VI. How do we define anything?

Erin:

It's probably true that some people find the "atheist" label off-putting, but the comments I've heard have more to do with AURA's tendency to take a tone of intellectual superiority towards anyone belonging to a religious community and the attitude that all religious people must not understand what science is or why it is important. It's not so much the atheism that bothers people as the tendency of some of AURA's members (though I think not the group itself) to be anti-religion. Hard to start a dialogue premised on rejection of an entire group's identity.

Sure, dictionaries are handy things (as for how dictionaries get there definitions, I highly recommend this book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Professor-Madman-Insanity-English-Dictionary/dp/0060839783 from when I went through my dictionary phase), but they're notoriously bad at speaking to the connotational dimension of language and when an issue is as ideologically and politically charged as "science v. religion," chances are that acknowledging something more than denotative meaning is going to be necessary to structure a productive debate. That's why I'm more concerned with how terms are actually used and what effect they have than how we ought to define them. Maybe Sagan's world view doesn't fit under Webster's "religion" entry (or maybe it does), but it still matters that people call his view religious. That's more interesting to me than the question of whether or not Sagan (or Einstein or anyone) is "actually" religious. And actually, I think a conceptual dictionary of family resemblances is a great idea: think about it! It would probably have to be digitally structured, but think of how you could link words and concepts to each other in a massive web of meanings and relations! It would probably look something like Wikipedia, though less encyclopedic and perhaps more visually oriented.

Sidenote: What class was the Great DiPrima-Jackson Religion Debate a product of? And why wasn't I in that class?

Chris:

Personally, I haven't seen AURA do the sorts of things that would lead to such a level of animosity, were they not self-identified as "no-religious." Then again, I wasn't here when it was founded and only started going to meetings this past fall. I know that they've co-hosted a debate or two, which could have been the issue, but since I've been going, it's been speakers and spaghetti.

Again, maybe it would help to inform my view by saying that I hate people and think that they're almost universally idiots - this has nothing to do with religion. I'm therefore completely uninterested in "how terms are actually used." Calling bird poop "droppings" doesn't make it any different.

The debate was a byproduct of Social/Science/Fiction in spring of 2008. I forget how we actually got into this, but it had something to do with Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow. [It kills me, by the way, that you can't underline or italicize in Facebook, but I refuse to put book titles in quotation marks.] Excellent class, of course - it's on a two-year cycle and (apparently) quite different each time.

http://www.neatorama.com/2009/12/31/carl-sagans-apple-pie-recipe/

Erin:

Spaghetti is delicious, even when it is consumed with mocking intent. And if you ever get Dr. Tyson to speak, I'll absolutely show up (provided it's not this year).

I take a pretty dim view of cynicism among anyone under the age of 60, but I suppose if you want to hate humanity that's your prerogative. I alternate between being frustrated and fascinated by the fact that so few people seem to think like I think (not so much what I think but how), but I don't think that makes them idiots. Basically, I don't understand the social world particularly well intuitively and I appreciate intellectually the puzzles it presents. Looking at language and how it's used is an appealing way to cut into this puzzle as language mediates, if not defines, much of what happens there. But then, I think there's an irreducibly subjective basis to what approach people take to making sense of the world. That's not an argument for "anything goes" relativism -- there's still an imperative to conduct your inquiry according to rigorous standards that are, as Weber puts it, "valid for other people," and to be intellectually honest about your work (your "Don't lie!") and nor does it exempt any approach from skepticism and criticism -- but I cannot find another compelling argument for theoretical and methodological differences among people from similar backgrounds. At some level one mode of understanding is just more intuitive than another. (On an individual level, of course, I love some people very much, strongly dislike a smaller number and am more or less indifferent to the rest. Kind of like most people.)

One of the articles I just read for my International Security class (which is, you'll probably not be stunned to find out, taught by a constructivist) begins by taking a stab at defining religion. Perhaps you'll find their recognition of the heterogeneous character of "religion" (in the context of a justification for drawing upon Kierkegaard's understanding of faith) more productive than my imagined web of meaning. (My imagined web of meaning is pretty amazing, though; it's all glow-y and responsive and interconnected like the plants in Avatar.) Anyway, here's what Lausten and Waever say: "Once, in criticising Kant’s transcendental categories, Hegel ironically claimed that every time he asked for a piece of fruit at the greengrocers he got an apple, a pear, but never a piece of fruit. Like apples and pears we only have Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc., never religion as such. Nevertheless, Hegel’s argument was not that this prevents comparisons and the introduction of categories. The point is,

however, that one has to accept that our way to the universal (religion as such) goes through the particular (Christianity)." [Disclaimer: It is possible that the image of Hegel shopping for apples contributes to my interest in this point.] Maybe an understanding and acknowledgment the limiting context of our definition is a better appraoch than resorting to limitless families? Regardless, I think the strength of your reaction to calling Sagan's world-view a religion demonstrates pretty clear that it does matter (in the sense of generating observable effects) how words are used ...

Alas, it appears I'm missing that class this year too. I'll soldier on somehow.

