Theater and Interactivity Pt. 1

I'm trying to lower my word-count for posts here, so as not to kill anyone foolish enough to try and read my ideas.

I was talking with a friend of mine here in Prague (I'm here studying temporarily) about theater, and he told me that the kind of theater he wants to create isn't so much him creating theater as it is him creating a pretext for theater to be created in the community.

What with my whole "culture is conversation" and "art should be responsive to the community" stances, I was very pleased, and enjoyed the idea. It has inspired me to look at that aspect more. I don't know if that's all I want to do, and I don't know how to do it entirely, but it's a lead that I'm really interesting, and that's that.

But it got me thinking about responsiveness in theater, which has come up for me at various times. Responsiveness in this case means responsiveness in the moment, not a general sort of metaphorical responsiveness.

We've always had this kind of responsiveness. After all, improv is an art form built around audience response. Whose Line Is It Anyway could be seen as the biggest success of theater on television. It takes what we love about theater: watching the actor think and feel in real time, and simply puts them in front of a camera. Whose Line Is It Anyway is for improv what SNL was for sketch comedy.

In the brick-and-mortar theater world, improv also continues to be a successful and lively part of action. Most comedians on television have come from a strong background in this--and the brick-and-mortar pedigree is still a mark of talent. The fact that Stephen Colbert comes from Second City Improv counts for a long way with people, in the way that other people's brick-and-mortar theater experience doesn't in the film/TV world.

And I am starting to think that this success is only going to get bigger.

We talk about theater's losing share in public culture often in terms of its competition. People have ruminated on the ease, comfort, and privacy of watching television. When I talked to my dad about theater, he (a software engineer) looked at theater and came to one conclusion: theater is struggling because it doesn't scale.

But what was he comparing it to? He didn't look to the world of television or film. And he was right not to. After all, statistics seem to show that movie-watching is stagnating. Television, on the other hand, is a little harder to assess. Why? Because television is moving to the internet. Internet is the growing source of entertainment and culture (I say culture as well) so Internet is the biggest competition to theater.

Talk about the 'competition' is not new: George Bernard Shaw was talking about what a theater needs to do to compete for the attention of viewers (one solution: comfy seats). Bertold Brecht argued along similar lines (one solution: let them smoke cigars).

At any rate, if there's one clear defining change between the Internet and what has gone before, it is the internet is interactive. This parallels the growing love of video games. We enjoy engaging our mind into what we're doing, and interaction lets us influence what we're doing. But theater is interactive too. So the theater has an opportunity: to stand as an interactive, communal entertainment.

Now, the internet will always win points over us in convenience. But then again, don't DVDs and films win over movie theaters in convenience as well? What we win over the internet is a sense of life and community.

But at the moment, our habits of theater aren't interactive. A playwright creates a play (usually alone), he takes it to a theater company, which decides everything in advance, and this is presented to a silent audience in the dark part of the theater. So the challenge of theater is how to combine the ingenuity of the artist with the contributions of the audience.

I'll leave it there for now, and think about where I've seen it applied and such, and discuss more tomorrow.

