The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
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If you get very into a genre of art, like for me is horror movies and metal music, you quickly realize there is a super deep well of amazingly high quality content that pushes the boundaries of the art form. There are passionate community members and creators that are using all the latest and greatest technology to produce ever higher quality art at less cost, expanding the amount of art and the number of people with the funds to create it.
If you look at the top-40 music charts and cringe just find music you actually like because there is tons of it being made and a community behind it. All the criticism about “modern art sucks” is such snobbish and flippant bullshit.
Nowadays you simply don't find any mainstream music approaching the levels of sophistication of, say, 1980s mainstream music. Where's the Dire Straits, the Gary Moore and the David Bowie of the 2010s?
Good art is by definition subversive, and you won't find subversion in the Billboard Top 40. Which is why conservative criticisms of stagnation in art/science feel so blatantly hypocritical too.
Janelle Monàe may be this generations Bowie. And Kendrick Lamar can definitely hold his own in comparison to dire straights.
Number one song on Spotify as of this moment:
"If he ate my ass, he's a bottom feeder"
"Beat it up, n-word, catch a charge"
"Never lost a fight, but I'm looking for a beating"
"I wanna gag, I wanna choke"
"Pay my tuition just to kiss me on this wet ass pussy"
Not that everyone who likes a song buys it, but regional sales show vast differences in sales and thus tastes for different albums.
Heck, just go through the KEXP YouTube catalogue to be blown away by what's happening in music.
> [T]he only thing more frightening than the possibility of annihilation is the possibility that our society could coast on forever as it is—like a Rome without an Attila to sack its palaces, or a Nineveh without Yahweh to pass judgment on its crimes
- arguing, effectively, that America is too comfortable and therefore must be destroyed? In some ways this feels like a quaint thing to worry about as a pandemic sweeps the US and police and demonstrators fight in the streets, but perhaps it explains the blase approach that has been taken to those events.
Trump has destroyed conservative intellectualism because he has no use for nor respect for them.
We've entered an era where Mutually Assured Destruction has reduced that selective pressure of superpowers down to nothing. In this environment, power can easily be pulled from citizens and placed into the hands of the autocrats who trust that the chances of being usurped is extremely low. And they're right.
There are social justice issues in the world, sure. But I think this issue of power redistribution is a big issue too.
for the lines of thought which I believe inspired 1984's Eastasia, Eurasia, and Oceania.
(the latter of which Airstrip One will have joined by the end of this year)
Edit: for GP, I believe BR 'quaint' == US 'out of touch', much like BR 'brave' == US 'will lose you the next election'.
As I've posted elsewhere in this thread, I would recommend reading the following series of blog posts.
https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...
Just because something is pithy, doesn’t mean it’s true.
Hard times can create hard ressentful men who value low empathy and are eager to unleash hard times on others.
I think that the article is not saying anything about ought-to-be matters. Just what-is observational statement.
It's not that it 'must' be, by some moral standard, be destroyed. It's that it would be destroyed by inevitable laws of objective reality, which, like gravity, do not take any moral stance.
I wouldn't describe the author's definition of decadence as synonymous with "comfortable": Sterility, poor response to covid, a lack of economic and technological progress, repetitive "arts" with nothing worth remembering by history.
https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...
(My description is summarizing to the point of uselessness, and I highly, highly recommend reading the series.)
All of which to say, you could liken periods of high wealth concentration as lending to decadence, though I'm not sure how useful that would be as the same argument could be made of golden ages. Decadence itself doesn't seem suspect but I would expect it to be around before things go awry.
edit: here - https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/08/12/book-review-secular-cy...
So it's possible that rather than high inequality leading to destabilization, it's the opposite: destabilization leads to decreased inequality.
Frankly, the historical record is not encouraging. Usually, when this topic comes up people chime in with easy takeaways like "people have always complained about this, and it rarely amounted to anything", "look at this thing that happened recently that's never happened before. It's proof that we're doing better than any other civilization ever has", or "things have not been going according to my value system, therefore doom is approaching!"
It's possible to cite example-after-example of these phrases coming up when the conversation happens in the historical record. And yet. And yet at times civilizations do die, and there was plenty of warning while it was happening. The problem is that denial and complaceny is tough to fight. When the Emperors took over Rome, it kept the Senate around. They gradually stopped having power, but by keeping them around, it was possible for the illusion of things staying the same to remain. People, with the very smallest prodding, are more than happy to believe that everything is as good as it used to be, plus there's all this new cool stuff we've never seen before!
Hell, ask a few people when the Western Roman Empire ended. Good luck with that. There are folks who will tell you it never did end. If you're that far in denial, how could you ever reason from your current historical position to the long run?
Many times I think conversations like this are much more interesting by the types of responses you get than the actual merits of the case presented.
