The Spiral Staircase

This post is moved from Creative Destruction.

I overheard a mother at a bus stop trying to interest her son in the video iPod she was carrying, apparently loaded with the usual kid shows. He was having none of it, though he wasn’t causing any disruption or disturbance, while she was in effect a drug pusher. The scene got me thinking about how we soothe our boredom, especially that of children.

Almost every parent insists that children’s unrelenting need for both attention and stimulation is exhausting. Given the tools at hand, it’s inevitable that parents use various means of pacification, increasingly electronic distractions. Some parents recognize that plopping the kid(s) in front of the TV means selling their children down the river of advertising (training them as rapacious consumers), and for some, there’s a sense of guilt. Lately, kids have portable electronic distractions (e.g., GameBoys and iPods) so that even the relative wholesomeness of summer camp is no longer free of electronics. And it’s bleeding into adulthood. Never mind the countless hours routinely forfeited to TV; now a gaming system, an Internet connection, a cellphone, a DVD collection, and a BlackBerry also clamor for time and attention. Workouts, rush hour commutes, plane rides, and virtually any idle time must now be complemented by an iPod or DVD. (I was flabbergasted by the number of passengers on a recent flights I took who were jacked into their laptos like they were IV morphine.) Electronics makers must be rolling their hands and twirling their mustaches, having convinced most of the population to be plugged in at all times, just as soft drink purveyors convinced previous generations that a meal isn’t complete without a soft drink.

So what’s with the cavernous emptiness of boredom that screams to be filled, even if only with the most banal of stimulation? Why is it so difficult to be content in silence, alone with our own thoughts? Like the T-Rex that can only sense movement in its field of vision, we’re evolved to notice and seek change rather than stasis, which has turned into a fetish for novelty. Many of us are also so ill-equipped to use our own creativity as a source of self-amusement, whether it be writing, singing, or even thinking, that we must instead turn our attentions outward and, in our general laziness, gather whatever stimulation is most readily available. With our current electronics options, much of that stimulation is empty of meaningful content, much like the graphics on a TV news program that do nothing but tantalize the eyes, or the variety of new musical styles that are all hook and beat and thump.

It used to be that when a child complained “I’m bored …” to a parent, an aphorism was delivered: “Boredom is the mark of an uncreative and impoverished mind.” The implication of that rebuke was that, by using the imagination, one could dream up things to do that would provide amusement and generate enthusiasm. Perhaps some parents still instruct children that way, but in public at least, the complaint “I’m bored” is usually interpreted as a fire alarm, sending parents scrambling to find something to quench the fire before some mischief sets in. The restless mind of youth transforms into the mind at rest, like the effects of a depressant. And the habit is easily formed: the expectation that stimulation is done to a person rather than something a person does for him- or herself. Over time, one effect is that one’s enthusiasms are dominated by outer directedness, which is to say that we cathect with celebrities, consumer goods, sports teams, alcohol, and drugs, all of which release us from the torments of being ourselves.

UPDATE: I just came across this new product. It’s a shopping cart with seating for kids and a TV screen. For the love of all things holy, don’t look away from the TV screen!!

I’m hearing more and more stories lately about some young person in middle school, high school, or even college who makes the strange decision that he or she would rather not work so hard and then abjures skills, experiences, or a degree program being offered on a silver platter. (Attracting people to actually work at something has never been harder.) It puzzles me that even ingenues could lack the foresight to recognize that building a foundation or developing oneself pays dividends over time, unlike frittering away one’s time and having nothing later to show for it. The declined opportunity could be joining a sports team, learning to play a musical instrument, studying nursing, etc. Doesn’t matter. What they have in common is that they all take a commitment of time that provides substantial benefit. Even modest time commitments like a nature hike are declined as too much effort.

