Maundy Thursday

Maundy Thursday

So good to me

Maundy Thursday

It is all we hope it will be

On Maundy Thursday

We come in so thirsty

For what you provide

On Maundy Thursday now

We proclaim the God who will die

 

Titania McGrath

I did not know until today she/he had a standup routine. The speed and the accent lost me at about the five minute mark, but I still loved it.

Algorithms for Recipes

If you want to get a real-life granular picture of what can go wrong with algorithms, try searching for recipes.  The search engines routinely ignore what you look for, insisting "Oh, this must be what you really want, because so many other people do."  If you search for Spare ribs, worcestershire, mustard, garlic, onion, it will ignore the garlic and onion. There is even a chance it will ignore one of the first three - spare ribs, worcestershire, or mustard. If you double back and put the garlic first, it will ignore the mustard and onion. If you put the + sign in front of all of them it will go completely random, giving you chicken recipes and pork in general rather than spare ribs per se. And don't even ask about the sudden intrusion of paprika, mushrooms, and red wine, all of which are perfectly good ingredients for slow-cooker spare ribs, but I didn't ask for them.

When it does this to me and I see a recipe that I actually do find intriguing, I force myself to ignore it.  I won't give the bastards the satisfaction. You got it wrong, dammit! I am giving you a failing grade for this assignment.

Addendum to the Tim Keller Essay

I thought I was finished after recent Part I, Part II, Last Part, on Tim Keller's discussion of the Christian obligation to speak for the voiceless and defend the oppressed, concluding with my pointed questions of "Yet who are the actual voiceless, and who has a voice? Who are the real people with power, and who are disadvantaged?"  I don't say oppressed because I think that's a hard proof for anyone in America, other than on the individual level of someone with an abusive family member they cannot get away from. Maybe living in a violent neighborhood is oppression, but it gets difficult to assign who the oppressors are in that case.

Looking for something else, I came across Scott Siskind's I Can Tolerate Anything But the Outgroup, which I linked to recently.  However, as that was among many other links, it might be better to showcase it here. People show lack of tolerance along political and cultural lines more than racial ones. Part VI discusses the research giving evidence for that. Measurements range from 30% to double the amount of discomfort or even active avoidance on the basis of politics/culture rather than race.

You might find Tim Keller Goes For a Walk fun.

Learning Mode

My books are backing up, as are my podcasts, and I am feeling the need to learn things. I don't know it that means more posting here or less, but it won't be current events, which is always a dead end in terms of learning anything. However bad things get in the country and the world, Christians in other times and places have had it much worse and have managed to soldier on. 

As usual, CS Lewis has the proper response. Learning in War Time. If you want my advice about anything, that would be it. Read more CS Lewis

Prophetic About Infection

 Peter Huber, he of impressive academic credentials in engineering and law and subsequent impressive writing credentials about their intersection, wrote prophetically in City Journal in 2007 about infection in cities, including pharma, vaccines, and antibiotic use. I don't feel remotely qualified to add anything.

The link was passed on to me by an MIT classmate of his who is a regular reader here.

Destruction

"The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it." Paul-Muad'Dib to the Guild navigators, at his confrontation with the Emperor Shaddam IV. Frank Herbert, Dune, (1965)

The story of this poor bastard was carried over at Instapundit. I have grown frustrated with that site for a few large reasons, but providing these stories that aren't going to make it to my local media sources nor the national ones is a thing that keeps me coming back. 

There are stories like this a few times a week on campuses.  I think FIRE and The College Fix are clearinghouses for these and there are even more I don't know about, because I don't go there often. Colleges are an ecosystem I no longer understand, and I guess I look at them as places that are going to have to stew in their own juice until the great reaping takes place. Government loans prop up an unsustainable product, and who knows how long that can go on?  We can predict collapse, but I have been hearing about the collapse of US government because of the debt since the Reagan administration, so I have to agree with Adam Smith that "there is a lot of ruin in a nation."

