Historians have said many of McLeroy's assertions are dubious and have worried about politicization of such classroom staples as the Revolutionary War and the civil rights movement.By all means, disagree with his assertions, but, um, "such classroom staples as the Revolutionary War and the civil rights movement" were explicitly political events. Oh, I suppose it is easier to consign them to "history," to denude them of context and controversy, to elide all disagreement on their meaning and ramifications, to pin their pretty wings to the velvet and cover them in glass, but it is also false. Look, I do not think that the United States was founded on "biblical principles," just one of the above-mentioned dubious assertions--I think "biblical principles" is an almost entirely hollow phrase, signifying very little. At the same time, yahoos like McLeroy do us a favor if they at least force us to look backwards with a moderately critical eye, to consider that wars, revolutions, and social movements aren't the passage of a breeze over grass, but are real, palpable, and catastrophic, even if we ultimately deem the end results to be salutory.
-WaPo
I too find it offensive to listen to white people making barely cryptoracist arguments about the Great Society causing the "destruction of the black family", but at the same time, the civil rights movement did not consist solely of a few marches and sit-ins culminating in a big speech at the Lincoln Memorial. That's a false telling. The civil rights era was a wrenching, traumatic time, full of death and conflict, and although I do not think that the disintegration of Jim Crow in the south is the proximate cause of epidemic black single parenthood, I do think that the question of how urban industrialization provided an economic foundation and context for civic struggle and understanding how subsequent de-industrialization has undercut some of those earlier gains is not only a legitimate topic of inquiry, but a necessary one.
See, shit is fucked, and although it sort of sucks that some kids are being taught incorrect reasons for shit being fucked, having their minds exposed to the fact of the shit-fuckery makes them a lot more open to unofficial counternarratives than panegyrical tales of the American Cincinnatus and Honest Abe and a sanctified and deracinated MLK.
82 comments:
Be that as it may, those who would teach incorrect reasons for shit being fucked are, perplexedly, against teaching the sorts of critical thinking skills that might expose their fuckery. Whoda thunk it?
hmmm. . .so they're criticizing the official government Word. . .well, at least it's a start. [insert slippery slope argument here]
YAY SLIPPERY SLOPE
"Critical thinking skills."
What are those and how do you teach them?
Ryerson's got a firm grasp on critical unthinking, so maybe we use Ryerson as the anti-example?
YOUR NOT DEALING WITH MORANS HERE
I'M AGAINST WHATEVER THIS IS, OR WHATEVER. AND STUFF
I suppose that's to water down critical thinking to simply a reaction, but it is what it is, you know?
NO IT'S NOT
Amen
Critical thinking skills, man. You know, like literacy?
Your general point is taken, IOZ, but if you really think that the average American high schooler's reaction to sitting through years of warmed-over SBC propaganda will be to reach for a copy of A People's History of the United States, you have hilariously overestimated The Yoof.
I think what's meant by teaching critical thinking is the presentation of a subject from multiple perspectives and narratives, and then teaching students to examine the multiple narratives for truth and falsehood, while encouraging students to decide for themselves.
Substituting one official narrative for another does not a critical thinking student make, regardless of whether it is more truthful. Even A People's History can be used for ideological indoctrination, depending on how it's taught.
yes, but if the students are being taught a narrative contra the dominant narrative, they will have a choice to make, no? they will have to reconcile why ma, pa, and teacher jim taught them one thing and the nytimes is telling them another. it ain't perfect, but it beats lincoln hagiography every single time.
so basically these puckermouth "historians" say classroom discussions of political events shouldn't be dialectical, i.e. imply conflict (otherwise known as "politics"). There's only one possible narrative to be extracted from recorded events. And IOZ saith, Nope. History should be critical. All sorts of possibilities are captured by the documentary record and we need to consider them in juxtaposition to each other or we don't understand how we got here from there.
Sure. But since I'm all about beating dead horses, I have no idea why some of y'all are so resistant to the idea that the Hebrew Bible was written with the same critical consciousness. I mean, it's not like people were ignorant of the dialectic back then. A good case can be made that actual Biblical principles are the opposite of "biblical principles" in the same way history is actually the opposite of "history." It's annoying to me that secular types are as unwilling to hear it as religious ones. This obviously does matter for the same reason it matters whether we juxtapose Civil War shit-fuckery against Honest-Abe sanctimonies.
i been readin this blawg for many a moon now, & NOW you tell us you don't think the US was founded on biblical principles?
i been readin' it wrong.
yes, but if the students are being taught a narrative contra the dominant narrative, they will have a choice to make, no? they will have to reconcile why ma, pa, and teacher jim taught them one thing and the nytimes is telling them another.
