Cut!

Speaking of tribalism, tribes, and primitive people, Samuel R. Delany wrote a long post about circumcision on Facebook the other day.  His father, he says, was not circumcised; Delany is.

Again and again I have wished I were not cut and have spent money on attempts to restore my foreskin. That presents two problems. First, it is purely for looks. It does not restore all the nerve endings that were removed in the circumcision itself. And further surgery would only destroy more—so that, for that reason, I have never thought about it at all seriously.

I've often encountered complaints like this, and they baffle me.  I'm circumcised, and I don't mourn my foreskin at all. I'm not aware of any decreased sensitivity (how could I be? I have no basis for comparison). When I first saw uncircumcised penises, I thought they were gross and ugly, because they didn't look like mine; we had a mix of cut and uncut in my junior-high PE class shower room, so I thought the differences were just 'natural' variation. (Not least because foreskins, like all natural features, vary widely. Some still look ugly to me.) I disagree that (as one commenter on Delany's post claimed) an "intact lover is a rare treat in the USA" -- I've encountered plenty, and I have not noticed any difference in their skills.

I say this just to offer a different perspective, one I very rarely see when circumcision is discussed. If I were consulted about a newborn male, I would respond with something like Delany's position:

As a tribal decision imposed on males before they can consent to it, I will never believe it’s a good thing. Nor do I believe most men would consent to the surgical mutilation of their genitals once they pass the age of reason, at what ever age it was set—especially when it is NOT the way of the tribe.

There isn't any good reason to do it, so don't do it, let the kid decide for himself when he's old enough to do so. But I don't feel deprived, mutilated, damaged, disabled, incomplete, etc. I also don't feel bad because I'm different from some other males in this detail. (Which apparently is a major factor in parents' decision to circumcise their sons: so they won't feel different from other boys in the locker room.  Not really a problem, since boys don't usually see each other naked in the locker room anymore -- we now protect their privacy, and have abandoned group showers so boys won't be traumatized by the sight of other boys' naked bodies.  But what a terrible rationale!  If everyone else jumped off a bridge ...)  I'm different from other people in so many ways, and this one seems minor to me by comparison. I feel sorry for those circumcised men who feel impaired by it; feelings are, and that can't be argued with. But I myself am totally comfortable with my lack of foreskin.

Notice the word "tribal" in Delany's remarks.  There's a lot of ambivalence about tribes in educated American discourse.  I see a lot of stuff on the Internet and elsewhere about the primal wisdom of tribal people, about how we shouldn't assume that we modern white Westerners are smarter than they are -- unless, as in this case, we don't agree with or approve of their wisdom.  Which is good, because no authority should be exempt from doubt or criticism.  It appears, however, that circumcision was a widespread though not universal practice among the ancient Egyptians, who can hardly be dismissed as "tribal" primitives.  (Warning: scary uncut mummy photo at that link.)  They were truly civilized!  They built the Pyramids!  They cut off their foreskins!  How dare barbaric modern Westerners disrespect them?

Delany continued: 

From a notoriously active sex life in my younger years—age 18 to (arbitrarily) 65—with many thousands of partners, here and in Europe, I gained the impression that, in the U. S. at least, circumcision as an extension of our anti-pleasure society has taken over. 

Not only Delany but several of his commenters remarked on the "anti-pleasure" US culture that practices circumcision, as opposed to -- Christian Europe?  All cultures, from what I can tell, are at best ambivalent about pleasure.  The apostle Paul is usually seen as "anti-pleasure," but it was he who rejected and forbade circumcision for gentile converts to Christianity.  Not, I'm sure, because he cared about their sexual pleasure; but at least he didn't endorse "becoming eunuchs for the kingdom of Heaven" as Jesus did.  Catholic Europe was anything but pro-pleasure, but neither Catholics nor the most repressive Protestants mandated circumcision as part of their anti-pleasure agenda.

