(Note: this got longer and more serious than I intended. I am not actually an art critic and don’t actually know what the hell I’m talking about)
William Bouguereau is an interesting case.
He’s one of those creative figures who was very popular in parts of the 19th century and is now almost entirely forgotten. (Like Marie Corelli, who I just learned about the other day – look her up, the plot summaries of her books are #amazing)
Bouguereau was apparently the epitome of something called “academic” painting, which is what the Impressionists were reacting against. Bouguereau was conventional in subject matter, realistic in style, sentimental in tone, often erotic but in a softcore, “safe to hang in your home and show to your stuffy parents” way. He seems to almost always aim at being pleasant, either through cuteness, sentimentality, sexiness, or some combination of the three.
You could see him as the ultimate anti-”modern” artist. But then, we’re actually making huge amounts of this kind of stuff in 2016 – it’s just on tumblr or DeviantArt rather than in galleries.
There’s a website called the Art Renewal Center, which is a classic “someone on the internet made a project out of their personal axe to grind” sort of place. The site’s creator, Fred Ross, thinks modern art sucks because it doesn’t value technical skill and actively avoids realism. This is a common complaint. But Ross’ version of it champions Bougureau as the single best example of everything he values in art. For Ross, seeing a Bougureau for the first time was something like a spiritual experience:
Frozen in place, gawking with my mouth agape, cold chills careening up and down my spine; I was virtually gripped as if by a spell that had been cast. It was so alive, so beautiful and so compelling. Finally, after about fifteen or twenty minutes of soaking up wave after wave of artistic and spiritual ecstasy, I started to take back control of my consciousness…..my mind started racing with unanswered questions. My first thought was “I haven’t felt this way about a work of art since I stood before Michelangelo’s David. Then I thought, “This must be one of the greatest old master paintings every produced. But no name or country or time would come to mind. Italian High Renaissance, 17th Century Dutch, Carravaggio,Fragonard, Ingres, Prud'hon … back further perhaps … Raphael,Botticelli, Leonardo, no! No! NO! Not one of those names or times felt anything like what I was looking at.
The painting he saw is this one. Which is … like, it’s good, I guess? I don’t know much about painting but it sure looks like there is a lot of technical skill going on there. Nicely varied (if oddly artificial-looking) lighting. Poses look real. Faces look real … almost too real, making the whole look like a posed photograph. The weird lighting only adds to that effect (the rightmost nymph is really bright even though the ground doesn’t get brighter beneath her? the satyr’s skin is no brighter right against her arm than it is near the other, dimmer nymphs? it looks like an effect that could only be produced with artificial lighting, if at all). The figures have apparently been moving around a lot and yet there are no tracks in the dirt whatsoever, making them look pasted-on. There’s not much going on emotionally. I don’t get what Ross is on about. But it’s not a bad painting.
Things get worse when you look at some of the other stuff Bougureau painted (and the Art Renewal Center has a big online gallery). The thing is, it’s … all like that. They all have the bright, not-quite-right lighting; the exposed flesh in the same skin tones as illuminated by the same lighting; the uniformly pretty-faced young women, who all seem to be based on one of about 2 or 3 facial templates; the emotional content that amounts to “well, that’s nice.” Usually it’s either cute children (optional: devoted mothers) or nubile young women, who look like grown versions of the cute children who will grow further to become the devoted moms. It’s all kitschy, and maybe kitsch isn’t bad – but what is clearly bad is having such a tiny range. (It reminds me a lot of those artists who just draw similar-looking anime girls over and over again.)
Bougureau does occasionally stray from his home turf to tackle more “serious” subjects, and the results are, IMO, just plain bad. The facial expressions are so realistic that Bougureau can’t convey emotion stylistically the way most painters would. The result, given the artificial lighting and Bougureau’s preference for youth, looks like a photo of an awkward high school theater production. (“Abduction of Psyche” is the height of this effect, for me.)
His “Flagellation of Jesus” is decent but if I look at any of the faces I start to see actors or models wondering when they’ll get to leave for lunch. (Except for that creepy child in the background, who is probably sending a psychic message to the Mothership.) His “Dante and Virgil in Hell” shows off his facility with dynamic nude bodies (just like the nymphs), but is otherwise a pretty half-assed vision of hell, with the ridiculous grinning demon who looks less “evil” and more “thinks he’s a lot funnier than he really is and gets on everyone’s nerves,” and the flat, tepidly glowing background (”yep, this is hell, it’s like red and stuff”).
OK, so the interesting part of all this to me is the question – was Bougureau actually technically skilled?
This is a key part of the Art Renewal Center view – Bougureau not only chose the right subject matter, he also had madskillz. And it’s certainly true that he could paint people who really looked like people (if often like the same people over and over again). His paintings are more photorealistic than those of any great master I’ve seen. That took craft.
But technical skill isn’t just pure craft. It’s also the capacity to do something with your medium. There’s pure craft – being able to paint a nose that looks like a nose, or whatever – and then there’s another sort of craft that involves channeling that craft for the purpose of playing the audience’s mind like an instrument. Bougureau could paint really nose-looking noses, but he could only achieve one or two effects.
Compare him to, say, Rubens. Rubens is a lot less photorealistic than Bougureau, and his paintings look rougher, with less of the “noses look exactly like noses” kind of craft. But Rubens could do this (Bougureau country) and he could also do this. Isn’t that preferable to hundreds of near-identical teenagers with impeccably rendered eyebrows?
Of course there’s no accounting for taste and I’m not saying that Fred Ross shouldn’t have reacted so strongly to that Bougureau painting. It’s good that he did; good for his own life and good for the variety of the world. I just personally don’t get it at all.
This guy also seems to subscribe to the Art is Religion or Greek Mythology school of thought; I mean, there’s a whole movement of photorealist painters whose entire shtick is incredible detail, meant to emulate scenes of ordinary life as closely as possible. But this fellow seems not to understand why abstract art took off in the first place–in an age with photography and mechanical reproduction of images, the whole presentational function of painting ceases to become especially interesting. If you just want objects that look realistic, you can take a photograph, and photography can be visually and artistically interesting in its own right. Art has another function also, representation, and the invention of photography frees artists to divorce presentational and representational aspects of painting from one another (if they wish to).
There’s a good reason why certain segments of the culture have moved sharply away from the kind of art Fred Ross likes, and it’s not because of snobbery, or academic elitism, or the insidious influence of postmodernism or anything like that.
Bouguereau captured the very souls and spirits of his subjects much like Rembrandt. Often I’ve heard said that Rembrandt captured the soul of age, while Bouguereau captured the soul of youth.His figures come to life like no previous artist has ever before or ever since achieved. He didn’t just paint their flesh better, but he captured the subtlest tender nuances of personality and mood. He took no short cuts. Every composition is incredibly original with perspectives and foreshortening and interweaving of figures more complex and successful than was any other artist of his time. His paintings never feel busy. There are never unnecessary elements strewn around.
All I can say is that I really don’t see it.
One of the things that strikes me about Bouguereau, which I don’t see much in other painters (except deliberate photorealists), is that you can’t see his brushstrokes. Apparently this is a specific thing called a “licked finish,” which was popular among the “academic painters,” and which can be produced by a straightforward if tedious process.
The licked finish confuses matters when directly comparing Bouguereau to almost any other painter, because Bouguereau is going to look “more real” because you can’t see his brushstrokes, which is all a consequence of the licked finish rather than any superior grasp of how to capture real objects on a canvas.
If I deliberately try to ignore that difference, I end up feeling like Bouguereau is just worse than someone like Courbet – check out all the different paintings on that page, the range of feeling, setting, composition, etc. This Courbet self-portrait is very clearly a painting – no licked finish – but otherwise it seems pretty realistic to me. It also just emotes way better than a Bouguereau face – I feel like it captures that guy making that expression perfectly, so that I almost feel like I’m talking to him and he’s making that face in response to something I just said, where Bouguereau’s faces just look like unconvincing actors to me.
(All of which makes no dent in the fact that Fred Ross seems to find Bouguereau a uniquely transporting experience. More power to him.)
What do you think about this one?
It’s one of the couple Bouguereau paintings I have prints of. I just think it’s a really nice, really realistic-looking portrait. It’s impressive.
Sure, there’s no message here. And she’s got a neutral expression. But it still looks really good. The neutral expression itself looks good: “striking”, “confident”.
And sure, most of his other paintings are highly similar. The ones that aren’t similar aren’t as good. But I don’t think it takes that much away from it.
The Courbet one is not bad (better than most of the paintings I see on his Wikipedia page), but it’s “blurry” and kind of silly-looking.
I think we must just be looking for different things out of paintings. That one just doesn’t do anything for me. It’s completely neutral. I look at it and think "that is a person” and not much else.
I guess it’s impressive in that a lot of work clearly went into it, but that doesn’t affect whether I want to look at it. My brain places it in the same category that photos go in (and a reflexive part of me wonders whether this is someone I know posting a photo on Facebook and whether I should “like” it).