This isn't an "alternative" to the dominant narrative, Nony. It's a replacement for the dominant narrative. It's the new dominant narrative.
As for the New York Times - you are just ADORABLE! Even New Yorkers don't read the fucking New York Times! You think kids are going to start questioning classroom indoctrination based on the power of mighty, omnipresent and everlasting institution, Print Journalism?
Also, the notion that teaching kids southern-fried propaganda will set up some kind of Clash of Ideas with classic hagiographic representations of American history is laughable. The constant complaint by right-wingers is that American history is not hagiographic enough, that it occasionally slips and lets a wart or a wrinkle or a whiff of genocide through, that there are still a few darkies in the ranks who are not assumed to be vicious savages in need of extermination. The McLeroys of the world do not want to overturn the official narrative; they want to take it to its logical extreme.
they will have to reconcile why ma, pa, and teacher jim taught them one thing and the nytimes is telling them another
What Chris M. said. Still, a lot depends on the teachers: even a bible-infused narrative of American history could be used in a critical manner and left open for debate if taught as such. But this doesn't have a chance of happening because teachers are forced to live in fear of standardized testing results, which arguably poses a greater threat to the advancement of critical thought than the curriculum.
There is no such thing as truth - so I'm with ya on that - but I have to note that a white American proposing that black people woulda-been-a-ok if we only hadn't a given them medicare is one of the more monstrous historical revisions I've come across. At least on par with denying the holocaust - its like denying that there were Nazis.
the NY Times is the worst.
Moloch-Agonistes: First, Aristotle did not write the Hebrew Bible. Second, not all Athenian Greeks were Aristotle. Third, people use Teh Dialectic selectively. You might have a look at Paul Veyne's Did the Greeks Believe Their Myths?.
To say that "the Hebrew Bible was written with the same critical consciousness" (the same as what? Thomas Friedman?) is, to put it gently, an overgeneralization.
Probably outta my league here, but...
M-A, I don't remember who was disputing the notion that the Bible is dialectic and not to be read literally, or whatever, but the original post arguably was written with that guy Wallis's own perspective in mind. For Wallis, the New Testament is literally prescriptive, and if that's the case, than all the chuckles IOZ had at the guy's expense arise from contradictions in the guy's own reading. Right? Wallis said, the Bible says we should love and pray for our enemies, so let's! And IOZ pointed out, the Bible also says that all the Lord's enemies will be tossed in a subterranean oven for all eternity, and that the Lord enjoins his disciples to abandon their families---are we supposed to do that too? Of course Wallis wants us to ignore those parts or at least understand them as allegory, otherwise his use of the Bible as behavioral authority would appear bogus.
In other words: To understand one part of the text as literally injunctive and then understand another as an instance of complex dialectic or allegory seems inconsistent at best. Not that that's what you're suggesting we do, but it seems to be, at minimum, what Wallis' statement requires. Thus IOZ's original point, so far as I understand it, stands: the guy's an idiot, and the instructions found in the New Testament, taken literally, are insane and contradictory.
Wait... So things mean something?
"To say that "the Hebrew Bible was written with the same critical consciousness" (the same as what? Thomas Friedman?) is, to put it gently, an overgeneralization."
Well, I think saying that anything written by thousands of people over the course of thousands of years is ANYTHING is certainly an over-generalization, isn't it?
Aristotle and Friedman-- fluffy snark. Junior Year is coming soon! Selective use of dialectic-- no doubt. But the question is its centrality as a strategy for exposition and legal analysis in this particular work of literature. Since you haven't made any actual claims it's hard to defend the point; then again, impossible to attack it.
The multiple authors issue is more interesting. But that's really the nub: the "bible" as we have it expresses many points of view whose reaction against each other was embedded in the current edition with intentionality that can actually be discerned. Whether it's a corporate author who composed it that way or an editor who simply preserved it, the point and counterpoint is a basic structural feature, and latter-day continuations and translations continued in the same vein.
