Modernist politics: Stalin and Hitler versus Hollywood · 3:58am May 1st, 2014
I just listened to Perl's lecture on modernism and politics, and also, by chance, read part of a book by F. Scott Fitzgerald called On Booze, which both cast light on the strange politics of literary modernists in the 1930s.
This post is poorly-organized, slightly cracked, and probably a waste of time. If you're not curious about the symbiosis between modernism and extremist politics, skip it.
On Booze cast light on the madness of the times. The main piece in it, "The Crack-Up", describes Fitzgerald's suicidal thoughts throughout the 1930s. It's one of the most depressing things I've ever read; it describes his jealousy, bitterness, emptiness, loss of emotion, and how the only joy he could feel anymore was smug satisfaction in watching himself turn evil. But he said that this was par for the course for writers in the 1930s.
The "typical" modernist writer was someone who had fought in the trenches in World War I; experienced high society in the 1920s; then been thrust into the depression of the 1930s.
WWI was especially psychologically horrific, because after it was finally done, nobody could say what it had been about. It wasn't like Vietnam or Iraq, which you could blame cynically on bad political theories or economic interests--it seemed to have been a sudden universal madness. Then from 1920 to 1940, technology and culture changed at a pace greater than anything the world has seen before or since. No wonder the entire generation acted manic-depressive.
Most European and American intellectuals in the 1930s favored either Stalin, Hitler, or Mussolini. Most were socialist and/or supported Stalin; some liked Hitler; TS Eliot was a monarchist; hardly any were moderates. Ezra Pound, the central figure of the paleo-modernist movement, lived in Italy during the war, where he made radio broadcasts telling England that it must purge itself of its Jews. After the war he was arrested for treason, but found not guilty due to insanity. His poems were used as evidence in his defense. Gertrude Stein, the leading neo-modernist, supported the Vichy government in France, or at least supported Marshall Petain, but her actions (saying that Hitler should be given the Nobel Peace Price for driving the Jews, who have a troublesome habit of thinking for themselves, out of Germany; saying that she did not flee Nazi occupation because the food outside of France would be dreadful; translating Marshall Petain's anti-semitic speeches into English for the Vichy government, but in a literal, word-for-word manner which conformed to her neo-modernist theory but made them unreadable) were either sarcastic or insane.
Ironically, it was Stein who said before the war,
It could be a puzzle why the intellectuals in every country are always wanting a form of government which would inevitably treat them badly, purge them so to speak before anybody else is purged. It has always happened from the French revolution to today.
The added irony is that both Hitler and Stalin viciously suppressed modern art.
I had the impression, from books like Darkness at Noon, that writers were ignorant of what Hitler and Stalin said and did. But Perl, who has gone through their essays and personal letters, says that wasn't so. Writers didn't support these dictators in spite of their violence, he claims; they supported them because of it.
I'm skeptical. He's got some quotes to back it up, but they're not numerous enough to indict an entire generation. But let's suppose he's right. Why would they do that?
For starters, the shock people claim to have at Hitler and Stalin was manufactured retrospectively. Petra Rau says in English Modernism, National Identity and the Germans, 1890-1950 that Hitler was much more popular in England in the 1930s than it is now admitted. England was still running a global empire justified by racial superiority, and conscious that it was losing control. Germany seemed to be striding boldly forward while England stood still. (Germany was striding boldly forward thru deficit spending and confiscation of private property, but the bill would not be due for several years.) Hitler's views on Jews and on racial purity were common in both Germany and England. Massacre and genocide were not a big deal back then. America and Australia had finished killing off most of their native populations in living memory; the Turks had only just finished killing off the Armenians; the British were still machine-gunning unarmed civilians in Pakistan; and nobody cared.
Also, all three dictators had massive propaganda machines, for which they needed many writers and artists. They promised heavy state sponsorship of art. (This was true, though it turned out that this state sponsorship would be only of propaganda.) Writers were generally liberal (remember, the 1930s made the 1950s look liberated by comparison), and these liberals fell prey to the disease that still often besets liberals today of believing that liberty must be defended against the attacks of parochial local governments by a strong, centralized, national government in a big city full of enlightened people like them. Hitler lived in Berlin; therefore, he must be enlightened.
Yet at the same time, these intellectuals almost uniformly supported the moderate Republican government over the fascist Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Many fought and died for the Republican side. Perhaps this was because the Catholic Church, which artists hated for their millenia-long censorship of art and of thought, was on Franco's side. Perhaps it was because the working class was on the Republican side.
The thing that most politically-active modernist writers seem to have in common are supporting the working class, and hating the middle class. (There are exceptions. T.S. Eliot was a monarchist, and Gertrude Stein said nice things about the middle class. William Faulkner seems to have been more interested in people than in economics.)
Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini all claimed to be friends of the lower class, who would throw off the shackles of the bourgeoisie. Writers, Perl says, chose whichever tyrant they thought would crush the middle class the most ruthlessly.
