Job's Friends; or, Excuses, Excuses!

When this meme came up in my "memories" on Facebook the other day, I clicked through idly to see what kind of reaction the original post got.  At the top of the comments was one from a Christian who asked why an unbeliever would mock someone they don't even believe in??!!  

I've seen this move before.  The first most obvious response would be that Christians and other believers arguably don't believe in other gods either, but that has never stopped them from mocking them and their worshipers.  (Historically, both Jews and Christians have accepted that other gods exist, but they're demons.  Remember that in ordinary usage, "believe in" can mean either "believe in the existence of," "have trust in," or even "agree with.")

The second obvious response is that the meme is making fun less of Jesus or his heavenly father than of the people who believe in them, who do unquestionably exist. While the meme is unkind, it's not an inaccurate representation of popular religion: God needs a million prayer warriors, thousands of Christians rallied in the streets for Christ last weekend, etc.  So what does God do while only half a million prayer warriors are on their knees?  Why doesn't Jesus heal the sick child right away? Does he really need to be informed?  What is the tipping point at which he'll (supposedly) take action?

A few months ago I saw a lot of video clips on Facebook - and no, I didn't have to watch them, but it was very educational for me - from a number of online preachers warning Christians that if they aren't constantly watchful, demons will sneak up on them and drag them down to Hell.  Why, I wondered, did God let that happen?  If a person is saved, how can demons even get near them?  If Satan can undo your salvation, what are the Christian promises worth?  That these preachers put the burden of resistance on the believer is even worse: how can a mere fleshly person fight off supernatural Evil?  One of the most basic premises of Christianity is you can't, which is why people need the intervention and protection of supernatural Good.

It happened that not long before I saw these videos, I'd also read The Case Against Satan by Ray Russell, a 1962 novel about the demonic possession and exorcism of a teenage girl, "a devout girl who attended Mass regularly."  Two Roman Catholic priests take on the job of driving the devil out of her, and much of the book is about their struggles and doubts as they perform the rite of exorcism.  I thought of writing about the book then, but at this remove I'll need to reread it.  For now, I'll just say that I had the same questions: why doesn't the Christian god protect his children against demonic harm, and why does so much depend on the efforts (weak and ineffectual by definition) of the exorcist?  The accounts of exorcism in the New Testament may be abbreviated, but there's no doubt that in that context Jesus and his followers drove out demons by the power of the Holy Spirit, not by theological disputation.  (To anticipate one possible objection, those stories were not merely symbolic.  Christian writers were bragging about the power of exorcism and healing for at least a couple of centuries after Jesus' day.  I should also concede that in one gospel exorcism story, Jesus admits that "prayer and fasting" are needed to drive out especially stubborn devils.)

The larger issue is what's known to philosophers as the Problem of Evil, though it's not just a problem to them: why, if there is a god who is both all-powerful and all-good, is there so much suffering in the world? Nowadays there's an apologetic tendency to distinguish between 'natural evil' like earthquakes and plague, and 'moral evil' committed by human beings, like the Holocaust.  I learned from Susan Neiman's Evil in Modern Thought (Princeton, 2004), that the distinction is a comparatively recent one: "evil" referred to natural disasters, also known as "acts of God," no less than to moral ones.  Sometimes evil might be the work of Satan, but it was always difficult to tell whether a given unpleasantness was Satan's mischief or God's judgment.

Not that this mattered much, because as the biblical book of Job made explicit, Satan couldn't bother a righteous person without God's permission.  In Job's case, which should be even more troublesome for simple faith, God gave that permission not because of any failing of Job's, but as a bet with Satan that Job wouldn't complain if God withdrew his protection.  Some theologians have argued that the opening prologue of the book of Job is a later addition to the main text, but I consider that apologetic invention. It wouldn't change the point of the book very much if at all, and anyway, that exit is closed to less sophisticated believers who work from the text as they find it in their Bibles.

