On the Book of Jonah

Repost of a comment I made after the High Holy Days *last* year, for reference *this* year.

slacktivist posted on the Book of Jonah and its interpretation, especially in Christianity. In the ensuing long discussion, I wrote:

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IMHO Michael Cule's rendition of the Book of Jonah isn't a parody, it's a faithful re-telling: Jonah itself is, originally, a parody or satire, in fact *humor*, one of the longest pieces of humor in the Bible. And it is humor of a very, very Jewish sort: try reading it aloud with a strong Yiddish accent and the cadence of a standup comic in the Catskills.

Look at the beginning. The other (older, more conventional) prophetic books always start with the prophet being called by G-d, and the prophet goes, "who, me? I am not worthy!" The prophet is always reluctant.

Jonah isn't just reluctant, he *runs away*. Jonah doesn't just disagree with G-d a little bit, he sulks and pouts. He predicts the future, all right, and it pisses him off -- he wants to be a fearful Jeremiah, calling destruction down on his enemies, but he knows G-d is too merciful for that. What a bummer!

And then there's the bit with the gourd, and Jonah's self-centered dramatics -- "The gourd died! Kill me now, I've had enough!" And the very ending, which trails off most peculiarly -- IMHO this was a knee-slapper of a joke 2500 years ago, but the reference has been lost so all we have is an inexplicable punch line, ba-dump ching! tip your waitress, I'll be here all week.

The thing about Jewish humor is that it's ha-ha-only-serious. Jacob gets the name Israel because he fights G-d to a draw: why do you think chutzpah is a Yiddish word? And then there's this classic story from the Talmud, which has been summarized as:
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Rabbi Eliezar was arguing with three other Rabbis. He said, "if I'm right, the heavens will open up and a voice proclaim it is so!" And the heavens opened up, and a voice intoned, "Rabbi Eliezar is right."

*beat*

"So," said the other Rabbis, "that makes it two to three."
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Now, this is both a joke, *and* an important principle of Talmudic interpretation. The simplistic, literalist readings a lot of you grew up on are incredibly thin gruel, by comparison. *This* is how you can read the Bible for a lifetime, for generations, without getting bored or coming to the end: by arguing with each other and with G-d, by not taking any reading as the final word, by not expecting it to be simple.

A couple pages of comments ago, someone pointed out that for Jews all of Jonah is very familiar, because the book is read in its entirety during day of Yom Kippur when everyone is in services. You might think this undercuts my theory that Jonah is humor, because Yom Kippur is the most solemn of Holy Days. But IMHO it is also characteristically Jewish to not focus on one emotion to the exclusion of all others: over the 27 hours of Yom Kippur the services are fearful and solemn and inward, but there are also stretches of anger, and grief, and some of the most beautiful music in the Jewish liturgy. The humor of Jonah is a slight relief, a lightening for an hour before we head into the final hours of the long fast, which includes the Yitzkor Service memorializing the dead.

False witness

Fred at slacktivist is really hitting it out of the park with False Witnesses, about lie- and rumor-mongering by supposed Real True Christians. I wrote:

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I can't really figure out how it *works*, that people so tolerant of false witness for "a good cause" (this is also a leitmotiv of one of the books I'm currently reading, The Devil in Dover: An Insider's Story of Dogma v. Darwin in Small-town America, by Lauri Lebo) can have so many serious discussions about whether it's OK to lie to save a life.

I mean, the point of such discussions in Sunday school, etc., is to get people used to the idea of consistent truth-telling as a highest goal, right? So why doesn't it take?

Do the discussions, sermons, etc., always involve dramatic and unlikely scenarios, instead of daily life? Or is it that Lying for Jesus is just too accepted for those in the culture to even notice it's happening?

The War of South Carolina Aggression

More from comments at Slacktivist, in a discussion that touched on the fact that Southerns are a disproportionate number of US military:

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The miliarism behind what James McPherson has called The War of Southern Aggression -- or, even more specifically, The War of South Carolina Aggression -- has roots much older and deeper than that War or even the slave system.