Feelings About Copyright

I was sitting in the car today, listening to Johnny Cash's performance of Nine Inch Nails' song “Hurt,” and I got to thinking about how they felt about the development. Clearly, they were not too unhappy, because they made some sort of agreement with Johnny Cash that allowed him to proceed legally. But suppose they weren't Johnny Cash fans? What if they didn't like the way they did it? I tried to imagine if I had written a song, only to have some musician I didn't like perform it—Barbara Streisand, for instance.
Of course, I know what that feels. Because I've had a short play of mine performed, and absolutely butchered. I won't say who did it, although you'd be surprised to know they were the performers because they'd won some sort of a youth theater award, and I won't talk about the stupid script cuts and lurching tempos that turned me off of their version. I watched on the video, and within ten seconds my excitement had drained away like pus siphoning out of a cut wound. Within moments I was empty, and then just mildly sick. I stopped the video there. Within moments I was feeling better, because I told myself that they had so altered the script that they were not in fact performing my play—they were performing a play that happened to have some words I'd written in it.
I'm recording these feelings not because I want to rag on a group of rather earnest young actors who I'm sure have gone on to become very accomplished in their field, be it medicine or law or astrophysics. Instead, I want to reflect on how my feelings intersect law and the economics. Although it is strange to think of 'feelings' as intersecting law and economics, it is in fact the case that both are realms which are almost as emotional as they are rational. And both are connected to these feelings because of how I own my words: they are my property.
Going back to Johnny Cash and Nine Inch Nails: if Nine Inch Nails had truly protested to Johnny Cash's version, they could have said, “We're not going to give you the rights.” And then Johnny Cash's version would be illegal, like Danger Mouse's Grey Album which mixed elements of The Beatles' White Album with Jay Z's Black Album. The Beatles insisted that their property had been 'stolen.' That, of course, was motivated by a different emotion: a desire for compensation. In some contexts we would call that greed, in other contexts we would call that justice—mostly based on the reasonableness of the claim. So in other words, if the Nine Inch Nails wanted to stop Johnny Cash from covering their song, the power was in their hands.
Samuel Beckett, though long dead and buried, has a remarkable talent for controlling his play. He wouldn't tolerate the sort of cuts and bumbling the way the young amateurs did to my play. Part of me warms to the idea of a cadre of lawyers with a very specific and accurate understanding of my artistic whim, patrolling the country and ensuring that if you see one of my plays you see it the way I intended. Amateurs, of course, would not be allowed to sully my work, no matter how much enthusiasm or interesting thought they had. Enthusiasm or new interpretation is not important: what is important is the proper representation of my work.
But of course, the law and economics is not solely dictated by emotions. Certainly, if they were, than a small group of dedicated amateurs who wanted to butcher my work (they, of course, wouldn't see it as butchering—they are proud of the mangled, misdirected work they have produced) would have a certain amount of legal-economic force, based on their sense of enthusiasm. And I, as well as they, know how it feels to want to put on a piece of work and find yourself frustrated.
Recently, I put up a play, in which music was a necessary component—it was a dance theater piece whose details I won't bore you with except to say that music was a necessary component. But where to get music? My attempts to have music composed for the production fell apart, much to our chagrin, and in haste we set forward to replace the music. Of course, the music I had truly wanted to use was by a popular band whose name I won't utter, except to say that my inquiries as to the possibility of using it were met by stony silence. I could have pressed forward, illegally, but of course I am one of those few people under the age of 25 in the United States who seems to think that it is important to follow copyright law, despite being one of the few people under the age of 25 in the United States who actually understands what copyright is. (It seems rather arrogant to be saying something as expansive as that while also emphasizing my relative youth, so let me follow it up by saying that I'm afraid of heights, and thus am not as fantastic as I make myself out to be).
Having felt the frustration of not wanting to violate the law without having communicated my intentions, I managed to secure the rights to certain music from a source which I had good reason to believe would not object to my playing of their song. I won't say who, but I will change the subject in a way which may hint as to their identity.
Covers are subject to the same regulation as any other derivative use of music. But sometimes artists perform unauthorized covers at concerts. Usually, it is not artists who object to this. I recall reading recently that Thom Yorke was shown by Radiohead's guitarist a video of Prince performing a song they had written. The video had been posted by YouTube, and Thom Yorke watched with approval. His first thought was, “That stealing bastard!” Why? Because he enjoyed the homage Prince was paying him.
His approval turned to disapproval when Prince issued a DMCA Takedown Notice to the YouTube poster, citing copyright infringement. Whose copyright? asked Thom Yorke. After all, the song did not belong to Prince. Had Prince licensed the cover, perhaps he could have had cause to issue a Takedown Notice—on the grounds that a licensed derivative work is to a certain degree an independent work. At any rate, he hadn't, so he was clearly overstepping his bounds.
Thom Yorke's feelings must have been odd, to see someone else asserting ownership over an idea that you had created. I suppose that's the feeling you get when someone creates a derivative work. Authors, upon watching the film adaptation of their work, likely feel the same thing. J.R.R. Tolkien might have been interested to see how Peter Jackson interpreted his work, but might he have squirmed if Peter Jackson got more attention as a result than Tolkien himself? I soon will get to experience that, as a play of mine (the one with the dance and the music, previously mentioned) is en route to being adapted to film.
Suppose I do get squeamish, and like Samuel Beckett wish to enforce an iron-clad control over my own work. I will, most likely, feel better. When I watch other people doing this, however, I don't feel as positively. I have seen the definitive Beckett. I want to see the nondefinitive Beckett. I want to see a Beckett that gets completely torn apart and ruined. I want to see all the things that Beckett put in the text but didn't mean to, I want to see all the ideas that are possible but not elucidated in his works. That, I suppose, is because I am not Beckett.
The law is supposed to, in theory, balance the feeling of the owner against the feelings of the prospective users. Currently, it does not. The reason is because the owners today have more money than the theoretical owners of the future. That is a different discussion, a legal-economic discussion, which is quite eloquently discussed by Lawrence Lessig in books such as Free Culture. The more philosophical discussion is best summed up by Jonathan Lethem's essay The Ecstacy of Influence (which is also an excellent example of derivative work being wholly unrelated to source material). And the practical discussion is best summed by a copyright comic book entitled “Bound By Law.” To a degree, I'm also looking at this philosophically, but based on this concept of “ownership” (philosophically; the legal definition is clear).
Who owns Shakespeare's work? The answer is very clear. It is in the public domain. We all own it. A subtler question: why do we own it? The law tells us that it's because Shakespeare wrote so long ago, that it now belongs to anyone who wants it. Common sense tells us that Shakespeare is dead, so clearly he can't own it. But suppose I could produce the rightful heir of Shakespeare—why wouldn't he be entitled to the Shakespeare fortune? There is one societal argument that says that we all deserve a cut at Shakespeare because it's only fair that after a while we get a chance at looking at it. This answer is slightly unsatisfying: basically, it says that at a certain point (arbitrarily decided by Parliament or Congress), the emotions of the owner are overtaken by the emotions of the rest of society. I don't disagree with that argument (I actually endorse it heartily), but I'm looking for the artistic argument.
Actually, I'm not looking for it. I've actually found it. I'm arguing that every artistic work has its own implicit rights.
What?
Think about it like this: a corporation is treated as an individual entity. The person who starts it may have put himself in control, but past a certain point, once it reaches the public sphere, it is treated in all senses as being separate from him. The founder, may in fact, be eventually forced out, but the corporation will continue until it is formally folded up.
Suppose an artwork had its own rights. Suppose it had its own feelings. How would Waiting for Godot feel about Beckett's “ownership?” Rather like a wife jealously lorded over by a paranoid husband, I should think!
When the artwork is first born, like any child, it is utterly fitting that the parent have full control over who it may consort with, how it may dress and behave. Children, after all, do not have the full right of free expression that parents have. But once it reaches the age of majority (originally 14), it is old enough to be set free on its own. In the United States, this “age of majority” is currently set at 70 years past the author's life, or 95 years. 95! Imagine if your father could still dictate who you could play with at the age of 95! Even past his death!
Artists are frequently referring to their works of art as their “babies.” Like parents, we want to hold our children close, keep them from risk, and stop them from leaving our grasp. But as any responsible parent will tell you, this is not the way to go.
Derivation from an artwork is how the artwork matures. The different interpretations, explorations, revisions, and extensions which subsequent artists add may not enrich the artist (unless, in today's copyright scheme, they're making money on each), but they do enrich the artwork. It matures, becoming fuller and more independent as more people interact with it and give to it. An excellent example is George Lucas' Star Wars universe. As a child, I watched the Star Wars trilogy with awe and excitement. When the movies were done, I watched them over and over again. I was eager for more. Quickly, I discovered that there were books. Authors like Stackpole and Timothy Zahn had created more and more stories, all related to the mythology and characters and fundamental universe as Star Wars, but each as different as the authors which contributed. Some were more aimed at youth, some were more aimed at adults. One series, Rogue Squadron, was in the subgenre of fighter-pilots; another (Jedi Academy) was in the old youths-at-school genre. I spent many years enriching myself in this wild and detailed universe.
Let us suppose that no one had ever been authorized to add another book to the Star Wars universe. All I would have had was those three movies. George Lucas sensed that, and so he added three more. And in a stunning example of an artist not knowing what's best for their own artwork, those three movies completely missed the entire spirit and sense of the universe. Normally, I would feel ashamed to say that—how can I know the artwork better than the artist?--but in actuality, the work of art “speaks for itself”--because it is its own entity. What I, and many other authors have found in the expanded universe, didn't seem reflected in the flashy but awkward prequels.
But this is not a Star Wars fan critiquing the missteps of George Lucas. My point is that the universe grew far more quickly when any author who wanted to (within certain guidelines and paying certain royalties) could expand the universe, than merely the lifetime work of Mr. Lucas on his own. The world would be impoverished without their efforts. And the artwork has a right to that infringement. For instance, under fair use clauses, we have already protected the right of journalists and academicians to write essays about artworks; thus complicating our thinking of an artwork by providing new perspectives. How many authors or playwrights or musicians wish they could use copyright law to suppress bad reviews! When Chinua Achebe or Ralph Ellison want to lash out at works like Heart of Darkness or The Sound And The Fury for perceived racism, they should be relieved to know that their work (which is a derivative of those works) is protected, no matter how many passages they copy to illustrate their point. Joseph Conrad or William Faulkner may disagree, but it is up to the artwork and its observers to understand the legacy.
An artwork encapsulates more than its initial writing. Brian Reynolds, in a series of essays analyzing Shakespeare and other authors, creates a concept called “Shakespace” which applies fairly well. “Shakespace” encapsulates not only Shakespeare's work, but all of the works which touch onto that, are derived from that, are related to that, are sparked by that. Shakespeare is the byword in theater that he is today because Shakespace is so large—it encapsulates West Side Story, and that movie with Leonardo Di Caprio, and also Billy Crystal and Robin Williams as the gravediggers. To attempt to define how large Shakespace is would be very difficult; Ubu Roi, though largely unrelated and still a fairly fanciful invention of Jarry's, is still in Shakespace.
So when I create a work of art, it carves a space in the world. At first, it is very small. It would remain small, aside from the effort of the artist. When I write a play, if I do nothing, it stays on my desk. I am the literary agent of my plays. If I had a literary agent, he too would be entitled a slice of the pie, but only inasmuch as I get him to help me. In that way, I'm entitled to royalties the way that the first theater to produce a play deserves royalties. They found my play, and gave it its first production, which gave it the recognition and public legitimacy it needed to become however profitable it turned out to be, so they deserve a profit. The Public Theater still today earns royalty checks on Chorus Line. I don't know whether they should still be getting royalty checks, but basic philosophy is fair.
So from the artwork's perspective, it owes a debt (which it cannot control) to the artist who created it. In fact, it always owes a debt to every artist who contributes, and their profit is according to the size of their contribution (from a commercial standpoint; sometimes the best contributors are not paid accordingly). But at a certain point, it is unfair for the artwork to continue to pay rent to an artist who no longer is doing anything to get the word out. Because if after 14 years the artwork is still in demand, then it is on the merit of the artwork, or other artworks by the same artist, and not the merit of the artist themselves. I do not buy a George Bernard Shaw play because I like the cut of his jib, or because he has tried very hard to sell it to me; I buy it because everyone tells me Major Barbara is a classic of the English language, and by the way Man and Superman is important, and maybe I haven't heard of this other play of his but if I liked Major Barbara I'll probably like it.
So you see why, from an artwork-oriented point of view, an artist is entitled to a copyright of a limited term? This philosophical approach creates a right to copyright without ever invoking the concept of ownership. Ideas cannot be owned. But your contribution to their furthering can earn you money. That, I believe, is the way things should be, and a law consistent with this spirit would certainly look a lot different than the one we have today. And to return, for just one last second, to my feelings: this gives an impartial judge, separate from the rights of the original creator and the rights of the end user (“rights” being very much tied to feelings of entitlement). The standard by which to judge is, what will further the ideas. And if you look at the Constitution, you notice that it declares that the purpose is for the promotion of progress in the arts and sciences—not in the promotion of artists and scientists.

