I have no idea what Leo‘s up to, but these mixtapes are nice. ((Although not The Nice.)
February, 2009
26
Feb 09
Are we drawn to art, or is art drawn to us?
I’m confused. Denis Dutton in Edge Magazine:
This experience taught me something crucially important: that New Guinea standards for greatness and for excellence are as far as I could determine the same as those of knowledgeable European curators, connoisseurs, and collectors… the people who really know the good work in museums, who are very deeply familiar with New Guinea art but who have never set foot in New Guinea, oddly have the same taste patterns as New Guinea carvers themselves. And this shows that with the art form, knowledge and familiarity with the whole field determines a convergence of taste. And that, again, has to be explained.
Dutton sees evolution’s hand at work in the development of human artistic capability. Well, maybe; but that seems to be overlooking a far simpler explanation.
Let’s assume the following factors are in play:
- Historically Guinean art would have been expropriated without sale on the basis of what appeared to be most valuable rather than most beautiful;
- Currently Guinean carvers sell their work, normally getting the highest prices from foreign collectors, and normally reserving their best work for those collectors.
These two assumptions appear relatively non-controversial. The first factor means that expert outsiders who have never been to Guinea will tend to have seen the “best” (most valuable) works, and so their taste will have been shaped by it. The second factor means that carvers now have a strong incentive to match their work to the tastes of expert outsiders who in large part determine the market for their carvings. If the two groups are in an economic relationship that has caused the tastes of both sides to converge around a certain set of aesthetics, it would explain why their tastes are so similar – while the tastes of the average joe are not:
I’m not saying that the New Guineans would make judgments that would coincide with every naive tourist — newcomers to the art — who gets off the boat. Tourists in my experience make very bad choices in buying New Guinea arts.
This example doesn’t present much, if any, evidence for a theory of evolved aesthetics, but it does serve as an excellent example of how our culture is shaped silently by our economic relationships. I’d be more interested to see a thesis that examines the influence that art might have played in economic terms rather than evolutionary terms, but I should also declare a vested interest, in that I’d rather make some money from my own writing…
20
Feb 09
This Year in Deaths (Remix)
The end of a life is a chance both to mourn and celebrate. Two months into 2009 and the music world has had some serious losses. This isn’t an exhaustive list, just a chance for me to celebrate the lives of some musicians whose music made a difference to me. Maybe you’ll discover something new, but be warned – this list is heavy on the jazz. Nice.
Joe Cuba (who doesn’t love a piece of El Pito?)
Snooks Eaglin (note to self: find more Snooks)
John Martyn (“troubled genius”, “missing leg”, “wonderful music”)
Louie Bellson (one of the drum battle giants)
Cachaito (for the record, my favourite artist on this list)
Blossom Dearie (for the record, my Mum’s favourite artist on this list)
Max Neuhaus (It’s difficult to find video clips of sound installations)
Ron Asheton (of The Stooges – skip this if you don’t like naked Iggy Pop)
Claude Jeter (of the Swan Silvertones – glorious)
Charles Cooper (of Telefon Tel Aviv – with a great new album just released, too)
David “Fathead” Newman (Not one of my favourite players, but what a version this is)
Anybody I’ve missed? Warm up. This is joy!
19
Feb 09
Fiction, Truth stranger than, Balkans Edition
If you still thought that Ramush Haradinaj was a bit dodgy, despite being acquitted of charges at ICTY, then your heart may sink when you hear this news:
KAMPALA (AFP) — Muslim rebels in Uganda said Wednesday they wanted Kosovo’s former premier Ramush Haradinaj to mediate peace talks with the Kampala government. Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) spokesman Assad Mukasa said they chose Haradinaj, recently acquitted of war crimes charges by the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague, because “he has passed through a lot.” Mukasa told AFP that Haradinaj had experience “of rebels and difficulties.”
Indeed he does, although I’m not sure it’s particularly relevant experience. While not wishing to impugn Haradinaj’s character, I can say with some confidence that he’s no Martti Ahtisaari.
18
Feb 09
When social software isn’t
Once again, Facebook has wandered into a minefield and then acted surprised when it lost a leg. In response to user protests, the company has reversed its policy regarding retention of personal data (as we all know, something of a bugbear of mine), in similar fashion to the reversal of policy regarding the Beacon advertising system. Why does this keep happening to Facebook, and why does it point out the fundamental flaw in Web 2.0 business models?
I’m a fan of Andrew Keen‘s critique of Web 2.0 as a viable alternative to existing media, but it’s hard for me to work up too much concern over the death of old media – as far as I’m concerned, it’s just a phase transition that we’re going through. In Chapter 4 of Predictably Irrational, however, Dan Ariely nails it when he describes the difference between social norms and market norms:
So we live in two worlds: one characterized by social exchanges and the other characterized by market exchanges. And we apply different norms to these two kinds of relationships. Moreover, introducing market norms into social exchanges, as we have seen, violates the social norms and hurts the relationships. Once this type of mistake has been committed, recovering a social relationship is difficult.
The problem for web businesses – and particularly for Web 2.0 businesses – is that people enter into them on the basis of social norms. They’re free and they’re friendly, and everybody is welcome to the party, and so when we’re using them we assume that they’ll treat us in the same way as our friends would, keeping our confidences and not abusing our trust.
As soon as those businesses introduce market norms – i.e. as soon as they try to monetise the relationship, which every Web 2.0 business must do sooner or later (and preferably before the venture capital runs out) – then the bond is broken. The fundamental basis of Web 2.0 business – community rather than customer relationships – is not financially viable.
