All posts by acilius

Jewish Exegesis and Homeric Scholarship in Alexandria, by Maren Niehoff

Nowadays there’s a lot of controversy among believers as to what if anything the latest trends in historical scholarship, literary theory, and the social sciences can teach us about how to read holy books.  That isn’t new; Professor Maren Niehoff of  the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has written a book called Jewish Exegesis and Homeric Scholarship in Alexandria about evidence that sheds light on how the Jews of Alexandria read the Bible in the years from 322 BC to AD 50.

The ethnically Greek residents of Alexandria had developed the study of Homer’s poems in directions that sometimes seem unsettlingly modern, and some Jewish Alexandrians had applied their techniques to the study of the Bible.    People who think it’s anachronism to hear about Mikhail Bakhtin or Judith Butler or Wolfgang Iser or Wendy Doniger in a study of the Bible might sympathize with ancients like Aristeas and Philo of Alexandria who were incensed with their fellows who seemed to think that you had to read Aristotle and other cutting-edge intellectuals to understand the scriptures.

I haven’t seen Professor Niehoff’s book yet.  I’ve read a review of it by Bruce Louden that was sent to a mailing list I’m on.  Here’s an interesting paragraph from Professor Louden’s review:

Part II, “Critical Homeric Scholarship in the Fragments of Philo’s Anonymous Colleagues,” situates Philo by demonstrating his differences with his contemporaries. Some anonymous contemporary exegetes, for instance, apply something close to the techniques of comparative mythology to analyze the Tower of Babel episode (comparing it to the myth of the Aloeidae), which he rejects. In their analysis of biblical texts they evidence the influence of Aristotle, and Alexandrian Homeric text-critics, seeing parallels between Homeric epic and the Bible. They place the story of Isaac in a context of actual narratives of child sacrifice, resolving interpretive issues by arguing for historical distance, as Aristotle does in the fragments of the Aporemata Homerica. They thus argue that the Bible, and its religion, has developed and evolved over time. Philo himself espouses a strongly conservative perspective, that Moses has written “eternal, unchanging truth” (95). His contemporaries, in strong contrast, criticize some of God’s acts, such as the confusing of languages in Genesis, as making matters worse for humanity. The section concludes with discussion of how the biblical exegetes, applying Alexandrian Homeric text-critical methods to passages with grammatical problems or flaws in the Greek text, were willing to correct words or phrases. While neither Philo nor his anonymous colleagues know Hebrew (they only know the Old Testament in the LXX), Philo nonetheless argues that the “flaws” could be explained by finding deeper meaning of some sort.

 

by acilius on June 30, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Ancient World, religion
Tagged , , , , , ,

Posted by acilius on June 30, 2012

https://losthunderlads.com/2012/06/30/jewish-exegesis-and-homeric-scholarship-in-alexandria-by-maren-niehoff/

Ancient Regime

Shortly before the stock markets closed yesterday afternoon, the US Supreme Court announced a ruling on the so-called “Affordable Care Act” (also known as ACA.)  Health care stocks generally rose on the news of the ruling, in some cases sharply, while shares in health insurers showed a mixed reaction.  Today, the trend has been slightly downward across the board.

A majority of the US Supreme Court held that the US government does have the power to compel citizens and other residents of the USA to buy health insurance.  While the court rejected the Obama administration’s argument that this power, the core of the law, was within the scope of the authority the Constitution grants the federal government to regulate interstate commerce, it concluded that, because the law is to be enforced by the Internal Revenue Service in the process of collecting taxes, it is supported by the government’s authority to levy taxes.

In effect, the law establishes a tax that will be paid directly to health insurance companies.  US residents who refuse to pay this tax will be assessed an alternative tax, one paid to the treasury.  As written, the statute did not include the word “tax,” speaking instead of “premiums” and “penalties.”  These words are euphemisms.  This is clear not only from the Supreme Court’s legal reasoning, but also from the most basic economic logic.  A law which directs people to dispose of their wealth in a particular way to advance a particular set of policy objectives is a tax, whatever label marketing-minded politicians may choose to give it.

Many opponents of the ACA have spoken out against the idea of a tax directly payable to private citizens.  For example, today on the Counterpunch website Dr Clark Newhall complains that the bipartisan Supreme majority represents “Corporatists United.”  Dr Newhall denounces the statute and the ruling in strong terms.  I would like to make three quotes from Dr Newhall’s piece abd add my own comments to them:

In an eagerly anticipated opinion on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, colloquially known as “Obamacare’, an unusual alignment of justices upheld the Act nearly entirely.  The crucial part of the decision found the ‘odd bedfellows’ combination of Chief Justice Roberts joining the four ‘liberal’ justices to uphold the ‘individual mandate’, the section of the law requiring all Americans to buy health insurance from private health insurance companies…

Many supporters of the ACA object to the term “Obamacare.”  The law was crafted on the model of a regime of health insurance regulations and subsidies enacted in Massachusetts in 2006.  That regime is widely known as “Romneycare,” in honor of Willard M. Romney (alias “Mitt,”) who, as Massachusetts’ governor at the time, had been its chief advocate.  So calling the federal version “Obamacare” is simply a matter of continuing to follow the Massachusetts model.  Now, of course, Mr Romney is the Republican Party’s choice to oppose Mr Obama in this year’s presidential election.  Therefore Mr Romney and his surrogates are creating much merriment for political observers by trying to attack the president’s most widely-known legislative achievement, which as it so happens is identical to Mr Romney’s most widely-known legislative achievement.

