What started me on this path of looking at the rising or falling of crime rates as a driver of larger social and cultural changes was the connection between the plummeting violent and property crime rates since their 1992 peak and the falling levels of sexual wildness among high schoolers during that same period, as reported by the bi-annual Youth Risk Behavior Survey.
One question asks if you've ever had sex, another if you've ever had sex before 13. It is straightforward how these behaviors will respond to a rise or fall in the violence level: when violence soars, people expect a shorter lifespan and therefore get an earlier start on life's major milestones, whereas a fall in the crime rate will produce the opposite effect because people expect a longer lifespan and thus lower costs to delaying maturity.
Yet the YRBS not only shows that people start to mature later after the fall in the crime rate, but that they have become far less promiscuous (a question asks if you've had 4+ partners in your life). Although we lack good survey data from the period when the crime rate was rising (1959 to 1992), it is clear that people became more promiscuous compared to the previous era of falling crime (1934 to 1958). The sexual revolution was not the figment of everyone's imagination.
What's the logic behind promiscuity tracking the violence level? I'll focus on females since male promiscuity is not surprising. It isn't immediately obvious, unlike earlier maturation. There are at least two reasons why: to recruit more male protectors into her social circle, and to further diversify her offspring as a hedge against a suddenly greater variety of dangers.
1) When violence soars, females want more male allies and friends in order to be better protected against the world's dangers. I've detailed before how violent times cause girls to want to hang out more with boys, while safe times lead them to retreat into the domestic sphere, have a few female friends, and perhaps some gay male friends only.
Part of what keeps males in her close circle of allies is the possibility of a sexual encounter or longer relationship. Granted this isn't a certainty, but it isn't trivial, and even a small probability of sex times a large number of female friends yields an expected number of sexual encounters within one's social circle that is worth the cost of protecting your chick friends. Readers who grew up mostly during violent times will be familiar with this, but it's worth stating it explicitly for the benefit of Millennials, who only came of age during highly sex-segregated times and have never had very close boy-girl friendships in the first place, let alone one that could go a little farther than that.
This pattern shows up in other primates, such as chimpanzees, where the female mates with many males in order to make each of them think they stand a chance of being the father and thus invest in her offspring (or at least refrain from harming them). Human females aren't more promiscuous for exactly the same reasons, but it's pretty similar -- recruiting more males who will help her out in surviving and ensuring her offspring survive too, when the danger to herself and her children starts to shoot up.
2) When violence soars, people not only perceive a shorter expected lifespan, but also a greater variance or unpredictability in the sources that these dangers are coming from. Suppose that the only reason that her expected lifespan has shortened is that there's a ritual sacrifice that used to occur upon her 70th birthday, but now occurs on her 60th. That would only lead to the change in when she got started sexually; it would not make her more promiscuous.
However, suppose that the cause of her shorter lifespan is a general rise in violence. This looks like a breakdown in the order of things, and that there are all sorts of dangers that no one had even imagined before. I mean, we had always been worried about catching a deadly infectious disease and had taken precautions against that -- but now it turns out that there's a supernatural killer who can enter your dreams and murder you when you're asleep, and that Satanic cults have taken over day-care centers in order to abuse your children as part of their perverse rituals, and so on. Who saw that coming?
If there were only one source of danger, then the female could plan for this very well -- just mate with a single male whose genes will make her offspring most robust to that danger. For example, if the only source of danger were a beast that could bite people 6' or taller, but which couldn't stoop low enough to bite people 5'3 or shorter, then she should mate with a very short male. Then her kids would be short enough to avoid this only source of danger.
Not so when the sources of danger seem to explode in variety -- and that's only the ones that people have currently seen. Who even knows about the new dangers that we haven't uncovered yet! Now she has to hedge her bets on where the danger to her kids will come from, namely by mating with a variety of males in order to diversify the portfolio of her offspring. Perhaps she should mate with an average-height and skinny lead singer of a rock band -- and then again maybe she should mate with a tall and muscular athlete. Well, when the variety of dangers starts to explode, why not have kids by both, just to cover all bases?
This is somewhat like the Red Queen argument for the evolution of sexual reproduction. After all, reproducing sexually involves more partners (at least one) than asexually (zero). William Hamilton's idea was that the wide variety of pathogens that one's offspring will face selected for a mating system where the genetic combinations could be scrambled every generation, throwing the pathogens off our track for a little bit. Bobbi Low showed that where pathogen load is higher, human males are more likely to be polygynous, which diversifies offspring more than monogamy, and especially in a non-sororal way (that is, the wives are not sisters, which further diversifies his offspring). As with violence, the sources of danger from pathogens present an endless variety every generation as the germs mutate and give rise to new strains.
Those who have read this blog for awhile will have noticed a major shift in my judgment of promiscuity. Earlier I saw falling promiscuity levels as a good sign of where society is headed. But after stumbling onto this secret passageway of how the violence level affects so much else, I've changed my mind. It's not that promiscuity per se is a socially desirable thing; probably all else equal, a society with more monogamy is more pleasant to live in for the average person. But all else is not equal -- so much else is inextricably tied to promiscuity.
Trust levels are one -- you wouldn't be so promiscuous if you weren't fairly trusting of others, and when you trust no one you won't take on many partners. Girls seeking out close friendships with boys is a subset of this. Only during violent and promiscuous times do boys and girls form tight bonds. And it affects female psychology -- if she is to be more promiscuous in her behavior, she must be capable of falling head over heels more easily, which puts her in a more romantic and boy-crazy mindset. On planet Earth, the alternative to this is not cool-headed rationality, which will never be common among females, but the cold-hearted mercenary use of her sexuality a la the femme fatales of film noir or the butt-kicking babes of the '90s and 2000s.
A greater chance of being cheated on, or dumped before cheating begins, and the greater costs this implies for heartbreak and for monitoring your girlfriend -- that's just the price you have to pay in order to enjoy the larger benefits in a rising-crime world, part of which is that girls will be more sexually curious and solicitous, more eager to hang out with the boys, more boy-crazy psychologically, and overall just more fun to be around.
November 13, 2010
November 9, 2010
What does it take for societies to make cool chicks?
Steve Sailer has a post up about what traits creative women tend to have, like whether they tend to be outsiders or more well connected. From the major figures he listed, along with ones that spring to my mind, the most noticeable thing they share is that they did their work during times when the violence rate was shooting up.
Recall from earlier posts that there are four eras of soaring homicide rates apparently across all of Western Europe: the 14th C., ca. 1580 to 1630, ca. 1780 to 1830, and ca. 1960 to 1990. In the US we also had a crime wave that began around 1900, maybe a bit before, and lasted until 1933. That one shows up in some European countries too.
There’s clearly a trend over the centuries of greater female creative output – they were nowhere to be seen during the first two major crime waves, aside from Gentileschi who worked during the wave that peaked around 1600. The next one, though, during the Romantic and Gothic era, sees women coming out of the woodwork. Some are pioneers in the new schools (Mary Shelley, Ann Radcliffe), while others are more (neo-)classical (Kauffman, Vigee Le Brun) or skeptical of passionate youth movements (Jane Austen).
During the Victorian period, though, they go back into hiding. There’s Wuthering Heights, itself set during the Romantic era, but not nearly as much as before. Once the 1890 or 1900 to 1933 crime wave takes off, they come out again – Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Parker, etc. From the mid-‘30s through most of the 1950s, again they most retreat into the domestic sphere.
