The utility of synonyms is revealed

Wasn't there a Love Boat episode about this?

Creative Destruction - Atari Style

For any not familiar, the phrase "creative destruction" is most often used in reference to its economic implications:

A term coined by Joseph Schumpeter in his work entitled "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy" (1942) to denote a "process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one."

Recessions are a form of creative destruction as companies that were surviving in stronger economic times are pushed over the brink, and new firms spring up to begin the cycle of wealth creation and improved productivity anew.

In that spirit, I think the following classified ad from Craigslist serves as a glimmer of light piercing through the dark night of our current economic times and foreshadowing a brighter future for us all:

In response to the economic downturn, I am offering personal Tetris training sessions on a limited, first-come first-serve basis. I am a patient and non-judgmental coach.

[snip]

Intermediate Tetris [includes]:

• This training program is slightly longer in duration, and incorporates all of the modules covered in Tetris Fundamentals but also includes beer, wine or liquor. You will challenge yourself by applying the skills you’ve learned while growing increasingly intoxicated and playing against someone who is similarly drunk.
• There may be a short primer on computational geometry and algorithmic complexity theory, unless we run out of time.

The kid has got some pipes

Cat plays it cool

The Dingo stole my Avatar

From Rough Type back in 2006. Presumably Second Life has *solved* this problem to a degree by now, but as with the music industry, as more and more of the things we value in life become digital rather than physical objects, this type of problem will continue, with larger and larger economic consequences:

The commercialization of Second Life has hit a speed bump. A new software program, called CopyBot, allows residents of the virtual world to make exact copies of other residents' creations. The knockoffs threaten the livelihoods of the many entrepreneurs, as well as big companies, that have set up shop selling clothes, trinkets, and other goods in the popular fairy land.

As an irate Caliandras Pendragon writes at Second Life Insider, "Those people who are living the dream that is promoted in every article, of earning a RL [real life] income from SL creations, are now living a nightmare in which their source of income may soon be worthless. That's not to speak of big commercial companies who have paid anything up to 1,000,000 dollars to have their product reproduced in loving detail, who will discover that every Tom, Dick or Harriet may rip off their creation for nothing - and then sell it as their own ... If someone wanted to destroy the economy of SL I don't think they could have found a better way."

The furor took an ugly turn late last night when, according to the Second Life Herald, a "seething mob" surrounded a CopyBot operation run by Second Life resident GeForce Go. The mob shouted that Go was "ruining their Second Life." Fearing for her safety, Go closed down her shop and sold her land. In a subsequent "tumultous meeting with dozens of angry and fearful residents all talking at once," Second Life official Robin Linden "sought to allay fears of any further concern about mass copyright violations."

And as some of my posts recently have noted, economic consequences lead to social ones, as in this update to the story:

But the arrival in Second Life of the CopyBot replicator hasn't just produced a commercial and a political crisis. It's brought an existential crisis as well. Because CopyBot can clone entire avatars as well as their possessions, people fear losing their virtual selves. Their sense of what I've termed "avatar anxiety" is deepening. Writes resident Harle Armistice in a comment on the official Second Life blog:

I’m sorry, but this isn’t just about sales ... I have a unique av that I made for myself. It’s me, it’s my work, it’s part of my persona. I’ve been wearing it for ages and I will be wearing it likely until the day SL either goes down or I can’t log in anymore. Or I would be, under normal circumstances ... I am terrified to wear my own content because there’s a script out there that any random user can run to steal my stuff if I do.

The Bloggess vs. One-Eyed Steve (note: not a pirate)

For any not familiar, The Bloggess is the alter-ego blog of a woman who writes an advice column for the Houston Chronicle. Not quite sure how she keeps her day job since her blog is extremely profane and nearly every post could be the source material for some form of public outrage.

However, it can also be extremely hysterical, as with this recent post where she torments a direct marketer trying to get her to promote his skin lotion on her blog site.

(Note that the big "info-mercial" style marketing pitch that Pete made for the lotion was a demo that shows it protecting you from rock-dissolving acid.)

