The Singular Flavor of Souls

While I’m recording things I’ve read recently that do a far better job of articulating, and expanding, what I was trying to say last summer, I have two more things to mention that touch on what I was trying to get at with my posts on difference and the acknowledgement thereof. I assume there are many people for whom these ideas are well-trod ground, but they were new to me and it might be worth something to record my nascent reactions here.

In “From Allegories to Novels,” in which Borges tries to explain why the allegory once seemed a respectable genre but now seems in poor taste, he writes the following:

Coleridge observes that all men are born Aristotelians or Platonists. The Platonists sense intuitively that ideas are realities; the Aristotelians, that they are generalizations; for the former, language is nothing but a system of arbitrary symbols; for the latter, it is the map of the universe. The Platonist knows that the universe is in some way a cosmos, an order; this order, for the Aristotelian, may be an error or fiction resulting from our perfect understanding. Across latitudes and epochs, the two immortal antagonists change languages and names: one is Parmenides, Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Francis Bradley; the other, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, William James. In the arduous schools of the Middle Ages, everyone invokes Aristotle, master of human reason (Convivio IV, 2), but the nominalists are Aristotle; the realists, Plato. […] 

As one would suppose, the intermediate positions and nuances multiplied ad infinitum over those many years; yet it can be stated that, for realism, universals (Plato would call them ideas, forms; we would call them abstract concepts) were the essential; for nominalism, individuals. The history of philosophy is not a useless museum of distractions and wordplay; the two hypotheses correspond, in all likelihood, to two ways of intuiting reality.[*]

But the distinction between nominalism and realism is not so keen as that, commentaries on Borges—Eco’s The Name of the Rose is notable—have noted, maybe missing that Borges might already have understood that.

I read Borges' essay months ago; Saturday, I read/skimmed the first chapter, written by Marcia J. Bates, of Theories of Information Behavior, edited by Karen E. Fisher, Sandra Erdelez, and Lynne (E. F.) McKechnie. In that chapter, I read this:

First, we need to make a distinction between what are known as nomethetic and idiographic approaches to research. These two are the most fundamental orienting strategies of all.

• Nomothetic – “Relating to or concerned with the study or discovery of the general laws underlying something” (Oxford English Dictionary).

• Idiographic – “Concerned with the individual, pertaining to or descriptive of single or unique facts and processes” (Oxford English Dictionary).

The first approach is the one that is fundamental to the sciences. Science research is always looking to establish the general law, principle, or theory. The fundamental assumption in the sciences is that behind all the blooming, buzzing confusion of the real world, there are patterns or processes of a more general sort, an understanding of which enables prediction and explanation of particulars.  

The idiographic approach, on the other hand, cherishes the particulars, and insist that true understanding can be reached only by assembling and assessing those particulars. The end result is a nuanced description and assessment of the unique facts of a situation or historical event, in which themes and tendencies may be discovered, but rarely any general laws. This approach is fundamental to the humanities. […]

Bates goes on to describe the social sciences as being between the two, the contested ground; at times, social sciences tend to favour one approach and then switch to the other. It is in the context of the social sciences that she talks about library and information science:

LIS has not been immune to these struggles, and it would not be hard to identify departments or journals where this conflict is being carried out. My position is that both of these orienting strategies are enormously productive for human understanding. Any LIS department that definitively rejects one of the other approach makes a foolish choice. It is more difficult to maintain openness to these two positions, rather than insisting on selecting one or the other, but it is also ultimately more productive and rewarding for the progress of the field.

I don’t think it’s difficult to see the realism/nominalism distinction played out here again, though it’s important to note that realism v. nominalism is a debate about the nature of reality, while the nomothetic v. idiographic debate concerns merely method (if method can ever be merely method).

Statistics, I think, is a useful way forward, though not sufficient. The idea of emergence, of patterns emerging at different levels of complexity, might also be helpful. Of course, my bias is showing clearly when I say this: Coleridge would say that I am a born Aristotelian, in that it is the individual that exists, not the concept. And yet it is clear that patterns exist and must be accounted for, and we probably can’t even do idiography without having ideas of general patterns, and it’s better to have good supportable patterns than mere intuitions and stereotypes. So we need nomothety! (I don’t even know if those are real nouns.) Statistics, probability, and emergence, put together, are a way of insisting that it's the individuals that are real while still seeking to understand those patterns the cosmos won't do without.

(And morality has to be at least somewhat nomethetic/realist, even if the idiographic/nominalist informs each particular decision, or else it literally cannot be morality, right?)

-----

As you can tell from the deplorable spelling of flavour, the title is a quotation, in this case taken from a translation of Borges' essay "Personality and the Buddha;" the original was published at around the same time as "From Allegories to Novels." The context reads like this:

From Chaucer to Marcel Proust, the novel's substance is the unrepeatable, the singular flavor of souls; for Buddhism there is no such flavor, or it is one of the many varieties of the cosmic simulacrum. Christ preached so that men would have life, and have it in abundance (John 10:10); the Buddha, to proclaim that this world, infinite in time and in space, is a dwindling fire. [...]

But Borges writes in "From Allegories to Novels" that allegories have traces of the novel and novels, traces of the allegory:

Allegory is a fable of abstractions, as the novel is a fable of individuals. The abstractions are personified; there is something of the novel in every allegory. The individuals that novelists present aspire to be generic (Dupin is Reason, Don Segundo Sombra is the Gaucho); there is an element of allegory in novels. 

* What is strange about Aristotle and Plato is that Plato was Aristotelian when it comes to people and Aristotle, Platonic. Plato admitted that a woman might be born with the traits of a soldier or a philosopher-king, though it was unusual, and if such a woman were born it would be just to put her in that position for which she was suited. Aristotle, however, spoke of all slaves having the same traits, and all women the same traits, and all citizens the same traits, and thus slaves must always be slaves and women subject to male citizens. I want to hypothesize, subject to empirical study, that racists and sexists are more likely to be realists and use nomothetic thinking, while people with a more correct view of people (at least as far as sex and race are concerned) are more likely to be nominalists and use idiographic thinking... but the examples of Aristotle and Plato give me pause. Besides, is not such a hypothesis itself realist and nomothetic?

To Exist is to Differ, Part One

To Exist is to Differ

Difference as a Place of Study

Part One

Recently I have been realizing that, for me, the proper appreciation and/or understanding of difference is one of the most important themes in how I think about social, political, and ethical matters. I want to think about this a bit over two posts, but I'll start out with some academic autobiography that might help explain why I think about things this way. The gist of it is that I was trained in the humanities, not in the sciences, but of course it's more complex than that.

Pierre Bourdieu, in "The Field of Cultural Production," writes, "to exist is to differ." What he means by this is that an artist, in order to be said to have produced art at all (by whatever definition of success, and these vary), must have a unique oeuvre (and a unique reputation). It also relates to Bourdieu's definition of art, which is anything that changes the field of art by participating in it with its own difference (roughly). As far as texts go, I take it to mean something a bit more obvious: in order for a text to exist, it must differ from other texts. If someone found a manuscript that was identical to Hamlet (let's say the B text, because it's a better play), then it would for all intents and purposes be a manuscript of Hamlet. Only if it were significantly different would it be a play unto itself.

(Of course, it is technically the case that having a different author is enough to make one text different from another. This may be the genius, or at least the only redeeming value, of Andy Warhol's work, in that all of his minor differences, like colour and contrast, emphasize the one difference he cares about, that between original and copy. An even better example of the copy-original difference, however, is Borges' excellent short story "Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote", in which the titular character re-writes Cervantes' classic, which is exactly verbatim but nonetheless different.)

In order to understand a text, then, you must understand what makes this text different from all other texts. Of course it is useful to understand how it is like other texts, too. We divide things into genres for a reason; when gathering texts together based on certain similarities, their differences become more salient. A lot of work can be done with similarity, but in the end it is what makes a text different from other texts that really helps us understand it.

