Victor A. Davis's Blog: Mediascover, page 3

A Voice to Share

[I am writing in reference to this short video, which you might want to watch before reading on.]

Okay, this is not about writing, but the parallels are striking. I've been a fan of Lindsey Stirling since I first saw a few of her videos. Part of her appeal is her back story, the one she shares in this video. It sounds a lot like the way unknown writers struggle to become known.

Like us, she says that when she first got serious about it, she "tried all the very traditional routes, because I didn't know any other way."

After gaining experience through discouragement and rejection, she ultimately has to face the sobering fact: "I don't have the kind of money that it takes to make it in this world... I don't have the connections."

I am one of those new age freaks who honestly believe being an artist is something inborn. I know that all indie writers can relate to the same sentiment she expresses: "I had a voice to share, I had art I knew could work and yet nobody would believe in my project."

Yet, today's technology offers us an opportunity to circumvent the exclusive, high-walled garden of success for the first time in history. It's the same in the music industry as it is in publishing: "Here was a world where I didn't have to wait for somebody else to tell me I was good enough."

Yes, you still face rejection, discouragement, and you still have to work harder than you thought, but "all the tools were there where I could invest in myself."

There is something to be said for having total control over the publishing process. It's not strictly a business decision, it's also a moral decision. The entire paradigm changes. When people say "the slushpile has moved online" they are absolutely right. But to believe that the public has the ability to sort through that pile themselves and find their own gems is to have a profound faith in the intelligence of your constituency. A lot of people fall by the wayside and remain obscure, and only a handful will really succeed. That hasn't changed. But that gateway is no longer guarded by an "expert," and the tearing down of that wall represents the very great moral advantage of self-publishing.

The Past is a Foreign Country

Review of The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

by Steven Pinker, Chapters 1 & 2

(Previously: Review of Preface)

(Credit: All block quotes are excerpts from the book.)

Chapter 1: A Foreign Country

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." ~ L. P. Hartley

We have lots of examples of how much more violent the world used to be under our very noses. Just read the Illiad or the Old Testament:

"The Bible depicts a world that, seen through modern eyes, is staggering in its savagery. People enslave, rape, and murder members of their immediate families. Warlords slaughter civilians indiscriminately, including the children. Women are bought, sold, and plundered like sex toys." (p 40)

Is Judaism (or Christianity) therefore a violent religion? Of course not. Their holy documents are simply windows, like many other ancient texts, that we can use to peek into the past and survey the landscape. What has happened, is that followers of these texts now take the symbols and imagery metaphorically, as fables to help them navigate a modern life which is far less bloody.

"Sensibilities toward violence have changed so much that religious people today compartmentalize their attitude to the Bible. They pay it lip service as a symbol of morality, while getting their actual morality from more modern principles." (p 43)

What about other texts? Turns out, when read literally, there are lots of examples of violence in texts we now consider innocuous: Greek mythology, the Grimm brothers, Mother Goose nursery rhymes, Lancelot, and Shakespeare. Consider the opening scene of Romeo and Juliet, when a personal insult escalates into an out-and-out brawl. Yet today dueling seems anachronistic.

"The career of dueling showcases a puzzling phenomenon we will often encounter: a category of violence can be embedded in a civilization for centuries and then vanish into thin air." (p 59)

Why is that relevant today?

"People today think of the world as a uniquely dangerous place. It’s hard to follow the news without a mounting dread of terrorist attacks, a clash of civilizations, and the use of weapons of mass destruction. But we are apt to forget the dangers that filled the news a few decades ago, and to be blasé about the good fortune that so many of them have fizzled out." (p 65)

Chapter Two: The Pacification Process

"During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition called war; and such a war, as if of every man, against every man." ~ Thomas Hobbes

Why are we violent? What are the conditions for peace? Hobbes provided history's first cohesive answers to both of these questions. According to Hobbes, there are three main practical reasons to fight:

- Aggression: invading neighboring territory for want of resources like food, water, hunting ground, and women
- Defense: protecting your resources from aggressive neighbors
- Deterrence: following through on a show of strength, or settling a score, to prevent being seen as weak

Working in tandem, these sources of violence (which apply to animals as well as humans) serve to create cycles of anarchic infighting among communities, waning in the presence of abundant resources, and waxing in their absence. Despite being taught that humans are wicked and animals are naturally peaceful, chimpanzees in the wild (humanity's closest evolutionary relative) enjoy homicide rates as high as 30%. That is, of all chimp deaths, nearly a third of them in some communities occur at the hands of another chimp, and only two thirds of natural causes. That statistic is far higher than any human community, past or present. This is our biological inheritance.

