# The Archdruid Report

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society

## Wednesday, August 17, 2011

### The Twilight of Meaning

This is not going to be an easy post to write, and I’m not at all sure it will be any easier to understand; I trust my readers will bear with me. I could begin it in any number of places, but the one that seems most important just now is the vestibule of the little public library six blocks away from my house. It’s a solid if unimaginative brick rectangle of Eighties vintage, one room not quite so full of books as it ought to be, another room in back for the librarians to work, a meeting space, restrooms, and a vestibule where books that are being discarded from the collection are shelved for sale.
That’s standard practice in most public libraries these days. If a book hasn’t been checked out for three years, or if it needs repairs and there isn’t a huge demand for it, it goes onto the sale shelf. Prices range from cheap to absurdly cheap; the sale doesn’t bring in a huge amount, but at a time of sparse and faltering budgets, every bit helps. The exception is children’s books, which aren’t for sale at all. They’re in a cart marked FREE, and if they don’t get taken in a month or so, they go into the trash, because there simply isn’t any demand for them. That was where, a few months ago, I spotted a copy of Kate Seredy’s 1938 Newberry Award winner The White Stag.
The vast majority of my readers will no doubt find the reference opaque. Still, back when I was a child—no, dinosaurs didn’t quite walk the earth back then, though it sometimes feels that way—winners of the Newberry Award, one of the two most prestigious US awards for children’s literature, still counted for quite a bit. Most libraries with a children’s collection of any size had the whole set, and most children’s librarians were enthusiastic about getting them into the hands of young readers. That’s not how I found The White Stag—I needed nobody’s encouragement to read, and Seredy’s compelling illustrations of galloping horsemen and magical beasts were well aimed to catch my eye—but find it I did, and that’s how medieval Hungarian legends about the coming of Attila the Hun wove their way permanently into the crawlspaces of my imagination.
So that was the book, one among dozens, that was awaiting its fate in the free cart at the South Cumberland Public Library. I already have a copy, and I decided to take the risk that somebody would find the one in the cart before it got tossed in the trash. As it happens, it was the right choice; the next week it was gone. I’ll never know whether some grandparent recognized it from his or her own childhood and took it as a gift, or whether some child caught sight of the cover, pulled it from the cart, and was caught by the magic of a tale that makes today’s canned children’s fantasies look like the pasty commercial product they are, but at least I can hope that it was something like that.
The White Stag was written the year my father was born. In my youth you could find books that old and much older, plenty of them, in small town public libraries all over the country. Nowadays, increasingly, you can’t. What you get instead are shelf upon shelf of whatever’s new, glossy, popular and uncontroversial, massaged into innocuousness by marketing specialists and oozing a fetid layer of movie, toy, and video game tie-ins from all orifices, all part of the feedback loop that endlessly recycles the clichés of current popular culture into minds that, in many cases, have never encountered anything else. In the process, the threads of our collective memory are coming silently apart.
I don’t think it’s going too far to describe the result as a kind of cultural senility. That concept certainly goes a long way to explain the blank and babbling incoherence with which America in particular stares vacantly at its onrushing fate. Without a sense of the past and its meaning, without narratives that weave the events of our daily lives into patterns that touch the principles that matter, we lack the essential raw materials of thought, and so our collective reasoning processes, such as they are, spit out the same rehashed nonsolutions over and over again.
It will doubtless be objected that we have the internet, and thus all the information we could possibly need. We do indeed have the internet, where sites discussing the current color of Lady Gaga’s pubic hair probably outnumber sites discussing Newberry Award books by a thousand to one. We have an effectively limitless supply of information, but then it’s not information that I got from reading The White Stag at age eight, and it’s not a lack of information that’s dragging us down to a sorry end.
The problem—for it is a problem, and thus at least in theory capable of solution, rather than a predicament, which simply has to be put up with—is the collapse of the framework of collective meanings that gives individual facts their relevance. That framework of meanings consists, in our culture and every other, of shared narratives inherited from the past that form the armature on which our minds place data as it comes in.
A couple of years ago, in a discussion on this blog that touched on this same point, I made the mistake of referring to those narratives by their proper name, which is myth. Those of you who know how Americans think know exactly what happened next: plenty of readers flatly insisted on taking the word in its debased modern sense of “a story that isn’t true,” and insisted in tones ranging from bafflement to injured pride that they didn’t believe in any myths, and what was I talking about?
The myths you really believe in, of course, are the ones you don’t notice that you believe. The myth of progress is still like that for most people. Even those who insist that they no longer believe in progress very often claim that we can have a better world for everybody if we do whatever they think we ought to do. In the same way, quite a few of the people who claim that they’ve renounced religion and all its works still believe, as devoutly as any other fundamentalist, that it’s essential to save everybody else in the world from false beliefs; the central myth of evangelical religion, which centers on salvation through having the right opinions, remains welded into place even among those who most angrily reject the original religious context of that myth.
But there’s a further dimension to the dynamics of—well, let’s just call them cultural narratives, shall we?—unfolding in America today. When the shared narratives from the past break apart, and all you’ve got is popular culture spinning feedback loops in the void, what happens then?
What happens is the incoherence that’s become a massive political fact in America today. That incoherence takes at least three forms. The first is the rise of subcultures that can’t communicate with one another at all. We had a display of that not long ago in the clash over raising the deficit limit. To judge by the more thoughtful comments in the blogosphere, I was far from the only person who noticed that the two sides were talking straight past each other. It wasn’t simply that the two sides had differing ideas about government finance, though of course that’s also true; it’s that there’s no longer any shared narrative about government that’s held in common between the two sides. The common context is gone; it’s hard to think of a single political concept that has the same connotations and meanings to a New England liberal that it has to an Oklahoma conservative.
It’s crucial to recognize, though, that these subcultures are themselves riddled with the same sort of incoherence that pervades society as a whole; this is the second form of incoherence I want to address. I wonder how many of the devout Christians who back the Republican Party, for example, realize that the current GOP approach to social welfare issues is identical to the one presented by Anton Szandor LaVey in The Satanic Bible. (Check it out sometime; the parallels are remarkable.) It may seem odd that believers in a faith whose founder told his followers to give all they had to the poor now by and large support a party that’s telling America to give all it has to the rich, but that’s what you get when a culture’s central narratives dissolve; of course it’s also been my experience that most people who claim they believe in the Bible have never actually read more than a verse here and there.
Mind you, the Democratic Party is no more coherent than the GOP. Since the ascendancy of Reagan, the basic Democrat strategy has been to mouth whatever slogans you think will get you elected and then, if you do land in the White House, chuck the slogans, copy the policies of the last successful Republican president, and hope for the best. Clinton did that with some success, copying to the letter Reagan’s borrow-and-spend policies at home and mostly toothless bluster abroad; of course he had the luck to ride a monstrous speculative bubble through his two terms, and then hand it over to the GOP right as it started to pop. Obama, in turn, has copied the younger Bush’s foreign and domestic policies with equal assiduity but less success; partly that’s because the two Middle Eastern wars he’s pursued with such enthusiasm were a bad idea from the start, and partly because his attempts to repeat Bush’s trick of countering the collapse of one speculative bubble by inflating another haven’t worked so far.
I’ve discussed more than once before in these posts the multiple ironies of living at a time when the liberals have forgotten how to liberate and the conservatives have never learned how to conserve. Still, there’s a third dimension to the incoherence of contemporary America, and it appears most clearly in the behavior of people whose actions are quite literally cutting their own throats. The kleptocratic frenzy under way at the top of the economic pyramid is the best example I can think of.
Back in the 1930s, a substantial majority of the American rich realized that the only way to stop the rising spiral of depressions that threatened to end here, as in much of Europe, in fascist takeovers was to allow a much larger share of the national wealth to go to the working classes. They were quite correct, because it’s wages rather than investments that are the real drivers of economic prosperity. The logic here is as simple as it is irrefutable. When people below the rentier class have money, by and large, they spend it, and those expenditures provide income for businesses. Rising wages thus drive rising business income, increased employment, and all the other factors that make for prosperity.
On the other hand, when more money shifts to the rentier class – the people who live on investments – a smaller fraction goes to consumer expenditures, and the higher up the ladder you go, the smaller the fraction becomes. Close to the summit, nearly all income gets turned into investments of a more or less speculative nature, which take it out of the productive economy altogether. (How many people are employed to manufacture a derivative?) This recognition was the basis for the American compromise of the 1930s, a compromise brokered by the very rich Franklin Roosevelt and backed by a solid majority of financiers and industrialists at the time, who recognized that pursuing their own short-term profit at the expense of economic prosperity and national survival was not exactly a bright idea.
Yet this not very bright idea is now standard practice across the board on the upper end of the American economy. The absurd bonuses “earned” by bankers in recent years are only the most visible end of a pervasive culture of executive profiteering, aided and abetted by both parties and shrugged off by boards of directors who have by and large misplaced their fiduciary duty to the stockholders. This and other equally bad habits have drawn a pre-1930s share of the national wealth to the upper end of the economic spectrum, and accordingly produced a classic pre-1930s sequence of bubbles and crashes.
None of this takes rocket science to understand; nor does it demand exceptional thinking capacity to realize that pushed too far, a set of habits that prioritizes short-term personal profits over the survival of the system that makes those profits possible could very well leave top executives dangling from lampposts—or, as was the case in the very late 19th and early 20th centuries, so common a target for homegrown terrorists that people throwing bombs through the windows of magnates’ cars was a theme for music-hall ditties. What it takes, rather, is the sense of context that comes from shared narratives deriving from the past—in this case, the recognition that today’s economic problems derive from the policies that caused the same problems most of a century ago would probably be enough.
Still, that recognition—more broadly, the awareness that the lessons of the past have something to teach the present—requires a kind of awareness that’s become very uncommon in America these days, and I’ve come to think that the main culprit at all levels of society is precisely the feedback loop mentioned earlier, the transformation of culture into marketing that exists for no other purpose than to sell more copies of itself. The replacement of The White Stag and its peers with the Care Bears and theirs is only one small part of that transformation, though it’s a telling one. There’s no tragedy in the Care Bears universe, no history, and no change, just a series of interchangeable episodes in which one-dimensional figures lurch mechanically through their routines and end exactly where they started, just in time for the closing flurry of ads.
The popular culture on offer to adults is by and large more complex, but no less subject to the pressures of manufactured popular culture. (The public library in Seattle, to my horror, once put up splashy ads asking, “What if everyone in Seattle read the same book?” Why, then we’d have even more of a mental monoculture than we’ve got already.) There the interchangeable unit is less often the episode than the movie, the novel, or the series. Whether the protagonist finds true love, catches the murderer, gets bitten by the vampire, saves the world from destruction, or whatever other generic gimmick drives the plot, you know perfectly well that when you finish this one there are hundreds more just like it ready to go through the same mechanical motions. Their sole originality is the effort to ring as many changes on a standard formula as possible—hey, let’s do another pirate zombie romantic mystery, but this time with Jane Austen! The result is like taking a loaf of Wonder Bread and spreading something different on every slice, starting with Marmite and ending with motor oil; there are plenty of surface variations, but underneath it’s always the same bland paste.
Business executives, you may be interested to know, read very little other than mystery novels and pop business books. I don’t know that anybody’s done a survey on what politicians read, but I doubt it’s anything more edifying. It’s really a closed loop; from the top to the bottom of the social pyramid, one or another form of mass-market popular culture makes up most of the mental input of Americans, and I trust most of my readers know the meaning of the acronym GIGO. Then we look baffled when things don’t work out, because we don’t know how to deal with tragedy or history or change, and trying to impose some form of Care Bear logic on the real world simply doesn’t work.
I mentioned earlier that this is a problem, not a predicament, and that it therefore has a solution. As it happens, I have no reason to think that more than a handful of people will be willing to embrace the solution, but it’s still worth mentioning for their sake, and for another reason I’ll get to in a bit. The solution? It’s got two steps, which are as follows.
1. Pull the plug on current popular culture in your own life. Cutting back a little doesn’t count, and no, you don’t get any points for feeling guilty about wallowing in the muck. Face it, your television will do you more good at the bottom of a dumpster than it will sitting in your living room, and the latest pirate zombie romantic mystery, with or without Jane Austen, is better off gathering cobwebs in a warehouse; you don’t need any of it, and it may well be wrecking your capacity to think clearly.
2. Replace it with something worth reading, watching, hearing, or doing. You may well have your own ideas about what goes in this category, but in case you don’t, I have a suggetion: go looking among things that are older than you are.
Yes, I’m quite serious, and for more than one reason. First, one of the advantages of time is that the most forgettable things get forgotten; there was a huge amount of vapid popular culture in the 19th century, for example, but only the most erudite specialists know much about it now. Your chances of finding something worth reading or watching or hearing or doing goes up as time has more of a chance to run its filter on the results. Second, even if what you find is pablum, it’s the pablum of a different time, and will clash with mental habits tuned to the pablum of this time, with useful results. When the visual conventions of a Humphrey Bogart movie strike you as staged and hokey, stop and ask yourself how current popular culture will look fifty years from now—if anybody’s looking at them at all, that is.
That, of course, is the third reason, the one I hinted at a few paragraphs back: current popular culture, like so much else of contemporary American society, is almost uniquely vulnerable to the multiple impacts of an industrial civilization in decline. Fifty years from now, the way things are going just now, the chances that anybody will be able to watch a Care Bears video are pretty close to nil; most of today’s media don’t age well, and all of them depend directly and indirectly on energy inputs that our society can scarcely maintain now and almost certainly won’t be able to maintain for most Americans for more than a decade or two longer. Beyond that, you’re going to need something more durable, and a great deal of what was in circulation before the era of mass culture will still be viable after that era is over once and for all.
There’s more to it, too, but to get there we’re going to have to take a detour through a conversation that almost nobody in America wants to have just now. We’ll get into that next week.

