Friday, May 4, 2007

Media Representations, Violence and Response

A person on my friend's list on Livejournal, posted about violent media leads to violence. I didn't respond there because, well, you've got to choose your battles and I doubt I could have said anything to change her mind (and, as a matter of fact, since I originally wrote this, I did respond and, lo, I did not change her mind). I am also going to act as though the idea that violent media leads to real violence is largely a dead issue, because it is. At best, no bad research finds that amongst children under 12 years old that there's a weak correlation between media violence and real violence. Likewise, studies of actually violent people – or, at least, people who are violent enough to get put in jail or prison for their violence – massively underconsume media of all sorts, including violent media. When studying people who are actually violent, the correlation is between not consuming violent media and violence, and the general trend is the more media a person consumes the less likely they are to be violent. (For what it is worth, I think that the reason people who consume more media are less violent, or in prison less, is due to the fact that media consumption is a form of consumption. People who can afford to consume anything in quantity tend to be rich, and both have less reason to be violent and have better lawyers when it does happen.) So, in my book, the issue is largely dead.

What surprises me is how tired and worn out this argument is! Plato wanted to outlaw theater because writers and actors were “liars”. Augustus did outlaw theater, because it promoted “immorality”. The Roman Catholic Church forbade whole swaths of musical types – mostly things involving rhythm – on the grounds that music leads to sex (or, perhaps, that music leads to dancing that leads to sex). You take any time and you'll find people who want to stop other people from making the “wrong” kind of art – they'll want to shut up hip hop artists, burn Harry Potter books, stop kids from playing those new fangled video games.

In short, what they want to do is elevate their personal aesthetic tastes to the level of morality. As a sort of secular humanist, scientific materialist, atheist transhumanist, libertarian consensualist (read: as the intellectually autonomous person known as Chris Bradley) this sort of thing annoys me, and it annoys me because virtually everyone wants to do it, regardless of their political beliefs.

So, you'll have socialists railing against the injustices of capitalist media, you'll have capitalists wanting to outlaw socialist literature, religious folks wanting to forbid secular music, liberals wanting to stop those violent video games, etc., etc. The elevation of a person's person sense of aesthetics to the point of absolute morality is nearly ubiquitous!

I wonder why that is – why most people feel their own aesthetic choices should be universal. I KNOW there's a lesson in there, somewhere, but I'm having a devil of a time sussing it out. Of figuring out why art gets people so fucking pissed off, so pissed off that they feel the urge to engage in tactics ranging from emotional blackmail to legislation to burning books? Of why they feel that audiences are empty vessels into which artists do nothing but pour their own biases and ideals?

I don't know, but I want to know.

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22 Comments:

Brian Dunbar said...

I wonder why that is – why most people feel their own aesthetic choices should be universal.


I suspect what's going on there is something really basic and fundamental - we're talking down at the reptile-brain level that sees the familiar as 'good' (won't eat me) and the unfamiliar as 'bad' (could eat me).

It's so rooted in the bottom of our psyche that if you removed it completely people would cease to be people.

But don't despair; it's possible to use culture to paper over this nasty thing well enough to get along. The same deal that enables people to stay monogamous when the animal that lives in the back of your brain is telling you NOT to.

So to speak.

May 4, 2007 6:14 PM  
L>T said...

Interesting questions.

I wonder why that is – why most people feel their own aesthetic choices should be universal. I KNOW there's a lesson in there, somewhere, but I'm having a devil of a time sussing it out. Of figuring out why art gets people so fucking pissed off, so pissed off that they feel the urge to engage in tactics ranging from emotional blackmail to legislation to burning books?



What I'm thinking:
People must somehow equate art with morality & morality with aesthetics. They think their morality is rational & universal for all human beings. They think everyone judges by their standards & if not they should.

why they feel that audiences are empty vessels into which artists do nothing but pour their own biases and ideals?
Maybe because they are empty vessels? ;)

May 4, 2007 6:31 PM  
Chris Bradley said...

It's so rooted in the bottom of our psyche that if you removed it completely people would cease to be people.

I think this is something of a stretch. We'd stop being people if we stopped enforcing our personal aesthetic sense as an absolute moral value? I'm not seeing that one. And if being a person requires that sort of thing, is it worth being a person?

Tho' I agree that we can create an environment where no particular behavior -- no matter how "natural" -- will actually develop.

