Teamwork

I recall being part of reproducing an experiment in a class in college.  It worked so consistently that the professor had his class repeat it every year. Everyone took that NASA test about being stranded on the moon, ranking the items in terms of what you would take with you. It was a reasoning test: We can't use a parachute, there's no atmosphere.  But wait! We could carry stuff in it. When the results were in, the class was ranked and separated into four groups. The top 25% were put in one group, the next 25% in a second, etc. People were told which quartile they fell in, but were instructed that they were not allowed to share that information with the group. The groups collaborated and took the test again. 

Group B got the best score of all groups, achieving a higher total than any individual, not only in their own group but in the whole class. Pretty cool really.

Groups A & C were about the same, with Group C pretty much holding to the average of its members' scores. They neither helped nor hurt each other much. That score was a significant dropoff for Group A, though. Their group score was worse than any individual score from the top two groups. They made each other worse.

Group D scored even lower together than they had individually, though not by much.

The standard explanation is that the high scorers arrogantly refused to listen to others and insisted on their own way, which depressed team functioning enough to make everything worse.  I would note that significantly, the fact that they did not fall much below the overall average could mean that such groups could go undetected in an organisation for years. And as these things go, observers would notice that Group D was clearly worse and start to develop new policies to correct their mistakes - and make everyone do those things as well, which would depress functioning over at least the top three groups.  Maybe even Group D, which is what they were specifically trying to fix.  But that's another story.

Group B did great when they had that mix of belief that "I am pretty good at this, but other people are better."

I wondered immediately about some other experiments off the same model. What if the top scorers knew they were with other top scorers? Presumably they would be more willing to listen, wouldn't they? What if the worst scorers knew they were in a group together?  Wouldn't that trigger at least one person saying "Okay, we need some very different strategy." Also, this was at an elite school where even the worst scorers were likely to be well above average in intelligence and conscientiousness. Maybe not so hot in other things. What happens when you don't segregate by quartile scores and just mix everyone together, which is more often the case in any job or organisation they are going to be in? The "experiment" looks like it provides valuable insights into human behavior, but it also tells us what we want to hear, so we should be doubly suspicious.

******

As my career developed, it became apparent to me that I had a special ability to rescue dysfunctional teams. I won't bore you with what attributes went into that, but there is an incident that was riveting for me, and allowed me to rethink what I was doing instantly and start applying it. We were multidisciplinary and by program design there had to be a member of each discipline present at the morning staff meeting where we reviewed each patient. Because of this,whenever a team member was out, for example psychology, that department had to send a representative to at least sit in for that day. A particular psychologist had sat in with us for two days and said almost nothing.  But he pulled me aside after and said "This team has plenty of people who can sit around contemplating their navels about each patient and getting into extended discussions about them. You are as good as any of them about that, probably better. (This was pleasant, as I was by far the least-credentialed at the table.) But you leave frustrated every day because the team doesn't come to decisions and you have to flounder for the rest of the day, half-doing three different plans in the hopes that something gets decided tomorrow. Your function, though none of them will admit it, is to be the team leader that forces the group to come to a decision every day.  Are we discharging this patient today? What will be the risks and who will complain? What can we do about that?  Are we discharging them next week?  What does that mean for our capacity?  Who is going to be pissed? Are we actually helping the patient or just avoiding conflicts with other agencies?" He gave some very clear examples from the last two days and the light dawned for me. 

It should be noted over the next thirty years, one marvelous team did not need this in the least and I got to just show up, fill out may forms and make my calls, and banter with that group of geniuses every day, even though these were the most difficult clients in the hospital. But another set of teams, all of which included one particular individual, never became more than functional. She brought out the worst features of everyone she worked with, so that to an outside observer it looked like the whole zoo was out of their cages. But after a year I knew otherwise, and was stuck with her for another seven, as everyone else in my department refused to work with her. 

