Episode 175 - Coolness Transcript

[00:00:00] 175. Ellie: Hello and welcome to Overthink.

[00:00:20] 175. David: The podcast where your two coolest professors connect philosophy to everyday life.

[00:00:24] 175. Ellie: I'm Ellie Anderson.

[00:00:26] 175. David: And I'm David Peña-Guzmán.

[00:00:28] 175. Ellie: I gotta say, the billionaires today are trying so hard to be cool. You have Lauren Sanchez, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg showing up to Fashion Week, sitting in the front row, wearing fancy Prada outfits, but the internet isn't buying it. When I started Googling the phrase "Mark Zuckerberg trying" to find some photos of him in this situation, so I just start Googling the phrase "Mark Zuckerberg trying," Google autofilled it with "trying to be cool."

[00:00:59] 175. David: Trying too hard maybe. But you know, there is nothing more cringe than aging rich people trying to use their wealth and influence to buy their way into the zeitgeist. And that's definitely when trying to be cool becomes trying too hard, which is, as we'll talk about later in the episode, the most uncool thing that you can ever do, is be perceived as wanting to be cool.

[00:01:23] 175. Ellie: And poor Zuckerberg has multiple articles written about how he tries too hard to be cool, you know?

[00:01:28] 175. David: I mean, he does. He does try really hard.

[00:01:31] 175. Ellie: Yeah. and I think the line between trying to be cool and trying too hard to be cool is really thin, and I've been thinking about this a lot in recent years because I've noticed a real shift has happened for me.

It used to be that I had my finger on the pulse. I had an intuitive sense of what was cool, but then I got to a certain point in my 30s, and this, I think, happens generally speaking even to, maybe not the coolest among us, but the relatively cool among us, among whom I might count myself. 

I would say, in my 20s I wasn't the coolest by any means, but I was, like, you know, pretty cool. And then I got to a certain point, I lost my intuitive sense of what was cool. And then when you lose that sense, there's suddenly a gap between you and what's cool, and I think you can either let that gap widen or you can try and close it by developing a mediated sense of what's cool. Kind of like a bridge back to the cool because you can never quite close that gap, right? So you need a bridge over it. You have to explicitly ask all of a sudden, "What's actually cool nowadays?" Like, you don't just know already. 

And if you're a college professor like we are, then you have a direct line of inquiry for asking people what's cool: your students.

So our Overthink assistants know that I actually often do this. Although I do follow some social media accounts that help give me a sense of the cool as well. And I don't ask or try and research what's cool under any delusion that I can be one of the youths again, but it's rather because I'm genuinely curious.

I mean, maybe I do also wanna be youth passing from time to time, but I think it's, mainly born a curiosity.

[00:03:11] 175. David: Youth passing. Maybe that's a new kind of privilege we need to talk about. But, you know, you're right that once you feel like you're aging out of the space of coolness, you have a choice to make. Either you let that gap become your new reality, or you try to close it. In my case, I feel like I've just let that gap dilate, like the gap has taken over the territory, and I'm largely okay with that.

And in some ways, that's the image that we have to some extent projected on our podcast, especially as friends, because you will tease me a lot for being out of the loop when it comes to things that are cool, and I tease you quite a bit about maybe being the girl version of Zuckerberg who is trying to be cool and who cares too much about being cool.

[00:03:57] 175. Ellie: Okay, that is so a bridge too far. However, I will say, I feel like there was a time when I noticed your humor change. Your humor used to be really zeitgeisty, and then I was like, "David," there got be a certain point, yeah, and I was like, "David, you can't keep saying hashtag as a joke on the podcast anymore." Like, it doesn't read the way you think it reads.

[00:04:20] 175. David: I know, but part of the humor is that I know it bugs you. But either way, the point being here that you and I are in our 30s, we clearly have aged out of the space of coolness, and as we were prepping this episode, we actually realized that we needed to ask other people what's cool, and so we asked our Gen Z assistants at Overthink, and they told us, I have a list here, they told us that the following things are cool nowadays.

The band Geese, Charli XCX, Fred Again, Tyler, the Creator. And that made me feel really uncool because of all of those, I only know one. I mean, I know Charli XCX, who I can confirm is objectively cool based on the moment, but the rest made me feel the sting.

[00:05:07] 175. Ellie: But I think if you don't know who any of those other people are, then you're not in a position to say that Charli XCX is objectively cool. You're not an arbiter here, right. I mean, you can think she's cool, but you said she's objectively cool. That's very different. So Charli XCX and Lorde working out on the remix is very cool.

Also saying Fred Again without saying, like, your intonation around Fred Again...

[00:05:30] 175. David: again, I don't... Yeah

[00:05:31] 175. Ellie: It was giving unc for sure.

[00:05:34] 175. David: But you know, the funny thing is that when I was chatting, when we were chatting actually, with our Gen Z assistants, they started showing signs of anxiety about aging out of the cool zone already relative to Gen Alpha. So they said, "We," even though they're college students, "We 

[00:05:50] 175. Ellie: They're literally 22. Yeah, I'm like, how do you not know what's cool? You're 22 years old.

[00:05:55] 175. David: So it might be even that you age out in your 20s as well. But they said, "We don't know what Gen Alpha thinks is cool, but it probably includes things like Twitch streamers and trends like mogging and maxing and all things the manosphere," which, A, makes sense, and is also, B, really disturbing, that what is cool nowadays is this really dangerous manosphere ideology.