The facial expression here also gives me the same “posing for a portrait” vibe that many of Bouguereau’s other faces do; it’s less of a problem here, but only because the scene is one where that is appropriate. With that Courbet self-portrait, or with many of Rembrandt’s portraits, the expression seems like it could fit into some sort of narrative, like the person could be making that face in response to something I’d just said. Here the story is just “I am having my picture taken.”
Of course, this is all personal taste, and I’m sure not everyone shares my impression that Bouguereau’s people “look like actors emoting for the camera.” (It really feels like they’re tripping some basic switch my brain uses to distinguish authentic from faked emotion, and it’s interesting that that would very between people.)
Note: This post is satire. (However, I have not made any deliberate mistakes in the reasoning or computations.)
This post is an attempt to evaluate the effectiveness of masturbation, as performed by individual effective altruists. “Effectiveness” here is meant in the usual sense of utility (as measured in, e.g., QALYs) gained per dollar invested, as used for instance by GiveWell to evaluate cost-effectiveness of charities.
Of course, as masturbation typically has no effects on others, it cannot be considered an act of “altruism,” effective or not. However, although utilitarianism assigns no greater moral weight to oneself than to others, it also assigns no lower weight to oneself than to others. Hence, insofar as effective altruists are interested in increasing global utility by any means, self-pleasuring acts have no special status and can be directly weighed against acts that benefit others.
To evaluate the effectiveness of masturbation, we must determine both its cost and the utility it adds. First, consider the cost. As there is no “price to entry” for masturbation, we can only evaluate the cost as an opportunity cost – say, the wages lost if an episode of masturbation is substituted for an episode of paid labor with the same duration. Typically individuals do not directly face this tradeoff, but in some cases they may, for instance if one has the option of taking on additional paid hours at the cost of time that would otherwise be allocated to masturbation (or vice versa).
This post involves enough uncertainty and enough distinct data sources that only order-of-magnitude estimates will be attempted. We will assume a salary of $80,000/year, and while this may be far too low or too high for any given individual, it will not be off by many orders of magnitude.
Thus the cost of a masturbation episode, for the purposes of this analysis, is simply its duration times ($80,000/year).
What utility is gained in an episode of masturbation? As a first approach to this question, consider the overall utility difference a non-asexual person would incur if deprived of their sex drive.
An approximation to this question was investigated in Wilke et. al. 2010, in which men with prostate cancer made tradeoffs involving a treatment which could extend their life at the cost of “profound lack of sexual desire and erectile function.” The men (mean age 72) were given a time trade-off question, as is standard in determination of QALY weights. The mean time trade-off utility was 0.78, meaning that a year with sex drive and function was valued at 0.78 years without.
In other words, time spent with sex drive and function is 1/0.78 ≈ 1.28 times as valuable as time without. (Obviously, these results are severely limited by sex, gender and age; we will treat them as universal here as a first approximation.)
The utility gained from sex drive and function is not uniformly distributed over time; it is primarily concentrated in the sex act itself. There may be other utility gains from mood and health effects of sexual desire and activity and from the sexual drive as a contributor to social well-adjustedness, as well as utility losses due to the difficulties involved in seeking sexual activity. However, it seems intuitive that the overall effect of sexuality on human preferences is dominated by the desirability of the sex act itself rather than by these peripheral effects. So will we assume that if a given unit of time “with sex” confers more utility than the same unit “without sex,” this is due solely to the subsets of this unit in which sexual activity is occurring.
For instance, if a year “with sex” is 1.28 times as good as one “without sex,” sexual activity itself must be much more than 1.28 times as enjoyable as the average activity, since one typically spends only some fraction of a given year masturbating or having sex.
How large is this fraction? Reece et. al. 2010 reviews data for men found in the 2009 National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior. For consistency, we must consider data for men of ages comparable to those studied in Wilke et. al. 2010, which in this case we will take to mean the “70+” age category. Some of the data is shown below (we have chosen to exclude “anal intercourse,” which is rare enough in the 70+ age category to be negligible):
Averaging over these data, the average man of age 70+ masturbates about 24 times per year and has sexual intercourse about 20.3 times per year. (Note that these rates may be different for men with prostate cancer. We will ignore this difference here.)
Survey data indicates that penis-in-vagina intercourse (i.e. “vaginal intercourse” in Reece et. al. 2010) lasts around 6 minutes on average. We will assume that masturbation episodes are also 6 minutes in duration. This implies that the average man of age 70+ spends 144 minutes per year masturbating and 122 minutes per year having intercourse.
It is commonly observed that masturbation and sexual intercourse are not equally desirable. Thus we introduce the parameter μ, defined so that μ minutes of masturbation are interchangeable with 1 minute of intercourse. The total time spent in sexual activity, in units of “equivalent minutes of masturbation” are thus 144 + μ*122.
A year “with sex” is thus made 1.28 times as enjoyable as a year “without sex” solely by the contribution of 144 + μ*122 minutes, which are some factor β times more enjoyable than their equivalents in the year “without sex.” In the unrealistic limit μ = 1, this gives β of about 558. With μ = 5, β lowers to 197.5, while with μ = 10, β lowers further to 109.7.
As stated earlier, we take the cost of a masturbation episode to be ($80,000/year) times the episode’s duration. To make the computation simple, consider a hypothetical year spent masturbating. Thus $80,000 is lost, but the year confers utility β*(one year) rather than 1*(one year). For β = 558, for instance, this can be interpreted as 557 years of life gained. Thus we would spent $143.6 per year of life gained.
The above estimate corresponded to the unrealistic μ = 1. With μ = 5, we instead spend $407 per year of life gained, and with μ = 10, we spend $737 per year of life gained. Increasing μ further will of course produce even lower estimates of efficiency, but very large values of μ are likely to conflict with the results of introspection. (We encourage readers to estimate their own value of μ, then perform the computation themselves.)
Converting to units of “lives saved,” as described here, gives us $4308 per life saved with μ = 1, $12210 per life saved with μ = 5, and $22110 per life saved with μ = 10. It will be useful here to consult GiveWell’s remarks on cost-effectiveness:
We consider anything under $5,000 per life saved (or equivalent, according to one’s subjective values about how to compare other sorts of impacts to lives saved) to be excellent cost-effectiveness. We consider anything over $50,000 per life saved (or equivalent) to be excessive for the cause of international aid, as it implies more than an order of magnitude higher costs than the strongest programs.
Thus masturbation is unlikely to be “excellent” by GiveWell’s standards (for international aid interventions), but probably not “excessive.” (Assuming μ takes integer values, it would be “excessive” only if μ > 24.)
GiveWell’s standards are possibly the most stringent in existence, meant for identifying the very best charities. Medical interventions costing up to $30,000 per QALY gained are often considered cost-effective; by this standard, $737 per QALY (μ = 10) is quite efficient.
Recall that this post only intends to estimate orders of magnitude. A closer analysis may reveal masturbation to be somewhat more or less effective than indicated here – for instance, it may be quite ineffective by GiveWell’s standards. But it is unlikely to be very ineffective.
The above is, of course, merely an analysis of the average episode of masturbation, and care must be taken when applying it to the marginal episode of masturbation. EAs who masturbate at a rate typical of their demographic category may encounter strongly diminishing marginal returns if they introduce additional masturbation episodes. However, given the remarkable cost-effectiveness estimates given here, EAs are strongly encouraged to reflect on whether or not they have reached this limit. If an EA considering a masturbation episode estimates that it will have an impact on their utility close to that of the average masturbation episode they engage in, they are strongly encouraged to proceed. This choice is straightforward if there is no tradeoff with other life concerns, but the above analysis indicates that the choice may be utility-maximizing even if traded off against an equivalent time spent making money, when considered in terms of that money’s potential to produce effective outcomes when donated. For instance, an EA who obtains an income of $80,000/year (the figure used above) for the purposes of earning to give should consider that some of the time spent earning this income could be spent equivalently-or-better on the task of, as it were, “masturbating to give.”
People now are like, “Your right to free speech doesn’t mean you can express an offensive opinion”
Like what the fuck does right to free speech mean, then?
God I hate this comic.
“The right to freedom of religion means the government can’t arrest you for what you believe that. That doesn’t mean anyone else has to listen to your bullshit backwards religion, or host you while you share it. The first amendment doesnt shield you from criticism or consequences. If you’re yelled at, boycotted, have your show canceled, or get banned from an internet community, your freedom of religion isn’t being violated. It’s just that the people listening think you’re an asshole. And they’re showing you the door.”
It’s just abundantly clear to me that respect for rights need to inscribed on the hearts of the people as well as the laws of the land in order ofr them to actually make a difference in the real world. An America where a Sikh is constantly mocked for wearing a turban, is denied employment, yelled ay, boycotted, etc. is simply not a place of religous freedom, no matter what the first amendment says. I have to wonder whether the people making this argument would have supported the passing of free speech protections in the first place. If you really want to be able to use coercion to silence opinions you dislike, why not just go whole hog? “Men may as well be imprisoned, as denied the means of earning their bread,” as John Stuart Mill reminds us in On Liberty. If you really want to be able to use social pressure to silence people you dislike, why not just use the easiest and most effective means available and use the state?
