On quora.com, I got into a discussion about life lessons -- that stuff we all wish someone had told us when we were younger. One of my contributions was the claim that play is vital. This is so important to me, that I often ask friends (or want to ask them), "When was the last time you played in the mud?"
Playing in the mud is somewhat a metaphor. If you don't like getting muddy, that's no big deal. But when was the last time you had a snowball fight or danced in your underwear or loudly sang a song in which all they lyrics were made-up nonsense words?
As I'm defining here, play isn't Scrabble. I love Scrabble, but it's not the kind of play I'm talking about, because it's too rule-based. Same with tennis and most other games and sports. Going-out-drinking with friends also doesn't count. You're cheating if you're using alcohol, pot or some other drug to make you playful. I'm not being a "just say no" guy here. My objection to drugs (as play facilitators) is that they make too much of a separation between your normal state-of-mind and your drugged state-of-mind. At best, the play you do when you're playful insinuates itself into your serious work life. It not very useful if it's a dimly-remembered escapade you can't possibly recapture without more drugs.
I claimed that "letting go" is vital for mental health, and I stand by that. But one quora member disagreed and said that he say no point to play -- that it served no purpose for adults. Below, I've pasted my response. You can read the entire discussion here:
http://www.quora.com/Life-Lessons/What-are-important-things-and-advice-to-know-that-people-generally-arent-told-about#comment313834
---
We are in agreement that play is not productive. In fact, I would say that if it IS productive (other than by accident), it doesn't count as play.
You don't see the purpose of play because there is no purpose, if "purpose" means something tangible you can point to before you start playing and say, "the reason I'm playing is to get this specific task achieved."
But let's drop "mental health" for a moment and talk about why children play -- why they evolved to play. I am, of course, speculating here, because we can never know the answer to that for sure, but I don't think anything I'm about to say veers far from Science or conventional wisdom:
Children have evolved to play because, by doing so, they make discoveries. How does a child learn about gravity? By dropping stuff.
Adults sometimes do something similar. We call it "brainstorming."
Now, there are many types of exploring/experimentation, and they ALL have great values:
1. Formulaic/algorithmic exploring is useful when you sense that a current problem resembles a previous one. "I'll try applying the X formula to it and see what happens."
2. Brainstorming is useful when you're stuck (you don't know what formula to apply) or are worried that you're thinking too "inside the box." You're essentially trying to surprise yourself with novel possibilities, and you're doing this by letting your mind free-associate.
Brainstorming is great, but it has a limitation: it is generally confined by pretty rigid, goal-based parameters. In other words, you're brainstorming TO figure out the name for a new product or TO figure out what speakers to invite to a conference.
Via this process, you'll likely get a lot done, but you'll never accidentally stumble across an idea to revolutionize the fashion industry or a sudden understanding of what's wrong with your dog.
I am NOT saying all thinking should be totally free. If someone else said that, I'd be posting here saying, "No! You need to ALSO do formulaic thinking and brainstorming!" In my view, the healthiest and MOST PRODUCTIVE approach is formulaic thinking, brainstorming AND
3. Play.
It doesn't work to consciously go beyond brainstorming. You can't say, "I'm going to brainstorm ideas of who to invite to the conference but also keep my mind open to all sorts of other potentially useful ideas that have nothing to do with the conference at all." By setting the parameters (speaker/conference), you are most likely binding your thinking to staying within those parameters.
You are GUARANTEEING that certain thoughts will never cross your mind. PLEASE NOTE THAT I'M NOT SAYING THAT'S ALWAYS A BAD THING. I am a big fan for structure -- but I'm also a big fan of partly-structured activities. And I'm ALSO a big fan of activities with no structure at all. Each type of activity has different kinds of payoffs, and a well-rounded person engages in all-of-the-above.
(I've had this same debate, but in reverse, with people I know who play ALL the time. To me, what they're doing is unhealthy. They are missing out on a great number of useful life strategies.)
By "letting go," which means explicitly NOT having a goal, you can free your mind in away that formulas and brainstorming never can.
You will wind up wasting a lot of time. But you also waste time when you apply formulas that wind up not working. And you waste time when you brainstorm and throw away 90% of the ideas you come up with. (I don't actually think of this as wasting time. It's pruning. It's the necessary trial-and-error you have to go through in order to grow).
I HATE the phrase "kids work is play," because I hate the need some people have to define everything useful as "work," but I understand -- or think I understand -- what the phrase means. It means what I wrote about, above. It means children need to play in order to make certain kinds of discoveries they can't make any other way -- discoveries that will help them out in life.
And my question is, if this helps kids, why wouldn't it help adults? Adults DO have avenues for learning that aren't open to kids. We can read and use power tools. But we can't learn EVERYTHING that way.
So if play is so useful, why don't adults play more often? Because we've been trained not to do it! ("It's childish!") If it's useful, why do people train us out of it? Because there's no metric for it. Schools and most jobs have no ability to deal with unquantifiable activities. If we can't grade it, we don't want to see it.
That's 100% about what's easy and practical for schools and offices. It has nothing to do with what's actually useful or healthy for individuals or society.
If we had more play, we'd have more Einsteins, Mozarts and Edisons. Ask ANY really creative person how important play is in his work. He'll tell you it's vital. I suspect that though natural talent is very real, a LOT of people would surprise us if they felt comfortable playing more often. (Remember, going out and drinking after work is not what I'm calling "play.")
I am certainly NOT an Einstein, but I AM someone who continually comes up with really useful and novel solutions to problems, and people continually ask me "how did you think of that." Not always, but surprising often, the answer is, "by not trying." Lots of answers "come to me in the bath." But only if I PLAY in the bath -- not if I strain to try to come up with the answers! Often, people much smarted than me don't come up with the answers, because they refuse to free their minds.
More important: if we had more play in the world, we'd have more happiness (even if we didn't wind up with more Einsteins). I have "proved" this to myself anecdotally, by observing my playful friends vs my more "adult" ones. There is, of course, a chicken-egg problem here: are my playful friends happier because they play or playful because they are happy? Either way, the correlation is pretty clear to me.
Tuesday, April 05, 2011
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
conversations are hard
In my experience, the conversations that work best are not logically causal. They do not entail structures in which person A builds on (or questions) something person A said. Rather, they involve free-associating around a fuzzy, shared idea:
A: Books like "The Blah Effect" don't work well, because the author is trying to mix fiction and non-fiction in a clunky way that serves neither genre.
B: Interesting comment! It reminds me of an essay I once read about experiments in non-fiction. Here's a link...
A: Cool! And you might be interest in....
Those sorts of conversations can be great fun (for many people), and everyone can learn from them -- AND they work without anyone defining terms -- but they have serious limitations. The conversations I'm most interested are more like this:
A: Books like "The Blah Effect" don't work well, because the author is trying to mix fiction and non-fiction in a clunky way that serves neither genre.
B: I disagree. Fiction works best when it has a dose of non-fiction it it, because...
Assuming A and B aren't just shooting-the-shit (assuming they really want to attempt to come to some sort of new understanding about their topic), they already have a problem. What do they mean by "fiction" and "non-fiction"? What does A mean by it and does B mean something different or the same thing?
If this is going to turn into a free-association discussion, pinning down the definitions doesn't matter, but it matters deeply if it's going to be a "causal" discussion. And, if it is, there's really no point in A and B continuing if they can't agree on definitions or at least understand each-other's definitions.
What tends to happen, IF A clarifies, is that we get into this sort of mess:
A: What I mean by "fiction" is a story containing a traditional plot and characters. It can be based on real-life events or people, but it will always bow to the needs of traditional narrative if there's a conflict between that and "what actually happened."
B: That's not fiction! That doesn't include experimental novels that don't have plots.
Now, A wants to discuss fiction as HE defined it, but B won't accept the label "fiction" being attached to A's definition. In my experience, though I stupidly attempt it again and again, this doesn't work:
A: Okay, I accept that my definition of fiction doesn't work for all ways the word is commonly used. But just for this discussion, when I say "fiction," can we take it to mean stories with traditional narratives. If we use a broader definition, it's going to be really hard to talk about this.
B: No, because "fiction" doesn't mean what you're saying it means!
B's thinking here is deeply alien to me. If someone wants to say, "For the duration of this conversation, can we take the word 'dog' to mean 'cat'?", I have no problem. Probably, this is because I'm a programmer, so I have years of experience detaching labels from what they point to. (Or maybe this is a chicken-egg things. Maybe I became a programmer because I have the skill of detaching labels from what they point to.)
(As it happens, I came across an interesting quote today. This will only resonate with you if you've done some programming. Skip past it if you haven't:
"Once upon a time, I used to be a TA (Teaching Assistant) for a web development class at University. When I met with my students in the computer lab, I quickly found that there were two kinds of computer science students: those that could understand the concept of a 'variable' and those that could not. No matter how I tried to explain variables, it seemed that some students simply could not wrap their minds around it.
"I always felt that their failure of understanding was my failure as a teacher. As such, I was tremendously excited when I read Haverbeke's explanation of variables in programming (pg 16):
"'You should imagine variables as tentacles, rather than boxes. They do not contain values; they grasp them - two variables can refer to the same value. Only the values that the program still has a hold on can be accessed by it. When you need to remember something, you grow a tentacle to hold on to it, or you reattach one of your existing tentacles to a new value.'"
http://www.bennadel.com/blog/2152-Eloquent-Javascript-A-Modern-Introduction-To-Programming-By-Marijn-Haverbeke.htm)
I don't really even get what's going on in B's head. It's like he thinks that if he temporarily agrees to use the word "fiction" in A's way, he has somehow changed something in the real world -- like he'll never be able to go back to using his own definition. Or maybe he thinks labels are somehow attached to the concepts they point to: you can't peel a tattoo off a person's arm without damaging his arm...
But whether I get it or not, it's a fact: it's a fact that there are many Bs out there, and they just can't accept temporary definitions. And, as many people have noted, the problem gets worse with analogies:
A: my marriage is "Romeo and Juliet"! My wife and I love each other, but other people keep creating problems that keep us apart.
B: what? You and your wife aren't ANYTHING like Romeo and Juliet! They were teenagers who lived in Italy. You're middle-aged people who live in New York!
(Or, worse...
B: you're comparing your REAL marriage to a relationship between fictional characters?!?)
What the analogy problem and the temporary-definition problem have in common is mapping. Many people seem deeply suspicious of mapping one thing onto another -- or they're just bad at doing it.
I have mostly just given up on analogies, though it's hard for me to always remember to give them up, because they work so well for me. They are natural to me. And I've learned so much from other-people's analogies.
When it comes to definitions, I've tried getting around the problem by using new terms:
B: That's not fiction! That doesn't include experimental novels that don't have plots
A: You're right. Okay, well I'm going to talk about something I call ... "narratives." Forget "fiction." We don't agree on what that is. Do you have any strong association with the word "narratives"?
B: Not really ... something about plots.
A: Okay. Great. So I'm saying -- for this conversation, anyway -- that a "narrative" is a traditional, plot-based story...
I've tried this before, and to be honest, have found it to be about as successful as anything else -- which is to say "not very."
You get into a problem which is that if you use a pre-existing word, the original issue happens all over again, this time with the new word:
B: No! That's not what narrative means!
And if you use a made-up word, people's eyes glaze over:
A: Fine. I'm going to make up a word: "Pleg." In this discussion, a "pleg" is a story with a traditional, plot-based narrative.
B: PLEG? That's absurd. There's no such word.
There are a couple of throw-your-hands-up-into-the-air responses here, and I hate both of them. One is to say, "Well, B is just an idiot." I disagree with this, though I have to admit, I sometimes feel like it's true when I let my frustration get the better of me. B may be bad at traditional, syllogistic, logical thinking, but there are many, many other types of thinking.
The other response is, "Well, we just can't have this kind of conversation. We really should stick to the free-association ones, since those are what work best." Maybe that is true, but I "can't go there." I don't really enjoy those conversations all that much, I suck at them, and I LOVE "causal" conversations. I live for them! I keep thinking there has to be a a way to make them work -- or at least to improve them. But I haven't figured out how yet.
A: Books like "The Blah Effect" don't work well, because the author is trying to mix fiction and non-fiction in a clunky way that serves neither genre.
B: Interesting comment! It reminds me of an essay I once read about experiments in non-fiction. Here's a link...
A: Cool! And you might be interest in....
Those sorts of conversations can be great fun (for many people), and everyone can learn from them -- AND they work without anyone defining terms -- but they have serious limitations. The conversations I'm most interested are more like this:
A: Books like "The Blah Effect" don't work well, because the author is trying to mix fiction and non-fiction in a clunky way that serves neither genre.
B: I disagree. Fiction works best when it has a dose of non-fiction it it, because...
Assuming A and B aren't just shooting-the-shit (assuming they really want to attempt to come to some sort of new understanding about their topic), they already have a problem. What do they mean by "fiction" and "non-fiction"? What does A mean by it and does B mean something different or the same thing?
If this is going to turn into a free-association discussion, pinning down the definitions doesn't matter, but it matters deeply if it's going to be a "causal" discussion. And, if it is, there's really no point in A and B continuing if they can't agree on definitions or at least understand each-other's definitions.
What tends to happen, IF A clarifies, is that we get into this sort of mess:
A: What I mean by "fiction" is a story containing a traditional plot and characters. It can be based on real-life events or people, but it will always bow to the needs of traditional narrative if there's a conflict between that and "what actually happened."
B: That's not fiction! That doesn't include experimental novels that don't have plots.
Now, A wants to discuss fiction as HE defined it, but B won't accept the label "fiction" being attached to A's definition. In my experience, though I stupidly attempt it again and again, this doesn't work:
A: Okay, I accept that my definition of fiction doesn't work for all ways the word is commonly used. But just for this discussion, when I say "fiction," can we take it to mean stories with traditional narratives. If we use a broader definition, it's going to be really hard to talk about this.
B: No, because "fiction" doesn't mean what you're saying it means!
B's thinking here is deeply alien to me. If someone wants to say, "For the duration of this conversation, can we take the word 'dog' to mean 'cat'?", I have no problem. Probably, this is because I'm a programmer, so I have years of experience detaching labels from what they point to. (Or maybe this is a chicken-egg things. Maybe I became a programmer because I have the skill of detaching labels from what they point to.)
(As it happens, I came across an interesting quote today. This will only resonate with you if you've done some programming. Skip past it if you haven't:
"Once upon a time, I used to be a TA (Teaching Assistant) for a web development class at University. When I met with my students in the computer lab, I quickly found that there were two kinds of computer science students: those that could understand the concept of a 'variable' and those that could not. No matter how I tried to explain variables, it seemed that some students simply could not wrap their minds around it.
"I always felt that their failure of understanding was my failure as a teacher. As such, I was tremendously excited when I read Haverbeke's explanation of variables in programming (pg 16):
"'You should imagine variables as tentacles, rather than boxes. They do not contain values; they grasp them - two variables can refer to the same value. Only the values that the program still has a hold on can be accessed by it. When you need to remember something, you grow a tentacle to hold on to it, or you reattach one of your existing tentacles to a new value.'"
http://www.bennadel.com/blog/2152-Eloquent-Javascript-A-Modern-Introduction-To-Programming-By-Marijn-Haverbeke.htm)
I don't really even get what's going on in B's head. It's like he thinks that if he temporarily agrees to use the word "fiction" in A's way, he has somehow changed something in the real world -- like he'll never be able to go back to using his own definition. Or maybe he thinks labels are somehow attached to the concepts they point to: you can't peel a tattoo off a person's arm without damaging his arm...
But whether I get it or not, it's a fact: it's a fact that there are many Bs out there, and they just can't accept temporary definitions. And, as many people have noted, the problem gets worse with analogies:
A: my marriage is "Romeo and Juliet"! My wife and I love each other, but other people keep creating problems that keep us apart.
B: what? You and your wife aren't ANYTHING like Romeo and Juliet! They were teenagers who lived in Italy. You're middle-aged people who live in New York!
(Or, worse...
B: you're comparing your REAL marriage to a relationship between fictional characters?!?)
What the analogy problem and the temporary-definition problem have in common is mapping. Many people seem deeply suspicious of mapping one thing onto another -- or they're just bad at doing it.
I have mostly just given up on analogies, though it's hard for me to always remember to give them up, because they work so well for me. They are natural to me. And I've learned so much from other-people's analogies.
