august philippic

A brief word about Tibet (not intended as support for any particular side).   Tibet was not “part of” China before the twentieth century.  Understanding the relationship between Tibet and China requires understanding the Qing Dynasty, which lasted from 1644-1911.

The emperors of the Qing were from Manchuria, and they engaged in conquest southward into China and westward into central Asia.  Once China was conquered, the Qing were primarily concerned with westward expansion to defeat an ethnic group of Mongols called the Zunghars.  The Zunghars, like many central Asians, practiced Tibetan Buddhism, and for this reason they sought to depict themselves as defenders of the Dalai Lama.  In the course of defeating the Zunghars, Qing emperors sought to take over that role.  The important relationship was not between “Tibet” and “China” — it was between emperor and the Dalai Lama.   There are differing accounts of the nature of that relationship, but basically the Qing was committed to prevent any rival power from gaining influence over Tibet by means of the Dalai Lama.  And again, as there was little danger of anybody sending an army over the Himalayas, the primary strategic problem for the Qing had to do with Mongolia, not control over Tibet.

The Qing did not have “sovereignty” over Tibet, not in any ordinary sense of the term.  The Qing did not collect taxes, nor did Qing law apply in Tibet.    The Qing depicted the entire world as subject to various zones of control, and Tibet was one of those zones.  We can blame Qing leaders and Tibetans for not having the foresight to see that in the future the world would be organized into nation-states, but we can’t claim that the Qing-Tibet relationship has any obvious parallel in modern international law.

The basis of China’s claim to Tibet is the same as the U.S.’s claim to New Mexico.  We can be sympathetic to the sufferings of the Apache, but we’d be suspicious if Vladimir Putin began to champion their cause.  And if an Apache leader took refuge in Tijuana, I can’t imagine that American public opinion would be swayed to reparations or to New Mexican autonomy.    I don’t defend the way that Tibetans are being treated, but I’m also not a fan of Tibet’s champions abroad.  The Chinese government acts like a colonial power largely because it itself emerged in response to colonialism.  Making sense of that history seems to me crucial to figuring out what kinds of policy will promote the greater good in China and elsewhere.  I hope to be writing more about it soon.

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On Wikifray, I posted something not well considered, and Gregor Samsa took me to task, at which point I made things worse. What follows is my attempt to say something less stupid…

The Wikifray discussion is here

Hi Gregor,

Your critique comes at a useful time for me. I’ve been designing a course about technology and interactions between Europe and the Qing dynasty. I’d meant the course to be about things like changes in the manufacture of opium, jesuit contributions to cannon technology, the development of a Chinese navy (and the sinking of that navy by the Japanese in 1895), changes in sugar production and how they affected labor, the development of rifles with a higher rate of fire, the relationship between steamboats and steamship diplomacy — that sort of thing, not really history of science at all.

Well, anyway, a lot of the ways that both Chinese and Europeans understood this technological development was cast in racial terms ( roughly “Machines as the Measure of Men” ). So I got into depictions of the world according to supposed technological prowess, and from there it’s just a short hop to Gould’s book on The Mismeasure of Men. I was in the middle of that when I read Saletan. I’ll add that I felt a bit horrified because the institution where I teach is very similar to one that trained him, I regard my main task as trying to prevent people from spouting the kind of bullshit he was spouting. And then I manage to spout my own forms of bullshit as well.

Point being, if you are willing to keep up this conversation (I know you are busy) it would be very helpful to me.

To your most recent points:

Again, genes (interacting with environment) choose specific traits in individuals, a mapping that is itself value neutral. Which traits are highly valued is chosen by society, and varies over time and space. This point is entirely trite and uncontroversial, at least among the sane.