Byron Auguste of Opportunity@Work, the group that got the State Of Maryland to identify a large percentage of its jobs that did not actually require the listed credentials and drop them - and do outreach to previous job applicants who had been screened out for those credentials, reasoning that that would be heavily weighted toward people who could probably do the job anyway dropped an interesting fact in his interview with Tyler Cowan.  Google has done the data gathering on a huge number of team members and decided that if you have another measure - pretty much any other measure - of the necessary skills for a job, such as conscientiousness, intelligence, ability to get along with others, having a Bachelor's degree provides no additional predictive value, and a Master's degree almost none. Observing what a person is doing in their current job tells you more than any other factor. Does the job require frequent online training? So give them the first three training modules as a test and weight that more than credits or diplomas.

Which makes complete sense and we all knew that. But at every bureaucratic level people apply their own defensiveness, their own prejudices.  HR departments used to be drawn from everywhere in the company, but are now people with degrees in vague subjects who are box-checkers, and they reason "well, it was important for me to have a degree to get this job, because it showed I'm the right sort of person for these important things. Therefore we should require people to have degrees for other important jobs because...well, they're important jobs."  Educators absolutely do the same thing.  I still remember my silent fury at being made to watch the deceptive video "Who Cares About Kelsey?" (It took place in a poor town in NH, so a NH human services agency was their market), when the Wonderful Teachers who had Believed In Kelsey were congratulating her about graduating from Somersworth HS and were hanging around, and one very slyly presented her with a sweatshirt from the local community college, because she was clearly going to need to go further in order to get a Good Job - oh, you know, a job like the one all of us do! Which requires a degree!

Or the woman at my church who was angrily advocating with the State of NH to pass legislation so that nursery school assistants had to complete at least three college courses to keep their jobs.  I asked if there was any evidence that these courses improved their abilities.  She was irritated, and explained to me Very Patiently that of course these course would improve their abilities. She found my unwillingness to be convinced by the "it just stands to reason" argument deeply insulting, as if her credentials were being brought into question as well.  Come to think of it, they were, though I didn't say that.  Nice lady, but a Master's in Education is more likely to be damaging than helpful.  I applaud pursuing the degree when it is someone who knows that this is how the system works and is gaming it for their benefit.  But I certainly don't respect it as an achievement. 

Degrees are like licensing, a less-obvious but even more deadening imposition on the system than the notorious stories about hair-braiding licenses.  There is a bait-and-switch (or motte-and-bailey) argument about MDs and civil engineers needing credentials that gets applied to a hundred other areas where there is no evidence at all.

One more thing. Managers and employers complain that employees resist learning new skills, while employees overwhelmingly say they would love to learn new skills but are uncertain which ones are the best to pursue. Let me take a guess at what is happening there, having spent forty years in a state bureaucracy.  Managers get so irritated at employees who "resist change" and need to be trained and retrained on new stuff. They interpret this as an unwillingness to learn new skills and accept change.  But what they are forcing down their throats is seldom new skills.  It is new procedures, new policies, cool stuff to change their attitudes about how ignorant and evil everyone has been for the last hundred years.  Maybe it is a change to a new app, which at least has a chance of being a new skill - though it usually isn't, just a new way to fill in the boxes and decide where the information will be sent.

Okay, rant over.  If I had more to say, I'll put it elsewhere.

Graphic Design

Okay, so everyone must have noticed, but did people comment on the obvious right out loud in those days?

Related: Mike Ditka's first Viagra commercial, throwing a football through a suspended tire swing.

Newborn

The newborn with the heart condition from Juneau, medevaced to Anchorage and then waited for a clear airport, a bed, and then a surgery in Seattle came through the procedure just fine yesterday. A small percentage of these children need a second surgery when older. Everyone speaks glowingly of Seattle Children's Hospital, we learned. The baby is bsking's nephew, and she assures us that even the snobby doctors at her famous hospital approve highly of SCH. 

