An interview with Mary Ruefle by [[Austin Kleon]]

Kleon's wife Meg, with a master's in architecture, has aphantasia.

Ungenerous to take Alter to task for context which he might not have the background to comment upon.

Does Alter call it a "platitude" from it's historical context, or with respect to the modern context of Donald J. Trump and a wide variety of Republican Party members who are anything but Christian?

• for: doppleganger, conflict resolution, deep humanity, common denominators, CHD, Douglas Rushkoff, Naomi Klein, Into the Mirror World, conspiracy theory, conspiracy theories, conspiracy culture, nonduality, self-other, human interbeing, polycrisis, othering, storytelling, myth-making, social media amplifier -summary
  • This conversation was insightful on so many dimensions salient to the polycrisis humanity is moving through.
  • It makes me think of the old cliches:
    • "The more things change, the more they remain the same"
    • "What's old is new" ' "History repeats"
  • the conversation explores Naomi's latest book (as of this podcast), Into the Mirror World, in which Naomi adopts a different style of writing to explicate, articulate and give voice to
    • implicit and tacit discomforting ideas and feelings she experienced during covid and earlier, and
    • became a focal point through a personal comparative analysis with another female author and thought leader, Naomi Wolf,
      • a feminist writer who ended up being rejected by mainstream media and turned to right wing media.
  • The conversation explores the process of:
    • othering,
    • coopting and
    • abandoning
  • of ideas important for personal and social wellbeing.
  • and speaks to the need to identify what is going on and to reclaim those ideas for the sake of humanity
  • In this context, the doppleganger is the people who are mirror-like imiages of ourselves, but on the other side of polarized issues.
  • Charismatic leaders who are bad actors often are good at identifying the suffering of the masses, and coopt the ideas of good actors to serve their own ends of self-enrichment.
  • There are real world conspiracies that have caused significant societal harm, and still do,
  • however, when there ithere are phenomena which we have no direct sense experience of, the mixture of
    • a sense of helplessness,
    • anger emerging from injustice
  • a charismatic leader proposing a concrete, possible but explanatory theory
  • is a powerful story whose mythology can be reified by many people believing it
  • Another cliche springs to mind
    • A lie told a hundred times becomes a truth
    • hence the amplifying role of social media
  • When we think about where this phenomena manifests, we find it everywhere:

The commons as a social glue

Perhaps there's a framing of "the commons" as a larger entity from which we not only draw, but to which we contribute and in which we participate that glues us all together.

Link under: https://hypothes.is/a/mEgAiEIFEe6trVPf7HjFhQ

We need some common culture to bind humanity together. Hutchins makes the argument that the Great Conversation can help to effectuate this binding through shared culture and knowledge.

Perhaps he is even more right in the 2000s than he was in the 1950s?

• for: gene culture coevolution, carrying capacity, unsustainability, overshoot, cultural evolution, progress trap

• Title: The genetic and cultural evolution of unsustainability

• Author: Brian F. Snyder

• Abstract

• Summary
• Paraphrase
  • Anthropogenic changes are accelerating and threaten the future of life on earth.
  • While the proximate mechanisms of these anthropogenic changes are well studied
    • climate change,
    • biodiversity loss,
    • population growth
  • the evolutionary causality of these anthropogenic changes have been largely ignored.
  • Anthroecological theory (AET) proposes that the ultimate cause of anthropogenic environmental change is
    • multi-level selection for niche construction and ecosystem engineering.
  • Here, we integrate this theory with
    • Lotka’s Maximum Power Principle
  • and propose a model linking
    • energy extraction from the environment with
    • genetic, technological and cultural evolution
  • to increase human ecosystem carrying capacity.
  • Carrying capacity is partially determined by energetic factors such as
    • the net energy a population can acquire from its environment and
    • the efficiency of conversion from energy input to offspring output.
  • These factors are under Darwinian genetic selection
  • in all species,
  • but in humans, they are also determined by
    • technology and
    • culture.
  • If there is genetic or non-genetic heritable variation in
    • the ability of an individual or social group
  • to increase its carrying capacity,
  • then we hypothesize that - selection or cultural evolution will act - to increase carrying capacity.
  • Furthermore, if this evolution of carrying capacity occurs - faster than the biotic components of the ecological system can respond via their own evolution,
    • then we hypothesize that unsustainable ecological changes will result.

