Four years before this book was published [in 1955], Chapter XVII, “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow,” appeared in Harper’s Magazine, of which I was then an editor. This chapter was written before any of the rest of the book, but it was written because of it. I thought that if I was going to write about tastemakers, I should define their quarry, and on one of several attempts to write an introductory chapter to the book, I devoted a couple of pages to highbrows, lowbrows, upper and lower middlebrows. I showed this draft to Katherine Gauss Jackson, a colleague of mine at Harper’s, who said, “You’ve got the essence of a piece here. Why don’t you write an article on brows?” So I did, and it appeared as the lead article in the February 1949 issue of Harper’s. Several weeks later Life magazine, which was at the time “the king of the visual media,” did an article about my article and published a pictorial chart illustrating the several “brow levels” of American taste at that time. Since then this article (later the chapter only slightly revised) has had an independent life of its own, and though I invented none of them, the words highbrow, lowbrow and middlebrow, with its subdivisions into upper and lower, have become part of the language of taste along with “tastemakers,” which was, so far as I know, my coinage.

I can think of no better way to indicate the changes in taste that have occurred in the last quarter of a century than to reproduce here the Life chart, in which I had the controlling hand, and to note what has happened in the interim …”

Lynes concludes thusly:

As I look at the chart, which a Life editor and I concocted over innumerable cups of coffee years ago, it strikes me, as it must you, that what was highbrow then has become distinctly upper middlebrow today. The rate of change, indeed, is about the same as that which is demonstrated in the chart showing what happened between the 1850S and the 1950S [I’ll reproduce these charts below]. Who regards an Eames chair as highbrow now? Or ballet, or an unwashed salad bowl or a Calder stabile? They have all become thoroughly upper middlebrow, and what was upper has become lower. Only the lowbrow line of the chart makes spiritual if not literal sense. Today television would find itself at all levels of the chart in ways, as we have noted, too obvious to define. The “pill” has taken the glamor out of Planned Parenthood as an upper middlebrow cause, and Art and The Environment are now their causes instead … and so on. Even if the shapes of the pieces have changed, and the board looks quite different, the basic rules seem to me much the same as they have been since Andrew Jackson Downing set about in the 1840s to make our forebears lead harmonious lives in tasteful surroundings.

“Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow” is a fun read. When it comes to brow-flexing, to hold back the forces of evil, it’s a tough call whether the prize goes to Sammo Hung, for his role as Longbrow in Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain (1983), or to Clement Greenberg for his role as Highbrow, getting quoted saying this sort of thing: “It must be obvious to anyone that the volume and social weight of middlebrow culture, borne along as it has been by the great recent increase in the American middle class, have multiplied at least tenfold in the past three decades. This culture presents a more serious threat to the genuine article than the old-time pulp dime novel, Tin Pan Alley, Schund variety ever has or will. Unlike the latter, which has its social limits clearly marked out for it, middlebrow culture attacks distinctions as such and insinuates itself everywhere …. Insidiousness is of its essence, and in recent years its avenues of penetration have become infinitely more difficult to detect and block.”

Lyne is bemused by such stuff:

The popular press, and also much of the unpopular press, is run by the middlebrows, and it is against them that the highbrow inveighs.

“The true battle,” wrote Virginia Woolf in an essay called “Middlebrow” (she was the first, I believe, to define the species) lies not between the highbrows and the lowbrows joined together in blood brotherhood but against the bloodless and pernicious pest who comes between. . . . Highbrows and lowbrows must band together to exterminate a pest which is the bane of all thinking and living.”

Pushing Mrs. Woolf’s definition a step further, the pests divide themselves into two groups: the upper middlebrows and the lower middlebrows. It is the upper middlebrows who are the principal purveyors of highbrow ideas and the lower middlebrows who are the principal consumers of what the upper middlebrows pass along to them.

And we’re off! But you should probably start by reading the original Woolf essay (really, a letter), which some months ago my friend Josh Glenn very kindly and shrewdly and thoughtfully posted on his site, Hilo, which is all about this stuff, and then some. Here is Woolf, coining the term:

Lowbrows need highbrows and honour them just as much as highbrows need lowbrows and honour them. This too is not a matter that requires much demonstration. You have only to stroll along the Strand on a wet winter’s night and watch the crowds lining up to get into the movies. These lowbrows are waiting, after the day’s work, in the rain, sometimes for hours, to get into the cheap seats and sit in hot theatres in order to see what their lives look like. Since they are lowbrows, engaged magnificently and adventurously in riding full tilt from one end of life to the other in pursuit of a living, they cannot see themselves doing it. Yet nothing interests them more. Nothing matters to them more. It is one of the prime necessities of life to them — to be shown what life looks like. And the highbrows, of course, are the only people who can show them. Since they are the only people who do not do things, they are the only people who can see things being done. This is so — and so it is I am certain; nevertheless we are told — the air buzzes with it by night, the press booms with it by day, the very donkeys in the fields do nothing but bray it, the very curs in the streets do nothing but bark it — “Highbrows hate lowbrows! Lowbrows hate highbrows!” — when highbrows need lowbrows, when lowbrows need highbrows, when they cannot exist apart, when one is the complement and other side of the other! How has such a lie come into existence? Who has set this malicious gossip afloat?

There can be no doubt about that either. It is the doing of the middlebrows. They are the people, I confess, that I seldom regard with entire cordiality. They are the go–betweens; they are the busy–bodies who run from one to the other with their tittle tattle and make all the mischief — the middlebrows, I repeat. But what, you may ask, is a middlebrow? And that, to tell the truth, is no easy question to answer. They are neither one thing nor the other. They are not highbrows, whose brows are high; nor lowbrows, whose brows are low. Their brows are betwixt and between. They do not live in Bloomsbury which is on high ground; nor in Chelsea, which is on low ground. Since they must live somewhere presumably, they live perhaps in South Kensington, which is betwixt and between.

