The Ethics of Awesomeness

Josh Landy
Is “awesome” just a word for things we approve of?

Ray Briggs
Or is awesomeness a particular kind of excellence?

Josh Landy
Would the world be a better place if we all try to be more awesome?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you via the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area

Josh Landy
continuing conversations that begin at philosophers corner on the Stanford campus where Ray teaches philosophy, and I direct the Philosophy and Literature initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today, we’re thinking about the ethics of awesomeness.

Josh Landy
You Americans, you just love to call everything awesome. I mean, once upon a time, that word used to mean something. I mean, inspiring awe, but now it’s become meaningless.

Ray Briggs
Oh, come on, you’re supposed to be a language guy, Josh. Don’t you know the meanings of words can change over time? And one word can have multiple meanings. Haven’t you lived long enough in the US to figure out what awesome actually means?

Josh Landy
As far as I could tell, it’s it’s a word that tech bros and valley girls use for things they like.

Ray Briggs
As if. Look, it may be overused by certain kinds of people, but so are many words, like, literally.

Josh Landy
Oh, don’t get me started on”literally.” I mean, that word used to mean its complete opposite. Like, my heart was literally in my mouth. Go see a doctor if that happened.

Ray Briggs
But look, awesome isn’t used to mean the opposite of its original meaning. If it were, it would refer to stuff that’s kind of mundane, tedious, but that’s not how we use it at all.

Josh Landy
All right, fair enough. Okay, so I’m prepared to bite and accept that it actually means something, But you’re gonna have to tell me what. So convince me that awesome means something beyond just expressing general approval.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, okay. So I think it means a certain kind of excellence, you know, an awesome person is one who does something excellent that inspires great respect or admiration.

Josh Landy
Okay, so let’s consider an example. Take Elon Musk.

Ray Briggs
No, you take him.

Josh Landy
Why do I have to take him?

Ray Briggs
I get the sense that you don’t actually think he’s awesome.

Josh Landy
No, not entirely. No, but I know plenty of people who think that way. They think going into space is pretty cool. I think they’d even say Musk and his space program are awesome.

Ray Briggs
Yeah. And I would disagree with those folks. Like, I don’t think they’re confused or wrong about the meaning of the word. But we have very different opinions about Musk.

Josh Landy
Okay, so you don’t think Musk is awesome for planning to, you know, populate Mars or something. But is there something he could do that you would call awesome? Or do you think anything he could ever do would for want, of a better word, suck?

Ray Briggs
Well, you know, if he used his vast wealth to end hunger here on earth, for example, instead of blowing it on some pipe dream. Now, that would indeed be awesome.

Josh Landy
Okay, I don’t disagree about that. Ending world hunger, that would be an awesome thing to do. But it kind of makes me wonder something. Do you have to help others in order to be awesome?

Ray Briggs
Oh, look at you. You’ve gone from claiming the word is completely meaningless to using it and saying it has this very precise meaning, a kind of pro-social excellence,

Josh Landy
Pro-social, you know, I do like that way of putting it. Fair enough. I’d be willing to call extraordinary acts that benefit humanity awesome.

Ray Briggs
Well, I’m glad I’ve convinced you, but I’m not actually sure I agree with you. I don’t think all awesome things have to benefit humanity in any grand way. Like, I could make an awesome sandwich, and it’d be one that only I get to enjoy.

Josh Landy
An awesome sandwich? What’s in there, gold leaf?

Ray Briggs
You know, a sandwich with like, perfectly ripe avocados and, and tomatoes that have been sliced and salted to perfection, fresh crunchy lettuce. Haven’t you ever had an awesome sandwich?

Josh Landy
I’ve definitely had tasty, well-made sandwiches. But were they awesome? It feels a little cheapening to use the word awesome of a sandwich. And besides, this show’s about the ethics of awesomeness. Shouldn’t we reserve the term for things that have some kind of ethical dimension?

Ray Briggs
Ah, you know, that’s a great question. And I’m gonna let our guest Nick Riggle answer it. He’s the author of a book called “On Being Awesome: A Nnified Theory of How Not to Suck.” He’s going to join us later to tell us exactly how to be awesome.

Josh Landy
Thinking of people who are totally awesome, we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter Shereen Adel, to ask what people on the street thought was awesome. She files this report.

Shereen Adel
Do you ever use the word awesome?

Speaker 1
Sparingly. Yeah, I think it’s this abused adjective. I think when people call something awesome, it is an overcompensation for the fact that it is often not awesome. Like a bacon sandwich, we will call awesome when it is, in fact, just a squalid little sandwich. And it’s not in fact, awesome. But we call it awesome because our lives are mundane and banal.

Shereen Adel
Would you call any bacon sandwich awesome?

Speaker 1
Well, I’m a vegan. He might. He’s paleo.

