Hubski – some observations

I’ve been a member of Hubski for about eight months.  Like many other members, I am a refugee from reddit.  In my case, I am not only a refugee but an actual exile, reddit having censored my posts because I committed the heinous crime of writing the content myself.  I am still moderately bitter about this – though, to be fair, reddit did post their policy and I blithely ignored it.  I won’t quibble over the guilty plea – but I will laugh at the policy.  “No more than 10% of your posts may be your own material,” sayeth the perky little cartoon character with the bent antenna sticking out of its bald pate.  What irks me is that if I had been truly cynical I could have simply polluted the site with nine reposts of nauseating celebrity news and cute puppy pictures for every one of my own essays – and I would have been in strict compliance.  Keeping up my karma score was never really a problem.  As it is, I look back on my reddit experience with no real fondness.  The tall spikes on my Google analytics charts were nice, but not much compensation for the lack of intelligent comments or coherent criticism.  Not to mention the outright ad hominem.  Or the fact that my posts swept off the pages like butterflies caught in the exhaust of a jet engine.  It seems a little indecent even to put Hubski in the same sentence with reddit.  Like putting an art critique in the same room with a dog fight.

I like Hubski.  If my data spikes are a little more anemic than they were in my reddit days, the volume and quality of the discourse more than make up for it.  I’m an odd user, I know, writing more posts than I read and tending to comment rather sporadically.  While I get the impression that some people actually live full time in Hubskiland, I am more of an itinerant artisan, laying out my wares on the virtual public square from time to time, waving virtually at people I know, smiling virtually at people I don’t.  It’s a pleasant place – wherever it is.

There seems to be a general anxiety, particularly among the more longstanding members, that, with time and expanding membership, Hubski is going to degenerate into something more redditesque.  To me, this seems unlikely.  While it is true that as the population goes up, the number of unpleasant people will inevitably go up with it, Hubski is moderated in an entirely different way than reddit – and that alone makes the probability that it will follow reddit’s destiny unlikely.

Hubski is moderated, from a functional point of view, by the individual member’s right to mute or ignore other member’s.  As a dedicated advocate of free speech, I was initially rather put off by the right to mute.  I think that if someone wants to argue anything – even that the world is flat – it does us more harm to shut them up than it does to go through the minor tedium of refuting them.  I lean toward J.S. Mill’s position with regard to censorship.  I made a personal resolution never to mute anyone – a resolution that I kept for approximately a month.  I discovered that the mute has at least one valid use.  It is a way to stop another member with an abundance of time and malice from conducting a personal crusade against your posts.  It is a sort of virtual equivalent to a restraining order, but with the advantage that it cannot be violated and does not require the approval of a judge – or a moderator.  Can it be abused?  Of course it can.  If a person just mutes people left and right who see things differently, that person undermines most of the benefit of rational discourse.  On the other hand, the promiscuous muter (or ignorer, for that matter) is wielding a double-edge sword.  No one likes being snubbed, and cutting off too many people is probably the quickest way to marginalize oneself.  I have only muted one member.  I consider it a dangerous right to be used only as a last resort – but without it I probably would have gotten sick of arguing with the person I muted.  I see no ethical justification for ignoring people – but I understand that this is my standard and not necessarily everyone else’s.

In any case, the right to mute or ignore (I don’t really know or care what hush does – it sounds like it should reduce that member’s font size) makes Hubski whatever the individual user wants it to be.  If you want to endure the dross and noise that comes with open membership, don’t mute or ignore anyone.  If you want to build a comforting little echo chamber you can bask in to relax – make your own tag and mute everybody except your five closest friends.  This is very different from reddit, where typically you got the dross and noise in addition to arbitrary moderation and irrational draconian site policies.  Unless mk and thenewgreen are struck by lightning, become afflicted by some personality-altering disorders, or are induced to sell to some nefarious 3rd party, I just don’t see Hubski mutating into anything like reddit.  This is not to say it cannot change, however.

The danger of letting people build protective walls around themselves is that they will be tempted to do just that.  Every time I hear the phrase “Hubski community” I mentally shake my head.  To me, a community is a group of people with tangible interdependencies.  Whether they like each other or not, they have to get along.  I have seen a certain level of emotional support offered up on Hubski from time to time, but if my car dies on the interstate I will probably not be logging in and begging members for immediate help.  Without any real need to stay on civil terms with members one doesn’t like, mute and ignore rights let Hubski fission into various little cliques and interest groups.  If I mute you and you ignore me, what can it possibly mean to say that we are part of the same community?  We might as well be living on different planets.  The problem this poses for members is just as I have said – it narrows their experience for the sake of intellectual comfort.  The problem it poses for mk and thenewgreen (and whoever else shares in their vision) is that, over time, Hubski may come to resemble reddit at least in that it will consist of a large collection of disinterested or even hostile camps.  I’ve already concluded that certain tags are functionally out of bounds for me.  It isn’t that they are in a hostile part of town where people disagree with my opinions, but rather that they are in a part of town where I evidently don’t exist.  Of course, it is nice to find someone who agrees with you now and then – but a steady diet of agreement is not a healthy diet for an active mind.  The best that we can hope for is that, while many members will sequester themselves one way or another, enough eclectic thinkers will remain at large to make this ongoing experiment a happy and welcoming success.

Every new member has the potential to bring something useful and enriching to the rest of us.  That is an exciting prospect.  Who are we to be bitter if some proportion of them either can’t or won’t?

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See also: http://cadwaladr.blogspot.com/2014/10/hubski-thoughtful-web.html

Someone to Hate

A couple of days after the 9/11 attacks, I overheard two coworkers talking.  One said to the other “…you know all those people in Afghanistan hate Americans.”  It was the kind of blind, unsupportable statement that makes my stomach tighten.  I said and did nothing.  Sometimes I am a coward.  I have interrupted the conversation a hundred times in fantasy, however:

     “So you’ve traveled in Afghanistan?” I ask.
     “No…” comes the sheepish reply.
     “Well, then you know alot of Afghans?  You see them hanging out downtown at the sports bar?”
     “No, not actually.”
     “Then how do you know that all – mind you, ALL – every last grandmother, every last child – in Afghanistan hates Americans?  Do they get up in the morning feeling this hate?  Do they stop at midday, kneeling down beside their flocks and in their fields, and pray fervently for our demise – every last one of them?  Why on earth would the average Afghan even think about us?  Haven’t they got their own troubles, their own domestic concerns, their own particular breed of human challenges to contend with?”

At this point in my fantasy, my interlocutor shrinks in shame while I stand in glorious triumph, having won another victory for humanity.  It is all pure nonsense – an absolute waste of mental activity on my part.  Stripped of his circumlocution – and my moral indignation – this is what my coworker’s statement actually meant:

     I publically affirm that I consider Afghans non-persons.

