Word As Sacrament

The highschool my older sons went to was attached to a Baptist church.  I recall being there in the quiet after hours one time – after a play rehearsal or a program, perhaps - noticing how the sanctuary was set up.  There was a table with a large open Bible in the front.  A spotlight from the ceiling was focused on it; no other lights.  I wondered what a visitor from Mars would think about this particular religion. It’s not the first time I have mentioned bibliolatry, the worship of the book, as an evangelical problem. I am certainly not the first.

It occurred to me this weekend that evangelicals have a similar view of Bible reading that Roman Catholics have of sacraments – that good things happen to you from the mere act. Ironically, that is what evangelicals often criticise first about the liturgical churches, especially the RCC – that they recite the same things without understanding them and think they receive grace from the Eucharist whether they are working hard at worship or not.  Evangelical, and especially fundamentalist focus on daily devotional reading can at times be no more than an insistence that eyes hit the page. Our heart isn’t always in daily disciplines, but we carry on anyway, trusting in God’s grace through the hard parts. Well, okay, but that’s sorta like centuries of mothers with small children barely making it through Mass, isn’t it?  Just show up.

Note that not only does Jesus not do this – one could argue that The Word doesn’t need the word – but neither do John the Baptist, the Apostles, Paul, or any other NT figure. Or OT figure, come to think of it.  I think the confusion of the word with The Word was fed by the general, more secular admiration or even worship, or books themselves.  Where they were rarest were the very times and places that word-for-word literalist Bible was most common. The American frontier comes to mind.

³ You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.

Thomas Nagel

After being reminded over at Maggie's about the controversy and criticism of philosopher Thomas Nagel, I asked a young philosophy prof at church if he had any insight what was driving the vituperation. He put me on to an article over at The Chronicle of Higher Education, Where Thomas Nagel Went Wrong.

The quick summary would be that Nagel believes evolution has a direction, a "natural teleology" in favor of complexity.  But he neither makes much of a case for that, nor references other modern thinkers who share that view.  Those who do not share that view, then, have pretty easy pickings with his newest work Mind And Cosmos.

Nagel's most famous work What is It Like To Be A Bat? was linked by Bird Dog, but I'm putting it in as well.  I had never read it before. It is a criticism of reductionism from 40 years ago, and quite interesting.  Though Nagel is an atheist, there are echoes of CS Lewis's criticism of naturalism at the outset of Miracles here.

Onomastics - The Women's Names You Will Be Hearing

I was looking up Kyle's pal Michele Tremblay, who is one of the top female HS soccer players in the country, to see what is being said about her nationally.  I didn't find much of that, but I did find a list of the 150 top players in the class of 2014.  Female soccer player's names are a good proxy for the most fashionable names for driven, upwardly-mobile girls, wouldn't you think? It will slant a tad to the athletic and masculine types, as opposed to the writing/artistic, math & science,  and music cohorts who will also have their say in ruling us, yet I think the list is likely to be representative.

The big winner?  The many variations of Alex.  There are in fact a disproportionate number of A-names, with the many Abby's and Allysons added in.  The continued fashionableness of variant spellings of names continues to irritate me as pure affectation.  But this seems to be the culture we have, and mothers across America clearly disagree with me.

Notice also how few have hyphenated surnames.  I would have expected more.

Small Groups

Jonathan, who grew up in the shadow of his family's powerful small group, and who has run a small group of his own more recently, asks a provocative question:  Are small groups bad for the Christians who are in them and their children?

Ayn Rand and CS Lewis

Ben sends along a First Things article about the marginalia in Rand's copy of CS Lewis's The Abolition of Man. The thing I notice is that she does not actually understand what he wrote.  She writes some pretty good refutations of things he didn't say.

Lewis wrote elsewhere that it is very difficult to attend to and fully understand opinions one is in disagreement with.  We choose sides and spend our time preparing arguments against the pieces we don't like, rather than striving to gain some wisdom from the portion, however small, that is correct.  I think intelligent people are worse at this.  They generally like to quickly understand the main points and see how that fits in to what they already know. That is usually the most useful strategy for listening to reading anyone.  But it has its costs.

The Abolition of Man was on many of the best-of-the-20thC lists that came out late 1999 (should have been late 2000). Even if one disagrees that the trend Lewis deplores was evil, one has to give him credit for accurately predicting where education did in fact go in the 1970's-90's. A prophetic book.

Hipness

So this simple lifestyle is very Portland to NoCal. It's much cuter and Cascadia-looking than a Winnebago or an Airstream, sure.  But how is it different, really?

And yet the woman seems to be congratulating herself on doing something noble, good for the planet, good for your character.  Better than you.

