My day with Brian Eno

Posted on 26 January 2025 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

Many years ago, when my first husband and I were getting to know each other, he made me four long “mix tapes,” cassettes of the music he wanted me to know about. My very favorite of all the works he shared with me was “St. Elmo’s Fire,” by Brian Eno. Here it is:

So guess what I did on Friday? I experienced “24 Hours of Eno”! There’s a new film that’s a documentary biography of Brian Eno, which has been available in theaters but on a very limited basis. When it was here in town it was for one night only, which sold out quickly, and an evening in a fully packed movie theater is no longer my idea of fun, so I signed up for learning when it would be available live-streamed. Friday was the day, billed as “24 Hours of Eno.”

The event included five showings of the movie Eno, along with a prerecorded conversation between the producer/director Gary Hustwit and Brian Eno, and a prerecorded panel discussion between Hustwit and four other members of the film crew. (There was also a fair amount of ambient music as filler, which gave me time to step back and think about what I was seeing, take a walk, and you know, eat dinner and all that.)

The point to the multiple showings, and much of the excitement about the event, was that this film is the first serious example of what they’re calling generative film-making. Each viewing is a different version! I read somewhere that there are more than 200,000 possible versions. In practice, the beginning and ending scenes are the same, as well as some common section anchors. During the panel discussion Gary Hustwit said that the versions are about 30% the same overall, and about 70% different. Version 4.120 started too early in the day for me; I watched versions 4.121, 4.122, 4.123, and the beginning of 4.124.

(In practice, at least for adjacently numbered versions like that, I was experiencing much more than 30% overlap. It felt like 4.122 only had maybe 40-50% new material compared with 4.121, and then for 4.123 (which strongly resembled 4.121), it felt like only 10% was new, so with 4.124 I was definitely getting diminishing returns, and as this version started at 3 a.m., I concluded I would be happier instead getting ready for bed.)

Anyway, back to the subject of the films. Like many British musicians of the 1960s and 1970s, Brian Eno (who is now 76) had been an art school student who discovered that there was very little going on in the world of painting, but that music had become a fertile ground for creativity, so that’s where they went. Eno, in particular, appears to think of himself much more as an artist than a musician. His musical career began as a member of the band Roxy Music, after which he had three conventionally structured solo albums (and by “conventionally structured,” I mean he was creating songs and organizing them together for publication as an album). My favorite of his songs was on one of these albums, Another Green World, and all three albums are simply wonderful.

After that, his career shifted. He began creating what he calls “ambient music,” music to be playing in the background while another activity is going on, perhaps to create a space for deeper focusing on that primary activity, and sometimes (as in the case of Ambient 1: Music for Airports) to put the listener into a more transcendent frame of mind without necessarily being aware of it. Meanwhile, he started working with other recording artists as a producer – U2, David Bowie, Talking Heads, Devo, and others. David Bowie described his contributions as “philosophical” – it seems that Eno’s focus was more on expanding the artists’ thinking about what they were doing and using wordplay and other techniques to help them make new connections and increase their creativity.

From watching the film, I can say that Brian Eno is an extraordinarily thoughtful person. He thinks – a lot. He’s kept diaries of much of it, stacks and stacks of them. He is very much aware of his creative process, and it looks like he has a lot of fun waking up and starting every day as an artist. He was saying so many thought-provoking things, too, that I was greatly enjoying my “24 Hours” of immersion in his way(s) of life and the insights he was sharing.

One point that kept coming across was the idea of all of human self-expression as art – that is, in contrast to the narrow understanding of art as something we go find in a museum or concert hall, this is the broader understanding of art as something everyone does, much or all of the time. But while it seems quite possible that Brian Eno is so thoughtful that at this point his ethical life is foundational to everything he does – he’s clearly concerned about politics and the planet – this overall ethical orientation is not something the rest of us necessarily share.

When he was talking about self-expression as art, for example, I started thinking about all of those January 6 protesters who had received presidential pardons this week. For some of them – like that guy known as the QAnon Shaman – their “visit” to the Capitol Building could definitely qualify as artistic self-expression. And that’s not to say that because it’s art it’s not also criminal. Some of the most notorious criminals treated their crime sprees as art projects.

This all got me thinking, then, about the ethics of art. I’d love to read more about it.

A simple example is consent. When we go to a theater to see a movie we’ve already heard all about, or to a concert hall to hear a performance of specific works, we are obviously giving informed consent to experiencing works of art. That’s at one end of a spectrum. If we’re just going about our day, and some loud and obnoxious art-thing suddenly appears in our faces, that’s obviously a lower level of consent, and if the art actually harms us, as in a work of terrorism, that’s at the far negative end of the consent spectrum. But we can’t always consent, because we share public space. If I decide to walk around downtown wearing a bizarre combination of colors with a plastic flower arrangement on top of my head, I’d be inflicting my self-expression fairly harmlessly on the other people downtown, but they wouldn’t really be justified in telling me to stop.

