Weekend Authenticities

Here are some links to some longer pieces that I'm going to try to get to, someday.

1. Charles Taylor on secularism

2. What was the hipster?

3. Socrates as a critic of consumerism

4. Anne Applebaum on the Eastern Front

5. William Kristol on countercultures past, present, and future

Holy Hipsters, Brooklyn: Doubling down on the authenticity hoax

The NY Post has a remarkably un-snarky piece about the growth in attendance at a Hispanic Lutheran church in Williamsburg. The upsurge is the result of Jesus-loving hipsters as "Worshippers with full-sleeve tattoos, skinny jeans, stocking caps and square glasses pack the pews of Resurrection Presbyterian Church on South Fifth Street."

This doesn't really surprise me. In fact, it strikes me as the next logical step in the evolution of hipsterdom. After all, for all the talk about hipster "irony", what has always characterized the movement is the search for the authentic, and as the competitiveness in authenticity-seeking has steadily ratcheted up, it was inevitable that hipsters would eventually see it for what it has always been: a form of thinly-disguised status-seeking. 

And once you've come to that realization, there are really only two ways you can go: Either you accept that the search for the authentic is and always has been a hoax, or you double down on the only form of authenticity-seeking that avoids the hamster-wheel of conspicuous authenticity. That's why -- as I argued earlier -- the current craze for "cool Christianity" completely misses the point. Churches shouldn't be selling cool, they should be selling they one product  that isn't cool. Brett McCracken put it best when he wrote:

"As a twentysomething, I can say with confidence that when it comes to church, we don't want cool as much as we want real."

President B-Rock: A pitch-perfect parody

Ignorance as a luxury

I'm going to call my next book "First World Problems". This story is going to be in the introduction:

A school in southern Ontario is the first in Canada to ban Wi-Fi over health concerns, despite Health Canada's assurances it's perfectly safe. Parents at St. Vincent Euphrasia elementary school in Meaford, Ont., voted to ban Wi-Fi transmitters, after some students reported feeling ill after they were installed.

"After learning the whole story about how risky WiFi is, parents voted to protect their children's health and plug the computers back in with hardwires," said Andrew Couper, a member of the elected school council. "This is something every school council across Canada should be questioning."

What every school council across Canada should be questioning is this: at what point does being a moron count as parental neglect? At what point should the state step in and take these children from their parents?

(Thanks)

The Harlem Children's Zone as counterinsurgency

Last year I wrote a short review of Paul Tough’s book Whatever it Takes, his account of the evolution of Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone into one of the most ambitious community development programmes in America. The HCZ is also the subject of a new documentary, "Waiting for Superman", which is getting lots of controversial buzz. The controversy mostly surrounds the film’s argument that one of the biggest obstacles to kids’ succeeding in school is incompetent teachers, who are protected by unions.

At the core of Mr. Canada’s project is the conviction that in order to succeed, a student needs all of the support that a middle-class student gets simply by being middle class -- regular meals, parental attention, moral support, secure and stable homelife, etc. And so what makes the HCZ different from similar charter schools (like the KIPP network) is that it tries to provide not just in-class attention and support to students, but a comprehensive  “conveyor belt” of support programmes, including parenting classes,  medical care, after-school programmes and so on, all designed to provide the appropriate and necessary intervention at the point in the child’s life when it is most needed and most likely to succeed.

But the Harlen Children’s Zone experiment is itself running into trouble. In particular, its two “Promise Academy” charter schools are not getting glowing results, especially on standardized English tests. A second complaint is with the cost of the programs: the HCZ spends about $16k per student per year, with thousands more spent on out of classroom programs. Finally, even as there is pressure for the federal government to get involved and bring the funds to scale the HCZ model up across the country, there is not a lot of sound evidence that whatever success the schools have had, it is the out-of-classroom supports that are driving it.

In a way, it would be nice if the conveyor belt were found to be unnecessary. There is a pretty strong analogy between what the HCZ is trying to do, and the counterinsurgency strategy that is the heart of the surge in Afghanistan. Just as the military COIN strategy aims to protect the population by providing all of the "supports" a citizen normally gets from civil society (governance, infrastructure, legal system, development, aid, policing, etc), the HCZ tries to protect the student by giving him or her all of the support that a middle-class student gets simply by being middle class -- regular meals, parental attention, moral support, secure and stable homelife, and so on.

