Link: Elitism

I promised another essay today, again from Victor Davis Hanson, this one on elitism. This one was published on PajamasMedia.com Sept 28, 2008. It's called Culture wars and the campaign. What I liked about it is that it answered some questions for me, one of the main ones being why do people who claim to like "women who do things", despise Sarah Palin?

People -- liberals, to be sure -- that I thought would surely appreciate her, instead find her "scary" and bumbling, clueless and absolutely inept. That completely befuddled me. In fact, one blog I was reading, by a person who I could somewhat relate to in other areas, railed on to the degree that I realized not only was Palin anathema, but so was I. But why? The writer did not say, beyond hurling derogatory adjectives and adverbs. It made no sense until I read this essay by Hanson.

So, here is the beginning of Culture wars and the campaign by Victor Davis Hanson:

You are a damn elite, not me!

That sums up the current political debate — whether we look at charges that John McCain has so many houses he can’t remember any longer the actual number of them; or that poor Barack Obama is depressed at the soaring price of arugula; or that Fightin’ Joe Biden once bootstrapped himself up at ten in Scranton; or that moose-hunting Sarah snowmachines as naturally as Barack Obama trips over himself in a bowling lane.

A nation of wood-cutters

In short, we remain log-cabin America, formed as the frontier antithesis of Europe. Apparently, we are determined, at least in mind, to stay that way — rightly or wrongly sneering at both natural Francophile John Kerry’s spandex, and also poor forced and uncomfortable duck-hunting John Kerry, decked out in camouflage, and looking as uncomfortable with a dead duck as Mike Dukakis in a tank helmet. We don’t like snooty elitists, and don’t give them a break when they clumsily try at election time in the eleventh hour to morph into one of the people.

A state of mind

So what is elitism? And who is an elitist?

Read more here.

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Creative Brains

I came accross this article in Science Daily the other day on creative brains, and how there may be a biological basis for linking creativity to mental illness. Not that I'm excited about that sort of linkage but there was another aspect in the article that fascinated me and that's the notion that we have differing levels of "latent inhibition".

The Harvard University study, which appeared in the September 2003 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, said the brains of creative people appear to be more open to stimuli from the surrounding environment than other people's, whose brains shut out this same information through a process called "latent inhibition". Latent inhibition is "an animal's unconscious capacity to ignore stimuli that experience has shown are irrelevant to its needs." According to the researchers, creative individuals are much more likely to have low levels of latent inhibition.

"This means that creative individuals remain in contact with the extra information constantly streaming in from the environment," said one. "The normal person classifies an object, and then forgets about it, even though that object is much more complex and interesting than he or she thinks. The creative person, by contrast, is always open to new possibilities."

Low levels of latent inhibition may be a good thing if the person has the capacity to think about many things at once. "If you are open to new information, new ideas, you better be able to intelligently and carefully edit and choose. If you have 50 ideas, only two or three are likely to be good. You have to be able to discriminate or you'll get swamped."

And getting swamped, obviously would not be a good thing. Apparently having many things tumbling through your mind at once is also a precursor to schizophrenia, among other things. (Which is the aforementioned link to mental illness.... but we won't go there.)

I think I might be able to classify myself as a creative individual. I know that I relate strongly to this idea of latent inhibition. I do tend to struggle with all the things that come into my periphery -- in the sense that I am aware of them and sometimes feel overwhelmed by them. They are all interesting and I want to think them out, or they bug me and then I really want to think them through. Or maybe it's not that I'm so open, just that there's a lot of stuff out there bombarding all of us all the time.

I have 100s of ideas for Enclave, but I'm definitely experiencing overload and the sense of being swamped when it comes to discriminating. At least if that discrimination must be performed right away. If I give myself time to niggle it, as one of my son's English teachers put it, then it's not really overwhelming at all.

But it just shows, again, how different we all are, and what different paths we take through life and thus, the specifically different plan God has designed for each of us.

Grace,
Karen

Names and Faces

People ask me sometimes where I come up with the names for my characters and how I choose them. It's a mysterious process. Sometimes I have a pre-existing favorite name (Cameron is one that I'm using in Black Box), and sometimes the name just presents itself. Sometimes it takes a lot of fiddling around to get the name to not only sound right but also look right.

Gillard, for example, I have always heard with a soft g. But "Jillard" looks too feminine for the character. Alas, many readers give the name I chose a hard G when they pronounce it, illustrating the frustrations of trying to properly convey the sounds of a name with which readers are unfamiliar.

Sometimes I've tried to rename my characters for one reason or another. Simon, Abramm's uncle, began as Klemnend -- Klemn for short. Klemn? What was I thinking? The shift to Simon was easy in that case.

