Gay marriage is the main liberatory movement in 2010 -- which goes to show how free everyone is in America, if that's all that's left to fight over. No more slavery, no landowning requirements to vote, no foreign rule, etc.
Freedom-seeking movements will try to get the most liberatory bang for their buck, so they will target sources of oppression that are truly heinous first, then move on to not so oppressive threats, and wind up squabbling over liberation that is so minor that achieving their goal could hardly be taken seriously as a Great Unyoking.
Throughout history, when a horde of invading foreigners took over a community, that community tended to resist, often violently and for long stretches of time. Because the revolt against foreign rule is so widespread across the world, so persistent through time, and so bloody, we infer that the revolutionaries are up against a very oppressive regime.
Gay marriage is at the other end of the spectrum: it appears almost nowhere in the world, even where it does it's only a decade old, and none of the proponents of it are willing to stake their lives for the struggle or even put themselves in front of firehoses. Thus, the denial of marriage rights to homosexuals is scarcely oppressive at all. After all, most gay guys have no plans to ever get married in the first place because, like most straight guys, they'd prefer to cat around until they turn gray. The point about banning gay marriage applies to homophobia in all forms -- fighting it is not widespread, old, or violent, so homophobia cannot have been very oppressive.
In the middle but closer to the anti-imperialist side are anti-slavery movements, including anti-wage slavery movements. They're not quite as widespread, old, and violent, but they're pretty close, especially when they also have an anti-foreign rule angle to them like slave rebellions in the Americas. Slaves and wage slaves are less oppressed than those under the boot of foreign rule because slaveowners at least have some incentive to keep their subjects decently fed, clothed, and housed -- otherwise they won't be able to work and earn the master any money. A foreign ruler is mostly interested in stealing whatever he can, abducting the pretty young women as concubines, and levying crushing taxes on the community that he has no ties to.
In the middle but closer to the gay marriage side is feminism. It's hardly widespread, has only appeared in the past couple centuries, and can get somewhat physically confrontational but rarely at the level of a slave rebellion or an overthrow of a foreign army ruling your land. Why did women the world over and for almost all of time feel that they weren't being oppressed? Well, they surely did see many restrictions on their freedom -- who they could date or marry, whether or not they could own property, etc. -- but they saw that men faced just as severe of restrictions on their freedom, albeit in different domains of life.
When a neighboring tribe or army comes through the village, guess who has no choice but to go face them in defense of their community? When someone needs to labor away at tracking down and hunting game animals to provide the animal fat and protein that we rely on, guess who gets conscripted into the hunting party? When a fight breaks out among the locals, guess who has to step in to break it up before it spills over? Men have brought home the bacon (not merely nuts and berries) and have protected women from violence and other threats to their safety, and they have no real choice to shirk these duties if they want to make it in the world. Women judged the drudgery of the woman's role as no more oppressive than the unavoidable danger of the man's role, so they didn't see any point in fighting for greater personal freedoms.
Only when most threats to a woman's physical safety were eliminated, and after the economy allowed them to bring home the bacon (from the supermarket with wages they earned), did they see an imbalance in how nice overall the guys and the girls had it. And even then most women weren't dyed-in-the-wool bra-burners, so this recent imbalance must not have been very oppressive either, contrary to all of those "prisoner of suburban domesticity" narratives about the 1950s.
The typical civil libertarian sees the world in black and white -- some group is being oppressed or not, and they don't focus much on the magnitude of oppression. Minor infractions must be fought on principle. In the real world, activists should target causes that will deliver the most freedom for the least effort, and go down the list of oppressed groups in order. The fact that so many spend such a large chunk of their outrage budget on trivial matters like gay marriage proves that they do not have liberatory goals, but must be more interested in other things like signaling the purity of their worldview to those whose approval they seek. Like I said, there's not much to fight over these days, but surely something greater than gay marriage -- ending the form of state-sanctioned discrimination known as affirmative action, for example.
August 16, 2010
Guys today name their Xbox and iPod, not their car or their junk
We give nicknames to very few things around us, only those that are close enough to sustain and enrich our lives that we feel the need to individuate them from all the other clutter in our lives. Our pets are the most obvious example. Naming newborn or unborn children is common, but not everywhere. In some places where infant mortality is high, mothers don't even name their children until they reach a certain age. Not naming them right after birth (or even before) is a way to keep from growing too attached to them and then feeling demoralized should the child die within the first couple years of life. This makes it easier for the mother to move on with things and start again.
Back when young people had a life, guys used to name their cars in the same way that they used to christen ships or give names to their horses. It was a vehicle for physical freedom, and as a token of gratitude you gave it a name to pick it out against all those other cars that weren't so special. Since the early 1990s the percent of 17 year-olds who have a driver's license has been plummeting, and within the last few years it finally slipped below 50% -- today the typical 17 year-old does not have a license. Let alone have access to a car, especially one that is only theirs.
The LA Times ran a feature story on this major shift in the early 2000s, and my own experience talking to Millennial guys matches that -- namely, they view cars mostly as a burden and a hassle. Driving a car is no longer the holy grail for the freedom-seeking American teenage guy, which makes sense since, not having a life, they don't really have anywhere to go or anything to do in the back seat like guys used to. I haven't seen any survey data on this, but obviously the percent of teenage guys who give a name to a car has fallen sharply; the only question is by how much.
After some googling, I found that plenty of guys today name their Xbox video game console, their iPod, iPhone, Mac laptop, etc. I'm not talking about cases where the technology allows you to register a name for it, like how you can have your computer referred to as "Darwin" instead of "My Computer." I mean where they christen the thing and refer to it that way in their own natural speech. Again there was no survey data that I could find, so how common this is I don't know. But I do know that no one nicknamed their phone when I was a teenager, or their computer, or their video game system.
This shows the larger shift that young people have undergone: they used to value the greater physical freedom that a car could deliver, while now they value the greater informational or virtual freedom that comes from farting around on the internet via your iPhone or playing Halo (both alone or online). They then give names to the vehicles that take them to the places they value most.
Not that I talk to Millennial guys an awful lot, but I'd wager dollars to donuts that almost none of them have given a proper name to their cock. Before, it wasn't as though everyone did that, but it was common enough to hold a place in the folklore and folkpractices of young guys. Millennial guys are so afraid of expressing their libido, though, and are generally grossed out by the physical nature of sex -- "Ewwww, she's got pubic hair! Mommy, tell her mommy to make her shave it off!" And statistics on sexual behavior show that they're far less wild than young guys used to be (the decline starts in the early 1990s, as with wild behavior in general). Put all of those pieces together, and I can't see that the old practice of naming it has survived.
For the same reasons, I doubt guys who have a girlfriend give names to her anatomy either. Obviously even in wild times this was less common than naming your own, since every guy had his own junk but not all had a girlfriend, and it's a bit of a risky move to give her parts their own names, since girls aren't as salacious as guys. * Still, today this folkpractice of young people must be entirely dead.
This decline in wildness is what's behind the observations about the lack of emotional depth that young people have in relationships today, like girls who are busy texting furiously even when they're grinding some guy on the dance floor. After all, it takes quite a close emotional bond for a girlfriend and boyfriend to share a pet name for her pussy. A subset of this phenomenon is all the worrying about the "hook-up culture," which is actually a sign of Puritanical rather than Dionysian sex lives. Among young people, there's less sex, it happens later, and with less of a sense of magic pervading it.
* To show that happened at all, I wanted to refer to a popular movie where this happens, but I can't remember the name or the overall plot. The scene shows a woman listening to an answering machine message, where an ex-boyfriend or ex-husband is trying to win her back by reminiscing about their fun times together. (Or perhaps he's there in the room with her?) He reminds her of how they named both her left and right tit, as well as her pussy, supplying the names for all (which I forget). She has a somewhat embarrassed, somewhat amused look on her face, like Sigourney Weaver does when Bill Murray charms her over in front of Lincoln Center in Ghostbusters. I tried finding this movie through google, but you can guess what sort of results I got instead. Anyone know which one I'm talking about? Seems like it was from the '80s through the mid-'90s.