March 16, 2009 - Dear Jenny,

how are you? Have you had a chance to try Skin MD Natural lotion I sent you? What do you think?

Sincerely, Pete

March 16, 2009- Pete, the lotion was great. My skin is smooth and not greasy and I loved that there was SPF in it as well. Sadly, my lawn maintenance team obviously did not follow the directions well because two of them ended up getting rocks lodged in their faces in spite of the powerful rock-busting lotion abilities. One lost an eye and threatened to sue me for disability and I insisted that he just didn’t apply the lotion correctly.

Then I generously (his lawsuit says “forcibly”) rubbed the lotion in his eyes and he started screaming “IT BURNS! IT BURNS!” Which, in retrospect, makes sense because if the lotion is stronger than acid (and the acid is stronger than rocks) it’s probably stronger than eyeballs too. Either way, it did not go well and I’m being forced to sell The Lawn Rangers (that’s the name of my lawn team) in order to pay for legal bills and for a new glass eye for One-Eyed Steve. Also, I’m being sued for calling him “One-Eyed Steve”. Apparently you can’t give someone a kick-ass pirate name without being sued for making fun of a disability. AMERICA!

Also, before I gave One-Eyed Steve the glass eye I rubbed that lotion all over it to protect his eye socket from the sun and he started screaming again. It was actually pretty funny because I was all “Oh, wait. That’s totally not going to work” but it was too late because he was already putting it in when I said it and he started screaming and they took him to the hospital. I was all “Oh my God, I am an idiot” but if you can’t laugh at yourself who can you laugh at, right?

~Jenny

PS. Seriously, your lotion is awesome and my hands are as smooth as an eyeball, which (take it from me) is pretty fucking smooth. Until you get lotion in it. Then all bets are off.

Naturally this sensibility extends to her commenters as well:

Comment of the day: How fascinating that you have to sell the Rough Riders because Pirate Steve or whatever his name is rubbed it in his eyes. They sent me their stupid lotion and I opened it just as my husband started to get a little lippy with me and you know how women can get when they’re nine months pregnant so I slathered him with that shit and poured acid on him and it didn’t work at all. The Skin MD people are not going to like my review.

And by “it didn’t work at all” I mean the lotion didn’t work at all. The acid totally worked. ~ pamela

Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste

Rod Dreher interviews with Matt Baglio whose journey into the world of contemporary exorcism is detailed in "The Rite," which has just been published.

You write in great detail about things your protagonist, Father Gary Thomas, saw in his training sessions with Father Carmine. Were you there to witness them? If so, what was that like for you?

I was able to see about 20 exorcisms, some of which Father Gary participated in. The thing that most surprised me was the relative normalcy of the people who had come to be prayed over. You could even have conversations with them. Of course once the exorcist began praying the Ritual then all that would change and the person would react, sometimes violently. Most of the cases I saw were of the milder sort where the person coughed, or just sat completely still. However I did see a few violent ones in which the person thrashed and their personality changed and they began speaking in a gruff and guttural voice that to me sounded very unnatural. In those instances I was really struck by the intense suffering that these people undergo.

[snip]

Many people today scoff at the idea of Satanic cults, but the exorcists you interviewed insist that they are a reality. Is the threat mostly real, or mostly imagined - and how, precisely, do cults threaten?

[snip]

The first thing to understand is that these groups can be very different as not everyone believes the same thing. Some consider the devil to be kind of a natural force that they see as being repressed by organized religion. Other groups apparently do believe in a personified devil, and they perform rituals, which are said to involve drugs, orgies and in extreme cases even human sacrifice. Another group could be classified as just young kids into the trappings of certain music and primarily looking for a way to rebel. In fact some experts feel that Satanism is more of a cultural phenomenon. Others, including exorcists, see Satanic cults as a real threat that can open a person up to demonic attack.

[snip]

Of course this doesn't mean that Satanic cults are harmless. In fact even skeptics point out the damage that these groups can cause to society because they preach a doctrine of hate and despair, and create narcissistic individuals who are incapable of feeling any kind of empathy for others. One police detective from Florence told me how hard it is for him to confront these groups because their members essentially take the shared values that we all have and flip them upside down. They take pleasure in lying and they celebrate death. He found it difficult to even talk to them because there was no common ground from which to start from.