Much of the point of art is to get us to question our assumptions, so art will often be transgressive – breaking boundaries, showing us other possibilities.

On the other hand, much of the point of art is for us to lose our individuality, temporarily, in a greater whole – the Eno film includes the example of singing as a group, but most other group activities also qualify. We get caught up in belonging to the group and surrender our “selves” to the greater whole. Here the importance of ethics is obvious, because we cannot necessarily trust that the group dynamics will lead to outcomes we would choose if we could step back and think about them clearly.

In the film, art is almost always for good. It’s creative, intriguing, thought-provoking. There’s a moment, though, where they show Pete Townsend of The Who smashing his guitar on stage. In a voiceover, Eno mentions someone they’d learned about in art school, whose work suggested the desirability of destruction as an artistic act. Looking it up, I think it was Gustav Metzger. Clearly I’ll want to read more about that. What are the limits? Is it like irony, which is far more effective as a criticism than when it’s central to a program? Historically, when leaders start breaking their country’s systems, people suffer. A lot. I’m thinking of Chairman Mao’s program to “Smash the Four Olds” (China’s old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits), but other examples may come readily to mind for you. (!!!)

(This example showed me a potential down-side of generative film-making – the ways it complicates scholarly citation. When I want to say, “Eno said…” I can cite which version of the film I was seeing, if I happen to know it, but I can’t go back and verify it, and unless the full script is published somewhere, no one else beside the filmmakers can verify it either.)

In conclusion, I can strongly recommend the idea of immersing yourself for 24 hours in a work of art that gives you new ways of thinking about things, especially if you can do it in the company of a brilliant artist like Brian Eno. But as a cautionary note, I’d like to reiterate that much of the value of the experience is in the reflection – thinking through the implications and how it fits with your own values – rather than total immersion, where you’re giving up your own perspective to adopt someone else’s. A work like Eno supports the former, and in a world where we’re being encouraged to fall in line politically as part of our new leader’s personal art project, we need all the help we can get in clarifying where we ourselves stand.

Image source: https://floodmagazine.com/184622/24-hours-of-brian-eno-livestream-announce/

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Trump as Trickster

Posted on 6 January 2025 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

Today I read Carl Jung’s essay “On the psychology of the Trickster-figure,” which was published in his book, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. My goal was to see what good it might do us to have Donald Trump as president, beyond the value he’s already given to the millions of voters who used their ballots to express their frustration with the Biden administration.

A trickster, as you probably already know, is someone who flagrantly violates all sorts of rules and expectations, because it’s in their nature or because they can get away with it or because it’s fun. As Jung puts it, “Although he is not really evil, he does the most atrocious things from sheer unconsciousness and unrelatedness.”

In gaming alignment terms, this person is “chaotic neutral,” with an emphasis on “chaotic.” He doesn’t care about consequences (“sheer unconsciousness”) and doesn’t have much empathy (“unrelatedness”). Usually this person is mythological or fictional, like Loki or Coyote or Bugs Bunny. You and I, however, get to see one on TV pretty much every day, if we look for him.

From wacky ideas like adding Canada and Greenland to the United States to his anti-constitutional approach toward making cabinet appointments to his alarming attacks on our basic institutions, Trump is very much a Trickster.

When Trump spent that Pennsylvania rally dancing to his campaign soundtrack, many commentators saw it as evidence of his cognitive decline. That was one possibility, but it could also have been just, whatever, he felt like dancing, so he did. If the rules don’t apply to you, why not revel in it?

(Honestly, I’d rather have a leader who spends his campaign rallies goofing off than let him test his theory that he could get away with shooting someone in downtown New York City.)

For his most devoted followers, Trump’s outrageousness is a big plus. In today’s slang, “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.” They want him to be the powerful outsider who overthrows the system and saves them from its tyranny. And this was something I learned from Jung today – the Trickster is often expected to take on the role of “savior.” He’s not bound by the rules, so (in theory) he can cut right to the heart of problems and fix them.

However, the presidency of the world’s most powerful democracy is an odd place to find a Trickster. As Fareed Zakaria says in The Age of Revolutions, “… democracy is about rules, not outcomes.” It’s jarring, if not outright worrisome, to put the care of our most precious institution into the hands of someone who doesn’t value it – indeed, who consistently violates its basic premise, that rules matter.

And yet, Donald Trump has twice been elected President.

Part of it probably comes down to education. The more we everyday citizens know about the federal government in all its complicated nuances, the more we understand how much we actually rely on its services. I’m thinking back to the people who were vigorously anti-Obamacare but insistent on keeping their ACA coverage – not realizing that the two are identical.