As a youngster, I had the usual spans of free time: after school, weekends, and glorious summer. I spent a great deal of time in Boy Scouts, reading, studying, playing trombone, playing tennis, swimming, riding my bike, and various other endeavors that kept me occupied. But I also worked — a lot. It started with the time-honored paper route and transitioned to winters spent shoveling neighbors’ driveways and summers tending lawns. There was rarely a time when I didn’t pitch in and do the work. It would never have occurred to me that it was too much effort to be worth my time. At least two things provided motivation: self-discipline and a Protestant work ethic. Whereas self-discipline is an acquired skill, the Protestant work ethic is a value system. In hindsight, I was lucky to grow up in a family where both were operative, and I instinctively responded in kind. I may also have been lucky not to have grown up at a time with too many easy distractions (other than TV, of course).

Not so with many youngsters these days. Despite some unevenness in their diffusion, almost everyone who wants them has access to cellphones, video game systems, computers, DVDs, and an impressive array of cable channels. Although enjoyable enough, these distractions’ greatest benefit may be a thumb workout. Otherwise, the way they’re typically used, they’re monstrous time sucks. One doesn’t have to go far to find a kid (or sadly, an adult) who would rather sit at the computer and watch an endless string of YouTube videos rather than, say, go on a 10-mile bike ride. The ride is just too much work.

My suspicion is that in our current consumer culture, many kids have absorbed the imperatives of the day (as I did in my day), which are built on the premise of enjoy now, pay later. By my lights, it’s easier to get a job or do the necessary work first, bank the earnings and acquired skills, and go without things I can’t afford until later. Indeed, part of my motivation was that unless I lay a substantial foundation, I’d never be in a position to reap rewards. The current model is reversed: build up debt (or cognitive and educational deficits) first and work it off (or repair one’s failings) later. Put another way, one can spend a period of youth working hard to avoid a lifetime of hard work or enjoy leisure in youth and pay for it with a lifetime of work.

What’s at work here? I think that marketing machinery that has matured over the last 30 or so years has successfully sold people (not all youngsters by any means) a bill of goods, namely, that the good life is characterized by having lots of stuff but without necessarily haven’t worked (yet) to acquire that stuff. As children, provision of that plenitude is on one’s parents’ backs, but especially as young adults, many learn quickly that while working as baristas at Starbucks they can’t afford the luxuriant lifestyles their parents afforded them. Yet they rely irrationally on the promise of rescue by inheritance, lottery winnings, fame, or some other quick, painless event involving no effort. It’s a recipe for disillusionment and suffering.

I’m not sure when it began exactly, but manufacturers, producers, and creators of all manner of goods, services, and entertainments now typically include some sort of behind-the-scenes or under-the-hood content for the general public. It can be observed in many manifestations. For example, the intricacy of analog wristwatch mechanisms is too tantalizing to hide behind a clock face, so many watches are now designed to expose their inner workings.

In another example, some high-end restaurants now offer seating not in a private dining room but at the kitchen table, which is literally a table in the kitchen of the restaurant. The noise, bustle, and harsh lighting of that location couldn’t possibly offer an very intimate or enjoyable venue, but the opportunity to observe the inner workings of a restaurant kitchen is apparently worthwhile to some diners.

Bonus features on a typical DVD, which weren’t available on VHS, are a better example of true added value in behind-the-scenes content. Typically, consumers have access to deleted scenes, “making of” featurettes, and commentary tracks. The best examples of these do not discuss merely technical aspects of filmmaking, which are primarily of interest to other filmmakers (and boring to the general public), but reveal decisions made to strengthen the narrative structure or coax better performances out of the players. One major failing of commentary tracks is typically the heaping of praise on celebrities, as though they were curing cancer or negotiating peace treaties. A few slice-of-life anecdotes are preferable.

I had the opportunity a week ago to travel the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, which is a modest two-lane road linking a variety of whiskey distilleries, large and small, that offer tours and tastings. I never knew such a thing exists and wasn’t especially interested even when I found out about it. However, due to his enthusiasm, I agreed to accompany a friend to the Maker’s Mark distillery in Loretto, Kentucky. The tour was free, and I was surprised to discover how interesting the history and process of making bourbon whiskey turned out to be. Pictures of the distillery from the 1950s revealed an small, modest industrial site of little distinction or appeal. Since then, the campus has been turned into an almost Epcot-like attraction, with the greater part of the actual distillery operation presumably taking place out of view. One striking detail on the trail was the four-story barns scattered around the county, clearly visible from the road, filled to capacity with “bourbon-eligible spirits” that age in five to seven years into the real stuff.