Cedar Murph will be returning to Juneau soon, but not imminently. Mother is a nurse practitioner from here in NH - we have known her since before she was born.  Father is from Ketchikan and looks the part of a large, black-bearded Alaskan as much as anyone you've met. Cedar bids fair to turn out...interesting.

Gluten-Free

Now that I pretty clearly need to be gluten-free, though I came to this conclusion kicking and screaming, I figure I will do something other than feel sorry for myself about it. (I have also to be dairy free for all "young" dairy like milk, mozzarella, and yoghurt, though I do fine with butter and aged cheeses.)

My wife has had to be GF for years, and most GF foods just suck. Either the flavor or the texture might be right, but not both.  If you can find a GF food that you'd rate a 4 on a scale of 1-10, buy it in quantity. At least it is a legit version of the food it is supposed to be, even if it's not a good version. So as I have found a few, I thought I would pass them along. 

BTW, I am no longer seeing people make the accusation that this is made up for most people, who are affecting a food sensitivity in order to feel special. That was a thing as recently as two years ago, and someone over at Maggie's was fond of putting up videos about it. I dunno - maybe they wanted to feel special.

GF beer is rare. Gluten-reduced is more common and no good for me, and some of the safe-looking things are malt beverages as the basic alcohol part. Like the hard lemonades, darn it. It's mostly only seltzers and ciders that qualify as GF.  Glutenberg is barely okay and at least tastes like beer, and the IPA is actually not bad. They are having distribution problems at present and it's hard to find. I have to go all the way to Merrimack for it. 

We had GF toast thrown in at a breakfast restaurant and thought it good enough to inquire back to the kitchen who made it. Little Northern Bakehouse makes a variety of breads, and nothing so far rises to the level of being a good piece of bread, but the white sandwich slice is legit. You could make a cheese toast or a turkey salad sandwich with it and not particularly even notice the lack. It's a slice of bread. My wife has been getting 3 Bakers which is edible, but if you try to do french toast it's got absorption issues, and any sandwich had better be strong flavored and not put too much strain on the strength of it. Still, it's usable, though we may just go strong in the LNB direction now. (It's through North America, from British Columbia.)

Gluten pretty much means "gluey" after all, so things like pizza crust (which ordinarily has extra gluten) or a nice chewy bakery loaf are nigh impossible. Gillian's makes a garlic bread that is actually pretty good. It is crisp instead of chewy, but otherwise fine. King Arthur makes a whole line of mixes and tests them extensively, so even their pie crust, a notoriously difficult feat for GF is actually okay. They don't mention what happens if you use lard for the fat, because I think that is just too far out of fashion these days, even in Vermont. I may try it when no one's looking someday. 

Glutino is meh, but the chocolate wafers are okay. Schar is uneven but the chocolate honeygrahams are not a bad cookie. I don't have cookies much, but my wife likes Goody Girl, which does knockoffs of girl scout cookies. Schar does a cracker that is not far off from saltines in taste, but so fragile as to be mostly unusable.

Philly Mort - and Sweaters!

I first learned about the color philly mort in David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed. The list of things I first learned about in that book, which came out in the 1980's, is quite long. It has a cult following at this point. I do think his argument gets weaker the further he gets into the (original) British invasion 1600-1800 of four distinct cultures from the Isles settling the colonies that would become America. Yet it comes up over and over again.

But the color.  It was a Sadd Color, meaning a serious and natural color favored by the puritans in both England and New England. Black and white were for those of elevated station and for more formal occasions, because the dye was expensive and both colors tended to fade and worsen with actual use. So get that myth out of your head right now (along with all the other myths you have about puritans). The puritan peoples were quite fond of "actual use," one of the few things they saw eye-to-eye with the Mid-Atlantic Quakers about.* The list of possible sadd colors at the link is trying to be exhaustive rather than representative, I think. Perhaps I have not been reading the right materials, but I don't think any periwinkle-like gridolin was commonly worn . Even violett looks like "Wait, is that black? Navy?" If one looks at the college colors for the New England colonial Ivies, Harvard's crimson is a dull red, Dartmouth's green a dull green, Yale blue was (until recently) dull, and Brown University was of course, brown. Not very snappy colors.

