Art music vs. popular music

After looking through the relevant Wikipedia pages and some cursory googling, I noticed that there isn't a common understanding among people who study music -- whether musicologists, sociologists, philosophers, or whoever -- about what the difference is between art music and popular music. (I'm viewing "folk / traditional music" as popular music that has survived a long time, become an ethnic marker, etc.)

I don't claim this is an original idea at all, because it's too common-sense not to have been put forward by someone (although you never know with the "thinking class"). The basic difference is that popular music makes you want to move your body along with it, whereas art music does not, appealing instead to the emotions only. A Bach fugue possesses your mind so much that you feel almost paralyzed.

Those are idealizations obviously -- some popular music like Bob Dylan does not try to take over your body, and there are some moments in Western classical music where you feel like you're at a pep rally, such as the Turkish style military march in the final movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. (And please don't labor to argue that the "dance" music from the Classical period is first-rate body-moving music. That was not its specialty.)

There is also variation among individuals -- some people are more overtaken emotionally by Schubert than are others, and some people are less able than others to sit still when "Another One Bites the Dust" starts playing.

And of course some music-makers are better at their craft than others -- Beethoven thunders more mind-possessing sounds through the listener than does Haydn, and Billy Idol gets your body pumping and jumping more than The Doors do. And certainly which emotions are targeted by the art composers, and in what way the pop musicians try to get your body to move, vary across artists and their works, but that split in the broad approach remains.

What are the components of this difference? Mostly it is how heavily the rhythm is emphasized, and not just how strongly the strong beats are heard but how prominently the entire rhythmic structure comes through, including syncopation. Following from that, popular music makes much more extensive use of percussion and plucked bass instruments, since the more voice-like durations of woodwinds, brass, and strings instruments (to pick from Western art music) are not brief and crisp enough to be heard as discrete pulses that establish a rhythm.

A good theory explains a lot with little. The emotional vs. motional focus accounts for all Western art vs. popular music, all the way from late Medieval polyphony through Bach through Terry Riley, and from Scott Joplin through Elvis through Madonna. Think of how much the various art music works differ among themselves -- and yet none of them make you want to get up and move. That reached its extreme limit in John Cage's silent 4'33" (well, maybe you wanted to get up and leave, but not rhythmically). Likewise, think of how different the popular music of just the 20th century sounds -- and yet it all is trying to get you to tap your foot, drum with your fingers, snap, and hopefully move your whole body while dancing.

Why haven't the famous thinkers on this topic noticed the obvious? And more importantly, why haven't their readers stopped them and pointed out how silly their attempts are? (For example, the mere restatement that art music appeals to an elite, while popular music appeals to the masses / working class.) It must be that professional thinkers, at least in the modern age, are drawn from the part of the population that has two left feet, that has a tin ear for dance music. Not that they haven't received formal dance instruction. Nobody dances like that to popular music most of the time anyway. Their bodies just do not respond with that sense of possession by the spirit of the sounds. That's why Serious Music Thinkers revile popular music that's specifically made for dancing the most, e.g. disco and synth pop.

In fact, this generalizes to their lack of kinesthetic "intelligence" more broadly, as intellectuals were also last to be picked in gym class as children, and today are in the worst shape within their socioeconomic class. And it's not some handicap of having above-average IQ -- if you got a bunch of doctors, lawyers, and businessmen together, they could probably come up with the right answer pretty quickly, assuming they had had a basic exposure to both approaches to music. These are the smart people who can keep their balance and lift things. It's always important to distinguish between smart people and nerds.

This might also explain why most dancing scenes in movies come off as hokey or forced. The writer and director are probably more of the thinking-and-feeling type than the moving-and-socializing type, so it's hard for them to know intuitively what the carnivalesque dance club experience should feel like. The verisimilitude of Last Days of Disco is the only exception that springs to mind (and I say that as someone who was an infant in "the very early 1980s"). In addition to his lack of caricature, which only an outsider who didn't get it would have employed, Whit Stillman must have provoked further toe-curling and sputtering among serious expert thinkers by speaking good words about synth pop as well (from here):

By the time I was really getting into [disco], I felt it was gonna go on and on. I didn't have to go that much because it'd still be around. By the time I got around to going more, it was all disappearing. And it went really quickly. I think that dance music came back in a nice way around '83 or '84. There was Boy George, Cyndi Lauper, Madonna. A lot of pop music that was fun. But the places weren't the same. There was no longer that mix that everyone went to.

If the lower classes get bored from art music's attempt to only tap into the emotional centers of their brain, the professional classes -- at least officially -- have a suspicious and even disdainful view of music that tries to engage and perhaps over-ride control of their body. Hence the elite respectability of popular genres such as folk, indie, and freer and less danceable jazz styles. (This is just about all they play in Starbucks, with the welcome interruption from reggae.) That explains why art music flourished during the Renaissance and after -- that's when the elite began to become characterized more by restraint and sobriety, a shift that has lasted through today. That is why body-moving music appeals more to a popular than an elite audience.

There has always been a strong teetotaler current within well-to-do American culture, regardless of political views. In fact, the liberal left is perhaps more puritanically scornful of body-moving music than the fundie right citizens who outlaw public dancing. They may not have tried to regulate it out of existence, but they go much farther in demonizing not just the music itself but the people who it appeals to -- escapist, apolitical, trivial, brainless, etc. (unlike the confrontational, grand, and genius Ubermenschen who dig The Beatles, Tori Amos, and Arcade Fire). At least the beat-banners acknowledge the listeners' basic humanity, if only to stress our susceptibility to music that will weaken our inhibitions and tend to lead us to sin.

It was not too hard for John Lithgow to give a humanizing portrayal of the dance-outlawing reverend in Footloose, but it would be impossible for anyone to give a sympathetic performance of some contemptuous indie dork from the Onion A.V. Club or an earnest left-liberal critic of this opiate of the masses.

