Myths Make Me Madoff

This post’s pithy aphorism comes from Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, although I found it second-hand in Anton Chekhov's short story “Gooseberries”:

The falsehood that exalts we cherish more
Than meaner truths that are a thousand strong.

Chekhov’s story “Gooseberries” tells the story of a man who toils his entire life to purchase a plot of land and chew idly upon berries all day, in imitation of the landed gentry of 19th-century Russia. Once the man, Nikolay, acquires the land and finally has bushels of his longed-for gooseberries, his brother Ivan discovers that the gooseberries are actually quite hard and sour.

This realization leads Ivan to cite the aforementioned Pushkin verse, and the bitter gooseberries become a symbol for all the pleasant myths we use to cover up the unpleasant bits of our society. Some such myths that come to mind at the present moment are (for example) that the economic market will correct itself – albeit after life-upending turbulence – and that mysterious, intangible “market forces” are to blame for financial crises like the one many of us are currently experiencing, rather than the rabid greed most recently exemplified by Bernie Madoff.

Is Google Making Us Stoopid?

Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

- Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stoopid,” The Atlantic July/August 2008

The gist of Carr's article is this: when powerful tools like the internet make lots of information instantly available, there is pressure put upon people to process information more quickly. However, processing more information can be achieved only through taking more time or processing information on a shallower, more superficial level. That is to say that, when confronted with more information, a person will be compelled to merely comprehend it, as opposed to analyzing or evaluating it. With Google and other tools shovelling sites and blogs and streaming video our way, we may have more information, but we do less with it. Conversely, if you agree with Carr's argument, spending time with a single article or book and reading it slowly and thoroughly allows you to enter into a conversation with that material. By the end of your reading (and re-reading), you have developed some thoughts of your own, rather than simply comsuming the thoughts of the author.

A Hero for the Neurotic in All of Us

Peter Parker, like most of us, swings moods more often than he swings webs. He is the neurotic in all of us, without the caricature of neurosis that allows us to laugh unselfconsciously at Woody Allen and George Costanza. Like most of us, Peter worries about paying the rent, about getting the girl, and about the acuity of his moral sense: does he do good for its own sake, or to buoy his own sense of self-worth?

Pete’s neuroses sometimes get the better of him; at certain moments of his career, they have crippled him physically, robbing him of his ability to stick to walls and lift car-weight loads over his head. But he always returns to the antidote of humour: he can make a crack about Doc Ock’s bowl-cut at the same time he’s stopping the villain from destroying New York City. In the darkest moments, he lightens the mood by sheer force of will. Peter’s ability to overcome the big and little troubles of life makes him heroic, in a way that makes the “super” prefix almost superfluous.

(Note: I wrote up this meditation on Spider-Man for submission to the "In Character" blog on NPR.com. It doesn't include a direct quotation as these entries normally do, and so I hope you'll forgive me for this rare contravention of the blog rules.)

Blindness

"Fighting has always been, more or less, a form of blindness."
- Jose Saramago, in the novel Blindness (1995)

This quotation comes from the novel Blindness, in which people across an unidentified country fall victim to an infection that robs them of their sight (they see instead a milky whiteness before them at all times). Saramago seems to be saying that we can only direct aggression at another person once we stop perceiving his or her complexity and perceive only that which frustrates our own self-centred needs. In this sense, then, the opposite of fighting is careful consideration of other people's needs and an ability to envision compromises.

Don't be blind!

The Dangers of Austerity

William Butler Yeats writes lines of such elegance and spiritual force that I find they resonate with me, like an unsettling, too-truthful dream, until I find an outlet for them. And thus the following quote:

Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.
(W.B. Yeats, "Easter 1916)

Yeats wrote this in reference to the sacrifices of the Irish nationalist movement, which sought to win Ireland's freedom from the United Kingdom into which it had forcefully been drawn in the early 1800s (and, of course, Ireland had been ruled by the English to various degrees since the 1300s). Irish nationalist movements had flared up occasionally throughout the centuries of English colonial rule, only to be snuffed out by the greater military resources of the English.

The armed rising that took place on Easter 1916 was the latest act of resistance plotted by Irish nationalists. They took over the post office in the center of Dublin and used it as a military base for the Easter Rising. The English sent battleships into the city centre, and waited out the leaders of the rising, executing all of them (save one) by firing squad. The death of these men was only the latest of many "sacrifices" incurred by Irish patriots.

