It looks like enough killjoys have been pointing out the US governments' fondness for interfering in other countries' elections, for overthrowing other countries' elected goverments and replacing them with brutal dictatorships, that some Democrats are starting to find it necessary to respond. What I've seen so far has pretty much been along the lines of "Two wrongs don't make a right" and "People who've done wrong things have the right to complain when wrong things are done to them." Sound enough principles, but these people are overlooking something important.
The US government generally, and Hillary Clinton in particular, does not not consider it wrong to interfere in other countries' elections-- quite the contrary. Therefore we aren't dealing with two wrongs here, if it turns out that Russia did intervene in the election; we're dealing with two rights, the prerogative of great powers. The same applies to the second retort: can people complain when someone does to them the same thing they consider right when they do it to others? What isn't acceptable is to change the rules when your own chickens come home to roost.
Many Democrats argued during the election campaign that anyone who failed to support Clinton with the requisite degree of devotion and adulation, let alone anyone who criticized her in any way, was aiding Trump and would be responsible for the terrible things that would happen if he became President. They were not willing to accept responsibility for the terrible things that would happen if Clinton became President -- that would have nothing to do with them, they insisted (when they deigned to hear the argument at all), and besides Hillary wouldn't do anything terrrible, since she was a true progressive who would keep America great again!
I've never seen Democratic loyalists of this stripe really object to US interference in other countries' elections or government anyway, so I can't take seriously their sudden discovery that it's a bad thing. They were at most silent, and more often celebratory, when the US and its proxies overthrew elected governments. So, like Clinton, they can't really claim that Russian interference in US elections would be a bad thing. (I'm obviously leaving aside the question whether Russian intervention took place, and if so whether it gave Trump the Electoral College victory; that too is open to doubt, but it's not my concern here.) Barack Obama, to whom these considerations also apply, has occasionally admitted that in the remote past the US has been less than saintly in its dealings with smaller, weaker states, but he never let this admission interfere with continuing the tradition. Of course this is just typical American exceptionalism: it's different when we do it, because we have good intentions.
(Why, yes -- I'm still procrastinating.)
Saturday, December 17, 2016
Wednesday, December 14, 2016
Some Further Thoughts on "Lesser Evils"
Another procrastinatory post, but it also fits in with the one I'm trying, slowly, to write.
A few weeks ago I said on Facebook that I'd voted for Bernie Sanders as "the lesser evil." This upset a friend who worked for Sanders in the primaries. He conceded that Sanders was flawed but he couldn't see him as evil. I pointed to Sanders's support for no-fly / no-buy (a no-due-process policy that would mainly target Muslims), his ambivalent criticism of Israel, his support for the Iran nuclear deal based on some odd assumptions about America's right to order other countries around. (In this position statement Sanders spends most of his time on a tirade about George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, but never acknowledges that Iran didn't have and wasn't pursuing a nuclear weapons program in the first place. In general, supporters of the agreement from Obama on down have deliberately confused "nuclear program" and "nuclear weapons program.") I got bogged down in other things and didn't continue the conversation, but something occurred to me today. Perhaps, having clarified this in my mind, I'll return to the exchange with my friend.
I want to ask my friend and all other Democrats, whether Sandernista or Clintonbot, what is the proper response when someone tells them that he or she intends to vote for their candidate -- but as the lesser evil. I think the answer is obvious. It should be something along the lines of "Thanks for your vote. Will you need a ride to the polls on election day?" It's revealing that, on the contrary, their first (and last, for that matter) impulse is to attack the prospective voter, as though his or her vote is not wanted unless it is offered in a spirit of total and unconditional adulation. A vague admission that the candidate is "flawed" may then be permitted, provided that no flaws are specified. It seems to me that a vote is a vote, but Democrats evidently don't agree. My friend was much less hostile than Clinton or Obama devotees, but that may be because no one had ever called Sanders "the lesser evil" around him before, and he wasn't ready to break out the vitriol yet.
My remarks on Facebook were partly satirical anyway, which I thought would be obvious to anyone who'd been conscious during the past election season. It now seems to me that anyone being asked for their vote should refer to the candidate in question as the lesser evil, and see what reaction they get. If you encounter resistance, you're dealing with a personality cultist who is unable to see their candidate clearly, and who is hoping to elect a messiah, not a politician. This is why there was a good deal of disappointment (exactly how much, I'm not sure) among his supporters when Sanders kept his promise to campaign for Clinton after she won the nomination. (My friend wasn't one of these, I should mention.) It's why Obamamaniacs were unable to hold his feet to the fire when he was elected and began breaking his promises, selling out his base -- though of course he'd begun doing that during the campaign, and met almost no resistance, so why not continue? If you can't vote for someone while being as critical of them as need be, but must attack all their critics -- even those who vote for them -- something is wrong; you're probably pushing a bad candidate, and the angrier the criticism makes you, the worse your candidate probably is.
A few weeks ago I said on Facebook that I'd voted for Bernie Sanders as "the lesser evil." This upset a friend who worked for Sanders in the primaries. He conceded that Sanders was flawed but he couldn't see him as evil. I pointed to Sanders's support for no-fly / no-buy (a no-due-process policy that would mainly target Muslims), his ambivalent criticism of Israel, his support for the Iran nuclear deal based on some odd assumptions about America's right to order other countries around. (In this position statement Sanders spends most of his time on a tirade about George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, but never acknowledges that Iran didn't have and wasn't pursuing a nuclear weapons program in the first place. In general, supporters of the agreement from Obama on down have deliberately confused "nuclear program" and "nuclear weapons program.") I got bogged down in other things and didn't continue the conversation, but something occurred to me today. Perhaps, having clarified this in my mind, I'll return to the exchange with my friend.
