This tweet, with its accompanying photograph, went viral this weekend. With any luck at all, it will cost Bo French the election for Texas Railroad Commissioner. Even Karl Rove, Ted Cruz, and other Texas Republicans were offended, though others were reluctant even to pretend they were. French has a long history of racist remarks, but he won the primary election for the post and has the support of the oil and gas industry. He's borne down on this tweet, mocking his critics.
Liberals too scolded French for his bigotry. Most of what I saw was in the "Oh, how can you say such awful things?" mode, which is fair enough, but there was little if any attempt to go beyond that and dismantle the assumptions that underlay French's tweet, which was something of a dogwhistle but obvious enough. Take this Houston public-media call-in show. The hosts spend twelve minutes being indignant, but I expect more and better from public media. (Not that I get it.) French would prefer that there be no non-white students, or residents for that matter, in Texas. From his responses to criticism, I gather that he assumes (or knows that his backers assume) that Indians and other foreigners are crowding out "American" (i.e., white) kids for admission to the University of Texas.
Two of the students in the photo told the Dallas Morning News that they’re U.S. citizens. Most UT students are Texans — state law requires that 90% of each freshman class come from in-state — and there is no evidence that the students in the photo French posted are foreigners.
French said UT was “filled with foreign nationals” and argued that the school has prioritized foreign students and workers. However, under state law, 90% of UT freshmen must be in-state residents, while the remaining 10% are international students or out-of-state students. International students comprised about 4% of undergraduates in the 2025-26 school year.
UT offers automatic admission to all in-state residents in the top 5% of their high school graduating class. Under state law, 75% of UT’s freshman class must be admitted under this policy. The remaining students are admitted through a holistic process that considers factors such as grade point average, extracurriculars and personal essays.
French doesn't care about facts, of course, and I don't think most liberals do either. But they should at least pretend to. I watched a YouTube video today on American slavery by Jamelle Bouie, in which he acknowledged a bit sheepishly that many people on all sides of American political debates don't really care much about facts, but said that it's still good to be armed with them when you encounter bad claims and arguments. I agree.
Remember Kash Patel's locker-room celebration with the US hockey team in May? I do, but I'd forgotten that "In 2019, an event at a Houston stadium headlined by Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi drew over 50,000 attendees. French’s comments could alienate those same voters, said Brendan Steinhauser, a Republican consultant in Austin." Republican elites are quite cozy with right-wing Hindus of the sort that currently run India. That's not why Bo French wants to run them out of Texas, of course. Racists pretend to care that immigrants won't "assimilate." The kids in that photo sure as hell have assimilated.
Well, this is a mess. The advertised subject, "The Original Jesus Was Hidden in Mark" never turns up. Ehrman keeps getting distracted, but then I know from his podcasts that he's eminently distractable. So is Derek the interviewer. It makes for a toxic combination.
I've now watched a number of Bart Ehrman's podcast videos, and one or two interviews he's given other podcasters. Even on his own turf he is a poor speaker, badly organized, prone to fits of maniacal giggling. I wonder what he was like in the classroom, but the lecture he gave when he retired suggests that he can do better than he does in his podcasts. I would expect, however, based on my own experience speaking to college classes from the 1970s to the 2010s, that Erhman would have organized his thoughts on a basic and familiar topic that he must have covered in his undergraduate classes over decades. Instead he sounds as if this is all new to him and he's never talked about it before. The same applies to interviews. Interviewers love to distract their subjects, if only because of their own ignorance, and someone who gives interviews regularly should learn how to push the discussion back in the direction he wants to go. With all due immodesty, I think I could do a better job on this topic than Ehrman did here.
But going with where Erhman let himself be led: I agree that the empty tomb is a legend; I figured that out soon after I began studying the New Testament and the scholarship in the early 1980s. I suspect that Mark invented the legend, though of course there's no evidence either way and we'll probably never know.
