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Descriptive vs Prescriptive Media: Which is Better for Society?
Hexmage-PA
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I've often heard certain people bemoan that today's media isn't more like The Andy Griffith Show or other shows of its time. By that they usually mean they'd prefer to see contemporary media portray a world where the characters are primarily people of upstanding morality and where immoral action is shown to be wrong by the end of the episode. Media since then has largely moved from a world of black-and-white morality that prescribes how people should act to largely shades of gray morality that either seeks to describe how people really act or deal in full-blown cynicism, with clear moral lessons largely the province of children's entertainment or religiously-inclined creators. There are exceptions to this, such as how popular media in the 2010's and onwards has trended towards being prescriptive of diversity and condemning discrimination.
I guess my overall question is if it would be better for society if popular media was primarily prescriptive (glorifying moral action and depicting immoral actors either learning the errors of their ways or suffering negative consequences) instead of descriptive or cynical. I can think of arguments against this: for example, people disagree on what is moral or immoral, it may not seem true to life, and it would discourage the uglier and/or more complex aspects of life from being represented. I also suspect prescriptive media would encourage episodic storytelling versus serialized storytelling, as would be easier to clearly depict consequences for immoral actions in a short timeframe rather than waiting months or years to get to the point. However, I can also imagine the argument that media showing what people and life are "really like" without clear condemnation of actions could cause people to internalize societally harmful beliefs (for example, I've seen people claim that the movie Scarface has caused harm by glamorizing criminal activity, or that Rick & Morty has glamorized cynicism, even though both pieces of media sometimes show the negative consequences for the things they supposedly glorify).
Thoughts on this? While I'm on it, are there any pieces of recent media that particularly stand out as being at least partially prescriptive in nature?
I guess my overall question is if it would be better for society if popular media was primarily prescriptive (glorifying moral action and depicting immoral actors either learning the errors of their ways or suffering negative consequences) instead of descriptive or cynical. I can think of arguments against this: for example, people disagree on what is moral or immoral, it may not seem true to life, and it would discourage the uglier and/or more complex aspects of life from being represented. I also suspect prescriptive media would encourage episodic storytelling versus serialized storytelling, as would be easier to clearly depict consequences for immoral actions in a short timeframe rather than waiting months or years to get to the point. However, I can also imagine the argument that media showing what people and life are "really like" without clear condemnation of actions could cause people to internalize societally harmful beliefs (for example, I've seen people claim that the movie Scarface has caused harm by glamorizing criminal activity, or that Rick & Morty has glamorized cynicism, even though both pieces of media sometimes show the negative consequences for the things they supposedly glorify).
Thoughts on this? While I'm on it, are there any pieces of recent media that particularly stand out as being at least partially prescriptive in nature?
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A lot of shows eoth a gritty edge are about people who have done bad things finding their way back to society or to the side of good and encountering complications, but at their core is still an idea of them knowing what good is and that evil is a temptation.
I'm hard pressed to think of a show that is truly nihilist, besides maybe Rick and Morty, but even that has its share of Morty chasing gratification and being made miserable. Rick isn't happy, clearly, strange for a nihilist.
Almost every superhero or scifi show is more of the prescriptivist side than the narrativist side.
You know how Scarface ends for him right?
In Plato's ideal city, all media would be what you call prescriptive and while that's radically different what society believes now, I don't think he should be dismissed out of hand. People may enjoy dark or cynical media and be upset if it denied them but people enjoy many things that are harmful to them and rightly should be withheld. I think people would agree with Plato that society is shaped by media and it follows that media should be carefully controlled much as we would control public drinking water to prevent the public coming down with some moral illness.
There are I think two main rebuttals to this. The first is that this kind of restriction is a restriction on human freedom and that can not be tolerated. According to this view, people should be maximally free to do as much as they can without impacting the freedom of others. Freedom is the meaning of existence, not virtue, and how people create meaning out of their lives. I think this rebuttal and plato's argument are operating from widely different premises. Plato believed that a group of intelligent people would be able to reason and discover what was Good, Just and True. That they would be able to rationally discover what was best for everyone and that all good rational people would come to the same conclusion in time. Those who value freedom usually reject that there is a universal good or rationality so these two views are opposed on a fundamental level.
My rebuttal is different. I'm sympathetic towards Plato but I think art and media has a place beyond what he establishes for it. To me, art is a way of expressing truth through other means than logic not merely a way to excite the feelings. It is an alternate way of telling truth about reality and that means that it will sometimes be dark because we live in a fallen world where there are dark things but it will not end in the darkness because there is also light at end. It is possible to have dark media that promotes a cynical or immoral view of the world just as it's possible to construct a convincing but wrong argument but that should not be a reason to ban all darkness. Plato would have all darkness removed but to use Lord of the Rings as an example, if you remove Frodo traveling through Mordor then you also remove him arriving at the West where 'the grey rain-curtain turns all to silver glass and was rolled back'.
I don't really know of shows that aren't at least tangentially prescriptivist. Always Sunny?
A more fundamental question is not whether art should be descriptive or prescriptive but whether it is. Is it a result of the zeitgeist or does it create the zeitgeist? Is it a self reinforcing cycle? A dialog between creators and the broader culture?
