A brief note for people interested in science:
This month's issue of Scientific American has a couple of interesting articles on the general topic of global warming.
SciAm March 2005.
First, there's "How Did Humans First Alter Global Climate?"
By William F. Ruddiman. "A bold hypothesis suggests that our ancestors' farming practices started warming the earth thousands of years before industrial society did" according to the magazine blurb. I found the ideas in it to be thought-provoking, though we're a long way from proving that agricultural land use changes marked the true beginning of global warming.
Unfortunately, you can't read the entire articles without subscribing, but this issue might be worth picking up for those interested.
There is also "Behind the Hockey Stick" which can be viewed for free.
It's a short interview/feature on Michael Mann, the scientist who has become more or less the poster/whipping boy of global warming.
Mann is also one of the founders of the RealClimate site I recommended a few episodes ago. RealClimate has a new primer on climate issues especially tailored to scientific amateurs like myself. I am looking forward to perusing it tonight.
OPK
Monday, February 21, 2005
Monday, February 14, 2005
Can we be cool
Below is a piece I wrote for the Northern Express as a follow-up to a "Cool Cities" article I had already written. The proposed title was "Adverse City," so in some ways it was a precursor to this blog. It's tone is a bit on the provocative side. But don't get mad, write a response!
Adverse City
The "cool cities" craze has more behind it than coffeehouses and sunglasses. The big issue at hand is whether your kids will be able to earn a decent living in Michigan.
by Oran Kelley
A few weeks ago I wrote in this space about Richard Florida's book The Rise of the Creative Class and its considerable influence in Michigan, most especially in the governor's “Cool Cities” campaign. The association of the word “cool” with Florida's work has tended to give it an air of frivolity. But Florida's points are actually in deadly earnest.
While new lifestyles are important to his work, the reason why the book is important is not because it defines who is "cool." Florida is an important read because it attempts to define who will flourish and who will languish in an economic world that is still in the process of emerging. To translate to the Michigan idiom, “cool” is living in an area with a wide variety of satisfying and good-paying jobs. Less cool is living in an area whose economy depends on providing inessential, low-cost services to the "cool" folk.
Florida uses a great deal of economic, demographic and cultural preference data to demonstrate his point about the emergence of this new class. It is important to note, though, as with seemingly all statistical studies, Florida's argument is a matter of interpretation, and some experts have questioned Florida's arguments. But I'd argue that, regardless of some of the arguments over detail, there are some important take-home messages for northern Michigan in The Rise of the Creative Class.
It is of course impossible to do justice to Florida's work in a short article such as this (even when there are two episodes!), but I think I can boil down his important points to this: we are living in a time when two significant changes--one economic, one cultural--are happening in our society, and one of the important effects of these changes is the emergence of a new class of workers: the Creative Class.
The "core" of this new class is composed of "people in science and engineering, architecture and design, education, arts, music, and entertainment, whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology, and/or new creative content." Join to these the creative professionals, "a broader group ... in business, finance, law, and health care [who] engage in complex problem solving that involves a great deal of independent judgment and requires high levels of education or human capital."
The Creative Class constitutes 30% of the US workforce, but almost half of its earnings. The future promises more jobs and an even more disproportionate share of earnings for the Creative Class.
In addition to identifying a type of job (creative), a working style (relatively independent, tending toward entrepreneurial), and a number of preferred areas (San Francisco, Austin, and Ann Arbor being among them) which will help shape the economy of the future, Florida also identifies a number of cultural characteristics that help define the new class.
Here’s a passage from an essay Florida wrote on his research for Washington Monthly:
Adverse City
The "cool cities" craze has more behind it than coffeehouses and sunglasses. The big issue at hand is whether your kids will be able to earn a decent living in Michigan.
by Oran Kelley
A few weeks ago I wrote in this space about Richard Florida's book The Rise of the Creative Class and its considerable influence in Michigan, most especially in the governor's “Cool Cities” campaign. The association of the word “cool” with Florida's work has tended to give it an air of frivolity. But Florida's points are actually in deadly earnest.
While new lifestyles are important to his work, the reason why the book is important is not because it defines who is "cool." Florida is an important read because it attempts to define who will flourish and who will languish in an economic world that is still in the process of emerging. To translate to the Michigan idiom, “cool” is living in an area with a wide variety of satisfying and good-paying jobs. Less cool is living in an area whose economy depends on providing inessential, low-cost services to the "cool" folk.
Florida uses a great deal of economic, demographic and cultural preference data to demonstrate his point about the emergence of this new class. It is important to note, though, as with seemingly all statistical studies, Florida's argument is a matter of interpretation, and some experts have questioned Florida's arguments. But I'd argue that, regardless of some of the arguments over detail, there are some important take-home messages for northern Michigan in The Rise of the Creative Class.
It is of course impossible to do justice to Florida's work in a short article such as this (even when there are two episodes!), but I think I can boil down his important points to this: we are living in a time when two significant changes--one economic, one cultural--are happening in our society, and one of the important effects of these changes is the emergence of a new class of workers: the Creative Class.
The "core" of this new class is composed of "people in science and engineering, architecture and design, education, arts, music, and entertainment, whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology, and/or new creative content." Join to these the creative professionals, "a broader group ... in business, finance, law, and health care [who] engage in complex problem solving that involves a great deal of independent judgment and requires high levels of education or human capital."
The Creative Class constitutes 30% of the US workforce, but almost half of its earnings. The future promises more jobs and an even more disproportionate share of earnings for the Creative Class.
In addition to identifying a type of job (creative), a working style (relatively independent, tending toward entrepreneurial), and a number of preferred areas (San Francisco, Austin, and Ann Arbor being among them) which will help shape the economy of the future, Florida also identifies a number of cultural characteristics that help define the new class.
Here’s a passage from an essay Florida wrote on his research for Washington Monthly:
The Creative Class tends to favor ”active, participatory recreation over passive, institutionalized forms. They prefer indigenous street level culture a teeming blend of cafes, sidewalk musicians, and small galleries and bistros, where it is hard to draw the line between performers and spectators. They crave stimulation, not escape. They want to pack their time full of dense, high quality, multidimensional experiences. Seldom has one of my subjects expressed a desire to get away from it all. They want to get into it all, and do it with eyes wide open.
The most highly valued options [for Creative people] were experiential ones interesting music venues, neighborhood art galleries, performance spaces, and theaters. A vibrant, varied nightlife was viewed by many as another signal that a city "gets it," even by those who infrequently partake in nightlife. More than anything, the creative class craves real experiences in the real world.
The creative class people I study use the word "diversity" a lot, but not to press any political hot buttons. Diversity is simply something they value in all its manifestations. This is spoken of so often, and so matter-of- factly, that I take it to be a fundamental marker of creative class values. Creative minded people enjoy a mix of influences. They want to hear different kinds of music and try different
kinds of food. They want to meet and socialize with people unlike themselves, trade views and spar over issues.
Creative class people value active outdoor recreation very highly. They are drawn to places and communities where many outdoor activities are prevalent both because they enjoy these activities and because their presence is seen as a signal that the place is amenable to the broader creative lifestyle. The creative class people in my
studies are into a variety of active sports, from traditional ones like bicycling, jogging, and kayaking to newer, more extreme ones, like trail running and snowboarding.
Another point Florida makes is that the usual thinking on regional development (attract the businesses and the workers will follow) seems not to apply with the new Creative economy. Here, attracting creative people is primary. The businesses then follow (or even arise out of) the workforce.
So, if the road to economic prosperity may lie through the creation of "cool" cities, does Michigan stand a chance? Michigan's economy definitely is at something of a disadvantage in converting to Richard Florida's new, information intensive economy. Until recently, Michigan's economy was still strongly based on heavy industry the car industry most prominently. (But, to look at the bright side, the severe industrial job losses we've been experiencing lately may finally take care of that!)
Also, Michigan has been doing a pretty bad job of retaining its college graduates, and its cities performed terribly on Richard Florida's "Creative Index" a list calculated to gauge the economic vibrancy of urban regions.
But there is hope for Michigan, I think. But it does not lie in the "more of the same stuff we've always done" attitude being pushed by civic and cultural officialdom here in Michigan. Florida is quite explicit about this. The Rise of the Creative Class is not a feel good book for our political and cultural leaders, because most of them have been doing a crummy job of building the social and cultural infrastructure that will attract the creative class.
But if we need to change the direction of the civic freight train, we're a lot better off if the train is a small one rather than a big one. Which is one reason why I think Michigan's best chance of attracting and retaining the creative class lies with its small cities rather than its big ones.
_____________________________________________
In his analysis of employment and income trends, Florida divides the economy into three basic sectors: Industrial, Service and Creative. Looking at the future prospects for each of the three, I think we'll see that it is highly desirable that Northern Michigan ought to pursue the course Florida recommends with some avidity.
Northern Michigan does not stand much of a chance to grow very much in the realm of manufacturing. One area, construction, is already a major employer here, but one has to be skeptical that this is truly a growth industry for this area: there is a finite amount of construction we can have in Northern Michigan before we remove the incentive for people to move here, and if we remove the incentive for people to move here, there will be little call for new construction. Construction then is a self-limiting industry in this area in a way that it probably isn’t in New Jersey or Connecticut. The main incentive for building in these places is to create more new homes in proximity to New York City. New Jersey and Connecticut will always be near New York, no matter how much construction goes on there, so construction there does not interfere immediately with the direct incentive for growth. People move to Northern Michigan in large part to get away from the sort of explosive growth seen in the major metropolitan areas, so growth in construction in Northern Michigan has to be contained in order for it to continue at all.
This should not be seen as a justification for the selfish, Luddite, close the door behind me attitude so often found among Northern Michiganders. What is needed is a rational policy of containment and controlled growth, not the systematic and irrational obstruction of any proposal that provides for growth. The reason I call this attitude irrational in addition to being selfish is that the growth will happen to some extend no matter how little we prepare for it or how rude we are to newcomers and tourists. The best way to prevent this area from turning into the sort of suburban/exurban wasteland we see in so many other places is to direct growth to places where it makes sense. The best way to do this is to optimize development in core areas, like Traverse City itself. A clever long-term growth strategy can give us both a town with some critical mass and a lot of nearby wilderness and open space.
Northern Michigan also stands at a disadvantage in other areas of industry. The new economy makes great demands on manufacturers. With the emergence of economies like India and the Philippines as industrial powers with large, well educated, English speaking populations, the main long term advantage a domestic manufacturer will have in the future will not be the quality of the American workforce, it will be flexibility contingent on proximity. In an atmosphere where everyone's goal seems to be keeping inventories to an absolute minimum domestic manufacturers will thrive on their ability to produce new items quickly and to make delivery of items with the lowest possible lead time. Being five hours from the nation's main drag will always keep Northern Michigan at a competitive disadvantage in this manufacturing environment. For orders where time is not of the essence, the new industrial economies will dominate because of their ability to deliver adequate or better product at very low prices.
On the other hand, Traverse City will probably have a plethora of jobs in service industries. With good stewardship, we can probably be more of a tourist destination in the future than we are today, and with an aging population, there will be a lot of jobs in the medical field, as well as in areas like institutional food service.
The trouble with service jobs, though, is that they don't pay well. There are exceptions, of course, nurses being the most obvious example. But, by and large, the service economy is by its very nature labor intensive and it depends on low labor costs to stay competitive.
The service economy faces several areas of pressure in the future: first, services that can be exported telephone marketing and call centers, for instance are quickly moving offshore to the same developing economies mentioned above. Second, many of the services offered by the service economy are inessential: people don't need to purchase them; they merely elect to purchase them. In this arena, cost becomes a very important deciding factor in whether or not a service will be adopted or put aside.
Even where a service is essential there is a tolerance level beyond which society begins to seriously question costs and benefits of services. In spite of all the valorization of doctors and medical science, in spite of the seemingly universal desire to live forever, in spite of all our efforts to hide the costs of health care through government shell games, we are now beginning to face the question of how much this service is really worth to us.
When the service being offered is not something essential, say, a luxury vacation or a dinner out, cost can very quickly become an incentive for people to simply opt out and pursue lower cost alternatives.
In the service industry, the main way to keep those costs low is to keep employee compensation low. And the downward pressure on wages gets to be even more intense if there are relatively few employment alternatives in the geographic area you live in.
Florida’s schema makes it clear where development efforts ought to be focusing: on creating a workforce capable of filling the jobs of the Creative Economy, jobs involving lots of skills and lots of creative thinking.
The trouble with a lot of the planning and investment that has taken place up till now is that it has been planning and investment in economic dead ends: Traverse City will never be a major manufacturing center, and the service industries that many civic leaders seem to count as our economic future are never going to provide very many good jobs.
