Monstrosities

 We who hate all things monstrous are now rejoicing at the news that GM is losing money on the Hummer and hopes to sell the brand this year.  This after pangs of guilt (or sanity?) coaxed GM to gradually deflate this swelling phallus–from the H1 (which is no longer sold) to the H2 (which is getting harder to find) to, finally, the H3 (which, at 14 miles per gallon, is the Hummer line’s most modest and sensible product). 

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

I don’t suppose it should come as a surprise to anyone that the cover story of Atlantic, vanguard of twentieth century print media, should suggest something so inimical to the newly christened Web 2.0.  I also don’t find it at all surprising that Web 2.0, having been recently christened, is already so blase that even a technophobe like me can have a weblog.

Least surprising of all, though, are the ubiquitous (and damaging) effects of web browsing on thought patterns.  Read the story in Atlantic: a blinding flash of the obvious will stun you senseless.  In short, Nicholas Carr argues that point-and-click reading (the preferred method for Americans now, regardless of age) is rewiring our brains out of any inclination (or ability, even) to focus on a line of plot or reasoning for more than a few minutes.

On Being an American (and Giving a Damn About Politics)

“Where, indeed, is there a better show in the world?  Where has there been a better show since the Reformation?  It goes on daily, not in three rings, but in three hundred rings…

“Consider, for example, the current campaign for the Presidency.  Would it be possible to imagine anything more stupendously grotesque–a deafening, nerve-wracking battle to the death between Tweedledum and Tweedledee–the impossible, with fearful snorts, gradually swallowing the inconceivable?  I defy anyone to match it elsewhere on this earth.  In other lands, at worst, there are at least issues, ideas, personalities.  Somebody says something intelligible, and somebody replies.  It is important to somebody that the thing go this way or that way.  But here, having perfected democracy, we lift the whole combat to a gaudy symbolism, to a disembodied transcendentalism, to metaphysics, that sweet nirvana.  Here we load a pair of palpably tin cannons with blank cartridges charged with talcum-powder, and so let fly.  Here one may howl over the show without an uneasy reminder that some one is being hurt…

“I hold that this elevation of politics to the plane of undiluted comedy is peculiarly American, that nowhere else on this disreputable ball has the art of the sham-battle been developed to such fineness…

“…Here politics is purged of all menace, all sinister quality, all genuine significance, and stuffed with such gorgeous humors, such inordinate farce that one comes to the end of a campaign with one’s ribs loose, and ready for King Lear, or a hanging, or a course of medical journals.”

H.L. Mencken, 1922

 

Is Specialization Good?

“Specialization is for insects.”

–Martin

 

 

 

The benefits to the post-Enlightenment world of career specialization are so well known and rehearsed that they have become a part of the mythology of modernization.  What schoolboy cannot recite, for example, the civilizing effects of the division of labor on primitive societies?  Of pottery, tool making, hunting, and farming?  What teacher of history bothers even to question the desirability of this increased specialization, given its necessary confluence with such unquestioned boons to human living as urbanization, commerce, the emergence of the middle class, and the phenomenon of leisure—that fertile soil for democracy?  It seems to go without saying: as people come together to create societies, individuals enrich the lives of their neighbors with the products of increasingly specialized skills. 

 

The perniciousness of this myth of development is that it ignores the central question of human existence—namely, the purpose of life.  “What does it mean to be human?” seems too broad, too ethereal a question for a career man or woman to ponder.  The career specialization that gives us ever faster cars and computers is a symptom of a great spiritual sickness, a plague that has been nibbling almost imperceptibly at the human soul ever since the advent of modernity.  Specialization has, I grant, propelled every large scale human development since the agricultural revolution.  It has also fed our post-Enlightenment preference for material goods over spiritual ones: the preference for dollar-and-cent accounting over metaphysical speculation, for example; or the preference for warehouses over cathedrals.