Social coercion is every bit as great a threat to freedom as state intervention - as any gay person will tell you. If a freedom is to be protected it must be protected from ostracism as well as imprisonment. Tocqueville understood that - which is why he looked at America, first amendment and all, and decided we ranked dead last in freedom of conscience and thought, lagging behind the worst despotisms of Europe.
“I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America. In any constitutional state in Europe every sort of religious and political theory may be freely preached and disseminated; for there is no country in Europe so subdued by any single authority as not to protect the man who raises his voice in the cause of truth from the consequences of his hardihood. If he is unfortunate enough to live under an absolute government, the people are often on his side; if he inhabits a free country, he can, if necessary, find a shelter behind the throne. The aristocratic part of society supports him in some countries, and the democracy in others.
But in a nation where democratic institutions exist, organized like those of the United States, there is but one authority, one element of strength and success, with nothing beyond it.In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them. Not that he is in danger of an auto-da-f‚, but he is exposed to continued obloquy and persecution.
His political career is closed forever, since he has offended the only authority that is able to open it. Every sort of compensation, even that of celebrity, is refused to him. Before making public his opinions he thought he had sympathizers; now it seems to him that he has none any more since he has revealed himself to everyone; then those who blame him criticize loudly and those who think as he does keep quiet and move away without courage. He yields at length, overcome by the daily effort which he has to make, and subsides into silence, as if he felt remorse for having spoken the truth.
Fetters and headsmen were the coarse instruments that tyranny formerly employed; but the civilization of our age has perfected despotism itself, though it seemed to have nothing to learn. Monarchs had, so to speak, materialized oppression; the democratic republics of the present day have rendered it as entirely an affair of the mind as the will which it is intended to coerce. Under the absolute sway of one man the body was attacked in order to subdue the soul; but the soul escaped the blows which were directed against it and rose proudly superior. Such is not the course adopted by tyranny in democratic republics; there the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved.
The master no longer says: “You shall think as I do or you shall die”; but he says: “You are free to think differently from me and to retain your life, your property, and all that you possess; but you are henceforth a stranger among your people. You may retain your civil rights, but they will be useless to you, for you will never be chosen by your fellow citizens if you solicit their votes; and they will affect to scorn you if you ask for their esteem. You will remain among men, but you will be deprived of the rights of mankind. Your fellow creatures will shun you like an impure being; and even those who believe in your innocence will abandon you, lest they should be shunned in their turn. Go in peace! I have given you your life, but it is an existence worse than death.”
Absolute monarchies had dishonored despotism; let us beware lest democratic republics should reinstate it and render it less odious and degrading in the eyes of the many by making it still more onerous to the few.
Works have been published in the proudest nations of the Old World expressly intended to censure the vices and the follies of the times: LabruyŠre inhabited the palace of Louis XIV when he composed his chapter upon the Great, and MoliŠre criticized the courtiers in the plays that were acted before the court. But the ruling power in the United States is not to be made game of. The smallest reproach irritates its sensibility, and the slightest joke that has any foundation in truth renders it indignant, from the forms of its language up to the solid virtues of its character, everything must be made the subject of encomium. No writer, whatever be his eminence, can escape paying this tribute of adulation to his fellow citizens. The majority lives in the perpetual utterance of self-applause, and there are certain truths which the Americans can learn only from strangers or from experience.
If America has not as yet had any great writers, the reason is given in these facts; there can be no literary genius without freedom of opinion, and freedom of opinion does not exist in America.”
Yeah, I think people often miss the fact that the First Amendment is a legal instrument intended to protect free speech (etc.), not the definition of “free speech.”
You’d only write something like that if you already believed that some broader thing called “freedom of speech” was valuable, and were trying to make sure your government wouldn’t interfere with it. If you see freedom of speech as some arbitrary legal gadget which you don’t care about outside of its legal consequences, then you don’t really “care about freedom of speech” in the way the creators of such legal protections did.
Likewise, we would find it odd if someone treated (say) “homicide” or “theft” as purely legal constructs, with no weight outside of their legal definitions. It’s not usually illegal to kill people in combat during a war, but we don’t thus see combat deaths as “not real deaths,” or “not the sort of thing one can reasonably say one would prefer to avoid.”
That earlier conversation cleared up my own feelings about EA a bit, and they are as follows:
I give to charity – and to “effective” charities specifically – not because of any abstract argument I have been given, nor out of a feeling of moral guilt, but simply because once it was specifically pointed out to me that I could, it seemed like something I wanted to do. It is consistent with the values I already have.
I do it because it is something I “should” do, but it isn’t the sort of “should” that comes from some ethical theory baring mercilessly down on me. It’s the kind of “should” that makes me, during everyday life, actively want to help people. Which is an impulse I have – not an infinitely compelling one, not one to which I will sacrifice all comfort and beauty and all other good things, but still a natural impulse. Not something alien bolted on from the outside.
And the reason I want EA to spread is not that I think I have my hands on the correct ethical theory and want people to follow its dictates, their own values be damned. My guess is that EA-like giving is – as it was with me – already consistent with many people’s values. In which case telling them about EA would be less like guilting them into doing good, and more like making them aware that an action, of the sort they like to do, is available to them.
Imagine that it is discovered that whenever anyone says the world “bagel,” there was a 1/1000 chance that some randomly chosen person with cancer would be completely cured. What would happen? Certainly, this would precipitate some guilt crises – some people would feel bad about doing anything except saying the word bagel over and over again, and some people would argue that this feeling was right. But the main reaction, I think, would be joy, and not just for cancer sufferers and those who know them. People would think: my God, I can help someone so much, just by doing something so easy! They would say “bagel” again and again with glee – not to the point of destroying their lives, but often, when they get a spare moment. Such a complicated world, and such a simple way to help people so much! Bagel! Such a shining piece of unalloyed good in a very alloyed world! And what a way to make even our own little lives brighten the world!
We would not be quite so happy if, instead, saying “bagel” merely had a 1/1000 chance of curing a less serious chronic illness – say, Tourette Syndrome (which I have, so I am allowed to say this). In EA, this natural difference in feelings leads to cause prioritization, and puts the “E” in “EA.” It is not some strange alien philosophical thing. It is a normal aspect of our sentiments.
I find myself frustrated both by a lot of the EA movement and by a lot of anti-EA sentiment. The EA movement tends to focus on the more philosophical, controversial, guilt-inducing aspects of the issue – the equivalent of telling people about the bagel thing by haranguing them about how awful it is to do anything but devote your life to maximal bagel-saying. Anti-EA writing tends to focus entirely on opposition to those philosophical claims, which is fine in itself but pushes people away from discovering how wonderful a thing it can be to donate to effective charities. It’s the equivalent of writing an article about these weird people who want you to do nothing all day but say “bagel,” and the problematic moral axioms involved, without ever mentioning the fact that saying “bagel” is magic.
The reason I want the EA movement to exist is that I want more people to discover this new action that is consistent with their values. I don’t literally mean that people don’t know donation is possible, but in my experience it takes some initial push to make them realize that they could be doing it right now. Many non-religious people, including me, grow up never thinking about it as a possibility, because no one around them talks about it. Having a community of people doing it, as in religion, also helps – which is something the EA movement has the potential to do.
But the EA movement is certainly not ideal at selling itself for this purpose. I wish it had nothing to do with Peter Singer, with his “really we should all just be ascetics” extreme utilitarianism and his ill-informed views about disabled people. I wish it were less about “really we should all just be ascetics” in general. Forget about asceticism and just focus on communicating the very simple fact that because of the declining marginal utility of wealth (among other things), you can help other people in marvelous ways at extremely low cost to yourself. This should be a cause for joy. Bagel!
Since I only really care about the EA movement as a vehicle for making people aware that they can give and that they probably already want to, arguments over EA often look strange to me. Little or no attention is paid to whether the critics themselves donate, or whether EA caused them to donate. Notice, in the article I linked this morning, this astonishing buried lede:
The utilitarian was no longer a theoretical construction to do dialectical battle with; he was knocking at the door armed with pamphlets, asking me to sign away 10 percent of my income (I was happy to oblige) and, in the seminar room, claiming authority over how I was to live (which I respectfully declined to concede to him).
Reading on it is clear that the author is not on board with the notion of effectiveness. But it sounds like the EAs got him to donate.
This is a very strange situation: the fact that the author was awakened to a new way of doing good in the world is relegated to a sidenote (literally in parentheses), while he writes many paragraphs about the problems with the people who thus awakened him.
A man came to the door and told me about the bagel trick. What is the bagel trick, you ask? Unimportant, although I will note that I now practice it regularly. What is important is that this man’s philosophy is wrong and you should not listen to him.
What the hell is going on here?
You may have noticed that I don’t actually seem to be a utilitarian. If I was, I would be much less concerned with the absolute numbers of people donating and more concerned with the quantity of donations. I might be much more interested in strategies like “earning to give,” which are weird and scary in ways that push people away from EA, but which may have the potential to create more donations, overall, even when you take that pushing-away into account.
