the Johnsonville Press » Life in a Glass House

Everything In It’s Right Place – An Essay by Josh Baker

Alex G — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 08:07:37 +0000

The Genre as a Bounded Social Construct

Like virtually everything else in our reality, the musical genre is not a naturally occurring phenomenon, but a socially constructed category of objects whose intersubjectively defined boundaries are the only thing which allow us to distinguish it from anything else (Zerubavel, 1991, p. 2). Just as there is no natural or inevitable reason that we should come to classify people as “Portuguese,” “Cambodian,” or “Australian” or various types of produce as “fruits” or “vegetables,” there is likewise no inherent reason that we should come to distinguish between the musical genres of “hip-hop” and “pop” or “country” and “blues.” That is to say, we only hear music as “belonging” in a category like “electroclash,” “metal,” “funk,” or “house” because of tacit social pressures to adhere to particular cognitive norms of thinking about – and, therefore, delimiting – the world (Zerubavel, 1997, p. 13).

For our purposes, a genre will be defined as a socially constructed category of music thought of as being distinct from others based on its general acoustic and, to a lesser extent, thematic properties. When music is conceptualized as “belonging” to a particular genre, there exists a concurrent implication that it follows a certain musical tradition, i.e., a certain style or method of writing and performing music. A genre may include several subgenres and may itself fall into a larger “supragenre.” My aim herein is to examine how we socio-cognitively categorize music into genres and demonstrate the similarity of this categorization to that of other entities, specifically, regarding the use of genealogical narratives. Throughout this work, I shall draw on examples from several diverse, ostensibly unrelated contexts in order to “highlight common underlying patterns” (Zerubavel, 2007, p. 137). The socio-cognitive categorization of music into genres through the use of genealogical narratives is but one example of a larger social pattern “that transcend[s] any one particular context” (Zerubavel, 2007, p. 134). We will see that our division of music into genres like “rock” or “jazz” is not fundamentally different than our division of animals into phyla like “Chordata” or “Mollusca.”

Language and Categorization

Before discussing the categorization of music into genres, we must first briefly examine the role language plays in our conceptual categorization of the world in general. As noted by Ferdinand de Saussure in his Course in General Linguistics, “[t]he bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary…The idea…is not linked by any inner relationship to the succession of sounds…which serves as its signifier” (1961, p. 67). There is, for example, no inherent connection between the concept of a domesticated canine and the word “dog.” Nevertheless, in the mind of the speaker, the two are inextricably linked, forming a category which is utterly separate from others like “wolf” or “fox.” Such linguistically defined categorical differences, however, are not naturally obvious, and, indeed, a small child who has yet to fully grasp the language (and also, therefore, the logic of its way of dividing the world) may not even notice them.

While the distinctions we make between different categories of objects often seem so apparent as to be logically inevitable, this is only because we “tend to forget that language itself rests on social convention and…regard the mental divisions it introduces as real” (Zerubavel, 1997, p. 67). It is precisely because such linguistic categories are conventional that we must undergo a process of cognitive socialization before “we come to assign objects the same meaning that they have for others…to both ignore and remember the same things that they do” (Zerubavel, 1997, p. 15). It is through the contrastive processes of lumping (“grouping ‘similar’ items together in a single mental cluster”) and splitting (“separating in our mind ‘different’ mental clusters from one another”) that we are able to use linguistic categories to establish the “relatedness” of various objects in the world (Zerubavel, 1991, p. 21). The particular ways in which we come to categorize objects in the world, then, rest entirely on the social conventions of the “thought communities” to which we belong, specifically, those “normative traditions of focusing” that dictate which of an object’s traits are or are not relevant when considering its relationship to others (Zerubavel, 1997, p. 51).

Regarding the primary focus of this work, the fact that such linguistic categories are nothing more than social conventions means that our perception of music as belonging to distinct genres has almost nothing whatsoever to do with the particular acoustic qualities of the sounds we hear and “everything to do with the impersonal, social categories into which we typically force our personal experience” (Zerubavel, 1997, p. 7). It is thus ultimately language itself which makes anything seem “different from” or “similar to” anything else. Indeed, just as it is only the mental concept “mammal” which makes gerbils in any way similar to whales, only “the concept ‘classical’…makes Ravel’s music similar to Vivaldi’s” (Zerubavel, 1991, p. 79).

The Use of Tree Narratives

The socio-cognitive categorization of music into genres is done primarily through the use of multilinear “tree” narratives and, to a lesser extent, unilinear “bloodline” narratives. Both of these types of genealogical narratives can be used to illustrate relatedness among music, but for the present, let us concern ourselves only with the former type: tree narratives are used, however implicitly, in the socio-cognitive categorization of many types of entities, from academic disciplines to languages to technologies. Such narratives are largely the same in all cases, following an increasingly complex, eternally differentiating, multilinear structure branching out from a single point of origin, used most famously to illustrate the biological evolution of organisms by natural selection (Zerubavel, 2003, p. 22).

Each “branch” in a particular tree narrative comes to be regarded socially as a discrete category with unique properties. The “closer” two branches are to one another within the overall structure of the tree narrative, the more relatively “similar” they are thought to be, and vice versa. Adjacent branches of the tree are understood to be “‘related’ because they share features which have been inherited from a common ancestor” (Bowler, 1996, p. 49). The perceived “relatedness” of a given musical genre to any other is “thus basically a function of time” (Zerubavel, 2003, p. 64). That is to say, the “degree” of similarity that is thought to exist between any two genres is directly proportional to historical depth, or how far “back” we must look in order to find a common ancestor between them: “the more recent the historical split between objects, the shorter the social distance between them” (Zerubavel, 2003, p. 64).

To draw an example from the genealogy of languages, Italian and Spanish are regarded as “sister languages,” having both descended from the common ancestor of Latin. The two “romance languages” are seen as being much more closely “related” to one another than either is to Russian, with which they share a more distant ancestor language, Proto-Indo-European (see figure A below). In a similar way, some music fans have come to view emocore and screamo as “sibling” genres with the common ancestor of emo and see these two genres as being more closely “related” to one another than to dance-punk, with which they share the more distant ancestor genre, punk (figure B).

While a resemblance between our categorization of languages and that of music may not have been initially obvious, we can see now that the cross-contextual similarity of these two examples is quite striking, at least in terms of the way in which the relatedness of the entities in question is conceptually rationalized. In this sense, the narratives diagramed above are no more than “different manifestations of a single generic pattern” through which we reason the relationships among progressively diverse, variably related entities “evolving” from some ancestor (Zerubavel, 2007, p. 136).

To be sure, “such reasoning also pervades the way we nowadays seem to envision our relations with gorillas, zebras and birds” (Zerubavel, 2003, p. 65). The ubiquity of the tree narrative structure in our categorization of objects owes to the fact that it is “part of a European iconographical tradition,” and, as we have seen thus far, has “considerable transformative power across domains” (Bouquet, 1992, p. 59). In diverse contexts, the tree narrative allows us to envision the historical relationships between various entities and place them into groups of varying size based on “particular arbitrary degrees of similarity” (Marks, 2001, p. 363). With this in mind, I wish to turn again to the case of evolution by natural selection, where we may note that all organisms are simultaneously classified as members of many categories at various hierarchical “levels” of similarity. The tree squirrel, for instance, is categorized as being related to the marmot on the family level (Sciuridae), to the capybara on the order level (Rodentia), to humans on the class level (Mammalia), etc. Critically, as the degree of similarity required to demarcate a category is arbitrary, any segment or branch of any size within the tree narrative may be defined so as to constitute a unique category, comprised of its own peculiar subcategories and belonging to a larger, more encompassing supracategory (figure C).

Supragenres, genres and subgenres of music are conceived of in much the same way. For instance, the band Spoon is typically thought to belong within the “indie rock” subgenre, which also includes the band Ratatat; the indie rock subgenre itself is grouped under the larger “alternative rock” genre, which includes The Pixies; the alternative rock genre is, in turn, grouped under the “post-punk” supragenre, which includes the band Joy Division; etc. The relationship among genres at varying levels of similarity may also be conceptualized as a set of concentric circles, literally illustrating which objects are to be lumped together within a given “level” based category and which are not (figure D).

