Ethnocentricity
bcmeikle@shaw.ca


      I'm not sure that this word is really known and understood yet. In its evilest earliest forms it was the thinking that allowed christian missionaries to destroy native culture, to destroy local cultures all over the world. It says "I am from a superiour culture, therefor I have the right to impose said culture upon you...My culture is central, yours is peripheral".
       Like its relatives anthrocentricity (I am the superior,central animal) and egocentricity (My point of view is the superior,central one) it is a term that denotes a failure of empathy. A failure to accept the subjective nature of the world, to look through the other person's eyes and see from their perspective.

      Here I will argue that not only are we not beyond such thinking but the web is reeling from its effects even today. In its most basic forms we just have arrogant americans, (or canadians, or germans, or japanese) who say "I am from japan. So are you." Really, this is pretty harmless, since most people just say "arrogant americans. Believe what you will..."

      But what about "Object oriented ethnocentricity" . This is where C.P. Snow's 'two cultures' of science and arts are the operating forces. I submit that this is RAMPANT on the web.  Quite often, I get messages from engineers that say... "your emails are too ambivalent, the meaning is not precise enough"... There is a lot of subtext here:a) You dont use the english language correctly. b)There is a correct way to use the english language and that is my way. c)The linear denotation of one word to one idea is how correct communication proceeds...

     All of these propositions are essentially stupid, ethnocentric, and wrong.Its time to tell the new priests,spreading the object-oriented religion, that they are fools.

     But lets sidestep a moment. Gather some images. The first is of Steve Jobs in a recent keynote saying "The reason we don't allow independent musicians to sell their music on itunes is because they don't have quality".  Without reading Pursig's excellent "Zen and art of Motorcyle Maintenance" which is essentially a 300 page meditation on the word "quality" and the aristotle-ian attempt to 'trap' it. (and the platonic realization that such 'trapping' is impossible)...we can guess this: He probably means production values. Is the recording well engineered, good levels, reverb, etc. And so horrific music that is well recorded gets a stamp of 'quality', while guy playing awesome thumb piano in a market in africa, recorded on a crummy nagra, lacks 'quality'.
     Sorry Steve, that's idiotic.
     We only have to look at the tsunami videos, grainy, shaky, and heart-wrenchingly moving, to realize that 'quality' has nothing to do with production values. Probably the most important media that the web has produced, these shaky movies are testaments that 'quality' is ellusive, undefineable, special case, in nature.

     But if we can't objectify quality how can we proceed? I think in computer sales you can...quantified measures like cpu speed, price, etc. can be added together for an objective score. Its just when steve starts selling art that he steps out of his league. In art all we can define are qualities.(plural) We can say "this piece has qualities that work for me." We can even say "This piece has qualities that I believe are universal and so I recommend it to everyone"

     But we have left the objective world. If someone says "That piece doesn't work, you are wrong" They are correct. In the subjective world, point of view is everything. Even if thousands of people agree with one view, having a totally opposite view is RIGHT TOO. The math is something like 2+2=5 and 2+2=6, and both answers are correct!
         When we step outside the simplistic, linear way of judging music, we must, (like early missionaries should have) look from the other person's subjective view. It is as valid as our own. One man's quality is another man's crap.

     A second image: The engineering joke: "That virus wrote poetry all over my drive" ... The suggestion here that poetry is random garbage, is classic object oriented ethnocentricity. This dovetails with a comment an engineer made to me at a convention: "We added a random number generator to the API. Now you can describe the logical, reversible world, and the right brained world too!'

     In both of these images, MASSIVE CULTURAL STUPIDITY is being displayed. Perhaps poetry seems random to an engineer, but to a poet, such a suggestion is both offensive and idiotic. The other side of logic is NOT RANDOMNESS. It is a messy, much-repressed-by-logicals notion called intuition. Intuition cannot be defined clearly. It is feeling your way. It is sensing a path. It is not something that the science culture knows much about but it is EVERYTHING to the artist.

     As a start to getting along between cultures, perhaps it would be good to know when you're being offensive. Like an early priest who actually takes time to learn about Potlatch, its time a few logicals take a moment to think about the creative mind. It's a mind that doesn't proceed in incremental steps, but in intuitive 'leaps'. It's a mind that doesn't communicate with simple linear parsing,(one word/one meaning)  but in blobs, patterns, non-linear blasts.

     So when you say "your emails are too ambivalent, the meaning is not precise enough", you deny a POV that SEEKS AMBIVALENCE. It may be hard to get, but there are people out there who speak in subtext, double entendre, and symbolism all the time. To a poet, only stupid people would be so literal as to use a one word/one meaning correlation. To say they are wrong is to be an arrogant ignorant christian priest telling natives that the culture evolved from a landscape for thousands of years is less appropriate than an imported truth. To say that the linear, object oriented mind is the correct mind is shockingly, web-shatteringly incorrect, ethnocentric, and arrogant.

     Really if we're going to proceed with any peace you idiots are going to have to learn to look through other eyes.

     Of course by calling you stupid or idiots I'm being ethnocentric too. I'm using my values to score yours. Please ignore this as a rhetorical device. My respect for logicals is great, and by pointing out some flaws in the 'logic culture' I am only hoping to improve it. In the asian taoist tradition of yin/yang it is only by finding dynamic equilibrium between the two sides that peace can be achieved. And let's face it, the yang-dominant neededs a bastion. Einstien blew physics out of that water. Gone was the reductionist/reversible universe of predictable forces acting in rational manners... The quantum world was all about probablities, possible events. The computer, at least for a short while, has offered that reassuring certainty. Here was a universe where linear logic still dominated. Where everything could be quantified, objectified, and the messy world of qualities and subjective experiences largely ignored.
    
       Now we have the ipod that pays 7% of its money to the creative. Even that has taken apple a huge leap to achieve. DRM is universally looked down upon, and the notion of the creative taking 100% of the money for their work is still a long way off. (really apple has just become a new exploitation class for musicians) I wonder if a day will come where 50% of the people working at apple are creatives. (not 5%) I wonder if the day will come where 50% of the people on the web are female. (its 30% today which isnt bad)

        I wonder if the day will come when computers multi-process.(Is this a technical or cultural barrier?) or when computers do a lot of the annoying incremental logic work leaving mankind to follow and be awed by intuitions in all their complexity.