After several decades of examining other interpretations, I still think Walter Kaufmann's discussion (The Faith of a Heretic, Doubleday, 1961) of the Problem of Evil in general, and of Job in particular, is the best.  It's ironic that the usual attempts to escape the problem are exactly those which the book of Job rejects, offered by Job's friends: You must have done something wrong, or God wouldn't have done this to you!  As Kaufmann stressed, it never occurs even to God's self-appointed defenders that God wasn't responsible for Job's misery, nor does God himself protest when he appears from the whirlwind that the Devil made him do it.

I thought of all this when the philosopher Helen De Cruz, who's undergoing treatment for cancer, posted on Twitter/X in December: "As a theist, I not only am angry at my own body and it not responding enough to treatment, I am also very angry at God. So that’s been fun."  She's been posting for months about her case and treatment, and she has quite properly received plenty of support and sympathy.  But Job's 21st- century friends promptly lined up to set her straight.

"I so understand your anger, dear H, but I think your body deserves compassion," wrote one. "It's doing its best to resist the onslaughts of cancer & treatment. As to God, he's, in appearance at least, mostly absent. Moreover, his demands are higher of beautiful souls bc life is an initiation."

And: "What did [you] think about The Essence of Christianity ~Ludwig Feuerbach 'People forget that their lives will end soon. For those who remember, quarrels come to an end.' Seems you are quarreling with your own body and with God. Though Nietzsche suffered terribly and died: belle âme".  Yes, De Cruz is quarreling with God, how astute of this person to figure that out.  She's not forgetting that her life will end soon, though; that's exactly her complaint. What Nietzsche has to do with this exchange isn't clear, but everybody dies.  That's part of the Problem of Evil.

And: "Helen, I'm not a theist, but I'm not an atheist either. I don't think death is the end of our stories. (Still, I hope a longer life for you.)"  So what if death isn't the end of our stories?  As Ludwig Wittgenstein asked rhetorically a century ago, ""[I]s some riddle solved by my surviving for ever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life?" (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.3412).

A few took this tack: "To be angry is to believe you are entitled to something you did not receive. There are others that didn't receive half of what you have. It would make as much sense to be overjoyed about that. In reality, both responses have no merit."  Think of the starving children in Ethiopia who'd be glad to have your cancer!  I commented elsewhere in the thread that the callousness of Christians toward other people's suffering amazes me; this comment is a good example of that callousness.  Maybe the next time I encounter Christians complaining that infidels mock them and their god, I should respond along the same lines?

Sometimes when I've invoked the Problem of Evil by pointing to the suffering of children with cancer (for example), Christians protest, "Gee, God must have done something to make you mad." Well, yes -- that's what we're talking about right now. Such people couldn't seem to grasp that someone might object to the suffering of the innocent (but we are all miserable sinners, none is innocent) as a matter of principle. It's an interesting inability.

De Cruz had posted about the Problem of Evil in an earlier post I can't find now, and I was struck by people who tried to solve it by denying another of its premises, namely that the God of Christianity could stop the evils we see.  These people suggested that he'd like to but he just can't.  That may be, though 1) it's difficult for me to understand how a being who could create the unthinkably vast universe we inhabit is powerless to stop suffering and other evils, especially since 2) it is a pillar of Christian faith that he will do so when he establishes his kingdom on earth, which means he can do it but for some reason won't.  And to some extent this argument requires me to accept 3) that he can't prevent any of the evils infesting the world now.  Maybe Jesus' miracles (in one small region of the planet) used up all his strength, and he's resting until he gets it back?

Those who consider C. S. Lewis an authority should remember that when he engaged with, as he called it, the Problem of Pain, he took for granted that suffering comes from his god, who kneecaps the righteous in order to keep them from becoming too full of themselves.  Even after his wife died of cancer and he was in turmoil with grief, he never denied his god's responsibility for her agony or his misery: he simply assumed it.  Maybe he was wrong, but not according to traditional or biblical doctrine.  After all, if Yahweh can't prevent suffering, how can believers hope that someday he will end it altogether?

