24 July 2008
What I'm Reading Lately: Death, Dog Poisoning, Novelty, Flawed Heroes, Psych Experiments, Limiting Generalisations
A mish-mash of my recent online reading, pondering, etc.
>> Alpine murder mystery: Are sheepdogs being poisoned to save the grey wolf? (Independent, 18 July 2008):
So far this year, 17 sheepdogs (including Great Pyrenees) have been poisoned -- with slug poison placed inside pork meatballs -- in the high Maurienne mountains, just inside the French border with Italy. The killings seem to stem from an ongoing dispute between sheep-lovers (and shepherds) and wolf-lovers. "'The pork meat balls were left, some time during the night, most likely just before dawn, in a place where the dogs would be sure to find them. This is the work of a maniac – a madman. What if the meat had been found by a small child? There are tourists everywhere at this time of year, including many British tourists.'"
"The dogs have often died in great agony.... [The poison] causes instant and catastrophic diarrhoea and lung failure in small mammals like dogs. 'They finish up dying completely dehydrated but, before that, they drown in their own bronchial fluids.'"
There are about 100 wolves in France. There is a sheep-protection plan in place in the area, and there have been no wolf attacks on sheep in the Maurienne area for more than two years.
>> If you haven't read it yet, I recommend "Cancer & Creativity: One Chef’s True Story" (Food & Wine, July 2008):
"While undergoing treatment for tongue cancer, Grant Achatz temporarily lost his ability to taste. Paradoxically, it taught him brilliant new ways to create flavor."
>> Impossible Experiments (Psychology Today, 1 July 2008) is a small collection of research psychologists would like to do "if neither ethics nor practical reality stood in your way." What interests me is that almost all the comments (so far) are about one hypothesis, that how parents raise their kids doesn't influence them significantly. The experiment I would jump on is Tamler Sommers' "Another Man's Shoes." (The YouTube video at the end makes clear that the whole thing is a joke ... or is it?) Other never-done experiments.
>> "Our Infantile Search for Heroic Leaders" by Johann Hari (26 June 2008, Independent). Hari's thesis is two-fold: That there are no perfectly good leaders and that we can't expect leaders to solve our problems because "every civilising advance in history ... was won because ordinary people banded together and agitated for it." Not much new there, but what interested me about this article was Hari's critique of Mandela, Gandhi, and Churchill as flawed leaders. I never knew that Churchill, for instance, was "strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes." His portrayal of Gandhi as a murderer (of his wife) seems overdone, not because I don't believe it's possible but because even as Hari presents it, it sounds more like a matter of adhering to principles in one case (his wife's illness) and not in another (his own illness), a rather ordinary though insidious trait.
>> Reframing Questions by Dave Pollard at How To Save the World (16 July 2008) seeks to promote critical thinking, to help us think beyond our own "false myths and limiting generalizations." He gives some examples of some limiting myths and generalisations he encounters everyday in business, then reframes the questions, and then asks his readers: "What are the false myths and limiting generalizations that you are struggling with, and how might you use appropriate questions to reframe them, disempower them, put them to rest?" Some day I may give some energy to it and respond to that challenge here.
>> "Why We Like New Stuff" (Mental Floss, 16 July 2008). Basically, "our brains are actually hard-wired to prefer novelty and adventure. ... In fact, research on the ventral striatum (the part of the brain associated with rewarding behavior) seems to indicate that sating our sense of adventure provides us the same sort of satisfaction we get from sex and food." Dopamine figures, too. Full study (7 pages, PDF).
>> "Italian Outrage Over Roma Drowning Photos" (21 July 2008, CNN) is confusing to me. "Italian newspapers, an archbishop and civil liberties campaigners expressed shock and revulsion on Monday after photographs were published of sunbathers apparently enjoying a day at the beach just meters from where the bodies of two drowned Roma girls were laid out on the sand."
I think I might be creeped out if dead people were lying on the beach -- I'm creeped out when a dead seal or horseshoe crab is lying on the beach -- but the sunbathers' critics aren't shocked that they're not repulsed enough, presumably; they're shocked that the sunbathers are indifferent to the bodies. Shocked that they can act as if they aren't there, that they can do what they would ordinarily do without creating a sacred space for the bodies, without making their deaths the focus. That doesn't seem so bad to me. In any important way, the girls are not there, so why regard the dead bodies as something sacred, something whose presence means we should act differently than we do ordinarily? I guess it's because death is seen as such a powerful force.
The Archbishop of Naples, Cardinal Crecenzio Seppe, said in his blog that "'To turn the other way or to mind your own business can sometimes be more devastating than the events that occur.'" I'd agree if the girls were injured or needed lifesaving efforts; then it would be cruel to be indifferent. But I don't see how the sunbathers' can really mind the dead girls' business now, or why they should.
I've been in the presence of someone in the moments of her death, and in the presence of her body, as it lay in her house, for a couple of hours after that. The moment of dying, yes, that felt like something happened, something a little unusual and yet not, like breathing in and out. But for the hours afterwards? My experience was that life went on in its ordinary way. If I hadn't felt that all along that morning, I would have when the mortuary folks came with their plastic garbage-like bag and heaved her body into it. It was about as sacred-seeming as bodies under beach towels on a sunny day.