Back when young people had a life, guys used to name their cars in the same way that they used to christen ships or give names to their horses. It was a vehicle for physical freedom, and as a token of gratitude you gave it a name to pick it out against all those other cars that weren't so special. Since the early 1990s the percent of 17 year-olds who have a driver's license has been plummeting, and within the last few years it finally slipped below 50% -- today the typical 17 year-old does not have a license. Let alone have access to a car, especially one that is only theirs.
The LA Times ran a feature story on this major shift in the early 2000s, and my own experience talking to Millennial guys matches that -- namely, they view cars mostly as a burden and a hassle. Driving a car is no longer the holy grail for the freedom-seeking American teenage guy, which makes sense since, not having a life, they don't really have anywhere to go or anything to do in the back seat like guys used to. I haven't seen any survey data on this, but obviously the percent of teenage guys who give a name to a car has fallen sharply; the only question is by how much.
After some googling, I found that plenty of guys today name their Xbox video game console, their iPod, iPhone, Mac laptop, etc. I'm not talking about cases where the technology allows you to register a name for it, like how you can have your computer referred to as "Darwin" instead of "My Computer." I mean where they christen the thing and refer to it that way in their own natural speech. Again there was no survey data that I could find, so how common this is I don't know. But I do know that no one nicknamed their phone when I was a teenager, or their computer, or their video game system.
This shows the larger shift that young people have undergone: they used to value the greater physical freedom that a car could deliver, while now they value the greater informational or virtual freedom that comes from farting around on the internet via your iPhone or playing Halo (both alone or online). They then give names to the vehicles that take them to the places they value most.
Not that I talk to Millennial guys an awful lot, but I'd wager dollars to donuts that almost none of them have given a proper name to their cock. Before, it wasn't as though everyone did that, but it was common enough to hold a place in the folklore and folkpractices of young guys. Millennial guys are so afraid of expressing their libido, though, and are generally grossed out by the physical nature of sex -- "Ewwww, she's got pubic hair! Mommy, tell her mommy to make her shave it off!" And statistics on sexual behavior show that they're far less wild than young guys used to be (the decline starts in the early 1990s, as with wild behavior in general). Put all of those pieces together, and I can't see that the old practice of naming it has survived.
For the same reasons, I doubt guys who have a girlfriend give names to her anatomy either. Obviously even in wild times this was less common than naming your own, since every guy had his own junk but not all had a girlfriend, and it's a bit of a risky move to give her parts their own names, since girls aren't as salacious as guys. * Still, today this folkpractice of young people must be entirely dead.
This decline in wildness is what's behind the observations about the lack of emotional depth that young people have in relationships today, like girls who are busy texting furiously even when they're grinding some guy on the dance floor. After all, it takes quite a close emotional bond for a girlfriend and boyfriend to share a pet name for her pussy. A subset of this phenomenon is all the worrying about the "hook-up culture," which is actually a sign of Puritanical rather than Dionysian sex lives. Among young people, there's less sex, it happens later, and with less of a sense of magic pervading it.
* To show that happened at all, I wanted to refer to a popular movie where this happens, but I can't remember the name or the overall plot. The scene shows a woman listening to an answering machine message, where an ex-boyfriend or ex-husband is trying to win her back by reminiscing about their fun times together. (Or perhaps he's there in the room with her?) He reminds her of how they named both her left and right tit, as well as her pussy, supplying the names for all (which I forget). She has a somewhat embarrassed, somewhat amused look on her face, like Sigourney Weaver does when Bill Murray charms her over in front of Lincoln Center in Ghostbusters. I tried finding this movie through google, but you can guess what sort of results I got instead. Anyone know which one I'm talking about? Seems like it was from the '80s through the mid-'90s.
Food observations, non-meat edition
- Canned or frozen fruits and vegetables are superior to fresh ones unless you're cooking the fresh ones yourself. Most people don't do that anymore because we've set up a purity taboo about eating cooked vegetables -- they have to be "fresh," i.e. raw, in order to be pure. Even when we're allowed to cook them, it has to be some way that will highly oxidize the vegetables, such as grilling. No one merely boils them, let alone ferment them.
Eating raw fruits and vegetables is a surefire way to get food poisoning to varying degrees, especially if they have a higher sugar content that would attract flies in the supermarket. Cooked vegetables that come in cans are less risky. Ditto frozen fruit -- won't grow fuzz in a couple of days. Many people complain about the gas they get from eating cruciferous vegetables (ones whose bottom makes a cross shape), such as cabbage, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, artichokes, broccoli, etc. The plants are only deploying some mix of toxins, irritants, and other defenses to keep from being eaten. Fermentation apparently zaps most of that junk, as you can quickly verify by eating a bunch of sauerkraut -- no gas. I go through one or two tightly packed cans of that stuff a week, and I could easily go through four.
Extra bonus: canned vegetables are a lot cheaper since their maintenance doesn't cost the supermarket much at all, aside from some shelf or freezer space. Raw ones are much more high-maintenance, and you end up paying for that. People are willing to pay a lot in order to avoid violating food purity taboos.
- Hazelnuts are the perfect nut. Almonds are just sweet enough to be somewhat addictive, which keeps them from being ideal. I once ate about a half-pound of almonds, and I could never do that with the much more savory hazelnut. Like the almond, though, it's very low in carbs (most of these being fiber anyway), and loaded with monounsaturated fats. Macademias are this way too, but they don't have enough of a crunchy structure to make a good snack food. They're hard at first, but you can't munch on them. Other common nuts are either too high in omega-6 polyunsaturated fats or too high in carbs.
- Real yoghurt has vanished from the shelves. I don't eat yoghurt often at all, but I remember just a couple years ago it wasn't so bad. Now more or less every variety is fat-free or low-fat. You really have to hunt to find a full-fat one, assuming it's even there. Of course the sugar content has only gone through the roof in the meantime, since it has to taste like something. By this standard of "healthy eating," the healthiest thing we could eat are jelly beans -- no fat, tons of sugar.
- After plenty of self-experimentation, I conclude what I did last year about the effects of cheese (especially aged ones) on libido, provided you're also on a low-carb diet. Once guys leave their teens, they feel glad not to be so governed by their boners all the time, and to be able to think about other things than that cute girl in front of you in math class who always finds some excuse to lean over her desk. Still, going half-way back there feels like the right amount of prurience.
Hmmm, a low-carb diet with plenty of cheese -- that sounds like what distinguishes a pastoralist diet from a hunter-gatherer diet (no dairy) and a farmer diet (super high-carb, uncertain dairy). No wonder the herders in all those pastoral poems are always so amorous. It can't be due to leading semi-isolated lives and having the pressure build up -- there are plenty of semi-isolated farmers, hunter-gatherers, and modern-day laborers who don't always have love and sex on the mind. If you deprive them all of sex for the same length of time, it seems like the herders experience greater pangs of feeling lovelorn -- meaning they had higher libidos to begin with (there's no frustration where there's no desire).
Eating raw fruits and vegetables is a surefire way to get food poisoning to varying degrees, especially if they have a higher sugar content that would attract flies in the supermarket. Cooked vegetables that come in cans are less risky. Ditto frozen fruit -- won't grow fuzz in a couple of days. Many people complain about the gas they get from eating cruciferous vegetables (ones whose bottom makes a cross shape), such as cabbage, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, artichokes, broccoli, etc. The plants are only deploying some mix of toxins, irritants, and other defenses to keep from being eaten. Fermentation apparently zaps most of that junk, as you can quickly verify by eating a bunch of sauerkraut -- no gas. I go through one or two tightly packed cans of that stuff a week, and I could easily go through four.
