Sensible · Marks · of · Ideas

After witnessing a bout of Islamophobia in, of all places, a Stoic forum, it occurred to me that Muslims today occupy a place in popular demonology equivalent to that held by Catholics in Protestant Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From popular broadsheets to Gothic novels like The Monk, Catholics were favourite bogeymen, and the popular view of Catholics had some uncanny similarities to the way Muslims are often perceived now.

1. Catholics abroad are bent on attacking our countries; Catholics at home owe loyalty to the Pope, not the King. Muslim nations are "rogue states" (unless we want to buy oil from them). Muslim immigrants are a fifth column whose loyalty is to mad mullahs rather than our democratic governments.
2. Catholics are always hatching evil plots. Guy Fawkes was the Osama bin-Laden of his day. Muslim clerics are the Jesuits of our day.
3. Catholics are simultaneously ascetic and licentious. Popular fiction of the day (either Protestant or, in the French case, secularist) often featured philandering priests, poking fun (with some justification) at the contradiction between the celibacy preached by the Church and the sensualism of some of its members. Similarly, Muslims are condemned simultaneously for restricting sexual behaviour and indulging in it. Again, Orientalism aside, there is some justification for this, but we should not forget that it is a nigh-on universal phenomenon found amongst Protestants too.
4. Catholics are irrational, superstitious and opposed to science and social progress. In the seventeenth century, science was strongly identified with Protestantism (see Frances Yates' The Rosicrucian Enlightenment) and Catholic dogma was seen as its antithesis. Now it is Islam which is seen as a dark force trying to drag us back to pre-Enlightenment days.

On this last note, here is part of what I posted to the forum. ( Read more... )

Some time back, a student once told me in shocked tones that he had just found out that Gandalf was gay. After a puzzled pause for thought, I replied, "Ah, you mean Sir Ian McKellan is gay, not Gandalf. Gandalf is not a real person, and even if he were, I don't think he has a sexuality of any kind. Sir Ian, on the other hand, is famously gay."

I had a similar moment just now when (thanks to insomnia) I found that George Takei has just married his partner Brad Altman, and my first thought was "Sulu is gay? Well I never!" Yes, I've been a Star Trek fan since the 1960s and didn't know that George Takei is gay. Shame on me. Anyway, may the happy couple live long and prosper.

One of the good things about globalisation is that, in addition to watching a dance troupe from Senegal performing Turkish folk dances on TV last week, I was able to see Jethro Tull in Ankara last night. It was nice to see that Ian Anderson, at sixty, is still too young to die and by no means too old to rock and roll—he still does his leprechaun dance and indeed looked fitter and more energetic than most of my students. Musically, it was a great performance, with a strong bias to the early stuff, with a lot of tracks from This Was, plus, of course, Thick As A Brick and Aqualung. Anderson's patter was also on form:

[Introducing "Dharma for One" ...]
"Back in the days when your parents listened to this kind of stuff, we had things called drum solos."
[Introducing "Bouree" ...]
"Unfortunately it got turned into light cocktail jazz, the kind of Bach you'd hear on a cruise ship."
[Introducing "Thick as a Brick" ...]
"Remember 1972? That was a funny year. Well, of course you don't remember 1972. I suppose some of you might have been an uneasy stirring in the womb then. Anyway, this is what they called ‘progressive rock’, but I think it's just a nice little tune."

I would really like to go to the cinema with Nalan tonght; the problem is which film to go to. Showing at our local are:

1. Indiana Jones, which would be my normal choice except that IMDB is full of reviews - well, rants - by disappointed Indy fans;
2. The Other Boleyn Girl, which looks like it has gorgeous costumes and locations (and Natalie Portman) but has also been panned by the masses at the IMDB;
3. Sex and The City, which we probably wouldn't understand because we haven't seen the TV series, or if we did understand it, would be a spoiler in the event that we watch the TV series.
4. El Cantante - hmm, not sure I like salsa that much
5. The Orphanage, described as a "Beautifully Sad Catholic Fairy Tale". Double hmmm.

From an article on Alternet (of all places!):

The Serb/Albanian conflict offers damn near perfect lab conditions to prove my case that birth rate trumps military prowess these days, because the Serbs always beat the Albanians in battle, yet they’ve lost their homeland, Kosovo. Here again, we can blame Woodrow Wilson and his talk about "rights." In places where tribes hate each other, a tribe that outbreeds its rival will become the majority, even if it can’t fight. So, after generations of skulking at home making babies, letting the Serbs do the fighting, the Albanians finally became the majority in Kosovo and therefore the official "good guys," being oppressed by the official "bad guys," the Serbs. At least that's the way the nave [sic] American Wilsonian types like Clinton saw it. So when the Serbs fought back against an Albanian rebellion in Kosovo, and dared to beat the Albanians, Clinton decided to bomb the Serbs into letting go of Kosovo, the ancient heartland of a Christian nation that had spent its blood holding off the Turks for hundreds of years.