But I think there is something right about that, especially in connection to boys.

[00:06:22] 175. Ellie: Yeah. Oh, how I long for 2014 when woke was cool, before, you know, the backlash. But I think what we're already talking about clearly conveys something crucial about coolness, which is that it's the youth that defines it. We had our time to be part of that zeitgeist, and now we're at a remove from it. And even our students experience themselves as starting to move away from it, right?

I don't think the gap has quite happened for them yet, but maybe there's cracks in their understanding of what cool is, and then the gap will eventually start to emerge. Yeah, like the crack will become a gap. So even our students, I would say as they're experiencing themselves starting to move away from it, they're experiencing their generation's idea of coolness getting superseded by a new one.

And of course, this is just the way that trend cycles work. But I think what's interesting about this is that it suggests that cool represents a status hierarchy that is very different from socioeconomic status. Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Elon Musk are the richest men in the world, but they are not cool.

Cool is an alternative status to that kind of socioeconomic status. And as someone who went to a preppy New England liberal arts college, I can also tell you that obvious displays of wealth are very much not seen as cool in preppy circles. It's much cooler to drive a beat-up Volvo than to have a brand new BMW because that is seen as nouveau riche.

So coolness pertains not only to youth, but also to complex displays of class status that aren't merely a matter of money.

[00:07:56] 175. David: I really like this point about thinking about cool as a status hierarchy that is not economic and, in fact, may be opposed to displays of wealth. And it reminds me of a joke that I once heard about the difference between LA and San Francisco, which is that LA is filled with poor people pretending to be rich, and San Francisco is filled with rich people pretending to be poor. Because in San Francisco, pretending to be poor, hiding, not coming across as nouveau riche, actually gives you the cultural capital that is coolness.

And there's been a lot of talk recently about how this noneconomic status affects all aspects of our lives. It includes our self-conception, it includes our relationships to other people, like our friendships and also our romantic relationships. And I'm here thinking in particular about this term that I learned about only in the last year, which is swag gap relationships.

Essentially, a swag gap relationship is a relationship where one person in the dynamic is really, really cool, has a great sense of fashion, has a great taste in music, has a lot of friends, and the other person is just not cool at all. And a lot of people who have written about this in magazines and things like that, have wondered whether this asymmetry in coolness is a red flag in relationships, whether that gap in coolness will ultimately kill the romance and the potential for a partnership, or whether dating somebody who is way less cool than you are is actually the highest display of your coolness, because you can take a hit, because you're so cool that you can date somebody who just doesn't have any of the status.

Today, we are talking about coolness.

[00:09:46] 175. Ellie: What does it mean to be cool?

[00:09:49] 175. David: How does the notion of cool emerge from Black American culture, especially jazz?

[00:09:54] 175. Ellie: And what are the dangers of being cool?

[00:10:06] 175. David: Ellie, you and I might not really know what's cool anymore, but I wanna talk about the history of coolness. Where did it come from? How did it evolve, either as an attitude or as an aesthetic?

[00:10:20] 175. Ellie: Okay. Yes. Predates the swag gap term by quite a long time in fact. But so to understand the roots of coolness, we have to talk about jazz. Today, for better or for worse, jazz might not have the same cultural cachet that it once had. But in the mid-20th century, jazz was the epitome of cool. Jazz musicians were rock stars before rock music, and they brought coolness into the aesthetic sphere.

They got the word cool from AAVE, or African American Vernacular English. And so that is where the word cool, which then jazz musicians started to use afterward, was first used. In the 1930s, cool referred to an attitude of calm and restraint, specifically in the face of social oppression. So to be cool in AAVE was about emotional self-control in high-stress situations.

That is, to keep one's cool, for instance. And then by the 1940s, cool made its way into the slang of the underground jazz scene. Coolness became a common reference in song titles, like Charlie Parker's Cool Blues and Count Basie's Stay Cool. And on stage, jazz musicians embodied coolness. They were super stylish. They had really restrained attitudes. And so before the concept became a popular part of post-war American culture, coolness was an attitude specific to Black American music.

[00:11:44] 175. David: So this element of restraint that you're talking about, especially restraint in the face of oppression, I think is super important, and it's often missed in the popular uses of coolness today. And so in the research that I did for this episode, I came across various histories of the concept of cool that traced this attitude to either the beginning of the 20th century, this moment with jazz, or even earlier in some cases.

In particular, one traced it all the way back to Black American culture during the Reconstruction period. And they argue that although the term was popularized in the 1930s, before the term existed, there was already an attitude of coolness, and that attitude of reservation and detachment was a really useful defense mechanism used by Blacks for physical and emotional safety in post-Reconstruction America.

So by not showing their cards and by keeping a posture of being unbothered, many Black Americans were able to cope with the violence of living under white supremacy. And bell hooks, for instance, at one point, says that coolness was how... and this is a direct quote from bell hooks: It was how Black men confronted the hardships of life without allowing their spirits to be ravaged. 

You see clearly a connection here between coolness, Black American culture, and the history of racism in the US, but I do wanna hear a little bit more about how this attitude and the aesthetics play out in jazz.

[00:13:19] 175. Ellie: So the answer is a bit complicated, and I don't myself know that much about jazz history, but our producer Aaron is a huge jazz fan, so he helped us out with this part. Aaron clarified that cool jazz is a specific type of jazz that developed in the 1950s. This was preceded by bebop, which dominated the jazz scene in the 1940s, and which was much more musically complicated and intense.

