| "Do it the Greek way" | Feb. 3rd, 2005 @ 03:03 am |
|---|
|
The title of this article is an inside joke between me and the cast of a play I financed. At least four members of that production read this journal, and I'm guessing that at least 3 of them will spew soda, milk, or worse coffee out of their nose. The rest of you may safely ignore it.
When I was growing up as a little kid in St. Louis in the early 1960s, we were told that ancient Greek civilization had collapsed because of moral degeneracy. We were not told what kind of moral degeneracy; we were left to imagine it. When we grew up a little bit more, teachers and books became a little less coy, and suggested that Greek civilization was destroyed by God because they committed the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah. Eventually, post-AIDS and after the Satanic ritual abuse repressed memory hoax, the taboo on saying what they really meant pretty much went away, and everybody now gets told more or less bluntly: Greek civilization started out okay, but collapsed because they tolerated adult men having sex with little boys.
Such is the conventional wisdom. I assume that if the topic is brought up at all in today's history classes for children and teens, that the same story is told? But you know, history is a funny subject. As James Loewen wrote in the introduction to his best-seller Lies My Teacher Told Me:  College teachers in most disciplines are happy when their students have had significant exposure to the subject before college. Not teachers in history. History professors in college routinely put down high school history courses. A colleague of mine calls his survey of American history "Iconoclasm I and II," because he sees his job as disabusing his charges of what they learned in high school. In no other field does this happen. ... Indeed, history is the only field in which the more courses students take, the stupider they become. This wasn't one of Loewen's examples, but it fits the pattern. If you get to a reputable college and you study ancient history or the classics, this is one of the notions they have to disabuse you of. You can find the truth in college-level history books, both textbook and popular. You won't see it many other places, though, because this is Forbidden History. You see, anybody who wants to explain that ancient Greece fell to the Macedonians because of pedophilia is going to have to explain how they thrived with pedophilia for longer than white people have lived in the western hemisphere so far. And they're going to have to explain why they had pedophilia before they had democracy. And if you study the subject long enough, you'll eventually find, whether it makes you uncomfortable or not, that the Greeks considered homosexual pedophilia a pre-requisite for a successful entrepreneurial democracy.
By putting that in writing in front of a non-scholarly audience, I have all but guaranteed that I will become the target of a federal and/or local police investigation. Ministers, cops, social workers, psychologists, postal inspectors, and even most professional historians believe that there is no reason to discuss this truth, to stand up for this truth, unless you are yourself a homosexual pedophile and seeking justification for your behavior. After all, if you don't learn it by college-level study of the classics, just about the only place you're likely to find this out is from NAMBLA, the North American Man/Boy Love Association, and look how many of their founders, leaders, and members have been convicted of homosexual pedophilia. So by standing up and saying that in this case, at least, NAMBLA is right about the historical facts, I've put a set of crosshairs on the concentric circles that I just painted on my own back. I will be tarred as a "defender of NAMBLA, and of pedophiles in general."
My motivation could hardly be farther from theirs. No, I bring this up because every attempt to revive Hellenic religion gets this thrown into its face, and usually sooner rather than later. And when they bring this up, most of the people who do so have such a gleeful air. "Ah hah," they're clearly thinking, "I've proved that your religion is for pedophiles! Now nobody will listen to what you have to say!" After all, what I'm saying is that I worship gods who sanctioned it, who blessed a society where 30 year old guys routinely screwed 14 year old boys. Some of them they fell in love with, others they paid. How could I possibly worship gods who thought that that was all right? Most Hellenic Reconstructionists, many of whom know nothing about the religion that they didn't learn from Bullfinch (or from cartoons), fall back on the excuse that all religions use for reprehensible behavior: it wasn't the gods who endorsed man/boy buttsex, it was the fallible Greeks themselves. Because after all, homosexual pedophilia is so, so evil that surely the gods would never have blessed it, right?
I say: wrong. The gods did bless this, and this does not make the blessed gods, nor the Greeks who lived this way, evil people. But to understand this, you're going to have wrap your head around some pretty alien concepts. ( Read more... )
Am I recommending or endorsing, or even tolerating, such relationships now? No. No, not with society the way it is now. Whether it was by Mary Kay LaTourneau or by the state, Vili Fualuaau did get his life ruined, and theirs was rather close to a best-case scenario. No sane, rational adult would attempt a relationship this insanely dangerous; any adult insane enough to risk such a relationship has no business being around a teenager, let alone becoming their adult role model. Do I think it would be a good thing if our culture changed so that such relationships were the norm? I've never made up my mind. What's the point? There is absolutely no imaginable way that our society could change from our current sexual and romantic pattern to that one. None. None whatsoever that I can imagine, whether gradually or all at once. No, we've made our bed and we shall lie in it, not to make too horrible a pun. We shall have to hope that the Greeks were wrong, and that entrepreneurial democracy can survive without it.
However, I refuse to denounce a society that was once otherwise, or the gods who blessed that society.
Next: Obviously, my sense of self-preservation is impaired. Sex today, drugs tomorrow. Next: the Mysteries.Current Mood:  worried Current Music: Coconut Monkeyrocket - Bloops, Bleeps, Bongos & Brass |
| Temporary Failure of Nerve | Feb. 2nd, 2005 @ 12:30 am |
|---|
|
I'm having a failure of nerve. It's probably temporary. But after the drubbing I took two columns ago for saying something I thought was relatively obvious, I'm not sure I want to take this discussion any further. That was only a contradiction of conventional wisdom. The next column, if I don't chicken out completely, involves plunging directly into Forbidden History territory. It involves discussing things that every classics scholar and every serious historian knows ... and knows better than to discuss in front of laymen, let alone in writing. And now that, for various reasons, I'm actually feeling a little bit saner, I'm wondering if I actually dare to have this argument in a public forum in writing.
I probably do dare. I'm an asshole that way; I'd rather be right, no matter the consequences. But for one day, spare me my moment of queasiness. Is this what sanity looks like? Caring as much or more about possible consequences as about truth or accuracy or honesty or any other principle? Hmmp. I don't know if I like it. |
| Athenian slavery, American wage slavery | Feb. 1st, 2005 @ 05:45 am |
|---|
|
Let me make one thing clear before I even start in on this topic.
We don't know much about slavery in Corinth. We don't know much about slavery in Thebes. Neither state left any written accounts, and archeology hasn't told us much. What we know about slavery in ancient Greece is pretty extensive, but it is only about Athens and Sparta. And the most important thing that you must know about slavery in Athens and Sparta is that slavery in Athens is nothing like slavery in Sparta.
You all have seen, by now, some of the resistance that comes up whenever anybody apologizes for or attempts to defend ancient Greece. Some of you can't believe that a post-modern American like me could stand up for a society with certain faults that you find intolerable, for gods who blessed such a society. Well, frankly, that's how I feel about Sparta, and it is almost entirely because of the issue of slavery. What the Spartans did to the Messenians is entirely comparable in brutality and savagery to anything that England, France, Spain, and America did to imported African slaves. No, that doesn't go far enough. It was actually much, much worse. For example, African slaves weren't as routinely hunted for sport. I will not say anything favorable about it. Not one thing.
At the height of the Athenian empire, all the world traded with Athens. One thing about Athens baffled the Persians and the Egyptians, seemed bizarre and hilarious to the Macedonians, and angered the heck out of the early Romans. What was incomprehensible and a little threatening to all of the other nations of the world was that when you walked down the street, there was no way to tell a citizen from a slave. Slaves wore no badge of shame; citizens no badge of honor. Citizen and slave men wore the same, well, frankly, not much more than rags or bits of draped cloth, the same straw hats and sandals. They couldn't be told apart by speech or mannerisms; they looked alike and spoke the same dialect of Greek. Citizens and slaves attended the same temple ceremonies and ate equal portions at those banquets. And I wonder how many of the foreigners noticed the most truly weird part of the situation. The city police force was 100% slave, were the only ones who routinely went armed in the city, and as slaves of the city could and did give orders to citizens.
Nor would any foreigner have realized that your average slave takes the same days off that his owner does, is allowed to work or trade for wages on those days, and is allowed to keep that money and spend it for his or her own purposes; this was especially common with slaves who had at least one skilled trade. And when home, the slaves not only wear the same clothes as the owners, but eat the same meals at the same hearth, and sleep in quarters no worse. I'm not going to say that life as a slave was a picnic. The slave's owner gives the orders and the slave obeys ... for all that the master works right along side the slave, and for the most part does the exact same work, it's the owners who make the decisions. On the other hand, every slave knows that if the household starves, they starve, and has the reasonable expectation that if the household thrives, they'll live better too.
If this seems incomprehensible to you, it's because a Greek slave, a doulos, is something different from a slave anywhere else: he's a native. Only in late and decadent times did the Greeks import slaves from elsewhere, and this didn't last long enough to change the customs and practices. The Greeks got their slaves through a process of informal, almost accidental exchange with other Greek cities. You see, when a Greek phalanx goes to war, it takes roughly equal numbers of citizens and slaves to carry the armor, weapons, and two days' or so of provisions to the battlefield. Both sides' citizens then fight; according to battlefield markers, the average fight ends when the winners have taken about 5% casualties, but the losers have taken about 15% casualties and their phalanx breaks. At this point, some large percentage of the losing side's warriors and slaves are taken by the winning side as slaves. This means that even free Greeks have a strong incentive to keep the institution of slavery as humane as possible; it is always possible that some day, they may be slaves themselves.
In the Odyssey, the ghost of swift Achilles tells clever Odysseus that he would rather be a poor man's paid employee and alive than be king of all the dead. He was clearly try to say that the worst of our world is better than the best of Hades. Isn't it interesting that he considered being a paid employee the worst thing imaginable, considering that Greece had slavery? He wasn't wrong, though. Slaves in Greece had more rights than employees. Poor people who had no land, who lost their land, or who ruined their land were available to work for hired wages. Work was available, or not, depending on the vagaries of the economy, but day laborers worked the fishing fleets, loaded and unloaded cargoes at the docks and the warehouses, and during harvest often found work on the more successful farms. But when you're hired as an employee, your employer has no obligation to feed you, house you, or clothe you ... but you're subject to the same discipline that a slave would be. Worse, actually, you don't have the slave's customary escape.
Athenian law allowed owners to beat slaves and employers to beat employees, but not to injure or kill them. And even then, there's a standard escape available to slaves: the slave has access to the family altar, and to any altar of the city. By long-standing religious law, nobody can be harmed or in any way interfered with while they are touching an altar. Of course, you don't have to feed them, either. On the other hand, while you're standing there waiting to beat them the second they leave the altar to eat or find a chamberpot, neither of you is getting any work done. It also makes both sides take time to talk it out and to calm down. This standoff is the stock scene in New Comedy, the single most common bit of theater painted on commemorative vases and cups. Hourly employees probably get the sanctuary of the city's numerous public altars, but farm laborers don't have access to the altar in the house.
I'm not saying that this would be a picnic. I'm certain that no middle class or upper class citizen would voluntarily change places, really, with his or her slaves, although threatening to do so to show the slave that the grass isn't greener is also a standard joke in Greek comedy. And there is at least one incomprehensible bit of weirdness in Athenian law regarding slaves. It's completely incompatible with all of the rest of the laws on slavery, and this baffled ancient Greek writers just as much as it baffles us. My guess is that it's a misremembered and misunderstood bit of bronze age law. Slaves can not give testimony in a court case until after they've been tortured. No, this didn't make sense to them, either. Plenty of bronze age legal codes say that slaves can't testify against citizens unless they do so even after torture; my guess is that the Greeks remembered it wrong, and got stuck with it. But judging by the few examples we have where it came up, the net effect was that owners went way out of their way to keep their slaves out of court cases altogether, and when they ended up having to testify, the torture was almost symbolic, pro forma. (There's a rather funny burlesque of this in Aristophanes' Frogs.)
So what does this mean to us? Probably nothing. Maybe something if you're a farm worker; conditions for migrant farm workers are still not much better than they were in ancient Greece. The United Farm Workers forced California growers to at least house their day laborers, rather than leaving them vagrant, but we're nowhere near granting them the same rights the Athenians would grant a slave. The rest of our households and our businesses don't run on slavery because frankly, we don't need slaves as badly as they did; that's what machinery and electronics are for, mostly. And besides, Americans have proven, beyond all shadow of a doubt, that we are no more to be trusted with slaves than the Spartans were. No, I'm not advocating slavery; I'm just saying that except in the horror show that was Sparta, the institution of slavery as it was practiced in the rest of the Greek world was not so horrible as to disqualify those people's gods from honorable worship.
But wouldn't it be something if you couldn't tell the richest people in America from the poorest people? Wouldn't it be amazing if poor people and rich people lived in the same houses, wore the same clothes, ate the same meals? Wouldn't it be interesting if, as was the case in Athens, the richest people in America only made 50 times what the poorest people made, or at least something less than tens of thousands of times as much?Current Mood:  okay |
| | Jan. 31st, 2005 @ 04:04 am |
|---|
|
Happy Birthday, ![[info]](http://library.vu.edu.pk/cgi-bin/nph-proxy.cgi/000100A/http/web.archive.org/web/20050203214721im_/http:/=2fstat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) mousefeathers!
Nothing's wrong, I just wrote so many replies yesterday that I'm tired of writing. I spend way too much time in this chair lately, and am getting even less exercise than I do most winters. I cut out one whole meal a day, and nearly all sweets, and most fat, and I still gained 40 pounds this winter, the heaviest I've ever been. *sigh* Anyway, series continues either late Monday or more likely Tuesday morning.Current Mood:  tired |
| Ancient Greece, sexist? | Jan. 30th, 2005 @ 02:00 am |
|---|
|
When somebody from today's world wants to condemn the first democracy, ancient Greece, one of the things that they inevitably bring up is that ancient Greek culture is terribly sexist and oppresses women (especially if they've read Riane Eisler's tripe). They base this criticism on the "fact" that women were only allowed one role in ancient Greek society, that they were denied the vote, and that they couldn't own land. And in point of fact, there are only two or three socially accepted roles for middle or upper class women in ancient Greece. But then, there are only two acceptable roles for middle or upper class men in ancient Greece. I'm curious as to how many acceptable roles you think there are for you in your social class?
It is unmistakeably true that ancient Greece is the mathematical opposite of a unisex society. There are definite roles that are for men only. There are definite roles that are for women only. What's more, men and women of the upper and middle classes actually had very little to do with each other. Their worlds overlapped very little at all. The fact of the matter is that it would have been very difficult for a husband to oppress his wife during most of the ancient and classical period in Greece ... first, he would have to see her other than briefly at dinner, and the couple of times in her life when she wanted a child. If anything, I could make a pretty strong case that the ancient Greek system oppressed men rather than women.
To make any sense out of what follows, you have to imagine the floor plan of your typical ancient Greek house. The house is shaped either like an L or a U, wrapped around a walled courtyard. It's either 1-1/2 or 2 stories, depending on whether or not the top (master bedroom) floor in the back wraps around the side(s) or is only at the back. The entrance to the house is almost always into the courtyard, which has the house cooking fire, the house altar, and some sturdy outdoor furniture. It is the only space that the whole household uses. Off to the right as you come in to the courtyard is usually a small room, about the size of an average guest bedroom. It's got one or two storage chests that can be used as low tables, and a couple of couches that are remarkably like a late 19th/early 20th century bachelor apartment's "day bed." That room is called the andron, the Man's Room. It is called that because it's the only indoor room of the house that he has the key to, the only room of the house he's allowed into except by her invitation. The master bedroom? Hers. The rest of the household storage? Hers. The various workrooms, dayrooms, and sleeping rooms? They're used by the slaves, who with the exception of maybe one field hand the rest of the slaves work for her, not him. In all likelihood, unless he's a remarried widower or we're talking about the rare family house in town, it was her (family's) money that paid for building the house, to her specifications. He may officially be the owner of the house, but he's the one who's treated like a guest. (Which is why, apparently, most middle class men slept outside if they could stand it, and why most upper class men kept a small apartment in the city; the farm fields and the house in town were theirs.)
There's only one acceptable role for him. He's got to be a farmer first, and a heavy infantry soldier, and a part-time priest in at least three neighborhood or city or family religious banquet clubs. He can barely escape a life as a farmer if he's lucky enough to find a permanent paid priesthood, but such jobs are super-rare. There were men who chose to risk their lives and livelihoods investing their inheritance in a sea-going trade boat (or fleet). To try to earn a living trading between cities and countries by sea was considered a semi-honorable way to go slowly broke and die young. Unless you combine it with also running a farm that's at least semi-successful, for a man any other way of making a living, oddly enough including quite a few things we'd consider skilled trades, were viewed as being about equal in honor to being a cheap afternoon-quickie prostitute by the city gate: you get paid wages for working for others. Even the famous orators, politicians, and generals you've heard of in ancient Greek history considered themselves farmers first.
(Right before the end, it became possible and briefly even faddish for even middle class men to make a full-time living as itinerant sophists. A sophist is basically a combination rhetoric instructor and lawyer. That this was a respectable way to make a living was a bad sign, as you'll see when I get around to discussing the reasons the Greeks fell.)
There are, however, two roles for her. Nearly all citizen women chose, more or less freely, the role of house-bound wife. Now, I say "house-bound" despite the fact that she can travel freely to any temple on any feast day (10 to 15 days out of any month), and in between can take a servant bodyguard and travel freely to any neighbor woman's house on the slightest excuse, without asking permission from anybody. There probably weren't very many women who took every opportunity to get out of the house, and the ones who did were looked down on not for being unwomanly but for being poor. Why? Because just as much as the husband, she's got work to do. In her case, that means overseeing almost the entire staff of the household. She's probably got her own vegetable garden to farm with servant help. She runs at least one loom, doing much of the weaving and embroidery herself but handing the repetitive parts out to servants who have to be supervised, too. If there are children in the house below the age that the city takes over their education, she's responsible for overseeing the servant who teaches the kid(s), too. The cook works for her. If the house is anywhere near a town or city center, one of the windows out of her rooms is probably a sales counter for the family's business; the servants who man that report, that's right, once again not to him but to her. She runs a staff, depending on how successful the household is, of anywhere from three to maybe ten employees, male and female. He's only barely trusted to manage one full-time field hand.