In other words, a lot of our efforts at regional planning and employment development have been preparing for a future in which college graduates from this area will be forced to move elsewhere to work, and where Traverse City will be a distinctly second-class or even third-class economy.
______________________________________________________
It might at first seem counterintuitive to suppose that small cities like Traverse City have any choice but to accept third-class-status in the new economy Florida envisages. After all, the things that attract the creative class are the sorts of things to be found in places like New York City, things that can only exist where there is a huge market.
To a certain extent this is true. Traverse City will never have the Metropolitan Museum. And Traverse City is not likely to have a Chinatown section anytime soon.
But, Florida's creative economy does hold some promise for Northern Michigan. Much of the creative economy delivers information and expertise rather than goods, which means creative businesses can run anywhere, so why not here? And many of the creative businesses that do deal in goods deal in specialized, high value added items, the sort of items where issues other than labor cost become crucial to market position.
So why not here? The immediate answer that springs to mind is "Because Northern Michigan is about as different from the urbane, tolerant places the creative class likes as can possibly be imagined. This is the backwoods.”
But, as important as that backwoods image might be to some folk who live up here, Northern Michigan is not completely populated by former extras from Deliverance. We actually live in a relatively talent rich area with many potential attractions for the Creative Class. Once all the pluses and minuses are accounted for, Michigan's best hope for retaining more of its native creative class and attracting out of state creative types may be in small cities like Traverse City rather than with big cities like Detroit and Flint.
But, the Creative Class is moving back to the big cities, right? Yes, but not to all big cities: Detroit, Flint and Grand Rapids are not drawing them. Detroit and Flint because these cities have huge social and economic problems which no one from city authorities on up to the Federal government seems ready to address.
Grand Rapids probably has a better balance of potential and problems. While the downtown revitalization efforts underway seem to hold up a candle of hope for the town, Grand Rapids still seems (at least from a distance) to be a city dedicated to the sort of boring respectability best personified by GR native Gerald Ford. There are developing problems, as well. For instance, elements of the religious right seem to think of Grand Rapids as a Great Lakes Colorado Springs: an outpost from which it can wage its cultural wars state- and even nation-wide. (Go here for some words on this. It isn't the conservatism of West Michigan as such that is the problem, but the particularly intolerant brand of it that seems to be taking hold there. The creative class can thrive in a free-market, libertairian environment, but not in an intolerant one.)
But, you ask, all those downstate problems aside, what has Traverse City got that these places don't?
For one thing, our problems are on a manageable scale, and they can probably stay that way with some forward-looking governance. Another potential we have is for strong regional development strategies. There are deep conflicts between Detroit and its suburbs, for instance. At this stage, voters and politicians in Northern Michigan can probably be convinced that there is a great deal of community of interest between town and country here, and a coordinated development strategy would go a long way to giving this area an edge in winning over the creative class.
Another thing we've got is nature and all of its attendant recreational activities: cross-country and downhill skiing, canoeing & kayaking, biking, camping fishing, etc. While they are gravitating toward cities there is a decided proclivity amongst the Creative Class toward outdoor, participatory, physical activities. We've got that.
Another strength we've got is the Internet: we are a well-wired community with lots of bandwidth per capita and lots of talent in networking and programming. We ought to make every effort to make sure that that remains the case: computer networks will be the backbone of the creative economy here in Northern Michigan. The stronger that backbone, the better our chance will be.
We also have a disproportionate number of artists and creative people here, who have already been attracted by our landscape and by the lifestyles they feel they can lead here. We can begin to list the national level musicians, artists, writers and academics that live here but, for fear of leaving someone out, we'll refrain. BUT, in spite of the sometimes pervasive contempt for the familiar many of us have, we should give credit where it's due: there's a lot of talent up here.
Lastly, we have a nascent "street culture" developing. Most obviously in Traverse City, but in other places across the area as well. But I'll reiterate a disputed point from my prior story: this has happened in large part in spite of rather than because of the efforts of the holders of the cultural purse-strings in this area, and that's only now beginning to change.
There is still altogether too much effort being put at the extremes of the cultural spectrum here in Northern Michigan: a seeming obsession with the lowest common denominator (and sometimes this is very low indeed) on the one hand, and an fixation on boring high cultural respectability (and, dare we say, cronyism) on the other. What is needed is a bit more concentration is the vital center: emerging artists and emerging markets and casual venues. This, of course, requires some risk, and it involves supporting artists and entrepreneurs who aren't already friends with all the right people.
But if our cultural leaders aren't willing to take risks then we'd all better start trying to figure out where our children will have to move to get a decent job.
Another area where we need work is diversity and tolerance. This is one of the whitest places in the country, and for some of us who fled from Detroit or Flint to avoid having to see any dark complexions or hear any exotic accents, this is a fine thing. But if we want our area to be economically viable, we're going to have to start changing our tune. One of the strongest factors related to economic success in Richard Florida's research is diversity: ethnic and sexual. There is certainly a vocal and visible cohort of our neighbors who are foursquare in support of diversity, but this isn't quite the norm here. While some may prefer to forget, the "We Are Traverse City" sticker was officially repudiated by our civic elders, and that proposal to officially limit the rights of homosexuals it was endorsed by the establishment candidate for mayor. If we want our region to be amongst the economic winners in the next 25 years or so, we will make Northern Michigan into a place that openly welcomes difference, rather than one that is decidedly ambivalent about it.
Keep in mind the next time one of your neighbor spouts off about gays: this isn't just a peccadillo, this is bigotry. And it's bigotry that may cost you or one of your kids a chance at a decent living up here. If you aren't inspired by common decency, let yourself be inspired by enlightened self-interest: Intolerance is economic sabotage!
Politicians here still seem to cater first to their friends and second to the white flight folk. The booboisie who seemingly are first and foremost concerned with then internal combustion engine in all of its most extreme permutations: the stock car, the Hummer, the overpowered snowmobile, the exceedingly loud motorboat all necessary perhaps to escape at a moment's notice the much feared incursion of non whites or gays into our snowy white enclaves. But, in more than one way these gas guzzling, under mufflered engines represent the past of our state, our region and our country.
The future of Northern Michigan lies in another direction: tolerance nay, embrace of diversity; and emphasis on physical, participatory activities; the growth of Internet and talent intensive jobs, and a lively cultural scene that happens at street level, not in the rarified ether of "high culture" or on the increasingly degenerate ether of television broadcasts.
In short, the future of Northern Michigan lies in emphasizing and caring for what we ran toward, not what we might have run away from.
OPK
Wednesday, February 09, 2005
(This is just a quick and dirty notice, which I will extend later)
I was tooling around the local college library the other day looking for things that might help flesh out my comparison of Traverse City and Montana and I found a couple of very interesting items, one was a community survey that was done over the course of a few years in the 1990s which had a lot of good data on "Bowling Alone" sorts of issues. We'll talk about this at some later point.
Another was Changing Places, the doctoral dissertation of a fellow by the name of Brian Hoey from the anthropology department at the University of Michigan. I found it funny to think of an anthropologist studying us up here in exotic Northern Michigan as if we were a bunch of hunter-gatherers in New Guinea. Somehow it didn't seem altogether far-fetched.
But, humor aside, the thing is full of interesting observations, good real-life stories of "lifestyle migrants," and contrary to all my previous experience with doctoral dissertations, the thing is actually readable and the author is identifiable as a real human being.
Hoey combines a number of qualities that make him an interesting start on a discussion of TC. Because he is a university trained anthropologist who has studied in the field in Indonesia as well as in Traverse City, he has cultivated the ability to see his subject at a certain remove, to contextualize northwest Michigan—historically and culturally—in a way many editorial-letter-writers seem to find impossible.
Though Hoey’s kind of ethnography relies on extensive interviews and prolonged with his subjects (northern Michiganders), it also relies on a cerain distance and objectivity.
But, in spite of Hoey’s academic credentials, he’s a peer with his subjects. He’s here not just to do a job, but because he wants to be here. He, too, is a lifestyle migrant, he, too, loves the lakes, and sailing, and the small town atmosphere. And as he finishes his dissertation Hoey, like many other well-educated young people in northern Michigan is about to enter a job market that has little call for his expertise.
All in all Hoey’s dissertation gives us some great information about what people are looking for coming to this area, what they are running from, and what they most value. Hoey is a great tool for making explicit what so often goes unspoken in this area.
We need a frank and sustained discussion of what we value about this place and what values are going to shape our future.
There are of course reasons why we have not had this sort of discussion in the past. One is that there has always been a tension in this town between natives and newcomers. But it is important taking a “deep time” perspective, we all got here relatively recently. This area was really only extensively settled by whites in the years after the Civil War. And the native population didn’t grow up out of the earth, either—who knows what violence might have occasioned the settlement of this area by the Ottawa and bands that whites found here in the early days of colonialism?
But since the 1970s, there has been a marked increase in in-migration to the area, and it is no coincidence that this was the heyday of white flight from the inner cities to the suburbs. The flight to TC can be seen as a more or less “extended white flight.” (Though it must be noted that Hoey himself finds mostly deeper and more laudible motives in our migrants)
So these sorts of discussions immediately bring up two subjects that are rather uncomfortable. The naked self-interest of the shut the door behind me phenomenon, the internal tensions between pre-WWII families and those who had migrated to TC as part of the great suburban migration in the cities of the Midwest, and finally, the fact that one of the great attractions of TC was the nearly complete and utter absence of racial minorities in the area. If Richard Florida is right, though, that attraction is quickly becoming a serious drawback to our area as a place that can provide meaningful and rewarding employment for our children.
OPK
I was tooling around the local college library the other day looking for things that might help flesh out my comparison of Traverse City and Montana and I found a couple of very interesting items, one was a community survey that was done over the course of a few years in the 1990s which had a lot of good data on "Bowling Alone" sorts of issues. We'll talk about this at some later point.
Another was Changing Places, the doctoral dissertation of a fellow by the name of Brian Hoey from the anthropology department at the University of Michigan. I found it funny to think of an anthropologist studying us up here in exotic Northern Michigan as if we were a bunch of hunter-gatherers in New Guinea. Somehow it didn't seem altogether far-fetched.
But, humor aside, the thing is full of interesting observations, good real-life stories of "lifestyle migrants," and contrary to all my previous experience with doctoral dissertations, the thing is actually readable and the author is identifiable as a real human being.
Hoey combines a number of qualities that make him an interesting start on a discussion of TC. Because he is a university trained anthropologist who has studied in the field in Indonesia as well as in Traverse City, he has cultivated the ability to see his subject at a certain remove, to contextualize northwest Michigan—historically and culturally—in a way many editorial-letter-writers seem to find impossible.
Though Hoey’s kind of ethnography relies on extensive interviews and prolonged with his subjects (northern Michiganders), it also relies on a cerain distance and objectivity.
But, in spite of Hoey’s academic credentials, he’s a peer with his subjects. He’s here not just to do a job, but because he wants to be here. He, too, is a lifestyle migrant, he, too, loves the lakes, and sailing, and the small town atmosphere. And as he finishes his dissertation Hoey, like many other well-educated young people in northern Michigan is about to enter a job market that has little call for his expertise.
All in all Hoey’s dissertation gives us some great information about what people are looking for coming to this area, what they are running from, and what they most value. Hoey is a great tool for making explicit what so often goes unspoken in this area.
We need a frank and sustained discussion of what we value about this place and what values are going to shape our future.
There are of course reasons why we have not had this sort of discussion in the past. One is that there has always been a tension in this town between natives and newcomers. But it is important taking a “deep time” perspective, we all got here relatively recently. This area was really only extensively settled by whites in the years after the Civil War. And the native population didn’t grow up out of the earth, either—who knows what violence might have occasioned the settlement of this area by the Ottawa and bands that whites found here in the early days of colonialism?
But since the 1970s, there has been a marked increase in in-migration to the area, and it is no coincidence that this was the heyday of white flight from the inner cities to the suburbs. The flight to TC can be seen as a more or less “extended white flight.” (Though it must be noted that Hoey himself finds mostly deeper and more laudible motives in our migrants)
So these sorts of discussions immediately bring up two subjects that are rather uncomfortable. The naked self-interest of the shut the door behind me phenomenon, the internal tensions between pre-WWII families and those who had migrated to TC as part of the great suburban migration in the cities of the Midwest, and finally, the fact that one of the great attractions of TC was the nearly complete and utter absence of racial minorities in the area. If Richard Florida is right, though, that attraction is quickly becoming a serious drawback to our area as a place that can provide meaningful and rewarding employment for our children.