The stuff about "the Jews expected a military messiah and couldn't cope with Jesus being all peace-and-love-and-shit" motif was popular in mid-20th century New Testament scholarship, and I see it's still with us. It's not necessary to invoke it to explain the disciples' cognitive dissonance, though. Mark shows Jesus preaching the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God, and most scholars agree that there's no reason to think he was at odds with the normal messianic expectations of his day, though it's not certain what those were. There's a famous old article by Morton Smith, "What Is Implied by the Variety of Messianic Figures?" (Ehrman surely knows it),* which shows that a wild variety of contradictory messianic expectations were current and not grounds for serious dispute. That article is still often cited. According to Mark and the rest of the New Testament, Jesus expected the Kingdom to arrive with violence and the punishment of poorly-defined evildoers. But the cognitive dissonance came from the fact that the Kingdom not only didn't arrive, its announcer was crucified. (Mark's stories about Jesus predicting his death are also probably legends, as I think Ehrman would agree.)
What I was expecting from this video was some discussion of Mark's theme of secrecy around Jesus and his mission, which has been much discussed, especially since Wilhelm Wrede's 1901 book The Messianic Secret,** though Wrede has frequently been misunderstood and misrepresented. His discussion is detailed and complicated, which helps to explain the misunderstandings. For example, he often paraphrases other scholars' attempts to explain the problems he discusses, then refutes them, so I think some of his readers mistook the paraphrases for his own position. I'm rereading it right now, so I was interested in Ehrman's take on secrecy in Mark. Not enough to pay money for the lecture series, though, sorry. His endless cackling and preacher-style jokes are just too annoying.
Ehrman has written about Wrede and the messianic secret on his blog, I see. I think he got it wrong, partly because of the need to simplify for his non-academic fanbase; inder one of those posts, a commenter asks "Isn’t it your view that Jesus did think he was the messiah and only told
his inner circle about this? So in a sense it is historical that he
kept it a secret?" and Ehrman replies "Yup." I disagree, but neither of us knows for sure, because there's no reliable evidence about it.
Briefly, in Mark's gospel Jesus goes around exorcising demons and healing the sick and dying. The demons he drives out recognize him as the Son of God, and he tells them to shut up. Several though not all of his healing miracles are done privately, with only his inner group of disciples (Peter, James, John) present, and he then tells the people he's healed not to tell anyone about his work. Naturally, they tell everybody. The more he tells them not to, the more they do it anyway. And some of his miracles are done in public, so I don't know who he was trying to kid. The theme continues through Peter's recognition that Jesus is the messiah, which Jesus also orders to keep secret, until Jesus' triumphant entry into Jerusalem just before his arrest and execution; but he still has some secrets, like the prediction the Temple would be destroyed and he would come on clouds of glory within a generation. Because Matthew and Luke left out most of this secrecy, I suspect that most Bible readers just assume that Jesus did everything in public; but Mark said otherwise. If this interests you, try reading the gospel of Mark yourself - it's not very long - and pay attention to its depiction of Jesus' secrecy.
Another motif Wrede discussed that I think is important is Mark's frequent alternation between Jesus teaching his disciples in private and Jesus teaching the crowds in public. No matter where he is - in town, by the sea, on a mountaintop - Jesus will suddenly interrupt himself and call the crowd to him, as though hundreds of people were waiting to be summoned and then dismissed. As Wrede said, this is not plausible or possible, and it shows that Mark isn't writing history but a sort of drama. My favorite example, though I don't remember if Wrede mentions it, is in Mark chapter 13. Jesus has taken Peter and James and John and Andrew aside on the Mount of Olives and predicted the bad times to come. Mark (I suppose, but it could be Jesus, why not?) interjects "Let the reader understand" at 13:14 about "the abomination of desolation" that will be set up in the Temple, and finally warns in verse 37, "What I say to you I say to all: Watch." The crowd is always there, out of earshot but ready to come running at a moment's notice.
