Why authenticity is bad politics, and bad for politics

(This post is an expansion of a column I wrote for the Ottawa Citizen.  I wrote this post because the limitations of a column length didn't allow me to properly address the various arguments made by Allan Gregg in his recent lecture on authenticity, to which this is mostly a reply. I still don't think I've adequately answered all of Gregg's arguments, but hopefully at least suggests the direction a proper reply might take).

 

 1. The Desire for Dave

The 1993 movie Dave is about a loveable everyman who happens to bear a remarkable similarity to the president, named Bill Mitchell. Dave is hired to impersonate the president at a public event for what he's told are security reasons, but it's really to serve as a stand-in while the president carries on an extramarital affair. Except the president has a stroke during the liaison and goes into a deep coma, so there is nothing for it but for Dave to continue to act as the president under the control of the president's chief of staff and director of comms. 

The President wasn't super popular and his wife hates him, and Dave's innocent enthusiasm is a fresh change from the cynical operator that Mitchell was. Mitchell's popularity starts to climb as President Dave visits a homeless shelter, takes on other feel-good projects, and generally acts as the anti-Mitchell. There's not need to explain the rest of the plot, the key point is this: "Dave" is the embodiment of one of the deepest desires in our culture for a leader who looks just like the current president, except he is selfless instead of calculating, innocent instead of cynical, and honest instead of deceitful. Bonus: it is even implied that Dave has a bigger penis than the actual president. 

Our culture is completely captivated by the desire for Dave, and it goes by the term "authenticity". 

2. Authenticity lost

The desire for Dave, or what we can call the search for authenticity, has been around for as long as there's been politics, which means it has probably been around forever. But over the last half decade or so, it has been elevated from a legitimate regulative ideal that serves as a check on some of the nastier tendencies of our political culture. It is now held up as the defining virtue of the political leader and the cure for all that ails the body politic. Authenticity, goes the argument, is both good politics (that is, a winning electoral strategy) and good for politics (that is, a way of regaining the trust of the public and its faith in the power of government to work for the common good). 

The American writer Joe Klein signposted the trend in his 2006 book Politics Lost, an essay about the decline of authenticity in presidential politics. Klein took his inspiration from what he called Harry Truman's "Turnip Day" speech at the Democratic convention in 1948 that confirmed his nomination for president. Coming on stage after midnight, speaking plainly, simply, and without notes, Truman challenged the "do-nothing Congress" to act upon those views they claim to endorse, and get back to work. Klein thinks we need more Turnip Day moments, more politicians like Truman. He argued that politicians need to "figure out new ways to engage and inspire us - or maybe just some simple old ways, like saying what they think as plainly as possible."

By the time the 2008 election rolled around, the authenticity meme had completely taken hold. For the most part, that election was framed as a battle between competing authenticities: Barack Obama's post-partisan and post-racial authenticity against John McCain's Straight Talk Express. Paired on the VP tickets were Joe Biden's "authentic" tendency to speak first and think later, up against Sarah Palin's moose-hunting mavericky small-town heartland authenticity. 

Four years later, the question of the supposed authenticity of  the various  Republican candidates for the nomination is once again a big issue - and it's something the candidates themselves seem happy to embrace. Here's John Huntsman in a recent NYT profile:

“I think what’s going to drive this election, really, are two things — authenticity and the economy,” Huntsman told me. “I think people have become so disillusioned by the professional nature of politics — the organizations around politicians, the way that politicians approach problem-solving, the way in which they go about their daily business. There has been very little in the way of authenticity in politics in recent years.”

My argument is that Huntsman has it wrong. The problem with politics today is not that there is not enough authenticity in our politics, it is it that there is far too much of it. The push for more authenticity fundamentally misunderstands the nature of mass politics, and contributes to the very problems it is supposed to solve.

3. Politics Unplugged

 
Like most bad ideas that come North from the United States, the authenticity craze has reached Canada in a somewhat bleached form. It doesn't dominate our political discourse the way it does in the US, but in late November, Allan Gregg -- a man with one of the most interesting CVs in Canadian public life -- delivered a lecture to the Public Policy Forum called "On Authenticity: How the Truth can Restore Faith in Politics and Government." Gregg's claim is that there is a profound disconnect between what we want from our politicians, and what we are getting. Our leaders' most systematic failure, Gregg says, is that "they have not picked up on the electorate's craving for authenticity nor adjusted their behaviour to conform to this new reality."

