This Blog Sits at the

Away on business

Ok, I am going to be in the field and on the road for the next week or so.

If I can blog, I will blog.

If not, have a look around.

There must be something you haven't read.

Best, Grant

Gods under scrutiny

They shape the way we think about the world. They decide who may have our ear and who may not. The editors at The New Yorker are as Gods. We may not know them, we may only know their work.

Along comes Ms. Milkman, a student in the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering at Princeton. Milkman had the bright idea of examining 442 stories printed in The New Yorker from Oct. 5, 1992, to Sept. 17, 2001. The NYT, closing ranks, is not impressed: “The study was long on statistics and short on epiphanies.”

Not so fast.

According to Ms. Milkman, the number of male authors rose to 70 percent under Mr. Buford, compared with 57 percent under Mr. McGrath. … The study also found that the first-person voice rose mightily under Mr. Buford, which may reflect the growth of memoir in the 90's more than anything else. … Mr. Buford was relatively more interested in sex, a topic in 47 percent of the stories he published as opposed to 35 percent under Mr. McGrath. Mr. McGrath's authors tended to deal with … children, more frequently than Mr. Buford's writers: 36 percent under Mr. McGrath, 26 percent under Mr. Buford. (History, homosexuality and politics all tied for the attentions of Mr. Buford at a lowly 4 percent.)

I knew Mr. Buford at Cambridge. We spent many Sunday afternoons playing touch football on the backs of King’s College. (Transplanted to Oxbridge, some North Americans take to silk scarves and faux accents. The rest of us played football.)

Milkman’s portrait sounds like the man I know. He is, in the old fashioned phrase, a “man’s man.” He is a writer of the old school, a person prepared to put himself in harm’s way for the sake of the story. No, I don’t mean touch football. Buford is the author of Among The Thugs, a first-person, thoroughly anthropological study of the English soccer hooligan. He posed as a hooligan, traveled as a hooligan, rioted as a hooligan and only just survived to tell the tale. Talk about harm’s way.

But Ms. Milkman’s portrait does not become him. There is a complexity, an imagination, a fineness, and a recklessly conceptual quality she does not capture. Her numbers “dumb him down.” In this blog, we have once or twice wondered whether the numerical study of culture and commerce might not help us capture the new complexity of the world. But Milkman tells us less, not more. A single interview with Buford (and McGrath) would have done better than the database.

I think the real story here is two fold. First, that Milkman dared to presume to study this elite, and, second, that she found a way in that did not depend on their participation (though it sounds as if she got it).

Among the Editors. Very well done, Ms. Milkman, but, next time, pose as a writer.

Buford, Bill. 1991. Among the Thugs. London: Secker and Warburg.

Carr, David. 2004. New Yorker Fiction, by the Numbers. New York Times. June 1, 2004. Available here.

You deserve a break today

This blog has been too earnest lately. Readers have been unreasonably patient as I grind out essay after essay.

Here's a video called Ocean Avenue by Yellow Card.

It's a pop song. The lyrics are banal (as usual), but the video manages to use the theme from Groundhog Day to good effect. Plus, the drummer knows what he's doing and the rhythm line is postpunk perfection. (Be sure to "supersize" your window and the base line.)

Larger significance? None apparent at time of post.

Dr. O’Neill, may I present Dr. Boudreaux?

In Santa Fe recently, Don Boudreaux was speaking extemporaneously. At one point, he paused, looked down, touched the table before him deliberately, and said something like, “I don’t presume to know what’s best for other people [on this topic] or that I could possibly ever know such a thing.”

It was a simple, matter of fact, acknowledgment of the limits of his moral authority and it struck me like a thunder bolt. It seemed to me to reveal an essential difference between two camps of social scientist: those who believe they know the moral order of things, and those who are prepared to defer to the arrangements the world works out on its own.

When I listen to many social scientists these days, they are plumping for their preferred order of things. They take this to be the point, the very obligation, of their scholarship. It is this presumption of moral authority that has shifted their teaching in the liberal arts from a dispassionate engagement to a partisan one, provoking, in the process, the “culture wars” of the 1990s and the present day.

I was reminded of my Boudreauxvian illumination yesterday when I came upon a review of The Market: Ethics, Knowledge and Politics (Economics as Social Theory), a book by John O’Neill. (I have not yet seen the book itself, and you will forgive me, I hope, if I rely upon the review.)