A similar hierarchical categorization structure can be seen in the conceptualization of lineage among the Nuer tribes of East Africa. Each individual member of a given Nuer clan is able to trace his or her descent from minimal to minor lineages, from these to major lineages, from these to maximal lineages, and from these, finally, to the original foundation of the clan itself (Evans-Pritchard, 1940, p. 196). Each Nuer clan is a “system of lineages, the relationship of each lineage to every other lineage being marked in its structure by a point of reference in ascent…[any] two lineages stand to one another in a certain structural relationship” (Evans-Pritchard, 1940, p. 201). In this case, much as in those explored earlier, the perceived relatedness of any two branches at a given taxonomic level within the tree narrative is determined by their relative proximity to one another within the overall clan structure. Here, I must again emphasize the arbitrary nature of our categorization of anything at all, and of music in particular; there is no natural or inevitable reason that we should demarcate music in any particular way, just as there is no such reason that we ought to categorically separate ourselves as humans from other animals or not regard ourselves as “the third chimpanzee” (Diamond, 1992, p. 25). Now, having sufficiently explored the categorization of music into genres using a multilinear tree narrative and having demonstrated the resemblance of this categorization to that of other types of objects, let us turn to an analysis of music categorization using a unilinear bloodline narrative.

The Use of Bloodline Narratives

Along with the multilinear tree narrative, the categorization of music may also be accomplished through the use of a unilinear “bloodline” narrative. This type of narrative follows a single line from its point of origin in the past, through various stages of succession, to the present time and “involves the image of actual ‘lines’ of descent…envisioned as…a single, continuous, linelike mental structure literally called a lineage” (Zerubavel, 2003, p. 56-57). While the bloodline narrative, as its name implies, is typically used to depict chains of succession based on consanguinity, such as dynasties, “not all interpersonal historical connectedness is biological” (Zerubavel, 2003, p. 56). Indeed, the same model may be used to illustrate virtually any sort of succession, from that of occupants of a specific public office to successive followers of a particular academic school or tradition, as “even ‘spiritual pedigrees’ are ultimately modeled after bloodlines” (Zerubavel, 2003, p. 56).

Let us now, for example, consider the chains of “guarantors” of the traditions of the Muslim Prophet Mohammed; each person in the chain, while biologically unrelated to those who came before him, upholds cultural traditions about the words and actions of the Prophet. In this case, we can see clearly that “the chains represent intellectual rather than biological transmissions” (Shoumatoff, 1985, p. 72). Indeed, it ought be understood that even those ancestors from whom we believe ourselves to have descended “are not always our actual biological progenitors, and it is purely symbolic threads that often connect us to them. Genealogies, in other words, are formal accounts of social rather than strictly natural ‘descent’” (Zerubavel, 2003, p. 67).

With regard to the categorization of music into genres, the bloodline narrative is most often used to conjure notions of relatedness between contemporary artists and those of the past. Like the rest of us, musicians “often draw on [their] ancestors as sources of status and legitimacy” (Zerubavel, 2003, p. 62). For instance, let us consider the Dandy Warhols, a contemporary band from Detroit, who make no secret of the influence had on their music by the legendary rock band the Velvet Underground. The name of the band itself is a play on the name of Andy Warhol, the onetime manager and producer of the Velvet Underground (Unterberger, 2002). According to one critic, the Dandy Warhols’ first album “establishes a tone of subterranean airiness that draws…from the dry-ice cool of the Velvet Underground” (Scoppa, 2004). The band has recorded a song entitled “Lou Weed,” a not-so-subtle reference to the Velvet Underground’s former frontman, Lou Reed and the Warhols’ music is frequently compared, however unfavorably, to the “druggy psychedelic pop” he penned (Prato, 2002).

The Dandy Warhols even make an effort to resemble the Velvet Underground thematically, crafting songs about infidelity, drug use and urban alienation, themes discussed heavily throughout The Velvet Underground & Nico in songs like “Venus in Furs” and “Heroin” (Unterberger, 2002). To be sure, all of the The Dandy Warhols’ “features…exist…in the here and now; but most of these features are the latest states of a tradition which has moved through various distances down from the past with varying degrees of modification” (Shils, 1981, p. 43). By attempting to resemble the Velvet Underground, the Dandy Warhols seek to demonstrate their “genealogical worthiness” as artists to be considered among the symbolic “descendants” in the tradition of one of the greatest rock bands of all time. Their efforts are not unlike those of John Kerry during the 2004 presidential race to compare himself to another Catholic Democratic Senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, and, hence, garner legitimacy and prestige.

Just as we as Americans commemorate the lives and actions of our national “founding fathers,” do artists pay tribute to the memory of those who came before them in a particular musical tradition. Despite being temporally removed from them, “our predecessors clearly occupy an extremely important place in our consciousness long after they die” (Zerubavel, 2003, p. 55). References to the late hip-hop greats Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. are so pervasive in rappers’ lyrics that one suspects they are somehow obligatory. Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo once wrote a song called “Buddy Holly” in which he repeatedly spouts the line, “I look just like Buddy Holly.” Not that surprisingly, he actually does resemble Holly, from his large, dark-framed glasses to his slightly coiffed hair to his black and white Fender. Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, while experiencing writer’s block during the recording of the 2000 album Kid A, reportedly drew pieces of scrap paper out of a top hat in a random order to come up with lyrics to his songs, a technique he knew to have been used by Talking Heads songwriter David Byrne back in 1980 (Klosterman, 2005, p. 89). Even the band name Radiohead is derived from a Talking Heads song entitled “Radio Head.” In all of the examples discussed in this section, an artist or band attempted to incorporate some of the methods or styles of their predecessors within a particular spiritual “bloodline” of music. The incorporation of the traditions of one’s genealogical predecessors is a common practice and, indeed, occurs in many diverse contexts.

Conclusion

Having investigated the socio-cognitive categorization of music into genres through the use of tree narratives and into traditions of intellectual descent through the use of bloodline narratives, I must first reiterate the similarity of these categorization processes to those of other types of objects. The tree narrative is so commonly used within our culture to illustrate the relatedness of entities because its structural features allow us to easily and systematically place arbitrary lines between objects in the world. Music, like any other object, is subject to classification through such narratives and serves as an ideal object of study in our attempts to apprehend the way in which we delineate boundaries between, and then negotiate relations among, objects. The bloodline narrative, as well, is so commonly used because it allows us to draw direct lines between contemporary entities and their predecessors. We have seen that this genealogical narrative, too, may be used to illustrate our conceptualization of related musical entities; the “line of descent” in this case, is a successive series of artists thought to write and perform music within a particular musical tradition or style. And, most importantly, we have seen that the socio-cognitive processes used in the categorization of music within these narratives are by no means context-specific. By continuing to study such cross-contextual structural similarities, we can increase our understanding of some of the most basic features of our thinking as social beings.

References

Bouquet, Mary. (1992). Family trees and their affinities: the visual imperative of the genealogical diagram. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2, 43-66.

Bowler, Peter J. (1996) Life’s splendid drama: evolutionary biology and the reconstruction of life’s ancestry. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

de Saussure, Ferdinand. (1961). Course in general linguistics. (Charles Bally & Albert Sechehaye, eds.). New York: Mcgraw-Hill. (Original work published in 1916)

Diamond, Jared. (1992). The third chimpanzee: the evolution and future of the human animal. New York: HarperCollins.

Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. (1940). The nuer: a description of the modes of livelihood and political institutions of a nilotic people. London: Oxford University Press.

Klosterman, Chuck. (2005). Killing yourself to live: 85% of a true story. New York: Scribner.

Marks, Jonathan. (2001). ‘We’re going to tell these people who they really are’: science and relatedness. In Sarah Franklin and Susan Mckinnon (eds.) Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies, 355-383.

Prato, Greg. (2002). The Dandy Warhols. MTV.com.

Retrieved November 10, 2007, from:

http://www.mtv.com/music/artist/dandy_warhols/artist.jhtml#bio

Scoppa, Bud. (2004). The Dandy Warhols. RollingStone.com.

Retrieved November 10, 2007, from:

http://www.rollingstone.com/artists/thedandywarhols/biography

Shils, Edward. (1981). Tradition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Shoumatoff, Alex. (1985). The mountain of names: a history of the human family. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Unterberger, Richie. (2002). The Velvet Underground. MTV.com.

