Balafon

I have been studying Ancient Greek for many years now, but my skillz seem to have reached an epic tipping point recently.

In fact, I can now report that I have discovered a hidden text in the manuscripts of the Synoptic Gospels that will surely shake contemporary politics to its foundations. What follows is my translation of the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 6 3/4, Verse 2.18:

And Jesus answered, saying, “Sell all you have and give your money to a government bureaucrat who claims he will use it wisely to help the poor and needy, and not waste it giving massive loans to corrupt businesses who will fritter it away, nor buy lots and lots of guns and give them away to Mexican drug cartels, no sirree.”

That is all.

The past couple of days have seen two unfortunate events, and two very curious reactions.

The events:

1. The Vancouver Canucks hockey team lost the Stanley Cup to the Boston Bruins in the seventh game of the final.
2. Some members of the crowd of people gathered in downtown Vancouver to watch the game engaged in violence and destruction of property afterwards.

The curious reactions (there were obviously many different reactions, but these are the ones that I find curious):

1. One person whose internet output I read uttered a vicious and vulgar condemnation of one particular member of the Canucks team. Another person said that the referees of the game allowed the Bruins’ style of skirting the edges of the permissible level of violence¹ in the sport to disrupt the Canucks’ “artistic” style of play and thus cost the team the final game.
2. The latter person also opined that the riots were the fault of the city government, who failed to provide enough police officers to quell the violence.

Both of these people are ministers of the Christian Church, one quite prominent on the national level.

I think the common element that I find deplorable about these reactions is that they utterly dehumanize the actors in question by depriving them of their status as independent moral agents with their own free will.

The first reaction is typical blameshifting to anyone other than one’s favourite, in a situation of cognitive dissonance where somone (in this case a sports team) whom you believe is the best at what they do is demonstrated to fail in this regard. The fault cannot be in the team as a whole, but must be either that of one renegade element, or else malevolent external forces.

The proof that this reaction in the case of the Canucks’ game is invalid is simple: the Canucks won three games of the series in the face of all the internal and external forces that were present in the 7th game, thus showing that it was entirely possible for them to win the series. The fact that they didn’t is simply a reflection of the fact that they failed to adapt their tactics or maintain their collective motivation: they didn’t play well enough to win. Last time I checked, a hockey game is not scored on “artistic merit”, but by putting pucks in the net. If you are so wedded to your style of play that you cannot change it when it obviously doesn’t work, then you don’t deserve to win.

To assign blame elsewhere actually does the Canucks a disservice. How does anyone become better at a given task? By first being worse. By honestly analyzing one’s failures and adapting one’s tactics appropriately. Claiming that the Canucks played as well as possible in this series is to deny them the chance to improve in the future.

The second reaction is, I think, similarly born of cognitive dissonance. Canucks fans/citizens of Vancouver obviously cannot be the type of people who would trash a downtown over a sporting event, so the fault must evidently lie in the government and the police.

This is far more serious than shifting the blame from your hockey team. It serves to completely deprive the rioters of their status as moral agents, and deprives them of both the opportunity and the responsibility to improve themselves. It’s analogous to saying a woman’s rape was inevitable because she didn’t wear the right clothes.

The blame for the riots rests entirely with those persons who chose of their own free will to commit violence, and no one else.

Saying “we need more police” is the answer of tyrants and oppressors. If you truly believe that state-sponsored violence is the best solution to private violence, then why not just go the whole way and use automatic weapons on the crowd instead of tear gas? I guarantee that this would quell the riot in a very short time, and act as a considerable deterrent to future rioters.

I think that the final and largest reaction to the riots is the correct one. Don’t deprive the rioters of their chance to improve themselves by ignoring their moral responsibility in favour of blaming the police. Don’t call on the government to “crack down” on public celebrations in the city. Rather, do as thousands of Vancouverites did yesterday. Show that you can get in the news by doing good and not evil. Go out and provide a praiseworthy counter-example by getting your own hands dirty cleaning up the streets, repairing the damage, and showing the world how to lose graciously, take personal responsibility, and show your support for your gallant defeated by acting nobly and building up, rather than tearing down, your community and society.

The grammar of a language consists of rules that govern how you arrange the morphemes, words, sentences, paragraphs, etc. that make up your utterances.

That said, why would I be hostile (and I am, if you’ve ever talked about it with me) to the idea that some utterances are “better” or more “correct” than others?

The problem is that “language” is a fuzzy concept. Language varies enormously between different communities, social groups, and all the gallimaufrey of human interaction.

Why do people persist in attributing value to one particular variety of language over another? As a tool of social dominance and status signalling. As Geoff Pullum notes in his excellent talk on the subject, the written expression of a particular form of English spoken in London a couple hundred years ago has become associated with, not to put too fine a point on it, being successful in business and politics. Therefore, using this one dialect, which is called Standard Formal English, merely out of a myriad of others in the continuum that is mutually-intelligible English, signals that you are a member of the upper class, that you had the priviledge and leisure in your childhood to become fluent in it.

Note that this post is written in pure SFE. I don’t wish to discourage the use of Standard Formal English, as it serves a useful purpose in facilitating communication around the world.

What I do intend to discourage is the notion that using other varieties of English is “wrong”, “bad” or “broken”. This is as ludicrous as the idea that wearing jeans and t-shirts is “wrong”. There are situations in which wearing jeans would be inappropriate (a funeral), just as there are times when wearing a formal suit would be inappropriate (the beach). Likewise, there are times when Standard English is appropriate (a job interview), and times when it doesn’t matter one bit (a text message to a friend).