(In a twisted way, it kinda reminds me of this ...)
06:15 Posted in animals , death , neuroscience, psychology, the mind , other people said it , politics, government and law , pop culture , science and tech , travel and place | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
23 July 2008
Not Many Dead - Volume II
A magazine I read monthly has a reader write-in column titled "Not Many Dead: Important Stories You May Have Missed." The column is made up of headlines or snippets of 'news' stories that are hardly news. As part of an ongoing series (first one here), I offer these recent non-news stories:
"A study by an independent nonprofit research group, The National Sleep Foundation, found that more than 65 percent of moms drink caffeinated beverages to get through their day." [CNN, 24 June 2008]
Headline: "If Gordon is our Heathcliff, who or what is his Cathy?" First paragraph: "[British PM] Gordon Brown apparently thinks voters are right to compare him to Heathcliff, the brooding figure at the centre of Bronte's Wuthering Heights. Political Editor Tomos Livingstone wonders whether this is one question he should have laughed off instead, while, below right, Catherine Jones explores the true nature of the character the Prime Minister is comparing himself to." [11 July, Wales Online]
"Rapper 50 Cent is free to take a vacation with his son after passing a court-ordered drug test." [18 Jul, NYT]
"Plans for a large human trial of a promising government-developed H.I.V. vaccine in the United States were canceled Thursday because a top federal official said scientists realized that they did not know enough about how H.I.V. vaccines and the immune system interact." [18 July, NYT]
07:05 Posted in media, film, tv, radio , other people said it , pop culture | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
20 July 2008
Websites with Narrow Focus, X
I've been saving them up for this post.
It's Lovely! I'll Take It!, "a collection of poorly chosen photos from real estate listings. With love." And comments. Don't miss it.
potentially nervous: "The world's going to hell. Here are some bunny photos."
How I Spent My Stimulus. Tell your story.
Kim's Page o' Chopsticks. Chopstick wrappers, actually. (Thanks, Mike.)
06:45 Posted in animals , art and photography , finance and business , food and drink , householding , pop culture , silliness and humour , websites with narrow focus | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
19 July 2008
Reason-Giving: Four Kinds of Reasons
At the heart of Tilly's book Why? (see previous post) are the four kinds of reasons he posits: conventions, codes, stories and technical accounts.
Conventions and codes don't posit cause-and-effect; they simply appeal to socially appropriate formulas as explanation:
CONVENTIONS -- Conventionally accepted reasons. Examples: My train was late, I wasn't in the mood, she's just lucky, gotta run, I'm so busy,
CODES -- Rules, basically. Particularly relevent in law, medicine, the military, government, religion, diplomacy, sports and so on.
Stories and technical accounts do posit cause-and-effect:
STORIES -- Explanatory narratives, usually used for exceptional, unusual, or unfamiliar events.
TECHNICAL ACCOUNTS -- cause-and-effect explanation used by authorities and specialists in their fields (engineers, physicians, programmers, artists, etc.)
To show the difference among these, Tilly starts the book with a discussion of causes put forth early on, by politicians and survivors, for the 9/11 terrorists attacks:
Story: Terrorists did it, but lax officials let them do it.
Convention: Modern life is dangerous.
Code: Because we have freedom to defend, we must combat terror.
Technical accounts: (Not many given initially. Later, specialists gave accounts of "how airplane crashes brought down supposedly unshakeable buildings, what went wrong with American intelligence," etc.)
He notes that "intermediate forms of reason giving exist. One form sometimes mutates into another as people interact. In religious communities, 'God wills it' stands halfway between a convention and a story, having more or less explanatory power depending on prevailing beliefs about divine intervention in human affairs."
He also makes clear that all of these ways of relating are also used to accomplish things other than give reasons. For example, stories also "amuse, threaten and educate;" technical accounts also "display their providers' expertise and signal where the experts stand on divisive issues;" conventions also "mark boundaries between insiders and outsiders, fill lulls in conversations, and convey accumulated ideas from one generation to the next."
More about each:
CONVENTIONS
Conventions, like etiquette, "mix propriety and self-interest." Etiquette "consists of supplying appropriate, effective reasons why -- for things you do, and for things you won't do. Good etiquette incorporates conventional reasons. The reasons need not be true, but they must fit the circumstances" and, even more, the relationship.
Some conventions consist of 'serviceable excuses' that try to normalise relationships. An example Tilly gives is of someone who's illiterate asking a stranger in a store to read something for them, with the explanation that they forgot their glasses. Other examples of 'serviceable excuses' we give to conceal "our suddenly revealed incompetence" include Sorry - I thought this was someone else's office, These gears always grind, The map was wrong, It's too loud to hear anything, etc. We use these to avoid embarrassment, to "prove that the relation between ourselves and others is not what it might seem." Sometimes, Tilly notes, we give similar explanations not to express our social competence but to "explain a failure as a result of excusable incompetence" (my watch stopped, I'm sick, I'm new in town, I've never done this before, etc.)
