Yule Heibel’s Post Studio © 2003-2008

Could “localism” help dilute “narcissism”?

Update, see end of post.

Ok, ok, I know it’s not a question I (or anyone) could possibly answer in a short blog post, but consider the discussions around the Emily Gould phenomenon (here, here, here, or a million other sites online). Fast Company’s Laura Palotie column, How Emily Gould Turns Us On, closes as follows:

…we like to equally spit on fictional New Yorker Carrie Bradshaw, traditional celebrity Denise Richards and the newest, self-made breed that Gould represents. We scarf down the private, aggravating realities of each with equal appetite, and let the resulting schadenfreude provide a soothing distraction from our own neuroses.

Well, um, maybe. Except that until someone in my Twitter stream tweeted about Gould’s NYT piece, blissfully ignorant me didn’t know who she was — except of course that I had heard of Gawker.

Yes, I did on one or two occasions glance at Gawker, but never really read it and certainly didn’t “follow” it. Why not? Because I don’t live in New York City. Call me naive, but I thought Gawker was all about New York — rather a long ways away from this (literally) “neck of the woods.”

And until reading Palotie’s piece, I didn’t know who Carrie Bradshaw was — I had to reread one sentence to understand that she doesn’t really exist and is in fact one of the characters on …um, a TV show? Something called Sex and the City?

Why would I not know who the Sex and the City characters are? Um, well, …I don’t watch TV. I have a TV (I have sex, too), but I have no access to TV channels (antennae don’t work in Victoria, and I refuse to pay money to the cable company). All I ever watch are DVDs — I don’t have a clue what’s on actual TV this season.

Instead, I know a lot about what’s going on in my local space — some of which overlaps with my online spaces. Not to sound too colloquial, but I’m totally about keeping my eye on the pulse of trends, seeing patterns emerge, knowing what’s coming up in terms of technological innovation. My interest lies in figuring out how that can apply to where I live, to the local.

Neither Carrie Bradshaw or Emily Gould have a locality in my world. Maybe that makes me sound backwards (or just really old) in pop cultural terms? Or perhaps if I were a psychiatrist, I might be interested in one or the other as an emblem for some sort of mental disorder; if I were a professional sociologist, I might be interested in one or the other as a specimen of forensic interest. But I’m not.

From what I recall of Emily Gould’s fantastic (and probably fantastically paid) 8,000 word ramble, there wasn’t anything that I could pattern-match in any useful sort of way to anything I’m interested in figuring out here.

Reading some of the commentaries on Gould, and the underlying assumptions they make that, exuding Schadenfreude, we must all be greedily “scarfing up” each breaking scandal, I can’t help but think that a passionate interest in your locale, in where you are, is a kind of vaccination against the narcissism that serves as a prerequisite to keeping the culture industry humming along.

Technology is making narcissism easier, but it would be wrong to blame technology just because it’s used by what appear to be the terminally narcissistic to amplify their ends. After all, that same technology is also making possible a renaissance of localism, enabling a community’s place-making voices to emerge from under the choke-hold of broadcast media.

It all depends on what you choose to focus on. Obviously, if you focus on the Goulds or the even more fictional Carrie Bradshaws, and you lose your place. Your life is where you make it.

Update, May 30, 7:30am: So, this is ironic… As it happens, I checked our local paper’s “Arts” section this morning — something I usually never do because this paper rarely reports on local arts happenings, instead typically filling this section with pop culture “news” I can easily pick up just about anywhere else. I don’t get why they (the paper) don’t get that I wouldn’t bother looking in my local paper for stuff I can read anywhere else. But I digress…: what did my bleary eyes see on the “local” paper’s “Arts” pages this cloudy a.m.? Not one, not two, not three, but four (4!) “stories” about …yup, you guessed it, Sex and the City. The movie and the TV show. And all of them, save one, were recycled filler from the feed of Canwest News Service. The one that wasn’t from that outlet was a cut and paste job of critics’ snippets cobbled together into an “article,” entitled”From the sublime to the ridiculous, the critics’ take on Sex and the City,” by “Special to the Times Colonist.” It’s enough to make you weep.

And some people think the bloggers are unprofessional or shallow or full of crap, and that those in official media are the professionals. Well, if that were true, one would have to rethink the whole notion of “professional.”