There have been schools of literary analysis that have attempted to study similarity rather than difference. One of the most famous, in terms of its former prominence in the field and its current notoriety, is archetypal structuralism (not all structuralisms failed in quite the same way, but lots of the failed because of an inability to account for difference). This is the school championed by Northrop Frye. His goal was to create a schema, or set of schema, on which all texts could be charted. (This webpage summarizes these schemes and also makes visual representations of them.) His work is really fascinating in the way that, say, the more convincing forms of Ptolemaic astronomy or Freudian psychoanalysis are fascinating: it is detailed, well-worked out, surprisingly plausible, and ultimately fantastic. While he had quite a few of these structures, his most famous involves what he called the archetypal myths: Comedy, Romance, Tragedy, and Irony, which cycle in a large wheel, each producing the conditions for the next. It is easy and kind of fun to take a text and plot it out according to Frye's structures, but it does not often tell you very much about the text itself. You get a sense of how the text relates to other texts (so, for instance, you see that Pride and Prejudice and As You Like It are both comedies; the first is a prose novel while the other is a dramatic romance), but you can't get a sense of how two texts differ in the case that they occupy the same space in his scheme (so, for instance, you can hardly tell Pride and Prejudice from Sense and Sensibility). A text is more than just a mode/myth/genre combination. Thus one of the ways Northrop Frye's archetypal structuralism fails is that it offers no way to discuss the sorts of idiosyncrasies that make texts what they are. Perhaps Frye's structuralism could serve as a tool to another form of criticism, but in the end it is of little use on its own.

A more contemporary, and even less plausible, school of literary analysis to have failed in the same way is literary Darwinism. Literary Darwinism is the attempt to use evolutionary psychology to discuss literary texts. Proponents say that the features of texts will be consequences of evolved human preferences (they're strict adaptionists), so we should be able to examine texts as a way of examining evolved human traits. In the end, literary Darwinism usually winds up saying that literary texts rehearse primary human drives, specifically the drive to survive and the drive to reproduce. Pride and Prejudice is about trying to fulfill the reproductive imperative, while Oliver Twist is about trying to survive. The sort of evolutionary psychology that is needed to support this claim (one that is strictly adaptionist and does not allow for the existence of spandrels) is pretty outdated and problematic in itself, but even if the scientific side of this method was sound, it would still be bad literary analysis, because it reduces all texts to "universal values". It has no way of accounting for the bewildering idiosyncrasy of texts other than claiming that they are irrelevant artifacts, obstacles to understanding the text's real workings rather than the actual subject of study.

Recently I noticed that one thing these schools of analysis have in common is that they all attempt to introduce a veneer of the scientific into literary analysis. (Frye's "Polemical Introduction" to The Anatomy of Criticism is an exhortation to make literary analysis more scientific; literary Darwinism's affinities with science are obvious.) It's really tempting to make literary analysis a science of literature because science has been so effective when explaining physical events. The scientific method has been one of the most reliable and just plain exciting epistemological devices we've ever hit upon, so cashing in on that is of course really tempting. But science works mainly by induction, generating universal laws from individual data. It moves from the particular to the general. Idiosyncrasy is not especially interesting to scientific research except as a test case for refining universal laws. As I argued using Bourdieu, difference is precisely what makes literary analysis tick. Texts can only be understood with respect to difference as much as to similarity, so trying to make the field scientific will doom it to failure. (Also, literature probably does not operate according to universal laws in the way the physical universe does. That's a hurdle.)

Of course, not all scientific fields are disinterested in idiosyncrasy. Human bodies are quite idiosyncratic, a fact of which the medical field seems aware. And not all of the humanities are interested in idiosyncrasy: a lot of analytical philosophy is all about universals, which is probably why English departments celebrate the continental philosophers which the more analytical philosophy deparments reject. Anthropology seems to balance between the two, but at its best, to quote Ruth Benedict, "[t]he purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences" (which is why I think Bones, of Bones, is such a terrible anthropologist--she universalizes anthropological observations far too much).

My training in this environment is, I think, part of the reason I am so invested in idiosyncrasy, in differences, in the particular over the universal. It is surely not a coincidence that I share the emphasis on the local over the global with most postmodernist thought, and is maybe why I sometimes get mistaken for an actual postmodernist rather than the appreciative outsider of postmodernism that I actually am. But I am attracted to structuralism more than many of my peers were, too. (Bourdieu is a structuralist, after all; my objections would apply as much to him as to Frye, in fact.) Very recently, I am suspecting that this has impacted my politics, as well. For the better, obviously. (That's supposed to be tongue-in-cheek.)

(tl;dr: Literary analysis only works if you can explain how texts are different from each other; such focus on difference is not true of science, and that's perfectly OK; I suspect that my own concern with the differences between people is at least in part a product of my studies in literary analysis.)

Like No Other Animal on the Planet

I want to recommend the BBC Horizon documentary The Secret Life of the Dog, which explores the relationship dogs have with humans re: domestication. One of their theses (granted, not the primary one) is that humans and dogs co-evolved; our relationship with dogs has radically changed them, but it has also changed us--perhaps allowing for the agricultural revolution. Thanks to my reading of Haraway, this is something I now take as obvious.

However, the primary subject of the documentary is the way in which dogs are unique among all other animals in the traits they've developed which adapt them specifically to human interaction. For instance, when dogs look at human faces, they regularly look towards the left (so they look to the right side of the face), a trait they share with humans alone. (They do not look at the left side of anything else; left-biased expression is a human trait.) So they've developed a unique capability of reading human emotion and understanding human communication.

One of the more interesting segments is about the planned and systematic domestication of foxes as an experiment to learn more about domestication. Two things are remarkable: the first is that it was successful. While foxes may not be as incredibly domesticated as dogs are, it is nonetheless possible to domestic foxes to a remarkable degree. The second remarkable thing is that while the experimenters selected for behaviour, certain physiological traits followed: shorter legs, more white in the coat, curled tail, floppier ears. Specifically, the traits that physiologically differentiate dogs from wolves also developed in foxes over the process of domestication.

I highly recommend this video. The combination of clever scientific research, dogs, and mind-theory stuff will always interest me. The Secret Life of the Dog has an X-Files feel to some of it, which I found amusing; they play almost-eerie music when leading up to the sorts of things a really intelligent dog named Betsy can do which made me think of the psychic-of-the-week episodes, and of course the experimental breeding of foxes was reminiscent of the experimental breeding of clones that a certain Fox Mulder discovered. Perhaps this is why I considered wild sci-fi scenarios while watching the show: what if the next sentient life to exist on Earth was not AI but canine? And what other animals could we domesticate: lions? cheetahs? elephants? If we did domesticate them, what effects would that have on our own behaviour and development? In what ways (cognitively, behaviourally) would those domesticated animals differ from dogs? (I suspect that horses are another animal worth investigating re: domestication and adaptations uniquely suited for interaction with humans.)

The Problem of the Augmented Body

or, What is our body? part 3

I return to this series somewhat more hesitant about it than when I began. Much of the reason there has been such a gap between instalments is that I realized I had little to say. Or, alternately, that what I had to say was not very well considered. In my discipline, literary analysis, there is a lot of discussion of bodies; how we relate to them, how they are represented, how they interact, and what they are. So when I say that I know nothing much about them, I do so in a field in which theorizing about bodies is taken very seriously and is done a great deal. Perhaps this in part explains my trepidation to proceed.

But proceed I will, because I still feel as though I can say something that will be new at least to some people, maybe even ones that will read my blog (especially if Leah continues giving it publicity). What I can perhaps offer is a sense of how the more postmodern, English department-style of thinking about things can impact such a question. I think I’d just like to bracket this post off as somewhat provisional, subject to revision. Or, even better, maybe we should think of it as a starting point for further inquiry.

And don’t worry. I will have a lot more to say, with more confidence, later in the post, once we move away from this issue of raw bodies.

Let’s catch up on the ground we’ve covered here. In my first post I considered a very biological, organic, cellular, genetic sense of body: bodies are made of continuous living tissue, distinct from one another based on disconnect. I used a number of case studies to indicate how this conception must fail. Continuous living tissue is not sufficient to any definition of a body, and I mean this in more than one sense: that which defines one body from another is not continuous living tissue. But I have not ruled out that it might be necessary. That is, it might be one component of a more complex picture.