The term "middle class" is strange, for by "middle class" they meant "capitalists", which meant "leaders of industry", which by then meant "the new aristocracy". They said "middle class" without realizing they really meant the richest people in the world, the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts.
The term "working class" is also strange, because it referred to their fantasies about the working class rather than any real people. Yeats assumed that it was only the middle class that had bad taste in art, and said that the working class appreciated instinctively the art that the upper class could acquire an understanding of (modernism) only by long study. Writers seemed to believe that everybody with an open mind would like the same sort of story that they did, and that if the middle class did not, it proved that they were biased by economic incentives.
There were several modernist attempts in the 1930s to write plays for the working class; these plays, including ones by Yeats and I think Auden, were bizarre, heavily-symbolic modernist plays, and the working class hated them, as anybody from the working class could have predicted. TS Eliot had some commercial success writing modernist plays that used plots from Greek drama, with Elizabethan language, set in English drawing rooms, that were also designed to educate the masses.
So the thing that united modernist writers in the 1930s was a mutually-shared fantasy about economics and class power in which the middle class was the bad guy, so bad that the world needed a Hitler or a Stalin to get rid of them.
Why?
On Booze also cast light on one possible reason why writers hated the "middle class" so much in the 1930s: Movies. People were tossing their books aside to watch movies. Writers hated the movies.
They said it was because the movies were stupid and incapable of art, but it might also have had something to do with how much money movies took from them. Many novelists and playwrights tried writing for the movies in the 1930s, including Fitzgerald and Faulkner; none, as far as I know, had success or enjoyed it. Hollywood had stolen their audience, opened up a new frontier of wealth and fame for writers, and shut them out.
The writers, lacking a good grounding in economics, blamed not the people who attended the movies, but the people who produced them--almost all of whom were Jewish.
The Jews, the story then goes, were forcing their crass, mindless movies onto the proletariat in order to drive them to consume, distract them from thinking, and control them. If freed from these bourgeois masters, the proles would rise up and storm the theatres and literary salons, demanding real culture.
(Hitler, ironically, loved American movies, including Mickey Mouse, Laurel and Hardy, and Greta Garbo.)
Similar things were happening in other arts. People were buying phonographs and radios instead of listening to live music, and buying prints instead of paintings. Technology was turning all kinds of art from a profession into a lottery in which a few people won big and everyone else lost their shirts--and no artists were happy discovering what songs and paintings sold the best on the mass market, any more than I'm happy to look at the featured box. Far easier to imagine a conspiracy of bourgeois capitalists behind it all, than to admit that people didn't like what you were doing.
One problem with this idea is that modernists were already bashing the middle class before movies. Joyce's Dubliners critiqued the Dublin middle class in 1914.
Perhaps this is all over-analysis. Perhaps it's only natural for modernists, who are devoted to radicalism in art, to also be radical in politics. Like I said, this post was probably a waste of time. But now it has already been wasted.
You have an unclosed italics mark about halfway through. Correction after the Stein quote.
2065958 Got it; thanks.
2065972 Good.
Now onto the blog post itself, let me first make a glib conclusion that in no way could seriously be derived from the blog.
"Hitler, you can blame the movies for how popular he got."
I have to say that for the most part throughout human history if you dragged out any random individual to examine how they conducted themselves in life, you'd think you were repeatedly pulling out someone from an insane asylum. People only ever really make sense when you start asking them questions, because suddenly they realize they have to make sense or the secret will be revealed to another person that they do not in fact think for much more than a few seconds before committing themselves to some deed.
That's normally when you either get a "My God, what have I been doing?" or some variation of "Fuck you!"
Sometimes you get a nice mix of the two. Like this:
[youtube=DMyca5XC_Ao]
I think this was, for me, among the most interesting and enjoyable reads I've had out of your blog posts—and that's saying something. Time definitely not wasted.
Would you recommend this Teaching Company course? If so, I may have to take a look at it, sometime when I can get a chance.
It doesn't seem to be a waste. It's a nice piece of historical perspective. You are a source I find likely to be kind and honest. Historical sources tend to make me wince. It's nice to have someone else do the hard work this time.
The lottery effects of media stardom are easy to hate. It reduces artistic skill from something honed over years to produce masterpieces into something where sheer output is the most important concern. Every fully-produced work is another chance to find the next big thing. Professional artists suffer magnum opus dissonance on a regular basis, and even the most well-established get to see works they love fall off the face of the earth when it fails to win the media lottery.
2066010 It would be easier if you asked about the sources for specific points. And don't quote me as a reliable source!
When I say most writers supported the Republicans, I've got a source for that, a survey of writers from the 1930s on the subject. When I say most intellectuals were extremists in politics in the 1930s, that's widely-believed, but the word "most" might not be literally true. When I said modernist writers all hated the middle class, that can't be literally true. I've heard quotes from many of them against the middle class, but there would be strong selection effects. UPDATE: Faulkner probably had nothing against the middle class; Stein loved the middle class.