Tribe.  It is all about advertising what tribe you are in.

Historic

Weirdest World Series game endings ever. Whatever else happens, you might want to check in, even if you aren't a St Louis of Boston fan. This has an Iowa Baseball Confederacy sort of weirdness. I don't know if that favors the Red Sox or not.

That pickoff to end the game?  That was the way that the Red Sox lost playoff games from 1946-2003, not won them.  Time and space begin to lose meaning.

Tallis Canon

BD put up Tallis' Spem in Alium, but I find this Canon more accessible, likely because of familiarity. It's also the first thing of Tallis's that comes to mind for Madeline L'Engle fans.

Epistasis, and The Mermaid's Tale

Jason Moore spoke about "missing heritability in neuropsychiatric illness" at Dartmouth Grand Rounds yesterday, so of course I was all over that.  It wasn't what I expected - Grand Rounds seldom is.

But via his site, epistasis (gene/gene interaction) I learned about The Mermaid's Tale, a blog by Penn State profs which is much more cautionary about the promise of genetic research, GWAS, and personalised genomic medicine than what I usually read.  You might start with their four-part series Who me?  I don't believe in single gene causation (or do I?) a cleverly-written puncturing of the popular myths - even among the scientifically literate - about genetic research.

I confess I am not entirely persuaded, by those essays and some others.  They quite rightly point out that the popular treatment of genomics is oversimplified and misleading.  Yet I think that is the lot of all complex science in the popular imagination.  Reasserting "But it's more complicated than that" is not so much helpful as a bit defensive.  There is also a good deal of limitations-of-technology rhetoric that seems more aesthetic than simply rational, such as food sustainability assertions founded on the idea that newer technologies are more complicated and fragile.  Yes, and so is modern medicine, communications, and entertainment, all of which depend on electricity and networks.  That's sort of what technology is.

But I quibble.  I agree with a great deal of what they write, and they write well. A simple arithmetic point I had not bothered to consider is worth noting.  The number of possible human beings, possible different genomes, is so huge that even the billions of current examples, were we to analyse them all, are not much different from reading one genome.  What we have as a sample size is analogous to regarding the first inch off the launch pad as a reasonable representation of our trip to Alpha Centauri. (But think of how many thousands of separate nanometers we sampled in that inch! Aren't they a lot?) Therefore, there are meaningful interactions between two, three, or five genes which could definitely "cause" one disease or another, which we will never know about because they will not occur in a living being.  Even if they do occur in one, two, or ten humans, we might not be able to separate that statistically from chance.  Rather like the infinite library in Borges, which contains books both proving and disproving the existence of the library, plus an infinite number of volumes which differ from those only by one or two letter, mere typos.

Nazi Bride Schools

The fascinating part is how the reporting on them is bent to fit modern narratives.  Here are the top Bing hits for the discussion of Reichbrauteschule. Note how many reference the German phrase kinder, kuche, kirche - children, kitchen, and church - even though a key part of the story is how the young women were directed out of the church into neopagan ceremonies for marriage. Current meager management opportunities for German women are also considered a natural outflow of this culture.

Still, it's an interesting story, now fresh because of recently discovered documents.  And there are pictures.

Acculturated

Those who liked the In Defense of Disney Princesses article linked over at Maggie's a few days ago might find they like the entire site, Acculturated. Its target demographic is clearly younger than I am, but seems to be an attempt by New Criterion to carve out a niche for short, intelligent commentary on popular culture. I got notified of a new biography of CS Lewis and a half-dozen other interesting-looking books. I read up on fashion: the history of Vanity Fair and how a Victoria's Secret model is now a "church lady scold." I read sports controversies: fantasy baseball, running up the score, steroids, from other perspectives - and Rick Reilly was nowhere to be found!

As for those Disney Princesses, I've never much liked them, finding them too similar and wrapped around the single pale virtue of spunkiness.  But I never had the intense disapproval, even venom, that is leveled against them these days. The essay linked above persuaded me more than a little that the kids are alright. There's more to them than one virtue.  And I always did know, though I never kept it in focus, that the fury at those rescues by handsome princes destroying all those poor girls' independence and agency and promising an unrealistic happily-ever-after was a retrospective interpretation of the stories by adults who no longer understood them.

Analogy: Job received double land, cows, children, and wealth at the end of his tale (I regard that book as a folk tale, BTW, but still consider it an important part of the canon), which more than one observer has noted is only weirdly a net good, if one has had beloved relatives taken in death earlier in the story.  Creepy, really.  But we aren't reading a history with real people and deaths, we are reading symbols.  And in that culture, Job received the standard reward for getting things right.  So too in fairy tales.  The prince and the wedding are not the point, they are just the standard reward for getting the lesson right in the story.  They are hustled onstage at the last moment as a prize.  We might offer different rewards to little girls now to close the tale. Try it yourself, if you like.