The other role was not terribly popular with citizen women, although foreign women migrated to Athens just to try for the job: Companion. The word heteira literally means "female companion." In English, the word is usually translated courtesan. She does not sell sex; that's a pornos, or prostitute. Indeed, it's not entirely clear if some of the most famous courtesans in the ancient world ever had sex. A courtesan, a companion, is something rather like a geisha in old Japan. She's a woman who's hired by the wealthy and the middle class to facilitate parties that were, in no small part, also business meetings. Unlike the woman who chose to be a wife, she travels freely throughout the city. But then, remember, as an unmarried woman she doesn't have a farm/business home to retreat to (although you could measure a companion's success by the size and location of her rented apartment or house in town). She doesn't own slaves, but she hires employees for her business of providing entertainment at parties: musicians, singers, jugglers, dancers, prostitutes. She doesn't vote in the Assembly, but she's expected to follow the debates. They have an entire boxed section at the theater, one second in quality of location only to the high priest of Dionysus and his guests. And very much unlike married women, she spends most of her waking life either at the men's parties, or preparing for them.
Why don't married women attend parties? Sexism? No. For the same reason that many jobs in America are closed off from women of childbearing age: they're not safe. Alcohol is not the primary intoxicant in ancient Greek party wines. Wine is used to extract and concentrate the active ingredients in many herbs, many kinds of "mint" in the common translation.These include opium, belladonna, amanita, and many other plants with abortificant or worse birth-defect causing side effects. (There may also have been, even at this early date, varying amounts of lead-based sweetener.) This getting stoned together, the symposion, was the great leveling ritual of Greek society. These social occasions were hemmed in with many careful customs and presided over with as much religious piety and sincerity as silliness, probably more, but the drugs are a major and unavoidable part of them. A pregnant courtesan who chooses not to abort is a scandal, even if she retires, even if she marries a single or widowed citizen. No, she's expected to retire single, childless, and propertiless ... which means that by the time she looses her charm or her energy for going to parties all night, she'd better have savings. Fortunately, your average courtesan during her working years has many rich friends. If she's good at it, they vie for the privilege of her attention, and being men, they compete in gift giving. If she's witty and charming, she'll do just fine.
(Again, I leave out the tiny handful of women in any given generation who landed a permanent full time job as a priestess. They exist, and there are at least as many of them as there are men in the priesthood, but your odds of landing that job as either a man or a woman are comparable to your odds of being a full time professional athlete now. Historically significant individuals, but not statistically significant for analyzing a society.)
Am I advocating that we return to a world with such strict gender separations, am I suggesting that the gods would only bless this way of life? No, probably not. This was a solution for a particular time, at a particular technology level, in a particular environment. But I do suggest that it is not a social solution to look down our noses at. It did at least as good a job of providing a safe and comfortable living for both men and women as our world does. It had few or no single-adult households. It did a great job of providing for children, in most cases, including all the adult attention a child could ask for; there is no ancient Greek word for "latchkey child." It put men in the most dangerous jobs, where we belong. It put women in charge of front-line management, where in a saner world they'd probably belong. What's more, for women who choose not to be parents, who choose the company of men, it provided a small but potentially very comfortable niche. As such, I'm willing to bet that it did at least as good a job as our society did of providing both sexes with a fulfilling life. No, we don't have to copy that model to be blessed by the deathless gods. But does our model really solve all of the same problems as thoroughly?Current Mood: okay Current Music: Aba Structure - 2k1 (D I G I T A L L Y - I M P O R T E D - G |
| Animal sacrifice | Jan. 29th, 2005 @ 04:43 am |
|---|
|
I only just found out last night that my friend the professor has her masters degree in ancient Greece, so I knew how she'd react when I told her that I aimed to sum up everything important and relevant about Hellenic animal sacrifice in 6 to 10 paragraphs. I was right, too: shock, horror, and rolled eyes.  The standard college textbook on ancient Greece, Walter Burkert's Greek Religion, dedicates about 20 pages to the subject, describes itself as only an overview, and makes no effort whatsoever to discuss what modern equivalent religious services might look like. If I didn't know that it was impossible, I wouldn't know to be intimidated at the effort. (Insert wry grin here.) But here I go, because there are four things that get thrown in your face any time you talk about Hellenic reconstructionism: blood sacrifice, sexism, slavery, and pedophilia. I know this, so I know that I can't talk about respecting the Greek gods and Hellenic religion of the classical era, in front of a modern mostly-American audience, without addressing these topics.
Of course, here in America a lot of the hostility towards even the mention of animal sacrifice deflated to mere huffiness and feelings of superiority after the Supreme Court's 1993 ruling in the case Santeria Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah, Florida. In Santeria v Hialeah, we had the case of a city that was grossed out by Santerian animal sacrifices, hoped specifically to shut down a specific Santerian church that had opened within the city, and so passed a law banning animal sacrifices. The law got overturned at the Supreme Court on the grounds that the city's deliberations showed that the intent of the law was to discriminate against a specific religion. Nonetheless, two other jurisdictions that had anti-animal-sacrifice laws accidentally misinterpreted this ruling as a blanket legalization of animal sacrifice, and so every jurisdiction in America takes it for granted now, ten years and more later, that animal sacrifice has been declared a basic religious right by the US Supreme Court.
Assuming that you have no problem with animals being killed for food, does it change how you feel about Greek temple sacrifices that the methods required were as humane and painless and non-terrifying to the animal as anything Temple Grandin might have come up with, subject only to the limitations of iron age technology? Actually, it probably won't soothe any of you, given the fact (incomprehensible to us post-moderns) that this humane and religious slaughter was performed as religious spectacle in front of tens, hundreds, or even thousands of people at a time. What could possibly have been the point of making men, women, and children watch while the poor animal is stunned and then bled quickly to death? Do those people benefit in any way from watching the butchers chop that animal up and serve certain organs to the honored guests raw? What's spiritual about watching the butchers carve the animal up, burn the fat and the bones and the hair from the hide on a sort of a forge, and boil the rest as a kind of barbecue or stew before handing out even portions to everybody else present? Am I saying that if we're going to save liberty and democracy in America, everybody has to go watch this sort of thing several times a month? And, well, ewww, right?
It would serve no purpose to restore temple animal sacrifice to 21st century Americans. That bugs me to say, because the gods are quite clear as to how much they wanted those sacrifices to take place. But I have a hard time believing that they'd still want it, because of two related "little" problems. First of all, those sacrifices wouldn't achieve the same goals. And secondly and even more importantly, there is absolutely no way that they could mean the same thing to a 21st century audience that they meant to an iron age Greek. When the ancient Greeks murdered an ox (and one of the Greek words for sacrifice means just that, "ox murder") they weren't just killing a food animal. They were destroying an important piece of the community. They were committing that classic upper class sin of "dipping into the capital." There isn't enough pasturage in ancient Greece to raise significant enough numbers of cattle to count on their hides for large amounts of leather, to count on their meat for any significant amount of the community's food. Nonetheless, every small farm needs at least one ox, and somebody needs to be raising more of them. The ox isn't primarily a future source of food, it's an absolutely essential piece of farm equipment. It turns inedible grass and stalks into motive power for plowing, heavy transportation of agricultural produce, fuel (dried dung) for starting fires, and nitrogen-rich fertilizer for the fields. Similarly, a goat or a sheep is only food in the richest or poorest of times; the rest of the time it's a garbage disposal that produces wool and milk. Even the lowly piglet is a garbage disposal that produces fertilizer. The situation of the ancient Greek, especially during the archaic dark age when the gods were here to instruct them, would be to us as if in order to eat any red meat, a farmer first had to burn his tractor.
 Until the Greeks developed the technology of large-scale fishing fleets with nets, meat was something that they only ate at religious ceremonies. Superstitious Greeks convinced themselves that this was because the Gods needed the smoke from those fires for their nutrition. Poppycock. The gods needed or at least wanted the community to thrive, and that community could only thrive if to everybody it was a reflex that one only dug into savings, impoverished the farm, sacrificed long-term utility for a short-term meal, to serve the larger community. Red meat is never eaten privately. And during the limited time when fish was available in the marketplace for private consumption, the Greeks developed a special insult for someone who ate very much of it. An opsophagos is a special kind of a glutton, a glutton for luxuries, a meat addict, and the Greeks had a deep-seated suspicion of people being slaves to any appetite, whether for food or drugged liquors or sex. Another element of that contempt was for anyone who'd abuse his wealth to monopolize, or consume more than a fair share of, any commodity.
And that brings up another part of the goal of the sacrifice ceremony, one that's basically impossible to meet in this manner by any society with freedom of religion. The larger sacrifices (such as the "hecatomb," which means the sacrifice of 100 oxen at a single ceremony, enough to feed a big percentage of the town at once) was to act as a kind of progressive income tax, at least in Athens. To qualify for certain privileges, you had to demonstrate that your farm and/or other businesses were generating annual produce in the highest of three ranges. However, being on that list made you eligible not only for those privileges, but for a lottery drawing by which the expenses of major city festivals were divvied up. And on top of those levied religious duties, every successful businessman and farmer knew what the religion taught about windfall profits. Whether you think you earned it through your own skill, or know that you received it in any part through the favor of the gods, if you didn't want to arouse the anger of the gods then your first duty was to buy up 100 oxen and offer them at a city temple.
All of these religious duties combined with various restrictive laws (for example, on land ownership) to try to prevent anyone from rising above a certain upper-middle-class level of wealth. When the gods were most active among the Greeks, the tended to vex and punish those who rose above that status. When society had become successful enough that the gods no longer had to be here in person for us, for a while men remembered to prevent that kind of concentration of wealth, because they knew that if you let enough men acquire vast wealth, sooner or later some of them will use that wealth as a lever, as a power tool to wreck democracy and freedom. They were right to fear this, too, as I'll show when I get around to talking about why this religion vanished (for a time) from the face of the earth.
But in the meantime, a society with freedom of religion can't realistically depend on religious law as a way of keeping the rich from becoming too powerful, or as a way of discouraging short-term thinking among the middle class, or as a way of teaching society that certain luxuries are only appropriately enjoyed if you share them with others. And that presents me with a terrible dilemma, because that would leave us with only teaching and debate and philosophy and politics as tools with which to achieve these worthy goals, and those are are slender reeds that may not be up to the job. But then, if you get down to it, I suppose that neither was religious law for them.
As an aside, while we're talking about religious observance, I wrote an essay quite a while ago about ancient Greek prayer. You might find it interesting.Current Mood:  indescribable Current Music: william hawk-say good bye (extended version) (D I G I T A L L Y - I M P O R T E D - European Trance, |
| Done? | Jan. 28th, 2005 @ 05:27 am |
|---|
|
On my way to bed, it occurred to me that just possibly (no, let's be fair, "very probably") I've far, far exceeded any interest that most of you had in the subject of just what it is I believe religiously and why I believe it. I say this because as I was getting ready for bed, it occurred to me the sheer number of subjects I haven't even touched on. Assuming that I talk about animal sacrifice, about Prometheus' deal with Zeus and its central role in the founding of free and democratic society tomorrow, I still won't have said anything about the Mysteries. I won't have said anything about Greek attitudes towards love, sex, and family life, and whether or not those attitudes are blessed by the gods, and whether or not we as Americans should care. I won't have tackled the thorny issues of Hellenic attitudes towards slavery. And I'll have only glossed over in passing how this world came to an end. Nor do I have the slightest idea how many other topics I'll think of before I finally admit that I'm done. And at the very least, I figure I owe y'all a bibliography, right? Well, maybe not.
Am I? Done, I mean? Have I exceeded this audience's patience for the subject, for now? Should I go back to dealing with news items, and politics, and books, and music, and interesting stuff seen on the internet? Or do you still want more on Hellenism and Hellenic reconstructionism now?
Poll #426561
Open to: All, results viewable to: AllHas Brad written enough about ancient Greek religion for now? |
| Why these particular historical gods? | Jan. 28th, 2005 @ 04:51 am |
|---|
|
When the first tiny little "kingdoms" start rebuilding after the archaic dark age, whether they had help from the blessed gods or not, they faced one very nearly insurmountable problem that I've already mentioned: Greece is a terrible place to try to build a bronze-age-style agricultural kingdom. This was even more true then than it is now, as climate data seems to suggest that as dry as Greece is now, it was dryer then. Non-salty water is scarce, and where you do find it, it tends to be on ground that's too nearly vertical to plant crops on. There's nowhere near enough pasturage to support any serious number of horses or cattle.
The Greeks eventually rose to this challenge through the development of a new model of agriculture, one not in use anywhere else in the world at the time. Conventional historians credit this to unknown human geniuses. The Greeks attributed it to gifts from the blessed gods; to an atheist or a Christian (but not to me) it is "obvious" that they were wrong and we are right, for all that they were a lot closer to the events than we are and we don't even have a contrary theory as to who the inventors were. But I digress. The special relevance of this agricultural model is not where it originated, since all agricultural societies attributed their success to the gods. The special relevance of this agricultural model is that in its uniqueness, it produced a uniquely valuable society.
 Victor Davis Hanson documented this best in his excellent book, The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization. The Hellenic model of agriculture is one that is based very, very heavily on vinticulture and orchard crops. Not only draft animals, but even smaller animals are cultivated more for their uses than as a source of protein. Tiny fields of cereal crops are grown wherever they can be, but up until the middle classical period (by which time grain was being imported from Egypt again), breads and cakes and most grain products are a luxury item. Among the virtues of this model of agriculture is that it is so diversified that it doesn't produce one, or even two, large harvests; properly managed, it produces a steady supply of food throughout most of the year. As such, it just plain doesn't justify central granaries. Also, once the orchards and vines begin to fruit, there are big chunks of the year where there just isn't that much to do. So this particular way of life more than any other similarly large agricultural civilization discouraged centralization of authority, and left unusually large amounts of time for civic participation. So it is no accident that this is where democracy was invented, and trial by jury. What's more, because there are few or no large central granaries, there is no central administration of charity; individual farmsteads either rise and fall on their own, or are dependent on their closest neighbors for help in a crisis. You see this in Hesiod's Works and Days, one of the four sacred long poems that every Greek, free or slave, man or woman, was required to memorize before entering adulthood. No religion in all of human history has sacred scriptures that are so openly, cheerfully, nakedly entrepreneurial; compared to Works and Days even The Book of the Subgenius looks socialist. Works and Days is the only sacred scripture I know of in the entire world that contains two whole business plans!
Now let us take it as given that in addition to virtue producing its own rewards, and vice attracting its own punishments, these processes are helped along from time to time by intervention of the blessed gods. Imagining that, how would the gods of the early Greeks have reconciled this decentralized and striving economy and morality with the universal virtue, esteemed by all the world's gods and religions, "know thyself" -- which generally includes the implication "know thy place, and don't think to elevate yourself above it, who do you think you are?" But let me give you another example from the beginning of the classical era, one that took place well after the age when the gods walked openly among men: the Harmodion. Harmodius and Aristogeiton were male lovers whose lives were ruined by the "evil tyrant" Hipparchus. They died killing him. That same Hipparchus was not only the king of Athens, but a great-grandson of Poseidon himself. By the rules of every religion in the world, this is not only homicide but regicide, and not only regicide but practically deicide, the sort of gravest insult to the gods that brings an eternal curse onto a city. But centuries afterwards Athens was a learned and prosperous and militarily successful city, capital of a thriving empire. Harmodius and Aristogeiton were celebrated for centuries after their deaths as the Liberators, and every party and religious banquet in Athens began with the Harmodion, the hymn to Harmodius and Aristogeiton.
How did this come to be? Because this happened so late, we are not told what the gods themselves said to each other about this; no god came down to make us privy to their debates. But if you follow prior debates among the gods, and only the gods of the Greeks, you can see the precedent for this being laid. Zeus, father of gods and men, is not primarily a god of kings ... he is primarily a god of justice. In the eyes of Zeus, as with all blessed gods, an unsolved and/or unpropitiated murder is a terrible blot on a city -- but to Zeus it is no worse a blot than a broken contract, a lying oath, or a bribed judge. But there's more to it than that, there must be. And high on the list of reasons they gods in this place and time encouraged democracy and entrepreneurial capitalism must have been that, well, it was working. We don't know why the gods want human beings to thrive. OK, some individual gods have their own personal stakes. Prometheus, our maker, loves us and is proud of his workmanship. Zeus and many other gods have descendents among us. And, of course, there are the temple sacrifices, a much misunderstood subject that I'll come back to on another day. But for whatever reason, the gods of the ancient Greeks must have seen that because of the geographic and agricultural limitations of the land these people were living in, then in this place the fierce independence and love of freedom that they may well have inherited from the city burners themselves was not to be punished as blasphemy and hubristic pride and anarchistic lawlessness, but to be channelled and then encouraged and grown into a society both just and free.
What's that got to do with us? After all, that civilization passed away twenty three centuries ago. Very few of us live in Greece; the Greece of our time, after 3000 years of terracing and other upgrades, is hardly the dry and barren wasteland of the archaic dark age, the age of heroes. Why should we care what conduct the gods rewarded and punished in that place and in that time, if it was so weird and nearly unique? Well, we in America have an odd connection to it. When the philosophers of the 18th century Enlightenment concluded that monarchy was a blot on humanity that had to be erased, they went looking for any historical model of a successful society that had survived and thrived after regicide or rebellion. There weren't a lot. Sure, they learned some from the Iroquois Federation next door, but to the Enlightenment philosophers there was also proof that maybe even white people could survive, and thrive, and advance the arts and sciences without a central monarchy. You see only a few centuries before, the Italian Renaissance had finally united the surviving fragments of the Greek world that were in Islamic hands with the surviving fragments of the Greek world that were in Christian monastic libraries, and the expanding use of the printing press put those Classics in the hands of an ever-growing number of people. A fad of middle-class philosophy broke out, and for a couple of centuries all educated people were fascinated with ancient Greece. Not so very many of those middle class intellectuals went so far as to renounce Christianity for Hellenism; a tepid universalist-like Deism was as much rebellion against monotheism as all but a few of them could stomach. But it is not an accident that in this country, the (re-)birth place of democracy and freedom, that our public buildings and our banks all used to look so much like Greek temples, and our public statuary for over a hundred years so closely aped the style of Pheidias.
