In 1993, a psychologist, James Cutting, visited the Musée d’Orsay in Paris to see Renoir’s picture of Parisians at play, “Bal du Moulin de la Galette”, considered one of the greatest works of Impressionism. Instead, he found himself magnetically drawn to a painting in the next room: an enchanting, mysterious view of snow on Parisian rooftops. He had never seen it before, nor heard of its creator, Gustave Caillebotte.
That was what got him thinking.
Have you ever fallen for a novel and been amazed not to find it on lists of great books? Or walked around a sculpture renowned as a classic, struggling to see what the fuss is about? If so, you’ve probably pondered the question Cutting asked himself that day: how does a work of art come to be considered great?
The intuitive answer is that some works of art are just great: of intrinsically superior quality. The paintings that win prime spots in galleries, get taught in classes and reproduced in books are the ones that have proved their artistic value over time. If you can’t see they’re superior, that’s your problem. It’s an intimidatingly neat explanation. But some social scientists have been asking awkward questions of it, raising the possibility that artistic canons are little more than fossilised historical accidents.
Cutting, a professor at Cornell University, wondered if a psychological mechanism known as the “mere-exposure effect” played a role in deciding which paintings rise to the top of the cultural league. In a seminal 1968 experiment, people were shown a series of abstract shapes in rapid succession. Some shapes were repeated, but because they came and went so fast, the subjects didn’t notice. When asked which of these random shapes they found most pleasing, they chose ones that, unbeknown to them, had come around more than once. Even unconscious familiarity bred affection.
Back at Cornell, Cutting designed an experiment to test his hunch. Over a lecture course he regularly showed undergraduates works of Impressionism for two seconds at a time. Some of the paintings were canonical, included in art-history books. Others were lesser known but of comparable quality. These were exposed four times as often. Afterwards, the students preferred them to the canonical works, while a control group of students liked the canonical ones best. Cutting’s students had grown to like those paintings more simply because they had seen them more.
Cutting believes his experiment offers a clue as to how canons are formed. He points out that the most reproduced works of Impressionism today tend to have been bought by five or six wealthy and influential collectors in the late 19th century. The preferences of these men bestowed prestige on certain works, which made the works more likely to be hung in galleries and printed in anthologies. The kudos cascaded down the years, gaining momentum from mere exposure as it did so. The more people were exposed to, say, “Bal du Moulin de la Galette”, the more they liked it, and the more they liked it, the more it appeared in books, on posters and in big exhibitions. Meanwhile, academics and critics created sophisticated justifications for its pre-eminence. After all, it’s not just the masses who tend to rate what they see more often more highly. As contemporary artists like Warhol and Damien Hirst have grasped, critical acclaim is deeply entwined with publicity. “Scholars,” Cutting argues, “are no different from the public in the effects of mere exposure.”
Ian Leslie, “The Mona Lisa Effect”, The Ruffian, 2022-10-29 (originally published in Intelligent Life in 2014.
February 8, 2023
QotD: How do the “great works of art” become “great”?
February 7, 2023
The Soviet Union Adopts an SMG: Degtyarev’s PPD-34/38
Forgotten Weapons
Published 21 Oct 2022The Soviet Union adopted its first submachine gun in 1935 after trials of some 14 different design in 1932/33. The winner of the trials was Vasily Degtyarev, once of the Soviet Union’s most prolific firearms designers. His model 1934 was a simple blowback gun reminiscent of the MP-28,II albeit with different trigger and magazine systems. The PPD34 used a 25-round box magazine, chambered for 7.62x25mm Tokarev. It was put into slow production, with just 3,300 or so produced by the end of 1938. During that time, Degtyarev made a number of small improvements to the gun, smoothing out the teething problems that are always found in new production systems. This improved version was designated the PPD34-38.
During the time, the submachine gun was not considered a priority by the Red Army. The leading generals did not see the value in the class of arms, and actually pulled all the PPDs from service in 1939 and had them put into storage. Only a few months later, the Red Army would be given a grim demonstration of SMG effectiveness when they closed the border into Finland and encountered determined Finnish resistance with kp/31 Suomi SMGs.
Some Suomis were captured by Soviet troops, and were very well liked — for obvious reasons. The inevitable inquiry into why the Red Army did not have such a weapon led to a frantic re-issuing of PPDs and production of as many as possible. At Stalin’s direction, the Suomi drum magazine was copied and adapted to the PPD34-38 as well. This required the addition of a short feed tower to fit the magazine well initially deigned for a standard box magazine. While PPD34-38 production continued, the PPD40 was quickly designed and put into production alongside the older model. Eventually, both were replaced in service by the PPSh-41, which was truly designed for mass industrial production.
