See also the review of Creative Destruction.
The first Indonesian song I'm aware of having heard was a MIDI of "Es Lilin". I was really impressed by it, mainly by an instrumental line that maybe was composed by the MIDI programmer. Or maybe they got it from someone's rendition. "Es Lilin" (I think) is a traditional song. It's about a popsicle -- a poetic translation of "es lilin" is "ice candle", but that's the word for "popsicle". I don't know what else the song is about, but I intend to try to translate the lyrics if I can, and discuss them in the follow-up to this post.
(I used to listen to MIDIs back at a certain era of my life, which was when we only had dial-up at home and I didn't have money to buy very many CDs, junior high or early high school. I didn't want to pirate music.)
I took a gamelan class in college of which I absorbed fairly little, although I do play a mallet percussion instrument and there are a lot of metallophones in gamelan. I remember the instructor, who I think was a fan of Indonesia, mentioning something about "Es Lilin".
When I became interested in Indonesia a few months ago, I thought to look up "Es Lilin". The versions I found didn't have the instrumental part that had stood out to me when I was younger. But it's still a good song. Here is Nining Meida's rendition, from her album Kalangkang:
"Kalangkang", the title track on that album, to me sounds like a darkly mysterious song. "Dark" can have different meanings in aesthetics. There's "depressing" dark, "horror" dark, "evil" dark, "sad" dark, probably others -- these being the Western dark vibes, to be found in goth and metal among other places. But in Asia, there are other dark vibes, in addition: "midnight" dark (like with midnight ragas), and ... whatever is going on in "Kalangkang". I don't feel like Asia's dark vibes are as close to "I'm going to die or have my being violated by evil" as the Western dark vibes. I'm not sure exactly what "midnight" means in all of Indian or Southeast Asian music, so they might include what I see in midnight, but I see there "presence before God", "quiet", "being in emotion", "being by yourself", "being outside of time". (Incidentally, I think Jewish music has its own take on midnight which I think includes "presence before God", at least I hear that in this song, at some points.) "Kalangkang"'s "verse" sounds like an invitation to a mystery -- but that's not having any idea what the lyrics are about.
Another song from Kalangkang is "Anjeun". I translated a few words from "Anjeun" that I remember. The title means "you". Indonesia has a lot of languages, and Indonesian is mostly a second language for Indonesians. They first learn a language native to whatever ethnic group they are part of. Some, or all, of Kalangkang is in Sundanese. (Fortunately there is an online translator for Sundanese.)
I suspect that "Anjeun" is a very sweet love song. I would normally find such sweetness hard to take, at least from Western songs. And I wonder if Indonesians find "Anjeun" to be too sweet. But to me it sounds innocent-enough to have in it the sweetness. Or perhaps "uncandylike" enough -- like it's sweet but not sugary. I don't know if that impression will survive a translation of the lyrics.
A karaoke version.
Speaking of love songs, while looking around random pages on Indonesian Wikipedia, I found the page for Efek Rumah Kaca ("C" is pronounced "tsh" in Indonesian, and I think maybe in all Indonesian languages). They made a song called "Cinta Melulu" which means "Only Love" / "Always Love". I was interested in it because on the English Wikipedia page for the band, it sounded like it was about how the Indonesian music scene/industry was being overwhelmed with love songs, as though somehow Indonesia was not a place already overwhelmed with love songs. But then I tried translating the lyrics and it made me think that ERK was really lamenting that there were too many bad love songs. And checking the source for the English Wikipedia page, it looks like that's what was really meant by that source.
Thinking of Indonesia as a place where for some reason they didn't have very many love songs, and "now" (in early 2000s, when "Cinta Melulu" was written), there was a trend toward them, made me think "is this evidence of a Westernization of Indonesian culture? We were overwhelmed by love songs back in the 1960s". I do see evidence of Westernization in Indonesian music -- Sundanese pop like Nining Meida does sound like a mix between Western pop (most obviously in the production) and traditional Asian music, and ERK sounds even more like Western music and even less like traditional Asian music, at least in "Cinta Melulu". But no, as I think about it, I'm going to guess that Indonesia has had love songs for a long time, like as far back as the 1980s when Nining Meida was making Kalangkang. It could turn out that "Es Lilin" is a love song and not a childhood song.