In both cases, you can probably get some semblance of success as long as you are willing to spend a great deal of money and devote a huge amount of resources; sort of like a sociocultural life-support system. But the question is whether any of it is sustainable once that support is taken away. In both cases, the answer appears to be that it doesn't, for similar reasons. You can't build a culture, or a nation, out of whole cloth. It has to be evolved organically in order to be self-sustaining. That's why, at least in the case of the HCZ, for interventions to work, the sooner they are implemented the better. If you want to help a child out of the poverty trap, you have to intervene preferably in infancy; by the time the kids get to kindergarten it is too late.

But ultimately, the moral is probably the same for both education and nation-building: A stable, cooperative society is itself a form of capital, probably the most valuable form that exists. The “middle class” society that most of us take for granted is actually an anomaly, and it isn’t clear that we have any idea how to construct one. What we do know is that it takes a great deal of time and patience, and all the money in the world isn’t going to do much to speed it up.


Baba, Banksy, Burgers: Some links, updates, and misc.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of writing a book in the Internet Age is the way it turns a book into an ongoing conversation with readers. I've been getting all sorts of helpful feedback on the book, suggestions for additional readings, criticisms, and plain old fun links. I try to reply to every message I get within a reasonable period of time, but sometimes I forget, and sometimes I don't have time to give it all the proper attention.

But here's some stuff I've been sent over the past few months that I want to acknowledge, and hopefully remind myself to get to it sooner than later.

1. Baba Brinkman has a new song out, about US health care reform. He's also on tour with the latest incarnation of the Rebel Cell -- review of it here.

2. Banksy gets a makeover, Simpsons-style! (via @nehathanki)

3. In Praise of Fast Food, from the Utne reader. It looks excellent -- it was sent to me by Andrew MacLeod. 

4. Alison Loat sent me a link to a TVO video featuring Joel Kotkin, arguing that our future lies not in large urban centres, but in smaller, more human scale communities like suburbs.

5. Melissa Nylander brought to my attention this great documentary called Yoga Inc., "about how the Westernization/commodification of yoga challenges its authenticity as a sport, spiritual movement, and aspect of Indian culture."

6. @thewyndtunnel alerted me to this NYT Mag piece about video games, Afghanistan, and authenticity -- pretty much everything a growing boy needs!.

Stupid regulation is the mother of invention

This is genius:

BERLIN (Reuters) – A German entrepreneur is bypassing a European Union ban on light bulbs of more than 60 watts by marketing his own brand as mini heaters.

Siegfried Rotthaeuser and his brother-in-law have come up with a legal way of importing and distributing 75 and 100 watt light bulbs -- by producing them in China, importing them as "small heating devices" and selling them as "heatballs."

Here's a column I wrote, in the early days of the anti-lightbulb jihad.

Thank You, Ecuador

What do you get when you cross the aboriginal environmentalism of Avatar, the cultural tourism of The Beach, and the narrative hilarity of Carlos Castaneda? You get “Amazon Awakening,” a humungeous work of travel journalism written by Andy Isaacson and published in last Sunday’s New York Times.

The moral hook for the article is the struggle of Achuar, an Ecuadorean indigenous group, to preserve their way of life against the encroachments of civilization in general, but more specifically the oil interests that are after the massive reserves that sit under the rainforost of the northeastern Amazon. But that’s just an excuse; the real motivation is for Isaacson to engage in the most egregious exercise in transcultural condescension since Alanis wrote “Thank You, India.”

It begins with the very setup for the trip, in which Isaacson offers the standard excuse of every self-styled authenticity-seeker: Everyone else may be a tourist and a voyeur, but I’m different:

The trip was to be a departure from the typical Amazon tourism, which tends to package wildlife viewing with a certain cultural voyeurism. I wanted something more immersive and participatory: an experience with Ecuador’s indigenous people that would expose me to a different orientation altogether.

