Re: Re: Good Bokeh

[pgs@thillana.lcs.mit.edu (Patrick Sobalvarro)]

Jim, I said "hooey" because I thought there was some chance you were
pulling our collective leg.  I didn't mean to upset you, but I
certainly disagree with what you said.  I'm a person who grew up in
two cultures -- maybe even two and a half, if you count Spain and
Latin America as culturally different -- and I have never seen any
evidence that there are ideas expressed in one culture that are
utterly incomprehensible in another.  Certainly there are many aspects
of cultures that are at first mysterious to outsiders; and also there
are instinctual reasons why those differences are played up; but it
seems to me nonsensical to claim that members of one culture could
never understand some aspect of another.  What basis could you have
for making such a claim?  Simply that you find some aspects of
Japanese culture mysterious?  I find some aspects of horticulture
mysterious, and so do many men I know; but this would not justify a
claim on my part that men are incapable of understanding gardening.

Furthermore, claims of the type "Members of group X could not possibly
understand aspect A of group Y's culture," as much as they may
resonate with our lowest-level instincts, have historically been used
to justify any number of horrors that members of one group have
visited upon another.  These are fundamentally bigoted statements.  It
is a short jump from, "Westerners could not possibly understand the
following aesthetic aspects of Japanese culture," to "Japanese are
incapable of understanding how to innovate, but only copy Western
technology," or "Westerners are barbarians."

As to your challenge:

    When is the last time you heard of a Westerner committing
    hara-kiri (<italic>seppuku</italic>) to save face. Killing
    yourself because you dishonored your family is totally
    un-thinkable to Western culture.

- -- I am very surprised you would make any such statement.  There are
certainly countless cases of Westerners faced with dishonor killing
themselves.  They go back to the Iliad (consider Aias), and are as
recent as the case of Admiral Jeremy Boorda, Chief of U.S. Naval
Operations.  An excellent article in the New Yorker detailed the
events surrounding his suicide and made it clear that this was the
only way he felt he could salvage his honor.

I would never claim that all cultures are alike, or that there is no
difference between Japanese and Western cultures.  But I would say
that the notion that an appreciation of the way that lenses render
out-of-focus parts of the image and of the way that that aspect of an
image can have meaning is incomprehensible to Westerners strikes me as
very unlikely.  Suppose it were so -- that Westerners never paid
attention to the way that lenses rendered out-of-focus elements of an
image.  Then how is it that one small firm in the west, working
through a large number of enormously different lens designs over a
period of decades somehow managed through blind luck to repeatedly
produce lenses with pleasing out-of-focus rendering?  Of course, it
wasn't blind luck.  The lens designers appreciated "bokeh," although
they probably didn't have a single short word for it.  They may even
have been among the first people to appreciate it.

- -Patrick