This question of good behavior dominated a good portion of the evening’s proceedings. It seemed that most attendees accepted that one of religion’s core tenets was the imposition of rules upon society; but questions remained as to whether moral codes arose out of religious belief structures or out of practical necessity. Did humans originally condemn killing because “God commands it”, or because society functions much better when the default position is to restrain ourselves from hurting one another?

Of course, the “rules” do not always forbid killing. There is war, there is the death penalty; there are honor killings, the murder of Osama Bin Laden, and other “justified” ending of life. While some argued an innate understanding of morality, most were skeptical. “Look at the behavior of children,” one participant said. “They often act like sociopaths.” We need to be taught how to behave toward others. Religion is remarkably consistent in its teachings: it usually boils down to the Golden Rule. So did each religion crib this from a common and ancient human understanding, or is religion necessary to create morality? I’d argue you don’t need God to tell you hurting others is wrong, and too often we’ve seen people justify the hurting of others based on the teachings of some deity.

Maybe higher belief is just a cop-out. If it’s too taxing to contemplate right and wrong in an infinite universe, just avoid it completely and lay it all on God. One doesn’t have to worry about the consequences of his actions if he believes his god holds all responsibility. On the other hand, consider the luxury of religion versus the necessity of religion. It’s easy to decry the fundamentalist who uses religion to deny the rights of others, or ridicule the man for whom “spirituality is just something you use to pick up chicks.” A religious community that provides real support to people who are in dire straits is much harder to attack. I have nothing against anyone who finds solace in their beliefs, even if we disagree – but skip the proselytizing, please.

Ed, an agnostic, posed a question to Trevor, an atheist. Isn’t atheism just as strong a belief system as any religion? An atheist believes that there is no god, as strongly as an evangelical believes there is; it is the expression of doubt on the question which marks the agnostic. I recalled our conversation with Pete from three years ago, when he put forth the case for atheism. The burden of proof, he asserted, rests with those who say god exists. Trevor upheld this, and said that, much like Christopher Hitchens, he reserves the right to change his mind should he see some persuasive evidence. Yet stubborn belief in the face of all reason can be something to admire. “Belief can be a powerful force for good,” said one participant, and he meant the conviction to carry on even when no one else believes in what you’re doing. Revolutions are made thus.

“I am really surprised there isn’t more outrage from Americans over the  Wikileaks releases,” said Joah. He meant the Apache helicopter video in particular. The soldiers in the video technically did follow the rules of engagement, but that’s just the point: war is by definition a suspension of the rules. War brings destruction, no matter how man tries to civilize it. “I believe,” said Trevor, “that video should be required viewing for every war supporter in the country.”

Iain piped in. “Diplomacy has required secrecy for thousands of years. It wasn’t just invented by Hillary Clinton. It goes back to the creation of the nation-state and even earlier. It is practically human nature. It is part of human culture. The really surprising thing was that more countries weren’t pissed off at the United States for allowing this info to leak.”

Is WL anti-statist? Are they anti-American?

“WL is for ‘us’,” said Russ. “It isn’t going to change anything in America.” In other words, these leaked documents are for the intellectual elite to mull over in their comfortable, wine-soaked evening discussions. Most Americans either don’t care or aren’t really aware of them.

“It is completely presumptuous and very arrogant for [Julian Assange] to think he knows better than career diplomats and foreign service personnel what ought and ought not to be classified,” said Pete. When questioned whether this wasn’t placing too much trust in the government, Pete emphasized the distinction between non-elected State Dept employees making careers in diplomacy, and unctuous politicians trying to get elected, blissfully unaware of the real workings of statecraft. “I would never trust an elected politician to make the right decision on any of this stuff,” he clarified. But things that can be revealed by these leaks, including the manner and method of US diplomacy, and the structure of the State Dept, are valuable and should be protected.

What about injured American pride? Isn’t there a sense of violation here, that our dirty American laundry has been hung out for the world to see? I think that is certainly part of the reason for the backlash against Wikileaks.

