I disagree with criticisms of current art or “pop” art like pop music, popular fiction books, etc. To become broadly popular you must appeal to as many people as possible. This is a balancing act between mediocrity and edginess that pushes just the right amount of boundaries to feel “new” and “fresh” without turning off a lot of people. So by definition the most popular song in the world is going to usually be fairly non-offensive.
If you get very into a genre of art, like for me is horror movies and metal music, you quickly realize there is a super deep well of amazingly high quality content that pushes the boundaries of the art form. There are passionate community members and creators that are using all the latest and greatest technology to produce ever higher quality art at less cost, expanding the amount of art and the number of people with the funds to create it.
If you look at the top-40 music charts and cringe just find music you actually like because there is tons of it being made and a community behind it. All the criticism about “modern art sucks” is such snobbish and flippant bullshit.
Even with music for example - look at what indie artists are doing. Touareg rock for example, or Altin Gun for Turkish folk psychedelia, Newen Afrobeat who are combining Chilean folk with Afrobeat or Coke Studio in Pakistan will be marvelled at decades from now.
Heck, just go through the KEXP YouTube catalogue to be blown away by what's happening in music.
Music never gets truly widespread appeal across society let alone globally. The highest selling album of the last 25 years was 1997’s Shania Twain Come On Over at 29.6 million copies verified and 40 million claimed. Bump that to all time and you hit 1982’s Michael Jackson Thriller at 47.3m verified and 66m calmed which had both people buying multiple copies over time and multi generational appeal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums
Not that everyone who likes a song buys it, but regional sales show vast differences in sales and thus tastes for different albums.
And your point is? Stodgy conservatives being shocked at the cultural shift in what is entertaining vs. out-of-bounds reflected by the younger generation popular art is...not a new phenomenon, nor is popular art deliberately and flagrantly violating the taboos of the stodgy conservative establishment.
If we take the premise to be true, the conclusion to be drawn is that those lyrics are NOT offensive. They way that ridiculous song has been celebrated in the media tells me that’s true.
The quality and sophistication of mainstream pop art is an important indicator, though. It is consumed by the majority of the population and gives sense to the "wisdom" of an era.
Nowadays you simply don't find any mainstream music approaching the levels of sophistication of, say, 1980s mainstream music. Where's the Dire Straits, the Gary Moore and the David Bowie of the 2010s?
I just looked at the top 5 songs from 1985, and I will gladly take WAP or Old Town Road over Careless Whisper or Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go. Top of the billboard has mostly always sucked IMO.
Janelle Monàe may be this generations Bowie. And Kendrick Lamar can definitely hold his own in comparison to dire straights.
The 80s were the era of synth-pop/new wave/new romantic. Initially emerging from late 1970s punk, diverting into sub-genres and refining its sound until around 1987. Generally dark and touching music with a very intellectual text.
Also disco, when it first appeared on the scene was strongly associated with an LGBT audience, and the Moral Majority crusaders then absolutely denigrated it.
Good art is by definition subversive, and you won't find subversion in the Billboard Top 40. Which is why conservative criticisms of stagnation in art/science feel so blatantly hypocritical too.
Well, there's something you don't see very often these days: conservative intellectuals. The old stalwarts of Ross Douthat and the AEI. The problem is though, if you skip ahead to the conclusion:
> [T]he only thing more frightening than the possibility of annihilation is the possibility that our society could coast on forever as it is—like a Rome without an Attila to sack its palaces, or a Nineveh without Yahweh to pass judgment on its crimes
- arguing, effectively, that America is too comfortable and therefore must be destroyed? In some ways this feels like a quaint thing to worry about as a pandemic sweeps the US and police and demonstrators fight in the streets, but perhaps it explains the blase approach that has been taken to those events.
As a counterpoint to this entire line of thought, I'd recommend reading "The Fremen Mirage", a series of blog posts linked to below. It does a fantastic job of going through the history of the idea of "decadence" as what destroys society, and of the idea of "hard times" as the crucible to form strong fighters. The long and the short of it is that there is no historical evidence for this idea, that the "decadent" groups had massive advantages over everyone else, and that the original idea of "decadence" tended to be created for internal political reasons, rather than any true comparison with outside groups.
I thought decadence equated to a corrupt and inefficient ruling class, where decline is inevitable if power is handed over to whoever has the biggest bag of coin to offer or highest number of spears.
A propos, there was a review on slatestarcodex for "Secular Cycles" effectively tracking the rise and fall of civilizations if I remember correctly. The argument is societies start to destabilize and stagnate once wealth concentrates to a certain point, after which war and strife levels the playing field once more. Except, we don't much expect that same sort of upheaval to happen today in Western society.
All of which to say, you could liken periods of high wealth concentration as lending to decadence, though I'm not sure how useful that would be as the same argument could be made of golden ages. Decadence itself doesn't seem suspect but I would expect it to be around before things go awry.
That correlation might be reversed, though. The author of The Great Leveler makes the argument that in peaceful times, inequality almost always rises to the maximum level that society can bear. It remains that way until a destabilizing event occurs (plagues, state collapse, destructive revolution, mass-mobilization warfare) which decreases inequality (mostly through wealth destruction - the wealthy have the most to lose).
So it's possible that rather than high inequality leading to destabilization, it's the opposite: destabilization leads to decreased inequality.
A succinct and pithy saying, but generally incorrect. Historically, good times create a food surplus. A food surplus creates well-nourished armies. Well-nourished armies, for better or for worse, create hard times for everybody else.
As I've posted elsewhere in this thread, I would recommend reading the following series of blog posts.
I agree with OP in some general sense in a closed political ecosystem because WWI/II didn't happen in a closed ecosystem. The extremes were just enough that it couldn't be easily contained within their perspective domains or countries. I wasn't aware of apt analogies before reading this thread but I just called it the Champion's Paradox, that with enough wins a fighter generally becomes less vigilant, "decadent" if you will, and I'd wager that the same holds true for larger domains as well given that all other things being equal.
I think that the article is not saying anything about ought-to-be matters. Just what-is observational statement.
It's not that it 'must' be, by some moral standard, be destroyed. It's that it would be destroyed by inevitable laws of objective reality, which, like gravity, do not take any moral stance.
> arguing, effectively, that America is too comfortable and therefore must be destroyed?
I wouldn't describe the author's definition of decadence as synonymous with "comfortable": Sterility, poor response to covid, a lack of economic and technological progress, repetitive "arts" with nothing worth remembering by history.
Amid all this discussion of Rome, perhaps worth noting that the largest Empire in history was busy dissolving itself exactly at the same time it was taking huge measures to improve the quality of life of its own home citizens.
This comment would make sense on Reddit or twitter “maybe” due to how easy it is to fall into a bubble but on HN? This website regularly features content from conservative intellectuals.
I'm pretty far to the left, but I will say that one thing that's good about HN is that you can discuss an idea here without it getting down voted into the abyss, sometimes. Sometimes people even argue on good faith. Try finding that on Twitter.
A government in the geopolitical landscape is much like an organism in the environment. Evolution is spurred on not by chance, but by selective pressure that prunes out the weak and unstable.
We've entered an era where Mutually Assured Destruction has reduced that selective pressure of superpowers down to nothing. In this environment, power can easily be pulled from citizens and placed into the hands of the autocrats who trust that the chances of being usurped is extremely low. And they're right.
There are social justice issues in the world, sure. But I think this issue of power redistribution is a big issue too.
This is a fascinating discussion because it hits directly at a topic that civilization-after-civilization has faced throughout history: are we able to reasonably assess whether we are continuing towards growth and progress or stagnation and extinction?
