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A correspondent to a newsletter also worries about Canada's future: “If the North Pole did in fact melt and the northwest passage remained ice-free year after year, none of this would be worth discussing anymore. Canadians would have to head to the hills as much of our nation would be under water. The rising water levels alone would cause massive slumping of the land, mud/rock slides and unimaginable flooding. Better start building an Ark.”
Wait a minute. Let's think this through.
If the temperature rose, the polar ice caps would melt.
But the rate of evaporation would also rise. Ergo, that water would not all go to rising sea levels, but be balanced by more water rising into the atmosphere.
Higher rates of evaporation would produce heavier cloud cover.
Heavier cloud cover would block sunlight.
Blocking sunlight would reduce the surface temperature.
Damn.
How is this global warming thing supposed to work again?
Wednesday, December 29, 2004
Tuesday, December 28, 2004
Augustine on the Bible
More thoughts from/on St. Augustine's Confessions, these mostly on the Bible:
On Biblical literalism: “I began to believe that the Catholic faith might fairly be maintained, especially since I had heard one passage after another in the New Testament figuratively explained. These passages had been death to me when I took them literally…”
“Anselm lifted the veil of mystery and disclosed the spiritual meaning of texts which, taken literally, appeared to contain the most unlikely doctrines.”
Augustine himself cites in this regard the following passage: “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” Surely, he suggests, this principle is to be followed in Biblical interpretation.
Augustine does not even bother arguing whether God exists; he takes that as a given. The issue for him is how to know his nature: why believe that the Bible has the truth about him, and not the Manichees or Neoplatonists?
Still a live issue today: how do we know Christianity is the truer path, and not Islam or Buddhism?
Augustine argues that
1. The truth about God is not easily accessible to unaided reason. This makes some form of revelation logically necessary. For, even if some men might arrive at the truth by reason alone, most men cannot, all men cannot. Since our reasoning ability is not entirely our own doing, this would not be fair, and so would not be expected of a just God.
Ergo,
2. There must be some definitive sacred book somewhere. Given that there must be some such thing, logically, a just God would make it the most obvious and most widely accessible of supposed sacred books.
For Augustine’s time, that meant the Bible and the Catholic faith.
For our time, that means the Bible and the Catholic faith.
I think it equally logically follows that other sacred texts are probably also substantially true. But given you have the choice, go with the Bible.
Augustine further argues:
3. The nature of the Bible also commends it as the likeliest candidate. “While all can read it with ease, it also has a deeper meaning in which … great secrets are locked away. “its plain language and simple style make it accessible to everyone, and yet it absorbs the attention of the learned.” This is just what you would expect from a book meant by God as guide: accessible to all, and profitable to all.
On Biblical literalism: “I began to believe that the Catholic faith might fairly be maintained, especially since I had heard one passage after another in the New Testament figuratively explained. These passages had been death to me when I took them literally…”
“Anselm lifted the veil of mystery and disclosed the spiritual meaning of texts which, taken literally, appeared to contain the most unlikely doctrines.”
Augustine himself cites in this regard the following passage: “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” Surely, he suggests, this principle is to be followed in Biblical interpretation.
Augustine does not even bother arguing whether God exists; he takes that as a given. The issue for him is how to know his nature: why believe that the Bible has the truth about him, and not the Manichees or Neoplatonists?
Still a live issue today: how do we know Christianity is the truer path, and not Islam or Buddhism?
Augustine argues that
1. The truth about God is not easily accessible to unaided reason. This makes some form of revelation logically necessary. For, even if some men might arrive at the truth by reason alone, most men cannot, all men cannot. Since our reasoning ability is not entirely our own doing, this would not be fair, and so would not be expected of a just God.
Ergo,
2. There must be some definitive sacred book somewhere. Given that there must be some such thing, logically, a just God would make it the most obvious and most widely accessible of supposed sacred books.
For Augustine’s time, that meant the Bible and the Catholic faith.
For our time, that means the Bible and the Catholic faith.
I think it equally logically follows that other sacred texts are probably also substantially true. But given you have the choice, go with the Bible.
Augustine further argues:
3. The nature of the Bible also commends it as the likeliest candidate. “While all can read it with ease, it also has a deeper meaning in which … great secrets are locked away. “its plain language and simple style make it accessible to everyone, and yet it absorbs the attention of the learned.” This is just what you would expect from a book meant by God as guide: accessible to all, and profitable to all.
Monday, December 27, 2004
True Confessions
I’m enjoying reading through St. Augustine's Confessions. It is thrilling to read something over 1,600 years old and think as the author thought, and feel as the author felt, so long ago and far away. And especially enlightening to see that he still has much to say about current events, 1,600 years later.
For example:
Of the spiritual quest: “All who look for him shall find him.”
“You come close only to men who are humble at heart.”
Of school and education: “a period of suffering and humiliation.”
“We learn better in a free spirit of curiousity than under fear and compulsion.”
Of the traditional lot of males: “No one pities either the boys or the men, though surely we deserved pity.”
Of flaming: “If he were worsted by a colleague in some petty argument, he would be convulsed with anger and envy.”
Of worldly success: “Man’s insatiable desire is for the poverty he calls wealth and the infamy he knows as fame.”
“To love this world is to break faith with God.”
“Come down from the heights. For then you may climb, and, this time, climb to God. To climb against him was your fall.”
“I lived in misery, like every man whose soul is tethered by the love of things that cannot last and then is agonized to lose them.”
“If the senses could comprehend the whole, we would wish that whatever exists in the present should pass on, so that we might gain greater pleasure from the whole.”
“A man who has faith in you owns all the wealth of the world, for if he clings to you, whom all things serve, though he has nothing yet he owns them all.”
Of pacifism: “Sloth poses as the love of peace.”
Of romantic love: “a snare of my own choosing.”
Of evil: “Evil is nothing but the removal of good until finally no good remains.”
It is to “set one’s heart on some one part of creation instead of on the whole.”
Of moral relativism: “Each age and place forms rules of conduct best suited to itself, although the [underlying] Law itself is always and everywhere the same and does not differ from place to place.”
Of homosexuality: “Sins against nature, like the sin of Sodom, are abominable and deserve punishment wherever and whenever they are committed.”
Augustine considers such actions even worse than sins against other men, things like theft or murder, because these are sins directly against God: “the relationship which we ought to have with God is violated when our nature, of which he is the author, is desecrated by perverted lust.”
An important distinction is perhaps missed here: while it makes sense that the state not rule against homosexuality, because it does not harm other members of the state, this in no way ought to imply that homosexuality is moral. Morality is not determined by the state, and is not punished by the state. The state’s job is to protect citizens’ rights and to preserve good order.
Of marriage: “contracted for the purpose of having children.”
Of truth: “the soul is weak and helpless unless it clings to the firm rock of truth.”
Of self-actualization: “What greater madness could there be than to assert, as I did in my strange madness, that by nature I was what you [God] are?”
Developing.
For example:
Of the spiritual quest: “All who look for him shall find him.”
“You come close only to men who are humble at heart.”
Of school and education: “a period of suffering and humiliation.”
“We learn better in a free spirit of curiousity than under fear and compulsion.”
Of the traditional lot of males: “No one pities either the boys or the men, though surely we deserved pity.”
Of flaming: “If he were worsted by a colleague in some petty argument, he would be convulsed with anger and envy.”
Of worldly success: “Man’s insatiable desire is for the poverty he calls wealth and the infamy he knows as fame.”
“To love this world is to break faith with God.”
“Come down from the heights. For then you may climb, and, this time, climb to God. To climb against him was your fall.”
“I lived in misery, like every man whose soul is tethered by the love of things that cannot last and then is agonized to lose them.”
“If the senses could comprehend the whole, we would wish that whatever exists in the present should pass on, so that we might gain greater pleasure from the whole.”
“A man who has faith in you owns all the wealth of the world, for if he clings to you, whom all things serve, though he has nothing yet he owns them all.”
Of pacifism: “Sloth poses as the love of peace.”
Of romantic love: “a snare of my own choosing.”
Of evil: “Evil is nothing but the removal of good until finally no good remains.”
It is to “set one’s heart on some one part of creation instead of on the whole.”
Of moral relativism: “Each age and place forms rules of conduct best suited to itself, although the [underlying] Law itself is always and everywhere the same and does not differ from place to place.”
Of homosexuality: “Sins against nature, like the sin of Sodom, are abominable and deserve punishment wherever and whenever they are committed.”
Augustine considers such actions even worse than sins against other men, things like theft or murder, because these are sins directly against God: “the relationship which we ought to have with God is violated when our nature, of which he is the author, is desecrated by perverted lust.”
An important distinction is perhaps missed here: while it makes sense that the state not rule against homosexuality, because it does not harm other members of the state, this in no way ought to imply that homosexuality is moral. Morality is not determined by the state, and is not punished by the state. The state’s job is to protect citizens’ rights and to preserve good order.
Of marriage: “contracted for the purpose of having children.”
Of truth: “the soul is weak and helpless unless it clings to the firm rock of truth.”
Of self-actualization: “What greater madness could there be than to assert, as I did in my strange madness, that by nature I was what you [God] are?”
Developing.
Sunday, December 26, 2004
Canada Death Watch
The following news story strikes me as a very disturbing sign for the future of Canadian democracy:
“Manitoba must pay for private abortions, judge rules
Fri, 24 Dec 2004 13:59:24 EST - CBC
WINNIPEG - Manitoba violated the rights of two women who paid for private abortions, a court in the province has ruled, opening up the possibility that others who paid for private medical procedures could sue for compensation.
A Court of Queen's Bench judge ruled on Thursday that the province's funding system violated Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms because the women felt they had to pay for a medically necessary procedure.
Justice Jeffrey Oliphant ruled that the province must pay for all therapeutic abortions.
The women had each tried to get an abortion in a publicly funded facility, but faced significant delays that they felt would pose medical and psychological risks. Instead, they paid fees to have the procedures at a private clinic.
…’If it takes a shorter period of time to have a medical procedure at a private clinic than it would in a hospital, that may infringe on a person's charter rights,’ Wullum said.”
This seems to imply not only that a woman has a constitutional right to an abortion on demand, but even a constitutional right to have it paid for by others. This implies, for example, that a country like the US in which abortions are not publicly funded is violating human rights. I suppose American women can now apply for refugee status in Canada, should they be so moved.
It also amounts to taxation without representation for the Canadian public: they are legally obliged to pay for something, and have no say in the matter through their elected representatives.
It also not only defines abortion as medically necessary, but implies that it is medically necessary that it be performed without delay, and that the patient is the one to decide what sort of delay is tolerable. If this is applied to any other medical procedures, Medicare as a whole will surely become financially insupportable. Imagine if this principle is applied across the board—to such relative trivia as cancer treatment or organ transplants.
Do they really plan to keep this as a special privilege for women? But if they do not, Canadian democracy itself becomes unaffordable. What happens then?
The easiest constitutional route, ironically, is probably separation, province by province. Easier still (and financially viable) if this is followed quickly be assimilation to the US. And such a ruling as this gives the perfect justification in terms of liberal democratic principles and in terms of American traditions: taxation without representation.
Another example of the Canadian death wish?
“Manitoba must pay for private abortions, judge rules
Fri, 24 Dec 2004 13:59:24 EST - CBC
WINNIPEG - Manitoba violated the rights of two women who paid for private abortions, a court in the province has ruled, opening up the possibility that others who paid for private medical procedures could sue for compensation.
A Court of Queen's Bench judge ruled on Thursday that the province's funding system violated Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms because the women felt they had to pay for a medically necessary procedure.
Justice Jeffrey Oliphant ruled that the province must pay for all therapeutic abortions.
The women had each tried to get an abortion in a publicly funded facility, but faced significant delays that they felt would pose medical and psychological risks. Instead, they paid fees to have the procedures at a private clinic.
…’If it takes a shorter period of time to have a medical procedure at a private clinic than it would in a hospital, that may infringe on a person's charter rights,’ Wullum said.”
This seems to imply not only that a woman has a constitutional right to an abortion on demand, but even a constitutional right to have it paid for by others. This implies, for example, that a country like the US in which abortions are not publicly funded is violating human rights. I suppose American women can now apply for refugee status in Canada, should they be so moved.
It also amounts to taxation without representation for the Canadian public: they are legally obliged to pay for something, and have no say in the matter through their elected representatives.
It also not only defines abortion as medically necessary, but implies that it is medically necessary that it be performed without delay, and that the patient is the one to decide what sort of delay is tolerable. If this is applied to any other medical procedures, Medicare as a whole will surely become financially insupportable. Imagine if this principle is applied across the board—to such relative trivia as cancer treatment or organ transplants.
Do they really plan to keep this as a special privilege for women? But if they do not, Canadian democracy itself becomes unaffordable. What happens then?
The easiest constitutional route, ironically, is probably separation, province by province. Easier still (and financially viable) if this is followed quickly be assimilation to the US. And such a ruling as this gives the perfect justification in terms of liberal democratic principles and in terms of American traditions: taxation without representation.
Another example of the Canadian death wish?
Thursday, December 23, 2004
Christmas and Consumerism
I’m of two minds on the whole consumerism of Christmas thing. On the one hand, it all sometimes makes me feel quite ill, the acquisitiveness and the materialism of it. And then again I feel the nobility of it, of thinking of others’ happiness and trying to find or do things that will please them. I think at least it is better to give than to receive, and accordingly Christmas is a much more blessed time as an adult than as a child.
Wednesday, December 22, 2004
Oppressive Flattery
Germaine Greer reportedly argues, in her book Slipshod Sibyls, that female poets have been historically disadvantaged by our evil patriarchal society not just by being told to shut up, but by being over-praised for too little, preventing them from properly developing their craft.
But this strikes me as a perfect Catch-22, or perhaps also, Procrustean bed. Opposite evidence is taken to mean the same thing.
It even seems to me intuitively there is something to what Germaine Greer is saying. Too much praise at the beginning can lead to less effort, hence poorer results in the long run. That's what spoiling children is supposed to be about.
But to see this as a form of oppression of women strips all meaning from the term. It is, by normal definition, the reverse. You might as well see pogroms as bias in favour of the Jews, cruelly spoiling the Germans and Russians and encouraging Jews to work and achieve. You would have to see England as putting centuries of self-sacrifice into the literature of Ireland at their great expense, and credit enlightened Jim Crow with increasing the vitality of the blues.
But this strikes me as a perfect Catch-22, or perhaps also, Procrustean bed. Opposite evidence is taken to mean the same thing.
It even seems to me intuitively there is something to what Germaine Greer is saying. Too much praise at the beginning can lead to less effort, hence poorer results in the long run. That's what spoiling children is supposed to be about.
But to see this as a form of oppression of women strips all meaning from the term. It is, by normal definition, the reverse. You might as well see pogroms as bias in favour of the Jews, cruelly spoiling the Germans and Russians and encouraging Jews to work and achieve. You would have to see England as putting centuries of self-sacrifice into the literature of Ireland at their great expense, and credit enlightened Jim Crow with increasing the vitality of the blues.
Tuesday, December 21, 2004
CBC Report Criticized by Press Bias Opponents
From the CBC's “Overnight Digest”:
ONTARIO REPORT CRITICIZED BY SHARIAH OPPONENTS
Some Muslims fear a report released Monday will encourage Ontario to introduce Shariah law to settle family matters.
FULL STORY:http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2004/12/20/sharia-boyd041220.html
Why isn’t the head “Ontario Report Approves Shariah Law”?
Isn’t it odd to make the story those who object to the report, not the report itself? And isn't it likely there are more Muslims who approve of the report than criticize it?
ONTARIO REPORT CRITICIZED BY SHARIAH OPPONENTS
Some Muslims fear a report released Monday will encourage Ontario to introduce Shariah law to settle family matters.
FULL STORY:http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2004/12/20/sharia-boyd041220.html
Why isn’t the head “Ontario Report Approves Shariah Law”?
Isn’t it odd to make the story those who object to the report, not the report itself? And isn't it likely there are more Muslims who approve of the report than criticize it?
Sunday, December 19, 2004
Shocked and Appalled
Dear Editor:
Last posting’s “Dear Abbot” column was out of line. What Abbot has is a theory about God and worse, he is trying to prove it with a statement that it is true because he believes in it.
Skeptical
Dear Skeptical:
If he is, I sure missed it. Any more than I am saying that I have a theory that my nose exists, and it is true because I believe it. I don’t need a theory that my nose exists, and all such theories are beside the point when I am about to sneeze.
As I do not need a theory of walking. Or to sit and ponder the question of whether I can walk or not.
Last posting’s “Dear Abbot” column was out of line. What Abbot has is a theory about God and worse, he is trying to prove it with a statement that it is true because he believes in it.
Skeptical
Dear Skeptical:
If he is, I sure missed it. Any more than I am saying that I have a theory that my nose exists, and it is true because I believe it. I don’t need a theory that my nose exists, and all such theories are beside the point when I am about to sneeze.
As I do not need a theory of walking. Or to sit and ponder the question of whether I can walk or not.
Saturday, December 18, 2004
A Guide for the Perplexed
Dear Abbot:
I choose to believe in god because I want to believe? Never have been able to work my way around this concept.
What I have trouble grasping is the notion of "choosing to believe.” In any other context, I believe things to be true on the basis of the persuasiveness of available information - and this would include the
reliability of the source. "Wanting to believe", or "choosing to believe", for me, just isn't a concept that computes.
- Everywoman in Canada
Dear Eve:
As a religious person, I could not agree with you more. There is no way you can simply choose to believe something. To even try to do this strikes me as immoral. It is a form of lying; lying to oneself. And if it were possible to do this, how could there be any reason to choose belief in God over belief in anything else that struck one's fancy or seemed in one's self-interest? It is, as you say, nonsensical.
For my part, I do not believe in the existence of God, any more than I believe in the existence of my nose. The question just does not come up; God's existence is, for me, unquestionable, and to think he does not exist immediately meaningless. It is like saying existence does not exist. There is reason to believe, and there is evidence, as in the article posted. But more important than this, there is an overwhelming awareness of God's presence.
I think there is a general misunderstanding out there about what "faith" means. When a religious person says "I believe in God," he or she does not mean "I believe [in an intellectual sense] that God exists." He or she means it in the same sense I might say, "Eve, I believe in you." This does not imply that others doubt your existence, or that I might.
That is, faith means faith in the goodness of God. It means trust.
I think the misunderstanding has screwed up a lot of sincere people, like you, in seeking answers from religion. Never accept anything less than the truth as you experience it. Accept no copouts, substitutes, or merely convenient beliefs.
No genuinely religious person would do any less. And if doing this does not lead you to God, nothing can or should. IMHO.
I choose to believe in god because I want to believe? Never have been able to work my way around this concept.
What I have trouble grasping is the notion of "choosing to believe.” In any other context, I believe things to be true on the basis of the persuasiveness of available information - and this would include the
reliability of the source. "Wanting to believe", or "choosing to believe", for me, just isn't a concept that computes.
- Everywoman in Canada
Dear Eve:
As a religious person, I could not agree with you more. There is no way you can simply choose to believe something. To even try to do this strikes me as immoral. It is a form of lying; lying to oneself. And if it were possible to do this, how could there be any reason to choose belief in God over belief in anything else that struck one's fancy or seemed in one's self-interest? It is, as you say, nonsensical.