Nor do I think that it is a coincidence that at times when America has been the least Christian, and our way of life the most in conformance with the ancient Hellenic scriptures, that we have thrived and prospered; at times when America has been the most strictly puritan Christian in its attitudes and governance, our science and education has regressed, our cities grown poorer, and our enemies bolder. We did not learn democracy, accountability of rulers to the judiciary, trial by jury, a civilian militia, elevation of the middle class as the cultural ideal of society, or entrepreneural capitalism from Christianity; indeed, these values are all deeply antithetical to the Bible. But you'll notice, I hope, that they work. It is not Christ who will save us from our enemies and lead us back to prosperity, but the true Gods, who have smiled upon our country so many times in the past.
Next: True religion.Current Mood: tired |
| Blessed gods and feral humans | Jan. 27th, 2005 @ 02:59 pm |
|---|
|
A couple of times now I've mentioned "feral" human beings. Here's what I mean by that. All kinds of people have wondered what human beings are like when you take them out of civilization, how do they live? Evolutionary biologists wonder about this, and geneticists, and anthropologists, and psychologists, and sociologists, and poets, and theologians, and philosophers, and political scientists, and just about every dead-tired group of caffeine-wired college students talking BS at 3:00 in the morning. Too bad none of them ever think to ask historians who specialize in either or both dark ages, because they don't wonder about this: they know. On at least two separate occasions, western civilization has disintegrated and the tiny remnant who lived through the fall were thrown out into a depopulated wilderness to survive any way they could. Both times, and in almost every place, human society followed the same path back up towards civilization.
Early in the process, human beings naturally form up in bands of 4 to 10 families, following one person who has demonstrated an ability to keep his family, and another 3 to 9 families, alive in a hostile environment. This primitive band of hunters, gatherers, and scavengers, this tiny "kingdom" of no more than 20 adults and perhaps as many kids, is what I call a band of feral human beings. It can take generations to accumulate or luck into what it will take to advance beyond hunter/gatherer/scavenger/raider life. They'll need to store up enough food that they can survive a whole year without migrating. They'll need enough seeds to plant. They'll need mated pairs of at least a couple of food animals and another mated pair of at least one kind of draft animal. They'll need minimal farming and building tools and a tool-making kit. Then, even more importantly, they have to find an unused site with all of the advantages necessary to build a permanent settlement: access to fresh water, enough flat fertile soil to grow crops on for ten or more families, and the right amount of rainfall. Then they can build a great house, and 3 to 9 smaller farm houses around it. Then it's the job of the leading family to protect what they have from other feral bands of raiders and scavengers, and when they run low or out of anything, or need slaves, to lead the men of the new settlement on raids of their own.
I'm sure that you noticed a long time ago that in fairy tales and myths, every fourth person or so that we meet is some kind of a king, queen, prince, or princess. Most people assume that this is because of the celebrity effect: those are the only people whose stories get preserved. No, I don't think so. I think it's because most of these stories date to times when feral human beings are trying to rebuild civilization, and in such an environment every fourth person is a king, queen, prince, or princess, or at least one out of every twenty.
Now in most places and most times, what comes next is practically programmed, and progresses as if on rails. The more successful settlements raid the less successful settlements, and finally annex them for their farmland. They enslave the locals, make the local leading family a barony or whatever, and we've begun the process of restoring feudal monarchy. Feudal monarchies expand until they come into conflict with each other, and war until there are only a handful of equally powerful, huge, multi-level feudal monarchies holding each other at bay. Then a time of relative peace arrives, and people inside those monarchies insist on improvements in their lives (whether they get them or not), and hey, that's the history of human civilization.
Now, go back to Greece and western Turkey around 1000, maybe 900 BCE. It's five or six generations after the fall of the bronze age, and other than the fact that there once was a golden age where life wasn't so brutal, hardly anybody remembers anything about it. Tiny little kingdoms dot the map, but in Greece in particular the fertile farmland is so scarce that none of them are really thriving, let alone expanding. And it is into these places at this time, according to the sources we have, that the gods of ancient Greece appeared. They performed miracles, intermittently rewarded virtue, intermittently punished vice, and occasionally stayed long enough to teach lost or new technologies. The men among them fathered a couple of dozen children by human women. They didn't say much about themselves. They said, or left the impression, that they were the 3rd and latest generation of gods since the origin of life on earth. They made it clear that the one of their number they called Zeus was the ruler of all of them, was the one that they trusted (or were required to trust) to render judgment, the court of final appeal. But other than that, they said very little about themselves; most of what is written in the songs and hymns and poems and sagas and epics and founding legends is speculation.
As the cities that they encouraged to grow became less tenuous, their survival more assured, and civilization more secure, the blessed gods themselves were seen in person less and less. It was a gradual process. They stayed involved in the lives of their descendants the longest. But long after they'd stopped being seen in person, those who remembered the miracles the gods had performed recognized them when events that defied all logic or luck occurred. Sometimes all the lucky breaks go your way. Sometimes a person is witnessed to be in two places at once, but one of him seems to be speaking unusually intelligently, or performing far above his or her normal level in some way. Sometimes a person opens their mouth and says something they don't know why they said, but the "winged words" pierce the hearts of the listeners and they know why that person said it: a god spoke through them. They attribute all these things to the gods not because they're superstitious or ignorant, but because it's a recorded part of their history that when the gods walked openly among men, that was their modus operandi.
Maybe they were right, maybe they were wrong. But the gods told them that on occasion, as time permits, at such times as the gods find it interesting or worthwhile to do so, they act (or at least acted) to reward virtue, or to punish vice. Even if they no longer act to reward virtue or punish vice, virtue and vice do in the long run act as their own reward and punishment. What's more, whether or not the gods still act to get their ways, there is such a thing as luck, if only lucky timing. (For example, I could go back through personal computer history and show you two dozen different designs from as many different companies for personal computers and personal computer operating systems. Microsoft's success owes nothing to its superiority over those companies either in design or execution, and everything to luck and lucky timing.) If those who knew the gods best believed that more good luck accrues to those who show virtue before the gods or their spies, and less bad luck accrues to those who eschew vice in the sight of the gods or their spies, isn't it prudent to keep that suggestion in mind?
Next: What was unique and special about the Greeks and their relationship with their gods? And probably either next or next after that, the conclusion: What's that got to do with us living here in America and in the rest of the world?Current Mood:  productive |
| | Jan. 27th, 2005 @ 02:06 am |
|---|
|
Happy birthday, fleabear! |
| Old gods when? | Jan. 26th, 2005 @ 08:51 pm |
|---|
|
 Let me start with a quick overview of the oldest of ancient history, the history that preceded the time of the Greek gods. Starting around 10,000 BCE, human beings almost everywhere abandoned the lifestyle of the new stone age (Neolithic) and what we call the bronze age began. Bronze metallurgy was only the least of the changes, though. The really big changes were economic and political. Hunter gatherer societies developed and then based their lives around annual cereal crops. When these crops were harvested, nearly 100% was paid out in taxes and offerings to two sometimes competing but generally cooperating sets of granaries: the palace of the king, and the temples. The temples doled out the grain as offerings, and as wages to pay to build religious buildings and produce religious spectacles. The king doled out the grain as needed, and as wages for public works like roads and monuments and yes, more granaries. But the king also used a lot of that grain to pay for and provision a small, elite, professionalized and expensively equipped force of chariot archers. This chariot army was used to annex other tribes or kingdoms that had embraced agriculture more slowly, to defend the kingdom from annexation by other empires, and to put down the occasional revolt.
This was the most stable way of life that human beings have ever known. The capital city of the empire would occasionally change, the names of the gods sometimes changing with it, but the actual way of life didn't change for thousands of years. Then, in the space of about 27 years, everything turned upside down. Out of all of the major bronze age cities we know of, all but two were attacked and burned viciously to the ground by unknown invaders or rebels. The first city burned around 1225 BCE. The last sighting of the city burners was when they were defeated at great cost by Ramses II in the Second Battle of the Sea Peoples in 1198 BCE. The effects varied from place to place, depending on how thorough the city burners were and how friendly the environment was to feral human scavengers. Let's take it counter-clockwise from that last battle of the end of the bronze age, empire by empire:
- Egypt: The only two great bronze age cities to survive were Memphis and Thebes. But the Pharoah spent so much of his army saving the kingdom that his dynasty ended, as Egyptian subjects from the south, up the Nile, came north and captured the throne. Written language and the bronze age model of society survived, but the change in dynasties marked the end of Egypt as an expanding empire; indeed, it is at this point that Egypt more or less withdraws from Gaza and Libya; the area along the Nile is all that they can afford to control.
- Hittites: Right before the end, the Hittites controlled everything that we now know as the middle east, having long ago conquered other empires such as Babylon and Assyria; they were at war with Egypt up to the very end. After the fall, for all practical purposes, there were no more Hittites, only a scattering of tiny towns too small and unimportant to attract the attention of the city burners. The largest and most successful of those small towns, Perseopolis, therefore got a jump start on the dark age, and when the dark age was over hundreds of years later became the seat of the mighty Persian Empire.
- Anatolia and others: We know almost nothing about the inhabitants of modern day Turkey from before the fall. Until archaeological discoveries in my lifetime, we didn't even know that there were empires in Turkey during the bronze age; the city burners were that thorough. Egyptian battle records from the Bronze Age list dozens of empires and kingdoms we've never heard of; only recently have we begun to suspect just how urbanized and wealthy and powerful Turkey was before the fall. Indeed, the crisis of 1200 BCE may have even started here. And archaeologists think that at at least one site in Turkey, the city burners came back only a few years later, found survivors trying to rebuild the city, and burned them out again. The scattered survivors went feral, and spread across the subcontinent as tiny hunter/gatherer bands.
- Greece: There was only one large bronze age city, the one we now call Mycenae (after a later town miles away, because nobody knows what its name was then), and as elsewhere it was burned and the inhabitants mostly massacred. One tiny trading port town at the southern tip was left behind to starve; starve because they had to have been importing food from Egypt or the Hittites or Turkey before. There is hardly anywhere in Greece is there enough naturally occuring well-watered flat land to grow annual cereal crops on even if you wanted to. (There's more now. Credit 2500 years of human engineering for terracing and fertilizing and channeling of streams.) For the most part, the survivors of Mycenae and Eleusis revert to feral hunter gatherer bands.
- The rest of Europe: Hadn't progressed much beyond that hunter gatherer stage, hadn't fully adopted bronze age civilization by the time it fell elsewhere. Went on slowly developing.
And thus it was to the people who called themselves the Ionians, the people of Greece and western Turkey, that the gods appeared, and it was at this time, more or less: some time in the first couple of hundred years after 1200 BCE. We can't pin it down much more precisely than that. From city histories and genealogical records, I feel strongly tempted to aim for a late date, no earlier than 1000 or 900 BCE. It absolutely must have come well before around 775 BCE, because that's when Homer and Hesiod composed the definitive histories of that dark age, and the gods were definitely in them. So we're talking about a space of three or four generations stretching from around 950 to 850 or so BCE, the absolute center of what's called the archaic dark age.
Next: What's a feral human being, and what difference did the gods make, and is this why they came?Current Mood: tired Current Music: Maile Serenaders - Keep Your Eyes on the Hands [1:44] - Let's Hula on Vegas Vics Tiki Lounge - Exoti |
| Other historical gods | Jan. 26th, 2005 @ 01:47 am |
|---|
|
Yesterday I said that there is an alternative to the philosophers' gods and the schizophrenics' gods, and that alternative is the historical gods. I restricted that to gods that were actually reliably witnessed, in person, by more than one person at a time. In other words, I'm talking about gods whose interventions in human history are at least as reliably attested to as any other historical event. I admitted that I've only had half a lifetime to study this, so there are probably a few examples (at least) that I don't know about. For example, I know very little about the origins of Native American spirituality, or to what extent the lives of gods and humans intermingle in the Hindu scriptures. But I did cite ancient Greece about halfway through the archaic dark age as one example, and I told you that I had another.
In the 4th century CE, almost all human tribes and nations west of the Gobi desert was united under a single rule, the civilizing iron age empire of Rome. But Rome over-reached, responded poorly to several environmental and economic crises, and made itself vulnerable to the barbarians outside the empire who viewed the whole idea of civilization with a skeptical eye. Wave after wave of barbarian tribes conquered Rome, but didn't stay to rule it. On the contrary, they set about sacking it over and over again until nobody could rule from Rome. And with the fall of the empire, and the civil wars that were sparked by that fall, civilization retreated pretty far away from what had been the outermost borders of the empire. Unfortunately for a lot of people living in those areas, Rome had already achieved a central place in their governance, in their law enforcement and justice, and in the administration of their farming economy. You all know the result, yet another dark age: anarchy, mass starvation, and educational standards falling even faster than population. This fall wasn't as bad as the previous one had been; written language and history survived in more places, this time. But still, it got pretty grim, and human beings reverted to their default feral social order in pretty short order. (More about that feral social order and the alternatives in the entry after next.)
And it is at the far northwestern part of the former empire, among the scattered pre-feudal Celtic tribes of Brittany, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, and in this particular time, when humans were dying like flies because nobody knew how to live any more, that there came to be sightings of the Good Neighbors. This is what the stories mean when they say, "long ago and far away."
The Good Neighbors, the Faerie folk, the Sidhe, were very protective of their privacy. They wouldn't say much about where they were from, or what they were really like. But other than this nervous or compulsive privacy, they were observed to have certain traits. They appeared in human form at will, always or nearly always beautiful or handsome. They could be injured by special weapons, but were otherwise deathless and mostly unaging. So many of them are described as being able to shape-shift at will that one must assume they all could. The nobility among them had some mysterious way of traveling vast distances supernaturally quickly. No door or wall or enclosure could keep them out. They were capable of passing among us unseen or unnoticed, observing our behavior; at times when they didn't, they were capable of receiving reports about our behavior from ghosts, from nature spirits, or just from ordinary gossip overheard in their travels. They were interested in us; some of them fatally romantically so. They had their own code of ethics and their own values, they esteemed certain behaviors and personalities more highly than their opposites. They were capable of rewarding behavior they admired, but seldom under any obligation to do so. They were capable of being bound to a conduct of behavior by oaths; the keeping of oaths was very nearly their highest value.
Were these beings the exact same ones who walked among the Greeks about a thousand years ago? Almost certainly not. The names don't match. The physical descriptions don't match. The virtues rewarded don't exactly match. But the similarities fascinate me. And here's the other thing that I find fascinating: the two times when these kinds of beings walked among human beings were during dark ages, and the places were both places where the collapse of civilization left almost everybody in danger of dying out, or at least dying back to only a handful of feral bands. And the places where these beings walked, and the descendants of the people whose virtues they rewarded, became the nucleus of new civilizations: the classical Greeks in ancient times, and the early Irish of the Irish renaissance.
This is running way too long. Three paragraphs from here I wasn't even done explaining why the archaic dark age was so much bigger a deal than the fall of Rome; to get from there to where I wanted to be tonight would have been at least another three or four paragraphs. So I'm cutting it here for tonight. I'll explain what I mean by comparing the Good Neighbors to the gods, and why I think it's significant that the faerie folk and the Greek gods showed up during a dark age, tomorrow.Current Mood: okay Current Music: Neo - A Night In Marseille (The Soul Monkey Remix) (D I G I T A L L Y - I M P O R T E D - Deep House |
| What Kind of Gods? | Jan. 25th, 2005 @ 01:01 am |
|---|
|
How do we know anything about any god? I'm not talking about secondary sources, I'm talking about primary sources. What are the primary sources for our knowledge about any kind of a god? Mostly we're talking about one of two kinds of sources.
Most direct information about a god comes from visionary experience. Some prophet, some visionary sees god, hears god. Nobody else sees or hears the god, not even if they're in the same room. The experience is inside the visionary's head. In most cases, the visionary knows this. It's a hallucination, an illusion, a purely psychological phenomenon. People ask how can we tell the difference between authentic spiritual experience and pathological schizophrenia, and after ten thousands years of history all that we've come up with is to judge the results. If the message is a good one when judged by subjective human standards, if it makes the prophet and the people who listen to the prophet into better people, then it may have been a legitimate vision. If the message is a screwed up one, if it drives the self-identified prophet or his followers to engage in dysfunctional anti-social acts or engage in horrible crimes, then we call it paranoid schizophrenia.
Some neurotheologians think that god or the gods made us with a structure in our brain specifically for receiving divine messages. They say that when we're healthy or sane, when that part of the brain isn't firing at random or malfunctioning in some other way, it provides us with our conscience. When it fails, its failure states include paranoia, schizophrenia, and/or psychosis. And mind you, that's what the people say who want to believe that these weird internal states might, under some circumstances, actually be delivering us information about a Higher Being and about what the Supreme Court called "matters of ultimate concern." But unless you believe that vox populi literally is vox Dei, how can anybody sustain any respect for a sensory hallucination, for an experience that can only be validated by human judgment and by outcomes? So I'm not going to be charitable. I'm going to call this kind of a god a schizophrenic's god.
The other way to find out information about god or the gods is to study mankind and nature, and to try to determine experimentally what kind of god or gods there must be behind it. At its most cynical, this has more than once taken the form of some secret atheist or other trying to figure out not what kind of god is real, but what kind of god it would be most beneficial to the State for people to believe in. Such a game is only meaningful, is only worth putting even a drunken evening's party game's worth of thought into, if you have already given up on any other kind of knowledge about the nature of god. Once you've given up on any kind of direct information about the nature of God, any kind of actual external and measurable evidence, then what have you got left? You try to come up with some axioms that seem obvious and undeniable. You then use logic to manipulate those axioms to prove theological theorems, much like Euclid taught us to do with plane geometry. If your conclusions from your axioms seem to you to describe the way the world works, then you declare your axioms to be logically consistent, and then hand wave the distance between internal logical consistency and actual real world proof. In fact, all you've proven is that you like the axioms you chose. You're not worshiping a god, you're worshiping your own mind.
Nowadays we call the kind of people who engage in this kind of speculation theologians, but it was the sophists who invented this game, specifically the philosophers. And that is why I'm going to call this kind of a god a philosopher's god.
Is there an alternative to worshiping a a schizophrenic's hallucinations or a philosopher's mental masturbation?