Once the Sixties kick off, they come out again, although the literary culture isn’t as prominent as it was before (still there’s Mary Higgins Clark, Joyce Carol Oates, and others), so now they show up more in pop music, the dominant cultural expressive form of that time. That includes the R&B girl groups of the 1960s (the Ronettes), the disco and hard rock groups of the ‘70s (Sister Sledge, Pat Benatar), and electronic/dance and rock of the 1980s (Madonna, the Bangles).
Since the crime rate began falling around 1992, however, girls have gone back into hiding. Some are still making pop music, it’s just not any good. Similarly, I’m sure there were female writers during the pre-Romantic part of the 18th C. and the Victorian period, but their work isn’t as enduring as that made during rising-crime times.
There’s a dearth of female movie directors no matter what time period, but spellbinding actresses fit this pattern too. I know some guys like the cold, bitchy type from film noir, which flourished only in falling-crime times, but not most guys. (The present-day counterpart is the butt-kicking babe of the post-1992 period.) The real sex symbols and girls you’d love to hang out with were most likely from the Roaring Twenties and the ‘60s through the ‘80s.
Getting even more general, it’s not just artistic creativity or skill as an interpreter of someone else’s creation – it’s an overall aura of coolness that girls get more of when times get more violent, and an overall cloud of boringness that hangs over them when times get safer.
Why is this? First, when the world gets more dangerous, girls start to socialize a lot more with guys, partly to have more protection from harm. And guys are more exciting than girls. Rarely is a girl the life of the party, the one egging people into thrills rather than being a wet blanket, and so on. Thus, by hanging out more with guys, girls in violent times absorb some of their wildness through osmosis and get a taste for it themselves. Who’s going to initiate a girl into punk rock or foreign movies? – not another girl, but some guy whose life revolves around having fun.
Plus there’s always more competition within sexes than between, so even if she could find a girl knowledgeable enough to make a good guide, she’d have to worry about her misleading her and sabotaging her, so as to not be replaced on the totem pole of coolness. Guys and girls stand on separate totem poles, so that’s no problem with a male guide.
Second and more importantly, when the world looks like it’s going to blow itself up, and that order is already breaking down, girls (and guys) are going to discount the future a lot more. In particular, they’re going to care less about the punishment that other girls (or guys) would inflict on them for acting wild. They’re more in the mindset of “I don’t give a damn ‘bout my bad reputation.” Normally this conformist fear of being looked at like a weirdo paralyzes an otherwise creative and fun girl from living out her potential as a cool chick.
But as we see with the higher rate of promiscuity during dangerous times, girls act with a lot less worry about how The Group is going to judge her. Hell, by the time that ostracism, persecution, or punishment would come around, she could well be dead by then anyway. When the world gets a lot safer, however, she expects to live a lot longer and is more certain of that. With no unpredictability or volatility to make her discount the far future, she can’t help but dwell on how every little choice will impact her reputation decades and decades from today. And because the primary basis on which females ostracize or punish other females is “standing out” or “being weird,” she will become more conformist and dull.
It is a mistake to look at the film noir women and today’s butt-kicking babes and see liberated, rebellious women with no regard for their reputation. Rather, they represent the default state of women – frigid, catty toward females and bossy toward males, preferring small and behaved groups to large and rambunctious ones, and mercenary in the use of their own sexuality. That is exactly the type you’d expect to succeed in the crucible of the tiny middle school clique or the cult of domesticity.
A truly liberated and rebellious personality in females shows up as having a general warmth toward others, at least tolerating the presence of other females, wanting the guy to control things (whether being swept off her feet during courtship or having a guy friend be her guide into the exciting areas of life), not wanting to be alone and constantly seeking out large wild groups, and having little control over her own sexuality (that is, being boy-crazy rather than a man-eater).
This is what’s behind the common observation that, compared to teenagers and 20-somethings from the ‘60s through the ‘80s, today’s young females are more like those from the mid-‘30s through the ‘50s – less passion, less exciting to be around, and generally more bitchy and nagging. Totally unlike the teenage honey bunnies who I had as babysitters back when the world still looked like it was all going to fall apart any time now.
Recall from earlier posts that there are four eras of soaring homicide rates apparently across all of Western Europe: the 14th C., ca. 1580 to 1630, ca. 1780 to 1830, and ca. 1960 to 1990. In the US we also had a crime wave that began around 1900, maybe a bit before, and lasted until 1933. That one shows up in some European countries too.
There’s clearly a trend over the centuries of greater female creative output – they were nowhere to be seen during the first two major crime waves, aside from Gentileschi who worked during the wave that peaked around 1600. The next one, though, during the Romantic and Gothic era, sees women coming out of the woodwork. Some are pioneers in the new schools (Mary Shelley, Ann Radcliffe), while others are more (neo-)classical (Kauffman, Vigee Le Brun) or skeptical of passionate youth movements (Jane Austen).
During the Victorian period, though, they go back into hiding. There’s Wuthering Heights, itself set during the Romantic era, but not nearly as much as before. Once the 1890 or 1900 to 1933 crime wave takes off, they come out again – Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Parker, etc. From the mid-‘30s through most of the 1950s, again they most retreat into the domestic sphere.
Once the Sixties kick off, they come out again, although the literary culture isn’t as prominent as it was before (still there’s Mary Higgins Clark, Joyce Carol Oates, and others), so now they show up more in pop music, the dominant cultural expressive form of that time. That includes the R&B girl groups of the 1960s (the Ronettes), the disco and hard rock groups of the ‘70s (Sister Sledge, Pat Benatar), and electronic/dance and rock of the 1980s (Madonna, the Bangles).
Since the crime rate began falling around 1992, however, girls have gone back into hiding. Some are still making pop music, it’s just not any good. Similarly, I’m sure there were female writers during the pre-Romantic part of the 18th C. and the Victorian period, but their work isn’t as enduring as that made during rising-crime times.
There’s a dearth of female movie directors no matter what time period, but spellbinding actresses fit this pattern too. I know some guys like the cold, bitchy type from film noir, which flourished only in falling-crime times, but not most guys. (The present-day counterpart is the butt-kicking babe of the post-1992 period.) The real sex symbols and girls you’d love to hang out with were most likely from the Roaring Twenties and the ‘60s through the ‘80s.
Getting even more general, it’s not just artistic creativity or skill as an interpreter of someone else’s creation – it’s an overall aura of coolness that girls get more of when times get more violent, and an overall cloud of boringness that hangs over them when times get safer.
Why is this? First, when the world gets more dangerous, girls start to socialize a lot more with guys, partly to have more protection from harm. And guys are more exciting than girls. Rarely is a girl the life of the party, the one egging people into thrills rather than being a wet blanket, and so on. Thus, by hanging out more with guys, girls in violent times absorb some of their wildness through osmosis and get a taste for it themselves. Who’s going to initiate a girl into punk rock or foreign movies? – not another girl, but some guy whose life revolves around having fun.
Plus there’s always more competition within sexes than between, so even if she could find a girl knowledgeable enough to make a good guide, she’d have to worry about her misleading her and sabotaging her, so as to not be replaced on the totem pole of coolness. Guys and girls stand on separate totem poles, so that’s no problem with a male guide.
Second and more importantly, when the world looks like it’s going to blow itself up, and that order is already breaking down, girls (and guys) are going to discount the future a lot more. In particular, they’re going to care less about the punishment that other girls (or guys) would inflict on them for acting wild. They’re more in the mindset of “I don’t give a damn ‘bout my bad reputation.” Normally this conformist fear of being looked at like a weirdo paralyzes an otherwise creative and fun girl from living out her potential as a cool chick.
