My pal Jim has a complete set of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. It was de-accessioned by a library in Quebec and he got it for nothing. It is now worth $8,500.

You can get the OED on line. The Oxford University Press will sell you access for $295.00 a year. If you belong to a University library, access is free.

But this is not the way to read the OED. Here’s what you want to do: get the hard copy, take a volume, any volume, find a big, comfy chair, and start pouring over the text. Warn the kids, unplug the phone, make yourself comfortable. You won’t be back for hours.

You have found a secret way in to a workshop of Western thought and culture.

Here’s the definition of Bohemian:

Taken from French, in which boheme, bohemien have been applied to the gypsies, since their first appearance in the 15th century because they were thought to come from Bohemia or perhaps actually entered the West through that country. Thence, in modern French, the word has been transferred to ‘vagabond, adventurer, person of irregular life or habits’, a sense introduced into English by Thackeray.

How wonderful. There’s more.

[A bohemian is] a gypsy of society: one who either cuts himself off, or by his habits is cut off from society for which he is otherwise fitted.

We know that the notion of the bohemian was embraced by the French avant-garde of the 19th century. They liked the idea of cutting themselves off from society. It become, ironically, a social type.

Indeed, bohemian impulse became ever more mainstream. In the American case, it was the beat poets who served as the agent of diffusion. They made the “person of irregular life or habits” a cultural hero. Youth culture was listening and the 60s saw the idea go wide.

And not just youth. As David Brooks tells us in his useful book, Bobos in paradise, the bourgeois bohemian became a pose for boomers as they traded away the suburbs for lofts in the city and coffee houses downtown. (Printer’s Row in Chicago is one of these. Soho in New York City, another.) Now, the person who “cuts himself off” was actually “cutting himself in” on one of the more interesting experiments in contemporary culture.

Your’re back! Plug the phone in. Give the kids the all-clear sign. Rub your eyes. The OED has just taken us from 15th century gypsies to the French 19th century to the American 20th century to the present day. Sure, $8,500 is a lot of money. But what did you expect to pay for a time machine?

References:

Brooks, David. 2000. Bobos in Paradise: The new upper class and how they got there. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Israel, Kali A. K. 1992. Style, Strategy, and Self-Creation in the Life of Emilia Dilke. in Constructions of the Self. editor George Levine, 191-212. Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

For more on the OED:
Murray, K. M. Elisabeth. 1977. Caught in the web of words: James A.H. Murray and the Oxford English dictionary. New Haven: Yale University Press.

For more on the French bohemians:
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/rschwart/hist255/bohem/tdefine.html

Your link to Abebooks:
http://dogbert.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=256379250

Dynamic systems are a challenge for anthropology. This is the way contemporary culture invents itself and anthropology hasn’t had very much exposure to this kind of thing. So I have been trying to think about how to think about these systems. As a novice, I suck at it.

I’ve been thinking about traffic in Montreal. There are two kinds of drivers: very good and very bad.

The good drivers go like the wind. They are quick, nimble, fearless and very calm.

I have good data here. I walk a lot, and sometimes it’s tedious. I relieve the tedium by sprinting to get the last of a green light or to cross the street in mid stream. In this second case, I time my passage so that I hit the stream of traffic just as a gap appears. (This is stupid and dangerous, but it is fun. But if the posts suddenly stop, you’ll know what happened.)

In Toronto, this sort of thing provokes howls of unhappiness and lots of horn work. Toronto drivers scare easily and they like to take umbrage at unruly pedestrian behavior. In Montreal, there is never an objection. They don’t object, I think, because I am walking the way they are driving: quick and nimble.

The bad drivers are amazingly bad. They appear to be oblivious to everyone and everything around them. They are inclined to draw the ire of the good drivers who punish them with lots of honking. And in this case, some of them seem to give up and just sit there. Bad drivers have become worse drivers.

So I fell to thinking: why such good drivers and such bad ones. Presumably, the Montreal driving “experiment” began with a normal distribution and a graduated continuum of skill. At some point, the continuum gave way to something bi-modal.

Maybe, I thought, these drivers created one another.

I believe (and this is where culture comes in) Montreal drivers subscribe to a European model of driving. They don’t care about right of way and rules of the road so much as they do seizing the opportunity exactly when it presents itself. The good ones create a highly dynamic traffic system. You have to be on your toes to avoid nimble drivers and on your toes to act like one.

