Not in Kansas anymore…

…WOW!

(Hat Tip: Jonah Goldberg at The Corner)

A Sermon I want to remember

This is just to jot down in order to remember, the basic idea of an intriguing sermon given by Rev. Jeremy Caddick at Emmanuel College chapel last year.  I can’t at the moment recall the reading, but the gist of it was familial.  Rev. Caddick began by noting that we commonly draw a distinction between our relationships with our family members on one hand, and with our friends on the other, the underlying rationale being that while we are given the former, we choose the latter.

He went on to point out, however, that in spite of the fact that we may freely associate with one person or another in our individual lives, the church we have is the church we are given, at least in terms of personal composition.

I think there’s a lot there to ponder.

2 from the East

An otherwise unfortunate series of circumstances has led me to a delightfully increasing acquaintance with Korean poetry. I don’t (yet) know the language, but I do appreciate what I can currently describe only rather vacuously as a sense of being an isolated thought suspended in a gentle breeze, flitting between apprehensiveness and freedom.

The first is one of the oldest extent Korean poems, a hyangga from the Silla period. The author is purportedly one Ch’oyong:

I revel all night long
in the moonlit capital,
come home and discover
four legs in my bed!
Two are mine;
whose are the other two?
Legs once mine, now purloined!
What am I to do?

(trans. from here)

The other is from a modern Korean poet, and curiously enough it reflects the situation that brought me to it. The author is Kim Sowôl:

Long From Now

Long from now, if you should seek me,

I would tell you I have forgotten.

If you should blame me in your heart,

I would say “Missing you so, I have forgotten.”

And if you should still reprove me,

“I couldn’t believe you, so I have forgotten.”

Unable to forget you today, or yesterday,

but long from now “I have forgotten”

It’s not what you say…

…it’s how you say it that counts. Apt advice from the Mediterranean ancients, who left us many examples of the consequences of not speaking correctly…or at least in the manner in which one’s audience would want one to speak.

I’m currently engaged in an intermittent discussion with Orwhalyus over at Works and Days on the origins of the medieval spellings michi and nichil for the classical mihi and nihil, (I’ve remarked on more than one occasion that all the evidence has probably already been compiled and the correct conclusions reached by some some late 19th Century German PhD candidate whose dusty thesis is currently rotting away under the stacks at Tübingen or Heidelberg. But that won’t stop us!) and the most recent exchange brought up Catullus 84 as an example of how you could be hammered in Ancient Rome for incorrect speech. That put me in the mind of one of the more entertaining episodes of early Roman history, namely, the origins of the Pyrrhic War. The following is from the Loeb translation of the Roman Antiquities of Dionysius of Halicarnassus:

Postumius was sent as ambassador to the Tarentines. As he was making an address to them, the Tarentines, far from paying heed to him or thinking seriously, as men should do who are sensible and are taking counsel for a state which is in peril, watched rather to see if he would make any slip in the finer points of the Greek language, and then laughed, became exasperated at his truculence, which they called barbarous, and finally were ready to drive him out of the theatre. As the Romans were departing, one of the Tarentines standing beside the exit was a man named Philonides, a frivolous fellow who because of his besotted condition in which he passed his whole life was called Demijohn; and this man, being still full of yesterday’s wine, as soon as the ambassadors drew near, pulled up his garment, and assuming a posture most shameful to behold, bespattered the sacred robe of the ambassador with the filth that is indecent even to be uttered.

When laughter burst out from the whole theatre and the most insolent clapped their hands, Postumius, looking at Philonides, said: “We shall accept the omen, you frivolous fellow, in the sense that you Tarentines give us what we do not ask for.” Then he turned to the crowd and showed his defiled robe; but when he found that the laughter of everybody became even greater and heard the cries of some who were exulting over and praising the insult, he said: “Laugh while you may, Tarentines! Laugh! For long will be the time that you will weep hereafter.” When some became embittered at this threat, he added: “And that you may become yet more angry, we say this also to you, that you will wash out this robe with much blood.” The Roman ambassadors, having been insulted in this fashion by the Tarentines both privately and publicly and having uttered the prophetic words which I have reported, sailed away from their city.