The Kosovo Albanians proved that military skill doesn’t matter, because they tried and failed to conquer Kosovo the old-fashioned way: armed rebellion by the Kosovo Liberation Army. It was a wipeout: local Serb militias, a bunch of tired middle-aged part-timers and cops, crushed the KLA. What happened next is a beautiful illustration of the way losers win these days: the Albanians took the bodies of KLA men who’d been killed in battle, stripped all weapons and ammo from them, and showed them to gullible Western reporters as victims of a Serb “massacre.” It was a massacre, all right, but only because the KLA couldn’t fight worth a damn. Alive and armed, they were a joke; dead and disarmed, they helped win Kosovo by making their side the "victims," which led directly to U.S. military intervention.

This is not just inaccurate, it's positively evil. Let's leave aside the historical fact that Albanians are descendants of Illyrians, who occupied most of the Adriatic region some time in the Iron Age, while the Serbs only turned up in the sixth century—it's still ancient history (well, early medieval history). As Flashman says in one of George Macdonald Fraser's novels, if we'd all stayed put, Ur of the Chaldes would be pretty crowded by now. As I see it, your homeland is wherever you were born, and the idea of a "historical homeland" (or "ancient heartland"), whether it's for Serbs or Albanians or, for that matter, Arabs or Jews, is a dangerous idea.

What amazes me is that someone is still trying to portray the Serbs as victims. OK, they've had some rough times throughout history, largely as a result of being batted about between the Austrian and Ottoman Empires, but that's a bit like saying the Nazis were victims because of the Treaty of Versailles. Yes, I'm sure Serbs spent a lot of blood holding off the Turks a couple of centuries ago, but that doesn't win them any brownie points now, and it's certainly no excuse for all the "ethnic cleansing", massacres, torture and mass rape they've been up to in more recent times. Neither is there any excuse for denying it by blaming fast-breeding Muslims.

I just had a look at an online survey, which contained the following question:

What is your primary racial/ethnic background?

• White/European American
• Black/African American
• East Asian/East Asian American
• South Asian/South Asian American
• Latino/Hispanic American
• Native/American Indian
• Middle Eastern/Arab American
• Other/Can't remember (specify below).

"Can't remember?" That implies that once upon a time you knew where your roots were, but somehow you just forgot. Now I can just about understand that with a family as complicated as my wife's, which is Turkish/Kosovo Albanian/Bosnian/Kurdish (with possibly a dash of Armenian). But given that the choices there correspond pretty closely to physical types, it's decidedly odd. I'm trying to imagine someone looking in the mirror, and saying "Hmmm, so does my olive skin mean I'm Hispanic American or Arab American? Never could remember that one. Oh hang on, a lot of people from the South of Spain or Italy look a bit like me, so might that make me a European American? Damn my bad memory!"

It's a bit late to be commenting on Saturday's Eurovision Song Contest, but I was busy all day yesterday grading student participation on online forums, helping my wife write an aesthetics exam and fixing my printer. So I'll just say that

• as usual, the winning entry sucked:
• I was surprised that the Greek Britney-clone didn't win, even though she didn't suck as hard as the Russians;
• the Turkish entry by Mor ve Ötesi was excellent;
• they should have a special "Spirit of Eurovision" prize, which should have gone to those Baltic pirates;
• just like last year, the former Yugoslav countries all voted for each other, which makes you wonder why they bothered splitting up Yugoslavia in the first place—as the poet Atilla the Stockbroker said, a lot of politicians should have "Tito was right" branded on their foreheads.

The contest must have imprinted itself on my subconscious, since I've just woken up after a dream in which our very own rodneyorpheus was performing at Eurovision and blowing everyone away with multilingual techno-metal. The only thing that wasn't quite right was his hair, which made him look like one of the Goth kids from South Park.

Dear me, yet another academic has published a book complaining about how the Internet is making us stupid. I haven't had a chance to read Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, but there's a summary at the Boston Globe: "8 reasons why this is the dumbest generation". It seems to be the usual stuff: young people are stupid because they can't spell, do maths or remember the name of the President, and what is making them stupid is progressive education and rock'n'roll TV soaps LSD the interwebs. Now there may be a grain of truth in Bauerlein's book (I'll let you know if our library buys it) but from the synopsis, it looks like he is simply taking a few of the skills prized by his generation, noting that the new generation don't seem to possess them to the same extent, and concluding that young people are "dumb". (By the way, is that really the sort of vocabulary one expects from an English professor?) I could use the same methodology to show that the previous generation is not that bright.