In my second post I considered an instrumental sense of body: my body is that which I have motor control over. I used a number of case studies to indicate that this cannot be a necessary definition of body. There are things I do not have motor control over (my teeth, my heart) which are my body. I want to clarify, though, that I do not mean to say that instrumentality is not sufficient to being part of my body: perhaps motor control over something is enough to make it my body.

It cannot be the case that continuous living tissue is necessary but not sufficient and motor control is sufficient but not necessary because there is at least one instance in which people have motor control over an object but do not have a continuous living tissue connection. That instance is possession of a prosthetic limb. (Which is the issue that sparked the whole controversy over at Unequally Yoked.)

So let’s get some examples. We have limbs which replace typical human appendages and have some motor function determined by synapses. This is a fairly commonplace example and is fairly easily conceived. While you might from the outset disagree, I think most of us could at least understand why a person with a prosthetic might consider it part of his or her body: it replaces a part of the body which is formerly there. If you replace a computer component with a new one, that new one is now part of the computer. If you replace a body component with another one, we could analogously consider it part of the body. This breaks down somewhat when you realize that prosthetics are not necessarily replacements: they are sometimes function where a person did not already have a limb or they sometimes offer functions which the “original” limb did not have. However, I think it’s a good place to start thinking about prosthetics. We could also say that the addition of a new periphery becomes part of the computer when added even if it does not replace anything that formerly existed there. If you would consider a transplanted heart as now part of the new owner’s body, I think I can expect the onus to be on you to explain how a non-organic heart would be any different. (If you wouldn’t consider the transplanted heart to be part of the new owner’s body, I would like to hear you explain why. The idea is alien to me.)

Let’s move in another direction for a moment. Let’s consider the Emotiv EPOC, a console device which allows you to play the video game simply with your mind. You wear a device on your head and, after a calibration process, it lets you move characters around on the screen with your thoughts. It does this by reading your brain waves. I must admit that I am personally less comfortable taking the characters on the screen to be part of my body. I must also admit that I would be less comfortable taking distant objects also moved only by synapse/circuitry to be part of my own body. To suggest that a remote control car is “me” because I can move it with my mind seems deeply problematic. That such a situation isn’t unimaginable given the EPOC indicates that we must take it seriously.
(And to forestall any complaints that this is not the same as a prosthetic, I’ll point out that some prosthetics operate on this technology and not through nerve-circuit interface.)

The point I see being appropriate here is that the Emotiv is not part of my body because I do not identify with it. That is, I specifically disagree with the claim that identification is not relevant to the conversation. Certainly it is not sufficient: no matter how badly I may identify with your body, that does not mean it is part of my body. But I think it is a component of what is going on. The physical attachment of a prosthetic encourages the owner to define it as part of her body; even when removed, in fact, it may still be considered part of her body due to her identification with it over time. Motor control also plays a role in this, of course; sensory feedback would play even more, and is perhaps part of why the EPOC, lacking as it does in tactile response, does not have the same identification.

But I am merely asserting that identification is relevant. I cannot, actually, back that up, but for two points which might be suggestive. The first is that many people with prosthetics say that those prosthetics are part of their body. While this doesn’t prove anything, I want to point out that we as a society have done a pretty bad job of listening seriously to minority groups. Once we do start listening, we often learn a surprising number of things from them. So maybe listening would be a good idea in this case; to simply say that they are wrong because they go against our own predetermined ideas is not a good idea politically, rhetorically, or epistemologically. The second point is also the destination of this post:

My opinion, as it stands and for whatever it’s worth, is that there is no way of determining, definitively, what a body is or who it belongs to. What we have instead are a number of competing ideas that almost work but that always, somewhere, break down. In the previous instalment I said that if we want a universal definition, it must apply to all bodies. Since I do not think we can find a definition that does apply to all bodies, then we cannot have a universal definition. I want to suggest, in fact, that we not only have no way of writing such a definition, but that the category of a discrete body might not exist outside of our idea of it anyway. There are not discrete bodies.

However, it is important that we act as if there are. (Imagine what rape would look like in a society which did not recognize discrete bodies.) But this doesn’t mean that we pick a definition of body and stick to it regardless of the consequences. Instead I suggest we ride definitions as far as they go until they break down. When they break down, we look around, see what the issue is, and draft a new definition that we can use until it stops working. What becomes crucial, then, is to listen very closely to what the people with those exceptional bodies are saying, because they’re the ones who have the best insight into what a body is in that situation. (And so I circle back to my first suggestion.)

So, to be clear: I would say that if people with prosthetics define body such that that prosthetic is part of their body, then it is part of their body. However, how we define bodies is not so simple because it must take into account the society we live in. I will address this a forthcoming section. In the meantime, I will spend a few instalments dealing with the opposite half of the dualist equation: the mind.

Series Index

Summer Reading List

or,
An Account of my Absence

I realize that the last post I wrote here was one promising activity. It was written about a month ago. I can explain.

In early May I returned to Fort McMurray to visit friends and family. I've been here since then and will be here a little while longer before returning to the beautiful British Columbia. While here I have been treating reading and writing like a full-time job, putting in eight hours a day, five days a week. At first I wrote an early draft of an article for a journal which I have sent to a professor for feedback, and since then I've worked on creative writing. For the first little while I journalled and wrote letters on top of these eight hours, but after a while I realized that I could not physically take it: my eyes and knuckles were in pain by the end of the day. Since then I have absorbed journal- and letter-writing into this schedule.

Needless to say, with all of this writing my blogging has suffered drastically. While I have continued reading blogs and commenting periodically, I have not felt interested in or even capable of producing posts of my own. For this reason I will henceforth include blogging in those eight hours, so long as I do not exceed one day per week.

Because I cannot share what I have been writing, I will instead give you my reading list so far.

1. "Against Literary Darwinism" (Jonathan Kramnick, Winter 2011)
Because I doubt many of my readers care about literary theory, I'll try for brevity: Kramnick is arguing that a particular school of literary analysis which calls itself Literary Darwinism is bunk. LD claims to be trying to draw literary analysis out of relativist irrelevance and into hard, stable science. Sadly, says Kramnick, the science they are using as a base is an older form of evolutionary psychology which is far from universally accepted in the current scientific academy (it suggests that all traits are selected for rather than merely selected, failing to recognize the possibility of byproducts, or spandrels). Further, it fails on the literary end, since it is unable to isolate the universal formal traits of literature which it seeks to identify, instead slipping into universal themes of love and triumph which, the LDs say, rehearse evolutionary pressures. Universal themes are not universal forms and so they fail to provide what they claim to provide. It's an interesting article, but because it's written mainly for a literary analytical audience it doesn't go into what's wrong with universal themes (since any literary analyst worth her salt already knows why), so if you aren't immersed in this discipline's theory you might wonder why that isn't addressed.

