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kafkaoftherubble · 12 hours ago

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艺术·意术

//The Pragmatism Value of Art from a Former Science-Supremacist

Reflection dates May 27th, 2025.

So, the You of this year has made a lot of friends, and it isn’t even mid-year yet.

Every single one of our friends is interesting. Nevertheless, because I’m such a slave to my curiosity, and there’s always one or two people with radically different perspectives who don’t mind talking to me for a bit…

Not all of them are “friends” in the “you’re a comforting presence to me” sense. One of the friends I made this year, whose manner and behavior consistently provoked me into these intra-Lyn debates, was this type. After all, one of his first conversations with us was, “I’m beginning to think Hitler was right in his Solution!”

But this isn’t really about him so much as what I’ve come to realize about our world. About our old attitudes, about art and anti-art, about anti-intellectualism.

One of our most memorable exchanges (and honestly, with this guy? We have a shit ton of “memory-burning exchanges”) involved trying to find new common ground with him.

At a later point in our months-long friendship, our conversations often soured. We understood what was happening in this world through very different information sources, and that exacerbated our differences in values and stances. Our understanding of reality was just not the same.

I was beginning to feel mentally weary of talking to him. Like, man, it was starting to give me no joy—I had to commit actual effort to engage. But my curiosity only allowed me to discover new things about him that I seriously hate, man, instead of things we could bond over.

Oh, I’m sure he grew irritated with me, too, though he just kept coming to chat. Lil’ Sis cynically said that men from “his society” enjoyed picking up “girls from foreign places” as some sort of exercise in ego. She had gone through this exact experience.

But, well, unless you have changed by this point—ain’t we stubborn as fuck. And I’m doing my best to practice mettā, which is a really big deal.

I wanted to find common ground between us. I wanted to keep this friendship somewhat alive, and also to prevent myself from thinking, “Fuck this shit, people online from your society sure become shitty quickly!”

Since we first started talking to each other about a mobile game based on a very popular manhua, I decided to talk about manga and anime—things we could both enjoy. Hey, if we're looking at the same material, then maybe we can have better conversations on values and philosophy, too. A way to circumvent our “differing realities!”

But nope.

He said he only cared about stories that are filled with “my society’s values and philosophy” and “pure escapist stuff where the main character is OP and destroys his enemies.” He liked some manga and anime, but he would never allow himself to call any of those his favorites, because they were “foreign.” Specifically, “Foreign writers just can’t write things as well as my homegrown writers. Plus, it’s Japanese. I hate them. Do you know the shit they’ve done—”

I pushed back by trying to remind him that good stories connect people despite cultures and nations, and that no group is a monolith. Then, changing subjects, I suggested reading manga with deeper themes like social critique, the human conditions, or just any philosophical themes that might interest him.

He cut me off and complained:

“Why do I want to crack my head over what I consume? I just wanna read entertaining escapist manhua after work. Why must entertainment be treated like work?! […] Also, enough with your moralizing and philosophizing already. Keep talking like this and I’m gonna throw up 🤮”

Another notable exchange—far earlier than this, when we were still figuring each other out—concerned his hobbies. We were having fun. I listed some of my hobbies and asked about his.

He had no hobbies other than “making money and gaming.”

Specifically, he said, “I wanna make a lot of money so I can support my parents and we can live a better, more economically ‘independent’ life. Everything else is a distraction to my goal. What’s the use of hobbies?”

As always, I stubbornly decided to push back. For his part, he was amused by my effort to disprove his belief that he found no interest in anything else. I was a funny, well-meaning daydreamer feeling bad over shit no “pragmatist” would give a damn about. Hell, given my age, I should've been too old to even feel bad about “the reality of life” at all.

In the end, I did manage to make him acknowledge he had another hobby: “cooking and other culinary pursuits.” How?

Well! Not to toot our horn, but we’re a super detective who notices shit—like the fact that he often literally pinged me just to show off some shit he cooked (he knew I sucked so hard, I once cried from eating my own cooking) or when he talked about how happy he was to whip up a feast on his own during the Lunar New Year reunion dinner, even though it was a lot of hard work and frustration.

And yet, he sounded surprised as he conceded defeat .It was as if this was the first time he recognized his own interest. As if this was the first time he reconciled this version of himself with who he believed he was—

A pragmatist who would never waste time on things that neither make money nor provide pure dopamine.

