I, A Woke, Found Me Here; or, All Things to All Persons

Last week I saw this definition of "woke" by Tyler Austin Harper, an African American academic I read sometimes on Twitter: 

An attitude prioritizing identities related to race, gender, and sexuality over class identities, and which reduces politics to ritualized performances of correct language use and self-examination that are designed to purge one’s inner bigot without requiring material sacrifice.

I understand where he's coming from, but he's wrong.

First, what he's describing here is what used to be called "political correctness," though that was as much of an aggravated misnomer as "woke" is now.  I wonder what it was called before that.  Despite its association with liberals and the left, a fixation on correct terminology over content can be found all over the political spectrum, and probably throughout history.  Today's American Right has its own totems, from "DEI," "CRT," "grooming," to "Merry Christmas," "There are only two genders," and "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."  And while I understand his formulation, it's composed in language that only an academic could love, and a left-wing academic at that: MAGA would see language like "class identities" as paradigm wokeness.

Second, while he's describing a recognizable attitude, it certainly isn't what Leadbelly meant when he advised his listeners to "stay woke."  Nor, at the other end, is what the Guardian writer I quoted in my previous post on this matter meant by the term.

But woke is at its most powerful, and valuable, when it is lived and not mentioned. When it’s not viewed as a quality to be smug about. Martin Luther King Jr, Steve Biko and Angela Davis didn’t declare themselves activists – they didn’t have to, their actions defined them. Woke people know not to, and need not, describe themselves as woke. 

That's the beauty of such words, I suppose.  They allow you to deride and dismiss people you disagree with -- or think you do, since you don't have to listen to or understand their actual views; with luck, they don't understand their views either, they're just using different shibboleths.  I've often gotten pushback from people I challenged to clarify their positions, because they couldn't do so and didn't see why it mattered.  They thought I was being sophistical, or "showing off," though throwing around "woke" is showing off one's moral superiority if anything is.  I ask them about this when it becomes obvious that they are talking past each other, assuming that they mean the same thing by a key word ("woke," say, or "God") when they don't.  Using these words can produce an illusion of agreement, but it's only an illusion.  True, it's easy to get bogged down while trying to sort out what you mean or believe, but that doesn't seem any worse to me than flailing around in mutual incomprehension because neither of you knows what the other means.

Although Harper is correct to criticize the attitude he does, it's not as if he's the first to do so: he has plenty of predecessors who denounced "political correctness" for decades before him.  Since he's defining a part of the problem as if it were all of the problem, he's coming close to the irrational people Sartre criticized in his essay on anti-semitism, who "know that their statements are empty and contestable; but it amuses them to make such statements: it is their adversary whose duty it is to choose his words seriously because he believes in words. They have a right to play. They even like to play with speech because by putting forth ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutor; they are enchanted with their unfairness because for them it is not a question of persuading by good argument but of intimidating or disorienting. If you insist too much they close up, they point out with one superb word that the time to argue has passed."  The "one superb word" in this case is "woke."

Someone tried to brush aside this problem in another context recently by pointing out that words change their meaning over time.  It's true, they do, but usually by adding new meanings that co-exist with old ones, which leads to the confusion I'm talking about here.  By "woke" do I mean merely "alert," with Leadbelly, or politically and morally enlightened, like the Guardian writer, or virtue-signalling, with Harper?  The most common meaning in the US today, I would argue, is none of these: it's the MAGA meaning of any and all opposition to bigotry and injustice, with (as with "political correctness") the smug assumption that their comfort with bigotry is itself truly correct and woke.  They try to sell their sloganeering as "common sense" rather than "woke," but "common sense" is another virtue-signalling evasion of thinking.  

If Harper thinks that right-wing opposition to "wokeness" has anything to do with a sophisticated class analysis that rejects mere theatrical posturing in favor of a thoughtful, informed stance, he's tripping - but I don't think he took the actual right-wing stance into account.  While I appreciate his take to some extent, I see it as part of the problem, not a step toward a solution.

This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

I noticed this poster in the window of a local business I patronize: hip, edgy, liberal-lefty.  Their hours of operation are rather limited, so I couldn't ask where it came from just then.  Most of the stuff in their windows announces events, with institutional or other affiliation included somewhere; there doesn't seem to be any such information on this one.  This isn't any kind of deal-breaker for me -- I'll certainly keep supporting them -- but I am curious.

To be blunt, this poster is pretty damn stupid, a word salad of buzzwords.  I expect better from my counterculture.  Which "lies of the alternative truth" should I reject?  There are so many to choose from these days.  The propaganda use of the word "alternative" is high on my list right now; it's the latest Newspeak for "politically correct" and "doubleplus ungood."

"Believe the evidence of your eyes and ears" is worse: it's painfully obvious that someone wasn't thinking.  Urging the marks to believe what is right in front of their eyes is one of the oldest cons in the book.  (Nothing up my sleeve!)  It's used by the Right ("Obama looks like a terrorist, it's his name") as much as by the Left.  Any political or other ideological position will be based not only on visible evidence but on interpretations and theories that offer to connect the dots, drawing the hitherto invisible lines depicting the Truth that They don't want you to see.