Retrieved November 10, 2007, from:

http://www.mtv.com/music/artist/velvet_underground/artist.jhtml#bio

Zerubavel, Eviatar. (1991). The fine line: making distinctions in everyday life. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Zerubavel, Eviatar. (1997). Social mindscapes: an invitation to cognitive sociology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Zerubavel, Eviatar. (2003). Time maps: collective memory and the social shape of the past. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Zerubavel, Eviatar. (2007). Generally speaking: the logic and mechanics of social pattern analysis. Sociological Forum, 22, 131-145.

Life in a Glass House – Josh Baker

Alex G — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 04:37:01 +0000

The Information Problem

In 1986 Theodore Roszak estimated that “a weekday edition of the New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in seventeenth-century England.” At first, this seems a bit difficult to accept, but the moment we stop to appreciate the tremendous amount of information we encounter each day it becomes all-too-believable. Information now comes to us through media as diverse as text messages, t-shirts, product packaging, newspapers, and the facebook news feed. Given the complexity of the information landscape we are made to contend with, it seems amazing that we are able to navigate it at all. Indeed, the store of information currently available to us is so vast that data retrieval and categorization (e.g., through search engines) has become a multi-billion-dollar industry.

In 2002, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, more than five exabytes (i.e., five billion gigabytes) of new information were produced; this amounts to 800 megabytes for each person on the planet and is about 37,000 times as much information as exists in the entirety of the Library of Congress.¹ Further, the amount of information we collectively produce has only increased during each subsequent year. I do not know how to begin working out the relevant math, but I would estimate that original content created by individual users on various digital platforms (e.g., Tumblr, YouTube, Blogger, Yelp, Twitter) now contributes significantly to the total amount of information available.

For the sake of argument, let’s say that we now produce something on the order of ten exabytes each year. Certainly, many of these pieces of information are inaccurate and many of them contradict one another. The empirical validity of a given piece of information, however, has virtually no direct influence over its likelihood of being learned and believed by a given individual. In other words, the information is copied from one location to another regardless of its merit.

One theory which is very illuminating at this point in our discussion is that of memetics (or meme theory).² First posited in 1976 by Richard Dawkins and based upon the principle of universal Darwinism, memetics contends that culture, much like a biological organism, evolves through the variation and selection of particular hereditary information. To elaborate: just as the information which is copied from parent to offspring (the genes) varies and is subject to the process of natural selection, so does the information which is copied from individual to individual through imitation (the meme). In other words, both of these types of replicators are units in competition with others like themselves, selfishly “trying” to be copied as many times as possible with no regard for the consequences.

This perspective paints a somewhat troubling picture of the role of human beings within the overloaded information landscape which we currently occupy, as it seems to reduce us to unconscious imitators. However, the explanation of culture laid out by memetics does much to explain how information is copied from person to person, particularly unreliable information. While it is true that some information is copied because it is good or true or useful, this is not the case for many of the memes out there trying to get copied (e.g., smoking). With this in mind, it becomes ever more imperative to evaluate all new information critically, as its ability to spread has virtually nothing to do with its value.

notes

1. See a summary of the researchers’ findings online at: http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/execsum.htm#summary

2. See a wonderful explanation of the science of memetics online at: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/susan_blackmore_on_memes_and_temes.html

Going Green – The Environmentalist Narration of History

Alex G — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 07:31:50 +0000

An Essay by Josh Baker

the thought community: a collective viewpoint

All social groups, from the level of the family to that of the congregation to that of the nation, have certain normative ways of viewing the world. On perhaps the most basic level, such groups, or “thought communities,”¹ may be differentiated from one another based on the particular ways in which they focus their attention when perceiving various events and objects in social reality. That is, all members of a given thought community come to attend (or disattend) specific aspects of reality in a manner consistent with the group’s own “traditions of mental focusing,”² thus ensuring that the community’s members view the world (and assign meaning to the objects in it) in remarkably similar ways as a result of their shared “‘optical’ style” of perception.³ For example, whether or not a particular object (e.g., tripe) is considered “edible” often has little to do with the body’s ability to digest it and much to do with how it is regarded by the “optical communities” of which one is a member, reminding us that although the world generally “looks” the same way “to people who happen to share the same sociomental lenses, it actually looks quite different to people who do not.”⁴

Just as our perception of objects and events in our daily lives is informed and influenced by the normative sociocognitive traditions of the communities in which we claim membership, so, too, is our perception of historical objects and events informed and influenced by such traditions. As members of various “mnemonic communities,” we come to narrate the past in accordance with our communities’ own particular “mnemonic traditions” (i.e., the impersonal, socially inherited mental filters which determine how events are processed in our minds) and “norms of remembrance” (i.e., those rules dictating what a collectivity ought to remember and, conversely, what it ought to forget).⁵ The apparent meaning of a given event is primarily a function of its position (with reference to other events) within a historical narrative.⁶ As there is, of course, no intrinsic connection between any two events in the past, the meaning of any single event is thus constructed by mnemonic communities through the process of “emplotment,” i.e., “the encodation of the facts contained in [a] chronicle as components of specific kinds of plot structures,”⁷ e.g., progress and decline narratives.⁸ Just as they vary in their plot structure, historical narratives also vary in their “density,” i.e., their perceived eventfulness.⁹ Herein, I intend to examine the modern environmental movement as a mnemonic community, focusing on its various strategies of emplotting historical events and differentiating “eventful” from “empty” historical periods.

strategies of emplotment

Emplotment, at its core, is the process of establishing some degree of connectedness between points or events in the past. Because “no given set of casually recorded historical events can itself constitute a story,”¹⁰ the members of a mnemonic community must construct a narrative into which to place them and, thus, imbue them with meaning. Let us now discuss some of the most prominent historical narratives of the environmental movement and the manner in which their composite events are emplotted. The modern environmental movement in the United States generally considers its ideological foundations to be the transcendentalist writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (most notably his 1836 essay “Nature”) and, later, those of Henry David Thoreau, whose 1854 book Walden is among the most widely known nonfiction books ever written. Throughout his work, Thoreau celebrates the iconic beauty of nature and, in his conclusion, suggests that immersion of oneself within the natural world can lead to revelations of truth.¹¹ Within the environmentalist mnemonic community, Walden represents what was probably the earliest notable systematic exposition of the importance and value of the natural world in the modern age, serving as one of the movement’s core philosophical bases (and, thus, as an important impersonal site of memory). In other words, the emplotment of the event of the book’s publication within the environmentalist historical narrative presents it as a catalyst, or, perhaps more accurately, as a source of inspiration for many of the contributors to the movement’s later philosophical and political development (most significantly, the naturalist John Muir, who founded the Sierra Club in 1892 and is sometimes called “the Father of our National Parks”).¹²

The publication of the book, in turn, is popularly seen as a continuation of the themes of Emerson’s earlier transcendentalist writings. We may see here that the specified mnemonic community has retroactively constructed the meaning of Walden by emplotting the book’s publication between earlier and later events, defining it within the narrative of the social movement’s history as an essential historical link between them.¹³ The Walden narrative may best be viewed as one of progress, reflecting the themes of development and improvement over time.¹⁴ Because the book’s publication served to further and refine the tenets of a philosophy based on an appreciation of nature (as originated by Emerson) and inspire subsequent elaboration of this philosophy, Walden may be viewed as an important rung on the way up environmental movement’s developmental ladder toward becoming a mature political movement. To be sure, many of the basic tenets of environmentalism are now so widely accepted among the American public that it is now what may be called a “consensus movement.”¹⁵ Currently, environmentalism “is supported by a large majority of the population and opposed by only a small minority…the environmental movement remains in the final stage of movement evolution.”¹⁶