Midgets in music videos

I won't pad this one out by detailing how it fits into the framework of violence levels affecting the culture. Briefly, rising violence rates cause people to be more curious about the dark parts of human life that they were unaware of during safer times, so that culture-makers will focus more on the grotesque in periods of rising crime. One of the most visible examples for them to notice and incorporate into their works are dwarves.

Near the end of the early 20th C. wave of violence, the 1932 movie Freaks popularized the sideshow midget to those audiences who'd never been to a freak show in real life before. During the last wave of violence, there were a good number of movies featuring dwarves as an example of a not-quite-human species -- Fellini movies, Time Bandits, Willow, Labyrinth, the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, and many others. Once crime began falling after 1992, these portrayals of dwarves gave way to the view that they were just like everyone else, just much shorter -- the Mickey character on Seinfeld, Mini Me in the Austin Powers movies, and Wee-Man from the Jackass TV show and movies.

But in the medium of the music video, it looks like they're hardly there anymore. I couldn't find a "list of music videos with midgets" anywhere, so I figured I might as well start one here. If you're aware of any others, especially ones from after 1992 that would be counter-examples to the "part of the normal world" portrayal of the past 20 years, leave a comment. But only for groups who were at all popular, or else it doesn't tell us that it catered to a somewhat mainstream audience.

"Little Girls" by Oingo Boingo (1981)

"Sex Dwarf" by Soft Cell (1981)

"Safety Dance" by Men Without Hats (1982)

"(Oh) Pretty Woman" by Van Halen (1982)

"When the Lights Go Out" by Naked Eyes (1983)

"Stonehenge" by Spinal Tap (1984)

"All I Want is You" by U2 (1988)

"Preacher Man" by Bananarama (1990)

"I Left My Wallet in El Segundo" by A Tribe Called Quest (1990)

"The Bad Touch" by Bloodhound Gang (1999)

"Man Overboard" by Blink-182 (2000)

"From tha Chuuuch to da Palace" by Snoop Dogg (2002)

The gay mind as an addict's mind, sweet-tooth edition

The dangers of a state as influential as New York legalizing gay marriage are the primary effect of allowing a bunch of people with an addict's brain to indulge their addictions without shame, and a secondary effect of sending the signal to the broader non-gay society that abandoning yourself completely to your vices is A-OK. If consenting adults want to destroy themselves and the wider society, then who are we to infringe on their liberty?

In an earlier post I walked through some of the basic logic behind why homosexuals are so self-destructive, and how this can spill over into polluting the majority non-homo population too. The main point was that they do not benefit from the negative feedback loop that straight people do, where a man's and a woman's interests are often at odds with each other, which leads them to develop a sense of compromise, some degree of restraint (that is, in anticipation, before the indulgence could even escalate into a quarrel), and trust -- you wouldn't let just any old person dampen your desires. It has to be someone you trust, so that you feel they aren't just clamping down to enjoy a power trip, but because they care about you.

Rather, gays and lesbians are locked into a feedback loop that is, er, positive, so that their relationships are marred by stubbornness, libertinage, and suspicion. When one male (or female) desire reinforces and encourages another, these desires spiral out of control rather than heal back to a healthy moderate level. That alone is reason enough to discourage gays and lesbians from coming out, being proud, and having relationships with each other. It would be better for themselves and others if they had their tendency toward sin kept in check either by self-discipline or by socializing with people who would look on gay or lesbian behavior as shameful, and so around whom the homosexual would not even go there behaviorally, in order to avoid their discouraging looks in the first place.

You wouldn't let a drunk hang out with other shameless alcoholic enablers, so why would you want a gay or a lesbian to suffer the fate of having no one in their social circle who gave a shit about that person's well-being, who only felt like encouraging their destructive behavior?

This brings up the second reason to nudge homosexuals to keep a lid on their urges -- namely, that at least for gays, these baseline urges are far more in the direction of an addict's than a normal person's. So by sending the signal that gays can do whatever they want (the symbolic message behind legalizing gay marriage, as few will actually make use of their "right"), there is a multiplicative or compounding effect. The "it's OK" to letting themselves get trapped on the positive feedback loop interacts with an already dangerously addict-like level of destructive urges.

This is why when society gives license to straights to do as they want sexually, the outcome is not so dire -- straight people do not have those addict-like urges to begin with, whereas gays do. Of course, most of the coalition of The Preachy and The Gushy, lacking curiosity about how the world works, have never spent any time inside the world of homos to be aware of this uniquely gay danger.

Rather than re-hash all of the well-documented examples of how gays are more prone to harmful addictions, I thought I'd try to sketch out a new one -- are they more sugar-holic than straight men? Empty carbohydrates, being mostly unavailable in even moderate amounts throughout our species' history, were used only as an emergency food until real food could be found. So you might wake up and eat a handful of berries before someone brought down a giraffe or made butter out of cow's milk.

Fat is satiating because that's what our body needs, so eating it provides negative feedback to your hunger centers -- hey, that's a pound of bacon and four eggs, you can stop eating now. Digestible carbs (starches and sugars) are not the goal for our body, just a stop-gap solution to hunger, so they provide a positive feedback -- well, that jelly on toast was OK, but now that glucose is all burned through and we still haven't taken in any fat yet, so go out there and try again to get real food. This is why eating anything but a low-carb diet causes you frequent hunger pangs throughout the day, and makes you feel like snacking, whereas someone eating mostly fat and little carbs can easily live on two or two-and-a-half meals a day with no snacking and no hunger.

Unfortunately there are no studies bearing directly on this topic, but there are some findings from peer-reviewed journals, plus some qualitative fieldwork, which suggest that gays are in fact more prone to carb cravings and sugar addiction in particular.

