I vividly remember when Julian Jaynes’ The Origin Of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind came out in 1977, and the rave reviews it got (the bloody thing was nominated for the National Book Award!); I thought then, and continue to think, that it is as prime an example of crackpottery as The Dancing Wu Li Masters, which came out a couple of years later to similar acclaim. I was lured into reading Scott Alexander’s review because he started so winningly, saying it has “only two minor flaws. First, that it purports to explains the origin of consciousness. And second, that it posits a breakdown of the bicameral mind.” Thus suckered in, I read and enjoyed the whole thing, but wouldn’t have thought of it as LH material except for this excursus:
Jaynes partisans are able to come up with a few anthropological works suggesting that the minds of primitive people are pretty weird, and I believe that, but they don’t seem quite as weird as Jaynes wants them to be. So the question becomes whether we would notice if some people worked in a pre-bicameral and pre-conscious way.
I’m tempted to answer “yes, obviously”, but for the counterargument, see this Reddit thread.
I think I’m very different from most people because of one main thing. I never thought with language. Ever. I moved to Canada when I was 2 from Asia, and have been basically been around English speakers my whole life. I’m in my twenties now and I can speak it relatively well, and can understand every single word. However, growing up, I never ever thought with language. Not once did I ever think something in my mind with words like “What are my friends doing right now?” to planning things like “I’m going to do my homework right after watching this show.” I went through elementary school like this, I went through Highschool like this, I went through University like this…and I couldnt help but feel something was off about me that I couldnt put my hand on. Just last year, I had a straight up revalation, ephiphany….and this is hard to explain…but the best way that I can put it is that…I figured out that I SHOULD be thinking in language. So all of a sudden, I made a conscious effort to think things through with language. I spent a years time refining this new “skill” and it has COMPLETELY, and utterly changed my perception, my mental capabilities, and to be frank, my life. I can suddenly describe my emotions which was so insanely confusing to me before. I understand the concept that my friends are still “existing” even if they’re not in site by thinking about their names. I now suddenly have opinions and feelings about things that I never had before. What the heck happened to me? I started thinking in language after not doing so my whole life. It’s weird because I can now look back at my life before and see just how weird it was. Since I now have this new “skill” I can only describe my past life as …. “Mindless”… “empty”….. “soul-less”…. As weird as this sounds, I’m not even sure what I was, If i was even human, because I was barely even conscious. I felt like I was just reacting to the immediate environment and wasn’t able to think anything outside of it. It’s such a strange time in my life. It feels like I just found out the ultimate secret or something. …..Can anyone relate, or understand what Im saying? Can anyone explain what is happening to me? I have no idea where to even post this but this has been on my mind ever since I’ve been able to think about it.
This guy thinks he “barely” had consciousness (in the Jaynesian sense), and it took him however many years to notice this about himself. It was just another universal human experience you can miss without realizing it! And notice how it was the culturally learned knowledge that other people worked differently which shifted him to the normal equilibrium. So maybe if there was some tribe like this somewhere, it would be easy to miss.
I confess I can’t quite wrap my head around what it would mean not to “think with language,” but (assuming the poster is sincere and accurate) it’s certainly interesting, and I pass it along for what it’s worth.
I’ve never been sure what people mean when they say they ‘think with language.’ Is an architect designing a building thinking with language, or is he imagining three-dimensional shapes in his mind, and how they fit together? Did Beethoven think in language, or was he imagining sounds and their relationships? Just the other evening I idled away a few minutes doing a sudoku, and I wouldn’t say I was thinking in language but mentally imagining which numbers were allowed in a space and which were not. I don’t see how language comes into it.
If I were trying to parse a legal document I suppose I would be thinking in language, but surely there are many example of thinking that don’t involve language.
Or maybe I’m missing the point here. Clarification welcome.
Not thinking in words is quite widespread (my wife, for instance, doesn’t). I wish I had a sense of the proportions, but I don’t, but in any case non-verbal thinkers are often just as astonished to find out their form of human consciousness is not universal. Food for thought!
I recall this came up before. Here and here, but maybe yet another time too.
Me, I slipped into thinking in words at some point when I was a kid, and quickly shed off the habit, with a bit of an effort. It made thinking very cumbersome. I don’t remember very well what it was like, or I’d share it to help answer David L’s question.
P.S. I wouldn’t touch books like Jaynes’s or Zukav’s, but I find them repellent in somewhat different ways.
Is there a joke lurking here? I mean, given that “primitive people” are by definition non-WEIRD (in the sense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#WEIRD_bias) and Alexander is certainly aware of the ongoing discussion of the ways in which studies of subjects from WEIRD societies should not be presumed to automatically scale up to the entire human species.
Is it commonly accepted that certain universals underly different ways of thinking? E.g.
1. Events or sense perceptions can be correlated and sorted.
2. Learning is possible.
3. Manipulation of symbols usefully precedes manipulation of real world entities.
4. In order to achieve objectives, both individual and cooperative effort may be required.
If the laws governing the universe were different, e.g., causality or time itself were different or e.g., physical laws changed rapidly with time or location, or could be altered by thoughts or actions, then a different basis for thinking would be necessary.
