The City (Lapham's Quarterly 03-1, 2011)

 LQ 03-4: The City (2010) The city is, I think, one of humankind’s great inventions. Through

most of our existence on Earth, there were no towns and cities. They became possible when agriculture improved enough to support a fairly large proportion of non-agricultural workers. Nowadays, in technologically advanced countries, about 5% of the population works directly in agriculture. It’s likely that building towns began when agriculture enabled supporting about 5% of the population as non-agricultural workers. But even so, pretty well every household raised all or most of their food well into the 18th or 19th century. Cities in the modern sense required not only more efficient agriculture but more efficient and cheaper transport. This may be why the first large cities were all on navigable rivers and/or next to good harbours.
     But from the beginning, towns and cities were disliked. Most of the excerpts in this collection attack the moral laxity and material excess of cities. The tension between the city and the country has varied, but it’s always existed. Cities have been targets of robbery, a.k.a. wars of conquest. They concentrate cultural and intellectual resources. That in turn fosters innovation, which raises suspicion and worse in the surrounding rural communities. In the relation between city and hinterland, exploitation and mutual dependence are often hard to distinguish, another reason for rural suspicion of the city. The first states, hierarchically organised societies with large power and economic differences, were cities. Larger States resulted from wars between cities.
     I like cities. I also like the small town in which I live. I doubt I would like it so much if I couldn’t get most of the advantages of city life as easily as I do. Communications technology provides more choice than we can manage; we’ve learned to limit our sources to make choice easier. Materially, pretty well everything I would want from the city is available by mail or special order when not available locally. Still, cities are increasing in size and number. Almost half of humankind now lives in cities. It’s will be more than half within a decade.
     Many comments in this collection indicate express praise not for human cities, but for the City of God. That golden city is not only the expected destination of the faithful, it is a counter example to the human cities that failed to live up to the expectations of their detractors.
     Recommended. ****

Humans at Play (LQ 03-4 Sports & Games)

 

    LQ 03-3: Sports & Games (2010) In 1938, Johan Huizinga published Homo Ludens, in which he argued that play was necessary for the creation of culture. His insight has become a cliche. This LQ collection demonstrates its truth, albeit indirectly, since it focuses on what we North Americans mean by its title. Huizinga included the arts, politics, etc in his concept. It seems to me that Huizinga’s argument amounts to saying that inventing ways of living that go well beyond finding food and reproducing is species-specific behaviour for humans.
     Play in the narrow sense is widespread among mammals. All young mammals play, and many species of adult mammals play, too. That is, they engage in some behaviour for no apparent reason other than they like doing it.
     Humans of course do more than that. We invent rules and customs around play, and spend an amazing amount of resources on it. Extend the concept to include the arts, and we humans act as if play is the purpose of life. But we find elements of play in all other aspects of human culture. It’s obvious in fashion, for example. The use of science to create useful technologies disguises that it, too, is a form of play. And all technologies eventually become at least adjuncts to play. Huizinga’s relabelling of our species is apt.
     Like other aspects of human culture, the variety of sports and games tends to distract attention from a fundamental unity. Sports and games range from pure pleasure to intense competition. All cultures engage in sports and games for both purposes. This collection shows that while humans have invented an astonishing variety of sports and games, their use is bounded by this range.
     Recommended. ****

Trivia Quizzes: "Quote...Unquote"

Nigel Rees. Quote...Unquote (1980) We like trivia. Maybe because every now and then some trivial fact turns out to matter. It may link some new fact to our store of knowledge, thus reassuring us the universe has a meaningful pattern. Or it may become the significant bit needed to solve a puzzle, or reveal some secret, or lead us to some deeper insight. All this helps explain why collections of trivia sell. Like this one. It’s an amusing selection of semi-esoteric quotations. Most are presented in quizzes, thus flattering the reader in its expectation that they will recognise most of the quotations. Taken as a whole, they make up a pointillist portrait of the 19th and 20th centuries.
     One of the quizzes asks the reader to amend such misquotes such as “Money is the root of all evil”, “ I knew him well, Horatio”, “Play it again, Sam”, etc. Misquotes like these are an example of our tendency to recall meanings but not the words used to express them.
     Cheeky illustrations by ffolkes. Fun, recommended if you can find a copy. **½