For my part, I do not believe in the existence of God, any more than I believe in the existence of my nose. The question just does not come up; God's existence is, for me, unquestionable, and to think he does not exist immediately meaningless. It is like saying existence does not exist. There is reason to believe, and there is evidence, as in the article posted. But more important than this, there is an overwhelming awareness of God's presence.
I think there is a general misunderstanding out there about what "faith" means. When a religious person says "I believe in God," he or she does not mean "I believe [in an intellectual sense] that God exists." He or she means it in the same sense I might say, "Eve, I believe in you." This does not imply that others doubt your existence, or that I might.
That is, faith means faith in the goodness of God. It means trust.
I think the misunderstanding has screwed up a lot of sincere people, like you, in seeking answers from religion. Never accept anything less than the truth as you experience it. Accept no copouts, substitutes, or merely convenient beliefs.
No genuinely religious person would do any less. And if doing this does not lead you to God, nothing can or should. IMHO.
Friday, December 17, 2004
Men's Conditioning
To look at men and say, “they are subject to bad conditioning; we must change them,” you must somehow assume that you, by contrast, are not subject to your conditioning in making this judgement. For if you are, you cannot know whether your conditioning is ultimately better in any way than theirs. It may be only your conditioning that makes you think so.
Danish Muslims
Someone has pointed out with alarm that the majority of gang rapes in Denmark are by Muslim immigrants.
But this is not that surprising to me: a sad clash of cultures and cultural signals. It is not surprising if someone raised in a traditional Muslim culture supposes that a woman who is walking by showing, say, the clear outlines of her breasts and buttocks, and exposing her legs and stomach, is advertising that, for her, anything goes. It would imply not just consent, but eager desire. Why hang a flashing neon shop sign if you’ve nothing to sell?
But this is not that surprising to me: a sad clash of cultures and cultural signals. It is not surprising if someone raised in a traditional Muslim culture supposes that a woman who is walking by showing, say, the clear outlines of her breasts and buttocks, and exposing her legs and stomach, is advertising that, for her, anything goes. It would imply not just consent, but eager desire. Why hang a flashing neon shop sign if you’ve nothing to sell?
Thursday, December 16, 2004
Evolution, Creationism, and Intelligent Design
I think the creationist theory that takes the world as created in six 24-hour days as we understand them, and believes it all happened 6,000 or so years ago, is basically nuts. It is nuts not least because it goes against the Bible. But it surely is not science.
But I also believe the theory of random natural selection is nuts. It really would have us believe, not only that an infinite number of monkeys sitting at typewriters for an infinite time could sooner or later produce the complete works of Shakespeare—which is believable—but that a limited number of monkeys over a limited time actually have. In the end, that makes my sense of probabilities go tilt.
The pure natural selection argument also does not, as Stephen Jay Gould has elegantly pointed out, fit the fossil record. Something like Gould’s “punctuated equilibrium,” it seems to me, must have occurred, and this looks a lot to me like an unseen hand intervening in the process.
But I also believe the theory of random natural selection is nuts. It really would have us believe, not only that an infinite number of monkeys sitting at typewriters for an infinite time could sooner or later produce the complete works of Shakespeare—which is believable—but that a limited number of monkeys over a limited time actually have. In the end, that makes my sense of probabilities go tilt.
The pure natural selection argument also does not, as Stephen Jay Gould has elegantly pointed out, fit the fossil record. Something like Gould’s “punctuated equilibrium,” it seems to me, must have occurred, and this looks a lot to me like an unseen hand intervening in the process.
Wednesday, December 15, 2004
Thoughts on Having a Three-Year-Old
All civilizations are convinced that in the long ago, giants walked the earth. And so it seems to me as well. Those people who went to the Klondike, who settled the Prairies, who fought the Great War, and then Hitler, and the Cold War, those were giants, and we seem much smaller than they.
As a child, we see as a child. Adults seem enormous from below; much bigger than they do seen face-to-face.
They also seem to have been here forever—a hundred years, easily; perhaps nine hundred years. When I was young, Walter Cronkite had always read the news, and either Pearson or Diefenbaker had always been Prime Minister.
And their views and acts and principles seemed grander and more meaningful as well: because each one was done or thought or met in existence for the first time.
It is in this light that I tend to read Genesis. The crime in Eden we all go through, we are all touched by original sin in that sense. It is inherent in the awakening of consciousness, or at least so far it has always happened: at some point as we feel our ego stir, we accept the notion that we ourselves might become God. We see the universe as centering upon us, not on any other.
Before this point, as children, we see all animals as our friends, and friends to one another. The stuffed lion lies next to the stuffed lamb. Our earth is a garden of wild flowers.
Then we think of ourselves as secretly great, and the shadows fall. And in them hide the monsters. Leviathan is under the bed; a flaming sword or something waits in the closet. And we, now being supremely ourselves and not a part of all, are suddenly all alone.
Those other things out there seek to devour us, and we can never trust them. We know this certainly, because we know we seek to devour them.
As a child, we see as a child. Adults seem enormous from below; much bigger than they do seen face-to-face.
They also seem to have been here forever—a hundred years, easily; perhaps nine hundred years. When I was young, Walter Cronkite had always read the news, and either Pearson or Diefenbaker had always been Prime Minister.
And their views and acts and principles seemed grander and more meaningful as well: because each one was done or thought or met in existence for the first time.
It is in this light that I tend to read Genesis. The crime in Eden we all go through, we are all touched by original sin in that sense. It is inherent in the awakening of consciousness, or at least so far it has always happened: at some point as we feel our ego stir, we accept the notion that we ourselves might become God. We see the universe as centering upon us, not on any other.
Before this point, as children, we see all animals as our friends, and friends to one another. The stuffed lion lies next to the stuffed lamb. Our earth is a garden of wild flowers.
Then we think of ourselves as secretly great, and the shadows fall. And in them hide the monsters. Leviathan is under the bed; a flaming sword or something waits in the closet. And we, now being supremely ourselves and not a part of all, are suddenly all alone.
Those other things out there seek to devour us, and we can never trust them. We know this certainly, because we know we seek to devour them.
Saturday, December 11, 2004
And More on Votes for Women
Women did not have the vote until the turn of last century. But then, men did not have the vote centuries ago either. In fact, for what it’s worth, female suffrage in most places really followed universal male suffrage in only a few decades. In the US, for example, you did not really have universal male suffrage until after the Civil War: officially, 1870. (And there were property and education requirements long after that in places). And you got universal female suffrage in 1919. Moreover, the vote was not officially _taken away_ from women until 1868: until then it was apparently only tradition or common law that women did not vote. And some did.
Given that the barrier to their participation was so low, the question is, why did women not agitate for the vote sooner? I think this is actually evidence that they felt themselves that they already held real power, or did not seek it. That it was by their own passive consent.
Given that the barrier to their participation was so low, the question is, why did women not agitate for the vote sooner? I think this is actually evidence that they felt themselves that they already held real power, or did not seek it. That it was by their own passive consent.
The Gender War Continues
The dabate on whether women have it worse than men continues on the LCP list.
Here's my latest friendly salvo.
T:
An upper class woman of olden times? I believe it's only been the last hundred years or so that women have even been allowed to get a thorough education, enter into professions like doctors, lawyers, etc. In Old England a woman of wealth didn't have to get an education, wasn’t encouraged to do so and was in fact told that her intelligence might frighten off a marriage prospect.
SR (that's me):
Thanks for wanting to continue the discussion.
I’m not an authority on all this, as Diane is, but this is not my understanding of our common past either.
It is difficult to generalize about all times and all places before 1904, but I do know a little about Asian as well as European cultures of earlier times.
You note that only since about 1904 have women been allowed to enter the professions. But remember, the true upper class would have considered such a profession beneath them; these were tradespeople. In many times and places, getting a formal education was considered beneath a gentleman as much as a gentlewomen. One hired people for that: clerks and scribes. Prince Charles is the first direct heir to the English throne ever to have actually gone to college; and if he makes it to the throne will be England’s first university-educated monarch.
On the other hand, this did not equate to getting no education of any sort. Rather, gentlewomen seem often to have been educated at home, by tutors. It was commonly considered important for a woman to be “accomplished,” in both Asia and Europe. The difference was that women usually studied the arts, while men were more often obliged to study more practical matters.
Such worthies as Hume and Descartes wrote self-consciously for the female upper class, as they were about the only ones to have the leisure for philosophy.
Were I a man of the time, I would have envied them.
Moving down the class scale, those who could not afford tutors would, I suppose, bundle off the sons to a public (that is, private) school. And generally not the daughters—they would continue to be tutored. But I do not see how this is self-evidently an advantage granted the boys. First off, the experience of the women is closer to that of the class above, which suggests special privilege. Second, life in a residential school away from one’s home and parents is not all fun and games. Indeed, the same treatment given aboriginal children is considered abusive.
Moving further down the scale, to perhaps the merchant or artisan class—the bourgeois—I expect most boys were at most times and places just thrown into apprenticeship or into the shop, to learn what they needed on the job; but women, by contrast, might at least still hope to get an education beyond the kitchen, if their family had social pretensions.
Lower down, nobody got learning.
As to men preferring women without brains or education, I know this is a common belief among women. “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses,” as Dorothy Parker claimed. But I always wondered about that, because it was never true for me, or for any men I knew. Unless perhaps the rare cad who was looking only for someone to take advantage of.
It seems never to have been true for the educated classes in Europe or Asia either. As I said, being “accomplished” seemed instead to have been always an important consideration for marriageability.
TS:
We were itemized right up there with the furniture in a marriage. We could indeed be an asset but only if our father's/dead husbands gave us an inheritance.
SR:
I think this was on the whole truer of men than of women. In most places and times, I get the sense it has been easier for a woman to “marry up” than for a man. A woman could make it on looks, or charm; a man had to be able to provide “security.”
TS:
…My, you paint such a venomous picture of women. I think if we were even a quarter of the percent devious and crafty as you paint us…
SR:
I don’t understand this reaction. Perhaps I have been unclear. I am not saying women are more ambitious for wealth, power, or social position than men. I am saying only that, as far as we can reasonably tell, there is no great difference between the sexes in this regard. Women and men just traditionally go about it in different ways.
If that makes women come out to you looking venomous, or devious, or crafty, then you must, I think, have believed this previously of men.
TS:
… then we certainly wouldn't be complaining about how unfair we're treated in the work place in the past or present. I should think we'd have gotten the vote centuries earlier too, don't you?
SR:
Your logic that there must have been injustice, or women would not be complaining, works both ways: then the fact that I am now complaining proves there is injustice against men.
But historically, a group complaining of injustice does not always have just cause, and is not always as powerless and as blameless as it sees itself. Hitler justified his acts by complaining of injustice to the German people, notably by the Jews, and Mussolini of injustice to Italy. The US South had a deep sense of grievance at the hands of the “carpetbaggers” and their black allies. The Boers of South Africa felt themselves treated unjustly by the British and threatened by their black allies as well.
As to why women, if they had any power, did not get the vote centuries ago, that is tautological. If they already had the power, why would they need the vote?
Here's my latest friendly salvo.
T:
An upper class woman of olden times? I believe it's only been the last hundred years or so that women have even been allowed to get a thorough education, enter into professions like doctors, lawyers, etc. In Old England a woman of wealth didn't have to get an education, wasn’t encouraged to do so and was in fact told that her intelligence might frighten off a marriage prospect.
SR (that's me):
Thanks for wanting to continue the discussion.
I’m not an authority on all this, as Diane is, but this is not my understanding of our common past either.
It is difficult to generalize about all times and all places before 1904, but I do know a little about Asian as well as European cultures of earlier times.
You note that only since about 1904 have women been allowed to enter the professions. But remember, the true upper class would have considered such a profession beneath them; these were tradespeople. In many times and places, getting a formal education was considered beneath a gentleman as much as a gentlewomen. One hired people for that: clerks and scribes. Prince Charles is the first direct heir to the English throne ever to have actually gone to college; and if he makes it to the throne will be England’s first university-educated monarch.
On the other hand, this did not equate to getting no education of any sort. Rather, gentlewomen seem often to have been educated at home, by tutors. It was commonly considered important for a woman to be “accomplished,” in both Asia and Europe. The difference was that women usually studied the arts, while men were more often obliged to study more practical matters.
Such worthies as Hume and Descartes wrote self-consciously for the female upper class, as they were about the only ones to have the leisure for philosophy.
Were I a man of the time, I would have envied them.
Moving down the class scale, those who could not afford tutors would, I suppose, bundle off the sons to a public (that is, private) school. And generally not the daughters—they would continue to be tutored. But I do not see how this is self-evidently an advantage granted the boys. First off, the experience of the women is closer to that of the class above, which suggests special privilege. Second, life in a residential school away from one’s home and parents is not all fun and games. Indeed, the same treatment given aboriginal children is considered abusive.
Moving further down the scale, to perhaps the merchant or artisan class—the bourgeois—I expect most boys were at most times and places just thrown into apprenticeship or into the shop, to learn what they needed on the job; but women, by contrast, might at least still hope to get an education beyond the kitchen, if their family had social pretensions.
Lower down, nobody got learning.
As to men preferring women without brains or education, I know this is a common belief among women. “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses,” as Dorothy Parker claimed. But I always wondered about that, because it was never true for me, or for any men I knew. Unless perhaps the rare cad who was looking only for someone to take advantage of.
It seems never to have been true for the educated classes in Europe or Asia either. As I said, being “accomplished” seemed instead to have been always an important consideration for marriageability.
TS:
We were itemized right up there with the furniture in a marriage. We could indeed be an asset but only if our father's/dead husbands gave us an inheritance.
SR:
I think this was on the whole truer of men than of women. In most places and times, I get the sense it has been easier for a woman to “marry up” than for a man. A woman could make it on looks, or charm; a man had to be able to provide “security.”
TS:
…My, you paint such a venomous picture of women. I think if we were even a quarter of the percent devious and crafty as you paint us…
SR:
I don’t understand this reaction. Perhaps I have been unclear. I am not saying women are more ambitious for wealth, power, or social position than men. I am saying only that, as far as we can reasonably tell, there is no great difference between the sexes in this regard. Women and men just traditionally go about it in different ways.
If that makes women come out to you looking venomous, or devious, or crafty, then you must, I think, have believed this previously of men.
TS:
… then we certainly wouldn't be complaining about how unfair we're treated in the work place in the past or present. I should think we'd have gotten the vote centuries earlier too, don't you?
SR:
Your logic that there must have been injustice, or women would not be complaining, works both ways: then the fact that I am now complaining proves there is injustice against men.
But historically, a group complaining of injustice does not always have just cause, and is not always as powerless and as blameless as it sees itself. Hitler justified his acts by complaining of injustice to the German people, notably by the Jews, and Mussolini of injustice to Italy. The US South had a deep sense of grievance at the hands of the “carpetbaggers” and their black allies. The Boers of South Africa felt themselves treated unjustly by the British and threatened by their black allies as well.
As to why women, if they had any power, did not get the vote centuries ago, that is tautological. If they already had the power, why would they need the vote?
Friday, December 10, 2004
Why Muslim Women Have it Better
Continuing with this week's apparent feminist theme, a bit on women's life in the Arab world.
There seems a common consensus in the West that women in Muslim countries are oppressed. And the symbol, at least, of that oppression is the burqa, the covering worn over the hair.
Those who object to women wearing this do not seem to care that it is voluntary. Or that it is growing in popularity. Or that men, too, have their traditional dress.
There is no question that Arab culture believes is a strict separation of men and women. But this does not imply a secondary status for women. Quite the contrary: in many ways they have it better than men.
For example, at the college where I work, the female employees are assigned the parking lot next to the entrance. Men must park across the street.
In the buses, similarly, men must sit in the back. Women sit in the front. If there are too few seats, a man must get up and give his seat to a woman.
If this is discrimination against women, blacks were the ruling elite in Mississippi in 1959.
Most of the city parks here are for women and children only; as a man, I cannot enter. When I go to the hospital, I need a permission slip from my employer--as I do for most things. My wife needs only to show up.
Women also dominate the student body at the universities.
In light of all this, why the notion that women are oppressed?
The official purpose of the burqa is modesty: it is supposed to cover the hair because the hair is a sexual attractant.
I think the fact that it has become such a red flag says something about the origin and essence of the "women's movement." In the end, it is not about equality for women and men, and it is not about improving life for women or men. It is about enabling casual sex. That, after all, was very much what "liberated woman" meant at the beginning of the "Women's Liberation" movement.
The burqa, and the Muslim-Arab practice of separating the sexes, are designed to make casual sex more difficult.
And that is the whole point.
There seems a common consensus in the West that women in Muslim countries are oppressed. And the symbol, at least, of that oppression is the burqa, the covering worn over the hair.
Those who object to women wearing this do not seem to care that it is voluntary. Or that it is growing in popularity. Or that men, too, have their traditional dress.
There is no question that Arab culture believes is a strict separation of men and women. But this does not imply a secondary status for women. Quite the contrary: in many ways they have it better than men.
For example, at the college where I work, the female employees are assigned the parking lot next to the entrance. Men must park across the street.
In the buses, similarly, men must sit in the back. Women sit in the front. If there are too few seats, a man must get up and give his seat to a woman.
If this is discrimination against women, blacks were the ruling elite in Mississippi in 1959.
Most of the city parks here are for women and children only; as a man, I cannot enter. When I go to the hospital, I need a permission slip from my employer--as I do for most things. My wife needs only to show up.
Women also dominate the student body at the universities.
In light of all this, why the notion that women are oppressed?
The official purpose of the burqa is modesty: it is supposed to cover the hair because the hair is a sexual attractant.
I think the fact that it has become such a red flag says something about the origin and essence of the "women's movement." In the end, it is not about equality for women and men, and it is not about improving life for women or men. It is about enabling casual sex. That, after all, was very much what "liberated woman" meant at the beginning of the "Women's Liberation" movement.
The burqa, and the Muslim-Arab practice of separating the sexes, are designed to make casual sex more difficult.
And that is the whole point.
Thursday, December 09, 2004
More on December 6th
More--much more--on December sixth and Marc Lepine showed up on the League of Canadian Poets' email list after I put up my last post here. In response, I made some of the same points I made here. And the discussion has continued from there.
So I post my further thoughts verbatum from that list:
A portmanteau response on the Dec. 6 memorials:
Robert Priest (and Anne Simpson says something similar) says that the Ecole Polytechnique is more worthy of remembrance than the Halifax explosion because
1. the Halifax explosion was an accident;
2. at the EP, it was women who were killed, because they were women; and
3. Ecole Polytechnique was more recent.
In response:
1. The Halifax explosion was an accident.
The Halifax explosion was an accident in one sense, but not in another. It was an act of war as well: these were munitions ships waiting for convoy, and the purpose of those munitions was to kill people. Men, specifically. They merely killed the wrong people. Indeed, we would no doubt remember it even less if it had killed its intended targets, all men, instead of taking a civilian toll of women and children.
Conversely, you can argue that the Ecole Polytechnique was, in a sense, an accident: one lone madman, who might as easily have gotten any other random notion into his head. He might as easily have gone after people with long brown hair, as Son of Sam apparently did.
