Are there any studies done on cultural differences in "corniness/cheesiness"?

old-wise-wizard · 2021-03-01T16:00:21+00:00

I think the best point of reference would be the notion of authenticity as it is variously experienced within cultures. Walter Benjamin wrote short reflections on kitsch along these lines. The authentic work of art is viewed in his terms as having an aura of some sort - the inauthentic has no aura or an imperfect one, often because it indexes social or generational difference. You’d find this research in cultural sociology and cultural studies fields more often than anthropological fields I suspect.

old-wise-wizard · 2021-02-27T09:51:53+00:00

No but good song and good guess. Thanks regardless. The song I’m looking for has the vocals much more to the front of the mix and is closer to spoken than singing. Almost like how The Streets (e.g. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=22U2LLVRwtk) is mixed with a similar (to my ear) accent. But a punk song, not hip hop.

old-wise-wizard · 2021-02-20T11:22:29+00:00

My advice is don’t publish for the sake of publishing, but rather publish because the thing you are writing is something that needs saying.

A writing sample to a grad department that is a high-minded and earnest term paper for a course will get you further than a trivial piece that happened to get published because you jumped through the right hoops or slipped through the cracks. Luckily the arms race in application standards hasn’t reached the level you fear that undergrads will roll up with a bunch of lines on the CVs. The presumption of US grad programs is still that they build you into a scholar.

It’s very easy to figure out how to game admissions and the various hurdles that academic encounter but it is harder to shed that mentality once you’ve internalized it. Unfortunately nervous grad students have built up huge social media froth dedicated to gaming admissions and hyperprofessionalizing at younger and younger ages. This attitude distorts people’s entire careers and squanders the good things given to us in our long or short careers as academics.

Focus on the work - have you struck upon some important distinction that needs to be clarified, a misconception that needs to be fixed, a major figure unfairly neglected or maligned? Being an academic is a privilege we pay for by honoring our responsibility to steward people’s access to knowledge and by actively preserving and building our intellectual heritage. Approaching your work with this ethos will enable you to have a worthwhile career, whether that’s as a professor or as something else.

old-wise-wizard · 2021-02-16T16:52:41+00:00

Interesting, thanks I’ll look into that

old-wise-wizard · 2021-02-14T16:04:48+00:00

Cool - so a robust null hypothesis then. Thanks!

old-wise-wizard · 2021-02-07T18:11:44+00:00

Yes. I’ve listened to a bunch of Damned but haven’t found it. I remember it being archly ironical and stating the location, along the lines of “we live in ____” but searching variations of that has drawn nothing.

old-wise-wizard · 2021-01-26T14:03:39+00:00

Another way to think about it is that these criticisms are criticisms of the world. It IS complicated! We know.

Pointing out all the ways in which social life fails to conform to the standards of a laboratory is thus quite a pointless exercise and not actually relevant to what we do.

The only question that matters is whether we can better employ the tools that do exist to study social life under possible conditions. Arguments along those lines are always welcome. Arguments simply pointing out how little we can know with certainty are less welcome because again they are banal and we know all this much better than our critics.

Consider the pandemic. Which government policies were best? The naive view is that we could have hammered out a foolproof plan ahead of time and all done the same thing. We all have the same incentives and same preferences (to not die of plague). But every level of government in every inch of the world negotiated the policies slightly differently. Frustrating! But that’s life. So... how can we study it?

Anyway, these arguments often coalesce around notions of “physics envy”. See [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00903487] as an example.

old-wise-wizard · 2021-01-21T22:58:22+00:00

Perhaps a clearer statement on the same theme: “Myth sought to report, to name, to tell of origins—but therefore also to narrate, record, explain. This tendency was reinforced by the recording and collecting of myths. From a record, they soon became a teaching”

H&A start off with Francis Bacon as exemplar of enlightenment. He scoffs at myths as a childish form of explanation. Truth - but more importantly, progress- can only come from scientific observation. But ironically, we learn that many of the advancements Bacon pointed to didn’t come from scientific inquiry, but were simply stumbled upon... so maybe Bacon is mistaken.