Tilly says that justification occurs in all types of reason-giving, but that "justification by means of convention ... has a peculiar property: participants rarely take the reason proposed seriously as a cause-effect account, and more often treat it as a characterization of the relationship, the practices, and the connection between them. A good reason offers an acceptable characterization."
CODES
Using codes as reasons is all about matching the case at hand to the code in the book: "Asked to justify a decision, adjudicate a dispute, or give advice, skillful users of codes find matches between concrete cases and categories, procedures, and rules already built into the codes. Like conventions, reasons based on codes therefore gain credibility from criteria of appropriateness rather than from the cause-effect validity that prevails in stories and technical accounts."
"Sermons, classes, Power-Point presentations, manuals and how-to books often present codes: briefly stated principles followed by practical applications. Their very formats separate them from everyday social interchange. ... Job applications, survey interviews, resumes, obituaries, and citations for honors typically require either their authors or some specialist to convert accounts initially presented in story form into stylized facts to match well-established codes."
Tilly gives lots of legal and medical examples, especially malpractice.
STORIES
Stories "truncate cause-effect connections. They typically call up a limited number of actors whose dispositions and actions cause everything that happens within a delimited time and space. ... Stories inevitably minimize or ignore the causal roles of errors, unanticipated consequences, indirect effects, incremental effects, simulataneous effects, feedback effects, and environmental effects."
(All those errors and effects are what interest me -- as well as what the 'actors' think, feel and do -- and may explain an aversion I have to stories that omit those messy things.)
Stories make meaning, make "the world intelligible. ... Stories provide simplified cause-effect accounts of puzzling, unexpected, dramatic, problematic or exemplary events. ... [T]hey often carry an edge of justification or condemnation. ... The story usually gives pride of place to human actors. When the leading characters are not human" ... (animals, God, storms, etc.) "they still behave mostly like humans. The story they enact accordingly often conveys credit or blame. ... Stories exclude ... inconvenient complications [like those errors and effects named above]. ... Even when they convey truths, stories enormously simplify the processes involved."
Elements of stories and when we choose to tell them:
- Stories explain events in question, when conventions and general principles won't do
- Stories often assign blame to the actors involved, omitting other non-actor causes
- There are master stories that recur frequently[ i.e., myths?]: "A let B down and B suffered," "C and D fought to a standstill," etc.
- Stories usually have some kind of moral, even if subtle through assigning praise or blame
This paragraph was most enlightening for me, articulating something felt but not always consciously understood:
"As with conventions the choice of stories obviously has consequences for later relations among the parties to the stories, and typically involves justification or condemnation of certain practices. If I tell you that a mutual friend has cheated me, I am simultaneously aligning you with me against the friend and warning you not to trust the friend .... That is why hearing stories often upsets us and sometimes incites us to challenge the teller: if we accept the story, we take on the consequences."
"Superior stories" are those that are simplified to the greatest degree and are also closest to truth; that is, they get their cause and effect right. These stories are widely accessible and persuasive.
TECHNICAL ACCOUNTS
Technical accounts "combine cause-effect explanation (rather than logics of appropriateness) with grounding in some systematic specialized discipline (rather than everyday knowledge). ... They assume shared knowledge of previously accumulated definitions, practices and findings. For that reason, outsiders often consider technical accounts inpenetrable because they are so hermetic or ... filled with jargon."
Their relationship work is that they "signal relationships with possessors of esoteric knowledge, saying you're one of us to other sympathetic specialists, marking differences within the field from others with whom the author disagrees, providing introductions to the field ..., and establishing the author's respectablity vis-a-vis respectful nonspecialists."
Technical accounts use codes to match and measure cases against norms and standards, and they go on to posit cause and effect based on this.
Tilly's examples concerns violence, crime, the National Academy of Sciences, privatizaton of common resources, property rights, Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs and Steel, etc.
(I find most of the examples in this book pretty tedious and very skippable.)
My Conclusion
After reading this book, I have the sense that pretty much every reason we give others or ourselves, or hear from same, is either formulaic or a highly simplified mythic account. Is that it?
I've been trying out reasons in my head -- all stories, so far, because that's the only place where it seems that complexity and doubt could enter -- conventions are not complex per se, codes may be complex but are also pro forma to some extent, and technical accounts aren't that useful for discussing ordinary relationships) -- for various actions I've done, and even when they sometimes include mention of coincidence, feedback effects, incremental effects, etc., they still, I can't help but notice, omit a lot of contributing factors, either because I want to minimise those factors when I present the reasons to myself, or the story gets unwieldy with so many offshoots -- perhaps with cause-and-effect accounts, there is a tendency to weight the contributing factors and to present those writ bold because they seem significant and seem to account for most of the outcome. My life experience, though, tells me that my justifications and reasons-giving after the fact are liable to be misinterpretations of reality, the result of my mind imposing actions, feelings and thoughts (and cause and effect hypotheses) into a biased framework.