When I talked about the way they regarded Hollywood, I'm over-generalizing badly from a few examples, and I made up the connection between Hollywood movie producers being Jewish (which they were) and the possible resulting writerly anti-semitism.
2066010
If you're in an American high school, you're being misinformed about a lot of things. You probably spent all of 20 seconds on the Rockefellers and no time on the Rothschilds or JP Morgan, you were probably never told why the gold-silver standard collapsed, any of the consequences of the War of 1812, the true lawlessness that led to the American Civil War, and... other things. I'll stop ranting.
I'm afraid I can't add much here, but I did find it fascinating.
...and apparently had so little understanding of those people that the questions of who they were and what was important to them seem impossible for those unhappy writers to have ever asked themselves.
The image I get of them is this: Floating on high clouds together, occasionally looking at each other's works from across the gaps, and seeing only faint, static patterns of activity below that never touched them except by distant interpretation.*
*Of course as always, I could be wrong...
I'm not sure that this is really true.
Indeed, I was interested by someone noting that the real cause of Doomsday predictions may well be the fact that people always see the world this way, as it ever accellerating and living in a time of great change, and thus when great changes occur, it warps the world.
But... well, was this the biggest transformation? There's a few arguments over history.
The first would be when we established regular communication with the entire world by ship. Sure, it was slow, but we had the whole world (or at least most of it) in the 18th century.
Then we had the railroads, which let us cross the country in days. Then the telegraph, which let information (albeit only a little) cross the country in minutes.
We got electricity.
We got the radio, and the airplane, and the telephone, allowing broadcasting, fairly rapid travel, and point to point communication, if you happened to be in your home.
Then we got jet planes, which let us reach anywhere on the planet within 24 hours, and enormous infrastructure projects like the interstate highways, allowing us to drive all over the place really easily.
Then we got television, which let us see anywhere in the world within seconds.
Then we got computers, which let us do a great deal which was previously extremely difficult or tedious vastly more quickly.
Then we got the internet, allowing simple multiway communication and broadcasting for the masses, and cell phones, allowing point to point communication anywhere.
And now we have smart phones, which allow us to talk to anyone, anywhere on the planet with cell reception (and in some cases with satellite phone reception), and access a vast quantity of information everywhere. Someone says something that sounds wrong? You can literally whip out your phone and look it up, and I've SEEN people do this in real conversations.
The 1920s to 1940s were a time of great change, but in truth, every generation since probably the second half of the 18th century has seen the world change in very large ways during their lifetime. The 20th century accellerated it even more - electricity, the radio, the airplane, the telephone, the jet, the interstate highway system, television, computers, the internet, and cell phones have all fundamentally changed our day to day lives. What we spend our time doing is just completely different, and what we spend our time doing today is completely alien to the 1920s to 1940s.
It is hard to say whether this change will continue - at this point, we can literally talk to anyone anywhere with a cell tower and send them pictures and video, and have them do the same to us, and we can probably reach any physical location in civilization within a day or so - reducing that time further would make a difference, I think, but because we can already basically "be" anywhere thanks to the internet, I'm not sure that physical location is even nearly as relevant as it used to be (though it does still matter, particularly for the transport of material goods, though even there I can ship anything to anywhere in the world, albeit for a high price, as fast as a man can get there). Many people spend more time on the computer than they spend watching TV now, and people's fears of TV rotting everyone's brains seems quaint - at this point, television is concerned about how they're going to keep relevant in 20 years. Newspapers, once the ultimate mediator of news, are struggling, as anyone can post anything on the internet, and any information you get can be taken by others and is only a click away.
I think this is why people have the idea that there is a technological singularity coming - because they see all these changes, and assume that it is going to continue forever. And the internet did revolutionize the world. But I'm not sure what comes after the internet, because at that point, you already have instant information communication - it can get better, to be sure, but it is not the same as what happens when you go from no internet to internet (well, world wide web really).
Of course, it isn't. But that doesn't stop the Eliezer Yudkowsky's of the world from existing.
I wonder what percentage of this same class of people from today are the people who attack corporations as the source of all that is evil in the world.
2066014
I think the "media lottery" is chaotic, not random. There are rules to it, and there are ways to succeed - in fact, people pay marketing folks a large amount of money to succeed at this, and many of them are quite good at it.
I think it is a game that many of these people are very bad at playing, and thus they get upset at it, but it doesn't mean that it isn't a game you can win.
Also, a lot of them aren't nearly as good as they think they are. If your magnum opus goes unloved and something else you considered a lesser work does better, that tells you something. And if you don't pay attention to that lesson - if you just assume everyone else is wrong and you are right - you learn nothing.
This is why they despise editors and corporate oversight. But if you take that away, you end up with Howard the Duck and the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy.
2066064
I don't know what kind of high school you went to, but at my high school we talked all about bleeding Kansas and the whole mess which lead up to the American Civil War. We know a great deal about it, and about Southern revisionism on the subject, the whole Lost Cause movement, all that stuff.