There is a speck of truth here, though: when something looks, feels, seems wrong to you, you should take the intuition seriously.  But that is only the beginning.  From there you must apply the canons of critical thinking.  I collected some of them here; you could begin with the educator Deborah Meier's version, taught over decades to kids at Central Park East Secondary School:

They are: the question of evidence, or "How do we know what we know?"; the question of viewpoint, in all its multiplicity, or "Who's speaking?"; the search for connections and patterns, or "What causes what?"; supposition, or "How might things have been different?"; and finally, why any of it matters, or "Who cares?"

Now I can add a passage I didn't quote last week from Patricia Roberts-Miller's Demagoguery and Democracy:

Trying to be fair in an argument -- enforcing rules, including the rule that the rules are applied to everyone equally -- will lead to arguments about the rules.  And that’s a good sign. Participants often need to argue about how we should argue, what we will count as relevant evidence, what constitutes disruptive behavior or unfair moves, and what “stases”are the most relevant. In fact, arguments about how we should argue most interfere with demagoguery, especially if those arguments concern whether the rules are being applied to all participants equally—if argument by insult is allowed for us, then it is also permitted for them ... We can be mean, angry, vehement, and highly critical, as long as we don't whine if they are just as mean, angry, vehement, and critical with us ... We need to enter the conversation willing to be wrong, willing to admit the limits of our own knowledge, willing to reconsider our evidence, sources, and premises.  That is self-skepticism [15-17].

Of course I realize that this goes against common sense, the evidence of our eyes and ears, the foundations of all civilization.  But common sense, the evidence of our eyes and ears, has brought us to the pass we're in, where we've pretty much always been, unable to see why They (you know, Them) are screwing things up for everybody, when all We want is to just get along.  Why do you have to insist on not letting me and mine have all the goodies? Can't we all just get along? ... No, we can't, until we start looking beyond our clan, our tribe, all our granfalloons, and recognize that they're made up of people too.  What Roberts-Miller, Meier, and others I've quoted and discussed offer are ground rules for moving beyond Us and Them; they can be debated too, but they have to be debated.

Somewhat curiously, someone -- a Facebook friend, whom I don't know at all in the meat world -- commented yesterday on something I'd posted by depositing a verse he'd composed.  (I long ago unfollowed him to keep his smug doggerel out of my feed; I'd forgotten that we hadn't unfriended each other.)  His reaction on the Charlottesville killing was to declare the final supremacy of Us and Them, and if You are Them, you ain't shit.  I disagreed, saying that Us and Them is always an invalid move; he disagreed with me, and declared that we must leave it there.  I agreed, and asked him not to post more of his verse on my page.  He then unfriended me; big of him.

Some readers will certainly conclude that I'm denying that white racists are a threat (much as some of the same people concluded that because I didn't think the US should invade Afghanistan, I didn't consider Al Qaeda a threat).  I'm not doing anything of the kind.  Because white racism is a pervasive, endemic threat, we need to come up with better ways of confronting and blocking it than we have so far.  Some people can't be argued with or compromised with.  But I don't see a "bloodbath," as one commenter on a post at the Intercept argued recently, as a sane way out of our situation.  As usual with wars, the people who initiate the war will probably be among those who suffer least.  We tried that approach in 1861, and even though white nationalists lost on the battlefield, they fought their opponents to a standstill in the years afterward, and took control of America by working within the system.  (It didn't hurt, of course, that white nationalism wasn't confined to the Confederacy.)  We're still living with the consequences.

In the end, I suppose I'm something of a nihilist.  To the universe it doesn't matter whether human beings blow ourselves up, enslave each other in some dystopic system, become extinct through natural selection, or are immolated when the sun goes nova, or an asteroid hits the earth.  There's nothing in Darwinian theory (or in religion) to say that we will have a happy ending, and in the long run we are all dead.  But it matters to us -- doesn't it?  It matters to me, and to some others, how things go while we are still alive.  Frankly, I'm not sure it does matter to most people.  The poster I saw today is, to me, one more slice of evidence that it doesn't: that they can't think ahead any farther than the next ragegasm.

What Did You Learn in School Today?

A number of people have been saying stuff like this, but this meme, which I first noticed today, has the longest wishlist I've seen of subjects people wanted to impose on kids.

Of course I'm in favor of getting rid of gold stars and other reward systems, and I recognize that the meme isn't necessarily about schooling; it's perhaps deliberately ambiguous on that point.  The great educational reformer and critic of schooling John Holt also advocated the introduction of "real-world" subjects and projects into schools, and Alfie Kohn has been a sound critic of rewards and punishments in general.  But then, when I was in school, we had shop class and Home Ec; "practical" subjects were not excluded even from mainstream schooling, and I doubt they are now either.