That’s all.  Clean and simple.  This is a different kind of statement altogether.  I may be as disgusted and self-righteous as I like, but I cannot argue with something that is not really an argument.  If I had spoken up, the conversation would probably have gone more like this:

     “So you’ve traveled in Afghanistan?”
     “No.  What difference does that make?  Whose side are you on?”


A few concepts

Sociologists call statements in the form “People in group x are all alike” expressions of a belief in outgroup homogeneity.  I’m not sure that the technical term does much real work, except to make the idea discussable as a neutral abstraction.  Saying “Those people are all alike” is functionally equivalent to saying “Those people are not individuals with unique views and feelings like ourselves; they are just instances of a certain type – interchangeable non-persons.”  We all think this way to some extent, whether we like to admit it or not.  It is an extension of the very useful human tendency to generalize.  We do it because, at a very deep level, our brains are attempting to model the world in a way that helps us cope, and keeping a completely open mind about every person that we meet is exhausting, inefficient and occasionally even dangerous.

Consider what I hope will be a non-controversial example for the generally liberal audience I am no doubt biased to assume I am addressing.  Image you’re a native American practically anywhere at almost any time during the 19th century.  Having the narrow and quite bigoted view that any white person you encounter is likely to be a source of trouble is probably going to serve you better than having the enlightened view that every person in the world is an individual and should be given the benefit of the doubt.  Prejudice, in this example, would have been a good survival trait.  For our hypothetical native American, adopting a hostile posture might occasionally have been unfair, might have hurt some innocent person’s feelings (or worse) but, on balance, it would still have been a pretty serviceable heuristic.  The world might be a much nicer place if people’s brains didn’t work this way, but as long as some people’s do, everybody else has reason to approach the odd stranger with at least some measure of caution.  To extend the example above, if the majority of native Americans actually were prudently unsympathetic toward whites, then, conversely, it would have been irrational for whites to show much sympathy toward native Americans.  Hostility is a thing best shared.  Arguments about priority (i.e. They started it!) do not seem especially helpful or enlightening.  To consider prejudice a kind of personal sin is to believe that people do not live within a powerfully influential social context, and that cultures are something we participate in only for the sake of tasty ethnic food.

Try the following enjoyable experiment: think about some group of people you dislike.  Unless you are the Dalai Lama you can probably summon up some group almost immediately – the rich, the poor, blacks, whites, Latinos, Jews, Muslims, Christians, Hindus, liberals, conservatives, gays – any group of people that you feel are making the world a more disagreeable place than it really needs to be.  Now ask yourself – “How many people in that group do I personally know?”  I don’t mean “have seen” or “have met once” or, worse still, “have read about on my favorite blog.”  By “know” I mean “have sat down and had a long, informal conversation with.”  “Have lived among.”  That sort of thing.  If the answer is “none” or “not many” – you’re prejudiced.  Sorry.  If it helps to make you feel better, when I’m not being consciously philosophical I am pretty sure I’m prejudiced too.  Personally, I find that people who claim to be free from prejudice are either lying or are living unusually insular lives.  If you live in an elite bubble or a gated community it is at least a theoretical possibility to be sublimely and completely tolerant.  You probably won’t be, but it’s possible.  I don’t live in such a bubble, but I can still feel any way I want to about Afghans – if only due to the accidental circumstance that I don’t know any.  It is important to consider that the person I cited at the beginning of this essay, who probably didn’t know any Afghans either, found it genuinely advantageous – in September, 2001 – to deciding to declare them non-persons.  Before 9/11, I doubt he had any opinion of Afghans at all.  Why would he have?  After 9/11, his prejudice gave him a sense of solidarity with those around him – a social benefit he would not have attained by expressing the opinion, at that time, that most Afghans might be ok people as far as he knew.  Dark and cynical as this may sound, echoing the prejudices of your particular group is a great way to make friends.  Some of us dehumanize more of the world than others – but we all agree on one thing: we only hate the people who deserve it.  Or, to put it another way, we tend to believe that the prejudices of our peers and our own subculture aren’t prejudices at all – but plain, self-evident truths.  We take the word of people that we know when it comes to our assessment, good or bad, of people that we don’t.1

No discussion of prejudice would be complete without at least a nod to another great sociological concept – the fundamental attribution error.  This is the human tendency to attribute the bad behaviors of other people to their basic natures, while attributing our own acknowledged bad behaviors to unavoidable circumstances.2  Fetching up our 19th century native American example once again, it would be easy for him to think that whites were simply antagonistic by nature, and that he himself was only antagonistic because he had no choice.  From the opposite side, the converse would also be an easy assumption.  The fundamental attribution error does not so much create prejudice as it offers a mental strategy for defending it where it already exists.  It can be seen as a fancy scientific term for nothing more sophisticated than a simple double standard.

A distinction should be drawn between prejudice and hate, which up to this point I have bandied about rather indiscriminately.  Prejudices are sometimes serviceable heuristics, and they are not always negative.  An automatic sympathy for members of a certain group is no less a prejudice than an automatic dislike for them.  Hate, on the other hand, is not a heuristic.  Hate is an emotion.  Prejudices are features of one’s intellectual architecture.  You could describe a prejudice as a series of assertions.  Even the fundamental attribution error is intellectual in character – it is the brain’s attempt, however imperfect, to make a certain sense of its social environment.  Hate asserts nothing.  It doesn’t even originate in the parts of the brain where assertions live.  Hate has causes, but no reasons innate to itself.

To understand that prejudice and hatred are not synonymous, one has only to consider that there are plenty of prejudices that don’t entail any emotions on the part of their bearers.  Suppose I have the belief that people in group x are generally handicapped at complex problem solving.  It does not follow from that assumption that I hate them.  I might pity them, or even be completely indifferent.  In general, we hate that which we perceive as a threat – just as any other animal does.  It is the object of prejudice (and here I mean – of clearly negative prejudice) who, simply by being depersonalized, feels threatened – and thus has cause for hate.  Being hated is, of course, another cause for hate – and this almost always makes hatred reciprocal.  “Hating the hater” is no less hating – no less indulging in an intellectually debilitating emotion.  Hatred, too, engenders prejudice since it is practically impossible to hate someone without the brain eventually getting around to constructing some sort of architecture of justifying reasons, perhaps legitimate or perhaps merely expedient.  Simply put, you can be prejudicial without hating but you probably cannot engage in hatred without becoming prejudicial.