In the poem, then, Yeats is suggesting that resisting the English may have too grave a cost - the drawn out resistance to English rule and the deaths that resulted threatened to make the Irish a cold and embittered people.

Yet, while the poem addresses a very specific sacrifice, Yeats' line has a lot of truth regarding sacrifices in general. We often make personal sacrifices so that we might come closer to realizing our goals - we avoid eating out or going on vacation to save for a car, a house, etc; we sacrifice time with loved ones to study or work; we forego new relationships to avoid being hurt. But that sustained act of self-denial can have a deadening effect upon us: repeatedly denying ourselves of the things that bring us joy eventually begins to erode our capacity to feel joy. At least this is what Yeats would have us believe when he speaks of a heart turned to stone, and I have found that he's usually worth listening to...

Will Not Compute

...friends, every day do something that won't compute.

- Wendell Berry

The poem from which this line is taken is about living your life in a way other than that prescribed by bureaucracy and business interests. The line asks us to do things that don't seem "normal" and which may confuse anyone who lives their life according to "common sense." Why challenge or resist common sense? Well, because common sense is just that - a system of beliefs and ideas that are held by the majority of the people around you. To live your life according to the precepts of the majority means that you trust VERY STRONGLY that the majority of people in your town or city know exactly what they're doing. That's probably not very likely.

Especially because the majority of people around you aren't operating solely on what they have figured out for themselves or as a community. No, much "common sense" is also a product of the suggestions and images we receive from the government, media, schools, business, and various other institutions with interests they hope to promote by cultivating particular germs in the larger store of "common sense." French critics have a more precise term for this kind of common sense - idees recue (received ideas). Received ideas are those notions that have filtered out into society and are accepted as valid simply because they are repeatedly stated. "Green consumerism" is an idea that has enjoyed a good deal of uncritical reception, for example, but which holds some problems upon closer examination (i.e. that often the "greenest" thing you can do is curb your consumption).

How to avoid the pitfalls of common sense and received ideas? Take actions and think thoughts that "don't compute" in the network of common sense. The poet from whom I took the quote suggests doing things like "planting sequoias" and "asking questions that have no answers."

For my part, yesterday I bought the ingredients to make bread and waited 18 hours for it to rise, when I could've just bought a loaf for $1.50. But can you really put a price on the satisfaction that comes with making your own ball of baked dough?

*******

Excerpt from Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
By Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag.

Local Celebrities

The people I loved were celebrities, surrounded by rumor and fanfare; the places I sat with them, movie lots and monuments. No doubt all of this is not true remembrance but the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past, and no doubt, as usual, I have exaggerated everything.

- Michael Chabon, in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

When I lived in Massachusetts, one of my very good friends was a Greek guy by the name of Vasilis. Vasilis is a very charming, polite, witty, and wonderfully controlled personality - he has a habit of saying the right thing at the right time. For example, when I asked him once why he chose to leave a party at 11:30, he responded, in the staccato rhythm required because of his slight discomfort with English, "you should always leave them wanting more." He was not at all egotistical, and that's why I cracked up when he said this.

But from that point on, I started referring to Vasilis as a "local celebrity," and he did the same to me. We were poking fun at each other's actual insignificance; but at the same time, in a tight knit group of a dozen or so friends, it was easy to feel that we all were celebrities, the focus of each other's "rumors and fanfare," the topic of conversations that others reserve for chatting about Hilton and Richie around the water cooler.

The point, of both the quote and my story, is that in the finer moments and finer situations of our lives, it is possible to feel that the people you know are the center of a universe (albeit your own small one), the only people you really need to or care to know.

Postscript: The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is Chabon's first novel and, in reading it, I've decided that he's awesome (he also wrote the screenplay for Spiderman 2). He lived in Pittsburgh for several years, proving again the sheer awesomeness of the 'Burgh.

