Joel Christensen’s substack on the Iliad is, I think, the only substack I’ve subscribed to, and I found this post particularly interesting:
This summer, I am working through two recent books that I think will become standard reading for Homerists and Hellenists: Charles Stocking’s Homer’s Iliad and the Problem of Force (Oxford, 2023) and Chiara Bozzone’s Homer’s Living Language: Formularity, Dialect, and Creativity in Oral Traditional Poetry (Cambridge, 2024). […]
Stocking’s Homer’s Iliad and the Problem of Force starts out by invoking both Simone Weil’s articulation of “force” as the subject of the Iliad rending Homeric poetry–in Stocking’s words–“a transhistorical monument to the singularity of force, which transforms the human subject into an object” (2023, 1) and Bruno Snell’s analysis of different forms of force in his famous Die Entdeckung des Geistes (The Discovery of the Mind). Where Weil sets up “force” thematically as a central concern of the epic (and ignores that there are many ways to talk about it), Snell sees the varied expressions for ‘force’ in Homer (menos, bie, sthenos, kratos, alke, (w)is, dynamis etc) as evidence of an externalization of motivation and agency in Homeric characters. For Snell, according to Stocking, “the plurality of forces parallels [Snell’s] other observations on the plurality of sight and cognition….[which] are symptomatic of a “primitive” form of “self-consciousness” which is not yet capable of unifying “self-conscious thought…[playing] a critical role in Snell’s overall argument that “Homeric man” is incapable of understanding himself as a single, unified individual, neither in body nor mind” (2023, 3).
What Stocking is getting at in his introduction, is that Snell uses the multiple words for force and their applications in epic to argue that Homer depicts people as subject to a number of external powers in a fragmentary way that implies they are incapable of imagining themselves as singular wholes. This argument–connected to a rather particular mid-century, European model of human development that is radically out of step with modern physical anthropology, human cognition, and more, was extremely influential in the 20th century. The most egregious–and amusing–example of an author taking Snell very, very seriously is Julian Jaynes in his The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (his use of Greek material is not good).
(Anybody who snarks about Julian Jaynes is a friend of mine!) He goes on to say:
Stocking’s method–to generalize it overmuch–is to do the philological work of analyzing the contextual meaning of all those ways of talking about force and then to see how these possible meanings reflect on our interpretation of the whole Iliad. As a result, there’s a lot of close reading of passages and discussion of linguistics, philosophy, and epic language.
Sounds good to me. And on the other book:
One of the most difficult things about explaining to people why it really doesn’t matter who composed the Iliad or the Odyssey or when writing was introduced into their textualization, is that fully comprehending oral-formulaic theory requires a familiarity with linguistics and Homeric language that is increasingly harder to gain. And, unfortunately, many people who gain expertise in one or the other end up with calcified ideas about language and literature that makes it harder to take that leap of faith needed to let go of prior assumptions. There have been a handful of books that have done this well– I would probably suggest anyone start with Albert Lord’s The Singer of Tales, John Miles Foley’s How to Read an Oral Poem, and Casey Dué’s Achilles Unbound as a good starting points, but Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy and Ruth Finnegan’s Oral Poetry are standards as well.
Chiara Bozzone’s Homer’s Living Language is likely to most important book-length contribution to oral-formulaic theory since Egbert Bakker’s Poetry in Speech: Orality and Homeric Discourse. This is a big claim, I know, but Bakker really capped over two generations of theorizing through linguistics, comparative approaches, and internal analysis to flesh out (and improve) the approaches to Homeric trail-blazed by Milman Parry and Albert Lord. Bozzone is similar to Bakker in that she adapts cutting-edge (for classicists) linguistic and cognitive theory to help us understand the form of Homeric language and its function.
Bozzone argues that Homeric kunstsprache (our term for an artificial language for an art form) is an “adaptive technology” that “emerge[s] in response to the challenges of oral-poetic performance”. In response to a century of hand-wringing over what this means for creativity and “innovation”, Bozzone presents a powerful case that rather than limiting a performer’s freedom, this technology contributes to “the greatness of his art”. In this book, I will be looking for what the singular “poet” means to Bozzone and how the modern scholarship engages with ancient concepts, but already suspect that I will be a fan of the process of discovery Bozzone shares with us. She adduces comparisons from chess and jazz alongside lessons from play-by-play announcers and hip-hop, all while presenting pretty technical and enlightening overviews of Greek dialect and meter. I think some of these chapters are going to make my brain hurt, but it will be a good kind of pain.