It feels odd that people wouldn't understand their own traditions, but it obviously happens. Information overload can obviously heavily afflict societies toward forgetting their traditions and the formation of new traditions, particularly in non-oral traditions which focus more on written texts which can more easily be ignored (not read) and then later replaced with seemingly newer traditions.

Take for example the resurgence of note taking ideas circa 2014-2020 which completely disregarded the prior histories, particularly in lieu of new technologies for doing them.

As a means of focusing on Western Culture, the editors here have highlighted some of the most important thoughts for encapsulating and influencing their current and future cultures.

How do oral traditions embrace the idea of the "Great Conversation"?

A book can't only be about the text, it has to be about the reader's interaction with it and thoughts about it. Without these, the object has no value.

Annotations are the traces left behind of how one valued a book as they read and interacted with it.

It has been suggested that - the human species may be undergoing an evolutionary transition in individuality (ETI).

there is disagreement about - how to apply the ETI framework to our species - and whether culture is implicated - as either cause or consequence.

Long-term gene–culture coevolution (GCC) i- s - also poorly understood.

argued that - culture steers human evolution,

Others proposed - genes hold culture on a leash.

After review of the literature and evidence on long-term GCC in humans - emerge a set of common themes. - First, culture appears to hold greater adaptive potential than genetic inheritance - and is probably driving human evolution. - The evolutionary impact of culture occurs - mainly through culturally organized groups, - which have come to dominate human affairs in recent millennia. - Second, the role of culture appears to be growing, - increasingly bypassing genetic evolution and weakening genetic adaptive potential. -Taken together, these findings suggest that human long-term GCC is characterized by - an evolutionary transition in inheritance - from genes to culture - which entails a transition in individuality (from genetic individual to cultural group). Research on GCC should focus on the possibility of - an ongoing transition in the human inheritance system.

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/the-aha-atlantic-history-discussion

Inequalities in income and wealth decreased markedly in the West from 1914 to 1980 due to a number of factors including:<br /> - Two World Wars and the Great Depression dramatically overturned the power relationships between labor and capital<br /> - A progressive tax on income and inheritance reduced the concentration of wealth and helped increase mobility<br /> - Liquidation of foreign and colonial assets as well as dissolution of public debt

https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:33585/

See also Wiki created in combination with this course: https://digitalbookhistory.com/culturesofthebook/Main_Page

https://archaeologyofreading.org/

The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe (AOR) uses digital technologies to enable the systematic exploration of the historical reading practices of Renaissance scholars nearly 450 years ago. This is possible through AOR’s corpus of thirty-six fully digitized and searchable versions of early printed books filled with tens of thousands of handwritten notes, left by two of the most dedicated readers of the early modern period: John Dee and Gabriel Harvey.

Perhaps some overlap here with: - Workshop in the History of Material Texts https://pennmaterialtexts.org/about/events/ - Book Traces https://booktraces.org via Andrew Stauffer, et al. - Schoenberg Institute's Coffe with a Codex https://schoenberginstitute.org/coffee-with-a-codex/ (perhaps to a lesser degree)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg

Worth digging into some of the papers mentioned here (@2022-06-03)

Color terms in The Odyssey by William Gladstone

Planetary Boundary / Doughnut Economic Main Category: SOCIO-ECONOMIC: Culture, Education

Although culture and education are chosen as the main categories, Plan E applies to all planetary boundaries and all socio-economic categories as it is dealing with whole system change.

Visit Stop Reset Go on Indyweb for detailed context graph and to begin or engage in discussion on this topic. (Coming soon)

Is this responsible for some of the "group think" seen in the Republican party and the political right? Imitation of bad or counter-intuitive actions outweights scientifically proven better actions? Examples: anti-vaxxers and coronavirus no-masker behaviors? (Some of this may also be about or even entangled with George Lakoff's (?) tribal identity theories relating to "people like me".