Apparently, O’Neill laments “the rejection of the Enlightenment project of a rationally ordered social life.” In the words of the anonymous reviewer:

O’Neill presents the market as having encroached too far upon non-market associations: … [T]he market corrodes conditions of human well-being, the commitments of personal relationships, social bonds and loyalties, social identity and the narrative order of human life, the norms of recognition that are vital to the internal order of the sciences, arts and crafts, skills and social esteem; and the public nature of the sciences and arts. … At the very least, markets need boundaries, ‘so that non-market associations and relations can flourish.’

The debate is joined. Dr. O’Neill believes that the moral order of world comes from non-market associations and an Enlightenment project in which men and women decide what their world shall be. It comes from ideas thought. Dr. Boudreaux, if I may speak for him, believes that the world emerges from the activities of many diverse groups and individuals as these activities emerge to shape the world. In this case, the order of the world comes from choices made. In O’Neill’s view, the market place is an enemy of moral order. For Boudreaux, it is order’s source.

Many social scientists treat Boudreaux’s position as an abandonment of responsibility and a willingness to “damn the consequences and let the market rip.” But what you could hear in Boudreaux’s remarks was not an eager abdication of responsibility, but a sober, scrupulous willingness to accept the world’s choice over the intellectual’s idea. For Boudreaux, I think, the world is, in a sense, imponderable. It is driven by an evermore active marketplace which in turn drives new social, cultural, and economic forms. The result is almost impossible to think. It is increasingly impossible to judge. To use the phrase ironically, the world is too much with us.

The debate is clear. O’Neill holds to the old mission of the intellectual. Powers of scrutiny and rights of judgment, these, he says, remain with us. From this perspective, Boudreaux and his like are barbarians who accept that, now to use the phrase ironically, “what ever is is right.” Scholar to the barricades! O’Neill takes up the defense of “non market associations.” He shouts the market back.

O’Neill does not see what was clear to the great American anthropologist, Marshall Sahlins in the 1970s. “[W]e have a kind of empirical society which precipitates organization out of the play of real forces. Ours too may be a culture, but its form is constructed from events, as the system gives people license to put their means to the best advantage and certifies the result as a genuine society.”

He does not see what was clear to Hayek in the 1940s, that “through the market [we are] made to contribute ‘to ends which [are] no part of [our] purpose.’”

What O’Neill does not see is that his intellectual mission has been displaced by the sheer force of the culture that capitalism creates. But I wonder if other intellectuals do. Sometimes, I think I hear, in the work of Frank and Klein, a burst of bad temper that the world should have dared displace them. Their traditional hostility for the marketplace has been redoubled by the inkling that “idea elites” are outstripped not just politically but intellectually. They glimpse, I think, the mortal wound dynamism has inflicted on their self appointed place of usefulness, and the result is outrage. (My favorite text here is Carey).

In such a world, things change for “idea elites.” It is not for them to say, because it is increasingly difficult for them to see. Their moment has passed. Like it or not, our culture will come from “the play of real forces.” It will produce “ends which are no part of our purpose.” O’Neill believes, evidently, that the moral game is still in play. Boudreaux demonstrates that it is time for the intellectual to take a position of new modesty, of new integrity.

A question remains. Is the world imponderable? Is the world impossible to think? (I accept that it is impossible to judge; that we are, to use the phrase ironically, obliged to “let a hundred flowers bloom.”) Where does order come from, if not idea? If it comes from choice, how do choices “add up” and order emerge?

In a pluralistic intellectual world, we will have many points of view. For my own purposes, I think we can see things anthropologically and posit: 1) a new multiplicity of cultural forms (plenitude), 2) a new presumption of the right of individuals and groups to reinvent themselves (transformation), 3) a new loose boundedness of individual and group that makes them newly responsive to plenitude on the one hand and transformation on the other. (My favorite text here is Postrel.) Or, we might put this in the language of complexity theory, and observe a culture that has become ever more like a Complex Adaptive System, prizing “heterogeneity,” “diversity,” “a network of interactions” and “non linearity.” (My favorite text here is Clippinger.)

In a pluralistic world, there will be many more and better ways to think about dynamism. But the first order of business is to leave off the favorite inclination of the old order intellectual: to mistake provincialism for integrity. The new position is the Boudreauxvian one. Let us all pause, look down, touch the table before us deliberately, and repeat after him: “I don’t presume to know what’s best for other people or that I could possibly ever know such a thing.”

References

Anon. n.d. Review of The Market. (lightly edited.) Available here.

Boudreaux, Donald. Café Hayek. A blog to found here.

