Subsisting on Dawkins's Tears

I'm rereading the philosopher Mary Midgley's 1981 book Heart and Mind: The Varieties of Moral Experience.  It's an excellent introduction to the subject of ethics and morality, even if I disagree with some of what she says, which I intend to write about more in the next few days.  In the meantime I've also been looking around the Web for some references on her 1979 critique of Richard Dawkins, which led to the entertaining spectacle (still in progress, apparently) of Richard Dawkins, the No-More-Mister-Nice-Guy of the New Atheists, Mr. Take-No-Prisoners in the War Against Superstition, whining that Midgley had been mean to him, that he couldn't understand why she was so hostile: "I have been taken aback by the inexplicable hostility of Mary Midgley's assault ... I deplore bad manners as strongly as anyone ..."  He also claimed, falsely, that she hadn't read The Selfish Gene when she wrote the review, and though he later retracted the claim, it still moves.

In the course of this agreeable procrastination I found a revealing characterization in a 2015 interview with Midgley.  (She's 95 this year, and though she's lost mobility she's still writing, and as well as ever.)

One gets the impression that Midgley doesn't keep on writing just because she enjoys it, but because she thinks the world needs her to counter prevalent ideas she considers "silly" or "ridiculous", and bring us all back to "talking sense" - and because she believes such questions should not be purely left to scientists. As the philosopher Roger Scruton has put it: "Midgley's view is that philosophy, in leaving the question of human nature to the biologists, has betrayed its mission."

Notice "One gets the impression" there -- Midgley didn't actually say that she thinks "the world needs her."   One gets the impression that the interviewer wanted to give the impression that Midgley has a big head.  Writers write for many reasons -- fame, fortune, and the love of beautiful women, as Freud reportedly said -- and if you want to know why we do it, why not just ask?  I hope that people will read what I write, but I'm agnostic as to whether the world needs me to counter prevalent ideas I consider silly or ridiculous.  What I do know is that I need to write about such things, and why not?  For myself, it's a way of scratching the itch that such ideas put in my brain: instead of just fuming about them, I write about them, as much to explain to myself why they bother me as to explain to anyone else, and thanks to the Internet I can publish myself.  Writing for me, then, is partly habit, and I would imagine that at 95 it's a habit for Midgley too.  I know from experience that some people find my writing useful, as I have found other people's published disagreements with prevalent ideas.

It occurs to me to wonder, however, whether the interviewer would have written such a patronizing suggestion about Richard Dawkins, or Neil DeGrasse Tyson, or Francis Crick, or Carl Sagan, or Bill Nye, any other purveyor of the prevalent ideas that people like Mary Midgley and I feel the need to differ with.  I certainly get that impression from them: they are often explicit about their conviction that the world needs to know the scientific truths of which they are merely the humble prophets and servants.  They even see themselves, rather like many Christians, as an embattled and even persecuted minority, and the ideas they present as anything but "prevalent."  Considering that they have (and welcome, and seek out) much more media access than Mary Midgley, and that Tyson for one was appointed by George W. Bush to government commissions on science, I think that their stance is as dubious as Christian claims of persecution when someone disagrees with them.  Yet it's someone like Midgley who, the interviewer hints gently, thinks that the world needs her opinions.  Well, yes, I think it does.

The Tribute Vice Pays to Virtue

A former co-worker of mine likes to post garbage on Facebook, alternating between moist devotional memes about God's goodness, celebrations of the Confederate battle rag, defenses of gun ownership, and attacks on Musims and liberals, especially President Obama.  I've given up trying to reason with her, and now simply attack her, though still in less vitriolic terms than the junk she posts.  She never replies -- in fact, like many people I know, she rarely writes anything herself, preferring to let the makers of memes do the talking -- but now and then someone else she knows replies to my comments, though he also relies on scattershot slogans and soundbytes.  He never actually addresses what I've said.  (It's the same tactic used by liberal Democrats when Obama is criticized, though they plug in different epithets.)

So, a few days ago this guy replied, "You sure like the beheading of children, don't you, Duncan?" to a comment I wrote on a meme celebrating the killing of Muslims by American snipers.  In a way, his riposte was successful, because I wasn't sure how to respond to it: What can you say to something that stupid?