There must always be a balance between security and transparency. Between centralized power and democracy. Between honesty and lies. My own personal feeling is that, for too long, the balance has been skewed toward too much secrecy, and that a dose of exposure is necessary to right the balance. The media has been pathetic for at least a decade – and likely much longer – at acting as a check on government abuse of power. Wikileaks is upstaging them, and in the process showing them what is possible in investigative journalism based on primary source documents.

Jeremy said that we are entering a new era of transparency. Or perhaps a new era of journalism? Greg Mitchell, a writer at The Nation, has been live-blogging everything Wikileaks for nine weeks. He has also just put out a book, The Age of Wikileaks, which sounds like it’s about exactly this point.

Before the evening’s discussion split into its separate paths, Iain raised a question which I intend to explore in future posts: Can we stack the actions of Wikileaks, and the results of its releases, against the goals and ideals of the organization, and what will that show? It’s still early days, but I myself am looking forward to seeing how that question is answered.

“Knowing where the food comes from” was the succinct answer to the question posed to Alex, on why he had become a vegetarian. Of all who attended, he was the only one who had forsworn meat. While working at McDonald’s – where he had often eaten his three daily meals – he had decided he could no longer eat beef or chicken. He cited links between red meat and heart disease and cancer, links which were disputed by Matt, of the chili takedown.

“The worst part of Food, Inc, I thought, was when they killed the organic chickens,” said Jeff. He was mainly impressed with the vast increase in yields that farmers have seen over the last fifty years. “Who can worry about the ethics of killing animals?” Someone asked the question, does it matter if the animal lived a better (happier?) life, if you’re still going to slaughter it?

“This is just white guilt,” somebody said.

Jeremy spoke about Peter Singer and his suggestion that apes be considered as candidates to be granted some form of “human” rights. The leap from gorillas to cows and pigs is surely not that great, though, is it? And so what is the litmus for inclusion in the sentient and politically protected species club? Someone suggested: “Does it cuddle?”

Indeed, consider an expansive line of thought. Not so long ago, doctors performing surgery on infant children did not bother anesthetizing the little ones, as they were not considered able to feel pain. It was long thought that dogs could not suffer, and that a lobster tries to escape a pot of boiling water by mere instinct – not because it hurts. Just last year, we started considering that fish might feel pain. What if we eventually learned that plants could experience suffering? Is there any denying that all life require death?

Animal welfare is irrelevant

There were a few people in attendance who had tried vegetarianism for awhile, sometimes for years, but had gone back to eating meat. It comes down to habit and taste, and the fact that “human cravings can’t be stopped” – at least not without great willpower and discipline. At a personal level, Mery reminded us, we don’t have to eat everything that’s served to us. Portion sizes in America dwarf the rest of the world, and evidence shows that we often assume what we’re given is the normal amount of food that we need. Only in America, Sean pointed out, is it normal to eat meat at all three meals, and possible to do it so cheaply.

Ultimately, Jeff’s argument is correct: the production of American farming is a triumph. Even though we have done awful environmental damage by creating vast monocultures  and concentrated animal feeding operations, we have also eliminated the problem of food scarcity, and we’ve turned beef – once a luxury – into a commodity. We’ve taken two crops – corn and soy – and turned them into 46,000 different kinds of consumer food products, everything from Wheat Thins to Big Macs.

The consolidation of such a food system is inevitable, because the American demand for meat cannot be satisfied by a network of small, self-sustaining farms. There simply isn’t enough land to raise 10 billion chickens, cows and pigs for slaughter every year in a sustainable way. If each one of us must have his sixty pounds of beef a year, then – yes – it’s going to require a food factory to produce it. It has caused us to turn nature itself into a machine.

Of course, we aren’t really that clever. The unforeseen consequences of this experiment in agriculture – and it is an experiment – are increasingly apparent: obesity, diabetes, heart disease, water pollution, soil depletion, E. coli breakouts… The repercussions of farm policy go so far as to affect illegal immigration.