Race and culture 3

Let’s begin with an unproven but supportable assumption.  Race – a set of heritable and outwardly observable physical characteristics – is not a consequential desideratum of either intellectual capacity or behavior.  In simpler English, if you take a baby of any race and raise it as a fully accepted member of a particular culture it will very likely display the values, abilities and behaviors consistent with that culture.  Genes matter, and may greatly affect the capacities and behaviors of individuals – but there are probably no smart races, no violent races, no dishonest races, etc.  I can’t prove this, but it seems to fit an honest assessment of daily experience.  Racism, per se, has little if any empirical support.

Culture is an entirely different matter.  To be a member of a culture is to exhibit certain behaviors and to shun others.  It is to generally adhere to a certain set of values and beliefs.  Behaviors and beliefs have outcomes in the real world, and it is utter non-sense to say that all behaviors or belief patterns are meaningfully equivalent.  If you are a dedicated relativist, I suggest you invite a few neo-Nazis to your next gathering and see how well they fit into your paradigm.  Or, if you’re a ultra-tolerant Unitarian, try inviting a few Satanists to your next vague celebration of the goodness of your amorphous deity.  Relativism is a philosophy for people who live carefully protected lives.

I would not propose ranking cultures (which would include what we usually call “subcultures”) into some great hierarchy from best to worst.  It is not that simple.  What I am saying is that for any given criteria one chooses – social cohesion, long-term survivability, adaptability, placidity, might, intellectual freedom, etc. – some cultures will generally produce better outcomes in terms of that criteria than others.  Further, it is hardly surprising that we are more likely to be tolerant of alien cultures that are most harmonious with the values of our own.  We are social beings.  In striving to adapt successfully to our environments, our brains put a high value on adapting to whatever cultural body we happen to inhabit.  Thus, even a culture that is ill-adapted to present conditions still presents a strong attraction to its members.  We cling hard to what we know, usually until circumstances render such an attachment impossible or at least deeply miserable.  Better the devil you know – the saying goes.  On the other hand, we tend to oppose cultures that we believe are at odds with our values and out interests – whether our beliefs happen to be accurate or not.  In other words, cultural prejudice is often entirely justifiable.  To use the example above – you really don’t need to feel you’ve committed a moral breach by not inviting the town Satanist group to your open-minded solstice celebrations.  Your prejudice, it that case, is probably quite prudent.  If they invite themselves and try to make an animal sacrifice of your dog – perhaps even a little hatred would be useful, giving you the courage to evict them.

Race, while not a true determinant of behavior in a biological sense, is often the identifier of default for members of a particular culture.  To return to an earlier example, the native American I envisioned need not have been explicitly racist to notice that all the people overrunning his land had a common set of physical characteristics.  If I tend to assume that most of the Asians I meet (apart from those working in restaurants) are college educated – am I being racist or merely being demographically observant?  Race, within the context of a particular society, functions more-or-less like mode of dress.  I might or might not be biased against men in suits – but I can assume, with considerable confidence, that they aren’t going to mug me.  It is always possible that a particular man in a suit happens to be a mugger fresh from a court appearance (taking full advantage of the suit-wearing heuristic, by the way) – but it is unlikely.  So long as a given group of people are associated with a certain set of characteristics, members of that group that do not share those characteristics are likely to suffer or benefit unfairly.  Again, although our innate social predispositions may not always be very admirable, imagine a world completely devoid of such tendencies.  How would we function if, on encountering another person, we could not make any prior assumptions based on dress, deportment, gender, sexual orientation, race, age, ethnicity or physical condition?  We would essentially live like robots in a world of identical mannequins.  Flawed as our assumptions may sometimes be, it is only the ability to make assumptions that makes the social world navigable.


Dogma

The real menace to human harmony is probably not prejudice – but intractability.  We all have prejudices – beliefs – we have acquired in the course of our particular lives.  The problem comes when one decides, perhaps unconsciously, that one’s beliefs no longer require the occasional reexamination.  How often have we heard somebody proudly declare “I have known ____ since I was sixteen,” or “I’m a lifelong member of ____.”  Isn’t that sort of statement just a way of making close-mindedness a virtue?  Isn’t it usually the same as saying “on that subject I am done with thinking and happy with the social benefits of pleasing my current set of friends”?  Introspection and reexamination are dangerous undertakings for the individual, but without them we are bound to certain views dogmatically -- the price of membership in whatever groups circumstances steer us into.  As human beings, we have the capacity to learn and adapt, to be conscious, and to undertake the plans our brains set out – but we also have the capacity to ossify, to live reflexively, and to undertake the plans we acquiesce to.

_________________________
1 As I write, I’m am visited by the miserable suspicion that some reader will get too this point of my essay and think – “That’s it exactly – the author has those people pegged!”  If that person happens to you, put down your coffee and start over at the beginning.  Repeat as necessary.  On no account write and tell me how I have described to a tee what’s wrong with the rich, the poor, blacks, whites, Latinos, Jews, Muslims, Christians, Hindus, liberals, conservatives, gays or anybody else.  That is yet another fantasy conversation I do not care to realize.

2 Interestingly, the fundamental attribution error always runs contrary to the common belief that humans have free will.  Regarding outsiders, it endows them with nearly immutable predispositions – presumably genetic ones.  With regard to ourselves, it freely surrenders the notion of freedom to the vicissitudes of external circumstances.  While I don’t believe we have free will, the fundamental attribution error is obviously no defense of that position.  Even for the bigot, it is irrational to say the universe itself manipulates other people with one set of forces but manipulates oneself with another.

3 We live in an age in which even discussing race hatred scares me.  I have long had the conviction, though, that that which cannot be discussed cannot be understood.

On ending mass incarceration – a modest proposal

Recently, an opinion piece appeared in The New York Times under the title:

"End Mass Incarceration Now”
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/opinion/sunday/end-mass-incarceration-now.html

The article puts forth a great deal of interesting material, and it is beyond my purpose here to address it all.  Instead, I will focus on a single passage that arrested my attention:

“After prison, people are sent back to the impoverished places they came from, but are blocked from re-entering society. Often they cannot vote, get jobs, or receive public benefits like subsidized housing — all of which would improve their odds of staying out of trouble.”

I don’t doubt for an instant that the Times has put its smudgy finger on a real problem.  While it isn’t at all clear how losing the right to vote pushes a person back into crime, it is undeniable that a released convict has to live somewhere, and shouldn’t to be forced back into criminal activity by an utter lack of other options.  No matter how high the rate of recidivism happens to be, those who truly want to live crime-free, productive lives ought to be given that chance.  That is basic decency.  Unfortunately, the lives of human beings are never simple, and when you consider the aggregate problems of communities the complexity only increases.  

Unless you make the assumption that the vast majority of the prisoners the Times is referring to are wholly innocent – simply rounded up at random and convicted automatically by a blind, cruel, and dysfunctional judicial system – you have to accept that most of them are in fact guilty of the crimes they were charged with, and that a certain fraction of those are going to commit crimes again if given the opportunity.  If rehabilitation programs were reliably effective, we probably would not have resorted to mass incarceration in the first place.