For many Trump voters, though, the federal government isn’t the people who make sure we get our health insurance, our tax refunds, our disability benefits, our national parks, our safe drugs and clean air and clean water and clean food supply. Instead, it’s some vague and apparently menacing “Deep State.” Our distress at the disruption of the government is vivid and meaningful, whereas for many of them, it’s “shaking things up,” which could be worth it.

As Arthur Koestler wrote, “Habits are the indispensable core of stability and ordered behavior,” and “the defeat of habit by originality” is “an act of liberation.” For Trump fans, the same may apply to social conventions and even laws.

Another aspect of the Trickster is that even though rules don’t apply to them, that doesn’t mean the rules are gone – it just means the Trickster is the exception. When Biden pardons his son, that’s bad. When Trump pardons the members of his family who have done things arguably worse than Hunter Biden, that’s just Trump.

And now we’re seeing others who want in on this flouting of rules, like the tech bros signing up as Trump fans. If you’re facing legal challenges, like Elon Musk, maybe the easiest way to disregard regulations is to disband or defund the agency in charge of seeing they get carried out? Trump was openly courting the angry young dudes who apparently see themselves as entitled billionaire wannabes. Hey, let’s all be bigger than the law!

On the other hand, as Jung tells us, part of the social value of having a Trickster in our midst is that “it is the best and most successful method of keeping the shadow figure conscious and subjecting it to conscious criticism.” Every time we notice Trump violating something we value, and we talk about it, our values are reinforced. If we cannot take for granted our sense of underlying order, then its eventual restoration will feel all the more hard-won.

Usually, however, the Trickster figure is someone on the margins, not the one at the center of things. Even if the majority of voters get fed up with him – assuming their news sources let them know what he’s doing – the complicating factor is that Trump has been normalizing obnoxiousness.

To the extent that Trump is a role model for American citizens, it may take a lot of work to bring back graciousness, decency, and kindness – traits that even their most severe critics would still associate with presidents like Reagan and the Bushes.

The next four years are surely going to be “interesting.”

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Another “we” versus “me” election

Posted on 9 November 2024 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

To say this has been a stressful week for many Americans is an understatement. Here’s my attempt to explain what happened, and since this is a place where I talk about our “meta-narratives,” that’s how we’re going to look at the 2024 Presidential election.

A meta-narrative is (more or less) a story about a group – who’s in the group, where we’re headed, what’s happened in the past and might happen next. It’s not a story about particular people and events, but a broader framework for understanding a society, over time. Meta-narratives are powerful motivators, and this time both candidates offered us relatively strong ones.

Former President Donald Trump campaigned with the same meta-narrative he’s been using all along, the need to make America “great again.” The simple storyline is that America used to be great, it’s messed up now, but we can fix it, get it back on track – in other words, a Restoration.

Some Restoration meta-narratives take a big sweeping look at their people’s history, noting that centuries ago they were free and proud, but now they’re part of someone else’s empire, and they want to get back to their earlier glory. Ireland is a good example of that, with its centuries of British rule, and so is Poland, which at one point was divided up entirely by other countries. These nationalist movements can lead to revolutions or terrorism, if peaceful methods don’t do the job.

Other Restoration meta-narratives are less dramatic, and more like a course correction. Trump is probably somewhere in the middle, with his horror stories about too many immigrants changing the American way of life.

Vice President Kamala Harris gave us a Crossroads meta-narrative. America is at a turning point. Do we want to align ourselves with what America stands for in terms of basic principles – the rule of law, orderly transitions, human rights? Or do we want to let Trump continue to violate these basic principles, as he has in the past and explicitly says he intends to do in the future? This powerful meta-narrative not only brought together Democrats from a wide variety of interest groups but also included numerous famous Republican politicians and military leaders.

One or the other of these meta-narratives resonated strongly with much of the American public. If you believed in MAGA or the existential threat to democracy, you were joining a powerful group with many like-minded Americans. But, just like in many earlier elections, many voters were quite reasonably focusing on their own personal lives.

As it happens, the vast majority of U.S. presidential elections are determined by how people feel about economic factors. And this time, for many people the first thing that came to mind is that prices are high, especially for food – an issue that most of us face every time we visit the supermarket. It doesn’t matter that the president has very little control over things like that, that’s still what people think about when deciding how to vote.

Trump has campaigned on the idea that he can fix all of these problems. Meanwhile, Harris did not correct the impression that the Biden administration has been responsible for the high food prices – although she and Biden could have tried harder to educate the public, certainly.

Why are food prices so much higher than they were five years ago? Remember that international pandemic that messed up supply chains, and gave us all those empty supermarket shelves? That’s why food prices went up.