The puzzle about where the middle-brows can possibly live has been pursued down the decades to this very day. In the very best and most thoughtful book on the subject ever written – that would be Carl Wilson’s Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste (33 1/3) [amazon] – the author quotes a baffled British critic, wondering where all the Celine Dion fans can possibly live. “Wedged between vomit and indifference, there must be a fan base: some middle-of-the-road Middle England invisible to the rest of us, Grannies, tux-wearers, overweight children, mobile-phone salesmen and shopping centre-devotees, presumably.”

But I promised you Lyne’s original, pre-Life charts. Here they are. (The one on the bottom is supposed to be on the facing page. So the top level is high, the middle middle and the bottom low. Obviously.)

Tell me of your time-saving note-taking methods, but don’t tell me to type it all in. What are good scanning products and OCR software suites and notetaking software. I’ve been using Zotero and I like it just fine. But maybe DEVONthink is better enough to be worth paying for, especially with the OCR?

Let me illustrate with a couple cases I’ve personally noted, which I suspect are representative. I just wrote a book about Plato [update: now optimized!], so naturally I’m curious what comes up if you Google Plato. Predictably: Wikipedia. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (I’m going to ignore erroneous results, due to ambiguity: computer systems named Plato, famous drivers named Plato, former child star actresses who committed suicide named Plato.) You get somewhat arbitrary Google book results. Why, in particular, is an edition of the Theaetetus, edited by Robin Waterfield #6? You also get a number of pages that, not to put too fine a point on it, look to have been designed along 1996-1999 lines. Because that’s surely when they were originally posted. This page, for example, is #2, right after Wikipedia, beating out even the SEP. Now, that’s nuts. There’s nothing wrong with the page, as far as it goes. But it’s clearly a beneficiary of the Matthew Effect. Google users are brought to this page – in droves, I’ll wager – because it was posted by an early-adopter of the interwebs thingummy. A similar example is this page, coming in at #6. This one is a much more serious project, by someone who is clearly competent to write about Plato, and who moreover has worked pretty hard to maintain and build-up this site. (Not that I’m implying the author of that other page was not competent. Just that the content hardly explains the #2 ranking.) That second site posts public stats, which are interesting: “870 000 visits in 2008 (an average of 2 374 visits per day).” I wouldn’t be surprised if the author of this site is, in a way, the world’s most influential Plato scholar, due to the fact that he had the good luck to start posting in 1996. Out of the top 10 hits for Plato (ignoring erroneous hits) we get, by my count: 2 that clearly deserve to be in the top 10 – Wikipedia and the SEP; 3 Google Books titles that are perfectly respectable but pretty random – i.e. none of the three is one of the first titles you would mention to someone asking ‘where should I start, to find out about Plato?’; 3 personally-maintained sites that are clearly here because they are late-1990’s Matthew Effect beneficiaries; a pretty good animated video of the Cave Parable on YouTube; and a link to the Plato page of the MIT Classics Archive, which – despite the academic imprimatur – is a late 1990’s affair. Another Matthew case. (The last time I visited, a lot of the links were broken. But maybe someone has fixed that.) The content is Jowett translations; that is, old stuff.

What are we missing? The Perseus Project, for one. I was surprised to see no Amazon links cracking the top 10. (Not that I think that’s so important, but I’m surprised.) How did we do? So-so. Partly the problem is that you should enter more intelligent search parameters. But part of the problem is runaway Matthew Effect. I suspect that the three random book hits could be explained by the Matthew Effect, in some way. Someone must have linked to these books. And these titles, rather than some others, lucked into a high slot. It’s interesting that Google doesn’t do better. (Not that I have any bright ideas.)

Second case: last year I posted this X-Mas card set on Flickr. (I’m making more this year!) Anyway, long story short, one of the images got Stumbled, as a result of which, eventually, two rather similar images diverged dramatically in their traffic. This one has been viewed 2,000 times. This one has been seen 12,000 times and has thereby accounted for 10% of the traffic my Flickr account has ever received. (I actually like the first image better.) I was curious whether it would just go and go like that forever, but recently it’s stopped. My Stumblejuice ran dry. (The part of me that values justice is glad to see this. The part of me that likes getting free stuff for no good reason is a bit dismayed.) Anyway, I don’t really understand how ranking sites like Stumble and Delicious and Digg and so forth work because I don’t use them myself. But it strikes me that all this stuff clutters things up worse, Matthew-wise. [UPDATE: clarification. I don’t mean the one pic got a huge spike that then disappeared. I’ve gotten those, too. Rather, you get a steady, slightly higher rate of traffic – in my case, 25-50 hits a day for months and months and months. But all that adds up.]

What could search engines do to combat the Matthew Effect better, algorithmically? Obviously if anyone knew, then Google would know, and presumably Google would then do it. (Or would they?)

The Plain People of the Internet: It hadn’t any McArdle in it!

I: Surely, my good man, we have not come to such a pretty pass as that.

The Plain People of the Internet: But here we are, and here you are.

I: I prefer to think it was due to modesty. False modesty, perhaps. But if it weren’t for false modesty, some people would have no modesty at all. Or so I like to flatter myself.

The Plain People of the Internet: What are you babbling about, you great baby, and bottomless bag of blog posts!

I: In my post, I quoted John Kricfalusi on the baneful influence of cool. “Why do young artists say they like UPA? Because it makes ‘em cool. Hipster Emo time. (It’s also easy to fake) It’s like when teenagers discover communism. They think it’s real cool to go against common sense and experience. But then when they meet the real world head on later, they realize it was youthful folly. You’re supposed to grow out of it. I too fell under the UPA spell for the 3 weeks I wanted to be cool.” But what is it, of which he speaks? A contrarian herd instinct, thus a bleating contradition in terms? An emo knee-jerk? What is the common denominator of Gerald McBoingBoing and the dream of One World Government? In short, what’s cool? Or if you prefer, what does ‘cool’ mean? Compared to this question, the trouble with McArdle’s opposition to health care is but a bagatelle.