While the Times article laments the injustice of those imprisoned for “non-violent crimes” it is misleading to imply that these are typically petty matters.  Burglary is not a violent crime.  Neither is stealing your grandmother’s social security check to finance your drug habit – a crime, by the way, that no urban social worker working with the elderly would find unusual.  Breaking into cars is not a violent crime, and neither, most of the time, is stealing the cars themselves.  Commit to a generous program of sentence reduction of non-violent criminals and you are committing to increasing the amount of crime in somebody’s neighborhood.  The question is – whose?

I, for one, would not recommend summarily encouraging ex-convicts to return to the slums and ghettos that most of them came from.  Notwithstanding the considerable value the Times suggests that crack addicts and car thieves might offer as role models for their abandoned children, these neighborhoods are already hard pressed.  An extra helping of shoplifting and break-ins isn’t really what the minority business owner needs as he, or she, struggles against the headwinds of a bad economy and an impoverished clientele.  If there is ever going to be an increase in the standard of living in such places, they are going to need healthy businesses creating decent jobs – and giving a boost to the criminal population runs counter to that purpose.

With the phrase “…benefits like subsidized housing…” the Times points the way to a program that the elites of our society are nearly oblivious to, but which strikes dread into the hearts of many in the middle class.  Most people support the notion of equality as an abstract ideal – but they live in the cleanest, safest, least-graffiti-covered neighborhoods they can afford to.  Most middle class neighborhoods are, believe it or not, already quite racially diverse.  They are full of people, black, white and otherwise, who were either born into the middle class, or who managed, by their own honest efforts, to lift themselves out of poverty.  Heartless though the barrier of higher rents and mortgage costs may be, practically no one in the middle class really wants a sudden influx of the poor into their neighborhoods.  This isn’t racism.  Middle class blacks and Latinos do not really want them either.  Of course, the majority of people living in poverty are decent people, but it is simply a fact that the most antisocial or otherwise dysfunctional among us tend to sink to the socio-economic bottom, being unable to meet the minimum threshold of social responsibility one needs to stay in the middle class.  To be blunt, crack addicts and car thieves don’t generally have good credit, and don’t buy houses in the suburbs.  Unfortunately, the rest of the poor have to live with the stigma of being lumped in with the lumpenproletariat.  Housing programs, particularly Section 8 subsidies in which the government pays the lion’s share (usually 70%) of a recipient’s rent, often let the poor jump over this barrier without any special effort.  Even with restrictions barring these subsidies to ex-convicts, enough bad cultural traits get through to make a scattering of subsidized housing in a middle class neighborhood a cause of sharp decline.1  Removing the restriction against ex-convicts is a depressing thought for anyone who likes their current neighborhood, and must be doubly discouraging for those members of the middle class who have worked their way out of poverty.  How would you feel if you had escaped a slum through your own hard work – only to have the government build a new hostile environment around you?

Having eliminated the two poorer classes from contention as the recipients of a million-odd ex-cons the Times feels are the victims of injustice, we are left with only one place to put them – and this is my proposal.  Settle them among the rich.  This scheme has quite a number of advantages.  First, it would give policy makers and opinion shapers (including the editorial board of the New York Times) a chance to experience cultural diversity first hand.  And who better to reform the wayward and disadvantaged than the most moral, most advantaged members of our society?  Second, the most affluent neighborhoods in the country have the greatest abundance of entry-level, unskilled jobs available – since it is generally beneath the dignity of the children of the rich to even consider such non-professional employment.  Wouldn’t it be better to have resident ex-convict waiters, cashiers, valets, gardeners, etc. – than to have to bus such people in from poor or middle class neighborhoods across town?  Consider how much of a reduction in an affluent community’s total carbon footprint the transportation savings could amount to.  Why settle convicts in Oakland when we could settle them in the more uplifting parts of Berkeley, or maybe Marin County?  Does anyone doubt that a disadvantaged soul from SE Washington would find more opportunities of all kinds in Bethesda or Georgetown?  From New York City’s Upper East Side, visiting relatives in the South Bronx on the weekends would be the easiest (and greenest) of subway journeys.  Why not build some half-way houses in the Hamptons?  Or a colony of convicts on the shores of Martha’s Vineyard – a sort of Botany Bay among the best and brightest?

Although the high cost of housing in such areas is an obvious objection, it is not beyond the government’s scope to invoke its right of imminent domain.  Failing that, the lower and the middle classes would probably be overjoyed to pony up the added taxes in the interest of their own self preservation.  Here too, settling convicts among the wealthiest Americans might go a long way toward alleviating the growing sense of inequality among the classes.  Let us share, on fair and equal terms, this legacy suffering, injustice and inconsequential non-violent crime.  What could be more moral, more impressive to the rest of the world than to have the great and powerful make such sacrifices?  Nor would this resettlement need to be in any way partisan.  Build section 8 apartments next to the Koch brothers and George Soros alike.  Build them next to Bill O’Reilly and next to Whoopi Goldberg too.  If there is crime, the rich have more than enough resources to protect themselves in more-or-less the same way many of the poor have done – by making their houses into little fortresses with bars on the windows and doors.  This is really what the rich have always done in any case, except that their barricades are usually more sophisticated – and erected further out.

In the real world, of course, the burden of living with crime will be saddled, one way or the other, on people that policy makers, media figures, and academics don’t really care about.  Prisons produce alarming statistics, but a million crimes perpetrated by the anti-social elements of the poor against the rest of their equally poor neighbors rarely disturb the after-dinner conversation in the places where decisions are made.  And, after all, it is the appearance of caring that matters – the moralizing, the wringing of hands over the fates of the correctly fashionable set of victims, the crying and shouting that the culture tacitly requires.  None of that has a damned thing to do with genuine human empathy.  One needs to know some real people to have a sense of empathy – and nobody really wants those people in their backyard.

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1 I have seen this happen personally, having lived on the edge of a ghetto for more than a decade, and then in a middle class neighborhood that was in decline. There is no need to take my word for it, however:

http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_3_housing_reform.html

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/american-murder-mystery/306872/

Three issues on which liberals and conservatives should agree

Let me say at the outset that I am fully aware that attempting to span the American cultural and political divide is a quixotic undertaking.  Still, having looked at that chasm from both sides, I believe I have more to say than someone who hasn’t.  One has to try. 

I need to say, too, that the people I am writing for are more-or-less ordinary human beings and not the weird elites that actually make public policy.  In the first place, no policy maker is going to listen to me, and in the second, the elites already agree on more points than they would like us to believe they do.

