Radical Christians

Son #1 sent a link to David French over at The Corner, Oprah, Snowflakes, and Despair. Excellent brief commentary, which includes a further link to one of the David Platt books, which French can only give a qualified recommendation to.

I am of two minds.  It is of course true that the American Dream and Christian teaching are not the same thing.  My first impulse is usually to sigh, roll my eyes, and mutter, straw man.  Who thinks that they are the same, really? Then I remember that there are Christians who do, at least partially.  Enough so that the David Platt's of the world should smack them around a bit, even if they themselves oversimplify in turn.

I am unusually fortunate in being spared the worst of evangelical excess, and thus overrate how reasonable we are. I raise the caution that many of the people who enjoy writing about the Church's falseness have their own cultural, political, and personal needs that they have little awareness of, driving them to be Great Deplorers.  But they aren't making this stuff up out of nothing.  Their unbalance may be closer to the reality than mine.

Different Languages

Arnold Kling has an interesting piece on how Liberal, Conservative, and Libertarian tribes speak different languages when writing about events.  Via Maggie's.

DNA

A coworker mentioned signing up for ancestry.com (this in context of my mentioning that her surname Voegler seemed related to English Fowler, and did she know if they were the same?)

I told her about getting my genome sequenced and wondering if I could get a bead on what percentage of my ancestry came from NW Europe, from Asia, or whatever.  She asked "What if it turns out to be Narnia?"

That would be awesome. 

Diner

My wife asked how it is that so many diner waitresses are “like that,” refering to the bantering style we had just encountered.  We had never been to this particular restaurant before. I knew what she meant without further explanation, and after a moment’s thought offered that it’s mutually selecting, and likely reinforcing.  If you go to a diner, as the bikers, boy scouts, and people after church we shared the place with had, you know at some level that such interactions are possible.  If you don’t like that, you learn not to go to diners, whether consciously or not. Food and time are not our only considerations, even though it is what we are focusing our thoughts on. 

I figure they don’t test waitresses for banter on interview, and certainly some are quiet types who simply take your order and serve you.  Yet if that’s your style, you learn at some level “maybe I’ll fit in there.”  The customers are seldom going to mind, and will often encourage that instant familiarity.  We all like to have places we belong, even at some cost in other considerations, such as pay and amount of work.

Some diner waitresses – I don’t recall see male waitstaff at any - express their exasperation and irritation too easily as well, telegraphing that you should not make things any worse by stressing them asking for more ketchup.  Yet I think that is a variant, not an opposite.  Like reality TV, festivals, and sporting events, emotions are on display here.  In contrast, upscale waitstaff and true fast-food counter help are expected to be increasingly invisible

Spatial Abilities

I watched my two-year-old granddaughter handle the puzzles in church nursery yesterday.  She's good at them*.  But noticing that doesn't tell you much, because it is difficult to tell whether this is one of those things that she's better than the other kids, better than her sister, or Holy Cow! She's uncanny at this!  We test out the latter by pushing more Legos at children, just in case they develop one of those fascinations and starts building more glial cells in one area from an early age.

Under theories of genetic load providing foundation for abilities, it's unlikely that she's got a few superstar alleles, more likely that she has fewer workable-but substandard alleles. Here's the thing: today we guess wildly at those answers.  By the time she is an adult, we will know them.

*Jonathan and Heidi both said she gets this from Heidi.

On The Map

I was given, and read, On The Map by Simon Garfield. I don't know what I was expecting, but this wasn't it.  The first half is a history of cartography, and a pretty engaging one.  The second half is digressions about maps, in roughly chronological order so that one can pretend it's still a formal history.  If that sounds like criticism, it's not.  The second half, with chapters long and short about WWII maps, maps of imaginary places, brain mapping, Googlemaps, videogaming, map theft, women's maps, and mapping Mars, is actually a lot more fun.  He gets some emphases wrong in the neurological and wayfinding sections, and his politics leak out a bit toward the end, but nothing problematic. Fun read.

