Martyn Joseph

We went to a benefit concert Friday night at which he was the headliner.  I liked him very much at first, but by the end was not so impressed.  I looked Saturday for a video to embed, and rapidly decided I didn't like the songs that much.  By Sunday morning I was remembering the irritating things he said more than the clever ones, and the lyrical complexity just seemed showy and shallow.

It's worth looking at this from a couple of angles.

First, it was a benefit concert - he gave his time and the other performers gave their time, as did the organisers.  We gave, but they gave more. I should respect the effort for a good cause, and perhaps not be so ready to be critical. So hats off to him for that - you don't catch me doing my profession for free very often.

Still, the performance is what it is and stands or falls on its own merits.  Further, the choice of this performer says something about those who invited him, and why they thought he would appeal to a middle-aged Christian audience.*

Hmm.  Begin at the beginning.  He is a folksinger with an attacking style. New Englanders might remember Jaime Brockett, but Phil Ochs, Barry McGuire, or Dave Van Ronk would be more widely known. He is vocally aggressive, aggressive in his guitar style, and lyrically aggressive.  He's good at all three.  He has that easy way of interacting with an audience that coffeehouse performers developed when they were up close, and modified only slightly when they got to the high stage. He also has a Welsh accent, and anything from GB seems to work for American folk audiences that way.  It had been a while since I'd experienced that, and it was exhilarating at first.

But then that was all.  There were some clever turns of phrase and internal rhymes, but when you really boiled down the lyrics, it was pretty much "Lots of things suck.  It would be better if people were nice to each other."  True, but not profound.  He did do a nice story-song, rather Harry Chapinish, toward the end that seemed to teach that kindnesses have meaning and sometimes have enormous consequences.

 

I have seen this before, usually among people within a decade of my own age, this deep response to a certain intensity couple with similar social values, becoming somewhat confused with Christian belief.  Not that they are unaware of theological distinctions and the faith as taught, but that they think this is all related somehow – the Next-Best-Thing.  There are lots of variations of this.  On the Right, patriotism and/or traditionalism get treated as if they are related phenomenon.  Again, not that decent and informed Christians can’t tell that the gospel is not the same thing, but that they think it’s a first cousin.

Worse, there are also people who seemingly can’t tell the difference, who think that patriotism, or folksingers who care about injustice, are actual siblings to Christianity.  There are emotional responses that are taking the place of clear-headed belief.  I have heard a pastor – a very intelligent and well-trained one who is presumably able to make theological distinctions – declare that the U2 concert he attended affected him as a religious experience.  I point out for emphasis that he did not immediately recoil and say “Whoa, I have to look at what is happening in my head and heart here.  That’s crazy talk.”  He said it as evidence that a U2 concert is a valid spiritual experience.  Because it felt good. (He didn’t put it as bluntly as my last sentence.  He described his emotions poetically and with intensity, using words like “profound,” and “connection” - but void of clear intellectual content. It felt good, no more.) The power of being part of a temporary community, all feeling the same thing together, was the ticket.

It troubles me because so many get sucked in to their own cultural nostalgia, their own comfiness, when someone pushes the right buttons. I am apprehensive not because I believe community unimportant and doctrinal differences an excuse to cut ourselves off.  On the contrary, I believe community is at the center of the gospel, far more than checking off the boxes on the Four Spiritual Laws, and because of that, dislike this imitation.

Both Nicodemus and the rich young ruler had some claim of being in the same community as Jesus.  They shared a lot of similar ideas. The major parties of Zealots, Essenes, Pharisees, and (less so) Sadducees all offered community, and appealed to fellow Jews on that basis. They were the patriots and the folksingers and affirming congregations of their day.  Jesus was pretty harsh on them, harsher than on people who were farther removed from the center, such as Romans or Samaritans.

*They might have been expecting a different demographic, but that's what they got.

Invasion Of Privacy

Retriever sent along this NYT story about Harvard administrators reading the emails of Resident Deans, lecturers who are not tenure-track professors.

Follow closely.  The initial outrage seems to be about "creepy" electronic surveillance and invasion of privacy.  Yet as you read on, you find that it would generally be okay to do that to staff, but not faculty - and profs are considering Resident Deans faculty in this instance.

Wow.  You can think it's allowable that an employer reads the emails on its account (as is true where I work), or you can think email should be private.  But to think it's okay to read the emails of some employees - I mean, who cares, really? - but not others, that's some entitlement.