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February 6, 2023
How We Make Our Videos (and what it costs)
World War Two
Published 5 Feb 2023We’re excited to finally answer all your questions about where Indy lives, how we produce the series, and how many of us there are in the TimeGhost Team!
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Why Traditional English Cheddar Is Aged In Caves | Regional Eats
Food Insider
Published 9 Oct 2019The earliest record of cheddar anywhere is at Cheddar, in Somerset, in 1170. The land around this village has been at the heart of English cheesemaking since the 15th century. Today, as many Cheddar producers have upscaled and require more land, there is only one traditional cheesemaker left in the village.
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QotD: US railroad land grants
The speech was widely reprinted by those skeptical of government pork barrel (a term that first became popular about the time Knott gave his speech). Sixteen years later, Northern Pacific, which received what was probably the largest land grant to a private company in American history, reprinted the speech in this brochure.
This might seem strange except that NP annotated the speech with recent facts in bright red letters, such as that Duluth had grown to house 26,000 people by 1886, that more wheat was delivered to Duluth each year than to any other American city, and that it also saw deliveries of millions of board feet of lumber and hundreds of thousands of tons of iron ore each year.
NP didn’t say so in so many words, but its point was clearly that the land grants, contrary to Knott’s predictions, were a good thing for most if not all Americans. However, the brochure also didn’t mention that James J. Hill was proving that a railroad that didn’t receive any land grants or subsidies could provide just as many benefits without going bankrupt, which would leave both investors and taxpayers in the lurch. (The St. Paul & Pacific did receive a small land grant, but Hill paid fair market value for that railroad and land after it went bankrupt, thus Hill didn’t particularly benefit from the subsidy.)
Train Lover (Randal O’Toole), “Debate Over Railroad Land Grants”, Streamliner Memories, 2022-11-01.
February 5, 2023
Leningrad: NO STEP BACK! – Week 232 – February 4, 1944
World War Two
Published 4 Feb 2023The Allies begin a new operation in the Pacific this week: assaulting the Marshall Islands. They also make big attacks from their beachhead in Italy at Anzio, but these are called off after only a few days in the face of heavy enemy resistance. However, in the USSR there are several successes against the Axis, as they are pushed back both in the far north and the far south of the front, and still surrounded near Korsun.
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This 1970s tank simulator drives through a tiny world
Tom Scott
Published 17 Oct 2022At the Swiss Military Museum in Full, there’s the last remaining example of a 1970s tank-driving simulator. But there’s no virtual worlds here: it’s connected to a real camera and a real miniature model. ■ More about the museum: https://www.festungsmuseum.ch/
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QotD: Annual cycles of plenty and scarcity in pre-modern agricultural societies
That has more than just economic impacts because the family unit becomes more vulnerable as that food stockpile dwindles. Malnutrition brings on a host of other threats: elevated risk of death from injury or disease most notably. Repeated malnutrition also has devastating long-term effects on young children […] Consequently, we see seasonal mortality patterns in agricultural communities which tend to follow harvest cycles; when the harvest is poor, the family starts to run low on food before the next harvest, which leads to rationing the remaining food, which leads to malnutrition. That malnutrition is not evenly distributed though: the working age adults need to be strong enough to bring in the next harvest when it comes (or to be doing additional non-farming labor to supplement the family), so the short rations are going to go to the children and the elderly. Which in turn means that “lean” years are marked by increased mortality especially among the children and the elderly, the former of which is how the rural population “regulates” to its food production in the absence of modern birth control (but, as an aside: this doesn’t lead to pure Malthusian dynamics – a lot more influences the food production ceiling than just available land. You can have low-equilibrium or high-equilibrium systems, especially when looking at the availability of certain sorts of farming capital or access to trade at distance. I cannot stress this enough: Malthus was wrong; yes, interestingly, usefully wrong – but still wrong. The big plagues sometimes pointed to as evidence of Malthusian crises have as much if not more to do with rising trade interconnectedness than declining nutritional standards). This creates yearly cycles of plenty and vulnerability […]
Next to that little cycle, we also have a “big” cycle of generations. The ratio of labor-to-food-requirements varies as generations are born, age and die; it isn’t constant. The family is at its peak labor effectiveness at the point when the youngest generation is physically mature but hasn’t yet begun having children (the exact age-range there is going to vary by nuptial patterns, see below) and at its most vulnerable when the youngest generation is immature. By way of example, let’s imagine a family (I’m going to use Roman names because they make gender very clear, but this is a completely made-up family): we have Gaius (M, 45), his wife, Cornelia (39, F), his mother Tullia (64, F) and their children Gaius (21, M), Secundus (19, M), Julia1 (16, F) and Julia2 (14, F). That family has three male laborers, three female laborers (Tullia being in her twilight years, we don’t count), all effectively adults in that sense, against 7 mouths to feed. But let’s fast-forward fifteen years. Gaius is now 60 and slowing down, Cornelia is 54; Tullia, we may assume has passed. But Gaius now 36 is married to Clodia (20, F; welcome to Roman marriage patterns), with two children Gaius (3, M) and Julia3 (1, F); Julia1 and Julia2 are married and now in different households and Secundus, recognizing that the family’s financial situation is never going to allow him to marry and set up a household has left for the Big City. So we now have the labor of two women and a man-and-a-half (since Gaius the Elder is quite old) against six mouths and the situation is likely to get worse in the following years as Gaius-the-Younger and Clodia have more children and Gaius-the-Elder gets older. The point of all of this is to note that just as risk and vulnerability peak and subside on a yearly basis in cycles, they also do this on a generational basis in cycles.