If our civilization is entering the great 1984/Brave New World Fizzle, I can tell you with certainty that there will be fierce denial that such a thing is occurring. Just like always.
or these? (techno genre) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FteYOA2cDkg
(they're evidently sweeping out of the steppe in all directions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvW8JEuIo58 )
I recently read "Decadent Society" as part of a binge on what another commenter calls "conservative intellectual" literature of the past couple of years. I'm not sure Douthat really makes a great case for his thesis but there is, to me, a sort of haunting note of truth to it--a sense of your "Fizzle" having entered a feedback loop that is difficult to ascertain from the inside.
Since I did march through the literature binge, I'll add that some conservative authors are quite a bit more pointed in their analyses than is Douthat. "Age of Entitlement," and "Return of the Strong Gods" are two titles that come to mind.
- How fast can we respond (provide a solution) to problem <x> - What are our dependencies, and how does it affect our ability to respond to problems <X>
Or in other words, we run out of things, or encounter problems we cannot adapt to.
AFAIK, the argument over when the western empire fell is not so much about the facts, so much as the meaning of the word "fall". it's inherently arbitrary to point to the "end" of a civilization with routine violent regime changes, varying degrees of centralized control, continuous contraction/expansion of borders, and cultural/ethnic mixing from the territories. everything we think of as "roman" was constantly in flux. if you look solely at centralized political/military power, the western empire clearly fell in the late 400s AD. if you look at cultural influence, you might argue it lives on today in the catholic church.
Those two, as far as I know, are the same thing. I know biological "race" has some negative connotations, but I guess you could also say "ecotype" to refer to roughly the same thing, which I reckon was what you were trying to do--correct me if I'm wrong.
The other issues aren't exactly unconcerning, but I think we have to acknowledge that this is a quite peaceful time. For most of history, what we call "unrest" was the status quo, and there were in addition wars of open territorial conquest which are nearly extinct today.
- Continued urbanization is essential to growth as we know it
- Non-urban voters are less attuned to what cities need to grow
Then regardless of political ideology, our disticts + FPTP method of growing makes non-negligible growth of the real economy very difficult.
History tends to get highly filtered and very little attention is paid to the incredibly bumpy road those times represent.
If you think we are, you’d have to agree that the EU is post-decline. The UK, France (the list goes on) are all countries that are past their peak of power, influence and prestige.
But I would argue those EU countries haven’t declined in a negative sense. They’ve just evolved into something other than a global superpower.
Europe has some issues too but they don't have the same systemic failures we have. Also, Europe can be independently successful or failing from the us.
France in comparison is building alliances in the Mediterranean, the Middle East and Africa. I believe they have a lot of growth in their future. They are far form done and very much realpolitik and with expansion in mind( plus one of the few countries that still holds colonies across the world).
A false dichotomy, since humans are uniquely able to harmonize with any environment through observation and planning. The need to buy stuff is the only reason we think of “progress or stagnation”
In fact, even during its heyday, the Roman Empire defied defied definitions. Were you Latin? Roman? A citizen? These and other terms all meant different things as the civilization progressed. There was almost a determined effort to keep shifting definitions around such that the Roman Empire never died. In fact, IIRC, there's a 60 Minutes segment where they interview some Greek monks living on an island. The flag they're flying? The flag of the Byzantine Empire, of course. (Also, the word "byzantine" is mostly our own invention. They considered themselves thoroughly Roman)
Having said all of that, it's completely obvious to any outside observer that major changes occurred, many of which had a negative impact on the population. So something happened. Until one starts in with definitions of what exactly constitutes a valid OEM part for our Theseusian ship and what doesn't, folks are free to completely ignore the discussion, no matter how bad things get.
But if you think SpaceX has anywhere close to the cultural impact of the moon landing, you really need to get out of your bubble.
Tiger King though, whew. Even my grandmother tried out her new Netflix subscription with that.
Also pretty dubious.
Regardless of what you and your friends did, you have to admit that there’s a whole wider world that didn’t watch it. Just looking at the numbers, the SpaceX launch got about 10.3 million viewers (https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.space.com/amp/nasa-spacex-as...)
That’s good, but about as many as an important cricket match in India (https://medium.com/@refsrc/indias-streaming-service-hotstar-...).
The Super Bowl often gets 10x that viewership.
I think that cultural bubbles are mostly harmless, but I’m surprised at how so many people seem to not realize they’re even in a bubble. Who seem to think that 95% of the world, or even America, lives like the average SV tech worker.
There's no way that Space X launching humans, something we've done dozens of times, is as significant as the first time someone walked on the moon. 94% of households in the US watched that. I'd be surprised if 0.94% of households watched Space X.
That said, he is still wrong. 9/11 was definitely a shared cultural moment. At least shared across the US.