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The Superiority of “Pragmatic Pursuits”

Well, Future Lyn. Like yourself (I assume), I’m a proponent of anattā. “Non-self.”

I don’t think anyone has a “self” at all—especially after research from cognitive sciences has steadily supported a constructivist theory of self-perception. Anyone who fancies themselves anempiricist would have to agree: no one’s the way they are because they were “born” this way. Certainly never in a simplistic, reductionist view best summarized by “it’s in some people’s nature/genes to be that way!”

This guy is no different, too. Sherry is who he is because of everything else around him, and a significant part of that is his society.

He’s from a country that valorizes a very particular kind of “pragmatism”: the production-and-result kind. It’s evident in the way scientists there are expected to behave: dispense with unnecessary considerations (ethics count as “unnecessary”), produce results, and only practical results. It’s very “scientific.”

The nation, in fact, proudly identifies itselfas scientific, purely rationalist,* and most of all, pragmatic. From the leader, his political party, to the common folks—especially those who are urban or in the process of being urbanized—what matters is this logical, calculated, productive pragmatism.

*Not exactly. In the name of national pride, certain homegrown quackeries manage to don a state-approved coat of science-ness while being purely pseudoscientific.

Here’s the thing, Lyn:

For a really long time—during our university years and pre-u and even before then—that was us, too. The “science and pragmatism supremacist.”

It didn’t matter that we'd never lived there; many past versions of you were believers.

So, we behaved similarly to him… right down to the way we viewed art.

Now, we neverstopped anyone else from partaking in art. We did not discourage anyone from wanting to do art. But we also didn’t think art was important to the common folks, including us, at all. When you think pragmatically and dispense with those self-stroking, vibe-ass words like ”soul” and “life” and “creative spirit” and “transcendence”, it seemed to us that—

The only value art possesses is in how much it could achieve a kind of quantifiable, objective standard of aesthetics.

Art is only truly art when it’s traditionalist—when it is a means to show off the profound “elegance,” “philosophy,” and “aesthetics” of a culture or a nation.

Art is only truly art when it’s fucking indiscernible, unless you’ve wasted the time you could have used to study science on “art” and “art analyses” and whatever the fuck a “liberal arts degree” is.

Art was a bunch of work, a useless toll on my common folk brain; standardized and elite; unfathomable and pretentious. I hardly felt deprived despite my inability to understand or dabble in art, because it was ultimately so impractical.

As for everything else? It was just kitschy attempts by either the obscenely well-off classes with a gross amount of time and resources, or naïve children who hadn’t yet occupied themselves with more important things in life. It was all such a distraction.

That wasn’t all.

If you can’t make “true art,” then you should at least be pragmatic and a realist. Your “art” should make enough people say, “This is my kind of aesthetics; I will take this in—as though it’s a product to be purchased or to be taken for free—so it can add to my identity.”

Be practical. Make your product marketable and widely appealing, so that it’s at least not completely worthless.

In comparison, science was the real avenue for the people. It was so in my eyes.

Science is the systemic, skillful use of our inquisitiveness. It provides us with knowledge, both in our immediate life and the greater world out there. It refines our epistemological skillsin seeking knowledge. It introduces and encourages critical analyses and factual skepticism.

It’s empiricist, logical, and factual. Experimental results—be it positive or negative—are equally useful. It produces things. It elucidates. It illuminates. It plants seeds for greater understanding and insight about the natural world. A lot of times, it even helps me refine other things like politics and social stances.

Science is the greatest tool of any pragmatist. At most, only philosophy could come close to the usefulness of science, and even then, it was supplementary and subservient to science.

But art, though? Ha! Art could not hope to compare to this avenue. There was nothing pragmatic about art. It was an array of talents we could have lived without.

If we were a public official in charge of a very tight budget, we wouldn’t blink at all when we slashed all of the budget for the arts to fund science and scientific education. A nation could do without the luxury of the arts just fine—as long as the people had access to the wonders and noble, pragmatic pursuits of the sciences!

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Whoa. So What Happened? What Event Changed Your Mind?

Well… There was never really a “fateful day” or “transformative event”. To be honest, I’m skeptical of narratives of “a single point of sudden enlightenment.”