Certainly, there is something very wrong—and sexist--with blaming all men for what Marc Lepine did, or suggesting Marc Lepine’s act says something about all men. Would you feel comfortable blaming all Arabs or all Muslims for 9/11? All Jews for Son of Sam? All women for Marguerite Petrie (for many years Canada’s most prolific mass murderer; She killed 23 people in 1949. More than Marc Lepine.)
2. Because it was women who were killed, because they were women.
As above, isn’t singling out women for special memorial, because they are women, as sexist in principle as singling out women, because they are women, to be killed? In effect, by doing so, you are commemorating not the women, but their murder. And, in effect, you are honouring Marc Lepine and his beliefs. Not the women, who were just there for another day of class, and worrying about the upcoming final.
And note that this argument in itself suggests that the Ecole Polytechnique was an anomaly, saying nothing about men or society as a whole. In Canada alone, 500-600 are murdered every year; in the US the figure is more like 15,000. (About seventy-five percent are men.) Remarkable that, in fifteen years, Marc Lepine’s deed still stands out. I submit that it is precisely because it is so unusual, and so offends our sensibilities. We are accustomed to and inured to the murder of men. We cannot stomach the murder of women. It is “man bites dog.” Or rather, “man harms woman,” instead of the expected, traditional, “man supports, defends, protects, rescues woman.”
This being so, it demonstrates precisely how supporting our society is of women. The very reverse of what it is commonly claimed to represent: widespread “gendercide” against women.
3. Because Ecole Polytechnique was more recent.
The Halifax explosion stood out because it was on the same day, in the same country, more died, and it was by comparison not commemorated. But it was never commemorated, even when recent, as the Ecole Polytechnique is. And there have been as bad and worse mass murders and massacres since Ecole Polytechnique, on other days or in other countries, that are not commemorated.
Air India flight 182: 331 people killed.
Can you name the day? Can you name the victims?
Trish Shields asks if I am referring to the death of men in war.
No, I am not just referring to the killing of men in wars. You may also have heard the phrase “women and children first.”
Note too that the great majority of officially-registered homicide victims are men, the vast majority of known suicides are men, and the vast majority of those the state executes are men. It is the general principle everywhere in our society. Men are expendable. Women are not.
She then says:
1. the killing of men in wars does not count because this is something men are doing to themselves: men are the ones who run the governments.
2. we should in any event stop seeing it as “us” and “them.” And
3. nobody remembers the names of those killed at the Ecole Polytechnique.
1. The killing of men in wars does not count because men run the governments.
Women cannot avoid responsibility for wars at least in democratic countries in which they have the vote. The officials who actually issue the orders are merely their servants, expressing the popular will.
Now compare the death toll from war among democracies in the 20th century, when women had the vote, to that in the 19th, when only men held it. Do you see a reduction in violence?
No, you see the reverse. If women were less warlike, their sudden fifty percent voice should have had a significant effect in this regard, should it not?
Accordingly, it is probably unfair to blame the men for wars even in non-democratic nations.
As I mentioned once before on this list, in most wars everywhere, the men who go off to fight are themselves convinced—and quite explicitly-- that they are doing it not because they want to go out and get killed, but for the sake of their women: their wives, daughters, sisters, and mothers. They are protecting the home fires, defending their sisters from rape, their babies from bayoneting, avenging nurses who were reportedly murdered, or something similar. They are showing their readiness to protect and provide.
They may have been misguided; in that case, they deserve our sympathies and our memories that much more.
Or they may have been right. You may recall that in the streets of London during World War I, women carried white feathers which they pinned on any young man they saw. It was supposed to symbolize cowardice, as they were evidently not at the front. In the Second World War, Lady Astor called any man who was not involved in D-Day a coward. (This especially upset the troops who were busily fighting their way up Italy.)
Consider too the US Civil War. Abraham Lincoln himself, without malice, assigned responsibility for it to Harriet Beecher Stowe: “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war?” It was believed at the time to be primarily women who were calling, rightly or wrongly, for a war to end slavery. And the Franco-Prussian War was commonly known in France at the time as “Empress Eugenie’s War.”
That accounts, I think, for the two biggest conflicts in the democracies in the 19th century.
Remember again Aristotle’s observation in Ancient Greece that warlike cities were dominated by women. The general tendency to leave government officially at least in male hands may indeed have developed, this suggests, as a way to prevent war.
After all, men have more at stake: they’re the ones who get killed. It stands to reason that they would be more cautious in resorting to it. Indeed, military service has often been the explicit justification for giving them political power.
So there is little sign women are not having their will fulfilled in these matters.
We know for certain that the primary victims of war are men. We can only speculate whether the prime instigators are primarily men. It is society: the discrimination against men is systemic.
And note: this is in important ctntrast with what happened at Ecole Polytechnique. That was a lone gunman, one crazed individual. There is no reason to suppose it has any wider significance. Very unlike the matter of war worldwide.
2. We should in any event stop seeing it as “us” and “them.”
My point exactly. And my problem with the Ecole Polytechnique remembrances, which single out the event, as Robert has said, because it happened to women. And was done by a man. Anyone’s death diminishes me; because I am involved in mankind (er, “humankind”?). A woman’s death should not count more than a man’s death, just as a German’s death should not count more than a Jew’s death, nor an American’s death more than an Iraqi’s death.
And nobody’s crime should count more because they are a man or a woman. Just as it should not count more because they are black, or native, or gypsy.
3. Nobody remembers the names of the women killed.
How many of the names of those killed in the Halifax Explosion can you give? Can you even cite the exact number? How about Air India? How about those killed in Korea?
QED
I heartily endorse what Harold has said. It is time to get beyond this mad war and mad hate between men and women, which harms us all and helps no one.
As Leonard Cohen put it, “the homicidal bitching that goes down in every kitchen/ Over who will serve and who is going to eat.”
Or as John Lennon put it, “War is over. If you want it.”
Steve Roney
So I post my further thoughts verbatum from that list:
A portmanteau response on the Dec. 6 memorials:
Robert Priest (and Anne Simpson says something similar) says that the Ecole Polytechnique is more worthy of remembrance than the Halifax explosion because
1. the Halifax explosion was an accident;
2. at the EP, it was women who were killed, because they were women; and
3. Ecole Polytechnique was more recent.
In response:
1. The Halifax explosion was an accident.
The Halifax explosion was an accident in one sense, but not in another. It was an act of war as well: these were munitions ships waiting for convoy, and the purpose of those munitions was to kill people. Men, specifically. They merely killed the wrong people. Indeed, we would no doubt remember it even less if it had killed its intended targets, all men, instead of taking a civilian toll of women and children.
Conversely, you can argue that the Ecole Polytechnique was, in a sense, an accident: one lone madman, who might as easily have gotten any other random notion into his head. He might as easily have gone after people with long brown hair, as Son of Sam apparently did.
Certainly, there is something very wrong—and sexist--with blaming all men for what Marc Lepine did, or suggesting Marc Lepine’s act says something about all men. Would you feel comfortable blaming all Arabs or all Muslims for 9/11? All Jews for Son of Sam? All women for Marguerite Petrie (for many years Canada’s most prolific mass murderer; She killed 23 people in 1949. More than Marc Lepine.)
2. Because it was women who were killed, because they were women.
As above, isn’t singling out women for special memorial, because they are women, as sexist in principle as singling out women, because they are women, to be killed? In effect, by doing so, you are commemorating not the women, but their murder. And, in effect, you are honouring Marc Lepine and his beliefs. Not the women, who were just there for another day of class, and worrying about the upcoming final.
And note that this argument in itself suggests that the Ecole Polytechnique was an anomaly, saying nothing about men or society as a whole. In Canada alone, 500-600 are murdered every year; in the US the figure is more like 15,000. (About seventy-five percent are men.) Remarkable that, in fifteen years, Marc Lepine’s deed still stands out. I submit that it is precisely because it is so unusual, and so offends our sensibilities. We are accustomed to and inured to the murder of men. We cannot stomach the murder of women. It is “man bites dog.” Or rather, “man harms woman,” instead of the expected, traditional, “man supports, defends, protects, rescues woman.”
This being so, it demonstrates precisely how supporting our society is of women. The very reverse of what it is commonly claimed to represent: widespread “gendercide” against women.
3. Because Ecole Polytechnique was more recent.
The Halifax explosion stood out because it was on the same day, in the same country, more died, and it was by comparison not commemorated. But it was never commemorated, even when recent, as the Ecole Polytechnique is. And there have been as bad and worse mass murders and massacres since Ecole Polytechnique, on other days or in other countries, that are not commemorated.
Air India flight 182: 331 people killed.
Can you name the day? Can you name the victims?
Trish Shields asks if I am referring to the death of men in war.
No, I am not just referring to the killing of men in wars. You may also have heard the phrase “women and children first.”
Note too that the great majority of officially-registered homicide victims are men, the vast majority of known suicides are men, and the vast majority of those the state executes are men. It is the general principle everywhere in our society. Men are expendable. Women are not.
She then says:
1. the killing of men in wars does not count because this is something men are doing to themselves: men are the ones who run the governments.
2. we should in any event stop seeing it as “us” and “them.” And
3. nobody remembers the names of those killed at the Ecole Polytechnique.
1. The killing of men in wars does not count because men run the governments.
Women cannot avoid responsibility for wars at least in democratic countries in which they have the vote. The officials who actually issue the orders are merely their servants, expressing the popular will.
Now compare the death toll from war among democracies in the 20th century, when women had the vote, to that in the 19th, when only men held it. Do you see a reduction in violence?
No, you see the reverse. If women were less warlike, their sudden fifty percent voice should have had a significant effect in this regard, should it not?
Accordingly, it is probably unfair to blame the men for wars even in non-democratic nations.
As I mentioned once before on this list, in most wars everywhere, the men who go off to fight are themselves convinced—and quite explicitly-- that they are doing it not because they want to go out and get killed, but for the sake of their women: their wives, daughters, sisters, and mothers. They are protecting the home fires, defending their sisters from rape, their babies from bayoneting, avenging nurses who were reportedly murdered, or something similar. They are showing their readiness to protect and provide.
They may have been misguided; in that case, they deserve our sympathies and our memories that much more.
Or they may have been right. You may recall that in the streets of London during World War I, women carried white feathers which they pinned on any young man they saw. It was supposed to symbolize cowardice, as they were evidently not at the front. In the Second World War, Lady Astor called any man who was not involved in D-Day a coward. (This especially upset the troops who were busily fighting their way up Italy.)
Consider too the US Civil War. Abraham Lincoln himself, without malice, assigned responsibility for it to Harriet Beecher Stowe: “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war?” It was believed at the time to be primarily women who were calling, rightly or wrongly, for a war to end slavery. And the Franco-Prussian War was commonly known in France at the time as “Empress Eugenie’s War.”
That accounts, I think, for the two biggest conflicts in the democracies in the 19th century.
Remember again Aristotle’s observation in Ancient Greece that warlike cities were dominated by women. The general tendency to leave government officially at least in male hands may indeed have developed, this suggests, as a way to prevent war.
After all, men have more at stake: they’re the ones who get killed. It stands to reason that they would be more cautious in resorting to it. Indeed, military service has often been the explicit justification for giving them political power.
So there is little sign women are not having their will fulfilled in these matters.
We know for certain that the primary victims of war are men. We can only speculate whether the prime instigators are primarily men. It is society: the discrimination against men is systemic.
And note: this is in important ctntrast with what happened at Ecole Polytechnique. That was a lone gunman, one crazed individual. There is no reason to suppose it has any wider significance. Very unlike the matter of war worldwide.
2. We should in any event stop seeing it as “us” and “them.”
My point exactly. And my problem with the Ecole Polytechnique remembrances, which single out the event, as Robert has said, because it happened to women. And was done by a man. Anyone’s death diminishes me; because I am involved in mankind (er, “humankind”?). A woman’s death should not count more than a man’s death, just as a German’s death should not count more than a Jew’s death, nor an American’s death more than an Iraqi’s death.
And nobody’s crime should count more because they are a man or a woman. Just as it should not count more because they are black, or native, or gypsy.
3. Nobody remembers the names of the women killed.
How many of the names of those killed in the Halifax Explosion can you give? Can you even cite the exact number? How about Air India? How about those killed in Korea?
QED
I heartily endorse what Harold has said. It is time to get beyond this mad war and mad hate between men and women, which harms us all and helps no one.
As Leonard Cohen put it, “the homicidal bitching that goes down in every kitchen/ Over who will serve and who is going to eat.”
Or as John Lennon put it, “War is over. If you want it.”
Steve Roney
Tuesday, December 07, 2004
Please to Remember the Sixth of December
Today, December 6, is the date of an important event in Canadian history.
I speak, of course, of the Halifax Explosion.
It was, in 1917, the biggest man-made explosion the world had ever seen. Almost two thousand thousand men, women, and children died.
But it is not remembered. Instead, this year as other years, December 6 is set apart for remembrance of the “Montreal Massacre,” in which a young Arab-Canadian man, Marc Lepine, walked into the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal and shot fourteen female students, then himself. Canada’s Minister of Justice, Irwin Cutler, has held a news conference to remind us of the occasion. A newsletter discussing its significance has appeared in my mailbox. In Toronto, they are selling white ribbons in the subway. In Vancouver, they have gathered at the Women’s Monument in Thornton Park for the ritual of remembrance. On both the League of Canadian Poets’ and the Canadian Poetry Association’s email lists, commemorative poems appeared, featuring stanzas like:
with sword in hand/gun in fist/he would put us in our place/back at the turn of the century/barefoot and pregnant
Why is the death of these fourteen remembered, and not the deaths of almost two thousand?
One reason, no doubt, is that the Ecole Polytechnique shootings are more recent. But no—the Halifax Explosion never earned the same kind of recognition, even when the memory was fresh. Or compare Air India, of almost the same vintage. Can you name the day?
No, the difference is that these victims were women, and almost exclusively women (Lepine did shoot some men, but they did not die). It has become a symbol in Canada of man's supposed murderous intentions towards woman.
At his press conference, Cutler seized the moment to denounce the "disturbing reality of violence against women." The newsletter warns “there are a lot of Marc Lepines around still.”
This, in fact, is precisely the reverse of the truth. We patently remember the “Montreal Massacre” largely because the deaths of fourteen women count more to us than the random deaths of a thousand. Similarly, the Vietnam Memorial in Washington includes one monument listing the names of all 50,000-odd Americans who died in Vietnam—and a second monument commemorating exclusively the eight female nurses who died. One woman counts as 7,000 men.
Second, Marc Lepine’s crime is remembered because it is news. And news generally means “man bites dog.” It is memorable precisely because it is so unusual. We are accustomed to men being separated out of larger groups to be shot. That is war everywhere. Can you think of another instance in which women were singled out to be shot? This is the shocking exception.
One woman counts as perhaps a million men.
That is the real lesson of the Montreal Massacre.
It is not that women are endangered by violence, or that women are commonly thought of as less than men.
Rather, the Montreal Massacre is the exception that proves the rule. Our extravagant reaction to it shows this.
I speak, of course, of the Halifax Explosion.
It was, in 1917, the biggest man-made explosion the world had ever seen. Almost two thousand thousand men, women, and children died.
But it is not remembered. Instead, this year as other years, December 6 is set apart for remembrance of the “Montreal Massacre,” in which a young Arab-Canadian man, Marc Lepine, walked into the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal and shot fourteen female students, then himself. Canada’s Minister of Justice, Irwin Cutler, has held a news conference to remind us of the occasion. A newsletter discussing its significance has appeared in my mailbox. In Toronto, they are selling white ribbons in the subway. In Vancouver, they have gathered at the Women’s Monument in Thornton Park for the ritual of remembrance. On both the League of Canadian Poets’ and the Canadian Poetry Association’s email lists, commemorative poems appeared, featuring stanzas like:
with sword in hand/gun in fist/he would put us in our place/back at the turn of the century/barefoot and pregnant
Why is the death of these fourteen remembered, and not the deaths of almost two thousand?
One reason, no doubt, is that the Ecole Polytechnique shootings are more recent. But no—the Halifax Explosion never earned the same kind of recognition, even when the memory was fresh. Or compare Air India, of almost the same vintage. Can you name the day?
No, the difference is that these victims were women, and almost exclusively women (Lepine did shoot some men, but they did not die). It has become a symbol in Canada of man's supposed murderous intentions towards woman.
At his press conference, Cutler seized the moment to denounce the "disturbing reality of violence against women." The newsletter warns “there are a lot of Marc Lepines around still.”
This, in fact, is precisely the reverse of the truth. We patently remember the “Montreal Massacre” largely because the deaths of fourteen women count more to us than the random deaths of a thousand. Similarly, the Vietnam Memorial in Washington includes one monument listing the names of all 50,000-odd Americans who died in Vietnam—and a second monument commemorating exclusively the eight female nurses who died. One woman counts as 7,000 men.
Second, Marc Lepine’s crime is remembered because it is news. And news generally means “man bites dog.” It is memorable precisely because it is so unusual. We are accustomed to men being separated out of larger groups to be shot. That is war everywhere. Can you think of another instance in which women were singled out to be shot? This is the shocking exception.
One woman counts as perhaps a million men.
That is the real lesson of the Montreal Massacre.
It is not that women are endangered by violence, or that women are commonly thought of as less than men.
Rather, the Montreal Massacre is the exception that proves the rule. Our extravagant reaction to it shows this.
Friday, December 03, 2004
Safe Sex Muslim Style
I was reading the local paper the other day, and saw a map of AIDS distribution. It was pretty striking. Sub-Saharan Africa: huge number of AIDS cases. 25,400,000. India and Southeast Asia: huge number of AIDS cases, growing rapidly. 7,100,000. And sitting there in the middle, the Muslim Middle East: 540,000 AIDS cases, growing slowly. And a large whack of those are supposedly from the sub-Saharan, non-Muslim portion of the Sudan.
This is the lowest incidence of AIDS in any comparably-sized part of the world. And with very little in the way of natural barriers to the disease's spread.
So what can make the difference?
One obvious possibility is that anti-AIDS education in the Muslim world doesn't even mention contraception--it's entirely abstinence-based. "In contrast to the case in Western countries, where youngesters are taught about safe sex, Dr. Khazaal [Dr. Zainab Khazaal, in charge of AIDS education for the UAE] said that in the UAE teenagers were discouraged from having premarital relationships in the first place."
The solution is so obvious, isn't it?
And these figures suggest that current sex education in North America must be actually helping AIDS spread, by falsely assuring students that they can safety have sex. "Safe sex," that's the slogan.
Of course, the abstinence programmes are stronger if they are backed up by the rest of society. Dr. Khazaal credits "strong moral and religious education programmes," and explains that "the religious teachings and the conservatism of the culture has prevented a fast spread of the disease." "We highlight abiding by our religious ...norms." (data and quotations from Gulf News, December 1, 2004. Their own source for AIDS figures is given as UNAIDS/WHO.)
This is the lowest incidence of AIDS in any comparably-sized part of the world. And with very little in the way of natural barriers to the disease's spread.
So what can make the difference?
One obvious possibility is that anti-AIDS education in the Muslim world doesn't even mention contraception--it's entirely abstinence-based. "In contrast to the case in Western countries, where youngesters are taught about safe sex, Dr. Khazaal [Dr. Zainab Khazaal, in charge of AIDS education for the UAE] said that in the UAE teenagers were discouraged from having premarital relationships in the first place."