For the record, though, we have no idea over how long and by how many people the text was composed. The oldest surviving copies are from about two centuries after Aristotle (the only known fragment from before then is a very brief prayer). The Creation, Flood and Tower of Babel episodes closely parallel a Babylonian anthology of local myths from about 290 B.C.
Re Wallis-- I'm not a fan. But he's making a tactical suggestion: Passive aggressiveness rather than open hostility? My point is simply that the bit about bringing the sword, not peace is in a specific rhetorical genre.
Dude, if students are "encouraged to think for themselves" they aint going to be coming up with the narrative you want them to come up with. While I personally think that your anti-straight-white-male narrative (you said you "basically hate us all" if I remember correctly) is horseshit it's a whole lot better horseshit than what students will "come up with" (read: be sold by the moneyed interests) if "encouraged" to do so on their own. So is the standard "everything's okay now!" narrative. The last thing you want is to deliver every young tabula rasa to the plutocracy. Let the stepford teachers continue to hold the reigns I say.
mnuez
I argued, contra Murray Rothbard, that enlightenment thinkers had relatively little influence and the Bible more over the participants in the American rebellion here. The American rebels bought into all sorts of wacky conspiracy theories, engaged in behavior far worse than the dregs of today's Teat Partiers and hardly did a better job than the English government of respecting the people's liberties once in power. Few people actually question their merits these days though.
I haven't read "A People's History" but I didn't know anyone thought it was anything other than ideological indoctrination. Whenever the label "people's" gets applied to anything, hold your nose for some bullshit. If the full phrase is "People's Democratic Republic", run like hell.
The greatest gains in black socioeconomic status were due to industrialization and migration north to urban areas, but they preceded the civil rights movement. The Moynihan Report came out in 1965, which doesn't sound like part of the era of de-industrialization but I can't say for sure. It's hard to tell from this image, but it looks like industrial employment was near its peak then. It was really de-agriculturization that was going on.
I'm a little late to this thread so I'll just parse two words here from the original article:
1) political - to hew to one of a limited set of orthodox interpretations
2) politicize - to add an unorthodox set of interpretations to the mix
TGGP, judging a book by its title? Really?
In any case, it was another view. That's all. And Zinn didn't write objectively. I'm not sure he was convinced that anyone could. I will say that I think he wrote fairly, and brought out a number of things that the official story to that point and since has ignored.
But hey, you know, that "We the People" bullshit also stinks to high heaven, so you may have a point.
Okay, so the passage cited by IOZ turns out to be a perfect example of dialectical usage-- and how translation flattens the allusive richness of an original literary work. The Greek word translated as 'sword' ("machaira," actually a one-bladed dagger) has a wide variety of meanings in famous Classical and Hellenistic texts. The author of Matthew almost certainly meant several of them to be understood simultaneously.
One alternative definition is sacrificial, as in the Iliad, in Aristophanes, Euripides and the Septuagint's version of the Binding of Isaac story. So its appearance in the Gospel creates a theologically resonant pun that foreshadows a basic point-counterpoint between Christianity and Hebrew religion. By wielding the machaira on himself Jesus will soon do away with blood sacrifice.
A similar kind of contrastive usage appears in the Gospel of John: Peter defends Jesus with a machaira and cuts off the ear of high priest Caiaphus's servant, this time parodying the sacrificial ritual.
The Homeric corpus used machaira for the tool with which a surgeon cuts an arrow from a wounded man. The same knife can kill or heal, a paradox central to sacrificial religions in general. This definition resonates in an obvious dialectical way with the motif of the exorcists (kathartai) presented earlier in Matthew 10. It's surely not accidental that shortly after enjoining his disciples to "heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils, Jesus wields the Iliad's scalpel.
Finally in the Republic Plato very famously used machaira in the sense of a 'pruning hook' (Jowett) to illustrate that the purpose of the soul is excellence (arete) just as the purpose of a pruning hook is cutting vines. That the Platonic analogue of the soul appears in this passage of Matthew by accident seems not-so-compelling. And once again the expected meaning has been turned on its head. Did Jesus bring the tool of a degraded priesthood or a tool representing spiritual perfection?