1.  Corporate Welfare

I know of no real person, liberal or conservative, who is for corporate welfare.  To be fair, I’m sure there are a few such people out there somewhere – people who either think an infusion of government funds is going to trickle down to them, or who believe that government should be in the business of subsidizing certain things that no one currently wants to buy – but ordinary people from both ends of the political spectrum tend to smell the quid pro quo and view the practice with disgust.

Most liberals have a visceral hatred for all things corporate on the grounds that corporations constitute an unfair and unhealthy concentration of power.  Thus, it requires impressive feats of doublespeak for the Democratic leadership to convince them that a giant subsidy to a donor’s business really is intended to safeguard the workers, save the planet, etc.  It’s easier, by far, to just not mention it.

To the extent to which conservatives dabble in economic theory (and a few of them do) corporate welfare is a straightforwardly unhealthy intervention in the market.  Corporations that do badly ought to be allowed to fail.  The goodness of capitalism, in principle, lies in making desirable goods and services in a way that is efficient enough that buyer, seller and employee all benefit enough from the transaction to want to play the game.  It is horrifying to the free marketeer to have the government pick the public’s pocket to give to businesses that cannot balance their own books.

Corporate welfare is, of course, good for a few big donors and the politicians that love them.  Spend a dollar on someone’s campaign – and get back ten or more in subsidies.  It’s an excellent investment.  Sure (I would have to say to my liberal friends) corporate greed distorts the political process – but (I would have grant to my conservative friends) those favors are only there to buy because there are people in government with the inclination to sell them.

2.  Banking Reform

Nobody liked the crash of ’08, and only a handful of very big banks like how little has been done about it.  There was a great deal of finger pointing for a year or two, and then we got Frank-Dodd, which no one seriously believes will prevent a crash from happening again.

Liberals tend to despise big banks for approximately the same reasons they despise big corporations.  The big banks stand at the pinnacle of their economic inequality argument.  When we are talking about a group of people who, in effect, create enough money to destabilize the economy out of nothing but thin air and clever accounting practices – it is hard to argue.  Some liberals have more nuanced positions, of course, but the sheer titanic vastness of the sums involved is usually enough to enflame the moral instincts of anyone with even vaguely socialist leanings.  Even I will march in that parade.

On the other side, there are a handful of free market purists who cringe at any regulation of any kind as a matter of principle.  There are not many such people, though.  The average conservative likes businesses that make things people can buy and that creates jobs people can do.  Giant banks creating complex derivative investments do not fit that bill.  One can make an argument that a bank that makes a loan to a business is doing something economically constructive and important.  You can’t really make that argument for bundling bad mortgages together into derivatives.

I would go a little further and say that nobody outside of the financial sector is thrilled about the commodification of debt.  If you buy a house, or take out a student loan, you ought to be making a contract a specific lender.  A contract is an agreement between two parties.  The character of the transaction is entirely different if one party gets to treat the other as a commodity and unilaterally sell their part of the agreement to someone else.  Imagine what the bank would say if you could pawn off your debt responsibilities to a bum that agreed to accept them for the cash price of a bottle of liquor.  Or, imagine what your spouse would say if you could just sell your end of the marriage to a stranger.

So who wins here?  The banks and their political cronies (of both parties).

3.  The Security State

“Security state,” frankly, is a term for the squeamish.  When you have mass surveillance, secret court proceedings, secret prisons, a torture policy (even in a state of polite abeyance) and the legal architecture to dispense with civil liberties when the executive bureaucracy determines that it’s expedient – you have a police state.¹  Jackboots and black uniforms are a nice theatrical touch, but are not strictly required.

Most liberals, until fairly recently, tended to be solidly against this sort of thing.  I would like to think that most of them still are if it is put to them correctly.  There is always the temptation, however, to be tolerant of state power when it is punishing your enemies.  People tend to forget that a wicked instrument used for what they believe is a good purpose may, sooner or later, be turned against them.  Or, to be more succinct, people tend to believe that the ends justify the means.  I know many conservatives that were not especially alarmed at giving up (or taking away) a great deal of civil liberty in the name of fighting terrorism, but it has now become quite obvious to most of them that the imperial presidency they applauded during the Bush administration is no longer their friend.  After the experience of Nixon, et al, the Left should have learned the same lesson long ago – but then I suppose if people paid more attention to the experiences of past generations, history would have fewer repetitions of the same delightfully murderous chorus.  A meaningfully free society is going to be full of people that you or I don’t like and don’t agree with.  That is, like it or not, what having a free society means.

There just aren’t that many ordinary people, of any political persuasion, that like big brother looking over their shoulder – let alone having big brother tell them what to do.  Edward Snowden split society in an interesting new way.  Leftist radicals and rightwing libertarians both embraced him as a hero.  The real statists at the heart of both political parties knew well he was their enemy.  The press, for the most part, decided that minimizing and discrediting him was in their interest.  Snowden divided us on one very simple question: what is it that matters – the constitutional rights of the sovereign individual, or the cohesion of the official state?  In an era of propaganda and counter-propaganda, Snowden provided an almost poignant moment of clarity.

Conclusion

There is a recurrent theme in all of these issues – that of the interests of the common citizen against the interests of the elite.  I have been to socialist street protests and Tea Party meetings.  There are differences between the two, but there are also striking similarities.  We share a common legacy of the Enlightenment.  No human being worth the name yearns to be someone else’s peon.

^{____________________________}

¹ I make my case against the police state much more thoroughly in an earlier post: http://cadwaladr.blogspot.com/2012/05/torture-civil-liberty-and-post-modern.html

Why is slavery wrong?

A question was posted by b_b on hubski.com recently under the title “An interesting question.”  In the post, the question was expressed:

“I think it's not really going out on a limb to say that the overwhelming majority of reasonable people oppose slavery in this day and age. But, the question made me realize that I'm not sure I'd ever been asked why slavery is bad, but rather, I've always taken it as axiomatic that slavery is morally abhorrent.”

I think it would be fair to paraphrase the question simply as:

     Why is slavery wrong?

I arrived late to the discussion (as usual) and only left a passing remark.  It really is an interesting question though, and quite worth a serious look.  Let’s start with a nice succinct definition of slavery – or at least of the sense in which I will use the term here.

     Slavery is the legitimized institutional practice of holding human beings as property, without recognized rights or legal standing of their own.

While perhaps not perfect, this definition does two immediately useful things.  First, it shears off any muddy arguments about softer forms of influence or coercion.  If the laws of your society recognize that you are an autonomous human being that cannot be legally owned by someone else, then you are not a slave.  Second, it limits our discussion to what a society recognizes as legitimate – and excludes conditions that authorities would punish were they brought to light.  A person locked in some sociopath’s basement may be no better off than a slave, but that person is only a slave so long as his or her condition goes undiscovered.