When it comes to definitions, I've tried getting around the problem by using new terms:
B: That's not fiction! That doesn't include experimental novels that don't have plots
A: You're right. Okay, well I'm going to talk about something I call ... "narratives." Forget "fiction." We don't agree on what that is. Do you have any strong association with the word "narratives"?
B: Not really ... something about plots.
A: Okay. Great. So I'm saying -- for this conversation, anyway -- that a "narrative" is a traditional, plot-based story...
I've tried this before, and to be honest, have found it to be about as successful as anything else -- which is to say "not very."
You get into a problem which is that if you use a pre-existing word, the original issue happens all over again, this time with the new word:
B: No! That's not what narrative means!
And if you use a made-up word, people's eyes glaze over:
A: Fine. I'm going to make up a word: "Pleg." In this discussion, a "pleg" is a story with a traditional, plot-based narrative.
B: PLEG? That's absurd. There's no such word.
There are a couple of throw-your-hands-up-into-the-air responses here, and I hate both of them. One is to say, "Well, B is just an idiot." I disagree with this, though I have to admit, I sometimes feel like it's true when I let my frustration get the better of me. B may be bad at traditional, syllogistic, logical thinking, but there are many, many other types of thinking.
The other response is, "Well, we just can't have this kind of conversation. We really should stick to the free-association ones, since those are what work best." Maybe that is true, but I "can't go there." I don't really enjoy those conversations all that much, I suck at them, and I LOVE "causal" conversations. I live for them! I keep thinking there has to be a a way to make them work -- or at least to improve them. But I haven't figured out how yet.
Saturday, March 05, 2011
A "Psychology Today" article compared an Abstract Expressionist painting to one made by a chimpanzee. Over at Metafilter, debate raged.
One commenter, known as Astro Zombie, said "With the exception of minimialism, which deliberately sought to make art that had no subtext or metaphoric meaning, but just was whatever it was ... most contemporary art doesn't exist in a vacuum, where you can just look at a piece on a wall and intuit what is mean or what is being shown. Contemporary art demands engagement from the viewer. ... And it's usually not hard to get that stuff -- most artists provide statements, and most galleries will discuss the art with you. But if you refuse to do any of that stuff, you're on your own. The art isn't for you"
I disagree.
I am an art-lover with a very different relationship with art from Astro Zombie's. Which doesn't at all mean that I think he's wrong. I don't believe a relationship-with-art can be right or wrong. AZ's is clearly pleasing to him -- as mine is to me.
Over the last 35 years, I have tried relating to art in a variety of ways: I've tried learning about the artist's intentions; I've tried learning about history and context; I've tried learning about works as an utterances in a big conversation (e.g. how does a particular work relate to its movement or respond to previous movements?)
What I've found is that, for me, while art can sometimes spark interesting ideas, it doesn't seem to be a very good medium for doing that (for me). If I want to think about intent or context (or theme), I can do that better with, say, history or philosophy books.
For me, art is best at sparking immediate sensation. It is sensual, and I respond to it most profoundly in a hedonistic way. (By "immediate," I don't mean I glace at a painting, feel something, and then walk away after two seconds. I might stand and look at a painting for hours. Still, what I respond to the most -- during however long I look at it -- is how it tickles my "lizard brain.")
I don't see much difference been my relationship with art and my relationship with and food or pornography. And I don't want more from it, because I can't think of more profound sorts of experiences than those I get when I'm having an orgasm or biting into a really good pie. (Well, there IS one feeling that competes with those -- that can, like fucking, eating or fleeing-from-danger -- take over my whole mind and body: that feeling of enlightenment I get when I'm reading a really good history, philosophy, mathematics or science book, but art never seems to be able to exicte that part of me as profoundly as non-fiction does. On the other hand, I've never been filled with lust or terror while reading Steven Jay Gould.)
I love both figurative and abstract art. Abstracts affect me a lot like music does. I respond to the colors and shapes -- often passionately. It always puzzles me when other people claim they don't like abstract art, because some of those same people DO like abstract patterns on clothing or wallpaper. Some of those same people will say "I don't get abstract art" and then expound on the beauty of the stripes on a tiger. (Presumably they are not trying to "get" the tiger's stripes.)
I think, often, people's disdain for abstract art comes from over-schooling. School taught them that when they look at a painting, they should be trying to figure out what it MEANS. It taught them that paintings contain some sort of secret message or intent. And they look at, say, a Pollack painting, can't figure out the secret, and suspect the artist is bullshitting them. Which pisses them off. To them, abstract art is like trying to solve a Rubic's Cube is for me. I can't do it. It's frustrating. And if I hadn't seen other people do it, I might suspect that Rubic was hoaxing everyone -- wasting their time with a puzzle that has no solution.
What some people are not doing is just letting the colors, lines and shapes flood into them. These same people could probably have a fantastic time staring out at the sea. They wouldn't try to figure out the MEANING of the sea. They'd be free to just respond to its vastness and its explosion of color.
What's interesting to me is that this (learned in school) habit of intellectualizing art ruins the experience for some people (at least when they're looking at certain kinds of art) and makes the experience more profound for others, for people like Astro Zombie. (Though I'm not implying that AZ doesn't also love art for its sensual effects.)
I disagree with him that "most contemporary art doesn't exist in a vacuum, where you can just look at a piece on a wall and intuit what is meant or what is being shown." Well, maybe I do agree with him, but I don't care what "is meant." What I can say is that I've been profoundly, profoundly, profoundly affected by a lot of contemporary art, without giving a second though to "what is meant." So the only thing I disagree with AZ about his his absolutism. I respect his relationship wit contemporary art, but it isn't the only possible relationship that can work. (Though maybe it IS the only possible one for someone who has been through school and who took the lessons of school to heart. Maybe someone like that can't STOP looking for meaning. So if he's going to ever like contemporary art, it's going to have to be via its meaning. To me, this is a bit sad. It means that person has lost something valuable he had a child. Most children love art without spending a second thinking about context or meaning.)
I have purposefully avoided learning much about the life and intent of artists like Pollack and Kandinsky, and yet I ADORE their work. I can't tell you how much their paintings mean to me. They have enriched my life beyond measure. If this is odd to you -- that I love Pollack's work without knowing anything about Pollack -- think of how people often respond to, say, a Beatles song or a Beethoven symphony, even if they're completely unschooled in music theory -- even if they're only five and know nothing about the history of the Beatles.
People often tell me that while I appreciate the paintings now, I'll appreciate them even more if I learn about the artist's history and intent. I disagree. First of all, I don't care about "appreciating" art. I don't even know what that means. It sounds boring. I want to be RAPED by art. I want to EAT art. I want art to stab me in the eye.
I agree that it's likely my relationship with Pollack's work will be CHANGED if I learn about his intent. Presumably those ideas will be stored in my brain alongside the sensual data, and one will affect the other IN SOME WAY. Maybe my experienced will be enriched; maybe it will be cheapened. I think most people have experienced both effects. Many people like some art more after learning stuff about the artist. Many people also like some art less after, say, learning that the artist was a Nazi sympathizer -- or a chimpanzee.
As you might expect with someone who responds to art sensually and prizes that response above all others, I really don't give a shit whether a work "could have been painted by a five-year-old" or was painted by a chimpanzee. Whatever. If it affects me, it affects me. So thanks, chimp! Thanks, five-year-old! Thanks, Jackson Pollack! In fact, thanks universe (for making oceans and sunsets)! It's all good!
I also don't really care that much about what I think of as the circus-feat aspect of art: how difficult or easy it is to make. I admit, it can be kind of fun to think about: when someone takes ten years to paint a gigantic mural, I DO enjoy thinking about their skill and whether or not I could do what they did. But, in the end, I respond to their work or I don't.
And that event -- the event of making the art -- is over. It's not like Michelangelo is repainting the Sistine Chapel over and over again. As it exists NOW, it is the same work whether he labored over it for years or whether space aliens came to Earth, fired an "art blaster" at the ceiling, and created the work in ten seconds. I'm not saying it's wrong to enjoy thinking about skill and craftsmanship. Whatever floats your boat! I'm saying that there's another sort of connoisseurship -- one that is more childlike: you look; you respond.
This "naive" approach IS malleable. I didn't use to like minimalist music and watercolors. Now I love both. But not because I learned anything about intent, theme or context. My new-found love came through repeated exposure to those sorts of works. I gradually learned their inner language. And, as I did, my heart started beating faster when I looked and listened to them.
One commenter, known as Astro Zombie, said "With the exception of minimialism, which deliberately sought to make art that had no subtext or metaphoric meaning, but just was whatever it was ... most contemporary art doesn't exist in a vacuum, where you can just look at a piece on a wall and intuit what is mean or what is being shown. Contemporary art demands engagement from the viewer. ... And it's usually not hard to get that stuff -- most artists provide statements, and most galleries will discuss the art with you. But if you refuse to do any of that stuff, you're on your own. The art isn't for you"
I disagree.
I am an art-lover with a very different relationship with art from Astro Zombie's. Which doesn't at all mean that I think he's wrong. I don't believe a relationship-with-art can be right or wrong. AZ's is clearly pleasing to him -- as mine is to me.
Over the last 35 years, I have tried relating to art in a variety of ways: I've tried learning about the artist's intentions; I've tried learning about history and context; I've tried learning about works as an utterances in a big conversation (e.g. how does a particular work relate to its movement or respond to previous movements?)
What I've found is that, for me, while art can sometimes spark interesting ideas, it doesn't seem to be a very good medium for doing that (for me). If I want to think about intent or context (or theme), I can do that better with, say, history or philosophy books.
For me, art is best at sparking immediate sensation. It is sensual, and I respond to it most profoundly in a hedonistic way. (By "immediate," I don't mean I glace at a painting, feel something, and then walk away after two seconds. I might stand and look at a painting for hours. Still, what I respond to the most -- during however long I look at it -- is how it tickles my "lizard brain.")
I don't see much difference been my relationship with art and my relationship with and food or pornography. And I don't want more from it, because I can't think of more profound sorts of experiences than those I get when I'm having an orgasm or biting into a really good pie. (Well, there IS one feeling that competes with those -- that can, like fucking, eating or fleeing-from-danger -- take over my whole mind and body: that feeling of enlightenment I get when I'm reading a really good history, philosophy, mathematics or science book, but art never seems to be able to exicte that part of me as profoundly as non-fiction does. On the other hand, I've never been filled with lust or terror while reading Steven Jay Gould.)
I love both figurative and abstract art. Abstracts affect me a lot like music does. I respond to the colors and shapes -- often passionately. It always puzzles me when other people claim they don't like abstract art, because some of those same people DO like abstract patterns on clothing or wallpaper. Some of those same people will say "I don't get abstract art" and then expound on the beauty of the stripes on a tiger. (Presumably they are not trying to "get" the tiger's stripes.)
I think, often, people's disdain for abstract art comes from over-schooling. School taught them that when they look at a painting, they should be trying to figure out what it MEANS. It taught them that paintings contain some sort of secret message or intent. And they look at, say, a Pollack painting, can't figure out the secret, and suspect the artist is bullshitting them. Which pisses them off. To them, abstract art is like trying to solve a Rubic's Cube is for me. I can't do it. It's frustrating. And if I hadn't seen other people do it, I might suspect that Rubic was hoaxing everyone -- wasting their time with a puzzle that has no solution.
What some people are not doing is just letting the colors, lines and shapes flood into them. These same people could probably have a fantastic time staring out at the sea. They wouldn't try to figure out the MEANING of the sea. They'd be free to just respond to its vastness and its explosion of color.
What's interesting to me is that this (learned in school) habit of intellectualizing art ruins the experience for some people (at least when they're looking at certain kinds of art) and makes the experience more profound for others, for people like Astro Zombie. (Though I'm not implying that AZ doesn't also love art for its sensual effects.)
I disagree with him that "most contemporary art doesn't exist in a vacuum, where you can just look at a piece on a wall and intuit what is meant or what is being shown." Well, maybe I do agree with him, but I don't care what "is meant." What I can say is that I've been profoundly, profoundly, profoundly affected by a lot of contemporary art, without giving a second though to "what is meant." So the only thing I disagree with AZ about his his absolutism. I respect his relationship wit contemporary art, but it isn't the only possible relationship that can work. (Though maybe it IS the only possible one for someone who has been through school and who took the lessons of school to heart. Maybe someone like that can't STOP looking for meaning. So if he's going to ever like contemporary art, it's going to have to be via its meaning. To me, this is a bit sad. It means that person has lost something valuable he had a child. Most children love art without spending a second thinking about context or meaning.)
I have purposefully avoided learning much about the life and intent of artists like Pollack and Kandinsky, and yet I ADORE their work. I can't tell you how much their paintings mean to me. They have enriched my life beyond measure. If this is odd to you -- that I love Pollack's work without knowing anything about Pollack -- think of how people often respond to, say, a Beatles song or a Beethoven symphony, even if they're completely unschooled in music theory -- even if they're only five and know nothing about the history of the Beatles.
People often tell me that while I appreciate the paintings now, I'll appreciate them even more if I learn about the artist's history and intent. I disagree. First of all, I don't care about "appreciating" art. I don't even know what that means. It sounds boring. I want to be RAPED by art. I want to EAT art. I want art to stab me in the eye.
I agree that it's likely my relationship with Pollack's work will be CHANGED if I learn about his intent. Presumably those ideas will be stored in my brain alongside the sensual data, and one will affect the other IN SOME WAY. Maybe my experienced will be enriched; maybe it will be cheapened. I think most people have experienced both effects. Many people like some art more after learning stuff about the artist. Many people also like some art less after, say, learning that the artist was a Nazi sympathizer -- or a chimpanzee.
As you might expect with someone who responds to art sensually and prizes that response above all others, I really don't give a shit whether a work "could have been painted by a five-year-old" or was painted by a chimpanzee. Whatever. If it affects me, it affects me. So thanks, chimp! Thanks, five-year-old! Thanks, Jackson Pollack! In fact, thanks universe (for making oceans and sunsets)! It's all good!
I also don't really care that much about what I think of as the circus-feat aspect of art: how difficult or easy it is to make. I admit, it can be kind of fun to think about: when someone takes ten years to paint a gigantic mural, I DO enjoy thinking about their skill and whether or not I could do what they did. But, in the end, I respond to their work or I don't.
And that event -- the event of making the art -- is over. It's not like Michelangelo is repainting the Sistine Chapel over and over again. As it exists NOW, it is the same work whether he labored over it for years or whether space aliens came to Earth, fired an "art blaster" at the ceiling, and created the work in ten seconds. I'm not saying it's wrong to enjoy thinking about skill and craftsmanship. Whatever floats your boat! I'm saying that there's another sort of connoisseurship -- one that is more childlike: you look; you respond.
This "naive" approach IS malleable. I didn't use to like minimalist music and watercolors. Now I love both. But not because I learned anything about intent, theme or context. My new-found love came through repeated exposure to those sorts of works. I gradually learned their inner language. And, as I did, my heart started beating faster when I looked and listened to them.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
blurb criminal
I'm going to slap the wrist of the "Times" writer who blurbed "The Nearest Exit" (a spy novel by Olen Steinhauer). He wrote, "Steinhauer can be legitimately mentioned alongside John Le Carre."
First of all, it's floundering in passivity. Steinhauer "can be mentioned"? Mentioned by whom? Why not, "I'm not ashamed to mention" or "you will wind up mentioning" or "readers will feel compelled to mention" or "My dentist mentioned"?
And what does it mean to "legitimately mention" something? Can you illegitimately mention something? Presumably, the writer is claiming that when Steinhauer is (passively) mentioned, the (unnamed) mentioner will have grounds for his (free-floating) mentioning. In other words, the statement uttered via mention will be true. But what a sloppy way to say so! For lunch today, I'm going to legitimately eat some Spaghettios.
And "mention"? What kind of a chicken-shit, faggy verb is that? If you love a book, fucking PROCLAIM your love on the mountaintops. Or at least speak up a bit. Don't make comments out of the side of your mouth. It's annoying enough when Robin Williams does it. Don't be like him. PLEASE don't be like him. (For so many reasons, such as "Patch Adams.")
Finally -- and here I'm quibbling, but, screw it, I might as well have some fun -- what does it mean to mention the author "alongside" Le Carre? Is the (mystery) mentioner claiming (espousing, broadcasting, opining ... saying) that Steinhauer is as talented as Le Carre? Or is he -- the disembodied mentioner -- at a dinner party, sitting next to Le Carre, when he engages in (untethered) mentioning?