#### 277 comments:

«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 277 of 277

John Michael Greer said...

  Sgage (offlist), thank you!
  Goat Path (offlist), excellent. The ability to differentiate between "believing in" something, on the one hand, and using it as a focus for will and imagination, on the other, is crucial; it should take you far. Good luck with the research!

  8/20/11, 1:35 PM
John Michael Greer said...

  Sofistek (offlist), as I've said several times earlier, that subject isn't relevant to the theme of this blog. 'Nuf said.

  8/20/11, 2:37 PM
Tony said...

  JMG - I've moved to Durham, North Carolina, for grad school. Bit of a ways from your neck of the woods, though it does have an Amtrak station.
  I'm still settling in and hardly know anyone, but I can say that terms of geography and resources like the used book stores, some locally owned businesses, and a pretty good public bus system to get you over the less walkable distances, it's definitely an improvement over where I grew up and went to undergrad. There's even a brand new, small-but-growing university-run organic farm where interested students can put in some time and get produce, and it either sells most of its output to local eateries or donates it to food banks. I have insufficient information to judge the library systems yet.
  I found it rather amusing when I realized that both the place I am now, and the place I almost went for graduate school (Bloomington, Indiana) got mentions in Star's Reach.

  8/20/11, 2:46 PM
Matthew Heins said...

  JMG,
  Great Post this week -as others have noted.
  After 200 comments I think I'll leave it at that except to say that I would like to see all three of your new fiction ideas in print, and would happily pay for hardback first printings of all of them as well (in case any publishers are reading).
  But what the heck is "anti-Tolkeinesque epic fantasy"? ;)
  -Matt

  8/20/11, 5:12 PM
Bill Pulliam said...

  JMG -- well, you and I both know that industrial mass pop culture will run its course with the rest of industrial civilization, and not a moment sooner, no matter what you or I or anyone else say. Fortunately, American society remains a huge and diverse place underneath the big smothering blanket of KardashianLand. There are people here who still get together to play dominoes, pick guitars, paint, dance, sing, and write just in one little town. So I trust pre-industrial-media culture will not go extinct and there will be many seeds from which it will regenerate as that afore-mentioned smothering blanket slowly rots away into compost. But I remain really curious to see just how this will come about, and how the youngest among us with their brains conditioned to constant media since birth will make the shift.
  FYI the wierd phenomenon of "being famous for being famous" has been pretty well entrenched as a dominant trend in mass culture for quite a few years already.

  8/20/11, 5:31 PM
Unknown said...

  JMG - Interesting, you've mentioned in the comments this week that private libraries might be a way to counter the closing of public libraries. We started just such a library only 2 months ago. It is called The Adocentyn Research Library, a Pagan library & research center located in San Francisco’s East Bay. Six pagan elders are conjoining their books to form it. While we plan to grow into the premier Pagan research center in the Western US, we are starting small, with only about 13,000 books. Eventually we plan to have a non-profit organization to manage the Library. As a private subscription library, it will not lend out books though that could change in the future. We're still placing the bookcases and organizing the books. So it won't officially 'open' for several months.
  Here is an explanation of how it got its name.
  'In the Hermetic dialogue called the Asclepius, Hermes Trismegistus prophesied that a time would come when the people would no longer worship Nature as a manifestation of the Divine and that the Gods would withdraw from Egypt to dwell in a city "to the furthest west from Egypt", leaving mankind to "the tyranny of the angels". Eventually, the Gods would venture out into the world again from this city, restoring the worship of Nature and the old wisdom.
  The Picatrix identifies this city as "the City of Hermes" and names it "Adocentyn", based on the Latin ad occidentem or "to the West".'
  Similar libraries are forming in Delaware and Minnesota. Interestingly they both seem to be called the New Alexandrian Library. Our name was chosen to distinguish us from them. Regional specialty libraries seem to be already appearing. As you see some of us don't believe that books should all be digitized, although there are projects to do just that.
  ~ Glenn in Berkeley
  (I'll figure out this comment section at some point.)

  8/20/11, 6:12 PM
siddrudge said...

  @ Brad K. - I'm intrigued by your ideas on the 'spectrum' of communication. Thank you.
  @ hadashi - Thank you very much. Feel free to use whatever you want.

  8/20/11, 7:11 PM
Cloud said...

  @ Bill
  Thanks for the insight.
  @JMG
  I obviously don't get off the ranch enough!

  8/20/11, 7:25 PM
John Michael Greer said...

  Tony, I'll keep that in mind if I ever get down Durham way. It sounds like a pleasant town.
  Matt, now that would be telling! It's the first fiction project I hope to write when time permits, though, so hopefully you won't be in suspense for too long.
  Bill, I hear from enough people who keep themselves well entertained without benefit of the pop culture machine that I have no doubt quite a bit'll get through. It's something cheering to contemplate amid the twinkly vampire crazes.
  Glenn, I'm quite familiar with the reference -- hard not to be, as I'm the co-translator of one of the two English translations of the Picatrix. I'm delighted to hear that that's under way. If you have the chance, you might talk to people at one or more of the Theosophical Society lending libraries -- they've got one in Seattle that's been active for a century or so, and they may be able to give you some useful tips based on their experience.
  Cloud, it was a reasonable question! Worth remembering, though, that just because a cultural phenomenon abuses women doesn't mean it necessarily benefits men; it can be a lot more complex, and more toxic, than that.

  8/20/11, 8:02 PM
Rita said...

  Just a couple of comments this week. Not on the current topic, but related to earlier posts about old tools, I ran across a blog called retrotechnologist.blogspot.com. Deals with old typewriters, hand tool, radio gear, etc. Lists some sources and related blogs, photos of projects, etc.
  Don Mason—your comment on decision fatigue reminded me of a Robin Williams film from 1984 called _Moscow on the Hudson_. Williams plays a Soviet circus performer who defects in NYC. The scene I have in mind finds him shopping for coffee in an American supermarket. He becomes so over whelmed by the choices available: regular, instant, French roast, decaf, whole bean, ground, etc., that he passes out.
  On libraries ridding themselves of books—a few years ago I was completing my collection of Jane Duncan, a Scot who published from 1958-1978. Her books used to be in almost every library I visited. I could always rely on finding them for a reread. But I had noticed that they seemed to be in fewer libraries. And when I went shopping online almost every copy I purchased had library stamps. One of her short series was in the local library when I first moved here, but disappeared the following year. Since I had noticed the disappearance of her other books from the system I kicked myself for not “liberating” the ones that had still been available. I could have donated a reasonable amount for each one and the library would have come out ahead. The absence of classics is becoming more and more notable. Anthony Trollope is rarely seen; his space taken by his great, great grand niece Joanna Trollope, who is a good novelist, but not yet a classic.
  It’s not just that TV is addictive, it is also so much part of our culture that to forego it brands one as an eccentric. Most people have some limits on how eccentric they wish to appear, especially if they are

  8/20/11, 8:37 PM
Cherokee Organics said...