(We discussed Lord, Ong, and Finnegan back in 2010.) They both sound like books I should read eventually.
Glad to see Bozzone get some recognition! I’ve been a fan of her work since running across her excellent UCLA IE conference paper “Weaving Songs for the Dead in Indo-European: Women Poets, Funerary Laments, and the Ecology of *kléuos”
does being named bakker predispose a person towards doing important synthesis? i haven’t read egbert – though i do keep meaning to read the oral-formulaic theorists systematically, so i clearly oughta – but robert (no relation)’s The Dinosaur Heresies had a big impact on me when it came out.
And then there’s Jim…
A true pioneer. He synthesized the worship of God with the worship of Mammon. His influence on US evangelicalism has been profound and enduring.
I’m sure, some practicioner of the theory analysed preachers.
I was about to say ‘you cannot make this stuff up’, but all three of them were in jail exactly for making stuff up.
I guess it shows even prison authorities have a sense of the absurd.
I was in the holding tank for about fifteen minutes with a lot of others, chatting with Norm (Mailer) about Marshall (MacLuhan) when Noam (Chomsky) came in but then security came and whisked them both away.
*high-five*
Was that an influential book? I read it, as a youngster, obviously, but I think it made more of an impression on my father than on me. But he was a physician, and so the homeothermy arguments must have seemed more relevant to him than to me.
@jack: my sister was once in a holding cell with starhawk, who proceeded to enthusiastically embrace a friend (of hers, not my sister’s) and incapacitate her with the pepper spray in her (starhawk’s) hair – i think this says everything anyone needs to know about the relationship between what’s in her writing and her actual lived/embodied practice.
but what did mailer think of macluhan?!?
He said, `He ratiocinates faster than any human being I’ve ever met’. That’s about all there was time for, there was another guy there, obvs a provocateur, to stilt the conversation. The memory is pretty clear because of the `ratiocinates’. There was some kind of rumor that Chomsky had been hurt but when he showed up everyody (maybe a dozen) was relieved. Zellig reports.
[I didn’t know about Starhawk, am happy to be only one or two steps from her.]
Influential enough to have Wikipedia articles in English, Russian, Indonesian and Czech.
And for those who don’t know, he pronounces his name “bocker.”
LaRouche was a one-man show. Unlike your common anti-communist or antisemitic or whatever conspiracist, his particular set was shared with no others but his followers, who, like him, were particularly intense.
Once I was on my way to the library at UC Berkeley. At the edge of campus, near the lush Strawberry Creek, was standing a group of three or so LaRouche fanatics, all about 20 or so, selling literature and proclaiming. I tried to skirt by them unnoticed. I was noticed, and once they saw the expression on my face, they got more agitated and wild-eyed*. I think they were about to fall on me right then and there and cut my heart out and eat it or so, when a huge white egret shot out from the creekside and flew about ten feet above our heads. I pointed at it, they looked up, and I made my escape into the campus, where they were not allowed.
* Quote: “See!! See how some people react when they are exposed to the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche!!”
Oh man, the LaRouchies were awful. Better ten Hare Krishnas than one LaRouchie!
Never trust a CamelCase person.
I was quite surprised to find some here in Berlin some 10 years ago (or a bit more, maybe 12). They didn’t say a word, though. The cultural barrier to talking to random strangers is that high.
And I’ve never encountered Hare Krishna outside the musical. I suppose the closest is reams of posters from Transcendental Meditation…?
The Hare Krishnas were notorious for sticky proselytizing, especially in airports. I think the movie Airport has a Hare Krishna gag, which will give you the idea.
Yes, they were inescapable during the ’70s. I can still hear that damn droning song of theirs — “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare…”
Did the Moonies peak before the HKs, or were they roughly of the same era?
In the US that genre is thankfully long past, but some cultural practices live on in the peripheries. Chabad adopted those techniques, and its agents are ever-present in Israel, especially on the streets of secular Tel Aviv and at the airport, a castor-oil simper on their faces, exhorting misguided sheep to lay tefillin at their stands. I stay far away from them, because they, and Chabad in general, inspire in me extremely unkindly thoughts.
The HK showed up again in the former SU in the 90s, I remember seeing one of their processions in Almaty. I haven’t seen any in a long while.