First of all, it's floundering in passivity. Steinhauer "can be mentioned"? Mentioned by whom? Why not, "I'm not ashamed to mention" or "you will wind up mentioning" or "readers will feel compelled to mention" or "My dentist mentioned"?
And what does it mean to "legitimately mention" something? Can you illegitimately mention something? Presumably, the writer is claiming that when Steinhauer is (passively) mentioned, the (unnamed) mentioner will have grounds for his (free-floating) mentioning. In other words, the statement uttered via mention will be true. But what a sloppy way to say so! For lunch today, I'm going to legitimately eat some Spaghettios.
And "mention"? What kind of a chicken-shit, faggy verb is that? If you love a book, fucking PROCLAIM your love on the mountaintops. Or at least speak up a bit. Don't make comments out of the side of your mouth. It's annoying enough when Robin Williams does it. Don't be like him. PLEASE don't be like him. (For so many reasons, such as "Patch Adams.")
Finally -- and here I'm quibbling, but, screw it, I might as well have some fun -- what does it mean to mention the author "alongside" Le Carre? Is the (mystery) mentioner claiming (espousing, broadcasting, opining ... saying) that Steinhauer is as talented as Le Carre? Or is he -- the disembodied mentioner -- at a dinner party, sitting next to Le Carre, when he engages in (untethered) mentioning?
Thursday, February 03, 2011
civil war 2.0
In a Facebook debate, one friend -- Wendy -- insisted that all Republicans are evil. My reply:
I've met people who are fiscal Republicans but not social ones. They are pro gay rights, etc. But they don't believe in big government. They think high taxes, etc. hurt the economy. Some of them are genuinely concerned about the poor (some of them ARE poor). They just think the economy works in a specific way.
When you strip the two parties down to their stances on economics, you have two groups espousing mystical beliefs. One group believes that the economy is healthier if you spread the wealth. The other believes it's healthier if money trickles down from the top.
We have no way of know which group is right. Maybe one is right given certain circumstances (a recession, a war, etc) but not in other circumstances.
Anyone who is SURE that one of those two views is right is trucking in mysticism. And most people do seem to be sure.
And you can't go by history, because it's a dirty test tube. Greece in 1928 or even American in 1980 is not America in 2010. The system is too chaotic to make good predictions.
I don't know if you've lived outside of Indiana (or the midwest). But one thing to keep in mind is that the Bible belt only introduces you to one kind of Republican. Definitely the worst kind. In my view, their main problem isn't that they're Republicans, it's that they're ignorant -- and they have a culture that protects and nurtures ignorance.
My feeling is that the world sucks in many ways because there are Conservatives in it. It also sucks in many ways because there are Liberals in it. But it would suck way more if everyone was Conservative or everyone was Liberal. We need the two groups to act as checks on each other.
It's hard for most people, Liberal or Conservative, to see that, because, to some extent, being Liberal means wanting everyone else to be Liberal and being Conservative means wanting everyone else to be Conservative. Why would you want people to be what-you-consider-wronghea
At it's heart, Conservatism is fear of change. At its most pathologic, it's a refusal to embrace change for the good. At its most wise, it's a caution not to leap before you look -- it's the reminder that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, and that solutions sometimes cause bigger problems.
At it's heart, Liberalism is an embracement of change. At its most pathological, it's reckless. At it's most wise, it's brave enough to experiment when problems need to be solved.
In a world with only Conservatives, nothing would ever get better. In a world with only Liberals, eventually everyone would fall off a cliff because, hey, it's worth a try! We survive only by the two forces tugging at each other.
And survival sucks, because so many Liberals and Conservatives suck. And because the pull is towards the center, and the center pleases no one. But the center is the only option that doesn't lean inevitably to destruction.
Most Liberals and Conservatives are utopians, because they believe there's a non-sucky option. They insist on acting like, one day, "the other side" will go away.
Conservatives aren't going away. Nor are Liberals. Like it or hate it, we will always share the planet.
Someone else pointed out to me that "...you can't strip it down to economics. Not for me, anyway. My economic theory isn't about what's best for the economy. It's about the obligations that come with being a member of a decent, functioning society. We need to provide for the poorest among us not because my economic theory says so but because I believe it to be the right and decent thing to do. We need to pay for these things by taxing the wealthy because the wealthy are benefiting from a healthy educated workforce and therefore pay for these things. That's not economics for me, it's (again) what's right and decent.
Therein lies the problem. It's impossible to separate economic theory from moral judgement, and it makes it hard to argue with those who you think are just out and out wrong."
When I talked about "what's best for the economy," I meant for PEOPLE -- not for corporations, except in the sense that people get their paychecks from corporations.
Presumably, we all agree that if the economy is in good shape, there are fewer poor people. But we differ over what we need to do to keep the economy in good shape.
Sure, there are asshole Republicans who don't care about poor people. But there are others who genuinely believe that Conservative economic policy helps the poor better than Liberal policy does. They may be wrong. I am neutral about that, because, frankly, I think anyone who is has a strong opinion about ANY economic policy is nuts. Macroeconomics is voodoo.
One of the caricatures of Liberals is that the bleeding-heart type. He will be told that if he invests some money that he has, the dividends will help 1000 poor people next year. But there are ten poor people in front of him right now, so instead of investing, he gives all the money to the ten. So only ten poor people benefited when 1000 could have. (I don't think that's a very good caricature, and I'm not promoting it. I'm just saying that "helping the poor" can take many different forms, depending on one's beliefs.)
My point is that at least some Republicans agree with you -- that you can't separate economics from morality. And they'd say -- and believe -- that their version of economics is the morally right one, the one that is most likely to help the disadvantaged.
Also, it's possibly a mistake to lump Fred, the Republican next door with "those people in Congress." Wendy talked about how horrible it is that Republicans side with those rape-redefiners in Washington. Well, one thing worth remembering is that many Americans, on both sides of the Red/Blue divide mistrust politicians and don't think of them as "their peeps."
I'm that way. I would call myself a Liberal -- at least when it comes to social issues. I'm pro gay rights, pro choice, blah blah blah. But those Democrats in Washington are NOT my folks. You may feel they are your folks, and, of course, there are plenty of Republicans who feel at one with Republican politicians -- but there are also plenty who don't.
I can't remember a president in my lifetime that I've liked. I'm a Liberal, but I'm not big Obama fan. I wasn't a fan of Clinton or Carter, either. So it's worth remembering that just because Fred's a Republican, that doesn't mean he likes the Republicans in power or agrees with everything they say.
You can bet if Obama does something horrible -- something you disagree with -- people on the other side will point at you and say, "See what YOU PEOPLE do?" That would be massively unfair, unless you happen to blindly support "your team."
"I get that some conservatives might think that their policies will help the working class, the poor, and the general population. But the facts aren't always on their side because America has proven recently that economic growth hasn't trickled down all that much.
Moreover, many of the people they choose to stand in for them use language that suggest that their notion of 'help' includes a form of condemnation. Reagan said that the unemployed were 'unemployed by choice' and held up one (as of yet never been located) 'welfare queen" as proof that welfare was not helpful but enabled people to cheat and have babies just to collect checks. The Tea Party and Conservative darlings of today say that unemployment 'spoils' people (Sharron Angle) and that unemployment insure 'rewards people who don't look for work' (a sentiment uttered in one form or another by about two dozen members of the Senate within the last year, all of whom were Republican).
So if Conservatism (economically) is aimed at helping the poor or the working class, it might need better spokespeople."
No argument here re bad spokespeople. Again, though, as a Liberal, I can relate to this. I rarely hear a Liberal politician speak and think, "Yes! He's a good spokesperson for me." It sucks that Conservatives hear these clowns talking and think that just because I'm they're liberal and I'm liberal, they speak for me. They don't.
As I said, there are plenty of Liberals and Conservatives who DO feel like their politicians speak for them. But this isn't the case for all Liberals and Conservatives.
This is the sort of thing that bothers me, and it's the sort of thing said by both sides: "America has proven recently that economic growth hasn't trickled down all that much."
Being very specific, what has been proven is that economic plan A did not work in county B at date C. That same plan might (or might not) work in a different country at a different time. The problem is that different countries -- or even the same country at different times -- are massively different from each other.
Saying that the the trickle-down effect works (or doesn't work) is like saying "you should always wear three layers of clothing." That's not true, because weather systems fluctuate. It's a bad idea to wear three layers in the Summer.
But the weather is far-less chaotic (in terms of what you should wear) than the economy. You CAN reliably say that it's a good idea to wear a coat in the winter, because one winter is more-or-less like every other winter: cold. But no economic place or time is like any other.
The variables for Summer/Winter are basically temperature and wind. The variables for the economy are stock-market fluctuations, interest rates, levels-of-inflation, job market statistics, consumer confidence, deficit, etc., etc., etc.
To say that predict that an economic policy is likely to work, you need to have seen it work or not-work before in with all the variables the same. If ONE variable between last time and this time is different, your prediction is worthless.
This is why no one has been able to predict most of the major economic crisis of the past, even though tons of highly-educated, brilliant people try and try and try. We will always be blindsided. Nassim Taleb has a great book about this called "The Black Swan." Its thesis is basically that no matter how many times history proves that when it comes to economics, it's impossible to know the answers, people keep insisting that they DO know.
This drives me batshit insane when it comes to politics. And whats funny is that both parties pull EXACTLY the same shit. If the economy goes South when a Democrat is on the throne, the Republicans jump up and down and point fingers: "See! Liberal economics don't work!" WRONG! Liberal economics doesn't work in this specific time and place, which will never come again. And, of course, Democrats do the same thing when Republican policies fail.
It's like everyone is picking random lottery numbers, and then blaming each other when those numbers fail to win the lottery. It's madness.
When the job market or the economy improve during a presidency, people are SURE they know why it happened. If the market improves tomorrow, half the country will INSIST this is because Obama did it. The other half will insist it was due to an effect that started before Obama came into office. Neither side knows the truth. Neither side CAN know the truth. So it all boils down to "rah rah my team!" Few people have the ability to say, "I really don't know why the economy improved, so I'm going to shut up."
I do agree that when you've heard the 200th Republican say something crappy about the poor or gays or whatever, it's human nature to feel that all Republicans suck. Natural as this is, I think we have to fight it like hell. This is ALWAYS a harmful thought.
If someone gets robbed by ten black people in a row, it's natural for him to think that black people are thieves. If he said this, we'd chastise him for being a racist, but he'd just be doing natural, human, inevitable pattern-matching. It's impossible to not do this. At the same time, it's VITAL that we continually urge people to overcome it. As we know, with race-based remarks, that sort of thinking, natural though it may be, leads to all sorts of horrible problems.
Whenever we hear "black people are...", "Christians are...", "Republicans are..." comments, we should be scared. We should, over and over, as tedious as it is, remind ourselves that not ALL black people or Christians or Republicans are... We need to be firm about this, because though it's true, it's not a natural way of thinking. We are always going to backslide into prejudices. And those prejudices are deadly.
LIBERALS should speak out when they hear someone lump all Republicans together. Christians should speak out when they hear someone lump all Atheists together. Men should speak out when they hear someone lump all women together. Poor people should speak out when they hear someone lump all women together. This is very, very hard to do. We tend to let groups stand up for themselves. (If woman want to be treated as individuals, let THEM work towards that goal. Why should men bother with it?) That's natural but deadly. We need to take a stand, in principle, against all forms of prejudice.
There's nothing wrong with saying, "Anti-gay legislation is evil." But once we slide over into saying ALL Republicans are evil, we're lost. And we're playing with fire.
We're in a terrible state right now, because both Liberals and Conservatives are FURIOUS and FRIGHTENED. And people in those states need to vent. Wendy needed to vent, and I understand that. I often do to. And here I come saying, "Not ALL Republicans are like that." That screws up her venting.
Whenever I hear Liberals making all-encompassing-remarks about Conservatives or Conservatives doing making them about Liberals, I speak up. It doesn't make me many friends. One thing both camps seem to agree upon is that I'm irritating. This is because both camps WANT to caricature the other.
I think many people feel -- and I understand this, because I often feel it too -- that though it's true that not all Republicans are this way or that way, it's okay to vent as if they are when you're around friends.
And sometimes it is. The problem is that right now it's not. Right now the country is crashing and burning. We're edging closer and closer to something that, at its worst, could turn into civil war. My greatest fear is that this train has reached a point where it's unstoppable.
Just prior to WWI, people used to chant "We want war! We want war!" I'm scared that we've reached (or almost reached) a point where this is the case in America. I think there are many people (I admit I'm one of them at times) who are sick of the fighting and would be thrilled to see Liberals and Democrats duke it out in one, final, apocalyptic battle.
What's tragic to me is that most Conservatives think that the biggest problem we have right now is Liberals. And most Liberals think the biggest problem we have right now is Conservatives. Being a Liberal, I DO think Conservatives are a big problem. But there's a bigger problem right now -- and it's the fact that America is almost at a boiling point. Tempers are so high, many people are beyond being rational. They are out for blood. They want their team to win at any cost. They want the other team crushed. Everyone needs a timer out!
No matter how right you are, it's always important to think carefully about whether your rightness is worth going to war over. I'm not saying it's never is. Sometimes it definitely is. It's just worth considering, and very few Americans are considering it.
I suspect this is because they don't think internal war is really a possibility. The assume we'll either just go on being angry at each other forever or that one side will win. Both of these (especially the first) are possible. But war is possible too, and it happened in America a very, very short time ago. Just 150 years ago!
I think we actually learned some lessons from WWI, WWII and The Cold War. Not enough, but some. But, strangely, in American, it's as if the Civil War never happened. Collectively, we learned nothing from it at all.
We need to make a choice. We need to go ahead and get Civil War II over with. Or we need to start working -- NOW -- to bridge the Red/Blue gap. That will be hard as hell, if not impossible. But if we don't make the choice, fate will make it for us. And it probably won't be pretty.
I've met people who are fiscal Republicans but not social ones. They are pro gay rights, etc. But they don't believe in big government. They think high taxes, etc. hurt the economy. Some of them are genuinely concerned about the poor (some of them ARE poor). They just think the economy works in a specific way.
When you strip the two parties down to their stances on economics, you have two groups espousing mystical beliefs. One group believes that the economy is healthier if you spread the wealth. The other believes it's healthier if money trickles down from the top.
We have no way of know which group is right. Maybe one is right given certain circumstances (a recession, a war, etc) but not in other circumstances.
Anyone who is SURE that one of those two views is right is trucking in mysticism. And most people do seem to be sure.
And you can't go by history, because it's a dirty test tube. Greece in 1928 or even American in 1980 is not America in 2010. The system is too chaotic to make good predictions.
I don't know if you've lived outside of Indiana (or the midwest). But one thing to keep in mind is that the Bible belt only introduces you to one kind of Republican. Definitely the worst kind. In my view, their main problem isn't that they're Republicans, it's that they're ignorant -- and they have a culture that protects and nurtures ignorance.
My feeling is that the world sucks in many ways because there are Conservatives in it. It also sucks in many ways because there are Liberals in it. But it would suck way more if everyone was Conservative or everyone was Liberal. We need the two groups to act as checks on each other.
It's hard for most people, Liberal or Conservative, to see that, because, to some extent, being Liberal means wanting everyone else to be Liberal and being Conservative means wanting everyone else to be Conservative. Why would you want people to be what-you-consider-wronghea
At it's heart, Conservatism is fear of change. At its most pathologic, it's a refusal to embrace change for the good. At its most wise, it's a caution not to leap before you look -- it's the reminder that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, and that solutions sometimes cause bigger problems.
At it's heart, Liberalism is an embracement of change. At its most pathological, it's reckless. At it's most wise, it's brave enough to experiment when problems need to be solved.
In a world with only Conservatives, nothing would ever get better. In a world with only Liberals, eventually everyone would fall off a cliff because, hey, it's worth a try! We survive only by the two forces tugging at each other.
And survival sucks, because so many Liberals and Conservatives suck. And because the pull is towards the center, and the center pleases no one. But the center is the only option that doesn't lean inevitably to destruction.
Most Liberals and Conservatives are utopians, because they believe there's a non-sucky option. They insist on acting like, one day, "the other side" will go away.
Conservatives aren't going away. Nor are Liberals. Like it or hate it, we will always share the planet.
Someone else pointed out to me that "...you can't strip it down to economics. Not for me, anyway. My economic theory isn't about what's best for the economy. It's about the obligations that come with being a member of a decent, functioning society. We need to provide for the poorest among us not because my economic theory says so but because I believe it to be the right and decent thing to do. We need to pay for these things by taxing the wealthy because the wealthy are benefiting from a healthy educated workforce and therefore pay for these things. That's not economics for me, it's (again) what's right and decent.