  Hi Bill,
  Enjoyed your post. I'm curious to see how it all plays out too.
  People are more adaptable to adversity than most give them credit for. In my mind, the young are more adaptable than the old, if the sample of ageing mates is anything to go by anyway! (hope they didn't read that)
  If you took media away from people, there'd obviously be a short period of adjustment and then, they'd just, well, sort of deal - like the rest of the world has to.
  Which gets me to a previous comment you made:
  "I think you need to allow for individuality in relationship to pop culture and TV as well. "
  I agree with you. I've noticed some people can be recreational users, whilst others are addicts and this applies to media. Everyone I visit now has the TV on in the background as if they're scared that there might be a moments silence or they'll be shown up as boring conversationalists. What a waste of energy and I find it to be distracting.
  Over here, when disaster strikes, usually the majority of people are pretty good. There is always a minority of people that are just bad and they'll take advantage of all sorts of situations - but they are the exception rather than the rule. After the Black Saturday bushfires here there was a small amount of looting, but again it was exceptional and in the absolute minority.
  I'm curious about a comment that you made and was wondering whether it is a cultural difference, because I see the core of it raised quite often in peoples comments:
  "Even if you intend to live a monastic life, you still might need to know what that torch-wielding mob marching down the road past your retreat in the middle of the night have on their minds..."
  I agree that you have to understand peoples motivations and circumstances, but what's with the mobs and pitchforks picture? I would have thought that in an energy constrained future, mobs would also be subject to the same energy constraints. I'm not having a go, it's just that I appreciate your insights/comments and I see this picture being raised quite often here so there must be some basis in peoples minds for it.
  I've been reflecting on my own situation from this perspective after seeing numerous mentions of this matter. My thinking about the subject is this: After many years learning I'm only about 30% to 40% self sufficient in food. It would be almost impossible for someone or some group to turn up at the gates, toss me out and make a go of living here. They would certainly fail (ie. die) through error or over consumption of the resources. The other thing that occurs to me is that most people are so removed from food production, they wouldn't even recognise the place for what it is. Most people wouldn't even know what an apricot tree looks like, let alone how to go about preserving the excess summer produce and that's only a minor part of the picture.
  Also historically people have tended to move towards the cities during times of crisis. They stick to what is familar rather than taking a risk on a new and unknown environment with uncertain outcomes.
  So why does the image of mob mentality keep raising it's head?
  I'd appreciate your thoughts about this too JMG.
  Regards
  Chris

  8/21/11, 1:35 AM
Les said...

  @Cherokee Chris
  dunno if you're still reading at this point, but:
  I think you're thinking of a different anarchism to the political movement when you wonder how an anarchist could go to a meeting.
  For a surprisingly good potted description of one of the organised variants of anarchism, see the peasant being repressed in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."
  And for what happened to the largest scale attempt at anarcho-syndicalism, see Antony Beevor's tome on the Spanish Civil War (the anarchists and their allies lost).
  Cheers,
  Les

  8/21/11, 2:51 AM
Bill Pulliam said...

  Re: masculinity...
  I have long maintained that the mass culture plays the same disempowering game on men as on women, but using different strategies. In both cases it creates an ideal gender definition based on standards that inherently cannot be achieved by any but a small minority. For women this has been the beauty queen, June Cleaver, the supermodel, and now the supermom. For men the game is played out as power -- a real man is the one who is on top of the hierarchy, be he the gangster, the CEO, or the pro athlete. When you define masculinity essentially as the number of other men you have below you in the pyramid, then you of course leave most men out. Hence they redirect their need for power in other areas -- cars, vicarious athletics (i.e. "sports"), and within the family, in power-defined and, too often, abusive family relationships.
  Industrial society is designed to keep the majority of its citizens disempowered, be they male or female. Pop culture serves to distract them from this with fantasies and images of power, preventing real power struggles.
  Note that I am not suggesting any of this was consciously concocted by evil conspiratorial overlords. These societal structures seem to emerge organically, without the need for deliberate scheming. Concentration of wealth creates hierarchy, disempowering structures stabilize the hierarchy, disempowered people are drawn to fantasies of power, which further stabilizes the structure.
  One thing we will be seeing in the coming decades is the disintegration of the prevailing stabilizing forces that keep people content in their disempowered positions. THAT is gonna be real interesting, especially if enough people chose to reach for power by means other than riot, insurrection, looting, and pillaging. One of the main points of this blog (apologies for oversimplifying your goal here with some jargon, JMG!) is to discuss ways that people can empower themselves with skills and resilience rather than guns and bricks (be they clay or gold).
  I have a corollary belief that, contrary to stereotypes, in general it is men who are the more emotional of the genders (on average, huge variation, any given individual can land anywhere in the spectrum). I mean, just look at it -- why do we need to go to such lengths to pound emotional control (repression) in to boys, if they are not inherently intensely emotional creatures? Men's emotions kill other people and themselves (think heart attacks as well as murders) at a far greater rate than do women's. You don't have strong cultural taboos against something unless there is a strong innate tendency that the taboos need to keep the lid on!

  8/21/11, 5:50 AM
hawlkeye said...

  @Lance-
  The Perelandra Garden Workbook by Machaelle Small Wright teaches how to engage the intelligence of nature to guide agricultural choices. Aside from this author, most "talking to plants" books reek of new age gobbledy-gook, thus the whole subject is often relegated to the “common-sense” bin of worthless pursuits.
  Wright calls it co-creative gardening, and I suppose I would call it interactive applied ecology. Even the most cutting edge permaculturists think this is silly wackadoo; they say (tut, tut) the world's just material stuff waiting for our (more) enlightened ecological understanding to make it all better. Kinda like Monsanto, but different.
  I don't think so. Why is it so darn heretical to presume that plants are intelligent, and we can learn their preferences directly from the source, the plants themselves? At some point, regardless of the State of Science, plant people will come to recognize that plants are not merely little blobs of chlorophyll just going through their biological motions and calling it life. Plants are more of a Who than a What, and in my view, this is one of our greatest mega-mechanistic misunderstandings within the Predicament...
  I've used and taught these techniques for over 20 years to create dozens of remarkable, thriving gardens. My students have found these techniques take much of the guesswork out of gardening, and their results give them greater confidence, especially for beginners who think they know nothing. Help is available and waiting beyond all the books, treasures that they are.
  I've been dissuaded from tapping this can of worms in this forum before, but all this talk about magic and science prompted another turn. The proof is in the pumpkin, not the peer-reviewed papers.
  www.scottallenmcguire.com

  8/21/11, 6:25 AM
Cathy McGuire said...

  @Shawn: Your viewpoint to just turn the tv off and walk away is, to me, akin to a Democrat saying it's time to just turn the Republican view off and not pay attention to it anymore. Is that really going to work?
  What I heard him say is to step back and not let it take over your mind – very different from totally ignoring it. I know many Jungians who watch movies to get the symbolism from them, and discuss in groups the unconscious projections that were incorporated into the flick. I think that might be a good use for film-watching, if you have the stomach for it.
  Popular culture is not as mindless as you make it out to be; it's just a different kind of mind and a different kind of voice.
  Only if those symbols are conscious can you call it “mind”… when those symbols reside in the unconscious, they drive people and filter their views but they do not dialogue with the logical side, and thus are more like possession than creativity. Read Jung or any of the Jungian psychologists.
  @LewisLucan: They called my mother who said "Give him anything he wants." And that, was that!
  Oh! To have had a mother like that!! Mine was super-keen on us following all the rules all the time (it didn’t apply to her, oddly enough. ;-}) I had to hide my copy of The Writer Magazine because I was certain she would have thrown a panic attack and accused me of writing up the family’s dirty laundry.
  @JMG: Jerry Mander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television may also be worth adding to the list.
  AND his “In the Absence of the Sacred”! A very sobering book and I’d forgotten I had a copy. I’m gonna re-read it.
  And a general thought viz. the theists and non-theists: it’s human nature to try to create dogma around a vision or novel idea. The followers of the visionary, the next generation, all (futilely) try to hang on to the original experience by codifying it. Even Jung was quoted to have said, “Thank God I’m Jung, and not a Jungian!” :-)
  @Siddruge: When I'm really mindful about reading … I am struck by the intimacy of the act - - where printed matter meets gray matter. What magic transpires there? What other human interaction can possibly compare?
  Ooh! Well said!! I have felt that, too. What a marvelous experience, which seems as often taken for granted as a walk in Nature takes for granted the marvels surrounding the walker.
  Bad enough for adults -- impossible for children who are like raw meat for those in the shadowy business of persuasion.
  True. I just uncovered a diary from my youth (1968) and it mostly listed the tv shows I watched… and reading the list and my comments forcefully brought home to me how uncritically I took all that in. I thought I was savvy (what 8th grader doesn’t?) but I soaked it in as “reality”… I have seen clips of those shows and they are painful to watch – so much for an 8th grader being able to parse commercial tv!

  8/21/11, 7:29 AM
Cathy McGuire said...

  Oh, and I have decided to confess (not because it’s good for my soul, but in hopes that it contributes to the discussion) that I was an avid Ayn Rand fan in my teen years. When I found The Fountainhead, then Atlas Shrugged, they lit a fire in me that helped to propel me from my family and hometown. But looking back, it is clear to me that I had been stultified by both an Irish Catholic upbringing and extra dependencies within my family that both put a huge burden on me as a child, and showed me the utter hypocrisy of those who required sacrifice from me. So the Randian “enlightened self interest” that stated a person had a right to their own life and their own creativity and need not be yoked to demanding/dependent others just burned through me like a cleansing fire. Unfortunately I threw the baby out with the bathwater and it took me longer than Don Mason to regain sanity. I didn’t regain my spirituality until my early 30’s, but in the meantime, I experienced the downside of Ayn Rand – life is not a contract, nor can relationships bloom with only logical parameters; life is not very fulfilling when you treat “the weak” (from your point of view) with contempt or superiority. So I have “recovered” but I see how it might catch those who have experienced the dark side of “close relationships”… and there was rumor that Ayn Rand herself grew up in an alcoholic family, which would make her POV quite understandable. But she was a hypocrite, refusing to recant or revise once she experienced the inability to live without depending on others… so it’s a doubly-dangerous creed, because it is not just selfish, but impossible.
  @Don Mason: Today I ran across a New York Times article that summarizes some research about human decision- making: people develop decision-fatigue. I have been following that research eagerly! It’s one more factor that the modern world has thrown at us – too many daily decisions. And I often wonder how much that affects the people’s inability to make decisions about important, longterm goals.
  Oh, and I’m really enjoying the Foundation Trilogy, but I have to giggle at how hard it is to drop contemporary culture when writing about the future – every main character so far, male or female, except one very neurotic one, smokes tobacco! It’s a “given” – and it dates the books to the early 50s when they were written. LOL.

  8/21/11, 7:30 AM
Bill Pulliam said...

  Chris -- The mob bent on no good is a recurring theme in American iconography, and unfortunately has a basis in historical reality. Our county here has only had one lynching of a black man in its history (some might be thinking "ONLY one??? Isn't one enough!!"), but we also had a Mormon massacre. These sorts of events remain within living memory for some. Notice that I mentioned the hypothetical mob was going *past* the hypothetical hermatige, rather than headed towards it! Generally the mob has been directed at someone who is perceived as presenting a threat to the status quo, not just an ordinary eccentric. But perceptions and mob mentalities can take strange directions sometimes.

  8/21/11, 10:02 AM
Paprikapink said...

