Fire and Knowledge

For the broad public at least, I am who the media says I am. I say what they say I say. I become who they say I’ve become.

—Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope (2006), p. 121

The other day I typed “why” on Google Suggest, and the first auto-suggestion was “why did i get married.”

At first I was surprised that the term was so popular and had over a million results. It seemed odd that humans, though admittedly a very strange mammal, could think Google could answer the question of why they got married.

But then I saw there was a movie by that name. A reasonable explanation after all!

An unsanitised history of washing is more interesting than it sounds. I’ve never thought of cleanliness as being inherently cultural until now.

I’ve often thought the nightly news will die a slow death, so of course this caught my eye:

Network newscasts are a holding effort. They are a rearguard action. They are prisoners of demography and cultural shifts that are as irreversible as the physical laws of the universe. Namely: fewer Americans have the time or inclination to watch a half-hour TV newscast at 6:30 in the evening; those who do will ultimately die; those who do not presently are not—unlike the generations before them—developing the habit as they get older. (James Poniewozik, “Life After Katie“)

When you can get more information in 5 minutes scanning CNN.com, why sit in front of a TV for 30 minutes at a specific time? Why scan the channels for weather when you can have all the weather you want in 10 seconds on your cell phone or computer? It’s a dying model.

[N]ot putting cupholders in a car is a serious mistake. I read a couple of years ago that Volvo had to redesign all its cars for the American market for this very reason. Volvo’s engineers had foolishly thought that what buyers were looking for was a reliable engine, side-impact bars, and heated seats, when in fact what they craved was little trays into which they could insert their Slurpees.

—Bill Bryson, I’m a Stranger Here Myself (Broadway Books: 1999), p. 71.

Everywhere, every day, local life is being discomforted, disrupted, endangered, or destroyed by powerful people who live, or who are privileged to think they live, beyond the bad effects of their bad work.

A powerful class of itinerant professional vandals is now pillaging the country and laying it waste. Their vandalism is not called by that name because of its enormous profitability (to some) and the grandeur of its scale. If one wrecks a private home, that is vandalism, but if, to build a nuclear power plant, one destroys good farmland, disrupts a local community, and jeopardizes lives, home, and properties within an area of several thousand square mile, that is industrial progress.

—Wendell Berry, “Higher Education and Home Defense” in Home Economics (1986), p. 50.

[This is a controversial claim, but his logic seems sound. What do you think? I'm inclined to agree.]

It is time for us to admit that not all cultures are at the same stage of moral development. This is a radically impolitic thing to say, of course, but it seems as objectively true as saying that not all societies have equal material resources. We might even conceive of our moral differences in just these terms: not all societies have the same degree of moral wealth. Many things contribute to such an endowment. Political and economic stability, literacy, a modicum of social equality—where such things are lacking, people tend to find many compelling reasons to treat one another rather badly.

Our recent history offers much evidence of our own developments on these fronts, and a corresponding change in our morality. A visit to New York in the summer of 1863 would have found the streets ruled by roving gangs of thugs; blacks, where not owned outright by white slaveholders, were regularly lynched and burned. Is there any doubt that many New Yorkers of the nineteenth century were barbarians by our present standards?

To say of another culture that it lags a hundred and fifty years behind our own in social development is a terrible criticism indeed, given how far we’ve come in that time. Now imagine the benighted Americans of 1863 coming to possess chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. This is more or less the situation we confront in much of the development world.

—Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (W. W. Norton, 2004), pp. 143-4.

By the 1980s, virtually every facet of life was improving for black Americans, and the progress showed no sign of stopping.

Then came crack.

While crack use was hardly a black-only phenomenon, it hit black neighborhoods much harder than most…. After decades of decline, the black infant mortality rate began to soar in the 1980s, as did the rate of low-birthweight babies and parent abandonment. The gap between black and white schoolchildren widened. The number of blacks sent to prison tripled. Crack was so dramatically destructive that if its effect is averaged for all black Americans, not just crack users and families, you will see that the group’s postwar progress was not only stopped cold but was often knocked as much as ten years backward. Black Americans were hurt more by crack cocaine than by any other single cause since Jim Crow.

—Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics (William Morrow: 2006), p. 113.