I want to ask my friend and all other Democrats, whether Sandernista or Clintonbot, what is the proper response when someone tells them that he or she intends to vote for their candidate -- but as the lesser evil. I think the answer is obvious. It should be something along the lines of "Thanks for your vote. Will you need a ride to the polls on election day?" It's revealing that, on the contrary, their first (and last, for that matter) impulse is to attack the prospective voter, as though his or her vote is not wanted unless it is offered in a spirit of total and unconditional adulation. A vague admission that the candidate is "flawed" may then be permitted, provided that no flaws are specified. It seems to me that a vote is a vote, but Democrats evidently don't agree. My friend was much less hostile than Clinton or Obama devotees, but that may be because no one had ever called Sanders "the lesser evil" around him before, and he wasn't ready to break out the vitriol yet.
My remarks on Facebook were partly satirical anyway, which I thought would be obvious to anyone who'd been conscious during the past election season. It now seems to me that anyone being asked for their vote should refer to the candidate in question as the lesser evil, and see what reaction they get. If you encounter resistance, you're dealing with a personality cultist who is unable to see their candidate clearly, and who is hoping to elect a messiah, not a politician. This is why there was a good deal of disappointment (exactly how much, I'm not sure) among his supporters when Sanders kept his promise to campaign for Clinton after she won the nomination. (My friend wasn't one of these, I should mention.) It's why Obamamaniacs were unable to hold his feet to the fire when he was elected and began breaking his promises, selling out his base -- though of course he'd begun doing that during the campaign, and met almost no resistance, so why not continue? If you can't vote for someone while being as critical of them as need be, but must attack all their critics -- even those who vote for them -- something is wrong; you're probably pushing a bad candidate, and the angrier the criticism makes you, the worse your candidate probably is.
Tuesday, December 13, 2016
This Is the Dawning of the Age of the Internet
Let me procrastinate a bit on another post I'm in the middle of by writing this one. It all ties together in the end anyway.
I disagree rather strongly with a recent post by Bodhipaksa on Fake Buddha Quotes on the more general issue of misquotation in the age of the Internet. He quoted a paper by Giovanni Gaetani, on misquotations of the philosopher Albert Camus. Like so:
After writing was invented, there was the problem of forgeries, or pseudepigrapha as they're more delicately known. Who composed the Homeric poems? No one knows, so it's convenient and not unreasonable to ascribe them to Homer. Other poems were ascribed to the same author, though probably they were not his. Works were written in the name of Plato and other philosophers. You'll find that many ancient works from the Greco-Roman world were written by Pseudo-guys.
Only those who believe everything they see in print take for granted that all the books in the Bible were written by the authors tradition assigns to them. All but the most conservative scholars believe that not all the letters ascribed to the apostle Paul in the New Testament were actually written by him, and many enterprising people wrote in the name of this or that patriarch, apostle, or hanger-on; many people took their word for it. Some scholars will tell you that it was commonplace and accepted to write pseudepigrapha in those days, but while it was commonplace, it wasn't accepted. Many writers denounced such works. Whoever wrote Second Thessalonians, for example, warned readers not to be fooled by letters "as though from us" (2.2), indicating that forged letters in Paul's name were already circulating in his lifetime -- which is ironic if, as many scholars believe, Second Thessalonians was not itself written by Paul. (How better to distract attention from one's own deception than by calling someone else a deceiver?)
Before the Internet came along in my own lifetime, many rumors and legends circulated: that queers wore yellow (or was it green?) on Tuesdays (or was it Thursdays?), for instance. That Franklin Delano Roosevelt was actually a Jew, who had syphilis not polio. At about the time I graduated from high school, the myth that Paul McCartney had died and been replaced by a lookalike began to circulate, and it persists to this day; even many people who don't believe it still think that the Beatles were responsible for the story and had put clues about it in their songs and on their album covers. Some of these canards circulated orally, others were mimeographed or printed cheaply on offset presses. It was often impossible to track such falsehoods to their source, and not many people cared much. If they liked what they heard, they believed it; if not, they scoffed. And although most people are acquainted with the concept of "urban legends," popularized by the folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand, they still readily believe them. The people who post lists of criteria for discerning fact from deception generally fail to observe them themselves.
The Internet has increased the reach of ordinary people, and the speed with which information travels and spreads. But the difference is one of degree, not kind. True, anyone with Internet access can express his or her opinions, regardless of competence, but most that is posted on the Internet will never be seen by more than a few people. No one can predict when a given posting will go viral.
Do people believe everything they see on the Internet? Of course not; that's more Occidental hyperbole. People believe what they want to believe, and ignore what they don't want to believe. So, for example, my Third Right-Wing Acquaintance boasted that since she couldn't tell who was telling the truth on the Internet, she just believed what she found congenial. Many other people do the same, but are less forthright about it.
Bodhipaksa quotes another passage from Gaetani:
In narrow domains, where comparatively little is at stake -- Camus studies, say -- credentialed authority can be relied on much of the time. It's fairly easy to tell whether a saying ascribed to Jesus is authentic or not, if you agree to limit authenticity to the contents of the four canonical gospels: they're not very long, they've been studied and indexed exhaustively, and it's easy enough to look up a saying you're not sure about to see if it can be found in them. The same is true for the Buddhist scriptures, though there are more of them. But where much is at stake -- the national or world economy, international conflicts that could turn into war, etc. -- it's harder to know whom to trust For one thing, the credentialed authorities disagree with each other. As with the variety of religions in the world, they can't all be true; how can you know whose claims to believe? For another, they often lie, and it's difficult for us ordinary schmucks to know when they're lying. These are problems that, like the poor, have always been with us and probably always will. It's not because of the Internet that we don't know what to do about them. I'd say, however, that anyone who blames the Internet for our difficulty in knowing what is true is probably not to be trusted.
I disagree rather strongly with a recent post by Bodhipaksa on Fake Buddha Quotes on the more general issue of misquotation in the age of the Internet. He quoted a paper by Giovanni Gaetani, on misquotations of the philosopher Albert Camus. Like so:
Nonetheless, we underestimate [the] Internet’s impact on literature and philosophy: ever since everyone has the power to say his personal opinion about everything, even when he is a total incompetent about the subject; ever since everyone can quote a writer without feeling the need to report the source and ever since everyone seems to not care at all about sources, believing in everything he sees on Internet, every quote has completely lost reliability.There's a fair amount of Occidental hyperbole in this paragraph: "everyone seems to not care at all about sources," etc. But everyone has always had the power to say his personal opinion about everything. Before literacy became widespread, anybody could stand outside and announce that he (less often she) was filled with the Holy Spirit and you'd better listen. Often people did. Often they didn't. There was always rumor, and folklore, and sources had a way of disappearing after a couple of iterations. You could never be sure who had said something, and the same sayings were attributed to different sages.