But as we see with the higher rate of promiscuity during dangerous times, girls act with a lot less worry about how The Group is going to judge her. Hell, by the time that ostracism, persecution, or punishment would come around, she could well be dead by then anyway. When the world gets a lot safer, however, she expects to live a lot longer and is more certain of that. With no unpredictability or volatility to make her discount the far future, she can’t help but dwell on how every little choice will impact her reputation decades and decades from today. And because the primary basis on which females ostracize or punish other females is “standing out” or “being weird,” she will become more conformist and dull.
It is a mistake to look at the film noir women and today’s butt-kicking babes and see liberated, rebellious women with no regard for their reputation. Rather, they represent the default state of women – frigid, catty toward females and bossy toward males, preferring small and behaved groups to large and rambunctious ones, and mercenary in the use of their own sexuality. That is exactly the type you’d expect to succeed in the crucible of the tiny middle school clique or the cult of domesticity.
A truly liberated and rebellious personality in females shows up as having a general warmth toward others, at least tolerating the presence of other females, wanting the guy to control things (whether being swept off her feet during courtship or having a guy friend be her guide into the exciting areas of life), not wanting to be alone and constantly seeking out large wild groups, and having little control over her own sexuality (that is, being boy-crazy rather than a man-eater).
This is what’s behind the common observation that, compared to teenagers and 20-somethings from the ‘60s through the ‘80s, today’s young females are more like those from the mid-‘30s through the ‘50s – less passion, less exciting to be around, and generally more bitchy and nagging. Totally unlike the teenage honey bunnies who I had as babysitters back when the world still looked like it was all going to fall apart any time now.
November 7, 2010
Criterion Collection 50% off at Barnes & Noble
Last night I picked up Eyes Without a Face for only $15. Looks like the sale is good online too, where the selection is even wider than at your local store (and there's free shipping if you spend $25). Normally I think these versions are overpriced, mostly for snob value, although if they have unique director or actor commentaries, that could make it worth it (not if the commentary is just some film dork regurgitating the bits of psychoanalysis that he was spoon-fed in grad school 30 years ago). But $15 to $20 is just right for good movies that are hard or impossible to get in any other version.
November 6, 2010
Fun-hating geezers intensify the borification of the Bay Area
San Francisco and the surrounding Silicon Valley have or will ban toys in kids meals at fast food restaurants. The reason given is to protect children from being duped into eating foods that are high in calories, fat, and sodium. Back on planet Earth, no human being needs to be plied with the lure of free toys to gorge on calories, fat, and sodium -- yum!
Notice they are not targeting any place that serves up mountains of sugar, like the yoghurt and fruit juice aisle of Whole Foods. (A serving of either has about as much sugar as a candy bar.) No wonder kids have gotten so fat -- they're being told to suck down all the sugar they want, as long as they don't contaminate its purity with nutritious fat and salt.
At the same time, it's not like this ban will affect any actual children, given how devoid of young people the Bay Area is. Once upon a time it used to be overrun with white teenagers and 20-somethings, making it a mecca for thrill-seekers. Now it only attracts graying, childless dorks desperate to prove how sophisticated their tastes are to one another. Boooorrrrrinnnnngggg. God damn, what ever happened to "mellow out, man," "simplify," and "sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll"?
Before moving somewhere, make sure to check out its age pyramid to get a feel for how much hormone-borne excitement will be hanging in the air.
Notice they are not targeting any place that serves up mountains of sugar, like the yoghurt and fruit juice aisle of Whole Foods. (A serving of either has about as much sugar as a candy bar.) No wonder kids have gotten so fat -- they're being told to suck down all the sugar they want, as long as they don't contaminate its purity with nutritious fat and salt.
At the same time, it's not like this ban will affect any actual children, given how devoid of young people the Bay Area is. Once upon a time it used to be overrun with white teenagers and 20-somethings, making it a mecca for thrill-seekers. Now it only attracts graying, childless dorks desperate to prove how sophisticated their tastes are to one another. Boooorrrrrinnnnngggg. God damn, what ever happened to "mellow out, man," "simplify," and "sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll"?
Before moving somewhere, make sure to check out its age pyramid to get a feel for how much hormone-borne excitement will be hanging in the air.
November 4, 2010
Generalizing Pascal's wager to all of the supernatural
In none of the presentations of Pascal's Wager have I seen it applied to other entities, concepts, etc. that are found among the world's religions. For example, not believing in god (or not behaving in a way consistent with that belief) is not the same thing as believing in the devil (or acting in accordance with that belief).
Pursuing Pascal's approach seriously, each entity or concept requires its own wager -- the devil, demons capable of possession, and so on. You might be able to group some of these into larger, more catch-all wagers like one about "evil beings that can influence human outcomes here and now as well as in the afterlife." But there will still be a list of wagers, one for each independent cluster of beliefs. The list will be finite and probably not too long -- no more than a dozen clusters, I wouldn't think.
Each wager follows the same logic as the one about god and heaven. If the thing doesn't exist, you're out some finite amount if you believed in it, compared to the person who did not. However, if the thing does exist, the non-believer gets nothing (maybe they are even punished) while you enjoy infinite benefits.
For example, if witches and sorcerers don't exist, then over a lifetime you've used up a certain amount of time, energy, and resources in order to protect yourself from them, to redirect their magic back at them, etc. Since beliefs cost you nothing, this comes down to all the little and large behaviors you work into your life. Adding it all up, it's probably no more than all the nuisances that we go through sorting every recyclable item into this and that category, hauling the bin out to the curb, lugging it back, paying taxes to run the program, the opportunity costs of the machinery, labor, etc., that powers the program, and so on.
We perform these rituals largely without thought or investigation into whether it really has the effect on the world that we believe it does, and that experts tell us it has. So a witch protection routine isn't so burdensome by modern standards.
As for the potential upside if witches do exist, well then the routine could save your life or that of a family member or friend or ally. Aside from overall health status, there's the stuff you own or the resources you depend on, whether plant, animal, or artifact -- they'll be more bountiful and secure if you can keep the witches away. And then there is the greater reproductive success you'll have if witches have a harder time making you infertile, stealing your children, causing abortions, etc. Not to mention the greater sense of happiness or satisfaction that you'll enjoy as a result of all this. Most people couldn't put a finite price on all of these benefits, and when we look at how such benefits would help the person out in Darwinian fitness terms, they do appear, if not infinitely large, then close enough to it, especially compared to the puny potential losses.
If you don't behave in a way that says you believe in witches, then you're going to miss all of that upside -- indeed, since you're so sure they don't exist, you'll be their easiest target and they'll exploit you first, hardest, and for the longest.
It's odd that modern people, even if they don't accept Pascal's wager, at least treat it as a respectable approach when it comes to god and heaven, but would certainly keel over laughing if they heard someone apply it to witches, possession by spirits, divination, etc. In those cases, it would look too backward and primitive, and professing intellectual beliefs is mostly about showing how sophisticated you think you are, so it would be a no-go. Of course, maybe beliefs and behaviors about witches are among the most widely held and practiced across the globe because they're closer to the unknowable truth than are other religious beliefs and acts.
The rationalist skeptic will foolishly object that you don't need to believe in witches to avoid the real harms of those styled as such. They'd say there's a perfectly naturalistic basis for what appear to be acts of witchcraft -- a once-a-century drought is what killed your crops, a newly introduced pathogen is what wiped out your livestock, and it was a sociopathic serial killer who went on a murderous rampage, not a witch acting from afar. A person can avoid these naturalistic sources of danger without having to dress it up in religious garb.