Dr Newhall goes on:

Those who make, interpret and enforce the laws no longer lie on the ‘left-right’ political continuum. Instead, they are in effect at ‘right angles’ to that continuum.  The ideology that drives the Supreme Court, the political administration and the Congress is not Conservative or Liberal but can best be described as “Corporatist.”  This is the ideology that affirms that “corporations are citizens, my friends.”  it is the ideology that drove the Roberts Court to the odious Citizens United decision.  it is the ideology behind a bailout for banks that are ‘too big to fail.’  And it is the ideology that allows Congress to pass a law like the ACA that is essentially written by a favored industry…

It seems to me very clear what Dr Newhall means to evoke in these sentences is the spectre of fascism.  During the 1930’s, fascists in Italy, Britain, Belgium, and several other countries used the words “fascism” and “corporatism” interchangeably, and economic historians still cite Mussolini’s Italy, and to a lesser extent Hitler’s Germany, as examples of corporatist economics in practice.  The American diplomat-turned-economist-turned-journalist-turned-pariah Lawrence Dennis argued in a series of books in the 1930’s that laissez-faire capitalism was doomed, that state ownership of industry was a dead end, and that the economic future of the developed world belonged to a system in which the state coordinated and subsidized the operations of privately-owned corporations.  The most famous of the books in which Dennis endorsed this system was titled The Coming American Fascism.

Not only the word “corporatism,” but also the image of a ruling elite “at right angles” to the old left/right politics might well remind readers of fascism.  The fascists continually claimed to represent a new politics that was neither left nor right; while such anticapitalist fascist tendencies as il fascismo della sinistra or Germany’s Strasserites were not markedly successful in the intra-party politics of fascist movements,* all fascist parties used anticapitalist rhetoric from time to time (think of the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party,” and of Joseph Goebbels’ definition of revolution as a process by which the right adopts the language and tactics of the left.)  Moreover, the image of “left” and “right” suggests that political opinions form a continuum that stretches from one extreme to another, with any number of points in between.  That in turn suggests that people who disagree may have enough in common with each other that their conflicts may be productive.  Fascism, on the other hand, demands a one-party state in which a single ideology is imposed on everyone.  Fascism finds nothing of value in political conflict, and strives to annihilate disagreement.  I think that’s what the late Seymour Martin Lipset was driving at in his book Political Man when he placed most fascist movements, including the Italian fascists and German Nazis, not on the far right, but in the “Radical Center.”

Counterpunch is edited by Alexander Cockburn, who recently declared that the United States of America has completed its transition to fascism.  So it would not be surprising if by these remarks Dr Newhall were insinuating that the ACA is fascist in its substance.  I would demur from such an assessment.  Before I can explain why, permit me to quote one more paragraph from Dr Newhall’s piece:

Why does Corporatism favor Obamacare?  Because Obamacare is nothing more than a huge bailout for another failing industry — the health insurance industry.  No health insurer could continue to raise premiums at the rate of two to three times inflation, as they have done for at least a decade.  No health insurer could continue to pay 200 million dollar plus bonuses to top executives, as they have done repeatedly.  No health insurer could continue to restrict Americans’ access to decent health care, in effect creating slow and silent ‘death panels.’  No health insurer could do those things and survive.  But with the Obamacare act now firmly in place, health insurers will see a HUGE multibillion dollar windfall in the form of 40 million or more new health insurance customers whose premiums are paid largely by government subsidies.  That is the explanation for the numerous expansions and mergers you have seen in the health care industry in the past couple of years.  You will see more of the same, and if you are a stock bettor, you would do well to buy stock in smaller health insurers, because they will be snapped up in a wave of consolidation that dwarfs anything yet seen in this country.

Certainly the health insurance industry was in trouble in 2009, and the ACA is an attempt to enable that industry to continue business more or less as usual.  In that sense, it is a bailout.  Indeed, the health insurance companies are extremely influential in both the Democratic and Republican parties, and there can be little doubt that whichever of those parties won the 2008 elections would have enacted similar legislation.  Had Mr Romney been successful in his 2008 presidential campaign, doubtless he would have signed the same bill that Mr Obama in fact signed.  The loyal  Democrats who today defend the ACA as a great boon to working-class Americans would then be denouncing it in terms like those Dr Newhall employs, while the loyal Republicans who today denounce the ACA as a threat to the “free-enterprise system” that they fondly imagine to characterize American economic life would then defend it on some equally fanciful basis.

In a deeper sense, however, I disagree with Dr Newhall’s assessment quite thoroughly.  A moment ago, I defined taxation as any law that requires people to dispose of their wealth in particular ways to advance particular policy objectives.  If we think about that definition for a moment, we can see that the United States’ entire health insurance industry exists to receive taxes.  In the USA, wages paid to employees are subject to a rather heavy tax called FICA.  Premiums that are paid for employees’ health insurance policies are not subject to FICA, and so employers have an incentive to put a significant fraction of their employees’ compensation packages into health insurance premiums.  Since the health insurers have been collecting taxes all along, it is quite misleading to call the ACA a bailout.  It is, rather, a tax increase.

Now, as to the question of fascism, certainly fascist regimes did blur the line between the public and private sectors.  The most extreme case of this was of course the assignment of concentration camp inmates as slave labor for I. G. Farben and other cartels organized under the supervision of the Nazi state.  So it would not have been much of a stretch for fascists to grant corporations the power to collect taxes.  Even if they had done so, however, fascists could hardly claim to have made an innovation.  Tax farming, the collection of taxes by private-sector groups in pursuit of profit, was the norm in Persia by the sixth century BC, and spread rapidly throughout the ancient world.  In ancient Rome under the later Republic, tax farming proved itself to be a highly efficient means of organizing tax collection. So the fact that tax farming is one of the principal aspects of the US economy is not evidence that the USA is a fascist or a proto-fascist regime.  Indeed, the fact that the Supreme Court seriously considered a case that would have challenged the legitimacy of tax farming is an encouraging sign, however unedifying the opinions that the court issued as a result of that consideration might be.

