Authority

The immensely influential humanist Edward Said wrote:

There is nothing mysterious or neutral about authority.  It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions, and judgments it forms, transmits, reproduces.  Above all, authority can, indeed must, be analyzed (Orientalism, p. 19-20, 1978).

Something to consider.  I’m currently teaching Sunday School class on the religions of the world; we have begun our study with Hinduism, a “religion” completely constructed by authority.  It is hard and not natural for us, but we are trying to analyze this.  Maybe by the end of the year we *might* be ready to do the same for our own dear Christianity.

Smallpox vaccinations

A couple of days ago, I had to go to the doctor for a routine check-up. The nurse and I determined that I had not had a tetanus shot since 1991, so she rolled up her sleeves, I lowered my pants, and I got it right in the behind. It’s good for ten years, which is to say, I am basically immune from lockjaw for a decade. The little things she injected me with are starting off their ten-year plan of defense against rusty nails and other mishaps.

While I was in the waiting room before the vaccination, I had been studying for my comps. I’m reading a book of essays by various anthropologists and ethnographers about the Huichol people of northwestern Mexico. Unlike many of their indigenous neighbors, the Huichol are famous for maintaining their cultural lifeways in the face of colonialism and the steamrolling external forces of assimilation. They are also famous for the peyote they eat as part of their ritual life. The so-called “Huichol trinity” is peyote, corn, and the deer.

Smallpox, known as etsá in Huichol, was a terrible assassin throughout the Americas in the years after the arrival of the Spaniard colonizers. One of the reasons for the Huichols’ amazing cultural resilience is that they were less affected than some by smallpox because their native medicine discovered vaccination. Allow me to quote at length an essay by Armando Casillas Romo, MD, who did a study of the various diseases and remedies known to the Huichol:

…the dreaded smallpox. The people of San Andrés Cohamiata say that no one in this area has had this disease for a long time, as long as fifty years.

The extraordinary thing is that to ward off this scourge in the absence of medical help from the outside, Huichol shamans developed their own technique of immunization. We were told that the mara’akáte (pl. of mara’akáme) would use the thorns of the plant known as huizache, a thorny shrub found over much of Mexico, to pierce the skin eruptions of people already suffering from smallpox and extract the liquid from them. With the permission of the parents, they would then inoculate the arms of healthy children with this liquid. The cure also involved the same “confessions” rite as that prescribed for rubella.

Several Huichols told us that etsá disappeared from their community thanks to a famous mara’akáme named Carrillo, who died several decades ago. It is said that to “cover up”–that is, calm–the disease he made a pilgrimage to Haixáripá, a sacred place on the slopes of Popocatépetl, the great snow-covered dormant volcano near Mexico City, where Huichol mythology says smallpox made its first appearance. His efforts were successful and small pox never again bothered the people of San Andrés.

All this has left me a little interested in the history of tetanus in our own world. I got a shot without clear understanding of what tetanus even is, why the shot lasts only ten years, and who discovered the inoculation. I also am clear that I have confidence in the shot without any confession or pilgrimage narrative as supplemental community participation in my wellness. So, my vaccination was effective but also socially impoverished.

One or Many

In the Intro. to Philosophy class I’m teaching, we’ve been covering the pre-Socratics.  Starting with Thales and moving on up to Democritus, these ancient people were fascinated by the fabric of being.  Many of them were quite clear that all things were made of some specific substance or other:  for Thales all things could be reduced to water, for Anaximenes it was air, Pythagoras saw numbers in everything, and for Heraclitus, perhaps fire was the base of all.

Others doubted this oneness.  Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Leucippus, and Democritus thought the universe to be far more fractured in essence, and more process-oriented.

Last Thursday I polled the class to find out how many of them were modern-day monists and how many accepted the other side of the debate, that being is in no sense unified in one reductive substance.  30% monists, 70% pluralists.  The pluralists cited mythic “science” as the reason for their notion that our being is made of discrete and differentiated motes.  The few monists foresaw Aristotle (he’s next week) and named the necessity of some sort of unifying first cause that was also the stuff of existence.