After writing was invented, there was the problem of forgeries, or pseudepigrapha as they're more delicately known. Who composed the Homeric poems? No one knows, so it's convenient and not unreasonable to ascribe them to Homer. Other poems were ascribed to the same author, though probably they were not his. Works were written in the name of Plato and other philosophers. You'll find that many ancient works from the Greco-Roman world were written by Pseudo-guys.
Only those who believe everything they see in print take for granted that all the books in the Bible were written by the authors tradition assigns to them. All but the most conservative scholars believe that not all the letters ascribed to the apostle Paul in the New Testament were actually written by him, and many enterprising people wrote in the name of this or that patriarch, apostle, or hanger-on; many people took their word for it. Some scholars will tell you that it was commonplace and accepted to write pseudepigrapha in those days, but while it was commonplace, it wasn't accepted. Many writers denounced such works. Whoever wrote Second Thessalonians, for example, warned readers not to be fooled by letters "as though from us" (2.2), indicating that forged letters in Paul's name were already circulating in his lifetime -- which is ironic if, as many scholars believe, Second Thessalonians was not itself written by Paul. (How better to distract attention from one's own deception than by calling someone else a deceiver?)
Before the Internet came along in my own lifetime, many rumors and legends circulated: that queers wore yellow (or was it green?) on Tuesdays (or was it Thursdays?), for instance. That Franklin Delano Roosevelt was actually a Jew, who had syphilis not polio. At about the time I graduated from high school, the myth that Paul McCartney had died and been replaced by a lookalike began to circulate, and it persists to this day; even many people who don't believe it still think that the Beatles were responsible for the story and had put clues about it in their songs and on their album covers. Some of these canards circulated orally, others were mimeographed or printed cheaply on offset presses. It was often impossible to track such falsehoods to their source, and not many people cared much. If they liked what they heard, they believed it; if not, they scoffed. And although most people are acquainted with the concept of "urban legends," popularized by the folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand, they still readily believe them. The people who post lists of criteria for discerning fact from deception generally fail to observe them themselves.
The Internet has increased the reach of ordinary people, and the speed with which information travels and spreads. But the difference is one of degree, not kind. True, anyone with Internet access can express his or her opinions, regardless of competence, but most that is posted on the Internet will never be seen by more than a few people. No one can predict when a given posting will go viral.
Do people believe everything they see on the Internet? Of course not; that's more Occidental hyperbole. People believe what they want to believe, and ignore what they don't want to believe. So, for example, my Third Right-Wing Acquaintance boasted that since she couldn't tell who was telling the truth on the Internet, she just believed what she found congenial. Many other people do the same, but are less forthright about it.
Bodhipaksa quotes another passage from Gaetani:
During my research I have contacted many bloggers, asking them where Camus should have written/said this or that; their answer was always the same: «check it on Google». Indeed, their reasoning was simple but tremendously naïve: if a quote is reported by so many people – millions of references in some cases – the author of this quote “must” be Albert Camus.I believe that it's much easier now, in the age of the Internet, to find out whether a given quotation is authentic or not. It helps that there are sites like Quote Investigator and Wikiquote, to say nothing of Fake Buddha Quotes itself, where people do a lot of the necessary detective work. But something else is going on here. Bodhipaksa remarks, "I paraphrase this attitude as 'It must be true. I read it on the internet.'" It's true, many people believe this, or act as if they do. But how different is it from saying, say, "It must be true, I read it in the Bible"? Or "I heard it on the news"? Much of the current concern about "fake news" is explicitly intended to recall people to the fold shepherded by traditional authority: print media, the three big television networks, government officials -- the right government officials, meaning those of one's favored party. Yet these authorities have discredited themselves again and again, with no accountability, and have never been particularly reliable. Who is competent to have an opinion? The general answer is: the same wise, credentialed, responsible commentators your parents trusted. But those people got us into the mess we're in now, and have no idea how to get us out of it except to proffer more of the same.
In narrow domains, where comparatively little is at stake -- Camus studies, say -- credentialed authority can be relied on much of the time. It's fairly easy to tell whether a saying ascribed to Jesus is authentic or not, if you agree to limit authenticity to the contents of the four canonical gospels: they're not very long, they've been studied and indexed exhaustively, and it's easy enough to look up a saying you're not sure about to see if it can be found in them. The same is true for the Buddhist scriptures, though there are more of them. But where much is at stake -- the national or world economy, international conflicts that could turn into war, etc. -- it's harder to know whom to trust For one thing, the credentialed authorities disagree with each other. As with the variety of religions in the world, they can't all be true; how can you know whose claims to believe? For another, they often lie, and it's difficult for us ordinary schmucks to know when they're lying. These are problems that, like the poor, have always been with us and probably always will. It's not because of the Internet that we don't know what to do about them. I'd say, however, that anyone who blames the Internet for our difficulty in knowing what is true is probably not to be trusted.
Sunday, December 11, 2016
It Is Written
Briefly, Landau thinks that the Revelation of the Magi was probably written in the late second or perhaps the third century. The Magi, of course, are mentioned in the gospel of Matthew: the word is often translated as "wise men." When Jesus was born they came first to King Herod, asking for the whereabouts of the newborn "King of the Jews." They had seen a new star in the heavens, which had led them to Judea. Herod's experts said that the prophets had foretold that such a person would be born in Bethlehem; Herod gave the Magi this information, and asked them to let him know when they'd found the child. The star they'd seen led them to the very house where Jesus and his parents were staying, and they "offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh." A dream warned the Magi not to report back to Herod, so they returned directly to their own country.