Of course, in the ancient world tax farmers bid competitively for the right to collect taxes, and the winners put their bids into the public treasury.  In the USA, there is no such bidding, and no such payment.  Instead, wealthy individuals and interest groups buy politicians by financing their campaigns and their retirements.  Perhaps we would be better off to adopt the ancient system.

At any rate, “fascism” seems a misnomer for our economic system, almost as misleading as “free enterprise” or as anachronistic as “capitalism.”  A more accurate term, at least as regards the components that are dominated by tax farming, would be neo-feudalist.  The US political class is increasingly an hereditary class; Mr Obama defeated the wife of a former president to win his party’s nomination to succeed the son of a former president, and now faces the son of a former presidential candidate in his campaign for a second term.  This hereditary nobility will now sit atop a system in which the non-rich are legally obligated to pay tribute or provide service to those in power in the land, who will in turn honor certain obligations to them.

*Fascism being what it was, “not markedly successful in intra-party politics” often meant “shot several times in the head and dismembered,” as happened to Gregor Strasser.

by acilius on June 29, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Counterpunch, Current Events
Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by acilius on June 29, 2012

https://losthunderlads.com/2012/06/29/ancient-regime/

Some points to consider when deciding how to vote

This morning a story went out on the Associated Press wire that appeared in American newspapers under titles like “Undecided voters may sway presidential election.”  These two paragraphs got me thinking:

“I don’t believe in nothing they say,” says Carol Barber of Ashland, Ky., among the 27 percent of the electorate that hasn’t determined whom to back or that doesn’t have a strong preference about a candidate.

Like many uncommitted voters, Barber, 66, isn’t really paying attention to politics these days. She’s largely focused on her husband, who just had a liver transplant, and the fact that she had to refinance her home to pay much of his health bill. “I just can’t concentrate on it now,” she says before adding, “If there were somebody running who knows what it’s like to struggle, that would be different.”

It takes a bit of a imagination to think of ways the U. S. political system might be reformed so that a person could go from Ms Barber’s current position to the presidential nomination of a major party.  While President Obama as a child lived for a time in a household eligible for food stamps, and as recently as 1996 both major parties nominated candidates who had begun their lives in very modest economic circumstances, by the time each of those men entered his thirties he had risen well into the upper middle class.  It isn’t to downplay the challenges that faced the poor children Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, and Barack Obama once were that I point out that none of them ever had to keep a gravely ill spouse alive by taking on substantial debt at a time when he likely believed that his working days were numbered.

I could suggest some reforms that might empower people like Ms Barber.  Among those suggestions would be the devolution of as many legislative powers as possible to neighborhoods and other localities small enough for all citizens to assemble in face-to-face meetings, and of executive powers to boards of citizens chosen by lot.  Such a system worked quite well in ancient Athens, and when systems like it are given a chance they work well in the modern world.   However,  I doubt that such reforms will be adopted any time soon.  So, granted that we are stuck with a system in which politics is conducted on a continental scale and the average citizen can signal her or his policy preferences only by voting in occasional election, what questions should we ask as we decide how to vote?

I agree with Ms Barber that we need people in politics who can see the world from some point of view other than that of the moneyed elite among whom presidential candidates typically move.  I’d add that people like Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, and Barack Obama may be the last people we should expect to adopt such a point of view.  A man who rose from a childhood of poverty and obscurity to wealth and power is likely to have learned two lessons from the experience: first, that it’s no fun to be poor; second, that the way out of poverty is to make oneself useful to the rich.  Such politicians may be able to empathize with the non-rich, especially the very young among them, but they are the very last people we would expect to go out on a limb for the sake of people who are not in a position to advance their careers. And people who have been anything other than rich as adults are simply not going to have the resume that people expect of presidential candidates, let alone have the connections to organize a viable national campaign.

So, if the candidate’s personal experience of economic or other hardship is not a major criterion to use in deciding how to vote, what is?  I brought up the 1996 presidential campaign, not only because Ms Barber’s remark reminds me of the Clinton-Dole pairing, but also because I read a magazine article during it that has helped to clarify my political thinking ever since.  Written by David Samuels, it was titled “Presidential Shrimp: Bob Dole Caters the Political Hors d’Oeuvres” and appeared on pages 45 through 52 of the March 1996 issue of Harper’s Magazine (volume 292, number 1750.)  Subscribers to Harper’s can access the article online here; I stopped subscribing to it years ago, and of course I don’t keep 16 year old magazines around the house, so when I read Ms Barber’s remark this morning I had to take a trip to the library to track the article down.

One night in December, 1995, Mr Samuels’ press credentials gained him admittance to a fundraising dinner for the Dole campaign.  The dinner, held at the Sheraton Hotel in Boston, was organized by a group of Massachusetts businessmen, among them “Mitt Romney, the Mormon banker who nearly knocked off Ted Kennedy in the Senate race here in 1994.”  It’s a bit misleading to say that Mr Romney “nearly knocked off Ted Kennedy” in that race; though an early poll or two had given Mr Romney a narrow lead, at the end of the day Mr Kennedy was reelected by a margin of 58% to 41%, hardly a squeaker.  Nor is it accurate to call Mr Romney a banker; as a private equity operator, he borrowed a great deal of money, though he neither lent money nor held it in trust in the way banks do.   Be that as it may, it was a bit of an uncanny moment to see his name in an article from so many years ago that I was looking up for insight into an election in which he is one of the leading candidates.  What they call an “Eldritch moment,” I suppose.

Mr Samuels used vignettes from that dinner to illustrate several points about how U. S. political campaigns operated in those days.  After listing many of the major donors in attendance, Mr Samuels writes: “If Bill Clinton is the candidate of high-wage, capital intensive business- investment banking, high tech, and entertainment- Dole looks increasingly like the candidate of low-wage, labor-intensive retail, manufacturing, and small business” (pages 49-50.)  Nowadays, a candidate with a donor profile dominated by retail, manufacturing, small business, and agribusiness concerns would be unlikely to advance as far as Mr Dole did; as Tom Frank demonstrates in his recent book Pity the Billionaire, it is precisely these groups that have funded the “Tea Party.”  Despite the headlines that tendency generated, it certainly did not represent much of an inconvenience for Mr Romney’s finance capital-backed march to this year’s Republican presidential nomination.