Browsing the yarns and replica clothing for Plimoth Plantation and reading the hedging and disclaimers I get the strong impression that the modern craftswomen are continually yearning to expand the repertoire of colors and styles and are conferring authenticity on something for suspect reasons.  Of course, the same was likely true of puritan women themselves, and the number of available colors in 1620 was likely considerably less than in 1776. The originals in the Great Migration were an earthy group, so colors like rat, liver, goose turd green, deer, and madder would not have seemed offensive in description. They were being prepared for use, not sale. 

"Philly Mort" was from the French feuille morte (see the word folio in there?) meaning "dead leaf."  Their opinion of what a dead leaf should look like might have changed once they settled in New England, but one still has to find dyes for these things, and the red of the sugar maple in October may not be an easy one to replicate.

A wargaming miniatures forum had a forum contributor who researched the question - now there's a thought, eh? - and discovered the following. The top two colors accord with what I was envisioning, the bottom two were more what my wife was thinking about. After reading the article I feel somewhat vindicated but certainly see her point.

 

This all came up because of the Christmas list, which is always a puzzle for me, as I am very much trying to get rid of things, not acquire them. Now that few places need donated clothes anymore, I wear mine even beyond the point where a homeless person would be insulted to receive them.  More on that in a moment. But I hit upon sweaters, as my aged red sweater is beyond repair and I have long wanted one in philly mort.  LL Bean used to carry them, and preppy sorts would wear them under blazers, but those days are gone. Sadd, as a puritan Donal Trump might say. They'll be back, I imagine. One of those in the top color would be a great treasure, enough that I might specify being buried in it, under the suit coat with the elbow patches.

So I got four sweaters from my children for Christmas, in various permutations of two-out-of-three features I specified: thickness, collar, and color. Having searched through the possibles myself last month, I know they were not going to do better than 2-of-3 for any money, so I am content, and in the manner of presents from children, I have already started to grow fond of them. One is pretty close to #4 above. There are also a magenta and a red-orange could conceivably echo a dead leaf somewhere.

My Favourite Sweater, a dull heather-brown wool I bought in Edinburgh in 1997, went the way of all yarn last year and was put in the trash after my wife (who hated it) bought me another brown heathery wool number. Numerous relatives applauded.

                                                                DECEMBER 2021

The elbows did not have enough good yarn to hold a patch and it is unclear what one would even attempt to do with the frayed collar. In my defense, I did not wear this out in public: just in the yard...or sometimes to the dump. Or, okay I admit it, the hardware store...and whatever errands were near the hardware store. Or to pump gas. Or walk the rail trail. Hardly anyone ever saw me in this. Its most common use was as itchy pajamas on cold nights. I don't understand why the whole family was so unified in their opposition to that sweater.

There was a puzzling present under the tree "To Dave from Santa," which is suspicious because I go by "David." The handwriting was not identifiable. Yet Santa had shown his great affection for me, because there it was, the Favourite Sweater, back from the dead a year later. I clutched it to my breast, exclaiming "It's a Christmas Miracle!" I have worn it to bed every night since opening.

*Another was marking sinners with letters, though the Quakers preferred to brand the letter onto the offenders hand or forehead rather than sew it into their clothes. Yes, really. Though they did drop that early on in America.  They hardly ever do that now, though it may come back in fashion for racism.

Meditations In A Tool Shed

The essay, which I first saw in God In The Dock, is an excellent example of Lewis's ability to take something that I had dimly perceived and even tried to work through a bit as a young man and make it suddenly clear.  It is a homely image, but it captures important philosophical points about perspective and perception. There are different ways of knowing and they reveal to us different things.