Carey, John. 1992. The Intellectuals and the Masses: pride and prejudice among the literary intelligentsia, 1880-1939. London: Faber and Faber.

Clippinger, John Henry. 1999. The biology of business: Decoding the natural laws of enterprise. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Hayek, Friedrich A. 1948. Individualism and Economic Order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 13-14.

McCracken, Grant. 1997. Plenitude. Toronto: Periph: Fluide. (available on this website for downloading.)

2001. Transformation. Toronto: Periph. :Fluide. (available on this website for downloading.)

2004. Our New Porousness. Entry on this blog. May 24, 2004.

O’Neill, John. 1998. The Market: Ethics, Knowledge and Politics. (Economics as Social Theory). London: Routledge.

Postrel, Virginia. 1998. The Future and Its Enemies: The growing conflict over creativity, enterprise and progress. New York: The Free Press.

Sahlins, Marshall David. 1976. Culture and Practical Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 52.

Stark, David. 1999. Heterarchy: Distributing intelligence and organizing diversity. In The biology of business: decoding the natural laws of enterprise. editor John Clippinger, 155-79. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

With nods to Wordsworth, Pope, and Mao.

A frictionless economy? How taking friction out puts more friction in

I take a frictionless economy to be a place in which transaction costs, channel constraints, information uncertainties, and production inefficiencies are reduced as much as possible. (With apologies to my economics readers. I will be sure to get some of these details wrong, but bear with me.)

So Amazon makes for a frictionless economy to the extent that it removes costs incurred getting books into bookstores and out again. If there were ever a channel more inefficient than book distribution, it would be hard to imagine. With hundreds of thousands of titles in print, the chances are good that our local book store won’t have the book we want and will have books we don’t. The result is lost sales on the one hand, remainder copies, on the other. In that miraculous moment when we do find the book we want, we pay a price inflated to cover the inefficiencies of the system. Enter Amazon: all books all the time, with disintermediated delivery direct to our door.

But there are two problems that will make the friction worse. First, consumer taste and preference is fragmenting. This makes matching production against consumption more difficult. The simplicities of mass production have disappeared. Second, consumer taste and preference is changing more quickly. This means that the producer has a smaller “window” in the marketplace. Arrive too early and the offering is merely strange. Arrive too late and it is simply dull. In sum, the producer must now make more product offerings and “drop” them into the market with newly astute timing.

It turns out, the marketplace has succeeded pretty well in responding to the first problem. It now produces a profusion of products. This is the work of many, smaller players playing the niche, and the discovery that “economies of scale” are possible even for an assembly line producing variations on a theme. “Mass” manufacture now produces microvariation without much difficulty. (See Baldwin and Clark, and Kostelanetz, below.)

But it is not so good at the second. Even with better marketing intelligence from the likes of McKinsey, Roper, Faith Popcorn and the cool hunters, the failure rate is still astonishing. Very large and wealthy corporations continue to make things we don’t want and to fail to make things we do. At this writing, the Gap, with the help of Sarah Jessica Parker, is undertaking a new move to more fashionable clothing. We will see if they get this right. Their last attempt to do so ended very badly. (See Gladwell, and Postrel below.)

This is a necessary problem. Producer dynamism will never catch consumer dynamism because the more it responds, the more it creates. Consumers live in an information, stimulus, opportunity rich environment. The more choice we give them, the more difference they will cultivate. Taste and preference now runs like a wave the producer cannot catch because it’s best efforts drive the wave beyond its grasp. In sum, now to return to the economist’s turn of phrase, capitalism creates its own friction. However much friction it removes from production, the more friction in creates in the market to which it must respond.

I have no idea how economists think about this problem, but I do know that it makes for an interesting problem for anthropology and the anthropologist. It means that there is a steady pressure for differentiation going on in a culture that is already almost impossibly rich in differentiation. Change that used to come from the outside now comes from within. Capitalism was once a grumpy, clueless aunt, prepared to change only when this change was forced upon it. Now it is one of the chief agents of that change. The fact that it will never catch it up does not mean that it will not get a great deal faster. By taking friction out, it will help put friction in.

It’s a thrilling prospect and one that makes the head spin. When we get this “friction” out, when corporations detect and respond to shift in consumer taste and preference in something closer to real time, what will our culture look like? How will anyone, economists, anthropologists, corporations, keep up? What happens when social life and the marketplace changes before our eyes? Life will become a blur. On second thought, I guess it’s that already.