Extra bonus: canned vegetables are a lot cheaper since their maintenance doesn't cost the supermarket much at all, aside from some shelf or freezer space. Raw ones are much more high-maintenance, and you end up paying for that. People are willing to pay a lot in order to avoid violating food purity taboos.
- Hazelnuts are the perfect nut. Almonds are just sweet enough to be somewhat addictive, which keeps them from being ideal. I once ate about a half-pound of almonds, and I could never do that with the much more savory hazelnut. Like the almond, though, it's very low in carbs (most of these being fiber anyway), and loaded with monounsaturated fats. Macademias are this way too, but they don't have enough of a crunchy structure to make a good snack food. They're hard at first, but you can't munch on them. Other common nuts are either too high in omega-6 polyunsaturated fats or too high in carbs.
- Real yoghurt has vanished from the shelves. I don't eat yoghurt often at all, but I remember just a couple years ago it wasn't so bad. Now more or less every variety is fat-free or low-fat. You really have to hunt to find a full-fat one, assuming it's even there. Of course the sugar content has only gone through the roof in the meantime, since it has to taste like something. By this standard of "healthy eating," the healthiest thing we could eat are jelly beans -- no fat, tons of sugar.
- After plenty of self-experimentation, I conclude what I did last year about the effects of cheese (especially aged ones) on libido, provided you're also on a low-carb diet. Once guys leave their teens, they feel glad not to be so governed by their boners all the time, and to be able to think about other things than that cute girl in front of you in math class who always finds some excuse to lean over her desk. Still, going half-way back there feels like the right amount of prurience.
Hmmm, a low-carb diet with plenty of cheese -- that sounds like what distinguishes a pastoralist diet from a hunter-gatherer diet (no dairy) and a farmer diet (super high-carb, uncertain dairy). No wonder the herders in all those pastoral poems are always so amorous. It can't be due to leading semi-isolated lives and having the pressure build up -- there are plenty of semi-isolated farmers, hunter-gatherers, and modern-day laborers who don't always have love and sex on the mind. If you deprive them all of sex for the same length of time, it seems like the herders experience greater pangs of feeling lovelorn -- meaning they had higher libidos to begin with (there's no frustration where there's no desire).
August 15, 2010
Pop musicians who are too educated for their own good
For the past several weeks Starbucks has been playing one of the most doofusy indie / pop songs ever recorded. Did he just say "drinking horchata"? God, what are they singing about now? So I looked up the lyrics; it's "Horchata" by Vampire Weekend. Here are the rhyme words: horchata, balaclava, aranciata, and Masada... How much more self-consciously status-seeking could this dork possibly get? Sure enough, their Wikipedia page mentions that the band met while they were at Columbia in the mid-2000s.
The only real pardon you can get for attending an "elite school" is if it's an art school, and only provided you don't fill your lyrics with references to horchata and aranciata. So, Talking Heads, who met at RISD, get a pass. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark had a few songs about things you'd learn in school -- "Enola Gay," "Joan of Arc," "Maid of Orleans" -- but they are fun and sincere instead of laboring to project erudition, which doesn't belong in pop music. Even the pioneers of geek rock, They Might Be Giants, didn't used to be so nerdily self-aware. (John Flansburgh went to Pratt.) Their first two albums fit squarely within the late '80s college rock sound. Although too interested in wordplay, at least they weren't trying to one-up the inbred clique of Stuff White People Like competitors.
Since then there have been too many pop musicians who went to elite non-art schools: The Strokes, The Bravery, Lisa Loeb, etc. Not that their songs are all bad, but still. They spent their formative years studying hard to get into a good school, and then remained insulated from the real world during their late teens and early 20s, when real rock musicians would have either started playing gigs or been engrossed in real life in other ways. Overly protected people are not going to see enough of the world to get inspiration to make good culture, whether grave or light. Instead you'll end up singing about the fruity drinks you got hooked on during your semester abroad.
(Back when the elites were highly exposed to violence, they were unable to avoid real life and made great culture.)
You'll be more able to rock out if you don't get sucked into the higher ed bubble in the first place. See for yourself:
The only real pardon you can get for attending an "elite school" is if it's an art school, and only provided you don't fill your lyrics with references to horchata and aranciata. So, Talking Heads, who met at RISD, get a pass. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark had a few songs about things you'd learn in school -- "Enola Gay," "Joan of Arc," "Maid of Orleans" -- but they are fun and sincere instead of laboring to project erudition, which doesn't belong in pop music. Even the pioneers of geek rock, They Might Be Giants, didn't used to be so nerdily self-aware. (John Flansburgh went to Pratt.) Their first two albums fit squarely within the late '80s college rock sound. Although too interested in wordplay, at least they weren't trying to one-up the inbred clique of Stuff White People Like competitors.
Since then there have been too many pop musicians who went to elite non-art schools: The Strokes, The Bravery, Lisa Loeb, etc. Not that their songs are all bad, but still. They spent their formative years studying hard to get into a good school, and then remained insulated from the real world during their late teens and early 20s, when real rock musicians would have either started playing gigs or been engrossed in real life in other ways. Overly protected people are not going to see enough of the world to get inspiration to make good culture, whether grave or light. Instead you'll end up singing about the fruity drinks you got hooked on during your semester abroad.
(Back when the elites were highly exposed to violence, they were unable to avoid real life and made great culture.)
You'll be more able to rock out if you don't get sucked into the higher ed bubble in the first place. See for yourself:
August 13, 2010
Dark-eyed Europeans were more likely to leave for the colonies (data)
The Europeans who left for America, Canada, and Australia were obviously not a representative sample of their home populations. Since they were not plucked at random by a Martian lab scientist, there must have been something different about them that made them want to leave. We can imagine all sorts of socioeconomic factors influencing this decision, but let's not forget that some people just have a greater sense of wanderlust than others.
In populations where eye and hair color vary a decent amount, like Northern Europe, correlational studies show that children with lighter eyes or hair tend to be more socially nervous, less exploratory in social situations. When we humans domesticated animals, their coat and eye colors lightened up (even if only partially, like large patches of white). Something similar probably happened when Europeans domesticated themselves, as they had to settle down in order to farm well. Looking at it the other way, the darker-colored ones like Christopher Marlowe must have had wilder personalities compared to their countrymen.
It's not very hard to see that Americans and Australians are a lot more sprawling and rambunctious than the British, and even Canadians are closer to the former than the latter. I've always wondered why there is such a disconnect between North Americans and the British on the topic of dark Irish or Scottish beauties. We seem to have a lot of them here, while those in Scotland and Ireland swear there's no such thing, that we Americans must be delusional. (It seems like there's more agreement on the presence of handsome, darker-looking Irish and Scottish men in the UK.)
Maybe, I thought, the colonies drew away the Europeans with darker eyes and hair? It would fit with the picture of lighter hair and eyes being associated with a less roaming social nature. Fortunately GameFAQs ran a poll on the eye color of its users. These are mostly 20-something males who are into video games. I collapsed blue, gray, and green into a single "light" category. Nation-level data were available for some parts of the world, including three Northwestern European countries and three former Anglo colonies. Here is the percent who have light eyes within each:
% Country
57 Netherlands
54 Germany
53 UK
38 Australia
37 Canada
35 US
The clear and big split is between the homeland populations and their colonial offshoots. Notice how little variation there is within each of the two clusters -- mid-50s for Northwestern Europe, upper 30s for the former colonies. The lower numbers outside of Europe are not due to the greater presence of Southern Europeans, Africans, Asians, etc. If that were true, it would imply that the Northern European populations of all three former colonies were only about 2/3 of the entire country. In the US, it's somewhere in the 70-80% range, in Canada in the 80-90% range, and in Australia about 90%. (The US may look so similar to Canada and Australia in this poll, despite having more dark-eyed people, if the American users of GameFAQs are mostly white. The website has never run a poll on race or ethnicity.)
