You Just Don't Get It, Do You?

I saw this montage over at Steve Sailer’s column

It's a fun line.  It's a Hollywood cliche because it's a cultural cliche. Let me jump over four paragraphs of argument and just announce: it's still more Hollywood than Holly Springs, and it's not an accident.

This is not new ground for us here.  This is how Hollywood sells its values, with social cues of what one should think, not logical argument.  Not just Hollywood, of course.  All forms of media and communication between human beings use at least a little of this, while some rely on it entirely.  The sudden silence when one makes a joke about a person or a topic signals that one has crossed into unacceptable territory. People seldom bother to explain these silences, you’re just supposed to get it. Condescension, eye-rolls, tones of voice, these are the armaments of a society keeping everyone on the same page culturally, and even more, of a group which considers itself superior trying to create change in others.

(I wonder if in some circumstances it could be considered discrimination against people in the Asperger’s clusters. Job interviews and training; school awards; critical remarks about someone in the media.  Someday the cards will fall just so and there will be a Wheelchair Moment.  Just a thought.)

People in churches or workplaces signal this way. You can see it in waiting rooms and social gatherings. It is so common in highschools and colleges that I have concluded it is a form of communication we learn early, before we quite know how to reason. The signals vary in different groups – one of the ways one shows membership is by signalling back that the message has been received.  If you just don’t get it, then you aren’t one of us.

A quick review, from the first paragraph of CS Lewis’s The Inner Ring.

May I read you a few lines from Tolstoy’s War and Peace?
When Boris entered the room, Prince Andrey was listening to an old general, wearing his decorations, who was reporting something to Prince Andrey, with an expression of soldierly servility on his purple face. “Alright. Please wait!” he said to the general, speaking in Russian with the French accent which he used when he spoke with contempt. The moment he noticed Boris he stopped listening to the general who trotted imploringly after him and begged to be heard, while Prince Andrey turned to Boris with a cheerful smile and a nod of the head. Boris now clearly understood—what he had already guessed—that side by side with the system of discipline and subordination which were laid down in the Army Regulations, there existed a different and more real system—the system which compelled a tightly laced general with a purple face to wait respectfully for his turn while a mere captain like Prince Andrey chatted with a mere second lieutenant like Boris. Boris decided at once that he would be guided not by the official system but by this other unwritten system.

It is powerful.

It may be a bit strong to call something so basic to human communication evil, yet I think relying on these social rather than rational cues goes bad so easily that it’s justified.  An interesting example of the power of the social cue trumping the logical one came across my FB feed recently.

Disclaimers are an annoyance and distraction, I know.  Great writers make their points solidly, vividly, in order to express and persuade.  Orwell and Shaw were quite specific on the point.  But I am not a great writer, just a person trying to make a point fairly, so I find the need to put in qualifiers that are likely damaging to my effect.

Hitting “like” on a post is not always much of an endorsement.  I am quite careful to check the doors and windows before endorsing things myself, but that’s not universal. People skim, approve of an issue in general, want to support a pal or a cause and just click without much more thought. My brother often clicks to show his support of feminism or of particular feminists.  I don’t know how closely he reads each one.

Cartooning is also the most unfair of communications by its very nature.  In all fiction one gets to make the characters say whatever one likes, so that the villains are really evil, the heroes very noble, etc.  We get to win every argument, because our opponents are obligingly stupid, rather like storm troopers in Star Wars. But cartooning exaggerates even this.  No one gets to answer it back, as they might in a movie review, an op-ed, on talk radio, or in a live setting.  The cartoonist gets to hit and run, claiming it was “just a joke” if something goes wrong. It can be a cowardly medium. Effective, though.

So when I encounter a cartoon that makes its point unfairly there is a certain element of facepalm myself.  What did I expect? Here's the cartoon.  It's had a lot of "shares" and a lot of  "likes" on many of those shares.

A: The woman gets off to a good start here in the top two panels.  Then in the 4th panel she wins the argument with an angry, illogical, personal attack. Here's a possible 5th panel. It would be better if I could draw the woman above alone and have her saying it.

Well, That was logical.

