Economics, History and Optimism

One of the readings we had to go through was an article on The Freeman by Stephen Davies. Essentially, he brought up a time in history where city planners of the late 19th century were panicking over the amount of horse manure caused by transportation, projecting that cities would be covered in it in the future. He brings up two points: Humanity will find solutions to problems it is facing through our ingenuity and that the future cannot be predicted. He states that people will adjust themselves accordingly if you give them incentives and reasons for doing so. The main incentive being high prices, in true economic fashion.

Price is not always monetary.

In a 3rd year class I took, we were studying economic history. I noted that throughout the course, there existed the same kind of optimism about crisis, that humans had the ability to eventually, successfully manage themselves. Perhaps the social science has always been this way, starting with Adam Smith's invisible hand. Anyway, I'd just like to leave two quotes from A Concise Economic History of the World that I feel are related.

"With a given technology...the resources available to a society set the effective upper limits to its economic achievements. Technological change, however, allows those limits to be expanded..."(11)

"...it was the shortage of timber for charcoal that led to the use of coke for smelting iron ore. There are many other instances where temporary or localized shortages of particular resources have given rise to substitutes, which often turn out to be more efficient or economical."(402)

"The technology does not yet exist to [use] solar energy directly in more than trivial amounts . But as conventional sources of power become scarcer -that is, as their prices rise-the inducement to engage in research directed to solar energy will increase. That is the way the economic mechanism functions. The possibilities are limitless."(402)

Going into this stream, the optimism of the subject really surprised me. Of course, things are always more complicated in real life than in theory. But throughout human history, humanity more or less seems for follow this pattern, so it makes a suitable guideline, I think.

References after the jump.

The Power of Myth/Star Wars: TV Tropes is my antidrug

In addition to all those readings, we were also told to watch this video of Moyers and Campbell talking about Star Wars. Earlier, they mentioned that some old religious rituals and morals needed to be replaced, since they have lost thier life-celebrating origins. I noticed that early in the video they mention that stories like the first Star Wars trilogy sort of fill that need to connect to the spiritual journey of the hero.

You can imagine how much money this would net you if you owned the franchise. 

Star Wars connected with so many people, it ended up drumming up a massive following. Even children today are growing up and getting into the films. Star Wars is probably one of the first pieces of media people think of when others bring up fandom culture. People can grow up with thier lives revolving around thier interests in movies, tv series and comic books like these.

Forrest J. Ackerman, the First Cosplayer

There have been plenty of instances where a company uses mythology to promote their franchises, and depending on their skill and vision can reach large numbers of people. Anyway, getting to my point is that there are so many different fans and fans communities for just about any piece of literature you can think of. And a good number of them enjoy thinking about the archetypes and tropes in thier favourite piece of media and listing and cross referencing them obsessively. Where can you find the end product of this obsessiveness? Enter T.V. Tropes, a fan-run encyclopedia cataloging the tropes, themes and archeotypes of just about any type of entertainment you can think of.

I can spend hours on this site. Hours! Look, I'm doing it now!

Just to start you on your own personal journey into the deep abyss of procastination, I'm going to list my 5 favourite Narrative Tropes:
Deadly Decadent Court
Stoic Woobie
The Woman Wearing the Queenly Mask
Red Oni, Blue Oni
Genius Bruiser

The Importance of Myth - Cultural Evolution?

I know we've moved on in subjects but I wanna backtrack for a bit. In reading The Importance of Myth, the list of the three traits that help a myth endure caught my eye. I'll repeat them here:

1. Easy to remember, even in an illiterate society.
2. Approachable and understandable, regardless of intelligence or education level
3. Stimulating to the imagination and feelings.

It got me to thinking about the Theory of Cultural Evolution. In this theory natural selection not only applies to genetic traits, but cultural elements as well. Darwin originally presented the concept of natural selection being that the offspring of a parent organism will resemble said parent, and hopefully these inherited traits will also allow the offspring to survive and become parents themselves. However, this isn't restrained to just genetic traits, behaviors are passed down from parent to offspring so that the offspring also resemble their parents in that way.Vertical transmission of traits in a cultural evolutionary sense is exemplified by parents teaching their offspring  about proper behavior within their culture. Horizontal transmission is exemplified by the influence of peers and other authority figures such as teachers and idols on one's behavior.

If a myth sufficiently exhibits all three of the above traits, it can be used to transmit concepts about acceptable behavioral within a culture alongside the culture's ideals and taboos, etc. Myth is a useful tool in both vertical and horizontal transmission of cultural norms.

In the case of myths, they play multiple roles. Some of them mentioned in the reading include:

1. To grant stability and continuity to a culture
2. To present guidelines for living
3. To justify the activities of a culture
4. To give meaning to life
5. To explain the inexpiable
6. To offer role models

And so, I was reading an article about the projected rise of atheists and agnostics in developed nations a few days ago. I was thinking about traits number 4 and 5 and how horizontal transmission may be at work here. Statistically, an atheist or agnostic is likely to have a post-secondary education, and live in cities and economically secure nations.  Therefore, there is a relationship between access to education and lack of faith. Teachers and fellow students are most probably acting as agents of horizontal transmission of scientific myth. Since scientific myth is able to preform the role of explaining how the world works better than religious myth, you can see it begin to gain ground in the Western World. In the realm of explaining the natural, physical world, science is more accurate in describing the physical world, has yeilded more physical benefits and supported with physical evidence. Therefore, sacred myth for many is no longer useful for explaining the physical world.