Hockey

I am not much of a hockey fan - have only written on it a few times over the years - but I do glance at the standings once in a while and wish the Bruins well. I did have fun writing about team colors long, long ago. This might be the year to pay closer attention. The Bruins are a good deal better than the rest of the league at this point. Being best in Goals For and Goals Against is highly unusual in any sport.

The Media Very Rarely Lies

The Media Very Rarely Lies over at Astral Codex Ten. Scott Alexander shows how the NYT and Scientific American do exactly the same sort of thing as Infowars - not providing context rather than flat-out lying. He then turns and applies this to the censorship debate about misinformation and disinformation

But lots of people seem to think that Infowars deserves to be censored for asserting lots of things like their context-sparse vaccine data claim, but NYT doesn’t deserve to be censored for asserting lots of things like their context-sparse police shooting claim. I don’t see a huge difference in the level of deceptiveness here. Maybe you disagree and do think that one is worse than the other. But I would argue this is honest disagreement - exactly the sort of disagreement that needs to be resolved by the marketplace of ideas, rather than by there being some easy objective definition of “enough context” which a censor can interpret mechanically in some fair, value-neutral way.

How To Lie With Statistics shows up immediately in the comments, which also warmed my heart. I almost gave it to the oldest granddaughter this Christmas, but I think it contains enough abstraction that it would be little fun for at least another year. And it's the sort of thing that I want to be enjoyable at first exposure, precisely because it's so important.

There is an internal link to an SSC post from 2015 about a study he took apart about the perception of required ability versus the actual required ability, and that the study failed to account for the very basic fact that the perception that some activities require special ability might in fact be accurate, and not just a made up stereotype. 

Okay. Imagine a study with the following methodology. You survey a bunch of people to get their perceptions of who is a smoker (“97% of his close friends agree Bob smokes”). Then you correlate those numbers with who gets lung cancer. Your statistics program lights up like a Christmas tree with a bunch of super-strong correlations. You conclude “Perception of being a smoker causes lung cancer”, and make up a theory about how negative stereotypes of smokers cause stress which depresses the immune system. The media reports that as “Smoking Doesn’t Cause Cancer, Stereotypes Do”.

This is the basic principle behind Leslie et al (2015).

I said in another context earlier this evening, about men vs women analysing actions and motivations, that stereotypes tend to be half-true. Both romance and mystery novels include a lot of why people are doing what they are doing, however different they may be in style, and women dominate both genres in both authorship and purchasing. I will think about other types of media consumption to see if the other areas where there is a sharp difference between men and women there is also this element that "why people do what they do" is a prominent piece. Right off the top of my head, literature and psychology majors were predominantly female when I was in school - though that was decades ago.

ACX also has it's typical followup after the discussion of something controversial, Sorry, I Still Think I'm Right About the Media Very Rarely Lying. Which is why I love this guy.  Some of the outrage was predicatble.  It is one thing to say that the NYT and Scientific American don't do the job they should about context and slant, but to even breathe their names in the same paragraph as Infowars is Not Allowed. Well, it's why Alexander is every conservative's favorite liberal.

Cheese

I just got some cheese for belated Christmas, including Norwegian sweet brown cheese.  I like it very much, but it is best served very thin and I don't get much help with it, so it tends to last quite a while here.  I've always meant to put some on the apple pie, and now I've got some. 

Dominion

Ed West over at Wrong Side of History, his substack site gives us The last shall be first and the first last his review of Tom Holland's Dominion, which is itself a sweeping review of how Christianity shaped Western culture, with even secularism being a Christian idea. The young Tom Holland accepted Gibbon's idea that Christianity had ushered in an era of superstition and credulity which only abated during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. The deeper he studied, however, the more he saw that this explanation did not accord with facts so much as preferences, even class preferences.

There were cultural movements that were not immediately visible yet ultimately transformative, such as...