Writing is a better way of thinking

Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.
- Francis Bacon, 16th century English philosopher

Bacon's point here is to say that while reading prodigiously will "fill" you with ideas and information, it is only when you are called upon to discuss those ideas and facts that you really apply them. More than this even, writing forces you to master your thoughts, to organize them and refine them, so as to express them clearly and concisely. It is this process that makes writing enjoyable (at least for me), and gives me a sense of satisfaction, that I have managed to say at least one thing with precision. It is also that wrangling with words, that wrestling which culminates in a satisfying victory, that probably spurred one poet to say

I hate writing, but I love having written.
- Dorothy Parker

Consume Away

Cultural Studies is a popular mode of criticism that has been practiced more and more in university English departments since the 1980s. What the practitioner of cultural studies does is examine products of pop culture to see what they reveal about our society's values and beliefs (which are often unconsciously woven into the things we say, movies we shoot, stories we write). For example, a very simple cultural critique might examine assumptions about masculinity in "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" - why do we associate poor grooming with straight masculinity, and fashion sense with male homosexuality? I'm prefacing my comments with this brief intro to cultural studies in order to assure you that what I am about to write is not really about comic books. And don't worry, I'll move back to high culture stuff like poetry and politics soon enough. But wait a second: who said comics were low culture?

"[Comic books are] one of the clearest and most direct expressions of socio-economic conditions I know of - conditions which permit an immensely rich industry with fantastic profits to reduce children to a market."
- Frederic Wertham, American psychologist and critic of comic books

Frederic Wertham was responsible for villifying comic books in the 1950s, and for bringing about events such as the New York State Joint Legislative Committee to Study the Comics, the Cincinatti Committee on the Evaluation of Comic Books, and the Canadian ban on crime comics.

Wertham was not a student of cultural studies in the sense that we use that term today, but he did have some interesting conclusions on the connections between what was being written and drawn in comic books and what was happening in 1950s North America.

Wertham's most famous argument was that the wide selection of detailed, highly graphic crime comic books available on newsstands contributed to the rise in juvenile delinquency observed in the first half of the twentieth century.

He cited many examples of gruesome criminal acts that appeared in comics and which (he believed) served as blueprints for the kind of delinquent behaviour he observed in his young patients. One of his most famous examples is the panel to the left, from True Crime Comics #2.

This is old news to all you comic nerds out there, and I'm sure we all agree that the notion that comic books would lead directly to swarms of pint-sized Tony Montanas running around sounds like a load o' bunk (yes, I wrote "load o' bunk").

However, the lesser-known dimension to Wertham's thinking is that comic books were emblematic of a larger problem with society, one which he alludes to in the quote I included above. It wasn't only the fact that comics were gruesome and violent that bothered Wertham, but moreso that the comics industry was including depravity and violence in its publications because they could hook kids on depravity and violence more easily than on other, less-offensive fare. Ultimately, what disturbed the psychiatrist was that the information, ideas, and cultural messages industry chose to present to children could be shaped by market considerations rather than considerations regarding their successful development as young people.

Bradford Wright, in his book Comic Book Nation, explains that while Wertham's belief that comic books directly contributed to juvenile delinquency was misguided, his concern that young people were being drawn into "a culture defined more by market considerations than by traditional values" was entirely valid. The boom in the post-World War II economy in North America resulted in children having more money in their pockets. As Wright notes, "America's young people had the consumer power to help shape their own culture, and entertainment industries proved increasingly eager to accommodate them." The potential problem here is that the entertainment industry was creating and selling this youth culture with consideration given to what would sell, not necessarily what was best for kids and society at large. This is a crucial turning point in contemporary North American/Western history - the empowerment of youth culture. This is what allowed the rise of such things as rock and roll, the hippie movement, and a new power balance in the parent-child relationship, wherein children are given leverage by commercial messages that suggest parents accede to child demands (this is why the United Kingdom has moved to ban commercials aimed at children twelve and younger).

My point here is not to say that commerce should not be allowed to shape culture - it always will, quite often in positive ways. But when it overwhelmingly compromises the practices, beliefs, and values of people for no other reason than to raise profit margins, we experience problems. Foremost among these today is the problem of needless overconsumption, the symptoms of which are global warming, super-sized meals, livestock factories that damage local water supplies, overburdened landfills and trains filled with trash sent to Michigan, two-for-one chocolate bars... (ok, maybe the last one isn't that important!)

I'll admit that at this point, I'm launching into a much vaster topic - commercial interests versus public interest - that can't be dealt with adequately in a small space. My aim has been to show how small things, like comic books, are emblematic of this struggle between commercial interest and public interest. Your best interests and my best interests are always in threat of being compromised when commerce decides it would like to acquire some of our money.

Is There Such a Thing as Shopping Green?

“There is a very common mind-set right now which holds that all that we’re going to need to do to avert the large-scale planetary catastrophes upon us is make slightly different shopping decisions.”
- Alex Steffen, the executive editor of Worldchanging.com, a Web site devoted to sustainability issues.