Mighty Ducks, Under-Dawgs

Posted on 2 December 2023 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

Yesterday, alas, we may have seen the psychological power of meta-narratives in action, in a different arena than usual – Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, to be more precise.

As my readers know by now, meta-narratives are the story-based frameworks we use to make sense of the world from the perspective of the groups we belong to. Familiar examples include believing we need to make our group (a particular country) “great again,” or that we need to save our group (all of humanity, or the biosphere itself) from further climate-based disruptions, or, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., that the long arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. In other words, meta-narratives are beliefs about what’s happening with one’s group over time, the big-picture stories.

Sports teams are also groups, and as any fan of the Chicago Cubs will tell you (although surely they won’t put it that way), sports teams can have meta-narratives too.

ducks_logoSo… speaking of sports teams, I’m a fan of the University of Oregon Ducks. My immediate family (parents, uncle, sister, and sons) and I have all attended the university, which is just a couple miles north of where I live right now. In fact, if I’m correctly remembering when my sister graduated, we’ve had someone at the U of O in each of the past eight decades. I’m the only one in the family who cares about sports, though. Go Ducks!!

Oregon’s official rival is Oregon State, a fine university about 40 miles northwest of us, in Corvallis. It’s a gentle rivalry, for the most part – more a matter of teasing than strong feelings. If Oregon isn’t in the Continue reading →

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Why do we have “human rights”?

Posted on 21 November 2023 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

Where did we get the idea that all people, not just those most like ourselves, should have basic, fundamental, “self-evident” rights? The historian Lynn Hunt has a theory – she credits the novelist Samuel Richardson.

Samuel_Richardson_by_Mason_Chamberlin

In her book, Inventing Human Rights: A History, Hunt describes how Richardson’s first novel, Pamela, published in 1740, became a major cultural event. Women and men alike found themselves totally enthralled by the story – one village even rang its church bells upon hearing a rumor of a happy ending. A few years later, Richardson’s second novel, Clarissa, was published, and the two books inspired a third, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, published in 1761. (Yes, that Rousseau, the one who wrote The Social Contract and became a major political philosopher.)

In each of these books, a young woman is pursued by a man who very much wants to seduce her, with no intention of marriage, and of course, in that era, her life would be ruined thereafter. Pamela is fortunate – although the man pursues her, tricks her, abducts her, and molests her, eventually (after she realizes she’s in love with him, and after he finds and reads her letters) he changes his mind and marries her.

Clarissa’s story, conversely, is tragic. She only wants to be left alone, but the rich and powerful Robert Lovelace insists he wants to marry her and eventually drugs and rapes her. She still resists him (and on, and on – at 1534 pages, it’s one of the longest novels in the English language). Eventually Clarissa starves herself until she falls ill and dies.

Here’s Sean Bean as Lovelace in the BBC dramatization:

sean_bean_clarissa

I watched a bit of it years ago.  He was creepy, and I’d want to avoid him too!

What was special about these books, and what’s the link to human rights?

Continue reading →

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Shocked by Mary Shelley

Posted on 31 October 2023 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

Until this month, I had never read Frankenstein. I always thought that I had, but, nope. Dracula is another matter – I bought my first copy from the Scholastic Book Club in sixth grade, and my life revolved around it for years. Frankenstein, though, surprised me.

Frankenstein is, of course, famous as the first book in a brand-new genre, science fiction, written by a brilliant teenage girl, Mary Godwin Shelley. The story of its origin is famous. One stormy night, at a villa in Switzerland, four friends decided on a competition to see who among them could write the best horror story. The competitors were young Mary Godwin, her lover and future husband the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, his notorious friend Lord Byron, and Byron’s personal physician, John Polidori. I don’t know if the other two completed their entries, but Polidori did come up with a story called The Vampyre, based on some notes that Byron had collected on his journeys in the Balkans.