(Oops, my bad: I just now realized that I hadn’t actually included a link to Gould’s NYT piece, and just added it, above, and here.)

Diigo Bookmarks 05/20/2008 (a.m.)

• The Big Sort - Bill Bishop w/ Robert G. Cushing - Book Review by Scott Stossel - New York Times - Annotated

  Informative review of Bill Bishop’s new book, The Big Sort. It’s intriguing to juxtapose this to the Knute Berger article that discusses transumerism, which I also bookmarked today. It’s almost as if two things are at work here: on the one hand, people “sorting” themselves demographically, and on the other, people circulating (and becoming a site of circulation), just like capital. The new physics of social data sets, with the transumers being a special case of relative sorting?

  Also of course fascinating in Stossel’s review/ Bishop’s book are the observations on “the big sort”’s effect on politics, and that homogeneous communities tend to be more cantankerous because they’re so bloody convinced that they have it right, whereas heterogeneous communities are forced into conversations with people of opposing views, which in turn informs all parties and makes “solutions” less “obvious,” but also makes people more willing to compromise and/or put their shoulder to the wheel to keep things rolling in the right direction.

  I personally believe that my hometown (Victoria BC) would benefit if more people here had more awareness of all the different things — vocations, careers, lifestyles, EVERYTHING — going on, instead of thinking that everyone else surely must think just as they do. You see this again and again when the question of urban development comes up: the same tired gang with the same tired cliches runs to the forefront, claims to represent the majority (which in a sense they do, as the passive majority is just as ignorant as the vocal gang), and bemoans all change coming to the city because they believe it “hurts” what they see as the primary economic engine here (tourism). They’re totally unaware, it seems, that the high tech industry overtook tourism several years ago in terms of how much revenue it generates (something like $1.2b for tourism, and nearly $2b for high tech in Greater Victoria). This clinging to homogeneity (which is an illusion here: see the tech and the arts and the “different” communities) dominates discourse to the city’s economic detriment as well as its political detriment. We have political gridlock up the wazoo here, with people sorting themselves into camps (”defenders” of the traditional Victoria on the one side, determined to thwart all change; and what the defenders project as the “opposition,” whom they typically malign as “greedy developers” — it would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic). Meanwhile, I’m sure the Provincial leadership (mostly all from Vancouver, even if they have to do their work here, as this is the Provincial capital) laugh at us, since all we seem to do is run in circles.

  tags: big_sort, demographics, democracy, trends, bill_bishop

• “Rich Jerk Watch,” by Knute Berger (Crosscut Seattle)

  Berger is on another tear here (albeit being inconsistent, as the first comment points out), but I’m totally intrigued by his illustration of the “transumer” trend. It makes so much sense, when you think about it, even though it’s almost creepy at some level. (I’m not impressed by Berger’s rants against transumers, though; those diatribes fail to ring my bells.)

  Years ago, I recall learning that Mick Jagger never traveled with luggage because he just “acquired” whatever he needed wherever he was (and left it behind when he left). He didn’t need to trail a score of cases of possessions when he hopped from place to place. In a sense, the wealthy people that Berger describes here exemplify a kind of Jaggerism-trickle-down effect. You don’t need to be a rolling stone anymore to be “free” of possessions (and fashion mistakes). You just rent the appropriate materials for brief moments of time. You become an occasion, occasionally dipping into things, and just as quickly escaping their hold again.

  The really really important thing about capital, after all, is that it circulates. Of course people will be the site of that circulation, not just the site of accumulation.

  tags: crosscut, knute_berger, trendwatch, transumerism

Steven Pinker on “dignity” (Diigo Bookmarks 05/17/08)

The Stupidity of Dignity, by Steven Pinker

This is a great essay by Steven Pinker, which skewers the conservatives’ “latest, most dangerous ploy,” namely their “defense” of “dignity.” Pinker proceeds from bioethicist Ruth Macklin’s 2003 challenge to the conservatives, her essay, “Dignity Is a Useless Concept.”