(An aside: the exact structure of these generational patterns follow on marriage patterns which differ somewhat culture to culture. In just about every subsistence farming culture I’ve seen, women marry young (by modern standards) often in their mid-to-late teens, or early twenties; that doesn’t vary much (marriage ages tend to be younger, paradoxically, for wealthier people in these societies, by the by). But marriage-ages for men vary quite a lot, from societies where men’s age at first marriage is in the early 20s to societies like Roman and Greece where it is in the late 20s to mid-thirties. At Rome during the Republic, the expectation seems to have been that a Roman man would complete the bulk of their military service – in their twenties and possibly early thirties – before starting a household; something with implications for Roman household vulnerability. Check out Rosenstein, op. cit. on this).
On top of these cycles of vulnerability, you have truly unpredictable risk. Crops can fail in so many ways. In areas without irrigated rivers, a dry spell at the wrong time is enough; for places with rivers, flooding becomes a concern because the fields have to be set close to the water-table. Pests and crop blights are also a potential risk factor, as of course is conflict.
So instead of imagining a farm with a “standard” yield, imagine a farm with a standard grain consumption. Most years, the farm’s production (bolstered by other activities like sharecropping that we’ll talk about later) exceed that consumption, with the remainder being surplus available for sale, trade or as gifts to neighbors and friends. Some years, the farm’s production falls short, creating that shortfall. Meanwhile families tend to grow to the size the farm can support, rather than to the labor needs the farm has, which tends to mean too many hands (and mouths) and not enough land. Which in turn causes the family to ride a line of fairly high risk in many cases.
All of this is to stress that these farmers are looking to manage risk through cycles of vulnerability […]
I led in with all of that risk and vulnerability because without it just about nothing these farmers do makes a lot of sense; once you understand that they are managing risk, everything falls into place.
Most modern folks think in terms of profit maximization; we take for granted that we will still be alive tomorrow and instead ask how we can maximize how much money we have then (this is, admittedly, a lot less true for the least fortunate among us). We thus tend to favor efficient systems, even if they are vulnerable. From this perspective, ancient farmers – as we’ll see – look very silly, but this is a trap, albeit one that even some very august ancient scholars have fallen into. These are not irrational, unthinking people; they are poor, not stupid – those are not the same things.
But because these households wobble on the edge of disaster continually, that changes the calculus. These small subsistence farmers generally seek to minimize risk, rather than maximize profits. After all, improving yields by 5% doesn’t mean much if everyone starves to death in the third year because of a tail-risk that wasn’t mitigated. Moreover, for most of these farmers, working harder and farming more generally doesn’t offer a route out of the small farming class – these societies typically lack that kind of mobility (and also generally lack the massive wealth-creation potential of industrial power which powers that kind of mobility). Consequently, there is little gain to taking risks and much to lose. So as we’ll see, these farmers generally sacrifice efficiency for greater margins of safety, every time.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part I: Farmers!”, A collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-07-24.
February 4, 2023
Poland’s Descent into Civil War – War Against Humanity 097
World War Two
Published 2 Feb 2023Poland, occupied, abandoned or even threatened by her allies is left to fight her own war. A war that under the influence of internal and external forces looks more and more like a full blown civil war inside the world war.
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A lobster tale (that does not involve Jordan Peterson)
In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes relates some of his recent research on the Parliament of 1621 (promising much more in future newsletters) and highlights one of the Royal monopolies that came under challenge in the life of that Parliament:
European lobster (Hommarus gammarus)
Photo by Bart Braun via Wikimedia Commons.