Mr Samuels describes Mr Dole’s public persona in a way that rings true to me: “[T]here is something appealingly adult about Dole’s performance.  As he smirks and blinks, and tramples on his applause lines, it is not hard to imagine some kind of fundamental honesty that prevents him from pulling out all the stops and putting on the expected show.  Dole’s best lines, his best moments in the Senate, have in common a weary and knowing respect for his audience.  The very depth of Dole’s cynicism can even translate as charm: ‘I’m not going to lie to you’ is one of the few lines that the senator delivers with any conviction in public, not because Dole doesn’t lie but because, unlike so many politicians, he is at least aware that he is lying” (page 51.)  As a connoisseur of world-weary cynicism, my favorite moment of the 1996 campaign came when Mr Dole, expected to repeat his campaign slogan “Bob Dole. A Better Man.  For a Better America,” said “Bob Dole.  Better man with a better plan.  Or whatever.”  The man had such contempt for the process that he couldn’t be bothered to memorize his own slogan.  That almost made me want to vote for him.

This image of Bob Dole as a man who “is at least aware that he is lying” inspires Mr Samuels to a flight of political science fiction: “In a rational political system, of course, geared to show off the strengths of the two opposing candidates for the highest office in the land, Bob Dole would be allowed to go on television and explain to the voters who is supporting him (and why,) who is supporting Bill Clinton (and why,) and encourage the voters to choose between them based on this practical knowledge.”  Mr Dole’s “weary and knowing respect for his audience” made it possible to imagine him operating under those conditions.  I can almost hear his voice saying “I represent a consortium of investors drawn from private equity, agribusiness, trucking, manufacturing, and retail.  They want a capital gains tax cut, managed trade deals like NAFTA, subsidies for exports, a rollback of workplace safety standards, and lax enforcement of securities regulations.”

I don’t disagree that our evaluation of the opposing candidates should begin with consideration of their sponsors and of what those sponsors expect in return for their investment.  But it mustn’t end there.  In a two-party system, we not only elect one party to fill an office, we also elect the other party to serve as the opposition.  So we should not only consider each party by the potential office-holders it offers us, but also by its likely effectiveness as an opposition party.  The first presidential election in which I voted was 1988.  I remember one afternoon that autumn when I read literature from the campaigns of George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis.  The more I read, the less appealing either of them looked.  The next day, I was walking to a class when it occurred to me that whichever of them was elected, Congress would rewrite any proposals he sent them.  That struck me like a thunderbolt.  Suddenly it was obvious to me that a President Dukakis would be in no position to enact the parts of his platform I disliked, while the President Bush we actually ended up with would have a relatively easy time enacting his very worst ideas.  So it was easy for me to vote for Mr Dukakis.

Moreover, while it is undoubtedly true that the people who provide the money for a campaign set the boundaries to the policies the candidate can espouse, that campaign must also enlist the support of groups that provide little money but many votes.  So, our parallel universe Bob Dole would tell us not only what his sponsors expected in return for their money, but also what they had authorized him to offer to constituency groups whose support he needed.  For example, none of his principal backers had a financial stake in the abortion-rights debate, yet Mr Dole adopted a rigidly anti-abortion line in preparation for the 1996 campaign.  A Republican candidate who failed to do so at that time would have lost his hold over voters without whose support he would have had no chance at all in the Midwestern states where presidential elections are usually decided.  A pro-choice Bob Dole would have been a certain loser and therefore an extremely poor investment.

So, when we elect a president, we elect three things: we elect a consortium of investors to serve as the president’s de facto Executive Council; we elect the other party as the official opposition; and we elect the most volatile constituency groups within the president’s coalition to a position in which they have a veto over executive action.  Notice, it is not the largest groups backing the president that hold this veto; it is the groups whose support the president cannot take for granted and must earn.  Therefore, when we choose a presidential candidate, we should do so because we see a way in which the economic interests of that candidates’ backers will promote the national interest as we understand it; because the other party, as the opposition party, is able to block the worst aspects of our candidate’s agenda and unable to block some of its best aspects; and because our votes, coming from us as members of particular constituencies,  are unlikely to send a signal that the candidate’s party can take our support for granted.

Mr Samuels, writing more than 16 years ago, noted that wealth was rapidly becoming more concentrated in the USA: “That the economic program of the new Democratic financiers may also imply the continuing hemorrhage of American jobs abroad is of little concern to those who pay the party’s bills today: with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer at unprecedented speed, the first term of the Clinton presidency bears an alarming resemblance, in its effects if not in its tone, to that of Ronald Reagan” (page 48.)  In the years since, this process of concentration has reached fantastic levels, as the financial sector’s elite has pulled away from every other group.  Mr Samuels describes scenes in which manufacturing bosses join the likes of Mr Romney and other financiers as the senior-most figures at the top table.  Today presidential candidates treat the heads of manufacturing businesses the way they treat disabled children,  seating them at the dais when they plan to introduce the as inspiring examples of what is still possible in America.  “And they are going to keep that factory and those jobs right here in the USA!,” applause, applause.