2. One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest (Wade Davis)
One River details the travels of the author and his colleague Tim Plowman (an ethnobotanist) through the Amazong rain forest in search of the origin of coca, the plant used to make cocaine (and Coca-Cola); it also details the botanical biography of their mentor Richard Schultes and his own journeys in Oklahoma, Mexico, and the Amazon rain forest (I realize I'm jumbling catgories there; all I can say is that it reflects how Schultes travelled, not how I conceptualize these places). I spent a lot of time with this book; its seeming endlessness may unintentionally replicate the Amazon itself. Despite what the title suggests, it does not seem to be especially about one river. Each time Davis announced that someone will embark on an exploration of yet another uncharted river, I would reflect on the irony of this title. This book is not for the faint of heart. And, yet, it was absolutely worth it, not just because I learned a lot about psychoactive and medicinal plants in the Amazon basin or about the rubber trade during the Second World War (which is incredibly fascinating, by the way) or about the customs and contact histories of numerous aboriginal peoples, but because I learned a lot about knowledge production itself. One River is about, among other things, an enormous taxonomical enterprise, in which the description and classification of plants make their discovery. That is, it is only when you can describe a plant and then place it in a larger categorical web (taxonomy, bionomial nomenclature, genetic lineages) that you can claim that such a plant is known and further work on it can begin. In a sense, One River helped me understand how taxonomy, the part of biology I liked most in high school and was least respected by biology and biochemical student friends in undergraduate, is integral to the very basis of biology and is also that point which most reveals how the field is organized. But this book is also about the weakennesses of western, post-enlightenment science (anyone mind if I stop capitalizing "enlightenment" as a historical event?) next to the botany of the aboriginal peoples of the Amazon, the numerous inheritors of Incan science. While Schultes changed botany, Davis has changed ethnobotany: some of his encounters suggest that the vast pharmaceutical knowledge of the South American peoples was generated after the Spanish arrived on the continent. That is, this is not ancient wisdom passed down after millenia of slow growth, but a (relatively) rapid generation of new empirical knowledge in response to the new diseases that the conquistadores brought with them, a knowledge reflecting social conditions and resources. This casts the indigenous peoples not as passive recipients of inflexible tradition but active creators of working medicinal practices. This is an important distinction to make.
Anyway, I could keep going on about this book: I could launch a substantial argument that it is an ethnobotanical epic just as the Iliad is a Greek national epic and The Faerie Queen is an English national epic, or I could discuss homosociality and the gendering of science as it appears in the chapter entitled "The Blue Orchid," but I'll forbear. If you want to see other books by Wade Davis I've discussed, you can look at this post where I talk about The Wayfinders or this post where I talk about The Serpent and the Rainbow.

3. The Problem of Pain (C S Lewis)
I see that Leah has recently read this as well. I always feel calmer after reading Lewis, but I presume Lewis only has this effect on Christians, and even then only on those of a certain bent. I'm not sure I think that this is quite sufficient as far as theodicy goes (note: theodicy is the branch of theology which accounts for evil and/or suffering in the world), especially as I'm not willing to follow Lewis down particular paths. (I always have trouble when he starts talking about drives and instincts because, quite frankly, I can easily postulate models which overcome his objections--mere hierarchy of drives usually does it--and I'm sure cognitive psychology can do the trick quite fine and with more empirical clout than my postulated models have.) This being said, Lewis' book does have a lot of value in the observations and discussions that he develops alongside his theodicy. For instance, I was fascinated with his idea of the necessity of an impersonal, causal world outside of human control and not subject to frequent miracles; we require separation from the other to recognize the other as something outside of oneself. If we were all so perfectly psychic as to immediately experience our neighbour's thoughts, we would not recongize those thoughts as someone else's. This, I think, is fascinating. I also find it fascinating that in this book Lewis clearly comes down on the side of evolution (though he has a twist of divine intervention in his story which I suspect Pullman borrowed and inverted in his Dark Materials trilogy).

4. Howl's Moving Castle (Diana Wynne Jones)
In Howl's Moving Castle, the young protagonist Sophie is cursed by the Witch of the Wastes so that she appears to be an elderly woman and, in order to be free of the curse, must seek the help of the wizard Howl, owner of a moving castle and eater of young girls' hearts. What this book may lack in deep insights about human character and social ills is amply made up for in the inclusion of unique main characters: the female lead, while nominally young like in most young adult books, appears to be and acts as if she were elderly for most of the book; the male lead, a powerful and older but nonetheless young- and handsome-looking wizard, frequently emasculates himself and gets through the book primarily through dashing cowardice. Also included in the novel are Sophie's sisters who for the time being go by the same name and appearance, a dog which seems to have once been a human being, a very determined scarecrow, a petulant fire demon living in a fire place, and a young apprentice (about the only generically recognizable character outside the Witch of the Wastes). Given the similarity of many YA and fantasy protagonists, especially when compared within gender lines, these characters offer refreshing alternatives. If you want something that plays a lot with generic conventions while somehow fulfilling them, you may want to look at this book.

5. An Acceptable Time (Medeleine L'Engle)
Polly O'Keefe is visiting her grandparents in a house recognizable to readers of the Time Quartet (A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and Many Waters), when Zachary Gray appears. With him seems to come a time portal, drawing Polly into the New England of 1000 BCE, where she interacts with the People of the Wind, an aboriginal group who have absorbed two exiles from Britain and their druidic teachings. Like all L'Engle books, Polly attempts to negotiate through a world both intellectual and relational, linking science, religion, literature, hope, and forgiveness. I quite enjoyed this book (notwithstanding the fact that my apparent taste in female-oriented YA continues to erode any sense of my own masculinty), though I am really starting to question L'Engle's protagonists' tastes in guys. I was a little uncomfortable in two places, though: first, the book tends towards a romanticization of indigenous peoples, though it's far better than many of its alternatives; second, Polly on occasion is taken for a goddess, and as uncomfortable as she says this makes her, she seems willing to use it to serve her goals. I'm not too keen on such behaviour.

6. Disappearing Moon Cafe (SKY Lee)
Before I begin, I want to state that I'm not sure why the author insists on capitalizing all of the letters in her first name. But she does, so I'll follow suit. (The Wikipedia page is not as accomodating.)
The professor I had for my Asian Canadian Studies class first semester recommended Disappearing Moon Cafe when we complained that there was no literature on the curriculum. I bought it at the end of that semester but did not get much past the prologue until last week. It explores four generations of the Wong family, Asian Canadians located in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, proprietors of the eponymous cafe. The narrative skips around time periods, structured not chronologically but rather revelationally, attempting to hold back the secrets which continue to trouble the narrator, Kae Wong of the fourth and last generation of the Wong clan's Vancouver branch. Only as the novel progresses do you discover the disturbing occurances lurking in the Wong family's past. It's a good book, if written in a perhaps over-ornamented style replete with modifiers. Some people like that sort of thing, of course. It's a little preoccupied with incest, however, so if that bothers you, you might want to pass. This is not an "easy" book either in prose or content, dealing as it does with feminist and Asian Canadian issues, and employing a lot of Asian Canadian colloquial language.

7. "Discourse in the Novel" (Mikhail Bakhtin)
I've started this but not finished it. It's the next installment in my literary analytical readings.
Bakhtin is an important and brilliant if sometimes underrepresentated and misunderstood literary theorist. His ideas about carnivalesque and heteroglossia have strongly impacted the English department but (at least according to my colleagues in my Reported Speech course) nonetheless remain poorly understood, having been twisted somewhat to fit the agendas or frameworks of contemporary theorists. As such, I have decided to become more familiar with this thinker. (I was also supposed to have read this for class and failed; further, I realize I lack the theoretical backing that many of my peers can profess and I think Bakhtin might be a good, more unique investment.) "Discourse in the Novel" outlines how a more dialogic understanding of the novel is necessary; this genre is situated perfectly, thinks Bakhtin, to reflect and use the contrasting unitary and heteroglossic forces in language and the perpetual fact of literature as located amongst other utterances. (If this seems rather technical, that's because it is.)

*sigh* You should never get me started on books, because then I tend to go on. I had planned to write more posts today but am running out of time. With luck I will get a few done.

The Problem of the Organic Body

or, What is our body? part 1

For most of us, this seems a fairly simple question because we have something to which we can refer. I can point toward my body and say, "This is my body." This is not a definition (description) but an indication. What happens, however, when we rely entirely on indication for our definitions is that we don't actually have a useful definition. Trying to determine what exactly defines your body as yours is a difficult question. (It might seem to be a useless question, too, if it weren't the case that a number of controversial ethico-medico-legal issues--abortions, amputations, and separation surgeries--are directly concerned with what is whose body. I'm not going to trace these particular problems out in this post, but if you're concerned that this is all fruitless philosophizing, I'd think again.) So I'm going to take a crack at it.