These things are simply insane.  I have no idea what my best response is to them.  It was milder when my first three sons went to college, and they went to schools where this was not much of an issue. 1997-2010. Son #4 went to a tech school and then the USMC - not an issue (though it might be now). Son #5 had a few classes in the Criminal Justice department that made my eyes widen and caused me to warn him about who might come after him and how to tread lightly.  In the Army Reserves, he once sighed to me that "half our trainings are people who look scared saying 'Please don't rape anybody.'" I'm hoping his current EMT training is still focused on actual knowledge and skills.  Although...emergencies...emotions running high...people blaming others because of their stupid decisions... the reality of unreality may come for him in time. I certainly saw it where I worked at an acute psych facility, of decent people being accused of sexual assault, racism, or violence and having to work under suspicion for months on another unit while the investigation played out.* Hmm. I need to talk to Kyle about this soon.

The activists have the power to destroy on social media, because the administrators don't much fear the faculty.  In 90%+ of cases on campuses it seems that sensible heads prevail and the dangerous people are mollified and hip-checked into the boards, rendering them much less powerful.  Yet this seems less true every year, and even a 1% chance of complete unfairness can stifle any speaking up.

*I don't know of any unfairly fired.  Unfair accusations are so common in our field that even the most clueless administrators pick up that "Hey, hardly any of these stories turn out to be true!" But because a few are true, the accused, nearly always male, has to live in fear while the process plays out.

Hobo's Lullaby

It's an old tune. The long pauses between lyrics, plus the hesitation of not starting a new line on the first beat but catching up on the next are reminiscent of human moaning, crying, with an occasional catch or sob. It is frequently used for melancholy songs, but i don't think it is artificial or intentional.  Artists naturally come upon these things because they express in the phrasing what the tune and lyrics don't fully accomplish.

"In My Lived Experience"

It is a meaningless phrase brought out when the speaker has no actual reasons. The phrasing is new, so we think of it as some deterioration of public culture proving that we would all be going to hell immediately, except for the handbasket shortage. Yet it is largely equivalent to the older "I just feel," and when you look at it closely, the more accepted phrase "In my experience" isn't much better. Older people have been saying for generations "When you've lived as long as I have..." We likely find it risible because as a newer phrase it is more frequently on the lips of people too young to have much Lived Experience. Also, it is usually said with an earnestness and passion that the speaker feels are proof of correctness. How dare you question my lived experience.  It's irrefutable, because I have actually felt these things for a long time. You can't know what I have been through.

The Weight of Glory

The most frequent quote from "The Weight of Glory" is also one of the most frequently misquoted and mis-described. 

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which,if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.

The qualifiers that point to these these extremes of "gods and goddesses" and "horror and corruption" as our eventual destinies rather than our current realities seems to be what trips people up.  Sometimes they just leave them out in requoting, as if Lewis is saying that the people we meet are gods and goddesses now, and that we should be worshiping them.  This goes wrong both in the understanding of the fundamentalists that insist that Lewis is saying something deeply heretical about the divinity of humans and the New Agers who insist he is saying something wonderful about the divinity of humans. When I was in the CS Lewis group on Facebook years ago, there were any number of spacey types who had loved something about Narnia but knew little else who nonetheless made bold pronouncements about what Lewis thought. This quote was a biggie, and I was involved several times in discussions trying to get the quote right and the idea right.  I became familiar with William O'Flaherty at that time and learned that he had a book completed and awaiting publication The Misquotable CS Lewis. We had some pleasant exchanges and it was fun to hear his actual voice on a "Pints With Jack" podcast recently.

I do wonder if the general inability to get this concept quite right is not related to a deeper evasion on our part, not just the standard carelessness and applying our priors to every new bit of information.  We resist the underlying concept. We don't like to think that the irritating, boring, and even destructive people we are dealing with might someday be a god or goddess.  We don't want that good result for them.  We say that we do, that we hope for the best for everyone, but the Plain Man at the beginning of The Great Divorce is recognisable in every heart. We know people we think should never be exalted, never allowed to forget the evil they have done. We are okay with grudgingly allowing them a corner in heaven where they can stay, so long as they promise to mostly stay out of sight and not ask for much. But to enjoy the company and admiration of people who we feel we have done more for in this life? Unacceptable.