First, here is a review article on diabetes in the homosexual population, noting that there are no studies that have attempted to estimate its prevalence, but drawing up a long list of risk-factors for diabetes that are particularly prevalent among gays and/or lesbians. Scroll down to "Unique LGBT Risk Factors." Most of the list recapitulates the various addictions that gays indulge in far more so than straights do, such as cigarette smoking and illegal drug use. Note that these destructive behaviors cannot be blamed on an "extreme male mind," as though straight men would use hard drugs just as frequently if only they didn't have to deal with women. Even without the harmful, compounding effect of the gays' lack of a negative feedback loop, they would already start with much more addict-like desires.

The list does mention, though, that lesbians are more likely than straight women to be overweight and obese, to drink heavily (and most drink beer, which is full of empty carbs that give you a beer belly), and to have Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (these women usually have other metabolic disorders). This is not the strongest evidence that lesbians have more addiction-prone brains, since the lack-of-negative-feedback story suffices here. That is, without having to please the male desire for a slim figure, lesbians don't mind letting their looks go to hell as the result of eating two pizzas, a six-pack of beer, and a couple pints of ice cream while they watch the WNBA game instead of making out or having sex.

However, it also says that "Diabetes rates among men receiving HIV treatment are four times that of HIV-negative men." Since HIV is mostly a gay disease, this tells us indirectly about the greater prevalence of diabetes among gay compared to straight men. Still, because it's in the context of already having HIV plus taking who knows how many medicines for it, it's not clear that the greater tendency toward diabetes stems from a greater indulgence in carbs among gays. It is at least consistent with that idea, though.

I also could not find any academic studies on how diets differ between gays, lesbians, and straights. Luckily the General Social Survey asked a question about whether the respondent was a vegetarian to varying degrees (NOMEAT). There are three different questions that split men into gays and straights (SEXSEX, SEXSEX5, and NUMMEN). No matter which of the three we use, straights are less likely to be vegetarian to any degree: 22% vs. 34%, 24% vs. 40%, or 23% vs. 33%. Lacking the fat that comes from animal products, vegetarians end up relying more on carbs to give them energy, and not by eating a cellar full of celery but by scarfing down heaps of grains, pulses, legumes, and fruit, all of which are loaded with starch and sugar. Admittedly this doesn't show that gays crave the stuff more to begin with; perhaps their social circles are more susceptible to silly fads like vegetarianism.

Now we turn to a more raw look at the food-related cravings straight from the queer's own mind, without the filter of some bureaucratic agency not funding a study that wanted to see whether gays and straights ate the same things in the same proportions, and without the whitewashing that straight blowhards use to prevent curious people from seeing anything that might be there -- "there are no gay foods, only gay people who eat food."

On the first page of a google search for "gay men" and "food," I found a very NSFW tumblr account called "fuck yeah gay men & food". It's six pages of homoerotic pictures with food photoshopped in. Interestingly, there's only one meat-filled picture, which features burlier looking guys. Just ballparking it, I'd say about 30% of the food items are savory starches like pasta, and 70% are sugar-dripping sweets. They don't have carrots, cucumbers, sausages, beefcakes, or other ironic foods that a straight guy would have chosen for yucks. Rather, the food that possesses a gay man's mind when thinking about indulging his other vices is sugar, sugar, and more sugar.

And it's not the kind of sweets that feature in hetero food-and-chicks pictures, where it's more utilitarian. For example, there might be a dollop of whipped cream meant to be licked off of her nipple, as part of the entire single experience you're imagining. The pictures at the tumblr page are more of an association of two things that are equally orgasmic -- Lucky Charms cereal, say, and naked dudes -- but that are not supposed to be taken as part of a single experience. If straight guys were to associate orgasmic food with naked girls, they wouldn't focus so much on sweets but Brazilian barbeque, steaks dripping with butter, triple bacon cheeseburgers, etc. The minority of carby foods would all be savory and still have lots of animal fat, like potato skins. So I think that collection of pictures really does say something about the greater sweet tooth that gays have compared to straights.

Moving on to drinks, here is a lengthy gab session from a gay fitness forum on what they order at Starbucks. It's all the fruitier stuff like mochas and lattes, or going further by adding syrup, sugar, or other sweeteners. I only counted one who would even go for a cappuccino, although there are a few who like their espresso...straight. Considering that these are gays who are supposed to be health-conscious, you can imagine how much of a sweet-tooth the non-gym-rat gays must have. Great quote from the one sane gay of the bunch:

I find it astonishing how so many supposedly health-conscious men have deluded themselves into believing that they aren't sugar-phobic candy addicts with obviously little-or-no liking for the flavour of coffee.

How is it possible to have a taste for blended cake-mixes and still think that its not so bad just because the sweeteners have snazzy trademarked names? – like the calories in one teaspoon of sugar were ever the real enemy.

Why not just swear off sweets then and shrug off such "effeminacies"? – as my father would say.

Contrast that to this one trying to defend his preference for sissy drinks:

Also, I am not in the least embarrassed to say that I don't like pure, unadulterated coffee. I want hazelnut, cream and some sweetener even if it means calories. There's a snobbery attached to this as though liking black coffee is an accomplishment deserving of a badge. Liking black coffee, just like smoking and drinking straight whiskey, doesn't make you deeper, smarter, more sophisticated or more worldly. It's just a different taste.

Sounds like it's too late for you to get deeper or smarter, but it would put some hair back on your waxed faglet chest. Observe what the lack-of-shame culture leads to -- they aren't going to indulge themselves more just within the realm of sexual behavior. Rather, that mindset will generalize to include sucking down sugar all day because, hey, it's just a different taste, like the taste for buttsex.

Speaking of girly drinks, how about booze? The stereotype is that women and gays dig the ones with lots of sugar to mask the taste of alcohol, just as the sweeteners mask the taste of coffee. Two groups of journalists visited local bars to see what the consensus was about gay drinks, and they confirm the greater sweet tooth of gays when it comes time to get drunk. Here is one from gothamist, who hit up New York bars, and here is a similar report from Halifax, which shows that it isn't some uniquely American aspect of gay culture. It's not as though they ignore beer entirely in favor of mango-tinis, but the fact that such a larger fraction of gays prefer girly drinks tells us that on average they have a more powerful craving for sugar than straight men do.

