Ethics and Creativity in Madmen II

Robert P. George's Clash of Orthodoxies (2001) provides a beautifully articulate defense of natural law.  George's discussion of John Rawls's pro-life arguments are eye opening and raise the abortion debate to a much higher level than one generally encounters.  As well his integration of the natural law and natural rights theories of Aristotle (in Rhetoric), Cicero, Sidney and Locke with current discussions, especially of civil rights, are important and rich with insight.

Chapter nine, "Natural Law and Civil Rights" offers a solution to the questions I raise to my class about the ethics of Madmen's Don Draper's manipulation of the public with respect to consumer goods.  The solution (p. 166) comes from no less a source than Reverend Martin Luther King, whom George quotes as to unjust versus just law and segregation:

"What is the difference between the two?...To put it in the term of St. Thomas Aquinas:  An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.  Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.  All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality.  It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority...Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful...I can urge [disobedience to] segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong."

---Martin Luther King, Letter from Birmingham Jail, quoted in Robert P. George, Clash of Orthodoxies, p. 166.

In Madmen, Don Draper (Jon Hamm) aims to engage the public's nostalgia for their children's and their own childhoods and weddings.  Is it ethical to manipulate people's feelings in order to encourage consumerism? One standard parallels King's evaluation of law.  Any business activity that uplifts human personality or improves human life is just. Any business activity that degrades human personality or harms human life is unjust.  There is little to criticize with respect to the Kodak camera or carousel.  Although a degree of manipulation is used in Draper's presentation of his concept or the real-world advertisement, on balance consumers can assess whether the product is to their benefit.  Cameras have improved human existence.  But the same cannot be said for smoking.  It is true that smoking brings pleasure, but the harm done from smoking's health effects outweighs its pleasure.

But the federal law banning advertising of smoking is not justified.  There are other concerns with respect to regulation. Laws which limit economic activity and choice demean the individual. They assert that human beings are incapable of choosing for themselves and therefore are like serfs to a patriarchal state that knows better than they do. Economic regulation limits human creativity and creates an atmosphere of fear whereby activities whose effects are uncertain are discouraged.  This in turn reduces creativity, initiative, progress and achievement.  Therefore, while advertising cigarettes is unjust, that is, it manipulates people into smoking and so harms them, laws against advertising smoking are also unjust because they harm human freedom and dignity, replacing human freedom with violent state power.

Ethics and Creativity in Madmen

I teach Introduction to Management at Brooklyn College.  The distance learning software we use nowadays is called "Blackboard" (NYU, Troy State and Brooklyn College have all used it since about 10 years ago).  I just posted a discussion assignment on the course's Blackboard site for this fall's class. One of the subjects in the course is "creativity" and the question I'm raising is whether there are ethical limits to creativity.  I use AMC's TV series Madmen to raise two discussion questions. The links to the Madmen and television advertisement clips are below.

The questions I raise are as follows.

After reading chapter two and after the class discussion on creativity go to blackboard's "external links" folder "Creativity and Ethics in Madmen" (see links below). Watch the five Youtube clips in the folder. The first two are of 1950s Lucky Strike TV commercials. The third is of a 1960s Eastman Kodak camera commercial. The fourth and fifth are from the TV series Madmen. They depict the fictitious creative genius behind the fictitious Sterling Cooper advertising firm, Don Draper (note the allusion to drapes, draping, hiding, the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain). The fourth clip is of Draper creating the Lucky Strike advertising strategy. The fifth is of Draper creating the ad campaign for Eastman Kodak's carousel (a picture slide display device) which is similar to the Eastman Kodak ad shown.

(1) What are the benefits of advertising?  What arguments can be made to justify the ethical foundations of Don Draper's approach to advertising? 


(2) Are there moral limits to emotional manipulation? For example, is a government which uses patriotism to motivate loyalty despite policies which are harmful to the public ethical? Likewise, is a firm which uses love, happiness, freedom and similar virtues to motivate sales of products ethical? If so, what are the limits? If not, is it realistic to expect managers to adhere to strict ethical standards? 