Opposition to female infanticide and divorce made the new religion especially attractive to women, who outnumbered men in the early church. Even women of the lowest class could, absurdly, rise to heights in a way unthinkable in Roman society, even if the price was very high. Blandina, a slave girl in late second century Gaul, was tortured and executed for her faith, and yet with her courage and nobility she had triumphed in death, worshipped in churches where it was said her broken body appeared transfigured. ‘That a slave, “a slight, frail, despised woman”, might be set among the elite of heaven, seated directly within the splendour of God’s radiant palace, ahead of those who in the fallen world had been her immeasurable superiors, was a potent illustration of the mystery that lay at the heart of the Christian faith.’(West's words, with the internal quote being Holland's.)

West covers a lot of territory quickly and seems especially concerned to call into question the assumptions of the chattering classes over the last 200 years, so You know I'm interested straight through. Thanks to Rob Henderson in his year-end post for finding it.

Seeking a Lewis Quote

I recall Lewis discussing his reviewers (it may have been concerning Out of the Silent Planet) and rhetorically asking how many times a writer had to say something before people stopped accusing him of saying its opposite. If you know it, let me know.

Or you could comment on the topic in general, because it is of course interesting in itself.

Buffalo Update - and Other Difficulties

Looks like about three dozen deaths from that blizzard in Buffalo, which we talked about last week. In our fussing over our own inconveniences we forget that some people have life very hard, very suddenly.

I will note that there were no snarky comments to Joe Biden about saying his prayers were with the people in the blizzards. When it is any kind of a gun crime there are many complaints that thoughts and prayers aren't adequate, and even a few who feel obliged to mention that prayers do no good anyway. Strangely absent now. I guess they understand that Common Sense Gun Legislation® will do little to prevent blizzard deaths. About what it will do for the homicide rate. 

The newborn in Alaska did get a bed at Seattle Children's and is scheduled for open-heart surgery tomorrow. It put things in perspective to remember what has happened in most families at one time or another, that it is a great relief to get to have a dangerous procedure done.

Our difficulty is clearly minor, but we keep focus on it because it is ours. One son's return was supposed to be last night, but they were on Southwest and at the moment Saturday is still only a possibility, not a guarantee.

Two By Lewis

“The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own,’ or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life — the life God is sending one day by day.”  Letter to Arthur Greeves, Collected Letters

We must get rid of our arrogant assumption that it is the masses who can be led by the nose.  As far as I can make out the shoe is on the other foot. The only people who are really dupes of their favourite newspapers are the intelligentsia.  It is they who read leading articles: the poor read the sporting news, which is mostly true.  "Private Bates"  Present Concerns (1944)

That Orwell Essay

Canadian author George Case over at Quillette revives George Orwell's essay on inflated, inaccurate writing Politics and the English Language for the thousandth time, but still necessarily so, as stating the obvious continues to be in short supply. He updates the concepts from the 1946 essay taking Orwell's 

Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. ... Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind 

and applying it to such modern phrases as rape culture, in which no identifiable rape, attempted rape, or excusing of rape is produced, but the speaker wants to arouse the same amount of outrage as if one had a basketful of rape kits left over from last weekend's parties. He shows that something similar happens when the word culture is applied to another modern phrase.

cultural genocide seems to be a linguistic device more than an objective phenomenon: by uttering a powerful word but hedging it with a thin qualification, protesters can subtly compare themselves to Jews under Hitler or Cambodians under Pol Pot, winning public support and governmental redress for undergoing mistreatment significantly milder than what the word stands for alone.*

It is unfortunately all to easy to correct such excesses, such as not calling something systemic racism when you mean it is widespread and sometimes subtle. "Systemic" has a meaning, as even I have been able to discern and discuss here, as well as a number of other posts. It is a shorthand for saying we are all to blame, and always - slyly - a call to get many of the current people out and their own people in as the solution. Take power away from these people and give it to these people, that's the ticket. And I myself want a pony when it's all done. Hate/-phobia/denial is another evasive construction that Case calls out. 

