Accents

"It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him."  GB Shaw, "Pygmalion"

We are not unfamiliar with this in America, where southern accents remain a moderate obstacle for those who would be thought intelligent.  The phenomenon has more variety in England, and came up in our discussion about CS Lewis's declining popularity as an apologist there, at least partly due to changes in accent over decades.

NYC-area accents are considered grating, and Western or Midwestern accents, particularly if they are rural, are also disfavored.  Hyphenated-American accents are also considered signifiers of those who are fresh off the boat and/or too lazy or stupid to learn how to get it right.  My grandmother's family was Swedish and tried to quickly shed all patterns of speech that would brand them as less American, less intelligent. Her husband's Scots-Irish family were schoolteachers after having been in Londonderry a hundred years, and were apparently the sticklers for correctness typically associated with that breed.

That is my culture.  That is my background.

But it's wrong. Accents might tell us something about a person's culture, but not his character or intelligence.  Displaying a favored accent, or the standard midamerican dialect is an advantage in many situations, and specific situations call for extremely strict rules of usage.  Those aren't quite the same as correctness, however.  We've been over this before.

The image I use to remind me of this is visiting a foreign country, where the varieties of accent would not be heard or understood by one such as I.  I think of one person in Elbonia describing the speech of another citizen:  "Hahaha, you can tell he is a stupid Mountain because of the way he pronounces his 't's!' We sophisticated Valleys do not do that, because we have been properly educated."

Thus, it seems amazingly ignorant to me that the English cannot simply shrug at Lewis's accent and tone and think - "Oh yes, the old accent.  Funny how things change" and just move on.  But it doesn't work that way, not for any of us, with accents that we actually encounter and have cultural associations with.  Those enter straight to the cultural centers of the brain and can only be overlooked with effort.

The effort is worth it.

Social Politics

I have railed more than once that people in general follow social rather than intellectual cues for their political and cultural beliefs, and that liberals are particularly suspect in this regard.  I will allow that it may just be more noticeable because their claim is to be the more intellectual, so the irony causes this to stand out.  Or it may simply irritate me more because they are the group that was my cultural home, though I have left.

I have treated this socially-cued politics as generally reprehensible, substandard, childish, whatever.  It is easy to caricature as the Views of the Cool Kids and find examples (sudden changes, such as gay marriage), modes of transmission (overvaluing current events and entertainment), and exemplars (Maureen Dowd, Jon Stewart)*. Our recent conversations here have included some worry about how powerful the Spirit of the Age is, and how fickle.

Well, if it’s that bad, how has it lasted for so long?  There must be some advantage conferred by having this quality.  Once we look at it that way, we can see that those who pick up on social cues are going to have an evolutionary advantage.  They won’t get killed as often.  They’ll figure out how the food is distributed.  They’ll find mates more readily.  People will take them in hard times more readily. Demonstrating that one understands the social rules is protective.  It isn’t the only survival skill, but it’s legit.

It has been a humor staple for years.  In this country, the focus was on immigrants who were made fun of because they didn’t get American ways.  This went to logical extension with the Coneheads on SNL, giving out fried eggs and six-packs to children on Hallowe’en. But all the country cousin/city cousin stories throughout the world build on the same theme.  The rubes and hayseeds are figures of mockery. It is a more important value to the young because it is part of their development.  They will have to make their way in the world with their age cohort as much as with their family, and need to stake out a place.

A lot of people make a living by reading or anticipating such trends, divining where the culture is going.

*Rush Limbaugh launched something similar from the right when he burst upon the scene in the 1990’s, taking the view that his group was larger and more forward-thinking, while the left included many fringe characters stuck in the past.  Limbaugh fans could thus consider themselves cooler in the larger scheme of things. He often referred to himself as “on the cutting edge of societal evolution.” Same principle, inverted.

Prayer Request

Sometime commenter Erin, daughter of Sponge-Headed Scienceman, had very difficult labor and delivery with her second child this week.  She lost a lot of blood and required five hours of surgery, ending up in ICU.  Baby Anna is fine, but mother will have weeks recovering.