Shereen Adel
Do you use the word awesome ever?

Speaker 2
I do. And I’m probably guilty of overusing it as well.

Shereen Adel
What’s something that happened to you like this week that you think is kind of awesome?

Speaker 2
I connect- I made some headway on a connection with somebody I’ve struggled to have connection with in the past. I was just surprised. You know, I’ve seen all of that taking a turning point, and that’s making a connection when I thought it was not possible.

Shereen Adel
Can you tell me something that you think is awesome?

Speaker 3
I think the way California has responded to this coronavirus is awesome. Because now we are getting a sense of security with all these people that are getting vaccinated like myself. And I guess 75% of the people in the Bay Area are vaccinated. So that’s awesome.

Shereen Adel
Hi, what’s your name?

Jeremy
Jeremy.

Shereen Adel
Jeremy, do you ever call things awesome?

Jeremy
Yes. Like, my favorite animal is monkeys. All the places I go to, like San Diego, maybe I go to Los Angeles, and a bunch of places and that’s really awesome.

Shereen Adel
You said your favorite animal’s a monkey? Can you tell me what’s awesome about monkeys?

Jeremy
That they love bananas just like me.

Speaker 4
I am very much like a small child vis a vis to be my sense of wonder and how often it overtakes me, but I think, at least most recently, I’ve been really excited about tree frogs. And especially the whites tree frog because it has the nickname dumpy tree frog. And I think that alone is awesome. But then it’s teal, during the day and at night, is kind of like this gray, purple, brown color. And I just think that’s really awesome and badass.

Speaker 5
I think awesome, is feeling awe in your every day. And so it’s feeling inspired. And you know, we kind of colloquially use it as like, that’s really cool. Or like, that’s really fun. But really, if we think about it on a grander scale, it’s like what inspires us to feel like, impressed.

Speaker 4
Like, I also find airplane food, awesome. And not because it’s super delicious, but because the packaging is really creative. And I guess a sense of wonder is more just sort of like, it takes you out of the experience and gives you a moment to pause and reflect on how cool it is.

Speaker 6
I think it’s really awesome when you have a friendship that you know, is really unconditional and really supported. And you guys might not hang out all the time, you guys might have really busy schedules and really busy lives or, or maybe you don’t, maybe you see each other all the time but you like don’t get sick of each other, or sometimes you do a little bit, but you still no matter what always unconditionally love an d support each other and make time to like get back in touch with that person. And that’s what I’m doing right now. And I think it’s awesome.

Speaker 1
It’s rare to have like exceptional experiences, to have like peak experiences that you would truly call awesome. I feel like that word should be preserved a little bit for those because it doesn’t happen that much.

Speaker 7
I think life is awesome, because I’m here. I mean, I’m just here and all this is, and I don’t know what any of it is, but it’s awesome.

Shereen Adel
I think that’s pretty awesome, that’s hard to top.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that awesome report, Shereen. I’m Josh Landy, and with me is my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs. Today we’re thinking about the ethics of awesomeness.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Nick Riggle. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of San Diego, and author of “On Being Awesome: A Unified Theory of How Not to Suck.” Nick, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Nick Riggle
Hi, thanks so much for having me.

Josh Landy
So Nick, before you became a philosopher, you had another career, even another life that many would call awesome. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Nick Riggle
Yes. So I was a professional inline skater at age 15 or 16. I dropped out of high school to travel the world and skate in various demos and competitions. And I was professionally ranked fourth in the world and competed in the X Games a few times, including twice in San Francisco.

Ray Briggs
That sounds really awesome. But earlier, Josh was skeptical about whether awesome meant anything other than just expressing what tech bros and valley girls think is cool. So has “awesome” these days just become an empty concept? Or does it mean something?

Nick Riggle
So I think it means a lot of different things. But I think there’s an especially interesting meaning that is worth defining and talking about, making very clear through philosophy. And that is that being awesome as a person is being good at creating social openings.

Ray Briggs
Wait, what’s a social opening?

Nick Riggle
So it’s a technical concept that I, that I invent in the book, but it’s best illustrated through an example. So imagine, you are on a bus ride, going home from work. And you know, maybe it’s been a long day, and you’re just kind of staring out the window, and the bus turns a corner and you see a gorgeous sunset, you know, off down one of the beautiful San Francisco hills. And you say, wow, you know, you think, wow, that’s beautiful. And you just turn to the person sitting next to you, and say, man, what a beautiful sunset. So that creates a social opening, because what you’ve done there is you’ve broken out of your normal role of being just the kind of everyday person riding a bus. And you’ve expressed your aesthetic sensibility to the person next to you. And that gives them a chance to express their sensibility in response, and there’s a bunch of different ways that they can take up that social opening.

Ray Briggs
So yeah, I see why that gives a really cool opportunity for two people to create a social connection. But what if the other person on the bus just doesn’t feel like talking to me? Have I still done something good?