Already having an insider’s view of a number of different industries, processes, and endeavors, I’m not always very interested in pulling the curtain back to reveal other men and women doing their respective things. But I was charmed by the low-key approach at Maker’s Mark and will be less hesitant to detour off the beaten path in the future. Of course, if things go well, the Kentucky Bourbon Trail could become a victim of its own success, with swarms of people descending on the various sites like locusts.

This post is recycled from a lengthy comment made on Morris Berman’s blog Dark Ages America (after the book of the same name). I have edited it slightly since it no longer has the context of that comment thread and included two of Prof. Berman’s objections from his response to my comment.

In a blog post about the purpose of a humanities education, Prof. Berman provides two numbered lists of facts and factors regarding the deplorable state of education in America. It has become almost a fetish among the cognoscenti to iterate examples of plebeian ignorance and misapplied sense of value, which provides an odd psychological satisfaction. Similarly, prophesying the imminent collapse of social, governmental, and economic structures and institutions imparts a bizarre nihilistic thrill for many able to peer a little bit over the horizon. Frankly, they’re both well-established postures. Of course, in the long run, societies, governments, and economies do eventually collapse, so such prophets are proved correct, though usually not in the timeframes they foresee. Current conditions make it very seductive to assert that we really are on the brink of collapse, that it’s different this time. That’s hard to dispute, so I won’t try. What’s interesting is the number of intelligent, educated people who now think of themselves as “doomers” — modern-day Cassandras reporting our demise but who are largely ignored by the masses, who are busy getting on with life (perhaps in the very fashion that will seal our doom). I fall somewhere between the extremes of ignoring what’s occurring and relishing reports of ruin.

Nonetheless, I feel a deep sadness that we’re quickly abandoning the Enlightenment legacy that has served us for some 400 years. Perhaps it deserves to be left behind, considering how it’s built on a lust for power and dominance over all of nature and indeed each other. Science has by now bequeathed to us the technical power to wreck the environment, which we’ve accomplished handily in a modest 150 years. I can’t imagine a worse injustice. Jim Kunstler writes that people can be divided into two groups: “those who believe we will ‘high-tech’ our way out of this predicament; and those who believe we’ll organize our way out.” He refers to economic collapse, but I suspect collapse of the biosphere may be the trump card — the bigger problem from which we cannot escape.

Abandonment of the questions posed by the humanities and revaluation of human life on mostly financial terms was discussed by Karl Marx in The 1844 Manuscripts, where he states that money is the “visible divinity” in a capitalist world. This is further described by Daniel Pinchbeck:

“By possessing the property of buying everything, by possessing the property of appropriating all objects, money is thus the object of eminent possession. The universality of its property is the omnipotence of its being. It therefore functions as almighty being. Money is the pimp between man’s need and the object, between his life and his means of life. But that which mediates my life for me, also mediates the existence of other people for me. For me it is the other person.”

The establishment of money as the ultimate measure of value has lured us into a trap. Our orientation is no longer as participants in communities or as a humble part of nature. We’re now free (condemned, really) to exploit nature and compete against each other in a Darwinian fight for survival, or more properly, struggle for personal wealth. The inevitable perversion of this new orientation is greed, loss of empathy, and narcissistic concern solely with ourselves. The best of Enlightenment thought was a projection of the human mind out into the world and the universe. That’s mostly gone now, replaced by inwardness, radical egotism, and sybaritism. For example, recent news of the discovery of a solar system like our own is disdained as irrelevant and a waste of time to think about now that computers and virtual life technology have created a program called Spore that allows people to evolve their own virtual life forms. Discovery of actual extraterrestrial life no longer holds so much interest because now we have very cool video games.

