Prefab house concept for Alcoa by Charles W. Moore and William Turnbill (via Mid-Centuria)
Why not build an airport that floats in the Thames Estuary?
After his acceptance speech TED curator Chris Anderson turned the auditoriums in Long Beach and La Quinta into a synergistic Baptist revival-style celebration of support. Pledge cards were distributed immediately to everyone in the rooms at both locations — they bear more than a passing resemblance to the envelopes and plates passed around right after the sermons in my old Presbyterian church. Audience members from large and small companies got up to pledge monetary and administrative support, and the mood was electric. Chris Anderson was the fiery yet graceful pastor, his fervor directed not at Jesus but at Mitra’s minimalistic school. This was the new type of religion I’ve often envisioned: the exuberant dedication of emotional and physical resources to a proven force of good, not to an irrational faith-based deity. This was a church without a god. Well maybe Bono is its god but that is a story for a different day.
But avoiding the words that people didn’t use back then is ultimately just a mechanical problem. A Princeton history graduate student, Ben Schmidt, has actually written a program that tags all the phrases in a script that don’t appear in the books of its era. The bigger challenge is to convey the meanings of the words that people did use, especially when they resonate differently now. “Equality,” “prejudice,” “race” itself — how can you have mid-19th-century characters use words like those without anachronistically evoking the connotations they have for us? To many of Lincoln’s contemporaries and even his allies, “equality” still evoked alarming echoes of the French Revolution. To speak of “race equality” implied not just that people should all be treated alike, but that the races really were morally and intellectually equivalent. That seems self-evident to us, but it was an extreme and dubious proposition to all but a few radical Republicans, like Thaddeus Stevens. Lincoln himself almost certainly didn’t believe it, nor did the prominent scientists of the age. In fact, the phrase “race equality” was the phrase the defenders of slavery threw at Republicans to charge that they wanted to raise Negros to the same status as whites and encourage miscegenation — charges the Republicans indignantly and sincerely denied.
East Lake Park, Birmingham, Alabama, in the 1920s. I grew up right next to East Lake but can’t quite figure out where this is — maybe down at the eastern tip of the lake?
And here we have arrived deep in the belly of the neoliberal whale, just in time to watch the experts and technocrats hand out machetes to we, the swallowed. If you want an explanation of the meanness of 21st Century American public discourse, for the fractures in the body politic, this will do as a starting place. “Get that guy to wear his helmet, because otherwise he’s going to cost you money.” “Get that woman to lose weight, because otherwise she’s going to cost you money.” “Hassle that couple because their kid plays too many video games and might slightly underperform in school and not make the contribution to net productivity that we are expecting of him.”…What the experts generally rarely say is, “Because we care for one another, want the best possible lives for one another, and would not be deprived of each other’s company one moment sooner than we must”. Why does your mom tell you to wear a helmet and stop smoking and lose some weight? Ok, sometimes because of the ordinary psychodrama of family life and its little struggles for power, but sometimes, often times, simply because your mom or your dad or your kid or your friend loves you. Because they value you.
As nations become wealthier, it is harder for them to sustain high rates of growth. That doesn’t mean that the United States is in decline, or even stagnating. When a nation is as rich as ours, it can realize larger absolute gains than it did in the past and larger gains than other nations even if it has lower growth rates. That’s because a growth rate of, say, 2.5 percent represents a larger increase in absolute wealth the richer an economy becomes. In 1900, a 2.5 percent increase in gross domestic product (GDP) per capita would have translated into about $150 in today’s dollars for every man, woman, and child in the United States. In 2010, it would have been roughly $1,200, reflecting the fact that in the aggregate, we are about eight times wealthier than we were 110 years ago. By focusing too much on growth rates and too little on absolute increases in wealth, we have failed to appreciate the magnitude of economic gains in recent decades.
Food is molecules, not bits—which also means it can’t be digitally copied, shared, pirated, or sent across the Web. And that may be the secret of its status now. The more virtual our experience becomes, the more we value the tangible, the sensual, and the immediate. Food is very intimate; we put it in our bodies. It creates and affirms our intimacy with others. Not for nothing do families gather around the table, dates begin with dinner, and religions use food as the symbol of communion.In the age of mechanical reproduction, Walter Benjamin famously argued, works of art have lost their aura of the sacred, their irreducible uniqueness and presence. One can only imagine what he would have said about the age of electronic reproduction. Forget about posters or vinyl or film; now we can be anywhere, to look or listen. But food is always unique. You have to be there, have to be present, have to be in contact with the thing itself. You have, in other words, to be here now. If the purpose of religion is to bring us into relationship with reality, perhaps it’s no surprise that food is our religion today.
I will say only this to its acolytes and votaries. Religions don’t stay innocent for long. Churches, dogmas, heresies, schisms, senescence: you have all this to look forward to.