Also, if you ask anyone who was at least 5 years old in 1969, they will tell you the two events were nowhere near the same on an emotional and pure coverage level. The moon landing was by far the most-watched television broadcast in history up to that point, and held that record for a decade - 650 million viewers for a live event. Demo-2 was less than 11 million (with probably a billion more people having access to it than in 1969). It kind of saddens me that America has gotten to the point where people think these two events are equivalent. We've really lost the sense of what national identity-defining big projects even mean.
I think that’s the wrong heuristic to apply. I don’t think he’s making testable hypothesis as much as trying to create a lens through which we can consider our current events.
Why? It's been done decades before. It just isn't that impressive from a feat perspective - if you gave anyone enough money to get top engineers you could do the same.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
The root issue here seems to be the focus on material prosperity as indicative of success. That strikes me as a very 20th century idea, one from before the "Information Overload" age. The cultural-philosophical problem of the future is figuring out how to prioritize in a land of abundance.
I find this comparison completely ridiculous. It is not just that I can tell difference between Madonna and Lady Gaga or 1980 metal against todays one. It is also that the actual difference between 1970s and 1950s music is that they changed genre. Metal must be metal, if it was different then metal if would not be metal. It just so happens that new genres did appeared between 1980 and now. Contemporary techno progressive music is incomparable to anything in 1980. Also, 1980 music is ridiculously easy to distinguish as 1980 music. And not just that new genres appeared, the music in 1980 was not consumed the way it is consumed now - all the time for free huge selection by own personal choice. Back then, you had either to pay or listen to one of radio stations. So the people moved more in lockstep.
> Renaissance linear perspective for the visual arts ... By mid-century, with a few admirable exceptions, the modern art world seemed determined to make itself the butt of jokes, as Tom Wolfe memorably described in The Painted Word (1975).
I personally like modern art more then renaissance, but that is personal taste - what I find fun.
The big reason for abstraction being the thing in art is that realism is largely figured out. People can do hyper realistic drawings today, the ones that are hard to distinguish from photography. They are stunning pieces of craft. But, at this point, it is craft that you can learn if you study enough and have talent. You are not discovering something new when you do it - but if they are your thing there are artists focusing on this particular thing. There are books you can read that teach you how to render, analyze and draw.
When did the peak in regard for, and contribution to the welfare of, others occur, in your opinion? Looking back through history, I struggle to find a time where it was greater other than perhaps in hunter-gather societies.
https://www.vox.com/podcasts/2020/6/17/21293202/ross-douthat...
> . It’s billed as a debate but it’s not at all contentious,
Does Erza ever debate though?( not counting sam harris episode). He seem to invite ppl who already kind of agree with his worldview and amplifies their thoughts.
He was on IQsuared debates but it wasn't a debate, he was just reading excerpts out of his book.
I would agree his podcast... well excepting Sam Harris I've never heard what I would call a debate on there. But I will say in listening to people on there I don't agree with, I've learned a lot and gained a lot of insight. I think it's been good bubble popping, if not like jumping totally into the pool.
For more bubble popping I'd recommend The Flip Side [1]. You get an email every day or two with Red/Blue takes on issues. They do a good job being faithful to both sides (at least, IMO), plus it's free.
Reading this reminded me a bit of reading the WHO and our own leaders (I’m Danish, we handled the pandemic decently) not to worry about Covid back in January.
Heh.
> In the past, each decadent civilization has eventually given way to a dynamic competitor. In our case, might it be Islam? China? Russia? An America led by a more capable populist president?
This also reads a little weird. The author is obviously well versed in history and the progression of civilisation, and as such, must be aware that we’ve always moved in a progressive direction. Sure it sometimes takes a few life times, but we’ve never moved permanently backwards before, so it would be rather strange if we started doing that now.
Playing devil's advocate here: perhaps that's because we always think of things that we're doing now as "right"? For instance there are societies in history that were open to some sexual relationships that we are not (mainly the ones involving minors or incest). At times in european history, animals were tried for crimes similarly to people. Are we more or less progressive than they are?
It would not be strange. It would be unexpected. It reminds me of this funny little story:
> "Every morning on a turkey farm, the farmer comes to feed the turkeys. A scientist turkey, having observed this pattern to hold without change for almost a year, makes the following discovery: “Every morning at eleven, food arrives.” On the morning of Thanksgiving, the scientist announces this law to the other turkeys. But that morning at eleven, food doesn’t arrive; instead, the farmer comes and kills the entire flock."
For the previous century's version of this trope: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rising_Tide_of_Color_Again...
If we did, how would we know?
I suppose it depends on what you mean by "we" here. There are plenty of societies that moved permanently backwards, and are currently quite far behind where they previously were. Iran is a regressive theocracy and used to be a very modern country. China had a beautiful intellectual culture that contributed immensely to the world and is currently a genocidal despotocracy. Egypt was the intellectual capitol of the known world. In the middle east, there were generations of people who thought that the ruins of the civilizations that came before them must have been made by gods because they couldn't fathom them being created by humans.