So as opposed to bebop, cool jazz went for a softer, more reserved, and more romantic sound. And this style quickly became very popular through hit songs that are famous to this day such as Dave Brubeck's Take Five or Stan Getz's classic The Girl from Ipanema.

[00:14:02] 175. David: Oh, I love The Girl From Ipanema, even though I hate listening to it on an elevator. Like you know, that's the sadness about jazz music, that some of it has become elevator music,

[00:14:11] 175. Ellie: Smooth jazz is the antithesis of cool, I feel.

[00:14:15] 175. David: Well, and bebop too. Like, the more energetic form of it, is completely antithetical to elevator music.

[00:14:24] 175. Ellie: Yeah. Wait, so bebop and elevator music are both uncool, but they're antithetical to one another? Or... That's what I understood you to be saying.

[00:14:33] 175. David: No, no, I think bebop is great. I think it's very cool. I'm just saying that when I think of elevator music, which has been the fate for a lot of slow jazz, it's just incompatible with bebop.

[00:14:44] 175. Ellie: I see. Okay, okay, I misunderstood you. Got it. Okay, so on the one hand, the attitude and slang that are used in Black American musical culture, that is cool as it was used there, did develop into a musical style or aesthetic. But on the other hand, it's not clear that this is a straightforward extension of coolness as an attitude of restraint in the face of social oppression.

And one of the really important things to note here is that cool jazz was actually dominated by white musicians. For instance, the person known as the Prince of Cool in the 1950s was Chet Baker, the white trumpet player who was widely known among his contemporaries to be less talented and innovative than some of the Black musicians at the time.

And second, some influential Black musicians at the time have explicitly denounced cool jazz. So Miles Davis, for instance, made an album called Birth of the Cool that pioneered a more reserved, cooler style of jazz, but Davis was never associated with cool jazz by critics or the public, and he has said that cool jazz was really just white imitators of Black music.

[00:15:46] 175. David: So in terms of the evolution of coolness here as a concept, it seems like the attitude emerges first as a coping mechanism in the post-Reconstruction period. Then the term appears in AAVE in the 1930s and becomes part of this rising jazz aesthetic. Then in the 1950s, there is this entire style of jazz called cool jazz that explicitly calls itself cool, but that is primarily geared toward a white audience.

And so here we start seeing coolness kind of travel from the Black cultural context in which it was created to then suddenly getting pulled out of that context and being pushed toward a white audience. And the idea that coolness is originally Black, but then it gets co-opted or appropriated by white culture, especially around the middle of the 20th century, is one that I saw in a few places, especially in this book, Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude by Dick Pountain and David Robins.

And in this book, Pountain and Robins offer what they call a genealogy of cool characters. They begin the book by pointing out that, yeah, in fact, coolness was appropriated by whites in the 1950s. There is the appropriation of jazz, then, of course, there is the appropriation of rock and roll.

He talks about, for instance, Elvis Presley, the white guy who could sing like a Black guy, and that's why he became so famous. And it's in this decade, in the 1950s, in the early 1950s, that coolness becomes white, culturally speaking. And then their book walks us through the various characters that come to embody coolness in America from the 1950s onward, and most of these characters are white, so it's like a procession of personas or of character types.

They say in the 1950s, the epitome of coolness was the beat poet, so think Kerouac, think Burroughs, think Ginsberg, where to be cool was to don this kind of despondent, anti-establishment attitude and also to do a lot of drugs. Then, in the 1960s, the beat poet is replaced by another character, the hippie. You know, 1960s, peace and love.

And the character of the hippie seems more politically engaged and more idealistic, and more communally driven, than the beat poet, but still shares a kind of hedonistic lifestyle with the beat poet. Hedonism, as we'll see in a little while, seems to be a common thread in discussions about coolness.

If we then move forward the timeline, in the 1970s and '80s, there is a new cool kid in town that, that comes to embody coolness in American culture, and that's the punk. Think about how the punk basically leans into an aesthetic of violence and stylized criminality, and that's what became cool in the late '70s and especially in the '80s.

And then finally, so this is where the genealogy basically ends, when something really interesting happens, and that is that the standard of coolness changes once again, but it becomes embodied by a new character, and that is either the hip hop star or the athletic superstar, especially an NBA player. And so if you think about hip hop and if you think about the NBA, those two are clearly Black.

And so in the 1990s, coolness becomes Black again and goes back to its origins of being associated with Black culture.

[00:19:30] 175. Ellie: So it's super interesting to see that Black American culture originates the concept of cool, and then it eventually circles back. And I know the '90s were a while ago now, but it seems clear to me that a lot of cool elements of today's culture, especially a lot of the terms and phrases that are popular today, also come from Black culture.

Like a lot of things in internet lingo, for instance.

[00:19:51] 175. David: Yeah, I think that's right. And if you think about some of the lingo that I hear, especially among Gen Z and some Gen Alpha today, many of them have their origins in AAVE. So when people today, for instance, talk about spilling the tea, when they talk about clocking things, like clock it, or no cap, you can find linguistic histories of those expressions that point out their Black origins.

It's yet another example of something that Black people created. I mean, I know it sounds weird to say Black people created being cool, but they did, both as an aesthetic but also as this coping mechanism originally.

[00:20:31] 175. Ellie: David, I'm obsessed with how no cap just rolls off the tongue for you.

"No cap."