The first answer I would propose to the question, the introspective one, is entirely uninspiring and unsympathetic.

     I believe slavery is wrong because, as a child, my parents, teachers, and the television taught me it is wrong.

Nasty and banal as this answer sounds, it is not trivial.  I am well aware that if I had been born into an English family in Barbados in the 18th century, a west African family at about the same time, or a Roman family at any point in Rome’s history, I would have almost certainly had a different set of moral standards.  It might be nice to think that my humane instincts would have forced me to find slavery abhorrent, but the plain fact is that most of the people in the groups I have just mentioned accepted it as a legitimate, acceptable institution.  It is important to understand that when we get asked important moral questions we naturally tend to regurgitate the values that our environment has imparted to us.  We want these values to be absolute, but in fact they rarely are.  In case you’re getting nervous already, I do not intend to advocate a moral relativist position regarding slavery.  Systems of social organization have consequences, so it is incorrect to say they are all equal – that one is no better than any other.  All I am saying is that it’s fruitless to congratulate ourselves for absorbing values we were almost certain to absorb.

One line of examination we could pursue, while not really a moral assessment, is to consider slavery from a Darwinian perspective.  By this I don’t mean to cast the slaves themselves as losers in an evolutionary struggle, but rather to ask whether or not slavery does some fatal damage to a society which supports it.  After all, if the institution of slavery couldn’t pass such a Darwinian test, one would have as close to an absolute reason for discarding it as one can expect to get out of nature.  Imagine, as a thought experiment, a society with a moral system that didn’t censure theft or murder in any way.  It is immediately obvious that such a society would not flourish, its members being constantly preoccupied with the security of their property and persons.  Sadly, the historical record shows that slave holding societies have often flourished – provided, of course, that one does not consider the welfare of the slaves themselves to matter in the assessment.  Rome prospered and endured for hundreds of years, as did many other slave holding societies.  The only society that I am aware of that collapsed because it supported slavery was the French colony of Saint-Domingue – which, following a successful slave rebellion, was renamed Haiti.  Again, this is by no means an argument that slavery is good – it is only an argument that slavery is not abhorred by nature.  Nature, it has often been observed, is not noted for compassion.

Again skipping over moral arguments, there is at least one good practical argument against the institution of slavery in modern times.  It has simply been rendered unprofitable by technology.  One big diesel-powered harvester can do the work of dozens, maybe hundreds, of agricultural slaves.  Further, the diesel-powered harvester does not plot to kill the farmer as it lies quietly in its shed at night.  House slaves have been replaced by many labor-saving gadgets run by cheap electric motors.  Why would one want slaves to beat the rugs when one could buy a Hoover – or even a robotic Roomba?  Even in poor societies, the worst of the heavy lifting is now done by uncomplaining mechanical servants.  While human sex trafficking does not meet my technical definition of slavery, it is notable that it accounts for a large fraction of the truly forced labor still performed in the world.  This is one of the few areas that has not been adequately mechanized – though I have no doubt that the Japanese robotics industry is trying.

Asking why anything is wrong, of course, is to ask a moral question.  Even allowing that human beings are very plastic in the kind of things they can consider good or evil, it is still true that some moral systems are innately more stable than others.  Moral systems that are internally coherent are more stable than moral systems that are riddled with contradictions.  It is important to consider that the great majority of people alive today believe, more-or-less deeply, in either some notion of freedom or some notion of equality.  They believe in these ideals not merely as abstractions, but as real conditions, however vaguely understood, that they desire for themselves.  Tolerating the institution of slavery threatens to make either of these ideals incoherent.  Freedom, in the simple sense of being free to act according to one’s own desires, is utterly nullified by slavery.  The essence of slavery is to be the property of someone else – an instrument rather than an autonomous human being.  Equality, too, is made ridiculous by the institution of slavery.  Even the sense of equality that the left and right can generally agree on – equality before the law – is rendered empty when one group of people are not even considered legal persons.

When neither the ideals of freedom nor equality are very general in a society, slavery is not so morally objectionable.  Most people, throughout history, have accepted the particular niches that their circumstances made for them.  The circumstances of a slave were a bit worse than average – but without a vague but powerful idea that everyone should, on the one hand, be free, or, on the other hand, be equal, the fate of the slave was just that – fate. Roman slaves, it should be pointed out, where not recognizable by race or ethnicity.  The Romans didn’t need the notion that someone was inherently less than a person to justify depriving that unlucky individual of autonomy.  It was only after the Enlightenment ideals of freedom and equality became widespread that would-be slaveholders needed a racial inferiority argument to avoid the troublesome moral incoherence.  Such an argument is adequately sustainable when the slaves are field hands – whom the slave holder only interacted with remotely – but rather fell apart with house slaves – whose humanity the slave holder could not help but constantly observe.  If one could not sustain the idea that slaves were not persons, then one had to reject the idea that personhood carried with it any rights.

While I think that the twin ideals of freedom and equality are largely incompatible with each other, neither is compatible with slavery.  You can only not think slavery is abhorrent if you are capable of thinking in some pre-Enlightenment way, or if you are bereft of moral sentiment altogether.

An anonymous death

These events were recounted to me by my wife, a county social worker.  For obvious reasons, I cannot use any real names, either of the persons or the specific institutions involved.  To avoid talking and thinking about a real person as an abstraction – which is precisely the sad circumstance I would like to decry – I will call the subject of this story Charlie.

Charlie was an old man in poor health.  A retired auto worker, he was not a rich man – but he was not a poor man either.  Charlie was, among many other things he may have been in his life, a Medicare recipient.  A little more than a month ago he went to his local hospital with an acute shortness of breath.  The diagnosis was a collapsed lung.

A collapsed lung is a serious condition but, in itself, it is by no means a death sentence.  In Charlie’s case the lung required periodic drainage, among other things, but given attention and reasonable care his prospects for recovery were good.  Charlie was in his seventies and had various other medical problems, but nothing about his state of health was immediately terminal.  He might have been expected to live some number of years with whatever quality of life he could manage for himself – the same sort of expectations you or I might have as living, breathing human beings.

I can only imagine that forty or fifty years ago Charlie could have expected a moderately long hospital stay, during which he would have rested, had his condition attended to at intervals by nurses in small white hats, and by the end of which he would have probably gotten better.  He would not have expected to have been bankrupted in the process – Medicare or no Medicare.  Things have changed.  In the last forty years we have invented new techniques and new diagnostic equipment, but you cannot stay in a hospital for weeks or days anymore unless you happen to be very very rich or very very comatose.  Thus, after a relatively short interlude of adequate care, Charlie was gently booted out the door.