As the number of people who qualify as truly rich and the range of fields in which their fortunes are amassed shrinks, the universe of moneymen who can finance national campaigns shrinks even more rapidly.  It shrinks not only in number, but also in the variety of interests it represents.  This shrinking variety has three major consequences.  First, the differences between the major parties fade into irrelevance as they come to depend not only on consortia of investors who are equally rich, but on consortia that are drawn from the same sectors and that massively overlap in membership.  Second, the likelihood grows that the moneyed elite, small as it is and detached as it is from any but a tiny handful of concerns, will become bizarre, absorbed in ideas that may come naturally to its members for some economic or other reason, but which have no relevance to the public at large.  Third, the less rapport there is between an elite and the public it governs, the more repressive its government is likely to be.

These three processes are all well advanced in the USA.  For evidence that the differences between the parties are fading into irrelevance, consider the unprecedented level of legislative and executive activity in Washington in the last twenty years.  Contrary to the weirdly fashionable complaint that national politics is mired in gridlock, the Congress has in these last decades appropriated money by the trillion, cut taxes by the trillion, and condoned the printing of dollars by the trillion, deregulated entire industries,  required citizens to pay taxes directly to corporations in favored industries, established massive new agencies, started several wars of aggression, and granted the president unrestricted power to monitor, detain, torture, and kill whomever he pleases.   Granted, politicians running for reelection rarely point to any of this activity as an achievement of which they are proud, and not one item of it enjoys the support of even a plurality of voters, let alone a majority.  But it certainly constitutes extreme productivity, and every part of it was enacted with broad bipartisan support.  The unpopularity of this formidably efficient bipartisan cooperation attests to the detachment of the moneyed elite that sponsors both parties from the life of the country more generally.  The legislation that Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama have signed granting their office the powers of a police state show that the donors behind both men see the nonrich public as a source of danger to their position and want to give their political agents the means to intimidate it into silence.

Even when there is a functioning avenue of communication between the elite and the rest of us, minor parties are essential to a two party system.  Voters who decide that the party they usually support has become too different from the other party can signal their displeasure by crossing over to support the other party.  But in the absence of minor parties, voters who decide that their party has become too much like the other party have no effective way to signal their opinion.  Abstaining can send that message, but may not give the party a clear incentive to alter its behavior.  Given a choice between continuing to do what they have been doing and holding on to whatever success they have already gained or changing their approach in hopes of bringing nonvoters back to the polls, surely it would be a rare leadership cadre that would take the path of high risk.

When the ruling elite has drifted as far from the voting public as they have in the USA, the role of minor parties is crucial.  The only party that will resist the excesses of the elite, let alone embrace a program that may reverse the centralization of power in ever fewer hands, is one that faces certain defeat otherwise.  The Republican Party draws its base of support from voters who are comfortable with hierarchy ; it is therefore unlikely to become the vehicle for such resistance.  The Democratic Party absorbs the votes of people who want to create a more open political system; if that is the goal, it is therefore necessary either to wrest control of the Democratic Party from its current sponsors, or to destroy it and make way for a new party that will rise to that challenge.  Therefore, I will cast my ballot for Rocky Anderson for president.

by acilius on June 25, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Barack Obama, Campaign 2012, Periodical Notes
Tagged , , , , , , ,

Posted by acilius on June 25, 2012

https://losthunderlads.com/2012/06/25/some-points-to-consider-when-deciding-how-to-vote/

Where the action is these days

I haven’t posted much here lately, though I’ve been quite active at our sister site, Thunderlads After Hours (our tumblr.)  Just today, I put up three pictures of dogs riding tricycles, as well as a post that starts with an old Peanuts strip, continues with a quote from Oliver Cromwell, and concludes with a remark about the purpose of theology.  Also today, I put up a quote from Franz Kafka and added a comment in which I tried to explain my attitude towards mysticism.  In fact, I posted a total of fifteen things there today.  Aside from the five I’ve listed, the rest are just photos to which I added little or no comment when I saw them on my dash and hit “reblog.”    That’s the thing about tumblr, it’s so easy to slap stuff up there.

 

by acilius on June 9, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in AboutTheBlog, Thunderlads at Large
Tagged , ,

Posted by acilius on June 9, 2012

https://losthunderlads.com/2012/06/09/where-the-action-is-these-days/

Profiteering or Environmentalism

This morning, I came across this cartoon that Ted Rall published in April.  Click on the link or on thumbnail below for the readable version at the site that’s paying him.

I think there are some distinctions to be drawn here.  On the one hand, it does  cost money to degrade the environment.  So businesses that cut costs in the ways Mr Rall here takes to task may in fact be reducing their environmental impact.  Moreover, there are a great many uses of taxpayer money that benefit average consumers but are clearly bad for biodiversity, such as water subsidies.  Both the public sector and private economic actors, then, can adopt many policies which would be at once good for ecological diversity and bad for economic equality.

At the same time, there are economic actors who have great influence over the political system and who use that influence to distort markets to their advantage.  So, a company that develops a product that consumers are not interested in buying may well manufacture some pseudo-ecological reason why its competitors should be forbidden to sell their products, and if it sufficiently well-connected may succeed in passing laws to that effect.

by acilius on June 5, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Comics, Politics
Tagged , ,

Posted by acilius on June 5, 2012

https://losthunderlads.com/2012/06/05/profiteering-or-environmentalism/

The Pope’s Hat in Two Recent Web Comics

I understand the appeal of hats and am puzzled by the appeal of popes.  The pope has distinctive headgear for which he is known.  So I sometimes wonder if I can use what I know about hat-fancying to gain some insight into the minds of pope-fanciers.  I haven’t had any success with this effort so far.  Apparently web comic writers also find the pope’s hats to be interesting, as the examples below illustrate:

Zach Weiner, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, #2526, 27 March 2012

Matt Bors, “Arrogance,” 11 April 2011

by acilius on April 13, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Comics, religion
Tagged ,