I’m not sure if I’m a utilitarian, but I think a utilitarian could still bear with me here. What I don’t want is for the EA movement to wither away into a strange, nerdy footnote that leaves most people cold. What I want is for it to flourish into an overall secular culture of giving that can engage a wide range of people. (Peter Singer wants this too, although I’m not sure he is effective at achieving it.) In the short term, yes, a few high-paid “earners-to-give” can numerically outweigh a bunch of well-meaning but lower-earning donors. In the long run, if we actually create a culture of giving, the number of EAs who just happen to work high-paying jobs will far numerically outweigh current earners-to-give, without anyone even having to adjust their career path.
EA, my EA, is a very normal sort of thing, one with broad appeal, and I hope it will be adopted very widely. I want a world where ordinary high-paid managers follow GiveWell recommendations because this is a normal thing for people to do. If we normalize giving – even those of us who can’t give much – the sheer masses of well-off normal people who give will far exceed anything that a small number of utilitarian nerds can do alone.
The obvious conclusion to draw here is that people don’t actually care about doing good in the world, so it’s misguided to try and even normalize the culture of giving. Sure they like to talk about and conspicuously signal that they care about poor people and oh no the inequality but…
How does voluntourism even become in a thing if they spend even a moment thinking about the costs and benefits? If people applied the same reasoning that they applied to, say deciding which movie to watch this evening, this institution would not have formed at all.
Witness the actual style of giving: essentially ostentatious, legalized begging on the streets or the vanity BUY YOUR OWN OVERPRICED VACATION auctions for rich people, or, the fact that it’s considered gauche to talk about how much money you donated. The linked article being more about self actualization rather than anything else should be a pretty clear signal: NO ONE CARES.
Most people think about charity in terms of what it can do for making themselves more impressive; why would you want to mar that with all of this bullshit mathy “effective” stuff that is just going to get in the way of showing off?
I’d like to be proven wrong here; what’s wrong with my view of charity’s primary purpose being a way for middle-high class westerners to brag?
What seems wrong to me with your view, on the basis of my personal experience, is that statistics say a lot of people already give to charity, yet I almost never hear about it.
I’ve looked around for statistics on what fraction of people give (particularly religious vs. non-religious) and the numbers vary a frustrating amount, but when I was looking around the numbers tended to always be above 50% for Americans, even for non-religious Americans. (A figure I see a lot is the one given here, which has 65% of religious Americans giving and 56% of non-religious Americans giving.)
And yet I basically never hear anyone talk about the fact that they give to charity, except for EAs. (In the case of EAs I don’t think it’s that they’re bragging, it’s because they have a culture of discussing what the best choices of charities are.) With a few exceptions, I have no idea whether anyone I know gives to charity, although statistically I’m sure some of them do. (Admittedly, I mostly know young people and older people are much more likely to give, but plenty of young people still give, according to the statistics I’ve seen.)
I agree that voluntourism is silly, but even if voluntourists are being counted as charitable givers, there still just aren’t enough of them to swamp the statistics (”more than 1.6 million” says this article). Obviously all these stats are rough and I would like to do them more carefully at some point.
Who are all of these people giving to (non-religious) organizations and not talking about it? I suspect some of them just ran into canvassers (although I don’t have statistics on this); this is not ideal for various reasons, but I think it indicates some interest in helping. (You can just turn the canvasser down, after all.) And, as I’ve said, these people generally don’t go on to talk about the donations they’re making.
What this looks like to me is some interest in donation combined with a complete detachment from any sort of culture of giving, so that people are willing to donate but tend to keep quiet about how they’re donating or how they could be doing it better, and tend to get pushed around by the sales pitches of individual charities rather than doing more careful research.
That earlier conversation cleared up my own feelings about EA a bit, and they are as follows:
I give to charity – and to “effective” charities specifically – not because of any abstract argument I have been given, nor out of a feeling of moral guilt, but simply because once it was specifically pointed out to me that I could, it seemed like something I wanted to do. It is consistent with the values I already have.
I do it because it is something I “should” do, but it isn’t the sort of “should” that comes from some ethical theory baring mercilessly down on me. It’s the kind of “should” that makes me, during everyday life, actively want to help people. Which is an impulse I have – not an infinitely compelling one, not one to which I will sacrifice all comfort and beauty and all other good things, but still a natural impulse. Not something alien bolted on from the outside.
And the reason I want EA to spread is not that I think I have my hands on the correct ethical theory and want people to follow its dictates, their own values be damned. My guess is that EA-like giving is – as it was with me – already consistent with many people’s values. In which case telling them about EA would be less like guilting them into doing good, and more like making them aware that an action, of the sort they like to do, is available to them.
Imagine that it is discovered that whenever anyone says the world “bagel,” there was a 1/1000 chance that some randomly chosen person with cancer would be completely cured. What would happen? Certainly, this would precipitate some guilt crises – some people would feel bad about doing anything except saying the word bagel over and over again, and some people would argue that this feeling was right. But the main reaction, I think, would be joy, and not just for cancer sufferers and those who know them. People would think: my God, I can help someone so much, just by doing something so easy! They would say “bagel” again and again with glee – not to the point of destroying their lives, but often, when they get a spare moment. Such a complicated world, and such a simple way to help people so much! Bagel! Such a shining piece of unalloyed good in a very alloyed world! And what a way to make even our own little lives brighten the world!
We would not be quite so happy if, instead, saying “bagel” merely had a 1/1000 chance of curing a less serious chronic illness – say, Tourette Syndrome (which I have, so I am allowed to say this). In EA, this natural difference in feelings leads to cause prioritization, and puts the “E” in “EA.” It is not some strange alien philosophical thing. It is a normal aspect of our sentiments.
I find myself frustrated both by a lot of the EA movement and by a lot of anti-EA sentiment. The EA movement tends to focus on the more philosophical, controversial, guilt-inducing aspects of the issue – the equivalent of telling people about the bagel thing by haranguing them about how awful it is to do anything but devote your life to maximal bagel-saying. Anti-EA writing tends to focus entirely on opposition to those philosophical claims, which is fine in itself but pushes people away from discovering how wonderful a thing it can be to donate to effective charities. It’s the equivalent of writing an article about these weird people who want you to do nothing all day but say “bagel,” and the problematic moral axioms involved, without ever mentioning the fact that saying “bagel” is magic.
The reason I want the EA movement to exist is that I want more people to discover this new action that is consistent with their values. I don’t literally mean that people don’t know donation is possible, but in my experience it takes some initial push to make them realize that they could be doing it right now. Many non-religious people, including me, grow up never thinking about it as a possibility, because no one around them talks about it. Having a community of people doing it, as in religion, also helps – which is something the EA movement has the potential to do.
But the EA movement is certainly not ideal at selling itself for this purpose. I wish it had nothing to do with Peter Singer, with his “really we should all just be ascetics” extreme utilitarianism and his ill-informed views about disabled people. I wish it were less about “really we should all just be ascetics” in general. Forget about asceticism and just focus on communicating the very simple fact that because of the declining marginal utility of wealth (among other things), you can help other people in marvelous ways at extremely low cost to yourself. This should be a cause for joy. Bagel!
Since I only really care about the EA movement as a vehicle for making people aware that they can give and that they probably already want to, arguments over EA often look strange to me. Little or no attention is paid to whether the critics themselves donate, or whether EA caused them to donate. Notice, in the article I linked this morning, this astonishing buried lede:
The utilitarian was no longer a theoretical construction to do dialectical battle with; he was knocking at the door armed with pamphlets, asking me to sign away 10 percent of my income (I was happy to oblige) and, in the seminar room, claiming authority over how I was to live (which I respectfully declined to concede to him).
Reading on it is clear that the author is not on board with the notion of effectiveness. But it sounds like the EAs got him to donate.
This is a very strange situation: the fact that the author was awakened to a new way of doing good in the world is relegated to a sidenote (literally in parentheses), while he writes many paragraphs about the problems with the people who thus awakened him.
A man came to the door and told me about the bagel trick. What is the bagel trick, you ask? Unimportant, although I will note that I now practice it regularly. What is important is that this man’s philosophy is wrong and you should not listen to him.
What the hell is going on here?
You may have noticed that I don’t actually seem to be a utilitarian. If I was, I would be much less concerned with the absolute numbers of people donating and more concerned with the quantity of donations. I might be much more interested in strategies like “earning to give,” which are weird and scary in ways that push people away from EA, but which may have the potential to create more donations, overall, even when you take that pushing-away into account.
I’m not sure if I’m a utilitarian, but I think a utilitarian could still bear with me here. What I don’t want is for the EA movement to wither away into a strange, nerdy footnote that leaves most people cold. What I want is for it to flourish into an overall secular culture of giving that can engage a wide range of people. (Peter Singer wants this too, although I’m not sure he is effective at achieving it.) In the short term, yes, a few high-paid “earners-to-give” can numerically outweigh a bunch of well-meaning but lower-earning donors. In the long run, if we actually create a culture of giving, the number of EAs who just happen to work high-paying jobs will far numerically outweigh current earners-to-give, without anyone even having to adjust their career path.
EA, my EA, is a very normal sort of thing, one with broad appeal, and I hope it will be adopted very widely. I want a world where ordinary high-paid managers follow GiveWell recommendations because this is a normal thing for people to do. If we normalize giving – even those of us who can’t give much – the sheer masses of well-off normal people who give will far exceed anything that a small number of utilitarian nerds can do alone.