I've seen some posts and videos from a recent theology Ph.D., whom I won't name yet because I want to go into his work in some detail later; but one is relevant here.  He declares that the Bible never says that its god is omnipotent, which in a narrow sense may be true; but I think he's hair-splitting. The biblical authors weren't professional philosophers or theology Ph.D.'s, but they regarded Yahweh as almighty and expected him to conquer Evil in the end.  If this guy is right, he's cut the Gordian knot of the Problem of Evil, but he's still saying that God is impotent to stop any of the suffering in the world, in which case the entire edifice of historical Christianity comes crashing down, and there is no hope for believers or anyone else. (Samson among the Philistines might be a better analogy than Alexander the Great.)  In which case, why believe in him?

I'm not sure that abandoning belief in Yahweh's power or his goodness would faze all believers, since they so often deny either or both as they find it useful to do so.  I think they know that openly admitting that they do so would hinder their missionary efforts, which depend on big promises they don't have to keep.  I also want to bear down heavily on their callousness to human suffering in the crunch.  "Oh, you're dying of cancer? Big whoop" is bad PR, and all their works of charity don't make it look any better. If suffering is no big deal, if it's your god's own action, then why ameliorate it in this life?

Ah Yes, I Remember It Well

Speaking of coincidences, this 2018 book was recently brought to my attention by the Algorithm, blessed be its name.  I can borrow the e-book through my library, but I have a large backlog so I've put it on my wishlist and will try to look at it eventually.

Sword and Scimitar is on a familiar, clash-of-civilizations theme, "the often-violent conflict between Islam and the West, shedding a revealing light on current hostilities" as the publisher's blurb puts it:

The West and Islam -- the sword and scimitar -- have clashed since the mid-seventh century, when, according to Muslim tradition, the Roman emperor rejected Prophet Muhammad's order to abandon Christianity and convert to Islam, unleashing a centuries-long jihad on Christendom.

Sword and Scimitar chronicles the decisive battles that arose from this ages-old Islamic jihad, beginning with the first major Islamic attack on Christian land in 636, through the Muslim occupation of nearly three-quarters of Christendom which prompted the Crusades, followed by renewed Muslim conquests by Turks and Tatars, to the European colonization of the Muslim world in the 1800s, when Islam largely went on the retreat -- until its reemergence in recent times.

It's true that the conflict between "the West" and Islam began in the mid-seventh century, because Islam didn't exist until then. So the Islamic jihad couldn't have been "ages-old" in 636.  Were West and East good buddies before?  I'd noticed this sort of vague erasure of history before, in Seven Myths of the Crusades, a collection edited by Alfred J. Andrea and Andrew Holt. published by Hackett in 2015.  It's valid as a corrective to the notion that Muslims had inhabited Palestine from time immemorial, and European Christians were blue meanies who opposed and attacked a religion of peace, but it still leaves a lot of history out.  

My own knowledge of Middle Eastern history is spotty, but I already knew that the region had been a battleground long before Muhammad was a gleam in Allah's eye, and East versus West is a sloppy, anachronistic way to look at it.  East was often at odds with East as far back as historical knowledge goes.  There are glimpses of this in the Hebrew Bible, from the numerous regional wars to the Babylonian conquest of Israel in 586 BCE, followed by the Persian conquest of Babylon in 538.  Persia tried to conquer Greece but failed; then Alexander the Great conquered both Persia and Greece, along with Egypt but also as far east as India. But then he died and his empire fell apart.  West, in the form of Rome, swallowed up not only the East but north Africa and western Europe.  All this happened not by sweet reasonableness but by conquest, with gains and losses at every step.

One Eastern threat to Rome was Judea, which rebelled at least twice, in 66-70 and 132-135 CE, necessitating a great deal of expense in life and treasure to put down.  You've heard of Masada?  That was the last gasp of a jihad by Eastern religious fanatics against Western Rome, though it's not usually framed in those terms.  