Sidebar Change

I am experimenting with putting Sailer's posts on the sidebar from its Unz position instead of isteve.  I may change back. There are lots of other columnists on that site's sidebar, which may be of interest.

Mapmaking

There are little-marked trails in the woods near my house.  They are used primarily by snow machines in winter, though I can see occasional footprints and tire prints when I am walking back there spring and summer.  A neighbor who grooms the trails tells me he doesn't know of any maps of them.  I resolved to make one for my own enjoyment and safety, to know where I am as the seasons change or I decide to explore different sections.

I didn't think it would be that hard.  I can make a decent road map to give directions, and think of myself as having a good, though not exceptional sense-of-direction. Also, the territory in question is only a couple of square miles tops, so I would have trouble getting deeply lost in any way. (I am guessing there are more than 5 miles of trail, though.  Maybe 10 or more. They interconnect quite a bit.)  I discuss a lot of the issues in my 2011 series on Wayfinding. (Has it been that long?)

Yet I find I go wrong almost immediately.  The cues are ambiguous, undermining one's confidence that the memorised links are valid: 643 steps generally WNW with some winding back and forth.  So say, less than 600 as the crow flies, call it a quarter mile.  Then almost north for 200 steps to the stream, then left onto that very winding path up to the ridge. I figure that is close to NW, maybe a little west of that, almost another quarter mile.  That leads us to -- hell, a stone wall about 70 degrees off from where it should be.  Something's gone wrong here.  I can't be crossing the stone wall at this angle. It shouldn't be near here, either.

Half a mile from the start and I'm already uncertain how to draw the path I have just trod.  Walking 200 yards up the ridge, so that I can now look back over the territory, and even into the neighborhood, does not resolve this.  Things are not where they should be.

I am slowly working it out.  I am not bringing paper and pen, trying to do this by memory.  I try different trails to come in from a different direction.  I hike earlier or later, to be more sure what direction the sun is in.  I am making corrections as well.  The central stone wall I have been using as the spine of my calculations actually turns 15 degrees S just as it goes out of my sight at the very beginning.  That 15 degrees, plus my "70 degrees off" above, is 85 degrees, suggesting that yes! this is a different stone wall, which meets the other at a right angle deep in the underbrush.  I was right the first time...except how can that trail meet the other so quickly then? That would make two sides of a triangle added together shorter than the third.  That can't be.  Where the hell am I?

I could bring in a GPS, things to write with, and the USGS or SPNHF maps, I suppose.  Yet I would like to have the ancestral experience instead. 

I'm not very good at this.

Upon Further Review

After contemplation, I think my commenters on the last post have pointed out a division between types of changes brought on by the Spirit of the Age that I had not quite thought through.  They both described situations in which a person's attitudes changed gradually, in stages, however quickly.  As if Year One: Women should not be allowed to use the alphabet:  Year Two: Okay, Women should be able to use A, but not B or C; Year Three: okay Women can use A-D, and E and F if there are no males present, but that's it; Year Four: Women can use all letters up to P, but only lower case, etc.

What I had described is a situation in which people retained the same value, but the mode of expression completely reversed, like something a magician does when he pulls out blue flowers instead of red ones from the jar.  The equivalent to the women in politics or allowing blacks into the good schools would be 1957: Blacks should make their own schools better vs 1967: We should give blacks the best schools.  Or, we should not have a female president, because of gender differences to we should have only female presidents, because of gender differences.

If we could measure what is going on inside hearts and minds, as Jonathan Haidt tries to do, perhaps we would find that there is no difference between these types of change, that they are the variations of the same process.  But I now suspect, as I did not quite in my original post, that these are distinct phenomenon.  Keeping one's stated value unchanged, though its expression is completely inverted, is one type of sheeplike obedience to the Spirit of the Age; giving ground quickly for unclear reasons in response to social pressure is another.

Addition:  Steve Sailer discusses how public perception of cops and teachers has moved recently.