Posted by acilius on April 13, 2012

https://losthunderlads.com/2012/04/13/the-popes-hat-in-two-recent-web-comics/

A long comment at 3QuarksDaily

A moment ago, I posted a very long comment in response to a post by Quinn O’Neill at 3QuarksDaily.  Ms O’Neill’s post was a response to criticism that she had received after saying, in an earlier piece on the same site, that the most effective strategy for increasing the likelihood that schools will teach a biology curriculum based on sound scientific research might not consist of atheists making displays of personal hostility toward religious believers.  Much of the criticism Ms O’Neill received was based on the premise that anyone who questions the efficacy of such displays has betrayed the holy cause of Science and opened the gates to the Satanic hordes of Creationism.  In her response, Ms O’Neill felt obligated to reassure everyone that she is a True Unbeliever who renounces religion and all its works, and said among other things that she does not “believe that science and religion, as worldviews, are compatible and I don’t believe that evolution is logically compatible with theism.”  I had to respond to that statement, and did so at a length that is really quite unreasonable for a blog comment.  Here it is:

“I don’t believe that science and religion, as worldviews, are compatible and I don’t believe that evolution is logically compatible with theism.”

That sentence includes some pretty broad terms.  I grant you that a religious sect which demands that its followers believe the earth to have been created in October 4004 BC is not likely to be pleased by the findings of geology, or biology, or astronomy.  But what about a religion like Confucianism, which, to the extent that it represents a worldview, does so not by preaching doctrines but by guiding its followers through ceremonies and structuring their social relations?  Where is the faith/ reason battle there?

To the extent that “religion” is a meaningful category, I suspect that its defining features have far less to do with the belief systems that many religions  have than with the social bonding that they all promise.  I’m inclined to agree with James P Carse, longtime professor of religious studies at New York University, who in his 2009 book THE RELIGIOUS CASE AGAINST BELIEF argues not only that religious can get along perfectly well without having belief systems attached, but that their belief systems often keep religions from achieving their real value, which is their ability to bind people together into communities that endure for many generations.

Professor Carse’s argument may seem odd, but if we draw an analogy with science I think we can see more clearly what he’s driving at.  The point of science isn’t to uphold certain doctrines or theories, but to challenge all doctrines and theories with evidence and logic.  A scientist who would rather defend a pet theory than face the facts that cast that theory in doubt isn’t making the most of science.  Likewise, religious believers who wage holy war in the name of militant ignorance in order to protect a cherished belief aren’t breathing life into the past and binding the present to the future; they are condemning past and present to the contempt of the future.

So “religion” is a problem.  “Theism” is a problem, too.  So far as I can tell from the Oxford English Dictionary, “theism” was first coined in 1678 by Ralph Cudworth as a contrary to “deism.”  While deists affirmed the existence of some sort of god but denied that the god they believed in had communicated directly with the world, Cudworth wanted a word to name persons who, like himself, believed in divine revelation.  Later it was used as we would now use “monotheism,” and presented as a contrary to “polytheism” and “atheism.”  Nowadays “theism” sometimes embraces polytheism and deism, and is defined in smaller dictionaries as “belief in a deity, or deities, as opposed to atheism.”

Does this attitude actually exist?  Is there, anywhere in the world, anyone who, as a matter of pure intellect, simply believes that there is at least one deity in existence?  I suspect not.  On the contrary, it seems likely that every person who would sincerely agree to such a proposition would also be a supporter of some particular religion, and of various other ideas and practices that come bundled with that religion.

However, let us assume, for the moment, that there is some point in talking about “theism” and “theists” in the very broad sense of agreement with the proposition that at least one deity exists.  Is it true that this proposition is not “logically compatible with” evolution?  Surely not.  An ancient Greek like Hesiod would fervently agree that at least one deity exists; however, in his THEOGONY, Hesiod describes the origin of the physical world as a spontaneous process that predated the birth of any gods, and frames the origins of the gods within the processes of nature.  It is admittedly unlikely that science will show Hesiod’s claims to be factually sound.  However, they are not only logically compatible with evolution, but are in the strictest sense of the words a story about evolution.

What about monotheism?  Is it logically inconsistent to say, on the one hand, that a single personal God created the world and rules over it, and on the other hand to say that life as we know it is the result of an evolutionary process.  I don’t presume to know why you think that these ideas are logically incompatible, but I can think of some other people who hold them to be so.  What I say next is directed at them, not at you.

In the early modern era, the idea took hold that the physical world operates like a machine.  It came to be widely expected that, given adequate knowledge, it would always be possible to predict what output would result from any given input.  In time, this idea became so familiar that it was fashionable to claim that reason could function only if events in the world were all predetermined.

When determinism of this sort reigned supreme and nature appeared to be a grand machine, theologians often described God as a grand machinist.  For thinkers like Jean Calvin or William Paley, reason demanded determinism and so faith demanded a God whose plans were complete before the creation of the universe and were bound to be realized in every detail. For people still invested in these theologies, evolutionary theory is profoundly disquieting, since it suggests a world in which events not only need not be predetermined to be described rationally, but in which many events may be in principle impossible to predict.  Obviously, quantum mechanics is a problem for them as well.

Is an unpredictable world logically incompatible with monotheism?  It seems not.  Not only was the idea of a universe that operated like a machine as alien to the ancient Hebrews as it was to everyone else before modernity, but the idea of a God who has nothing to learn from nature is absent from the record of their religious ideas preserved in scripture.  At several points in the Hebrew scriptures God changes his mind in response to appeals from the prophets and patriarchs.  Evidently these men, members of nature as they are, have told God something he did not know.  As a result of what he learned from them, God alters his plans.  These passages were a scandal in the early modern era, but they don’t seem to have bothered the Jews before the West had its encounter with mechanistic determinism.  Now that evolutionary theory and quantum mechanics have shown that reason can get along quite well without determinism, why should the idea of a God who can learn from the world and change his mind as a result of that learning bother any believer?

by acilius on April 11, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in religion, Responses
Tagged , , , , ,

Posted by acilius on April 11, 2012

https://losthunderlads.com/2012/04/11/a-long-comment-at-3quarksdaily/

Counterpunch, 1-15 March 2012

In the latest issue of Counterpunch, JoAnn Wypijewski tells the story of Keith Jennings, a resident of Stony Ridge, Ohio.  Mr Jennings couldn’t keep up with his house payments, so the bank owns it now.  He has responded to this by enlisting a group of local youths to seal the house off, covering it in tar and cement.  Ms Wypijewski is at pains to portray Mr Jennings and his cohorts as a thoroughly unheroic bunch.  Their lack of heroism is precisely what makes their odd little story seem urgent to her.  They stand for all the forgotten eccentrics who have, over the centuries, done odd, apparently pointless things that have made life a little bit more complicated for people in power, and have thereby helped to prepare the way for the great figures whose names we do remember.