(3) Elaborate on the question of whether Don Draper is ethical in using higher order emotions, happiness and familial love to sell cigarettes that he knows kill and photography supplies given the gains from advertising.
External Links

Lucky Strike ad 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeUAhuSzSDs


Luck Strike ad 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWj_tR64Ti4

1960s Kodak ad, “Turn around”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBWVWjdNWC0

Madmen clip: Lucky Strike: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5rQF7Ofc5w

Comment: AMC's excellent Madmen series is supposed to be about the advertising business in the early 1960s, but as you can see from the above the "It's Toasted" concept was already established in the 1950s and earlier (1917 according to Wikipedia). Also, American Tobacco, founded by James Buchanan Duke (cf: Duke University), owned the Lucky Strike brand and it was not a family run operation by the 1960s (the US Supreme Court broke up American Tobacco, the Tobacco Trust, in 1911). Famed heiress Doris Duke who died in 1993 was Duke's only child.

Nevertheless, this scene gives a cool illustration of a creative process. In the episode, the hero, the brilliant and creative Don Draper (Jon Hamm), is asked to think of an ad campaign for Lucky Strike cigarettes to address the recent findings that cigarettes cause cancer. He thinks about it for weeks but cannot come up with an idea. At the beginning of the meeting with the tobacco executives, he still draws a blank. After consulting a psychologist, he is still speechless. His account exec, Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) quotes the psychologist to fill the gap (Campbell is sneaky and the implication is that he stole the research from Draper's trash can).

Just as the tobacco executives are walking out, Draper's light bulb lights: the cancer finding is a strategic opportunity to appeal to higher order needs like happiness. Lucky Strike is "toasted."

Madmen clip: Kodak carousel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suRDUFpsHus

The Eastman Kodak executives are interviewing ad firms to handle their new product, which they call "the wheel." You put slides in the wheel and then click to turn the wheel to the next slide. They have told Don Draper and his boss, Herman "Duck" Phillips (Mark Moses), media director Harry Crane (Rich Sommer), and art director Salvatore Romano (Bryan Batt) that their firm, Sterling Cooper, is one of four or five they are interviewing.

Draper uses his own wedding pictures, pictures of his wife Betty (January Jones), his children and himself to show that the product should be named the "carousel", not the wheel, because it is reminiscent of childhood and evokes the nostalgia of bringing up children that the "carousel" can capture--the deep feelings the consumer has for his or her own children, the nostalgia for the past and perhaps their own childhoods. "It takes us where we ache to go again. It lets us travel like child. The carousel."

Harry Crane leaves the room as he breaks into tears. The Kodak executives are speechless. Phillips confidently looks at the Eastman Kodak executives and says "Good luck at your next meeting."

Madmen, Hillary and the Wizard of Oz

American Movie Classics'(AMC's) Madmen is great television. Madmen's quality equals HBO's and Showtime's, which puts it a cut above today's Hollywood movies.

Madmen stars Jon Hamm as Don Draper. It is about an advertising agency in the golden age of television, the late 1950s and early 1960s. The name "Draper" alludes to draping or deceiving, and we are reminded of the Wizard in the Wizard of Oz, whom Dorothy exposes behind the drapes of the control room. Like the Wizard, Draper's job is to create illusion. One of the story lines is that Draper's firm represents the Nixon campaign pro bono in the 1960 election, the first that television influenced.

Before watching Madmen it would be useful to read a history of consumerism. One is William Leach'sLand of Desire: Merchants, Power and the Rise of a New American Culture and another is Gary Cross's All Consuming Century. Both books provide rich perspective on the dynamic of consumerism and its implications for culture. Leach goes into an extended analysis of the Wizard of Oz.

Following amusement parks, Wannamaker's department store decorations, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and L. Frank Baum's ideas (Baum, besides being an author, was an early expert about window displays), advertising has been the basis of consumerism. That is, one of the characteristics of consumerism is the creation of imaginative imagery about consumption. Thus, New York and several other large cities became the centers not only of art, culture, theater and television, but more importantly of imagery about consumption that created today's global culture. Such imagery would be unnecessary or unimportant were it truthful. The association of consumerism and advertising suggests that deception is at consumerism's root.

There is an inherent conflict. To be possible, consumerism requires advances in technology. In turn, technology depends on uncovering of the truth, discovery of fundamental principles and a relentless willingness to let old modes, business methods and social constructs die. Schumpeter called this creative destruction. But stimulation of consumption relies on creating an image, one that is often false, romantic or misleading.