The extraordinary incuriosity of the masses toward learning may be a harbinger of the completion of a cycle away from the Cartesian mind toward what Rousseau called the “sleep of reason,” where a utopian minimalist state is characterized by “abandonment of books and other accouterments of intellect in order to cultivate enjoyment of the senses and good health” [borrowing here from E.O. Wilson]. Oddly, this cultural drift may be the very thing described in Berman’s final chapter of The Reenchantment of the World and recommended in Coming to Our Senses (though as Prof. Berman protested, without discarding the intellect). The upbeat descriptions contained there are an apparent obligation of cultural critics — the sugar-coated cures for our ailments. What we actually have instead is characterized by loss. Reason won’t be merely dormant, it will be forgotten. We are very likely in the midst of a paradigm shift, a restyling of human consciousness. In the process, we have jettisoned the ideals of the Enlightenment and failed to truly answer or even address the central question of the humanities: “What is the meaning of human life?” That failure may be out of laziness or misdirection, but probably not. Rather, it’s in our nature, perhaps best put by John Gray in Straw Dogs (in a quote I’ve used in the past and with which Prof. Berman disagrees):

“The mass of mankind is ruled not by its own intermittent moral sensations, still less by self-interest, but by the needs of the moment. It seems fated to wreck the balance of life on Earth — and thereby to be the agent of its own destruction …. Humans use what they know to meet their most urgent needs — even if the result is ruin. When times are desperate they act to protect their offspring, to revenge themselves on enemies, or simply to give vent to their feelings. These are not flaws that can be remedied. Science cannot be used to reshape humankind in a more rational mold. The upshot of scientific inquiry is that humans cannot be other than irrational.”

I pulled together my papers for my tax return this week. The most surprising detail was that I drove my car just over 4,000 miles last year. Since I bought my current vehicle 4.5 years ago, I have added just under 30,000 miles, an average of about 6,670 per year. This low mileage is something of which I’m rather proud, and it’s only possible because I live in a city with good enough public transportation to forgo the car many days, especially the commute to and from work. If fact, if it weren’t for needing the car to get to musical engagements, I would consider selling the car and going without.

This reminded me of an article I saw comparing the fuel efficiency of a BMW diesel to a Toyota Prius hybrid. While the Prius has earned all the accolades for being the green, energy-conscious choice of the environmental set, the BMW, with its greater weight, power, and luxury status, actually won in a heads up competition. It may be that the Prius is designed to excel especially in stop-and-go city driving rather than the long-distance driving that was the basis for the comparison, but it’s still a surprising result.

The way the article is presented, though, reinforces the fact that most Americans are not really all that interested in energy conservation except as a byproduct of greater fuel efficiency. It’s still our implicit birthright to drive cars whenever, wherever, and at whatever cost we desire so long as we’re able to afford the fuel and the vehicle itself. The roadways are of course the responsibility of our government, meaning that they’re socialized (gasp!). The mainstream media rarely suggests that perhaps conservation might mean not driving everywhere, even or especially when it’s more convenient. (It’s rarely more efficient or less costly to drive a car except in terms of time. That calculus must include all the factors of driving, not just the fuel cost.) And there’s little urgency or sense in the public mind that driving habits may have broad implications beyond our personal economies.

Like everyone else, I haven’t yet given up the convenience of driving. A grocery store run (scarcely a mile from home) would be a very different endeavor on a bike were transporting milk, eggs, canned goods, meat, etc. It would often require several trips and a lot more time and be really unpleasant in the rain and/or cold. Similarly, the car extends my range so that I can shop at a greater variety of stores farther distant than the one grocery nearby. But I’ve still limited my driving considerably, and I have a guilt pang every time I drive, wondering if maybe I couldn’t make the trip some other way.

Of my circle of friends and acquaintances, only one has limited his driving because of an inability to afford the increased price of gas. Several don’t own cars (again, a real possibility in Chicago). The suburbanites who commute from the burbs to downtown Chicago are fully dependent on their cars. Most of us will continue to pay for fuel and drive at will until … well … until we can’t anymore. What then? Considering how firmly lodged driving has become in our daily habits, our social organization, and our nearly complete dependence on regular supply of cheap energy, some forward-looking individuals prophesy that Americans will go positively apeshit when fuel scarcity occurs. Peak oil projections indicate that such scarcity may not be far off, at which point the suburbs and exurbs will become the new slums, unreachable by most newly carless or fuelless people. For now, however, it’s still happy motoring. Enjoy it while you can.

