Recently in Ideas Category

What is the role of government? It might depend on what’s needed. Obama, during his inaugural address, recast the debate not in terms of size but utility.

But it’s an argument going way back to the 1930s when capitalism was untenable and marketplace forces threatened to tear the country apart.

Given our crisis, I’m struck by the similarities between now and then. Reading William E. Leuchtenburg’s new biography of Herbert Hoover is like reading today’s newspaper. In this New Haven Review piece, I say it’s nothing short of breathtaking:

After Barack Obama won the election, my elation clouded my journalism. I was incapable of thinking about anything else. So when it came time to write about an event in Charleston called Kulture Klash, I had to figure out what it meant amid this historic change.

Kulture Klash is really an arts party like the kind commonly organized in New York. I’m told the place to go is PS1, but I’ve never been there and never been to one of those events. Kulture Klash, and I’d imagine events at PS1, are about diversity, creativity, and having a lot of fun. KK injects a radical social dimension into the arts and the arts give rise to a radical social dimension, mostly because the kind of art you’ll find there stems from street art — break dancing, graffiti art, aerial skating, juggling, hula hooping, etc.

In the wake of Obama’s victory, Kulture Klash seemed to have more significance than just an arts party. It seemed to embody a new set of ideals, a grass-roots and egalitarian value system shaped and given expression by the internet and social-networking sites. When all was said and done, more than 2,000 people had gone to Kulture Klash. In a Charleston context, that’s an enormous crowd and an important step in local arts.

Tim Wu, in a review of Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet (And How to Stop It), aptly notes that what makes our age special, in technological terms, is its “generative” nature: “‘Generativity’ is a central notion in his book, and he means what it says: that the Net has made us all mini-generators — not of electricity, but of information and innovation. Who today is not at least sometimes an online analyst, poet, or publisher, even if just of Facebook updates?” (Read Wu’s review in full in The New Republic.)

In a piece in a November issue of Charleston City Paper, I attempted to draw a connection between Obama’s win, the ideals of Web 2.0, and this generative nature among those born after 1980, those who not only gave YouTube and Facebook their current cache, but who also expect interactivity in whatever they do. I suggest that this is a turning point.

Of what, I don’t know. But something is turning. You can feel it.

Creativity is a part of their lives. Millennials don’t just dream it. They be it. Kulture Klash’s website tells why the event matters: “For the sake of art and community.”

“We want everyone to have a voice, everyone to get involved,” says Gustavo Serrano. “If we can tap into everyone’s imagination, who knows what will happen?”

The idea of a bottom-up, idealism-based community of creative types, like Kulture Klash, goes back to the ancient Greeks.

Today, it can be found in knitting circles, jazz ensembles, open-source technology like Linux, crowdsourced knowledge consortiums like Wikipedia, community arts projects like the recent The Future Is on the Table art exhibit at City Gallery, and even in pick-up games of basketball (which is, because of its reliance on the integrity of individual players, Barack Obama’s favorite pastime).

These have characteristics that challenge the old guard of established arts professionals whose minds were galvanized, like Clinton and Bush, by “great disruption” of the 1960s. These characteristics include participation over presentation, collaboration over competition, amateurism (in the best sense of the word) over professionalism, and process over product.

Grassroots creativity is an old idea (Walt Whitman exulted the inventive potential of diversity), but the difference now is scale.

Ninety-five million Americans are applying the ideals of Web 2.0 to the real world, including their approach to the arts.

Read full story …

Now that the election is over, the object of my obsessing has shifted from presidential politics to the disarray of the global economy. From the macro to the micro, stories about the economy dominate the news. While I read quite a lot of personal finance stories and have an affection for the fabulously weird Suze Orman, I don't generally read actual, y'know, books on economic matters.

Yet I was intrigued by an interview I heard this past June on Wisconsin Public Radio (which you can stream online via this link or, if that ever fails, search the online story archives) with Nan Mooney, author of (Not) Keeping Up with Our Parents: The Decline of the Professional Middle Class, which came out earlier this year from Beacon Press. Now, a few months later, I've finally gotten around to reading Mooney's book.

Mooney's topic will, I imagine, be of interest to lots of ArtsJournal readers since her focus is on the economic straits of what she dubs the "educated professional middle class." These are white-collar workers whose jobs require at least a bachelor's, if not a master's or PhD, and are in--as Mooney phrased it in her WPR interview--"professions that, oftentimes, got you more moral prestige than financial rewards," such as journalism, nonprofit work and the arts.

While Mooney has interviewed a large number of subjects of different ages, her perspective, as someone born in 1970, seems very much of a piece with the Generation X mindset. X-ers have had to come to terms with a climate in which the value of a four-year degree has shrunk, making it, in many cases, akin to a high-school diploma for previous generations.