Frankly, the historical record is not encouraging. Usually, when this topic comes up people chime in with easy takeaways like "people have always complained about this, and it rarely amounted to anything", "look at this thing that happened recently that's never happened before. It's proof that we're doing better than any other civilization ever has", or "things have not been going according to my value system, therefore doom is approaching!"
It's possible to cite example-after-example of these phrases coming up when the conversation happens in the historical record. And yet. And yet at times civilizations do die, and there was plenty of warning while it was happening. The problem is that denial and complaceny is tough to fight. When the Emperors took over Rome, it kept the Senate around. They gradually stopped having power, but by keeping them around, it was possible for the illusion of things staying the same to remain. People, with the very smallest prodding, are more than happy to believe that everything is as good as it used to be, plus there's all this new cool stuff we've never seen before!
Hell, ask a few people when the Western Roman Empire ended. Good luck with that. There are folks who will tell you it never did end. If you're that far in denial, how could you ever reason from your current historical position to the long run?
Many times I think conversations like this are much more interesting by the types of responses you get than the actual merits of the case presented.
If our civilization is entering the great 1984/Brave New World Fizzle, I can tell you with certainty that there will be fierce denial that such a thing is occurring. Just like always.
> Hell, ask a few people when the Western Roman Empire ended. Good luck with that. There are folks who will tell you it never did end. If you're that far in denial, how could you ever reason from your current historical position to the long run?
AFAIK, the argument over when the western empire fell is not so much about the facts, so much as the meaning of the word "fall". it's inherently arbitrary to point to the "end" of a civilization with routine violent regime changes, varying degrees of centralized control, continuous contraction/expansion of borders, and cultural/ethnic mixing from the territories. everything we think of as "roman" was constantly in flux. if you look solely at centralized political/military power, the western empire clearly fell in the late 400s AD. if you look at cultural influence, you might argue it lives on today in the catholic church.
Those two, as far as I know, are the same thing. I know biological "race" has some negative connotations, but I guess you could also say "ecotype" to refer to roughly the same thing, which I reckon was what you were trying to do--correct me if I'm wrong.
I think culture and ethnicity are not exactly the same, but I couldn't tell you specifically what the difference is. I don't mean anything terribly specific here, just looking for a convenient way to express the set of things that are different between one group of people and another, aside from the political borders they happen to live within. as a weird example, if china conquered half of france, we would still consider the people that lived there to be french, not chinese. if a single chinese family moved to france, we would probably consider them to be french after a certain number of generations. but if many chinese families moved to france and integrated with the existing society, we would consider that society to be not entirely french or chinese, but something new.
It is interesting to note that if you read Roman generals' letters from the fourth/fifth centuries AD, they seem like they have no idea that their civilization is in the late stages of decline, something totally easy for us to recognize millennia later. It's weird and uncanny, and kind of concerning given contemporary circumstances
Strongly disagree we’re (the US) in decline at all.
If you think we are, you’d have to agree that the EU is post-decline. The UK, France (the list goes on) are all countries that are past their peak of power, influence and prestige.
But I would argue those EU countries haven’t declined in a negative sense. They’ve just evolved into something other than a global superpower.
Strongly, why? The us is declining in lifespan, people's happiness, education, govt and this was all before covid. Cv19 failures have revealed the problems more than ever.
Europe has some issues too but they don't have the same systemic failures we have. Also, Europe can be independently successful or failing from the us.
France is not past their peak of power unless you count centuries old empires. UK and Germany sure, neither of them have any strong foreign policies and especially the UK isolated itself by their own decision.
France in comparison is building alliances in the Mediterranean, the Middle East and Africa. I believe they have a lot of growth in their future. They are far form done and very much realpolitik and with expansion in mind( plus one of the few countries that still holds colonies across the world).
Funny, I agree with him because of things like Covid being self-inflicted. We're so unable, as a species, to avoid even known risks (yes, we've known about the risk of new Coronaviruses since SARS), prepare for them, or deal with them when they've actually occurred. Even now, a not insignificant part of the US population thinks Covid is a hoax. Or that climate change is a hoax. We're reaching a point where catastrophic failure is just a stone's throw away, and we're already seeing the system buckle (rise of the Republican's hold over Congress, the rise of Trump, the rise of far right activists across Europe, growing environmental issues causing things like surges of refugees and civil war, unrest across the globe, etc.). It's only going to get worse from here as problems go unsolved and people's suffering grows.
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Respectfully, politicians you don't like gaining power isn't evidence of the system buckling.
The other issues aren't exactly unconcerning, but I think we have to acknowledge that this is a quite peaceful time. For most of history, what we call "unrest" was the status quo, and there were in addition wars of open territorial conquest which are nearly extinct today.
A lot of this stuff is just ship-of-Theseus for politics; institutions and power structures gradually break down and are replaced piecemeal with other ones, making it difficult to identify a cutoff date. Not only that, what are the boundaries of "our" "civilization" - what's not ours, and what's not civilization?
Trying to stay at a meta level, this discussion is almost intractable _because_ of the issue of definitions. It reminds me of the SCOTUS 1964 case for obscenity, where one justice notes "I'll know it when I see it" [1] You can look at, say, Western Europe after 700AD or so and see that things are not as good as they were 500 years before, but it's quite arguable which (if any) of those things constitutes a "decline" Charlemagne, after all, was crowned (among many other things) "Emperor of the Romans" [2]
In fact, even during its heyday, the Roman Empire defied defied definitions. Were you Latin? Roman? A citizen? These and other terms all meant different things as the civilization progressed. There was almost a determined effort to keep shifting definitions around such that the Roman Empire never died. In fact, IIRC, there's a 60 Minutes segment where they interview some Greek monks living on an island. The flag they're flying? The flag of the Byzantine Empire, of course. (Also, the word "byzantine" is mostly our own invention. They considered themselves thoroughly Roman)
Having said all of that, it's completely obvious to any outside observer that major changes occurred, many of which had a negative impact on the population. So something happened. Until one starts in with definitions of what exactly constitutes a valid OEM part for our Theseusian ship and what doesn't, folks are free to completely ignore the discussion, no matter how bad things get.
I recently read "Decadent Society" as part of a binge on what another commenter calls "conservative intellectual" literature of the past couple of years. I'm not sure Douthat really makes a great case for his thesis but there is, to me, a sort of haunting note of truth to it--a sense of your "Fizzle" having entered a feedback loop that is difficult to ascertain from the inside.
Since I did march through the literature binge, I'll add that some conservative authors are quite a bit more pointed in their analyses than is Douthat. "Age of Entitlement," and "Return of the Strong Gods" are two titles that come to mind.
> growth and progress or stagnation and extinction?
A false dichotomy, since humans are uniquely able to harmonize with any environment through observation and planning. The need to buy stuff is the only reason we think of “progress or stagnation”
Coincidentally enough, today is actually the anniversary of the deposition of the last Roman Emperor in the west, Romulus Augustus. That happened on September 4th 476.
- How fast can we respond (provide a solution) to problem <x>
- What are our dependencies, and how does it affect our ability to respond to problems <X>
Or in other words, we run out of things, or encounter problems we cannot adapt to.
While I don't necessarily disagree with his thesis, I think the author cherry picks points and creates a narrative where there isn't one. He mentions the last "shared cultural moment" was Buzz Aldrin landing on the moon. Personally after watching it live, I'd argue Space X launching humans into space is one of those "moments". This all comes down to your own interpretation of the events and there's so many other examples in the piece. Narrative fallacy at best, but mostly pseudoscience in my opinion - world progress can't be binned into a coherent storyline.
Yeah, it’s obviously all anecdata here but I don’t run in tech circles outside of work, and genuinely can’t remember a single post, tweet, or meme about Space X that didn’t come from my coworkers or few tech friends.
Tiger King though, whew. Even my grandmother tried out her new Netflix subscription with that.
