A few years ago, Princeton University Press published How Literatures Begin: A Global History, edited by Joel B. Lande and Denis Feeney; having had a chance to examine it, I find it a fascinating look at a phenomenon of great interest, and I’ll share some excerpts here, starting with the introduction:
Literatures are rather improbable things. While storytelling and myth making seem to be fixtures of human society, literatures are much more rare. After all, very few spoken languages ever developed a script, let alone enduring institutions of the kind surveyed in this volume. And in those instances where a literary tradition does take hold, survival is far from guaranteed. Literatures require technologies for their preservation and circulation, groups interested in their continuing production, audiences invested in their consumption, and so on. Literatures are sustained over time by diverse practices. But much like individual lives or entire cultures, they also experience birth and death, periods of florescence and of decay, migration from one place to another, and transformation from one shape into another.
With all the specialized interest in individual literatures, in addition to the widespread use of big-picture categories like postcolonial and world literature, one can easily lose track of just how strange it is that literatures exist in the first place. This book embraces such strangeness, asking how an array of literatures, extending across time and space, came to be. By examining the factors that have brought forth and kept alive various literary traditions, the case studies presented here provide the occasion to rethink many of our most basic assumptions about literature in the singular and literatures in the plural.
It is not hard to recognize the risks built into such a project. Neither the concept of literature, nor that of a beginning, can be taken for granted. There are, to be sure, intrinsic difficulties in translating the concept of literature from one idiom to another, especially because of the term’s modern European provenance. Using the term literature universally, that is, runs the risk of projecting a historically and culturally specific set of textual practices and aesthetic values onto times and places that worked very differently. Along the same lines, the search for beginnings can easily be construed as the attempt to uncover a single pattern or a uniform set of enabling conditions, common to each of the case studies included here. In reflecting on processes of literary beginning, it is all too easy to impose a hegemonic mold that all examples either manage or fail to live up to.
I normally bristle when I read the word “hegemonic,” but here it’s used sensibly and imparts an actual meaning. A later passage:
As this project developed, it became clear that beginnings are not themselves “literary units of value,” akin to commodities, circulating within a global literary system. In other words, beginnings cannot be equated with a genre like the novel that may (or may not) have sprouted up across the globe from Korea to England and throughout time from late Greek antiquity to the present day. Rather, beginnings are processes that unfold over time in unforeseeable, contingent, and often chaotic ways. Differences among beginnings are also especially revealing of the factors that shape the paths respectively taken by literary traditions, clustering the factors that lend literatures their unique signature. By recognizing commonalities among the contributing factors, one does not thereby erase differences among literatures but rather shows how, to borrow a chemical metaphor, a single element can produce radically different compounds, depending on the other contributing elements and environing circumstances. Just because a single factor like the invention of script or, relatedly, the dissemination of written language, plays a prominent role in many of the literary historical narratives present here does not mean that its impact can be uniformly accounted for.
In order to meet these demands, this volume proceeds as a series of case studies. As a glance at the table of contents makes clear, the contributions do not provide exhaustive coverage—inevitably, readers will find a lamentable absence or two. Our goal was not to create an encyclopedia or handbook of literary beginnings, but instead to offer a representative sample of responses to the conceptually robust question laid out in the book’s title. In so doing, we have sought to create opportunities for, without overtly determining, comparative axes to emerge: ancient and modern, East and West, European and colonial, cosmopolitan and national, to name some of the most obvious categories. The sheer heterogeneity of literary traditions also brought with it stylistic and argumentative constraints. If one zooms in too closely on a historical moment or individual problematic, one risks losing readers unfamiliar with the broader historical and cultural context. And if one views a historical landscape only from afar, one may not get a granulated picture of the tradition under discussion. Thus all the chapters included here try to strike a balance between the sort of detailed precision that experts cherish and the broad-brushstroke narratives that grant newcomers access.
There are chapters on Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, English, Romance Languages, German, Russian, Latin American, African, African American, and World Literature (whatever they mean by that); I’ll dive into the ones that particularly interest me and report back.
As to “World Literature (whatever they mean by that),” a local radio station used to have a dj presenting “world music.”
Whatever that meant, she was great, it was great, and I miss her.
The Grammy category “World Music” got renamed “Global Music” in 2020. Said the press release: “The change symbolizes a departure from the connotations of colonialism, folk, and ‘non-American’ that the former term embodied while adapting to current listening trends and cultural evolution among the diverse communities it may represent.” It is not clear to me that the sort of recording artists that get nominated in the category has changed at all since then, however. Winners/nominees back to the primitive days of 1992 are listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammy_Award_for_Best_Global_Music_Album
Another listing of current Grammy taxonomy puts “Global Music” into a higher-level taxon titled “Latin, Global, Reggae & New Age, Ambient or Chant.”
en:WP:World literature and de:WP:Weltliteratur claim to have the same subject, but, despite a large overlap, that’s not the case…
OK, I checked the chapter, and I’m afraid it’s one I’ll skip. Here’s the beginning:
I can’t even read those few paragraphs — my eyes glaze over. I hope the other chapters aren’t so theory-ridden!
From the sound of those extracts, Lande and Feeney do not recognise oral literatures as being an actual thing. While that may be etymologically correct, it seems rather a limited view.
https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0025
To be fair, an account of the origins of humanity’s written literatures alone is doubtless enough to fill a good few Damned Thick Square Books.
No, no, I only quoted the start of the intro — don’t judge by that! They have a whole section on Orality and Literacy, beginning:
Ah. Fair enough.
“I can’t even read those few paragraphs — my eyes glaze over. I hope the other chapters aren’t so theory-ridden!.”
Reading the text might have been easier had the authors broken it up into more than four paragraphs.
Eh, not much easier. Here’s a single sentence:
I despise that kind of academic writing.
I got as far as the ludicrous confusion of etymology and meaning before putting my brain into neutral and just admiring the pretty letters on the page.
I, too, can invoke Goethe:
Da steh’ ich nun, ich armer Tor,
Und bin so klug als wie zuvor.
(Where’s that poodle when you need him?)
https://debeste.de/378524/Bist-du-der-Geist,-der-stets-verneint
[Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie …]
When I see “orality” the gag reflex kicks in. It’s like latinx, much beloved by a subset of academics, and a great rarity among my many latino/hispanic and lusophone friends of many genders. The orality crowd much enjoy sharing their precious jargon amongst themselve.
I’m not sure what the two have in common. I agree that “latinx” is stupid and offputting, but “orality” seems to fill a need — how would you replace it, other than with a cumbersome circumlocution?
this is the stuff that makes me cranky:
Because of the continuing special prominence of ancient Greece in discussions of the beginnings of literature and in European-centered university literature courses, it is easy to be misled into thinking of the Greek case as paradigmatic.
that is not being “misled”! that is recognizing the historical cultural and cultural specificity of the goddamn concept – for which the greek “classics” are, literally, the paradigm. “literature”, if the word means anything, means a specific discursive mode (of reading more than of writing) created around a specific body of texts – the christian european “classical” canon – and gradually extended to other texts according to their assimilability into the model established in relation to that canon.
sure, you can apply that discursive mode to any text. but that should be a prompt to consider why that’s being done, and how well the text (and its existing readership) fits into that model – and the next question is should you!
and sure, there are analogous discursive/textual formations in other contexts – china, dar al-islam, the jewish diasporic constellation, etc – but they work differently, and how they work is not particularly relevant to “literature”, and has not meaningfully influenced it.
dissolving the term “literature” into meaninglessness is just as silly as trying to shove, say, hadith collections into the existing model of “literature”. what’s interesting in comparative work like this is precisely what going the vapid route makes impossible: looking closely at the ways that these analogous formations differ, and seeing where those differences mean that how one model works can shed light on what’s going on in a different model’s purview.
(also “world literature”, like “world music”, came into being purely as a marketing label*, and trying to analyze it as if it has some existence separate from that is a GIGO situation)
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* i think at basically the same time, with garcía márquez and rushdie** in the role of Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Clannad.
** both, incidentally, very consciously writers of Literature in the most limited sense of the term – just as Ladysmith and Clannad (for example) were/are very legible in the established framework of u.s./european popular music ensembles (compared to, say, most mbube choirs and most seisiún players).
according to their assimilability into the model established in relation to that canon
Some of us are more assimilatory than others … and assimilation need not entail flattening everything into preexisting categories. There’s surely a dialectic?
This strikes me as analogous to the point Martin Haspelmath was making in his hiphilangsci podcast: there’s a definite tension between the appropriate conceptual framework you need to describe any one individual language adequately, and the kind of framework you need for comparing languages typologically.
But it doesn’t follow that the gap is unbridgeable and we are forever doomed to radical incompatibility; nor that just because a concept arose in the analysis of SAE, it must be banned from comparative work outside that domain. Nor that a concept derived from an analysis of even Latin or English might not have some use in the analysis of an African language, say.
In fact, there is (potentially) a fruitful interchange between the particular and the general. If I describe some language in terms which are entirely idiosyncratic, no matter how apt they may be for that one language, my description will be effectively incomprehensible to anyone else; if I adhere slavishly to some preset model grown in North America or Western Europe, my description will be wrong. But, ideally, the particularities of my own target language and a description which honours them properly will feed back into the general comparative framework and enrich it.
(This has in fact happened quite a bit with African languages and general linguistic theory, for example in the now fairly industry-standard notion that tone is often best analysed as autosegmental. The particulars of African tone languages led to the development of new tools for the general comparative toolbox … tools which are then helpful in understanding the particulars of African languages, and others too.)
Ruth Finnegan’s book describes African (oral) proverbs as a literary genre. Surely this is a valuable extension of our idea of what we mean by “literature”, and not an attempt to corral African reality into some kind of Western Christian canon?
Just because something is frequently done badly, it doesn’t follow that we shouldn’t be trying to do it at all.
I agree with DE here. I don’t think it makes sense to segment off every culture’s in-some-sense-literature-equivalent phenomena and refuse to talk about them together because it smacks of hegemonic appropriation or whatever. Nihil humanum alienum and all that.