But anyone who occupies the “far half” of the continuum, the “not so good” half, now has a problem. They are surrounded by people driving like the wind. I am guessing that this group now splits in half as well. The medial half “gets with the program” and begins to drive with forced enthusiasm. But the far half (last quartile) is now living in an environment that constantly overwhelms them. Tested to their limit, they get worse. And then they get punished. And so they get worse.

The readers of this blog are, I know, smarter at thinking about systems like this and I am curious to see what they have to say. After all, and as I have just demonstrated, I suck at this.

Grant:                                          So, um, what would you call yourself?

Respondent:                            I’’m a punk, a crusty punk.

Grant: [long pause]               Er, so what’’s a crusty punk?

Respondent [sneering]:      It means I don’’t bathe much.

Grant: [long pause]:              So… like… [long pause]  I see. 

In the early 1980s, I was doing ethnographic interviews with Punks in Toronto.  The video tape was funny to watch afterwards.  You can’’t see me on the tape but you can hear the discomfort in my voice off camera.  I was out of my depth.  I didn’’t know where to start the interview or what to ask.  More embarrassingly, it’’s clear I was quietly terrified.  Terrified and clueless, the anthropologist’’s best moment.

I was thinking about punks the other day when blogging about the "society of strangers.”" 

The society of strangers says we don’’t have to know the people around us to live with them.  We don’’t have to have to be bound to them by "trust neworks."

Punks go right after this.  They present us with someone who looks threatening.  Those mohawks, tattoos, safety pins, ripped clothing, black leather jackets send a message.  (I still have a leather jacket from the exhibit we did at the Royal Ontario Museum.  The back reads: "Help the Police, Beat yerself up."”  No, I don’’t wear it.)

Our reaction: "how nervous should I be?"  "What order of threat is this?"”  The punk finds a way to say, "if I am prepared to disregard my own comforts and niceties, can I be relied upon to respect yours?"”  The logic of the (pre-1990s) tattoo was even clearer: "if I am prepared to inflict this act of violence upon myself, think do you think what I am prepared to do to you?”" 

The deeper cultural logic was still clearer.  By breaking the "soft rules"” of civil life (social conventions), Punks signaled the possibility they might be prepared to break the "hard rules”"of civil life (the ones defined and enforced by law).  (I am setting aside the larger cultural and political messages of punk.) 

Punks are, in other words, a test of the limits of a society of strangers.  They introduce a very strange stranger, one who gives us pause.  (Finally, this was more agitprop theater than reality.  For all their talk of anarchy, most punks weren’’t very anarchic.  Conventionally dressed soccer hooligans are much more dangerous.) 

Punks were a test of whether we meant what we said.  Did people have the liberty to define themselves as they wanted to, or not?  In the period following World War II, we were, in a sense, cheating.  The forces of convention were still so powerful that the society of strangers wasn’’t very strange at all.  Most people could read most people pretty well.  Most marginal groups were marginal, driven by stigma and exclusion from the mainstream.  In effect, we had were a pluralist society that permitted freedom but had not yet had to contend with freedom.  We were living a lie.  (No cliché is unwelcome in this blog.  We are inclusive here too.)

Then marginal cultures began to demand a new voice and profile…and now the test was on.  As someone who came of age in the 1960s, I remember how long hair was received.  It was customary for people to react badly, sometimes insisting, in a classic Douglasian moment, that they were witnessing a confusion of gender categories and that the wearer "must be a girl."”  (I remember Rodney Graham one summer in Banff threatening to remove his pants to answer the challenge.)

The test has continued.  As marginal groups have insisted on a more visible place in the mainstream, we found ourselves with stranger strangers.” At first, we reacted badly.  The various youth cultures, lesbians, gays, all took a good deal of grief and, sometimes, acts of violence.  (As of course some still do.)

Then came a relative rapprochement.  As a collectivity, we discovered that these "differences"” weren’’t so different.  Punks might look threatening, but eventually they became merely one more part of the urban landscape.  Most people discovered the wisdom, or at least the usefulness, of the New Yorker’s standard response to the blooming variety of that urban setting: "Whatever, buddy.  Do what you wanna.  Just don’’t ask me to like it.”"  Now we could go back to business as usual.  Benign neglect was the order of the day.  It might be better to call this, in the New York style, "disgruntled neglect.”"