Changes In Prejudice

I competed in state speech contests in high school, usually "Boys' Humorous Interpretation." The winner in 1970 was Bob Shea, later of local fame as an actor and manager of the Palace Theater.  He did a piece called "Peasletree," which I can still recite, having competed against it so many times. He introduced it with a mention that he was attempting to preserve a vanishing cultural resource: "The Old Negro Storyteller." Slam! Liberal trump card! Judges in sport coats and turtlenecks nodded approvingly.  Bob was good, told it well.  The rest of us were competing for second place.

Peasletree was in heavy in Uncle Remus-style dialect, with its bimebyes and sezees. No one would do it today. So my entertaining Bible story that begins "Well Ol' King David was a king.  An' he was a mighty king.  And one moanin' he wuz..." is no longer remotely welcome.

I mention this because its acceptability in society has not merely changed, it has reversed. It might, might have been unacceptable in 1970 if people had known what the title meant: the confused pronunciation of a poor reader encountering the biblical word psaltry. (And had the judges known that Bob had gotten the piece from an old 78 record instead of from library research, that might have counted against him as well.) Yet even then, I think it would still have attracted admiration.

In the early 1980's we had special trainings at the hospital as AIDS became a worry. Not much of the training was strictly medical.  A lot was mythbusting and political, including wide-eyed cautioning that we must never, never suggest that homosexuals were more likely to have AIDS.  That was demeaning and bigoted.  When a psychologist suggested after initial staffing of a client that we might want to offer him AIDS testing and be cautious about contact and the safety of the other patients - said psychologist having accurately identified him as gay - people got up and walked away from the table in disgust that he should say that.  Yet three years later it was important as part of our social justice mission to side with homosexual men in their efforts to get HIV recognised as a health hazard for them in particular, which was being swept under the rug, ignored, by the Reagan Administration (despite the unprecedented quick ramp-up for research funding).  I was still liberal then.  Perhaps that was one of the pieces in becoming postliberal.

Again, the correct response had not merely changed, it had reversed.

These occurred to me as the Donald Sterling events unfolded.  When Sterling tried to contrast his actions to those of Magic Johnson, he was making an evaluation that well north of 90% of Americans would have agreed with a century ago.  Leave aside the probable truth that Sterling was actually not scandalised by Johnson's sexual promiscuity, but was merely grasping at anything that might get him out from under and allow him to kick back. What Donald Sterling hid behind was a sentiment that would have been unexceptional in 1914, even among black people.  Some would have been irritated, even quietly angry about a powerful white person saying such things in private, but most would have shrugged it off as pretty typical, yet been as scandalised as any white person at Magic's behavior. That Johnson would be considered a role model would have been repugnant to them, believing that it made them all look bad. The morality has not merely shifted, it has reversed.

Every American president from 1900-1945 made racial and ethnic comments that would destroy not only a political career these days, but might destroy one's entire life, no matter how small and unimportant one might be.

Plus there is that in private aspect. There is more variability among Americans on that, but not too many years ago people would have refused to consider any evidence against a person which had been obtained in that way. They would have pretended it did not exist, as jurors are supposed to when a judges orders something struck from the record.

I was about to say it's an advantage to have lived so long, so that I have the benefit of personal observation that the morality applauded or condemned by popular opinion was once different, giving me some perspective and balance.  Yet this is not so.  It is not an advantage.  People change quickly, and become outraged, disgusted, infuriated by things they approved of not long ago.  Pointing that out does not make one popular.

Please remember, even if you have to keep it quiet, when you hear the outrage of the crowd on any topic.  One can't count on the same people being angered by the same act 10 years later.  This isn't new, it is in our nature.

In fact, people outright deny they said the opposite only a few years before.  I have had this happen at work and at church.  Thankfully, I don't think I have experienced it among friends and family.  When people change their minds, they are quite aware of it.

Check that.  I just thought of some examples closer to home.  Best to forget if I can.

We have always been at war with Oceania.

On Not Being CS Lewis

I think I’m over this now.  Spufford’s speech came at a bad time for me (or at the perfect time, if heightened discomfort was the best preliminary to AVI learning something).