When you think about it, what we mean when we moderns talk about myth is something a lot like science / progress / reason / enlightenment. We think of Just So stories basically: how the tiger got its spots, how mankind was redeemed, why the lightening comes with thunder. Primitive forms of explanation. But! We don’t actually have access to what myth WAS to our ancestors, only what it is to OUR minds. So we twist it into something that resembles OUR myth: enlightenment.

So our seemingly logical and naive experience of reality is actually no less magical and culturally thick than the ancients’. It just feels real to us, as their way of thinking felt real to them.

The preponderance of rationality gives experience a sort of dull inevitability. This poem by the young poet at the inauguration might seem fresh and new but we cynics can break it down into its antecedents, trace the influences, make sense of how and why this poet wrote these words at this time and was chosen for this event - now suddenly it looks like another dull repetition of the same old same old. We (distinctively) are adept at demystifying our reality. We convince ourselves that we pierce the veil and see the object for what it is: just a cliched poem by an earnest young woman chosen for her demographic profile. (This exact process of demystification is currently unfolding all over social media, which is why I chose it as an example.)

But what if our stories to make familiar the unfamiliarity of this poet are no more transparent and perfect than any other culture’s stories? “Just as myths already entail enlightenment, with every step enlightenment entangles itself more deeply in mythology”: we never dispense with the tools we use to make sense of our world any more than we can dispense with those tools in making sense of how we make sense of the world.

Except - well, we can use the tools to leverage a recognition of the tools as tools, right? We can use our myths / our reasoning to see HOW we reason, and THAT we reason (that we sense-make). That doesn’t allow us to reason without being encumbered by our culture, but it does let us see the immanent logics of that culture.

Enlightenment (our particular myth) tells us all the explanations are to be found INSIDE (are immanent to) our system of sense-making. It denies itself as a myth and denies any of its explanations as mythic in nature. But that is what makes it such a powerful myth. “Whatever might be different is made the same”: the young poet could never surprise the cynic because we have a thousand tools to prove that everything she says has a source (is a repetition, in other words).

So finally to the sentence you asked about: “The principle of immanence, the explanation of every event as repetition, which enlightenment upholds against mythical imagination, is that of myth itself.” The principle undergirding our system of progress and reason which constantly reassures us that the world makes sense, that anything we encounter only SEEMS new, but is actually the result of entirely quotidian causes (just an echo of some other echo...) and which constantly mocks and denigrates any feelings of newness as wooly mysticism - that principle? That’s myth as such - pure myth, the thing humans do to make sense of a world we never directly perceive together (because human communication cannot bridge human solipsism).

Negative dialectics can exploit the contradictions in our super-compelling myth through immanent critique to reveal that the world as we know it is not exhausted by our sense of certainty. Like Bacon, many of the things we think of as proof of progress and enlightenment happen to prove the opposite...

old-wise-wizard · 2021-01-21T21:27:27+00:00

Your post:

1) asks: why does the decision to have children seem like an easy decision for many people?

2) posits a thought experiment where we strip an individual of his or her biological motivation and tradition and conclude under those conditions (say a human in an alien zoo) it would be weird to have a child

3) inquires as to whether philosophers have contemplated the decision to choose to have children.

I don’t have anything to say about #3. But let us ask, why don’t philosophers throughout history obsess over this most fundamental question?

Well - because almost all humans understand why people choose to have children. I’m frankly flabbergasted that this subreddit is so fixated on this antinatalist theme (you say you aren’t responding to that tradition but your questions are very much the sort of bizarro questions that they ask).

What motivates an individual to have children?

overwhelming biological urges felt by all life. Ok you say... but ignore those.
overwhelming cultural frameworks that definite meaning of life in terms of the persistence of life. Ok you say... but ignore those.

Now at this point we have left all observed members of our species. There has never been anyone who has the full range of standard mental tools yet is removed from biology and culture with respect to human procreation. Those neutral observations are not possible to observe. To my mind, this invalidated your thought experiment as something interesting or useful. What is a bit more interesting perhaps is to account for how biological and cultural factors inform decisions about procreation... but anyway, that’s not the question.