And this is why the Protestant Right has responded so ferociously to gay marriage.  Now a marginal group was asking not just for neglect but for inclusion in the very institution that the Protestant church had made the sacred moral ground of the family.  Gay marriage violated the "disgruntled neglect" rule.  In my opinion, it is entitled to do so.  Let us keep an eye on this test of our inclusiveness.

But for the rest of us, disgruntled neglect remains the order of the day.  Except when it provokes the sensitivities of a particular group, difference is tolerated.  We discovered that the society of strangers could expand very considerably…and that was ok. 

The post on plastic surgery (4 posts ago) suggests that we may have new differences on the way.  An encounter with the lion-like Bride of Wildenstein in a New York restaurant would almost certainly give me pause (paws?). 

But I’’d get over it.  Because, 25 years after my first face-to-face encounter with a crusty punk, I know the society of strangers can encompass even this.  It’’s a good thing I finally got the news.  Because the real difference engine isn’t a computer, it’’s a culture, our culture.

References

Douglas, Mary Tew. 1966. Purity and danger: an analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Leblanc, Lauraine. 1999. Pretty in punk: Girls’ gender resistance in a boys’ subculture. New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press.

McNeil, Legs, and Gillian McCain. 1996? Please Kill Me: The uncensored oral history of punk.  New York: Grove Press.

Pray, Doug (Producer). 1997.  Hype. CFP Video.

Savage, Jon. 1991.  England’s dreaming: Sex Pistols and punk rock.  London: Faber and Faber.

Whatever happens to the “swing” movement of the late 1990s? Me neither. The last time I looked in it was going gang busters. So what happened?

Everyone interested in contemporary culture has a tough time keeping up with all cultural developments that interest them. I am thinking about books, magazines, cds, music videos, zines and the profusion of experiment they represent. This isn’t so bad if our interests are narrowly defined. Somewhere out there, there’s a magazine editor getting the job done. But most of us have a several interests, driven by a breadth of enthusiasm, or at least curiosity. (We are all anthropologists now.)

Normally, the marketplace would solve this problem by creating a “clipping service” with summary comment. But as far as I know, there isn’t such a thing. The magazine/CD Blender tried something like this a few years ago. But it didn’t have the breadth I wanted. Sarah Zupko’s excellent popculture.com does this but it is more academic, more mediated than I want (for these purposes). Arts and Letters Daily does a nice job for, well, arts and letters, but it doesn’t have extraordinary pop culture cover.

What I don’t want is someone demonstrating their pop culture chops. They may know a area inside out, but I want something that a) takes nothing for granted, and b) is really inclusive. Entertainment Weekly satisfied both conditions (and supplied very good reviews by Lisa Schwarzbaum) but I have got out of the habit of reading it in print and access to the website is restricted.

This might be something that could be handled in an emergent way by a Friendster variation. Everyone posts the things that interest them and eventually we find the people who post the things that interest us. (If anyone knows of such a thing, please let me know.)

Surely one of those pop culture virtuosos wants to step up. The demand is there. The business model is not hard to imagine. The VCs are opening the pockets once more. The suppliers of pop culture are eager for exposure. A great many music videos are already on line, waiting for reference.

Perhaps, I’m missing something. But then that’s the problem.

In yesterday’s post, I raised a question: “What are the chances that we should be afflicted en masse with OCD, autistic tendencies, narcissism, schizophrenia, ADD, and latent inhibition diminishment?” I suggested that the time had come to burn our copies of the DSM, and to start again. We need a new paradigm for new problems.

Which paradigm? There might be something useful in Complexity theory. The complexity theorists posit something called a CAS, a complex adaptive system. The CAS has 4 properties: aggregation, diversity, flows and non-linearity. The complexity theorists intend the CAS as a way of thinking about a species. Clippinger and company have suggested that it is a good way to characterize a business organization. It occurred to be that it might be a useful way to characterize the self.

Clark defines the CAS aggregation as something that occurs when “heterogeneous elements are temporarily recruited to form a coherent whole.” The aggregation is, in Clark terms, a “soft assembly,” the pieces neither internally fixed nor externally bounded.