One of the great things about the 1621 Parliament, as a historian of invention, is that MPs summoned dozens of patentees before them, to examine whether their patents were “grievances” — illegal and oppressive monopolies that ought to be declared void. Because of these proceedings, along with the back-and-forth of debate between patentees and their enemies, we can learn some fascinating details about particular industries.
Like how 1610s London had a supply of fresh lobsters. The patent in question was acquired in 1616 by one Paul Bassano, who had learned of a Dutch method of keeping lobsters fresh — essentially, to use a custom-made broad-bottomed ship containing a well of seawater, in which the lobsters could be kept alive. Bassano, in his petitions to the House of Commons, made it very clear that he was not the original inventor and had imported the technique. This was exactly the sort of thing that early monopoly patents were supposed to encourage: technological transfer, and not just original invention.
The problem was that the patent didn’t just cover the use of the new technique. It gave Bassano and his partners a monopoly over all imported lobsters too. This was grounded in a kind of industrial policy, whereby blocking the Dutch-caught lobsters would allow Bassano to compete. He noted that Dutch sailors were much hardier and needed fewer provisions than the English, and that capital was available there at interest rates of just 4-5%, so that a return on sales of just 10% allowed for a healthy profit. In England, by comparison, interest rates of about 10% meant that he needed a return on sales of at least 15%, especially given the occasional loss of ships and goods to the capriciousness of the sea — he noted that he had already lost two ships to the rocks.
At the same time, patent monopolies were designed to nurture expertise. Bassano noted that he still needed to rely on the Dutch, who were forced to sell to the English market either through him or by working on his ships. But he had been paying his English sailors higher wages, so that over time the trade would come to be dominated by the English. (This training element was a key reason that most patents tended to be given for 14 or 21 years — the duration of two or three apprenticeships — though Bassano’s was somewhat unusual in that it was to last for a whopping 31.)
But the blocking of competing imports — especially foodstuffs, which were necessaries of life — could be very controversial, especially when done by patent rather than parliamentary statute. Monopolies could lawfully only be given for entirely new industries, as they otherwise infringed on people’s pre-existing practices and trades. Bassano had worked out a way to avoid complaints, however, which was essentially to make a deal with the fishmongers who had previously imported lobsters, taking them into his partnership. He offered them a win-win, which they readily accepted. In fact, the 1616 patent came with the explicit support of the Fishmongers’ Company.
It sounds like it became a large enterprise, and I suspect that it probably did lower the price of lobsters in London, bringing them in regularly and fresh. With a fleet of twenty ships, and otherwise supplementing their catch with those caught by the Dutch, Bassano boasted of how he was able to send a fully laden ship to the city every day (wind-permitting). This stood in stark contrast to the state of things before, when a Dutch ship might have arrived with a fresh catch only every few weeks or months, and when they felt that scarcity would have driven the prices high.
February 3, 2023
“Lady of The Dark” – Milunka Savić – Sabaton History 117
Sabaton History
Published 2 Feb 2023One of the most badass and decorated soldiers of the Great War was a woman. Serving first in the Balkan Wars, this Serbian war heroin became a celebrity when she won the Karađorđe’s Star — the highest Serbian decoration — in 1914 and 1916. Those weren’t her only decorations either — watch to find out more.
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Tank Chats #166 | SOMUA S35 | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 14 Oct 2022Join David Willey in this week’s Tank Chat as he details the history of the SOMUA S35, a French cavalry tank of the Second World War.
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QotD: Democracy
Democracy always devolves into ochlocracy, as some Dead White Male said, but since the last Dead White Male died centuries before Twitter, he didn’t realize that ochlocracy was just a pit stop on the way to kakistocracy.
“Democracy” only works — if, in fact, it does work, which is a very fucking open question — in a stakeholder society. When Madison and the boys pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to each other, they meant all of that literally — Washington could well have died a pauper, Alexander Hamilton ordered his cannon to fire on his own house, and so on. They had skin in the game, which is why they were so public-spirited — if they screwed up, they personally would have to live with the consequences. These days, of course, getting “elected” — or even selected to run for “election” — is a free pass to Easy Street. The rules apply only to the plebs, and only so long — and, insh’allah, the day is soon coming — as we have to pretend to let them “vote” on stuff.
Severian, “The Stakeholder State”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-01-22.