The solution is so obvious, isn't it?
And these figures suggest that current sex education in North America must be actually helping AIDS spread, by falsely assuring students that they can safety have sex. "Safe sex," that's the slogan.
Of course, the abstinence programmes are stronger if they are backed up by the rest of society. Dr. Khazaal credits "strong moral and religious education programmes," and explains that "the religious teachings and the conservatism of the culture has prevented a fast spread of the disease." "We highlight abiding by our religious ...norms." (data and quotations from Gulf News, December 1, 2004. Their own source for AIDS figures is given as UNAIDS/WHO.)
Wednesday, December 01, 2004
Code Breaking
Like its predecessor, Angels and Demons, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is full of errors.
Lots of other articles and web sites have pointed many of these errors out. But what the heck, since I’ve just gone through what I spotted in Angels and Demons, why not do the Da Vinci Code at the same time?
Start with the blurbs: “Several doctorates’ worth of fascinating history and learned speculation.” –Chicago Tribune.
Heaven help us. But it’s probably true.
“All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.”
p. 61: “Early religion was based on the divine order of Nature.”
Early religion may or may not have had a concept comparable to our “nature.” My bet is that it did not. “Nature” as we understand it is, I think, peculiar to our culture, and invented by the Romantic movement in the late eighteenth century. The closest the ancients probably came to it was something more like “desolation” or “howling wilderness.”
p. 61: The pentacle is a goddess symbol.
The pentacle is called, in the Jewish tradition, the star of Solomon, as opposed to the six-pointed star of David. Here it is a symbol of Solomon and of Judaism, obviously not of the goddess Venus. It is also common in many flags: in the flag of the US and EU, for example. It is improbable that, in these cases, it is meant to be either a symbol of the Goddess or a Satanic symbol. It is also, as Solomon’s star, a symbol of Islam, and is common in Muslim flags, most notably the flag of Morocco.
While it could also represent Venus, Brown is way off to say it must represent Venus, and miss all these (mostly more common) associations.
Brown ignores or fails to understand something absolutely basic to symbols and “symbology.” Symbols are multivalent: they never have just one meaning. If they do, they are signs, not symbols.
Neither is the planet Venus as the morning star necessarily a symbol of the pagan goddess Venus. In Christian tradition, the morning star can be either a symbol of Mary or of Lucifer. And of course, other cultures have any number of other associations.
The association with Lucifer may be why the pentacle is often a satanic symbol in Europe.
Therefore, Brown is also wrong when he says:
p. 62: “the pentacle’s demonic interpretation is historically inaccurate.”
Again, Brown misunderstands a symbol as a sign.
p. 172: Brown refers to paganism as “matriarchal.”
This is fiction. Ancient Greece was no more “matriarchal” than Christian Greece.
p. 173: “During three hundred years of witch hunts, the Church burned at the stake an astounding five million women.”
Astounding indeed. The witch hunts were more active in Protestant lands; and the total toll throughout Europe was probably about 50,000 over the three centuries. Few witch burnings even in Catholic countries involved the Catholic Church. A quarter of those convicted were men. And few were pagans, as Brown claims.
p. 174: “The once hallowed act if Hieros Gamos—the natural sexual union between man and woman through which each became spiritually whole—had been recast as a shameful act. Holy men who had once required sexual union with their female counterparts to commune with God now feared their natural sexual urges…”
“Hieros Gamos,” the sacred marriage, was generally not a literal sex act, but an allegory.
Nor does goddess worship necessarily go with more sexual activity. While there was such a thing as temple prostitution, in pagan Greece and Rome, priests of the goddesses also commonly castrated themselves. So the genuinely religious were still those who abjured sex. For Buddhism, all sex is wrong. Christianity stood apart from Gnosticism, its chief historical rival, precisely in not seeing sex as intrinsically shameful.
p. 174: “Mother Earth had become a man’s world, and the gods of destruction and war were taking their toll.” In “…testosterone-fuelled wars.”
The association of the male with war would have been a surprise to the pagans. There was a goddess as well as a god of war. The Amazons, supposedly all female, were noted for their bellicosity. And Aristotle observes that warlike polises are usually dominated by women.
It would also have been a surprise to the ancients that the rise of Christianity meant the rise of the “gods [note plural] of destruction and war.” Indeed, Christianity seemed to lead to a notable reduction in the prestige of war and of the soldier. Christianity was unpopular in the legions. Soldiers were generally strong adherents of Mithraism.
p. 191: of Da Vinci’s Madonna of the Rocks: “Oddly, though, rather than the usual Jesus-blessing-John scenario, it was baby John who was blessing Jesus … and Jesus was submitting to his authority.”
Surprising only to someone who has never read the Bible. For this is exactly how it happens in the Bible. John baptizes Jesus. It would be odd to see it the other way around.
p. 200-201: “The head of this key was not the traditional long-stemmed Christian cross but rather was a square cross—… This kind of cross carried none of the Christian connotations of crucifixion associated with the longer-stemmed Latin cross…”
Square crosses are common in Christianity; they mean the same thing as those with one longer arm. Either version is mostly a symbol; as far as we know, the actual cross used for crucifixions was T-shaped.
p. 201: “equal-armed crosses like this one are considered peaceful crosses.”
The Maltese Knights, the most famous surviving Christian military order, use an equal-armed cross. The German Iron Cross, originally the insignia of the Teutonic Knights, is also equal-armed. So is Britain’s Victoria Cross.
If anything, Brown has it backwards. But the distinction is imaginary. An equal-armed cross is a Christian cross.
p. 225: “[D]oes it make any sense that it [the Grail] is merely a cup? If so, then certainly other relics should generate similar or greater interest—the Crown of Thorns, the True Cross of the crucifixion, the Titulus—and yet, they do not. Throughout history, the Holy Grail has been the most special.”
For one simple reason: the crown of thorns, the true cross, and the titulus have already turned up. Only the Grail is still missing. It is not necessary to seek what has already been found.
And the fact that no phony “Grail” has ever popped up makes one suspect that the other relics, in turn, are not faked, as cynics commonly assume. Otherwise why has nobody successfully faked a Grail?
p. 267: “Silas fell to his knees… and he said ‘I am a lamb of God. Shepherd me as your heart commands.’”
No real Catholic is likely to speak like this. “Lamb of God” is a title of Christ, used every mass in the formula “Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world.” It would seem blasphemous to use it for oneself.
Dan Brown should really not write so much about the Catholic Church until he at least attends a mass.
p. 306: “… looked like they’d been lifted from some Byzantine temple.”
Constantine, the emperor who founded Byzantium (as Constantinople), was also the emperor who endorsed Christianity as the religion of the Empire. Accordingly, a “Byzantine temple” would be almost a contradiction in terms. There must have been precious few temples in Byzantium, ever.
p. 314: “Egyptian sun disks became the halos of Catholic saints.”
Possibly. But how did they (halos) manage to appear in Buddhist art in East Asia as well?
p. 314: “The new-born Krishna was presented with gold, frankincense, and myrrh.”
I think I have read all the Vedic accounts of the birth and childhood of Krishna while in grad school. This is sure news to me. Might it show up in some more recent version influenced by Christianity?
p. 315: “Until that moment in history [the Council of Nicaea] Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet.”
The major controversy at Nicaea was whether Jesus was of one nature or two. Two won. But both parties held him to be divine; the question was whether he was also fully human. That he is divine is clear throughout the New Testament, which predates the Council of Nicaea.
p. 317: “The Dead Sea Scrolls … speak of Christ’s ministry in very human terms. Of course the Vatican… tried very hard to suppress the release of these scrolls.”
The Dead Sea Scrolls contain no clear references to Jesus. And they have never been in the Vatican’s possession. They were held by Israeli Jewish scholars, over whom the Vatican is unlikely to have had much influence.
p. 327: “the one seated in the place of honour, at the right hand of the Lord [in Da Vinci’s The Last Supper] … was, without a doubt … female.”
He does look effeminate. This is commonly understood to be John the Evangelist, “the one Jesus loved,” and follows the usual iconography: young, with flowing red hair.
In a common devotional practice, Catholics read and have read the Gospel of John imagining themselves in John’s place as “the one Jesus loved.” As such an everyman or everywomen figure, John can be imagined as of either sex. As the individual soul is in Catholic tradition thought of as naturally female, female features are iconographically appropriate.
Nothing that strange about it. There are similar female “everywoman” figures in Raphael’s paintings.
If the figure is Mary Magdalene, we have an obvious problem: where is the apostle John?
p. 340: “A child of Jesus would undermine the critical notion of Christ’s divinity…”
Then why wouldn’t the idea of God having a Son undermine His divinity?
p. 357: “The millennium has recently passed, and with it has ended the two-thousand-year-long astrological Age of Pisces…”
This is a New Age idea, not a Catholic one; Brown acknowledges this later. And it is untrue. The cusp of the Age of Aquarius does not correspond with the end of the Christian second millennium. As I recall, we still have about three hundred years to go.
p. 410: “Since the days of Isis, sex rites had been considered man’s only bridge from earth to heaven… a climactic instant when his mind went totally blank and he could see God.”
As noted before, as far as we know, this has never been seriously and literally believed anywhere. At least before Freud.
p. 411: “Early Jews believed that the Holy of Holies in Solomon’s Temple housed not only God, but also His powerful female equal, Shekinah.”
The Shekinah was one of God’s ten emanations, a “name” of God, not an independent, equal being.
p. 419: “The modern belief in a horned devil known as Satan could be traced back to Baphomet and the Church’s attempts to recast the horned fertility god as a symbol of evil.”
Nobody knows what “Baphomet” looked like; most likely the name is a corruption of “Muhammed.” The horned image of the devil probably comes from the Greek god Pan. Pan was not a nice guy. Note the word “panic.”
In his bias toward paganism, Brown seems unaware that the relationship of pagans to their gods was not like that of a Christian toward God. Pagan gods are not generally loved. They are feared and placated.
p. 453: “The boxy annex jutting out to the right was an unfortunate eyesore, although it did little to shroud the original pagan shape [i.e., circular] of the primary structure [the Templar church in London].”
Circular churches are not too unusual in Europe. The Templars’ churches were usually circular. My guess is that they were circular in imitation of the Dome of the Rock, the modern Temple of Jerusalem, which was after all what the Templars existed to protect.
p. 501: Brown’s Boolean search here seems to make no distinction between “and” and “or.” It would not work in practice.
I guess that’s it. Brown is fascinating, as a mirror held up to the culture. But it is scary that so many people seem to believe he speaks with some authority on history, symbols, religion, or culture.
Lots of other articles and web sites have pointed many of these errors out. But what the heck, since I’ve just gone through what I spotted in Angels and Demons, why not do the Da Vinci Code at the same time?
Start with the blurbs: “Several doctorates’ worth of fascinating history and learned speculation.” –Chicago Tribune.
Heaven help us. But it’s probably true.
“All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.”
p. 61: “Early religion was based on the divine order of Nature.”
Early religion may or may not have had a concept comparable to our “nature.” My bet is that it did not. “Nature” as we understand it is, I think, peculiar to our culture, and invented by the Romantic movement in the late eighteenth century. The closest the ancients probably came to it was something more like “desolation” or “howling wilderness.”
p. 61: The pentacle is a goddess symbol.
The pentacle is called, in the Jewish tradition, the star of Solomon, as opposed to the six-pointed star of David. Here it is a symbol of Solomon and of Judaism, obviously not of the goddess Venus. It is also common in many flags: in the flag of the US and EU, for example. It is improbable that, in these cases, it is meant to be either a symbol of the Goddess or a Satanic symbol. It is also, as Solomon’s star, a symbol of Islam, and is common in Muslim flags, most notably the flag of Morocco.
While it could also represent Venus, Brown is way off to say it must represent Venus, and miss all these (mostly more common) associations.
Brown ignores or fails to understand something absolutely basic to symbols and “symbology.” Symbols are multivalent: they never have just one meaning. If they do, they are signs, not symbols.
Neither is the planet Venus as the morning star necessarily a symbol of the pagan goddess Venus. In Christian tradition, the morning star can be either a symbol of Mary or of Lucifer. And of course, other cultures have any number of other associations.
The association with Lucifer may be why the pentacle is often a satanic symbol in Europe.
Therefore, Brown is also wrong when he says:
p. 62: “the pentacle’s demonic interpretation is historically inaccurate.”
Again, Brown misunderstands a symbol as a sign.
p. 172: Brown refers to paganism as “matriarchal.”
This is fiction. Ancient Greece was no more “matriarchal” than Christian Greece.
p. 173: “During three hundred years of witch hunts, the Church burned at the stake an astounding five million women.”
Astounding indeed. The witch hunts were more active in Protestant lands; and the total toll throughout Europe was probably about 50,000 over the three centuries. Few witch burnings even in Catholic countries involved the Catholic Church. A quarter of those convicted were men. And few were pagans, as Brown claims.
p. 174: “The once hallowed act if Hieros Gamos—the natural sexual union between man and woman through which each became spiritually whole—had been recast as a shameful act. Holy men who had once required sexual union with their female counterparts to commune with God now feared their natural sexual urges…”
“Hieros Gamos,” the sacred marriage, was generally not a literal sex act, but an allegory.
Nor does goddess worship necessarily go with more sexual activity. While there was such a thing as temple prostitution, in pagan Greece and Rome, priests of the goddesses also commonly castrated themselves. So the genuinely religious were still those who abjured sex. For Buddhism, all sex is wrong. Christianity stood apart from Gnosticism, its chief historical rival, precisely in not seeing sex as intrinsically shameful.
p. 174: “Mother Earth had become a man’s world, and the gods of destruction and war were taking their toll.” In “…testosterone-fuelled wars.”
The association of the male with war would have been a surprise to the pagans. There was a goddess as well as a god of war. The Amazons, supposedly all female, were noted for their bellicosity. And Aristotle observes that warlike polises are usually dominated by women.
It would also have been a surprise to the ancients that the rise of Christianity meant the rise of the “gods [note plural] of destruction and war.” Indeed, Christianity seemed to lead to a notable reduction in the prestige of war and of the soldier. Christianity was unpopular in the legions. Soldiers were generally strong adherents of Mithraism.
p. 191: of Da Vinci’s Madonna of the Rocks: “Oddly, though, rather than the usual Jesus-blessing-John scenario, it was baby John who was blessing Jesus … and Jesus was submitting to his authority.”
Surprising only to someone who has never read the Bible. For this is exactly how it happens in the Bible. John baptizes Jesus. It would be odd to see it the other way around.
p. 200-201: “The head of this key was not the traditional long-stemmed Christian cross but rather was a square cross—… This kind of cross carried none of the Christian connotations of crucifixion associated with the longer-stemmed Latin cross…”
Square crosses are common in Christianity; they mean the same thing as those with one longer arm. Either version is mostly a symbol; as far as we know, the actual cross used for crucifixions was T-shaped.
p. 201: “equal-armed crosses like this one are considered peaceful crosses.”
The Maltese Knights, the most famous surviving Christian military order, use an equal-armed cross. The German Iron Cross, originally the insignia of the Teutonic Knights, is also equal-armed. So is Britain’s Victoria Cross.
If anything, Brown has it backwards. But the distinction is imaginary. An equal-armed cross is a Christian cross.
p. 225: “[D]oes it make any sense that it [the Grail] is merely a cup? If so, then certainly other relics should generate similar or greater interest—the Crown of Thorns, the True Cross of the crucifixion, the Titulus—and yet, they do not. Throughout history, the Holy Grail has been the most special.”
For one simple reason: the crown of thorns, the true cross, and the titulus have already turned up. Only the Grail is still missing. It is not necessary to seek what has already been found.
And the fact that no phony “Grail” has ever popped up makes one suspect that the other relics, in turn, are not faked, as cynics commonly assume. Otherwise why has nobody successfully faked a Grail?
p. 267: “Silas fell to his knees… and he said ‘I am a lamb of God. Shepherd me as your heart commands.’”
No real Catholic is likely to speak like this. “Lamb of God” is a title of Christ, used every mass in the formula “Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world.” It would seem blasphemous to use it for oneself.
Dan Brown should really not write so much about the Catholic Church until he at least attends a mass.
p. 306: “… looked like they’d been lifted from some Byzantine temple.”
Constantine, the emperor who founded Byzantium (as Constantinople), was also the emperor who endorsed Christianity as the religion of the Empire. Accordingly, a “Byzantine temple” would be almost a contradiction in terms. There must have been precious few temples in Byzantium, ever.
p. 314: “Egyptian sun disks became the halos of Catholic saints.”
Possibly. But how did they (halos) manage to appear in Buddhist art in East Asia as well?
p. 314: “The new-born Krishna was presented with gold, frankincense, and myrrh.”
I think I have read all the Vedic accounts of the birth and childhood of Krishna while in grad school. This is sure news to me. Might it show up in some more recent version influenced by Christianity?
p. 315: “Until that moment in history [the Council of Nicaea] Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet.”
The major controversy at Nicaea was whether Jesus was of one nature or two. Two won. But both parties held him to be divine; the question was whether he was also fully human. That he is divine is clear throughout the New Testament, which predates the Council of Nicaea.
p. 317: “The Dead Sea Scrolls … speak of Christ’s ministry in very human terms. Of course the Vatican… tried very hard to suppress the release of these scrolls.”
The Dead Sea Scrolls contain no clear references to Jesus. And they have never been in the Vatican’s possession. They were held by Israeli Jewish scholars, over whom the Vatican is unlikely to have had much influence.
p. 327: “the one seated in the place of honour, at the right hand of the Lord [in Da Vinci’s The Last Supper] … was, without a doubt … female.”
He does look effeminate. This is commonly understood to be John the Evangelist, “the one Jesus loved,” and follows the usual iconography: young, with flowing red hair.
In a common devotional practice, Catholics read and have read the Gospel of John imagining themselves in John’s place as “the one Jesus loved.” As such an everyman or everywomen figure, John can be imagined as of either sex. As the individual soul is in Catholic tradition thought of as naturally female, female features are iconographically appropriate.
Nothing that strange about it. There are similar female “everywoman” figures in Raphael’s paintings.
If the figure is Mary Magdalene, we have an obvious problem: where is the apostle John?
p. 340: “A child of Jesus would undermine the critical notion of Christ’s divinity…”
Then why wouldn’t the idea of God having a Son undermine His divinity?
p. 357: “The millennium has recently passed, and with it has ended the two-thousand-year-long astrological Age of Pisces…”
This is a New Age idea, not a Catholic one; Brown acknowledges this later. And it is untrue. The cusp of the Age of Aquarius does not correspond with the end of the Christian second millennium. As I recall, we still have about three hundred years to go.
p. 410: “Since the days of Isis, sex rites had been considered man’s only bridge from earth to heaven… a climactic instant when his mind went totally blank and he could see God.”
As noted before, as far as we know, this has never been seriously and literally believed anywhere. At least before Freud.
p. 411: “Early Jews believed that the Holy of Holies in Solomon’s Temple housed not only God, but also His powerful female equal, Shekinah.”
The Shekinah was one of God’s ten emanations, a “name” of God, not an independent, equal being.
p. 419: “The modern belief in a horned devil known as Satan could be traced back to Baphomet and the Church’s attempts to recast the horned fertility god as a symbol of evil.”