Regarding African proverbs as a literary genre, I’ve only recently begun to really register the distinctive formal features of Kusaal proverbs. Some enterprising L1 speaker could surely find plenty of materials for a thesis there …
Being now more aware of these things, I recently noticed that the 2016 Bible translators, who often write in a commendably idiomatic style, frequently incorporate some of the stylistic features of Kusaal proverbs into their rendering of Hebrew proverbs.
‘Proverbs” are actually quite a good example of what I’m driving at. “Wisdom literature” is a venerable and meaningful term for something with no real analogue in the Greco-Roman tradition.
And it would be perverse not to gloss the Kusaal word siiliŋ as “proverb”; yet, as I was saying not long ago, the role of siilimis in everyday life and speech is very different from the role of “proverbs” in English or Latin. It’s eminently reasonable to call these things “proverbs” when speaking English – so long as you don’t stop at that point and leave people with the misleading impression that you’re talking about exactly the same thing as an English proverb.
While I’m still digesting this discussion of the (pardon my academese) ontology of verbal art, I should throw in that mainstay of freshman courses, “The Bible as Literature”.
In the days before Amazon had killed the secondhand bookshops, one used often to come across (but not buy) a work called “The Bible Designed to be Read as Literature.” All together now: Oh, no it ISN’T!
Which reminds me of a stray remark from Haywood and Nahmad’s Arabic grammar: “The language of the Qur’ān, however, is not allowed by Muslims to belong to any genre.”
… but “orality” seems to fill a need — how would you replace it, other than with a cumbersome circumlocution?
Depending on context, speech, oral tradition, spoken word.
Does this book aspire to be an undergraduate text book or a general interest trade book? (genuine question – I can’t find enough information to guess).
If the latter, I certainly would not give them a pass for using “hegemonic” in the introduction.
An issue for me (and I presume for rozele also) is whether Literature is or is not required to have “absolute fidelity” to an Urtext (or final version). The stuff of Homer and Hesiod existed in multiple condensed versions, as one can see from the dramatic poetry. The Gaelic poetry and law professionals went through a rigorous training, where they needed to memorise and reproduce large wadges of canonical stuff. But they existed beside storytellers, who improvised and adapted for an audience. I think this is independent of whether the medium is oral or written.
This looks weird on the face of it. I doubt there’s a society in the (non-Pirahã) world without oral traditions. I guess the point could be that the written literary tradition was imported wholesale, not growing out of native narrative and poetic traditions expanding into a new medium — but even that looks weird in the case of China.
Academia.org emails become yet more surreal:
“Our AI turned your paper A Grammar of … into a shareable comic.”
I’m hanging on for the musical.
I guess the point could be that once there’s been a written tradition for long enough, all the existing oral tradition ends up depending on a written text at some point. For example that thing about all Russian folk songs having known 19th-century composers – it’s (most likely) not the case that the Russians simply didn’t sing until then, but apparently the stuff composed in writing (itself most likely based, to varying degrees, on older, orally transmitted material) has swamped everything else. Or the lack of evidence that Manas ever existed in purely oral form, as opposed to having been composed (in its present form; probably not from scratch) in writing and now being learned by heart from reading.
lolwut
I suppose that rozele is making a somewhat similar point to one I have often made myself regarding the term “religion.” I do think it’s misleading to use it for e.g. those bits of the Kusaasi worldview that happen to overlap with things which we categorise as “religion” in our culture.
Having said that, there are some parallels, and it’s hard to come up with an acceptable snappy substitute. (One can’t go on all the time with elaborate periphrases like “those bits of the Kusaasi worldview that happen to overlap with things which we categorise as ‘religion’ in our culture.”)
Personally, I think using the word “literature” for sundry aspects of “notable” discourse in unfamiliar cultures is less misleading than all the baggage of inappropriate cultural associations which “religion” carries with it, but I can see rozele’s point, even so.
Does this book aspire to be an undergraduate text book or a general interest trade book?
Neither, I think — it’s a scholarly collection of essays for scholars in the field. Academic terminology is perfectly at home (and largely indispensable).
I can see rozele’s point
Oh, me too. It’s a reasonable point that seems to me to be expressed too dogmatically in this context.
Not that I have any standing to complain about dogmatically expressed ideas!
dogmatically expressed ideas
They have their place.
One of the things I’ve always tried to convey to medical trainees is the importance of making some sort of diagnosis, while still (crucially, of course) being open to the possibility that you might be wrong.
If you don’t commit yourself to at least a provisional view, you are depriving others – and yourself – of a startingpoint for further analysis.
I’ve often found incorrect diagnoses made by juniors helpful in arriving at a better diagnosis – certainly much more so than timid fudging on their part. “No, that can’t be right, because …”
[A somewhat different concern is that there are areas, especially in acute surgery, where delaying until you are certain about what you should be doing, is itself likely to lead to disaster.]
Academia.org emails become yet more surreal:
“Our AI turned your paper A Grammar of … into a shareable comic.”
And you didn’t look at it?
I learned recently that the illustrator Quique Palomo has been graphic-izing the biographies of Spain’s most beloved poets, and I thought that was weird.
The quotes in “come” “to be” are amazing. Especially if you picture the prof lecturing with air quotes.
“Students, please recognize I don’t mean come or to be in the plebeian understanding of these terms. Instead I mean them ironically, with a certain critical distance…”
And you didn’t look at it?
I did not. Any time I want a Kusaal Grammar manga, I’ll produce it myself. No “AI” could possibly capture the nuances.
I wonder if there’s one of Syntactic Structures? (I don’t go for the Marvel Superhero genre so much, though, with its X-bar-Men and suchlike.)
The quotes in “come” “to be” are amazing.
Yes, “I” “was” mind-boggled by them.
“(1)” is a reference, from which these three quotes are evidently taken. I’d have gone for “come […] to be”, though.
The idea that meaningful insights into literature can be gleaned from pondering the Deeper Meaning of “come” and “be” strikes me as intellectually on a par with Chomsky’s epoch-making discovery that defining ordered pairs via sets is the Key to All Grammar.
It probably works like gematria, to be fair: the authors probably understand that the origins of the word “begin” in Old English have no actual bearing on its current meaning (still less does its OHG cognate); but it’s a sort of purely conventional jumping-off point for their sermons on hegemony or whatever. Initiates will presumably understand this well enough, and not get side-tracked by the deployment of the etymological fallacy, as we muggles might. It’s a genre thing …
There’s only one author of that chapter; I haven’t named her because I don’t want to shame her. I just want to skip her chapter.
Seems to have her fans, judging by this laudatory (if a trifle opaque) review of another of her works.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/renaissance-quarterly/article/abs/jane-o-newman-pastoral-conventions-poetry-language-and-thought-in-seventeenthcentury-nuremberg-baltimore-and-london-johns-hopkins-university-press-1990-xiv-313-pp-44/C41428B2FC105D585680AD6C7ECCA078
I think I get the gist; in fact the point seems to be not dissimilar to rozele’s (though rozele is rather more lucid …)
Fun fact: beginnen in modern German has come to mean exactly the same as its English cognate. Maybe fallacies about True Meanings should be based on drift instead of origin…
I love the way chainstore bookshops group their offerings by subject area: sport, cookery, business, self-help, crime, romance, general fiction …
Somewhere in a corner up the back will be litracha. Jane Austen will be in the litracha.
I used to work for a chain bookstore (Borders) and our literature and genre fiction areas were located next to the public restrooms which guaranteed plenty of foot traffic to those areas. Jane Austen was located somewhat near the ladies room, to the right.
o, i’m definitely a conceptual splitter, in most areas! and i’ll certainly cop to being (deliberately) maximalist to the point of dogmatism (especially in polemical screeds). but i do think we lose much, much more – in terms of understanding, even where the loss doesn’t serve social/political ends i disagree with – by using terms from very specific contexts (especially ones that carry massive social force along with their bushels of rarely-examined premises) as transcontextual generics than we ever could by making neologisms or using clunky phrases.
the sentence i cited is, i think, a perfect case in point: the extension-unto-meaninglessness of “literature” is here used to actively deny the precise historical and cultural reality of the term, and pretend that the very texts and reading/teaching-histories that define its use – still, and most blatantly in exactly this kind of collection – are somehow irrelevant. you might as well pretend that it’s “misleading” to talk about classical athens and pre-augustinian rome as “paradigmatic” for the late-18th-century republics established in france and the u.s. – sheer nonsense, and an active barrier* to any meaningful understanding of what was going on, either in the minds of the people involved or in a broader historical sense.
on the neologism side, i quite like “orature(s)” – and because it’s a neologism, my sense is that in practice it’s removed enough from (while nodding to) “literature(s)” to be genuinely useful for cross-cultural / cross-contextual comparisons. i think it could, for instance, be a useful rubric for talking about the differences and similarities between the russian and yiddish repertoires of folk songs with published source material at different removes, or among them and, say, the relationships between published sources and orally-transmitted lyrics in u.s. christian contexts (gospel music in particular).
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* or, better, an active refusal to even attempt any meaningful understanding
So how would you change the title of the book to avoid meaninglessness? Or do you think the very idea of the book is misguided?
my issue is less with the language itself than what it does to the analysis. i’d be most strongly for an overall reframing move, that would allow these reading/canon traditions to be compared horizontally rather than with the explicit or implicit or denied “literature” paradigm as the defining reference point. and that would probably imply a very different kind of collection to begin with! but maybe “Ur-Texts and Ur-Readings: How canons and their discourses emerge”?
I find “discourse” to be an extremely vague word, so vague it is inherently offputting… “canons” seems like a good idea, however.
part of why i get cranky about these kinds of meaning-dissolving expansions is that they do a lot to help make technical terms (like “discourse”*) unusable – when people in the field where a term was created use it in empty ways, it’s goes from hard to impossible for people outside the field to even tell when they’re using it in even emptier ways.
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* which i used in the hypothetical title in its foucault-influenced social analysis guise, as opposed to the linguistics one.
Forthcoming in 2026 from Miskatonic University Press: “Interrogating the Problematics of Canonical Discursivity: a Decolonized Meta-ecology of Paradigmatic Ontologies.”
Yeah, no — literature did not begin like that.
Well, speaking as a paradigmatic ontology myself, I have to say it sounds plausible. You puny humans have never understood the perils you face in your pathetic attempts to decolonise us.