A human is a continuous psychocausal process, and cause-and-effect doesn’t operate in a single, linear course. You can’t determine a distinct point of change in a continuum, and cause-and-effect is really a web of conditions upon more webs. When we recount our “enlightenment,” we’re really just showing how many factors we manage to acknowledge post-hoc. A “fateful, transformative event” is often just the most memorable point in our personal fable.

Let’s start with something concrete: My curiosity made me befriend other kinds of people “who are different from me.” While it led me to befriend a guy whose first political conversation was so cursed, it made me text my best friend for “an emergency debriefing” at 1 am*, it also introduced other kinds of friends, too.

*Yes, things actually escalated from “Hitler was Right,” particularly because I pushed back against him in the way I know best: long ass essays and texts. Just as amazingly, he rebutted with more. It was only a few weeks after that conversation ended when I learned that he was merely parroting (state-approved) punditry he saw from social media in his country.

Many of these people were artists instead of scientists or science enthusiasts. One of them was way, way more into art than they are with the sciences. We became really close friends,, but we also argued a shit ton about the merits of our respective “domains,” especially at the earliest stage of our friendship.

If this sounds like it's going down the path of, “Oh, a friend managed to convince me in these debates—”

Nope! The thing about your past versions, Lyn (and I imagine you’re not gonna be different either), is that we analyze, argue, and research shit just to argue even more. There were precious few things This Friend could say that Past Me had not already thought of and countered.

The thing is: one friend alone is not enough to change someone’s mind. Especially when that someone has a pronounced “Debatey Ass.”

One process alone wouldn’t be enough. It takes a web of conditions to get there. And our web is this:

No matter how removed from art I thought we were, we had never lived apart from it.

I love stories. I enjoy listening to other people’s stories��real life or a world of their creation. I enjoy discussing them with friends.

Every human gravitates toward stories, no matter the shape, form, or medium it is told. But storytelling itself is a form of art—the manifold ways it takes shape, the experience it provides to both the listener and the storyteller, the way they present the ideas and themes within it, the aesthetics…

I enjoy video games and manga. I enjoy shows and movies, animated or live-action. I love sci-fi and horror; that’s some good shit.

All of these are stories. I also enjoy nonfiction books the most; they’re just evidence-based stories!

I enjoy listening to people make jazz music out of memes. I enjoy people making songs from a cat’s random meowing. I enjoy Songify This and people remixing songs. I enjoy parodies; I enjoy some dude in a skirt and a pair of shades turning pop tracks into metal songs.

I’m not good at it, but I also like singing. I love singing the enka or songs from the 1930s. Shit by “The Seven Singing Stars of Shanghai” and jazz music of the time. Oh, man. That’s just the tip of the iceberg—

This is the kind of web we have always lived in.

I can’t understand shit about modern art in galleries. Traditional calligraphy (“by true Masters!”) just looks like strokes from a wet mop, minimized. I don’t get some of these performance art pieces and plays and musicals. And what the hell are these goddamn arthouse films? And I don’t know what’s the point of artsy-fartsy shit—

I’d say, “Art is beyond me,” then turn around and analyze Fire Emblem Three Houses enough to write essays in the goddamn YouTube comment sections.

I’d say, “I don’t understand what this animation is doing,” only to later tell you what I thought the story was about.

I’d watch a movie and say, “Ah, at least this isn’t one of those deep, hard-to-get films that made me feel like an idiot!” Only to later spend my time before sleep wondering about the characters’ psychology and other social commentary in that film.

One day, I watched a Korean horror movie named Exhuma. It was what you’d expect from a horror film, but underneath all those supernatural anxieties were the scars of the Japanese occupation and its consequences on Koreans long after they left.

Some high school girls were talking quite a bit throughout. When the movie ended, one of them asked her friends loudly, “What the hell is this movie trying to say?! Like, I don’t get it!”

And man, I wanted to just move in and explain it all to them. I wanted to explain it just like how we love explaining science to anyone who sounds confused and frustrated. As the girls complained about their confusion over that movie, while my brain was quietly bursting with overwhelming chatter and discussion of the movie’s themes—

I realized I understood art.

This movie was a form of art. And I understood it.

I understood art all along.

But how? We’re only supposed to be good at science shit. Not this!