The Conversation: Confrontation in Politics

• "You'll get a chance to answer [sic] your questions but you
• "All you gotta do is be courteous, that's all." Respect. Clearly.
• His return to speaking to the young man. It would have been shameful if he hadn't returned to ask the question, but it is important nonetheless.
• "I made a promise to you but also that means I want you to give your mic back after you ask your question or make your comment." ---- A statement of the responsibility of both sides. Obama will give legitimacy to the question if the heckler will give legitimacy to the answer.
• Audience response: Obama does not leverage the sympathetic audience against the heckler; rather, he attempts to restrain the audience, at one point saying "Hold on a second, everybody, I want everybody to be respectful, that's why we're having a townhall meeting. This is democracy at work. Now he asked a legitimate question, so I want to give him an answer." (Emphasis mine).
  
• The Kicker: "Now, I may not have spoken out the way you would have wanted me to speak out, which is fine, because ... that doesn't mean that I'm always going to satisfy the way you guys want these issues framed, which gives you the option of voting for somebody else, it gives you the option of running for office yourself. Those are all options, but the one thing that I think is important is that we're respectful towards each other, and...the only way we're going to solve our problems in our country, is if all of us come together..."

The conversation is sustained by new voices, provided those voices are respectful. The key, which Obama returns to and is rather the point of my discussions on conversation, is respect of opinions.

Narratives And Vignettes In Music

I have been reading an excellent book by Alex Ross (NYTimes music critic) called The Rest Is Noise. It serves as a fantastic primer and introduction into the great composers of the Twentieth century, both in terms of their work, their contexts, and how they are in conversation with one another and in history. Armed with this book, and an Emusic.com account which I have been using to purchase the seminal works of the book (Thus Spake Zarathustra, the Ring cycle, symphonies by Mahler and Struass and Shostakovich), I have been exploring one of the genres of music which I have previously been unacquainted with: classical music.

Classical music has been somewhat of a puzzle to me. I have very much enjoyed certain of the iconic musical gestures of classical music (the beginning of Thus Spake Zarathustra which features so prominently in 2001; the theme to Edward Grieg's In The Hall Of The Mountain King from Peer Gynt; the signature of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and the 1812 Overture). And yet I find it not very fulfilling background music. Film scores (which are similar in musical gesture) did not prove quite so forbidding.

After a while of scrutiny, and with some insight provided by The Rest Is Noise, I think I have put my finger on it, and it has given me a lens, which has given me an anchor with which to listen to the music more properly. This reminds me of certain lessons I learned over the last couple of years which had given me more of a toe-hold in the world of painting, which I also confess I was not quite so interested in.

Much has been made of our current fast-paced media saturated culture. But one thing I will highlight is different between so-called "classical music" and today's pop culture is in format. Whereas symphonies were epic works spanning between a half hour and two hours, today's pop song spans between a minute and a half and five minutes--certain exceptions excluded.

There are reasons for this, mostly having to do with the early methods of encoding sound. But the difference between the musical story being told in a three minute song and being told in a three hundred minute song is a phenomenal one.

Narratives and Vignettes: Theater

Take, for example, a three minute piece of stage and a three hour piece of stage. These are known today as 'flash plays' if they are in one vein, or 'skits' if they are in another. What is notable about a skit or flash play is that (because of the constrained time) they quickly establish their premise, build this premise, and then pay it off. A beginning, middle, and end. But there is one dimension to the progression.

Take, for instance, a classic sketch by Monty Python: the Dead Parrot Sketch. The shop patron enters, and says, "I'd like to make a complaint." Upon questioning, he reveals that his parrot is dead. The shopkeep does not believe him. This is the thrust of the beginning. But this is also the premise of the middle. The patron builds in frustration, insisting the parrot is dead. The shopkeep builds in obfustication, coming up with more and more elaborate ways of dodging the buck. The conflict is finally defused (the shopkeep offers to replace the parrot) and after a brief denoument, the sketch is done with.

This is the layout of a vignette: a single image or idea established, examined briefly, and let loose. There is only one tone (in the sketch, comedy; in flash plays, any number of tones) that predominates. If the Dead Parrot Sketch had two minutes of comedy about whether or not the parrot is dead, and then suddenly the shopkeep revealed that his denial of the parrot's death was a serious grief-based reaction to losing the parrot, something more complex would have opened up--and the sketch wouldn't have the time to deal with it. So there is one narrative thrust: one tone, one plot-line, and a quick succession of events.

On the other hand, imagine a complex play. Let's take Hamlet. I will not synopsize Hamlet here. If Hamlet were able to be easily synopsized in one or two sentences, it would be a vignette. I could write a flash-play in which Hamlet is told by the ghost of his father that he has to kill his uncle, but Ophelia wouldn't be in it. Nor would Polonius. In fact, every added character and every added dimension of the play forces the play to be longer, in order to be adequately dealt with. The best example of that is Rosencranz and Guildenstern. Even after being dead, the playwright must further acknowledge the complicated link between cause and effect by having their deaths cause a war with England.

This is a narrative. There are a number of tones--Rosencranz and Guildenstern arrive, and bring with them merriment (which causes a scene in which Hamlet's "madness" is actually funny), but the same two characters betray their friend and are murdered for their role. There are competing interests, complex dimensions, etc. etc. etc. Hence, a narrative. And hence, a play in five acts.