Summing up, religious texts in the biblical tradition were produced by small groups of overeducated scribes, lawyers and rhetoricians for whom every key word had a thick patina of allusion. In Hebrew, unvoweled text can mean two opposite things depending on pronunciation. The authors or editors used this syntactic peculiarity to very strategic effect as a way of emphasizing the degree of interpretive latitude offered by matters of law and doctrine. "Speak not to Israel of Good or Evil," God tells Laban. A reader makes her own decisions each time she opens the book.
In Greek translations and continuations like the Septuagint and the Gospels the same phenomenon has to be simulated. This is done either by substituting a word that meant the opposite of the original Hebrew or by leveraging the varied usages of the Greek literary corpus to refer simultaneously to a thing and its opposite. An apparent contradiction is almost always a sign that you need to look at the passage more closely for other layers of meaning. This is in fact a standing midrashic strategy, visible in the original text as well as the Talmud.
I find the Bible discussions tiresome. Look: the Bible is a hodgepodge of contradictory statements and crazy gibberish; believers read whatever they want to read into it, because there's really no other way to relate to such a text if you insist on taking it seriously. Every Christian cherrypicks the Bible to construct the God and the moral system they want to believe in: liberals sweep Crazy Jesus and most of the Old Testament under the rug, conservatives ignore pretty much anything anyone says about money, dispensationalists have more or less pulled the rapture out a handful of queasily-stretched verses in First Thessalonians and their collective ass.
The extent to which I care about any of this is merely the extent to which these beliefs end up affecting the outside world. So I'm perfectly happy for Lefty Christian X to believe that Jesus of Nazareth was a big friendly hippie who opposed war, liked gays and promoted marijuana decriminalization, even if these beliefs are not in fact supported by a bundle of two-thousand-year-old religious manuscripts nobody actually reads anyway.
Yeah, seriously. Who reads that shit still?
(@ original post)
Truth!
If you squint your eyes and stare into the sun just rising across the desert on the spring solstice, the dozens of authors with different agendas, spread over centuries, dance by the fire, holding hands and chanting contrasting paradoxical allusions to everything and nothing, but especially cultures and practices that preceded them by several millenia, as specifically described here. see! amazing.
Yeah, who reads that stuff?
Different eras? Please. In a manuscript literary culture time functions differently. The Iliad and The Republic are not in the library of whatever Grecophone rhetors wrote the Gospels? They weren't aware of different usages? They didn't use them with intentionality?
Your certainty is weird and telling. If you don't take texts and their rhetoric seriously you're in the dark about the mechanics of historical change. Why people fought (and fight)so hard over meanings. There is a social substrate, but the form that conflict took (and takes) is bitter struggle over the meaning of words.
It is important that the authors of these books, by their own admission, were interested in deliberately provoking such conflict. No surprise that partisans of a secular society are contemptuous of biblical rhetoric, but it's a self-defeating strategy. You just end up confused about why others continue to take it seriously.
M-A: what's your point? The examples you link to are not examples of people studying the text of the Bible, they're examples of people who choose to justify existing ideologies and prejudices based on a handful of cherrypicked scriptures. This notion that secular atheists can make any kind of meaningful point with the religious world by waving the Bible around and saying "See, it doesn't say what you think it says!" is laughably naive. None of these people give a shit what their holy texts say. They could claim to be following the divinely-inspired word of a bubblegum wrapper and would still arrive at conclusions like "God hates fags" and "kill the darkies," because that's what they want to do.
In a manuscript literary culture time functions differently.
Fer realz? That is some deep-in-it bullshit. I have shakespeare on my shelf, but that doesn't transform my sentence on cultural ennui into wry commentary on Hamlet. And it certainly doesn't because someone 2 thousand years after I'm dead fucking guesses so.
I'm up on my derrida, yo, but ain't nothin gonna convince me that insisting on contradictory, paradoxical, ultimately inscrutable meanings within each passage is somehow an improvement over "thats some whacky randomly cobbled together shit about make-believe"
You project like a tent-revivalist on peyote, and while I begrudge no man his scam, I've seen your act before.
Sure. And no one's going to convince this McLeroy person that America was not founded on "biblical principles." But teaching kids to read history critically produces... kids who think critically. Who take the act of interpretation seriously. Who engage with the world in a way that handles ambiguity without falling into anxious aggression.
