It's notable that he too starts off with similar observations about how hard it is to tell compelling stories without punishing the characters in the story. I think about Vonnegut's Uncle's question a lot, actually.
This perfectly captures something I’ve often felt but couldn't put into words. The "Great Systems Asymmetry" explains so much about our laws, our news, and even our stories. It's far easier to spot the bug than to design the beautiful experience. Your reminder to cherish and try to understand the positive is the perfect antidote. A very valuable read.
Traditionally art, especially art in pre-modern forms like medieval high romance, classical sculpture + painting, and symphonic music, have served the function of “articulating our true deep positive values”. Arguably, this was exactly the purpose and meaning of “beauty” in these arts as the “deep truths” seem necessarily difficult to communicate through direct language.
The modern and post-modern move towards art as criticism has weakened the role of art as expression of these deep values, although some contemporary art (film, certain modern music, maybe memetic communities e.g. Remilia) still seek to communicate these deep truths.
A societal appreciation of at least some classical forms of art is likely a necessary starting point from which new art that communicates positive values can be created.
Oxford Press just suckered me into buying another of its critical-theory Very Short Introductions. The last was "African History: A very short introduction". It wasn't about African history; it was about the history of African history: how the archaeological process has changed over time, how the works of different historians of Africa reflect their social context, power relations, values, assumptions, etc.
I just started listening to "Art History: A very short introduction", and again, it isn't about the history of art; it's about the history of the history of art, eg how the status and role of women in art and in art history, the ways in which histories of art were organized, and what questions they sought to answer, changed over time.
I think the authors of these books would say they were focusing on our true deep positive values; namely, equity for women and non-Western cultures. Yet the actual effect I felt while reading these books was an obliteration of all values, a continual insistence that no thing could be better than any other thing, that evaluation and judgement of anything is inherently evil.
But this has a chilling effect which extends far beyond tabooing judgement. Critical theorists are incapable of asking the important questions which a less white-male-centric view of the world has made possible, like: What do we mean by "art"? Are there major attractors in art and culture which are found around the world? How have different cultures influenced each other (other than as oppressed/oppressor)? They've brought the data needed to ask these questions; but they don't.
Maybe that's because it would require looking for similarities and differences between cultures, and this seems to them perilously close to comparing them judgementally. Critical theorists think all comparisons are moral comparisons. If you said that SpaceX's rockets are better than NASA's, they would accuse you of being a crypto-capitalist on the wrong side of history, and keep funding the Orion.
Or maybe it's because they aren't actually interested in African history or in art, only in gazing into their eyes in the mirror gazing back at themselves. Either way, these meta-historians have cast out the thing they loved, the positive value that attracted them to history or art in the first place.
>Yet the actual effect I felt while reading these books was an obliteration of all values, a continual insistence that no thing could be better than any other thing, that evaluation and judgement of anything is inherently evil.
Indeed, pomo-ists don't believe that there are such things as non-relative values, according to which anything could be judged. They have fallen into the old trap of nihilism, as many before them had, and are so confused that they don't even realize this. Of course, there are good reasons for why this has happened, but in theme with this post, it's much easier to see the ways that things have gone bad, than how to make them better instead.
>Either way, these meta-historians have cast out the thing they loved, the positive value that attracted them to history or art in the first place.
Blame academia for its deadening touch, which excises humanity from those poor kids with chilling efficiency.
- academia in the abstract, which is the pursuit for truth, and which enlivens rather than deadens
- academia as it exists today, which is a conspiracy by the mediocre majority to ensure that academic prestige is not a function of ability, nor of ardor for the subject
Sure, but I'd say that given the extent of failure, the ideal itself might use adjustment, to make the pursuit of it less susceptible from going disastrously astray.
Re. "A societal appreciation of at least some classical forms of art is likely a necessary starting point": I... disagree, but only because the word "classical" is a Trojan horse which smuggles in a perverse value system. You're presumably using the word "classical" to refer to eg ancient Greek art; but the word refers more precisely to sculpture in the post-Archaic Athenian style from about 510 to 400 BCE, and tragedies from the period of Aeschylus. That particular art is unemotional (see eg the blank faces of the soldiers on the Parthenon frieze) and, well, kinda statist.