A second CAS property is diversity. Clippinger defines diversity as a “measure of variety; in general, the more diverse an organization, the more fit and adaptable it is.” Innovations find their way into and out of the aggregation with some frequency.

The third property of the CAS are flows. Clippinger defines these as “webs or networks of interactions,” a meta-message system by which diverse parts of the aggregation communicate with one another.

The fourth property of the CAS is non-linearity. Manville defines this as the ability of the organization to move beyond “linear projections[s] of the past” and under take “sudden and unexpected ‘threshhold changes’.”

Let’s say we are, some more than others, turning into Complex Adaptive Systems. We exhibit the symptoms of OCD because we are, as a CAS, newly attentive to a changing environment, always looking for the way to best read and react. This is the Monk in all of us. We are sometimes autistic in tendency, because there are moments when we retreat from the world for periods of disengaged reflection. We might think of these as “soft assembly” moments. We are narcissistic in moments because we are incapable of self regulation in highly dynamic unless constantly monitoring the things we want. We are schizophrenic in moments because we are running many selves in order to maximize our adaptive advantage. We are ADD sometimes because the world comes at us suddenly and from many origins and we must attend to it often and quickly. And finally we cultivate “latent inhibition” diminishment because this is one of the sources of the creativity that is now demanded of us.

Or something. Just a thought. But it feels like this is a better approach than heaping up the psychiatric acronyms.

May I say, as a closing note, that I devoutly hope that Portugal never wins another soccer game. Today’s victory, and every victory, makes my neighbors here in Montreal drive endlessly in circles, honking their horns, blowing whistles, and sounding air horns, for hours. Normally, the Dionysian in me responds well to expressions of pagan joy. But I am beginning to think these people need to get some seriously counselling. Please feel free to blame all logical inconsistencies and typographical errors in this post on the people of Portugal or the game of soccer, as you wish.

References

Clark, Andy. 1999. Leadership and Influence: The manager as coach, nanny, and artificial DNA. The biology of business decoding the natural laws of enterprise. editor John Henry Clippinger, 47-66. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, p. 49.

Clippinger, John Henry. 1999. The biology of business: Decoding the natural laws of enterprise. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, pp. 10-22.

Holland, John H. 1995. Hidden order: How adaptation builds complexity. Helix Book. Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley.

Manville, Brook. 1999. Complex Adaptive Knowledge Management. The biology of business decoding the natural laws of enterprise. editor John Henry Clippinger, 89-111 San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, p. 99.

How are you feeling today? A little obsessive, compulsive, autistic, narcissistic, schizophrenic, over stimulated, easily distracted? Yeah, me, too. Join the party.

In Monday’s post, I noted the popularity of a new TV show called Monk. The “defective detective” suffers from OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder. The show finds a way to make Monk’s condition funny without disguising the misery it causes him. Still, we like the character, and some of this comes, I was suggesting, from the fact that we identify with this man and his frailty. Something in Monk resembles something in us.

Leora Kornfeld and I have been corresponding about the new book called The curious incident of the dog in the night-time, an imagined first-person account of an autistic child who investigates a crime. Christopher knows every prime number up to 7,057. He cannot read people’s emotions and keeps a “cheat sheet” in his pocket to decode facial expressions. Food can’t touch on his plate. He particularly fears the color yellow.

For all of these peculiarities, Christopher is likeable. More than that, he is, as Leora and I have been noting, plausible. Something in him speaks to something in us. (It may well be that Leora knows all the prime numbers up to 7,057. She remembers a credit card number she saw very briefly 10 years ago. This sticks with me because it was my number.)

Some years ago, Christopher Lasch suggested that our “culture of competitive individualism” has taken ‘the pursuit of happiness to the dead end of a narcissistic preoccupation with the self.” Normally on this one, I would plead the fifth, but in the interests of science and good blogging, I am prepared to say: guilty as charged. Why else would I blog?

A few years later, Frederic Jameson suggested that we are now like schizophrenics who are “condemned to live a perpetual present with which the various moments of [the] past have little connection and for which there is no conceivable future on the horizon.” I do sometimes live in a very narrow present, and as Leora can tell you, I am famous for having only the dimmest memory of even important life events, but I am not now, nor have I ever been, a schizophrenic. (Touch wood. Often and obsessively.)