Yes. Yes, there is. Because it is not impossible to know actual externally validated facts about all gods. Some gods actually entered history. They were seen by more than one person at a time. They could be touched, they could be handled. They ate food and drank water and wine. In many cases, they even had sex with mortal humans, and stayed around long enough or came back in time to deliver half-divine, half-human children. These are not the actions of a figment of anybody's imagination, fevered or intellectual. These are the actions of a real being. And out of all of the world's religions, I know of at least two where this is said to have happened. In both of those cases, the divinity of those beings was not to be questioned, it was just as obvious as the perception that water is wet or that fire burns. They may have taken on usually-consistent human form, but they were not constrained by it. They were shape shifters. They could appear as anyone. They could travel vast distances at unimaginable speeds. They could pass insubstantially through any wall or barrier. And each and every single one of them demonstrated some other kind of miraculous power.
It became fashionable in 4th century BCE Greece to claim that all of these stories were made up by the Hesiodic and Homeric schools of poetry, that the epics and hymns and collected founding legends of the heroic families and the scattered temples were all just examples of schizopherenics' gods and philosophers' gods. But that the 4th century Greek philosophers called the epics "the lies of the poets" undercuts their own argument. If the gods were seen by multiple people at the same time, then they couldn't have been hallucinations, could they? And if the gods behave in ways that no philosopher would postulate, then what kind of philosopher's god are we talking about here? And the biggest reason to doubt this claim, for all that it's taught in the classics departments of every university in the world, is that when these epics were first collected in written form in the early 8th century BCE, they were talking about events that had happened as little as a hundred years before.
These are not just fictional stories that were made up and passed along around the campfire until people forgot that they were fiction. These are stories that were being written down while some of the people reading them had been alive as children at the time and were still around to criticize. Even given that the parts of the epics that go back the farthest, to the earliest contacts between the Greeks and their gods, go back to around two centuries before the epics were written, those epics would have had been read by or recited before audiences who would have judged what they heard by what their own families knew, and remembered, first hand about those gods.
But three and a half centuries later, the philosophers didn't want to believe in the literal gods. The literal gods made the philosophers uncomfortable. So they taught the people that they could pick and choose what they believed about the gods, that they could ignore the historical accounts, that they should only believe the parts of the stories about the gods that were consistent with the axioms of the philosophers.
That same generation voted for the disastrous course of aggressive imperialistic wars, and then a civil war, that destroyed democracy. Tyranny and empire descended again upon the only free people of the time, and the grandchildren of that generation that chose to believe their own fictions about the gods rather than the historical records of the gods saw all of civilization collapse around them into another dark age.
Coming up over the next several essays: What other time do I know of that this happened? What do those two times have in common? How are they different? What do they say about the nature of real gods? What little did those gods tell us about matters of ultimate concern? And how then should we live, knowing this? (So don't ask these questions; I already know they need to be answered.)Current Mood: okay Current Music: Solar Fields - Blue Moon Station (D I G I T A L L Y - I M P O R T E D - Chillout - ambient psy chill |
| Apology and a Prequel | Jan. 24th, 2005 @ 03:42 am |
|---|
|
First an apology for not having written lately. Basically three or four things are going on. If you've read any of what's come before, you should know one of them and can probably guess another. First of all, the most obvious issue is that I'm depressed and stressed. But normally that's not enough to stop me from writing. There's another issue that my old friends mostly know, and those of you who read a recent attempt of mine at lyrical prose might have guessed. As much as I love the south wind, I have a much less accomodating feeling for the north wind. When, as happens just the other day, that north wind comes in January or February at 25 miles per hour gusting to 45, it sucks the life, and mind, and wit, and sanity, and energy right out of me, right alongside all the moisture from the air. Even when I'm at my most mentally and physically healthy, I've never done my best work on days like that; one or two rote reptitive tasks per day is about the limit of what I can achieve. When the wind howls over the bathroom vent cover, and the windows rattle, and even a brick building seeps an arctic January breeze right through the walls, then I lose all ability to think about anything but two things: (1) damn, I'm cold, and (2) give me Earl Grey tea right now. (I've had so much Earl Grey the last two days my pores are almost certainly seeping oil of bergamot.)
The third thing is that I may have discovered (or rediscovered) the hard way that Linux really is a better platform for writers than Windows is. For one thing, the tools are slightly better in some ways. That every program has built-in on-the-fly spelling checking, not just the bloated slow-moving high end word processor, is a heck of a productivity boosters. But the real reason, I think, that I was more productive under Linux than under Windows is that Linux had basically no games. I forget who described the process of writing as staring at a black page of paper until drops of blood sweat out of your forehead? It's way too easy for me to get halfway through that and think, this isn't working, I need a Starcraft or Neocron break.
And I wonder if something else isn't going on, something that would bode ill if true. I'm only a couple of entries away from my 500th LiveJournal entry. I wonder if I'm running out of things to rant about without repeating myself ad nauseum?
Before Brother North Wind stole my lifeforce, I was thinking of following up that last thing about religion with a multi-part statement of belief. I'm having trouble structuring it in my head. No surprise; people have been after me to write this up in book form for a couple of years now, and I always feel like it makes less sense on paper than it does in my head. (A bad sign that; it means I'm probably full of crap.) I'm feeling a hankering to take a rough draft cut at it over the next week, whether it makes sense or not. As Bill Gothard used to say, it's easier to steer a ship that's moving. But before I write about what I believe, it's probably worth documenting my journey up to this point.
- Prior to age 4, I had no religious thoughts or feelings at all. For that matter, to the best of my knowledge and recollection, I had no thoughts or consciousness at all. Yes, I know how weird that sounds.
- A few weeks prior to my 5th birthday, I had a genuine freakishly powerful spiritual experience that I still don't know what to do with. When I tried to describe it to the people around me, I was humored, then criticized, then ordered to knock it off and shut up, then threatened. So within a couple of weeks, my spiritual awakening went away. Anyway, that one spiritual experience pretty nearly sums up my whole religious education up to about age 15. My father believed that religion and spirituality are powerful things that require informed consent, and just like all other life changing and/or life threatening experiences minors have no business being anywhere near it.
- From around ages 6 to 15, that secular upbringing, plus a brief intense period in which American schools were trying desperately to get kids interested in science and engineering (because the US was losing the Space Race to the Russians), plus my first exposure to science fiction and science fiction fandom, combined to make me a fiercely atheist scientific materialist.
- When I was 15, more out of fear for my safety in an increasingly unsafe school environment that had already come close to killing me once than out of any religious impulse at all, my parents yanked me out of the public school system and stuck me in an Independent Bapist run private school, Faith Christian Academy. The school made the usual semi-serious attempts at brainwashing, which rolled off of me like water off a duck's back. The only real effect that their propaganda itself had on me was that my theology classes instilled in me a lasting love of theology as a verbal game, a fondness that persists to this day. No, it was the sense that even the worst of my fellow students were different, were better people than the ones that I had grown up around, that led me to become a born-again Christian fundamentalist a few months before my 16th birthday.
- Seven and a half years later, I was struggling with this faith for several reasons. For one thing, I had concluded from eight intense years of Bible study that the Christian God, the God of the Bible, is a monstrous jerk. His moral standards do not live up to mine. He is a bully, and I have issues of my own with bullying. What's more, my original reason for converting to biblical literalist Christianity was leaking away. Yes, those kids were better than the ones I'd grown up with. But so were lots of other people, including Pagans and atheists. I was comparing the best of one group, the ones whose parents cared enough to get them out of the public schools, with the average (at best, and dregs at worst) of an embattled working-class neighborhood that had just been turned into a warzone. So I spent several months looking for a religion whose doctrines, teachings, practices, and gods better suited me and ended up a Neopagan Witch.
- Over the next dozen or so years, I progressed about as far as it is possible to do so within that framework, and ended up serving for about a year and a half as the priest of a coven, one whose lineage can be traced back to the original Neopagan group via a direct chain of only 2 links; I'd also done enough online and festival networking to have become a mini celebrity, a small-time Big Name Pagan, a respected elder of the St. Louis Pagan community. But over those dozen years, the religion itself kept changing around me, and it seemed to me that pretty nearly every single one of those changes was for the worse. I resigned from the priesthood, but kept going to coven meetings. Then I went out on the road for two years. When I came back, I found that I had no urge, no drive to find another coven any time soon. Whatever I was, I really wasn't a Neopagan Witch any more, at least not what anybody else who's practicing the religion considers to be one.
- Then a funny thing happened to me, something completely unforeseen. I got pious in my old age. I discovered that the one thing that I missed the most when I was a Neopagan was a sense that this was all real. In fairly short order, I stumbled into then searched out about a dozen or twenty really good books about the actual religious beliefs and practices of the people who worshipped the gods that I felt most drawn to, the practice and belief of Athenian religion during the classical period. Over the intervening five years or so, I've continued studying the primary and secondary source material on the subject, and concluded that I was right to be most drawn to this nearly-dead religion ... it's the right one. Yes, I know how impolitic to say this but I really do believe it: this is not only the right religion for me, but the right religion.
And if I get my head out of my ass, and/or the nine lovely daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne lend me winged words, I may yet be able to explain to you why I feel this, why I think this. If not, I'll keep trying from time to time, and who knows, maybe eventually I'll get it right.Current Mood: tired Current Music: SheepShyfter - Nimbus (D I G I T A L L Y - I M P O R T E D - Chillout - ambient psy chillout, check |
| What Does My Religion Do for Me? | Jan. 21st, 2005 @ 11:31 pm |
|---|
|
Right after my meltdown, kukla_tko42 was talking to me on the phone and trying to give me hope. Good Catholic that she is at heart, she tried to say something soothing in the context of my own faith such as she understands it, but drew up short and had to ask, "What exactly does your religion do for you, anyway?" The question came back to my mind, because ononion is working on a beautiful detournement of a Jack Chick anti-Catholic comic book tract. Sample page with link:
I think that on most levels, the object of this exercise is to try to come up with something that'll be as offensive to the kinds of Christians who hand out these tracts as these tracts are to us. But be that as it may, I actually don't have a problem almost any of the theology in this little gem.
But anyway, when Kukla asked me what my religion "did for me," I had to backpedal and stutter for a while, because the question is so alien to the way I've always addressed spiritual matters. To quote Diderot again, I've never "played the usurer with God," I've never expected my religion to do anything for me. I don't worship the Gods because I expect to get something out of doing so. When I was a fundamentalist Christian before, I didn't worship Jesus because I expected to getting something out of him. When I worshipped scientific materialist logic before that, I didn't do so because I thought that I would gain something by doing so. I've changed my mind off and on over the years, but I've never done so in order to get a better deal. That anybody would do so seems baffling to me. Yes, the picture my default icon is based on shows me wearing a hand-made button that says, "Not all Gods are alike! Shope and compare!" But I never meant that in the sense of, "see if you can get a better bargain." For me, at least, what I mean is, "See if you can find something that fits you well and suits you the best."
The closest thing that I had for an answer for Kukla at the time, and I haven't come up with a better answer yet, was this. My religion explains the world to me. It tells me my place in it. It answers hard questions about the world, ones that exoteric history can't answer. It prescribes a code of ethics, and a standard by which I judge the world (for all that low self confidence and standards of politeness keep me from judging people by my religion's standards to their faces). It tells me how men and women ought best live, by explaining what ways of life encourage the blessed gods to bestow favors on a city and which ways of life put a miasma of uncleansed evil over a city through which no god will bother to intervene, which will cause the gods to leave us alone to fail. In short, I guess if there is a benefit that I get out of my religion, it is only this: it makes me feel like I'm right, like I have more of the pieces of the puzzle that is life.Current Mood:  depressed |
| Apparently I'm a Too Lazy Fairy | Jan. 19th, 2005 @ 04:06 pm |
|---|
|
So to test the perception that LiveJournal is just a diary site, I put a button on my toolbar with the following URL, and clicked it a couple of times: http://www.livejournal.com/random.bml. (You can also do this manually by going to any LiveJournal info page, cursor over Search, then down and click on Random.) I had a hard time telling, since at this point LJ seems to have even more Russian writers than English. The last time I did this experiment, about 1/3 of the pages were Russian; this time it was easily at least 2/3. And I admit, I didn't find a whole lot of essay pages, mostly it was what the critics say, diary pages and quiz results.
Although speaking of quiz results, I thought that the artwork on this one made up for the rather too-obvious personality quiz: ( Read more... )
I've been taking time off to work on another project, one even more worthless than this journal but I was in the mood. Besides, my sleep schedule has gone very weird the last week or so, I'll tell you about it later. |
| The Prisoner: A New Theory? | Jan. 17th, 2005 @ 02:16 am |
|---|
|
 A couple of months ago, it came up in conversation that I'd never actually seen the 1967 British ITC miniseries "The Prisoner." I've been hearing about this show since it first came out, back when I was a little kid. Many, many people whose opinions I respect loved this series, and wrote about it at length. For all that I'm pretty severely un-fond of British TV, ITC did at least two other projects in that same time period that I loved, "UFO" and the short-lived "Star Cop," so that was no obstacle. No, for me the obstacle was that so many people I respect said that the only way to appreciate the show was to watch all 17 episodes of it in order, and I never had a chance to do so. And the reason that this all came up in conversation again two months ago was that phierma and cos_x happened to mention in passing that they owned the complete series on DVD and hadn't gotten around to watching it again straight through. So when they found out I'd never seen it at all, they set out to do for me with "The Prisoner" what I had done for them with "Firefly," namely watch it with me a few episodes a week until we were caught up. Tonight we finally finished, and I have to say that I really liked most of it.
Without spoiling anything, for those of you who've never seen it or never even heard of it, here's the basic premise. The title character is a secret agent who angrily resigned without giving a reason. When he got home and started packing for an overseas trip, he was gassed in his apartment and taken to a mysterious place called The Village. Ringed by mountains on one side, guarded by sea (and by giant robotic balloons called Rover) on the other, it's impossible to leave without a helicopter, and the helicopters are all too well guarded. Once he wakes up there, they take away his name, and give him the number 6. The highest ranking official in the village is number 2, and number 2 explains to him that no, they won't tell him which side has him, but what they want from him is information. Specifically, there are three things they must know, and they have to know them soon, as in there is a deadline. They need to know the real reason why he quit. If the real reason he quit was that he was planning to defect or sell out, they absolutely must know to whom and what information he offered them. Finally, they need to know every secret he ever learned in his career that he decided not to share with his superiors. And if they can't persuade or trick him into telling them in time, they'll have to resort to methods that are likely to break or kill him; that would mean losing some of the information, but when the deadline comes they'll have to take what they can get. In basically every episode, number 2 tries yet another trick; in every episode, it fails. As a result, in almost every episode there is a new number 2. This leaves the Prisoner with two dilemmas. First of all, he must escape, and do so soon. Second of all, he needs to find out by any means possible just which side has him.
What drove audiences nuts back in 1967, and still bothers some people, is that the series never actually answers that question. In fact, it answers that question in at least four places. In two separate places, the show offers consistent internal evidence that he is being held by his own side. In two other separate places, the show offers equally consistent and compelling internal evidence that he his being held by the Russians. So, what are the possibilities that are usually banded about?- The Village is run by British foreign intelligence.
- The Village is run by the KGB.
- The Village is run by some other spy agency, such as maybe the CIA.
- The Village is run jointly by two or more of the world's spy agencies, as a place to park people who'd be dangerous to world peace if they were allowed to run around loose.
The first explanation is the simplest one, but I found it unsatisfying. By episode 12 or 13, I had my own theory. Now that I've seen the final episode, number 17, I still haven't seen anything to disprove my theory. And I'm told that Patrick McGoohan, who produced the series and wrote most episodes in addition to playing the lead role, has never said anything to answer the question, so there's no contradiction to my theory to found there. And when I explained my theory to phierma and cos_x, both of whom have been fans of the show for 30 years, they couldn't come up with either (a) any proof that I'm wrong, or (b) any evidence that anybody else has thought of my answer, either.
I don't think any side has him. Notice that the car that trails him back to his apartment in the opening credits is a hearse, and the person who gasses him through the keyhole is dressed like an undertaker. I don't think that the gas was knockout gas. I think the Prisoner is dead and in hell.
(At the risk of spoiling the ending of one of my favorite movies -- phierma, don't click that link -- if you know that's one of my favorite movies, you can see where I got the idea.)Current Mood: okay |
| Pagan Picnic, and other events | Jan. 16th, 2005 @ 07:35 am |
|---|
|
OK, I got word a couple of days ago that the last Sunday's vote, the one I wrote about back on the 5th, did happen and it did turn out the way everybody expected it to: the Council for Alternative Spiritual Traditions no longer owns the event known as St. Louis Pagan Picnic. The event is now owned by, and being managed by, Yarrow Coven. I don't have a clear answer yet on whether or not CAST itself still exists. My sources seem to think so, but as of this morning their website is down; I presume they couldn't pay the bills.
Since then, I've got a couple of increasingly panicky urgent-sounding emails from the co-chair of the programming committee, asking me to write something about this. Ordinarily I don't do by-request journal entries, and especially not from people who aren't on my LiveJournal friends list, but this time it's for something I care about and the urgency is great. Yes, I mean it, the urgency is great. It may not seem like it from all the way back here in snowy 14°F January, but the first weekend in June is way, way too close to be starting over from scratch when it comes to planning an event of this size and complexity. The programming committee has asked me to offer at least one workshop, and I gather they need other people to run workshops. I don't know for sure what other volunteer openings Pagan Picnic has, but I can make a few educated guesses.
If they don't already have a ritual coordinator, they're going to need one mui pronto. Pagan Picnic has at least three rituals: opening ceremonies, main ritual late Saturday afternoon, and closing ceremonies. Opening and closing practically write themselves, but main ritual is traditionally a big deal; to keep up the standards, it should have a committee already working on the script by now. Another big volunteer job that I know needs to be started by now is Kids Zone. I don't know if they have a children's programming coordinator, but whether or not they do, I know that they need to start now on gathering volunteers to work Kids Zone because I know that historically, that's a hard part of the event to staff. (I am not the only person in Paganism who doesn't get along with kids and who is especially nervous around strangers' kids.) The other reason they need plenty of volunteers now, if history is any experience, is that Kids Zone goes through a lot of donated supplies, and it is not even vaguely too early for people to be shaking down their friends for donations.