I had not known that Lewis’s accent was off-putting to British ears now.  I knew that it was something of an advantage during his lifetime: here was an Oxford don who sounded like “a bloke in a pub,” as Spufford put it.  He looks and sounds a red-faced butcher, was the description at the time. The years turn, and he now comes off as a toff, even in print. “He sounds bossy,” Spufford says with some emphasis. He spends the rest of the hour explaining how this style doesn’t work anymore, and developing a non-confrontative narrative is a better way to go.

His only real “let’s leave off with this Lewisian style of apologetics” data is the accent, plus the echoes of it that appear in print. The rest is all stuff that I recognised the truth of immediately – because I had first learned it from Lewis. It’s all very fashionable to be “about story” in the church just now, but I Was Story (When Story Wasn’t Cool) because of Lewis.

To be fair to Spufford, I was always confrontative, lecturing style as well (which was never cool), and justified it largely from Lewis, who could also engage in that mode of apologetics.  In my case it predates my exposure to Lewis, and is contaminated by a lot of personal combativeness that has little to do with defending the faith.  But that had been the long goal, to Be Like Jack and turn the contentious nature to good, attacking misunderstanding and deception, not for my own good but the good of all.

To be told that this goal was never worth pursing and even damaging – that it was responsible for much of the unpopularity of the faith now – went down rather hard.  Especially, in the context of recent articles handed to me about “argument culture,” and a rant from a young person I am fond of about my critical nature.

Let’s separate out the two things as best we can. That much of my criticism may have been secretly personal, designed to benefit myself instead of the church, I grant. So be it.  I wish I had done better.  But the other piece, that we should not be engaging in this style at all in this era, I completely reject.  Spufford is following fashion.  His is a counter-fashion, perhaps, to a previous few generations of evangelicals who were very confrontative, didactic, and lecturing. Personal, political, or social issues often seemed to drive them more than

People who have left the church, or have no interest in considering the claims of Christ point to those folks with blame. Westboro Baptist comes up in this regard frequently, and ridiculous church signs. How can you belong to a group that includes such people? is the implication. Doesn’t this in itself prove that what you believe cannot be taken seriously?

Generally speaking, these are not the things that chase people out of church.  These are the excuses people drag in later as they are already deciding to leave their wives, hang out with cooler people, or find moralities that are less expensive but more affirming.

We should strive to be all things to all men, of course, as Paul teaches. Or to live in peace with others, so far as it is in our power, as he mentions later. We should not be stumbling blocks, providing excuses for others to stay away.

But Jesus's disciples did not come up and say "We aren't getting a lot of response from the Pharisees, especially the 25-34 y/o urban Pharisee demographic.  We've got to change our style to reach that group."  Jesus was brutally hard on many of his hearers.  Even his words of comfort to some are rather obviously pointed at powerful others, who are being condemned.  There is no Gospel of Niceness in Jesus.

Does this provide excuse for evil and selfish men to condemn others?  Sure.  Apparently, that is considered the lesser problem.

More to come.

That Angelou Quote

A particular quote of Maya Angelou's, of people not remembering your words, but remembering how you made them feel, is making the rounds just now.

It is deeply true.  So true, in fact that even when it is subtle, when you are being sneakily insulting, deceptively critical of others, pretending to kindness and innocence and "speaking truth to power" when you wish to shame others, it is still remembered by the insulted more for the tone than for the content. And when those who call you out on this are further vilified as haters, it's still true.

Just sayin'

CS Lewis

I have not forgotten that I said I will post on Spufford's talk about Lewis.  It is just becoming unwieldy and I can't decide whether to divide it or reduce it.  Soon.

Needles

I have long suspected that much of the objection to vaccinations stems from a dislike of needles (and "chemicals," see below).  I am not trying to say that people who object to vaccinations are merely afraid of shots because they hated getting them as kids.

But it's moderately close to that.  About halfway there. As that is a bit insulting, I should provide more evidence than mere impression.

I have two other streams of data that are not available to most people.  I have not been methodical about gathering it, but they're there and you should know about them.