I think I wish that cultures could be radically different from my own, and in my naivety I could suppose that different cultures in the world were radically different from my own. I know that love in some form is part of I would assume every non-monastic culture, and monks and nuns were first children as part of the world of family at least to some extent, but while the basics of human existence have to be just about or exactly the same everywhere, we don't have to talk about all of those basic phenomena. The world of what we talk about, about what we choose to bring up, examine, celebrate, meditate on, be horrified by, protest, etc. is to some extent up to us.
A culture that talks about everything literally as it observes it might tend toward so-called "Western" culture.
(Not so much "literal" in a "scientific" / possibly Humean or phenomenological way where we dissect our experiences and see them in a non-personal way -- as "pure" objects apart from us -- because that's not how we observe things most of the time; but more in a naive, lived life, firsthand way, as we experience / observe things. I guess this "literal" is one which is like seeing everything on your desk that's in front of you (no microscope needed, no rifling through the pages of closed books), or every emotion that goes through you (not scrutinizing them, nor even letting them pass by you in a "mindful" way, if they really are your emotions and part of you), or develops takes on the subjects raised by each day's experience (naive takes, or if you really feel like it, sophisticated ones); without passing over an object on the desk, or an emotion that passes through you, or a day's experience in your life. I guess like with how reason evolves out of rigorous common sense, this "literal" observantness of "seeing everything on your desk" could turn into something philosophical (Humean, phenomenological, etc.). But there's a difference between more rigorously or even extremely scientific observation of the level of Hume or Husserl, and proto-scientific observation, and while there is probably a continuum between the two (I assume that, not having thought this through), there might be a clear difference between the two, like that between a puddle and a lake which is big enough to have waves.)
I find persuasive, whether I should or not, Scott Alexander's observation that what we call Western culture in terms of "Westernization" is really not inherently Western and is more like "appetite-following culture" or "hewing-to-individual-biology culture", which simply first emerged in the West. (This idea, or something like it, from his How The West Was Won.) So then if you just say how you're feeling, literally how you feel it, you're not keeping people's minds away from your appetites, which are presumably theirs as well. "I've got appetites" -- "those are my appetites too!" -- "Yes, appetites". Whereas a traditional culture can push against individual appetites, and through some form of censorship can make itself unique. I think in our American "Western" culture we still have lots of non-literalness and lots of censorship, but it comes from social pressure or maybe low-level authoritarianism, and not from a more monolithic presence, like an official religion or totalitarian government. ("Censorship" is a harsh word, like total bans, but there can be a softer version which is more like turning the volume up or down, maybe a lot, on some strain of culture.)
Maybe "hewing-to-invididual-biology" ends up being a kind of censorship of its own, causing us, when we look at our "desk" when we want to write songs, to mostly only see the things relating to courtship and mating, or overrepresent those, leaving out some others.
So maybe I was hoping that the censoring of reality (or the "artistic thematization", to pick a less loaded word than "censor") that was done in Indonesia was such to create a unique, love-song-downregulating cultural world. And maybe it is unique in some ways -- even still in "Cinta Melulu" I can hear some uniqueness -- but it is not nearly as unique as my idea of the possibility of cultural diversity seems to promise me.