OPK
Wednesday, February 02, 2005
Global Warming
The global warming issue has, ahhhh, heated up of late.
First there was Michael Crichton's attempt to debunk global warming as environmentalist hysteria. This was followed by a lot of new data tending to shore up human-caused global warming as an important problem. Now the British government has been pushing the issue, telling the US that the world would be more interested in fighting global terrorism if the US would show a bit more interest in the global environment, especially human-caused global warming.
I wrote a pretty lightly critical review of Crichton's book in these pages, and I still think pretty much the same thing as I did then: Crichton's book isn't very good as a novel, but it is interesting as polemic. Not to say that it's right. I doubt that it is.
But what I do think is that arguments tend to get a lot sharper and more convincing when everybody knows that there are intelligent skeptics in the audinece. Crichton and, before him, Bjorn Lomborg have given notice that there is an intelligent contingent in the opposition to the notion of global warming, and I think the arguments in support for the proposition are bound to get better in light of that skepticism.
Nothing is worse than a field where everyone just agrees with one another. The competition in fields like that goes away from determining who has the sharpest and most convincing argument to finding out who can state the argument in the most extreme and absolutist terms.
There is a very good website out there for those interested in the technicalia of global warming: www.realclimate.org.
First there was Michael Crichton's attempt to debunk global warming as environmentalist hysteria. This was followed by a lot of new data tending to shore up human-caused global warming as an important problem. Now the British government has been pushing the issue, telling the US that the world would be more interested in fighting global terrorism if the US would show a bit more interest in the global environment, especially human-caused global warming.
I wrote a pretty lightly critical review of Crichton's book in these pages, and I still think pretty much the same thing as I did then: Crichton's book isn't very good as a novel, but it is interesting as polemic. Not to say that it's right. I doubt that it is.
But what I do think is that arguments tend to get a lot sharper and more convincing when everybody knows that there are intelligent skeptics in the audinece. Crichton and, before him, Bjorn Lomborg have given notice that there is an intelligent contingent in the opposition to the notion of global warming, and I think the arguments in support for the proposition are bound to get better in light of that skepticism.
Nothing is worse than a field where everyone just agrees with one another. The competition in fields like that goes away from determining who has the sharpest and most convincing argument to finding out who can state the argument in the most extreme and absolutist terms.
There is a very good website out there for those interested in the technicalia of global warming: www.realclimate.org.
RealClimate is a commentary site on climate science by working climate scientists for the interested public and journalists. We aim to provide a quick response to developing stories and provide the context sometimes missing in mainstream commentary. The discussion here is restricted to scientific topics and will not get involved in any political or economic implications of the science.
(from the site)
I highly recommend this site for those of you who are really interested in the science.
No one can stay out of politics on this issue, of course, and there has been some controversy over realclimate, though its been fairly civil and reasonably argued controvery.
Check out the Promethius archives for some criticism of realclimate.org.
OPK
Saturday, January 29, 2005
Dirda for Hitchens?
Michael Dirda is a critic for Washington Post Bookworld.
I am fond of Dirda for a number of reasons. First, he is a middlebrow in an age which largely disdains efforts at public education. Second, he is from a working-class background and is neither afraid to talk about it or using it as a touchstone in everything he writes. Third, he has championed genre writing—the science fiction of Philip Dick, for instance—as serious reading (rather than as fun slumming or mere cultural artifact).
I suppose I can see a lot of myself in Dirda, and I see a lot of what I aspire to in what he has already accomplished. He’s a Northern, working-class kid, a scholarship boy in the Hoggartian sense, and a man who has developed a level of comfort with both the old traditions of “high culture” and a way of communicating that comfort to a relatively broad audience through the newspaper and the Internet. And also through books.
Dirda’s second collection of essays and reviews has recently come out. For fans of his first collection, Readings, this second collection may come as a bit of a disappointment. Readings was a slim volume of pieces cherry-picked from Dirda’s journalism to best reflect that which was most characteristically Dirdian. There was very little of the sort of workaday reviewing that necessarily makes up most of his work for the Post. Bound to Please is a different matter. It is a much bigger book than Readings, and it can print only that which came after or was passed over for the earlier book.
So, the reader oughtn’t come to Bound to Please with the expectation of the intimate experience we got in Readings. But, as a collection of reiews, this isn’t bad. Dirda always writes clearly, and there’s usually some insight or aside that makes each short review more than worthwhile.
This is an excellent book for idle perusing. But one really longs for Dirda to be given a better platform than the Post’s Bookworld pages. Many of these essays seem like they were quite a bit longer in an earlier draft. and most of those can use the extra length.
I’d be interested to see Dirda taking up a post like Christopher Hitchens’s gig at the Atlantic. In fact, as Hitchens has become more and more self-indulgent and positive pontifical in his Atlantic criticism, it owuld seem to me to be trading up at this point to replace Hitchens with Dirda. Dirda’s erudition is rather more pedestrian that Hitchens’s maybe, but Hitchens’s bailiwick is seeming very narrow lately—how much more are we expected to read about the death throws of the British Empire and the literature that coincided with it? At this point in history, not only is the British Empire dead, but the death of the British empire is dead.
And I think we ought not be shy of declaring the death of a certain strain the post-imperialist British writing, either. Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens—the spawn of Nabokov and Naipul—are over. (They all might want to deny the Naipaul legacy, but it's become pretty apparent of late.)
Martin Amis once wrote that “The novelist has a very firm conception of the Ideal Reader. It is himself . . .” I’m not sure he’s right about “the” novelist, but it certainly seems to me that he’s right about himself and his close friends Hitchens and Rushdie. They write for well-heeled, Oxbridge educated males. And those who desperately want to attain to that condition.
Once, perhaps, I may have been someone who wanted to gain access to this metropolitan elite, but anymore I find them to be privileged dinosaurs, living out an anachronistic afterlife courtesy of Anglophone sentimentality. These are all talented men, no doubt, but to me it seems they are attempting to pass elaborate erudition and natural superiority when these things have simply lost their currency. They may soldier on in the same manner in a sort of Sinatra-esque endless farewell tour (Hitchens definitely looks to be the Dean Martin type), or they may well transform themselves into something more meaningful. But time has come that we put these folks aside as our literary ideals.
Appropriately enough, Dirda would not represent an absolute break from the Nabakov line. He, too, is a great admirer of the Swiss master, and he has been generally respectful to the post-imperialists, as well. But his predilections are for the middle brow and his admiration of the really quite different Pynchon-esque American stream modern fiction.
OPK
I am fond of Dirda for a number of reasons. First, he is a middlebrow in an age which largely disdains efforts at public education. Second, he is from a working-class background and is neither afraid to talk about it or using it as a touchstone in everything he writes. Third, he has championed genre writing—the science fiction of Philip Dick, for instance—as serious reading (rather than as fun slumming or mere cultural artifact).
I suppose I can see a lot of myself in Dirda, and I see a lot of what I aspire to in what he has already accomplished. He’s a Northern, working-class kid, a scholarship boy in the Hoggartian sense, and a man who has developed a level of comfort with both the old traditions of “high culture” and a way of communicating that comfort to a relatively broad audience through the newspaper and the Internet. And also through books.
Dirda’s second collection of essays and reviews has recently come out. For fans of his first collection, Readings, this second collection may come as a bit of a disappointment. Readings was a slim volume of pieces cherry-picked from Dirda’s journalism to best reflect that which was most characteristically Dirdian. There was very little of the sort of workaday reviewing that necessarily makes up most of his work for the Post. Bound to Please is a different matter. It is a much bigger book than Readings, and it can print only that which came after or was passed over for the earlier book.
So, the reader oughtn’t come to Bound to Please with the expectation of the intimate experience we got in Readings. But, as a collection of reiews, this isn’t bad. Dirda always writes clearly, and there’s usually some insight or aside that makes each short review more than worthwhile.
This is an excellent book for idle perusing. But one really longs for Dirda to be given a better platform than the Post’s Bookworld pages. Many of these essays seem like they were quite a bit longer in an earlier draft. and most of those can use the extra length.
I’d be interested to see Dirda taking up a post like Christopher Hitchens’s gig at the Atlantic. In fact, as Hitchens has become more and more self-indulgent and positive pontifical in his Atlantic criticism, it owuld seem to me to be trading up at this point to replace Hitchens with Dirda. Dirda’s erudition is rather more pedestrian that Hitchens’s maybe, but Hitchens’s bailiwick is seeming very narrow lately—how much more are we expected to read about the death throws of the British Empire and the literature that coincided with it? At this point in history, not only is the British Empire dead, but the death of the British empire is dead.
And I think we ought not be shy of declaring the death of a certain strain the post-imperialist British writing, either. Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens—the spawn of Nabokov and Naipul—are over. (They all might want to deny the Naipaul legacy, but it's become pretty apparent of late.)
Martin Amis once wrote that “The novelist has a very firm conception of the Ideal Reader. It is himself . . .” I’m not sure he’s right about “the” novelist, but it certainly seems to me that he’s right about himself and his close friends Hitchens and Rushdie. They write for well-heeled, Oxbridge educated males. And those who desperately want to attain to that condition.
Once, perhaps, I may have been someone who wanted to gain access to this metropolitan elite, but anymore I find them to be privileged dinosaurs, living out an anachronistic afterlife courtesy of Anglophone sentimentality. These are all talented men, no doubt, but to me it seems they are attempting to pass elaborate erudition and natural superiority when these things have simply lost their currency. They may soldier on in the same manner in a sort of Sinatra-esque endless farewell tour (Hitchens definitely looks to be the Dean Martin type), or they may well transform themselves into something more meaningful. But time has come that we put these folks aside as our literary ideals.
Appropriately enough, Dirda would not represent an absolute break from the Nabakov line. He, too, is a great admirer of the Swiss master, and he has been generally respectful to the post-imperialists, as well. But his predilections are for the middle brow and his admiration of the really quite different Pynchon-esque American stream modern fiction.
OPK
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
A new consituency?
Fiona Morgan wrote some time ago in North Carolina's Independent Weekly:
OPK
Perhaps this is part of what Florida means in his chapter "The Creative Class Grows Up," when he urges its members to see themselves as a group and take the responsibility of mobilizing as such. "Class is a dirty word in America," he writes. "But for the Creative Class and society as a whole, a little class awareness would be a healthy thing." He exhorts the group to get organized around three goals: investment in creativity (i.e., schools over stadiums and research centers over factories); overcoming the class divide and finding a channel for the creative potentials of people in the working class and service class; and "building new forms of social cohesion."
If you're not into traditional politics, fine, he says, but get involved. "Unless we design new forms of civic involvement appropriate to our times, we will be left with a substantial void in our society and politics that will ultimately limit our ability to achieve the economic growth and rising living standards we desire."
Living in Traverse City, a city to which thousands of people have migrated over the past thirty years or so, a city which has become a city of migrants--my experience living here gets me to wondering about the similarities between the situation with Florida's "Creative Class" who have yet to come to self-recognition and TC's incomers.
In spite of the fact that so many new people have moved here over the years, and the fact that so many things have changed culturally because of that in-migration, in spite of these things politics still seems to have a throwback quality to it. What do I mean by that? Well, the legacy of old guard folks, the people who helped put TC on the map in the 1950s still seems to hold a lot of sway. The same family names keep cropping up in local politics, even when the current holders of those surnames seem to have lost a little something in the genetic shuffle. And the opposition to the old guard seems to me to have a lot of the same qualities that the 1950s opposition must have had: they are the resentful "outs."
They have a lot of personal axes to grind. They seem to have little in the way of alternative plans and lots in the way of plans for revenge against the entitled. The "ins" on the other hand seem to act alternatively with thoughtless arrogance and petty paranoia. Where, I wonder, are the people who don't give a damn about these longstanding resentments? Where are the people who care more about rationally planning a community their children will live in than in the local political soap opera? Where are the people for whom Traverse City is a city undergoing a delicate transition and not a mythical fantasyland?
Incomers, especially, should be interested in developing a political power base here that looks at the city's problems and possibilities with an eye to the future and not to the past. Many of us used to live in places that planned wrong or planned not. That's why a lot of incomers picked up and left. Here in Traverse City growth is the reality, and no amount of griping and nostalgia for the TC of the 1950s and 1960s is going to alter it.
If we don't manage the growth process, though, we're going to be in for trouble. Suburbs grew partly because they were bucolic, but mostly because they were close to (and eventually in) the urban area and its jobs. They're always going to have proximity to jobs going for them.
Traverse City grew and grows because it is beautiful and unlike urban areas in many ways. If we let growth take away those things, TC will become a ghost town--it'll just get used up.
We should be working on identifying ways to keep this area as beautiful as possible and on identifying those "non-urban" qualities that are important, positive and preservable.