None of these examples are best explained by the lack of negative feedback that characterizes gay life -- as though straight men, when shielded from the influence of women, would be as likely as gays to eat vegetarian meals, orgasm while dreaming of parfaits, take swigs from a gingerbread latte, or nurse a cocktail charmingly called a Rim Job. Instead it looks like gay men really do have a stronger compulsion to suck down addictive sugar, rather than fill up on ewwww icky animal fat.

Placing this in the larger list of gay impulsiveness, it seems like their minds are more addict-like to begin with, even without the harmful positive feedback loop that they trap themselves into by coming out and socializing with and banging other gays. Thus, sending the signal that it's OK to indulge your every fantasy is especially dangerous for gays. These quasi-addicts need more than straights to be discouraged from surrendering to desire. For us, the urge to indulge is less frequent, and giving in even less frequent. We won't be so degraded if someone tells us "Oh just go for it!" because we take that to mean occasionally. Gays, however, will be destroyed by following that call. Only a bunch of morons insulated from the reality of gay life would cheer such self-destruction along so credulously and merrily.

It took the plague of AIDS to peel open the dazed eyes of the gay community and made them take fewer sex partners. And yet condom use is down by 6% among New York City gays from 2007 to 2009. So this broad support for letting them do whatever they want could not have come at a worse time, when the memory of AIDS has apparently just begun to fade, and its hard lessons along with it.

When phone calls could be trance-inducing

Via Steve Sailer, here's an article from last year by Virginia Heffernan, mourning the analog phone call. She explores how the changes in engineering have disrupted the intimacy of the phone calling culture, for example the more frequent dropped calls, the chewed-up sound quality, and with tiny handsets the vanishing of "the awesomely strange sensation, via the mouth- and earpieces, of being inside someone else's accent, intonations and sighs, ear canal and larynx and lungs."

What was it about analog phones that allowed a conversation to last "hours upon dazed hours," that's missing in the digital age? It's not just the fact that people don't call each other anymore, or that the dazed feeling had simply beeen transferred to the realm of texting. No one gets mentally lost for hours in texting -- it is the choppiest and most attention-requiring form of communication ever invented. There's something about cell phones that won't let you lose your self-consciousness.

For all the reasons she goes over in the article, digital voice calling breaks the feeling of intimacy needed in order to shut off your mental spotlight and just go with the flow in a conversation with someone you trust. On top of that, though, is a basic ergonomic factor -- namely, how damn uncomfortable it is to hold a cell phone next to your head for more than ten minutes. The pinnacle of common phones, the Conair Phone, offered a handset designed to be cradled by the human hand, that could be supported between the ear and shoulder if you needed your hands free for a moment, and that could still fit snugly next to your mouth and ear when you were laying down and not even holding it at all, only letting it rest on the bed or pillow.

Other analog phone handsets, like the barbell-shaped ones, let you grip them, but that is still tenser than cradling. And because of the barbell shape, they wanted to flop with the mouth and earpiece pointing down, so you had to apply a little extra pressure to hold it the right way. But that's just hairsplitting.

Cell phones, however, hurt the hand if you talk for awhile. The rounder-shaped and larger-sized smart phones can be cradled more so than the earlier microscopic and razor-slim cell phones, where you had to squeeze its sides with your fingertips, an incredibly tense pose for the hand. But they still don't take up enough space to be supported only by cradling; squeezing and gripping is still necessary. And because of how thin they are, you find yourself flexing out the palm-side of your lowest knuckles to prop it up better. You also tire from having to hold it higher up than the analog handset, which most people held near the mouthpiece, and you can't support it on your shoulder or when lying down. It's not painful, but these many little inconveniences make it harder to just blank out your mind when talking.

Texting is even less suitable. The utter irregularity of exchanges prevents a rhythmic alternation between partners, or even of a steady stream from one of them while the other listens for awhile. It is like trying to dance along to the on-again / off-again racket of construction on the street outside. And texting allows everyone to indulge their inner upper-hand-gainer and leave a text unanswered for awhile, in order to appear like you have more to do in that instant than just check your Facebook again. This adversarial striving for dominance may have its place in the beginning of a relationship, to determine at the outset who is less desperate to reply to texts than the other. But once a relationship has been cemented, constantly playing petty games like this erodes trust.

During analog phone calls, there was no contest to see who could wait the longest before responding to what the other said, since you couldn't pretend to be occupied with something else -- you were giving them more or less all of that span of time. When you're texting with someone, though, you assume that they're doing all sorts of other things in between responses, which totally kills the vibe of two people trying to connect, whatever wonders it may work for making plans, getting information, etc.

Not being a girl, I never used to walk around the house with a phone attached to the side of my face. But I still miss the analog phone culture. Long phone calls were still needed to maintain the bonds of friendship between guys, although there wasn't a whole lot of yakking -- it was like hanging out on their couch, not really gossiping or having to say much, but just making a costly display of your commitment to the friendship. Sometimes my friends and I would just tune into the same TV show and watch it together over the phone, only speaking here and there if something was funny, painfully stupid, and so on. And occasionally there are times when you need to help one of your buddies through something, or they have to help you, and how could you let go and lay it all out there without a sense of trust and turning off your self-consciousness?

Then there were phone calls with girls. I don't remember making a habit of talking for long stretches over the phone with my girlfriends -- why not just meet and talk face-to-face? But sometimes it was impossible or inconvenient to see them, and a nice long phone call could still allow you two to drift out of conscious awareness together. You don't enter (or exit?) that mental state with just any old person -- sharing that experience proves to the other that you trust them enough to dial down your self-monitoring, and they prove the same to you. Only in adversarial or at-arm's-length interactions do you really police what you say.