From his essay:

The problem is that “dignity” is a squishy, subjective notion, hardly up to the heavyweight moral demands assigned to it. The bioethicist Ruth Macklin, who had been fed up with loose talk about dignity intended to squelch research and therapy, threw down the gauntlet in a 2003 editorial, “Dignity Is a Useless Concept.” Macklin argued that bioethics has done just fine with the principle of personal autonomy–the idea that, because all humans have the same minimum capacity to suffer, prosper, reason, and choose, no human has the right to impinge on the life, body, or freedom of another. This is why informed consent serves as the bedrock of ethical research and practice, and it clearly rules out the kinds of abuses that led to the birth of bioethics in the first place, such as Mengele’s sadistic pseudoexperiments in Nazi Germany and the withholding of treatment to indigent black patients in the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study. Once you recognize the principle of autonomy, Macklin argued, “dignity” adds nothing. [Source

Exactly. Autonomy should be the key driver — not some “wooly” concept of dignity, which, as Pinker points out, is usually used as a weapon to keep “uppity” people in place (women, for example, or gays wanting to marry, and so on). From “dignity of…” to “sanctity of…” is just a small shift, after all. And once they’ve cowed people with the godawful sanctity stuff, the authoritarians have won.

• tags: bioneering, bioethics, ethics, dignity, steven_pinker, autonomy

“Techne” and “Arte”: Qualities.

It’s one of those long-buried texts in the back of my mind: Adorno’s dissection of techne and “art” (both of which he of course spelled in Greek letters, so tough luck for you if the Greek alphabet wasn’t something that tripped off your eyeballs easily…).

I won’t embarrass myself by trying to recapitulate what he wrote, but I’m certain that Martijn de Waal’s blog post from May 12, Is GPS-navigation turning us into ‘Men without Qualities’?, relates to the questions Adorno asked in the texts collected in the book, Aesthetic Theory:

The Dutch Daily NRC Handelsblad published a highly interesting interview with retiring law-professor Egbert Dommering. He enters the current debate about new media, personal development and cultural authority by expressing his fear that the dominance of cultural systems for information retrieving like Google or GPS-Navigation will turn us all into ‘Men without Qualities’ (after the Robert Musil book). Are we becoming blank subjects, servile obedient to the instructions that our computers conjure up for us? (…)

Dommering fears that rather than building personalities with an extended intellectual and cultural substance, the current media system encourages us to rely on algorithms like that of Google, Satelite Navigation etc to provide us with the right information when we think we need it. This might be handy, but will we still be able to paint a bigger picture out of all these fragmented tidbits. Will we still be able to evaluate them critically? Can we still place the facts into a bigger cultural context? GPS-Naviagtion tells us exactly how we can get somewhere. But do we still know where we are? What is the history or culture of the places we are travelling through, what issues are at stake here? Dommering fears that we might loose the interest in and capabilitie to answere these questions. (source)

Sounds like just another negative culture critic, doesn’t he? And yet, consider the profile of Piotr Wozniak by Wired Magazine’s Gary Wolf: Want to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm. Wozniak is the driven genius behind SuperMemo, his program that teaches proper “spacing” so your memory will be able to absorb and recall everything. The catch? You have to surrender to the algorithm.

Hmm, what do I want? Superhuman powers of recall (but nearly servile dependence on an external clock that brooks no escapades of artistic whimsy)? Or…?

Just what do you call the alternative, anyway? “Normal” is so …well, 90s. Or 80s. Or something altogether unhip.

After running through alternatives to what looks like a pessimistic cultural perspective on Dommering’s part, Martin de Waal closes his blog post with some excellent questions:

So what should locative designers or theoreticians take from this discussion? Is it an attitudinal problem, where people get used to not look beyond the first 5 results that Google produces on any search? And is that attitude promoted by the technology itself or the way it is presented? Is it an algorithm-cum-interface problem, where the strength of an algorithm plus the design of the interface might promote deeper understandings of local contexts? Can we design locative media in such a way to promote a richer experience of place, rather than just getting us where we want to go as efficienly as possible? [see complete article here.]

I think those questions — and Piotr Wozniak — prove the need for arte coupled with techne. Wozniak is an artist in his way — but I bet his technique would suffer in “mass” deployment. It works for him, it works for many people. Which doesn’t yet mean that many people should use his techne, his technique. Not everyone could keep hold of “qualities” in the face of such algorithmic rigour.