References

Baldwin, Carliss Y, and Kim B Clark. 2000. Design rules the power of modularity. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Gladwell, Malcolm. 1997. The Coolhunt. The New Yorker. March 17, 1997: 78-88.

Kostelanetz, Richard. 1968. Beyond left & right: Radical thought for our times. New York: Morrow.

Postrel, Virginia I. 2003. The substance of style: how the rise of aesthetic value is remaking commerce, culture, and consciousness. New York: HarperCollins.

Armageddon in your in-basket

Every morning I turn on my computer, and start up Outlook. My emails come ambling in, one by one, a burlesque parade ground, soldiers presenting themselves for inspection.

I watch them with the usual combination of anticipation and unhappiness. (Oh, there’s someone I was hoping to hear from. Oh, not him again.)

Naturally, there is lot’s of spam. I have grown fond of some of this. I like, but of course no longer read, the ones from Ph.D.s in Africa inviting me to help liberate a vast fortune held in escrow. I like, but no longer read, the ones that come with imaginative subject headings. “Solipsism” by Burgos sounds promising and turns out to be a filter for cable TV. (Naturally, if I were a solipsist, I wouldn’t want to filter my TV. I would embrace every channel as an expression of my endless creativity. Yes, even Ronco’s Ron Popeil. And wouldn’t he take an amazing imagination?)

The emails that really give me pause are, naturally, the viruses intercepted by Norton. Norton makes a great, irritating, show of its usefulness by halting the parade and insisting that I “sign off” on the offending email. But I am grateful for this “inspection of the troops.” Plainly, the parade ground has one or two anarchists and I am happy to have them rooted out.

This morning I fell to thinking about what the parade ground is going to look like in 30 years.

As we know, China and India represent something like 2.4 billion people. Many of these people do not participate in a sophisticated educational system.

For instance, half the women of the Northwestern provinces of China are illiterate.

And in the case of India:

About one third of all Indian children are out of school. In the large north Indian states, which account for over 40 per cent of the country’s population, the proportion of out-of-school children in the 6-14 age group is as high as 41 per cent, rising to 54 per cent among female children.

This is a tragic waste. This is hundreds of millions of people. With education enfranchisement, many thousands of them would rise to academic, industrial and cultural greatness. Or, to put this more concretely, trapped in that mass of humanity are literally thousands of would-be Nobel prize winners, scientists, and entrepreneurs.

The good news is that India and China are developing at a furious pace. Some of their new wealth will be invested in education and eventually some of that talent will come “on-line.” Indeed, once India and China are fully up to speed, the West will no longer be fretting about “outsourcing.” We will be grateful for our narrowing share of insourcing.

Back to my in-basket. What happens when education participation equips hundreds of thousands of people with the ability to produce viruses? (Let’s be clear: this is not a xenophobic insinuation that China and India will produce an unusually high number of virus generators. Merely, their own share. To rework Freud’s famous title, I am assuming only that all cultures are equally responsive to the problem of “education and its discontents.”

It would be interesting to “run the numbers” here. We would need to calculate: the number of people who will have full educational participation, drilling down to those smart enough to get a higher education, to those who take up programming of some, even rudimentary, kind, and finally to those inclined to use this knowledge for malevolent, virus generating purposes.

It’s a lot of people, people. By my calculations, in the year 2034, it will take me roughly 7 hours every day to empty my in-basket, and I will be struck by a virus every 14 minutes and by a Norton-avoiding virus every 23 days.

Happy thoughts for a Friday.

References

Anon. n.d. Capacity building for Rural Women’s participation in sustainable development in five provinces in Northwest China.
http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/china/policy/acca21/211-6.html

Drèze, Jean and Geeta Gandhi Kingdon. 1999. School Participation in Rural India. Centre for Development Economics (Delhi School of Economics) & Institute for Economics and Statistics (University of Oxford). This Draft: August 1999. http://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/dps/de/dedps18.pdf

Unlawful assembly

Madonna is famous for her transformational inclinations.

Madonna has demonstrated a gift for playing the currents of the diffusion stream and she is routinely cited as the defining token of a transformational culture. (Salon.com calls her “pop’s most irresistible changeling.”) She picks up a new fashion just as it is hitting the “radar” of her fans, and she abandons it as it is about to go “mass” and lose its currency.