At the same time the left is a romantic movement that itself is a reflection of consumer society and advertising. The left manufactures political ideas that are romantic but have as little truth or reality as the mountain stream in a Newport cigarettes ad. The left claims to oppose the deception inherent in commercialization, but does so through "draping" and deception that parallel commercialization. To the left, ideology plays the role that advertising plays to consumerism. The left substitutes lies about a romanticized past and a fictional claim to ethical belief. It deceptively claims that the past is the future.

Thus, the left claims that centralized economic planning (monarchy) is economically superior to markets, a lie. The left claims that government power and regulation, much like the power of kings, is more humane than limited government and private enterprise, which is a lie. The left claims that monetary expansion, which favors the wealthy over the poor, is necessary to help the poor, which is also a lie.

Hence, the dialogue of twentieth century America* was largely between a conservative, market-based view which depends on the truth and technology for its foundations, but furthers its ends through lies and mass media; and a left-wing view whose ideology is itself a lie. Both modern conservatism and left/liberal ideology depend on groupthink. Both rely on the mass media. Both focus on the trivial. Both advocate policies whose effects are the reverse of what they claim. It may be said that in the twentieth century the Sophists triumphed and that the Sophists now dominate our most retrograde institutions, such as universities.

The Republicans claim to be for less government, then when elected expand government. The Democrats claim to be for the poor, but create massive inner city slums, urban ghettos that isolate racial minorities and the poor. As well, the Democrats' educational policies, via left-wing institutions like NCATE, cripple the poor by enfeebling them educationally; and they and the left attack private institutions such as Wal-Mart that benefit the poor economically.

Were it not for the left, the role of intellectual would in part be the one that L. Frank Baum assigned to Dorothy: lifting the drapes from the Wizard's control room, and exposing him for the fraud that he is. That is the tradition of Thorstein Veblen as well as the Austrian economists. But the academy fell prey to ideology, and has adopted rigid, ideological deception, commitment to elitism and attacks on the poor, for instance, through attacking Wal-Mart and through favoring the Federal Reserve Bank, low interest rates and inflation. Universties themselves are a state supported system that encourages class stratification, alienation of the average person and economic isolation of the talented poor. Universities are institutions who demonize the average person, humanity, in the name of an inept elite that produces nothing and whose main purpose is to institutionalize itself.

Doug Ross @ Journal lists "Hillary's Top Ten Fabrications". These include her claim that she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary although she was born five years before he climbed Mt. Everest; her failure to disclose profits from Whitewater; and her description of abortion as a "tragic choice".**

It is not surprising that Hillary is a liar. Nor would it be surprising that the Republicans are equally liars. The groupthink; lack of vision; fixation on trivia; emotional outrage about superficial issues and ignoring the fundamental issues such as special interest group influence; corruption of the democratic process through gerrymandering and related processes; misleading disclosure in areas like government operations and inflation; monetary expansion and the corruption of the dollar; claiming to be for less government when you are for more government (such is the history of Rudy Giuliani) all suggest that Republicans and Democrats have similar stakes in equivalent forms of corruption. Both are parties of liars.

It is increasingly important that competition be introduced into the political system. "Voters for None of the Above" offers a mainstream alternative. I discuss NOTA here.

*In Europe, with the exception of Britain, the chief ideologies of the twentieth century were mainly variants of the left, to include fascism, Nazism, communism and today's dirigisme.

**Concerning the abortion issue, William Saletan of Slate writes:

"...against the ugliness of state control, she wants to raise the banner of morality as well as freedom...'There is no reason why government cannot do more to educate and inform and provide assistance so that the choice guaranteed under our constitution either does not ever have to be exercised or only in very rare circumstances.'...Once you embrace that truth—that the ideal number of abortions is zero—voters open their ears...Admit the goal is zero, and people will rethink birth control. 'Seven percent of American women who do not use contraception account for 53 percent of all unintended pregnancies'..."

But Clinton's argument, which transfers the moral concern about abortion into a discussion of abortion as a quality process, a quality target that needs to be minimized, is itself a form of draping.