Yet Mooney's central point is that the sharp rise in fixed, necessary costs such as health care premiums is eroding the already modest salaries of teachers, social workers and the like. While I found some of her anecdotes a little lacking (such as a Chicago couple with a combined income of $93K and a home purchased for $179K; that doesn't seem like much of a stretch to me), the book makes for interesting reading.

I'm also glad to see Mooney discard the tired "latte myth," one of those irritating little tidbits that seems to make it into every magazine personal-finance story (and which I heard Matt Lauer recycle just this morning on NBC's Today). The idea is that if you cut out your $3 or $4 latte every day and plunk the money into a savings account, a worthwhile amount will rack up by the end of the year. As Mooney writes:

This may be useful advice to some degree, but it's hard to imagine that saving a few dollars here and there will ever add up to a home of your own... The only thing this theory seems to accomplish is making us feel guilty for enjoying small pleasures, when we definitely can't afford the larger ones. Forgoing a fancy cup of coffee can't ameliorate the fact that wages have stagnated and the cost of most major items has risen.

I'm all for economizing and limiting frivolous expenses (I can't help it; I grew up in a middle-class but ultra-frugal family), but I think Mooney makes a great point. This trite latte example, which we've heard over and over, doesn't address the fact that the level of consumer spending hasn't really gone up since the 1970s, but fixed costs have risen and wages have stagnated. There's more at work here than occasional self-indulgence.

While I have quibbles with some aspects of this book, I think it's a useful counterbalance to the rosy picture painted by Richard Florida's much-hyped The Rise of the Creative Class, which made it seem as if the creative and well-educated were endlessly in demand and could write their own tickets in terms of where to live and work. I always found it strange that Florida lumped together hairdressers and more highly paid types like software developers. Income level was simply glossed over.

If these sorts of issues intrigue you, I recommend listening to Nan Mooney's Wisconsin Public Radio interview with host Joy Cardin or reading her book. While I'm sure some will deride her as a whiner (and I'll admit I found some of her interviewees unsympathetic), she raises worthwhile questions about how certain professions are valued and where we're headed in the future, especially for those with children. I'll close with another excerpt:

If we feel torn between money and values, imagine the pressures our financial anxieties will place on our kids now and in the future... How fully do we propagate those ideals that left so many of us disenchanted: the sense of entitlement, the idea that hard work and fair play will automatically get you somewhere, the virtues of meaningful work, generosity of spirit and a life of the mind? Much as we might relish having grown up in an era where possibility was the watchword, can we say we're responsible parents if we encourage our children to do as we did, bypass financial security and focus on following their dreams?

This is Michael Heller talking about his new book, called The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives.

Basically, he argues that when too many people own too much of a thing, it doesn’t work anymore and it actually hurts us all.

There’s much about science and technology, but he also discusses culture, especially the problems facing hip-hop artists and sound sampling.

How can we innovate with this problem? What’s the reward of being creative?

Charleston City Paper

There’s an interesting piece over at LiveScience called “Monsters, Ghosts and Gods: Why We Believe.” It was inspired by the recent string of weirdness.

That string began with the so-called Montauk Monster on Long Island, then a Big Foot, then this creature found in Texas last year that the discoverer swore was the Chupacabra, or goat sucker, of Mexican lore.

Turns out we want to believe.

Most people simply can’t not believe.

It doesn’t matter how educated you are. PhDs are as likely to believe in ghosts as high-school drop outs.

But those who hold deep religious beliefs are less likely to buy into the paranormal.

Those who attend church infrequently, or never, are more likely to believe Big Foot and the Montauk Monster are really, really real.

From LiveScience: The bottom line, according to several interviews with people who study these things: People want to believe, and most simply can’t help it… . A related question: Does belief in the paranormal have anything to do with religious belief? The answer to that question is decidedly nuanced, but studies point to an interesting conclusion: People who practice religion are typically encouraged not to believe in the paranormal, but rather to put their faith in one deity, whereas those who aren’t particularly active in religion are more free to believe in Bigfoot or consult a psychic. “Christians and New Agers, paranormalists, etc. all have one thing in common: a spiritual orientation to the world,” said sociology Professor Carson Mencken of Baylor University.

Oh, and that Chupacabra? Not the mythical slayer of domestic animals.

Nope. DNA testing showed it’s just a coyote.

If you haven’t guessed by now, I’m interested in new ways of thinking, news ways of understanding, new ways of seeing the world. Art, to me, is the ultimate lens through which to see the world. Art is a product of culture and the mystery of the human brain (mind?), so it’s no surprise that a series by SEED Magazine called Revolutionary Minds caught my attention.