It's telling, though, that reading, writing, math, and critical thinking are notable for their absence from that list. So is science. They also are worth doing for their own sake, and doing them is its own reward.

I also think it's funny how freely people pile subjects and tasks onto kids, or at least fantasize about doing it. One size fits all! (And there's at least significant overlap between people who post stuff like the meme above and those who post the one in that post.)  I think that in practice, kids would and do resent having their whole lives regimented by adults, because they have their own interests, and not everybody is interested in everything anyway.  Like it or not, kids are also interested in electronics and other technology, and no matter how much adults choose to simplify their own lives, it's going to be very difficult to return to the eighteenth century completely. 

Kids used to learn the listed tasks from their parents and grandparents, not in school, and that's appropriate. School was where you went to learn academic subjects, not what your family and neighbors taught you anyway.  We don't really live in the kind of society where that sort of thing is possible, and that needs to be thought about, not fantasized about nostalgically.  So this meme reminds me of adults who don't want to take responsibility for educating their children in their own religion, but want the schools to do it.

Whenever I see the words "common sense," I reach for my critical thinking. This meme is a good example of why.

P.S. The meme is also confused about the individual's position in the world.  On the one hand, the logo says the goal is to be "more self-reliant"; on the other, the text talks about encouraging kids to "care about something other than themselves."  Self-reliance, of course, is a great American myth.  American pioneers and homesteaders were self-reliant only when they had to be, and even then they depended heavily on technology (guns, iron tools) that they didn't invent and couldn't always manufacture themselves.  They also relied on neighbors for help, expecting to return the favors they received.  Barn-raising and quilting bees, for example, were group projects and activities, not just because many hands lightened the work but because human beings need company.  There were undoubtedly some pathological individuals who chose the wilderness and the prairie in order to get away from neighbors; we have accounts from the wives of some such men, who weren't as interested in solitude their husbands and longed for friends, company, the support of others.  Solitude and loneliness probably contributed to the failure of many a homestead.

I've also been seeing memes from some of the same people about a more recent period.  This one is representative:

"Do stuff"!  Maybe the words "supply chain" are meant to gesture toward the human networks Grandma was embedded in, but again, this meme puts too much emphasis on the atomized individual.  Grandma also relied on government Relief, on various charities, and just plain human kindness, which she gave as well as got.  This blog post, though probably not the best history, is a reminder of the reality:

My grandfather was born in 1928 and grew into a young boy in the aftermath of the US economic collapse. Pop-pop remembers his parents opening up our hay barn for random people to sleep in on cold winter nights. He also remembers that he and his family were “not so bad off”; they were farmers so they had the land and the knowledge to grow most of the food they consumed. In fact, Pop-pop told me that anyone who spent the night in their barn was also given a plate of food for the night, which shows how valuable their garden truly was. His impressionable years during a time of great financial ruin impacted the rest of his life dramatically, from his hoarding of cash and mistrust of companies and banks, to his refusal to use air conditioners and instead spend his summers in sweat-drenched muscle shirts. When he died he left an inheritance for each of his children from a measly family dairy farmer’s income.

The writer's grandfather didn't experience the Great Depression as an adult, and that surely makes a difference in his account.  (Neither did my parents, who were born in 1923 and 1926.  I wish I knew more about how my grandparents got through those years -- they all died in the 1960s, when I was a child -- but I know they had hard times.)

America was a lot more rural in the 1930s than it is now, and more people had space for gardens to grow food.  I live in a residential area with small lawns, for instance, but I don't know what my landlord would say if I started a vegetable garden.  There are community gardens around town, but they're some distance away from where I live, and some of the ground there has been contaminated over the years by chemical waste. My father kept a good-sized garden when we moved to the country, but never succeeded in getting us kids to really participate in it.  I think all of us could do some gardening if we had to, but we didn't have to.  (Nor did my mother can the vegetables my father grew, or make our clothes; not everyone relished the memory of their impoverished childhoods and wanted to relive them.)

If there were another economic crisis on the scale of the Great Depression -- and 2008, as bad as it was, wasn't on that scale -- the knowledge that people would need for frugality and self-help is still available and would surely be used.  But one always helps oneself among and with other people, with their help.  "Pulling one's own weight" is a better metaphor than "self-reliance."

Only Nixon Could Go to China

It was really just a tactical rhetorical move, I know, but I was slightly surprised by Roy Edroso's decision yesterday to speak ill of the Only President We've Got:

I realize that, as circumscribed as he's been, Obama has accomplished some good things for the country. The trouble is, they're mostly half-measures. Take Obamacare. We only have this shaky Rube Goldberg system because the insurers and the AMA had to get paid off or national healthcare would never fly -- Senators and Congressmen have to get their contributions from somewhere, y'know! Single payer has been and remains the choice of the American people, but in the name of prudence and moderation we have instead a system nobody's entirely happy with, and because they're not happy Republicans get to exploit it while scheming to bring back their preferred Pay or Die healthcare system.