I have been guilty of this reckless use of symptoms myself, suggesting in Plenitude that we are now so multiple in our interests and responsive to so much stimuli, that it is as if we all suffer from ADD, attention deficit disorder. Those of you who read email the moment it arrives will know what I mean. In a recent post, I had a look at new Harvard research on “latent inhibition” diminishment with a view to showing its larger cultural significance.

But I’m wondering, “Is this profusion of symptoms perhaps a symptom of its own?” Call it SAMS: symptom as metaphor syndrome. SAMS is a new scourge of our time, as intellectuals anxiously search the DSM (as above) for psychiatric symptoms that they can use to make sense of things.

But hold on. We cannot all be suffering all these symptoms. What are the chances that we should be afflicted en masse with OCD, autistic tendencies, narcissism, schizophrenia, ADD, and latent inhibition diminishment? Pretty slim. Taken together these would be enough to kill a man or at least send him out into the street wearing a metal hat, shouting and waving his arms. We may have our problems, but we are “high functioning.”

SAMS has the tell-tale signs of intellectual crisis. We are resorting to the old models to make sense of new phenomena. Isn’t this what intellectuals usually do? Confronted by novelty, they resort to existing explanations. They don’t much care that this ends up as an alphabet salad of implausible imputations. Their work is done. Faced with grappling with novelty and restoring to old paradigms, they take the lazy way out.

Clearly, something is happening here. Clearly, we are responding to the demands of a new world, and reinventing how we behave within it. But perhaps it’s time to start fresh. Watch this space.

References

Haddon, Mark. 2003. The curious incident of the dog in the night-time. New York: Anchor.

Jameson, Frederic. 1983. Postmoderism and Consumer Society. in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern culture. editor Hall Foster, 111-25. Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press, p. 119.

Lasch, Christopher. 1978. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expections. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, p. XV

(sorry about not posting yesterday, my @%&! ISP was down.)

Bars are great observation platforms. Next time you are in Chicago here are 4 possibilities, with preliminary field notes to get you started.

115 Bourbon Street (SE corner 115th and Homan Avenue)

This place featured a middle aged heavy metal band, a kind of unintentional tribute to This is Spinal Tap. Five guys in ill fitting leather or spandex pants. The lead singer was doing an Axel Rose imitation. The bass player was actually wearing a wig. (I guess he has a day job.) Everyone on stage was “head banging” in unison until the cheap light stands began to sway alarmingly.

It was one of these strange post-irony performances. The band was at once completely guileless, deadly earnest, and relatively self mocking. Really, three acts in one. I think this worked for the audience which consisted of blue collar teens, college kids, outlaw biker type, and a slightly aggressive boomer singles scene at the bar complete with “cougars” and knuckleheads. (“Cougars” are women of middle age who are single and active in the bar scene. Knuckleheads are the male equivalent.)

Down town Chicago: The Redhead Lounge (16 West Ontario)

The piano player does a Billy Joel thing. It’s very comfortable, people happily reveling in a musical style that puts them several decades out of date. It is the kind of place where you can feel your clothes going out of style (to borrow an old line from Hollywood.) And, no, you don’t care. And there was a couple waltzing drunkenly in the corridor. No sense of irony here. It is charming, unassuming, likeable but then in a great, blinding moment, you understand why Punk was born. This is your Johnnie Rotten moment, but being Canadian, you say nothing and leave quietly.

Downtown Chicago: N9NE: the Ghost Bar (440 West Randolph)

Well designed bar, well designed people, exuberant and glamorous both. The crowd was 30 something, very well heeled, with celebrities making periodic appearances. The music is electronica that threads into and out of consciousness in the most cunning way. (That could just be the vodka.) Lots of tiny, jewel like TV screens turn up in the most unexpected places. They were showing an episode of Dharma and Greg, which struck me at the time as a witty choice. The bar staff conducted several conversations simultaneously, working a range of topics, intoxications, and treatments with the genius of really good improv.

But then this is Chicago, the very birthplace of improv. If I really had my wits about me, I would track down that train station where Mike Nichols and Elaine May met for the first time. “Do you have ze package?” he asked her, and that’s how improv was born. No, really.