Gregg even has his own Turnip Day homily to explain just what he's getting at. He tells a story about the night he went to see a folk-rock band in a club in Manhattan when the guitar player's electric pickup broke. Instead of stopping the show to fix the guitar, the band unplugged their instruments, moved closer to one another, and performed an intimate number, with the two singers at one point singing directly to one another in stunning harmony. Says Gregg: "As the last chord was struck, the room literally exploded with rapturous cheering, hooting."

Gregg thinks there's a lesson in this for our politicians. What they need to do, he suggests, is unplug from the way they've always done things and try to reconnect with the electorate. They must drop the prefab talking points designed to "conceal meaning." They need to stop claiming to be the only island of virtue in a sea of knaves. They should cancel all political advertising, and talk straight to the people, saying what they mean and meaning what they say.

How would the electorate respond to a politician who took this approach? Extremely well, Gregg believes. As evidence, he cites a poll showing that three quarters of Canadians would vote for a politician who promised to be truthful 100 per cent of the time, regardless of their party affiliation. "Speaking the truth," he concludes, "is not bad politics." Even better, such an approach would be good politics, and good for politics. "For government to have the  capacity and legitimacy to make the kind of decisions necessary to deal with situations that go seriously wrong, requires trust, " he says in his concluding remarks. And he thinks authenticity is the means to that end. 

4. Is authenticity good politics?

Allan Gregg gives two examples to support his thesis that the public will respond to authenticity: The election last year of the socially progressive Muslim Naheed Nenshi as mayor of Calgary, and the election in fall 2010 of Rob Ford -- "a leather-lunged, no necked know-nothing" -- to a landslide victory as mayor of Toronto. Here's how Gregg parses these victories:

The evidence suggests that Ford and Nenshi’s very uniqueness -- and that they were not afraid to hide their uniqueness -- made them seem more authentic and believable – basically, the message these politicians sent the electorate was ... “what you see if what you get”. In Rob Ford’s instance, his very crudeness and unrefined nature made him seem “real” and signalled he was not trying to  hide anything from voters. The fact that their candidacies horrified traditional power brokers also  worked in their favour – basically, if the defenders of the status quo were afraid of them, Nenshi  and Ford must be “for the people”.  

One initial problem with this is that, in the case of Toronto at least, Gregg is ignoring the recent history of the city's politics. Rob Ford is far from the first crude, loudmouthed rightwinger to win a landslide victory as mayor -- Mel Lastman did it twice, in 1997 and 2000. So perhaps this has more to do with the city's post-amalgamation demographic than it does with any strong public craving for "authenticity". At any rate, Gregg's thesis has hardly been convincingly established. 

A more serious problem with Gregg's analysis is that he never actually defines what he means by authenticity. He opens his talk with Polonius' famous "to thine own self be true" line from Hamlet, but he does not seem to grasp the lesson of that passage. Throughout the talk, Gregg insists on treating "authenticity" as a synonym for "truth" or perhaps "honesty". But as Lionel Trilling explains in his book Sincerity and Authenticity, the significance of Polonius and the way we have internalised his message to Laertes is that authenticity has nothing to do with the truth. More precisely, it is about being true to your (idealised) sense of self, not to any external objective facts. 

It is hard to overstate the importance of this. The shift from objective facts to self-actualization marks the shift from reason to the emotions as the foundation of knowledge. The hero of a culture of authenticity is not Descartes, or Bacon, or even Hume, but Oprah Winfrey. 

It is this fundamental confusion over just what it is he's talking about that leads Gregg to confuse populism with authenticity. It's an extremely common mistake, but it's the sort of mistake that leads him to suggest that Rob Ford is a paragon of authenticity. Ford may in fact be acting "true to himself", in that he doesn't seem inclined to do the usual things we expect of politicians such as hide their antideluvian bigotry or show respect for their entire constituency.  But given that Ford is also one of the least honest, and least transparent politicians to appear on the Candian scene in decades, it isn't clear how his brand of authenticity-as-rube-populism is good for anyone, or anything. 

5. Authenticity is in the eye of the beholder

You see what I did there, in that last passage? I took someone that some people might hail as refreshingly authentic, and turned his purported virtues into vices. That is, I just wrote an anti-Rob Ford attack ad. And the reason I could get so personal against Ford is thanks to the jargon of authenticity.