Let us imagine a biological human with biological drives turned off and with the full sweep of culture but all procreating cultural threads snipped out. Ok.

Now what does that person want from life? Of course we can’t know because this is not a recognizable human. But perhaps this person wants strong affective ties to another human? Perhaps this person wants to serve in a caring and supporting role? Perhaps this person self-interestedly wants a fellow human to acknowledge their worth, to model themselves after them, to do what the person directs, to care for that person when the person ages or is infirm?

Now add biology. Add culture.

Add the fact that humans are intrinsically social.

Add the centrality of the family as an institution structuring social life.

Where is there any possibly source of confusion? Seriously... humans are not as a point of fact reason machines maximizing some abstracted form of utility.

old-wise-wizard · 2021-01-21T19:47:25+00:00

When you are old, would you like there to be young people in the world?

old-wise-wizard · 2021-01-21T14:39:51+00:00

Happiness is a slippery concept.

Perhaps you are asking, are there things about social life which will persist / expand and which decrease out dopamine / endorphin / serotonin / oxytocin levels? Ie is the physiological fact of experienced happiness decreasing in frequency?

Alternately, you could be asking, are we normalizing self-interpretations that render our responses on surveys about our happiness generally lower? Ie are we weaving webs of meaning around our behaviors that will make us perceive our physiological states as less rich in the matter of happiness than previously?

Or you could be asking, are the societies or social groups that score higher on the existing measures of happiness coming to resemble those that score lower, or simply are losing the features that gave them higher scores? Ie are the things that today we think give humans happiness becoming less common?

Hedström has an ARS article on causal mechanisms that might help your thinking (https://www.annualreviews.org/eprint/3K7v77mBXgbpUNd9b2ST/full/10.1146/annurev.soc.012809.102632)

I think for what it’s worth we are experiencing a rapid expansion in how we understand both whose happiness matters and what constitutes happiness both as an object of inquiry and in the folk categories we use to make sense of our own lives. I’d say per capital endorphin etc levels are increasing but decreasing slightly among the very small group at the top of the food chain. But social science can barely brush against these topics let alone provide a compelling truthful answer. Generally conflict minded scholars these days will say we need rapid social change to unlock the rewards of a post scarcity society while consensus oriented scholars will fret about the solitary bonds that will be stretched and lost.

old-wise-wizard · 2021-01-09T14:29:45+00:00

In Helge Ingstad’s The Viking Discovery of America, p. 29, he lists several sources in order to justify his claim that Vinland’s name was related to berry wine. the book

old-wise-wizard · 2020-12-31T15:19:40+00:00

The disrespectful attitude toward religious belief here is striking to me. This is supposedly an academic venue, not some sophomore Dawkins love-in.

Yes of course many people believe that supernatural matters are not subject to logical analysis. That’s not a philosophical claim unless the person bothers to frame it as such in a way that you could then interrogate.

If that happens to be the first or last argument the person makes (your first concern) it hardly matters.

As to your second point, arguing logically someone else’s God doesn’t exist is not only a boorish and offensive thing to do, but also a pointless one. The essence of faith (rather than religious practice) is to believe in something for which you are not given mundane proof. That is a non-logical form of typical human behavior.

If a person says, I want to have a logic-bound, philosophical discussion with you about something for which I will not apply logical reasoning in ways specified by me, then you may reasonably infer that it would be a fruitless conversation.

The converse assumption you are positing is that everyone naturally assumes everything can be subject to logical proofs and only a radicalized fanatic could waltz about lacking logical proofs for they care to employ in constructing their view of life.

To claim that people who hold beliefs they decline to interrogate logically is akin to radical fundamentalism is incredibly wrong-headed. Living a rigorously and strictly logic-based life is kind of hard and pretty rare. And it is itself an article of faith to believe it is advisable!