Let us now examine another example of a progress narrative within the environmentalist mnemonic community, viz., the advancement of “green” technologies. This narrative, as presented by the environmentalist mnemonic community, is basically as follows: 1) in the past, our machines were incredibly inefficient (in terms of energy consumption) and caused much harm to the environment because they released large amounts of pollution; 2) currently, our machines are far more efficient (for example, the average car today gets more miles per gallon of gasoline than the average car of the 1950s) and cause less pollution (for example, some manufacturing practices have been reformed so as to be “cleaner”); 3) in the future, our machines will be improved even further, perhaps to the point that they will be completely energy efficient and produce no harmful environmental pollution. Our current stage of technological development, it should be evident from the above, has been emplotted in this narrative as an intermediary stage between a dark, reprehensible past and a bright, laudable future. The initial push toward the development of these technologies, the environmentalist narrative would contend, was caused by the realization of just how inefficient and environmentally harmful past technologies were (and how much better future ones might be). It is exactly this type of progress narrative which underlies the environmental movement’s current push for the continued development and implementation of technologies such as hybrid and hydrogen-powered cars, wind turbines, solar panels, and energy-efficient appliances. This same narrative was also invoked in President Obama’s recent remarks to Congress that, as a part of his vision to improve the nation, the federal government “will invest fifteen billion dollars a year to develop technologies like wind power and solar power; advanced biofuels, clean coal, and more fuel-efficient cars and trucks.”¹⁷ It is interesting to note here the implications of the vocabulary associated with this particular progress narrative: phrases like “eco-friendly” and “environmentally responsible” are frequently used to describe the new technologies found in the latter stages of this specific progress narrative, insinuating that those older technologies from earlier stages are, perforce, “eco-unfriendly” and “environmentally irresponsible,” hence reinforcing the contrast between old and new.

Let us now discuss an example of a decline narrative, the exact opposite of a progress narrative, which is best imagined as a downward sloping arrow, illustrating a fall from some idealized past.¹⁸ Undoubtedly the foremost example of such a narrative within the environmentalist mnemonic community is that surrounding global warming and probably the most well known impersonal site of memory relating to this narrative is former Vice President Al Gore’s 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, although many other such sites exist. To continue, the general event sequence of the global warming narrative is as follows: before modern industrial civilization began transforming the atmosphere, the planet’s temperature conditions did changed over time, but at a slow enough rate that the biosphere could adapt to any such changes through evolution. However, the story continues, the relatively sudden changes in the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere (namely, an increase in greenhouse gases) which have resulted from human activity now put all life in danger. In the case of this narrative, the emergence of developed industrial society is emplotted as the cause of decline. As the global temperature steadily increases, the narrative continues, living organisms face increasingly dire consequences, beginning with habitat loss for many species and disrupted hibernation periods for others, followed by mass extinction of wildlife, melting ice shelves (and rising sea levels), more frequent hurricanes and wildfires, and increased threats to the health of the human population (e.g., increased risk of heart attack and contraction of malaria); finally, the story warns, global warming will make droughts and famines ever more frequent, causing a mass migration of human populations, increasing border tensions and, concurrently, the likelihood of war.¹⁹

The frighteningly precipitous deterioration of environmental conditions summarized above is at once a quintessential example of a decline narrative and a fitting sociological explanation for the urgency felt by environmentalists and those sympathetic to their cause to act immediately and drastically to reverse the current warming trend. Indeed, the global warming decline narrative is intimately related to the green technology progress narrative discussed earlier. To elaborate, from the perspective of many in the environmental mnemonic community, the impending decline of the Earth’s ecosystems can only be counterbalanced by meteoric progress in the efficiency and cleanliness of our technologies. As a cultural practice among the environmentalist community, “buying green” (produce, appliances, clothing, etc.) has become increasingly popular as a result of the visions of the past and future painted by both the green technology narrative and the global warming narrative. Other practices like recycling, employing reusable cloth grocery bags in place of disposable plastic ones, attempting to reduce one’s “carbon footprint,” celebrating Earth Day, and opting to ride a bike or use public transportation rather than take a private car are becoming more commonplace for similar reasons.

The environmentalist mnemonic community also presents a number of zigzag narratives, i.e., those in which the trajectory of the narrative reverses abruptly during the course of the story; there are two basic forms “rise-and-fall” and “fall-and-rise.”²⁰ Let us now examine some examples of the latter. Among the most prominent fall-and-rise narratives within the environmentalist mnemonic community are those surrounding the recovery of species which had once been endangered. The formal features of such a narrative are as follows: 1) decline: the population of a given species (e.g., the bald eagle) is said to have been in decline and approaching dangerously low levels, perhaps on the border of extinction, most likely due to human causes; 2) turning point: after activism on the part of some environmentally minded individual(s), the species is protected from the threat (generally through legislation); 3) recovery: with protective measures in place, the species’ population again begins to grow, perhaps approaching its original levels. Here, the activism of concerned citizens is emplotted as the force which halted the narrative’s decline and spurred its recovery. Another fall-and-rise narrative has to do with London’s “Great Fog” of 1952: throughout that year low-quality coal was being burned in the city, polluting the air with sulfur dioxide, and causing the deaths of many Londoners (particularly smokers and asthmatics). At the “elbow” of the narrative, the disastrous effects of this pollution are seen to lead to legislation mandating stricter standards of air quality in the city. Hereafter, such efforts to control air pollution became far more commonplace. Writes David Bates, who helped to treat many of those affected by the “Great Fog,” “it was the London disaster that compelled governments to act. This is why the London Disaster of 1952 should be commemorated; the many efforts to limit air pollution that have occurred in the past 50 years are the proper memorial to…its victims.”²¹ London’s disaster of 1952, then, represents “rock bottom” in the narrative regarding harmful ambient air pollution; the fog was a “wake up call” for governments to take greater measures to protect their citizens from coming to harm. Now, having examined the formal features of some of the environmentalist mnemonic community’s most prominent historical narratives, let us turn to an analysis of its mnemonic density.

mnemonic density

No era of history is inherently more eventful than any other; this fact, however, does not prevent us from envisioning some historical periods as “mnemonically empty” and others as “mnemonically full.”²² Within the standard historical narrative of “major” events, as conceptualized by members of the environmentalist mnemonic community, there appear to be six main stages of mnemonic density throughout the movement’s history. The first time period, encompassing all years prior to the 1840s, is practically barren from the perspective of the environmentalist movement. The basic norms of narration here owe to the idea that prior to the industrial revolution in the early 19^th century, humans were not thought to pose a serious threat to the environment and, thus, no real “environmentalism” (as it is currently understood) was necessary. Of course, there were many thinkers throughout who advocated respect for and conservation of the natural environment, but their contributions are not generally remembered, as they do not directly address the types of issues created by modern industrial society. The second time period, from the 1840s through the 1880s is – according to the community’s norms of narration – the beginning of the environmental movement as we know it today. The period is characterized by a low level of mnemonic density, with five “major” events: Thoreau’s relocation to Walden Pond in 1845; the establishment of the U.S. Department of the Interior by Congress in 1849; the publication of Walden in 1854; the passage of the British Alkali Acts in 1863, creating the first comprehensive environmental laws of the modern age; the establishment of Yellowstone in Wyoming as the United States’ first National Park by Congress in 1872. The third time period, the 1890s through 1920, is characterized by a moderate amount of mnemonic density, with seven “major” events: the establishment of Sequoia National Park and Yosemite National Park in 1890; the incorporation of the Sierra Club by John Muir in 1892; the first official Sierra Club outing in 1901; President Theodore Roosevelt’s visit to Yosemite National Park in 1903; the death of Martha the passenger pigeon in captivity, marking the species total extinction in 1914; the foundation of the U.S. National Parks Service in 1916. The norms of narration present this period as the formalization and early political implementation of the environmentalist philosophy. The fourth time period, the 1920s through the mid-1940s, is practically empty from the perspective of the environmentalist mnemonic community. To be sure, there were some notable environmentalist events during this period, such as the foundation of the Wilderness Society in 1935. However, the events of this period are simply not as important to the environmentalist mnemonic community’s understanding of history as those in the periods before and after, thus, this fourth period’s level of mnemonic density is practically zero.

