A Friend of a Friend of a Friend Told Me!

The first question is whether Tyson actually said this.  I still haven't found a real source, as opposed to the blizzard of memes and reposts and reblogs and retweets that come up from a search.

For a moment I thought I had it, in a link to a National Public Radio story on two "anonymous art students ... who have been creating gorgeous hand-lettered and illustrated chalkboards featuring inspiring quotes from literary and public figures," illustrated with a photo of their chalkboard of the supposed Tyson quotation.  The same page has a link to the quotation, which leads to an interview with Tyson on Fresh Air promoting his remake of the Cosmos TV series.  The text teaser doesn't include the quotation in question, and I don't really feel like listening to the whole program right now.  Maybe later.  The excerpts provided are annoying enough, like this:

If you are one of those people who don't like thinking about astronomy because it makes them feel small, Tyson suggests looking at it a different way: "Our molecules are traceable to stars that exploded and spread these elements across the galaxy," he explains. If you "see the universe as something you participate in — as this great unfolding of a cosmic story — that, I think should make you feel large, not small. ... Any astrophysicist does not feel small looking up in the universe; we feel large."

I think this is apologetic invention, but I say bullshit anyway.  One of the pillars of scientific triumphalism has always been that Man is a worm, that Science puts him in his place, decentering the earth from the center of the universe, toppling Homo sapiens from the crown of creation, and so on.  He confuses the emotional issue, too.  I'm supposed to feel big because I'm an extra in "this great unfolding of a cosmic story"?  I don't believe that people who are concerned about feeling small are going to get much comfort from this.  And greater scientists than Tyson have seen things differently:

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

But c'mon, Tyson is an astrophysicist, not a philosopher!

Tyson also told NPR:

You will never find people who truly grasp the cosmic perspective ... leading nations into battle. No, that doesn't happen. When you have a cosmic perspective there's this little speck called Earth and you say, "You're going to what? You're on this side of a line in the sand and you want to kill people for what? Oh, to pull oil out of the ground, what? WHAT?" ... Not enough people in this world, I think, carry a cosmic perspective with them. It could be life-changing.

Maybe you won't find "people who truly grasp the cosmic perspective ... leading nations into battle", but you will find them building weapons of mass destruction that could wipe out life on the planet.  And Tyson isn't unaware of that; he told a blogger from Scientific American who questioned him about it:

Lastly, you speak as though all War is bad. I tend to agree with you on a personal level. But I know as a matter of political awareness that not all wars are unjust and some wars are, in fact, worth fighting. Many scientists who serve military interests do so because they believe deeply in the value of their work to the security of our country.

It's probably not too surprising that Tyson prefers not to address the politics of these matters; that would be, how you say, bad for business.  And maybe he's learned, as people do, what is safe to say on controversial issues and what isn't.  For example, here's his take on the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Look at how we reacted to September 11, 2001: about three thousand Americans died that day, and, that’s more than who died in the attack on Pearl Harbor. So, one of the most devastating days in American history since the Civil War. Understood, people are pissed off. We want blood. So, we go into Afghanistan, and we would later go into Iraq, and war would be conducted – I remember people kept track of when American servicemen died, and there was the date where more American servicemen died, than who died on September 11, and that was kind of an interesting milestone, to compare, but we just pushed on, and so now many more Americans died in those wars than have died – and countless others died, local citizens. But apart from that, count thirty days from September 11. Thirty days after – by then, in those thirty days, more Americans had died on the highways in car accidents than who died on September 11. Not only that, that number keeps dying every month. So, there’s no outcry for people dying on highways – there is locally, we fixed our drunk driving laws, and there’s enforcement [that’s] very high and taken very seriously in all our public consciousness, but if deaths of Americans is what you care about and protecting the lives of people is what you care about, and you rank all ways Americans die, then terrorist attacks is not high on that list. It’s high on the list because we fear them, because it’s a terror factor, but because of the actual numbers.

Tyson focuses on whether "deaths of Americans is what you care about and protecting the lives of people is what you care about," but as he seems to realize, that's not the real reason for the wars in which the US mired itself starting in 2001.  (Though the roots of the conflicts go much further back.)  Even on his reasoning, it would seem that World War II wasn't worth fighting, because far fewer Americans died at Pearl Harbor than on September 11, 2001 -- but judging from his response to the Scientific American blogger, he considers World War II one of the good wars.  (Or maybe not; he's kind of coy about it.)  It's all very well to have a "cosmic perspective," but from a cosmic perspective, not much that happens on earth -- nuclear war, global warming, the destruction of the rain forests, etc. -- matters very much.  So other values have to be taken into account, and Tyson either doesn't understand that or prefers not to go there.