What about the earliest primitive human cultures? Humans started out as territorial, anarchic hunter gatherers, and some of those communities still exist today. Despite the myth we all learn in school about how peaceful the Native Americans were before the Europeans came, contemporary hunter-gatherer societies enjoy the highest homicide rates in the world, and the reasons are right out of Hobbes:

"One Yanomamö man in Amazonia told an anthropologist, We are tired of fighting. We don't want to kill anymore. But the others are treacherous and cannot be trusted." (p 92)

This is a classic description of the Hobbesian Trap. Consider, a homeowner is awakened by a rustling in the garage. He grabs his gun and goes down to investigate, whereupon he finds a burglar with a gun in his own hand. Now, both of these men are thinking, "I don't want to kill this guy, but I'd better kill him before he kills me." They might even be thinking, "I know he doesn't want to kill me any more than I want to kill him, but he might be tempted to kill me preemptively if he thinks I might kill him." And round and round we go. Taking this one step further, imagine the personal vendetta that would erupt between the two men's families if one of them did kill the other. It is easy to see, from this simple example, how honor and might can amplify violence that may have been seeded by a simple quarrel over resources. Hobbes' real thesis is that law is better than honor.

Historically, violence did not start its precipitous decline until the invention of agriculture, with its sedentary lifestyle and the creation of the first primitive states. According to Hobbes, the dominion of a ruling class over a producing mob creates a social pressure against infighting.

"Just as a farmer tries to prevent his animals from killing one another, so a ruler will try to keep his subjects from cycles of raiding and feuding that just shuffle resources or settle scores among them but from his point of view are a dead loss." (p 86)

He referred to this influence as the Leviathan, the power "to keep all men in awe." Today, this influence comes in the form of law, police, courts, standing armies, treaties, penitentiaries, even credit scores. In the above example, it is the thought of "I should kill this man, but I could wind up in jail, and he's itching to kill me, but he doesn't want to get locked up any more than I do." Thus, Hobbes provides a way out of his own eponymous trap: The Leviathan. It is the threat of retaliation by a disinterested third party for any infighting amongst the masses. It is the popularly sanctioned monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Note that "popularly sanctioned" is an important part of that equation. Although despots can reduce violence in their territories relative to their "natural" tribal state, they hit a glass ceiling that only more modern democracies have been able to break. That is, the people's trust and approval of the ruling power increase its effectiveness.

If all of this sounds intriguing, even counter-intuitive, watch Pinker's TED Talk for a wonderful summary of the book.

(Next: The Civilizing Process)

Review of "The Better Angels of Our Nature," Preface

Yes, you read that title correctly. Here's the story. I read about this book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker, in a Scientific American article. A deadly shooting had just occurred in Norway, and the author used it to promote this book, about the decline of violence in the modern world. There's a statement to stop a reader short. A decline of violence? The article went on to summarize Pinker's theme, as it related to the shooting. Namely, that a decline in violence is evidenced by the shock value of a random act of violence that kills only a handful of people. In times past, such events would have been commonplace, and hardly newsworthy. Interesting point, I thought, but is that not just semantics? I was intrigued, and bought the book… The 1314-page book. Shit.

My loyal readers know I do not like long books. However, all of my research into Pinker and this particular book of his led me to believe that it was important. 481 pages in, I can tell you this is not just an important book, this is an incredibly important book, not just in its content and theme, but in its accessibility. A few years ago I read Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity by Lawrence Lessig, and it so struck me as one of the most important books I've ever read that I went out and bought about twenty copies and started gifting them to people I knew. I am not going to do that here. I doubt very much that my friends and family, if gifted a 1314-page book, would read it. So, while my impression so far is that this is one of the most important books I will ever read, I am in a pickle as to how to share its essence with others.

I have decided that rather than a short, blurb-like review of the book once I've finished it, I will write a short blog post after finishing each chapter, summarizing the main points for a skeptical audience. That way, I can satisfy my prophetic urges to disseminate the profound content of this book to the masses, while still respecting my friends' and family's sense of patience. That's right, after 481 pages, I am turning back to page 1 to re-read, re-bookmark, re-highlight, re-live, and re-hash this book in more granular detail, so I can broadcast my reactions as I go. Having said all that (which I will not repeat in subsequent reviews), I suppose I can summarize the preface for interested readers:

Review of the Preface

(Credit: All block quotes are excerpts from the book.)