Or one could have the man alone saying the same thing, with similar expression. In fact, if one added either fifth panel, one could use the cartoon as a deeply insulting characterisation of how women reason.  And what would be unfair about that?  It is indeed an example of a woman reasoning that lots of other women have endorsed, followed by accurate mockery. It's one of those things that if one used it as a made-up example - say, in a cartoon - it would be called unfair.  But as it really happened, I guess it's fair game.

B: By social cue, he was wrong from the start. Given his first word balloon, you can erase all the others (Try it).  Feminist has entered the language as a common term, many women take the label to themselves, and he is being a bit of a jerk - remember that someone is putting words in his mouth - for even asking.  It carries a whiff of trap and accusation right out of the gate, as does his expression. He just doesn't get it. Yet he could have asked it reasonably, and his reasoning in panel 2 is fine.  Panel 3 he makes a bit of a leap and unfairly uses "only," which she has given him no reason to.  It's a common rhetorical tool, to force the other to defend a point at an extremity they haven't embraced.

But that's not uncommon.  Immediately under this cartoon in one of its shares were two photos of Jon Stewart asking "Does sexism still exist?" Followed by "Many men say 'no'," which has got a lighter touch and is funnier - but still cheats.  The proper question is never whether some evil exists - does racism exist, does cyberbullying exist, does poor nutrition exist, does bad spelling exist - but how serious a problem it is. Most evils go on forever, conveniently for those who oppose them.

Shaw

George Bernard Shaw was considered one of the great intellectuals of his day, and widely quoted.  His plays are not much produced, nor his books much read these days, but he is certainly not obscure or unremembered. In my generation he was still regarded as a great lion of 20th C thought, and as my generation is still teaching, he is still on the syllabus.  He was known as a socialist, a vegetarian, and great progressive, so that will keep him going longer.  Yet I sense the end is near.  Like Mencken, much of what he wrote was merely cynical, a disapproval not only of those he disagreed with, but the great mass of humanity as well.  He hated elites, except the particular brand he belonged to.

Still, he was not a stupid man, and could give and take in debate. When one is in a cynical mood, Shaw quotes can still evoke wry smiles.  I went looking for a particular quote, because it suddenly came to me that its opposite was true, and I wanted to get the wording exact.  It's an appropriate exercise, because it is a Chestertonian approach to take any common assertion and wonder "Is the opposite also true?  Is the opposite in fact more true?" Shaw and Chesterton were affectionate enemies, and debated with spirit.

So, here's the quote:

The more ignorant men are, the more convinced are they that their little parish and their little chapel is an apex to which civilization and philosophy has painfully struggled up the pyramid of time from a desert of savagery.

We see some truth in this immediately.  This expression of how silly our little ethnocentrisms and religious exclusivities are became one of the dominant ideas of the 20th C.  It is in our bones now. However...Though stated in general terms, that seems rather a charade.  Shaw may have agreed with the idea as stated, but his wording rather clearly points to England in his own day, and to religious people in particular. Parish...chapel...civilization...savagery.  Hard not to see criticism of the men of empire in that.  

But our main object was to apply the GKC treatment, turn the idea on its head, and see what happens.

He can't be much talking about Papua New Guinea, or Cote d'Ivoire, or Lappland or the Amazon Basin.  The people of those regions may indeed be very certain that they are the best folk around, and the only ones worth bothering about, but nothing in their recorded history suggests that they thought they were any apex of civilization anyone had struggled up to.  In fact, in our several discussions of seasonal and circular time it's clear that few peoples see themselves as having developed, but rather of always having been this good.  No, this is the west he's talking about.  It is Shaw, in fact, and not the rest of mankind, who is going very narrow here - though to criticise rather than praise.  Victorian and Edwardian England were rather an apex of a society which no longer believed its religion and had been experimenting with alternatives for over a century. There was a great deal of sentimentality about the C of E - its architecture, its music, its language - but other than a very few neighboring countries, England rather stands out in comparison as country without a unified creed. Compare to even the Poles or Russians, the Japanese, the Italians.  And internally, England was evidently remarkably tolerant of heterodox religious opinions.  Not enough for Shaw. Thus he gets it backward.

Doubly backward, for he also correctly notes   

Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation.