I always start with Albion's Seed and the British roots of American culture.

In England, the military is a traditional career for the *second* son -- because in the central & southern counties of the English "heartland", inheritance is by primogeniture and the first son gets the lot. The original English settlers in Virginia and points South were from this part of England, and though they themselves were mostly younger sons they reproduced the inheritance structures they were familiar with. So in addition to being a culture that tolerated a lot of individual violence, they also tended to have a lot of men interested in joining the military for lack of other inheritance.

In contrast, the Puritan settlers of New England came from East Anglia, where inheritance was traditionally partible. Every son got *something* and was expected to make that into more (by trade, etc.), so there was no automatic pipeline into military careers. East Anglian culture also stressed restraint of individual violence, turning people away from the idea that fighting was the way to solve problems.

The later groups of settlers -- Quakers from the North Midlands who settled in the Delaware Valley and were even more anti-military than New Englanders, immigrants from the English-Scottish Border who moved to the American backcountry and were even more violence-tolerant than the Virginian Cavaliers -- only emphasized the original division between the more military South and less military North.

Polytheism and What Would Jesus Do?

There's a rather free-form discussion at Slactivist, to which I contributed:

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Other people are addressing Greek/Roman polytheism, I'll talk about a couple others.

I recently asked some e-friends of Chinese background whether they thought most Chinese are atheists or not.

One said, "My parents seem to regard the gods as if they were a mildly corrupt, easily incensed government." This is IMHO very similar to ancient Greek/Roman religion: you worship the gods because it is prudent to do so. Pascal's Wager looks similar, but I don't think it is: for Pascal, you only find out if you won or lost the bet after you're dead. For these polytheistic religions, the bad consequences show up in the here and now: crop failures, bank failures, bad luck, bad water.

But my Chinese friends agreed that in general the theist/atheist distinction does not apply.

So maybe lots of Chinese don't have a deity they direct worship towards, and maybe they don't seem to carry out religious rituals or celebrate religious festivals all that often, but they live out their spirituality, if that makes any sense. What you might call "folk" beliefs are central to our lives in a way very similar to the way religious beliefs direct many Westerners' lives.

In contrast, a Hindu friend notes that

during my short stint teaching Religious Instruction, one of the main things I was told to emphasize to the students is that Hindus do NOT worship different gods. There is only One God, the Lord. He is in everything and in everyone and so his form is in thousands - Shiva, Rama, Lakshmi, Buddha, Jesus, etc. Which is why it's one of the few religions that doesn't preach converting, since my God and your God are the same 'person' (just with a different face).

So we give him different human characteristics, and different physical forms, to help in our own feeble understanding, but never one Ultimate form, because he is basically everything and nothing.

Each Hindu "god" is a Way, a path or discipline, much more than a separate god as in the usual Western understanding of polytheism. And this is despite the fact that the Greek gods and many Hindu gods are historically related -- the Hindu system has become something much wider and deeper over time, and Indra is no longer "really just" Zeus.

To dismiss either Chinese-style or Hindu-style polytheism out of hand is incredibly ethnocentric, given that between them they cover about half of all humans. But it's also incredibly *narrow*, because both types of polytheism acknowledge that not all people have the same minds and the same needs. "What Would Jesus Do?" implies that there is only one way to be a good human being -- it may be more helpful for more people to be able to have a variety of Best People to pattern ourselves after, so that some can say "What Would Ganesh Do?" and others "What Would Krisha Do?" without us having to say that only one of these can be *right*.

As an aside, this IMHO is one reason Catholicism is much more schism-resistant than Protestantism (see: Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1915). The panoply of saints gives Catholics more heroes, more life-patterns to work with.

And then, of course, there's What Would Spock Do?

Macho Sue and reconstructing the hero

In the discussion at slactivist on the Appeasement Meme, I wrote:

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It is simply not possible that these people are sincere

I must respectfully disagree, Fred.