I understand, reading this book, why I have felt at times so slighted by someone I considered a friend, when he listens to my story (sometimes a reason-giving story, sometimes not) and responds with what feels to me like a pat convention ("You know it's wrong to do that." "Well, these things happen." etc.) I've done the same thing and felt the chilling effect it's had on the reason-receiver, too. Now I wonder if answering a friend's drama with a conventional response always necessarily reveals either (1) an intention to push the other away, to make an intimate relationship more distant, or, likewise, (2) an intention to change the relationship's power balance -- the one offering the convention is in effect saying, "I'm superior," or is at least making a claim to more power than she currently has within the relationship.
13:10 Posted in books and reading , community , language , lists , neuroscience, psychology, the mind , other people said it , pop culture | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
18 July 2008
Reason-Giving
I read about sociologist Charles Tilly's book Why?: What happens when people give reasons ... and why (2006) at about the same time I watched a "House, MD" episode (It's A Wonderful Lie) in which House says, "The only reason to give multiple reasons is that you're searching for what the person wants to hear." That struck me as exceedingly true, and I thought that Tilly might have more to say about what's behind reason-giving.
Tilly says that reason-giving happens only in relationships (and only in human ones) and he makes a direct connection between reason-giving and status within the relationship, or, the perceived equality of the relationship. The main determiner of the kind of reason we give is not the behaviour we're explaining or the situation, but rather the relationship we have with the person to whom we're giving the reason:
"Reason giving resembles what hapens when people deal with unequal social relations in general. Participants in unequal social relations may detect, confirm, reinforce or challenge them, but as they do so they employ modes of communications that signal which of these things they are doing. In fact, the ability to give reasons without challenge usually accompanies a position of power."
Reason-giving can be verbal, and it can also be through pantomime, or "body gloss." He offers the example of a girl entering a congregating area in a ski lodge, who wants to "see and be seen by boys," giving for all the world the "appearance of looking for someone in particular." She's proferring an unspoken reason for being there, for looking around, one that contradicts or hides her true reason.
As Tilly notes early on,
"people do not give themselves and others reasons because of some universal craving for truth and coherence. They often settle for reasons that are superficial, contradictory, dishonest, or -- at least from an observer's viewpoint -- farfetched. Whatever else they are doing when they give reasons, people are clearly negotiating their social lives. They are saying something about relations between themselves and those who hear [or observe] their reasons."
Reasons, Tilly says, are always given to define, or redefine, the relationship between the parties. They are given to create, confirm, negotiate, or repair relationships. "Appropriate reasons vary dramatically with the equality, inequality and intimacy or distance of the relationship." Superiors can give perfunctory reasons to inferiors, as can those in distant relationships. In fact, it would likely be "intrusive or embarrassing" to give elaborate reasons to someone you don't know well. Inferiors, otoh, usually have to offer defensible and sometimes apologetic reasons to superiors, as do intimates. Though there is much social pressure to give appropriate reasons to each other, most of us are skilled at this and so usually don't notice reasons unless the reason given doesn't match our view of the relationship.
I'll post soon about the four types of reasons Tilly identifies and explores. (And yes, many reasons are combinations of the four, not pure examples.)
17:45 Posted in books and reading , community , language , neuroscience, psychology, the mind , other people said it , pop culture | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
17 July 2008
Need for Sense of Control, Either Personal or External
Overcoming Bias points to an article in the July 2008 issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (links to full text here but it's fee-based, or available through your library system) that examines four psychological experiments and concludes that when we feel a weak sense of personal control, we are more likely to believe "in the existence of a controlling God" and to defend "the overarching socio-political system." The authors discuss "the implications of these results for understanding why a high percentage of the population believes in the existence of God, and why people so often endorse and justify their socio-political systems." Sounds interesting -- I hope to read more when the July issue is available via my library system's EBSCOhost subscription.
This hypothesis seems in line with earlier reporting correlating that the longevity of communities with their religious underpinnings (religious communities last longer than secular ones, on the whole) and finding that the communities persist longer when those underpinnings (and the lifestyle they lead to) are stricter, more controlling.
Marginal Revolution commented on the same article, hypothesising that similar effects may hold for medicine and media, i.e., that we'd be more likely to believe that doctors are effective when our health is in jeopardy and that we'd be more likely to believe in media accuracy when we believe we need that media information in order to be safe. In all cases, we want to feel that someone is in control.
08:40 Posted in community , neuroscience, psychology, the mind , politics, government and law , pop culture , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
16 July 2008
Notes from Status Anxiety: Conclusion
Final note on Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety (2004). This is the twelfth post on this topic; the first is here.
CONCLUSION
We need status anxiety because "fear of failing and disgracing oneself in the eyes of others is an inevitable consequence of harbouring ambitions, of favouring one set of outcomes over another, and of having regard for individuals besides oneself."
But we can choose the audience from whom we accept judgment, we can recognise that values that seem fixed and immutable actually fluctuate with time, place, the ethos of the age.