An interesting starting point is the question of whether the public really believes the world is a peaceful place. Certainly, an opinion poll would reveal quite a healthy dose of despair stemming from the news feed today. But an opinion poll is not reality, and we must proceed scientifically if we are to investigate the question of whether modernity with all its virtues and vices, is a force of good or evil in the overall moral progress of the world. The first problem, of course, is the old "if it bleeds it leads":

"The human mind tends to estimate the probability of an event from the ease with which it can recall examples, and scenes of carnage are more likely to be beamed into our homes and burned into our memories than footage of people dying of old age." (p 16)

Another problem is what Pinker refers to as "historical myopia," that is, the tendency to dwell mostly upon recent events in thinking about the world as a whole, and ignoring more distant events. Thus, the world as it existed to a peasant during the time of Attila the Hun, is too remote to incorporate into our modern vision of life as it exists today. When we think of violence, we tend to think of the days of innocence we remember from our childhood, and that our parents relay to us, and the contrasting ugliness of events we see on TV today. We forget to acknowledge that (a) as children, things just seem innocent by default, though surely awful things were going on then too, and (b) parents sugar-coat the world for their children, and tend to remember the best things their generation accomplished in their prime, not the ugliness of the world around them.

One thing Pinker does not do is claim that human nature itself is changing for the better. He clearly states that this book is an investigation of the external (or, in the scholarly parlance, exogenous) factors that push the world towards peace. Thus, the thesis is that while human nature itself does not change, the environment does change, partly by our conscious effort, and partly by happenstance. For example, things like medical progress, decreasing infant mortality, literacy, and urbanization, are all factors that, via one route or another, can lead to decreasing rates of, say, rape and domestic abuse. While some factors are truly exogenous, having (at least ostensibly) nothing to do with violence, others are very purposeful, like feminism:

"Since violence is largely a male pastime, cultures that empower women tend to move away from the glorification of violence and are less likely to breed dangerous subcultures of rootless young men." (p 23)

Even if we accept Pinker's thesis without a fight, we are still left with a moral qualm. Should we dismiss modern acts of violence as symptoms of the death throes of anachronistic world views and not worry about them, since the overall trend is opposite, effectively giving them a free pass? Absolutely not. The book will argue that, far from giving anachronistic violence a free pass, societies going through periods of pacification will amplify the reactions of rage and disgust to such acts, and push even harder to eradicate them than before. In other words, an anti-segregation movement, for example, could not take hold until an anti-slavery movement had succeeded. If that statement seems obvious, think about it a little more. Not until a disgusting and unspeakable evil (by modern standards) had been eradicated, could sentiments react to the more subtle and insidious evils that took its place.

"One starts to appreciate the small gifts of coexistence that would have seemed utopian to our ancestors: the interracial family playing in the park, the comedian who lands a zinger on the commander in chief, the countries that quietly back away from a crisis instead of escalating to war. The shift is not toward complacency: we enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to reduce it, and so we should work to reduce the violence that remains in our time." (p 23)

The moral lesson is not, then, to ignore the eddies of violence in the overall flow toward peace. Rather, it is this: Let us first acknowledge that we, as a civilization, are doing something right. Then, let us identify those somethings so we can do more of it, and perhaps leave an even more peaceful society behind for the next generation.

If all of this sounds intriguing, even counter-intuitive, watch Pinker's TED Talk for a wonderful summary of the book.

(Next: The Past is a Foreign Country)

Preview of Upcoming Story: The Flying Kite

Below is an excerpt from an upcoming short story, "The Flying Kite." The inspiration came to me as a novel. I envisioned a man out to set a record for an Out of Eden style walk. Failing in his progress but determined to the point of obsession, he loses his family, then his sanity, then disappears. I have never written a novel before, so I mulled the idea over for a while until I came up with a way to present it as a short story. A young man walks into a bar, introduces himself as a photojournalist, then tells a tall tale about finding the star-crossed traveler out in the wilderness, still dead set on completing his goal, decades after its completion would have meant anything to the rest of the world.

---

Cometa del Vuelo. All eyes went to the old man. He continued to rub his chin, remembering the story. When he noticed that everyone was staring at him, he tried to collect himself to deliver it well. He smoothed his short white hair, cleared his throat, and took a sip of Tequila. El Cometa del Vuelo era un hombre, un Americano...