Alignment

A young gaming friend asked on FB about alignment, and enforcing declared alignment.  I think there's more than gaming here.

In the Dungeons & Dragons world, characters chose, or were assigned, a moral alignment.  This consisted of two axes: Good-Neutral-Evil and Lawful-Neutral-Chaotic.  I never much liked it.  It has some function as a narrative and character development tool, but it always struck me as a milk-and-water evasion by secular people who couldn't abide the thought of thousands of Percivales and Frank Merriwethers populating their games, wanting more variety.  Fair enough, but that's rather a false stereotype, innit?  There are plenty of characters of moral ambiguity in Tolkien after all.  So, not understanding good and evil, they came up with a clumsy way around it.

In all gaming there is a tension between narrative truth and real life truth. Go too deeply into a truth that is only game-contained and real people don't identify much anymore.  This is why playing characters too many removes from humanness becomes less interesting rather than more.  We don't really care to play intelligent rock-creatures or pure spirits for very long.  On the other hand, it becomes a little silly to insist too much on realism when one is playing a dark elf from the underworld who is mounted on a flying lizard.

Still, the narrative attraction is often right at this pivot point of where do loyalties lie? Or the courage to stand up for larger values.  Or trying to understand deeper truths that are only partly illustrated by the local truths the character grew up with in the Shire or Redwall.  Good and evil often are the story, so understanding what they really are in humans must have something to do with how it will play out successfully in a game.

We have to first realise that everyone believes they are on the side of good.  The number of people who actively seek evil, even among those who seek to shock us, is vanishingly small.  People who claim to be bad are usually posers who are really saying "I'm a lot of fun. I seek pleasure. I have the courage to challenge norms.  I don't care what those icky people think."  All of these they define as good.  One can sometimes find those who reject most ideas of goodness and rather openly seek power, so that cruelty and dishonesty are considered tools of the trade.  They might actively enjoy taking advantage of others, who they see as weak or foolish, but really "It's business."  This certainly is evil - it is the mentality of criminals - but even these do not worship evil gods because they are evil but because they believe it's all a crock and they side with power.

The standard human morality is the narrow altruism of "What is good for my tribe/clan/class" held in tension with "What is good for me within my group?" Law vs. chaos doesn't much enter into it:  it's all law vs. selfishness.

So too in literature.  The solo quest is actually not quite what heroic literature is about.  The hero starts as a leader of many retainers, all of whom are gradually destroyed, leaving him to quest on - Beowulf, Ulysses, Roland. We don't see that so clearly with our American, Daniel Boone or Jack London eyes, and see the individual hero.  Not so in origins - the reality of the clan is still there.

We rationalise stealing from Oppressors or Usurpers or Corporate Interests because they aren't our group.  So it isn't really evil, nay nay. They are evil, we only seek to even the score. Trying to stuff that into the traditional D&D alignments is just clumsy.  Gygax and Arneson weren't moral philosophers, they were idea-guys who took a guess how human morality, and thus literary morality, and thus gaming morality really works.  They guessed wrong, in a very late 1960's way that thought Druids were neutral and law was vaguely Nixonian. Gaming alignment doesn't describe anything real in the character.

Idear Will Be The Last To Fall

I have mentioned that much of the Eastern New England accent, which sounds its O and other low vowels a little differently while dropping some r’s and adding others, still persists in NH, though much weakened. The dropped-r (officially called non-rhoticity) in cards, or marked is more subtle now, but I don't believe the added-r at the end of words has diminished at all.  Many feminine names end in –a,* which in NH can still be pronounced –er, as in Christiner, Aniter, Wander, Rebeccer. The –a sound is more likely to be retained after a soft consonant, so it is rarer to hear Carler or Sarer (though they do occur). Lots of medical words end with the –a sound as well, created out of Greek and Latin roots, so here at the hospital one hears nurses saying nausear (sounds like NAW-zhur, not NAH-zee-ur), dystonier, dyslexier.