Soon after the Roman Empire was Christianized, it came under attack by northern tribes who had no connection to Islam (that was still three centuries in the future) and split into western and eastern regions with different empires and capitals.  In the east, they were menaced by the new Sassanid Empire, est. 224 CE.  Both sides suffered internal strife and external attack until the Sassanids fell to Muslim forces in the mid-7th century.  While all this is peripheral to the Crusades four centuries later, it's part of the background and should be borne in mind.  I don't suppose that Raymond Ibrahim, the author of Sword and Scimitar, or the editors of Seven Myths of the Crusades, are ignorant of it, but they rely on the ignorance of their readers.

I found two books useful for filling in the gaps somewhat.  One was Robert Graves's historical novel Count Belisarius, about a hero of the late Roman Empire - or, if you like, the Byzantine Empire.  Graves was a fairly dry novelist, and Count Belisarius often reads like straight history rather than a novel, but it includes some racy stories about the imperial family, and gives an accurate picture of the period and events.  The other was The War of the Three Gods: Romans, Persians, and the Rise of Islam (Skyhorse, 2014) by Peter Crawford.  Crawford's approach is that of a military historian, and he emphasizes the battles, but he covers the historical background on this key period.  As the subtitle indicates, the conflict was between East and East as much as East and West.

This is not to say that Islam was or is a "religion of peace," only that neither was Roman "paganism" or its Christian successor.  Contrary to some current-day propaganda, Muslim armies didn't put conquered peoples to the sword (or scimitar, whatever) any more than the Romans or other conquering empires did.  (The later English invaders of North America were a different story.)  From what I read, they (either side) would massacre whole populations in cities that refused to surrender, but they needed those populations alive, to produce food and pay tribute.  None of the sides involved in this history comes off well.

Did you notice the reference to "European colonization of the Muslim world in the 1800s"?  European - Christian - conquest and colonization of the Americas, Africa, and non-Muslim Asia may not be directly pertinent to Ibrahim's thesis, but it's not irrelevant and shouldn't be forgotten.  It caused immense loss of life both in crushing initial native resistance and in maintaining imperial control, and it has a lot to do with the Islamist reaction of the twentieth century.  It doesn't justify Islamic violence, but European Christian violence can't be justified either - which won't keep propagandists from trying.

Someone said that all beginnings are political -- meaning, I think, that where you begin a narrative is a decision that shapes what your story will tell.  The same is true of endings, I would think: the Muslims finished off Constantinople's longstanding enemy the Sassanids, but that turned out to be just the beginning of another story. In Ibrahim's case it's easy to see how political his choice of beginning is.  Its ending is yet to come.

These Are My True Doctrines - If You Don't Like Them, I Have Others

People love coincidences. I love coincidences.  But I get jumpy when people try to find meaning in them.

Take the story in the video I embedded above.  It's charming, it's moving: A woman and the son she gave up for adoption find each other in the bakery she runs, where it turns out he has been a regular for years.  When she falls ill, he takes over running the bakery.  It's like the string of coincidences in Oedipus Rex, only with a happy ending.  "You can't tell this story without talking God, because I was led the entire way," the son tells the TV reporter, as the camera pans over inspirational mottoes and a battered Bible.   You could say the same about Oedipus.

Here's another story, also from Chicago.

     

The owner of a construction company is remodeling the bathroom of his parents' house, and finds a Christmas present behind the drywall; it fell there in 1978.  Hashtag Christmas miracle! -- I take it that's the TV station's label, since the man himself is pleasantly wry about it all.  "It's worth tens of tens of dollars," he says of the mint, unopened package of Thunder Jets.

