Who eats better, europeans or north americans?

A few years ago I would, like many of us, have laughed at the naievete of such a question, and said:  ”well, europeans, of course!”  But now, having lived in the low countries for several years, both holland and belgium, and also having lived earlier in england and spain, and spent time in italy and germany, I am getting a pretty good sense of how people in various western european regions eat.

And I can state with confidence that until the early 1990s, europeans ate better than americans, or at least, many europeans did.  American food was fairly monolithic:  hamburgers, hot dogs, pizza, spaghetti, and a bit of chinese food and some mexican thrown in to boot.

But then, the urban food revolution came to north america (both the u.s., and canada, that is), and by the mid-1990s, there was no cuisine that you couldn’t get ahold of in any urban centre or college town.  Thai was cool for a while but quickly became old hat.  Ethiopian, Kazakh, Indonesian, Yemeni, you name it, you could find a restaurant selling it.  And then, people started wanting to do this at home.

First came the garlic and spice revolution.  By the early 90s, people were using whole buds of garlic (i.e., 12 cloves) in their meals.  Through the mid 80s, all the recipies in your mom’s cookbook had the following spices:

 

-pinch of salt

-pinch of pre-ground pepper, 3 years old.

-1 bay leaf or 1/4 tsp dried oregano, 5 years old minimum.

 

Remember those days?  Vegetables were boiled until they fell apart under their own weight,

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The basic human motivators. Competition, dominance, and sex in an ideal society.

So it’s an ongoing project here at the Platonist, to come up with the ground rules for what would ideally become a book, setting out a Grand Unified Theory (if we may), of how to create an ideal economy, politics, and society.  This is essentially an update of Plato’s Republic, moving beyond earlier utopian or dystopian literature and taking into account what we’ve learned in the last few decades, since advances in the social sciences have been tremendous, and very inspiring if you know where to look.  This is especially true  in our advances in the theory of egalitarianism, and the discursive elements of this, since Foucault.  And of course our ‘system’ has to move beyond being a system, since one thing we’ve learned is that imposing systems doesn’t at all work.  What we would suggest in this rewriting of the Republic, would be a series of concrete policies that would be designed to maximize happiness, through existing democratic and legal institutions, and maximize opportunity, for those who would want it, without imposing anything on anyone (since this would never be better than our current system–freedom is key).  In essence, we’d be continuing the current and ongoing explorations in the social sciences, whose goal, we would argue, is to find ways to help us to live better.  To explain what has worked, and why, and what hasn’t, and why, with the aim of furnishing us with wisdom to make the right choices, ones that are of course naturally obvious.  For example, it’s quite obvious now that democracy works better than any true monarchy or one-man rule, for a whole host of reasons.  This was not so obvious 300 years ago.  This is the sort of thing, only using newer discoveries, that we are aiming to highlight here.  Economics, in particular, is a rich field for this, since  the marxist-capitalist conflict of the 20th century arguably blinded most economic thinkers by turning them into partisans, instead of scientists.  Economics has been dominated too much by polemics, and not enough with the business of maximizing happiness and opportunity.  It is still in the hands of the anti-marxist, pro plutocratic elite, and we need to reclaim economics from them –  - real economics, scientific university economics.  The book ‘prosperity without growth’ is part of this new trend.  It is happening.

At any rate, one of the fundamental stumbling blocks to any would-be set of principles for improving the way things work (since surely there are quite a few problems we have yet to address as well as we could if only we worked it through) is the fact that we’re still pretty much hardwired for hierarchy as I have said in another post – i.e., we still carry strong tendencies to act according to pack and troop principles, which got us through our millions of years living as beasts.  These instincts aren’t however often so great for creating an egalitarian, maximum-opportunity society.  Psychologists and anthropologists have now identified a lot of these, but let’s spell them out here, so that we can get them out in the open, and grapple with them as we discuss and shape our economic and political wish list.

1)  The desire to be cool.  This used to be called ‘honor.’   It’s probably our first instinct, once we move beyond toddlerhood, and stays with us until senility.  You want to have the people immediately around you like you, and act positively towards you.  This is because in primate troop society, this meant you were  ’alpha.’  Everyone fawns over you, does stuff for you, laughs at your jokes.  This translates into personal power.  The Fonz snaps his fingers, and people do stuff for him.  (Jeff Winger in “Community” being an updated version of the same).

2)  The desire to be sexy.  

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How to find your ideal soul mate.