Tremble before our canonical discursivity! You will be part of the Meta-Ecology soon enough!
“what we do here, in this department, is to take the programs for some very complicated problems, their verbal synopses and the specifications for answers—often the problems themselves contain millions of elements and millions of operations—and do a quick survey from which we try to map which one-space, two-space, or seventeen-space the problem/answer belongs to; and then suggest a proper topological interpenetration for the constituent P’s, Q’s, R’s and S’s that make up the thing, thus yielding a custom-tailored metalogic, that, when it goes into the computer, reduces the whole thing to manageable size and shape
[…]
if we fail to generate a coherent problem-mapping onto a space of n coordinates, a cross-indexing of the mapping onto 3-space through a set of crossproduct matrices represented by #1, #2, *3… #n can often suggest whether an approximation of coherence can be obtained on a space of if + 1, n + 2, n + 3 … n + r coordinates. Which is very nice, because all you have to do, for a given map, is take the volume which only leaves you to figure out certain metalogical aspects of its translation which we can model as regressive acceleration with respect to the specific products of the noncommutative matrix i, j, and k…”
(bron helstrom explaining Metalogics)
(written by delany, of course)
these kinds of meaning-dissolving expansions … people in the field where a term was created use it in empty ways, it’s goes from hard to impossible for people outside the field to even tell when they’re using it in even emptier ways.
Yeah. As has happened with Autism –> Autism Spectrum Disorder, except the public discourse dispenses with the full term, and thinks they’re talking about the same scarey thing.
‘Asperger’s Syndrome’ (also a spectrum) used to be a useful category — for those smart-but-obsessive nerds[**] who could have better social interactions but affected not to. Lumping it in with people who are cognitively unable to recognise how social interaction works just gives the likes of Musk the excuse to be total shit-arses.
[**] Not that ‘nerd’ was to hand as a word for those of my parents’ generation.
I once looked up the original description of Asperger’s, and it was already then described as a form of autism; but it should also be noted that the condition described was much more severe than “smart-but-obsessive nerds who could have better social interactions”, so it’s not just that the category “autism” was needlessly expanded, the same thing happened to Asperger’s (especially all those self-diagnosed people who then proudly post “I am an autist!”).
I think this is part of a much broader tendency, to wit, medicalising* human differences more generally.
Part (not all) of this is due to the fact that “disease” exculpates, certainly in our culture, and probably in most. If you have a “sex addiction”, for example, you are a simple victim, whereas if you are casually and heartlessly promiscuous, you might perhaps be regarded as acting without due regard for others, which could be Bad.
There is a healthy reaction against this essentially reductionist view of humanity, happily, quite often from those who quite rightly object to being regarded as a medical “problem” rather than autonomous human beings responsible for their own choices and/or unashamed of their own personal idiosyncracies.**
(I don’t mean to overstate the case here. There most definitely are unequivocal diseases which affect both minds and behaviour, and it is entirely proper to take that into account when assigning blame – or not. And it’s not all or nothing: mad people can also be bad people, for example. There’s no simple formula to be had here, any more than elsewhere in human behaviour.)
* You might imagine that I would welcome such an extension of medical hegemony, but I have been corrupted by Socialised Medicine®, and consequently regard this expansion of our empire as a mere imposition of yet more work, rather than as a business opportunity.
** As a man with skin in this game said:
I hate the modern trick, to tell the truth,
Of straightening out the kinks in the young mind,
Our passion for the tender plant of youth,
Our hatred for all weeds of any kind.
Slogans are bad: the best that I can find
Is this: ‘Let each child have that’s in our care
As much neurosis as the child can bear.’
Goddess of bossy underlings, Normality!
What murders are committed in thy name!
Totalitarian is thy state Reality,
Reeking of antiseptics and the shame
Of faces that all look and feel the same.
Thy Muse is one unknown to classic histories,
The topping figure of the hockey mistress.
Part (not all) of this is due to the fact that “disease” exculpates, certainly in our culture, and probably in most.
In some parts of our culture (with “our” from an American point of view). In other parts, people call criminals sick to justify capital punishment.
“Sorry for your loss of not having a daddy around because of this sick man who should have been given the chair.”
https://unsolved.com/gallery/edward-harold-bell/
I assume that arose because of people who called criminals sick in attempts to exculpate them. I don’t know what the person I quoted would answer if you asked, “If the killer was sick, shouldn’t he have been treated instead of executed?”
When one is called sick (or a sicko, even) in this context, they are being judged unkindly. “Mentally ill” would be used to ascribe their actions to forces beyond their moral control.
In a word, no.
@AntC
What DM said. Maybe you are talking about wrong (self-)diagnoses, but I think real Asperger’s sufferers may be “obsessive nerds”, but they generally need a lot of coaching and rote learning to be more successful at social interactions, even if they want to be; it is not a case of switching something on that they have switched off on purpose.
@David Eddyshaw (or anyone else who may be knowledgeable about this): I know less than I would like to know about African proverbs. Is Ruth Finnegan a good meaty introduction for someone who wants to learn more than, say, wikipedia, is capable of teaching? Or should I be looking elsewhere for a worthwhile introduction?
Yes, it’s a good book, insofar as I’m in a position to assess. (My own experience is geographically pretty limited, but where I do have independent sources, what she says is very much recognisable. But Africa is extremely diverse culturally, so one generalises at one’s peril.)
Also, her book is freely downloadable!
There are actually a remarkable number of Android apps listing selected proverbs in various African languages, but they don’t give you much of a feel for how people actually use them.
I’ve got various dead-tree collections of proverbs in Kusaal, Farefare, Dagara and Hausa. One of the interesting things is comparing and contrasting: quite a few seem to be areal, but there are also a lot that seem to be language-specific. There’s also something of a gap between the Western Oti-Volta Kusaal, Farefare and Dagara, which reflect basically similar cultures, and Hausa.
I know hardly anything about proverbs in Arabic, which could well have a bearing on such things in Hausa (or Manding or Songhay.)
Similar in Europe – some translate 1 : 1 from the Atlantic to the Volga, others are limited to a part of German for example.
David Eddyshaw: Awesome, thanks! I definitely am interested in the actual use side of things, and felt like I was getting bogged down by internet resources which were either extremely basic analyses or were just lists of proverbs. And there’s the risk of generalizing across a continent but I have to start somewhere, if I want to advance beyond generalization.
I list a few dozen Kusaal ones as one of the texts in my grammar (also freely downloadable, and worth every penny!), but, again, that doesn’t go into the interesting sociolinguistic aspects of their use. But Finnegan is good on that.
I was just refreshing my memory on what she says in that chapter, and would certainly recommend it; in fact, both there and elsewhere, she’s also very good on the cultural diversity side. In fact, she has chapters on whole genres (like religious poetry) with no analogues in Western Oti-Volta languages, as well as on the sort of topics you’d expect, like Manding griots.
Niggli’s Mooré dictionary contains quite a few proverbs, easily searched for in the pdf as “proverb.” The dictionary does quite good job of explaining what they actually mean in context, too. (Though the English glosses are surprisingly often subtly mistranslated from the French ones.)
https://www.webonary.org/moore/files/Dictionnaire-Moore-fran%C3%A7ais-English-avec-images.pdf?lang=en
@Y: When one is called sick (or a sicko, even) in this context, they are being judged unkindly. “Mentally ill” would be used to ascribe their actions to forces beyond their moral control.
I think that’s a good point, but I feel that part of that unkind judgement is hostility toward people because they’re sick in that sense.
(On the other hand, I feel that “sick” is sometimes used to mean “sickening, disgusting”. AHD and OED don’t feel that.)
Wiktionary offers “disturbed, twisted, warped” as synonyms for that judgmental sense of “sick,” as well as the related “in bad taste” sense when applied to e.g. jokes rather than their human utterer. I suppose opinions may vary as to whether there are subtle nuances in the extent to which they each do or don’t imply some freedom from moral responsibility due to mental illness. There’s also of course the polarity-inverted sense of “sick” that means “very good, excellent, awesome, badass.”
In related bleached psychobabble, the BBC/Grauniad rushes to tell me
Ok somebody’s catalogued his sketchbooks, and the BBC has made a documentary. Useful to know.
All the other blathering nonsense is the sort of thing makes me want to cancel my subscription.
Warning: graphic descriptions of accidents.
On the other hand, I feel that “sick” is sometimes used to mean “sickening, disgusting”.
OK, why not find some evidence? (Other than the need for a warning.)
https://www.yahoo.com/news/control-car-kills-two-during-141800773.html
https://www.stetson.edu/law/studyabroad/media/Washington-v-Hartwell-Oxford-Version.pdf
https://www.facebook.com/groups/3151156608394157/posts/3212432642266553/
What DM said.
Oh(?) I thought DM was (very wittily) demonstrating a typical socially-blind response.
* He quoted a clause of complicated psycho-description;
* ripped out-of-context from a more complicated sentence.
* A single-word response being as conversationally inappropriate as to ‘Have you stopped beating your autist yet?’
‘no’ to which bit(s) of what I wrote?
@PP [I can’t tell if DM’s fuller response would have included this] need a lot of coaching and rote learning to be more successful at social interactions, even if they want to be; it is not a case of switching something on that they have switched off on purpose.
I specifically said ‘smart’ — which DM didn’t include. So I have in mind what’s called ‘high-functioning Aspergers/ASD’. I understand that if the right capabilities didn’t kick in at the needed developmental stage, they are in a sense a ‘victim’, as DE explored. OTOH if they _don’t_ “want to be”, they have “on purpose” chosen not to learn how to fake it. (As I understand it, the term here is ‘masking’: using your intellect to recognise the social cues, and pretending to behave ‘as if’ socially ept.)
Yes, ‘masking’ is emotionally draining for the faker. Equally, refraining from telling a smart-obsessive to catch yourself on is draining for others.
(I’ve just been stuck in a concert next to two gents of getting-on-for my parents’ generation, of which one appeared to be the world expert on phylloxera in Pacifica. When he stopped for breath, he failed to recognise his companion’s silence was not from hanging on for more detail.)
Musk is rich enough to pay a full-time coach to kick him under the table.
You’re sick, Jessy! Sick, sick, sick!