We don't like it in the other direction either, that people we have some fondness for might not ever show the least repentance, and gradually become more corrupt, more selfish, eventually becoming a horror from a nightmare we could not bear to observe. We would still have memory of what good had been installed in them at the beginning, and the charm or courage or even kindness that was worth preserving. It may even be a person who had done more than merely a good turn for us, but had rescued us when we were rejected or abandoned, who we feel we owe a good deal to and would like to rescue. We do not like to contemplate that this might have a bad end.  We believe God should not allow this.

Vaccine Passport

The discussions are already loading up whether this is dangerous, unamerican, ripe for civil rights abuses, etc. I think my concern comes even farther back up the chain.  Is there any evidence this will actually accomplish anything in terms of public health? It sounds like it might if you imagine infected people boarding airplanes and sneezing their way to New Orleans, but lots of things sound like they might work. Our imaginations are unreliable guides for legislation. In this it is similar to Second Amendment rights questions (there may be distinctions that have not yet occurred to me). There isn't any evidence that proposed gun control legislation will increase safety, and it might actually make things worse. Therefore, the question should not even make it to the table.

I do understand that many reverse this framing and say "First, let us note that this is an infringement on liberties and should be rejected on that basis."  I don't object. I may think more like an engineer than a lawyer.

I think the twin solutions are admired for similar reasons.  They both make some people feel safer when they imagine simplistic narratives, that is, stories they quickly imagine about how illness could be spread or someone could be shot.

It gets difficult for private companies. An airline might have good data showing that requiring a vaccine ID provides no added safety benefit, but if the public believes it does, they will fly other airlines. Where do you draw the line between not being bullied and just saying "Eh, it's all about advertising and perception anyway. Put on the show and stay in business."

Updates: Someone at National Review does not think there is evidence that a vaccine passport would create any positive benefit.  He quotes some interesting people, and notes that some groups have difficulty obtaining a vaccine and others have legitimate reasons for caution.

In the online arguments, I notice that the sides quickly split into people who are opposed to the vaccine itself (and often all vaccines) and thus feel they are being forced to get something unsafe in order to exercise rights of movement and interaction that are foundational as American, versus people who are asserting that all who oppose the vaccine passport are unscientific conspiracy theorists who oppose all vaccines.  When those poles are set up, they become self-fulfilling, as the antivaxxers look like the whole other side to the passport-demanders, and inflexible tyrannical sheeple look like the whole of the other side.  People who have any view between those poles have a hard time getting heard over the shouting.

Transcending One's Era

In discussing great books of the past, there is now a tendency for modern examination to get stalled by accusations that the author was sexist, racist, or homophobic. While these are excellent questions to apply to anyone we are proposing be read now, I find that the objection seems to work well for those who would prefer to talk about nothing else.  They have succeeded in focusing all attention on what they personally want to talk about rather than anything else the author might have to say. Funny how that keeps working in every era and culture.  Much of modern art is about "starting a conversation" about...whatever the artist wants to spend endless evenings talking about.

The defenses of the author can be similarly weak, however. "Well, he was a product of his time..." is a frequent starting point. It is a valid explanation at times, but that is also why people fall back on it as an excuse. All decent excuses are subject to abuse. Wolves don't hide in wolves' clothing, but in sheep's. If we are to be reading someone now, we expect them to transcend their times in some way, else why would we read them at all? They should provide something from outside their time, whether that be a universal, something that anticipates later developments, or something that summarises the past up to their point.  There is some value in reading an author who is simply representative of his or her time in order to learn about that era.  But we are not then learning from that author, but merely learning more about that era.

However, when that objection is answered, the accusers usually double down and expect that an author entirely transcend his or her era. I sigh when this happens because it comes under the category of "Suspicions Confirmed."  The accuser does not expect in the slightest to learn anything from an author from another era or from understanding the era on its own terms. The accuser wants only that all views echo his own. He does not see that insistence saws off the branch he is sitting on. If earlier writers are rejected because they do not support what our era insists must be true, then the question quickly* emerges "Well, doesn't that also apply to us, then?" Writers from earlier eras might be used as ammunition, to "prove" that the modern's current prejudices are in fact universals.  Isolated quotes are very good for that.  I think many of my papers in college followed this template. See? **Malory, Euripides, and Jung all agree with me.  