So you’ll have to help me with this one, but I thought that it might be useful to start a list of the things that you yourself should be, and that you should do, in order to find an ideal soul mate.  I wrote in another post on marriage that, for some reason, we keep getting married; and I concluded that the ideal of it seems to be hardwired into our biology, and we find it fulfilling in many fundamental ways:  that is why we consider it to be the ideal.  Not least of these includes the idea that except in exceptional circumstances, kids want their parents to stay together, not just for a while, but for all time; even when parents get divorced when kids are in their 30s, kids get adversely affected, and begin to despair that their own marriages must be somehow doomed.  Even elderly seniors divorcing have serious negative repercussions on younger folk who can’t help but look to their example to see whether it is possible to ‘live happily ever after.’  A recent onion article, in typical parodic fashion, ends up listing the traits of an ideal marriage, and incidentally notes the fact that most of us continue to see the ‘happily ever after’ thing as an ideal.

Of course, in order to live happily ever after, you need to find a soul mate first:  it’s no fun to live happily ever after with someone who is only sort of suited to you:  the ideal of course is to be with someone so in tune with you, that you can’t imagine being not around them for more than a few hours here and there.

And, as any councillor or psychologist will tell you these days, the main thing that determines whether or not you find a soul mate is you.  You’re almost entirely in charge of your destiny there.  Yes, it may be hard to meet people in certain situations, but, if you were doing things differently, you would find them, and relatively quickly.  So how do you do it?  Let’s try making a list and see what we come up with.

1)  You have to believe in love, as the horrendous autotuned song goes.  I.e., you have to be willing to have faith, and trust, and not be essentially cynical about relationships and marriages.  You have to believe that it is possible for people to live happily ever after.  If you’ve convinced yourself that marriages, relationships, etc are doomed, and that all members of the opposite sex are mercenary, lying, cheating scum, well, guess what?  However, there are at least a third of people out there who manage to live life in stable, healthy, happy marriages, and a decent number of these folks are eternally in love, and would vastly prefer the company of their partner to anyone else, to death do them part.  So yes, it’s entirely possible, and so, if you want it, you gotta believe in it first.

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What is the ideal environment for raising children?

There are  quite a few ways in which one could define the term  ”Environment,” but right now I’d like to talk a bit about kids’ physical surroundings.  Clearly, you need a nurturing household, and a happy, stable family life, with loving parents and access to enriching activities and a good education in order to have an optimized upbringing.  But what role does physical environment play in producing an ideal childhood, and thus, hopefully, an ideal adult?

First, I will come down hard on the side of nature.  I believe that raising a child in an urban setting is tantamount to raising a chicken in a factory.  Urban parents have to work extra hard to give their children anything like an enriching environment, and unless they are rich and have regular access to horse stables or a vacation home in the suburbs, or else outdoor enthusiasts who bring the kids to natural parks every weekend, the main result is that urban kids grow up with the stultifying sense that there are always four walls present.  Always.  Every direction that an urban kid turns, she or he sees brick walls, cement walls, highway overpasses, and other built environments.  In a city, one is very seldom more than 100 feet from a wall, in fact.  Walls, walls, walls.  Not good symbolically, and not good psychically.

You see, we have been evolving for millions of years, our own species for a hundred or two hundred thousand years, outside.  Nary a wall in sight.  And for the past several thousand years, our ancestors have spent most of their time farming (a few of them hunting), which means most of their time has been spent outside, in wide open natural surroundings.  Due to this extremely long genetic history, we as individuals come pre-programmed to like certain things:

-Green valleys.  Why?  When primitive humans came into a green valley, this told them that there was plenty of water, game, fruit, nuts, berries, and the other things which sustain life.   Coming into a brown, sterile landscape always spelled wariness, and brought with it the very real danger of starvation.  Urban environments are like desert wastes (which people only appreciate now because they know they will not run out of water, food, etc), and trigger an innate uneasiness, linked to this very strong instinct.

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Who determines the prices we pay? Are they fair? Would our quality of life improve if we paid less?

Do we have any right to complain about the prices of things?  Is there anything we can do about them?  Does it make economic sense to complain, or are they truly fixed by some untouchable economic laws that are beyond our poor powers of comprehension?  In short, do we just have to sit down and take it, when someone asks us to pay $4.00 for a gallon of gas, $3.50 for a half-gallon of orange juice, or $2.00 for a little carton of yoghurt?  I mean, does yoghurt really cost that much?  Do oranges cost that much?