I don't know yet if Pagan Picnic has yet (or still has) a merchant coordinator, but considering that merchant fees are what pay for the portajohns and the park reservation fee and the permits and the printing and so on, it's absolutely essential that this not get screwed up and it is way, way late to be dealing with it. Somebody with authority from Yarrow needs to be not just emailing but actually writing to the few current vendors, and especially to former vendors, explaining the management change and encouraging them to sign up for Pagan Picnic 2005. Most vendors have their schedules planned out at least through June by now, so this can't be considered urgent enough. Once they get volunteers up and working on those three committees, I think that takes care of most of what needs to be done in the short term except that, frankly, they're going to need the best word-of-mouth campaign in the last ten years to get over the accumulated stigma and encourage people to come back after the gradually diminishment of the last two years, to convince people that CAST's having dropped the event is a good thing.
Closer to the event, they're going to need classic, traditional "fun mavens" for two big group jobs, that historically the fun mavens in the subculture have been able to make fun: setup and security. Like all big events, come the night before the event they're going to need the traditional swarm of people and pickup trucks to get the equipment out of storage, schlep it to Tower Grove Park, and set it up. The two weekends before that, there may be lesser schleppage to get stuff that got stashed in out-of-the-way places together for the Friday night swarm. Then, on Saturday, I assume that they're doing the same thing they've done many years now, which is deputizing a group of people to semi-legally camp in the park as semi-legal security, to keep an eye on the vendor booths over night. (I say semi-legally in both cases because officially it can't be called camping, you can't camp in Tower Grove Park, and because in St. Louis city and county you can't call what you're doing "security" unless you're a licensed professional security officer whose license covers this location.) I'm told it's a lot of fun. And, of course, the day of the event they're going to need go-fers, at least some of which get to run around the event on a golf cart, and people to man the main event booth, and a bunch of other jobs.
Pagan Picnic 2005 has a web site at http://www.paganpicnic.org/, but it would be an exaggeration at this time to say that they have it set up. Most of the pages are blank or have "lorem ipsum" filler text. Right now, the second most important thing on that page is the web BBS they have setup. I imagine that in the short run that needs to be where a lot of the volunteer stuff gets discussed, so if you want to help Pagan Picnic it'd be a good idea to go to that page and register a user ID. But the most important thing is the aggravating Java applet menu that pops up email addresses for the committee heads. Since I hate that kind of thing, let me reproduce them for you here. (And boy, oh boy do I hope these are getting redirected to the right people!)
I'm a little worried about two other events scheduled for this year.
Conflation, the St. Louis area adults-only science fiction "relaxicon," is only six weeks away, the last weekend in February. But the first worrisome sign is that even though it's only six weeks away, there is basically no chatter going on in the Conflation email discussion group. The other worrisome sign is that the Clayton Radisson Hotel is advertising heavily on my favorite local radio station, Red @ 104.1, that they're having "renovation specials." Last year's big renovation-related problem was that there was basically next-to-no heat in the main programming areas, as in temperatures down around 60°F or lower. That's pretty sub-optimal for an adult-oriented relaxicon, so I sincerely hope that doesn't mean that they haven't fixed that problem.
I'm also wondering what these problems with CAST are going to mean for Magical Weekend in October. No, it is not too late to be worried about Magical Weekend, because nine months is only just barely enough time to be planning a hotel convention event. I asked around, and two sources tell me that the woman who founded Magical Weekend wants it back. Unless she's moved back to the St. Louis area, I don't see how that could work; maybe she has and I just haven't heard. Anyway, at least one source reassures me that she at least says that she has the up-front money and the volunteer organization to make it happen. The only remaining obstacle is that if CAST still exists, then technically they still own it. Trying to find enough of CAST to hold a vote on the subject, and getting them to admit defeat on Magical Weekend this early, could be big problems. But if those problems don't get taken care of right now, then it may rapidly be too late for there to be a Magical Weekend 2005. And once you skip a year on an event, the last remaining vendors make other plans for that weekend next year, and there goes half of what's left of your revenue and something like 90% of your up-front revenue; that's a deep hole to have to climb back out of.Current Mood: groggy |
| System Outages and Pink Collar Ghettos | Jan. 15th, 2005 @ 10:11 pm |
|---|
|
For the benefit of those of you who don't check your LiveJournal account at least once a day, LiveJournal just went though a slightly over 24 hour complete system outage, and parts of it are still being brought back up. Basically, despite fully redundant power supplies, the collocation facility that hosts their servers lost all power, and it would appear that bringing things back up was made more complicated by the fact that they're in the middle of a conversion from one database package to another. There'll be more details about it later; right now they're not that important.
Because LiveJournal.com is one of the busiest sites on the Internet, it became a minor news story. eWeek used it as an excuse to grind one of their favorite axes, namely that free Internet services are doomed, all doomed, and will never amount to anything. But pretty much everybody else, including sources as diverse from each other as Slashdot and Something Positive, spun the story in a way that took me completely by surprise: total contempt for LiveJournal's customers. What's more, the majority of Slashdot's membership expressed their contempt in the exact same way that Randy Milholland did, namely, by stereotyping all LiveJournal users as bubble-headed teenage girls. I guess that adult male writers like me, and arkhamrefugee, and theferrett don't exist in their world. No, that's not fair -- what's really going on is that they see us as aberrations, as unusual exceptions. No, it is 100% clear to half of the Internet, apparently, that other than a few people, what LiveJournal is really for is for teenage girls to obsess about their mundane high school lives.
brad has been after me for months to get my journal off of LiveJournal. Her argument wasn't technical, it was social (for all that she's the one who introduced me to LiveJournal in the first place). She keeps telling me that I'll never be taken seriously as a writer as long as I'm on LiveJournal. And until today, I had no idea what she meant, let alone that she might be right. But you know, there's something I say about corporations that may be true of Internet subcultures as well. What I've been saying for a long time is that no matter how big a company gets, and no matter what companies it merges with, and no matter what other jobs or industries it branches out into, the company's "core DNA," by which I mean its corporate culture and norms, is set by the first industry that it was in. Well, one of the things that people were saying over and over again in that Slashdot article was to stop calling LiveJournal a blog site. To the snobby purists, LiveJournal isn't a blog site. Never mind that it has hundreds of thousands of people using it to blog. Since (in their opinion) it started out as a diary site, that's what it's going to be forever in their minds. And keeping a diary and reporting breathlessly on your daily life is seen as a pre-teenage girl's activity. And like all activities engaged in by more women than men, it is therefore by definition contemptible.
God, I hate that kind of crap. I may not be doctrinaire enough to make some feminists happy, but I'm sick and tired enough of seeing "pink collar ghettos" to be reminded why I think of myself as a feminist. Let me give you an unrelated by clearer example. As my ex-wife found out, from the 1950s through the 1980s, being a Technical Writer was an almost all-male profession. Technical Writers were by and large middle aged male engineers who'd been trained in technical writing so that they could maintain project and software documentation. As a job that was traditionally held by moderately successful male engineers, it was semi-high status, and paid very well. But then over the course of the 1980s, more and more college English departments offered courses and specialization programs in Corporate Communications, graduating fresh young college graduates who were ready-made professional Technical Writers. But college English departments are a largely female preserve, so an awful lot of the 1980s crop of technical writers were female. And not coincidentally, over the course of that decade, despite the fact that standards were rising and demand was rising, wages fell in the technical writing field. Why? Because it was no longer a high status job. And what made it low status? It was a job done by young women. It had stopped being thought of as a white collar job and had become a "pink collar" job, one with all of the prestige of a clerk-typist or a secretary (both of which were also higher-prestige jobs back when they were all-male jobs, oddly enough).
And now I find that in the eyes of much of the male world, I'm doing my writing in a pink collar ghetto, and am therefore contemptible. Who knew?Current Mood: tired Current Music: Evil's Toy - In the Army Now [3:53] - Silvertears on EBM-Radio.com |
| Office Space Was a Documentary | Jan. 14th, 2005 @ 03:41 am |
|---|
|
 I have an odd relationship with the movie Office Space, odder than most people's.
When the movie first came out, I ignored it. Modern screwball comedies mostly don't work for me. I'm not all that fond of Mike Judge's work. I'd seen the original series of cartoons that it was based on, the ones about the character of Milton and his humiliation at the hands of his manager, and I'd mostly hated them. And what's more, I don't go to see a lot of movies, probably not more than four to six per year, so I actually need a reason to go see a particular movie, and I just didn't have one for this one. So it came, and went, and I didn't think twice about it. Eventually it came out on DVD, and hick0ry was all over me to watch it, but my reasons still held, so I kept blowing him off. Then I found myself working at a place where all of the front-line supervisors, and most of the employees, were huge huge huge fans of Office Space, and kept making inside jokes from it. So out of self-defense, and because I can't stand not getting a joke, I grudgingly borrowed a DVD copy and watched it. And was promptly blown away, far more than even the most enthusiastic fan among you. You see, I recognized it. Not Milton's story, not the lead character's exact story, but I recognized every other detail in that movie.
If you have seen Office Space, you may have thought of it as being a lot like Dilbert. A lot of the early Dilbert strips were based largely on Scott Adams' experiences at (if memory serves) Pacific Bell, but a lot of it came from conversations with friends, then emails from fans, and so Dilbert became basically the generic awful-office cartoon, with little bits of this and that from awful companies all over the country and around the world. You know, like you thought Office Space was. Ah, but you're wrong. That's an actual company. I know. They wanted me to work there. No, I know what you're thinking, and I'm not delusional, and I'm not projecting my own issues on to the canvas of the movie. There are just too many of the details that line up. I wish I could tell you the name of the company, but there's no way I'm going to remember it, and at this late a date I probably can't even find it with a Google search. You see, there were a lot of companies in that particular business niche at the time, and after I got fired from MasterCard, there were about a dozen of them that were desperate to hire me. All of them offered to pay my relocation, and offered me a 50% salary increase over my already fairly impressive $48k/yr salary from MasterCard. Only one of them was from Austin, Texas, though, and the urban landscape in that movie is unmistakable to anyone who's seen even pictures of the real Austin, Texas. (If one needs more proof, let me point out that Mike Judge is from Texas; the only place he would know that would have that particular job would have been in Austin, the "technology capital of Texas.")
I turned them down flat. For one thing, I was in the middle of a complicated and mildly risky real-estate deal that would have been seriously jeopardized if I left St. Louis. But with that kind of money, I could have had a lawyer look after that, and the recruiters reminded me of this on a regular basis. How regular? Two and three times a day, most weekdays. You see, they all had a job that they very desperately needed filled. It was the same job every time. I knew that job. I knew how to do it, I knew I could do it, I knew people who'd had similar jobs. That last part's the catch: I knew too much about the job to fall for their seductive offers. I'm glad I didn't, too. They were offering me "Peter Gibbons' job," and I knew long before the movie Office Space came out just how awful that job is.
Peter Gibbons, the character played by Ron Livingston in Office Space, was a software quality analyst for a consulting firm in Austin, Texas, that was heavily involved in Y2K conversions. And, just as the recruiter for the actual company told me, their original client list had been largely in the banking and savings & loan business, and through referrals from past clients they were making big, big money doing Y2K conversions for banks and S&Ls.
What is a software quality analyst? Only the worst job in North America. I'd rather work fast food. You see, it's like this. Systems analysts and business managers design software. The programmer teams write it and (to an extent) debug it. The resulting product consists of at least a hundred, and often as many as several thousand, pages of what looks like especially cryptic modern poetry. The job of the SQA department is to read, by hand, all thousand of those pages, every single line of it. In most places, they don't even let you read it on screen; for obscure industry reasons, it must be read and marked up on paper printout. The Software Quality Analyst is not looking for bugs in the software. He is not verifying whether or not it will work. He is verifying that it is formatted according to company guidelines. The variable names must follow the company's data dictionary standards for how to name variables. The lines of code must be indented to standard company indentation rules. The spaces around the various operators must be there, or not be there, even though the spacing has no effect, according to the company's standard for when there should be spaces and when there shouldn't be. In computer programs, "comments" are notes in more-or-less plain English that are embedded in the code, saved along with it, to provide helpful hints to the next programmer to work on this program as to what was done, and how, and why. They don't have an effect on the way the program runs. The software quality analyst's job is not to make sure that those comments are correct, only to make sure that there are comments everywhere that the company standard says that there must be comments and that they are formatted the way they're supposed to be. It is, as I say, quite possibly the worst job in North America, and I say that even after having read this year's list of the worst jobs in science. Because they must have at least some understanding of what the code says and what properly formatted code looks like, it must be done by someone with a bachelor's degree in computer science. But the job amounts to proofreading gibberish. It has always paid about 50% more than any job in computer science that has comparable education and experience requirements ... and still, hardly anybody lasts a whole year in it.
And the worst part of this was that they were calling me about this during the exact time that the movie Office Space was set ... in 1999! When I asked those recruiters what the company was going to have me be doing after December 31st, they said, to a man, "We're a successful and growing consulting firm, we'll have plenty of work." They were lying. They knew it. They hoped I didn't know it, but I'm not that dumb. I knew that as each and every one of those Y2K projects was completed, most of each project team was going to be laid off. The "lucky" few would be transferred to projects that were running late (in blatant violation of Brooks' Law: "Adding personnel to a late software project makes it later.") But by the beginning of January, every single person at every single one of those firms who'd been working on Y2K conversion was going to be unemployed. And that is why everybody in Office Space is obsessed about when the layoffs are going to begin, and in what order.
You thought this was a generic office? Why did you think that? You have to have noticed, you must have noticed if you ever went anywhere near a restaurant in 1999, that the character of Joanna (Jennifer Aniston) was working at TGI Friday's? That wasn't a generic "experience marketing" bar and grill, that was a particular one: exact same uniforms (with the exact same obsession with buttons and gewgaws and other "flair" that was supposed to conceal the fact that your waitperson was exhausted from a long week of hard work and convince you that they were having fun), decor only modified enough to make it possible to get film cameras in and around the characters conveniently -- for crying out loud, same red and white striped awnings! So if you noticed that the restaurant business in the movie wasn't just any generic chain restaurant but one particular one, did it occur to you to wonder if the office job in question might not be just any generic office job? Well, it wasn't. It was, in fact, one particular office job at one particular firm, and one I count myself very, very lucky to have not been caught in.
Postscript, added later: A TPS Report, by the way, is almost certainly a Time and Productivity System report. All consulting firm employees, even the salaried ones who technically don't have to use a time card, have to report what project each 15 minutes of their day should be reported to. Back in the early 1980s when Project Management software first became available, someone came up with the idea of modifying those forms so that people would also report what phase of each project each 15 minutes was spent on; that way the software could track how many man-hours had been spent on that phase and could thereby attempt to predict how close to being done that phase of the project was by comparing reported man-hours so far to forecasted man-hours until completion. Then as various productivity improvement fads swept through the system, most notably Total Quality Management, the word "productivity" got hung on everything, especially every report. Management cares a lot about TPS Reports because they determine how the client gets billed for a project in progress. Bottom level managers like Bill Lundburg care a great deal about even finicky little details like using the right updated version of the cover sheet for the TPS Report because having them all be identical makes it quicker for him to copy the cover sheet details into his own email or TPS data entry screen so that he doesn't have to actually read your report to make his report to upper management. Does this mean that real jerks like Bill Lundburg don't also take advantage of minor screwups to reassert their authority over people they feel inferior to, say, people with more up-to-date degrees, by making them feel stupid? Oh, no, you betcha that they do that.
And for those of you who've never used any of the HP LaserJet printers that an LCD display in addition to warning lights, "PC LOD LTR" means that the Paper Cartridge is either empty, or loaded with legal-size paper, so for this print job to go through you need to LOaD LeTteR sized paper.Current Mood: tired |
| Administration Trial Balloon: Death Squads Redux | Jan. 13th, 2005 @ 05:27 am |
|---|
|
When I first saw in the Rude Pundit's blog that the Bush administration is gearing up to create another set of death squads, my reaction was not too far off from the Rude Pundit's own reaction, allowing for his tendency to dramatic exaggeration. I was not only horrified, but shocked. That policy was such a total failure the last dozen or so times that it was tried, that it blows my mind that the idea still has any currency anywhere. Never mind that it's as immoral as anything the Third Reich or Stalin ever came up with, it doesn't work. And my first reaction was, Dear Ghod, this is what it's like to have the most "uncurious" President in American history. The man doesn't know any history, doesn't want to know it. So whenever he comes up with some obvious idea, he doesn't know if it's been tried before and failed, so he doesn't have any reason not to try it again.
But I'm glad I got distracted from writing about it for a while, because it gave me time to realize that no, that's not what's going on at all. First of all, it's incredibly unlikely that he doesn't know, because so much of that history affected him personally, and I don't care what quantity of cocaine and alcohol he's gone through in his life, he has to remember some of it. He was in the service (more or less) during Vietnam, and going to college when Operation Phoenix was in the news and one of the burning issues on campus. Odds are he doesn't remember much about Operation Phoenix, but he has to have at least heard of it and must remember that a lot of people hated it; he must also remember that despite (or because of) Operation Phoenix, Vietnam fell anyway. It's possible that he doesn't know that the Shah's Iranian death squads were what lead to his downfall, but given that that was a Democratic Party screwup, surely somebody most have told him. But here's the kicker, whether George W. Bush remembers it or not, the huge failure and horrible blowback of the American-backed death squads in Latin America happened during an administration that included Cheney and Rumsfeld, and I guarantee to you that they remember it. What's more, when this policy blew up in the Reagan/Bush administration's face in the late 1980s, Bush's dad was one of the people that Congressional Democrats were gunning for. Bush the Younger may not have personally cared, but I guarantee you that his mother made him pay at least some attention to that part!
A quick overview of the subject of pro-American death squads, for those of you who never paid much attention to the subject: ( Read more... )
This strategy was tried in Vietnam; it has a lot to do with why we lost. This strategy was tried in Iran, and was the direct cause of why we lost. This strategy was tried, is still being tried, almost everywhere from Guatemala to Columbia, and it has made the US look really, really evil. But on the other hand, it occurred to me today, it may well look to Rumsfeld and Cheney like in Latin America, it worked. After all, the death squads have been able to prevent a Marxist takeover in almost every country where they are being used. What's more, where they weren't tried in time, in Nicaragua, anti-Marxist death squads are credited by most American Republicans as having successfully defeated the Marxist-lead coup d'etat that put the Sandanista Party in power there. So for all that the policy killed hundreds of thousands in Vietnam and many hundreds of thousands in Latin America, and for all that nearly all of the dead were civilians, this administration may actually consider that policy to have been a success.