So little data is collected on eye color that I'm sure this is the first demonstration that the colonists who set off from Northwestern Europe were darker-eyed than those they were leaving behind. It fits with the tiny number of studies done on eye / hair color and personality. And it also helps explain why Americans and Britons can disagree so much on the prevalence of dark Celtic beauties -- looks like we have a lot more of 'em outside of the UK.
In populations where eye and hair color vary a decent amount, like Northern Europe, correlational studies show that children with lighter eyes or hair tend to be more socially nervous, less exploratory in social situations. When we humans domesticated animals, their coat and eye colors lightened up (even if only partially, like large patches of white). Something similar probably happened when Europeans domesticated themselves, as they had to settle down in order to farm well. Looking at it the other way, the darker-colored ones like Christopher Marlowe must have had wilder personalities compared to their countrymen.
It's not very hard to see that Americans and Australians are a lot more sprawling and rambunctious than the British, and even Canadians are closer to the former than the latter. I've always wondered why there is such a disconnect between North Americans and the British on the topic of dark Irish or Scottish beauties. We seem to have a lot of them here, while those in Scotland and Ireland swear there's no such thing, that we Americans must be delusional. (It seems like there's more agreement on the presence of handsome, darker-looking Irish and Scottish men in the UK.)
Maybe, I thought, the colonies drew away the Europeans with darker eyes and hair? It would fit with the picture of lighter hair and eyes being associated with a less roaming social nature. Fortunately GameFAQs ran a poll on the eye color of its users. These are mostly 20-something males who are into video games. I collapsed blue, gray, and green into a single "light" category. Nation-level data were available for some parts of the world, including three Northwestern European countries and three former Anglo colonies. Here is the percent who have light eyes within each:
% Country
57 Netherlands
54 Germany
53 UK
38 Australia
37 Canada
35 US
The clear and big split is between the homeland populations and their colonial offshoots. Notice how little variation there is within each of the two clusters -- mid-50s for Northwestern Europe, upper 30s for the former colonies. The lower numbers outside of Europe are not due to the greater presence of Southern Europeans, Africans, Asians, etc. If that were true, it would imply that the Northern European populations of all three former colonies were only about 2/3 of the entire country. In the US, it's somewhere in the 70-80% range, in Canada in the 80-90% range, and in Australia about 90%. (The US may look so similar to Canada and Australia in this poll, despite having more dark-eyed people, if the American users of GameFAQs are mostly white. The website has never run a poll on race or ethnicity.)
So little data is collected on eye color that I'm sure this is the first demonstration that the colonists who set off from Northwestern Europe were darker-eyed than those they were leaving behind. It fits with the tiny number of studies done on eye / hair color and personality. And it also helps explain why Americans and Britons can disagree so much on the prevalence of dark Celtic beauties -- looks like we have a lot more of 'em outside of the UK.
August 12, 2010
Did you have a job as a kid?
Thinking more about the tough aspects of the real world that young people are shielded from today, having a job came to mind. The days of Fast Times at Ridgemont High -- where the average teenager desires, seeks out, and gets a job -- are long gone. I think this must be a difference between safe vs. dangerous times, as movies showed teenagers with jobs throughout the '80s, and only by the mid-late '90s did they not have jobs (e.g. Clueless and American Pie), a picture that remained through the 2000s (Mean Girls and Superbad).
It's shocking to go around today and see how few teenagers there are doing teenager jobs -- any job in the supermarket, a fast food place, movie theaters, you name it. Also, teenagers don't babysit, mow lawns, or shovel snow from driveways anymore. (I reflected on the disappearance of the babysitter in American life here.) So in the interest of setting down some oral history about a lost way of life (lost for now anyway), why don't we remind ourselves and others how common it used to be for quite young people to have jobs? -- before wimpy kids and helicopter parents both conspired to keep the young 'uns protected from the messy world of real life.
My first real paying job came from the restlessness that nearly pubescent boys naturally feel, provided they aren't total pansies, that spurs them to go out there and achieve something -- doesn't matter what, but something that most of the world's cultures would recognize as a growing-up activity. Perhaps we wouldn't go slay a dragon, but we weren't just going to sit around anymore. During the summer of 1991, when I was 10 years old, a small group of friends wanted to do grown-up stuff like work. Of course, child labor laws prevented us from most jobs, but my friend Robbie's parents asked around and found out that some odd jobs could still be done by youngsters with their parents' and the government's permission.
So that summer, we decided to undergo that ancient rite of passage -- spraypainting someone's address on the curb in front of their house.
Robbie's parents drove us to the municipal building, filled out some forms, and there it was in our hands -- our permit. To us it was like a college degree with a royal seal of approval. Every time we gave our sales pitch, we always boasted about how "We've even got a permit!" So don't worry, we're not total amateurs or anything. Unfortunately the permit also said we could charge no more and no less than $4, when I'm sure anyone who would've paid $4 would've paid us $5, boosting our revenues 25% right there.
On the other hand, the regulation probably made the homeowners more willing to take a chance on us. They always asked how much the service was before making a decision, and if we had set our own price, they might have felt that a bunch of punk kids were going to take them for a ride. But when we told them that the law required exactly $4, I think it made us seem more honest and trustworthy -- it was a no-haggle price, and it was set by a neutral third party. Normal market participants don't need these regulations to ensure trust, but when the offerer of a service is a bunch of 9 and 10 year-old kids, it could be necessary.
We bought some supplies at an arts & crafts store in the shopping center just a couple blocks away from Robbie's house, practiced a good deal on flat surfaces like pizza boxes -- though I don't think on actual curbs -- and once we felt comfortably trained, headed out on our daily tour through some part of our neighborhood in Upper Arlington, Ohio (a quieter suburb just outside of Columbus and the huge Ohio State campus). This was back when kids were allowed to go anywhere and do anything they wanted, all unsupervised, and often without even telling our parents we were leaving as we walked out the door. One or two of us brought a bike along, though we mostly moved on foot. We were only out canvassing for work for about 3 or 4 hours a day at most, so we rarely got tired from walking. Plus it was fun to see new parts of our neighborhood, till then invisible to us because we didn't have any friends on that street. And all in the fresh summer air!
Our approach was as naive and simple as you would think it: just walk up and knock on the door, give a pretty bland and hassle-free schpiel, and then either move on or get down to work. I think the fanciest thing we ever tossed out to finesse them was to note how useful it would be if acquaintances or firetrucks and ambulances needed to find their house quickly or at night. Really, though, how much can you dress up a proposal to spraypaint their address on the curb?
The painting process itself was fairly easy, although not something you could do on auto-pilot. We got into a state that I would later learn is called Flow by psychologists, where your skill level and the challenge at hand are matched so that you do pretty well, get quick feedback about how you're doing, and are focused yet unaware of time passing. We had cut out the shape of a smallish picture frame from a brown paper grocery bag, which served as the stencil for the white background. It had to be of a flexible material since we were going to press it against a rolling curb. The only trick here was pressing down all around the perimeter, not just here and there, or else the white spraypaint could slip under an area that wasn't held down fast. From heavy cardboard, we made a stencil that would block out all of the white background except for a small rectangular area where one of the numbers would go. On top of this we laid our store-bought number stencil, let the black paint fly, and after three or four times, we were done.
Of course, that doesn't mean we didn't occasionally screw up -- and learn how to deal with the inevitable failures that come from putting yourself out there. (The shielded kids of the past 15 to 20 years fail to learn how to cope with failure because they don't get any real-world practice with it.) It only happened once, as I recall, but it was pretty devastating for us. Somehow whoever painted the white background made it too big -- it wasn't just a long rectangle that tightly framed the address numbers, but yawned vertically across the entire front of the curb, making lots of ugly negative white space.
