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The death of literature
There is a central London graveyard called Bunhill Fields. It’s the last resting place of many well-known people, among them John Bunyan, author of The Pilgrim’s Progress; Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, and the great Romantic poet William Blake. But the educational researcher Daisy Christodoulou notes that those titans of English literature are no longer Bunhill’s most famous inhabitants. Nowadays, that title would probably go to Reverend Thomas Bayes. At his death in 1761 he was almost completely obscure, but today, his name is an adjective, and his work “has had a profound influence on philosophy, medicine and technology.”
That work is not a novel or a poem, but an algorithm for navigating uncertainty. Bayes’ posthumous fame is justified — although Flagship’s Tom would say that, being the author of a book about Bayes. But it is also, says Christodoulou, an indicator of a shift in society: “Maths is in the ascendancy and the humanities, particularly literature, are in decline,” across several countries. “Many of us have grown up in a world where literature was at the heart of the English story,” she writes. “That may not be the case for much longer.”
Learning by watching
Is the widespread availability of adult material online shaping men’s expectations of sex? It’s a common concern, and a difficult one to research. The adult-film-star-turned-data-blogger Aella, though, wants to do just that. She gathered thousands of men and women’s responses — in men’s case, asking what women want in bed; in women’s case, asking what they actually want in bed — and also asked the men how much they watched, among many other questions for both men and women. The results might be surprising: “Yes, porn is affecting men’s judgment of what women like in bed,” Aella writes, but perhaps not how you’d expect.
“Men who watched porn more frequently… were slightly more accurate in their predictions about what women liked,” she writes. That’s because they were more likely to guess that women enjoyed more extreme things, and “women did in fact report liking those [things] more.” She notes that there are lots of possible ways her findings could be false — her sample might be biased, or the result could be due to confounding factors in the data, although she tried to correct for both possibilities. But it was a consistent finding that the women in her survey were “a bit freakier than the men.” WARNING: VERY OBVIOUSLY, THIS POST CONTAINS ADULT THEMES.
Culture is downstream of politics
In the US in the 1960s, there was a claim that “liberals took over Hollywood, while conservatives took over Washington.” The former Donald Trump adviser and Breitbart boss Steve Bannon thought the right’s focus on political power was a tactical error, ceding control of culture to liberals. The philosopher Joseph Heath’s own work suggests the opposite: “Progressives had become obsessed with cultural politics, but that in so doing had made the wrong choice,” because Bannon’s famous claim that “politics is downstream of culture” is backwards.
Heath cites the struggle for gay rights: Decriminalization of homosexuality “happened during a time that a large majority of the population continued to disapprove of it.” When same-sex marriage was legalized, it blindsided some conservatives, who “in a classic case of mistaking a symptom for the cause” blamed the movie Brokeback Mountain. But that film’s political message, that people’s sexual lives are their own business, reflected a three-decade-old legal reality. Culture is not an “all-powerful, controlling force, tantamount to a system of mind control,” although that idea “flatters the self-conception of… academics and journalists.”