Okay, maybe not ill but less than the adulation that is mandatory for the faithful.  I mean, how can Edroso undermine POTUS like this?  If Barack is defeated by Ann Coulter in 2016, we'll know who to thank.

Edroso's mild critique followed on praise of Obama for criticizing Republicans who wanted to block Syrian refugees from our shores.

Naturally I am very pleased to see this, not only because Obama is usually much too nice to these assholes, but also and mainly because it's a refreshingly strong defense of common sense in the normally common-sense-free War on Whatever. When was the last time you heard any other top-tier elected official call bullshit like this?

Better late than never, I suppose.  As I've said before, it would have been better to anticipate the Republican hysteria before Obama was even elected, instead of whining that no one could have foreseen that the Right would be so mean.  But you'd have to be mighty gullible to think that Obama really will follow through when he talks tough.  I don't deny that he faces a vicious, obstructionist opposition -- "art of the possible and all that," as Edroso says -- but it seems to me that in such a case it's better not to make threats or promises you can't keep.  In Obama's case, I doubt he even intends to do so.  These remarks are meant to excite his fans, who will spread them all over the social media and pump their fists and hoot derisively like the Bandur-log they are.

I decided to look at the comments to see if any of his regulars would attack Edroso as a turncoat stealth Republican and Trump-lover.   So far (I'm not up to wading through all 350-plus comments), no.  What there was was funnier.  The first comment is from the blogger Susan of Texas, whose Hunting of the Snark is even more specialized than alicublog: most of her posts for the past several months have been devoted to jeering at Megan McArdle.  Here's Susan of Texas's opening volley:

When somebody starts talking about reality and common sense, run for the hills. They're about to do something stupid and they want you to tell them that they are being smart.

Okay, I agree with this too.  But Ms. Texas seems to have missed Edroso's invocation of common sense in his post.  Did she mean that he was about to do something stupid and wanted his readers to tell him that he was being smart?  Of course not: she was attacking the centrist writer Kevin Drum for expressing his commonsense concern about letting thousands of Ayrabs into our country.  Several other commenters defended Drum, and I quit scrolling through the comments when one of them accused Drum's critics of "purity of rhetoric."  It's entertaining to see conventional liberal-Democrat invective turned back on its usual deployers, though.

For what it's worth, Ms. Texas herself has been known to call on the name of Common Sense in her critiques of the Right ("Stupid people think they are following their ideology to its logical conclusion. They ignore common sense, logic, reason, and empathy because they they have an ax to grind."  So has Barack Obama.  So does just about everybody, including sophisticated moral philosophers who ought to know better.  It's almost always a sign that someone is arguing in bad faith.

And what's wrong with talking about "reality"?  That used to be popular among Democratic loyalists as it is on the Right.  Am I the only person who remembers liberals casting themselves and their positions as "reality-based"?  The very Republicans supposedly conceded that they were, by contrast, "faith-based."  But since then, Democrats gained Hope, and they're clinging to it fiercely, until you pry it from their cold, dead fingers.

Beam Me Up, Scotty ...

I'm reading The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence (Houghton Mifflin, 2010) by Paul Davies, a physicist and popular science writer.  I've never been a fan of his, but I hoped he would give me some idea of the current state of the scientific search for extra-terrestrial life and intelligence, and he is doing that. So far it appears that the current state of SETI is about where it was the last time I looked, a couple of decades ago, though Davies does have some intriguing ideas about where it might conceivably go.  Conceivably.  Maybe.  Hypothetically.

But right now I want to gripe about a famous quotation from Calvin and Hobbes, that Davies uses as an epigraph to chapter 4: "Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."  Davies ascribes it to "Bill Watterson, cartoonist," but what the hell, I know that white people find it difficult to distinguish between a writer and the words he puts into the mouths of his characters, and I wouldn't be surprised if Calvin was speaking for his creator there.

What bothers me about the quotation is its nerdy contempt for all human beings except the speaker.  I've written before about this

misanthropic dismissal of human intelligence.  The most extreme case I can think of was someone on the first computer BBS I frequented, back in the mid-1980s.  He said that he didn't think there was such a thing as human intelligence; there might, he allowed, be such a thing as real intelligence somewhere else in the universe, but not among Homo Sap, and not on this planet.  That was interesting in so many ways.  First off, since he wasn't intelligent by his own assumption, why should anyone take him seriously?  We're all dumb here -- you're dumb too, or you wouldn't be here.  Second, "intelligence" is something that most of us ascribe to human beings, and to a lesser extent to other animals.  It has no meaning except as a trait human beings have, and until we actually encounter "intelligent" extraterrestrial organisms, we won't have a basis for comparison anyway.  It's sort of like saying that there's no such thing as human beauty, except that we human beings do perceive beauty in other animals, in plants, in inorganic things (from quartz crystals to the Grand Canyon), in natural phenomena like sunsets or the night sky.  I suppose that a human being could decide that no human beings are beautiful, that only seal-point Siamese cats or the Andromeda galaxy are really beautiful; but I would reply that while it's fine for him, I (like many other people) do find many human beings beautiful.  Beauty, like intelligence or goodness, is in the eye of the beholder.  If everybody is ugly, then nobody's beautiful; if everybody's dumb, then nobody's dumb.  Or at least, some are dumber than others.