A certain amount of anti-Semitism tends to lurk beneath the surface of contemporary anti-circumcision discourse, and there's an interesting debate about that question in Susan Miller Okin's Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (Princeton, 1999).  Though of course circumcision is also mandated by Islam, the religion of 1.2 billion people worldwide; so condemning circumcision as a primitive tribal practice is Islamophobic, right?  I know of some South Korean men who chose circumcision for hygienic reasons as adults, during their mandatory military service; but I have no idea how common that is, or whether it predates the influence of European medicine in Korea.

But if there's anything to the "anti-pleasure" trope in connection with circumcision, it would have to connect to Science.  That's the current rationale for its prevalence in the United States, and you cannot go against the word of Science.  According to an article in the Washington Post, younger Americans ("millennials") are much less in favor of circumcision than their seniors: "The age gap on circumcision is of a piece with millennials' skepticism about vaccines."  Which ought to set off alarms for all good believers in Science, shouldn't it?  As of 1999 the American Academy of Pediatric Association no longer recommends infant circumcision as a medical default, but they seem to be waffling, and in 2012 they recommended it again.  In 2014 the Mayo Clinic published new data on (slightly) declining rates of circumcision in the US, which it deplored.

"Infant circumcision should be regarded as equivalent to vaccination," said Brian Morris, coauthor of the new report and professor emeritus in the School of Medical Sciences at the University of Sydney, in a press release. "As such, it would be unethical not to routinely offer parents circumcision for their baby boy. Delay puts the child's health at risk and will usually mean it will never happen."

I guess Australian doctors are anti-pleasure too.  It's curious how lightly scientific consensus can be dismissed by highly educated Americans who'd jeer at anti-vaxxers, climate-change deniers and Creationists for rejecting the consensus of Science.  Delany himself is not a reflexive Science worshiper, but I'm not so sure about his commenters.  In comments, Delany also talked about the wisdom of Nature, to which I don't defer.

So, how interesting.  When you have contradictory categorizations of a practice, and opposition to it on contradictory (if not incoherent) grounds, something is going on: on the one hand, circumcision is "tribal"; on the other, it's the product of an "anti-pleasure" society.  Also Science, but we can ignore Science when we want, as long as we accept evolution and climate change.  To repeat: I am not endorsing, recommending, or mandating circumcision.  I'm just not sure of the quality of the objections I'm seeing to it.

Much of what people were saying in this discussion, about circumcision and its effects and significance, reminded me of some things people say about gay men.  That if you're not a particular physical type, no one will have sex with you because all gay men are obsessed with looks.  Or that if you're older than twenty-five or so, no one will have sex with you, because gay men are obsessed with youth.  Or that gay men are incapable of committing themselves to long-term relationships.  All these claims are common knowledge among gay men, even among gay men who know from their own experience that they aren't true.  Much of what people (and not only gay men) were saying about circumcision felt to me like the same kind of folklore.  I began to wonder if some of what other circumcised men were saying was stuff they'd heard and absorbed, even if (or because?) it made them feel bad about themselves.  The oddity would be that I, who have always been ready to feel bad about myself, never bought into the folklore about the inferiority of the (my) circumcised penis.  To repeat: I don't think that the uncircumcised penis is inferior either.  I do get the impression that they're working hard to convince themselves, and each other, that they are hopelessly damaged, which seems to me out of all proportion to what was actually taken from them.  Perhaps, as a very wise man once said, what they need is a good facial.

But maybe not.  I don't want to go too far in the other direction and tell them what they ought to feel.  I can't tell gay men who feel that being gay is a curse what they ought to feel either.  Just because I feel differently, doesn't mean that they must feel as I do.  If anything, I'm surprised that I don't feel a "morose delectation," as the Jesuits and Andrew Holleran might call it, over either condition.

In the past gay men could and did blame their parents, especially their mothers, for having made them gay.  With belief in gay genes hegemonic among us now (though just as bogus as belief in the Close-Binding and Intimate Mother), they can't do that anymore.  But they can blame Mom and Dad for letting the doctors snip away their foreskin.  Just as long as they blame Science too.  And tribalism.