[00:20:38] 175. David: I was listing. I was not using. I was mentioning,

[00:20:41] 175. Ellie: It's okay. the frequency with which say I'm obsessed is so millennial, so it's not cool lingo either. But can I just say on that point, so I think what's really interesting, given that you mentioned earlier that a lot of cool lingo today comes from manosphere incel communities online, is that, Equally so, if not more so, a lot of the things that you just mentioned are not just from Black culture generally, but they're from Black drag culture specifically.

we're living in a time of, the most bizarre gender norms I could have imagined in my over a decade of teaching philosophy of gender. And I think what we see there is that the lingo is coming from these highly gendered spaces, but on such different sides of the political and social spectrum. I mean, I just watched the manosphere documentary on Netflix that Louis Theroux did, Inside the Manosphere, and, one of the things that struck me most was how deeply uncool these guys are. Not just based on my own kind of subjective out of touch sense of what's cool, but they were so nerdy, and they so obviously were obsessed with people liking them.

So I don't know if we wanna say it's actually cool, but there is at least an attempt at subversion there. A lot of the manosphere discourse has to do with, rejecting the status quo and building your own new status quo, which somehow ends up looking exactly like the status quo as it is because it means making a lot of money and, fucking a lot of women.

But, you know.

[00:22:08] 175. David: Well, and another thing that is interesting about that documentary is that so many of these young male influencers are coming across as their version of nouveau riche, because they are obsessed with these displays of wealth and displays of image that make it very clear that there is a gap actually even between what they project and what they really are.

and once you see that gap, which the documentary exposes, you realize also how uncool they are because they go around pretending to be something that they're not, in the same way that, we said trying to be cool and being exposed for that will automatically reveal you as being uncool. But also one other quick comment, you know that trend looksmaxing, that's promoted by people like, this, young guy Clavicular.

He was recently confronted by a group of trans women when he was, I think, at a restaurant who said, "Look, you're just basically doing what we've been doing this whole time." And one of the women said, "Trans women are the OG looksmaxers," right? Because yeah, we have been doing this at a level that you cannot possibly even imagine.

And so another kind of appropriation, in this case tied to gender and sex.

[00:23:15] 175. Ellie: Okay, so I wanna ask one more thing about what we've just been discussing, which is that it seems like on the one hand, given... I think I started the point about manosphere lingo and Black drag culture lingo both being notably important in the cultural sphere at the moment as a way of saying that speaks to the fact that what is cool is subversive.

But as we've been talking it out in the past couple of minutes, I think it's actually the case that the manosphere, at least in its outward expressions, isn't cool. Although maybe that's, our perception of it and the Gen Alpha people are, talking about something different, which I think also speaks to the way that cool is an aesthetic and not a moral category, which we'll come back to.

But is that, because it's suddenly now kind of out in the open? That would seem not quite to be the case. Is it because these guys are trying so hard to look cool, and that's very obvious, and so it's kind of giving up the game? And if that's the case, if one thinks that drag culture is cool, it would seem we might need a more nuanced account of what it means to try to look cool or be cool.

And maybe people don't think drag culture is cool, but I think drag culture is widely seen as cooler than manosphere culture in a sort of broad social sense, although maybe it really depends on your political affiliations here. But inasmuch as drag performers are very much putting on a performance, they're not hiding their efforts.

But I think maybe that's where we get into, camp and drag and that having a different relationship with the cool than, Mark Zuckerberg wearing Prada at Fashion Week or, Clavicular hitting his face with a hammer.

[00:24:54] 175. David: Well, and I think there's a difference, right, between, trying to be cool, which maybe for you and I is true of these manosphere characters, and somebody who is putting a lot of effort into their art, but who is doing so as a way of accentuating something that they, quote-unquote, "already are," right?

Like, these are, cool drag queens and cool performers, and what they're donning is a costume, that allows a performance, but it's not the wig and the makeup and the heels that make a drag queen cool. It's usually other things, right? It's, their ability to perform, to make people laugh, to say witticisms on the spot, and that's not something that you can easily fake.

And so there is a sense in which even through the disguises and the costumes, we have a sense that, and this is the rhetoric, for instance, in RuPaul's Drag Race, that there is an authenticity that shines and that makes the performance a performance and also a reality.

[00:25:47] 175. Ellie: That's a great point, because I just saw this clip of Clavicular talking about strategies for short men to seem taller to get women to go to bed with them. And it was so clear that it's not about this performance. It's literally just about, faking th- like you're taller than you are. And he was literally talking about, so you move from wearing your wedge shoes out on your date with a woman, but you have these long pants so it covers up the fact that you're wearing heels, to then going to your bed, you turn off the lights, and I swear to God, I'm n- I'm not making this up.

[00:26:18] 175. David: And you jump on the bed.

[00:26:21] 175. Ellie: You have a large book under your bed that you then stand on before you get into bed. And I was watching a couple of older male comedians react to this, and they were just like, so you don't think having a personality means anything? You think all women care about is literally your physical height? You need to try harder." And so I think that actually speaks to what you're talking about, too, which is that the looksmaxxer's idea of what it is to not only or maybe not even necessarily to be cool, but to be appealing and attractive, to have value, is so shallow. It's just rooted in this metric as opposed to the much more complicated nature of the performance and the looks in relation to the performance that you're talking about with drag performers.