I think the article is itself unfortunately somewhat tainted by the Jaynesian drivel.
In talking about “theory of mind” as a culture-bound thing you are actually taught by your parents, he is not using the term in its normal sense at all
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind
Lacking “theory of mind” in this sense is a pathological state, not a cultural thing: all normal adult human beings have it, just as all normal adult human beings have language.
I have never heard of a culture in which there was no concept of deliberate deception, and the concept of deliberate deception entails having a theory of mind.
He also uses “hallucination” in a highly odd way. I had an imaginary friend as a child, but I was never under the impression that he was real in the sense my parents or siblings were. I also believe that God answers my prayers (sometimes) but have yet to hear him actually talking to me. I think I’m fairly mainstream in this … indeed, even the more enthusiastic of my coreligionists seem to regard actual hearing of the voice of God as something worthy of particular note, not an everyday occurrence. To use “hallucination” in the way the article does is just antireligious polemic, not making any actual point about anything.
However, he puts me in mind of an Argentine psychiatrist I once knew in London. She was an altogether admirable person, though almost completely lacking in a sense of humour. I remember her talking about the time Rastafarians first arrived in any numbers in the UK, and how there was a great tendency to misdiagnose them as schizophrenic before the penny dropped that hearing voices and seeing visions is in fact a cultural norm for Rastafarians. “Nowadays”, she said earnestly, “we don’t diagnose Rastafarians as schizophrenic unless other Rastafarians agree that they’ve been acting oddly.” It immediately struck me that wearing a suit and tie probably qualifies …
That sounds to me like the “inner voice”. I just learned about this a few days ago, it’s summarized well here:
https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human-brain/inner-voice.htm
I don’t have an inner voice and I’m surprised that it’s an actual thing. I don’t think I could learn to have one either.
And I recently discovered that some people imagine things by seeing pictures inside their head, which I don’t. Turns out that most people see the pictures. (If you aren’t sure which group you are in: Imagine a horse galloping past you. Now, is it galloping to the right or the left? If your answer is “Huh?” then you don’t see the pictures.)
As for consciousness, a lot of people are studying it but I think nobody really has a good idea of what it is. Or even if there’s an “it” there. A lot of what people say seems to be trying to explain why humans are better than other animals.
@DE: There’s also Everett writing about the Pirahã matter-of-factly seeing and talking to ghosts in broad daylight, which he couldn’t see or hear. With Everett, though, I never know how much he’s exoticizing the Pirahã.
I don’t think in language either. I find it bizarre when people assert to do that. Maybe in my middle age I’ve begun to “think in language” a little, but my fundamental thought process has nothing to do with language.
@Y:
The normal way to greet somebody sitting quietly alone in Kusaal is to say Nɛ sɔnsiga “(Blessing) on the conversation”, the same greeting as you would use to greet a group of people talking together. This is because a person sitting alone is assumed to be (silently) conversing with their own win “spiritual individuality, genius.” I’ve always imagined this as describing essentially the experience of just thinking your own thoughts to yourself, but that could be just my own cultural preconceptions. I suppose that at the very least it does illustrate how different cultures may express the same experiences in very different ways.
People describe talking to kikiris “tutelary spirits” too; and there are also supposed to be hostile kikiris in the bush which deliberately lead wanderers astray, and whose feet are attached backwards to confuse trackers. They sound pretty corporeal. Some sources describe them as “invisible”, but I suspect that this is some sort of oversimplification introduced to smooth over the disconnect between two very different worldviews.
There was some discussion of closely related topics around here.
Something in all that reminded me of James Hogg’s grandfather being one of the last people to meet fairy folk in Ettrick, and being told by them that they were flitting (I think because there were too many people about).
And yet that is sort of relevant, because I don’t believe that 18th century Scots had no idea of consciousness, and yet there does seem to be an era before which people sometimes had vivid encounters with fairy folk, and after which they mostly didn’t.
David E: I’ve never seen an imaginary friend, but I have seen the monster which lived in the cupboard in my gramma’s spare room, although a few years later it mostly looked like a roll of old carpet…
I feel like I don’t really know whether I think in language or not and in fact don’t actually understand the question “do you or don’t you think in language.” Outside of contexts where the language is explicit because I’m ruminating about what to say in a hypothetical conversation and/or thinking about what to write, at least. And of course there’s not a particularly clear line between “thinking” in some narrow-scope sense and “whatever my brain is generally doing that I am aware of when I am either conscious or dreaming.”
@David L I idled away a few minutes doing a sudoku, and I wouldn’t say I was thinking in language but mentally imagining which numbers …
And didn’t you name the numbers? You might point at cells (with a finger, or mentally, or by eye movement) rather than internally voicing ‘if this cell is a …, that cell must be …’; but how do you “think” the contents of the cell? If you don’t voice them you might imagine shape ‘7’ — but that’s just as much symbolic thought as saying ‘seven’. Do you visualise seven swans swimming in the cell?