I'll agree with your point but his 4 other examples were "steamship, railroad, assembly line, and commercial aviation" which are comparable. With that said it felt like everyone I knew watched it (I associate with mostly non-techies) so to each his own. But yes the moon landing was on another level.
> steamship, railroad, assembly line, and commercial aviation" which are comparable
Also pretty dubious.
Regardless of what you and your friends did, you have to admit that there’s a whole wider world that didn’t watch it. Just looking at the numbers, the SpaceX launch got about 10.3 million viewers (https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.space.com/amp/nasa-spacex-as...)
The author defines his shared cultural moment as "some feat of technical mastery". Obviously sports, politics and celebrities are always going to eclipse these. I'd put money on an order of magnitude more Americans caring about Lincoln's assassination than the steamship.
I think that cultural bubbles are mostly harmless, but I’m surprised at how so many people seem to not realize they’re even in a bubble. Who seem to think that 95% of the world, or even America, lives like the average SV tech worker.
>Personally after watching it live, I'd argue Space X launching humans into space is one of those "moments".
There's no way that Space X launching humans, something we've done dozens of times, is as significant as the first time someone walked on the moon. 94% of households in the US watched that. I'd be surprised if 0.94% of households watched Space X.
That said, he is still wrong. 9/11 was definitely a shared cultural moment. At least shared across the US.
To me there's a pretty big difference. The moon landing was a national effort envisioned by the President and involving thousands of employees in the public sector as well as massive media coverage and public funding + support for close to a decade. SpaceX is a private company. Their accomplishments, while impressive, are nowhere near the same national-level endeavors as the Apollo program.
Also, if you ask anyone who was at least 5 years old in 1969, they will tell you the two events were nowhere near the same on an emotional and pure coverage level. The moon landing was by far the most-watched television broadcast in history up to that point, and held that record for a decade - 650 million viewers for a live event. Demo-2 was less than 11 million (with probably a billion more people having access to it than in 1969). It kind of saddens me that America has gotten to the point where people think these two events are equivalent. We've really lost the sense of what national identity-defining big projects even mean.
Why is not the internet a shared cultural moment? Why is the smartphone of today a lesser innovation than the Saturn V? I really don't get the nostalgia in the article
> I'd argue Space X launching humans into space is one of those "moments".
Why? It's been done decades before. It just isn't that impressive from a feat perspective - if you gave anyone enough money to get top engineers you could do the same.
> Narrative fallacy at best, but mostly pseudoscience in my opinion
I think that’s the wrong heuristic to apply. I don’t
think he’s making testable
hypothesis as much as trying to create a lens through which we can consider our current events.
"A state that cannot attain its ultimate goal usually swells to an unnaturally large size. The world-wide empire of the Romans is nothing sublime compared to Athens. The strength that really should go into the flower here remains in the leaves and stem, which flourish."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
The root issue here seems to be the focus on material prosperity as indicative of success. That strikes me as a very 20th century idea, one from before the "Information Overload" age. The cultural-philosophical problem of the future is figuring out how to prioritize in a land of abundance.
> What’s the difference, really, between the music of the 1990s and the 2010s—between the music of Madonna and Lady Gaga, of Mariah Carey and Adele? Between the heavy metal or rock or rap of the 1980s and those genres now? Nuances distinguish them. You don’t need to resort to nuances to tell the difference between the music of the 1970s and 1950s or the 1950s and 1930s.
I find this comparison completely ridiculous. It is not just that I can tell difference between Madonna and Lady Gaga or 1980 metal against todays one. It is also that the actual difference between 1970s and 1950s music is that they changed genre. Metal must be metal, if it was different then metal if would not be metal. It just so happens that new genres did appeared between 1980 and now. Contemporary techno progressive music is incomparable to anything in 1980. Also, 1980 music is ridiculously easy to distinguish as 1980 music. And not just that new genres appeared, the music in 1980 was not consumed the way it is consumed now - all the time for free huge selection by own personal choice. Back then, you had either to pay or listen to one of radio stations. So the people moved more in lockstep.
> Renaissance linear perspective for the visual arts ... By mid-century, with a few admirable exceptions, the modern art world seemed determined to make itself the butt of jokes, as Tom Wolfe memorably described in The Painted Word (1975).
I personally like modern art more then renaissance, but that is personal taste - what I find fun.
The big reason for abstraction being the thing in art is that realism is largely figured out. People can do hyper realistic drawings today, the ones that are hard to distinguish from photography. They are stunning pieces of craft. But, at this point, it is craft that you can learn if you study enough and have talent. You are not discovering something new when you do it - but if they are your thing there are artists focusing on this particular thing. There are books you can read that teach you how to render, analyze and draw.
To me, the decadence observed seems like the result of a decline in regard for and contributions to the welfare of others. Conservative activists have successfully enshrined shareholder primacy in corporate decision making and hostility to public goods and social programs in our politics.
> To me, the decadence observed seems like the result of a decline in regard for and contributions to the welfare of others.
When did the peak in regard for, and contribution to the welfare of, others occur, in your opinion? Looking back through history, I struggle to find a time where it was greater other than perhaps in hunter-gather societies.
Conversely, the rise of entitlement, decrease of attention span and work ethic, and the explosion of dependence on the state successfully enshrined by liberal elites has led to perceived stagnation and continued social frustration between the classes.
Ezra Klein had Ross Douthat (the author) on his podcast to discuss the book and it’s a great conversation. Highly recommend. It’s billed as a debate but it’s not at all contentious, at least I didn’t get that impression.
> . It’s billed as a debate but it’s not at all contentious,
Does Erza ever debate though?( not counting sam harris episode). He seem to invite ppl who already kind of agree with his worldview and amplifies their thoughts.
He was on IQsuared debates but it wasn't a debate, he was just reading excerpts out of his book.
Eh, I haven't run the numbers or anything but, he has a fair number of people he strongly disagrees w/ on (Grover Norquist, Yuval Levin) mostly just to talk. He definitely doesn't observe the fairness doctrine, but it's questionable whether that's even possible these days. But regardless I don't think he's under any obligation here.
I would agree his podcast... well excepting Sam Harris I've never heard what I would call a debate on there. But I will say in listening to people on there I don't agree with, I've learned a lot and gained a lot of insight. I think it's been good bubble popping, if not like jumping totally into the pool.
For more bubble popping I'd recommend The Flip Side [1]. You get an email every day or two with Red/Blue takes on issues. They do a good job being faithful to both sides (at least, IMO), plus it's free.
I've felt the "technological sublime" that the article mentions many times when contemplating the internet. Perhaps the only difference is that there wasn't a precise moment to focus attention (e.g. moon landing) and there aren't big fanfare events when new internet infrastructure is created (e.g. a politician nailing a golden spike to complete a railroad).
> But there is also the possibility of a worst case that he describes in a chapter titled “Catastrophe.” Suppose that climate change has created an uninhabitable equator. The aging advanced nations cannot sustain their deficit-financed prosperity. The population of Africa continues its rapid growth, resulting in a mass migration into Europe that meets increasing resistance.
Reading this reminded me a bit of reading the WHO and our own leaders (I’m Danish, we handled the pandemic decently) not to worry about Covid back in January.
Heh.
> In the past, each decadent civilization has eventually given way to a dynamic competitor. In our case, might it be Islam? China? Russia? An America led by a more capable populist president?
This also reads a little weird. The author is obviously well versed in history and the progression of civilisation, and as such, must be aware that we’ve always moved in a progressive direction. Sure it sometimes takes a few life times, but we’ve never moved permanently backwards before, so it would be rather strange if we started doing that now.
> Sure it sometimes takes a few life times, but we’ve never moved permanently backwards before
Playing devil's advocate here: perhaps that's because we always think of things that we're doing now as "right"? For instance there are societies in history that were open to some sexual relationships that we are not (mainly the ones involving minors or incest). At times in european history, animals were tried for crimes similarly to people. Are we more or less progressive than they are?