Nobody knows what “Baphomet” looked like; most likely the name is a corruption of “Muhammed.” The horned image of the devil probably comes from the Greek god Pan. Pan was not a nice guy. Note the word “panic.”
In his bias toward paganism, Brown seems unaware that the relationship of pagans to their gods was not like that of a Christian toward God. Pagan gods are not generally loved. They are feared and placated.
p. 453: “The boxy annex jutting out to the right was an unfortunate eyesore, although it did little to shroud the original pagan shape [i.e., circular] of the primary structure [the Templar church in London].”
Circular churches are not too unusual in Europe. The Templars’ churches were usually circular. My guess is that they were circular in imitation of the Dome of the Rock, the modern Temple of Jerusalem, which was after all what the Templars existed to protect.
p. 501: Brown’s Boolean search here seems to make no distinction between “and” and “or.” It would not work in practice.
I guess that’s it. Brown is fascinating, as a mirror held up to the culture. But it is scary that so many people seem to believe he speaks with some authority on history, symbols, religion, or culture.
Friday, November 26, 2004
The Trials of Expat Life
A local organization of expats with which I am involved is big on environmentalism. Every year, they put aside a day for going out into the countryside and cleaning up garbage. More recently, they have organized a recycling bin for a local school, to collect used newspapers.
But it is apparently a constant struggle. The problem is, they can’t find any garbage. Pakistanis come around on bicycles and snatch up anything that is reusable.
The troublemakers. How is one to launch a proper recycling programme in the circumstances?
Bears pondering.
But it is apparently a constant struggle. The problem is, they can’t find any garbage. Pakistanis come around on bicycles and snatch up anything that is reusable.
The troublemakers. How is one to launch a proper recycling programme in the circumstances?
Bears pondering.
Thursday, November 25, 2004
Angels, Demons, and Dan Brown
Dan Brown gets much credit for the research that goes into his books.
An Author's Note at the beginning of Angels & Demons claims "references to all works of art, tombs, tunnels, and architecture in Rome are entirely factual (as are their exact locations). They can still be seen today."
Not. Dan Brown is instead a fascinating study in the current popular mythology.
Page 31: "Outspoken scientists like Copernicus-- …Were murdered…. Murdered by the church…"
Copernicus remained a Catholic canon and priest in good standing throughout his scientific career. His books were published at the urging of prominent churchmen. He was not murdered.
Page 31 (and repeated often as a basic premise of the book): "Since the beginning of history, … a deep rift has existed between science and religion."
In fact, until recently--the last hundred and fifty years or so--no difference was seen between the two. As Arthur Koestler has shown, most significant scientists up to the present day have been devout.
Page 37: of Satanism: "The rumours of satanic … animal sacrifices …were nothing but lies spread by the church as a smear campaign…"
Animal sacrifice remains a part of satanism and shamanism today.
Page 39: "It seemed there was always close correlation between true believers and high body counts." (and a claim that religion led to "an ignorant future of senseless holy wars.")
The term "true believer," from a book of the 1950s, refers not to religious believers, but those who hold to a political ideology as if it were a religion: Fascists and Marxists.
There have been few real "religious wars." Consider the obvious high body counts of the last century. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Saddam, Rwanda. These were non- or even anti-religious, not religious, movements.
Even the IRA and the PLO--hence the current conflicts in Northern Ireland and Palestine--are explicitly secular and Marxist, not religious.
Page 46: "…half the schools in your country [the USA] are not allowed to teach evolution."
Evolution is taught in all US public schools.
Page 50: Hatha yoga is referred to as "The ancient Buddhist art of meditative stretching."
Hatha yoga is a Hindu, not a Buddhist, tradition.
Page 65: A Muslim is represented as thinking: "In his country women were possessions. Weak. Tools of pleasure. Chattel to be traded like livestock. And they understood their place."
As a description of the treatment of women in Muslim countries, this is absurd. Not to mention racist.
Page 110: Native Americans are represented as referring to God as "her," and as "Mother Earth."
While Native American religions commonly had an earth goddess, she was never the supreme being, only one god among many. The supreme being was male: the Great Spirit.
Page 111: The pyramid and all-seeing eye on the US dollar bill is Masonic.
This is no more than an interesting speculation.
The all-seeing eye in a triangle or pyramid, as a Christian symbol of God the Father, long predates Freemasonry.
Page 112: "Novus Ordo Seclorum … means New Secular Order…Secular as in nonreligious."
It does not mean secular as in nonreligious. It means something like "A New Order of the Ages."
Henry Wallace and Franklin Roosevelt are the source of the design of the Great Seal and the US dollar bill.
It was actually designed in 1782.
Page 158: "Church attendance is at an all-time low--down forty-six percent in the last decade."--according to an anonymous caller (The Assassin?) speaking to the Papal chamberlain.
This might be true of Italy specifically, but worldwide, attendance at Catholic churches is rising.
Page 165: "His Holiness once told me that a Pope is a man torn between two worlds … the real world and the divine."
To a Pope, the divine world is the real one.
p. 169: “Olivetti looked the camerlengo dead in the eye. ‘The prayer of St. Francis, signore. Do you recall it?’
…’God grant me strength to accept those things I cannot change.’”
The “Prayer of St. Francis” is quite different: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace…” This looks like a form of the Alcoholics Anonymous “Serenity Prayer,” by Niebuhr.
Page 174: Langdon assumes the murder of four cardinals will discredit the Catholic Church in the popular mind. "If the faith of a priest did not protect him from the evils of Satan, what hope was there for the rest of us?'
Brown overlooks the cult of martyrs and Jesus's crucifixion. If this logic held, Christianity would never have begun.
Page 177: Brown refers to "unpublished books of the Bible" held in the Secret Archives of the Vatican.
There are no unpublished books of the Bible. The Bible as we know it is those writings the Church chose as canonical. If a book is not included, it is necessarily not part of the Bible.
Page 224: The Pantheon "got its name from the original religion practiced there-Pantheism--the worship of all gods, specifically the pagan gods of Mother Earth."
The original religion practiced in the Pantheon was not pantheism, but polytheism.
Pantheism is not the worship of "all gods," but the belief that god is coterminous with the created universe--that "all is God" or "God is all."
The gods worshipped at the Pantheon were in no sense "of Mother Earth." Gaea was a minor deity, not even a member of the official pantheon. The creator God was Saturn, and the chief god was Zeus--both male.
Page 225: "Langdon had been amazed to learn that the dimensions of the Pantheon's main chamber were a tribute to Gaea--the goddess of the Earth. The proportions were so exact that a giant spherical globe could fit perfectly inside the building with less than a millimeter to spare."
Name me a globe that is not spherical.
This simply means the Pantheon's dimensions are those of a perfect sphere. This is a tribute to geometry as eternal truth. It has nothing to do with the Earth, generally understood by the ancients as the realm of imperfection, in contrast to the pure world of geometry and logic.
Page 239: Pagan gods are described as "Gods of Nature and Earth."
The pagan gods had nothing in particular to do with nature or the earth. The ancients held nature and the earth in no higher esteem than we do--rather less, in fact.
Langdon translates the inscription on the Pantheon to read "Marcus Agrippa, Consul for the third time, built this," and muses "So much for humility."
The Pantheon was actually built by Hadrian, who refused, out of modesty, to put his own name on any of his projects. He credited Marcus Agrippa, builder of an earlier version, instead.
Page 243: "According to the Bible, Christ was born in March."
There is no indication in the Bible of when Jesus was born. But the choice of December is not random; it fits with an earlier tradition of the time of the Annunciation--counting nine months forward.
Page 243: "The practice of 'god-eating'--that is, Holy Communion--was borrowed from the Aztecs."
Communion dates back to the first century AD. There was no significant contact between the Americas and Europe or Asia until 1492. Aztec civilization did not yet exist in the first century AD.
Ritually eating God was familiar wherever there was a god of grain or harvest: which is to say, throughout the ancient world.
p. 255: of Churchill: "Staunch Catholic, by the way."
There is no way Churshill was Catholic. I assume he was Church of England, but for a Catholic to have been British Prime Minister in the 1930s would have been a cause celebre. There were rumblings even recently over speculation that Tony Blair might convert.
P. 262: "the ancient myth of Daedalus, how the boy kept one hand one the wall as he moved through the Minotaur's labyrinth..."
Brown may be relying on some minor tradition, but in the most familiar version of the myth, Daedalus is the builder of the labyrinth. It is Theseus who solves the puzzle, by unravelling a thread.
p. 284: "Two pyramids, each with a shining elliptical medallion. They were about as un-Christian as sculpture could get."
As noted, the pyramid is an ancient symbol of God the Father. A church spire is a pyramid.
p. 290: a BBC reporter comments, on a big story, "I'll be taking the Pulitzer with me."
He would not be eligible. The Pulitzer is an American prize, for American reporting.
p. 290-1. The hero, Langdon, "scanned the rooftops for a church steeple or bell tower…. He knew, of course, that not all churches would have visible spires, especially smaller, out-of-the-way sanctuaries."
Like, say, St. Peter's Basilica, or St. John's Lateran.
Almost no churches in Rome have spires. Spires are Gothic; Rome's churches are Renaissance and Baroque.
p. 294: Referring to St. Peter's Square, the hero, Langdon, comments that it has no statues.
It is surrounded by statues of the saints. Large statues of Sts. Peter and Paul stand at the west side of the square.
p. 294: A Vatican guard explains "Most maps show St. Peter's Square as part of Vatican City, but because it's outside the walled city, Roman officials for centuries have claimed it as part of Rome."
Vatican City, and its legal boundary, has existed only since 1929--less than a century.
p. 295: Bernini's Respiro di Dio or West Pomente, at the base of the monolith in St. Peter's Square, is cited.
The guard describes it as "the image of a billowing gust of wind."
Who has seen the wind? What does it look like?
p. 337: "Though brilliantly rendered, the statue [Bernini's The Ecstasy of St. Theresa] depicted St. Theresa on her back in the throes of a toe-curling orgasm."
How does one know, by looking, that someone is experiencing an orgasm? According to St. Theresa's own testimony, what she felt was intense pain.
The statue shows St. Theresa seated, leaning backward.
p. 338: "St. Theresa was a nun sainted after she claimed an angel had paid her a blissful visit in her sleep."
And Albert Einstein was a patent clerk.
St. Theresa was a doctor of the church--that is, one of the church's most important theologians--and founder of the Carmelite order.
Nobody is made a saint during their lifetime.
p. 338, speaking of the same statue: "Even the type of angel Bernini had selected seemed significant. It's a seraphim, Langdon realized. Seraphim literally means 'the fiery one.'"
Seraphim is plural; the singular is seraph or saraph. Brown also uses "Illuminati," elsewhere, as a singular.
There is no iconographic reason to assume the angel in Bernini's statue is a seraph.
p. 341: the chamberlain, a Catholic priest, refers to the late pope as "Supreme father."
This would be blasphemy to a Catholic. The supreme father is God.
p. 355: "The church (Santa Maria della Vittoria) is on Piazza Barberini."
It is on Piazza San Bernardo.
Note the preface: "references to all works of art, tombs, tunnels, and architecture in Rome are entirely factual (as are their exact locations)."
p. 363: "Langdon realized that despite the encroachment of modern buildings, the piazza (Barberini) still looked remarkably elliptical."
Piazza Barberini is triangular. Piazza San Bernardo is a square.
p. 398: Brown has the arrow of the angel in the “Ecstasy of St. Theresa” pointing west.
It points north.
p. 399: "What figure would Bernini have carved as a glorification of water. Neptune and Apollo? Unfortunately that statue was in London's Victoria & Albert Museum."
Bernini carved perhaps a dozen fountains throughout Rome. All of them were glorifications of water. Trevi Fountain seems pretty obvious, with Neptune guiding his chariot over the waves, flanked by tritons and sea horses.
p. 402: "A flawless tribute to water, Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers glorified the four major rivers of the Old World--The Nile, Ganges, Danube, and Rio Plata."
The Rio Plata is in South America, between Uruguay and Argentina.
p. 424: "The lone dove is the pagan symbol for the Angel of Peace."
Angels are a Semitic concept; there are no pagan angels. The dove representing peace is a specifically Christian image: the Holy Spirit as "the comforter."
p. 473: "no crucifixion … could possibly match the scope and drama of this very moment."
A bit over the top for a book on the Catholic Church. Bigger than the crucifixion?
p. 484: "Each of us is a God, Buddha had said."
Buddha said nothing like this. His main metaphysical doctrine was "Anatta": literally, "there is no self." Which seems the polar opposite of this assertion.
p. 488: "The early Christians had believed in the resurrection of the flesh."
All Christians believe in this, or are supposed to. It's in the Apostles' Creed.
p. 519: "by Holy Law the camerlengo is ineligible for election to the papacy. He is not a cardinal."
There is no such requirement. Not all popes have been cardinals.
p. 534: "for centuries…science has picked away at religion…condemning religion as the opiate of the masses."
This is from Marx, who was a political philosopher, not a scientist.
p. 535: The papal chamberlain says "Headlines carried science's miracles every day. How long had it been for religion? Centuries?"
More like minutes or seconds. According to the Catholic Church, miracles are common and happening all the time. It is necessary to document miracles for canonization.
p. 558-9: "Although an unlikely candidate, Mortati was chosen by an unprecedented unanimous vote by the College of Cardinals."
The actual vote totals in papal elections are never revealed. Even if they had been in this instance, there is no way anyone could know if this was unprecedented.
All this is just what I caught in a cursory reading, without research. Some distortions might perhaps be necessary to fit the plot. But a lot of this is certainly unnecessary and speaks of ignorance and sloppy research. Consider too: this book must have gone through editing. Imagine how many more mistakes the editors must have caught.
An Author's Note at the beginning of Angels & Demons claims "references to all works of art, tombs, tunnels, and architecture in Rome are entirely factual (as are their exact locations). They can still be seen today."
Not. Dan Brown is instead a fascinating study in the current popular mythology.
Page 31: "Outspoken scientists like Copernicus-- …Were murdered…. Murdered by the church…"
Copernicus remained a Catholic canon and priest in good standing throughout his scientific career. His books were published at the urging of prominent churchmen. He was not murdered.
Page 31 (and repeated often as a basic premise of the book): "Since the beginning of history, … a deep rift has existed between science and religion."
In fact, until recently--the last hundred and fifty years or so--no difference was seen between the two. As Arthur Koestler has shown, most significant scientists up to the present day have been devout.
Page 37: of Satanism: "The rumours of satanic … animal sacrifices …were nothing but lies spread by the church as a smear campaign…"
Animal sacrifice remains a part of satanism and shamanism today.
Page 39: "It seemed there was always close correlation between true believers and high body counts." (and a claim that religion led to "an ignorant future of senseless holy wars.")
The term "true believer," from a book of the 1950s, refers not to religious believers, but those who hold to a political ideology as if it were a religion: Fascists and Marxists.
There have been few real "religious wars." Consider the obvious high body counts of the last century. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Saddam, Rwanda. These were non- or even anti-religious, not religious, movements.
Even the IRA and the PLO--hence the current conflicts in Northern Ireland and Palestine--are explicitly secular and Marxist, not religious.
Page 46: "…half the schools in your country [the USA] are not allowed to teach evolution."
Evolution is taught in all US public schools.
Page 50: Hatha yoga is referred to as "The ancient Buddhist art of meditative stretching."
Hatha yoga is a Hindu, not a Buddhist, tradition.
Page 65: A Muslim is represented as thinking: "In his country women were possessions. Weak. Tools of pleasure. Chattel to be traded like livestock. And they understood their place."
As a description of the treatment of women in Muslim countries, this is absurd. Not to mention racist.
Page 110: Native Americans are represented as referring to God as "her," and as "Mother Earth."
While Native American religions commonly had an earth goddess, she was never the supreme being, only one god among many. The supreme being was male: the Great Spirit.
Page 111: The pyramid and all-seeing eye on the US dollar bill is Masonic.
This is no more than an interesting speculation.
The all-seeing eye in a triangle or pyramid, as a Christian symbol of God the Father, long predates Freemasonry.
Page 112: "Novus Ordo Seclorum … means New Secular Order…Secular as in nonreligious."
It does not mean secular as in nonreligious. It means something like "A New Order of the Ages."
Henry Wallace and Franklin Roosevelt are the source of the design of the Great Seal and the US dollar bill.
It was actually designed in 1782.
Page 158: "Church attendance is at an all-time low--down forty-six percent in the last decade."--according to an anonymous caller (The Assassin?) speaking to the Papal chamberlain.
This might be true of Italy specifically, but worldwide, attendance at Catholic churches is rising.
Page 165: "His Holiness once told me that a Pope is a man torn between two worlds … the real world and the divine."
To a Pope, the divine world is the real one.
p. 169: “Olivetti looked the camerlengo dead in the eye. ‘The prayer of St. Francis, signore. Do you recall it?’
…’God grant me strength to accept those things I cannot change.’”
The “Prayer of St. Francis” is quite different: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace…” This looks like a form of the Alcoholics Anonymous “Serenity Prayer,” by Niebuhr.
Page 174: Langdon assumes the murder of four cardinals will discredit the Catholic Church in the popular mind. "If the faith of a priest did not protect him from the evils of Satan, what hope was there for the rest of us?'
Brown overlooks the cult of martyrs and Jesus's crucifixion. If this logic held, Christianity would never have begun.
Page 177: Brown refers to "unpublished books of the Bible" held in the Secret Archives of the Vatican.
There are no unpublished books of the Bible. The Bible as we know it is those writings the Church chose as canonical. If a book is not included, it is necessarily not part of the Bible.
Page 224: The Pantheon "got its name from the original religion practiced there-Pantheism--the worship of all gods, specifically the pagan gods of Mother Earth."
The original religion practiced in the Pantheon was not pantheism, but polytheism.
Pantheism is not the worship of "all gods," but the belief that god is coterminous with the created universe--that "all is God" or "God is all."
The gods worshipped at the Pantheon were in no sense "of Mother Earth." Gaea was a minor deity, not even a member of the official pantheon. The creator God was Saturn, and the chief god was Zeus--both male.
Page 225: "Langdon had been amazed to learn that the dimensions of the Pantheon's main chamber were a tribute to Gaea--the goddess of the Earth. The proportions were so exact that a giant spherical globe could fit perfectly inside the building with less than a millimeter to spare."
Name me a globe that is not spherical.
This simply means the Pantheon's dimensions are those of a perfect sphere. This is a tribute to geometry as eternal truth. It has nothing to do with the Earth, generally understood by the ancients as the realm of imperfection, in contrast to the pure world of geometry and logic.
Page 239: Pagan gods are described as "Gods of Nature and Earth."
The pagan gods had nothing in particular to do with nature or the earth. The ancients held nature and the earth in no higher esteem than we do--rather less, in fact.
Langdon translates the inscription on the Pantheon to read "Marcus Agrippa, Consul for the third time, built this," and muses "So much for humility."
The Pantheon was actually built by Hadrian, who refused, out of modesty, to put his own name on any of his projects. He credited Marcus Agrippa, builder of an earlier version, instead.
Page 243: "According to the Bible, Christ was born in March."