The Plain People of the Internet: Blast your eyes!

I: I have been doing some research on the subject. Here is a passage from Charles Dickens, Great Expectations. Joe Gargery – honest soul, who wears his heart on his rolled up sleeve, as he works an honest day at the open flame of the forge – reports on what has become of Miss Havisham’s fortune:

“Dear Joe, have you heard what becomes of her property?”

“Well, old chap,” said Joe, “it do appear that she had settled the most of it, which I meantersay tied it up, on Miss Estella. But she had wrote out a little coddleshell in her own hand a day or two afore the accident, leaving a cool four thousand to Mr. Matthew Pocket. And why, do you suppose, above all things, Pip, she left that cool four thousand unto him? ‘Because of Pip’s account of him the said Matthew.’ I am told by Biddy, that air the writing,” said Joe, repeating the legal turn as if it did him infinite good, ‘account of him the said Matthew.’ And a cool four thousand, Pip!”

I never discovered from whom Joe derived the conventional temperature of the four thousand pounds, but it appeared to make the sum of money more to him, and he had a manifest relish in insisting on its being cool.

I submit that if even a simple soul like Joe, what never learned his letters, can have such a fine appreciation of cool, then it cannot be beyond the capacity of the internet itself.

The Plain People of the Internet: Why if I could just reach through this comment box, as if it were a window, I’d post a comment, I’ll say!

I: [With an air of venturing a novel and highly advanced experimental technique] Googling around a bit, I have discovered -

The Plain People of the Internett: – Zzzzzzzz.

I: – I have discovered that, apparently, Joe’s usage, although Pip regards it as slangy and fresh to the point of mild obscurity, is attested much earlier: “Applied since 1728 to large sums of money to give emphasis to amount.” By contrast, the use of ‘cool’ to predicate a particular sort of somethingness to people and other things only dates to the jazz age: 1933, to be exact. This is interesting because it makes me realize that I am no longer sure how to hear, for example, the title of Nathanael West’s classic, A Cool Million (1934). I have always thought that title is very much of its time, and should be played on the keys of the mind in a jazzy way. But now that I know it could have come from Joe Gargery, with his coddleshells and meantersays, I don’t know what to think. (Commenter Lemuel Pitkin, you must have an opinion on this question.) The puzzle is this: how can we be sure that the sense that arose in 1933, or thereabouts, is distinct from the sense that had been around since 1728. This is no idle puzzle, I hasten to emphasize, but is key to our present difficulty: namely, the lack of comments to my previous post, due to the absence of McArdle and (I can only assume) the emphasis on cool. What can one say in response to Kricfalusi if one is not even sure (for how can one be?) that the coolness of One World Government is the same coolness as 4000 pounds, or is it more like the coolness of jazz? Or all they all one. Is there a unity of the coolnesses, akin to the unity of the virtues? And what does this have to do with Gerald McBoingBoing? Because, after all, Pip’s point is that the paradox of cool is that it makes valuable without adding value. 4000 pounds will buy, on the open market, exactly as much as will a cool four thousand. Likewise, Kricfalusi’s point is that animators deluded in the school of UPA and the flat style will be forever making things valuable, in some sense, without adding value, in any sense. As Foghorn Leghorn says: “two nothings is nothing.” Thus, there must be a unity of the coolnesses, and the 1728 sense, the Joe Gargery sense, must just be the same as the Jazz Age sense. Then again, we seem to have a sense that this is not so. As King Lear says: “Nothing? Nothing comes from nothing.” We have a sense that, surely, the Jazz Age sense of cool must have derived from the Joe Gargery sense, by extension. It must have been caused by the difference between 4000 pounds and a cool 4000 pounds. It must have occurred to people that this was also true of some people and things. That there was a discernability, along the jazz axis, of identicals along any other axis. It is enough to make one’s head hurt. And how much more would it have hurt, I console you, if I’d made the same point, but in Heideggerian terms?

The Plain People of the Internet: For that small mercy, I’ll let you live – this time!

Next: even more of those psychedelic biology scans up. This one for example:

(Sorry if you’re not into it, man.)

The next thing our skull-bound friend posted was every bit as good. Scans from a 1936 children’s book about Japan. Like this:

That’s a lovely, lovely chicken.

But I don’t want to talk to you about chickens. I want to talk about the future. This is sort of a follow-up to my Taleb post. Here’s a passage from The Black Swan:

This point can be generalized to all forms of knowledge [you’ll get what the point is from what follows]. There is actually a law in statistics called the law of iterated expectations, which I outline here in its strong form: if I expect to expect something at some date in the future, then I already expect that something at present.

Consider the wheel again. If you are a Stone Age historical thinker called on to predict the future in a comprehensive report for your chief tribal planner, you must project the invention of the wheel or you will miss pretty much all of the action. Now, if you can prophesy the invention of the wheel, you already know what a wheel looks like, and thus you already know how to build a wheel, so you are already on your way. The Black Swan needs to be predicted!

But there is a weaker form of this law of iterated knowledge. It can be phrased as follows: to understand the future to the point of being able to predict it, you need to incorporate elements from this future itself. If you know about the discovery you are about to make in the future, then you have almost made it. (172)

I’m interested in this because I’m writing something about Plato’s Meno. You remember his silly argument? I’ll just quote the Stanford Encyclopedia version:

For anything, F, either one knows F or one does not know F.

If one knows F, then one cannot inquire about F.

If one does not know F, then one cannot inquire about F.

Therefore, for all F, one cannot inquire about F.

I’m interested in ways in which Taleb’s point, like Meno’s, is an exaggeration of a basically sound view. (Meno’s version is rather more exaggerated than Taleb’s, I appreciate.) Taleb emphasizes that scientific discoveries come when people are looking for something else entirely. But, although that’s right, I think the power of serendipity as the main engine of scientific discovery can be overstated. Does Taleb overstate his case? What do you think?