First, many psychiatric medications come in long-acting injectable forms. It is very hard to talk people into taking those.  It is not the case that there are more side effects when delivered in this form.  In fact for most of them, smaller doses can be prescribed, reducing the side-effects.  There is a confounding factor with the mentally ill that they often don't want to take these medicines at all, and hope to cheek them or otherwise avoid them.  Many don't believe they need them, so why lock oneself in to a medicine coursing through the blood that cannot be removed?  Yet even subtracting those out, and including the pressure that providers and families put on people to accept the biweekly or monthly shot, there is simply a lot of refusal to switch from oral to injectable medication.  I have heard from nurses that the same applies for Depo Provera, but I don't have any numbers on that.  The impressions of nurses are not infallible, but neither are they chopped liver.  Weigh that as you will.

Second, because of the questions at the Red Cross blood center about recent vaccines, I am always reminded to ask that day's nurse about my pet theory: Do people who refuse vaccines give blood?  No one has any numbers, but the question always intrigues them.  They note that none of the refusers they know are also blood donors.  That may seem a small sample size, but people who don't like vaccines seem to be eager to tell nurses about this a lot. Nor, when discussing the question about recent vaccines, do they ever encounter people who say "Oh I never get vaccines." This data source has pretty much dried up now, as the questions are answered privately on computer.

I'm betting that people who don't vaccinate their kids don't give blood, either.  It's unnatural.

People sometimes don't get the flu shot because they forget, or are too busy, or otherwise miss it for reasons of "soft avoidance." As they seldom get influenza, they are generally rewarded in this. Less bother, no change in health outcome.  We also all encounter people who announce every year "I never get the flu shot, and I never get the flu.  The only time I got sick was the year I got the shot." Which is crap, but how can you prove their evidence wrong?  But these folks likely have some effect on the soft avoiders. The best one can do is to point out that you don't get into an accident every time you don't wear your seat belt either.  In fact, some people go their whole lives unbuckled and uninjured.  But that doesn't mean that fastening your seatbelt is a bad idea.  Because when you need it, you really need it.

I note that people who do not get their children vaccinated are invariably people who prefer what they call "natural" treatments and medicines. That is only partly so for those who don't get flu shots.  Those certainly tend that way, but I have encountered some who are not especial granolas who nonetheless have talked themselves into not getting flu shots. I will spare you the lengthy scientific discourse about the history of medicine except to note that 99% of the plants and animals around you are inedible, and often poisonous. People who live in safe areas that have not had epidemics tend to believe that it's all largely controllable if we just take care of ourselves.  They read only selected history and science.

"Natural solutions are always better," read one of the facebook comments in my feed.  Such comments are delivered with the authority of philosophical, even religious advice.  Christians who say such things include a belief in naturalness in their theology, in fact.  They prefer to believe that God has provided everything naturally, if we would just cleverly use it and trust in Him and not vainly pursue solutions of man's devising. There is nothing in scripture to even remotely suggest this, they just like that sort of god better.  That's the way the world should be, therefore it is that way. It's a variation on some German heresies of the 18th & 19th C's. People combine it with any religion now, or have it as a religion to itself.

It would be a charming eccentricity - and in fact the individuals are often charming eccentrics - if it weren't for the dead children.

Putting a needle under your skin is unnatural.  I get it.  It's not in the Bible, it's not in Gram's list of home remedies (and she lived to be 99, so those millions of folks who died of the Spanish Flu must have...oh, forget it; they've never really thought about epidemics), it's got chemicals in it that you can't find in Nature (that is, God's World), or those much wiser Native or Eastern folks. Not to mention those corporations that are getting rich lying to you, so stay away from that. And it hurts, and kids cry, which parents of young children spend a lot of energy avoiding, and they don't like the feeling that I let them hurt my child, who will be traumatised and hate me at some level.  I want her to think mommy's presence is a safe, gentle place.

Even the idea of spacing the vaccinations out derives from this idea that if it's a shot, then it must be very risky, and hard on your child's tiny body, which must be given some sort of rest before it can be put through the ordeal or another shot.