Nick Riggle
Yes, insofar as you’ve created a social opening, there’s a bunch of ways that they can respond, as I said. One would be to take up the social opening in, in my terms that that would make them down in one way or another. And they can take it up in lots of different ways. They can say, oh, yeah, it’s really a beautiful sunset. They could even say, if they said it in the right way, you know, actually, I hate sunsets, you know, I find them boring. Or, but they can also, they have two other options. One is to be what I call merely polite. They can fail to, as it were, express their individuality and instead, just kind of refer to the norms of respect and politeness and just saying, oh, yeah, that’s a nice sunset and just kind of essentially declining the invitation to engage, but they can also suck.

Josh Landy
Okay, well, I want to hear about sucking. But before we get there, I’m curious to know how you would feel if I responded by quoting the poet Apollinaire, “sunn severed head,” which is a, you know, it’s a pretty powerful poetic metaphor, but it might be a disturbing thing to hear on the bus. Are all forms of individual self expression, you know, conducive to awesomeness?

Nick Riggle
Right? What if you just start singing, you know, Schubert like, whoo. So yeah, I mean, one of the things that’s really important in being awesome, is being sensitive to the individuals that you’re offering these social openings to. So you have to actually be really good at having a sense of which invitations they would want to take up. So if you don’t have any reason to think that they’d be especially interested in French poetry in the early 1900s then, you know, maybe Apollinaire is not your go to, right. But a sunset is something that is pretty accessible to everyone, normally, and so it’s a good bet that it might be something that would create a social opening, you’re referring to it.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about awesomeness with Nick Riggle from the University of San Diego.

Ray Briggs
Can someone be awesome all by themselves? Or does awesomeness require other people? Doesn’t it suck when someone tries too hard to be awesome?

Josh Landy
How to be down with awesomeness, along with your comments and questions when Philosophy Talk continues?

That’s clearly the best and most awesome cover Tina Turner ever done. I’m Josh Landy. And this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything

Ray Briggs
except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about the ethics of awesomeness with Nick Riggle, from the University of San Diego, author of “On Being Awesome.”

Josh Landy
We’re pre-recording this episode, and so unfortunately, we can’t take your phone calls. But if you’ve got comments or questions, please email them to comments@philosophytalk.org. Or you can comment on our website where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
So Nick, earlier you were saying that if somebody doesn’t take up a social opening, they might not take it up in a sucky way. Can you tell us more about what it is to suck?

Nick Riggle
So suckiness as I define it is a matter of being offered a social opening, being able to take it up, but declining for no good reason. So if you’re on the bus and you say, hey, look at that beautiful sunset, the person next to you says, maybe they just glare at you, and then turn their head. That would be a way of sucking because you were offered this social opening, and you declined it for no apparently good reason. Now, of course, that person might have had a good reason that wasn’t discernible. So it might have just seemed to you that they suck. But, but they actually didn’t. To really suck you, you have to have you know, this good reason and not take it up.

Ray Briggs
So what if they don’t notice that there’s a social opening? Like, what if they don’t hear me? Do they suck, then?

Nick Riggle
No, they’re they’re off the hook. It might seem like they’re sucking in the vicinity, but there’s not.

Ray Briggs
Well, it seems like it might be kind of hard to tell who sucks. And maybe I should give the people around me the benefit of doubt.

Nick Riggle
Yes, exactly.

Josh Landy
And I like your definition in the book, you know, that, you know, the reason you want to call this suckiness is, it’s almost like it literally sucks the air out of the room., right? That’s right, that at least one way to kill a social opening is seen to pour cold water, right? So imagine the person you say what a beautiful sunset, and the other person says, you know, sunsets are boring, or just something you know that that doesn’t just fail to take up the offer, it actively stifles it.

Nick Riggle
Right. Yeah, those people are wack in my, in my taxonomy,

Josh Landy
So, tell us more about wack.

Nick Riggle
Well, they not only failed to take up the social opening in the sucky way, but they also disparage your offering it so you know, they said something like, only fools like beautiful sunsets or something kind of mean, you know, that squashes the social interaction.

Ray Briggs
So these are examples of people responding badly to awesomeness. Are there ways to like proactively encourage awesomeness or shut awesomeness down even before somebody has created a social opening? How do I think about that?

Nick Riggle
It’s a really cool question. I think there are yeah, I think that certain forms of self-presentation can encourage awesomeness, certain ways of dressing or comportment. You know, having style in my language. But also, I think the environment is a big contributor to our willingness to create and take up social openings. So you know, exciting spaces, interesting parks, things like that can be conducive to creating the kind of value that I call awesomeness.

Josh Landy
So awesomeness, in your definition, is creating these social openings where both people can express their individuality and be themselves, express themselves. Can you tell us a little bit about why that’s important? And why is it important to be an individual and express your individuality?