Writing to the Scientific American blogger, Tyson took the easy way out, blaming the electorate for voting for politicians who make scientists do bad things: "I can scream at lawmakers without limit, but their duty is to serve their constituents. And so it’s the electorate that I, as a scientist and educator, will always target for my messages."  Do lawmakers serve their constituents?  That's open to some dispute.  It's also debatable whether the massive government subsidy of high-tech research and development was the work of lawmakers.  David F. Noble showed, in his book Forces of Production, that the reality was complex and tangled.  Scientists, engineers, corporate interests, the American military, political appointees, and Congress were all involved, and their interests didn't necessarily agree.  The taxpayers, the electorate, had little idea what their tax dollars were paying for, as usual, but the need for the US to be what Tyson calls "an innovation nation" was part of the sell.

Like many scientists, Tyson is ambivalent about the hoi polloi.   He was a lightning rod for the reclassification of Pluto as an unplanet, and the criticism he drew obviously nettled him: "So astrophysicists should be under no obligation to poll the public. I don't care how deeply affectionate you felt for these objects that we had talked about. Now that's not arrogance, that's just simple common sense about what it is to move a frontier and the sensitivities you need on that frontier to classify or not."  I sympathize, and agree to a point, but notice the irony here.  Tyson is very big on educating the public on science, but a major part of his approach is an appeal to emotion.  He wants to get kids excited about science in the same way it was done in the 1950s and 1960s, with carefully-managed spectacles involving rockets thrusting into the unknown, heroic astronauts, the lure of adventure, and competition with other superpowers to Get There First.  This may be effective in motivating people, but it has nothing to do with what science is supposed to be about: the quest for knowledge and truth and shit.  (As far as I listened in the Fresh Air interview, his take on SETI is conventionally emotional, based on whether it makes sense to think we're Alone.)  The people who objected to Pluto's 'demotion' were people who'd been fossicked up by just such an approach: science for them was a spectator sport, with teams to root for and a personalization of all issues: if Pluto stopped being a planet, its feelings would be hurt, the scientists were just being meanies, and people had to stand up for the underdog.  That's what happens when you personalize issues that have nothing to do with people.  But if you don't use that approach, how are you going to get the voters to pressure their lawmakers to fund a manned mission to Mars?  Mars is waiting for us; it's so lonely, all alone out there, and it's so stupid that it should be alone.

Anyway, back to the meme in question.  Whether or not Tyson said it, it's an odd thing for a scientist to say.  In the NPR interview he says, "If you're a scientist and you have to have an answer, even in the absence of data, you're not going to be a good scientist."  There are a lot of bad scientists running around, then.  But that's as close as I can find to a sentiment like the one attributed to Tyson in this meme, and it's not very close.  It's an article of faith among scientists that the universe does make sense, if you study it hard enough and interpret the data correctly -- which is basically what fundamentalists believe about their scriptures.  I say "an article of faith" because it's an animating premise of the scientific quest, not a conclusion based on a coldly rational evaluation of all the data.  I think it's a fine article of faith as such things go, but for me it's a presumption, a starting point which can be proven false.

Even more, the statement in the meme is one that many religious believers would agree with, at least as far as lip service: they'd just substitute "God" for "the Universe."  The practice, for the spiritual as for the devotee of science, is more ambivalent: on one hand we are nothing, mere dust in the cosmic perspective; on the other, we have been granted insight and knowledge by the Most High.  The religiosity of the sentiment doesn't prove that Tyson didn't say it, of course, but that a scientist said it doesn't make it true either.

If You Want to Imagine the Future ...

Vast Left posted this on his Facebook page today, and not because he liked it. It's quite a piece of work, isn't it?  Aside from the tangled syntax, I love the bit about "their genetically inherited ignorance and racism."  If it's genetic, it means that God made them racists, and he doesn't make trash -- right?  It means that racism isn't a choice, it's an orientation, they're not responsible for it, and it's immutable -- right?  If it's genetic, of course racists are "unable to shed" it.  Try to get your apologetics sorted out, people.