Perhaps this is what Joesph Campbell meant...

Radium and You!

We were just talking in class about a concept called Dependency Theory. In general, it suggests that if we are presented a new idea with no context, it has more impact. Also, before there were regulations preventing things like false advertising, companies could get away with a lot concerning what they could put in advertisements. And since my thoughts on all the readings so far will take a while to percolate, I decided to run through the Vintage Ads community and collect some pictures.

The theme today is Radium!

 Stick in on your face!

More applications for this wonderful element after the jump!

The Power of Myth: Thoughts 2

Also, I noticed Campbell mentioned the separated duad, and insinuated it was a fundamental part of this "being alive". I got to thinking how there are a number of different ways people think about love, romance and marriage nowadays and not all of them involve finding one member of the opposite sex to be with until the day you die.

Man, look at all these new sexuality definitions and thier nifty colour schemes.

Also, the idealized form of marriage doesn't always happen in real life, either. No doubt throughout the long history of our race, marriages have been conducted for economic and political reasons. In the Edo period of Japan, the wife was seen as the master of the house for their samurai husbands rather than their equal partner. Ancient Roman couples were free to divorce each other. During the Middle Ages, the notion that your romantic love was not the person you married was the basis of romantic chivalry. However, the idea that men and women were once parts of a whole is not uncommon in myth, (it appears in Plato's Symposium for example) so I'll let it go for now...

Now for something completely different.

Other than that, he expressed an idea that I think exemplifies the tension between religion and modern science at this point of time in the western world. In the same interview with Bill Moyers, Joseph Campbell states:

On this immediate level of life and structure, myths offer life models. But the models have to be approperiate to the time in which you are living, and our time has changed so fast that what was proper fifty years ago is not proper today. The virtues of the past are the vices of today. And many of what were thought to be the vices of the past are the necessities of today. The moral order has to catch up with the moral necessities of actual life in time, here and now. And that is what we are not doing. The old-time religion belongs to another age, another people, another set of human values, another universe. By going back you throw yourself out oy sync with history. Our kids lose their faith in the religions that were taught to them, and they go inside. (http://mythsdreamssymbols.com/...)

He describes old-time religion as "vestigial" and "doesn't serve life". Essentially, that means that orthodox rules once served a purpose, but can no longer fulfill that purpose and can be quite damaging to the well-being of others.

I'm going to share an article and some blogs about spiritual abuse that I personally found eye-opening. I hope you do, too.

New York Times - Why Afghan Women Risk Death the Write Poetry
No Longer Quivering - Archive
The Pheonix and Olive Branch
The Way Forward
Love, Joy, Feminism

References after the jump.

The Power of Myth: Thoughts 1

So, the first readings appear to be from a transcript of a conversation between mythology author Joseph Campbell and journalist Bill Moyers. The conversations were aired a year after his death on PBS on a program called, unsurprisingly, Joseph Campbell and The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers. Apparently, Campbell was a popular professor and lecturer in life. I find it interesting that after he graduated, he felt aimless and unsure of his future, so he went on a journey across America, like a modern spirit quest. The Joseph Campbell Foundation states that he wrote in his journal in 1932: "I begin to think that I have a genius for working like an ox over totally irrelevant subjects...I am filled with an excruciating sense of never having gotten anywhere—but when I sit down and try to discover where it is I want to get, I'm at a loss."(http://www.jcf.org...) But it looks like he was able to use his interests to make a living for himself, in the end.

There's probably lots of kids nowadays that know that feel.

I first ran into Joseph Campbell in High School, in grade 9 or 10, where in one of our units was devoted to the concept of the Hero's Journey and how it related to J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. From my teacher's introduction of The Hero of a Thousand Faces, I got the impression that The Hero's Journey was a very influential concept in fictional literature, acting as a guideline to pinpoint the common threads between past heroic myths worldwide as stories about maturation. I suppose it was presented to us as students so that we could determine what makes modern heroic tales compelling. In a way, they echo the tales of the past that endured within the culture they were formed. Some of them still endure even in modern cultures.

The gospel singing Muses were probably stretching it a bit...

I remember reading an article that was written by someone who did a lot of travelling and how they noticed that people everywhere generally had the same hopes, dreams and fears regardless of their cultural differences. You could say these common threads unite us as a species; help us communicate with concepts and images. Therefore these themes and concepts show up in our myths and allow them to cross time and different cultures. Personally, I love myths. Not only because they capture the imagination, but because they have a sort of universal quality to their narratives that come from humanity's fears, hopes and desires as a whole. Since this course is about consumption culture, I'm assuming we'll be coming to the conclusion that through this language of myth, tropes and archetypes, modern businesses perpetuate the consumer culture by appealing to these collective hopes, fears and desires...but advertisers have only a few minutes or a limited area in the newspaper or on a website, so it's easier to use a visual language that many people can relate to and understand.

References after the jump.

Introduction

To whom it may concern...and anyone else that just happens to drive by, welcome to my blogging project for COMM 3P75 (Cultures of Consumption course) at Brock University! Since this is all about relating what we're learning in class to our daily lives, I'll probably be writing impressions of our readings, and maybe an article about something related to the topic of the week. Maybe a little history and some related comics I'll draw. My major is economics, so I'm hoping my thoughts will be interesting!

Enjoy!

-Ange