T HE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION WEDNESDAY, JULY 31, 2019| 9

“Porn” isn’t just a word for sex stuff

anymore. There’s a new use of that

word, a broader use. We’re talking

about food porn, real estate porn,

closet-organization porn.

Sometimes “porn” is used as an

accusation, as when you call out some

artist who takes photographs of impov-

erished foreigners for making “poverty

porn.” The comedian Alex Moffat

teased an audience last year for its

obsession with “impeachment porn” —

and everyone knew exactly what he

meant. But other kinds of porn seem

just fine.

This new, generic sense of “porn” is

catching on because it’s useful. It gives

a name to a specific kind of relation-

ship we can have with images and

other media. It’s worth getting clear

about the nature of that relationship.

For once we understand it, we may

discover that we have cultivated some

porn-y relationships in some unexpect-

ed places.

The philosopher Michael Rea has a

helpful account of sexual pornography.

He says that an image is sexual

pornography when we use it for imme-

diate gratification, while avoiding the

complexities of actual sexual relation-

ships like physical intimacy, emotional

connection and romantic interaction.

To capture the new, generic sense of

porn, we need only to generalize Pro-

fessor Rea’s account. Food porn is

images of food, used for immediate

pleasure, without your having to go

out and buy the food, cook it or worry

about the calories.

Real estate porn is pictures of real

estate, used for instant gratification,

without your having to buy the house,

clean it or take care of all that furni-

ture. And so on.

These kinds of porn, like sexual

porn, tend toward the extreme — and

for the same reason. Food porn is often

pictures of unhealthy, decadent or

expensive food. Real estate porn is

usually pictures of lavish homes, with

hard-to-maintain surfaces and delicate,

easily damaged décor. Porn is free to

go to extremes because its consumers

don’t have to deal with the complica-

tions of the real thing. With porn, we

get to skip the hard part.

This can be relatively harmless.

There doesn’t seem to be much wrong

with food porn, for example, because

there’s nothing particularly bad about

using pictures of food for immediate

gratification. But other types of porn

can be damaging.

Consider what we call moral outrage

porn. This is when you use morally

outrageous states of affairs for the

sake of immediate gratification, while

avoiding the efforts and entangle-

ments of actual moral engagement.

When you read your Facebook

newsfeed and soak in all the reports of

morally outrageous events, and you do

it just for the satisfaction of feeling

outraged, then Facebook has become

your porn stash. You’re not trying to

fix problems or make morally balanced

judgments. You’re just after the pleas-

ures of moral outrage: the smugness,

the self-satisfaction, the delightfully

hot feeling of righteous indignation.

Our point isn’t that moral outrage is

bad and that we should all be civil to

each other, or anything like that. Our

point is the opposite: Genuine outrage

is a crucial part of a moral existence. It

motivates us to act, to fight injustice.

Moral outrage porn is troubling be-

cause it threatens to undermine the

all-important function of the real thing.

Genuine moral engagement is diffi-

cult. When we care about doing the

right thing, we have to pay attention to

the details. And then we have to do the

hard work of pushing against the

world to fix it, while sweating those

details.

But when you are interested only in

the pleasures of moral outrage, you

engage with the world differently. The

pleasures of moral outrage are maxi-

mized when morality is simple and the

world is starkly divided into good and

evil. So the consumers of moral out-

rage porn will seek out the most car-

toonish depictions of the enemy. They

will want a newsfeed full of unambigu-

ous stories of the other side’s wick-

edness.

Over time, they may even develop a

less nuanced and more easily inflamed

sense of right and wrong, to increase

their moral outrage.

Notice, too: You could have a porn-y

relationship with your outrage at other

people’s moral outrage. You could

gratify yourself with urgings for civili-

ty and calm in the face of too much

antagonism. And you could do it just

for the smug pleasure of your own

high-mindedness. This would be civili-

ty porn — a species of moral outrage

porn.

It’s bad enough that moral outrage

porn can lead to inaction. But if you do

decide to act after consuming all that

moral outrage porn, you are liable to

act in light of the cartoon morality it

cultivates. Recall a traditional worry

about sexual pornography: that it

evokes pleasure by portraying sexu-

ality in unrealistic terms, and that

consumers of sexual pornography then

risk exporting unrealistic expectations

to the real world of sex, with poten-

tially disastrous consequences.

The equivalent worry, with moral

outrage porn, is that its consumers,

having simplified their moral systems

for the sake of self-righteous pleasure,

will take that cartoon morality with

them when they engage with the real

world. We may already be seeing the

results.

ILLUSTRATION BY NICOLAS ORTEGA; PHOTOGRAPHS BY DWIGHT ESCHLIMAN, IMAGE SOURCE, AND NITRUB, VIA GETTY IMAGES

The word

captures a

new way of

relating to

food, real

estate and

even moral

outrage.