Civilizations backslide, and die, regularly throughout history.
Now, if you mean "we" as in humanity as a whole, it's a tougher question. I do agree that humanity as a whole makes progress forward on a long enough timelines, but there were still many stumbling blocks along the way.
As a counterpoint, I'd read the essay "The Whig Interpretation of History"(1931). Her criticizes the notion of interpreting history as a story of progress.
Review: https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2015/11/19/philosophy-of-h...
My eyes kind of roll every time someone says decadent society as it reminds me of communist propaganda.
Not seeing much of those four horsemen, either.
Do Russians not believe in things like equal pay, all jobs being open to women, fair divorce settlements, protection from physical abuse, access to family planning? (Honest question).
Likewise, equal pay sure, but dont you dare to point out when it is not. Naturally woman is the one expected to primart focus on kids and home, guy is more likely to be promoted of course. It is not seen as "not a woman place" to be leader - but it is happening less then incapable guy being promoted. Basically, there is more sexism but less hostility.
Jobs are not closed to women, but people perceive you weird putside of proper gender bounds and talk about it openly. The different expectations of boys and girls are in the open too. You wont find male teachers much, super rare.
Divorces seem fair money wise, except really guy will get less access to kids. But no alimony, she is expected to work. Access to familly planning is good.
It doesn't take much effort to find current instances of sword, famine, and plague. Only thing missing is the beasts, but maybe that's because we've already hunted them to extinction.
Then again, we've been seeing all four them regularly for over centuries...
And yet those things are affecting fewer people proportionally than at any time in recorded history.
I suppose any one unhappy with decadence, preferring spectacular instability to stability, a good fight against misfortune to contentment, and struggles with temptation or fatal overthrows by passion is free to become whatever flavour of jihadi they find congenial: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24373042
David Crosby on how becoming a millionaire changed his life: "you know those pistachios that are hard to open? I don't bother with those anymore."
Decadence as a concept makes a good polemic but it isn't a good source of judging problems let alone solving them. It really just means "I the self-proclaimed moral authority dislike this direction of society!".
The closest to an "objective decadence-like concept" is an expectation of a way of life that cannot be sustained without significant damage. Cottage industry after the dawn of industrializarion would be "decadent" as factory volume beats them out and can no longer sustain the middle class lifestyle. Not exactly what comes to mix when one thinks decadence but it is a lifestyle made unsustainable. There is no "sin" to it but it just doesn't work anymore and trying to force it wouldn't work out well. Notably even that is subjective and depends upon means. Having less than 10% of the population involved in food production would be stupidly unsustainable before agricultural advances but is the first world norm today.
It's typical of non-technical "intellectuals" to completely ignore the main areas of modern human progress, simply because they don't understand them.
e.g. the whole discussion on Art completely ignores Video Games, which are undoubtedly Art, and also an area of rapid innovation and development. Yet they're usually dismissed out of hand because no-one who takes "Art" seriously plays them or understands them.
The whole "we went to the moon and never went back" completely ignores the argument that the moon landing was, right from the start, an uneconomical publicity stunt. The exciting time is now, when space is starting to become economically viable and we have organisations making viable plans to colonise Mars.
The Internet is taken for granted as a method of "chatting", and smartphones as a method of "taking selfies". Again, because the author doesn't understand what vast and wide-reaching achievements these are. Watching a Cambodian tuk-tuk driver watch a YouTube English lesson while parked up waiting for a fare is a modern marvel. Bringing communication and the spread of knowledge to anyone who wants it, wherever they are, is the most important thing to happen to humanity since the invention of agriculture. And yes, it's as disruptive to human societies as agriculture: we should expect our societies to be disturbed by it.
The economic malaise is mostly a result of WW2. Europe was economically destroyed, and the US changed its entire economy to meet the demand (and the USSR moved its entire manufacturing base a thousand miles east in a year, an astounding thing to do). Recovering from that meant that growth was easy because it was coming from such a low base. We've hit the final point of that recovery, and growth isn't so easy any more.
Not everything is perfect. There are some changes we need to make. But please let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. And to anyone writing about modern society: if you don't understand technology, please stop fucking writing about it.
It sounded to me like a case of "back in my day" but with incoherent arguments.
My personal explanation is the collapse of the record industry. I don't think it was due to piracy, though piracy didn't help. It was mostly due to the abandonment of the old practice of scouting for interesting new music in favor of producer-led manufactured pop. The suits wanted a more reliable way to produce marketable acts, and they got it... at the expense of virtually all innovation. The same thing happened to mainstream Hollywood studios who can now only make one movie. Of course it only works for a while. Now everyone is bored and nobody cares and listenership and movie attendance numbers are crashing.