The general point may be uncontroversial, but the specifics matter. I assume this is so obvious to you that you choose not to dwell on it (or maybe you just think I’m dwelling too deeply on it, and want me to look in a different direction.) Anyway, as you know but apparently Saletan doesn’t, and for the benefit of anybody else reading — the variation is in the genes, the ways the genes are expressed, the ways that a given observer chooses to define the trait under observation, and the social value/attention placed on the trait. The cases of race and intelligence both show that you can construct a trait that, yes, corresponds to some kind of physical reality but is itself a reification. I think it is fair to say that most people are less aware of that last point than you are. And I also think the example is an argument for paying attention to history – which definitions have caused mischief in the past, and how? Perhaps you think that if people get the math right the problems are solved and the history doesn’t matter. The honest answer is that I don’t know the math well enough to judge, but it seems to me your Platonic goal of disinterested observation might be served by keeping an eye on those interested observers who thought they were being disinterested.
In my sober moments, I don’t mean to throw the baby out with the bathwater. My post is overstated, but I don’t think that that point is trivial, even to the sane. Maybe I wouldn’t know.

What is not trite is your normative claim that society should choose what it values so that people of different genetic endowments enjoy roughly equal success. The dog example illustrates that nobody is prepared to embrace it beyond a point, not even you (yes, their treatment varies across cultures but pampered slaves is as good as it gets). That is because there are other properties (e.g., general affluence, peacefulness, culture, etc.) that we find desirable in our notions of a good society, and a trade-off between equality and these other virtues is plausible. Some values may be imposed by power elites, but many others are rendered necessary by widely shared goals, like freedom from hunger and violence.

Fair enough. Still, the conversation seems to be going like this:
You “What about the constraints?”
Me “What about the way people overstate those constraints?” I mean, freedom from hunger and violence seem to me goals of very, very few societies – the far more common model seems to be “Protect one group from hunger and violence by lumping as much as possible of it on another.”
So I guess one of my questions is, what kind of a question are we debating? If we are talking about the world of2007, what do you think is the bigger problem – our failure to acknowledge genetic differentiation or the arrangement of the world into societies based on a bogus categories supposedly derived from science? I recognize the two aren’t mutually exclusive, and I also recognize that that isn’t your claim.

So yes, a trade off between equality and heritable virtues is possible (you are right) – but it seems to me that the more difficult social problems up to now have involved trade offs (not made) between groups that are not constituted by genetic differences. More often, what I see happening is people trying to justify for example, poor treatment of women on the basis of female biology. Hence my claim “Surely a just society is one that finds the best way for biological differences to be advantageous to all concerned, that finds opportunities for both short and tall. An unjust society is one that allows prejudice to shape scientific categories, thus justifying discrimination.” – I take your point that the “best way” is going to have a number of caveats, that it will never be possible to ignore genetic differences. I still think the second sentence is correct – you may find it trivial (and not relevant to your own intellectual endeavors) but it’s relevant to the lives of lots and lots of people. It doesn’t necessarily help them to acknowledge the general principle as obvious when the fallacy is so common. (Not that I’m doing them any good either).

Both you and Arch (to say nothing of Stanley Fish) also seem to suffer from the perennial confusion between normative science and the sociology of practiced science. The fact that there are few, if any, disinterested observers doesn’t imply that we shouldn’t endorse a Platonic principle of disinterested observation, and hold each other to it. The statements “Rushton’s motivations are racist” and “Rushton is wrong” require different (though not completely unconnected) reasoning. If I claim that dogs are genetically unsuited to play piano sonatas, it is not enough to cite chapter and verse on how many poodles I have killed or how I am funded by the cat lobby (cats, it is well known, have a deep appreciation of Chopin), true as they might be. The arrogance of postmodernism lies in the smug assumption that everyone who rejects epistemological relativism/nihilism must be a political naïf.

I’m not Stanley Fish. Point taken. As noted, I reacted the way I did because Saletan was rehearsing ideas that were both wrong and caused terrible injustice. He claimed that ignoring the injustice made him more objective, and then used his supposedobjectivity to ignore the ways issues he brought up had already been demonstrated to be problematic. What I think is sad about the episode is that Saletan has now replicated precisely the error you bring up here – he’s partially retracted what he said because he discovered that one of the authors of a study was racist, but still not pointed out the ways that the study was wrong. Probably a more socially useful post would have been to rehearse Gould’s points.