Matias translated as the man spoke. The Flying Kite was a man, an American. In the year... The man thought for a moment... 1970 or 1971, he tried to set record for walking the spine of the Andes, from Colombia to Patagonia. He and his wife, they held a big stage for the press in Bogotá, where they boasted of their resolve. But they experienced difficulty. They walked too slowly to make their name shine. Many months went by and in Bolivia, his wife, she died. Faulkner vowed to continue in her memory, but the journey was too difficult. A press man met him in Salta in the year 1973, before the revolution. He spoke nonsense. He thought only a few months had passed. He thought he was making progress. He even spoke as if his wife was still alive. He was firm with commitment to his journey. The press man called him The Flying Kite.

Then the revolution came, and people forgot about him. He went crazy in the mountains. People assumed he'd died or settled down somewhere or returned to his homeland. But every now and then he'd make the news. Somebody would find him out in the wilderness or some small shantytown in the Andes or a fishing village on the coast of Chile. For years and years people would report sightings, until the reports became incredible. People eventually stopped believing. Last I heard of him was 1983. Some homeless man in Valparaíso claiming to be Faulkner. Now, The Flying Kite is more of a National urban legend. Every now and then, some hoaxer will claim to have seen him. Some hoaxer will show up at a radio or television station claiming to be Faulkner, looking for attention, money sometimes. Nobody believes.

Kent smiled the whole time, watching the old man, listening to Matias translate from behind him. It's not a hoax. Or a legend. He swallowed off his beer. He's still out there. I met him. I walked with him.

---

If you would like to be notified upon its release, please leave a comment below. If you are available for editing or beta reading, please leave a comment or send me a message. Spanish-speakers would be particularly helpful.

Thanks, everyone!

La Loba

I'm writing a short story about one of my dogs. While reading Women Who Run With the Wolves, I came across a passage about a Pueblo myth called "La Loba" and decided to incorporate it into the story. So, here's my rendition of the myth:

There is an old woman who lives among the many ridges and hollows of the Southern Appalachians. She lives in a hidden place that everyone knows but few have ever seen. La Loba does her collecting at night, particularly on a night like this, when the full moon glows blue over the entire valley. A single seeing eye peers out from beneath her hood, the other pale and lifeless. She clings her flowing robes tightly around her fat body as she moves, hopscotching quickly along the dry riverbed in tattered sandals. She is excited, scanning the ground feverishly, looking for that pale ivory object jutting out among the round gray stones. After a while, she finds what she is looking for. She dives for it, plucking it from the ground and examining it carefully with her fingers, sniffing it and rubbing the sharp edges. Satisfied and giddy, she opens the makeshift pouch at her waist and drops it in with the rest of the bones. La Loba turns around and trots up the hill, gripping the fabric around her prize.

She arrives back at her secret place, where her campfire has burned low. She carefully empties the folds of her robe and lets the bones tumble to the ground. She grabs a poker and turns the coals in the fire, feeds it a few more logs, and watches as it roars back to life. The light illuminates the pale white object on the other side. A wolf's skull lies on the ground before an incomplete skeleton. Dozens of vertebrae form the spine all the way down to the narrow tail. The ribcage is a hodgepodge of narrow curved pieces, many broken and missing. Several flat pieces form the hips and shoulders, and the long bones of the legs descend to the many-jointed paws. La Loba leans over her criatura, selecting each bone carefully and placing it like a puzzle in its right place. When she has placed the last, she sits back and grins widely at her beautiful white sculpture.

La Loba rocks back and forth on her haunches for many moments, studying the skeleton, thinking about what song she will sing. When she thinks of the right song, she stands up and throws many sticks and logs onto the fire till it burns high in the air, eye level with her. She spreads her arms and begins to sing. Her voice is soft at first, concentrated at the project before her. All of her energy is focused on the white objects, as if throwing sparks and asking them to light. The bones rattle and begin to shift. First the ribcage begins to flesh out as the sculpture rises from the earth. Then the hips and the shoulders move into place and fuse, muscle and tendon washing over them. La Loba sings louder, riding the crest of this creative wave. White fur sprouts on the chest and moves down the spine, down the legs, down the tail. She looks at the face of the skull as it turns from white to red to pink, then sprouts delicate white fur. She moves her hands in the air inches above the body.