Nowadays, the only sect I occasonally see in the streets in Germany is Jehova’s Witnesses, with their Wachtturm paper. They stand around waiting to be approached, without bothering passers-by.
My advisor cited LaRouche (who was in prison at the time) in an academic paper. This was alongside a comic strip he got permission to reproduce. The context was that he was mocking a terrible result claiming a parity-violating asymmetry to the universe.
@Y: You are thinking of Airplane with the Hare Krishna joke. That film was a parody of the “serious” Airport films, which were forgotten much faster than the parodies.
that damn droning song of theirs — “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare…”
Yeah, there’s still a bunch doing that in central Christchurch every lunchtime. They drone past the Jehova’s Witnesses standing silent on the edge of the ‘strip’ of bars, then to the bible-basher/fire-and-brimstone preacher in Cathedral square. Oh, the fun we have in the provinces!
@Brett, thanks! That’s the one I meant (and I even saw it one or two months ago.)
The Hare Krishnas I remember in Germany – white gowns, shaven heads, and those awful chants – basically disappeared in the later 70s. That was about the time when the Bhaghwanis first appeared — pink gowns, more professional, with rumours about a lot of sex. Another religious group proselytizing in the early 70s were the so-called Jesus People — basically a hippie version of evangelical Christianity. They were also gone by the mid-70s.
LaRouche had his own political party in Germany in the 1980s. They never had any success. I think they promoted a conspiracy theory where the British Queen was the head of a world wide organised crime syndicate controlling the drug trade. Very bizarre. At that time people were still immune against this kind of silly conspiracy theories.
*half a minute of giggling*
Also Erwachet! – an interesting choice of register, that word, but similar to the original Awake!.
Once I saw two Mormons in Paris. Never noticed any anywhere else despite living in walking distance from a Mormon church (…and having been to Salt Lake City for a conference…).
The faction of the continuing LaRouche movement led by his German widow Helga Zepp-LaRouche (sub nomine “The International Schiller* Institute”) is supposedly hosting a conference this coming weekend on the inspiring theme “A Beautiful Vision for Humanity in Times of Great Turbulence!” [exclamation point in original] There will be six panels, with topics ranging from the cliched-sounding “Strategic Challenges and the Emerging New Order” to the inspiring “The LaRouche Program to Create 3 Billion New Productive Jobs in a Generation.” Here in New York last year our U.S. Senate election was enlivened by the presence of an overt and self-identified LaRouche disciple (Diane Sare) who got on the ballot as an alternative/third-party candidate and netted 0.49% of the total vote.
*As I understand it, Friedrich Schiller is one of many prophets of former times who is claimed in LaRouchean exegesis to have typologically foreshadowed LaRouche’s own vision for the betterment of humankind.
Growing up in New Hampshire, I was privileged to extensive interactions with LaRouchites in the 1970s. In fact a classmate and I represented the NDPC in our mock Presidential debates in 8th grade. Not out of any political conviction, but simply because in 8th grade it’s always more fun to take weird positions in a school debate, and the LaRouche campaign was very generous in donating campaign materials and bumper stickers to us when we asked. I have even have a vague recollection of Lyndon himself coming to talk to our middle school, but that might be a trick of aging memory.
In the 1980s Lyndon seemed to fade away in New Hampshire, maybe his new German wife had other international plans for him. Plus, I suspect a lot of his late 1970s supporters happily switched to Reagan.
I’m not sure if I was yet aware of LaRouchedom back when Vanya was in 8th grade and I was in 9th. I was at the time caught up in the bubble of enthusiasm surrounding the presidential campaign of John Anderson, which was in hindsight perhaps just as quixotic as LaRouche’s if less outre. We had some mock presidential debate in school, but with fictitious candidates (perhaps thought safer by some school authority than students aligning explicitly with the real-world candidates?), in which I played the candidate of the (if hazy memory is accurate on this point?) “Conservative Anarchist” party whom I was modelling pretty overtly on the “Uncle Duke” character in Doonesbury. Whom I at age 14 thought charming or intriguing although I don’t know that the character has aged well. Well, probably no worse than any other Doonesbury character.
The word on campus in the 80s was that it was worth putting up with the Hare Krishna recruiters for an hour every now and then because the food was awesome. I never tried it though. The spread of better Asian food in the US probably put an end to that line of recruiting.