Madness

Garfield assassin Charles Guiteau, though clearly mentally ill, was not found to be so at the time.  This may have had something to do with the usual public anger and desire for swift justice that usually accompanies such events.  Yet the arguments actually put forth at the time revolved around his ability to plan and control his actions.  A person who could do that could not be "really" insane, they thought.  I recall that theory still being advanced when Hinckley shot Reagan as well.  He's not crazy.  He knew what he was doing. One would think that mad scientist movies, if nothing else, would have disabused folks of that notion.

Yet more fascinating to me were the arguments by Dr. Edward Charles Spitzka, an expert witness who testified in favor of the belief that Guiteau was insane.

Guiteau had "the insane manner" he had so often observed in asylums, adding that Guiteau was a "morbid egotist" who "misinterpreted and overly personalized the real events of life.

Psychiatrists were called alienists in that era, and he was one of the few in America.  He had studied in Vienna, bringing the empiricism of that school to the model more popular in America and England at the time, of seeking a mechanism and theory of illness first. (That conflict between approaches seems to have been part of all branches of medicine for centuries.) I browsed his work Insanity: Its Classification, Diagnosis, and Treatment because it seemed so thoroughly in the camp of understanding of mental illness as a brain disorder, likely heritable, that went so out of fashion a few decades later.

One of the arguments people still try to use in defending Freud and his theories is that he came upon the infant field of understanding behavior and the mind when it was still inchoate, backward, and terra incognita. Of course he wouldn't get things completely right, but he brought science and insight to a field in which virtually nothing was known, etc. For this he should still be treasured and applauded, they say.  And, they assure us, many of his insights are still valid, and we can't go back to the Bad Old Days before people dared talk about (s.e.x.) can we?

Yet here we have clear evidence of something approaching recent understanding of mental illness, not only appearing in the literature decades before Freud and thus available to him, but being taught in Vienna. Freud did not merely interrupt the development of psychiatry, he actively set it back.  Sigmund could not have done so without the complicity of the society around him, especially in European intellectual circles.  But there it is - he was something of an intellectual menace, putting forth theories that people wanted to be true.

Infographic

Physician's Weekly's most recent poster has an infographic on rates of diabetes by state. That one is still behind the wall so I can't post it, but it's pretty similar to this one from 2007.

This is largely a map of percentage black or hispanic by state.  Not entirely - West Virginia is a notable outlier there - but the dramatic coloring would be milder if we allowed for that.  In fact, the dramatic coloring is itself pretty deceptive anyway.  From 12th place to 45th is only a swing from 7.8% to 5.8% (more recent numbers and a slightly different definition).

I think that's ultimately unfair and even dangerous to African-Americans and Hispanics. Less so to whites, but them also.  The idea that where you live (with all the hidden assumptions about culture) is a big part of the problem isn't going to help you much.  I have been hearing good PSA's quite explicitly reminding AA's that they have a higher risk, but then memorable visuals like this one undo that good.

Food culture is different by region, and that is indeed a real thing being measured here. But genetics seems to play a larger role, which you would never dream if you just looked at the map.

Autism

Young friends have just been given a solid diagnosis for what they suspected: their young son - I think Max is around two - has autism. There are folks here who can advise me what is best to say and do at this point.

Nutella

Retriever passes along the proximate cause of the moral downfall of the children of the 1%: Nutella. I first had the spread on crepes at the Princessa Margherita restaurant in Transylvania in 1998. Son #4 was seriously addicted at one point.

Torah and West Bank

We have a new commenter here that most of you may not have seen much of, because he has been browsing and commenting on some of the archival posts.  The way to a blogger's heart is through his archives, as the Talmud points out.

So. Luke Lea, who I have seen commenting over at the HBD sites, passes along this older article which I liked, The Torah and the West Bank. It touches not only on that tight subject, but the whole expanse of how we are to read Scripture, including competing texts that point in parallel, or even different directions.  I didn't know it was older until well into the essay.  Even after reading the name Meir Kahane I only thought "Really?  He's still around?  Who knew?"  Many paragraphs later I looked up at the top of the essay and saw that it comes from 1987.  That's the sort of important detail that aids understanding, eh?

Or not.  The general principles hold, and it provides the sort of conclusion I have an attraction to:  the moderates turn out to be the real keepers of the ancient understandings, while the supposed extreme fundamentalists turn out to be following some newer understanding that is old to them, but not actually from the foundation.

Route 10, Route 11

Those who followed my studying where old NH Rte 28 went before they put in the new version in the 1950's may remember how fond I am of the tricks for noticing spots where the old routes lay.  I found a few on the western half of 101 last summer.

