15 July 2008
Solutions: Bohemia (Notes from Status Anxiety)
Notes from Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety (2004). This is the eleventh post on this topic; the first is here.
PART II: Solutions
CHAPTER 5 - BOHEMIA
Bohemians came to prominence in France after Napoleon, 1815. Bohemians are found in all social classes, age groups, professions, and in both genders. They include Romantics, surrealists, Beatniks, punks, situationalists, Kibbutzbiks, et. al.
Bohemians lived simply, read a lot, didn't care much for money, were melancholic, had an allegiance to art and emotion, led unconventional sex lives, and ... some of the women wore their hair short! Most importantly, they did not fit into the bourgeois conception of respectability.
Bohemians don't like the bourgeoisie, private schools, debutantes and 'eligible bachelors,' blood sports, missionaries, bores, and people who worry about their reputations.
Bohemians like men and women, Nietzsche, Picasso, Kokoschka, jazz, acrobats, Havelock Ellis, the Mediterranean, DH Lawrence, those who don't anticipate life after death.
Flaubert: "Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom."
The bourgeoisie are seen as prudes, materialistic, both cynical and sentimental, immersed in trivia and trivial pursuits.
'Real' bohemians were those who "set themselves up as sabatoeurs of the economic meritocracy." They valued 'sensitivity' over worldly ambition. Work and money, they felt, destroyed one's capacity for sensitivity. They thought themselves "deserving of the highest honour for their ethical good sense and their powers of receptivity and expression." [Isn't this just another form of meritocracy, status based on talent, skill, intelligence?]
Thoreau - lack of wealth didn't necessarily mean, as the bourgeois said, that one was a loser at the game of life; one might be impoverished financially because one focused energies on things other than making money, equally enriching in their own right.
Bohemians (and others) realised that maintaining confidence in their values, so at odds with the mainstream, required mixing socially mainly with others who shared the same values, and reading and listening to materials that supported their values. Hence, enclaves of Bohemians in Montparnasse, Bloomsbury, Chelsea, Greenwich Village, Venice Beach, etc.
Bohemians redefined failure. For the bourgeoisie, failure in business or the arts was an indictment of character because it's assumed that society is fair in distributing its rewards. For bohemians, there's nothing punitive about failure. In fact, because those who succeed in society are those who can best "pander to the flawed values of their audiences," commercial success was viewed with some suspicion. (Myth of the misunderstood artist)
Bohemians emphasise the "dignity and superiority of the rejected ones," which is a secular counterpart to the Christian message and story of Jesus's marginalisation and crucifixion: "Torture at the hands of the uncomprehending masses" is "evidence of the righteousness of the neglected party."
Sometimes bohemians were "radicals devoted to anything so long as it was taboo in the Mid-West," shocked the middle class, outraged public opinion.
It's "only a short step from valuing originality and emphasising the non-material aspects of life to feeling that almost anything that could surprise a judge or pharmacist -- from crustacean-walking [Gérard de Nerval] to strawberry-breast-cooking [Filippo Marinetti] -- must be important."
Most generally, bohemia has legitimised the pursuit of an alternative way of life." They "articulated a case for a spiritual as opposed to a material method of evaluating both oneself and others."
08:10 Posted in books and reading , community , consumption , girardian anthropology , other people said it , pop culture , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (1) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
09 July 2008
Causes: Meritocracy (Notes from Status Anxiety)
Notes from Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety (2004). This is the fourth post on this topic; the first is here.
CHAPTER 3 - MERITOCRACY
Explanations for why one might be poor and what one's value to society is have grown "notably more punitive and emotionally awkward in the modern era."
From AD 30 to the latter part of the 20th century, there have been three stories for the "lowest in Western societies" that were consoling:
(1) The poor are not responsible for their condition and are the most useful members of society. This is the medieval and pre-modern story. God and/or the natural order are responsible for societal position. In this story, there's a sense of mutual dependence among the classes, and the lowest classes are acknowledged for making life easier for the upper classes.
(2) Low status has no moral connotation. Per Scripture. Neither wealth nor poverty are an accurate index of moral worth. Jesus was poor and good. If anything, poverty was good because it led to the recognition of one's dependence on God.
(3) The rich are sinful and corrupt and owe their wealth to the robbery of the poor. 1754-1989. Rousseau, Marx (1887), Engels (1845)
These weren't the only stories, but they were widely credited.