As soon as Aemilius, with the cognomen Barbula, had assumed the consulship, Postumius and those who had been sent with him as ambassadors to Tarentum arrived in the city, bringing no answer, to be sure, but relating the insults that had been offered them and exhibiting the robe of Postumius as proof of their story. When great indignation was shown by all, Aemilius and his fellow consul assembled the senate and considered what course they ought to take, remaining in session from early morning until sunset; and this they did for many days. The question was not whether the terms of peace had been violated by the Tarentines, since all were agreed upon that point, but when an army should be sent against them. For there were some who advised against undertaking this war as yet, while the Lucanians, the Bruttians, and the large and warlike race of Samnites were in rebellion and Tyrrhenia, lying at their very doors, was still unconquered, but only after these nations had been subdued, preferably all of them, but if that should not be possible, at least those lying eastward and close to Tarentum. But others thought the opposite course advisable, namely, not to wait for a moment, but to vote for war at once. When it was time for counting the votes, those in the latter group were found to be more numerous than those who advised postponing the war to another time. And the populace ratified the decision of the senate.

(XIX, 5-6)

A Further Point on Modernism

Earlier in this post, I posited a definition for Modernism based on an artist’s relative consciousness of how things in a given culture can be considered “new” or “old”. I was to partially retract that on the grounds that the consciousness and manipulation of such categories was manifestly in full operation in previous eras, particularly in Roman civilization. There’s an excellent article by Hines, I think, and I’ll get the reference here once I dig it out. The gist of the matter is that by the time the Romans came along literarily, Greek poetry had already been established as something of a gold standard for centuries. Once you’ve had a few generations of Latin poets come along and develop their language for poetry, you then get your Golden Age Latin literature (e.g., Horace’s Odes, Virgil’s Aeneid, etc.). Well…what happens to the guys who come next, the so-called Silver Age writers, when Virgil’s already gone and written the Aeneid? In other words, we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that any given generation of artists is somehow especially conscious of the fact that it has the weight and authority of previous artistic generations bearing down upon itself. Hines’ article does an excellent job of demonstrating conscious poetic innovation in successive epochs of Latin literature.

But I did say “partially retract”. I’m now thinking that instead of a “new vs. old” consciousness, perhaps Modernism might be best explained by a “part vs. whole” consciousness concurrent with the late 19th and early 20th century upheavals ultimately resulting in the more or less peaceful settlement we now look back upon as “Western Civilization”. In other words, whereas prior to Modernism the prevalent mindset might have been to draw sharp cultural distinctions among, say, French, German, and English art and literature, the Modernist movement marked the beginning of what we now more normally see as closely-linked subgroups of a more general “Western” phenomenon.

As for previous parallels, I repeat a point raised in a lecture on Late Roman Antiquity (ca. 200AD-400AD) that the art and literature of this period owed much to the idea of the Cento or literary patchwork (e.g., consider the Cento Nuptialis of Ausonius, a poem fashioned entirely from lines and half-lines of Virgil. Also, take a look at the Vergilian Cento of Faltonia Betitia Proba, which retells the life of Christ through Virgilian verse [I couldn't find the full text, but here's a helpful page]). If you try to interpret this kind of artistic movement in light of several other Late Antique cultural developments towards a far more inclusive definition of what it meant to be a Roman than had existed under the Republic and the Early Empire, then I think you come up with something that looks a lot like the Modernist movement in early 20th century Europe. Then take into account the fact that what is often considered the first Modern novel, Don Quixote, came from an area of the world that had already been struggling for a long time with the problem of juggling in one coherent work the artistic “vocabularies” from multiple cultural traditions, each in some sense “foreign” to the other–well, take that into account, and it throws the similarities in higher relief.