The fifth period is that from the 1ate 1940s through the early 1970s, characterized by high mnemonic density (particularly during the 1960s). The norms of narration here present ever more dire environmental conditions requiring ever more comprehensive social and political action, as well as an increasing scientific knowledge of the extent of the effects of human activity on the natural environment. Aldo Leopold’s 1949 book A Sand County Almanac sparked the first wave of public interest in the science of ecology; 1952 saw the arrival of London’s aforementioned “Great Fog;” Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published in 1962, presented to the public convincing evidence of the harmful environmental effects of synthetic pesticides; The Wilderness Act, written to protect several million acres of federal land, was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964; in 1966, the Sierra Club led the movement to prevent the building of a dam across Arizona’s Grand Canyon; 1967 saw the first prediction that global warming would occur as a result of increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere as well as the Torrey Canyon oil spill disaster off the coast of Cornwall, England; 1970 saw the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency, the passage of the Clean Air Act extension, and the first celebration of Earth Day; the Clean Water Act was passed in 1972; the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973.

The final period, from the late 1970s to the present is characterized by moderate mnemonic density. The norms of narration for this stage present a global society which knows it is headed for disaster and must fundamentally reconfigure itself if it is to survive. In 1985, the hole in the ozone layer was discovered and later found to be caused by chlorofluorocarbons released into the atmosphere by humans; 1986 saw the meltdown of the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl and a global ban on whaling; in 1989, the Exxon Valdez spilled nearly 11 million gallons of crude oil off the coast of Alaska; in a more encouraging turn, the bald eagle was downgraded from “endangered” to “threatened” in 1994; 1997 saw a summit in Kyoto, Japan to discuss the reduction of carbon emissions along with the market introduction of the Toyota Prius, one of the first mass-produced hybrid-electric cars; in 2005, the Kyoto protocol was put into effect, but the U.S. chose not to take part in the agreement.

We can see from the segmented historical periods discussed above that different time periods of equal lengths may be extraordinarily unequal in terms of their mnemonic content and, concurrently, that time periods of unequal length may be perfectly equal in terms of their amount of mnemonic content.²³ For example, the 27 years between 1845 and 1872 are equal in their perceived eventfulness to the five year stretch between 1962 and 1967. Beyond this, many other five (or ten, or twenty!) year periods in the above narrative contain no mnemonic content whatsoever. From the perspective of the environmentalist mnemonic community, then, these years may as well have never happened, so uncelebrated are their composite events.

conclusion

As we have seen, the environmental mnemonic community, like all others emplots past events within certain archetypal narrative structures (e.g., progress, decline, zigzag) in order to establish some sense of connectedness between these events, and thus, imbue them with some degree of historical meaning. This mnemonic community also establishes varying degrees of mnemonic density for different periods throughout history by highlighting the importance of the events of some eras while downplaying that of events in other eras, essentially painting some eras as more “eventful” than others. Crucially, as I hope to have demonstrated, the processes this mnemonic community employs to craft a coherent vision of history are structurally identical to those used by other collectivities (such as wine enthusiasts, Democrats, or computer scientists), differing only in terms of content. Further analysis of such cross-contextual similarities will shed yet more light upon the processes behind intersubjective memory.

notes

1. Eviatar Zerubavel, Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 9.

2. Ibid., p. 12.

3. Ibid., p. 33.

4. Ibid., p. 34.

5. Eviatar Zerubavel, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003, pp. 4-5.

6. Ibid., p. 12 .

7. Hayden White, “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978 [1974]), pp. 83-84.

8. Zerubavel, Time Maps, pp. 14-18.

9. Ibid., pp. 25-26.

10. White, “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” p. 84.

11. Henry David Thoreau, “Chapter 18: Conclusion,” in Walden (1854), available online at

12. An official Sierra Club biography of John Muir is available online at:

13. Zerubavel, Time Maps, p. 7.

14. Ibid., pp. 14-15.

15. For further discussion, see John D. McCarthy and Mark Wolfson, “Consensus Movements, Conflict Movements, and the Cooperation of Civic and State Infrastructures,” in Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, Aldon D. Morris and Carol M. Mueller, eds. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press: 1992), pp. 273-97.

16. Riley E. Dunlap and Aaron M. McCright, “Social Movement Identity: Validating a Measure of Identification with the Environmental Movement,” Social Science Quarterly, v. 89, n. 5 (December, 2008): 1045-1065, p. 1051.

17. A partial transcript of President Obama’s speech is available online at:

18. Zerubavel, Time Maps, pp. 16-18.

19. A comprehensive list of the negative effects of global warming is available online at:

20. Zerubavel, Time Maps, pp. 18-19.

21. David V. Bates, “A Half Century Later: Recollections of the London Fog,” Environmental Health Perspectives, v. 110, n. 12 (December, 2002): A735

22. Zerubavel, Time Maps, p. 27.

23. Ibid., pp. 25-28

Rushing to Judgement – Josh Baker

Alex G — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 05:27:01 +0000

In response to the polemic article “…The Tough Get Spinning…” by Alex Giannattasio

I would like to take this opportunity to respond to a number of criticisms leveled against my column of two weeks ago by my friend Alex Giannattasio in a letter to the Daily Targum (“…The Tough Get Spinning….”). The letter’s writer first takes issue with my previous assertion that Obama’s attempts at bipartisanship “may ultimately prove fruitless – at least in the short term.” To clarify, by this statement, I meant that such attempts may not necessarily help him in obtaining the support of many Republicans, at least during his crucially important first 100 days in office. Giannattasio contends that, because President Obama’s stimulus bill passed through Congress somewhat quickly and was not met with a filibuster in the Senate, the administration’s bipartisan efforts have been successful. I think we would agree that the President’s persuasion of three Republican Senators to vote for the bill appears to constitute some degree of success in reaching across the aisle, perhaps even preventing a filibuster. However, appears is the operative word here. It is prudent to note that all three of these senators are career long centrists. Says a February 10 piece in the New York Times about Senators Susan Collins and Olympia J. Snowe, both of Maine: “[the stimulus vote is] hardly the first time the two have broken from their party; it has occurred regularly over the years on budget, health, tax and environmental policy.” If we also consider the fact that Sens. Collins and Snowe hail from a state in which Obama won fully 58% of the vote, we may see that their votes on this matter reflect the desires of their constituents along with their own independent attitudes. Much the same can be said of the third of these Republican “ayes,” Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who is among the most centrist members of congress and also comes from a state which Obama won decisively. Considering these facts, we cannot definitively say that the personal efforts of Obama and his staff had any substantial effect on the results we saw in the Senate. On the other hand, if we look to what happened in the House, we may see a striking example of just how ineffective the administration’s early attempts at bipartisanship have been. The very fact that Obama’s plan went through the House of Representatives twice without earning a single Republican vote – despite the administration’s numerous attempts to address GOP concerns with various amendments and revisions to the bill – proves that these attempts had virtually no positive impact whatsoever.

Giannattasio also takes issue with my citation of a Gallup poll which found that 59% of those polled support the plan and only 33% oppose it, writing that I make my “second error in suggesting that because a slight majority of Americans are in support of the stimulus package, Republican opposition is somehow unwarranted,” and, later, that “a poll…should not be taken as factual evidence of…anything.” First of all, a 59-33 margin is not in any way “slight” – nearly twice as many Americans support the plan as oppose it. As for the notion that polls are not evidence of anything, how can I possibly respond? Of course they do not paint a perfect picture of what our citizens are thinking, but polls generally do a pretty good job and are, without a doubt, the best way to quickly and reliably find out public opinions on issues of interest. Further, the contention that I would find any Republican opposition to be unwarranted is patently false. As I wrote two weeks ago, I know that some Republicans have “legitimate philosophical issues with the plan, [but] most Republicans appear to be voting against Obama purely for the sake of, well, voting against Obama.” I stand by this statement, which has been further validated by the subsequent actions of some Republican Representatives who opposed Obama. For instance, many of them (22 to be precise) have been touting the bill’s benefits in their home districts. That is, these congressmen, in a series of actions which can only be called staggeringly hypocritical, are taking credit for the aspects of the bill that will help their constituents after having voted against it twice.