Why is this objection foolish? Because people who are complacent, overly optimistic, and not paranoid enough in one domain of life are that way in all others as well. I mean, c'mon, a once-a-century bust of the housing market couldn't wipe out the global economy! A brand new "killer germ" -- yeah right, how many times have we heard that one before? An epidemic of serial killers -- please, that's just the powers that be trying to stoke your fears in order to brainwash you into obedience and consumption so you won't be a threat to their power.
So, someone who quickly dismisses the probability times the impact of a bizarre event of supernatural origin is also going to dismiss the contribution of a bizarre event of natural origin. They won't perform the same degree of protection from "witches" as the believer in witches, only stripping away the supernatural mumbo-jumbo and replacing it with more rational and naturalistic ideas. They have a domain-general contempt for what they see as unfounded paranoia about the bizarre, no matter the intellectual framework that supports the paranoia.
Again it's not hard to imagine how easily this overly complacent mindset would be weeded out by natural selection. It seems to be on the rise in industrialized countries, but that's not even 10 generations in most of them, thus hardly a proven stable equilibrium. For all we know this super-sanguine sensibility is going to lead us right over a cliff -- ah c'mon, we've taken 1000 steps in this direction so far, how could the next step do us any harm?
Pursuing Pascal's approach seriously, each entity or concept requires its own wager -- the devil, demons capable of possession, and so on. You might be able to group some of these into larger, more catch-all wagers like one about "evil beings that can influence human outcomes here and now as well as in the afterlife." But there will still be a list of wagers, one for each independent cluster of beliefs. The list will be finite and probably not too long -- no more than a dozen clusters, I wouldn't think.
Each wager follows the same logic as the one about god and heaven. If the thing doesn't exist, you're out some finite amount if you believed in it, compared to the person who did not. However, if the thing does exist, the non-believer gets nothing (maybe they are even punished) while you enjoy infinite benefits.
For example, if witches and sorcerers don't exist, then over a lifetime you've used up a certain amount of time, energy, and resources in order to protect yourself from them, to redirect their magic back at them, etc. Since beliefs cost you nothing, this comes down to all the little and large behaviors you work into your life. Adding it all up, it's probably no more than all the nuisances that we go through sorting every recyclable item into this and that category, hauling the bin out to the curb, lugging it back, paying taxes to run the program, the opportunity costs of the machinery, labor, etc., that powers the program, and so on.
We perform these rituals largely without thought or investigation into whether it really has the effect on the world that we believe it does, and that experts tell us it has. So a witch protection routine isn't so burdensome by modern standards.
As for the potential upside if witches do exist, well then the routine could save your life or that of a family member or friend or ally. Aside from overall health status, there's the stuff you own or the resources you depend on, whether plant, animal, or artifact -- they'll be more bountiful and secure if you can keep the witches away. And then there is the greater reproductive success you'll have if witches have a harder time making you infertile, stealing your children, causing abortions, etc. Not to mention the greater sense of happiness or satisfaction that you'll enjoy as a result of all this. Most people couldn't put a finite price on all of these benefits, and when we look at how such benefits would help the person out in Darwinian fitness terms, they do appear, if not infinitely large, then close enough to it, especially compared to the puny potential losses.
If you don't behave in a way that says you believe in witches, then you're going to miss all of that upside -- indeed, since you're so sure they don't exist, you'll be their easiest target and they'll exploit you first, hardest, and for the longest.
It's odd that modern people, even if they don't accept Pascal's wager, at least treat it as a respectable approach when it comes to god and heaven, but would certainly keel over laughing if they heard someone apply it to witches, possession by spirits, divination, etc. In those cases, it would look too backward and primitive, and professing intellectual beliefs is mostly about showing how sophisticated you think you are, so it would be a no-go. Of course, maybe beliefs and behaviors about witches are among the most widely held and practiced across the globe because they're closer to the unknowable truth than are other religious beliefs and acts.
The rationalist skeptic will foolishly object that you don't need to believe in witches to avoid the real harms of those styled as such. They'd say there's a perfectly naturalistic basis for what appear to be acts of witchcraft -- a once-a-century drought is what killed your crops, a newly introduced pathogen is what wiped out your livestock, and it was a sociopathic serial killer who went on a murderous rampage, not a witch acting from afar. A person can avoid these naturalistic sources of danger without having to dress it up in religious garb.
Why is this objection foolish? Because people who are complacent, overly optimistic, and not paranoid enough in one domain of life are that way in all others as well. I mean, c'mon, a once-a-century bust of the housing market couldn't wipe out the global economy! A brand new "killer germ" -- yeah right, how many times have we heard that one before? An epidemic of serial killers -- please, that's just the powers that be trying to stoke your fears in order to brainwash you into obedience and consumption so you won't be a threat to their power.
So, someone who quickly dismisses the probability times the impact of a bizarre event of supernatural origin is also going to dismiss the contribution of a bizarre event of natural origin. They won't perform the same degree of protection from "witches" as the believer in witches, only stripping away the supernatural mumbo-jumbo and replacing it with more rational and naturalistic ideas. They have a domain-general contempt for what they see as unfounded paranoia about the bizarre, no matter the intellectual framework that supports the paranoia.
Again it's not hard to imagine how easily this overly complacent mindset would be weeded out by natural selection. It seems to be on the rise in industrialized countries, but that's not even 10 generations in most of them, thus hardly a proven stable equilibrium. For all we know this super-sanguine sensibility is going to lead us right over a cliff -- ah c'mon, we've taken 1000 steps in this direction so far, how could the next step do us any harm?
November 3, 2010
More on acronyms as a sign of Aspberger's
Somewhat recently I showed how acronyms scarcely existed prior to the 18th or 19th centuries, and that their rise is tied to a shift toward a more autistic or Aspbergery mindset. The examples were from hard and well as soft science. Still, finding them in geeky areas of academia isn't too surprising. But what about where you'd least expect them? That shows just how autistic people become as they genetically and culturally adapt to modern life.
Within English and folklore studies, there's the viral acronym FOAF -- "friend of a friend" tale, meaning who the supposed source of some urban legend is. These people are arts and humanities types, not the ones who are supposed to be dorks.
Then there are the even fluffier fields like queer studies, women's studies, etc. There and within related activist groups, there's some permutation of the widely used acronym LGBTQ (that was the form I remember among the "theory" people and activists at Brown), standing for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender(ed?), Queer. "Gay and lesbian" or "homosexual" or whatever just won't do -- an acronym must be coined!
Weird sexual preferences even among straight guys are also littered with acronyms, which you can look up on your own: BDSM, CBT, CFNM, and the most mellifluous YKIOK,IJNMK. Not being a porn hound, each time I tune in there are at least one or two new genres with cryptic acronyms as names since that last time. You can bet that these genres have a nerdier-than-average fan base. This isn't an academic field at all -- just porn. Earlier I mentioned the alphabet soup of terms found among PUAs.
Video games also show lots of acronyms, even though they aren't inherently geeky -- they're just toys or games. But the ones that appeal most to the Aspbergery mind are full of them -- RPG, MMORPG, LARP (not a video game, but related), and terms like MP, HP, XP, NPC, etc., not to mention the names of their favorite games. Hardly anyone refers to SMB (although that term does exist; just not popular) for the Super Mario Bros. games, or DD for games in the Double Dragon series, and so on. Yet just about every role-playing game is referred to by fans in acronym form: FF, BoF, CT, SoM, etc. And while role-playing game terms are only referred to by acronyms (XP, NPC, etc.), no one does this for platforming games like Mario Bros. -- "one-hit death" is not called 1HD or OHD, "mini-bosses" are not called MBs, and so on.