One Cannot Go Against the Word of the Internet

Getting away from religion isn't as easy as many of my fellow atheists like to think, though, mainly because religion isn't a discrete entity that has nothing in common with other human cultural inventions.  Culture isn't made up of discrete entities, though: everything overlaps.  Sometimes you can find clear cases, but they're only part of the picture; the boundaries between the categories aren't clearly defined.  (Even putting it that way assumes that the categories have clear cases at the center, with those pesky permeable boundaries at the edges -- but this picture can only be drawn after a lot of sorting and organization of the instances.)

When I call some idea "religious" in a dismissive and derogatory way, I'm guilty of the same failing: I mean (and should probably say instead) that the idea is woolly, irrational, emotionally derived, etc.  I've often called the geek debates over the virtues of Macintoshes vs. Microsoft "theological," for example, to suggest that they are like the supposed medieval debates over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin (though those debates were probably more rational than Mac vs. PC: the Scholastics were smarter and more rational than today's computer fanatics).  It's convenient to use "religious" or "theological" this way because they've acquired such connotations.  It would be just as accurate to to call anthropomorphizing and teleological thinking "scientific," because these tendencies are just as common among scientists as they are among the conventionally religious, without being universal in either group -- but if I did, how many people would recognize that I was being derisive?  Calling something "scientific" is supposed to be praise.

I'd do better to stick to terms like "anthropomorphic" and "teleological" in such cases.  Anthropomorphizing is what's mainly on my mind today, anyway: speaking of "Nature" or "Science" or "Religion" or "Natural Selection" or "Globalization" or "the Internet" as though they were conscious agents, instead of impersonal abstractions.  I recently read a fascinating new book, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov, published this year by PublicAffairs.  Both his critics and his fans notice how much he's read, though I don't believe he's any more learned than, say, Mike Davis or any number of other scholars who write for an educated general audience.  I've already noted several books he refers to that I'd like to read, though -- just what I don't need.  Anyway, it looks to me like Morozov has done a normal and reasonable amount of reading for a book about a big subject; those who marvel at his erudition may not have been aware that there were all these relevant tomes out there -- unless, like some of Noam Chomsky's critics, they're indulging in anti-intellectualism: why does he have to include all those footnotes, and use all those big words?  It's so inappropriate and unnecessary.

To Save Everything, Click Here is about the cult of "the Internet," about the assumption that the Internet is an entity, and in particular that it's a new one.  Morozov quotes numerous evangelists of the Internet who personify it, such as Jeff Jarvis: "I’m a befuddled [sic] over the roots of the curmudgeons’ one-sided debate. Why do they so object to tools being given credit? Are they really objecting, instead, to technology as an agent of change, shifting power from incumbents to insurgents? Why should I care about their complaints? I am confident that these tools have been used by the revolutionaries and have a role. What’s more interesting is to ask what that role is, what that impact is" (Morozov, 56).

Technology, or a given tool, can't be an agent: they can be used by agents, but that's not the same thing.  (Notice too Jarvis's reference to "tools being given credit.")  A word like "medium" would work better than "agent" here.  Much of Morozov's argument is directed against the notion that "the Internet" is an agent in this sense: something autonomous, goal-directed, with its own determining "logic" driving social change in the direction it chooses, before which we must humble ourselves and submit.

One of the best features of To Save Everything, Click Here is Morosov's account of the history of technology and its reception, demolishing the Internet evangelists' claims that the Internet is totally unprecedented.

