Some problems with Mattel's new Barbie ad

Mattel's New promotional ad for Barbie, titled "Imagine the Possibilities".

I think the problems with this ad campaign are complicated, and we'll obviously have to see where Mattel goes with it in the future. But for a company specifically trying to brand themselves as genuinely empowering, I believe it's fair to subject it to considerably more scrutiny.

First, I think the primary issue here is that the commercial relies on the "humor" of little girls in positions of authority. While it might be equally funny to see little boys in the same situations, I think it has a different impact in the explicit context of women's empowerment. Honestly, I think the whole thing can't possibly avoid at least accidentally implying that "All women in positions of power are as (amusingly) unsuited to those positions as a child would be".

Second, it was not at all obvious to me from the commercial that this campaign is based on girls playing by themselves with barbies, and draws from (or mimics) the understandably limited knowledge of a child making up stories for themselves. Unfortunately, the ultimate impression given is that the girls in these scenes aren't actually taking their (fake) jobs seriously. The "veterinarian" is talking about cats flying, and the "professor" and the "museum tour guide" are just making stuff up. I'm sure there are seven- or eight-year old boys (and girls) out there who know a *lot* about dinosaurs, and it would be just as cute to see children dispense actual facts. There have to be some elementary school level facts about the human brain that a child could talk about besides "dogs don't go to high school" and "brains are medium-sized". 

Could Mattel not find girls who are interested in these things? Or at the very least spend the two hours it would take to teach such facts to the girls they chose as actors? And I'm not "expecting too much" here. It's not that I would actually expect a normal child to act any differently than these girls, or to have any special expertise or knowledge. But this is a carefully constructed, highly polished ad campaign - and it is one which (again) explicitly references, and tries to leverage, the empowerment of women.

Third, the Barbies shown at the end do not appear, at first glance, to be different from the Barbies that existed in 1995. One of them is black, and one of them has glasses (thick dark frames tucked into her long, flowing blonde hair), but otherwise they appear as gratuitously heteronormative as ever. Every one of them is wearing a skirt. They all have perfectly styled hair. So the message is "You can do anything, as long as you're still attractive and cartoonishly feminine while you do it!"

Ferguson is important - Michael Brown is not.

Back in August, there was an exchange between Sean Hannity and Patricia Bynes, a democratic committee-woman of the Ferguson Township. The exchange was not particularly enlightening - Sean Hannity's agenda turns the "interview" into what is basically a piece of theater: Hannity is the no-nonsense defender of common-sense and the constitution, while his guest, Patricia Bynes, is the knee-jerk liberal activist making mountains out of molehills. Fox News 101, what else would we expect.

What's so interesting about it, though, is how cleanly the interaction cuts to the biggest stumbling block in a national discussion which eventually turned violent. Sean Hannity asks Patricia Bynes "Where you there?" - as in was she, personally, a witness to Michael Brown's shooting. He continues with this line of questioning (belligerently), she follows his lead, and the conversation becomes exclusively about one small thing: What happened to Michael Brown that day.

When I say "small", I'm not being dismissive, I'm being honest about what really brought so many people and so much media attention to this one town, this one teenager, and this one incident. What all those people care about is the wider problem of young black men all over the county being mistreated, beaten, and killed. The specific details don't actually matter - Michael Brown, as an individual, is not important. 

Were there thousands of protesters on the streets of Ferguson because they all had a personal connection to Michael Brown, the human being? No. Of course not. Because Michael Brown's real importance is as a symbol: What's happening in Ferguson is not about one white cop shooting one unarmed black teenager, it's about an entrenched, systemic prejudice in America's law enforcement and justice system. It's about cops and young black men everywhere.

And while that larger issue obviously is being addressed in the news and by protesters, it's also being consistently muddied by the personal story. The bigger-picture narrative of racial discrimination should have been emphasized to the near exclusion of anything else, and yet the local narrative of Michael Brown - criminal thug or beloved son of Lesley McSpadden and Michael Brown Sr? - was given a massive spotlight. The problem is that that second narrative, painted positively or negatively, plays right into the hands of those who want to obfuscate, distract, and misdirect away from the first narrative.

How much time has been wasted in an obsessive examination of the witnesses, the autopsy report, and the indictment of Officer Wilson? The fact of the matter is that a large group of angry people cannot - no matter how justified their anger is - determine what happened in a single disputed event. How many African-Americans throughout history have been accused, judged, and executed by a lynch-mob? I'm not saying that the American justice-system isn't horribly flawed, I'm saying that the court of public opinion is significantly more flawed.