The theme of secrecy is bigger than these details, though. Dramatic irony runs throughout Mark, and to some extent through all the gospels. That is, the reader knows from the beginning who Jesus is, and how the story will turn out; but the people, the disciples, the priests and the Pharisees and the scribes, don't know. Think of Sophocles' Oedipus: the audience knows from the beginning of the play who Oedipus is, what he did and what it all means, but the characters in the play don't. Mark tells the reader too (1:1, RSV): "The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God." No surprises there!
In The Cost of Authority (Fortress Press, 1982), Graham Shaw suggested (I think reasonably) that Mark's stress on secrecy may have reflected his own intention (p. 189):
It was, for example, never intended to be printed, so that everyone might have a copy. The stress on the esoteric within the book suggests that access to the text may itself have been a privilege which the reader could not take for granted. Although it very quickly acquired a public use in the new Christian community, ... a much more private use may have been the original intention. The injunction 'let the reader understand' (13.14) seems to envisage an individual rather than a colletive audience... The phrase in ch. 13 already quoted assumes that the reader will come to the text well furnished with a knowledge of Christian lore.
I like this, but I'm not sure about it. While Mark does stress the esoteric, he also is revealing those secrets, publicizing them, letting the reader into the privileged circle of them who know. To this day people write similar books; the Amazon algorithm points me to them daily. These secrets were hidden for thousands of years from everyone but the Elect, but now I am revealing them to you for the price of this book!
Remember that the Greek word apokalypsis means "revelation," and that Mark includes some typically apocalyptic material. I still think that Mark could be classified as an apocalyptic book like Daniel, Enoch, or the New Testament Revelation. One of the things it has in common with Daniel and Enoch is the motif that these truths were kept hidden, secret, sealed until now, which explains why they weren't known before, but also implies that the End has arrived. The New Testament book of Revelation is different on that: John is told not to seal up the book (Revelation 22:19, RSV): "And [the angel] said to me, 'Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this book, for the time is near.'" Oops! Well, nobody's perfect.
Matthew and Luke threw open the doors, which indicates a change in the knowledge ordinary Christians were allowed or expected to have. (And not only Christians: by the mid-second century, hostile educated pagans wrote attacks on Christianity based on some knowledge of Christian writings.) If so, it happened fast, like other developments in early Christianity that we'll never be able to reconstruct now but which are visible in the New Testament writings. Paul, for example, also refers to esoterica in his letters. Later on, the Gospel of Thomas would begin, "These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down." As with Mark, we're entitled to ask how secret those teachings were by the time they were written down. This is the sort of stuff I thought Ehrman would touch on in this interview. No such luck. But maybe only the truly worthy are given to know the original Jesus who's hidden in Mark.
No, wait: I don't really mean that. For one thing, I see no reason to believe that Mark knew anything about "the original Jesus", and Ehrman probably would agree, so the title is a misleading come-on. That's complicated by the fact that at times Mark, or some of his sources, show accurate information about first-century Judaism. That's why this MythVision video is so frustrating: like Mark, Ehrman promises to reveal "the original Jesus hidden in Mark," but it's just a tease.
If, as most scholars think, the gospel of Mark was the first of the four to be written down, its success indicates that it found a market and an audience rather quickly. Very soon afterward, the authors of Matthew and Luke produced new, improved gospels based on Mark's outline, which overtook it in popularity. Mark was bumped down to second place, after Matthew, in the emerging canon. More imitators followed, and "gospel" came to mean a particular kind of book about Jesus. (Similarly, the success of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings made it the three-volume template for many imitators.) I don't think the author of Mark foresaw that.
----
*Journal of Biblical Literature 78 (1959): 66-72.
** English translation published by James Clarke & Co., 1971.
By Grabthar's Hammer, these two are insufferable. But I see from the comments that many find them adorable.
I'll concede the necessity of providing a general background, but it takes Ehrman far too long to get to the ostensible subject of the video, and then he sort of dances around it in a way that will probably just confuse most of his audience. If I were going to try to answer the question of whether Paul was an eyewitness to the resurrection of Jesus, I think I'd begin by explaining who Paul was, what he said about the resurrection, compare it to the accounts in Acts, and if there was time, maybe compare the gospels.