There is more to “what if” than proof by insinuation (though it is often employed as such a tactic, for sure). The evidence for racial differences in socially valued genetic endowments is unpersuasive, but that for substantial individual variations is overwhelming (mushy liberals refute the former by rejecting the latter). If you haven’t thought about how society should treat its congenitally dumb, ugly, lazy, criminal or psychopathic members (in proclivity, at least) - regardless of race or gender - you haven’t paid attention to much that is relevant in the social realm.

Your second sentence – I assume rewritten it says that “There are substantial individual variations in socially valued genetic endowments” I don’t quite understand how that answers my worries about who is deciding what is socially valued. And again, I remain impressed that there might be a lot of different ways of handling this problem, and that an answer on first principles might not be as effective as a kind of ad hoc pragmatism.
But I’ll try to take your question as stated. It seems to me that we have differential moral obligations. I think that there is a certain base set of obligations due to people simply by virtue of their being human, and that those obligations take priority over others (I’m perhaps Confucian in this respect – I see somewhat higher obligations to immediate community, family, etc). Once those basic obligations (i.e. those due to people by virtue of being human) are met, my tolerance for inequality is high. Indeed, I’d prefer a world in which the morally astute (which may well be a heritable characteristic) are rewarded.

Is that a useful response? If not, it would be most helpful for me if you reproduced the old ghost of a-z you –yadda yadda, me trenchant point, you idiotic point, me ??? style of précis.

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mrs. august was infuriated today by a review of Diana Abu-Jaber’s book, Origin, in the New York Times. It’s a negative review, but that wasn’t the biggest problem. What annoyed mrs. august (and me) was that the reviewer tried to recast the book as Arab-American fiction, when the story has nothing to do with Abu-Jaber’s previous work.

The review is here. I’ve read (and loved) Abu-Jaber’s earlier work, but haven’t looked at this one yet.

In other news, Jim Shephard didn’t win the National Book Award. He got robbed. I will still consider myself ahead of the curve.

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On subway platforms, he was always convinced that a maniac would push him in front of a train, and that his parents would think it was suicide.  He took various precautions — sitting down when  he could, grasping available girders, positioning himself behind solid-looking passengers.  He was often concocting homicidal scenarios in which he was victim of a reckless cab driver, a drunk college student, a cop.  Respite from these fantasies came only when he could concentrate on something very intensely, as this morning, when he sat looking at the patterns of sunshine on the brick facade of a nearby building.  Soon the brick was not brick and the city not a city, but everything was a canvas, and he felt safe, as if in a museum.

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Seeing the leaves against the granite, orange and green and red, gave me vertigo.  I thought of the Japanese aesthetic of death, that a way of dying can be beautiful.  I think in the U.S. the idea has an unfortunate association with kamikaze pilots.  But what would it mean to honor death, to see it as potentially ugly and potentially beautiful?  How might an aesthetics of death shape, for example, health care policy? 

I’m trying to think of my favorite film death.  I think it is the end of Le Samourai (Japan again, but filtered through France!), which I am now going to spoil by saying that it involves a sacrifice, a clean modern line, a kind of love that can’t really be love.  It’s death as a Sade tune — “We move in space with minimum waste, maximum joy.” 

Tags: visions, grooves // 2 Comments »

ME: I had a hard time telling how you were different from earlier nightmares.

NIGHTMARE: I get asked that a lot. I’d say it was indeed subtle, my own artistic inspiration, borrowing a bit from German Expressionism and (because I love the textures) the Righteous Brothers. I feel that I had an artistic whole, a real organic quality that…

ME: But just to back up for a moment…

NIGHTMARE: …that recalled Fellini at his most playful and yet sad. I guess La Strada was my biggest influence. Such a brilliant film!

ME: Right, but what specifically was different?

NIGHTMARE: This was the biggest tsunami yet — a wave to convention in order to subvert it.

ME: All my nightmares have the biggest tsunami yet.

NIGHTMARE: But here, recall, that you were at top of the big cliff! And so, breaking down the forth wall, going a little meta, when you thought “those waves are just like in my nightmares,” you felt a false sense of triumph — as if you had endured it all before. As if now, finally, you could rise above and look down on your terror, as if all was well.