  I thought when the post opened with "this is hard to write" and then led to "unplug" that you were leading up to saying that you were ending your blog. Very relieved to find that that's not the case.
  But I have the subsidiary reaction of .... well, do we unplug or not? I suspect my habit of spending so much time reading one pundit, blogger, commenter, tweeter, or what-have-you or another expostulating on his or her theories of life, the universe, and everything is probably at least as mind-numbing/culture-killing as watching a few episodes of "The Wire" or "Arrested Development," if not more so.
  I also suspect that contemporary popular culture has not really changed so much throughout history, whenever your version of "contemporary" is. It's the same as the "kids today" complaint... the same lament, repeated generation after generation; why can't we hear ourselves being our grandparents? Charles Dickens was not revered as a literary master in his day. He was more like, say, Stephen King. I can easily imagine that one day Stephen King will be respected more like Charles Dickens.
  And I have to ask, why does everyone who wants to take a pot-shot at popular culture use Lady Ga-Ga as their target? Because it's easy? Requires no research, no verification of any claim? Because lots of people who have also not investigated will chuckle and nod? That's certainly one formula for appealing to the lowest-common-denominator. I'm not an art historian, I'm not a teen-ager, not a hipster, not even a Lady Ga-Ga fan. But it doesn't take too much investigating to see that Lady Ga-Ga is a phenomenal and powerful cultural force, delivering messages that seem to be going over most of our heads. Next time you need a cultural punching bag, I suggest you use a Kardashian, Justin Bieber, or maybe The Wiggles. But maybe, for the integrity of your argument, at least Google them first.

  8/21/11, 10:06 AM
Matthew Heins said...

  @ JMG,
  Ha! Fair enough I suppose. As long as it's not evil hobbits. Tad Williams did evil hobbits and they were ridiculous. ;)
  @ All Archdruid Report readers and/or Green Wizards,
  The way to get JMG busy on his "anti-Tolkienesque epic fantasy" work -and answering my critical question, "evil hobbits, yes or no?"- is to make his latest Apocalypse Not: Everything You Know About 2012, Nostradomus, and the Rapture is Wrong a bestseller. Tell your friends! If we can move about 67 copiers per Report-follower we should get there. ;)
  @ Cloud and Bill and JMG,
  I highly recommend Susan Faludi's Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man on the subject of our society's recent treatment of the male half of the species (though I suspect that at least one of you has read it already).
  -Matt

  8/21/11, 11:20 AM
Jason Heppenstall said...

  Okay, so I sent off for a copy of The White Stag today. 1 cent on Amazon -- and it should arrive shortly after Smaug the dragon is slain.
  Hopefully it will be the best cent I have ever spent. Thanks for the tipoff.

  8/21/11, 11:48 AM
siddrudge said...

  re: the lost definition of masculinity
  This problem is as bad for women as for men, and as long as we're regarded as "consumers" rather than "citizens," we don't stand a chance to ever recapture our essential masculine and feminine natures. Doesn't consumerism play a major role in creating these awkward mutations of masculinity?
  Consumerism is finishing the job on masculinity. For all its wonders, the industrial revolution forced males into a form of captivity.-- and captivity does strange things to animals and men.
  Have you ever noticed how bears, in captivity, nervously pace back and forth on it's hind legs, exposing it's undersides, it's vulnerability? This same indignity is what we're witnessing today as men and boys struggle to recapture what they lost.
  How do women figure into this? I'm not sure, but this quote from one of my favorite authors, W. Somerset Maugham haunts me constantly:
  "A women will never forgive a man for what he gives up on her behalf."

  8/21/11, 1:08 PM
tubaplayer said...

  I am more than a little late on coming in on this JMG, but wow what a powerful piece! I can only agree with other commenters that that is such deep and correct thinking.
  Do you think this is just an American malaise, or would you say it is equally prevalent in, say, Europe or anywhere else that you can think of?

  8/21/11, 1:10 PM
Don Mason said...

  JMG wrote: “With regard to the Ho-Hos and all, though, have you noticed that the more obsessive Americans get about obesity, the more obese Americans get? There's an intriguing feedback loop there, too.”
  The explosion of obesity in the industrial world (and obesity-related illnesses) is a complex issue.
  But yes, it seems to be another one of these crazy positive feedback loops that are getting so common in industrial society: the worse in gets, the worse it gets.
  As the article stated about dieters: “As their willpower weakens late in the day, they need to replenish it. But to resupply that energy, they need to give the body glucose. They’re trapped in a nutritional catch-22:
  1. In order not to eat, a dieter needs willpower.
  2. In order to have willpower, a dieter needs to eat.“
  So the elements in the positive feedback cycle seems to be:
  a)The dieter experiences decision-fatigue from being forced to make too many decisions in a hyper-complex society (including decision-fatigue from trying to abstain from eating while on a diet); and this results in low blood glucose levels, which causes their thinking to get fuzzy, and causes the person to crave sugar but reduces their willpower to abstain from eating.
  b)Sugar is easily available in heavily marketed, industrially-produced simple carbohydrates (Ho-Ho’s, etc.) that are rapidly metabolized, causing a quick spike in blood glucose levels (which gives the positive reinforcement of improving their thinking) but then just as quickly leads to a rebound crash in blood glucose levels – which causes the person to crave sugar again but reduces their willpower to abstain from eating…
  Round and round it goes.
  - Continued Below -

  8/21/11, 4:27 PM
Don Mason said...

  - Continued from Above -
  About 20 years ago, I had a problem with my weight. I’ve always been skinny (6’ 1’’, 135 lbs. Body Mass Index of 18, which is regarded as underweight in modern society, although it’s average for a healthy hunter-gatherer.)
  But due to a family history of heart disease, I had gone on the Ornish ultra-low fat diet, which included lots of rapidly-metabolized carbohydrates (unbuttered popcorn, corn flakes, etc.)
  For the first time in my life, I found my weight was going up and down like a yo-yo (varying by up to 50 pounds, I had classic Metabolic Syndrome: I was a skinny guy with a big, fat gut.)
  Six years ago, I largely replaced the simple carbs with more fat (like raw nuts, which are roughly 50% unsaturated fat, 25% protein, and 25% complex carbohydrates), and my weight has been stable at my set point of 135 lbs. ever since – and no more sugar psychosis, and with a huge improvement in HDLs and Triglycerides. I don’t have to diet, I just eat when I eat – but I have to be careful about what I eat.
  Many other people on low-fat diets have had the same problem, so it appears that some people seem to be genetically predisposed to have a problem with a diet high in carbohydrates, particularly simple carbohydrates with a high Glycemic Index.
  How will this obesity epidemic play out in the future? That’s a puzzle.
  People may grow and eat more raw foods (like raw vegetables and fruits) which contain a higher percentage of complex carbohydrates and more fiber - and they may get more exercise doing it. Consequently, they may look more like skinny hunter-gatherer types – which could help relieve some of the pressure on the health care system that is caused by the huge increase in obesity-related illnesses.
  On the other hand, carbohydrates are cheaper for the industrial system to grow, pack, ship, and store than protein or fat. As real incomes fall, people might tend to purchase more cheap carbs, and less of the expensive protein and fat. So the obesity epidemic may get worse – until real incomes get so low that people start to starve.
  And if people are languishing in a FEMA camp for refugees fleeing from an imploded, water-starved Las Vegas; and if the camp has an all-you-can-eat food line featuring cheap, industrially-produced simple carbs; then it’s going to be Blue Tarp Fat City.

  8/21/11, 4:32 PM
Shining Hector said...

  Interesting discussion.
  On our current political scene, I don't really know anymore. Deep down, I just wish it would all go away honestly. The idea that we're going to come up with some ideology and organization to neatly manage the majority of needs and desires of 300 million people is patently absurd and the definition of hubris. I don't really know any other way we'd go about it than our current attempts, though, so I'd really rather just call it off and quit trying.
  Anyone who's spent much time in a nursing home can probably understand it as a reflection on our society. We really spend a lot of resources to simultaneously take care of and forget about our loved ones when they are no longer of much use to us, it's rather scary. I suppose that's why I don't really believe in government as the source of charity, it depersonalizes the whole thing, and lets us just spend the money, call ourselves good people, and forget about them. Efficient, impersonal compassion for an efficient, impersonal people. People do indeed manage to eke out some semblance of a living on welfare and social security, but it's usually not a whole lot of one. Are they really better off alone in their rent-controlled apartment, buying subsidized food and watching television than having to depend on a specific benefactor with a real face who will likely place limits and expectations on their behavior in return for the charity? It's easier to misspend resources when it's someone else's money, too. I've lost count of the thousands in public funds (per patient) I've spent on getting alcoholics back to some semblance of health only to send them out and know they'll just do it all over again. But that's the current socially acceptable (and legally required in my case) definition of compassion.
  I guess I lean more toward libertarianism, yet at the same time, I've seen people make positive changes in their lives and sometimes their communities on the public purse. Plenty of civil servants and the like do plenty of good for the world, and without public funds, they'd need to be independently wealthy to pull it off, which would curtail their numbers signficantly. It's not as simple as either side wants to make it.

  8/21/11, 4:37 PM
Bill Pulliam said...

  Paprikapink -- I do find Gaga more interesting than a lot of others in the "pop" sphere, though I have to admit the only reason I even hear mainstream pop is because it is often playing at the gym where my mother and I work out. But she is to a large extent just reworking turf that Madonna covered decades ago, both musically and culturally, and Madonna is still very much a part of the contemporary pop lexicon herself. But yes she does attempt to challenge the mainstream mind rather than just pander to it, with her punk-ish influences. But, of course, she is now an industry of her own... I do have to say "Don't be a drag, just be a queen" is one of the better lyrics I have heard in a pop song recently (for the uninitiated, from "Born This Way," lyrics available here among many other places)

  8/21/11, 6:16 PM
Don Mason said...

  @ Cathy McGuire wrote Re: Ayn Rand:
  “Unfortunately I threw the baby out with the bathwater and it took me longer than Don Mason to regain sanity.”
  I never regained my sanity. My insanity simply expanded to include many other incompatible characters.
  Ayn Rand is still in my brain, but she’s been screaming at Chairman Mao for over forty years now, and he's been hollering back. Peter Kropotkin is arguing with systems analysts from MIT. Karl Marx is yelling at Aldo Leopold. And Ivan Illich is arguing with everybody.
  Nobody agrees with anybody else. It’s like a bad committee meeting that never ends. That’s my brain.
  @ Cathy McGuire wrote Re: decision fatigue:
  “It’s one more factor that the modern world has thrown at us – too many daily decisions. And I often wonder how much that affects the people’s inability to make decisions about important, longterm goals.”
  The ability of people to form a reasoned response to the obvious dangers we face is so damaged that I’m amazed that anyone is still able to walk cross a street without getting run over by a truck.
  But then again, this isn’t the first time in recorded history that we have collectively acted like fools.
  The only new wrinkle is that this time we understood with such a high degree of scientific precision that we were racing off a cliff like demented lemmings, and we did it anyways.