Whatever else it may be, a claim to be authentic is a claim about your character, and if you choose to rest your appeal entirely on who you are -- your sincerity, your honesty, your truthfulness -- then you open yourself up to personal attacks. And why should it be otherwise? When it comes to the politics of authenticity, character assassination becomes a legitimate -- if not completely obligatory -- gambit. That is why, despite what supporters of authentic politics like to argue, the focus on authenticity may end up exacerbating the deeply partisan and negative campaigning that voters claim to find so off-putting. 

It is important to keep in mind that no one goes into public life with the intention of speaking in sound bites, breaking their promises, and demonizing their opponents. So why do they do it? For the most part, it is because they are soon confronted with the challenge of trying to communicate to millions of people under the continuous and hostile gaze of a political opposition and media that will rip them apart at the slightest misstep.The result is, inevitably, a political culture that is almost completely devoid of spontaneity or intimacy.   

What this points to is perhaps the biggest problem with Gregg's thesis, which is the very concept of "politics unplugged." The metaphor of the political sphere as something like a small Manhattan club gets it exactly wrong. National politics is more like an outdoor rock festival with two or three stages, where radically different groups of fans are mixed together to see radically different bands. Pure volume is the only means of survival in such a scenario, and any group that tried to "connect" with the audience by going unplugged would get steamrolled.

But so what? The desire for something else -- for Dave, for Turnip Day, for Politics Unplugged -- is often held up as the stance of noble idealism. It is not. What the pining for authenticity amounts to is just the desire to take the politics out of politics. If this is idealism it is of a very immature sort - there's a reason why Dave is a whimsical Hollywood comedy, not a documentary.

It's an idealism that encourages voter apathy (because "they are all liars", or because "no one speaks to my interests") and obscures this essential truth: We live in an enormous country of 33 million people with any number of deeply incommensurable conceptions of the good.

Canada is not a quaint little village, and the fact that our politicians frequently feel the need to pander to the masses, to change their minds, to break promises, and generally to do what is politically expedient and not govern according to their own idiosyncratic notion of the truth -- this is not a flaw in our system. It is its best feature. 

The End of Authenticity

All of a sudden, the authentic is on the outs. The first intimations came last summer, when a major marketing magazine declared that authenticity has lost its cachet. Then USA Today ran a piece pointing out that if Starbucks can call its breakfast sandwich “artisanal,” and if Tostitos can say the same thing about its corn chips, then maybe artisanal is just a synonym for mass-produced. But the last hand-forged nail was driven into the reclaimed-wood coffin recently when the New York Times published a long feature under the title, “All that authenticity might be getting old”...

That's from my latest column for The Ottawa Citizen.



Authenticity Watch: VHS

From - where else -- the NYT.

Technological slumming -- check:

“You just don’t get the same feeling in a pristine print of a DVD,” Mr. Kinem said. “With VHS it’s like I’m experiencing an old grind-house movie theater. I would never watch them on a computer.”

Old-timey small-town slow-ism -- check, check, check:

“VHS represents a period when you could walk into a mom-and-pop video store, and what you could rent was limited to what was right in front of you,” Ms. Davis said. “There were these amazing illustrations on the big boxes, and no one had any idea what the movie was. You were taking a gamble. It’s the opposite of instant gratification.”

Nostalgia for manual labour -- check.

“VHS is cumbersome,” said Mr. Husney (who was creative director of Intervision before moving to Drafthouse). “You have to maintain it. It has to fit on a shelf. You may have to dust it off. But you also get to interact with a piece of art on a personal level.”

Thanks to Simon Cott.

On the true true

I asked Meronym if the Abbess spoke true, when she said the Hole World flies round the sun, or if the Men o' Hilo was true sayin' the sun flies round the Hole World.

Abbess is quite correct, answered Meronym.

Then the true true is different to the seemin' true? said I.

Yay, an' it usually is, I mem'ry Meronym sayin', an' that's why true true is presher'n'rarer'n diamonds.

David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

Amy Winehouse and The Authenticity Trap

Before I could rouse myself to write something on this, Amanda Petrusich has done a bang-up job for Salon. Her central claim is that Winehouse's struggle with addiction gave her the sort of credibility to sing the blues that normally wouldn't be open to a young, white, jewish, girl from London:

Addiction is a fundamentally different kind of hardship, but Winehouse’s life wasn’t charmed. She had credibility, suddenly, and that trumped everything else -- race, circumstance, origin. She made dozens of unforgivable professional and personal mistakes, but no one could accuse her of being full of shit.