It's true that in American popular music, we have a lot of love songs, but maybe a lot of non-love songs as well. I may be disinclined to be a fan of love songs, but I don't remember having a strong bias against them, and without trying, I ended up getting into the following bands between age 10 or so and age 30: Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine, AIR, Stereolab, Klaus Schulze, and the instrumental music of J. S. Bach -- none of which are rich sources of heartfelt love songs; as well as They Might Be Giants, Simon and Garfunkel, and Elvis Costello, which do have some, but a fair amount, or a lot, of other songs. If you consider a non- or less-heartfelt love song to be a love song, I guess you could include MBV among the love song set, if you listen closely to the lyrics, but those seem like aestheticized dreams more than relations between two people, and I get the sense that MBV's lyrics are an afterthought to the music, which is the real point. Mostly when I listened to their album Loveless, I couldn't tell and didn't care what they were singing, and same with AIR, Stereolab, and Cocteau Twins. I was listening more for music itself, perhaps the emotion of the singing, but not whatever story or point the words might have been trying to convey. And I would guess that there are a fair amount of Cocteau Twins, AIR, Stereolab, MBV, etc. listeners who approach that music like I did, and that the bands, more or less, expect that. In the "alternative music" tradition, there is a lot of music that doesn't end up connecting the listener to romantic love, sometimes by saying nothing about love in the lyrics, and sometimes by the mixing or how the words in the vocals are pronounced, so that the lyrics are de-emphasized for many listeners.
Maybe if you add up all the secular and Christian music in America (or in the Anglophone world, which is maybe more the cultural unit for popular music), everything on that culture's "desk" is being covered. The longing for what is not-here is where art comes from, perhaps. What do we not already have? Something in me wants there to be something other than Anglophone popular music, and maybe I get something of it in Southeast Asian music. But after I assimilate that, what then? I think that secular and Christian Anglophone popular music is still "appetite-following" music, is still part of our "appetite-following / Western" culture, and deliberately not following appetites, or not viewing life as being about things like hedonism or preference satisfaction, might open up new ways of listening to and making music. Maybe one could hope that, like adults, we can learn to not follow our appetites without an external force making us not follow them. Still, there would be the longing for what is not-here, or at least I would hope so, or else how could we be alive?
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What if the cultures of the whole world get the same contents on their "desks" and then talk about them literally? Perhaps they would see the objects on the "desks" in an uncensored way, or they would be "appetite-followers" and thus censor them the same way, having the same human appetites. Would that be harmony and truth? Or would it be endless stasis, or some other kind of death?
In San Diego, one 4th of July, I think I was a witness to the "Big Bay Boom Bust". I remember it, but somehow remember it happening late in the day instead of at night as it really did -- see video of it -- and I remember it being smaller. It was a fireworks show that had a glitch that made all the rockets go off in 30 seconds -- both more intense than a normal fireworks show, and disappointing. Everything went off and then it was all over. Also, I remember a story from the 2004 tsunami, where the huge tsunami wave drew up water from the shore, leaving parts of the ocean floor exposed, near the beach. Some people ran down to get the free fish just lying there where the water had been. I wonder if culturally we are part of a decades-long mixture, in some sense, of those two metaphors.
Holden Karnofsky has speculated that art is something that is mined. I have thought similar things before I read him. Maybe things look really, really wonderful until we reach the end. One pessimistic version of this is to think that the "tsunami" is something like AGI killing us all so that it can do whatever it randomly thinks is important. But another, less pessimistic, take, is that we will survive the transition to AGI and continue a bonanza of cultural development, until we homogenize by enriching and making intercompatible all cultures into one -- maybe this isn't pessimistic at all, but I wonder, what might be lost if we get rid of cultural diversity, in the sense of, that there are different more or less distinct cultures, and also, what life would be like if we no longer could innovate artistically, because we had enthusiastically mined everything. If the outcome of that homogenization was sufficiently bad for us spiritually, that might be the real "tsunami", or part of it.
I read somewhere that Tyler Cowen was interested in culture, and so I thought I would get his book Creative Destruction, which is about how globalization is good for art. I guess I might want to plug that into the preceding two paragraphs by saying something like "globalization is the computer glitch in the Big Bay Boom Bust, or the powerful earthquake that draws the ocean off the beach in 2004" and the process of art excitingly intercombining and innovating like crazy is like the fireworks or the fish.