He does a good job.  He does well with words because he does well with thinking, which is a great deal of Orwell's point. In every generation lazy thinkers will try to use the juice out of dramatic words without having evidence to justify their inclusion, and our updating of the listings is necessary in every generation as well. I wonder how many of the battles are already lost, however.  I have been railing against the imprecise use of -phobia ans in homophobia, which used to have a specific meaning in clinical psychology, since the 1980s.  It doesn't mean that we have to just shrug and start using it ourselves, because a rearguard action even during a long defeat not only has nobility and honor, but real use in reminding people about precision. Yet perhaps our energy would be put to better use finding newer phrases that can be strangled in the cradle. There will always be new phrases that are cheats, attempting to use strong words in defense of weak ideas, but we can at least make them work for it.

Ann Althouse and Glenn Loury are people who notice new usages early in their life-cycle and raise the proper questions: Is this word justified? Is it true? Have we seen it used legitimately in other contexts? Is it ungainly and ugly?  

If you have favorites you can use the spot here.

*It is often noted that using some words as adjectives is always a red flag, such as "social," which used to be a good word but is now mostly emotion, while some nouns are suspect whenever they are modified, such as "justice." Suggesting that "social justice" is particularly deceitful - which it is.

Subscriptions

I still have free one-month subscriptions to Razib Khan's substack if anyone is interested. I think he gave me more because I moved the first three along so quickly. I just need your email, either here or to wymanhome/comcast or asstvillageidiot/gmail

Good King Wenceslas

 The "feast of Stephen" is St Stephen's Day, in case the obvious eluded you, as it did me for years.

But was he real? we ask in our 21st C voices. Did he actually exist? There is record of his life from a few decades after his purported reign (as a Duke or Prince, probably not a king in Bohemia in the 10th C), and even more there is record of his death around 927. 

Well okay, but was he notably Christian?  More than those around him? We ask the wrong question.  The writers of songs, histories, poems, and epics were not focused on their subject but on their many audiences. To tell a story of a good king was to declare to both royalty and subjects what a Good King should be like.  You found a likely candidate, who had been declared a saint or had a cult springing up around him or inspired some large collection of people and you imbued him with all the good qualities. Wenceslas was reported to have diverted a battle to a single combat between himself and another local ruler. His motive might have been vainglory, or tactical because he thought himself the superior fighter or his army the inferior force, but what got passed on is that he wanted to spared his retinue, each of whom he loved dearly, from any bloodshed, taking it upon himself instead. Not because there was any evidence that this was true, but because that is what a really good king was supposed to do, and the composers of legends wanted to make that point so that other kings would take that point.

Christianity was a bit of a chancy thing in that part of Europe. It was his grandfather who supposedly converted and his parents founded churches in Prague, but still the rumors persisted that some of them remained pagan.  Getting baptised and going to Mass regularly and saying nice things about Jesus and the Church usually qualified you for being regarded as Christian, no matter what your other actions were. As it was in the days of Lot, who mostly only got one thing right, figuring out which god he was going to point to at key moments.

To those of us who have studied history this seems sloppy, however quaint and romantic it might be.  We would consider it beneath us to treat history this way. We want TRUTH, dammit.

Oh yeah? JFK anyone? Civil War Generals? Gandhi? Einstein? Have we ever wanted the truth? And each era does so well at casting out the myths of the previous ones - in order to make room on the shelf for its own.

On Small-d Democrats

"I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that every one deserved a share in the government. The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true. . . . I find that they’re not true without looking further than myself. I don’t deserve a share in governing a hen-roost, much less a nation. . . . The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters."  CS Lewis, Present Concerns 

Rene Girard

All of a sudden I am seeing this name I know nothing about show up everywhere, enough so that young people with pretensions will be tempted to look wise and say "Oh sure, Girard.  I had to read him in college and I just loved his insights but I haven't really kept up with him. Oh there's a new book out about mimetic desire?  I'll have to get that.  That was one of the things he was known for" when they have in fact never heard of the guy before and are just guessing.  I was pretty good at that kind of treading water back in the day, but have come to accept that I have not only not read 50% of what I should, I haven't read 10%, and I can let it go. 

