the secret pain of the hipster

For hipsters, prevailing ideas and values are not necessarily oppressive, just stupid; not necessarily worthy of anger, just ridicule. (They generally focus on cultural output from the recent past, for reasons we have yet to consider.) Thus for example hipsterism encourages its adherents to propose, in writing, on their t-shirts, to sell moustache rides for five cents, not because they intend to give anyone a moustache ride, and not even because the apposition of ‘moustache’ and ‘ride’ is seen as a source of humor. What is humorous is that in some imagined Country Comfort Lounge in Amarillo or Cheyenne a generation ago some big slab of a man actually sported a moustache of which he was proud, which he believed could function directly and un-ironically as a sexual attractant.

This from Justin E.H. Smith, who says hipsters

construct their social identity primarily in opposition to the prevailing sensibilities of the age, without however conceiving this opposition as political.

This, I think, takes me out of the running for hipsterhood for good. The only thing that annoys me more than justifying actions based on accord with prevailing sensibilities is justifying actions based on opposing prevailing sensibilities. Perhaps this is what unsettles me slighly about hipster irony, or "snarkiness." There's an insidiousness to it. Hipster irony avoids the heavy-duty destructiveness of traditional against-the-man political opposition, but it isn't exactly lighthearted. Snark is smug, and it's not constructive. It serves to point out the absurdity of the status quo, but it offers no real alternative. There is, I think, some frustration there, as in John Mayer's über-hip Waiting on the World to Change:

me and all my friends
we're all misunderstood
they say we stand for nothing and
there's no way we ever could
now we see everything that's going wrong
with the world and those who lead it
we just feel like we don't have the means
to rise above and beat it

so we keep waiting
waiting on the world to change

Step three, I'd say.

recursive (adj.) see recursive

Daniel L. Everett says recursion might not be essential to language after all. Recursion, or self-reference, plays a central role in most human languages. It gives language its incredible power and flexibility. Parmenides exploits recursion in his famous liar's paradox, "this sentence is lie." But

Pirahã culture, Everett claimed, was unique: it was totally focused on immediate experience and it lacked basic number skills, a vocabulary for colours, a past perfect tense and a creation myth.

The Pirahã, Everett says, do use recursion in their language, it's just not built into their grammar. They have to construct self-reference by telling stories in which, for example, one part is subordinate to another. The modern paradigm of linguistics was framed by Chomsky 50 years ago, amd the fundamental feature is the Universal Grammar; the biological basis for language. Disagreements in linguistics are supposed to be about determining the elements of that universal grammar, not about whether it exists (although strong arguments exist on both sides of that question as well. I always found Chomsky more reasonable, but Fodor's arguments are infuriatingly hard to dismiss. Indeed, the only thing harder than arguing against Fodor is agreeing with him). In any case, recursion is one feature of language few thought to deny.

Assuming Everett is right, what are the implications? (not for Chomsky, for Pirahã)

For one, Pirahã seem not to count. Mathematics is heavily recursive, to the point that an elementary exercise for computer scientists learning about recursion is to formulate the recursive rules of arithmetic--counting, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and (this one's tricky) division.

Pirahã are an interesting folk, and it's hard to know which (if any) of their values are related to their recursionless grammar. Everett started out as a missionary, but found it hard going trying to convince the Pirahã. This is partly because one of their strongest values is "no coercion."

When I began to tell them the stories from the Bible, they didn't have much of an impact. I wondered, was I telling the story incorrectly? Finally one Pirahã asked me one day, well, what color is Jesus? How tall is he? When did he tell you these things? And I said, well, you know, I've never seen him, I don't know what color he was, I don't know how tall he was. Well, if you have never seen him, why are you telling us this?

The Pirahã, who in some ways are the ultimate empiricists—they need evidence for every claim you make—helped me realize that I hadn't been thinking very scientifically about my own beliefs.

In striking contrast to the way we tend to think of empiricism, however,

the Pirahã are not that curious about what we have. They haven't shown interest in a number of things that other indigenous groups [have].... The Pirahã have been in regular contact for a couple of hundred years now, and they have assimilated almost nothing. It's very unusual.

Everett thinks this is because of thir focus on the immediacy of experience: they just aren't interested in things "if they don't know the history behind them."

Everett is building a case for culture making architectonic demands on language, amd it's intriguing to turn the question upon ourselves: what linguistic demands is our culture making? Supposing we undergo a cultural change, what implications might it have for language?

To connect this narrowly to my field, what has this to say about incommensurability between scientific paradigms?

moral stunts

University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt and graduate student Jesse Graham have expanded on previous theory to come up with a list of five domains for ethical “intuitions” that seem to be common across humankind: concern for harm to people, fairness, loyalty to members of the in-group, respect for authority, and “spiritual” purity.

I make a distinction between ethics and morals that may not be universal. Ethics are rules of action, while morals are the values underlying them (I can get away with loose talk like this because I'm neither a moral philosopher nor an ethicist). It's not clear yet whether Haidt and Graham are following a similar distinction, but you should take a moment to judge for your self based on the five categories they've picked out.