Either that, or it all becomes an incomprehensible pastiche…which thought, curiously enough, brings to mind the epigraph to “The Wasteland”, quoting the vacuously bombastic Trimalchio, who was so thoroughly (un)cultured that he had 3 libraries(Cf. XLVIII). Either you bring this all together in order to mean something larger and more profound (e.g., Roman Identity, Spanish Identity, Western Identity), or it all ends up consumed by a horrific banality. And thus the Sybil perishes.

The Battle Continues…

Whereas in Germany they have these, in the anglophonic world we have these.

“Wouldn’t you love to be on the cover of a magazine?”

My last few posts have been somewhat bland and meandering. This one isn’t.

As usual these days, I was picking up a few household necessities at the local Jewel-Osco earlier this evening, waiting in line and trying not to look at the magazines displaying, pound for pound, more female flesh than dressing–not that I have an aversion to women’s bodies, mind you. I just don’t really relish the prospect of being assaulted by magnified images of the latest celebrity T&A and/or fashion faux pas . I don’t care. It is not desirable; it is not sexy, no matter how much Cosmo (which Kurt Vonnegut somewhere described as “a harrowingly explicit sex manual” (Google that at your own risk…)) may insist it’s what I, as a man, “really want in bed” (or some such), which is actually more like “regular sleep” or “a comfy pillow”. But then, to their children asking for bread the editors of such fine publications would likely give silicon, which I suppose these days is a trendy enough substitute for stones. Plus ça change…

A Brief Statement of Purpose: Unanswered Questions

I dislike the idea of raising broad questions without actually attempting to push the ball down the field a bit, as it were.  So, while I doubt that I’ll come to any definitive conclusions about many of the matters I raise in this blog, I’d like to think that I’ve at least made some kind of progress measurable in terms of more precise definitions of terms and/or sub-questions along with some footholds in the literature that’s out there.

This being a blog, however, I’m bound to leave a number of threads hanging in mid-air.  So I resolve to try not to leave too many out there at one time.  In order to enforce a check on this behavior, I’ll periodically post lists of things I’ve merely put out to the universe without really giving any real critical examination.  In other words, random bloviation may be useful from time to time as much for the pinpointing emotional fault lines as for general entertainment and steam-letting, but on the whole it’s useless for anyone who actually cares about the matters at hand.

Here’s a current list of things I need to get back to, along with a few potential prompts:

1-The status of myth and fact in the Information age

-C. S. Lewis on Myth become Fact

-Snopes

2- The definition of Modernism viz-a-viz Primitivism and Futurism

-R. Scruton’s “An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture”

3-Language as Instrument vs. Language as Act

-Saussure

-Lacan

-Heidegger (Crap…this one’s going to take a while…)

4-Behavioral Mimicry in Child Development

-Um…not sure where to go on this one.  The sources I’m familiar with for child development are by and large for moral development and the individual’s definition personal need fulfillment (e.g., Piaget, Erickson, Maslow, Gilligan, etc.), of which I’m now wondering whether much has taken into account the Behaviorist side of the coin, which is where the concept of mimicry seems like it might have got its roots.  On that score, start with Skinner and work upward.

5- Tolerance: Different approaches for different contexts.

-Hmm…another topic that’s way too broad.  Let’s see…I suppose I’ll approach this as a question of social ethics…which means philosophy in general…which means I’ve got my work cut out for me on this one…back to Plato and hit all the main stops on the way up.

Bumper Stickers (Rant/Counterrant)

I saw a particularly irritating bumper sticker today on my way to the hospital. It said, “God is too big for any one religion”. Now, the thing about me and bumper stickers is that I find them irritating not when I think they’re wrong, but rather when I think that they’re taking a reasonable basic principle and skewing it into a shallow, supercilious soundbite.

In this case, there are several assumptions and skewed principles. First, the assumption seems to be that we all know what we’re talking about when we say “God”. This is one of the more annoying by-products of living in a culture that is blissfully unaware of its monotheistic roots–everyone seems to think that its pretty obvious what God is like. Ironically, I’d lay fair money that the driver of that car would squirm at being called Eurocentric, even as s/he uncritically mouthed the platitude that “Muslims and Christians should get along because they all worship the same God”. In one sense, they do; in another, they don’t. There’s a world of difference betwixt.