If you talk too loud about the price of things these days, there will always be some glasses-wearing, brainy-smurf-esque economist dude who begins lecturing you in a nasal voice about how prices are set by supply and demand, and that the prices of most things are just, because the market determines them.  If you force companies to lower prices, they will not make enough profit to make production worthwhile, and they will invest their money and efforts into making something which is more profitable.  So, in short, the free-market economists have straight-jacketed us with their current ideology, which holds that any “messing with the market” puts us in imminent danger of world economic collapse.

In many ways, however, this laissez-faire extremeism has more than proven itself to be quite flawed.  It was this type of thinking which led Alan Greenspan and his libertarian buddies to attempt to do away with federal regulation of the banking system, which directly led to the 2008 economic crash, which has since that time been causing misery for the majority of people on the planet.  The fact is, as most economists acknowledge, the economy cannot exist without a strong framework of regulation.  Without regulation, as any economist knows, one company would soon eat up all the others:  coke would eat pepsi, Wal-Mart would eat K-Mart, etc.  It’s a very basic law of economics.  Also, without regulation by the federal reserve and other overseers, economic booms and busts would be far far wilder than they are today – it would be like the early 20th century over again, and we’d have huge 1920s-style booms, followed by gigantic, 1930s-style busts.

So, the point is, the “free market” theory of prices is not necessarily entirely correct.  Prices are probably open to much more manipulation than we suspect.  In other words, we could all be paying much lower prices for many basic commodities, and the companies in question would still be making plenty of profit to make it worth their while.  For many basic products, we are clearly being shafted.   Here are a few examples that I have noticed:

1)  At your local Indian grocery store, you can buy a gigantic bag of peppercorns, a cheerios-box sized package, for like $4.00.  If you go to your local big-chain grocery store, you will find a tiny jar of Mc Cormick peppercorns, one pathetic pepper-shaker full, for $4.00.  It’s as though peppercorns were worth their weight in silver.  What gives?  Does it really cost McCormick 20x more money to make and package peppercorns than it takes for those Indian dudes to provide you with peppercorns?

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Are Song Lyrics Poetry?

Why yes, yes they are.

I was at a poetry reading by a “famous” (in the poetry world) Irish poet named Paul Muldoon, whose most famous poem’s refrain is something like “with a rinky-tink dinky-tink link link,” or something like that.  For such work, Muldoon has won a Pulitzer prize in poetry, which to my mind says something about the state of the arts at this point, but we’ll get to that in a moment.  Inevitably, perhaps, during the question and answer period one of the undergrads in the audience asked Mr. Muldoon:

“Sir, do you believe that song lyrics are poetry?”

And Mr. Muldoon said:  ”Well, no, son.  Not really.”

And I wanted this supposedly world-famous, ultra-talented spokesman for modern poetry in the world to explain for us, why, indeed, this was not so.  All that he could manage, however, was something along the lines of, “Well, poetry is different; it’s more complex, and it often has forms which are not compatible with simple song lyrics.”

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Who are the 15 visual artists who have influenced me the most?

Someone sent me this quiz via facebook, and as the friend himself said, he’s usually not into this sort of thing, but this one got him thinking.  It also helps that he’s a trained visual artist.  But he sent me the quiz, and, it did get me thinking, and so I thought I’d post on it here.  Being primarily a writer of nonfiction, my take on the visual arts will necessarily be a bit different from that of a visual artist, but that’s part of the fun.

My take is very much coloured by the fact that I am an historian of western civilization, who has been trained to see art history as one of several highly interrelated cultural, political, social, and economic threads which run through both western history, and, at the same time, of course, through global history, with the understanding that all of these are in dialogue, i.e., they are affecting each other dialectically at all times–though in some ways more than others, and more at some times than others.

It’s also very much coloured by an awareness of what I consider to be the ‘great divide’ in western cultural history – namely, before and after Dada-ism became prominent right around World War I.  My take on Dada, as outlined elsewhere on this blog,  is that it was attempting to grapple with the discovery of the subconscious by Freud, the relativity of time and space as articulated by Einstein, and the sense that species were not absolute and immutable, as Darwin had implied.  All of these, artists saw, seemed to imply that there was in fact no truth to the notion of a Platonic ideal, of the kind which had underlay all western art since the middle ages.  In other words, there seemed to be no absolute at all, of any kind:  no Truth, no Beauty, no Good, and thus, there was nothing which had created and could anchor such ideals, namely, God.  If God was dead, as Neitzsche had argued, then there could be no point in attempting to do art which followed the ideals which God had supposedly (according to Plotinus, and the Christian theology which followed him, and all renaissance and enlightenment thinkers who followed the Christians for the most part) laid out when he created the universe.

