I really ought to find that passage from Nietzsche to plug in here but I can remember where it is. Ah well. The wages of a hyper-refined type sense (I am not speaking from experience here) is apparently a kind of inky hemophilia, through which you are capable of bleeding profusely from a minor cut. The world fills up with little letter-y fishhooks that snag your eyes, painfully, but leave the ordinary mass of readers untroubled in their reading passage. Being able to appreciate truly great typography means sacrificing the capacity to find sloppy typography to be perfectly legible. A common enough trade-off, in a sense. Coming to appreciate really good anything means becoming annoyed by merely mediocre samples of the same. But it’s a bit different when the thing is such an everyday functional item. It’s one thing to like really good beer, and come to hate cheap beer. It’s another thing to come to appreciate why a particular sort of hammer is really well-made, and be rendered slightly butterfingered by any $9 hammer from the hardware store ever after. Not a major paradox, I do concede, but kinda funny.

THE IDEA

A talented, creative writer invents a story about an object. Invested with new significance by this fiction, the object should — according to our hypothesis — acquire not merely subjective but objective value. How to test our theory? Via eBay!

THE PROJECT

1. The project’s curators purchase objects — for no more than a few dollars — from thrift stores and garage sales.

2. A participating writer is paired with an object. He or she then writes a fictional story, in any style or voice, about the object. Voila! An unremarkable, castoff thingamajig has suddenly become a “significant” object!

3. Each significant object is listed for sale on eBay. The s.o. is pictured, but instead of a factual description the s.o.’s newly written fictional story is used. However, care is taken to avoid the impression that the story is a true one; the intent of the project is not to hoax eBay customers. (Doing so would void our test.) The author’s byline will appear with his or her story.

4. The winning bidder is mailed the significant object, along with a printout of the object’s fictional story. Net proceeds from the sale are given to the respective author. Authors retain all rights to their stories.

5. The test’s results — photos, original prices and final sale prices, stories — are cataloged on this website. The project’s curators retain the right to use these materials in other venues and media. For example: Maybe we’ll publish a book.

They are up to their 100th and final entry: Jonathan Lethem vs. the Missouri Shotglass (The Missouri Shotglass would be a good nickname. Greg “the Missouri shotglass” Whillikers.) Now, just as if that little birdy on the glass flew to my ear, I hear the project will continue as some sort of charity fundraiser type thing, which I think sounds like a fine model for a charity fundraiser type thing.

I think it’s interesting how central the investment of cultural ephemera with significance has been to cultural and artistic imagination, lo the last 40 years or so. Ephemeral is the new eternal. Yard sales and eBay, the new sites of the Sublime (whereas a Romantic poet once had to trudge to a picturesque ruin, the seaside, or a mountaintop.)

That’s not really an adequate summary of the state of art and culture, in case you are disappointed I can’t do it in two sentences flat. But it does seem to me interesting and actually quite appropriate, in our present age, that so many artists feel compelled to build almost exclusively by repurposing ‘low’ cultural products. They can’t build to a decent height any other way. Pop culture – nay, aged mass culture, in its dotage – is the new Nature, to which one turns for authentic inspiration: the ever-returning waves of the sea, no mere wading-pool of nostalgia. (Fear of the future combined with contempt for the present, as a wise comic book character once said.) Oh, it might seem this sort of dumpster diving and incessant craphounding around is just amusing, ironic subjection of the whole culture to Mystery Culture Theater 3000-style snark commentary. But these artists aren’t just kitsch-whisperers and camp followers, my dear sir or madam. Nay, these are so many brave Aeneases (what is the plural of Aeneas?), passing through Gates of Ivory, which they bought cheap on eBay, and it works out ok for them, for what dreams but false dreams could be true doors into themselves. Am I right, or am I right?

I’m most interested in repurposing-the-low because it is the spiritual engine of most good work done in comics for the last generation, ‘course. Anyway, I’ve enjoyed watching the Significant Objects project roll along. Best of luck to them, going forward.

So, which page is your favorite and why? (Defend your answer.) I’m partial to the Escher-like quality of Thunderstrike’s – what is it? I guess you could describe what we are seeing here as a cross between a deltoid and a mobius strip. Or between a pectoral and a tesseract?