The greatest Greek art, IMHO, is not classical: Geometric pottery, Homer, the tragedies of Euripides, and Hellenistic sculpture. (Euripides will be found under "classical" in textbooks, but his contemporaries recognized that he was what we would call a social progressive, and his interests were those of the later Hellenistic sculptors.)
This is an extremely important distinction. The classical style valued order, beauty, and ideal perfection, and was fundamentally elitist and aristocratic. Homer was more honest and empirical, and Hellenistic art was more naturalistic, compassionate, and inclusive.
Art history in the West has until recently been written from a powerfully Platonist or fascist perspective, which praised the classical period and slandered Hellenistic art as "degenerate" for allowing women, the poor, the old, and the conquered as subjects. That is why I would rather not call for a return to "classical" art.
I could say something similar (though not as harsh) about classical music, a musical tradition which emphasized order and strict adherence to Form, sandwiched between the baroque and the romantic, which I think are at least as good. People say "classical music" and usually mean all three. Bad actors can sneak in Platonist values by moving back and forth between the two meanings of "classical" as it serves their purpose.
Things are further complicated when we contemplate shared values. Who shares our value and who doesn't, and how strongly? It requires a discovery procedure, and has all the difficulties that prevent central planning from being a viable solution. The alternative to central planning is the common law, which while more decentralized is still quite a blunt and inefficient instrument.
I submit that the Constitution’s “negative rights” - that Obama decried - are a good thing.
Positive rights are what gets us into trouble (at least according to those of us of a libertarian or classical liberal bent).
We actually have done well to have much of culture - and all of government - be about negative rights.
And imo this is doubly true in an age of leftists wanting to give government ever more power.
I submit that the reason that the reason we are drifting faster is that security in general and lack of a common enemy (the Soviet Union from WW II until the crumbling of the Soviet Union) made it less necessary to have any focus on “positives” in culture, since the security thread positively pulled us together, and the “negative rights” culture was in fact helpful, not harmful, in avoiding even more maladaptive cultural drift.
Subtractive strategy scales higher than your examples; you could think of increasing liberty, for instance, as reducing constraints. The Buddhist idea that life is suffering is analogous to temperature: temperature is heat. What we call cold is less heat than we might like, but everything above absolute zero - everything in the universe, belike - has heat. Having sex or winning contests is less suffering than baseline. Jhana is less suffering than that. Nirvana is no suffering at all. There are other paths to increasing beauty than reducing ugliness, but it is a fruitful one. Reduce deadweight losses. Don't tax positive externalities or subsidize negative externalities...
Re. "there do at times appear in our lives precious people, moments, and things that we deeply and positively value. The point of apparently positive items like “liberty”, “safety”, “prosperity”, and “innovation” is mostly to help us hold bad things at bay, so that our systems can function to sometimes let us see and realize our few precious positive things. About which we understand so little.":
Thank you for writing this. So many of the world's "great" religions and philosophers teach that life is suffering. So many people and institutions highlight the bad. So many people think that nothing else counts, that joy is a con game, that solving "useless" math problems, or building a museum, or writing a poem or story that isn't politically "relevant", or sending a man to the moon, is a crime if just one person, somewhere, is suffering.
I love Aristotle’s analysis in his Ethics. Everything he says about friendship, courage, greatness, happiness seems to apply today. But the analysis breaks down when we need an articulation of society-level rather than individual-level deep values?
The rational, and I think quite common goal is for (individual) human flourishing -- i.e. physical, mental, and spiritual (in the sense of higher values) well-being. These can be objectively defined.
The foster these values one needs to live by rational principles -- i.e. acquire rational virtues
My favorite version of this observation is from Kurt Vonnegut:
https://youtu.be/GOGru_4z1Vc?si=mjqRaKjyGGmtwNgC
It's notable that he too starts off with similar observations about how hard it is to tell compelling stories without punishing the characters in the story. I think about Vonnegut's Uncle's question a lot, actually.
you've just not investigated the positive side. There are those out there who did. find them.