Low pay may be a non-urban quality, but I don't think it's one worth defending. Lack of cultural opportunity and anti-intellectualism may be non-urban qualities, but they're just as well put behind us. But things like safety, friendliness and the accessibility of civic leaders are very different matters.
But this is a job we've got to work at. We can't just gripe about change and pretend that griping and being rude to tourists is going to make change go away.
OPK
Sunday, January 09, 2005
More on Diamond, Montana & Adverse City
Reading the interviews with Diamond's Montana "focus group" was especially interesting for me. Many echoes of our situation in Northern Michigan.
Steve Powell, a former county commissioner in Ravalli County, Bitterroot Valley, MT:
Steve Powell, a former county commissioner in Ravalli County, Bitterroot Valley, MT:
I tell my real estate agent and developer friends, "You have to protect the beauty of the landscape, the wildlife, and the agricultural land" Those are the things that create property value. The longer we wait to do planning, the less landscape beauty there will be. Undeveloped land is valuable to the community as a whole: it's an important part of that "quality of life" that attracts people here.
But this situation creates a dilemma. Many farmers who own that "undeveloped land" have no other pension than the potential sale of that land to developers at handsome prices, often in the neighborhood of one million dollars.
It's hard for many people (including me, I admit) to feel sorry for farmers who are sitting on so much capital. We saw the effects of this resentment this past November here in Northern Michigan when a proposal to set up a program to buy development rights fell through in most of the places it was on the ballot. Regular folks just had a hard time setting up a government program to funnel tax money to farmers whom they considered to be rich opportunists. The farmers who stood to reap the biggest benefits were seen as real estate speculators with a means of making money (farming) while they waited for the right offer to come along.
And perhaps it takes an east-coast perspective to savor the irony that the development value of farmland in Montana and Michigan is predicated on some farmland going undeveloped. So whose farmland should become subdivisions and whose should remain marginally profitable farms? Which farmers should retire to collect interest and dividends on Marco Island and which should scrape along on whatever they could reap from selling a farm that is to remain a farm?
Not easy decisions to make. In fact decisions for which there is no real forum for discussion, no process--just a free-market race to get while the getting's good. One wonders if Northern Michigan and Montana--two hotbeds of the delusional militia movement--can even imagine a way of solving a problem like this.
Steve Powell, summing up:
People are trying to preserve the Bitterroot as a rural community, but they can't figure out how to preserve it in a way that would let them survive economically. . . . The fundamental problem here is how we hang on to these attractions that brought us to Montana, while still dealing with the change that can't be avoided.
Here's hoping that they, and we, can manage it. The big step seems to be getting to the point where you can acknowledge that there will be change, whether or not you may want it. The point is to shape the change in a way that produces a relatively desirable outcome.
Here in Michigan, in spite of all the change that's happened already, in spite of the rise of a substantial (but still relatively small) urban area in and around Traverse City, despite all the ugliness (strip malls and the usual random roadside development) that has already happened because people let change happen to them rather than making it happen in a more acceptable fashion--in spite of all this, people still seem to think that the best response to growth is to cover their ears, close their eyes and shout "no, no, no."
Unfortunately we've already seen what that "strategy" gets us.
More later.
OPK
Saturday, January 08, 2005
Adverse City, Montana?
This is a pretty faulty draft, but I may as well get it posted while I work on it:
One of the sections of Diamond’s book I have read through thoroughly is the first chapter on Montana. I was struck by how much Diamond’s descriptions of the Bitterroot Valley in Western Montana reads like Northwest Michigan in extremis. Much of this chapter goes right to the point I am getting at in the title of this blog.
Like Diamond’s Montana, the Grand Traverse area in Michigan is a changing place. Where Montana once had agriculture, lumber and mining as its main industries, Northwest Michigan once depended on lumber and agriculture. Lumber is essentially dead as a job-providing industry, while in the most desirable areas agriculture is beginning to give up the ghost as well.
The problem with lumbering is simply that Michigan, like Montana is not a place for fast-growing. profit-making trees. The problem for agriculture are threefold: 1) the climate and relatively short growing season; 2) the relative remoteness of Northern Michigan from large markets where agriculture goods might be sold at best price; and 3) the rising value of land and an antiquated property tax system which demands that farmers pay property taxes on what the developed value of their land would be rather than its value as a farm.
Cherry farming used to be a mainstay of the economy around Traverse City. It is still important, but now more for the identity of the community than for the employment it provides. (We still have the National Cherry Festival each summer; our airport is “Cherry Capital Airport,” tourists still buy anything labeled “cherry,” etc.). But relatively few people work in the cherry industry or are directly dependent upon that industry for their livelihoods.
Like in Diamond’s Montana, tourism and in-migration have become the two main drivers of the economy here. Many of the jobs created by these drivers, though, are seasonal (tourism, construction), and may be low paying (tourism, service industries of various kinds). For most residents, the only prospects for secure, good-paying employment are in the medical and
governmental (teachers, civil servants) fields.
For young people who wish other sorts of employment, the only real option is to leave northern Michigan for various cities—usually close by: Ann Arbor, Detroit, Chicago; but sometimes far away: Portland, Seattle, New York. So the area experiences a great outflux of the young and
talented, first to get a university education (there is no university in the area) and then to get a job concomitant with the degree they attain.
On the other hand there is a significant influx of early retirees, semi-retirees, and full-fledged retirees who are still vigorous enough to weather and even enjoy Michigan’s severe winters. Many of these people were vacationers to the Traverse City area as children and adults. Some
of them are natives who return to the area once they gain a degree of financial independence.
there are also those of child-bearing years who move back to Traverse City in order to raise their children. Many of these people make a conscious choice to live a simpler and less affluent lifestyle when moving to TC . . .
Now some contrasts should also be made with Diamond’s Montana. In Montana, the process of change is really only just getting started, the degree of isolation remoteness is a great deal higher, and the environment seems to be a great deal more fragile than northern Michigan’s. Diamond talks about the children of Hamilton who have to drive 40 minutes to get to the
nearest mall, but Traverse City is already on its second mall, and we have all the big box stores you could possibly want. In Montana, the natives and the newcomers struggle over issues like paying for the schools, property taxes and environmental strategies. In Traverse City, old-timers—people who are natives and descended from natives—are substantially outnumbered by relative newcomers.
The “old-timer” sentiment here is usually a matter of nostalgia, not a matter of old-timers defending their way of life. Here in Traverse City, the old-timer way of life is gone and the economic basis of the old timer way of life is mostly gone.
But thought the arguments here are probably less bitter than they are in Montana, they can probably be just as intractable. While the "whole way of life" of few of our residents is at stake as we develop, the cherished illusions of many of them are. Many people have made considerable sacrifices in their lives to move somewhere that they could tell themselves was somehow "pristine" or "anti-urban." Many people moving to Northern Michigan did so to escape the cultural and economic maw of the metropolis.
In fact, they never did any such thing, but the growth of the Traverse City area in the last few decades has really driven the point home, and people are unhappy.
OPK
Friday, January 07, 2005
Collapse
Just for the sake of balance, my new book is Jared Diamond's Collapse (I can't remember the last time I read two current best-sellers in a row, but . . .).
I have a lot of respect for Diamond. He's a guy who seems to me to have an excellent understanding of things like genetics and "evolutionary psychology" with the rare addition of having the good sense not to make grandiose claims on the basis of these things. Diamond is also a very good writer, who has something of the intellectual scope of someone like Stephen Jay Gould or Peter Medawar, but whose style is far more spare and simple than Gould's peripatetic intertextuality or Medawar's donnishness.
Diamond is fairly good at dealing with Crichton's sort of environmental skepticism in a fair-minded sort of way, but he's foursquare in the court of those who believe in global warming and in the potential for a global environmental meltdown on the horizon.
That specter on the horizon is the point of the book actually. Through historical examples, Diamond seeks to persuade us to see that that specter of environmental collapse exists and by analyzing the present he hopes to show the much greater scale such a collapse would have in our case.
Diamond also hopes to show us that we oughtn't give up hope for ourselves just yet. Effort and wise stewardship can see us through this potential crisis, and he has historical examples of isolated societies succeeding in such efforts.
I've jumped around in the book a great deal, but I haven't far enough in my cover-to-cover reading just yet to give you an evaluation of Diamond's success in persuading a marginally skeptical reader.
One thing I can say having read several other pieces that respond directly or indirectly to Crichton is this: scientists still have a very difficult time expressing themselves regarding scientific issues that are surrounded by uncertainty. The public expects answers from scientists, not uncertainty, unfortunately what science has to offer are often not certainties, but well-educated guesses and insight into likely and unlikely outcomes for any particular course of action. The lay public hates this--they want science to decide issues for them, not to give them a more information-rich dilemma.
Unfortunately, a lot of scientists seem to have responded to this situation by speaking to the public as if the uncertainty weren't there. To themselves they seem to say "I am a scientist. I have looked over the data. There is some degree of uncertainty, but I feel confident in interpreting the data in such-and-such a way."
In public though, what we get is "I am the expert and I say such-and-such is going to happen and we damn well better do something about it!"
This is one of the things Crichton seems most irked by in the public discussions of global warming: everything gets dumbed down. Discussion is structured in such a way that the scientists are figured as initiates and the public as hopelessly incapable of real participation. Diamond, though, is not really of that ilk. He himself is a poacher across the borderlines between faculties and fields of study (he's now a professor of geography--a classic resting place for thinkers who can't seem to stay in one division of the faculty). So I have high hopes for this book as a clear and honest statement about the environmental crisis we in the 21st century may face.
OPK
I have a lot of respect for Diamond. He's a guy who seems to me to have an excellent understanding of things like genetics and "evolutionary psychology" with the rare addition of having the good sense not to make grandiose claims on the basis of these things. Diamond is also a very good writer, who has something of the intellectual scope of someone like Stephen Jay Gould or Peter Medawar, but whose style is far more spare and simple than Gould's peripatetic intertextuality or Medawar's donnishness.
Diamond is fairly good at dealing with Crichton's sort of environmental skepticism in a fair-minded sort of way, but he's foursquare in the court of those who believe in global warming and in the potential for a global environmental meltdown on the horizon.
That specter on the horizon is the point of the book actually. Through historical examples, Diamond seeks to persuade us to see that that specter of environmental collapse exists and by analyzing the present he hopes to show the much greater scale such a collapse would have in our case.
Diamond also hopes to show us that we oughtn't give up hope for ourselves just yet. Effort and wise stewardship can see us through this potential crisis, and he has historical examples of isolated societies succeeding in such efforts.
I've jumped around in the book a great deal, but I haven't far enough in my cover-to-cover reading just yet to give you an evaluation of Diamond's success in persuading a marginally skeptical reader.
One thing I can say having read several other pieces that respond directly or indirectly to Crichton is this: scientists still have a very difficult time expressing themselves regarding scientific issues that are surrounded by uncertainty. The public expects answers from scientists, not uncertainty, unfortunately what science has to offer are often not certainties, but well-educated guesses and insight into likely and unlikely outcomes for any particular course of action. The lay public hates this--they want science to decide issues for them, not to give them a more information-rich dilemma.
Unfortunately, a lot of scientists seem to have responded to this situation by speaking to the public as if the uncertainty weren't there. To themselves they seem to say "I am a scientist. I have looked over the data. There is some degree of uncertainty, but I feel confident in interpreting the data in such-and-such a way."
In public though, what we get is "I am the expert and I say such-and-such is going to happen and we damn well better do something about it!"
This is one of the things Crichton seems most irked by in the public discussions of global warming: everything gets dumbed down. Discussion is structured in such a way that the scientists are figured as initiates and the public as hopelessly incapable of real participation. Diamond, though, is not really of that ilk. He himself is a poacher across the borderlines between faculties and fields of study (he's now a professor of geography--a classic resting place for thinkers who can't seem to stay in one division of the faculty). So I have high hopes for this book as a clear and honest statement about the environmental crisis we in the 21st century may face.
OPK
Monday, December 20, 2004
Crichton's _State of Fear_
I'm reading Michael Crichton's new book. He was one of the folks who really got me intersted in science back in the days when he wasn't tremendously famous. I've noticed a real falling off in his writing since Jurassic Park made him really rich, but I held out hope that this one might be interesting, anyhow.
And it does look like the book will be interesting. It also looks like the novel will be bad--about on the standard of The Davinci Code: pretty poor as literature, pretty implausible and old as far as plot goes.