Nick Riggle
So yeah, so awesomeness is the value that’s created when someone is awesome, and another person is down. So the social opening is created and taken up. There’s a, what I call a mutual appreciation of individuality, or a mutual valuing of individuality where someone’s individuality is expressed, and another person expresses theirs in return. And you’re sort of seeing each other for the individuals you are. What’s valuable about that, is that it’s hard to do. It’s hard to get into that state, because we spend so much time just inhabiting various social roles and routines and habits that effectively obscure our individuality.

Ray Briggs
So Nick, you’re saying that awesomeness is kind of fundamentally social. And I wonder how I square with this with my belief that I make awesome sandwiches? Because I’m usually the only one who gets to eat my sandwiches. Are my sandwiches only awesome if I make them for other people?

Nick Riggle
So no, that’s a really good question, though. I, I like that a lot. Because it focuses on when we call things awesome. There’s a really great Eddie Izzard joke. Josh might be aware of this, where he makes fun of Americans for calling hot dogs and socks awesome. But when we call a thing awesome there’s a really interesting question about what we’re doing, given my definition, where awesomeness is something you do in social interaction with other people. What do we mean when we call a sandwich or hotdog or socks awesome? And my view is that it’s a way of attributing a value to the object, such that you’re noting that it could play a role in these social dynamics that I’ve articulated in the book. So if you call your sandwich awesome, you’re essentially saying it has this power. It has this value that can work in the social dynamics. So it might be a really delicious tasty sandwich, might be really original, it might have a great cream sauce, or whatever. And that just, you know if it’s awesome, it means that you could like, give it to a friend. And they would they would, you know, as something you made. Or you could make a bunch of them for your colleagues or, or something like that.

Josh Landy
Yeah, I’m pretty much insisting in our next Philosophy Talk meeting that Ray make the sandwiches, I’m sorry, Ray. You’ve oversold, you’re gonna have to be awesome about this, they better be good. But I want to dig a little deeper into this because this is one of the really fascinating parts for me of your theory, the way in which you- because we often think that individuality and individualism, this focus on me as me and you as you is sort of in the way of community, but your view is actually it’s the opposite that individuality requires community. You say, this lovely thing that, you know, expressing ourselves is something we cannot do alone. So what do you mean by that?

Nick Riggle
So I think that, you know, making ourselves expressing our individuality, we can have individuality, alone, in a sense, but I think it’s really something that comes to fruition and really gets a more beautiful articulation and definition in social interaction, when we sort of offer ourselves up as individuals to others so that we can, quote unquote, vibe, or be awesome together. So think of like, you know, if you’re good at the drums, I mean, there’s this, you can do a lot of good drumming in your basement. But it’s so much better when someone else is there playing another drum, or the guitar or singing or rapping, or whatever it might be, when there’s this kind of dynamic mutual interaction that I call awesomeness.

Ray Briggs
So I’m curious also about the relationship between individuality and rule breaking, which has come up a couple of times. So rules seem like they’re kind of inherently social. And in order to break them, I have to have a rule in place. Is individuality just something that can only be expressed through rule breaking. Are rules inherently social, how do I think about the relationship there?

Nick Riggle
Good. So that’s a really deep question. I think that, you know, in a typical case, the ones that I think we encounter every day, almost every moment of every day, where, you know, we’re inhabiting a role. I mean, you know, whether it’s walking down the sidewalk, ordering a coffee, getting on the bus, you know, in every case, we’re just a normal person walking on the sidewalk, a normal person getting on the bus, a normal person ordering a coffee. And we all know how to enact those roles. We all know how to embody them or to play out those scripts. But when we do, when we do those things, we’re not that different from one another. That script is the one, it’s the same that we all know Hi. What would you like? I would like a coffee. That’d be that’d be $2, etc.

Josh Landy
Two dollars?

Nick Riggle
I wrote this like five years ago, so.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about awesomeness with Nick Riggle from University of San Diego. And, Nick, I want you to finish your thought. But I also want to throw your way an email received from Tim in Portland, Oregon. Tim asks about a story from the Iliad, where Nestor convinces Achilles to wear the armor of his dead comrade Patroclus and go back into battle. And Tim says this offers Achilles a social opening to rejoin the fight, and thereby expresses rage and purpose. It seems like a really interesting potential example of something awesome. Do you think that fits?

Nick Riggle
Wow, yeah. I have not thought about my notion of awesomeness in the context of war. That’s really interesting. I mean, so in that context, the norms and rules, a lot of them that we’re used to, in everyday civic life are out the window and other rules, the rules of engagement take precedence. So in that case, I wonder if, if it is a social opening.

Ray Briggs
Actually, this raises a worry for me, which is, what if your individuality involves killing people? If I give somebody a social opening in war to be murderous and cruel, and they take it up, did that count is awesome? That seems bad.