Your exorcist contacts advise you, as mine - the late Father Mario Termini - did me, that people should absolutely stay away from the occult, even in its most apparently benign forms, because that is a gateway to the demonic. Yet occultism seems ever more present in popular culture. Does this concern you?

I think it is very troubling even just from the standpoint that it really reflects on how we have become a society of instant gratification. Nobody wants to struggle anymore, or accept the notion that there may be mystery, or things outside our control. I think there is also this notion that life should always be dramatic, and that we should be constantly pushing our senses to the limit or we're not really living. Seen in this context, for some people, just going to Church is pretty boring and so they go looking for answers elsewhere.

One of the things the course talked about was the concept that where faith decreases, superstition grows. And as more and more people turn away from traditional religions, other beliefs are rushing in to fill the void. What people don't realize is that there can be a consequence. Exorcists of course are adamant that this can lead to demonic attack. But even looking at this from a secular standpoint, you can have impressionable people becoming victims to "magicians" or "psychics" who defraud them out of thousands of dollars, destroying families and ruining people's lives.

Exorcists tend to have great concern, and even disdain, for contemporary priests and bishops who deny the reality of the demonic. In your opinion, how widespread is that denial in the ranks of the clergy, what are its roots, and what is its result? In my personal experience, once you've seen this sort of thing with your own eyes, it takes a superhuman act of will to deny the reality of malevolent spirits.

One of the first things I found fascinating at the course was this notion that some priests didn't believe in the devil. When I first met Father Gary he was quite candid about the fact that he'd never been taught anything about the devil or exorcism. He also told me of a few instances that had happened to him in Rome where he'd shared with some of the other priests he was living with that he was the exorcist and how some of them had dismissed him out of hand.

[snip]

The result was that many priests saw the devil as a metaphor for evil and didn't believe in things like demonic possession or exorcism, which is the biggest complaint that exorcists make. This meant that Christians who in some way felt their lives were being affected by evil spirits had to go outside the Church to get help. Interestingly, Father Gary told me that the newer generation of seminarians is more apt to believe in the reality of Satan.

This made me recall one of my previous posts on Grant McCracken and the significance of the loss of ritual within modern culture and life...

The original transformational power, once the property of gods, elders, and shamans, is now in civilian hands. Once collective, it is now individual, open to everyone. Once sacred, it is now profane. Once directed by the ceremonial calendar, it can now happen anywhere, anytime. Once strictly bound by tradition, it is now free, or at least freeform. When the power of transformation entered the profane world, it was exuberantly transformed. Once this culture learned to give itself "bodies of another kind," it did not cease until it was capable of endless range and variety.

The price, of course, was high. Driving ritual from the temple cost us dearly. The punishment was the loss of an enchanted world that submitted to, that resonated with human designs. The universe became a chilly alienated, dislocating place. Good thing everyone now had their own powers of self-invention. They were going to need them. [em: mine]

Which is to say that there was once a time when ritual had a truly transformative effect on ourselves and our world, and by that I don't just mean a ceremonial one. Anyone familiar with the intensity of the placebo effect is aware of the dramatic and measurable impacts that are possible from simply believing something to be true.

But while I don't believe in a disembodied intelligent evil (as Dreher and Baglio seem to), or to quote the inimitable Ulysses Everett McGill:

Well, there are all manner of lesser imps and demons, Pete, but the great Satan hisself is red and scaly with a bifurcated tail, and he carries a hay fork.

This is different than saying that I don't believe in evil itself, which is to say a darkness that is beyond seemingly rational comprehension or simplistic explanation.

From CNN:

Rosalio Reta sits at a table inside a Laredo Police Department interrogation room. A detective, sitting across the table, asks him how it all started.

Reta, in Spanish street slang, describes his initiation as an assassin, at the age of 13, for the Mexican Gulf Cartel, one of the country's two major drug gangs.

"I thought I was Superman. I loved doing it, killing that first person," Reta says on the videotape obtained by CNN. "They tried to take the gun away, but it was like taking candy from kid."