Read all of Petrusich's piece, I think it gets it exactly right. The only thing I would add is that I wonder to what extent, if any, Winehouse felt obliged to continue to draw from that well of authenticity. That is, I wonder if Winehouse, like others before her, bought into her self-image as a messed-up singer of the blues, which made it that much harder for her to get clean.

I'm not suggesting she was simply playing a role, or that she killed herself in the name of cred, but there is a powerful looping effect in all of our identities. All identities are social constructs which get their power from being recognized by others. As a result, there is a looping effect in our identity construction, where we internalise the norms that govern our chosen (or assigned) identities. When the norms of a given identity contain a built-in mechanism for both radicalisation and self-destruction (as they do for an identity like "messed-up singer of the blues"), it is not hard to see how it could become literally inescapable.

I made a similar argument in my refereeing of the spat between M.I.A. and Lynne Hirschberg, for Mediaite:

The problem is that M.I.A. herself buys into the authenticity hoax. This drives her to counter the charge that she’s a hypocrite or a sellout by ramping up the “political” dimension of her art and her persona – she needs people to see that for all her money and security, she’s still Maya from the ‘hood. And so we get her recent video for the song “Born Free”, which features what appears to be an American SWAT team hunting down and killing red-headed males. Politically, it’s completely obtuse, but it is pretty much what happens when the need to be seen as “radical” overwhelms all other artistic considerations.

Death of a Counterculturalist

Theodore Roszak, the sociologist who coined the term counterculture, has died at 77. His book “The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society” was extraordinarily influentional. Or should I say, is extraordinarily influential: the book was published in 1969, but it remains the definitive critique of the alienating effects of techno-capitalism, and his proferred solution -- youthful dissent -- is the air that every self-styled political non-conformist breathes.

More than any other book (including No Logo), Roszak's Making of a Counter Culture was the chief foil for the argument that Joe Heath and I advanced in The Rebel Sell. In his last work, Roszak argued that "the idealistic values of the 1960s would inspire millions of baby boomers in their last years"; the sad truth is that he was right. The hippies didn't sell out when they became yuppies, they simply traded their VWs for SUVs. And now that they are heading into retirement, they are looking for authenticity. The hoax, unfortunately, remains the same.

Authenticity Watch: The narcissism of indifference

(Picture courtesy of Ryan Davey)

1. A very good Q&A about reason and skepticism with philosopher Stephen Law, author of "A Field Guide to Bullshit"

2. New York performance artist Tania Bruguera is spending a year as a poor immigrant, living amongst illegal immigrants in Queen's. Her new-found neighbours aren't sure what to make of her, and Bruguera herself is having trouble fitting in: "After finding her apartment and roommates in January through a flier on the street, she was surprised that the local gym did not offer yoga."

3. The latest in authentic tourism: An outfit in Turkey will let you come and be "Muslim for a month".

4. The narcissism of indifference: The New York Times finds a couple of hyperlocal fanatics who are actually smug about how their ecolunacy is completely pointless and apolitical.

5. China's assualt on our preconceptions about authenticity continues with Hengdian World Studios, aka "Chinawood," which contains, among other things, a full-scale replica of the Forbidden City.

Hengdian has plenty to offer beyond the Forbidden City. There is the Qin dynasty imperial palace that was the backdrop for the movie "Hero." There are 100 authentic Ming dynasty riverside houses shipped in from southern China, and the largest indoor Buddha in China.

6. And then there is this lovely Austrian town, a UNESCO heritage site, that the Chinese are secretly making a complete copy of. Tyler Cowen gets its exactly right: "It’s funny how a town gets insulted when outsiders start taking its kitsch seriously as proper kitsch."

That light bulb ban? "Of such deals are Tea Parties born"

In Bloomberg this week, Virginia Postrel serves up a typically smart column about the idiocy of what amounts to an effective ban on incadescent lightbulbs in the United States. Her argument is two-pronged: First, she outlines the way a bizarre alliance of green activists and big bulb producers joined forces to convince Congress to ban incandescents:

It was an inside job. Neither ordinary consumers nor even organized interior designers had a say. Lawmakers buried the ban in the 300-plus pages of the 2007 energy bill, and very few talked about it in public. It was crony capitalism with a touch of green.