The Revelation of the Magi invents a backstory for the wise visitors. Instead of the Persian astrologers / magicians / sages they were usually thought to be, the Revelation's Magi are from the distant land of Shir, by an unnamed ocean. According to the text, their name meant that "in silence, without a sound, they praised the God of all" (page 36). They were descendants of Adam's son Seth, custodians of books of prophecy and wisdom that he had bequeathed to them, as well as of treasures that they were to give to the Messiah when the star finally appeared to them and led them to him. (Personally, I find this detail the most interesting one in the book: the gold, frankincense, and myrrh brought by the Magi are said to have been assembled by Seth and kept in storage for thousands of years, just so that they could be brought to the baby Jesus. Why? It obviously seemed important and reasonable to the author, but it makes no sense at all to me.) When that day arrived, they had a vision of the star, which appeared to them as a child with a cross, who gave them instructions and led them to Judea. They found that their provisions were miraculously restored, that mountains and other obstacles were leveled to let them pass, so that the journey passed quickly and easily. Years after they returned to Shir, Jesus' disciple Thomas visited them, baptized them and their people, and bade them bring the gospel to their whole land.
This edition is intended for a general audience. (Someday I may take a look at the scholarly version, his dissertation, which is available online.) Landau does a fine job of giving the document a context, explaining its relation to the story of the Magi in the gospel of Matthew, and its remarkable influence on Christian imagery of the Nativity and the Wise Men.
All this is interesting enough, but I must say that the Revelation itself would be a disappointment if I'd had great expectations for it. I expected it to be fan fiction filling out a fictional story, and so it was. Whatever differences from or additions to Matthew's story it contained wouldn't matter except as they revealed something about the mindset of the author. The structure of the story seems very much like today's Tolkien-inspired fantasy fiction, which often feels similarly pointless to me -- the authors create worlds for the sake of creating worlds, and then are not sure what to make happen in them. Often they hope to teach beautiful lessons about how people should live, which while usually unexceptionable are nothing new, and the imaginary backdrops don't add anything to the lessons. Luckily, the author of the Revelation had a plotline ready-made in the gospel.
What surprised me was that there was very little content. Pages are filled with references to the "mysteries" and "treasures" of which the Magi are worthy to be custodians --
And when it became the first of the month, we ascended and went to the top of the mountain and stood before the mouth of the Cave of Treasures of Hidden Mysteries. And we knelt on our knees and stretched forth our hands to heaven, and we prayed and worshiped in silence, without a sound, to the Father of that heavenly majesty that is ineffable and infinite forever. On the third of the month we entered the cave up to the treasures, the treasures that were prepared as the star’s own [gifts] and for the adoration of that light that we awaited. And what we read and heard from the revelation, when we returned, descending in joy, we said to and instructed our sons, our families, and everyone who gave themselves with love to learn.-- along with quotations from Seth's instructions to their ancestors and from Adam's instructions to Seth.
"For there will be from my family and my children glorious and honorable people, (the reciters) of the mysteries of the majesty. And they will find great mercy and will pray, ask, and be heard. And [text missing] of the majesty, but at the end times of that generation they will again be [rebelling,] and they will not be afraid of my foolishness and of the judgment that I have. Instead, they shall be headstrong and shall speak blasphemy unto the heavenly majesty. And they will say many things, and shall also make painted idols and graven images, and shall even serve the sun and the moon, and they shall speak words of blasphemy. And all these things that are among them from the deceits of my treacherous deceiver, because he will offer the love of his fraud and his deceit filled with poison to each of the generations that will be after me. And he will [show] and make them desire the empty praise of great riches, pride, clothes, property, fornication, boastfulness, injustice, greed, and various possessions. And he will appear to them like a lover or a friend and entice them. And again, with reveling, drunkenness, impure and defiled feasts, which are an illusion [of his] empty [apparitions,] and again, with possessions of assorted excesses, he will take hold of them with fraudulent affection, which is not virtuous, just as also to me through Eve."As usual in apocalyptic literature, an ancient authority "predicts" what the reader (or audience -- this text was probably meant to be read aloud) can see in his or her present day. Also as usual, what is predicted occurs in every generation, so that the predictions are hard to prove wrong. Not that it matters -- most people are perfectly happy to overlook falsified predictions. The New Testament contains multiple assurances that the End is near, that Jesus will return within the first Christians' lifetimes to judge the world, and so on, yet most Christians are able to overlook them, and indeed to miss them entirely.
Landau believes that "whether one is a born-again Christian, a Latter-day Saint, a 'religious seeker,' or a Buddhist, the Revelation of the Magi raises challenging questions about divine revelation, religious pluralism, and the uniqueness of religions—questions that merit deep, sustained reflection." In particular he finds an endorsement of religious pluralism in the story, though I think he's overreaching there. But even if he's right, that aspect of the story had no detectable influence on Christian doctrine over the centuries. Its influence appears to have been limited to details of the representation of the Magi in Christian art: the Star of Bethlehem was often represented as the Christ Child with a Cross in the sky above the travelers, for example. The theologian and saint Thomas Aquinas also was influenced by it, according to Landau. It also influenced European invaders' understanding of the peoples they met in the New World. To me, however, this indicates that the Revelation was understood to be about Christian universalism, the doctrine that the whole world would come to worship Christ (and had unknowingly been waiting for his missionaries to arrive all along), rather than about religious pluralism, and that's probably what the story's writer meant to convey. As Stephen Colbert mockingly put it, there are infinite paths to accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior.
Any text can be and will be understood as its readers wish to understand it, and this extends far beyond an old Syriac manuscript. I'm trying to figure out what people take from the Revelation. The customer reviews of the book at Amazon are instructive. Quite a few readers take for granted that the Revelation, though apocryphal, supplies authentic information on Matthew's Magi, filling in details that he left out. "The story of the Magi, their preparation for the events that would change history, their description of the trip to Bethlehem, and their re-telling of their conversations with all involved, for me, had a feeling of truth about it," wrote one. "Fascinating unknown information on the Magi, which contributes to ancient Christian tradition," wrote another. Another, after dismissing "A lot of introductory material that was of less interest," reported that she "personally treasure this manuscript as filling in much description no more astonishing than the virgin birth of the Messiah." "I love to learn about books that have been left out of the bible to figure out what really happened," wrote another. "I would definitely recommend to anyone interested in learning about where the Magi might have come from," wrote yet another.