Although the cool aesthetic originates in Black musical culture, there are precursors to coolness as an attitude. One that comes to mind for philosophers, at least for me, is stoicism, given that its ethical ideal is ataraxia, or an emotional equilibrium or stance of non-attachment. You might also think about the Italian Renaissance attitude of sprezzatura, which is a kind of aristocratic disdain.

Sprezzatura creates the appearance of effortlessness. A person carries out a difficult task, but they conceal their effort so it appears easy. Like, oh, that incredibly difficult harpsichord piece I just played? No big deal. It's a kinda studied nonchalance that I think is a clear precursor to coolness.

And I actually think in some ways, sprezzatura might better map onto the folk concept of coolness today than the original meaning of cool, which as we know, was the attitude of restraint in the face of oppression.

[00:28:04] 175. David: I think that's right, because when we call somebody cool, we mean that they're effortless in the way they float through space and through social settings more so than, hey, they're coping with social oppression in a particularly effective way. Although I think the attitude of coolness also can convey not just effortlessness, but a sense of superiority.

And in fact the Italian verb sprezzare, it literally means disdain. And you mentioned disdain, but that's built into the concept, as in disdain for other people. And it presents the cool person as somebody who is projecting an enlarged sense of self. But I also think that there are other precursors to the modern concept of coolness that are worth mentioning.

I'm thinking about the figure of the dandy, who is a figure from the 19th century, but who similarly conveys this sense of effortlessness and flowiness, right? Like, a dandy is somebody who just moves through space like a hot knife through butter. And this really brings us to an important part of our discussion, which is the actual definition of coolness.

What exactly is coolness? Is it just whatever happens to be fashionable at a certain time, or can we identify some features that apply to coolness across history and that is not reducible to just a trend? Now, the book that I mentioned, Anatomy Rules, defines cool as follows. They say, "Coolness is a permanent state of private rebellion."

And so it's a permanent state because coolness is not an ephemeral state, like I'm cool, I'm feeling cool right now, and it's also not a costume that you don for a few days or for a few weeks, right? When we describe somebody as cool, we're trying to capture something a little bit more persistent through time, like they are cool independently of whether they're trying or not.

At least that's the perception. And then it's private, it's a private rebellion because coolness is a posture of individual defiance rather than a stance that's geared toward political action or collective liberation, right? Think about teenager maybe, as the epitome of this.

The cool teenager who is just too cool for those around him is perpetually revolting against the tyranny of mom, but from the privacy of their bedroom, So it's like this private rebellion in which they always are, or in which they are for a long time.

[00:30:37] 175. Ellie: Okay. I mean, I'll be honest, I kind of have questions about the permanence part here because to define it as a permanent state of private rebellion doesn't seem to imply to me that it's a core of someone's personality. And actually, if anything, maybe I would wanna say it's an enduring state of private rebellion because we about how, yeah, we used to be cool, we're not cool anymore.

You just talked about the cool teenager; that teenager's not gonna be cool when they're 40 unless they really make it. And then somehow they escape the sands of time.

[00:31:08] 175. David: The tyranny of mom at 40.

[00:31:10] 175. Ellie: I mean, this is a whole other thing, but there are definitely lots of cool 70 plus year olds. But one thing I've talked to my slightly older colleagues about, especially as a woman, is that it's really hard to be a cool woman from 40s to 60s. So I'm curious, I don't know if people have thoughts on that, but I do think there's maybe, I think especially being coded as a certain kind of middle-aged person makes it very hard to be cool.

But then once you're old, you can kind of regain the land of cool because you don't care anymore, and maybe this is a private state of rebellion. So let's talk about that other feature. So the permanent state of private rebellion, I might wanna say enduring rather than permanent, but the state of private rebellion is super interesting.

So this seems to be why we associate youth culture with coolness, because the cool person wants to rebel against the status quo, but they're doing so in a relatively inefficacious way and a very personal way because they only seem to care about themselves. Who is that person who engages in a private rebellion that is inefficacious, or at least largely so? That's the teenager. And I wanna focus on another thing you said here, which is coolness as an attitude versus coolness as a state, because you describe coolness as an attitude, but the authors describe coolness as a state. You did describe... 

[00:32:36] 175. David: Yeah, I described it as an attitude, but I quoted from this book, and they do call it a state, a permanent state, which is also kind of weird.

[00:32:43] 175. Ellie: So this raised a question for me about the ontology of coolness. Is it an attitude or a state> If we think those are two different things, which I would be inclined to say they are.

[00:32:51] 175. David: So I think that's right, 'cause I think of a state, especially if we call it, a mental state, as something that's really short-lived, right? we're talking about something that's fleeting

[00:33:02] 175. Ellie: I'm an Aristotelian about these things. I think a state can be long lasting, but go on.

[00:33:07] 175. David: But not as long lasting as like an attitude. I think of an attitude as closer to a personality trait or something like that, something that shapes you for a longer period of time. But the difficulty here is that most of the people that I read in connection to coolness are not philosophers. They're like historians or cultural theorists, and so they, use these terms in non-precise ways.

So I, wanna just say that. And so I think I would prefer the term attitude rather than state for philosophical reasons. But at one point, the authors of this book do point out that people talk about it in all kinds of ways that make it really confusing. So some people call coolness an attribute of people, a mood, an attitude, which is a term that I used, or even a mental state. some people also call it a zeitgeist, like coolness is a zeitgeist, so it's not even a property of persons. It's this kind of atmospheric reality. And so again, I think it's best to use the term attitude, and the reason that I wanna say that is just because I want to maintain that coolness pertains primarily to people.