"Philosophy, art, politics, religion and bohemia have never sought to do away entirely with the status hierarchy. They have attempted, rather, to institute new kinds of hierarchies based on sets of values unrecognised by, and critical of, those of the majority while maintaining a firm grip on the differences between success and failure, good and bad, shameful and honourable."
[This all falls flat for me somehow.]
09:00 Posted in art and photography , books and reading , community , other people said it , pop culture , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
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
14 July 2008
Solutions: Religion (Notes from Status Anxiety)
Notes from Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety (2004). This is the tenth post on this topic; the first is here.
PART II: Solutions
CHAPTER 4 - RELIGION
Death
Tolstoy's novella The Death of Ivan llyich (1886) is a Christian memento mori. Ivan Ilyich is all about status. When he realises he's going to die, he recognises he's wasted his time on Earth by leading an outwardly respectable but inwardly barren life. He always wanted to appear important and to impress people whom, he sees now, don't care for him at all. Those around him love his status, not his true vulnerable self.
The prospect of death may cause us to do what matters most to us and to pay less attention to the verdicts of others. We see we cannot "afford to defer forever, for the sake of propriety, our underlying commitments to ourselves."
Ruins! They comfort us, reveal our "punishingly high-minded sense of the gravity of what we are doing," our own exaggerated self-importance. Our miseries are tied to the grandiosity of our ambitions.
Community
We all have the same vulnerabilities and the same two driving forces: fear, and a desire for love.
The Christian would say that there is no such thing as a stranger, "only an impression of strangeness born of failure to acknowledge that others share both our needs and our weaknesses."
Christianity attempts to enhance the value we place on community -- through ritual (a transcendent intermediary) and through music (great leveller and social alchemist -- we see that others respond as we do, which forges connection).
Twin Cities
Jesus is the model for Christians' understanding of status. He has two different sides, as ordinary carpenter and as the holiest of men. We can see the difference between earthly status (determined by occupation, income, others' opinions) and spiritual status (related to one's soul and merits in God's eyes).
The City of God, Augustine, 427 AD: All human action can be interpreted from either the Christian or the Roman (earthly) perspective, which are different. Christian status derives from humility, generosity, recognition of one's dependence on God, etc.
Divine Comedia, Dante, 1315: Dante's Hell is home to many who enjoyed high status while they lived.
Christian lore asserts the superiority of spiritual over material success and endows its virtues with "a seductive seriousness and beauty" through music, art, literature, architecture, etc. "Through its command of aesthetic resources, of buildings, paintings and Masses, Christianity created a bulwark against the authority of earthly values and kept its spiritual concerns in the public eye."
Heydey of cathedrals, 1130-1530.
Christianity never abolished the Earthly City or its values, but that we retain any distinction between wealth and virtue is largely due to the impression left on Western consciousness by Christianity.
06:00 Posted in books and reading , community , death , girardian anthropology , other people said it , politics, government and law , pop culture , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
13 July 2008
Solutions: Politics (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 ninth post on this topic; the first is here.
PART II: Solutions
CHAPTER 3 - POLITICS
"Every society holds certain groups of people in high esteem while condemning or ignoring others, whether on the basis of their skills, accent, temperament, gender, physical attributes, ancestry, religion or skin colour. Yet such arbitrary and subjective criteria for success and failure are far from permanent or universal." G It's the job of the status quo to make them seem absolutely universal and permanent.
Rather eccentric timeline: of who and what has been held in high status:
400 BC Sparta: Soldiers: Men, aggressive, vigorously bisexual, not family men, not business men.
Western Europe 476-1096: Saints: followers of Jesus Christ, shunning of material goods, suppression of sexual feelings, extreme modesty.
Western Europe 1096-1500 (after first Crusade): Knights: Wealthy, killed people and animals. Lovers, poets. Prized virgins. Loved money but not from trade, only from land.
England 1750-1890: Gentlemen: Dancing, dabblers, not merchants. Supposed to like families but OK to have mistresses. Cultivation of languid elegance. Hair. Women seen as taller children.
Brasil, 1600-1960 (Cubeo tribe): Men who spoke little, did not dance or play a part in raising children, and were good at killing jaguars. High status - hunters; low status - fishermen. Shameful to even be seen helping wife make a root-based meal.
London, Sydney, New York, LA, 2004: Anyone who can accumulate money, power and renown through their own accomplishments in some sector of the commercial world. Because culture is now seen to be meritocratic, financial achievements are understood to be deserved. The ability to accumulate wealth is proof of creativity, stamina, intelligence. Other virtues, like godliness and humility, don't matter much.
By what principles is status distributed?:
(1) by threatening and bullying
(2) by defending others (strength, patronage, control of resources, etc.). Where safety is in short supply, soldiers and knights are celebrated. Where the livelihood of the majority depends on trade and high-tech, entrepreneurs and scientists are celebrated.
(3) by impressing others with goodness, talent, skill or wisdom (saints, European footballers)
(4) by appealing to conscience or sense of decency of peers - by moral authority.
Ideals are not cast in stone; the process by which they alter is politics.