Walking the Privilege Walk

Just a quick one today, as much to remind myself of this material as to share it with you.  (You all?  Y'all?)  I was directed to this post on privilege by a comment on this post at John Scalzi's blog.  I was so pleased by it that I clicked through to a couple of the blogger's other posts on the subject, especially this one.  It's about the now-notorious Time magazine piece by a Princeton freshman in which he explained why, as God is his witness, he will never apologize for his white male privilege.  The blogger writes:

How to respond to that? First, I don’t know who at Princeton has been telling [Tal] Fortgang that there is a patron saint of white maleness handing out success like a Sicilian godfather, or that “nothing you have accomplished is real”, but I hope that sooner or later someone gives Tal a more accurate metaphor: Privilege is like a tailwind. You have to handle the sails, but if you handle them moderately well, you get further. The places you get to are quite real, but … you had a tailwind and a lot of other people had a headwind. Sometimes that’s the difference between arriving at your destination, being lost at sea, or never getting out of port.

In short: Lots of people studied in high school and have strong values and characters. Lots of people’s parents and grandparents were smart, long-suffering, plucky, and hard-working. Not all of them are where Tal is or have the prospects he presumably does.

It's a good one.  That is all for now.

Accentuate the Positive

Recently I began following the Facebook page of Bread and Roses, a non-profit organization " established in 2010 to help with the planning, coordination, and fundraising necessary to commemorate the 100th Anniversary of the Great Lawrence Strike of 1912, popularly referred to as the Bread & Roses Strike."  They post material about US labor history, some of it current, with arresting graphics, and from time to time I share their posts on my timeline, as a corrective to the nostalgia that many people my age indulge promote.  Some of my favorite items, like the one above, depict child labor, and I link to them with snarky comments about how these kids weren't spoiled with cell phones, game consoles, and other luxuries, unlike Kids Today.

Today, though, I held back.  I wondered if anyone thinks I'm being negative when I pass this stuff along. I don't intend to be.  Pictures and stories like these make me feel hopeful about all the people (too often forgotten) who resisted the powerful and worked for positive change. No, they weren't perfect. Sometimes they were closed-minded. (But does anyone nowadays really believe that they're free of prejudices and other opinions that will look embarrassing fifty or a hundred years from now? I certainly don't.) Worst of all, a lot of the changes that they gave time and sometimes their lives to bring about, are taken for granted now. We often forget that the good things we have now had to be worked for and fought for, against fierce resistance. Until we have to work and fight for them again -- but the example of people like these can give us hope that we can do it, just as they did.

I was pleased. by the way, that several friends responded favorably.  History is interesting, if it's presented the right way.

A Lot of Explaining to Do

I recently read Rebecca Solnit's new book, Men Explain Things to Me (Haymarket Books, 2014), a collection of essays kicking off with her deservedly famous piece of the same title.  Readers may be surprised that I bought a copy right away, since I've hammered on Solnit more than once in the past (she really ought not to try to write about religion, she gets it wrong every time), but "Men Explain Things to Me" is a powerful, important essay, and the other essays in the book are fine too.  So this time I'm going to quote her with approval and appreciation.

In the essay "Grandmother Spider," Solnit writes:

I think a lot about obliteration.  Or rather that obliteration keeps showing up.  I have a friend whose family tree has been traced back a thousand years, but no women exist on it.  She just discovered that she herself did not exist, but her brothers did.  Her mother did not exist, and nor did her father's mother.  Or her mother's father.  There were no grandmothers.  Fathers have sons and grandsons and so the lineage goes, with the name passed on; the tree branches, and the longer it goes on the more people are missing: sisters, aunts, mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, a vast population made to disappear on paper and in history.  Her family is from India, but this version of lineage is familiar to those of us in the West from the Bible where long lists of begats link fathers to sons.  The crazy fourteen-generation genealogy given in the New Testament's Gospel According to Matthew goes from Abraham to Joseph (without noting that God and not Joseph is supposed to be the father of Jesus) ... Thus coherence -- of patriarchy, of ancestry, of narrative -- is made by erasure and exclusion [70-72].

This is very good, and I hope it will encourage my readers to read the entire essay, and the book.  I still have to quibble, though.  The genealogy of Jesus that opens the gospel of Matthew is not a "fourteen-generation genealogy": it is forty-two generations, divided into three groups of fourteen.  Maybe that's what Solnit meant, but it's not what she wrote.

