Why We Do What We Do, Pt III

So, I listen to science podcasts when I get the chance, and one of the things that is most fascinating to me in the scientific world is how much there is to be interested in. Seriously. Today's episode of Quirks and Quarks included someone who sequenced the genome of an extinct human being, someone who studied whether six month old babies who can read our intentions, and someone who studied the tentacled snake to figure out why it has tentacles. Oh, and a Canadian astronaut who spent six months in space.

And then there was This American Life's 400th episode, where they let their parents pitch stories to follow up on -- and they wound up covering a car, the Erie Canal, a near-destroyed university in Haiti, the humor of death, and corporate personhood.

What it reminds me is that we, as artists, have so much potential to do work about. In the same way that scientists can find out interesting and cool stuff about any number of obscure creatures or beings, we can find ourselves in an unlimited sea of ideas and possibilities.

It's on my mind because my theater company is in the process of figuring out what we're doing for the next year (as for this year, come see our production of Hamlet that opens next week!). And I guess there's a lot of ink that has been spilled over how plays are selected, but I'm interested in the independent theater from the DIY crowd -- how do they select ideas?

What's the general process? Are there tendencies in terms of what we're drawn into taste-wise? How much do we draw inside of our own organization, and how much do we draw from outside? When we draw from outside, how much do we take in from strangers and how much do we take from acquaintances? What is our prime focus? Is it finding something new? A unique structure? Something that seems topical or immediate? Something that leaps off the page as being well-made? Something that accomplishes the mission statement? Something that you can striking home for your audience? Something that you imagine will be fun to do?

I'm thinking of stumbling my way towards making this a survey of some kind. Not just a collection of anecdotes, but something--if not 100% empirical, but something to look at trends in DIY theater season-making.

Cold War Stories

In addition to being a Supreme Court nut, I am very much a history buff, specifically Cold War history. I'm one day hoping to create a one-man show around my love of telling Cold War stories, but I have other things on my plate.

Why do I love Cold War stories?

Well, the Cold War is an interesting case that makes something I believe about life very clear. In the Cold War, you have events that are driven, largely, because of the Force of History. Each event calls back to the event right before it, each seems like a natural response to the thing that just happened, and yet by the time you're ten events down history has taken baffling turns. Yet things seem to drive towards inevitable events and conclusions.

As a for instance, a lot of ink has been spilled about why the Soviet Union collapsed, and one of the stories -- the one economists tend to favor -- is that the centrally planned economy was inefficient and created a perverse incentive structure which, in aggregate, corroded the economy from Day One, until eventually it was untenable. (the Reagan-killed-the-USSR theory is really an extension of that theory).

On the other hand, the "inevitable force of history" is kind of boring and abstract. And there's a lot of case to be made that Cold War history can be seen through the lens of a few individuals who appear, in choice moments, to make singular decisions that ripple out through history. After all, the Soviet economy was struggling for years and years before the collapse, but the Soviet Union didn't really collapse until Mikhail Gorbachev decided that he was not going to use military force in Eastern Europe, even if Eastern European countries turned away from communism -- that his democratic reforms were more important than territorial integrity. As a point of comparison, Khrushchev was faced with the same decision at the end of the Khrushchev Thaw, when his resolve to end the bloodshed Stalin had unleashed was challenged by an uprising in Hungary. Khrushchev decided differently, and the USSR persisted.

So on the one hand, you have a view of history that is individuals making heroic decisions -- which is, by the way, the theatrical view of history -- or the view of history where large economies of scale overpower the individual and force their hands. These views are not, in fact, incompatible. In fact, the latter emerges from the former.

(That word is very complicated, and rather than explain it, which I would do a pretty poor job of it, I'll leave it to the masters at Radiolab to do that for me. Honestly, LTTWT)

At any rate, I love those moments when a single person managed to change the direction of the Cold War, whether by accident by pure moxie.

Case 1: Matthias Rust, a young West German Teenager who learns how to fly, flies into Moscow, lands outside the Kremlin, goes to prison for a long time, and gives Gorbachev pretext to fire old-guard Communists from the military chain of command.