ME: Yes, I see.

NIGHTMARE: And then giving you this illusion of wakefulness, I of course produce an even bigger wave, one that makes the cliffs disappear, one that shook the building you were in and covered everything with water.

ME: And then I woke up. It was chilling. I’m wondering, I was speaking to somebody over the weekend who claimed she no longer had nightmares, that even in sleep she knew herself to be dreaming, and thus felt no fear.

NIGHTMARE: The detached observer. Yes, that might be your best strategy, your best hope. But you have to be very careful, because we nightmares are always laying traps, subverting your awareness, sneaking up again. We’re tricky bastards. Comfort yourself in your world all you want, but you’ll see me again, or somebody quite like me.

ME: You’re like a talk show before the writer’s strike.

NIGHTMARE: I enjoy my work. What can I say — I’m an auteur. One can’t strike from oneself.

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I mentioned Adam Langer’s Crossing California in a previous post. One of the many interesting things about that book is that it’s central theme is a street – California Avenue in Chicago – that was a border for a Jewish neighborhood. It’s a familiar kind of border – anybody who has lived in a city (or in suburbs, or in rural areas) will recognize a variety of borders that have nothing to do with political boundaries. If you talk to people, they can usually point to a line (sometimes corresponding to a street, an overpass, or the clichéd railroad track) that separates rich from poor, or race from race, educated from non, safe from un. Part of the specialized knowledge of place is to understand the shifting nature of these borders (they may emerge only at night, for example. They may even be marked by, for example, gang symbols or neighborhood watch signs).

That much everybody knows. So why am I  blogging about it?
What do I have to add? Well, the way the borders change – they are contingent on collections of impressions, shifting landscapes of shops, schools, apartments, transportation. We recognize that the borders of daily life are impermanent, however meaningful they may be in any moment.

Is that part of the reason for the ever-recurring immigration debate in America? We all know that a border is a fake thing, and thus we pour money into policing, wall-building, legislation, caricatures of immigrants in order to make this fake thing seem real, urgent, permanent, safe. When really no border can be any of those things.

I know that the observation doesn’t solve the problem, or even address what most consider to be the issues, but over and over in the immigration debate my sense is that the actual lives of immigrants are totally marginal to the fears that people have about losing jobs, low wages, security, a breakdown of established rules. Like terrorism, immigration is a debate about our own neuroses. I just wish we once again had political elites willing to insist that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself. Instead, we get “FEAR! FEAR! FEAR!” Which in turn makes me rather afraid, just not about immigration or terrorism.

Tags: cities, philippic // 4 Comments »

I’m finding myself oddly attuned to space today. I think it’s because mrs. august and I spent a few hours this weekend biking though a sculpture park. Something about taking in so much art in motion, circumnavigating, weaving, braking and accelerating through sculpture. It was really exhillerating, a reminder of how art can affect our perceptions. Also: really fun!

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I was looking across the sky at the sunset, which made the clouds seem like mountains, when I surprised myself by turning inside out.  My eyes could only see my inner brain, while my organs felt at first warm, then cooler as the world got darker through my translucent humours.

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I’ve just read a short essay by Riccardo Petrella titled “A Global Agora vs. Gated City-Regions.” The title refers to two visions of the future. The first is a world (”Global Agora”) in which things like information technology have made it possible for the voices of people around the world to be heard, and where therefore a new sense of ethics, justice, and equality takes hold. Petrella believes that utopian view lies in the distant future. In the meantime, we are stuck with gated city-regions, a network of about 30 urban conglomerations where wealth, technology, management skills, and political power is centered. Petrella’s list includes New York, LA, Miami in the U.S., Tokyo, Osaka, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Jakarta in east/southeast Asia. Odd (to me) that Mumbai and Abu Dhabi didn’t make the list, but that’s neither here nor there.

Here’s what I’m thinking. Imagine there is a world of a limited number of wealthy cities, and a vast hinterland of poor areas squeezed out by the imbalance of capital. Imagine, therefore, people immigrating to cities to try to gain a portion of the wealth. How do you think the rich mercantile powerbrokers would react? Perhaps their response would have something to do with police? And perhaps this structure of the world might have come into existence in the late nineteenth century?