That same day, Kazys Varnelis coincidentally posted a brief and cryptic-seeming post about Bruno Latour’s book, We Have Never Been Modern, entitled On distinction:

I’m rereading Bruno Latour’s We Have Never been Modern. (…) What’s striking me right now about this seventeen-year-old book is that it’s predicated on an argument against the modern sense of distinction between spheres. In the intervening period, it seems to me (please feel free to shoot me down …better now than later), the postmodern process of “blurring boundaries” has been made obsolete by a thorough loss of distinction in society and culture. The Enlightenment project of modernity, it seems to me, is increasingly something that our generation cannot even conceive of. [see entry here.]

Back to Adorno and his belabouring of the “distinctions” between techne and arte?

Part of Adorno’s point — if I recall correctly (and I should probably follow Kazys’s example and re-read the text, instead of producing a new one off the cuff) — is that the distinction between the two is itself artificial. They are in fact interwoven and are perceived as antitheses or separate endeavours because we learned to parse them that way.

In reality, neither exists without the other — which is obvious when you think about it. You can’t make art without technique, and technology or technique without some sort of art (most highly and refinedly practiced by the best technologists) isn’t particularly compelling, either.

So anyway… to bring this ramble (so precariously close to artlessness and certainly not polished in technique, either) to a close: we are in the thick of rethinking the distinctions between art and technology — albeit too often at the expense of art. During the Enlightenment (as Adorno correctly deduced) people believed the distinctions were clear, and that it was possible to move ahead without further hiccups. Then, when technology was used (artfully, or not) to carry out irrational projects (the world wars, the genocide, other atrocities), that belief was shaken to the core. Now we’re “cynically enlightened“: hip to the fact, perhaps even resigned. But I bet those old distinctions will be back to haunt us yet.

Diigo Bookmarks 05/04/2008 (a.m.)

• Escapable Logic » Blog Archive » “Oh, if only government went in for an open source make-over…” - Annotated

  Britt Blaser coins the compelling term “collaboration mall.” I left a long comment on April 28, but it appears stuck in moderation or has been deleted. Here’s what I wrote:

  QUOTE
  Thank-you for using my comment as a jumping off point to a thought-provoking blog entry here, Britt! (And I hope I didn’t sound as ‘despairing’ as all that — my despair, such as it is, stems as often as not from the fossilized pace of local governance here. Other than that, I’m a pretty optimistic, happy-go-lucky person, which is probably why I’m ready to stumble into pre-existing conversations! …Like, duh Yule: one quick google search could have told me that you, Britt, have been talking about open source government for …well, for a while.)

  But on to your post: I really like your descriptive term, “collaboration mall.” As a city person (and yeah, Victoria is a smaller city, but it’s pretty dense and urban and walkable), I’m of course loathe to admit that the suburbs might be places that produce appropriate symbols (”mall”) for civitas / civic life. But I can remind myself that in the 1920s Walter Benjamin wrote about 19th century Parisian arcades as localities of social meaning (and manufacture of meaning) — and what were the arcades but urban forerunners of suburban malls?

  I’d say that the urban street is still more democratic/ porous/ open, if only because it really is public space, vs. private or semi-private. But the mall can bring together all sorts of different (including “regular”) people, and it’s a great term (compared to “street”) because it acknowledges the reality of markets, fees for services, settings for enterprise, and consumer platforms.

  I’m at the very beginning of trying to create a community aggregator type service here, and your suggestion of a “collaboration mall” is intriguing. Just as with Doc’s entry on infrastructure, I find it helps my thinking when one (physical) thing typically seen in one context is transposed into another (more abstract) context. Till now, I was thinking for example of “public space” (physical) and how that manifests online (abstract). But narrowing that space to a mall brings things into better focus.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: infrastructure, britt_blaser, collaboration_mall

Suburbs, food deserts, and old-fashioned delivery trucks

As it happened, Christopher Hume’s follow-up story today in the Toronto Star on the Leslieville big-box debacle, Wal-Mart and the city an uneasy mix (which I blogged about here), made some points that coincided nicely with a story by Shannon Proudfoot, which appeared in yesterday’s Province (Vancouver), about food deserts in cities: Suburbs cause ‘food deserts’ in cities; People stranded in low-income neighbourhoods have little choice.

Let’s start with food deserts in cities. From Proudfoot’s article:

The migration of supermarkets to the suburbs has left some Canadian cities with “food deserts” in their most vulnerable neighbourhoods, according to new research that counters previous studies suggesting that phenomenon wasn’t happening in this country.