And like idk maybe it’s just me but all of this Discourse on how pocs aren’t repped in hp is all wrapped up in like this godawful association I have with decolonisation discourse and what it means to be Indian (by extension how you get to see yourself represented in literature) that just… I get its empowering for some ppl to be able to go back to roots but for me it’s more liberating to be able to say yes I’m Indian AND I’m westernised do u have a fucking problem with it? But like the way the representation discourse is its like there’s a correct way to represent Indians and it always just reminds me that I am not that and will never be allowed to be that and just. fucking ugh.
this is a month late but
OMG YES THANK YOU FOR SAYING THIS AAAAAHHHHH
A ton of the circles I’m in are big on decolonization politics, and as someone who was born and raised somewhere near their “homeland”, their approach frankly creeps me the hell out.
Just about everybody I know who’s into decolonization were either born & raised in a Western diaspora (US, UK, Australia) or were raised there from a very young age. They constantly talk about how if they could decolonize ourselves and go back to our homeland culture then we’ll be better off, or something. About how it was colonization that oppressed LGTBQoC and if we can decolonize our queerness we can go back to our ancestral genders and sexualities. Ancestral everything. Reclaiming culture, reclaiming heritage, etc etc.
Sometimes this comes off as exotifying the homeland, or reducing it to particular unrepresentative facets. For instance, South Asia often just gets reduced to a particular cultural area of India that’s Hindu-centric and I think also limited to a particular caste. I once pointed out to a friend - a very well-respected QWOC writer and activist who is part South Asian - that while she meant well when she talked about how our South Asian ancestors would practice yoga every morning and thus we have a deeper connection to yoga than other cultures, it was also erasing South Asian Muslims, Christians, and other faith groups who have been around for centuries and who wouldn’t have yoga as their daily practice because it’s a Hindu thing. (And then people are shocked when they find out that my first time trying out yoga was at college in Australia coz they offered free classes.)
And god I really don’t get the whole ancestral worship thing a lot of my QPOC witchy friends & acquaintances are into. My ancestors were Muslims for centuries, they wouldn’t have been down for me incorporating them into whatever witchy woo spirituality I have! I’m trying to shift away from the Islam my family was raised in! Ancestral knowledge does fuck all for my spirituality!
Then there’s people like you and me, people who are way more comfortable being “Westernized” despite being born and raised in the “homeland”. (At least with me there’s some excuse of being born and raised as a child of immigrants, but the cultures of my parents and of my birthplace were way more similar than say Asian vs Western.) Local media and culture had no space for me, if anything they kept saying someone of my race and sexuality and interests were “wrong” and “evil” and “the tool of the oppressors” or whatever. Western media and culture was where I found a space and a voice. “My” cultures didn’t know what the hell to do with me - but in the West I at least found some compatriots.
Going back to sexuality and (de)colonization: if these decolonization activists ever came to their “homelands” and tried to “decolonize sexuality”, they would immediately be seen as colonists. Why? Because right now our “homeland” society is being told that anything outside the dominant heterosexual cispatriarchy is an agent of colonization. Being queer, being a feminist, being trans or non-binary, being an activist, being an artist, being an apostate, being a convert to the wrong religion, being vocal - that makes you A Tool Of Foreign Zionist Agents and next thing you know the State has sponsored a musical warning people about you.
These decolonization activists are obsessed about hijabi rights in the West, but do fuck-all for their sisters fighting back against Islamic oppressors in power where they are. They want to decolonize gender and sexuality but complain about the use of “third gender” and “the transgenders” by people in those communities in non-English-dominant countries. They speak about ancestor worship and going back to your cultural roots but don’t help people who are facing dire threats to their lives because they want to change or drop faith openly for any reason.
And yet if we say we’re more comfortable being “Western”, if we feel that there is more space for someone like us in the West than in the East, if we point out that when they come to our side of the world their Western-ness never really leaves them and they’ll be seen as more “white” than they want to admit, suddenly we’re the colonized ones. (I once had a WOC non-South-Asian burlesque performer tell me that I was somehow complicit in the subjugation of South Asians because I didn’t think it was a huge deal that Dita von Teese was wearing a sari in India made by an Indian for a major Indian event and objected to all the non-South-Asians white-knighting supposedly on our behalf.)
Maybe these decolonization activists need to look at how colonial their approaches really are.
Let’s also not forget that when non-white “decolonisation activists” DO go back home to the motherland to “go back to their cultural roots”, they often complain about how it doesn’t fit with their idealised notions of their ancestral homeland anyway (not to mention they don’t fit in as well as they always imagined they would) and basically end up being not much different from the White Westerners they slate for being “colonial” anyway.
(For some reason I am reminded, as an example, of that British Muslim who went to the Middle East to join ISIS and allegedly complained that “no one knows how to queue here in Syria” and that his fellow Arab militants “lacked basic manners” when eating - basically complaining that, shock horror, the countries he went to weren’t like Britain or the British way of doing things)
Ha! I haven’t noticed the complaining on my end - what I have seen lately are people who return and are all OMG THIS FEELS JUST LIKE HOME and WOW ISN’T THIS SO MUCH BETTER THAN USA/CANADA/WHATEVS and MY SOUL IS NOURISHED BECAUSE I AM EATING THE FOOD OF MY ANCESTORS or whatever
and here I am thinking wow, when I go back to my parents’ home country I am guaranteed indigestion and fever and allergies, it took this country 26 years to recognize me as a citizen and the first year I could vote the supposedly progressive party centered their campaign around how people of my race were fakers paid off by the Government so force them to sing the National Anthem when you spot them in line, home’s a place that I have never known, I would so so gladly switch places with you because your home felt more like home to me than mine did.
As a person who is not ~PoC~ but still hated in my country explicitly in a framing of “too Westernized”… goddamnit, yes, all of the above so much. FUCK WESTERN “ANTI-IMPERIALISTS”.
Fuck the spoiled idiots who complain about ~homonationalism~ or ~pinkwashing~, but do nothing and say nothing helpful to non-cis-het-male people who are objectively, notoriously oppressed by the wonderful exotic non-Western societies.
This is an excellent piece on a lot of the stuff I’m referencing when I say “y’all motherfuckers need Sahlins” or talk about appropriation activism’s failures of anthropology.
So: a lot of colonialist discourse framed non-western cultures as basically primitive. Untouched, lacking cultural as well as the more obvious technological sophistication, in need of civilizing. The “walled garden” view of cultures that a lot of modern anti-colonialist and anti-appropriation activists draw on is premised on the same idea of the untouched primordial, but with the moral valence reversed: native cultures are pristine, authentic, and true, while Euro-American culture is brutish and corrupt. Problem is, that premise was never true in either direction. With the exception of some of the more isolated groups in the Amazon and Pacific, just about all cultures are the products of constant exchange. Take yoga: while it draws in part on very old calisthenic practices, modern (i.e. late 19th century on) yoga also consciously draws on a variety of British elements. And it was, as notyourexotic points out, a conscious attempt at cultural exportation, a way for Indian nationalists to fight British cultural dominance by getting British people to do things that were visibly Indian.
This is one example of colonized people being “westernized” by using Euro-American culture in the service of resistance; another is Islamic radicalism. It’s no coincidence that so many members of Al Qaeda were educated in America and Europe. From the beginning, modern advocates of the outer jihad like Hassan Al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb have been the products of westernized education in major cities, and went out of their way to maintain substantial contact with the west. Islamic radicalism is in large part an outgrowth of Islamic modernism. There have been more purely traditionalist Muslim fundamentalists, but they’ve rarely been successful. Ruhollah Khomeini is the closest I can think of, and even he strayed far from the walled garden in practice.
Basically, this two-tiered model of cultures can only be true if we accept a variety of orientalist premises. It’s self-exoticizing. To put it bluntly: the modern notion of cultural separateness, cultural authenticity, and cultural appropriation is inherently and irrevocably orientalist.
Then there’s the other major point: colonized groups are not homogenous. (And again, it should be pretty obvious why this view would emerge from and reinforce the values of colonialism.) Who gets to define what being “Indian,” “Muslim,” “Japanese,” and so on means matters. It conveys a great deal of cultural and political power. And often the most reactionary elements of colonized cultures are the ones who win that argument; after all, who better to play the Tradition card? Leftist activists often wind up giving more power to the worst people in these cultures, in so doing greatly harming those we’re supposed to look out for. While I’m by no means endorsing the “kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity” idea that the American right has run with since 9/11, and I think support of progressive local power blocs usually works a lot better in the long run than stirring up a bunch of hate with military intervention, I strongly believe we have a moral obligation to protect women, queer people, racial/ethnic minorities, and other subaltern groups, even if they don’t have the best argument for “authenticity” within their cultures.
(Of course, there are other reasons to oppose stuff that gets called appropriation: a lot of it promotes pernicious stereotypes, or involves plagiarism; nevertheless, the notion of appropriation per se that tumblr has fallen in love with makes the baby Edward Said cry.)
^^^^^^^^^^^ broadly this.