Rosalio Reta and his friend, Gabriel Cardona, were members of a three-person cell of American teenagers working as cartel hit men in the United States, according to prosecutors. The third was arrested by Mexican authorities and stabbed to death in prison there three days later.

[snip]

"One thing you wonder all the time: What made them this way?" Garcia told CNN. "They were just kids themselves, waiting around playing PlayStation or Xbox, waiting around for the order to be given."

[snip]

Prosecutor and investigators say Reta and Cardona were recruited into a group called "Los Zetas," a group made up of former members of the Mexican special military forces. They're considered ruthless in how they carry out attacks. "Los Zetas" liked what they saw in Cardona and Reta.

Both teenagers received six-month military-style training on a Mexican ranch. Investigators say Cardona and Reta were paid $500 a week each as a retainer, to sit and wait for the call to kill. Then they were paid up to $50,000 and 2 kilos of cocaine for carrying out a hit.

The teenagers lived in several safe houses around Laredo and drove around town in a $70,000 Mercedes-Benz.

As the teens became more immersed in the cartel lifestyle, their appearance changed. Cardona had eyeballs tattooed on his eyelids. Reta's face became covered in tattoo markings. And both sported tattoos of "Santa Muerte," the Grim Reaper-like pseudo-saint worshipped by drug traffickers.

[snip]

Just hours before they were arrested, federal authorities taped a phone conversation between them in which Cardona brags about killing 14-year-old Inez Villareal and his cousin, a Cardona rival.

Cardona laughs as he describes torturing the two boys and dumping their bodies in large metal drums filled with diesel fuel. He says he made "guiso," or stew, with their bodies.

As the call ends, Cardona says, "There are three left to kill, there are three left."

Rosalio Reta


Gabriel Cardona

Dreher would be tempted to look at these faces and pick up on the story of Santa Muerte and see the devil infiltrating their hearts. I'm not sure it is quite that simple. I doubt their "faith" in Santa Muerte can be considered a philosophy or belief in any coherent sense, but there is a reversal of ethics in such a life where the good becomes bad, and evil is celebrated. It's an ex post facto way of explaining to yourself why you are doing the things you are doing.

But once you accept that, anything is possible. To kill is to succeed, to gain power, to exalt oneself. To decline to do so in the context of their world would be to be weak, robbed of one's masculinity, powerless and defeated.

It is the story of Tolkein's ring, is it not? The allure of absolute power and the darkness that lurks one step beyond it. I won't call it the devil, but I don't know that I have a better explanation either.

Kid Koala rocks the house

Utopia, the new and improved rural flavor

Patrick Deneen writes on a speech Obama gave recently on the economic crisis at Georgetown:

And so, we are told, our current economic crisis is due to a few bad loans made by a few bad eggs who work on Wall Street. What is neglected in this explanation is a broader and deeper perspective: our current crisis is due to the fact that we have, as a civilization, refused to live within our means - and the means afforded us by the natural world - over roughly the past 50 years.

Mistaking a temporary glut of post-war wealth and resource plenty as a permanent condition, we are told by our leaders - indeed, we demand of them that they tell us - that we can continue to have it all, costless plenitude. Yet these past thirty-odd years of our “economy” have been one in which we have maintained our wealth simultaneously by transferring the accumulated national wealth abroad, importing oil and debt, while refusing to face the mounting costs of this exercise - including its costs in the form of a massive military presence that was the only real guarantor and bargaining chip on our bankrupt side of the bargain. Meanwhile we continue to dismantle those cultural institutions that once taught restraint and limits - many of them religious, since they are an offense, above all, to our sense of sexual entitlement - in an effort to achieve ever more perfect individual autonomy.

Meantime, the American citizenry - scratch that, consumerdom, or consumerdumb - has all the while been willing to trade away any actual political and civic liberty for the sake of a guarantee of two cars, a plywood and aluminum siding house in the burbs, a college education (a.k.a. four year binge) for their children, and 401Ks that grew at a healthy 10% a year, no matter how an economy that grew only 2-3% a year was producing such outsize stock market returns. Enjoying our returns in the various markets in which we participated - stocks, bonds, real estate - we didn’t ask too many questions, not even when the national savings rate dipped to -2% in the late 90s. Everything seemed to be going along just fine.