…which brings me to the principle skewing: “Many religions contain some truth” gets conflated with one possible divine characteristic, namely, God’s incomprehensibility, to produce the grand conclusion that since no one really understands God, then no one religion can claim a monopoly over religious truth. Superficially convincing and probably worthy of being a bumper sticker ideology, but sorry, no dice.

In the first place, it’s a blatant contradiction. Suppose we define religion loosely as a set of convictions. The bumper sticker then translates to: God is too big for any one set of convictions. But the idea that “God is too big for any one set of convictions” is itself a conviction, which God is allegedly too big for. Uh-oh. Call St. Anselm; we have a problem…

In the second place, it’s circular. Suppose that this driver is a generous soul and believes that there is a grain of truth about God every religion (e.g., probably dislikes several tenets of the Catholic church, but nonetheless refuses to equate it with the spawn of Satan, whore of Babylon, or any other of a plethora of assorted apocalyptic beasts). That seems to be a fair principle that one can derive from reasonable assumptions about the function of religion in any given society. But the catch is that one must first define what truth is in order to ascertain whether or not a given religion contains a grain of it or not.

…which brings me to the third objection: It’s presumptuous. Say what you want about the many annoyingly ostentatious Christians in this country, at least they usually have the intellectual integrity to let you know up front that their fundamental claim is that Jesus is God, which at the very least provides a clear basis for disagreement with anything they say and points the way towards a rational discussion about the nature of God (this is, of course, not to say that such things will actually *guarantee* that a rational discussion ensue, but that’s another matter altogether). This guy, on the other hand, is driving around telling you that s/he pretty much knows who God is and has all other religions figured out…without so much as gesturing at the provenance of such certitude so that the idle passer-by may contemplate his sticker for a brief moment, conclude yea or nay, and proceed along his merry way having determined whether or not s/he would wish to follow up on the morsel of purported wisdom imparted by said sticker.

Now, enough ranting.

I guess you could say that, at the end of the day, I’m somewhat ambivalent about my judgment of these stickers. After all, part of their rationale is to get you to think about their topic–which I’ve clearly done, at least more so than I would have on that day had I not seen the sticker and been duly irritated to bang out a boilerplate blog post. But even further, there’s the general question of how much one ought to display personal views one ought to display in public . NB: I’m not inquiring after what or whether one ought to be *allowed* to do so; it’s not censorship I’m discussing here, but rather social conventions of extroversion, politeness, and the definition of reasonable topical reticence. In other words, at what point does push come to shove when dealing with what ticks one off? Shouldn’t one scale back from a specific incident to a general rule and then apply it in one’s life even-handedly? Or is culture in a pluralistic society bound ever to battle, or at least ever to step on toes?

Case in point: Nearby where I live is a relatively large community of Orthodox Jews. I often see them on the Sabbath walking to the Synagogue to pay obeisance to the God of their forefathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Whole families, all dressed alike–Men, tall and gaunt or thick and stout, bearded, frequently bespectacled, peering out from under their broad-rimmed black hats; Women, wrapped in skirts and shawls, their hair hidden to all save their husbands, often holding children by the hand as they cross the busy North Chicago streets. I’m fascinated by them.

But if I’m getting so irritated by one lousy bumper sticker that doesn’t really say all that much and in fact slightly denigrates itself by its untoward placement on a rusty bumper, shouldn’t I get even more irritated by the silent, yet blunt and open statements made by these people for all to see as they eschew human technology and crawl across the broken Earth to praise their God?

Is tolerance just about keeping your mouth shut when something rubs you the wrong way, or is it about taking opportunities like these to force yourself to see in a different light those things that you instinctively dislike? Either way, it can be very difficult…

Children’s Television

The other day, I was reading this article in the NYT about Sesame Street. The following passage in particular caught my eye:

“I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”

Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street” that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” she said.