The answer is not to overcome nature, but to learn from her. As Chef Dan Barber recounts in a recent TED talk (which Lauren directed us to), a fish farm in Spain has restored a natural marsh to such a condition, that the thriving ecosystem is actually purifying the water of a long-polluted river. And the fish taste delicious. This is the kind of system we can have, if we demand it. Maybe it can’t provide us each ninety pounds of chicken a year – but maybe that’s a good thing.

DeRosa was commenting on the possible irony that we had gathered to watch his film in a so-called “luxury condo” development. Eighty Metropolitan was built on the site of an old mustard factory in Williamsburg, and DeRosa said that he actually thought it was pretty tastefully done. Sure, it has a lap pool, but the building is only six stories, and it kind of resembles a factory in this old industrial neighborhood. Perhaps he was being diplomatic, but I found him sincere. His thoughts also closely resemble my own feelings about the building.

What he and Senko do have a problem with is “the city funding these changes”, and favoring the rich at the expense of the poor and middle-class. They set out to make the film because they noticed their own neighborhood changing, with locally-owned shops going out of business. “It was originally supposed to be a nostalgia piece,” DeRosa said. “But as we got deeper into it, we started learning things that really pissed us off.”

A common refrain from developers is that they are catering to the free market, and supplying a demand. “Well, if that’s true, then what’s city planning for?” asked DeRosa. “Our tax dollars are subsidizing these efforts which may eventually push us all out of our own city.” He was referring to the $500 million in annual tax abatements now granted to certain developers of high-priced residential and commercial property, a result of the shift in the 1970s toward accommodating businesses in the FIRE industries (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate). Although the film criticizes Bloomberg, his PlaNYC, and his conception of New York itself as a “luxury product,” it says he is only the latest NYC mayor to embrace this development philosophy, which unfairly targets working-class and lower-class neighborhoods for re-zoning.

Cities never stand still, nor should zoning.
—NYC Dept of City Planning

The Equitable Building sparked the first zoning law in NYC

The key to everything is zoning, a concept first introduced to New York City with the rise of the Equitable Building, at 120 Broadway. Built in 1915, the Equitable replaced a 7-story building that burned down in 1912, and the new construction dwarfed the old; at 40 stories, it rose over 500 feet in the air and each floor was built out to the full extent of the foundation, i.e., it had no “setbacks”, and cast a 7-acre shadow across the city.

Much like today, the city fathers viewed such development as progress. John Purroy Mitchel, the “Boy Mayor of New York”, personally laid the cornerstone of the Equitable’s foundation, the first time a mayor had done so for a building erected solely with private financing. In a short speech, he compared the building to the city itself, its owners to public servants. However, he seemed to already anticipate the public reaction to come. He congratulated the builders for “having, what I feel may possible be, the last of these cities within a city – but that is a problem for tomorrow.”

The Equitable set off a public outrage. People worried that such enormous towers would deprive the streets of light and air, making the city a dark and gloomy place. This led to the city’s first zoning ordinance, the Zoning Resolution of 1916, which limited not the height of buildings, but the amount of mass at certain heights – builders had to include setbacks which slimmed the buildings as they rose. These regulations spurred the design of Art Deco buildings like the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building.

The zoning resolution was updated again in 1961, with provisions mandating parking lots and encouraging open spaces. This is the period when the modernist Robert Moses was advocating the leveling of neighborhoods and the construction of highways like the Cross Bronx Expressway. Jane Jacobs famously opposed the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have connected the Holland Tunnel to the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges via an 8-lane elevated highway, displacing in the process some 2,000 families and 8,000 businesses.

Today the organization of the city depends on the involvement of its residents more than ever. As someone states in the film, the traditional process has been that “the board creates a plan, and then the community has to fight the plan.” It’s important to remember that the city will change no matter what. We can do nothing, and allow other forces to shape our city in their own image, or we can speak up and demand that the character of our neighborhoods be preserved in city planning.