Yet strongest of all is idear.  People who add the R onto no other words might retain it there.  I don’t believe accents are actually going away, as is commonly claimed.  (It sounds plausible, but there’s actually not much evidence for it.  Most accents show up in vowels - which already have a lot of variety no matter long you put Hooked On Phonics on continuous loop in your kid’s ipod - and in dropped consonants, which already occur so often in English that they hardly raise a red flag when a particular region has variants.) But even if it is true, and Americans are homogenizing to the speech of Medina, Ohio, idear will still be around in 50 years.

*-a is a frequent feminine ending worldwide, which is part of Ruhlen’s argument for common origin of all languages.

Irish Mossing Museum

A neurologist friend at the hospital was fond of taking educational leave to obscure places.  While there, he would take in their esoteric museums.  He went to the cigarette lighter museum in Guthrie OK, the Davistown shovel museum at Stonehill College, and the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices in Minnesota. 

Ben and I stopped at the Oz Fantasy Museum when looking at colleges in 2001– how can you pass up a giant ruby slipper in a field as an ad, after all?  I lived near Nash Dinosaur Tracks as a wee lad, and we try to drop in on local historical societies.  Those often have unusual finds, as one eccentric resident from earlier days may have assembled an impressive collection of bugles, or redone the Seven Wonders out of matchsticks. These were duly donated to the society by his heirs, who were likely sick of it all by then.

Most recently we went to the Irish Mossing Museum in Scituate, MA, more properly called the Maritime Museum.  Irish Moss was a cash crop out of the ocean off-and-on for a hundred years, as it was used as an ingredient in medicines, foods, soaps.  If you used to read the ingredients on labels, the word carrageenan may look familiar.  That comes from Irish moss - a good Gaelic-sounding word, isn't it?  

It’s hard on these smaller museums – they have to create interest by being different.  Irish moss is well less than half of the museum, which has much more on the boat-building and shipwrecks of Scituate. One can tell that the docents like that part better as well, and want to download the whole three volumes on you if they can. Plus, there’s not much to say about Irish mossing.  Harvesting the stuff was hard work and most years there wasn’t much money.  There were no carrageenan moguls or pirate mossing raids to fill a youngster’s heart with a desire to strike out on his own to make his fame and fortune there.

On the other hand, “Maritime Museum” likely fits a hundred organisations down the East Coast, so it doesn’t stand out much. The museum is a good specimen of the type.  Inexpensive, comfortable, taken in an hour or two, with more if you want it.  You come out knowing more maritime history in general, especially regionally, and more about Irish moss than 99.9% of the world will even know

Immigration III

In 2001 we brought two immigrants to America: orphaned Romanian teenagers.  My framing of that event now is only slightly different from my moral thinking then.  I reasoned that my own family, and to a lesser extent our circle of friends, were absorbing nearly all the inconvenience and cost.  The question of assimilation became unimportant, because adoptees are among the most enculturated to mainstream society.  As far as I could tell from the information given, I was not asking my local school district, nor America in general, to absorb expensive special-needs services that might have gone to some current resident.  In fact, we actively avoided public school services they were eligible for, and sent them to a private Christian school. No ESL for them.

(In other places, BTW, Christian schools developed a reputation as white-flight academies, and perhaps that is/was justified.  But up in NH, Christian schools had more diversity, not less, making significant efforts to bring in exchange students and treating disabled students well.  There is a level of disability they cannot deal with, so the comparison may not be fair.  But if you had a kid with some physical disability in that era, or a strange or eccentric child, you would find that kids in public school would torment him, kids in Christian schools encourage him. That's not theory, that's kids we knew. And in the case of our own, we wanted the greater emotional support they would receive.)

