[part 2]
[New Republic co-founder Herbert] Croly’s confidence in public opinion and “virtuous social actors” struck most liberals by this time as old-fashioned and unsophisticated. They were more impressed by Walter Lippmann’s analysis of the irrationality of public opinion and by H. L. Mencken’s ridicule of democracy as the reign of the “booboisie.” Mencken taught liberal intellectuals to think of themselves as a “civilized minority” and to wear unpopularity as a badge of honor. A man of intelligence and taste would always find himself “in active revolt against the culture that surrounds him.” Praising Sinclair Lewis, Mencken laid it down as a dogma that “the artist is … a public enemy; vox populi, to him, is the bray of an ass.” The best thinking was always carried out in “conscious revolt” against the majority.
The postwar reaction made it easy for liberals to accept Mencken’s low opinion of the average American. Not only liberalism but civilization itself, it seemed, had no future in America: such was the conclusion reached by most of the contributors to Harold Stearns’ celebrated symposium, civilization in the United States (1912). Another collaborative project, a state-by-state survey conducted by the nation in the early twenties, conveyed the same impression, on the whole; even more than the Stearns collection, “these United States” revealed liberals’ deep revulsion from American politics and popular culture.
In launching the series, the editors of the nation expressed the hope that “variety and experiment” in the United States would prevail over the forces making for “centralization and regimentation.” The picture of America that emerged from most of the articles, however, looked more like the one made familiar by Mencken and Stearns. Mencken himself contributed the piece on Maryland: “no light, no color, no sound!” several articles were written by authors well known for savage satires of provincial life: Sinclair Lewis on Minnesota (“Scandinavians Americanize only too quickly”); Sherwood Anderson on Ohio (“Have you a city that smells worse than Akron, that is a worse junk-heap of ugliness than Youngstown, that is more smugly self-satisfied than Cleveland?”); and Theodore Dreiser on Indiana (“dogmatic religion,” “political somnolence,” “pharisaical restfulness in its assumed enlightenment”). At least two articles (“Michigan: the Fordizing of a pleasant peninsula” and “West Virginia: a mine-field melodrama”) were written by proteges of Mencken on the Baltimore Sun; another (“Arkansas, a native proletariat” referred to him repeatedly; and several others, including Ludwig Lewisohn’s scathing piece on South Carolina (“appalling and intolerant ignorance and meanness of spirit”), were done in the Mencken manner. Evidently the editors of the Nation saw no contradiction between a celebration of regional diversity and a satire of local customs bound to leave the impression that the United States was populated largely by rednecks, fundamentalists, and militant adherents of the Ku Klux Klan. They conceived of the series as a “contribution to the new literature of national self-analysis”; but they did not distinguish between self-analysis founded on a writer’s identification with his community and a social criticism that reflected an impregnable sense of superiority to the surrounding culture.
The South in particular—condemned as much for the backwardness of its provincial culture as for its deplorable race relations—elicited this second type of criticism. In Alabama, a state “saturated with provincialism,” the ideas of the arch-reactionary G. K. Chesterton “would be considered advanced,” according to Clement Wood. The state’s “mental and spiritual sterility” had been analyzed “with devastating impertinence” in Mencken’s well-known diatribe against the South, “the Sahara of the Bozart,” and Wood found it difficult to add anything to the indictment. He could only ask, once again, what Alabama had contributed “to music, to drama, to sculpture, to painting, to literature, or to the world of science, that handmaiden of man in his progress from beasthood.” Only Virginia and North Carolina, among southern states, came in for mildly favorable comment. According to Douglas Southall Freeman, the “new educational movement” was the “hope of every progressive Virginian.” Robert Watson Winston took comfort from the existence of an “active, forward-looking element” in North Carolina, a state that no longer proclaimed herself “provincial and proud of it.”