Pro-American death squads, in our name, raped and tortured nuns and priests to death because it was believed that their "liberation theology" was encouraging the Marxists. Pro-American death squads, in our name, burned down schools with the children and teachers barricaded inside, so that the Marxists wouldn't get credit for providing education. Pro-American death squads, in our name, murdered doctors and nurses, and blew up clinics and water treatment and sewage handling facilities, if they suspected that they had been paid for with Moscow's rubles, again so that the Marxists wouldn't get credit. And if they suspected the residents of a village of disapproving of the fact that their doctors, nurses, teachers, children, and sanitation workers had been murdered, then sometimes whole villages were murdered in our name for being Marxist sympathizers. When all of this came out in Congressional hearings over money illegally sent to the Contras in Nicaragua, some Democrat (Kennedy?) asked some White House official (Rumsfeld? I forget) how this was any different from terrorism? The reply was, "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter."
So now the US military is facing a 300,000 or more combatant entrenched insurgency in Iraq, one that assassinates collaborators and occupation troops with impunity from one end of the country to the other, and just as in Vietnam the killers effortlessly slip back into a civilian population that will not turn them in to the collaborationist government or to the US occupation troops. And now Rumsfeld is floating a trial balloon, leaking to the media to see if the American public will sit still for the idea of taking Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, and Islamist Shiite militias, who might hate the Iraqi resistance for their own personal reasons, bringing them back to the School for the Assassins, equipping them with fully automatic assault rifles and explosives and body armor, and turning them loose on Iraq's Sunni population, and if they rob and kill a few tens of thousands or a hundred thousand innocent Sunnis but manage to contain or even kill the leaders of the Iraqi resistance, well, then, we win, right? And since it won't be US troops doing the killing, or even the collaborationist government, we can't be blamed for it, right?
News Flash: It's not "our freedoms" that they hate. It's stuff like this. The Newsweek article says that nothing has been done yet, that the idea is only being debated. There's an update from 3 days after the article in which Rumsfeld seems to be backing away from the idea, in which case the punditocracy by raising outrage will have done their job. But God, it's a frightening thought to think that people at the top of the US government might actually think that the death squad policies of Vietnam, Iran, and Central America were a good idea, a success, something that should be tried again, that they might think that the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dead poor brown people were actually a good thing.Current Mood: depressed Current Music: Vegas Vics Tiki Lounge - Exotica and Polynesian Tiki Lounge Tracks -- Mai Tai Music for the Jet Set |
| | Jan. 12th, 2005 @ 01:09 am |
|---|
|
There are bad days and there are worse days. This is a worse day. I've slept roughly 20 of the last 24 hours, nearly solid random nightmares (the only one I remember based roughly on Philip Jose Farmer's Flesh) but still more comforting than being awake. I woke up to use the bathroom, grab a small snack, and see if I could stand to write something before going back to bed. Nope. So I'm going back to bed. Sorry. Hopefully regular updates will resume tomorrow.Current Mood: depressed & scared |
| I'm Twitching | Jan. 11th, 2005 @ 02:35 am |
|---|
|
 Umm. I've just spent probably half an hour staring at something that scares the living daylights out of me. I blame a story in tonight's BoingBoing.net. Frankly, this scares me even more than the late breaking news coverage that the US is encouraging the formation of another generation of death squads overseas ... but that'll wait for tomorrow, apparently. Because the horror of this other story is so much creepier to me, because this one resonates personally. Meet ... The Cubes.™
They can't advertise it for what it really is, for obvious licensing reasons, but The Cubes is recognizably a collectible Fisher-Price playset based on Office Space. OK, the heads are box-shaped instead of round, and the articulation's a little better than Fisher-Price bothers with on their kids toys, but anybody dispute the playset similarities? Now consider this. The manufacturer's website for The Cubes™ gives away three PDFs full of additional motivational posters, screenshots for the desktop computers, sales graphs, desk calendars, office posters (including spot-on miniature recreations of several legally mandatory workplace posters), and various office paperwork ... including a TPS report. And the desktop icons page includes the famous red stapler (which, for those of you who didn't know, is now actually offered by Swingline). On the other hand, oddly enough, it doesn't seem to come with an HP LaserJet printer/fax machine. Maybe they're saving that for another expansion set. Or maybe the Cubes™ have already destroyed theirs for saying "PC LOD LTR" too many times.
Supposedly they're available in stores as well, but Archie McPhee sells them online for the surprisingly reasonable price of $12.95 per set. Four of the sets come with one employee and their cube; the other set includes no cube, just additional accessories and four more employees. So you could put together the whole collectible set (so far) for $65 plus shipping. But you'd only have four cubicles. The full horror of this is lost unless you create a whole tabletop cubicle maze. The web site includes graphics (including one introductory flash animation) that show whole cubicle farms of sixty or so cubicles, an absurd and ridiculous expense. But it's vaguely mesmerizing to look down onto ... roughly the way a small bird is mesmerized by a snake. As in, my eyes are still wide with horror.
Of course, the old roleplaying gamer in me wants to come up with any imaginable excuse to write rules for these and use them to run some modern horror roleplaying game. All I'd have to do is find a source for 2-3/4" monster figurines ... *shudder.* And to think that my old regular crowd of gamers were afraid to let me run a Wraith: The Oblivion campaign. "Wait'll they get a load of me now," bwa hah hah. No, I can't do it. Never mind the money, this is too creepy even for me to do. Hmm. I suppose it bodes ill for my future employability that I can take the whole Cthulhu/Azathoth mythos, The King in Yellow, and The Great God Pan totally in stride, confront detailed reports from the Rwandan genocides with only mild sadness, and find your average horror movie to be as boring as watching paint dry, but this scares the living crap out of me? Suddenly I feel very much like an Addams.Current Mood:  creeped out |
| Subculture Engineering: A Few Clarifications | Jan. 10th, 2005 @ 02:30 am |
|---|
|
If I ever edit that series for publication, I see that there are a few points that need to be clarified at the beginning, something I didn't make clear enough or state strongly enough.
The three subgroups I'm talking about are not personality types. When nancylebov compared it to the Myers-Briggs personality types (not a metaphor I'm especially fluent in, by the way), she asked where was the fourth personality type? I take it from her remarks that the fourth type, whatever it was, is all about rules and bureaucracy and order or whatever. My first thought was, "Not having anything to do with volunteer organizations or subcultures, I wager." There's a marvelous anecdote at the beginning of P.J. O'Rourke's best book, Parliament of Whores, where after driving past some big demonstration in the US capitol he asks his local friend and driver why it is that when liberals have a demonstration, there are thousands of them, and they have all of these huge creative puppets and all of these big pre-printed vinyl banners and whatever, but when conservatives hold a demonstration, all they can scrape up are a couple of bedraggled looking families with homemade cardboard signs? His friend answered, "We've got jobs."
But the real problem with that analysis (other than that it's not true) is that it misses the point, and it's a mark of how cloudy my explanation was that even I could be side-tracked from the real point. I'm not saying that you are either an Authenticity Cop or else you are a Dream Nazi or else you are a Fun Maven. What those terms are about are roles and reputations. Within any given group or subculture you're in at any given time, if you make any impression on those around you at all, you're likely to be pigeon-holed as an Authenticity Cop, as a Dream Nazi, or as a Fun Maven. But unless you only join one group or subculture in your entire life, and unless you never change or grow as a person, over the course of your life you're likely at one time or another to be all three of them. I certainly know that I have.
Everybody enjoys feeling like what they're doing is important, and going to make a difference in the world, not just Dream Nazis. What makes you a Dream Nazi is that for you, that's the most important reason why you're in this particular group, and everything else comes after that. What turns you into a raging monster Dream Nazi is if you decide that the group's importance and the difference it could make in the world are the only legitimate reasons to be there, and that being there for any other reason makes you a bad person.
Similarly, everybody enjoys knowing bits of jargon, trivia and/or obscure techniques that not everybody else knows, it's not just the Authenticity Police that enjoy such things. Anybody who's paid even casual attention to memetics knows that there's a powerful little thrill that comes from being the first one to tell someone something that makes them happy or impresses them; that's why your average new (or even "new") joke travels from its origin to every person on the planet in under 9 days. What's likely to give you a reputation for being an Authenticity Cop is if you become an unstoppable fountain of such trivia, jargon, and technique, if you're the one who's constantly lecturing and teaching others. And as you should be able to guess by analogy, what makes you a raging monster Authenticity Cop is when you decide that people who are in the group for any reason other than to learn these things is just plain stupid and beneath you.
And yes, just as in the other two examples, everybody enjoys hanging around with their friends and having a good time, not just the Fun Mavens. What's likely to get you labeled as "one of those" Fun Mavens, though, is if you're seen as consistently passing up opportunities to attend the group's spiritual, propaganda, or educational functions to just have some beers and some laughs. What makes even raging monster Fun Mavens different from the cruel or demeaning or otherwise out of control people in the other two roles, though, is that only very seldom do you find raging monster Fun Mavens who look down on the Dream Nazis or the Authenticity Police for their interests. No, at least here in Puritan America, even the raging monster Fun Mavens feel guilty because their whole culture, both within and without the group, holds the idea of "just" having fun in total contempt, and by now all but the most self-aggrandizing and insensitive of Fun Mavens has thoroughly internalized their oppressor, to borrow a relevant piece of feminist jargon. No, the offending behavior of the raging monster Fun Maven isn't terribly likely to be cruel or destructive towards others, but towards themselves or towards other Fun Mavens.
commonreader, who rather obviously doesn't like my analysis here (and, I suspect, rather disapproves of fun mavens in general), pointed out that by contrast with the beer, mead, or weed of the fun mavens, "primary spiritual experience ... very very rarely gets anyone in trouble with the law or creates scandal." I respectfully disagree. On the contrary, it is my experience that primary spiritual experience, or for that matter intense scholarly pursuit of knowledge and technique, run the very serious risk of teaching you to devalue the common experience of ordinary people and to only value members of and things from the group. That way lies madness, at best. At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, I'm sure that the famous Nuremberg Rallies were a powerful primary spiritual experience; nonetheless, many millions of people were terribly harmed thereby. I also have no particular doubt in my mind that Jonestown, Guyana was a place with many powerful primary spiritual experiences. Primary spiritual experience, intense solitary scholarship, and pursuit of pleasure are all things that can mess up your life. But that doesn't mean that you should avoid them. At most, it means that they should come with warning labels.
My 8th grade shop teacher, like most shop teachers, started the class with a series of safety lectures. And, as I suspect that most shop teachers do, he included plenty of grisly cautionary tales from his own experience. I recall three of them especially clearly. One student, who was holding something incorrectly while using a screwdriver, slipped and put the blade of the screwdriver straight through his palm. Another student had been in a hurry, rather than wait in line used a grinding wheel that had been placed off limits because the safety shield was broken and missing, and ended up embedding a small metal assembly into their forehead. The third story that sticks with me was about a superintendent of schools who leaned over a lathe, bumped the on button by accident, and nearly suffocated when his tie got caught in the lathe. Now, the point of these stories was not, "screwdrivers, grinding wheels, and lathes are all dangerous so we're not going to let people use them any more." No, I suspect that the real point of those stories was not only "these things can hurt," but also "and if they do, we're going to make fun of you behind your back for years" -- a very powerful de-motivator, that.
Nearly everybody uses alcohol in the pursuit of a good time at some time or other in their lives, certainly a large enough percentage to make up a reliable statistical universe. Of all of those people, maybe 6% screw up their lives by abusing alcohol. Maybe instead of blaming the alcohol, or may the god forbid simply blaming and attempting to place off-limits all attempts to have a good time, we should blame the 6% who ignored basic safety precautions and used the alcohol wrong? Or if they weren't warned how not to use alcohol for risk of hurting yourself, maybe blame the parents and the society that failed to socialize them to properly use alcohol? Personally, I don't think we need fewer drunks; I think we need better ones than the ones we've got.Current Mood: groggy |
| | Jan. 10th, 2005 @ 01:55 am |
|---|
|
Happy birthday, the_geoffrey! |
| Subculture Engineering (part 3 of 3): Fun Mavens | Jan. 9th, 2005 @ 05:58 am |
|---|
|
 For the last two days, I've been talking about three subgroups that I insist make up the membership of every even semi-successful movement, club, lifestyle, subculture, or other organization that depends heavily on unpaid volunteers to provide the membership and the money. I've spent a lot of time drifting between subcultures, straddling the gaps between many of them, and researching the ones I wasn't interested in joining. What can I say? Subcultures interest me, they always have. Then a couple of years ago I read Robert Putnam's 2001 best-seller Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community and I felt less like I was wasting my time studying these things.
Any way, I got the names of the three subgroups from a nationwide medieval re-enactment club educational charity called the Society for Creative Anachronism -- but in my experience, if a group or movement or subculture has what it takes to make an impression on the world or even just on the city it lives in, then it's because it has these same three groups, which people in the SCA informally call the Dream Nazis, the Authenticity Police, and the Fun Mavens.
What is a Fun Maven? Of the three groups, the fun mavens are the easiest to incorrectly think that you understand. You can quickly sum up what a fun maven is by saying that they're the people who are "only there to have a good time." But to paraphrase Andre Gide, it is dangerous to understand things too quickly. Or to make it personal, I'm never in any greater danger than the first time that I think I know what I'm doing. There's a reason that your parent(s) warned you over and over again not to jump to conclusions. It's not an accident that a movie with that is its whole theme was one of the best-selling movies of 2001.
Dream nazis and authenticity police look down on the fun mavens, and the raging monster dream nazis and authenticity police hate them, for the "same" reason, for all that they mean different things when they say it. "They're not serious." The dream nazi means that they don't disdain the pleasures of the present for the hypothetical pleasures of a future after the organization has won its struggle. The authenticity cop means that they aren't studious enough. Still, the effect is the same: fun mavens are the thinly tolerated pariahs in any organization. But the fastest cure to misunderstanding the fun mavens is to ask yourself what will be, in hindsight, an obvious question, but for most of you only in hindsight: "If they're just looking to have a good time, why did they pick this group to do it in?" If they just want to get drunk, they can buy or bum liquor almost anywhere. If they just want to get the attention of the opposite sex, there are singles bars in every town, and almost as many strip clubs and prostitutes for the desperate. You think it's because the liquor and sex may be cheaper in your movement? Dismiss the thought. I've never seen a subculture where the people who were "just" looking for a good time could find one without putting in more investment of money and effort than it would have taken them to procure those things on the open market.
The fact of the matter is that if a fun maven didn't buy into the organization's dream, and if they weren't at least passingly interested in the organization's unique or specialized knowledge, they'd do their carousing elsewhere. It's just that, in general, your average fun maven just isn't cut out to be a dream nazi or an authenticity cop. They lack the dream nazi's conviction, and they lack the authenticity cop's ability to work hard alone. You see, that word "alone," that's a very negative concept for your typical fun maven, and the key to understanding them. What your average fun maven is really looking for, what is to them the only "fun" thing to do, is to do things together with like-minded people.
 The Apprenticeship of a Fun Maven: It almost always starts with beer. Sometimes there's mead, and sometimes there's weed, but nearly always there's beer. A young man or woman finds a group that they somehow identify with, where they feel like the people there are "people like me," and sits down with a bunch of people who're splitting a case or a half-keg of beer. They have some drinks, they flirt with members of the preferred sex, they laugh at the group's jokes, and they try to drunkenly join in on the chorus of the group's silly songs, all of which the other fun mavens know by heart. They have a great time. They come back and do it again, and after they've done it a couple of times, then they're a familiar face to the other fun mavens. Phone numbers and/or email addresses are swapped, and now the silly beer drinking flirt is on the phone list of the group's more influential fun maven(s).
So pretty soon, the young man or woman receives a phone call, and it goes like this: hey, the group needs some physical chore done. A bunch of us are getting together to do it. It'll only take a couple of hours, you don't have to get all dressed up, and afterwards we're going to all have a bunch of beers. Come on, it'll be fun! Maybe they'll try to cheat and show up late, but if they do, they find themselves invited to fewer and fewer of the bashes. No, the even halfway promising ones let themselves be bribed or chivvied into showing up with the rest of their drinking buddies. They spend a couple of hours, maybe a dozen hours, sweating in the hot sun (or more seldom, shivering in the snow) with hand tools, like the "shovels and rakes and implements of destruction" of famous lore. Maybe all they do is carry things back and forth from somebody's pickup truck, or up and down ladders for their older drinking buddies who might be handier with tools. Heck, sometimes it's just a matter of getting a whole bunch of people to collate papers and stuff envelopes. Maybe some of 'em have a beer or two while they're working, maybe they don't, but either way people are laughing and joking and making enthusiastic light-hearted (but occasionally mean-sounding) fun of each other.
Hours later, a consensus informally emerges that enough has gotten done for today, or at least all that's going to get done. So everybody drifts over to the only spot of shade, or to an improvised camp fire or trash barrel fire, or onto a nearby porch. A case or two of beer gets dragged over, and an amazingly high percentage of the time some kind of hibachi or cooking grill miraculously shows up and somebody "just happens" to have a bunch of smoked sausages, bratwursts, or burger patties in a cooler in the back of their pickup truck. And once again, maybe there's weed and maybe there's mead, and what do you know, to the disgust (veiled or otherwise) of the non-fun-mavens it's just like any other time the fun mavens get together, a bunch of people sitting around drunk off their behinds laughing and flirting and grab-assing, and maybe a little bit of the terrifying fun you'd halfway fear to expect from drunks with blow torches and/or chainsaws.
But the new guy or gal in the middle of this is having a minor epiphany while looking for a place to pee. You know what? they think, this is a whole lot more fun when we're all sweaty and dirty from working our asses off together. So now when they get together and drink and flirt and sing loud silly songs, the new guy or gal is one of the ones who remembers to ask, "So when is the next work party?" After they've had a certain amount of this kind of fun, they can't get enough of it. Pretty soon they're the one who knows of some job the group needs done and is calling all their drinking buddies and telling them, "Hey, let's go to so-and-so and all do such-and-such this weekend. Come on, I'll bring some beer, and it'll be fun!" After they've done this a couple of times, then even the non-fun-mavens in the group know who they are. Depending on the health of the group, they're either respected for the work they've done or hated for their more notorious misbehavior, but the one thing they can count on is that everybody in the group knows that that young man or woman is one of "those" notorious big-time fun mavens.