To think otherwise is, in a nutshell, a morally reprehensible prejudice. I had a conversation the other day with someone who had believed all their life that “Low” German was a “funny”, primitive pidgin, thus consigning millions of people to the status of subhumans. I had some trouble convicing them that the “Low” and “High” in varieties of German referse to geography, not any qualitative judgement, and that the only reason that the “High” variety has the higher prestige is that it happened to be the variety that Luther spoke when he translated the Bible.

I will teach my daughter that Formal Standard English is a useful life skill, but I would never dream of telling her that she is a lesser sort of person if she uses abbreviations in a text message, any more than I would insist that she wear a formal business suit to the beach.

There are quite a few people who have given up Facebook for Lent this year. I believe that I’ve done them one better. Tired of the oppressive toll in stress, human contact, and spiritual well-being that the omnipresence of technology in our world today brings, I have decided to give up all technology for Lent.

Things are going pretty well. I really feel a revitalized connection to the natural world and the human condition.

I was originally going to camp out in the shrubbery next to my townhouse — houses are made from trees cruelly ripped apart by steel blades and pierced by iron nails, after all — when I realized that even the shrubbery was a product of genetic engineering and was kept trimmed by power tools. Luckily there is a nice chunk of wild space in the middle of my city, so I was able to find a nice clump of bushes that keeps out the worst of the wind. Since most of the city is below sea level, protected by dykes constructed by petroleum-gulping machines, I chose the marshiest spot I could, in order to simulate the experience of living without the dykes. The skin on my feet will no doubt grow back after Easter.

I used to wear glasses, but having had laser eye surgery a couple of years ago I simulate the experience of giving up my glasses by tying a strip of clear plastic around my head to make everything look fuzzy. It’s a bit harder avoiding the use of my front teeth — they are made of a ceramic material similar to the tiles on the space shuttle — but I find that I can manage to skin and eat the rabbits and birds I catch bare-handed with the teeth on the sides of my mouth. (I know that rabbits don’t have enough fat to make a complete diet, but it’s only for a few more weeks, and I can stand to lose a bit of weight, anyway.)

I was conflicted about gathering leaves and branches to make a bit of a shelter, but considering that many animals make nests for themselves, I felt that I would be OK collecting a bit of natural material to keep warm at night. I can’t think of any animals that wear clothing, though, so I have discarded the rabbit pelts I’ve been collecting. I’ve had some near-misses with the unfortunately techno-philic Royal Canadian Mounted Police, no doubt incited by ignorant townspeople who have no appreciation for the free and easy lifestyle that is possible when you give up the trappings of modernity. It’s been around the freezing point for the past couple of weeks anyway, so any offending personal attributes have become practically invisible from a distance.

I haven’t quite achieved the level of authentic human contact I was aiming at in giving up the alienating interference of technological media — for some reason people tend to edge away slowly when I approach them. My wife got tired of carrying our toddler back and forth to see me — using a car would be completely artificial, after all — and the little one tends to … let loose … when she gets a chill. Luckily I was able to hold her over a nearby ditch the last time it happened. But for now I am enjoying the human warmth and geniune connection of my community of one.

I thought work might have been a problem, since I am a computer programmer, but things have worked out. I can make it cross-country to the office in a couple of hours — luckily it’s the Equinox right now, so I just work sunrise-to-sunset. I can’t go into the office, of course, or even the parking lot, so I have hired a teenager to sit at my computer and yell out the window whatever is on my screen. Then I yell back from the bushes what I want to change. Works pretty well, although for some reason I have caught a bit of a cold despite my natural lifestyle, so I’m getting a little hoarse. Anti-technological phlegm has a nice green colour, much more pleasing than the regular old stuff.

I can’t remember any Bible verses or anything from the prayerbook, and my teeth are chattering too much to really pray or anything, but I think that the spiritual side of this experience is starting to get going. Last night even though there was a bit of a frost I started feeling this nice warm toasty feeling, and I felt like I was making a voyage out into the heavens because the moon kept getting larger and larger, especially after I ate those mushrooms that I’d been saving.

Anyway, I think that this experience is a hugely valuable one. I’m really feeling in touch with my humanness — although I haven’t been able to feel my fingers and toes for the last week — and my ultimate place in the universe. I would recommend this type of discipline to all who wish to undergo a meaningful discipline for Lent.

That poor misguided dear Suzanne McCarthy has got her bloomers in a twist again, insisting that the girls should be able to play in the treehouse. Luckily we have the likes of Michael Heiser and John Hobbins to slap her down. Hobbins writes:

Said ["complementarian", ptui] churches motivate their position with care and acumen, as anyone familiar with the debate knows.

The slave-owners of the antebellum south likewise motivated their position “with care and acumen”, basing their position — that persons of African descent were fit only to slaves — on the carefully exegeted Biblical principle of the curse on Ham’s children.

The sin of “complementarians” is the greater in that they condemn not merely a significant fraction of the human race, but precisely one half, to a lifetime of slavery.

Absolute literal slavery. For one human being to be subordinate to another in every aspect of behavior and dependent upon his merest whim for her status before God Almighty is to be worse than a slave.

There are some issues where it is NOT all right to agree to disagree.

To argue that those men who abuse their wives are misusing their God-given authority and do not represent the ideal is like arguing that Stalin and Mao do not represent the ideal socialist. That may be true, but it is irrelevant. By their fruit you shall know them, and those who espouse and transmit an ideology are responsible for the fruits of their teaching.

Hobbins makes much of the Christian-sounding ideal of “tolerating” complementarians. Just like we need to tolerate slavers. And the priests of Huitzilopochtli‘s quaint custom of disencardiacizing a couple dozen peons before breakfast.

He also makes much of the desire of complementarians to follow “tradition”. Much like the church before William Wilberforce followed tradition.

There are no words vile enough to express my disgust.