Now, some prices can go back down again, depending on the circumstances. The price of a house, or a gallon of gasoline, or an airline flight across the country – they all go up and down, depending on supply and demand. Food prices… not so much. Once the price of breakfast cereal or toilet paper goes up, it stays up.

The thing is, Biden’s administration did extremely well with the economy. Check out this graph of the Dow Jones Industrial Average – Trump did well, but Biden’s has been the highest ever.

After Biden took office, unemployment dropped dramatically, and his administration pretty much stopped inflation. However, when an economist says they’ve “stopped inflation,” that just means that prices aren’t continuing to rise like they had been. But when an everyday American hears that Biden “stopped inflation,” they might think it’s a lie because… prices are still high! It would have been better if Biden and his team had taken the time to explain this, in basic terms, until it sunk in, so everyone could know what they were talking about.

As political scientist Philip Converse put it back in 1962: “Not only is the electorate as a whole quite uninformed, but it is the least informed members within the electorate who seem to hold the critical balance of power, in the sense that alternations in the governing party depend disproportionately on shifts in their sentiment.”

Of course, the Harris campaign did address economic issues. It’s shameful that the United States still has a $4.25 minimum wage, for instance. We need more affordable housing, we need more high-paying jobs – but she knows that and had plans. Oh well.

Besides grocery prices, another time that people might be focused on “me” instead of the group that’s part of the MAGA and “Save Democracy” storylines is when they’re thinking – quite rationally – about their own civil rights. Many women of childbearing age are now very concerned about their reproductive health. Trans people are highly stressed about their ability to thrive in modern America, especially if they live in “red” states.

All of these issues – economic well-being and civil rights – are issues that affect individuals deeply. It’s definitely desirable to think about “me” as well as “we.” Unfortunately, though, sometimes it means taking an emotional short-cut to decision-making: Throw out the current administration if Cheerios cost too much.

Political ads and slogans are often directed toward us as individuals rather than as group members. Hillary Clinton’s team drafted dozens of slogans, and not one of them appealed to voters as members of a group.

Some slogans are more ambiguous as to whether they’re pointed at individuals or evoking meta-narratives, like the 1920s ad telling Americans that the Republican presidents had put “a chicken in every pot.” In theory, that could be a meta-narrative, if it’s interpreted as “America is a land where we can now all afford chicken for dinner, woo hoo!” but more often it’s probably just an individual-level, “mm chicken, that would be nice.”

(And incidentally, it’s a fine thing that a hundred years later, the vast majority of us can eat chicken whenever we want, if that’s something we’re into.)

So, sure, a politician might be content with appealing to us as individuals, but there’s a special energy that comes from creating a group with something important they care about. Meta-narratives create a group and give that group energy.

This time, we had two campaigns organized around meta-narratives, and energized by them – one for MAGA and one for democracy and the democratic process. Then we had a whole lot of voters who didn’t resonate with either of those particularly, but who did care very much about their individual concerns – buying groceries and other economic issues, or civil rights.

And in each of those two cases, their individual concerns aligned very closely with one of the two candidates. If you’re concerned about costs, Trump’s grandiose “I’ll fix everything and make it like it used to be when times were good!” would appeal, and if you’re concerned about your rights, Harris was right on target.

As it works out, Trump literally cannot lower the price of groceries, and the ideas he’s floated would drive some of them up even higher. Trump’s new voters, the ones motivated by their household budgets, will NOT be happy with him.

Meanwhile, Harris has not only appealed to individuals, she’s also energized a group, and that energy will carry on into the future. Already, governors in many of the “blue” states are taking action to protect civil rights – and the economy and the environment – in their states. Others are using their leftover energy from their feelings about the election to follow the advice Harris suggested in her concession speech:

“This is a time to organize, to mobilize, and to stay engaged for the sake of freedom and justice and the future that we all know we can build together. … Let us fill the sky with the light of a brilliant, brilliant billion of stars. The light, the light of optimism, of faith, of truth and service.”

It’s time to get to work.

Image credits:

Stars: kjpargeter on Freepik (cropped)
Dow Jones Industrial Average graph: https://www.macrotrends.net/1358/dow-jones-industrial-average-last-10-years (cropped and labeled)

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The “f” word

Posted on 6 November 2024 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

On October 23, Anderson Cooper asked Vice President Harris whether she considered Trump a fascist, and she said, “Yes, I do.” She later alluded to Trump as someone who “admires dictators and is a fascist.”

Today, the New York Times columnist Bret Stephens says that Kamala shouldn’t have called Trump a fascist because it makes his supporters feel like they’re being called fascists too.

Did that make a difference? I don’t know. But here’s what she could have said:

“I don’t know if Trump’s a fascist – I cannot read into his heart and mind. However, I can tell you one thing with confidence: He talks like a man who loves violence.