Downtown Chicago: (name and address forthcoming)

A dark subterranean place with extravagant design scheme and Everything but the Girl playing on the sound track. This was once the toughest place to get into in the city. It is now so “over” that the guy at the door reads a news paper and just waves you in. There was a “girl’s night out” taking place at the bar. And that’ pretty much it. For a change you can actually hear yourself think, but there is, of course, nothing much to think about. My waitress turned out to be a young women who talked about her new glasses with great animation and some intelligence for what seemed like 20 minutes. I listened in astonishment. Obviously, a champion talker. Guess what she does for a living? She is a dancer.

All of these people are Americans. All of them occupy the same culture and economy. It is very hard to figure how this is possible.

The Art Institute has a sculpture of the Dragon King (Heian period, 11th, early 12th century).

I learned today that the dragon king was originally a Hindu god who found his way into the Buddhist pantheon and migrated from India to China, then to Korea, and finally to Japan where he became a Shinto god.

What, I asked himself, is this guy doing stuck in the 12th century? Restless, mobile, transformational, with the ability to leap religions and cultures in a single bound, all he needs is an agent and a couple of appearances on the Ryan Seacrest show and he’d be, er, a god.

I am still in Chicago, doing ethnography in bars for a client.

It is interesting. Last night the Cubs were playing in Houston and Cub fans had come to bars in the shadow of Wrigley field to shout them on. (How sweet is that.)

The Cubs won in the 9th. The bar went wild.

Doing ethnography in these conditions is a challenge. The sound system is almost always so loud you have to shout…and strain to hear. There is a game on so people are distracted. People are usually intoxicated so often you have proceed with care or caution, depending. Some are looking for a fight. Others are trying to pick you up. Fortunately, as a highly trained anthropologist, I have no difficulty telling the difference.

But this is Chicago. People are forthcoming and talkative. So the interviews are rich. I have done this kind of research in New York City and sometimes this is like wearing your “kick me” sign on the front of your jacket. Chicago has unofficial transparency rules. Locals are expected to know what they think, and say what they think. Even to strangers.

I did some work at Bar Louis and I left with a t-shirt that reads “Your team sucks, whoever they are.” I am taking back to the lab. See if the boys can figure it out.

The new World Trade Center will apparently contain a “Freedom Center.”

Terry Teachout is not happy about it.

“[This] is one of the self-evidently silly ideas that only an underemployed committee could have conceived, a portentous-sounding Museum of Nothing in Particular destined to present blandly institutional, scrupulously non-controversial exhibitions.”

Scrupulously non controversial?

Some people say the attack on the World Trade Center was, among other things, an attack on the Western idea of freedom, that Muslim orthodoxy is designed to contest this idea, that children wrap themselves in dynamite to resist this idea.

Extremists and terrorists would be surprised, I think, to learn they are taking issue with “nothing in particular.”

The rest of us must wonder what Terry isn’t quilty of an anthropological naivete. He assumes freedom so deeply, he lives it so implicitly, that he cannot see it. This is not an odd thing in most culture bearers. But it is a strange thing in someone who reviews plays for a living, don’t you think?

Perhaps that Freedom center is not such a bad idea.

References

Huntington, Samuel P. 1996. The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Teachout, Terry. 2004. In the Fray: At Ground Zero, Culture by committee. Wall Street Journal, June 14, 2004

A couple of people wrote to share their pet experiences.

Jane told me she went househunting recently. She took her dog. And talked to her dog. “We always tell her what’s going on so she’s in the loop.”

This is consistent with the theme of yesterday’s post: that we are endowing our pets with new rights, responsibilities, and personhood. Not only is Gizmo part of this family. She is part of the loop, i.e., a sentient, informed, fully current participant in the household. This is transformational: a dumb animal has become a conversational partner with a “need to know.”

Now there are lots of oddities here.

First, In what sense can we tell a dog “what’s going on?” It puts one in mind of that Larson cartoon. What we say to our dog:

“Gizmo, we’re changing houses because we’re running out of room and Jeff really needs a bigger office.”

What Gizmo hears:

“Gizmo, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

Second, if Gizmo really is capable of grasping what we tell her when we make her part of ‘the loop,” surely she’s capable of working things out for herself. But this implausibility condition does not prevent us from having conversations with Gizmo or from believing that she has heard us. It is a fiction but it’s a useful, compelling, persuasive fiction.

And the next line of the email tells the larger story, “she’s helped me through some very rough times.”

We are transforming our pets to make them useful companions as we struggle to live in a culture that is newly unpredictable, demanding, disequilibriating.