Condemnation of Southern backwardness, in a liberal weekly, might have been expected. More surprising was that a series conceived as an exploration of diversity so often ended by holding up a uniform standard of cultural progress, one measured by great works of art and notable achievements in science and technology. None of the contributors asked whether a new order in the South would not have to rest on traditions indigenous to the region. None showed much interest in the requirements for a vigorous civic life, as opposed to the number of orchestras, art galleries, libraries, and universities. The implication was that “civilization,” if it was ever to come to the south, would have to come from outside. The only hope for Mississippi, according to Beulah Amidon Ratliff, was an invasion of “missionaries” from the North. Like the rest of the South, Mississippi needed “educational missionaries, to bring both white and colored schools up to modern standards; medical missionaries, to teach hygiene and sanitation; … agricultural missionaries, to teach modern methods of farming.” Only in the wake of a second Reconstruction would the “light of civilization penetrate the uttermost parts” of Dixie. …
Even Kansas and Iowa, states that prided themselves on their spirit of improvement, remained culturally backward. William Allen White described Kansas as a “Puritan survival.” Although he conceded her civic spirit, her elimination of poverty and crime, and her rising standards of health and education, his account stressed the negative side of “Puritanism.” The “dour deadly desire to fight what was deemed wrong” had grunted the sense of beauty. Kansas had produced “no great poet, no great painter, no great musician, no great writer or philosopher,” only the “dead level of economic and political democracy.” Johan J. Smertenko used the same kind of language in his account of Iowa, a “cautious, prosaic, industrious, and mediocre” place in which the prospects for “cultural expression” were “bleak indeed.” Lacking any “generous purpose” or “spiritual background,” Iowa was a “dull, gray monotone.” “Seldom has a people been less interested in spiritual self-expression and more concerned with hog nutrition.”
John Macy, the Nation’s literary editor, painted an equally unflattering portrait of Massachusetts, where Yankee traditions had been modified by Catholic immigration without producing anything more than a “complaisant and insignificant conformism.” If Catholics “mistakenly and stupidly” abused their “new-found strength” by banning works on the spanish inquisition or the novels of Zola from public libraries, their attempt to impose intellectual uniformity marked only a “slight transformation of Puritan zealotry.” The “more enlightened citizens of Massachusetts” could take pride in Holmes and Brandeis, but mediocre politicians like Henry Cabot Lodge, David Walsh, and the “yokel” Calvin Coolidge more accurately represented the electorate. The people of Massachusetts got the politicians and the newspapers they deserved. Except for the Christian Science Monitor—a national rather than a local paper—the press exhibited the “dress and cultivation of a boom mining-town.”
That states as different as Iowa and Massachusetts could prompt the same kind of disparagement suggests that the conventions underlying this disparagement had acquired a life of their own. …
Taken as a whole, these reports conveyed an unmistakable impression of liberal intellectuals’ sense of alienation from America.
— Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven
On one occasion while Jerome and I attempted to explain the project to the community in a village in the South Fore, an elderly gentleman leaning quietly against a house interjected saying words to the effect of ‘You know, maybe kuru is not caused by sorcery after all if the white man gets it since we know they do not do sorcery’. …
In another village, a man suggested a research project to me. He proposed using actual and mock sorcery bundles to test the sorcery theory of kuru and volunteered himself to be the subject. His outline protocol was not conceptually different from a placebo controlled trial. I found his proposal to use an experimental test very impressive, but, in addition to ethical considerations, did not relish putting this before the Neurosciences Board of the MRC.
The year is 20X6. The States are under attack. Leviathan has gotten sick of humans’ shit, and has built an army of flying death robots to kill anyone who gets within fifty miles of the ocean. USG includes these deaths in its homicide statistics.
What happens to the homicide rate?
When the robots show up and start killing, the homicide rate increases. Eventually, people figure out what’s going on, and everyone who’s still alive flees the affected areas—and the homicide rate drops back down to normal.
But the coastal regions are still uninhabitable.
The flying death robots are still there—but people got used to their presence, ate the losses, and learned to work around them.