  8/21/11, 6:39 PM
John Michael Greer said...

  Rita, thanks for the site reference! I'll have to check that one out.
  Bill, that seems like a solid analysis to me. Particularly the idea that men are the more emotional gender -- you've read Homer, I'm sure, so you'll remember how the Homeric heroes were as quick to shed tears as to shed blood. The Iliad isn't about "the cost-benefit analysis of Achilles"!
  Cathy, true, and of course it's also relevant that I don't think I've ever met a non-theist -- just plenty of anti-theists.
  I somehow managed to avoid reading any Ayn Rand until I was well into my twenties, and it left me hugely unimpressed at that time. Still, I know a lot of people for whom she was a transformative thinker.
  Paprika, Lady Gaga has said repeatedly that she doesn't care what people say about her, so I figure it's okay to take her at her word. I've never heard any of her music, that I know of -- the local stores here in Cumberland almost all play oldies stations. We've already treated the Kardashian sisters as a running joke, anyway.
  As for Justin Bieber -- well, unless he's far more reflective or more canny than he shows any signs of being, he's headed for the long arc of failure and misery to which our society consigns its adolescent pop stars; as soon as he loses the cute look that endears him to the prepubescent set, he gets to spend the rest of his life in a losing struggle against beccoming yet another media has-been. That is to say, I pity the kid, and choose to direct my barbs at someone who's adult enough to have chosen her own fate.
  Matt, no, no evil hobbits. That would be like being nibbled to death by ducklings. Thank you for the free plug -- yes, the best way to enable me to write fiction is for lots of people to buy my books!
  Jason, I hope you enjoy it!
  Siddrudge, that seems like a sensible analysis -- and any friend of Maugham is a friend of mine.
  Tuba, I have no idea -- I've never lived in Europe, or anywhere else. Maybe some of the European readers can comment.
  Don, that's certainly one of the factors. It's also interesting that the official definition of obesity has moved lower and lower over the years, and that the diets most often recommended to treat obesity -- as yours did -- generally goose people's metabolism so they put on weight more easily. It's quite a toxic mess, really.

  8/21/11, 7:07 PM
John Michael Greer said...

  Sofistek (offlist), what is it about atheists and schoolyard insults? That makes two of you in two weeks. Still, you know the rule; if that's the best you can do, go do it somewhere else.

  8/21/11, 7:09 PM
Lance Michael Foster said...

  It is possible to change our situation. Did you wonder why Iceland has not been in the news?
  http://sacsis.org.za/site/article/728.1
  "As one European country after another fails or risks failing, imperiling the Euro, with repercussions for the entire world, the last thing the powers that be want is for Iceland to become an example. Could this be because Iceland seeks to jail those responsible for the country's economic debacle? ... The belief that citizens had to pay for the mistakes of a financial monopoly, that an entire nation must be taxed to pay off private debts was shattered, transforming the relationship between citizens and their political institutions and eventually driving Iceland’s leaders to the side of their constituents. " BY ODIN, YES!!
  Re: Agricultural magic, of course there is also Findhorn and those amazing people like ROC. But that first miracle so long ago, seems to have been codified (ala Jung to Jungians) into a series of workshops, courses, etc. The magic is gone without gnosis...and Pan.

  8/21/11, 7:38 PM
Ana's Daughter said...

  @Don Mason: What people eat is only one factor. There are many other complex factors feeding in to the situation. For example, it's just recently been proven in replicated studies that if a mother doesn't get enough to eat during pregnancy, her fetus develops in ways that make it, after birth, extremely prone to obesity. Physicians have been ordering pregnant women to diet and refrain from "too much" weight gain since the 1950s. Nowadays it's practically considered child abuse for a pregnant woman to gain more weight than the doc thinks she should --- and if she has a BMI above 25, she's usually not allowed to gain the amount of weight that a woman with a BMI of 24 or less is allowed to gain. Voila, a couple of generations of fatter people as the kids of dieting pregnant women grow up to diet, and have kids of their own while dieting.
  Add to that the way that the BMI categories were changed in the late 90s so that millions of people became overweight overnight, and millions more who were overweight became obese, all without gaining an ounce, and the "obesity epidemic" looks much less simple.
  By the way, the definition of obesity has been set so low that many people who are clinically "obese" don't even look overweight. Check out The BMI Project for an idea of just how thin an "obese" person can be.

  8/21/11, 9:20 PM
Mike said...

  I have mixed feelings about this post. There's more than a bit of grumpy-old-man-ism here: These darn kids today and their pastimes that don't appeal to me! And of course there's the usual nostalgia for the 70s. Plus, having "no sympathy for atheist beliefs" and dissing Richard Dawkins earns the Archdruid a demerit in my book. Dawkins is a pretty reasonable and admirable guy. Mind you, I'd say Karen Armstrong is pretty admirable, too. Anyway, I agree that getting rid of your TV is probably a good idea -- I haven't had TV for years (well, just for watching occasional DVDs). Reading great (or good) old books is also a fine suggestion. But I question the blanket denunciation of current popular culture. Depends what you mean by popular culture, maybe. There are always new cartoonists, musicians, writers, filmmakers, even comedians, and other kinds of artists and entertainers, coming along and beginning their careers. Some never become terribly "popular" or commercially successful but produce great work (and some produce great -- or good -- work and do become popular). There are also contemporary designers and craftspeople of multitudinous kinds doing interesting work! Surely you can find some whose work resonates with you or speaks to you -- and then you could support living artists, not just dead ones. (I say this as a professional illustrator and designer!) Finally, the rant about Care Bears is a bit odd. Are they still a big thing? True, there is no tragedy or change in their world -- but are you aware of Harry Potter? Plenty of tragedy, and character growth, there. As I recall, the kids loved it. Instead of "grumble grumble, I hate the modern world, I hate my own culture, etc" just look for the work being created now that's worthwhile to you! It's there! And it, too, (including your own work) is part of our current culture. Reading Isaac Asimov is great -- and ALSO, there may also be someone writing now, maybe one of these darn annoying kids with their crazy music and their weird non-1970s gadgets, who is just as good, in some interestingly different way. Instead of just glamorizing old stuff, appreciate the good stuff coming from currently living people, too.

  8/21/11, 9:37 PM
John Michael Greer said...

  Lance, I think most of Europe's upper clesses realize that if their people start paying attention to Iceland -- which let the big banks fail, instead of offloading their debts on the citizens, it's all up for the rentier class. Give it a couple of years, and it's probably all up for the rentier class anyway.
  Ana's Daughter, well put.
  Mike, I don't find Dawkins in the least reasonable or admirable; an intolerant ideological zealot is an intolerant ideological zealot, whether the belief system he uses to club other people over the head involves gods or not. If that upsets you, well, get used to it or read somebody else's blog. As for my post, though, did you actually read it? Most of what you accuse me of saying or thinking isn't anywhere in what I wrote, and I specified what I meant by popular culture in a way that excludes most of the things you seem to think I'm denouncing. Whether you were just being careless or deliberately setting up a straw man to whack, the results weren't impressive.

  8/21/11, 9:48 PM
Dode said...

  Having just passed through another local celebration of the founding of the state here I was struck that actually myth can also bring problems.
  "When the shared narratives from the past break apart, and all you’ve got is popular culture spinning feedback loops in the void, what happens then?"
  Can't the shared narratives also create problems. I'm living in Hungary, a nation that has a strong mythic narrative. This has frequently been hijacked by those in power to manipulate the people. It is still very much the case, the wrongs of the past were done by "the other".
  Myths are maybe necessary to bind us as people but we have to hold on to our rational and critical abilities or we become very easy to manipulate.

  8/22/11, 12:48 AM
Joel said...

  This comic makes an interesting case against paying attention to the news, along similar lines:
  http://www.viruscomix.com/subnormality.html

  8/22/11, 2:51 AM
Cherokee Organics said...

  Hi JMG,
  Err, I noticed there was a discussion earlier in the posts about donations, charities etc. As an outsider to your system, I'll note that many of these so called charity foundations are set up by wealthy families to avoid death duties. They are also setup to provide employment for the children of those wealthy people and if you were really cynical - you'd say that the people setting up the charities were pulling strings from beyond the grave. I'm also pretty certain that they'd pursue pet projects and you have to ask what is their mandate for this anyway - shouldn't they just pay higher taxes if they're so keen to give?
  There's been quite a bit of talk in the media in the past year or so here about charity. I can't help but think that this is driven by the same people who have taken so much of the common wealth here. The previous prime minister was deposed by only a $22m campaign against him - PR is pocket money for these types. It was an excellent return on investment for them.
  Hi Les,
  I'm still reading, although I only have the energy for two websites and that's it. I'll re-watch the Monty Python scene and thanks for the tip. I always felt that the scene was about a multiple occupancy. They're such a great idea and I even considered one for a while, but they always have difficulties because of the "passenger" predicament. My long term money is on a village concept - there may even have to be an overlord to sort out the bigger issues. Unpleasant, but workable on a sustainable basis.
  Hi Bill,
  Thanks for your thoughts. Ordinary eccentrics are OK by me as they're mostly harmless and usually reasonably attuned to their environment. There are a few old timers up here in the forest and I always appreciate and enjoy the time I spend talking with them.
  I faced down an angry mob once (about 9 people) and I was an authority figure - it was solely directed at me. It was an unpleasant experience and not one I am keen to repeat if it can be at all avoided.
  I live in a retreat hence my interest in the subject and it's good to know that you think that they may go past. There's always collateral damage though, although I am out of the way of anywhere important. How about where you are? I always imagined that you were down South on rural acreage for some reason.
  Anyway, the reason that I posed the question was that some Aussie commenter many weeks ago posted a comment about having some police mates and if there were any problems they'd just take what they needed. It got me thinking about a suitable response, however their overall strategy seems so short term and pointless.
  I have some thoughts regarding your posts about male/female issues. I think you're also hinting at the driver behind the recent UK riots when you talk about empowerment. This subject is important so I'm going to digest on it for a few days and then post a comment.
  Regards
  Chris

  8/22/11, 2:53 AM
hawlkeye said...

  Ah well, there's the Findhorn box, so back on the shelf you go...
  The Findhorn Community at one point (around the arrival of David
  Spangler) made a conscious decision to grow people, not plants, and dedicated its efforts to become an "international human potential community" or something like that. And so now it's common to assume that once the charismatic characters like ROC went away, they took the magic with them.
  Machaelle Wright carried the Findhorn torch back to Virginia and put a yes, scientific, system under it. Rather than being codified or corrupted, Wright demonstrates ways any dolt with no charisma can get the inside answers to their garden conundrums, and put it to work for remarkable results.
  It doesn't seem in the spirit of dissensus to blank this entire path as worthless.
  The magic is far from gone, and Pan is alive and well...

