The Packbats' Weblog

So, we just watched an old TED talk - "The transformative power of classical music" by Benjamin Zander, you can look it up if you're bored - arguing that everyone likes classical music, and I feel like there's ... four assumptions? it made that we can't vibe with.

Like, the first assumption is that we need to be convinced that everyone likes classical music, but we'll get back to that.

The second assumption is that everyone always prefers a lively and excited performance to one that is more understated and subtle, which, whatever, I don't care - if one-buttock playing is just how Benjamin Zander plays, so be it.

The third assumption is that people who don't listen to classical music are sitting it out because they don't care about classical music. Like, y'all know how much of the world got fucked over by western European nations to make a tiny portion of folks from western Europe rich, right? Their culture can't escape being the culture of colonizers and oligarchs, so folks are gonna react to that.

The fourth assumption is that music in the western European classical tradition is somehow distinctive in this regard.

Like, okay, yes, Frédéric Chopin's Prelude No. 4 in E Minor is a lovely, heartbreaking piece of music. Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car" is a lovely, heartbreaking piece of music. Bea Miller's "feel something" is beautiful and desperate. MUNA's "Around U" is beautiful and lost. Andy G. Cohen's "Oxygen Mask" is overwhelming, powerful, perhaps despairing. Erik Satie's Gymnopédie No. 1 is agonizing, we actually have to turn it off because it hurts so much. We're talking about music here - if you're talking about music and people loving music, you can find music to love.

...because we're not even arguing with Benjamin Zander. We're arguing with the tradition that Benjamin Zander is participating in, of campaigning for classical music.

Like, does Zander know that classical music isn't music? He talks about a scourge of bland, technically accurate performances, then launches into playing a piece he loves with passion, intention, and understanding, and he thinks he's demonstrating that classical music is good. Music is good, my dude! People love the music you play because you're playing them music!

But classical music is a performance by the audience, of class. It is class-ical music. It's allowed to be boring garbage because, to paraphrase early (worse) xkcd, it's about getting some culture in you - and white culture is allowed to be terrible, to be bland and technically accurate, because white oligarchs can pay to have everyone taught that it's great anyway, that everyone should have it in them.

We found Zander's talk in the least charitable context possible. We found it via an Innuendo Studios video about "smart music" - about music you play to show that you have drunk deep the well of colonizer oligarch culture, and that therefore you are worth listening to. Because, in part thanks to Zander and Zander wanting people to love classical music, Chopin's Prelude No. 4 in E Minor makes the list.

I wish he'd been trying to teach people to love music instead. I really do. But the TED people wouldn't have paid him for that, because when the audience is paying six thousand dollars a year to be here, the speakers better be selling something exciting to rich people, and rich people don't want to be told that the problem with classical music is them.

(This began as this fedi thread.)

Bigotry is specifically the exercise of power within and by a system like kyriarchy to fuck over marginalized groups in favor of privileged groups. We're not professionals, but that's our best understanding of the definition.

That said, kyriarchy isn't self-consistent. Kyriarchy can contain hatred of men just fine - hating men is a lot less threatening to it than hating injustice, so threats to the system can be diverted to individuals within it...

...and especially diverted to marginalized individuals within it.

So, yeah, misandry is real. You can tell it's real because autistic people, black people, trans people, disabled people, PoC, children, migrants ... we all get attacked. People take a power structure, turn it into a description of a villain, and use it to attack the vulnerable. It's not hard - all it takes is attacking people you hate with things you're told are hateful traits, and never ever ever listening to them when they try to teach you to be better.

This is half a tangent, but we still like Jay Smooth's video "How To Tell Someone They Sound Racist" and its distinction between the "what they are" conversation and the "what they did" conversation. Pretty near every time we try to talk about something we have a problem with, we try to talk about actions we have a problem with - about what they did - and, when necessary, let people draw conclusions from what they did about what they might do next.

(By the way, Jay Smooth's followup TEDx talk, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Discussing Race", is terrific. It's worth watching both.)

I'm gonna be honest with y'all as people who've been around on the Internet for a hot minute: we've seen some bullshit. But I'm also gonna be honest with you as a disabled genderqueer transfem Black plural system: "what they are" got fuck-all to do with whether you got bigotry in you. You got bigotry in you. You got that for free.