What I don't get is what a right-wing American Christian patriot has against beheading: beheading was a traditional method of execution in the Christian West (not to mention the rest of the world) until the 18th and 19th centuries; the last time in Great Britain was in 1817; in France the guillotine was used until 1977.  Our good friends the Saudis still behead criminals.  True, beheading in the West has succumbed to political correctness -- we in America now prefer to kill people with botched lethal injections -- but my co-worker and her defender despise political correctness and favor the death penalty for those they believe deserve it.

The other form of violence that has American patriots righteously indignant is burning people alive, though again, I don't see why.  Executing people by burning is another traditional Christian practice.  The United States has never used it as an official method of execution, but unofficially it has been popular among tradition-minded white Christian Americans well into the twentieth century.  That's only here in America, of course.  The US pioneered the use of firebombing civilian populations in World War II, adding the use of napalm in Korea and Vietnam, and now burns people alive with Hellfire missiles fired from drones.  Teenagers who should have picked "far more responsible" parents, for example, but nine-year-old children too.

That little girl survived, unlike many beneficiaries of this well-intentioned but pitiful and helpless giant.

The accusation that critics of US violence "like" the atrocities of our enemies is a familiar one.  I'm not going to say that my co-worker and her buddy necessarily like the atrocities committed by our country, though probably they do in many cases, where the victims are black or brown or Muslim or otherwise safely Other.  Still, like most Americans they prefer not to know too many details, and to cheer for the horrors from a safe distance, getting indignant only when their grubby noses are rubbed in reality.  And in this they are no different from Obama fans, who don't want to be reminded of his crimes either.  Patriotism is the opiate of the people.

Mistakes Were Made

I'm a lifelong Dairy Queen fan, and this won't stop me.  But still.

I was out of town this week, and while waiting for my order to be filled, I idly looked at this historical display.  I've added a red frame around the part that caught my eye.

I'm pretty sure that what they meant in that first item was "clamor," not "clamber."  Oh, I suppose it's possible they meant that customers were crawling awkwardly over each other to get some of that DQ goodness, but I doubt it.  Ah well, mistakes like this do happen.  Maybe no one but me has even noticed it.

But then today, back in Bloomington, I was browsing idly in the New Arrivals section when I noticed a slim novel called In the Company of Educated Men, by Leonce Gaiter, published in 2014 by Astor+Blue Editions.  It's a road-trip / crime novel or something.  I flipped through the pages to see how the writing looked, and for some reason this leapt out at me near the bottom of page 66:

She clamored into the back.

Hm.  I just realized while writing this post that I'd always assumed that "clamber" was pronounced clam/ber.  My mother insisted, when she was teaching me read fifty years ago, that I sound out words I didn't know.  I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone say "clamber" aloud, though; I just assumed it sounded like it looked.  I looked again at the Webster's entry on the chance that clamber is not pronounced the way it looks to me.  And sure enough, while my pronunciation is the first one listed, there's a second one with a silent b.  That means it's not the preferred or "standard" pronunciation, but it's common enough to be noted by Merriam-Webster.  So the confusion of spellings I stumbled on this week is understandable.  Clamor and clamber can be pronounced the same.

But it still seems odd that the marketing department of an international fast-food chain would confuse the spellings, and about as odd that a small literary press would do it.  Has anyone else encountered this?

I Just Look White

It's Saturday midmorning, and it's quiet here in the food court, where I've come with my computer to check e-mail, and infuriate myself by reading racist memes on Facebook.  I guess there isn't a home game, and then too it's Labor Day weekend, so many students will have gone out of town.  Others have not, though, and I was startled to see drunken parties already underway on the sidewalks outside some new student-oriented apartment units at 9:30 in the morning yesterday.  But then, the weekend in a Big Ten college town usually begins on Tuesday night, judging from the festivities I hear in those buildings.