Did Beethoven think in language, or was he imagining sounds and their relationships?
I can call to mind long passages of music. (Don’t count myself as a composer/no comparison to Beethoven.) And yes that recall involves no words. “their relationships” is a tricky question: Beethoven would know that sound-sequence is a ‘plagal cadence’. It’s a compartmentalised/symbolic thought, whether or not the actual words go through his head alongside the music.
As @JWB describes, “whatever my brain is generally doing” is in words. The only way I can stop the words is concentrating hard on a complex passage of music. Increasingly I find the only composer whose music is demanding enough, is Bach. (Or Beethoven, Shostakovich honouring Bach.)
As for consciousness, a lot of people are studying it but I think nobody really has a good idea of what it is. Or even if there’s an “it” there.
Except in its crasser meanings – as awareness of the kind that an anaesthetist interrupts, for example – consciousness is overripe for removal from our inventory of what there is. Let’s expunge persons, while we’re at it. Together these notions remain responsible for ruinous confusion, and reams of futile philosophastry.
From the review [**] Jaynes (writing in the 1970s) was both a psychology professor at Princeton and an expert in ancient languages, so the perfect person to make this case. He reviews various samples of Bronze Age writing from before and after this period, and shows that the early writings have no references to mental processes, and the later ones do.
I thought most early writing (that’s survived) is administrative records and accounts. I wouldn’t expect to find there references to mental processes/that’s no evidence early Bronze Age peoples had no theory of mind.
That the (non-interpolated) text of Iliad locates Achilles’ fears in his guts rather than a construct of ‘mind’ strikes me as no evidence for anything. I wouldn’t locate my mental life any particular place; I’m not aware of my brain ‘buzzing’ any more than any other part of my anatomy.
Jaynes argues the Bronze Age was obsessed with burials and the afterlife (eg the Pyramids) …
Very little of Bronze Age artefacts have survived. Only the Pharaohs/rulers could command enough resources to build permanent memorials. If people were obsessed with other stuff that got memorialised only in now-decayed or only-ceremonial forms, we wouldn’t know. Would there be celebrations of new life/Spring? What traces would those leave?
[**] I agree with @Hat, I don’t think I’d stomach (hah!) the actual book for more than a few pages.
I probably should have said “whatever my mind is doing” rather than unconsciously parroting the modern assumption that the “mind” is physically situated in the physical brain rather than in the spleen or gall bladder or whatever some other some less modern and more Homeric (or third-thing) civilization may have hypothesized.
consciousness is overripe for removal from our inventory of what there is
Well, one way of solving a problem is indeed to assert that it does not exist.
The Jaynesian thesis seems to boil down to: other cultures used very different metaphors to express some things from those we are accustomed to use ourselves nowadays. Ergo, the things in question must be mere illusions.
Well, one way of solving a problem is indeed to assert that it does not exist.
Well, where’s the onus? One way to guarantee a philosophical problem’s perdurance is to insist at all costs on a dubious ontology, with a show of Cartesian certainty buttressed by “common sense”.
@David L I idled away a few minutes doing a sudoku, and I wouldn’t say I was thinking in language but mentally imagining which numbers …
@AntC: And didn’t you name the numbers?
Not consciously, no. I see which numbers are permitted and which are not, but they are simply a set of nine symbols. I visualize them but don’t need to name them.
May it please the court, I would like to amend my testimony. I just did a sudoku and realized that if I am figuring out which number is missing from a row or a square, then I mentally count them out. But if I am looking at patterns of numbers in two adjacent squares, says, to figure out where to place a number in a third square, then I do not name them. I think.
Basically, what I wanted to write. Except that JWB very well formulated this: ‘“whatever my brain is generally doing that I am aware of when I am either conscious or dreaming.”’ and I tried, but was not able to do that:-)
Instead I began thinking what happens when I formulate (in words) a line I’m goint to type and then type it – and when I just type it.
Can we say that in the former case I first think it, then subvocalise, then type and in the second case I first think and then type? Or in the former case I first think (in words) and then type and in the second I think by typing? There does not seem to be much difference between typing and subvocalising…
I’m not sure if I am aware of any meaning of consciousness other than what Noetica calls “crasser”, “awareness” etc. “Awareness” is hardly less problematic.
Accordingly, I don’t quite understand people who explain that some people or animals have it and other do not.
I find that for me the process of formulating (in words) a line I’m going to type and then typing it is not that straightforward. It often happens that I think that I have a sentence clear in my mind, but when I type I find that there are still decisions to be made about the best word to use or details of the sentence construction.
I think it was Steven Pinker who suggested that we think in ‘mentalese’ and translate into words. This made sense to me as in my example above, and when in speaking I choose between words to express the shade of meaning that I want to convey, which implies that the thought was not already in words.
Sometimes I think via “inner monologue/dialogue.” It doesn’t mean I hear voices in my head; rather, I simply talk or dispute with myself, sometimes silently, sometimes in a whisper. But I’ve always regarded this mode of thinking as shallow and childish. Proper thinking, in my mental world, is deeper than language and original thought has to be translated into human language.