People are cool or are not cool. Obviously, we do talk sometimes about things being cool or like music being cool, but I think usually it's when they're used by people or performed by people in cool ways. So that's my position 

[00:34:31] 175. Ellie: Exactly. One thing I've noticed in LA in recent years is that a lot of the really old school restaurants that when I was growing up were very parent or even grandparent coded and very uncool have suddenly become cool. And it's not because something has changed about the restaurant, it's that something has changed about the patronage of that restaurant and the public perception of that restaurant.

You know, young people are going there ironically. okay, what characterizes then the attitude of cool, if we wanna call it an attitude? I think it's fair to say that coolness has a very positive connotation, but it's importantly not something you can say about yourself. You can't identify as cool. You have to have coolness attributed to you by others.

you even called me out basically as cringe earlier, David, when I was like, "I used to be cool." I wasn't even calling myself cool now. I was saying I used to be pretty cool, and you even found that objectionable. we've also talked about how even being caught trying to be cool is instantly uncool, as we said of Zuckerberg.

So coolness is not something you can first personally claim, it's rather an external attribution. this leaves someone who desires to be cool in a tough position. They can either give up the attempt and likely remain uncool, or they can attempt to be cool but risk being caught trying to be cool and then give up the game.

And so cool people are either those who haven't tried to become cool, they just are, or they have but they've successfully achieved coolness through dissimulation

[00:35:59] 175. David: Yeah, I like the way that you're, framing this hard choice that we face. And that's the weird thing about it actually for me, that others can attribute coolness to you, but you not only cannot attribute it to yourself, but you lose it if you attribute it to yourself or even if you seem interested in attributing it to yourself.

And I think coolness is very similar to authenticity in this regard. like insisting that you are authentic is a red flag that you're probably being inauthentic. it's just a little weird. And, the reason that I say that this is a really weird thing about it is because I don't really know a lot of other aspects of persons that work in this way, where other people can say it of you and it be true, but if you say it of yourself, it suddenly becomes false.

Or if you desire it, the attribution suddenly becomes false. It seems to be a very, very narrow set of, I don't know if we wanna call it properties or attributes of people or whatever, that work in this way.

[00:37:03] 175. Ellie: I think there are actually a lot of things like this. I think trustworthiness, beauty come to mind as a couple, but we

[00:37:09] 175. David: You can say "I'm beautiful" and that doesn't make you ugly.

[00:37:12] 175. Ellie: Oh, so you're not just saying it's objectionable to attribute this thing to yourself, you're saying to attribute it to yourself immediately makes you not that thing.

[00:37:20] 175. David: It falsifies it,

[00:37:21] 175. Ellie: Yeah, okay. okay. valid. I mean, maybe trustworthiness, though. To say I'm trustwor- no, maybe not.

[00:37:28] 175. David: No, I don't think so.

Only coolness.

[00:37:32] 175. Ellie: No, no, well, you said and authenticity. I'd be curious to think about more cases, but that's a good point. Maybe it is narrower than I initially was inclined to believe. Regardless, being cool involves pulling off a careful performance of not caring about being cool, right?

Or at least not caring too much. So it's cool to win, but it's not cool to appear to try to win, and it's even cooler not to seem to care if you win. So there's a lot of irony, I think, any time coolness is being cultivated.

[00:38:01] 175. David: Irony is right. And the book that I read uses the term ironic detachment to capture this. And the ironic detachment of coolness is a combination of a wholesale rejection of sincerity. Like when you're cool, like too cool for school, you never really say what you want or what you desire, because that's not cool, right? If you seem invested, if you seem like you really care about something,

[00:38:27] 175. Ellie: That's how all these young people end up in their horrible situationships.

[00:38:31] 175. David: Yeah. no kidding. And, so there's also, aside from this rejection of sincerity, an unwillingness to express interiority. So there's a protective armor around the cool person and that's what produces that ironic detachment from the world, where you want to make sure that people know that you don't give a shit.

And so anyways, like there is this ironic detachment, and that's one of the criteria that they use for defining cool, but they actually define it in terms of three criteria. That's just one of them. The other two are narcissism, because there is this admiration of the self , a hyper-awareness of who you are and how you are perceived by others that is at the root of the psychology of coolness.

And then the other defining characteristic of coolness is hedonism. Usually, the cool person is devoted to the search for worldly and bodily pleasures and for having as many adventures as possible. And so when you think about especially the hedonism, it brings into focus the kind of anti-political or apolitical nature of coolness because to be cool doesn't really require you to embrace any ideals, any vision of a better life for the community, that might be worth fighting for.

It's all about seeking individual pleasures and, basically sex, drugs, and rock and roll. 

[00:39:58] 175. Ellie: Yeah, and I think this points to the aesthetic character of coolness and the way that it has a kind of moral hollowness to it.

[00:40:08] 175. David: The question is, if we build this notion of distance, this ironic detachment into our understanding of cool, where does that distance ultimately come from? So is it a distance that I, as a cool person, freely and voluntarily choose to impose on myself ? Or is it a distance that, I'm forced into by the conditions of the world?

Does the world force me to detach myself from it in this way? And the reason that I ask this question is because a really interesting point that Pountain and Robins make is that coolness spread in the 1950s, so this is the post-war period. And the reason that it became such a powerful concept that appealed to so many people was because of changes in, political and economic life, not only in the US, but sort of globally.

