Philosophy
The shorter shorty rode his two wheeler without training wheels for the first time this weekend. You could tell he was nervous and asked at first that we not remove them. But some gentle coaxing from TheWife and he agreed to give it a try and it was just a few minutes later that I let go of the bike and he rode by himself for several yards. I gave the obligatory "You did it!" and he had that smile we all know, the "I'm so proud of myself, oh my god I didn't think I could do that, wow" smile. It is authentic joy. It is the opposite of cool.
I look at that smile and then I look at my college students. There is a tyranny of the cool. Authentic displays of emotion are "so gay" and are actively quelled...usually.
In my philosophy of science class, I have a critical mass of students who love science and who have decided that it is a geek-safe space. They just don't care about what the cool kids think of them. Man, were they into it yesterday in talking about Thomas Kuhn's notion of paradigm shift and whether there could be an extra-paradigmatic notion of rationality sufficiently robust to sustain a meaningful concept of scientific progress. It reminded me of the bike. It was so much fun.
So, I'm declaring war on cool again. Cool sucks. Cool keeps us from engaging with each other and the world. Cool keeps down the smart, the strange, the interesting.
But the Heathers have the social capital and are not about to give it up. I need strategy here people. How do we launch our attack? How do we make authenticity acceptable?
- Justifying Fashion
This is fashion week in New York. To be honest, I've always had an antipathy for fashion. Growing up as a nerd in an upper-middle class suburb, fashion always seemed to me to be a two-pronged evil. On the one hand, it was something...
- False Needs, Technological Regress, And The Mechanical Pencil
As I wasted a perfectly good hour of vacation fixing the shorter of the short people's mechanical pencil -- a stocking stuffer he asked for and received -- Marx's notion of false needs came to mind, that is, the idea that in order to sell more...
- James Dean And Modern Cool
Yesterday would have been James Dean's 78th birthday. In just three films and a tragic accident, the man defined the modern notion of cool -- disaffected, alienated, but good-hearted. Is there anyone alive today who deserves mention in the same sentence...
- Gay Vs. Cool
Aspazia has an interesting post on the utterance, "that's so gay." The context of her discussion is to question Vanessa, from Feministing's contention that uttering the phrase is an act of deliberate homophobia. Spaz does not contend it to be...
- When Did This Blog Become (semi) Popular?
This little one-man operation usually gets about a thousand hits a day. I can't tell you how pleased that makes me, especially considering that we're not associated with any cool, popular or powerful organization at all. Hell, I don't even...
Philosophy
The War on Cool
The shorter shorty rode his two wheeler without training wheels for the first time this weekend. You could tell he was nervous and asked at first that we not remove them. But some gentle coaxing from TheWife and he agreed to give it a try and it was just a few minutes later that I let go of the bike and he rode by himself for several yards. I gave the obligatory "You did it!" and he had that smile we all know, the "I'm so proud of myself, oh my god I didn't think I could do that, wow" smile. It is authentic joy. It is the opposite of cool.
I look at that smile and then I look at my college students. There is a tyranny of the cool. Authentic displays of emotion are "so gay" and are actively quelled...usually.
In my philosophy of science class, I have a critical mass of students who love science and who have decided that it is a geek-safe space. They just don't care about what the cool kids think of them. Man, were they into it yesterday in talking about Thomas Kuhn's notion of paradigm shift and whether there could be an extra-paradigmatic notion of rationality sufficiently robust to sustain a meaningful concept of scientific progress. It reminded me of the bike. It was so much fun.
So, I'm declaring war on cool again. Cool sucks. Cool keeps us from engaging with each other and the world. Cool keeps down the smart, the strange, the interesting.
But the Heathers have the social capital and are not about to give it up. I need strategy here people. How do we launch our attack? How do we make authenticity acceptable?
- Justifying Fashion
This is fashion week in New York. To be honest, I've always had an antipathy for fashion. Growing up as a nerd in an upper-middle class suburb, fashion always seemed to me to be a two-pronged evil. On the one hand, it was something...
- False Needs, Technological Regress, And The Mechanical Pencil
As I wasted a perfectly good hour of vacation fixing the shorter of the short people's mechanical pencil -- a stocking stuffer he asked for and received -- Marx's notion of false needs came to mind, that is, the idea that in order to sell more...
- James Dean And Modern Cool
Yesterday would have been James Dean's 78th birthday. In just three films and a tragic accident, the man defined the modern notion of cool -- disaffected, alienated, but good-hearted. Is there anyone alive today who deserves mention in the same sentence...
- Gay Vs. Cool
Aspazia has an interesting post on the utterance, "that's so gay." The context of her discussion is to question Vanessa, from Feministing's contention that uttering the phrase is an act of deliberate homophobia. Spaz does not contend it to be...
- When Did This Blog Become (semi) Popular?
This little one-man operation usually gets about a thousand hits a day. I can't tell you how pleased that makes me, especially considering that we're not associated with any cool, popular or powerful organization at all. Hell, I don't even...