Yet we knew of situations from the same orphanage where children were brought to America who did turn out to require expensive special services.  It was legal to bring them, and it was certainly kindly meant by the parents, but I am less certain of its pure generosity now.  It is being generous with other people's money.  I suppose the fact that it had been duly enacted in legislation and policy is proof that at some level, our society has signed on to that risk, but it is less obviously good than I once thought.

In our case it seems to have worked out as a plus for the country.  One boy is a hospital accountant in Nome, which turns out in practical experience to be "a job Americans won't do."  They have a hard time finding people to hire there, and a harder time finding ones who will actually show up and try hard.  And yet...he went to a college down south for a year and a half, and at some level, took an admissions spot that might have gone...or maybe not.  Hard to say.  The second boy went into the USMC, which we traditionally regard as giving something important to the country.  We may overrate that, as America did spend a million dollars training him which it did not recoup in combat or even supportive roles.  He was ready, but never sent.  Also, one can imagine that there is some native-born American whose enlistment slot he took, but really, it was only a delay of 30 days for a determined volunteer, and if the next person in line wasn't that determined, I don't feel too bad for him.  That son now works in Norway, so the computation gets muddled.

Neither of them looks to turn out to be an axe murderer or a grasshopper refusing to work and sponging off others.  But I suppose it could have happened, and I know I thought only a little at the time of what an unfair thing that would have been to do to my society, to unleash some monster on it.  However well-meant I might be, it was still being generous with a little bit of other people's stuff.  I didn't see it at all as potentially taking a job from some poor American.  Had the economy been worse when we started the process in 2000, I might have.  Since then I have come to question whether there will be meaningful paid employment for 50% of the population in 30 years.  I had put my energy into making sure my descendants were in that 50%, or even, ultimately the 10% who actually do things rather than the 90% tricked into thinking they are important. Potentially, the boys I brought in might not have been taking jobs from my sector in America, but from poor Americans.  I might have been being generous with things that were not mine, asking fellow-citizens to pay a cost I was evading.

And that's with a fully legal situation where someone has stepped up to pay most of the initial cost, and assimilation is largely guaranteed.

At an even more  worrisome level, sponsoring agencies bring in immigrants, all quite legally, and agree to look after them and launch them and provide services for them for 6 months, or 18 months, or two years.  They set that limit in order to push people out of the nest to make it on their own - mostly a good thing - but also to be able to devote their energy to others coming in.

Some of those pushed out of the nest don't fly.  I get to see some of those, and I have some resentment at the agencies, some of them church-based, who take this approach.  That they are sticking others with the later costs is more visible to me than to others.  They see themselves as generous Christians, expressing the love of Christ to the unfortunate - and that's not necessarily untrue.  But they are being generous with other people's stuff as well as their own. And even if that were not the case, that's not quite what Jesus (and Paul) said anyway. There's a standard modern sheep vs. goats misreading buried in there as well.

I mention this because these are the legal situations - the one the society has at some level agreed to be generous, or at least risk being generous about.  With the unsponsored the risk becomes greater, and with illegals even more.  I say this primarily for Christians who have fallen unthinkingly into the idea that this is all generosity, something we should righteously encourage our government to do more of, and encourage lawbreaking when it doesn't.  Even the very best situations involve some giving away of other people's stuff. A job, some school funding, a place at a university.  It's not really generosity.  Someone is being generous, of course, but mostly it's not us.  It's the poor, the less skilled, the (gulp) disabled, the unattractive, the uncharming, and above all, minorities who are paying that price.

We might decide as a society that we want to bring in certain non-citizens because the citizens who don't work have ticked us off, or to pressure them, or improve our own economy, or to maintain our Welcoming status at the expense of some who live here.  We could decide that and even justify it.  What I am calling into question here is the idea that doing so is obviously moral and generous, and opposing such things automatically stingy and bigoted.

