As I mentioned recently, many in “my culture”—including myself; the scare quotes are there simply to remind me that I want no single culture, that I seek no consistent views, that I need to question every damned thing I assume—value things highest that exist on a “human scale”.
Right-sized meetings, hand-made crafts, simple graceful little software projects, locally-grown food, first-hand personal experiences in our worklives and abroad. Don’t like politics, TV, mass production, don’t like best-sellers, or shrink-wrapped meat, have no truck with big-city black-suited consultants or politicians or men in gray flannel suits. We don’t revile these; we pity them and the benighted folks who ignorantly choose to deal on that level.
Want to help.
See, things are out of whack. We’re off track. A correction is in order. There’s been some kind of global cultural inefficiency, because the world’s gone too fast, too far, away from where it would have been otherwise. Too busy, too mechanized, too commercial. Soon “our” social efforts, and those magical sustainable electronic inventions some blessed insightful souls [among “us”] have brought to light recently, those forces will permeate this shadowed world and guide us all back onto the lost track.
[Where by “track” one doesn’t mean to imply railroad tracks, of course; we mean sylvan wooded grassy path. Without any ticks or anything on it. But not too crowded, either.]
Back to a simpler day, in other words. The way things should have been. Before reviled patriarchal Corporate American workaday polluted greedy culture pervaded our lives, turned us (well, no, not “us” literally—mostly other people one doesn’t often encounter in our immediate circle) into little more than political stooges, and obligate poverty-ridden consumerist zombies.
“We” are some rude amalgam (no doubt the phrase “distinctly American” will crop up soon in this passage; whoops, there it goes) of Transcendentalist, Craftsman/Socialist and Decadent, boosted high by privilege, and living in a para-academic cosmopolitan world of seven-layered education and a jointly held small-world of empowerment.
Christ—I sound like David Brooks, of all things. This is all just some crappy list of straw men. Kill me now. [See? Amusing recursion! Geeky and meta.]
Anyway, to date what we do most actually has been sitting and typing on blogs and in literary magazines, among ourselves: pining for the romance, the democratizing “level playing field”, the human scale of some lovely lost golden “past”.
You might be able to tell, that sets my hackles to rising, that kind of talk.
Then, in re-reading something important about war and actual history and our self-deceptions, I remembered: Sir Walter Scott.
It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them.…
Twain makes the argument that Scott and his backward-looking romanticism reinforced the leanings of the people of the South before the Civil War. That he provided pre-written propaganda, accidentally reinforced the tropes and tendencies that set the South apart from the rest of the country.
And then they went to war. We did—“we” without the quotes, so far. So recently and thoroughly that if you’re from the United States you are probably no more than four steps away from knowing somebody personally who survived the Civil War.
Watch not the skies: watch the books. Watch the literate folks’ reading lists, not your opponents’. Look carefully at the blogrolls not of your political “enemies”, but your own. Watch the sharp boundaries of networking groups, the sharp divisions between what people wear or own, and who they spend their time with.
Count the number of friends who “can’t stand” other people you know. Keep track: You want that number high, not low.
Watch for “revolutions”, and “uprisings”. Watch for any over-simplification that decries a mindless, soulless local enemy, that threat to “our” lifestyle who lives next door. Watch carefullest of all for the words “we” use to blame the bad, misguided people who led us astray from the track.
Because Twain was right. He almost always was.
“We” are heading down a path that strives to build “our own” culture, a separate parallel lifestyle that preserves what “we” think is right. We don’t need the other folks; we have our own stores, books, blogosphere, our own meeting-spaces, churches. Our own candidates, our own better lifestyles.
See, maybe “we” can split off “our” culture from the ugly scar that is the rest of the misdirected world. Bring back some sensible, human-scale order locally, and will our human-scaled communities into the shapes we believe they should have had, all along.
For it is “our” communities that are, by definition, human–scaled. The rest must surely be something else to be so patently different.
Hmmm. Now what word could we use to describe them?
Watch yourself. Watch how you think of your neighbor, your boss, your political representative: the ones you didn’t like very much to begin with.
What makes you so special? Not one damned thing.
Surely not your “scale”, straw man.
The post “r/K selection and cultural dynamics” seems to have its comments off? I’ll post here instead.
I have a lot of fun reading these posts, but one thing stands out to me. “Sitting on your ass surfing” shouldn’t be underestimated. I can’t make things without consuming something or other first. Surfing is where a lot of the good work grows from: bookmarks and conversations, occasional blog posts, sometimes prints on analog lettepresses. Maybe you mean the empty surf process, the mindless one where a person refreshes Kottke four times a day and then checks her email again, but that’s just low-quality surfing and it isn’t completely bad either.
Part of what I like about the Nasty Nets Internet Surfing Club (and other net art) is that it argues, in its own particular way, that surfing is valuable and worth close inspection. Of course, it argues this by producing something out of it.
And heh, surfing my network’s gang signs on Facebook is a vital part of my community-building process.
We all do it. Any time something is labeled pathological, even though we all do it, that’s a good time for skepticism. About the label, not the thing itself.
I think what I’m arguing against is underestimating anything, or anybody.
those also serve who sit and surf?
my typical problem with surfing is figuring out how to avoid reloading kottke all the time.
tonight’s effort, such as it was, is to use Google Spreadsheet as an organizing tool for the “what’s next to look at” function, with a geographical ordering of sites so that people in the same place clump together. Bill, you’re C14.
That sounds good to me, Ed. Radioactive, but rapidly decaying. Good for the long perspective. Always coming up in discussions of history, archaeology.
C14 works for me.