And like every other tourist before him, the voyeurism begins almost immediately, when he takes advantage of a layover in Quito to visit a nearby shaman named “Don Esteban,” aka “Steve”.

…Don Esteban emerged wearing a knit V-neck sweater and slacks, beaded necklaces and a yellow-feathered headdress. He beckoned us into the adjacent treatment room, which was sparse and dim and smelled of burnt sugar cane alcohol. I was directed to sit in the corner beside a desk cluttered with melted wax, glass balls, brown eggs and various other mystical paraphernalia.

Sounds like my friend John’s coffee table in residence in first year university. Steve proceeds to perform some ceremony that will help bring Isaacson in tune with – wait for it – Mother Nature:

Don Esteban had me stand naked in the center of the room. Beating a drum and chanting around me, he summoned the ancestral spirits before instructing me to face the four directions of nearby volcanoes in turn, with arms raised, as he blew tobacco smoke on my skin and slapped me with nettle leaves. Then, with his cheeks engorged with alcohol, he held a candle flame to his lips and unleashed spectacular balls of fire that dissipated across my chest.

It’s pretty clear the “shaman” was making this up as he went along. You can imagine what really happenened. Don Esteban and his wife are sitting around having a drink when the tour guide shows up and goes, “dude, we got a live one here. Get out your headdress!” And then Steve – sorry, Don Esteban – is like, "Uh, here, rub this candle all over yourself, and then I'll beat you with nettles and...uh...blow smoke in your face."

Isaacson, of course, leaves feeling “serene”.

The whole thing continues on like this for another three thousands words as our narrator finds himself embedded deeper into Achuar life. After conceding that tourism has its downside (“the loss of communal values and a new market mentality, alcohol abuse, litter, men cutting off their traditional ponytails”), Isaacson has the gall to suggest that he’s actually helping these people:

Such quaint cultural displays meant to satisfy tourists expecting something “authentic” and exotic can also resuscitate and revive aspects of traditional culture. “It makes us see how we’re admired and validates the importance of our traditions,” Mr. Tsamarin had told me, adding that the Achuar now consider the value of their cultural heritage as a useful leverage against oil development.

Right – helping people by convincing them to turn their village into what amounts to a zoo.

There’s no question that the Achuar are in a tough spot. Like almost every aboriginal group on the planet, they are going to face tough choices trying to balance traditional forms of life with the imperative to modernize. But probably the last thing they need is people like Andy Isaacson visiting them for the express purpose of having them minister to his own spiritual lacking.

(Thanks to the Handcaper)

The Rebel Sells out, or, when Banksy did the Simpsons

The above cartoon, courtesy of the late and lamented Spy magazine, captures pretty much everything that needs to be said about the relationship between art and money. For those who need it spelled out: there is a very lucrative market for art that takes a swing at capitalism. As Thomas Frank famously put it: Capitalism has amassed great sums by charging admission to the ritualized simulation of its own lynching.

 

There are two ways of interpreting this. One is to fret that this is just evidence of the ability of capitalism to co-opt and commodify all forms of dissent. That’s the line taken over the years by Adbusters magazine, Naomi Klein, and even Frank himself, in his weaker moments. There’s another way of reading this, though, which is to recognize that capitalism does not co-opt various forms of non-conformist artistic dissent, because there is nothing to co-opt in the first place. Dissent doesn’t threaten capitalism, because capitalism does not require the sort of conformity that the dissent purports to subvert. That, anyway, is the argument that Joe Heath and I advance in our 2004 book, The Rebel Sell.

Despite close to half a century of futile attempts at jamming the system, many artists continue to take their kicks at the can. One of the more recent is the now-famous intro to the Simpsons that was done by the British street artist, Banksy. For those who missed it, the notorious couch gag at the end of the intro pans out to show the episode being produced in the cartoon-world equivalent of Mordor, a sweatshop where kids and unicorns toil and are sacrificed in the name of capitalism. 

As my colleague at Maclean’s magazine, Jaime Weinman, has pointed out, there are two problems with this. The first is that it is old: they did this gag in their fourth season, i.e. almost twenty years ago. Second, it has no bearing on reality. Yes, the Simpsons is produced in Korea, that’s no secret. But apparently when the original asian-sweatshop gag was done, the cartoonists almost refused to do the work, on the grounds that it did not reflect their working conditions. 