Every group wants to make shibboleths to distinguish in-group from out-group members. But in a pre-modern world, people were creative enough to coin whole new words ("transubstantiation") or evocative phrases ("Sturm und Drang"). With the shift toward autism and lower creativity, no effort is made to endow today's jargon with any charm -- just begin with the most straightforward and anodyne description of something, then turn it into an acronym (like "U.F.O." or "IS/LM"). And as the above examples show, it's not just the inherently geeky areas of life that are being colonized by acronyms -- games played for fun, sexuality, and the arts and humanities are also under attack. This has less to do with the essential qualities of the domain in question and more to do with the people whose desires are reflected therein.
Within English and folklore studies, there's the viral acronym FOAF -- "friend of a friend" tale, meaning who the supposed source of some urban legend is. These people are arts and humanities types, not the ones who are supposed to be dorks.
Then there are the even fluffier fields like queer studies, women's studies, etc. There and within related activist groups, there's some permutation of the widely used acronym LGBTQ (that was the form I remember among the "theory" people and activists at Brown), standing for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender(ed?), Queer. "Gay and lesbian" or "homosexual" or whatever just won't do -- an acronym must be coined!
Weird sexual preferences even among straight guys are also littered with acronyms, which you can look up on your own: BDSM, CBT, CFNM, and the most mellifluous YKIOK,IJNMK. Not being a porn hound, each time I tune in there are at least one or two new genres with cryptic acronyms as names since that last time. You can bet that these genres have a nerdier-than-average fan base. This isn't an academic field at all -- just porn. Earlier I mentioned the alphabet soup of terms found among PUAs.
Video games also show lots of acronyms, even though they aren't inherently geeky -- they're just toys or games. But the ones that appeal most to the Aspbergery mind are full of them -- RPG, MMORPG, LARP (not a video game, but related), and terms like MP, HP, XP, NPC, etc., not to mention the names of their favorite games. Hardly anyone refers to SMB (although that term does exist; just not popular) for the Super Mario Bros. games, or DD for games in the Double Dragon series, and so on. Yet just about every role-playing game is referred to by fans in acronym form: FF, BoF, CT, SoM, etc. And while role-playing game terms are only referred to by acronyms (XP, NPC, etc.), no one does this for platforming games like Mario Bros. -- "one-hit death" is not called 1HD or OHD, "mini-bosses" are not called MBs, and so on.
Every group wants to make shibboleths to distinguish in-group from out-group members. But in a pre-modern world, people were creative enough to coin whole new words ("transubstantiation") or evocative phrases ("Sturm und Drang"). With the shift toward autism and lower creativity, no effort is made to endow today's jargon with any charm -- just begin with the most straightforward and anodyne description of something, then turn it into an acronym (like "U.F.O." or "IS/LM"). And as the above examples show, it's not just the inherently geeky areas of life that are being colonized by acronyms -- games played for fun, sexuality, and the arts and humanities are also under attack. This has less to do with the essential qualities of the domain in question and more to do with the people whose desires are reflected therein.
No one dresses up as characters made in low-crime times
Recently I showed that the most enduring characters from new mythological sources (such as comic books, video games, horror movies, etc.) have come from periods when the violence level was shooting up. The public wants a role model to emulate when the world looks like it's about to blow up, so we get better quality heroes. They also want a clearer picture of who's fucking things up, not just a vague sense that there are more bad guys than before, so we get better quality villains and scapegoats.
Even outside the "heroes against villains" framework, the entire culture is just more exciting when times are more violent, so characters that don't fit as good guys or bad guys will also endure longer if they were created in high-crime times.
Sure enough, over the four days or so that I saw people dressing up for Halloween weekend, there was hardly anyone imitating a character created since the 1992 peak in the crime rate. I saw some of the Scream masks for sale, so someone must be buying them, but it wasn't common enough for me to see anyone wearing them in real life. Hell, I saw more adolescents dressed up as Waldo from the late '80s kids books than I saw Scream masks. I did see a girl dressed up as a Pokemon character at a dance club on Saturday, though. And maybe some of the littler kids are dressing up as someone from the Toy Story or Harry Potter movies (though none that I saw).
But for the most part, all of the big characters created over the past 18 years haven't lasted. No more Power Rangers, Darth Maul, or anyone from those dopey Saw movies or Halo video games. Yet they're still dressing up as Transformers, Darth Vader and slave Leia, Freddy Kruger, and characters from the Mario Bros. and Legend of Zelda video games, all created 20 to 35 years ago. Then there's Spiderman, Iron Man, etc., who were created in the early-mid 1960s.
Moreover, there's hardly anyone from the previous falling-crime era of 1934 to 1958. No Creature from the Black Lagoon, that robot from The Day the Earth Stood Still, or Howdy Doody. Go back to the previous rising-crime era of at least 1900 to 1933, though, and you find them still being imitated today -- especially Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Mummy. These characters are older, but the particular way that we imagine them and dress up like them today dates back to their portrayals during the 1920s and early '30s.
There are also popular costumes for gangsters and flappers from the Roaring Twenties, hippie chicks and disco dancers, and punks and metalheads. At the supermarket I saw a 4 year-old boy dressed up like one of the guys from KISS. Yet there are no popular costumes for big band, bobby soxers, or beatniks.
Taken together, these patterns show that the popularity of certain older icons is not due to nostalgia but to their being higher quality. If it were nostalgia, then everything in the past would be carried on -- yet it's only the exciting stuff from high-crime times in the past that survives, while the boring stuff made during low-crime times in the past fades away.
Even outside the "heroes against villains" framework, the entire culture is just more exciting when times are more violent, so characters that don't fit as good guys or bad guys will also endure longer if they were created in high-crime times.
Sure enough, over the four days or so that I saw people dressing up for Halloween weekend, there was hardly anyone imitating a character created since the 1992 peak in the crime rate. I saw some of the Scream masks for sale, so someone must be buying them, but it wasn't common enough for me to see anyone wearing them in real life. Hell, I saw more adolescents dressed up as Waldo from the late '80s kids books than I saw Scream masks. I did see a girl dressed up as a Pokemon character at a dance club on Saturday, though. And maybe some of the littler kids are dressing up as someone from the Toy Story or Harry Potter movies (though none that I saw).
But for the most part, all of the big characters created over the past 18 years haven't lasted. No more Power Rangers, Darth Maul, or anyone from those dopey Saw movies or Halo video games. Yet they're still dressing up as Transformers, Darth Vader and slave Leia, Freddy Kruger, and characters from the Mario Bros. and Legend of Zelda video games, all created 20 to 35 years ago. Then there's Spiderman, Iron Man, etc., who were created in the early-mid 1960s.
Moreover, there's hardly anyone from the previous falling-crime era of 1934 to 1958. No Creature from the Black Lagoon, that robot from The Day the Earth Stood Still, or Howdy Doody. Go back to the previous rising-crime era of at least 1900 to 1933, though, and you find them still being imitated today -- especially Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Mummy. These characters are older, but the particular way that we imagine them and dress up like them today dates back to their portrayals during the 1920s and early '30s.
There are also popular costumes for gangsters and flappers from the Roaring Twenties, hippie chicks and disco dancers, and punks and metalheads. At the supermarket I saw a 4 year-old boy dressed up like one of the guys from KISS. Yet there are no popular costumes for big band, bobby soxers, or beatniks.