IMHO they *are* sincere. It's not so much that they are ignorant of history, etc., as that they are filtering everything through a narrative. They are telling themselves anot story, and I think our own Praline has most accurately nailed it: Macho Sue:

The essential story structure of a Macho Sue tends to revolve around untouchable pride. If love means never having to say you're sorry, being Macho Sue means the whole of reality loves you. Typically, Macho Sue's storyline follows a certain trajectory: he begins by acting egregiously, picking or provoking fights and causing problems. However much the ensuing difficulties can be laid at his door, Macho Sue is not about to apologise, in any way. So the problems continue - only to be salvaged by some immense reversals that give the impression that he was right all along. The man he insulted turns out, suddenly, to be a bad guy. The woman who dislikes him falls into his strong arms when he solves a problem that is not the same problem he caused for her. People change their personalities, storylines shift and flip like a mechanical maze popping up new paths and lowering old gates in order to keep Macho Sue from ever, ever having to backtrack. As John Wayne says, 'Never say sorry - it's a sign of weakness.'

Your crazy uncle/co-worker/President is telling himself a Macho Sue story, he's invoking Munich because he's re-imagined Winston Churchill as the Macho Sue star of WWII, the unshakable fighter who was right all along.

IMHO the parallels to "Left Behind" are exact. It doesn't matter to their fans that LaHaye & Jenkins have re-written or tossed out great swaths of the Bible -- "Left Behind" is a more satisfying, simple narrative for them, so when they do go to the Bible they will read it through the filter of "Left Behind".

I'm starting to think that what we need isn't logic, history, thought, or knowledge; what we need is better *stories*.

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Fred picked that up and asked, Is there a third possibility, a way to get through to people using Macho Sue narratives? A great discussion is taking place, with some wonderful writing from Praline (Kit Whitfield) and others. My comment so far:

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unless you can somehow create epiphanies on demand

We call that "story-telling". As Praline said, If people want heroes, give them better ones.

We need *better stories* -- not just in blogs, but books and movies and TV shows. And I think there's a specific need for better stories about men:

In the same way that Bush challenges people's manhood, B Clinton and Obama challenge people's principles - and men are supposed to be principled, so it can form an alternative template of manhood.

I've seen some tentative speculation that "Iron Man" could be the start of such a template, and that may have something to do with the film's huge and immediate popularity. I'm not sure yet, myself.

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Over at her own blog, Praline writes about separating manhood from violence. I commented:

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I think the problem is subtractive masculinity. If manhood is defined as "being a good person and male" it's easy to have role models like Atticus Finch. But if manhood is a virtue that women do not display, then only strength and violence will do. At the extreme, every other virtue becomes effete, unmanly, because it does not show you are a *man*.

I think the idea that men and women are complementary, "made to match" and balance each other, very easily slides over into subtractive masculinity.

Atheism, Religion, Statistics

Left at Slacktivist under The Guinness Book, about the writings & advocacy of Os Guinness, an evangelical who is ticked at the political machinations of the Religious Right. Anyway, we wandered off to discuss "The New Atheists", among other topics.

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Froborr [who asked about statistics and a marble-picking game]:

The flaw is in trusting the person who told them there's a white marble in there.

Here's another example. Introductory statistics courses always have a Chapter One quiz where they ask, "if you toss a fair coin 99 times and get heads each time, what are the chances that the next toss will be heads?" And you're supposed to answer, "one-half."

But in life outside the classroom, the chances are that *the person who told you it was a fair coin is lying*, and you should keep one hand on your wallet as you back away.

In both the coin case and the marble case, the premise-behind-the-premise is, who do you trust to tell you the parameters of the situation?

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As far as I'm concerned, Christopher Hitchens is a successful one-man demonstration that atheists can be perfect jerks, too. So far, the score-card looks to me like:

Atheists: can be kind decent people or total douchebags.

Theists: can be kind decent people or total douchebags.

Society-level atheism: can be associated with war, genocide, oppression, etc.

Society-level theism: can be associated with war, genocide, oppression, etc.

hmm. Not very helpful, is it?