  8/22/11, 5:37 AM
Les said...

  @Cherokee Chris – you said “Also historically people have tended to move towards the cities during times of crisis.”
  I’d be really interested in a reference or two on this statement. We’ve been operating on the conventional wisdom (based on Great Depression experience) that those who can’t make ends meet in the city will go and bludge off the rellies in the country. The fact that no-one has rellies in the country any more is kinda problematic and why the missus and I are selling our house to go become our family’s rellies in the country (and we even found a pair of suckers, er, doctors who still believe in economic growth and have put the money down to make this happen for us).
  All my local permie buddies are worried about the starving hordes that are going to climb the fence and pinch their veggies, eggs and whatnot. If what you say is true, this may actually turn into a real problem for them.
  @JMG – In defence of Richard Dawkins, his book “The Blind Watchmaker” is an absolute cracker in tying together the disparate strands of modern scientific enquiry that all point toward natural selection as the mechanism for the speciation we see in the natural world. I suspect “The God Delusion” is mostly a response to the attacks he’s been subjected to since the publication of the earlier work. I must say I enjoyed reading the latter work, but it’s always misfiled in the libraries in the science section – it actually belongs in the humour section…
  Cheers,
  LD

  8/22/11, 5:50 AM
Les said...

  JMG: re-reading your original post:
  “it’s wages rather than investments that are the real drivers of economic prosperity”
  This is actually a singular observation. I dunno how it is in the US, but in Oz, the powers that be managed to convince (for a while, at least) a big chunk of the middle and working classes that getting into the stock market was a great way to become rich. Needless to say the gummint of the time was trying to flog off a bunch of government owned monopolies (telecommunications and the like). Mums and dads all over the place bought the spiel, hook line and sinker. And of course they sank.
  Even now, after several more attempts at selling off more assets at lower and lower prices and people losing money hand over fist, the myth of prosperity for no effort still seems to prevail. It really does seem to defy sense, gravity, quantum electrodynamics or whatever (un)natural law that can be applied to the situation.
  I can’t see anyone admitting to the validity of your perspective anytime soon (that coyote just refuses to look down).
  Cheers,
  LD

  8/22/11, 6:25 AM
RainbowShadow said...

  Hey, John Michael Greer, speaking of our earlier discussion about whether or not the rich should pay as much as they benefit and whether or not they should pay more than the poor, I have a news article you might be interested in:
  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/21/mitt-romney-la-jolla-home_n_932462.html
  Tell me what you think.

  8/22/11, 6:40 AM
Andrew MacDonald said...

  Long time reader, with appreciation.
  A knowledge of history and the past is a necessary, but imo insufficient part of creating a healthier future.
  On the plus side it gives us an appreciation and understanding of the structures that support our current life and where they've gone awry. . . the role of fossil fuels, our legal and governmental systems, and much more.
  On the downside, looking backward doesn't help us grapple with our unique current challenges, or even imagine that we can do so. Looking backward for advice and solace can be hiding out.
  Among favourite "forward lookers" and practices:
  - engaging and working with conflict and diversity (World Cafe, Open Source meetings);
  - community reinvention (e.g., Peter Block, Berkana Institute),
  -new myths (Michael Dowd of Thank God for Evolution fame; renaissance philosopher Ken Wilber)
  Personally I'm learning more from the future than I am from the past . . . though if I'd learned better from how they used to do it I'd have my winter wood cut and stacked by now :-)

  8/22/11, 7:19 AM
Justin said...

  Apologies to all because this is off topic.
  Cherokee,
  All cats are animals. Plato is an animal. Plato is therefore a cat.
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anarchist_organizations
  Substitute political and social hierarchy and you have got it.

  8/22/11, 7:24 AM
Adrian Skilling said...

  On politicians reading material. I did hear recently on Radio 4 in the UK that Ed Milliband (leaders of the Labour party - currently in opposition) was reading "Prosperity without Growth" by Tim Jackson. Thats encouraging at least. Maybe there is hope yet.

  8/22/11, 9:17 AM
pbxtalk said...

  I have a ray of hope for you. I googled Lady Gaga Pubic Hair color and got 3,320,000 hits, and Newberry Award Winners and received back 2,720,000 hits. So the ratio is not, as you suggest, a thousand to one. Whether the ratio between the two is anything to cheer about, I will leave as a point to ponder on for the reader.

  8/22/11, 10:30 AM
A.K. McKay said...

  JMG, I think your idea of cultural senility is very similar in a lot of ways to Derrick Jensen's idea of toxic mimicry. Jensen writes, "Toxic mimics...take a very real, necessary, creative, life-affirming, and most of all relational urge and turn it -- pervert it -- until it furthers not fully mutual relationships at all but instead superficial relationships based on domination and control. Toxic mimics...can cause people to forget those original relational urges, to forget mutuality is possible, to forget depth is possible, to believe control is natural and desirable."
  In your case it would appear that Care Bears is a toxic mimic of the The White Stag from your childhood. This concept can be applied to pretty much any aspect of modern life.

  8/22/11, 1:47 PM
A.K. McKay said...

  I see gangster rap has been mentioned as one of these vacuous avenues for modern pop culture. I agree mostly, but like all things there are extremes on both sides. NWA's "Straight Outta Compton", while full of false bravado and extreme violence displayed to the world a way of life and a response to government ill treatment that up until then had largely been ignored. There are plenty of underground rappers these days that have created there careers around criticizing and questioning the establishment. I think Immortal Techniques song "Peruvian Cocaine" is a brilliant commentary on the hypocrisy of the United States war on drugs.
  Likewise punk is another genre of music that has sold records and become commercialized to a certain degree but has also been extremely influential on shaping the minds of young people, including my own. DOA, The Dead Kennedys, Propagandhi and numerous other bands have made careers out of questioning the status quo and searching for answers on how to build a better world.
  I guess the obvious point to be made is that although these groups were relatively successful and able to make a living from their music they never had any illusions about 'making it big'.
  My point is that not everything you perhaps don't understand is somehow damaging and something to be feared or ridiculed. If I've learnt anything as an ecologist it's that diversity is the foundation of life and I will continue to search through the many varied and different views that reside in unpopular culture to form my opinions.

  8/22/11, 2:06 PM
Doctor Westchester said...

  In regards to your astute observation that recent Democratic Presidents simply copy the policies of the last Republication President that got reelected (I wouldn't call them "successful", except by that standard), I've had the same thought. Ten years ago I thought that Clinton was one of best Republican Presidents we had in recent times. I also wonder if that accounts for some of the intense partisan rage that we see, since in reality there is very little else that distinguishes the two parties that one can hang one’s hat on.

  8/22/11, 6:17 PM
John Michael Greer said...

  Hector, oh, it's going away. I'm sorry to say, though, that what takes its place is unlikely to be any kind of an improvement.
  Dode, good. Of course the shared narratives can be problematic, and the example you've given is of course quite apposite. That's the challenge of reconnecting ourselves to the lessons of the past; it has to be done with a clear sense of the potential difficulties, including those you've mentioned.
  Joel, thanks for the link!
  Cherokee, that's true of some nonprofits over here but not anything like a majority of them. The Druid order I head is a religious nonprofit, and I promise you we're not benefiting from any rich person's largesse!
  Hawlkeye, well, I don't recall dismissing Findhorn, although some do; David Spangler is a friend of mine, for that matter. If their work still works for you, by all means go for it.
  Les, he wrote some very good books and had some interesting ideas back in the day. I simply find the tirades about religion that make up most of his current activity arrogant, ignorant, and abusive. As for the wages/investments thing, it's one of those pieces of simple common sense that can't be admitted these days without undercutting the rentier class' struggle for survival, and so it won't be admitted until that struggle fails.
  Rainbow, thanks for the link -- will check it out when I have the chance.
  Andrew, those who ignore the past are condemned to repeat it -- and the claim that we need to look to the future rather than the past is one of the most hackneyed ways of ignoring the past I can think of. Come to think of it, the insistence that the current crisis is unique and that therefore we should ignore what the past has to teach about comparable crises is another.
  Adrian, that's promising, though I'd be happier if he was reading Richard Heinberg's The End of Growth.
  Pbx, it fascinates me that no two people come up with the same ratio. The information superhighway seems to give very uncertain information!
  AK, it can, though I'm not sure I want the rest of the baggage Jensen loads on the concept. The critique of gangsta rap, btw, wasn't that it's unoriginal; it was that it's full of grossly corrupt stereotypes about men and women.
  Doctor W., of course! It's always those groups that can hardly tell themselves apart from the other guys that are most vitriolic about what few differences they can find. A bad conscience on both sides, fed by the uncomfortable realization that both parties have betrayed their historic ideals, doesn't help much either.

  8/22/11, 6:55 PM
John Michael Greer said...

  By the way, this post now has more comments than any other post in the history of The Archdruid Report. If I claimed I had any idea why I'd be lying.

  8/22/11, 6:56 PM
A.K. McKay said...

  JMG, here is an article that may interest you, "A case study of corporate morality and intention, "The Mouse that Roared" also analyzes the zeitgeist and culture that both give rise to and are shaped by Disney, which, as the authors illustrate, succeeds in raking in money by both pandering to childhood and adult imagination, and molding the minds of our youth.
  The authors quote Walt Disney: "I think of a child's mind as a blank book. During the first years of his life, much will be written on the pages. The quality of that writing will affect his life profoundly." They demonstrate how Disney's movies, TV shows and toys are doing a majority of that writing in this generation's children."
  http://www.truth-out.org/se-mouse-roared-how-disney-instills-greed-and-consumerism-starting-three-months/1310572322

  8/22/11, 7:32 PM
Cathy McGuire said...

  Dang! BLogspot has changed its program! I couldn't figure out why the number of comments went up but the bottom comment was one I'd read. I could barely see the tiny print that said "200 of 249... newer" So just a heads up for those like me who were used to seeing all posts on one page!

  8/22/11, 7:45 PM
sage sorell said...

  I had decided to finally overcome my (inexplicable) reluctance to entering a comment (after having been an avid reader of the Archdruid Report for about six months now) because I found this to be quite possibly my favorite post yet. I now see I am not alone in feeling this way. I'll wait till later to add to the discussion, and will just express my appreciation of the post at this time. Thanks so much, the archer has split the tree on this one.

  8/22/11, 9:29 PM
Ruben said...

