Taylor Swift is Not Your Beast of Burden

Reflections on Rerum Novarum and Parasocial Relationships

Details on the next reading club are below the fold for supporting subscribers.

Let Workers Be Human Beings

This summer,

Sarah Carter

and I hosted a series of Zoom discussions on Catholic Social Teaching (CST), working through three key documents that have helped shape Christian moral imagination over the last hundred years. It just so happened that two colleagues on campus had the same idea for a reading group, hosted generously by the Adams Center for Teaching and Learning. There’s a hunger for Christians to have guidance at the intersection of theology and ethics, and CST is an excellent resource.

CST is the term collectively given to a series of papal writings on social topics, dating back to 1891’s Rerum Novarum. Over the last 140 years, popes have written targeted encyclicals (pastoral guidance) on everything from ecology to war to euthanasia to labor conditions, providing a rich body of teaching and practical wisdom. The compendium, available here, provides a nice summation of the basic principles, and we’ve organized four sessions covering roughly the four basic principles of human dignity, solidarity, the common good, and subsidarity.

At the university, I led our first reading group session yesterday on the granddaddy of all the Social Encyclicals, Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII’s intervention into the relationship between laborers and owners. If this seems like an odd place for popes to begin commenting on social problems, we have to remember that, in the 19th century, there is no such thing as a minimum wage, few labor unions, a whole lot of owners, and not much politically in the way of worker protections.

This is the era right before Sinclair Lewis’ The Jungle, one generation after Marx’s Communist Manifesto, twenty years before Walter Raushenbusch wrote his best-selling Protestant manifesto on Christianity and labor, Christianity and the Social Crisis. In 1891, workers were growing tired of having no say in their own future, and the air was brimming with potential for a new way forward.

The document itself is still electric. On the one hand, it marks off the errors of 19th century socialism: that it tries to solve all social problems by abolishing all private life, that it resolves all problems at the largest possible scale, that it thought of the world in terms of economic class warfare. But no soon as it has done that, it speaks in terms of work as that which should be humanizing, the need for labor laws governing contract negotiations, just wages, Sabbath laws, employee ownership of companies.

There’s something to make everyone mad in it, because it refuses to say there is no value in private property, while consistently calling the existing economic order to a vision of collaboration and cooperation instead of competition. Bringing together theological reflection, political analysis, and social commentary, it’s still a compelling work nearly 140 years later.

Central to its thesis is that human beings work, but they are not, at the bottom, workers. And so, the conditions of labor have to be conducive to helping human beings be human beings. Work should foster the virtues rather than grind us down. The work we do should be consistent with Christian wisdom and virtue, both in what it is and how we do it. Labor conditions should help build up societies rather than extract from them, and provide the conditions for families to flourish rather than be broken down.

All of this brings us to Taylor Swift.

Let the Girl Get Married

Our household is unapologetically on team Tay-Tay. My musical tastes range far and wide. I’ve gone to Christian heavy metal concerts, jazz shows, classical concerts, and stomp-folk shows. The fact that I liked Swift came as a surprise to me initially, but now, seems pretty obvious. For she is, without question, one of the most savvy marketers of her music in the modern age, but it only works because the songs are good.

You didn’t have to be too alive this week to hear the news that Miss Americana is getting married to a football player. And almost immediately, the unhinged responses starting pouring in. The top one is just one of these, and the bottom one catalogs them:

A Dark Day for Smart Women

“My Close Personal Friend”: Taylor Swift and the Parasocial Illusion

The phenomenon of the “parasocial” relationship is one which is more pronounced in an Internet age, when every aspect of a star’s life which has been made available to us is dissected, and encourages us to think that we actually know the celebrity. By virtue of our love for their art or their performance, we feel emotionally invested in their lives as a whole.

I’ve written here about Bruce Springsteen before, and yes, I would happily sit down for coffee with the Boss on a minute’s notice if it came available. Yes, we would invest in a polo pony together. But I’m under no illusion that the Boss is someone that I might actually get along with. I think he’d be interesting to hang out with, but he’s probably just the kind of person that I’d have much in common with. Part of the difference between Springsteen and Swift is precisely that Springsteen has kept his distance from the media for the most part, preserving his on-stage persona as just that: a persona.