May 4, 2007 10:47 PM  
Chris Bradley said...

Maybe because they are empty vessels? ;)

See, answers like this don't make me feel better. Not because they're wrong, but because they could be right. :p

May 4, 2007 10:48 PM  
L>T said...

I really do have faith in human kind, though. :)
Humankind has just had the faith in themselves supressed by you know who.

Have you read Phillip Pullmans "His Dark Materials" trilogy? Just curious.

May 5, 2007 6:24 AM  
beepbeepitsme said...

Religion survives through the dissemination of fear. Religions of most types have learnt how to push the buttons of the fearful in order to use that fear against them and for the purposes of the religion.

May 5, 2007 4:42 PM  
Brian Dunbar said...

I think this is something of a stretch. We'd stop being people if we stopped enforcing our personal aesthetic sense as an absolute moral value? I'm not seeing that one.

Wow - I suck at communicating today.

No - we'd stop being people if we erased the reptile "known is good, unknown could eat me" thing. What I'm talking about in my basic half-assed non-academic way is the stuff that's down deep.

It's more fundamental and basic than what you're talking about.

May 5, 2007 5:19 PM  
Chris Bradley said...

No - we'd stop being people if we erased the reptile "known is good, unknown could eat me" thing. What I'm talking about in my basic half-assed non-academic way is the stuff that's down deep.

Again, I'm just not sure that's true. Even if this behavior was genotypical, I don't think that our humanity would be robbed by insuring that it didn't develop into phenotype.

But this gets into dicey areas of "what is human?", hehe. I, myself, am not so attached to the idea of "humanity" that I wouldn't gleefully see certain parts of it expunged, even if that meant we were not "really human" anymore.

May 6, 2007 12:52 AM  
Chris Bradley said...

Have you read Phillip Pullmans "His Dark Materials" trilogy? Just curious.

No, I have not. What kind of stuff is it?

May 6, 2007 12:53 AM  
Chris Bradley said...

Beep,

It seems to happen even when it doesn't have an explicitly religious character to it, tho'. So, you'll have (some) socialists who want to destroy capitalist modes of art with as much vehemence as any fundie wants to burn pornography.

I hope it IS connected to religion, tho', 'cause I think religion is gonna die off pretty soon. ;)

May 6, 2007 12:55 AM  
L>T said...

IMO, it's in the league of the Lord of The Rings & Gormenghast books.

I pulled this up from wikipedia Pullman's stated intention was to invert Milton's story of a war between heaven and hell.[3] In his introduction, he adapts Blake's line to quip that he (Pullman) "is of the Devil's party and does know it." The novels also draw heavily on gnostic ideas, and His Dark Materials has been a subject of controversy, especially with Christian groups.

What is cool about these books is that God is the bad guy in ways that we atheists/agnostics/secular humanists understand.
It's written for youg adults but I enjoyed it very much.

There is a long awaited movie on the books coming out. But, HUGE disappointment...All references to God & the Church will be taken out because they are negative. As wik says, Pullman's stated intention was to invert Milton's story of a war between heaven and hell. I won't bother to watch the movie.

BTW, a bit of advice for your videos. nix the crock pot or what ever that is in the background, while you do the vidoes. I think a plant, a bust of your favorite philosopher, a ceramic skull with a candle in it....anything but a crock pot. :)

May 6, 2007 6:47 AM  
L>T said...

A big black stuffed crow?

May 6, 2007 6:50 AM  
beepbeepitsme said...

chris

I don't think religious will ever die off as people are always going to be fearful or have questions about death. But I do hope that religion as a political weapon is squeezed back into the box.

May 6, 2007 3:24 PM  
divabeq said...

Oh, I laughed so much. I've got to back l>t here on the matter of the crock pot.

May 6, 2007 5:02 PM  
Chris Bradley said...

L>T,

I will take out the crock pot and check out Pullman when I go down to the library and/or bookstore, next! Thanks. It sounds up my alley. An inversion of Milton, indeed. :)

May 6, 2007 11:57 PM  
Chris Bradley said...

Beep,

Well, this is terribly futurist of me, but I think that within the next century or two we'll, uh, beat death. And we will certainly make it so people have longer, healthier and saner lives. I am not sure in a sane world that religion has much of a place. We'll have better things to give to people than religion.

May 6, 2007 11:59 PM  
Brian Dunbar said...

We'll have better things to give to people than religion

Who is 'we'?

