Savage Minds has had some excellent material lately. For example, The Savage and the Subtle, about anthropology as a connoisseurship of life, and trying to communicate that to the wider public rather than astounding differences, because humans really aren’t that different all over the world, or through time:

How many times can Tony Bourdain discover street vendors who sell sausage? Or the astounding fact that “this country also has flat bread/stew/a staple starch”? As a result I always feel these shows are constantly being ground down by the very hyperbolic nature which always requires them to push up against their edges.

I think an important part of being an anthropologist is that you are not deeply attracted to savagery, but rather something I’d call ’subtlety’: an appreciation for the little things in life. It comes from an awareness of them, all of them, which helps you put things in context: why that flat bread that way? How does metalworking in this place mean the dough gets put on top of one sort of thing rather than another?

And trying to segue-way from that to my point…

Over the years I’ve slowly come around to this “connoisseurship” way of thinking. Life, really, is pretty boring if you’re always looking for the grandiose. Learning to appreciate subtlety brings the act of living back to life.

One this implies, aside from awareness of possibilities and appreciation of subtlety, is an appreciation of subtlety in time. Patience. Some things are better when you allow them to take their time and follow their course. When you put in slow effort.

Perhaps this is best illustrated by the concepts of slow politics and slow food.

This is also hitting me as I start delving into the materials provided by The Five O’Clock Club, learning how to strategically go about a job search and plan a career.

Now, part of me abhors selling myself. Part of me wants to go back to school, especially now that I get anthropology (perhaps I was too young, 12 years ago, or perhaps there was just too much emphasis on statistics and pre-postmodern angst). However, I’d still have to sell myself, and compete in the academic world, which might be easier and more fun than “in the labor market,” but, well… the timing is also just not right.

I came to New York before the Bush years had their toll. As one of these books puts it, in decent times, employers can afford to hire a surplus of employees and hope that some of them do their jobs right. I temped-to-permed very quickly, gaining the instant luxury of being able to spend my evenings watching scifi or agonizing over what I might really want to do with my life, without making any real plans or decisions.

That time is over. But I can still plan my life with an eye towards connoisseurship, and in particular, the patient attitude helps with thinking about the time it will take to develop the skills and experience I’ll need to get where I’d like to be.

First things first: re-gain the luxury of empty evenings. And then fill them strategically.

In other news, I love Bernard Cribbins, or at least his Wilf character.

Yes – and not just pop music – and that requires more thought given to what values are important and how to speak about them. And more thought given to what human possibilities really are and communicating about them. I think that’s my new secret life project. Hooray to all progressive culture thinking!

Of course, this isn’t the only important thing, nor are people not doing it no good, and everyone’s going to disagree on what values and lessons in life are most important. Some people think “cherish the moment” is the message of the day, and you know what? They’re right, too.

(A side note – Yes, altruism is part of human nature as much as self-interest is. And I do think that, in general, people want to do good, for their self, family, friends and social group. But it’s somewhat useless in the face of other values. Culture guides, culture always guides. If culture says that authority often knows better than you, you lean on authority. You can do terrible things if you’ve been guided to think less of your own opinions, and to think you’re doing what’s best for your social group. If culture values self-interest, competition, force, authority… you can see where this is going, I hope. These values can coexist with latent values of equality and fraternity; what matters is which values are given the most weight in our myths & stories about ourselves and our past.)

At one point, a few groups of people decided they valued liberty, equality and fraternity, and tried to set up rules and institutions to nurture these qualities in their societies. They didn’t do enough, they weren’t aware of enough that needed to be done. But it was a good go. As it is, we say we value these things, and will force them on the rest of the world at gunpoint. And quietly, we really value competition and acquisition, and spectacle rather than substance.

(A side note – I think it’s sad that dominant narratives of power and force latched on to Darwin’s theory of evolution to validate themselves. The correct lessons of evolution are not of progress towards perfection, cream rising to the crop, might makes right, or survival of the fittest (my how we have adopted these violent values in our culture!). The correct lessons are that there is no one right way to be, that diversity brings strength and resilience to life in general and to species. If we valued diversity and the input of others for how they enrich and strengthen our shared society, how differently might we approach decision-making and organizing? One begins to understand even more how the logic of autocratic, totalitarian corporations is insanely inhuman.)

We also need to value diversity with a pluralistic (not merely tolerant) attitude, the creative potential of conflict and non-violent conflict resolution. Creative collaboration and problem-solving. These values are inter-related, and ignored in daily life as much as those other three have become. There will always be conflicts between individual needs and group needs, but how we choose to manage them is up to us.

We also need to value, for lack of a better shorthand, “the people’s history.” Properly formulated, it can remind us of the dark side of human nature, the potentialities of bosses and despots, tycoons and autocratic moralists. It can inform new myths and fairytales to do the same. Awareness of these potentials inform our values and how we prioritize them in the institutions we build and maintain. We should frighten our children in myths, histories and fairytales so they know how to protect themselves and stand on their own. (I’m thinking here, too, Graeber’s ideas of “imaginary counterpower” and the violent cosmologies of egalitarian cultures – the idea of the moral values of a culture not just being embodied in institutions pitted against, for example, the power of lords and kings, but in institutions ensuring such people never come about in the first place. (pp. 22-30, roughly, in his Fragments).

(A side note – I have a feeling that, in the days of lords and kings, people hated them as much as we hate our CEOs and politicians and misleading media and advertising. Yet I also suspect they secretly desired that power for themselves as much as many Americans openly desire to be their own bosses, run their own companies, control the minds of others… the autocratic, totalitarian instinct is similar to the old desire to “be the king.” If tempered with different values of pluralism, fraternity, collaboration, could it be a kinder, autonomous instinct? I think I never want to run a business, I want to create solutions collaboratively.)