> This also reads a little weird. The author is obviously well versed in history and the progression of civilisation, and as such, must be aware that we’ve always moved in a progressive direction. Sure it sometimes takes a few life times, but we’ve never moved permanently backwards before, so it would be rather strange if we started doing that now.
As a counterpoint, I'd read the essay "The Whig Interpretation of History"(1931). Her criticizes the notion of interpreting history as a story of progress.
> we’ve never moved permanently backwards before, so it would be rather strange if we started doing that now.
It would not be strange. It would be unexpected. It reminds me of this funny little story:
> "Every morning on a turkey farm, the farmer comes to feed the turkeys. A scientist turkey, having observed this pattern to hold without change for almost a year, makes the following discovery: “Every morning at eleven, food arrives.” On the morning of Thanksgiving, the scientist announces this law to the other turkeys. But that morning at eleven, food doesn’t arrive; instead, the farmer comes and kills the entire flock."
> ... we’ve always moved in a progressive direction. Sure it sometimes takes a few life times, but we’ve never moved permanently backwards before, so it would be rather strange if we started doing that now.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by "we" here. There are plenty of societies that moved permanently backwards, and are currently quite far behind where they previously were. Iran is a regressive theocracy and used to be a very modern country. China had a beautiful intellectual culture that contributed immensely to the world and is currently a genocidal despotocracy. Egypt was the intellectual capitol of the known world. In the middle east, there were generations of people who thought that the ruins of the civilizations that came before them must have been made by gods because they couldn't fathom them being created by humans.
Civilizations backslide, and die, regularly throughout history.
Now, if you mean "we" as in humanity as a whole, it's a tougher question. I do agree that humanity as a whole makes progress forward on a long enough timelines, but there were still many stumbling blocks along the way.
Eh, I grew up with the faces on TV constantly blabbering about the "decadent West" and yet my country and most of the ex-USSR has deteriorated worse than any western one.
My eyes kind of roll every time someone says decadent society as it reminds me of communist propaganda.
It's an ongoing rhetoric in Russia and much of Eastern Europe. Western issues like gay marriage, feminism, overconsumption, politically-correct language and identity politics are skillfully used by nationalistically-oriented populists to paint a decadent image of the West.
Do Russians not believe in things like equal pay, all jobs being open to women, fair divorce settlements, protection from physical abuse, access to family planning? (Honest question).
Yes and no. Theoretically domestic violence is bad. Practically, it is more prevalent then in west and often seen as dirty familly issue. Local preacher and familly will focus on forgiving, make familly together and that kids need dad.
Likewise, equal pay sure, but dont you dare to point out when it is not. Naturally woman is the one expected to primart focus on kids and home, guy is more likely to be promoted of course. It is not seen as "not a woman place" to be leader - but it is happening less then incapable guy being promoted. Basically, there is more sexism but less hostility.
Jobs are not closed to women, but people perceive you weird putside of proper gender bounds and talk about it openly. The different expectations of boys and girls are in the open too. You wont find male teachers much, super rare.
Divorces seem fair money wise, except really guy will get less access to kids. But no alimony, she is expected to work. Access to familly planning is good.
Women rights are equally respected especially in the workplace and in education (a lasting legacy from communism), but the whole Western narrative about socially-constructed gender roles and men oppressing women are just not there. Women are encouraged to act and look like women, little girls are encouraged to play with dolls only. The general policy is to strengthen the family unit and reduce divorces in the first place.
Decadence is a dumb and useless concept really - every damn time the society in decline considered something else irrelevant or actually helpful "decadence" while ignoring the actual cause of their downfall which they call "virtue". The infamous gladiatorial games which lead to multiple large scale insurrections were to "fight decadence" by trying to instill the military values they thought were important when really their expansionism and campaigns were a root of their downfall.
Decadence as a concept makes a good polemic but it isn't a good source of judging problems let alone solving them. It really just means "I the self-proclaimed moral authority dislike this direction of society!".
The closest to an "objective decadence-like concept" is an expectation of a way of life that cannot be sustained without significant damage. Cottage industry after the dawn of industrializarion would be "decadent" as factory volume beats them out and can no longer sustain the middle class lifestyle. Not exactly what comes to mix when one thinks decadence but it is a lifestyle made unsustainable. There is no "sin" to it but it just doesn't work anymore and trying to force it wouldn't work out well. Notably even that is subjective and depends upon means. Having less than 10% of the population involved in food production would be stupidly unsustainable before agricultural advances but is the first world norm today.
It doesn't take much effort to find current instances of sword, famine, and plague. Only thing missing is the beasts, but maybe that's because we've already hunted them to extinction.
Then again, we've been seeing all four them regularly for over centuries...
So all the propaganda was true: the decadent West was heading for a cliff, and the USSR not only caught up to it, but indeed even surpassed it.
I suppose any one unhappy with decadence, preferring spectacular instability to stability, a good fight against misfortune to contentment, and struggles with temptation or fatal overthrows by passion is free to become whatever flavour of jihadi they find congenial:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24373042
David Crosby on how becoming a millionaire changed his life: "you know those pistachios that are hard to open? I don't bother with those anymore."
I realise this is a review, not the actual text. But still. This is utter bollocks.
It's typical of non-technical "intellectuals" to completely ignore the main areas of modern human progress, simply because they don't understand them.
e.g. the whole discussion on Art completely ignores Video Games, which are undoubtedly Art, and also an area of rapid innovation and development. Yet they're usually dismissed out of hand because no-one who takes "Art" seriously plays them or understands them.
The whole "we went to the moon and never went back" completely ignores the argument that the moon landing was, right from the start, an uneconomical publicity stunt. The exciting time is now, when space is starting to become economically viable and we have organisations making viable plans to colonise Mars.
The Internet is taken for granted as a method of "chatting", and smartphones as a method of "taking selfies". Again, because the author doesn't understand what vast and wide-reaching achievements these are. Watching a Cambodian tuk-tuk driver watch a YouTube English lesson while parked up waiting for a fare is a modern marvel. Bringing communication and the spread of knowledge to anyone who wants it, wherever they are, is the most important thing to happen to humanity since the invention of agriculture. And yes, it's as disruptive to human societies as agriculture: we should expect our societies to be disturbed by it.
The economic malaise is mostly a result of WW2. Europe was economically destroyed, and the US changed its entire economy to meet the demand (and the USSR moved its entire manufacturing base a thousand miles east in a year, an astounding thing to do). Recovering from that meant that growth was easy because it was coming from such a low base. We've hit the final point of that recovery, and growth isn't so easy any more.
Not everything is perfect. There are some changes we need to make. But please let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. And to anyone writing about modern society: if you don't understand technology, please stop fucking writing about it.
Agreed. I was especially unconvinced at the arguments for "repetition", for example that today's music is separated from the 90s only by "nuance". What? Sure, from up close it may seem that way, but given 30 years I'm sure we can look back and very clearly see the style developments just as we can for the 70s and the 80s.
It sounded to me like a case of "back in my day" but with incoherent arguments.
That's the part I completely agree with. Music is absolutely stuck. There have only been micro-genres, such as the many micro-genres of techno/EDM or hip hop. There has been nothing approaching the birth of hip hop, techno/rave, grunge, "alternative" rock, and so on. Those all came of age in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. For some reason after 2000 music died.
My personal explanation is the collapse of the record industry. I don't think it was due to piracy, though piracy didn't help. It was mostly due to the abandonment of the old practice of scouting for interesting new music in favor of producer-led manufactured pop. The suits wanted a more reliable way to produce marketable acts, and they got it... at the expense of virtually all innovation. The same thing happened to mainstream Hollywood studios who can now only make one movie. Of course it only works for a while. Now everyone is bored and nobody cares and listenership and movie attendance numbers are crashing.