Therein lies the problem. It's impossible to separate economic theory from moral judgement, and it makes it hard to argue with those who you think are just out and out wrong."
When I talked about "what's best for the economy," I meant for PEOPLE -- not for corporations, except in the sense that people get their paychecks from corporations.
Presumably, we all agree that if the economy is in good shape, there are fewer poor people. But we differ over what we need to do to keep the economy in good shape.
Sure, there are asshole Republicans who don't care about poor people. But there are others who genuinely believe that Conservative economic policy helps the poor better than Liberal policy does. They may be wrong. I am neutral about that, because, frankly, I think anyone who is has a strong opinion about ANY economic policy is nuts. Macroeconomics is voodoo.
One of the caricatures of Liberals is that the bleeding-heart type. He will be told that if he invests some money that he has, the dividends will help 1000 poor people next year. But there are ten poor people in front of him right now, so instead of investing, he gives all the money to the ten. So only ten poor people benefited when 1000 could have. (I don't think that's a very good caricature, and I'm not promoting it. I'm just saying that "helping the poor" can take many different forms, depending on one's beliefs.)
My point is that at least some Republicans agree with you -- that you can't separate economics from morality. And they'd say -- and believe -- that their version of economics is the morally right one, the one that is most likely to help the disadvantaged.
Also, it's possibly a mistake to lump Fred, the Republican next door with "those people in Congress." Wendy talked about how horrible it is that Republicans side with those rape-redefiners in Washington. Well, one thing worth remembering is that many Americans, on both sides of the Red/Blue divide mistrust politicians and don't think of them as "their peeps."
I'm that way. I would call myself a Liberal -- at least when it comes to social issues. I'm pro gay rights, pro choice, blah blah blah. But those Democrats in Washington are NOT my folks. You may feel they are your folks, and, of course, there are plenty of Republicans who feel at one with Republican politicians -- but there are also plenty who don't.
I can't remember a president in my lifetime that I've liked. I'm a Liberal, but I'm not big Obama fan. I wasn't a fan of Clinton or Carter, either. So it's worth remembering that just because Fred's a Republican, that doesn't mean he likes the Republicans in power or agrees with everything they say.
You can bet if Obama does something horrible -- something you disagree with -- people on the other side will point at you and say, "See what YOU PEOPLE do?" That would be massively unfair, unless you happen to blindly support "your team."
"I get that some conservatives might think that their policies will help the working class, the poor, and the general population. But the facts aren't always on their side because America has proven recently that economic growth hasn't trickled down all that much.
Moreover, many of the people they choose to stand in for them use language that suggest that their notion of 'help' includes a form of condemnation. Reagan said that the unemployed were 'unemployed by choice' and held up one (as of yet never been located) 'welfare queen" as proof that welfare was not helpful but enabled people to cheat and have babies just to collect checks. The Tea Party and Conservative darlings of today say that unemployment 'spoils' people (Sharron Angle) and that unemployment insure 'rewards people who don't look for work' (a sentiment uttered in one form or another by about two dozen members of the Senate within the last year, all of whom were Republican).
So if Conservatism (economically) is aimed at helping the poor or the working class, it might need better spokespeople."
No argument here re bad spokespeople. Again, though, as a Liberal, I can relate to this. I rarely hear a Liberal politician speak and think, "Yes! He's a good spokesperson for me." It sucks that Conservatives hear these clowns talking and think that just because I'm they're liberal and I'm liberal, they speak for me. They don't.
As I said, there are plenty of Liberals and Conservatives who DO feel like their politicians speak for them. But this isn't the case for all Liberals and Conservatives.
This is the sort of thing that bothers me, and it's the sort of thing said by both sides: "America has proven recently that economic growth hasn't trickled down all that much."
Being very specific, what has been proven is that economic plan A did not work in county B at date C. That same plan might (or might not) work in a different country at a different time. The problem is that different countries -- or even the same country at different times -- are massively different from each other.
Saying that the the trickle-down effect works (or doesn't work) is like saying "you should always wear three layers of clothing." That's not true, because weather systems fluctuate. It's a bad idea to wear three layers in the Summer.
But the weather is far-less chaotic (in terms of what you should wear) than the economy. You CAN reliably say that it's a good idea to wear a coat in the winter, because one winter is more-or-less like every other winter: cold. But no economic place or time is like any other.
The variables for Summer/Winter are basically temperature and wind. The variables for the economy are stock-market fluctuations, interest rates, levels-of-inflation, job market statistics, consumer confidence, deficit, etc., etc., etc.
To say that predict that an economic policy is likely to work, you need to have seen it work or not-work before in with all the variables the same. If ONE variable between last time and this time is different, your prediction is worthless.
This is why no one has been able to predict most of the major economic crisis of the past, even though tons of highly-educated, brilliant people try and try and try. We will always be blindsided. Nassim Taleb has a great book about this called "The Black Swan." Its thesis is basically that no matter how many times history proves that when it comes to economics, it's impossible to know the answers, people keep insisting that they DO know.
This drives me batshit insane when it comes to politics. And whats funny is that both parties pull EXACTLY the same shit. If the economy goes South when a Democrat is on the throne, the Republicans jump up and down and point fingers: "See! Liberal economics don't work!" WRONG! Liberal economics doesn't work in this specific time and place, which will never come again. And, of course, Democrats do the same thing when Republican policies fail.
It's like everyone is picking random lottery numbers, and then blaming each other when those numbers fail to win the lottery. It's madness.
When the job market or the economy improve during a presidency, people are SURE they know why it happened. If the market improves tomorrow, half the country will INSIST this is because Obama did it. The other half will insist it was due to an effect that started before Obama came into office. Neither side knows the truth. Neither side CAN know the truth. So it all boils down to "rah rah my team!" Few people have the ability to say, "I really don't know why the economy improved, so I'm going to shut up."
I do agree that when you've heard the 200th Republican say something crappy about the poor or gays or whatever, it's human nature to feel that all Republicans suck. Natural as this is, I think we have to fight it like hell. This is ALWAYS a harmful thought.
If someone gets robbed by ten black people in a row, it's natural for him to think that black people are thieves. If he said this, we'd chastise him for being a racist, but he'd just be doing natural, human, inevitable pattern-matching. It's impossible to not do this. At the same time, it's VITAL that we continually urge people to overcome it. As we know, with race-based remarks, that sort of thinking, natural though it may be, leads to all sorts of horrible problems.
Whenever we hear "black people are...", "Christians are...", "Republicans are..." comments, we should be scared. We should, over and over, as tedious as it is, remind ourselves that not ALL black people or Christians or Republicans are... We need to be firm about this, because though it's true, it's not a natural way of thinking. We are always going to backslide into prejudices. And those prejudices are deadly.
LIBERALS should speak out when they hear someone lump all Republicans together. Christians should speak out when they hear someone lump all Atheists together. Men should speak out when they hear someone lump all women together. Poor people should speak out when they hear someone lump all women together. This is very, very hard to do. We tend to let groups stand up for themselves. (If woman want to be treated as individuals, let THEM work towards that goal. Why should men bother with it?) That's natural but deadly. We need to take a stand, in principle, against all forms of prejudice.
There's nothing wrong with saying, "Anti-gay legislation is evil." But once we slide over into saying ALL Republicans are evil, we're lost. And we're playing with fire.
We're in a terrible state right now, because both Liberals and Conservatives are FURIOUS and FRIGHTENED. And people in those states need to vent. Wendy needed to vent, and I understand that. I often do to. And here I come saying, "Not ALL Republicans are like that." That screws up her venting.
Whenever I hear Liberals making all-encompassing-remarks about Conservatives or Conservatives doing making them about Liberals, I speak up. It doesn't make me many friends. One thing both camps seem to agree upon is that I'm irritating. This is because both camps WANT to caricature the other.
I think many people feel -- and I understand this, because I often feel it too -- that though it's true that not all Republicans are this way or that way, it's okay to vent as if they are when you're around friends.
And sometimes it is. The problem is that right now it's not. Right now the country is crashing and burning. We're edging closer and closer to something that, at its worst, could turn into civil war. My greatest fear is that this train has reached a point where it's unstoppable.
Just prior to WWI, people used to chant "We want war! We want war!" I'm scared that we've reached (or almost reached) a point where this is the case in America. I think there are many people (I admit I'm one of them at times) who are sick of the fighting and would be thrilled to see Liberals and Democrats duke it out in one, final, apocalyptic battle.
What's tragic to me is that most Conservatives think that the biggest problem we have right now is Liberals. And most Liberals think the biggest problem we have right now is Conservatives. Being a Liberal, I DO think Conservatives are a big problem. But there's a bigger problem right now -- and it's the fact that America is almost at a boiling point. Tempers are so high, many people are beyond being rational. They are out for blood. They want their team to win at any cost. They want the other team crushed. Everyone needs a timer out!
No matter how right you are, it's always important to think carefully about whether your rightness is worth going to war over. I'm not saying it's never is. Sometimes it definitely is. It's just worth considering, and very few Americans are considering it.
I suspect this is because they don't think internal war is really a possibility. The assume we'll either just go on being angry at each other forever or that one side will win. Both of these (especially the first) are possible. But war is possible too, and it happened in America a very, very short time ago. Just 150 years ago!
I think we actually learned some lessons from WWI, WWII and The Cold War. Not enough, but some. But, strangely, in American, it's as if the Civil War never happened. Collectively, we learned nothing from it at all.
We need to make a choice. We need to go ahead and get Civil War II over with. Or we need to start working -- NOW -- to bridge the Red/Blue gap. That will be hard as hell, if not impossible. But if we don't make the choice, fate will make it for us. And it probably won't be pretty.
Wednesday, February 02, 2011
the party line
I just realized a huge change I went through, starting sometime in my late 20s/early 30s. It's a little hard to explain.
When I was a child and teenager, it was often the case that I hadn't made up my mind about some issue. Or I didn't have a strong aesthetic sense about whether some movie or book or actor was good or bad.
But I felt it was important that I have -- or seem to have -- a strong opinion. I decided that "grown ups" were always sure about things, and I wanted to be grown up.
So, instead of honestly reporting my confusion or undecidedness, I pretended to have a stance. Sometimes it was a stance I copied from someone else -- someone I liked who seemed sure of himself, at least about whatever issues I was currently thinking or talking about.
Okay, I suspect that what I've described so far is pretty common. What may or may not be common is that I somehow felt that my stance was a kind of truth.
Someone would ask me if I liked Shakespeare or not. My true feeling, at my core, might have been something like, "I don't know. I haven't read much Shakespeare. And what little I have read was hard for me to understand, and I didn't like that, because it made me feel stupid. At the same time, I did understand parts of it, and I liked those parts..."
But, having decided that Smart People Like Shakespeare, I'd take that stance and say, "Yes, I like Shakespeare very much." On a simplistic level, we'd call that a lie.
But, of course, like everyone else, I sometimes told lies, and I knew what it felt like to tell a lie. This felt a bit different. It felt like the option I was working towards. Like an almost surely true prediction of what my option one day would be.
If I could have somehow have put my this into worlds, I might have said something like, "Well, I haven't quite gotten there yet, but I'm pretty sure I'm the kind of person who will one day like Shakespeare, so let's just simplify things by putting me in the likes-Shakespeare camp. And, even if I don't actually have both feet in that camp, I promise to act like I do. I'll go see Shakespeare plays. I'll read his works. Etc. So, in terms of behavior, there will be no difference between me and a true Shakespeare fan. To say I'm not a one is just quibbling."
It was as if I had an official spokesperson, and his brief was to handle public relations. And he also made sure that, regardless of my private feelings, I always acted according to the party line. Which made the party line true -- or true-ish.
(If I told one friend that I liked Shakespeare but admitted to another that I didn't, this DIDN'T feel like truth. For it to feel like truth, I had to steadfastly ALWAYS tell the same story.)
Once I got my official-spokesperson stance set, I could utter it in confidence, without shame, and it never felt like a lie. As-far-as my internal state was concerned, it wasn't a lie.
Sometimes, my deep-down confusion would quickly come in line with the party line (and I really would like Shakespeare). I guess that's what they mean by "fake it until you make it." At other times, this process took years.
For instance, as a kid, I spent YEARS claiming to love school, when in fact I hated it. But, again, "I love school" didn't feel at all like a lie. It felt like the official party line. And, in fact, admitting to myself that I hated it was hard, because the spokesperson was screaming at me, "No you don't!"
Sometimes, all that existed was the party line. In other words, I got bored with the actual issue and stopped thinking about it. So whatever truth there was about my stand on it was JUST the stance.
(My dad is very opinionated about music. He used to play a lot of Sondheim, but he HATED the sound "Liaisons" from "A Little Night's Music." When that track would start, he's run to the turntable and skip over it, proclaiming the song's worthlessness. I aped his opinion. It became my stance. And, eventually, though the stance was really powerful and seemed true, there was nothing underneath it. TWENTY YEARS after I adopted the stance, I realized I loved that song and always had.)
In my late 20s, my spokesperson went away. I'm not sure why? It may have had something to do with my immersion in psychology and neurology books. I may have had something to do with my worsening Asperger's symptoms.
I'm not saying I never lie. I'm sure I lie at least as much as anyone. But I KNOW it's a lie. And I always know if I like carrots, hate carrots or are confused about whether I like them or not. So it's not that there's no ambiguity in my soul. There's plenty of it. It's just that I'm comfortable with it. I don't need a spokesperson to pretend I know something that I don't know. If I don't know, I don't know.
Well, that last paragraph sounds like I always have perfect self-knowledge. I don't. Truthfully, I am capable of discovering that I don't really like something that I thought I did. But that's different from having an actual truth and a spokesperson truth in my head at the same time.
When I talk to other people, I sometimes feel like I'm talking to the a spokesperson. And, again, that's not my way of saying I feel like the person is lying to me. It's more complicated than that. I feel like I'm getting a sanitized party line, and that the person I'm talking to believes that line is a kind of truth. That he feels none of the guilt or shame that he'd normally feel if he was lying.
One example is sexuality. If you're a man who is only attracted to women, you're straight. If you're attracted exclusively to other men, you're gay. If you're attracted to both sexes, you're bisexual. It's really simple.
But there are a lot of people you "identify" as gay or whatever. What does this mean? Does it mean, "I am fully aware that I am attracted to both men and women, even though I'm more often attracted to men. I am aware that the TRUTH is that I'm bisexual. But since I don't act on my occasional attraction to women, I'm just going to call myself gay, because that makes things simpler in conversation -- and it makes my life easier in a world that's harsh on bisexuals"?
Or does it mean, "THE PARTY LINE IS THAT I'M GAY and as that IS the party line, it's as true as anything else. They fact that I'm sometimes attracted to women is a non-issue. It's not my official stance. (And maybe my attraction to women will even cease if I hold to the party line with enough conviction.) In any case, the part of me that's attracted to women doesn't count. Because I SAY so!"
In other words, does the bi person who identifies as gay actually feel like that identity is more meaningful than an arbitrary category BECAUSE it's his party line?
I think my lack of a spokesperson gets me into trouble sometimes. For instance, my friends are generally not racists. That means two things: (1) it means that, in general, they treat people of all races fairly and don't discriminate on the basis of skin color and (2) they CLASSIFY themselves as non-racists.
Now, most of us -- I think -- do have the occasional racist thought or feeling. It's not terribly important, as long as we realize it's wrong, etc. What's interesting is it IS part of who we are, but it's NOT part of how we classify ourselves. In other words, we're "bi" when it comes to being racist, leaning heavily towards not.
That is the LITERAL truth. So the LITERALLY TRUE answer, for me, if you ask me whether or not I'm racist, is "Almost never, but very occasionally I have a racist feeling."
While it's almost impossible for me to believe this isn't the case for nearly all "non racists," I've noticed almost no one says this (except for those people who have taken the stance that "we're all racist"). When you're asked if you're racist, you're supposed to go with the party-line answer. Your'e supposed to let the spokesperson talk. And, of course, the literal truth and the spokesperson truth are pretty close.
But, generally, if I admit to the literal truth, people get upset. They say, "You ADMIT you're sometimes racist and you don't do anything about it? That's horrible!"
But I KNOW I'm not alone in my once-in-a-blue-moon racism." I'm just alone in dropping the spokesperson.