“When Trump refers to people in our country – our fellow human beings – as vermin and sub-human animals, he’s following a long tradition of leaders using language to encourage or excuse mass violence against those people. Some of them have been fascists, like Hitler, who referred to an important but vulnerable minority group in his country as maggots, trash, germs, garbage, and poison. Others have used this kind of language to support genocide or ethnic cleansing, like the Hutu people of Rwanda who referred to their Tutsi neighbors as cockroaches. Stalin, too, called some of his people swine, bloodsuckers, insects, and enemies. Stalin was evil in many ways, but he was not a fascist.

“Is Trump talking like this because he wants our permission for a campaign of violence? Or is it just because he knows that language like that gets people riled up?

“I don’t know whether Trump is a fascist. People we all trust, military leaders who have spent much more time with him than I have, have said so. The alternative is that he’s using talk like this to manipulate you and your emotions. He wants to flip the “fear and righteous anger” switch in your brain and make you vote for him. Are you okay with being used like that?”

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Inside or outside the box?

Posted on 31 October 2024 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

Getting dressed for Halloween is a challenge, when one hasn’t planned in advance. I’d been thinking of revisiting my identity as Cecil Featherstone, Professor of Morbid Poetry, who spends the day reciting the various death-themed poems I memorized as a teen, but I didn’t get around to buying a tweed jacket. Instead, I ended up with cats’ ears plus my “I Like to Think Inside the Box” t-shirt.

And that brings me to my topic for today, that “box.” No, not the coffin from my t-shirt, but that metaphorical box that we try to transcend when we’re being creative – our routines, habits, ordinary and expected ways of doing things and seeing the world.

I was recently reading a very interesting 1964 book by Arthur Koestler: The Act of Creation. Koestler sees intriguing similarities between humor, scientific discovery, and art. With humor, there’s a clash between the rules governing two contexts – we value “thinking outside the box” but skeletons belong inside their “boxes.”

Science (at least the new discoveries part) and art also involve two contexts. We start by mastering the usual rules and expectations for our field, and then – typically inspired by a second context – we may get new insights. Astronomy was limited by geometry for a very long time, until Kepler realized that physics, like the laws of gravity, could teach us even more.

Pablo Picasso, considered one of the greatest artists of modern times, started by totally mastering the practices of representational art. Here’s an example. Realistic, right?

Once he had thoroughly learned all the rules and expectations of art-as-it-was, he could play with those rules to convey his understanding of a very different context:

Now Picasso is violating convention and showing us the horror of chaos – the fascist slaughter of the village of Guernica. The government of Spain had violated all the rules of supposedly civilized warfare and invited its ally, Nazi Germany, to bomb this village and teach the Spanish people not to question the government’s power.

In other words, Picasso creatively violated the rules of one context to show us what can happen when governments violate the rules in another.

Order… and chaos. In our personal lives, we need a balance. We want many things to be predictable, because it saves us time and effort and lets us better cope with things that are unpredictable. That’s why we have routines. Steve Jobs famously wore basically the same outfit every day – it saved him time and thought. I eat basically the same meals most days – it’s faster and easier. But that’s my personal choice. I’m always free to just order a pizza instead. And then with that time and energy we’ve saved, ideally we’re ready to be creative, bringing together different contexts for new insights.

When we’re thinking about the bigger picture, though, we value order. We need things to be predictable – we want our supermarket shelves to be stocked, our flights to be on time, and our government to follow the laws that our representatives have agreed to, and to work within normal channels in conventional ways. There’s already plenty of chaos – hurricanes, terrorism, war, wildfires.

One of our presidential candidates is clearly in favor of even more chaos. As Heather Cox Richardson put it yesterday, “Ending a campaign with a promise to crash a booming economy and end the Affordable Care Act, which ended insurance companies’ ability to reject people with preexisting conditions, is an unusual strategy.”

Meanwhile, we’ve got Vladimir Putin funding chaos in our information system – telling people who don’t know any better things like “Kamala is a godless heathen” and “Trump’s tariff idea won’t dramatically raise prices.”

I’ve written elsewhere about the value of small-c conservatism, expecting things to work a certain way and hoping things won’t change. Building on that, here are my points for today, the day I turned in our family’s ballots for the 2024 general election:

It is actually more small-c conservative to choose a leader who values order.

It is actually more small-c conservative to go with the party that recognizes actual risks and plans to address them proactively, like climate change. If you don’t like immigration now, just imagine what it would be like if Bangladesh, a nation of 170 million people, was submerged by water.

And above all, whether we want things to be comfortable and familiar or whether we’d rather shake things up, we need systems that give us a place for us to have our say – and that means we need leaders who respect the rule of law.

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Doomed to keep learning the same lessons?