Trickster tricks make for a good life

 

    Tomson Highway. Laughing With the Trickster (CBC Massey Lectures, 2022) I learned that what I had learned about First Nations cultures was woefully incomplete. Read this book. It will educate you, and entertain you. Highway shows what he means when he says that Indigenous people laugh a lot. Life’s a blast, even when it isn’t. The Trickster deludes us, but also makes life interesting. The Creator made us for enjoyment.
     Threaded throughout this hugely exuberant romp through life is the dark narrative of the clash of Indigenous and Settler cultures. We Settlers have a lot to learn. A brighter thread, told mostly through Highway’s life story, is that Indigenous peoples are adaptable. Their cultures thrive because they have been able and willing to adapt. They don’t try to preserve their way of life, but to live it. And if that includes telling their stories in Settler languages, well, that’s life. And if that adaptation causes Settlers to adapt, too, well, that’s even better life.
     Highway ends with a brief account of his brother’s death. Rene told him, “Don’t mourn me, be joyful”. The last sentence of the book is, “ I have no time for tears; I’m too busy being joyful.”
     Read this book. ****
Footnote: Another essential book is Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian.

Social Media and Social Disruption

     The media are still obsessing about the effects of Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, and his rebranding it as X. It seems to me that Twitter was always more important for the media than the rest of us. If the media hadn't reported on the latest Twitter kerfuffle, I wouldn't have had a clue. Without the media, Twitter would have had no presence in my life. That's still so.

     From where I sit, "social platforms" differ from previous media in one crucial respect: the audience controls the content. Newspapers, radio, TV all had a passive audience. You bought the paper, switched on the radio/TV, and got the news the purveyors thought was fit to tell. Despite different political/etc viewpoints, those media created a mass audience with a common culture. Cable began the shift to audience control. The internet has made it the default. We now have a fractured culture, with no common narratives, and hence no widely held understanding of how the world works. Worse, we have an increasing number of people who believe that they and those who agree with them know the truth. Too many people no longer  understand that all insights about the world are provisional and at best merely good approximations to the truth; and at worst they're delusional.

     In many ways, this fracturing repeats the fracturing of the common religious culture when print made books cheap, and so fostered reading. The almost immediate effect was individual interpretations of the sacred texts, which led to disagreements about creeds, which triggered wars. It took two centuries before something resembling a consensus about the social role of religion emerged in Europe.

     Every time a disruptive communication medium appears, there is cultural reconfiguration. People "do their own research". The effect is profound disagreement and mutual distrust. It is always painful, and often bloody. We're living through such a reconfiguration. It's more complicated, difficult and dangerous than previous ones because we're also living through a major environmental change. It's going to be a very rough ride.

Edited and extended version of a comment posted in the New York Times 2023-10-19

 

Travelling (Lapham's 02-3, 2009)

 Lapham’s Quarterly 02-3: Travel. (Summer 2009) Migration is forced, travel is chosen. We

succeed at both because humans have survived by keeping on the move, whether within a territory suitable for hunting and gathering, or by removal into a new territory. We share wanderlust with other animals, which suggest that it’s a condition of species survival.
     This collection tells us what we already know: Travel confirms our conviction that there’s no place like home, and prompts wonder and even delight at the variety of human ways of living and making a living. Which effect predominates depends on the traveller. The evidence shows that the self-centred make poor travellers.
     Tourism is the invention of the leisure class, of people who did not depend on trading profit to finance the journey. But apart from that, there’s little difference between tourism trading, and exploration. Travel reveals as much about ourselves as about the places and people we meet. The modern variety of tourism developed from the Grand Tour, paid for by parents anxious that their offspring would acquire experience useful for a successful career in the higher branches of capitalism and government. The educational component still predominates: the tourist industry offers education as the reason and excuse for spending time being carried across water and land while being cosseted by “the staff”.
     Many of the pieces here are firsthand accounts, which satisfy the reader’s wanderlust without requiring the tiresome nuisances of actual travel. The fictions use the differences between the traveller and the strange lands as opportunities for allegory and satire, or demonstrations that growing up entails self-discovery. Hence the many plots strung out along the roads taken, or not taken, by the hero and their companions.
     I enjoyed the collection as much for its reminders of my own travels as for the experiences of the narrators. ****