Harry Browne asks “How Toxic is the Fog of Benevolence in Foundation Journalism”?  Mr Browne points out that, while many people express concerns about possible conflicts of interest when journalistic enterprises are parts of big businesses, very few express such concerns about journalism that is funded by philanthropic institutions.  Considering that philanthropic institutions are usually endowed and overseen by the very people who have the greatest influence over big businesses, this certainly is a strange state of affairs.  It is all the stranger in view of the fact that for-profit journalism must appeal to a broad public, while charity projects need only satisfy their funders.

Self-described “adventurer, chef, yogi, and army wife” Rachel Ortiz contributes “Faith: An Atheist Perspective.”  As a Jewish teenager in Texas, Ms Ortiz fell in with a group of very outgoing Southern Baptists.  Converting to their faith, she spent three years being happy at church and miserable at home before she started asking questions that the Southern Baptists couldn’t answer.  After a period away from church, the 16 year old Ms Ortiz went back as an observer.   She was appalled to see everyone moving at the same times and speaking in the same ways during the service.  This seemed to her a sign of “brainwashing.” She writes:

I began to notice that when children “spoke in tongues,” it sounded remarkably similar to the way their parents sounded when they spoke in tongues.  I noticed that everyone simultaneously knew when to bow their heads, when to stand, when to sit, when to clap, when to say Amen!  It was in that moment that I knew to the very core of my being that I had been, and all of them were, brainwashed.

My reaction to this was a bit complicated.  Mrs Acilius and I pay regular visits to a couple of nearby Anglican and Lutheran churches.  There, everyone simultaneously knows when to bow their heads, when to stand, when to sit, when to kneel, when to say amen.  If that’s the result of brainwashing, it’s the least subtle brainwashing imaginable. They give you a paper when you go in the door on which a full set of instructions are printed.  It isn’t subliminal recruiting, but superliminal recruiting.  So the picture Ms Ortiz painted did not immediately strike me as sinister.

On the other hand, most Sundays we can be found in a Quaker meetinghouse.  Mrs Acilius is a member of the meeting, and I am also active in it.  In traditional Quaker meetings, shared silence is communion and an explicit agenda is a sign of the secular.  The one we attend isn’t like that.  They have a bulletin with a list of Sunday morning Protestant stuff, including hymns, a sermon from the pastor, etc etc etc.  There are some moments which are not stuffed full of planned events, what Quakers call “Open Worship.”  In these moments we usually sit silently together, but occasionally someone feels compelled to speak.  These moments are usually too brief to be a meditative experience that quiets the mind.  Frankly, that’s part of the reason why we keep going back to the neighboring liturgical churches; a well-executed service there is a single experience, and has a clarifying effect similar to that which an hour of meditation in communal silence can provide.  By contrast, the brief interludes of silence in our very churchy Quaker meeting often represent interruptions in a little series of tasks that all concerned are busily keeping up with.  Even so, the meeting fits into what is often called the “Free Church” tradition of Protestantism, in which congregations value spontaneity and individualism.  Because of these values, Mrs Acilius’ fellow members grow uneasy when we remark on the amount of busy-ness that is packed into that hour.  Thinking of their reactions when we talk about how little spontaneity there is in the meeting, it is easy to understand how a Free Church Protestant could be shocked to see a group of worshipers behaving in the highly coordinated manner Ms Ortiz describes.

by acilius on March 22, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Counterpunch
Tagged , , ,

Posted by acilius on March 22, 2012

https://losthunderlads.com/2012/03/22/counterpunch-1-15-march-2012/

May the Great Bird of the Galaxy Bless Your Planet

From the late 1970s through the mid-1980s, I watched Star Trek about 4 times a week.  I’ve had occasion to watch it since, and it holds up.  It’s a good show, and an interesting specimen of 1960s liberalism.  Of course, when I see it now I also feel strong nostalgia for that period 30 years ago when I watched it regularly.

Over the last couple of days, I’ve spent a good deal of time indulging in that particular nostalgic feeling.  Webzine io9 ran a story about a Flickr photostream called “Bird of the Galaxy“* maintained by a man called Tom Redlaw.  Mr Redlaw has collected a great many photographs taken on the set of Star Trek.  This photostream consists of scans of the photographs that depict moments that did not appear on the show.  So we glimpse alternate takes, deleted scenes, images meant to be combined in double exposures, stagehands at work, structures on the soundstages, miniatures under construction, bloopers, practical jokes, et cetera.  Mr Redlaw discourages embedding of his photos, so I won’t embed them  But I will link to a few:

Here’s another set of behind the scenes Star Trek photos, including some shots very similar to ones Mr Redlaw has posted.  For example, this picture seems to have been taken a couple of  seconds before the one linked first above:

*If the phrase “Bird of the Galaxy” rings a bell, you may be thinking of “The Man Trap,” the first episode ever broadcast, in which Mr Sulu thanks Yeoman Rand for a favor by saying “May the Great Bird of the Galaxy Bless Your Planet.”

by acilius on March 5, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Nostalgia, Photography
Tagged ,

Posted by acilius on March 5, 2012

https://losthunderlads.com/2012/03/05/may-the-great-bird-of-the-galaxy-bless-your-planet/

Deep in the brain

An article about brain parasites that breed in cats and spread to creatures, possibly including humans, that then become unreasonably attracted to cats appeared in the March 2012 issue of The Atlantic.  The article triggered vast amounts of comment around the web; I’ll just mention that it appeared at about the same time Gregory Cochran argued on his “West Hunter” blog that the likeliest biological basis for homosexuality is a brain parasite.  If this strikes you as an obnoxious point to make, you are well on your way to grasping the nature of Dr Cochran’s mission.