This is SO hard to describe. I feel like someone could read this and say, "So you're just saying people are hypocrites?" No, that's not what I'm saying. If someone has an internal spokesperson, and that's really a part of them, and that spokesperson has a strong opinion, then that opinion is true -- or it FEELS true... or it's true-ish.
Without a spokesperson, you (or at least I) wind up living in a much murkier world, in which things aren't cut-and-dry and opinions are apt to shift.
Here's one last example: most of us say things like, "'The Wizard of Oz' is my favorite movie." (If you don't happen to like that movie, imagine some other movie that you do like.)
That becomes the party line, and it IS true most of the time. But sometimes you don't feel like watching it. You're not in the mood to watch your "favorite movie." If someone forced you to watch it right then, you'd have a lousy time. Why? Because THAT MOVIE would be irritating you. A movie you "love" would be irritating you.
I'm not sure what the phrase "my favorite movie" actually means. I guess it's some sort of averaging. It's the movie that most often gives you pleasure. It's a statement that's 100% stance. "Favorite movie" doesn't feel like anything. "I'm enjoying this movie right now" means something, as does "I remember having enjoyed it lots of times in the past, and when I think about it, those thoughts tend to give me pleasure." As does "I'm not enjoying it right now."
The only feelings that exist are the ones you're having right now.
The literal truth is that sometimes you have a good time watching (or thinking about) the movie and sometimes you don't. Your experience skews way more towards "good time" than "bad time." But the bad-time experiences are certainly real. You're "bi" when it comes to "The Wizard of Oz," chocolate cake (which you hate when you have an upset stomach) and the rest of your "favorite things."
But "'The Wizard of Oz' is my favorite movie" FEELS like truth to me. It's the official party line. What's fascinating is that I can say it, with great conviction, without actually feeling anything (other than conviction). It may not be literally true in this moment (I'm not even watching the movie right now), but if you focus on this moment, you're quibbling.
Oops. I claimed not to have a spokesperson. I guess sometimes I do. Especially when I'm tired. He can take over when it's too much work to dredge up my actual feelings. Or when someone forces me to state my feelings about something I don't have any feelings about.
But though he's still around, my spokesperson seems semi-retired. He was so active in my youth. Now he just pokes his head in to say hi once in a while. And he often takes naps, during which time my true feelings (or lack of them) are obvious to me.
We sometimes simplify our internal states in order to be able to think about them and talk about them. Those simplifications can have the emotional force of truth.
When I was a child and teenager, it was often the case that I hadn't made up my mind about some issue. Or I didn't have a strong aesthetic sense about whether some movie or book or actor was good or bad.
But I felt it was important that I have -- or seem to have -- a strong opinion. I decided that "grown ups" were always sure about things, and I wanted to be grown up.
So, instead of honestly reporting my confusion or undecidedness, I pretended to have a stance. Sometimes it was a stance I copied from someone else -- someone I liked who seemed sure of himself, at least about whatever issues I was currently thinking or talking about.
Okay, I suspect that what I've described so far is pretty common. What may or may not be common is that I somehow felt that my stance was a kind of truth.
Someone would ask me if I liked Shakespeare or not. My true feeling, at my core, might have been something like, "I don't know. I haven't read much Shakespeare. And what little I have read was hard for me to understand, and I didn't like that, because it made me feel stupid. At the same time, I did understand parts of it, and I liked those parts..."
But, having decided that Smart People Like Shakespeare, I'd take that stance and say, "Yes, I like Shakespeare very much." On a simplistic level, we'd call that a lie.
But, of course, like everyone else, I sometimes told lies, and I knew what it felt like to tell a lie. This felt a bit different. It felt like the option I was working towards. Like an almost surely true prediction of what my option one day would be.
If I could have somehow have put my this into worlds, I might have said something like, "Well, I haven't quite gotten there yet, but I'm pretty sure I'm the kind of person who will one day like Shakespeare, so let's just simplify things by putting me in the likes-Shakespeare camp. And, even if I don't actually have both feet in that camp, I promise to act like I do. I'll go see Shakespeare plays. I'll read his works. Etc. So, in terms of behavior, there will be no difference between me and a true Shakespeare fan. To say I'm not a one is just quibbling."
It was as if I had an official spokesperson, and his brief was to handle public relations. And he also made sure that, regardless of my private feelings, I always acted according to the party line. Which made the party line true -- or true-ish.
(If I told one friend that I liked Shakespeare but admitted to another that I didn't, this DIDN'T feel like truth. For it to feel like truth, I had to steadfastly ALWAYS tell the same story.)
Once I got my official-spokesperson stance set, I could utter it in confidence, without shame, and it never felt like a lie. As-far-as my internal state was concerned, it wasn't a lie.
Sometimes, my deep-down confusion would quickly come in line with the party line (and I really would like Shakespeare). I guess that's what they mean by "fake it until you make it." At other times, this process took years.
For instance, as a kid, I spent YEARS claiming to love school, when in fact I hated it. But, again, "I love school" didn't feel at all like a lie. It felt like the official party line. And, in fact, admitting to myself that I hated it was hard, because the spokesperson was screaming at me, "No you don't!"
Sometimes, all that existed was the party line. In other words, I got bored with the actual issue and stopped thinking about it. So whatever truth there was about my stand on it was JUST the stance.
(My dad is very opinionated about music. He used to play a lot of Sondheim, but he HATED the sound "Liaisons" from "A Little Night's Music." When that track would start, he's run to the turntable and skip over it, proclaiming the song's worthlessness. I aped his opinion. It became my stance. And, eventually, though the stance was really powerful and seemed true, there was nothing underneath it. TWENTY YEARS after I adopted the stance, I realized I loved that song and always had.)
In my late 20s, my spokesperson went away. I'm not sure why? It may have had something to do with my immersion in psychology and neurology books. I may have had something to do with my worsening Asperger's symptoms.
I'm not saying I never lie. I'm sure I lie at least as much as anyone. But I KNOW it's a lie. And I always know if I like carrots, hate carrots or are confused about whether I like them or not. So it's not that there's no ambiguity in my soul. There's plenty of it. It's just that I'm comfortable with it. I don't need a spokesperson to pretend I know something that I don't know. If I don't know, I don't know.
Well, that last paragraph sounds like I always have perfect self-knowledge. I don't. Truthfully, I am capable of discovering that I don't really like something that I thought I did. But that's different from having an actual truth and a spokesperson truth in my head at the same time.
When I talk to other people, I sometimes feel like I'm talking to the a spokesperson. And, again, that's not my way of saying I feel like the person is lying to me. It's more complicated than that. I feel like I'm getting a sanitized party line, and that the person I'm talking to believes that line is a kind of truth. That he feels none of the guilt or shame that he'd normally feel if he was lying.
One example is sexuality. If you're a man who is only attracted to women, you're straight. If you're attracted exclusively to other men, you're gay. If you're attracted to both sexes, you're bisexual. It's really simple.
But there are a lot of people you "identify" as gay or whatever. What does this mean? Does it mean, "I am fully aware that I am attracted to both men and women, even though I'm more often attracted to men. I am aware that the TRUTH is that I'm bisexual. But since I don't act on my occasional attraction to women, I'm just going to call myself gay, because that makes things simpler in conversation -- and it makes my life easier in a world that's harsh on bisexuals"?
Or does it mean, "THE PARTY LINE IS THAT I'M GAY and as that IS the party line, it's as true as anything else. They fact that I'm sometimes attracted to women is a non-issue. It's not my official stance. (And maybe my attraction to women will even cease if I hold to the party line with enough conviction.) In any case, the part of me that's attracted to women doesn't count. Because I SAY so!"
In other words, does the bi person who identifies as gay actually feel like that identity is more meaningful than an arbitrary category BECAUSE it's his party line?
I think my lack of a spokesperson gets me into trouble sometimes. For instance, my friends are generally not racists. That means two things: (1) it means that, in general, they treat people of all races fairly and don't discriminate on the basis of skin color and (2) they CLASSIFY themselves as non-racists.
Now, most of us -- I think -- do have the occasional racist thought or feeling. It's not terribly important, as long as we realize it's wrong, etc. What's interesting is it IS part of who we are, but it's NOT part of how we classify ourselves. In other words, we're "bi" when it comes to being racist, leaning heavily towards not.
That is the LITERAL truth. So the LITERALLY TRUE answer, for me, if you ask me whether or not I'm racist, is "Almost never, but very occasionally I have a racist feeling."
While it's almost impossible for me to believe this isn't the case for nearly all "non racists," I've noticed almost no one says this (except for those people who have taken the stance that "we're all racist"). When you're asked if you're racist, you're supposed to go with the party-line answer. Your'e supposed to let the spokesperson talk. And, of course, the literal truth and the spokesperson truth are pretty close.
But, generally, if I admit to the literal truth, people get upset. They say, "You ADMIT you're sometimes racist and you don't do anything about it? That's horrible!"
But I KNOW I'm not alone in my once-in-a-blue-moon racism." I'm just alone in dropping the spokesperson.
This is SO hard to describe. I feel like someone could read this and say, "So you're just saying people are hypocrites?" No, that's not what I'm saying. If someone has an internal spokesperson, and that's really a part of them, and that spokesperson has a strong opinion, then that opinion is true -- or it FEELS true... or it's true-ish.
Without a spokesperson, you (or at least I) wind up living in a much murkier world, in which things aren't cut-and-dry and opinions are apt to shift.
Here's one last example: most of us say things like, "'The Wizard of Oz' is my favorite movie." (If you don't happen to like that movie, imagine some other movie that you do like.)
That becomes the party line, and it IS true most of the time. But sometimes you don't feel like watching it. You're not in the mood to watch your "favorite movie." If someone forced you to watch it right then, you'd have a lousy time. Why? Because THAT MOVIE would be irritating you. A movie you "love" would be irritating you.
I'm not sure what the phrase "my favorite movie" actually means. I guess it's some sort of averaging. It's the movie that most often gives you pleasure. It's a statement that's 100% stance. "Favorite movie" doesn't feel like anything. "I'm enjoying this movie right now" means something, as does "I remember having enjoyed it lots of times in the past, and when I think about it, those thoughts tend to give me pleasure." As does "I'm not enjoying it right now."
The only feelings that exist are the ones you're having right now.
The literal truth is that sometimes you have a good time watching (or thinking about) the movie and sometimes you don't. Your experience skews way more towards "good time" than "bad time." But the bad-time experiences are certainly real. You're "bi" when it comes to "The Wizard of Oz," chocolate cake (which you hate when you have an upset stomach) and the rest of your "favorite things."
But "'The Wizard of Oz' is my favorite movie" FEELS like truth to me. It's the official party line. What's fascinating is that I can say it, with great conviction, without actually feeling anything (other than conviction). It may not be literally true in this moment (I'm not even watching the movie right now), but if you focus on this moment, you're quibbling.
Oops. I claimed not to have a spokesperson. I guess sometimes I do. Especially when I'm tired. He can take over when it's too much work to dredge up my actual feelings. Or when someone forces me to state my feelings about something I don't have any feelings about.
But though he's still around, my spokesperson seems semi-retired. He was so active in my youth. Now he just pokes his head in to say hi once in a while. And he often takes naps, during which time my true feelings (or lack of them) are obvious to me.
We sometimes simplify our internal states in order to be able to think about them and talk about them. Those simplifications can have the emotional force of truth.
Saturday, December 25, 2010
words were said
Many were upset by the Pope's recent claim: "In the 1970s, paedophilia was theorized as something fully in conformity with man and even with children."
Here's some unsolicited advice from yours truly: ignore passive-voice statements. Translate them as "blah blah blah," and then say, "Well, that's meaningless, so I can ignore it." You'll throw some babies out with that bathwater, but most of them will be baby trolls.
WHO theorized it? A bunch of priests? An academic? Some guy selling porn? Most ideas have been theorized by somebody. It's been theorized that the world is flat. It's been theorized that I shit five-dollar bills.
Seriously, just ignore statements like that. They have no content -- just not-very-good rhetoric pretending to be content. Same goes for "there's a school of thought that..." and "it's been said that..."
Tell me who said it and what his qualifications are. Or shut up. You're wasting oxygen.
Here's some unsolicited advice from yours truly: ignore passive-voice statements. Translate them as "blah blah blah," and then say, "Well, that's meaningless, so I can ignore it." You'll throw some babies out with that bathwater, but most of them will be baby trolls.
WHO theorized it? A bunch of priests? An academic? Some guy selling porn? Most ideas have been theorized by somebody. It's been theorized that the world is flat. It's been theorized that I shit five-dollar bills.
Seriously, just ignore statements like that. They have no content -- just not-very-good rhetoric pretending to be content. Same goes for "there's a school of thought that..." and "it's been said that..."
Tell me who said it and what his qualifications are. Or shut up. You're wasting oxygen.
what exactly does a guy like Julian Assange want?
On a forum I frequent, someone wrote: It does raise an interesting question -- what exactly does a guy like Julian Assange want? What does he want that someone, anyone, can give him? Not celebrity, not money, not power ... What is left?
That, to me, is an extraordinary question. And, by that, I don't mean it's a stupid one. It's actually an elegant, pithy wording of a common attitude -- one that's diametrically opposed to a less common attitude. The part that kills me is "what is left?" It's like a knife in my belly.
An even pithier version is "Looks like someone has too much time on his hands." I've complained, on Metafilter and other places, about that phrase. I hate it. Like Assange, I have a lot of oddball interests (luckily for me -- and I really mean "luckily," because there but for the grace of God... -- hacking isn't one of them), interests that have nothing to do with power, money, notoriety or sex. I spend hours and hours on those interests, and so I get "Looks like someone has too much time on his hands" a lot. To be honest, my response (which I generally keep to myself) is "up yours, you soulless fuck!"
But I understand that, for many, those urges are pretty much all there is, except that I'd replace "celebrity" with a the larger category of social cache. According to this view, we do what we do for love, friendship, respect, money, power and sex. And that's it. Everything we do should be traceable (if not reducible) to one of those fundamental drives. So if I spend two years building a lego tower that I never show to anyone, I'm acting in an inexplicable way. I have too much time on my hands. I am doing stuff "for no reason," because when you take those commonly understood reasons, "what is left?"
What's left is working through a system, completing a project, learning a new skill, experiencing a particular sensation or ritual... not for any of those common purposes -- not so you can impress people, get girls or whatever -- but, as the famous Everest climber said, "Because it's there."
Sticking steadfastly to some political ideal is the same urge. Ultimately, it's aesthetic. It's working a system through to its logical ends, insisting on dotting every i and crossing every t. To that mindset, a system is pointless unless it's perfect -- or unless its experienced perfectly. This is the same drive that propels nuns to take vows of silence. It drove Jackson Pollack. It makes Stephen Sondheim say that every tiny word in a song lyric is vitally important. It makes computer programmers -- some of them -- spend hours coining names for variables.
(Amateur programers think the whole point is making the program work. It will work just as well if a variable is named hs as if it's named highScore. Pros know that getting the program to work is just part of the point. It should be readable, self-documenting and elegant. So highScore is a much better choice. Or should it be playerHighScore? Or humanPlayerHighScore? ...)
One of my obsessions is directing plays. Yes, I do it partly because it's a way for me to hang out with my friends. Yes, I do it because I like the praise. Yes, I do it -- or I did it -- to meet girls (I married an actress). I would happily do it for money, if only someone would offer me some.
But if you told me I'll never get paid (which is likely), that I could only direct actors I don't particularly like, that no one will ever see my plays, that (assuming I was single), girls wouldn't give a shit... Well, I'd be upset, but I'd still direct plays. That's right: I'd direct plays even if I had to act them out myself, in an otherwise empty room, for an audience of myself. And if you don't understand why I'd do that, you'll never understand "what's left." Because what's left is the process of working on the play. That can't be reduced to sex, money, power or social needs. It's its own need.
That, to me, is an extraordinary question. And, by that, I don't mean it's a stupid one. It's actually an elegant, pithy wording of a common attitude -- one that's diametrically opposed to a less common attitude. The part that kills me is "what is left?" It's like a knife in my belly.
An even pithier version is "Looks like someone has too much time on his hands." I've complained, on Metafilter and other places, about that phrase. I hate it. Like Assange, I have a lot of oddball interests (luckily for me -- and I really mean "luckily," because there but for the grace of God... -- hacking isn't one of them), interests that have nothing to do with power, money, notoriety or sex. I spend hours and hours on those interests, and so I get "Looks like someone has too much time on his hands" a lot. To be honest, my response (which I generally keep to myself) is "up yours, you soulless fuck!"