I don't remember exactly how he tried to fix it, but I think Robbie tried to make the numbers bigger to compensate, and that looked even more hideous. Frustrated and angry, he sprayed the black paint in a wavy, scribbly motion across the whole thing, as though he were crossing out a misspelled word in his book report. The rest of us freaked out, sure that we were going to get grounded for this -- for Robbie losing his cool -- and that we'd have to repay the homeowners who knew how much. Luckily they let us use their phone to call Robbie's parents, who came with a can of paint thinner and their grown-up social skills to smooth things over with the poor bastards whose curb we'd ruined. It took at least another hour to fix it up, but it ended up looking fine. Boy did we learn first-hand how when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging!
Still, most of our offers went nowhere, perhaps because they imagined something just like this happening to their as-yet-unsullied front yard. Paying $4 for a service that had a 1% chance of lowering their property value by $10,000 must have been too much risk for them to take just to indulge some kids in their quest to grow up and be doing something meaningful. By the end of the 10 or so weeks of our summer job, we'd pocketed between $80 and $90, although adjusting for inflation that would now be $125-140. Pretty sweet for kids who just graduated 4th grade, let alone for an activity we loved anyway -- hanging out together, exploring the neighborhood, trying to talk ourselves up to the grown-ups, and occasionally even getting to work in a focused way with our hands and tools.
And that was just the work day -- afterwards we almost always went to either of the two local public pools (unsupervised, naturally) to cool off, to goof around after having to be somewhat serious for hours straight, and especially to wash all that gunky spraypaint off our hands before we went home.
What did we do with the money we'd earned? Well Robbie and I did most of the work, so we had more say. And because we were friends, we didn't want to just split up the dough like some band of mercenaries -- we wanted to buy some Really Big Thing that would belong to us all and commemorate our adventure. We didn't think about it this way consciously, of course; it just came to us naturally. In June of that summer, we heard about what would become one of the greatest video games -- and at the time, one of the most expensive -- Sonic the Hedgehog for the Sega Genesis system.
None of us could have ever saved up enough money to get it on our own, so we decided to put our collective earnings toward it and play it together, trading it around whenever someone else wanted to play it (mostly just me and Robbie, though). It was the same as the premise of a later Simpsons episode where three boys pool their money to buy a rare comic book, but whose friendships are torn apart by the rivalry over who has greater access to it. That may happen in the imagination of self-centered TV writers, but back on planet Earth we got along just fine. It worked because it was such a small group and we all were friendly toward each other, so enforcement of fairness wasn't hard at all. Plus that was before anyone was a self-ruined video game addict who would have wanted to play it as their second full-time job. So, it was no more disruptive to our relationships than two or three housemates sharing a bathroom.
I returned to Upper Arlington once after moving away before middle school began, but I didn't think to look for the curbs we'd painted. I'll bet they're still there, even though the houses may look funny from additions, and despite the turnover of occupants during the 20 years since. You'd have to be pretty anti-address-on-the-curb to scrub it off if it was already there. It's no work of art -- no one will behold it in 10,000 years and marvel -- but it feels bizarrely rewarding to know there's some enduring mark of our existence and our teamwork out there.
* * *
When you're a little kid, especially a little boy, you can only take it so long before you get bored of trying to sell some of your toys or other junk in a yard sale, or setting up a sidewalk stand for lemonade. (Or for milk and cookies, like my brothers tried -- my parents soon bought all the milk, which had already spoiled in the summer sun, so no one would get poisoned). You want to band together with your allies and go out there and do something. When children and adults alike pussy out of their duty to help get the kids' hands dirty with real-world experience, not too long after we'll see a generation of young adults whose personal growth has been too stunted to function as well as young adults used to when they entered college or the workforce with a history of working.
This stunted generation may not bring down the economy, but it won't sail as smoothly as if they'd been properly trained by the real world. And even if it did work just as well as before, there's the matter of giving meaning to young people's lives, independent of how much value they add to the economic pie. If the Millennials appear to be coasting through an existential drift, bereft of a passion for life, it's no surprise: they've been a lot more shielded from the stressors of real life throughout their development. Even during materially prosperous times, like the dangerous years of the 1960s through the '80s, kids still felt the urge to make something of themselves, and their parents encouraged them. It's a tough world out there, so they've got to learn. During safe times, this sense of urgency evaporates, kids remain insulated, and they don't develop that grab-the-world-by-the-balls attitude.
i mean, dude, i'll get around to that later. right now i'm busy kicking some noob's ass in halo, so leave me alone.
(This is true even of the 1950s, which were a safe decade. Most people falsely project the period from roughly 1958 to 1963 back onto the 1950s. But that was when rock music blew up, when Hitchcock made Psycho, and when The Sandlot is set. Those are all from wild, rising-crime times, not The Fifties. People make this mistake because the explosion of the late '60s had not happened yet, but the pre-counter-cultural days were still squarely within the post-'50s era of unsupervised wildness.)
Well, at the start I thought I'd have a chance to yak on about my second pre-teen job as a paperboy on a route that my best friend and I shared in middle school, but this has gotten pretty long, so maybe I'll save that for later.
It's shocking to go around today and see how few teenagers there are doing teenager jobs -- any job in the supermarket, a fast food place, movie theaters, you name it. Also, teenagers don't babysit, mow lawns, or shovel snow from driveways anymore. (I reflected on the disappearance of the babysitter in American life here.) So in the interest of setting down some oral history about a lost way of life (lost for now anyway), why don't we remind ourselves and others how common it used to be for quite young people to have jobs? -- before wimpy kids and helicopter parents both conspired to keep the young 'uns protected from the messy world of real life.
My first real paying job came from the restlessness that nearly pubescent boys naturally feel, provided they aren't total pansies, that spurs them to go out there and achieve something -- doesn't matter what, but something that most of the world's cultures would recognize as a growing-up activity. Perhaps we wouldn't go slay a dragon, but we weren't just going to sit around anymore. During the summer of 1991, when I was 10 years old, a small group of friends wanted to do grown-up stuff like work. Of course, child labor laws prevented us from most jobs, but my friend Robbie's parents asked around and found out that some odd jobs could still be done by youngsters with their parents' and the government's permission.
So that summer, we decided to undergo that ancient rite of passage -- spraypainting someone's address on the curb in front of their house.
Robbie's parents drove us to the municipal building, filled out some forms, and there it was in our hands -- our permit. To us it was like a college degree with a royal seal of approval. Every time we gave our sales pitch, we always boasted about how "We've even got a permit!" So don't worry, we're not total amateurs or anything. Unfortunately the permit also said we could charge no more and no less than $4, when I'm sure anyone who would've paid $4 would've paid us $5, boosting our revenues 25% right there.
On the other hand, the regulation probably made the homeowners more willing to take a chance on us. They always asked how much the service was before making a decision, and if we had set our own price, they might have felt that a bunch of punk kids were going to take them for a ride. But when we told them that the law required exactly $4, I think it made us seem more honest and trustworthy -- it was a no-haggle price, and it was set by a neutral third party. Normal market participants don't need these regulations to ensure trust, but when the offerer of a service is a bunch of 9 and 10 year-old kids, it could be necessary.
We bought some supplies at an arts & crafts store in the shopping center just a couple blocks away from Robbie's house, practiced a good deal on flat surfaces like pizza boxes -- though I don't think on actual curbs -- and once we felt comfortably trained, headed out on our daily tour through some part of our neighborhood in Upper Arlington, Ohio (a quieter suburb just outside of Columbus and the huge Ohio State campus). This was back when kids were allowed to go anywhere and do anything they wanted, all unsupervised, and often without even telling our parents we were leaving as we walked out the door. One or two of us brought a bike along, though we mostly moved on foot. We were only out canvassing for work for about 3 or 4 hours a day at most, so we rarely got tired from walking. Plus it was fun to see new parts of our neighborhood, till then invisible to us because we didn't have any friends on that street. And all in the fresh summer air!
