CSotD: Pastivity
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Every once in awhile, and Lord knows more often than anyone has a right to expect, xkcd comes out with a major project. In the past, it's been wonderful, gigantic graphics that would drag you, quite willingly, into a long, minute exploration of some fact that matters or at least reveals.
This one is smaller and more static than that, but still large enough that plonking the entire thing down here would (A) pretty much wrap up the whole topic, and (B) stretch the definition of "fair use" well beyond my comfort zone.
So I took a screen shot and you can see by the slider in the right margin that it will be worth your while to go read the rest of it.
Plus, of course, you get the mouse-over comment, which is like the cherry in the Manhattan, an appropriate metaphor when dealing with how much more well-considered life used to be compared to now.
(I not only miss the days when bartenders assumed a martini contained gin, but heard a piece on NPR a few days ago about how to make your own frozen cocktails with fresh ingredients, which I would put on a futility level with re-shooting episodes of the Teletubbies with Daniel Day-Lewis, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Natalie Portman.)
This is certainly not the first time anyone has quoted commentators of the past for ironic purposes, but the sheer volume of appropriate examples is effective, as is the resulting impression that all change is both unsettling and not without cost.
The most commonly cited of these is likely the not-quite-what-he-said-and-quite-clearly-not-what-he-meant Socrates quote: "The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."
Apart from its being semi-apocryphal, the point of that quote is ambiguous: Does it indicate that kids have always been little jerks, or that old people have always complained about them? Where does the so-what fall?
When I was doing the 100-75-50-25 years ago feature for the newspaper, I used to come across these things all the time: 100 years ago, the opening of the library was praised for giving young people a safe, wholesome place to gather, but I also found a story that kids at the high school were said to be snowballing passersby, and 75 years ago, kids were loitering in the post office lobby as young ladies held court in its recessed windows, and 50 years ago teens were standing around on the streets failing to give way to adult pedestrians and 25 years ago a youth center opened which would give them a safe, wholesome place to gather.
So either kids have always been little ruffians or adults have always bitched and complained about them or both. And it's true we survived, but if that's all you take away from it, the lesson becomes a passive "so what the hell" and that's not very helpful.
It's dangerously close to "We get along fine without triceratops, so why fret over the rhino?"
These things are only positive if you actually stop and think about them. For example, what harm does it really do if some girls perch in the marble window ledges and talk to their friends? And do you really think all the high school kids are gathering en masse to snowball people?
And if the takeaway is that old people constantly bitch, what's the application?
One of the thing that bothers me is the people who complain that, "My daddy would have tanned my hide for doing that!" as if hitting kids would solve things.
As if Dr. Spock had, in fact, been against discipline, including spanking.
As if our prisons weren't full of former kids whose daddies had tanned their hides on a regular basis.
On the other hand, if you take the attitude that, like keeping the sea from flooding into Holland, the issue of young people finding direction is an ongoing concern that requires each generation to step up, that's a good reading of history. It's also not a bad reading of Plato.
Many of the quotes in xkcd are about how modern communications have become more ephemeral, and it's natural that each time the media make things easier, you lose a bit of gravitas, and that the chorus of voices becomes larger and louder.
But if your conclusion is to become passive, to say "The dikes collapsed in 1730, so there's no real point in maintaining them now," or "we get along fine without triceratops," you're copping out.
When an invasive marine worm attacked the wooden dikes, they were replaced by stone structures, and equating the death of dinosaurs with the loss of rhinos is like saying people used to die of smallpox, so why bother with vaccinations today?
And if the ease of communications has always resulted in more people saying less well-thought-out things, well, maybe the answer is to think about what you are throwing out there.
Upon which, I'll stop.
Well, in a minute:
An odd, completely personal bit of synchronicity:
Today is the birthday of Rico Schacherl, half of the Madam & Eve creative team, and, by sheer coincidence, today's M&E is a reminder that I didn't get him anything, but not for lack of effort.
If you define "effort" as keeping the camera in the car in case of once more running across the driver with an out-of-state license plate that would get a good laugh from geeks in South Africa: "KAK 404."
The first time I pulled up behind it, I laughed but assumed they were just passing through. Then I saw it again and determined that, next time, I'd get a shot and post it on Facebook for my SA friends.
Which, of course, insured that I would never, ever see it again.
Though having the camera along has been greatly to the benefit of modern culture. (Speaking, as we were, of gravitas.)
In the absence of that intended photo, I'll simply wish him the best and hope he doesn't run into a lot of 404s, because his work is not kak.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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