What about the history of future? Often, when people write about the future they are just allegorizing the present in some fairly transparent way. That’s what makes it so funny, looking back. But that’s often because they actually are commenting on the present, in some way. They aren’t really, seriously trying to predict the future. They’re just sort of spoofing what they see around them by pretending to project its development forward.

Historically, who are the serious, working futurists? The successful ones (I do appreciate that if you have thousands of people flipping coins, someone is going to get a whole string of heads.) It seems it should be more possible to predict the future piecemeal, as it were. It’s true that trying to predict it all exposes you to ‘black swans’. If you miss one big thing then you miss everything.

OK, that’s enough. Here’s some eye-candy to accompany this theme. I just finished reading a relatively neglected (I think) SF classic, The Twentieth Century, by Albert Robida [amazon].

Published in 1882, set in 1952, it’s not the greatest read but it has some truly inspired bits. I’ll show you some pictures – of which there are many, and which are certainly the best parts.

That’s a cover detail, obviously.

That’s another of the man’s books. Very Verne-y affair it promises to be. (Dames in diving suits on ostrich-back. That’s change we can all believe in.)

That’s Robida. It’s all about the electricity. The next may, despite appearances, need a bit of explanation.

Here’s an inadvertently humorous quote from a Robida descendant, in 1955. Robida foresaw: “aviation, television, gas masks, subways, underwater fishing, helicopters, women’s emancipation, in a word, all that constitutes our lives today.” Well, that’s not quite ALL there is to life today. Robida does get a surprising amount right, honestly, but you only need to miss a few big-ticket items to be fairly badly off the mark, prediction-wise. (Taleb’s point.)

One thing Robida does get surprisingly right is mass media and multimedia. Everyone talks on the telephone all the time, and the televisiphone (or whatever they call it). Robida predicts 24 hour news channels, RSS feeds and podcasting (more or less) and several other developments. He predicts that action movies will pretty much conquer media. Muscular women with big guns will squeeze out classical French culture, in various humorous ways. (He predicted Sigourney Weaver, roughly.)

Some fun details. Mormons take over England after China takes over the Western United States and the British government relocates to India. In 1920 Russia is destroyed. “Bombs set by the mysterious and fearsome Nihilist Party blew up chunks of land several square leagues at ta time, wiping hwole cities off the map in the process! The devices used by these terrorists combined electricity, compressed air, and a mysterious explosive substance eleven hundre times more powerful than dynamite.” Russia is now underwater, Europe is disconnected from Asia (except for Sweden and Finland, which are now on the Asian side of the divide.) In the final chapters of the book there is a bold project to raise a new continent by filling in between Indonesian islands.

French politics involves pre-scheduled revolutions, which helps everyone work out the psychic tensions of modern life. There are contests to construct the best barricades. Aerial barricades, for example. “Mr Barlincourt’s model consisted of a long armored platform one meter wide and eighteen meters long, held up by three small balloons plated with a bulletproof gutta-percha coating.”

Here’s the most BoingBoing of them all. The ‘picturesque barricade’, designed by ‘Mr. Narcisse Boulard, photo-painter.’

Constructed of short-fitted and bolted beams, dirt, and cobblestones, this barricade stands out by the picturesque quality of its design, making it resemble a scale mmodel of a German castle on the Rhine. The beams can be combined in a thousand different configurations to create barricades of all styles. Cost of material and bolts: 250 francs. The inventor generously offers his idea to public domain and shall not take out a patent on it.

That’s enough Robida.

One other link for the night. A few weeks back ASIFA had a great post on futurism and (mostly) mid-century illustration and animation. It includes a Quicktime version of Ward Kimball’s classic “Mars and Beyond”, from 1957, which I highly recommend for its fine cartoon modern qualities. Here are a few screencaps:

Those are the inhabitants of Mercury.

Can’t remember where he’s from, but he’s supposed to have a good memory.

Self-explanatory. I’ll leave it at that.

But, tragically – sinisterly, even – no mention was made of possibly the greatest occult detective of all. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you …

He appeared in a 1940 issue of Jungle Stories, available in this volume [ amazon].

Not to give away the ending, but …

Fero, Planet Detective:

Turn-offs:
Long walks on the beach
Women

Turn-ons:
Detecting planets
Stamping out vampires of Pluto that have invaded the earth.

Periplum is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as having come from the poetry of Ezra Pound, specifically in The Pisan Cantos, Cantos LXXIV to LXXXIV of a larger work known collectively as The Cantos.

A periplum is a map or drawing that that shows how land looks from a point at sea. That is to say that a cartographer often draws maps from a bird-eye view and not from the perspective as the land would actually appear from the crow’s nest or deck of a ship. Therefore a periplum would, theoretically, be drawn as if the cartographer were out to sea so that sailors could know which land or port they were approaching.

Pound uses the periplum as a figure to describe the form of the Cantos: not history from a historian’s or philosopher’s elevated point of view, but rather from the poet’s point of view where the poet is a voyager navigating history personally.

As appears in the Pisan Cantos,
Periplum, not as land looks on a map
But as sea bord seen by men sailing.
(E. Pound Cantos LII-LXXI lix. 83)

There’s no reason for such a concept to be sea-locked. A peripatetic lifestyle can crave a periplum perspective as profoundly. Maybe Google Periplum for every point on earth.

In other at-sea perspective news, Julian Sanchez provides a nice account of how hypothetical sea-and-land look to the man ‘steading:

Rachel: do the libertarian wonks supporting seasteading intend to continue their wonkery once they move to the sea colony? or would they have to like, build stuff for the first few years?

Julian: Build stuff? Don’t be silly. The Market will provide

Rachel: So the equilibrium is a place populated partly by libertarian escapists, and partly by non-libertarian teachers and nurses and radio dispatchers who work there because none of the escapists could do those jobs (or in sufficient quantities to meet demand)?