There is no indication in the Bible of when Jesus was born. But the choice of December is not random; it fits with an earlier tradition of the time of the Annunciation--counting nine months forward.
Page 243: "The practice of 'god-eating'--that is, Holy Communion--was borrowed from the Aztecs."
Communion dates back to the first century AD. There was no significant contact between the Americas and Europe or Asia until 1492. Aztec civilization did not yet exist in the first century AD.
Ritually eating God was familiar wherever there was a god of grain or harvest: which is to say, throughout the ancient world.
p. 255: of Churchill: "Staunch Catholic, by the way."
There is no way Churshill was Catholic. I assume he was Church of England, but for a Catholic to have been British Prime Minister in the 1930s would have been a cause celebre. There were rumblings even recently over speculation that Tony Blair might convert.
P. 262: "the ancient myth of Daedalus, how the boy kept one hand one the wall as he moved through the Minotaur's labyrinth..."
Brown may be relying on some minor tradition, but in the most familiar version of the myth, Daedalus is the builder of the labyrinth. It is Theseus who solves the puzzle, by unravelling a thread.
p. 284: "Two pyramids, each with a shining elliptical medallion. They were about as un-Christian as sculpture could get."
As noted, the pyramid is an ancient symbol of God the Father. A church spire is a pyramid.
p. 290: a BBC reporter comments, on a big story, "I'll be taking the Pulitzer with me."
He would not be eligible. The Pulitzer is an American prize, for American reporting.
p. 290-1. The hero, Langdon, "scanned the rooftops for a church steeple or bell tower…. He knew, of course, that not all churches would have visible spires, especially smaller, out-of-the-way sanctuaries."
Like, say, St. Peter's Basilica, or St. John's Lateran.
Almost no churches in Rome have spires. Spires are Gothic; Rome's churches are Renaissance and Baroque.
p. 294: Referring to St. Peter's Square, the hero, Langdon, comments that it has no statues.
It is surrounded by statues of the saints. Large statues of Sts. Peter and Paul stand at the west side of the square.
p. 294: A Vatican guard explains "Most maps show St. Peter's Square as part of Vatican City, but because it's outside the walled city, Roman officials for centuries have claimed it as part of Rome."
Vatican City, and its legal boundary, has existed only since 1929--less than a century.
p. 295: Bernini's Respiro di Dio or West Pomente, at the base of the monolith in St. Peter's Square, is cited.
The guard describes it as "the image of a billowing gust of wind."
Who has seen the wind? What does it look like?
p. 337: "Though brilliantly rendered, the statue [Bernini's The Ecstasy of St. Theresa] depicted St. Theresa on her back in the throes of a toe-curling orgasm."
How does one know, by looking, that someone is experiencing an orgasm? According to St. Theresa's own testimony, what she felt was intense pain.
The statue shows St. Theresa seated, leaning backward.
p. 338: "St. Theresa was a nun sainted after she claimed an angel had paid her a blissful visit in her sleep."
And Albert Einstein was a patent clerk.
St. Theresa was a doctor of the church--that is, one of the church's most important theologians--and founder of the Carmelite order.
Nobody is made a saint during their lifetime.
p. 338, speaking of the same statue: "Even the type of angel Bernini had selected seemed significant. It's a seraphim, Langdon realized. Seraphim literally means 'the fiery one.'"
Seraphim is plural; the singular is seraph or saraph. Brown also uses "Illuminati," elsewhere, as a singular.
There is no iconographic reason to assume the angel in Bernini's statue is a seraph.
p. 341: the chamberlain, a Catholic priest, refers to the late pope as "Supreme father."
This would be blasphemy to a Catholic. The supreme father is God.
p. 355: "The church (Santa Maria della Vittoria) is on Piazza Barberini."
It is on Piazza San Bernardo.
Note the preface: "references to all works of art, tombs, tunnels, and architecture in Rome are entirely factual (as are their exact locations)."
p. 363: "Langdon realized that despite the encroachment of modern buildings, the piazza (Barberini) still looked remarkably elliptical."
Piazza Barberini is triangular. Piazza San Bernardo is a square.
p. 398: Brown has the arrow of the angel in the “Ecstasy of St. Theresa” pointing west.
It points north.
p. 399: "What figure would Bernini have carved as a glorification of water. Neptune and Apollo? Unfortunately that statue was in London's Victoria & Albert Museum."
Bernini carved perhaps a dozen fountains throughout Rome. All of them were glorifications of water. Trevi Fountain seems pretty obvious, with Neptune guiding his chariot over the waves, flanked by tritons and sea horses.
p. 402: "A flawless tribute to water, Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers glorified the four major rivers of the Old World--The Nile, Ganges, Danube, and Rio Plata."
The Rio Plata is in South America, between Uruguay and Argentina.
p. 424: "The lone dove is the pagan symbol for the Angel of Peace."
Angels are a Semitic concept; there are no pagan angels. The dove representing peace is a specifically Christian image: the Holy Spirit as "the comforter."
p. 473: "no crucifixion … could possibly match the scope and drama of this very moment."
A bit over the top for a book on the Catholic Church. Bigger than the crucifixion?
p. 484: "Each of us is a God, Buddha had said."
Buddha said nothing like this. His main metaphysical doctrine was "Anatta": literally, "there is no self." Which seems the polar opposite of this assertion.
p. 488: "The early Christians had believed in the resurrection of the flesh."
All Christians believe in this, or are supposed to. It's in the Apostles' Creed.
p. 519: "by Holy Law the camerlengo is ineligible for election to the papacy. He is not a cardinal."
There is no such requirement. Not all popes have been cardinals.
p. 534: "for centuries…science has picked away at religion…condemning religion as the opiate of the masses."
This is from Marx, who was a political philosopher, not a scientist.
p. 535: The papal chamberlain says "Headlines carried science's miracles every day. How long had it been for religion? Centuries?"
More like minutes or seconds. According to the Catholic Church, miracles are common and happening all the time. It is necessary to document miracles for canonization.
p. 558-9: "Although an unlikely candidate, Mortati was chosen by an unprecedented unanimous vote by the College of Cardinals."
The actual vote totals in papal elections are never revealed. Even if they had been in this instance, there is no way anyone could know if this was unprecedented.
All this is just what I caught in a cursory reading, without research. Some distortions might perhaps be necessary to fit the plot. But a lot of this is certainly unnecessary and speaks of ignorance and sloppy research. Consider too: this book must have gone through editing. Imagine how many more mistakes the editors must have caught.
Tuesday, November 23, 2004
Alberta Towns
In honour of the Alberta election, here are the answers to the "Alberta Towns" challenge I posted a couple of weeks ago:
Not Quite in Earnest: Frank
Calvin & Powers: Calgary
Chicken Out: Cochrane (Cock-ran)
Shy Forest Creature: Red Deer
Scat Cat: Jasper (Jazz-purr)
Fat Bastard: Edmonton (Edmund – ton)
No Swearing Allowed: Banff
Giant Steppes: Grande Prairie
Crossing the River of Forgetting: Lethbridge
Noisy Devil: Drumheller
Jesus! Grandma's Missing: Lac Ste. Anne
Big Money: Grand Cache
Drunkard's Creek: High River
Not Quite in Earnest: Frank
Calvin & Powers: Calgary
Chicken Out: Cochrane (Cock-ran)
Shy Forest Creature: Red Deer
Scat Cat: Jasper (Jazz-purr)
Fat Bastard: Edmonton (Edmund – ton)
No Swearing Allowed: Banff
Giant Steppes: Grande Prairie
Crossing the River of Forgetting: Lethbridge
Noisy Devil: Drumheller
Jesus! Grandma's Missing: Lac Ste. Anne
Big Money: Grand Cache
Drunkard's Creek: High River
Monday, November 22, 2004
Yasser Arafat and the Monsters
The face of Yasser Arafat as he was helicoptered out of Ramallah haunts me. One might assume he would be distraught, being very ill. Instead, he seemed overjoyed. Blowing kisses to the crowd.
I wonder—did he know he was about to die? And was he looking forward to it? I suspect he was, in some deep part of his soul. Death is frightening, but also inviting. And in the end, I suspect, more inviting than frightening.
I watch my three-year old son. He is now fascinated by “monsters.”
What is a monster? Anything that seems capable of eating him up. You can see the basic survival instinct working here.
And yet, it is not simply that he is afraid of them. He is afraid, and he cannot get enough of them. He wants and does not want to be eaten; he wants and does not want to be caught in games of chase.
On a tour of the Colosseum, our guide reported that, even though the competitions were roughly 50%, there were many who sought the life of a gladiator. She suggested it was the only way for some of the poor to hope for fame and fortune. I suspect instead an instinct more basic.
I wonder—did he know he was about to die? And was he looking forward to it? I suspect he was, in some deep part of his soul. Death is frightening, but also inviting. And in the end, I suspect, more inviting than frightening.
I watch my three-year old son. He is now fascinated by “monsters.”
What is a monster? Anything that seems capable of eating him up. You can see the basic survival instinct working here.
And yet, it is not simply that he is afraid of them. He is afraid, and he cannot get enough of them. He wants and does not want to be eaten; he wants and does not want to be caught in games of chase.
On a tour of the Colosseum, our guide reported that, even though the competitions were roughly 50%, there were many who sought the life of a gladiator. She suggested it was the only way for some of the poor to hope for fame and fortune. I suspect instead an instinct more basic.
Sunday, November 21, 2004
Why Don Cherry is the Greatest Canadian Who Ever Lived
CBC TV has offered a list of the top ten Canadians of all time, as decided by Internet poll. Over the upcoming season the list will be gradually narrowed, until at last the greatest Canadian of all time will emerge.
Here's the starting list:
* Tommy Douglas
* Wayne Gretzky
* Don Cherry
* Sir John A. Macdonald
* Terry Fox
* Dr. Frederick Banting
* Lester Pearson
* Alexander Graham Bell
* Dr. David Suzuki
* Pierre Trudeau
Inevitably--and happily, for CBC--the list has been controversial. Everyone objects.
Me too, of course. With all due respect, I cannot see Tommy Douglas or David Suzuki. I ran the list by non-Canadians of my acquaintance; none had heard of them. Douglas never even rose to the top of his profession.
Others object to Don Cherry. Funny. He's the one who struck me as most clearly belonging there.
Here's my thinking:
1. You cannot be truly great unless you are self-made, self-defined. If you do not rule yourself, you rule nothing.
2. Anyone who owes their greatness largely to office is less great. They may have merely had greatness thrust upon them.
3. Anyone who owes their greatness to privileged birth is less great. They started on second base.
4. Anyone who has not faced and overcome significant adversity is less great. They may only have been lucky.
5. To be a great Canadian, you should be somehow special to Canada. You should reflect or speak to the Canadian soul. To be, say, the "first Canadian" to do something is meaningless.
Most on the CBC list are surely still great by these criteria; but the greatest? Only Don Cherry seems to me to perfectly fit the bill. Cherry was not born to privilege; he has defined himself, has succeeded in widely differing roles, has overcome a career setback (losing the coaching job in Boston), and he surely speaks to something in the average Canadian.
Canadians think of themselves as quiet, modest, conformist, polite. Don Cherry seems to violate this mold. But in fact, when I think of other great Canadians who fit my criteria, they all seem to defy this type. In fact, they are, like Cherry, generally boisterous, roughhewn, and eccentric. Is this, perhaps, the real, unacknowledged, Canadian character?
Consider this list, presented not in any particular order. Perhaps it is a list of real Canadian heroes. Perhaps it is a list of Canadian anti-heroes. You decide.
1. Eddie Shack. Anyone with Gretzky's talent can be great. Eddie Shack did it without talent.
2. John George Diefenbaker. Not even his own party seemed to want him to be Prime Minister. His views were radically different from those that ruled the Conservative party of his day: in some ways, Margaret Thatcher was really a Diefenbaker Conservative. Dief overcame much adversity: he lost his first wife, and his first several tries for public office. He has left a deep impression: no prime minister save Trudeau is so well remembered, so loved or hated.
3. Robert W. Service. Ignored or scorned as an embarrassment by "sophisticated" Canadians, Service is the most successful poet who ever lived. Keith Spicer once said Canada, to become a nation, needed to be defined by poetry. At your Service: he invented the North. Considered rough and uncouth even in his own day, he struck a chord with ordinary Canadians. And he did it on his own: he wandered the country destitute for some years.
4. William Kurelek. Here too is a self-made man: surviving a poor and abusive childhood and crippling depression, Kurelek invented himself as an artist, following no school nor established style. His style is childlike, rough, often falsely called primitive. His political and religious views were strongly held and unfashionable. He sanctified the Canadian landscape and daily Canadian life.
5. Gordon Sinclair. Another self-made man. Sinclair said what he believed, regardless of the consequences. His reporting of the Second World War made him persona non grata with the Canadian brass. He established something of a Canadian tradition of the radio curmudgeon.
6. Ed Mirvish. Not the richest man in Canada, but unique, irreplaceable, boisterous and roughhewn. Toronto would be a very different place without Ed Mirvish.
Don't we begin by now to see a definite type?
7. Johnny Wayne. I can hear the groans. The official view of Wayne today seems to be "too corny for words."
Never mind. "Sophisticates" of all nations are embarrassed by just what is unique in their culture. They want to be like everyone else.
He was an odd mix: very literate, even intellectual, but never above a cheap gag. Frank Schuster, his partner, was more the standard Canadian model of the standard Canadian; but Johnny Wayne was the one who drew your eye.
Nobody was ever bigger in Canadian entertainment.
Here are a few more examples of the type: Real Caouette, Camillien Houde, Jean Drapeau, Ma Murray, Amor de Cosmos, Richard J. Needham, William Lyon Mackenzie, Irving Layton, Jim Carey, Stompin' Tom Connors, Ben Weider, John Robert Colombo, Charlotte Whitton.
Not a lot of shrinking violets there.
Now let's look at the feminine form of the archetype:
8. Lucy Maud Montgomery. The unacknowledged founder of Canadian literature. Almost everything written or even filmed in Canada since has been annotation on Anne of Green Gables. I have little impression of Montgomery's own personality; I take it as expressed in her character Anne. And Anne is the female Don Cherry. Anne knows adversity, and triumphs by the force of personality. Rough-hewn, outspoken, and self-invented. She is, in short, a Canadian.
And Montgomery is our Shakespeare, our Moliere. One consequence is the great Canadian strength in children's literature.
9. Celine Dion. Again, I can hear the groans. Of course, the average Canadian "sophisticate" is embarrassed by her. But she has to be on the list: she is probably the most famous Canadian, in world terms, of all time. She too came from nowhere in social and financial terms; not even blessed, as are so many current "divas," with looks. She is not outspoken in the way some of the male figures on this list are, but she does seem to be her own woman.
10. Kateri Tekakwitha. Perhaps not a familiar name to all Canadians, but one engraved deep in the heart of Canadian Catholics. Leonard Cohen saw her as archetype of Canadian spirituality. And that is, in the end, the greatest of greatnesses. Blessed Kateri too was a determined non-conformist in her Mohawk milieu. No timid soul.
How to account for the variance between this list and the official “modest Canadian” type?
I think it may be a question of class: my criteria have naturally favoured the working class; I think the official view favours the Canadian upper class.
And it says something about Canada that the two classes are so different. They would not be, say, in Korea or in the US. Canada, in the end, is, like Europe, a very class-conscious place.
Canada has always been a bit of a struggle between the Family Compact and the Clear Grits, between Citadel clique and Patriotes.
The CBC list is mostly the Family Compact list. Mine, although some are nominally Tories, is mostly a list of Clear Grits.
Here's the starting list:
* Tommy Douglas
* Wayne Gretzky
* Don Cherry
* Sir John A. Macdonald
* Terry Fox
* Dr. Frederick Banting
* Lester Pearson
* Alexander Graham Bell
* Dr. David Suzuki
* Pierre Trudeau
Inevitably--and happily, for CBC--the list has been controversial. Everyone objects.
Me too, of course. With all due respect, I cannot see Tommy Douglas or David Suzuki. I ran the list by non-Canadians of my acquaintance; none had heard of them. Douglas never even rose to the top of his profession.
Others object to Don Cherry. Funny. He's the one who struck me as most clearly belonging there.
Here's my thinking:
1. You cannot be truly great unless you are self-made, self-defined. If you do not rule yourself, you rule nothing.
2. Anyone who owes their greatness largely to office is less great. They may have merely had greatness thrust upon them.
3. Anyone who owes their greatness to privileged birth is less great. They started on second base.
4. Anyone who has not faced and overcome significant adversity is less great. They may only have been lucky.
5. To be a great Canadian, you should be somehow special to Canada. You should reflect or speak to the Canadian soul. To be, say, the "first Canadian" to do something is meaningless.
Most on the CBC list are surely still great by these criteria; but the greatest? Only Don Cherry seems to me to perfectly fit the bill. Cherry was not born to privilege; he has defined himself, has succeeded in widely differing roles, has overcome a career setback (losing the coaching job in Boston), and he surely speaks to something in the average Canadian.
Canadians think of themselves as quiet, modest, conformist, polite. Don Cherry seems to violate this mold. But in fact, when I think of other great Canadians who fit my criteria, they all seem to defy this type. In fact, they are, like Cherry, generally boisterous, roughhewn, and eccentric. Is this, perhaps, the real, unacknowledged, Canadian character?
Consider this list, presented not in any particular order. Perhaps it is a list of real Canadian heroes. Perhaps it is a list of Canadian anti-heroes. You decide.
1. Eddie Shack. Anyone with Gretzky's talent can be great. Eddie Shack did it without talent.
2. John George Diefenbaker. Not even his own party seemed to want him to be Prime Minister. His views were radically different from those that ruled the Conservative party of his day: in some ways, Margaret Thatcher was really a Diefenbaker Conservative. Dief overcame much adversity: he lost his first wife, and his first several tries for public office. He has left a deep impression: no prime minister save Trudeau is so well remembered, so loved or hated.
3. Robert W. Service. Ignored or scorned as an embarrassment by "sophisticated" Canadians, Service is the most successful poet who ever lived. Keith Spicer once said Canada, to become a nation, needed to be defined by poetry. At your Service: he invented the North. Considered rough and uncouth even in his own day, he struck a chord with ordinary Canadians. And he did it on his own: he wandered the country destitute for some years.
4. William Kurelek. Here too is a self-made man: surviving a poor and abusive childhood and crippling depression, Kurelek invented himself as an artist, following no school nor established style. His style is childlike, rough, often falsely called primitive. His political and religious views were strongly held and unfashionable. He sanctified the Canadian landscape and daily Canadian life.
5. Gordon Sinclair. Another self-made man. Sinclair said what he believed, regardless of the consequences. His reporting of the Second World War made him persona non grata with the Canadian brass. He established something of a Canadian tradition of the radio curmudgeon.
6. Ed Mirvish. Not the richest man in Canada, but unique, irreplaceable, boisterous and roughhewn. Toronto would be a very different place without Ed Mirvish.
Don't we begin by now to see a definite type?
7. Johnny Wayne. I can hear the groans. The official view of Wayne today seems to be "too corny for words."
Never mind. "Sophisticates" of all nations are embarrassed by just what is unique in their culture. They want to be like everyone else.