Pinker may be wrong about many things but his “mentalese” theory makes sense to me. Even if it’s flawed, Pinker is on home turf here. He only gets in big trouble when he ventures into alien fields like statistics.
The post is not absolutely crazy.
Obviously, a prson like me or JWB can use language in thinking more or less (cf. Y: “I slipped into thinking in words at some point when I was a kid, and quickly shed off the habit”). We even can speculate which particular skills may benefit from doint it “more” [than I do currently] or in some optimal combination.
It’s the experience as a whole which is unfamiliar.
I see Alexander goes in hard against Jaynes focuses heavily on “bicamerality” . I suppose in 1977 left-brain : right-brain was a big buzz. I remember in 1980’s suffering Management Training that traditional management over-emphasises right brain, whereas winning hearts needed left-brain appeals. (Or was it the other way round? It was total bollox, anyway.)
Research on brain bicamerality has validated the ‘bollox’ assessment AFAICT. Alexander: recent research has not been kind to any theories too reliant on hemispheric lateralization.
Are there population-wide correlations between left-handedness and … anything? (Maybe difficulty in writing l-to-r scripts? Now that we’re all on keyboards, that’s probably disappeared.)
By the way, I meant to comment on the unusual word in this sentence: “A few years ago, someone rediscovered/invented tulpamancy, the idea of cultivating multiple personalities on purpose because it’s cool.” Never heard of it, but there’s a Wiktionary entry: “(neologism) The culture and practice of talking to tulpas (autonomous thoughtforms).” And tulpa is:
Tulpas (or at least Lynch’s take on the concept) feature prominently in the latest even-weirderer series of Twin Peaks.
When this matter was discussed previously, and some people were asking “How is it possible to think without language?”, I wanted to say “How is it possible to think with language? Does that mean you can’t think any faster than you can talk?”
I think (heh) for me it means my mind is continually throwing out verbalizations of whatever processes are going on (“whatever my brain is generally doing that I am aware of when I am either conscious or dreaming”) behind the scenes. If I’m in another language mode for whatever reason, those verbalizations may be in French, Spanish, or Russian (the usual suspects). I certainly don’t suppose my thought-activities (“whatever my brain is generally doing”) are carried on in language, but I also can’t imagine accessing them with my conscious mind without the aid of language. The phenomenon described in the Reddit thread is alien to me.
@LH but what about say, geometry problems? Solving them requires creativity and spatial imagination.
I use some language in doing jigsaw puzzles. For instance, “let’s group all the pieces with red over here.” The primary work of putting pieces together is not verbal.
I would agree that my mind is routinely throwing out verbal descriptions of what I’m doing, and some of those verbalizations may occasionally lead to recognitions, but the bulk of the processing work seems to be happening elsewhere, as far as I can tell.
@LH but what about say, geometry problems? Solving them requires creativity and spatial imagination.
I’m not very good at geometry problems.
When I think without words it’s
I also find it hard to say if I think in words. It feels more like I am thinking thoughts, then articulating them if needed.
One thing that strikes me, though, is that I will occasionally use concepts from a foreign language when thinking. This suggests that words and their semantics do have a reality in thinking. One example that I can think of is the Japanese term 迷惑 meiwaku, which can be translated into English as ‘to cause inconvenience, disturbance, trouble for others’. I personally do think in terms of meiwaku as a concept. Of course this is not a particularistic concept — I know it occurs in most, if not all, cultures — but is not linking them all into a single semantic concept an illustration of the role of words? And thinking in terms of avoiding meiwaku surely shows that our thoughts are expressed in ‘words’. Or perhaps this is just another case where it’s not possible to really know if we are thinking in words or not.
I always thought of “The Origin of Consciousness …” as one of those elaborate hoaxes which demand admiration for the ingenious and intricate nature of its construction. Like “The White Goddess” or “Holy Blood, Holy Grail”.
I recently saw an article speculating that, because ancient texts, such as Homer, don’t have a word for “blue”, that indicates that Bronze Age people had a visual system more limited in wavelength than modern people.
The book is like that, but blown up to gargantuan proportions.
(Although I now know that the backstory of HBHG is a bit weirder than I originally thought.)
This reminds me of some passages from Robert Sapolsky’s A Primate’s Memoir. In addition to baboon studies, he also had various interactions with local Kenyans.
I tried trimming this down. It’s not until now that I realize how very stream-of-consciousness the narrative is.
There’s another couple of paragraphs on the same topic many chapters later:
I note that Sapolsky did his field work in the 1970s through the 1990s. I don’t know how much Kenya may have changed in the ~3 decades since.
Oh, that wasn’t what I was expecting after such a build-up. I was expecting (what might be the other half) “she hears the wrong voices” — that is, channeling personas/deities that aren’t usually voiced/don’t usually speak/don’t say stuff like that.
Is it not only that killing goats is a male prerogative, but also that there’s care and ritual in the butchering? Presumably in order to cook/eat the goat(?)