  @Cherokee
  re: organized anarchy-- My take is that it is helpful to think of anarchy (lack of any form of government) to mean the political system with White Houses and whatnot. Anarchy is about self-governance, not absence of governance.
  A term that has been used to avoid the misconceptions common with the word anarchy is autarchy, in which you can see the root for self.
  I think the single most inspirational thing I have ever seen, regarding anarchists and co-ops and community, is The Take, about the financial collapse in Argentina.

  8/22/11, 10:08 PM
Cherokee Organics said...

  Hey Les,
  I'm not sure where you are in OZ, but good to see another OZ person here.
  The Great Depression had unemployment of about 30% here. A lot of the returned WWI servicemen this far south were employed on infrastructure projects during this time such as the Great Ocean Road (susso work ie. sustenance work). In the north of the state (Murray Darling basin), people were provided with irrigated selections as well as in Gippsland much forest was also cleared. However, these failed because of: rabbit plagues and the drought which kicked off in 1937. The Great Depression only ended because WWII was a massive economic stimulus - sad but true. Yeah, there were swagmen on the road, but most people stuck to the cities as it's pretty hard to make a living off the land. The ideal of the swaggie was romantic but not very historically accurate. Historical records from around here state that these people would inevitably be living down the back paddock (whatever that means) and they'd help out in exchange for food.
  Which gets me to the next point...
  If I understand what you are saying (correct me if I'm wrong)then, you reckon that you'll get some land and then family and friends will lob up if anything untoward happens.
  Well, you have to take carrying capacity into account and in OZ it's low. There's also the history of the land - like how was it used previously. How short or long is the growing season? What's the condition of the top soil? How much rainfall are you likely to get in both good and bad years? Can you store the rain water that you do get? What's your experience with agriculture? Do you understand how firewood works? Are you fit enough for hard labour? What infrastructure is in place? When will you know when to move? Do you have goal congruence with your family and friends?
  The list goes on and if you get one wrong, you may end up being toast.
  Much better to turn up and ask to do an apprenticeship in return for food and lodging with experienced people - or start now and learn.
  Regards
  Chris

  8/23/11, 1:44 AM
Cherokee Organics said...

  Hi JMG,
  I stand corrected about the non-profits. I was referring to the big fish in the pond!
  Congrats on your blog.
  Regards
  Chris

  8/23/11, 1:48 AM
Jason said...

  @Adrian Skilling:
  I did hear recently on Radio 4 in the UK that Ed Milliband (leaders of the Labour party - currently in opposition) was reading "Prosperity without Growth" by Tim Jackson. Thats encouraging at least. Maybe there is hope yet.
  Oh, he was visiting Transition Towns gatherings whilst he was still in power, and has known for ages that growth is finished. Trying to get him to say one straight sentence about it, even off the record, is not easy. He has probably already read Heinberg. I'm not expecting any great shakes from him.

  8/23/11, 5:36 AM
An Eaarthly Planner said...

  Hi JMG,
  How might I get ahold of you to discuss a possible speaking engagement? I'm with the group Transition Lancaster (PA).
  By the way, I haven't had a chance to look at all the comments, but your discussion of mythology -- I mean, "cultural narratives" -- reminds me of Joseph Cambpell's works.

  8/23/11, 7:57 AM
Greg Belvedere said...

  I could not find a post that was 100% relevant to my question, so I hope you don't mind me asking here, because I feel it is important.
  Do you think we can salvage the internet? We obviously can't keep it in present form and many of our current uses are frivolous at best, but I think it is worth salvaging because it allows the kinds of exchanges taking place here.
  I realize all the technology is dependent on the current system, but do you think we could create a more resilient scaled down network?
  I'm thinking of some current projects to create a "next net" , or "second internet" that started to materialize after the government shut down the net in egypt and wikileaks had all their troubles.
  I think mesh networks supplemented by different types of radio for longer range communication could work, though I don't have the technical expertise to say for sure. This would create a less centralized internet, as well as one that more closely resembled networks of the past (fidonet).
  The US military has started to experiment with similar measures to create networks in Afghanistan. There is a conference happening in October that promises to have a lot of projects like these http://contactcon.com/projects(under technology and society).
  I was going to read through all your blogs for an answer to this, but it will be a while before I finish as I just started reading it a week or two ago, so I figured it might be worthwhile to pass on information about this conference.
  Thanks. Your blog is excellent.

  8/23/11, 8:16 AM
Maria said...

  Once again, JMG, I am wandering through my life wondering what is going on and you explain it.
  I had entire conversations this past weekend that boiled down to a lack of common understanding, and even a lack of agreement on what is and is not acceptable in a so-called civilized society. I could see there was no way to bridge the gap, but I couldn't have explained why. You did. Thank you for that.

  8/23/11, 9:30 AM
Tracy G said...

  JMG wrote: "Pbx, it fascinates me that no two people come up with the same ratio. The information superhighway seems to give very uncertain information!"
  That effect is possibly due to the filter bubble. If you and Sara each have personal computer that you individually use online, you can try this experiment: Google the exact same term on the two computers and see if you both get the same results. I doubt that you will.
  That's because Google tracks 57 signals from your computers even when you're not logged in. It attempts to identify you as an individual based on that information. Your search results are then "personalized" according to you've read in the past, and what Google thinks you might be interested in. Different people can receive radically different clusters of results.
  This is not a good thing, in my view. I use Ixquick as my primary search engine.

  8/23/11, 10:47 AM
prometheia said...

  Hi JMG,
  Setting aside your point about incoherence, which I found quite insightful and timely, to poke at one of your minor assertions:
  I see a misstep here when you equate "forgettable" with "trash." Some stories are only meant for their cultural moment; I don't see how this invalidates their purpose, or makes them not worth one's time. If one wishes to become a hermit, that's a noble enough enterprise for a number of reasons, but I don't see how anyone has ground to -really- fault someone who wishes to be engaged in the world around them as it is (an expression of which involves pop culture).
  I adore the past. My bookshelves are altars to the old, dead white guys that have come and gone. I bothered to learn Greek so I could read the most lasting works of the canon in their original language. Don't mistake me; I'm deeply sympathetic to your major point. Reading the Newberry winners was a sacred activity to me once, and the thought of any of them anywhere near the trashcan makes me feel very hopeless about the state of the world as it stands.
  But do you, in all honesty, think that the Great Celestial Canon of works is based on that which survives by its own merits alone? Cultural influence has nothing to do with it? Postmodernism would like a word or ten with you ;) This is, I think, an unsupportable position, even though I myself have exhaustively read Harold Bloom and my tastes are very much in line with what has survived. It's simply too arbitrary, and our existential needs -- the ones that drive us to seek out classics in the first place-- too dependent on cultural contexts. And too dependent, I have to say, on the dominant demographic. (Look up 'Franzenfreude' if you want a recent discussion on how that is _still_ an issue.)
  So dammit, I have a love for pop culture as well as a love for the classics -- the common reference points with others, the surprising treasure to be mined there, the occasionally archetypal theater of it all. A lot of it is pure dross, but there is plenty to be examined and pondered over. (Wildly clever and incisive parodies of Twilight are just as pop as Twilight itself.)
  Aside from that, you're also dismissing entire mediums wholesale; alot of what you're calling pop culture can be subversive and brilliant. As a child, alongside those Newberries, I played video games. In the grand scheme of human history, the Newberry winners will be much more important than the particular games I played; but I don't exaggerate when I say that the video games revealed nearly as much to me, and for reasons specific to their medium. Video games have taught me about what to do.
  So here's my point: good TV exists. Spectacular TV, even -- TV that is (to rob a Matthew Arnold sentiment) _bettering_, and not just clever. After all, it's only film in a serial format. Is it worth owning a TV set to see? For me, no, but that doesn't mean everyone who owns a TV does so for escapist reasons. What points you have about incoherence and the sustainability of technology can stand apart from some assertion that no one should explore these avenues of expression. Saying "be discerning," and reframing your argument, will serve you much better than "turn off your TV."
  I'm saying this as someone who is fundamentally on your side. ;)

  8/23/11, 11:02 AM
LewisLucanBooks said...

  I know it's silly, but I don't use the "favorites" function on my computer. Call it old-and-set-in-my-ways or, computer voodoo. So, I always type "Michael Greer" into my Google search.
  It used to be that this site was always, pretty consistently #3 on the list. In the last month, it's been in the #1 slot. Several times.
  You've become a "meme." :-) Well, I certainly spread the word and sing the praises of Archdruid Report and Green Wizards. org, wherever I travel in the forest (the internet.) Posts are going up. How about number of "hits?"

  8/23/11, 1:03 PM
dltrammel said...

  Nisarga said:
  There was some talk of green wizards in St. Louis meeting up, at the end of August.
  Yes, we are having an informal meet-up of those in the Saint Louis, Missouri metro area on this Saturday, the 27th of August, at 2pm, at the Chevy's mexican restaurant on Olive Blvd just west of Hwy 170.
  So far its about 5-7 people but anyone in the area feel free to join us.
  And for new people to this blog, there is an accompanying forum for discussions here:
  Green Wizards.org

  8/23/11, 2:34 PM
John Michael Greer said...

  AK, that sounds about right. Thanks for the tip!
  Sage, thank you.
  Cherokee, no problem -- and yes, there are some very corrupt nonprofits out there.
  Planner, drop a note to info (at) aoda (dot) org. I'd be happy to come talk!
  Greg, I've actually discussed this quite a bit on several occasions here. The short form is that yes, for the short term, something using packet radio is a good option; your local amateur radio club can tell you everything you need to know about that, and get you on your way to getting your license, too. In the long run, shortages of the necessary components to build computers will bring it down, but it should be possible to move to a lower-tech messaging arrangement and keep some of the benefits.
  Maria, you're most welcome.
  Tracy, thanks for the info. That's worth knowing.
  Promethea, if you don't want to take my advice, then by all means don't; please realize that this doesn't mean that I'm going to change it. I'll save discussion of canons and their value for a later post, but as for postmodernism -- feh. I finished my degree at a university that was awash with it, and it left me with a lifelong distaste for fashionable academic Derridadaisme. And yes, I'm dismissing entire media wholesale, because at this point they've been completely prostituted to the service of business as usual -- that was, after all, the point of my post. Whatever their abstract potential, in the world as we have it today, they're better off ignored, and in the world of tomorrow, they'll be permanently unplayable.
  Lewis, we're running about 3000 page hits a week just now -- not spectacular. Most of my readers actually follow the blog on the dozens, or in some cases hundreds, of other sites that pick it up each week, so I have no idea how many people actually read it.

  8/23/11, 2:40 PM
sgage said...