Case 2: (my favorite) Guenter Schabowski, a party bureaucrat whose single press conference gaffe brought down the Berlin Wall and, in its own way, set a date for the dissolution of the Soviet Union as it had been known for three full decades.

Suspension of Disbelief

One of the things I love is neuroscience. I will never have the ability to be a neuroscientist, but I just love it. And one of the things I love most is neuroscience of the arts.

Today's post by The Frontal Cortex (written by the incomparable Jonah Lehrer, frequent Radiolab contributor) tackles what we mean when we say we're "lost in a movie," or "suspension of disbelief."

Basically, according to Lehrer and the studies he cites, this is an observable mental phenomenon. Your brain suppresses certain reflexive (self-aware) processes to focus on processes it considers involved in understanding the story -- visual, sonic, and touch understanding.

Brecht would be furious. This is exactly what he was talking about!

Oh, and the post uses Avatar as the jumping off point, saying that the hollowness of the spectacle is part of what your brain is looking for when it wants to zone out to a movie.

The Future of Culture IV: War Memorial

In the Radiolab episode "New Normal" that I talked about in the last Future of Culture installment, the episode began with a discussion of changing cultural attitudes toward war. Specifically, it was about a man who was surveying people about whether they thought war would ever end, whether there would ever be World Peace. He says that in the early 1980s, the answer was overwhelmingly "Yes." And today, the answer is overwhelmingly "No."

This seems indicative of the modern cynicism about everything (although the early 1980s still exists in that post-Nixon, post-Vietnam era that I at least consider the modern cynical age), but what's interesting to me is that this mindset flies in the face of certain evidence.

Actually, before we go on, I want to quibble about the question -- the question should be more realistically phrased as "Will we ever reach the point where wars are rare, abnormal events." In other words, I don't know if we'll ever reach that asymptotic event, but I do think it is an asymptote--I think we will get closer and closer to having "no" wars.

Somewhere between 1900 and 2000, war left the cultural norm in Europe. In 1900, war was considered a measure of strength of nations. By the end of World War One, we were praying that this war was the "war to end all wars." It wasn't until World War Two that this seemed to be achieved in Europe. Now, World War Two is not the complete end of War in Europe -- there were some near-wars, such as the Soviet invasion of Hungary and of the Czech Republic, and two genuine wars (the last genocides of the former Yugoslavia), but those were considered to be abnormal, and in the case of the latter, Europe actually interceded and brought an end to the war.

I was thinking about this for a very specific reason. This Sunday, I walked through Grand Army Plaza at Prospect Park in Brooklyn. The centerpiece of the plaza, pictured above, is the grand triumph arch, topped with what I feel comfortable in assuming is Nike, goddess of Victory. I feel comfortable in assuming this because nearly identical arches can be seen at the Brandenburg Gate, in Brussels, and throughout New England and Europe. Every one is a memorial to victory, a triumphal memory of war.

And that's what gives me hope: we don't build those arches anymore.

If you compare post-WWI memorials to pre-WWI memorials, you'll note that they suddenly become not memorials to Victory, they become memorials to loss. Lists of names or headstones. Nearly universally in Europe. It's a sudden, 180 degree shift of our cultural conversation about war.

Even if we were to win in Iraq--win in the most unequivocal terms; a stable democracy, no car bombs, Al Qaeda surrendering in one moment "on the deck of a battleship," as they say, etc.--even the most incredibly fantastical of victory scenarios--there will be no arch of triumph. We will simply erect a memory of those we have lost.

This is just one aspect of our cultural conversation about war. There's also Rush Limbaugh, and Band of Brothers, and the Medal of Honor games, and the coverage out of Iraq. But I find it interesting that what once was a common, "cultural" expression of memory of war has suddenly shifted. It gives me hope.

The Future of Culture III: Think of the Children

This blog is a blog about culture. (I promise I'll get back to the Grassroots/Power thing). It's also about the potential of culture to change.