(This is always what happens when the bean counters run things. You get a short term bump in profit, but what they are really doing is cannibalizing the value of the enterprise in hidden ways. The body is basically digesting its own organs. Eventually you are left with a shell with no value.)
Piracy did worsen this trend in the record industry. When the economic model starts to be threatened, a natural response is to become more conservative and cancel anything innovative. It's usually the wrong response, but it's a very normal human response to a feeling of threat or starvation.
The only part of this I really agree with is that the music industry is harming artists more than usual. It is a meme at least as old as jazz or even older (Baroque music was so-named because it was said to be lopsided, like a misshapen pearl) that music ain't what it used to be.
There is still great music being made, and the really deep stuff has always gotten ignored by most people most of the time. Heck, I majored in music and I don't listen to Bach or Coltrane every day. That stuff is too rich for every occasion.
I'd say that innovation within genres - just people making good songs - is every bit as important as creating new genres. New genres aren't automatically created at a certain rate. They're an event, triggered by major social changes or new cultural influences most of the time. For America to invent a new genre we might need to conquer or be conquered by someone else, or have a new wave of immigration.
Some good artists currently making popular music with depth and interest off the top of my head:
St. Vincent, Dessa, Chris Thile, SquarePusher, BJ Cole, Run the Jewels, Billy Joel (I list him here because rather than just repeating his same hits forever, he went and recently released a classical-style piano album that's quite good, so he's still growing and changing as an artist), Tori Amos (she's been making music a long time but has a new style every decade or so).
I dislike the stuff called music so much these days that I have started to listen to classical music. As a hardcore grunge and heavy metal addict I ever thought that hell would freeze before. But the nth remix of a 90 hit doesn't move me - nothing original in it.
I think time will tell us that a bar, alcohol and blue smoke will do more for creativity than a gym and health food all day long.
Classical can get pretty metal, for sure. :) Wagner and Mahler come to mind.
On a totally different note - have you listened to Them Crooked Vultures? John Paul Jones, formerly Led Zeppelin, playing distorted console steel is pretty wild.
> That's the part I completely agree with. Music is absolutely stuck. There have only been micro-genres, such as the many micro-genres of techno/EDM or hip hop. There has been nothing approaching the birth of hip hop, techno/rave, grunge, "alternative" rock, and so on. Those all came of age in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. For some reason after 2000 music died.
I don't really see this at all. I might agree that mainstream music hasn't changed much since the late 2000s, when synthesizers seemed to mostly replace guitars in popular music. to me, taylor swift sounds really different than she did in 2009, but pretty much the same as in 2011 or so. then again, I don't really pay enough attention to this kind of music to give it a fair analysis.
grunge was certainly a major departure from what was popular in the 80s, but it's not radically different from a lot of less popular music that came before it. I would argue there's much more variation in the last twenty years of hardcore subgenres than there was between hüsker dü, pixies, and nirvana.
Music became largely teen-oriented by the late 90s and onwards. Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears... fast forward to the 2010s and nothing has dramatically changed - Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande etc. Maybe it's a very profitable spot exploited by producers and songwriters.
When I was a teen in the early 90s I listened to Tool, Nirvana, emerging Techno/Rave, Rap, as well as older rock like Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Jimmy Hendrix, and King Crimson. I could keep going but that's a sampling. In college I got more into electronic and obscure hip hop, both of which were quite new and innovative at the time. I lost all interest in pop because that was the late 90s when all pop went to crap.
All of that has held up pretty well because it was all good music. Nobody is going to remember the absolute dog shit pop that teens listen to today. It's boring, repetitive, devoid of deep emotion, and is basically the same song over and over.
What I see is that many teens today (those who really like music) are listening to old music from the 60s-90s and very little new music. That's because their generation's music is objectively awful. I have seen studies that have quantified this via means such as Shannon information content. The content of popular music has been declining since the late 90s, and the similarity of songs and acts has been increasing.
> What I see is that many teens today (those who really like music) are listening to old music from the 60s-90s and very little new music.
Teens after 1990 who fancied themselves liking music and being intellectual listened to older music too. I know, because I had friends like that. They considered Nirvana and grunge repetitive crap. Emerging techno and rap too. They would listen Pink Floyd or Beatles, but those were old at that point.
Anecdotal, but my parents (whoil like, Hendix/ Zep / Floyd) thought that Tool / Nirvana / et al sucked. Hard.
Both my parents have pretty good formal music education; my dad was a high school band director for a while. They never said as much, but I am pretty sure that from their perspective most of what I listend to in high school in the early 90s was "absolute dog shit pop" and " objectively awful".
To be fair, Coal Chamber and Sublime are "objectively awful" :D
They are not totally wrong, though I would debate Tool with them. Even if you don't like the style or content Tool is really well done musically. Grunge was innovative and creative but wasn't that musically "serious." I can see classically trained musicians hating it. Same goes for punk.
There can be musically well crafted music and there can be creative music. Occasionally you get music that is both. My point was that post-late-90s pop is neither. It's churned out repetitive trash that relies heavily on cheap hooks and bass lines to be catchy and inspire superficial emotion.
The slide of music toward mindless manufactured repetitive pop started in the 80s, but it was in the late 90s that it became really obvious.
"The slide of music toward mindless manufactured repetitive pop started in the 80s, but it was in the late 90s that it became really obvious. "
Just an opinion (and I am aware it's not a popular opinion), but the Beatles going on Ed Sullivan is what really screwed up our system... prior to that the contemporary popular music was jazz, and that was a moment when every boomer musician I know gave up accordion or clarinet or whatever and got into a shitty garage band.
Like, I think there are worthwhile developments even in the shittiest, most repetitive music. Lately I've been having a grand time making electornic music in a single groove box...
my main point is that there's no transcendent "goodness" to US pop music, as various generations each think the newer generations stuff sucks for one reason or another.
Personally, I love the stuff my teenager sends me, even if a lot of it heavily rips of Devo or the Talking Heads or the Dandy Warhols or whoever.
IMO (and heavily-- just my opinion) it's incredibly repetitive stuff that's often making fun of its audience.
I love Alex Grey's art and I liked the music when was in high school, but I get why folks who are into stuff like hard bop or Chopin think that it's not super refined.
Manufacturer produced pop’s beginnings are exactly contemporaneous with the invention of recording. Just as soon as people learned that they could sell a recording, they started collecting and selling them. And they took care that what they recorded they could sell. And people did buy it. See the Columbia music hillbilly series for example. The recorders totally looked for the most marketable acts.
They got better at predicting what could sell, but commercialized recording didn’t appear later.
Further, prior to recording, musicians couldn’t make a living without that same broad appeal. People don’t buy tickets to shows they don’t want to see, and patrons don’t commission works from artists they don’t like.
The only artists free from commercial concerns are ones who have money from other things.
Another issue is that today discovering new music becomes hard. An algorith will tell you what you like based on your past hearing habits. New music will come to you as a surprise by the one who is paying most to feature it to you. Passive consumption like listening to radio which virtually no one seems to do these days means to be confronted with new things you may dislike but there might be something new which becomes a trend and later a new genre.
The past decade has been acknowledged as the Golden Age of Television. Art evolves - and Breaking Bad is as much art as Anna Karenina.
There is a very irritating snootiness in the review that only thinks classical music as art, and just passingly acknowledges jazz - which by the way was denigrated often in vehemently racist terms when it first appeared.
Have you ever heard of "classical" music? It's a single music genre covering about 500 years of music.
Then, very briefly, the technology of recording music developed to the point where it was commercially viable to mass-market music. As happens with any technological revolution, that triggered a massive spike in innovation. That spike lasted ~50 years, we're just getting to the end of it.