1. I seem to remember part of Jaynes’ argument was that a genetic predisposition to hearing and obeying an imaginary God’s or chief’s voice conveyed an advantage to larger groupings, enabling them to cooperate, settle disputes without collapsing in to anarchy, etc., offsetting the evolutionary disadvantage of missing the odd predator because busy taking a call from God.
2. You could probably say that all human non-extended-family groupings rely on some sort of mass psychosis (or, if one prefers, shared myths) in order to function. In this case, the mad one is the one whose individual psychosis overrides his (ok, this was a she, but I think numbers favour the male here) allegiance to the “normal” mass psychosis. If you prefer a more precise metaphor, if members of a society are like coupled cars on a track, it is easy for members to see when a car has uncoupled and left the track.
In Sapolsky’s smug anecdote Rhoda’s “She’s crazy. Can’t you just see from how she acts?” seems pretty justifiable to me. I don’t find Sapolsky’s posturing quite as amusing he he himself seems to. No doubt he enjoys gently mocking (as he supposes) the ways of amusing foreigners in general. Such people are common.
Schizophrenia is common in Africa, and the provision for dealing humanely with those afflicted is generally minimal. Deep anthropological analysis in aid of diagnosis only called for if you subscribe to R D Laing bollocks about such things. These things are really not difficult, Sapolsky.
I was trying to remember who Rhoda was, so I found the paragraph that introduces her:
So while she had more than one perspective on the world, she had no actual training in diagnostics, and Sapolsky had no reason to think that she might have a sophisticated theory of insanity.
I have a vague memory of watching a video of Sapolsky describing some sort of diagnostic test for clinical sociopathy. And he looked at the test, and applied it to himself, and found that he himself met quite a few of the criteria.
I’m not sure if the conclusion was that the tests are problematic, or that he himself is problematic, or both.
Yeah, I don’t think many groups of people, whatever their views on magic, voices, and the like, have much trouble identifying when somebody is having a severe psychotic break in public.
@Brett, there are cultures where such people are thought to be possessed by spirits, they go to the [cleric] the cleric reads [holy text], the person screams, and the spirit gets expelled from his victim’s body. Then the person is fine.
I’m pretty sure that even in such cultures there are people who are not thought to be possessed by spirits but are considered just plain crazy. People are not blind or stupid. (I trust you are not under the delusion that all crazy people could be cured by a shaman saying the right words.)
a person sitting alone is assumed to be (silently) conversing with their own win “spiritual individuality, genius.” I’ve always imagined this as describing essentially the experience of just thinking your own thoughts to yourself
One Ainu word for “think” is yay-nu, literally “listen to oneself.” Worth trying every once in a while.
When I think without words it’s
(tips hat)
Jaynes is obviously ridiculously wrong, but wrong in interestingly thought-provoking ways.
His theories would make a great concept for a science fiction novel. (Indeed, I imagine that they already have done, though I can’t immediately think of an example.)
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, IIRC.
AFAIK the Kusaasi have (or used to have, prior the the European invasions) no concept of spirit possession. (The relevant Bible verses translate “he is possessed by an evil spirit” as “a bad kikirig follows him”, leveraging the translationese use of kikirig, generally rendered “fairy” in the local Ghanaian English, for “devil, demon”, a concept absent from the traditional Kusaasi worldview.)
On the other hand, they have some perfectly good words for “mad”, readily reconstructable to proto-Western Oti-Volta.
@drasvi: I have mentioned a few times that I took Magic, Witchcraft, and the Spirit World in college. One of the things we discussed was how forms of spirit contact (Professor James Howe’s preferred term) were extremely culturally bound. Whether people were possessed, or had visions, or spoke in tongues, was determined by their societal environment. Certain forms of atypical, seemingly irrational behavior were accepted as (more or less) normal occurrences, but generic schizoid behavior was not. Frequently, the “allowed” episodes provided outlets for people (often low-status women) to express dissatisfaction with their circumstances and to have their issues addressed, without upsetting the existing power structure. Someone who is possessed by a demon (or abducted by an alien) is most typically stressed, pained, searching for fulfillment and affirmation. When the community accepts the reality of the condition and comes together to assist and to treat the possession, that confirms the sufferer’s importance and attractiveness and gives them time to recuperate and develop arrangements for further, more mundane assistance in the future.
even in such cultures there are people who are not thought to be possessed by spirits but are considered just plain crazy
The usual Standard Arabic word for “crazy” is literally “possessed by jinn” (majnūn). The current use of the term doesn’t even automatically entail a belief in jinn; but most people do, and the semantic shift suggests that the distinction was not considered particularly important.
Are you saying that people who speak Arabic do not acknowledge the existence of insanity in the medical sense (schizophrenia, paranoia, etc.) — it’s all just jinns, and can be dealt with by some sort of exorcism? Because I find that hard to believe. Needless to say, etymology is neither destiny nor semantics.