To give Madonna her due, it is exceedingly difficult to play the diffusion wave as well as she does. Thousands of artists try each year, and only a relatively few succeed. And no one has succeeded as well as Madonna over the two decades of a career. (McCracken, below)

But in her new tour, which kicked off Monday in California, Madonna breaks two rules of the transformational game.

The first rule is that artists (and the rest of us) should DO transformation, not talk about it. Madonna chooses to call her new show “Reinvention.” This is unnecessary (Sanneh of the New York Times compared it to John Kerry calling his cross-country tour “lots of speeches”)> It is also unwise: a little like Robin Williams opening an improv with “and now I am going to become a bewildering succession of people in quick succession. Watch!")

No, no, no. The interest of live performances of transformation is that they come at us in the real time of the real world. This is what we admire about our transformational exemplars. (In the language of linguistics: we want the direct comparison of metaphor, not the proposed comparison of simile.)

The second rule is that the transformer is supposed to keep moving. Madonna is repeating herself. As Sanneh puts it, the new show finds her “shadowboxing with her own past lives.” Apparently, Madonna has retired from the diffusion stream. Now she is reprising not popular culture, but herself. “There were times when Madonna seemed somehow oppressed by the weight of all her old selves, times when it seemed that she just wanted to wipe the slate clean and start over.” says Sanneh. Indeed, this is what she used to do and this is what we want our transformers to do. Keep moving.

Maybe she’s tired. Living in a transformational society, remaking ourselves with such frequency, there is an unmistakable wear-out factor. Staying ahead of the diffusion curve in a dynamic society, as Madonna does, or did, must be even more difficult.

Or maybe she is dropping out of the transformational game altogether. She appears to have taken to a gentrified life in England with some enthusiasm. (Though surely that new English accent is one her very worst impersonations. Get a voice coach!) New religious enthusiasms also appear to have won her heart. Perhaps the two together, not too mention motherhood and all that wealth, make it more difficult for a girl to follow, or to care about, the diffusion curve.

Poor Madonna. Her concerts were staging areas for the next restless self. They sprinted out ahead of contemporary culture, sending back new intelligence. Now they are more like a high school reunion, with all the old Madonnas turning up, unbidden, unwelcome, and more often than not, uninteresting. Somewhere in the life of this changeling, the transformation stopped. As Sanneh, says, “Having created all those old selves, she can’t now disown them, she can only play with them.”

McCracken, Grant 2001 Transformation. Toronto: Periphe: Fluide. (available for download on this site)

Sanneh, Kelefa. 2004. Madonna’s Latest Self, a Mix of Her Old Ones. New York Times. May 26, 2004. Available here.

Saroyan, Strawberry and Michelle Goldberg. 2000. What’s up with Madonna? Salon Magazine. October 10, 2000. Available here.

Thanks to Jim Carfrae for the head’s up on this one.

Surveillance Camera Theatre

Thanks to Evolution Will Be Blogged, I now know there is such a thing as Surveillance Camera Players.

What a clever idea. I like the idea of strolling through my city and coming upon a troop as they gamely see how much drama they can pack into the grainy lens and black and white photography of a security camera.

With a little ingenuity, it should be possible to jack into the feed and send the image to the internet.

With email alerts, we could gather round our browsers and enjoy wild, street corner, pantomime.

We might even wager what, if any, theatrical theme is intended. ("It's about folk dancing in Romania!" "No, no, no, a tribute to Ty Cobb, surely.")

Naturally there would be advertising, and this too would be interesting. How do you sing the praises of AT&T; or Tide when all you have is a bad camera and a talentless band of thespians? Marketing, surely this is buzz worthy. Reinvent thyself.

But EWBB tells us that Surveillance Camera Theatre has been commandeered for the usual, dreary, political purposes. (Plainly they have found the medium they deserve.)

Here’s the sign that gets posted when the New York players perform. There is nothing quite as entertaining as a manifesto, is there?

More details here.

Evon Z. Vogt, Jr. 1918-2004

This month, the world lost two anthropologists: William H. Hinton and Evon Z. Vogt. Both will be mourned but there is an odd asymmetry in their influence on anthropology and the world.

Hinton was the author of a book called Fanshen: A documentary of revolution in a Chinese village. Those of you who went to college in the 1960s will remember this book as required reading in the liberal arts. Fanshen, published first in 1966, is still in print. It was reissued in 1997.

Vogt was the author of a book called Homesteaders: the life of a twentieth century frontier community. This wonderful little book, published in 1955, is not in print. Indeed, I have been able to find only a single used copy on line.