All of it together, because I was too tired to write a full-length response to how much disgusting nonsense you packed into so few words.
It may take a week; I’m about to leave for a conference.
Equally, refraining from telling a smart-obsessive to catch yourself on is draining for others.
As my mom often tells me when she things I’m behaving too incorrectly, выключи аутиста! (“shut down the autist!”)
@AntC
It would surprise me if Musk has made results of a psychiatric examination public (or even spent much time having an examination done–if it’s not broke, why fix it?). In the absence of more detail, ascribing some of Musk’s behaviour to Asperger’s syndrome might be unfair to other Asperger’s sufferers (e.g., if a narcissistic or other personality disorder is more central, or if Musk is “acting out” in response to some childhood or adolescent trauma). However, I am unqualified to do anything more than speculate.
@PP, see wikip on Musk, ‘Personal life’. The claim sourced from an ‘authorized biography’.
But yeah I Am Not A Psychologist. I was talking more about how his supporters use the alleged autism to excuse his behaviour as if he’s deserving some sort of sympathy. (Appeals for sympathy cut both ways.)
The whole problem with broadening Asperger’s to ASD to ADHD to neurodivergent is these terms leak into the public discourse, and become unmoored from any sort of denotation. That’s why I’m trying to keep within ‘high-functioning’. (After a career in IT, mostly mediating between the smart-obsessives and those who are trying to get the smart solution to work within dumb business reality, I reckon I can spot how the social interactions don’t work.)
@DM I was not intending to affront/disgust anybody. I of course had nobody here in mind: I’ve had no in-person social interaction. Enjoy your conference.
OTOH if they _don’t_ “want to be”, they have “on purpose” chosen not to learn how to fake it. (As I understand it, the term here is ‘masking’: using your intellect to recognise the social cues, and pretending to behave ‘as if’ socially ept.)
You clearly have made no effort to actually understand what autism is like and are taking your cue from smug op-eds on the subject. Do you also believe the undeserving poor frequently use their food benefits to buy luxuries, and women frequently make false rape accusations to punish men?
The medicalization of conditions like mild autism spectrum disorder is actually really important bureaucratically. For children, getting a diagnosis and a rundown of the severity of specific symptoms is key to getting them official and useful help in school.
I meant to add, regarding that poetry posted by David Eddyshaw, that I don’t recall ever coming across a sonnet made up of two septets, each with an ABABBCC rhyme scheme. (Also Google’s AI helper is terrible at identifying the poet. I Googled the first two lines several times, and each iteration produced a different hallucination as to who wrote it.)
That’s not a sonnet, that’s a couple of stanzas (not successive) from Auden’s (very long) “Letters from Iceland.”
I guessed Auden because style and DE preference. Clearly (not sure why) not Larkin or Hughes.
Google’s AI helper is terrible at identifying the poet
Why bother at all about Blockheads?
Why shouldn’t they do as they please?
You know if it came to a brainy game
You could baffle a Blockhead with ease.
@languagehat: Interesting, although it functions pretty well as a sonnet on its own.
@David Eddyshaw & PlasticPaddy: I suspected Auden also, but I wasn’t sure, so I Googled the first two lines. The actual search results revealed the answer, but Google decided to “help” with an LLM result as well.* It confidently informed me that the poem was by John Gould Fletcher—who, although he was an American, lived in Britain for many years. Along with his troubled psychological history, it made the proposed answer not absurd, and that was what got me interested in repeating the search, to see whether it would always suggest Fletcher, or, if not, how long it would take to guess correctly. However, the LLM’s subsequent attempts were all much wider of the mark—the likes of Robert Frost, Rudyard Kipling, and Rupert Brooke.
* I wonder what triggers Google to ask its LLM about some searches but not others. It’s consistent at least, in that I got LLM suggestions every time I searched for those first two lines.
To go back to the OP and hat’s tendency to bristle at the word “hegemonic,” I did a dive into antique texts on google books in an attempt to find a non-bristle-inducing usage. Try on for size this: “but Sparta again in her turn having abused her hegemonic authority, by endeavouring to impose upon the states a universal system of oligarchy, Athens again became supreme at the battle of Cnidus, B.C. 394.” This from _Outlines of the History of Greece, in Connexion with the Rise of the Arts and Civilizations in Europe_, co-authored by William Douglas Hamilton and Edward Levien, M.A., and published in London in 1853.
One online source blames Signor A. Gramsci for the subsequent 20th-century extension of “hegemonic” from a technical term used almost entirely in discussions of ancient Greek history to a loose metaphor which in time may have come to befuddle readers who took the metaphor literally.
I certainly associate the modern use with Gramsci. Pretty much consciously so, when not merely dropping the word in at random to impress those in the cheap seats, and/or to tease Hat.
G himself meant it in a fairly precise technical sense, though it had appeared in a vaguer meaning in previous Marxist writers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Gramsci#Hegemony
Far-right culture warriors have imbibed something of the idea of Gramscian hegemony by popcultural osmosis: hence their stock insult “cultural Marxism” for all concepts not in strict accord with their own Weltanschauung. They aspire to create (or reinforce) their own kind of hegemony. The cleverer ones even invoke Gramsci by name.
Hegemon (not sure how it’s spelled in Russian) is Pontius Pilate’s preferred title when he meets with Yeshua in The Master and Margarita.
To go back to the OP and hat’s tendency to bristle at the word “hegemonic,” I did a dive into antique texts on google books in an attempt to find a non-bristle-inducing usage. Try on for size this
I don’t think you needed to go to the trouble, seeing as how I said “here it’s used sensibly and imparts an actual meaning.” That should steer you in the right direction, namely that I have no problem with the word as such, only its ridiculous overuse by followers of followers of Gramsci.
Hegemon or “igumen” (I’ve seen both spellings in English) is in the Orthodox Slavic world a “church word” and a title given to senior monks, classically only to an abbot although I think sometimes the practice has been looser. It’s игумен in modern Russian (ігумен in Ukrainian), from игоумєнъ in OCS, which borrowed it from ἡγούμενος. Best as I can tell, it is not perceived as coming with any Gramscian overtones.
to actually understand what autism is like
There is no one thing ‘autism’. (Especially after the DSM 5 redefinition to a spectrum disorder.) So I claim no-one knows what autism is like; even those diagnosed with it know only their own particular form. So I am deliberately not making any observations about autism-in-general. My whole point at the first time I mentioned was the in-general term is now vacuous. Pay attention to the qualifications in my statements.
Do you also believe the undeserving poor frequently use their food benefits to buy luxuries, and women frequently make false rape accusations to punish men?
You know me at least well enough to answer that for yourself. I’m disappointed in you. If you want me to fuck off, just say so. My name is not Jaeger,
Best as I can tell, it is not perceived as coming with any Gramscian overtones.
Native speakers of Russian just plain do not realize that the words игумен (the church term) and гегемон (the usual spelling of the “Gramscian” term) are etymologically related. I myself was surprised and had to look it up.
Adding to the confusion, Bulgakov, specifically, unusually spells the other word as игемон; reportedly it shows up in this spelling (…modulo final yer, I guess) in the Church Slavonic Bible.
They seem to have been distinct words in the original Greek, too, though ultimately from the same root. The church term had been borrowed into English as hegumen (mostly used in Eastern Orthodox contexts).
So I claim no-one knows what autism is like; even those diagnosed with it know only their own particular form.
As the saying goes, if you know one autist, you know one autist.
@AntC:
I’d prefer it if you didn’t fuck off, personally …
I think there are indeed some underexamined issues about the lax use if terms like “autism”, but it doesn’t follow that states of being perhaps wrongly called “autism” are not themselves both real and debilitating. (I don’t suppose for a moment that you were actually maintaing that, either.)
This intersection between physically-cut-and-dried disease, “mental illness” and the social consequences of both is something that I’ve long been interested in professionally. Lots of doctors have unfortunately grossly simplistic ideas about it all, let alone laypeople. (Most of the literature on this within ophthalmology works with an implicit assumption that if you can’t find a cause, the patient is malingering. Ophthalmologists are simple people …)
They seem to have been distinct words in the original Greek, too
Nah, all from Greek ἡγεμών, etymologically simply “leader.” The verb ἡγέομαι that it comes from means “go before, precede, guide.” (Kusaal has the exact same idiom in tuongat “leader”, literally “in-front-passer.” The “Judges” in the Bible are rendered tuongatib in the Kusaal version.)
You know me at least well enough to answer that for yourself. I’m disappointed in you. If you want me to fuck off, just say so. My name is not Jaeger,
No, I don’t want you to fuck off, and I know the answers. I just get pissed off sometimes at your insouciant refusal to acknowledge what most people of any sense acknowledge. Apologies if I offended you (though I would have thought your skin was pretty thick).
Discussion of by-no-means-trivial question, ‘what, exactly, do we mean by “a disease”?’ reminds me of an occasion years ago when I was at a formal case presentation in a lecture theatre, and in the question session afterwards an extremely eminent physician said to the presenter. “I’m having some nosological difficulty with your presentation.”
For years, I’ve wanted to say this at a case presentation, but I realised eventually that I just don’t have the gravitas to pull it off.
I had to communicate? with people like Jaeger yesterday in person. It took me a day to cool off, and I still am not ok. I did it to myself.
Bulgarian literature did not begin like that — it did begin with contact with Greek literature in the end of the 8th century, that much is true, but then the Greeks tried to erase it — arguably three times, and ultimately succeeded in the 17’s century, with the burning of the Tarnovo library.
(though I would have thought your skin was pretty thick)
Indeed. What offended me was not the character-assassination but the failure to recognise the distinction I was at pains to draw, several times. (I suspect DM also has so failed.)
that states of being perhaps wrongly called “autism” are not themselves both real and debilitating.
I have family friends whose son suffered oxygen depletion at childbirth (as they later discovered). As a youngster he was clearly ‘not right’ and exhibited obsessive behaviour, but this was before there was any such diagnosis as autism. Now in adulthood, his neural difficulties are both real and very obviously debilitating: he can’t keep up eye contact; he can’t continue a conversation; he immediately switches to subjects of his obsession. This ‘state of being’ is NOT WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT.