I mentioned in one of the earlier chains of this that the people most loudly in favour of decol discourse back ‘home’ are largely fascists and/or people from powerful majority groups who have dubious ethics re the treatment of minorities & marginalised folk & the idea of cultural separatism falls into a similar category. There’s certainly some use for appropriation discourse in talking about power relations between cultural groups - which allow some cultural groups the power to take from others, control how these others are seen and in general commodify and sell their own ideas about these cultural groups to the point that even these groups may replicate these relations entirely on their own (e.g. how goa has basically been turned into western hippie paradise and so everywhere you turn you see hippie paraphernalia with figures of ganesh plastered all over them even though goa itself has a sizeable & dominant catholic community).
But this whole idea that cultures are static and immutable and that traditions must be preserved at all cost needs to be put away - it’s loudest proponents are almost always ppl with vested interests, interested in holding on to the power that makes them elite within their own countries. Sure, caste is a tradition. That’s why anti-caste campaigners are now being called anti-national for daring to talk about how the current Indian government is complicit in the suicide of Rohit Vemula, who was unfairly thrown out of his university after a couple of hindutva student union guys complained about his union’s anti-caste activism. God knows what else tradition is used to defend here. Section 377, for one. And obviously women are being raped only because we’re being westernized - if we just behaved like good Indian women none of this would happen! Just follow traditions, you’ll be fine!
Like, this is shit being said by our police and our ministers in government with impunity.
Maybe, just maybe, it’s an okay thing if cultures can change and if we can excise the shitty bits of our cultures in favour of the good. Maybe human rights aren’t just neo - imperialism (tho I’m not fond of the way how America’s version of spreading human rights almost always seems to involve trampling on the rights of people on the ground). Maybe actually a better conversation to be having about cultures and appropriation is the way to move forward to dialogue - and a means of creating mutually agreeable and beneficial cultural exchange because that’s literally what fascists of every single stripe from around the world do not want us to do.
So, in almost any artistic field, there’s a disjoint between critical and commercial (or if freely distributed, simply “popular”) success - many things that have the first lack the second, and visa-versa. This is widely remarked upon as something that requires explanation, and the explanations always seem to be either aesthetically realist (the snobs are right, the masses are idiots, some things are just better but most can’t appreciate it) or bulveristic (the plebes are just innocently enjoying what anyone would enjoy, the snobs are engaged in signalling games.) These can be put in more nuanced forms than the strawmen I’ve summed them as, but they seem to be the main approaches.
But does this require an explanation? Consider:
1) The most critically successful (say) books are those that most appeal to those who are really really into books; the most commercially successful books are those that most branch out beyond that group; and more generally
2) Desiderata will be tend to anti-correlate after a process of selection; works with no potential for either rarely get propagated. (The exceptions, like say My Immortal or The Room are probably best understood as a strange kind of critical success; they most particularly tweak (whether innocently or by design) the tastes of aficionado communities who seek out and build commentary around them for that reason.)
So while there may or may not be such things as good faith or bad taste, I don’t think you need to postulate either to get the general pattern.
This strikes me as kind of similar to the “aesthetically realist” explanation, except without the moral component. That is, it still explains the distinction by invoking intrinsic properties of the books, and it suggests that the snobs have more experience with which to make judgments (”really really into books”), just without saying that’s a good thing.
In other words, it seems like this is close to restating the notion of “good taste,” but without calling it “good.”
The thing I think this theory has trouble with – which the “aesthetically realist” theory also has trouble with – is how “snob taste” (or whatever one wants to call it) is a recognizable thing that is distinct from “the taste common among people who read a lot.” I know voracious readers who read only “low” fiction, who read only “high” fiction, and (probably the most common category) those who read both and everything in between. It’s only (some of) the “high-only” people who strike me as “snobs,” not exactly because of what they like, but because of what they won’t even try.
So – what I identify as “snobbery” seems like a process of binary inclusion/exclusion rather than a spectrum of taste. It’s hard for me to understand exactly what causes certain works to be included or excluded, and the whole thing seems very cultural, path-dependent, and hard to explain in terms of individual psychology/taste. (Dorothy Dunnett is a better prose stylist than Eleanor Catton, and Elizabeth Bear is a better stylist than Donna Tartt, and all four write plot-heavy books, but if a “high-only” person asked me what fiction I’d been reading, I would guess that Catton and Tartt would “count,” would be “answers in the spirit of the question,” where Dunnett and Bear wouldn’t.)
Hmm, I think you’re mostly right. I think what removing “good” does structurally for the theory, rather than just making it polite, is open things up to the acknowledgement that communities of taste can be pretty varied, and in principle should be able to each be superior to the other by their own standards (though I can’t think of any good examples off the top of my head for that.) “Read a lot of books” may have framed things in a particular way, though I do suspect the most common route to a “snobbish” sensibility is investment in a particular set of aesthetic standards. (Maybe this makes it ultimately still just a polite good taste theory?)
But it does seem to be the case that there is snobbery within pretty much every aesthetic to invest in, not just a single snob community looking down from their art museums and literary fiction reviews. Elizabeth Bear is better/more snobbish than Terry Goodkind, Pillars of Eternity than Fallout 4, Sandman than Spider-Man, &c. I’m too invested in hegemonic masculinity to know anything about, say, genre romance* but I would bet money on the same applying to them (or maybe a large section of Lit-Fic just is the romance snob group? IDK.)
(I’m actually not sure where I’m going with this at this point; I’ll have to give it further reflection, maybe.)
*he said, Bioware fanfic in the next tab over,
I find that a lot of the ‘high level’ stuff does actually require certain experiences and foreknowledge to enjoy. I don’t know a heck of a lot about fiction, but I know about jazz.
Jazz is objectively more complex than rock and pop music. And if you walked up to someone who only listens to pop or rock music and made them listen to, say, this Charlie Parker track, there’s a good chance that they won’t like it. They don’t have the tools necessary to understand what’s happening in the song, so it’s liable to be completely incomprehensible to them. So of course that track is going to be unpopular among the general population. It requires a certain skillset and background to enjoy.
I haven’t read Elizabeth Bear but Sandman does require more foreknowledge to enjoy than Spider-Man, since a lot of the stories in Sandman rely on knowledge of the Western Canon. Someone who doesn’t know about Orpheus and Eurydice is less likely to enjoy Sandman than someone who does, because they’re missing a lot of what is being conveyed. Any references in Spider-Man to non-comic book works are going to be much more incidental to the story than those in Sandman.
I think that there are actual barriers that prevent the average person from accessing certain works, and that these have a lot to do with both skill-based education (e.g. ear training) and cultural background (e.g. the jazz language). Critics necessarily must have the second and are likely to have more of the first than the average person.
I think this is an important factor, but it doesn’t go all the way to explaining what I’m talking about.
In the quartet of authors I mentioned, Dunnett and Bear are also (I’d say) more densely referential than Catton and Tartt, and also much less “accessible" – the reader has to do a lot more work to figure out what’s going on, often through the screen of opaque, reference-heavy prose and dialogue. Obviously, I chose those particular authors because they suited my point, but I don’t think they’re outliers. (Authors who like being densely referential often take gladly to the historical-fic and SF/fantasy genres, for obvious reasons.)
The hypothesis I’m darkly hinting at here is that a lot of this is the result of marketing. Or, more accurately, a broader social phenomenon in which books are marketed differently but also blurbed and reviewed by different people, etc., and some social groups take this as a cue for which books to read or care about.
(The dividing line is very clear if you look at the covers of books by Dunnett/Bear vs. those by Catton/Tartt – the latter tend to be a whole lot more, uh, tasteful.)
I’m not saying this is all arbitrary, though I’m pretty sure at least some of it is arbitrary. But even if it’s arbitrary, that’s not necessarily a problem: no one can read every book in the world, and it’s valuable to be reading the same books your friends are reading for social reasons. Snobbery is to some extent a thing that certain social groups do to focus their attention on the same books, which can be useful even if the choice has nothing to do with what’s between the covers.
I feel like Family Guy is a counterpoint to this argument.
It’s nothing but references, things that require foreknowledge to enjoy – some of them super obscure – and yet, it’s the lowest of the low status even when looking solely at its references.
Hmm, yeah. Ulysses, Homestuck, and Family Guy are all packed to the gills with 1) dick and fart jokes and 2) references to absolutely everything, but one’s gazing down from Mt Olympus, another is a big fish in a small pond, and another is a landfill full of AOL cds.
Probably accessibility in other ways matters? Like Family Guy for instance is episodic - each episode stands entirely on its own. Though maybe that doesn’t matter so much because most Sandman issues stand on their own, too, whereas gargantuan map fantasy series outside of Tolkien and Martin tend to be lower caste even within SFF fandom?
(I could probably throw out better hypotheses on the Ulysses/Homestuck/FG front if my knowledge of all wasn’t mostly osmotic.)
Hmm, okay, hmm, here are some “maximally” like-with-like comparisons: Family Guy vs. Simpsons, Fallout 4 vs Fallout: New Vegas, Sword of Truth vs Game of Thrones. Can we pile up some more examples like these? Do they lead anywhere in particular?
