Outrageous is outpacing acceptable
Our social worlds have become hyperbolic—everywhere all the time, over the top with everything. Celebrations in sport, yelling at the top of one’s lungs over minor accomplishments, revealing fashion styles that might have warranted an indecent exposure citation several decades ago have become commonplace.
I hesitate to say this is the “new normal” because I want to offer an interpretation of why we are an over-the-top society that points to the absence of constraint.
The year of the first Super Bowl in 1967, I was in the Army. I listened to the game on radio. I remember telling friends that the idea of a “Super Bowl” was so obviously over the top that it couldn’t possibly become an institutional feature of pro-football. The American sports fan, I argued, was too sophisticated to fall for such a ploy.
The first Super Bowl was not a sellout, and featured as halftime entertainment marching bands from the University of Arizona and Grambling State University and a drill team from a local high school. What a contrast to Michael Jackson descending from the heavens and whatever that was last year (perhaps gyrating white bags).
From flouting of the simplest etiquette to exaggerated and licentious displays such as Sam Smith and Kim Petras’ performance of “Unholy” at the 2023 Grammys, a shared sense of comportment and constraint has faded from our society. I used to ask my students if they could tell me how to set a table. They had an almost total ignorance of this simplest of etiquette. And they lacked a sense of embarrassment at the lewd lyrics of popular music.
There are many reasons for changes in decorum, etiquette and fashion, and sociologists often understand these changes as cycles or shifts in a civilization process that draws us closer to or further away from raw nature—using eating utensils instead of hands and concealing natural functions. Our society seems to be cycling away from civilized practices toward an extreme individualism where small tribal identities are formed. The boundaries between acceptable and offensive have become porous.
Sociologist George Simmel, nearly a century ago, observed that conditions of urban life such as crowding, the noise of construction and sirens, traffic, and diversity of people may result in over-stimulation, and in an adaptation that he referred to as the blasé attitude. He meant that attending to every aspect of the urban environment with all its complexity taxes our senses to their limits, and we deal with all this by adopting an aloof standpoint, making judgments about what pertains to us and ignoring the rest.
To get the attention of the modern urban person, it is sometimes necessary to exaggerate. Flashing lights, high music volume, overly revealing fashions and suggestive gestures seem to do the trick.
Then there is the nature of work in modern society, particularly from the bottom to the middle levels of occupational prestige. Most work consists of playing roles designed to manipulate others and often consists of repetitious labor. Recent polls indicate that Americans are at once both bored and indifferent about their employment.
Gallup identifies boredom as a major financial cost to employers. The cost of bored workers in the U.S. equals somewhere between $450 and $550 billion annually. That includes the cost of turnover (which averages about $15,000 per employee), but also lost business until a replacement gets up to speed, plus a huge opportunity cost.
Obviously, advertising contributes to our over-the-top culture. Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays put Freud’s psychoanalytic theories into advertising. He believed a marketer could commercialize the choices consumers make by influencing their unconsciousness.
In 1929, he transformed an Easter parade into “Torches for Freedom” to promote cigarette smoking among women, and perfected the focus group as a way to create advertisements that appeal to the preference and desires of consumers.
As another example, beer commercials show happy imbibers watching sport events, monster trucks and action movies—an escape from the routine of work-a-day life.
Other social conditions set up opportunities for hyperbole. Consider the tension that citizens of the modern society experience between over- and under-stimulation. Both result in detachment and indifference.
To get the attention of the modern mind and hold it, entertainment, business and even religion must go over the top. An example is the demise of the church choir with its close harmonies and soaring tones, replaced by loud and raucous Christian rock and roll.
In country music, Don Williams sat sedately on a stool with his band behind him and sang his songs, using no theatrics. Country music concerts today are loud, with laser lights, smoke and mirrors.
Our tastes and preferences are responses to the tensions of modern life. Robert Merton, perhaps the most cited sociologist of the 20th century, famously depicted a dis-junction in our society between the goals we aspire to and means that are available to us to achieve those goals.
Ubiquitous role models of the rich and famous (the goal) conflict with the spiraling cost of higher education (the means for most of us). In his analysis, people adapt to the strains variously. Some retreat from pursuit of success, others cling to the means as a substitute for success and still others search for and invent new ways to succeed. The greater the strains, the more likely people become numb, simply going through the repetitions of work, child rearing and tedium of everyday life.
The organization, or disorganization, of modern society compels us to go over the top to gain the attention of others and to establish a sense of belonging in a world driven by change. Whether new norms will move us to quieter, more restrained times depends on the strength of social conditions that push us towards hyperbole.
After watching the new Indiana Jones film with a friend, I asked him how many chase scenes did he think there were in the movie. His reply: just one: the whole movie!