My point is that what happened between ~1950 and ~2000 isn't normal. That's not how fast music normally changes. That was a specific response to a specific stimulus. It will take another stimulus of equal magnitude to provoke a similar level of change.
(also: musicians were almost permanently broke prior to the recording industry. Interesting, and sad, to see that returning too)
Everything moves faster now because there are more people to move it. The rate/person is not that different.
What we have seen since the late 90s is the collapse of musical creativity (at least in popular music... you can still find some creative music if you dig really hard) in spite of population and economic activity continuing to grow. That is not normal. That's a dark age.
Interesting. But it's circular reasoning isn't it? "there were less people, so less innovation. Then there were more people, so more innovation. But now there's more people, but less innovation, so it must be a dark age" doesn't really work as a self-evident statement.
You could make an argument that innovation follows the money. The innovation boom of the late 20th century correlates with the music industry profit boom of the same priod. Now there's less money being made, there's less innovation.
Also, you could probably chart the risk-taking of the music industry. They started off not knowing what the hell anyone wanted, so produced weird shit. Then they got hit by waves of disruption. Then they got a grip on it all and stopped taking risks. Which is where we are: stuff that sounds different doesn't get published.
Except, of course, that we have people self-publishing now. There probably is completely freaky weird awesome shit being made, but we don't hear it because discovery is hard in such a huge sea of music.
I think inovation is stagnant because of team work. No tongue in cheek. But when you take a look at the sea changinf inventions it has been the work of a nerd who was passionate for a prlonged period of time. Not a team which has to publish every brain-fart as a paper.
Universities favouring publish-or-perish are another dead end development.
This may be true, but a lot of the early 60's music was very much collaborative. I think it's more about a risk-taking culture. Universities are not risk-taking cultures.
you seem to be circling around the idea that winner-take-all dynamics have taken over music (and other industries) because of the internet. rather than democratizing exposure and innovation and distributing esteem and reward, the internet has collapsed major strains of interest into one conglomerated popularity contest where even fewer can make it big. the curation of the music industry was useful when access was limited and marketing had cost and power, but not so much now, so it's demise is more coincident than prerequisite.
I think the music argument is somewhat valid, there's nothing like "rock" and "hip-hop" anymore. We have a ton of different styles but nothing groundbreaking. It's to be expected though with how the music industry evolved. Conservative investments and volume instead of quality.
Yes absolutely. What qualifies Anish Kapoor's Bean for example as art above the Shadow of the Colossus?
And there was an absolute explosion of written works only starting two centuries ago - due to mass scale printing. And even in books, fantasy is somehow not high literature - which is just gatekeeping at this point.
In physics for example, computational modelling has been exploding. The availability of GPUs and ML based modelling has been rising rapidly too.
Yet another point - when I was a MS student quantum computing was a pie in the sky fantasy - today it's an exploding field. Same for energy storage - the progress we have made there in the last decade is mind boggling.
There is an effect that we humans cannot really accept - it takes time to really judge the quality of a work. And that time is often decades. Human beings are exceptionally poor at long term thinking (we have literally mountains of evidence for this) and yet stubbornly refuse to accept this limitation.
I agree in that I have major problems with the article, but disagree that somehow we are in this period of great innovation. I think this kind of argument always goes down two paths. First, someone says "things are terrible right now and it's the end." Then someone else says "no it isn't here's why things are actually great!"
Sure we have access to more knowledge than ever - but have we seen the effects of such? Just the opposite - anti-science sentiment is as high as ever. How many people actually truly learn a language online? Downloading duolingo and using it for 2 weeks before giving up is not learning a new language. We overrate minutiae such as this.
> if you don't understand technology, please stop fucking writing about it.
HN is for openly discussing ideas. Technologists face the same biases as anyone else.
> Sure we have access to more knowledge than ever - but have we seen the effects of such?
yeah this the disruption I mentioned. Our society is going to change because mass communication. Not all of that change is going to be good. All of that change is going to be resisted. The same was true for all changes in society, from feudalism to parliamentarianism to democracy, including electricity and steam power.
> Technologists face the same biases as anyone else.
I get that. But technologists tend to get clued-up about everything else before airing their opinions. For some reason, Art Critics especially, intellectuals seem to think it's OK for them to know everything about 19th century impressionism and nothing about Internet Protocol and still have a valid opinion about 21st century Art.
I don't think FaceTime has the societal impact you think it does. it's just the evolution of the phone - very nice, but doesn't solve our real challenges. When you think about it - the computer itself wasn't an insane concept since the 1950s. The technology evolved with major improvements much like anything else, like cars, planes, boats, etc, but the theory behind it pretty much remained the same. Once the right materials and manufacturing of chips were figured out, is it really much of a jump to guess we'd have amazing computers today?
And without the Soviet Union around, it's much harder to solve the challenges we have because there isn't a big bad. The current conservative talking points of China do not carry the same weight because the entire nation's stock portfolios are reliant on cheap chinese factories. There is a general schizophrenia with our world today. Connected by so many things - email, instagram, video chat, cell phones, facebook. And yet depression is very high. People seem far more distant. We need more manufacturing here - but wal-mart and amazon dominate the retail market with cheap chinese goods and Americans can't get enough. Google gives us vast knowledge - and yet looking at tests from the 70s, most are far, far harder. Schools have gotten easier. Anti-vax has a powerful voice. I think technology contributes to this, but all in all I think it's not the sole cause.
> I get that. But technologists tend to get clued-up about everything else before airing their opinions. For some reason, Art Critics especially, intellectuals seem to think it's OK for them to know everything about 19th century impressionism and nothing about Internet Protocol and still have a valid opinion about 21st century Art.
I don't think knowing about IP has anything to do with one's ability to judge art. It's a slippery slope, or rather absurd, because art debates always go down the rabbit hole of "what is art"
My go-to example for this is the Cambodian tuk-tuk driver taking a YouTube English lesson while waiting for a fare. This is radical change. The democratisation of knowledge is huge. And it has unwanted side-effects: everyone does their own "research" now, and then we have to un-democratise some knowledge so that lies don't get passed off as truth. It's going to take us a couple of generations to work out how allowing everyone to publish anything they like, and read anything they want, is actually going to work in a sane society.
Video games are indeed a form of media, but I think it is misleading to say they are art in the same sense as this author intends. Art and mass entertainment are only superficially similar, and most video games are made to entertain. Video games are (generally) consumable goods created to provide an amount of temporary pleasure.
Good art is recognized not just by beauty or the skill required to create it, but by its ability to engage with some aspect of what it means to be human, in a way that is coherent, mature, and thought-provoking.
There are no video game equivalents (yet, one would hope) of, say, Bach, Rembrandt, or Bernini.
Maybe someday there will be, but not today.
edit: To the downvoters, I'm saying all this as a pretty avid gamer. video games are a very young medium and a hopefully in a few centuries I will be wrong.
I love video games. I spend a great deal of time playing them and I think they have a lot of oppurtunities other mediums can't match. But they don't move me the way even a mediocre novel or movie can.
Video games are terrible at interpersonal relationships, for example. I find the more "interactive" relationships with NPCs the more shallow the relationshop, while "railroad" games tend to be better at it.
Maybe it's that AAA titles mostly focus on the adolescent male demographic. But we've yet to find our Tolstoy.
> Video games are terrible at interpersonal relationships, for example. I find the more "interactive" relationships with NPCs the more shallow the relationshop, while "railroad" games tend to be better at it.
I think this is more of a money issue. in a highly linear game, every dollar is spent on content that every player will experience. if you have even three choices in the game that depend on each other meaningfully, you suddenly have eight possible endings and several additional plot paths on the way there. so you have to do several times as much development work to achieve the same level of polish, but each player will probably only experience one or two of the paths. they'll still only pay ~$60 for it.
