Susan Lampert Smith begins by blaming modern technology and TV shows for students' lack of civil involvement. I don't quite understand. With new technology it is easier to schedule around entertainment; our little worlds of personal electronics let us run things on our own time. Also, cell phones and other communications technologies can help organize large groups of people, as we saw in the mass twittering phenomena of the most recent election. If today's students really cared about something, technology would not be a deciding force to stop them.
"They care--but not that much." sums up, I think, a more plausible argument for the change in protests. Fewer people have personal connections to this war than did to the Vietnam war. Advances in technology should be giving us even more information, understanding, and cause for protest, but we have so little personal information that it does not make up the difference. To protest effectively, people have to make sacrifices ("Grey's Anatomy" is a pretty mild one), and to be willing to do that, they need to have a personal connection that makes it not just worth it, but necessary and meaningful.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Monday, October 19, 2009
Rites and Credos and Carnivores
First of all, I would like to offer a conditional apology. When I presented Joseph Campbell's sprawling 12-page discourse on The Importance of Rites, I began the discussion with an unsympathetic "So suck it up." I know that many of you actually enjoyed it, and that several of you usually take the time to re-read essays to gain a better understanding of them. This is an essay that all but demands multiple readings, and you only had one night with it. I retract the coolness of my reaction insofar as I am able; I made it in jest because I had no idea how you were going to react.
I bring up The Importance of Rites again because it is very directly related to "A Carnivore's Credo", the essay on vegetarianism we read for class last Thursday. Roger Scruton dissects the sense of moral guilt we as humans feel toward eating meat, and proposes that for many thousands of years we have relieved this in how we care for animals and respect them in death.
This is exactly the kind of rite Joseph Campbell was talking about.
A key concept in Campbell's argument is the idea of the "great mystery," the thing which is inaccessible and incomprehensible to humans and therefore transcendent of mortal life. He discusses how different cultures have different focuses on the mystery due to different ways of life--the farming culture hallows the fertile earth, the culture of discovery (e.g. rising Mesopotamia or Renaissance Europe) has a fascination with the heavens.
The fundamental purpose of religion, the "deeper meaning", is not moral in nature. Morality becomes an important part of religion because religion is a very effective way to communicate cultural values (the "payload" in the essay "Lies We Tell Kids"), but by this same function morality in religion is extremely relative to time and place. Religion's deepest meaning, the one for which it probably arose, is linked to the great mystery. What religion is about, or should be about, or has been intended to be about, is simply how to live; how to survive as a human, even in the presence of the unknown and overwhelming. The primary function of religion is to transform the great mystery and the powerful fear we experience at being left in the dark into reverence and certainty.
The earliest human cultures were hunters and gatherers, so our fascination with the animals that die to sustain us is the mystery at the heart of the oldest spiritual systems. Our relationship to animals is crucial to the understanding of our own nature. We condemn human murder, so why is it OK to kill animals? How are we different from them? As humans, we possess self-consciousness, and that gives us the obligation to reflect on our actions and take responsibility for them. We can recognize the gravity of death and killing, yet we kill living things to physically survive. (Animals have always been more worrysome to us than plants because we ourselves are animals.)
We can't deal with it ethically; we have developed evolutionarily to eat meat, and that is outside of the control granted by our self-consciousness. (Yes, now we can make the choice not to eat animals, but most early humans depended on meat as a source of food, and even today we cannot change the fact that our bodies are suited to it.) We can't deal with it or understand it morally, so we philosophized and created myths and rites to reinforce it and integrate it into our culture. The ethical treatment of animals and the gratitude and honor we show at meals of their flesh is a recognition of the ethical discrepancy. By treating their remains with respect, almost as we would our own, by affirming the value of a life that has passed and not merely been lost, we retain our human dignity.
I bring up The Importance of Rites again because it is very directly related to "A Carnivore's Credo", the essay on vegetarianism we read for class last Thursday. Roger Scruton dissects the sense of moral guilt we as humans feel toward eating meat, and proposes that for many thousands of years we have relieved this in how we care for animals and respect them in death.