Replace religion with .. what?

We have few cultural things in common with our 40,000 years ago ancestors but belief in the divine is one of them.

Call me stubborn or a throwback but I don't see belief being tossed out the window anytime soon.

May 7, 2007 8:53 AM  
Chris Bradley said...

Brian,

We as in "people, generally."

Non-theism is certainly the fastest growing religious belief in the world. In America, about 15% of the population are non-theists. These numbers are doubled in Europe. Something like 80% of Chinese and Russians are non-theist, too. So, even on inspection, it's obvious that a large fraction of the human population simply does not need religion even now, and it is similarly clear that population is growing.

Also, the character of religion has changed since 40,000 years ago. Religion has fewer and fewer political implications -- tho' in some parts of the world it has a lot of political implications, still, such as the US, in many other places it has virtually none and overt religion is seen with some hostility by the public.

Religion has furthermore been eliminated from both ontological and even epistemological discussions, replaced with superior forms of reasoning (such as scientific materialism, pluralism and consensualism, psychology and even philosophy). Even with morals, few people actually propose religion as the real blueprint for laws -- and those that do are considered to be throwbacks to a bygone era and either threatening or ridiculous. There's still some trouble with this, but the nature of the change is pretty clear. Popes no longer dictate to national leaders, and most of the world is unified in contempt for theocratic forms of government.

Plus, the whole argument of "oh, we've done it for a long time, so we won't stop" is absurd. It's an argument of genetic determinism and virtually everyone who isn't a slack-jawed moron knows that genetics is not destiny -- that even if it was something akin to a genetic force, that our genetics change over time (and the more nuanced amongst us know that we can prevent the phenotypical development of a genotype without the mechanism of evolution). The argument of "we've done it for a long time" completely ignores the various aspects of change that are readily observable in society, individual people and the natural world.

May 7, 2007 9:19 AM  
Brian Dunbar said...

Plus, the whole argument of "oh, we've done it for a long time, so we won't stop" is absurd.

I didn't say 'we won't stop'. I merely pointed out that religion has been with us for a long time.

Maybe it's me. I believe that 'things change' but the idea that I'd be around to see a change of such import seems a little odd. What makes 'right now' and 'me' so special that I'd get to see stuff like that?

But then .. I'm the guy working for a space elevator company, who feels that we're right on the edge of an epoch that will make the Industrial Revolution seem like a bump in the road.

Clearly I lack Vision.

May 7, 2007 1:29 PM  
Chris Bradley said...

Brian,

Well, you actually said, "Call me stubborn or a throwback but I don't see belief being tossed out the window anytime soon."

I just happen to be of the opinion -- and I think with a lot of good reason -- that religion is in the process of being thrown out the window. Not only are the number of open skeptics of religion radically higher than at any point in history, and growing, but even religious people aren't as religious. They're putting less and less faith in religion to solve their problems (and tend to go to religion only when all other paths are shut off, though perhaps that's always been the case and we just have more paths nowadays) -- most people prefer going to science, politics or various philosophies to resolve whatever problems they have. And even religious authorities use these techniques -- most religious marriage counselors have psychological training. So even the religious are less religious: when they break a leg, they call the doctor before their priest, if they bother with the priest at all.

And, right now, anything that religion purports to do can be done at least as well non-religiously -- and religion requires people to believe in downright goofy things. Religion doesn't feed the poor and heal the sick -- non-religious government agencies do, with support from sciences like medicine and agriculture.

It is also a little weird to me, too, that a guy who is so OBVIOUSLY trying to change the world can be so stubborn about other fields. How to say this? All scientific fields are developing as fast as your field, Brian. Every one. The whole world is seething with change, and society follows technological developments. Science and it's technological children drag the world behind it (sometimes with a serious dose of future shock, I should add).

May 7, 2007 2:35 PM  
Brian Dunbar said...

Well, you actually said, "Call me stubborn or a throwback but I don't see belief being tossed out the window anytime soon."


'anytime soon' does not equal never.


.... So even the religious are less religious: when they break a leg, they call the doctor before their priest, if they bother with the priest at all.

Agreed. Of course it was not so long ago that the priest and the doctor were the same guy - and even more recently that most scientists (or at least the guys doing what would become science) were trained by religious.