Narratives and Vignettes: Music

I think that narrative/vignette dichotemy (which, of course, is not merely black and white) was more obvious to me in the realm of theater than in the realm of music because I am far more at home in theater than in music.

Pop music today, if you look at this narrative/vignette breakdown, is more clearly in vignettes. Usually, in three minutes, you have the establishment of an idea, its development, and its completion. A little more rarely but still common enough, you have the establishment of an idea, its development, its subversion, and its completion. Take, for instance, a very very classic song: When I'm Sixty-Four, by the Beatles. It establishes itself very quickly: the tone is kitsch, and it asks, "Will you still be there for me when I'm sixty four?" This song would more more troubling if, right after proposing a summer at the Isle of Wight, it suddenly broke into a screaming guitar solo replete with burning instruments, shattered equipment, and violent curse-words.

On my iTunes, I have my songs broken down by mood. I have loud and angry songs when I want to feel powerful, calm songs when I want to chill out, positive songs when I want to be cheered, nostalgic songs when I want to wallow in nostalgia.

So when I sat down to listen to Stravinsky's Firebird Suite, I was thinking I would listen to it in the background, and that it would very quickly say what it had to say. I wanted to figure out where among these playlists I would put it. But really, Firebird, and most symphonies, have a complex narrative function. Firebird begins with what can only be described as a pastoral setting; a beautiful, calm melody, woodwinds barely audible. I slowly turned up my radio dial several times because it was faint and imperceptible. Clearly, this was going on my "calm" playlist.

And then Stravinsky hit, fortissimo, possibly the loudest and scariest chord of noise. Partly because of my expectations and partly because of my high volume knob, the surprise note blasted out and nearly killed me. Then came the angry building of music, tearing apart whatever pastoral scene we saw before. Any attempt to boil down this suite into a single mood was clearly futile.

This is the narrative of Firebird. And it goes on from there. And because these longer classical songs were in the form of a narrative, it was impossible to get into them in my usual way: "getting into their groove" lazily while my mind heads out elsewhere. The narrative begs to be followed, to be examined.

Genes, Memes, And Temes: Reams of Teeming Beings Seemingly Teaming To Dream

The TED conference is one of my favorite places in the world. I love hearing ideas, hearing what people are thinking of, and seeing new fields of study in their infancy. One of these new fields is Mimetics, which is formed around the concept that brilliant biologist Richard Dawkins created.: memes. Memes, from the Greek word mimesis or imitation, (also related to the root mneme, from memory), are anything that can be imitated. Typically, we think of memes in the context of ideas or social habits (Natural Selection is a meme, as is this blog), but they can be as banal as "You can't HANDLE the truth!" or the Numa Numa dance meme.

The defining aspects of memes are two-fold: they spread through carriers like viruses, and they are subject to Natural Selection. Dawkins first created them as a model for genes, demonstrating that genes are not the only codings of information that Natural Selection can describe.

My interest with memes is that I am interested in culture; if culture is, as I've said before, the sum total of all the creative and spoken and intellectual and social creativity of a culture, than in a way, culture is entirely composed of memes. You could say that the sum total of all the memes in a given set of people is culture. I'm not sure that's the only definition, but if I were a mimeticist (which I am not, bear in mind) I'd probably go with that.

So I was interested to see Susan Blackmore's talk at TED--I was not previously familiar with her, but the title "Memes and Temes" caught my attention. Early on, I suppose, it became clear to me that my opinions about memes (although founded on the same beliefs as hers) have diverged with hers over several points.

• The first point is which she made which I must strongly disagree with is one she made rather offhand, and at first I thought I would leave it out, but having thought about it I realized it was very important. Blackmore at one point makes reference to the fact that only human beings can support memes. I might have agreed with her, but two important references.
  
  The first is When Elephants Weep, an excellent book by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson Susan McCarthy. The point of this book is not to catalogue all of the range of emotions of all of the animals, but if you read it all the way through you are convinced entirely that animals have, at the very least, a complexity of emotional intelligence beyond what we normally give them. You see, the book posits that humans assume that only humans are intelligent, and this causes them to not recognize the differing sorts of intelligences (emotional being the focus of the book) that creatures have. The more specific arguments in the book are hit and miss, but to the degree that animals are smarter and feel more than we usually give them credit, the book argues its point excellently.
  
  The second is another TED talk, given by Joe Klein. Klein, thanks to a cocktail party wager, spent a long period of time researching crows, with the eventual aim of creating a vending machine that crows could be trained to use. The point he was making is that crows are far more intelligent than we believed, and thus we could try to forge a new relationship with them, a more beneficial one.
  
  What these two sources have in common is a belief that not only are animals smarter than we give them credit, they also deserve to be treated in a manner more equal to us. Inserting the meme, as it were, that there is no huge chasm between mankind and animals, but rather that we can come into a new cultural relationship with animals.
  
  Indeed, if it is true that animals have memes--which Joe Klein reveals when he discusses the spread of crows teaching one another to use cars to break open nuts--then that means that animals too have culture (certain tribes of chimpanzees have different levels of tool use, as I understand it). The relationship between two cultures is very difficult than the relationship between one culture and a large number of automata.
  
  
• The second point in which Blackmore lost me is in her new definition of temes. I understand, to a certain degree, that technology develops like verbal or social ideas--but I have no idea why she wants to treat them separately, and why she says that now is the point at which temes are becoming part of our society. When did we cross the "third threshhold" into teme-creating parts of culture? Was it the Industrial Revolution? The invention of the computer? Was it robotics? Or the first use of tools? (which would suggest that crows and chimpanzees are perhaps at the third threshhold already).
  
  
• The third point I disagree with is her contention that each of the three threshholds has a potential to destroy the race. Any mutation has the potential to destroy its bearer. But the cataclysmic turning point in history that she seems to foresee smells of hyperbole and sensationalism.
  
  
• The last point with which she and I don't see eye to eye is her fork-in-the-road for technology: mankind integrating into technology and disappearing, or mankind being replaced by more-competitive temes which don't care about the planet or about us.

The deeper problem that seems to me to unite these problems is the tendency of certain thinkers to try to fit new ideas into pre-constructed narratives. After all, the last point has been the subject of science-fiction writers for many decades now: if you combine the two choices you get The Matrix. But what her entire premise leaves out is mankind's self-consciousness.

I was looking down at the comments for the video and I saw, quite at random, this comment:

Genes don’t have any way of caring about whether they survive or not, and most species don’t have any way of knowing or caring if their species survives or not. The only way we human beings are able to care about our survival is because we host memes that identify us as human beings, as members of biological families, social groups, races, etc.

What memes are you host to? If all races disappeared as distinguishable entities and we all became a homogeneous latte color, would you care, and if so, why? How did you come to harbor a meme that says race is important?

If world culture became homogenized as well, so that we all shared the same language, values, and technology, would you be sad? Why?

If all nations became subsumed under some super union so that national boundaries were no more than administrative districts, would you lament the loss of the USA, France, Japan, etc.?

Suppose we lost the meme that says it’s important for human beings to survive, and instead of identifying with a particular instance of biological evolution--human beings--we became identified with evolution itself in whatever form it takes: animal, vegetable, or mineral. If computers become more intelligent than we are, and self-reflective, and capable of propagating themselves more efficiently than we can, would you lament that we were being replaced by products of evolution?.