This was a revisionist interpretation of art history, and it had two prongs. The first was the suggestion of actual collusion between MOMA and the C.I.A. The evidence for this has always been largely circumstantial. The man who directed cultural activities at the C.I.A. in the early years of the Cold War, Thomas Braden, had previously been the executive secretary of MOMA. According to Saunders, a number of MOMA trustees were also on the board of the Farfield Foundation, a C.I.A. front. The president of the museum in the nineteen-forties and fifties was Nelson Rockefeller, whose family had supported MOMAfrom the beginning, and who had close ties to the intelligence community and an unabashed commitment to the patriotic uses of art. (It was Nelson who had demanded the removal of Diego Rivera’s murals from the walls of Rockefeller Center, because they depicted Lenin.) During the war, Rockefeller had been the Roosevelt Administration’s coördinator of inter-American affairs; the head of the art section in that office, René d’Harnoncourt, joined MOMA in 1944 and became its director.
What this suggests, though, is simply that the leaders of MOMA, like the leaders of most mainstream institutions in the United States after the war, were anti-Communists. As Saunders acknowledges, there were no explicit arrangements between the government and the museum, and the reason was that there didn’t need to be. Everybody was on the same page. Rockefeller and Alfred Barr, the founding director of MOMA, who, after the war, served as chairman of the painting and sculpture collections, did not have to be encouraged to use American art to promote the nation’s image abroad. They never pretended that they were up to anything else. Barr was a lover of European modernism, but he was on a mission to persuade Americans that theirs was a modern culture—a mission that he pursued by mounting exhibitions on modern architecture and design, and starting the museum’s department of film, headed by the formidable Iris Barry and dedicated to the proposition that Hollywood movies were part of the modern movement in the arts.
But, you know, it’s still a wacky conspiracy theory to say that everyone was on the same page.
What would have been the geopolitical uses of abstraction? The theory, as it was proposed in articles published in Artforum and other journals in the nineteen-seventies, and then elaborated in Serge Guilbaut’s “How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art” (1983) and Frances Stonor Saunders’s “The Cultural Cold War” (1999), is that abstract painting was an ideal propaganda tool. It was avant-garde, the product of an advanced civilization. In contrast to Soviet painting, it was neither representational nor didactic. It could be understood as pure painting—art absorbed by its own possibilities, experiments in color and form. Or it could be understood as pure expression—a “school” in which every artist had a unique signature. A Pollock looked nothing like a Rothko, which looked nothing like a Gorky or a Kline. Either way, Abstract Expressionism stood for autonomy: the autonomy of art, freed from its obligation to represent the world, or the freedom of the individual—just the principles that the United States was defending in the worldwide struggle. Art critics therefore developed apolitical modes of appreciation and evaluation, emphasizing the formal rigor or the existentialist drama of the paintings; and the Museum of Modern Art favored Abstract Expressionists in its purchases and international exhibitions, at the expense of art whose politics might have been problematic—the kind of naturalist art, for example, that was featured in the “Advancing American Art” exhibition.
A handful of liberal and socialist writers, led by philosophy professor Sydney Hook, saw their chance to steal a little of the publicity expected for the Waldorf peace conference [the ‘Scientific and Cultural Conference for World Peace’, a pro-Moscow event organized by a CPUSA front group]. A fierce ex-Communist himself, Hook was then teaching at New York University and editing a socialist magazine called The New Leader. Ten years earlier he and his mentor John Dewey had founded a controversial group called the Committee for Cultural Freedom, which attacked both Communism and Nazism. He now organized a similar committee to harass the peace conference in the Waldorf-Astoria.