One of the positions I think I detected among the commenters on Leah's blog (see the introduction to this series for a summary) holds that what something (an organ, say) is part of your body because it is 1) attached with living tissue and 2) composed of living, organic cells. So my hand is part of me because it is attached and organic. If my hand were chopped off, it would no longer be part of me. If it were replaced with a prosthetic, that prosthetic would not be part of me because it is not organic. No matter how strenously I insisted that it was part of me, I would be mistaken.
I would suggest that there are people who would wish to add that those cells must be genetically identical (or at least genetically similar) to those that make up most of your body. I do not want to suggest that the commenters I mentioned have this requirement, but I imagine that someone does. After all, there are parasitic animals that fuse themselves onto their hosts (or live deep within their hosts) such that there is a band of continuous living tissue extending from one organism to another. Genetic markers could be a way of differentiating one body from the next.

Either way, I'm going to suggest that this is the wrong way of finding the edges of your body. Once again, I am not looking so much to prove through syllogism as provide instances in which this sort of definition seems entirely unhelpful.

1. Organ and tissue donation

I cannot systematically prove that a transplanted heart becomes part of the new owner in some metaphysical sense. What I will suggest is that we have a number of reasons for wanting to think so, primary among them practical and legal concerns. I will spend more time discussing this issue in part 3, but let's for the moment identify a few traits: the new organ was formerly part of another person (or their body, at any rate), and most likely carries a quite different genetic signature. If we say that a new heart is part of the person who received it, we must conclude that at the very least the genes do not determine what is or is not part of your body. I suppose you might want to argue that the transplanted heart isn't really part of your body, in which case my next example might prove harder to refute.

2. Chimeras

No, I don't mean the Greek mythological monster. I refer to tetregametic chimerism, in which a person has two genetic lineages. Chimerae are people (or animals) who either developed from an egg fertilized by two sperm or from two non-identical zygotes which fused into one. This means that some of their cells have one genetic code and some of their cells have another. This could result in pigmentation or hair-growth unevenness or in intersexed anatomy, but it may very well go undetected. (Which is to say, you could be a chimera and not know it.)
I hope you can see what I'm driving at. This is one body, satisfying the connected living tissue requirements, that contains multiple genetic markers. Unless you want to claim that a chimeric person has two blended bodies, genetic material cannot constitute a useful distinction.
If you really want to push it and say that at least the cells are related on the level of siblings, I'll observe that researchers have created chimerae lab rats from two non-related zygotes... and other chimerae from zygotes of different species.

3. Conjoined Twins and Parasitic Twins

(Some people may not be surprised to see this example come up. I assure you that it will appear again in this series.)
The connected living tissue requirement is a problem when there are people (genetically identical) who are connected with living tissue. Consider Violet and Daisy Hilton (right), connected at the base of the spine. At their point of connection it would be exceptionally difficult to determine which tissue was Violet's and which tissue was Daisy's. Furthermore, since they (along with most if not all conjoined twins) have connected circulatory systems, it would be impossible to say whose blood is whose. We might want to make some kind of argument based on whose "side" the blood is on, but ths is a problem (and here's the real kicker) if we're defining bodies based on connected living tissue because under this definition Violet and Daisy Hilton have one body. You could trace a path of continuous connected living tissue from the centre of Violet's brain through to Daisy's brain. Under this definition, there is no way to distinguish Daisy's body from Violet's.
I think it might be worth distinguishing the instance of conjoined twins from supernumary limbs or digits. An extra thumb or arm does constitute (I would suggest) part of your body. Additional pieces don't fall outside this category. This is interesting because parasitic twins are like supernumary organs in some respects and are like conjoined twins in others (origin, say). Parasitic twins do not have brains or consciousnesses, so do they count as separate bodies? However, we are here moving into a new way of defining body or self, and so I shall rest with the observation that it seems that connected, genetically identical, living tissue is at the very least not sufficient in defining where your body ends. I will return to this topic again in the part 3.

Finally, I will point out an interesting piece of etymology that will help segue into the next post. Organic, according to the Oxford English Dictionary On-Line, can mean a number of things. The entry most representative of common use seems to be the following:

Having organs, or an organized physical structure; of, relating to, or derived
from a living organism or organisms; having the characteristics of a living
organism (OED).

However, there are other meanings, some of which are obsolete. One of these offers a second way of thinking about what does or does not constitute part of your body (the one advocated in some form or another by both dbp and Leah):

Serving as an instrument or means to an end; instrumental. Obs. (OED)

To Series Index

Photosynthesis Like Colour

I'm in the midst of writing (and grading) finals, so I haven't a lot of free time to spend posting. One of those finals, the one that is currently stressing me, is about Thomson's The Seasons and Erasmus Darwin's Loves of the Plants. This means that I am writing about nature and botanical literature. In the spirit of that, I thought I would type out a passage from Wade Davis' One River, in which talking botany becomes something like aesthetic mysticism. I will warn you that there's a swear (gasp) in it, as well as something that reads, when out of context, like pantheistic psychedalia near the end, but otherwise it's quite fascinating:

As the afternoon wore on, the conversation turned to botany and in particular a new book that made a great fuss about house plants responding to music and human voices. For Tim the very idea was ridiculous.
"Why would a plant give a shit about Mozart?" I remember him saying. "And even if it did, why should that impress us? I mean, they can eat light. Isn't that enough?"
He went on to speak of photosynthesis the way an artist might describe color. He said that at dusk the process is reversed and that plants actually emit small amounts of light. He referred to sap as the green blood of plants, explaining that chlorophyll is structurally almost the same as the pigment of our blood, only the iron in hemoglobin is replaced by magnesium in plants. He spoke of the way plants grow, a seed of grass producing sixty miles of root hairs in a day, six thousand miles over the course of a season; a field of hay exhaling five hundred tons of water into the air each day; a flower pushing its blossom through three inches of pavement; a single catkin of a birch tree producing five million grains of pollen; a tree living for four thousand years. Unlike every other botanist I had known, he was not obsessed with classification. For him Latin names were like koans or lines of verse. He remembered them effortlessly, taking particular delight in their origins. "When you say the names of the plants," he said at one point, "you say the names of the gods."

Photograph © 2010 Christian H

7 Quick Takes (62)

1. I watched some movies last weekend: Splice and Eve and the Fire Horse.

Splice is a Canadian bio-horror movie about a pair of sceintists who make designer organisms for a living. They decide at one point to (illegally) experiment with human DNA and create a human-hybrid named Dren. As Dren grows up, maturing in ways completely unexpected, she becomes harder and harder to keep a secret . . . and harder and harder to manage.

It's a pretty good movie, especially considering that it's Canadian-made; it's creepy, and builds suspense without much violence or gore for most of the movie. But about two-thirds of the way through the movie it gets disturbing, fast. Let's just say that the characters who made Dren have some issues themselves. And let's just say that inter-species sex will always be uncomfortable at best. (And I just got myself some weird visitors from Google again.)

Eve and the Fire Horse is also Canadian-made, about two girls, Eve and Karena, who live with their parents in Vancouver in the 1960s. Their parents have immigrated from China, and Eve (the protagonist) and Karena live in a hodge-podge world of "Chinese superstition" (what an awful name for that religious tradition, by the way), Confucianism, Buddhism, and poorly-understood Catholicism. It's in the style of Big Fish in some ways, with flights of imagination unfolding before your eyes. I suppose you would call it magic realism? Anyway, it deals with racism, family dynamics, guilt and grief, and spiritual life. I might write a proper review of it some day.

2. At church, they played Disney songs for hymns. If this interests you, I wrote out the service at this post.

3. I discovered Gerard Manley Hopkins this week. Some of his poetry was assigned in the class I am a TA for. Hopkins (1844-1889) was a Jesuit priest, and his sonnets are beautiful, rich, and complex; they require a good dictionary, and are worth it. I encourage you to take a look at them.

"The Starlight Night"

Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!

O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!

The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!

Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves'-eyes!

The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!

Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flame!

Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare! --

Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.

Buy then! bid then! -- What? -- Prayer, patience, alms, vows.
Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!

Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow-sallows!

These are indeed the barn; withindoors house

The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse

Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.