How about you?  Do you think the universe is made up of one thing or many?  Why?

What Is Diet Coke?

I started my teaching gig this afternoon with a session in my Intro. to Philosophy course. We did all the normal things like making introductions and going over the syllabus and the books we are going to use, but I also had the students read a blogpost by the Freakonomics author Steven Levitt over at the New York Times. The post is about a new ad campaign by the Coca-Cola company that promotes the fact that Diet Coke is 99% water. Since water is now a good thing to buy and to drink, this is used as proof that Diet Coke is likewise healthy, refreshing, and fashionable. We searched out (with much prodding from Herr Professor) the philosophical debates that might be underpinning this blogpost and its arguments.

1. perception and value. Why do I like or dislike Diet Coke? How do I know that I like or dislike Diet Coke?
2. ethics. Is it right to sell something that is 99% water at such inflated prices? Is advertising Diet Coke–a luxury item–convincing people to buy Diet Coke when they should be buying milk for their baby?
3. political philosophy. Why does our government regulate the ingredients of Diet Coke? Is this for our benefit, and how?
4. free will vs. determinism. Am I free to choose not to drink Diet Coke? How does my culture dictate my supposedly free decisions?
5. ontology. What is Diet Coke?

This last question freaked them out pretty bad. They had a hell of a time answering the question. Answers:

• a carbonated beverage with no calories (me: sounds like Diet 7Up)
• something with a Diet Coke label (me: we can move the label to a different product)
• the 1% of flavor (me: so the water in the can is not part of the beverage?)

I haven’t told them yet that there is an ideal place where the form of Diet Coke exists in all its glorious ding an sich.

(Image is a collage of canvases painted by David Payton.)

New job

I just got a new job.  I’m the newest adjunct professor in the philosophy department at the local community college.  For now, I’ll be teaching two classes:  Intro. to Philosophy and Non-Western Philosophy.  The rest of the time, I’ll keep studying for my oral exams and preparing to write my dissertation.

So, any pointers?  What sort of philosophy would you want to cover in an introductory class?  What answers do you need questioned?

World Wonders

I’m sure you’ve heard that there is a new complement of world wonders.  The  new Seven Wonders of the World are:

1. the Great Wall of China;
2. the pyramids of Chichen Itza;
3. Petra;
4. the Taj Mahal;
5. Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio;
6. the Colosseum; and
7. Machu Picchu.

These new wonders were chosen by a global internet-based vote.  People from around the world could vote for wonders near and far–this is why a relatively new statue of Jesus Christ stands among relatively ancient architectural wonders.  Jesus can obviously win an election, as long as he doesn’t speak or move.

The only remaining wonder of the old Seven Wonders are the pyramids at Giza.  The Egyptian minister in charge of antiquities, Zahi “Sour Grapes” Hawass, said that the new competition had no value, and then he said this:

“THE MASSES DO NOT WRITE HISTORY.”

What’s shocking about this statement is not its content–it is undoubtedly true–but rather that Mr. Hawass said it with no irony.  He means it, he supports it, he revels in the patrician comfort of these words.

Of course, this means that history is not actually a faithful record of the past (as the foolish masses assume).  Instead it is the carefully scripted and coercive “memory” of the powerful.

What better metaphor for this than the pyramids themselves, like fascist monuments rising from the desert.

It’s funny because it’s true

For shame…

The very first “Sheep Days” post touched on the topic of torture sponsored by the U.S. government. Unfortunately, this topic continues to plague us.

A new twist has come up in the way U.S. armed forces and CIA operatives are torturing our fellow human beings: it has been revealed that they have been using trained and licensed psychologists to help them increase the pressure on their victims.

Mark Benjamin, a reporter for salon.com, details the collusion between these psychologists and the torturers:

After the Sept. 11 attacks, [the CIA and the U.S. military] turned to a small cadre of psychologists linked to the military’s secretive Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape program to “reverse-engineer” techniques originally designed to train U.S. soldiers to resist torture if captured, by exposing them to brutal treatment. The military’s use of SERE training for interrogations in the war on terror was revealed in detail in a recently declassified report.