Aside: It's interesting to me that going back to (say) Europe in the 16th century you find guys doing double duty - priests practicing science. The Church (Holy Roman and Those Other Guys) at that time attracted the really smart guys - the nerds of their day. Where else was a smart guy who didn't want to chase cows for a living going to go?

At about that time science and religion parted ways, and it was possible to do science (as it were) without having to worry your head professionally about the God stuff.

Since then the standards for being a scientist have increased and the profession has attracted the nerdly and geeky and given them an outlet. The religious orders have (the Roman Catholic Church being a general exception) loosened their standards and now you can spend two years - or less - at a cow country seminary, learn nothing but how your own creed sees the world and become an ordained man of God.

No wonder (he snarked) religion is on the decline - the guys running things are bottom of the barrel kinds guys.



And, right now, anything that religion purports to do can be done at least as well non-religiously -- and religion requires people to believe in downright goofy things.

Goofy is in the eye of the beholder.

Religion doesn't feed the poor and heal the sick -- non-religious government agencies do, with support from sciences like medicine and agriculture.

'Religion' doesn't - and never has - done any of those things. Religious institutions have and continue to do so. With, yes, support from sciences like medicine and agriculture.


It is also a little weird to me, too, that a guy who is so OBVIOUSLY trying to change the world can be so stubborn about other fields.

If it helps your understanding I didn't set out to change the world - that's certainly not LiftPort' mission statement. All we want to do is build a cheap, reliable and efficient means to get to space.

Now, we're not dumb nor blind. The implications of achieving our goal are pretty obvious, even if you can't specifically point out what will happen as a result. Simply put Things Change and options open up.

The world is grand tapestry - guys that set out on a deliberate course to change great big swatches of it are foiled by the very scope of their ambition. We're more modest - we see a small bit we can work on, so we do. It's enough.

How to say this? All scientific fields are developing as fast as your field, Brian. Every one. The whole world is seething with change, and society follows technological developments. Science and it's technological children drag the world behind it (sometimes with a serious dose of future shock, I should add).

No, I see that, although reviewing our conversations it may not be obvious. Here is where I'm coming from;

You're talking vast and grand changes that affect the way people are and live - these have happened before. As a species we've gone from hunter-gatherer to agricultural to Industrial to whatever comes next. Each a wrenching change, enormous social changes, entire belief systems transmorgified ...

But take a guy from the dawn of time - 40,000 years ago. Bring him forward to Right Now. I contend that once you clean him up a bit, school him in the basics of how to get along - he'd get along ok. He'd get our basic drives and motivations, he'd understand what a place of worship is, he might even get the sardonic use of a killing device as a religious fetish.

He'd get along in other words.

I don't think that for all the changes the next 1,000 years will bring that people will stop being people - that we'll suddenly cease needing whatever comforts a belief in the divine brings.

I''m willing to be wrong of course - the only thing I've really learned is that I'm really good at being wrong, at times. I used to think the future of the internet belonged to walled gardens like CompuServe.

....

I will allow that people say - and believe - they are not religious.

I look at the beliefs some people hold with what in another age would be called religious intensity. They believe in this or that without examining the evidence. Like what?

Global warming, for one. No, climate change happens but the number of people who fervently believe in it without examining the evidence, who take it on Faith is astounding.

Professed religion is on the wane in the first world. But people still seem to want to believe in something bigger than themselves.

Again, I could be wrong.

May 8, 2007 6:08 AM  
Chris Bradley said...

Brian,

Oh, yeah, until the 19th century in Europe the only place a person could go to get an advanced education was a religious institution -- a university, which existed primarily to educate clergy. In the Renaissance they started to educate lawyers separately from priests and then other disciplines -- so by the 18th century you could go to a university to study astronomy or biology -- but it wasn't until the 19th century that non-religious universities came into existence.

And, yeah, part of the reason why the church is in decline is that a smart person tends to become something that doesn't require them to ignore the evidence of their reason and senses. They do stuff like become engineers or scientists or even literature professors, where they are allowed to exercise their reason in a way that doesn't require them to deny, say, evolution or the material world.

'Religion' doesn't - and never has - done any of those things. Religious institutions have and continue to do so. With, yes, support from sciences like medicine and agriculture.