The idea that American high schools are bad is something that people made up to comfort themselves, mostly. A lot of the time, the high schools teach this stuff; if people don't know it, it is because they failed to absorb it, not because it was not taught to them. Because I've seen the textbooks, and they definitely go into a great deal of detail about the lead up to the American Civil War.
And frankly, a lot of the people you listed didn't actually matter that much. They were people who did things, but had it not been them, it would have been someone else. A lot of history is made up of said people.
And they DID actually talk about the gold standard, and why it collapsed and fiat currency took its place - more or less, it never really worked or made sense in the first place. Gold is a commodity like any other, and as such its value is no more stable or constant than any other commodity. The net result of this was that the whole system was reliant on the idea of a standard which wasn't actually a standard and which didn't really make a whole lot of sense, and the way that people actually used money was by fiat anyway. Indeed, gold itself is, as far as the masses are concerned, itself another type of fiat currency.
Almost no one in the real world has any use for gold coins. Sure, there are uses for it in manufacturing, but to a guy on the street, a gold coin has no more intrinsic value than a dollar bill does - and a dollar bill is a lot more convenient to carry around and use.
Once the US said that the Emperor had no clothes, everyone else followed.
I find this comment especially interesting, since it made me realize that my history class never really talked about what the masses/popular opinion thought of dictators (especially foreign ones), aside from late 1950's Cubans and Castro and Depression-era Germans and Hitler. We learned quite a bit about Chamberlain and appeasement and Churchill's opinions on communism, but I don't think we ever spoke of what the average Frenchman thought of Hitler in the 1930's.
Waste of time or not, I got some value out of it.
2066183
That's because their views are terribly inconvenient and embarrassing.
The US talks about isolationism in its own politics, at least, as well as our fun history with the Native Americans and the blacks, though on the other hand the role of Africans in the slave trade is often fairly glossed over - slaves came from Africa to the US. How did the slaves come from Africa? We don't really go into that.
And a lot of black people don't know that their own people very often were the ones who sold them out to the slave traders.
There's a reason it was Africa which was the source of slaves and not elsewhere, and no one really talks about THAT. Native Americans made terrible slaves, for instance - and goodness knows people tried.
2066189
"Dumbing down" - i.e. trying to make things easier for people to understand - is incredibly necessary. If you're finding that students are failing to retain the information you're teaching them, you need to try and figure out what you can do to get them to keep that information in their heads.
Trying to distill simplicity out of complexity is very difficult but very important in communication.
This is actually a good practice, because doing this demonstrates that you understand the material in question. Condensing down material correctly is not only a valuable real-world skill, but it also requires that you understand the source material so that you can accurately represent it.
Repetition is a valuable tool for teaching. That's why taking notes is valuable - yeah, the notes are helpful, but the actual process of taking notes makes you retain the information much better.
It may seem cheesy, but this is actually entirely logical.
The essay for the SAT was always a joke anyway. It didn't exist when I took it circa 2002, and tons of places simply casually disregarded it and only considered the old portions of it anyway.
Also, the idea that test taking isn't challenging students brains is outright false and is part of the gold star mentality; standardized testing is, in fact, the only reasonable way to evaluate student performance. The SAT itself is interesting in its own ways, and it is something of a combination of a test of your knowledge (you have to at least reached a certain benchmark in your studies to do all the math stuff properly - IIRC trig) and your IQ. It is called the Scholastic Aptitude Test for a reason - it is meant to actually see both how knowledgable and how smart you are, i.e. rate your scholastic aptitude.
Actually, it is entirely fair. The best classes are the classes with the best students, which is why teachers WANT to teach the best students - they are the ones who most care about it and are most interested in it.
The #1 indicator of the quality of a school is the quality of the students who go into it.
2066266
Well, can the teacher do it?
How is it demeaning? They're just symbols.
Don't hold strong opinions about things you don't understand.
The essay is not extra credit. It does not add to your score in any way. It instead is an entirely separate score. It is purely optional (or rather, will be; the change does not go into effect until 2016).
And you could have figured this out yourself if you had bothered to Google changes to the SAT. The #1 result is this webpage which explains why you don't know what you're talking about.
You're wrong. See also: AP tests. And the SAT I does test your math knowledge and your reading ability.
These are a total ripoff, honestly. The net gain you get from these courses is MAYBE 30 points (they claim they give much better results, but studies suggest otherwise). And you can get all the same benefits via independent study.
I got a 1560 out of 1600 on the SAT without ever going to any of those things, just studying the material you get for it.
And it is going to be even LESS valuable in the future because they're eliminating the point penalty for wrong answers (meaning that now, you should always fill in an answer for everything; previously, it was only worthwhile if you could eliminate answers), which was primarily the point of confusion people had in the first place. The real thing most of those courses teach you is how to eliminate all the wrong answers to get the right one, which is something you can explain to someone in about five minutes.