In short: where exactly is either his left shoulder or the left side of his chest? Did his shoulder just sort of give up on becoming an arm and then the arm tried again, launching itself out, a bit below, where the intercostals should be? I could stare for hours. It’s like a cross between a Japanese sand garden and a fancy butcher shop. But perhaps you prefer the Doctor Strange pin-up in which the good doctor is – well, how tall would you say he looks to be?

via War Rocket Ajax

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.)

As of 2009, there is no fully conservative translation of the Bible which satisfies the following ten guidelines:[2]

1. Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias
2. Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, “gender inclusive” language, and other modern emasculation of Christianity
3. Not Dumbed Down: not dumbing down the reading level, or diluting the intellectual force and logic of Christianity; the NIV is written at only the 7th grade level[3]
4. Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms as they develop;[4] defective translations use the word “comrade” three times as often as “volunteer”; similarly, updating words which have a change in meaning, such as “word”, “peace”, and “miracle”.
5. Combat Harmful Addiction: combating addiction by using modern terms for it, such as “gamble” rather than “cast lots”;[5] using modern political terms, such as “register” rather than “enroll” for the census
6. Accept the Logic of Hell: applying logic with its full force and effect, as in not denying or downplaying the very real existence of Hell or the Devil.
7. Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning
8. Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story
9. Credit Open-Mindedness of Disciples: crediting open-mindedness, often found in youngsters like the eyewitnesses Mark and John, the authors of two of the Gospels
10. Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio; avoid compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities; prefer concise, consistent use of the word “Lord” rather than “Jehovah” or “Yahweh” or “Lord God.”

They are basically planning to start with the King James Bible and then just make it say what they think it should. Not only do they apparently regard it as inessential to involve anyone with knowledge of the original texts – although they off-handedly contemplate this as a possibility – they are touting ‘mastery of English’ as one of the benefits those who help with the project can expect to reap. What can one say? I find it hard to believe the whole thing isn’t some sort of elaborate, Borat-style hoax. Could it be? (Is Conservapedia for real?) Discuss.

via Sadly, No!

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!

Also, I have an invented a test. First, view this image. Now check under the fold for the answer.

Was your first reaction: shouldn’t that be ‘dwarves’? If so, you are way too influenced by J.R.R. Tolkien.

Next: ASIFA is serializing – for a limited time only! – an e-book version of Eugene “Zim” Zimmerman’s Cartoons & Caricatures, or Making The World Laugh (1910), in 5 page installments. I’ve downloaded my first five. I love this stuff.

Zim was the founder of the so-called “Grotesque” school of caricature, and was the first caricaturist to incorporate exaggerated cartooniness not only in the faces of his subjects, but in the bodies as well. Zim worked for Puck and Judge, the two top humor magazines of their day. Along with caricatures by George McManus and Frederick Burr Opper, Zim’s caricature of a moon faced grinning kid (an example of which appears on page 3 of this book) was said to be one of the earliest inspirations for Mad magazine’s mascot character, Alfred E. Neuman

Last but not least, Scott K. points out that you can read eight pages from David Mazzuchelli’s Asterios Polyp [amazon]. I just finished and I really, really, really liked it. The whole book, I mean. The eight pages are nice, too.

‘Horatio’ is a Greek or Roman name that almost rhymes with ‘You’re boring us’. Check. And ‘bent wheat’ was, no doubt, the sort of thing 19th Century and earlier peoples put in baby food, to make sure the baby didn’t eat too much. I left out the hardship suffered by mariners. (Let’s add it in: Horatio Wheatbender Tunnybotham Filibuster.) And ‘filibuster’ is close to ‘noise made in anger’. I give myself 4 out of 5 stars for effort.

What is delicate, I will admit, is settling how and where desire crosses belief and expectation and action. (As Wittgenstein says, wanting and trying to get are very closely related.) For example, this ad crosses over into Kierkegaardian territory.

It is absurd to expect to get more from something than you think it is possible to get from anything. Especially if it’s instant coffee.

Still, I don’t think it is absurd to want coffee that would be better than life itself could possibly be. That would be a damn fine cup of coffee.

Am I right?

Gail Collins:  David, can we talk hot-button social issues for a second? I know this is not really an area where you fly the conservative colors, but you’re the go-to guy on how America lives, and I’d like to hear your thoughts even if we can’t work up a fight.

This just makes me want to lie down on top of the Applebee’s salad bar and never get up again.