That didn’t stop Naomi Klein from posting the following to her Twitter account last week:

@NaomiAKlein

YES, I've seen Banksy's Simpsons thing. It's brilliant. Still, can't help but despair at capitalism's ability to absorb all critiques

Yes, if by “brilliant” you mean “not true” and “not new”. As for “capitalism’s ability to absorb all critiques”, I remain surprised at Klein’s reluctance to celebrate the manner in which capitalism does so. After all, more often than not, capitalists absorb legitimate critiques in ways that actually make the world a better place. As I argue in this essay looking at No Logo ten years on, the mainstreaming of old critiques is a success story:

From eco- to organic, fair trade to locally sourced, sweatshop safe to dolphin friendly, sales pitches that 10 years ago would have reeked of patchouli oil and set the red baiters on full alert are now thoroughly mainstream. Companies like Whole Foods (and its quarterly “5 Percent Day,” when each location donates 5 percent of its net sales to a nonprofit) or the Vermont-based Seventh Generation (a natural soap and detergent company devoted to all forms of sustainability, whose co-founder and executive chairman is known as the “inspired protagonist” of the firm) are massively successful operations.

This is only a bad thing if you think that the point of dissent is not to change the system for the better, but to bring it down entirely. And while Klein is welcome to that pipe dream, it is disheartening to see an artist like Banksy falling for the same nonsense. 

I’m a big fan of Banksy's work, and I thought his recent film was a minor work of genius. Yes, his work is “anti-authoritarian”, but only, for the most part, in the most juvenile sense. As I read him, his work is essentially playful and ironic, devoted to the proposition that whatever else it may be, street art is ultimately about just playing around with images, ideas, and the urban environment. But lately he seems to have decided that it is not enough to be a genius aesthete, he needs to be taken seriously as a pundit as well. This past summer, he produced a couple of “environmental” installations, including one showing a young girl down on the Brighton Pier riding a dolphin that was stuck in a net as it tried to jump a barrel of BP oil. 

And now with this Simpsons gag,  he’s jumped into the world of culture-jamming circa 1996. Perhaps he means it all to be oh so meta, pointing out the absurdity of artists taking money while criticising the people who are giving them money. In which case, I point you to the cartoon at the top of this blog entry. And if he means it seriously, then so much the worse, to see a genius of the absurd selling out his principles to the politics of the ridiculous, in search of some vacuous left-wing cred that he neither needs nor deserves. 

The Prince and the Pope

Pope Benedict XVI is the head of the global Catholic Church. As the heir to the British Throne, Prince Charles’ full title will include his status as “defender of the faith”, reflecting his position as the supreme governor of the Church of England. So when it comes to religion, these two are born antagonists. But when it comes to the travesty that is the modern world, they are in full agreement.

Charles’s views are increasingly well-known. He calls modernity a “curse” that “divides us from nature”. The combination of technology and the search for profit alienates us from the world, and what we need to do is restore our lost “balance” and learn “the grammar of harmony”. He’s been rattling on like this for a few years now, and has collected his musings on the subject in a new book called, naturally enough, Harmony. The book has achieved a certain amount of notoriety in the British media, mainly for its slum-tourism suggestions that the Mumbai shantytown that was the setting for the film "Slumdog Millionaire" is a role model for sustainable living in Western cities.

Meanwhile, the Pope last week gave a speech at a world congress of Catholic media in which he did his best Baudrillard impression. He warned of our increasing reliance on “images” and the development of new communications technology: "New technologies and the progress they bring can make it impossible to distinguish truth from illusion and can lead to confusion between reality and virtual reality," he said.

Maybe the Pope has trouble telling truth from illusion – that would be a natural consequence of spending years pretending that huge tranches of the priesthood had got into the biz for the express purpose of abusing the boyish elements of the flock. If you don’t acknowledge it, did it even happen? Maybe we should ask a postmodernist.