Until very recently, a hospital that could no longer profitably treat a Medicare recipient’s serious but unresolved condition passed him or her on to the second line of defense – a long term care facility, usually a nursing home.  There, Medicare would pay the person’s expenses for the first 30 days.  This was not enough for everyone, but it was something.  It might have gotten Charlie over the hump.  A funny thing has happened lately though – a little bureaucratic fine point with enormous consequences – as the result of the passing of the Affordable Care Act.  Medicare still covers the thirty days of long term care if a person is admitted to a hospital in the normal way.  However, Medicare doesn’t cover this long term care if you are admitted for observation instead of being admitted normally.  Medicare now also pays a hospital more if it admits a patient for observation than would be paid if the patient were admitted normally.  In medical terms, there is no distinction between the two kinds of admission.  Patients get the same care in the hospital regardless of their admission status.  It is purely a bureaucratic distinction, channeling a person in one direction or another.  Hospitals are businesses and their administrators know a deal when they see one.  Charlie was admitted for observation – so no long term care for him.

Charlie was instead ushered gently to the third line of defense – home healthcare.  One cannot send a person home while they are still seriously ill, not without the promise that a home healthcare worker will come around from time to time to try to finish the work that the hospital didn’t do.  Charlie was given a choice of home healthcare providers, and he picked one he had experience with from a prior illness.  Unfortunately, the provider Charlie picked was not the one the Federal authorities preferred.  Again, hospitals get reimbursed for referring patients to a particular provider, and not to others.  A little competition might be nice to keep home healthcare agencies on their toes, but it is bureaucratically easier for both the hospital and the government to only deal with one.  Thus, somewhere in the bowels of the hospitals administrative apparatus Charlie’s unprofitable and inefficient request got shuffled to the bottom of someone’s in-box.  Charlie sat at home – wheezing and waiting.

Finally some concerned bystander to Charlie’s suffering contacted my wife – the last line of defense.  County social workers have rather limited resources to work with.  In general, they investigate – then wheedle, cajole, and bluff more powerful institutions into producing better outcomes.  My wife sorted out what had happened, and extracted a promise from someone at the hospital to complete the unprofitable paperwork to set up services with the provider Charlie wanted.  My wife is not empowered to hold a gun to anybody’s head, nor does she want to be.

In the end, no paperwork was sent – and no one came.  Four days after the hospital promised to resolve the issue, Charlie’s collapsed lung filled to capacity with fluid.  He died of a heart attack, brought on by the accumulated strain, while sitting on his toilet.  A dignified death under the watchful eye of the caring institutions of his society.

We may bicker and haggle about who ought to be doing what – about whether this public policy or that one is the more moral or humane.  Perhaps, as individual human beings, we should spend a little less time trying to be maximally high-minded and a little more time being at least minimally decent.  Everyone involved in this process got a good outcome – except for Charlie.  The people at the hospital didn’t lose any money doing things they couldn’t bill for, and neither did they suffer the embarrassment of having a patient expire on their premises.  The Federal government was a financial winner too, saving money which it will no doubt spend – in its nearly infinite compassion – on someone else the anonymous bureaucrats decide to bestow it on.  The system functioned as designed.  It did everything perfectly – except deliver healthcare.  And let’s not kid ourselves that Charlie’s miserable fate was the product of peculiar circumstances that, you understand, just happen now and then.  Charlie died as the result of policies that people put in place.  Policies that remain in place.  Whether those policies were the result of malice, incompetence, or mere indifference makes very little difference to the outcome.  Any way you look at it – a man is dead.

Further discussion on the state of art

I received some interesting comments on my previous essay from fuffle (a Hubski contributor) that deserve a serious and well-considered response.  A link to my original essay is included below (in case my blog’s scroll bar isn’t working or you got here some other way).  Below that are fuffle’s comment in full (in blue).

http://cadwaladr.blogspot.com/2014/03/art-for-no-ones-sake.html

I loved this, but to be fair to John Cage: some of his work requires, as you say, no inherent chops from the performers. But-

A) alot of his composition and prep-work was very... very impressive. In which case, isn't the work impressive for the underlying code, which illuminates technical complexity on the part of the composer if not the player?

B) 4 33 is just as much incidental music as anything else- wherein environmental response dictates the melody rather than the person on the stage. Schmancy? Yes, but I see very little difference between this and your assertion about perceiving the beauty of the sycamore. When attention is directed at the sounds in between sounds, people might just start to appreciate with more enthusiasm things that they'd otherwise ignore as just everyday drone.

C) Cage may have once been considered weird, but his work has since influenced the output of mad composers, man. Electronic artists, contemporary classical guys, guitar legends, score-writers... His work may not be, uh, listenable, but his WORK has inspired plenty of people you've listened to.

D) He's not that weird. Have you heard Stockhausen's helicopter quartet? There is some gnarly, indigestible shit out there (see note). Cage just has the most brand recognition. And if he has brand recognition, his art can't be that inaccessible, can it?

Ultimately, though, E) It could reasonably be argued that Cage is more performance art than music, and there is a lot more leeway granted in performance art for eccentricity. Does any of this nullify your overall argument? No. But to say that classical music died with the advent of Cage is pretty unfair, especially since there have been perfectly decent classical composers since Cage, and he was certainly not the first experimental composer to sincerely fuck with the rules of the craft. Hildegarde Von Bingen. The Artusis and the Monteverdis. Gesualdo. Obligatory Stravinsky shout-out,

Anyhow, I badged, but then felt a pang of regret about readily accepting the cheap shot about Cage and music. Still a great read.

note: there's this one guy- wish I could remember his name- who put out an "album" that was just him stuffing a contact mic up his buttle and railing his girlfriend. That right thar is the example you should have used.

(fuffle has recanted this note:  "bfv corrected me last week in that the work I referred to (Nymphomatriarch by Venetian Snares and Hecete) isn't really just raw footage of them bumping nasties. They bumped nasties and then sampled those sounds for beats/tones. It's nowhere near as esoteric as believed/led you to believe."
- emc)

Yes, I savaged John Cage mercilessly and for the worst of motives – my own literary amusement.  Admittedly, he did not assassinate classical music single-handedly.  I’ve watched interviews with Cage and found him fascinating.  I even find his Zen perspective personally congenial.  I am acutely aware that there is a similarity between Cage’s perspective and mine – however they are not identical.  Cage considered 4’33” a musical composition; I do not consider my perception of a sycamore against a winter sky itself a work of art.  I assert that our appreciation of art derives from our appreciation of other things in the physical world.  Cage asserted, effectively, that there is no distinction between art and the physical world as perceived.  My assertion defines art within a broader context; Cage’s assertion does the opposite – it renders the word “art” practically meaningless.  By Cage’s definition, dog turds could be art.  You wouldn’t even have to put them under a spotlight at MoMA – you would just have to perceive them.  Perhaps I snarled at Cage unfairly, but Cage attacked my dearest friend – the English language.