This is exactly the kind of rite Joseph Campbell was talking about.
A key concept in Campbell's argument is the idea of the "great mystery," the thing which is inaccessible and incomprehensible to humans and therefore transcendent of mortal life. He discusses how different cultures have different focuses on the mystery due to different ways of life--the farming culture hallows the fertile earth, the culture of discovery (e.g. rising Mesopotamia or Renaissance Europe) has a fascination with the heavens.
The fundamental purpose of religion, the "deeper meaning", is not moral in nature. Morality becomes an important part of religion because religion is a very effective way to communicate cultural values (the "payload" in the essay "Lies We Tell Kids"), but by this same function morality in religion is extremely relative to time and place. Religion's deepest meaning, the one for which it probably arose, is linked to the great mystery. What religion is about, or should be about, or has been intended to be about, is simply how to live; how to survive as a human, even in the presence of the unknown and overwhelming. The primary function of religion is to transform the great mystery and the powerful fear we experience at being left in the dark into reverence and certainty.
The earliest human cultures were hunters and gatherers, so our fascination with the animals that die to sustain us is the mystery at the heart of the oldest spiritual systems. Our relationship to animals is crucial to the understanding of our own nature. We condemn human murder, so why is it OK to kill animals? How are we different from them? As humans, we possess self-consciousness, and that gives us the obligation to reflect on our actions and take responsibility for them. We can recognize the gravity of death and killing, yet we kill living things to physically survive. (Animals have always been more worrysome to us than plants because we ourselves are animals.)
We can't deal with it ethically; we have developed evolutionarily to eat meat, and that is outside of the control granted by our self-consciousness. (Yes, now we can make the choice not to eat animals, but most early humans depended on meat as a source of food, and even today we cannot change the fact that our bodies are suited to it.) We can't deal with it or understand it morally, so we philosophized and created myths and rites to reinforce it and integrate it into our culture. The ethical treatment of animals and the gratitude and honor we show at meals of their flesh is a recognition of the ethical discrepancy. By treating their remains with respect, almost as we would our own, by affirming the value of a life that has passed and not merely been lost, we retain our human dignity.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Blog log help, please!
Hello, fellow AP Compers.
I began this blog ignorant of my "blog log" responsibilities, so I am trying to catch up on my records. I'm having trouble tracking down all of my comments, though, so I would like your help if you would be so kind. If you know I commented on one of your posts, just tell me which one by responding here or emailing me.
Also, I would like to use this as an opportunity to remind you to update your blogrolls so that newcomers can benefit from your wisdom.
Thank you.
I began this blog ignorant of my "blog log" responsibilities, so I am trying to catch up on my records. I'm having trouble tracking down all of my comments, though, so I would like your help if you would be so kind. If you know I commented on one of your posts, just tell me which one by responding here or emailing me.
Also, I would like to use this as an opportunity to remind you to update your blogrolls so that newcomers can benefit from your wisdom.
Thank you.
Friday, October 2, 2009
Geekery part III: Semantics to Vocabulary
I've finally decided to divide this into three posts so you may skim or ignore as you like.
I think that vocabulary must affect our thinking, too. In English, the words gratitude, gratification, and gratuitous have very different meanings, but they all come from the same Latin root. The Romans, then, when they exercised their social niceties with the "Thank you" phrase "Tibi gratias ago," had more associations with the ideas we might call pleasure, prosperity, and goodwill than with ideas we would call thanksgiving or gratitude.
Words are a shorthand way for us to think of and express the complex and formless concepts in our heads, so they often take on cultural connotations as well. When we begin to manipulate ideas in our heads, we are more likely to use ideas or sets of ideas connected to the words in our language than to come up with something completely new, even if we are not "thinking in words."
The Latin word anima denotes the seat of human sentience and feeling. We have no single English word that directly translates. Anima is a combination of our ideas of heart, mind, and soul, which are separate in our language and in turn have cultural connotations that are not present in the Latin anima. As English thinkers, we concern ourselves separately with minds, hearts, and souls, not animae.