What Happens to an Organization without Fun Mavens? The stuffiest group you've ever heard of has its fun mavens. Even your local Republican Party Township Club has a bunch of guys and a handful of gals, probably spunky retirees (and combat veterans and widows and widowers), who are way too fond of their beer and who use volunteer opportunities at the township club as an excuse to get together for a couple of short ones; you should see these people tear the place up at statewide and national political conventions. Even in your Baptist churches, the most anti-fun group you'd think to find, there are guys who show up to do all the hard work with hand tools, and Pastor J. Random Biblethumper of the Nth Baptist Church of Any-Old-Place knows to look the other way and not make a big deal of it if a bunch of them are splitting a case of beer or two after resurfacing the church parking lot. He'd better know. If he doesn't know, and makes a big deal out of it, then two years from now he's going to be paying people to resurface that parking lot, because the volunteers drifted off to join other churches that didn't give them a hard time for doing all the work.
One of the most common ways that clubs or organizations die is that some group of Raging Monster Fun Mavens creates such a horrible public scandal that the dream nazis and the authenticity police won't stand for it any more. As far as the dream nazis are concerned, if you have to be bribed with intoxicants and the possibility of sleazy sex to work for the cause, then who needs you? As far as the authenticity cops are concerned, if you can't be bothered to spend time alone researching the interesting parts of the group's areas of study because you'd rather be out drinking and screwing, then you're no good and who needs you? And after a couple of nasty scandals, rather than blame and shame the few bad apples, the dream nazis and the authenticity police all too often join forces to chase out all of the fun mavens. From now on, to be part of the group, you must be committed and serious. They think that it'll be a smaller group, but a better group, and so more will get done.
But then they find out that getting dream nazis to do real work, and getting authenticity police to work together in groups (especially at hard physical labor) is nearly impossible. They also find out how few dream nazis and authenticity police they have. That last part becomes especially true if they practice a particularly nasty form of guilt by association, where if you've ever been seen drinking and having fun with the fun mavens then no matter how much more fiercely you identify with the dream and/or no matter how meticulous your research and study, you're a fun maven by association and so you have to go when the rest of them go. And if the harshest form of this occurs, if the authenticity police and dream nazis decide to slam down the shutters and not let anybody in who's suspected of maybe possibly having the potential to be a fun maven ... well, then they might as well close the bank account and sell the assets while they're at it. Why? Because the membership will only go down from there. People move. People die. People lose interest. If the group is to thrive, those people must be replaced. But who joins a group if it's widely known to be no fun?
"No fun" is just as big a turn-off for potential members as "boring and uninspiring" is, as much as "painfully stupid" is. And that's the number one reason why a thriving volunteer group, organization, movement, or subculture must have all three groups.
What Happens to an Organization of Only Fun Mavens? It barely exists. If you've got enough money to throw at the problem, you can create the illusion of such a group for a while by throwing out sufficiently large quantities of free booze, drugs, and potential for sex. But if the people there don't perceive that the others there are enough "people who are like me," then they won't really be comfortable enough to enjoy the booze, drugs, and/or potential cheap sex. They'll go somewhere more fun, even if it involves more commitment or their own money. And unsurprisingly, when they find some place that's more fun, they'll find that the more fun place has dream nazis and authenticity police.
Where Should You Keep Your Fun Mavens? Out of sight, for the most part. When they do come to non-fun-maven gatherings of the group, don't be surprised if they drift to the back of the room. Let them. There are probably enough humorless people in the organization who are offended by them that they don't want to be staring at the back of the fun mavens' heads, anyway. Trust me, even from the back of the room, even if looks to you like they're not paying any attention, the first time that a question of hard work comes up, some fun maven will speak up and offer to get a group together to cover it.
Raging Monster Fun Mavens: There are fun mavens that give the rest of the group a bad name. Raging monster fun mavens not only make the other fun mavens look bad by association, they have the potential to make the whole group look bad. This can create some awful dilemmas, because sometimes the very most obnoxious, dangerous, unhealthy, shameful, disgraceful, and disreputable people in the group are also the hardest workers. Worse luck, the other fun mavens often love them, because by being the Official Asshole, the biggest loudest most out of control jerk in the group, they do two things that other fun mavens need and adore. First of all, they give the rest of the fun mavens permission by example to cut loose and act up a little bit themselves. More subtly, they also establish an outer boundary for the fun: have all the fun you want, but don't make a jerk out of yourself and screw up your life the way So-and-so has.
Sometimes, though, there just has to come a time when any group has to ask themselves if certain alcoholics, drug addicts, drama queens, nymphomaniacs, sex fiends, or other people with sufficiently self-destructive habits are costing the group more than they're benefiting it. And unfortunately, there is almost never any way to handle this that doesn't at least half-wreck the group. The absolute best that they can hope for is that there are dream nazis and/or authenticity police, or even maybe more reasonable and responsible fun mavens, whose opinions the raging monster fun maven respects. If so, then those people might get the desired results by performing a quiet, off-screen, personal intervention: "Man, you have got to knock off this and this and this particular behavior, you're ruining things for everybody." And if the people doing the intervention are human saints, living bodhisattvas, wholly enlightened beings, then maybe that'll be all that it takes. Good luck. Hardly any group is that lucky, although I do think that it's a mark of almost any successful group or subculture or whatever that it has a certain number of enlightened beings in it.
But no, what's more likely is that nothing short of throwing the offending raging monster fun mavens out is gong to solve the problem. After all, if they had enough self control to stop doing whatever it is that's ruining everybody else's fun, they probably wouldn't be doing it in the first place. And if it's handled publicly, and may the gods forbid if it's made to be a public humiliation, don't be at all surprised if half to 90% of your fun mavens quit in protest. Even if they don't make a big public scene out of their displeasure, don't be surprised if an uncomfortably large number of them suddenly find that when they're called for work parties, it just doesn't seem as much fun to them any more, and they find it easier and easier to make excuses to be elsewhere. Then all you can hope to do is to recruit more fun mavens, and hope that enough of a corps of hard workers exists to teach the new people the old silly songs. Because if you decide not to recruit any more fun mavens after that, or if you fail to recruit and train more of them, you're screwed, and once again, just as in the last two failure modes, your club or organization or movement or whatever is doomed to crawl back into the coffee houses and basements it previously outgrew.Current Mood:  lethargic Current Music: Vegas Vics Tiki Lounge - Exotica and Polynesian Tiki Lounge Tracks -- Mai Tai Music for the Jet Set |
| Subculture Engineering (part 2 of 3): Authenticity Police | Jan. 8th, 2005 @ 06:47 am |
|---|
|
Just as every successful volunteer organization or subculture has Dream Nazis (which I talked about yesterday) and Fun Mavens (which I'm going to talk about tomorrow, Lord willing and the crick don't rise), every successful volunteer organization seems to require Authenticity Police.
What is an Authenticity Cop? An authenticity cop is an amateur scholar. Once in a rare while, they're also a professional scholar, but you don't get the label of authenticity cop unless you drag it into your personal life and your relationships with others as well. No, far more often the authenticity cop is an amateur scholar, a well read dilettante (for variable definitions of "well read"). An authenticity cop gets drawn into a culture or a subculture most often because they, too, agree with the dream nazi that there was something better, or at least interesting, about some time in the distant past. They may even agree with the dream nazi that it might be interesting to bring some of that past into the future.
But what separates a dream nazi from an authenticity cop?- Values: To the dream nazi, a message or an artwork or a song or a costume or whatever is only valuable if it is inspiring. To an authenticity cop, these things are only valuable if they're correct.
- Standards: To a dream nazi, a statement is "true" if it makes that bump on the back of their head that tells them when something is important tingle, that is to say if it "feels right," and if it furthers what the group is trying to do. To an authenticity cop, a statement is "true" if you can footnote it with authoritative sources.
- Preferences: Dream nazis love emotional rhetoric. Authenticity police love detailed analysis.
- Sources: To a dream nazi, the best sources are the ones that come from within the group, because you know that they're not working at cross-purposes to try to sabotage the dream. To an authenticity cop, the best sources are the ones that come from or are used by neutral academic scholars, because they're the ones that will hold up under scrutiny.
- Hopes: A dream nazi wants the audience to be inspired, and to agree with everything they say. An authenticity cop wants the audience to be educated, and to make up their own minds ... and then agree with everything the authenticity cop says, because after all, the facts are on their side!
- Fears: An authenticity cop is afraid of looking stupid. A dream nazi is afraid of looking boring.
What Happens to an Organization without Authenticity Police? An organization or movement that drives out its authenticity police can thrive for a while, but not for long. Sooner or later, without the authenticity police and their painstaking fact-checking (see apprenticeship, below), the dream nazis will go out in public and say something so stupid as to make the whole movement a mockery in the the public eye. A few such howlers and even the group's own fun mavens start to think that the dream nazis are jokes, and that the whole dream is a joke, and go looking for a form of fun that isn't so stupid looking. Within at most a generation after that, the organization or movement collapses into irrelevance; for all practical purposes it collapses back into the coffee houses and/or parents' basements that it crawled out of (see "only dream nazis," yesterday).
What Happens to an Organization of Only Authenticity Police? Organizations of authenticity police that relentlessly push out the dream nazis and the fun mavens have a much easier time getting real intellectual work done, they produce some fine scholarship ... that nobody will ever read and few people will ever hear of. Being amateurs and dilettantes, professional scholars won't even look at their work. And without dream nazis to make it seem relevant, and fun mavens to make it look fun, such a group may grow or shrink, but it will never have the slightest effect on either scholarship or on society.
The Apprenticeship of an Authenticity Cop: Take a young man or woman who spends too much time with their nose in books, even if they're the trashiest books. Rope them in with (fun maven) silly songs and (dream nazi) stirring songs. When they edge away because such things make them a little uncomfortable, have an established authenticity cop walk up beside them and comment knowledgeably about some historical or scientific fact that's unusually right (or even annoyingly wrong) about the last song, or with the singer's costume, or some other little nitpick. While they nibble on appetizers, feed their mind little appetizers of factual trivia that only members of this group care about. If they look interested, they may be potential authenticity police ... or they may just be pretending to be polite until they find out where the tap for the beer keg is, or until it's their turn to sing, or whatever.
But if they ask one of the magic questions .... Wait, you ask, what are the magic questions? "Who says so? Where did you hear that? How do you know? What makes you right and (some popular book) wrong?" If they ask the right questions, then they probably have real potential as an authenticity cop. So now it's time to take them to the next level. Drag them along to a good used bookstore, or better yet a good university research library, or best of all a good history museum with at least one actual historical artifact that's relevant to the group. And while they're looking bored (because they will be, probably, most people are when they don't realize what they're looking at), explain to them the difference between primary, secondary, and tertiary sources. If their eyes light up with a fiery need to voraciously pursue primary source material, and to only grudgingly accept skeptically peer reviewed secondary sources, then sign them up ... you've created an authenticity cop.
"If this young man expresses himself in terms too deep for me,
Why, what a very singularly deep young man this deep young man must be!"
---W.S.Gilbert, from the opera "Patience" |
And if one of these days, after much perusal of primary source material and thoughtful interpretation of that material from the viewpoint of the group's vision, that young authenticity cop attends a scholarly public lecture or writes a scholarly book review on the Internet, and outside experts on the subject are suddenly brought up short and say things like, "That's a good question, I'll have to look into that more," or better yet, "That's a new interpretation, and you may have something there," or best of all, "That's a fascinating insight. What group are you with? I want to learn more about them" then everyone within the group will have to acknowledge what a masterful authenticity cop that young man or woman has become.
Where Should You Keep Your Authenticity Police? For the most part, you should keep them where they're the happiest: behind a keyboard. Stick them with newsletter chores. Make them responsible for many of the pages on the website. (But never, for the love of god and all that's holy, give them total responsibility for the front page, the opening page of the web site! That responsibility must be shared with at least one dream nazi!) But there's another good place for them. Expert authenticity police get used to working on their own, doing boring research grunt work and endlessly repetitive (but ultimately rewarding) precision work. By coincidence, any active group has several volunteer jobs that must be done alone, at home, by yourself, and many of those jobs require finicky attention to detail, boring repetition, and/or careful precision. Authenticity police don't want those jobs, unless it involves their precious research. But the magic word to get an authenticity cop to take such a volunteer job is, "But you're the only one I can trust to do it right." That word "right" is a Power Word for authenticity cops.
Raging Monster Authenticity Police: What is it that some authenticity cops do that sometimes makes the whole idea of having authenticity police seem like such a bad idea? Ah, that's a little more subtle than the last question, but not by much. A raging monster authenticity cop (sometimes also called an authenticity nazi) is someone who judges not just works, but people by the standards of academic scholarship. Since the fun mavens didn't spend endless hours in the library and online researching their group project and put an authenticity cop in charge of it, then the protection of the group requires that it be pedantically nitpicked endlessly to death, until everybody sees that (while nobody but an authenticity cop would notice) the project is really so stupid that nobody should want to work on it. Raging monster authenticity cops also sabotage the organization by criticizing the dream nazis openly, in front of everybody else, and if successful make the whole vision, the whole point of the group look stupid. In fact, that really does sum it all up: a raging monster authenticity cop destroys his own organization by making everybody except higher-ranking authenticity police feel stupid. And hardly anybody's idea of a productive or fun or important thing to do is to go feel stupid.
(Editorial Note: I went back and added a section to yesterday's post, one on "Raging Monster Dream Nazis." It came up in conversation over dinner tonight that it needed one. Also, while I think I'm going to be able to wrap this up after the next section, people keep raising interesting general objections and I reserve the right to decide that I need a "wrap up" section 4 to address them, in which case I'll come back and edit them "part n of 3" subject headings to "of 4." |
| Subculture Engineering (1 of 3): Dream Nazis | Jan. 7th, 2005 @ 05:56 am |
|---|
|
Twice now I've referred to a set of terms that I was taught long ago in the Society for Creative Anachronism. There, these terms were coined to describe a built-in tension in SCA politics. At any given time, three different kinds of people were struggling for the soul of the organization, to determine what kind of a club the local branch of the Society was going to be. Were we going to be primarily a role-players' club? Were we going to be primarily an educational and research organization? Were we going to primarily be a social group? But what I've come to understand since, and failed to make clear the last two times I used these analogies, is that I've come to understand that this is a useful division of roles for any volunteer-run, or even volunteer-dominated organization, subculture, political party, interest group, church, temple, or any other kind of organization that must recruit, fund-raise from, and labor with volunteers. Whether we're talking about any political party (whether major or fringe, whether at the local, state, or national level); whether we're talking about any church or temple (from the smallest basement coven to the First Whatever-denomination Church of Someplace-or-other), or any subculture (whether science fiction fandom, bikers, or even artistic movements), they all must have at least some Dream Nazis, Authenticity Police, and Fun Mavens. Here, let me prove it to you, one group at a time.
 What is a Dream Nazi? A dream nazi is someone to whom the group is important because of a vision that it represents. A dream nazi thinks not only about what he wants to do with his little group or subculture, but how he's going to change society with it. As Eric Hoffer documented in The True Believer (a book on the short list of perhaps half a dozen or so books that I'm going to keep hyping until everyone has read it), all thriving mass movements really do have these themes in common:- Once, things were better than they are now, a lost Golden Age, a world in which people like us were more successful and better appreciated.
- People who aren't like us changed the world without our permission, to one where most of the people like us aren't so successful or appreciated.
- If we could only change society to our particular dream, our particular vision, then the world would be a better place.
When put that baldly (and non-specifically), it sounds as scary as it sometimes is. I never knew why of the three factions this one got the most insulting name, but when it comes down to it a dream nazi can be a very frightening person. To a hardcore dream nazi, nothing in the current "real world" matters, because the "real world" is crap. To a hardcore dream nazi, no historical or scientific fact matters, if it conflicts with their dream. To a hardcore dream nazi, no individual or individual's needs matter; only the dream matters, because if the dream can be implemented, then life will automatically be better for (the surviving) individuals.
You don't think that it's really that simple, do you? Lets look at a few visions, a few dreams, shall we?- Republican: Once, in the late 1800s, there was a wonderful time when the invisible hand of free market capitalism was turned loose, and hard-nosed capitalists made America a wealthy nation; then, greedy and covetous liberals saddled those capitalists with regulation and robbed them with taxes; someday we'll conquer those liberals and capitalists (like us) will be free to make America wealthy and powerful again.
- Democratic: Once, there was a Progressive Era where a wise nation taxed people only what they could easily afford, and used that money to improve the lives of everyone; then greedy Reaganites conquered the nation through trickery, and set up a society where only the wealthy matter; some day, we'll win back control of society and a Place Called Hope will flourish again.
- Fundamentalist: Once, there was a wonderful Puritan Experiment, and nearly everyone in America worshiped the true God of the Bible and His literal word, and in exchange God made America a free and wealthy and powerful nation; then evil secular humanists threw God out of the public square, and those of us who believe in God's word were no longer able to protect the nation's values; someday our Biblical values will triumph again and God will once again make America a wealthy and powerful nation.
- Feminist: Once, there was a wonderful matriarchal (or at least matrifocal) goddess-worshiping society where both genders were respected, liberty and equality reigned, and all life was sacred in a peaceful world; then the evil patriarchal Kurgans rode down from the steppes and imposed their brutal warrior patriarchy on the world, and all women knuckle under to it in submission or else are punished; some day, our feminist values will triumph and the world will again be a peaceful, free, happy place.
- Science Fiction Fandom: Once, there was a genre of literature that celebrated ideas, and whose heroes were those who solved great problems, and that encouraged people to study the sciences and engineering and other arts that improve the world; but people who didn't appreciate it oppressed it and then greedy media companies watered it down into unscientific pap; if we keep promoting the good science fiction then maybe the people who don't yet "get" it will open their eyes and see that our technocratic literature can make the world a better place.