My employer sponsored an in-service luncheon recently on the topic Achieving Balance. The presentation was essentially a PowerPoint presentation conducted by a representative of a professional human resources company (which will remain nameless since I’m about to criticize the presentation harshly). The presenter promised an interactive, fun, lunch meeting. The part that was true was lunch. If the presenter had any public speaking experience or credentials on the subject being presented, they weren’t evident. In fact, just about any classroom teacher knows that the surest way to lose the interest of students is to read from an outline given as a handout. That’s no less true of adults, and compounding the issue by having lunch led to a particularly uninspired presentation. The interactive part consisted of querying attendees and mostly ignoring the responses when no clear segue to the next point was offered, which was most of the time. Nobody there would have called any part of it fun unless they sat in the back and made sarcastic comments.

But that’s merely form. The content is what really irked me. The balance to be sought is between the demands of professional life, family life, and what is commonly understood as “having a life.” Everyone registered recognition that we’re all pulled 100 directions in the course of a day, leaving precious little time for quiet contemplation or enjoyment. The tips and suggestions included things such as taking a self-inventory; prioritizing time and goals; discarding unused things, unrealistic expectations, and toxic relationships; adopting a healthy lifestyle; and keeping an activity log and to-do list. All well and good, but these are all elements warmed over from just about any self-help book or time-management pamphlet. And worse, they were all ultimately aimed at recovering lost time and improving efficiency so that one could accomplish more. And that, as they say, is the root of the problem: more. We want more, and more … and more. Yet there isn’t enough time in the world to watch all the TV and movies, listen to all the music, read all the books and magazines (and blogs), eat at all the restaurants, have all the personal relationships (and sex), do the exercise, get the sleep, and still hold a full-time job to afford it all. Plus, with all the new media and experiences being added to the to-do list every day, some with the best intentions of actually do them, most of us just keep piling on without every really diminishing the pile.

What little discussion there was in the seminar, considering how poorly the presenter guided participants, all took for granted the notion that the only solution was more — more desires and more accomplishments, even if only something as mundane as organizing a closet. Ugh! I kept my lip buttoned, lest I be regarded as disruptive and confrontational, but I really wanted to examine this assumption. My initial question would have been in two parts: “What do you think about the time most Americans waste watching TV and what would you recommend regarding insulating oneself from the influence of manufactured desire?” The first part might have gone over okay, but the second would doubtlessly have opened a Pandora’s Box for those able to see even the initial implications. Other questions I might have entertained if I thought the presenter had the first clue how to answer them professionally would have included how to be satisfied with what we have; how to say no to others (and ourselves) piling on expectations; how to avoid feeling stressed at being idle; how to be comfortable in quiet, stillness, and solitude; and how to adopt an other-directed orientation as an antidote to narcissistic self-absorption. (I had others I can’t remember anymore. But I’m not stressed about it.)

On the heels of the presentation, which I was mulling for a few days, I came across two related blog posts (here and here). Both resonate in the direction opposite that of the presentation, namely, do and expect less and be happier for it. What a refreshing and serendipitous reminder. As a personal example, I update this blog on average once per week. The interval varies, but unlike many bloggers who report feeling stressed to keep up with new posts to drive or maintain traffic, I write when I’m ready. I notice that hits double for a day or two after each post (and fall off on weekends invariably), but I’m content with the intervals between posts and the diminished traffic. I’m doing other things that matter to me more.

Great Britain takes a lot of heat at Fark.com for being a nanny state: a country that goes to unwarranted and sometimes intrusive lengths to care for its citizens. Most policies and laws are charmingly eccentric, but a few step over the line of infringing upon individual liberties (which don’t always coincide with American liberties). In the former category is a trial program of padding lightposts to keep people from injuring themselves by walking into a post while texting.

