In the end, how did Hungary fare under his rule, when compared with the regional countries, like Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Romania, Croatia, Slovenia? It doesn't seem that he had much of an effect in the direction you're saying. Those other similar, post-communist countries also didn't get flooded with migrants, I don't think there is much higher levels of wokeness in those other countries, however you'd measure it. Hungary has certainly no higher religiosity or churchgoing numbers, and no real tangible "conservatism" compared to those. The tangible effects are the highest food price inflation in the EU, the steepest rise of housing prices, very low economic growth numbers etc. both in comparison with regional and with overall EU countries. And as we saw, fertility is also back to baseline levels.
Orbán is just a great salesman and managed to sell this idea of the big antiwoke fighter to the MAGA people. In the net effect it's showbusiness, marketing, billboard propaganda etc. He's also a master of moving the party strategically in the political coordinate system. From the 90s onwards he has strategically shifted the party position several times. The latest one since around 2014 was aimed at pushing out the 20% strong extreme right Jobbik by shifting towards the far right. Jobbik seriously felt the danger, as their traditional topics were suddenly "stolen" from them and used by the government. So Jobbik shifted into the center, and eventually teamed up with the liberals. This move led to a break in Jobbik, and the radicals went on to found Our Homeland, which is still in parliament at about 5-6% support level. You can read plenty of critiques about Orbán's governing by Our Homeland party, they are quite dissatisfied with him, despite being also right-wing (though Our Homeland also had to find a new niche, and they've been focusing on globalist conspiracies, WEF, BlackRock, antivax etc).
SpringFish
2hr ago
despite having control over all the mainstream media.
Most Hungarians below ~50 or so, like in the rest of the (western) world, are now getting their news from social media, but certainly from online new portals as opposed to traditional mainstream media. Orbán took over a lot of the traditional media, like the county-level (online) newspapers, the public media obviously, but these mainly reach the old generation, pensioners. He did try to, and in some sense managed to, take over the most read news portal Index.hu, but basically when the transfer of ownership happened, the whole staff resigned and then promptly made a competitor Telex.hu, which is by now the second most popular behind Index.hu. And there are other online portals, many professional youtube channels who are against Orbán.
Orbán did try to manufacture social media influencers in a topdown way, this was called Megafon, where they basically received central messaging from the government, they were trained how to produce social media content etc, but it was very fake and weak. Then in the campaign they started the "Fight Club" which was about teaching Orbán-supporters to get into comment fights on Facebook to defend the government. Orbán made a WhatsApp group then a Facebook group for this, and he literally sent a list of topics to comment about, for some time every morning (to tens of thousands of group members, so it was not some super secret thing). Then they made the "Digital Civic Circles", which was basically "Fight Club"-light, basically thematic Facebook groups with some celebrities headlining them, but it was still about receiving a centrally crafted message and lists of Facebook post links that you were supposed to like and put comments on.
Orbán was basically begging people to just spend 10 minutes on this per day, even if this digital world is foreign to many supporters (they are mostly pensioners and rural people). Orbán himself still uses a dumbphone and works on printed paper with pen, and generally hates technology. So him pushing for this shows how much he noticed the problem.
All this to say, nowadays it's not so easy to control the media.
There are probably some who don't consume it directly, but through local intermediaries who make TikToks in their local language etc. It becomes a discussion topic and the third and fourth degree viewers are not aware of the origin (for BLM it's more concrete, but other woke topics it can seem blurry if it's organic European post-WW2 equality and justice development vs import from America). But even those that are, they just see it as global universal culture, not specifically American.
It's like asking European Taylor Swift fans why they are obsessing over an American celebrity. It's just a bewildering question. It's not like they predecided to obsess over an American. They just consume media, and they liked this celebrity and it's just very organic and obvious and just happens. Like the way in movies aliens always land near LA but certainly somewhere in the US. People are just used to international trendsetting happening in the US. I guess we are in agreement, I'm just elaborating. BLM was just put in front of people at a time when everyone was on their phones during covid. They didn't wake up one day saying "let's follow some American trends, I wonder what trends are going on there and which ones are worth following and which ones aren't". It's just shown to them and they have an emotional reaction to it that this is wrong and has to change and they can feel part of a movement of a morally right cause etc. American or not didn't factor into that chain of reasoning/emotion.