The poster, Norman Bearrentine, is making a point that the desire for human survival is, in itself, a meme. And in fact, Bearrentine is pointing to something important: we, as humans, have a self-consciousness that gives us choice.

This brings me to the major point of divergence between Blackmore and myself. The idea behind CultureFuture is that we have the ability to control our own fate by exercising self-consciousness and criticism to guide ourselves forward. It is not natural selection: it is human selection. We, as human beings, have proven the ability to stop natural selection by saving the lives of people who would otherwise die. And we, as human beings, have the ability to look for ways to cooperate rather than compete. And we, as human beings, have the ability to make choices about our future.

Blackmore, in her discussion about the third threshhold possibly killing us all, is making an oblique reference to global climate change. But the very idea that we are discussing global climate change and alternative sources of fuel means that we as a race are invested in changing our fate. One of the most misleading phrases in science or statistics is "if current trends continue." Current trends rarely continue, and they especially don't continue if we see a trend we don't like and choose to make it not continue. We can do that.

It's true: eventually there will be implants. And there will be drugs available that will make people stay up all night without sleeping. But so long as there are hollistic doctors, and the Amish, and luddites, and people who don't trust surgeries, and government regulators, and a world-wide conversation on the effects of our actions, we have our hands on the steering wheel. The only challenge is to get us all to make the right choice.

Blackmore, in the outset, tells us that memes and temes and genes can't "want" and don't "care." But this is missing the point: we humans care. And since we humans generate memes, and temes, and genes, we can learn how to manipulate them to our ends. Sometimes these ends will be destructive--propaganda is the science of using memes to manipulate populations, for instance--but my faith is to believe that we eventually will make the right choices, and will bumble our way towards a tomorrow that is just so slightly better than today. Not through natural selection, but through human selection.



EDIT: [removed the video due to its irritating habit of playing from the get-go. find it at ted.com]

Performances Of State, Commerce, And Art

Ngugi, in his essay “Power in Performance,” discusses the performance of power by the state and the performance of power by the artist, and how they are often in direct conflict. On my way to my second visit to 2001, I found myself in a strange netherworld between the two.

Normally, Occam’s law of direct travel (the quickest route is the one most likely to be taken; an adaptation of Occam’s Razor) would have me getting off the N or R train at W 60^th Street, literally within sight of the sculpture I was after. But for a second visit, I decided to shake things up, to listen to a little Robert Frost and take “The Road Not Taken.” In this case, the road not taken was not “the road less traveled by”; in fact, the road I was walking along was 5^th Avenue, one of the world’s largest shopping districts.

5^th Avenue proper extends the length of Manhattan, but the average American referring to 5^th Avenue is referring to the strip of 5^th Avenue through Midtown, which ends roughly at 60^th Street (my destination). This is the 5^th Avenue known for its pricey clothing stores. Window displays line the streets, aiming to draw in the unwary passersby into an abyss of merchandise.

I am not a materialist. I haven’t gone shopping for clothes since last year, and then I didn’t buy anything because I didn’t want to. But I have a personal vice: I enjoy watching television ads. Not all of them, of course: just the good ones. I will frequently turn to my roommate after certain ads and discuss to him why it was a well constructed work: sometimes I prize the simplicity, or a particularly striking moment. Television has the potential to be either art, entertainment, or commerce. Television ads, usually, fall fairly under the ‘commerce’ heading: thirty seconds of someone trying to sell you something. As a result, the average advertisement has the same effect on the watcher as a street vendor barking his goods—at best, ignored, and at worst, hated. Some ads, however, add in the entertainment element, drawing in the viewer with a joke and a punchline. A very precious few (most notably, of late, the viewer generated internet video ads for the Microsoft Zune) cross the threshold into being artistic. It is no small feat to sell a product, entertain, and be artistic in thirty seconds. Ad images on billboards have the same challenge. Perhaps it is a fascination with that often overlooked potential art space that led to Andy Warhol and the Pop Art movement: to tell society that the barrier between artist-generated public art and commercial-generated public art is not as wide as one seems.

I’m standing on 5^th Avenue now. For most of my way, I have tuned out the stores. Lifeless mannequins fill shop windows, bedecked in fashionable clothes that will never seem to look as good on you as they did on the mannequin. There is something mute, blank, and alienating about the mannequins—they try to appeal to the everyman, but the lack of identity portrayed by the blank-faced (or worse yet, headless) dolls lends a creepy post-industrial feeling to the streets. I don’t like to look at them. I wouldn’t have stopped, but one storefront has caught my eyes.

I had almost reached 2001, unenlightened by the eerie capitalism of 5^th Avenue, but now I was confronted with one of 5^th Ave’s newest stores, and one which looks like the future in many ways. It is the Apple Store. The store itself is not visible—consumers go downstairs, below 5^th Ave, as though descending into its core. But what is visible above-ground is a huge glass cube broken up into individual panes. Despite its fairly straightforward design, its elegance and glasswork recall the cathedrals of the 1600s; it strikes the eye impressively and stands out from the buildings around it, from all of the buildings in Manhattan. In the middle, a large Apple Corp. logo is suspended, glowing white in the sunlight. It would not look any more impressive if it had been a cross.

Just across the street is 2001, a piece which Ngugi would call a performance of power by the artist, and General Sherman, a piece which Ngugi would call a performance of power by the state. What is so striking to me about the Apple Store, and its latticed window cathedral? It seems to be, to adapt Ngugi’s vocabulary somewhat, a performance of power by the corporation. In the way that television advertisements can be either artistic (breeding thought), entertaining (breeding contentment), or commercial (breeding desire), public performances can be by the artist (breeding thought), the state (breeding contentment), or the commercial (breeding desire).

And yet, can we truly say that all three of these spheres are separate? 2001 is built of space-age plastics, which were probably developed through the government research; it also relies on the production power of the corporation. The Apple Store shows the corporation as an artist; it is creating an aesthetically pleasing structure for only indirect benefit. It is attempting to benefit the passersby, and hopes that its benefit will be returned to it in the form of commerce.

As the Pop Art movement showed, or the development of the iPod, or countless other examples of the ways in which commerce becomes artistic, or art becomes commercial, or both intersect the realm of the government. In a democratic society, the interests of art, commerce, and governance are locked constantly in the give and take and negotiations that ensure that each reach the same public and provide their own unique benefits.

When we want to talk about art, mass culture, and politics, perhaps there is no more shining example than that infamous and well-worn example of poor Ché Guevara’s face, plastered on commercial t-shirts worldwide. Like the McDonald’s in Hanoi Square, the McDonald’s in Red Square, and the Starbucks that until recently was in the Forbidden Palace, the perverse irony of mass-produced images of Ché Guevara would seem at first to be the victory of Capitalism over Communism.

One of the reasons that many cite for Capitalism’s “victory” over Communism is that where Communism excludes other ideologies, Capitalism swallows them whole. China, the largest “communist” country still in existence, has long since eroded the communist underpinnings, to the point where it now lives in some economic nameless twilight between the capitalist market economy and the communist planned economy. At any rate, it has become the engine that powers America’s capitalist economy. The success of today’s most iconic American ventures, from Wal-Mart to McDonald’s, relies heavily on the cheap, mass-produced goods. Capitalism has always defeated its enemies through engagement; rather than destroying, we simply merge.