Yes, 9/11 was disturbing to everyone, but the President told us to go shopping, and we were good at that. We were really good at that.

Yesterday the President told us that we were going to have to become again a nation that worked - and my ears perked up - until he described precisely what he meant. By work, more of us are to become scientists and engineers. That is, more of us are to become the kinds of workers who make it possible for the rest of us not to work, to engage in the sort of work that lies at the heart of the modern project, namely of extracting from a recalcitrant nature its secrets so that we can enjoy the “relief of the human estate.”

More of us are to engage in that project that is being taken up readily by our Chinese and Indian competitors, to transform our world ever more into a useful commodity for our pleasure and enjoyment. Americans must cease trying to make easy money at the casinos of Wall Street and instead seek to extend the mastery and dominion of nature so that the rest of us will not have to work or think too hard about what makes living possible or even worthwhile. Fewer traders, more lab coats.

Above all, no jobs that actually demand work. Top scientists are working to eliminate any possible drudgery from our lives, especially the need to do things with our hands, make or repair our own stuff, understand for ourselves how the world works and how we can best live in it. [em: mine]

This kind of tripe is typical of threads running through some conservative blogs lately that center on 2 recurrent themes:

1) The sneering disgust (e.g. "consumerdumb") with how people choose to spend their time and money when given the freedom (both in the political and economic sense) to do so.
2) The belief that this world would be a much better place if we were all living in a global Little House on the Prairie remake where everyone worked with their hands or farmed to earn a livelihood.

The former impulse is a form of petulant name-calling since what Deneen is really objecting to is the failure of others to adopt (and thereby ratify) the philosophical choices he advocates. Deneen confidently projects the utter assurance that he *knows* what is best for everyone else, they are just too dumb to see it for themselves. Strange that he hasn't attracted more adherents to date.

The latter is a pastoral fantasy born startlingly frequently it would seem amongst the right-wing academic and political class. In other words, by people who are far more familiar with the philosophy of Wendell Berry and the mythology of small-town America than with what it means to actually hitch a plow to an animal and till the Earth.

I recall reading about Lyndon Johnson's advocacy of the Rural Electrification Act and how he wanted to do something for the "bended" people. What he meant was the people whose bodies were stooped and misshapen from lives of long hard farm work.

Get back to me when you've walked a mile in their shoes. Of course, Deneen would have to give up his endowed chair at Georgetown first. No time to xerox your syllabus when the hogs need to be slopped. I'll start holding my breath now.

Or, as Caleb Stegall put it:

You want to farm. Great, so farm. Start small. What you lack isn't knowledge, but skill. Go talk to some locals. I recommend the feed store as a near infinite source of local knowledge and wisdom (which, by the way, is exactly where the old timers told me what I'm telling you now). Financially, stay out of debt, don't buy stuff you don't need, and learn how to work hard.

I have no patience for those who blame the world or the age we live in or the flood of Progress for their failure to have the life they supposedly want. This victim mentality is even uglier in conservative nostalgics (and I say that as one who is intimately familiar with the emotion). It needs to be ruthlessly dealt with. The worst thing that can happen to gatherings like Front Porch Republic is that they have a tendency to become a place for parlor dress-up mind games for spoiled misfits each nursing their own grievances. A kind of virtual second life for conservatives who get to imagine the world they want without engaging in any of the real work, sacrifice, pain, and suffering that is required to attain the real thing.

If preventing that hurts a few feelings, so be it. You have bootstraps. So use 'em.

Which one of these 2 guys sounds like a farm hand to you?

Dogma Aversion Syndrome

On the one hand, the higher levels of religiosity present in America (compared to Europe) are often attributed to the lack of an established state-sponsored church in the US. Religions compete in an open marketplace for followers and this competition improves the products and services available, or so the capitalist thinking goes.