The debates over electricity were, in fact, as dramatic and bizarre as the debates we are currently having about “the Internet,” its democratic potential, and its effect on our brains.  How else to explain the publication of a book like The Silent Revolution, or the Future Effects of Steam and Electricity upon the Condition of Mankind – in 1852! – which promised “social harmony of humanity” on the basis of a “perfect network of electric filaments.”  Or what to make of the fact that Patrick Geddes, Petr Kropotkin, and other nineteenth-century thinkers believed that electricity would usher in a brand-new age of neotechnics, where, to quote French historian Armand Mattelar, “town and country, work and leisure, brain and hand” would be reconciled?  Or what to do with Nazi engineers like Franz Lawaczeck, a founding father of the National Socialist engineers’ association, who believed that the Third Reich could promote small farms and businesses, thus encouraging a decentralization of society, by generating an abundance of cheap electricity?  This is not to mention the complex and controversial history, itself full of protracted battles and rancorous debates, over the physical infrastructure that made electricity widely available.  Only by papering over and suppressing such history can we see “the Internet” as unique and exotic [44-5].

Morosov also confirms a long-held suspicion of mine about the thinness of young people's technological competence:

Several studies show that, of all age groups, young people tend to be least informed about many aspects of digital culture.  For example, a 2010 study that investigated what users know about online privacy found that “among all age groups, higher proportions of the eighteen--twenty-four-year-olds had the poorest understanding of the privacy policy label and the right of companies to sell or share their data with other firms.”  As one of the study’s authors put it, “The online savvy many attribute to younger individuals (so-called digital natives) doesn’t appear to translate to privacy knowledge.”  In other words, it’s not that young people don’t care about privacy – they do – they just don’t have the digital savvy that Tapscott and Williams attribute to them.  These conclusions are echoed in a recent study from the European Commission that also found young people lacking in many digital competencies.  A 2009 empirical study of students at five British universities found that “it is far too simplistic to describe young first-year students born after 1983 as a single generation …. [They are] not homogenous in [their] use and appreciation of new technologies and … there are significant variations amongst students that lie within the Net generation age band.”  But conducting such studies, of course, is not as sexy as musing on “the digital revolution that is changing every institution in society.”  The latter probably pays better, too [46].

Or again, "technology pundit Kevin Kelly"

notes that “the Protestant Reformation makes for good allegory because it separates power from control; it draws on stories of catechism and ritual, alphabets, pamphlets and liturgies, indulgences and self-help in order to give geeks a way to make sense of the distinction between power and control, and how it relates to the technical and political economy they occupy.”  This is why, in many a geek debate, the state is recast as the monarchy, large corporations as the Catholic Church, startups and programmers as Protestant reformers, and the laity as “lusers” and “sheeple.”  Kelly believes that such stories are popular with geeks because they “explain a political, technical, legal situation that does not have ready-to-narrate stories” [52].

But they also explain that situation in terms that flatter the geeks' inflated sense of elite status and entitlement.

I'm not totally enamored of Morosov; I started to read his previous book, The Net Delusion, and was turned off right away by some dubious statements.  But To Save Everything, Click Here is a valuable survey and critique of what David F. Noble called the Religion of Technology.

Against Nature

A reader wrote in to correct something I wrote in this post, that "this cultivated nostalgia for a carefully modified-and-tamed-by-humans Nature is an artifact of modernity.  It's a luxury we moderns can indulge because we can keep Nature at bay.  (Most of the time, anyway.)"  My reader pointed out "the Roman poets and their longing for simple country life," and I sit corrected.

I should also have remembered Socrates, who according to Plato, reacted against a similar romanticizing of nature even before the Romans.  In the Phaedrus, Socrates says that "the country places and the trees won't teach me anything, but the people in the city do."  The trick to getting him out of the city, he continues, is to dangle a book in front of him, as people dangle carrots in front of hungry draft animals to get them moving.

I noticed this too when I read The Tale of Genji about a decade ago.  It's a vast novel a thousand years old about Japanese court life.  The title character likes to send flowers on branches, wrapped in poems of his own composition, to the ladies he pursues.  (And rapes, as often as not.)  But when Genji goes out in the rain or snow to collect these romantic gifts, he is wrapped in oilcloth against the elements.  It's his servant, less well covered, who does the work of breaking the branches off their trees.  Japanese culture is famous for its aestheticization of nature, but I noticed that "nature" in Genji's day was something to be cut up and gift-wrapped.  Just like my co-worker, taking her backlit e-reader with her when she goes camping to commune with nature.  So I admit, this fetish isn't a product of modernity.