Something about this strikes me as very funny, and this is a case where a picture is worth a thousand words. The so-called CrackBerry phenomenon is just sad, and I suppose constant IMing (instant messaging) is no better, so I feel no empathy for folks who can’t tear themselves away from their tiny screens. Add the element of walking into shit and injuring yourself and, well, that’s just plain funny. It’s more tragic, of course, when it’s the combination of texting and driving, or texting and railroad crossings. Human devolution has clearly begun when we’re so jacked in people can’t even handle walking down the street.

Randall Denley as a curious opinion column in The Ottawa Citizen called “The Death of Mass Culture.” Denley’s complaints are two-fold: (1) we no longer have a shared, common culture to which we all subscribe, and (2) the quality of the common culture to which we used to pay attention is no longer producing much of value. Let me consider his second point first. Denley writes,

The music industry has become obsessed with people stealing their products electronically, but the real problem is a lack of compelling talent. We lack major figures such as Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley and the Beatles. Each redefined pop music and drew vast audiences that crossed generations. Literally no one is doing that now. Few new singers today even have a hope of cracking music’s second tier.

I have no argument with what he’s feels is a lackluster music scene compared to giants of the past (handpicked with the considerable advantage of hindsight). Other mass culture offerings arguably suffer the same diminished worthiness. Why might that be? I have two ideas.

There is a demographic effect at work here not unlike what propels so many Kenyans into the top tier of long-distance runners. As described by Alberto Salazar in a Sports Illustrated article by Alexander Wolff:

[I]ronic circumstances … seem to cast the U.S. as a Third World country in distance running: “As big as we are, we have fewer people to draw on. In Kenya there are probably a million schoolboys 10 to 17 years old who run 10 to 12 miles a day. That’s how they get to and from school. The average Kenyan 18-year-old has run 15,000 to 18,000 more miles in his life than the average American — and a lot of that’s at altitude. They’re motivated because running is a way out. Plus they don’t have a lot of other sports for kids to be drawn into. Numbers are what this is all about. In Kenya there are maybe 100 runners who have hit 2:11 in the marathon — and in the U.S., maybe five.” [emphasis added]

Can we honestly say we have nearly equivalent numbers working diligently at music compared to, say, 1965? Most kids these days expect immediate gratification and don’t have the patience or long-term vision to spend the countless hours necessary to hone a craft. They would rather learn how to play rock music (sorta) from a video game. That was less true of kids in the past, and so from a demographics perspective, far fewer adults develop even modest musical skills such as being able to read music or play the piano at any level.

The other idea is that entertainment media are a gluttonous smorgasbord compared to 40 years ago. Then, there was no Internet, no video games, only three TV channels, far fewer professional sports (and sports teams), and movies stayed in theaters for months rather than weeks (if they’re profitable). Indeed, we have so much mass media competing for our attention that we’re inevitably ignorant of most of it. Who knew, for example, that there is now a sport for stacking cups? Stacking cups!! If in the past we could attend to, say, 8 of 10 categories in mass culture, that might be considered fairly comprehensive. Now, even if we knew even slightly about 50 of 100+ things, we are hopelessly uninformed to be able to capture the Zeitgeist or cultural moment except accidentally. We’re full-time consumers, which leaves little opportunity for thoughtful, reflective creation.

Denley identifies the problem of fragmentation himself:

In television, the wide proliferation of channels has turned broadcasting into narrowcasting. With so much choice, the market is fragmented. That doesn’t mean the shows are all bad, but they all face such competition that few garner numerically significant audiences.

Which brings me to his first complaint mentioned above. We simply can’t keep up with the volume of TV shows, music, best seller lists, blogs, movies, and everything vomited up by the Information Age. Hardly anything gets a wide audience anymore, even with our teeming numbers. So I’m lucky if I can talk to someone about my favorite show, band, books, etc. because it’s unlikely they know anything about my preferred entertainments. Further, the limited number of creative jobs could be offered to only the most creative and imaginative artists and practitioners. Today, with so much space to fill, competence no longer clusters around a few media outlets.