This perfectly captures something I’ve often felt but couldn't put into words. The "Great Systems Asymmetry" explains so much about our laws, our news, and even our stories. It's far easier to spot the bug than to design the beautiful experience. Your reminder to cherish and try to understand the positive is the perfect antidote. A very valuable read.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvkT9NBBc-4
Traditionally art, especially art in pre-modern forms like medieval high romance, classical sculpture + painting, and symphonic music, have served the function of “articulating our true deep positive values”. Arguably, this was exactly the purpose and meaning of “beauty” in these arts as the “deep truths” seem necessarily difficult to communicate through direct language.
The modern and post-modern move towards art as criticism has weakened the role of art as expression of these deep values, although some contemporary art (film, certain modern music, maybe memetic communities e.g. Remilia) still seek to communicate these deep truths.
A societal appreciation of at least some classical forms of art is likely a necessary starting point from which new art that communicates positive values can be created.
Oxford Press just suckered me into buying another of its critical-theory Very Short Introductions. The last was "African History: A very short introduction". It wasn't about African history; it was about the history of African history: how the archaeological process has changed over time, how the works of different historians of Africa reflect their social context, power relations, values, assumptions, etc.
I just started listening to "Art History: A very short introduction", and again, it isn't about the history of art; it's about the history of the history of art, eg how the status and role of women in art and in art history, the ways in which histories of art were organized, and what questions they sought to answer, changed over time.
I think the authors of these books would say they were focusing on our true deep positive values; namely, equity for women and non-Western cultures. Yet the actual effect I felt while reading these books was an obliteration of all values, a continual insistence that no thing could be better than any other thing, that evaluation and judgement of anything is inherently evil.
But this has a chilling effect which extends far beyond tabooing judgement. Critical theorists are incapable of asking the important questions which a less white-male-centric view of the world has made possible, like: What do we mean by "art"? Are there major attractors in art and culture which are found around the world? How have different cultures influenced each other (other than as oppressed/oppressor)? They've brought the data needed to ask these questions; but they don't.
Maybe that's because it would require looking for similarities and differences between cultures, and this seems to them perilously close to comparing them judgementally. Critical theorists think all comparisons are moral comparisons. If you said that SpaceX's rockets are better than NASA's, they would accuse you of being a crypto-capitalist on the wrong side of history, and keep funding the Orion.
Or maybe it's because they aren't actually interested in African history or in art, only in gazing into their eyes in the mirror gazing back at themselves. Either way, these meta-historians have cast out the thing they loved, the positive value that attracted them to history or art in the first place.
>Yet the actual effect I felt while reading these books was an obliteration of all values, a continual insistence that no thing could be better than any other thing, that evaluation and judgement of anything is inherently evil.
Indeed, pomo-ists don't believe that there are such things as non-relative values, according to which anything could be judged. They have fallen into the old trap of nihilism, as many before them had, and are so confused that they don't even realize this. Of course, there are good reasons for why this has happened, but in theme with this post, it's much easier to see the ways that things have gone bad, than how to make them better instead.
>Either way, these meta-historians have cast out the thing they loved, the positive value that attracted them to history or art in the first place.
Blame academia for its deadening touch, which excises humanity from those poor kids with chilling efficiency.
I would distinguish between:
- academia in the abstract, which is the pursuit for truth, and which enlivens rather than deadens
- academia as it exists today, which is a conspiracy by the mediocre majority to ensure that academic prestige is not a function of ability, nor of ardor for the subject
Sure, but I'd say that given the extent of failure, the ideal itself might use adjustment, to make the pursuit of it less susceptible from going disastrously astray.
Re. "A societal appreciation of at least some classical forms of art is likely a necessary starting point": I... disagree, but only because the word "classical" is a Trojan horse which smuggles in a perverse value system. You're presumably using the word "classical" to refer to eg ancient Greek art; but the word refers more precisely to sculpture in the post-Archaic Athenian style from about 510 to 400 BCE, and tragedies from the period of Aeschylus. That particular art is unemotional (see eg the blank faces of the soldiers on the Parthenon frieze) and, well, kinda statist.