It profiles thinkers, writers, and researchers on the vanguard of human knowledge. It’s really interesting in and of itself. You might consider spending some time with this podcast featuring social psychologist Heejung Kim (pictured above) at the University of California at Santa Barbara, who is exploring that finest of fine lines between nature and nurture, and how our culture is not merely a product of our genes, but how our genes, over long stretches of time, might be a product of our culture.

From the magazine: Sorting out the competing yet complementary influences of genes and culture is a problem that has captured the attention of some of the most talented scientific minds. Researchers have looked for genes that influence behavior regardless of cultural context. In her first foray into the world of genetics, social psychologist Heejung Kim is taking a decidedly different approach by examining how culture shapes individuals’ responses to their biological inheritance. In doing so she is creating a profound new framework for how to think about our genetic and cultural backgrounds.

heejung-kim-genetic-accultration.mp3

Psychologist Mahzarin R. Banaji, in the Chronicle Review, takes issue with The New Yorker’s recent cover depicting Barack Obama in Muslim garb fist-pumping his wife Michelle who is dressed as a terrorist. The flag burns in the fireplace of the Oval Office while a portrait of Osama bin Laden looks on. Banaji says the cover’s intended satire is a failure on the part of the magazine’s editors to recognize what actually happens in the human brain when it interact with such images.

From the Chronicle Review: If he [cartoonist Barry Blitt] were cognizant of the facts about how the mind works, the simple associations that typify the brain’s ordinary connection-making, he might have thought differently before he sketched the first flame in that fireplace. If he had paid attention to a few of the dozens of experiments available — even in the popular media — that describe how the mind learns and believes, he and his boss wouldn’t have responded as they did to the questions posed to them the day after the cover appeared. I am, as are most others in my social class, an emphatic defender of the arts as a primary vehicle to irritate, aggravate, and offend. I have been trained to step back and rethink my reaction to that which jolts and nauseates me. I know that, in such moments especially, I must look within for a possible inability to transcend ingrained values. For that reason, and because we who read The Chronicle are likely to be among the staunchest supporters of the First Amendment, we must, of course, defend the right of The New Yorker to print the image it did. What we need not defend is the absurd naïveté about the basic facts of information transmission that accompanied the reasoning behind the drawing.

C.P. Snow, the novelist and chemist, once wrote about the two cultures: one being the scientists, the other being intellectuals, those who wrote for a wide audience in general-interest publications like Raritan and The New Criterion. He said there was too much of a divide between them. They didn’t know how to talk to each other. And this divide is what characterizes the life of the mind in the West.

In his view, the scientists were going to stay the same, that is, set on their course. So it was up to the intellectuals — the historians, novelists, poets, journalists, policy writers — to relate to the rest of the world what scientists were doing, why, and why it mattered. These would make up what he called The Third Culture.

That was in 1959. The idea never took off.

That’s partly due, I think, to the fact that traditional intellectuals, those who work in academe, especially English departments (where I spent some time way back when), turned inward. Pressured by academic standards like “publish or perish,” fueled by a huge expansion of the American and European university, and in thrall to intellectual orthodoxies originating from Continental Europe (Foucault, Derrida, Irigaray, Lacan, Adorno, Habermas, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and so on), they increasingly talked to themselves and not to everyone else.

Meanwhile, scientists have made their way into territory that used to belong to Snow’s intellectuals. Oliver Sacks, Atul Gawande, Jerome Groopman, and Steven Pinker — these are just a few of the scientists, researchers, and doctors who have incredible careers but who also are terrific writers with a lot to say to everyone who is not as intimate, or even remotely versed, in their respective disciplines. They write and they write well. And sometimes they write about the arts, especially that intersection where the arts and the scientific fields of mind messily come together.

For instance, Oliver Sacks’ latest book is about music (Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain). There’s a group called the Society for the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. There are many journals dedicated to exploring this new and fertile terrain: PsyArt, The Arts and Psychotherapy, Empirical Studies of the Arts, and so on.

But you don’t see artists, or literary intellectuals for that matter, talking about science the way that scientists talk about the arts. You don’t see them trying to understand what they do given what we now know about the mind, about human behavior, about how we constitute our societies, about the universe.

And it’s not just scientists writing about the arts as scientists. For many years, they have also engaged in them. You have scientists who write novels (e.g., Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams). You have medical scholars and researchers writing poetry (a local example is MUSC’s literary journal, Humanitas).

Artists do reach out but not with equal volume, probity, and cultural impact. These exceptions so far undermine the rule. They are far from proving it.

Suzanne Anker, chair of the Fine Arts Department at the School for Visual Arts in New York City, co-curated a 2006 exhibit called Neuroculture: Visual Art and the Brain. And Adrienne Klein, co-director of the Science & the Arts Program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, created a video installation called Mind’s Eye in 1998 that taps into the flow-chart nature of human thought.