And of course what better practice was there for the test of calling the girlfriend than talking to your chick friends over the phone? I only had about three who I called at all, but one was pretty close, and we could easily leave the rest of the world behind for a couple hours talking about who cares what. This experience through phone calls is more important in guy-girl friendships because hanging out in-person is less common there than if it's two guys or two girls. And the trust created is especially needed when the friends are boy and girl, given the justified suspicion girls have that their guy friends may be trying to get them in bed.

On a side note, one of a teenage girl's most important ways of establishing trust and warmth on her side is to giggle and laugh, and those sounds just do not come through in digital. If pieces of speech go missing through poor sound quality, we can reliably go back and fill them in to recover the meaning. But a giggle does not have some specific meaning like a word does -- it's more like the reflex girls have where they reach out and touch your arm to heighten your closeness. Having her variety of non-speech sounds garbled by cell phones is like being touched by some phantom hand of hers that was only partly there.

Although its role is minor, the disappearance of analog phones probably contributes to the very lukewarm emotions and even suspicions that Millennial boys and girls have toward each other, whether in the area of dating or just friendship.

This raises an interesting question -- if the cell phone technology as it exists today and at today's real prices had existed back in 1984 when Virginia Heffernan was lost in the phone culture, would anyone have bothered with them to the extent they do today? I'm sure they would've kept them for emergencies, and used texting for making concrete plans and asking specific pressing questions. But people were more social, trusting, and uninhibited back then, so I doubt they would've allowed cell phones to replace analog phones. (The same goes for internet usage.) Perhaps only once people's mindsets had already shifted in a more sheltered, suspicious, and self-conscious direction could cell phones have taken over rather than complemented analog phones.

The three classes of conservatives, their origins, and their futures

Nassim Taleb has a uniquely helpful way of categorizing people and institutions based on how they are affected by shocks, whether in some physical sense (like if they take a fall, do they break a bone or get stronger) or in an epistemic sense (like if some piece of their worldview is wrong, do they collapse or grow). See his easily readable presentation here, and check out his blog for more detailed examples.

His three classes are "fragile," "robust," and "anti-fragile." When given an unexpected shock, fragile things tend to break, robust things tend to heal back to where they were before, while anti-fragile things actually grow stronger from the shock.

We can use this lens to distinguish between groups who all call themselves "conservative" but in fact differ fundamentally.

The fragile conservative is the helicopter parent type: they prefer a system that is so shielded from risk that it becomes weak and unable to withstand life's inevitable shocks. That creates a positive feedback loop, as the mother of an incredibly frail and sickly child instinctively tries to shield it even further, until the kid is incapable of performing basic life functions on its own, and is hooked up to a clutter of machines. Their motto is, "You can never be too worried."

The robust conservative is the traditionalist type: they prefer a system that has withstood the test of time, or more specifically it has passed a survival test among rival systems. As long as you don't really whack it over the head, it'll heal itself. The aversion to blind trial-and-error limits the amount of further progress that could be made, but they are fine with that because the system can only heal itself up to a certain level of injury before breaking, and discovering exactly where that threshold lies is not worth the risk of blowing up society. Their motto is, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" (though they would never use those exact words).

The anti-fragile conservative is the hillbilly (not redneck) type: they prefer a system, never explicitly detailed, that not only withstands shocks but benefits from a good deal of rambunctiousness. They are too restless to sit through yet another generation of the same ol', same ol' and want to tinker around with things to see if something better can be done. It is not radically experimental, which would be like a genetic mutation rate that was so high it prevented parents from faithfully passing on fitter genes to their offspring. Nor is it experimental for its own sake -- only to discover better adaptations. Their motto is, "It may taste like shit, but it'll put hair on your chest."

Taleb already applied the taxonomy to modes of subsistence, but there's more to add. The fragile conservative is a product of single-crop agriculture or modern market economies, and their prototypical ethnic group today is the Ashkenazi Jews, forced into and adapted to a managerial niche in Central and Eastern Europe.

The robust conservative is a product of diversified agriculture -- not that there might not be a dominant, staple crop, but there is still a web of other crops to fall back on if one gets struck. Being more robust, these tend to be larger and more enduring farming societies, and their prototypical ethnic groups are the Han Chinese in Asia and a good deal of the French and Germans in Europe. The hunter-gatherers would probably have produced these kinds of conservatives, but their way of life was not robust enough to withstand the incursions of horticulturalists, agriculturalists, and pastoralists.

The anti-fragile conservative is not a hunter-gatherer, as their way of earning a living does not have the risk/reward set-up that allows for really huge pay-offs. Instead, they are a product of nomadic pastoralism, and also of groups with mixed agriculture and pastoralism. In such societies, after a string of unsuccessful raids, a herdsman may run off with dozens or hundreds of a rival's livestock, increasing by orders of magnitude his pre-existing stock. (The large amount of meat brought down by a hunter who kills a giraffe cannot be stored as flocks of animals can be.) Their prototypical ethnic groups are the Near Eastern Semites (for purer pastoralism), along with the races from the hilly and mountainous parts of Europe such as the Scottish and Italians (for agro-pastoralism).

Taleb points out that the fragile systems are doomed, and indeed the long history of monoculture farming and the brief but disturbing history of hyper-specialized capitalism seem to confirm that. Entire ways of living that were robust have nevertheless nearly vanished, such as hunting and gathering.