I don’t think you can go that much further on the meta level without picking apart the content in some depth, but when you do that it’s harder to generalize. So just a couple of thoughts:
There is a sort of reflective sensory and emotional reaction that great narrative awakens, one that brings a certain kind of insight, a sort of broadening of empathetic understanding. This is vague, but I think there’s a definite mental state that this refers to.
Certain works can be complex in its vocabulary or references but not manage to do this much or at all. Family Guy, for example, is mean-spirited to its core, and offers little to none of this (most egregiously imo it invites the viewer to enjoy its relentless savaging of Meg). Game of Thrones punctures sentimentality, but it never moves beyond its own brand of nihilism (there’s more to it than that, but I think this generally holds). Something like Children of Men, though, maintains a balance of hope and despair, leading to a note of transcendence, and you may not come out knowing more after you watch it, but you feel like a better person.
Of course this is just the vaguest gesturing towards a whole theory of narrative criticism, but it’s coming out of years of rumination on the subject, so it’s not just some ad hoc theory.
But there’s definitely work that’s both high-prestige and spiritually dead, isn’t there? Houllebecq, for instance?
I think it is more the level of cognitive work required (or perceived as required) to extract the “content” (be it spiritual or otherwise) from the work. The cognitive load can be reduced by skill (i.e. an Literature degree), or the perception of cognitive load can be artificially inflated (i.e. by adding obscure references). I feel like this explains Family Guy (references but no cognitive work required to understand them), Epic Fantasy (A lot of time and possibly effort required to understand them, but it is a low cognitive load), and Ulysses (High cognitive load).
I think the content in the work is also supposed to be worth the effort required to get it, but this is probably more about the perception of the value of the content than its actual properties, due to various biases.
Yeah, I think these sorts of complexity/barriers to entry are definitely part of it, although there also seem to be things that are coded as “pretentious” that have a low cognitive load: post-rock for instance. (Well, likely there are additional treasures to be gained in it through an appreciation of musical theory and history, but I lack all those things and just like to listen to it because it’s immediately pretty.)
“I like everything except rock and country” is clearly just about class, clearly enough that it’s become a stock level-2-signalling joke. But bluesette is probably right about e.g. jazz being objectively complex too. Hmm.
I think this is close to the mark, although I’m not sure I understand the distinction @bibliolithid is making here
Epic Fantasy (A lot of time and possibly effort required to understand them, but it is a low cognitive load), and Ulysses (High cognitive load)
What is the “effort” possibly required by epic fantasy if not cognitive load? Do you mean that you have to work hard to memorize all the factions and characters (etc.), but you don’t have to think much? If so, I agree, but I’m not sure Ulysses is actually much different. Sure, it’s full of long or abbreviated sentences that are very confusing if you try to directly parse them, but no one who tries to directly parse every sentence in the book ever finishes it, I’d imagine.
In other words, I agree that difficulty or cognitive load explains the difference between Family Guy and {Game of Thrones, Ulysses, Homestuck}, but I’m not sure it explains the difference between the latter three. It requires some pretty heavy thinking about causal loops and crisscrossing motivations to “follow” Homestuck fully, but most first-time readers don’t actually do that, just as most first-time readers don’t actually parse the grammar (or lack thereof) of every sentence in “Oxen of the Sun.”
The explanation here, IMO, is something like “how easily can I imagine writing a paper about this?” I found Homestuck intimidatingly confusing when I first read it, but it had a reputation as this fun fandom thing and so I just kept on trucking. Somehow the fans all understood this thing without, like, having to take classes on it, right? Whereas Ulysses took me multiple tries to read – in part because it gets a lot better as it goes on, but in part because it seemed like a legitimate possibility that I was just “missing the point” of a lot of it and that without specialist study I was wasting my time.
For the most part I’ve stopped believing that this “you have to be a specialist” category actually exists – it’s possible to follow along with very difficult works and enjoy them without understanding them 100%, and I ultimately did this with Ulysses just as I did it with Homestuck. But if something seems like “the sort of thing you’d study in a class and write papers on,” a lot of people are going to decide it’s above their weight class. Likewise, the only reason so many people have made it through something like Homestuck is that there are no classes on it.
My concept of cognitive work (and cognitive work per second/unit i.e. cognitive load) primarily derives from my own qualia. When I am under a heavy cognitive load, I feel pressure in my head, and if I do too much cognitive work I get a headache. Conceptually, I feel like it is about halfway between the concept of “mental burden” used here and “cognitive work” used here. For, say, a book instead of game, it may be helpful to think of mental calculations per word, rather than per second. When I am reading epic fantasy (and I have read my fair share) the majority of the effort I exert is willpower: keeping reading despite a slow chapter or a new tumblr post. The cognitive work is mostly so light as to be automatic, I remember people and places in the story as part of my normal brain function, without needing to use any conscious thought or my executive functions at all (which may be the key differentiator). “the sort of thing you’d study in a class an write papers on” seems like a Mysterious Answer, replacing the class of “things people are snobs about” with the class of “things people write papers on”, without really explaining anything.
I think this is the difference. You get more out of spending more energy thinking about Ulysses than you do Family Guy, but unlike Game of Thrones it is hard to enjoy without putting in much cognitive work.
“the sort of thing you’d study in a class an write papers on” seems like a Mysterious Answer, replacing the class of “things people are snobs about” with the class of “things people write papers on”, without really explaining anything.
What I’m trying to say is that people’s reactions are being created here by the culture surrounding a given work rather than intrinsic qualities of the work itself. We’re never going to be able to have a satisfactory theory based on intrinsic qualities if those qualities just don’t actually cause the variation we’re looking at. It’s possible to imagine there one day being classes about Homestuck; there’s nothing about it that precludes that, and once it starts looking like homework it is going to fall on the other end of this dividing line. (Shakespeare is the go-to example of someone who has gone through this process – the groundlings didn’t worry that they hadn’t studied enough to “appreciate” what they were seeing.)
Re: cognitive load, that’s an interesting idea, which I had not thought about before. I think the choice of examples may not be working for me – I’m not sure I was enjoying Ulysses more when I was “thinking hard about it”; I tended enjoyed it when it was less easily comprehensible, but that was mostly a “wow, pretty” reaction without much perceived effort involved. It is possible to mentally strain for comprehension by, say, keeping very close track of the various little things Bloom thinks about repeatedly during the day, but I’m not sure readers generally consider this “more enjoyable” than just watching the fireworks – it’s just something that’s there to do, if you want to, probably on second reading or later.
But now that I think about it, I’m not sure I’ve ever had the experience depicted in your Ulysses graph? Much more common is something where the graph goes up and then down: I need to think a bit to make sense of the thing, but trying to keep track of more than the essentials removes me too much from the experience. (I’m having something like this experience now with Dorothy Dunnett, who I mentioned earlier as an author I don’t think would “count” for a typical snob. But I do have to think when reading her or I’ll be totally lost, and I’m at least 50% lost anyway because I’m not willing to obsess over every detail at the price of engagement. This is roughly my experience with all “hard” fiction.)
So, in almost any artistic field, there’s a disjoint between critical and commercial (or if freely distributed, simply “popular”) success - many things that have the first lack the second, and visa-versa. This is widely remarked upon as something that requires explanation, and the explanations always seem to be either aesthetically realist (the snobs are right, the masses are idiots, some things are just better but most can’t appreciate it) or bulveristic (the plebes are just innocently enjoying what anyone would enjoy, the snobs are engaged in signalling games.) These can be put in more nuanced forms than the strawmen I’ve summed them as, but they seem to be the main approaches.
But does this require an explanation? Consider:
1) The most critically successful (say) books are those that most appeal to those who are really really into books; the most commercially successful books are those that most branch out beyond that group; and more generally
2) Desiderata will be tend to anti-correlate after a process of selection; works with no potential for either rarely get propagated. (The exceptions, like say My Immortal or The Room are probably best understood as a strange kind of critical success; they most particularly tweak (whether innocently or by design) the tastes of aficionado communities who seek out and build commentary around them for that reason.)
So while there may or may not be such things as good faith or bad taste, I don’t think you need to postulate either to get the general pattern.
This strikes me as kind of similar to the “aesthetically realist” explanation, except without the moral component. That is, it still explains the distinction by invoking intrinsic properties of the books, and it suggests that the snobs have more experience with which to make judgments (”really really into books”), just without saying that’s a good thing.
In other words, it seems like this is close to restating the notion of “good taste,” but without calling it “good.”
The thing I think this theory has trouble with – which the “aesthetically realist” theory also has trouble with – is how “snob taste” (or whatever one wants to call it) is a recognizable thing that is distinct from “the taste common among people who read a lot.” I know voracious readers who read only “low” fiction, who read only “high” fiction, and (probably the most common category) those who read both and everything in between. It’s only (some of) the “high-only” people who strike me as “snobs,” not exactly because of what they like, but because of what they won’t even try.
So – what I identify as “snobbery” seems like a process of binary inclusion/exclusion rather than a spectrum of taste. It’s hard for me to understand exactly what causes certain works to be included or excluded, and the whole thing seems very cultural, path-dependent, and hard to explain in terms of individual psychology/taste. (Dorothy Dunnett is a better prose stylist than Eleanor Catton, and Elizabeth Bear is a better stylist than Donna Tartt, and all four write plot-heavy books, but if a “high-only” person asked me what fiction I’d been reading, I would guess that Catton and Tartt would “count,” would be “answers in the spirit of the question,” where Dunnett and Bear wouldn’t.)