So when we're talking about misconduct, we leave "what they are" out of it. We even avoid "reply guy" and "mansplaining" and other suchlike phrases. Are they doing harm?

Are they doing harm?

Like, seriously, is anyone being hurt here? Is this just weird and uncomfortable and makes you feel bad? Because it's okay to feel bad, feeling bad isn't a sin.

And if people are getting hurt, what kind of hurt is it, where did it start, and why? If one person weren't fighting, what would the other person be doing? (That last question is inspired by "Lady Eboshi is Wrong" from Innuendo Studios.) (Lady Eboshi transcript.)

It doesn't matter which people in the conversation are being called what kinds of oppressor. Calling your critics your oppressors is the easiest damn thing. And the kyriarchy doesn't care why you attack its favorite targets. It just wants those targets taken down.

Step 1: Make a mistake that hurts someone.

This is something to avoid as much as you can, but it will happen no matter what you do - it's kind of inevitable. All of us grew up in a society that was pervasively problematic, and as much as we try to work against that, we're not immune to it and it still comes out sometimes. It still sucks, though, and trying to avoid it wasn't a wasted effort.

Step 2: Get called on it.

This is actually harder than you might think. With some notable exceptions, it mostly happens when you associate with people who are themselves trying to fight their bigotries and have a positive impact on the world, and it mostly happens when you demonstrate by your actions that you aren't prone to self-protective displays of anger, distress, contempt, or the like when people disagree with you, and when you demonstrate an interest in and willingness to learn.

Step 3: Don't do a self-protective display of whatever.

Finding out that you screwed up is really hard, and dealing with your emotions around it is hard as well. Some useful tactics include:

• Giving yourself space to process
• Talking to people outside the situation if you need to vent your upset
• Talking to people outside the situation that you trust if you can't figure out on your own if you're in the wrong or if people are being unreasonable, and conveying the details as accurately and completely as you feel able to/you can ethically do

but ultimately, you need to figure out what works for you.

Step 4: Figure out what you did and avoid doing it again.

If you've done Step 2 well - which, as we mentioned, is harder than you might expect - this will be a lot easier: generally people will try to call out what needs changing, so you should be able to figure it out from what they said. If you need help, it's possible to ask for it or do research, but remember that people who were just hurt aren't obliged to help you.

Step 5: Apologize, if appropriate.

If someone tells you to go away, don't protract your presence in their company, but most of the time, an apology in the place where you screwed up is appropriate.

Remember to apologize for what you did. Apologizing because people are mad at you isn't helpful. Apologizing when you hurt someone for actions by people who are not you - for society, for your race, for whatever - isn't helpful. Apologize for what was done that you did.

Step 6: Figure out why you did it and learn how to do better.

This ... can take decades. Or minutes. Work at it as best as you can, be aware of it as something you had to work on. Research you did or do on what you did wrong is often helpful here.

That's probably the main stuff we'd like to suggest. Remember, the point isn't actually to be a jerk, however ethical - the point is to actively make things better - but also remember that being the jerk isn't something you have to double down on. You learn what you can and you do better.

We really like the pattern of info sites about identities folks might be wondering if they share including links to sites that are just called "Am I [x]?"—

—and open right up to a page saying "Yes" in big letters front and center, because frankly it is quite rare for people to be wondering that hard about themselves and be wrong.

I don't think I'm cut out for being a professional philosopher - a lot of the job of such philosophers is to study, understand, and respond to popular positions held by other philosophers, however asinine or incoherent, and because "asinine" and "incoherent" are philosophical judgments, you can't make any agreed-upon list of works to exclude on that basis. I can deal with the stuff sometimes, but my tolerance for it is too limited to do the job in any kind of consistent way.

I do like philosophy, though, and philosophizing. And I've been thinking about how to define art lately - "art" as in the all-of-it thing, not specifically visual art - and that turned into the following.

( Content warnings: homophobia, classism, sexism and racism mentions, hospital mention, and a brief rant about 1978 made-for-TV movie 'Rescue from Gilligan's Island' )

(Original post, 2016-04-19)