Do I need to say that I'm happy for these people?  Of course I am, just as I was happy for the friend who lost her car keys.  Her friends on Facebook had prayed up a storm for her, but I didn't, so maybe it was my fault that she only found them only after paying a couple of hundred dollars to replace them.  I was also happy that a seven-year-old boy who was hit by a van and spent some time in an induced coma recovered and became a chef; I was not so happy that his mother said on NPR that the accident was God's way of nudging her to become a nurse, a career path she had resisted until then.  I'm more neutral when believers kvell that the Lord preserved a Bible, or a stack of Bibles, or some holy icons (via), when a church or residence burned down; I think they're flaunting a lack of moral sense, but as moral failures go this one is relatively mild.

When something terrible happens to someone by coincidence, nice people are apt to chalk it up to karma, not-so-nice people will call it a judgment.  But believers disagree on specific cases, and I've never been able to get them to explain the criteria they rely on.  Some believe that the COVID pandemic was God's judgment on America (the rest of the world doesn't exist for them); but the same people are apt to believe that the pandemic was a liberal germ-warfare plot.

I love to remember something the philosopher David Hume wrote centuries ago, that your ordinary person will justify belief in the Christian god by telling "you of the sudden and unexpected death of such a one: The fall and bruise of such another: The excessive drought of this season: The cold and rains of another. These he ascribes to the immediate cooperation of providence: And such events, as, with good reasoners, are the chief difficulties in admitting a supreme intelligence, are with him the sole arguments for it." This is still true, though belief in a capricious deity easily coexists with belief in a trustworthy deity whose eye is on the sparrow and will never let his chosen stumble, let alone fall.  

That Janus-faced god is not the god of the philosophers but the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; the god of the simple common-sense believer who has no time for the double-talk of the pointy-headed intellectuals.  Not only of the superstitious doofus, though: in 1983 the late skeptic and (I presume) round-headed intellectual Martin Gardner published a book, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener, in which he declared (Kindle edition, loc 2882):

In line with the practice I have tried to follow throughout this book, I take the word God to mean what I believe it means and has always meant to most philosophers and theologians in the history of Western thought, as well as to almost all ordinary people. As I use the term, God is a God who is in some way outside our universe, who in some manner created the universe, who has some kind of plan for humanity and for every person, a God to whom we can pray, above all a God who sustains our hope for immortality. A personal God. Yes, the God of Christianity, but not only of Christianity. The God of Judaism, of Islam, and hundreds of smaller faiths. The God of Plato (yes, Plato!) and Kant and Charles Peirce and Miguel de Unamuno and a thousand other eminent philosophers and writers who were theists unshackled by the doctrines of any organized religious institution.

There are many problems here, and I'm wondering whether I should bother to reread the entire book; but as another famous scrivener reportedly said, I would prefer not to.  His argument boils down to the claim that everybody else does it, which isn't even an argument.  Gardner would never have let an opponent get away with a similar assertion about belief in healing crystals, or ESP, or a "literal" seven-day creation.  Notice too how he goes along with the crowd while invoking bold free-thinkers "unshackled by the doctrines of any religious institution", giving his readers the worst of both worlds.

A few pages later Gardner wrote: "Plato, remember, wanted to keep Homer out of the hands of school children because he regarded the Homeric mythology as blasphemy against the gods."  

Gardner was being disingenuous here. First, Plato wanted to ban Homer and other canonical Greek poets from his ideal republic, not only to protect school children but all its subjects except for the small minority of philosopher-kings who ruled it. He suggested instead a "noble lie" of humanity composed of different metals according to the roles they played in the republic, which the ignorant Many would believe and their rulers would not.  Second, the god of Plato (yes, Plato!) was not a creator but a craftsman, not an interventionist personal god but a philosophical principle, and certainly not the god of Christianity.  Gardner tried to explain away the difficulties of his position by pointing out that "educated" Christians don't take Christian mythology literally. Nor, I would add, do uneducated Christians: both groups interpret their mythology opportunistically and incoherently.

