Why can’t we eat spaghetti too?
So the sunlit past of the culinary Luddites never existed. So their ethos is based not on history but on a fairy tale. So what? Certainly no one would deny that an industrialized food supply has its own problems. Perhaps we should eat more fresh, natural, local, artisanal, slow food. Does it matter if the history is not quite right?
It matters quite a bit, I believe. If we do not understand that most people had no choice but to devote their lives to growing and cooking food, we are incapable of comprehending that modern food allows us unparalleled choices not just of diet but of what to do with our lives. If we urge the Mexican to stay at her metate, the farmer to stay at his olive press, the housewife to stay at her stove, all so that we may eat handmade tortillas, traditionally pressed olive oil, and home-cooked meals, we are assuming the mantle of the aristocrats of old.
If we fail to understand how scant and monotonous most traditional diets were, we can misunderstand the “ethnic foods” we encounter in cookbooks, at restaurants, or on our travels. We can represent the peoples of the Mediterranean, Southeast Asia, India, or Mexico as pawns at the mercy of multinational corporations bent on selling trashy modern products—failing to appreciate that, like us, they enjoy a choice of goods in the market. A Mexican friend, suffering from one too many foreign visitors who chided her because she offered Italian food, complained, “Why can’t we eat spaghetti, too?”
One aspect of serendipity to bear in mind is that you have to be looking for something in order to find something else.
—Lawrence Block, via SwissMiss
The people’s Bible
It’s well-known that Luther translated the Bible into German, and it’s often thought that he was the first one to do so. But that’s not true at all. In fact, there were 17—that’s right, 17—other translations of the Bible into German before Luther’s! . . .
Gutenberg’s Bible was the first book printed in the West using movable type. But while the technology was new, the social system was still old. We have in the Gutenberg Bible a classic product designed for the nouveaux riches. His Bible promised to up-and-coming classes the same access to written culture afforded previously only by ecclesiastics and nobility.
We can see that in even in its style. Gutenberg’s work left the intial letters unprinted with space left for illumination. His printed Bible was meant to simulate the great illuminated Bibles owned by the nobility and rich monasteries, but for a bargain-basement price. That’s not to say they were cheap. Gutenberg’s Bible would have cost the average worker a fortune. It was still a prestige piece, not meant for study but to decorate the collections of those who wished to be identified with book culture.
What we see in Luther’s work is an entirely different kind of thing. Here was a whole Bible meant for study, for reading. It was designed to be printed en masse, to be bought and distributed to many people below the nobility, used in churches and schools for catechesis. We can see the difference in the design. Older Bibles were large, folio-sized objects, printed in small numbers. Luther’s was was small, mass-produced, and affordable.
I’m very weary of the hipster obsession with zombies by now. Cut it out, hipsters. So I felt shame the other night as my friend and I sprinted through the dark along treacherously uneven brick sidewalks, running from zombies and loving it.
Not real zombies, or even hipsters—we were responding to an awesome app for Android phones called Zombie, Run! It’s a location-based game of sorts that places a bunch of zombies between you and your destination on the map. When you’re near enough to a zombie, it begins to give chase. You must reach your destination without a zombie catching you and eating your brains. It’s lots of fun and can make mundane trips much more interesting, especially if you enjoy running around like a maniac in public.
But a game like this is also fascinating when you set down your can of High Life and put on your Geographer hat. It directs a kind of spatial behavior that technology more often stamps out in one way or another—wandering. While our gizmos usually tell us exactly where something is and how to get there, here is something that forces a person to stray from the direct path. Assuming the player keeps his eyes open and actually notices the world around him, the game provides an interesting way of experiencing and understanding urban spaces. By acting upon virtual landscape in the physical landscape, the player travels unpredicted paths and enters areas that might otherwise never have been seen.
Cement bag graphics
But that was only the first part of the experiment. The psychologists then repeated the jam taste test with a separate group of college students, only this time they asked them to explain why they preferred one brand over another. As the undergrads tasted the jams, the students filled out written questionnaires, which forced them to analyze their first impressions, to consciously explain their impulsive preferences. All this extra analysis seriously warped their jam judgment. The students now preferred Sorrel-Ridge—the worst tasting jam according to Consumer Reports—to Knott’s Berry farm, which was the experts’ favorite jam. The correlation plummeted to .11, which means that there was virtually no relationship between the rankings of the experts and the opinions of these introspective students.
What happened? Wilson and Schooler argue that “thinking too much” about strawberry jam causes us to focus on all sorts of variables that don’t actually matter. Instead of just listening to our instinctive preferences, we start searching for reasons to prefer one jam over another. For example, we might notice that the Acme brand is particularly easy to spread, and so we’ll give it a high ranking, even if we don’t actually care about the spreadability of jam. Or we might notice that Knott’s Berry Farm has a chunky texture, which seems like a bad thing, even if we’ve never really thought about the texture of jam before. But having a chunky texture sounds like a plausible reason to dislike a jam, and so we revise our preferences to reflect this convoluted logic.