The result? Consumers got screwed. They are now stuck with a technology, compact fluorescent, that gives inferior light at a higher price, but which has a failure rate not noticeably different from incandescent. But most stupidly, it doesn't even succeed at its intended goal, which is to reduce electricity use in order to reduce pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. How could it? As she points out, the ban provides no incentive at all to reduce these emissions:

A well-designed policy would allow different people to make different tradeoffs among different uses to produce the most happiness (“utility” in econ-speak) for a given amount of power. Maybe I want to burn a lot of incandescent bulbs but dry my clothes outdoors and keep the air conditioner off. Maybe I want to read by warm golden light instead of watching a giant plasma TV.

What matters, from a public policy perspective, isn’t any given choice but the total amount of electricity I use (which is itself only a proxy for the total emissions caused by generating that electricity). If they’re really interested in environmental quality, policy makers shouldn’t care how households get to that total. They should just raise the price of electricity, through taxes or higher rates, to discourage using it.

(My emphasis)

I couldn't agree more. In fact, I did agree entirely, in a column I wrote over four years ago (cripes, has it been that long?) for Maclean's. Like Postrel, I argued that the key is to simply get the price of electricity right, because then it means that what I do with the electricity I purchase is my business alone. If I want to bask in the hothouse glow of incandescent bulbs -- or if I choose to install compact fluorescents but spend the savings on a central air conditioner that I use to keep the house at 15C in the middle of summer -- so what?

If a government believes it is entitled to micromanage the preferences of its citizens with respect to electricity consumption, there is no reason to stop at light bulbs. Why not ban sales of 72-inch plasma screen televisions, or outlaw central air conditioning? Why not legislate limits on the number of hours a day I can spend surfing the Internet, or playing video games? The problem with using state power to implement moral distinctions is not that it's annoying; it is that it's authoritarian, with no obvious non-arbitrary stopping point.

It is hardly surprising that it was Cuba that first introduced such a ban a few years ago; it sent teams of youth into people's homes to switch out the old bulbs for energy-saving ones. As Postrel puts it, "of such deals are Tea Parties born."

Everything sounds better in Italian...

... including my writing:

La frutta che mangiate è tutta biologica? Pensate che la vita sia troppo breve per sorseggiare vini che non siano doc? E per le vacanze alle porte, vi terrete alla larga dalle destinazioni più commerciali, optando per un antico borgo o una fattorialontano da turisti e venditori ambulanti? Se sì, allora benvenuti nel mondo danaroso e competitivo dell’autenticità ostentata, che in molte parti del mondo ormai rappresenta la forma più aggiornata della cara, vecchia corsa all’accaparramento di status symbol esclusivi...

That's from my contribution to the new issue of ITALIC magazine. My deepest thanks to Gaetano Prisciantelli (Twitter @myrthus) for inviting me to contribute. (Attn Italian publishers; Lots more where that came from). 

Goodbye Oprah, and good riddance

Rousseau’s most successful contemporary heir is Oprah Winfrey. Her entire brand is built around a cult of authenticity through therapeutic self-disclosure and promiscuous emotionality.

That's from a column I wrote for Mediaite last year when Kitty Kelly's memoir about Oprah came out. I didn't like Oprah then, I like her less today, and I'm glad she's gone. She's basically a cult-leader who  has had a horrible impact on the publishing industry, helping transform literature into a form of talk therapy while becoming so influential the entire book business is terrified of her. She celebrates "personal authenticity" while serving as an exemplar of the worst forms of ultra-conspicuous shop therapy.  Perhaps worst of all, she went into business with Playboy Bunny-turned anti-vaccine lunatic Jenny McCarthy.

If there is a person who has made more money and become more famous peddling a more perverse ideology to Americans than Oprah, I can't think of who it might be.

How Jay-Z became the black Warren Buffett

Street-cred authenticity and mass-market success are natural antagonists in the corporate world, and very few hip-hop artists could survive wholesale embrace by white suburban adolescents and keep their image intact. But then again, very few hip-hop artists are Jay-Z.

That's the hook to my review of Zack Greenburg's Empire State of Mind, a book about Jay-Z's business philosophy. 