Lumping everything together as ASD (it’s the lumping that I’m complaining about — since this is a language discussion) then leaves me looking like a heartless idiot when …
I take Musk as a concrete example of what I am talking about. (Acknowledging PP’s caveat that we don’t know if there’s been a formal diagnosis.) It’s very difficult for me to see the richest individual in the world as debilitated. I suggest the debilitating is inflicted on those around him, and indeed on anybody in the US Government.
refusal to acknowledge what most people of any sense acknowledge.
Musk’s smartness is immediately obvious, also his glaring stupidity, and sheer lack of any common sense. The condoms-to-Gaza episode was very telling. Firstly a ‘sniff test’ would tell the dollars involved were insignificant compared to the Administration’s budget he was tasked with slashing; second, the outrage he brought ‘this isn’t right!’ should have raised doubts that it was not in fact right — in the sense of not factually correct; third, how ignorant do you have to be to think there’s only one place in the world called ‘Gaza’? — FFS there’s four in USA alone; there’s a whole (former) kingdom/province right next door to where Musk grew up.
Then by @Hat’s measure, clearly I am also lacking any sense, and on the spectrum: you should be cutting me slack/ patiently explaining what I have misunderstood. (Did I say “sympathy cuts both ways”?)
(I don’t suppose for a moment that you were actually maintaing that [lack of sympathy], either.)
Quite. Thank you.
My mentions of ‘my parents’ generation’ of (what we’d today call) nerds is specifically most of my father’s brothers and colleagues (he was a nerd working in a nerd-filled government scientific establishment). The debilitating was inflicted on their wives and children: mental breakdowns, psyche hospitalisations; morbid fear of intimate relationships/inability to maintain long-term relationships; a suicide. Meanwhile the nerds all outlived their wives, seemingly unable to apply their cleverness as to why.
So my sympathies are far more with those around ‘high-functioning’ Aspergites.
“mental illness” and the social consequences of both
Of course the nerds would bristle at any suggestion of their “mental illness” — even the ones who were taking ‘little pink pills’/calmers-downers. Whereas they couldn’t so much ignore when the son (of the one obsessed with steam locomotives) was sedated and chained to a hospital bed, with no apparent physical symptoms. (We do not talk about mental illness.) Of course by then the damage was all done.
Lots of doctors have unfortunately grossly simplistic ideas about it all, let alone laypeople.
Whether Psychologists would count as doctors I leave moot. The profession has by now had plenty of opportunities to see how laypeople/journos pick up their terminology and abuse it. I blame the authors of DSM 5 for all this vaccines-cause-autism nonsense. Just dream up a completely new term in Greek as obscure as you can manage. Perhaps the authors are all Aspergers-spectrum? Are they even in the right career?
Will @Hat call me out again for ‘blaming’ them for being so-clever-yet-so-stupid?
two septets, each with an ABABBCC rhyme scheme
In case anyone who doesn’t know is interested, that stanza is called rhyme royal, as Auden mentions in the poem.
Ottava Rima would, I know, be proper,
The proper instrument on which to pay
My compliments, but I should come a cropper;
Rhyme-royal’s difficult enough to play.
But if no classics as in Chaucer’s day,
At least my modern pieces shall be cheery
Like English bishops on the Quantum Theory.
I had to communicate? with people like Jaeger yesterday in person. It took me a day to cool off, and I still am not ok. I did it to myself.
I feel your pain. (The locomotive-obsessed mentioned above was also the classic racist uncle. And lived right next door to a suburb of high immigration from the sub-continent, who’d arrived in the ’50’s/’60’s. My tactic was to elaborate at length on all the delicious curry houses.)
I had a surprisingly uplifting encounter yesterday. I was gang-tackled in the High Street by a pair of god-botherers — not the pentecostalist/evangelist type, but very reasonable ‘low church’/nonconformists. Their glee at encountering a real live strident atheist (as opposed to their usual fare of milkthistle agnostics) was rapidly tempered when I started quoting inconvenient bits of the bible (thanks in part to the Hattery) and could itemise the clerical child-abuse scandals in NZ. We rehearsed all the usual why is-there-something-rather-than-nothing; where-did-DNA-come-from; just because some Christians are not evil does not mean Christianity has a monopoly on ‘the good’. Their whole arguments from logic collapsed when I enlightened them about Gödel’s Incompleteness.
Whether Psychologists would count as doctors I leave moot
No, but psychiatrists do.
Moreover, (though it pains me to say so) relevant expertise in such matters (and even some others) is not confined to (medical) doctors.
The profession has by now had plenty of opportunities to see how laypeople/journos pick up their terminology and abuse it
Few doctors are much good at media management, or have any particular desire to be so. (Those that are good at it are often not professional shining lights, either in terms of competence or ethics.) I don’t think doctors are a group can be fairly blamed for this admittedly unfortunate state of affairs, though our professional organisations could assuredly do with being more active in such realms.
I think one can draw an an analogy with economists, of whom the same is largely true. I would maintain that the damage done to society by populist media pseudo-economics is actually considerably greater overall than that done by pop medicine. (“The government has maxed out its credit card” … The concept that the economics of a state works pretty much exactly like that of an individual household has been of enormous benefit to politicians intent on misleading voters about their real agenda. It radiates truthiness … almost any economist will tell you it’s – factually – bollocks, but the mass media have no interest in either finding this out or informing the public about it.)
Fortunately, pop pseudo-linguistics has much less (though non-zero) potential to blight real people’s lives.
We rehearsed all the usual why is-there-something-rather-than-nothing; where-did-DNA-come-from; just because some Christians are not evil does not mean Christianity has a monopoly on ‘the good’. Their whole arguments from logic collapsed when I enlightened them about Gödel’s Incompleteness
They made an argument from logic? That was … ambitious …
St Anselm lives!
As I’ve said before, I think it’s actually important for Christians not to believe that Christianity has a monopoly on “the good”, even in principle (you’d have thought that a moment’s reflection on history or current affairs would induce a certain diffidence in claiming a monopoly in practice …)
Re the Paley’s Watch sort of stuff: some much cleverer people than I have thought that there is mileage in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_theology
Can’t say I’ve ever quite seen it, myself …
By chance, I’m just reading al-Ghazali’s تهافت الفلاسفة The Incoherence of the Philosophers (excellent title*, though how apt it is as a translation of the Arabic I am not remotely competent to say, alas. My Arabic is not within a million miles of coping with the original.) It deals with a lot of issues relevant to this, in a way which I find I often …. agree with …
* Averroes wrote a detailed critique of it called تهافت التهافت “The Incoherence of The Incoherence.”
They made an argument from logic?
Yeah, bizarre. I know [to be said in a Liz Truss parody tone of voice]. I was trying to keep away from it[**], because it leads nowhere. They took my reluctance as signalling some kind of weakness, I suppose. So they then got a lecture on the amount of human choice in axiomatic systems/the utter lack of any inexorable conclusion; and that was before the Gödel. … dodginess of the Riemann hypothesis … vacuousness of existence proofs … unknowness of Perfect Numbers …
[**] For the record, I was initially going with: I have as much personal experiential evidence there is a God as that there are fairies at the bottom of my garden. Ref al-Ghazali point 5, I’m unable to say how many fairies I don’t have experience of. (Compare: how many stamps I haven’t collected.)
(Also I had recently refreshed my armoury of Dawkinsisms. I guess the watchmaker stuff might have carried greater credibility before Watson & Crick — to demonstrate all threads are one.)
current affairs would induce a certain diffidence
Yeah. What turned me into a _strident_ Atheist? Mike Pence, J D Vance, Brian Tamaki (our local representative, whose political aspirations have got nowhere thanks to PR). Hitchens was right, I should have paid attention earlier. (That is, to his arguments, although his hectoring style probably drove more people the other way.)
I’m just reading al-Ghazali’s تهافت الفلاسفة The Incoherence of the Philosophers …
Averroes wrote a detailed critique of it called تهافت التهافت “The Incoherence of The Incoherence.”
I had not been aware that the “Philosophy of Poverty” / “Poverty of Philosophers” taunt mechanism goes so far back !
The “philosopher” personality disorder is remarkably stable both over time and cross-culturally.
What turned me into a _strident_ Atheist? Mike Pence, J D Vance, Brian Tamaki (our local representative, whose political aspirations have got nowhere thanks to PR).
But vile/murderous atheists don’t bother you?
“Fairies at the bottom of my garden”* is, like “law of the jungle” or “honored in the breach,” one of those expressions that is typically used to mean practically the opposite of the original intended meaning.
* When I Googled to get the name of the poet (Rose Fyleman), the search engine provided a link to a musical setting of the poem. Apparently, the musical version is well known, but I had never heard it, so I gave it a listen. However, I had to stop the video at the end, since the singer rendered the last few lines in an unbearable falsetto, clearly well beyond her proper range.
But vile/murderous atheists don’t bother you?
Of course they do. There’s no single sacred text or mytho-historical figure that Atheists all cling to or claim to derive authority from. Absolutely Mao was a monster, or Stalin (_if_ he was an Atheist).
Atheism isn’t a faith I have to ‘defend’ or stand with. I’m a Humanist; but I’m not blind to the history of humans being vile to each other. I don’t think Atheism-in-general makes them more vile; I am pretty sure Religion does.
I can quote Hitchens/Dawkins/Dennett/Harris; I don’t venerate them; I don’t ‘submit’ to their authority; I quite openly disagree with parts of what they say. (Not that they’re vile/murderous.)
If the Christian/Muslim/Hebrew God of Abraham is all the one, why does he tolerate his name being taken as authority for vileness, for inter-faith genocide in particular?
(Anyhoo, this is a language site, not ReligionHat. The moderator will be deleting my rants.)
I’m not sure the above accounts for my “_strident_”. Prior to the rise of Trump, I’d been a confirmed Atheist, but sotto voce, indeed looked on favourably where Christians had supported liberation movements in South America. (As had Methodists/Baptists supported Socialism/Unionism in the UK, Bruce Kent and the Quakers CND, …)
Catching up quickly, I saw the US Christian Right was not only hostile to the religious freedom on which the Republic was founded, but hell-bent on establishing a Theocracy, and entirely comfortable with electing Cyrus the Great to achieve it. (Hypocrisy would turn out to be a recurring theme.) Hitchens’ warnings had been right all along.