There is some useful information here, scattered among the giggling and smirking: the research on memory and eyewitnesses Ehrman refers to, especially, which he wrote about in Jesus Before the Gospels, one of his better books. I find it hard to believe he spent two years boning up on it, it sounds like a pastor's exaggeration to me, and he's so disorganized that I wonder how many viewers will be able to follow what he's talking about. (I encountered some of the literature on memory in the 1990s, in the wake of the Ritual Satanic Abuse scare, and much on the Jesus tradition before the gospels in the 1980s and afterward.)
One thing that has long bugged me is the inexactness of "the resurrection" in Christian discussion of the subject. It seems to me that it should refer specifically to the restoration of Jesus' body to life on the Sunday after his crucifixion, and by extension to his visits with his followers immediately afterward. In that sense there were no witnesses to the resurrection, at least according to the gospels. (Interestingly, the non-canonical Gospel of Peter depicts the disciple Simon Peter watching as Jesus or a symbolic avatar is carried out of the tomb. That gospel is not recognized by any church today, and the only existing copy dates from several centuries after Jesus' death. Some scholars speculate that it may draw on earlier traditions, but nobody knows.) But after awhile I realized that Christians, including scholars, used "resurrection" to refer to the cosmic fact of Jesus' victory over death, in which his raising is almost incidental. The empty tomb is equated with the resurrection, though it's not the same thing.
"Witness" has a similar vagueness. It refers not only to someone who saw the risen Jesus but to anyone at any time afterward who testified that the resurrection had happened. "Witness" and "testify" (not to mention the Greek martyr, which means "witness" and didn't originally denote someone who died for his or her beliefs) are basically synonyms. Someone who testifies that he believes that Christ was raised is also a witness to the resurrection, even centuries later.
"Eyewitness" at least seems more exact, though again, no one actually was an eyewitness to Jesus getting up from the slab, shedding his grave wrappings, and emerging (nekkid?) from the tomb. They were eyewitnesses to the appearances (another interestingly vague word) of the risen Lord. Although the gospels stress the fleshly, meaty substantiality of his risen body, the risen Jesus flits around the vicinity of Jerusalem, popping in and out of locked rooms, sometimes recognized by his followers and sometimes not. According to Paul in I Corinthians 15, however, the risen body was not and could not be of flesh, but of spirit.
So, what about Paul? One frustrating thing about him is that in his letters he's very coy about his witness to the resurrected Jesus. Maybe he said more when he was making converts and founding his churches. In I Corinthians 15 he says he's reminding them of what he preached to them:
3 For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. 6 Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. 8 Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.
When I first sat down and compared Paul with the resurrection stories in the gospels, I was startled by the differences. He doesn't mention Mary Magdalene, and only Luke among the gospels mentions Jesus appearing to Peter ("Cephas" comes from the Aramaic for "rock," as "Peter" comes from the Greek, so most scholars believe that Paul is referring to Peter here). That's odd if Mark's gospel was written from Peter's preaching, as tradition claims; maybe Peter was just too modest ever to mention it?
The Twelve can probably be harmonized with appearances to the Eleven in the gospels, since Judas was no longer with them, but this too is a strange lapse. Didn't Paul know about Judas? Some scholars think that the betrayal of Jesus by Judas is a later legend, and I agree, but no one knows. The appearance to "more than five hundred brothers at one time" has been getting some attention lately from fundamentalist YouTubers, but it's more of an embarrassment: why do none of the gospels mention it? According to Acts, all of the brothers present after Jesus' ascension into Heaven numbered 120. What happened to the other 380?
"James" is generally thought to be the brother of Jesus. Again, this appearance isn't mentioned in any of the gospels or in Acts, though in Acts 15 this James is an authoritative figure in the Jerusalem church. "All the apostles" is confusing, aside from the fact that it doesn't appear elsewhere either. How many apostles were there?