I still don’t experience “transcendence” or “my soul” from dabbling in art—I should know, because at that point, I was already very close to The Artist Who Tried to Debate Me. They managed to convince me to try out drawing, but I’ve never felt anything uniquely special about it. I just like doing it even when my drawing sucks ass. This Friend also talked about theatre and arthouse films with me, and till now, I still don’t fucking understand half of that shit. I still don’t get “the culture.” And yet, I can understand a horror movie that didn’t state its themes and explorations outright.

I can understand the underlying themes and artistic endeavor of the stories I enjoy.

I’ve been drawing, singing, writing, watching shows and thinking about them automatically, being immersed in video games, bopping my head to a dope jam—

These are the things I’ve done before and have always done. Things I am still doing now. Almost none of it is new.

What felt new was realizing this: “That these were the things I’d been doing, this whole time…”

Like a guy who just realized cooking is his hobby, that cooking is part of who he is.

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术不异学，学不异术- Art is Not (That) Different From Science; Science Is Not (That) Different From Art

Since “Children Lyns’” times, there’s one thing we've always firmly believed in: the opportunity for science is everywhere. The use of science, too, is everywhere.

If we humans are truly the only life there is, then we are—in a way—the universe’s consciousness trying to learn about itself.

Unsurprisingly, every version of you detests anti-intellectualism. Fewer people piss me off as much as those who loudly rail against, trivialize, ignore, or demonize science as exclusive to the elite, or see science as a tool of control.

Science is our shared project, one we can—and are welcome—to participate in!

For a long time, when I thought of anti-intellectualism, all I thought of was those who are anti-science. But then, slowly, I couldn’t help but notice—

The same crowd that decries science and scientists also calls for banning books. It’s often not even necessarily scientific books.

This same crowd wants certain movies, art, theaters, shows, plays—certain stories—banned. Otherwise, they want them lobotomized.

But anti-intellectualism, I notice, is more than that. Let’s go back to individuals like Sherry. He’s definitely not an all-encompassing representative, but he’s very attuned to the mainstream zeitgeist of his society. What he expressed can be found in many other nations and societies, too, including mine:

Why think this much? Why waste your time and brainpower on trying to make meaning out of entertainment?

What’s the use of art?

What value does it even produce?

There’s a widespread unwillingness to engage with art in our societies. Plenty of folks may even express contempt at it. And none are as proud to wear this contempt as a badge as those who so readily label anything high-minded as “elitist.”

Anti-intellectualism is a many-headed snake. As one head denigrates science, another denigrates art.

Just as one may call science elitist, one may also call art elitist. One may call science removed from the everyday reality of the common folk, just as one may accuse art of the same thing.

Science may be stripped of its complexity and reduced to a simple calculus of utility. To be seen only as the mother of technology—a specific kind of tech that provides “production value” high enough to grant bragging rights to a certain group of people while they cosplay as heralds of the future. The anti-intellectualist patronizes and uplifts only the sciences that can create better weapons, robots, tools. The sciences that can move fast, solve fast, and turn their chosen group of humans “superior.” Everything else that cannot prove its “utility” is unrewarded, unfunded, and belittled.

Art is just about the same. The anti-intellectualist also separates art by its utility: one group providing “production value,” another belittled or suppressed. The art they patronize is the one that amplifies the propaganda of those who are either in power or want power. In this vein, even traditional art becomes a utilitarian tool—it becomes an advertisement for the supremacy of a certain culture (their own, of course!) and a cover for the anti-intellectualist’s actual apathy towards art. Otherwise, the utility of art is in how much it can superficially entertain, to amuse us without arousing the curiosity to think more, to pacify our brains. Art that does more than this “utility” is to be mocked as sickeningly self-important and a waste of time.

The anti-intellectualists diminish both science and art.

The savviest ones, however, use the utilitarian version of science and its supposed “pragmatism” to alienate and deemphasize art… even when these two things are kin.

That’s Sherry. And that was me.

I’m sure he didn’t opt into this branch of anti-intellectualism, just as I didn’t either.

But to be anti-art is to be anti-intellectual. Just as being anti-science is also anti-intellectual.

Think about it.

Science is empiricist, yes? So is art. How so? Well, science is more than just concepts and theories. It’s also experiments, excavations, observations, and a lot of practical effort. Art is also about that! About taking it up, experimenting, and practical efforts.

I thought I would never understand art. I thought it was a domain my science-minded head could never get. But after being coaxed into it by my artist friends—and by The One Who Debated Me in particular—into taking something up myself, I realized I get better at understanding it, too, regardless of the “production value” of my art. Art is empiricist.