Nick Riggle
Right, yeah. So one of the things I do emphasize is that the individuality has to be appreciable, so worthy of valuing, valuable. And I think that being a murderer is not one of those traits, right? Insofar as Achilles is, is expressing traits like that, then I think it’s not going to be awesomeness. Awesomeness is not in the offing there. Something else might be sort of a pure expression of courage or something.

Josh Landy
But that gets us something I think was really powerful in your- in your theory, because, as I understand it, your theory situates awesomeness as a moral value, and so it rules out things like murderousness, right? It seems like it sits on top of a base layer of sort of ordinary morality to, you know, be a good person, don’t harm other people, right? But then it’s kind of over and above that base layer. You can also you can go above and beyond to help other people fully express who they are, and recognize them for who they are and see them for who they are. Is that an accurate characterization?

Nick Riggle
It really is. Yeah. And this goes back to what I left hanging, when I was trying to answer a race question about rules. The way I think about these norms that are broken, is that they’re sort of the basic norms for functional society. You know, when I, when I enact the script of coffee shop customer, you know, I’m just observing these these simple rules of kind of efficiency, first come first serve, that allow us to, you know, order coffee in a sort of effective way. Now, those rules are social, in a sense, because they help society function. But they also go against something in our nature. And this is a point that I think Friedrich Schiller made a long time ago, and I love this in “Letters Upon the Aesthetic Education.” If you just abide by these rules all the time, then your individuality is never going to flourish, to be expressed in community with others. And so it’s in breaking out of those rules in a respectful way that that allows awesomeness to flourish.

Ray Briggs
So I actually have a question now about one of the vices that you say in your book is opposed to awesomeness. And I’m kind of worried that I have it sometimes. One of the really bad ones that you really hate, which is what you call being a fake ass person.

Nick Riggle
Oh, no!

Ray Briggs
A fake ass person is somebody who always abides by social scripts and tries to escape being an individual. And I don’t always do this, but I do this a lot of the time. Yeah. Because I want my life to go smoothly. Yeah, like, if I’m on the bus, I don’t want anybody to talk to me. And so like, when is this bad? Is this always bad? Is this like irredeemably bad?

Nick Riggle
So there’s a couple of things going on there. One is, Ray, you might just be someone who’s really into being polite, a lot of the time. So you want your life to be really governed by these by these moral norms, which, you know, I can’t fault that, that’s not something I have any interest in criticizing, and that’s great. But I do, I would say, in that case, you’re missing out on another value, which is the values that I’m talking about in the book. That said, if the fake ass person is really someone who acts like they’re going to be taking up these social openings, and then doesn’t deliver in the in the way of being deceptive about the individual that they’re presenting. So it sounds like in your case, you’re kind of not, you’re signaling that like, I don’t even really, I’m not interested in the social openings at all. In a lot of contexts. I just want to be a polite person, keep to myself. That’s fine. What would be problematic in my view is if you somehow indicated that you wanted to take the social openings up, but then sort of didn’t deliver on your end of the bargain.

Ray Briggs
So that’s a relief to me, because I don’t usually indicate that I want to take social openings up when I don’t. But But this sort of introduces a kind of another ingredient, which is whether I’m expected to take up the social opening, and how that can depend on a signal that I’ve sent.

Nick Riggle
Yes. And I think that I think there’s also a lot of problematic parts of culture that place these expectations on different genders, different races. And that’s where kind of social norms and expectations can really clash with the ethics of awesomeness.

Josh Landy
That’s so interesting. And you know, they’re these really difficult cases, right? I mean, I still think Ray’s going to awesomenes heaven.

Ray Briggs
It’s my sandwiches.

Josh Landy
It’s definitely because of the sandwiches. But I wonder right now, so that you’ve mentioned a couple of different possible cases, Nick, you were talking about, you know, the, these injustices in our society sort of shading over into potential worries for the view. I wonder also about introversion. You bring this up in your book, but here’s my worry about it, you know, you point out look, introverts don’t suck, they’re not going to hell, but it’s harder for them to be awesome because they’re just kind of shy retiring people. And so my worry is look, this is supposed to be an ethics. Aren’t ethical principles supposed to be available to everybody? It seems like introverts just don’t really get to have it, you know, they can be in limbo. They’re not gonna go to awesomeness hell or sucking hell,but they can’t get to awesomeness heaven. Isn’t that a little sad?

Nick Riggle
Well, no, I wouldn’t say that. It would be very sad. I agree. But I don’t- I don’t think that’s part of the view. So, you know, I do think it’s like, well, I call it an ethico-aesthetics. So it’s, it’s really a set of principles that I think govern an aspect of our social and individual lives that is really important to take seriously. And it’s one that philosophers typically overlook, this aspect of sociality. I think that people who are introverted can have some further difficulties in accessing this realm of value. But also in in some of the expectations that people have about how one typically accesses this realm of value. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t access it. So I think as I described the book, there’s a lot of different ways that introverts can be awesome without putting in a lot of kind of face time.

