A Brief History of Vice

by Robert Evans

  Monkeys, and Celebrity at the Dawn of Time

  That glossy rack of magazines obsessing over the sundry pregnancies, drug addictions, and diet tips of Western glitterati feels like a clear sign of the times. Only in an era of untold opulence and freedom from want would people dedicate hours of their lives and their precious, precious money to stare at the faces of strangers. It’s the kind of thing you just assume hunter-gatherers wouldn’t have crammed into their schedule, if only because they had saber-toothier matters to worry about back then.

  But that irresistible impulse to pay attention to a few stars among our number isn’t unique to modern humans . . . or to humans, as it turns out. Back in 2005, several scientists at Duke University got a bunch of monkeys and housed them in pairs. Periodically, each monkey was given a choice between receiving delicious juice or receiving a different amount of juice along with a picture. The pictures were either of low-status-monkey faces, high-status-monkey faces, or candid butt shots of female monkeys.

  Scientists call this a “perineum shot,” but we all know the truth.

  Michael Platt / Duke Institute for Brain Sciences

  I talked to Dr. Michael Platt, one of the architects of the study/trailblazers of simian pornography. Here’s how he described the results:

  Monkeys (presumably unconsciously) give up juice to see pictures of female genitals and pictures of high-status monkeys, and you have to give them extra juice to look at other categories.

  Now, remember, these monkeys weren’t living in a normal social group. They were housed in pairs, but in the same general monkey-storing area as all the other adorable little furry porn fiends in the study. Despite a total lack of contact, they were still able to tell which monkeys belonged at the top of the social ladder, and which ones belonged on the bottom.

  If you’ve ever been in a colony of monkeys who are housed in pairs but who have visual, auditory, and olfactory access to each other, you get the definite impression that they develop a social hierarchy as well as other relationships despite never interacting through touch.

  There’s surely some interesting commentary there about how shouting and body odor were the original Facebook, but I don’t want to get too off track. What matters here is that monkeys are willing to give up resources to gaze at the beautiful (monkey-)people who top their social hierarchy, even if they’ve never had a chance to meet those (monkey-)people in person. So what do monkeys get out of staring at pictures of elite strangers? What do we get?

  Knowledge. Dr. Platt described the faces of high-status monkeys as having a “high information content.” Monkeys are great social learners. By paying close attention to the faces (and behaviors) of their more socially successful neighbors, they can learn from them. There’s a fine line here; the studied monkeys paid less for faces, even high-status faces, that seemed threatening. But in general they were happy to sacrifice some of their resources (juice is like monkey gold) for a chance to study their betters.

  Macaques aren’t early humans, but it’s sensible to hypothesize that Dr. Platt’s experiment hit on a behavior that’s existed in primates for quite a while. It’s easy to see how paying attention to the people with the most food/opportunities to shoot their DNA down to another generation would have paid off, even in hunter-gatherer days. And it’s also easy to see how that pragmatic behavior would have grown over time, as our social groups grew larger and our definition of success widened from “not starving and having lots of sex” to “living in mansions and having lots of sex.”

  In a way, our modern problems with obesity and runaway celebrity obsession share a common cause. Both of these modern plagues started with people tapping into a powerful, primal need and finding a way to sate it on demand for a nominal fee.

  When Fandom Becomes a Disease

  In 2002, a group of psychologists designed the “Celebrity Attitude Scale.” It’s basically a test you can give someone to tell if he or she just really likes famous person X, or if you should start filing the paperwork for a restraining order on X’s behalf.

  The Celebrity Attitude Scale presents respondents with a series of statements about their attitude toward “MFC,” or “my favorite celebrity.” Since I’m a big fan of Patrick Stewart, I’m going to use his name from here on out because it makes me smile. The statements range from fairly innocuous (“Keeping up with news about Patrick Stewart is an entertaining pastime”) to straight-up terrifying (“I would gladly die in order to save the life of Patrick Stewart”) to really just . . . weird (“If I were lucky enough to meet Patrick Stewart, and he asked me to do something illegal as a favor, I would probably do it”).

  The scale has respondents give a number between 1 (“strongly disagree”) and 5 (“strongly agree”) to each question and then places them into one of three categories, depending on their grade. If I’m just the kind of guy who likes to catch any movie or TV show Patrick Stewart shows up in, I’d go in the “entertainment social” category. If I was just dead certain that deep down, he and I had some sort of spiritual connection, I’d qualify as “intense personal.” And if I’m the kind of fan who’d happily dive in front of a bullet aimed at Sir Patrick while carrying a butt full of his illegal drugs, I’d probably qualify as “borderline pathological.”

  The Celebrity Attitude Scale is still quite new, but early surveys done on limited samples of people suggest that celebrity worship is a common and growing phenomenon. The effects can be more subtle than you might guess, not just wide-eyed fans shrieking themselves hoarse on YouTube. Remember: Our brains reward us for paying attention because it makes evolutionary sense to emulate successful people. It’s only when that urge is coupled with the modern world that things get weird.