The late Christopher Hitchens often irritated me, though not in the way that Dr Cochran sets out to irritate people.  I read his column in The Nation for many years, and always wondered what percentage of their working day that magazine’s widely praised fact-checkers spent correcting his misstatements, exaggerations, and outright falsehoods.  A few always slipped through; my personal favorite was this, from his column of 22 October 2001:

There are others who mourn September 11 because it was on that day in 1683 that the hitherto unstoppable armies of Islam were defeated by a Polish general outside the gates of Vienna. The date marks the closest that proselytizing Islam ever came to making itself a superpower by military conquest. From then on, the Muslim civilization, which once had so much to teach the Christian West, went into a protracted eclipse. I cannot of course be certain, but I think it is highly probable that this is the date that certain antimodernist forces want us to remember as painfully as they do. And if I am right, then it’s not even facile or superficial to connect the recent aggression against American civil society with any current “human rights issue.”

I agree that it is foolish to regard the attacks of 11 September 2001 as an act of political protest, but that is not because Hitchens was right in his suspicion that their perpetrators chose the date 11 September from an obsession with the events of the seventeenth century.  A correction appeared in the following issue pointing out that the Ottoman forces actually suffered their defeat on 12 September 1683, not 11 September.  Hitchens, in his next column, dug his heels in and argued that because the battle began the previous day, he shouldn’t have to give up his point.  In defense of this apparently preposterous stance, he quoted a remark in which Hilaire Belloc put the battle on 11 September, then said that Belloc’s “awful ‘Crusader’ style is just the sort of thing to get him noticed by resentful Islamists.”

The same column in which Hitchens tried to salvage his theory that 9/11 was a reprisal for Hilaire Belloc’s prose style includes a quote from G. K. Chesterton.  Chesterton and Belloc were so closely associated that in their day they were often referred to as “Chesterbelloc.”  This issue of The Atlantic includes an essay by Hitchens about Chesterton, who was apparently one of his favorite authors.  I didn’t think of it in 2001, but it explains a great deal about Hitchens to think of him as a follower of Chesterton and Belloc.  Like those men, he was a prolific writer who prided himself on a fluent style, showed significant erudition in a wide range of fields, and did not particularly trouble himself about questions of fact.  Also like Chesterton and Belloc, he was an insistent and grossly unfair apologist for his religious ideas.  Chesterton and Belloc defended the Roman Catholic church by presenting every other faith tradition in an absurdly negative light; Hitchens simply added one item to their catalogue of strawmen when he set up shop as a professional atheist.  The essay in this issue raises the possibility that Hitchens imitated at least some aspects of Chesterton and Belloc’s work deliberately, as well as exhibiting an influence that stemmed from his early and long exposure to them.

Sandra Tsing Loh describes the difficulties she faces adjusting to the idea that her father, Eugene Loh, is in a long, terminal decline, and that she is his caregiver. The article’s hook is “Why caring for my aging father has me wishing he would die.”  I shouldn’t think that would require much explanation.  It is difficult to watch a loved one suffer irretrievable losses, stressful to take care of another person, and natural to resent unfamiliar responsibilities.

I suspect that everyone who has ever occupied Ms Tsing Loh’s current position has at least momentarily wondered how much nicer things would be if the other person would just hurry up and die already.  If Ms Tsing Loh had written a short story about a fictional character in her position who couldn’t shake that thought, she would have explored a facet of the human experience* that needs acknowledgement.  By choosing to forgo the distancing mechanism of fiction and write a first person account, complete with photographs of Mr Loh, she is performing an entirely different sort of speech act.  She is not only confessing to this wholly predictable, probably well-nigh universal human response; she is also confronting her father and everyone else who loves him with a demand that they discard pretenses that have become conventional because they often make life more comfortable for people in their situation.  That demand, if met, would create a new kind of social situation, one which would be “honest” in the sense that it leaves raw emotions unconcealed.  However, that very honesty is another form of role playing, in which the members of the group play roles that might be appropriate in a therapeutic setting, though not necessarily so in the setting of a family group that is supposed to survive for many generations.  To keep people together for that long under all the stresses that come with family life, it’s necessary to develop a shared understanding of boundaries and to define ways to renegotiate boundaries.  Without those understandings, it’s impossible to predict each others behavior, which means that it is impossible to communicate without leaving the impression that one is saying more than one intends.  If Mr Loh were to recover the ability to read, I can hardly that he would not flinch when he realized that he was the theme of sentences like “if, while howling like a banshee, I tore my 91 year old father limb from limb with my own hands in the town square, I believe no jury of my peers would convict me.  Indeed, if they knew all the facts, I believe any group of sane, sensible individuals would actually roll up their shirtsleeves and pitch in.”  He might laugh, but I’m sure he would flinch.

*I’m familiar with the arguments against the phrase “the human experience”, and I still like to use it.  If you rehearse those arguments in the comments, be prepared to read long discussions of the thought of Irving Babbitt in response.

by acilius on March 3, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in The Atlantic Monthly
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Posted by acilius on March 3, 2012

https://losthunderlads.com/2012/03/03/deep-in-the-brain/

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