For us in the western world now, prosperity = worthiness. And poverty = moral deficiency. Money is ethical. This equation of prosperity and worthiness seems "natural" to us but it only came into being as "the way it is" in the mid-1800s.
Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class (1899): "Wealth has become the conventional basis of esteem." Material goods confer honour (hence conspicuous consumption, to give evidence to one and all of one's 'true' worth).
Some have fought the idea of meritocracy, the idea that wealth = virtue, including most notable John Ruskin, and also George Bernard Shaw, Michel de Montaigne.
Modern life also posits a connection between making money and being happy. This connection rests on three assumptions:
(1) that we know what we need to be happy and so we know what careers and projects will help us flourish as humans. Rousseau refutes this (in Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, 1754): We are actually, he says, "dangerously inept at deciphering our own needs. Our souls rarely articulate what they must have in order to be fulfilled, and when they manage to mumble something, their requests are likely to be misfounded or contradictory .... Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied...." G
(2) that all of the occupational possibilities and consumer goods available to us are actually a helpful array that's capable of satisfying our essential needs.
(3) that the more money we have, the more goods and services we can afford, which increases our odds of happiness.
(de Botton writes more about this here: "Americans Were the First People to Worship Work")
Current Events Tie-In: "Will economic growth make Americans happier?" (23 June 2008, Chicago Tribune)
Some posit, in contrast to the money-happiness connection, that those who live in a "natural state" understand themselves much better. (Part of the 'noble savage' idea) E.g., the native Americans, who lived with little yet were reputed to be content. But within only a few decades of the arrival of the first Europeans, what came to matter to the Indians was the amassing of weapons, jewellery and whiskey. This didn't happen spontaneously; the European traders deliberately sought to foster desires in Indians to motivate them to provide animal pelts for the European market.
In 1690, the English naturalist and minister John Banister noted that the Indians of Hudson Bay area had been successfully tempted by traders to want "many things which they had not wanted before." As the volume of trade increased, suicide rates and alcoholism also rose, fracturing communities. Indian leaders called on tribes to renounce their addiction to European luxuries.
Defenders of commercial society argue that no one forces anyone to buy anything. Rousseau emphasised how strongly predisposed humans are to listen to others' suggestions about how to think and what to value. G
Advertisers et al. actually insist that their trades are ineffective because the population is so independent-minded. This is not shown to be true, based on what people once said were luxuries that they quickly came to see as necessities:
Percentage of Americans who say these are necessities:
2nd car in 1970: 20% / 2nd car in 2000: 59%
dishwasher in 1970: 8% / dishwasher in 2000: 44%
A/C in car in 1970: 11% / A/C in car in 2000: 65%
A/C in home in 1970: 22% / A/C in home in 2000: 70%
more than one telephone in 1970: 2% / more than one telephone in 2000: 78%
(Salon article about marketing -- "commercial persuasion industry" -- and consumerism: We Are What We Buy: "'We can talk all we want about being brand-proof ... but our behavior tells a different story.'")
"Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another" and we're not aware of it. G We think achievements and acquisitions will satisfy us but they don't. Not only can we not stop envying, but we envy the wrong things!
John Ruskin excoriated 19th-century Britons for being wealth-obsessed. He said he was, too, but he was obsessed by being wealthy in kindness, curiosity, sensitivity, humility, godliness, and intelligence -- which in the aggregate he called "life."
In his conception, the wealthiest Britons would not be automatically merchants or landowners but rather those who felt the keenest wonder gazing at the stars or who were best able to alleviate the suffering of others. (in Unto This Last)
Ideology and Political Change
Lots of ideas have been seen as so immutable as to be 'natural', e.g.,:
- men's rule over women (Earl Percy, 1873)
- European people are better than Africans (Lord Cromer, 1911)
- women don't have sexual feeling (Sir William Acton, 1857)
- Africans are naturally subordinate to whites (Alexander Stephens, 1861)
Dominant beliefs are at great pains to suggest that they are no more alterable than the orbits of the sun. They are ideological -- "a statement that subtly promotes a bias while pretending to be perfectly neutral." The ruling ideas of every age are those of the ruling class; but they can't seem to rule too forcefully. The ideas have to seem natural and unforced, just "the way it is."
Ideology, like a colourless, odorless gas, is pervasive and yet unnoticed as what it is. It makes light of its perhaps unjust or illogical take on the world and meekly implies that it's only presenting age-old truths.
"When institutions and ideas are held to be 'natural,' responsibility for whatever suffering they cause must necessarily either belong to no specific agent or else to the injured parties themselves."
Virginia Woolf, when not allowed into a college library in England on the basis of being female, became sceptical of the feminine role model she grew up with, the image of a woman who was always charming and utterly unselfish. The model woman sacrificed herself daily. She took the worst piece of meat, the most uncomfortable seat, etc. "She was so constituted that she would never have a mind or wish of her own, but prefer to sympathise always with the minds and wishes of others."
"The enthusiasm for materialism, entrepreneurship and meritocracy that saturates the newspapers and television schedules of our own day reflects nothing more complex than the interests of those in charge of the system by which the majority earn their living."