But watch actual girls playing such games and they don't focus on those last few moments.  They focus on the "trying on adulthood" that the stories are really about.  They get adult clothes, and very nice ones.  They order other creatures around - not other humans very often, but cups and saucers, dwarves, small animals.  They go places independently. They run risks.  But all of this is in the safety of the living room, and it is important that their parents watch them doing this. Adulthood - actually going out from the nest - is presented as obtainable, and if one is kind or brave or hardworking, one will get one of the good adulthoods, with a nice version of those rather troubling boys and an assurance it will all go well.  Even that is only at the last moment, with a well-dressed and boringly good-looking Guy With A Horse.  The girls are clearly oblivious to any sexual symbolism of learning to like those hairy, dangerous, frightening creatures - as they should be. The lesson is meant to be only vaguely reassuring.

Okay, having to sing their feelings thoughout the movies is a bit much.  But those are also some of the little girls favorite parts, so those songs are likely expressing feelings little girls cannot quite articulate.

What would I give if I could live out of these waters?

What would I pay to spend a day warm on the sand?

Bet'cha on land they understand

And they don't reprimand their daughters

Bright young women sick of swimmin'

Ready to stand

Yeah, that's just about how a preteen views independence and adulthood, isn't it? She goes on to learn she was mostly wrong but partly right, and grows up a little.

Related:  In the Barbie universe, remember that it is Ken that is the accessory, not Barbie, and even Cricket had more personality.  What the meaning of a game or toy would be if an adult were playing with it is irrelevant.  What it means in the child's mind is the lesson.  On that score, I wonder if the anger against some girl toys is anger at Other Women.

Reminder

Even if you can't believe that God forgives you, believe it anyway.

Paying it Backward

...as a method of Paying it forward. We used to do this at the tollbooth, but I haven't done it in years. The recipient would sometimes try and catch up to see if it was someone they knew. Or perhaps just to say thank you. I'm trying to think where else in the world people would do this. Canada? Australia? Sweden? HT Bird Dog at Maggie's

To Anacreon In Heaven

I've always wondered about this.  It is a story-story, a conversation among gods about mortals.  It's a bit risque, as the myrtle of Venus was believed to be an aphrodisiac and a common symbol for erotic love from the Renaissance on. That it was to be twined with Bacchus's vine suggests revelry.

The tune is just slightly different from what we are used to, but different in a way that is more 18th C than 19th, certainly.



It has fallen out once already, and so may be removed again. I don't know why youtube does that sometimes.

HT Dan at Chicago Boyz

Fan Psychology

The debate at work and on sports radio about our expectations for the Red Sox seem to have a generational split.  The younger - under 40, and maybe even under-50 - group is talking about its increased expectations from the beginning of the year.  They even vaguely recognise that they are being somewhat unfair, and should just be happy with a much better season than they dared hope.

The few older people calling in, or offering opinions at work - those would be my people - are much more pleased just to be here.  But there is an undercurrent that I think is important:  just don't kill us.  The Red Sox can lose, can have unfortunate luck or poor decisions by Farrell, or a bad call, or just get stomped.  But don't kill us.  Don't have one of those amazingly bad decisions or luck that used to kill us in the old days.  No eephus pitches. No leaving a pitcher in beyond what even fifth-graders knew was wise. No misunderstood communications from the 3rd-base coach. No perfect storms of wind changes, corked bats, and the Green Monster. No finishing 0.5 games out because of a strike (1972) or having a better record than a team going to the playoffs because of a strike (1981).

Losing is because of injuries is endurable (1974, 1967).  Just don't kill us.  For the love of God, let it be 1988 or 1990, not some other haunting death.

Citizens of Cleveland, I know you understand.  Pray for us.

Advantage: Marriage

The Witherspoon Institute passes on a summary of a Canadian research article showing that outcomes are better for children with married parents. It compares graduation rates for the children of same-sex couples with married heterosexual parents and finds them worse, especially for girls, and especially from lesbian parents. Whether both married heterosexual parents were also the birth parents does not seem to have been included in the measuring.

- children of married opposite-sex [i.e., normal] families have a high graduation rate compared to the others; children of lesbian families have a very low graduation rate compared to the others; and the other four types [common law, gay, single mother, single father] are similar to each other and lie in between the married/lesbian extremes.

The caveat is that this tells me what I want to hear, and so I should view it with some suspicion.  Whether it is what the researchers wanted to find, I don't know.