Here's my contention: Vaccination avoidance stems from needles and chemicals, and the associations we have of such things as unnatural, painful, and unholy.  All the other arguments are post hoc.

fMRI Doubt

My son sends along a link to Neuroskeptic casting doubt on some, and perhaps even most fMRI data. It seems that the subjects' regular breathing may be confounding the experiments.  This would be pretty devastating, as functional MRI's are the sexiest thing going at present in neuropsych.

Neuroskeptic's blog is in general quite good.  Other articles include: his decision that the suspicious data of German social psychologist Jens Förster's can only be explained by data fabrication (Well that's not good); an improper use of sockpuppets by an astrophysicist to shut down criticism; and a Swedish study about a physical technique to predict suicide not being anything clearly definable statistically.

Which reminds me, I have some links about predicting violence and sexual-offense recidivism that I keep meaning to fashion into an understandable post without bogging everyone down in jargon.  Perhaps this will spur me to do it.

The Way NH Used To Be

Remembering No More Dead Dogs and A Dog Called Kitty reminded me of the Great Stone Face Award, NH's annual contest for best children's book, voted on by 4th-6th graders. My wife ran this for a few years in the 1980's, a labor-intensive task at the time. In that era, children voted on paper ballots for whatever they wished. The thousands of ballots were sent to our house, where we sorted through them by hand.

It was ultra-democratic, and quite charming. There would be the occasional vote for Moby Dick or Oliver Twist (rather doubtful), and confusing votes for "Narnia," "Babysitter's Club," or "Sweet Valley" that were difficult to assign. But every kid could vote for whatever he damn well pleased, unlike other states, which often gave their awards on the basis of committees of adults. Heck, you've got the Newbery for that. Hundreds of titles got a mention, having one last day of minor fame before gradually slipping beneath the waves.

Either one year or two after Tracy stopped doing it, the format changed to a short list of newer books that the children could choose from. This struck me as great loss for independence of thought.

New Hampshire is one of the few places that still has town meeting, though fewer every year. That also is ultra-democratic, in which any citizen can get up and address his fellow townspeople about issues of concern to them all.

The Hew Hampshire presidential primary every four years used to have all manner of candidates. When I was in high school, a Hawaiian king and his multiple wives (in odd-fitting grass skirts) came to speak at one of our assemblies, Harold Stassen had a perpetual candidacy, and all manner of crusaders, manics, and reformers came through. I think it is technically still true that a very low number of signatures and a nominal fee can get you on the ballot, but the change in media culture makes it less likely they will spend much time here. They can reach more people with a website and test the waters that way.

Are we seeing a common thread here? I have lauded this approach and my state's culture in the past, referencing it as one of the last places where democracy/independence/eccentricity still functions. Yet looking at the results, I'm not sure the old ways are the best ways. In the era that students could vote for whatever book they wanted, Judy Blume won eight years out of ten, with Superfudge winning five years in a row. Any system which creates that result should be scrapped - especially if it's Judy Blume we're talking about here. More choice has led to less choice. As for this year's winner, I have no doubt that the dog dies in the end. 

Considering town meeting, we always imagine it will be like this

and fear it will be like this.

Having been to my share, let me assure you that it's more like this.

Though there is at least some pointless ranting every year as well.

As for the primary, I'm not sure that seeing either the Hawaiian king or Harold Stassen provided much value-added. I suppose there was some advantage to the mere illustration Yes it's true. Anyone can run for president here. It's a good thought to know in the back of one's mind.

Throwing Things

Rapper 50 Cent did a terrible job of throwing a ceremonial first pitch for the Mets.  I have terrible accuracy throwing - baseballs, snowballs, darts, anything - but would not do this badly.  Most American girls, putting the wrong foot forward and not used to throwing overhand, would still do better than this.