Residents marooned in these grocery wastelands — usually those who can least afford it — have no easy access to stores that stock fresh, affordable food, researchers say, forcing them to pay inflated convenience-store prices or eat junk food.

These conclusions are based on 40 years of data, and researchers found that the situation is getting worse, with “the poorest neighbourhoods …the most stranded.”

“If you think about a single mother with limited income without a vehicle — if you can’t hop in your car and drive to a supermarket, you must shop locally,” Gilliland says. “You’re going to be buying your groceries at local convenience stores.”

That forces people to pay an average of 1.6 times more for groceries, he says, perpetuating a financial “downward spiral” for those already in a precarious position.

Better-off urbanites are turning to Zipcar services (car sharing services), which they then use to make those big runs to the suburbs (and the big-box discount stores):

Now they use Zipcar for day trips out of the city or bulk-buying missions that are more convenient and budget-friendly.

“If you work during the day, get off and want to do a grocery run, the buses would be packed and I couldn’t imagine having to carry that many groceries on a bus for your entire family,” MacPhee says. “It really does come down to convenience.”

Proudfoot concludes with the researcher’s advice that city councils must boost population density in cities so that grocers will locate there, too.

But if the grocer is also a retailer like Wal-Mart, that can be a real problem for urban cores, as Hume’s article makes clear. This is where Hume’s common-sense suggestion to bring back the delivery truck comes into play. As he points out, it used to be the case that no self-respecting city person lugged home tonnage from a shopping trip …because the delivery guy would deliver your goods to your home within hours.

So, if you’re going to put a big-box store into a downtown, get rid of the acres of surface parking for individual cars, get public transportation in, get people to walk or bike in, and let the delivery trucks do the delivering again. The money saved on all that parking would surely pay for a small fleet of vans that ferry goods to their purchasers.

In Toronto, the opposition to this suburban monstrosity with an ocean of parking lapping up prime urban real estate is fierce. But Hume then adds:

One wonders how different the response would have been had SmartCentres announced that it intended to build the city’s first no-parking mall. Sounds ridiculous, but maybe not, on second thought. Already there’s a mall in San Francisco that has no parking. Why not Toronto?

From here it’s a short hop (’cause you’re not driving, see) to the idea of the delivery truck:

Then there’s that revolutionary concept known as the delivery truck. Remember that? There was a time when the big stores – Eaton’s and Simpsons – all had their own fleets. In those days, few shoppers even considered schlepping home anything larger than a breadbasket. And let’s not forget the IGA on Danforth at Pape, which to this day has no parking on its premises.

Clearly, the time has come to bring back the delivery truck, and Eastern Ave. could be a perfect place to start. Of course, the Wal-Marts would have nothing to do with such a concept, but being Toronto’s first green shopping centre, Wal-Mart wouldn’t be wanted anyway.

Shoppers would walk or cycle to the centre, make their purchases, then walk or cycle home. The goods would show up later. Now that’s convenience.

“We think delivery is a great idea,” says Smith, who also points out that, “this is a huge evolution for us. None of us has a lot of urban experience.”

The return of the delivery truck could also address the problem of “food deserts” in urban cores. There is enough density already if you include the people who can’t afford to drive to the store.

Here in Victoria, several of our core and downtown grocers deliver for free, same day, if you shop before noon or 2pm and your order is over $25. The liquor stores (non-government, that is) figured this one out, too: right below Market on Yates (”Your uptown downtown grocery store” is, I believe, their slogan) on View Street there’s Harris Green Liquors, which not only delivers, but takes orders for home delivery over the phone. Cheers, eh?

Above: Market on Yates delivery ad as seen on the website.

Left: Harris Green Liquor Merchants delivery truck.  They also use a regular       car…

Suburbs and their replicating ways

Two items about suburbia came across my horizon recently.

One is a USA Today report on Chinese delegations coming to the US to study planned suburbs: Modern suburbia not just in America anymore by Haya El Nasser (today, April 18), which has an ominous (to my ears) conclusion, although there’s a lot of interesting stuff before that. More on that in a moment.