My job as a performer is to make something memorable. If I do something nice but forgettable, it needn’t have happened. But if it sinks inside someone else’s brain and then they make connections, that’s something worth doing, because you’re going to intimate places in someone else’s psyche. I spend a lot of time thinking about what is the magical mix that can make the thing I love to do be so wonderful for others.
—Yo-Yo Ma, interviewed by David Mermelstein, 29 July 2010
It’s interesting to see that although people appreciate their very rich culture, they do not connect its traditions to contemporary knowledge and practices. For example, students in the graphic design course I taught at ENAV asked me to give them lessons in color, insisting they knew nothing about it. This really surprised me. My immediate answer was, “But you should teach me! You’re surrounded by color and use it in such powerful ways in every aspect of daily life. I admire you for it!” Their response was to laugh and say, “But Teacher! That’s not design! We need to use design colors.” From talking to my students and people in the cultural sector, I got the impression that design was this distant, quite artificial, field they had to adapt to. Their main concern is learning software.
Rejected, then revolutionary
The DeYoung Museum in San Francisco has a wonderful special exhibition, Birth of Impressionism, which uses French paintings from the late 19th century to provide a kind of social history of the impressionist movement. As is well known, the impressionists were shut out of the classic Paris salons because of their unorthodox subject matter and style. Rejected by the art establishment, they became a school of their own. The exhibition shows many of the paintings that were accepted by the official shows; and it offers early impressionist paintings that reveal how the painters interacted with each other as their movement took shape.
For example, there’s a painting of a painter painting. His model is a dead bird. Displayed next to this painting is another of that same dead bird. But this second painting is not the one portrayed in the first painting, it is by a third painter, who happened along to the studio, saw the dead bird being painted, and set up his easel to paint alongside. Three artists going at it in a kind of art incest.
Two comments. First, the official salon paintings that the impressionists reacted against were often magnificent paintings. They weren’t all stiff, tired, and mannered, as art history would sometimes seem to suggest. Also, it’s not hard to see that they shared some of the impressionists’ approach. In fact, one could easily mistake some of their paintings for impressionist art.
Revolutionaries tend to overstate their reaction against the status quo. Really, the New Age owes a lot to the reviled Old Age.
Second, the impressionists became a “school” mainly because the official salon rejected them. They had widely different ideas and styles, and no one might ever have thought to group them had they not been driven together by their rejection. They met together, often. They met in cafes on a regular basis to talk and argue, and they often disagreed strenuously. (At one such meeting Manet fought a duel with Duranty, and wounded him. Afterwards, their friendship continued.) The cafes gave them a place to work out their ideas and to be part of something bigger than themselves. Revolutions require fellowship. And rejection can create it.
Where do would-be revolutionaries find fellowship today? On the internet?
Conspicuous conservation
Our findings suggest that marketers of green products are well-advised to clearly link such products to status (e.g., celebrity endorsers, prestigious events), especially when a green product is relatively expensive (e.g., when such products have high development costs and cannot be sold at a loss). As indicated by Study 2, however, a key component of harnessing the power of status motives to benefit social welfare necessitates that the prosocial acts be visible to others, whereby such acts can clearly influence the well-doer’s reputation. For example, nonprofit organizations are well-advised to give their benefactors visible signs, tags, or badges (e.g., the highly visible yellow Livestrong armband signifying cancer donations), so that benefactors can clearly display their self-sacrificing and status-enhancing acts.
A costly signaling framework also suggests that it would be a mistake to link green products to status when such products are relatively cheap because inexpensive products can undermine the signaling of wealth by its owner. Indeed, a key counterintuitive aspect of this framework is that attempts to make green products cheaper, easier to buy, or more time-saving can actually undercut their utility as a signal of environmentalist/altruist dedication. For example, in contrast to standard economic models, a costly signaling framework suggests that electric cars might be seen as more prestigious and more desirable if recharging stations are harder to find and take longer to recharge the batteries, rather than being ubiquitous, fast, and efficient.
A surprising declaration
The man who wrote it owned other human beings. The rich Anglo-Saxon males who signed it believed themselves superior to women, Catholics, Jews, other Europeans, Native Americans, blacks, Asians, and poor white males. It contained no development strategy, no announced intention for poverty reduction, and no nation-building Power Point presentation. For many decades afterward, anyone who took it literally would have been seen as crazy.
Yet the principles the Declaration gave in two sentences have done more than anything else for both liberty and development in the 234 years since that day.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
Happy birthday, Declaration, and thank you.
It creates no wealth or goods
A characteristic of play, in fact, is that it creates no wealth or goods, thus differing from work or art. At the end of the game, all can and must start over again at the same point. Nothing has been harvested or manufactured, no masterpiece has been created, no capital has accrued. Play is an occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill, and often of money ... As for the professionals—the boxers, cyclists, jockeys, or actors who earn their living in the ring, track, or hippodrome or on the stage, and who must think in terms of prize, salary, or title—it is clear that they are not players but workers. When they play it is at some other game.
[Culture Making] was smart, challenging, and most of all very humane. I couldn’t stop thinking about it and talking about it long after I finished reading.
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Tara, educator living
in Cambridge, Mass.