Having actually taken the SAT, the "odd wordings" you were speaking about were readily comprehensible to me, and that was back when analogies were still on the test. I am sad they did away with those; I thought they were neat.
If you're actually smart, the only way you're going to get a very low score on the SAT is if you fall asleep or if you screw up and try and skip a question and fail to skip a line on the bubbles and then get the rest of your test off by one answer.
A lot of schools have this problem known as "grade inflation", AKA the "everyone gets a gold star" phenomenon (something even Harvard falls victim to). The standardized testing is there to find these people and reveal them.
This is simply outright wrong. The SAT doesn't care about facts at all, unless you define the definition of words as "facts", which I find highly dubious. It tests your math knowledge and ability, and your ability to read and write and to draw conclusions from tests and answer questions properly and to eliminate wrong answers and get right ones.
Some of the SAT IIs do involve factual knowledge (for instance, of history), but that's becuse the subject matter is factual in nature. But the SAT I does not.
I graduated from high school with a year and a half worth of college credit from AP courses. I am very well aware of the AP tests.
But AP tests are themselves standardized tests!
AP courses are better than normal courses both because they teach higher level, more advanced material and because you have better classmates, which is why you always want to be in the top track at your school.
I'm not saying some teachers aren't better than others; teachers do make a difference.
But you don't really get to choose your teacher quality very much; the only way to assess teaching quality really is to look at how well the students do, and this is complicated by the fact that they've done innumerable studies which show that if you take a bunch of low-achieving students, you end up with them being low achieving at the end of it. They might be less low achieving, and you might be able to raise some of the people who were lumped in with them out, but the teacher who comes in with top track students is going to end up with students who get better scores than the teacher who comes in with the bottom track students. If you take two teachers and give them students from the same tracks, then you can see real differences between them in teaching quality, and I've seen this in real life.
But you can't take a good teacher and stick them in with bottom tier students and expect them to turn out a bunch of people who are going to be top track students from now on. That isn't a realistic expectation.
That's not to say that getting a better teacher won't help; I had wonderful teachers throughout my educational carreer, and the worst teacher I've ever had was (ironically) at Vanderbilt University (and man was she bad). And I know I benefitted greatly from it. And I'm sure the AP teachers I had in high school got their hideously high AP test pass rates for a reason (possibly because their general principle for teaching AP classes was actaully giving you AP tests and grading them 90/80/70/60, which meant that, on the physics test at least, you could in principle fail the class with a score high enough to give you a 5 on the AP test).
You're assuming that the testing methodology is flawed. But how is the testing flawed? SAT tests are used by colleges for a reason; they really do correlate with ability, especially when combined with other metrics (grades help give some idea of conscientiousness, for instance, which the SAT probably does a poor job of measuring).
Give some example of how the testing is flawed. The tests aren't flawed because students fail them; a lot of people whine about them because they fail students. They say "you are, objectively, below average". And people don't like that. At all.
And they fight against it endlessly. And that is bad because the problem isn't the tests, the problem is that people don't like the idea that you can actually measure that students suck at things.
There's no other possible way to do the measurements in an economically feasible way than standardized testing.
You do need to know the quality of the students going in in order to measure teacher performance and the performance of a school (if you get bottom rung students, you need to be compared to other places which get bottom rung students, not to the school which only serves upper-middle class kids). But the idea that the testing is wrong because it doesn't give you an answer that you like is hugely flawed.
You've said nothing about how the tests are flawed. All you've done is repeat the same garbage that everyone who is against standardized testing says.
And note that I'm not saying that the tests are perfect; the SAT could be made better by putting back in analogies. There are ways of improving standardized tests, and your standardized test should predict performance. If you get a test which better predicts performance, that means you've got a better test.
2066087
I don't know what you mean by "unfair skewing of the laws in the North's favor". I think it was more the North's persistence in violating the laws that required them to let slaves be returned. Lincoln was just openly anti-slavery at a time when the South wouldn't tolerate an anti-slavery president. To be fair, both sides had taken extreme and blatantly illegal measures to support their own sides.
Wikipedia has a good article on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_events_leading_to_the_American_Civil_War
2066125
I was talking about the gold-silver dual standard. The gold-silver standard didn't work because silver was intentionally overvalued to pump fiat into the economy, leading to an arbitrage where people would buy gold from the government and sell back silver after trading on the international market. It was what depleted the federal government of gold and led to the Panic of 1893, and it was JP Morgan and the Rothschilds that loaned gold back to the government. That loan is why we had the Gold Standard Act, why it included a clause that allowed the government to set up a central bank, and why the Federal Reserve was ultimately created. I think that matters just a little bit.
About the American Civil War: I meant the blatant disregard for the law by (1) Buchanan pressuring the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case, (2) Congressman Eli Thayer openly bribing Kansas settlers with land for anti-slavery votes, (3) The Act to Punish Offenses Against Slave Property, (4) Boston fighting off federal soldiers to defend a fugitive slave. It wasn't just a money-vs-morality issue. It was rampant corruption, violations of the law, and political ties exposing themselves.