And so on. Even if you insist that Matthew's Nativity story has some basis in fact, there's no reason to suppose that the Revelation adds any factual information to it. The Revelation of the Magi is a fictional expansion of a fictional story -- fan fiction, in short. Yet many people jump to the conclusion that because it's not in the Bible, it is the truth, long forgotten or (better) suppressed by the Church. (That the story influenced orthodox conceptions of the Magi and the Star of Bethlehem for over a thousand years shows that it wasn't suppressed, by the way.) We can see the same thought process at work today, in readers' objections to the revelation that Dumbledore was gay. Even though this information was handed down by the Creator herself, many readers (including gay ones, to my amazement) rejected it in favor of their own fantasies and prejudices. Other readers proved to their own satisfaction that Rowling was wrong in pairing Harry Potter with Ginny Weasley, since Scripture itself showed that he should have married Hermione Grainger. Though they knew on some level that the Potteriad is fiction, they demanded that it conform to their wishes. It's not surprising, then, that people would take for granted that any ancient text, "apocryphal" or not, contains fact. This is how many (most?) people respond to stories they find attractive.
This would be enough to baffle me, but even more, I don't get what other readers get from Revelation of the Magi. I know that stories are important tools that people use to make sense of the world, but they aren't the only ones, and since any story can be interpreted in mutually contradictory ways, no story can authorize any doctrine or principle. People ignore even the most direct commands in canonical writings, so an ambiguous passage in one non-canonical story mandates nothing.
Recently I got into another dustup on Facebook when a friend posted a meme about how nice it would be if we had a story in the Bible about a "Middle Eastern" family looking for shelter, like today's refugees. I disputed the meaning of the story the meme-maker had in mind (Joseph and Mary unable to find a room at the inn), and was chastised for supposing that it had the meaning I suggested. My accuser advised me to study some theology, unaware that I've spent many years doing that. Which is unimportant; what is important is that he violated his own stricture by assuming that the story had one meaning, a meaning congenial to his political principles; the assumption of the meme was that the right story, understood rightly as any right-thinking liberal would, could settle a contemporary political question. Reading theologians will quickly show you that biblical stories can be interpreted to endorse almost any principle you like, including mutually contradictory ones. Whichever one you happen to like will conform to your "faith," and that, I've often been told, is beyond the reach of reason or even persuasion. So whatever you want to do about refugees, the Bible cannot settle it.
There are plenty of good reasons to value religious pluralism, and I don't see that the Revelation adds anything to it other than the very dubious possibility that one writer may have endorsed it. I'm intrigued too when I find "modern"-seeming arguments in old writings, because people will often claim that the ancients had no such concept and couldn't possibly have seen things that way. Such examples show that in fact, the ancients could and did (and many moderns don't), but they don't settle anything, and they especially don't settle anything in religious doctrine.
This is important right now, as people of all political positions wax indignant about the lies and myths their opponents accept, while credulously accepting the lies and myths spread by their own faction. I'm not going to specify which ones just now. The reader will surely be able to think of several, according to his or her own predilections and affiliations. Readers' reactions to the Revelation of the Magi indicate that the problem is much more general than religion or politics.
Thursday, December 1, 2016
Thanks, Obama!
But I don't mean to give POTUS (genuflect) all the credit. I must also remember the US Congress, which has let numerous Presidents do these things and has been notably submissive to Obama; the corporate media, who've done their best to ignore these atrocities (they have plenty of practice!); and the millions of liberals whose well-disciplined memories ensure that they will simply refuse to acknowledge what their President is doing. Thanks to you all for your service.
Thursday, November 17, 2016
The Key to the Prison House of Gender
Richard Seymour wrote recently:
Maybe I was slightly disingenuous, however. I can't see any reason not to say that children may (and do) do things that hurt themselves and others, as adults do. It's not an accusation (a term that in this context still perplexes me), and "abuse" is a problematic word: like much of the terminology of regimes of control, it's ambiguous and so is often used carelessly, as in "drug abuse" and "self-abuse" itself. So let's toss it aside and try to focus on what is really at stake here.
The sentence I quoted from Seymour was the overture to a discussion of, or around, a recent court case in Britain, in which "a judge took a child out of the care of its mother because it was deemed that the child was being forced to 'live as a girl' while in fact identifying as a boy."
The ensuing discussion is murky and confused, which is unusual for Seymour. He's usually exemplary in the clarity and directness of his writing but gender, like religion, is one of his weak areas. He begins:
The confusion that runs through the post, though, is the equation of gender socialization and abuse. Seymour evidently assumes that "socialization" is explicit and overt and probably punitive, though most of the time it's implicit and covert and enforced by approval and reward. The mother who praised her young son for announcing that he wanted to be Queen of New York was socializing him into her own assumptions about gender. (I still wonder if she'd have been as delighted if he wanted to be a cowboy named Butch.) But parents socialize their children by speaking to them in their native language; by living in a given locale with its language and customs, by feeding them some foods and not others, by singing them songs and telling them stories, by providing examples of what people are and how they live. Parents also socialize their children by teaching them to resist norms and stereotypes: if you teach your sons to cook and clean, and your daughter carpentry and small-engine repair, that is also socialization, and I don't think Seymour would consider it abuse.
It's impossible to raise children without socializing them. Children can't survive without intensive interaction with other human beings, socializing themselves and being socialized by them; so socializing them cannot be categorized as abuse if "abuse" has any meaning at all. If it really was the radical feminist position that all gender socialization is abuse, that's a critical flaw in radical feminism. I presume that Seymour is aware of this, and that he was using "socialization" in a narrow sense, such as punishing a child for failing or refusing to conform to some norm. By "abuse" he presumably meant something like mistreatment and cruelty; mistreatment and cruelty are unacceptable whether they're meted out to children or adults, and regardless of what sort of norms (or none at all) they are used to enforce.
