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A closed circle of squares: Hipster costumes can’t make exclusion cool

A closed circle of squares: Hipster costumes can’t make exclusion cool

Last updated on: May 7, 2015 at 6:13 pm by Fred Clark

A closed circle of squares: Hipster costumes can’t make exclusion cool 2015-05-07T18:13:18-04:00 Fred Clark

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There’s a lot we could talk about in Ruth Graham’s Slate report on the Q Ideas conference — a gathering of youngish white evangelicals sometimes described as “the Christian Ted Talks.”

The slogan for Q Ideas is “Stay curious. Think well. Advance good.” The parallelism is a bit awkward, but I certainly agree with the sentiment. And I’m sure that if I attended this conference I would find many sessions thoughtful and enjoyable and that I’d meet a lot of lovely people who were friendly and hospitable.

But, as Graham reports, that friendliness and hospitality have strict limits. They are bounded and constrained by the same strict limits that Q Ideas places upon curiosity, thinking, and its understanding of what is “good.” And once you run into those boundaries and the external and internal mechanisms that enforce them, you begin to think that maybe the conference slogan should be rewritten to more accurately reflect its reality: “Stay acceptable. Think acceptably. Advance what is acceptable.”

Acceptability, at Q Ideas, means not doing anything that might perturb the tribal gatekeepers of white evangelicalism — the moneymen and the guardians of privilege, the media bishops and the would-be politicos. That’s why the conference invited a couple of token *non-*antigay Christians — Matthew Vimes and Dave Gushee — so that participants could have a “dialog” about why such heretics were dangerously wrong.

So, again, there are several dismaying angles highlighted in Graham’s report that we could discuss here: the conflation of Christianity with the white north American evangelical subculture, the obliviously undifferentiated use of the hegemonic “we,” the apparent confusion of the Nicene Creed and the Republican Party platform, etc. But I’m just going to focus here on something relatively trivial, yet highly annoying: the conference’s misunderstanding and misapplication of “cool.”

Ruth Graham describes this with a withering precision, but doesn’t explore it further:

According to Q’s own survey, the typical conference attendee this year was a thirtysomething church employee with at least a master’s degree. According to my own survey, the 1,300 Q-goers were also intimidatingly attractive and stylish. The women wore patterned silk blouses and little blazers; the men rolled their skinny jeans above their Red Wings. Signifiers of a sort of mainstream Brooklyn cool were everywhere. If evangelical Christianity in general is concerned with “engaging the culture,” these believers want to impress that culture, too.

Like at TED, the air at Q hums with buzzwords. Here, the favorites include story, narrative, culture-making, winsome, and intentionality. At lunch an attendee told me that he and his wife have been coming to Q for seven years now, and the conference shapes how they “do life.”

Read that too quickly and you may come away with the impression that Graham is telling you these people are cool. Read it again, carefully, and you’ll see she’s doing something very different. She describes the attendees — and the conference itself — as “stylish” and desperate “to impress,” and therefore garbed in “signifiers of a sort of mainstream … cool.”

That’s not cool. It’s a gathering of people wearing a costume of cool. It’s an application to be perceived as cool. And thus, like all such applications, it must be denied.

Fashion can’t make these guys “cool.”

Any attempt to define or delimit “cool” is a mug’s game.* It’s like trying to explain why a joke is funny without ruining the joke itself — it can’t really be done.

As a general rule, though, any attempt to be cool — and even more so, any attempt to portray oneself as cool — is self-refuting. Any such attempt constitutes an appeal to others, ceding to them the role of the arbiters of cool and, thereby, surrendering any claim to that role for oneself. It’s the difference between wanna-being and just being.

That’s why being stylish or fashionable isn’t the same as being cool. These things can certainly sometimes overlap (see, for example: Bowie, David), but usually they’re separate categories — with style and fashion chasing to keep up with cool, and never the other way around.

And anyway, the costumes that Graham describes aren’t actually stylish and fashionable — merely trendy. You can put on such a costume, adopting the “signifiers of a sort of mainstream Brooklyn cool,” but you’re not wearing those skinny jeans. Those skinny jeans are wearing you.

The larger mistake here is the notion that cool is a kind of exclusive club — a VIP lounge on the other side of a velvet rope line. And that notion of coolness as exclusivity is the most uncool thing about this eminently uncool conference.

Cool is not exclusive. Cool is, rather, a response to having been excluded. It belongs, always, to outsiders. And to be an outsider is to side with outsiders.**

The uncoolness of Q Ideas, I think, stems from its desire to attain insider status — its need for permission and approval and the influence that permission and approval might bring.***

Insider status always depends on a willingness to accept the rules of the insiders, which means a willingness to keep the outsiders outside. And excluding outsiders is the definition of uncool. Excluding outsiders precludes the possibility of coolness.

Insiders and wanna-be insiders can’t make themselves cool by changing into a cooler costume. And they can’t become cool just by inviting a handful of token model outsiders to come inside to audition to join them. Their only path to cool is to stop being insiders — to get up and go outside.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

* There is, of course, a Simpsons for that:

HOMER: So, I realized that being with my family is more important than being cool.

BART: Dad, what you just said was powerfully uncool.

HOMER: You know what the song says: “It’s hip to be square.”

LISA: That song is so lame.

HOMER: So lame that it’s cool?

BART and LISA: No.

MARGE: Am I cool, kids?

BART and LISA: No.

MARGE: Good. I’m glad. And that’s what makes me cool, not caring, right?

BART and LISA: No.

MARGE: Well, how do you be cool? I feel like we’ve tried everything here.

HOMER: Wait, Marge. Maybe if you’re truly cool, you don’t need to be told you’re cool.

BART: Well, sure you do.

LISA: How else would you know?

** Including siding with unhip, unfashionable, unstylish outsiders. Fonzie never turned his back on Potsie and Ralph Malph. That would’ve been uncool.

*** See also: Bono, The Problematically Ambiguous Coolness of.

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