Of course not! But it is a clue about the past. No one had a concept of schizophrenia before the 20th century anyway, Arabic-speaking or not. Probably doctors in previous centuries would have drawn a distinction between “medical” insanity and possession (with schizophrenia falling squarely under the latter, obviously.) My hazy memories of premodern medical practice suggest that the former would involve humoral imbalances, to be treated by changes of diet or sleep patterns or music or the like. But most people aren’t doctors, and the generalisation of majnūn to “crazy” in general suggests that at some point they saw the distinction as just a pedantic detail.
Oh, OK, I didn’t realize you were talking only about the past — thanks for clarifying!
And he looked at the test, and applied it to himself, and found that he himself met quite a few of the criteria.
I’m not sure if the conclusion was that the tests are problematic, or that he himself is problematic, or both.
I don’t think it has to be either. It’s well-known that merely reading a list of the signs and symptoms of a specific mental disease tends to make the reader believe that they themselves have the condition in question.
Jaynes’s theories would make a great concept for a science fiction novel.
Harry Turtledove’s short story “Bluff” is specifically about this idea: the aliens turn out to have bicameral minds, but the situation is unstable and beginning to break down, starting with traders and soldiers who interact with other bicameral societies with different gods. After the story was published in Analog, Jaynes wrote to Turtledove saying he had liked the story and found that it represented his ideas well, to Turtledove’s considerable relief. Turtledove’s later fantasy novel Between the Rivers is based on a similar set of ideas, but without the external visiting-Earthman perspective of “Bluff”.
Back to the original topic.
Language production is a conscious activity. When you speak you are aware that you do. It is interesting because of the association between speech and awareness in the OP.
Whether it is unique in the concentration it requires, it is one activity you are always aware of.
Another fact (possibly related to this awareness) is that langage is either directed at someone or addressed by someone to you (I know, LH believes that language is not merely for communication, but I think he will agree that communication is an important part). It is interactive.
I also beleive it is recursive… No, I don’t associate “recursion” with Chomsky. I mean recursive in the sense: your choice of forms when it is not habitual/formulaic can be based on somewhat recursive calculations like “if I say this she’ll think that I think that I think that …”.
Daniel Everett, Don’t Look, There Are Snakes, p. xvi:
I have occasionally tried to figure out if there is a point in a recursion like he knows that she knows that … the dog is dead where both parties have exactly the same model of the other’s state of mind. Or is it like continued fractions where the infinite series can express an irrational or even transcendental number, but cutting it off at any stage leaves you with a rational number?
Does the result change if you assume that both parties are language and logic nerds like yourself and will model the outcome of the infinite series for themself and the other?
@lars
How good are you at remembering directions to an unfamiliar destination involving a number of direction changes? I do not mean “proceed at X compass bearing for a distance of N metres….” but “turn left at the second set of traffic lights…”. I suspect that the answer depends on “what are the consequences if I navigate incorrectly?” perhaps more than on your mapping or logical recursion abilities.
a recursion like he knows that she knows that …
Grice (talking of nerds) did some ur-quantification of this recursing/reciprocating in the cooperative principle. After only a few cycles, if he knows that she knows that he knows the dog is dead, she knows that he knows that she knows that the dog is dead, then both parties can infer all higher cycles of knowing-otherness. We presume each party can verify for themselves the liveness of the dog.
It works because a mind can’t keep secrets from itself — ex hypothesi, YMMV.
It gets trickier if one party is trying to deceive the other in some sort of double-bluff. But that’s for mutually promised undertakings/contracts, or for relying on some other’s claims, not independently verifiable facts about the world.
My lecturer in ‘mathematical political theory’ also was pioneering longitudinal quantification of ‘the iterated Prisoners’ Dilemma’, where if both parties know they’re going to go through the challenge repeatedly (but don’t know exactly how many times), they’ll in effect appear to be co-operating out of mutual interest. Which might or might not be a way to model ‘tactical voting’ in electoral systems with Proportional Representation. And for political aspirants who know the electorate will remember what they claimed last time. YPMV (Your Politician Might Vary.)
@pp, I’d probably be pretty bad at “random” sequences of turns, but this is more like “turn left and right at alternate corners until you see a dead dog”. I can do that, I think.
(In most cities, such a set of directions is a witness to the director not understanding the main grid. If I can tell someone “Go straight west to the Birmingham road and turn right, then straight north for 6 lights and you’ll be at the town hall” I feel that I’ve done something useful. My ex-wife hated when I did that, she preferred to construct a route from little local patches that she was confident in and was happy as long as each patch brought us “closer” to the goal in some sense — possibly just in the sense of being more confident that we could actually get there eventually — so going to some crossing of main roads out of the usual haunts was not on).
I’m squarely in the camp of putting thoughts in words when I’m thinking. Whether that’s the actual thinking process or some simultaneous translation from mentalese, I can’t tell. But I am able to solve purely visual problems (with my job, mostly where to put what graphic element on a powerpoint slide) by manipulating images in my head without talking to myself.