Anyway.  Most of the visible workers in the food court are students employed part-time, and since it's so quiet I can clearly hear some of their conversations.  One was trying to explain to one of the managers why she's not comfortable talking to a co-worker, and the manager teased her that she must be racist, because that co-worker is Mexican.  Well, part-Mexican, on her father's side.  The young woman was stunned, she had no idea, because aside from not having an accent her co-worker doesn't look Mexican, she looks "white."  Her mother's white, the manager said.  I had to zip my lips, because I so much wanted to jump up and say that many Mexicans are "white."  If I'd been wearing my "I Just Look Illegal" t-shirt today, I might have done it.

Over the past several years I've watched a fair number of classic studio-made Mexican movies, from about 1940 to 1970.  These were mainstream films, corresponding to Hollywood product, and so of course there are almost no indio faces in them, except a few scattered in crowds of extras.  It's still true of Mexican TV.  One of the notable exceptions was the comic actress María Elena Velasco, whose character La India María was popular for decades.  But she was the exception who proved the rule.

Velasco, who before La India Maria was usually cast as a maid or a servant, got her big break when director Fernando Cortés recommended her to portray an indigenous woman named Maria in a comedy sketch. Over the course of 30 years, the character appeared in 16 films and a spinoff television series, Ay María, qué puntería. La India Maria was usually garbed in colorful, traditional blouses and skirts—costumes that Velasco’s mother helped make— and braided hair, and countered racial and class discrimination with her good nature, strong morals, and slapstick sense of humor.In addition to creating the iconic character, Velasco was also a screenwriter, producer, and one of Mexico’s few major female directors.

"A maid or a servant" -- sound familiar?

I suppose that young woman thinks that Mexicans are all of American Indian ancestry, and so are visible to the ethnically anxious eye.  If so, she's probably unaware how many students attending this university have recent ancestors who speak Spanish, or are themselves foreign students from Spanish-speaking countries.  She probably attends classes with such students, but they don't "look" Hispanic, so they must be "white."  It's convenient to suppose that she's just ignorant because she's an undegraduate, but there are white Americans with advanced degrees and cushy think-tank jobs who also think that "Hispanic" refers to a non-white race.  I imagine they're more common than anyone knows, because who bothers to count them?

It struck me how entertaining it would be to say something to people like this that someone they know is of mixed race: her father is English, her mother is white; his father is white, his mother is Swedish.  Or Polish.  Whatever.  If you want more evidence that "race" is a social construct, consider the confusion that nice, educated liberal white people exhibit over what a "race" is.  In any case, non-"white" Mexicans might better be referred to as Indians if you really must label them -- those who aren't of African or Asian descent, that is.

Mensa for Dummies

John Scalzi posted a grab of one of his tweets this morning:

It was prompted by the ongoing Sad Puppies vs. Social Justice Warriors "kerfuffles surrounding science fiction and its awards, there have been a couple of people (and their spouses, declaiming about their beloved) who have been slapping down Mensa cards as proof that they (or their spouse) are smart."  Scalzi explained, in his trademark style, why doing this tends to prove the opposite.  For example:

Your Mensa card does not mean you know how to argue. Your Mensa card does not mean you do not make errors or lapses in judgment. Your Mensa card is not a “get out of jail free” card when someone pokes holes in your thesis. Your Mensa card does not mean that you can’t be racist or sexist or otherwise bigoted. You may not say “I have a Mensa card, therefore my logic is irrefutable.”

Good enough.  The comments under his post are another matter, however.  They fell into two main groups. In one group, the commenter would mention that he or she had attended Mensa meetings, even joined for a while, and found the people in the organization to be mostly pretty nice people.  The other group declared that they'd never joined or gone to a meeting, but all the Mensa members they'd met were jerks.  I found this latter group fascinating, because despite their evident conviction of their own superior intelligence, they were making a fundamental logical mistake, one that Scalzi himself didn't: they were generalizing an entire group based on their experience of a few, probably unrepresentative, members.  Analogous stereotypes are "All the Christian fundamentalists I know are hypocrites," "Did you ever see a fag who wasn't effeminate?" (actual example), "All heroin addicts started out on pot, so smoking pot will turn you into a heroin addict."