- Biker: Once, the greatest Americans of all times, the explorers and then the cowboys roamed free across the unfettered, unfenced plains, and after WWII, those great free men traded their horses for beautiful and powerful iron horses, the greatest symbol of freedom ever made by the hand of men; but small-minded cops and weak-minded milksops hate freedom, and oppress the motorcycle clubs; some day, we'll be so big and so organized and we'll have done so many good deeds for them that even they will come to respect our freedom-loving ways, and the world will be a better place.
- Pagan: Once the world worshiped many gods, and so no priest or government could claim that god was on their side and their side alone, and the people lived closer to the earth, and lived more emotionally honest lives, lives that valued all kinds of human beings and all kinds of human ideals; then the evil monotheists of the Inquisition and so on marched across the world with sword and noose and burning stake and imposed their so-called One God on the whole world, and as a result the earth suffers and so does nearly all life; if we can show people that old, better way of living and they throw off the chains of monotheism, the world will be a better place.
- SCA and Renaissance Faire: Once the world was a magical place, where leaders and followers understood that their obligations to each other were mutual, not only from the bottom to the top, and it was a beautiful colorful and romantic world; then drab industrialists and Puritans dyed the world and everything in it machine-gray and imposed wage slavery more brutal than feudalism ever was; if we live up to the Feudal Ideal and show the world our beautiful and romantic way of life, we can brighten the world and make it a better place for everyone.
I could go on, but by now you know how to construct one of these; any more would just be a waste of time. Were you going to object that not everybody in any one of those subcultures agrees with all of that? You'd be right. But every one of those subcultures has a large and visible subgroup who do believe things like that, and it is those people I call the dream nazis.
What Happens to an Organization without Dream Nazis? "Where there is no vision, the people perish." (Prov 29:18a) George H.W. Bush was asked what his vision for America was, and he was scornfully dismissive of "the vision thing." Then he ran for re-election against the man who famously "still believes in a place called Hope" -- and got his butt handed to him on a platter. OK, other things went wrong for him, too, but the fact remains. If you don't have dream nazis, you don't have a mass movement. By inspiring people with a vision, dream nazis tell your potential recruits, donors, and volunteers that what they're doing matters. If you don't have dream nazis out there fervently preaching their vision of how to make a better society, then people find something more interesting to do with their time, effort, and money, something that will matter. You can start a movement without any dream nazis, but if you try it, you'll find that it never gets out of the coffee house you're in, if it even gets out of your basement.
What Happens to an Organization of Only Dream Nazis? Nothing. Ever. Well, that's not true. There's nothing incompatible about being a dream nazi and possessing great artistic, literary, or rhetorical talent. Dream nazis who do have one or more of those talents leave behind some beautiful poetry, some emotionally moving images, some stirring manifestos, some inspiring books. But where you stumble across these powerful manifestos, great artworks, and moving speeches that nothing ever came of, it's because the dream nazis that created them lacked authenticity police and fun mavens to bring that dream into reality.
The Apprenticeship of a Dream Nazi: Take a young man or woman who's vaguely dissatisfied with the world, who wishes the world was a better place. Now gather them in to a supportive environment of dream nazis. Then comes the singing of folk songs. There's nearly always folk singing involved. ("Q: How many folk singers does it take to change a light bulb? A: 4. One to change the light bulb, and three to sing about how much better the old light bulb was.") Often Kipling is involved.
Fill them with haunting visions of a better yesterday and a better tomorrow ... and sing those visions in unison so that the young dreamer can feel what its like to believe that "everyone" agrees with the vision. Keep the tunes so simple that anyone can learn and that even the guitar player can spare enough attention to sing perfectly well. When they've sung enough of these songs in unison, they'll want to sing these songs for other people, as well. If they possess talent, or can be persuaded to think that they possess talent, they'll write poems, manifestos, more folk songs, and nearly-incoherent jargon-filled letters to the editor. They'll stand up in coffeehouses and recite poetry meant to stir hearts, or else declaim their vision to a rapt (or captive) audience in fiery speeches over beer or cappuccino. And oh my oh my, will they write about it online!
All in all, a sufficiently fired-up dream nazi can drive anybody else batshit nuts. But those other people will read the manifestos and the poems and the Internet web pages and still find inspiration in them, and when all the work is done they enjoy listening to the singing, and sometimes singing along, just as much as the dream nazis do. And so if that young man or woman learns to sing sufficiently inspiring songs, to write sufficiently stirring manifestos, and as a result the others have plenty of manpower and money to do their work, then the others will grudgingly admit that that young person certainly did grow up to be a fine, masterful dream nazi.
Where Should You Keep Your Dream Nazis? In front of the public ... and away from the money and the work. Keep your dream nazis creating art and music and literature. Put them in front of crowds, internal and external, to speak. But never put them in a position of supreme authority unless that position of supreme authority is largely symbolic, and there's a well organized and equally powerful and genuinely independent bureaucracy to make sure that the work gets done, and to moderate and calm down those who get dangerously enthusiastic about the dreamer's vision.
Raging Monster Dream Nazis: What is it that some dream nazis do that gives all of them such an awful nickname, that creates so much tension with the rest of the organization? It's quite simple. To a raging monster dream nazi, everything and I mean everything is judged by only one standard, namely, whether or not the person or group behind it is sufficiently loyal to the dream nazis' vision. To a raging monster dream nazi, it doesn't matter how much volunteer effort or external legitimacy an authenticity cop brings to the group; if that authenticity cop isn't entirely motivated by The Dream, then they're no good as a person, no good to the group, and so their work for the group is no good. And raging monster fun nazis hate the fun mavens most of all. Why? Because fun mavens don't hate the present. They don't automatically assume that the past golden age was better or the future golden age will be better. Even if they do think so, they don't seem to a raging monster dream nazi to be as motivated as they should be, because while the dream nazi is "suffering the persecution of those who changed the world against us," the fun mavens are still managing to have a good time. Authenticity Police can sometimes be too serious, but only a buzz-killing raving monster dream nazi can take a fun hobby, a healthy club or church, a lively subculture, or a thriving movement and make it so deathly grim.Current Mood: cold |
| A Question I Never Got Answered | Jan. 6th, 2005 @ 01:33 am |
|---|
|
I spent pretty nearly all of July 1996 at the Brushwood Folklore Center in far western New York state, just east of Erie, Pennsylvania. It's a lovely site, and the creme de la creme, the Club Med, of Pagan festival sites. I could say a lot about Brushwood Folklore Center; I think the world of the place. But the relevant background to this story is that I was living in an RV at the time, making my living selling mind machines and other meditation-related toys at science fiction conventions and Pagan festivals. In July 1996, there were three promising looking week-long events scheduled for Brushwood, so it made the most sense for me to just pay the between-event camping fee and stay in more-or-less one place for the whole four weeks. I arrived in time for the original end of the world party for the Church of the Subgenius, X-Day. I then camped in relative quiet for a bit over a week. After that came Sirius Rising, and then immediately on its heals the Starwood Festival. Now, as I've said before and will say again, Starwood is huge, and marked especially by three things. It is the most intentionally eclectic festival on the Pagan festival circuit, far more inclusive than any so-called eclectic Neopagan event. Secondly, it is insanely over-merchanted, the merchant rows stretch longer and are fuller than your average suburban enclosed shopping mall. And thirdly, contrary to what you'd expect from the preceding two statements, their carefully practiced and choreographed main bonfire ritual is, so far as I can tell, the single most reliable, reproducible, and effective large-group spiritual experience in North America.
So it will not surprise you that the Starwood Festival's attendance is huge, and I mean absolutely freaking huge. Nor will it surprise you that the main vendors take any excuse they can to get there early and set up early. So even though the festival that always rents the event space for the week before Starwood, Sirius Rising, is really a small local Pagan festival, it has all of these hundreds and hundreds of merchants sort of wandering around the edges of it, mostly doing their own thing. And on the Saturday of Sirius Rising, for want of anything better to do, I attended one of the workshops that was scheduled for right before main ritual. (Main ritual was, as it always and without exception has been at every large Neopagan event I've been at since about 1987, deadly and painfully dull, under-prepared and incompetently and unenthusiastically performed.) The workshop I attended before main ritual was set up to be a carefully moderated, carefully managed polite debate over the burning issue in Neopaganism circa 1996 (and since): "Now that Neopaganism is becoming a nationally recognized and multi-generational religion, isn't it time that we made sure that all Neopagan events are family-friendly?" And by "family-friendly," what they meant was no alcohol, no drugs, no exposing of skin that couldn't be exposed on a city street, and no flirting, public displays of affection, or any other hint or suggestion that human beings ever engage in sex.
I won't bore you with the arguments on either side. I will only note that one of my favorite texts from the great philosophers of the 18th century Enlightenment is Denis Diderot's "A Philosophical Conversation." If I may quote my two favorite passages from that amazing piece of work, with the part I think relevant to this discussion underlined by me:La Maréchale: And so you that it is quite a matter of indifference whether we be Christians or pagans; that as pagans we shall be equally good and that as Christians we are no better?
Monsieur Crudéli: Indeed I am convinced of it; excepting that as pagans we should be rather merrier. ... In all inspired books there are two kinds of morality; one general and common to every nation, to every religion, and which is followed pretty nearly; another peculiar to each nation and to each religion, in which men believe, which they preach in their churches, which they teach in their homes, and which they do not follow at all. Anyway, walking from that workshop to the main ritual, I fell into step with a woman who had been the most polite but forceful in arguing for the "pro-family" side. I ran through her points, to make sure that I understood them, before asking my question. What she and most of the "pro-family" (or as their detractors call them, "no-fun") Neopagans want is for Neopaganism to be a responsible, respectable family religion. That means a credentialed seminary program on the campus of a nationally accredited university, with a complete and consistent degree program, leading to a centrally controlled program for ordination and discipline of Neopagan group leaders, and for that discipline program to expel any leader or group that disgraces the religion with any ritual or festival featuring intoxication, nudity, or any hint of sexuality. Religious services should be solemn, serious affairs in which the whole family can participate.
So, having made sure that I understood her position, I asked: supposing that you could wave a magic wand and have all of that, next Wednesday after lunch? What if we did make over Neopaganism exactly to your specifications? How would the resulting religion be different in any way from the Unitarian Universalist Church? She thought about it for a moment, while we walked, and then answered, "Truthfully, it wouldn't be." I lost my temper. Only briefly, and I got it back under control quite quickly and apologized, but her blunt honesty shocked me into angrily shouting at her, "Then if that's what you want, then why in the hell don't you go there?" Once I had apologized for my outburst, again, she had to think about that one for a minute. Then she answered, "Because Neopaganism is my religion, and I shouldn't have to change religions to get what I want." At the time I let it go because I had no answer for that, but the more I think about it, the more bullshit her answer becomes ... because like 95% or more of the people in Neopaganism, she's a convert. She wasn't raised in it. She didn't demand that Christianity or Judaism or whatever her family religion was to change to suit her, so what's the logic in demanding that this one change?
It's the sheer wasteful duplication of it that annoys me as much as anything. There already is a perfectly good Unitarian Universalist Church. They're every bit as eclectic as the Neopagans are. They're as intellectual as Neopagans like to think they are, as they used to be. They have the seminary, the ordination body, and all that. They have hymns to the gods and the goddesses in their hymnal, they revere the Earth and all life. They have lovely buildings that are better than anything that the Neopagans are going to have ever. They have completely family-friendly services, and a full service Sunday School program for children of all ages. If those are the things that you want, then why don't you go there and leave Neopaganism for those of us who want our earth-centered magic-friendly spirituality to be, as Diderot hoped it would be, "rather merrier?"Current Mood: sleepy |
| It Finally Comes Down to This | Jan. 5th, 2005 @ 04:14 am |
|---|
|
The coordinator for St. Louis Pagan Picnic just sent an email to four mailing lists related to Neopaganism in St. Louis. I wish I could link to it, but all four of those email mailing lists have their archives set to subscribers-only. And, characteristically, CAST didn't post this information on their website or make any other effort to get this information to any CAST member or to any St. Louis Pagan who doesn't have the patience to subscribe to one or more of those lists. So given that it is, at this point, semi-public information and important, I saved a copy to a text file and put it up on my server. I trimmed out the only even vaguely secret information, the originator's email address; in the interests of clarity, I also trimmed out the automatic footer information. That way you can decide for yourself whether or not I'm being unfair about this.
Here's what it comes down to: the Council for Alternative Spiritual Traditions is basically this close to admitting that they no longer have the means to pull off any kind of an event. So they're having an almost-unannounced vote this coming Sunday, January 9th, starting at 3:30 pm (and running who-knows-how-long, discussions may run long on this one), at the Grand Oak Hill Community Center in south St. Louis at 4168 Juniata, just a couple of blocks south of Tower Grove Park. Yarrow Coven has volunteered to take over Pagan Picnic and run it just the way it's always been run, at their own expense and their own risk. Anyone may show up and, subject to time available and assuming you stay polite, anyone make speak, but only CAST members may vote. If you want to vote and you're not a CAST member, you can pay the $10 at the door for a membership. What's really ironic about this is that if you show up and pay your $10 to vote yes, you're basically voting to render CAST totally irrelevant, so there goes your $10.
Here's my take on what's happened before, and what's going on now. Pagan Picnic is older than CAST. Pagan Picnic started out really tiny. Then Yarrow Coven and Larry "El Bee" Brown stepped in, and put heroic amounts of work into organizing and publicizing the thing, and in one year it jumped from around 30 attendees to around 500, making it one of the midwest's more important regional Pagan gatherings. But there were legal issues, insurance issues, issues of getting more help from the broader community, issues related to the fact that not everybody likes Yarrow or El Bee, and so on. So when CAST volunteered to sponsor the Pagan Picnic, it seemed like a great way to solve a lot of problems all at once, and everybody jumped on the idea.
CAST was originally under the auspices of what I consider to be "the grownups" of the St. Louis Pagan community, Omnistic Fellowship, who volunteered to cover their incorporation and insurance and so forth issues because O.F. wanted more input and more help from the broader community. Eventually, CAST chafed at having OF people be more important than the rest of the membership because they controlled the purse strings, and OF members resented being treated like cruel parents, so the two groups split and went their separate ways. Originally, CAST was going to be an outreach within and on behalf of all of the non-monotheistic and/or pro-magickal faiths and practices in the St. Louis area, but well, they got zerged by the Neopagan Witches, so it pretty quickly became a Neopagan Witchcraft umbrella group that just happened to tolerate a few token Taoists, ceremonial magicians, and reconstructionist Pagans. But that wasn't their downfall. On the contrary, say what you will about being zerged by the Pagans, they do bring plenty of manpower to the table, and manpower was what CAST needed.
CAST started out with all kinds of grand plans about how they were going to make Paganism more respectable and more influential, many of which centered around the idea of forming a seminary with a centrally controlled curriculum, textbooks, and ordination procedures. But in the meantime, what they were doing was holding four events. Magical Weekend was another event that had pre-existed CAST, had been turned over to CAST when its organizer moved out of state; it was basically structured like a small local SF convention only dealing with Paganism and the New Age instead of science fiction, an annual event that happened in late October. It pretty much ran on a break-even basis. When CAST took over the summer Pagan Picnic, it was a money loser. So to compensate, CAST created fund-raising party events in the spring and fall, Spring Fling and Fall Ball, held on the cheap as potlucks in cooperating local bars with a volunteer band, splitting the door take with the bar owners. Eventually Spring Fling, Pagan Picnic, Fall Ball, and Magical Weekend became the party-event tail that wagged the CAST dog. CAST did get other things done; they had a longish semi-successful run of Open Full Moon ceremonies and a somewhat less successful monthly New Moon Lecture series.
Now, when I wrote my essay "How Authentic is Too Authentic?," I introduced those of you who weren't in the SCA to three SCA terms, terms that were coined to describe the three basic subgroups of any subculture. The Authenticity Police are the ones who're obsessed with historical accuracy. The Dream Nazis are the people who're deep in the thrall of some vision of how whatever it is the subculture is doing could lead to a better world. The Fun Mavens are there for the liquor, the sex, and for the fun of working on projects together. The reason I bring this up now is that about two years ago, CAST underwent an upheaval not unlike the one that hit the SCA only a few years before. The Authenticity Police and the Dream Nazis decided that the reason that Mundanes weren't taking them seriously was because of the Fun Mavens. In the case of CAST, it was also firmly believed that since Paganism is a religion, a church, then all church/religious events should be family friendly, and there were people who didn't want their kids to be anywhere near the Fun Mavens. So step by step, they squeezed the Fun Mavens out of the organization. And only now are they discovering that Authenticity Police and Dream Nazis don't volunteer. Or at least, they don't volunteer for hard work, not the way that Fun Mavens do. And once they'd squeezed all the fun out of CAST and CAST events, not only did they lose a big chunk of their volunteer base, but they lost a big chunk of their customer base, too, to the extent that the last Magical Weekend was famously a travesty, an event planned for up to 300 people where something like less than 20 showed up.
I say, pull the plug, before it drags Pagan Picnic and Magical Weekend down with it. I may even show up to say it in person, but I doubt there's any point to my doing so, so maybe I won't bother with an hour-plus MetroLink/MetroBus commute with a long walk on either end. (The alternative being to cadge a ride, which is unlikely as I doubt I could get one, or drive into and park in the City, which I'm unwilling to do.) But CAST is dead. Nobody's doing the work. You'll notice that as important as this vote is, nobody bothered to put a notice that this was on the agenda on their web site; in fact, that this meeting is happening at all is pretty thoroughly buried in the detail. And why bother? If you were farsighted, you could see the end coming when they abandoned/were abandoned by Omnistic Fellowship. They lost any point in existing and most organizational integrity when they were zerged by the Neopagans. They lost most of their credibility with the community, and much of their support, when there was an internal coup d'etat a few years ago and "BooBoo's" new constitution replaced consensus management with Robert's Rules of Order and strict hierarchy. And the "pro-family" crowd has cost them all of their membership and money. So they've got no adult supervision, no point in existing, no organizational integrity, no support from the community, no membership, and no money. Their sum total assets are two semi-valuable unregistered trademarks, Pagan Picnic and Magical Weekend, both of which they're mismanaging into the ground. Why wouldn't you vote to pull the plug? Nostalgia? |
|
|
64 (82.1%)