I do a lot of thinking in language, but that’s not my only mode of thinking. I remember a discussion I had with my mother when I was in elementary school about whether it was possible to think about certain kinds of things without forming them into words. (We did not come to any firm conclusions.) In any case, I have definitely observed the phenomenon of thinking in mentalese. Sometimes, I have a statement in my head, which feels like it is completely and explicitly laid out in words; however, when I then go to say or write it, it turns out that there are some pieces that my mentalese version had not completely specified, and which I need to decide on the fly as I speak or type.
I just ran across a post from 2010 quoting Tom Lubbock’s account of his brain tumor and consequent loss of control over speech and writing, which makes interesting reading in this context; a couple of bits:
That seems to be most of what I think.
The rest, though, is in images or motions/”muscle memory” (probably all with emotions attached – have I complained about the kolinahr fallacy recently…). For example, when I need to plan my movements because they’re of kinds I can’t leave to the cerebellum (climbing a tree, running down a muddy hill so I need to plan very fast where exactly to step…), there’s no language involved.
Supposedly yes: a recent and long history of fighting. In the West some 10% of the population are left-handed; there are more peaceful societies where there are only 5%; and there are warlike societies where the advantage of surprise that a left-handed fighter apparently has is so great that there are 20%.
This implies, BTW, that lefthandedness has, or comes with, a Darwinian disadvantage by default. I have no idea what that could be, and my source never brought this up.
That source was… something popularizing I read a long time ago. Sorry. :-/
I can read much faster than I can articulate, and there’s obviously language processing involved in that. Whether I can think in language faster than I can read I have no idea.
The immense progress of recent decades has replaced this by a tendency to dispense hydroxychloroquine…
That’s a bit of a matter of definition. Some people are capable of falling asleep while talking – in the middle of a sentence that suddenly turns into a random sequence of random, but normally articulated, words.
In my case, AFAIK, it only turns out that some of the pieces aren’t specified in the language I need to put this in – they’re simply in another, and I forgot to make sure I can translate them.
Some people are capable of falling asleep while talking …
Grandmother Tells a Ghost Story, with stage direction ‘grandmother goes to sleep’ about 1:40.
This implies, BTW, that lefthandedness has, or comes with, a Darwinian disadvantage by default.
According to what my wife said vs. what my daughter says, it’s a matter of chronic stress from being coerced into right-handed uniformity in many things from writing to which hand holds the knife when eating. (The tendency to coercion has diminished over time.) Statistics on right-handed and southpaw pitchers show that while the latter have a definite advantage when playing baseball, they don’t tend to live as long.
As I have often told my left-handed daughter, left-handed woman are all witches. (She seems OK with the idea.)
How globally widespread has that ever been, though?
It was certainly usual in my father’s day: he (also left-handed) was made to write right-handed, and he still does. It doesn’t seem to have done either his handwriting or his personality any particular damage, though.
Some people are capable of falling asleep while talking …
Presumably this depends on how boring you are. It puts me in mind of an exchange from Leo Rosten (I think) along the lines of
Patient: Doctor! You have to help me. I talk to myself all the time.
Doctor: I really wouldn’t worry about it. Lots of people talk to themselves. It’s quite normal.
Patient: But Doc, you don’t know what a nudnik I am!
Yes, it was universal in the West until quite recently, but my source’s claim spanned the globe and enough centuries for natural selection.
An interesting thread that I only just noticed. I think my responses are running a little long – and that’s with skipping a few where I wasn’t very sure what exactly I wanted to say…
And I recently discovered that some people imagine things by seeing pictures inside their head, which I don’t. Turns out that most people see the pictures. (If you aren’t sure which group you are in: Imagine a horse galloping past you. Now, is it galloping to the right or the left? If your answer is “Huh?” then you don’t see the pictures.)
Apparently it’s called “aphantasia”.
I heard that some people go very far in the other direction: their mental images are so vivid that they can almost confuse them for reality. I fortunately don’t seem to have this.
(In my case, the horse is galloping from behind, slightly to the right of me but roughly perpendicular to the right-left direction. Also, I think it might actually be trotting.)
That the (non-interpolated) text of Iliad locates Achilles’ fears in his guts rather than a construct of ‘mind’ strikes me as no evidence for anything. I wouldn’t locate my mental life any particular place; I’m not aware of my brain ‘buzzing’ any more than any other part of my anatomy.
There’s the infamous story (not sure how true) that the ancient Egyptians tried to preserve all the organs of a (high-status) dead person except the brain, because they thought that the brain isn’t actually used for anything and consequently wouldn’t be needed in the underworld.
AFAIK active thinking does seem to correlate with headaches, but this could easily be merely an artifact of cultural knowledge that thinking goes in the head.
IIRC fear, in particular, being placed in the guts (or thereabouts) is a common metaphor in many languages into the modern day, or at least into the 20th century. (In Russian it’s commonly the spleen, AFAIK.)
By the way, I meant to comment on the unusual word in this sentence: “A few years ago, someone rediscovered/invented tulpamancy, the idea of cultivating multiple personalities on purpose because it’s cool.” Never heard of it, but there’s a Wiktionary entry: “(neologism) The culture and practice of talking to tulpas (autonomous thoughtforms).”