Has media become more cynical because we stopped trying to make it prescriptive or because society has become more cynical and amoral?
I think it falls more heavily on the descriptive side. Media is a product of the culture that creates it and especially the media that becomes popular is that which speaks to the feelings of people at the moment.
We can see this in how the current war over the wokeness of media is a reflection of an underlying cultural divide. It didn't create that divide, it has been building because of various social and cultural changes and processes for decades. Both sides consider themselves to represent the majority viewpoint. If media was capable of being simply prescriptive you couldn't have a backlash against it. I'm not sure the actual contents of any media is doing much to change anyone's mind even. Even considering the impact on the next generation I think there is plenty of evidence that media detached from the broader influence of family and community has a limited impact.
Apparently it was part of the "Code of Practices for Television Broadcasters". As summarized on Wikipedia:
Though the Code of Practices for Television Broadcasters is no longer followed, Standards & Practices departments at various networks have their own sets of rules:
Source
But this is only a thing that's really possible with science fiction. In a more general sense, I feel the division is not between cynical and prescriptive media, but between cynical and optimistic takes on humanity as a whole. A question I would pose is: if a random background character (not a main character) in X media found a thick wad of 20s, (or universe-specific untraceable items of reasonable value) what would they do with it? I feel there's a pushback against properties where the answer is "pay a hitman to kill their neighbor's dog".
The problem is that if you go too far in the other direction without thinking too deeply you end up at "tell the cops", which runs straight into some of the ways that Real Life is kind of a shitty place, at least partially because of said cops. Upholding the status quo is not always a good ideal to hold, because the status quo harms people, and dealing with that is tricky in a way that I don't expect most media to even attempt.
EDIT:
To bring this back around to your actual question, I feel that there's room to ease up on South Park-esque hyper-cynicism without having episodes ending with a spin on the Wheel of Morality.
However, there is the issue that a lot of people who have opinions on what is moral are horrible people - and the powerful people who would be able to choose what shows up in media are likely to just decide that what benefits them is moral.
I would like it if more artists *chose* to produce aspirational works, or at least works that depict bad things more honestly, but even then you're going to be struggling with perspectives. Rick and Morty is a fine example of the artist putting a lot of work into showing that being a terrible person is terrible, and the audience failing to accept that message.
One of the few college literature classes I took was on literature emerging around the Isreali / Palestinian conflict. The teacher was always trying to push out what questions each story was asking, about the war, its meaning, its victors, and identity. Some authors were even known to have particular moral points of view they were pushing (prescriptions) but she thought that was of little value. It was the multiple interpretations and viewpoints that emerge from the story that made them interesting, that would enhance our understanding of the conflict as it is, as well as imagining how to move on from it. Great literature was not a place you went to find the answers handed to you, it was entirely as a prompt for questions and debate.
Like if your only takeaway from "Beloved" was that American slavery was fucked up, yeah that's a big part of the story, but I'd say you missed something rather important if you just leave it at just that. Even if you ask "is infanticide justified to escape slavery" you're still wide of the mark. These things were just the set-up for the story; the novel is largely about the process of coping with having already made such a choice.
If descriptive media has any "value" to society, it is less in pushing us how to act a certain way, and more in prompting us to think what goals we want to aim for in the first place. It is not a tool for creating a specific utopia, but formulating what such a utopia would even look like, or whether that's even a thing we should bother undertaking. It is more for interrogating values than imposing them. That's always going to be pretty niche by definition, but its also what tends to end up in the canon of what academics and critics elevate as high art as far as narratives go.
Even Rick & Morty is Prescriptive, in that it shows bad guys doing bad things, and having bad things happening to them as a result. It is also incredibly cynical about the nature of humanity, and I think that's the message people who base their personality on Rick & Morty are taking from the show.
I do agree that there's a lack of descriptions of utopia at the moment.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Anti- shippers demand that fanartists and fanfiction not depict anything against morality, like yandere or sexual assault, even when the fan creator explicitly says ‘this should not happen in real life’
My current fandom, due to the limited number of non related characters, has had a running battle between those depicting incest (often using the canon that the characters aren’t fully humans, so human norms don’t apply to them) , and those vehemently opposed. Both sides attack each other viciously, and this is not some new fandom, many fans are in their 30’s.
As to where I fit in… I would classify myself as a pro shipper, in the same way I describe myself as pro choice, even though I would never get an abortion. Fictional depictions should not be forbidden, no matter the dark subject matter.
WoW
Dear Satan.....
As someone who has been watching that fight from the outside, it has always felt more like a misunderstanding of the nature of a community vs an archive. An archive grabs everything that fits a particular category, and doesn't care about the content. It's a storage facility, and isn't putting any sort of stamp of moral approval on what it chooses to keep. A community can and should have standards and moderation, both of content and members.
Or in more concrete terms, people are mad at Archive Of Our Own for being an archive, because they're using it as a community, and the same rules that make it a good archive make it a bad community.
Again, I'm on the outside of this fight, so I could have misunderstood things, but that's my perspective.
of the two variations of the fantastic, the moralistic prescriptive is generally trite, and the gritty descriptive is generally insufficiently fantastic.
So you're taking the opinion that both options presented in the OP are insufficient and also a false dichotomy?