The only difference there *might* be in the "but do you get a better society?" sweepstakes is that the evil of rationalistic atheist regimes may have a shorter half-life than theistic evil. So for instance, the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge were just as high on the atroc-o-meter as a particularly horrible religious war, but they didn't keep going for generations. Atheist atrocities are easier to *stop* -- it's easier to get over a bad idea than a bad faith.

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Praline:

I should have said, "atheist atrocities run out of steam more easily." The Stalinist, Maoist, and Khmer Rouge atrocities were not stopped by external forces -- but they were all dependent on a particular individual, and when he was gone they withered away. As you say, the problem is authoritarianism and fanaticism, and atheism doesn't provide the structure that will keep it going into the next generation.

I consider both Kosovo and Rwanda atrocities of religious societies, not atheist ones. Yes, the Rwandan genocide was not along religious lines -- but religion did no good, either. Indeed, for me Rwanda was what pretty much destroyed any inclination to believe that Christianity might be good for a society, because Rwanda is not only Christian, but pretty freshly-Christian, without centuries of cultural bad habits intertwined with its Christianity.

And yet, when push came most directly to shove, Christianity did Rwanda as a society no *good*. If something that justifies an enormous investment of human energy, time & caring by saying "it's a moral system" is not able to get most people to act morally in the most blatant sort of moral crisis, how can it truly be a moral system?

Gay-hatin' and Subtractive Masculinity

Fred Clark at Slacktivist has been asked to put in another post on the sources and support of the Gay-hatin' Gospel.. My comments got to be a bit long:

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I'm surprised, Fred, because I think you're overlooking the point, again.

A big part of the issue is gender roles. And that means that a big part of the issue is *women*. Even though (as several people have pointed out) 99% of the vitriol & repugnance is directed against gay men specifically and anal sex even more specifically, I think the thing which is being talked about without being named is *women*.

Same-sex marriage is in fact a threat to traditional heterosexual marriage, because SSM is obviously between equals. Anal sex is a deep threat to masculinity because it involves a man -- a full human being, just like the default "me" of patriarchal society -- being penetrated. And if human beings (=men) can be penetrated and not scorned, then maybe the people who are traditionally penetrated (=women) ... are human beings.

The idea that women might be human beings threatens J. Matt Barber profoundly, because the view of masculinity that has developed over the past century (I'm not sure about earlier) is subtractive. That is, a Man is defined as someone who is Not A Woman. This worked OK when men could do a lot of things women can't. But if women can be smart, then men must be stupid; if women can be moral, men must be evil; if women love beauty, men must love ugliness. You can see this all too clearly in the link Brel found in Part.5: creativity itself (long a male prerogative) has become suspect.

And at the end, Barber and his ilk are faced with the horrific consequences of their subtractive masculinity: if women are human beings, men ... cease to exist. He's reacting like he's facing an existential threat because he *is* facing one: he's standing what used to be a glorious castle but which turned out to be a pile of sand, slipping away into the tide. His idea of masculinity is part of his *self*, and eroding the one is eroding the other.
(continued on next rock)

One of the best illustrations of how subtractive masculinity works is in a old, not all that good science fiction story, "The Last Man" (written by Wallace West in 1929, anthologized in The Pocket Book of Science Fiction). My copy seems to have disappeared (or crumbled into dust), but IIRC the narrator talks about how women's energy and ambition couldn't be suppressed forever, and they moved into one field after another until all that was left for men to consider important were sports and war. And then war became unthinkable, and women got into sports, and then all the men just died out, useless (our hero is a throwback in a zoo).

Subtractive masculinity isn't confined to the evangelical Right in America, by any means. After the 2004 election, religion journalist Jeff Sharlet admitted what he'd been reluctant to say before: that homophobia is the true unifying factor for strongly religious Americans of every stripe. The stresses currently in the Anglican Communion over homosexuality are largely coming from churches in the Southern Hemisphere, based in societies that don't have all that much in common with the US Bible Belt. But they *do* still face stresses from changing gender roles, just as traditional Muslim societies do, too.