The other thing is that they may even deny there is a trend. It's not a trend. It's just being a decent human being. There is no such thing as woke, etc. etc.
SpringFish
5hr ago
This ignores regression to the mean. The 120 IQ parent's children will tend towards a longer term average of the ancestors of that parent. Roughly speaking. So the distribution is not symmetric. An especially smart, outlier person's children are more likely to go downwards in IQ than to go upwards.
SpringFish
5hr ago
Are you from the US? I think Americans often have a distorted view of how Europeans view them, especially if they base this mostly on online stuff like Reddit. The recent animus towards the US is to a large extent about Trump, and there is certainly some longer term undercurrent even during Obama etc that the US is a bit cheap, overly capitalistic, materialistic, everything for sale, everything measured in money, lot of displays of religion, whatnot, but Europeans still follow and consume American cultural products overwhelmingly, often more than domestic ones. European universities are eager to copy the American academic fads (coastal, blue tribe). They might grumble about some aspects, but those are pretty much the same aspects that American blue tribers grumble about.
Nope, the criticism was also applied to European cultures, often in ways that make absolutely no sense. For example they apply anti-collonialist critique to Ireland, or try to claim that the descendants of Eastern European peasants, who just barely got out of communism, somehow inherited "white privilege".
Yes, but this is the "we're all living in America", fish in water thing. They just see this stuff being the current thing in Hollywood, Oscars, etc. You may underestimate how much Europeans live in an American-defined media environment.
SpringFish
7hr ago
And if intelligence is caused by the soul, then nobody chooses what soul gets put into their bodies
Nope, that one works. And you reversed the quote you linked. The quote says "You don’t have a soul, Doctor. You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily". You seem to have reversed it as you are a body and you are inhabited by a soul. If the soul is the "you", and your personal qualities are attached to it, then there is no separate independent "you" who received that soul, but you are that soul. That's logically coherent.
But also this is folk religion and not Christianity, which emphasizes both body and soul and the resurrection of both at the end of time, though in somewhat different and vague form, like a spiritual body etc. but that's beside the point.
SpringFish
9hr ago
I also get the feeling that there is a cloud of issues that get mushed together because the internet promotes having sharp delineations and lines. AI has many uses, chat and companionship, solving homework, replacing the search engine, automating desk jobs, automating some parts of software dev, generating image art, doing image editing, generating music etc. Each of these have quite different aspects but they are collapsed in the discourse as pro- or anti-AI. Not to mention the more technical applications that the average user isn't exposed to, like math theorem proving, protein folding, industrial applications like steel cracking prediction and factory quality control or whatnot.
It seems to me that the only ones who like it are gray tribe nerds, "shape rotators" who don't see art in a high regard and consider it as too high-prestige in society, undeservedly, compared to tech which is more meritocratic and measurable and has real effects and practical usefulness. This is somewhat moderated by the fact that AI is getting too good at writing software so middling software devs feel danger, and also see the dollar signs pop up in the eyes of their bosses who push for more and more AI adoption, tech debt be damned.
But actual right wing conservatives or far right people also don't like art being relegated to this role, and would talk about the human spirit, the soul of the work, the effort, the sacrifice etc. The same people typically also don't like mega capitalism and skyscrapers as opposed to cathedrals and so on. The American-style right, which is quite different from the original pro-aristocratic meaning of the term may like it as a form of economic line-go-up thing, but that's quite different. The far-right also doesn't like the power concentration aspect, but they'd frame it less about capitalism and more about Jews.
SpringFish
9hr ago
But those in their mid-thirties today would have handled cassettes at least occasionally in the late 90s as kids, even if CDs were already popular.
SpringFish
9hr ago
You could have an open-minded, fairness-driven Arthur Morgan by the standards of his day who was a 'good guy', but he's still going to have a vocabulary and assumptions that are still going to shock and appall the playerbase.
Obviously, because the goal is not to be a past-simulator but to hit moral and emotional valence. If the message is that he is a good guy, it has to register to the player as being a good guy. "He is saying evil stuff but back then being evil was considered good actually, hence you should feel positively towards his evil behavior and should respect and like him for it" just doesn't work. Either he's good and then he has to be good regardless of whatever circumstances, or he's not. This is how it shows that moral relativism isn't really internalized by woke. There indeed is a universal moral standard that applies across time and space, which is a Christian-inherited idea, but they don't really reflect upon where that comes from, it's just self-evident, as the bill of rights also says.