Posted on 19 October 2024 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

So there’s this novel. I haven’t read it myself, so it wouldn’t be fair for me to identify it – but it was written by an Oregon-born author, published in 2020, became a best-seller, and won awards. Many people love it, including at least one of my friends, and others really don’t care for it, including many members of my husband’s book club, a generally fine group of people. It’s about embracing diversity, and since it’s a fantasy novel, I bet that theme gets pretty interesting.

My husband and I had a long discussion about the book this week. I was hoping he could help me see why some people might love it while others, who do value its themes, didn’t enjoy it at all.

For him, it came down to the story’s logic. The main character is great because he has all of these desirable qualities, but then he’s plunged into a situation where he has to develop these same desirable qualities, as if he didn’t already have them. Another character does likewise – starts great but then has to go through a process to become great. That’s inconsistent!

I agree, but I kept thinking about it. Now I’m wondering – and this is sheer speculation, because as I said, I haven’t read this book – if maybe the conflict is between cyclical and linear time. The people who share my husband’s complaint might prefer a linear way of experiencing the world, where cause leads to effect and these effects accumulate and grow. That’s normal and common sense, right?

In a more cyclical way of experiencing the world, however, things may be eternally true and yet need to be developed and experienced again and again. Let me give two examples that I hope will expand your sympathy toward cyclical thinking, if you’re skeptical.

When we celebrate our annual holidays, each year we touch base with old truths (the emotional heart of the holiday) in new contexts (where we are in life right now). We carry our memories of our earlier holidays with us, but we also get to do things fresh and new each time we celebrate – the new experiences and the memories resonate together. We go through cycles of experiencing “eternal truths” in new ways.

In the writings of Mircea Eliade, a Romanian historian of religions, all ancient religions worked this way, with eternal truths that new generations of people would be born into and experience. Only Judaism and its offshoots, Christianity and Islam, are more linear, where societies are building toward a future.

A second way that cyclical thinking comes in handy is when we understand that societies that haven’t experienced a particular bad outcome are less likely to heed its warning signs. With new generations, we find ourselves re-experiencing some of the same old patterns and not necessarily noticing or caring. It is an eternal truth that totalitarianism is bad, whether that’s Stalinist communism or Hitler and Mussolini’s fascism, but people who aren’t attuned to its signals may be vulnerable to its lies.

So where many of us hope that we have collectively learned to Run! Run! Run! from a man using language like “vermin” to describe people living among us, others see a tough leader standing up to problems on our behalf. It could be tempting to trust someone like that.

Over the last few months, I’ve been reading key works in a variety of fields beyond my own and finding more examples to add to my book manuscript on the ways we use language to shape public opinion. If you’d like to read more about the topic right now, though, I’d suggest the paper that Gerard Saucier and I wrote a few years ago. “Vermin” and words like it have been used to soften people up toward the idea of committing genocide.

As the philosopher George Santayana told us more than a hundred years ago, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” You can’t get more cyclical than that.

For fans of this book, then, maybe the eternal truths it celebrates are not diminished by the reminder that they may need to be relearned. For the real-world usefulness of this idea, though, let us hope that whatever lessons we collectively need to review aren’t put to too great a test this November.

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Momentary treasures

Posted on 24 August 2024 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

The first time I tried going on a walk this evening, I discovered it was starting to rain, so I went back inside for a bit. I’m glad I did, because the next time I tried, I found this:

Wow! I wished I could teleport to the neighborhood school for a better view – I knew I couldn’t possibly walk or even drive there in time. Or better yet, the western Ridgeline trailhead on Blanton Road, which looks westward toward the Coast Range, with the reservoir sparkling at its foot.

As it was, by the time I got to the school, the sky looked more like this:

Oh well. Sunsets are ephemeral wonders, although many of us try to capture them with our cameras – at least four other neighbors were doing so, just like me.

The treasures of the moment – such beauty in the world. Sometimes the event itself is transient, like a sunset, the blooming of wildflowers, a live musical performance. At other times, the event is available for quite a long time – but not forever – and it’s our own presence there that’s momentary.

Recently I was reading a book by Kenneth Burke, an expert on rhetoric and narrative, and I was surprised to learn that he was the grandfather of Harry Chapin. Remember his song, “Cat’s in the Cradle”? The song’s storyteller learns the hard way that if he doesn’t focus on the beauty right before him, he may not get a second chance.

The ephemeral is one of the main ways we can experience awe and wonder – its opposite is the vast and overwhelming. As I’ve explained elsewhere, I don’t think of awe and wonder as synonyms. “Awe” is something that grabs and focuses our attention in such a way that we can’t even think, and it’s not necessarily good. Some people (like me) love aerial fireworks, and others find them distressing.

Wonder is more delicate, it draws us in – it’s often pretty or interesting, like a rainbow. Wonder can engage our imaginations… “I wonder why…” “I wonder whether…” Many have noted that wonder can go hand in hand with scientific thinking.