Tibi multas gratias, and thank you to any and all besides Mr. Kunkle who have read this far. You are awesomer in the eyes of Thoth for having done so.
I think that vocabulary must affect our thinking, too. In English, the words gratitude, gratification, and gratuitous have very different meanings, but they all come from the same Latin root. The Romans, then, when they exercised their social niceties with the "Thank you" phrase "Tibi gratias ago," had more associations with the ideas we might call pleasure, prosperity, and goodwill than with ideas we would call thanksgiving or gratitude.
Words are a shorthand way for us to think of and express the complex and formless concepts in our heads, so they often take on cultural connotations as well. When we begin to manipulate ideas in our heads, we are more likely to use ideas or sets of ideas connected to the words in our language than to come up with something completely new, even if we are not "thinking in words."
The Latin word anima denotes the seat of human sentience and feeling. We have no single English word that directly translates. Anima is a combination of our ideas of heart, mind, and soul, which are separate in our language and in turn have cultural connotations that are not present in the Latin anima. As English thinkers, we concern ourselves separately with minds, hearts, and souls, not animae.
Tibi multas gratias, and thank you to any and all besides Mr. Kunkle who have read this far. You are awesomer in the eyes of Thoth for having done so.
Geekery, cont.
After Stefanie's comment I realize that I didn't quite accomplish what I set out to do with my last post, so here is a hearty supplement. I will continue to use Latin examples because it is the only non-English language in which I feel I have some grammatical authority. Sorry, Spanish students, I'm neither as normal nor as practical as you, and you have my respect.
What I mean by "an effect on how we associate ideas" is something like this:
The Latin verb curo means "care for." Not "care," like the English verb, but "care for." The prepositional idea of "for" is part of the verb. Curo can take a direct object in the objective [1] case with no preposition or inflection. This means that in Latin, the idea of caring is much closer to the direction of the action than in English. When a Roman used the word for "care," it was assumed that there was a person or object receiving the care. There was more emphasis on the receiver, and maybe less on the giver, than there is in English.
We have something similar with some English verbs, although we still say the preposition. Take the phrase "fed up." The verb "fed" doesn't have the same meaning if it is not used with the preposition; they are linked into one idea. A sentence using "fed up" sounds strange and clumsy if you treat "up" as a normal preposition and separate it from the verb: That is the sort of mean-spirited criticism up with which I am fed. [2]
In general, we are a preposition-happy language, which means we isolate ideas from verbs into prepositional phrases. Latin is verb-friendly: the verb often has meanings other than the action attached, and many more words in any given sentence will be somehow directly associated with the verb. Just think about it. It's fascinating, really.
[1] Actually the accusative case in Latin, but objective is the English equivalent here. Most of you probably don't care either way, hence the footnoteage.
[2] Winston Churchill's rebuttal upon being corrected for less-than-perfect preposition placement.
What I mean by "an effect on how we associate ideas" is something like this:
The Latin verb curo means "care for." Not "care," like the English verb, but "care for." The prepositional idea of "for" is part of the verb. Curo can take a direct object in the objective [1] case with no preposition or inflection. This means that in Latin, the idea of caring is much closer to the direction of the action than in English. When a Roman used the word for "care," it was assumed that there was a person or object receiving the care. There was more emphasis on the receiver, and maybe less on the giver, than there is in English.
We have something similar with some English verbs, although we still say the preposition. Take the phrase "fed up." The verb "fed" doesn't have the same meaning if it is not used with the preposition; they are linked into one idea. A sentence using "fed up" sounds strange and clumsy if you treat "up" as a normal preposition and separate it from the verb: That is the sort of mean-spirited criticism up with which I am fed. [2]
In general, we are a preposition-happy language, which means we isolate ideas from verbs into prepositional phrases. Latin is verb-friendly: the verb often has meanings other than the action attached, and many more words in any given sentence will be somehow directly associated with the verb. Just think about it. It's fascinating, really.
[1] Actually the accusative case in Latin, but objective is the English equivalent here. Most of you probably don't care either way, hence the footnoteage.
[2] Winston Churchill's rebuttal upon being corrected for less-than-perfect preposition placement.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