But I understand that, for many, those urges are pretty much all there is, except that I'd replace "celebrity" with a the larger category of social cache. According to this view, we do what we do for love, friendship, respect, money, power and sex. And that's it. Everything we do should be traceable (if not reducible) to one of those fundamental drives. So if I spend two years building a lego tower that I never show to anyone, I'm acting in an inexplicable way. I have too much time on my hands. I am doing stuff "for no reason," because when you take those commonly understood reasons, "what is left?"
What's left is working through a system, completing a project, learning a new skill, experiencing a particular sensation or ritual... not for any of those common purposes -- not so you can impress people, get girls or whatever -- but, as the famous Everest climber said, "Because it's there."
Sticking steadfastly to some political ideal is the same urge. Ultimately, it's aesthetic. It's working a system through to its logical ends, insisting on dotting every i and crossing every t. To that mindset, a system is pointless unless it's perfect -- or unless its experienced perfectly. This is the same drive that propels nuns to take vows of silence. It drove Jackson Pollack. It makes Stephen Sondheim say that every tiny word in a song lyric is vitally important. It makes computer programmers -- some of them -- spend hours coining names for variables.
(Amateur programers think the whole point is making the program work. It will work just as well if a variable is named hs as if it's named highScore. Pros know that getting the program to work is just part of the point. It should be readable, self-documenting and elegant. So highScore is a much better choice. Or should it be playerHighScore? Or humanPlayerHighScore? ...)
One of my obsessions is directing plays. Yes, I do it partly because it's a way for me to hang out with my friends. Yes, I do it because I like the praise. Yes, I do it -- or I did it -- to meet girls (I married an actress). I would happily do it for money, if only someone would offer me some.
But if you told me I'll never get paid (which is likely), that I could only direct actors I don't particularly like, that no one will ever see my plays, that (assuming I was single), girls wouldn't give a shit... Well, I'd be upset, but I'd still direct plays. That's right: I'd direct plays even if I had to act them out myself, in an otherwise empty room, for an audience of myself. And if you don't understand why I'd do that, you'll never understand "what's left." Because what's left is the process of working on the play. That can't be reduced to sex, money, power or social needs. It's its own need.
Friday, December 24, 2010
more bullshit
"He who questions training only trains himself at asking questions."
"When you doubt your powers, you give power to your doubts."
"We are number one! All others are number two, or lower."
- The Sphinx from "Mystery Men"
By now, I should expect bullshit from academics and critics. Maybe I should be charmed by it: "whatchagonnado?" But I'm not. I can't seem to lose my innocence. I assume educators and writers are trying to communicate something that makes sense. Yet when another apple from the nonsense tree bops me on the head, I'm shocked and angered again, as if it was happening to me for the first time.
In this piece on Edward Hopper, Morgan Meis, who "is currently finishing his Ph.D. in philosophy at the New School for Social Research [and] teaches undergraduate philosophy courses at Eugene Lang College and at various other institutions ... throughout the city, including Columbia University," launches into the bullshit almost immediately: "Is he a cliché? That's the question you keep coming back to when you look at the paintings of Edward Hopper." No, it's not. It's not a question I have ever even once asked myself, while looking at any painting by Hopper or anyone else.
There's no such thing as a universal cliché. "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" is a cliché to me, as it probably is to most adult English speakers, but to someone who has never heard the phrase before, it's potentially a strong, witty and vivid metaphor. Clichés are subjective. And, as the owner of his subjectivity, each person instantly know if something is cliché to him or not. He may not be comfortable with the word "cliché," but he knows whether something affects him in a visceral way or if it's so blunted that it bounces off him. He's either affected by it or he isn't.
Sometimes I hear people say, "I know that's a cliché, but it still makes me cry." Then it's NOT a cliché -- to you! What you probably mean is this: "I know many people consider it a cliché. But I'm moved by it. And since I know most people aren't -- since I know most people think folks like me are sentimental fools -- I'm embarrassed. I'm ashamed that I'm moved. I hope no one finds out. Or I hope I can figure out some way to prove to everyone that they're wrong -- that it's not a cliché." I wonder if this is Meis's real concern. Is he embarrassed that he likes Hopper paintings?
When he asks, "Is he a cliché? That's the question you keep coming back to when you look at the paintings of Edward Hopper," I wonder what will happen to him when he's finally able to answer the question. If he like Hopper but figures out that, yes, he's cliché, will that knowledge suddenly make him stop liking Hopper? "Big Macs taste terrible!" "Oh, they do? Thanks for clearing that up for me. Now I'll know not to like them any more."
Meis is fond of talking about "you" and "we" when he means -- or should mean -- himself:
"We may have to accept the fact that Hopper painted the sad clown smoking a cigarette in the café because he felt it to be a poignant scene."
"Still, we wonder. Did Hopper stick to his guns for all the right reasons?"
"We know that there is an entire universe of interiority unfolding within that person as she does what she does."
This is such an old bullshit trick, most people probably don't notice it. It's a rhetorical device that's supposed to make a personal observation sound universal: "It's true and you know it's true!" No, I don't. "When we think about our childhood, we yearn for our innocent pasts." No, we don't. Just be honest, Mr. Writer. Write, "When I think about my childhood, I yearn for my innocent past." I know that doesn't sound as profound as a universal statement. And that's because it's not. Sorry. Saying "we" doesn't make it more profound or universal. Just tell the truth, which is about your experience. It might be mine, too. Let me decide. Don't tell me what I think. Or, if you're really brave, try writing things like this: "When we see a small child, we want to pick up an axe and chop her head off."
Of Hopper's painting "Soir Bleu," Meis writes: "We may have to accept the fact that Hopper painted the sad clown smoking a cigarette in the café because he felt it to be a poignant scene. He was so moved by the depressed clown that he went and painted one of the silliest paintings of the era."
Well, I keep looking and looking at the painting, which is not one of my favorites, either, but I'll be damned if I see a depressed clown.
http://connect.in.com/hopper/photos-1-1-1-ce64547cb28f18134448be85d813f96e.html
What I see is a clown with a rather neutral expression. He COULD be sad. He could be pensive, bored, concentrating, tired, constipated, whatever. I have absolutely no problem with Meis or any other viewer thinking of the clown as sad. I make up stories about paintings all the time. (I think the Mona Lisa owes me five dollars.) But the clown is not necessarily, universally sad to all viewers. There's no information in the actual painting that forces or urges the viewer to see the clown as sad.
"He didn't want to be an abstract painter. His mind was not blown by Cubism. He did not succumb to the excitement of any avant-garde. How many of us have ever shown that kind of resolution?"
Presumably, any painter who knows about the existence of non-realism and yet continues to paint realistically shows that kind of resolution.
"The fact that so many of Hopper's paintings make good postcards and prints makes the worry about cliché even stronger."
Why is Meis so worried about it? When he looks at Hopper's paintings, what is his actual experience? "Oh, dear... this might be cliché. If it is, what are we going to do?"
"His most famous painting, 'Nighthawks' ..., the one with the people sitting in a diner late at night, has become global kitsch. ...The accessibility and near-universal appeal of that painting, like so much of Hopper, starts to make a person suspicious."
Very, very odd. Meis can't tell, for sure, if something is cliché or not. To him, cliché is a sly trait that an artist can sneak into a painting. You might be innocently enjoying it, not knowing that it's cliché! How embarrassing! Can't you just see all those sophisticated museum-goers, laughing behind your back, while you're standing there, looking at "Nighthawks," with a tear running down your face?
I'm also not sure what near-universal appeal has to do with cliché. Sounds a bit snobbish to me.
Not content with his own nonsense, Meis wheels in Clement Greenberg, "the great American critic of postwar painting and the champion of the Abstract Expressionists," to spout some of his own: "Even though Hopper is a terrible painter, Greenberg famously remarked, he is a great artist."
What does that mean? Hopper makes paintings that move people, but you'd be crazy to hire him to paint your living room?
Then Meis makes this baffling statement (which sounds clever if you don't think about it): "Hopper seems to have been fascinated with the fact that all people can really know about each other are what they show on the surface."
Well, all people CAN know about each other is what they show on the surface -- AND what they say. But since paintings are silent, they always -- the figurative ones, anyway -- only show people's surfaces. This is as true of Davinci's and Carravagio's paintings as it is of Hopper's. It's a really boring, obvious thing to say. Yes, a figurative painting can't show you what someone is thinking, unless it includes a comic-book thought balloon.
"Hopper was dealing with people and places as surface. Everybody is nothing more than what they look like, how they behave. And yet, we know that to be human is to inhabit our own interior, to be in our own head, to feel a million different emotions every day that we never get the chance to express fully, even to ourselves."
Since WE know that humans have inner lives, it sounds like Meis is saying that Hopper doesn't know that -- or doesn't agree with it: "Everybody is nothing more than what they look like, how they behave." How do his paintings convey that idea? Even though I have no idea whether the clown is sad or not, to me, it looks like there's something going on in his head. I assume he has an inner life. So if Hopper's goal was to get me to feel or think the clown is entirely surface, Hopper failed.
"Hopper ... paints individuals of great inner depth with the full knowledge that that inner depth itself can never be painted."
I really hope all painters (and all non-painters) have that same knowledge.
"Because he is painting people as surfaces, he is going to flirt with cliché constantly."
So I guess all figurative painters flirt with cliché constantly. Because they all paint surfaces.
"When he gets it wrong, when he tries to be too evocative, too objective, the whole thing falls apart."
What does "too objective" mean? It sounds like the opposite of "too evocative." It sounds journalistic. But I'm not really sure what "too evocative" means, either.
But maybe I'm guilty of the crimes I'm accusing Meis of committing. Maybe I'm projecting my subjective beliefs onto other people, specifically my belief that it's impossible to paint a realistic picture of someone's inner life. Meis certainly disagrees:
"[Hopper's painting] 'New York Interior' gives us a woman wrapped up in the process of acting and doing and thinking and dreaming all at once. We don't even have the faintest glimpse of what could be going on in her head, where her thoughts have wandered as she sews her dress. But we know that she is going somewhere, mentally, that her thoughts are wandering."
Here's the painting: http://www.thesmartset.com/files/Images/Daily/Idle_Chatter/ID_IC_MEIS_HOPPE_AP_001.jpg
Yes, her thoughts may be wondering. Or, as Meis says, contradicting himself, she may be "heavily involved in the process of what looks to be the sewing of a dress ... as she concentrates."
Well, we don't have to debate it. We know for sure that her mind is wondering, because "we know that she is going somewhere, mentally, that her thoughts are wandering. It is in her gesture, in the absent-minded way she pulls the thread."
I'm really trying to see her gesture as "absent-minded," but I just can't. What I see her doing is what someone has to do when sewing by hand -- pulling the needle away from the cloth.
Like me, Meis loves the painting: "It is a great painting because it hovers so very close to being a cliché without ever crossing that line." But we disagree about cliché. I don't think something can be kinda cliché or almost cliché. Cliché-ness is a binary property. Something is either cliché or it's not.
I'm sorry to be so hard on Meis. He's just doing what countless academics do: he's using rhetoric to make vacuous statements sound like profundities, personal feeling sound like universal truths and nonsense sound like logic. He's also trying to express his visceral response to a painting in the form of a logical proposition, and this is an activity generally doomed to failure.
Meis is playing the game. He's playing the game that countless students and teachers and pundits and critics play out many times each day. I am being unfair in that I'm criticizing the player and not the game itself. I'm saying "How dare he make a forward pass," when, in fact, that's what you do when you're playing football. So I'll end by saying this: go to a museum, look at an painting, have an experience. If it affects you, it affects you; if it doesn't, it doesn't. If you have something truly interesting to say about the painting, by all means do so. If you don't, shut up! Don't add more blah blah blah to a river that's already overflowing.
"When you doubt your powers, you give power to your doubts."
"We are number one! All others are number two, or lower."
- The Sphinx from "Mystery Men"
By now, I should expect bullshit from academics and critics. Maybe I should be charmed by it: "whatchagonnado?" But I'm not. I can't seem to lose my innocence. I assume educators and writers are trying to communicate something that makes sense. Yet when another apple from the nonsense tree bops me on the head, I'm shocked and angered again, as if it was happening to me for the first time.
In this piece on Edward Hopper, Morgan Meis, who "is currently finishing his Ph.D. in philosophy at the New School for Social Research [and] teaches undergraduate philosophy courses at Eugene Lang College and at various other institutions ... throughout the city, including Columbia University," launches into the bullshit almost immediately: "Is he a cliché? That's the question you keep coming back to when you look at the paintings of Edward Hopper." No, it's not. It's not a question I have ever even once asked myself, while looking at any painting by Hopper or anyone else.
There's no such thing as a universal cliché. "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" is a cliché to me, as it probably is to most adult English speakers, but to someone who has never heard the phrase before, it's potentially a strong, witty and vivid metaphor. Clichés are subjective. And, as the owner of his subjectivity, each person instantly know if something is cliché to him or not. He may not be comfortable with the word "cliché," but he knows whether something affects him in a visceral way or if it's so blunted that it bounces off him. He's either affected by it or he isn't.
Sometimes I hear people say, "I know that's a cliché, but it still makes me cry." Then it's NOT a cliché -- to you! What you probably mean is this: "I know many people consider it a cliché. But I'm moved by it. And since I know most people aren't -- since I know most people think folks like me are sentimental fools -- I'm embarrassed. I'm ashamed that I'm moved. I hope no one finds out. Or I hope I can figure out some way to prove to everyone that they're wrong -- that it's not a cliché." I wonder if this is Meis's real concern. Is he embarrassed that he likes Hopper paintings?
When he asks, "Is he a cliché? That's the question you keep coming back to when you look at the paintings of Edward Hopper," I wonder what will happen to him when he's finally able to answer the question. If he like Hopper but figures out that, yes, he's cliché, will that knowledge suddenly make him stop liking Hopper? "Big Macs taste terrible!" "Oh, they do? Thanks for clearing that up for me. Now I'll know not to like them any more."
Meis is fond of talking about "you" and "we" when he means -- or should mean -- himself:
"We may have to accept the fact that Hopper painted the sad clown smoking a cigarette in the café because he felt it to be a poignant scene."
"Still, we wonder. Did Hopper stick to his guns for all the right reasons?"
"We know that there is an entire universe of interiority unfolding within that person as she does what she does."
This is such an old bullshit trick, most people probably don't notice it. It's a rhetorical device that's supposed to make a personal observation sound universal: "It's true and you know it's true!" No, I don't. "When we think about our childhood, we yearn for our innocent pasts." No, we don't. Just be honest, Mr. Writer. Write, "When I think about my childhood, I yearn for my innocent past." I know that doesn't sound as profound as a universal statement. And that's because it's not. Sorry. Saying "we" doesn't make it more profound or universal. Just tell the truth, which is about your experience. It might be mine, too. Let me decide. Don't tell me what I think. Or, if you're really brave, try writing things like this: "When we see a small child, we want to pick up an axe and chop her head off."
Of Hopper's painting "Soir Bleu," Meis writes: "We may have to accept the fact that Hopper painted the sad clown smoking a cigarette in the café because he felt it to be a poignant scene. He was so moved by the depressed clown that he went and painted one of the silliest paintings of the era."
Well, I keep looking and looking at the painting, which is not one of my favorites, either, but I'll be damned if I see a depressed clown.
http://connect.in.com/hopper/photos-1-1-1-ce64547cb28f18134448be85d813f96e.html
What I see is a clown with a rather neutral expression. He COULD be sad. He could be pensive, bored, concentrating, tired, constipated, whatever. I have absolutely no problem with Meis or any other viewer thinking of the clown as sad. I make up stories about paintings all the time. (I think the Mona Lisa owes me five dollars.) But the clown is not necessarily, universally sad to all viewers. There's no information in the actual painting that forces or urges the viewer to see the clown as sad.
"He didn't want to be an abstract painter. His mind was not blown by Cubism. He did not succumb to the excitement of any avant-garde. How many of us have ever shown that kind of resolution?"
Presumably, any painter who knows about the existence of non-realism and yet continues to paint realistically shows that kind of resolution.
"The fact that so many of Hopper's paintings make good postcards and prints makes the worry about cliché even stronger."
Why is Meis so worried about it? When he looks at Hopper's paintings, what is his actual experience? "Oh, dear... this might be cliché. If it is, what are we going to do?"