4. I also discovered Erasmus Darwin's The Loves of the Plants. Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) was the grandfather of Charles Darwin and a celebrated botanist. His The Loves of the Plants is a poetic re-writing of Linnaeus' famous work in the reproduction of plants. Linnaeus analogized stamens and pistols as men and women having romantic liaisons, and Darwin followed suit in Loves. What Darwin did differently, however, was place agency on the female characters rather than do as Linnaeus did and put agency in the male characters. This work would be very very fruitful for gender studies on a number of levels, but one of the more immediately interesting is that female polyamory shows up time and time again:

Two brother swains, of COLLIN'S gentle name,
The same their features, and their forms the same,

With rival love for fair COLLINIA sigh,

Knit the dark brow, and roll the unsteady eye.

With sweet concern the pitying beauty mourns,

And sooths with smiles the jealous pair by turns.

[later]

With vain desires the pensive ALCEA burns,

And, like sad ELOISA, loves and mourns.

The freckled IRIS owns a fiercer flame,

And three unjealous husbands wed the dame.

An interesting formal note is that Darwin's footnotes, which explain the botany behind the poem, take up more space on the page then the poem itself.

5. I did a lot of picture-taking today, and I am exhausted from the walking. I really wanted to get the autumn colours in the Nitobe Gardens and on Wreck Beach. (Will upload shortly.)

For more 7 Quick Takes, visit the host of the carnival, Jen Fulwiler at Conversion Diary.

7 Quick Takes (XLIX)

1. I spent hardly any time on Blogger for the last week, and my Blogroll exploded. I have so much catching up to do that I won't read every post.

Wait. I usually read every post on my blogroll? No wonder I never get anything done.

2. I just got back from seeing Despicable Me with coworkers. I loved it. I think I enjoyed it more than the kids in the theatres. But do you know what's awkward? When you laugh so hard that your eyes start streaming, and then a feel-good sort of part comes on. Then your eyes are all teared up and you want to yell out, "Seriously, I wasn't crying!"

Back to the movie: You can tell it was designed for 3D (it wasn't 3D in the theatre I saw it) because of scenes with huge and diverse depth-of-field, as well as complicated aerial sequences. As I predicted, movies will now shoe-horn flying in because they need to compete with How to Train Your Dragon and Avatar (which I still haven't seen), movies which set the bar high for how to incorporate three dimensions into the movie well.

3. I finished Sense and Sensibility and moved on to One River.

Sense was good, or at least I thought so, but only if you take it for what it is. It is a comedy of manners written and set in Regency England, written by Jane Austen. So it will have last-minute plot convolutions ("discovery" is the literary term) which resolve the action happily. It's a comedy (in the Northrop Frye sense) and comedies do that pretty much ever time. If you don't like it, you should stop reading comedies. Switch to romances (in the Northrop Frye sense) if you're in for a feel-good book, or tragedies and satires if you're not. So if we take it for granted, from the outset, that this is what will happen, then I think we can enjoy the book for what it is. At least, I could. And there are some hilarious parts and hilarious characters. My only complaint is that I found Elinor's story arc less interesting--and less relevant--than Marianne's, with the exception of the final scene before Edward...well, I won't go any further than that.

One River is a book my aunt lent me some time ago that I need to finish before I go to Vancouver so I can return it. It's another one by Wade Davis, this time concerning coca, the source of cocaine, deep within the Amazon rainforest. As usual, Davis himself, one part author, one part anthropologist, one part botanist, made the journey himself and we the reader benefit from his lucid descriptions, generous mind, and solid research skills. The downside is that it's a tome.

4. Yet again I broke my book-buying moratorium. I got the newest NorthWord--the northern Canadian literary magazine--and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I want to see what the hype is about, and the movie came out, and it sounds pretty good, too. I was burning time at the Peter Pond Mall, and this means I was in Coles with a gift card in my wallet. One thing led to another, and I owned more published goods. Lesson: I need to stop being in bookstores, since this always results in the acquisition of books.

5. My mother returned from here trip to Ontario this week, bringing back with her all of my CDs. This means I have most of my music back. I am happy about this.

6. I have been reading Godless Girl and Unequally Yoked lately, and have been having a few conversations at the latter. As you may or may not know, I had been reading Atheist Revolution for my dose of atheist web-media. This being part of my plan to read widely. Blogs allow all sorts of voices self-publication, and so you can find out about unique perspectives. The trouble was that Atheist Revolution seems to me to be dogmatic and unreasonable. I was looking for atheist bloggers who blogged about atheism but weren't obnoxious when doing so. In these two bloggers I may have found something approaching what I'm looking for. We shall see.

I've yet to find any interesting Buddhist, Mormon, Muslim, or Taoist bloggers. (Not to mention many many other religious traditions that I haven't even begun searching for yet.) Surely there are some and I just haven't found them.

7. I read an article in a Discovery magazine about light that is pretty cool. Light is both waves and a particle, right? If it is a particle (photons), then it is technically matter in a very low-density gas state. This means that if you could slow down the photons and get enough of them together in one place, then you could make light turn into a different state. In this case it would be condensation, and you would get a liquid.

Of course you can't slow light down, because its speed is a constant. Except, oh wait, you can. It's been done. Certain materials slow light. So, in theory, you could make liquid light. And a scientist somewhere intends to do so in the next year or two, possibly revolutionizing the fibre optics business. And making so really nifty stuff.

The 7 Quick Takes blog carnival is hosted by Jennifer Fulwiller. Please visit her for more.

A Second Post on Postmodernism

Part II

(If you have not read Part I, I suggest you do so now.)

I think it's about time we move from the foundations of postmodernism to some of its common but not essential traits, as well as some examples of postmodernist thought.

This radical destabilizing of belief and knowledge must necessarily apply to the postmodernist's own beliefs, and they are not naive enough to overlook this. A postmodern thinker will in general use a specific sort of irony in anything they say; they don't necessarily mean the opposite of what they say, but they are continually aware that whatever they say applies only right now, to this context, from this perspective. Many have given up hoping to find a universal solution, even to the problems posed about postmodernism, and as such give only preliminary answers. Other postmodernists hope to find some grand rhythm behind the confusion postmodernism has so far uncovered, though they think that pattern will be better expressed in terms of dynamics, relationships, and tendencies rather than systems, identities, and facts. Postmodernism doubts the efficacy of things like logic, especially logical language and scientific discourse, which makes postmodern express difficult. Irony as a result plays an important role in at least the expression of postmodern ideas, leading the movement into wordplay, bet-hedging, satire, and deliberate self-parody.

As you may be able to tell from what I've written so far, and from the emphasis on wordplay and bet-hedging, you can guess that another postmodern trait is obscure language. Postmodernism writing and speech tends to be full of neologisms, vague language that sounds hyper-specific, compound nonce words, words heavy with suffixes, and brackets or slashes in the middle of words (such as "in/deforming the text" or "uni(n)formed"). This is partly an attempt to create a new way of discussion that doesn't rely on modernist philosophy, but, as Stephen Katz discusses in his essay, it can also be an attempt to dismantle criticism against postmodernism or hide the fact that you have nothing of interest to say. For instance, you can intimidate opponents by confusing them; they are less likely to call you out if they don't understand what you're saying, because they don't want to sound like an idiot. Instead, they try to pick up the rules of your wordgames and play those games themselves, validating your position in the process. Further, if no one understand what you're saying, they can't tell if you're not saying anything at all. Lastly, it's difficult to come up with a cogent criticism against such an argument because there aren't the standard logical pieces to work with. Even if someone does come up with an argument against what you've said, you can just fire back that binary logic (ie. modernist logic) can't address postmodern ideas, which transcend such historically located ideas. (Cait, Jon, I think you'll recognize certain professors who do this kind of thing. Think the use of "problematize" or "the economics of _______.")

I think this is almost enough for one post, and I hope it gives you a good if basic idea of what postmodernism is. I think I should give you three basic areas in which postmodernism really makes a difference in how we operate.