The other is another palpable hit from a couple of days ago by The Mobile City’s Martijn de Waal, Video as suburban condition. This blog post references an installation by Martijn Hendriks, also entitled video as suburban condition. As de Waal writes, Hendriks has compiled a loop of YouTube video clips showing teens “performing” (as it were) their selves — on suburban parking lots or in “the fluorescently lit aisles of strip mall supermarkets.” What de Waals observes is fascinating: the clips, he writes, aren’t “loose incidents” unrelated to one another, but “part of an ecosystem”:

Teenagers perform their identity, video tape it with their mobile phone or handheld camera and put it on Youtube. Other teenagers watch those clips and in their own distant yet almost similar suburbs re-enact or remix the performance. Japanese teenagers copy funny dances and supermarket gags from their peers in the US and the other way around.

The performances are then copied by other teens around the world. De Waal quotes from Hendriks’ site to explain how suburban places are imagined in these clips: “The videos show people performing in places that would normally lack all interest, like back yards, parking lots, roof tops and malls. (…) Each place, as ordinary as it may be, is re-imagined as a place for doing extraordinary things.”

What’s fascinating is how de Waal thinks this through in terms of the technology: video allows for a replication — a reproduction, actually — of the performance of that identity, and in that sense, we are talking about an ecosystem. A cardinal clue whether something is animate or inanimate is whether it can reproduce. Humans are using technology to reproduce memes, lifestyles, …and identities. This means they are alive.

De Waal writes:

These videoclips show that performers at spaces like parking lots and strip malls now do have a way to find an audience - although the interaction is not in real time and in real space. These spaces declared dead do seem to come alive and work in a way that is comparable to traditional city squares. At least in terms of processes of performance and identification.

Now… what I really like about this approach to the topic is that it honours and recognizes the vitality in the thing.

I don’t feel the same friendly way toward master-planning. And that takes us back to the USA Today, where the author (Haya El Nasser) describes a certain flavour of “master planning” that overpowers whatever those teens might get up to in those videos.

El Nasser’s article starts as follows:

A Chinese delegation from Beijing arrived in Phoenix last month and headed west to the Sonoran Desert, deep into suburbia. Its destination: a quintessential American residential development in Buckeye, one of the many suburbs dotting the sprawling metropolitan area.

It goes on to describe Sun City Festival, a 3,000-acre planned community. Do young people dance or “perform” on parking lots there, I wondered? Nope, this is for folks 55+ of age. The Chinese delegation was there to study how they might “replicate” (El Nasser’s word) that “community” back home in China.

If the kids are having sex, the planners are in the lab doing in vitro “fertilization” it seems….

Ironically, this push to plan is done for reasons of sustainability:

The push is on to inspire developing countries to do what more American communities are doing: steer away from sprawling, cookie-cutter subdivisions popularized after World War II and create sustainable communities that will not deplete natural resources.

That includes developments built around mass-transit stations to reduce reliance on cars and projects that mix homes and businesses so that people can walk from home to stores and other services.

That sounds good, but what does it feel like? Will there be dancing (or miming or performing) in the streets (or parking lots or aisles)?

I’m not defending the existing suburban places that the kids documented by Hendriks are filming (not at all), but I’m just a bit skeptical about the “planning” described in Nasser’s article — irrespective of my basic sympathy with its goals (to have livability, sustainability, all that good stuff — oh, and good design, too…).

I’m wondering, when all is said and done (planned!), how do you plan for something like YouTube, for example? We’ll always be using technology to enhance our replicating ways, and often on unexpected platforms. From the backseats of cars to the digital virus via YouTube, life will find a way…

In the meantime, though, by all means plan better, cleaner, more sustainable communities. It makes sense — sort of like more comfortable plush in the backseat upholstery?

“Forgotten Architects,” and some thoughts on the creative class

Here’s a great blog post by BLDGBLOG’s Geoff Manaugh, Forgotten Architects, where he details Myra Wahrhaftig’s research project on German Jewish architects who were suppressed and banned from practicing in Nazi Germany. Some of Wahrhaftig’s work is now published by the Pentragram Papers (and here); there is also a German-language lexicon with 500 biographies, Deutsche juedische Architekten vor und nach 1933 — Das Lexikon.

In his commentary (and do surf over to BLDGBLOG to see the fabulous illustrations), Geoff Manaugh nails it when he writes “…frankly, it seems impossible not to look at these images and judge 20th century Germany in light of the catastrophic stupidities that led to its murderous exile of the creative classes, whether those were physicists, novelists, abstract expressionists, or even architect members of the Bauhaus.”