Julian: Who said anything about teachers and nurses? The Market will do it.
Julian: In a pure libertopia, the Market will be so efficient as to dispense with the need for human intermediaries, like a Lovecraftian Elder God who casts aside the husk of an avatar to bestow the touch of madness with its own deathless tentacles.

Rachel: Sweet. I’m moving.
Rachel: Ready the dinghy.

Julian: Also, I’m having T-shirts with the slogan “ready the dinghy” made up.

There’s more. But your job is to use ‘periplum’ in a sentence. It can be a Robert Ludlum-style made-up title for a novel about a libertarian seasteading scheme undermined in sinister fashion, for sure. P-based alliteration, obviously a temptation.

You know what that means. I’ve been reading Jonah Goldberg again. Here we go, pondering the notion that a few of these teabag types might be right-wing extremists of a certain sort.

I wrote a book on fascism which tried to show that what everybody knows isn’t necessarily true. The idea that soldiers will return from war and become right-wing militants? Well, that has its roots in Fascist Italy, where veterans returned as black-shirted shock troops of “Il Duce,” Benito Mussolini. The only problem with this theory is that what they clamored for was socialism — the socialism of the trenches! — and their leader had earned the title “Il Duce” as the leader of the Socialist Party.

Now obviously ‘socialism of the trenches’ means something like: recover that feeling of unity and common cause we had, in the immediate aftermath of that initial irruption of chaos and disaster, when everyone set aside petty class differences and stood, shoulder to shoulder, against a perceived external enemy.

And it’s obvious that nothing like that could be spiritually akin to – oh, say, Glenn Beck’s 9/12 project. Because Glenn Beck isn’t in favor of socialism.

Sigh.

Let’s talk Texas secession. Like I said, Belle bought me this stack of old paperbacks – because she loves me – and the whole mouldering lot are turning out to be weirdly prescient. First the beaver management, now this.

You can read the back, too.

I’ll just give you a sample from Chapter 5. A bit of background. A flying saucer full of beautiful female aliens has landed, wiping out Alexandria, VA by accident. But they are apparently friendly. These seductive Lyru are welcomed in ‘Biddyland’, as the Texans now refer to North America outside of Texas. (They haven’t actually seceded, but they’ve basically severed social and cultural contact with the rest of the country. Oh, and you have to be able to rope a steer in order to vote. It’s sort of Cowship Troopers, that way.) But all is not well …

David Hull let Lily, the mare, clop along the composition paving with a slack rein while he listened to the radio that was build into his saddle. Crazy Texans, he thought fondly. They’d probably have rigged up a saddle-video, too, if they could think of a way to watch it at a gallop.

Dave had got the news about the Lyru at the office, and now he was listening to a commentary by Panhandle Pete, whom the announced introduced as Texas’ Own Analyst of Current Events.

“Evenin’, Texans,” Pete drawled. “The latest reports of the goin’s-on in Biddyland are disquietin’, to say the least.

“These here Lyru critters, who wiped out two thousand people quicker’n you or me could even draw a bead on a rattler, have now been given the run of the range, so to speak, despite the valiant objections of our own Lone Star congressmen. No good can come of this indecent haste in admitting strangers to the very bosom of our lives.

These gals’ve left plenty of questions unanswered. You probably noticed how they squirmed and stammered when they was asked about their menfolk. What kind of men have they got, I ask you, who’d let women do their dangerous scouting work for them? Or maybe they haven’t got any menfolk – maybe they only seem to be women. But how can we tell if we take them at their word for everything and let ourselves be hoodwinked by a pretty face and a show of leg?

“Fellow Texans, let’s not join the idiot parade. I say to you that these Lyru people have a lot more to make clear before we give them the run of our range – before we let them into Texas to perpetuate [sic] whatever nefarious schemes may be bubblin’ in the black cauldron of a space ship hangin’ up there in the sky …”

Panhandle Pete, in his melodramatic, over-folksy way, voiced the prevailing mood of most of Texas, Dave knew. And more than mere anti-feminism was behind it. It was a natural caution that seemed to be lacking in the love-thy-neighbor philosophy of the females who were running things from Washington.

Dave reined up at a hitching post outside a white frame house set back from the road behind a neat garden. He looked again at the number to be sure he had the right house. He’d expected something more rough-hewn, frontier style, from Frank Hammond, the ex-Pennsylvanian gone Texan.

Frank met him at the porch, holding two highball glasses.

“Time for a drink before dinner,” he said. “Might as well sit out here. Nice evening.”

“Perfect,” Dave agreed, relaxing in a deep chair and looking at the long shadows from the setting sun. “Didn’t think I’d find you in such a pretty place, Frank. Guess I expected more of a bunkhouse atmosphere.”

Frank laughed. “Hardly. Ann would never approve.”

“Ann?”

“My wife, She’s responsible for the garden, and for the roast pork you’ll be putting away shortly.”

“I didn’t know you were married. I don’t know why -”

“I know why,” Frank said, “You robably thought I fled to Texas to get away from women. That’s only partly true. There are women and women, and the ones I can do without are the domineering, brassy, this-is-the-way-I-run-your-life kind. Ann’s the other kind, as you’ll see. A man’s woman. And when it comes to her I’m no mysogynist, believe me.”

“Well, sure,” Dave said, “but I supposed women were pretty scarce in Texas as a result of the great migration.”

“It wasn’t quite so great as all that – in its effects, at least” …

[I’ll just skip ahead a couple paragraphs. I’m getting tired of typing.]

“I heard you talking about me behind my back,” she said. “so I spunkily made myself a drink along with refreshers for the fearsome menfolk.”

“Forward woman,” Frank smiled. “Next you’ll be wanting to vote.”

She sat down next to her husband and made a face at him.

“Just so you’re not misled, Dave,” Ann said. “women do vote without hindrance in this county. We’re not entirely medieval here. Furthermore, when I was a girl back home I could rope and brand a steer on Daddy’s ranch long before the big male egos made that a requirement for registration.”