Hook’s new group called itself the Americans for Intellectual Freedom. Its big names included critics Dwight MacDonald and Mary McCarthy, composer Nicolas Nabokov, and commentator Max Eastman. Arnold Beichman, a labor reporter friendly with anti-Communist union leaders, remembered the excitement of tweaking the Soviet delegates and their fellow conferees: “We didn’t have any staff, we didn’t have any salaries to pay anything. But inside of about one day the place was just busting with people volunteering.” One of Beichman’s union friends persuaded the sold-out Waldorf to base Hook and his group in a three-room suite (“I told them if you don’t get that suite we’ll close the hotel down,” he explained to Beichman), and another union contact installed 10 phone lines on a Sunday morning.
Hook and his friends stole the show. They asked embarrassing questions of the Soviet delegates at the conference’s panel discussions and staged an evening rally of their own at nearby Bryant Park. News stories on the peace conference reported the activities of the Americans for Intellectual Freedom in detail. “The only paper that was against us in this reporting was The New York Times,” recalled Beichman. “It turned out years later that [the Times reporter] was a member of the Party.”
In an alternate universe, the field of psychology began fifty years earlier than it did in ours. Sigmund Freud was born into a society where psychology had utterly captured the public imagination: ordinary people got together and talked about psychology, kept up with newspaper coverage of the field, and so on, often cluelessly. Would-be psychologists took advantage of the interest and jumped into the spotlight, forsaking depth and rigor for pay and prestige, and holding entertaining and utterly uninformative psychological debates in giant theaters which always managed to find themselves full. Freud, seeing the state of the field, despaired of ever finding a halfway decent critic, but he soon hit upon an idea: he knew that the psychologists and the journalists didn’t read in great detail and often came away with clueless and muddled interpretations of what they had only skimmed, and decided to allow the casual reader to believe that he had written something absurd, but make it unambiguously clear that he had not.
Sure enough, the weekend after he released his book, the theaters all sold out, and their headline events all had to do with this strange man who actually believed — and this is not hyperbole! — that all your dreams are about your secret desire to fuck your mother. Thus is it revealed to Freud, and to everyone with a goddamn clue, who is and who isn’t applying the principle of accuracy.
Except for the spotlight, this isn’t far from what happened in our universe, so intent, while useful to those who want to ensure they can know who understands what they’re talking about and who doesn’t, isn’t necessary. People will naturally misread, exaggerate, pattern-match to the most ridiculous shit, and walk away confident that they understand what this dumbass they just wasted five minutes on was on about. But you already know that — and you already know that it can be used as a test, to see if they really understand what that dumbass was saying. Evolution contradicts the laws of thermodynamics! Checkmate, atheists!
By the way, Mencius Moldbug believes that a quasi-conspiracy that includes all of America’s top universities is secretly working to control what people are allowed to think.
Robin Hanson says that people would rather live like ‘foragers’ than like ‘farmers’:
I think a lot of today’s political disputes come down to a conflict between farmer and forager ways, with forager ways slowly and steadily winning out since the industrial revolution. It seems we acted like farmers when farming required that, but when richer we feel we can afford to revert to more natural-feeling forager ways. The main exceptions, like school and workplace domination and ranking, are required to generate industry-level wealth. We live a farmer lifestyle when poor, but prefer to buy a forager lifestyle when rich.
In other words, in a situation of contact between traditional cultures heavily adapted to vertical transmission and progressive cultures heavily adapted to horizontal transmission such that it’s possible for people to convert from the former to the latter, the latter will win out.
This situation of contact exists in the case of religious groups like the Haredi Jews and the Amish, but the retention rates of at least the latter (I haven’t looked into Haredi retention rate) have gone up over time.
The historical evidence shows a decline in defection in some Amish communities in the last half of the twentieth century. Defection in Geauga County, Ohio, for example, dropped from 30 percent for those born during the 1920s to 5 percent for those born in the 1960s. Similarly, the exit of people from the Elkhart-LaGrange community in northern Indiana dipped from 21 percent for those born in the 1930s to 10 percent for those born in the 1950s. The loss of Amish-born people in Nappanee, Indiana, dropped from 55 percent in the 1920s to 16 percent in the 1970s.