The problem is not that failing to entirely transcend one's era should not be a criteria because it is a bridge too far that even brilliant writers might not achieve, it is a bad idea in its own right. All human beings lived in an actual time and place.  Even Jesus ate fish and wore sandals. He did not leave a one-page, double-spaced document with simple directions, then quietly go off to die for our sins and defeat the powers of hell - salvation SOLVED. We sometimes try to put him in such a box, but he keeps escaping it. Mark Twain transcended his era on the issue of race admirably. To wring our hands and clutch at pearls that he doesn't write as "_____ Studies" professors think would have been better is not just weak thinking, it is backwards. People who attempt to write from completely outside of time and place are bloodless. The thing is neither possible nor desirable, and we should be deeply suspicious of those who claim it. 

To express universality, one can only write about the particular. This is so pervasive in literature that modern authors use it as a trick, because others have used it so effectively. But in Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," it is the very small-town plainness that leads to the universality (as in the postal address "Jane Crofut, The Crofut farm, Grovers Corners, Sutton County, New Hampshire, United States of America, Western Hemisphere, the earth, the solar system, the universe, the mind of God"). Solzhenitsyn is not universal in spite of his Russianness, but because of it. No one reads Jane Austen because they want to return to that world, except perhaps as a visitor on an adventurous vacation, but because her world of women is alike enough for the modern woman to understand it, but different enough to provide a contrast. She gives us a clear particularity, which is the only foundation of universality. St. Paul is writing to particular churches, and even the Revelation to John is structured around admonishment to specific churches. Those who purport to be universal right out of the gate only become vague, platitudinous, rather Eastern in their understanding.

*By quickly, I mean both  "immediately, to those who have self-observation," and "never, to those who refuse to acknowledge that mirrors exist." 

**Liberal-Arts majors will recognise this as a good Trifecta.

Obesity

I keep neglecting to mention the influence of obesity on Covid deaths, likely because I am obese myself and keep trying to shelve it elsewhere in my brain. But it's there and it's real.

Tim Keller and the Biblical Critique of Secular Justice Theories - Last Part

It's a good time to reread the previously-linked essay by Keller. I say again that he is largely right and I have little to add to much of what he says. I do think my few corrections or different looks are important, though.

I mentioned in my first post that the secular theories he discusses and calls a spectrum are actually not a continuum of any sort.  They are separate slots.  James even thought that "junk drawer" might be accurate. I think that is fair, especially as we all know from personal experience that while junk drawers eventually include a lot of crap we should have thrown out years ago, they also retain importance.  In your last year of life, there are drawers in your house you did not use.  But you went to the junk drawer three times that last week.

Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory includes 6 axes on which moral decisions hinge. 

Care/harm

Fairness/cheating

Loyalty/betrayal

Authority/subversion

Sanctity/degradation

Liberty/oppression

He would say that these are what actually operate in our morality, regardless of what our theories say. So in Keller's discussion of Libertarian Justice, it is quickly obvious that liberty/oppression is the primary driver. (There are real but weaker influences from the other axes, as there will be in the subsequent theories, but I leave them aside for simplicity.) Liberal (classical liberal) Justice is about fairness/cheating. Utilitarian Justice is about care/harm. Postmodern Justice is only weakly about morality, being concerned with power, but there are elements of all the moral axes in it, though authority/subversion and loyalty/betrayal (Oh yes.  Oh very yes.  Look closer) are stronger. Keller isn't wrong, here, but I think Moral Foundations makes these things jump out more sharply.  I fantacise that if I pointed him to Haidt, Keller would drink it right in in a few minutes and rewrite this all better in a week.

Race Is Only One Category, And Not the Biggest

Because Keller wrote an earlier essay in the series about race and justice, and because the MLK statue in DC is one of the photo illustrations, the signalling is clear that when Keller is talking about justice, he may be talking about many things, especially the poor and the powerless (I think he mercifully avoided the weasel-word marginalised), but race is present in every sentence he writes. It is the Topic of the Age, so that is hardly surprising. But i think it diverts him from seeing his own lesson accurately. He forcefully points out that systems of power work hard to perpetuate themselves, and that Christians should be alert to this. I have no quibble with his assertion that Christians should try to be a voice for those who have no voice, however much others have used that and similar formulations deceitfully, to advance political rather than spiritual agendas.  Keller gets it right in theory, and mostly in practice.