  That deeply programmed drive to emulate the most successful among us can now be taken literally, thanks to the wonders of plastic surgery. Case in point: a 2010 study by PhDs John Maltby and Liz Day in the Journal of Adolescent Health that looked into the impact of celebrity obsession on cosmetic surgery rates among young people. More than two hundred thousand teens receive some form of cosmetic surgery in the United States each year. The Maltby-Day study found that this demographic was particularly prone to at least one form of celebrity worship: 22.8 percent were described as the mild “entertainment social” version, 8 percent rated as “intense personal,” and 2.5 percent qualified as “borderline pathological.” All those numbers are markedly higher than they are in the general “real adult” population.

  All those hundreds of hours spent obsessing over the photoshopped perfection of the world’s Tatums and Cyruses have a real impact. The Maltby-Day study found that those people with an “intense personal” obsession with a celebrity were markedly more likely to go under the knife. (An “entertainment social” interest doesn’t seem to have had this effect.)

  The body of research in the field of “how looking at airbrushed beautiful people fucks kids up” is actually quite broad. A 2006 study found that just watching a few minutes of music videos featuring thin models caused an increase in body dissatisfaction among sixteen- to nineteen-year-old girls. Self-esteem didn’t seem to have any protective effect; even girls who felt good about their bodies were affected. It goes beyond just the idolization of skinny, airbrushed bodies. A 2011 study by Eleni-Marina Ashikali and Helga Dittmar of the British Psychological Society suggests that merely focusing on the lavish lifestyles and material possessions of a famous person can have a negative impact on many women’s body image.

  At this point, the bulk of the research on how mass media affects body image has focused on women, particularly teenage girls. But don’t worry, lads: we’re next. Over the last decade or so of movies, male protagonists have gone from handsome and fit to superhuman eighty-ab’d muscle-support systems with faces. If you want to be a leading man today, you’ve got to commit to working out like it’s a full-time job, shooting yourself full of human growth hormone and severely dehydrating yourself
the day before a shirtless scene (it makes the ab muscles look bigger, you see).

  Somehow, somewhere along the line, our natural inclination to learn from the most successful among us got twisted into doomed attempts to emulate people who might as well be mythic figures. The most famous actors have personal trainers, teams of graphic designers, and PR representatives whose sole goal is to hide every sign of aging and unmarketable personal habit from public view. No amount of crunches and face-lifts will turn you into a myth, or a god, and yet that’s what our most famous people have become.

  The Weird Relationship Between Celebrity Worship and Religion

  If you want to take a look at the ancient equivalent of a tabloid magazine, look no further than the mythology of the Greeks. A stroll down that pre-checkout aisle of your local supermarket does a pretty good job of catching you up on which beautiful rich famous people are impregnating/sleeping with which other beautiful rich famous people. If you were a citizen of Athens in 300 BCE, you’d have to consult the nearest priest to scratch that same voyeuristic itch.

  Here’s a brief list of some of the different people and things Zeus slept with across the annals of Greek myth:

  1. A swan. (Zeus was also a swan at the time. It’s complicated.)

  2. His sister, Demeter.

  3. His niece, Demeter’s daughter, Persephone.

  4. Europa, the moon goddess, whom he banged while taking the form of a white bull for some reason.

  I could keep going for pretty much the rest of this book, but I think you get the point. Ancient religion and today’s tabloid culture clearly have at least a few things in common. Back in 2013, I read an article by Carian Thus of United Academics Magazine (“Like a Prayer—Is Fame the New Religion?”) that wondered if, in an era of declining religiosity, the cult of celebrity might be stepping in to fill the void in millions of hearts.

  Religion News Service (a DC nonprofit) put together a graph of religious activity in the United States from 1952 to 2012. It paints a pretty stark picture of God’s modern-day social cachet:

  A representation of the original graph, with a diving board added for panache. Tavia Morra

  The story is much the same worldwide: A 2011 study by Northwestern University found that people with religious “non-affiliation” formed one of the fastest-growing minority groups across much of the world. A Gallup poll in 2012 showed that, on average, 13 percent of the world’s population considers itself to be atheist. That’s a 9 percent increase since 2005. I won’t hammer home this point any longer: Religious worship is in decline across the globe.

  But celebrity worship is on a troubling upswing. And there’s a definite connection to be made between the two. We’ve established that people will obsess over (and even get plastic surgery) in order to be more like their favorite famous people. More than emulate a specific famous person, many of us want to be famous. That’s a common desire, especially among young people, who are also more likely to skip out on church and religious belief altogether.

  One major traditional function of religion has been to help assuage and moderate the believer’s fear of death. Belief in a God generally comes with a belief in some sort of afterlife. And as fewer and fewer of us believe in literal life after death, we start looking for a less literal sort of immortality: fame.

  Researchers have devised two sentences to provoke what they call “mortality salience” in respondents. That’s a fancy way of saying “make them actively fear the reaper.” Once you’ve primed them with these lines . . .

  1. “Please describe the emotions the thought of your own death arouses in you.”