This victory is plain in the story of Ché Guevara’s t-shirt.

If we are to look at the powers of art, commercialism, and politics, it is clear that Ché’s shirt began in the realm of politics. Alberto Kordo, a loyal communist, took the photo of Ché at a memorial service of the La Coubre explosion, a ship of armaments that exploded while being unloaded (the Cuban government still alleges that this was a CIA plot). Kordo sent the photo, among others, to the editor of the paper he was on assignment for; it was returned to him. He cropped it (removing several intrusions) and decided to keep it. He distributed prints to guests and friends, for no charge—it was not, after all, a performance of commerce.

Kordo did not accept money for his photo, entitled Guerrillero Heroico. Neither did the first man to popularize it, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. Feltrinelli had been issued the rights to publish Ché’s Bolivian Diary outside of Cuba, and asked Kordo if he had a fitting photograph to put on the cover. Kordo knew instantly which one to choose: he had always been proud of the expression he had captured on Ché’s face, of which he said that it’s “A kind of mystery. His personality comes through.” Here is the performance of the power of the artist, capturing as much of Ché’s life in a photograph as Ché’s diary did in the pages within. Indeed, photographer Giorgio Mondolfo said, “I was not even slightly interested in the author. I was only fifteen, and it was the picture that had drawn us - many for the first time - to gather in the streets, crying Che lives!”

The artist stands, not for a political purpose, but to record the life of a man. But the man is political, and the artist represents that faithfully, with a bit of the ideal. There is the performance of politics. In Ché’s case, both the politics and the artistic representation meet because Ché has become politics personified. Without investigating Ché’s life deliberately, our instinctual reaction to Ché is political: his every movement and action is political. His face is not just angry, it is angry at the injustices against the poor; he is not just looking up, and he is David looking into the face of the Goliath of Capitalism.

It is this deeply accessible, deeply human, and idealized expression which attracted the attention of Jim Fitzpatrick, who created the original iconic poster from the Kordo photo. Like Kordo, Fitzpatrick’s original intention was to spread the image as much as possible, because he “felt this image had to come out, or he [Guevara] would not be commemorated otherwise, he would go where heroes go, which is usually into anonymity.” He wanted the image to “breed like rabbits” so he created thousands of prints and distributed them by hand to people in London.

The difference between Kordo and Fitzpatrick was the difference in format. Kordo was hand-printing from photographic negatives; Fitzpatrick was using a simplified version, which was highly compatible with silk-screen transfer printing. Silk-screen transfer was extremely popular in the 1960s, especially in the realm of t-shirt making. In other words, Fitzpatrick had created a version of the Kordo photo which was ready for mass-production: the great breakthrough of the 20^th Century.

Here it is easy to see how capitalism came to consume the image of Ché; in the realm of Capitalism, ideas and images are property, just as any other. And since the creator (Kordo) was not in the realm of Capitalism, the image was presumed to be in the public domain. Thus, anyone could supply a copy without having to buy the intellectual property; and Ché, through being a political and heroic symbol, created the demand. By the time that Kordo’s heirs attempted to reassert their rights over the creation of copies (the true meaning of copy-right), it was 2005, and thus was too late: Capitalism had merged with Ché’s legacy.

This is why the photo of Ché is fascinating: it is a recurring cyclical layering of performances. Layer one is Ché himself, trapped in image: a political leader’s life, embodied by Ché’s image. Layer two is Kordo’s photo, the artistic expression of Ché’s life as arranged by Kordo—a performance of the artist’s power to create Ché’s legacy. Layer three is Fitzgerald’s mass-produced, inadvertently commoditization, which is both literally and metaphorically a reduction: it flattens him to a symbol which is easily exploited. Patrick Symmes put it best when he described it as “An easy emblem of meaningless and unthreatening rebellion, a queer blending of educated violence and disheveled nobility, like Gandhi with a gun or John Lennon singing 'Give Peace a Chance.'”

The real interest in this third layers is in its relationship with the first two: although the political and the artistic are in alignment, the commercial aspect of this newly commoditzed Ché stands in blatant disregard and utter contradiction of them. This creates dialectic, a dramatic tension. And of course, this creates a new, fourth, political layer of performance: the layer of Capitalism as having bought out a hapless Communism, and the short-sightedness of a young 60s generation of liberal idealist who rails against a system they are in fact a part of.

Perhaps a parallel example to this multi-layered Ché portrait (although less iconic and emotional) is the song by Cake entitled “Rock And Roll Lifestyle.” The lyrics, set over a contemporary rock song, ask, “How do you afford your rock and roll life style?” The first chorus targets a generation of entitled children who ‘rebel’ against their parents while still depending on their parents for their money, asking, “how much did you spend on your black leather jacket? / Is it you or your parents in this income tax bracket?” The next paragraph expands into the machine the children are rebelling against:

How much did you pay for the chunk of his guitar,

The one he ruthlessly smashed at the end of the show?

And how much will he pay for a brand new guitar,

One which he'll ruthlessly smash at the end of another show?

And how long will the workers keep building him new ones?

As long as their soda cans are red, white, and blue ones.

The cycle of repetition takes away the holiness of the act of rebellion, and the invocation of ‘red white and blue’ invokes both the American Flag (and the American political hegemony it represents) and also the (presumably) Pepsi cans (and the American economic hegemony). The song ends with the answer to these rhetorical questions

Excess ain't rebellion.

You're drinking what they're selling.

Your self-destruction doesn't hurt them.

Your chaos won't convert them.

They're so happy to rebuild it.

You'll never really kill it.

Indeed, the cycle of creation, consumption, destruction, and creation again reveals the futility of this so-called ‘rebellion.’ This is further complicated when you look at the artist who is distributing this song. Who are these musicians? Are they not selling this rock-and-roll lifestyle themselves? Do they not promote consumer goods?

In truth, the artist stands apart from a pro- or anti- consumer sentiment. In the United States, it is impossible for a performance to be entirely artistic without the performance also being a performance of commerce, because art is commercial here. And both of these performances are political. We walk through the world, attempting to isolate different performances into different categories. Most movie theaters are considered to contain performances of commerce; those that do not are called “art houses,” as though they are separate and distinct. We have art galleries, and we have trade shows, and we have memorials.

But the most potent performances live where these three intersect. To work our way back towards where this essay began: the Pop Art movement was an engaging attempt to bridge these three performances. There is a strictly utilitarian reason to bridge these three movements: because the intellectual, rigorous lens we apply to art is often not applied to performances in politics or performances in commerce. Andy Warhol wanted us to look at soup cans not with the eyes of a consumer, but with the eyes of an art critic—with an emphasis on the word critic. Critical. Using our critical facilities to dig deeper into the meanings and construction of each performance. In our contemporary life, our commercials and our political events are just as carefully crafted as pottery or theater; it behooves us, if we want not to be misled, to look at them critically the way we look at art.