Although The Vampyre went on to inspire Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Frankenstein won the competition, and Shelley published her book in 1818. Then in 1831, she revised it heavily, having been told it was “too radical,” and this later version has been the most widely published since then.

And thanks to the online book club sponsored by retro game streamer Karkalla, whom my partner follows on Twitch TV, it was now my turn to finally read Frankenstein. We’re reading the 1818 edition. It’s considered more true to Shelley’s own beliefs, which were heavily influenced by the writings of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, the pioneering feminist who had died when her daughter was a baby.

The thing that floored me from the very earliest chapters was the realization that Frankenstein is a total take-down of Romanticism, an artistic and cultural movement that was central to the identities of her Continue reading →

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Biden’s age, Trump’s… everything?

Posted on 13 September 2023 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

This week, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni asked a very revealing question: Why is the American public so focused on Joe Biden’s age, when Donald Trump is almost as old and has a far less healthy lifestyle and physique? It’s a good point. For the moment, let’s set aside all of our thoughts about policies and values associated with the two men (to the extent that our imaginations can stretch that far). Which of them is more likely to be physically thriving in 2028, a trim 85-year-old man who eats well and at least up until now has been getting regular daily exercise, or an overweight 82-year-old man who has spent the last few decades sitting around eating junk?

So why do we care about Biden’s age but not Trump’s?

Bruni mentions geriatric specialist Rosanne Leipzig, who suggests that Biden’s language reads as “old.” He uses words and phrases like “malarkey” and “God love ya” and “c’mon man,” which feel dated. And that theory makes sense, for the small fraction of Americans who actually pay attention to Biden’s speech patterns. (I hadn’t realized “c’mon man” was elderly-talk. I must be getting up there too!) Meanwhile, she says that “Trump’s rebel pose reads young.” Maybe so. Also, as Bruni points out, Trump does his best to disguise his age with hair dye and cosmetics, whereas Biden looks his age.

But I think Bruni himself hits on a better theory, and I’m going to back it up with science.

Way back in the 1950s and 1960s, psychologist Daniel Berlyne dedicated his research career to the features of things that draw our attention: sharp contrasts, disorder, novelty, surprisingness, and so on. In art and music – and in things we see and hear more generally – these features can interest and excite us, Continue reading →

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Living in suspense

Posted on 9 May 2023 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

A few weeks ago, I was eagerly awaiting the final episode of Sanditon. It was a Masterpiece Theater series based on Jane Austen’s unfinished novel of the same name – she’d introduced the characters and the setting, but didn’t live long enough to tell the story, so it wasn’t obvious how it would end. Charlotte would surely end up with the man she wanted, but what about Miss Lambe, the young heiress Austen had described as “half mulatto”? Would she marry the duke to get the fortune seekers to leave her alone, or would the duke be free to pursue his intimate friendship with lovely Arthur Parker? And how about our more mature lovers, the rascally lawyer and the king’s ex-mistress? Or the much more mature lovers, Lady Denton and her long-lost, now rich, childhood sweetheart?

(Arthur Parker is the best!)

turlough-convery-sanditon-arthur-6435c427e6eb7That last week, it felt hard to wait for the ending – especially when the cable’s schedule said there would be a “shocking revelation” (and thankfully that was a total misrepresentation – there was nothing shocking nor a revelation, only a reasonable misunderstanding). Then I realized that with PBS Passport I could easily watch the final episode online, immediately.

I declined. I realized I liked having a whole week to wonder how things would be resolved. It’s a normal human thing to take pleasure in suspense, at least where recreation is involved. Otherwise we’d never sit down to watch or read a story at all.

And I’m accustomed to the pace of television that I grew up with, where you waited from week to week to learn what happens next, and sometimes spent the entire summer waiting for a cliffhanger to be resolved. This binging of an entire series over a few days is alien to me.

I’m not a purist – with anime shows I’m fine with watching two or three episodes back-to-back, and a few more the next night, and the next, especially if the entire show is hundreds of episodes long.