SpringFish
9hr ago
Indeed, and that's why focusing on the childless is less productive. We should be focusing on getting the 1-kid families to 2, the 2s to 3 and so forth. One important factor there is making sure they start while they still have time.
This probably also works better in an evolutionary sense. "Forcing" people to have kids who would prefer not to and are dragging their feet, selects for a population that is statistically of a certain heritable temperament, who will pass on this type of psychological and personality profile and then the next generation will again prefer not to have kids on their own. But if you promote increased number of children for those who already self-select to having at least one child, they are more likely to be family oriented and also growing up with more siblings (or any at all) will also likely promote having children of their own.
SpringFish
9hr ago
But BLM itself kind of sees itself as going against "that kind of" America. When European libs are opposed to "America" they are against the bald-headed-eagle, flag waving, monster truck and pickup truck riding gun obsessed fat rednecks who eat cheap burgers all the time and shop at walmart in a mobility scooter. BLM in Europe is seen as a revolt against that racist America. There is no contradiction.
In Hungary, they follow similar policies. Hungarian parents who have multiple children to become eligible to receive mortgages with no interest by having at least three. If you have four or more, you’re exempt from paying income tax for life. You can also get a grant of eight thousand euros to buy a car but only if it has more than seven seats. In total it’s resulted in something like a 25% increase in children being born. Still below 2.1, but a reversal of the current trend.
The online right likes to repeat this, but it was a temporary effect and by 2025 Hungary's TFR dropped back to 1.31, which is lower than Sweden's 1.43.
Around 1991, it was around 1.87, then sharply fell to 1.28 in the economic turmoil of the system change, floating around 1.3, reaching a new low in 2011 with 1.23. Then as the economy started to recover and also with the measures you mention, it went up gradually to 1.61 in 2021, from which it sharply declined with the aftermath of the covid recession and then the Ukraine war's economic effects. Another possible reason is that people brought their plans forward, and simply had children earlier to get the money, leading to a frontloading of the numbers that would have been coming a few years later, leading to this sharp drop.
Regarding marriage rates, there was a sharp decline after the system change also. The number of marriages per nonmarried men was 47 in 1990 (36 for women), and it steadily dropped to a low of 17.0 / 13.7 by 2012, when Orbán's policies and the recovering economy managed to reverse the trend, reaching 33.4 / 28.1 in 2021, but the economic downturn also affected this and now it's back at 21.6 / 18.6, which matches both 2006 and 2015, but it's still only about half of 1990.
So the communists apparently did a much better job of this. And that wasn't though nationalist race-conscious rhetoric nor a stay at home tradwife lifestyle advocacy. Women had jobs, this was no 1950s Americana. But people saw things as more stable, homes were much more affordable, there was less anxiety around jobs and the basic life pattern was laid out and clear, while alternatives to it were not really promoted or thought about.
The issue is that today, if a country is held back based on economic problems, the economic improvements wouldn't lead to a steady reversal either, because then not only does having children become easier but it also becomes easier and more affordable and available to do other, more immediately fun things, like traveling, living an entertaining leasure life of going to concerts, nice bars and restaurants.
Now that Orban is ousted, it is to be seen what direction those policies take, since the winning Tisza party is a conglomerate of many ideologies. The liberals will push for what they see as non-discrimination of the childless, and they emphasize how these conditions limit women's autonomy, e.g. if you divorce, you have to pay back those credits, same as if you don't end up having the children you "promised" in order to access those funds (unless you get a doctor's paper about infertility - adoption is also accepted), you can always find some sympathetic stories about this. The center-right part of Tisza is probably satisfied with the programs. The less-talked-about undercurrent of the debate is how to target functioning families instead of mostly Roma people who will have many children for the welfare money and then live in terrible conditions. Orbán did it by framing most of the programs as tax cuts or as credit where you had to prove employment, no criminal record etc. as conditions, as opposed to simple welfare for the number of kids. The left typically criticises this as discriminatory against the poor and the Roma, and as helping only the already relatively well-to-do middle class.
So far this is in the program of the new governing party:
By 2035, we will halt population decline, and we will set the goal that from 2050 onward, Hungary’s population will once again grow above ten million.
- To stop and reverse population decline, we are preparing a comprehensive program that will encourage Hungarians living and working abroad to return home, improve the health status of our citizens and increase life expectancy, while also encouraging childbearing.