Giannattasio then contests my assertion that Rush Limbaugh has become the de facto leader of the GOP, citing Pat Robertson’s “recent repudiation” of the talk show host. First, Pat Robertson is not a Republican politician – as we will see, those GOP politicians who have repudiated Limbaugh have been severely censured. Of course, I did not mean to suggest that Limbaugh is officially leading the GOP, but no figure on the right currently has anywhere near the amount of clout he has. Consider: this past weekend, after his keynote address at the Conservative Political Action Committee conference, Limbaugh’s words were criticized by RNC Chairman Michael Steele as “incendiary” and “ugly.” The following day, Limbaugh went after Steele, insinuating that he is more supportive of President Obama and House Speaker Pelosi than of his own party. On Monday, Steele attempted to make amends: “My intent was not to go after Rush – I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh. I was maybe a little bit inarticulate . . . There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership…” Let’s look at that last bit again: there was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or leadership. Steele knows that Limbaugh’s opinions of him will make or break his future in the party, and if this is the case, Limbaugh is indeed the GOP’s de facto leader, simply by virtue of the fact that no other figure on the right currently has as much influence as he does over the social/political climate in conservative America. Many other Republicans (e.g., Rep. John Barrasso of Wyoming) are terrified to publicly contradict Limbaugh, further demonstrating the hold the talk show host has over the American conservative movement.

Finally, Mr. Giannattasio disagrees with my claim that no Republican has voiced an alternative to Obamanomics, pointing to Congressman Ron Paul. Of course, Ron Paul has been a longtime advocate of fiscal and tax policy reform, and ran primarily on these issues when seeking the presidency this past year. Many of Ron Paul’s ideas are quite respectable, and I agree with him on many matters (including the drastic limiting of the United States’ global military presence). Paul’s ideas, though, do not constitute a viable alternative to Obamanomics in the eyes of most Republicans, as they have been roundly rejected by most GOP members of Congress (or at least not embraced as realistic policy approaches). Because most in his party do not see eye to eye with Paul on these issues, the GOP thus is united by no real economic ideology, save its distaste for that of Obama, Pelosi and Reid. Ultimately, despite its imperfections, the Obama stimulus plan was necessary. I do not wish to sound trite, but, as many have said before me, inaction on the part of the administration would have yielded far worse results.

This article was originally published by The Daily Targum.

You may view the original article at the following address: http://www.dailytargum.com/opinions/rushing_to_judgment-1.1594098

Pharmacologic – Josh Baker

Alex G — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 05:37:24 +0000

We say the map is different from the territory. But what is the territory? Operationally, somebody went out with a retina or a measuring stick and made representations which we then put upon paper. What is on the paper map is a representation of what was in the retinal representation of the man who made the map – and as you push the question back, what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite series of maps. The territory never gets in at all. The territory is Ding an sich and you can’t do anything with it. Always the process of representation will filter it out so that the mental world is only maps of maps of maps, ad infinitum. All “phenomena” are literally “appearances.”

Gregory Bateson, “Form, Substance and Difference”

introduction: classification, language, and the social mind

As social beings, we continually and comprehensively attempt to impose order and intelligibility upon the world through various systems of classification. Any such system depends on our ability to separate objects from one another and assign meaning(s) to them. Separation, in turn, requires language, “since it is much easier to isolate an island of meaning from its mental surroundings when there is a special word available to denote it.”¹ Once it has been isolated in this way, an object may be imbued with properties and, in light of these, compared to others with reference to specific “traditions of mental focusing”² that “dictate which of an object’s traits are or are not relevant when considering its relationship to others.”³ Professedly similar objects are “lumped” together as a single mental group, whereas those thought to be different from one another are “split” into distinct clusters.⁴ While the categories we delineate are, to be sure, completely arbitrary, we often neglect to realize this. That is to say, “we tend to forget that language itself rests on social convention and to regard the mental divisions it introduces as real.”⁵ For instance, there is no natural or inevitable connection between the word brother and the notion of a male sibling, i.e., the concept “is not linked by any inner relationship to the succession of sounds…which serves as its signifier.”⁶ Indeed, the Italian fratello has virtually the exact same meaning as brother in English, despite a total lack of verbal resemblance. This fact, however, does not in the least diminish the power of language to reify the distinctions we make as collectivities, as “in the mind of the speaker, the [word and the concept] are inextricably linked, forming a category which is utterly separate from others.”⁷

The conventional nature of the categories we construct (and the assortment of objects they happen to include) becomes apparent the moment we recognize how variable or contentious many of them are. The celestial body Pluto, for example, was designated as a planet upon its discovery in 1930.⁸ However, in August 2006, when the International Astronomical Union (IAU) defined the term planet for the first time, Pluto was stripped of this designation and placed into the dwarf planet category; widespread disagreement about Pluto’s new status followed: “On the day of the IAU decision, two members of the California state assembly introduced a resolution condemning the ‘mean-spirited’ IAU for its decision on Pluto, calling it ‘a hasty, ill-considered scientific heresy.’”⁹ Another case in point: The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision upheld the constitutionality of the practice of racial segregation in the public sphere, stating that Louisiana’s Act 111 of 1890 – which required separate accommodations for whites and blacks on railroads – did not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.¹⁰ This conception of racial segregation as constitutionally justifiable was generally accepted until the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Here, the Court found separate facilities to be a hallmark of inequality and ruled that such de jure racial segregation as the Plessy decision upheld did indeed violate the Equal Protection Clause and was, thus, unconstitutional.¹¹

We may see, then, that whether a debate is over the status of a celestial body or the interpretation of a law, on the most basic level, it concerns how (or whether) objects are to be placed into categories like constitutional or planet. In this sense, the two examples discussed above are no more than “different manifestations of a single generic pattern”¹² (viz., one in which ostensibly discrete islands of meaning are delineated and subsequently classified by means of linguistically-constructed notions of similarity and difference) that, as we have seen, “transcend[s] any one particular context.”¹³

the taxonomy of intoxicants: constructing mental discontinuity among drugs

Having examined some of the basic processes behind our classification of the world in general, we may now direct our analysis to that of psychoactive drugs. We must first ask, what is a drug? In contemporary society, a drug is generally taken to be any “nonfood substance intended to affect the structure and function of the body, most often to diagnose, cure, mitigate, treat, or prevent disease.”¹⁴ Psychoactive drugs, such as alcohol, cannabis, and methamphetamine, “affect brain functions, mood, and behavior and are subdivided primarily on the basis of physiological and psychological effects.”¹⁵ Some drugs, such as antibiotics and vitamins, are non-psychoactive, but these are not important to our present discussion, which will focus primarily on what are known in the United States as “illicit drugs,” i.e., those “psychoactive drugs used for pleasure, most of which are covered by…criminal provisions.”¹⁶ This brings us to a key point, as perhaps the most important distinction we make with regard to drugs has to do with their level of social acceptability, a function of which is their legality: “Different drugs are assigned to different social categories in different cultures…In modern industrial societies, we put great emphasis on keeping these categories separated…that is one reason why psychoactive drugs are so difficult for us to deal with [emphasis added].”¹⁷ The heated and ongoing debate over psychoactive drugs, then, is of the same basic social pattern as those discussed above, revolving around how a given set of objects is to be classified, in this case, as legal (i.e., socially acceptable or morally permissible in a formal sense) or illegal. Put differently, the dispute is essentially about what meaning drugs should have for us as a social group.^18.

While the number of controlled substances (in all of their various forms) in the United States currently numbers in the thousands and billions of dollars are spent each year to regulate of them, this was not always the case. In fact, until the passage of the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act in 1914, there were no federal laws governing the manufacture, importation, distribution or possession of any psychoactive drugs whatsoever (although some attempts had been made to create such policies, among them the Foster Anti-Narcotic Bill of 1910).¹⁹

The status of legislative control of dangerous drugs during the nineteenth century may be summed up as follows: The United States has no practical control over the health professions, no representative national health organizations to aid the government in drafting regulations, and no controls on the labeling, compositions, or advertising of compounds that might contain opiates or cocaine. The United States not only proclaimed a free marketplace, it practiced this philosophy with regard to narcotics in a manner unrestrained at every level of preparation and consumption.²⁰

Certainly, such an ideology with regard to drugs would be unthinkable to the majority of Americans today, but this is only because we have reified for ourselves the categories according to which we presently classify them. The conventionality of our conceptions of drugs becomes even more apparent when we note that other nations began taking measures to control drugs long before the United States. In 1868 the British legislature passed the Pharmacy Act, a law which controlled the sale of opiates and other purportedly dangerous substances; other European states soon enacted similar policies and some (for instance, those of Prussia) were quite strict.²¹ Here, we may tenably say that before the passage of such laws, drugs were almost completely irrelevant to most people, i.e., they simply failed to attract society’s moral attention.²² As we shall soon see, “what we come to deem as worthy of our moral concern is primarily a function of our socialization”²³ and drugs are no exception.