I suppose that some radical Second Wave feminists did imagine that it would be possible to raise children without socializing them into gender norms. In 1972 the novelist Lois Gould published a fable, X: A Fabulous Child's Story, about a child who was raised without gender socialization as a part of a $23 billion scientific experiment guided and evaluated by "Xperts." Because it was ostensibly written for children, it's written in an obnoxious cutesy style (another kind of socialization: because you are a child, I will talk down to you). The child X has to wear red-and-white checked overalls, and after X overcomes the other children's false consciousness, they all want to wear them too. And after X is evaluated by Xperts who conclude that X is just about the least mixed-up X evar, the neighborhood parents still aren't satisfied:
The best I can say for Gould's fable is that she recognizes that raising a child without gender expectations would be very difficult -- as difficult as raising a child to conform to gender norms. X's parents are given a manual thousands of pages long (they're up to page 85769 by the time X is in first grade), and are guided throughout the experiment by the scientists. They must maintain a rigorous balance at all times -- indeed, their scientific guides are as rigid in their prescriptions for socializing an X's gender as any conservative:
I'll quote again the woman who told a symposium in 1971: “This short haircut, because it is mine, is a woman’s hairstyle. These so-called men’s boots, because I am wearing them, are women’s boots. This pipe, because I am smoking it, is a woman’s pipe. Whatever women wear is women’s wear. It is a matter of individual choice – and comfort.”* To "live as a man" is any way a man lives; to "live as a woman" is any way a woman lives.
When Richard Seymour wrote about the boy from the court case living "as a girl," he meant living so as to conform to prevailing gender stereotypes. By his logic, living either as a boy or a girl, as a man or a woman -- regardless of your body configuration or your sex chromosomes -- must be the product of bad faith at best, of abusive socialization at worst. (Oddly, though, people who reject their assigned stereotype in favor of the opposite one are seen as heroic, free, non-binary. And can a child "consent" to either?) Adopting any gender identity apparently means accepting the stereotype, agreeing that certain modes of dress, certain body language, certain occupations, and so on have a gender. They do only by the same social agreement and processes of socialization that Seymour characterizes as abusive. Perhaps they are, but we can't get rid of them. If we don't teach children sex roles, they'll invent their own. Children aren't passive objects of socialization. They resist, they create options, they socialize each other.
Seymour mentions "the absence of gender specialists consulted in court." I find this curious, since expert testimony on gender is always culture-bound, and the results will be largely predetermined by which gender specialists are allowed to testify. As a gay liberationist influenced by radical feminism I wouldn't trust a child's (or adult's) fate with them; call me old-fashioned if you like. The only authority Seymour quotes in the post is the psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi (1873-1933), who might or might be right in his opinions, but I wouldn't look to a Freudian or any other mental health professional for guidance on sexism.
Seymour says that the same parents who are "evasive and anxious in answering questions about sex, particularly if they are unhappy about their sex lives"
Against Seymour's stricture on "the strict relationship between birth-assigned sex and one’s future gendered life trajectory," I've noticed that advocates for gender atypical children, and at least some transgender adults are claiming a biological basis for gender variance. They equate biological sex with the sex chromosomes or a tiny region of the brain and equate it with gender. One such person, for example, claimed that "science is increasingly revealing to us that gender identity is more or less inborn"; a transgender friend told someone who asked her why she was trans that it was "a matter of brain structure"; both of these claims are false, just like the claim that homosexuality is more or less inborn and a matter of brain structure. I don't know what Seymour thinks about this, but the current trend even for gender nonconformists is as hostile to the radical feminist position as any traditionalist, seeking to root gender in the body. Failing that, they try to reify gender, as a pre-cultural autonomous essence rather than a cultural construction. Both positions are incoherent and quickly become entangled in their contradictions, as Seymour's does. A radical feminist position would be to abolish gender, but though I consider that desirable I'm not sure it's possible. Even the radical Second Wave feminists who argued for the abolition of gender kept falling back on gender stereotypes. It will be no more possible to abolish the socialization of children; the best we can do is try to make the process more flexible, open and humane.
*Del Martin and Phyllis Lyons, Lesbian/Woman (Bantam Books, 1972), page 81.
When he quoted that line on Twitter, I remarked:From a certain perspective, notably that of radical feminism, all gender socialisation is child abuse.
In the same way, though, child gender self-identification is self-abuse.To which he replied:
you're accusing children of abusing themselves.I answered:
No, I was playing on an antique term that I thought was no longer in serious use. ("Accusing"!)That, thankfully, was the end of that exchange.
Maybe I was slightly disingenuous, however. I can't see any reason not to say that children may (and do) do things that hurt themselves and others, as adults do. It's not an accusation (a term that in this context still perplexes me), and "abuse" is a problematic word: like much of the terminology of regimes of control, it's ambiguous and so is often used carelessly, as in "drug abuse" and "self-abuse" itself. So let's toss it aside and try to focus on what is really at stake here.
The sentence I quoted from Seymour was the overture to a discussion of, or around, a recent court case in Britain, in which "a judge took a child out of the care of its mother because it was deemed that the child was being forced to 'live as a girl' while in fact identifying as a boy."
We have the text of the judgment to go on, and we have the reactions of trans activists, who have expressed concern about the value judgments implied in the judgment and the absence of gender specialists consulted in court. There is a petition seeking to reverse the decision.And that's about it; privacy concerns, I presume, have limited the amount of information accessible to the public. Seymour therefore decided simply to "ask: what if everything the judgment says is true? I doubt that it is that straightforward, but supposing it is: what conclusions should we draw? For the sake of argument, then, I will assume the factual accuracy of everything that is claimed by the judge."
The ensuing discussion is murky and confused, which is unusual for Seymour. He's usually exemplary in the clarity and directness of his writing but gender, like religion, is one of his weak areas. He begins:
In particular, I will assume that the child identified as a boy, and did not consent to live as a girl. Or, more precisely, that the child would have preferred to identify as a boy, and only consented to live as a girl in order to please his mother."Identified as" is intensely problematic. "Identify" is not an analytic term, despite its popularity as a political one. If the child considered himself a boy, then he continued to "identify as" one despite his mother's pressure. "Identify" and "live as" are not the same thing at all. I "identify as" male and as a man, for example, but what does it mean to say that one "lives as" a man? A child (or an adult) might very well "identify as" one sex while neglecting or refusing to fit the stereotypes (i.e., "gender") associated with it. I myself violate numerous expectations of masculinity, some of which require more steadfastness than others.