But, I skipped to the end just to see what Crichton had as an afterword, and he has an extensive annotated bibliography, mostly on the topics of the politics of science and environmentalism. I get the feeling that a technothriller isn't really what Crichton wanted to write. He wanted to do a reasoned polemic. Instead we get all his research inserted into a plot that reads like some old Saturday afternoon short, with scheming Nazis or Commies. And this complete with characters representing the likes of Ralph Nader--no, I don't like him either, but as evil mastermind . . . well, that stretched credulity. He isn't good enough to be a evil mastermind. Ralph Nader is just a puffed-up schmo. Underserving of villainhood on this scale, in both senses.
If you check out Amazon, you'll see the Dan Brown fans love the book, the environmentalists hate it because they disagree with it. Both camps are wrong: the book is horrible, the ideas are . . . worth having a look at.
To oversimplify, Crichton is taking up Bjorn Lomborg's side of the Skeptical Environmentalist debate. Lomborg's ideas are provocative and hard to summarize in a short piece (I will try to later), but essentially he questions the idea that the world is in a general environmental decline, calling into question a wide range of environmentalist worries, including the loss of species and habitats and global warming.
A group of scientists including EO Wilson led the counter-attack against Lomborg's questions in Scientific American (which has behaved "shamefully" over the course of the controversy, according to Crichton).
And it does look like the book will be interesting. It also looks like the novel will be bad--about on the standard of The Davinci Code: pretty poor as literature, pretty implausible and old as far as plot goes.
But, I skipped to the end just to see what Crichton had as an afterword, and he has an extensive annotated bibliography, mostly on the topics of the politics of science and environmentalism. I get the feeling that a technothriller isn't really what Crichton wanted to write. He wanted to do a reasoned polemic. Instead we get all his research inserted into a plot that reads like some old Saturday afternoon short, with scheming Nazis or Commies. And this complete with characters representing the likes of Ralph Nader--no, I don't like him either, but as evil mastermind . . . well, that stretched credulity. He isn't good enough to be a evil mastermind. Ralph Nader is just a puffed-up schmo. Underserving of villainhood on this scale, in both senses.
If you check out Amazon, you'll see the Dan Brown fans love the book, the environmentalists hate it because they disagree with it. Both camps are wrong: the book is horrible, the ideas are . . . worth having a look at.
To oversimplify, Crichton is taking up Bjorn Lomborg's side of the Skeptical Environmentalist debate. Lomborg's ideas are provocative and hard to summarize in a short piece (I will try to later), but essentially he questions the idea that the world is in a general environmental decline, calling into question a wide range of environmentalist worries, including the loss of species and habitats and global warming.
A group of scientists including EO Wilson led the counter-attack against Lomborg's questions in Scientific American (which has behaved "shamefully" over the course of the controversy, according to Crichton).
If you'd like to read the extensive response from the SciAm team, click here.
Here is Lomborg's blow by blow response.
And SciAm's response to the response.
And so on. More is to be found at the SciAm site and at Lomborg's.
Anyhow, this stuff is far from uninteresting, and Lomborg is far from alone in calling some environmentalist predictions of doom greatly exaggerated. Certainly worth a look and a thought or two.
Coincidentally, I am also reading a book by Stephen Budiansky, who was one of Lomborg's important defenders during the controversy. It's called Nature's Keepers and it deals with the non-scientific wing of the environmental movement, and their links with romanticism, and religious, political and dietary reform movements.
Funny thing, everything I've been reading lately seems to tie into a great whole--here comes creeping wholism!--even when I am trying to change the subject I'm reading about. I started reading Lasch just for the hell of it (I ran across Culture of Narcissism in a thrift shop), and it turned out to have a lot to say about the foreign policy stuff I was writiing about before the election and with some of the anti-modernist trends I was worried about in Wendell Berry. Budiansky I'd read because I love books about codes (he wrote Battle of Wits the story of WWII code-breaking) and I just stumbled upon his writings about those I'll call the Berry-ites (Budiansky never mentions Berry). And Budiansky has something to say about another of my interests--theories of ancient goddess worship. My favorite of these being Robert Graves' writings on this controversial topic.
The Crichton book is less of an accident, but now that seems to be leading me back to another of my little pet issues: the "science wars" of the nineties and the whole struggle over what science is and what it should be doing.
Perhaps one day I will find a really new subject to write about, one that doesn't tie back into my already existing interests. We'll see.
OPK
Sunday, December 12, 2004
Political Theater II
Christopher Lasch today seems a bit dated, especially if you read him for the psychology, which screams 1970s. But there are other, more interesting, ways to read him than as a 1970s Freud wannabe.
For instance, my take on Lasch has always been that his psychology is the least interesting part of his writing: it is far too strongly based on an uncritical acceptance of nineteenth-century moralism (family, work ethic, strong code of personal morality). As much as he'd deny this, Lasch's psychological insights are really driven by a sort of New Deal/Old Left horror at the "irresponsibility" of the New Left that arose out of the 1960s. Especially these days when psychoanalysis has fallen into such general disrepute, Lasch seems to us to play at Freud far too much in Narcissism.
On the other hand when he plays Max Weber, updating Weber's views on Western cultural institutions and their motors, Lasch strikes us as a keen and prescient observer. First-time readers of Weber are often struck by his positive evaluation of what has become for us a dirty word: "bureaucracy." For us bureaucracy exists as the great opposite to capitalist entrepenuerialism, to responding to market needs, to bringing the people what they want and making a little on the side, to healthy competition.
But Weber's bureaucracy didn't replace these things, it replaced corruption, bribes, sweetheart deals between politicians and railroad barons, elections that were bought and sold, success based on who you knew and who you were related to. The Robber barons were aptly named, and though their relentless pursuit of self interest did have some Mandevillian payback for the social good, there was also a fairly steep social cost to pay: inhuman working conditions, displacement, huge inequalities and resultant social friction, and, not least, the communist movement which tyrannized so much of the world for 75 years can be said to be the direct result of the deeply unenlightened pursuit of self interest that Max Weber saw being rightfully tamed and directed through the rise of governmental, legal and administrative bureaucracies.
For Weber, it was through these structures that science, proceduralism and rationality could be introduced into a system whose driving force would remain self-interest.
Today, we are more likely to see the downside of bureaucracy: today, it is bureaucracy that seems to dominate, and the independent pursuit of self interest that seems marginal. Today, bureaucracy seems more to be a self-perpetuating structure, less interested in conditioning the motive forces in the economy than in creating a almost autonomous social subsystem. Bureaucracy tends not toward the conditioning of "reality," it tends toward isolating itself from other realities to the greatest degree possible.
It is for insight into this tendency that we turn to Lasch.
The unfortunate thing is that Lasch was right about the tendency of public administration to attend to image while ignoring real outcomes. This would seem to be one of the easiest lessons to learn from the Vietnam experience "look first to your interests, not to your image" but not only have we not learned that lesson, hardly anyone seems to think the Vietnam experience has anything to say on that score.
The lesson of Vietnam seems to have been "take no military risks if you can possibly avoid them." This is the foreign policy of Colin Powell. Over the last few years we have seen the emphatic rejection of that particular foreign policy, but what has taken its place?
American foreign policy is an interesting animal. Unlike domestic policy, foreign policy is not something we can easily dichotomize. In domestic policy we have fairly well-established liberal and conservative views, which dominate discussion. Then there is the slightly complicating views: libertarians who are economic conservatives and social liberals; fire-eating conservatives who, though they are loud in touting their nominal allegiance to the free market, actually have very little loyalty to it when its findings differ from their prejudices.
In foreign policy, particularly since the fall of the Soviet Union, it is very difficult indeed to make sense of where the various players stand.
The greatest contrast in foreign policy thinking used to be between those who thought of the Soviet Union as a serious threat to the United States and those who did not. But even here there was great complication. There was the wing that thought that Khrushchev's threat to "bury" us was likely to come true if the US didn't act dramatically and soon. There were those who thought that the Soviet Union was a highly corrupt and decaying system, but that they ought to be opposed to the utmost of our ability on moral grounds: they were evil, even if they were not the direct threat the first group made out, and they ought to be thwarted wherever possible. There were those who thought the Soviet system was weak and crumbling and that the fastest way to complete the process of collapse was detante and rapproachment. There were those who saw the Soviet Union as a viable and legitimate and perhaps even necessary alternative to the hegemony of Western capitalism, and that the only way forward was to learn to peacefully co-exist with our rival.
And there were many admixtures of these positions, all with different evaluations of 1) the ability of the US to tolerate any international rival; 2) state socialism; 3) the viability of the Soviet system; 4) the threat posed by the Soviet Union; 5) the most effective way to thwart that threat; 6) the danger of any prolonged confrontation with a well-armed nuclear rival; 7) the moral obligation of the US to thwart advances in Soviet power, regardless of our material interests in doing so.
Now, perhaps the most dramatic dichotomy in US foreign policy has been between the rationalists, influenced most crucially by the political scientist Henry Morgenthau; and the crusaders, who can be represented by Woodrow Wilson, but whose crusading spirit actually has largely taken a different cast.
The limited usefulness of this dichotomy is made immediately clear when we look at the background of the Vietnam scenario sketched out by Christopher Lasch. One of the main proponents of extending the Vietnam war to maintain US "credibility" was Henry Kissinger, a student of Morgenthau's. Most of the people who cried out for the US to cut its losses and withdraw from Vietnam were moralists.
Morgenthau famously wrote an article inn the journal Foreign Affairs where he pretty much laid out the rationalist take on Vietnam: there were no interests there on behalf of which the US ought to sacrifice lives and money. Kissinger responded by weaving one out of the air: credibility.
On the other side, moralists desperately wanted to withdraw from Vietnam, but they wanted to do so for moral reasons, and therefore they concentrated much of their attention on portraying US intervention in Vietnam as not only stupid but as morally reprehensible. Though there was certainly room to argue that dropping millions of tons of high explosive on a country we had little hope of holding at the level of sacrifice we were willing to engage, the moralists went well beyond this, puffing up the legitimacy and humanity of a North Vietnamese government which was , in fact, ruthless, little concerned with the immediate welfare of its people, and not at all concerned with democratic notions of legitimacy.
Unfortunately for all of us, the Morgenthau tradition has passed down to us largely through Henry Kissinger, who still has a great deal of influence over our foreign policy, both through his students and through his being consulted at times of high foreign policy drama.
For instance, Kissinger had a phone conversation with Condoleeza Rice directly before the launch of the most recent intervention in Iraq, urging the administration to pull the trigger on war so as to maintain US credibility: The US could not threaten to do something so prominent and so often and then not do it, regardless of how stupid that action might be.
Hans Morgenthau did not think reputation and image were negligible concerns. Morgenthau, in fact wrote to quite the opposite effect:
Kissinger, though, institutionalized the notion that symbolism trumps all, and for Kissinger and for the current administration, the "mind of the observers" is all that matters, because they have no notion whatsoever of what the true power interests of the US are, what counts as a true (as opposed to an apparent) threat, and what counts as true (as opposed to seeming) security.
Our foreign policy has become a Brechtian perfromative theater, where real blood is spilt and real power gets expended on pursuit of image, rather than material gain.
In an era when our wealth, power and willingness to make real sacrifices are all quite limited, this is a dangerous and stupid way to align foreign policy. Foreign policy as theater means we have almost literally infinite opportunities to expend all these finite resources, and we are unable to choose which to take up on the basis of interest. We make our foreign policy a slave to the image we are seeking to maintain.
In fact, we make ourselves slaves to whatever dictator who can threaten or manipulate that image, which is very, very easy to do.
OPK
For instance, my take on Lasch has always been that his psychology is the least interesting part of his writing: it is far too strongly based on an uncritical acceptance of nineteenth-century moralism (family, work ethic, strong code of personal morality). As much as he'd deny this, Lasch's psychological insights are really driven by a sort of New Deal/Old Left horror at the "irresponsibility" of the New Left that arose out of the 1960s. Especially these days when psychoanalysis has fallen into such general disrepute, Lasch seems to us to play at Freud far too much in Narcissism.
On the other hand when he plays Max Weber, updating Weber's views on Western cultural institutions and their motors, Lasch strikes us as a keen and prescient observer. First-time readers of Weber are often struck by his positive evaluation of what has become for us a dirty word: "bureaucracy." For us bureaucracy exists as the great opposite to capitalist entrepenuerialism, to responding to market needs, to bringing the people what they want and making a little on the side, to healthy competition.
But Weber's bureaucracy didn't replace these things, it replaced corruption, bribes, sweetheart deals between politicians and railroad barons, elections that were bought and sold, success based on who you knew and who you were related to. The Robber barons were aptly named, and though their relentless pursuit of self interest did have some Mandevillian payback for the social good, there was also a fairly steep social cost to pay: inhuman working conditions, displacement, huge inequalities and resultant social friction, and, not least, the communist movement which tyrannized so much of the world for 75 years can be said to be the direct result of the deeply unenlightened pursuit of self interest that Max Weber saw being rightfully tamed and directed through the rise of governmental, legal and administrative bureaucracies.