1. Computer Illiteracy

In a sample of 50 white, college-educated males* between the ages of 40 and 60, only two respondents were able to correctly explain the difference between the regular expressions "?" and "*", and none were able to read "#!/" as "hash bang slash". Similarly, in a study conducted among members of the Faculty of Humanities at Emory University, 77% were unaware that Java was not only a type of coffee or an island in Indonesia but was also a computer language, 58% thought that C++ was a grade somewhere between C+ and B-, and 18% failed to complete the questionnaire because they could not navigate to the web page.

2. Poor cell-phone skills

Most people over the age of thirty either cannot use SMS at all, or type so slowly one would think they did not have reversible thumbs.

3. Impoverished vocabulary

Large numbers of middle-aged and older people are completely unaware of words like "anime", "machinima" or "mashup".

4. Orthographical fixedness

Many older people are unable to decode even the simplest of letter-transformations, such as "teh" for "the". They also tend to be poor at phonics: in the aforementioned Emory University survey, less than half of the tenured faculty were able to read "ur" as "you're", though TAs did much better here.

5. Lack of critical thinking

Many older people are so uncritical of what they read that they send money to people claiming to be trying to smuggle funds out of Nigeria.

6. Inability to multi-task

Psychologists at the Stanford Research Institute recently conducted an experiment to measure the multi-tasking abilities of subjects aged over fifty from a variety of ethnic and educational backgrounds. In the first phase of the experiment, subjects were asked to write an essay on well-known subject; the answers were then graded by Freshman English instructors to provide a standard metric. In the second phase, a similar essay task was given, but this time it had to be performed while holding a conversation on a cell phone, chatting using IM and listening to indie rock: performance dropped dramatically.

7. Cultural sterility

Walk into any retirement community in America and you will be hard-pressed to find anyone who can name three characters from Battlestar Galactica. You might do better with Star Trek, but only TOS.

8. Ignorance of local geography

To be fair, older people often have an impressive knowledge of national and even world geography, but they are alarmingly ignorant of the geography of their home towns. In a series of interviews conducted on a typical suburban street, CNBC found that most older people were unable to give directions to well-known locations like the best park for skateboarding or a cool mall to hang in.

 

* All statistics are invented.

Reading through the latest essays in my "virtual worlds" course, I expected to find, despite my repeated warnings, the usual crop of Internet michés. "Michés?" I hear you ask. A miché is a conceptual blend of "myth" and "cliché": something that is untrue but is unthinkingly accepted because it is so quotable. It's a kind of condensed urban legend. "Anyone can access any information they need through the Internet," is a favourite miché among my students because it is something they can put in the introduction to almost any essay on the Internet without thinking about it; of course if they did think about it for even a second, they would recognise it as a blatant falsehood. Even though the amount of information stored on-line is now so great that if it were written down on parchment by medieval monks it would take them a million years just to do the illuminations for e-bay, there is still some information that you cannot access through the Internet. For example, once in a while a particularly innovative but not particularly ethical student hits on the idea of plagiarising from a book that is not available on-line. And then I assume that there are some details about my personal life which are unknown even to Google (at least I hope so, given that my wife has finally started using that Macbook we bought last year). But even if we ignore this little hyperbole, where does the "anyone" come from? I've reminded the class several times that most people do not have Internet access, and they have even read a chapter of Snowcrash containing the following pithy description of the state of technology in the near future: "In the real world—planet Earth, Reality—there are somewhere between six and ten billion people. At any given time, most of them are making mud bricks or field-stripping their AK47s. Perhaps a billion of them have enough money to own a computer." Even so, when it comes to writing an essay, students have an uncanny ability to forget everything they have learnt in class and fall back on a kind of mental template for essay-writing.

Another miché is "Paedophiles use the Internet for grooming their victims by pretending to be teenagers." If I set an essay about the advantages and disadvantages of any online service, this will come up. All legends, they say, have a grain of truth, and this is no exception: there certainly have been cases where something like this has happened. But not only is it hardly typical of adult-teen online relationships (adults also talk to teenagers about things like World of Warcraft, Xena or Perl hacking), it is probably not even typical of those involving sexual predation; apparently the majority of adults wanting to find teenagers for sex present themselves as adults because teenagers—or at least the kind of teenagers they are looking for—are more flattered by the attention of adults than by the advances of their fellow teens. Then of course there is a blatant contradiction in the sentence itself. A paedophile is an adult who is sexually attracted to prepubescent children, so he would be wasting his time chatting to teenagers.