The notion of cultural literacy was first popularized by E.D. Hirsch, Jr. in his book of the same name in 1988. Since exclusions always inspire heated debate, it’s obviously a mistake (though seductive) to assert specific cultural knowledge we should all share, and Hirsch has ironically fragmented his own focus by creating a diverse cottage industry of “things you need to know” by certain age milestones. Now that the information environment is blown wide open, it’s even more difficult to establish any canonical culture. For example, I was recently dismayed to learn that a 15-year-old music student of my acquaintance had never heard of Brahms or the three B’s (Bach, Beethoven, Brahms). It’s apparently know longer taught even to those studying music. (Don’t even get me started about the number of people — not just kids — who think the sun revolves around the earth.)

As much as I might want to agree with Denley about the death of mass culture and bemoan the loss of conversational common ground, I think his report of such demise is premature and greatly exaggerated. It’s not that we no longer have a mass culture, it’s merely that those cultural  mainstays of 1965 or even 1985 have receded to the background and become minority players in niche markets. We still have a common culture, but it’s no longer what it was, and it won’t stay what it is for much longer, either. TV is still probably the most democratic medium, but it’s fragmentation into a dizzying array from which to choose simply means that each show attracts its own increasingly narrow slice rather than a large pie piece.

More importantly, the mass culture and conversation we share is characterized less by our entertainment choices than by our values. We value connectedness and are constantly at our electronics chattering away but many of us can’t hold a meaningful conversation. We value security and are willing to cede our privacy to obtain a semblance of security. We value affluence and are drawn to paths that produce the most perceived bang for the buck (business degrees and lotteries). We value beauty and heap unwarranted praise on the genetically fortunate while paying obscene sums to transform ourselves into their image. We value family and insist on its sanctity even while we erode the very sense of community that fosters belonging. Most of all, we value the self-deception of righteous American virtue that allows us to turn a blind eye to the awful machinations of American corporations and government. That’s the mass culture that’s still thriving in America.

While the larger focus of an article by Jennifer Palmer called “Zombie Apocalypse” is deconstructing our weird zombie fetish in entertainment, the best part is the discussion of a curious term: the uncanny valley. The term finds its origin in robotics (in 1970, according to the Wikipedia article). Although purely theoretical and lacking scientific support, even the soft science of psychology, it goes a long way toward explaining a wave of revulsion we typically feel as objects of our own creation approach realistic human likeness just before they become indistinguishable from real humans.

The theory states that as an object begins to acquire human characteristics, those characteristics stand out from its nonhumanness and we empathize with it. As it begins to look too human but is still recognizeably nonhuman, the nonhuman characteristics stand out and we feel revulsion. Once we can no longer tell the robot or doll from a human, we again feel empathy. The valley between the tops of the two empathetic curves is uncanny precisely because humanness is too closely yet imperfectly imitated. They theory draws inspiration from an essay by Sigmund Freud called “The Uncanny.” This graph, unscientific as it is, plots the effect and several objects:

I draw attention to the lack of science to support the theory, but it nonetheless deals with some very real effects we experience and witness with dolls, animation, robots, corpses, and yes, even zombies. Artists who create life-like human forms that blend into crowds at art museums play on this effect. In animation, styled human movement (or animal movement, as is often the case) poses no trouble, but purely CGI characters (as in Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, I Robot, etc.) cause varying levels of discomfort. Those of us who contempate a possible future with very life-like robots find the idea of it more than a little bit ooky. Read more »

One of my first posts on Creative Destruction (my nearly dead group blog) featured comments on a twisting skyscraper design, the Fordham Spire (now the Chicago Spire — cool flash website here) meant to start going up any old day now. That post still draws some hits. Well, it seems that the new self-proclaimed skyscraper capital of the world has copied the twisting building idea (the first is actually a building called Turning Torso in Malmo, Sweden) and intends to erect the Infinity Tower:

(For the politically correct feminist folks, erect is the proper word, since these buildings represent phallic, patriarchal triumphalism in the extreme.) Perhaps it’s such an attractive design that it bears repetition, one per city, let’s say. Whether post-industrial economics can continue to thrust multiple supertall buildings skyward remains to be seen, but for a short while at least, it seems that the undeniable appeal of multibillion-dollar projects with futuristic design aspects will continue to cast aside more humble aspirations.