That’s what Frederick Wakeman’s Policing Shanghai made me think. He describes the French and British both competing and colluding with the Chinese public security forces in Shanghai in the 1920’s and 30’s. The city was very corrupt, with various forces trying to control the opium trade, and the imperialist powers having a deep interest in helping Chiang Kaishek defeat the Communists (who, the British and French worried, might spur revolts in Indochina and India). Seems like this scenario supports Petrella’s hypothesis.

Occurs to me that this basic regime has only shifted its centers of gravity, not its fundamental logic.  How depressing..

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Taiwanese identity is one of the world’s more complicated, volatile, and undiscussed issues. This article only hints at the depth of feeling about mainland China, and particularly Chiang Kaishek’s army, which took over the island in 1945 and retreated there in 1949 (with branches winding up in Korea and Southeast Asia). Even when Chiang ruled the mainland, the links between government, military, and organized crime were rather too close for comfort, and nothing changed when he arrived in Taipei. Taiwan’s current ruling Democratic Progressive Party leaders, including Chen Shuibian, cut their teeth as political prisoners and targets of what amounted to gangland-style violence. It explains a lot, including the tendency of legislators to get in fistfights.
Still, it is a democracy now. Seems like there are fewer and fewer of those…

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This American Life is a favorite radio program, although it is rare that I get a chance to devote an hour to it. Last night I was cooking dinner, and I caught the updated version of the show’s tribute to Harold Washington. It reminded me of another great novel I read recently (well, last year). Adam Langer’s pair of novels about kids growing up in a Jewish neighborhood in Chicago was even better that This American Life. Langer has a wicked sense of humor (as when a 13 year old decides she wants to hold an orgy), and even though the characters were totally outrageous, they felt like people I’d known for a long time.

Speaking of outrageous, I just finished Jim Shephard’s short story collection, Like You’d Understand, Anyway.  It’s very dark.  A man who survived a massive tidal wave in Alaska when he was three now wants to get a vasectomy.  A revolutionary executioner is has marital difficulties after he offs the king.  Nazis hunt yeti in Tibet to prove racial theories they don’t believe.  An engineer tries to find out what happened to his brothers at Chernobyl.   The stories have a poetry of isolation and estrangement.  They are perfect to read if you are feeling lost.

They are also up for a National Book Award.  We’ll see on Wednesday whether I’m still gaining on the curve.

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“Old Man River” is about the saddest song I know.

Warning to would-be authors — a rave in the New York Times Book Review means an amazon rank of 3614. I’m amazed anybody is still writing books. Say you’re a movie director, and your film is a total bomb. Well, that still means that probably thousands of people have seen the movie. But write a novel, and you’re lucky if 1000 people buy it, to say nothing of actually reading it.

It is for this reason that I am developing my powers of telepathy and mind control. You have been assimilated. This is a test.

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It is rare that I can prove that I am ahead of the curve. I can assure you, however, that I have the curve in my rear window, eating my dust. In today’s New York Times Book Review, a rave of a book that I praised in Wikifray last week.

Here it is again:

The problem with seduction is time. You have to figure out that you are attracted to somebody, plot a means of approach, work up your courage, and execute your plan in finest form before the object of your affection gets off the subway. You have to move. And when you see that special someone gathering to hand the purses, backpacks, and other accoutrement of daily life, you know that your deadline is looming. What do you do?

If you are Maynard Gogarty, you pull the emergency break cord. And if you are Rudolf Delson, author of this season’s best book, Maynard and Jennica, you give the subway its due say, along with a macaw, a scheming ex-wife, a man named Puppy Jones, scumbag lawyers, and Jennica Greene, the woman who provoked Maynard’s subway impulse. This love story is told by thirty-five narrators (befitting, I think, the way love stories should be told — in mock grandiosity, a bit like Bugs Bunny doing opera).