What I expect or somewhat hope to see in Cowen's book is things like arguments for why cultural homogenization is a good thing (perhaps because cultural differences aren't actually good, or because individual diversity outweighs the loss of them), why homogenization isn't going to go as far as anti-globalization people might fear, why artistic innovation will never end, why economic growth outweighs whatever cultural losses come from cultural homogenization. But randomly opening the book a few times and looking at a few sentences makes me think there may be other unexpected things that Cowen brings out, that I will find interesting.
It occurs to me to ask myself "why does the subject of cultural diversity matter?". Maybe "culture" is just a form of wealth, except insofar as it bears on a religion that can save. I think from an effective altruist standpoint, culture, some form of it, could bear on whatever is supposed to come out of the Long Reflection. For some reason, getting the Long Reflection right matters even to atheists, as though it's necessary in order for the future to really go well, that future being the repository of atheistic hopes and fears. From an MSLN perspective, I do think that culture in any of its forms has some bearing on whether people come to fully love God -- either it is a temptation, an anti-temptation, or prepares one to face temptation or anti-temptation better, if that doesn't just reduce to temptation or anti-temptation, or if neutral on the temptation/anti-temptation axis, is something that fills the mind, using time that could have been spent on spiritual maturing, perhaps offering rest, or distraction. So the question of culture matters, and of whether the right culture exists and is accessible. This relates to cultural diversity and the phenomenon of cultural homogenization.
So is homogenization (the intermixing and equilibrating of all cultures into one culture) good or bad? Cowen, I think, will say that it's good. Some potential dangers that I see (off the top of my head) are: maybe having coherent (unmixed) traditions allows people to go deeper into them, maybe belonging to a family (thus an ethnic group) has some inherent value, maybe traditions that prevent us from being fulfilled in this life help us to learn to long for what is not-here, maybe when those longings connect to an until-now-unknown culture we experience a kind of blessing that will no longer be possible when we get too good at finding the things that satisfy our longings (perhaps because they are easily accessible for being part of our culture, like in the same language), maybe certain cultures are more compatible with being in tune with true value (holiness / the output of the Long Reflection). In principle, any of these could apply to the Long Reflection, and many could have some bearing on MSLN concerns.
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(Some more thoughts from my notepad:
Cultural diversity: the desire for an unknown personality type, "Is this all there is?", Is "all there is" in the right proportions? Do we have "the answer"? Are we stuck on a fully-developed, nonetheless wrong, answer?)
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One thing I've assumed in this post so far is that human biology is relatively similar around the world, and that therefore culture can equilibrate to a common, homogenized state. However, in principle, human biology can be modified and unless transhumanism is checked in some way, I would assume that it will in the future. This means that humans can be engineered into new, divergent forms, or even new species, bringing about new cultures, and reintroducing cultural diversity.
Another less futuristic but still futuristic thought is that humans will no longer associate in tribes of ethnic descent (no more Germans, Indians, Arabs, etc.), but instead according to aesthetic tastes (goths, punks, metalheads, etc.). Or perhaps according to some other affinity. This is already happening, but it could happen to a much greater extent. The idea being that we can concentrate genes by re-sorting peoples (who genetically lean toward certain tastes) and then create cultures around those genetic affinities. This would be a more future-proof preservation of cultural diversity that might arise through civilizational drift.
This raises the question of connection to one's ancestors, which I take to be the foundation of nations and national culture. Connection to one's ancestors arises naturally out of being in a family and being connected to your parents (thus to their parents). This creates interest in the shared history of the people group which is one's parents, their parents and siblings, and so on back to some point in the past, some distant ancestor. A broad-brush characterization of modernity (and thus the hypermodernity of transhumanism) is that it is the destruction, erasing, denaturing, attenuating, setting-aside, etc. of family. And thus, of history, nations/tribes, and national/tribal culture.
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I might be able to write more here on this topic, but I think that's enough for now, and I will go see what Creative Destruction has to say.
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