In a manner of speaking, all of our pets are now “seeing eye.”

[sorry this is rushed. I just checked into my hotel in Chicago and I am out the door.]

(Thanks to Steve Portigal for correcting my Booth, now Larson reference. This is what happens when you blog on the run, on the road.)

This blog has been too earnest lately. Readers have been unreasonably patient as I grind out essay after essay.

Here’s a video called Ocean Avenue by Yellow Card.

It’s a pop song. The lyrics are banal (as usual), but the video manages to use the theme from Groundhog Day to good effect. Plus, the drummer knows what he’s doing and the rhythm line is postpunk perfection. (Be sure to “supersize” your window and the base line.)

Larger significance? None apparent at time of post.

Every morning I turn on my computer, and start up Outlook. My emails come ambling in, one by one, a burlesque parade ground, soldiers presenting themselves for inspection.

I watch them with the usual combination of anticipation and unhappiness. (Oh, there’s someone I was hoping to hear from. Oh, not him again.)

Naturally, there is lot’s of spam. I have grown fond of some of this. I like, but of course no longer read, the ones from Ph.D.s in Africa inviting me to help liberate a vast fortune held in escrow. I like, but no longer read, the ones that come with imaginative subject headings. “Solipsism” by Burgos sounds promising and turns out to be a filter for cable TV. (Naturally, if I were a solipsist, I wouldn’t want to filter my TV. I would embrace every channel as an expression of my endless creativity. Yes, even Ronco’s Ron Popeil. And wouldn’t he take an amazing imagination?)

The emails that really give me pause are, naturally, the viruses intercepted by Norton. Norton makes a great, irritating, show of its usefulness by halting the parade and insisting that I “sign off” on the offending email. But I am grateful for this “inspection of the troops.” Plainly, the parade ground has one or two anarchists and I am happy to have them rooted out.

This morning I fell to thinking about what the parade ground is going to look like in 30 years.

As we know, China and India represent something like 2.4 billion people. Many of these people do not participate in a sophisticated educational system.

For instance, half the women of the Northwestern provinces of China are illiterate.

And in the case of India:

About one third of all Indian children are out of school. In the large north Indian states, which account for over 40 per cent of the country’s population, the proportion of out-of-school children in the 6-14 age group is as high as 41 per cent, rising to 54 per cent among female children.

This is a tragic waste. This is hundreds of millions of people. With education enfranchisement, many thousands of them would rise to academic, industrial and cultural greatness. Or, to put this more concretely, trapped in that mass of humanity are literally thousands of would-be Nobel prize winners, scientists, and entrepreneurs.

The good news is that India and China are developing at a furious pace. Some of their new wealth will be invested in education and eventually some of that talent will come “on-line.” Indeed, once India and China are fully up to speed, the West will no longer be fretting about “outsourcing.” We will be grateful for our narrowing share of insourcing.

Back to my in-basket. What happens when education participation equips hundreds of thousands of people with the ability to produce viruses? (Let’s be clear: this is not a xenophobic insinuation that China and India will produce an unusually high number of virus generators. Merely, their own share. To rework Freud’s famous title, I am assuming only that all cultures are equally responsive to the problem of “education and its discontents.”

It would be interesting to “run the numbers” here. We would need to calculate: the number of people who will have full educational participation, drilling down to those smart enough to get a higher education, to those who take up programming of some, even rudimentary, kind, and finally to those inclined to use this knowledge for malevolent, virus generating purposes.

It’s a lot of people, people. By my calculations, in the year 2034, it will take me roughly 7 hours every day to empty my in-basket, and I will be struck by a virus every 14 minutes and by a Norton-avoiding virus every 23 days.

Happy thoughts for a Friday.

References

Anon. n.d. Capacity building for Rural Women’s participation in sustainable development in five provinces in Northwest China.
http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/china/policy/acca21/211-6.html

Drèze, Jean and Geeta Gandhi Kingdon. 1999. School Participation in Rural India. Centre for Development Economics (Delhi School of Economics) & Institute for Economics and Statistics (University of Oxford). This Draft: August 1999. http://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/dps/de/dedps18.pdf

This month, the world lost two anthropologists: William H. Hinton and Evon Z. Vogt. Both will be mourned but there is an odd asymmetry in their influence on anthropology and the world.