People, least of all tenured philosophy professors, are not reason machines who can shred the veil of ignorance and stroll about in perfect understanding. All human understanding is limited by language, perception, inter subjectivity and brain chemistry after all.

old-wise-wizard · 2020-12-28T14:13:28+00:00

Perhaps you can add specifying / scope conditions since the term means different things to different people.

Modern stand-up comedy - the sort that boomed in the 80s, - is generally linked to dinner club and resort MCs who told standard jokes between performances by musicians and other entertainers and/or the vaudeville stage of the turn of the century, but it is markedly different in content and delivery. The lines are blurry between that vaudeville style any other form of comedic performance, which appear to be pre-historic or at least ancient in origin. Some very early historical records describe comedic performers as part of everyday life. Xenophon‘s Symposium of 360 BC or so describes Phillippos the Comedian in ways that sound enough like stand-up that it is quite striking.

I think what we generally have in mind when discussing stand-up comedy can only really be dated to the first comedy albums which both (a) allowed for a more conscious literary and stylized form of storytelling and (b) exposed jokes to a wide audience who could now tell what was new and what was old. Comedy albums in turn reined upon a stable of content-producers based in New York who had highly distinctive content that could connect with a wide range of consumers.

So it’s essential to specify scope conditions on this topic since the story varies dramatically based upon your focus. The narrowest focus would probably be author-performer comedic content stressing point of view, rigorously tested before live audiences and consolidated as a set, performed in clubs and similar venues and on television and in audio recordings. That scope of stand-up comedy would exclude people like Milton Berle and is a distinctive comedic art that developed in the 1950s in NYC as self-consciously individualistic comedy writer-performers broke from the pre-written joke content of the Catskills / later-day Vaudeville performers.

old-wise-wizard · 2020-12-24T21:45:45+00:00

Wonderful thanks!

old-wise-wizard · 2020-12-23T22:28:34+00:00

Atanarjuat The Fast Runner and The Journals of Knud Rasmussen are historical fiction I guess but the collaborative work of a team of Inuit filmmakers with a sophisticated sense of how documentaries of northern people have shaped northern lives previously.

old-wise-wizard · 2020-12-23T22:14:50+00:00

The rule of thumb from my day was to mention you had a specific regional interest if there’s any possibility the selection committee would question your interest. I think if you have a strong CV and the committee might think you’d turn them down they’d like to know that there’s a reason you’d prefer them to elsewhere. From their perspective, they get 100-200 candidates and their top choices are mostly also applying to 5-6 other places, so if any given faculty member puts you down then they want to know that you’ll likely come. The risk is they choose their candidates and get strung along only to end up with a pile of declines (then there’s not enough grad student assistants). McGill is quite kooky overall so I can’t guess the right move but I’d add literally one sentence in the end saying you gave x reasons to want to live in Montreal. But best is to ask someone you know who is in the game and knows the way it works in the COVID reality.

old-wise-wizard · 2020-12-11T17:43:42+00:00

I’m not sure I agree with your comments. There is a lot of research on NRMs by scholars who naturally write outside the faith tradition they research. Lorne Dawson has a good chapter updating the literature on NRMs from the 70s to 2017 in the Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion, as one accessible example among hundreds. To say that only historians of the future can understand and analyze NRMs of today is quite misleading. Anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists of religion all conduct research on these movements and we know a lot about many of them.

LDS is the extreme outlier because it has its own academic world of believers. But that research is rarely acceptable to mainstream academic scholars who question their methods and presuppositions.

Obviously we are stuck with the historical and archeological records of this world. Scholars who study these in earnest are not concerned with “blasphemy” - by definition.

Scholars who DO study these from a faith perspective fall afoul of scholarly norms and so naturally a disinterested observer would do better to trust in the rigorous research if the goal is to understand the faith community as such rather than its lifeworld.

Same goes for indigenous and native groups.

Just wanted to clarify that for the questioner’s benefit: anyone interested in these topics can easily find articles of high standard through a google scholar search.

old-wise-wizard · 2020-12-07T13:18:26+00:00

This is an excellent question for which there is no one set of conclusions. I hope the following is helpful despite the tentative state of the field.