So let me digress for a moment and have a New Testament scholar, Dennis Nineham, explain things to you*.  Nineham points out "the problem that on the most plausible interpretation of the most likely form of the text as we have it, the third period contains only thirteen names; [but] Matthew clearly intended, or understood it, to contain fourteen" (172).  He goes on to explain that Matthew seems to have gotten the names in his genealogy "from the LXX [i.e., the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible used by the early churches], mainly from I Chronicles 2-3, supplemented by Ruth 4.18 and possibly Haggai 1.1 -- an intelligible enough procedure if you believed, as presumably Matthew did, that the Old Testament was inerrantly accurate on all matters, including matters genealogical" (174).  That covers the first thirty names.  However, "When we come to the last eleven names in the third list, the vital names which specifically link Jesus with the acknowledged kingly line in Israel, we are completely in the dark" (174),

To add to the confusion,

... we may ask: if Matthew drew on the Old Testament because he regarded it as authoritative, how comes it that he felt free to deviate widely from it in the way he does, for example omitting four names from the list it gives and assigning Rahab to a date fully three hundred years later than that to which both the Old Testament and later Jewish tradition unmistakably ascribed her?  It has often been suggested that the absence of the names of three of the kings may simply have been accidental, the result of an error on the part of a copyist; in which case we should presumably have to say that the balanced numerical structure which so impressed the evangelist was fortuitous and factually baseless.  although this suggestion of a scribal mistake is not without plausibility on palaeographical grounds, to suggest that such a symbolic numerical structure was simply the result of an accident surely stretches our credulity rather far, and we may notice that if we accept it, we shall have to suppose that Matthew cared so little about accuracy in factual matters that he did not know, and did not bother to check, whether the numbers he regarded as so significant were really derived from the Old Testament [175].

Speaking of Rahab, she's one reason I don't think Solnit bothered to look at this crazy genealogy before she wrote about it.  One of the other puzzles about Matthew's genealogy (and there are plenty of them, discussed in Nineham's article) is that it includes the names of five women: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary the mother of Jesus.  This makes it anomalous for a biblical genealogy, the exception that proves the rule.  I suppose Solnit was limited for space (though "Grandmother Spider" is pretty long), and discussing the women in Matthew's genealogy would have diverged from the main course of her argument; but given her customary sloppiness when she writes about the Bible I think she simply didn't know about them.

This doesn't affect the point Solnit wanted to make, of course: genealogies, Matthew's included, are meant to bolster someone's authority, and they do so by erasure and exclusion, not to mention invention.  And it happened that a few days after I finished reading Men Explain Things to Me, I read another book that showed the same process of erasing women at work, but this time in evolutionary biology.

The book was Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death: Essays on Language, Gender and Science by Evelyn Fox Keller, published by Routledge in 1992.  By quoting it I run the risk that some of the problems she points to have been corrected in the past twenty years, but from what I see in more recent discussion about science, I doubt it.  And in any case, the 1980s and 1990s were hardly primitive, pre-scientific times; they were a time of scientific triumphalism as defenders of Darwinism contended with "Scientific" Creationists in the courts and in the media, asserting the correctness of their science against pseudoscientific superstition.  In "Language and Ideology in Evolutionary Theory," Keller wrote:

In much of the discourse of evolutionary theory, it is commonplace to speak of the "reproduction of an organism" -- as if reproduction is something an individual organism does, as if an organism makes copies of itself, by itself.  Strictly speaking, of course, such language is appropriate only to asexually reproducing populations because, as every biologist knows, sexually reproducing organisms neither produce copies of themselves, nor produce other organisms by themselves.  It is a striking fact, however, that the language of individual reproduction, including such correlative terms as "an individual's offspring" and "lineage," is used throughout population biology to apply indiscriminately to both sexually and asexually reproducing populations.  Although it would be absurd to suggest that users of such language are actually confused about the nature of reproduction in the organisms they study (for example, calculations of numbers of offspring per organism are always appropriately adjusted to take the mode of reproduction into account), we might nonetheless ask: What functions, both positive and negative, does such manifestly peculiar language serve?  And what consequences does it have for the shape of the theory in which it is embedded? [128-9].