And then, Paul says, Jesus appeared to him. As Ehrman asks rhetorically in the video, how did Paul know it was Jesus? He could have asked the same question about Ananias of Damascus, to whom Jesus appeared "in a vision" in Acts 9 after he appeared to Paul. (So Paul wasn't "last of all" after all.) Ehrman tosses out several possibilities, none of which seems plausible to me. In Acts Jesus tells Paul who he is, and would Jesus lie? (That sort of circularity is popular among apologists.) Maybe more to the point, does a vision count as "eyewitness"? Acts isn't a reliable source, but Paul is no help either.
Paul says he "received" the list of resurrection appearances. Where, from whom, did he receive it? Most scholars assume that he received it from Peter and James when he met them in Jerusalem. There are several reasons why this isn't a good answer, such as how Paul preached this stuff during the long period after his conversion but before he went to Jerusalem. Paul insists in Galatians that he received his gospel directly from Jesus, by revelation. Even fundamentalists are reluctant to take him at his word, for some reason. Don't they believe that the risen Lord could instruct Paul personally? I don't, but I'm an infidel.
Again, we'll never know. I've noticed before that Paul says he "received" his version of the Eucharist, the Christian communion meal, from "the Lord," and again I take him at his word, that this is what he believed even if I don't. Interestingly, though, his version agrees closely, almost word for word, with the versions in the synoptic gospels. (Mark, Luke, and Matthew.) Maybe Paul and the gospel writers drew on the same branch of tradition. If that's the case, then why are their accounts of the resurrection so wildly, impossibly different? I've been wondering lately if the gospels based their accounts of the Eucharist on Paul's, but if so, why did they ignore his list of resurrection appearances? I mean "ignore" deliberately: they knew it but didn't feel bound to follow it. Oral tradition varies a great deal in how well it preserves material. Sometimes a story will be passed along verbatim very accurately, while other stories are changed freely. That might have happened here.
I also wonder why Ehrman in his videos seems to be talking about his topics almost for the first time, as if these issues wouldn't have come up often in the courses he taught for decades. It seems to be his shtick, and I find it annoying. If I were new to biblical studies, I think I would find it confusing and unhelpful. Judging by the comments, I'm not sure that many of his fans really follow him. They're impressed by his credentials, which are certainly real enough, and by his opposition to fundamentalist Christianity, but they seem to miss a lot of what he says, and miss that his positions are as much at odds with their liberal, feel-good vision of Christianity as they are with conservative evangelicals'. Like C. S. Lewis's fans, they bask in the aura of his superior learning; it's not vital that they themselves learn.
Dolly Parton died today at the age of eighty. Her nephew and security chief Bryan Seaver announced it in a moving video on behalf of her family. He says Parton asked him to do it several years ago. That impressed me, because it suggests that Parton planned ahead, aware of her mortality before it really caught up with her. Maybe she'd had some health scares even then? There were bursts of publicity in the past year when she had to cancel appearances, but she always minimized them in her public statements. Probably that was a good idea; she was always a canny manipulator of her image.
Many people, predictably, are going nuts. One old friend of mine, a highly educated and intelligent person in her sixties, wailed on Facebook that she'd believed Dolly would live forever, and said Willie Nelson should be wrapped in cellophane bubble-wrap to protect him. To be fair, she's dealing better with her own mother's failing health, having just moved her to a closer care facility as her memory gets worse. I suspect that people are more realistic about the people they are close to and must care for, while celebrities just aren't real to them and they can fantasize that they're immortal. I shudder to think what will happen to her when her idol Bruce Springsteen (age 76) buys the farm.
I've written before about this, how people refuse to let their heroes go, when I saw the mass tantrums over Nelson Mandela's long decline.