Update: See comments for some possible sources of weakness in the data.

HT: Steve Sailer

Discouragement

Looking for a post I put up in 2007, I wearily scanned everything I wrote in 2005-2007. I was impressed with how brilliant I was then. In fact, I wondered why I had bothered to write anything at all since my first ten months of blogging.

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

Jonathan Winters On Fishing

Wedding

I think being in a wedding party gives young men reasons not to get married. Release the hounds.

Minstrel Show

I have said I must be among the last people to have acted in blackface in a minstrel show.  I must have been about 6 or 7 years old, so make it 1959 or 1960. Looking into the matter, small communities in the northeast seem to have had minstrel shows for a few years after that; the latest I can find is 1965. I confess I have not looked into it deeply, so there may be many later ones I simply missed. But I think they lasted longest in places where there were vanishingly few black people, and that is not accidental.

I don't think these were the bigoted travesties of racial prejudice second only to lynch mobs that they are now perceived to be. The minstrel show was but one variant of a style of entertainment that made fun of types. Just like we do today.  We just design our feelings of superiority along political and personality lines now.  We are no kinder. That particular variant brought into focus why all the other ethnic humors were wrong.  So we dumped that and turned our meanness elsewhere almost immediately.  "All In The Family" for example.

My father was a community theater actor, usually but not always in comic roles.  I remember the show being performed at what was then Chelmsford High School, but this is almost surely wrong.  I must be confusing it with "The Steadfast Tin Soldier," which he played there another time. Yet I am certain it was a raised stage, with theatrical lighting enough to darken the audience to the players but not render them invisible.  It was something of a big deal.  I was in a silent skit, of a street bum or hobo trying to eat a sandwich on a park bench, but continually interrupted.  I, a sad boy looking hungrily at the sandwich, was one of the interruptions, the others being a thief, a policeman, and an attractive, parading woman. Decades later I learned that this latter was a stock character called the Yaller Girl. Very broad comedy, with double-takes and exaggerated expressions and gestures.  The Wyman wheelhouse, I now know.

I remember only that bit, and that the entire program was something of a variety show. It was all very similar to the other community variety shows I saw as a boy:  "Hicks In The Sticks" in 1966, in which I was the MC with stage whiskers and overalls, "Kiwanis Kapers" in 1969, which included that routine with guys' stomachs painted like a face whistling while "Bridge Over The River Kwai" was played - a laff riot, as always; skit night at camp 1960-69; "Irish Eyes," on the Central High stage in 1963 or 64, replete with early teens pretending to be sloshing ale and staggering about. People used bad accents and rank stereotypes a lot - German, Irish, Hillbilly, Texan, English, Southern, Italian, Mexican, French (but not French-Canadian, those were told privately), New Yorker, Chinese. It was just a traditional community performance which played up its old-fashionedness quite intentionally. It takes awhile before people finally go "Y'know, we really shouldn't be making fun of Negroes this way.  Even if there aren't any within twenty miles and none of them will ever see it, it's just kinda low and mean."  And the next year, it would just be a variety show, with some stray German doctors or bowing Chinese for awhile, and then those would fall out too.

Not all of it was unkind, even when stereotyped.  More importantly, not all of it was stereotyped, even when unkind.  It was necessary only that somebody be the butt of a joke because they were stupid, for any reason.  That was what eventually pushed that penguin off the ice, I think. The scripts had gotten less racist over time, making fun of a generic stupid person on stage with the same lines that had been used since early burlesque (at least), but there was no getting around it.  Once you put on blackface (or a sombrero and serape) you were pretty much including the whole group in the accusation, even if there was nothing specifically Negro about the type of stupidity.

You can see both at work here: the blackface and accents are pretty rank. But the jokes themselves could be just anyone.

Notice that when people kept the format after 1967 or so they could find only one group to be made fun of safely - Scandinavians.  Think Laugh-In's Arte Johnson, the Muppet Show, Prairie Home Companion.  Other ethnic groups were mocked only in the gentlest manner, and most not at all.*  Relatedly, Foster Brooks and Frank Fontaine as Crazy Guggenheim dropped like a stone. Though Craze was something of a subtler type, showing innocent wisdom in his damaged thinking. You couldn't do those routines now.

The petty meanness has not fled, only changed its costume.  We do think we are morally superior now, but it isn't so. We just like congratulating ourselves on how we're not racist - which we prove by finding racism in others. It's a great disguise to keep us from looking at our own new and improved bigotries.

*There was a major exception, in being able to make fun of Hillbillies, but they often participated in same (Hee Haw, Minnie Pearl at the Grand Old Opry).  That could turn mean, though, from other whites wanting to kick someone. Still does.