The Larouchies had this notable Pyrrhic political victory. Read to at least the second graph. And ignore the implication that there was any significant support for Larouche in Illinois. They ran under the radar at a time of a deeply divided party where being known could mean close to half the primary voters disliked you and would vote for the name they didn’t know.
the presidential campaign of John Anderson
Good lord, I’d forgotten all about that.
I still meet people who brag about the purity they evinced by voting for John Anderson in 1980.
FWIW, we used to have some Buddha-adjacent group doing the full orange-robed Hare Krishna procession down the main pedestrian drag. I think there was a full-on Buddhist monastery here, so they were bona-fide monks. Long time since I saw them, but maybe not as long ago as the 70s. I may even have seen some in Stockholm (tpq 2006). But as Hans says, only the JW are active on the streets now, and they are very reticent.
(I happened to see two Mormon “elders” [no older than 25] on the street the other day, but I only knew what they were because of the dress code and the name tags. They weren’t proselytizing at that instant, but I assume they were on their way to ring some doorbells).
You moved the comment, but the authorship is wrong.
No it’s not — I just checked.
I did not myself vote for John Anderson in 1980, the authorities not allowing 15-year-olds to cast ballots, thus freeing myself from any temptation to subsequent smug self-congratulation. (I’m not complaining; I do not in hindsight think that it was even necessarily prudent for them to allow me to vote at 19, as they did.)
In fact in the highly improbable event that every Anderson voter instead voted for the hapless and doomed incumbent Democrat, the outcome of the election would have been exactly the same, but it would not have seemed such a sweeping victory, so these self-congratulatory sorts that Brett may understandably find irksome were not in fact spoilers of any sort as a matter of outcome-causation. It is, I have come to believe, useful to think of the 1980 presidential election as having functioned as a referendum on two different questions. Question One: Do we want Pres. Carter to continue in office? Answer: A very resounding No. Question Two: Do we want to try the somewhat new and different policy direction Gov. Reagan is proposing for the nation? Answer: A notably much less resounding Yes (but still a Yes). The geographical concentration of the Anderson vote was also in hindsight an interesting and meaningful signal of future partisan realignment.
the hare krishnas are still very much around, if less pervasive than 20 or 30 years back: in nyc they usually set up near the gandhi statue in union square all summer, though i think the last clutch of them i saw (maybe a month ago) was in a subway station further uptown.
and i don’t know that i’d say the moonies have necessarily peaked even now; but if they have, it was within the last 10-15 years. the succession squabbles have slowed them down a bit, but even in places like nyc where they don’t have much of a visible-people presence, their Washington Times rag is all over midtown and the financial district; they’re allied with the current u.s. regime and were significant backers of the 1/6/20 attack in washington; and it took a home-made shotgun and a fairly articulate shooter with a compelling personal narrative to even start to dent their influence over the national government of japan (they had at least 5 cabinet ministers in 2022 under abe y”sh, and likely as many as 10 (of 19), depending on whose reporting you prefer – plus the prime minister, of course).
Falun Gong shows up occasionally, but in Berlin only in the city center as far as I’ve noticed.
I’ve never noticed Falun Gong in public here in Bonn.
Falun Gong has a presence in Vienna, they were on Stephansplatz a few weeks ago.
A friend of mine spent many years with the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, so I can attest that they remain active across the world; she spent time in temples in NY, London and Barcelona before returning to Argentina.
As Ryan mentioned, one of ISKCON’s best resources for recruitment is food. When I lived in Barcelona they ran a couple of vegetarian restaurants that were cheap, cheery and very good. The cheapest one is now closed, but you can still get the menu du jour for €13 at the other one.
I don’t know when I last saw Hare Krishnas in Edinburgh – possibly pre-covid – but definitely not the 70s, because I wasn’t born then!
I am disappointed that the Moonies turned out not to be the people who occasionally send me emails from the inside of the moon…
the people who occasionally send me emails from the inside of the moon
That is a thing? (On reflection, they’re perhaps friends of DE and Noetica…)
A frind maintains that if all the people who would have voted for John Anderson if he could have won would have voted for John Anderson then he could have won.
BTW my dialect has double modals like `might could’. Does anyone have a problem with that?
How does “could have won” contrast with “might could have won” in your dialect? Or is the choice determined by the construction, rather than available to mark a semantic contrast?
>I still meet people who brag about the purity they evinced by voting for John Anderson in 1980.