Here, have some posty-toasty asteroid lit: https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0BwOyd8-QlWaTOGM3Y2NiNDAtMzk3YS00YjhmLThkYzEtOTI1MWE4ODAxYTQw&hl=en.

Chris:

My reaction to PTJ's calling Sagan's world-view "religious?" I looked it up and decided that it was possible but an incredible stretch. "If we are to call Sagan’s beliefs his religion, as we may do, we must include the caveat that those beliefs are nothing like the religions that we know." And then, of course, going into an abbreviated version of my whole point, that religion as defined and as practiced involves certainty and invocation of the supernatural, which aren't things that Carl Sagan does at all in his work.

I'm sure that given time and the Principia Mathematica, I could come up with a hilarious equation that takes into account the strength of a definition based on its position (1, 2, or in the case of the definition I thought supported the "Sagan's religious" argument, 3) and the number of words from that definition which support versus deny the claim, but I neither have the time nor the Britishness to do so. It would be fun, though.

In terms of mocking intent for the Flying Spaghetti Dinner? Eh. The flying spaghetti monster is, I think, sort of an icon of a few years ago. I think it's a character that stretches across the line of theism versus non-theism into the realm of "snarky kids" in general. And to boot, it's an open event that's advertised by AURA as an AURA event with spaghetti provided by AURA and a movie (Religulous) screened by AURA. Whoever went just for the free spaghetti and got offended deserved it. Also, they are idiots (not for their religion in this context, but because they didn't figure out that they might be offended by going to a meeting of people whose "beliefs" they are diametrically opposed to). And because there's nothing wrong with theists laughing at the Fred Flintstone world of the Creation Museum in Kentucky.... See More

Which is an excellent transition into my "people are idiots" thingy. I'm merely being realistic. I don't mean that people are without redeeming qualities; merely that on the whole, the vast majority of people are idiots. (Get into a car and drive around. You'll find them. They often hide in plain sight in the left lane of expressways or drive giant SUVs because they think that they're safer for their families. Occasionally, one will leap across four lanes of traffic to get to an exit. Or better, use an exit that's not actually there. I will grant that there are less idiots in Germany and the state of the Autobahn is an excellent biproduct.) Then, on the one end are the truly psychotic among us, whom I don't think count as idiots, and on the other end, there are the people who at least meet some minimum requirements for making 3.8 billion years of evolution worth it. Note: this does not mean that I agree with them.

To learn how the social world works, it's best to assume either the worst or the simplest (or both - they usually fit together quite well). It's not very difficult. And again, I don't think that's a cynical statement as much as one that's tried and true.

Barely related to all of this: http://gladwell.com/2004/2004_09_06_a_ketchup.html - There may not be a Platonic ideal of ketchup, but there's certainly a difference between ketchup the sauce and ketchup the condiment.

TO BE CONTINUED ...

Pirates in church?

Well, in a UU church, anyway! Last Sunday, Rev. Louise Green at All Souls Unitarian Church gave a sermon on "The Inconvenience of Compassion" which began with an anecdote about feeling compassion for the Somali teenager, Abdiwali Abdiqadir Muse, who is being tried in New York for piracy. The sermon went on to play the rhetorical commonplace of "pirates as godless and evil" against teachings on compassion, and included a poem by Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist monk, poet, and peace activist:

Please Call Me By My True Names

Do not say that I'll depart tomorrow
because even today I still arrive.

Look deeply: I arrive in every second
to be a bud on a spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
in order to fear and to hope.
The rhythm of my heart is the birth and
death of all that are alive.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river,
and I am the bird which, when spring comes, arrives in time
to eat the mayfly.

I am the frog swimming happily in the clear pond,
and I am also the grass-snake who, approaching in silence,
feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,
and I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to
Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea
pirate,
and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and
loving.

I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my
hands,
and I am the man who has to pay his "debt of blood" to, my
people,
dying slowly in a forced labor camp.

My joy is like spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom in all
walks of life.
My pain if like a river of tears, so full it fills the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and laughs at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart can be left open,
the door of compassion.

I don't actually like the poem very much, but I have included it here as an example of a contemporary deployment of the "pirate as ultimate evil/hostis humani generis/enemy of all mankind" commonplace. That this common understanding of pirate is, to varying degrees, deliberately contested and refuted, both in the poem and in the wider context of the sermon, is actually further evidence of its being a rhetorical commonplace: In Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson takes great care to establish that a rhetorical commonplace is only weakly shared; it is a "potential resource," and "not a univocal, completely fixed bit of meaning that is identically possessed by multiple people; that would be a strong form of shared meaning, and ... would also have the logical consequence of making debate and discussion unnecessary: if we already agreed in this strong sense, why would we have to talk about it?" (28; 44; 50). Indeed, the sort of contentious conversations about representations of actors that Charles Tilly talks about in Stories, Identities, and Political Change are only possible with what he calls a shared set of idioms and history (116-118). Using pirates to demonstrate the possibilities of human compassion is an attempt to redefine the meaning of pirate, but such redefinition is only possible given that "pirates as evil" is already weakly shared among the congregation.