For years before [his death], he had "retired from retirement" because of his failing health. 2013 was a morbid death watch, the way millions of people panicked every time Mandela went into the hospital. At 95, after a very long life of public service, I'd have thought he had earned the right to rest. But people still wanted a piece of him, and wanted him to go on living no matter what. They saw this craving as love, but I think it was something else. Selfishness is when you let your wishes override the wishes of another person, and I think that selfishness was the dominant emotion in those who wanted Mandela, or anyone else, to be kept alive forever, no matter what.
Robin Williams was another morbid case. I know people who are still obsessed with him.
My friend is a Parton fan, and I'm not. I like some of her music, but country has never done much for me. What mattered to me was that Parton transcended her background, wandering beyond country as she pleased, while insisting that she was just a simple country girl all along. I will always wonder how much of that was a conscious act, though it doesn't really matter. Her philanthropy is also important - as a reader I naturally admired her books for kids initiative, and will forever hate my state's governor, for cutting off funding to it. (I know, others did too.) It didn't really affect the program, it was more a show of allegiance to Trump and his own MAGA base. Parton's openness and humanity is her legacy. I expect we'll see more of her planning in the days and years to come; she didn't let death take her by surprise. But like all of us, she was never going to live forever. I'm seventy-five myself, my health is tolerably good, but I know my days are numbered. I need to do some more planning myself.
In one of those meaningless coincidences that make life interesting, Parton's death was announced just as I was coming to the end of DavidLodge's 2008 novel Deaf Sentence. Lodge died last year at the age of 90, which I didn't know until I looked him up just now. The protagonist of Deaf Sentence is a retired professor of linguistics in his 60s. He's progressively losing his hearing and the novel is largely about his struggle to adjust. But it's also about mortality and the meaning of life. The protagonist encounters a young American graduate student who's studying the rhetoric of suicide notes. His first marriage ended in his wife's death of cancer, and he's caring for his elderly father; he makes a lot of dad jokes about deafness, playing on the word's closeness to death, such as I had not known deaf had undone so many, and of course the novel's title. In many ways it's a dark, disturbing book, but it has Lodge's typical humanity and humor. I was annoyed when I read a recent review of another novelist's survey of The Novel, who singled Lodge out as an especially bad novelist. I disagree vehemently, but then I don't much care, and Deaf Sentence is a reason why, apart from the fact that I happened to read it at an appropriate time.
More important, though, two proposed amendments to the state constitution were rejected by Missouri voters. Amendment 4 would have made it much harder for citizen-based ballot initiatives to amend the state constitution; this was an effort by Republican elites to block initiatives they find distasteful - for example, to expand Medicaid or protect abortion rights in the state. Voters defeated it, roughly 82-17%. Amendment 5 would have abolished the state income tax; it too went down in flames, 83-16%.
MSNBC commentators, including the obnoxious Rachel Maddow, exulted over this result. They were delighted that Missouri voters had slapped back at the Republican leadership and insisted on People Power. Fair enough; I agree. This was, however, on Tuesday night, when the results of another closely-watched primary were still uncertain, in Michigan. Here too, party elites and special-interest money had played a major role with the aim of defeating Abdul El-Sayed, who was running against Haley Stevens for the Democratic Senate nomination. El-Sayed is not a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, but he ran on a strongly progressive platform and is vehemently critical of Israel's war crimes and US support for them. Stevens notoriously said "Israel comes to me in my dreams", is strongly supportive of Israel, and received massive campaign donations from AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups. She outspent Sayed by a factor of 9 to 1. Liberal Democrats supported her and attacked El-Sayed harshly as a communist, an anti-Semite and an Islamist. But he defeated Stevens anyway, though very narrowly, by one percentage point. I don't know whether Rachel Maddow is as happy about this outcome as she was of the one in Missouri, but as a matter of principle she ought to be.
Progressives did well elsewhere in Michigan; there's a good discussion here. The funniest upset involved a Trump-approved Republican who lost by double digits to a competitor who had stopped campaigning weeks ago. The winner said he'll accept the nomination and run in the general election this November.