- The main components of the detailed program aimed at achieving a demographic turnaround are:
- supporting the return of 200,000 Hungarians living abroad through the “Your Homeland Awaits!” program;
- increasing life expectancy at birth to 80 years;
- significantly increasing the number of births by expanding family support measures, improving the healthcare and education systems, and ensuring better access to fertility treatments.
- The details of the program elements will be elaborated in the policy areas of economic development, healthcare, family policy, and women’s equal opportunities.
This doesn't seem very effective. The 200k Hungarians working in Western Europe won't turn things around in a country of 9.5m for sure. Increasing life expectancy will make the pensions system even more strained. Healthcare and education aren't really the things holding back people from having kids. And as we see in Scandinavia, more women's equality, even if good for other reasons, certainly isn't a measure that contributes to increased fertility, so it doesn't make sense to list in this section.
My prediction is that Hungary will inevitably converge and keep with Western Europe in these macro trends, because it's no longer isolated like under communism. Hungarians are tapped into the same memes, cultural products like movies and music and messaging as the rest of Europe. It's the same social media trends, young people know English, travel more often, take exchange semesters abroad etc. You can't have your little oasis that would work on an entirely different basis.
SpringFish
9d ago
I'm not in favor of this and it's my outsider perspective trying to make sense of what their honest self-conception may be. As I understand, a lot of postmodern public-space art and architecture was designed to be ugly for this purpose. To deny normalness, to make people face the very non-normal guilty nature of western civilization. To awaken them to the crimes of the previous way of things, and to signify a discontinuity etc. And I'm likening this to a more general pattern where the elite tries to guide and educate the people.
"to spark the activist fire in their hearts" (presumably against the elites) borders on parody.
It's one type of elite against another. The revolutionary leftist elite who have risen to the top of the prestige in academia and art and institutions etc. against the elite that embodies the patriarchy, oppression of minorities and capitalist exploitation.
My point was that what the revolutionary elite is doing is not all that different from classical elites at least in this high level analysis. Neither is about some kind of authentic majoritarian voice of the average people (they call catering to the base nature of the masses populism). Critical theorists have the concept of "false consciousness" that is a jolly joker to explain away any "wrong" opinion of the masses. "If only they were more educated, they would not wish it."
SpringFish
9d ago
Right, the question is, what's the role of the elite towards the masses? Should they simply satisfy all their desires, or should they try to shape them and educate them and "raise them" like a parent raises a child? The classic liberal/libertarian democratic view would be that the "masses" consist of knowledgeable units of citizens who have well-thought out positions and beliefs and attitudes and they should be able to exert this authentic will and the "elites" should just be administrative managers who make this will manifest. The more classical, traditional way is that the elite should help civilize the masses, moderate their excesses, keep them in check, set them good examples and bring out the better side of them. Even if your kid just wants to eat candy and not go to bed, you know better and don't entertain all their wishes.
Of course they don't want to express it this way, but performatively it's the best explanation.
SpringFish
9d ago
Actually, I have to defend the lifestyle of a community of young devout Catholics over the lifestyle of a commune of young art students, because both are in communion with their respective traditions. Do you have any doubt which one would have behaviors more conducive to wellbeing? I don’t think I would be able to find a clearer divide between people who are halfways to inner hell and people who are at least a little bit close to human felicity.
Not sure if this should be the criterion though. If the art students are correctly disillusioned about seeing reality as it is, and the Catholics are just placated and blindfolded to the injustices and whatnot.. Just trying to be devil's advocate. Monks self-flagellating and extreme ascetism also doesn't seem to be the most wholesome and conducive to well-being, but it's also derived from the same source.
SpringFish
9d ago
but I certainly do believe that most people think the mural in Toronto's Union Station is ugly.
Okay, but beauty was never the goal of it, it's not failing at being beautiful, it's just playing a different game entirely. And the posted picture is the most ugly part, the rest are somewhat more colorful. You can read about it here: https://stuartreid.ca/zones-of-immersion
The expression of psyche in public space can give public art a purpose greater than spectacle or decoration. This work presents the unvarnished witnessing of our human dwelling – which speaks of our collective separateness. (I feel a kinship here with Daumier’s Third Class Carriage, and Henry Moore’s wartime subway drawings). The unwritten code of the subway gaze, which says ‘look down/look away’, is challenged as we see ourselves in the work, through drawings and reflections. This window into our contemporary isolation offers faces and body language, blurred and revealed poetic writings from my journal entries, and rhythms of colour that punctuate the ribboned expanse.