For Weber, it was through these structures that science, proceduralism and rationality could be introduced into a system whose driving force would remain self-interest.
Today, we are more likely to see the downside of bureaucracy: today, it is bureaucracy that seems to dominate, and the independent pursuit of self interest that seems marginal. Today, bureaucracy seems more to be a self-perpetuating structure, less interested in conditioning the motive forces in the economy than in creating a almost autonomous social subsystem. Bureaucracy tends not toward the conditioning of "reality," it tends toward isolating itself from other realities to the greatest degree possible.
It is for insight into this tendency that we turn to Lasch.
The unfortunate thing is that Lasch was right about the tendency of public administration to attend to image while ignoring real outcomes. This would seem to be one of the easiest lessons to learn from the Vietnam experience "look first to your interests, not to your image" but not only have we not learned that lesson, hardly anyone seems to think the Vietnam experience has anything to say on that score.
The lesson of Vietnam seems to have been "take no military risks if you can possibly avoid them." This is the foreign policy of Colin Powell. Over the last few years we have seen the emphatic rejection of that particular foreign policy, but what has taken its place?
American foreign policy is an interesting animal. Unlike domestic policy, foreign policy is not something we can easily dichotomize. In domestic policy we have fairly well-established liberal and conservative views, which dominate discussion. Then there is the slightly complicating views: libertarians who are economic conservatives and social liberals; fire-eating conservatives who, though they are loud in touting their nominal allegiance to the free market, actually have very little loyalty to it when its findings differ from their prejudices.
In foreign policy, particularly since the fall of the Soviet Union, it is very difficult indeed to make sense of where the various players stand.
The greatest contrast in foreign policy thinking used to be between those who thought of the Soviet Union as a serious threat to the United States and those who did not. But even here there was great complication. There was the wing that thought that Khrushchev's threat to "bury" us was likely to come true if the US didn't act dramatically and soon. There were those who thought that the Soviet Union was a highly corrupt and decaying system, but that they ought to be opposed to the utmost of our ability on moral grounds: they were evil, even if they were not the direct threat the first group made out, and they ought to be thwarted wherever possible. There were those who thought the Soviet system was weak and crumbling and that the fastest way to complete the process of collapse was detante and rapproachment. There were those who saw the Soviet Union as a viable and legitimate and perhaps even necessary alternative to the hegemony of Western capitalism, and that the only way forward was to learn to peacefully co-exist with our rival.
And there were many admixtures of these positions, all with different evaluations of 1) the ability of the US to tolerate any international rival; 2) state socialism; 3) the viability of the Soviet system; 4) the threat posed by the Soviet Union; 5) the most effective way to thwart that threat; 6) the danger of any prolonged confrontation with a well-armed nuclear rival; 7) the moral obligation of the US to thwart advances in Soviet power, regardless of our material interests in doing so.
Now, perhaps the most dramatic dichotomy in US foreign policy has been between the rationalists, influenced most crucially by the political scientist Henry Morgenthau; and the crusaders, who can be represented by Woodrow Wilson, but whose crusading spirit actually has largely taken a different cast.
The limited usefulness of this dichotomy is made immediately clear when we look at the background of the Vietnam scenario sketched out by Christopher Lasch. One of the main proponents of extending the Vietnam war to maintain US "credibility" was Henry Kissinger, a student of Morgenthau's. Most of the people who cried out for the US to cut its losses and withdraw from Vietnam were moralists.
Morgenthau famously wrote an article inn the journal Foreign Affairs where he pretty much laid out the rationalist take on Vietnam: there were no interests there on behalf of which the US ought to sacrifice lives and money. Kissinger responded by weaving one out of the air: credibility.
On the other side, moralists desperately wanted to withdraw from Vietnam, but they wanted to do so for moral reasons, and therefore they concentrated much of their attention on portraying US intervention in Vietnam as not only stupid but as morally reprehensible. Though there was certainly room to argue that dropping millions of tons of high explosive on a country we had little hope of holding at the level of sacrifice we were willing to engage, the moralists went well beyond this, puffing up the legitimacy and humanity of a North Vietnamese government which was , in fact, ruthless, little concerned with the immediate welfare of its people, and not at all concerned with democratic notions of legitimacy.
Unfortunately for all of us, the Morgenthau tradition has passed down to us largely through Henry Kissinger, who still has a great deal of influence over our foreign policy, both through his students and through his being consulted at times of high foreign policy drama.
For instance, Kissinger had a phone conversation with Condoleeza Rice directly before the launch of the most recent intervention in Iraq, urging the administration to pull the trigger on war so as to maintain US credibility: The US could not threaten to do something so prominent and so often and then not do it, regardless of how stupid that action might be.
Hans Morgenthau did not think reputation and image were negligible concerns. Morgenthau, in fact wrote to quite the opposite effect:
The prestige of a nation is its reputation for power. That reputation, the reflection of the reality of power in the mind of the observers, can be as important as the reality of power itself. What others think about us is as important as what we actually are.But Morgenthau wrote in 1965 that Vietnam was mainly a moral crusade, and that since our resources were limited, we could not afford to undertake moral missions which were negligible in terms of interest, as Vietnam was.
Kissinger, though, institutionalized the notion that symbolism trumps all, and for Kissinger and for the current administration, the "mind of the observers" is all that matters, because they have no notion whatsoever of what the true power interests of the US are, what counts as a true (as opposed to an apparent) threat, and what counts as true (as opposed to seeming) security.
Our foreign policy has become a Brechtian perfromative theater, where real blood is spilt and real power gets expended on pursuit of image, rather than material gain.
In an era when our wealth, power and willingness to make real sacrifices are all quite limited, this is a dangerous and stupid way to align foreign policy. Foreign policy as theater means we have almost literally infinite opportunities to expend all these finite resources, and we are unable to choose which to take up on the basis of interest. We make our foreign policy a slave to the image we are seeking to maintain.
In fact, we make ourselves slaves to whatever dictator who can threaten or manipulate that image, which is very, very easy to do.
OPK
Wednesday, December 08, 2004
Something on Political Theatre (finally)
I share an insight with Christopher Lasch. Of course he thought of it almost thirty years ago, but I did think of it on my own before I read this now much quoted passage in his Culture of Narcissism:
The point of the passage was to observe that America in the 1970s had so lost perspective on itself and its material interests that we could only define positive and negative through the perceptions of others. In other words, we did not conduct foreign policy to acheive any stated ends--we didn't seem able to decide what those ends should be--we conducted foreign policy to maintain a elusive thing called "credibility."
In the absense of material interests to pursue, we strived mightily to give the appearance of a country that would act decisively to protect its interests.
The war in Vietnam dragged out for years because Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon could not bring themselves to do what they finally did anyway: cut Vietnam loose and cut our losses. Kissinger and Nixon found it difficulkt to do this because they felt it would be a grave sacrifice to our "credibility," our reputation for fulfilling our commitments even when they are stupidly undertaken.
I've often thought of the Kissinger line on credibility as the "barricaded house" approach to foreign policy--it makes the United States sound kind of like one of life's losers, who has taken hostages and barricaded himself in somewhere, carrying out his idiotic threats because, though he's a loser and a practitioner of senseless violence on innocents, he is a man of his word.
more later
OPK
Success in our society has to be ratified by publicity... all politics becomes a form of spectacle. It is well known that Madison Avenue packages politicians and markets them as if they were cereals or deodorants; but the art of public relations penetrates more deeply into political life... The modern prince [an apt turn of phrase for the current member of the Bush political dynasty] ... confuses successful completion of the task at hand with the impression he makes or hopes to make on others. Thus American officials blundered into the war in Vietnam... More concerned with the
trappings than with the reality of power, they convinced themselves that failure to intervene would damage American 'credibility...' [They] fret about their ability to rise to crisis, to project an image of decisiveness, to give a convincing performance of executive power... Public relations and propaganda have exalted the image and the pseudo-event.
The point of the passage was to observe that America in the 1970s had so lost perspective on itself and its material interests that we could only define positive and negative through the perceptions of others. In other words, we did not conduct foreign policy to acheive any stated ends--we didn't seem able to decide what those ends should be--we conducted foreign policy to maintain a elusive thing called "credibility."
When politicians and administrators have no other aim than to sell their leadership to the public, they deprive themselves of intelligible standards by which to define the goals of specific policies or to evaluate success or failure. It was because prestige and credibility had become the only measure of effectiveness that American policy in Vietnam could be conducted without regard to the strategic importance of Vietnam or the political situation in that country. Since there were no clearly defined objectives in view, it was not even possible to say how defeat or victory was to be recognized, except that American prestige must not suffer as a result. The object of American policy in Vietnam was defined from the outset as the preservation of American credibility. This consideration, which amounted to an obsession, repeatedly overrode such elementary principles of statecraft as avoidance of excessive risks, assessment of the likelihood of success and failure, and the calculation of the strategic and political consequences of defeat.
(Christopher Lasch, Culture of Narcissism, 146-47, Warner, 1979.)
In the absense of material interests to pursue, we strived mightily to give the appearance of a country that would act decisively to protect its interests.
The war in Vietnam dragged out for years because Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon could not bring themselves to do what they finally did anyway: cut Vietnam loose and cut our losses. Kissinger and Nixon found it difficulkt to do this because they felt it would be a grave sacrifice to our "credibility," our reputation for fulfilling our commitments even when they are stupidly undertaken.
I've often thought of the Kissinger line on credibility as the "barricaded house" approach to foreign policy--it makes the United States sound kind of like one of life's losers, who has taken hostages and barricaded himself in somewhere, carrying out his idiotic threats because, though he's a loser and a practitioner of senseless violence on innocents, he is a man of his word.
more later
OPK
Sunday, November 28, 2004
More on creeping agrarianism
I've been reading quite a bit around this topic. I thought I should make a few things clear as I start in on some of the issues and thinkers connected with it.
First, I, like most thoughtful people I know, agree with Wendell Berry and the agrarianists in their negative evaluation of contemporary culture: there is something empty in it, it does lack for something very needful. But, I also know that part of this feeling is part of life--the ancient Greeks moaned about the same sort of hollowness in life that we do.
I say part because I think that contemporary culture has exacerbated this basic condition of life.
I am happy that Wendell Berry has expressed his discontent with contemporary culture and that his negative analysis of our lives has given focus to so many others who feel discontent.
I also agree with some of the agrarianists in their notion that technology is not neutral. If you think about it, the proposition that technology might be neutral is absurd--if it doesn't have a significant impact on the way we live, why invest so much in it?
BUT, I don't think that technology is such a great villain in the story of human kind, either.
I am surprised also by how much of the agrarianist agenda seems to come out of the diet-obsessed neuroticism we so often see amongst the health-food-store set. This line of "thinking" is not a solution to our cultural problems, it is one of its more depressing and sad symptoms: people with critical perspectives and (generally) significant educational and economic resources turned into obsessors over trivia that they imbue with issues of purity, defilement, and apocalyptic accountability.
Farmer, writer and technophobe Wendell Berry could not be better suited to become the patron saint of this movement: intimately engaged in the production of food, engaged in a livelihood many Americans are brought up to reflexively revere, a noble smallholder who plows his fields behind a team of horses; browned and callused, yet sensitive and profound; Our new-age Cinncinnatus.
Unfortunately, though, Berry is essentially a simple soul and a simple thinker caught up in a world where simple answers are often disastrously wrong, or even deeply pernicious.
As for the simplicity end of things, witness his exchange with Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin. (Please forgive my telling the whole of this long story, but we will eventually come around to the point!)
Lewontin had written a piece in the New York Review of Books where he reviewed a number of books on the controversy surrounding genomic foods. Lewontin is a Marxist and is generally in sympathy with democratic movements and with people's power to decide what risks they'd like to take. So while Lewontin is very critical of the abuse of science and scare-mongering he sees in many GMO opponents, he is equally critical of the elisions and obfuscations of the interested parties who'd like to have us growing and eating as much genetically modified food as possible.
But, in the course of his review one of Berry's friends, the Indian physicist and activist Vandana Shiva, comes in for something of a drubbing. Berry ran to the defense of Shiva in a cover article of the Progressive magazine, "The Prejudice Against Country People." Lewontin was used as the first and most prominent example of said prejudice.
Lewontin responded with a letter to the same publication.