He was an odd mix: very literate, even intellectual, but never above a cheap gag. Frank Schuster, his partner, was more the standard Canadian model of the standard Canadian; but Johnny Wayne was the one who drew your eye.
Nobody was ever bigger in Canadian entertainment.
Here are a few more examples of the type: Real Caouette, Camillien Houde, Jean Drapeau, Ma Murray, Amor de Cosmos, Richard J. Needham, William Lyon Mackenzie, Irving Layton, Jim Carey, Stompin' Tom Connors, Ben Weider, John Robert Colombo, Charlotte Whitton.
Not a lot of shrinking violets there.
Now let's look at the feminine form of the archetype:
8. Lucy Maud Montgomery. The unacknowledged founder of Canadian literature. Almost everything written or even filmed in Canada since has been annotation on Anne of Green Gables. I have little impression of Montgomery's own personality; I take it as expressed in her character Anne. And Anne is the female Don Cherry. Anne knows adversity, and triumphs by the force of personality. Rough-hewn, outspoken, and self-invented. She is, in short, a Canadian.
And Montgomery is our Shakespeare, our Moliere. One consequence is the great Canadian strength in children's literature.
9. Celine Dion. Again, I can hear the groans. Of course, the average Canadian "sophisticate" is embarrassed by her. But she has to be on the list: she is probably the most famous Canadian, in world terms, of all time. She too came from nowhere in social and financial terms; not even blessed, as are so many current "divas," with looks. She is not outspoken in the way some of the male figures on this list are, but she does seem to be her own woman.
10. Kateri Tekakwitha. Perhaps not a familiar name to all Canadians, but one engraved deep in the heart of Canadian Catholics. Leonard Cohen saw her as archetype of Canadian spirituality. And that is, in the end, the greatest of greatnesses. Blessed Kateri too was a determined non-conformist in her Mohawk milieu. No timid soul.
How to account for the variance between this list and the official “modest Canadian” type?
I think it may be a question of class: my criteria have naturally favoured the working class; I think the official view favours the Canadian upper class.
And it says something about Canada that the two classes are so different. They would not be, say, in Korea or in the US. Canada, in the end, is, like Europe, a very class-conscious place.
Canada has always been a bit of a struggle between the Family Compact and the Clear Grits, between Citadel clique and Patriotes.
The CBC list is mostly the Family Compact list. Mine, although some are nominally Tories, is mostly a list of Clear Grits.
Sunday, November 07, 2004
Sheikh Zayed Passes
I was wrong.
I read the papers as implying that the UAE presidency would pass from Sheikh Zayed al Nahyan, on his death, to Sheikh Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai.
On the evening of November the 1st, the passing of Sheikh Zayed was made public.
I was at a meeting of a local society’s executive committee when I heard the news:
“At this moment, 8:50 pm, November 2, 2004, M’s cell phone rang. He retreated to the other room to take the call. On his return, he reported that Sheikh Zayed’s death had just been announced.
In the sudden silence, it was resolved that the group would express our regrets and condolences in a letter to our sponsor, Sheikh N.
B. volunteered to compose such a letter.
‘This is a very significant and very sad event,’ said G.
At this point, other cell phones started going off. J, after answering his, advised, ‘Take it easy when you’re going home. There are people hysterical out there on the streets.’
Indeed, there was loud mourning through the night from all the city’s mosques.”
This is an event bigger, in local terms, than the Kennedy assassination would have been in the US. Zayed is literally the founder of this country, its George Washington. And he is a genuinely good man as well, genuinely loved by all. No one, after his very long rule, has a bad word to say about him. On Dave’s ESL Café, all the comments by usually cynical expat English teachers, were praise. At mass the next Friday, the priest declared that “Sheikh Zayed is now in heaven,” and that “he was a very holy man.” This a Catholic priest speaking of a Muslim.
It is in a way sad that Zayed’s passing was noticed less than it might have been in the wider world, happening as it did on the eve of the US elections and at almost the moment that Yasser Arafat’s illness was revealed.
I suppose this is as it should be: Yasser Arafat’s passing, and what happened in the US election, will have a far greater bearing on the world. They took up all the attention of this blog as well.
But it is a shame that we do not more celebrate the truly good among us, and the truly good leaders.
One measure of Sheikh Zayed’s generosity: fully 28% of the budget of Abu Dhabi went on foreign aid.
His funeral did attract a very good selection of Middle Eastern leaders. Afghanistan’s President Karzai was there, I believe on the very day he won his election, perhaps his first official act. Prime Minister Allawi of Iraq was there, despite his pressing concerns at home; and so was the Iraqi president. Almost every ruler in the Arab world attended personally. Britain managed Prince Charles and Prince William, plus the Minister of Defense, Geoff Hoon.
The US did less well. I imagine people were tied up with the election, but the best they managed was Assistant Secretary of State Armitage a few days later.
This might, however, have been the preference of the UAE government.
But then the surprise. Maktoum did not, as I predicted, take over.
Even though the constitution provides for him to automatically become president for a thirty day period pending election by the Supreme Council, the presidency was given within hours to Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the Abu Dhabi Crown Prince.
Nothing shocking here; many people thought Sheikh Khalifa would get it. It just defies the tea leaves I thought I read in the newspapers.
Peace, in any case, be upon Sheikh Zayed’s soul.
I read the papers as implying that the UAE presidency would pass from Sheikh Zayed al Nahyan, on his death, to Sheikh Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai.
On the evening of November the 1st, the passing of Sheikh Zayed was made public.
I was at a meeting of a local society’s executive committee when I heard the news:
“At this moment, 8:50 pm, November 2, 2004, M’s cell phone rang. He retreated to the other room to take the call. On his return, he reported that Sheikh Zayed’s death had just been announced.
In the sudden silence, it was resolved that the group would express our regrets and condolences in a letter to our sponsor, Sheikh N.
B. volunteered to compose such a letter.
‘This is a very significant and very sad event,’ said G.
At this point, other cell phones started going off. J, after answering his, advised, ‘Take it easy when you’re going home. There are people hysterical out there on the streets.’
Indeed, there was loud mourning through the night from all the city’s mosques.”
This is an event bigger, in local terms, than the Kennedy assassination would have been in the US. Zayed is literally the founder of this country, its George Washington. And he is a genuinely good man as well, genuinely loved by all. No one, after his very long rule, has a bad word to say about him. On Dave’s ESL Café, all the comments by usually cynical expat English teachers, were praise. At mass the next Friday, the priest declared that “Sheikh Zayed is now in heaven,” and that “he was a very holy man.” This a Catholic priest speaking of a Muslim.
It is in a way sad that Zayed’s passing was noticed less than it might have been in the wider world, happening as it did on the eve of the US elections and at almost the moment that Yasser Arafat’s illness was revealed.
I suppose this is as it should be: Yasser Arafat’s passing, and what happened in the US election, will have a far greater bearing on the world. They took up all the attention of this blog as well.
But it is a shame that we do not more celebrate the truly good among us, and the truly good leaders.
One measure of Sheikh Zayed’s generosity: fully 28% of the budget of Abu Dhabi went on foreign aid.
His funeral did attract a very good selection of Middle Eastern leaders. Afghanistan’s President Karzai was there, I believe on the very day he won his election, perhaps his first official act. Prime Minister Allawi of Iraq was there, despite his pressing concerns at home; and so was the Iraqi president. Almost every ruler in the Arab world attended personally. Britain managed Prince Charles and Prince William, plus the Minister of Defense, Geoff Hoon.
The US did less well. I imagine people were tied up with the election, but the best they managed was Assistant Secretary of State Armitage a few days later.
This might, however, have been the preference of the UAE government.
But then the surprise. Maktoum did not, as I predicted, take over.
Even though the constitution provides for him to automatically become president for a thirty day period pending election by the Supreme Council, the presidency was given within hours to Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the Abu Dhabi Crown Prince.
Nothing shocking here; many people thought Sheikh Khalifa would get it. It just defies the tea leaves I thought I read in the newspapers.
Peace, in any case, be upon Sheikh Zayed’s soul.
Saturday, November 06, 2004
Democrats Robbed Again
The emerging party line among Democrats now seems to be that they were robbed again. The Diebold Corporation stole the election from them, be juking the vote on their voting machines in six (out of 88!) counties in Ohio.
Never mind that Kerry lost the popular vote big time. That only matters when it’s the other side. If a Democrat can win electorally while losing the popular vote, that’s just simple justice.
The only real evidence of fraud seems to be that the exit polls are at variance with the actual vote. And that the head of Diebold apparently supported Bush.
This is wildly improbable in its face. There are basically only four possibilities here, with regard to the variance between the exit polls and the actual vote:
1. the vote count was wrong, and there was wrongdoing involved.
2. the vote count was wrong, and it was honest error (snafu)
3. the exit polls were wrong, and there was wrongdoing involved.
4. the exit polls were wrong, and it was honest error.
Now, based on Occam’s Razor alone, 4 is the most probable answer, and 1, the Democratic position, is the least. Proposition 1 requires a vast conspiracy, proposition 4 requires only the usual level of random human imperfection.
But we have further evidence, making this Democratic claim, in a word, incredible.
First, the exit poll figures (or the vote) were off across the board by six percentage points or so; they were not off only in places where there were electronic voting machines, or any one type of voting. They were off in Democrat-controlled counties, and they were off in Republican-controlled counties. This means the accused voting machines cannot possibly be responsible for the discrepancy. Nor can any conceivable conspiracy have been big and diverse enough to have cooked it on the voting side.
Nor could any such conspiracy have confidently predicted it would finally come down to Ohio, and to six of its counties, and so have managed to plant their machines there, years ago.
It would have been theoretically possible, on the other hand, for a small group to cook the exit polls: they were all done by one firm. Making this a far more plausible solution, if there is a problem.
Now recall that the exit polls are also at variance with the regular polling in the days close to the election. These other polls, by contrast, predict the voting outcome rather accurately. So, you have, let's say, six polls plus the actual vote. All but one poll say one thing. One poll calls it differently. It’s a pretty slim premise that the one poll that got it wrong must be right, and all the others plus the actual vote wrong.
Second, we _know_ the exit polls are off. We know this because their demographics are skewed. They include far too many women to be representative of the group that actually voted. Therefore, the exit polls being off is zero evidence that there was anything wrong with the actual vote. This by itself reduces the real possibilities to propositions 3 and 4 above. The exit polls were wrong, and the only question is whether they were skewed deliberately, or in honest error.
Honest error seems the most likely answer. Especially since, according to Slate, "Today's exit polls were no more off the mark than were those of four, eight, or 12 years ago." - Slate. They were significantly off in 2000 as well—so far off that the job was given to a new firm this time.
This argues strongly to me for proposition four. However, we should also remember that:
Third, we actually know there was wrongdoing involved in the exit polling. This came, at a minimum, in their being publicly leaked. This violated the terms under which the exit pollers were employed, although they themselves were not necessarily the culprit. The leak prima facie aided Kerry, not Bush.
Never mind that Kerry lost the popular vote big time. That only matters when it’s the other side. If a Democrat can win electorally while losing the popular vote, that’s just simple justice.
The only real evidence of fraud seems to be that the exit polls are at variance with the actual vote. And that the head of Diebold apparently supported Bush.
This is wildly improbable in its face. There are basically only four possibilities here, with regard to the variance between the exit polls and the actual vote:
1. the vote count was wrong, and there was wrongdoing involved.
2. the vote count was wrong, and it was honest error (snafu)
3. the exit polls were wrong, and there was wrongdoing involved.
4. the exit polls were wrong, and it was honest error.
Now, based on Occam’s Razor alone, 4 is the most probable answer, and 1, the Democratic position, is the least. Proposition 1 requires a vast conspiracy, proposition 4 requires only the usual level of random human imperfection.
But we have further evidence, making this Democratic claim, in a word, incredible.
First, the exit poll figures (or the vote) were off across the board by six percentage points or so; they were not off only in places where there were electronic voting machines, or any one type of voting. They were off in Democrat-controlled counties, and they were off in Republican-controlled counties. This means the accused voting machines cannot possibly be responsible for the discrepancy. Nor can any conceivable conspiracy have been big and diverse enough to have cooked it on the voting side.
Nor could any such conspiracy have confidently predicted it would finally come down to Ohio, and to six of its counties, and so have managed to plant their machines there, years ago.
It would have been theoretically possible, on the other hand, for a small group to cook the exit polls: they were all done by one firm. Making this a far more plausible solution, if there is a problem.
Now recall that the exit polls are also at variance with the regular polling in the days close to the election. These other polls, by contrast, predict the voting outcome rather accurately. So, you have, let's say, six polls plus the actual vote. All but one poll say one thing. One poll calls it differently. It’s a pretty slim premise that the one poll that got it wrong must be right, and all the others plus the actual vote wrong.
Second, we _know_ the exit polls are off. We know this because their demographics are skewed. They include far too many women to be representative of the group that actually voted. Therefore, the exit polls being off is zero evidence that there was anything wrong with the actual vote. This by itself reduces the real possibilities to propositions 3 and 4 above. The exit polls were wrong, and the only question is whether they were skewed deliberately, or in honest error.
Honest error seems the most likely answer. Especially since, according to Slate, "Today's exit polls were no more off the mark than were those of four, eight, or 12 years ago." - Slate. They were significantly off in 2000 as well—so far off that the job was given to a new firm this time.
This argues strongly to me for proposition four. However, we should also remember that:
Third, we actually know there was wrongdoing involved in the exit polling. This came, at a minimum, in their being publicly leaked. This violated the terms under which the exit pollers were employed, although they themselves were not necessarily the culprit. The leak prima facie aided Kerry, not Bush.
Friday, November 05, 2004
Has America Really Lost Jobs Under Bush?
This is true only on a very arbitrary selection of facts. I look at the unemployment rate, and see it at a historic low. Which seems to suggest the problem, if there is a problem, is not a lack of jobs, but a lack of workers. You can't have more jobs than you have workers to fill them, after all.
What is really happening seems to be that a larger proportion of the population is in retirement and early retirement than ever before. And this suggests growing prosperity, not doom and gloom. Perhaps more women also feel they can afford to stay home and raise their children, instead of pulling in a second income.
What is really happening seems to be that a larger proportion of the population is in retirement and early retirement than ever before. And this suggests growing prosperity, not doom and gloom. Perhaps more women also feel they can afford to stay home and raise their children, instead of pulling in a second income.
Thursday, November 04, 2004
It's Values, Stupid
Iraq was not the overriding issue for the American people, at least according to the much-maligned exit polls. People said instead that they were voting on values.
It was morality, stupid. It was about defending the family. It was about preserving conventional ideas of right and wrong.That is what civilization is: at base, the basic acknowledgement that there are rules of proper behaviour.
This essential premise has clearly been under attack in the last few years, by postmodernism et al.
Bush had the best of that issue, because he appeared to be a man of principle. Kerry was labouring under memories of Clinton’s personal misbehaviours, I imagine. But he was also the wrong candidate on values. Kerry, in the end, seemed to have no principles. That resonated. And I think I was right that he hurt himself tremendously with his comment about Mary Cheney in the third debate: it made him seem to lack character, to lack honour. This is also, I think, why the Swift Boat ads resonated so strongly: Kerry seemed to show no honour as a soldier. This is why the CBS memo fiasco resonated: it spoke of general dishonesty on the left.
The Dems have lost the moral high ground.
It was morality, stupid. It was about defending the family. It was about preserving conventional ideas of right and wrong.That is what civilization is: at base, the basic acknowledgement that there are rules of proper behaviour.
This essential premise has clearly been under attack in the last few years, by postmodernism et al.
Bush had the best of that issue, because he appeared to be a man of principle. Kerry was labouring under memories of Clinton’s personal misbehaviours, I imagine. But he was also the wrong candidate on values. Kerry, in the end, seemed to have no principles. That resonated. And I think I was right that he hurt himself tremendously with his comment about Mary Cheney in the third debate: it made him seem to lack character, to lack honour. This is also, I think, why the Swift Boat ads resonated so strongly: Kerry seemed to show no honour as a soldier. This is why the CBS memo fiasco resonated: it spoke of general dishonesty on the left.
The Dems have lost the moral high ground.
The US Election
I have been arguing for some time that the oughts are marking a political and cultural shift as profound as that in the sixties. You can even trace it in the election results year by year.
Some parallels:
Reagan = FDR
Clinton = Eisenhower
George W. Bush = John Kennedy
Iraq War = Vietnam War
9/11 = Kennedy Assassination
The first major departure from the script is that--thank God--Bush did not get assassinated in his first term. Now we see how that changes things.That had the result that Goldwater (= Dean) did not win the nomination for the opposing party. I guess Scranton did (= Kerry).
Coming soon: a cultural sea change like the sixties. But in what is now called the "conservative" direction.Three years to go 'till the Summer of Love.
As to the breakdown of civility and the political hardball in recent years, I see that not as a permanent trend, but the kind of thing that happens at any transition, in any democratic revolution. Stands to reason: when a new view emerges, first you necessarily have a dramatic split in views, because not everyone accepts the new view at the same pace. Next, the establishment, feeling embattled, fight fiercely to preserve its power and privilege.
We saw it all in the Sixties; we’re seeing it again now.
The new view is the complex of attitudes currently called "neo-conservatism." As it was the "New Left" in the Sixties.
Some parallels:
Reagan = FDR
Clinton = Eisenhower
George W. Bush = John Kennedy
Iraq War = Vietnam War
9/11 = Kennedy Assassination
The first major departure from the script is that--thank God--Bush did not get assassinated in his first term. Now we see how that changes things.That had the result that Goldwater (= Dean) did not win the nomination for the opposing party. I guess Scranton did (= Kerry).
Coming soon: a cultural sea change like the sixties. But in what is now called the "conservative" direction.Three years to go 'till the Summer of Love.
As to the breakdown of civility and the political hardball in recent years, I see that not as a permanent trend, but the kind of thing that happens at any transition, in any democratic revolution. Stands to reason: when a new view emerges, first you necessarily have a dramatic split in views, because not everyone accepts the new view at the same pace. Next, the establishment, feeling embattled, fight fiercely to preserve its power and privilege.
We saw it all in the Sixties; we’re seeing it again now.
The new view is the complex of attitudes currently called "neo-conservatism." As it was the "New Left" in the Sixties.
Sunday, October 31, 2004
Maktoum Receives Khalifa
Today’s banner headline in the Gulf News reads “Maktoum receives Khalifa.”
This is indeed big news.
Let me explain. The United Arab Emirates are one of the world’s last remaining absolute monarchies, albeit tempered by federation. All is decided by the seven families who control the seven constituent Emirates.
Rumour, never publicly acknowledged, is that Sheikh Zayed, the current ruler of Abu Dhabi and founder and president of the UAE, is ailing. Therefore the question of succession comes up.
Officially, the presidency of the UAE is supposed to go on Zayed’s death to Sheikh Maktoum, the hereditary ruler of Dubai. He is also the vice president and prime minister, and so nominally next in line. Many have thought this would not happen, however, because the Nahyans, the rulers of Abu Dhabi, have most of the country’s oil, and so reputedly pay most of the bills. It was thought that, when the time came, they would not be ready to give up the presidency.
That would presumably mean it would pass to Sheikh Khalifa Al Nahyan, the designated Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi.