The New Yorker has a better write up than I can provide here. Suffice to say that the path by which Maynard and Jennica find each other extends well beyond the number 6 train, to San Jose, to avant guard film, to 9-11 scams, to really exceptionally bad poets, and to a cat whose name is a matter of some dispute. So rather than spending a cold fall rehashing yet another Philip Roth, wrap a blanket around your shoulders, pick up something new, and warm yourself up with Maynard and Jennica. Worst that can happen is you spend a few hours laughing your butt off.
Also: coolest cover of the season, by far.

Okay, so I guess that means the New Yorker was really ahead of the curve, but still…

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My job is full of interesting conversations. I am all the time meeting people I didn’t know worked here, and we are reshaping the world by making it less stupid. Every day we discover innovative ways to combat morons. We are exceptionally witty, and very well paid. We travel enough to keep things stimulating but not so much that it interferes with family life. On Thursday evenings, everybody breaks early for a drink, and the venue always has a view; the bartenders make perfect Manhattans; everybody wants my phone number. In future generations, historians collect my papers, and they reek from envy.

Tags: august // 10 Comments »

I was having a conversation this morning with somebody who didn’t like Royal Tenenbaums: “It just didn’t go anywhere.” I see her point. Wes Anderson is a self-absorbed filmmaker of self-absorbed people. A lot of people have complained that he cares more about the wallpaper patterns than the acting. On the DVD of Tenenbaums, there’s an interview with Gene Hackman in which the actor describes his own discomfort with Anderson’s style — the way he had to ignore all the, the stuff to turn in his performance.

I still love the movie. I love the energy that narcissists can produce around themselves — the movies devote themselves to big personalities. They are fantasias of ego. I don’t mean Anderson’s own ego; I mean that Anderson’s lens shows us a world twisted by the personality of his characters, and in that world the most important thing about the Indian funeral, for example, is not the death, not the way the Indian characters feel, not even really the way the protagonists feel, but the way the protagonists can dress to match the color scheme. It’s borderline offensive. But it’s also entertaining, a Brooklyn-warp, a watercolor of the damaged.

It also works as light parody. In Darjeeling Limited, Bill Murray (who has no lines), runs to catch the Darjeeling Limited, and misses it. It feels like a reference to Razor’s Edge. In that movie, the protagonist has survived World War I, and the journey to India is taken very seriously as critique of the world at hand. In this movie, it’s not clear that there’s any merit to this trip beyond the emotions expressed by some odd characters. It’s funny, but the humor is subtle in all sorts of ways that Wes Anderson films mostly aren’t. There’s a central peacock feather ritual devised by some guru that is hilariously anticlimatic. There is portent and fuss and not-very-convincing reconciliation. The epiphany in this movie feels like the deep realization that we’ve been accessorizing all wrong.

To enjoy the movie, you have to love adornment and be skeptical of essences in ways that the main characters are not. You have to be able to appreciate assholes. And you have to be willing to see a story as a vehicle for serving up visions of a more beautiful universe. I’ll take that bargain any day.

Tags: visions // 2 Comments »

“I wonder,” says one brother to the other two, “if the three of us could have been friends in real life.” It’s one of the few lines in Darjeeling Limited that got a laugh, but I loved the movie. It’s because I love trains, love watching the landscape, love the sense of motion. I also love Wes Anderson movies. I consider them to be a guilty pleasure, because I am aware that they are flawed. This one is orientalist in uninteresting ways, but the landscape allows Anderson a fuller palette than Brooklyn, and I love the way he can pack a frame with objects. You can smell this movie, it has perfumes and sand, tea, sex, bathrooms, train brakes, peacock feathers. Wes Anderson pays attention to detail. I wouldn’t want other directors to emulate him, but it’s an aesthetic I’m behind: poetry of objects in motion.

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That’s the way most city conversations sound to me — that famous background distortion. Lord knows what these people are saying. On the subway I often need several stops to figure out whether a couple is speaking English or not. I wonder if gurgling babies aren’t, in their bubbles, simply repeating what they mostly hear. This isn’t language; it’s aural glare.