Identity: postmodernism dismantles the concept of self, like it dismantles many other things. This deserves a post in and of itself, but I'll give you a very brief sketch here of two 'models' of the postmodern self. First there is the Protean self, which changes according to social situation. The idea is that there is no core 'self' with predictable traits that run through a person. Rather, each person's self-concept, behaviour patterns, thought patterns, and even beliefs change as they are in different social circumstances. (Which is why we feel uncomfortable when two of our social groups begin to mingle; this is a manifestation between conflict or competition between two of our self-concepts as we try to wear both at the same time.) We are culturally trained to try to be a consistent self throughout all of our interactions, but this runs counter to what we actually do. Thus we feel guilt about changing our masks when we ought not to feel guilty. Some thinkers suggest that only some people are truly Protean, a sort of vanguard of the new postmodern self, while others suggest that all people are Protean and may only appear otherwise due to social restraints.

The second postmodern position on identity is that there is no self. When Descartes encountered his own thoughts, he reasoned that there must be a thinker, famously stating, cogito ergo sum. Buddhists disagreed with this assessment since before the birth of Christ. Having conducted a similar experiment, they determined not cogito, which means "I think," but rather, "there are thoughts." They then searched for something other than those thoughts that could be having them, and came up with nothing. They concluded that there are thoughts, desires, urges, fears, neuroses, and more, but that there was no 'self' having them: rather, what we think of as the self is simply all of these things bundled together, coming into existence and then disappearing just as quickly. Some postmodernists agree. They say that what we think of as a 'self' is just a bundle of drives, emotions, fears, beliefs, cultural expectations, biases, beliefs, beliefs about beliefs, and so forth, some or many of which are contradictory, jockeying for relative prominence. There is no "core" self, but instead a bunch of different self-components arranging and re-arranging. The fact that many of us experience having a self is simply due to the fact that our culture has since childhood insisted that we have this experience; it, too, is a cultural construct. I should also point out that attributing these self-components to biological/neurological processes might be tempting, but postmodernism would likely shy away from that. Rather, these components are themselves culturally constructed, or if not that at least they can only be understood or experienced through cultural mediation. Which is to say, (almost) everyone experiences lust and sexual arousal--but we can only experience it if we have a cultural category for it, and so how we experience it depends on what culture we are in. Notice that this view is not inconsistent with, but also not dependent on, that of the Protean self.

Science: While one of the two major backlashes against postmodernism is scientism (also called rational-materialism or the cult of reason), there is such a thing as postmodern science. This is the sort of science which is non-dogmatic, recognizing that every discovery is tentative and only legitimate in so far as it works. It has little concern for truth and more concern with whether or not it works in the current situation. Postmodern science values other domains of knowledge and does not try to impose its own discoveries upon others. Further, it often violates what are considered in theory to be rules of the scientific method, while arguing that, in practice, most major advances in science are produced by breaks from the scientific method. There is actually great overlap between the scientism of Lee Smolin, who I wrote on before, and certain postmodern scientists, as they wrestle with what makes science tick. Most importantly, postmodern scientists see the scientific method as a social construct, no more objectively valid than competing constructs; there choice of it is arbitrary, personal, historical, and, since they are aware of this, ironic. My understanding of postmodern scientists is that they don't voice their postmodern opinions too loudly in the department, since that would kill their chances of advancement.

Religion: The second major backlash against postmodernism is traditionalism, with religious fundamentalism being among these (along with the sort of 50s-ideology of consumerism and normative society). However, there is postmodernist religion as well. Buddhism and Hinduism have had postmodern members before there was such a thing as postmodernism, but even some monotheists are getting on board. The idea that our current form of worship is just a way that man has constructed in order to reach God is a postmodernist one, and it should be noted that early postmodernist writers got their ideas from Vicco, who wrote on religion. Many people recognize that their own religious beliefs are a historical 'accident,' meaning that they are only Christian or Muslim or Taoist or Sikh due to where and when they were born, but at the same time they happily and usually without internal conflict participate piously in worship. While these people might not be postmodernists, that is a postmodern attitude. There are of course other more radically postmodernist theologians, but I know less about these and so won't try to discuss them.

Likely the greatest intellectual contribution that postmodernism has made, and likely the one thread underlying all postmodernist thought, is nicely put by Walter Truett Anderson the editor of The Truth About the Truth as, roughly, "Postmodernism has changed our beliefs about belief." Its ideas and mannerisms run through our culture and has taken a strong grip on at least the arts departments in academia, so much so that postmodernism itself has sort of become that culture that we cannot see because we live within it. You might find that a number of things I mentioned are beliefs you hold yourself and you never knew that those beliefs have postmodern origins. I know I found that. While I don't agree with all of postmoderism--I believe, for instance, in an accessible universal reality--I find myself sympathetic to much of it. I will save my criticisms for another time.

If you have any questions, please ask.

The "Real Christian" Question

[This post has nothing to do with probing my identity. Sorry if this is what you were expecting.]

Lately I've been spending a little time at Atheist Revolution, a blog which is devoted to "breaking free from irrational belief and opposing Christian extremism in America." I originally found it at the Blogger's Choice awards, and have been snooping over there silently to see what the atheists are getting up to these days. It's part of my personal fair-reading policy, though it's also an excellent exercise in keeping my temper and not writing stupid things on the Internet.

A common theme at Rev. Atheist's blog (the url, http://www.atheistrev.com/, always makes me think of an atheist reverend) is discussing why people like Pat Robertson are "real Christians." Or, actually, from what I can tell, the theme is discussing that more than discussing why, but I think I can infer the why easily enough by what Vjack (the author) says. You could likely find a representative post in short order by going through the recent archives, but I'll give you a good one here. I encourage you to go and read it now. It's rather short.

Alright, I hope you've read it. In case you missed it, the article was supposed to be ironic. That is, Vjack does not remotely buy the claim that people who claim to be Christian and then do un-Christ-like things are thereby not Christians. Given the sorts of arguments he has likely been in and given his understanding of what Christianity is, I completely understand where he is coming from. On the other hand, I have heard Christians discuss the idea of "real Christians" and "non-Christians who say they're Christians" enough times to know that they are using the term in a valid way. What we have here is a case of equivocation: one term, in this case "real Christian", has two or more meanings, and these are getting confused. I hope to clear this up.

I can imagine the sort of debate Vjack might be in; Vjack will make a claim like, Pat Robertson and George Bush and Pope Urban II all demonstrate that Christians can be dangerous and stupid, and then his Christian opposite will make a claim like, Those are not real Christians. Vjack will then try to parse what his opponent means, and his opponent will 'help' him as follows: Because these people do things that are not in keeping with Christianity, they cannot be Christians. And this sounds an awful lot like, if a Christian sins, they either immediately become non-Christian or reveal that they never were Christian.

You can understand why an atheist would find this notion absurd. Stated like that, I find the idea absurd. An atheist, especially a rational materialist one, will likely understand Christianity as a sociological phenomenon; a Christian is a member of this movement called Christianity, or this group of individuals, organizations, and institutions roughly known as Christendom. Thus it seems kind of silly to claim that there is some sort of moral identity clause in Christian membership that says that one can only be a Christian if one doesn't do such-and-such and always does this-and-that. If you are part of the sociological movement, then you are a Christian. Of course, some behaviours might strongly suggest you aren't actually a "real Christian"--consulting the priestess of Delphi, for instance, or summoning Satan by burning a Bible--but for the most part, if a person is any sort of Christian, they are necessarily a "real Christian."

There remains the slight concern about how a person becomes a member of this sociological phenomenon, which is thorny and, regardless of what anyone might say, intractable. You cannot simply say that anyone who claims to be of a particular religion is of that religion. I can claim to be Taoist however often and vigorously as I like; if I don't believe that there is a Tao ordering the world, if I take pride in pride, if I shun the local natural world and delight in the cosmopolitan centres, if I have no truck with either the Tao Te Ching or the I Ching, if I am determinedly competetive, and if I think meditation, feng shui, and tai chi are for idiots, then I am absolutely not Taoist. Claiming membership is not sufficient. (Which is to say, Ghandi was not Christian or Muslim, regardless of what he might have claimed.) Membership must instead lie in some combination of beliefs and behaviours, but the requirements are a source of contention even among Religious Studies scholars, who presumably would have the best idea about this sort of thing. Like all sociological phenomena, religions have fuzzy borders.