Let us also consider the fact that many of the drugs we prohibit nowadays were not only legal less than a century ago (or, in some cases, just a few decades ago), but were also broadly promoted as pharmaceuticals. That is, the very same substances which are now depicted as agents of death and personal destruction were formerly seen as beneficial for one’s health! Today, heroin is widely regarded as one of the most dangerous drugs in existence and its bad reputation among psychoactives is practically unrivaled. Until just over 80 years ago, however, the drug was openly manufactured and sold in the United States, having “been made available by the Bayer Company of Germany in 1898 as a…cough suppressant.”²⁴ Similarly, cocaine was used to alleviate a variety of ailments. Sigmund Freud, in his notorious 1884 essay, “On Coca,” advocated its use to treat a number of conditions, including nervousness and fatigue; between 1892 and 1903, Coca-Cola contained actual coca extract and was advertised as a remedy for headaches.²⁵ Cocaine is still approved – though rarely employed – for use as a topical anesthetic in eye surgery²⁶ and researchers in Japan have recently used eye drops containing the drug (along with phenylephrine, another stimulant) as a diagnostic test for Parkinson’s disease.²⁷ Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), better known as ecstasy, was first synthesized in 1914 and marketed as an appetite suppressant and was later used as a therapeutic drug in counseling session; until it was outlawed in 1985, “the drug was legally sold in bars in Texas catering to college students.”²⁸

The United States’ highest authority in the implementation of drug policy is the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), which derives much of its authority from the Controlled Substances Act of 1970; this law classifies practically all common psychoactive drugs along a continuum as belonging to one of five categories, ranging from Schedule I (these drugs are said to be the most dangerous, have a high abuse potential and no acceptable medical use; they are illegal at all times for any type of use) to Schedule V (these drugs are said to have a relatively low abuse potential and some accepted medical use).²⁹ Among the numerous drugs named in the statute are: Schedule I – heroin, cannabis, and MDMA; Schedule II – cocaine and the synthetic opiates fentanyl and methadone; Schedule III – amphetamines, phencyclidine (PCP), and lysergic acid amide (LSA), a chemical relative of the schedule I drug lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD); Schedule IV – barbiturates such as methohexitol and barbital; Schedule V – low-dose, low-potency painkillers such a codeine and many drugs which may be purchased without a prescription. The DEA’s authority was later expanded by the Controlled Substance Analogue Enforcement Act of 1986, which states: “A controlled substance analogue shall, to the extent intended for human consumption, be treated, for the purposes of any Federal law as a controlled substance in Schedule I.”³⁰ For example, the law would treat any of the Schedule I drug MDMA’s chemical relatives (e.g., MDA and MDEA) as if it is actually MDMA itself, thereby denying (at least implicitly) any sort of meaningful difference between the two drugs.

Among a number of the Controlled Substance Act’s hotly debated classifications is that of dimethyltryptamine (DMT). As a Schedule I drug, DMT, like heroin or cannabis, is said to be among the most dangerous and is illegal for any use. In 2006, however, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled “that a small congregation in New Mexico may use hallucinogenic tea [containing DMT] as part of a four-hour ritual intended to connect with God.”³¹ In the eyes of the court, then, the allegedly dangerous substance was acceptable for use in religious contexts. Perhaps most interesting, here, is the fact that DMT actually occurs naturally within the human body.³² In other words, the Controlled Substance Act has outlawed a chemical which all of us have in our bodies at all times! (How dangerous could it possibly be?) To continue: we have heretofore looked at the various ways drugs are classified in different of social and historical contexts. Now we must examine the types of mindsets which promote particular classification schemes.

just say no: drugs and the rigid mind

The first mindset we shall explore is that of the rigid mind, characterized by “unyielding, obsessive commitment to the mutual exclusivity of mental entities,” and an “either/or logic…which…does not tolerate any ‘gray’ shadings among mental fields.”³³ The rigid mind despises “ambiguity and tr[ies] to force intermediate essences into ‘pure’ categories” and is the polar opposite of the fuzzy mind, which sees the world as “a boundless, monotonous, continuous ocean uninterrupted yet by the insular mental entities that we only later learn to ‘see.’”³⁴ With reference to the main focus of this work, the rigid mind treats drugs as a bounded and absolute category, a whole class of objects with enduring and undeniable characteristics. Thus, the rigid mind thrives on the sort of starkly differentiated categories seen in the Controlled Substances Act. As it is unable to view objects differently in changed circumstances, tending instead to polarize them in order to render them “more obviously distinct from one another,”³⁵ the rigid mind opposes virtually any reconceptualization of the logic to which its division of the world adheres. It follows that this mindset simply cannot accept the notion of medical cannabis, as the use of such a drug for medical purposes (i.e., to improve a patient’s life) runs counter to preexisting categorizations of it as invariably dangerous and harmful. The rigid mind, in other words, holds an inherently conservative perspective, refusing to adjust its classifications in light of new evidence or acknowledge the superficial nature of its own distinctions.

This same mindset fuels the opposition of some religious groups to abortion in all cases, including pregnancies which threaten the mother’s life or result from rape or incest; such strict and immovable divisions, “by their very nature, are blind to the intricate and indexical nature of the issues at hand…assuming an overarching universal system of ethics which are to be followed unconditionally without regard to context.”³⁶ Similarly, the rigid mind will not be sensitive to the concepts of set (“the user’s state of mind at the time of use”) and setting (“the physical environment…surrounding…drug use”) and how these can affect the experience of drug use.³⁷ The “moral entrepreneur” is a perfect example of the rigid mind:

The existing rules do not satisfy him because there is some evil which profoundly disturbs him. He feels that nothing can be right in the world until rules are made to correct it. He operates with an absolute ethic; what he sees is truly and totally evil with no qualification. Any means is justified to do away with it. The crusader is fervent and righteous, often self-righteous. [emphasis added]³⁸

It is just such a conception of particular substances as “truly and totally evil” which is the inspiration for such rigid-minded ideas as “zero tolerance” and the War on Drugs.³⁹ This sort of mindset is excellently personified in Harry J. Anslinger, “who directed the Bureau of Narcotics [a DEA precursor] from 1930 to 1962” and advocated the “view that drug use inevitably produced dysfunction and pathology.”⁴⁰ In Anslinger’s mind, one was either a non-user or a dysfunctional addict – any in between would have been unthinkable.

let it be: drugs and the flexible mind

The last mindset to be discussed is best seen as an integrative blend of rigid- and fuzzy-minded thinking; the flexible mind appreciates “the inherently open potential of essence, it avoids freezing entities in any one mental context by assigning them fixed meanings, treating them instead like algebraic symbols that can assume practically any value.”⁴¹ Recognizing such “potential of essence” allows the flexible mind to view objects not just how they currently are, but how they could be. The flexible mind respects the fact that drugs can be harmful, but also recognizes that personal “deterioration is not inevitable” as a result of drug use and “the risks of taking…drugs are often overestimated because American society as a whole has rejected nonmedical drug use” since the early 20^th century.⁴² We may see the flexible mind at work when we note that heroin is still used medically (as a painkiller) in the United Kingdom⁴³ and that from 1839 to 1900 “more than a hundred articles appeared in scientific journals on medical uses of marijuana.”⁴⁴ Drugs, the flexible mind believes, are not merely dangerous intoxicants or life-sustaining remedies, but both – they simply act like one thing or the other as a function of context, and in this way they are far more meaningful. Similarly, the flexible mind appreciates the possibility of decriminalization, a somewhat strange intermediary between prohibition and legalization which the rigid mind cannot tolerate.