However, as with my recent post on economic dynamism driving us towards cultural individualism, there seems to be an inherent conflict of interest at work here. If religions are competing for *customers* then the power of the moral injunctions (thou shall nots) religions are supposed to be instilling in believers runs counter to the customer-is-always-right ethos that pervades all other kinds of *consumer* interaction we participate in.

Burger King doesn't tell me what to do, they let me have it my way. It's hard to see the Pope embracing quite the same attitude on things. But maybe he just needs to hire some better PR staff.

From USA Today:

For the past two years, I have asked students in my introductory religion courses at Boston University to get together in groups and invent their own religions. They present their religious creations to their classmates, and then everyone votes (with fake money in a makeshift offering plate) for the new religions they like best.

This assignment encourages students to reflect on what separates "winners" and "losers" in America's freewheeling spiritual marketplace. It also yields intriguing data regarding what sort of religious beliefs and practices young people love and hate.

[snip]

What strikes me most about my students' religions, however, is how similar they are. Almost invariably, they mix fun with faith. (Facebookismianity anyone?) But they do not mix faith with dogma. My students are careful — exceedingly careful — not to tell one another what to believe, or even what to do. Above all, they want to be tolerant and non-judgmental.

[snip]

During the 1930s, the neoorthodox theologian H. Richard Niebuhr skewered liberal Protestants for preaching "a God without wrath (who) brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross."

But my students' "dogma aversion" (as one put it) goes liberal Protestantism one further. These young people aren't just allergic to dogma. They are allergic to divinity and even heaven. In the religions of their imagining, God is an afterthought at best. And the afterlife is, as one of my students told me, "on the back burner."

[snip]

In their final exam this past semester, I asked my students to reflect on whether young Americans are the canaries in the mines of more traditional religions. Study after study has shown that American college students are fleeing from organized religion to mix-and-match spirituality.

So what will happen to what one of my students referred to as the "religions of discipline" when this millennial generation (born in the late 1970s through the 1990s) grows up? What will today's youth do with religions whose ethical injunctions arrive as strict commandments rather than friendly suggestions? Will they be able to abide religions that divide the human family into the saved and the damned, that present as absolute truth what they suspect is mere speculation?

My students' projects suggest that traditional religions are in trouble.

[snip]

One of my students, Carrie-Anne Solana, told me that the religions her colleagues presented in class amounted to nothing more than "organized atheism." "They took normal human impulses," such as eating, drinking, sleeping, having sex and socializing, she said, "and justified them under the title of religion while not offering any form of explanation into why we are here, where we came from or where we go when we die."

I am not saying this is a good thing. Clearly any faith so thoroughly vacated of its moral strictures isn't much of one. But it seems that the cultivation of moral virtue needs to be presented as having more value to young people in the here and now. Adhering to doctrine needs to lead to a *good life* in this life.

Now *good* can be defined in many different ways, not merely as simple hedonistic happiness. But if all the benefit to following dogma accrues only in the after-life, well that's a recipe for declining market share.

And I'm not quite sure this type of thing is going to make up for that:

On the nature of the GingerBrain

I don't know that I am cut out for blogging per se. Often I find things on the Internet that I think I might like to blog about and I bookmark them (rather than post them) because I need to figure out what I would like to say about the subject and don't want to "waste" the content until my thoughts on the matter congeal.

As one might expect, it can take a considerable amount of effort in order to shape one's thoughts into a moderately long post of at least minimal cogency. Therefore, the pace of my blog posting can slow to a crawl when I don't have time to dedicate myself to content generation.

Obviously, this writing process is the anti-thesis of the way blogs work naturally as a publishing form, which is to favor short, rapid-fire, off-the-cuff reactions with excerpts and links to the associated content if readers want the whole story.

To that end, I am going to try to release the reins a bit moving forward, while still dropping in from time to time with my "big think" commentary that I know you are all waiting on pins and needles for each day. In the land of the blind...

Quote of the Day: "How do you feel? Bloody fantastic."

The Age of Abundance

Brink Lindsay's new book, The Age of Abundance, captures some themes I have touched on previously here, here and here. Namely that a lot of the cultural upheaval we are dealing with in our politics today is a by-product of the economic upheaval that has radically transformed our society and the world over the past 100 years.