Yet the Biblical word "generations" leads us astray. Sometimes power and influence are transmitted generation over generation, as they were in in Bible times, and have been unto our present day. Yet that has diminished every year. Since the beginning of the age of exploration, into the ages of industrialisation and information, on to whatever we call what we are entering now, generations have weakened and other factors risen.  When Keller talks about power structures and brings in the idea of generations, he can' help but have all further thinking on the subject be about race. If we want to look at power structures perpetuating themselves and think long term.  Race is inescapable.  And accurate.

But I don't think race has much to do with what describes institutional power anymore.  That urban black populations continue to have bad lives is no longer simply a matter of oppression. 

There has been a fun game among the race-baiters recently of claiming that all their statements about white fragility and white oppression must be true, the evidence being that it upsets white people so much. Not a strictly logical statement, but vivid. I would like to flip that and give a return volley: the reason that the history of racial oppression has become of enormous importance in the last few years is that the present isn't as rich a resource of examples. I knew sixty years ago that white people had held black people as slaves and treated them horribly, and that there was still prejudice in the south (ten years later I figured out it was in the north as well, just different). So all of a sudden this is news? No one ever heard this before? No, all it means is that something else is happening, so they are bringing this up as a fake bush to hide behind as they move across the landscape.

When we used to visit my in-laws there was a card game where you had to get to 500 points, or not get to 500 points or whatever, played over many hands, with totals kept. Many competitive people present. My mother-in-law was well in the lead. Stuart, her husband, had two good hands in a row, vaulting him into second place, still well behind her. Her eyes narrowed. "Everyone get Stuart." And everyone did. This is race atop the Powerlessness rankings. Race has been the clear champion for generations (biblical term), retiring trophy after trophy.  But is it still true. The new and immense power of social media like Twitter and Facebook are much in the news.  Do we see those as organised along the lines of keeping black people down? The Upper-class media of networks, NYT and WaPo, they are clearly very powerful and influential.  Is race much a part of that?  To counter that in both cases those are largely white people running them is to miss what is actually happening. That's a cover, a diversion. Look closer. And notice which black people - because it's not all of them, but there are lots and lots - are being elevated in those systems.  It's not the ones who are most white, but most SWPL. Government is ever-more powerful, and ever-more diverse. The powerful do perpetuate themselves, Keller is right, and all those CRT people are right in that sense that this self-perpetuation is still going on.

It's just that this ceased being about race decades ago, and in the last decade that has accelerated. Disadvantage by race has persisted, but it is diminished, and in most sectors is only residual now. There is a parallel from Dilbert, when one of the female characters is railing at Wally and Dilbert that the powerful people in the company are ALL MEN and Wally meekly says "those are other men." To focus on whiteness is to entirely miss who is ruling you and screwing you over for their own good now.

And Christians, of all people, should not be falling for that. We need to be a voice for the actual voiceless, who show up in tens of thousands for DC protests but don't even get reported on, who vote by the millions but get sneered at by the people who represent them. There was a joke from the 1980s that a woman from my church told in the early 2000s, making what she thought was a series of lighthearted but ultimately bigoted comments in a political discussion, about Tip O'Neill being told that one of his previous supporters had made a little more money and was now a Republican.  He asked what the dollar amount was and sighed "Is that all it takes, now?" There was a day when there was truth in that, when Republicans went to country clubs and Democrats were working stiffs. Even then it wasn't as deep as the accusations made it, but there was something to it.  By O'Neill's day that was already more untrue than it was true, and by the time my friend repeated it around 2002 the reverse was clearly true. And now the very rich are overwhelmingly liberal, yet remnants of the myth persist. People still believe old ideas to be true, because you can still find examples of rich Republicans or old-money white people preserving power with government influence, serving as confirmation bias.

I suggested who the powerful are but perhaps should not have.  Run it over in your mind yourselves who had power in America ten years ago, not one hundred years ago, who are trying to pull up the ladders and prevent competition now. Who has the money, the influence, the leverage, the ear of government entertainment and publishing and academia? If you have other power categories you think of that I didn't mention, so much the better.  I ask only that you consider where the power really lies, not where you were told it lies when you were in school.