But from context of the references I was seeing I could tell I 'd bet I would like this guy and thus made guesses and then looked him up to see how close I had gotten.  He is mostly only known to academics but has been penetrating, well somewhere.  People I read, anyway. 

So in the spirit of Pierre Bayard's How To talk About Books You Haven't Read (which I actually have read, ironically, and wrote about in 2015), I give you Rene Girard, French philosopher of anthropology.

His idea is that as social creatures, we do not want things because we see them as objects and think "Oh, I think I would like that," but because we see other people using them and want to imitate their joy/satisfaction/prestige/whatever. The mind rebels against such accusations.  We like to think we are more independent in our thoughts, but we certainly see that this observation seems to be true for lots of other people and so...uggh, maybe it applies to ourselves as well.

I have counterexamples which immediately spring to mind WRT my own desires, so I am quite confident that Girard's observation is not entirely true about all of us all the time. Still, I admit that there may be far fewer exceptions to this than any of us would like to believe. It is part of our base personalities since childhood, after all, which we see when we are no longer children ourselves but observe toddlers who suddenly want a toy they were not interested in once another child picks it up from their pile of discards, or watches a 19 y/o girl start affecting the anti-fashions of the girls in their 20s who "couldn't give a fig about fashion"®. 

Tangent: I saw a teenager with her mother at the store today wearing a black cape and thought "When I was that age, I would have fallen in love with that girl on sight. Five years later I would have inquired after her with moderate interest. Now...she drains energy out of me just to look at her." 

It is not just that we want things because others have them, however.  That is only the simplified foundation of our desires. We are finely attuned to not only the type of people having the pleasure - are they the sort of people who are enough like us that we might have this pleasure as ell - but what type of pleasure are they having, and do we want that ourselves. We see people enjoying large family gatherings but know ourselves to be people who are not as drawn to many connections that carry implied obligations even if the temporary enjoyment of them is considerable. To take a physical example, we do not like holding babies for more than a few moments, or to be polite and declaring our solidarity with the rest of the cousins. We recognise that others want to get a fourth or fifth turn at holding the baby, but that is not us.

The idea came to him as a young man, and thus unsurpirisingly when one is young, because he fell in love.

When he was in early twenties, René Girard got his first glimpse into the structure of desire. During his university studies in France, he fell in love. After a short and intense period of courtship, he settled down into a stable relationship with his girlfriend. Then things changed in an instant. His girlfriend asked him if he wanted to get married.Right away, he experienced a decrease in desire. He quickly backed off. It wasn’t long before he ended the relationship.She accepted it, went her own way, and began dating other men.Then, suddenly, he was drawn back to her again. He noticed something that he found curious—and troubling. The more she denied herself to him, the more he wanted her.

He observed that she was both the object and mediator of his desire, and began forming a philosophy around this, Mimetic Desire. 

How French, I hear you saying. Yes, exactly.

Girard expands this outward to larger anthropological issues. If we want what others like us want, those desires will converge, and we - Our Selves or Our Tribe -  will tend to want the same thing that other selves or tribes want, in a self-reinforcing dance. This can lead to all sorts of animosity, even violence. But at this point I would actually have to start knowing something, so i pass it over to you, to decide whether you want any more of him or not.

Six To Eight Black Men

 

Magi Retrospective

James has a brief story, and links to a poem by Eliot. What must the Magi have thought years later?

It reminds me also of Simeon, who was told he would not see death until he had seen the Messiah. Tradition pictures him as old and at the Temple every day, a mirror of Anna the prophetess. But that doesn't have to be so.  He could have been thirty and had a regular job, but that day was quietly impelled to go to the Temple.  Most importantly, he might not have been expecting a baby at all and smiled at the joke God had played on him that day. Some of the shepherds may have lived long and wondered if this Jesus was the same one they had visited thirty years before.