Intellectual

This is not a political post! I’m bugged by people using the word ‘inaugural’ interchangeably with ‘inauguration’ as a noun. Dictionary.com lists this as a valid usage of ‘inaugural’, but it really bugs me. And I strongly suspect that most people using it do so simply out of laziness: ‘inaugural address’, ‘inaugural celebration’, inaugural ball’ all get truncated to just “inaugural”. I may not be right, but that doesn’t stop me from being irritated by this.

Slate offers a nice peek behind the curtains at how the Linguistic Society of America chooses its Words of the Year. Some excerpts:

In the Most Euphemistic category, Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction seemed like a lock until Bill Frawley, the dean of the Columbia College of Arts and Sciences at George Washington University, suggested badly sourced, which was used by Colin Powell and others to mean “false.”
This year the strongest contender [in the Most Outrageous category] was santorum, defined (and heavily promoted) by sex writer Dan Savage—in a campaign to besmirch the name of right-wing Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum—as “the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex.” We dismissed one potential problem—that newspapers wouldn’t print the term if it won—on the grounds that we shouldn’t censor ourselves. And indeed, in the afternoon’s voting, santorum did win, but many newspapers simply skipped this category in their coverage. So much for academic freedom.

In my recent post, Conformity and consumption, I linked to and quoted from The Rebel Sell. The article’s authors argue that our attempts to reject mass culture just lead to different types of consumerism. The authors believe that there is no real way to avoid this trap:

It is tempting to think that we could just drop out of the race, become what Harvard professor Juliet Schor calls “downshifters.” That way we could avoid competitive consumption entirely. Unfortunately, this is wishful thinking. We can walk away from some competitions, take steps to mitigate the effects of others, but many more simply cannot be avoided.

Maybe we cannot avoid all forms of competitive consumption, but I want to believe that we can consciously avoid many of them.
Today I received an email from someone who had read my earlier blog entry. This correspondent lives on a kibbutz in Israel, and writes:

We are 20 families, living in smalltown Israel. Each of us has his/her professional life. All salaries go to one bank account and split
equally.
No member owns a private car. Not owning a car makes you indifferent to what make and model and year it is, as long as it goes from here to there with minimal comfort. It makes you indifferent to cars as objects.
What counts in this kind of life is what kind of a person you are to
your friends and kibbutz members, and not what you own.

Living in such a communal intentional community certainly seems to be one way to avoid many forms of competitive consumption, but it’s a pretty radical step for most people. From my research a few years ago into intentional communities, it takes a pretty strong commitment to withdraw together from the mainstream (it helps that so many intentional communities have a spritual basis, I think).
Many intentional communities just don’t make the break successfully. Or at the least, instead of competing with everyone in the culture, the members end up reproducing the same types of issues within their much smaller community.
The question is still open if and how I can ‘downshift’ in meaningful, though less radical, ways.

I’ve long thought of myself as an independent thinker and a skeptic of conformity and consumerism. In the last few years, however, it’s occurred to me that much of what I thought of as my rebellion against conformity was, in fact, just a different type of conformity.
Go back to high school. For reasons that I do not fully understand, in the U.S. we tend to think of teenagers socially as falling into two groups: the ‘socials’ and everyone else. As a non-social, I thought of myself back then as a rebel against the conformity of that group. In actuality, I now realize, I conformed quite well and willingly to the norms of other groups: band member, speech nerd, etc.

(more…)

Last week, Hannah had to do a report on an extinct animal of her choosing. Since she’s such a horse nut, we decided she would write about one of the ancestors of the modern horse. As I was helping her find sources via Google, I was amazed by the number of hits that were creationist challenges to the scientifically accepted theory of horse evolution.
I’m not going to dignify any of those pages with a link, but this page summarizes and debunks the creationist arguments.
But the biggest puzzle to me was why the creationists have targeted equine evolution. As near as I can tell, it’s not because the theory of horse evolution is particularly shaky. Rather, it’s simply because horse evolution is apparently covered in some public school science textbooks.
Side note: asking kids to write a report about extinct animals seems to be a good indication that Hannah’s school isn’t caving in to the religious wackos.

Malcolm Gladwell, one of my favorite essayists, has a new article in the New Yorker in which he examines the conventional wisdom about prescription drug prices in the U.S.
Gladwell does not deny that the drug companies are money-hungry machines that are willing to do pretty much anything to increase their profits. But Gladwell points out that the situation is much more complex than that. It’s an excellent read.
I’m a sucker for any writer who points out that the reality of a situation is more complex than most others portray it.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has published a short article outlining the signs to watch for in evaluating science:

1. The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media
2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work
3. The scientific effect involved is always at the very limit of detection
4. Evidence for a discovery is anecdotal
5. The discoverer says a belief is credible because it has endured for centuries
6. The discoverer has worked in isolation
7. The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an observation

Read the article for elaboration on each point.

Jacques Derrida died three days ago. As The Times alludes to, if the purpose of an obituary is to put a person’s life in a certain perspective and/or to draw meaning from that life, it’s impossible to write an obituary for Derrida. Ah, delightful irony.