How about more conversations like this one? SEED magazine this month asked Tom Wolfe, the novelist and journalist, to interview Michael Gazzaniga, the father of cognitive neuroscience. You can see a video of the discussion here.

Perhaps the most exciting event to characterize this cross-pollination was in Iceland in May. There, in what was called an “experiment marathon,” part of the Reykjavík Arts Festival, dozens of artists and scientists discussed topics “as diverse as sleep patterns, wind currents, and how we laugh, stepped to a small stage,” according to the Boston Globe.

Later, one artist, Halldór Úlfarsson, would describe the wider world of artistic abstractionists like this: “It’s a kind of think pot where stuff happens. And once in a while, out of that, something grows that people connect with better.”

What can be said about this on a local level? How can artists better understand their role in the psychological and cognitive experience of everyday people? If we are only beginning to understand the human mind, doesn’t it follow that artists, who have so much insight into the human mind, should be a part of that discussion? Wouldn’t artists have a lot to say to scientists of the brain and philosophers of the mind?

Laurie Anderson performance of Homeland at this year’s Spoleto Festival was similar to a couple of other performances: They felt a little late in the game.

Drag queen and performance artist Taylor Mac and the Nottingham Playhouse’s performance of Seamus Heaney’s The Burial at Thebes had political overtones, too. But while one maked fun of the absurdities of the past eight Bush years (airport security, etc.), the other underscored the tragic elements of those years (the social and political dangers of nationalism and xenophobia).

In neither, however, was politics essential to what they are. They had more to offer.

For instance, Mac, the transgressive, cross-dressing trickster and fool, is a master shape-shifter, able to manipulate and charm any kind of audience. Though some of his material has lost its frisson (i.e., jokes about “unattended bags”), he elicited an amazing range of emotions — from mirth to sadness to pity to respect.

On the other hand, Thebes was a spartan and ingenious production that spoke to timeless themes of concern to all of us — death, duty, honor, family, and religion. King Creon himself was an oblique allusion to George Bush, but one could completely ignore that allusion. Creon is a tragic figure that has stood on his own since Sophocles wrote Antigone.

The same couldn’t be said of Anderson’s Homeland. It depended almost entirely on politics and current events that aren’t as current as they used to be. It felt stuck in time.

It’s been a couple of weeks since the end of the annual international arts festival here in Charleston, but I’d like to post a few of the things we did here at Charleston City Paper, primarily from the paper’s blog, Spoleto Buzz. Our blogs, during May and part of June, attracted some 742,000 hits from more than 58,000 unique visitors. Not great, but not bad for a mid-sized independent weekly newspaper in a city of about 600,000 people. Let’s start with this.

MY BLACK FAMILY AND MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH’S THE BREAK/S

I never thought the one-drop rule affected me personally until I read David Matthews’ memoir, Ace of Spades.

The one-drop rule is a phenomenon of American slavery. It determined who was black and who was not. In brief: If you had as little as one drop of “black blood” in your ancestry, you were considered black. If you were half black, you were black. Looked at the other way: If you were half white, you were black.

It damned African Americans if they did and damned them if they didn’t.

At its core, Matthews’ 2007 memoir is about a youth spent “passing” as white — and the serious and obvious questions the social phenomena raises about the metaphysics of race and the paradox of racial identity — while coming to terms with the price he paid for abandoning his heritage and family.

“I was not a racist; I was a hater. I hated the netherworld in which I found myself, the one that tacitly reassured me that it would shun, relegate, fear and ignore all of me if I acknowledged half of me. Half-black, eighth-black, mulatto, quadroon, octoroon — all meant black.

I have five aunts who married black men. Four on my mother’s side I never got to know well, nor did I know their children, my cousins. On my father’s side was Margie. She married Jerry. They had three boys and girl. I grew up with them. I went to church with them. We ate Sunday dinners together and played in our grandfather’s apple orchards together. We knew each other. We were blood relatives.

Yet in my childhood, my entire family, even I suspect Margie and Jerry, thought of my cousins as black.

Warren, Douglas, Phillip, and Bathsheba are as white as I am. But such is the perniciousness of American racial pathology — the unconscious yet ubiquitous application of the one-drop rule — that I came to understand my own kin as the Other. Their blood was my blood, yet they were black, not white.

They were seen to be different from us even though they were the same. Race in America, as was the case in my family, has always been either/or. With us or with them. One thing or the other. Never both. A throbbing paradox. I hope my white family had no intention to privilege one race. I’m certain my “black” family members themselves didn’t. Even so, are we, all of us, guilty?

Yes, I’m afraid we are.