(Just for disclosure's sake, I have never joined Mensa or gone to a meeting.  The Mensa members I know in person are quite nice and bright people, and the Mensa jerks I've encountered were all online, trying to establish their intellectual credentials by bragging about their IQ scores or their Mensa membership.)

Some of the discussion focused on IQ tests and SATs.  Several commenters pointed out the uselessness of IQ tests as a measure of intelligence.  One riposted:

IQ tests (what Mensa uses) are tests of aptitude. They are basically measuring how easily and quickly you will learn and absorb concepts of all types, and solve new problems. How accurate they are is almost beside the point because really they are irrelevant in most situations including arguments about topics.

How easily you could learn is not a measure of how much you know.
If two people sit down to learn a skill and one can attain expertise in 1 hour and the other needs 1.5 hours that is interesting. However if the first person never spends the hour learning the skill then the second person is absolutely the one you want around when you need that skill set.

IQ tests do not measure aptitude.  As far as I know, no one knows how to do that.  IQ tests mostly measure what you already know, or know how to do.  I last took an IQ test in high school, and I don't recall any part of it devoted to how quickly I could learn a skill; nor, from what I've read about the IQ controversies, has such an exercise become part of the test since then.

Similarly, the SAT, which was based on the Stanford-Binet IQ tests, was originally "called the Scholastic Aptitude Test, then the Scholastic Assessment Test, then the SAT Reasoning Test, and now simply the SAT."  The College Board. who owns the franchise, explains that it "tests the skills you’re learning in school: reading, writing and math. Your strength in these subjects is important for success in college and throughout your life," which sounds like what used to be called an achievement test.  It is not an aptitude test, and it's not even a very good predictor of college success, though that's its usual rationale.  This commenter's confident assertions are interesting; they seem to have no basis in fact, and I wonder where he or she got them.

Another commenter, a former Mensa member, wrote:

I studied rhetoric in school and my mom was a physicist; what I learned from this background is that the way to persuade people is to provide relevant and verifiable evidence.

I think this person may be confusing "is" and "ought."  I also value relevant and verifiable evidence, but I've learned to my disappointment that many, even most people, don't.  The way to persuade people in the real world appears to be to assert, as loudly as possible, that your opponent is fat or Republican or a libtard or a funditard or an asshole.  This approach is more "natural," and much easier.  It's also more effective, from what I see.

For example, this morning a liberal / progressive friend of a friend shared this meme on Facebook:

According to Snopes, Palin didn't say this and wasn't even on Hannity on that date.  I pointed this out in a comment on the Facebook post, exulting sarcastically that liberals aren't gullible or dishonest like Republitards.  Of course the person who'd posted was displeased -- she reacted exactly like the right-wingers I know react when I point out that they've posted something bogus, asking why I was on her timeline and getting indignant about my meddling.  Mockery is a very private thing, especially when you're posting it in public on Facebook.  One hears that social media are an echo chamber, that people want to engage only with people who share their politics; to a great extent that's true, as this person showed.  And I suppose we need places where we can find others who share our opinions and prejudices, but we also need to engage with people who don't, or the social and political changes this person hopes for will never happen.

Back at Scalzi's blog, the same commenter continued:

Anti-intellectualism is hardly the worst form of prejudice, but I know people who have been hurt. Also it’s like fat-shaming; we’re not a protected class and some people think it’s okay to show disrespect.

This lament was oddly off-topic.  The Sad Puppies clearly see themselves as intelligent, and intelligence of certain kinds as important and a sign of one's value.  They may well be anti-intellectual, since they associate what they call Social Justice Warriors with a kind of pointy-headed intellectualism that is widely devalued and mocked by people who think themselves intelligent.  "And let’s be honest — we all know someone who’s pretty book-smart and pretty life-stupid," wrote another commenter, providing an example of this distinction.  I can't recall where, but not too long ago I read something where the writer distinguished between being intelligent and being an intellectual.  I think of an intellectual as someone who works with more or less abstract ideas; an engineer or other scientist may be highly intelligent but no good at dealing with ideas, and dismissive of those who can.