OK, I admit it, I did indeed finish that conversation.  But only because I was fortified by this old chestnut first.  Once I regained the will to live, I read Brooks’ final comment:

what I’m trying to say is that people seek to preserve the orderly bonds around them. Most people, even on these hot button issues, gravitate toward positions that seem to best preserve unspoken communal understandings. As a result, I don’t expect sharp change on any of these subjects. There is a gradual acceptance of gay and lesbian rights, but I think progress will take longer than people anticipate. On gun control and abortion, I don’t see much change of any sort.

There are fewer and fewer culture warriors in America. Most people want order and peace.

Right, of course, except for the people who don’t.

More importantly: to revive an argument I made in What’s Liberal and have been repeating ever since (like right now!), this kind of sober centrism doesn’t explain why seventy-something percent of Americans disagreed with the Supreme Court’s rejection of state bans on interracial marriage in Loving v. Virginia in 1967, but only about seventy-something people consider this a “hot-button social issue” now.  (For those of you who still haven’t read What’s Liberal despite my most earnest entreaties: I note in the epilogue that TV’s first interracial kiss occurred the next year, in 1968, on Star Trek—and that the episode was widely banned in the South.  This despite the fact that (a) Uhura and Kirk, the kissers in question, were not acting under their own power at the time, and (b) Kirk kisses every woman in the galaxy eventually.  Not to mention the ancillary fact that since this is Star Trek we’re talking about, the kiss took place in the twenty-third century, so even in 1968 it hadn’t really happened yet, which should have reassured Southerners and racists everywhere that their unspoken communal understandings about such matters would persist for quite some time.  (Flash forward to the twenty-first century: a check of the Google tells me that the only people upset by the Spock-Uhura kiss in the new Star Trek movie are the people at Stormfront, and no, no link to them.)

I keep coming back to Loving v. Virginia not only because it’s the obvious reference point for contemporary debates about gay marriage, but also because I think it’s an especially good device for asking one of Ye Oldest Questions in Ye Olde Historicist Handbook, namely, how does seismic cultural change like this happen?  Base, superstructure, determination in the last instance, you know the tune—the last time I tried to sing it, I wound up with this three-part essay on Raymond Williams’ “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory.”  When I was out at Reed College earlier this month, I mentioned this in the course of a talk on the history of cultural studies, and since my audience consisted of about fifty alumni most of whom were twentysomethings when Loving v. Virginia was decided, we had a spirited discussion of this and much else.  One younger alumna wanted to know why there seems to have been such an amazing liberalization of popular opinion with regard to gay marriage, gays and lesbians in the military, etc., while progress on gender equity, measured from (say) the Neolithic period, has been so glacial; I responded, of course, by saying “you know, when you feel like you’ve been leapfrogged by gay marriage, this is where Williams’ dominant/ emergent/ residual argument comes in really handy.”  Then someone asked how I would account for the decline in smoking over the past forty years.  I said, more or less, that (a) maybe, just maybe, sometimes enormous, decades-long public-health campaigns actually work! and (b) at some point over those forty years, as the social stigma of smoking got stronger and stronger, smoking got itself more and more strongly associated with the poor and the working class, which surely accelerated the process of stigmatization.  These are pretty obvious arguments, I know.  If only I’d waited until Henry’s post went up!

Anyway, the point remains that the “people gravitate toward positions that seem to best preserve unspoken communal understandings” argument is just lazy and bad and also wrong.  Because sometimes, those unspoken communal understandings turn out to be no more substantial than a puff of smoke.

I just got my Plato book [yes, you can read the whole thing!] ms. back from Pearson for final-final-final corrections and it’s clear the proofreader is not a philosopher. That’s actually not a bad thing, since it means fresh eyes about some things. One thing I’m not sure about: I’m being told not to use single-quotes. Since there are a number of places where I definitely need them for use-mention purposes, I’m going to have to put my foot down. This probably means I should announce to the reader what the convention is. But then I have to state it and, the truth is, I also use ‘scare quotes’ – single-quotes to indicate that there’s something questionable or problematic about a term or phrase. There are a few bits where I briefly conjure a bit of hypothetical dialogue and use single quotes to make it look more speech-like. Looking at all these red marks, I gotta clean up my act. Maybe the proper thing to do is restrict myself to necessary use-mention uses and don’t use the things for anything else. What is your preference, if any? (I don’t mean just about my book. In general. What are single-quotes for?)