It causes me to wonder if the baseball culture of America produces better throwers of small objects, so that even below-average Americans are far better than throwers of other nations.  I don't even want to get into spears and atlatls, thanks, though you can if something clever occurs to you.  It intrigues me because of hobbits, known for their ability to throw stones accurately.  Tolkien did not come from a baseball culture. But he did come from a cricket culture, another overhand-throwing sport.  Jamaica, where 50 Cent is from, does have cricket but has never been big in the sport, even on a local, West Indies level.

I wonder if Tollers, though not an especial cricket fan, just naturally thought that boys, and thus hobbits, grow up throwing hard objects and imputed that ability to his fictional race, even though it is an unusual ability historically and geographically.  It carried over into the D&D rules, where halflings continue to get a racial bonus in throwing.

Get A Grip

Reading the comments around Red Sox Nation.

Yes, it hurts that Josh Beckett pitches this no-hitter just as we are careening off into oblivion.  But get a grip.  He went 0-5 last year and cost a lot of money.  If we had had him, we wouldn't have won the WS.  Tip your hat, move on.

Lack of Editing

Today's sermon was "Does God Heal Today?"  The following song was "Never Once."  I love it when missteps like that invade our lives.

It was a good sermon and a good song, though.

BTW, my own personal observation is that healing seems to take place mostly in the context of community, not atomised, separated, individual events.  I know of exceptions, and I don't declare it as doctrine - it just seems to work that way more often.

"On Not Being CS Lewis" Link

I could embed the video, but prefer you see the interesting Mockingbird site it comes from.

Have I backed the wrong horse all along?

I took it personally and painfully at first, and still think there is much to it.  But second and third thoughts have caused me to question parts of it.  I'd rather the few folks who have the energy to catch the video in full do so before I comment.  I recommend skipping the Q & A section at the end, BTW.

HT:  Dubbahdee over at Necat Draco

Patriotism in Worship

Just mentioning again, apropos of Memorial Day, that I dislike any mix of patriotism with worship.  I think patriotism is great.  I am not one of those who believes that one-world or transnational philosophies are more Christian than nationalist ones.  They both stand mostly outside the faith, but I lean toward the nationalist ones for complicated reasons.

There is cultural overlap between the patriotic and Christian threads in American society.  This is mostly of the enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend variety, however.  There are those who loudly hate both patriotism and Christian faith, driving the two idea groups together.  But that is a lack of clarity that must be resisted.  Worship is worship of a God beyond all our local, temporary attachments. That is orders of magnitude more important than any tribe or nation. I think America is the best grouping in the history of mankind.  (Its only competitors in greatness are its sister nations of Anglospheric colonies and perhaps, other groupings derived from NW European cultures.)

Yet there will be no America in heaven.  There may be little memory of it, or none.  Human beings are eternal; worldly arrangements are so insubstantial as to be mere mist.  Our time-bound perspective causes us to think of our poor selves as temporary and our nation and ideals as long-term.  The opposite is true.

A Dog Called Kitty

To understand the family story about A Dog Called Kitty, one has to start with Korman's excellent mockery of the doggie genre, above.  A student is punished for writing a critical book report of the English teacher's favorite book, Old Shep, My Pal - which the drama club also has in rehearsal. "How did you know the dog dies in the end?"  "If you see a book with a dog on the cover and one of those medallions that shows it won an award, that dog is going down!"

True, that.

When Ben was a HS senior, he had a crush on a girl a few years younger.  She was less enamored of him, but friendly, at least.  They weren't hitting it off, weren't clicking, so Ben suggested that if each read each other's favorite childhood book, they might understand each other better.  He handed her Watership Down.  She thought it was okay.  She handed him A Dog Called Kitty.

Ben dutifully read it, then described it to us. After the usual poignancy of boy and dog not meshing at first but then becoming utterly devoted to each other (rather a precursor to rom-com movies, when you think of it) there is of course great danger, and the dog dies. Ben is now giggling as he tells it.

Here's the thing: the dog doesn't die in the heroic scene of great danger, during the rescue.  The dog lives through that.  Ben cannot go on, has to stop and compose himself. Kitty dies in the next chapter, by accident, when an oil pipeline piece falls off a truck randomly, killing him as he's running along the road (Those darn oil companies!). How can any writer misunderstand the genre so thoroughly as to do that?