2066223
I disagree with almost everything you said in this post. (I'm saying this for Timetraveling Pony's sake.)
2066353
The thing is, a lot of people are redundant. So while yes, they mattered in the sense that they were involved in it, but on the other hand, if it hadn't been them, it would have been other people instead who loaned the government gold, and I don't think things would have ended up completely different.
And really, the lead-up to the Civil War was, essentially, a disintegration of lawfulness in general. That's why the Civil War happened; it wasn't something that happened overnight. As things got worse and worse people took increasingly extreme measures, and got more and more brazen in their defiance of the law. However, the reality of it was that the South was basically wanting to be able to claim political power from their black population without giving them the right to do anything, which really made no sense at all and was simply a brazen attempt to maintain power. Once the South realized that it wasn't going to maintain political power anymore, it stopped the low-grade rebelling and just outright broke off.
And then got beat down for it, because the very reason that they were losing power was that they were less powerful.
2066096
About your quote regarding Eliezer Yudkowsky: well, Moore's law seems to still be in effect...on the other hand, evolution probably selected brains to be as efficient as they possibly could, so maybe (certainly) there is a thermodynamic limit we still have to reach...on the other other hand, once we reach it someone is going to build a tower made out of 100% brains, and who knows what could happen then, which is probably what he's worried about.
And I just rebutted to a point you didn't actually make in your initial argument
Also, what the hell is going on in this comment section, and why are people debating with you when you're factually right?
2065996
Agreed, I hold this opinion also
2066096
This is brilliant. Thanks for putting into words something I haven't been able to articulate well
2066309 2066266 Folks, please take discussion of
the American education systemSAT and AP testing standards to PMs. TD, you can find a way to say the same things without being rude.2066087 I'm going back up the stream (and deliberately ignoring the testing debate) but I'll say a couple things about learning history:
In order to fully understand the lead-up to the civil war, you need to basically understand everything that happened in the North American continent from about 1607 to 1860. It's just a huge amount of data, more than can possibly be covered in high school. So they do the best they can, selecting the "most important" facts to the best of their interpretation.
But while the class is doing the 'best it can,' you as an individual can do more for yourself - by reading. Pretty much anything, too. All new facts will help refine your understanding of history. I've found that looking at president is a surprisingly useful way to break down US history: they're small enough units of time and pretty much everything important crosses the President's desk at some point. There's always going to be more depth to an issue, but then you research the issue. If you want to know more about the lead-up to the civil war - I don't have any great reading suggestions. Ask me about Indian (South Asia) independence if you ever get curious, though!
2066612 Last week I visited the public library in a small town I'm thinking about moving to. They had 4 shelves of books on the civil war, and 20 books total on math.
2066183
AFAIK many countries around the world had governments with Nazi/Fascist influences during that time period, including the government of countries that in the end fought against the Axis. Brazil, for example, was governed between 1930 and 1945 by a dictator named Getulio Vargas, whose main difference compared with Hitler is that he didn't dabble in genocide. He is still considered a hero by much of the population even now thanks to his efforts to "protect" the working class, which resulted in laws that are still in effect today.
2066444
The fact that a person's only contribution to history is that he just happened to be selected for something is not a reason to not study his involvement. You seem to believe that people should only be studied for their strangeness, but a person's place in a history book is about more than just remembering that person.
If you've been through an American high school, you must have heard that people study history to avoid repeating its mistakes. JP Morgan and the Rothschilds played a tremendous role in American history, not necessarily because of their strangeness (though honestly, I think the Rothschilds were nigh-unreplaceable), but because they were involved with important mistakes.
That the gold and silver standards failed was just the precursor. The real issue is that in 1893, the government took on a debt it could not reasonably pay off after being depleted of its gold, and it promised a lot of people a lot of money to be paid in precisely 30 years. It was a failure of the government that led to the the "economic boom" precisely 30 years later, and the subsequent crash. It was a failure of the government that it thought it could pump money into the economy without being abused. It was a failure of the government that it put itself into a position where it could be strongarmed by those that could lend it money.
These are important lessons, and they're not being taught. It doesn't matter that the people involved "were redundant", and it doesn't matter that "things wouldn't have ended up completely differently". They are mistakes, and we should be learning from them.
2066630
2066266
You're quite correct. I apologize.
2066612
I don't think you need to understand everything, and I think that most textbooks do a pretty reasonable job of hitting on all the main points; or at least, the textbook I had in high school more or less covered it.
History never really ends, and it never really has a beginning; everything feeds into everything else. At some point old events stop really directly influencing newer events, but the consequences of the older events feed into newer events indirectly.