However, if we can grant that all Christians must agree on at least some basic set of beliefs (the existence and divinity of Jesus Christ, the existence of a Holy Spirit, the value if not truth of the Bible, the existence of a potentially eternal soul, salvation acheived through the Crucifixion, the in-born sinfulness of human nature coupled with the inherent goodness of the soul) and that anyone who professes these beliefs and meets some minimum requirement of Christian behaviour (which may be no more than not worshipping other gods), then certainly there are Christians, under the sociological definition just given, who do profoundly un-Christ-like things. Claiming that these people are not "real Christians" seems utterly absurd if you are thinking of "Christian" in the sociological sense required. Of course they're real Christians; they are real people, and they meet all of the criteria required to be a Christian.

If Vjack's hypothetical opponent indeed did mean that these people do not fall under the sociological umbrella of Christianity, then he would be rather wrong. A Religious Studies scholar* must conclude that people like Pat Robertson are Christians, and real ones, at that.

However, I suspect Vjack's hypothetical opponent might have meant something else entirely, and in this case he could be quite right in his claim.

A Christian** will view Christianity as something other than a sociological phenomenon. (An intelligent one will still see that there is a sociological phenomenon called Christianity and that it overlaps rather a bit with the Christianity to which she claims allegiance, but strictly speaking she is not claiming allegiance to the sociological phenomenon.) Christianity to a Christian is more than just a set of beliefs and institutions, but also a relationship to God and a particular outlook. A Christian identifies themselves as such when they have decided to act like Christ, simply put. I suppose it would be more accurate to say that Christians have decided to try to act like Christ and call on the Holy Spirit for help. To a Christian, being a real Christian means genuinely attempting to share Jesus' worldview and trying to emulate Jesus' ethics.

Under this definition, it is unlikely that a member of the Ku Klux Klan could be a real Christian. Why? Because the KKK espouses hate, and Jesus espoused love. It is necessarily impossible that a person proud of hating could be a "real Christian." That's not to say that a person who hates cannot be a Christian. What I'm saying is that person who thinks that in some circumstances it's good to hate other people, as did the KKK, cannot be Christian. That's part of the definition of a Christian. (The Bible does, at least in the NRSV translation, encourage hating sin, but hating the sinner is not such a good thing.)

Of course, the KKK could talk about believing in Christ and salvation and the Word of the Lord; he could go to church and sing hymns; he could vote for the Christian Right and give to charity; he could be part of the temperance movement and teach Sunday School. Under the vast majority of sociological or academic definitions, he would be a Christian, and if we only were looking at this sociological membership, it would be absurd to claim that he was not a "real Christian." But, so long as he believes that it is good to hate black people, then he cannot in truth be a "real Christian," as a real Christian does not believe that it is good to hate. (Of course, we could always posit the existence of his daughter, who does not believe that it is good to hate but nonetheless attends Klan meetings, burns crosses in fronts yards, and if truth be told hates black people regardless of her desire not to. Whether or not she is a real Christian would be a matter of debate were it not for the fact that it isn't any of our business. It's God's business, and His alone.)

Is this sufficiently clear? To the rational-materialist/anthropologist, it makes no sense to distinguish between real Christians and less-than-real Christians; if a person is a Christian at all, then she is a real Christian. To the Christian, however, there is a huge difference between a person is following Christ and one who isn't, and that has little to do with public identification as a Christian.

Of course, the rational materialist atheist might say, "Sure, they think there's a difference, but I know there isn't. How does this make their claim any less absurd?" Put another, it's fair to ask how the Christian's understanding of the term "real Christian" has any relevance to an non-Christian. I do have an answer for that.

Let's go back to the hypothetical debate between our hypothetical blogging atheist and our hypothetical Christian. The atheist has made some arguement which attempts to undermine Christianity's validity by saying that many Christians are loathsome creatures who molest children and slaughter Jewish people and ostracize people for 'sins' that aren't actually wrong. This argument is trying to demonstrate that Christians are hypocrits and, somehow, that Christians are hypocrits will prove that the tenants of Christianity are false. (Which of course is a steaming pile of manure; that's an ad hominem arguement. However, I have heard this arguement before, so we'll run with it.) The Christian wants to demonstrate that most Christians are not hypocrits, so makes the distinction between real and not-real Christians. The atheist scoffs. But ought she? No. Because the Christian actually has a point here. That is, Christianity the sociological phenomenon may be flawed, but Christianity the religion, the Christianity which is neither more nor less than trying your hardest to be like Jesus and calling on the Holy Spirit to help you do so, that Christianity is a different thing altogether from the sociological phenomenon that shares its name. Which is to say that any judgement derived from the sociological phenomenon is invalid when applied to the "walk of like" Christianity.

I'll give you an example. A scientist somewhere does experiment in which he takes a frog and puts in the freezer. Note that, while doing so, he is wearing a lab coat and lab goggles and has his Ph.D.s in Biology and Astrophysics mounted on the wall behind him. He takes the frog out sometime later and thwacks it on the table, demonstrating that it is as hard as a rock. He then carefully thaws the frog, and it's quite fine. It hops around and ribbits and eats some flies and finds a lady-frog and begets itself some tadpoles. The scientist then writes a paper saying that if we freeze our limbs, we will be able to do more dangerous labour because we will be safe from damage. He cites his frozen frog as proof.

This is not "real" science, obviously. If this is all he ever does, then he is not a real scientist. We know this. A real scientist follows the scientific method, and that's not something this guy does. So he's not a real scientist. Except, of course, for the fact that he's receiving grant money to do this, is employed by a department of science in a accredited university, claims to be a scientist, and is perceived to be a scientist by his peers and students. Sociologically speaking, he is a scientist; as far as the scientific method is concerned, he is not. If we tried to claim that science is somehow flawed because this guy is an idiot and makes ridiculous claims in the guise of proven facts, we ourselves would be the ones making ridiculous claims. In fact, even if 99.9% of scientists were like this guy, we'd still be wrong to claim that science itself is faulty. The scientific institutions might be derailed, but that doesn't mean that science is.

In the same way, claiming that people like Klan members demonstrate that there is something wrong with Christianity is only valid if you're talking about Christianity as a particular sociological phenomenon. This is a different Christianity than the one I am claiming to be a part of; there is overlap, of course, and I am certainly a member of the sociological Christianity, too. But what is not flawed is the religion in which I attempt to be Christ-like and, frankly, people who espouse hate are not a part of that religion. What this means is that you may point out as many problems as you like with the Pat-Robertson Christianity; that bothers me not, for he's not part of my Christianity. In this sense, he is not a "real Christian".

To be honest, I don't think it is often my place to judge whether or not a person is really trying to follow Christ. I cannot get into their headspace and so simply cannot know. For this reason you will not often see me making the real/not-real distinction. But I wanted to outline why this distinction could be a legitimate claim on the part of a Christian and how this affects concerns about making generalizations about Christianity as a whole.

[This post is too long, so I'm cutting it off now. I'm actually truncating the "Why this is important part," because there are a lot of anti-religious arguements that fall down when this distinction is brought to light. But I realize blogs are not the best forum for dissertations, so I will stop going on now. Just one more paragraph and then the footnotes.]

Of course, there's also the issue that the debate itself is derailed, here. Whether a person does horrific things doesn't affect whether or not "their" Christianity--even if it's the very specific kind my hypothetical Christian is endorsing--is a good thing. We don't want to abolish science because the Nazis did real science (ie. following the scientific method) when mutilating people in their Holocaust laboratories. But that's a whole new ball-game.

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*I'm not an authoratative Religious Studies scholar; it was my minor in undergrad, is all. I am not claiming to represent the standpoint of such a scholar. Rather, I am saying that from such a standpoint a person would likely draw such a conclusion.
** I suppose it's not quite fair to generalize like this; certainly many Christians will disagree with what I've said. I am being lazy and saying "a Christian" when what I mean is "the sort of hypothetical Christian I'm talking about who could reasonably make the claim that some people professing to be Christians are in fact not real Christians."
***At this point I've voyaged to far into speculation to make any claim that my hypothetical atheist resembles vjack at all. Not that he ever did, more than likely.