I suppose we could say that awe is “Wow!” or “Whoa!” while wonder is more “Ooooh…”

When I’m enjoying the sunset, I usually focus on how great it is right at that moment, which is a positive experience, but it’s also possible to focus on the bittersweet transience of it all. It’s my understanding that that’s the classic emotional experience behind the Japanese cherry blossom festival – every falling petal reminds us that the beauty cannot last.

Another emotion associated with the ephemeral is surprise, which can definitely be fun. Yesterday’s thunderstorm covered my lawn with hail – in August! – and I rushed to the front door to see. While I was out there, though, there was a clap of thunder pretty much directly overhead, which utterly overwhelmed my ears and shook the roof of my house. My son was in the kitchen, and the two of us started cracking up with laughter.

We humans are very much attuned to noticing the unexpected. Our cats didn’t care about the thunder one bit (although a strange light can definitely excite them). I have to say they probably didn’t notice the sunset either. But I’m glad that I did.

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The problem with STAR Voting

Posted on 23 May 2024 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

I’ll admit it – when the woman stopped me outside the library a few months ago to get my signature to add “STAR Voting” to our local ballot, I was enthusiastic. STAR Voting is a system where, instead of casting your vote for one candidate, you get to rate them all. Then, for the two highest-rated candidates, a second look at the ballots sees which of those two was favored by each of the voters, and they’re the winner. It’s a system that, according to its promoters, supports “More Voter Choice – Vote Your Conscience! – Never Waste Your Vote!” Mark Frohnmayer has written up a thorough explanation in favor of STAR Voting, here.

On Mother’s Day, though, when we sat down to vote (Oregon is 100% vote-by-mail), my husband was definitely not in favor. He’s a math guy who’s experimented with lots of voting systems, and he immediately saw a problem. The advocates of STAR Voting think that people will vote with their true preferences, but they’re expecting a rather measured voter mentality – and STAR Voting favors a more extremist temperament. So I gave it some more thought.

Let’s imagine an election with three candidates. (In an election with two candidates, STAR Voting is just a more complicated version of what we’ve got right now, so we need at least three to show its flaws.) In our imaginary election, let’s suppose that the Red party has one candidate, and although the majority doesn’t want him, those who do are very enthusiastic and hate the other two.

The Blue party has two candidates, and normally the stronger candidate would get almost all of the Blue votes, but let’s suppose the weaker candidate’s fans are excited about STAR Voting and want to show their support for their candidate, assuming the stronger candidate will win in the second round.

Let’s name the Red candidate Trump, the stronger Blue candidate Biden, and the weaker Blue candidate RFK-Jr. And just to make things simple, let’s pretend we have ten voters, but of course this is all basically the same if we scale it up to an actual voting population.

Of our ten voters, there are three who are enthusiastic for Trump. They rate him as 5, and they rate Biden and RFK-Jr as 0.

We also have three RFK-Jr fans. They rate him as 5, and they rate Biden and Trump as 0. Why do they rate Biden as 0, even though they prefer him to Trump? Because they’ve got caught up in the extremist rhetoric and think a “0” is the right thing to do. (STAR Voting incentivizes trashing the opposition, as we’ll see.)

Now let’s suppose that Biden’s four supporters are taking a more measured approach. Sure, they favor Biden, but they don’t buy into extremism, so they rate him as 3. They rate the other two as 0 because they simply don’t want them.

Normally, we’d have three votes each for Trump and RFK-Jr, and four for Biden, even if the RFK-Jr fans don’t remember that they’re really Blue party members who, under the usual voting system, would typically vote for Biden too. Even without them, Biden has the most supporters, so Biden wins.

With the STAR Voting, though, we now have 15 points each for Trump and RFK-Jr (since they each have three people scoring them as “5”), and 12 points for Biden (four people scoring him as “3”). Only Trump and RFK-Jr go on to the second round, and they’re tied (the downside to having only 10 voters).

But suppose one of those measured-temperament Biden voters thinks, “Ugh, I really don’t want Trump or RFK-Jr, but RFK-Jr isn’t as bad as Trump, so I’ll rate him as “1” on my 0-5 scale and keep Trump as “0”. Guess what? Now RFK-Jr is the winner.

My husband points out that this argument still assumes that all of the voters are being sincere. In this era, though, that’s not something we can take for granted. If the Trump voters really dislike Biden, they could campaign to have their supporters give “5”s to Trump and “4”s to RFK-Jr, such that a majority giving “3”s to Biden end up being outscored anyway, even without a competitive number of RFK-Jr supporters. So the STAR system encourages “strategic” voting too.

I read online today that STAR Voting has failed this time, but of course its creators and backers will keep trying. I hope they’ll take into account, though, that voters do have different temperaments.