At another point I decided for some reason (I think it was the similarity to Abram of the Bible) that I needed to change Abramm's name to Alaric. I wrote a number of chapters with Alaric as the viewpoint name, but it never seemed right and finally I went back to Abramm. Then found a way to use Alaric anyway -- as his alias -- so that was fun.

Trap came whole cloth. A strange name but somehow the right one, though some readers have said that it sounds sinister. It never sounded sinister to me, just strong and straightforward.

Anyway, I've often thought this sense of a name "sounding" right seemed to be very mysterious, esoteric and maybe a little silly. But turns out it's not as silly as I thought.

My friend Ed Willett recently did a piece on his blog called The Face is Familiar, But That Can't be Your Name... in which he reported on a recent research project designed to find out if Americans "hold common notions of what kinds of faces should go with certain names." Turns out they do, and furthermore, that it is much easier to remember someone's name if their face matches your concept of what the name implies (they don't always). Which I suppose explains why you can merely give a character a name and a reader can make up a face to go with it. One that often doesn't look anything like the faces that are put on the book's cover.

These conclusions were followed by the reflection on why that might be. Ed's article said that since Bob is a round-sounding name, it makes sense that it would go with a roundish face, and that Tim, being a thin, angular-sounding name describes an angular face. That might be. I think an even more compelling rationale is the fact that "Bob" is a round-looking name, while "Tim" looks tall, thin. To me, that makes more of a connection with how Bob and Tim will look than how the words sound. But I'm more visually oriented than sound oriented. Then again... why not both: round-sounding and round-looking?

By this measure what are Abramm and Trap? Abramm seems tall, commanding and substantial. Trap is trim, strong, deep. And Cameron... hmmm. Softer, but still strong, kind of mysterious, but with substance as well. Or maybe I'm just biased, since I know the characters I've given those names to. (But what's with all the a's and m's? I detect a pattern here. What does it mean? I haven't the foggiest, but you can read the entire article here.)

Grace,
Karen

Scientific Study of the Sin Nature?

Awhile back my friend Ed Willett did a column on why people resist doing what they are told. No one, it seems, likes to be told what to do. Especially if they don't see any good reason to do it. On the other hand, I do think sometimes people do like being told what to do, because then they don't have to think about what they're doing. But it doesn't take much to get them not to want to do what they're told.

Psycologists, says Ed, call this "reactance," and it generally happens when we perceive a rule or restriction as unfair. Recent research at Duke University shows this emotional and sometimes irrational "reactance" can be triggered even when we're unaware of it. But rather than quote from Ed's article, I'll simply send you over to it:

Why Won't You do what You're told?

I think it's endemic to our nature. The original sin of the original sinner was not eating fruit, but going off on a course independent from God's. I speak of Satan, of course, though basically that's what the woman did as well. And the man. All three decided that God's plan stunk and their own was much better. To a large degree that same mindset plagues us all, still, though we are very good at hiding it, camouflaging it, rationalizing it, or maybe, as in the experiment mentioned in Ed's article, not even realizing it. We have sick heads, deceitful hearts, we don't know our own motives half the time, and we are more than capable of carrying a lie in our right hand (the hand of power) and without even knowing it. Look at the Laodicean believers: they thought themselves were rich and wealthy and in need of nothing and did not know they were poor and wretched and miserable and naked. That's quite an indictment of self-evaluation! At least self-evaluation apart from the filling of the Holy Spirit and the truths of God's word.

Something to think about...

Grace,
Karen

Is Santa Real?

When my son was born my husband and I weren't terribly excited about the whole Santa Claus story, though I had very much enjoyed it as a child, growing up in an unbelieving home. Other relatives, however, were quite invested in Santa Claus, so I sat back and let them do their thing. I read Adam The Night Before Christmas, but beyond that I don't recall ever actually telling him there was a Santa.

When he was about five, we were driving in the car around the Christmas season, and he asked me if Santa was real. I asked him what he thought. He said he didn't think so. How could Santa deliver all those presents to everyone in all the world in a single night? (As a child, I recall being troubled by how he was going to slither under the door, since we had no fireplace and chimney.) I said that was very observant of him, and no, Santa wasn't real. That was the end of any active belief in Santa for my son, though "Santa" still continued to visit on Christmas eve for some years...

On that subject, and a related one -- ie, that children are unable to distinguish fantasy from reality, a claim which parents who object to fantasy stories evoke as justification for condemning them -- my friend Ed Willett has an interesting post on his blog today, What's Real and What's Pretend . It's about a study done at the University of Texas that challenges child expert Jean Piaget's 1930 statement that "children consistently confuse fantasy and reality, the mental and physical, dreams and reality, and appearance and reality. " In fact, according to this study, they're pretty darn good at figuring out what's real and what's not.

Karen