I have given up on getting a good story out of emergent gameplay and sandbox-y games. Bioshock 1 & 2 is about as good as it's going to get with regards to producing a good story that can go multiple ways. Those games moved me like very few songs or books ever did.
Dwarf fortress is a pretty good stochastic story generator, it's head and shoulders above anything else in that vein. But yeah, those kinds of stories will never really be quite as focused or meaningful as human-crafted narrative
Video games developers employ a huge number of artists, musicians, sculptors, cinematographers and architects. All of whom produce what would on a daily basis be called "art". It is a strange kind of alchemy to put all that art in a box at which point it becomes Not Art.
(also ignoring the whole 20th century modernist questioning of "what is art, anyway" involving all kinds of installations, found art, outsider art, signed soup cans, prints, International Klein Blue, and so on)
Some video games that explore the human condition and could be said to be Art with the capital A:
The Stanley Parable (deconstruction of what it is to play a game. It starts with a third person narration of your character being at work, pushing buttons all day without being quite sure why, and proceeds into multiple endings that deconstruct reality in quite creative ways that sometimes break the fourth wall)
Braid (Mario clone, but you can rewind time and there's a story line that riffs on the old Mario memes but uses them as a metaphor for the atomic bomb)
Dragon Age: Origins (DnD based game with excessively fiddly combat but a fairly massive branching story line, asking the user to make many moral choices, with outcomes ranging from mostly happy to everybody dies)
Portal I and II (notable for their sci-fi dystopian narrator GlaDOS, who is voice acted by an opera singer who plays a computer that has gone insane)
A lot of what computer games do as an art form is fundamentally different than other genres - their chief advantage is interactivity, which is something we haven't known what to do with in art very much prior to this, other than a handful of plays that break the fourth wall.
This interactivity allows for experiments in the concept of community and alternative models of fairness and social status. The reason I still would qualify these as art is that they are exploring these spaces in a non-systematic and intuitive manner rather than an academic one.
This puts MMOs at the top of the medium as an example of what games can do to explore the human condition. They can be life-consuming and addictive, but they explore alternative identities, economies, and social systems in a way and on a scale that no purely intellectual endeavor detached from real economic and political consequences has ever done before. As to what we take from this, I'm not sure other than World of Warcraft has taught me how naive libertarian economics can be given how completely a player was able to take over the entire server economy on one server by just buying low and selling high until his economic advantage was sufficient to control the market.
Yeah like I said in another comment, I'm really not trying to deny the validity or value of individual games or anything like that. Portal is brilliant, and I really liked DA:O (though not quite as much as Baldur's Gate or Pillars of Eternity). I just think that the Shakespeare of the video game medium, whatever form that would even take, hasn't been born yet.
Portal may be ok puzzle, but I just really fail to see that as some kind high art equivalent. I mean, it is fun for enough people for me to be sure it is something valuable, but calling it "exploring human condition" would be a massive stretch.
It is enjoyable puzzle that was big deal when puzzles like that were rare. But it is not a game you will show next generation of children so that they learn something about human condition or some such.
Yeah, that's fair. But I'd put it in the category of like sci-fi movies (she's obviously based on Hal from 2001), and Portal 2 has movie-equivalent levels of storyline.
I think it's an art form in its infancy, and that different arts have different levels of both time spent and depth of understanding gained by taking them in. How much does a painting teach you about the human condition?
Most paintings don't, but that standard came from top thread and not from me. Imo it us ok for majority of them to not be that special.
Most paintings are ideally fun to look at and then get forgotten. Others have some practical purpose (showing war at the time with no photos, celebrating personality for propaganda purpose etc) or are simply moving craft to higher level.
The human conditions ones were the ones in what I called practical category. For example when I was reading about John Brown, that famous painting of him helped me to keep in mind the personality. I have some more examples like that but way more obscure.
I think the best of contemporary writing (whether fun or human condition level) is in movie series. That is format that is currently at the top, having the most complicated and touching and what not storylines. None of that was possible before streaming services.
Yeah, that could be. It's a young genre and I think that paintings from before perspective became systematically understood are super awkward. That's a cool thought. I'm totally okay with blowing some hours to experience the Hamlet of games.
You should take a look at Pathologic. If you're looking for high art in games, that's what I'd recommend. Watch Hbomberguy's video on YouTube if you're curious.
I would respectfully submit that you're talking from a standpoint of utter and complete ignorance about your subject.
There are a thousand games that have an "ability to engage with some aspect of what it means to be human, in a way that is coherent, mature, and thought-provoking". I've been moved to tears by several (killing the dragon in Minecraft after literally months of effort, This War of Mine). Stupid things like "Clicker Heroes" have reminded me that all life is inherently meaningless and all endeavour is ultimately futile, given meaning only by what we feel about it.
Compare that to some of the utter crap that passes for High Art, and video games are way ahead in mature, thought-provoking exploration of what it means to be human.
No we agree much more than you think. I really like minecraft, some of my greatest teen memories are of running a server with a bunch of my friends that had 40+ mods. I think the world is made better by minecraft's existence, and people have made all kinds of beautiful and artful things in minecraft.
My point was not to say that there are no games that provide powerful, meaningful, beautiful experiences to the humans that play them. Such a claim would be absurd. What I am saying is that the game as a medium probably hasn't matured to the point where it can be compared to the Arts with a capital A, as they are historically understood. Precisely, I mean things like painting, sculpture, music, and literature.
I am not the stupid kind of cultural elitist who would say that there is something inherent about the video game medium that would prevent it from rising to that level, I just think that empirically it hasn't happened yet, though in the long term I am quite hopeful.
And yeah, contemporary "high art" has been in largely poor condition for quite some time. At least if the stuff that makes it into museums is any indication.
Awesome, I apologise for judging your ignorance then.
I have studied Art. I have an "O"-level in Art History. I have been to famous museums, and looked at world-class paintings, sculptures, etc.
I mean, I've stood in front of the Night Watch in the Reiksmuseum, and it was great. I get that. I sketch (badly), and I appreciate the craftsmanship that went into that. It's a great piece of art, and it moved me.
But to say that that, awesome as it is, is more "Art" than any video game... is bollocks. It's just not true.
The problem with this "conversation intellectualism" it's all 30,000 feat drab cultural analysis of symptoms and no rigor to actually dissect causes. A good materialist approach might not charm at the moody cocktail party, but actually has explanatory power and proposes remedies.
If Ross Douthat thinks we've slowed technologically and modern technological gimmicks are trivial, well hahahaha, I agree, and he's just betrayed every conservative tenant.
- Space race was classic post-war consensus big goverment spending, and planning.
- Modern technologies, whether it's startups focusing on trains not plains, small powerplants not big ones, phones satellites and not wires in the ground, is entirely tech hacking around coordination failure. We've lost the ability to collaborate on the big stuff, and a lot of that is due precisely to conservationism weaponizing exiting structural failures in our governance model.
Art stagnation: well actually the popular art has been getting a lot better. Look at old music videos vs new ones, for example. Also R&B triumphing over rock as the foundation of pop means we get better rhythm and harmony, the twin pillars of syncretic music. But if high art is stagnent, well, that's clearly got to do with a the stagnation of the people on the top of the economic period with the leisure time. Nothing promotes changing tastes like changing audiences. Or blame underfunded schools and increasing in working hours for the non-rich.
Economic stagnation. Obviously wage growth decline is a proximate cause, not just a symptom (i.e. other factors might cause it or make it hard to fix, but if we could fix it it would help with the rest).
I could go on, but basically Douthat is just talking about symptoms to get along with the more literary coastal elites. It's shambolic. I'll take it more serious if he learns macroeconomics and becomes some sort of libertarian UBI-er.