Hand in hand with this attitude goes the assumption that if real intelligence comes along, whether extraterrestrial or computer-driven, the misanthropic nerd will get to be its BFF.  It's partly a religious fantasy as well as a racist one, of being Chosen and finally Rescued / Raptured from the inferior herd by the Truly Cool People from Outer Space, or Cyberspace, or Heaven, or what you will.

Thinking of this made me wonder, not for the first time, why so many people are so eager to know that there are other people -- preferably superior, though not so superior that they won't be super-nice to us when we finally meet -- elsewhere in the universe.  True, it would be interesting to know, though as Noam Chomsky pointed out in another context, Society is happily in ignorance of insignificant matters of all sorts.  (Yes, I consider the existence of extra-terrestrial life an insignificant question in the present state of our ignorance.)  One of the recurring themes is that it would be bad to be "alone," though again this doesn't seem like a very pressing concern compared to war, poverty, hunger, and disease on this planet.  Since human beings don't get along with each other as well as we ought, why do we need more species to not get along with?  It's like the desire to colonize other planets because we've about ruined this one.

Even if we do discover that there are civilizations in other solar systems or galaxies, it is extremely unlikely, to the point of certainty, that we would be able to communicate with them or they with us, let alone go for a visit.  Some people might find it comforting to know that there are other people in the universe, but at least as many would feel threatened -- despite the minimal, not to say nonexistent nature of the threat -- and would start trying to gin up concern about defending ourselves against the Andromedans.  Others would start collecting money to send missionaries to those poor benighted aliens who don't know Jesus.  As I say, I consider the question whether there is life in other solar systems to be insignificant, and I feel sure it's a distraction for most people who think it's important.

Then there was the quotation in the meme above, which was shared on Facebook by a former co-worker, newly retired.  The very term "common sense" always gets my back up, for reasons I've gone into before, but the meme made me giggle because, as I suspected, my friend had no idea who Robert G. Ingersoll was.  He was a famous 19th-century Freethinker, the most popular speaker in America in his day, known as "the Great Agnostic."  It's safe to say that his idea of common sense was very different from my former co-worker's, who's a mushy Cafeteria Christian with common-sense middle-American politics and attitudes.  She's a very nice person, but she wouldn't have gotten along with Ingersoll.  He was, for instance, a prominent abolitionist too, and while as a decent white American born in the middle of the twentieth century, my friend disapproves of slavery since it's a safely dead issue now, I doubt she'd have felt the same way had she been born in antebellum America.  I mean, slavery was just common sense in those days.

That's the thing about common sense: it may be common, but it's not very sensible.  I'm not sure whether the people (including the scientists) who are obsessed with knowing that We Are Not Alone have too much common sense, or too little, though so many of the arguments are couched in terms of common sense: the universe is so big and there are so many stars, there must be other planets and there must be people out there, it would totally suck if we were alone!  In a matter like this, there is no "must."  There's only evidence, and right now there isn't any.  I notice from Davies's book, which I finished reading over the weekend, that the proponents of SETI are still overstating what they know.  More on this later, I hope.

He Don't Know Us Very Well, Do He?

The Hankyoreh, the left-liberal South Korean news site, has an interesting article about the Hope and Sympathy Youth Concert, which put three political figures on stage to discuss political issues on August 12. "Concert" is a misleading word, maybe a mistranslation; since what is involved is two traveling speakers joined by local figures, "Tour" might be more accurate. They drew an overflow crowd of 1600 in Changwon, and according to the article they've regularly spoken before audiences of around 2000 young people at each stop. There's also going to be a big Hope rally in front of Seoul City Hall this coming weekend.

The title of the article made me wary, though: "For three figures, 'common sense' replaces left and right.'" That might be better than the American cliche of the middle of the road, since it implies something other than splitting the difference, but "common sense" (again, I don't know what Korean words it's supposed to translate) is generally wrong too. One should especially keep one's hand on one's wallet when politicians and business types appeal to common sense, and the Hope and Sympathy tour appears to be no exception.

The article got off to a promising start, though: Yoon Yo-joon, "a 72-year-old former Minister of Environment and conservative strategist who twice served as director of the Yeouido Institute, the Grand National Party’s think tank", told the audience:

Korean society likes to apply labels. I have hardly heard the term ‘Red’ thanks to my ancestral background, but democracy only deepens when you first move from political democracy to socioeconomic democracy. That is Article 119, Item 2 in the Constitution [on economic democratization]. If we did a good job of upholding that, there would not be the inequity and polarization we see in Korean society today.

The others agreed with him, pointing to the irony involved when people who call for implementing the Constitution are accused of being Commies. We have a similar irony here, where the rightists who claim that they simply want to return to a strict reading of the US Constitution have no idea what that document says. And ours is evidently a lot shorter than the Korean Constitution.