As for the rest of his remarks: Being in “a protected class” doesn’t mean that others can’t “show disrespect” to you, nor should it. “Protected class” is a problematic legal term which means that the law will protect you from certain specified and more-or-less carefully defined forms of discrimination. But showing disrespect is fine, and hardly anyone really believes that it isn’t — except disrespect to themselves. For example, almost everybody wants respect for their religious affiliation, and discrimination based on religion is forbidden by Civil Rights law in certain spheres. But just about everybody has some religious class — liberals, fundamentalists, “Cafeteria Christians,” etc. — they love to mock and disrespect, and they’d be outraged if anyone told them not to. And the other part of the First Amendment guarantees our right to do so, as it should.

So sure, it’s perfectly okay to show disrespect to intellectuals, or to the intelligent.  It's not necessary to define bookish kids as a "protected class" to protect them from the bullying they too often face at school.  But kids who aren't "smart" also face bullying and contempt at school, including from their teachers, and they also need help from those around them.  If anything, they are probably more vulnerable than the smart kids: I know people who've been hurt.

I've mentioned before the graduate student I once knew who told me, sweetly and almost shyly, “I don’t say this to many people, but I think of you as my intellectual equal.” I thanked him, embarrassed, because I realized that though I hadn’t thought about it before, and don’t go around making such comparisons in the first place, I didn’t consider him my intellectual equal.  But, as Scalzi noted this morning, what he said revealed more about him than it did about me.

Credit where credit's due: I stole this post's title from another of Scalzi's commenters.

There's Gold in Them Far-Out Hills

I've begun reading Gerald Graff's Literature Against Itself, originally published in 1979 but reprinted in 1995 with a new preface by Graff that I'm saving until I've read the rest of the book.  I like Graff, and have read several of his other books, but this is the first of his scholarly books I've gotten into.  It's dense, and will take me a while to read, but it's also very entertaining and quotable, including when Graff is quoting someone else.

For example, early on he quotes the critic Harold Rosenberg, who wrote in 1972:

Social and/or aesthetic far-outness is a public relations technique aimed at the presumed indignation of a stable middle class that ceased to exist four decades ago [2, footnote].

Graff also cites evidence that outraging the middle class was exhausted at least as far back as the 1920s.

I mostly agree with this, though immediately after I read it with approval, it occurred to me that there is still an American middle class, ready and eager to be indignant at the performance art of various political and media celebrities.  Ironically, given, the traditional association with this indignation with conservative and reactionary sectors of the population, today's cultivators of the ragegasm are mostly liberal, while those who feed their indignation are on the Right.  This was true even when Literature Against Itself was originally published; it hasn't become less true in the years since then.

A page or so later, Graff himself remarks:

Some scholars in this group [those who feel little affiliation with the literary or critical "vanguard"] applaud attacks on deconstructionism and other fashions as proofs that they need not bother to read the critics in question.  It would be self-deluding to pretend that in attacking "fashionable" ideas, one is not oneself doing something fashionable [3-4].

Of course this cuts both ways and up and down, as Graff goes on to note:

Both the "conservative" and the "vanguard" factions in current cultural quarrels use the word "fashionable" as a stick with which to beat the other side, yet both sides can substantiate their usage convincingly enough [4].

And that's just in the first few pages.  I'll be taking a lot of notes as I proceed.

Honor among Scholars

Over thirty years ago I began studying the New Testament and Christian origins, mostly on my own though I took a class or two along the way.  I began for several reasons. I wanted to write a definitive essay on why biblical teaching on homosexuality had no authority, and found that the backstory was too large for anything brief.  I was also reacting to the defensive arguments of Christians that I should judge Christianity by Jesus and his teachings, not by the interpretations or conduct of specific Christians.

This project turned out to be very rewarding.  It reaffirmed my atheism in a way that no writing by an atheist could have done, though I had read and continued to read writings by atheists.  I learned how to do research, and how to think historically and critically.  But I also learned that if I hoped to learn the truth about Jesus and Christianity, I was doomed to failure.  In the first few months I read several reconstructions of Jesus' career that at first seemed plausible enough.  After each one, I'd read another that effectively refuted the previous one, and offered another, initially plausible account of what Jesus and the early Christians were up to; and so it went.  One of the conclusions I reached was that it is probably impossible to produce a valid account of the historical Jesus.