Vogt was a specialist in the study of the indigenous people of southern Mexico and Guatemala and I don’t know the circumstances that prompted him to study a little town in Texas (popular 374), except it must somehow have been connected to his work for the Comparative Study of Values at Harvard’s Laboratory of Social Relations. (Vogt taught at Harvard for 32 years.)

But the results were spectacular.

Vogt’s book gives us a chance to see the operation of the frontier impulse described here by Frederick Jackson Turner:

...each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier.

Or to put this in the rather more modernist language of a homesteader, as recorded by Vogt:

Why, I’d say we live in the future. We’re always looking forward to the future. Once in a while some of us gets together uptown and talks about the past, but everybody is for the future. What’s done past, I don’t care a thing about that. (p. 93)

Vogt says that while Homesteaders were very hard workers, they were also deeply committed to a practice called “loafing.” Men loafed more than women, and they did so at local stores where whittling, chewing tobacco, and “tall stories” were the order of the day. This proved a test for the investigator and produced what might be the funniest line of the book.

To an urban observer the time spent in these loafing groups seems almost endless. The writer has many times attempted to sit through one of these loafing bull sessions, but found it almost impossible to do so. (p. 115).

I can’t help wondering what would happened if the required reading of the 1960s was Vogt’s exquisite little study of one aspect of the American condition, instead of a worthy but in some ways merely fashionable study of a small village in China. We must also ask why this little book is not in print, even as Fanshen continues to flourish. Is it any surprise that, for anthropological purposes, we are more knowledgeable about Chinese villagers than ourselves?

References:

Hinton, William. 1997. Fanshen: A documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. 1920/1976. The Frontier in American History. Huntington, New York: Robert E. Krieger Publishing, p. 38.

Vogt, Evon Zartman. 1955. Modern homesteaders: the life of a twentieth century frontier community. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Paul Seabright buys a shirt

Most anthropologists are pretty bad at explaining how culture and the economy work together to fashion our world in an emergent way (see my post for May 6 for a statement of the problem).

In his remarkable new book, The Company of Strangers, Paul Seabright, an economist, goes squarely at the issue.

He begins by describing his new shirt.

The cotton was grown in India, from seeds developed in the United States; the artificial fiber in the thread count comes from Portugal and the material in the dyes from at least six other countries; the collar linings come from Brazil, and the machinery for weaving, cutting, and sewing from Germany; the shirt itself was made up in Malaysia. (p. 13)

This sounds a little like Tyler Cowen’s treatment of a global economy, but Seabright has another purpose in mind.

What, he asks, if shirt production had to be planned?

One can imagine an incoming president of the United States being presented with a report entitled The World’s Need for Shirts, trembling at its contents, and immediately setting up a Presidential Task Force. The United Nations would hold conferences on ways to enhance international cooperation in shirt-making, and there would be arguments over whether the UN or the U.S. should take the lead. The pope and the archbishop of Canterbury would issue calls for everyone to pull together to endure that the world’s needs were met, and committees of bishops and pop stars would periodically remind us that s shirt on one’s back is a human right. … Experts would be commissioned to examine the wisdom of making collars in Brazil for shirts made in Malaysia for re-export to Brazil. More experts would suggest that by cutting back on the wasteful variety of frivolous styles it would be possible to make dramatic improvements in the total number of shirts produced. (14)

But of course new shirts don’t come from planning. As Seabright says,

The entire enterprise of supply shirts in thousands and thousands of styles to millions and millions of people takes place without any overall coordination at all. (14)

We forget how miraculous are the emergent properties of this enterprise.

Citizens of the industrialized market economies have lost their sense of wonder at the fact that they can decide spontaneously to go out in search of food, clothing, furniture and thousands of other useful, attractive, frivolous or life-saving items and when they do so, somebody will have anticipated their actions and thoughtfully made such items available for them to buy. (15)

And this is the point of this remarkable book. This is to show:

how even some of the simplest activities of modern society depend upon intricate webs of international cooperation that function without anyone’s being in overall charge. … It seems hard to believe that something as complex as a modern industrial society could possibly work at all without an overall guiding intelligence, but since the work of the economist Adam Smith in the eighteenth century, we have come to realize that this is exactly how things are. (4)

What particularly interests Seabright is that this miracle of coordination is now being performed by “the same shy, murderous ape that had avoided strangers throughout its evolutionary history” and now somehow proves capable of “living, working and moving among complete strangers in their millions.” That is to say, us.