Mainstream Democratic celebrities have moved to pledge support to El-Sayed's campaign. Haley Stevens herself has taken the high road; good for her. Kamala Harris even sent out a fund-raising letter to her list to try to piggy-back on his success. "It is so important that Abdul enters the general election with a strong start," the letter says. This is perhaps unfortunate rhetoric, given that Harris's 2024 campaign also had a strong start, with a huge war chest; I hope that El-Sayed will have learned from Harris's mistakes.
Harris's letter also mentions that Republican attacks on El-Sayed have "already begun." True, but so have right-wing Democratic attacks from the usual scum. CNN aired an attack interview with him. He calmly batted aside the purity-test questions. Comments under that post, ostensibly from Democrats, are the kind of bigoted froth that was aimed at Zohran Mamdani, and at El-Sayed himself during the campaign; "communist", "mandatory Quran classes in elementary school," "Russian agents but little investigation into it due to fear." Some are probably from MAGA and some are bots, but some are clearly from Democrats.
Democratic Congressman Dan Goldman of New York complained: "All three of us who lost in NYC had very progressive records (including supporting Medicare for All) and we all had the overwhelming support of actual working families — labor unions, public housing residents and immigrant communities." That's interesting, because I can remember when supporting Medicare for All marked you out as a radical Marxist, and reasonable Democrats pledged to block it.
It's true, supporting Israel is no longer a safe position for Democrats, and even Republicans are less enthusiastic than they used to be. Now we're going to see how firmly Democrats will hew to "Vote Blue No Matter Who." Some of the terminally online are ready to jettison it and have been since Mamdani won his primary, though I don't know how representative they are. But I've seen enough frenzied accusations that El-Sayed and Mamdani are communists from Democrats I know personally to feel sure that a significant number of them yearn to make common cause with MAGA. MAGA-adjacent? MAGA-lite? MAGA-curious? Whatever you call them, they're a blight in the party, and in the country. Meanwhile, though I'm gratified by leftish victories, most of them are just primaries. The generals are yet to come.
[I hope that the clip I've embedded here from Facebook shows up; I'm trying to find it on YouTube and will replace it if I can. Failing that, I'll transcribe it later.]
I don't think that Brian Cox, who appears to be Britain's moptop answer to Neil DeGrasse Tyson, is fully responsible for this clip, at least not for the computer animations. But the words appear to be his.
From one perspective I agree with him: he's addressing people who think that we live in an "advanced" society, and pointing out that compared to where human technology may go in a millennium, we're not all that. But "advanced" is a relative term. We are advanced compared to societies where human and sometimes other animals' muscles did all the work, where communication consisted of messages carried orally, or in one jump, in written form by human messengers. But what celebrant of Science doesn't know that, or hasn't imagined the far greater glories to come? It's been a common trope of speculative fiction since the 19th century.
It's hilarious that so many of my fellow atheists jeer at the fantasies of Bronze Age goat herders that theists believe in, and then turn around and say "Look at this amazing imaginary civilization I made up, with computer animation to look real! I even have multiple categories of imaginary civilizations! This proves that I am smarter than Bronze Age goatherds with imaginary friends!" One way to get perspective on this is to look at scientific projections from 1900 or even 1950 of what the year 2000 would look like.
I was pleasantly surprised to see that other people who
objected to Cox's spiel in comments under the clip, in the same
terms I do. It wouldn't be as funny if Cox didn't talk about Type 3 Civilizations as if they exist. They don't, so he comes across like a Christian revivalist talking about the glories of the Kingdom of Heaven that await those whom God loveth. You think the riches of this world are something special? Compared to the shining garments prepared for you in the world to come, your so-called riches are but filthy rags!
The fantasy Cox explores here is known as the Kardashev scale, proposed by a Soviet astronomer in the 1960s but boosted by Carl Sagan in the 1970s. According to the Wikipedia article, Sagan "found that the differences between the types Kardashev identified were so great that they did not allow for the best possible modeling of the evolution of civilizations. Consequently, Sagan proposes a more refined classification, still based on Kardashev's types, but integrating intermediate levels using the following logarithmic interpolation formula." It's probably not fair to theology to say this, but this is theology, like disputing the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. But then, Modern Science emerged from religion and magic, and it's hasn't left its origins behind.