This might also be the place to mention a couple of related things I've read lately.  Today I noticed a collection of C. L. Moore's Jirel of Joiry sword-and-sorcery stories.  The stories themselves date back to the 1930s, but the collection was published in 2007, with an introduction by the science-fiction writer Suzy McKee Charnas.  I liked some of what Charnas had to say, but much of it baffles me.

For example, she discusses the popularity of "two-fisted action" in pulp writing of the early twentieth century, and contrasts it with literary fiction of the period:

Meanwhile back at the library, the stuff called “literature” in the United States was dominated by people like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, stylists of a terse, “masculine” mode touted as the truest voice of serious American writing.  This hard, stripped-down style was clearly intended to challenge the more ornate, emotional, and melodramatic style of novel that had been popular (especially with middle-class women) for generations – think Dickens, and you’re definitely in the ballpark.  World War One had a powerful effect in concentrating the cultural mind on consensual reality.  After all that killing and dying in reality, mere “fancy” had come to be considered childish and insignificant in literary quarters.  Or, worse, decadent (code for – gasp! – homosexual) [12].

First, Hemingway I can see (though he learned his "terse, 'masculine' node" from the much butcher Gertrude Stein), but Fitzgerald?  His writing is only "terse" compared to, say, Dickens.  I just took another look at the opening pages of This Side of Paradise, thanks to Project Gutenberg:

When Amory was five he was already a delightful companion for her. He was an auburn-haired boy, with great, handsome eyes which he would grow up to in time, a facile imaginative mind and a taste for fancy dress. From his fourth to his tenth year he did the country with his mother in her father's private car, from Coronado, where his mother became so bored that she had a nervous breakdown in a fashionable hotel, down to Mexico City, where she took a mild, almost epidemic consumption. This trouble pleased her, and later she made use of it as an intrinsic part of her atmosphere—especially after several astounding bracers.

Young Amory sounds more like Truman Capote than Conan the Barbarian.  I also know from reading Ann Douglas's The Feminization of American Culture (Knopf, 1977) that nineteenth-century American male writers were obsessed with writing what Julian Hawthorne called "Man-books."  Herman Melville, says Douglas, "regarded the reception of his books as a test which would ascertain what genuine masculinity, or, as he tacitly defined it, what health and independence of mind, remained in American culture" (296).  "Over and over, Melville assures us that he will "set forth things as they actually exist"; he writes to correct 'high-raised romantic notions' about life at sea; no 'sentimental' illusions motivate him; he will give us 'facts'" (301).  Self-conscious striving after "literature" by American males seems to go along quite often with masculine anxiety and homosexual panic; it's not specific to any particular period.

About Jirel of Joiry, whose adventures take place in a version of medieval Europe, Charnas goes on to say that of course both her parents are dead by the time she's an adult, because "In such a violent age if you reached maturity your parents were likely dead, leaving you to replace them as you were meant to" (17).  True, the feudal period was violent, but violence wasn't the only thing that killed people then.  Plague swept through Europe periodically, decimating the population, and women often died in childbirth.  Also, says Charnas, "The feudal, rural France of 'Joiry' is nothing like the Renaissance world of reason, light, and beauty we’re familiar with from history" (15).  Renaissance Europe was still a violent, dirty, stinking, plague-ridden place, with "reason, light, and beauty" kept within strict limits.  Charnas seems to be relying on some outdated histories here, which depicted the medieval period as much 'darker' than it was, and the Renaissance as much 'lighter' and more rational.