There was also an uptick in Evangelicals in New Zealand, linked to anti-scientism [**], most notable during the Covid when they refused vaccines, refused to wear masks/socially isolate, and set up a protest camp on the grounds of Parliament, very much in the style of the Jan 6 riot. Poetic justice I suppose that they all came down with Covid.
There was also the continuing drip, drip of cases of child abuse not only within Catholicism but also Anglicanism, with church authorities (Justin Welby) not just failing to root it out, but much more active in protecting the abuser and themselves. The mega-churches in USA, with pastors exploiting congregations for their own material wealth (Brian Tamaki in NZ) and/or sexual gratification, hypocrisy about abortion (it’s OK to get a termination for a pastor’s extramarital affairs), hypocrisy about homosexuality (Ted Haggard). The evangelical Arise Church in NZ exploiting the young and vulnerable as interns.
My position nowadays is that Religious Institutions are evil, until proven otherwise. Likely it’s much more an Institution-thing than a Religion-thing (the CCP is clearly evil). The way theism requires adherents to suspend critical thinking and believe impossible things before breakfast is what enables the gobshites to take power over them.
Then evangelicals who approach me on the street get told to go away put Christianity’s house in order before trying to inflict bollocks on the populace (with Chapter and verse, and footnotes).
To somewhat counter @Hat’s false-parallel, how often have you had an Atheist come up to you in the street and thrust pamphlets at you?
[**] The first edition of the Flat Earth Society started just after perfecting the steam locomotive — IOW when terrain surveying for the canals and then the railways had given ample evidence the earth is curved not just in the abstract, but measurably between London and Bristol. It got a relaunch, thanks to Biblical literalism, soon after the general availability of GPS satellites (not that the Bible makes any such claim). I don’t think even Socialist Wheat can compete for sheer barking madness.
Has it ever occurred to you that actual Christians might be grieved about blasphemous perversions of the Gospel to support bigots, xenophobes and fascists? Perhaps you just feel that we’re all the same …
I am not, myself, in the habit of adducing the atrocities of (say) the Khmer Rouge to “atheists” as if atheists were some sort of monolithic group. Do you think you could find it in you to extend a parallel courtesy to those of us who regard a J D Vance or a Paula White with horror? Who regard cover-ups of sexual abuse as a grievous stain on our churches and are actively involved in trying to prevent such things both now and in future?
[Apologies, Hat: please delete the preceding comment. I left it too late … medication didn’t kick in soon enough …]
Abusive religions aside, strident atheist proselytizers can be just as offputting as religious ones. As one example, The Skeptical Inquirer, while it does a public service unmasking charlatans, its tone is insufferably self-righteous and insulting toward anyone who isn’t like its crowd.
(I don’t know what I’d call myself. Not agnostic — they don’t know, but wish they did. I just don’t think about it.)
I just don’t think about it
I reckon this is the standard human position (for believers and non-believers alike.)
Those who do think about it are either nerds (these are the honest ones) or working an angle. We all have limited bandwidth …
I was just saying that I recognise a kind of mental kinship with al-Ghazali (whether this would have been mutual is doubtful, but hey …) Someone else who wonders about causation and God! I have to say that this is something of a niche interest.
One imagines Mrs al-Ghazali saying “Are you coming to bed yet, dear?”, and him replying, “I can’t: Avicenna is wrong about Philosophy being able to prove the existence of a Creator … I have to refute his argument using his own Aristotelean framework …”)
“One imagines Mrs al-Ghazali saying “Are you coming to bed yet, dear?”
One of my favourite cartoons, by Australian Patrick Cook:
A Galileo-like figure in 17th century garb is standing beside a telescope, looking a bit crestfallen.
A figure who is clearly Mrs Galileo, harassed housewife with a couple of small children pulling at her skirts, upbraids him:
“You’re all wrapped up in your own little world!”
The “philosopher” personality disorder is remarkably stable both over time and cross-culturally.
strident atheist proselytizers can be just as offputting as religious ones.
Point taken. I should really adjourn to a Atheist blog.
One imagines Mrs al-Ghazali saying “Are you coming to bed yet, dear?”,
Indeed. Isn’t it the middle of the night over there?
“Fairies at the bottom of my garden”* is, … one of those expressions that is typically used to mean practically the opposite of the original intended meaning.
And what was the original meaning? The “I dare you to believe, … Was it just a dream, or was it a fairy?” from the poem/song? The Cottingley Fairies (apparently the same year as the poem??) were a celebrated hoax. Conan Doyle wasn’t satisfied with belief alone.
It’s been an Atheist trope for a very long time. Dawkins ref’ing Adams 1980-ish; usually in context of seeking evidence over belief.
Rose Fyleman [wrote the poem] is presumably the model for Madeleine Bassett, to whom Bertie found himself inadvertently affianced.
Has it ever occurred to you that actual Christians …
I said (in my first post on the topic) “… some Christians are not evil …”.
I also right up front introduced the “strident”. That’s surely fair warning you’re not going to get a balanced view. I thought I was merely telling an anecdote as a bit of moral support to @V. I expected it to go no further, since it was off-topic with no language-y content. But somebody asked for more …
atheists were some sort of monolithic group
I think that would be a Category Error. (To put on my Philosopher hat.) Atheism is not a religion in the same way not-collecting stamps is not a pastime. Those who not-collect stamps are not a monolithic group with those who not-collect locomotive numbers.
Anyhoo, the Khmer Rouge, Stalin, Mao have so skunked ‘Marxism-Leninism’ I’m proud to declare I’m not a Marxist-Leninist. I don’t read the Communist Manifesto/Kapital/What is to be Done as revered texts/a revealed truth. I don’t read Ayn Rand at all, ewww. (Although fair question as to how many Christians know what’s in the Bible/read it at all/never mind with some sort of reverence.)
If you agree the Christianity brand has got skunked, why so anxious to cleave to the name? The Baháʼís (for example) seem to hold holy much the same God and texts and Jesus. And seem to be free of accusations of abuse or corruption. Also have a very pleasant temple/shrine on Mt Carmel; lovely view out to the Mediterranean. “has been in Aotearoa New Zealand for over a century.” “The first Baháʼí literature in the Welsh language was published in 1950. Today there are local assemblies in Cardiff, Newport and Swansea.” Shop around.
If you agree the Christianity brand has got skunked, why so anxious to cleave to the name?
Perhaps because “brand” does not exactly capture what it means to a believer to identify with a religion. You are coming over like all those Americans who assert (in some cases, at least, with apparent sincere stupidity) that to describe oneself as “socialist” is to support Stalin or Pol Pot. Or those (generally the same Americans) who pretend that “Muslim” is synonymous with “violent antisemitic jihadist.” (They’re currently doing both with Zohran Mamdani. Some of the insane invective directed at him is stuff that these people actually really believe.)
Why do you self-identify as a “man” when “men” commit the vast majority of violent crimes?
What alternative name do you suggest for people who suppose themselves to be followers of “Christ”?
Certainly names for various subdivisions of Christianity have got skunked by such people to the degree that people who would previously have self-described with them now avoid them. “Fundamentalist” is one. I suspect “Evangelical” may end up following.
The Vances and the Whites are evil people in themselves, but from the point of view of someone like me (and there are a lot of us, whatever you may think) not the least of their crimes is blaspheming the name of Christ by associating it with hatred. Trumpodules like them are the worst threat to Christianity in the world at present – not Muslims or Socialists, as these liars proclaim.
I say “at present”: this has happened before over the past couple of millennia. If actual Christians abandoned the name “Christian” as soon as egregious crimes were committed in the name of Christ, the term would have passed out of use as a self-designation quite a while ago.
What you need to demonstrate is, not that self-described Christians have committed grave crimes in the name of Christ (which is beyond dispute), but that in so doing, they were correct in asserting that their actions followed naturally from the core doctrines of Christianity.
In fact, many an atheist has quite correctly noted that (for example) a J D Vance, in lying without shame in order to stir up hatred against refugees and immigrants for political gain, is directly contravening the very moral principles he pretends to promote.
But you feel that I should stop calling myself a Christian because Vance is a hypocrite? Illogical, Captain.
Why do you self-identify as a “man” …
I wasn’t aware that I do. Do you have a cite? I try to use gender-neutral pronouns for myself as much as for others[**]. I prefer ‘human’, to align with Humanist.
[**] At least until they express a preference. Except God is a ‘He’.
Apologies for misgendering you, comrade. I applaud your consistency in this matter.
Though I must say that you humans (despite being so puny) have perpetrated some pretty astonishing atrocities on one another over the period during which we have been observing you. I wouldn’t be altogether happy to self-identify as a “human”, personally.
I think Piers Plowman identified as “Earthling”.
Earthling Pride!
[rant deleted]
Hat, I admire your commitment to free speech, but this troll is becoming a significant impairment to the enjoyment of this site.
CJ, I thought we understood each other, but it seems you don’t want to keep to the agreement, which was that you would confine yourself to non-controversial topics like language. You are not allowed to use an ongoing discussion to shoehorn in your unpleasant views wherever you can. Capeesh? I don’t care if you don’t feel it’s unfair; this is my site and you play by my rules. Everybody else seems to do so with no problem, so I imagine you’re capable of it. If you’re not, then I’ll just have to ban you outright.
@LH My understanding was that I’m not allowed to talk about socio-political issues. I should not talk about religion either? Alright. Your rules.
Right. You don’t know how to converse in the amiable fashion we’re used to around here, you use the insulting tactics of a bully and/or troll. I’m sure you don’t think of yourself that way and are doubtless feeling miffed, but I can’t help that; the fact is that the rest of us find it unpleasant to interact with you, and having to deal with that, and worry about what you’ll say next, drains the enjoyment out of my running the blog, which I’m sure you don’t want to do. So save your ideology for other venues where it will be appreciated. Thanks in advance!
@LH
I must be the first bully and troll in history who not only has no idea he’s a bully and a troll but even his accusers are convinced he has no idea of that. Honestly wow.
Look, I’ll make one last effort never to talk about anything that isn’t related to linguistics. If I fail I’ll just leave.