  2. “Jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you physically as you die and once you are physically dead.”

  . . . your subjects will feel their mortality is salient as shit, and presumably give you honest answers about how death’s grim inevitability makes them feel. A 2007 study in the journal Self and Identity found that mortality salience led to a greater desire for fame in people, specifically the super-lame kind of “fame” that comes with paying to have a star named after you. Thoughts of death didn’t just make people want to be famous, though; it also made them want to connect more with the celebrities they already admired. People primed with thoughts of their own demise were more likely to report liking modern art only if it was made by a celebrity.

  Celebrity worship climbs as religious worship falls. Our society isn’t the first to have experienced this phenomenon. It happened in ancient Greece around 300 BCE, if the classical scholar Eric Dodds is correct. Since the good folks at Gallup weren’t around back then, he had to look at the tombstones of long-dead Greek commoners to gauge their attitudes toward religion. He noticed a declining number of references to the gods or an afterlife as the Hellenistic period rolled along. This growth in nonbelief was met with a growth in fandom-like cults of personality around famous figures like the first king of unified Macedon, Demetrius I.

  This is made incredibly clear by an ode to Demetrius I, written after he saved the city of Athens from a different Demetrius who’d tried to conquer it: “Other gods are either far away, or do not have ears, or do not exist, or pay no attention to us, whereas you we see present, not wooden or stone but real.”

  Writing about this ode in his 1951 book, The Greeks and the Irrational, Mr. Dodd reflected:

  When the old gods withdraw, the empty thrones cry out for a successor, and with good management, or even without management, almost any perishable bag of bones may be hoisted into the vacant seat.

  He wouldn’t have been at all surprised by Dr. John Maltby’s 2004 finding that “religious puritanism” has a protective effect against celebrity worship. People who believe strongly in the rules prescribed by their deity have a clear guide for how they should live their lives. They don’t feel as strong a need to look to the examples of other people.

  Because the truth is, whether you believe in a god or not, we’re all looking for some sort of cheat sheet to the big existential questions. Why are we here? How should I act? What is it OK for me to have sex with? Even monkeys know those answers don’t all come from within. And while some people get their answers from philosophy, from history, or from the admirable people in their own lives . . . a lot of us will always look to the person who seems to be having the most fun.

  It all started with a beer.

  By “it,” I mean all of human civilization and civic organization. And by “beer,” I mean something that technically falls under the same umbrella as the six-pack (or case) in your fridge, despite looking and tasting quite different.

  I started this book by taking you back to the prehistory of humankind’s love affair with fermented beverages. Primates have been drinking alcohol since long before Homo sapiens ever stepped onto the world stage. But humans brought something very important to booze: intention.

  The ability to make alcohol out of fruit (etc.) has been with our species all along; our skin is permanent home to a variety of yeasts. Conventional drunken archaeology places the first organized beer brewing between the eighth and fourth millennia BCE. That’s, at least, around 1,500 years after the birth of agriculture, and it makes beer roughly contemporaneous to the birth of cities and human civilization.

  But archaeologists have long suspected that the brewmaster’s art goes back even further to the Natufian Period (12,500–9,500 BCE). See, the grains required to brew beer don’t have much nutritional value in their raw state, and it’s a pain in the ass to shell and husk them into something you can turn into proper cereal. There were other foods more easily available to Neolithic humans. They had animals to face/spear, fruit to pick, roots to chew, a vast array of options that didn’t involve sitting down on a plot of land and inventing agriculture.

  Beer, and the promise of unlimited future beer, would’ve made that sacrifice much more palatable. In 2013, a team of archaeologists (Brian Hayden, Neil
Canuel, and Jennifer Shanse) published a paper, What Was Brewing in the Natufian?, that makes a strong, albeit circumstantial, case that civilization evolved because our ancestors grew tired of “nature alcohol,” and started craving a more reliable fix. Farming is the only way to make enough grain to ensure a regular, consistent rate of beer production. So farmers we became.

  As I pointed out in the introduction, you may have read references to Dr. Hayden’s article before. When it came out in 2013, the Internet exploded with a variety of articles like “How Beer Gave Us Civilization” (The New York Times) and “How Beer Created Civilization” (Forbes). Dr. Hayden thinks those summaries oversimplify the truth and leave out something really awesome.

  Feasts were like the United Nations of the Natufian world. Tribes would invite their neighbors, even their enemies, and use the celebration as an opportunity to brag about how badass they were. Feasting was a way to project power, as well as to cement alliances and work out political disagreements. Dr. Hayden described the whole process to me:

  There was sort of a rotating system of feasting. So one family has a feast one week, another family has a feast another week . . . and then there’s the rotating feasts, one house [after] another. It keeps going on and on. These societies are much more social than contemporary industrial society. And all the social relationships are cemented with beer.

  Rather than describe it as “beer created civilization,” Dr. Hayden suggested an alternate summary of his work: “Complex communities do more feasting, brewed beverages represent more of an investment in resources and as such are high value and high status. People focused on making more of it, and one consequence of that was increased agriculture.”