Our approach was as naive and simple as you would think it: just walk up and knock on the door, give a pretty bland and hassle-free schpiel, and then either move on or get down to work. I think the fanciest thing we ever tossed out to finesse them was to note how useful it would be if acquaintances or firetrucks and ambulances needed to find their house quickly or at night. Really, though, how much can you dress up a proposal to spraypaint their address on the curb?
The painting process itself was fairly easy, although not something you could do on auto-pilot. We got into a state that I would later learn is called Flow by psychologists, where your skill level and the challenge at hand are matched so that you do pretty well, get quick feedback about how you're doing, and are focused yet unaware of time passing. We had cut out the shape of a smallish picture frame from a brown paper grocery bag, which served as the stencil for the white background. It had to be of a flexible material since we were going to press it against a rolling curb. The only trick here was pressing down all around the perimeter, not just here and there, or else the white spraypaint could slip under an area that wasn't held down fast. From heavy cardboard, we made a stencil that would block out all of the white background except for a small rectangular area where one of the numbers would go. On top of this we laid our store-bought number stencil, let the black paint fly, and after three or four times, we were done.
Of course, that doesn't mean we didn't occasionally screw up -- and learn how to deal with the inevitable failures that come from putting yourself out there. (The shielded kids of the past 15 to 20 years fail to learn how to cope with failure because they don't get any real-world practice with it.) It only happened once, as I recall, but it was pretty devastating for us. Somehow whoever painted the white background made it too big -- it wasn't just a long rectangle that tightly framed the address numbers, but yawned vertically across the entire front of the curb, making lots of ugly negative white space.
I don't remember exactly how he tried to fix it, but I think Robbie tried to make the numbers bigger to compensate, and that looked even more hideous. Frustrated and angry, he sprayed the black paint in a wavy, scribbly motion across the whole thing, as though he were crossing out a misspelled word in his book report. The rest of us freaked out, sure that we were going to get grounded for this -- for Robbie losing his cool -- and that we'd have to repay the homeowners who knew how much. Luckily they let us use their phone to call Robbie's parents, who came with a can of paint thinner and their grown-up social skills to smooth things over with the poor bastards whose curb we'd ruined. It took at least another hour to fix it up, but it ended up looking fine. Boy did we learn first-hand how when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging!
Still, most of our offers went nowhere, perhaps because they imagined something just like this happening to their as-yet-unsullied front yard. Paying $4 for a service that had a 1% chance of lowering their property value by $10,000 must have been too much risk for them to take just to indulge some kids in their quest to grow up and be doing something meaningful. By the end of the 10 or so weeks of our summer job, we'd pocketed between $80 and $90, although adjusting for inflation that would now be $125-140. Pretty sweet for kids who just graduated 4th grade, let alone for an activity we loved anyway -- hanging out together, exploring the neighborhood, trying to talk ourselves up to the grown-ups, and occasionally even getting to work in a focused way with our hands and tools.
And that was just the work day -- afterwards we almost always went to either of the two local public pools (unsupervised, naturally) to cool off, to goof around after having to be somewhat serious for hours straight, and especially to wash all that gunky spraypaint off our hands before we went home.
What did we do with the money we'd earned? Well Robbie and I did most of the work, so we had more say. And because we were friends, we didn't want to just split up the dough like some band of mercenaries -- we wanted to buy some Really Big Thing that would belong to us all and commemorate our adventure. We didn't think about it this way consciously, of course; it just came to us naturally. In June of that summer, we heard about what would become one of the greatest video games -- and at the time, one of the most expensive -- Sonic the Hedgehog for the Sega Genesis system.
None of us could have ever saved up enough money to get it on our own, so we decided to put our collective earnings toward it and play it together, trading it around whenever someone else wanted to play it (mostly just me and Robbie, though). It was the same as the premise of a later Simpsons episode where three boys pool their money to buy a rare comic book, but whose friendships are torn apart by the rivalry over who has greater access to it. That may happen in the imagination of self-centered TV writers, but back on planet Earth we got along just fine. It worked because it was such a small group and we all were friendly toward each other, so enforcement of fairness wasn't hard at all. Plus that was before anyone was a self-ruined video game addict who would have wanted to play it as their second full-time job. So, it was no more disruptive to our relationships than two or three housemates sharing a bathroom.
I returned to Upper Arlington once after moving away before middle school began, but I didn't think to look for the curbs we'd painted. I'll bet they're still there, even though the houses may look funny from additions, and despite the turnover of occupants during the 20 years since. You'd have to be pretty anti-address-on-the-curb to scrub it off if it was already there. It's no work of art -- no one will behold it in 10,000 years and marvel -- but it feels bizarrely rewarding to know there's some enduring mark of our existence and our teamwork out there.
* * *
When you're a little kid, especially a little boy, you can only take it so long before you get bored of trying to sell some of your toys or other junk in a yard sale, or setting up a sidewalk stand for lemonade. (Or for milk and cookies, like my brothers tried -- my parents soon bought all the milk, which had already spoiled in the summer sun, so no one would get poisoned). You want to band together with your allies and go out there and do something. When children and adults alike pussy out of their duty to help get the kids' hands dirty with real-world experience, not too long after we'll see a generation of young adults whose personal growth has been too stunted to function as well as young adults used to when they entered college or the workforce with a history of working.
This stunted generation may not bring down the economy, but it won't sail as smoothly as if they'd been properly trained by the real world. And even if it did work just as well as before, there's the matter of giving meaning to young people's lives, independent of how much value they add to the economic pie. If the Millennials appear to be coasting through an existential drift, bereft of a passion for life, it's no surprise: they've been a lot more shielded from the stressors of real life throughout their development. Even during materially prosperous times, like the dangerous years of the 1960s through the '80s, kids still felt the urge to make something of themselves, and their parents encouraged them. It's a tough world out there, so they've got to learn. During safe times, this sense of urgency evaporates, kids remain insulated, and they don't develop that grab-the-world-by-the-balls attitude.
i mean, dude, i'll get around to that later. right now i'm busy kicking some noob's ass in halo, so leave me alone.
(This is true even of the 1950s, which were a safe decade. Most people falsely project the period from roughly 1958 to 1963 back onto the 1950s. But that was when rock music blew up, when Hitchcock made Psycho, and when The Sandlot is set. Those are all from wild, rising-crime times, not The Fifties. People make this mistake because the explosion of the late '60s had not happened yet, but the pre-counter-cultural days were still squarely within the post-'50s era of unsupervised wildness.)
Well, at the start I thought I'd have a chance to yak on about my second pre-teen job as a paperboy on a route that my best friend and I shared in middle school, but this has gotten pretty long, so maybe I'll save that for later.
August 11, 2010
Any area where young people live more dangerously than before?
I've been trying to think of some part of life where teenagers and young adults are bucking the overall trend toward greater short-term safety and (over-)protection that began in the early-mid 1990s. But I can't come up with any good counter-examples off the top of my head. Any ideas?
Actually, let me update that to include any greater exposure to the tougher aspects of real life. It's not just dangerous things that kids are more protected from than before, like violence and drug use, but also having a job, being in the Cub Scouts or Boy Scouts, or playing challenging video games (ones that are "Nintendo hard").
I emphasize short-term safety because I'm convinced that insulating yourself from the stressors of the real world here and now ultimately weakens and endangers your robustness to them. (See the afterword to the new paperback edition of Taleb's The Black Swan for more on this piece of lost wisdom.) Someone who has never gotten into a fight of any kind probably lives in a world where full-out brawls have become more rare -- but once he does encounter that obstacle, he'll come away much more banged up than someone who has had the occasional exposure to fights. Someone who has been shielded from interactions with exploiters probably lives in a world where these encounters are more rare -- but once they do meet an exploiter, they'll really get taken to the cleaners, like Little Red Riding Hood. The only cure for naivete is occasional exposure to real-world dangers.