Ultimately it is about having an increasingly fine-grained view of events. But it is also about keeping the broader view as well; I hear some people claim that the Civil War wasn't about slavery, which is an entirely INCORRECT view of the Civil War; it was, in fact, entirely about slavery. Slavery is what caused the Civil War. But it is important to recognize that from the North's perspective, the war was started because the South tried to secede from the Union, which was brazenly illegal; the war, from the Union perspective, was directly from the South trying to leave the country, not because the South had slaves. But the South seceded precisely because it feared losing its slaves, which it felt was inevitable once the abolitionists gained political ascendancy, so while the North was fighting to keep the Union together, what had caused the split in the first place was slavery. If people understand the first order approximation (the South wanted to keep its slaves, the North wanted to take them away), that isn't really wrong in broad strokes. A more refined view reveals the above. An even more refined view talks about the other fears of the South as relates to economic issues and suchlike, which can be traced back to slavery and slave power, as well as the North's dislike of the South and the three-fifths compromise and the South trying to have it both ways with blacks (i.e. they counted for votes, but weren't people as far as they were concerned). There's Bleeding Kansas and trade issues and John Brown and innumerable other compromises and squabbles and incidents.
You stop teaching at a certain level of detail because you've got the gist of it, and move on. And I think that the view that the textbooks present is actually a reasonably accurate view of things. It isn't perfect, but it doesn't need to be. But not everyone picks up on all that level of detail. And unfortunately, going into too much detail can just confuse people.
Add to it that there are STILL some people in the South who are bitter about losing the Civil War...
2067300
History is very, very complicated. Thus, understanding all the fine details of history isn't terribly helpful unless it is directly pertinent to something. The various panics which happened over and over again from the 1870s to the 1930s were all interconencted in various ways. Most people don't need to understand the details of every single one of those panics because, well, it is less important than numerous other things they have to learn.
So talking about JP Morgan and the Rothschilds is in many ways a dangerous oversimplification, because there are other, more important factors at work, and knowing their specific names and businesses isn't quite as important as having a broader view of things (silver production, debtor desire for high inflation, run on gold, tariffs, bank failures as a result of the fiasco, ect.). Your view, in trying to be finer grained, is actually more wrong than the broader view, because you're focusing on things which are less important and in the process missing out on things which are more important.
The reason the gold-silver standard failed was precisely because it was a terrible idea to begin with, and the idea that it was just the government who was behind it is false. The Free Silver movement was behind it, and had agendas of their own, and frankly, as far as 1893 goes, Hearst was probably more important than JP Morgan or the Rothschilds due to his desire to make gigantic piles of money off of his railroads and silver in the West. In the end, it was largely a combination of people wanting to more or less cheat on their debts, as well as silver producers and owners wanting to sell silver at a marked up, unrealistically high price, and a railroad bubble, and some other things.
And it worked for a while until the Emperor had no clothes and the whole thing fell apart, as tends to happen with most such things.
Saying that the Great Depression was caused by the Panic of 1893 is almost completely wrong and is itself a massive oversimplification is which LESS correct than the more macro view which is not so fixated on JP Morgan and the Rothschilds. It is certainly not a mainstream view of the cause of the Great Depression, and indeed the Great Depression was really the convergence of multiple factors and mistakes in policymaking decisions, including the gold standard, the banking system, capital bubbles, overcapitalization, a decline in productivity, debt deflation, a drop in aggregate demand, ect. But I think this blog may not be the best place to go into the details of the economic policies of the early 20th century, though if you'd like to go into it in PM I'd be happy to do so.
2067583 If you'd like to go into it in PM I'd be happy to do so.
No, that's fine. I'm not that invested in this, and I think Bad Horse is enjoying it. I was also doing this more for Timetraveling Pony, and I think he has enough material now that he can start looking into things by himself.
I personally think that the 1923 boom and 1929 crash are simpler than you believe, but I don't see a reason to argue the point in this way. Arguments are for conveying understanding, experiments and studies are for settling differences. I also don't have a problem with the way the rise of the gold-silver standard is taught, just the fall.
Obvious next steps involve doing away with the need to interface through any sort of keyboard (voice command of smart phones) and then direct neural interfaces. What happens when you can unobtrusively think to access vast databases?
You barbarians still have to think?
2068380
Heh -- good point. What happens when we merge with the systems entirely, to the point that it's no longer perceived as externally commanded?
2068464 Well, suppose my query is, "What is a treatment for Foobar disease?"
Google says, "Here are 60,000 pages with the words treatment, foobar, and/or disease."
A better search engine says, "Here are 5,000 pages that mention a disease called Foobar, and some action or drug that ameliorates its symptoms. Here is a list of those actions and drugs."
A better search engine says, "Here is an article that says Foobar disease is caused by a buildup of protein aggregates in the thalamus, and here is another article that says hamster videos reduce protein aggregates in the thalamus. Perhaps hamster videos treat Foobar disease."