"His most famous painting, 'Nighthawks' ..., the one with the people sitting in a diner late at night, has become global kitsch. ...The accessibility and near-universal appeal of that painting, like so much of Hopper, starts to make a person suspicious."
Very, very odd. Meis can't tell, for sure, if something is cliché or not. To him, cliché is a sly trait that an artist can sneak into a painting. You might be innocently enjoying it, not knowing that it's cliché! How embarrassing! Can't you just see all those sophisticated museum-goers, laughing behind your back, while you're standing there, looking at "Nighthawks," with a tear running down your face?
I'm also not sure what near-universal appeal has to do with cliché. Sounds a bit snobbish to me.
Not content with his own nonsense, Meis wheels in Clement Greenberg, "the great American critic of postwar painting and the champion of the Abstract Expressionists," to spout some of his own: "Even though Hopper is a terrible painter, Greenberg famously remarked, he is a great artist."
What does that mean? Hopper makes paintings that move people, but you'd be crazy to hire him to paint your living room?
Then Meis makes this baffling statement (which sounds clever if you don't think about it): "Hopper seems to have been fascinated with the fact that all people can really know about each other are what they show on the surface."
Well, all people CAN know about each other is what they show on the surface -- AND what they say. But since paintings are silent, they always -- the figurative ones, anyway -- only show people's surfaces. This is as true of Davinci's and Carravagio's paintings as it is of Hopper's. It's a really boring, obvious thing to say. Yes, a figurative painting can't show you what someone is thinking, unless it includes a comic-book thought balloon.
"Hopper was dealing with people and places as surface. Everybody is nothing more than what they look like, how they behave. And yet, we know that to be human is to inhabit our own interior, to be in our own head, to feel a million different emotions every day that we never get the chance to express fully, even to ourselves."
Since WE know that humans have inner lives, it sounds like Meis is saying that Hopper doesn't know that -- or doesn't agree with it: "Everybody is nothing more than what they look like, how they behave." How do his paintings convey that idea? Even though I have no idea whether the clown is sad or not, to me, it looks like there's something going on in his head. I assume he has an inner life. So if Hopper's goal was to get me to feel or think the clown is entirely surface, Hopper failed.
"Hopper ... paints individuals of great inner depth with the full knowledge that that inner depth itself can never be painted."
I really hope all painters (and all non-painters) have that same knowledge.
"Because he is painting people as surfaces, he is going to flirt with cliché constantly."
So I guess all figurative painters flirt with cliché constantly. Because they all paint surfaces.
"When he gets it wrong, when he tries to be too evocative, too objective, the whole thing falls apart."
What does "too objective" mean? It sounds like the opposite of "too evocative." It sounds journalistic. But I'm not really sure what "too evocative" means, either.
But maybe I'm guilty of the crimes I'm accusing Meis of committing. Maybe I'm projecting my subjective beliefs onto other people, specifically my belief that it's impossible to paint a realistic picture of someone's inner life. Meis certainly disagrees:
"[Hopper's painting] 'New York Interior' gives us a woman wrapped up in the process of acting and doing and thinking and dreaming all at once. We don't even have the faintest glimpse of what could be going on in her head, where her thoughts have wandered as she sews her dress. But we know that she is going somewhere, mentally, that her thoughts are wandering."
Here's the painting: http://www.thesmartset.com/files/Images/Daily/Idle_Chatter/ID_IC_MEIS_HOPPE_AP_001.jpg
Yes, her thoughts may be wondering. Or, as Meis says, contradicting himself, she may be "heavily involved in the process of what looks to be the sewing of a dress ... as she concentrates."
Well, we don't have to debate it. We know for sure that her mind is wondering, because "we know that she is going somewhere, mentally, that her thoughts are wandering. It is in her gesture, in the absent-minded way she pulls the thread."
I'm really trying to see her gesture as "absent-minded," but I just can't. What I see her doing is what someone has to do when sewing by hand -- pulling the needle away from the cloth.
Like me, Meis loves the painting: "It is a great painting because it hovers so very close to being a cliché without ever crossing that line." But we disagree about cliché. I don't think something can be kinda cliché or almost cliché. Cliché-ness is a binary property. Something is either cliché or it's not.
I'm sorry to be so hard on Meis. He's just doing what countless academics do: he's using rhetoric to make vacuous statements sound like profundities, personal feeling sound like universal truths and nonsense sound like logic. He's also trying to express his visceral response to a painting in the form of a logical proposition, and this is an activity generally doomed to failure.
Meis is playing the game. He's playing the game that countless students and teachers and pundits and critics play out many times each day. I am being unfair in that I'm criticizing the player and not the game itself. I'm saying "How dare he make a forward pass," when, in fact, that's what you do when you're playing football. So I'll end by saying this: go to a museum, look at an painting, have an experience. If it affects you, it affects you; if it doesn't, it doesn't. If you have something truly interesting to say about the painting, by all means do so. If you don't, shut up! Don't add more blah blah blah to a river that's already overflowing.
Saturday, December 11, 2010
required classes
Someone emailed me, asking why I am against required classes. Here's my response:
Regarding school, most people are stuck in a mental rut. I was, and it took me years of reading, thinking and debating to claw my way out of it. Thinking clearly about school is like imagining alien life. It's really hard -- impossible? -- to imagine it without picturing human, animal or insect forms. One's mind grasp a few other possibilities (e.g. giant gas clouds), but it's mostly stuck thinking in terrestrial terms. Earth forms are all we know. Worse, Earth forms seem inevitable, as if having-two-eyes is writ into the rules of the universe.
School, for most of us, is like this. We started experiencing the sort of schools we have when we were very, very young, and we went on experiencing them for many years, maybe twenty or more. So when I make a claim that schools should be very different from them way they are, people have a viscerally unpleasant reaction. That's natural. But, if they want to think clearly about education, try should try to figure out why they're uncomfortable. Is it because my idea is bad or is it because I'm rocking a foundational boat? When boats rock, people get seasick.
I get frustrated when people argue about school, because it's usually like hearing people argue about whether Camel Lights or Marlboro Lights are least likely to give you cancer, instead of saying, "Hey, let's just quit smoking."
I hear people fight about whether we should use this textbook or that textbook, but not about whether we should or shouldn't use textbooks at all; they fight about whether kids should be tested via essay questions or multiple-choice problems, but not on whether kids should be tested at all; they argue about whether or not teachers should lecture about Creationism or Evolution, but not about whether lecturing is a useful pedagogical tool; they argue about whether kids should or shouldn't listen to music while they do their homework, but not about whether or not they should be don't homework at all. They argue about whether this or a particular class should be required, but not about whether classes should be required at all.
I'm not suggesting, at least in this paragraph, that we should do away with textbooks, tests and requirements. What saddens me is that people's minds just refuse to explore these foundational questions. For most people, they aren't questions. Of course kids do homework! Homework like the sky or rocks. It just exists, right?
Yet I insist that if we're going to have textbooks, tests, lectures, homework and requirements, we should have them for a good, logical (at best empirical) reason -- not due to inertia, not because they're the defaults.
Because people cling to what they know, when I say, "I don't believe in requirements," they picture their high school, as it was when they went to it, but with no required courses. They picture themselves in sixth grade, all the sudden being told they don't have to do anything they don't want to do. They say, "Oh, man! If I wasn't forced, I would never have learned ANYTHING!" What they're not picturing is a child who has grown up, from preschool, with a totally different sort of experience.
I spent many years working with young children in a daycare center for preschoolers, with a summer program for older kids. So I was with two-through-five-year-olds year round. Then, my students would graduate and move on to public or private elementary schools. But I'd see them during the summers. I saw what school did to them, and it gibed with what I remembered from my own schooling.
Children are born as learning machines. No one has to force them to learn. They have a drive to do it that is at least as strong as the sex drive in adults. Then, gradually, school beats it out of them. School teaches them that learning is work, not fun -- that learning is something you do at someone else's pace, not your pace. Gradually, most kids forget that they used to love to learn. As adults, all they can remember is the school sort of learning, the forced sort. They know it was painful, but they value what they got out of it. They can't imagine it not being painful (because they can't remember their early childhood), so they naturally assume this is important, worthwhile pain, and that the alternative is ignorance.
I also spent years teaching adults. I taught computer classes to people whose companies were forcing them to use computers. They always said the same thing: "I'm not a computer person. I just don't get this stuff." What I learned, from talking to them and observing them in their workplaces (and, frankly, from talking to my family and friends) was this: these people didn't have trouble with computers; they have trouble with learning anything new, because they haven't had to do that in years. They "aren't computer people" because it just so happens that computers are the only things they've been forced to learn as adults.
Most professional people work from rote. Even highly skilled professionals, such as GP Doctors and non-trial lawyers. They learn their skills to the point where them becomes automatic, freeing them up so they can get a paycheck by just going through motions.
I now make my living as a computer programmer. Every day DOES involve some real problem solving, but about 80% of my work is just plugging in boilerplate solutions. Many of these are solutions that "laypeople" couldn't employ, which is what makes me highly skilled. Still, once I worked them out for the first time, it took no skill to employ them a second or third time.
Most adults do little learning or problem-solving at work, and when they get home, they watch TV, talk to their friends and family about light-hearted, unchallenging stuff, do mindless chores and go to bed. What they don't do is read Shakespeare plays for fun, do math problems for fun, learn foreign languages for fun, etc. Why not? What happened to that LUST for learning they had as kids?
It's possibly that this desire naturally falls away from people as they get older, but I don't believe it. It's telling that kids who didn't go through traditional schooling -- kids that were allowed to keep learning in a natural way, following their own instincts -- tend to never lose this lust. In their 80s, they are still challenging themselves, for no other reason than because it's the most fun they can possibly have. So I believe that the reason most people stop learning (when they don't have to) is that school teaches them to associate learning with pain, boredom and forced labor.
By the time a kid is halfway through elementary school, the damage is already done. It only takes a couple of years to replace "learning is something I naturally do and love to do" with "learning is something I have to be forced to do," so of course people wind up thinking, "Thank God Mrs. Wilson forced me to learn grammar! If she hadn't, I never would have!" They're right. They're right because school turned them into that sort of person.
"If we didn't require people to learn to read, some of them would never learn!" That's the most common objection to dropping requirements, so let me address it.
First of all, note that we don't force people to learn to read. In fact, it's impossible to force anyone to learn anything. What we do -- when we require certain subjects -- is to force kids to go to classes. We force them to spend a certain amount of time in certain rooms with certain teachers. If doing that doesn't end up with a particular kid learning to read, we shrug and say, "Well, we did our best." A lot of the reason we force kids it to absolve ourselves. "Hey, we tried!"
Note that whatever we do, a certain number of kids (because they don't pay attention or "apply themselves") will not learn. A certain number will not learn if we have requirements; a certain number will not learn if we don't have requirements.
So the issue shouldn't be "if we don't have requirements, some kids won't choose to learn to read." The issue should be (a) what will produce MORE literate kids, a system with requirements or a system without it, and (b) what will produce more kids who have a lifetime LOVE of reading, a system with requirements or a system without it?
The truth is, no one wants to be illiterate. By the time a kid is eight (or perhaps younger), he already is very upset if he can't read. Our culture is full of things that need to be read. So naturally everyone want to be able to understand those things. It's not that people don't want to read: it's that people don't want to go through the pain of learning to read. If we took the pain away and said, "Hey, learn when you want to -- here are the resources," most people would learn.
"Here are the good resources" is key. If we're going to drop requirements, we also have to drop boring, incompetant teachers. We have to put kids in environments full of rich materials, full of lusty art and enticing scientifi experienets. We need teachers who ratiate enthusiasm. We need a world that says, "No one is going to force you to go to the really fun party if you don't want to." Which is why dropping requirements won't work in a standard elementary school or high school. Of COURSE kids won't choose to go to Mr. Boring's Algebra class or Mrs. Nasty's English class!
You asked about books that turned me on to this way of thinking. The main one was "Summerhill" by A. S. Neill.
http://www.amazon.com/Summerhill-School-New-View-Childhood/dp/0312141378/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1292082736&sr=8-1
Warning: it was written in 1960, and it contains some offensive (e.g. sexist, homophobic) writing that was a product of the way many people thought at the time. (Though I linked to an "updated" edition, so maybe that stuff has been removed.) If you read it, I urge you to try to look past that crap to the ideas underneath.
Summerhill was (maybe "is." I don't know if it still exists) a school in England -- elementary-through-high-school -- with no requirements. Kids weren't even required to go to class. That's right, they could run around outside all day if they wanted to. No on forced them to do anything.
The result? Most of them -- almost all of them -- chose to go to class. When kids transfered there from other schools, naturally they said, "No one's going to make me go to class? SWEET!" And they spent a couple of months goofing off. Then they got bored, got the rebellion of of their systems, and started going to class.
The school produced many successful people.
I don't expect you to come to the same conclusion as me about this subject. But I am thrilled it's something you're thinking about.
Thursday, November 25, 2010
my response to a YouTube video defending modern art
Response to One day, Pablo PIcasso was on a Train... (A Defense of Modern Art):
"You cannot just dismiss an entire movement simply because it doesn't look like art. That's the whole damn point of the modern-art movement. You don't get to say what is and what isn't art. Because you don't know. No one does."
So there's a thing called "art"?
How do we know this thing exists? The philospher doesn't say.
Well, how do we usually know something exists? We go find it in the world. How do we do that? Well, we have a description of it, which may or may not correspond to reality, and we go looking for something that matches that description. (We form a hypothesis that object X is a thing in the real world that has properties A and B, sometimes C and never D. Then we go looking for objects that match that description.)
It's worthless and pointless for me to say "There's an object called a "blurg." Does it exist?"
"What's it like?"
"I don't know. But, still, I ask you if it exists?"
That's what he's doing. He's saying, "There's something called 'art' that exists. I'm not going to define it or describe it, but it exists. Given that it DOES exist, I'm really upset that some asshole is claiming some specific objects are not 'art.' I can't define 'art'; he can't define 'art'; and yet he has the AUDACITY to say that certain items are not art!"
Actually, now that I type that out, I see he's right about that in a very literal way: you can't say that a paperclip is not a blurg, because you don't know what a blurg is! No one does!
(I should pause here and make clear what I mean by "it exists." I doubt the philosopher believes there's a thing called "art" that you can touch and smell. Rather, I assume he believes that it exists as a mental construct -- as a category in the mind.
By building on top of that construct -- by using it in sentences and deriving other ideas from it -- he's giving that construct credence. He's saying something like, "This is a USEFUL construct." He's also saying, "This is a construct we share, just like we all -- or most of us -- share the concept of 'red.'"
But whereas it's actually possible to define "red" -- in terms of wavelengths or whatever -- he doesn't even try to define "art."
"It's a concept we all share, and I'm assuming we all mean more or less the same thing by it. I can't define or describe it, but how DARE you say something I don't like about it.")
I think the complicating factor here is that though no one has a definition or description of art that is even close to universally accepted, most of us have a profound FEELING that "art" exists. I would love to analyze where that feeling comes from and what it means, but I'm not sure that's possible.
I suspect it arises from many forces acting in concert over many years, but two of the main ones are...
1. Looking (listening, etc) to certain objects can make one have profound feelings (of some sort). And it's easy to notice that, throughout life, certain objects tend to trigger such feelings over and over.
(There's a lot of fascinating stuff to say about that. One is the fact that having a visceral reaction to something is different from categorizing something, though having the reaction might lead one to categorize.
For instance, when Fred first sees "Starry Night," he might be overwhelmed with feeling. He might recognize that that he's had similar responses before, and, generally, when he's had them, he's been focusing his attention on something people tend to call "art." And so he categorizes "Starry Night" as art.
There's nothing wrong with that. But let's say that he buys a print of the painting and puts it up in his living room. He looks at it every day and, gradually, it stops affecting him. He gets to that point where it becomes part of the background. Even if he wants to, he can't recapture the feeling he once had. Yet, if he's like most people, he still categorizes the painting as "art." It's rare for people to move objects OUT of categories.
I still see nothing wrong with what Fred is doing. People are free to categorize things however they want. But it's interesting to note that "Starry Night" went into the category because it ONCE affected him in a certain way and now it's still in that category, even though it no longer affects him that way.
Given that, does the category have any meaning to Fred, other than an arbitrary grouping of objects? I suspect we can give it a useful meaning: it's a set of things that ONCE affected Fred in a profound way -- some of which might still affect him that way -- and which are likely to affect other people in similar ways, if their aesthetics are similar to Fred's.
I think that works, but it's much more complex than it seems on the surface.)