> little or no growth in working-class wages, lower social mobility
Murray, and the AEI he works for, have fought against higher wages for workers and social mobility for decades. I don't take seriously him bemoaning the results of what he has helped do.
Fighting against a policy is not the same as fighting against it's intended outcome. Me fighting for 2nd amendment rights is not the same as me fighting against lowering the murder rate.
How does he reconcile his form of degeneracy in fighting to keep people at the top of society rich and decadent while pushing the poor down? When people are pushed down too much they can also grow degenerate and decadent as the very rich and develop mental and physical issues which may devolve into drinking and other forms of drug use.
To me, this represents the paradox of morality. That in a closed (somewhat in this case) ecosystem the extremes can horseshoe around, which reminds of horseshoe theory in politics as well as this phenomenon of society seemingly rubberbanding when forcefully pushed to one extreme throughout history. I could go on about my pet theory of how it may relate to thermodynamic regulation on Earth's ecosystem, a self-sustaining form of gradient moderation, but it's too unsubstantiated.
Life is a lot easier these days, thanks in no small part to advances in cars. As an American, cars are a central feature of your life. I feel like a large part of my “character building” years was spent struggling with unreliable, old, leaky, carbureted cars. All the energies I spent keeping that thing running could have better spent working or socializing. And yet I have a deep appreciation for what it takes to make a car go and keep it going.
I may take a century to realized it, but I think you are right. Historians will look back and see America's car-centric culture as its height of extreme decadence and the pivotal point to its eventual decline. When you think about the trucks and SUVs that people drive around everywhere, the entire infrastructure dedicated to it, the health outcomes, etc.
I disagree. Cars are freedom. Freedom has upsides as well as downsides. Technological advances will continue to reduce the downsides, but the upsides are genuine and should not be thrown away. There's a reason why electric cars are a thing, as opposed to Americans just giving up cars and everyone using public transportation.
America should not give entirely up on cars, but reduce to a more balanced level where cars are not a necessity to live. Americans engineered many places to be car dependent when it didn't have to. Once something changes from a nice to have to a requirement, it becomes more like a drug, and the freedom is lost.
> Americans engineered many places to be car dependent when it didn't have to.
No, Americans responded to the preference of many of us for more freedom and less crowded places to live, by producing them. You don't get to decide for other people what a proper "balance" is or for whom cars are a "necessity".
That is my point. Civic leaders DID decide how Americans would live for the next few generations. It is hard to undo even if our children want to go back to the traditional village which had worked for centuries.
Since we live in a somewhat closed ecosystem, you're exchanging freedom now with freedom later with the costs we will pay from the excesses of material luxury. Until we open up the ecosystem, ie, get off earth or really learn to decrease waste, this "freedom" you speak will eventually come around to imprison us if we're not careful.
Technological advances have been steadily decreasing the material costs, not just of cars, but of all forms of freedom. I see no reason why that will not continue to happen in the future. The car I drive today gets about twice the gas mileage of the family car my parents had when I was a teenager, even though it has significantly better performance in every respect; it also weighs about half as much and many of the materials it is made out of can be recycled in ways the materials that old family car was made out of couldn't.
For an even better example, the computer I am typing this on has orders of magnitude more processing power, memory, and storage space for significantly less power consumption than the one I had when I was a student many years ago. It also weighs about half as much and is made of more recyclable materials (and yes, I make use of that: there is a computer recycling center in my town where I take old computers).
There's a lot of talk about how civilisation lifecycles lately, and articles, books coming out, and yet one of the best works in this space goes completely unnoticed and unread, it seems, at least in anglosphere: Lev Gumilyov's Ethnogenesis. May be it's because he worked in Soviet Union, where there were not much interaction between historians on different sides of the Iron Curtain, or may be there's still no good translation to English; anyway, if you're interested in these matters, I highly recommend his books and theories.
I'm absolutely not saying that he's right in everything he says, of course — there's plenty of backwards or outright bigoted opinions in his works — but his theory is so unorthodox and interesting that it should at least be an important part of the conversation.
Could you please summarise "passionarnost, ethnos, and phases of ethnogenesis" for those of us who might be willing to read more if we were convinced there was a there, there?
I'll try, although I don't think I'm qualified enough.
First of all, what he's talking about is usually described as different stages of _civilisations_ in english literature. However, he goes into much length to explain why he talks about ethnoses instead: in sub sense, it's a different definition, and a group which is smaller than what you usually call a "civilisation", so this distinction is important. It's derived from the word "ethnic", but again, he's very particular that it's not exactly the same as ethnical group in a genetical sense, although one usually correlates to another.
In general, it's very hard to summarise his work, because he goes into a lot of details that are really important to understand his ideas correctly. Unfortunately, it's very easy to misunderstand them, and sometimes in some very awful ways, if you just assume that the words he uses have meanings that you usually ascribe to them.
Then, he describes different stages of lifecycle of ethnos. Once again, there are stages that you would expect, from birth to death, but he adds a lot of detail, describing how an ethnos can be both in a dynamic arc going from beginning to an end, but also in a static, balanced state that can continue, without outside interference, for an eternity. He's a historian with a deep knowledge of very wide array of different human eras and places, and draws a lot of examples to make his point from all over the human history.
After that, he tries to describe the underlying forces that influence this process. He goes through all possible theories and finally arrives at his concept of "passionarnost" (derived from passion) to describe the cultural energy that drives these transformations.
After reading other contemporary books on the matter, such as Guns, Germs and Steel, and Neil Ferguson's Civilization, as well as dozens of articles and blog posts discussing these things, I think that his analysis and thoughts are one of the most interesting and engaging ideas about it.
> The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in “advanced” countries.
Note that the author of the linked piece killed and maimed a bunch of innocent people in order to blackmail major newspapers into printing it. In my opinion, out of respect for these victims and a desire to discourage such behavior, you should NOT read this piece, and instead wait to read Murray's piece (or Douthat's book). Say what you will about Charles Murray, but he's never put any explosive devices in the mail.
I think you would be very interested in the rest of the document. That is very similar to the point that the author makes throughout. He suggests that spending more time on fulfilling our primitive needs of food water and shelter would result in a much more satisfying lifestyle and much higher quality of life.
Sure but it's a degenerate ideology. We can all base our lives on what feels good or what's satisfying but primitive lifestyles aren't going to save man from a dying planet. Kazynski was a degenerate, if you use TFA's definition, so trapped into his own local mindset he couldn't see the wrongs when in context of the global.
Ah yes, once we get rid of modern technology, I can die of bronchitis five times before age ten (that almost happened), and then be murdered after the next outbreak of Black Plague for using the blood of Christian children to bake my bread (yes, many people actually died because of the Blood Libel).
The Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution and their consequences are the only reason I'm not dead several times over, and the only reason I can walk down the street in the place I live today in any kind of safety, so no, I'm really not buying that they were a disaster for the human race.
> The Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution and their consequences are the only reason I'm not dead several times over, and the only reason I can walk down the street in the place I live today in any kind of safety, so no, I'm really not buying that they were a disaster for the human race.
I completely agree! I do find however that if you read the author's arguments they are not entirely baseless and in many cases are quite relevant to the isolated work from home environment that we face today. The problems offered by the author are well known and interesting however his solutions I disagree with
If you get very into a genre of art, like for me is horror movies and metal music, you quickly realize there is a super deep well of amazingly high quality content that pushes the boundaries of the art form. There are passionate community members and creators that are using all the latest and greatest technology to produce ever higher quality art at less cost, expanding the amount of art and the number of people with the funds to create it.
If you look at the top-40 music charts and cringe just find music you actually like because there is tons of it being made and a community behind it. All the criticism about “modern art sucks” is such snobbish and flippant bullshit.