(This is always what happens when the bean counters run things. You get a short term bump in profit, but what they are really doing is cannibalizing the value of the enterprise in hidden ways. The body is basically digesting its own organs. Eventually you are left with a shell with no value.)
Piracy did worsen this trend in the record industry. When the economic model starts to be threatened, a natural response is to become more conservative and cancel anything innovative. It's usually the wrong response, but it's a very normal human response to a feeling of threat or starvation.
All of that has held up pretty well because it was all good music. Nobody is going to remember the absolute dog shit pop that teens listen to today. It's boring, repetitive, devoid of deep emotion, and is basically the same song over and over.
What I see is that many teens today (those who really like music) are listening to old music from the 60s-90s and very little new music. That's because their generation's music is objectively awful. I have seen studies that have quantified this via means such as Shannon information content. The content of popular music has been declining since the late 90s, and the similarity of songs and acts has been increasing.
Teens after 1990 who fancied themselves liking music and being intellectual listened to older music too. I know, because I had friends like that. They considered Nirvana and grunge repetitive crap. Emerging techno and rap too. They would listen Pink Floyd or Beatles, but those were old at that point.
Both my parents have pretty good formal music education; my dad was a high school band director for a while. They never said as much, but I am pretty sure that from their perspective most of what I listend to in high school in the early 90s was "absolute dog shit pop" and " objectively awful".
To be fair, Coal Chamber and Sublime are "objectively awful" :D
I love Alex Grey's art and I liked the music when was in high school, but I get why folks who are into stuff like hard bop or Chopin think that it's not super refined.
There can be musically well crafted music and there can be creative music. Occasionally you get music that is both. My point was that post-late-90s pop is neither. It's churned out repetitive trash that relies heavily on cheap hooks and bass lines to be catchy and inspire superficial emotion.
The slide of music toward mindless manufactured repetitive pop started in the 80s, but it was in the late 90s that it became really obvious.
Just an opinion (and I am aware it's not a popular opinion), but the Beatles going on Ed Sullivan is what really screwed up our system... prior to that the contemporary popular music was jazz, and that was a moment when every boomer musician I know gave up accordion or clarinet or whatever and got into a shitty garage band.
Like, I think there are worthwhile developments even in the shittiest, most repetitive music. Lately I've been having a grand time making electornic music in a single groove box...
my main point is that there's no transcendent "goodness" to US pop music, as various generations each think the newer generations stuff sucks for one reason or another.
Personally, I love the stuff my teenager sends me, even if a lot of it heavily rips of Devo or the Talking Heads or the Dandy Warhols or whoever.
Then, very briefly, the technology of recording music developed to the point where it was commercially viable to mass-market music. As happens with any technological revolution, that triggered a massive spike in innovation. That spike lasted ~50 years, we're just getting to the end of it.
My point is that what happened between ~1950 and ~2000 isn't normal. That's not how fast music normally changes. That was a specific response to a specific stimulus. It will take another stimulus of equal magnitude to provoke a similar level of change.
(also: musicians were almost permanently broke prior to the recording industry. Interesting, and sad, to see that returning too)
https://populationmatters.org/sites/default/files/styles/ful...
Everything moves faster now because there are more people to move it. The rate/person is not that different.
What we have seen since the late 90s is the collapse of musical creativity (at least in popular music... you can still find some creative music if you dig really hard) in spite of population and economic activity continuing to grow. That is not normal. That's a dark age.
You could make an argument that innovation follows the money. The innovation boom of the late 20th century correlates with the music industry profit boom of the same priod. Now there's less money being made, there's less innovation.
Also, you could probably chart the risk-taking of the music industry. They started off not knowing what the hell anyone wanted, so produced weird shit. Then they got hit by waves of disruption. Then they got a grip on it all and stopped taking risks. Which is where we are: stuff that sounds different doesn't get published.
Except, of course, that we have people self-publishing now. There probably is completely freaky weird awesome shit being made, but we don't hear it because discovery is hard in such a huge sea of music.
Interesting stuff.
Universities favouring publish-or-perish are another dead end development.
pop music was better before (even 80s music! =)
They got better at predicting what could sell, but commercialized recording didn’t appear later.
Further, prior to recording, musicians couldn’t make a living without that same broad appeal. People don’t buy tickets to shows they don’t want to see, and patrons don’t commission works from artists they don’t like.
The only artists free from commercial concerns are ones who have money from other things.
I don't really see this at all. I might agree that mainstream music hasn't changed much since the late 2000s, when synthesizers seemed to mostly replace guitars in popular music. to me, taylor swift sounds really different than she did in 2009, but pretty much the same as in 2011 or so. then again, I don't really pay enough attention to this kind of music to give it a fair analysis.
grunge was certainly a major departure from what was popular in the 80s, but it's not radically different from a lot of less popular music that came before it. I would argue there's much more variation in the last twenty years of hardcore subgenres than there was between hüsker dü, pixies, and nirvana.