Actually, let me update that to include any greater exposure to the tougher aspects of real life. It's not just dangerous things that kids are more protected from than before, like violence and drug use, but also having a job, being in the Cub Scouts or Boy Scouts, or playing challenging video games (ones that are "Nintendo hard").
I emphasize short-term safety because I'm convinced that insulating yourself from the stressors of the real world here and now ultimately weakens and endangers your robustness to them. (See the afterword to the new paperback edition of Taleb's The Black Swan for more on this piece of lost wisdom.) Someone who has never gotten into a fight of any kind probably lives in a world where full-out brawls have become more rare -- but once he does encounter that obstacle, he'll come away much more banged up than someone who has had the occasional exposure to fights. Someone who has been shielded from interactions with exploiters probably lives in a world where these encounters are more rare -- but once they do meet an exploiter, they'll really get taken to the cleaners, like Little Red Riding Hood. The only cure for naivete is occasional exposure to real-world dangers.
August 10, 2010
When music videos were narrative
I don't know where I stand on this whole "death of the word / rise of the image" debate, but after watching a bunch of old music videos, I was reminded by how important they found it to make the video tell some kind of story. Maybe it wouldn't treat the grand themes of the human condition, and maybe it wouldn't even make use of common folklore motifs (like "hero slays monster" or "stroke of luck enriches a thief"). Still, there was some narrative, however crude, that the song was meant to accompany.
Certainly not all videos used to be like that, but it was much more common than the approach of following the band around in some setting, with no action in particular required. Now people are not interested in music videos that tell a story -- neither the band, nor the director, nor the audience. "Uh, I think that'd be taking it a little too seriously," they'd protest in ironic detachment. Meanwhile, look at how overly visually ambitious a lot of the more recent videos are. It's fine to invest a lot of thought, time, and sweat into the video's images, just not the story that they might tell.
So perhaps there's something to this "death of the narrative" business after all. Just think -- even a medium that's primarily visual (supposedly) like music videos relied heavily on storytelling, much like a movie or TV show. When MTV launched, people were afraid that the videos would become total visual spectacles and crowd out the music. That didn't happen during MTV's hey-day, when they were more like brief stories set to music.
When did the shift occur? Like with so much else, it looks as though the wake of the larger early '90s social transition marked the end of narrative music videos. Here's a brief overview using representative videos from several periods. The spectacles "Here It Goes Again" from 2006 by OK Go and "Mo Money Mo Problems" from 1997 by the Notorious B.I.G. show where we've been for awhile. Rap videos used to avoid bling and blammo and focus on stories, even as late as 1993 with Dr. Dre's and Ice Cube's videos. Guns N' Roses was probably the last big rock band to make narrative videos, but Aerosmith kept them alive somewhat in the mid-'90s. Here's their earlier and better video for 1989's "Janie's Got a Gun." New Edition's 1986 video for their cover of "Earth Angel" features a classic folklore motif -- the kind girls who are rewarded and the mean girls who are punished when a lowly man reveals himself to have been high-status all along.
Actually, early MTV stuff sometimes just showed the band in some setting, before directors figured out what to do with the new medium. So Madonna had the spectacle-only video for "Lucky Star" but also a more narrative-based one for "Borderline," both from 1984. Duran Duran made a here's-the-band video for "Planet Earth" in 1981 (the year MTV was born), as well as a more story-filled one for "Hungry Like the Wolf" in 1982.
I'm not sure if this is a rising-crime vs. falling-crime difference, though I wouldn't be surprised. It's not "word vs. image" but "narrative vs. mere spectacle," of course. There were dazzling visuals in Aliens and The Terminator, but they were there to enhance the gripping narrative; people complain that more recent action and horror movies are only visual. Same with porn: earlier, the images were there to lay flesh on the bare bones of the narrative, whereas now it is story-free spectacle.
We'd have to go back farther in history to see if rises in the violence rate saw greater interest in compelling narratives. That's my impression anyways. The Elizbethan / Jacobean people and the Romantics had more fascinating stories than the Augustans or the Victorians, who seem more interested than the former groups in showing off their literary special effects. The Romantic era of course saw a surge in running around to collect folktales like the Brothers Grimm did. And the super-violent 14th C. gave us The Divine Comedy, The Decameron, and The Canterbury Tales, which wasn't matched even closely by look-how-clever-we-are Renaissance humanist writers of the 15th and most of the 16th centuries (that is, before the violence rate blew up again around 1580).
What's the connection? People working at the interface between evolutionary psychology and literary studies suggest that narratives help us navigate the world by letting us run a bunch of social experiments, of a sort, and gaining wisdom from their outcomes. This knowledge is worth more when the world looks a lot more dangerous, so the audience will demand more of it, and the culture-makers will boost their supply in response.
Certainly not all videos used to be like that, but it was much more common than the approach of following the band around in some setting, with no action in particular required. Now people are not interested in music videos that tell a story -- neither the band, nor the director, nor the audience. "Uh, I think that'd be taking it a little too seriously," they'd protest in ironic detachment. Meanwhile, look at how overly visually ambitious a lot of the more recent videos are. It's fine to invest a lot of thought, time, and sweat into the video's images, just not the story that they might tell.
So perhaps there's something to this "death of the narrative" business after all. Just think -- even a medium that's primarily visual (supposedly) like music videos relied heavily on storytelling, much like a movie or TV show. When MTV launched, people were afraid that the videos would become total visual spectacles and crowd out the music. That didn't happen during MTV's hey-day, when they were more like brief stories set to music.
When did the shift occur? Like with so much else, it looks as though the wake of the larger early '90s social transition marked the end of narrative music videos. Here's a brief overview using representative videos from several periods. The spectacles "Here It Goes Again" from 2006 by OK Go and "Mo Money Mo Problems" from 1997 by the Notorious B.I.G. show where we've been for awhile. Rap videos used to avoid bling and blammo and focus on stories, even as late as 1993 with Dr. Dre's and Ice Cube's videos. Guns N' Roses was probably the last big rock band to make narrative videos, but Aerosmith kept them alive somewhat in the mid-'90s. Here's their earlier and better video for 1989's "Janie's Got a Gun." New Edition's 1986 video for their cover of "Earth Angel" features a classic folklore motif -- the kind girls who are rewarded and the mean girls who are punished when a lowly man reveals himself to have been high-status all along.
Actually, early MTV stuff sometimes just showed the band in some setting, before directors figured out what to do with the new medium. So Madonna had the spectacle-only video for "Lucky Star" but also a more narrative-based one for "Borderline," both from 1984. Duran Duran made a here's-the-band video for "Planet Earth" in 1981 (the year MTV was born), as well as a more story-filled one for "Hungry Like the Wolf" in 1982.
I'm not sure if this is a rising-crime vs. falling-crime difference, though I wouldn't be surprised. It's not "word vs. image" but "narrative vs. mere spectacle," of course. There were dazzling visuals in Aliens and The Terminator, but they were there to enhance the gripping narrative; people complain that more recent action and horror movies are only visual. Same with porn: earlier, the images were there to lay flesh on the bare bones of the narrative, whereas now it is story-free spectacle.
We'd have to go back farther in history to see if rises in the violence rate saw greater interest in compelling narratives. That's my impression anyways. The Elizbethan / Jacobean people and the Romantics had more fascinating stories than the Augustans or the Victorians, who seem more interested than the former groups in showing off their literary special effects. The Romantic era of course saw a surge in running around to collect folktales like the Brothers Grimm did. And the super-violent 14th C. gave us The Divine Comedy, The Decameron, and The Canterbury Tales, which wasn't matched even closely by look-how-clever-we-are Renaissance humanist writers of the 15th and most of the 16th centuries (that is, before the violence rate blew up again around 1580).