In real life, too, there are a great many ways in which it’s wonderful that we don’t have to wait and wait to find out what’s happened. I can’t imagine living in the 19th century, when if someone you loved moved away or went on a long trip or – ack – went off to war, you’d have to wait for them to write and send you a letter so you’d know they were okay. It was much better when I was a kid – if anything important happened, they could probably use the phone. Now it’s trivial to send a message instantly using that handy device we all carry in our pockets.

I wonder, though, whether this all points to a way our speeded up society has changed that we tend to overlook. If we don’t like dramatic tension when it’s only recreational – if we’d rather binge and get it all at once – then how can we bear such suspense when the stakes are much higher?

Continue reading →

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Is it “good”? Or is it “sweet”?

Posted on 12 April 2023 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

This year on Easter, after a lovely dinner with my partner and son, and after we each looked to see what the Easter Bunny had put in our Easter baskets, we settled down to consider playing the board game Bunny Kingdom. (If you’re guessing we celebrate what might be described as a “secular pagan” version of the holiday, you’d be correct – bunnies and eggs and candy are at the forefront.)

As I read the Bunny Kingdom rules, I found myself becoming sleepier and sleepier. My partner and son didn’t care – they were eagerly discussing the upcoming new set of cards for Magic: The Gathering. I then curled up for a nap, but kept listening to the two of them.

After a bit, I noticed that some of the new Magic cards were “good,” while others were “sweet!” I asked about this and was told the two terms are not synonyms – a card can be good but not sweet, or sweet but not good, or neither, or ideally, both. After following their conversation a bit longer, I suggested that maybe “good” means it’s a rational, calculated judgment, while “sweet!” is more emotional. They agreed.

You may not know anything about Magic: The Gathering beyond what I’ve just told you – it’s a game played with cards that come out in sets. If you’re curious, I can add that the game’s been around for 30 years. It has millions of players and generates several billion dollars in revenue each year for the company that owns it, which is currently Hasbro. About four times a year, new sets of cards are released, each set having its own theme but also including ongoing themes and characters.

MtG_cards

I’m not here to talk about Magic, though – what I’m interested in here is that good/sweet distinction. We like some things for rational reasons, and others for emotional reasons.

I’m not going to claim those are two separate things. Pretty much everything has an emotional charge, otherwise we’d pay little attention to it. Believing that something is rational, orderly, logical, elegant, efficient, thorough… that comes with a certain emotional satisfaction.

But I would also make the case that emotional responses to abstract things, things that don’t affect us directly, happen for rational reasons. There are predictable patterns for considering something to be Continue reading →

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Thinking like a rose

Posted on 2 April 2023 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

I wonder what roses think about wildflowers that “volunteer” to share their garden without an invitation?

That’s a comment one of my readers made in response to my last blog post. I loved that comment, because it sends us off in either of two very illuminating directions, and as I made notes for my response I realized my answer could become a blog post of its own.

In my post, when I talked about garden plants, wildflowers, and weeds, I wrote as if the human perspective was what mattered, and more specifically, the “human who’s in charge of a garden” versus a “human observing what nature does on its own.” In both cases, it was humans making the categories on behalf of plants.

Making categories is an act of power – a way of claiming and exercising power. When scientists do it, the categories are provisional. They recognize that there can be better ways to categorize things, which they’re (in theory) open to, and they (generally) understand that categories serve a purpose. You need different category systems depending on what you’re doing.

But there are also lots of categories that we learn culturally, and these often have considerable social power behind them that usually resists any openness to questioning and revision.

Who’s in charge of the categories? It makes a big difference. If you were a German Jew in the 1930s, you’d likely think of yourself as a German who happened to be Jewish, while the Nazi party wanted people to think of you as a Jew who happened to be located in Germany.

sarunasMy all-time favorite professional basketball player is Šarūnas Marčiulionis, who played for the Golden State Warriors. He’s Lithuanian who came to the U.S. from the Soviet Union, and I was continually shocked by some people’s hostility towards him as a “Russian.” Didn’t they understand that the Russians had forcibly conquered Lithuania and were thus even more of a threat to him and things he valued than they were to American interests? Well, no, they didn’t, and I kept thinking how painful it may have been for him to be called “Russian” by ignorant Americans.