Ray Briggs
Small follow-up about unfair expectations. So if people want me to be more social because of my race or my gender, do I owe it to them to take them up more on their social openings?

Nick Riggle
No, no, not at all. They owe it to you to offer social openings that are sensitive to your individuality.

Josh Landy
Yeah, that’s lovely. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about the ethics of awesomeness with Nick Riggle, author of “On Being Awesome.”

Ray Briggs
What do you do to create more awesomeness in the world? Do you give others the opportunity to express their individuality? Are you receptive to the awesome opportunities others offer you?

Josh Landy
Being open to awesomeness, plus commentary from Ian Schoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher when Philosophy Talk continues

Is choosing to be awesome like choosing a pair of shoes that rule? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything

Ray Briggs
except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Nick Riggle, from the University of San Diego. And we’re thinking about the ethics of awesomeness.

Josh Landy
So Nick, one of the interesting aspects of your theory for me was the intersection with politics. So we’ve talked a little about the intersection with the moral. I can see it kind of going in one of two very different ways, right? So one way you could go with it is, well, gee, look at all the social progress that’s been achieved by virtue of people sort of standing up for their rights as individuals. I have the right to date who I want, marry, who I want, you know, worship how I want or not at all. On the other hand, you might imagine somebody saying, well, gosh, you know, if, if you have people thinking of themselves primarily as individuals in this kind of atomistic way, isn’t that going to kind of kneecap collective action. You’re gonna have people say, it’s my right not to get vaccinated, you know, and things like that. So which way is it you know, is this kind of individualist awesomeness and engineer social progress or, or could it potentially block large scale collective action?

Nick Riggle
What I argue in the book is that, you know, this value, this emphasis, and at least in US culture, on awesomeness, is a consequence of increasing individualism. I think since the since the 60s, probably in our society, where yeah, we can date who we want, we can practice religion, however we want, we can marry, we can not marry, a lot of these social expectations that were so forceful in the 1950s and before are loosened very, very, very much. And this has been by a lot of sociologists and historians, and philosophers with the result that, you know, we’re sort of more lonely. The more there’s this emphasis on just being me, the less you might think we’re able to feel this enriched, profound sense of community, and awesomeness, I think, the sort of collective cultural emphasis on maybe not on the word, but on what it picks out, this kind of connecting with other people as individuals, is something that we’ve started to really desire. And that’s the desire in a sense for community, while also being an individual. Not the community where we all have the same religion, we all have the same sexual orientation, we all have the same haircut and so on. We all have the same skin color, you know, but where we allow the individual to flourish, while not losing our grip on the sense that, you know, we can fuel this almost love for one another as the individuals that we are. We don’t have to like all be the same in order to feel like we’re at home with one another.

Ray Briggs
So I wonder sometimes about the effects of social oppression on people’s ability to feel awesome. And I know that you’ve given some really good examples of this. So like if women are walking down the street worrying about being sexually harassed, it makes much less sense for them to try to take up any social opening that anybody offers them. That can kind of crush people’s awesomeness. And I think also, things like being at the mercy of your employer can really crush your individuality if you have a job where you can sort of be fired at any time.

Nick Riggle
Yeah. So there’s, I mean, oppression is terrible for the ethics of awesomeness, because it’s often totally insensitive to individuality. It just cares about some skin color or sexual orientation, or you know that your skin color might be part of your individuality, but the the oppression doesn’t care about its being part of your individuality, it just cares about the skin color, or the sexual orientation, or what have you. So fighting against those oppressive norms is really important, not just for justice, but also for this, for this other sort of higher level of flourishing that human beings can engage in.

Ray Briggs
That’s kind of encouraging. I also, I want to ask for, like examples of social justice-y actions that are also awesome if you have any of those.

Nick Riggle
My favorite? Well, I have a lot in the book, but my favorite is probably the example of Mayor Mockus, Antanas Marcus in Bogota, and then in the mid 90s. So in the mid 90s, there, Bogota was a pretty, pretty rough city with a lot of civic unrest. People didn’t observe a lot of the laws, there was a lot of late night drunkenness, and fighting and murders and corruption at all levels, including at the level of the street cops, who would fail to issue tickets to cars that were not observing the rules of the road, or if they did get a ticket, you could just easily bribe them. And so there was tons of traffic deaths, and injuries and car crashes in the streets of Bogota. And Mockus has a fascinating story, he was a math and philosophy professor, he was head of the University of National University of Colombia, and he became mayor and he fired all the traffic cops, and replaced them with mimes. So instead of getting a ticket, if you were, you know, parked in the middle of the crosswalk, or something, a bunch of a troupe of mimes would come out and start publicly mocking you, right in the sort of fun mime way. And this actually worked. And if you were observing the rules, then you’d get a parade of mimes celebrating you. And so they created this public spectacle, this awesome public spectacle. And actually, it actually worked. Traffic deaths were reduced, crashes were reduced, and people started observing the rules of the road. And Mockus, that was one of many things that he did.

