By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, June 20, 2025
As you’ve probably heard, it’s the 50th anniversary
of the release of Jaws. If you’re anywhere close to my age, odds are
good that you have discovered all sorts of random things can make you sore.
Odds are even better that Jaws scared the crap out of you.
To this day, when I open my eyes underwater—sometimes
even in pools—my mind wanders to the image of an open-mouthed shark suddenly
materializing from the murky middle distance. And I know I’m not alone. Yes,
there are probably a few weirdos, stoics, or Beowulfs out there who were
unfazed by the movie. But, statistically and stylistically, I’m comfortable
saying that Jaws freaked everybody out.
Speaking of statistics, I have a gripe with how people
talk about Jaws, and frankly, with shark discourse more broadly.
“Scientists in California believe that the classic 1975
film ‘Jaws’ led to a generation of galeophobics—people with an irrational fear
of sharks,” the New York Post reported
back in 2022. CBS, reporting on the same study, phrased
it almost the same way: “Scientists in California are researching what makes
people so scared of sharks. They believe the 1975
movie ‘Jaws’ caused a generation of people to develop galeophobia—an
irrational fear of sharks.” The “Jaws effect,” the Post reiterated
last week, “caused an entire generation to develop an irrational fear of
sharks.”
Here’s the thing: Fear of sharks is entirely rational.
If you’re in the water and a giant shark approaches you, it is entirely normal
for you to deploy an improvised bowel-emptying version of the squid ink tactic
in response. Alas, we are not human B-52s, and the deployment of fecal chaff
countermeasures is not a proven way to distract sharks.
I always laugh at the advice on how to deal with sharks.
One common suggestion is to treat a shark encounter like a job interview or
negotiation: Look
it in the eye. This is, apparently, sound advice: You don’t want the
shark to think you’re prey, and prey don’t do the whole Robert DeNiro in Meet
the Parents thing—“I’m
watching you!”—with a great white shark. Good to know, but in the annals of
“easier said than done,” this ranks just above “playing dead” during a grizzly
bear attack, standing your ground when an elephant charges you, and not feeling
regret over eating at Taco Bell at 3 a.m.
Anyway, here’s my point about statistics. The Jaws
effect is better understood as an irrational fear of the likelihood of a
shark attack. Think of it this way. It is entirely normal and rational to be
afraid of serial killers who want to eat your liver or wear your skin like a
suit. It’s irrational to organize your life around avoiding this fate.
Most of us understand this when it comes to air travel. Pretty much all sane
people are afraid of plummeting to the earth in a fiery ball of twisted metal.
But we grasp that the odds of that happening to us are very, very low.
If every person afraid of dying in a plane crash avoided flying, the airlines
would go out of business.
Spielberg’s dilemma—and ours.
Let’s get back to Jaws.
Part of the movie’s genius is that you don’t actually see
all that much of the shark. We really don’t lay eyes on it for the first hour
or so of the film. This was not the plan, but the three mechanical sharks
constructed for the movie kept breaking down like an Amish-made dialysis
machine. The 26-year-old director, Steven Spielberg, feared his career might
die in its infancy; production delays and cost overruns were killing him. All
because Bruce—the mechanical shark, nicknamed after Spielberg’s lawyer—was a
dud.
My buddy Rob Long once told me a (probably apocryphal)
story about what Spielberg did next: consult with Martin Scorsese, George
Lucas, and other legendary cineastes about how to deal with the problem.
Spielberg brought them all to the lot and showed them the fakakta shark.
According to the legend (I can’t find any proof it’s true), Scorsese said
something like, “I got it. Turn the camera around! Film the whole thing from
the point of view of the shark.” (If Leonardo DiCaprio had been alive, he
probably would have suggested casting him as the shark.)
Whether the Scorsese angle is true or not, that’s
basically what Spielberg did. And it worked brilliantly: We see all those
dangling legs from Bruce’s POV, and that makes us feel so much more vulnerable—that
could be me!
Oceans are awe-inspiring because there’s so much of them.
Our imagination gets the better of us because there’s just so much … muchness
out there beyond our control. We can’t feel the bottom. We’re at the mercy of
unconquerable nature. The shark becomes the manifestation of that anxiety. Of
course, it’s also the manifestation of that much narrower terror of a giant,
real-world, eating machine biting us in half.
As a writer, I think about Spielberg’s dilemma often.
Hardship and difficulty can be a gift.
Take deadlines. Deadlines can be a real drag, but they’re
also a reason to get out of bed. Would you have ever written a term paper or
filed your taxes without the threat of a deadline?
As Parkinson’s law holds, “Work expands so as to fill the
time available for its completion.” Parkinson’s law is one of the great gifts
to unions and government contractors. Just ask the folks in charge of
California’s still entirely theoretical high-speed rail system. Choose your
cliché. Desperation breeds daring. A sword over the head sharpens the pen.
Deadlines invite creativity because the scarcity of time
creates not just the demand for solutions but the inspiration to find them.
If Spielberg weren’t on a clock, he probably would have
waited until the crew got the shark to work. But he had to get the movie done.
As Spielberg later put it, “The shark not working was a godsend. It made me
become more like Alfred Hitchcock than like Ray Harryhausen.”
Time scarcity is just one kind of scarcity. Lack of
working animatronic sharks is another. The larger point is that nearly all
human progress—certainly nearly all material progress—is driven by one kind of
scarcity or another. Better farming techniques, modern transportation, cures to
diseases, stuffed-crust pizza: They all exist because there was a need to solve
or alleviate some form of scarcity. Of course, scarcity is just another way of
talking about necessity. No one has invented a way to kill steel-plated,
super-intelligent, laser-equipped, flying bears. But once those suckers start
hovering over our cities, someone is going to get to work on that real quick.