There were other possibilities. Many believed another son of Sheikh Zayed might take it—while succession within ruling families is by heredity, the tradition does not require primogeniture. That is, the oldest son does not get it automatically. Instead, the most capable candidate is chosen, as determined by the previous ruler or by family consensus. A few speculated that it might even go to the ruler of another of the seven Emirates.
Up until now, a close reading of the Gulf News suggested Khalifa was indeed going to take over: gatherings of the clans seemed all to be at his palace, and his name was given first.
Hence the headline: it seems Khalifa has now dramatically thrown his support behind Maktoum. Maktoum is receiving him: that is the sheikh's role.
Interesting: nobody says what is really happening, but everyone more or less knows. The headline would make no sense as a headline if everyone did not know. It is a question of tact and decorum, I suspect, not to talk openly about such things, more than anything else. I hope I am not violating that decorum by posting these speculations here. I presume that, because I have no inside information and am only speculating, I am not.
I certainly mean no disrespect. It would be sad to see Sheikh Zayed go: he has been an exemplary ruler, and remains high in the affections of his people. He had oil money to help; but many other rulers and many other nations have done far less well and wisely with their oil wealth.
On the other hand, no one can fault Maktoum for his management of Dubai, which he has made into a world-class city. He would presumably do a good job with the UAE as a whole.
This is indeed big news.
Let me explain. The United Arab Emirates are one of the world’s last remaining absolute monarchies, albeit tempered by federation. All is decided by the seven families who control the seven constituent Emirates.
Rumour, never publicly acknowledged, is that Sheikh Zayed, the current ruler of Abu Dhabi and founder and president of the UAE, is ailing. Therefore the question of succession comes up.
Officially, the presidency of the UAE is supposed to go on Zayed’s death to Sheikh Maktoum, the hereditary ruler of Dubai. He is also the vice president and prime minister, and so nominally next in line. Many have thought this would not happen, however, because the Nahyans, the rulers of Abu Dhabi, have most of the country’s oil, and so reputedly pay most of the bills. It was thought that, when the time came, they would not be ready to give up the presidency.
That would presumably mean it would pass to Sheikh Khalifa Al Nahyan, the designated Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi.
There were other possibilities. Many believed another son of Sheikh Zayed might take it—while succession within ruling families is by heredity, the tradition does not require primogeniture. That is, the oldest son does not get it automatically. Instead, the most capable candidate is chosen, as determined by the previous ruler or by family consensus. A few speculated that it might even go to the ruler of another of the seven Emirates.
Up until now, a close reading of the Gulf News suggested Khalifa was indeed going to take over: gatherings of the clans seemed all to be at his palace, and his name was given first.
Hence the headline: it seems Khalifa has now dramatically thrown his support behind Maktoum. Maktoum is receiving him: that is the sheikh's role.
Interesting: nobody says what is really happening, but everyone more or less knows. The headline would make no sense as a headline if everyone did not know. It is a question of tact and decorum, I suspect, not to talk openly about such things, more than anything else. I hope I am not violating that decorum by posting these speculations here. I presume that, because I have no inside information and am only speculating, I am not.
I certainly mean no disrespect. It would be sad to see Sheikh Zayed go: he has been an exemplary ruler, and remains high in the affections of his people. He had oil money to help; but many other rulers and many other nations have done far less well and wisely with their oil wealth.
On the other hand, no one can fault Maktoum for his management of Dubai, which he has made into a world-class city. He would presumably do a good job with the UAE as a whole.
Friday, October 29, 2004
Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
Current claims of oppression by this and that group must be examined dispassionately.
The one who complains the loudest is not at all necessarily the one who is most oppressed. Remember the fairy tale of the Princess and the Pea? There is a great truth expressed in it. One who is accustomed to comfort and deference, will often complain loudly about a minor irritant. One who is used to physical rigours and to being treated badly becomes inured, and will commonly not complain if they are treated badly for one more day.
Spoiled children complain the most.
The one who complains the loudest is not at all necessarily the one who is most oppressed. Remember the fairy tale of the Princess and the Pea? There is a great truth expressed in it. One who is accustomed to comfort and deference, will often complain loudly about a minor irritant. One who is used to physical rigours and to being treated badly becomes inured, and will commonly not complain if they are treated badly for one more day.
Spoiled children complain the most.
Thursday, October 28, 2004
Keep This One under Your Hat
More on the odd controversy about Muslim women wearing burqas:
Let’s look at a similar example, in which dress restrictions are imposed only on men: Sikhs. Sikh men are required by their faith not to cut their hair or beard, and to cover their heads. There are no special dress requirements for women. It is therefore necessarily true that only men face social pressures to dress a certain way.
For some reason, however, there is no concern about this supposed trampling on the rights of the men, as there is on the subject of Muslim women. Why the double standard?
Why no outrage about the orthodox Jewish requirement for men to cover their heads and not to cut their hair, at least their forelocks?
Apparently it is only repressive if such things are asked of women. Or by Islam.
For that matter, even in the Catholic Church: it used to be expected that women would cover their heads in church, and men would uncover them, both out of respect. For some reason, the notion that women must cover their heads was found to be oppressive, and has been completely abandoned in practice. But I’d wager any man would be rebuked today if he kept his hat on in church.
Why the double standard?
I see nothing wrong with dress codes per se. Standards of public morality are generally enforced in all countries: in the US recently, a teenaged man who streaked his high school graduation was sentenced to prison. If that is not an infringement on his rights, neither is a stricter regimen as is practiced in, say, Saudi Arabia.
The only issue is that freedom of religion requires that dress codes not ban dress required by a major faith. Therefore, the important right in Afghanistan is that Muslim women be allowed to wear burqas. But if Christian women or atheist women are also required to wear burqas, this is no big deal, no human rights issue. Nobody’s religion prohibits women covering their heads, so even requiring that a burqa be worn is not an infringement of anyone’s basic rights.
It follows that the current law in France, by which Muslim girls are not allowed to cover their heads in classes, is more of an infringement of human rights than the Afghan law on burqas ever was.
The more interesting question is, why has the wearing of the burqa become such a flashpoint among politically-correct types in the West?
Is it hostility to Islam as a highly moralistic religion?
Or is the bottom line that the burqa prevents women from fully advertising their sexual desirability?
Too often, modern concepts of “freedom” seem nothing more noble than a demand for unrestricted sex.
Let’s look at a similar example, in which dress restrictions are imposed only on men: Sikhs. Sikh men are required by their faith not to cut their hair or beard, and to cover their heads. There are no special dress requirements for women. It is therefore necessarily true that only men face social pressures to dress a certain way.
For some reason, however, there is no concern about this supposed trampling on the rights of the men, as there is on the subject of Muslim women. Why the double standard?
Why no outrage about the orthodox Jewish requirement for men to cover their heads and not to cut their hair, at least their forelocks?
Apparently it is only repressive if such things are asked of women. Or by Islam.
For that matter, even in the Catholic Church: it used to be expected that women would cover their heads in church, and men would uncover them, both out of respect. For some reason, the notion that women must cover their heads was found to be oppressive, and has been completely abandoned in practice. But I’d wager any man would be rebuked today if he kept his hat on in church.
Why the double standard?
I see nothing wrong with dress codes per se. Standards of public morality are generally enforced in all countries: in the US recently, a teenaged man who streaked his high school graduation was sentenced to prison. If that is not an infringement on his rights, neither is a stricter regimen as is practiced in, say, Saudi Arabia.
The only issue is that freedom of religion requires that dress codes not ban dress required by a major faith. Therefore, the important right in Afghanistan is that Muslim women be allowed to wear burqas. But if Christian women or atheist women are also required to wear burqas, this is no big deal, no human rights issue. Nobody’s religion prohibits women covering their heads, so even requiring that a burqa be worn is not an infringement of anyone’s basic rights.
It follows that the current law in France, by which Muslim girls are not allowed to cover their heads in classes, is more of an infringement of human rights than the Afghan law on burqas ever was.
The more interesting question is, why has the wearing of the burqa become such a flashpoint among politically-correct types in the West?
Is it hostility to Islam as a highly moralistic religion?
Or is the bottom line that the burqa prevents women from fully advertising their sexual desirability?
Too often, modern concepts of “freedom” seem nothing more noble than a demand for unrestricted sex.
Tuesday, October 26, 2004
Use the Rod and Spoil the Child
This just in from the CBC:
"PUNITIVE PARENTING MAY LEAD TO AGGRESSIVE KIDS: STATSCANChildren raised in homes dominated by punitive parenting styles are more likely to bully, get into fist fights and be mean to others, says a six-year study of 2,000 Canadian children.
"FULL STORY:http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2004/10/25/aggressivebehaviour_041025.html"
Your tax dollars at work.
Yes, “punitive” parenting might lead to more aggressive kids. But one obvious problem with such a study is determining cause and effect. Those who are imprisoned by the government are more likely to commit crimes than the general population.
It follows, by the logic used here, that sending people to jail causes crime.
"PUNITIVE PARENTING MAY LEAD TO AGGRESSIVE KIDS: STATSCANChildren raised in homes dominated by punitive parenting styles are more likely to bully, get into fist fights and be mean to others, says a six-year study of 2,000 Canadian children.
"FULL STORY:http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2004/10/25/aggressivebehaviour_041025.html"
Your tax dollars at work.
Yes, “punitive” parenting might lead to more aggressive kids. But one obvious problem with such a study is determining cause and effect. Those who are imprisoned by the government are more likely to commit crimes than the general population.
It follows, by the logic used here, that sending people to jail causes crime.
A Short Note on the Riyadh Fashion Scene
Politically correct types in the West ignore/don't want to hear that most women in the Middle East want to wear burqas; burqa use is even growing by leaps and bounds. It is not something imposed on them.
It was imposed on them in Taliban-led Afghanistan. But there, what PC types don’t want to hear is that similar dress codes were imposed on Afghan men. All men had to wear beards. This was not oppression of women; it was oppression of everyone. And it was unique to that regime.
It's time people in the West got over the idea that there is something wrong with traditional Muslim and traditional Arab dress.
It was imposed on them in Taliban-led Afghanistan. But there, what PC types don’t want to hear is that similar dress codes were imposed on Afghan men. All men had to wear beards. This was not oppression of women; it was oppression of everyone. And it was unique to that regime.
It's time people in the West got over the idea that there is something wrong with traditional Muslim and traditional Arab dress.
Sunday, October 24, 2004
Of Mayans and Pharisees
I was half-listening to two college professors chatting. Something about Von Daniken and Velikovsky; they both enjoyed them. One was advising the other what books to read next. Then something about the Mayan pyramids in Mexico being identical to the early pyramids in Egypt. But the Church had destroyed the Mayan writings.
The International Catholic Conspiracy had struck again.
These were in theory very educated people, holders of advanced degrees. These are the people educating our young.
How is it that so much of what they “know” is apparently merely superstition and prejudice?
The experience was not unique, nor did I find it surprising. I am myself an academic. I have been around many water coolers and faculty lounges and have heard many urban legends. This actually seems par for the course.
Let’s look at this bit about the Catholic Church suppressing Native American culture. I have heard it many times before, generally from the well-educated and fashionably opinioned. And, notably, never from a Native Canadian. All the Native Canadians I know are devout Christians.
In fact, I what records we have of the Mayans were preserved by Catholic clergy. The Popul Vuh, the Mayan sacred epic, was preserved and translated into Spanish by Father Francisco Ximanez in 1702. Without him, we would know nothing of the Mayans.
And this is true throughout the Americas. In most places, where the native peoples have a writing system, it was devised for them by missionaries. Where languages have been preserved, it has been through grammars and dictionaries made by missionaries. Where we know the old legends and beliefs, these were recorded by missionaries. Missionaries commonly worked hard to preserve native culture. Back in Kamloops, Father Jean-Marie Raphael LeJeune published the Kamloops Wawa from 1891 to 1923: a regular newspaper in the Chinook language, reflecting Native concerns.
Native culture was changed forever –one might say it was “destroyed,” but that in the end is a value judgment, and debatable--by plagues, alcohol, and the sudden availability of higher quality goods and more efficient technologies from abroad.
Christianity was one part of this mix. Christianity replaced the Native religions, just as it had replaced native religions across Europe. At the same time, it did what it could to protect the Natives from alcohol and plague. And the change from native to Christian beliefs was hardly by compulsion. I, too, would be pretty eager to embrace a new faith that condemned human sacrifice, slavery, and torture, preached the equality of man, and protected from curses, loss of soul, and demonic possession.
Was that a great loss, or a great gain, for Native culture? I would call it a great gain, and in itself no more a matter of “destroying” Native culture than the evangelization of Europe “destroyed” European culture.
But I digress. We were talking about two college professors. Why do they believe something so obviously false?
Whenever occurs a great evil or a great good, whenever right and wrong appear in the world in the raw, a mystical process begins. All of us who have a vested interest in concealing the truth—which probably means all of us--start to work, spinning silken threads out of our own innards, and begin to conceal matters under thick cobwebs of misinformation. The guilty are gradually exonerated and rewarded, the good blamed and punished. We do this so we can live with ourselves, for we know we are too often not good and not right.
Case in point: the evils of Fascism and Nazism are now commonly blamed on the Catholic Church, which was at the time almost the only voice against it.
Case in point: pedophilia, which was almost accepted by Kinsey and the Sixties “sexual revolution,” is now commonly blamed on the Catholic Church, which was at the time almost the only voice against it.
Case in point: racism is now often blamed uniquely on White Anglo-Saxons, to the British and the Americans; Andrew Young’s famous claim that the English invented racism has been eagerly taken up in many places. But these were, historically, the people who fought most fiercely against it, against Hitler, against slavery, against caste in India.
Case in point: racism now masquerades as “anti-racism.” The White Anglo-Saxons, as above, are now racially stigmatized themselves, by “anti-racists,” in terms hauntingly similar to those once used against Jews.
Case in point: Jesus was crucified. By the scribes and Pharisees, by the Roman civil authorities, with the assent of the mob. But surely those who were first and most fierce against him were the scribes and Pharisees.
By the scribes and Pharisees; by the teachers and intellectuals of his day.
Teachers and intellectuals. Essentially the same class Plato called “Sophists.”
Of course there are good teachers and honourable intellectuals: we have all known some. And they are pearls of great price. But there is a great and persistent truth here.
Precisely because our universities and colleges are supposed to be the bastions of free inquiry and deep thought, this is also sure to be where the cobwebs most gather. Because we are all frightened of truth; we all have something to lose from it.
I suspect the only thing that can give us the courage to face truth is deep religious conviction. It is no surprise, therefore, that the great universities were all founded as religious enterprises.
And it is equally no surprise, perhaps, that, stripped of this religious sense of mission and secularized, they have become so commonly places not of free enquiry and deep thought, but of ignorant prejudice and group thought. Even places frightened to death of independent thought or free enquiry. Whose main mental exercise seems to be to believe six impossible things before breakfast. In the words of Abigail Thernstrom, “islands of repression in a sea of freedom.”
Woe unto us, scribes and Pharisees.
The International Catholic Conspiracy had struck again.
These were in theory very educated people, holders of advanced degrees. These are the people educating our young.
How is it that so much of what they “know” is apparently merely superstition and prejudice?
The experience was not unique, nor did I find it surprising. I am myself an academic. I have been around many water coolers and faculty lounges and have heard many urban legends. This actually seems par for the course.
Let’s look at this bit about the Catholic Church suppressing Native American culture. I have heard it many times before, generally from the well-educated and fashionably opinioned. And, notably, never from a Native Canadian. All the Native Canadians I know are devout Christians.
In fact, I what records we have of the Mayans were preserved by Catholic clergy. The Popul Vuh, the Mayan sacred epic, was preserved and translated into Spanish by Father Francisco Ximanez in 1702. Without him, we would know nothing of the Mayans.
And this is true throughout the Americas. In most places, where the native peoples have a writing system, it was devised for them by missionaries. Where languages have been preserved, it has been through grammars and dictionaries made by missionaries. Where we know the old legends and beliefs, these were recorded by missionaries. Missionaries commonly worked hard to preserve native culture. Back in Kamloops, Father Jean-Marie Raphael LeJeune published the Kamloops Wawa from 1891 to 1923: a regular newspaper in the Chinook language, reflecting Native concerns.
Native culture was changed forever –one might say it was “destroyed,” but that in the end is a value judgment, and debatable--by plagues, alcohol, and the sudden availability of higher quality goods and more efficient technologies from abroad.
Christianity was one part of this mix. Christianity replaced the Native religions, just as it had replaced native religions across Europe. At the same time, it did what it could to protect the Natives from alcohol and plague. And the change from native to Christian beliefs was hardly by compulsion. I, too, would be pretty eager to embrace a new faith that condemned human sacrifice, slavery, and torture, preached the equality of man, and protected from curses, loss of soul, and demonic possession.
Was that a great loss, or a great gain, for Native culture? I would call it a great gain, and in itself no more a matter of “destroying” Native culture than the evangelization of Europe “destroyed” European culture.
But I digress. We were talking about two college professors. Why do they believe something so obviously false?
Whenever occurs a great evil or a great good, whenever right and wrong appear in the world in the raw, a mystical process begins. All of us who have a vested interest in concealing the truth—which probably means all of us--start to work, spinning silken threads out of our own innards, and begin to conceal matters under thick cobwebs of misinformation. The guilty are gradually exonerated and rewarded, the good blamed and punished. We do this so we can live with ourselves, for we know we are too often not good and not right.
Case in point: the evils of Fascism and Nazism are now commonly blamed on the Catholic Church, which was at the time almost the only voice against it.
Case in point: pedophilia, which was almost accepted by Kinsey and the Sixties “sexual revolution,” is now commonly blamed on the Catholic Church, which was at the time almost the only voice against it.
Case in point: racism is now often blamed uniquely on White Anglo-Saxons, to the British and the Americans; Andrew Young’s famous claim that the English invented racism has been eagerly taken up in many places. But these were, historically, the people who fought most fiercely against it, against Hitler, against slavery, against caste in India.
Case in point: racism now masquerades as “anti-racism.” The White Anglo-Saxons, as above, are now racially stigmatized themselves, by “anti-racists,” in terms hauntingly similar to those once used against Jews.
Case in point: Jesus was crucified. By the scribes and Pharisees, by the Roman civil authorities, with the assent of the mob. But surely those who were first and most fierce against him were the scribes and Pharisees.
By the scribes and Pharisees; by the teachers and intellectuals of his day.
Teachers and intellectuals. Essentially the same class Plato called “Sophists.”
Of course there are good teachers and honourable intellectuals: we have all known some. And they are pearls of great price. But there is a great and persistent truth here.
Precisely because our universities and colleges are supposed to be the bastions of free inquiry and deep thought, this is also sure to be where the cobwebs most gather. Because we are all frightened of truth; we all have something to lose from it.
I suspect the only thing that can give us the courage to face truth is deep religious conviction. It is no surprise, therefore, that the great universities were all founded as religious enterprises.
And it is equally no surprise, perhaps, that, stripped of this religious sense of mission and secularized, they have become so commonly places not of free enquiry and deep thought, but of ignorant prejudice and group thought. Even places frightened to death of independent thought or free enquiry. Whose main mental exercise seems to be to believe six impossible things before breakfast. In the words of Abigail Thernstrom, “islands of repression in a sea of freedom.”
Woe unto us, scribes and Pharisees.
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