The question is a good one: "how the hell does this happen?" How does impossibly complicated order emerge from various, uncoordinated, unplanned projects. Complexity theory is one answer to this question. Seabright has another.

This book is highly recommended.

Reference

Cowen, Tyler. 2002. Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World's Cultures. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Seabright, Paul. 2004. The Company of Strangers: A natural history of economic life. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Our new porousness and "latent inhibition" diminishment

“Cultural porousness” is one of the intellectual challenges that faces the anthropologist who wants to understand contemporary life.

Selves, groups, institutions, nations, cultures are all now more porous and less bounded than they used to be. Once like silos, they are now more like bird cages: positively breezy in their willingness to admit influences from outside.

To take one example, US culture, once a drab and faithful descendant of English cuisine, now admits the influence of virtually every other cuisine (as Tyler Cowen, our economist on the spot, testifies each week). To take another, we see once sober sided members of the middle class now opening themselves to new influences and definitions, as David Brooks pointed out in Bobos in Paradise. To take a third, Tom Peters is a long time champion of the idea that corporations must make themselves newly open to outside influence. To take a fourth (the last, I promise), let us quote Lamont:

In a loosely bounded culture such as American culture, one finds a high level of cultural innovation in lifestyles and in norms for interpersonal relations, and a high degree of tolerance for deviance. (All references below.)

Harvard Magazine, this month, has an interesting article by Craig Lambert that bears on this theme. New research says that some people may owe their creativity to diminished “latent inhibition,” a cognitive mechanism that works to screen out irrelevant stimuli.

Latent inhibition helps most people to filter out random inputs. But creative people are inclined to let things in. In the words of Harvard psychologist Shelly Carson, creative people admit “bits and pieces” which they may then combine in “novel, interesting ways.” In short, we may think of porousness as one of the conditions of their creativity.

Reading Lambert’s piece, I began to wonder if it might not give us a useful way to think about contemporary culture. Perhaps things might be a little clearer if we supposed that our culture suffers a diminished latent inhibition of its own.

Many cultures captured by the ethnographic record are pretty good at latent inhibition. They regard as ill-formed (or “noise”) anything that is not fashioned according to the cultural code in place. This impulse is sometimes the very well spring of xenophobia and the deep suspicion that things that are “different” must be dangerous. In the words of Mary Douglas, these cultures see external influences as “unclear” and so “unclean.” In reaction, they will mobilize extraordinary efforts (and intensity) to bar “difference” and, when necessary, to root it out. (Some part of the enduring crisis of the Islamic world might be put down to an attempt to refuse foreign influences that cannot be refused. The French treatment of 16th century Huguenots and the Nazi treatment of German Jews in the 1930s and 1940s are sometimes seen in these Douglasian terms.)

First-world cultures enjoy a relative confidence that difference is “ok,” that we may admit foreign influences from abroad, and novelty from within, with impunity (not impurity). The confidence had deep roots in the Western tradition but there are moments when confidence falters. Early reviews of Samuel Huntington’s new book, Who are We?, suggest that a man once confident in the Western capacity for assimilation is now wondering whether we shouldn't raise the draw bridge. The Western feeling for porousness is marked by moments of doubt and repudiation.

But now there are grounds to ask whether what the West once endured, with moments of ambivalence, it must now require. Our culture and our economy now appear to be predicated on the constant flow of “difference” both from without and within. In the words of Thomas Stewart, “intellectual capital” is the new wealth of organizations. More to the present point, it is the necessary wealth of organizations. Without a constant stream of new ideas and innovations the organization withers and dies. To put this more apocalyptically, it is as if we are as a culture and an economy, now hydroplaning. As long as we continue hydroplaning, we’re fine. It’s the moment of touchdown we do not want to think about.

This would allow us to add a second supposition. Not only are we inclined to “practice” diminished latent inhibition but we are called upon to do so. Without this characteristic approach to porousness, we cannot hope to summon the creativity on which our world depends.

But is diminished latent inhibition a useful idea with which to understand our culture? Could this idea make us make more sense?

Certainly, it would help explain why we advance a new category of white collar worker, the group Richard Florida calls the “creative class.” We prize these people, perhaps, because they suffer from diminished latent inhibition and are to this extent peculiarly useful in a culture of the same character. We prize them. that is to say, because they have an internal condition that replicates, and helps fund, our external condition.

But we could use the idea less mechanically. If we were to understand diminished latent inhibition as one of our essential conditions as a culture, we might be in a position to calm the fears of those who treat our porousness as the occasion of a fundamentalist anxiety, as this manifests itself on high in the work of a distinguished scholar and en bas in the eruption of political and religious conservativism.