Like it or not, these two thousand year old self-contradictory religious texts continue to play a significant role in our transnational society. Just as critical thinking about U.S. history is an end in itself (despite the fact that history is the product of conflict and politics therefore inherently ambiguous), I think it's valuable to make a good faith effort to find meaning in this other much-cited body of ambiguous documents. At any rate, while it's not your personal obligation to do so I find the absolute certainty that the whole enterprise is useless kind of interesting.
I think I'm worn out on earnesty for the moment.
Without wishing to get too closely involved in this no-doubt fascinating debate, I feel I must point out that la Rana apparently doesn't understand what "a manuscript literary culture" even means... Hint: we do not currently live in a manuscript culture, and we haven't since the days of Gutenberg. Oh, and if you have a Shakespeare manuscript on your shelf, you might want to put it on eBay or something.
I am reminded of Doug Stanhope's observation that "97% of Americans will give you a strong opinion on a subject they know absolutely nothing about."
Hey, M-A, I just wanna put in, I didn't find any of this tiresome, and I actually learned something. So, thanks.
M-A,
Do you happen to be a Johnnie? Just wondering...en arche 'en 'o logos...
I am certain because the enterprise is self-negating. I made my good faith effort to find meaning in this much-cited body of ambiguous documents. I concluded that paradoxical contradictory crap that doesn't help us understand anything about the world except how insane human beings are, is useful for two things: as an instrument of power ("continue to play a significant role in our transnational society"), and as filler in a classroom. What the importance of interpretation, or taking stuff seriously, or being earnest, has to do with insisting that the bible means paradoxical contradictory and ultimately inscrutable things, when that is precisely the reason I find the enteprise nothing more than intellectual masturbation, is beyond me.
In all seriousness, I interpret language for a living. It is transitory, and can only be understood within defined parameters. When language is capable of two meanings within that parameter, meaning is that which is imposed by the interpreter. Asking what the bible means is inherently personal, rhetorical. You are just asking yourself.
Dunc - a meaningful distinction is one worth making. Try to explain your point and you'll find yourself up a creek.
Look, obviously I don't mind projecting like a tent revivalist. Not especially scary, and potentially interesting. For that matter I don't think you're actually the second coming of Tupac Shakur, yo.
As for Shakespeare, Bible Codes and whatnot, look, this is an argument about rhetoric. People used to care a lot about it and no longer do. Certainly your right to be faddish. But it's not the attitude people took at the time these texts were written. When Lucretius uses "contagion" to mean the interaction of body and soul, and when Augustine gets mad at one of his Arian opponents for deploying it in just that positive sense, it is clear that they really cared about definitions. Why not try to understand the way they thought rather than projecting our own standards on them?
Anyway, I was ultimately just curious to see the reaction.
perfect timing.
Try to explain your point and you'll find yourself up a creek.
I'm not making a point, I'm just being a dick. It's Friday afternoon. As I believe the kids say nowadays - BLAWG!
Am I in the wrong place or something?
These humble Texans simply want the right to name their own Garry Wills or Howard Zinn in this brave new era of personal spelling, personal math, and now personal history. Personal history, where I Come Out a Winner! Where we cheer personal heroes (heroes that are heroes mostly cuz they Look Like Me!), hiss at villains (that don't), and weep for martyrs.
The old-school Christian-American Dream hagiography was justly pilloried by progressive historians, but they replaced the focus instead instead of rejecting the practice. Now sanctimonious, tendentious anti-racism and one-world egalitarianism hold the holy places at the civic altar formerly occupied by sanctimonious, tendentious anti-Communism and American exceptionalism. Blasphemy, heresy, and perversion are redefined and punished as before; blacklisting, witchhunts, and Proper Speech codes predominate as before; just with a new set of loathesomely pious cultural mandarins codifying and enforcing the political-moral code.
McLeroy just wants his own small piece of the American pie.
Dunc - as one who has pursued those ends relentlessly for more or less the duration of my life, condolences! the bums lost!
When language is capable of two meanings within that parameter, meaning is that which is imposed by the interpreter.
Sure. But your stance applies to any historical analysis at all. If your objective is to explain ambiguous phenomena that emerge from conflict in a way that no one can possibly dispute, sure it's pointless. But critical thinking doesn't worry about coming up with the "correct" meaning, it tries to understand the structural relationship between different interpretations.