Tags: cities // 6 Comments »

(Part III in the Urban Voices series)

Taipei emits a constant roar of petty commerce — hawkers peddling, firecrackers declaring the birth of a new hair salon, police cracking down on illegal shops, loudspeakers encouraging the purchase of knives or noodles, trucks delivering such wares as they may hold. Penetrating this din — shouting, shouting, and more shouting: the abusive husband in the back aparment, the gamblers celbrating their winnings, the schoolchildren announcing to one another that later they will be studying in the McDonald’s, the bus drivers exchanging greatings and traffic info. Along the fountains and covered walkways of Chiang Kaishek Memorial Park in the nineties, even late into the night one could find veterans shouting to one another about the war years.

Urban conversations are high-decible affairs. In the nineteenth century, such shouting bothered Chinese officials, who thought that noise could usher affrays, mobs, riots, rebellions. Shouting is necessary (try getting a train ticket in China without raising your voice — no chance), but it seems to bespeak extremes of emotion, and thus unruliness.

For there is much in shouting that is unnecessary and nonsensical. The man screaming “Hallelujah…Hallelujah…Hallelujah” at regular intervals signals something closer to mental illness than religious devotion. The woman on a Brooklyn streetcorner who told me that the book I was reading was “Really, really great” spared nothing of her larynx to convey her enthusiasms. Even my yoga class, mostly silent in its unfolding, spills out into the dressing room in a sizzle of overdone voices.

Why is there so much shouting? It’s more than the creep of trying to rise above your neighbor. It’s a declaration of cosmopolitan worth. Within each shout stir professions of belonging: “I am here. I deserve to be here. I can afford to call attention to my presence. I shout.”

It is this self-confidence that makes shouting threatening to urban planners, who tend to wish to rearrange and beautify city populations, and to officials who hope for docile burghers. Shouting is the city’s choral retort: “We shall not be moved.”

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Ira Glass, the host of This American Life on public radio, in total darkness, began his — well, his what? His talk? His multimedia presentation? His spiel? Whatever — it was an homage to voices and their intimate power. Part of his point was that an enormous amount of prejudice is based on visual rather than aural cues. Because radio deprives us of first impressions, we allow its voices to engage us. Ira Glass played a clip of two boys in a housing project, complaining about how hard it is to get dates. Apparently the girls either avoid boys altogether or hook up with the sort of guy you would definitely not wish to piss off by hitting on his girlfriend, or on anybody he might want to be his girlfriend.

The presentation was taking place in Seattle, and it was clear that radio was allowing the white, middle class audience to focus on their common yearning — the desire for a partner. Taking that aspect of radio a step further, WNYC’s “radio rookies” project takes recording equipment to different neighborhoods and helps young people tell their own stories in a medium that encourages listening.

Radio may seem like a one-way transmission of station to those who tune in, but in Chinese cities it is clear that listeners are far from passive. The taxi drivers in Taipei listen constantly to talk radio, and frequently call in to local stations. They are a formidable political block — mobile, engaged, and capable of jamming thoroughfares in short order. When taxi driver’s protest, the city cannot operate. And one can spend hours listening to high schoolers and college students working through their emotional insecurities on the airwaves. Older folks, too. If you’ve ever encountered Delilah on a U.S. dial, you can picture the most common genres of Chinese radio just by pretending that Delilah let the callers talk a bit longer.

In cities, radio can foster a sense of community akin to a public park or an internet message board. I think Charlie Warner over at Media Curmudgeon is on to something when he emphasizes radio’s localism. Radio gives you accents, announcements, debates that can be as grand in scale as global warming or as small as the road work on a particular block.

I’m obviously not claiming that radio’s effects are restrained to cities, but urban areas do offer more venues for listening and for collective response. I like to listen to radio while working, but I hear it nearly everywhere — the cab, the barber shop, the grocery store, or (my favorite) the Met game blasting in the Mustang parked in front of the local bodega. A couple of years ago, during the big blackout, the same Mustang informed me that the problem was a surge, not a terrorist attack.

Of course, much of the conversation is inane, and the ever-increasing number of channels can mean that radio fosters segregation instead of transcending it. But the issue is voice — where do you hear people speaking in cities? You could do worse than to start with the radio.

Tags: cities, China // 2 Comments »