Taken together, these patterns show that the popularity of certain older icons is not due to nostalgia but to their being higher quality. If it were nostalgia, then everything in the past would be carried on -- yet it's only the exciting stuff from high-crime times in the past that survives, while the boring stuff made during low-crime times in the past fades away.
November 1, 2010
How many trick-or-treaters?
Jesus, what a pathetic showing. Saturday it rained hard late afternoon and early evening, so that explains why we didn't get any then. But we didn't get any at night either, despite it being Saturday night with no school the next day. Tonight we got exactly one, a little girl, or maybe two if you count her 2 year-old brother being escorted via stroller by their parents. How castrated has this society become when a kindergarten girl has more guts than males of any trick-or-treating age?
I even got somewhat dressed up and waited for them outside, so it's not as though there were a lot of them who for some reason didn't approach our house. I only saw one trick-or-treater making the rounds on the other side of the street, and again it was a tiny little girl. Hey Millennial boys -- grab your sack and go trolling for some candy. You might become a man yet, but not the way things have been going.
At least I brought a book and got some reading done. I sat out there from 7 to 8:30 and retired after that; no one knocked after I headed inside.
You know, I didn't even see any teenagers out pressing their luck to get some free sweets, let alone egging the houses of their enemies from school, let alone toilet-papering anyone's house. I know they wear costumes and go to parties, but being huddled around a game of beer pong, with everyone but the two players being bored out of their minds, is no replacement for the thrill of "TP-ing" or "wrapping" someone's house, as they used to say back when adolescents still acted wild.
I got all pumped up a couple weeks ago when I heard a toddler in the row behind me on a plane reciting the classic "Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me something good to eat," despite his mom telling him to stop. Elsewhere on this blog I've covered the theme of children not knowing most of these subversive and gross-out songs and folklore (like when was the last time you heard 1st graders singing "99 bottles of beer on the wall"?). So I was thankful to hear at least one little booger keeping the tradition alive -- though he did leave out the killer concluding line of "If you don't, I don't care -- I'll pull down your underwear!"
But that (tempered) enthusiasm isn't translating into behavior. I know Halloween's been dying at least since I kept informal track of it while passing out candy in high school (mid-late '90s), but to only see two kids out just blew my mind. And of course both had their parents not just there but literally hovering over their shoulder the whole time, but you take what you can get. I guess their older siblings are too shackled to their Xbox 360 or Facebook chat window to escort their little brothers and sisters, a truly disgusting abdication of the "cool older brother/sister" role. (That was still going as of 1995, judging from the Halloween episode of My So-Called Life.) Is that what the anti-addiction ads of 2020 will look like? -- a parent discovers that his son is a loser who makes video games a part-time job, only to be told "I learned it from watching YOU, Dad!"
Both families were blue-collar, by the way. I can't begin to imagine how dead trick-or-treating must be in lacrosse-and-SAT-tutoring neighborhoods. Working-class parents know that their kids will face a more dangerous world, so they don't try to insulate them as much while they're growing up -- they've got to learn a certain amount of toughness. Although hovering, the little girl's parents didn't fetch the candy for her -- they at least prodded her to work up the guts to approach a zombie stranger and say "trick or treat."
Since kids these days are so damn coddled, I made sure to give her a little scare and said, "Trick or treat? Hmmm, I don't know which one... have you been bad or good?" I was going to give her two of each candy no matter what she said, either rewarding her for not blowing society up or for having some rambunctious fun every once in awhile. The point was just to throw her a curveball and show her that the social real world isn't so simple to navigate. Yeah yeah, I know, like she'll really turn out different, but you never know, and I'm certainly not going to be part of the wussification problem.
So many people whine about "the commercialization of ____" -- Halloween, Christmas, etc. -- but I'll take that any day. At least it shows that most people still care about it, or else the sellers' pleading would fall on deaf ears. Cynical hack moralists love taking this route, especially in the form of documentary movies, but as usual they're clueless. In popular culture, the portrayal that's closest to reality is a fantasy -- The Neverending Story, where cultures are swallowed up by their own apathy, by the Nothing. The Grinches and Scrooges can only sink a holiday when its one-time celebraters have stopped giving a shit about it anymore.
I even got somewhat dressed up and waited for them outside, so it's not as though there were a lot of them who for some reason didn't approach our house. I only saw one trick-or-treater making the rounds on the other side of the street, and again it was a tiny little girl. Hey Millennial boys -- grab your sack and go trolling for some candy. You might become a man yet, but not the way things have been going.
At least I brought a book and got some reading done. I sat out there from 7 to 8:30 and retired after that; no one knocked after I headed inside.
You know, I didn't even see any teenagers out pressing their luck to get some free sweets, let alone egging the houses of their enemies from school, let alone toilet-papering anyone's house. I know they wear costumes and go to parties, but being huddled around a game of beer pong, with everyone but the two players being bored out of their minds, is no replacement for the thrill of "TP-ing" or "wrapping" someone's house, as they used to say back when adolescents still acted wild.
I got all pumped up a couple weeks ago when I heard a toddler in the row behind me on a plane reciting the classic "Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me something good to eat," despite his mom telling him to stop. Elsewhere on this blog I've covered the theme of children not knowing most of these subversive and gross-out songs and folklore (like when was the last time you heard 1st graders singing "99 bottles of beer on the wall"?). So I was thankful to hear at least one little booger keeping the tradition alive -- though he did leave out the killer concluding line of "If you don't, I don't care -- I'll pull down your underwear!"
But that (tempered) enthusiasm isn't translating into behavior. I know Halloween's been dying at least since I kept informal track of it while passing out candy in high school (mid-late '90s), but to only see two kids out just blew my mind. And of course both had their parents not just there but literally hovering over their shoulder the whole time, but you take what you can get. I guess their older siblings are too shackled to their Xbox 360 or Facebook chat window to escort their little brothers and sisters, a truly disgusting abdication of the "cool older brother/sister" role. (That was still going as of 1995, judging from the Halloween episode of My So-Called Life.) Is that what the anti-addiction ads of 2020 will look like? -- a parent discovers that his son is a loser who makes video games a part-time job, only to be told "I learned it from watching YOU, Dad!"
Both families were blue-collar, by the way. I can't begin to imagine how dead trick-or-treating must be in lacrosse-and-SAT-tutoring neighborhoods. Working-class parents know that their kids will face a more dangerous world, so they don't try to insulate them as much while they're growing up -- they've got to learn a certain amount of toughness. Although hovering, the little girl's parents didn't fetch the candy for her -- they at least prodded her to work up the guts to approach a zombie stranger and say "trick or treat."
Since kids these days are so damn coddled, I made sure to give her a little scare and said, "Trick or treat? Hmmm, I don't know which one... have you been bad or good?" I was going to give her two of each candy no matter what she said, either rewarding her for not blowing society up or for having some rambunctious fun every once in awhile. The point was just to throw her a curveball and show her that the social real world isn't so simple to navigate. Yeah yeah, I know, like she'll really turn out different, but you never know, and I'm certainly not going to be part of the wussification problem.
So many people whine about "the commercialization of ____" -- Halloween, Christmas, etc. -- but I'll take that any day. At least it shows that most people still care about it, or else the sellers' pleading would fall on deaf ears. Cynical hack moralists love taking this route, especially in the form of documentary movies, but as usual they're clueless. In popular culture, the portrayal that's closest to reality is a fantasy -- The Neverending Story, where cultures are swallowed up by their own apathy, by the Nothing. The Grinches and Scrooges can only sink a holiday when its one-time celebraters have stopped giving a shit about it anymore.