And as it happens, the Hebrew Bible employs several specific strategies to emphasize ambiguity rather than clarity--two meanings instead of one. If you succeed in getting a text like that adopted as Scripture, it's a recipe for endless legal disputation, and in the process, historical change. That strikes me as a pretty interesting finding, but of course no one is obligated to agree.
You'll probably kick my virtual ass, la Rana, and Lord knows I'm no lawyer--but it seems you are, of some sort. Isn't that profession engaged in adjudicating the meaning of a rather recondite and sometimes self-contradictory body of texts, written across centuries by a multitude of authors? Aren't competing interpretations of these texts voiced in every Supreme Court decision and at every trial? The variety of those interpretations would seem to imply the texts in question are at least somewhat ambiguous, and yet those readings have a very real affect on people and their behavior. And so do readings of the Bible: a pastor's or a Pope's interpretation of a passage certainly affects more than just himself, though, I admit, it does lack an armed enforcement mechanism.
I think you are misreading me (or at least thats my interpretation). I said nearly the opposite of "coming up with a correct meaning." I agree that understanding language is like historical analysis, only less complicated.
The parameters through which we determine meaning can be set by asking the words a question (does this give the federal agency this power? Does god love me?) and/or by limiting the range of potential meanings (e.g. originalism). The "answer" is not "correct," but rather better than the alternatives, given the parameters. The discovery is not truth, but utility: we need to know the answer because something else is contingent upon the meaning. Was the action unlawful? How should I lead my life? (there is a sense of "right and wrong" in this mode of thinking, but thats too philosophical for a friday afternoon, as Dunc reminds)
I completely reject the idea that "truth" exists in the abstract. And you appear to concede that the bible cannot be understood to say one thing, as well as the necessary correlary that this renders any meaning your own creation. If your point is just that the rhetorical exercise has value - in understanding that meaning is inherently transitory and that no account of history is "true" - then I don't know what the hell we are arguing about.
An astute observation George, and probably why I react so viscerally to M-A's proposals (though now I don't even know what we are arguing about). As I said above, the difference is that legal analysis comes with certain parameters, and the ranking of potential answers has utility. I don't think either is true with biblical interpretation. Whatever meaning one extracts from the bible is inherently a personal choice, and whatever choice is urged on others is inherently political. I mean, we can argue all day long about whether or not the bible proscribes homosexuality, but that debate will never tell us anything about homosexuality. How could it?
Is that what we are talking about? homosexuality? I forgot...at any rate, I am for it...
Huh? No, what the fuck are you... I'm not..
You mean, coitus?
Yes, hurrah for lazy Fridays.
I think we may have a substantive disagreement. Basically what I'm proposing is that while the Hebrew Bible fails in many instances to say one thing only, this does not render those passages ipso facto meaningless. Important terms are given a particular range of meanings, some of which are antithetical or contrastive. They require choice by the reader, but not an infinite number of possible choices.
This expository strategy depends in many cases on the syntax of Semitic languages, making the text essentially untranslatable. It can't even be given vowels, since by fixing a single meaning you're destroying the basic design. Copies of the Quran were supposedly vocalized beginning in the early eighth century specifically to deal with the problem of multiple meanings and interpretive schism. But while Jewish grammarians ultimately followed suit in the effort to preserve a "canonical reading", following ancient tradition the text of the Torah is to this day always read from a manuscript scroll with no vowels on it.
The idea of meaning as variable but finite has interesting legal implications, which come out clearly for example in the medieval disputation between Nachmanides and Pablo Christiani. This didn't turn out to be about facts-- was Jesus the Messiah?-- but rather about the permissible limits of ambiguity--can one religion commit simultaneously to positive law, as in the prescriptive parts of the Talmud, and "literary" indeterminacy, as in its midrashic passages. Pablo said that all meaning must be reduced to propositions, Nachmanides stubbornly tried to defend his parallel modalities of religious truth.
There do in fact seem to have been lots of people who read the bible in this way during late antiquity, as well as others (like the authors of the Gospels) who were apparently aware of it if not using the same strategy themselves. It implies a particular answer to such questions as "does God love me," or "why do bad things happen to innocents," to wit, "only God could possibly know for sure but it's important to move forward with a hypothesis."