I went to a fundraiser for Sen. Durbin quite a while ago – it was probably during the Bush-Gore(-Nader) election. Durbin told the story of a guy in his town who organized for Anderson locally. Durbin of course was a strong Carter supporter. After the election, he ran into the Anderson volunteer, and congratulated him, since Anderson had done very well in this community which was in the process of transitioning from main street GOP to college educated Dem. The volunteer replied “in the end, I couldn’t waste my vote. I voted for Carter.”
The volunteer was my dad. I’d never heard the story before and would have told you my dad voted for Anderson.
BTW my dialect has double modals like `might could’. Does anyone have a problem with that?
I love them and occasionally use them (to honor the Ozark side of my family); I posted about them in 2012 but it didn’t arouse much interest.
@ DE re modals: I don’t have good intuitions about them, which is why I asked. The issue is a genuinely vexed one in logic, IIUC: is being possibly possibly the same as being possible or is it more remotely possible, etc… ? I am unaware of much discussion (aside from navel-gazing) about such things and would happy to know what others think.
When “could” means “was/were able to” rather than “would be able to”, there’s no implication of uncertainty. So “When I was younger, I could have lifted it” is not the same as “When I was younger, I might could have lifted it.” Actually, even when it means “would be able to”, there’s not necessarily uncertainty. “If the door were an inch wider, we could get the sofa in” has no uncertainty.
A good analysis.
*lightbulb moment*
On the other topic, I’m disappointed – I only get emails from Aisha Gaddafi.
When “could” means “was/were able to” rather than “would be able to”, there’s no implication of uncertainty.
On the other hand, in “You might could use HPLC,” is there any difference from “You might be able to use HPLC,” or is it just more concise?
(In northern N.M., I don’t hear double modals except from other foreigners, specifically those from Double Modalia.)
Disambiguating “could” – yes, I can see that. Thanks, Keith Ivey.
Jerry, double modals have never been part of my speech, even when I lived in North Carolina, but from what I’ve heard from people who do use them, I’d say your sentences mean the same.
I saw a passel of Hare Krishnas in Amsterdam a couple of years ago, singing their thing. Also – because I can never resist making random comments three days after the thread has moved on to other topics – I will always be fond of Jim Bakker for having thoughtfully mailed a Living Bible to my ten-year-old brother in the 1980s, along with a letter of thanks for his generous (imaginary) donation of several thousand dollars. It was the most hilariously unpoetic translation I’ve ever seen. I still remember the complaint in the Song of Solomon that “my dove is hiding behind some rocks.”
Thanks, Keith. I can’t utter double modals either, no matter how useful they might be.
In other words, it’s so bad it’s good?
“my dove is hiding behind some rocks”
Don’t you just hate it when they do that? I’d rather have eels in my hovercraft.
(I see that in the Kusaal version, the famously grape-eating little foxes of the next verse have turned into striped ground squirrels, Euxerus erythropus. I expect they’d eat grapes if they had the chance. The Mooré version has jackals. Do jackals eat grapes?)
I want these motherfucking eels off the motherfucking hovercraft.
Moonies — the assassination of Shinzo Abe in 2022 was about a grudge against the Moonies (though the perpetrator’s grudge went back to 2002). This led to significant popular backlash against the Moonies in Japan, including the national legislature passing laws to restrict donations to them. Wikipedia even calls it “one of the most effective and successful political assassinations in recent history”.
Falun Gong — I’ve never seen their members proselytizing, but ads for their dance group Shen Yun are all over the United States. Actually I can’t remember seeing any recently (in the past few months) but i used to see them on my commute and pretty much wherever I went.
Falun Gong publishes The Epoch Times which has played a not insignificant role in spreading right wing conspiracy theories around COVID, immigrant crime, »the Deep State » etc., and is an enthusiastic supporter of the current US President and the AfD in Germany. They make LaRouche seem quaint.
I’ve gotten Shen Yun ads in the mail too.
My only recent in-person encounter with cultists (aside from seeing the occasional Trump supporter) was when I skirted around a group of people with graphic crucifixion signs handing out Chick tracts in Fredericksburg. But perhaps it was performance art.
I still have a sort of feeling that woo ought to lean left politically, though a moment’s reflection re Nazis and current MAGApersons immediately shows that the reverse is very much the case.
The DFH was but a momentary aberration in the history of woo.
For ye have the woo with you always.