I feel like T-Rex explains this concept pretty well. (click to enlarge)

On the subject of language ...

Because at its heart, the pirate project is really about language. And because this is hilarious:



"So for you, language is more than just a means of communication ..."

Swine flu and pirates: why language matters

The recent debate over what to call the H1N1 virus (also discussed here in the Financial Times) is good reminder of the importance of language in international relations as emphasized by constructivism. (See Karen Fierke's chapter "Breaking the Silence: Language and Method in International Relations," the beginning of which is available here on GoogleBooks for an actual reasoned, theoretical explanation of why we should take language and rhetoric seriously). Although Matthew Cordell at the UN Dispatch says "who cares" to the question of what to call the disease, it's clear that, in fact, a lot is in a name ...

The name "swine flu" led Russia to ban pork imports from affected countries, despite a complete lack of evidence that the virus can be transmitted by eating pork or that pigs can even contract the mutated form of the virus. In response to complaints from the pork industry and in an effort to set the record straight, the last few days have seen several alternative names proposed. President Obama used "H1N1 flu virus" earlier this morning and the World Health Organization has referred to the virus as "Mexican flu" or "2009 H1N1 flu," though assistant director-general for health security Dr. Keiji Fukuda says there are no official plans to change the name. The World Organization for Animal Health has proposed "North American flu," which, like "Mexican flu" emphasizes the geographic origin of the flu and is reminescent of the geographically-named 1918 "Spanish flu." The Financial Times downplays concerns that such geographic labels would stigamatize the countries and regions referred to, noting that "There is no evidence that the reputation of Spain or Hong Kong suffered in the past." Mexico is clearly suffering economically from association with the flu, though it is hard to judge how much this is a result of linguisic deployments. The EU Health Commission has suggested "novel flu," in an attempt to avoid all reference to genetic, historic, and geographic origin.

The name "swine flu" has also produced a unique response from several Middle Eastern countries, where some leaders have exploited the (initial and linguistic) connection between the virus and pigs to seek to ban pork consumption which is prohibited in Islam:

The Egyptian parliament wants all pigs in the country – where they cater largely to the non-Muslim minority – to be slaughtered. Egypt already is on edge because of a surge in cases of unrelated bird flu, which last week claimed a 26th fatality.

Lawmakers in Bahrain are hoping to use the scare to strengthen their bid to have all pork and pork products outlawed. Bahraini lawmakers are pressing for a measure that would make the import, sale or possession of pork a criminal offense.

“The outbreak of this flu, which has killed dozens, will make our case stronger to outlaw pork from the kingdom,” lawmaker Sheikh Adel Al-Moawada, who heads the parliamentary foreign affairs and security committee, was quoted by local media as saying.

In Kuwait, a top health figure also cited the Islamic prohibition in saying that the country’s “pig-free” status would probably afford it some protection.

“We are unlikely to have an outbreak since we don’t have pig farms here. We don’t have pig products and [the region where the strain emerged] is miles away from Kuwait,” said Dr. Khalid Al-Hasawi, deputy director-general of Kuwait’s Infectious Disease Hospital.

A similar view came from the government, with Undersecretary of Health Ibrahim Abdul Hadi saying that as Kuwait did not import pork in any form, it was safe.

Still, international airports in the Gulf, including the major hub at Dubai, are taking precautions, and Gulf States’ health ministers are to meet next week to discuss the issue.

In Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, city authorities ordered the removal of all pork products from store shelves and restaurant menus, local media reported.

Aside from the implications for economics and trade, this trend is worrisome from a public health perspective:

According to al-Bawaba, a pan-Arabic news organization, the question of pork consumption and the flu outbreak has stoked debate on Internet forums across the Arab world, with many Middle East Muslims “certain they are safe and immune from the new strain.”

Jeffrey Yoskowitz at the Atlantic raises related concerns regarding Israel's unwillingness to call a pig a pig:

[I]n Israel--where pigs are raised on Arab lands and pork shops are firebombed out of certain neighborhoods--pork is highly politicized. Even the word for "pork" in Hebrew, chazir, is so reviled that it goes by many euphemisms: "white meat," "other meat," and "white steak" ... Completely unrelated to eating pork though the flu might be, a swine pandemic by any other name is still porcine in origin. By refusing to recognize the source of the problem and regulate irresponsible farm practices in Israel, future swine viruses could emerge from Israel, and could wind up bearing an Israeli moniker--a much more humiliating prospect.

Israeli officials have retracted comments made earlier suggesting they were "offended" by the reference to an un-Kosher animal and will continue to use "swine flu."

At this point, it would likely be futile to attempt to change the way the virus is referred to by most people, given that even news articles that use a different name first have to establish that they are talking about "swine flu" before proceeding with an alternate designation. We are more interested in how the debate swirling around the "swine flu" label mirrors that surrounding the word "pirate," discussed earlier here and here.

(As a sidenote, the idea that I would abandon the pirate blog in favor of completing statistics review packets and writing econ papers is, of course, empirically denied and probably absurd from the get-go.)