Explore this area more deeply.

Another contributing factor for this effect may be the small-town effect as most Republican party members are in the countryside (as opposed to the larger cities which tend to be more Democratic). City dwellers are more likely to be more insular in their interpersonal relations whereas country dwellers may have more social ties to other people and groups and therefor make them more tribal in their social interrelationships. Can I find data to back up this claim?

How does link to the thesis put forward by Joseph Henrich in The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous? Does Henrich have data about city dwellers to back up my claim above?

What does this tension have to do with the increasing (and potentially evolutionary) propensity of humans to live in ever-increasingly larger and more dense cities versus maintaining their smaller historic numbers prior to the pre-agricultural timeperiod?

What are the biological effects on human evolution as a result of these cultural pressures? Certainly our cultural evolution is effecting our biological evolution?

What about the effects of communication media on our cultural and biological evolution? Memes, orality versus literacy, film, radio, television, etc.? Can we tease out these effects within the socio-politico-cultural sphere on the greater span of humanity? Can we find breaks, signs, or symptoms at the border of mass agriculture?

total aside, though related to evolution: link hypercycles to evolution spirals?

https://people.com/tv/main-characters-in-satc-revival-and-just-like-that-are-same-age-as-the-golden-girls/

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/evangelical-trump-christians-politics/620469/

Evangelical Christians have been held together more by political orientation and sociology than they have by a common theology. This has set them up for a schism which has been exacerbated by Donald J. Trump, COVID-19, and social changes.

Similar to Kurt's quote, "We go to church to see and be seen", too many churches are focused on entertainment and being an ongoing institution that they aren't focusing on their core mission. This is causing problems in their overall identity.

Time at church and in religious study is limited, but cable news, social media, and other distractions are always on and end up winning out.

People are more likely to change their church because of politics than to change their politics because of church.

The dichotomy of maleness and femaleness compound the cultural issues of the evangelical church.

Southernization of the Church

Pastors leaving the profession due to issues with a hostile work environment. Some leaving because parishioners are organizing and demanding they be fired.

Peter Wehner looks at the rifts that are appearing in the Christian evangelical movement in America, some are issues that have been building for a while, while others are exaggerated by Donald J. Trump, the coronavirus, the culture wars, political news, political beliefs, and and hypocrisy.

https://infohist.fas.harvard.edu/news/information-cultures-series-john-hopkins-university-press

This looks like a fascinating series and who could go wrong with Ann Blair, Anthony Grafton, and Earle Havens?

Also interesting to see what sorts of things they will find interesting at the cutting edge of all these disciplines.

Is it simply the stratification of power and roles that is causing these problems? Is it that some of this has changed and that communication between people of different power levels is the difficulty in these cases?

I have noticed a movement in pedagogy spaces that puts the teacher as a participant rather than as a leader thus erasing the power structures that previously existed. This exists within Cathy Davidson's The New Education where teachers indicate that they're learning as much as their students.

Modern mob justice is not too dissimilar to the historical experience of the Salem witch trials.

How might one rewrite Arthur Miller's The Crucible within the framework of modern cancel culture? What does that look like? We need more art to reflect these changes in society to tell our story and get people thinking.

Should people be judged by statements made in their youth or decades prior? Shouldn't they be given some credit for changing over time and becoming better?

How can we as a society provide credit to people's changed contexts over time?

This can be related to Heraclitus' river.

This is a whole new sort of "attention economy".

This genre of problem is also one of the most common defenses given by the accused as sort of "boogeyman" meant to silence accusers. How could we better balance the ills against each of the sides in these cases to mitigate the broader harms in both directions?

Wouldn't it be better for us to focus our efforts and energies on people who are doing bigger mass scale harms on society?

Surely the ability to protect some of these small harms undergird ability to build up protection for much larger harms.

Why are we prosecuting these smaller harms rather than the larger (especially financial and) institutional harms?

