The Dish

Steven Pinker is interviewed about his new book, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century:

Many purists have remarkably little curiosity about the history of the language or the scholarly tradition of examining issues and usage. So a stickler insists that we never let a participle dangle, that you can’t say, “Turning the corner, a beautiful view awaited me,” for example. They never stopped to ask, “Where did that rule come from and what is its basis?” It was simply taught to them and so they reiterate it.

But if you look either at the history of great writing and language as it’s been used by its exemplary stylists, you find that they use dangling modifiers all the time. And if you look at the grammar of English you find that there is no rule that prohibits a dangling modifier. If you look at the history of scholars who have examined the dangling modifier rule, you find that it was pretty much pulled out of thin air by one usage guide a century ago and copied into every one since, And you also find that lots of sentences read much better if you leave the modifier dangling.

Meanwhile, Cass Sunstein flags some findings about another irritating behavior:

New research by social scientists Irene Scopelliti, George Loewenstein and Joachim Vosgerau offers a powerful explanation for why people undermine their own goals, and create a seriously negative impression, by bragging. In a nutshell, braggarts project their own emotions onto the person they’re talking to.

The researchers tested this hypothesis by asking about 50 people to describe a situation in which they had bragged. They asked these “self-promoters” to say whether they felt positive or negative emotions while they were bragging, and also to say whether they thought those who heard them felt positive or negative emotions. At the same time, the researchers asked about 50 other people to describe a situation in which someone had bragged to them. They asked these “recipients” to say whether they felt good or bad while they listened.

The self-promoters greatly underestimated the recipients’ negative feelings. They figured that slightly more than a quarter of people reacted negatively to their bragging when, in fact, almost three-quarters of recipients said they did so. These differences mirror another finding — that most self-promoters felt positive emotions while they were bragging. Only a small minority of recipients of bragging said they felt good during the experience.

That’s how Geoff Manaugh describes the opening chapters of Deep Down Dark, Héctor Tobar’s account of the 2010 Chilean mine disaster. Really riveting stuff:

Tobar builds and builds to the actual moment of collapse, like an orchestra tuning itself to some inevitable and apocalyptic note that only gets more terrifying as its implications becomes clear. There are dust clouds and claps of thunder; changes in air pressure and growing suspicions; then an event unlike anything I’d ever read about before—the complete internal cleaving of a so-called “mega-block” inside the mine. Here, Tobar explains that a single block of diorite two times heavier than the Empire State Building has suddenly broken free inside the mountain.

It immediately free-falls straight downward like a cork plunging into a bottle of wine, breaking through the spiraling ramp on hundreds of underground levels and completely—seemingly fatally—trapping the miners nearly at the very bottom of the entire complex.

After hours—days, weeks—of audible strain and the popping of unseen faults, “the essential structure of the mountain must have failed.” It’s as if the entire mountain is “pancaking” from within, Tobar writes: “the vast and haphazard architecture of the mine, improvised over the course of a century of entrepreneurial ambition is finally giving way.”

For the trapped miners, the inhuman scale of this “mega-block” makes it into an almost totemic object, an otherworldly and supernatural mass. It is impossible for the miners to comprehend, let alone to see, in its entirety, and crawling around or—given their now drastically limited tools and virtually non-existent food supply—digging through.  As Tobar points out, “Only later will the men learn the awesome size of the obstacle before them, to be known in a Chilean government report as a ‘megabloque.’ …

And, terrifyingly, it is not done falling.

(Photo: A view on October 13, 2011 of the tunnel that collapsed trapping 33 miners at San Jose mine, in Copiapo, Chile, 850 km north of Santiago, during the first anniversary of the rescue. By Ariel Marinkovic/AFP/Getty Images)

Jennifer Fredette is troubled by the depiction of French Muslims:

It is true that we need to consider immigration when talking about the Muslim experience in France. That said, it is inaccurate to conflate “Muslims” with “immigrants.” Exact numbers are difficult to obtain because the French government refuses to collect or store statistics based on religion (or race or ethnicity). Nevertheless, we do know that many Muslims in France today are the children of immigrants, or even the grandchildren of immigrants; additionally, some have only one immigrant parent. And increasingly, French people are converting to Islam. Recognizing that immigration has directly or indirectly affected the lives of many Muslims in France is not the same as assuming (fallaciously) that all Muslims are foreigners.