Well, to make a long story short, Sam Buckskin – a Walker, Texas Ranger-type – and his followers save America from the Lyru. It turns out that there are ugly old women aliens – the Crones – holding the beautiful young ones as slaves. The Texans free them. And, in the last chapter, it looks like a male Texan might actually be elected President in the year 2000!

There. That was much better than complaining about the rest of Jonah Goldberg’s column.

(The Girls From Planet 5 was apparently published in 1955, in case you are wondering. My reprint is from 1967.)

Take the anti-same-sex-marriage stuff, for example. NRO has two perfect examples up right now: “The Future of Marriage”, signed by ‘the editors’. And Maggie Gallagher’s latest effort, “Married To Liberty?”

From the NR editors piece:

Same-sex couples will also receive the symbolic affirmation of being treated by the state as equivalent to a traditional married couple — but this spurious equality is a cost of the new laws, not a benefit. One still sometimes hears people make the allegedly “conservative” case for same-sex marriage that it will reduce promiscuity and encourage commitment among homosexuals. This prospect seems improbable, and in any case these do not strike us as important governmental goals.

Andrew Sullivan, responding:

Ponder those sentences for a moment. The fact that gay Americans may feel equal because of inclusion within their own families and societies is now a cost to society, not a benefit. Encouraging commitment, fewer partners, and greater responsibility are important governmental goals with respect to heterosexuals but not with respect to homosexuals. As far as National Review is concerned, homosexuals can go to hell. Their interests and views cannot even be accorded respect. They are non-persons to National Review: means, not ends.

Flip this around and you see what the theocon right actually believes: that society has no interest in the welfare of its gay citizens, and an abiding interest in ensuring that they remain unequal, feel unequal and suffer the consequences of a culture where family and commitment and fidelity are non-existent.

I expect a splutter of indignation at the Corner, in response. Andrew Sullivan is demonizing opponents of same-sex marriage. How can he accuse us of this truly awful stuff?

The irony is that, in fact, the editors surely don’t personally think anything so awful, although Sullivan is perfectly right that their argument makes no sense whatsoever unless they do.

What do the editors, and Gallagher, really think? The ick argument, I’ll wager. They want to stop same-sex marriage as a way of sending a message of ‘ick’ to gays, and about gays. But they also don’t want to be labeled homophobes. That is, although saying ‘gay marriage shouldn’t be allowed because I believe gay sex is icky’ is actually a less terrible argument than anything they’ve got – hey, it’s not flagrantly internally incoherent, it’s basically honest (I’ll wager), and who doesn’t believe that on some level people steer, morally, by emotional attraction-repulsion drive? – it’s considered embarrassing. (Homophobia: the yuck that dare not speak its name.) And, even if it weren’t embarrassing, it’s obviously not strong enough in the current environment. So what do you do? You end up thoughtlessly backing into something that’s frankly orders of magnitude worse than just saying gay sex is icky. Namely, gays are un-persons, so far as the state is concerned.

What makes these arguments so weird is the mildness of the underlying opposition to homosexuals and homosexuality – the implicit inclination to be basically tolerant. ‘C’mon, gays, you know you’re ok, and we know you’re ok, and you even know that we know you’re ok, but we don’t like it, so can’t there be some way that we can insist on us being a little better than you? It can be a small thing. Symbolic, but slightly inconvenient for you, so people know it’s also serious?’

I also like the sweet innocence of the assertion that “marriage is by nature the union of a man and a woman.” My very own daughter is charming in just the same way. Just the other day she was asking which boy cats the various girl cats in the neighborhood are ‘married to’. There are kittens in our neighborhood, you see.

Let me make a few somewhat fresh points about stuff in the general vicinity of the Murray speech (which was well received by conservatives. Goldberg loved it, and Douthat thought it was pretty good.)

As you’ve probably noticed, conservatives tend to argue against liberalism/progressivism by asserting (plausibly) that Robespierre, or Stalin, or Hitler did bad things; then asserting (considerably less plausibly) that liberalism/progressivism somehow equals, or naturally tends to slide into, bad authoritarianism of a distinctively modern sort. Ever since Burke wrote his book about the French Revolution, some such slippery slope argument is the Ur-argument of conservatism as political philosophy.

Suppose we sketch out that thing that it is feared liberalism/progressivism will slipperily slide into. See if you don’t agree that the one thing every conservative swears up and down that he hates in all its many works and deeds, is anything resembling the following:

Intellectuals cook up some abstract, scientistic, rationalistic System. Blinded by the light of Enlightenment hubris, they conclude that a very great transformation of society can be happily effected in relatively short order. A political revolution shall ascend atop some alleged social science breakthrough which, we are assured, is a sold extension of more fundamental advances in the natural sciences. Mostly, the engine of change is the force of changed minds themselves. First, some activist elite manages to get their heads on straight. Then the people will eventually be dragged (if necessary) into the light. It’s Politics of Meaning as the Rule of Reason. The job of government is to understand what the right values are, and make sure those values permeate the lives of the (potentially false-consciousness afflicted) masses. For their own good.

The elite summon the New Man onto the stage of history, by cramming ‘enlightened’ values down the throat of the Old Man. Which never works. And that’s if he’s lucky. (If he is unlucky, his head has been cut off.)

Now: quite apart from his tendency to prescribe misery, what is notable about Murray is the degree to which he fits the science-turned-social-engineering-hubris bill. He claims that some people know what the true values are in life – the transcendent ones. What this enlightened elite should do is use the government (i.e. by forcibly shrinking it) to induce those who are deluded by false values to accept the true ones. Also, the scientific basis for this sort of thing is established in works like Consilience, by E.O. Wilson. (An ambitiously systematic, totalizing, rationalistic philosophy that asserts, among other things, that the apparent plurality and complexity of social phenomena must ultimately give way to highly reductionistic understanding of such phenomena in terms of simple natural laws. Even rationalistic analytic philosophers are leery of this stuff as way too rationalistic to be workable.) Murray predicts that the New Man (as we may as well call him) will emerge within the next decade or so, sweeping into the dustbin of history all those fools (they said I was mad! MAD!) who resisted this totalizing, systematic, rationalistic, Enlightenment-inspired understanding of things. Mankind is about to take leave of immature childhood – ‘adolescence’ as Murray says – and enter into rational, scientifically-informed adulthood. Plus Darwin is great, too.