Let us take, for instance, one of the greats of Pop Art, Roy Lichtenstein. Lichtenstein’s format is that of the comic-book drawing. The comic-book format is most interesting because it evokes the simplicity of childhood, and the straightforwardness with which youth views the world. But there is always something faintly wrong to the adult eye in viewing his works. Take for instance, Drowning Girl. A girl, surrounded by water, eyes closed, streaming with tears, and she is thinking: “I Don’t Care! I’d Rather Sink—Than Call Brad For Help!” It calls to mind the many helpless, emotive women in the comic books, who often need strong males to help them. As a child, this is all fantasy, and we don’t think too much about it. Her peevishness will cost her life if she doesn’t get over it. It is almost surreally stubborn. And yet in a comic book, such things happen, in order to create the dramatic set-ups the child enjoys—whether they are meant to be identifying with the girl, or identifying with the hero about to rescue the girl.

Another one, entitled, Whaam! features an American pilot destroying another plane in a dogfight. The exploding plane makes the familiar comic-book noise, Whaam! and the pilot narrates in poetic language: "I pressed the fire control... and ahead of me rockets blazed through the sky..." This painting is adapted from a 1962 issue of DC Comics' All-American Men of War. In 1962, the Vietnam War had only just begun, and the tide of public opinion hadn’t truly turned against it yet—although the Bay of Pigs invasion just the year before should have chastened America that its foreign policy interference was too much.

This panel is so striking because the violence it portrays is perfectly glorified. And yet, somehow, hung in an art gallery, it seems perverse. What was okay in a children’s comic book (“boys will be boys”?) does not seem right in an art hall. Why is that? One explanation will be in the way we hold performances of commerce to a different standard than the way we hold performances of art. The comic book is marketed to boys: they like hitting things, and they like girls (even if they don’t know it yet). We don’t expect DC Comics to take into account the harsh realities of war or misogyny: they’re just making comic books. It’s “just entertainment.” On the other hand, an artist has attempted to transform this into a performance of art. In that, he has taken that glorification of violence or female helplessness to a new level: a level which is uncomfortably high. Does the artist actually ennoble those things? Is this glorification ironic? Without knowing the artist’s state of mind, we can see a performance of art which dialectically opposes the intent of the performance of commerce, but we can also see a sickening possibility that somehow we have turned violence into an art form.

So here I am, standing between General Sherman, the Apple Store, and 2001. What I have discovered, during my intellectual ramblings along 5^th Avenue, along the road Ché’s face traveled, and along the path charted by Pop Art is that the three different modalities of public performance (art, commerce, state) are most interesting when they are in conversation with one another. These three prove that axiom to me deeply.

Firstly, there is 2001. The sculpture is very aesthetically pleasing, and I certainly like to look at it, but it bores my brain. I hate to be that honest, but it really does. It’s a ball, and although I have explored ideas of child’s play and child’s thinking, I do not find it actually very informative about the world we live in and the world we interact in. As a performance of art to the exclusion of commerce and state, it has reached the aesthetic dream: art for art’s sake.

Then, there is General Sherman. It is a grand performance by state. Not just any state, as a matter of fact, but the United States in 1903. The gaudy display of gold, the literal realism of the style, the religiosity of the Archangel guiding Sherman’s path, and of course the presence of the bloody war criminal Sherman anchor General Sherman inartistically into a moment in the past which I would prefer to reject. Sherman’s burning March to the Sea may have been in the cause of anti-slavery or in the cause of defending the Constitution, but the brutality of his acts and the brutality of his campaign against Native Americans is beyond glorification. A performance of the state is anchored in its moment of conception.

Lastly, there is the Apple Store. It may be a pinnacle of art and commerce merging, but of course, the Apple Corporation would like you to think that Apple Corporation is the pinnacle of art and commerce merging. In actuality, Apple is a designer company, charging a premium for its products in return for a sleek, beautiful design aesthetic. It may be pretty to see once, but the demographic which enjoys the Apple Store’s architecture the most are the homeless who gather around its poorly insulated glass frame at night, hoping for warmth and inadvertently casting an awkward negative spell over this idealized capitalist dream.

I leave the square, and take Occam’s Direct Line of Travel (also known as the R Train) back to my home.

Culture Future II: Absolutism versus Reducible Complexity

It is easy to believe that we cannot change culture, because it is so large. So we throw our hands up and accept it as fate. But it doesn't have to be.

When I wrote this in the first post, I was speaking mainly of our contemporary American culture. In a way, Americans are still caught in the ancient debate of free will versus predestination. Although for some it is still in the old frame of God versus human free will, there are other outlets for that way of thinking. One place where I see this schism developing, which is a very difficult place to disentangle it, is in the realm of health (mental and physical). Am I the way I am because I made certain choices? Were those choices pre-determined by a combination of my genetic code and my upbringing?

This debate is crucial today because the two different views have two different solutions. If our depression (as a for instance) is caused by a plethora of causes beyond our control--our family, our genetic predisposition--then the best solutions will be medical ones (Prozac or Zoloft or some new experimental treatment). But if it is our choices which cause our depression, then it is our choices which will liberate us from it.

Our problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable – and we believe they can do it again.

John F. Kennedy said that. He was not speaking in the realm of health, but in the realm of culture. He was speaking of American politics, of the direction which America wanted to take, of its growing fear in the face of the Soviet Union.

Our culture is man-made, therefore it can be shaped by man. Although, as I said before, we think we cannot change culture because it is so large, Man can be as big as he wants. There is both good and bad in that.

The discovery that man can be scientifically manipulated, and that governments can turn large masses this way or that as they choose, is one of the causes of our misfortunes.

That statement was written twenty years before Kennedy's speech; it was Bertrand Russell in an essay about religion entitled An Outline Of Intellectual Rubbish. 'Our misfortunes,' which he refers to, is the scourge of Nazism, which at the time was even more dangerous than the Soviet Union of Kennedy's day, purely by virtue of the fact that the Soviet Union was as wary of the United States as we were of them.

Russell is correct that scientific manipulation of societies was the well-spring of Nazism, and of the Soviet Union. It is, of course, also the well-spring of American democracy; but Russell is right to highlight the dangers of mass manipulation. Sociology and communication, for instance, are combined to create propaganda. What went wrong for Nazis and for the Soviets was not that culture cannot be controlled--it is that culture cannot be rigidly controlled.

The current model I enjoy for examining culture is that of the conversation. A good conversation requires two people who are interested in the exchange of thoughts and/or feelings. "Interested" means that they are ready to listen; "the exchange" means that they are ready to speak.

The Nazi Party and the Bolsheviks had something to say, clearly--this is clear by how much they wrote at the time. It was very fashionable for them to write tracts and to make speeches. But they were not willing to respond, not willing to interact with the rest of culture as a whole. They wished to substitute Nazi culture for German culture, to substitute Bolshevik culture for Russian culture, and thus, were not ready to listen. If writing tracts and making speeches shows how willing to speak, then the brutal censorship of tracts and speeches (and those who made them) shows how unwilling to speak they are.

In point of fact, this shows that they had failed the 'scientific approach' to culture that many have ascribed to them. They started with the hypothesis of culture, and they performed the experiment. But by refusing to acknowledge the data which returned, and by refusing to engage in active conversation with other cultures, they were stifling that very same intellectual approach to changing society that first led them to embark. After all, Karl Marx was able to write his tracts on the economy because he was a professor at an English university, able to write what he pleased without fear.