This, I recognize, assumes that there was a historical Jesus.  I'm agnostic on that question, because the same difficulties that prevent our producing a reliable picture of the Jesus of history also make it impossible to say for certain that he did or didn't exist.  This is true of all history: certainty is almost never possible.  The best we can do is to sort out probabilities, even concerning fairly recent events and people where the documentation is much richer.  That's why I recommend Albert Schweitzer's The Quest for the Historical Jesus, originally published in German in 1906 and first translated into English in 1910, to anyone who's interested in this subject.  The bulk of that book is a survey of historical-Jesus research from the late 1700s to around 1900; Schweitzer showed what was wrong with all of the theories those writers produced, and then offered up his own reconstruction, which had flaws of its own but still challenges New Testament scholars more than a century later.  You won't learn what Jesus did say or do, but you may learn to be skeptical of the speculations or other claims about Jesus that you'll encounter -- not just from Christians, but from non-Christians and anti-Christians who are sure that the Bible is fiction but are mysteriously convinced that their opinions and speculations are non-fiction.  You'll also learn that almost all accounts of the supposedly real Jesus that are touted as something new are not only old, but were refuted ignominiously by Schweitzer a hundred years ago.

Recently I read Honor Among Christians: The Cultural Key to the Messianic Secret by David F. Watson, published in 2010 by Fortress Press, which over the years has published many books I've found useful.  It looked like this one might offer some new insights into the New Testament, so when I heard of it I went to the university library and checked it out.  And I did learn from Honor Among Christians, though nothing really earth-shaking.

Watson, like numerous scholars before him, seeks to apply social science to biblical interpretation, in particular to the problem known to scholars as "the Messianic Secret."  That phrase applies mainly to the gospel of Mark, where Jesus tries (inconsistently) to maintain secrecy not only about his status as messiah but about some of the miracles he performs.  In 1901 a German scholar named Wilhelm Wrede published a book on this problem, Das Messiasgeheimnis in den Evangelien [The messianic secret in the gospels], which wasn't translated into English until 1971 -- in time, luckily, for me to read it.  It had much the same impact on New Testament studies as Schweitzer's big book: it was upsetting to conventional piety, but it was too well-argued to ignore altogether.

There are elements of secrecy in the other three gospels, as well as elsewhere in the New Testament, but it was Wrede's discussion of Mark that drew the most attention.  Briefly, in the gospel of Mark, Jesus drives out demons, who on their way out of their victims claim to know who he is, and he silences them.  Sometimes when Jesus does healings, he takes the sick person aside, or (as in the case of the daughter of Jairus), shuts himself in a room with only one or two other people (usually his chief disciples) present.  Afterward, he may or may not order them to tell no one about what he has done, though this doesn't work: despite his strictures, people will talk, and they do.  When Simon Peter correctly identifies Jesus as the Messiah, Jesus tells him and the rest of the Twelve not to tell anyone about him until after he has died and risen from the dead.  Scholars had already noticed these and other details in the gospels, and debated what they meant.  If they were historically true, and until the late 19th century most biblical scholars took for granted that they were, they sought to explain why Jesus would behave like this.  Wrede argued that these details were not historical but were dogmatic or theological -- that is, Mark invented them to make theological or doctrinal points.

I read Wrede around 1990, and I noticed that much of what I'd read about his work was erroneous, as if often the case with controversial ideas. Some of the received wisdom about flaws in his argument turned out to be about ideas that he considered but rejected. But I can't recall the details; I should reread The Messianic Secret sometime soon.  So I'm not sure about some of Watson's criticisms of Wrede, but I'll grant their validity for the sake of argument.  For example, I think Watson is correct that not all of the "secrecy" in Mark is necessarily related to Jesus' status as messiah, and that not all of it is necessarily secrecy.  He devotes a chapter to the language and concepts of secrecy in the ancient Mediterranean world, which is one of the best parts of the book.