Beginning around the middle of the 18th century, 3 more troubling stories (if you were poor) began to form:
(1) The rich are the useful ones. Bernard Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees (1723) is the written origin of this story, which says that the rich contribute more to society because their spending provides employment for everyone under them. The impact of the rich on others is the most beneficial even if their intentions and motivations are not beneficent. (To those of us in the 21st century, this 'fable' seems to have been always with us, but it's a relatively new take on things!) Hume repeats this idea in 1752, and Adam Smith seals the deal in 1759: "The whole of civilisation, and the welfare of all societies" depended on people's desire and ability to accumulate unneeded capital and show off their wealth. The greedier they are, the better for all.
(2) Status does have moral connotations. Seen in Thomas Paine (The Rights of Man), Napoleon, Carlyle -- all against hereditary aristocracy and for meritocracy, i.e., an aristocracy of talent. Inequality is OK so long as there is equality of opportunity (e.g., in education). This led to public schools, SAT tests (scientifically proven meritocratic standard - could rank people by their "real worth"), and the 1946 Universal Declaration of Human Rights which required compulsory education in the countries that signed on. Also led to equal opportunity in the workplace (1961, Kennedy) and competitive entrance exams (1870, Britain).
Now worldly position was obviously related to inner qualities: "Faith in an increasingly reliable connection between merit and worldly success in turn endowed money with a new moral quality." The rich were not only wealthier; they were plain better.
Christianity in the U.S. revised its thinking: now to possess riches in this world was evidence that one was deserving. The Rev. Thomas P. Hunt's The Book of Wealth: In Which it is Proved from the Bible that it is the Duty of Every Man to Become Rich (1836), was a bestseller. More on this connection between moral goodness and prosperity here at Talking Pentecostalism.
(3) The poor are sinful and corrupt and owe their poverty to their own stupidity. The poor were no longer seen as unfortunate. Now they were seen as undeserving failures. Poverty became a matter of shame.
Social Darwinism -- the weak are nature's mistakes and should be allowed to perish. Herbert Spencer in Social Statics: or, The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed (1851) argued that biology is opposed to charity. Andrew Carnegie, in his autobiography, said that "Those worthy of assistance, except in rare cases, seldom require assistance. The really valuable men of the race never do."
--- * --- * --- *
Current Events Tie-In: Extremely wealthy Americans evoke sense of awe in their wealthy psychiatrists: "Dr. [Byram] Karasu acknowledged that he was not immune from taking satisfaction in the success and fame of his patients. 'Wealthy people bring about a degree of awe, even in their therapists sometimes,' he said. 'This is the biggest problem I see in the doctors I supervise. And these are fully practicing doctors, doctors making $400, $500 an hour.'"
05:45 Posted in books and reading , community , consumption , education , finance and business , girardian anthropology , other people said it , politics, government and law , pop culture | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
08 July 2008
Causes: Expectation (Notes from Status Anxiety)
Notes from Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety (2004). The book generally aligns with mimetic theory and Girardian ideas; I've added a G near comments that seem to do so particularly.
This is the third post on this topic; the first is here.
CHAPTER 2 - EXPECTATION
Material Progress
In 1800s England, services and goods that previously only the elite had access to were now available to the masses. "Luxuries became decencies, and decencies necessities." From the 1750s, one could identify specific fashion styles for each year, which had never been the case before. The change was mostly due to agricultural innovations from 1700-1820s, and in the 1800s to technological innovations like the can opener, sewing machine, typewriter, lighting, sanitation, etc.
Equality, Expectation and Envy
A decline in actual deprivation has led to an increase in the sense of deprivation and in the fear of deprivation: "Neither who we are nor what we have is quite enough."
How do we decide how much is enough? It's never determined independently but rather by comparison to a reference group, "a set of people who we believe resemble us." G
A feeling that we might, under other circumstances, be other than what we are can be brought on by "exposure to the superior achievements of those whom we take to be our equals" and can lead to anxiety and resentment. G
We envy only those whom we feel are like us, our reference group. G
Per David Hume, it's not the disproportion between ourselves and others that produces envy but the proximity (in A Treatise on Human Nature, 1739). The greater the disproportion, the less likely we will envy because the other is remote from us, diminishing the effects of the comparison. G
The more people we take to be our equals, the more there will be for us to envy. [This is where differentiation comes in.]