How will musicians and writers, and other artists and tradesmen whose work is now primarily digital, make a living now that their product can be so easily and freely acquired?

Jeremy poses that the barriers to entry have been removed. Any musician with GaragePro can become world-famous: “The limits are only on ability, marketing savvy and drive.” He argues that the business model of the big labels is defunct, and I’ll grant that Big Music has lost its former sway, but can the model really be outdated if there are still commercial pop superstars making big money with the help of mega-amplified media attention?

But ok, bands don’t make much money from their albums anyway, it’s the record companies who take that home. The artist makes money on the tour, right?. That was true for a band like the Grateful Dead, who made all their money from touring and whose records sold poorly – but new, anonymous artists cannot conjure up legions of fans to follow them cross-country. According to EJ, who should know these things, the labels put the young artists out on tour and take most of the returns for themselves, leaving the artists with the merchandise take. “If you’re out on tour and you’re not selling merch, you’re not making money.”

It seems there’s no money to be made for anyone anymore selling CDs. Around the table, no man could remember the last time he’d bought one. Digital music purchases were also rare. All admitted to downloading free music, often illegally, though some said they had dialled back from the days when they could fill an entire hard drive in an afternoon. “I’ve got way more music than I could ever conceivably listen to.”

One participant brought up software downloads as a comparison. “I had a project for which I needed to have Adobe Dreamweaver. Well I looked it up and it’s four hundred bucks! But within minutes through a simple Google search, I was able to find the torrent, follow the crack instructions to load the software onto my machine and use it. Now, would I walk into a computer store and see this program for $400 on the shelf, put it under my coat and try to walk out? No fucking way! But I’m happy to do essentially the same thing over the internet, because it just doesn’t feel like stealing.” This sentiment was echoed around the table.

Despite the lack of legal, paid downloads happening, we were not hostile to the idea. But for most, it was the price. “Ten dollars for an album is still too much.” I asked what a good price would be, since I felt that $10 for an album is not so excessive. Five-dollar albums? Jeremy said yes, he’d buy albums at that price. But Don was obstinate, and said albums should be a dollar, because then he would just buy them on a whim. What didn’t occur to me at the time was that there could be a service that adjusted the price per album according to how much money each subscriber vowed to spend on a monthly or yearly basis. So I could sign up and guarantee that I’d spend $500 this year on music: at that level I could get albums for $2. Kind of like the BMG mail order service of my high school days, when I started my first collection (CDs) by becoming a member. (Join Now and Get 6 CDs FREE!)

Another noted the proliferation of auctioning sites like eBay and asked why there was not a platform for auctioning mp3 songs and albums, or tickets to movies. “Why is every movie the same price? Some movies are clearly worth more than others.”

What about cash donations? I related a recent story in which I had “otherwise acquired” an artist’s album and was so moved by it, and listened to it so often, that I decided it was absolutely criminal that I hadn’t paid this guy – I went online and bought the album I already owned, just on principle (and as a result, probably transferring about $0.89 to the artist in question). And it’s true that people support art they love with their dollars even when they don’t have to. But the argument that won the evening was, “altruism is not a business model.”

If not charity, what about “Artistic Freedom Vouchers” from the government? Each of us gets $100 from Uncle Sam to spend on art and art alone… I leave it to you, gentle reader, to pursue that thread or not.

***

As for the news, we discussed James Fallows’s recent piece on Google “saving the news”, and it seems that the best news for the journalism industry is that everyone inside Google assumes that “users” (“readers”) will once again pay for their newspapers and magazines – and pay willingly – it’s just a matter of how. The argument is sound, because it also depends on the news changing somewhat. No longer will newspapers and media be able to provide the same stories as everyone else. They will have to provide something unique.