Two psychologists in question, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, apparently specialize in the infliction of psychological stress. The reporter continues,

Isolation in cramped cells is also a key tenet of SERE training, according to soldiers who have completed the training and described it in detail to Salon. The effects of isolation are a specialty of Jessen’s, who taught a class on “coping with isolation in a hostage environment” at a Maui seminar in late 2003, according to a Washington Times article published then. (Defense Department documents from the late 1990s describe Jessen as the “lead psychologist” for the SERE program.) Mitchell also spoke at that conference, according to the article. It described both men as “contracted to Uncle Sam to fight terrorism.”

Mitchell’s name surfaced again many months later. His role in interrogations was referenced briefly in a July 2005 New Yorker article by Jane Mayer, which focused largely on the military’s use of SERE-based tactics at Guantánamo. The article described Mitchell’s participation in a CIA interrogation of a high-value prisoner in March 2002 at an undisclosed location elsewhere — presumably a secret CIA prison known as a “black site” — where Mitchell urged harsh techniques that would break down the prisoner’s psychological defenses, creating a feeling of “helplessness.” But the article did not confirm Mitchell was a CIA employee, and it explored no further the connection between Mitchell’s background with SERE and interrogations being conducted by the CIA.

This reminded me of another collusion between professional scholars and government travesties. During the Vietnam War, our government called on anthropologists to help them make peace (do battle) more effectively in a scheme called “Project Camelot.” One of the United States’s best anthropologists, Marshall Sahlins, condemned this cooperative project as early as 1965 when he addressed the American Anthropological Association. Sahlins declared that the project was,

an example of the corrosion of integrity that must accompany an enlistment of scholars in a gendarmerie relation to the Thrid World. Subversion of mutual trust between field-worker and informant is the predictable next step. The relativism we hold necessary to ethnography can be replaced by cynicism, and the quest for objective knowledge of other peoples replaced by a probe for their political weaknesses.

This is exactly what these shameful psychologists are doing–they are betraying their profession’s high purpose to heal, to comfort, and to hold confessions in confidence. They are preying on weakened men and women supposedly to help win a war. The pastor in me cannot help but point out that this commitment to victory no matter what the method or cost is surely not an American value, much less a Christian one.

I also await the day that the CIA or the Pentagon arrives in my Religious Studies department looking for sick and little men and women who are willing to betray our field’s sensitivity to the religious mores of others so that the torturers can know even better how to flush a Qur’an down the commode.

(Image is “Shame” by Ori Kleiner, 2004)

This Holy Sadness

I’m in the process of reading books and more books to prepare for my comprehensive exams. This morning I was reviewing Friedrich Schleiermacher‘s On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799) and came across this sublime little passage:

What do you call the feeling of an unsatisfied longing that is directed toward a great object and of whose infinity you are conscious? What seizes you when you find the holy most intimately mixed with the profane, the sublime with the lowly and the transitory? And what do you call the mood that sometimes forces you to presuppose the universality of this mixture and to search for it everywhere? The mood does not seize Christians now and then but is, rather, the dominant tone of all their religious feelings; this holy sadness–for that is the only name language affords me–accompanies every joy and every pain; every love and every fear accompanies it.

He is probably wrong about this feeling (holy sadness) being the dominant tone of all Christian feeling, but he makes a good case for it. Perhaps the tango would be the best hymn tune; it arrives at melancholy in such a seductive way.

Published article!

A colleague of mine and I have just had an article published on the online journal Refuge & Rejection. If you like scholarly articles, check it out. After you click on this link, I encourage you to click on the “html” version of the full text for the more creative lay-out of the article. For a more straight-forward read, which includes the two comments from Drs. Poethig and Saunders, click on the “pdf.” The two comments are also available in “html” format from this introduction page.

And, yes, this is my first published article!  Academia here I come!