I have a whole set of blog posts I haven’t yet finished writing about the importance in today’s political world of who gets to decide how to categorize things, a topic that’s highly relevant both for gender issues and abortion rights. But Steve, if your question was metaphorical (pointing out that I’m not taking the perspective of those in the thick of it), it’s going to have to wait until I finish writing those posts, because I’m also fascinated by where we go if we take your question literally.

There’s a growing body of amazing work on plant perception, awareness, and even communication. I’ve been collecting books on the topic, but the only one I’ve read in the past ten years was What a Plant Knows by Daniel Chamovitz. Probably the most up-to-date book is Planta Sapiens: The New Science of Plant Intelligence. The lead author is Paco Calvo, the head of the Minimal Intelligence Laboratory in Spain, where they focus on understanding how plants experience the world. Plants can learn and remember! Wow! Continue reading →

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Wildflowers or weeds?

Posted on 29 March 2023 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

Wildflowers! Today I got a break from the massively complicated paper I’m writing, and we also had a break in the rain, so I went out to check in with the neighborhood wildflowers. A few years ago, I set myself a project of photographing them every Sunday, so I know just what will be there, but I hadn’t taken a look yet this year.

My main wildflower photography spot is a forested hillside next to Edgewood School, and over the years I’ve seen literally dozens of types of wildflowers there (of course, not all at once). Yet, when I went to photograph “wildflowers,” I found myself struggling to define the term. Obviously I’d photograph the shooting stars, the cat’s ears and hound’s tongue, the native iris, the fawn lilies, and the wild roses, but how about the ox-eye daisies? They’re lovely flowers, but I’m told they’re “naturalized,” that is, they came to Oregon with the Europeans then learned to thrive here. (Yes, I photographed them.)

daisies

What about the dandelions? They’re “native” but also “weeds.” (Eventually I photographed them too, for the sake of thoroughness.) How about the periwinkle? I drew the line there – the very healthy patch right at the edge of the forest looked too likely to have escaped from someone’s yard.

In a garden, we have clear categories. There are the things you planted, things you didn’t plant and don’t want (weeds), and things you didn’t plant that you welcome anyway. My grandma called those “volunteers.” I have a few of those in my own yard – two red-cedar trees, natives that sprouted up nicely near the back fence; pretty little cyclamen that inexplicably appear in my lawn every fall; and a walnut tree that popped up beside the driveway ten years ago and has grown large enough to provide nice summer shade.

Back when I was photographing the wildflowers every week, I was thinking of writing an essay about categories of plants as gardened or native or weeds, and relating that to politics, where people could be making a “garden” (colonists deliberately transforming what they find) or “native” (indigenous people making their own choices) or “weeds” (with entire categories of people targeted as undesirable and problematic by virtue of who and where they are, and because they’re a “problem,” the people in power sometimes think it’s okay to focus on how to get rid of them).

These supposed problem people could be natives, like when the American settlers wanted to put farms and ranches on land that was already in use. Poison oak is native to our region, and I have to say, if we could magically banish it without poisoning the environment or paving it over, I’d be in.

Or, the supposedly problem people could be immigrants. Tansy ragwort blooms with clusters of cheerful yellow daisies, but it’s toxic for horses and livestock (and us too, if it contaminates our food supply). Continue reading →

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Overcoming the temptations of conservatism, with the good people of Cranford

Posted on 12 November 2022 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

Even for progressives, being “conservative” is not necessarily a bad thing. A great many of us are conservative in at least some ways. Maybe we don’t like to try new foods, or we have some routines we really don’t want to change.