What's the connection? People working at the interface between evolutionary psychology and literary studies suggest that narratives help us navigate the world by letting us run a bunch of social experiments, of a sort, and gaining wisdom from their outcomes. This knowledge is worth more when the world looks a lot more dangerous, so the audience will demand more of it, and the culture-makers will boost their supply in response.
Correcting the grammar Nazis: "illogical comparisons"
An earlier post on the rise of too-literal grammar Nazis during the 18th C, and the concomitant decline of cognitively flexible speakers, gave me the idea to get back to my linguistics roots and correct these self-proclaimed guardians of language whenever I notice something.
The previous example was plural subjects taking a singular verb when construed as a collective, which fell out of usage from the 18th C. onward. If a present-day Shakespeare tried to use this construction, he'd be pilloried by the dictionary dorks and would therefore probably keep his mouth shut in the first place. It doesn't matter that the sense is entirely understood by the audience -- it's simply illogical to have a plural subject take a singular verb. (I've also noticed that they could take singular pronouns as well in a collective context.)
Anytime you hear someone accuse another of committing a speech crime because something-or-other is "illogical," you know you're dealing with a Mr. Spock Aspie who just doesn't get people, can't read between the lines, and needs everything spelled out. Which leads us to our next example, whose name I didn't know at first, but through some googling found this grammar tutor who uses the apparently standard term "illogical comparisons." Here is the example he gives:
1. Skateboarding in New York, unlike California, is usually hampered by busy streets and crowded sidewalks.
He even admits that the meaning is 100% clear. We don't pause for a second and say to ourselves, "Huh, I kinda see what they meant, but it still sounds off in some way." This is a totally acceptable sentence in English, then. Ah, but not for the Nazis. You see, the words involved in the comparison are "skateboarding in New York" and "California" -- the first is an activity, the second a state of the U.S. Thus, comparing the two would be IL...LO...GI...CAL.
What these geeks fail to appreciate is the role of elision in human speech. We elide all kinds of unnecessary junk in our speech because the other person -- assuming they aren't Dr. Spock -- can read between the lines and fill it in with no error whatsoever. Take this example:
2. The boy Hayley kissed began to blush.
If we must be totally obvious about what we mean, we really need to supply a relative pronoun connecting "the boy" and the modifier "Hayley kissed" --
3. The boy who(m) / that Hayley kissed began to blush.
Yet sentence 3 is just fine in its more stripped-down form as sentence 2. This silencing of unneeded words is exactly what's going on in the so-called illogical comparisons. Obviously the speaker is not thinking about a contrast between an activity like skateboarding and a state like California, and obviously no listener would infer that. The Nazis' correction is something like this:
4. Skateboarding in New York, unlike skateboarding in California...
But who the hell needs all that extra words in there? It would be fine with just:
5. Skateboarding in New York, unlike in California...
Aha, they don't specifically mention "skateboarding" in California -- and they don't have to. They know it, and we get it. Take it just one step further by eliding "in" and you get the original, which is perfectly fine.
I think autistics and Aspies must not have existed before the 18th C. -- that's when we start to leave agriculture behind and move to market economies, where a more flexible mind becomes something of a cost, given how hyper-specialized your role in society becomes. The Age of Reason and the birth of grammar Nazis both stem from this change in people's genetic make-up. I think there must have been some profoundly Aspie people who really jarred on hearing "illogical comparisons." By affiliating with each other or merely spreading their confusion to others, their influence came to dominate and rules were written down about making language use more logical.
Most people learning these silly rules today realize that they make no sense and accept them as one of those annoying things-you-must-learn to impress your social superiors and colleagues with your writing style. Though most adherents of such rules know them to be baseless, they won't point out that the emperor is wearing no clothes -- if they squint for just a moment... yes, there it is! -- fabric after all! Following dogma isn't always bad, but here it is as though a mass of dieters were following the prescriptions of some guru who was 200 lbs overweight, couldn't move at all, had dessicated skin, and labored even to breathe.
Why would anyone treat language laws as scripture if they came from someone who couldn't even understand the speech of a normal 10 year-old child without having every last little assumption made overt? If you need that many hints about what someone means, you're too clueless to be giving us advice on how to make our meaning clear.
The previous example was plural subjects taking a singular verb when construed as a collective, which fell out of usage from the 18th C. onward. If a present-day Shakespeare tried to use this construction, he'd be pilloried by the dictionary dorks and would therefore probably keep his mouth shut in the first place. It doesn't matter that the sense is entirely understood by the audience -- it's simply illogical to have a plural subject take a singular verb. (I've also noticed that they could take singular pronouns as well in a collective context.)
Anytime you hear someone accuse another of committing a speech crime because something-or-other is "illogical," you know you're dealing with a Mr. Spock Aspie who just doesn't get people, can't read between the lines, and needs everything spelled out. Which leads us to our next example, whose name I didn't know at first, but through some googling found this grammar tutor who uses the apparently standard term "illogical comparisons." Here is the example he gives:
1. Skateboarding in New York, unlike California, is usually hampered by busy streets and crowded sidewalks.
He even admits that the meaning is 100% clear. We don't pause for a second and say to ourselves, "Huh, I kinda see what they meant, but it still sounds off in some way." This is a totally acceptable sentence in English, then. Ah, but not for the Nazis. You see, the words involved in the comparison are "skateboarding in New York" and "California" -- the first is an activity, the second a state of the U.S. Thus, comparing the two would be IL...LO...GI...CAL.
What these geeks fail to appreciate is the role of elision in human speech. We elide all kinds of unnecessary junk in our speech because the other person -- assuming they aren't Dr. Spock -- can read between the lines and fill it in with no error whatsoever. Take this example:
2. The boy Hayley kissed began to blush.
If we must be totally obvious about what we mean, we really need to supply a relative pronoun connecting "the boy" and the modifier "Hayley kissed" --
3. The boy who(m) / that Hayley kissed began to blush.
Yet sentence 3 is just fine in its more stripped-down form as sentence 2. This silencing of unneeded words is exactly what's going on in the so-called illogical comparisons. Obviously the speaker is not thinking about a contrast between an activity like skateboarding and a state like California, and obviously no listener would infer that. The Nazis' correction is something like this:
4. Skateboarding in New York, unlike skateboarding in California...
But who the hell needs all that extra words in there? It would be fine with just:
5. Skateboarding in New York, unlike in California...
Aha, they don't specifically mention "skateboarding" in California -- and they don't have to. They know it, and we get it. Take it just one step further by eliding "in" and you get the original, which is perfectly fine.
I think autistics and Aspies must not have existed before the 18th C. -- that's when we start to leave agriculture behind and move to market economies, where a more flexible mind becomes something of a cost, given how hyper-specialized your role in society becomes. The Age of Reason and the birth of grammar Nazis both stem from this change in people's genetic make-up. I think there must have been some profoundly Aspie people who really jarred on hearing "illogical comparisons." By affiliating with each other or merely spreading their confusion to others, their influence came to dominate and rules were written down about making language use more logical.
Most people learning these silly rules today realize that they make no sense and accept them as one of those annoying things-you-must-learn to impress your social superiors and colleagues with your writing style. Though most adherents of such rules know them to be baseless, they won't point out that the emperor is wearing no clothes -- if they squint for just a moment... yes, there it is! -- fabric after all! Following dogma isn't always bad, but here it is as though a mass of dieters were following the prescriptions of some guru who was 200 lbs overweight, couldn't move at all, had dessicated skin, and labored even to breathe.
Why would anyone treat language laws as scripture if they came from someone who couldn't even understand the speech of a normal 10 year-old child without having every last little assumption made overt? If you need that many hints about what someone means, you're too clueless to be giving us advice on how to make our meaning clear.
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