A better search engine says, "Here is a database showing blood serum data and RNA expression levels for 10,000 proteins in five thousand people, fifty of whom have Foobar disease. If we identify the genes with the different expression between people with and without the disease, and do a pathway analysis to identify the probable point of pathway dysfunction in each patient, then hypothesize the ten thousand most-likely small-molecule drugs to counter-balance or restore function to the implicated pathway, then test them all in a whole-cell simulation, these are the 20 drugs with the greatest predicted impact."
A better search engine asked the question on its own after your embedded sensors indicated a buildup of protein aggregates in your thalamus, then computed those 20 best drugs, then negotiated with volunteers in Malaysia to test them all, then manufactured the best five and injected them into your bloodstream while showing you a hamster video.
It's much too late and my mind is too muddled to make any thoughtful comment here, other than to say that I really enjoyed reading this; assuming it's all true (no offense, I hope) I've learned quite a lot that I really had very little idea about before.
2067103
Getulio is an interesting and bizarre figure.
He came to power by overthrowing the previous government, and changing Brazil's previous constitution. He took power as interim president, and then postponed direct elections indefinitely – using, in a way, the presence of armed communist revolutionary groups as an excuse.
He was a fairly brutal dictator, with his own secret police, responsible for torturing and killing many political dissidents, closing newspapers, censoring media, etc. However, he is hardly considered to be bad due to his more populist actions, such as establishing very strict labor laws, or creating multiple state controlled companies.
Most interestingly, after being ousted by a fairly pacific military uprising in 1945, he was elected again in 1951. However, seeing himself stonewalled by a stronger senate, and unable to reestablish the same level of control as before, he decides to commit suicide in the most cinematic (or messianic) way possible.
He first spends the day commenting to his inner circle and enemies how he would give his life to save his country. Then, he signs a document to be opened in the next day during his last official meeting, before retiring to his room, and killing himself with a single shot to the heart. The signed document was his suicide letter – probably the most self-aggrandizing piece of Brazilian literature in existence. It is absolutely insane (and clearly redacted with great care), and after many comments of how he fought for his country and how his enemies fought against the people, it ends like this:
Nowadays he is remembered as "the father of the poor", and, much like Bad Horse's post would indicate, is remembered fondly by the type of academic that hate Fascism but worship Fidel, and hate the middle class.
2066096
Smartphones are a fascinating artifact of modern-day magic. Like seriously.
Physical location still matters a lot for some things. At an example, playing D&D when you're all gathered around the same table is a qualitatively different experience from playing D&D over the internet. This particular may be about interfacing, but similar will apply to anything with a high physical component--collaborating on the design of a new instrument trinket, for example. (Doctorow-esque makerbot+scannerbot+post-scarcity economics may eventually surmount this.)
2066223
I want to argue against this, but I'm not sure of a good way to do so. It might come down to me agreeing with what you mean, but disagreeing with what you actually said. Like a "making things easier to understand is generally good, but removing information to try and do so is generally bad" kind of thing.
2086095
Removing information in order to be understood is both good and necessary.
Take global warming. "Increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere increases the temperature of the Earth, which is bad because it will melt the ice caps and flood coastal regions permanently."
There is VASTLY MORE to it than that, and that doesn't explain a whole mess of things, but if you understand at least THAT MUCH, those thirty words, you understand what you need to worry about (greenhouse gases) and the consequences of not worrying about it (raising the temperature of the earth, which melts the ice caps and causes massive flooding).
Going into heat exchange, absorption of infrared light, the carbon cycle, shifting climatic conditions, oceanic acidification, ect. is all well and good, but only once they have gotten the gist of what you're talking about.
As they say, perfect is the enemy of good enough. It isn't that it isn't important to communicate that other stuff; it is that it is more important to communicate the most important stuff. If the most important stuff gets lost in the noise, you're buggered. And that's bad.
And people are not very good at dealing with complexity. So layering your explanations is important as it allows people to progress to the level they're comfortable with without getting lost getting thrown in the deep end too soon.
In game design, a lot of the time you end up cutting stuff out to make the game simpler so that it works better. For instance, in Magic, it once was the case that combat damage between creatures would go onto "the stack", then you could cast spells on the creatures while that damage was on "the stack" but hadn't actually hit them yet, and thus potentially save them from said damage. They changed the rules so that combat damage did not go on "the stack", and therefore you had to cast any spell you wanted to use to save the creature BEFORE it happened. Why? The game becomes less strategically complex in some ways that way, but it also makes it easier to learn and understand, and it changes the value of some abilities by making them worse, which actually allows you to make some of them more powerful because they are weaker now, paradoxical as that may seem.
"Dumbing down" isn't a bad thing when the alternative is not being understood at all. And very frequently, that IS the alternative.
2086401
So maybe it's just your "this is how information should be presented" use of "dumbing down" doesn't match my connotations of "dumbing down".
It's also bad if you're loosing smart people while you're aiming at the "dumb" people, but that would have as much to do with classroom organization as with "dumbing down" the content.
(This may have more to do with my disagreement instinct than I realize.)