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Why were artists and poets seen as the equal of scientists until, say, 1950?

So this just came to me today, as I was playing piano.

I realized that between the renaissance and about 1900, artists, musicians, and poets were instinctually worshipped as though they were demigods, in the same way that scientists were (in fact, often moreso).

This is primarily because, these artists were seen as revealing the mind of God, just like the scientists.

Let me explain:  between 1500 and 1900, most people in the West believed that the Christian god had created the universe, and made it according to a definite and logical set of laws, which however remained to be discovered by humanity.  Many believed after 1500 that it was the purpose of mankind to discover these laws – this would make him more reasonable, more perfected, and he could thereby overcome some of the ill-effects of the fall.  Pico even said that by discovering the laws of god, we became gods ourselves – and many secretly agreed with him, even if it was blasphemous to say it outright.

So, the point is, that scientists, such as Galileo, Newton, the inventors of the telescope and microscope, etc., were seen as ‘revealing the mind of god.”  I.e., God was one with the universe – he created it, he was it, he was in it, all around it, but he was also the universe itself.  So the idea was that if you discover the laws of nature, i.e., the laws of physics, you are discovering the laws of god – even, perhaps, how his mind itself works.

And, at the same time, it was known that musicians were discovering the laws of harmony, which were considered to be related to the “music of the spheres,” i.e., the mathematics which made gravity and the laws of physics work – or rather which ordered them, and explained them, and were the building blocks of them.  So, the laws of music, the laws of harmony, of major and minor scales, of thirds, fifths, and the rest, were considered to be the same laws that were written into the code of the universe – and this is why some notes are inherently pleasing (e.g., a fifth), while others are inherently jarring (i.e., a half step, or a series of notes out of scale).

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Twentieth-Century Art. (Draft Post)

So, class, today I’d like to discuss why it is that twentieth-century art has been so important (considering that most people consider art to be worthless and at best frivolous), at the same time that it sucks.  So let’s start with a simple and obvious proposition:  twentieth-century art sucks.  Then, we can go into why it has nonetheless been hugely important, and we can end with some observations on the positive impacts that it has had, basically despite itself.

Before we can discuss why this art sucks, we should discuss the ideas and the technological underpinnings which have by and large shaped the direction of twentieth-century art.

First, some definitions.  What do we mean by twentieth-century art?  Well, we are speaking in the broadest meaningful terms.  In general, we can talk of this art as the sum of the cultural movement which has come under the rubric ‘modernism’ and which started about the time of the first world war.   Under this heading we can put classical music, painting, sculpture, architecture, and literature, including whatever sub genres you like.  All of these fields have been influenced in broadly the same way, and followed broadly similar trajectories, since the dawn of European culture in the middle ages, and they have continued to do so up to the present day.

Thus, we come to the ideas that have shaped this art.  First is obviously the western cultural tradition, which has been evolving since the middle ages, and has taken the form of a dialogue between plato and aristotle:  between the idealism of plato and the scientific desire to continually improve one’s knowledge represented best by artistotle.  Since the renaissance, at least, European artists have seen themselves as being part of a continually evolving, and usually improving, tradition, where artists of the present are in dialogue not only with their peers, but with their forebears.  Up until about 1900, artists in this tradition believed for the most part that by improving their art, they were striving and perhaps reaching ever closer towards the platonic ideals of truth, beauty, and beauty.  They also, many of them, at least paid lip service to the notion that these platonic ideals were also the ideals that formed the best parts of the christian tradition:  in other words, when Bach wrote  “ad maiorem gloriam dei” at the top of his compositions (“to the greater glory of God”), everyone shared his sense that he was making things beautiful because one of God’s commandments to huanity was that they should continually try and achieve the perfection which He embodied (viz, truth, beauty, the good, justice, etc.). 