2. The feeling that something is "art" can also happen because one is TOLD that something is "art." A child might not know what art is, but he knows it's something important -- that is he's aware that people say the word "art" with reverence (or anger or bafflement or pleasure or whatever -- some extreme reaction). So, even if someone feels nothing when he initially looks at The Mona Lisa, if he's told it's "art" -- and he's "told" that by virtue of that fact that it's in a museum -- he may have a profound feeling that it IS art.
It's easy to scoff at this and talk about people who can't form opinions of their own, but we're social creatures. We're built to accept other people's categories, and what's interesting to me is that it's not necessarily just a matter of acceptance.
Fred MIGHT feel like "Okay, since it's in a museum and everyone SAYS it's art, I guess it's art. Whatever. Glad that's categorized. Now I can move on." But it's also possible he might feel like "Wow! It's art? I didn't know that! Man, now that I DO know it, I feel really moved when I look at it."
We tend to look at herd behavior as unthinking -- and maybe it is -- but it is rarely unFEELING. The question "Does Fred REALLY get a profound feeling when he looks at The Mona Lisa or is he just aping what other people say" is, potentially, really complicated and not binary as the question suggests. He might be getting a profound feeling BECAUSE he's aping what other people say.
And, of course, these two forces -- one's initial response to the object itself AND one's social response -- can interact and strengthen each other.
Those two forces can also be at odds, which, I think, is why we get into some of these aesthetic debates: Fred is told that object X is "art," so it's already in the "art" category. But when he looks at X, he feels nothing. So is it art or not?
Though there may be some profound (and profoundly oppositional) feelings here, there really isn't a debate. There are some facts:
1. People generally categorize X as art.
2. Fred cares about the way people categorize X.
3. Fred doesn't have strong feelings when he looks at X.
4. Fred generally doesn't feel comfortable putting items in HIS personal "art" category unless they affect him profoundly.
There's no contradiction here, but it's easy to see why Fred feels uncomfortable. The general category called "art" is smashing up against his personal category called "art".
We can get rid of this problem by giving the two categories two different names. But we don't. We call them both "art," and because they have the same name and are similar, we get confused and think they're the same thing. And then when we notice differences between them, we think that ONE thing contains contractions or that certain people are wrong about that one thing.
The philosopher is mad because some other guy claims Pollack paintings aren't art. Let's see if we can get rid of the problem (or reframe it).
1. Fred notices that many people put Pollack paintings in a category called X.
2. He has a similar category, called Y, which but it doesn't include Pollack paintings.
3. X and Y are similar but not identical.
That's fine. North-America and USA are similar, but it's not a contradiction that one contains Ontario and the other doesn't.
If Fred claims, "People do NOT put Pollack paintings in category X," he's wrong. He's just wrong. They do. (Many of them do.)
If Philosopher clams that Fred is saying Pollack paintings aren't members of X, Philosopher is wrong. Fred is NOT claiming that most people don't put Pollack in X. He's claiming that he doesn't put Pollack in Y. (Fred is not claiming that OTHER people don't think of Pollack as art. He's claiming that HE doesn't think of it as art. And that is an ambiguous statement. What does it mean to say he doesn't think of it as art? We don't know. Since we don't know, it's silly to say Fred is wrong.)
If Philosopher is claiming that Fred is "wrong" to not put Pollack in Y, Philosopher is behaving oddly. He's saying something similar to, "You're wrong to not like broccoli." Fred is equally odd to claim something about the world outside of his own brain. If he means that Pollack is NOT art to anyone, he's just wrong. Clearly Pollack IS art to many people. If he means it SHOULDN'T be art to those people, he's being as nonsensical as Philosopher. Why not, Fred?
Fred can make up any reasons he wants, e.g. "Because it doesn't take talent to make Pollack paintings." Okay. Why should I care if something takes talent or not? Why should someone NOT care if something takes talent or not?
Finally, I'd like to say something about statements like, "You can't judge modern art without understanding its historical context." Taken literally, that statement is at worst meaningless and at best it's untrue. You CAN -- and maybe do -- judge modern art without understanding its context. Perhaps the philosopher means "You shouldn't."
Why not? I assume he doesn't think it's morally wrong to do so. Surely he doesn't think Fred is causing serious harm to anyone by judging Pollack without knowing its context. If the philosopher DOES think this is morally wrong, then his ethics must be really complicated and it must be really easy -- in his ethical system -- to sin all the time. Children sin just by not-having-yet-learned a bunch of stuff. The urge to judge comes way before the acquisition of contextual knowledge.
Here's how I can give meaning to "You can't judge modern art without understanding its historical context." I canrephrase it like this: "If you dismiss Pollack without understanding its context, you are missing out on a profound experience." In other words, if you spend some time learning some stuff and training yourself in certain specific ways, you will have profound feelings and thoughts when you look at a Pollack painting, and I'm sad for you that you're not willing to do that."
(There is a way ethics enters into it here. If an art critic -- or someone else who has influence over others' behavior -- dismisses a work without understanding its context, he might be robbing others of a profound experience.)
One question pops into my mind here: how do I know this will happen? How do I know that Fred will have a profound feeling if he learns the context? I don't. What I know is this: *I* had a profound feeling after I learned the context. Furthermore, I know that many other people did, too. I'm assuming that Fred is similar enough to me (and these other people) that he'll have the same feelings if he goes through the same steps. But I may be wrong. As yummy as it is, there are people who don't like chocolate.
(At some point, the philosopher calls a certain work "undeniably art." Interesting. Why is the fact that it's "art" undeniable? What if I deny it? Are there certain foods that are undeniably yummy?)
I suspect there ARE aesthetic universals. And I suspect they can be studied in the lab. I'm guessing that if they exist, they are really basic. Maybe people are genetically built to prefer shade-of-red X over shade-of-red Y, and it's impossible for any non-damaged human to prefer Y over X. But it's hard for me to swallow that there are universals of a higher order, e.g. that all people necessarily prefer "Hamlet" to "Macbeth."
We might be able to make really complex statements like, "If you have had events A, B and C in your childhood and educational moment D, E and F, you are likely to respond to Pollack painting in the same way that I do."
Professor McArtHistorian tells us that Painting X is "art." We read that it's "art" in ten books. We hear lots of people refer to it as "art." We have a profound "art-ish" experience when we look at it. Our friends have that same experience. All of these facts entrench us deeper and deeper int he conviction that X IS "art."
Then Fred comes along and says it isn't. It's natural to respond to him as if he just said "two plus two is not equal to four." But what he said is actually much more complicated. What is our basis for calling him "wrong"?
"You cannot just dismiss an entire movement simply because it doesn't look like art. That's the whole damn point of the modern-art movement. You don't get to say what is and what isn't art. Because you don't know. No one does."
So there's a thing called "art"?
How do we know this thing exists? The philospher doesn't say.
Well, how do we usually know something exists? We go find it in the world. How do we do that? Well, we have a description of it, which may or may not correspond to reality, and we go looking for something that matches that description. (We form a hypothesis that object X is a thing in the real world that has properties A and B, sometimes C and never D. Then we go looking for objects that match that description.)
It's worthless and pointless for me to say "There's an object called a "blurg." Does it exist?"
"What's it like?"
"I don't know. But, still, I ask you if it exists?"
That's what he's doing. He's saying, "There's something called 'art' that exists. I'm not going to define it or describe it, but it exists. Given that it DOES exist, I'm really upset that some asshole is claiming some specific objects are not 'art.' I can't define 'art'; he can't define 'art'; and yet he has the AUDACITY to say that certain items are not art!"
Actually, now that I type that out, I see he's right about that in a very literal way: you can't say that a paperclip is not a blurg, because you don't know what a blurg is! No one does!
(I should pause here and make clear what I mean by "it exists." I doubt the philosopher believes there's a thing called "art" that you can touch and smell. Rather, I assume he believes that it exists as a mental construct -- as a category in the mind.
By building on top of that construct -- by using it in sentences and deriving other ideas from it -- he's giving that construct credence. He's saying something like, "This is a USEFUL construct." He's also saying, "This is a construct we share, just like we all -- or most of us -- share the concept of 'red.'"
But whereas it's actually possible to define "red" -- in terms of wavelengths or whatever -- he doesn't even try to define "art."
"It's a concept we all share, and I'm assuming we all mean more or less the same thing by it. I can't define or describe it, but how DARE you say something I don't like about it.")
I think the complicating factor here is that though no one has a definition or description of art that is even close to universally accepted, most of us have a profound FEELING that "art" exists. I would love to analyze where that feeling comes from and what it means, but I'm not sure that's possible.
I suspect it arises from many forces acting in concert over many years, but two of the main ones are...
1. Looking (listening, etc) to certain objects can make one have profound feelings (of some sort). And it's easy to notice that, throughout life, certain objects tend to trigger such feelings over and over.
(There's a lot of fascinating stuff to say about that. One is the fact that having a visceral reaction to something is different from categorizing something, though having the reaction might lead one to categorize.
For instance, when Fred first sees "Starry Night," he might be overwhelmed with feeling. He might recognize that that he's had similar responses before, and, generally, when he's had them, he's been focusing his attention on something people tend to call "art." And so he categorizes "Starry Night" as art.
There's nothing wrong with that. But let's say that he buys a print of the painting and puts it up in his living room. He looks at it every day and, gradually, it stops affecting him. He gets to that point where it becomes part of the background. Even if he wants to, he can't recapture the feeling he once had. Yet, if he's like most people, he still categorizes the painting as "art." It's rare for people to move objects OUT of categories.
I still see nothing wrong with what Fred is doing. People are free to categorize things however they want. But it's interesting to note that "Starry Night" went into the category because it ONCE affected him in a certain way and now it's still in that category, even though it no longer affects him that way.
Given that, does the category have any meaning to Fred, other than an arbitrary grouping of objects? I suspect we can give it a useful meaning: it's a set of things that ONCE affected Fred in a profound way -- some of which might still affect him that way -- and which are likely to affect other people in similar ways, if their aesthetics are similar to Fred's.
I think that works, but it's much more complex than it seems on the surface.)
2. The feeling that something is "art" can also happen because one is TOLD that something is "art." A child might not know what art is, but he knows it's something important -- that is he's aware that people say the word "art" with reverence (or anger or bafflement or pleasure or whatever -- some extreme reaction). So, even if someone feels nothing when he initially looks at The Mona Lisa, if he's told it's "art" -- and he's "told" that by virtue of that fact that it's in a museum -- he may have a profound feeling that it IS art.
It's easy to scoff at this and talk about people who can't form opinions of their own, but we're social creatures. We're built to accept other people's categories, and what's interesting to me is that it's not necessarily just a matter of acceptance.
Fred MIGHT feel like "Okay, since it's in a museum and everyone SAYS it's art, I guess it's art. Whatever. Glad that's categorized. Now I can move on." But it's also possible he might feel like "Wow! It's art? I didn't know that! Man, now that I DO know it, I feel really moved when I look at it."
We tend to look at herd behavior as unthinking -- and maybe it is -- but it is rarely unFEELING. The question "Does Fred REALLY get a profound feeling when he looks at The Mona Lisa or is he just aping what other people say" is, potentially, really complicated and not binary as the question suggests. He might be getting a profound feeling BECAUSE he's aping what other people say.
And, of course, these two forces -- one's initial response to the object itself AND one's social response -- can interact and strengthen each other.
Those two forces can also be at odds, which, I think, is why we get into some of these aesthetic debates: Fred is told that object X is "art," so it's already in the "art" category. But when he looks at X, he feels nothing. So is it art or not?
Though there may be some profound (and profoundly oppositional) feelings here, there really isn't a debate. There are some facts:
1. People generally categorize X as art.
2. Fred cares about the way people categorize X.
3. Fred doesn't have strong feelings when he looks at X.
4. Fred generally doesn't feel comfortable putting items in HIS personal "art" category unless they affect him profoundly.
There's no contradiction here, but it's easy to see why Fred feels uncomfortable. The general category called "art" is smashing up against his personal category called "art".
We can get rid of this problem by giving the two categories two different names. But we don't. We call them both "art," and because they have the same name and are similar, we get confused and think they're the same thing. And then when we notice differences between them, we think that ONE thing contains contractions or that certain people are wrong about that one thing.
The philosopher is mad because some other guy claims Pollack paintings aren't art. Let's see if we can get rid of the problem (or reframe it).
1. Fred notices that many people put Pollack paintings in a category called X.
2. He has a similar category, called Y, which but it doesn't include Pollack paintings.
3. X and Y are similar but not identical.
That's fine. North-America and USA are similar, but it's not a contradiction that one contains Ontario and the other doesn't.
If Fred claims, "People do NOT put Pollack paintings in category X," he's wrong. He's just wrong. They do. (Many of them do.)
If Philosopher clams that Fred is saying Pollack paintings aren't members of X, Philosopher is wrong. Fred is NOT claiming that most people don't put Pollack in X. He's claiming that he doesn't put Pollack in Y. (Fred is not claiming that OTHER people don't think of Pollack as art. He's claiming that HE doesn't think of it as art. And that is an ambiguous statement. What does it mean to say he doesn't think of it as art? We don't know. Since we don't know, it's silly to say Fred is wrong.)
If Philosopher is claiming that Fred is "wrong" to not put Pollack in Y, Philosopher is behaving oddly. He's saying something similar to, "You're wrong to not like broccoli." Fred is equally odd to claim something about the world outside of his own brain. If he means that Pollack is NOT art to anyone, he's just wrong. Clearly Pollack IS art to many people. If he means it SHOULDN'T be art to those people, he's being as nonsensical as Philosopher. Why not, Fred?
Fred can make up any reasons he wants, e.g. "Because it doesn't take talent to make Pollack paintings." Okay. Why should I care if something takes talent or not? Why should someone NOT care if something takes talent or not?
Finally, I'd like to say something about statements like, "You can't judge modern art without understanding its historical context." Taken literally, that statement is at worst meaningless and at best it's untrue. You CAN -- and maybe do -- judge modern art without understanding its context. Perhaps the philosopher means "You shouldn't."
Why not? I assume he doesn't think it's morally wrong to do so. Surely he doesn't think Fred is causing serious harm to anyone by judging Pollack without knowing its context. If the philosopher DOES think this is morally wrong, then his ethics must be really complicated and it must be really easy -- in his ethical system -- to sin all the time. Children sin just by not-having-yet-learned a bunch of stuff. The urge to judge comes way before the acquisition of contextual knowledge.
Here's how I can give meaning to "You can't judge modern art without understanding its historical context." I canrephrase it like this: "If you dismiss Pollack without understanding its context, you are missing out on a profound experience." In other words, if you spend some time learning some stuff and training yourself in certain specific ways, you will have profound feelings and thoughts when you look at a Pollack painting, and I'm sad for you that you're not willing to do that."
(There is a way ethics enters into it here. If an art critic -- or someone else who has influence over others' behavior -- dismisses a work without understanding its context, he might be robbing others of a profound experience.)
One question pops into my mind here: how do I know this will happen? How do I know that Fred will have a profound feeling if he learns the context? I don't. What I know is this: *I* had a profound feeling after I learned the context. Furthermore, I know that many other people did, too. I'm assuming that Fred is similar enough to me (and these other people) that he'll have the same feelings if he goes through the same steps. But I may be wrong. As yummy as it is, there are people who don't like chocolate.
(At some point, the philosopher calls a certain work "undeniably art." Interesting. Why is the fact that it's "art" undeniable? What if I deny it? Are there certain foods that are undeniably yummy?)
I suspect there ARE aesthetic universals. And I suspect they can be studied in the lab. I'm guessing that if they exist, they are really basic. Maybe people are genetically built to prefer shade-of-red X over shade-of-red Y, and it's impossible for any non-damaged human to prefer Y over X. But it's hard for me to swallow that there are universals of a higher order, e.g. that all people necessarily prefer "Hamlet" to "Macbeth."
We might be able to make really complex statements like, "If you have had events A, B and C in your childhood and educational moment D, E and F, you are likely to respond to Pollack painting in the same way that I do."
Professor McArtHistorian tells us that Painting X is "art." We read that it's "art" in ten books. We hear lots of people refer to it as "art." We have a profound "art-ish" experience when we look at it. Our friends have that same experience. All of these facts entrench us deeper and deeper int he conviction that X IS "art."
Then Fred comes along and says it isn't. It's natural to respond to him as if he just said "two plus two is not equal to four." But what he said is actually much more complicated. What is our basis for calling him "wrong"?
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