October 28, 2010
In a dark, dark room...
Over the past couple weeks I've been checking out what's available for little kids to get into the Halloween spirit. My nephew will soon be old enough to have scary stories read to him and go trick-or-treating, so I want to see exactly how sissified the holiday has become in order to counteract it.
It's even worse than I thought, and I already knew that it was going to be pretty wussy. First, there are virtually no scary story books on sale in the children's section of Barnes & Noble. All of the books on display for Halloween show monsters as goofballs, harmless and bumbling dorks, or similar characters from today's kid culture who happen to be wearing costumes (like the Go Diego Go books). Nothing eerie or spooky, let alone frightening -- in either the text or the pictures. The same goes for TV shows and movies on sale: they portray an adorable and safe holiday rather than one where you're going to get an exhilarating scare.
Still, this research triggered lots of memories of Halloween during the dangerous high-crime times of the 1980s, back before it became hijacked by aging women dressing like sluts and virgin-for-life guys struggling to think up the most uniquely meta-ironic costume in the hopes that it'll finally get them laid with that indie chick who works at the local independently owned coffeehouse. No, back then it was a carnivalesque night for children rather than an overly self-conscious status contest between adults.
In order to keep that original spirit alive, here are some books, music, and TV shows and movies that will protect any little ones who you have influence over from the growing apathy and cutesiness that's been killing off Halloween as a kids' holiday.
Music
When I handed out candy in high school I used to play early albums by The Residents from a front window of the house, but looking back on it I was just doing "weird for the sake of weird." I don't think kids really found it creepy. This year I'm going with the soundtracks for A Nightmare on Elm Street, Labyrinth, and Twin Peaks (and maybe a few off the Fire Walk With Me soundtrack; not nearly as good). People complain that they sound "dated" because of all the synthesizers, but that's like whining about hearing Scarlatti played on a harpsichord. At any rate, synths are inherently spooky-sounding because they lie in the "uncanny valley" between clearly organic sounds and clearly artificial sounds.
The soundtrack for Labyrinth is the most upbeat and kid-friendly one, yet there's just enough sorrow in David Bowie's voice and other-worldiness in the scored music that it will ease them into the Halloween atmosphere. The one for Twin Peaks is the most haunting, both because of the brooding synth compositions by Angelo Badalamenti and the ghostly yearning tone to Julee Cruise's voice. Of course the one for A Nightmare on Elm Street is the most unsettling because of the heavy use of percussion, which calls to mind stalking footsteps, heels striking the ground while running away, windows and doors slamming shut, and things falling or being dropped unexpectedly that give you a jolt. There's lots of plodding, yawning synth lines that give it a surreal and dreamy feel, plus gently chiming sounds that suggest a child's music box or glockenspiel, heightening the contrast between the worlds of the safe and the dangerous.
Books
In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories by Alvin Schwartz. He popularized a lot of adult folklore and urban legends for children, including in this book a version of "the vanishing hitch-hiker" and an otherwise normal girl who always wears a green ribbon around her neck. This is the only scary book you can get in the B&N children's section, and for only $6 hardcover. When I saw the cover, I vaguely recalled the title story, but it was the darker one about the green ribbon girl that really woke up the memories I had of being spooked out when someone read this to me in elementary school (probably the school librarian). Three of the seven stories prominently feature death, but kids have to learn about that some time.
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (series), also by Alvin Schwartz. You can find watered down versions of some of these books at B&N, but they've junked the original illustrations by Stephen Gammell and replaced them with boring pictures by someone else. Gammell's disturbing, nightmarish drawings are half the fun of this series (see for yourself with a google image search), so you'll have to get the older ones from the '80s and early '90s. There's a newer boxed set of all three books, though I can't vouch for that. There's also an audio book version (most of which can be heard on YouTube) that stars a wonderfully creepy story-teller.
Halloween Poems by Myra Cohn Livingston. Actually the poems here are pretty dopey, but the kids will ignore them and focus on another unnerving set of illustrations by Stephen Gammell.
Thump, Thump, Thump! by Anne Rockwell. This tells the old "who stole my hairy toe?" folktale, but unlike other presentations of it the drawings are scarier (even if cartoony). The color palette is a dreamlike restriction to grays, blues, and oranges, and the desolate rolling landscape looks like it would in a kid's nightmare. It won't seem scary at all to a grown-up, but I remember the tension I felt every time my mother read this to me as a pre-schooler, and the only customer review at Amazon said the same thing. Unfortunately it's been out of print for nearly 30 years, so unless you feel like plunking down $40 for a beaten up copy or over $100 for an intact one, you'll have to find a local library that has it.
TV shows and movies
I'm only talking about ones that are explicitly about Halloween, not just scary movies in general. That's certainly a good idea, too, but you probably don't need any help remembering what the great horror movies are.
Halloween is Grinch Night by Dr. Seuss. You can find this at B&N on the Seuss Celebration DVD, which is a compilation of most of the Dr. Seuss made-for-TV specials of the 1970s. Most of it is a quiet, tension-building series of songs and shots of a small community locking themselves in on a frightening evening; the climax shows a young boy confronting a gauntlet of surreal horrors inside the Grinch's wagon.
Before the '90s explosion of helicopter parenting, my public library used to show this near Halloween in a small theater they had in the basement, at the bottom of winding stairs. When I watched this at age 7 or whatever it was, that climax was one of the scariest things I'd ever seen -- and this is coming from someone who during elementary school saw The Elephant Man, Night of the Living Dead, Aliens, Terminator, the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, Child's Play, etc. When I watched it again recently, it wasn't very scary, so perhaps this is one that needs to be seen while staring up at a menacing big screen.
The early Treehouse of Horror specials from The Simpsons are spooky enough, and you can buy those separately from the complete-season DVDs. Both the show in general and the Halloween specials in particular started sucking around the same time in the mid-late '90s, but anything before that is great.
The original Halloween movie needs no reminder, I hope. I saw that last year and my heart still races every 20 minutes during that movie, especially during the many scenes where she's locked outside and pounding and screaming at some clueless kid to let her in, while Michael Myers is closing in on her. Don't be so afraid of showing this to little kids -- like I said, I and most of my friends saw all kinds of frightening movies before we graduated 3rd grade. Hell, at age 10 I even got to see Predator 2 in the theater, where I pestered my dad into sitting in the front row.
I know some of you are thinking of The Nightmare Before Christmas, but I didn't even find that one spooky when I saw it projected on the big screen. To me, most of Tim Burton's attempts at fright are too self-conscious, like the guy in high school whose slouchy posture is more of a pose for attention than a congenital deformity that we truly believe. Batman is full of awesome thrills precisely because it doesn't pause so often to make puppy-dog eyes at the audience and ask to be held. Even the single "Large Marge" scene from Pee-wee's Big Adventure is scarier than all of The Nightmare Before Christmas. It's presented matter-of-factly, and you feel like it could really happen. His later movies lost that believable campfire story-teller vibe, feeling more like you're joining some emo geek to dress in all black and read Edgar Allan Poe aloud in the neighborhood graveyard. Too affected.