Yes, of course, and if one perceives that "teachers" in the only real sense means people like himself more than those who teach Latin to schoolboys, then the snake has wrapped quite far around Shaw's own body at this point, and stares him in the face.  Shaw very nicely - and I grant, ahead of the curve - discovers that other religions have supplanted the former, going by other names but having the same cultural force. He deplores (some of) the new religions, and does well to expose them.  Yet he must be studiously avoiding mirrors.

Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity; and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom.

I might agree, with a pointed remark about his own defense of the Soviet Union when he was in fashion himself.  But the original remark also bears turning over.  Custom also prevents atrocity,  and resists fashion.

And finally, keeping in mind my rule that anything that is "too absurd for discussion" is probably not very true, but only believed to be true by the fashion a certain set: 

The period of time covered by history is far too short to allow of any perceptible progress in the popular sense of Evolution of the Human Species. The notion that there has been any such Progress since Caesar’s time (less than 20 centuries ago) is too absurd for discussion. All the savagery, barbarism, dark ages and the rest of it of which we have any record as existing in the past exists at the present moment.

Recently, we've gotten some numbers to support the notion that this is quite backward:  Shaw lived in one of those places where "savagery, barbarism, dark ages and the rest of it" had been diminishing for nearly half the time in question - though he was unable to perceive it.

Countries That Avoid Default

I am skimming Reinhart and Rogoff's This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly which was popular a few years ago. Its premise is that however much we believe our current financial booms are structurally different from those of the past, and thus not likely to send us into a crash, they are all quite similar, whether the countries are wealthy or poor, advanced or simple, large or small.  Things appear different because A) Governments and businesses disguise what they are doing and B) we want to believe. In particular, debt drives downturns. The book is fine, and more readable than most economics. You will find both vindication and shame for your own political responses to economic events in your lifetime.  Readers here, more of the former.

There was an interesting quote in the preface which I pass along with only a slight comment after.

One of the fascinating questions raised in our book is why a relatively small number of countries, such as Australia and New Zealand, Canada, Denmark, Thailand, and the United States, have managed to avoid default on central government debt to foreign creditors, whereas far more countries have been characterised by serial defaults on their external debts.

I admit I'm curious about Thailand. I'm betting Steven Pinker might see something in the others.

NPR and Livable Planets

A perky woman was interviewing a scientist on NPR tonight about finding goldilocks-planets: not too hot, not too cold.  "Our planet isn't going to last forever. We'll need to find places that our descendents can live when that happens.  Is that what scientists are thinking when they look for livable planets?" I didn't stick around to find out who she, or he, was.

The scientist politely deflected this.

It is this sort of vacuity, even among clever people, that causes me to again say "Tell me again why you think the foolishness of Young Earth Creationists is a problem.  Isn't this worse?"

First, the time frame. Does she think we are going to be heading out for these distant places anytime soon?  Mars, maybe. But both suspended animation or life-sustaining rocket colonies that last for thousands of years are uh, not on the drawing board at the moment.I suppose if the singularity occurs in 2039 and our technology improves superfast then all bets are off as to what we could accomplish.

But then all bets are off as to what human beings, intelligent machines, and hybrids or assisted-intelligence creatures will be like as well. Which leads to the second point: if we don't know what these creatures are like, why are we rooting for them to spread about the universe?  It's one of those things that the folks who like the idea just feel is obvious.  That life-forms vaguely related to us should be able to go on indefinitely seems not only permissible - that I could see - but an obvious positive, something to be encouraged, the ground of heroes.

I can understand someone wanting to be one of those travelers and explorers. Adventure, novelty, being part of something larger than oneself - all quite comprehensible.  Or just wanting to get away from other humans because they are unutterably stupid, or doomed, or boring - that I can also see.  But what's in it for everyone else?  Why are we thinking of paying for it, hoping for it, rhapsodizing about it? The feeling that life has gone on, has persevered, has triumphed, because an unrepresentative and unpredictable set of flawed humans might wake up and live in some distant place...seems to not even rise to the level of a religious aspiration, but a merely aesthetic one.

Post 4500 - How To Be A Conservative

Quotes from Roger Scruton's new book How To Be a Conservative have been making the rounds, including this one in the WSJ this week.

Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created. This is especially true of the good things that come to us as collective assets: peace, freedom, law, civility, public spirit, the security of property and family life, in all of which we depend on the cooperation of others while having no means singlehandedly to obtain it. In respect of such things, the work of destruction is quick, easy and exhilarating; the work of creation is slow, laborious and dull. That is one of the lessons of the twentieth century. It is also one reason why conservatives suffer such a disadvantage when it comes to public opinion. Their position is true but boring, that of their opponents exciting but false.

I assent to this idea even though I do not share his conclusion that the conservative position is always true.  Perhaps Scruton doesn't either, and is giving a merely general observation, written vividly for grace, beauty, and clarity's sake.

I had thought at the time that Obama was making his foolish "You didn't build that" statements that the deeper truth was that our grandparents and great-grandparents had "built that," if he meant rule of law, infrastructure, assumed reciprocity, free markets, etc. In that instance, those he was chastising had far more claim on saying "We built that" than Barack Obama's administration did. Even if we are indeed "lesser sons of greater sires," as Theoden said, that is not a reason to give credit to government.

Dire Straits

This was an Indian Summer in my popular music listening. That essentially eroded during college and stopped altogether after graduation and conversion. But excellent guitar work could still catch me, and if the radio worked on the VW, so much the better. I didn't reenter popular music listening until Jonathan started getting interested around 1993. I can't remember who he started with, but Hootie & The Blowfish owned 1995 and he was in full swing by then.

Quiet Rant

Training today. Trainer from academic setting, about my age. She had us do a group exercise that purported to show how we could have greater success (strangely defined) if we changed our assumptions. A common trainer's parlor game, never with any validity. She contrasted American responses to those of Russians, when the training was offered there. Several possible explanations were offered, but she told us it that because of their communist heritage, they were concerned tha...t everyone got ahead together, and cooperated automatically.

This is insane. Habitat For Humanity and other nonprofits have a hard time getting locals to volunteer in former communist countries. It's every man for himself.

This is not only ludicrous, it is offensive. Part of the reason my Romanian children went hungry was because of western apologists who believed and taught such things. Hungry. I'm gonna be in trouble next time I meet with my supervisor because of my comment today.

Folk Instrument

I read a Spengler column about a month ago in which he declared tangentially that the American folk instrument is not the guitar, but the piano. It was unexpected enough that it has stuck with me.  It seemed ridiculous.  Yet I think he is right.

One might make a case for the violin/fiddle, used in many types of music and highly portable, as we automatically expect a folk instrument to be. Yet I don't think it reaches the threshold of commonality necessary.  Not every extended family has a violinist or fiddler.  Not every church or school has one.

The other nominations which might occur to us, the banjo because it is American or the harmonica because of its extreme portability, provide a clue where we went wrong in thinking it is the guitar in the first place. Both are commonly associated with poor people's music, and we think of those as "the folk."  I can see why in international terms one would learn to automatically exclude the music of the wealthy and elite from any consideration of "folk" music, preferring the music of the countryside and the peasants, who greatly outnumbered them.  But in America, that was not so.

The guitar was not especially a poor person's instrument in America anyway.  It was a Spanish instrument, which made it popular in Mexico and the southwest, where cowboys and ex-slaves in those areas picked it up. After that happened, the guitar backfilled to the east in bluegrass and country music, breaking north south at the Appalachians. (Guitars were not always present in early bluegrass.)  Among black musicians, the backfill hit the Mississippi River and went north-south there instead. By 1900, one could find a lot of African-Americans along the New Orleans-Chicago route who played guitar, and it worked its way into Eastern cities over the next few decades.  But guitar isn't a big jazz instrument even now, and it certainly wasn't before the 60's.

There was some German and English use of the guitar which had made its way into America, but they were largely in more classical circles. No, the guitar a century ago was cowboys, hillbillies, and streetcorner singers.  And these were exactly the people who academic song-collectors trained in eastern universities thought were "the folk," and thus, the source of Real Folk Music. The guitar was rather an accident in that.  Song collectors also checked in on sailors and prisoners; unaccompanied singers were not neglected, nor were fiddlers - though the latter were at a disadvantage because instrumental music runs along different streams in folk music. There was no pro-guitar conspiracy among the academics, and they might not have identified it as America's folk instrument themselves.  But the groups that they defined as "the folk" - and there was a lot of politics in their framing - just happened to include the few groups that also had guitars.