On the other hand, some of the essays I received actually managed to challenge some assumptions about online behaviour. For example, I had assumed, along with the rest of the class, that people generally constructed avatars that were much better-looking than their real-life selves: "Awesome You", as David Wong puts it. In some online environments, like World of Warcraft or Guild Wars, it's pretty hard not to do this, since all the characters are so damned good-looking: you can't role-play an ugly elf, and even the half-orcs have a certain panache. But where users have a bit more freedom, it looks like they don't beautify themselves as much you'd expect, or at least they don't think that they do. In a poll conducted by Zogby International for Second life, people were asked if and how they would alter their avatar's appearance to make it different from themselves. Only 15% said they would want to create a radically different avatar; 18% said that they would enhance their masculine or feminine characteristics, while 44% said they would want their avatar to look pretty much like them (the rest were not sure). On the other hand, if that's true, how come there are so few podgy avatars in Second Life, and why is everyone so tall and youthful? Perhaps the mid-points of the sliders are misplaced.

People do the most extraordinary things for world peace, not least because the most obvious things to do to attain this goal—like getting rid of national governments—are rather too difficult for the average well-intentioned citizen. In my time, I have marched, chanted slogans and mantras, attended music festivals ("Yeah, but when we did it we actually stood for something. I mean, remember Woodstock, Sharon?"), marched, stood up, sat down, got down, marched some more, chained a friend to a gate (Oh hang on, that was a BDSM convention an environmental protest), marched across the Pennines ... I think I might even, so help me God, have been in a drum circle. The latest unusual act for peace, and my favourite so far, took place in Pune in India, where Yogiraj Siddhanath has constructed a thirty-inch shivalingam out of solidified mercury. However much conservative Hindus try to gloss over the fact, a shivalingam (or shivling, for short) is basically a stylised penis, and mercury is well known in alchemical literature as a symbol of semen. But according to Siddhanath, the shivalingam is also a symbol of "earth peace".

Now I like this symbolic reversal. Penises, over the ages, have acquired a rather bad reputation, not least because of some men's habit of trying to stick them where they aren't welcome. Specifically, they have been associated with weapons, with whimsical epithets like "gun" or "pork sword"; in Tantrik literature the penis is even referred to as a "missile", which evokes a rather strange mental image ("Sorry dear, crashed on lift-off"). So it's nice to see this organ being symbolically rehabilitated.

[Thanks to Shivanath and Lal for putting me on to this one.]

From my favourite source of statistics, the Daily Telegraph, comes the shocking headline "Muslims 'to outnumber traditional churchgoers'." This comes in the wake of the Bishop of Rochester's assertion that there are now non-Muslim no-go areas (take a pause to figure out the double negative). Put the two together, and we face a scenario where large parts of of Britain (say, Yorkshire) are, like Mecca, ruled by Shariah and closed to unbelievers.

But of course, this is the Telegraph, which would perhaps like its readers to be shocked by this prospect, but doesn't really have any evidence for it. What we have is a prediction that by 2020, the number of people going to Mosques will be 683,000, while attendance at Catholic services will have fallen to 679,000. Leaving aside the fact that both of these figures are very low compared to the total population of sixty million (only 38% of whom believe in a god of any kind), since when did "regular churchgoers" equal "regular Catholic churchgoers"? I knew that membership of the Church of England was going down when I left Britain in 1991, but has it been completely wiped out my absence (perhaps by some Papist/Muslim plot)? In any case, it's a bit sneaky to compare figures for a whole religion with figures for a denomination (and one which I assume is still a minority). We might as well get alarmed that there are more Buddhists than Plymouth Brethren.

Following links to related stories reassured me that the Anglican Church does still exist, since Rowan Williams, the wonderfully Satanic-looking Archbishop of Canterbury, has raised hackles by saying that the British legal system should take account of some aspects of Islamic law. Again, this sounds scary, conjuring up a situation where if you steal from Tescos you get a fine and/or an ASBO, but if you steal from the local Pakistani supermarket, you get your hand chopped off. But of course, this isn't what he said at all; what he said was that Islamic courts should have the power to declare people married or divorced. No stonings, no beheadings…in fact not much more than Christian and Jewish religious organisations are already allowed to do.

I still disagree with Dr. Williams, not because I am worried about Britain going down the Malaysian route, but because no religion—Muslim, Christian, Jedi or whatever—should be involved in the legal process. Except perhaps Thelema. That would simplify the law wonderfully, since there would be only one law on the statue books—"Do what thou Wilt shall be the whole of the Law"—with one amendment—"Love is the Law, Love under Will."