There is still great music being made, and the really deep stuff has always gotten ignored by most people most of the time. Heck, I majored in music and I don't listen to Bach or Coltrane every day. That stuff is too rich for every occasion.
I'd say that innovation within genres - just people making good songs - is every bit as important as creating new genres. New genres aren't automatically created at a certain rate. They're an event, triggered by major social changes or new cultural influences most of the time. For America to invent a new genre we might need to conquer or be conquered by someone else, or have a new wave of immigration.
Some good artists currently making popular music with depth and interest off the top of my head:
St. Vincent, Dessa, Chris Thile, SquarePusher, BJ Cole, Run the Jewels, Billy Joel (I list him here because rather than just repeating his same hits forever, he went and recently released a classical-style piano album that's quite good, so he's still growing and changing as an artist), Tori Amos (she's been making music a long time but has a new style every decade or so).
I think time will tell us that a bar, alcohol and blue smoke will do more for creativity than a gym and health food all day long.
On a totally different note - have you listened to Them Crooked Vultures? John Paul Jones, formerly Led Zeppelin, playing distorted console steel is pretty wild.
Holds equally true for motion picture.
There is a very irritating snootiness in the review that only thinks classical music as art, and just passingly acknowledges jazz - which by the way was denigrated often in vehemently racist terms when it first appeared.
Good art is recognized not just by beauty or the skill required to create it, but by its ability to engage with some aspect of what it means to be human, in a way that is coherent, mature, and thought-provoking. There are no video game equivalents (yet, one would hope) of, say, Bach, Rembrandt, or Bernini.
Maybe someday there will be, but not today.
edit: To the downvoters, I'm saying all this as a pretty avid gamer. video games are a very young medium and a hopefully in a few centuries I will be wrong.
There are a thousand games that have an "ability to engage with some aspect of what it means to be human, in a way that is coherent, mature, and thought-provoking". I've been moved to tears by several (killing the dragon in Minecraft after literally months of effort, This War of Mine). Stupid things like "Clicker Heroes" have reminded me that all life is inherently meaningless and all endeavour is ultimately futile, given meaning only by what we feel about it.
Compare that to some of the utter crap that passes for High Art, and video games are way ahead in mature, thought-provoking exploration of what it means to be human.
My point was not to say that there are no games that provide powerful, meaningful, beautiful experiences to the humans that play them. Such a claim would be absurd. What I am saying is that the game as a medium probably hasn't matured to the point where it can be compared to the Arts with a capital A, as they are historically understood. Precisely, I mean things like painting, sculpture, music, and literature.
I am not the stupid kind of cultural elitist who would say that there is something inherent about the video game medium that would prevent it from rising to that level, I just think that empirically it hasn't happened yet, though in the long term I am quite hopeful.
And yeah, contemporary "high art" has been in largely poor condition for quite some time. At least if the stuff that makes it into museums is any indication.
I have studied Art. I have an "O"-level in Art History. I have been to famous museums, and looked at world-class paintings, sculptures, etc.
I mean, I've stood in front of the Night Watch in the Reiksmuseum, and it was great. I get that. I sketch (badly), and I appreciate the craftsmanship that went into that. It's a great piece of art, and it moved me.
But to say that that, awesome as it is, is more "Art" than any video game... is bollocks. It's just not true.
Nasty swipes like 'Have you ever heard of "classical" music?' aren't ok either (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24375636).
We're trying to have curious conversation here, not sharp elbows.
I love video games. I spend a great deal of time playing them and I think they have a lot of oppurtunities other mediums can't match. But they don't move me the way even a mediocre novel or movie can.
Video games are terrible at interpersonal relationships, for example. I find the more "interactive" relationships with NPCs the more shallow the relationshop, while "railroad" games tend to be better at it.
Maybe it's that AAA titles mostly focus on the adolescent male demographic. But we've yet to find our Tolstoy.
I think this is more of a money issue. in a highly linear game, every dollar is spent on content that every player will experience. if you have even three choices in the game that depend on each other meaningfully, you suddenly have eight possible endings and several additional plot paths on the way there. so you have to do several times as much development work to achieve the same level of polish, but each player will probably only experience one or two of the paths. they'll still only pay ~$60 for it.
(also ignoring the whole 20th century modernist questioning of "what is art, anyway" involving all kinds of installations, found art, outsider art, signed soup cans, prints, International Klein Blue, and so on)
The Stanley Parable (deconstruction of what it is to play a game. It starts with a third person narration of your character being at work, pushing buttons all day without being quite sure why, and proceeds into multiple endings that deconstruct reality in quite creative ways that sometimes break the fourth wall)
Braid (Mario clone, but you can rewind time and there's a story line that riffs on the old Mario memes but uses them as a metaphor for the atomic bomb)
Dragon Age: Origins (DnD based game with excessively fiddly combat but a fairly massive branching story line, asking the user to make many moral choices, with outcomes ranging from mostly happy to everybody dies)
Portal I and II (notable for their sci-fi dystopian narrator GlaDOS, who is voice acted by an opera singer who plays a computer that has gone insane)
A lot of what computer games do as an art form is fundamentally different than other genres - their chief advantage is interactivity, which is something we haven't known what to do with in art very much prior to this, other than a handful of plays that break the fourth wall.