The "rape" of yoga and the problem of invented traditions

While the Tea Party continues to press its advantage in yet another round of the interminable American culture wars, a far more interesting cultural battleground is brewing in the Indian community over the question: who owns yoga?

Over the past year or so, a number of Hindu groups in America, in particular the Hindu American Foundation, have been working to remind westerners that that yoga isn't just about stretching and stretch pants, that it is instead part of an unbroken Hindu religious tradition that stretches back 5000 years. The fight has been brewing for a while, but it came to more general attention last November when the New York Times published a piece about the fight entitled "take back yoga". What is striking about that piece is that the Hindu groups seem conflicted, and unable to decide whether what they find objectionable is that their ancient tradition has been commercialized, or that they're not getting a big enough slice of the pie.

This is, of course, a classic dilemma of authenticity. But it isn’t necessarily a contradiction – there’s nothing inherently wrong with insisting that if a culture is going to be sold at a profit, the people who invented that culture should share in the wealth. But it gets a bit more complicated when what is being laid claim to is an invented tradition. In the classic definition from Eric Hobsbawm, an invented tradition is "a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past."

The point of an invented tradition is that it is not about the past, it is about the present. For Hobsbawm, many traditions are invented by national elites to justify the existence and importance of their respective nation states – such as the whole-cloth invention of the Turkish nation by Ataturk. A recent example was the use of the Loya Jirga to cement Hamid Karzai as the legitimate president of Afghanistan, by (falsely) implying that this is how Afghan rulers had been chosen for centuries.

But sometimes the point of an invented tradition is about laying a claim of cultural identity, intellectual primacy, economic ownership, and even of the moral high ground. The fight over who owns yoga involves all of these. And if a recent article by Meera Nanda for Open Magazine is correct, yoga – as understood by all the players in this fight – is an invented tradition.

I won’t try to summarize the entire article – you should really just pause here and go read it for yourself before I continue – but here is the money claim: The HAF argument - that all yoga, especially its physical or hatha yoga component, is rooted in the Hindu way of life that goes all the way back to the Vedic sages and yogis – is false. Instead,

what HAF calls the “rape of yoga”, referring to the separation of asanas from their spiritual underpinning, did not start in the supposedly decadent West; it began, in fact, in the akharas and gymnasiums of 19th and 20th century India run by Indian nationalists seeking to counter Western images of effete Indians. It is in this nationalistic phase that hatha yoga took on many elements of Western gymnastics and body-building, which show up in the world-renowned Iyengar and Ashtanga Vinyasa schools of yoga. Far from honestly acknowledging the Western contributions to modern yoga, we Indians simply brand all yoga as ‘Vedic,’ a smug claim that has no intellectual integrity.   

The argument then is that 21^st century yoga not an integral part of an ancient and pristine cultural and spiritual tradition. Instead, it is a mongrel, a thoroughly modern and cosmopolitan practice upon which Hinduism “has no special claims.” If this is true, then it causes a few problems for the “take back yoga” movement. Most obviously, it undercuts any claims that there is a “yoga” that was stolen or appropriated from Hindus and which is there to be reclaimed. It also undercuts any possible financial claims that might be made, and puts a crimp in the mat of any lawsuits over yoga postures and intellectual property rights.

But it also causes problems for westerners. After all, a great deal of the appeal of yoga to North Americans, apart from how great they look in Lululemon clothes, has been precisely that it is an integral part of an ancient, pristine, and highly exotic cultural tradition. After all, there are plenty of more explicitly “western” practices that offer pretty much the same physical benefits as yoga – Pilates being the prime example – but which have not had nearly the cultural and economic impact. As Meera Nanda puts it,

Thus, doing namastes, intoning ‘om’ and chanting Sanskrit mantras have become a part of the experience of doing yoga in America. Many yoga studios use Indian classical or kirtan music, incense, signs of ‘om’ and other paraphernalia of the Subcontinent to create a suitably spiritual ambience.

More than any other factor, yoga owes its success in North America to the fact that it serves the needs of hip, young, urban, white, people whose lives lack nothing except a sense of authenticity. Unable to find it in their own seemingly deprived traditions, these authenticity seekers do what they’ve always done – look for it in the exotic, the ancient, the un-marketed.