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12 July 2008
Solutions: Art (Notes from Status Anxiety)
Notes from Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety (2004). This is the eighth post on this topic; the first is here.
PART II: Solutions
CHAPTER 2 - ART
Literature
The history of art is filled with challenges to the status quo.
Mansfield Park, Jane Austen (1814): The rich and well-mannered are not ipso facto good, and the poor and unschooled are not necessarily bad.
"Almost every great novel of the 19th and 20th centuries stages an assault on, or at the very least harbours scepticism regarding, the accepted social hierarchy, and each offers some sort of redefinition of precedence according to moral worth rather than financial assets or bloodlines."
Examples: Balzac - Le Père Goriot (1834), Hardy - Jude the Obscure (1895), G. Eliot - Middlemarch (1872), Fielding - Joseph Andrews (1742), Thackeray - Vanity Fair (1848), Dickens - Bleak House (1853), Wilkie Collins - The Woman in White (1860), A. Trollope - The Way We Live Now (1875), Zadie Smith - White Teeth (2000).
Painting
(You have to see the book for this, as he reproduces "paintings of the commonplace" -- which elevate the status of the ordinary -- and discusses them)
Tragedy
"Fear of the material consequences of failure is thus compounded by fear of the unsympathetic attitude of the world towards those who have failed, exemplified by its haunting proclivity to refer to them as 'losers' - a word callously signifying both that they have lost and that they have, at the same time, forfeited any right to sympathy for losing."
Tragedy helps to re-inject empathy into the equation by showing how like everyone else the tragic figure is. G
Examples: Oedipus, Antigone, Lear, Othello, Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Hedda Gabler, Tess, et al.
Tragedy doesn't absolve its subjects of responsibility but does offer and elicit a level of sympathy.
At the center of tragedy is an ordinary human being with a tragic flaw who makes an error in judgment from which flows a terrible reversal of fortune. Tragic flaws are defects common to humans, such as excessive pride, anger, impulsiveness, etc. Errors in judgment occur not from evil motives but from lapses in judgment, slips.
Tragedy reflects:
(1) how apparently small missteps can result in grave consequences
(2) the blindness we suffer with regard to the effects of our actions
(3) a fatuous tendency to presume that we are in conscious command of our destiny
(4) the sped and finality with which all that we cherish can be lost
(5) the mysterious forces against which our powers are pitted
Tragedy apportions blame without denying sympathy. We're appalled yet compassionate as we see the universality of the situation. This form of art seeks to plumb the origins of failure.
Comedy
More specifically, satire.
"Jokes are an enormously effective means of anchoring a criticism. At base, they are another way of complaining: about arrogance, cruelty or pomposity, about departures from virtue or good sense."
"History reveals no shortage of jokes intended to amend the vices of high-status groups and shake the mighty out of their pretensions or dishonesty." [q.v. George Carlin]
Comedy also can be used to make sense of and mitigate status anxiety: "Comedy reassures us that there are others in the world no less envious or socially fragile than ourselves.
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11 July 2008
Not Many Dead
A magazine I read monthly has a reader write-in column titled "Not Many Dead: Important Stories You May Have Missed." The column is made up of headlines or snippets of 'news' stories that are hardly news.
Examples from the magazine include:
"An overheating lightbulb triggered a fire alarm in the City Art Gallery in York yesterday afternoon. Fire crews were not needed."
"Top jockey Frankie Dettori told the Daily Mirror that he had never had sex in a stable."
"Prince Andrew has worn the same tweed jacket twice in five years."
I'd imagine many of us come across these sorts of items ourselves with jarring regularity, these 'news' stories, or tidbits embedded in news stories, that we read and think "wtf?" or "slow news day, eh?" I'd hate to keep the non-news I stumble across to myself, so I'll share it here from time to time; feel free to contribute others.
"John Mayer admitted on Tuesday night to 'hooking up' with a fan in the past." [10 July]
"Thousands of canceled flights may vex travelers: Fliers should be ready to be flexible as airlines cut capacity and schedules" [10 July]
"Swastika ('卐') tops Google's search list, then disappears" [10 July]
"An initial examination of the plane that had maintenance problems while carrying Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama found no evidence of missing parts or tampering, federal investigators said Thursday." [10 July].
"An elderly Indonesian woman famed nationwide for supernatural skills in lengthening penises has died, reports said Thursday." [10 July]
and
Court: Wisconsin Law Bans Sex With the Dead, which is unfortunately not as superfluous at it sounds ... [Reported today]
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10 July 2008
Who are the Victims?
Another idea I have for an occasional series: News stories in which some group is labelled 'the victim' of a group, abstraction, or individual. I think it's educational and interesting to explore who or what are identified as victims and perpetrators in the media.