I've just begun reading George Sturt's The Wheelwright's Shop (Cambridge UP, 1923), several months after I learned about it from David Ellis's Memoirs of a Leavisite.  Ellis accuses Sturt of romanticizing the old ways of working and living, but this seems at odds with this lovely passage:

The shop was still but half opened when the two front doors had been unfastened.  On either hand was a window, shuttered at night with two shutters put up from within and then fixed with a wooden bar.  When the shutters had been taken down from the windows there was nothing to take their place.  Snow, freezing wind, had a clear run.  With so much chopping to do one could keep fairly warm; but I have stood all aglow from yet resenting the open windows, feeling my feet cold as ice though covered with chips.  To supply some glass shutters for day-time was one of the first changes I made in the shop.  Nowadays, when all the heavy work is done by machinery, men would not and probably could not work at all in such a place; yet it must have sufficed for several generations.  My grandfather and my father had put up with it, and so did I until the winter came round again and the men began to ask me for sundry small indulgences, of which this was one.

Six o’clock in the morning was well enough in the summer; none the less I liked the dark winter mornings better.  Truly they were dark!  At that time the Farnham Local Board, caring nothing for working-class convenience and caring much to save money, had all the street lamps in the town put out at midnight.  The result was that, in the depth of winter, every man who went to work at six in the morning, and most artisans did, had to find his way without any light.  To be sure, there were moonlight mornings.  Sometimes, too, snowy roofs showed clear enough under glittering starlight.  But, on the other hand, there was freezing fog, there was the blackness of dense rain.  One foggy morning I lost my whereabouts in the familiar street; no building could be seen nor any sky distinguished; nothing but a slight difference in the feel of the pavement under my feet told me that I was passing So and So’s shop.  Another time a little glimmering light that met and passed me proved to be a lighted candle-end between the fingers of a chimney sweep, against whom one might otherwise have uncomfortably blundered.  And one black morning I walked through and was conscious of what I took to be the aura of a man on the pavement whom I never saw – probably a motionless policeman [13-14].

Lately I've been thinking often about what life was like in the days before electric light, about town streets -- let alone country roads and paths -- at night; or what it would be like to work in a place like the shop Sturt describes.  Sturt gives a striking picture of that time, and he doesn't seem unduly nostalgic about it.  Well, I've only read the first chapter or so, but I suspect I'll find more nuance here than Ellis allowed.

Each to His or Her Own

Funny -- I would rather the exact opposite.

One person who liked and shared this meme on Facebook is a coworker who loves to go camping.  But she doesn't go out into the wild, the real nature.  She and her husband take their camper to campsites that provide electricity and other amenities, where they're surrounded by many other like-minded nature fans.  (She's often remarked on the difficulty of getting a good spot, which must be reserved in advance.)  And of course, they don't go out during the winter.  Communing with nature has its season.

I like green grass, living water, and fresh air myself, but on the whole I prefer to be amongst city traffic and the noise of "man."  I live in a small (though growing) city, and my idea of fun is to travel to a city -- San Francisco, Chicago, Seoul, Incheon.  It's a bit ironic, given my loner tendencies, but even as I live alone I'm glad to know that there are people handy, and I like interacting with other people.  That kind of interaction is a benefit of city life.

Yes, cities have their dangers, but so does Nature.  Before "Man" wiped out many predators, a sojourn in the forest would likely bring you into the proximity of critters that would view you not as Man, but as Lunch.  It seems, in fact, that this cultivated nostalgia for a carefully modified-and-tamed-by-humans Nature is an artifact of modernity.  It's a luxury we moderns can indulge because we can keep Nature at bay.  (Most of the time, anyway.)

Ah well, each to his or her own.  The difference between a city-lover like me and a nature-lover like my coworker is a matter of degree rather than kind, I think.  I wouldn't want to live in a place where there was no greenery, but well-maintained cities should and do have plenty of plant life within reach; parks aren't "nature" in the sense meant by the meme, they're human creations.  Nor would my coworker want to abandon the technology of Man that she and her husband cart along with them into the greenwood.  I'm just a bit bothered by the contempt expressed in that meme for those comforts -- since the speaker in the meme is a human being himself, there's self-hatred in it too.  That can't be a good thing.