But the real answer to our question about “permanent foreignness” does not lie in sloppy demography. French Muslims continue to appear foreign largely because today’s political debates are premised on an assumption of Muslim “different-ness,” and structured in a way that emphasizes this difference. For all of the discrimination, educational inequality, violence, and hostility that Muslims experience in France, political discourse concerning Muslims in the country overwhelmingly focuses on narrow religious issues it attributes to all Muslims: the hijab, the niqab, halal meat, the construction of mosques and the oppression of women.

She regrets how this creates “a flattened, homogenous view of Muslims in France” and “sidelines other political concerns that French Muslims have.” Meanwhile, Sara Wallace Goodman considers Muslim integration in the UK:

Muslim youth are born into British society and socialized in British schools, or naturalized after years of residence and integration, but endure frustrating barriers to socioeconomic mobility and face discrimination as members of an ethnic minority. And though a majority identify as British, a 2006 Pew survey shows how British Muslims maintain attitudes of disaffection and alienation more than Muslims in other European countries. Opportunistic imams can then mobilize a minority of impressionable youth toward a fundamental practice of religion. In fact, former Foreign Office Minister Kim Howells directly attributes the threat from British-born Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq to not dealing with their radicalization in the U.K.

Yet blame is ascribed not merely for the absence of tough responses to radicalization at home, but also in providing weak tropes of belonging in the first place. As David Cameron stated in a speech criticizing state multiculturalism, “We have failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong.”

Ross Douthat wrote a recent column noticing how “the cult phenomenon feels increasingly antique, like lava lamps and bell bottoms.” Drawing on the thinking of religious historian Philip Jenkins and entrepreneur Peter Thiel, Douthat argues that the decline of cults “might actually be a worrying sign for Western culture, an indicator not only of religious stagnation but of declining creativity writ large”:

The implications of Jenkins’s argument are specific to religion. Cults can be dangerous, even murderous, but they can also be mistreated and misjudged (as Koresh’s followers were, with fatal consequences); moreover, spiritual experiments led by the charismatic and the zealous are essential to religious creativity and fruitful change. From the Franciscans to the Jesuits, groups that looked cultlike to their critics have repeatedly revitalized the Catholic Church, and a similar story can be told about the role of charismatic visionaries in the American experience. (The enduring influence of one of the 19th century’s most despised and feared religious movements, for instance, is the reason the state of Utah now leads the United States on many social indicators.)

Thiel’s argument is broader: Not only religious vitality but the entirety of human innovation, he argues, depends on the belief that there are major secrets left to be uncovered, insights that existing institutions have failed to unlock (or perhaps forgotten), better ways of living that a small group might successfully embrace.

Suderman argues that Douthat probably “understates the ways in which semi-cult-like behavior has come to infuse daily life and mainstream culture”:

Yes, there are probably fewer cults in the aliens-and-messiahs sense, but there are more subcultures, in a wider variety, than ever before, more regimented lifestyle trends and minority beliefs about how to improve personal productivity or fitness, about how to become a better person and live a purer, more interesting, more connected and compelling life. Some of these subcultures remain distinctly fringe (dumpster-diving freegans, gently quirky bronies, furry fans, Juggalos [seen in the above video), while others are embraced, to varying degrees, by the mainstream:

At its height, Occupy Wall Street was as much an alternative lifestyle and belief community as a political movement. What is Crossfit if not a ritualized system that offers its highly dedicated, tightly-knit cells of followers a better and more meaningful existence?

None of these are cults in the specific sense that Douthat describes, with gated compounds and secret songs, but they are all experiments in behavior, taste, and belief intended to help adherents find meaning and connection in their lives.

In response, Douthat wonders if these subcultures really can take the place of religion:

I’m only slightly exaggerating when I say that this raises the most important question facing Western culture and society right now. Suderman is right, I think, that these “individualized and custom-tailored” forms of association are where creative/questing/artistic/religious impulses are increasingly being channeled, thanks to the internet and various broader economic and social forces; what’s more uncertain, to my mind, is whether they really encourage the kind of intense, enveloping commitment that I tend to think that deep creativity (among other goods) requires.

To the extent that like-minded people finding one another in ways that weren’t previously possible are creating cultural experiments that are as immersive, if not more so, than anything in the human past, then Suderman’s case for optimism makes a lot of sense. But to the extent that these experiments are more, well, dilettantish than past cultural groupings, more like hobbies than real commitments, more of a temporary identity that can be shaken off the moment it no longer completely pleases, they seem more likely to skim the shallows of creativity (to borrow an image from one of online culture’s more persuasive critics) than plumbing the true depths, more likely to cycle through pastiches and remixes (often fun and entertaining ones!) without stirring up something fully-realized and new.

(Image from the cover of Leander Kahney’s book Cult of Mac)