Hinton was the author of a book called Fanshen: A documentary of revolution in a Chinese village. Those of you who went to college in the 1960s will remember this book as required reading in the liberal arts. Fanshen, published first in 1966, is still in print. It was reissued in 1997.

Vogt was the author of a book called Homesteaders: the life of a twentieth century frontier community. This wonderful little book, published in 1955, is not in print. Indeed, I have been able to find only a single used copy on line.

Vogt was a specialist in the study of the indigenous people of southern Mexico and Guatemala and I don’t know the circumstances that prompted him to study a little town in Texas (popular 374), except it must somehow have been connected to his work for the Comparative Study of Values at Harvard’s Laboratory of Social Relations. (Vogt taught at Harvard for 32 years.)

But the results were spectacular.

Vogt’s book gives us a chance to see the operation of the frontier impulse described here by Frederick Jackson Turner:

…each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier.

Or to put this in the rather more modernist language of a homesteader, as recorded by Vogt:

Why, I’d say we live in the future. We’re always looking forward to the future. Once in a while some of us gets together uptown and talks about the past, but everybody is for the future. What’s done past, I don’t care a thing about that. (p. 93)

Vogt says that while Homesteaders were very hard workers, they were also deeply committed to a practice called “loafing.” Men loafed more than women, and they did so at local stores where whittling, chewing tobacco, and ‘tall stories” were the order of the day. This proved a test for the investigator and produced what might be the funniest line of the book.

To an urban observer the time spent in these loafing groups seems almost endless. The writer has many times attempted to sit through one of these loafing bull sessions, but found it almost impossible to do so. (p. 115).

I can’t help wondering what would happened if the required reading of the 1960s was Vogt’s exquisite little study of one aspect of the American condition, instead of a worthy but in some ways merely fashionable study of a small village in China. We must also ask why this little book is not in print, even as Fanshen continues to flourish. Is it any surprise that, for anthropological purposes, we are more knowledgeable about Chinese villagers than ourselves?

References:

Hinton, William. 1997. Fanshen: A documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. 1920/1976. The Frontier in American History. Huntington, New York: Robert E. Krieger Publishing, p. 38.

Vogt, Evon Zartman. 1955. Modern homesteaders: the life of a twentieth century frontier community. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

In today’s NYT, David Brooks gives us his review of the book by Edward Laumann (and others) entitled The Sexual Organization of the City.

Brooks was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago (as we have noted before in this blog) and he should know that the first revelation of Laumann’s study is that Chicagoans are having sex. At least this is the first evidence of a scientific kind…and frankly no one at the University of Chicago is likely to have any other kind. When this community talks about the “life of the mind,” they’re not kidding.

Here are the last four paragraphs of Brook’s story.

When you step back from this data, you see that, first, there has been a flowering of diverse sexual zones. This spontaneous evolution is so rapid, it is very difficult for big institutions to keep up. How can the city government of Chicago design health and welfare programs for areas as different as Southtown, Westside and Shoreland? How can the churches and other moral authorities keep up?

Second, sexual marketplaces are a rapidly expanding feature of society, and they are becoming more distinct from marriage marketplaces. Furthermore, as the sex markets become bigger and more efficient, people have less incentive to get married. As the scholars Yoosik Youm and Anthony Paik write, “Opportunities in the sex market act as constraints in the marriage market.”

The big problem here is that there is an overwhelming body of evidence to suggest that marriage correlates highly with happiness. Children raised in marriages tend to have more opportunities than children raised outside marriage.

Over all, Americans are spending much less time married. They marry later and divorce at high rates, and remarry less and less. We are replacing marriage, one of our most successful institutions, with hooking up. This is a deep structural problem, and very worrying.

Hang on a second. Isn’t there a contradiction here? Brooks makes it sound like the problem with “hooking up” is that it moves us away from a marriage-based society and that this is a problem because “marriage correlates highly with happiness.”

Can we not assume that these people are leaving the institution because marriage does not make them happy?

We may concede that these people are not as happy as people who are married, but it is not clear that a return to marriage will make them happier. It is presumably to escape the limitations of the old forms and or the opportunities of the new forms of marriage that prompted them to leave in the first place.

Or am I missing something?

There is the unhappy, and uncharacteristic, implication here that Brooks knows better. I’m disturbed he’s disturbed.