Oddly, Shen Yun has been coming to the San Francisco Civic Auditorium yearly for many years now, giant billboards announcing it for months ahead and all that. No one has raised any significant stink about such an explicitly and nastily anti-gay organization getting the regular welcome mat there.
Oh, yes, billboards for the latest Shen Yun show seem to be up year-round.
Vaccine woo has migrated from the left to the right over the last 30 years or less, and I suspect that “does reality even real” woo, which was likewise a left phenomenon, has contributed to the development of bothsiderism, which unintentionally but pretty consistently favors the right.
@ Keith Ivey,
yes, late thanks – things move fast here
Yeah, a lot of things about the current state of affairs horrify me, but the loss of any faith in the concept of reality is fundamental, and I feel bitterly pleased that my decades-old contempt for postmodernism (in its pop-philosophical aspect: there’s no such thing as objectivity, there’s no such thing as facts) has been borne out by history. Like Robert Conquest, I want to say I Told You So, You Fucking Fools.
@DM:
It’s probably the natural consequence of the growing realisation by the extreme right that reality is a Radical Socialist plot.
Which reminds me, I’m also sick of the smug “reality has a liberal bias” meme so popular on the left. Reality doesn’t give a shit, it just sits there and ignores us, and we paw at whatever bits of it please us and ignore or deny the bits that don’t, and lefties are just as prone to that as anyone else. (Calling Comrade Lysenko on the courtesy phone…)
Hah! You anarchists are always making out that reality is anarchist!
“And for those who don’t know, he pronounces his name “bocker.””
This implies that the 1990s PBS series “The Dinosaurs” hasn’t been a formative piece of media for everyone. Bakker was one of the regular guests, and had a clear flair for coming up with fun ways visually make points for the audience.
I highly recommend watching the animations from them, at least. I think they’re all on Youtube, and they’re really beautifully done — if perhaps a bit dated in terms of paleontological accuracy.
except from other foreigners, specifically those from Double Modalia
I can’t utter double modals either, no matter how useful they might be
I can say an occasional double modal in Russian, but never in English. Guess, I have stopped translating my thoughts into English at some point…
BTW, what is Chomskyan theory about adult language acquisition?
Falun Gong’s street presence in nyc has been declining over the past few decades (i assume because they’ve realized it does less for them than working the politicians and media and doing larger-scale propaganda stage productions), but as of last summer they still maintained a regular presence outside the PRC consulate, and launch occasional fliering ventures around midtown and in union square. here’s NPR, with the latest iteration of reporting on the back-of-the-house nightmare of Shen Yun.
it takes a specific kind of cult to really go all in on the theater side of things: Falun Gong (Shen Yun); Moral Re-Armament (Up With People); and on a much smaller scale the Sullivanians (Fourth Wall Rep)…
Falun Gong’s street presence …
Yeah they used to actively proselytise in the car park just outside my local clutch of Chinese supermarkets/grocers. This is within a km of the PRC consulate, so the shopholders were not happy. I’ve not seen Falung Gong in recent months. On the one hand you want to support their opposition to PRC; on the other, their socially conservative views are repellent. (I did try to engage with a conspicuously non-Chinese ethnicity proselytiser, but they proved as slippery as the JWs.)
JWs actually have a set playbook* for doing their door-to-door stuff. A friend of mine who used always to invite them in (with, I am afraid, the unworthy motive of wasting their time) got one pair of them so flustered by his responses that they accidentally left a manual behind.
I used to work with a couple of JWs in my first (crushingly boring) holiday job when I was a student. They were perfectly nice people when not, as it were, on duty.
* Which is not a bad idea, in principle. Other canvassing organisations often do something similar. Most people aren’t much cop at extemporising while staying on-message.
rozele, I think you got it exactly right. The Moonie flower sellers and the HK panhandlers and Bhagavad Gita peddlers were fine for the ’70s. These days, it’s much more efficient to get billionaires to bankroll you (FG), or governments to corrupt into supporting your business ventures.
The Moonies once had another venture, illegally catching protected leopard sharks in the San Francisco Bay for the aquarium trade. That was when Moon himself was still alive, and he gave his blessing to the venture, because Jesus Fish. Nowadays they surely are above such petty crime.
Ah, whatever you say about the JWs, they haven’t (AFAIK) got any billionaires to bankroll them or corrupted any governments.