The necessity of struggle vs. the struggle for
necessity.
There are a vast number of literary, religious,
political, and intellectual traditions focusing on the importance of struggle.
I dislike a lot of it, but not because all those Kampf-lovers don’t have
a point. Accomplishing meaningful tasks is one of the few great wellsprings of
life satisfaction and earned success.
The misapplication of the point is what gets people into
trouble. Going to war to toughen up the young is gross. Oppression can create
heroes, but the heroism is not worth the price. The yearning for struggle is
human and can be the source of great and glorious things, but the manufacturing
of struggles for struggling’s sake is dangerous folly. Albert Camus, for
instance, once wrote, “The
struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must
imagine Sisyphus happy.”
No, one mustn’t. The point of Sisyphus’ struggle was that
it was pointless—and struggle for its own sake is by definition
pointless. If Nietzsche was right that “whatever doesn’t kill me makes me
stronger,” everyone would be grateful to get audited by the IRS or lose a limb.
But thinkers like John Stuart Mill, C.S. Lewis, and
Alexis de Tocqueville (to name three of many) were right about the problem of
not providing people with meaningful avenues to struggle, achieve, or overcome.
As Mill put it: “The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the
individuals composing it …” And a state “which dwarfs its men” so “that they
may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes—will
find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that
the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything will in the
end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the
machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.”
De Tocqueville said it even
better:
It must not be forgotten that it is
especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life. For my own
part, I should be inclined to think freedom less necessary in great things than
in little ones, if it were possible to be secure of the one without possessing
the other.
Subjection in minor affairs breaks
out every day and is felt by the whole community indiscriminately. It does not
drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till they are led
to surrender the exercise of their own will. Thus their spirit is gradually
broken and their character enervated.
But Lewis said it best: “We make men without chests and
expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to
find traitors in our midst.”
I can go all libertarian about these points and how they
relate to public policy. Dependence on the government is always bad when
dependence is unnecessary. But I don’t want to get into a big argument about
cutting Medicaid for able-bodied people or any of that stuff.
Instead, I want to close with a different point.
Technology is great. I am no Luddite. But technology is a huge part of material
culture. And material culture is a huge part of, well, culture. Try to
think of culture without reference to the physical stuff we associate with it.
Talking about cuisine without talking about the methods and ingredients is sort
of silly. Music is largely a function of the instruments on which it is played.
Clothes, cars, architecture, movies, even books are inseparable from the
doodads and doohickeys that make them possible.
One of the great challenges of technology is that it
removes or lightens the amount of struggle and effort from tasks. Again, I
think that is mostly a good thing. I do not want to walk to the river with
buckets every time I need to bathe. I don’t want to walk or ride a horse to
California, no matter how much I would benefit from the lessons of the journey
or how many friends I would make along the way. I like antibiotics even if they
come at the cost of some revelatory fever dreams. Is that you, Obi-Wan?
But I worry that the rise of the internet and screen life
in general has enervated a lot of character. My friend Tevi Troy published a
great tribute to our old boss Ben Wattenberg today, and it got me thinking
about how grateful I am that I worked as a researcher—for a fairly polymathic
dude—before the advent of the internet. And it makes me even more grateful for
having a father who responded to nearly every question I asked with, “Let’s go
look it up.” I would roll my eyes as he dragged me to a book or books in search
of the answer. Today, I often get similar eye rolls from my daughter, even
though the answer resides in the internet-connected supercomputer literally in
her hands.
I was a good researcher, at least in part, because I read
a lot. I got asked a lot of questions I didn’t know the answer to. But
because I read a lot, I had a good idea about where to look for the answers.
And in the process of looking, I further prepared myself to find the answers to
yet more questions still unasked.
The struggle made me better. If all I had to do was ask
ChatGPT or Google for the answers, the process would have been, in most cases,
more efficient for Wattenberg, but I would be the less for it. Indeed, the evidence
for this point is already starting to trickle in.
This is an admittedly tiny example of what I am getting
at. I think living a very online life creates an expectation that life offline
should operate the same way. We can now generate realistic pictures and videos
with relatively few keystrokes. Why shouldn’t reality-reality be as subject to
our whims as the pseudo-reality on our screens? Consciously, we all know the
answer—but I’m not sure that answer holds for many people subconsciously. When
I hear people like Zohran
Mamdani talk about public policy (Government
grocery stores! Free public
transportation! Rent freezes!), I hear someone who thinks reality should be
as easy to manipulate as Photoshop. Why care about scarcity? Just print more
money, mint a $2 trillion coin, and will cheaper housing and free bus fare into
existence by declaring it so. Small children ask, “Why can’t everything be
free?” Grown-ups know the answer. But I think screen life makes the
make-believe world of childhood seem ever more plausible.
Children also dream of being knights and warriors,
conquerors and kings. Screen life summons this childish yearning to the
surface. Every day, I see people yearning to live in interesting times, as the
Chinese curse goes. The yearning for “greatness” is derivative of the yearning
for struggle, and it has a siren-like appeal to men without chests. Screen life
fuels this yearning because, like all addictions, the drug constantly demands a
greater dose. But the unreality of screen life doesn’t bolster the tools of
character worthy of actual greatness. People want the juice, but resent the
effort of the squeeze. Pre-packaged joy should be delivered to us like so many
items in our Amazon cart.
America does not lack for real problems, of course. But
those problems do not lend themselves to the sort of character being formed by
technology today, because the problems we have are hard, requiring not only
sacrifice, but the civility and seriousness required to do the homework, to
look up the answers, to listen to people who disagree with you. And that kind
of struggle is just too boring and hard for the denizens of the screen age.
If Steven Spielberg had had access to today’s CGI and AI
tech, he would have made the movie he planned. It would have been really cool.
It wouldn’t have been as good.
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