What if, as much as Americans have disdain for envy or sloth, we had disdain for greed or vainglory? We can build this culture if we want. It’s hard, though, I’m 32 and I’m still having to familiarize myself with the people’s histories and radical movements and freethinking essayists and artists. There’s a whole lost culture of hidden values to discover and try to keep alive and give more voice.

(A side note – We have a whole culture of insulation and protection, of comprehensive infantilization, also reflected in how femininity is increasingly girlish, and masculinity increasingly boyish, although sometimes critics tilt at shaved windmills, but I digress. An infantilized, protected people cannot grow up to maintain the systems that enabled their infantilization. The route we’re on depends on some adults somewhere to take care of things – and what values do they have? Whose interests do they have in mind? Our culture is perpetually impoverished, and blissfully so.)

What little democracy we have, warts and all, was itself created by people trying to protect themselves from monsters. We need to be more aware of the monsters in our midst, our potential to be monsters, in order to protect against them. What if we maintained awareness of what it meant for some people to collect all the resources, to give orders to others, and were determined to ensure such things never came about? (see Pierre Clastres as well.)

(A side note – We should also value individual autonomy more. Why, instead of placing our children in contact with a variety of people in the community, and the realities of what people do daily as adults to be productive and happy, why do we instead place our children in institutionalized centers of desks all the same, few adults, all the same, and teach them generalized packages of information about history and the wonders of the state and commerce? This also creates a battle in society over what values with which to indoctrinate our children. Do we teach them about unions? Or do we teach them about free markets? If we let the parents and children decide, what would happen? Unschooling is pretty neat.)

Those of us who believe in the values of a different possible world need to start fleshing them out more and creating the myths and histories that will sustain the future. We need to imagine a different society, and start building its culture on our own, and repeating the myths and stories that sustain us to anyone who will listen. It’s impossible to make even minute policy changes in existing government, not just because of problems inherent in the system, but because there’s quite literally a culture war going on, and the competitive, violent values have been winning for decades. The ultra-progressive critique is to point out that they were always the dominant values of those in power to begin with.

(A side note – Conservative anti-intellectualism is, I think, too often mistaken by progressives for anti-learning. Well, it is anti-learning, but it’s wrong for us to devalue the power critique that speaks to people. There are ivory-tower intellectuals telling everyone else who and how they should be. Of course people resent this. The best response is perhaps not to ridicule people who don’t want to learn, but to do our best to champion self-learning and nurture curiosity as much as possible. Another value to put in our future-myths: curiosity.)

I also had other dreams. A new resident in an apartment in the building right next to ours (new building? not our current, that’s for sure) was showing off her new apartment to a few of her friends. One of them saw me in our window and knew me so she called out to me. Strange, communicating with neighbors in next-door buildings through windows. They invited me over but it was late at night; Alex & I were both trying to sleep. But more and more people started showing up – it wasn’t just a housewarming, it slowly turned into a block party, person by person – but all in their building – and hours as there ended up being spillover. Our apartment was full of hipster professionals. It was a nice time, but also got strange with some arena line-dancing and parades and people going off in pairs to secluded bathrooms…

Food Deserts Could Bloom if City Hall Helps (Gotham Gazette, Jan 2010) We need to move from encouraging better food choices to improving the food access to enable and empower those choices… better food market planning (not big chain displacement), urban agriculture, better greenmarkets, CSAs… “The new [supermarket zoning] initiative can pave the way for giant retailers to move into low-income areas that are in transition to upper income communities, helping to push out the very people that are most in need of access, and thus not solving the problem of access.”

Related, the Five Borough Farm project is interesting – it will partner New York City’s most successful urban farm – Brooklyn-based Added Value – with New York’s largest landowner – the City itself – to create the nation’s first citywide plan for urban agriculture. It will inventory existing agricultural activity in the five boroughs and assess underutilized arable land in order to identify opportunities for City agencies to support urban agriculture.

…if there are words and phrases that I use, but haven’t actually thought about — idioms that may be so common that I don’t have a clue about their etymology, but which I find are undeniably rooted in discrimination and oppression when I use the “explain it to a non-native speaker” exercise above (such as the phrase: “I got gypped” — a slur against Romani people that I’m often surprised people don’t know about) — if I continue to use these words and people are offended by them and I say: “Hey, it’s common usage! I didn’t mean it like that” . . .

Well, if I do that, I think that what I’m really saying is:

“I want to use these phrases because they are an easy short-hand for me, and/or they make me sound hep, or edgy, or current — and I want that more than I want to effectively communicate and connect with you.”

Which, when I put it like that, sounds really shitty of me.

Unrelated, this post on “mansplaining” is also good – I’ve definitely been guilty of it.

Since the rise of the social sciences, and the elevation of universities to special status, is something of a strangely Western statist/classist/imperialist phenomenon in general, anyway, the whole notion of intellectualism vs. idiocy is questionable anyway.

In fact, for me it’s been rather liberating recently to realize more and more that smart people are dumb, too. Or, intellectuals are human, too. When you publish the good stuff and ignore the rest, it’s easy to think someone can do no wrong. Then, once celebrated, it’s easy to think the bad stuff is good.

I will say one thing: practicing good note-taking, record-keeping, and writing skills, is definitely a benefit to good thought and expression. But not necessary. How many good poets do?

This dovetails with thoughts on Neil Gaiman, who I was reading about in the New Yorker this morning. In response to the old question of “where do you get your ideas,” he points out that everyone imagines, everyone has ideas. The unspoken addition there is, “but I write mine down, constantly.”

I’m increasingly convinced that’s all there is. And then you get noticed, respected, acknowledged, etc. …or you don’t.

Universities are just structured social systems for nurturing certain forms of knowledge-production and acknowledgment.