Making a space pretty, like putting up some nice flowers, is kind of pedestrian and kitschy for the in-crowd. They want to make a statement about the grim reality of having to take the subway day after day in this daily grind. A social statement, a critique of society. The purpose was never to brighten people's day. It's to draw their attention to the grim reality and I guess to spark the activist fire in their hearts or something?
SpringFish
9d ago
But already this narrative assumes that artists have to be these geniuses who invent something new all the time, or that there is a specific task to be solved (e.g. to make the most realistic perspective- and color-accurate depiction of the thing as if looking through a rectangular window). In many cultures art was not so artist-as-superstar-genius-centered, but more about repeating the motifs of the culture, establishing a connection with their tribal ancients etc. Ancient Egypt managed to keep a more-or-less constant art style (I'm sure this makes the egyptologist cringe, but change was certainly much slower). In fact, it's a cultural value question whether individual-based innovation is placed above integrating into and expressing one's community tradition. It's similar with writings and stories, which were in older times not so connected to specific authors and would rather float around and have different versions and variations, quite unlike today's intellectual property ideas or ideas around plagiarism.
SpringFish
9d ago
I don't think the elitism was so different in earlier centuries. It was still elites trying to impress elites. They didn't ask for the opinions of the serfs and peasants whether they like the Baroque style better than the Renaissance style, or whether Gothic is an improvement over Romanesque. It just so happens that the metagame was at a place where making stuff beautiful was the right costly signal to use. But it was still about whatever is hot right now in Italy and other fancy trendsetting places, so commissioning similar stuff in your town meant being worldly and connected and a proper insider. Now, with machines and easy manufacturing, the meta has moved to a sophisticated understanding of nuance and implications and appreciating non-obvious context, which can mark you as being in the conversation.
Regular people did their own folk art in parallel to this, which got brought into the mainstream with Romanticism but the taste of the average nobody was never seen as all that important.
SpringFish
9d ago
It's an old tradition in Christianity to make people face the off-putting and shocking. Initially it was scandalous to depict Christ on the cross and his passion, but over time it became integrated and accepted and in a way sanitized and defanged. One could also say, and indeed Nietzsche's critique is something like this, that the crucifix is ugly and the solemn hymns about blood and so one are also unworthy, and a good strong civilization with an inner vitality should only show strong glorious victories and victors and sing self-celebratory songs that uplift people to move forward to even more winning.
I'm not sure that Angelus Novus is intended to "demoralize", but even those things that are intended so are understood by their creators to actually point at some deeper morality. (I'm sure there are also some that are simply perverted and enjoy the destruction of all that is good and want everything to rot and decay and die and suffer and squirm and so on - but I don't think the entire art world was like this). Instead they saw their role as warning society and awakening in them a desire for change and to realize that what they were sold previously, packaged in superficial beauty, was in fact rotten and corrupt in the core, that ornament and beauty was used to hide crimes and oppression. These kinds of impulses are not unprecedented and they are similar to iconoclasm (whether the Protestant Christian or the Muslim kind) and other cases of new movements destroying the icons and totems of the old one, which they deem broken and false prophecy packaged in deceptively appealing packaging.
For one or another reason, around the turn of the century artists got saturated with all the straightforward beauty, and they longed for something fresh and not stale. The old aesthetic values felt disconnected from the modern world, dishonest even, just an anachronistic show. Instead they looked for motifs from other cultures, from the east in Art Nouveau, or from other untainted sources, such as several then-rediscovered ancient cultures, or from natural childish innocent instinct. This is also connected to accurate representation being devalued due to photography. In Angelus Novus I mainly see this celebration of childish innocence and clumsiness and honesty, as well as an echo of cave paintings or other primitive art from non-Western cultures, along the lines of Le Taureau by Picasso.
You can't get around the fact that to defend the moral authority of the pictures you linked as positive examples, you have to defend the actions of the Catholic Church. This is not an impossible task. But you have to actually do it. You can't shortcut to it by saying that the paintings look better aesthetically, hence they should be the moral examples. What exactly is this part: "his life could change forever — he would be more courageous, more moral, more humble"? This is where the crux of the thing lies. Go on with social reality and values as it was in the late 1800s? You can defend that. But you have to actually do it.