Now, to be fair, both Goldberg and Douthat express polite demurrals at the ambitiousness of the 10-year plan. But even so: it’s notable that conservatives apparently find this sort of thing quite attractive.

Conservatives will object that advocacy of limited government can’t be any sort of totalitarian temptation. Small is the opposite of big. But this misses the point. At the philosophical level, the concern is not big or small. Coercion is as coercion does. The philosophical concern is about willingness to force others to accept your values for their own good. Bringing about small government, on the grounds that this will eventually induce others to accept your superior value system, is just as ‘coercive’, in the relevant sense, as bringing about big government to do that. (Forcing people not to have something they think they want is no less coercive than forcing them to have something they don’t think they want.)

I can think of a couple other bad arguments against what I’m saying here. But that’s what the comment box is for.

What’s the significance of all this? Well, apart from the fact that it’s silly that some conservatives can spy the totalitarian temptation under every liberal bed, but can’t recognize it when it gives a speech after dinner – but that’s why they pay Goldberg the big bucks. No, seriously. The significance might be this: the Ur-conservative argument, the slippery slope argument that somehow liberalism/progressivism tends to threaten freedom, hinges on the observation that liberals think they know what is really good for people, and generally think they have some arguments about all this that make a considerable amount of sense. Thus, liberals are naturally going to be tempted to sacrifice classical liberal values of liberty – freedom from coercion – for a ‘politically correct’ imposition of this or that alleged value. But obviously conservatives think they know what’s really good for people, and think they have arguments that make a certain amount of sense. (I think Murray is a nut. But I don’t fault him for having, and expressing, opinions and arguments about what is valuable in life.) This is why it isn’t really all that surprising or damning that Goldberg and Douthat would kinda like Murray’s speech – for its overall attitudinal tendencies. But this just goes to show, by analogy, how weak the conservative slippery slope argument must be.

It’s plausible that modern life has introduced us to distinctively nasty forms of authoritarianism. At the ideological level, a toxic combination of The Politics of Meaning (if you must call it that) and the Rule of Reason. (Of course, at best this gives us the left flank, from Robespierre to Stalin; not the right flank. But let that major point pass.) But it’s absurd to treat all minor manifestations of this combination, in modern life, as canaries in the coalmine of liberty. Because what’s distinctively bad is not the combination, per se, but precisely the extreme cases of it. In a low key way, the combination of the politics of meaning and the rule of reason is just any old case of thinking you know what really ought to be done, politically, combined with a strong suspicion that those who don’t see it that way are confused.

I ask you: if even Charles Murray doesn’t constitute much of a totalitarian temptation, what hope do the mere Clintons and Obamas of the world have of being secret enemies of freedom?

I realize that beaver management jokes are so a fortnight ago. Nevertheless, my wife – because she loves me – bought me a book on the subject.

(To be fair, she bought a whole bunch of other old paperbacks in the same lot.)

I read it. (Just so you know I have an excuse for not posting or keeping up with my Gerry Cohen reading.) An evil industrialist – who scorns these earnest bureaucrats who want to shut him down – dumps radioactive waste in the river. Result: 20 foot tall telepathic, teleporting beavers terrorize mankind. That’s fairly awesome.

I’ll type out the last page of the book. (Warning: contains plot spoilers!)

“The third possibility,” said Brogan. “The machine has undone the effects of the radiation. He is no longer a genius. He is a normal nine year old again.”

“Sinclair,” said Barney. “I’ve been thinking. I believe he did it on purpose. He wanted to be normal again. He did what he had to do.”

“Now then!” exclaimed Brogan. “That must be it.” He stroked his great beard thoughtfully. “The boy built the machine for us, saved humanity from the menage menace of the radio-active beavers, then decided that he didn’t want to be alone on his pedestal of super genius.”

“He must have known,” broke in Sinclair, “that the machine would neutralise the strange brain powers which the radio-activity had produced. I’m not really sorry though, it would have been a horrible thought to realize that there was a nine-year old child walking around with a brain powerful enough to destroy the universe.”

Discuss. Should the boy have ‘gone Galt’ instead?

And now I would like to report that the book contains the single worst argument against atheism yet devised. I present “The Atheist and the Acorn”, by Anne, the Duchess of Winchelsea. Complete with an engraving of the young PZ Myers by H.S. Marks:

Methinks this world is oddly made,
And every thing’s amiss,
A dull presuming atheist said,
As stretch’d he lay beneath a shade,
And instanced it in this:

Behold, quoth he, that mighty thing,
A pumpkin, large and round,
Is held but by a little string,
Which upwards cannot make it spring,
Or bear it from the ground.

While on this oak, an acorn small,
So disproportion’d, grows;
That, who with sense surveys this all,
This universal casual ball,
Its ill contrivance knows.

My better judgment would have hung
The pumpkin on the tree,
And left the acorn, lightly strung,
‘Mongst things which on the surface sprung,
And small and feeble be.

No more the caviller could say,
Nor further faults descry;
For as he upwards gazing lay,
An acorn, loosen’d from its stay,
Fell down upon his eye.

The wounded part with tears ran o’er,
As punish’d for the sin:
Fool! had that bough a pumpkin bore,
Thy whimseys would have work’d no more,
Nor skull have kept them in.

Discuss.

I found the illustration here, and was saved from having to scan it. The poem can be found elsewhere on the web, in slightly different versions. Here, for example.

What are your favorite podcasts that I probably don’t know about? (I have this weird problem where iTunes decides it doesn’t like certain podcasts after a while and won’t download them anymore. Example: I can only download Rachel Maddow at work because my home mac doesn’t do that stuff anymore. I click. It tries for a second then gives up. Very strange.)