They don’t even seem to be agitating for the US to outlaw the Satanic practice of blood transfusion, though you’d have thought that the current regime would provide a great opportunity for implementing this long-overdue impeccably Judaeo-Christian reform before more precious souls are lost forever.
JWs actually have a set playbook* for doing their door-to-door stuff.
Do they have a (different) playbook for their standing-in-a-thoroughfare stuff? That is, where they don’t make eye contact until somebody walks up to take a leaflet/ask a question?
The “slippery” I mentioned seems to apply if the somebody clearly isn’t a lost soul/can produce a rationale rather than seeming full of doubts. Presumably this is to — exactly — avoid timewasters. OTOH, in what sense does standing staring into space/talking to no-one constitute ‘Witnessing’/being “on duty”/not wasting time?
I do look at Awake! if I find an abandoned copy. The over-the-top kitschy illustrations are entertaining. (As opposed to the malignant over-the-top kitsch of Shen Yun).
@AntC:
Doing this sort of thing is actually mandatory for JWs. Human nature being what it is (including for JWs), and most people not having kind of personality type that just lurves preaching to random strangers, I imagine that quite few of them spend their allotted time hoping (perhaps without consciously admitting as much to themselves) that they can get through it all without all that much actual engagement with the Public.
[JWs] They were perfectly nice people when not, as it were, on duty.
Hmm. My hairdresser is a son of JWs. That’s not his opinion. OTOH he’s gay in a conspicuously camp fashion. I guess he did at least keep up some sort of contact with his family.
Presumably this is to — exactly — avoid timewasters
Dunno. But it would be a sensible policy, if so. As I was saying just the other day, in the not-altogether-dissimilar context of political canvassing, it’s a classic newbie mistake to get involved in long doorstep conversations. You’re either just enjoying yourself chatting with a kindred spirit when you ought to be moving on to something more productive, or talking to someone who is probably also politically aware, and so also a kind of kindred spirit (normal people don’t give a toss about politics) but is never actually going to vote for your party anyway.
The chance that you’ll actually change their mind is much lower than inexperienced canvassers imagine.
In the UK, at least, outright hostility from those you canvass is surprisingly uncommon: but what you do get is plenty of people who nod and smile in the hope that you’ll go away soon, and lots of really nice people who don’t want to hurt your feelings by telling you that they’re actually going to vote for someone else.
My hairdresser is a son of JWs. That’s not his opinion
Just reporting my own experience. I’ve no doubt there must be lots of nasty JWs too.
(Reminds me of an account I was reading of some not-religious people who moved to Salt Lake City and were struck – against their better judgment – by just how nice their new Mormon acquaintances were. “There was one woman we used to call the ‘Nasty Mormon.’ She actually wasn’t really nasty – she just wasn’t quite as nice as the other Mormons.”)
When I was working in Uzbekistan in the late 90s, one of the drivers at the company I worked for was a JW. Very nice and reliable. He never tried to proselytize at work, but that may also have been due to the fact that JWs and similar sects were non-desirables in Uzbekistan and he didn’t want to risk his livelihood; he told me that they had to hold their meetings across the border in Kazakhstan.
in the not-altogether-dissimilar context of political canvassing, it’s a classic newbie mistake to get involved in long doorstep conversations.
My experience of canvassing was it’s surprising how many people’s not-giving-a-toss extended as far as not knowing which day the election was on/not knowing where the polling station is/not knowing what time it closes. (I don’t think that was feigned.)
It’s not about changing anybody’s mind so much as getting those who would vote for your side actually to turn up at the polls. (Without stirring up those who wouldn’t.) Sometimes all it needs is the offer of a lift.
“I’m voting for the Democrat!”
– Sir, it’s a primary. They’re all Democrats.
“What?”
On only two occasions have I ever been canvassed myself by an actual Member of Parliament. Once was by a rather nice old-school aristocratic Tory, and the other occasion was in Ghana. In the latter case, I explained that, as a non-citizen, I actually didn’t have a vote, but the candidate seemed to feel that this was not an insuperable problem.
I’ve not seen Falung Gong in recent months. …
To correct myself: today they were camped out in the City centre, slap next door to the JW’s usual pozzie.
The FG were at least spending their time usefully, practicing extreme Tai-Chi. The JW’s OTOH were merely looking nose-out-of-joint. Neither was trying to proselytize to the other. Seems like a lost opportunity with a captive audience. Or would they neutralise each other, like matter meeting anti-matter?