I have only seen "Jersey Shore" a couple of times, and on every occasion I was immediately bored and nauseated, and found myself wishing I was elsewhere. (The moon would not be far enough.) But the "characters"/real people on "The Shore" were not what nauseated me such grotesques populate the fringes of every conscious person's existence and one ought to treat them kindly, as a rule. What nauseated me was the fact that the viewing public was probably, on the whole, watching the show in order to have bemused contempt for idiots. If Orwell's "1984" had the "Five Minutes of Hate," we can be rightly said to possess our own "Hour of Snickering Contempt."
This is not only true of "Jersey Shore," but of "Keeping Up with the Kardashians," and of nearly every other program on MTV, E! or VH1. I avoid these things like the plague, but I've been contaminated just enough to talk about them. I'm sure people at Dartmouth who watch these shows watch them in a highly ironic way, but that is just what they want you to do. It's almost as if you ironically made sub-witty remarks about supporting ultra-conservative viewpoints, and then voted for Pat Buchanan as a "joke." In the same way, when you watch "Jersey Shore," you may feel that you are above the fake tans and muscle milk and idiocy, but in reality your brain is getting that fake tan, juiced and becoming stupid. We take on the qualities of the things we despise, simply by devoting our attention to them.
Not only does laughing at wretches make us wretched, but it also atrophies all higher feeling, removing any possibility of sympathy or empathy. Modern life tends to make one feel like a mannequin. There's a fair amount of anesthetic in our surroundings. When we seek to break out of that numbness through art and entertainment, it seems obvious that we should turn to stunning and moving representations of sensitive human beings. Frequently, however, we escape our numbness through the cheap and easy stimulus of cruelty. And what is most reality TV, but a form of cruelty? Whereas the gladiators suffered and died physically for the jeering Roman public, the American public inflicts mental cruelty on society's more ridiculous members. The ultra-materialistic upper class gets theirs (Paris Hilton) but so do less fortunate lost souls (American Idol auditions).
By putting emotional distance between ourselves and the legions of the bungled and botched who march through our TV sets, we estrange ourselves from our own humanity. Consider that Tolstoy took a story of simple adultery and wove it into the psychological masterpiece that is "Anna Karenina." But today, I'm sure Anna would be featured on a show called "Cheaters," or something. Or maybe she would be filmed doing jello shots out of another woman's navel whilst cavorting with macho dudes in a hot tub. If all that we demand of life is that it appear ridiculous, that is all it will appear to be. The only thing that can genuinely satisfy us for long is real depictions of human nature, in its more sensitive and interesting forms. The function of art should not be as in "Jersey Shore" to estrange, but to draw us closer together and wholly persuade us that other selves actually exist.
In interpreting St. Paul's injunction to "Suffer fools gladly," G.K. Chesterton provided a piece of wisdom that should be accessible to secular and religious reader alike. He gives us a standard for determining when laughing at another person is genuinely acceptable: "The great fool is he in whom we cannot tell which is the conscious and which the unconscious humour; we laugh with him and laugh at him at the same time This largeness, this grossness and gorgeousness of folly is the thing which we all find about those with whom we are in intimate contact; and it is the one enduring basis of affection, and even of respect." This is perfect wisdom it would do us well to keep it in mind as we decide how to kill time during another savage decade on this lonely planet.