Next, who is trying to keep you from seeing that? 

Now, take Tim Keller's very good biblical advice and go be a voice for the powerless.

What a Difference a Day Makes

Zachriel's link in a comment section about skin tone reminded me of an odd phenomenon Steve Sailer pointed out years ago: people who believe human behavior is entirely* environmental and cultural are willing to accept and even applaud research that shows differences earlier and earlier in human development. Finding themselves appalled by behavioral and cognitive differences in males versus females and among different races when they show up in kindergarten, they start tracking back, running experiments to see when this begins and what cause it.  They accept that it is already present in preschool.  They breathlessly report that it shows up even in toddlers. Clever researchers uncover that even among infants boys and girls look at different things, mothers speak to them differently, and Chinese infants are better-behaved and cry less often than European ones. No matter how far back we push the research, it seems, people are different.

They are not willing to push it back to before birth, however, and certainly not nine months before birth. (They acknowledge the possibility of prenatal influences in theory, but then never mention it again in any discussions, not even in recognised categories like Fetal Alchohol Syndrome. Oh that, yeah.  Terrible stuff. Now, as I was saying about mother's attitudes to girls versus boys in terms of what they coo when they are nursing, did you know that their nonsense language is softer and at a higher pitch toward girls?  It just goes to show...). We seem to communicate a wealth of destructive cultural information in the first few months which takes a lifetime of intervention to undo.

It is bizarre reasoning when looking at 15-year-olds and their problematic behaviors to keep going back, and back, always saying "so it must be even earlier than that, huh" through all the years that children aren't listening to their parents, their teachers, their priests, or their grandparents about anything else are somehow learning all this terrible stuff unconsciously beginning in the first year of life. It must be the TV! Or movies! Except that we reportedly had even more of those terrible ideas before there were even newspapers...

But not just a few days before that.

When what looks at the consequences of those beliefs, however, they suddenly look less bizarre.  If children are already responding in horrible sexist, racist, homophobic ways by the time they enter Montessori school at age three, then it just should that we've got a lot of work to do here! The government needs to be involved, we need to have programs for toddlers, we need to get more words being spoken to little black babies, we need to supervise the colors and fabrics children are dressed in, we need to have puppets explaining to them about social attitudes and cute animated characters singing to them! This has got to be a full-court press.  There is not a moment to be wasted. Civilisation is at stake.  Society needs to find ten times more jobs for people like us to intervene here. 

But if those things are present at conception, then there's not a lot for them to do anymore. It means those jobs are useless, and may even run the risk of being harmful. I suggest that is a powerful motivator.  People may not think their particular job or prospects are in danger, but folks are extremely alert to what things benefit their tribe and which things benefit some other tribe instead. Their students, their neighborhood, their children - they are all going to need jobs, and mates, and friends, and status.  And the sources of that must be protected.

*As I have noted many times, there will be a theoretical acknowledgement that some heritable factors contribute to behavior and ability, but all of their experiments and their reporting about them do not notice that this possibility is even on the table.  The genetic is routinely excluded as even a possible explanation among almost everyone in the social sciences, except those who are specifically interested in it and looking for it. I mention this from time to time when a new study hits the news and I feel the obligation to point out once again that the heritable is a clearly possible explanation for x, but in this expensive study of 4,000 middle-schoolers it has clearly not even occurred to these professionals.  But it gets tiring.  It's always the same.

Return to Live Worship

We returned to live worship for the first time since last November, and the first time indoors in over a year.  I had thought we were only going to be allowed to hum along beneath our masks but we were able to sing out (though still masked) and the church was moderately full, though distanced.  We sang "All Glory Laud and Honor," and i got to sing in parts, and started crying by the end of the first verse, so happy to be back.

I also automatically go into tears when a descant comes in, so I got to cry twice over this hymn this morning.

Voice-to-Text

Voice to text, which I am now calling voice-to-joke, is not good at Native American names, which occurs throughout the country. Piscatasquog is rendered as "biscuit a squawk."  My particular app is clearly racist.  Someone needs to come up with a woke version of voice-to-text.