February 2, 2023
MAC Model 1947 Prototype SMGs
Forgotten Weapons
Published 12 Oct 2022Immediately upon the liberation of France in 1944, the French military began a process of developing a whole new suite of small arms. As it applied to SMGs, the desire was for a design in 9mm Parabellum (no more 7.65mm French Long), with an emphasis on something light, handy, and foldable. All three of the French state arsenals (MAC, MAS, and MAT) developed designs to meet the requirement, and today we are looking at the first pair of offerings from Chatellerault (MAC). These are the 1947 pattern, a very light lever-delayed system with (frankly) terrible ergonomics.
Many thanks to the French IRCGN (Criminal Research Institute of the National Gendarmerie) for generously giving me access to film these unique specimens for you!
Today’s video — and many others — have been made possible in part by my friend Shéhérazade (Shazzi) Samimi-Hoflack. She is a real estate agent in Paris who specializes in working with English-speakers, and she has helped me arrange places to stay while I’m filming in France. I know that exchange rates make this a good time for Americans to invest in Europe, and if you are interested in Parisian real estate I would highly recommend her. She can be reached at: samimiconsulting@gmail.com
(Note: she did not pay for this endorsement)
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February 1, 2023
Changing views of Gandhi
In UnHerd, Pratinav Anil recounts some of the changes to Gandhi’s reputation and place in Indian public memory:
Nehru with Gandhi, August 1942.
Photographer unknown, public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.
Gandhi, poor fellow, had his ashes stolen on the 150th anniversary of his birth. “Traitor”, scrawled the Hindu supremacist malcontents on a life-size cut-out of the Mahatma at the mausoleum. That was a couple of years ago, but it’s a sentiment that’s grown shriller since. Unsurprisingly. In government as in schools, in newsrooms as on social media, the founding father’s defenders are being put out of business by his detractors. His Congress Party, after 50 years of near-uninterrupted rule since independence in 1947, is now in ruins, upstaged by the Bharatiya Janata Party. Hindu supremacists have stolen the show, while India’s Muslims, Christians, and Dalits are persecuted. With the changing of the guard, Gandhi’s extravagant ideal — unity in diversity — has gone the way of his ashes.
His reputation, too, is in tatters. Last year, the National Theatre staged a play about his assassination. But The Father and the Assassin centred not on Gandhi but Godse, the man who killed him 75 years ago this week. Here is a tender portrait of a tortured soul, a blushing boy raised as a girl to propitiate the gods who had taken away his three brothers, who becomes radicalised and blames Gandhi for betraying Hindus and mollycoddling Muslims, so causing Partition. It is no accident that Godse was a card-carrying Hindu supremacist, a member of the parent organisation of the BJP, to which India’s new ruler Narendra Modi belongs. Today, statues of Godse are going up across the country just as statues of Gandhi are being pulled down across the world.
Needless to say, this is a most disturbing development. Yet the reaction of liberals, Indian as well as Western, has been no less troubling. An unthinking anti-imperialism of old has joined up with an unthinking anti-Hindu supremacism of new to beget a bastardised Gandhi. What we have is not a creature of flesh and blood, possibly a great if also flawed man, but rather a deified hero. This is the Gandhi with a saintly halo around him who greets you from Indian billboards, grins at you from rupee notes, stares down at you from his plinth on Westminster’s Parliament Square, and, in Ben Kingsley’s portrayal of him, slathered in a thick impasto of fake tan, moves you to a standing ovation.
This is the easily comestible fortune-cookie Gandhi you encounter in airport bestsellers such as Ramachandra Guha’s double-decker hagiography, and also the sartorial icon whose wire-rim glasses were emulated by Steve Jobs. There is the Gandhi of the gags, most famous for a retort he probably never made: asked what he thought of Western civilisation, the Mahatma is reported to have replied: “I think it would be a good idea.” Ba-dum ching! Then there’s the Christological Gandhi, a modern messiah turning the other cheek: “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.” There’s also Gandhi the self-help guru: “Be the change that you wish to see in the world.” One could go on.
Here’s where the historian in me says, would that it were so simple. Gandhi was no liberal. And if those who sing his praises today knew a little more about Gandhi the man, rather than Gandhi the saint, their adulation would very quickly dry up. The fact is that the Mahatma hasn’t aged well. He detested democracy, defended the caste system, and had a deeply disturbing relationship with sex.
None of this should surprise us. Unlike some of the more cerebral thinkers of his cohort, figures such as Ambedkar and Periyar, Gandhi possessed a shallow mind. The product of a rather parochial education, admittedly the best that could be bought in turn-of-the-century western India, he struggled to juggle academic and conjugal demands. His precocious marriage to Kasturbai at 13 was a misalliance, perennially troubled by his suspicions of her infidelity. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, he dropped out of Samaldas College. It was only in London, where he went to read law, that his horizons widened.
Then again, not for the better.