Visiting friends in Elkins, recently, I saw the standard clues of a nearly-parallel side road ending in a built embankment, with the telephone poles running on ahead anyway next to Route 11, which traverses NH east-west in very winding fashion about a third of the way up. I checked the current and older USGS maps at home and sure enough, that road was considerably straightened in the 1950's.  Some side sections along the way are even named Old Route 11 - about as nice a confirmation as one could hope for.

Somehow at night in the rain I noticed the sudden disappearance of telephone poles on Route 10 near Marlow, and checked that road as well.  That road runs all the way from Connecticut and was called the College Highway well back into the 19th C. I vaguely recalled having heard that years ago. In NH it was called Dartmouth College Road No. 10.  I can't find many places where that one has been straightened, according to the map.  I had stumbled on one of the few.

Hate Groups II

I noticed that SPLC provides essentially the same type of information about these hate groups as the hate groups gather about the folks they're suspicious of.  They report alarming quotes from people they assure us are representative of the group, and tell us about meetings that were held.  A lot is said by implication, with unflattering photos,

interruption:

Look at the lead photos here.  I'm not saying they aren't accurate, that they
aren't actual pictures of people from some group or another they call a hate group, but can't we imagine that the KKK could find alarming, angry photos of
black leaders, or National Socialists find some crafty-looking, hook-nosed Jew?  Wouldn't such incitement offend us, causing us to not bother to read further?

return

-references to the terrible things some member or leader has done in his personal life, and in some cases, in pretty isolated context.  There's a lot of expectation that quotes speak for themselves, because the worst possible interpretation is the true one.  Details are left out and logical connections not made.  For example, the SPCL reported that National Socialists had a demonstration in a black neighborhood in Toledo.  The residents and countrprotesters rioted, causing $300K damage.  I can see a line of reasoning where you blame this on the inciters, on the provocation. But once you go there, you have to say that Dr. King and the others should never have marched, because they knew the likely result it would provoke.  It's hard to decide which is more unamerican, saying something hateful, or rioting because someone said something hateful.

This is getting roundabout.  What I am trying to ask is what is the measurable difference?

One difference is that when the SPLC issues a press release, it's reported on the news - which is what sparked these two posts.

Paul Radulescu, Baritone

Paul was a friend of the Lucaciu's, our friends who founded the orphanage and clinic in Beius, Romania where we did went for short-term missions, and where we found sons three and four.



If you think he fills a room with that voice in a Chicago auditorium, you should hear it - unexpectedly - in a small peasant church in Romania. A wonderful guy, and I wish I had been able to have more conversations with him than the few I did.

Hate Groups

The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that far-right hate groups are showing "explosive" growth, similar to what we saw just before the Oklahoma City bombings, because Obama is black and many immigrants are non-white.  No, really, that's what the article says, though they probably wouldn't like it that I summarised it that way.

There are 8 times more of these groups than in 2008. 813% increase.

And yet, we have not seen the country descend into increasing violence. Huh. Unexplainable.

Digging deeper, state by state, we find that New Hampshire has six of these groups, including the "Radical Traditional Catholic" Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and IHM Media.  I've written about them before (disagreeing with them rather strenuously), and the first thing for sale on their website is, chillingly, "Joining Eucharistic Worship with Devotion to Mary." Yeah, and check out the revolving photos on that first site, eh?  Wouldn't want to see any of those characters coming at you in a dark alley.  Those Feenyite kids are killers, you can see it in their eyes.

There's a Crew 38 group mentioned, but no location, not even a town.  I hadn't heard of them, but they've got 100 likes on Facebook - that would be worldwide - so you know they're an army-and-a-half.  National socialists - again, no town.  But it's the largest neo-nazi group in the country, with 61 chapters, though the number of uh, individuals is strangely absent, even in estimate, from the SPLC site. So we don't know how many of 'em there are in NH.  Best to be cautious and assume the storm is just about to break. Same with the Empire Knights of the Ku Klux Klan out in Dover.  They have zero web presence, so they must be part of that Dark Web I keep hearing about.  I was out in Dover today.  I should have asked around, but I would likely have had better luck in South Berwick.

Finally there's the South Africa Project, a group with some pretty ugly views from, well, South Africa. What are the odds, there, eh? They seem to be planning to...well, I can't find any plans, just a lot of complaining that Winnie and Nelson Mandela are murderers - batting one for two - and communists - two for two.  The group seems especially upset that they, and president Jacob Zuma, have sung the song "Kill the Boer" publicly.  And who wouldn't really? Sing the song, I mean.

I can't find any connection of the group to NH, but there must be something, otherwise no one would have mentioned it.  Maybe they're having membership problems since Zach quit in 2009 when his wife had a baby, Stephan moved to Florida, and the knuckleheaded brothers Hans and Lou joined the military. And oh yeah, Bill is doing time for having too much oxycontin out in the barn.

