Cr4Bdbgs, It is possible…to simply enjoy one thing more than...

It is possible…to simply enjoy one thing more than another. Think of a person who enjoys soccer more than baseball. Does that person enjoy soccer more than baseball because they are a snob? It is surely possible; they might literally go to bed every night and wake up every morning seething at baseball’s very existence when so much grander a game is available to participate in. But it is just as likely that they grew up liking soccer, or they grew up with parents who liked soccer, or that the kids who played baseball in their hometown were pricks and the kids who played soccer weren’t, or a thousand other explanations that account for the preference for one over the other. In Murray’s world, such explanations simply do not exist; if you prefer A to B, it must be because you simultaneously assume the superiority of A to B and the inferiority of not only B to A, but of the person preferring B to A.

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“On Preference, Briefly.”

A pretty commonsensical (though far from exhaustive) response to the existence of Charles Murray’s terrible new book which seems purposefully designed to invent and inflame taste-and-class-based cultural differences under the rubric of “snobbery.” I’ll be so glad that day in the far future when we can talk about taste without immediately mapping them onto some imaginary class positionality.

(via marathonpacks)

I dunno, it’ll take decades even for academia to get all that Bourdieu out of its system.

(via cureforbedbugs)

But to be less snarky for a second (because if someone challenges me on even the basics of Bordieu you will ruin this nice house of cards I have sitting here) Duncan Watts’s new book, which I’ve just started, has as one of its central arguments that this sort of question over “other people’s tastes” can’t be answered with common sense — the reasons why people prefer X to Y are not “obvious.” But I’ll withhold saying more about the book until I’m further in. (I would say that from what I have read of Bourdieu in Distinction, his ways of actually testing “who likes what” seemed pretty shoddy, and his insights fall under a more commonsense-y punditry than actual evidence.)