There is an excellent film called "Yoga, Inc.", which addresses the question of whether "yoga can survive big business with its karma intact". I suspect the answer to that is “yes”. The bigger question is whether yoga can surive the revelation that its karma owes more to turn-of-the-20^th-century Danish gymnasts than to ancient forest-dwelling Brahmin sages.

In praise of hydrobeef

It’s getting increasingly hard to find anything good to say about meat. It is expensive, sucking up lots of land, grain, and other resources. It has a large carbon footprint. Finally, industrial meat production is hard on the animals, even before they’re slaughtered.

But what if there was a technology that eliminated all three of these drawbacks, while giving us a large supply of low cost, custom-designed meat products. That is, what if we could grow meat in a vat? At this point, would there be any reasonable objection to eating meat?

It’s still a hypothetical question, but it won’t be for long. As Reuters reports today, a handful of researchers are working away at  “cultured” meat grown in-vitro out of stem cells. One of these scientists is Medical University of South Carolina, researcher Vladimir Mironov, who envisions “football field-sized buildings filled with large bioreactors, or bioreactors the size of a coffee machine in grocery stores” to produce this meat.

Even better:

"It will be functional, natural, designed food," Mironov said. "How do you want it to taste? You want a little bit of fat, you want pork, you want lamb? We design exactly what you want. We can design texture.

It is telling that while the US government won’t fund his research, PETA will. Because PETA understands that the goal is not to micro-manage consumer preferences, it is to prevent harm to animals. And if that is taken out of the equation, there’s not a lot to object to. There is of course the “Ick” factor, but I suspect that would disappear quite quickly once the product hit the market.

A few more thoughts:

1. Any “ick” objections (or “ick” objections disguises as moral objections) could be handled by a serious and mandatory labeling regime.

2. The idea of custom-designed meat products opens up a whole new realm for interesting (and relatively harmless) competition. You can imagine celebrity chefs designing their own special lines of meat textures and tastes; a well-designed “blend” could be sold for meatballs, or stews, or meatpies, etc. Imagine a steak that was a mixture of lamb and venison?

3. At the same time, in-vitro meat will suffer from all the drawbacks of everything else that is produced cheaply and for mass consumption – it will be “inauthentic”. And so it will also open up a more pernicious form of authenticity-mongering amongst people who only eat meat grown “on the hoof”. At the extreme, you can imagine private or inviation-only restaurants and supper-clubs opening up where certified on-the-hoof meat is provided to the privileged elite.

4. But even that might not be such a bad thing; at the very least, it is hard to see how it would be net loss to the planet, to the animals, or consumers.

5. The upshot is that it is hard to see the downside to in-vitro meat. Am I missing something?



Comic Sans; or Why I Love the French

This is how it starts:

Trouble is brewing at OuBaPo, France's experimental-comic-book movement. After years of infighting over artistic direction, at least four of the nine founding members have quit, and the two highest-profile artists aren't speaking to each other.

And this is how it ends:

The 46-year-old Mr. Trondheim is also preparing a tell-all comic detailing various fallings out with Mr. Menu.

RIP Denis Dutton, philosopher, aesthete, aggregator

Denis Dutton has died. An American philosopher working in New Zealand, Dutton is probably best known as the found of the Arts and Letters Daily, one of the best of the early Web 1.0 aggregators. The ALDaily has always been a great read, but my feelings about Dutton himself are somewhat ambivalent.

When I was teaching philosophy at Trent University in Peterborough, we invited Dutton to give the annual Ryle Lectures, a series that brings a distinguished philosopher to the university for lectures and informal meetings with students, staff and the public. Dutton's lectures were not very good. They consisted mostly of slide shows and amounted to little more than a version of "what I did on my summer vacation" wrapped in a weakly-argued anti-Gombrichian thesis about evolution and objective aesthetic value. Nor did Dutton do much to ingratiate himself to his hosts: his preference for lunchtime conversation appeared to be based in either red-baiting or feminist-baiting. All told, his visit was a disappointment.

But he did do some valuable work in philosophy and art. His essay "Authenticity in Art", written for the Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, is excellent. This piece was a big influence on the arguments in chapters 3 and 7 of AH, especially his riff on the importance of a critical audience in maintaining a living artistic tradition. Indeed, every fan of contemporary jazz should pay attention to his argument about the death of opera. I also helped myself to a great anecdote from this essay:

A Pacific Island dancer was once asked about his native culture. “Culture?” he responded. “That’s what we do for the tourists.”

He will be missed.