Underground II

I came across another London Tube parody, in a similar but unrelated search.  This one has anagrams of all the stations.  There was controversy when it came out because there was nervousness that people would be confused, which more likely means "the brand will be damaged."  As my audience is primarily American, I doubt the danger of readers getting lost from this misdirection is very high. 

The Northern Line is the absolute winner here.  It's hard to beat "Wifely Stench" and "Aleph & Tentacles," just for openers, but it is the consistency of the line that makes it the standout.

The real version is here.

Immigration II

Short version.  We want to be generous, and believe Christ commands it, but what if something is not ours to give?

European Attitudes...Toward Each Other

Pew Research has frequently checks up on how (some) Europeans feel about each other.  The year it is entitled The New Sick Man of Europe: The European Union. It's always fascinating to not only follow the ups and downs of who is considered most trustworthy - everyone thinks that would be the Germans, except the Greeks, who consider themselves the most trustworthy - versus least trustworthy - the Greeks, French, Italians, and contradictorily The Germans, all figure prominently, but to ponder why some questions were asked at all.

The French have become depressed in the last year.  "Dyspeptic" and "disillusioned" are the words used. Just about all of Southern Europe is discouraged about economic prospects.  Spain's percentage of folks who think the economy is good has dropped from 65% to 4% since 2007.  I do wonder who the 1% of Greeks are who think economic conditions are good.

Human nature being what it is, each nation rated itself the Most Compassionate.  Given my fondness for seeing social and political events in tribal terms, I think they are all likely correct.  Greeks are going to find that other Greeks are going to be more compassionate toward them than say, Germans.

Tube Parody

The London Underground schematic is the greatest map of all time.  Wonderful to behold, clear, original...

And easily parodied, perhaps the surest indicator of great art.  Today's entry is from the British comedy site Poke, The Daily Mail Moral Underground.  The lines have names like Media Scum (including Madonna and Dr. Rowan Williams), Arch-Enemies (Scroungers and The French) and many that do double or triple duty on multiple lines, as London stations do in reality.  Energy-Saving Bulbs is a stop on the PC Gone Mad, Cancers, and Nuisances lines.

Big Fish, Little Ponds

There was a Bob Newhart routine in the 60's on his The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back album called "School For Bus Drivers." The monologue is a lecture by the course instructor, encouraging the students to become not mere good bus drivers, but "one of the great all-time bus drivers.  Drivers like the legendary Larry Strickland.  The greatest bus driver of our time, and perhaps of any era: Neil Norlag."

A little later when I was in college, a group of us from theater would ironically go roller-skating a few towns away. (Had fun, though.)  As I had also noticed in high school, each rink had its stars, its special couples, whether skaters or announcers.  Others would bask in their reflected glow, if they could demonstrate an easy familiarity and friendship with one of these.  "I'm usually the one who signals to Benelux when to Shoot The Duck," one odd gentleman confidently assured me.

Every little corner of the world has them, these giants in their respective arenas which seem unimportant - or at least arcane - to outsiders.  The Saturday morning men's Bible study had several members who became enamored of the men's movement and Iron John, speaking in admiring tones about Robert Bly. This all grew into retreats and weekends over the next few years, with Bly becoming an important enough figure that participants would become bitterly disappointed if his presence could not be arranged.

Come to think of it, everything that goes into the weekends and retreats mode likely has its figures which inspire at least a little awe.  Every hobby or area of study, every obscure sport or competition has names instantly recognised by the others, carrying with them an automatic prestige of association.  There are women who speak at Christian conferences, whether humorous or as authors of serious studies (or both) who have regional, topic, or national prominence.  Their names are not much recognised outside of evangelical circles, somewhat restricted in generation, and by males only vaguely or inaccurately.

I belong to a small but national denomination - we have our stars.  I have seen a dozen sets of heroes and heroines come and go in mental health.  Many of these figures deserve their minor fame, however unimportant or even ridiculous they may seem to outsiders.