One passage in Lewontin's original piece became the center of the exchange:
First, I, like most thoughtful people I know, agree with Wendell Berry and the agrarianists in their negative evaluation of contemporary culture: there is something empty in it, it does lack for something very needful. But, I also know that part of this feeling is part of life--the ancient Greeks moaned about the same sort of hollowness in life that we do.
I say part because I think that contemporary culture has exacerbated this basic condition of life.
I am happy that Wendell Berry has expressed his discontent with contemporary culture and that his negative analysis of our lives has given focus to so many others who feel discontent.
I also agree with some of the agrarianists in their notion that technology is not neutral. If you think about it, the proposition that technology might be neutral is absurd--if it doesn't have a significant impact on the way we live, why invest so much in it?
BUT, I don't think that technology is such a great villain in the story of human kind, either.
I am surprised also by how much of the agrarianist agenda seems to come out of the diet-obsessed neuroticism we so often see amongst the health-food-store set. This line of "thinking" is not a solution to our cultural problems, it is one of its more depressing and sad symptoms: people with critical perspectives and (generally) significant educational and economic resources turned into obsessors over trivia that they imbue with issues of purity, defilement, and apocalyptic accountability.
Farmer, writer and technophobe Wendell Berry could not be better suited to become the patron saint of this movement: intimately engaged in the production of food, engaged in a livelihood many Americans are brought up to reflexively revere, a noble smallholder who plows his fields behind a team of horses; browned and callused, yet sensitive and profound; Our new-age Cinncinnatus.
Unfortunately, though, Berry is essentially a simple soul and a simple thinker caught up in a world where simple answers are often disastrously wrong, or even deeply pernicious.
As for the simplicity end of things, witness his exchange with Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin. (Please forgive my telling the whole of this long story, but we will eventually come around to the point!)
Lewontin had written a piece in the New York Review of Books where he reviewed a number of books on the controversy surrounding genomic foods. Lewontin is a Marxist and is generally in sympathy with democratic movements and with people's power to decide what risks they'd like to take. So while Lewontin is very critical of the abuse of science and scare-mongering he sees in many GMO opponents, he is equally critical of the elisions and obfuscations of the interested parties who'd like to have us growing and eating as much genetically modified food as possible.
But, in the course of his review one of Berry's friends, the Indian physicist and activist Vandana Shiva, comes in for something of a drubbing. Berry ran to the defense of Shiva in a cover article of the Progressive magazine, "The Prejudice Against Country People." Lewontin was used as the first and most prominent example of said prejudice.
Lewontin responded with a letter to the same publication.
One passage in Lewontin's original piece became the center of the exchange:
Now we understand the Turning Point Project. They're a bunch of Luddites. Right century, but wrong movement. The followers of the unseen King Ludd and Captain Swing from 1811 to 1830 were industrial and rural laborers thrown out of work or trying to live on poverty wages, who destroyed
knitting and threshing machines that had displaced their labor. Their objection to technology was not ideological but pragmatic. If we want to find the nineteenth-century equivalent of the sources of Turning Point consciousness, we must find it in the movement that began with Blake and
ended with Rossetti, Ruskin, and the pre-Raphaelites, in the call to arms against the dark Satanic Mills:
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.
That nineteenth-century discontent was the reaction of a middle class repelled by the spiritual and physical ugliness created by a surging industrial capitalism to which they sensed no attachment. One might think that because the rise of industrial capitalism occurred so long ago and the culture it created has become so much the basis of European and American life, any truly popular new romantic movement against it would be inconceivable. But what was then a struggle against the rise of its dominance is now a struggle against its last consolidation in spheres of life that seemed set apart.
Berry immediately jumped on the first two sentences of this passage, and castigated Lewontin for his trite response to the challenge of the anti-technologists.
But a bit of attention the passage (and to what follows) quickly tells us that this is far from being a trite and uncomplex response to the Turning Point Project and their ilk. Lewontin tries to spell this out for Berry in his letter of response to the Progressive:
Berry's passions have interfered with his ability to read plain English. I did not speak of Vandana Shiva's allies as Luddites, but, rather, made a special point of the incorrectness of such a claim. I wrote that the Luddites were "industrial and rural laborers thrown out of work or trying to live on poverty wages, who destroyed knitting and threshing machines that had displaced their labor." In contrast, I pointed out that the correct nineteenth century equivalent of the Shivaites was the middle class educated urban romantic movement of Blake and Rossetti, which called for the return to an idyllic rural life that never, in fact, existed. Most people engaged in English agriculture in the nineteenth century and before were, in fact, hired laborers whose chronic poverty and misery were the root of the struggles over the Poor Law, just as in Berry's grandfather's day, half of Southern farmers were landless tenants and sharecroppers.
In other words, the first two sentences of the passage are meant to be ironic, the rest is intended to correct the trite and mistaken comparison to the Luddites. The true parallel, as Lewontin sees it, is to the nineteenth-century Romantics. (Lewontin is no doubt thinking about his Raymond Williams at this point--Culture and Society is a relatively sympathetic portrait of Romantic anti-modernism, and The Country and the City deals quite directly with the fantasies and realities surrounding life in the country).
Berry didn’t get the irony the first time. And even after Lewontin spells out everything for him, Berry responds by simply quoting the first two sentences again. Irony and voice, apparently, being literary technologies that Berry as reader has completely forsaken!
And Lewontin is no stranger to agricultural issues either, as he points out. He's written two serious considerations of the plight of the farmer in industrial modernity in the Monthly Review: "Technology, Research, and the Penetration of Capital: The Case of U.S. Agriculture" (July/August 1986, with J. P. Berlan) and "The Maturing of Capitalist Agriculture" (July/August 1998).
Reading over this exchange, one point is driven home: you'd be far better off reading and thinking about Lewontin than Berry, unless you're in the market for Lukewarm Comfort Farm.
Personally, I think Lewontin is on the right track with the nineteenth-centruy romantics, but I think the best parallel to today's agrarians can be found a bit later, after Romanticism has gone to seed. We ought to be looking at Boyle's Road to Wellville.
More later . . .
OPK
Monday, November 22, 2004
Creeping agrarianism
Prefatory note: We'll have to wait a little while longer for my promised "Political Theater" piece--the election and some other stuff having taken away my research time for a little while. But here's something else I've been thinking about of late.
Lately on the local community radio station, I heard a song by John McCutcheon called "It's the Economy Stupid," part of an album of polemical tunes he's written about Clinton and Bush-era political and social issues. Other titles include "Hail to the Chief" which cleverly weaves together a bunch of Bush malapropisms and "I'm Packing," which spoofs concealed weapons carriers.
All fairly typical of your folk lefty.
But "It's the Economy Stupid" really struck a chord with me, and not a receptive one. This in spite of the fact that I'm generally in agreement with McCutcheon is his other left-of-center sentiments, from fear of yokels with concealed handguns to contempt for George Bush's intellectual capacity.
But "Economy" resonates loudly with an agrarian populism I'd come to hope the left had left behind, or had left to the nutters on the right. But, surprisingly enough to me, a new sentimentalist, crypto-nativist, populist agrarianism has taken hold on the left, and McCutcheon's lyrics are the most direct expression of it I've heard, so I will quote them here in their entirety:
It's the Economy, Stupid (2001)
words and music by John McCutcheon
Written after reading Wendell Berry's fabulous novel, Jayber Crow.
It's the economy, stupid
A victory sign
A mantra
An explanation
A reminder
A warning
An omen
An onus
A threat
It's the economy, stupid
Farmers' wives bring eggs
Chickens
Whole milk
Fresh butter
To the local market
To the store
Come in with groceries
And leave with groceries and money
Small farmers raise crops
For local markets
Up at dawn
Home at dusk
More in fallow
Than under the plow
Dark loam
Rich with earthworms
Defying erosion
Anchoring forest borders
Home for
Game
Shelter
Shade
Now virginity is no longer fashionable
Even in our forests
We will harvest another crop
Of walnut
Cherry, oak
If we only live
Another hundred years.
Man was the last piece
Of creation
And has been playing catch up
Ever since.
Farming is a balance
Of muscle
Daylight
And conservation
Machinery
Becomes the muscle now
Allowing us to work
Into the night.
We plant our debts
Fencerow to fencerow
Swallowing
Every bitter dram
Of expert advice
Until
'drunk with dreams
of fortune
equity
leverage
growth'
We grow
What we cannot use
Purchase
What we used to raise
Spend
What we used to save
Sell
What we used to treasure
Mock
What we used to revere
Hate
What we used to love
It's the economy, stupid
Understand--
I am not a nostalgist
I am a most pragmatic man
I look at what naturally occurs
In the living world--
And see diversity
Not specialization.
I look at
Hometown banks
Restaurants
Hardware stores
Where your name
Is your credit
And decisions are rendered
By people who know you
Where you are more than
The five banks
And the four airlines
And the three newspaper chains
And the two big box stores
And the one-and-a-half political parties
And the one retort:
It's the economy stupid
And the standards
That demand that
Every teacher teaches
Every student
Exactly the same thing
And, like these students
I have to ask 'why?'
Why?
It's the economy, stupid
Now those educated
Appraised students
Ride their buses
From their consolidated schools
Back to their small towns and farms
And cannot wait
To drive their cars away
On that highway of diamonds
Into the consolidated cities
Where they look back
In shame
And wonder
Stranded
Between what they know
And what they've been sold
It's the economy, stupid
The economy that looks
For the maximum return
For the quick turnaround
For the short term gain
For the unearned income
For the Big Lotto
It's the economy, stupid
And the economy
Is impatient
It has a short attention span
It is easily bored
It is hungry
It is late for its next appointment
It puts you on hold
It does not return your call
It's the economy, stupid
The economy
Has you working two jobs
It is mandatory overtime
It is expensive sneakers
Made by sweating children
It is cheap food
Picked by landless hands
It is good paying jobs
Disappearing from American towns
And reappearing
Nowhere
It is your closed up main street
And it is your boarded up mill
And it is your condo-minimized factory
And it is your cookie cutter mall
And it is not accountable
It is not America
It's the economy, stupid
The economy now has no borders
Or horizons
Or faces
Or hands
The economy has only one rule:
More.
And the economy lies.
The economy tells us it is about Freedom.
The economy is about Dependence.
Not on land
Or animals
Or weather
Or neighbors
But
On machinery
And fuel
And credit.
Most farmers
Have borrowed their way
Right out of farming.
And
No government loan
No government program
Will change
That cycle.
Because the government
Is powerless now, see:
It's the economy, stupid
And the government is the economy's
Biggest cheerleader.
It plays by the same rules:
The quick fix
The stronger army
The bigger bomb
The dependence on machinery
To do work
That can only effectively be done
By humans.
It consolidates
When diversity is required.
It's about economy
It's about small towns with
Banks
And baseball teams
A general store
Churches
Family cemeteries
A schoolhouse
A lumberyard
A radio station
A newspaper
A roadhouse
A funeral home
A filling station
Open space
Open opportunity
Open eyes
Open hearts
Choice
Recourse
Response
Responsibility
It's about economy
Craigston, Carriacou, Grenada February 2001
©2001 John McCutcheon/Appalsongs (ASCAP)
Keep in mind, I live in Northern Michigan, and though the town where I live is fairly moderate, much of surrounding area is rural. There are few minorities or foreigners here. To me, a lot of this sort of song really seems to me to appeal directly to the racism and xenophobia which are very strong ideological undercurrents in this area, even on the left.
And I am not doing the white guilt thing here--finding reason for the whites to castigate themselves everywhere--I am merely observing that popular movements here like the effort to shut down the Perrier water plant in Macosta, Michigan make pretty freely appeal to nativism and xenophobia to get people excited--the company is FRENCH! (or, somewhat less dramatically, Swiss) or its a MULTINATIONAL! (code word for "foreign") and the scandal is that "our" water might be taken so that foreigner can profit by it and some brown-skinned people somewhere may get to drink it.
Keep our water here!
If this sounds a lot like the sort of agrarian nativism Richard Hofstadter wrote about in his works on American populism and nativist paranoia, well it should.
The American left is slowly but surely leaving behind its commitment to things like science, social progress and urbanity and embracing irrationalism, nostalgia and, rather more surreptitiously, the sort of "blood and soil" ideology that gave a bad name to this line of thinking in the first place.
The time to head this off is now. The way to do it is by facing up to some hard truths: we are stuck with modernity; We are stuck with the rest of the world; We are stuck with negotiation, compromise and politics no matter how righteous we think we are; We are stuck with uncertainty, complexity and complication.
More on this topic later.
Lately on the local community radio station, I heard a song by John McCutcheon called "It's the Economy Stupid," part of an album of polemical tunes he's written about Clinton and Bush-era political and social issues. Other titles include "Hail to the Chief" which cleverly weaves together a bunch of Bush malapropisms and "I'm Packing," which spoofs concealed weapons carriers.
