The Emperor’s Boy

This week, we commemorated the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s death. It got me thinking about the amazing power of an individual to inspire a groundswell of activism amongst everyday people—King led a true revolution in attitudes towards racial divides in America and spurred policy changes to address them.

Thinking back to the Government class on “American Public Policy” I took seven semesters ago, I am reminded that social changes seem to happen either from the bottom up, with individuals transmitting their shifting ideals to the politicians who represent them (think of King’s 1963 March on Washington), or from the top down, with politicians or courts making sometimes-progressive policies that individuals gradually accept with realigned opinions.

The paradigmatic example of top-down opinion leadership is the Supreme Court’s 1954 “Brown v. Board of Education” decision calling for desegregation. The Supreme Court’s decision reflected and—likely more so—contributed to shifting public opinion on racial issues.

Changes in popular opinion are not only a matter of changing minds: they require communicating to society at large that minds are being changed. But much of the content of our social consciousness has nothing to do with laws or policy: the acceptability of subtle prejudices, the terms of political debate, or what subjects of public conversation are taboo—these cannot be legislated. How then do we know when opinions are changing?

In “The Stuff of Thought,” Steven Pinker talks about the fable of The Emperor’s New Clothes: “Every onlooker knew that the king was naked, but they had no way of being sure that the others knew, and so were intimidated into silence. All it took was for one boy to say ‘The emperor has no clothes!’ and the crowd burst into laughter. Crucially, the boy was not telling a single person anything he didn’t already know. But his words still conveyed information. The information was that all the other people now knew the same thing that each one of them did.” Social change often is a collective action problem: no one is willing to state their knowledge, belief, or opinion—against segregation, for instance—until they know others share it.

The 1947 Gregory Peck movie, “Gentleman’s Agreement,” features Peck as a reporter who goes undercover, pretending to be Jewish. After experiencing private and public prejudices, he realizes that his personal objection to anti-Semitism is not enough. He must speak up.

After observing his love interest, Kathy Lacey (Dorothy McGuire), stay silent after hearing an anti-Semitic joke at a dinner party, he upbraids her: everyone may object to the joke, but if everyone stays quiet or laughs politely, the jokes will keep getting made. She must speak up and bring to the collective conscious of the room the unacceptability of bigotry. He does not want her to change their minds: he wants her to be an emperor’s boy.

And, in a broader way, the movie played the role of candid dinner party guest in the social dialogue over anti-Semitism in the 1940s. Indeed, in changing our attitudes about issues like race, religion, and sexuality—and in changing the content of our everyday political and social dialogue—popular culture consistently plays the part of emperor’s boy, one loud enough for all of us to hear.

There are numerous other examples of pop culture overcoming taboos, from the title character’s abortion on Maude in the 70s to the Sex and the City girls’ frank discussion of women’s sexual preferences in the last decade.

In the last few weeks, Jay Leno was railed against for asking Ryan Phillipe to give his “gayest look” to the camera after discussing the actor’s early role as a young gay man on “One Life to Live.” The event, a pop cultural incident salient and accessible to millions, vocalized a broad consensus that casual jokes based on gay stereotypes are not acceptable.

Tonight, many millions of Americans will be tuning into “Idol Gives Back,” the second annual charity event from top-rated show “American Idol.” The event raises money for charities here and abroad, leading us to focus on giving but also making explicit to all of us that fighting poverty is actually a shared national priority.

These examples all have aspects of opinion leadership in them—perhaps we are being told to think abortion is acceptable, casual homophobia is wrong, and philanthropy is imperative. More likely, though, pop culture is reifying our already-shared but unexpressed belief that the emperor has no clothes.

So, when it comes to social change and political discourse, we need figures like Martin Luther King to mobilize individuals who share beliefs to make our policies reflect them, and we need opinion leaders like Congress and the Supreme Court to make policies that lead us to better beliefs. But we also need popular culture. It doesn’t tell us what to think—it tells us that others think what we think, too. It is the voice of the silent majority; it is the emperor’s boy.

Ryder B. Kessler ’08 is a social studies concentrator in Quincy House. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.