Most of history has been a contest between larger and more diversified, though more static, farming societies vs. smaller and even more diversified, and far more dynamic, herding societies. Depending on exactly what window you choose, either one could be seen as having the upper hand. However, the most genetically prolific man in history was Genghiz Khan from the pastoralist Mongols. Niall of the Nine Hostages in agro-pastoralist Ireland ranks among the most prolific too. Genes for digesting lactose have spread across much of the globe thanks to milk-drinking pastoralists. And culturally, by far the most dominant language family is Indo-European, which was spread by an initially tiny group of agro-pastoralists, while the dominant religions are the three monotheisms originating from pastoralist tribes of the Ancient and Medieval Middle East, perhaps with a mixture of pagan Proto-Indo-European mythology. Rock music took the world by storm, and it was cooked up by Scotch-Irish hillbillies and Britons with noticeably non-Anglo surnames like McCartney, Lennon, McCulloch, Jones, etc.

So while large and diversified agriculture has not disappeared, it does look like the future lies with a society that is more pastoralist in character -- smaller in scale, less crowded in density, diversified, offering rare but fantastically high pay-offs, stewardship of the environment, treating animals with dignity instead of as beasts of burden, frequent social interaction, lively music and dancing, a culture of honor and hospitality, warmhearted and good-looking girls... and you get the idea. Again I ask, is Australia the country of the future?

How hard do you have to strike back to restore order?

During the Vancouver riots, some skater faggots were beating up on a car, when a community defender walked in and started getting in the way, lecturing them about how they shouldn't treat "our" city that way, and so on. Within a minute or so, the whole group of them, including some onlooker friends who made empty threats with their skateboards, walked off.

Even this tiny display of "you won't get away with this" sent them away because the cost to the vandals had been zero -- the cops were doing nothing, and all pedestrians either walked right by without trying to shame them, or took pictures that made the vandals get a rush from feeling famous. The guy who stepped in imposed a small cost, and boom -- they weren't willing to pay even that much to pretend to be badasses.

Obviously a gang of bank-robbers is highly committed and prepared to pay pretty dearly in order to run off with so much money. But disturbances like that are so rare compared to the low-level, everyday stunts that losers and sociopaths try to pull, and these can be shut down by imposing small costs on those who are only misbehaving because they believe that they can do so for free. Because these are so much more common, standing up in these ordinary situations goes a long way to making the community more enjoyable, if enough people chip in.

Three personal examples from the past month. Please add your own in the comments.

- At '80s night I saw a fat, gray-haired man in his 50s or 60s who I recognized from three years ago, when he was standing on the dance floor just looking the college girls up and down, totally creeping them out. He was incredibly tense, clearly aware that he shouldn't be there but hoping he wouldn't suffer any embarrassment. Back then, there were some college guys on the stage behind him who started rubbing his hair and doing pelvis thrusts behind his head, and that made him nervous enough that he left. I hadn't seen him again until last week.

I only caught sight of him as he was leaving the dance floor for the outside patio, but that gave me enough time to stop my dance on stage, crouch down and give him some good strong pats on the shoulder, look him dead in the eye, and wave while saying "Hi." This makes the person feel compelled to wave and say "Hi" back, so now he had acknowledged that someone was watching him and was onto him. He must've left or hidden somewhere else in the club (maybe the bar where adults go), because I didn't see him for the rest of the night. It only takes one sicko like that to ruin everybody's fun.

- I'm walking toward the supermarket entrance, about 15 feet away, when some young punk comes out of the doors, makes eye contact with me for a second, then walks full speed right at me with his head down, pretending to futz around with his pack of cigarettes. He's very on-edge (he looks like he's on drugs) and almost running. No one else is around, so it's not like he's heading toward me to avoid foot traffic -- he is targeting me. I have no idea what made him want to run into me -- maybe to run some kind of scam ("hey, that guy knocked into me!"), maybe just for kicks. Most people would just step aside and either mutter under their breath or at most shout back at him "watch where you're going!" after he'd already passed.

I picked up the pace myself and braced for impact, turning my left shoulder into his chest and using my left upper arm to shove him away to my left side -- and goddamn if the little shit didn't take a hard fall onto the pavement. Like all sociopaths, he then tried to blame the victim -- "duuude, what was that for?" and "duuude, why the hell did you do that?" -- while kneeling to pick up the pack of cigarettes that I'd sent flying.

I can't remember the last time I collided with someone -- or something -- so hard, but I steeled myself and wasn't even thrown off-balance (though my leg muscles began shaking like crazy to prepare me to chase him down). I just gave him a cold stare, told him to "come here then" and made that motion with my hand, but he kept at his crocodile tears act.

When I went inside, one of the cashiers (a middle-aged woman) walked up to me and said jokingly, "Gee, why did you run into him like that?" I said, "yeah, probably trying to hit me up for something." She said, "Haha, no, I saw him, he was trying to knock you over." I wonder how many times he's pulled that stunt on other people and gotten away with it because they didn't want to make a scene? I don't even want to imagine what sick things he's tried to do to girls walking alone. Now that little meth-mouth will think twice.

- Then there was one of those annoying Critical Mass type of bike rides where the police block off traffic on two busy streets just so a bunch of sanctimonious pedal-pansies can hog the road -- er, "reclaim the streets." I was on foot, and the cops were only redirecting cars, not pedestrians. So when I got the walk signal, I began into the crosswalk, with the bike riders coming in my direction but then turning onto the street that I am crossing.

Since the cops are doing nothing, and since I have the walk signal, I figure some of them will stop, the way that a lane of right-turning cars will stop to let the pedestrian through. No chance -- even as I came to within 10 feet of their stream, no one stopped. OK, fuck this, I'm just going to barge through these selfish assholes and if someone hits me, I'll get in however many punches and kicks before the cops come over to break it up. Only when I'm within 5 feet do they start to slow down and go around me, six entire seconds of their trip stolen.

One whines, "Way to care about other people!" -- the hypocrisy of that almost sent me after him. Jesus Christ, car drivers are a hundred times more courteous to pedestrians -- at least they stop. It's clear that the bike riders only care about themselves, not walkers too. A second guy complains, "Um, you're kind of a dipshit" in that flaccid "seriously, guys? seriously?" way. Without screaming, I bellowed out "Fuck off, retard." He turned his head back and had one of those "omigod, i mean did he like just say that?" puzzled smiles. I told him to "come over here then" and made that hand motion. He resumed his course, I bellowed out "Pussyyyyyyy!", he still did nothing, and that was that.