The theme that night was evidently harsh criticism of the Korean conglomerates. One of the other speakers, Ahn Cheol-soo, dean of Seoul National University’s Graduate School of Convergence Science and Technology, "said that large companies like Samsung were 'like newborn babies that want everything when the urge strikes.'"

So far, so good, though American corporations are well-known for demanding government money whenever they run into difficulties; and Korean conglomerates always benefited from government support and intervention. But then the speakers revealed rather serious ignorance about the US corporate and political scene.

Ahn commented, "In the U.S., when chairmen gather together, the news comes out the next day that they are forming a research organization to lower expensive healthcare costs, while when we gather together, we demand tax cuts."

Er, no. US corporations also demand tax cuts. If American CEOs have ever formed a research organization to lower expensive healthcare costs, it would prescribe the elimination of Medicare.

Yoon explained that the reason large South Korean companies engage in a “plundering” management style is because they are at an early stage of capitalism.

Again, this would imply that American corporations are also "at an early stage of capitalism," but it might be better simply to acknowledge that capitalism is plunder, whether it is state-managed or nominally private. Corporations have no natural existence anyway; they are not "people," as one distinguished American political theorist claimed last week, but creations of the state. If these gentlemen are dispensing "common sense," they'll need to look for something better, like accurate information.

"The Thankful Receiver Bears a Plentiful Harvest" (William Blake)

Today on Thanksgiving, I give thanks to Homo Superior Curates the Web, JaySays, and LGBTLatest Science for irritating me into posting after a week of procrastination. Like Easter and Yule, the Thanksgiving season evidently depresses IQs and brings the mushbrained out of hibernation. (And if they see their shadows, we'll have six more weeks of winter.) Homo Superior linked to posts at the latter two sites, which I followed and read, till smoke began coming out of my ears.

"Common sense tells me that God did not put pen to paper," writes geekgirl at JaySays in her meditation on the Bible and love; this is what Homo Superior quoted. Oy! Common sense tells me that the earth is the center of the universe, and that God created Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve. To see a scientist invoke common sense, which is rightly undermined by so much of science, makes my brain hurt. In any case, fundamentalist Christians don't believe that Yahweh "put pen to paper", they believe that he inspired the biblical writers to do so, and preserved them from error in some obscure way. There's an old rabbinic story, quoted by the philosopher Walter Kaufmann in one of his books, in which Moses encounters Yahweh fashioning little decorations for the letters in the Hebrew alphabet so that, centuries later, Rabbi Akiba could come up with interpretations of their use in the Torah. But the rabbis didn't take this story literally; it was a loving joke about a revered, martyred teacher.

Geekgirl begins by lamenting that "I can’t recall a year, in my adult life time, where religion has been used so much as a tool for discrimination and lies." Since she has been married for 32 years, she and I must be more or less of an age, so I suspect she simply hasn't been paying attention. During the struggle for African-American civil rights, for example, the Bible was used on all sides, for as geekgirl also writes, "The Bible can be used to support or dismiss almost any point of view." Opponents of racial equality appealed to biblical teaching to justify racial inequality and segregation, and of course many prominent leaders of the Civil Rights movement were Christian ministers. Since then we've seen the religious campaign against abortion, and the 1980s saw a flood of polemics against "Secular Humanism."  Then there's the use of the Bible to support anti-Semitism, the displacement and elimination of aboriginal Americans, internecine quarrels among Christians themselves, and of course Crusades against both infidel and heretic. And need I mention the Religious Right campaign against gay people, which began 30 years ago with Anita Bryant?  (Who, like the Lord Jesus, is with us always.)  The Bible itself, both Testaments, contains plenty of material witnessing to (sometimes literally) bloodthirsty attacks by believers on outsiders.

Geekgirl continues:

The Bible is a collection of writings, mostly found through archaeological means, written in ancient languages such as Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic, over centuries. It has undergone translation and censorship. It has been studied by many people intensely for years at academic institutions. Common sense tells me that God did not put pen to paper. ...

Those who've read much of this blog may notice echoes here of other foolish things that liberal Christians say about the Bible. This time I was struck by geekgirl's remark that the Bible is "mostly found through archaeological means." While ancient biblical manuscripts have been found by archaeologists among the Dead Sea Scrolls and some other finds, the Bible has been in continuous use by Christians and Jews for around 2500 years. The ancient copies are useful for the scholarly study of the Biblical text, but they're not necessary; the Bible would still be with us if none of them had ever been discovered. I can't imagine what geekgirl thought she was saying, but on its face it's absurdly false. Further, while Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic have been used since ancient times, all three of them are still in use as first languages today: they are every bit as modern as they are ancient. If geekgirl (who "believes in Buddhism and attends the United Church of Christ") wants to write about the Bible, she should set her common sense aside and do some studyin'.