Gardner thought he was staking out a middle position between atheism and fundamentalism, but his position was the false one that all religions basically believe in the same god.  In one sense he was correct, in that the god of Hume's "vulgar" believers probably is like the gods of most lay believers in all religions.  But in another he was completely wrong: the god of the philosophers, including Gardner himself, is an explicit rejection of the gods of popular piety.  Like another famous preacher, Gardner was trying to be all things to all men; but what was he offering except yellow stripes and dead armadillos?

If someone wants to believe that a god led them to the bakery owned by the mother who gave them up for adoption, no one is harmed by that. It's not even harmful if someone believes that a god nudged her to become a nurse by nearly killing her young son, since she didn't cause the accident herself. But what if someone believes that a god saved Donald Trump from the assassin's bullet?  From which it would follow that a god didn't save John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King Jr. from the assassin's bullet.  Or as I've asked in a non-Christian context, do earthquakes happen because the spirits are understaffed, or inattentive, or hungover?  In my experience, most believers try to avoid following their logic to its conclusion in matters like these; I don't think they should be allowed to get away with it.

Lately I've been thinking more about useful atheist responses to missionary activity.  The standard attacks on belief in gods, or on established religion, are generally valid but tend to miss the point, as Hume indicated.  Like Christian apologists, we sometimes move the discussion to topics we are prepared to address, instead of meeting our opponents head on.  I've been noticing a lot of books on Amazon or in the library which claim to help apologists and missionaries deal with the "new" secularism, and to avoid alienating potential targets.  It doesn't appear that they offer anything new, which may be a mercy.  But I find I have other questions, other objections, which go deeper and I think will be useful to explore. I want mainly to ask: what are they selling, and how are they selling it?

--------------------------------------------

*Gardner wrote a critical review of his own book for the New York Review of Books - under the pseudonym George Groth, as he apparently acknowledged at the end of the piece.  It's paywalled, so I can't read it. 

Am I Confrontational? Very Well Then, I Am Confrontational

In the past decade or so I've become a fan of numerous British women writers from the middle of the 20th century.  Some, like Nancy Mitford, are still pretty well-known; her novel The Pursuit of Love was adapted (not for the first time) by the BBC and aired / streamed in 2021.

But most of the writers I've been enjoying are not that well-known anymore: Elizabeth Cadell, Noel Streatfeild (and her alter ego Susan Scarlett), Betty Smith, D. E. Stevenson, and others. Most of them were working writers, and very prolific. Their books are being re-issued, and are available as e-books at attractively low prices.  Cadell is my favorite at the moment because of her humor -- at my age, not many writers make me laugh as she does -- but I've begun buying and reading Stevenson.

Most of these women began publishing before World War II, so their books give a glimpse into life in England just before and during the war.  It's a bit eerie to read their (or their characters') experience of what is now history: the 21st century reader knows what will happen, but they don't. I've dipped into one of D. E. Stevenson's series, Mrs. Tim of the Regiment and its sequels.  The first book originated as Stevenson's diary, recounting her experiences as an Army wife from 1932 onward.  She fictionalized it and it became popular, so she followed Mrs. Tim and her family into the postwar years.

Today I tentatively started Mrs. Tim Carries On, originally published in 1941.  The Kindle re-issue opened to an introduction by another writer, which eulogized Stevenson and writers like her.  Most of it was unexceptionable until I reached this passage:

The appeal that they have for the contemporary reader lies in the fact that there is no artifice in these books. They are not about dysfunctional people. They are not about psychopathology. There is no gore or sadism in them. The characters speak in sentences and do not resort to constant confrontational exchanges. In other words, these books are far from modern. But therein, perhaps, lies the charm to which Stevenson’s many readers are so quick to respond.