But these are merely the most particular and general opportunities for application. A more thoroughgoing attempt is called for. And here we must ask what precisely are the characteristics of diminished latent inhibition in the creative individual and may we may use these characteristics as a model with which to understand the dynamics of our culture and economy? Lambert’s essay, at several hundred words, does not give us quite enough detail to try this here. (Besides, might I be allowed to point out that this is a blog entry, not a dissertation!)

There are reasons, of course, to think that the exercise is wrong-headed. Projecting the psychological on to the cultural has been undertaken before by the likes of Ruth Benedict and Christopher Lasch. And in Lasch’s case the results were disappointing and reductive. On the other hand, we have embarked on an ethnographic experiment for which there is no comforting precedent. It is perhaps unwise to refuse any gift horse that comes our way. We are almost certain to experience touch down one of these days and wouldn’t it be nice to have a little more preparation?

References

Benedict, Ruth. 1934. Patterns of culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Brooks, David. 2000. Bobos in paradise: The new upper class and how they got there. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Cowen, Tyler. n.d. My thoughts on food

Cowen, Tyler. n.d. Ethnic Dining Guide

Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Florida, Richard. 2002. The Rise of the Creative Class and how it’s transforming work, leisure, community and everyday life. New York: Basic Books.

Huntington, Samuel P. 2004. Who are we? American national identity and the challenges it faces. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Lambert, Craig. 2004. Ideas Rain In. Harvard Magazine. May-June, pp. 13-16. available on-line here

Lamont, Michele. 1992. Money, Morals and Manners: the culture of the French and the American upper-middle class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 115.

Lasch, Christopher. 1978. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expections. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.

McCracken, Grant. Transformation. Toronto: Periphe: Fluide. (available for download on this site).

Peters, Tom and Robert H. Waterman, Jr. 1982. In Search of Excellence. New York: Vintage, p. 201.

Stewart, Thomas A. 1997. Intellectual capital the new wealth of organizations. New York: Doubleday / Currency.

Transformation watch: new sightings

This site features a book called Transformation which is dedicated to the idea that most of us are now surprisingly transformational, that we cultivate a portfolio of selves, that we inhabit many selves, that we add and change selves often.

I thought it might be appropriate to note new ethnographic data as and when these turns up.

Two recent sightings:

Sarah Jones as just about everybody

Sarah Jones is staging a one-woman show at 45 Bleecker in New York City. This is an imaginary multicultural open-mike poetry at an fictional Bridge and Tunnel café in South Queens.

According to the Wall Street Journal:

“In rapid success, Jones becomes an anxiously ingratiating Pakistani emcee, a grumpy Jewish grandmother from Long Island, a Vietnamese slam poet, a pretentious Jamaican performance artist and that's just for starters."

Some of the appeal of a performer like Jones is that she moves so effortlessly from person to person. We admire this virtuosity, I believe, because we now practice it in our lives. In other words, we go to see acts like this for the same reason amateur golfers turn out for PGA events. They have just enough in common with this activity to “get” and revere the abilities of a Tiger Woods. (The rest of us are inclined to think, “Great, hitting a ball with a stick.”)

Subcultures and culture

This just in!

Leora Kornfeld tells me that a friend of hers just returned from a Lesbian festival in Oregon called Lesbopalooza where some women were seen to be sporting beards, real or drawn on.

This is not the sort of thing that will make for performance art on Bleecker street but it is the sort of furious self invention that routinely takes place on the far margin of our culture. Much of our transformation activity consists in borrowing of some kind, as one group seeks new expressive possibilities by helping itself to the signs and symbols that define another group.

(As an anthropologists, I must say I am puzzled. I never understand why radical groups raid the wardrobes, in this case the physical characteristics, of the enemy. Of course it doesn’t matter what I think, and we make take my observation as a declaration of the limits of my ethnographic mastery.)

Clearly, this is not the sort of invention that will move to the center of our culture. But it is not quite as peculiar as we might, at first blush, imagine. If we all engage in transformation, it is because we all engage in a lively trade of cultural signs and symbols. We are, to borrow the title of the wonderful book by Alan Wolfe, one nation after all.

References

Teachout, Terry. 2004. One for the Show. Wall Street Journal. May 21, 2004, p. 11.

Wolfe, Alan. 1998. One Nation, After All. New York: Viking.