"I sure loved Kitty. That's why it tore me up so much when he died."

We nodded at each other.  "I have to tell you, Ben.  This is not the girl for you."

Post 4400: 1493 by Charles C Mann

This has already joined Souls on Fire, Nine Nations of North America and Albion’s Seed as books which changed my entire framework for viewing things

Mann’s earlier book, 1491, upended much of what is commonly taught about the Americas before the arrival of Columbus.  I had known some of it; there was more I should have put together from pieces I did know; much was entirely new.  Short version: the effect of European diseases on the Native Americans, particularly in the areas settled by the Spanish and Portuguese, was far more profound than anything we had been taught in school. They wiped out 90%, perhaps even 95%, of the population.  Secondly, we continue to discover entire civilisations that were unheard of even a few decades ago, in the Andes, in the Amazon, in Mexico.  I reviewed it a few years ago, and followed up on that last year.

But upending pre-Colombian understanding is a smallish thing.  Few of us speak much of that, or connect it to our own history, physical or intellectual. The history of the world after 1500, especially in Europe and North America, is part of our intellectual furniture. It includes much that we use to define ourselves, our culture, and our enemies.  We discuss ourselves in a world connected to Martin Luther, Queen Elizabeth, Thomas Jefferson, and Isaac Newton.  Battles, royal successions, great thinkers, scientific advances – these are the influences that made our world.

Right?

Mann would rate their influence far lower, seeing them as riding atop deep currents that drove the actions of leaders.  From the moment the Columbian Exchange started in 1492, it changed the world.  Silver – vast piles of it from Potosi, far and away the richest city in the world.  Had you heard of it?  Me neither. It was in in the Andes, and its hiccoughs brought down the Ming empire in  China and bankrupted Spain - the two most powerful entities in the world.  Now unremembered. Mosquitos – and the differences among them – may have fueled most of the African slave trade and drawn our Mason-Dixon line for us, as well as extending a one-year Civil War on for four years.  Potatoes and sweet potatoes, tobacco, guano, beer and wine, horses, epidemics – these were the main players on the stage, driving the human decisions in ways we still have difficulty understanding. Our actions did not mean nothing, but neither were individuals of much influence, save by accident.

It upends everything you thought you knew.  You will never read world history from 1500, including the parts you thought you knew well, in the same way again.  It does not contradict what was known before so much as swamps it in newer, larger concepts.  Time and again I nodded to myself “I knew that.  Why did I not make the connection?”  It is strong evidence of the ability of narrative (as well as counternarrative and amendments) to channel our thought. 

What you know is still there, just pushed a few rows back. Northwest Europe colonised the world and became rich because of a few crops which allowed it to eliminate years of complete famine. That changed trade, acquisition, science, mortality, weaponry. That may be most of history. Is that an oversimplification and a bit of a stretch?  Absolutely.  Does it make as least as much sense as my previous understanding?  Probably.

Mann himself says "...any general history of Europe without an entry in its index for S tuberosum should be ignored." So there.

People interested in environmental issues will have much to consider as well.  Mann declares that both the catastrophists and the free marketers are right, and provides a lot of information either could use to advance their arguments.  He concludes that the unregulated exchange and the free movement of goods across the world has indeed made humanity much more prosperous.  But it has also caused famines, epidemics, wars, and other suffering.  For those who worry that intensive agricultural practices might cause ecological collapse, Mann would say it already has.  Lots of times.  Yet he also gives evidence that it has fed the world, brought huge swaths of humanity into comfortable existences undreamed of before, and improved our cooperation and goodwill.  Both are true.  We won’t be able to keep our old assurances quite intact, none of us.  Okay, lots of us will anyway, because we will only keep the parts we like.  Yet I think even the most stubborn and polarised will pause.

There is also a lot here for those who wish to understand how the Far Eastern trade 1500-1900, both with Europe and the west coast of South America, connects with events we are more familiar with.