Swift has done this in a way that only a 21st century star can: cultivating connections at every turn to a watching audience, on Instagram, with documentaries, with teaser pictures and appearances. She’s very good at this. But the result is that she has become something of an emotional support doll for a portion of the Internet. This girl gets why this is so weird:

@ekelleydesignThat’s my emotional support popstar 🫶✌️ @Taylor Swift #THETORTUREDPOETSDEPARTMENT #swifttok #swiftie #taylorswift

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I have no interest in dissecting the psychology of fandom, however interesting the roots of fandom are. On the heels of teaching Rerum Novarum, what seemed most interesting are the ways that the reaction of disappointment of Swift to get married is an interesting modern kind of problem critiqued by Leo XIII those many decades ago.

As the emotional support doll of the Internet, Swift has become that worker who is endlessly allowed nothing but space to do more emotional labor.

Fandom is tricky in this way: it depends on a particular emotional connection to an object, such that when the object behaves differently, a sense of betrayal ensues. The fans expect a return on their emotional investment, such that when someone like Swift behaves like a human being—getting engaged, falling in love, behaving like a grown woman seeking lifelong commitment—the object is not living up to their end of the parasocial bargain¹.

One of the key moments in Rerum Novarum is precisely this: that in labor agreements, labor should happen in a way which allows for the facilitation of the worker to be fully human. A person isn’t expected to somehow set aside the pursuit of virtue, or to be less than a full-orbed human, particularly in their place of employment:

Now a State chiefly prospers and thrives through moral rule, well-regulated family life, respect for religion and justice, the moderation and fair imposing of public taxes, the progress of the arts and of trade, the abundant yield of the land-through everything, in fact, which makes the citizens better and happier. Hereby, then, it lies in the power of a ruler to benefit every class in the State, and amongst the rest to promote to the utmost the interests of the poor; and this in virtue of his office, and without being open to suspicion of undue interference - since it is the province of the commonwealth to serve the common good. And the more that is done for the benefit of the working classes by the general laws of the country, the less need will there be to seek for special means to relieve them (32).

Leo XIII is writing specifically here about the exploitation of the poor by business owners, and no one should pity Swift, one of the wealthiest performers in the universe, on this account. But the principle for Rerum Novarum is that both owners and laborers are called to be people of virtue, to work for the common good, to love their neighbors, to conduct their work in a manner befitting what humans everywhere should do. Work can be dehumanizing, even if you’re very wealthy because of it.

Particularly, Leo focuses in on how dehumanizing work affects the formation of families:

Again justice demands that, in dealing with the working man, religion and the good of his soul must be kept in mind. Hence, the employer is bound to see that the worker has time for his religious duties; that he be not exposed to corrupting influences and dangerous occasions; and that he be not led away to neglect his home and family, or to squander his earnings (20)

This is a basic point that marriage advocates have been making for years: an economy which is deterimental to people being able to form and support a family is a bad economy. It doesn’t matter whether you own the business, or whether you’re employed: Swift is both as both mogul and performer. And accordingly, if fandom—that complex arrangement in which a employed professional is taken as an emotional totem—leads to the expectation that performers should prop up your psychic well-being, refuse to do blatantly normal things like marry, fall in love, have children, live ordinary lives, then fandom should be blasted with a nuclear bomb from the heights of space.

Fandom, as a particular part of an economy, helps us to see that economies generally speaking are built on desires, not needs. We buy that which we want, or that which we are schooled to want, in market economies, a truism which cuts both against workers forced to produce those wants, and owners bound to keep supporting more and more fine-grained versions of the same product over time. By being driven by want, economies frequently produce the things which are indexed to pleasure, and things which have little relationship to need.

No one needs music, but the point is this: economies built on want become effectively irrational, moved forward by the expectation that this good will fulfill desire—for companionship, for meaning, for goodness. But products—whether tables or musicians—can’t hope to deliver on this promise, and the results will always be disappointing to the buyer. In exposing this dynamic, it is my hope that fandom’s worst aspects do us all a favor: to help us to see that economies—for both the fans and the performers—should be human economies, facilitating those goods for all involved. Economies should be more sober affairs, realizing that a musician is a musician, that they get paid (sometimes very well) for what they do. They owe you nothing but their music, and fans owe them the space to be humans.

So, go on, gurrrrl. Get you married. Don’t invite me or anyone on the Internet to the wedding. Looking forward to future albums about marital bliss and morning breath.

Some Details on the Next Zoom Book Club

As promised, we’re going to be reading Ivan Illich’s The Rivers North of the Future. We’ll take it slow, doing it in two parts. We’ll read Part One of the book on September 15th, at 6:30 p.m.