None of the three cops at the intersection approached me, so I certainly was not in the wrong. It's just that these fake rebels have obviously not been challenged for ruining traffic for all of the walkers out that day. Next time there's one of those, I'll have to bring a dowel rod to throw into their spokes if they keep up their blind disregard for pedestrian safety. Or I could always take the black VW Golf out for a spin and hold my own re-claim the streets protest. And I'll have this blaring out the windows as my getaway music:


The Primitives -- Crash

Al | Myspace Video

Internet radio

There's something wrong about not having the radio on during the summer, but ever since new music became unlistenable around the mid-'90s (and it was only tolerable in the early '90s), I haven't bothered with it. But over the past week I've tried out internet radio again, having found it lacking before, and discovered a great station.

Radio cannot be replaced by listening to CDs or putzing around an mp3 playlist. An album allows you to sit back and enjoy music without having to plan what song will come next, but the variety is limited to the sound of that group or at most the range of groups already in your collection. An mp3 playlist opens up a wider variety of sounds to hear (though still limited to what you already have), but there is either too much planning involved as you choose one song after the next, or there is a lack of coherence due to the completely random way that the shuffle feature works.

Tuning into a good radio station frees you of decision-making, letting you more easily drift out of self-consciousness, while also taking you on a ride through a variety of soundscapes. The trend of technology that tries to help you find new things has been toward narrowing the range of what you're exposed to, so it's a real pleasure to have something like a radio station that puts more of the blind trial-and-error back into the cultural exploration experience.

My ideal radio station would play music from 1974 through 1990, across all genres except for country (although crossover acts like Emmylou Harris are fine -- especially in video when you get to see her face). However, that doesn't cohere enough for most listeners for there to be a station that does that. But the '80s themed stations are close enough, and they along with '80s nights at dance clubs are always happy to include songs that belong with the rest but technically lie outside of that decade, such as all of the hits from Depeche Mode's 1990 album Violator, "Heart of Glass," "Rock Lobster," and so on.

The major downside of internet radio is the sheer volume of stations to browse until you find a good one, but luckily I hit upon a great one early on -- Star 107.9 from Columbus, Ohio, where coincidentally I grew up from 1985 to 1992, which is nostalgic icing on the cake. First, they run very few ads and have good sound quality. And it's not like most of the others I found, which just replay the same 10 stereotypical "Best of the '80s" compilations over and over. It does play mega-hits, but is mostly focused on recreating the full spectrum of sounds. Hearing a few songs that you think are only OK heightens your appreciation when a great one comes on; they don't overdo this either, where it drags on and on until you find a fun song.

They cover the tail end of disco and the '70s hard rock sound from the early '80s, the New Wave heyday from '82 to '84, the softer rock middle years, and the return to a harder rock sound and heavily syncopated dance music by the end. There's less R&B, but it is also spread across the decade. The only music that they don't play as much of is the college rock, post-punk, and other less mainstream rock genres. I did find a good station at Live365 called "Alternative '80s" -- a misnomer, as alternative music is from the mid-'90s -- that played a lot of Camper Van Beethoven, Echo & The Bunnymen, etc., but it looks like you only get to listen to so many minutes before they make you register an account, sign in, bla bla bla. Their sound quality is noticeably worse, and they run frequent ads too, so I've junked that station.

I don't want to exaggerate the greatness of internet radio like some technophile spazz, as it is no improvement over what was widely available 20 years ago. But at least it can counteract the downward trend of pop music quality, the narrowness of what people are exposed to, and the need to plan out what you're going to listen to.

Have there been any pro-family movies during the family values revolution?

Feeling like a movie about family for Father's Day, I watched Uncle Buck, a later John Hughes movie that while not great is still a nice experience. This one, along with Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, came after he finally dropped the preachy and angsty tone of his earlier teen comedies.

What makes it a good family flick? First, the surrogate father puts the whiny spoiled brat of a daughter in her place rather than try to play the Cool Dad or resign himself to the kids-what-are-ya-gonna-do role of the Disgruntled Dad. Eventually she figures out that he was right to get on her case about dating her loser boyfriend, Bug. At the end, she even apologizes to her mother for being such a terrible daughter. Buck also gives Bug the good old "touch her and you're dead" speech, complete with the threat of taking a hatchet to him if he does. During the course of the movie, he goes through a rite of passage from layabout to as much of a patriarch as he's capable of, and this civilizing transformation came about by being thrust into family life.

Plus there's that great scene where he deflates the ego of the authoritarian cunt of a principal at his niece's school.

This movie came out in 1989, so when helicopter parents started raising a stink about "family values" in the early-mid-1990s, you might have expected to see more like Uncle Buck. Instead what they paid to go see were top-10 box office hits like Hook, where the message is that the father should stop being a dad and become a kid again; Forrest Gump, where by the end one child must raise another, and by himself no less; and American Beauty, where married life is a nauseating hell (see Family Guy for a less emo but more kabuki version). After that, "family-friendly" movies didn't even treat family dynamics at all. Rather, parents only paid to see the kiddie movies that have dominated the box office, which keep children entertained but don't try to remind them to be more grateful.

The shallowness, as well as cynicism, of family-oriented pop culture also marked the previous era of falling crime, the mid-'30s through the late '50s, as exemplified by Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, and of course that generation's American Beauty -- Arthur Miller plays and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. When the outside world presents few challenges to the security of the household, family members take each other more for granted and undergo fewer rites of passage, in coping with problems, that would cement the bonds of kinship more strongly.