By the 1950's, and certainly the 60's, the reach of guitar as the everyday peoples' instrument swept back the other way. Not only did rockers and hootenanny make it their central instrument, but its place grew even stronger in country & western music at exactly the time that genre became wealthier and more mainstream. Classical guitarists got a boost, because now that there were so many other people playing it, many of those became interested in others who could play it really well.


The piano's history in America doesn't look at first to be very folksy.  First, it's not very portable.  As a person who has moved several pianos I can assure you they aren't very portable.  Relatedly, they are more complicated and expensive than the more portable instruments, which one would think would put them out of the reach of po' folk.  You can't strap a pianner on yer back and ride the rails. We think of Irish harps or Scots bagpipes, or Greeks with that whole bouzouki/lyre/mandolin spectrum, all portable.

But wherever you rode those rails, there were likely lots of pianos wherever you got off.  They made up for portability with ubiquity.  (I have claimed that the largest number in the known universe is the number of times two girls have sat down at a church piano and played "Heart and Soul."  That was true for two generations anyway, though it has faded now.)

Even small churches had a piano, or a pipe or pedal organ.  Schools had them, and even in a mill city in the 1950's in a lower-middle-class district, it was one per classroom.  Quality poor, but piano present.  Bars and movie theaters had them; town halls, mess halls, dance halls, and dining halls. During slavery, not many African-Americans could get their hands on one, but by 1900, it wasn't just blues guitars along the Mississippi. There was an enormous variety of instruments, and pianos strong among them.  Many, many families had them. Because it was a sign of wealth and refinement in the 1700s (especially back in the old countries), it became a middle-class aspiration in the 1800's and by the 20th C, even poor kids took lessons. Starting in 1900, there were 200,000 - 300,000 brand new pianos sold every year, and the instruments tend to last. That has fallen off since about 1980, and guitars have risen to well over that.  That's a more recent phenomenon. One might make an argument that the guitar has become the preferred instrument of "the folk" since 1975, when everyone started moving to a new city every decade or so and moved away from heavier instruments.  Recent.

All styles of music are played on keyboard.  But hymns and church music were the staple early on and persisted even when the keyboards popped up in brothels and barrelhouses. Immigrants from everywhere sat down at them. 

Who Do You Think You Are Kidding, Mr. Hitler?

I had thought the song was WWII authentic, but it was written for the show. There is a nice moment in the second season when these ridiculous, hapless men from the Home Guard - those not in the regular army because of age or some exemption - believe that Hitler is invading, and the three of them must make a stand at the crossroads near Godfrey's Cottage to give the army time to arrive. The entire point of the show (1970's) was to poke gentle fun at an earlier generation. The joke rather caught in the throat when one of the three said "Mind you, it will probably be the end of us, but we're ready for that, aren't we men?" and another answered " a'course." Apparently it was deeply moving to many.

I watched it (S2E2, halfway through.) It was all the more powerful for being a throwaway line, not milked as they did in Titanic.

On our 1997 visit to England and Scotland for Jonathan's graduation, I wandered one evening from the apartment we had rented in Marleybone in search of an interesting pub and came across one closer to Bond Street, where the sound of people singing around a piano drifted out into the night.  I went in and sang songs from the war, from music hall, from Steeleye Span, Tom Lehrer, and show tunes.  One of the most marvelous nights of my life.  I brought Tracy back on Thursday, but the magic of serendipity wasn't there.

I can still picture three or four of them quite clearly, though.

Feminism

It has always seemed to me that young women spend an inordinate amount of time arguing about who and what a real feminist is. I can't tell whose side I'm supposed to be on here.

Men can get temporarily interested in discussing what is real masculine behavior, but usually can't go more than 40 minutes straight, even at a Promisekeepers weekend. This is because pretty rapidly, some guy in the group will reveal himself as an opinionated prick who has no interest in listening to anyone else - often it's the lecturer - and the other guys start wandering away to see if anyone has any beer or cigars or good stories.

Women, OTOH, seem endlessly fascinated by the idea of who has got it right an who hasn't.  I think this slows down after children, particularly the second child. The issues which were once so central start to become remote.  Beer and cigars and good stories don't become remote.  Men are lucky that way.

Particles

James is so far over my head that I cannot even make intelligent-sounding noises about this.  But he's excited about these particles, so I expect we should be too.