Hi Isabel, Thank for you for the question. My thesis with this essay is that some ages are more assholey than others. I don't know if this is absolutely true. I tend to think that assholeness is distributed fairly evenly across eras and cultures, but that certain cultures and eras positively select for assholeish traits and these come to be dominant. Once you have ingrained inequality and associate that inequality with merit (e.g. "people who are at the top deserve to be there") you tend to drift towards collective assholeishness. The Middle Ages seem to have had that, the GIlded Age had that, and our age unfortunately seems to have moved in that direction. Having some widespread consciousness of equality - even if you don't have the economic instruments to put equality into effect - is the antidote to that assholeishness (I'd associate the Renaissance, the Progressive Era, the '60s, with that consciousness of equality).
Many thoughts, Sam, in your discourse here. At first, easy to be discouraged by the points you so eloquently make. So, I began exploring my reading--and for me, reading, you included, always saves me in some way. Here is Lewis Hyde on that exchange: In Lewis Hyde’s book _The Gift: Imagination and the erotic life of property_, he wisely tell us that “the true commerce of art is a gift exchange, and where that commerce can proceed on its own terms we shall be heirs to the fruits of a gift exchange: in this case, to a creative spirit whose fertility is not exhausted in use, to the sense of plenitude which is the mark of all erotic exchange, to a storehouse of works that can serve as agents of transformation, and to a sense of an inhabitable world—an awareness, that is, of our solidarity with whatever we take to be the source of our gifts, be it the community or the race, nature, or the gods.” --Mary
Mary, you're the best. Thank you. I still haven't read The Gift - it's definitely a hole in my reading. That's a really beautiful passage. I agree completely. It reminds me of a passage from 'A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again' that really got me: Wallace is complaining about a piece of branded content and writes "This is the reason why even a really beautiful, ingenious, powerful ad (of which there are a lot) can never really be any kind of real art: an ad has no status as a gift i.e. it's never really 'for' the person it's directed at." For me, that's really been a useful place to start - there is a degree to which art can be in the gift economy and not mercantile, which is truly a salvational role for art. (To make the market itself less mercantile is a very different, tougher ask.)
Dope
Question. Is every age an age of assholes or are some more assholey than others?
Hi Isabel, Thank for you for the question. My thesis with this essay is that some ages are more assholey than others. I don't know if this is absolutely true. I tend to think that assholeness is distributed fairly evenly across eras and cultures, but that certain cultures and eras positively select for assholeish traits and these come to be dominant. Once you have ingrained inequality and associate that inequality with merit (e.g. "people who are at the top deserve to be there") you tend to drift towards collective assholeishness. The Middle Ages seem to have had that, the GIlded Age had that, and our age unfortunately seems to have moved in that direction. Having some widespread consciousness of equality - even if you don't have the economic instruments to put equality into effect - is the antidote to that assholeishness (I'd associate the Renaissance, the Progressive Era, the '60s, with that consciousness of equality).
Many thoughts, Sam, in your discourse here. At first, easy to be discouraged by the points you so eloquently make. So, I began exploring my reading--and for me, reading, you included, always saves me in some way. Here is Lewis Hyde on that exchange: In Lewis Hyde’s book _The Gift: Imagination and the erotic life of property_, he wisely tell us that “the true commerce of art is a gift exchange, and where that commerce can proceed on its own terms we shall be heirs to the fruits of a gift exchange: in this case, to a creative spirit whose fertility is not exhausted in use, to the sense of plenitude which is the mark of all erotic exchange, to a storehouse of works that can serve as agents of transformation, and to a sense of an inhabitable world—an awareness, that is, of our solidarity with whatever we take to be the source of our gifts, be it the community or the race, nature, or the gods.” --Mary
Mary, you're the best. Thank you. I still haven't read The Gift - it's definitely a hole in my reading. That's a really beautiful passage. I agree completely. It reminds me of a passage from 'A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again' that really got me: Wallace is complaining about a piece of branded content and writes "This is the reason why even a really beautiful, ingenious, powerful ad (of which there are a lot) can never really be any kind of real art: an ad has no status as a gift i.e. it's never really 'for' the person it's directed at." For me, that's really been a useful place to start - there is a degree to which art can be in the gift economy and not mercantile, which is truly a salvational role for art. (To make the market itself less mercantile is a very different, tougher ask.)