Basically, a weirdly high number of responses to “How much to blame were the Jews for the financial crisis?” were in the ‘moderate’ to ‘a great deal’ range. 32% of Democrats and 18% of Republicans ‘blame the Jews’ at least moderately for the financial crisis. I realize there is such a thing as the crazification factor. But that’s still pretty high. (I’m guessing the Republican numbers are lower in part because high numbers of them don’t actually admit there’s a crisis. They might be more willing to blame the Jews if it were made clear that they weren’t thereby committed to conceding the existence of the thing the blame is for. But that’s just an unscientific guess.)

The weird thing, of course, is that people are willing to go with ‘the Jews’ as a cohesive, mass-noun sort of designation. In part, people must be responding the way they do on the basis of a vague awareness that there are lots of Jewish names in the stories about the financial crisis. Bernie Madoff, for example. That is, they are saying: among those responsible (if we assume those at the top of the financial world are responsible) there were a number of Jews. Yes. But suppose you asked people whether to blame ‘the Jews’ for all the bad movies Hollywood keeps making. All the vaguely unfunny romantic comedies that keep being inflicted on innocent Americans – on Mainstreet, if you will. Look at the lists of producer and executive names on these productions. See any Jewish names? I’ll bet you see a couple. I like my Blame The Jews For Unfunny Romantic Comedies as premise for a Mel Brooks movie. Kind of a cross between “The Producers” and “Good Night, and Good Luck”. Some sort of hysterical anti-semitic, McCarthyite rumbling across America. Innocent Jewish producers of unfunny comedies having to go into hiding. And Jewish producers of perfectly funny comedies suffering guilt by association.

Suppose you ask who gets credit for America’s first class higher education system. Would people be willing to say ‘the Jews are somewhat or mostly responsible’, just because lots of professors are Jewish. Suppose you asked people whether ‘people whose names start with ‘M’ are somewhat responsible for the financial crisis’. Literally, that’s probably true, in some analytically vastly uninteresting sense. Madoff. I’m sure I could find other bad actors with names that start with M in the financial sector.

Probably you don’t need me to tell you that ‘blaming the Jews’ for the financial crisis is a bad idea. But I’m really at a loss as to what the hell so many respondents thought they were saying. Did 30% think they should answer ‘somewhat’ if they merely believed there were a number of Jewish individuals in the financial sector in positions of authority? Or do substantial numbers of Americans seriously suspect that there might be Jewish conspiracies afoot?

UPDATE: Malhotra and Margalit respond to critics. See this newer post.

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.

I feel the need to cheer poor PZ up. So: the coolest thing on Flickr is this set of scans from a 1972 biology textbook that so desperately wanted to be a prog rock concept album. You should also read the tart commentary by the guy who posted it.

I thought about posting a few of the images here but I think, for full effect, you just need to view the whole set. (Just like you can’t really explain to someone why a particular Yes album is great by playing only 10 seconds of it.)

There’s this bit, for example:

You won’t be interested in any such promise [of faith], you won’t see the point of clinging to it, if you think that “apart from the odd, stubbornly lingering spot of barbarism here and there, history on the whole is still steadily on the up,” if you think that “not only is the salvation of the human species possible but that contrary to all we read in the newspapers, it has in principle already taken place.” How, Eagleton asks, can a civilization “which regards itself as pretty well self-sufficient” see any point in or need of “faith or hope”?

So basically Eagleton (and Fish) are arguing against a hyper-panglossian rationalist-atheist liberalism that is, by hypothesis, decisively refuted by ‘all we read in the newspaper’. And from this Eagleton and Fish conclude that the only way to puncture this hubristic bubble of supreme self-sufficiency is with … religion? It doesn’t even occur to them, apparently, to try to get these panglossians to read the newspaper? Which. would. refute. them?

Of course, devastating that lot would still leave all the actual liberal-rationalist-humanist-atheists unaddressed. But I take it Eagleton and Fish have absolutely no idea what to say against any of them except (stamps foot, for extra truthiness) ‘do these liberals not understand the importance of Important Things! Hubris! Harrumphsnort!’

If there is any more cogent anti-liberal-ratonalist-atheist argument in that whole Fish piece, I am very sorry to say that I must have missed it.

I thought the ending was a nice ‘more in sorrow than anger’ touch. Eagleton, writes Fish, “is angry, I think, at having to expend so much mental and emotional energy refuting the shallow arguments of school-yard atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins. I know just how he feels.” Oh, and the bit in the middle where Fish spends a whole paragraph crowing about Eagleton’s cleverness in referring to them both as ‘Ditchkins’.

Don’t they teach irony in the English department any more? I think they should.