How can this be explained? Cochran and Harpending attribute it to genetic selection: if there’s a genetic component to the plain, ‘farming’ personality that the choice to join the Amish church selects for (and they think there is), then, each generation, you get biological evaporative cooling: the people with the lowest ‘Amish quotient’ leave, and its average across the group increases.
The key assumption here is that personality has a genetic component. If you grant that, everything else falls into place.
Let’s say a space alien lands in Belgium and redesigns all its buildings overnight, so that the buildings in the north of Belgium are designed for very tall people, the buildings in the south of Belgium are designed for very short people, and the buildings in the middle of Belgium are designed for people of average height. (To avoid the issues posed by sex differences in height, let’s also say the alien converts all of Belgium to Islam, adds separate men’s and women’s facilities to every building, and carries out the height calculations separately for each sex.) If you’re a very tall person living in the south or the middle of Belgium, you’ll get sick of having to duck all the time and move north; if you’re a very short person living in the north or the middle of Belgium, you’ll get sick of being unable to reach things and move south. Everyone knows that there’s a genetic component to height – so everyone would expect that, after a few decades of this, there would be a genetic height gradient in Belgium. It might take a few generations – you could have people who didn’t eat well in their childhood moving south and having tall children – but it would eventually show up.
There wouldn’t be a genetic height gradient in Belgium now, but that’s because the selection mechanism isn’t there. To step out of the analogy: if your social context is uniform in ‘farming’/‘foraging’ tendencies, your genetic tendency toward one or the other won’t matter for the purposes of selection. It’s only when you have ‘farming’ and ‘foraging’ populations in close contact that the selection would apply – and the strength of the effect is going to depend on how easy it is to move from one to the other.
Strictly speaking, no genetic explanation is necessary. If the fertility and retention rates of a group are high enough, the group will grow over time – and the group doesn’t even have to grow; it just has to decline at a lower rate than the general population for it to show proportional growth. And since retention rates can, for whatever reason, increase over time, it’s even possible for a declining group to turn around, as long as its fertility rate is far enough above replacement to allow it.
Anything that causes higher fertility is selected for, and anything that causes lower fertility is selected against. This is the principle behind IQ shredders. In this case, if ‘farming’/‘foraging’ tendencies have a significant genetic component, there’s a ‘foraging’ shredder: the exodus from ‘farming’ to ‘foraging’ social contexts is not a time-invariant law about the relative strength of the two memeplexes or of horizontal to vertical transmission – it’s a temporary process of selection. The ‘farmers’ burn off their ‘foragers’, but they have more children, so they win in the end.
From 1994 to 1997, the artists worked on the series People’s Choice, whereby they created the “most wanted” and “least wanted” paintings of various countries based on the results of surveys conducted by professional polling companies. The book, Painting by Numbers: Komar & Melamid’s Scientific Guide to Art, published in 1997, explains the statistical underpinnings of the polling process and provides the results of each country’s preferences. Komar & Melamid used the same process in 1996–1997 in a collaboration with composer Dave Soldier to create The People’s Choice Music, consisting of “The Most Wanted Song” (a love song with low male and female vocals, of moderate duration, pitch, and tempo) and “The Most Unwanted Song” (in part: an operatic soprano raps over cowboy music featuring least-wanted instruments bagpipes and tuba while children sing about holidays and advertise for Wal-Mart).
The Most Unwanted Song has a Wikipedia page. The Most Wanted Song does not.
The Most Unwanted Song was uploaded to YouTube in September 2012. It has over 238,000 views. It was also uploaded in parts in October 2009. The first part has over 73,000 views. The Most Wanted Song was uploaded in December 2011. It currently has 34,512 views. Here’s the video description:
The Most Unwanted song is easy to find everywhere, but the Most Wanted isn’t – so here it is.
And here’s the first comment:
The funniest thing about this is that I listened to the Most Unwanted song longer. I found it more interesting. Does that make me a hipster?
And here are the replies:
nope, this is a rubbish song. makes sense.