Lindsay summarizes the point in a podcast overview of his book [paraphrased]:

It was in the post-war boom in the 1950’s that America represented something fundamentally new under the sun. By the 50's, this was a country where the vast majority of people were well insulated from the edge of subsistence where most human beings had lived for all of history.

Most people lived with a fair degree of material comfort, in fact an extravagant degree of material comfort by historical standards. Only a minority of people were considered in poverty. This is something without precedent.

Not only were they insulated from want, but they were insulated from nature. America had always been a prosperous country by world standards, but it was one where most people made a living as farmers, directly exposed to vagaries of nature for their well being.

Whereas by the 50s, most people lived in cities and began working in offices. Most people lived in a human created world, a world of human institutions and inventions, and didn’t face nature except for recreation. This is a fundamental change in the human condition. [em: mine]

I believe it is hard for us to imagine how radical this change is, since the society we live in is the one we have always known. But it seems that the change in our everyday conditions from one that is highly limited by the natural world (constraints on our existence are imposed from without) to one that is removed from nature and self-consciously constructed for our use (where limits are not imposed, but are overcome) has sweeping implications for our perceptions on human agency and freedom.

And given this far-reaching material change to the very nature of human existence, Lindsay argues that cultural change almost inevitably had to follow...

The end of scarcity pushes us towards cultural individualism. When people are poor, they don’t have a lot of choices. They don’t have a lot of stuff, they don’t have a lot of choice about what to consume, and they don’t have a lot of choice about where to live. So things are very simple: you do this or you die.

Likewise everybody is more or less alike. When people are poor, it means the division of labor is very underdeveloped. 90% of all people are subsistence farmers and so there isn’t a lot of variety in human experience.

And then finally, everything is the same from generation to generation. Without economic growth, one generation is just like the next. If your dad is a farmer you’ll be a farmer. If your dad is a cobbler, then more than likely you’ll be a cobbler too.

In this world of uniformity and changelessness and lack of choice, it makes sense that the kinds of cultural values that held sway were one-size-fits-all. People belonged to a group, they owed loyalty to that group, they had to do what that group says or else, because when there is no margin for error you can’t have a lot of freelancing.

Our traditional moralities that evolved during the agrarian era tended to be absolutist and didn’t give great scope for people to go their own way simply because the material conditions for them to go their own way weren’t there. But when those conditions changed, I think you see the inevitability of the culture opening up to accommodate that change.

And so by nature, when we change things, especially things that have been guiding society, relationships and human behavior over a long period of time, we don't quite know what we are going to get. And it is this uncertainty that seems to underlie much of the cultural angst that emanates from the socially conservative segments of our society.

I can understand the angst. There is a tension in facing the unknown. The thing that I can never fully appreciate is why cultural conservatives are so CERTAIN that any such change is by definition disastrous for humanity.

By contrast, I share much of Lindsay's tempered but hopeful optimism about the possibilities for our collective cultural future:

The rule is: 90% of everything is crap. A lot of [our culture today] is vulgar and base and stupid and trivial and shallow. And in moderation doing vulgar, shallow, stupid things is fine. It’s fun. It’s great to have a couple glasses of wine with dinner, it’s terrible to be wino. It’s great to be able to see world events live on TV, it’s terrible to be a couch potato. You have all these options and there are all kinds of ways to exercise them poorly.

But we have more of everything now. We have more trash and we have more superlative greatness than ever before. The opportunities to live a phenomenally well-lived life have never been more in our grasp. Whether everyone uses freedom wisely is a different matter.

But this is a fundamental faith that libertarians have: The very predictable ways people in which people misuse their freedom are more than compensated by the unpredictable miracles that occur when people are free to be creative. [em: mine]

There is a spark of our humanity that is lost if we snuff out this creativity for the sake of cultural continuity. We gain security but lose part of our essence as well.

Quote of the Day: "What this boy talking 'bout on the telephone?"

Beyonce's unforeseen influence on IT departments

Quote of the Day: "I'm so glad I have this diaper on right now."

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