The confusion that runs through the post, though, is the equation of gender socialization and abuse. Seymour evidently assumes that "socialization" is explicit and overt and probably punitive, though most of the time it's implicit and covert and enforced by approval and reward. The mother who praised her young son for announcing that he wanted to be Queen of New York was socializing him into her own assumptions about gender. (I still wonder if she'd have been as delighted if he wanted to be a cowboy named Butch.) But parents socialize their children by speaking to them in their native language; by living in a given locale with its language and customs, by feeding them some foods and not others, by singing them songs and telling them stories, by providing examples of what people are and how they live. Parents also socialize their children by teaching them to resist norms and stereotypes: if you teach your sons to cook and clean, and your daughter carpentry and small-engine repair, that is also socialization, and I don't think Seymour would consider it abuse.
It's impossible to raise children without socializing them. Children can't survive without intensive interaction with other human beings, socializing themselves and being socialized by them; so socializing them cannot be categorized as abuse if "abuse" has any meaning at all. If it really was the radical feminist position that all gender socialization is abuse, that's a critical flaw in radical feminism. I presume that Seymour is aware of this, and that he was using "socialization" in a narrow sense, such as punishing a child for failing or refusing to conform to some norm. By "abuse" he presumably meant something like mistreatment and cruelty; mistreatment and cruelty are unacceptable whether they're meted out to children or adults, and regardless of what sort of norms (or none at all) they are used to enforce.
I suppose that some radical Second Wave feminists did imagine that it would be possible to raise children without socializing them into gender norms. In 1972 the novelist Lois Gould published a fable, X: A Fabulous Child's Story, about a child who was raised without gender socialization as a part of a $23 billion scientific experiment guided and evaluated by "Xperts." Because it was ostensibly written for children, it's written in an obnoxious cutesy style (another kind of socialization: because you are a child, I will talk down to you). The child X has to wear red-and-white checked overalls, and after X overcomes the other children's false consciousness, they all want to wear them too. And after X is evaluated by Xperts who conclude that X is just about the least mixed-up X evar, the neighborhood parents still aren't satisfied:
"But what is X?" shrieked Peggy and Joe's parents. "We still want to know what it is!" "Ah, yes," said the Xperts, winking again. "Well, don't worry. You'll all know one of these days. And you won't need us to tell you."This makes no sense. When it "matters which sex X is," will X give up the overalls and walk around naked? Or in sex-appropriate clothing to signal X's sex? Will X have to give up the freedom X had as a child, and adopt sex-appropriate pastimes and career? A person's sex continues to matter a lot to adults; children are often granted a fair amount of gender freedom until they reach adolescence, at which point they're supposed to get serious, knuckle down, and conform.
"What? What do they mean?" Jim's parents grumbled suspiciously. Susie and Peggy and Joe all answered at once. "They mean that by the time it matters which sex X is, it won't be a secret anymore!"
The best I can say for Gould's fable is that she recognizes that raising a child without gender expectations would be very difficult -- as difficult as raising a child to conform to gender norms. X's parents are given a manual thousands of pages long (they're up to page 85769 by the time X is in first grade), and are guided throughout the experiment by the scientists. They must maintain a rigorous balance at all times -- indeed, their scientific guides are as rigid in their prescriptions for socializing an X's gender as any conservative:
Ms. and Mr. Jones had to be Xtra careful. If they kept bouncing it up in the air and saying how strong and active it was, they'd be treating it more like a boy than an X. But if all they did was cuddle it and kiss it and tell it how sweet and dainty it was, they'd be treating it more like a girl than an X. On page 1654 of the Official Instruction Manual, the scientists prescribed: "Plenty of bouncing and plenty of cuddling, both. X ought to be strong and sweet and active. Forget about dainty altogether".I almost think that Gould was satirizing the premise of the experiment there, and the idea some people hold that if we just left children to their own innate wisdom and goodness, racism and sexism and all bad things would disappear. This belief begs the question of where all those bad things come from. The usual response is that these attitudes are the result of having been carefully taught by wicked or, at best, misguided people. But where did those careful teachers come from? Where did their bad ideas come from ? Why are the ideas they teach so tenacious? Why are they nevertheless so ineffective much of the time? The usual answer entangles us in an infinite regress that doesn't explain anything, but distracts the questioner long enough for the explainer to change the subject. In Gould's story, after some initial confusion the children around X follow X's example, to the dismay of their parents, but the good guys win easily. As we know, in real life it's not that easy.
I'll quote again the woman who told a symposium in 1971: “This short haircut, because it is mine, is a woman’s hairstyle. These so-called men’s boots, because I am wearing them, are women’s boots. This pipe, because I am smoking it, is a woman’s pipe. Whatever women wear is women’s wear. It is a matter of individual choice – and comfort.”* To "live as a man" is any way a man lives; to "live as a woman" is any way a woman lives.
When Richard Seymour wrote about the boy from the court case living "as a girl," he meant living so as to conform to prevailing gender stereotypes. By his logic, living either as a boy or a girl, as a man or a woman -- regardless of your body configuration or your sex chromosomes -- must be the product of bad faith at best, of abusive socialization at worst. (Oddly, though, people who reject their assigned stereotype in favor of the opposite one are seen as heroic, free, non-binary. And can a child "consent" to either?) Adopting any gender identity apparently means accepting the stereotype, agreeing that certain modes of dress, certain body language, certain occupations, and so on have a gender. They do only by the same social agreement and processes of socialization that Seymour characterizes as abusive. Perhaps they are, but we can't get rid of them. If we don't teach children sex roles, they'll invent their own. Children aren't passive objects of socialization. They resist, they create options, they socialize each other.