  It is really fun watching people push back as their particular ox is being gored here - TV, various facets of pop culture, whatever it is.
  JMG happens to be really good at it (ox-goring that is) - I will confess he's gotten to me a couple of times, and I love him for it ;-) When your knee jerks in defense of whatever, at least stop and think about it for a while...
  I do enjoy seeing who rises up to different challenges. If you spend a lot of time on a blog over a period of time, it becomes sort of like a Rorshach test - you get to know your fellow commenters just a touch better. To say nothing of the blogger himself.
  I love this blog!

  8/23/11, 2:52 PM
prometheia said...

  JMG, as I don't own a TV and possess an avid reading habit, I have little need to take your advice. :) My point was that, even though it will be forgotten, pop culture has intrinsic value. That value, by the by, is present _now_ -- business potential be damned (do I really have to repeat the 'Dickens was paid by the word' line? to quote a pop culture meme, "Shakespeare had to get paid, son") -- and not an abstract. Pop art simply has the potential to be worth experiencing. Maybe not by you, or maybe not at the expense of books, but it's there and has resulted in people's bettered and more meaningful lives.
  I do not base the value of art solely on whether it will last, nor do you give a compelling argument to do so here, though as you said, it's not the precise point of the post. I'd certainly look forward to your thoughts on the matter later, though, if you care to share them.

  8/23/11, 6:10 PM
SophieGale said...

  This and that:
  Conservatives contributing more to charities than Liberals...
  Why Liberals Are More Intelligent Than Conservatives
  Endocrine disrupting chemicals, or EDCs and obesity:
  Why You Can't Lose Those Last 10 Pounds
  Baboons, obesity, and British Civil Service:
  Earlier, I mentioned Robert Sapolsky's research on baboons: National Geographic Specials: Stress: Portrait of a Killer
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7K_1XTvUz0
  Contrary to our expectations, the alpha baboons had control of the available food, but the baboons at the bottom of the pecking order were the fat slobs.
  The video refers to a study among British Civil Servants which correlated with the baboon research: That's
  the Whitehall Study.
  For folks looking for a good read:
  How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival

  8/23/11, 6:38 PM
Brad K. said...

  @ Promethea,
  I have a different take on this one. You said, "After all, it's only film in a serial format".
  Telling a story is an encompassing experience; listening to a well-told story is a shared experience.
  Advertising is intended to disrupt the story, to implant urges to buy and use, to persuade the erstwhile listener to *stop* following the story, to *pay attention* to the colorful, blatant, often deliberately irritating (they work better!) interruption. The story teller -- the TV, the magazine, the newspaper, the web page, then *hopes* to re-establish the story and re-engage the listener/audience.
  A movie, back in the old days when there were no pre-show ads to distract one from anticipation of the story promised, is closer to a play. That is, an uninterrupted storytelling.
  The difference between TV and a movie is the same as the difference between a magazine or newspaper and a novel. It is not just the short snippets that "work" with TV or a newspaper, but the cluttered and disrespectful aspects of the storytelling.
  In the past, novels and storytelling trained and rewarded skills in memory, in long-period attention spans, and attention to detail. Today we get ADD/ADHD, etc. instead of discipline.
  You don't have to wait for the newspaper to find out what went on at the city council or school board meeting. You could just attend.
  It will be interesting to see whether the energy and money will be available, to keep cheap paper and writing instruments available. And whether oral history and legal identities ("Remember Jack X, he was Lucy X's third boy? He just married Jane Y.") will be re-established any time soon. Funerals, weddings / handfastings, namings / Baptisms, and other life events are legacies of communities committing events and identities to the communal memory.
  I shudder to think that some joker might perpetuate a seven minute interval, and insert product and self promotions in the midst of the story, just because "it has always been done that way." Gack.

  8/23/11, 7:31 PM
Kevin said...

  This discussion brings up some of my pet peeves. To wit: I can't stand postmodernism, regarding it as time-wasting toxic pretentious drivel. And pre-show ads at movie theatres are a major reason why I no longer attend films at the cinema. Once when I criticized this practice in another web forum, some idiot actually attacked me and insisted that the movie business would go broke or that attending films would cost 25 bucks a pop if they didn't do it. Many minds, to paraphrase Mr. Kunstler, have apparently been colonized by corporations.
  Not all teen pop stars turn out badly. Leo DiCaprio, for instance, has made a pretty respectable career for himself, and there are a few others. Pop culture doesn't have to be trash, and wasn't always in its present sorry state.
  I bet Philo Farnsworth thought he was making a great contribution to humanity with his brilliant invention. It's good thing he's not around to see how it's being used nowadays.

  8/23/11, 10:34 PM
Zach said...

  @SohpieGale,
  It seems to me Kanazawa is proposing a simple syllogism:
  1. "Intelligence" is adherence to evolutionarily-novel patterns of thought and/or behavior.
  2. Liberalism is evolutionarily novel.
  3. Therefore, liberals are more "intelligent".
  Or, in other words, being "intelligent" consists in holding the right (or, I suppose, "left") opinions...
  This is unfortunately a very common approach. "Ours is the only reasonable viewpoint; our opponents must therefore be stupid, evil, or both." This elimination of the possibility of an honorable opponent seems to me to be... not off-topic to this weeks theme. If We have no common ground, no shared meaning, with Them, then there is no point in reasoned discussion -- one may as well use what power and propaganda are at hand to beat back the barbarians at the gate.
  (For a psychologist's critique of the Kanazawa article you linked, see Are Liberals More Intelligent than Conservatives? Another Broken Study Says It Is So.)
  (In case I am misinterpreted as being wholy partisan here, I will admit up-front that the "our opponents must be stupid/evil" meme is sadly present in too much of what passes for "conservatism" these days also. Being of a more conservative persuasion myself, though, I notice the irony more when it's expressed by liberal partisans who pride themselves on being open-minded and generous thinkers, not like those stupid nasty brutish conservatives... :) )
  peace,
  Zach

  8/24/11, 4:21 AM
Les said...

  @ Greg B – From what I understand, Australia’s CSIRO has a bucket of patents on mesh networking like you suggest, which may or may not slow general implementations.
  Recently someone pointed me at LifeNet (an open source project out of Georgia Tech) as a possible means of building resilient ad-hoc networks that are less reliant on major infrastructure:
  thelifenetwork.org/about.html
  It is still very much a work in progress, minimal documentation and really aimed at developers for the moment. Linux only, porting to other platforms (particularly recent versions of Windows) will probably be “interesting” in the apocryphal Chinese curse sense of the word.
  In order to install on my system, I had to install a whole bunch of development management tools, download the code and compile it. And then it didn’t actually work. Given I only gave it 15 mins or so of troubleshooting, this in no way implies that it doesn’t work. I’ll give it a proper go when I can find some time in the coming weeks.
  Cheers,
  LD

  8/24/11, 5:22 AM
Morning Glory said...

  My first visit to your blog--an excellent post. Thanks so much. I love Kate Seredy's books--how wonderful to see you talking about "The White Stag" here. I frequent used book stores for just this kind of incredible old story. Your discussion of children's lit, popular culture and myth remind me of two books I highly recommend: "The Green and Burning Tree: On Writing and Enjoying Children's Books," by Eleanor Cameron, where you'll find discussion of many wonderful children's books not often available in bookstores (or even libraries) these days (Cameron was the author of the very dated but sometimes luminous Mushroom Planet books, among others), and JRR Tolkien's "Tree and Leaf," which includes his essay, "On Faerie Stories," about the meaning and power of myth and a little known story-myth of his own called "Leaf By Niggle."

  8/24/11, 9:46 AM
Mike Noga said...

  As a future librarian I'm not sure how to take this column. However, if the internet does go down, that would certianly be better for business.

  8/24/11, 12:40 PM
LewisLucanBooks said...

  @ BradK - "Remember Jack T, he was Lucy T's third boy? He just married Janey."
  LOL. That brought back memories. My Grandparents moved out from a little Finn town in Minnesota (New York Mills, Otter Tail Co., pop 1,000) to work in the shipyards in Portland at the beginning of WWII.
  All there lives they subscribed to the back home local newspaper. They got it once a week, and then passed it around among all my uncles and aunts. "Remember Mikko? He was Hilma's third boy? He married Kaisa, who was Attu's second daughter."
  I heard more conversations like that then I care to remember. I used to think Finns were as bad as people from the south with their fixation on genealogy.
  As I got older (but not necessarily wiser) I realized that these conversations are about "Who was your mother?" or, more accurately, WHO ARE YOUR PEOPLE? It's a long narrative. Story telling.

  8/24/11, 12:58 PM
Mike Noga said...

  Does this all mean that I should abandon my plans to attend grad school and become a librarian? Or, are good librarians needed now more than ever?

  8/24/11, 1:06 PM
Brad K. said...

  @ LewisLucanBooks,
  Actually, I think it was both a form of entertainment, dating from before mass broadcast media, and an oral tradition form of identification. Back before you had to show a green card or Social Security card to get a job, the most likely questions would be "who knows you/will speak for you?" and "Who are you" -- in terms of people known in the community.
  Reminding each other of who is related to whom was an important component of maintaining a record of who lives here, and who is a furriner. Today we rely on birth and death records at county, state, federal, and community levels to establish this, with maybe a finger print to compare to police files, and a list of jobs and residences for the last ten or thirty years (it depends on what you are applying for).
  Divorces were much less common than widows and widowers. Remarriages were few, and marriages were for various reasons aside from affection, and seldom let to fall apart. Where you might have had ten elders agree on who was related to whom in the community, back then, today you have to run them each down and check -- something that is simpler to do in days of cheap energy, cheap transportation, and cross-indexed people.
  @ Mike Noga,
  That depends on what a degree in Library Science prepares you for -- and what the post-industrial library looks like.
  Some parts of what will be needed -- caring for documents and books, perhaps re-binding, maintaining (hand printed card?) indexes, perhaps incorporating estate collections, perhaps keeping track of which books are checked out, and which are overdo. Most of this can be taught on the job, with little advanced education.
  Perhaps I oversimplify. I suspect that many colleges are fundamentally rooted in cheap energy and the affluence gained from the use of cheap energy. As the current political abuse of the economy continues, and oil demand continues to challenge oil production, world wide, I think a number of college position, and colleges, will face tough times or outright closure. In the next five or fifteen years, will we see much change? Or will it be noticeable in 15 months? I surely don't know, and it is entirely possible that getting your degree now might prepare you to be a significant contributor in making the coming post-industrial world a better place for us all. It could happen; there are worse things than to follow a dream.
  There is no reason that you can't focus on a Green Wizardry personal collection. You might be a significant leg up on your colleagues, some day.

  8/24/11, 9:13 PM
hadashi said...

  @.siddrudge
  I've incorporated your above comment as a quote at http://will-1-am.blogspot.com/2011/04/to-kill-cat.html Feel free to comment. Many thanks.

  9/2/11, 12:01 AM

«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 277 of 277 Newer› Newest»
Newer Post Older Post Home
Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)