There are people who believe that Twitter (for example) can make money, but it’s telling that for all the wonderful suggestions made by bloggers over the last year, precisely none of them has been implemented. That doesn’t mean that Web 2.0 is dead, but anybody expecting to make any money from their investments is probably going to find their friends leaving the party to go next door.
17
Feb 09
The horns of the genocide dilemma
The discussion about Darfur – and more specifically about the work of the Save Darfur coalition – is interesting to me because it goes right to the heart of why I chose to work for humanitarian organisations – a choice that I wrestle with every day, but that’s another discussion entirely. Following on from my previous post, both Michael and Michelle have written new posts, while David Sullivan at the Enough Project and Steven Bloomfield (the journalist whose interview with John Holmes started this whole discussion) has now also weighed in.
Steven is closest to my line of thinking when he explains that
My problem with describing it as a genocide is that genocides have have simple solutions. You stop the genocidaires… the crisis in Darfur won’t stop if the janjaweed and Bashir’s armed forces are forcibly disarmed or if the Khartoum government is overthrown. It is a nasty, messy war with many players.
We can debate the finer points of his examples of the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, but this is fairly near to my thinking. David Sullivan, on the other hand commits the cardinal sin of argument without evidence:
…when Michael suggests that neither the U.S. nor Europe has the leverage to bring peace to Darfur, I wonder how he’s come to such a conclusion. Nobody knows exactly how much leverage the United States, Europe, or any combination of governments may have against Khartoum and the Darfur rebels, because there has been no consistent effort to use that leverage and lead a viable peace process, such as that which helped to resolve Sudan’s North-South civil war.
To sum up: nobody knows how much leverage any external actors have, but the Save Darfur coalition is prepared to expend huge amounts of time, money and effort on trying to get those actors to bring that leverage – if it exists – on to the government and various armed groups of Sudan. This summarizes the problem I have with Michelle and David’s argument (and by extension with Save Darfur as a project) – the lack of evidence to support their case is obvious to anybody who cares to look. Yet Michelle also has a point – what do those who question the work of Save Darfur propose?
In the possibly apocryphal words of Edmund Burke, all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing, and nobody likes standing around doing nothing. I could propose a purely humanitarian response – save as many lives as possible and forget about intervening in the politics of another country altogether – which would probably please David Rieff but few others. I could make a radical proposal like splitting Sudan into relatively stable pieces, something which is likely to happen sooner or later in any case. I could make an even more radical proposal for state-established corporations to buy as much of Sudan’s natural resources as possible and then hold the government to ransom. Or we could have a laugh and suggest a more robust peacekeeping force.
All of these? None of these? The truth is that we are on the horns of a genocide dilemma – whichever way we turn, we’re likely to get gored by a bull called unintended consequences. Rwanda is what got me into this mess, but preventing the genocide would have left the social pressures that lead to it in place, still boiling away. Yet that doesn’t mean the genocide was a necessary evil, the expulsion from the body politic of toxins – we can’t mutely accept these things without throwing away a piece of our humanity. This calculus is impossible, you see.
The truth is that we need to take action on these things long before they come into view, but we’ve also constructed a political system that is chronically myopic and consistently unprepared. We can see the seeds of future Darfurs right now, if we look hard enough – and they’re all resource wars rather than ideological wars – but we do very little to prevent them from blossoming. The price we pay for a Dayton is a Kosovo; but Kosovo is further on in our ride through the House of Horrors, after our politicians have gotten off the ride. I don’t have the cure, but I suspect that Save Darfur is a placebo.
I’m not surprised that its supporters defend it so vigorously, given how much they’ve invested in its success; they have true faith, which is something that I’ve always – unfortunately – lacked.
6
Feb 09
The convenience of relativism
Andrew Taggart has a good point when he says
There are, however, good reasons to think that relativism is a rather stingy philosophy for people living in a confusing time: stingy because it ultimately offers us an impoverished ethical vision of the world and of our place in it. I am constantly struck by its inability to answer the question: why care? Why bother when the matter before us has nothing to do with fulfilling our individual or collective interests? No relativist will be able to get off the couch when you tell her that there is genocide in Darfur, that the conditions of women living in Iran fall well below any reasonable mark, or that there is widespread poverty in Africa.
His essay on relativism grows from this concern that it’s a dead end, a stagnant pool in which little can grow except ill. Yet relativism is not a philosophical argument, but a mindset, and not usually a particularly well-founded one at that. At the start of the essay, he points out:
Needless to say, I reject relativism, but I am not certain that reason, as it is traditionally conceived, will do much to change things… whatever authority practical reason has—the sort of reason, I mean, that is concerned with moral conduct, political affairs, and values in general—is slight in comparison with traditional authority and with the authority that we implicitly associate with our everyday practices. Rarely indeed has engaging in philosophical argument changed somebody’s mind or gained her rational assent. Normally, she simply opts out or grows silent. As the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah argues in Cosmopolitanism, our views of the social world tend to change when our individual habits and our communal practices change.
I would argue that most people don’t accept the full ramifications of relativism. Few of those people in the West who in general proclaim that everybody’s views are equally valid would continue to assert this in the case of (for example) the popularity of female genital mutilation in various parts of the world. The reason that relativism is popular is that it is convenient, saving us both from having to think critically about other peoples’ positions or – more critically – to defend our own positions.
At the same time, relativism has its benefits. Those who speak out vigourously against relativism (and I don’t include Andrew here) are often speaking on behalf of a parochial viewpoint that they wish to see privileged against others. In many ways this is simply a mirror image of relativism – if their views are privileged, it will save them from having to defend it and from having to think critically about others (because all others will be equally condemned).
Surgically removing relativism from public discourse won’t be very productive if we don’t replace it with something else – but Andrew’s suggestion of “public practical reason” is unlikely to find much acceptance.