These are just a few examples that sprung to mind while I was out browsing. I'm sure there are plenty that I either forgot or never experienced in the first place. So what else is there to shield kids from the adorablization of Halloween? Maybe something by Edward Gorey. I doubt elementary school kids would get the text, but the drawings alone would be great. After Halloween is Grinch Night, the library screened some episodes of Mystery!, and I recall loving his opening animation even at a young age. But it wasn't until high school that I started buying whatever I could get my hands on by him.
It's even worse than I thought, and I already knew that it was going to be pretty wussy. First, there are virtually no scary story books on sale in the children's section of Barnes & Noble. All of the books on display for Halloween show monsters as goofballs, harmless and bumbling dorks, or similar characters from today's kid culture who happen to be wearing costumes (like the Go Diego Go books). Nothing eerie or spooky, let alone frightening -- in either the text or the pictures. The same goes for TV shows and movies on sale: they portray an adorable and safe holiday rather than one where you're going to get an exhilarating scare.
Still, this research triggered lots of memories of Halloween during the dangerous high-crime times of the 1980s, back before it became hijacked by aging women dressing like sluts and virgin-for-life guys struggling to think up the most uniquely meta-ironic costume in the hopes that it'll finally get them laid with that indie chick who works at the local independently owned coffeehouse. No, back then it was a carnivalesque night for children rather than an overly self-conscious status contest between adults.
In order to keep that original spirit alive, here are some books, music, and TV shows and movies that will protect any little ones who you have influence over from the growing apathy and cutesiness that's been killing off Halloween as a kids' holiday.
Music
When I handed out candy in high school I used to play early albums by The Residents from a front window of the house, but looking back on it I was just doing "weird for the sake of weird." I don't think kids really found it creepy. This year I'm going with the soundtracks for A Nightmare on Elm Street, Labyrinth, and Twin Peaks (and maybe a few off the Fire Walk With Me soundtrack; not nearly as good). People complain that they sound "dated" because of all the synthesizers, but that's like whining about hearing Scarlatti played on a harpsichord. At any rate, synths are inherently spooky-sounding because they lie in the "uncanny valley" between clearly organic sounds and clearly artificial sounds.
The soundtrack for Labyrinth is the most upbeat and kid-friendly one, yet there's just enough sorrow in David Bowie's voice and other-worldiness in the scored music that it will ease them into the Halloween atmosphere. The one for Twin Peaks is the most haunting, both because of the brooding synth compositions by Angelo Badalamenti and the ghostly yearning tone to Julee Cruise's voice. Of course the one for A Nightmare on Elm Street is the most unsettling because of the heavy use of percussion, which calls to mind stalking footsteps, heels striking the ground while running away, windows and doors slamming shut, and things falling or being dropped unexpectedly that give you a jolt. There's lots of plodding, yawning synth lines that give it a surreal and dreamy feel, plus gently chiming sounds that suggest a child's music box or glockenspiel, heightening the contrast between the worlds of the safe and the dangerous.
Books
In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories by Alvin Schwartz. He popularized a lot of adult folklore and urban legends for children, including in this book a version of "the vanishing hitch-hiker" and an otherwise normal girl who always wears a green ribbon around her neck. This is the only scary book you can get in the B&N children's section, and for only $6 hardcover. When I saw the cover, I vaguely recalled the title story, but it was the darker one about the green ribbon girl that really woke up the memories I had of being spooked out when someone read this to me in elementary school (probably the school librarian). Three of the seven stories prominently feature death, but kids have to learn about that some time.
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (series), also by Alvin Schwartz. You can find watered down versions of some of these books at B&N, but they've junked the original illustrations by Stephen Gammell and replaced them with boring pictures by someone else. Gammell's disturbing, nightmarish drawings are half the fun of this series (see for yourself with a google image search), so you'll have to get the older ones from the '80s and early '90s. There's a newer boxed set of all three books, though I can't vouch for that. There's also an audio book version (most of which can be heard on YouTube) that stars a wonderfully creepy story-teller.
Halloween Poems by Myra Cohn Livingston. Actually the poems here are pretty dopey, but the kids will ignore them and focus on another unnerving set of illustrations by Stephen Gammell.
Thump, Thump, Thump! by Anne Rockwell. This tells the old "who stole my hairy toe?" folktale, but unlike other presentations of it the drawings are scarier (even if cartoony). The color palette is a dreamlike restriction to grays, blues, and oranges, and the desolate rolling landscape looks like it would in a kid's nightmare. It won't seem scary at all to a grown-up, but I remember the tension I felt every time my mother read this to me as a pre-schooler, and the only customer review at Amazon said the same thing. Unfortunately it's been out of print for nearly 30 years, so unless you feel like plunking down $40 for a beaten up copy or over $100 for an intact one, you'll have to find a local library that has it.
TV shows and movies
I'm only talking about ones that are explicitly about Halloween, not just scary movies in general. That's certainly a good idea, too, but you probably don't need any help remembering what the great horror movies are.
Halloween is Grinch Night by Dr. Seuss. You can find this at B&N on the Seuss Celebration DVD, which is a compilation of most of the Dr. Seuss made-for-TV specials of the 1970s. Most of it is a quiet, tension-building series of songs and shots of a small community locking themselves in on a frightening evening; the climax shows a young boy confronting a gauntlet of surreal horrors inside the Grinch's wagon.
Before the '90s explosion of helicopter parenting, my public library used to show this near Halloween in a small theater they had in the basement, at the bottom of winding stairs. When I watched this at age 7 or whatever it was, that climax was one of the scariest things I'd ever seen -- and this is coming from someone who during elementary school saw The Elephant Man, Night of the Living Dead, Aliens, Terminator, the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, Child's Play, etc. When I watched it again recently, it wasn't very scary, so perhaps this is one that needs to be seen while staring up at a menacing big screen.
The early Treehouse of Horror specials from The Simpsons are spooky enough, and you can buy those separately from the complete-season DVDs. Both the show in general and the Halloween specials in particular started sucking around the same time in the mid-late '90s, but anything before that is great.
The original Halloween movie needs no reminder, I hope. I saw that last year and my heart still races every 20 minutes during that movie, especially during the many scenes where she's locked outside and pounding and screaming at some clueless kid to let her in, while Michael Myers is closing in on her. Don't be so afraid of showing this to little kids -- like I said, I and most of my friends saw all kinds of frightening movies before we graduated 3rd grade. Hell, at age 10 I even got to see Predator 2 in the theater, where I pestered my dad into sitting in the front row.
I know some of you are thinking of The Nightmare Before Christmas, but I didn't even find that one spooky when I saw it projected on the big screen. To me, most of Tim Burton's attempts at fright are too self-conscious, like the guy in high school whose slouchy posture is more of a pose for attention than a congenital deformity that we truly believe. Batman is full of awesome thrills precisely because it doesn't pause so often to make puppy-dog eyes at the audience and ask to be held. Even the single "Large Marge" scene from Pee-wee's Big Adventure is scarier than all of The Nightmare Before Christmas. It's presented matter-of-factly, and you feel like it could really happen. His later movies lost that believable campfire story-teller vibe, feeling more like you're joining some emo geek to dress in all black and read Edgar Allan Poe aloud in the neighborhood graveyard. Too affected.
These are just a few examples that sprung to mind while I was out browsing. I'm sure there are plenty that I either forgot or never experienced in the first place. So what else is there to shield kids from the adorablization of Halloween? Maybe something by Edward Gorey. I doubt elementary school kids would get the text, but the drawings alone would be great. After Halloween is Grinch Night, the library screened some episodes of Mystery!, and I recall loving his opening animation even at a young age. But it wasn't until high school that I started buying whatever I could get my hands on by him.
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