
There are things more interesting than people - kevtbee
https://lithub.com/richard-powers-there-are-things-more-interesting-than-people/
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thereare
> Richard Powers: There Are Things More Interesting Than People

>Richard Powers hates the hulking white Chevy Silverado pickup he’s driving.
He apologizes after picking me up at the airport in Knoxville, Tennessee, on a
cool evening in early April, that his Chevy Volt, an electric hybrid, is in
the shop, and he has to maneuver this beast, with its 20 miles to the gallon,
across winding country roads. He’s pretty sure the service-department guy at
the Chevy dealer, having identified Powers as a treehugger, is still grinning
at loaning him a four-by-four. I laugh off Powers’ apology, knowing he’s a
good environmentalist, but am a little concerned when he veers into the
opposing lane. “Holy, crap, sorry about that,” he says, nervously correcting
an oversteer, as an oncoming truck whizzes by us.

>A few miles from Powers’ home in the Smoky Mountain foothills, we stop at a
scenic overlook. Powers strikes up a conversation with a Tennessee old-timer,
who’s standing beside an immaculately restored 1935 Ford pickup. He opens the
engine hood for us. “Ford’s early V8,” he says. “Look at that flathead,”
Powers says. “A beauty.”

Bringing the subtext to light: the journalist who wrote this piece disagrees
with the assertion "there are things more interesting than people". He then
goes about in advancing this view in a variety of ways:

1\. He writes in a way so that the most interesting subject in his article is
a person.

2\. He creates negative emotions at the start of the article so as to
emotionally color how people will read the tamer, more objective rest of the
article.

3\. He shares his (negative) personal experiences with the interviewee so as
to both create a sense of sympathy for the journalist and a sense of animosity
towards the interviewee. That is, he brings up unrelated information so as to
bolster his main subtextual argument.

Among other ways. I leave their spotting as an exercise for the reader.

~~~
gjm11
An ingenious thesis but I'm not at all convinced. In particular, I don't see
anything there that looks like the journalist is trying to provoke "a sense of
animosity towards the interviewee".

Let's take the bit you quote. The first thing we learn about Powers, after the
fact that he doesn't like the car he's driving, is that he (1) took the
trouble to pick the journalist up from the airport, and then (2) apologized to
the journalist for something minor that wasn't even his fault, (3) in a
humourous way. We're told that Powers is "a good environmentalist". Most of
us, especially readers of this sort of thing, are likely to feel good about
that, but it might suggest a certain sanctimoniousness and car-hostility ...
so the next thing we get to see is Powers appreciating a fine old motor
vehicle, and making friendly conversation with his neighbours in the process.

I'm really not seeing what's meant to make me feel a sense of animosity here.

Here's another paragraph from the article, pretty much the only one that's
wholly occupied with description of Powers.

"Powers may strike dissonant notes about his novels’ public image, but in
conversation he never resorts to fanfare. Still charmingly lanky at 60, with a
boyish face just starting to pay a debt to aging, he articulates his views
with an intelligence so free of self-importance that you wonder if there’s
something wrong with his wiring. He listens patiently and respectfully, then
dazzles with quiet authority."

Charming. Youthful. Intelligent. Humble. Patient. Respectful. Dazzling.
Authoritative. I guess you might describe someone that way if you were hoping
to make your audience hate them _out of jealousy_ , but I really don't get
that impression from the article.

Pretty much everything else there seems to me like it puts Powers in a
positive light, too.

So I can kinda buy claim 1 and maybe claim 2. Claim 3, though? Not so much.

------
bobthechef
That the world exists only to satiate our appetites is practically a founding
doctrine of consumerism. That kind of "human exceptionalism" actually degrades
man and reduces him to a mere consumer and then corrupts him and renders him
an obsessive, exploitative, perverse, and disordered creature, a voracious
idiot and a pathetic disgrace. If you want to live the good life, you must
respect human nature and its inherent end(s). Dismiss ends, and not only do
human beings unravel and become unintelligible, but so does everything in
existence. No bespoke delusion engineering here.

~~~
profalseidol
Opposite of Epicurus' philosophy huh?

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cimmanom
And yet this article is about 75% human interest fluff and 25% substance.

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TeMPOraL
A point I agree with, though the article very much focused on people instead
of the interesting bits.

Reminds me of when people criticize some sci-fi works for lacking in character
development. My default response is: almost _every other literary genre_ is
about character development. I read sci-fi _precisely_ because it's about
ideas, about things more important than how people feel about each other. If I
wanted to experience more of the interpersonal drama, I'd pick up a romance
novel instead. Alas, I see enough of that in the real life.

~~~
automoton1
I think that in a lot of Sci-fi the people still play a critical role in the
story, alongside the ideas. Not all sci-fi stories are about the ideas. They
can often contain how the ideas impact people, how people use the ideas to
shape their world and so on.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I'm fine with that. I _like_ people. I guess my main objection is against
critics arguing sci-fi should look like regular old human story, but with sci-
fi flavour. For me, the setting is an important part of the story, not just
some irrelevant background styling.

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devnonymous
It was only last night that I was thinking, assuming the eventuality of the
emergence of a self-sustaining super-intelligance (doesn't matter whether it
takes form a hybrid long living cyborg race or not ), what justifications
would it have to keep around the human race besides the kind of empathy that
drives humans to conservation for things whose absence would not affect the
ecology? (IOW, is the only way a hypothetical superior lifeform will consider
letting human exist be based on the the existence of empathy in the lifeform?
Or is there any other rational reason that necessitates keeping us around?)...
(IyOW, purely logical, uncaring children of the elite who'd have the benefits
of longevity research as well as superior intellect may consider rodent
conservation more important than human conservation... aka There possibly are
things more interesting than people)

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IIAOPSW
I can't help but think that perhaps there is something in brain structure and
genetics which creates one class of people focused primarily on people and
another class focused primarily on ideas. I couldn't agree more that there are
things more interesting than people, but obviously the author wants to sell us
on the opposite notion.

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baconhigh
this is a beautiful piece of writing, thank you for sharing.

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jimmaswell
Was framing 20 mpg as if it were bad supposed to be facetious?

~~~
khedoros1
In the context of the hybrid that he usually drives, it's pretty bad (about
half of the gas-only fuel economy for a Chevy Volt, and about 1/5 of the
"MPGe" rating).

~~~
jimmaswell
20 is almost twice as good as what I apparently get, which I found out with an
obd2 reader to be decently less than it's supposed to be, but I don't really
mind.