Next geekgirl picks out one bit of the Bible that she likes, chapter 13 of Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians, his celebrated celebration of love. "If one reads the writings of St. Paul in Corinthians, it’s almost as if he is bipolar. There are passages regarding slavery, women shaving their heads, not speaking in church, and the list goes on. Yet, we have a passage that has remarkable insight." Her reference to "Corinthians" as if it were a book is a minor but telling confirmation of her ignorance about the Bible. There are two epistles to the Corinthians, and scholars believe that there were more; some may have been lost, or perhaps parts of them were incorporated into the canonical versions you'll find in a Bible today.

Diagnosing the mental health of a person who's been dead for almost two thousand years is rarely a good idea. Why does geekgirl suggest that Paul was bipolar? Is it because he expresses views on "slavery, women shaving their heads [another indication that she hasn't read Paul with even minimal care], not speaking in church" that she disagrees with, while expressing other views with "remarkable insight"? It's not necessary to look at other ancient writers to find similar behavior -- indeed, today's gay Christians and their allies are capable of prattling about love and then switching to hateful stereotyping of other, less sanctified homosexuals. I wonder if "bipolar" is replacing "schizophrenic" as a pseudo-medical label for people with erratic personalities -- or who simply make other, "nice" people uncomfortable.

As for what Paul wrote on love, I don't find it particularly interesting. "Love" is a buzzword now, and reading the New Testament indicates that it also was in Biblical times. One of my favorite examples, aside from Paul or Jesus himself, are the epistles of John. The famous slogan "God is love" appears in one of these, 1 John 4:8 and 4:16. In the second epistle, the writer warns, "If there come any unto you, and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into your house, neither bid him God speed; for he that biddeth him God speed is partaker of his evil deeds" (10-11, KJV). But in the third epistle, the writer complains that he has been treated as he treated others: "I wrote unto the church: but Diotrephes, who loveth to have the preeminence among them, receiveth us not. Wherefore, if I come, I will remember his deeds which he doeth, prating against us with malicious words: and not content therewith, neither doth he himself receive the brethren, and forbiddeth them that would, and casteth them out of the church" (3 John 9-10, KJV). By geekgirl's criterion, John the Elder must also have been bipolar.

Next we move to geekgirl's own blog, LGBT Latest Science. In the post linked by Homo Superior, she takes on the argument against same-sex marriage that "Marriage is for procreation." She doesn't provide any links to people who actually say this, however; at most it is a shorthand for a more complex position, like "Marriage is about love." What I've seen in this regard is something slightly different, that the (or at least, one) marriage is to provide a stable environment for children to grow up in. Earlier today, for example, I saw an article at the Advocate online, quoting former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee to the effect that "the basis of marriage is procreation; children ideally need a man and woman as parents he said." (Huckabee also brought up polygamy, inexplicably treating it as a bad thing instead of a return to traditional biblical values.)

On this point, however, Huckabee isn't that far from advocates of same-sex marriage, who also often claim that children need parents who are married to each other. In Beyond (Gay and Straight) Marriage (Beacon, 2008) Nancy Polikoff wrote:

The marriage movement uses one refrain to push its agenda: that marriage is good for children and that raising children outside marriage damages both them and society.

It’s especially troubling when marriage-equality advocates make similar assertions. The constitutional mandate and law reform of efforts of the late 1960s and 1970s reflected the understanding that children are not supposed to suffer harm as a result of having unmarried parents. The lifelong disabilities of “illegitimacy” have been erased. If a law discriminates between a child born to married parents and a child born to unmarried parents, it is subject to heightened scrutiny under the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution.

… Some who urge marriage as the solution to children’s needs fail to distinguish between consequences of marriage and consequences of parenthood. For example, a National Gay and Lesbian Task Force publication refers to the lack of educational assistance for the children of deceased public safety officers “who lack legal recognition of the parent-child relationship due to the lack of marriage rights of their parents.” But a child does not need his parents to be married to get these rights; the child needs his parent to be legally recognized as his parent. The same is true for children of heterosexual parents.

…For those advantages linked to parenthood, marriage is not necessary for the children of either same-sex or different-sex couples. For those requiring marriage of a child’s parents, all children with unmarried parents suffer. All the costs to children of what the Human Rights Campaign Foundation calls “marriage inequality” would be eliminated by building on the changes started in the 1970s to eliminate the disadvantages that children of unmarried parents experience [pages 100-1].

Though geekgirl disavows the intention of getting into religion in this post, she can't quite stay away from it. "For years, conservative religions have encouraged abstinence. The Catholic Church went so far as to say that couples should have sex only when they want sex." (I think she meant to end that sentence, "... only when they want children." I don't think she disagrees that couples should have sex only when they want sex.) "Conservative religions" have indeed "encouraged abstinence" for years: the New Testament is at best ambivalent about marriage, with Jesus encouraging his followers to become eunuchs for the Kingdom (Matthew 19:12) and forbidding divorce, which his disciples took as discouraging marriage in the first place (Matthew 19:10). Paul discouraged marriage in 1 Corinthians 7, where he argued that although marriage provides a licit outlet for sexual desire, a married man cares about pleasing his wife while a single man cares about pleasing the Lord, so it's better to remain single if possible. This remained the ideal of the Christian churches for centuries afterward.