Thanks very much. (Note that I didn’t say you were a bully and troll but that you sounded like one; that is not a veneer of politeness over a veiled accusation, it is a simple statement of fact. As I said, I’m sure you don’t think of yourself that way, but it doesn’t matter, since you cause the same reactions as if you were what you sound like.)
>I should not talk about religion either?
Oh, man, this is going to be like minding a puppy. “No, you can’t go there either. Only on the newspaper.”
Here would be my suggestions as start for the no-go list:
– ethnic/racial difference
– gender difference
– grammatical gender (too close)
– language as in any way related to, predicting or shaping culture
– Athens or the West or their values
– anything about any polis at all, both the semantic relationship to Athens/the West and the etymological relation to politics make it too hot
– most everything else if you feel that tingly sensation you get when you know you’re going to piss someone off and you’re kind of enjoying it.
– German, Germany or anything about German people
German grammar and proto-Germanic might be okay, as long as proto-Germanic is not seen as determining anything about anyone who ever spoke a Germanic language.
AntC, atheists don’t form a group, but Atheists do.
As a hardcore Nominalist, I take issue with that statement. There is no
tryAtheists, onlydo or do notatheists.bully? troll? the man’s an active nazi apologist, and he’s expressed his politics fine in the form of statements “about linguistics” the whole time he’s been here. i’m with tom morello on letting nazis sit at the dinner table, whether it’s physical or metaphorical.
If there’s the slightest chance that CJ’s presence will discourage rozele from joining a conversation, then I’m very clear on which I would prefer.
What alternative name do you suggest for people who suppose themselves to be followers of “Christ”?
Today I tried an experiment. I brandished aloft my Bible [Presented Promotion Sunday, October 1966, slightly foxed] and declaimed “I do renounce Atheism and all its pomps.” Nothing. (Also still no evidence of Fairies in the garden; unless it’s them planting out all the lovage seedlings amongst the palings in the back fence. Sparrows would be an equally plausible explanation.)
So we’re stuck in the same boat. Or rather we’re each stuck in a different boat, swirling uncontrollably towards the same cataract.
Atheists do. [form a group]
I think not. I’ve tried searching out Atheist groups in my city, as some sort of moral support. There is a ‘Rationalist and Humanist’ resource centre in NZ’s biggest City, which hosts occasional discussion groups and visiting speakers. It used to have a branch down here. That withered. So you all get together on Sunday morning and … what? The not-stamp collectors could pay obeisance to Ray Tomlinson; the not-locomotive numbers to Beeching. We could have a collective rant against whatever Fundamentalist latest outrage. I doubt we’d get agreement on a hymn to sing — the Red Flag is irretrievably skunked.
Then what to put on the agenda for next Sunday? (I have limited tolerance for reruns of the Four Horseman.) There is a Baháʼí centre in the city …
you humans (despite being so puny) have perpetrated some pretty astonishing atrocities on one another …
Fair point. So there’s a baseline level of human-on-human vileness. I’d put it there’s a spectrum. The question is does (some forms of) Religion or of Atheism raise vileness above that level on average; and is that a systemic consequence? [**] Perhaps Religion/its Institutions does no more than attract the viler sort of human, and teach them extra techniques. I’d put the Catholic Church firmly in that category. (Particularly its strictures on priests that seem exquisitely honed to produce child abusers. Everybody I’ve met with a Catholic upbringing has been abused in some form or other.) Eastern Orthodox seems to follow along. (Hitch claims Stalin learnt all he knew from Theological Seminary; then passed it on to Mao, to Pol Pot.)
Anglicanism was looking a little more promising — until they had the temerity to appoint a female Archbishop of Canterbury, triggering a schism. The breakaways seem to be suffering from Catholic-envy.
Evangelicals/Fundamentalists might start trying to be qualitatively different, but pretty quickly the Institution takes over, power corrupts, the naïve young minds are just too tempting. (There’s a parallel problem in Ashrams and Buddhist seminaries.)
Quakers are lovely. I have grounds to think Methodo-Socialists[***] fail to attract the viler sorts. The trouble is, these are tiny numbers relatively. They don’t shift the dial on the average.
(I did draft a longer thesis to the effect it’s monotheism as opposed to polytheism or atheism that underpins the systemic vileness. As I’ve said before, the polytheism I’ve experienced in S.E. Asia seems so much less fraught. But to persist would impose on our host’s tolerance for going off-“non-controversial topics like language”, methinks. Would also draw complaints of double standards.)
[**] The proposed test of adherence to “core doctrines of Christianity” seems to me a complete non-starter. I as an outside observer have no grounds to tell core from non-core, doctrine from heresy. As written in the Bible? Whose Bible? The test will end up aligning to which sect you adhere to. I think more mileage in comparing how Quakers/Methodo-Socialists/atheists are in similar ways not-organised institutions.
[***] Comrade, the mot juste in the mouths of the Fundamentalists is RadicalMarxistSocialistproAbortionist — of which I have been accused to my face. Without that incantation, I think we can whisper bare ‘socialist’, strictly amongst ourselves.
@AntC
Maybe instead of “produce child abusers”, it would be better to say “allow child abuse to occur and reporting of child abuse to be suppressed”. For me this is a governance issue endemic to institutions (churches, but also schools, armies, charities, government welfare departments) which deal with children behind closed doors. I don’t see why it is necessary to couple the occurrence of abuse with the stated ethos of any institution, except as an added reproof to convicted abusers.
couple the occurrence of abuse with the stated ethos of any institution
The Justin Welby saga is instructional — because the abuse (by Smyth) first occurred in the 1970’s and right under Welby’s nose. Fair enough that he was relatively junior at the time. But as Welby rose through the ranks, and as more examples of abuse became known — even commonplace, he was officially informed in 2013, six months after he was elevated to Archbishop. By then schools, charities, government departments, etc all had protocols in place, especially in response to the Jimmy Saville revelations 2012. I’d expect an institution whose “stated ethos” was all about moral leadership to be ahead of those other bodies, to be vigilant. The 2024 “report found that the Church failed to use full efforts to ensure that Smyth was investigated and prosecuted.”
Welby at no time took responsibility or showed leadership. Neither any of the many subordinates who had various levels of knowledge. Welby was eventually forced out by the laity[**], not the leadership. You might remember that absolutely cringe-making speech in the Lords.
In the case of Catholicism, not only are there all those ‘behind closed doors’ dangers; and specifically the closed confessional; not only is there institutional misogyny in wanting to control sexuality and reproduction — that is, men controlling women’s bodies; there is the enforced celibacy of the only allowed authority. Celibacy of the priesthood is not amongst “core doctrines of Christianity” [@DE] Catholicism is not (for example) moving to ensure priests are chaperoned by a responsible adult (not another priest) during interactions with the vulnerable. This will produce child abusers. (My “attract the viler sort of human” above had the Catholic priesthood particularly in mind. Have you met any priests?)
The institution disagrees (of course). And even (higher up that page) points fingers at other religions as having a worse problem. This does not say to me they’re taking responsibility/being diligent in cleaning out the house. To repeat, the Institution’s “stated ethos” includes a monopoly on ‘the good’. It’s not just another charity or government department.
[**] IOW, per DE “actual Christians … grieved about blasphemous perversions of the Gospel to support ” vileness.
@Ryan
Wow I can’t escape the impression that you actually relish in compiling long censorship lists.
@AntC
I think where we disagree is mainly:
—
I’d expect an institution whose “stated ethos” was all about moral leadership to be ahead of those other bodies, to be vigilant.
—
Is the expectation based on statistics or is it mainly based on theoretical considerations? One needs to be careful about statements like “I don’t see why anarchists pay their taxes” or “I don’t see why pacifists slap their children”–the two things might be intrinsicaļly coupled in one’s own mind but not in the minds of those whose behavior one is censuring.
Wow I can’t escape the impression that you actually relish in compiling long censorship lists.
Come off it. CJ, you are on very thin ice, and as Y said: “If there’s the slightest chance that CJ’s presence will discourage rozele from joining a conversation, then I’m very clear on which I would prefer.” You need to confine your presence to innocuous remarks about language, with zero spillover into implied social/political bullshit, or you’re gone. Is that something hard for you to understand? I repeat, I don’t like banning people, but you’re making it hard for me.
I think that within Christian institutions, effective action is (or has been) often undermined by the idea that offenders should be offered forgiveness. I’ve encountered this myself (I have a formal role in preventing problems like these.) While this reflects well on the forgiveness-promoters’ good nature, it reflects deep confusion about (a) who gets to do the forgiving and (b) the fact that forgiveness does not imply the remission of penalties and does not address what needs to be done institutionally at all.
In the most grisly cases of institutional abuse of power, victims have been pressured into “forgiving” abusers. (And of course the whole horrible mechanism is further enabled by cultures of secrecy.)
Power is what this all comes down to in the end. It’s not accidental that abuse correlates strongly with the kind of (always defective, often heretical) theology that implies that Christians should be exercising power within our societies (the ones who prove by their attitudes that, whatever words they may mouth, they really believe that Jesus made the wrong choice when Satan offered him all the kingdoms of this world.)
Incidentally, although sexual abuse is what the media love to write about, it’s by no means the only severely harmful manifestation of this pathology of power.
Practicing the actual Gospel message entails giving up power. Power and love are very largely antithetical.
XKCD.
Power and love are very largely antithetical.
This is the conclusion I have come to after many decades of observing the world. There are people who want power (and almost always wind up ditching love in the process of chasing it) and people who want love (and generally avoid getting anywhere near power structures if they can help it). Alas, people who create art (including writers, musicians, etc.), though by nature in the love camp, tend to be fatally drawn to the world of power because that’s where the money is, and they need money to create (or to see their creations realized).
@LH
This link was obviously meant to satirize me so how could I ignore it? To be clear, I never complained that my rights to free speech are denied. I don’t believe in the concept of personal rights so I couldn’t possibly complain that mine are being abused. Feel free to censor the wits out of me to your heart’s content. Please note that my wish to be allowed the freedom to comment on linguistics is simply a request for a favor, not a demand.
This link was obviously meant to satirize me so how could I ignore it?