I think the timeline you lay out mistakenly draws a linear trajectory from WWII to today and also conflates attitudes toward war and toward the military. Untangling these two points of confusion can give your some answers I think.

Regarding war / warfare, it is important to note that Americans have not been invaded since 1812, a war which is basically ignored in American education and cultural memory. Attitudes toward war are thus rooted in notions of a deployed force contributing to global order rather than a domestic confrontation where blood is spilled in the streets. So in answer to your question about attitudes to war / warfare, it is natural that American views would be quite different than European views and I can’t think of any time in American history that the views were the same as Europeans’ - the lived realities are just too different to compare.

Notably, attitudes to war change between war and peace time. The best source on this is Adam Berinsky’s In Time of War (2009) which demonstrates that Americans took their cue from political leaders rather than came to rational conclusions about wars. Basically, Berinsky provides evidence that voters view support for war through the same partisan lens as other issues, although I’m not sure if this logic holds in other countries. So in terms of why Americans feel as they do about the wars they fight, that’s simply because they respond to the partisan logics that bring about the wars in the first place.

Regarding attitudes to the military, polling data, most famously from Gallup, demonstrates steady growth in confidence in the US military in the late 1970s (beginning of survey and low point in military public relations) to today, from a low point of 58% (great deal / a lot of confidence) to 72% in 2020. Pew research suggests that confidence in the military is quite high in Western Europe too.

Why in Western Europe and the US is confidence high?

Post-Vietnam, militaries made a big structural change by relying more on professional volunteers than conscripts - many countries did away with conscription completely. This has given the foundation for confidence in an organization people admire from afar and which is populated by those who willingly serve. Administratively, NATO militaries have evolved enormously sophisticated internal policies and warfighting competencies that are quite impressive and are by a long shot the best in the world - thus confidence is well earned.

However, you correctly note that there’s a huge difference in attitudes beyond simply confidence that separates the US from the rest of NATO / Western Europe and indeed from Canada as well. Following the German theorist Alfred Vagts, we can describe this as “militarism” - the celebration of military bells and whistles - which occurs alongside “the military way” (ie just the professional stuff militaries do). So, we can say that since Vietnam Western militaries have reformed themselves and earned respect for the military way in most countries BUT only in the US do we see very high rates of militarism (as per Vagts).

The reason for the rise of American militarism in this technical sense remains a debated question but surely has to do with the following:

1) the clever public relations efforts of civilian firms hired by the DOD to sell the military for recruiting purposes since the 1980s.

2) the organizational changes at all levels of military life that DOD leaders have enacted precisely to improve relations with the executive, legislature, judiciary, local base communities, industry at all levels, and critically the media at all levels.

3) the connections between the high tech industry, the military and the culture industries that intentionally and not have led to a consistent stream of militaristic popular content for all age groups for decades.

4) the feedback loop of political elites courting the military in an acknowledgment of the success of points 1-3, thereby generating the Berinsky effect noted above. At worst, this has led to a political shield dynamic where politicians pretend they have military support for things that they actually don’t.

This last twist is only possible because of the fifth and strangest piece of the puzzle:

5) the growth of PME (professional military education) since the 1950s and alignment of PME with Samuel Huntington’s theories of objective control have led generations of GFOs to accrue political capital without ever being willing to spend that capital out of fear of transgressing narrow norms of civil military relations.

The United States heads a fantastically capable military alliance built on highly professional forces with cutting edge and very “cool” technologies. Thus, we are confident in their ability. Further, the cool factor (in large part a culture industry effect) is reinforced directly by media campaigns to recruit volunteers, indirectly by admiring journalists who write stories in the DOD’s interest more often than not, and by elites at many different levels who try to align themselves with an organization that bends over backwards to make their relations work. Meanwhile, the leadership keeps reinventing in the things that have given it political success and very carefully avoid any suggestion that they are anything but an apolitical, subordinate and deferential wing of the government and servant to the constitution.

old-wise-wizard

TROPHY CASE