Historically, inequality and low expectations for achievement were the norm. In 18th and 19th centuries, there began a belief in the innate equality of all and the unlimited potential for anyone to achieve anything. Previously, it was believed by most as Aristotle said, "Some by nature are free and others by nature are slaves." The working class were seen as without reason, and without rights and aspirations.
All believed inequality was fair, or at least inescapable.
Christianity affirmed the belief in inequality in practice. "Humans might be equal before God, but this offered no reason to start seeking equality in practice!" A "good Christian society" was stratified, with absolute power at the top and each in their place underneath. God was seen as creating all beings in rank order, with some superior and some inferior.
By the mid-17th century, political thought began to be more egalitarian. Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651), Locke (Two Treatises of Government, 1689, with its completely new idea that rulers were instruments of the people!), the American Revolution in 1776.
Society changed from a "hereditary, aristocratic hierarchy" to a "dynamic economy in which status was awarded in direct proportion to the (largely financial) achievements of each new generation."
Tocqueville, visiting in the USA in the 1850s, first pointed out a "particular problem that seemed to be endemic to the equal societies they created;" he observed that though Americans had much, this didn't prevent them from wanting more or from suffering envy. In a society where "everything is more or less level, the slightest variation is noticed .... G That is the reason for the strange melancholy often haunting inhabitants of democracies in the midst of abundance."
Previously, Tocqueville noted, "a serf considered his inferiority as an effect of the immutable order of nature. ... Democracy ... tore down every barrier to expectation."
Concerning expectation, William James said that "We are not always humiliated at failing things, ... only if we invest our pride and self-worth in ... an achievement and then are disappointed. ... Every rise in our level of expectation entails a rise in the danger of humiliation. What we understand to be normal is critical in determining our chances of happiness." [This may be the key sentence in the book for me.]
For instance, we could accept aging, fat, poverty, obscurity, but we generally don't.
Note the prevalence, since the 19th century and starting with Ben Franklin's Autobiography, of autobiographies of self-made heroes, advice for attainment and achievement, and "morality tales of wholesale personal transformation."
The mass media, beginning with magazines in the 1880s, gave people the opportunity for the first time to study the lives of people of higher status and to forge a connection with them. The magazines, and the advertising, created longings. Rousseau (1754) said that being truly wealthy isn't achieved by having lots of things, it's achieved by having the things one longs for. Wealth is not absolute but is relative to desire.
With expectation and a sense of unlimited possibility comes anxiety that we are far from being what we might be.
06:40 Posted in books and reading , community , consumption , girardian anthropology , other people said it , politics, government and law , pop culture | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
07 July 2008
Causes: Lovelessness (Notes from Status Anxiety)
Notes from Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety (2004). The book generally aligns with mimetic theory and Girardian ideas; I've added a G near comments that seem to do so particularly.
This is the second post on this topic; the first is here.
CHAPTER 1 - LOVELESSNESS
Each adult is defined by two great love stories, (1) the quest for sexual love, and (2) the quest for love from the world. The first is acceptable and celebrated; the second is secret and shameful.
Love is a kind of respect, a sensitivity on the part of one person to another person's existence. It's attention, the feeling that one is the object of concern, that one's presence is noted, ones views are listened to, ones needs are ministered to. The loved one feels the "benevolent gaze of appreciation."
The impact of low status is not primarily material for most people. It's in the challenge that it poses to one's sense of self-respect. We will sustain many material hardships if we have an awareness of being held in esteem by others.
Being ignored drives us to "rage and impotent despair," said William James, in The Principles of Psychology, 1890. James also argued that "The attention of others matters to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value." G Others' judgments and responses to us hold us captive.
The place we occupy in the world determines how much love we are offered and in turn whether we can like ourselves or lose confidence in ourselves.
05:35 Posted in books and reading , consumption , neuroscience, psychology, the mind , other people said it , politics, government and law , pop culture | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
06 July 2008
Notes from Status Anxiety - The Basics
Just finished Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety (2004), a book I have long wanted to read. Most of it was enlightening; the ending was disappointing. The book generally aligns with mimetic theory and Girardian ideas; I've added a G near comments that seem to do so particularly.
THE BASICS
Status is position in society, one's value or importance in the eyes of the world. In the west, it's increasingly tied to financial achievement.
Consequences of high status: resources, freedom, sense of being cared for, space, time, being thought valuable, comfort.
Status is conferred in flattery, laughter, invitations, deference, attention.
Status anxiety is the pernicious worry about the danger of failing to conform to ideals of success laid down by society. We're anxious because our self-concept is dependent on what others make of us. G
Chapter 1, Lovelessness, here.