Be vewwy vewwy afwaid.

Spectrum of Belief

Audacious Epigone has nice pie-charts worked out measuring belief in God across many groups.  The usual suspects, he calls them, which is about right. 

Nothing shocking, to my mind, though there were a few oddities I didn't have immediate theories for, such at the absence of atheists among Native Americans.  Anyone who plays with these kinds of questions is aware that definitions are slippery, not so much because the questions aren't asked well, but because many people really don't think very clearly about such matters, including those he rates by wordsum as Really Smart.  Many of those who describe themselves as "firm believers" and think of themselves as Christian may actually be congenitally truculent believers in some second-cousin to any traditional trinitarian faith.  Alternatively, "uncertain believers" may be those who hedge their bets even when quite sure, and "agnostics" may include those who don't much care about the question either way, rather than those who have an opinion on the possibility of knowledge.

Now that the fun surveys have come out - much loved by preachers this year - that even some atheists pray, you can't even count on that as a clean category.  Still, the breakdowns probably represent something real, and relatively close to the categories listed.

When these numbers are run and posted, there is sometimes an agenda behind that, such as attempting to show that a majority of even the smartest people believe, or its counterpunch, that fewer people are firm believers as one moves up the intelligence and educational scales. (I don't know if AE is trying to make some such point, BTW.)  I would like to offer one complicating factor that I have never seen mentioned: that intelligent a/o educated people are more likely to question just about anything, including their current positions.  In my experience there are intelligent atheists who question their own atheism at times, and agnostics who wonder if they are really just avoiding thinking hard.  There are uncertain believers who wonder in both directions - whether their uncertainty is a halfway point to disbelief, to strong belief, or their natural dwelling.  And, even those who eventually decide they have firm belief may have days when it all looks very doubtful.

Of all the results, the one that should concern believers is the breakdown by age.  I think the gradual abandonment of firm belief and even uncertain belief in favor of atheism or agnosticism among the young is a real trend, and I don't see any factors that will reverse it.  Popular preachers and contemporary Christian musicians to the contrary, I don't think believers acting like believers, darn it, will amaze the world and bring revival to this land.  While some are drifting (or marching) away for some reasons that we might recognise as logical even if we disagreed with them, most young people are leaving because we are out of fashion. There have been ages when faith was in fashion (and thus consequently a mile wide and an inch deep), and it goes in and out of fashion among various groups. The next groundswell of fashion is likely underway and not visible to folks like me who aren't deeply embedded in modern culture.  But for the time being, we will continue to be the Tyrolean hats of the belief world. (Unless those have recently come back?  In which case, porkpie hats.)

Math Textbooks

James commented over at Grim's Hall on one of Texan99's posts - we are clearly some small but excellent node of the internet here - about HS geometry textbooks, and it reminded me of Richard Feynman's experience advising about same in 1964.

Changes In The Immigration Debate

Steve Sailer has a piece about Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Jordan's commission on immigration in 1994.  As with so many debates in this country, look what has changed in less than 20 years. That the good of our own current citizens counted for more than those knocking at the door - citizenism - was considered automatic.  That exceptions were to be made mostly in the case of special skills in short supply was also generally accepted.  In the 1990's it was noted that the distinction between legal and illegal immigration was eroding in the public mind, and this was held to be the fault of poor enforcement, not because opponents were bigots who hated all immigrants.  I don't recall even hearing that argument until the late 1990's, in fact.  It came to the fore uncomfortably a few years later when the husband of a woman at our church made that claim publicly.  He was an immigration attorney, originally from Chile himself, and made the accusation in relation to the actions of a police department in the southern part of the state.

He did not state that some people who claimed to be against illegal immigration were only using it as a cover for their dislike of all immigrants; in a letter to the Concord Monitor, he declared categorically that all people claiming to be opposed to illegal immigration were lying, covering for their bigotry against all immigrants.

As someone who had just spent thousands of dollars bringing two immigrants into my family, who had worked resettling refugees, I found this deeply insulting.  I didn't mention it to his wife, and wondered for some time what I might say if he came to some function at the church.  As they were activist sorts, I feared he might even want to address us on that issue at some time.  His wife taught adult Sunday School, and spouses who were not actual believers did speak at seminars occasionally.  She was a very nice woman, but quite liberal in her politics, and these sorts of unconsciously offensive statements would sometimes come from her mouth as well.  She remains one of my best examples of nice liberals who simply don't hear themselves.  They are used to social groups where such beliefs about those who disagree with them are matter-of-fact.  Opponents do not have values they don't share or logical points they don't agree with.  Opponents are ignorant, or prejudiced, or badly-raised. They don't want to yell at them or be mean to them, and they are willing to gradually and patiently teach those poor benighted others. Nice people. With horribly bigoted attitudes that they are unaware of.