And this type of conservatism doesn’t necessarily match up with our political affiliation. My late step-dad (the good one, the one who kinda sorta shared in a Nobel Peace Prize) was a diehard Democrat and quite progressive for his time politically, but personally he was, shall we say, set in his ways. It’s possible that his lifestyle conservatism gave him the sense of background stability that let him be more open to new ideas for making the world a better place, and for living and working in places very unlike his Midwestern origins.

In contrast with this lifestyle conservatism, there’s also what we might call social or political conservatism. This worldview is focused on preserving institutions and traditions, and this is what we usually mean by conservatism. These folks want the security of knowing that things will continue to be how they expect them to be. But that’s not realistic. Things do change!

(And before we go any further, let me note that the “turn back the clock” mentality associated with Donald Trump and his followers is not what I’m talking about. Some political scientists call that mentality “radical conservatism” – these folks very much want change. True conservatives emphatically do not.)

Given that change is unavoidable, what are our realistic options for encouraging conservatives to make their peace with it?

gaskellRecently I was rewatching one of my favorite BBC mini-series, Cranford, based on the novel of the same name (and several shorter works) by one of my favorite authors, Elizabeth Gaskell. Her books helped open people’s eyes to the human costs of Britain’s Industrial Revolution, and she’s also known for being good friends with Charlotte Brontë.

Cranford isn’t like her “heavier” novels. It’s a sympathetic and often humorous look at life in a cozy village where ongoing sameness is a virtue. And yet, things do change. People come and go, loved ones die, technology advances.

This time while I watched the show, I realized that Gaskell was showing us different ways that even the most conservative people can begin to accept new ways of doing things.

1. When the change is obviously and indisputably for the best. Jem Hearne, a carpenter, falls from a tree and suffers a nasty compound fracture of his arm. Standard medical practice would be to remove the arm – but even if Hearne survived the surgery, he would no longer be able to work. A newly arrived Continue reading →

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Beyond love/hate binaries

Posted on 15 October 2022 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

Quick! What do e-cigarettes, fossil fuels, and Downton Abbey all have in common?

E-cigarettes are great – if you used to be a heavy smoker and managed to switch your nicotine addiction entirely to e-cigarettes, which are much less likely to cause lung cancer. E-cigarettes are kind of terrible, though, if you’re a teen who tried them a few times then found yourself hooked on nicotine, which is not without its own health risks, and which can pretty much control your ability to feel okay, once you’ve let it. And all too many people who use e-cigarettes end up using regular cigarettes too.

Fossil fuels? Obviously we’d rather be using Earth-friendly renewable sources of energy, but if the year is 2022 and you find yourself suddenly needing to cross a continent or ocean in a matter of hours, then fossil fuels will come to your rescue.

E-cigarettes and fossil fuels are both what we might call “ambiguously valenced” products – good for some people in some circumstances, bad for other people or in other circumstances. Other examples could include, hm, beef, whiskey, morphine, guns. I’m sure there are many others. (And there are also ambiguously valenced activities: abortion, jumping from airplanes…)

The trouble is, “good sometimes, bad sometimes” involves more nuance than we generally want. Nuance takes mental effort. We’d rather like or dislike something than have to call on more complicated feelings.

Sometimes, something many people think is bad turns out to be somewhat good. Both cannabis and chemicals classified as “psychedelics” may have valuable medicinal properties.

And sometimes, something we think of as good turns out to be not so great, like Bill Cosby.

When things are ambiguously valenced, it’s harder to deal with them. People who want to quit e-cigarettes get less support from others, because those others may think there’s really nothing wrong with e-cigarettes, especially compared to the alternative. (It’s also hard to get funding to help people quit. Grant reviewers don’t necessarily see the need for it.)

Why am I thinking about this, and what does it have to do with Downton Abbey?

I finished reading an interesting book yesterday: Orwell’s Roses, by Rebecca Solnit. It’s an exploration Continue reading →

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