Solutions: Politics, here.Solutions: Religion, to come.
Solutions: Bohemia, to come.
20:40 Posted in books and reading , consumption , finance and business , girardian anthropology , other people said it , politics, government and law , pop culture | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
02 June 2008
Local Food
Interactive map to show what's fresh in your state, by month. How come New Hampshire and Vermont have artichokes in June but Maine, Massachusetts, and Connecticut don't?
(via Rebecca)
11:12 Posted in community , consumption , earthcare and environment , gardening and weather , holidays and seasons | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
31 May 2008
What I'm Reading Online: We All Need -- or Don't Need -- to Improve!
>> at Zen Habits, 12 Practical Steps for Learning to Go With the Flow. A simple list. I like the quotes, especially this one: 'Flow with whatever is happening and let your mind be free. Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.' - Chuang Tzu. I wonder whether the idea of accepting whatever I'm doing is consistent with Christianity, with prayers of confession, etc.
>> from Life 2.0, Follow Your Bliss. The central idea, similar to the quote above, is 'no need for self improvement.'
"The central premise behind all the self improvement stuff (although often unseen as it can be oh so subtle) is that there is something wrong with us, something flawed that needs to be improved, something we need to do in order to be happy, healthy, successful and fulfilled. It is this unexamined assumption, that we can be improved and therefore must be less than perfect, that keeps us in chains ... that reinforces this illusion of brokenness, powerlessness and being a victim-of-circumstances-beyond-our-control, which we see reflected back to us in the world we perceive around us."
Instead, this weblog counsels "an alternative to self-improvement, a spiritual path or another kind of seeking.... Vow to do what makes you happy right now and see where that takes you." Ah, but "anything we think we want, we have been conditioned to want," so it's not as easy as it might seem to do what makes us happy.
What I can't help thinking is that this plan to "be happy" is self-improvement by another name, with its implication that we're not happy enough already, and that we need to do something about this lack.
>> "Jesus Made Me Puke" by Matt Tabbi in Rolling Stone, about a 3-day "Encounter Weekend" retreat with John Hagee's Cornerstone Church:
"The program revolved around a theory that [pastor Philip] Fortenberry quickly introduced us to called 'the wound.' The wound theory was a piece of schlock biblical Freudianism in which everyone had one traumatic event from their childhood that had left a wound. The wound necessarily had been inflicted by another person, and bitterness toward that person had corrupted our spirits and alienated us from God. Here at the retreat we would identify this wound and learn to confront and forgive our transgressors, a process that would leave us cleansed of bitterness and hatred and free to receive the full benefits of Christ.
"In the context of the wound theory, Fortenberry's tale suddenly made more sense. Being taken on that eighteen-hole golf trip with the barmaid, and watching his family ditched by Dad, had been his wound. It was a wound, Fortenberry explained, because his father's abandonment had crushed his 'normal.'
"'And I was wounded,' he whispered dramatically. 'My dad had ruined my normal!'
"The crowd murmured affirmatively, apparently knowing what it was to have a crushed normal."
>> at Marginal Revolution, How To Choose An Apartment. How much does the actual living space matter, and how much does the location matter? Do we under- or over-invest in one or the other? Interesting anaylsis via comments. I now live in a house I don't really like, in a location I love. Before this, I lived in a house (including extensive grounds) that I loved in a location I didn't like. I still don't know which is better.
>> provacateur PJ O'Rourke's "Fairness, Idealism and Other Atrocities," commencement advice. His advice: make money, don't be an idealist (they're bullies), get politically uninvolved (politics is anathema to truth), forget about fairness, be a religious extremist (that is, realise that "using politics to create fairness is a sin").
About fairness:
"Well, I am here to advocate for unfairness. I've got a 10-year-old at home. She's always saying, 'That's not fair.' When she says this, I say, 'Honey, you're cute. That's not fair. Your family is pretty well off. That's not fair. You were born in America. That's not fair. Darling, you had better pray to God that things don't start getting fair for you.'"
>> 25 Things All Women Should Learn to Do Already by the women at Jezebel. Ranges from manual and practical skills like rapid vegetable chopping, masturbation, financial investing, and assembling furniture, to the more abstract realm of truth-telling, and social skills like withholding information, getting angry without being passive-aggressive, and not taking things personally. And of course, there are comments.