I don’t doubt for a minute that John Cage was influential – that is, in fact, the crux of my critique.  Had he been unknown he would have been completely harmless.  Cage is not all that weird by what passes for contemporary standards, but he helped to lay the groundwork those who followed in his wake.  One can argue that many people before Cage were violating the rules of their time, but there is a difference between violating an art form’s traditional norms and violating its fundamental definition.  I may think that Pablo Picasso produced a large number of very bad paintings – but I have to admit that they are paintings.  On the other hand, if I say I-70 is my most recent painting (and I wasn’t the guy who painted the dashes down the middle) I am doing nothing more-or-less than obfuscating the word “painting”.

The history of culture rarely turns on single, pivotal events in the way that military history does.  The Post-Impressionists did not defeat the Impressionists decisively in the battle of Mont Sainte-Victoire.  What one sees instead are trends, influences, styles, and so forth.  Things move gradually.  Cage, if not decisive, was still significantly influential.  If what Cage delivered was not exactly a deathblow, it was, at least, a milestone.  I think what is important about Cage is that once he attacked the very definition of music, mere trifling with odd keys and rhythms seemed rather tame.

Consider the example cited above, of the musician making recordings with the microphone shoved up his rectum.  Things like this are what the avant garde must do when someone who came before has upped the ante.  In the 1930’s you could still be fashionably radical by banging away at a piano like George Anteil – but how is that even interesting after Cage?  But if you can no longer raise eyebrows by being merely discordant, you can at least still raise them by being blatantly disgusting.  Again, this is not a matter of taste or of degree.  It is a watershed distinction – a difference of kind.  I’d be willing to bet that a chimpanzee watching someone shove a microphone up his own ass would be disgusted, but it would be a toss-up whether the same chimpanzee would prefer Richard Wagner to George Anteil.

Here, really, I need to take a step back and talk about what separates the last century and a half or so from the entire previous history of the arts.  I think it is fair to say that the great majority of artists who worked prior to the late 19^th century were trying to achieve some standard of excellence.  From that point forward excellence has gradually waned in favor of the pursuit of originality.

Ancient Egyptian relief carvings, rigidly stylistic as they are, are beautiful.  They are beautiful because the artists who produced them had an idea of excellence.  Egyptian sculpture does not require the context of museum for us to recognize it as art.  One may or may not have a taste for ancient sculpture, but one knows that it is art regardless.  Drop a Roman statue into a landfill, and the garbage man would know that it does not belong there.  Toss half the contents of MoMA into a landfill and the garbage man would never notice.  You’d need an army of academics in rubber hip waders to sort it from the rest of the trash, and even then they’d probably be wrong at least one time in three.  By contrast, if you could have taken an average Vermeer to ancient Egypt I have little doubt that nearly everyone, high and low, would have marveled at it.  They may or may not have tried to copy its style.  They may or may not have found it somehow blasphemous.  They would have known it was art.  I have listened to some cutting-edge contemporary music and, frankly, if I heard it coming through the wall of my apartment I would not assume my neighbor had sophisticated tastes, but rather that he had a serious plumbing problem.  I only know it’s art if it is packaged as art.  And then, if you’ll forgive me, I still have doubts.

I don’t wish to insult anybody’s sensibilities here.  Well… actually I do – but I’m willing to throw myself onto the trash pile along with them.  I did go to art school, after all.  Put me in a museum and I will stare with rapturous solemnity at a nice Mark Rothko color field painting, knowing full well I could achieve a very similar mental state by going outside and staring at a random patch of sky.  I know when I stare at the Rothko that I am engaging in an art act, and that other people passing through the gallery will see me as an aesthete admiring something beyond the comprehension of the common herd.  Academia has created a group of people large enough to support nonsense.  If I stare at a random patch of sky, on the other hand, the same people will only think I’m off my meds.  Do I like the Rothko really?  I don’t know.  How could I know?  It depends on whether one believes my conditioned response to something is definitively me or not.  Did Pavlov’s dogs really like to salivate at the sound of the bell?  So it is with everyone.  We all have our own unique conditioning histories, dependent on where and when we were born, how we were educated, etc.  It is quite hard to overcome the impression that our particular place in the universe is absolutely normal.  It’s only relatively normal – really.

To get back to the distinction I raised earlier though, excellence and originality are very different kinds of goals.  The arts did change under the regime of excellence, but they did so in a gradual, organic way.  You could have swapped the romantic period in classical music for the baroque without the whole world exploding.  When the emphasis began to tip in favor of originality, however, art acquired a definite and self-destructive direction.  In the pursuit of excellence, one tries to express one’s concept of art to the of best one’s ability.  In pursuit of originality, one tries to destroy whatever concept of art happens to prevail.  The Impressionists made blurry paintings and that was fine – enough to irk the traditionalists of their day.  And then we got Matisse, who annihilated the third dimension and all the lovely refinements the Renaissance had achieved.  After that, Mondrian, et al, gave up on paint things altogether.  De Kooning and Pollock extirpated any meaningful requirement for skill.  Et cetera.  The worst thing you could say to an artist when I was in school was not that his or her work was crude, but that it was derivative.

Sooner or later, the quest for originality makes someone shoving a microphone up his ass inevitable.  People simply run out of other things to do.  Technology may delay the act for awhile by opening up other avenues of exploration, but sooner or later the microphone will find its way into the hands of some ass that has tried everything else.  It has been more than four decades since Chris Burden took a potshot at an airliner with a pistol.  He later had a friend shoot him in the arm.  Both incidents were widely accepted as art by the academics and critics who get the final say.  One wonders how the arts community would have reacted if Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had eschewed any religious or political motives for the Boston Marathon Bombing, and declared instead that his motives were entirely artistic.  Wouldn’t the curators at MoMA have had to take him at his word, and sought out photos and artifacts of the event to fill a gallery?  How could they do otherwise?  By what standard would they deem such a bold piece of self expression not art?

Personally, I dislike being called an artist.  I do not dislike art – that is, I do not dislike what I define as art in the inner recesses of my brain.  What I do dislike is being called something that, in current usage, has no coherent meaning.  Throwing me into a category that contains both Rembrant van Rijn and Chris Burden is little more meaningful than calling me non-broccoli.  You might as well just bark.  An artist is a person whose name is on the little plaque beside the random object under the spotlight at MoMA.

All of this matters because, as a society, what we call art is some indicator of what we value.  If what we value above all else is novelty, it is hard to see how we can have a culture at all.  A tradition of upheaval isn’t merely tiresome – it’s an oxymoron.