Josh Landy
And you have some other wonderfule examples too, like the Mexican artist, Pedro Reyes, who melts guns, bought back guns into shovels to plant trees is fantastic. So that makes me think that there’s this kind of benevolent spiral or a kind of mutual- kind of reciprocal relationship, that social change, progressive social change is good for awesomeness. And awesomeness can be good for social change. And maybe similarly, you know, the way that we’re talking about earlier, individuality of the right kind, you know, requires communities good for individuality. And maybe individuality is, is good for community too. I mean, I, you know, I sometimes think maybe you’re right in a kind of jazz spirit, right? Where that you mentioned drumming, drumming on your own, that’s fine. But hey, if you’re in a band, especially in a jazz band, where, where the success of the group depends, not just on the moments where people are playing together, but also on these moments of, you know, the spotlight’s on one person, that expression of internal individuality isn’t just solipsistic and selfish, but contributes.

Nick Riggle
Yeah, the image of the improvisational jazz band is actually one of the images I use. It’s sort of a great symbol of awesomeness. And in fact, Lester Young, the, the great jazz saxophonist and also widely recognized as the father of coolness, I argue that his original coolness was really one of the earlier forms of awesomeness.

Ray Briggs
I want to ask one more question about social scripts, which is that it seems like whether they’re bad or good to break depends partly on how bad or good they are as scripts. So is it more awesome to break a social script that was kind of lousy anyway? And also can like, can you by breaking and and rewriting a social script, can you create a new social script?

Nick Riggle
Yes. So this reminds me of some of the great work that’s being done right now on social scripts, which I’m super inspired by. When I was writing this, there was- I didn’t know of anything on social scripts in philosophy. And there’s some really cool stuff being written by Samia Husni and others. I, you know, I think it’s gonna depend, you know, I think sometimes there’s a social script that kind of requires more direct action to break. And other times as a social script where you know, can just being awesome around it in certain ways could be the way to break it. So I don’t have a hard and fast rule. But I think that it can also just depend on the immediate context. So Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, who’s a street artist in New York City, wanted to combat catcalling and sort of sexist oppression in the streets, and did so by creating these really beautiful portraits of women, with quotes about their experience being harassed in the streets, and put those up in the streets as a way of combating catcalling in those in those areas. Now, that’s awesome. And it’s a way of pushing back on this oppressive script that says, hey, if someone says you’re beautiful, you should respond, right? This kind of patriarchal, sexist norm.

Ray Briggs
This also is reminding me about, sort of the fact that breaking a social script and creating a social opening might make people uncomfortable. So I imagine that some of the people seeing this poster would be uncomfortable. And I also feel like I have to tell a story of like one of the greatest poetic performances I ever saw, which was by a guy with cerebral palsy, who had like a device that he typed on, and had able bodied members of the audience read from where he asked them, like, obnoxious questions that he had been asked. And he actually, he dragged me up, I hate being seen in public, I felt super uncomfortable, and also felt like that was a really great social opening, because it really made me think. Are social openings always fun?

Nick Riggle
No, but you know, if you read my book, you might think that they are right, because I do have this kind of fun tone in the book. But you know, like anything of value, we can have a lot of different attitudes towards it, and a lot of different experiences of it. So I think that your example is a really nice one that shows that, you know, awesomeness can make you uncomfortable. It can make you feel, you know, like contemplative or thoughtful. It’s not always kind of, you know, spontaneously jumping out of your seat and lip syncing to Bon Jovi.

Josh Landy
I have one last question for you, Nick. I’m, you know, I love the connection to improv. I’m a big fan of improv myself, you know, accepting offers, making your partner look good. The question I had is, you know, in a successful improv interaction, something gets created that isn’t really me, and isn’t really you. It’s sort of an us, or it’s a thing that kind of came out of nowhere, you know. Are awesome social openings, do they open up the possibility not just for individuals to express who they are, but for something kind of magical to happen that’s sort of neither me nor you, but somehow between us or a synthesis of us or something like that?

Nick Riggle
Yes, that’s exactly right. So in the book, I noticed very cheesily that awesome can be parsed as a we that is so me. So it’s a bit of a you know, it’s a corny slogan. But that’s- you put you put it really well, I think that when we do express our individuality in this invitation on communal way, and someone is down to take that up and respond in kind, something else happens. And that is awesomeness, that thing that happens that’s so wonderful, that’s what awesomeness is.