Science has an experience-based component to it, yes? The more you learn, the longer you learn—the better you are at understanding it in the future. Maybe you weren’t good at applying a certain scientific concept as a kid, but you’re quite likely to be better at it now. So is art. The deeper themes our younger selves might not have understood, we can now. Just because we didn’t get it back then doesn’t mean we’ll never get it. And the artistic things we weren’t good at back then—we can be, now. All it takes is practice, just like science… because they are both empiricist.

There will always be sciences where we cannot do well enough to directly partake, like quantum physics and complicated math, but we can always listen in, wonder, and ask. Art is the same. There are all kinds of art that you enjoy and wonder at, even when you’re not good enough, like watching a dance performance.

Then there are avenues of science where you can take part. How about science communication to your relatives when they post misinformation? How about researching science for a story you’re writing? And there are just as many kinds of art that are already taking part in your everyday life, like teaching others how to draw. Or making science accessible through your chosen medium of art?

I’m just not meant to understand math and physics as well as I hope, but I don’t resent science as a whole—neither do I resent mathematicians and physicists. So why did I act that way toward artists who create art I can’t understand? Why did I resent art as a whole? There will always be art I can enjoy the same way as scientific fields I love.

In truth, I’m not even good at experiments! What I’m good at is explaining research and facts. I’m good at analyzing things and bridging them to the real world or other kinds of stories—nonfictional or fictional.

I can do that with art, too. I can explain certain art. I can analyze certain art. Do I not enjoy it? Do I not feel just as enriched?

Most importantly, what kind of cognitive faculties does science help refine?

Critical thinking. Lateral thinking. Creative thinking. Communication and discussion.

… Which are also the same cognitive faculties art helps refine!

That is why anti-intellectualism attacks both. Why some groups may paint science and art as an either-or choice, as if we must be at odds with each other.

It’s because both offer spaces to practice these skills and allow us to become more intellectual, better humans. They won’t be able to prey on our ignorance, and they won’t be able to control us.

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At Least I Didn’t Have to Sit Under a Tree For This Insight

As I pen this reflection for you, Future Lyn, I wonder what sort of art and science you have been having fun with.

Me? Whenever I’m not stressing out or crushed by work and my financial situation, I’m having fun with Disco Elysium. I’m trying to write Something Fictional And Cool™, which I hope will lead to The Bigger Fictional and Cool Project™. I wanna write a shit ton of essays about Pantheon, which I’m rewatching with My Beloved 知己 (formely known as The Artist Friend Who Debated Me). I am still hoping to finish The Enigma of Reason. There are a ton of science podcast episodes on my 2k+ cache, and I still wanna listen and make notes about them.

A lot of times I think I’m the biggest waste of space ever. That I’m an underachiever who provides zero utility in anything; that I’m a failed chimera who can produce neither scientific nor artistic utility.

But that’s not true. I’m proud of the pluralism in my pursuits. I feel enriched by it, too. At a time when our society’s anti-art attitude and/or apathy toward art is being brought to the fore by the proliferation of AI art, here I am, coming to an important realization I deem deserving of this whole essay. Here I am committing to the defense of science and art—the two noble pursuits of humanity.

I wanna stop thinking things only in their “utility,” and it’s really tough to break that habit. But I believe art helps a lot in this regard. I hope my effort, after webs of cause-and-effects, helps you become further away from its pernicious hold than I am.

Here’s what I believe in:

The best way to combat anti-intellectualism is to embody the very things they are afraid of.

These are empiricist avenues. By experiencing it, they cannot take it away from us.

For me, it means being a science-minded artist and an art-minded scientist.

It seems like I was talking about science and art, but this is actually an essay about my friends, too. The position I was in and the stance I take now—these are all reflected through them because they were part of my conditions.

So, I also dedicate this essay to this web of friends. Every one of them, no matter how long our interaction lasted. Especially the artists!

Most of all, I dedicate this essay to you, my 知己, whose actions create causal webs of their own.

Happy (early) Friendship Anniversary.

Thank you for reading my ramble.

P.S. If you want an explanatory note on the Chinese words used, read here.

#anti intellectualism #anti art #anti science #okay to read by the public #long read #(4.5k words. Yep.)#睿得失这个话痨的长篇大论 #a piece to the rubble

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