No, I think that’s the point. This song was made based off of what was popular on the radio/what people ‘liked’; the result being that it sounds really samey and not special. The unwanted song was built off of weird things that you don’t hear often, so it’s more interesting. I don’t know what their aim was with this project, but I assume it has something to do with showing how popular music can be quite boring.
See also: Eurovision.
Men who play music may be engaging in practicing behavior to the point that it’s harming their emotional or physiological health, according to a recent study.
The preliminary study, presented Thursday at the American Psychological Association’s annual convention, recruited 195 men ages 18 to 65 who played music at least twice a week and regularly engaged in practicing behavior.
Participants answered questions about their practicing behavior use as well as their self-esteem, mental image, musical habits and gender roles.
“These men want to be conventionally talented, and it makes sense that [practicing behaviors] are what they’re using or abusing,” says Richard Achiro, lead author of the study and a registered psychological assistant at a private practice in Los Angeles.
Forty percent of participants, who were all men, increased their practicing use over time, while 22 percent were replacing regular activities with practicing behaviors. Eight percent of participants had signs of bodily stress due to practicing behavior, and 3 percent reported injuries caused directly by it.
Men who used practicing behaviors inappropriately also were more likely to have behaviors associated with mental disorders.
Achiro is no stranger to the culture of practicing behaviors. His interest was piqued when he noticed throughout college and graduate school how common it was for his male friends to go to practice rooms to use musical instruments.
“It became more and more ubiquitous,” Achiro says. “Guys around my age who I knew — I’d go to their apartment and see some kind of guitar.”
Not to mention that this has become a multibillion-dollar industry that’s grown exponentially in the recent decade or so, he adds. …
One big factor behind practicing behavior use is dissatisfaction, the study found. The men internalize a particular set of cultural standards of talent usually depicted by the media: “like Yngwie Malmsteen,” says Achiro. And they’re unhappy that they don’t meet that ideal.
But the study also found that the men using practicing were more likely to feel gender role conflict, which Achiro explained as underlying insecurity about one’s masculinity.
“This isn’t just about the music,” Achiro says, “What this is really about is what the music represents for these men. It seems that the findings in part [show] this is a way of compensating for their insecurity or low self-esteem.” …
“Someone with anorexia will feel they need to continue to get thinner and lose weight. With musicians, they act in the same kind of manner. They acknowledge that they’re skilled, but are obsessed with certain techniques that they find inadequate. This drive for talent preoccupies them. Practicing behaviors serve them the same way diet products serve someone with an eating disorder,” Cohn says.
For people affected by musical dysmorphic disorders, this constant and compulsive behavior takes over their lives — they are constantly skill-checking and can be unhappy, dissatisfied, or have low self-esteem.
“Think about bands on the high school and college level. Lots of these guys are encouraged by teachers and trainers to take these behaviors,” says Cohn. “This isn’t thought of as a negative behavior but can have negative consequences.”
The silver lining, Achiro points out, is that 29 percent of study participants knew that they had a problem of overusing practicing. But they might not be aware of possible underlying psychological factors.
“Guys think using practicing behaviors is healthy, [they’re] convinced it’s good for them, [it’s] giving them all kinds of skill they wouldn’t be getting otherwise,” says Cohn. “[This is] ignorance about what proper skill is.”
It’s also not unusual for people diagnosed with musical dysmorphic disorder or its characteristics to also have a high incidence of depression, anxiety and alcoholism, Cohn adds.
Although the research is preliminary and has yet to be peer-reviewed, Achiro hopes his research puts the issue on the map and encourages researchers to replicate his work.
“This is just the very beginning. There’re still tons to look at,” he says.
You heard it here first, folks. Wanting to get better at something is a sign of disordered thinking, low self-esteem, and insecurity about masculinity. And if an angel ever gives you a choice between being Haydn and being an immortal oyster, pick the oyster.
The original article is here.
nydwracu niþgrim, nihtbealwa mæst 
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