And their argument is that the horrors of World War II, and then the politics of the Cold War sort of led to this widespread sense of disillusionment in people, because people realized that there are no values worth latching onto.

There are no political programs that are really bringing us closer to human liberation and to human freedom. And so the result was a turn inward, where a lot of people tried to find some kind of solace, some kind of liberation in this ironic detachment from the world and the search for a hedonistic model of self-liberation, which was ultimately empty, and that was rooted in nothing more than the intensity of private experience and just, again, this ironic detachment from the world, where you care, but you don't feel like you can say that you care, and so you pretend that you don't.

[00:41:57] 175. Ellie: I'm thinking about how the archetypical cool teenager of the post-war period is James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. In fact, David, you showed me the book cover of Cool Rules earlier. I think that was James Dean on the cover. just this disillusioned adolescent from this period. And in addition to ironic detachment, you mentioned that one of the other features was narcissism.

I wanna think a little bit about this. Do you think a cool person is inherently narcissistic? we said that they're self-centered in a certain way. Does that amount to narcissism? how far do we wanna take that?

[00:42:30] 175. David: I guess it depends on how far we want to stretch the concept of narcissism, but insofar as coolness is something that one intentionally projects while pretending not to do so, there is a narcissism at work here because one has to constantly think about how one is being seen by others, so this obsession with the, ego and the self, and especially with manipulating its perception by third parties in, the public space, I do think points to a narcissistic structure. And, actually Robins and Pountain use an amazing image for capturing this narcissism. They say, think about the cool teenage boy, maybe in high school, the one that everybody wanted to sleep with, that, everybody wanted to go on a date with, that is, the star of the football team and has a lot of friends, whatever.

That teenage boy, they say, doesn't enact the male gaze because the male gaze is about staring at others, especially women, and staring at others for too long is actually showing too much interest in them. And so it's too sincere 'cause it reveals your cards, and therefore the male gaze is uncool because it looks for too long.

And they say that teenage boy doesn't enact the male gaze. They enact instead the male glance, where they, quickly look at you, but then they look away to make sure that the other people look at them without seeming like they themselves are looking. And so this constant glancing back and forth can, I think, only be described as narcissism because it, again, points to being consumed by our image in the eyes of other people.

[00:44:14] 175. Ellie: Okay. 'Cause the person who wasn't beset by this narcissism would either just stare, like, "Oh, that guy's, interesting to look at," or be so occupied in other activities that didn't involve a level of self-consciousness that, you know, they weren't looking at that person to begin with. 'Cause it seems like what the glance is inaugurating is, or expressing, is a kind of comparative moment, as well as the self-awareness that, like, I shouldn't look too long because then it will be obvious that I am doing that, which implies a kind of reflexivity.

[00:44:44] 175. David: Well, and it's also, I think, an unwillingness to linger on an object, right? To stay with it, because that would be an expression of sincerity. I am a cool boy and I'm looking at somebody else, it raises their coolness status and it decreases mine, 'cause suddenly they are the object of my desire. 

[00:45:02] 175. Ellie: They're mogging you, to use cool lingo.

[00:45:04] 175. David: Probably.

[00:45:05] 175. Ellie: I think it's clear from what we've been talking about so far that coolness is pretty closely associated with norms of masculinity. We've done an episode on masculinity in the past, but I think there's also a very distinctive trope of the cool girl that I think is worth mentioning here too.

Gillian Flynn's novel Gone Girl includes an extremely famous passage that has since become known as the cool girl monologue, and this is a passage that points to the impossible standards to which women are held under patriarchy. She notes that there's no higher compliment for women than to be called a cool girl by a man.

And who is this cool girl? She's the girl who drinks beer and eats pizza and tells dirty jokes, but still wears a sexy miniskirt. And so she's the ideal of femininity while also playing into the male gaze perfectly. And one of the lines from the monologue here that I think is relevant is, "Cool girls never get angry.

They only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. I don't mind. I'm the cool girl." So we see the nonchalance there for sure, right?

[00:46:10] 175. David: Well, you see the nonchalance, but I think you also see some of the other criteria that we talked about, which were the ironic detachment, the narcissism. So both of those maybe go a little bit into the nonchalance, but especially the hedonism because the example that you gave is of the girl who throws herself into these pleasures that may not even be pleasures for her.

It's the pleasures of the male gaze, right? it's the man who wants the beautiful girl who, is eating a pizza and pounding beer and watching sports while embodying this ideal of femininity. And of course, the thing that we have to add here, even though it's already there in what you said because of the ideal femininity part, is that the cool girl is always a thin girl in this image.

You can be a cool girl if you are bigger, but usually your entry point into coolness is different. It has to be humor, right, under patriarchy. Whereas the cool girl who is thin, it's the combo of being thin and eating things that are forbidden, typically for women by body standards, that make her seem like she is enacting that private rebellion. Like she doesn't care about being beautiful, but magically she is.

[00:47:26] 175. Ellie: We've discussed how coolness has a positive connotation but is also distinctly different from good. Coolness refers to attributes like hedonism, narcissism, ironic detachment, and, those are not necessarily things that we deem good. And I think cool is more an aesthetic concept than a moral one, and that it may coexist with or possibly even require immoral behavior

[00:47:53] 175. David: So I agree with you, although in the book, the author has mentioned that coolness has become such a popular notion and everybody aspires to coolness nowadays, that we might as well describe it as a secular virtue. Not necessarily like in a full moral sense, but in the sense that people want to be it more than they want to be moral agents.

