There can be only one standard of taste

Our finite time is the measure of all things

Here’s a common scene: 

FRIEND 1: It wasn’t gonna win any Oscars, but it did what it set out to do. Judged by its own standards, it was great.

FRIEND 2: And we’re allowed to have our guilty pleasures. 

Naturally I know what all this means. I’ve said this kind of thing myself, verbatim. But recently I’ve been calling it out.¹ The implication is that it’s unfair or invalid to judge, say, a kids’ movie like Toy Story 3 against a more serious film like Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.

I say: there is no judging anything by “its own standards” because everything is competing with everything else all at once for your very limited attention.²

Living 80 years, you have approximately 150,000 hours of discretionary time — more for the trust fund kids who don’t need to make a living; less for wretches born into serfdom.

How to spend this endowment of time? You could use some of it to watch Toy Story 3 or The Seventh Seal or you might think you can do both, so it doesn’t matter. But this is absolutely a zero sum game: the more time you spend watching one the less time you have free to watch the other or for anything else.³ Time is irredeemable. 

And, in general, we misprice time. Money can be used to buy more time before you die, by paying for necessities and freeing you from burdens. But most people who earn a surfeit of money simply spend their time trying to get more. This isn’t evil but it is mad.⁴

It makes some sense to judge functional items according to their own standards: a can-opener might be better or worse at opening cans⁵ But art and entertainment generally have no other end than to enrich your time in some way.

The judgement of which film to watch will be subjective, in the sense that it will be specific to you. But subjective is not the same as arbitrary or random or relativistic. 

However you want to spend your time is the only standard for what is good for you. How do you decide what you want to spend your time on? That’s on you. I think anyone who calls themselves any kind of liberal must allow that people should have some free time and what makes it free is that it can be for anything the person wants, subject to the usual boilerplate about not harming other people. 

If time can be bought it can be donated

My favourite charity is GiveDirectly because it prioritises whatever the recipients’ priorities are. It gives direct cash transfers to poor people, mainly in rural Kenya. Money goes from my bank account to the account of a person I’ll certainly never meet nor know anything about. That person is free to spend it on whatever they think is most important according to their own standard.

GiveDirectly are impressively transparent and they publish unvarnished testimonials from recipients. The gulf in standard of living between them and me is wide. Most of the people in this program need the money for food, food security, shelter, or sending their kids to school. Some manage to invest the money to start a small business. 

Here are some random excerpts from their website.

Kalenda:

I used to eat once in a day but now I eat 3 meals a day, I did some shopping as a lady as I had taken long without buying anything for myself, I also did some shopping for my unborn baby.

Kahindi:

At present, I am engaged in various odd jobs within the construction sector and also sell charcoal. However, these occupations do not provide substantial financial returns. Two years ago, I was unable to pursue further education due to the prevailing poverty in our household. To rectify this situation, my goal is to diligently save money and enroll in college starting in August of this year.

Frida:

I am very excited for my business. I used to hawk pastries and this would earn me $0.5 to $1.5 in a day in profit and this was not sufficient in purchasing food for my family. I needed to find a way of increasing my income and starting the street food stall was the way to go. I now make between $2 to $3 which although still not sufficient is more that what I got before. I want to grow this business further through my transfers to ensure that I make a sufficient income to take care of my family and even educate my child.

My hope is that, indirectly, by taking care of some basic needs, the transfers buy these people some more free time, that they can have some say over their brief experience on this sunlit planet.

I recommend giving some money to this cause. And I recommend Toy Story 3 and The Seventh Seal. Both are beautiful films about death. But, following my own standard, I think Bergman’s film is a little more worthy, because it teaches the fleeting nature of time itself.

1. By which I mean, I’ve been politely offering a different viewpoint in conversation with friends.

2. I endorse this effort to have everything in the world compete for chess-style rankings via head-to-head contests.

3. Obvious objections abound. Wants are contextual: coffee is valuable at breakfast not at bedtime. You want variety: reading my favourite book five hundred times in a row isn’t as good as reading a mix of suboptimal books. But although your priorities will change over time, at any given point, how you spend that time, is a contest open to anything, that only one thing can win.

4. They say you can’t take it with you, about money and worldly goods, but that’s not quite right. You can’t take anything with you because there is no aftertime. So if there are material goods you enjoy in this life, acquire them. After all, you can’t take them with you.

5. Even here, you judge a can-opener by the standard of how well it opens cans, but presumably this is only meaningful if you want to spend some of your time eating tinned lychees or whatever it is. So as far as your actions go — the only thing over which you have any control and hence the only morally relevant quantity — it does ultimately boil down to whatever you think is worth your time. There’s also the obscure but important philosophical question over “function” in artefacts or biological systems and whether you can ever really say what something’s function is, because doing so seems to imply a teleological understanding of things where a thing’s nature is affected by its ends which are in the future. Don’t worry about it.