That part is describing his young self's thoughts and a naive somewhat autistic nerd would indeed find that a much more understandable and good world, where things worked that way. A human has certain sense inputs, like vision, which is like pixels in some arrangement, and hearing, and taste, and these combine in the brain and they give pleasure or sometimes pain if it's like a sharp object poking at your skin. You want the inputs that create the pleasure type of sensation, and the goal of humanity is to bring about such sensations. So we have to experimentally ascertain which kinds of inputs give which kinds of sensations and then do more of the good type. For this, we have to isolate the effect of the thing itself, so we don't have noise from other aspects, so we can purely classify and score each individual type of input and then we know what is good and what is bad. It's an impulse to catalog things, like understanding all the herbs and mushrooms and fruits of the forest to know which one is good and which ones is bad. Experiences and tastes and visual qualities are similarly somehow out there, for us to pluck and test, and to use to bring about more pleasure.
If your brain doesn't tick this way, this may sound totally alien, but the more extreme thing-oriented engineer type nerd would find this more comfortable and clean for answering the question "what do people want? what makes them tick?", than the mess that humanity actually works like, the mess and mystery and contradictions that are appreciated and enjoyed by people-oriented people. But obviously the above is exaggerated for effect, I'm not saying that such people are incapable of understanding social realities, and indeed Scott also has grown out that view. Grappling with these things has brought about the concept of "type 2 fun" in this community, but it's still grappling with these ideas of "do you truly like X, or do you just pretend for status reasons", when these are much more inseparably blended in the socially attuned, normal person's mind. Because the type of "input" that humans really crave is the one that validates their status/identity/value within the community/society, a combination of being liked/loved/respected/feared or even just stably attached to such people.
SpringFish
9d ago
I think the rise of takeout and online orders from regular restaurants via Wolt and Foodora indicates that many people are fine with just the food part. As people are getting increasingly atomized, at least the food part stays constant and you don't have to sit together with a bunch of people who happened not to cancel last minute this time, but are staring at their phones anyway. Instead, you can eat the food at home and not pretend, and watch something more engaging than the boring stories your acquaintances would relay.
Of course this is exaggerated, but I think the reason that many see the food as the main thing of a restaurant visit is related to the erosion of communities. And for sure, for many people it's really just about practicality. American dining is anyway about rushing the customer out the door once the food is off the plate. So it's not hard to see that they would understand the purpose being the food.
SpringFish
9d ago
It's a good summary and he gets it much better than his previous self but not completely. He writes on early Scott:
So: young Scott was deeply disappointed to learn how restaurant critics worked.
In his imagination, a critic’s assistant would deliver dishes to her house, so she wouldn’t know which restaurant it came from. Otherwise, the critic might let her preconceptions influence her judgment, and a restaurant’s reputation would become self-reinforcing. She would eat blindfolded (or be spoon-fed?) so the food’s appearance couldn’t distort her judgment either. A typical tasting would intersperse food from dozens of different restaurants, with each dish tried multiple times (obviously the critic wouldn’t know it was the same dish) to ensure that the ratings were consistent. Any critic whose ratings were unreliable - two blind tastings of the same dish were no more likely to correlate than tastings of two different dishes - would be laughed out of the business.
Imagine how I felt when I actually read restaurant criticism. It was all stuff like “Oh, the ambience here is very nice; I had a great conversation with the chef who told me about how his childhood in Sardinia motivated new takes on traditional dishes.” How can you be sure the chef’s personable manner isn’t influencing your impression of the food?! Haven’t you ever heard of the Pepsi Paradox in psychology? Aaargh!
This is probably how many on the autism spectrum see things, without intuiting the interpersonal aspects. You have atomized, mostly fungible human individuals, and to decide whether a thing is good or bad, you administer the thing to the human and see if he or she gains utilions. And utilions are a kind of irreducible thing like qualia, a kind of pleasure, the opposite of pain. If utilions go up, thing is good, otherwise bad. It's a clean, legible, well understandable rule, and can serve as a basis for an engineering mindset to work on. As a kid, this is also how I would have wanted the world to work.
Mature Scott comes around to see social context etc. as being also relevant but still sees it as a bit of a sham.