There is a long pause and La Loba's voice grows feverish and low. She smacks the ground with her hands and guttural syllables come out of her song. Her brow wrinkles in determination as she watches the fur climb down the feet to the paws, watches the nails grow. Then they begin to twitch. The tail moves up and down, the chest begins to heave slightly and she can feel the vibration of a heartbeat through the earth. The eyes of the wolf open and take her in, still singing and beating against the ground. Her voice breaks into high pitches and her incantations fill the valley. The white wolf stands and stares at her, listening, breathing heavily. Her song ends. She kneels down and looks deeply into the wolf's pale blue eyes, sizing her up.

“Ir! Tráeme a alma!”

The white wolf barks once in assent.

“Ir!” She points off into the mountains.

The white wolf turns and bounds off. La Loba lifts her neck and cackles at the night sky. She dances around the fire, arms spread wide, her robes spinning about her. She herself hoots and howls at the moon. Up on a ridge, she sees the outline of her beautiful, beautiful criatura silhouetted in the moonlight, looking down at her. She howls at it, bellowing:

“Tráeme a almaaaa!”

Women

I started keeping a book journal as a New Year's Resolution in 2012. This was the seed of an idea that would eventually culminate in discovering Goodreads! After about a year and a half, somebody commented that I didn't read many women authors. To which I replied, "Why, that's ridiculous. I'm not sexist. After all, Ayn Rand is my favorite author!" However, going back to my handy journal confirmed it: I had read 38 books by male authors and a whopping 2 by female authors in the past 18 months.

First of all, Ayn Rand is quite masculine, as female authors go. Her prose is sharp, unforgiving, professorial, and grand. Secondly, there are a handful of female authors I've read and loved: Madeleine L'Engle, Lois Lowry's The Giver, Barbara Kingsolver, To Kill a Mockingbird. Third, I never used the author's gender to screen out a book I was considering reading (I think). Fourth, my perception was skewed partly by enjoying books that were either "feminine," or had a female protagonists: Winter's Bone, A Walk to Remember, Never Let Me Go, The Miracle Worker -- all of course written by men.

How does this happen? I wonder. I believe it has to do with how I hear about books in order to add them to my reading list. For example, physics is a male-dominated field, and so all the nonfiction physics books are by Stephen Hawking, Michio Kaku, Brian Greene, and so on. All the "classics" they teach us about in school are by men: Arthur Miller, Ray Bradbury, William Golding. Lastly, book-reading is a networked experience (which is why sites like this work). So, if I enjoyed Helter Skelter and In Cold Blood, then that might turn me on to other nonfiction true crime such as Killing Lincoln which I have not yet read. It might simply be the case that "nonfiction true crime" is a male-dominated genre, while there are plenty of other female-dominated genres that I have simply not waded into yet. It would be difficult to venture into a genre like "soul exploring travel" after reading Eat Pray Love if I only liked a book instead of loved it. In other words, my "to read" list grows far faster than my "have read" list (I think this is true of all avid readers) and therefore every book I want to read is probably very similar to some other book I have read. Therefore, entire genres get overlooked, and with them, genders.

My first approach to a fix is simple: a New Year's resolution. For 2014, I am reading female authors only. Already, this has worked wonders for me. I have discovered amazing writers I'd never heard of, like Julie Orringer and Nancy Huddleston Packer, which has opened me up to new genres like "coming of age short story collections." I've discovered great writers I should have heard of, like Jhumpa Lahiri. Even though I'd probably heard of them subconsciously, they never registered because I didn't recognize the name, because I'd never read their book or heard of them in a classroom. That's what makes it a systemic problem.

I also have to have a good sense of balance. Even though there are "must reads" on my list like Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, I have to be careful of this domino effect. For every one book I read, I'm going to add two similar (and therefore, most probably male) books to my "to read" list. I have to consciously intersperse my "to read" list with books that are unlike others, like Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies.

So, sexism isn't necessarily the problem, or at least, not the whole problem. Part of the problem is that the act of reading a book never removes or closes an item from a to-do list, it only ever bubbles up and multiplies that item. If you allow that bubble (say, self-help business books) to grow unchecked, then of course you are going to read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, How to Win Friends and Influence People, The Speed of Trust, and get yourself caught in a male-only rut. But by "seeding" your "to read" list with new, different, unfamiliar books, you can stumble over great works (Women Who Run with the Wolves) that open up new bubbles you had never considered or knew existed (psychology of feminism).