Which individuals reproduce themselves?  For a long time, biologists assumed them to be male on the assumption that "the reproductive contribution of females [provided] the raw materials or nutriments for growth" (130), though that has changed.  Even Darwin, who tended to see natural selection as a process affecting individuals, "was at other times quite explicit in including differential procreation along with survival in his definition of natural selection" (131).  Eventually population genetics tried to solve the problem by focusing on the reproduction of gametes.

In spite of this fact, however, the theoretical (and verbal) convention that subsequently came to prevail in much of the teaching and practice was to equate natural selection with differential survival and ignore fertility altogether.  In other words, the Hardy-Weinberg calculus seems to have actually facilitated not one but two kinds of elision -- first, of all those complications incurred by sex and the contingency of mating that are lost in the representation of reproduction as gametic production, and second, more obliquely, of reproduction in toto [133].

One way of dealing with

the difficulties of sexual reproduction is that of acknowledging sexual difference, and attempting (at least in some contexts) to restrict reproduction to only one sex -- for obvious reasons, usually the females of the species ... This strategy (known in demographic theory as the reproductive dominance of females) would be perfectly adequate were there, in fact, one sex, or alternatively, if neither the attributes nor the availability of males were relevant to the reproductive process, and we furthermore agreed not to inquire too closely about the reproductive fitness of males [138].

Although "rewriting the equations of mathematical ecology for two sexes appears to relatively straightforward" (139), Keller shows that there is a tendency among scientists to resist doing so, and to continue to treat sexual reproduction as if it were asexual.  And twenty-first century evolutionary psychologists continue to treat reproduction, and evolution, as if they were about the reproduction of males, with females either cooperating passively or wickedly obstructing the males' struggle to perpetuate their genes.

*Dennis E. Nineham, "The genealogy in St Matthew's gospel and its significance for the study of the gospels."  Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 58 (1976): 421-444.  As reprinted in Nineham, Explorations in Theology, London: SCM Press, 1977: 166-187.

A Paranoid Delight in Persecution

(Another post from the Drafts folder.)

It just occurred to me that, thanks to xkcd, I've used more expletives than usual in the past two posts, possibly more than I've used in the past run of this blog put together.  That trend will continue in this one.  Onward!

I learned here about Candida Moss's 2013 book The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom, so I went to the library, found a copy on the shelf, and read it within a day.  It's fascinating, and persuasive on the whole.  Moss is a professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Notre Dame University, and she isn't arguing that early Christians were never persecuted: she's arguing that when it did happen, persecution was sporadic and usually local, and that most of the time Christians flourished in the Roman Empire in the days before Christianity became the official Imperial brand.  The "myth" she's talking about is that of ongoing, universal official persecution of Christians throughout the first four Christian centuries.  (Compare Robert Wilken's The Myth of Christian Beginnings, which acknowledges that Christianity had a beginning but criticizes the official story about that beginning.)  She supports her claims by analysis of early stories of Christian martyrdom, which she shows to be flawed as historical accounts.

One of the most interesting points she makes, to my mind, is that the archetypal stories of martyrdom, laden with gory details and sexual overtones, were mostly written (and especially popular) after Constantine established official toleration of Christianity and what persecution there was, had ended.  Moss compares the popularity of these stories to that of modern slasher films.  They were often completely invented, and some were borrowed from other religious or cultural traditions.  This was established not by Moss but by a centuries-long research project on the lives of the saints initiated in the 1600s by a Dutch Jesuit named Heribert Rosweyde, and taken up after his death by Father Jean Bolland, under whose name the work continued into the 1800s.  It was the Bollandists who found how inaccurate the martyrologies often were, and how many of the saints had never existed.  This wasn't, apparently, their original intention but a conclusion that emerged as their study proceeded.

A better analogy than slasher films might be certain contemporary urban legends.  A good many people clearly want to believe that thousands of children are abducted in shopping malls to be sold into sexual slavery; that thousands of women are killed in front of cameras to make snuff films, which are available under-the-counter at your family video store; and so on.   In the same way, many Christians like to believe that -- in a country which not only has Constitutionally-mandated freedom of religion, but in which they are the overwhelming majority of citizens -- they are persecuted, fearful of confessing their faith in public, hiding in the catacombs from gay secularists who hate God.  Being called a bigot, or even a Bible-thumper, is exactly like being thrown to the lions.  There are other parallels, such as the many people who believe (without very good evidence) that America's schools in general are failing, though they think their local public schools are doing a fine job.  Or the way that even right-wing jingoist Americans romanticize the American Indian and like memes that depict Columbus, the Pilgrims, George Armstrong Custer, or other European invaders as illegal immigrants: it's safe to do that now that the Indians are no longer raiding our settlements.  In a familiar pattern, the great Christian mystic St. Teresa de Ávila wrote in her autobiography that as a child, she and her brother were "seized by a passionate desire for martyrdom, and they planned to run away to North Africa, preach the Gospel, and be beheaded by the Muslims – but their parents would not allow it."   Held back from their holy vocation by these enemies of Christ, "we decided to become hermits; and we used to try very hard to build hermits' cells in an orchard belonging to the house".  Centuries later, after the danger is past, children play Cowboys and Indians.