>> "Total Recall … Or At Least the Gist" at Miller-McCune, on the differences between gist and verbatim memory. What interests me here is the hypothesis called 'fuzzy trace theory,' which "explains how we can 'remember' things that never really happened:"
"When an event occurs, verbatim memory records an accurate representation. But even as it is doing so, gist memory begins processing the information and determining how it fits into our existing storehouse of knowledge. Verbatim memories generally die away within a day or two, leaving only the gist memory, which records the event as we interpreted it. Under certain circumstances, this can produce a phenomenon Reyna and her colleagues refer to as 'phantom recollection.' She calls this 'a powerful form of false alarm' in which gist memory -- designed to look for patterns and fill in perceived gaps -- creates a vivid but illusory image in our mind." ...
"Gist memory allows us to make snap decisions. But life does not always follow familiar patterns, and harm can result when we discard evidence that doesn't fit our assumptions."
They note that this 'misremembering' is a very common, ordinary occurence.
>> "The Candidate, the Preacher and the Unconscious Mind" by Shankar Vedantam in the WaPo. Central idea: We are biased against people who are in proximity to people we are already biased against. Second idea: We believe that people "from other ethnic, cultural and political groups are quite similar to one another, whereas they know that people from [our] own groups are quite varied."
The study he cites is fascinating:
Volunteers in a research experiment see an applicant sitting in a waiting room next to an overweight person, while others see the applicant sitting next to someone of average weight. ... "A variety of experiments have shown that overweight people suffer from discrimination; what [researcher Michelle] Hebl wanted to find out was whether strangers in the vicinity of overweight people would share in such approbation.
"Remarkably, Hebl found that volunteers rated job applicants more negatively when they had been seen seated next to an overweight person than when they were seen seated next to an average weight person. The volunteers had no idea that they were showing not only a prejudice against fat people but also a bias against people who were merely in proximity to overweight people."The experiment tells us something about the Obama-Wright controversy. The presidential candidate may have made it clear that the minister does not speak for him, but every time Wright's words are replayed on talk radio and cable TV, they automatically retrieve mental associations in many voters' minds with Obama. Hebl similarly found her volunteers unconsciously made associations even after being explicitly told there was no connection between the job applicants in the waiting room."
Similarly, "men and women seen in the company of beautiful partners are perceived as being more attractive than when they are seen in plainer company." But -- "there is some evidence our minds are especially attuned to negative associations."
>> "The Gospel of Consumption And the better future we left behind" by Jeffrey Kaplan in Orion. The article, with a focused accounting of Kellogg company work-hour policy over the years, is primarily a vision of Americans working and spending less while living comfortably.
"Machines can save labor, but only if they go idle when we possess enough of what they can produce. In other words, the machinery offers us an opportunity to work less, an opportunity that as a society we have chosen not to take. Instead, we have allowed the owners of those machines to define their purpose: not reduction of labor, but 'higher productivity' -- and with it the imperative to consume virtually everything that the machinery can possibly produce. ...
"By 1991 the amount of goods and services produced for each hour of labor was double what it had been in 1948. By 2006 that figure had risen another 30 percent. In other words, if as a society we made a collective decision to get by on the amount we produ€ced and consumed seventeen years ago, we could cut back from the standard forty-hour week to 5.3 hours per day -- or 2.7 hours if we were willing to return to the 1948 level.
"But we cannot do it as individuals." The marketplace doesn't offer "a choice to work less and consume less. The reason is simple: that choice is at odds with the foundations of the marketplace itself -- at least as it is currently constructed. The men and women who masterminded the creation of the consumerist society understood that theirs was a political undertaking, and it will take a powerful political movement to change course today."
In a sort of rebuttal to PJ O'Rourke's suggestion (above) that democracy might mean having our clothing choices, e.g., determined by the majority (of shoppers, i.e., teen girls), Kaplan notes that Edward Bernays, "one of the founders of the field of public relations and a principal architect of the American Way," decreed that "the choices available in the polling booth are akin to those at the department store; both should consist of a limited set of offerings that are carefully determined by what Bernays called an 'invisible government' of public-relations experts and advertisers working on behalf of business leaders. Bernays claimed that in a 'democratic society' we are and should be 'governed, our minds ... molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.'"
>> "Engines of Emotional Pollution" (continues here) by Steven Stosny, Ph.D., in Psychology Today, posits four mechanisms that "govern most human interactions:" contagion, attunement, negative bias, and reactivity.