Seymour mentions "the absence of gender specialists consulted in court." I find this curious, since expert testimony on gender is always culture-bound, and the results will be largely predetermined by which gender specialists are allowed to testify. As a gay liberationist influenced by radical feminism I wouldn't trust a child's (or adult's) fate with them; call me old-fashioned if you like. The only authority Seymour quotes in the post is the psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi (1873-1933), who might or might be right in his opinions, but I wouldn't look to a Freudian or any other mental health professional for guidance on sexism.
Seymour says that the same parents who are "evasive and anxious in answering questions about sex, particularly if they are unhappy about their sex lives"
are usually strangely emphatic, insistent, about who is a boy and who is a girl, and about the strict relationship between birth-assigned sex and one’s future gendered life trajectory. They leave no doubt about the matter, even though many children quietly entertain the gravest doubts. Simply, where children want knowledge and independence, parents often communicate ignorance and obedience.This seems to me to sentimentalize children. Of course one might suggest that adults "leave no doubt about the matter" exactly in areas where they have many doubts, and little knowledge. No one has much knowledge about gender, and it would be better to "communicate ignorance" than certainty (which is not the same as knowledge) where one is ignorant. Most adults are no better informed about sex and reproduction than they are about gender, and their evasiveness comes partly from uncertainty about how best to answer the questions they're asked, and partly from anxiety about bodies, their own and their children's. If they are insistent about "who is a boy and who is a girl," it's probably because it's how they were socialized, and I'm not sure that most children are any more interested in complex, indeterminate answers on that matter than adults are. A lot of research has been done on children and gender in the eighty-plus years since Ferenczi died, and it indicates that even very young children are active participants in their construction of gender and other matters while they are still infants. Children who vary from the prevailing norms aren't necessarily interested in ambiguity either. They are often quite sure what is girl stuff and what is boy stuff. While they should be allowed as much freedom as possible to chart their own course, their gender theories are as likely to be bullshit as their elders' are, and for the same reason.
Against Seymour's stricture on "the strict relationship between birth-assigned sex and one’s future gendered life trajectory," I've noticed that advocates for gender atypical children, and at least some transgender adults are claiming a biological basis for gender variance. They equate biological sex with the sex chromosomes or a tiny region of the brain and equate it with gender. One such person, for example, claimed that "science is increasingly revealing to us that gender identity is more or less inborn"; a transgender friend told someone who asked her why she was trans that it was "a matter of brain structure"; both of these claims are false, just like the claim that homosexuality is more or less inborn and a matter of brain structure. I don't know what Seymour thinks about this, but the current trend even for gender nonconformists is as hostile to the radical feminist position as any traditionalist, seeking to root gender in the body. Failing that, they try to reify gender, as a pre-cultural autonomous essence rather than a cultural construction. Both positions are incoherent and quickly become entangled in their contradictions, as Seymour's does. A radical feminist position would be to abolish gender, but though I consider that desirable I'm not sure it's possible. Even the radical Second Wave feminists who argued for the abolition of gender kept falling back on gender stereotypes. It will be no more possible to abolish the socialization of children; the best we can do is try to make the process more flexible, open and humane.
*Del Martin and Phyllis Lyons, Lesbian/Woman (Bantam Books, 1972), page 81.
Wednesday, November 9, 2016
Thank You for Pressing the Self-Destruct Button
I didn't notice at first that it's partly an exhortation to vote for the lesser evil if that will "shift your country as much closer to your ideal as possible." That's pretty funny right there, since Dem loyalists were furiously denouncing the Lesser Evil option so recently. I guess that if you don't actually say the words, it's okay. (But if you say them three times quickly ...?)
The main thing, though, is that the meme amounts to a denunciation of Hillary Rodham Clinton, the DNC, and Democratic partisans. Clinton most of all, though, who put her determination to be President ahead of every other consideration, including the probability that Sanders had a better chance of beating Trump. Her ego, her entitlement, her notion that it was her turn now. I can't think of a better example of "extreme individualism." To ensure that she won the nomination, she played dirty, which some of her fans even thought amusing. It's their party, after all, one such person wrote, which at least was honest: the party belongs to its elites and big donors, not to the rank and file who do the scut work of making phone calls, knocking on doors, driving voters to the polls -- let alone the voters themselves. It's not about you, you individualist with your silly notions of government by the people. Don't believe the fairy tales the elites told you, that elections are meant to choose the best candidate for office. Don't believe the fairy tale drummed into your head since childhood, that American values and ideals have anything to do with the running of our government. It's like the Bible: you're not supposed to take it literally, just have faith in your leaders. Just don't reject the fairy tales during election season, or in the hearing of the real owners of the party.
I guess I'm more or less functional again, after spending a day walking around feeling stunned. I needed to write to find out what I thought about Trump's victory, but I wasn't sure I wanted to know what I thought. I stayed off Facebook yesterday, and timidly logged in today. Before long my liberal friends' reactions had me angry again, and I was back in the fray.
Most notable, as I expected, were Democrats blaming everybody but themselves for the debacle. Paul Krugman was apparently leading the charge, but I hear Rachel Maddow was in there too. If I'm not mistaken, that was one of the tendencies that drove Germany into the hands of the Nazis. Did Germany lose the Great War? It wasn't their fault, it was the Jews and the homosexuals and the Reds stabbing the Fatherland in the back, and women spitting on Our Troops. Did Hillary lose this world-historical election? It wasn't her fault, it was the Bernie Bros and Julian Assange and Jim Comey and all the haters who made voters stay away from the polls.
Most entertaining are the Dems who yell "Don't play the blame game!" when their own attempts to play the blame game are rebutted. We can blame everybody, but don't you dare blame us -- that's being judgmental. We aren't being judgmental, we're just pointing out who stabbed Hillary in the back... Really, they are acting as we were warned Trump's followers would react if he lost. I imagine I'll be seeing a lot more of that.
Meanwhile, what to do? I don't have any answers, but some writers are making sense. There are others, of course, but these two were close to hand. It's alarming that so many liberals and progressives and near-rightists and neoliberals are freaking out, lashing out almost randomly, but that was only to be expected. I can't go on, I'll go on.
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