conclusion: for ourselves and our posterity – drugs and cognitive socialization

Throughout this work, we have seen a great diversity of ways of defining and classifying psychoactive drugs. Each attempts to place such objects into various categories in accordance with particular social definitions in a battle to control the “dominant social ideology.”⁴⁵ Through the use of programs like Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE), the rigid-minded individuals among us hope to spread “their perception that psychoactive substance use is inherently dysfunctional.”⁴⁶ During the 1950s-60s, the “FBN actively discredited scholars who expressed contrary views, such as sociologist Alfred R. Lindesmith, who…argued that drug maintenance was a possible option.”⁴⁷ Others in society have attempted to challenge the prevailing wisdom about drugs: the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) has been petitioning the government to change its drug policies for years⁴⁸ and the 1960s-70s era Student Association for the Study of Hallucinogens (STASH) published the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs in order to challenge the prevailing social logic of the time.⁴⁹ While a rigid-minded anti-drug ideology has dominated the U.S. drug policy discourse for decades, flexible-mindedness may yet prevail: “It is just possible that the prohibitionist ethos may loosen its hegemony, thus opening the way for the first time in…a century for a fundamental rethinking of the issue of drug use.”⁵⁰ If we are to have any effective drug policy, we must allow ourselves to be open to new ideas and diverse ways of thinking about the world, while at the same time maintaining enough structure to ensure coherence and intelligibility in our endeavors.

notes

1. Eviatar Zerubavel, Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 55.

2. Ibid., p.12.

3. Joshua Baker, “Everything In Its Right Place: The Sociocognitive Compartmentalization of Music Through Genealogical Narratives” (written for the course ‘Time, History, and Memory’ [920:421]; professor Eviatar Zerubavel; Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA; Fall 2007; grade: A+), p. 3.

4. Eviatar Zerubavel, The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 21.

5. Zerubavel, Social Mindscapes, p. 67.

6. Ferdinand de Saussure. Course In General Linguistics. Charles Bally & Albert Sechehaye (eds.). (New York: Mcgraw-Hill, 1961 [1916]), p. 67.

7. Baker, “Everything In Its Right Place,” p. 2.

8. Alexis Akwagyiram. (2005, August 2). Farewell Pluto?. BBC News Online. Retrieved November 5, 2008 from < http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4737647.stm>

9. David Shiga. (2006, September 7). Pluto added to official “minor planet” list. New Scientist. Retrieved November 5, 2008 from

10. See the court’s opinion in full online:

11. See the court’s opinion in full online:

12. Eviatar Zerubavel, “Generally Speaking: The Logic and Mechanics of Social Pattern Analysis,” Sociological Forum, 22 (2007): 131-145, p. 136.

13. Ibid., p. 134.

14. Richard Fields, Drugs in Perspective: A Personalized Look at Substance Use and Abuse, fifth edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003), p. 60.

15. Ibid.

16. Lester Grinspoon & James B. Bakalar. “Medical Uses of Illicit Drugs,” in Dealing With Drugs (San Francisco: Pacific Institute for Public Policy [now the Pacific Research Institute], 1987): 183-219, p. 187.

17. Ibid., pp. 183-184.

18. Zerubavel, Social Mindscapes, p. 15.

19. D. F. Musto, “The History of Legislative Control Over Opium, Cocaine, and their Derivatives,” in Dealing With Drugs (San Francisco: Pacific Institute for Public Policy [now the Pacific Research Institute], 1987): 37-71, p. 56.

20. Ibid., p. 40.

21. Ibid., p. 38.

22. Zerubavel, Social Mindscapes, p. 39.

23. Joshua Baker, “E Pluribus Unum: Attention, Relevance and Frame in Politics” (written for the course ‘Sociological Approaches to Social Psychology’ [920:319]; professor Eviatar Zerubavel; Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA; Fall 2008; grade: A), p. 3.

24. Musto, “Legislative Control Over Opium,” p.59.

25. Grinspoon, “Medical Uses of Illicit Drugs,” pp. 190-191.

26. Fields, Drugs in Perspective, p. 80.

27. Hideyuki Sawada, “Cocaine and Phenylephrine Eye Drop Test for Parkinson Disease,” Journal of the American Medical Association, v. 23, n. 8 (2005). Retrieved November 8, 2008 from

28. Fields, Drugs in Perspective, p. 51.

29. See the Controlled Substance Act in full online:

30. See the Controlled Substance Analogue Enforcement Act in full online:

31. Associated Press. (2006, February 21). Court Upholds Church Use of Hallucinogenic Tea. MSNBC Online. Retrieved November 5, 2008 from

32. See S. A. Barker, J. A. Monti & S.T. Christian, “N,N-Dimethyltryptamine: An Endogenous Hallucinogen,” International Review of Neurobiology, v. 22 (1981): 83-110

33. Zerubavel, The Fine Line, p. 34.

34. Ibid., pp. 49, 82.

35. Ibid., p. 46.

36. Joshua Baker. (2008, September 3). Faith and Politics. Daily Targum (Opinion). Retrieved November 9, 2008 from

37. Fields, Drugs in Perspective, p.58.

38. Howard S. Becker, “Moral Entrepreneurs: The Creation and Enforcement of Deviant Categories,” in Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (New York: The Free Press, 1963): 2-7, p. 2.

39. Charles Winick, “Social Behavior, Public Policy, and Nonharmful Drug Use,” Milbank Quarterly, v. 69, n. 3 (1991): 437-459, p. 449.

40. Ibid., p. 446-447.

41. Zerubavel, The Fine Line, p. 121.

42. Winick, “Nonharmful Drug Use,” p. 451, 453.

43. Ibid., p.447.

44. Grinspoon, “Medical Uses of Illicit Drugs,” p. 212.

45. Winick, “Nonharmful Drug Use,” p. 446.

46. Ibid., p. 454.

47. Ibid., p. 447.

48. Grinspoon, “Medical Uses of Illicit Drugs,” p. 219.

49. Winick, “Nonharmful Drug Use,” p. 450.

50. Ibid., p. 455.

Life in a Glass House – Computerized Recommendations

Alex G — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 03:40:04 +0000

By Josh Baker

In recent years, as our computer technologies have become more sophisticated, many functions which were once performed exclusively by trained workers (e.g., those of the cashier, the bank teller, and even the family doctor) may now be accomplished in large part through the use of automated online systems. Online shopping sites, commercial banking sites, and health information sites (such as WebMD) allow consumers to access and use a formidable number of services without the direct aid of another person. Even many occupations which previously seemed impervious to computerized outsourcing (as with the aforementioned family doctor) may ultimately face just such a fate.

The job of music journalist, too, may come to be threatened as a result of the steadily growing popularity of automated music recommendation services such as Pandora, last.fm, and iTunes Genius. As with virtually everything in our digital age, the process of discovering music has been greatly streamlined by such services. These services are viewed as a highly convenient and efficient means of finding and consuming music, as their users can literally discover and listen to thousands upon thousands of previously unknown artists and songs based entirely on their own preferences, rather than poring over pages of record reviews in Rolling Stone or Spin and relying upon the opinions of another.

With last.fm, users can view virtually endless lists of artists deemed to be similar to those they already love by the website’s sophisticated software, which recommends artists, songs, and videos after collecting data on their listening habits and comparing it to that of other users. The site also offers comprehensive profiles of many artists, recommends events based on geographical location, and provides many free downloads. Pandora allows users to create their own custom internet radio stations based on particular artists and songs; these stations then stream music that has been determined to be similar to the “seed” music based on its acoustic qualities (as catalogued by the Music Genome Project). The new Genius feature on iTunes allows users to create playlists based on a specific song in their library with a single click: iTunes will automatically assemble a group of similar songs (based on listening history data collected from users’ iTunes accounts). Genius also recommends music to be purchased from the iTunes store.

So what does all of this mean for our discovery and consumption of music? And what is the fate of the music journalist? As far as I can tell, these services are a godsend to those who use them, allowing their users to easily keep up with new or previously unknown artists and albums. Users of last.fm, myself included, are consistently astounded by the site’s ability to recommend just what they want. Many are equally impressed with Pandora and Genius. But what of our music writer? Currently no automated system can provide music fans with the sort of in-depth analysis that a writer can provide, so far as discussing an artist’s influences, thematic properties and so forth, but many consumers are not necessarily interested in much of this information. Those who had no choice before but to consult publications in order to discover new music now have an alternative, and it appears that most music fans are eager to jump on board with it.