Contagion for Stosny is "what makes you feel what the rest of the group feels."
Attunement is a type of contagion, or a response to it; it's when we match "the intensity and tone of [our] emotions with those of someone else." It's honouring the boundaries of social convention. Interestingly, "[a]lthough our unconscious sensitivity to others is almost always active when we're not alone, it is not always accurate, i.e., we sometimes misconstrue what other people are feeling. However, we are far more accurate in sensing what others feel than in knowing what they think. This disproportionate accuracy between sensing another's feelings and judging their thinking leads to most of our misunderstandings of one another." We're pretty accurate in knowing another person's feelings but in trying to account for what's behind them, we make wrong assumptions.
Negative bias is related to attunement: Our 'negative' emotions influence us more than our positive ones, and we 'tune in' to negative emotions more than we do to positive ones: "So if you come home from work in a fairly good mood and find that your spouse is brooding or upset, attunement will bring him or her up a little and you down a lot. To keep from being 'brought down' by the other's negative mood, many couples attempt to dull their sensitivity to the other's emotional world."
Reactivity: is "learned resistance to the unconscious pull of contagion and attunement." It can be obvious -- 'I'm not putting up with your attitude!' or passive, ignoring another's bad mood.
From a Girardian perspective, I found this paragraph, which speaks of interdividualism (as opposed to individualism) without naming it, enlightening:
"The aspect of reactivity that makes it difficult to see, let alone change, is its illusion of free will and ego independence, even 'authenticity.' You think that you are acting of your own volition and in your best interest, when you are merely reacting to someone else. We've all uttered (or at least thought) the most ironic of all statements, 'You're not going to bring me down!' As long as you're in this reactive mode, you are down -- reacting to negativity with negativity."
12:05 Posted in books and reading , community , consumption , finance and business , girardian anthropology , householding , neuroscience, psychology, the mind , other people said it , politics, government and law , pop culture , silliness and humour , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
28 May 2008
Brand Timeline Portrait (R)
Following Jane's lead, I'm blogging the (visible) brands I use today:
7:15-7:45 a.m.
Getting up, getting ready ... Zadro is the Shower Bug I listen to in the shower.
I'll note only this first use of Quilted Northern ...
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7:45 a.m.
Getting dressed ... socks and necklace don't seem to have a brand on them ...
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8:00 a.m. - 9:45 a.m.
What's happening in the virtual world?
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8:15 a.m.
Dog feeding and cooking rice for future dog meals ...
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8:45 a.m.
Feeding me, vitamins (some are not branded), cleaning up ...
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9:45 a.m.
Going out -- need jacket, gum, shoes, and a treat for the dog ...
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11:00 a.m.
Returning-home treat for the dog ...
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11:00 - 11:52 a.m.
Now what's happening in the virtual world?
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11:52 a.m.
Going out again for a walk ...
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12:05 p.m.
Got a phone call while walking ...
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1:00 - 1:30 p.m.
Home and reconnecting ...
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1:27 p.m.
Water plus tonic water ... Lunch was leftovers in a non-brand plastic container, so no brands to record. Then in the garden.
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1:50 - 2:00 p.m.
Playing with the dog ...
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2 - 2:30 p.m.
Working out ... weights don't seem to be branded ...
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2:52 p.m.
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3:00 - 3:40 p.m.
Watched taped "Workout" and blogged, read online, etc. ...
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4:50 p.m.
Did dishes. Oh joy. (Swept earlier, but no brand names on broom or dustpan.)
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5:15-5:30 p.m.
Made cornbread to accompany leftovers for dinner. Most cornbread ingredients not name-brand.
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5:35-6:10 p.m.
Reading the paper online and doing email as cornbread cooks and before heating up leftovers ....
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5:42 p.m.
Dog eats again.
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6:15-6:55 p.m.
Dinner (leftovers, cornbread, and half of Christmas beer) and TV. Dog goes out.
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7:00 - 9:30 p.m.
Reading. Drinking tea. One phone call.
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9:55 p.m.
Dog to bed.
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10:00 p.m.
Evening ablutions.
22:00 Posted in consumption , finance and business , food and drink , householding , lists , pop culture | Permalink | Comments (1) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
28 April 2008
What I'm Reading Online - Our Personal Connection To What Is Wrong
>> SACRALISING DRESS
This article at Anderson Cooper's 360 Blog by a former female Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saint, interested me because it seems to concern sacralising behaviour (related post).