The application of social science to this material is interesting too.  Watson argues that Jesus' culture, as well as others around the Mediterranean, placed a very strong emphasis on honor and shame.  Expectations about how a man should honorably conduct himself, how he should avoid shame, how he should react to praise, how he should treat his inferiors, and how they should respond to patronage.  So, Watson argues, when Jesus tries to keep his healings secret, he is deliberately going against the normal expectations of a great man, who would usually expect thanks and praise and the spreading of his fame for helping others.  Jesus wanted to overturn the normal conception of honor, by arguing that the great should be the servants of the less, rather than lording it over them.

This is all very well, but it's not exactly news, nor is social science necessary to see it.  Even if you know nothing about ancient Mediterranean culture, an attentive reader can see that Mark's Jesus (and not only Mark's) is going against the grain of his society.  He must continually squelch his disciples' competition for status among themselves, for example; he must tell people not to spread around the news of (some of) his miracles, though as Watson and other scholars have noticed, his efforts are doomed to failure from the start.

After all, if he didn't really want all that attention, why do the miracles?  They weren't part of the normal messianic expectations, which Jesus supposedly didn't want to fulfill anyway.  It can be argued that he had to do his miracles, because of his compassion for human suffering; but many of his miracles have nothing to do with that.  Some, like walking on water, look like mere showing off.  Some of his secrecy, such as his declaration that he taught in parables so that his audiences would not understand him, has no detectable relation to the culture of shame.  As Graham Shaw pointed out in The Cost of Authority (Fortress Press, 1982), some of his non-miraculous conduct was oddly provocative for someone who supposedly didn't want attention: "For paradoxically the refusal to conform to demands for public religious observance is itself intensely visible; so that the criticism of religious visibility acquires many of the characteristics of exhibitionism.  Repeatedly they attract hostile attention to themselves and their master.  Invisible spiritual religion thus proves to have a highly public face."  Early in Mark's story Jesus also publicly claimed the authority to forgive sins, which was hardly a stance of meek humility.

A common explanation for Jesus' quixotic secrecy, noted by Watson, is that he didn't want to come to the attention of the Roman authorities, who took a dim view of anyone who drew crowds in territories they controlled.  Again, if that was really his concern, why do the miracles, why preach publicly, why draw all the attention to himself while pretending he didn't really want it?  Supposedly, as I indicated before, Jesus was at odds with the normal expectation that the Messiah would be a military figure and a king in the mold of David; but instead of disavowing them openly, he played coy games with his audiences.  Was he or wasn't he a prophet, the reincarnation of Elijah, John the Baptist resuscitated ... ?  Jesus wasn't telling; you had to guess.

And, of course, according to Christian mythology, Jesus ultimately wanted to come to the Romans' attention.  He told his disciples that the prophets had foretold that the messiah must be betrayed, crucified, and on the third day rise from the dead.  (The prophets had also foretold a great military victory which would restore David's kingdom, extending its rule to the entire world, but Jesus supposedly wasn't on board with that part.)  Eventually he entered Jerusalem with great fanfare, violently disrupted the Temple Court in front of thousands of people (including the occupying Roman troops), playing hide-and-seek with his enemies until they finally caught him. That was supposedly Judas Iscariot's fault, but what would have happened to Jesus' mission if he hadn't been caught?  He was supposed to die on the cross for the sins of humanity.  After the resurrection, of course, all pretense of humility on Jesus' part went out the window: he ascended to the right hand of the Father, resumed his status as the Second Person of the Trinity, and would eventually judge the quick and dead.  According to the New Testament, he would then become a military messiah; the conventional expectations were not really rejected, just postponed.

Watson doesn't do much better with Mark's conflicting and inconsistent narrative than his predecessors have done, it seems to me.  The "culture of shame" theme makes sense of some of the material he needs to account for, but not all of it.  I also think that Watson underestimates how important honor and shame remain in the modern West.  I haven't observed that modern Christians have any trouble understanding what Jesus was demanding of his followers by ordering them to be humble servants, though they do (understandably) have as much difficulty meeting those demands as Jesus' first followers did.  Twenty-first century social science isn't necessary to see how Mark's Jesus went against his culture's ideas of a good or great man's attitudes and behavior, because they are our culture's ideas too.