Life is complicated. If you asked me to guess, I'd probably say that Wilson's shooting of Michael Brown was unjustified (twelve gunshots does seem inexplicably excessive...) but even if I feel really, really sure of that, my confidence is not enough to condemn Wilson without some kind of careful investigation. How many situations in the world are presented to us as simple, when in fact the truth turns out to be a mixed-bag? Maybe you're just sure that Darren Wilson is guilty - if so, how sure are you? Are you 70% sure? 80% sure? 90% sure? Sure enough to alter his life forever? What would give you an authority that a jury being presented with the evidence doesn't have?

I understand that there's outrage regarding the corrupt bias of the justice system in favor of police officers. Not only do the police have a history of prejudice and violence towards African-Americans, but the officers who get caught for such actions often seem to avoid even the most minor consequences for their actions. But this is yet another issue of the difference between the specific and the abstract. Just like the shooting itself, the lack of indictment against Darren Wilson is primarily useful as a symbol.

And that symbolic emphasis needs to be made very, very clear. Otherwise the only message that white, middle-class America hears is that the protesters in Ferguson and around the country had deemed Wilson guilty before any kind of trial, that they were a vengeful mob, demanding eye-for-an-eye justice. Without that symbolic emphasis, the statistically compelling, nation-wide problem becomes hopelessly linked to a single, contestable, unpredictable data point - which is exactly what happened.

Unfortunately, we all love a human interest story so much that we immediately and almost effortlessly conflate the symbol of a phenomenon with the phenomenon itself, and by doing so we allow the critics to distract attention away from the forest by focusing on that one single tree. Ferguson should never have been about Michael Brown. The outcome of that one single tragic incident ended up dominating what should be - what needs to be - a reasoned debate; a debate about a complex sociological phenomenon and the countless data points that add up to something that can't be so easily dismissed. When people stubbornly insist on simple narratives, they jeopardize that debate in their pursuit of a smoking gun that settles things "once and for all". And in situations like this, there is no smoking gun. Even if Darren Wilson was charged and found guilty, it would still be just one data point - no more conclusive by itself than any other. As a symbol, very important; as an example, just one of many.

Clearly, there has been a powerful emotional response to Michael Brown's shooting. I also understand that many people have run out of patience; that at some point the ignorance, insensitivity, discrimination, and oppression become unbearable, and anger is the only natural response (and as a white male I understand that I have the privilege of being able to remain distant). Presumably, though, most of the people voicing their anger about the events in Missouri this summer would sincerely like to see things change. One way to create that change is to just push it through by yelling loudly enough, but anyone who embraces this tactic is following in the footsteps of every movement in history that thought its convictions were important enough that the ends justified the means. Personally, I believe you should only yell as loudly as you need to in order to be heard (and in some cases that might mean very loudly and repeatedly). After that, you need to persuade. Not because it's easy, and not because your opponents deserve patience or respect, but because it's honest. And because, these days, persuasion has a better chance of success than revolution.

Public Philosophy

The public, by and large, are not sufficiently motivated to spend the time necessary to thoroughly understand complex philosophical issues. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, since any kind of expert level knowledge requires time, energy, and money, and most people usually only have enough of those things to become an expert in one area (and there are lots of areas to choose from, most of which have a much more obvious financial and social pay-off than philosophy). Actually, to be clear, most people don't have the time, energy, and money to become an expert in any area.

So the experts of the world are left with a challenge: Not only do they need to make discoveries in their area of expertise, they also need to come up with ways to translate those discoveries into products which benefit the non-expert public (if only to acquire the funding to continue their research). Furthermore, they need, essentially, to sell people on the worth and utility of those products. The point here is that just making the discoveries is not enough - be it the theory of evolution, the invention of the automobile, or the development of psychotherapy. The public has to be able to manage a rudimentary understanding of it, the public has to get excited about it, and the public also has to be able to see some clear application for it.

If they can't understand it, they can't get excited about it or see its worth. If they can't use it without becoming experts themselves, then they won't be able to see its utility. This is why most fields of expertise are supplemented by two important agents: the Evangelist and the Entrepreneur. Sometimes there are individuals who are exclusively one of the three, expert, evangelist, or entrepreneur, but more often the people involved are some mix of the three.

