let's stumble towards success and pack some snacks for little breaks

When I was twelve, I spent an afternoon hanging out with a girl who was not like most of the people I knew. I think her name was Morgan. She was also twelve years old. She wore enormous hoop earrings and makeup applied so expertly that I wasn't sure it was there, and she liked SpongeBob SquarePants. (This was 2003, when it was fashionable for teenagers to like SpongeBob SquarePants.) She acted very bored, not with me so much as with the world, and I didn't understand her very well.

I told Morgan that she seemed normal. I said it apologetically, because in the world where I grew up, that wasn't a compliment. I spent my childhood around freaks and hippies, geeks and jugglers, people who valued intelligence and originality.

She didn't seem to mind at all. "Why don't you want to be normal?" she asked.

"Because then you're just like everyone else," I said. "You're just a conformist."

"What's wrong with conformity?"

I was flummoxed. I distinctly remember struggling to even process that question. I ended up stammering something about how I wanted to do something important with my life someday, and that I wouldn't be able to set myself apart if I never did anything differently, but it wasn't a real answer. I didn't have a real answer to that question. Conformity was bad because it was bad, that was all. When I liked things that other people liked, when I got into Pokemon and Harry Potter and Avril Lavigne, I insisted that they were exceptions, that they were good despite the fact that they were popular. I kept doing this through adolescence--sure, this song plays on the radio all the time, but it's actually a pretty great song. This TV show is actually totally awesome, even though everyone watches it.

I was a pretty smart kid, or so I believed because I'd been told that so many times, but I somehow never scraped together the sense to consider the possibility that things might be popular because they were good.

I didn't have an answer for Morgan because I didn't understand what I was talking about when I used the word "conformity." Conformity, in the context that I meant it when I denigrated it, means behaving in socially standard ways because they are socially standard. There are often excellent reasons to do this, which is another thing it took me a while to realize, although it can be dangerous to get in the habit of it.

But there are other reasons to engage in socially standard preference behaviors. It's possible to like a band or fashion for its own sake, not because everyone else does. I am of the opinion that Lady Gaga is a damn good musician, and I didn't come to that conclusion based on how many other people agree or how many people don't. I just like her music. And yeah, some people tend to blindly follow the trends, but trends don't exist because of the people who follow them once they're already there. Trends exist because of a whole lot of people who, individually, just like the music.

It's also possible to engage in a particular behavior not to join the masses, but to understand them. I read the trending tags on Twitter on occasion, not because I think I'll find anything particularly worthwhile there, but because there are a lot of people in the world that aren't me. I don't watch Glee because I think it's good; I watch it because there are a lot of kids growing up right now whose worldviews will be influenced by it, and I want to have that cultural context. (I also watch it because there are two plus-sized characters and five queer characters, and even if they're all as two-dimensional as the rest of the cast and the plots suck like they were written by Edward Hamhands, I can't help wanting to support that kind of presence on such a mainstream show.)

I'm not just figuring all this out now. I think I had most of it worked out in my own head by the time I was sixteen or seventeen. It's just hard to articulate, because preference behavior seems so ingrained. And it's really not. That's just mixing up the concept of ingrained behavior with the concept of impulse. Preferences are extremely impulsive, but they're not predetermined. They can be influenced and to some extent controlled by the most random factors. One of the factors that tends to determine my behavior is the drive to understand how people think. Sometimes that means taking conformist behavior seriously, and sometimes it means identifying and examining it in myself.

I just stumbled across a lovely example of the concept of the hipster: "Pop Songs Your New Boyfriend's Too Stupid To Know About" by Tullycraft. It reminded me that I'd been meaning to try to find Pierre Bordieu's 1963 book “Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste" online, since my library doesn't have it. I heard of it through a New York Times article called The Sociology of the Hipster, which is worth reading. Anyway, in the process of googling the book, I found a critical review of it and just had to stop and giggle for a moment about this: a critique of a critique of critiquing critique. Beautiful.

I've been thinking a lot about hipsters lately. My first exposure to the term was in early 2009, when I was linked to the photo blog Look At This Fucking Hipster. (Well, technically my first exposure to the term was probably in QC, but I don't think I ever really noticed it there.) I spent some time clicking through the blog, trying to figure out what on earth the pictures had in common. The blog is a lot funnier now that I have some background.

