Captain, ye don't have the power!

This probably isn't too rare for apartment buildings, but my building has certain emergency lights that aren't usually on and can't be switched on by the residents, but they're hooked up to a special emergency generator. So paradoxically, if you see that they are on, you know there's been a power failure. I came home today and saw that these lightbulbs had tripped on. Those and the lights behind the EXIT signs, which are apparently indispensable either way.

Needless to say I wasn't too happy to find out that we were without electricity on what will probably be one of the hotter days of the year. But there was nothing to do for it but wait for the guys from National Grid--who were already working on the street--to fix it. I read outside while waiting. At one point I looked up at a neighbor's window fan and saw the blades spinning, but it turned out that the wind was blowing them, then it would stop. But after some time I poked my head in and saw that it was dark. Again paradoxically, this was a good sign.

For our own good

The US-Canadian professor Justin E. H. Smith is a new name to me. In fact when I first started reading this essay I thought it was by a woman named "Justine H. Smith." No matter. Don't think of it as long, consider it substantial.

I will say that I do not support anything so simplistic as “distinguishing between the artist and the work”, since it is fairly plain to me that often the moral rottenness of the artist is constitutive of the work. This extends even to philosophy, where any honest person will concede that Martin Heidegger was not “a great philosopher” who was “also a Nazi”, and that the whole challenge of dealing with Heidegger and his legacy is to figure out how Western philosophy developed in such a way that when Nazism emerged it made sense for at least one of its greatest expositors to offer his services as a handmaiden to this ideology. It is precisely for this reason that reading and understanding Heidegger is so urgent. There is nothing “honorific” about doing this; philosophy is not a fan club, and if you are treating it as one, this is because you do not really understand what philosophy is.

There are a couple of trends that Smith touches on that seem very strange to me. One is that the enforcers of the most stringent identitarian morality so often come from the world of YA fiction--if not as authors then at least as proponents. But once upon a time I was studying to become a schoolteacher. And included in this training was a class in Young Adult literature. At the time YA Lit was essentially a coverall term for children's books with accomplished prose. Occasionally they might contain mature scenes--sexual or otherwise--that you'd hesitate to show an 8-year-old, but not really a 15-year-old. And the object of exposing students to any of this was as part of a broader education, to help the youth become balanced and curious people. That's a worthy agenda, but apparently not a sexy one.

Smith also talks about an online meme of books that you might see on the shelf of a guy she goes home with, books that should warn her off. Seems to be a standard list of Hemingway, Foster Wallace, Nabokov. There's probably a lot that could be said for or against each author, but that's a conversation starter, not an ender. It's hard to see why a woman would need to be protected from a man's literary tastes, or pretensions to same. Unless he's not just a fan of the novel Lolita, but an actual ephebephile.

Act the same

Kat Rosenfield, whose work I've linked to at least once before, has a good new article on the pretense that the corporate world--and especially the tech industry--values individuality, even eccentricity. This is something that was very big around the turn of the millennium. Free thinkers and mad innovators were supposedly the new royalty because they just might change the world.

It was always and empty sham, of course. These companies were only interested in a very narrowly defined kind of visionary, the kind that could foresee and nudge developments in their own field. And even this may have been devalued in the ensuing years, as the CEOs figure they already know everything worth knowing. Better to save up and buy a few politicians.

Anyway, one of the big relics Rosenfield talks about is Apple's Think Different™ campaign, a representative poster from which is shown below.

Notice anything that all or at least most of these people have in common? Yeah, kind of a brilliant touch, actually. They had the cachet of having shuffled off this mortal coil, and Apple didn't have to worry about them doing anything new that might be off-script or which, in today's parlance, might get them canceled. 

Less than meets the eye

One of the books I'm reading now is Jesse Singal's The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Fix Our Social Ills. It's a survey of ideas from the social sciences that have gone viral on the common assumption that they're more accurate and useful than they actually wind up being. Having been a psych major in college before switching to English, and having read a good deal of the literature both good and bad, I can see the temptation to find magic bullets in psychology.

Singal has chapters on the self-esteem movement--which was kicked into high gear by a very weird California legislator--and the late 20th century panic over delinquent underclass youth being "superpredators."

There's also the Implicit Association Test, a test intended to help the user pinpoint their level of (usually racial) bias. The idea that unadmitted racial prejudice has a negative effect isn't crazy and is in fact fairly logical. The test itself, though, has huge problems.

Implicit bias has enjoyed blockbuster success because there is a simple test that anyone can take to measure one's own level of this affliction: the implicit association test, or IAT. If you've been in a diversity training anytime in the last few years, it's likely you've come across this tool, which is promoted by Harvard University and a veritable army of well-credentialed social psychologists who study bias and discrimination. You can go to Harvard's Project Implicit website at implicit.harvard.edu to take an IAT yourself, and if you do you'll see that the setup is fairly simple. First, you're instructed to hit i when you see a "good" term like "pleasant", or to hit e when you see a "bad" one like "tragedy." Then hit i when you see a black face, and hit e when you see a white one. Easy enough, but soon things get more complex. Hit i when you see a good word or an image of a black person, and e when you see a bad word of an image of a white person. Then the categories flip to black/bad and white/good. As you peck away at the keyboard, the computer measures your reaction times, which it plugs into an algorithm. That algorithm, in turn, generates your score.

When I first read this description I mistakenly thought that it primed the test-taker to associate black faces with negative words. It apparently doesn't, or at least not exclusively. But there are enough moving parts to the test to make it hard to read. In practice it's not obvious that it measures anything at all. 

Which is often the case.

Meta note

Okay, so I found out a while ago that this blog shared a name with a piece by the French composer Maurice Jarre. Which, a few years ago, started to pop up in the Google results for "flying totems."

But now it's exclusive. This blog doesn't show up at all unless I add "blogspot." Dang. I was using the phrase before he was. I've never been so insulted in all my life.* #minorannoyances

*Not really true, but I can play it up.

Seeing things differently

 

On the front page of Rachael Hulme's website she calls herself  "an artist, art educator, and learning experience designer." Despite the welcome presence of the Oxford comma, this may come off as wordy obfuscation and have you expecting something drab and awful.

Pleasant surprise, then, that her work actually turns out to be a lot of fun, especially in her Constructivism project. I don't know the exact age of the pupils she's taught art to, but she's able to bring a childlike perspective to her work. And perhaps hand-in-hand with that is a recognition of untapped possibilities within familiar objects. The potential of a beginner's mind.

The obsolete man

In the process of writing a story and it's occurring to me that to a lot of people it's not going to seem like it's happening in the present day. Basically just because it's me writing it.

For one thing the main character comes home and calls his semi-estranged girlfriend. Could have done that from anywhere, right? And everyone says now that you don't call someone out of the blue, text them first. But from a drama and scene-setting vantage point, texting lacks something for me.

For the same reason I'm more likely to write someone channel surfing than just selecting what they want on Netflix or what have you. The latter seems to me to close off more storytelling possibilities than it opens.

In part I guess this is a function of age, but not just that. Kit Reed, who wrote in science fiction and a number of related areas, was born in 1932. She passed on in 2017, but up until that time she was very savvy about young people and their relationship to technology. Different people have different gifts.