Recently,
American people are the victims: "The whiners are the leaders. Hell, the American people are victims. ..." [Said by political advisor and former Congressman Phil Gramm, reported today]
Palestinians are the victims of Jewish persecutors: "Touring the somber [Holocaust] museum, it occurred to [Israeli-Arab lawyer] Mahameed that 'we Palestinians are the victims of the terrible things that were inflicted on the Jews by the Holocaust.' [8 July; the article is actually eye-opening, moving, IMO]
Bass and salmon are the victims of mismanagement: "Striped bass are the victims of gross state and federal mismanagement of Central Valley rivers and the Delta, as are collapsing Sacramento River chinook salmon populations." [8 July]
Tuna are the victims of their own success: "Chronically overfished, Mediterranean tuna are the victims of their success with fish lovers, especially with the passion for sushi." [3 July]
Sociopathic politicians, celebrities and sports figures are the victims: "For all the public examples of bad behavior set by politicians, celebrities and sports figures, many young people see these individuals for exactly what they are: spoiled, overrated sociopaths who are the victims of an overly indulgent, disengaged society in search of civilization." [7 July]
Pakistani college women are the victims of cell phone use: "Mostly intermediate students are the victims of mobile mania" [8 July]
San Diego stores are the victims of shopping cart theft and displacement: "The stores are the victims, Councilman Jack Feller said, and they aren't the ones who should be punished." [12 June]
and finally, the word "victim" isn't used but it's sure implied in this odd story [7 July]:
"A special meeting about Dallas County traffic tickets turned tense and bizarre this afternoon.
"County commissioners were discussing problems with the central collections office that is used to process traffic ticket payments and handle other paperwork normally done by the JP Courts.
"Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield, who is white, said it seemed that central collections 'has become a black hole' because paperwork reportedly has become lost in the office.
"Commissioner John Wiley Price, who is black, interrupted him with a loud 'Excuse me!' He then corrected his colleague, saying the office has become a 'white hole.'"That prompted Judge Thomas Jones, who is black, to demand an apology from Mayfield for his racially insensitive analogy."
wtf?
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Causes: Dependence (Notes from Status Anxiety)
Notes from Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety (2004). This is the sixth post on this topic; the first is here.
CHAPTER 5 - DEPENDENCE
Status, historically, was tied to what one was at birth, not what one achieved in one's lifetime. [Can you imagine that this is a new concept? It seems so wholly part of what one seems to know.] Modern societies try to reverse this, to make rank dependent only on achievement -- usually, financial achievement.
The most evident trait of the struggle to achieve status now is uncertainty.
de Button lists five unpredictable elements:
(1) talent - it could desert us or we could find we never really had it
(2) luck - no longer as acceptable to point to as a factor, no moody gods to blame these days. The world is "enamored of rational control."
(3) dependence on an employer (q.v., Machiavelli, Guicciardini, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, et al.)
(4) dependence on an employer's profitability
(5) dependence on the global economy
Workers' status is never guaranteed, is always dependent on their own performance and on factors that are outside of their control.
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09 July 2008
Causes: Snobbery (Notes from Status Anxiety)
Notes from Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety (2004). This is the fifth post on this topic; the first is here.
CHAPTER 4 - SNOBBERY
Snobs give highly conditional attention. They believe there is a flawless equation between social rank and human worth.
When with a snob, we sense how little of who we are, apart from our status, will be able to govern their behaviour towards us.
As babies (if we're lucky), we're loved and looked after for who we are, presumably [I would argue with this.]. As we mature, affection from others depends on achievement, on our being polite, successful, etc.
Snobs combine a weak capacity for independent judgment with a strong appetite for the views of influential people.
(I'm sure de Botton said much more than this, but this is all I wrote down!)
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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.'"
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08 July 2008
Shopping Camp at the Mall - Patriotic!
In news related to status anxiety, ruling class ideology, materialism, and creating desires: Marketplace reporter Benjamin Barber lauds shopping camp -- held at a mall, at which girls ages 6-12 visit stores to learn how to accessorize outfits -- as patriotic. I'm pretty sure he's being sarcastic .... More here. And Jezebel readers have something to say about it, too.
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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
How Revolutions Feel
I'm reading Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present (2000). It's very readable for an 800-page book, though a bit heavy on the lap when sitting on the deck in the sun, and because Barzun's style is so conversational, it's highly quotable.
Here, very early on, is what Barzun says about revolutions, of which he posits there were four from 1500-2000: the 16th-century religious revolution; the 17th-century monarchical revolution; the "liberal, individualist 'French'" revolution straddling the 18th and 19th centuries; and the 20th-century 'Russian' revolution, "social and collectivist." He defines a revolution as "the violent transfer of power and property in the name of an idea."
Barzun takes two pages to describe the movement of a revolution from "ripple" to "tidal wave" -- something is done or said that "fits a half-conscious mood or caps a sitatuation," it's given airplay, news spreads, there's rumour, there are exaggerations and lies and misunderstandings, some other event related to the issue occurs and arouses emotions and passions, people feels their lives are upset, "manners are flouted" and insults become commonplace, buildings are defaced and looted, people read and talk about the issues with "delight or outrage," people takes sides and identify turncoats, people with a grudge take one side or the other, youths with high spirits catch the wave, leaders try to determ