Thoughts on production, alienation, and ideology
These are posts on culture from the blog Base and Superstructure. Mostly the focus is on American culture. But there might be a few posts on broader, international issues.
I’m taking a bit of a vacation to New Orleans this week! As a result, if there aren’t many posts or I’m not too responsive, don’t be alarmed! I’m here for the 4S conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science. Here are a few things I’m doing in New Orleans.
People talk about ‘authentic food’ or ‘authenticity’ during discussions of cultural appropriation. That’s a frequent site of disagreement. But I think it’s worth talking about those phrases in their own right. Not that I don’t have any thoughts on cultural appropriation. Maybe I’ll write about that later. For now, check out Briahna Joy Gray’s article in Current Affairs as a starting point.
‘Authenticity’, in general, and ‘authentic food’, in particular, raise their own issues.
The fact is, ‘authentic food’ is all the rage. Diners and reviewers alike demand it. When you turn on Food Network, you see celebrity chef Aarón Sánchez judging Chopped contestants on it. And when the show goes to commercial break, you listen to him tell you to ‘go auténtico’.
And it’s not only reviewers and diners. There’s a broad consensus on this. Plenty of left-leaning critics of cultural appropriation, particularly ones found on social media, also uphold the virtues of authentic food. Along with it, they extol the virtues of broader notions of authenticity.
What should we make of all this? A few leading questions: What do people mean when they talk about ‘authentic food’? The same thing? What kind of a word is ‘authentic’? Where do broader cultural practices enter the picture?
Earlier this year, William Davies published a book called Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason. The book’s about a number of things, but I want to focus on one of them. That’s the declining trust in democratic institutions among Americans. But this declining trust isn’t consistent across institutions. It’s unevenly distributed.
So which ones do Americans trust and distrust? We see declining trust in the media and in elected representatives above all. And we see the least declining trust in doctors, nurses, the military, and (perhaps) the police.
Let’s speculate a bit about all this.
About ten years ago, Alain de Botton wrote a book called The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. It’s a perfectly fine book, not a great book. From the great tradition of writing about working, I far prefer the live interviews of Studs Terkel. And so, I’d greatly recommend his book Working.
But there’s something I do find admirable about de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. Especially insofar as it says something about working in a corporate office.
Lots of people in the US have the idea that there’s something vaguely 1930s about our current politics. And not only in the US, but across much of the world. Mostly these conversations revolve around the potential re-emergence of fascism. But another component is the uses and abuses of propaganda in the Internet age. Democrats, including Hillary Clinton herself in her recent book What Happened, are particularly interested in the idea that Russia funds right-wing propaganda to influence politics in the US and elsewhere.
Is there anything to this?
I’ve never published any articles on propaganda, though I’ve developed material on it over the years. And I’ve delivered a few presentations. Mostly notably at the Iowa Lyceum, a summer program on philosophy and critical thinking for pre-college students.
What stands out to me most about propaganda, and what most people misunderstand about it, is the issue of who it targets. You can learn a lot about propaganda by discerning its audience. And so, I’ll say a bit about that.
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