To each his own, but this really isn't true.  I'm not sure how he jumped from "no artifice" (all fiction is artifice) to no "dysfunctional people", and the 1930s are definitely modern.  It's true that most of these books, including Stevenson's, have little overt sex or violence, but novels set in wartime have mass violence hanging over them, or raging offstage.  Mrs. Tim wrote, "Indeed my diary is a sort of escape from the war ... though it is almost impossible to escape from the anxieties which it brings", including air raids -- violent death was part of everyday life in those years for English civilians, no less than English soldiers.  Most of these books featured varying amounts of romance, but explicit eroticism was forestalled by legal censorship as well as by genre conventions.  For all that, Mrs. Tim's four children were not virgin births, though some readers will consider stories about large families "clean" as long as they can pretend that no bodily fluids were exchanged to produce them.

Besides, books like these were and are a publishing niche. The same readers who turned to them for a soothing draught of wholesome family life (some of Mrs. Tim's wackier escapades remind me of I Love Lucy) might on another day pick up a murder mystery full of psychopathology and sadism, or a gothic like Daphne DuMaurier's 1938 best-seller Rebecca. (Would Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre count as "modern"?  Or Shakespeare? Their characters "speak in sentences" too.)  One popular genre that I find rather weird is the "cozy" mystery, which takes place in small towns that suffer inventively spectacular murders as often as the series authors can turn them out.  That's not what I consider cozy, but ...

Perhaps you're wondering what disingenuous clown wrote the introduction that annoyed me so much.  So was I, until I reached the end and found the writer's name: Alexander McCall Smith, author of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency books, along with numerous other feel-good series.  It made a kind of sense: McCall Smith has progressively toned down the "mystery" elements of Precious Ramotswe's investigations as he's ground out the tomes, and his other series are even less eventful - but also less interesting to me.  I still read the Precious Ramotswe books as they are published, but it seems to me that the characters are increasingly becoming one-dimensional collections of tics.  A bit more "artifice," like Western civilization, would be a good idea.  Stevenson, Mitford, Cadell, Streatfield do this sort of thing much better.

Here We Go Again...

I used to start each new year by listing the ten or fifteen posts that got the most views, but in 2024 I only posted thirteen times.   That makes the ranking easier, at least.  Let's go with the top five.

5. Now You See It...., 69 views. On the death and resurrection of this blog.

4. One Wants One's World-Class Cafeteria Trays, 81 views.  The novelist Edmund White thinks that the Russians beat America into space because of the progressive school he attended as a kid.  Nonsense, of course. White's older contemporary Noam Chomsky went to a progressive school too, and it didn't dumb him down:

But up until 8th grade I was in an experimental school run by Temple University. Progressive school, and that was great. But then high school I had to go to an actual high school. There was one academic high school were I was, one for boys, one for girls, and it was very rigid. For the teachers it was a dream because the kids there wanted to go to college, so the teachers could sit back and relax. But it was very rigid, you know, tests, grades. I had never had grades before, never knew I was good student, nothing. And it was a bore. It was a black hole.

3. What Did You Do in the Woke Wars, Grampa?, 82 views.  See also the followup, And I, A Woke, Found Me Here, with 33 views so far.

2. Forbidden Desire and Blameless Friendships, 128 views.  I still haven't read Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe, a review of which sparked this post, but I did buy a copy.  I'll get to it this year.  Admittedly the review didn't make it sound terribly attractive.

1. The Golden Meanie, 203 views.  On the fantasy that Americans have gotten meaner than they used to be.  This one probably should have been a little longer, with more details of political vitriol from US history. I was influenced by Larry Tagg's The Battles that Made Abraham Lincoln, which was originally published in 2009 as The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln: The Story of American's Most Reviled President.

Not a bad resumption, I think.  We'll see if I keep it up.

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.

Vagabond Scholar's Jon Swift Memorial Best of 2024

Once again, Batocchio has posted his annual Jon Swift Memorial Roundup, carrying on the good work of the late satirist and blogger Al Weisel, alias Jon Swift.  Bloggers choose their own favorite post of the year, and Batocchio links to them.  Have a look, and see what you think.