Easily: just ignore it. I appreciate your expressed willingness to restrict yourself to linguistics; I hope you can manage to do so. (I might say that having spent some time in Crete, I would be interested in any observations you might have on Cretan Greek.)
@PP Is the expectation based on statistics or is it mainly based on theoretical considerations?
@DE wrote (was it only yesterday!):
My comments are trying to avoid intruding my own morals (probably I failed — esp about the misogyny bit), but holding the churches’ very own proclaimed standards up to their own behaviour.
Now anybody can be a hypocrite, mea culpa and the examples you mention, but I’m not claiming moral leadership; I don’t have a seat in the House of Lords; I’m not leading a Crusade to (re)impose alleged American values and specifically alleged Christian values. I don’t think my beliefs give me a right/duty to intrude in other people’s private lives (I’m pre-choice, not pro-abortion), whereas Religions do that all the time, and ‘justify’ that by appeal to an ineffable, uninterrogatable authority.
It doesn’t escape me the parallels of claiming authority from Marx/Lenin, or the equally ineffable ‘will of the people’,
Trying to connect back to where this thread sprouted from, that’s what’s turned me from a sotto voce atheist (one’s religion is a private matter) to strident. The couple of jokers the other day claiming Christianity[**] represents ‘the good’.
[**] Of course _not_ those Christians over there, or over there, or across there, but this proselytisers brand.
I think that within Christian institutions, effective action is (or has been) often undermined by the idea that offenders should be offered forgiveness.
Thank you for those sensitive comments. It’s not that I disagree, but shouldn’t the first idea be to comfort and support the suffering? And especially to believe them; not suppress their testimony. (Perhaps they’ve made it up/though I can’t see why/perhaps they misinterpreted the situation, so counsel them just as much as the accused. This is not what Welby ever did.)
The actual practice has been to offer forgiveness only to those within the church institution. Even if a woman has offended by seducing a priest (I very much doubt that’s how it happened), she gets condemned as a hussy, not forgiven.
AntC, as usual you are cherry-picking the worst examples of the belief system you oppose and claiming they are representative and you needn’t bother your head about any others. While perfectly understandable (that’s how most people behave when arguing religion and politics), it’s not very persuasive. As I’ve said more than once, I am an atheist but I recognize that religious people are, on the whole, at least as good (by my standards, which I don’t think are unusual) as atheists. Religion has encompassed the entire range of human behavior, which is not surprising since it is the default setting of humanity (as far as can be told from human history). Atheists, being a self-selected and (by their own feeling) embattled minority, tend to be belligerent, which doesn’t lead to productive discussion.
but shouldn’t the first idea be to comfort and support the suffering? And especially to believe them; not suppress their testimony
Sure. Were you expecting me to disagree?
Perhaps they’ve made it up/though I can’t see why
Really? One of my students, who I’d given a failing grade to, accused me of various misdeeds, though not any kind of sexual misconduct, to try to force me to improve her grade. She said explicitly at the hearing that when she’s kicked, she kicks back.
Another student told me she’d make various false charges against me and the college in the local paper if I didn’t give her a passing grade. When I said none of the charges she mentioned were true, she said she’d do it anyway. (I still refused, and she said she’d go to college officials and try the same thing. I never heard any more about it and never dared to check whether they’d changed her grade.)
Another student of mine accused a fellow student of using drugs at a certain time. Based on faculty members’ observations of the accused at that time, the accusation seemed to be very implausible and to result from personal spite. So yes, some people do make serious false accusations against others for blackmail or out of spite, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some people do it just for excitement.
Of course some accusations are true, and testimony shouldn’t be suppressed. Just to stay on stories about people I’ve known, one of my professors in college lost his job that way and later wrote a memoir about his sex addiction, confirming the charges that had been made.
Indeed: not all accusations are true, and not all cases are straightforward, even when accusations are true. But the point is not to discount accusations by default, nor to have structures in place which in practice have that same effect. That is all too often how it has been.
I agree completely. I was just responding to AntC’s statement that they couldn’t see why anyone would make up an accusation.
Of course. Sorry for my sanctimonious overreaction.
In the context of US “evangelical” churches, the idea of false accusations of sexual assault against godly men, usually by demon-possessed women, is an actual God-damned trope. It figures more than once in the regrettable works of Frank E Peretti. (I came across these on the bookshelves of several apparently sane US missionaries in Nigeria whom I stayed with at various times; it was either that or Lord of the Rings. I have to admit that they were memorable. But I skipped a lot …)
tom morello
The response to his entirely reasonable comment nicely illustrates the term “concern troll”, which I only recently became aware of (the term, not the thing it refers to: I just didn’t have a name for it previously.)
@DE Were you expecting me to disagree?
No of course not. In these perfervid times I think it’s wise policy/for the avoidance of doubt to prioritise first saying out loud the first priority. Even at risk of being tedious/the bleedin’ obvious. Rather in the way that Welby didn’t.
I’m not convinced the Catholics have yet even got to the stage of paying lip-service.
I had the same (over)reaction to @JF’s post. I’m very well aware of the trope. Though not of Peretti ugh. I suggest JF reads this testimony at “To then be told that I was lying was devastating.” Similar testimony appears hundreds of times.
demon-possessed women
An only lightly fictionalised case.
though not any kind of sexual misconduct
Quite. Serious accusations should be taken seriously in the first case. Does not mean taken unquestioningly.
@Hat Atheists, being a self-selected and (by their own feeling) embattled minority, tend to be belligerent,
Aren’t Christians “self-selected” just as much? Or (say) Muslims in USA? The only ones who aren’t self-selected are @Y’s “I just don’t think about it.”.
I don’t feel embattled within NZ; I’m not sure I’m even in a minority/or only in that I’ll say ‘Atheist’ out loud. God-botherers are hardly a daily danger. NZ’s Fundamentalists/MAGA fanboys (yes, really) regularly receive sub-percent votes. Heck ‘atheism’ was an answer in today’s cryptic.
I didn’t used to be belligerent; I still feel put off by Hitchens’ style even when I agree with the content of his argument.
I recognize that religious people are, on the whole, at least as good (…) as atheists.
Hehe. I’m not disagreeing with you. I am trying to counter the default association “religious … good”. I’d put it: some religious people are at least as vile as some atheists. That’s what gets the God-botherers agitated, like they were expecting a free pass. (I still feel there’s an asymmetry: how would it go down as a piece of rhetoric to start “As a person of no faith, I’m in a special position to advocate you make the decision by talking it over with your loved ones”?)
worst examples … claiming they are representative
Thanks to the frenzied media environment, the _only_ examples reaching me from your country are all the worst. I suspect what’s going on is that the Christians I’d agree with on sociopolitical issues are the ones who think explicit religion should be kept out of politics, in a secular State with constitutionally guaranteed freedom of religion — on which I agree with them. Perhaps the politicos feel that saying out loud “blaspheming the name of Christ by associating it with hatred.”[DE] wouldn’t garner them any votes. [**]
Similarly, religion only gets into the news here when it’s institutional abuse or corruption. (If it’s not an explicitly religious institution, religious affiliations of the perpetrators are not given.)
[**] Edit: AOC speaking as a person of faith > applause < I withdraw and apologise.
Aren’t Christians “self-selected” just as much?
No, most Christians absorb the religion of their parents and community without giving it a second thought.
the default association “religious … good”
This “default association” exists only in your mind as a straw man.
the _only_ examples reaching me from your country are all the worst.
You mean the only examples you pay attention to are the worst. Come on, don’t pretend you have any kind of disinterested attitude; you despise religion and are constantly looking for excuses to trash it. “Ooh, another pedophile priest — that proves religion is bad!” It’s satisfying for you, but you can’t expect anyone else to take it seriously.
@AntC: I had the same (over)reaction to @JF’s post. I’m very well aware of the trope. Though not of Peretti ugh. I suggest JF reads this testimony at “To then be told that I was lying was devastating.”
Why do you suggest that? I did not say that people who make accusations of sexual abuse should be told they’re lying. I did not say anything even close to that, and of course I don’t believe such a thing.
To remind you, you said, “Perhaps they’ve made it up/though I can’t see why.” I was pointing out that people do sometimes make up accusations and have reasons for doing so. That’s all.
Serious accusations should be taken seriously in the first case. Does not mean taken unquestioningly.
I agree completely.
Accusations, even when made in good faith, can be complicated. I was accused, not so many years ago, of making an inappropriate pass at a former student. It was entirely a misunderstanding, not on my part or the student’s part, but on the part of her mother, who was there to celebrate her daughter’s recent graduation. The student and I had become pretty good friends, and she asked me to let her know the next time I went to Friday night karaoke, since she might want to come along. I made the error of offering her a ride to karaoke in front of her mother (with the aside that I figured she would be busy doing family stuff that night). Her mother, not understanding the background, made a furious complaint to my department chair that I was trying to seduce her daughter.
@Brett
Maybe next time lose the cigar, the Humphrey Bogart accent (even without this, calling the student “Toots” or “Sweetheart” would probably raise maternal suspicions), and the twinkle in the eye.
I think the thing about Phony Stark claiming to be on the autism spectrum boils down to a conflation of empathy and sympathy. Empathy is the ability to understand how other people feel, and how; sympathy is caring about how other people feel. These are separate abilities. The classic sociopathic manipulator understands exactly how you feel and how to get you to feel something else, and mercilessly exploits that knowledge for personal benefit. That’s empathy without sympathy. Conversely, my sympathy is deep – once I think I understand what’s going on, and sometimes I just don’t. Musk definitely has a sympathy deficit (I suppose sympathy is mutually exclusive with narcissism), and that can’t be attributed to the autism spectrum.
It used to be “specifically the combined MMR vaccine causes autism”, and that claim comes from a paper published in 1998.
(It’s since been retracted because the data had been freely invented. Andrew Wakefield wanted to sell his separate M, M and R vaccines, so he made shit up.)
By “Catholic upbringing”, do you mean “gone to a Catholic school” or something? I grew up Catholic in a majority-Catholic country and don’t know anyone who was abused. (It did happen, at least elsewhere in the country – scandals came to light later and ended the careers of two archbishops – but not close enough to me for me to notice.)
I have, actually, and didn’t notice anything creepy, FWTW.
…That didn’t age well.