All fairly typical of your folk lefty.
But "It's the Economy Stupid" really struck a chord with me, and not a receptive one. This in spite of the fact that I'm generally in agreement with McCutcheon is his other left-of-center sentiments, from fear of yokels with concealed handguns to contempt for George Bush's intellectual capacity.
But "Economy" resonates loudly with an agrarian populism I'd come to hope the left had left behind, or had left to the nutters on the right. But, surprisingly enough to me, a new sentimentalist, crypto-nativist, populist agrarianism has taken hold on the left, and McCutcheon's lyrics are the most direct expression of it I've heard, so I will quote them here in their entirety:
It's the Economy, Stupid (2001)
words and music by John McCutcheon
Written after reading Wendell Berry's fabulous novel, Jayber Crow.
It's the economy, stupid
A victory sign
A mantra
An explanation
A reminder
A warning
An omen
An onus
A threat
It's the economy, stupid
Farmers' wives bring eggs
Chickens
Whole milk
Fresh butter
To the local market
To the store
Come in with groceries
And leave with groceries and money
Small farmers raise crops
For local markets
Up at dawn
Home at dusk
More in fallow
Than under the plow
Dark loam
Rich with earthworms
Defying erosion
Anchoring forest borders
Home for
Game
Shelter
Shade
Now virginity is no longer fashionable
Even in our forests
We will harvest another crop
Of walnut
Cherry, oak
If we only live
Another hundred years.
Man was the last piece
Of creation
And has been playing catch up
Ever since.
Farming is a balance
Of muscle
Daylight
And conservation
Machinery
Becomes the muscle now
Allowing us to work
Into the night.
We plant our debts
Fencerow to fencerow
Swallowing
Every bitter dram
Of expert advice
Until
'drunk with dreams
of fortune
equity
leverage
growth'
We grow
What we cannot use
Purchase
What we used to raise
Spend
What we used to save
Sell
What we used to treasure
Mock
What we used to revere
Hate
What we used to love
It's the economy, stupid
Understand--
I am not a nostalgist
I am a most pragmatic man
I look at what naturally occurs
In the living world--
And see diversity
Not specialization.
I look at
Hometown banks
Restaurants
Hardware stores
Where your name
Is your credit
And decisions are rendered
By people who know you
Where you are more than
The five banks
And the four airlines
And the three newspaper chains
And the two big box stores
And the one-and-a-half political parties
And the one retort:
It's the economy stupid
And the standards
That demand that
Every teacher teaches
Every student
Exactly the same thing
And, like these students
I have to ask 'why?'
Why?
It's the economy, stupid
Now those educated
Appraised students
Ride their buses
From their consolidated schools
Back to their small towns and farms
And cannot wait
To drive their cars away
On that highway of diamonds
Into the consolidated cities
Where they look back
In shame
And wonder
Stranded
Between what they know
And what they've been sold
It's the economy, stupid
The economy that looks
For the maximum return
For the quick turnaround
For the short term gain
For the unearned income
For the Big Lotto
It's the economy, stupid
And the economy
Is impatient
It has a short attention span
It is easily bored
It is hungry
It is late for its next appointment
It puts you on hold
It does not return your call
It's the economy, stupid
The economy
Has you working two jobs
It is mandatory overtime
It is expensive sneakers
Made by sweating children
It is cheap food
Picked by landless hands
It is good paying jobs
Disappearing from American towns
And reappearing
Nowhere
It is your closed up main street
And it is your boarded up mill
And it is your condo-minimized factory
And it is your cookie cutter mall
And it is not accountable
It is not America
It's the economy, stupid
The economy now has no borders
Or horizons
Or faces
Or hands
The economy has only one rule:
More.
And the economy lies.
The economy tells us it is about Freedom.
The economy is about Dependence.
Not on land
Or animals
Or weather
Or neighbors
But
On machinery
And fuel
And credit.
Most farmers
Have borrowed their way
Right out of farming.
And
No government loan
No government program
Will change
That cycle.
Because the government
Is powerless now, see:
It's the economy, stupid
And the government is the economy's
Biggest cheerleader.
It plays by the same rules:
The quick fix
The stronger army
The bigger bomb
The dependence on machinery
To do work
That can only effectively be done
By humans.
It consolidates
When diversity is required.
It's about economy
It's about small towns with
Banks
And baseball teams
A general store
Churches
Family cemeteries
A schoolhouse
A lumberyard
A radio station
A newspaper
A roadhouse
A funeral home
A filling station
Open space
Open opportunity
Open eyes
Open hearts
Choice
Recourse
Response
Responsibility
It's about economy
Craigston, Carriacou, Grenada February 2001
©2001 John McCutcheon/Appalsongs (ASCAP)
Keep in mind, I live in Northern Michigan, and though the town where I live is fairly moderate, much of surrounding area is rural. There are few minorities or foreigners here. To me, a lot of this sort of song really seems to me to appeal directly to the racism and xenophobia which are very strong ideological undercurrents in this area, even on the left.
And I am not doing the white guilt thing here--finding reason for the whites to castigate themselves everywhere--I am merely observing that popular movements here like the effort to shut down the Perrier water plant in Macosta, Michigan make pretty freely appeal to nativism and xenophobia to get people excited--the company is FRENCH! (or, somewhat less dramatically, Swiss) or its a MULTINATIONAL! (code word for "foreign") and the scandal is that "our" water might be taken so that foreigner can profit by it and some brown-skinned people somewhere may get to drink it.
Keep our water here!
If this sounds a lot like the sort of agrarian nativism Richard Hofstadter wrote about in his works on American populism and nativist paranoia, well it should.
The American left is slowly but surely leaving behind its commitment to things like science, social progress and urbanity and embracing irrationalism, nostalgia and, rather more surreptitiously, the sort of "blood and soil" ideology that gave a bad name to this line of thinking in the first place.
The time to head this off is now. The way to do it is by facing up to some hard truths: we are stuck with modernity; We are stuck with the rest of the world; We are stuck with negotiation, compromise and politics no matter how righteous we think we are; We are stuck with uncertainty, complexity and complication.
More on this topic later.
Saturday, October 16, 2004
Political Theater
No, the title doesn't refer to the debates, but to an area where the theatrical comes to play a much more powerful and disturbing role in our politics: foreign policy.
Hearing and reading the rhetoric (and I don't use the word pejoratively, by the way) coming from the President and his supporters, I am struck by the degree to which they seem to base their foreign policy ideals on "messages" that are sent (to whom?) by policies we take and a near-mythical conception of American "credibility" (what precisely is this? is it really worth the sacrifices these people want to make for it?).
I am currently at work on what will probably turn into a few essays on the topic of Bush's foreign policy and his foreign policy rhetoric.
Sorry to be posting a merely anticipatory entry here, but, if you read this and have any ideas about potential avenues in this connection, please post them here.
As you can see from my post below on Imperial Hubris (and even moreso from a reading of the book itself), there is a sense in which Bush's foreign policy can be looked at as more the end result of ineptitude than of any particular philosophy. But I think there may be more to it than blundering and the mindless confusion of what ought to be distinct areas of policy-making.
I am not really interested in writing a polemic so much as a critical analysis of the Bush foreign policies, but I would certainly appreciate the views of other folks on this general topic.
OPK
Hearing and reading the rhetoric (and I don't use the word pejoratively, by the way) coming from the President and his supporters, I am struck by the degree to which they seem to base their foreign policy ideals on "messages" that are sent (to whom?) by policies we take and a near-mythical conception of American "credibility" (what precisely is this? is it really worth the sacrifices these people want to make for it?).
I am currently at work on what will probably turn into a few essays on the topic of Bush's foreign policy and his foreign policy rhetoric.
Sorry to be posting a merely anticipatory entry here, but, if you read this and have any ideas about potential avenues in this connection, please post them here.
As you can see from my post below on Imperial Hubris (and even moreso from a reading of the book itself), there is a sense in which Bush's foreign policy can be looked at as more the end result of ineptitude than of any particular philosophy. But I think there may be more to it than blundering and the mindless confusion of what ought to be distinct areas of policy-making.
I am not really interested in writing a polemic so much as a critical analysis of the Bush foreign policies, but I would certainly appreciate the views of other folks on this general topic.
OPK
Monday, October 11, 2004
Return to Normalcy?
"We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance." --John Kerry
"Just this weekend, Senator Kerry talked of reducing terrorism to - quote - nuisance' - end quote - and compared it to prostitution and illegal gambling. See, I couldn't disagree more. Our goal is not to reduce terror to some acceptable level of nuisance. Our goal is to defeat terror by staying on the offensive, destroying terrorists, and spreading freedom and liberty around the world." -- George W. Bush
Earlier today, Vice President Dick Cheney took John Kerry to task for comments published this weekend indicating that he hoped to see a day when terrorism would again be at the level of a national "nuisance." Cheney called "naive and dangerous."
Kerry's rather careless choice of words aside, it is remarkable the extent to which Dick Cheney, in this and other published comments, talks as if America can expect to be in a constant state of emergency and a perpetual state of war for the foreseeable future.
One has to wonder sometimes if the Vice President is setting the stage for a future promotion from Dick Cheney to Dick Tator.
But the siege mentality seems to be spreading quickly among Republicans. Rudy Giuliani said that the notion of "an acceptable level of terrorism is frightening." And the President himself assured a Colorado audience that his vision of the War on terror has America "on the offensive . . . spreading liberty and freedom around the world."
This line of rhetoric would not seem to me to serve Republican interests very well, and I hope to see the Democrats take them up on it quickly. The Republican vision for the War on Terror has the sort of endless quality of a moral crusade--much like a crusade against liquor, or fornication. While we might, like Rudy Giuliani, find it hard to accept that there will be murders and drunkenness and fornication in New York City in any perspective future, not to be able to overcome that difficulty in the final event would mark us as insane.
The same goes for terrorism: there will always be people out there who hate us and who are willing to die and kill to harm us. Can we imagine a world where there is absolutely no terrorism? When can we imagine America can rest in its task of spreading Democracy and Freedom? When does being on the offensive not going to mean being up to our necks in quagmires halfway around the world?
The short answer is that the Republican have no vision for America safe and at peace. All they have is a vision of crusading America. For them, the endless crusade began on September 11th and there is no end in sight. There is no end that they can even imagine.
Mr. Kerry ought to jump straight to the hustings and proclaim loudly that he, for one, can envision a day when Al Qaeda has been vanquished, when America returns to a watchful but prosperous normalcy, and if Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush cannot envisage such a future, they ought to step aside.
OPK
My debut
Greetings-
The title of this, my web log, is a riff on the town I live in, Traverse City, MI.
I'm not trying to tear the place down or anything--Traverse City is a beautiful place with lots of interesting and kind people in it.
But "Adverse City" does sometimes reflect my experience of northern Michigan. The job market is tight, intellectually stimulating jobs are particularly hard to come by, it snows every day from Halloween to Easter, and the cultural atmosphere sometimes seems rather limited and retrograde when compared to New Jersey, where I used to live.
I also use "adverse" in the sense of "going in the opposite direction" in reference to myself. I tend to be a bit contrarian. I don't trust the consensus on a lot of things, and I like putting people's assumptions to the test. (Hopefully my own as well as others'.) Over time, as I fill these pages with my contrarian and sometimes cranky views and arguments, I hope this will become indeed an "Adverse City" for people who cherish unexamined assumptions about the world.
Also, I am fascinated with cities and how people, goods and information travel through and
The title of this, my web log, is a riff on the town I live in, Traverse City, MI.
I'm not trying to tear the place down or anything--Traverse City is a beautiful place with lots of interesting and kind people in it.
But "Adverse City" does sometimes reflect my experience of northern Michigan. The job market is tight, intellectually stimulating jobs are particularly hard to come by, it snows every day from Halloween to Easter, and the cultural atmosphere sometimes seems rather limited and retrograde when compared to New Jersey, where I used to live.
I also use "adverse" in the sense of "going in the opposite direction" in reference to myself. I tend to be a bit contrarian. I don't trust the consensus on a lot of things, and I like putting people's assumptions to the test. (Hopefully my own as well as others'.) Over time, as I fill these pages with my contrarian and sometimes cranky views and arguments, I hope this will become indeed an "Adverse City" for people who cherish unexamined assumptions about the world.
Also, I am fascinated with cities and how people, goods and information travel through and
between them. The fascination of cities is all the accidental juxtaposition they force on us as this process takes place. I'm hoping for something like that here, though on a strictly voluntary basis!
OPK
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