Hmm, I think you’re mostly right. I think what removing “good” does structurally for the theory, rather than just making it polite, is open things up to the acknowledgement that communities of taste can be pretty varied, and in principle should be able to each be superior to the other by their own standards (though I can’t think of any good examples off the top of my head for that.) “Read a lot of books” may have framed things in a particular way, though I do suspect the most common route to a “snobbish” sensibility is investment in a particular set of aesthetic standards. (Maybe this makes it ultimately still just a polite good taste theory?)
But it does seem to be the case that there is snobbery within pretty much every aesthetic to invest in, not just a single snob community looking down from their art museums and literary fiction reviews. Elizabeth Bear is better/more snobbish than Terry Goodkind, Pillars of Eternity than Fallout 4, Sandman than Spider-Man, &c. I’m too invested in hegemonic masculinity to know anything about, say, genre romance* but I would bet money on the same applying to them (or maybe a large section of Lit-Fic just is the romance snob group? IDK.)
(I’m actually not sure where I’m going with this at this point; I’ll have to give it further reflection, maybe.)
*he said, Bioware fanfic in the next tab over,
I find that a lot of the ‘high level’ stuff does actually require certain experiences and foreknowledge to enjoy. I don’t know a heck of a lot about fiction, but I know about jazz.
Jazz is objectively more complex than rock and pop music. And if you walked up to someone who only listens to pop or rock music and made them listen to, say, this Charlie Parker track, there’s a good chance that they won’t like it. They don’t have the tools necessary to understand what’s happening in the song, so it’s liable to be completely incomprehensible to them. So of course that track is going to be unpopular among the general population. It requires a certain skillset and background to enjoy.
I haven’t read Elizabeth Bear but Sandman does require more foreknowledge to enjoy than Spider-Man, since a lot of the stories in Sandman rely on knowledge of the Western Canon. Someone who doesn’t know about Orpheus and Eurydice is less likely to enjoy Sandman than someone who does, because they’re missing a lot of what is being conveyed. Any references in Spider-Man to non-comic book works are going to be much more incidental to the story than those in Sandman.
I think that there are actual barriers that prevent the average person from accessing certain works, and that these have a lot to do with both skill-based education (e.g. ear training) and cultural background (e.g. the jazz language). Critics necessarily must have the second and are likely to have more of the first than the average person.
I think this is an important factor, but it doesn’t go all the way to explaining what I’m talking about.
In the quartet of authors I mentioned, Dunnett and Bear are also (I’d say) more densely referential than Catton and Tartt, and also much less “accessible" – the reader has to do a lot more work to figure out what’s going on, often through the screen of opaque, reference-heavy prose and dialogue. Obviously, I chose those particular authors because they suited my point, but I don’t think they’re outliers. (Authors who like being densely referential often take gladly to the historical-fic and SF/fantasy genres, for obvious reasons.)
The hypothesis I’m darkly hinting at here is that a lot of this is the result of marketing. Or, more accurately, a broader social phenomenon in which books are marketed differently but also blurbed and reviewed by different people, etc., and some social groups take this as a cue for which books to read or care about.
(The dividing line is very clear if you look at the covers of books by Dunnett/Bear vs. those by Catton/Tartt – the latter tend to be a whole lot more, uh, tasteful.)
I’m not saying this is all arbitrary, though I’m pretty sure at least some of it is arbitrary. But even if it’s arbitrary, that’s not necessarily a problem: no one can read every book in the world, and it’s valuable to be reading the same books your friends are reading for social reasons. Snobbery is to some extent a thing that certain social groups do to focus their attention on the same books, which can be useful even if the choice has nothing to do with what’s between the covers.
I feel like Family Guy is a counterpoint to this argument.
It’s nothing but references, things that require foreknowledge to enjoy – some of them super obscure – and yet, it’s the lowest of the low status even when looking solely at its references.
Hmm, yeah. Ulysses, Homestuck, and Family Guy are all packed to the gills with 1) dick and fart jokes and 2) references to absolutely everything, but one’s gazing down from Mt Olympus, another is a big fish in a small pond, and another is a landfill full of AOL cds.
Probably accessibility in other ways matters? Like Family Guy for instance is episodic - each episode stands entirely on its own. Though maybe that doesn’t matter so much because most Sandman issues stand on their own, too, whereas gargantuan map fantasy series outside of Tolkien and Martin tend to be lower caste even within SFF fandom?
(I could probably throw out better hypotheses on the Ulysses/Homestuck/FG front if my knowledge of all wasn’t mostly osmotic.)
Hmm, okay, hmm, here are some “maximally” like-with-like comparisons: Family Guy vs. Simpsons, Fallout 4 vs Fallout: New Vegas, Sword of Truth vs Game of Thrones. Can we pile up some more examples like these? Do they lead anywhere in particular?
I don’t think you can go that much further on the meta level without picking apart the content in some depth, but when you do that it’s harder to generalize. So just a couple of thoughts:
There is a sort of reflective sensory and emotional reaction that great narrative awakens, one that brings a certain kind of insight, a sort of broadening of empathetic understanding. This is vague, but I think there’s a definite mental state that this refers to.
Certain works can be complex in its vocabulary or references but not manage to do this much or at all. Family Guy, for example, is mean-spirited to its core, and offers little to none of this (most egregiously imo it invites the viewer to enjoy its relentless savaging of Meg). Game of Thrones punctures sentimentality, but it never moves beyond its own brand of nihilism (there’s more to it than that, but I think this generally holds). Something like Children of Men, though, maintains a balance of hope and despair, leading to a note of transcendence, and you may not come out knowing more after you watch it, but you feel like a better person.
Of course this is just the vaguest gesturing towards a whole theory of narrative criticism, but it’s coming out of years of rumination on the subject, so it’s not just some ad hoc theory.
But there’s definitely work that’s both high-prestige and spiritually dead, isn’t there? Houllebecq, for instance?
I think it is more the level of cognitive work required (or perceived as required) to extract the “content” (be it spiritual or otherwise) from the work. The cognitive load can be reduced by skill (i.e. an Literature degree), or the perception of cognitive load can be artificially inflated (i.e. by adding obscure references). I feel like this explains Family Guy (references but no cognitive work required to understand them), Epic Fantasy (A lot of time and possibly effort required to understand them, but it is a low cognitive load), and Ulysses (High cognitive load).
I think the content in the work is also supposed to be worth the effort required to get it, but this is probably more about the perception of the value of the content than its actual properties, due to various biases.
Yeah, I think these sorts of complexity/barriers to entry are definitely part of it, although there also seem to be things that are coded as “pretentious” that have a low cognitive load: post-rock for instance. (Well, likely there are additional treasures to be gained in it through an appreciation of musical theory and history, but I lack all those things and just like to listen to it because it’s immediately pretty.)
“I like everything except rock and country” is clearly just about class, clearly enough that it’s become a stock level-2-signalling joke. But bluesette is probably right about e.g. jazz being objectively complex too. Hmm.
I think this is close to the mark, although I’m not sure I understand the distinction @bibliolithid is making here
Epic Fantasy (A lot of time and possibly effort required to understand them, but it is a low cognitive load), and Ulysses (High cognitive load)
What is the “effort” possibly required by epic fantasy if not cognitive load? Do you mean that you have to work hard to memorize all the factions and characters (etc.), but you don’t have to think much? If so, I agree, but I’m not sure Ulysses is actually much different. Sure, it’s full of long or abbreviated sentences that are very confusing if you try to directly parse them, but no one who tries to directly parse every sentence in the book ever finishes it, I’d imagine.
In other words, I agree that difficulty or cognitive load explains the difference between Family Guy and {Game of Thrones, Ulysses, Homestuck}, but I’m not sure it explains the difference between the latter three. It requires some pretty heavy thinking about causal loops and crisscrossing motivations to “follow” Homestuck fully, but most first-time readers don’t actually do that, just as most first-time readers don’t actually parse the grammar (or lack thereof) of every sentence in “Oxen of the Sun.”
The explanation here, IMO, is something like “how easily can I imagine writing a paper about this?” I found Homestuck intimidatingly confusing when I first read it, but it had a reputation as this fun fandom thing and so I just kept on trucking. Somehow the fans all understood this thing without, like, having to take classes on it, right? Whereas Ulysses took me multiple tries to read – in part because it gets a lot better as it goes on, but in part because it seemed like a legitimate possibility that I was just “missing the point” of a lot of it and that without specialist study I was wasting my time.
For the most part I’ve stopped believing that this “you have to be a specialist” category actually exists – it’s possible to follow along with very difficult works and enjoy them without understanding them 100%, and I ultimately did this with Ulysses just as I did it with Homestuck. But if something seems like “the sort of thing you’d study in a class and write papers on,” a lot of people are going to decide it’s above their weight class. Likewise, the only reason so many people have made it through something like Homestuck is that there are no classes on it.