The greatest Greek art, IMHO, is not classical: Geometric pottery, Homer, the tragedies of Euripides, and Hellenistic sculpture. (Euripides will be found under "classical" in textbooks, but his contemporaries recognized that he was what we would call a social progressive, and his interests were those of the later Hellenistic sculptors.)
This is an extremely important distinction. The classical style valued order, beauty, and ideal perfection, and was fundamentally elitist and aristocratic. Homer was more honest and empirical, and Hellenistic art was more naturalistic, compassionate, and inclusive.
Art history in the West has until recently been written from a powerfully Platonist or fascist perspective, which praised the classical period and slandered Hellenistic art as "degenerate" for allowing women, the poor, the old, and the conquered as subjects. That is why I would rather not call for a return to "classical" art.
I could say something similar (though not as harsh) about classical music, a musical tradition which emphasized order and strict adherence to Form, sandwiched between the baroque and the romantic, which I think are at least as good. People say "classical music" and usually mean all three. Bad actors can sneak in Platonist values by moving back and forth between the two meanings of "classical" as it serves their purpose.
Things are further complicated when we contemplate shared values. Who shares our value and who doesn't, and how strongly? It requires a discovery procedure, and has all the difficulties that prevent central planning from being a viable solution. The alternative to central planning is the common law, which while more decentralized is still quite a blunt and inefficient instrument.
Agreed.
It was far easier when we had a common enemy to worry about from a security / way of life standpoint to have sufficient coherence on shared values.
Now we don’t have that. The price of success.
Hmmmm…
I submit that the Constitution’s “negative rights” - that Obama decried - are a good thing.
Positive rights are what gets us into trouble (at least according to those of us of a libertarian or classical liberal bent).
We actually have done well to have much of culture - and all of government - be about negative rights.
And imo this is doubly true in an age of leftists wanting to give government ever more power.
I submit that the reason that the reason we are drifting faster is that security in general and lack of a common enemy (the Soviet Union from WW II until the crumbling of the Soviet Union) made it less necessary to have any focus on “positives” in culture, since the security thread positively pulled us together, and the “negative rights” culture was in fact helpful, not harmful, in avoiding even more maladaptive cultural drift.
Subtractive strategy scales higher than your examples; you could think of increasing liberty, for instance, as reducing constraints. The Buddhist idea that life is suffering is analogous to temperature: temperature is heat. What we call cold is less heat than we might like, but everything above absolute zero - everything in the universe, belike - has heat. Having sex or winning contests is less suffering than baseline. Jhana is less suffering than that. Nirvana is no suffering at all. There are other paths to increasing beauty than reducing ugliness, but it is a fruitful one. Reduce deadweight losses. Don't tax positive externalities or subsidize negative externalities...
Re. "there do at times appear in our lives precious people, moments, and things that we deeply and positively value. The point of apparently positive items like “liberty”, “safety”, “prosperity”, and “innovation” is mostly to help us hold bad things at bay, so that our systems can function to sometimes let us see and realize our few precious positive things. About which we understand so little.":
Thank you for writing this. So many of the world's "great" religions and philosophers teach that life is suffering. So many people and institutions highlight the bad. So many people think that nothing else counts, that joy is a con game, that solving "useless" math problems, or building a museum, or writing a poem or story that isn't politically "relevant", or sending a man to the moon, is a crime if just one person, somewhere, is suffering.
I love Aristotle’s analysis in his Ethics. Everything he says about friendship, courage, greatness, happiness seems to apply today. But the analysis breaks down when we need an articulation of society-level rather than individual-level deep values?
The rational, and I think quite common goal is for (individual) human flourishing -- i.e. physical, mental, and spiritual (in the sense of higher values) well-being. These can be objectively defined.
The foster these values one needs to live by rational principles -- i.e. acquire rational virtues
https://medium.com/@petervoss/rational-ethics-38b0b59fff4e