"Women lost a lot of rights in 1953. They no longer had any say in who they could marry nor could they choose how to dress. The way this was spun was that since the community had come through the raid so successfully, it was now ready to practice a higher form of God's law. (God is always the explanation when things get more restrictive; change is presented as a prize for being righteous and faithful. We were always told we were worthy of a higher law.)"
She reiterates the idea a little further down the page:
"The clothing also desexualizes women. Our chests are flattened out and any natural shape is hidden.
"We were always told by Warren Jeffs when the dress and choices became more restrictive that is was a sign that 'God loves you so much he wants you to be more like him.' (We believed Warren received direct revelations from God.) What we were losing were rights and any sense of control over our lives and all individuality."
As mentioned in a study of religious and secular communes in the previous blog post, the study's authors concluded that "ritual constraints are not by themselves enough to sustain co-operation in a community -- what is needed in addition is a belief that those constraints are sanctified."
>> LIVING CLOSE TO NATURE = POVERTY AND MISERY, or ENRICHING RELATIONSHIPS with earth and others? Or both?
"Couldn't God Have Designed A Gentler Universe?" by Jesuit astronomer Guy Consolmagno SJ at Thinking Faith: The Online Journal of the British Jesuits got my attention because I just finished reading Three Cups of Tea for a bookgroup, which is about American Greg Mortenson's mission to build schools in Islamic countries (Pakistan and Afghanistan). Twice in that book there's a sort of teaser for a comparison-contrast argument that never actually happens. Early in the book, the question is raised whether the rural mountain town that Greg is so taken with is a paradise, because the people seem happy, they are welcoming, they smile a lot, they are patient and accepting of what happens, they have leisure time, they have close relationships with each other and live intimately with the land and seasons, or a miserable backwater, because the people have high rates of goiters, cataracts, malnutrition and infant mortality, almost no access to health care, live in frigid temperatures for half the year, and work very hard to survive. Later in the book, there is a moment's musing about a 'hard' but 'pure' life of such people, and what Western technological influences like roads, bridges and buildings will do to the close relationship those people have to their land.
Consolmagno's words resonated with that in my mind:
"There's an odd divide in Western culture nowadays. We've become separated from nature. We have air-conditioned homes, air-conditioned cars, air-conditioned offices, air-conditioned lives. [In far northern climes, substitute 'well-heated' for air-conditioned.] We spend most of our lives wrapped in cotton wool. If we feel pain, we want it to stop, now.
"Well-lit streets at night that mean that most people never see the Milky Way -- or at least not until the lights go out. After the Northridge earthquake in southern California in January 1994, the phones at the Griffith Planetarium in Los Angeles started ringing off the hooks as people wanted to know why the earthquake made the sky look so scary. The earthquake struck at 4:30 a.m., while it was still dark outside. When people rushed through their blacked-out homes to the outdoors, a million people saw something in the skies over Los Angeles they'd never seen before: stars. And they were terrified. ...
I spent two years in the Peace Corps in Africa.I saw there how we used to live, back before flush toilets and neon lights. People lived close to nature, in a way that hardly anyone in America does anymore. And I learned in Africa that there’s a word for people who live close to nature: starving.
Our lifestyle puts a heavy toll on the environment; but so does the lifestyle of the desperate people in Kenya or Haiti, who strip the forests bare in their day-to-day struggle to stay alive. So I don’t necessarily mean to disparage our cotton-swabbed existence. My point is just to point it out, because the shock we experience when a natural disaster hits us is precisely the wrench of being jerked out of our cotton-wool womb and forced to confront nature. Nature can be hostile as well as beautiful; nature gives us food and gives us death."
The rest is worth reading, though no answers are given.
>> Two articles on the HIGH PERCENTAGE OF IMPRISONMENT in the U.S.:
Adam Liptak in the NYT (23 April) writes "Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations'" and Marie Gottschalk writes "Two Separate Societies: One in Prison, One Not" in the WaPo (15 April), both on the same topic.
Gottschalk points to a recent Pew Center study which showed "that for the first time in this country's history, more than one in every 100 adults is in jail or prison" and one in every 32 adults is or has either been "incarcerated, on parole or probation or under some other form of state or local supervision." The U.S. incarceration rate "is 5 to 12 times that of other industrialized countries as well as being the highest in the world." The rate is ten times higher for African-American men: One in 9 young black men is imprisoned.
Liptak elaborates on the stats: "The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners. Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes -- from writing bad checks to using drugs -- that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations."