It is easier to focus on the small and specific rather than broad and unspecific. (Is there a name for this as a cognitive bias? There should be, if not. Perhaps related to the base rate fallacy or base rate neglect (a form of extension neglect), which is "the tendency to ignore general information and focus on information only pertaining to the specific case, even when the general information is more important." (via Wikipedia)

Could the Jesuits' descent into the particular as a method help out here?

Putting people beyond the pale creates isolation, public shaming, loss of income, loss of profession, and sometimes loss of personal identity and psychological worth. The most insidious problem of all is the indeterminate length of the "sentence".

For wealthy people like Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, and Kevin Spacey, they're heavily insulated by the fact that at least they've got amassed wealth which mitigates some of these issues. In these cases the decades of extracting wealth through privilege gives them an unfair advantage.

There are now apparently enough cases of this happening, it would be interesting to watch the long term psychological effects of this group to see if these situations statistically effects their longevity or if there are multi-generational knock on effects as have been seen in Holocaust survivors or those freed from slavery.

There is a growing number of cases in which people are having their lives being completely upended because they are being deprived of due process.

In some cases, it may actually be beneficial as people may have been abusing their positions of privilege and the traditional system wouldn't have prosecuted or penalized them at all. In these cases the dismantling of institutional power is good. However, how many of them aren't related to this? How many are being decimated without serving this function?

This sounds a lot like the article How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life though in that case it was a single instance and these examples here may go beyond social media.

Though I'm curious if all of them will entail social media as a (major?) factor in how they played out.

Cancel culture and modern mob justice are possible as the result of volumes of more detail and data as well as large doses of context collapse.

In some cases, it's probably justified to help level the playing field for those in power who are practicing hypocrisy, but in others, it's simply a lack of context by broader society who have kneejerk reactions which have the ability to be "remembered" by broader society with search engines.

How might Google allow the right to forget to serve as a means of restorative justice?

Given the prevalence of people towards making mistakes and practicing extreme hypocrisy, we really ought to move toward restorative justice. Especially in the smaller non-capital cases.

Context: Sonia was watching Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath: Season 3: "Episode 1" and had previously been watching a documentary One of Us about people who had left oppressive seeming Hassidic Jewish communities.

I can't help but that that every culture could be considered a "cult" in which some percentage of people are trapped with comparison to all other cultures on Earth. Based on one's upbringing and personal compass, perhaps living and submitting to one's culture can become oppressive and may seem particularly unfair given power structures and the insidiousness of hypocrisy.

Given this, could there logically be a utopian society in which everyone lives freely?

Even within the United States there are smaller sub-cultures withiin which people feel trapped and which have the features of cults, but which are so large as to not be considered such. Even the space in which I freely live might be considered a cult by others who don't agree with it. It's only the vast size of the power of the group which prevents the majority who comfortably live within it from viewing it as a bad thing.

A Democrat may view the Republican Party as a cult and vice versa, something which becomes more apparent when one polarizes these communities toward the edges rather than allowing them to drift into each other in a consensus.

An African American may think they're stuck in a broader American cult which marginalizes them.

A Hassidic Jew may feel they're stuck in a cult (of religious restrictions) with respect to the perceived freedoms of broader American Culture. Some may feel more comfortable within these strictures than others.

A gender non-comforming person living in the deep South of the United States surrounded by the Southern Baptist Convention may feel they're stuck in a cult based on social norms of one culture versus what they experience personally.

What are the roots of something being a cult? Could it be hypocrisy? A person or a broader group feeling as if they know "best" and creating a rule structure by which others are forced to follow, but from which they themselves are exempt? This also seems to be the way in which authoritarian rules arise when privileging one group above another based solely on (perceived) power.

Another potential thing at play here may be the lack of diversity within a community. The level of cult within a society may be related to the shape of the bell curve of that society with respect to how large the center is with respect to the tails. Those who are most likely to feel they're within a "cult" (using the broader definition) are those three or more standard deviations from the center. In non-diverse communities only those within a standard deviation of the norm are likely to feel comfortable and accepted and those two deviations away will feel very uncomfortable while those who are farther away will be shunned and pushed beyond the pale.