Snuffleupagus is visible only to Big Bird; since 1985, all the characters can see him, as Big Bird’s old protestations that he was not hallucinating came to seem a little creepy, not to mention somewhat strained. As for Cookie Monster, he can be seen in the old-school episodes in his former inglorious incarnation: a blue, googly-eyed cookievore with a signature gobble (“om nom nom nom”). Originally designed by Jim Henson for use in commercials for General Foods International and Frito-Lay, Cookie Monster was never a righteous figure. His controversial conversion to a more diverse diet wouldn’t come until 2005, and in the early seasons he comes across a Child’s First Addict.”

I take it that the question underlying all of this is, How do we create television programs that will positively (or at least not negatively) influence children’s behavior? From the basis of this passage, I infer that the experts behind Sesame Street have concluded that children who watch the show regularly will tend to mimic the behaviors presented therein–hence, the gradual phasing out of all characters and/or character traits that may in some way be interpreted by children as appropriate models.

Now, I’m certainly not informed about cutting-edge developments in child psychology, and I’m sure that the good folks who bring us Sesame Street (in conjunction with all their alpha-numeric pals, of course) do keep abreast of this literature, much more so than I do at any rate. So the following is intended less as constructive criticism about how to run a kids’ TV shows, and more as a comment on how technology can and does influence the nurture side of nature/nurture.

Per the article, Sesame Street is now in the business of character models. I recall, however, reading something in a book about Sesame Street (I think it was this one) that part of the original rationale behind many of the character traits that are now perceived to be too negative for children to encounter, was that in the real world children will actually meet people who are grouchy like Oscar or boring like Bert. In other words, Sesame Street was meant to present children with a diverse range of personalities in order to demonstrate that all people were in some way lovable and in some way able to live together in a community. So Oscar may like trash and occasionally tick off Gordon or Maria with his negativity–so what? If I remember correctly (it’s been a while, though…), whatever conflicts did arise, were resolved along typical models of community politeness. I may be wrong, but it’s hard for me to imagine what could be so objectionable about that, especially given that that’s still a standard cartoon plot.

So the question remains, At what point does exposure to negative characters result in behavioral mimicry? Again, I may be wrong, but I find it awfully hard to believe that one character on a children’s show can lead to all sorts of profound physio- and psychopathologies, like Cookie Monster promoting childhood obesity or Oscar the Grouch encouraging Sartrean existensial malaise or Big Bird and his unseen Snuffleupagus prompting paranoid schizophrenia. Or actually, I find it hard to believe in a causal relationship *IF* we’re dealing with an otherwise healthy family in which the children watch a reasonably limited amount of TV and interact regularly with family members and other children. So it boils down to a situation similar to the whole violence and video games correlation/causation debate, only with younger, more impressionable minds. There’s the rub, as it were.

So, if my hypothesis is correct, and if the only cases in which we really have to worry about negative character models having a significant effect are those in which TV is used as a surrogate parent, then I wonder about the degree to which all of these restrictions actually have an effect. When you think about it a bit, it is a very sad case to consider that the only place a neglected child may hear the words “I love you” with any certitude and regularity is when they come from a television character like Elmo; it’s in no way my desire to deprive anyone of that. But the next thing I wonder is how what happens when that child takes the next step into maturity and begins to divide the world into the real and the fictional. In other words, we’re all supposed to “grow out of” many of the trappings of childhood, and I to some extent think that we’re able to do that because we have a supportive environment to get what we need elsewhere on a deeper level. But if that environment isn’t there, and if it never was except in the shape of a fictional character, then how should that fictional character be in order to best provide for the neglected child? Is Elmo the ideal surrogate parent? Is that even the role he’s expected to fulfill? Should it be? If so, to what extent and how?

This discussion is, of course, all very tenuous. But maybe I’ll follow up on some in greater detail on some of the psychological development themes later on.