I have no quarrel with geekgirl's observation, quoted by Homo Superior, that "Our desire for sex is a desire for sex, not a desire for children," nor with the Darwinian framework in which she put it. I suspect that our desire for marriage is also a desire for an fairy-tale wedding, not a desire for children. But I do think that geekgirl needs to inform herself a little before engaging in debate as a GLBT ally. As I've said before, gay people and our allies shouldn't spread misinformation -- that's what bigots are paid to do.

And now, I'm going out for a walk. I hope it's not raining too hard.

(image credit; and thanks, seriously, to the teachers I had who inspired and encouraged me to be the reading, thinking person that I hope I turned out to be, even if not in the way they might have wished)

Common Sense / Horse Sense

One of my coworkers, a fellow about my age, likes to harp on the foolishness of academics compared to regular folks like (apparently) himself. “Went to college,” he says complacently of some of the students, “but didn’t learn a thing.” It’s true, he’s a practical person, with technical training and some college, and I envy him the knowledge he has that I don’t. But then, I feel the same way about everyone who knows something I don’t, which is just about everybody. I wish I could open the hood of a car and know everything my father could know by looking and listening and poking around in there. He could also hunt and fish, grow vegetables, do carpentry and painting, and more – any number of practical, useful things that I never applied myself to learn. My coworker has a lot of the same skills and knowledge, and he reminds me sometimes of my father. (He also reminds me of my younger brother, who is more like our father in this respect than any of the rest of us).

But I’ve learned to be skeptical about “common sense”, as so many people call it. I’ve pointed out to my coworker that “common sense” sometimes means “what everybody knows,” and what everybody knows is often false. And non-academics don’t necessarily have good sense: I’ve known too many people who got no further than high school, yet can’t hold a job, won’t walk out of abusive relationships, can’t pay the rent even when they have money, to believe that lack of education makes you smarter. What you learn in school is something else; it doesn’t take other knowledge away from you. It may be useful for other ends, or it may be an end in itself.

My coworker recently told me that the Constitution forbids the income tax, for example – a fairly popular myth among the Real People, I’ve found, but a myth nonetheless. (Article I, Section 9, of the Constitution declares that “No capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein before directed to be taken”, and the Sixteenth Amendment explicitly grants to Congress the power to lay and collect income taxes; but even more telling, my coworker seemed to have trouble grasping that amendments alter the Constitution, and can override its provisions.)

He also told me that Charles Darwin wrote that if any biological unit smaller than the cell were ever discovered, his theory of natural selection would collapse beyond repair. I can’t say for certain that Darwin never wrote this, but thanks to the power of the Internet I could search the full text of two different editions of The Origin of Species, and the few references I found to cells don’t say anything like this. I found, though, that Darwin did say something similar on some other topics – but this was a rhetorical move he used before showing that his theory could explain what his critics might think it couldn’t explain.

To his credit, my coworker acknowledged, when I told him what I found in Darwin, that he’d probably remembered things wrong. As I get older, I find that I have to go back and recheck what I think I remember, because my memory is so faulty. I’m not sure that’s necessarily a function of age, though, as anyone who spends time around children will recognize: their memories are also highly porous and distorting. At most it’s just a result of trying to remember things I read forty or more years ago – hardly surprising that I don’t remember it accurately at such a remove.

I don’t have much common sense, and that seems like a good thing to me. I’ve found so often that what was obvious to most people was not obvious to me (and vice versa), and that I did well to trust my intuition, because what was obvious to most people was frequently false. It was obvious to most people, when I was growing up, that Negroes were not the same as white people and couldn’t be equal; it was obvious that women and men were fundamentally different -- and women just naturally couldn’t throw a baseball or fix an engine or be a philosopher, while men just naturally couldn’t cook or clean house or change a diaper; it was obvious that homosexuals were at best weird, doomed creatures who could never be happy. It was obvious that we were in Vietnam because our allies there had asked us to help them defend themselves against Communist aggression, and it was obvious that Americans who criticized that war were at best misusing the precious freedom of speech Americans have (but should never use); at worst they were dirty Reds who wanted Ho Chi Minh and Castro to invade and conquer America without firing a shot. More recent obviousness can be left as an exercise to the reader, I hope, though you might practice on this amazing bit from one blogger’s recent attack on another blogger:

It [“the important battle before us”] is about slowing down the Radical neo-conservative ultra Imperalists in our current government. And that battle is won by defeating the Republican party.

It is about winning the class war in America by defeating the Republican party.

It is about defanging the racist, sexist, corrupt Republican party and bringing our soldiers home. PERIOD

“Common sense” is sometimes also called “horse sense,” but that would be the kind of sense that makes horses run back into a burning barn.