How can we help create more diverse and broadly accepting communities? We're all just people, aren't we? How can we design communities and governments to be accepting of even the most marginalized? In a heavily connected world, even the oddball teenager in a small community can now manage to find their own sub-community using the internet. (Even child pornographers manage to find their community online.)

The opposite of this is at what point do we circumscribe the norms of the community? Take the idea of "Your freedom to strike me ends at my nose." Perhaps we only shun those extreme instances like murder and pornography, and other actions which take extreme advantage of others' freedoms? [This needs to be heavily expanded and contemplated...] What about the over-financialization of the economy which takes advantage of the unprivileged who don't know that system and are uncapable of the mathematics and computation to succeed. Similarly hucksters and snake oil salesmen who take advantage of their targets' weaknesses and lack of knowledge and sophistication. Or the unregulated vitamin industry taking rents from millions for their superstitions? How do we regulate these to allow "cultural freedom" or "religious freedom" without them taking mass-scale advantage of their targets? (Or are some of these acculturated examples simply inequalities institutionally built into societies and cultures as a means of extracting power and rents from the larger system by those in power?)

Compare with Hester Prynne and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.

Book review (and cultural commentary) on Alex Beam's A Great Idea at the Time, (Public Affairs, 2008).

Tangentially related idea which this sparked:

Within my beyond the pale thesis, banishing people in smaller social groups is easier, but doesn't necessarily scale well.

In larger towns, cities, and even states, it may work in some of the smallest and most egregious cases like major crime or murder when carried out by the state, but what about the smaller social infractions?

Cancel culture is attempting to apply this larger social pressure to bigger public figures in ways that it traditionally has been more difficult to do. It's even more difficult in a highly networked world where globalism has taken hold.

How do we cater to the centric masses while potentially allowing some flexibility to the cultures considered at the edges? Ethics aren't universal, so there will be friction at a huge number of overlaps.

Examples:

• Paula Dean (racism), loses shows, deals, etc. but still has reach in certain sections of the country and online

This is another solid example of the hypocrisy of large portions of the Republican party. Do as we say, not as we do. How far can these laws drift from our overarching principles before there is a schism?

How does this fit into the [[beyond the pale]] idea going from small communities to a much larger internet-connected society?

Our institutions are colonial systems, the ivory towers render the people leading and running them to become disconnected from the very public they are supposed to be representing, ending up only serving themselves. “Do we have to burn it down and start again? Do we have to completely recalibrate it from the inside?

Van Tongeren, D. R., DeWall, C. N., Chen, Z., Sibley, C. G., & Bulbulia, J. (2020, April 24). Van Tongeren et al. (2020) JPSP - Religious Residue. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000288

Given danah's age, I would suspect that with a copyright date of 2014, she's likely referencing the 2010 feature film The Kids are Alright.

However that film's title is a cultural reference to a prior generation's anthem in an eponymous song) by The Who which appeared on the album My Generation. Interestingly the lyrics of the song of the same name on that album is one of their best known and is applicable to the ideas behind this piece as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETvVH2JAxrA

I really find this argument fascinating. The "less obviously difficult" perspective as it relates to many works that have been in-part inspired by The Waste Land. I like the idea of nuanced allusion, you don't necessarily need to know all the allusion to understand the storyline. This manifests itself well in works with more plot-based writing. The novel or cinema might be better at achieving the "less obviously difficult" allusion because it has a strong narrative already. The allusion comes alongside of it, or in the case of Moulin Rouge, the allusions are a part of the pop culture the audience is already familiar with.

This shows how Public enemy started a physical movement among the people. Many took to the streets to participate in non-violent protests for the cause. Many were forced to hear what they had to say and there was a push for change. Public Enemy never wanted the protest to be violent, they just wanted change.

This is one of the intended effects of The Gardener role. By centralizing the duty of interrupt handling into one person's job it will free up time for each of the rest of us to focus on projects most of the time, and only occasionally every couple of months will we each have to worry about interrupts when the role of The Gardener passes to one of us for the week.