I'm Going To Give It To Mary With Love

 

Great piano work.

Susceptible

I wonder if a tendency to mystical experience co-occurs with susceptibility to just drifting into the Spirit of the Age, or one of the spirits of the age.

In my Jesus people days we looked on that susceptibility entirely as a spiritual danger.  If you messed around with meditation, or with yoga, dabbled in occult practices, or were even too easily enamored of ecstatic Christian experience you were thought to be "opening yourself out" to unclean spirits, demons, or other unhealthy spiritual realities. Even playing around with them "for fun" was thought dangerous.  We took it seriously, and I do believe we went overboard with it.  We still do not celebrate Hallowe'en and go out at the times the children would come by for candy blackmail, but that is just habit at this point, and living in a 55+ community it is no longer an issue.

I don't know much about the possibility and reality of unclean spirits and demons acting, whether on you or in you.  I have read and heard stories I find credible, but I don't have any myself. They may have been there, or be there still, and I am simply oblivious.

Yet I now have a different worry. Mystical experience that people professing to be knowledgeable about has long been one of the ways that cults work.  There is a setup for a powerful experience, which they then interpret for you, and they slowly swallow you.  More subtly, I think even Christians who rely too heavily on their meditative practices, even when they call it a "discipline," have a susceptibility to suspect theologies and mixing in secular political or cultural elements as if they are neglected parts of the faith which the church at large must now expend energy on to incorporate into the faith going forward.

I relate it to a reliance on feelings. They believe they are sensing where "the spirit" is leading them or even leading the church (with the obvious conclusion that they must get on board with that). But the spirit is just a spirit of the age.  Is that the same thing ultimately, a spiritual being we don't have much understanding of, influencing a movement or a cause or even the entire age? I don't even speculate except to bring it up in case those of better discernment find it helpful.  But I don't rule out that destructive movements in the church might not just be temptations, but tempters.

Rocks Are Heavy

The study Rocks are Heavy: Transport costs and paleoarchaic quarry behavior in the Great Basin was referenced with admiration in a podcast I listened to this morning for reasons very dear to an aspiring Village Idiot.  It is an example of not overlooking the obvious, which the authors felt had become altogether too common in their branch of archaeology. I have not read the study, only the abstract, and am relying on the summary by the archaeologist being interviewed.

The behavior of the people at the quarry was measurably different from the behavior of what seemed to be similar or related people away from the site. The authors suggested that it might be the same people, acting differently in different circumstances, or that even if it was separate clusters of people, the variation might be best explained by circumstances, not diverse cultures or technologies.

If it's a good quarry, people likely came from miles around to use it. They could have adopted strategies of getting in quickly, grabbing a lot of usable rock while the rest of the tribe watched your back, and getting out of Dodge ASAP, chipping off pieces to make arrowheads and spear points at some remote location in safer territory instead.  But rocks are heavy, and that would reduce the number of points you could make from each raid on the quarry, so you would have to go back more often.  This might limit your range for hunting or foraging, as you couldn't get too far from that necessary resources.

If people recognised that there was plenty of rock to go around, however, they might adopt another strategy: everyone learns to get along while they are at the quarry. This would result in more trade, which reliably results in more prosperity for everyone. More marriage arrangements rather than abductions, more looking over the shoulder of those other guys to see how they cook things or make blades. People in the same area often have deeply related languages, and those would get more similar - or if languages were not mutually intelligible, simple shared vocabulary would be developed. 

Seasonality might be similar, so that multiple bands had similar times that were convenient to come to the quarry. Festivals might emerge, and possible alliances against outsiders would be easier to establish. Building projects for religious or economic purpose could become larger, more permanent.  Think megaliths, defensible walls, or temples. Small walled areas can be economic - trading areas that neither side can get an army into, which would make conflict less impulsive.

In short, culture changes because rocks are heavy. It is best not to draw conclusions too quickly about hierarchy, marriage, or mobility among sites within range of the quarry their blades come from.  Whether they traded for the points or untreated rock, or did a smash and grab for some stone cores, or met yearly and left lots of rock flakes behind while everyone was talking and partying.