Amanda has a post up at Pandagon about the anthology Choice and about how too many men react:

abuse and control is less an obsession for a lot of men and more the natural result of thinking of women as functional objects in your life. Like if she starts behaving in ways that are inconvenient (like getting pregnant or trying to prevent pregnancy), then it’s appropriate to treat her like a malfunctioning appliance. ...

... Anything outside of functional use is considered irrelevant at best, an infringement on functionality at worst. Not that all men are like this, by any stretch, but this way of viewing women as objects is endemic and honest men will admit that even if they resist it, they get messages that it’s an appropriate way to view women.

But with a subtractive model of masculinity, men *have* to think this way -- because if women are not objects, then there's no humanity left for men.

Truth and Certainty

There's a long, fascinating discussion going on at Slacktivist's that I don't have time to sum up right now, but I wanted to put up a comment at Gay-hatin' Gospel Theory No. 4: The Exegetical Panic Defense:

I don't know if Exegetical Panic explains why homosexuality gets so much *more* panic than most of the many other things that contradict a simplistic reading of the Bible. But I do think that the risk for a fundamentalist of Exegetical Panic is going up all the time, so it becomes a constant source of stress.

A lot of this is due IMO to the greatest philosophical achievement of 20th-century science: realizing that the quest for capital-T Truth means you have to give up capital-C Certainty. It took a while, but I'd say most scientists are now content with the idea that there are things that are in principle uncertain, that one way to learn is to get proved wrong, and that your ideas about the world are going to change. That's why scientists can face situations like oops, we seem to have misplaced 80% of the universe -- AGAIN without getting terribly bent out of shape about it -- not that it wouldn't be nice to have some answers we all agree about, but it's not a horrible ontological trauma.

But I think I think living in a world like this *is* an trauma for a lot of people. Perhaps 20 years ago I remember reading an article in Biblical Archaeology Review, in which the author was expressing irritation at historical-critical analysis of the Bible, because "what kind of real knowledge changes every generation?" Well, that would be scientific knowledge, actually, where even if new knowledge doesn't sweep the old away, it changes it so it becomes gradually unrecognizable.

For a lot of people the result will be Future Shock. I think this is what a lot of the "culture wars" are about: people who've been trained not to expect the shock of the new, being hit with it wave by wave.

Conservation and Conservatism

Amanda posted about her recent visit with her family in Lubbock and the mind-set of modern conservatism -- as show in wedding planning, women doing housework while men sit around, and not believing in global warming. One of my comments was:

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What is the connection between conservatism and short-term thinking?

Ethyl, I think you’ve got it backwards: young-Earth theology is attractive to conservatives because they’re already short-term thinkers, not the other way around.

I think the core of conservatism isn’t a philosophy, but an emotional attitude: a preference for the status quo. Don’t rock the boat, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, don’t change horses in mid-stream, the old ways are the good ways, give me that old-time religion.

But I don’t see why that attitude goes with short-term thinking, rather than the kind of long-term thinking traditionally called “prudence”. How did prudence become unconservative?

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One commenter, Richard, also noted:

the corporate mentality that puts short term thoughts and profits over every other consideration in the business world. THAT mentality permeates all the discussions of global warming: “Why, if we do what you say, we would have to invest all this money in processes, equipment, whatever and our profits would go down.” It’s the penny-wise pound foolish attitude that causes firms to not invest in new equipment or preventive maintenance until it is too late.

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Meanwhile, slacktivist had a discussion of the price evangelicalism pays for its bargain with the Republican Party. One commenter (Scott, our pet Libertarian not-quite-troll) deprecated environmentalism by saying

the green tree does have red roots after all

I replied:

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Piffle. The root of the green tree is essentially *conservative*, but in an emotional rather than political sense. That is, it's the desire to keep things from changing -- that's why "conservation" and "conservative" are so similar linguistically, though they're the opposite in current American politics.

Speaking as a scientist and an historian of science who saw this develop over the last several decades, scientific concern about global warming is deeply conservative. It taps into many of the basic conservative feelings: fear that any change may be catastrophe, love of things the way they are, valuing the old above the new. But none of these feelings are attached to human power relationships, which by definition makes them apolitical.