Haidt and Graham then asked 1,613 people who identified themselves as liberals or conservatives to answer questions aimed at identifying which of the five domains elicited strong reactions from them (including cognitive disgust at certain possible moral scenarios). The results were stunning, if not entirely surprising with hindsight: while conservatives where sensitive to all five moral “domains,” liberals were concerned only with the first two (harm to others and fairness).

I think Haidt and Graham are conflating ethics and morals. That might be an unfair accusation, given that it's my distinction and not theirs, but I make it for a reason, and it's precisely to draw a line between such principles as fairness and loyalty. Perhaps it's a failure of imagination on my part, but it's hard for me to imagine a situation in which actions guided by "fairness" would be wrong, but I can easily think of situations in which loyalty would be. Fairness is universal, loyalty conditional. It never occurred to me that anyone else could think otherwise. Taking the results on board

may go a long way toward explaining why certain people simply cannot see the point of starting a moral crusade in response to, say, homosexuality (which falls under “spiritual purity,” whatever that is), or do not understand how someone can follow a leader regardless of how stupid or criminal his actions may be (“my country right or wrong,” which falls under both respect for authority and loyalty to the in-group).

From here.

I have questions: Where does the difference come from? Is it innate? Genetic? Learned? How strong are these "intuitions"? Are there degrees? Can these intuitions be overcome? Reasoned for or against? How does one decide between the five in cases of conflict? Does everyone have a set order?

I have trouble deciding between avoiding harm to people and fairness. But both are clearly more important than the other three. Loyalty is a clear winner over there remaining pair. I tend to respect authority because it is easy and convenient. There are some activities I'm uncomfortable witnessing and others I refuse to take part in. I assume that's what's meant by spiritual purity, but I'm really not certain.

I suppose that makes me a godless liberal.

irony

Yesterday, I said our built environment

usually fades into the background. Or, better, it seeps into our subconscious.

That's not entirely true. This happened today, just down the street from my house:Yikes.

From Torontoist.

the built environment

The built environment--the buildings and streets and parks that form the background of our daily activities--usually fades into the background. Or, better, it seeps into our subconscious. It nevertheless shapes our movements, alters our mood, and becomes a part of our identity. This is my beautiful building.

It's just down the street from this monstrosity, the Royal Ontario Museum.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not against modern architecture. I rather like this bit of Wright-inspired tastefulness, the Gardiner Museum, also just down the street.
I'm not against glass, either, as I'm quite fond of Apple's Fifth Avenue retail store:I like the idea of preserving our heritage (top) and building the new and exciting (bottom). But mixing the two can be very dangerous (the ROM). A progressive alien crystalline form engulfing our very heritage may not have been quite the effect the architects intended.

Progress is a funny thing.

In Maine, we pay dairy farmers money to keep them in business. We do it so that we continue to have a dairy industry in Maine. It's a part of our heritage we want to hold on to, even if it isn't self-sustaining. At the same time, we want to be a part of the global economy. So we give tax breaks to high-tech companies in the hopes that the old can live alongside the new. It would be easy to say that every time we change our built environment, we're giving up a piece of our culture. Every time we cut down a 200 year old oak to widen a street, we're selling our very soul. Would greening Trafalgar have the same effect? More to the point, there was a day Old Vic was new--a great mass of stone thrust up out of farm lands, a manifestation of the siren call of progress ushering in a new economy of opportunity--and inequality. To avoid change is to stagnate, to become irrelevant. The challenge is to make each change our own, to incorporate it into our environment so that it, too, can seep beneath our consciousness and become a part of us. Toronto has a long history of architectural creativity, as much evidenced by what it has chosen not to do as by its current distinctive skyline.

I am by no means settled on this question. Perhaps knowing something about architecture might help. Likely not. Although knowing something would surely accelerate my ruminations and perhaps allow me fuller expression of them, I suspect that the question of heritage and progress will remain forever a very personal and troubled one.

architectural warfare

I've been planning this post for a while, but a friend of mine beat me to it.

Blowing up buildings as a form of psychological warfare has a long and ignoble history. Sometimes, it takes the form of an

architectural ritual, played out over centuries between rival governments and religions. This is the "repeated demolition or adaptation of each other's buildings," and retaliation can sometimes take generations. For instance, Bevan writes about the site of the cathedral, in Córdoba, Spain, which "started out as a Roman temple" before being destroyed by Christian Visigoths: "A subsequent church on the site was replaced by a mosque following the Arab conquest of the early eighth century. Some seventy years later this was itself demolished to create the first stage of a massive new mosque. The Christian recaptured Córdoba in 1236 and consecrated the building as a cathedral."

I wonder if the tradition will continue?

traveling at the speed of science

UPDATE: Some sort-of mainstream coverage of the odd theory that nerves might conduct via sound, not electricity. See my March post.