After about 1910, however, everything changed in the art world:  in general, it became fashionable, due to the influence of Marxism, to see “traditional” art (i.e., all art before 1910) as “bourgeois,” and thus as part of the culture of “oppression,” which had previously dominated all societies.  And this makes sense on many levels:  because the cathedrals and churches which were the centres of so much western art were so obviously just monuments to the oppression of clerical elites, and arguably of theocratic voodoo pushers who wished merely to keep the masses dumb by feeding them opiates, it was not too difficult for an increasingly sophisticated intellectual elite to grasp the notion that all previous art had been the product of oppression.  Even neoclassical art was the product of “bourgeos” rulers who wished to awe the people into thinking that they were the “most reasonable” and obviously had a monopoly on beauty, harmony, and truth.   So, sure, this was one reason to suspect previous art.

Another reason was the recent “death of god” proclaimed by Nietzsche, which was shored up by the findings of Darwin, Freud, and Marx in their respective fields (which together covered most of human knowledge).  If God had always been the underpinner of the platonic ideals of truth, justice, and beauty, but he was now dead, then were these ideals of truth beauty and the good just farcical lies?  If god was just a big lie perpetrated on the people by ruling elites, then were not the very ideals of truth, justice, and beauty just sublimations of the same thing?  One had to throw out all the old notions of beauty if one wanted to create a “new art,” which alone would be “free” and alone would be “liberating” to “the people.”

So 20th century art was born in a notion that it would:

a) expose the lies of the bourgeoisie (i.e., show that they had been for centuries creating a property system, a capitalist system, which mimicked feudalism, insofar as it exalted a rich few who exploited the masses for their labour and stole their birthright from them). 

b) find new modes of expression which were based on a truer and freer truth than ever before.

c) in doing so, it would create a “new beauty” of its own which was not defined by theocrats, or some long-dead culture’s notion of what God is, but rather a beauty of proletarian solidarity.

Note that, after the 1980s, these ideas are seeming pretty stale, these notions of the proletariat, etc.  This is because economists have realized, even left wing ones, that Marxism doesn’t really work that way, and so the underpinnings of a proletarian beauty have been proven to be wrong.  Not to mention, we’ve all now had ample experience of where a quest for “other forms of beauty” gets us:  both communist regimes,. and twentieth century artists have now spent decades proving to us that their quest was sorely misguided.  The rusty i-beam sculptures which ruin many public parks across the world are eloquent testimony to that, as are the architectural skylines of almost any city built between 1930 and 1990 (when things started to pick up, a little). 

Note, too, that pretty soon after the initial rebellion against beauty, most artists kind of forgot the original purpose of these movements, but instead just followed what they learned at art school, which was that what their art teachers did was the fashion. 

Now, we can talk about the technological underpinnings of twentieth-century art.  

1)  Painting vs. Photography.  One of the key components of 20th century art which few people remember to discuss is that changes in a few basic technologies drastically and permanently changed the nature of art, the relationship between people and artistic media.  By about 1900, photography had become so common and convenient that it began to supplant painting.  Remember that prior to this, for thousands of years, the only way to record, or remember a person or place was to paint it.  Thus, prior to about 1900, painting was a necessary art form, which filled a basic functions that could not otherwise be fulfilled.  Nowadays, it’s an extravagant luxury.  After 1900, however, painters began to develope some pretty radical reactions to th efact of photography chasing them off the field of usefulness altogether:  the surrealists attempted to take painting into a place that photography couldn’t easily go.  Again, it’s arguable if this was very useful, since for at least 60 years now painting has had next to no cultural signficiance.   

2) Music in the age of the phonograph.  Argument:  classical composers, live performance, and the orchestra form, became mere luxuries, instead of being necessary to the production of music.  A few stars could now monopolize the market.

3) Poetry in the age of the phonograph.   Argument:  poetry was killed by recorded music. 

4) Drama in the age of television.

5)  Literature in the age of television and movies.   

So, we’ll have to leave it here for now.  This is a draft post, but the issue is a complex one, so it may take a while to finish.  In the meantime, if you are inspired to do so, please comment! 

-trivium.

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Is the history channel educational?

The other day I heard a friend chide her husband for watching the history channel, and made fun of him for being all highbrow when he watched TV.  “I don’t watch any of that serious educational stuff,” she said.

Which struck me as, well, to be polite, funny, because in class, I make a point of calling it the “Hitler Channel,” since literally 75% of the programming is on World War II.  What the audience doesn’t seem to realize, is that there were in fact other years in history besides 1939-1945.  That was only six years.  There have been other years, sometimes.  And the other 25% of their programming is split between the Cold War, Vietnam, and maybe a bit of World War I here and there.  Was there more to the history of human civilization than the last few wars that happened to involve the US?

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