This interactivity allows for experiments in the concept of community and alternative models of fairness and social status. The reason I still would qualify these as art is that they are exploring these spaces in a non-systematic and intuitive manner rather than an academic one.
This puts MMOs at the top of the medium as an example of what games can do to explore the human condition. They can be life-consuming and addictive, but they explore alternative identities, economies, and social systems in a way and on a scale that no purely intellectual endeavor detached from real economic and political consequences has ever done before. As to what we take from this, I'm not sure other than World of Warcraft has taught me how naive libertarian economics can be given how completely a player was able to take over the entire server economy on one server by just buying low and selling high until his economic advantage was sufficient to control the market.
But Hideo Kojima was born years ago...
It is enjoyable puzzle that was big deal when puzzles like that were rare. But it is not a game you will show next generation of children so that they learn something about human condition or some such.
I think it's an art form in its infancy, and that different arts have different levels of both time spent and depth of understanding gained by taking them in. How much does a painting teach you about the human condition?
Most paintings are ideally fun to look at and then get forgotten. Others have some practical purpose (showing war at the time with no photos, celebrating personality for propaganda purpose etc) or are simply moving craft to higher level.
The human conditions ones were the ones in what I called practical category. For example when I was reading about John Brown, that famous painting of him helped me to keep in mind the personality. I have some more examples like that but way more obscure.
I think the best of contemporary writing (whether fun or human condition level) is in movie series. That is format that is currently at the top, having the most complicated and touching and what not storylines. None of that was possible before streaming services.
Sure we have access to more knowledge than ever - but have we seen the effects of such? Just the opposite - anti-science sentiment is as high as ever. How many people actually truly learn a language online? Downloading duolingo and using it for 2 weeks before giving up is not learning a new language. We overrate minutiae such as this.
> if you don't understand technology, please stop fucking writing about it.
HN is for openly discussing ideas. Technologists face the same biases as anyone else.
yeah this the disruption I mentioned. Our society is going to change because mass communication. Not all of that change is going to be good. All of that change is going to be resisted. The same was true for all changes in society, from feudalism to parliamentarianism to democracy, including electricity and steam power.
> Technologists face the same biases as anyone else.
I get that. But technologists tend to get clued-up about everything else before airing their opinions. For some reason, Art Critics especially, intellectuals seem to think it's OK for them to know everything about 19th century impressionism and nothing about Internet Protocol and still have a valid opinion about 21st century Art.
And without the Soviet Union around, it's much harder to solve the challenges we have because there isn't a big bad. The current conservative talking points of China do not carry the same weight because the entire nation's stock portfolios are reliant on cheap chinese factories. There is a general schizophrenia with our world today. Connected by so many things - email, instagram, video chat, cell phones, facebook. And yet depression is very high. People seem far more distant. We need more manufacturing here - but wal-mart and amazon dominate the retail market with cheap chinese goods and Americans can't get enough. Google gives us vast knowledge - and yet looking at tests from the 70s, most are far, far harder. Schools have gotten easier. Anti-vax has a powerful voice. I think technology contributes to this, but all in all I think it's not the sole cause.
> I get that. But technologists tend to get clued-up about everything else before airing their opinions. For some reason, Art Critics especially, intellectuals seem to think it's OK for them to know everything about 19th century impressionism and nothing about Internet Protocol and still have a valid opinion about 21st century Art.
I don't think knowing about IP has anything to do with one's ability to judge art. It's a slippery slope, or rather absurd, because art debates always go down the rabbit hole of "what is art"
My go-to example for this is the Cambodian tuk-tuk driver taking a YouTube English lesson while waiting for a fare. This is radical change. The democratisation of knowledge is huge. And it has unwanted side-effects: everyone does their own "research" now, and then we have to un-democratise some knowledge so that lies don't get passed off as truth. It's going to take us a couple of generations to work out how allowing everyone to publish anything they like, and read anything they want, is actually going to work in a sane society.
> ... rabbit hole of "what is art"
Agreed :)
And there was an absolute explosion of written works only starting two centuries ago - due to mass scale printing. And even in books, fantasy is somehow not high literature - which is just gatekeeping at this point.
In physics for example, computational modelling has been exploding. The availability of GPUs and ML based modelling has been rising rapidly too.
Yet another point - when I was a MS student quantum computing was a pie in the sky fantasy - today it's an exploding field. Same for energy storage - the progress we have made there in the last decade is mind boggling.