But in listening to a bunch of Jonathan Pageau recently, I've come around to seeing art as serving community orientation. Scott should recognize this too, it's a kind of rallying point, defining Schelling points and common knowledge, a coordination mechanism. What is our community going through currently? What happened with recent generations and what are our aspirations for the next generation, and for the next next and then for beyond? What kind of picture do we want to paint of ourselves and how we relate to each other, the past, our neighbors, our future etc? What is good and what do people around me look up to with reverence? What do they doubt and look down upon as stupid or evil or nonsensical or pointless? Art is functional, it tells concrete stories, delivers concrete messages. Beauty that is stripped of all this is quite pedestrian. Symmetry, nice color combinations, intricate patterns here and there, balanced proportions etc and you're good to go. Just like a delicious taste is in fact not super hard to achieve, you need fat, salt and sugar in reasonable proportions and it will taste good from a tastebud perspective. Food that tastes good indicates caloric density and that we are in good times, the hunt was good, we are doing well in life.
Beauty in art, architecture etc has a similar role, it says that things are well-kept, in order, people have extra time to spare for beautifying things beyond just keeping things afloat. Its opposite, decay and trash shows that people around you don't give a fuck or there are hostilities going on where people deface the common living space etc. Or a clean but gray, flat, unbeautified space also communicates something, that there is no extra effort spent on this, there are tasks to be done, no time to wander, to look beyond the immediate task you were given, it's all about efficiency etc.
Art has both a message and some weight backing it. It can't be cheap, because for me to take your message seriously, a proof of cost helps to see you're truly standing behind it and are willing to expend time, effort and money to express it. The costly signal is not sufficient, but certainly a component. This is in part why ornaments or fancy clothes or colorful dresses are not as impressive today, it's just too cheap to produce that appearance. It's like, in my grandmother's time, having a table full of meals that included meat was a big deal and a central point around holidays, like Christmas or Easter, because it couldn't be taken for granted. It's excess and waste in a sense, just like ornaments, but they orient people to a shared vision and goal.
Back to beauty: When things are beautiful, you'll feel things are on a good track. But what if the zeitgeist is all about how things are not on a good track? The 20th century artists wanted to explicitly wake people up from their slumber, so they don't think that everything is fine. To upset and shake people by the shoulders. The second industrial revolution, then the industrial-scale meat grinder of WWI, then the Holocaust. They wanted to express that things are very much not normal, and the man on the street should not be seeing some idyllic space, where he can just go about his day. Everything about the old order was tainted in their minds. You may say that it's not true, a lot of things from the old times is valuable and worth preserving, but this becomes a more substantial discussion about history, the good, how people should live, what the events of the 20th century mean for humankind etc.
That's the steelman. Of course, like anytime, there will be posers and imitators and indeed making something ugly and repellent needs much less effort and skill than making something beautiful, so you end up with a race to the bottom and a bunch or ridiculous bullshit.
My point is that it's a much better discussion if you address the actual reasons that those ugly artworks got made. Unpack your view on the trajectory of Western civilization, what is to be preserved and what is to be tossed aside, what was a dead end and what was an eternally valid compass? Or at least say that you don't care about history or what people did generations ago, and you just want to be entertained and pleased, but then don't be surprised when the world becomes an algorithmic tiktok feed of VR brainrot that tickles people's brains just the right way to make it feel mildly engaging and in a kind of homeostasis.
SpringFish
10d ago
You're comparing this to your relationship, but when a guy wants this kind of test, probably it's not the kind of relationship that you likely have.
SpringFish
10d ago
I'm assuming a setup where the wife has a brief time of cheating on her husband and gets pregnant, then the cheating guy is gone, and the wife is silent and wants the husband to raise the family. It's not very satisfactory on moral grounds but probably the answer is that the biological father is typically more of a swindler type who may already be far away and has a personality and attitude that makes collecting stuff from him a bigger hassle. Meanwhile the other guy, who married the woman, is probably a more prosocial guy, who settled properly, has more job stability, follows rules more and is just easier to extract money from.
I'd say it's more in terms of the strain on the pension system, the lack of enough nurses for old people etc. It's more framed as the aging society, and it's the justification for more immigration and there is also hope that robots will help in elderly care. The framing is not really about ending up with too few ethnically [German/French/Swedish/...] people in the long run, but the medium-term practicalities of the age pyramid imbalance. If you frame it in those ethnic terms, it's fringe and a no-no in real life in Western Europe too.
More options
Context Copy link