To the broader point: the distinction between “real” and “illusory” only maps helpfully onto the distinction between “old media” and “new media” if you make a large number of very tenuous assumptions, most of which only hold if you load the moral dice in favour of the past. And that is certainly something that both the Pope and the Prince have a vested interest in doing.

But what I find most fascinating about both of these characters is that they are both supposedly defenders of two of the oldest and most established religions on Earth. To that end, they are offering the exact remedy for what people are missing most in the modern world, viz., a spiritual dimension. But what is odd is that neither seems to have much faith in their own product; instead, they are bent on pandering to the worst tendencies of the modern mind – the search for meaning in the false comforts of the “authentic”.

On Hitchens vs Blair

Thanks to a friend with more perseverance than I have, I've snared a ticket to the upcoming debate between Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens in Toronto. It is part of the popular Munk debate series, and apparently they'll debating the question of whether or not religion is a force for good in the world (regardless of whether or not God "exists".)

I'm excited, but that excitement is tempered by mixed feelings. Blair was one of my political heroes when he was elected for his first term -- he always struck me as a more principled and engaged politician than his Canadian counterpart Jean Chretien, whom I had come to despise. But Blair was far too credulous of the claims of the Bush regime over Iraq, and at the end of his tenure he became a morally decadent money grubber.

As for Hitchens, I find it somewhat annoying that he's become a posterboy for atheism, and lumped in with the Dennett/Dawkins/Harris crew. It isn't that I disagree with that crew, not at all. It is just that I think it does a disservice to what Hitchens is on about. As someone put it about Hitchens, his anti-theism is less about belief, more about obedience -- what Hitchens has always railed against is the obedient mind.

That is why I'm bothered by the topic of the Blair-Hitchens debate. I pretty much know what each man's answer to the question is, and I don't expect to be much enlightened by it. Instead of the artificial schoolboy construct of the debate, I'd much rather see them talking about the Iraq war, its justification, its conduct, and its aftermath.

Logrolling in our time: Future Babble Edition

Next week, I'll be doing a mini-book tour with Dan Gardner, my old colleague from the Ottawa Citizen and the author of the just-released book Future Babble. It's about why everyone is wrong about everything; it also has a chimpanzee in a suit on the cover. If that doesn't sell books, I don't know what will.

Anyway, we're going to be at Edmonton's Litfest next Friday and Saturday (I'm hosting a session on blogging and opinion writing on Friday), then Ottawa's writer's fest next Sunday. We'll do the same thing we did for The Authenticity Hoax launch last spring, except we'll sit in different chairs and I'll ask Dan about his book.

Should be loads of fun.

Authenticity Hoax: Fake soccer fans

Italian soccer club Triestina has decided to  by covering the empty stands with two-dimensional images of fans printed on a giant sheet of vinyl and stretched across the empty seats.

Authentic Harlem

A hot summer in Harlem saw the return of a form of moonshine production, in the form of a sweet boozy drink called nutcrackers: 

“It’s definitely a summer drink, and I try to serve them as cold as possible,” said a regular nutcracker seller, a man in his early 30s who goes by the name of Kool-Aid and asked that his full name not be published. “It’s a fruity drink, so you don’t have to sip it with your face all scrunched up; you feel really nice without getting totally bombed out.”

The man said he made six gallons at a time in a big plastic water cooler jug, mixing 160-proof Devil’s Springs vodka, 151-proof Bacardi 151 rum, Amaretto, whatever sweet liqueur he had on hand and a variety of juices depending on the desired flavor, including cranberry, mango, pineapple and peach nectar.

For some the drink’s presence in Harlem conjures up an era 80 years in its past, when selling and consuming home-concocted alcohol was an illegal, dangerous pastime.

The Next Chapter with Shelagh Rogers

Over the summer I taped a nice long interview with Shelagh Rogers of the CBC for her new show, The Next Chapter. It finally aired today, you can stream it here.  Shelagh was one of the first shows that Joe Heath and I did when we were promoting The Rebel Sell, and it was great. She's one of the warmest and smartest interviewers at the CBC, and this interview was no different. What made it extra fun was that she was conducting the interview from her home on Gabriola Island.