Uncle Buck came near the end of rising-crime times, where we see the opposite pattern, particularly after the halfway point, when people stop believing that some simple change will fix everything and start shifting their mindset to one of "let's figure out how we can help each other through this." Mostly this was shown on TV shows instead of movies, with All in the Family being the first truly memorable pro-family show, followed by Family Ties, The Cosby Show, Family Matters, Who's the Boss?, the early pre-snarky Simpsons, along with scores of less popular shows. Back to the Future was a notable exception to the tendency for these to be TV shows.

Beset by greater problems, these family members incurred a higher cost in helping out one another, making them more altruistic, and they were far more appreciative of their kin after having been helped out so much. Although they only had to deal with infrequent obstacles, they were common and daunting enough that the solidarity forged during their common attack lasted through their ordinary lives as well. It's hard to look back at family life during the Reagan era, whether stylized or from personal memories, and not be struck by how joyful and chummy most people were when interacting with their folks -- and during a time when the parents did not have the explicit goal of Trying to Be Your Friend. The lack of pettiness, and of bearing pointless passive-aggressive grudges, is another feature that seems to have vanished from family life, at least compared to before.

With family feelings having become more alienated or at best lukewarm over the past 20 years, it's understandable that pop culture will reflect these changes, as consumers choose the portrayals that resonate with them. Still, we shouldn't try to dignify this trend by calling it family-friendly or an example of family values, lacking as it does a spirit of camaraderie among kin. Only after recognizing that might parents encourage a greater degree of risk-taking in family activities -- for example camping (without $50,000 worth of "gear") -- that would do as much to strengthen their bonds until a more dangerous world compels them to really band together.

Sports rioting, a disease of sick societies

The most pathetic thing about the recent riots in Vancouver is not the packs of video game addicts finally emerging from hibernation to smash windows, loot, and set things on fire -- which, by the way, proves what pussies they are, as they'll only lash out when there is zero risk of detection or punishment, when they can slink like cowards into a vast crowd.

No, what's more disgusting is everyone else sitting on their fat ass -- or in some cases walking right by the vandalism, perhaps even taking pictures for their Facebook updates. Why aren't old ladies pouring out into the streets to smack these punks around with brooms and frying pans? Why aren't neighborhood kids forming block patrols to keep the loser brigades from screwing with their hang-outs? And why aren't military veterans organizing a posse? Shoot, the Vancouver police should have booked a flight for Epic Beard Man if their local residents are just going to sit around and watch their city burn.

Given how few are causing real trouble, and given how cowardly and uncommitted they are, it would hardly take an army of people from the community to shut down most of this senseless destruction. It would not even have to get very violent: it would go a long way to just have a large crowd glaring at them, like "God, you're pathetic, it's no wonder you'll always be a failure." A good deal of their motivation is to boost their non-existent status by having a mob cheer on their (imaginary) badassery. So if their kicking in a store window was only met with stares of contempt, they would stop, scream "Well screw you guys for judging me, then!" and shuffle home crying to tell their mommies how mean the crowd was, and to "leave me alone while I play Grand Theft Auto -- I mean it this time, Mom!"

That the residents of Vancouver could not manage even a fraction of this low necessary level of response shows how thoroughly wasted away the city is on the inside. It has abandoned community defense and outsourced the clean-up job to even more apathetic mercenaries, i.e. the police. It is as though the social body had shut off its own immune system -- "too much hassle to protect something we don't care about" -- and began relying on emergency room visits and cocktails of antibiotics after the inevitable invasion by pathogens. Their will to survive has dwindled so much that they are just a couple steps away from telling the doc to just pull the plug and get it over with already.

Perhaps if the rioting served some larger purpose -- whether justified or not -- things would not look so bleak. If, for example, the rioting were about politics, economics, race relations, and so on. When there are two sides in a battle-with-a-purpose, onlookers might not be able to tell right away which side was right, or if both had legitimate grievances. They might also have a greater fear of reprisal by the group who they sided against, since in these situations -- but not where it's just a bunch of uncommitted losers wreaking havoc -- the other side feels strongly enough about their side winning that they will try to retaliate. This senselessness is what makes sports rioting such a telling sign of how weakly held together a society is.

But such shockingly low levels of social cohesion are hardly unique to Canada, which has never really had a strong national identity. Even in America, over the past 20 years as our solidarity has plateaued or started to fall, sports rioting has become far more common, at least judging from Wikipedia's list of riots, which does have pretty extensive coverage of the past half-century. They were not entirely absent during our peak as a society from roughly 1950 to 1990, but in comparison they have exploded since 1992.

However, 1950 to 1990 was not a period free of sports riots in England; in fact, that was when soccer hooliganism became a regular feature of the culture. This was just one symptom of the widespread fraying of the social fabric during that time, which would lead to losing its first-place status among nations to America. Similar hooliganism pervades the rest of Europe, and of course they haven't been strong countries for over 100 years.

Turning to the good news, where don't we find sports rioting in Western countries? You shouldn't be surprised if you read the post below predicting that Australia is the best bet in the medium-long-term for upholding civilization. The list of riots mentioned earlier doesn't have any entries that are sports riots within Australia, or New Zealand for that matter, aside from protests against visiting teams from Apartheid South Africa in 1971 and 1981, respectively. The small handful of riots in Australia are the occasional garden-variety race riots that erupt whenever highly dissimilar groups live within the same nation. Even those don't appear to have involved more than a couple hundred people.

The 2005 Cronulla riots were larger, but they still were nothing like the scale and damage done during the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. And those riots were more of a community-defense response against some Middle Eastern troublemakers -- a sign of a functioning immune system, then, unlike the sports rioting of other Western countries.

And it's not as though there's no culture of sports and drinking there to provide the pretext for senseless rioting, if that's what people wanted to do. I've never been there, but I do remember that the Australians in Barcelona went carousing like other Anglo groups on the weekend. Evidently, this only goes as far as chummy drunken revelry, and not wantonly trashing the community while everyone else looks on in apathy.