Huh.  How about that?  I didn't use any expletives in this post after all.  The Xkcd Effect must have worn off.

Post-Pre-Colonial Theory; or, Going for Tongue

I'm still reading Tim William Machan's Language Anxiety, and it's full of goodies.  Like this one from pages 72-3, where he quotes a New York Times op-ed by a Hispanic writer denouncing Spanglish:

… for Roberto González Echevarría, ‘Spanglish, the composite language of Spanish and English that has crossed over from the street to Hispanic talk shows and advertising campaigns, poses a grave danger to Hispanic culture and to the advancement of Hispanics in mainstream America.  Those who condone and even promote it as a harmless commingling to do not realize that this is hardly a relationship based on equality. Spanglish is an invasion of Spanish by English.’

Machan is nicer in discussing this rant than I intend to be: it's nonsense.  I wonder if Echevarría knew that he was in accord with Anglophone racists who see the presence of brown-skinned Hispanics as an invasion of American by Meskins, despite the fact that contemporary American English contains quite a few Spanish words that it acquired from contact between the US and Mexicans.

But more than that, he overlooks the fact that modern European Spanish could analogously be called Sparabic, since it contains borrowings from Arabic courtesy of the Moorish invasion and occupation of Iberia a millennium ago, hardly a relationship based on equality.  Western-Hemisphere Spanish has been infiltrated by indigenous languages, though more to the point here is the effect that Spanish had on indigenous language and peoples, which was a literal invasion of the Americas by Spaniards and by Spanish.  That was hardly a relationship based on equality either.  None of this excuses or is meant to ignore the malign influence of the United States on Latin America, but I always want to jeer and make rude noises when Latino creoles try to cast themselves as indigenes victimized by yanqui imperialism.  Now that the real American indigenes are rising up against the Hispanic colonizers all over Latin America, this sort of talk should be on the way out.  A lot has changed since Echevarría wrote this piece in 1997, though I still encounter the same tropes in the writings of self-styled post-colonial theorists.

Machan points out that English has been the subject or beneficiary of such invasions itself:

For English, the third person singular indicative verbal inflection –s as well as the third person plural pronouns they, them, and their are not native Anglo-Saxon forms but derive directly from Old Norse, the language spoken by the descendants of Viking raiders and colonizers in the Midlands and northern parts of England; a kind of Norslish gave rise to them, as surely as Franglais has qu’est-ce que tu veux pour lunch [73].

And in America:  

In the colonial era of North America, the principles of North America, the principles of grammatical and pragmatic regularity motivated the production of pidgins not only between Europeans and Native Americans but among the Europeans themselves.  In the Middle Ages England’s linguistic repertoire similarly came to include entire linguistic codes structured like Spanglish or Denglish [German-English, btw] in the forms of a Latin-English macaronic variety utilized in sermons and a French-English-Latin interlanguage employed in late-medieval business, alongside of which Latin, French, and English each continued to exist.  At that time, code-switching among Latin, French, and English could also achieve significant rhetorical effects, much like the style-switching effected by modern novelists.  This is the case in William Langland’s fourteenth-century poem Piers Plowman, where switches from English to Latin both help foreground moments of thematic importance and portend, perhaps overly optimistically, the eventual emergence as England’s dominant language in all domains of business, education, and government [74].

This reminds me of immigrants in America: each wave of immigrants comes to regard itself as native, and then attacks the next wave as a bunch of dirty invaders who will destroy civilization.  Machan's study focuses on English, but he makes it clear that most if not all languages are hybrids, mongrels, victims of invasion by dirty foreign tongues, though contemporary speakers are of course unaware that what they regard as proper English (or whatever) is what their grandparents would have regarded as corrupt, degenerate gibberish.