And religion doesn't do them very well. The strongest argument against religious charitable organizations isn't that they're religious, but that they're inefficient, for instance. Like with government, itself, religion is so concerned with itself -- with religion, its own and others -- that it is difficult for it to operate in places where cultural sensitivity is an issue. It is simpler and easier -- it is more efficient -- to divest with religion when curing the sick and feeding the hungry. Which is why the largest aid organizations in the world today (such as UNHCR or the Red Cross) are explicitly non-religious. The Red Cross couldn't do it's job if it was religious . . . ironically, because of religion! Christians would be hesitant to accept help from Muslims, and vice-versa. Things like that. Religion is inefficiency when it comes to serious aid.

I also get your point about LiftPort. To me it's this grand scheme. To you, it's a day at the office. But, honestly, when a space elevator is built, it's going to be as revolutionary as the printing press. You are doing a huge project that will change everything. ;)

But! Since I'm argumentative by nature!

But take a guy from the dawn of time - 40,000 years ago. Bring him forward to Right Now. I contend that once you clean him up a bit, school him in the basics of how to get along - he'd get along ok. He'd get our basic drives and motivations, he'd understand what a place of worship is, he might even get the sardonic use of a killing device as a religious fetish.

The experience with bringing neolithic people into the modern world is that they get suicidally depressed and often just die. The evidence suggests that you couldn't just clean the guy up and he'd get along. The evidence is that the modern world is so different from the neolithic world that it kills them with the same efficiency that we'd die if we were forced to live a neolithic lifestyle.

The more general point, though, is this:

Yes, people have undergone change, before. Then did come in off the plains and build cities (tho', really, since it cut their life expectancies in half, I'm not sure why they bothered to do it, hehe), develop the industrial age, etc.

But even the relatively rapid changes that took place over the Renaissance took centuries to actually develop. And the big, important inventions were few and far between. So, gunpowder came to Europe in the 13th century. The printing press came in the 16th. People were able to fully integrate the one technology -- gunpowder -- into their lives BEFORE the the printing press came out.

Now? In the past hundred years, I'll name off SOME of the wholly life altering technologies that have arisen. Radio. TV. Airplanes. Computers. The Internet. Genetic engineering. Space travel. Nuclear weapons.

And we're on the cusp of a space elevator and cloning! Of the integration of computers into our physical brains! The next century looks to be even more amazing than this one.

Rather than having lifetimes to socially integrate these life-altering technologies into our culture and lives, we're being given them right now and all at once. And by the time we have integrated them into our society and culture, they're obsolete, replaced with something even more radical.

Humans have never had to deal with that before. Alvin Toffler calls it "future shock" -- the future is happening so fast that people are being stunned by it.

And this is appropriate to the general discussion! Religion is one of the primary areas where we're gettin' future shock, or it is where a lot of people are retreating into when they are future shocked. Religion is . . . stable. It's traditional. It is a rock in the maelstrom of the modern world -- consciously non-corporate, non-info age, and indeed somewhat hostile to the social and technological changes swirling around it.

But future shock isn't gonna go away without plunging our world into a new dark age -- which would be worse than the future shock.

However, once the cause of this anxiety is brought out into the open, it can be addressed better than religion is doing. Religion is, uh, the opium of the masses, to borrow a phrase -- it numbs the pain, but doesn't remove the source of the pain. And the source of the pain is the shock of all this change. But outside of religion it can be dealt with honestly. Through education, through stress reduction techniques, even through a "back to basics lifestyle" that takes out some of the techno-stress from a person's life. Religion is, at best, a placebo -- and not effective, because while it might allow a momentary respite, it does NOT even address the problem. Which is unsurprising since most religions are Iron Age inventions.

But I think you're wrong when you say that people have a religious attitude towards science. Oh, I agree that most of them don't understand it. I don't understand the nitty gritty of most science, myself, and this is true of every scientist I know. Science is so big that no one can know it all.

However, there are still important differences between science and religion, even if you don't understand the details of science. Here's the big one: science works. Science, unlike religion, puts things into people's hands that make their life a better, richer place. The authority that science possesses is based on that fact: it works.

The other big one is that when science is examined, it continues to make sense. This is not generally true of religions. If science asks you to accept something that seems freakish and weird -- and this is normal in quantum mechanics and relativity -- it will support it with experimental data, detailed observations and theoretical comprehension. In addition to the material devices it helps to create.

This is radically different than religion.

But, I think I covered all the main points.

And, for the record, I also don't care if someone is religious as a personal choice. It's when they start trying to force their religion on other people (which is nigh constantly for all the big religions) that I get pissed off. ;)

May 8, 2007 10:36 AM  

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