She eventually left the church because we were not welcoming toward homosexuals - by which she meant of course, that we did not actively denounce the historical Christian teachings on the subject.  Not that she saw it that way.  She was a nice person, she tried to say this gently and politely.  That it might be she who is prejudiced would simply not occur to her, and accusations of same disregarded. (Another similarly-insulting spouse - perhaps coincidentally also a lawyer - prevailed upon his wife to leave the church a bit later.  It is likely that my mild pushback to one of his statements was the proximate cause.)

Conservatives say similar things to liberals, of course, perhaps especially in churches where they feel they are "among their own" and not expecting that anyone present disagrees.  But I never noticed that happening - conservatives would make statements, even pronouncements, that might have been uncomfortable to listen to - yet not general attacks on character.

Plus, the irony is greater because it is tolerance that is supposedly one of the highest values, and standing against bigotry one of the greatest acts.

Much Better

Chatter

The country's most popular VBS curriculum company may do many things well. Perhaps distribution, or age-appropriateness, or choice of music, or whatever. My granddaughter seemed to like "Sky" last year, at least the music and crafts.  But the dialogue in their videos is not merely bad, but stunningly so. Bad enough that one has to stop and listen and analyze "What exactly is it about this approach that makes it so terrible?"

Our Bible study group had five families writing skits every Christmas for two decades.  Every single one of them had better dialogue.

My daughter-in-law noticed that Chatter's videos were somewhat better a decade ago.  "Maybe they had better student interns that year," she laughed.  But even then, not good.  Those who have followed Sunday School and church camp materials over the years will recognise one standard horror: the insistence on inserting a particular theological lesson into the content whether it fits or not. (What?  You don't think it's important that children know they can talk to Jesus when they're afraid? Are you saying we shouldn't teach them that God loves them?)  The expression is stilted as well.

This is why Veggie Tales took over the North American Christian Ed departments for a generation beginning around 1997.  They could write, and do plenty of stuff with animated facial expressions and voices.  VT was plenty didactic, and not entirely immune from forcing things at times, but the touch was much lighter.

Still, I may have it entirely wrong.  Just because it rings false to me doesn't mean it doesn't work for kids.  I similarly groused in Romania about the use of flannelgraph stories, a Sunday School staple from my childhood.  The Romanian children, in contrast, seemed to like them just fine.  Yet I am reminded that CS Lewis had a particular horror or writing in a patronising manner to children.  In his On Three Ways Of Writing For Children he deplores giving children what we do not like but think they will.

Anthropocene

January's Smithsonian magazine has an article in it's "Time" series whether we should declare a new geologic era and name it after ourselves. The thinking is, human beings have changed the planet enough to warrant re-conceiving how we describe the eras of the earth.

A stratigrapher at SUNY, Whitney Austin, thinks it's ill-defined and "more about pop culture than hard science." I not only concur, I'll go him one better.  Note paragraph six of the article:

Some Anthropocene proponents concede that difficulty. But don’t get bogged down in the mud, they say, just stipulate a date and move on. Will Steffen, who heads Australia National University’s Climate Change Institute and has written articles with Crutzen, recommends starting the epoch with the advent of the industrial revolution in the early 1800s or with the atomic age in the 1950s. Either way, he says, the new name sends a message: “[It] will be another strong reminder to the general public that we are now having undeniable impacts on the environment at the scale of the planet as a whole, so much so that a new geological epoch has begun.”

"...sends a message"..."general public"..."undeniable"...

I am not seeing how this differs from The science is plastic. What's important is that people are taught to agree with our viewpoint.

Texting

I have gone on facebook, in order to comment on my sons' sites under my own name, not Tracy's. While I have had a cell phone little-used in the car for a long time, I am now carrying a cell phone and using it. I have decided there is one enormous advantage that texting has. People have to get to the point. Wish I could use that at work. This does sometimes result in messages from the teenager that seem curt or demanding, but we are learning to draw a deep breath around those.

Dogged By The Dark

Via a Bible-study friend whose son-in-law is finishing up graduate studies at Notre Dame, comes this essay about depression, joy, and the existences of God from the Notre Dame Magazine. For most of us, it is a simple lesson that we nonetheless have to keep relearning. I think that is by design.

Upworthy

Via Maggie's a very discouraging post from Legal Insurrection. Discouraging, because I have nothing like the skills needed to combat this sort of politics. This is how we watch the world get away from us.