As for your criterion of utility, I think the proposal meets that test both in an absolute sense and a relative one. It is good practice to confront things like indeterminacy of causation and interpretive choice. On the other hand, if the Bible is constructed in this way we can make more sense of the conflicts that grew up in its vicinity over time. What remains is to actually make the argument, but that depends on a knowledge of Hebrew. I guess I was trying more to draw out people's reactions to its basic form, which is identical to the original point about critical thinking and the high school history curriculum. The strong reactions to one and not the other were pretty interesting to me.
Inkberrow, as if you don't push personal history.
Hey, you know what? Zinn didn't act with appropriate outrage at the military base shootings, too. How about you weep over that?
Oh, and blah blah blah, they don't deserve history if they can't control the means of producing information.
Wow... this thread made my day... MA - when I was in grad school people were often surprised that I focused so intently on philosophers like Plato and Heidegger, because I detested them so thoroughly. But that is often the point - in order to understand the conflicts present within historical movements, one needs to thoroughly understand the texts produced by such movements. History, at bottom is textual analysis - an exegesis of the shadows inherent to language.
Cuneyt---
I am but a humble paleocon sinner, but Educated, Principled Progressives were supposed to above all that for the most part. Instead, once again we have bald substantive-worldview preferences asserted under the guise of universal procedural ethics, such as general civility, open-mindedness, education, and safety.
There's precious little conceptually to separate the fate of Don Imus and the pretextual conflation of Tea Partiers with virulent arch-racists, from the fate of the Hollywood Ten and the pretextual conflation of so-called "pinko" groups with card-carrying Communists. Same posturing, same moralizing, conformist orthodoxies, same demonizing groupthink, same chilling of free expression, same calls for Justice and for the Good People of America to stand firm against dire internal threats. Same dangerous sanctimony and stunning hypocrisy.
Maybe new MSM celebrity yapster Mark Potok of the "non-partisan" Southern Poverty Law Center wll be available to consult on revised history-text standards for use in Connecticut covering this troubled period. Domestic terrorists abounded, killing Saint George Tiller and menacing Michigan police officers from double-wide trailers, even as a climate of racist, anti-Muslim sentiment proceeded from isolated criminal incidents....
Yes, "We the People" is bullshit (I think I've mentioned I'm an antifederalist who regards the Constitution as a mistake). "The People" didn't engage in any such collective action (even the supporters of the rebellion were at most about a third of the populace, with about another third supporting the mother country and the remainder indifferent). A group of representatives (a few people, not "the people") were supposed to have been amending the Articles of Confederation instead threw out the whole thing. The participants in Shay's or the Whiskey Rebellion had as much place to call themselves "the people" as the rebels-turned-nationalists.
I don't judge Zinn's book just based on the title, but the opinion of even reviewers* one would expect to be ideologically sympathetic. In that link a supporter defends it by saying "The book is purposely meant to be biased", supporting my point about "even".
*My linking to it should not be taken as an endorsement of all the points made, even against Zinn.
George Jones, I have no legal education, but I know that full-throated textualism is not the dominant form of jurisprudence. Even Scalia, who is relatively speaking an outlier, admits his originalism is "faint-hearted". To say that some ambiguity exists is not to say all that much, such a statement is true for any epsilon quantity of ambiguity. Over some sections, like the required age of officeholders or the number of senators per state, there is no controversy. That's to a significant extent because there's not a whole lot of interest in ignoring the text. In other areas "balancing interests" and precedent override, and strict textualism is regarded as too extreme.
Gosh, after reading through all of these comments I sure as fuck feel stupid.
I can, however, make a kick-ass muffuletta. So there's that.
These new standards will inspire students to think about where dominant ideologies come from the same way those "I'm a Mac" ads inspire people to switch to Linux.
Zinn's book was "A People's History..." It isn't just about battles, or great men, but it's about the little folk. Some of us, in fact. But it is not "the people's," nor am I sure anyone tried to make it so.
And if it wasn't for revisionists like him, you wouldn't have heard much of Shays at all. I don't know about you, but I had a little bit too much of that chopping down cherry trees horseshit in grade school.
Off-topic: A while back I was in an argument over whether Elinor Ostrom proved Garret Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons" to be bogus. Guess who agrees with me: Elinor Ostrom. For a more elaborate discussion of the issue of how collective action problems expected in theory often don't occur but are a legitimate problem, you can check out this video of David Friedman.