Gottschalk, citing hearings held by Senator James Webb (D-Va) last October, says that the increases in incarceration are not "driven so much by an increase in crime as by the way we chose to respond to crime," with tougher sentencing guidelines. Her main point is that "the leading presidential candidates have not identified mass imprisonment as a central issue, even though it is arguably the country's top civil rights concern."
Liptak points to more reasons than simply tougher sentencing guidelines for the high U.S. incarceration rate (which, he notes, seems to have led to decreases in crime, although Canada's crime has likewise decreased with no concurrent increase in incarceration rates), and he discusses each factor separately:
"Criminologists and legal experts here and abroad point to a tangle of factors to explain America's extraordinary incarceration rate: higher levels of violent crime [a murder rate 4 times higher than many Western European nations], harsher sentencing laws, a legacy of racial turmoil, a special fervor in combating illegal drugs, the American temperament, and the lack of a social safety net. Even democracy plays a role, as judges -- many of whom are elected, another American anomaly -- yield to populist demands for tough justice."
Is this high rate of imprisonment our country's nuanced form of mob justice?
Concerning the factor of "American temperament," Liptak notes that "some scholars have found that English-speaking nations have higher prison rates. 'Although it is not at all clear what it is about Anglo-Saxon culture that makes predominantly English-speaking countries especially punitive, they are,' wrote Michael H. Tonry, a professor of law and public policy at the University of Minnesota, in Crime, Punishment and Politics in Comparative Perspective (2007).
"'It could be related to economies that are more capitalistic and political cultures that are less social democratic than those of most European countries,' Mr. Tonry wrote. 'Or it could have something to do with the Protestant religions with strong Calvinist overtones that were long influential.'"
>> WHY BOTHER WITH ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY?
That's what Michael Pollan ask, and answers, in his article titled "Why Bother" in the NYT Magazine (20 April). Pollan examines some of the obstacles and justifications for doing nothing, or very little:
Why bother to take any steps in the direction of reducing my footprint on the Earth "when I know full well that halfway around the world there lives my evil twin, some carbon-footprint doppelgänger in Shanghai or Chongqing who has just bought his first car (Chinese car ownership is where ours was back in 1918), is eager to swallow every bite of meat I forswear and who's positively itching to replace every last pound of CO2 I'm struggling no longer to emit."
And even if, for the sake of virtue, "I decide I am going to bother, there arises the whole vexed question of getting it right. Is eating local or walking to work really going to reduce my carbon footprint?" (Pollan points to studies that show they may not. )
"If determining the carbon footprint of food is really this complicated, and I've got to consider not only 'food miles' but also whether the food came by ship or truck and how lushly the grass grows in New Zealand, then maybe on second thought I'll just buy the imported chops at Costco, at least until the experts get their footprints sorted out."
His argument for making our daily, individual lives more sustainable is this:
"Whatever we can do as individuals to change the way we live at this suddenly very late date does seem utterly inadequate to the challenge. It's hard to argue with Michael Specter, in a recent New Yorker piece on carbon footprints, when he says: 'Personal choices, no matter how virtuous, ... cannot do enough. It will also take laws and money.' So it will. Yet it is no less accurate or hardheaded to say that laws and money cannot do enough, either; that it will also take profound changes in the way we live. Why? Because the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle -- of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending represents 70 percent of our economy), and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences. "
Pollan cites Wendell Berry, who 30 years ago "was impatient with people who wrote checks to environmental organizations while thoughtlessly squandering fossil fuel in their everyday lives -- the 1970s equivalent of people buying carbon offsets to atone for their Tahoes and Durangos. Nothing was likely to change until we healed the 'split between what we think and what we do.' For Berry, the 'why bother' question came down to a moral imperative: 'Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live.'"
----
Much more to Pollan's article (specialisation, hidden energy costs, why we should take individual steps anyway), but where this last bit leads me is back to a perhaps romantic notion of the 'purity' -- or at least the honesty -- of living life close to the land, and that state of being contrasted to the cultural free-floating angst, the urge to crime and urge to punishment (leading to high rates of incarceration and a punitive justice system), the need to sacralise and the need to artificially create meaning that we find widespread in our culture, where we are so much more likely to be living without integrity, living "the best we can," as Berry says, in at least a veiled awareness of our own complicity in unsustainable living, in an unnecessarily harsh 'justice' system, in the war we are waging and its collateral damage as well as its inte