In other news, I haven’t been posting at the Valve of late. But I finally got back on that horse and hauled off and posted a great huge thing about literary stuff and Theory … just for those who are all nostalgic for the good old days.

God, I don’t want to read such a thing (you reasonably protest, and I can offer no cogent counter-argument.) Then, after you read it, you come back and complain: after all that hemming and hawing, you don’t even say whether Nietzsche has an unsatisfactorily one-dimensional account of power, in your considered opinion, or not?

Very well: it is my opinion that Nietzsche’s philosophy of power is precisely isomorphic, in dimensionality, to the subject matter of this work of art, “Monster Attack”, by young Eli Kochalka. It is the greatest work of art ever. Ergo, Nietzsche is a very sophisticated theorist of power!

I suggest you click on the Monster Attack link and leave it at that.

I believed that evolution and the account of the Bible about creation could exist along side of each other very well. I just didn’t see what the big argument was all about. I had some friends who had been studying the Bible much longer than I had who saw it differently…Eventually, I came to the conclusion, through my study of the Bible and science, that the two positions of evolution and creation just could not fit together. There are some real problems with the idea that God created through evolution… My prayer is that you will have this same experience!

The Bible’s picture is that dinosaurs and man lived together on the earth, an earth that was filled with vegetation and beauty…man and dinosaurs lived at the same time…From the very beginning of creation, God gave man dominion over all that was made, even over the dinosaurs.

After that, I decided to give my X-Mas presents the attention they richly deserved. The adverb that describes the way my mother-in-law shopped for me is ‘awesomely’. She got me Jack Kirby’s The Eternals, Book 1 and (!) Jack Kirby’s Devil Dinosaur [amazon].

Here are a few choice panels. First, from The Eternals #1:

And from Devil Dinosaur #6:

Do you suppose Rick Warren’s friends have been sneaking peeks at old issues of Devil Dinosaur, to fill in some of the dinosaur-related gaps in the text? As the first issue announces: “Since the picture of genesis is still incomplete – this may be the most sensational origin of all time!” And ‘Moon Boy, the first human’ has the ability to control Devil …

What’s it about? I’ll quote the subtitle: ‘the NEW business of self-publishing – or – how to publish books for profit with print on demand by Lightning Source and book marketing on Amazon.’ That’s pretty narrow, so maybe you don’t care. If you do think that might be interesting, I’d say it’s a good book, and an excellent how-to. If you want a practical step-by-step to starting your own micro-publishing business, he’s got the blueprint. If that’s not for you, it’s still interesting. For example, he has smart things to say about Amazon’s apparently hair-raisingly ruthless attempts to stamp out the POD competition. (If you don’t know about that, you could start here, then graduate to reading the actual legal complaint here. It’s an ongoing class action suit.) Shepard doesn’t deny that Amazon is ruthless but he takes a small-fish-can-still-swim-here line. I’ll quote from his blog (presumably he doesn’t want his draft quoted, but it says pretty much the same):

Though I’ve already written about Amazon.com’s supposed policy of no longer buying books from Lightning Source—and though nothing has changed—I keep getting asked about it by people who simply cannot believe that self publishing through Lightning is still viable. So, let me say this quite clearly:

Not a single independent self publisher is known to have been affected by Amazon’s new “policy” in any way. Only larger publishers and self publishing companies have been affected—and it doesn’t look as if Amazon ever intended it any other way. If you are self publishing through Lightning Source in the manner described in my book Aiming at Amazon, it is business as usual, for now and the foreseeable future.

Small comfort to the more medium-sized fish, of course. And none of this bears on Eszter’s shipping cost irritations, not directly (so I didn’t clutter her thread with it); but it’s relevant in that a source of the confusion (certainly there was some of that) is that Amazon is this funny Puzzle Palace of a Bazaar. Amazon isn’t just selling stuff to customers. It’s selling access to customers to other stores. Amazon Prime is this funny sort of deal because it’s sort of an attempt to lock the likes of Eszter into Amazon within Amazon. Well, anyway: Shepard is staring hard at one puzzle-piece, from the point of view of a seller. That’s an enlightening angle, if you are used to looking just as a customer. (Obviously it’s nothing new for bookstores to deal with publishers on one end and customers on the other. But the two sets of dealings now come together and mix in new ways).

In other Amazon news, the DVD for Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is actually a POD. (Or a MOD - manufacture-on-demand.) Whedon used Amazon’s CreateSpace service, which is Amazon’s attempt to eat Lulu.com’s lunch in a serious way. Interesting that such a big name would decide this is the way to go. In effect, it’s another lock-in. CreateSpace provides high quality (so everyone seems to say) and it’s cheap to use, so profit margins for creators can be higher than at, say, Lulu (which is seriously expensive. I use it to make family X-Mas albums, and I think I’m paying too much. I also use Blurb, which seems like a good service.) Your stuff gets listed on Amazon. But: it’s not going to be available anywhere else. So Dr. Horrible is only available from Amazon (I take it.) This is Shepard’s publishing philosophy as well: you can do well enough aiming only at Amazon. (Chapter 1 is: Forget Bookstores.) That’s a crucial tipping-point that scares lots of folks: when the inside of Amazon is big enough that whole businesses can live there. But it’s actually quite convenient for a crop of small businesses.

Discuss. I’d be curious to hear more about Amazon CreateSpace. Anyone have anything to say about it, good or bad?

UPDATE: just to clarify. Amazon’s CreateSpace doesn’t lock you in in any legal way. All POD services leave you owning your own stuff. (If any don’t, then run, don’t walk, in the opposite direction.) It’s just that being listed on Amazon is so attractive that Amazon can, in effect, offer nothing further, and still have an attractive service. If you want more you aren’t going to get much help from CreateSpace, but they aren’t stopping you from D.I.Y.