That NYT article defines hipsters by their judgment of taste. I think that's mostly accurate. A lot of subcultures involve judging taste--that's how you differentiate the in-group from the out-group*, by finding out what you agree and disagree about. But hipster culture is defined by value judgments of personal choice, to the extent that even an acknowledgement of the existence of the culture is an insult. No one wants to be called a hipster, because that means you care what other people think. The successful hipster manipulates other people's opinions of their taste while simultaneously cultivating an image of nonchalance.** There are more tangible hipster indicators, trucker hats and that particular kind of glasses and so forth, but they're all derived from the practice of judging judgment.

We all judge each other. I make a habit of fighting to the death to prove wrong anyone who gets all noble in my face and tells me they don't judge anyone. Bullshit. You do, and it's a good thing that you do, because if you were not capable of using heuristic mechanisms to take mental shortcuts through the maze of social interaction, you literally would not be able to function. (If you don't believe me on that, let me know and I will expand on the point with examples and citations until you do. I'm A Behavioral Neuroscientist, Ask Me How!)

But hipster culture isn't just about judging people. It's about judging people's judgments, their choices of clothing and friends and particularly music. The only other subculture I can think of that is focused so exclusively on judging taste is scene culture, and that overlaps significantly with hipsters.

And we all do that too, judging people's taste. Determining shared taste is important in the early stages of friendship, when you're deciding whether you'll get along. But I think it's important to distinguish between determining taste and actually placing a value judgment on it. Personally, I'm trying to move away from doing that. It's easy, so easy, to make fun of people who honestly love Twilight, or listen to Justin Bieber, or make a big deal out of Valentine's Day, or voluntarily wear crocs. Those value judgments are not ones I would make. But, and this is the culmination of a great deal of academic pondering, fuck that shit. I'm not making any promises, because sometimes the snark cannot be held within, but when it comes to purely aesthetic choices that don't actually matter to me, I'm making an effort to knock it off.

*I'm talking in psychological terms here. "In-group" and "out-group" don't just refer to high school cliques; they apply to any social community.
**This sentence is lifted directly from a disagreement I had in the comments of my little brother's friend's Facebook status with someone (I think he was fourteen years old) who claimed that Luna Lovegood was a hipster. I corrected him thoroughly.

The whole point of human existence--the whole point of the existence of any organism--is to reproduce. That's basic biology. It's self-preservation once removed; by having babies, we make sure there's as much of us left in the world when we leave as possible.

I think I'm just as driven to pass myself along as anyone, but not genetically. For me, what's important is the stuff that happened to me after the blueprints were done. I care about what experience has done to my neurons, not the initial tabula rasa configuration. I want to share my knowledge, my thoughts, my gradually changing perception of the world as I find out more about it. Genetics affects all that, certainly, but all it gives us is potential. It's experience that determines, in the long run, who we are.

Maybe that's why I blog. Maybe that's why one of my favorite feelings in the world is the feeling I get when I phrase something a certain way and someone looks at me and goes, "WHOA. Yes. That." Maybe that's why, despite all my certainty that I never want biological children, I've always left the possibility of adoption open. It's because the DNA isn't what's important to me. The ideas are.

Maybe teaching wouldn't be so terrible a career path for me, after all.

I've been called a crazy irrational tree-hugger without any respect for facts, and I've been called a cold scientific-minded student who can't accept anything without published evidence. Some people tease me about being vegan and enjoying pagan gatherings; others hear a description of the Whole Earth Festival and express astonishment that I would be caught dead at such a wifty event.

I've been aware of this odd discrepancy for some time, but it's been particularly noticeable recently because of the ramifications of certain people perceiving me as one way or the other. I've been learning about self-presentation and judgment of others in social psychology, and that's definitely helped me understand what's going on here. People behave differently in different situations. In a classroom situation, or with people who are more analytical in general, I'm going to try to be as rational and objective as I can, and I'm going to question people's assumptions. If I'm at the Gaia Goddess Gathering in the middle of the woods, I'm not going to argue cartography with the chick in the tie-dye scarf who's drawing energy and passion from the south. Scientific research isn't about wifty stuff, and hippie culture isn't about empirical testing. And people who see me in one of those situations are not likely to see me in the other.

The most interesting thing about this for me is that they're not making a mistake by seeing me one way or the other. The way I present myself has everything to do with others' impressions of me as a person. The problem only arises when someone refuses to acknowledge evidence that other aspects of me exist (as has definitely happened from both sides of this particular dichotomy). That's the fundamental attribution error, and it's a pain in the ass.

I desperately want to reread The Phantom Tollbooth now.

( I think I've managed to put my thoughts into words this time. )

This, by the way, is why I love my UU church: we can talk about things like this, and hear other people's thoughts and opinions, and no one has to be afraid to express themselves because of the way they're supposed to think.