[00:48:15] 175. Ellie: Interesting.

[00:48:16] 175. David: Of course, there is a, difference, between being cool and being morally upstanding. And in fact, if we think even about high school, the cool kids are not actually the good kids.

[00:48:26] 175. Ellie: Uh, yeah, definitely not.

[00:48:28] 175. David: Yeah, and you said you were cool, so that means that you were also bad, morally bad.

[00:48:32] 175. Ellie: David, come on. You know me well enough to know that I was not cool in high school.

[00:48:36] 175. David: Oh, that is true. That is true. You said that you were a theater geek. Well, I was not really cool at any point in time, really.

[00:48:42] 175. Ellie: You were definitely when I first met you, I was like, "Oh, that guy's cool." And you even had adult braces and I thought you were cool. Yeah, so that's saying a lot.

You rocked those adult braces.

[00:48:51] 175. David: I had adult braces. I think your barometer for coolness was broken.

[00:48:55] 175. Ellie: No, you, really pulled them off in a way that nobody else could.

[00:49:00] 175. David: Like literally, physically, like argh. Anyways, so coolness, I think, differs from goodness in obvious ways, but also in the sense that it's rebellious. Often the cool kid will rebel against standards of moral comportment, like the expectations that they comport themselves in particular ways will become something that they rebel against.

Also, there is the nonchalant element. Coolness is also rebelliousness. But I think here we're getting closer to a point that we need to underscore, which is that coolness can be very alienating for the people who inhabit it, now I'm moving to the atmospheric concept of coolness, because it leads to passivity rather than to active engagement in one's life. 

And so again, even if you think about it from the original, meaning of coolness as this defense mechanism that African American men in particular use to protect themselves from the onslaught of white supremacy, there is a sense in which coolness is a retreat into passivity, and it's actually a defense strategy that prevents you from stepping into the world as a political agent who is willing , enter the world of action. in that sense, I do think that there are reasons for us to worry about the dark side of coolness.

[00:50:25] 175. Ellie: I think we can also think about how changes in culture have rendered cool superficial relative to that original meaning that you just mentioned. And bell hooks discusses this. She talks about how late 20th century cultural developments, including the rise of hip hop and gangster rap, led to a cool pose among Black men that is actually not a sign of strength, but rather a thin veneer masking vulnerability and promoting misogyny.

So hooks says that Black male cool used to be defined by the ability to withstand heat and remain center, that heat of oppression, as we talked about earlier. It was a way that Black men could define themselves rather than being defined by others. And she associates this with the vulnerability of blues music, which she thinks is the ultimate form of cool.

Like forget jazz, it's, blues for her. That form of cool combined a serious politics with a quest for self-transformation. But hooks worries that cool today is just an expression of dominator culture. Think about all of the rap lyrics that are so misogynistic that talk about gun and gang violence, that praise patriarchy, upholding the status quo.

That's the stance of keeping it real or what she describes the cool pose, and she thinks it's really dangerous.

[00:51:40] 175. David: Yeah, and I think the danger there would be both because of the superficiality, but also because it prevents, in this case, Black men on her account, from even recognizing the vulnerabilities and forming bonds based on those shared vulnerabilities. So I think that's a really good point.

Another worry that we might have about coolness is that it can be very quickly co-opted by capital, and that's because, as I alluded to a few moments ago, coolness is... it's ideologically neutral, right? You don't have to embrace any one ideal. In fact, it's kind of seen as uncool to care too much about social justice or ideals or political commitments because it is that permanent state of private rebellion.

And one example that the authors of Cool Rules use to highlight this danger is Andy Warhol. They say when coolness becomes appropriated by white culture It's no surprise that the coolest person, especially in the world of art, became Andy Warhol and that's because of his ideologically really ambiguous position in relation to capitalism.

Andy Warhol is cool, and he did define what it meant to be cool, at least in certain circles, for a very long time.

[00:53:00] 175. Ellie: Although I'm gonna say having an Andy Warhol piece in your home is not a flex. It's not cool anymore.

[00:53:05] 175. David: But I think that's true for you and I as philosophers. I don't think that's actually true culturally. I think for a lot of people it's still like, "Oh my God, pop culture, it's so revolutionary."

The point here is that the reason Andy Warhol was able to position himself in this way is because of the politically kind of empty or at least double-sided content of his art, where on the one hand you can describe it as revolutionary, but on the other hand, you can very easily describe it as capitulating to the capitalist order and as a celebration of a democracy of consumers where everybody is equal because everybody is equally consuming commodities that are meant to increase our comfort.

And so in that regard, I do think coolness at all these stages can very easily be appropriated by capitalism, who then can sell us coolness as a commodity of its own.

[00:53:59] 175. Ellie: Well, for what it's worth, I wouldn't put it past Mark Zuckerberg to have a Warhol print in his home. Probably an original, in fact. 

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[00:54:16] 175. David: To connect with us, find episode transcripts, and make one-time tax-deductible donations, go to overthinkpodcast.com. You can also check us out on YouTube, as well as TikTok and Instagram at overthink_pod. 

[00:54:29] 175. Ellie: We'd like to thank co-producer and audio editor Aaron Morgan, production assistants Bayarmaa Bat-Erdene and Kristen Taylor, and Samuel P.K. Smith for the original music. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.