I see no reason why the above wouldn't apply to philosophy. Philosophy does have a few problems, though. One is that it deals exclusively with ideas, often the extremely abstract ones. Another is that questioning axioms themselves is part of its process, whereas every other field accepts at least a small number of axioms without question. A third is that its usefulness is directly tied to its tendency to second-guess the common-sense intuitions of the public.

But I think most people who are passionate about philosophy see something (or some things) valuable in it, so there must be some kind of potential product there (I suppose there are probably some curmudgeonly folks who just want to do philosophy for its own sake, or for their own sake, and who don't care at all whether society could or should benefit from it, but those individuals exist in every field). The questions regarding public philosophy are "What is that product?" and "How can it be transmitted to the public?".

This article by Aikin and Talisse definitely addresses the second question. I called them "evangelists", because that's how they're referred to in the technology world, and because I like alliteration, but it's the same thing as a "spokesperson". Philosophy has a handful of these - names like Michael J. Sandel and Slavoj Zizek come to mind, and they are without a doubt experts as well as evangelists  - but obviously it could use a lot more of them. The entrepreneur is also necessary, though. Public forums like Seattle's Town Hall and podcasts like "Philosophy Bites" turn contemplating philosophy into something that fits neatly into our lives. Affordable or free online courses and lectures offer reasonably brief excursions into some of philosophy's deeper waters. Philosophically themed meet-up groups also serve an entrepreneurial function, in that they combine philosophical discussion with inherently appealing activities like socializing and informal debate (Personally that is neither the reason I started my own meet-up group [Drunken Philosophy], nor why I've kept it going, but I thinks it's fair to ascribe that potential value to it, however small). I'll bet there are all sorts of other entrepreneurial possibilities that people could come up with.

It's the first question, I think, that might need a more clear answer. It's also the more difficult question, because philosophers tend to get all philosophical about it. Speaking very loosely, though, I'd say there are a few good candidates. One possible product is the philosophical questions themselves - not providing answers or solutions, as experts in other fields often do, but instead "merely" highlighting the many important unanswered questions in the world. Another possible product is the tools to argue and examine - philosophers have made a science of argument and counter-argument, and a lot of those techniques can be taught to non-experts, potentially introducing more critical thinking into public discourse. A third possible product is the packaging and terminology which chop up muddy human confusions into manageable boxes - ideas like "Dualism vs. Monism" and "Consequentialism vs. Deontology" can help to simplify and standardize concepts which people might otherwise approach in a sloppy, careless, or misleading manner.

A fourth possible product, one that I like a lot, is thought experiments, or Daniel Dennett's intuition pumps. These are the word problems of philosophy, and I think they've proven incredibly useful - and viral - throughout the history of philosophy. The Ship of Theseus, the Ring of Gyges, the Veil of Ignorance, the Trolley Problem, the Chinese Room - these are puzzles that "the public" can easily grasp, and it can lead to a deeper appreciation of the loose sand that many common-sense assumptions and unquestioned societal norms are ultimately founded on. Obviously many or most philosopher's don't need to produce these kinds of thought experiments - there's definitely a lot of philosophical investigation that just can't be reduced to thought experiments, and some thought experiments whose import can only be appreciated by those already familiar with highly developed philosophical concepts. But creating publicly digestible thought experiments is clearly possible, and furthermore it's a concrete goal. There's always room for more thought-experiments, and there's always a need for new or updated ones since society is constantly shifting. Political, cultural, and technological changes mean that very decade brings with it a new set of questions and a reexamination of old questions.

There's probably a lot more thought that could go into this, but there are two very important prerequisites for a successful dissemination of whatever it is that philosophy has to offer. The first is the need for "the profession at large to acknowledge the need for such spokespersons, and to find ways to recognize the scholarly importance of public outreach", as Aikin and Talisse state at the end of their article, and I would expand on that to include the kind of "entrepreneurial" outreach I described above. The second is a clear understanding of who the public are, and a generous stance towards the philosophical ignorance and even stubbornness of most non-philosophers. There is a special kind of arrogance in philosophy that is counter-productive to any desire for a more philosophically enriched public perspective (Ironically, or perhaps just sadly, this arrogance has probably been exacerbated by the public's frequent [and historic] unwillingness to take philosophy seriously). But any philosopher who is committed to understanding the world in all its complexity needs to understand how most human beings function - specifically, that most human beings are not naturally philosophical, or at least that they are only as naturally philosophical as they need to be, and no more. To expect anything else - without encouragements and incentives - is to be willfully blind to the actual facts of reality, something that ought to be anathema any self-respecting philosopher.