The potential to change culture was rather excellently tackled by WNYC's incomparable science radio show, Radiolab, in an episode called "New Normal." Obviously, if culture has no potential to be changed--or at least, no potential to be changed deliberately--this blog has absolutely no purpose.

Culture, often, is used as a stand-in for fate, for programming. Think about the phrase "Culture of corruption." The implication of the phrase is that corruption has become a social norm, and is therefore so widespread that penetrating it is difficult. Cultural habits and norms are incredibly deeply ingrained, and very difficult to shift.

I don't like the word "culture" when it is used in the context of cultural habits, the sum of a large group of people's outlooks and views. As discussed a long time ago on this blog, when I use the word culture, I'm talking about the sum of cultural conversation--all of the ads, books, plays, talk radio segments, etc. that add up to form what we are talking about. Not just the zeitgeist (which is this moment in culture) but also the history of culture--the conversation as it has always been.

The reason I don't talk about culture in terms of the sum of a large group of people's outlooks and views (which is the "culture" that sometimes is called upon by bigots when they disparage a group of people en masse) is because I find it to be fluid, in a historical sense, despite how entrenched it in a moment.

For me, culture in terms of that sum of large group of outlooks and views is something that gets ingrained in a young person as they develop. And the reason that a particular group of people develop similar outlooks and views is because they're growing up in a similar place. The phrase "Growing up as a young ______ in ______" comes to mind--my hip-hop teacher uses it to try and get across to us privileged young NYU students what it was like to be a New Yorican in the 1970s. And you have to understand that, he means, to understand the culture.

This idea dawned on me when I was on the subway this morning, and I saw an older lady making baby faces at a child that was not hers. I reflected for a moment about how different that experience was for that baby than in my life--I doubt that I was fawned over by many strangers in the distant, alienated suburbia I grew up in. And then I realized that this child would grow up far more comfortable with strangers than I would, simply by necessity. That's the effect of place on this child.

And that's how culture really gets transmitted. The assumptions a child makes about the world around them are formed by the knowledge carried within parents, and how those adults act and perform. But here's the good news--in this moment of transmission, there is an incredible opportunity for intervention. By structuring the world that those children learn their assumptions in, we can powerfully intervene in culture.

This means, by the way, that the fastest that culture can change--deeply, meaningfully change--is one generation. On the one hand, this is a horrifyingly long amount of time--the idea that if we wanted to change culture in a deep and meaningful way, we would need to work on our children now and it would only bear fruit in a generation.

The reason that we are having the current "Change" and this wave of reformism and cultural renovation right now is because of the new emerging generation, and the withdrawal of the older generation. In a way, the massive cultural battle of the 1960s forged our parent's outlook, and my parent's outlook in the 1980s formed the world that I grew up in. This is why the culture of the 1950s is so incredibly distant from today.

Another example, perhaps a better one, is the end of war in Europe. After all, before 1945, war between European superpowers was as much a cultural norm as it is in the rest of the world. Part of this is a genuine ethnic hatred between, as an example, Germany and France. Today, Germans and Frenchmen have some sort of rivalry, but the concept of Europe is so built into the fabric of Europe that a war between Germany and France is not only impractical, but seems as absurd as a war between New York and New Jersey (which, by the way, used to happen).

The reason is because entire generations have grown up in which the reality, as articulated by society and everywhere, has drastically changed that assumption. In 1950, although Germany and France did not go to war, for the people who had lived through WWI (and the optimism that had run rampant afterwards), it could not be taken for granted. But a child who grew up in 1960s Germany, war with France would seem like a distant, remote, and silly perspective. A child who grew up in 1980s France would not only feel that the option is distant, remote, and silly--the child would be surrounded by adults who feel the same.

So if we want to influence culture, we have to change the world that our children grow up in. This is why what our children perceive has become a battleground in the aptly named culture wars.

A conservative example of attempting to influence the moment of transmission of culture is the gay-marriage debate. Take this article from The Plank, describing the gay-marriage fight in Maine and the main argument against allowing gay-marriage:

"I don't think that parents want their kids as young as kindergarten being taught about same-sex marriage, period, whether the teacher thinks it's appropriate or not," Brown said.