TGGP is a polymath A.I. spam-bot sent back in time by some futuristic race. It's links are good, though.
Bogus is a stretch. Thus spake Ostrom:
"Yes. People say I disproved him, and I come back and say 'No, that’s not right. I’ve not disproved him. I’ve shown that his assertion that common property will always be degraded is wrong.' But he was addressing a problem of considerable significance that we need to take seriously. It’s just that he went too far. He said people could never manage the commons well."
Still, I love how she qualifies the thesis and corrects its errors. That doesn't mean the original model is faulty.
Elinor Ostrom triangulated on Hardin's thesis, she didn't call it into question. She turned it into a scarecrow that only slightly resembled Hardin's thesis, then picked apart that scarecrow, and declared that she'd called Hardin's thesis into question.
That sort of parlor trick is known as rhetorical prestidigitation where I come from. Rabbits pulled out of hats, coins dropped from sleeves above "empty" hands, that sort of thing.
It would be nice if Ostrom examined Hardin's actual thesis in the context Hardin created it, but then if Ostrom did that, Ostrom wouldn't have the same grounding for her parlor trick.
An acre of land can only grow so much food. If the population dependent on that land continues to increase, at some point the acre cannot carry the population.
Ostrom suggests this cannot be so, and she makes that suggestion by triangulating a new thesis that isn't Hardin's thesis, despite her calling it Hardin's thesis.
Looks to me like Ostrom trips over her extra-long strap-on while she is approaching the blow-up doll she calls Hardin.
To clear up any confusion, I wasn't claiming that Hardin or Ostrom's theories were bogus. I thought Hardin showed there was a real problem, and Ostrom gave some examples of how people confronted the problem and came up with some fairly workable solutions (in some situations). The thread in which I argued with la Rana (who was claiming that there was no tragedy of the commons) is here.
this thread made possible by graduate school: what a waste.
What a waste. Ponder this on the tree of woe.
Crucify him.
"Purging is at last at hand. Day of Doom is here. All that is evil, all their allies; your parents, your leaders, those who would call themselves your judges; those who have lied and corrupted the Earth, they shall all be cleansed."
The nattering about whether "graduate school" (i.e. in the humanities -- no one complains about an MBA) is yoooosful always struck me as a pretty stupid and corrupt internalization of marketplace values. I got no beef with people entertaining themselves however they like, but the compulsion to bellow This is NOT interesting smells an awful lot like special pleading. Same goes for hostility toward biblical discussions, for that matter.
I've been checking out some googlefights for "MBA is worthless" vs "humanities degree is worthless", "humanities is worthless" and "grad school is worthless". The former has been kicking ass. I recall seeing a number of people saying that Harvard MBAs specifically had done a great amount of harm.
I'm inclined to view institutional education generally as worthless. To let my internalized marketplace values speak for a second, useful stuff you learn on the job. I've got a B.S in C.S, but still didn't learn that much. I just needed to get a piece of paper indicating that I was able to get into a decent school and didn't burn out before graduation. As for all the useless facts I know, those are due to spending all my free time on the internet. I've forgotten the stuff I had to sit through in school.
I'm not so much hostile to the idea of Biblical discussions as I am hostile to them suddenly dominating this thread.
MBAs do get a lot of shit talked about them. But they're as important and necessary as other degrees, because they keep people out of the workforce while noting them as being primed for their target workforce. "Learning" isn't the main societal point of getting degrees, spending time on them is.
Yes, because all the other threads are vastly more interesting.
"Learning" isn't the main societal point of getting degrees, spending time on them is.
And this is why I hated college, am glad I didn't end up in grad school, and am not so fond of "society" and its "points."
I have no particular interest in Biblical arcana. So yeah, other threads are more interesting.
"am not so fond of "society""
Fuck the system, they can't have me!
I don't need society!
haha, nice link, TGGP. Even if it was meant in gentle mockery.
in fact, lemme swap you one
""Critical thinking skills."
What are those and how do you teach them?"
1) Unquantifiable.
2) By example.
Hilarious that this is still going on. I guess my general response to uninteresting stuff is to ignore them, which is why I found it odd to be confronted with such definitive opinions about a boring and useless topic. Having been in a bad relationship or two, guessing that hostility and indifference are secreted by totally different parts of the endocrine system.
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