There is an effect that we humans cannot really accept - it takes time to really judge the quality of a work. And that time is often decades. Human beings are exceptionally poor at long term thinking (we have literally mountains of evidence for this) and yet stubbornly refuse to accept this limitation.
If Ross Douthat thinks we've slowed technologically and modern technological gimmicks are trivial, well hahahaha, I agree, and he's just betrayed every conservative tenant.
- Space race was classic post-war consensus big goverment spending, and planning.
- Modern technologies, whether it's startups focusing on trains not plains, small powerplants not big ones, phones satellites and not wires in the ground, is entirely tech hacking around coordination failure. We've lost the ability to collaborate on the big stuff, and a lot of that is due precisely to conservationism weaponizing exiting structural failures in our governance model.
Art stagnation: well actually the popular art has been getting a lot better. Look at old music videos vs new ones, for example. Also R&B triumphing over rock as the foundation of pop means we get better rhythm and harmony, the twin pillars of syncretic music. But if high art is stagnent, well, that's clearly got to do with a the stagnation of the people on the top of the economic period with the leisure time. Nothing promotes changing tastes like changing audiences. Or blame underfunded schools and increasing in working hours for the non-rich.
Economic stagnation. Obviously wage growth decline is a proximate cause, not just a symptom (i.e. other factors might cause it or make it hard to fix, but if we could fix it it would help with the rest).
I could go on, but basically Douthat is just talking about symptoms to get along with the more literary coastal elites. It's shambolic. I'll take it more serious if he learns macroeconomics and becomes some sort of libertarian UBI-er.
Murray, and the AEI he works for, have fought against higher wages for workers and social mobility for decades. I don't take seriously him bemoaning the results of what he has helped do.
To me, this represents the paradox of morality. That in a closed (somewhat in this case) ecosystem the extremes can horseshoe around, which reminds of horseshoe theory in politics as well as this phenomenon of society seemingly rubberbanding when forcefully pushed to one extreme throughout history. I could go on about my pet theory of how it may relate to thermodynamic regulation on Earth's ecosystem, a self-sustaining form of gradient moderation, but it's too unsubstantiated.
Unfortunately true and frankly one of my least favorite features of American life.
No, Americans responded to the preference of many of us for more freedom and less crowded places to live, by producing them. You don't get to decide for other people what a proper "balance" is or for whom cars are a "necessity".
For an even better example, the computer I am typing this on has orders of magnitude more processing power, memory, and storage space for significantly less power consumption than the one I had when I was a student many years ago. It also weighs about half as much and is made of more recyclable materials (and yes, I make use of that: there is a computer recycling center in my town where I take old computers).
I'm absolutely not saying that he's right in everything he says, of course — there's plenty of backwards or outright bigoted opinions in his works — but his theory is so unorthodox and interesting that it should at least be an important part of the conversation.
First of all, what he's talking about is usually described as different stages of _civilisations_ in english literature. However, he goes into much length to explain why he talks about ethnoses instead: in sub sense, it's a different definition, and a group which is smaller than what you usually call a "civilisation", so this distinction is important. It's derived from the word "ethnic", but again, he's very particular that it's not exactly the same as ethnical group in a genetical sense, although one usually correlates to another.
In general, it's very hard to summarise his work, because he goes into a lot of details that are really important to understand his ideas correctly. Unfortunately, it's very easy to misunderstand them, and sometimes in some very awful ways, if you just assume that the words he uses have meanings that you usually ascribe to them.
Then, he describes different stages of lifecycle of ethnos. Once again, there are stages that you would expect, from birth to death, but he adds a lot of detail, describing how an ethnos can be both in a dynamic arc going from beginning to an end, but also in a static, balanced state that can continue, without outside interference, for an eternity. He's a historian with a deep knowledge of very wide array of different human eras and places, and draws a lot of examples to make his point from all over the human history.
After that, he tries to describe the underlying forces that influence this process. He goes through all possible theories and finally arrives at his concept of "passionarnost" (derived from passion) to describe the cultural energy that drives these transformations.
After reading other contemporary books on the matter, such as Guns, Germs and Steel, and Neil Ferguson's Civilization, as well as dozens of articles and blog posts discussing these things, I think that his analysis and thoughts are one of the most interesting and engaging ideas about it.
"Industrial Society and Its Future"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unab...
An excerpt from the introduction:
> The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in “advanced” countries.
The Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution and their consequences are the only reason I'm not dead several times over, and the only reason I can walk down the street in the place I live today in any kind of safety, so no, I'm really not buying that they were a disaster for the human race.
I completely agree! I do find however that if you read the author's arguments they are not entirely baseless and in many cases are quite relevant to the isolated work from home environment that we face today. The problems offered by the author are well known and interesting however his solutions I disagree with