Josh Landy
Nick, on that happy note, I want to thank you so much for joining us today. It has definitely not sucked.

Nick Riggle
Oh, good. It was my pleasure to be here and to chat with you.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been Nick Riggle, Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Diego and author of “On Being Awesome: A Unified Theory on How Not to Suck.” So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
So I’m thinking about how I have a social opening every time I walk my dog and somebody remarks on how beautiful she is, how I have so many social openings in the show. Like basically, my two favorite things I will toss them both into a limerick. There’s Blossom, my dog. There’s this show, and they both creates social openings, making them awesome.

Josh Landy
I highly approve of your verse, But suspect that my own would be worse. So I’m gonna stop there. We’re gonna put links to everything we mentioned in our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comments@philosophytalk.org and we might feature it on the blog.

Josh Landy
Now, creating social openings with awe inspiring speed. It’s Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Schoales. I was never really a hippie, but like a good little sponge, I soaked up all the buzzwords back in the day. That’s when I learned and I think hallucinogens may have aided in the process, I don’t know. I probably got stoned and forgot. But I think that is when I learned that when you’re saying something, what is being said is never as important as letting people know you’re the kind of person who says these kinds of things. Thus the long hair, the blase affect, the lack of a necktie, the inability to get to class on time, this gave me the ability to be unresponsive to requests and still make an impression. Did you study for this midterm? For example, would be met with “I’m cool.” Which could mean anything. Maybe even an answer to the question. All options are on the table when you’re a young man trying to stop the war machine without calling much attention to yourself. 60s thing though was dynamite man. Unreal, outstanding., excellent. What’s the word I’m looking for? Oh, right. Awesome. So originally awesome meant the Grand Canyon or an elephant or a film by Cecil B. DeMille. When you’re on the marijuana however, many things can stop you short. A guitar lick, a snowflake, the smile of that girl who sits behind you in colonial American literature. Why is she even in that class, man? It’s unreal. She should be going for a CompLit MFA finding echoes of Grendel and fourth century Abyssinian epigrams. Such thoughts play havoc with the libido of a young man not fully acquainted with the curriculum before him. Why’d I you get stoned before my colonial American literature class? We’re not even reading Hawthorne? It’s Indian place names and diaries of a plantation owner. On the bright side, I learned that when the plantation owner writes about Roger in [unintelligible], it is the same Roger as the Jolly Roger, a pirate lord. What a thing to discover in a university situation! Out of sight awesome, but today, shockingly inappropriate. The hero went away, but awesome stuck around, joining other words like cool and jam. Today, awesome is often used in TED talks, also often used by corporate creatives to describe both team building exercises and teams. Recruiters looks for superstars to get an awesome working environment. Put it on a poster and others a foot high and by gall, you got a campaign. More used in speech and print though as in thanks, you’re awesome. Or you know what would be awesome? That guy’s awesome. That shot was awesome. How was the sex? Awesome. It was? Awesome. It’s often used to foreshadow an anticipated event. Dinner tonight, that would be awesome. If you can have that done by the end of the day, that’d be awesome. Unlike other bits of sign that are only used infrequently, like calling where you live your pad or if you don’t want to do a thing, saying it’s not your bag, or calling yourself stoked if the thing you’re going to do is your bag, awesome seems to thrive because it contains echoes of its original meaning. Describing a majestic thing that may or may not have been some Endor created whole-cloth by gods or demons and so very American to take that word by the horns and inflate the importance of a more or less everyday thing and to promote yourself as discerning and enthusiastic purveyor of positivity. It elevates what it modifies, and it elevates you. Itt’s a group effort that raises us all. Still, it’s not the 60s. We no longer see that poster with a kitten cleaning my little claws, my tree branch with the caption “hang loose.” Loose hanging is not a thing to which we now aspire. We want to be perceived as uptight competent hard workers even though we don’t like working that much. What does it wait people say now when you place an order? They say, not a problem. Two eggs overeasy, home fried sausage? Not a problem. Well, I hope not. It’s your job. It’s why we too are here right now. Why would it be a problem? This is the cafe, you serve breakfast. Bring it to me, I’ll eat it then pay for it, that would be awesome. I wish I mean nice, fine. Awesome means okay. Awesome means nice I can live with that. That’s my jam, bring on those eggs, sock it to me daddy-o. Oh, I gotta go.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University. Copyright 2021.

Ray Briggs
Our executive producer is Tina Pamintuan.

Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
Thanks also to Merle Kessler and Angela Johnston.

Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
The views expressed or misexpressed on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders,

Josh Landy
not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website philosophytalk.org where you could become a subscriber and get access to our library of more than 500 episodes. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

Eddie Izzard
The universe is awesome using the original version, the meaning of the word also. Not the new one, which is sort of the socks and hot dogs, hey red and yellow, awesome!