I just read this book (published by St. Martin's Press, 2012) and found it very interesting, but thought it missed something. It follows the history of the idea of "the savage" from ancient Greece to the present-day West, and for one thing someone should look at ideas of foreign barbarians in the East; what stereotypes did the Chinese, for example, have of outsiders?
The Greeks were of two minds about barbarians, though. On the one hand they were dirty and violent and lawless and hairy; on the other hand they were clean and pure and much happier than so-called "civilized" Greeks. This contradiction runs through the idea's later history.
"Idea" is important because the Greeks knew nothing about distant peoples and just made up what they thought they were like. According to the Greek historian and geographer Herodotus,
The farther one moved from Greece toward the distant edges of the world, the more strange and different are the lands and life-forms encountered there. Thus, Greece, Herodotus confidently tells his audience, sits at the stable center of the world, with “far the best and most temperate climate.” The most distant lands, he says, will likely have those things the Greeks think the finest and the rarest. He follows this ancient mythic geographic schema of distance determining the degree of cultural and geographical divergence from the comforting Greek norm at the center of the world throughout the Histories. The most remote lands also are where the strangest and most primitive tribes of fierce and ennobled savages are found. Nearer at hand are barbaric peoples, the nomadic livestock breeders, like the Scythians to the north, who are less savage but still practice ritual forms of cannibalism typical of highly uncivilized barbarians. Closest to Greece are those barbarians who are more or less civilized like the Greeks, with more or less sophisticated customs and belief systems.
The Romans took over this schema verbatim, though they knew of distant civilizations like China. It persisted through the Christianization of the Roman Empire. After the European invasion of the Americas, European thinkers simply carried over ancient stereotypes to the native peoples there. They were lawless and cruel, always at war, and had no conception of property, therefore European Christians were justified in killing them, enslaving them, and taking their land. This was at a time when European Christians were constantly at war with each other, torturing and executing offenders in public, and were busily trying to steal each other's land and property. Down to modernity, they also invaded other civilizations that had laws and property, from the Middle East to the Pacific Ocean. (Just as the Greeks and Romans had.) By that time, when Europeans had explored the entire world, it was no longer plausible to fantasize one-eyed people who walked upside down, and the main criterion for conquest was that a country wasn't Christian - though again, this didn't stop Christian countries from invading each other. What's going on here is projection: by describing the savage, the barbarian, we are describing ourselves.
And the mentality is still with us:
Think of all the different ways twenty-first-century politicians,
military generals, and talking heads on cable news programs draw on a
language of savagery to describe the West’s violent, dangerously opposed
enemies in the “primitive” mountain ranges and “tribally controlled”
territories of Afghanistan or Pakistan. People over there are stuck in
the “Stone Age”; they are possessed of a “medieval” mentality. A
distinctively Westernized language of savagery, dating all the way back
to the ancient Greeks and their civilization-defining conflicts with the
“barbarian” hordes of the Persian Empire, might have something to do
with where these mental pictures in our heads originated.
I did some online searches, and it appears that the Chinese also had a concept that gets translated as "barbarians." I doubt they got it from Herodotus. I don't believe "these mental pictures in our heads" originated with the Greeks, and I don't think they would have survived if people hadn't found them congenial. I wouldn't go so far as to say that they're innate, but they're definitely ubiquitous, and probably older than the invention of writing; we just can't trace them farther back in time. It's probably useless to try to find an oridin of the idea in time; we reinvent it in every era.
Savage Anxieties is still a valuable work, though. It goes well with Stefanos Geroulanos' The Invention of Prehistory (Norton, 2024), which shows European intellectuals and scientists similarly making up prehistoric humans based on fantasy, since they had no real evidence about their lives and cultures, in terms derived from Greek and Roman inventions about savages and barbarians.