In other words, in the minds of Yes On 1 supporters, teaching gay marriage can mean merely saying that it exists, although, inevitably, gay-loving teachers will go further and tell children it's a good thing. And the Maine law does nothing to prevent this. "I'd like to see that in writing, guys. Show it to me that it's not going to be taught in schools," Marc Mutty, chair of Yes On 1, said this week in a local news segment. "I dare you to guarantee me that this subject will not come up in schools. I don't think they [No On 1] can do that."

Marc Mutty is right on one important level (and none others). The problem for conservatives is that if we create a society in which gays are treated equally, not only will gays have more rights, but more importantly, children will grow up in a world where gays are equal--and therefore less of them will think of gays as unequal. In other words, I don't think Marc Mutty is fighting a war to keep gays from having marriage -- he may not care less -- Marc Mutty is fighting a war to defend his brand of homophobia from leaving the cultural norm. To all of those people who want their children to believe in the same homophobia, his argument will ring true--no matter how irrational it seems on the face of it.

Lest I be accused of being imbalanced, let's take another use of this tactic: namely, the left's campaign against smoking advertised towards kids, culminating in the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act.

Why does it matter if smoking is on the television? Chiefly, the campaign is one to remove cigarettes from the public norm. And the way to change that culture from a smoking culture to a non-smoking culture is to aim towards the children. For children growing up, we want to make smoking not part of the social norm--to remove any representations from their eyes.

Unfortunately, what we've discovered is that although removing smoking from television has had effects, it hasn't removed the social norm of smoking fully. And hence the next wave of the culture war: removing smokers from public space. Some of it, of course, is prompted by the valid second-hand smoke argument, but once we are banning people from smoking in the street, or public property even once outdoors, I think it has gone beyond that: it has come to the attempt to eradicate smoking culture by removing them from the public eye. And although that won't stop most current smokers, it may reduce future smokers--the children.

If you're thinking of culture, think of the children. That moment of transmission of culture is where we can intervene. And as much as we'd like to avoid propagandizing towards children, the way we structure the environment they grow up in creates who they are. There is no such thing as letting them develop "naturally," or "untouched." We need to think about how we communicate to our kids.

(see also: the NYTimes Article on shouting at kids).

A Side-Bar About Ethics, Darwinism, and New Athiesm

I've been trying to focus on arts development and arts communities on this blog now, but I was listening to WNYC's peerless Radiolab, which most recently was basically an interview of Richard Dawkins about Darwinism versus Religion, and Darwinism versus Social Darwinism.

I don't really have the time or inclination to go sorting through all of the arguments-- you should go there yourself and take a listen. I just wanted to say that although Richard Dawkins is just as staunchly anti-religious as Christopher Hitchens or Sam Harris, I don't think he's quite the same as them, and he's not in quite the same category of New Atheist.

Whereas Christopher Hitchens will argue (in ironically largely illogical arguments) the very foundations of why Religion is wrong and Science is right, Dawkins has a much more elegant and straightforward--and to me, more accurate--rebuttal of religion. His argument against religion is simply that the need to find purpose in systems is an illusion.

Now, Hitchens goes at great length to make Religion the sum total of human evil, and even Dawkins will overexaggerate the evils of religion, but Dawkins is most powerful when he's simply looking at the reason we irrationally search for reason. By showing that our need for purpose overrides the actual reflection of the universe, he's making a far more powerful case than by labeling it as an attack on freedom, or whatever Hitchens' thrust du jour is.

It reminds me this morning of listening to the other incomparable radio show, This American Life, do a fascinating look at the war between Scientologists and Psychiatrists. It starts with the journalist's sense of revulsion at the DSM-IV, with which he managed to diagnose himself with several "disorders" in a manner of minutes, including poor handwriting, poor mathematical skills, etc. He then examined how difficult it is to prove sanity to the psychiatric profession. Through this, he was being guided by a Scientologist who was eager to make an ally out of him. But then at the end of the episode he sits listening to their propaganda about how psychiatrists have caused 9/11, caused rape and slavery, etc. etc., and they've lost him.