C. Thi Nguyen

Bekka Williams

C. THI NGUYEN is an associate professor

of philosophy at Utah Valley University.

BEKKA WILLIAMS is an assistant profes-

sor of philosophy at Minnesota State

University, Mankato.

Why we call things ‘porn’

Soren Kierkegaard asked God to give

him the power to will one thing. Amid

all the distractions of life he asked for

the power to live a focused life, whole-

heartedly, toward a single point.

And we’ve all known geniuses and

others who have practiced a secular

version of this. They have found their

talent and specialty. They focus mono-

maniacally upon it. They put in the

10,000 hours (and more) that true

excellence requires.

I just read “You Must Change Your

Life,” Rachel Corbett’s joint biography

of the sculptor Auguste Rodin and his

protégé, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke,

and they were certainly versions of

this type.

The elder Rodin had one lesson for

the young Rilke. “Travailler, toujours

travailler.” Work, always work.

This is the heroic vision of the artist.

He renounces earthly and domestic

pleasures and throws himself into his

craft. Only through total dedication can

you really see deeply and produce art.

In his studio, Rodin could be fe-

verishly obsessed, oblivious to all

around him. “He abided by his own

code, and no one else’s standards could

measure him,” Corbett writes. “He

contained within himself his own uni-

verse, which Rilke decided was more

valuable than living in a world of oth-

ers’ making.”

Rilke had the same solitary focus.

With the bohemian revelry of turn-of-

the-century Paris all around him, Rilke

was alone writing in his room. He

didn’t drink or dance. He celebrated

love, but as a general outlook and not

as something you gave to any one

person or place.

Both men produced masterworks

that millions have treasured. But read-

ers finish Corbett’s book feeling that

both men had misspent their lives.

They were both horrid to their wives

and children. Rodin grew pathetically

creepy, needy and lonely. Rilke didn’t

go back home as his father was dying,

nor allow his wife and child to be with

him as he died. Both men lived most of

their lives without intimate care.

Their lives raise the question: Do

you have to be so obsessively focused

to be great? The traditional masculine

answer is yes. But probably the right

answer is no.

In the first place, being mono-

maniacal may not even be good for

your work. Another book on my sum-

mer reading list was “Range,” by Da-

vid Epstein. It’s a powerful argument

that generalists perform better than

specialists.

The people who achieve excellence

tend to have one foot outside their

main world. “Compared to other scien-

tists, Nobel laureates are at least 22

times more likely to partake as an

amateur actor, dancer, magician or

other type of performer,” Epstein

writes.

He shows the same pattern in do-

main after domain: People who spe-

cialize in one thing succeed early, but

then they slide back to mediocrity as

their minds rigidify.

Children who explore many instru-

ments when they are young end up as

more skilled musicians than the ones

who are locked into just one. People

who transition between multiple ca-

reers when they are young end up

ahead over time because they can take

knowledge in one domain and apply it

to another.

A tech entrepreneur who is 50 is

twice as likely to start a superstar

company than one who is 30, because

he or she has a broader range of expe-

rience. A survey of the fastest-growing

tech start-ups found that the average

age of the founder was 45.

For most people, creativity is pre-

cisely the ability to pursue multiple

interests at once, and then bring them

together in new ways. “Without con-

traries is no progression,” William

Blake wrote.

Furthermore, living a great life is

more important than producing great

work. A life devoted to one thing is a

stunted life, while a pluralistic life is an

abundant one.

This is a truth feminism has brought

into the culture. Women have rarely

been able to live as monads. They

were generally compelled to switch,

hour by hour, between different do-

mains and roles: home, work, market,

the neighborhood.

A better definition of success is

living within the tension of multiple

commitments and trying to make them

mutually enhancing. The shape of this

success is a pentagram — the five-

pointed star. You have your five big

passions in life — say, family, vocation,

friends, community, faith — and live

flexibly within the gravitational pull of

each.

You join communities that are differ-

ent from one another. You gain wisdom

by entering into different kinds of

consciousness. You find freedom at the

borderlands between your communi-

ties.

Over the past month, while reading

these books, I attended four confer-

ences. Two were very progressive,

with almost no conservatives. The

other two were very conservative, with

almost no progressives. Each of the

worlds was so hermetically sealed I

found that I couldn’t even describe one

world to members of the other. It

would have been like trying to de-

scribe bicycles to a fish.

I was reading about how rich the

pluralistic life is, and how stifling a

homogeneous life is. And I was realiz-

ing that while we’re learning to preach

gospel of openness and diversity, we’re

mostly not living it. In the realm of

public life, many live as monads,

within the small circles of one spe-

cialty, one code, no greatness.

Navigating

the tension

between

work and

relationships.

Do you have to be a jerk to be great?

Auguste Rodin in his workshop in Meudon, France, circa 1910.

TALLANDIER, VIA BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

David Brooks

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