“Usually, you see essentially the same approach taken by a thousand publications at the same time,” [Krishna Bharat, the engineer who designed Google News] told me. “Once something has been observed, nearly everyone says approximately the same thing.” He didn’t mean that the publications were linking to one another or syndicating their stories. Rather, their conventions and instincts made them all emphasize the same things. This could be reassuring, in indicating some consensus on what the “important” stories were. But Bharat said it also indicated a faddishness of coverage—when Michael Jackson dies, other things cease to matter—and a redundancy that journalism could no longer afford. “It makes you wonder, is there a better way?” he asked. “Why is it that a thousand people come up with approximately the same reading of matters? Why couldn’t there be five readings? And meanwhile use that energy to observe something else, equally important, that is currently being neglected.” He said this was not a purely theoretical question. “I believe the news industry is finding that it will not be able to sustain producing highly similar articles.”

I think that maxim could be applied equally to producers of art and media everywhere.

We began Wednesday night with Alex reading from the introduction to his book, which centered on a speech Glenn Beck made in Tampa, in November 2009. There Beck announced “The Plan”, an as-yet-undefined blueprint for taking America back from the progressives and advocates of “social justice”. Beck believes that this phrase is a euphemism for socialism.

Though Beck does not intend to announce details of the plan until August, he has said that it will encompass 100 years. We can safely assume that it will hit the major Tea Party points.

Alex touched upon the emotional nature of Beck’s speaking style in this passage:

Finally, inevitable as gravity, there was the florid signature that appears somewhere at least once, often twice, in every Beck performance. This is the moment when the voice catches, the eyes mist, and it seems, for one or two excruciating moments, that the reluctant patriot might not be able to hold back the tears, so verklempt has he become at his rote invocation of love of country, or the brave troops, or George Washington…

You don’t have to read past the title to understand this is an anti-Glenn Beck book. But right from the beginning, Alex is unrelenting in his criticism, which is sometimes laced with sarcasm. Though he says the book was not commissioned as a hit job on Beck, the target audience is clearly the young, urban, liberal elitists who mostly know Glenn Beck from watching The Daily Show.

Alex talks about Beck as a dangerous force to be stopped, but also as a charlatan whom he compares to P.T. Barnum. The question was raised whether it was fair for us, in our conversation, to ridicule Beck as insincere. Perhaps we are mistaken and he does, in fact, have genuinely strong feelings about “loss of liberty” in this country. Or what if, yes, it is a performance, but it is intended to convey his message, which still has value?

The Junta being what it is, there was not a lot of sympathy for Beck in the group. But Jeff valiantly tried to counter our native arguments with the viewpoints of his father, who watches Beck’s show (as does my own). For those who genuinely feel that the government is encroaching too much on our private lives and businesses, for those who feel that the country has moved too far away from religion, Beck’s message can ring true. Just because some of us feel that these fears are unfounded or misplaced (I, for one, worry far more about the government’s assassinating US citizens or wiretapping our phones without warrant than I do about the federal takeover of GM), this doesn’t mean we should reject out of hand the concerns of our fellow citizens outside the major cities. “If you think about conservatives as stupid, then you’re making a mistake,” Jeff said.

Alex’s rebuttal to that is that Beck is indeed dangerous. When he talks about Obama and progressives representing a “virus that feeds upon the host of the Republic”, when he says “I’m going to be a progressive hunter like the old Nazi hunters” (as he did on his program, June 10, 2009), Alex argues that Beck is playing the fear card to such a degree as to be inciting violence. He is appropriating the language common to genocidal regimes.

Cedric said that, to him, commentators like Beck and Rush Limbaugh seemed to be moving closer to entertainment (and away from serious political debate) every year, with less and less of a grip on historical fact. Alex agreed, and talked about how Beck has, in his opinion, grossly distorted history. “The American Revolution was about destroying centers of power to create an egalitarian society,” he argued. “But over time, private corporate power grew to such a degree that it became necessary for government to introduce a ‘flattening’ effect, with the antitrust laws, income tax, etc. Without government exerting that power, we end up with a segregated society – gated communities and the poor – is that what the Founders wanted?” Adam Serwer, at the American Prospect, talks about Rand Paul employing a similar distortion in his recently panned comments about discrimination.