Why were they unable to be in conversation? Because they were absolutists. They dreamed of a utopia, but it was an absolutist utopia. There was no room for non-communism in the Communist ideal; the bourgeois had to be brutally crushed. There was no room for the "impure" in the eugenics of Nazis; the impure had to be brutally crushed. It is specifically in the utopian, absolutist execution of these ideals that they were unable to be in conversation with other cultures. Nothing in the universe is perfect, so an ethos which calls for the destruction of the imperfect is by definition destructive; in fact, it targets everything in the universe. In fact, if these absolutist movements could look at themselves with objective eyes, they'd be forced to destroy themselves. How many of the leading Nazis were genetically pure? How many of the Communist leaders were truly equals to the rest of their society?

In The Rest Is Noise, Alex Ross wonders why intellectuals who formed the artistic elite in Vienna found themselves supporting Nazism during its rise. As an answer, he says,

The cultish fanaticism of modern art turns out to be unrelated to the politics of fascism: both attempt to remake the world in utopian forms.

In fact, it is the cultish absolutism of certain modern artists; many of these same artists purported to hate the support of the people because the people were inferior. Take, for instance, Schoenberg:

If it is Art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art.

This sort of bloody-minded absolute extremism is underpinned on a hatred of the imperfect. It is unfortunate, for instance, that this absolutism can sometimes arise from religion. I do not believe, like many of the New Athiests and their intellectual forebears, that everything religion touches is evil. But I do agree that absolutism is in religion is perverse and destructive. If, as some purport, we are all touched by sin and born in sin, and God hates sin, then how can God not hate everything?

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.

Jonathan Edwards, one of the earlier evangelicals in this country, spoke that in his sermon "Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God." Through the hyperbole of the text, it is clear to see that once you accept the philosophy of absolutism, everything which is not absolute is absolutely wrong; the world is black and white--and in fact, mostly black.

It has often been said of Islam that it is actually one of the most respectful religions, and that today's fundamentalists are perverting the Koran. But the Koran does have passages within it which support today's fundamentalists, just as the Bible supports today's fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist Marxists can use the Manifesto to slaughter Capitalists if they so choose. Each of these ideas, when taken absolutely, are incompatible with other cultures--obviously, because absolute cultures refuse to be in conversation with other cultures.

But the hope for the world is not, as Richard Dawkins or George W. Bush might think, to set up an opposite absolutism and let them battle to the death ("Democracy" versus totalitarianism; Hitchens' anti-theism versus theism, etc.), but rather to create the forum for conversation which refuses to tolerate violence and moderates the conversation as it precedes.

The clear example for this is in the creation of the US Constitution. Reading the Federalist papers by Madison and Hamilton reveal something clear about the Constitution: although the Constitution was founded on certain ideals, the machinery of the Constitution was built not for a utopian, ideal community, but rather for the everyday. Rather than hoping that America would never elect a cruel dictator or greedy, self-serving beaurocrats, the machinery was put into place to keep such people in check. This is the center of the concepts of checks and balances. The machinery continues to need tinkering, especially considering the abuses which the Constitution has weathered over the past eight years, but the concept is still sound.

We still have a culture which allows for conversation, although the state of our conversation is still poor. We have a culture which allows for change. Even cultures which attempt to stifle change and innovation find themselves prey to the human spirit. Consider Vaclav Havel, writing in the frozen Czechoslovakia during the oppression of the Cold War.

I am unwilling to believe that this whole civilization is no moer than a blind alley of history and a fatal error of the "human spirit."

But he did not sit and wait for things to happen; nor did he preach some extremist anti-Communist revolution. Rather, he preached the idea of "living in truth," describing in his seminal essay "Power of the Powerless" of a green-grocer who does simply nothing more than stop following the ridiculous laws of the Communist regime. He is not attacking the problem at the center, not trying to topple a powerful and huge regime alone, but rather: he is eroding the ideological and absolutist foundation of the regime. The more people simply stop cooperating, the weaker the regime was. And in fact, that is how the Soviet Union collapsed: not with a bang, but with a whimper.

The problem of "solving" culture is a problem of reducible complexity. It is impossible to change all of culture overnight; that path leads to absolutism. The Soviet Union tried, in one act of revolution, to cure every problem of the Industrial Revolution which had been brewing for a full century, and further to cure every problem of the feudal, monarchal Russia which had been brewing for centuries before that.

At the same time, the Western world was addressing the problems one by one. Today, we have ensured a far higher quality of life than the Soviet Union had, and far higher than the time of the Industrial Revolution. We solved each problem slowly, over the course of the 20th Century. There was a brief period, at the beginning of the Soviet Experiment and during the Great Depression, when actually there was a higher quality of life in the Soviet Union. But because of the absolute and rigid ideology that had created it, the Soviet Union never advanced; in fact, it regressed.

Take for instance, Richard Foreman:

If you’re a big person, carrying your big, heavy, important projects and concerns with you into the theater, when you confront my play it will appear to be an amorphous cloud of molecular particles, circulating in a seemingly random pattern, like Brownian motion. Perceiving it like that, the big person that you are measures the play against the heavy projects you carry around in your head, and you think: ... I want help in resolving such weighty problems, and all this play proposes is an amorphous cloud of circulating molecules, incapable of budging those big solid shapes that fill my life. What I need from a play is a shape bigger and heavier than my own in order to reorganize my own massive shapes.

My art proposes, however, that by shifting your attention to the scale on which atomic events occur...you discover that your own solid shapes are themselves but clouds of molecules in circulation.

Richard Foreman is talking about tackling personal problems on a quantum scale; the model which he's using (metaphorical) is of reducible complexity.

Our society is having trouble doing this. We expect our President to "fix" the education system. But the problems in the education system today are myriad; problems of race, economics, educational theory, and cultural value of education are among many problems which face the education system. Others, seeing the complexity in their face, would prefer to withdraw; give everyone who can the opportunity to flee to private education.

Foreign policy is the same; on the one side, President Bush wishes to attack every problem with an Insta-Solution: democracy. Iran, Russia, North Korea, Iraq, Palestine--all of these problems could theoretically be solved by sweeping aside their leadership, and instituting 'democracy.' This ignores their complex histories, the billions of individual forces which are the swirling and pushing in every different directions. Others, currently led by Ron Paul, have a different approach: withdrawing from the foreign policy sphere. While a movement toward disengagement might be appropriate at the moment, isolationism is not how America can use its considerable position in the world to make it better--for itself as well as for everyone else.

What American politicians lack is the care, attention, and complex conversation with the rest of the world which leads to smart foreign policy. When we discuss foreign policy, we don't reduce the problem; we reduce our approach to it. We approach it in reductive terms; that is to say, reductionist. And reductionist thinking is absolute thinking because what reductionism and absolutism share is an inability to deal with complexity. Complexity is caused by different forces in different directions. Iraq is not just Sunni versus Shiite.

If we attempt to solve the problems facing our culture by reducing complexity into simplicity, and attempting to solve those 'simple' problems with absolute principles, we will fail. If we lump problems together into massive, fear-inducing entities (the War on Terror; the War on Poverty; the War on Drugs), then we will fail. But if we, as a community, break apart these problems into small, workable chunks, then each of us can play a part in solving these problems. We can only solve these many particles of problems if we're in conversation about these problems, but it will no longer be like climbing Darwin's Mount improbable.