STAR Voting measures enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can be manufactured.

And as my son put it when we were casting our ballots on Mother’s Day, people who think in more measured terms are generally more trustworthy. We want our voting system to support that, not to undermine it with incentives for extremism.

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To create “small pockets of flourishing”

Posted on 19 May 2024 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

This month, the Oregon Bach Festival book club’s reading project combines two of my special interests: music and nature writing. We’ve been listening to Sarah Kirkland Snider’s “Mass for the Endangered,” which the Oregon Bach Festival is going to perform on June 30, and we’ve been reading a book by Oregon author Kathleen Dean Moore, Earth’s Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World.

Kathleen Dean Moore is one of my favorite nature writers. She’s an environmental philosopher, and since she lives just 40 miles or so north of me, she’s often writing about my own ecosystem. Her writing is simply beautiful.

I consider Moore’s writings to be classic examples of “earnest” environmental literature. Scott Slovic, a world expert on nature writing (and, disclaimer, now my work colleague), has written about the distinction between “earnest” writing, where the author says what they mean directly, and more “ironic” literature, where the point is often made indirectly, often with humor. And then, within “earnest” writing, he’s described two categories very commonly found in environmental literature, the “rhapsody” and the “jeremiad.” A rhapsody draws us in with awe and wonder, the beautiful and the sublime – and then a jeremiad hits us with a looming or ongoing disaster.

In one of his papers, Slovic explained that, especially in the earlier decades of environmental literature, it was important to authors not to scare away their public. They would have to be very careful about the ratio of beauty and doom. Sometimes writers would have their whole book focus on describing the amazing qualities of their topic, with only a few sentences of concern. At other times, like with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, she had already created a large audience for her work with two books purely on natural wonders, and then she was able to bring that audience with her for her book on the disasters of profligate pesticide use. (I’ll note that Carson did pepper Silent Spring with moments of sarcasm, which made it all the more readable.)

Now, however, as author Nicole Seymour explains in her book Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age, people are reacting to decades of such writing. The earnest style has become alienating for many. It’s as if the rhapsodies and jeremiads have created a group of insiders who appreciate them, but also outsiders who don’t particularly care about nature, and to whom these styles look too much like religion.

I have to say, it can be very jarring to read Kathleen Dean Moore after reading Nicole Seymour.

However, in one of the essays we read in the book club for this past week, Moore addresses the question of, “What are we supposed to do? What is there to hope for at the end of this time? Why bother trying to patch up the world while so many others seem intent on wrecking it?”

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Immersed? or transported?

Posted on 14 April 2024 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

My favorite memory from high school chess club was the time I played against a guy I’ll call Fred, the top player at a small-town high school about 20 miles west of us. I was normally our #2 player, but our #1 player wasn’t available that night, so this was my one and only chance to show what I could do against another school’s very best.

“Fred” and I had been in a college math class together the previous summer, although we sat on opposite sides of the room, so I knew who he was, and I was happy to see him again. He had a buddy with him, though, who was watching him play, and they kept making sarcastic comments to each other about how embarrassing it was that he had to play against… a girl.

I realized quickly that Fred was a better player than I was. I was certainly not a great player. I didn’t study the game, I just went on intuition. Fred was probably a lot more methodical. It was obvious to both Fred and his friend that he was going to win.

I decided to try something crazy and desperate. Ha! Fred dismissed it as irrational, I guess, and continued with his plan of attack. Whoops, checkmate – I had won.

I wasn’t the best sport – I remember running gleefully down a hallway to tell our coach, who was just arriving, that I had beaten Fred, and he scolded me for not being very polite about it. After the snide comments about my gender, though, I felt justified.

This incident came to mind today when I was thinking about what goes on in our heads when we’re playing games.

One of my big interests is “narrative transportation,” the way our imaginations create the world of the story we’re reading or watching. When we’re reading an engrossing book, we can lose track of what’s going on around us – our minds have been “transported” away into somewhere else entirely, a “secondary world” in our imagination that might work somewhat differently from our own.

In my book project #3, when I finish my meta-narratives book and find a home for the one about ways we use language to influence how we think about things, I’m looking forward to thinking about narrative transportation at work in the real world, not just with fiction, and not just for recreation.

Meanwhile, I’m writing a paper about games, which has been a great opportunity to get up to speed on the latest research on narrative transportation, and I’ve had some new ideas. Want to hear them?

When we’re talking about what goes on in our minds when we read, we refer to “narrative transportation,” as I’ve mentioned, but when we talk about playing a game, we use the term “immersion.” Immersion in a game can include narrative transportation, too, if it has a good storyline, but it also includes engagement with other aspects of the game – the aesthetics, the physical aspects, the social aspects, and so on.

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