As is typical for a Junta meeting, we wandered off on various tangents here and there, like the nostalgic idea of 1950s America and whether it really existed (and if it did, why), the merits of the French ban on the burqa, the origins of American progressivism, etc, etc. It was a great night with a lot of food for thought. Be sure to catch our next meeting, likely near the end of June.

JohnJ started us off with a quick overview of artistic movements in the last 140 years, with an emphasis toward trying to explain how we got to the present moment, not just in terms of movements and periods, but in terms of the modern way art works: galleries, openings, agents, etc. It wasn’t always this way, but there is a pattern. Certain “tastemakers” – those with money or influence – determine what is relevant and what gets promoted, and these people are not all artists. They are curators and patrons and customers, from Lorenzo d’Medici to modern hedge fund collectors.

But that is the “art world,” separate from art itself, where an artist must make a living using his work – and often himself – as a commodity. When did art become a path to celebrity? Some argued that it was with Picasso and other painters around the turn of the 20th century – essentially that celebrity came with the rise of the mass media. But wasn’t Shakespeare’s name known throughout England in his day? Well, yes, but he had a technological boost as well; he wrote in the wake of the invention of the printing press.

There were some interesting sidenotes about writing, with the question being raised whether it should be included in a discussion about “art.” Of course! said I, and some others, although a painter disagreed and it was painting that dominated the conversation. What about poetry, does anyone still write it? Yes, said a poet who was with us, and brought up Mary Oliver, who is indeed prolific, but who is also part of an earlier generation (b. 1935). I pointed out that Twain grew massively wealthy and famous by his writing (although he died a pauper), and until recently it was still possible to become a celebrity by writing (although if it’s fame you’re after, you’d better stick with crime or romance novels and skip the poetry.)

Damien Hirst is “the first billionaire artist.” Which is absurd on its face, but it brings up good questions about authenticity. If Hirst puts a shark in a glass case full of formaldehyde, what makes it different from you or I doing the same? DC wanted to know why a urinal, when placed behind a “velvet rope” by DuChamp, suddenly became art. The question becomes one of context: the place where one views the art, the background of the artist and how much of it is written next to the piece, and of course the title of the piece can change interpretations easily. DuChamp called the urinal Fountain.

DuChamp said that anyone could be an artist; that anything could be art. This was the precursor to Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame, and today it is really happening. Art is life, art is expression, art is commodity. The thing and the representation of the thing now overlap so heavily as to be nearly the same thing. In The Society of the Spectacle, Guy DeBord wrote “All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.” That was 37 years before Facebook. Today it presents a paradox: if everything is art, then nothing is art. So how do we know what’s good or bad?

We have to learn for ourselves what feels authentic and original. And those tastemakers are important. They perform a real function, by paying constant close attention. They watch the ticker of the art world go by, and from the great flow deduce the zeitgeist. Only over time do patterns emerge. But like Jeff*, a painter in attendance, said, “You come to New York as a young person painting still-lifes, with a traditional background, and you see what’s happening here, and you stop doing that, because what you’re doing could have been done 300 years ago.” When John Cage wrote “4:33″ it was revolutionary. But writing a silent song today is not relevant, because it’s not moving the needle.

Towards the end, we spoke of art which lives but is not commoditized – the work of the undiscovered or unappreciated. Henry Darger lived alone in a small apartment, having little social interaction, yet was busy producing lengthy novels and paintings. Van Gogh was never famous in his lifetime and died penniless. And for some, dressing up like superman is a path for “fame and fortune.”

Like JohnJ said, “We could talk about this all night, and no one is going to leave here saying, ‘Yes, we’ve got it figured out now.’” With that in mind, I’ll end here and say thanks again to everyone who came out. It was a great night. Look for the next Junta to gather near the end of May…

* I originally attributed this to Sam. Apologies.