This is the position that Scientologists and New Athiests share: they both are facing an institution with many flaws, but by painting the evil with a wide brush, they lose the ability to criticize impartially.

So that was the first part of the Dawkins interview. The second part was Dawkins' elegant defense of a Post-Darwinian rather than Social Darwinian view of society. Listen to the interview. And to hear to a much older, but also well argued version, read Thomas Huxley's Evolution and Ethics.

That's more than I wanted to say on this topic, but I guess it's been on my mind, having just finished The Selfish Gene and halfway through Oliver Sack's Musicophilia and with both Radiolab and This American Life touching the subject.

How To Start I: NPR

So, looking at this research (I'm still in the research/concept phase of the project, sneaking it in among the show I'm preparing for and my unrelated job as a technical writer), the first huge question that dawns on me is:

How do you start changing a community?

The problem, as I see it, is that the Thriving Arts report predicates the creation of an arts community on an already extant set of background values: a sense of place, a tradition of informal arts, a few people who already personally enjoy the arts, etc. The question, however, is where you start if such a thing is not available.

Obviously, there isn't such a thing in the universe as a place where there is no tradition of any arts or etc. The question is, where can you find a good thread to start with, a tiny spark that you can gently blow on and put kindling with to start a frame.

The one I was thinking of this morning is one that I've been thinking of for the last few days: National Public Radio.

I don't know exactly what NPR (and I suppose by extension PBS on TV) has in terms of reach in regional areas. But when I listen to Car Talk (the number one rated radio show), people call in from everywhere. Brooklyn. Tallahassee. Squunk Corners. The Hubble Spacecraft. The South Pole. So if we make the assumption that NPR is listened to everywhere -- at least some shows on it, at least a little bit -- then NPR's arts programming might be the beginning.

It would be really cool if NPR had an arts show that was quite as engaging as Car Talk is. After all, many of the people who listen and call in to Car Talk are not people previously interested in car. They're not the people who have a dead car on their lot that they're tinkering with. They're people like me--I've never even owned a car but I listen in. It's fun.

The other day on NPR, they were interviewing a publisher, and asked him whether fiction books published about the financial crisis are still going to be relevant three or four years from now, when the financial crisis is not what's in our minds. The publisher said, "It doesn't matter what it's about. If the characters are well written and they are put in engaging situations, people will read."

That's what we need to do with the arts, I think. We need to communicate a vision of the arts as being full of real characters and engaging situations. I don't mean on-stage. I mean us, as arts practitioners. We have to be real and engaging, and we have to be real and engaging when we discuss our work. We need a show where a couple of artists talk about art, and they don't use any sentences that begin with the word "Postmodern".

The Sloan Foundation understands this. They fund projects which promote science in fiction, but in engaging ways that bring the art into human contexts. And my favorite project that illustrates what the Sloan Foundation is talking about is WNYC's Radiolab. Each week, they ask a question ("Why do we laugh" or "What is music") and then spend the episode examining specific scientific aspects of that ("Do animals laugh" or "When does speech become song?") But the way that the hosts examine the questions, it isn't heavy on the science. It's high on the wonder.

A non-NPR example of this is, quite famously, Mythbusters. Another great example would be what Ace of Cakes does for the wedding-cake industry. By the way, Ace of Cakes is actually probably a good foundation for a community arts.

So how can we start an arts community? Well, you can start with a popular radio or television arts show (none of which exist, by the way--I'm a hardcore arts person, and I don't listen to a single arts podcast regularly, because... I haven't found any that are as engaging! Consider that a challenge, reader community: get me a podcast that I can subscribe do with my open-source music program that makes the arts fun and engaging). Then, you create a fan-club locally for the show. Start by watching/listening to the show together, move on to actually trying some of it hands on.

Hesto presto! It's a beginning.