Invoking the phrase “creative classes” conjures Richard Florida, who we might think “discovered” the creative class as a slightly more recent phenomenon. But clearly there’s much to learn about the “creative classes” and their role in society by studying the consequences of Nazi Germany’s actions, too.  In effect, it modeled for the world what it really means to squeeze the creative class from a country’s economy and culture. “Purity” (in Nazism’s case, “Arian” purity) is the opposite of all those vital “Ts” that Florida advocates for (talent, technology, tolerance). To aim for a “purely German” architecture or science or math is as absurd as to label any architecture, science, or math “Semitic,” yet that’s what the Nazis tried to do. Stalinists of course also believed, like Nazis, that there could be Soviet technology or art. Absurdly, they all thought they were being creative in some “new,” virile way.

These histories teach the need for a more complex approach: we can’t get out of having to evaluate, case by case, whether something contributes or is creative …and it involves choices and judgments as to what individuals and societies believe is worth contributing to. As someone who intensely dislikes Nazi-style “purity” (or ideologically prescribed “correctness” of any kind), I (like so many others) have sometimes not been disinclined to court the opposite view: namely, that anything fun and freaky must be (should be?) good or creative. But sometimes fun is just …well, fun. And sometimes freaky really is a freakish temporary blip that doesn’t deserve sustained attention. (Tell that to the attention economy, though…) In other words, the opposite of Nazism (to use an umbrella term) isn’t “anything goes,” but understanding — of creativity, of what works, of tolerance, talent, and technology.

Is “balance” enough?

Just a quick post, as I’m still in catch-up mode. This morning I read an article in the local paper about a man who has 250 charges against him for public drunkenness, causing disturbances, aggressive panhandling, harassing people, and so on. “Red,” as he’s called in the article, is not homeless, according to police, and they do not believe that he has a mental health problem (although that’s debatable, given his behavior). See Persistent panhandler gets summons under a section of community charter.

Now the city will use a new community charter bylaw to haul this individual before court, where they hope the judge will sentence him to stay away from the downtown core. The intent is to ban Red from panhandling and from “socializing” downtown.

One city council member, quoted in the article, says, “There’s always got to be a balanced approach in dealing with all the issues.”

This bothers me, maybe because we hear too much about “balance” these days. The councilor is concerned that Red’s rights to be downtown on the street to panhandle (which isn’t illegal as such) aren’t infringed upon, and that the way to address the problems caused by the behaviors of people like Red is to seek balance. It somehow makes me think that balance is starting to become a sort of mantra which doesn’t allow valuation. And if that’s the case, you have to ask: Is “balance” stasis? If so, it’s death.

What about judgement? Are we (especially in Canada) so afraid of judging (as my daughter pointed out to me a couple of years ago, in Canada judges need to take workshops to learn how to be non-judgemental…) that we opt for balance (stasis), versus embracing quick, nimble, intellectually aware and alert change? And besides, isn’t our supposed balance often enough just an appearance of balance? All sorts of stuff is still out of whack beneath the surface and in other domains, and the fervent wish for balance is …well, just a wish. Perhaps a wish to get out of making judgements and decisions?

It’s ironic that the US should be full of religious evangelists, whose mantra on the Christian side of the register is not to judge, lest ye be judged, and yet it’s we in Canada, supposedly secular, who are holier than thou in being non-judgemental.

So here’s the deal: I have a problem with being non-judgemental, especially since I’m not a Christian or religious. Being non-judgemental might work fine in your spiritual life, but it sucks when it comes to ethics and politics and economics and policy. You know, it’s like that old shibboleth about rendering unto Caesar what’s Caesar’s and onto god what’s god’s.

Which finally makes me wonder if politicians, when they talk about “seeking balance,” are refusing to judge, …which makes me wonder whether focusing on “balance” is replacing decision-making. I also wonder whether balance in the spiritual sense was ever intended to be a sort of placeholder for anything, whether painful or pleasurable.

As an atheist, I object to any strategy or philosophy that introduces religion into politics. When people talk about “balance,” they usually mean something quasi-religious (or at least “spiritual,” whatever that horse of a different color means to all the riders out there).  Whether the councilor in question is religious or not is moot for me at this point.  I’m concerned with the discourse of “balance,” which is starting to sound like religion.  I object to religion whenever and wherever it worms its way into places where it doesn’t belong.