Previously on LH.
Incidentally, when the review was written (June 2020) – and indeed when the linked comment was written (November 2020) – the phrase in brackets had read “magical creatures or imaginary friends”.
In January 2021, a practicing tulpamancer who really didn’t like this phrasing changed it to “thoughtforms capable of independent action, with a persistent personality and identity”; this was quickly reverted, and then rephrased again by the same (unregistered) contributor as “autonomous mental constructs with a persistent personality and identity”.
The current phrasing (which puts “thoughtforms” back in) dates from March 2023.
My ex-wife hated when I did that, she preferred to construct a route from little local patches that she was confident in and was happy as long as each patch brought us “closer” to the goal in some sense — possibly just in the sense of being more confident that we could actually get there eventually — so going to some crossing of main roads out of the usual haunts was not on
This is actually a not-necessarily-bad idea if you’re in a city that is not entirely built on a grid, such that local incongruencies in the grid can make a direct two-part route significantly longer and/or significantly more inconvenient.
In one route I commonly took in Izmaylovo (a relatively griddy bit of Moscow), going north and then west took me a good deal farther north than required; going west and then north took me a good deal farther south than required; and my usual route involved a complicated (and varying) combination of both westward and northward directions.
Of course if your city is not on a grid at all you’re often better off looking on a map anyway, because there could be a shortcut to your destination that is a lot shorter than the obvious route but that you wouldn’t necessarily think of because it goes in a non-obvious direction.
Sometimes, I have a statement in my head, which feels like it is completely and explicitly laid out in words; however, when I then go to say or write it, it turns out that there are some pieces that my mentalese version had not completely specified, and which I need to decide on the fly as I speak or type.
In my case, AFAIK, it only turns out that some of the pieces aren’t specified in the language I need to put this in – they’re simply in another, and I forgot to make sure I can translate them.
I think I’ve had both at various times? Certainly phrases from dreams can feel like that, but that’s a general tendency of dreams.
I’ve also noticed a few cases where the mental version included some grammatical specifications that were not actually represented in English. It’s a strange feeling to be assembling a sentence in English and have a strong impression that a particular adjective or verb should take feminine agreement.
(Side-note: English has it so nice with gender agreement that only shows up in third-person pronouns, and that with plenty of nonbinary options. In Russian you can’t say “Sam was nice” without specifying whether Sam was male, female, or neuter; Hebrew is the same except you don’t even get the neuter option.
I wonder if there are “nonbinary” West Africans who would prefer to be referred to with one of the nonhuman noun classes.)
I can read much faster than I can articulate, and there’s obviously language processing involved in that. Whether I can think in language faster than I can read I have no idea.
In my case I always assumed that I can, at least, think in language faster than I can articulate [note for comparison with further figures: the human articulatory limit is on the order of 300-500 wpm, though some exceptional cases can allow slightly higher speeds]. Whether I can think in language at least as fast as I can read, I have no idea.
The reason this is so confusing to me is that my reading (as far as I could tell) is, effectively, super-skimming: AFAICT it’s combining speed-reading techniques with skimming techniques to produce reading speeds approaching (and sometimes exceeding) 2000 wpm, but with skimming-level comprehension/retention (previously on LH; I think I might have mentioned it a few more times but I’m not sure how to search for that).
This means my brain probably gets away with not necessarily being able to directly process everything on the page by reconstructing the intermediate bits. (Obviously I can’t tell for sure, and obviously in any case there’s a ton of under-the-hood complexity that I can only vaguely approximate at.)
So I don’t actually know if I’m doing language processing at 2000 wpm (or faster) when I’m reading; presumably some place in my brain must be, but this might easily happen at a level well below that of conscious thought. I do seem to be able to think pretty fast, though.
The brain also just rots too fast.
Heraclitus supposedly: “A blow to the head can confuse a man’s thinking, a blow to the foot has no such effect, this cannot be due to an immortal soul.”
Yes, and strenuously trying to follow a conversation in a language I know just well enough for that gives me a localized headache – evidently in both frontotemporal lobes.
I wonder if there are “nonbinary” West Africans who would prefer to be referred to with one of the nonhuman noun classes.
Not in any language I know of*: referring to people with non-human concords is usually pejorative (unsurprisingly.) There’s also not a lot of point in it, with languages in which biological sex is completely irrelevant to grammatical gender anyway. It may be different in Chadic languages, but if they have gender at all, they don’t have a neuter that you could choose, anyway: just masculine and feminine.
In the Volta-Congo languages there tend to be lots of nouns in non-human classes that do refer to people, but they then take human-class agreement instead of the class-determined “grammatical gender” agreement; in Swahili, nouns referring to animals do this too. Swahili nouns placed in non-human classes secondarily, in order to produce affective senses like “dear little” or “lumbering great”, can take the corresponding class agreement, but even that is more usual with pejoratives.
Kusaal doesn’t have noun-class-based agreement any more, but only three of its seven morphological noun classes contain all sorts of nouns referring to people (and one of those probably got all its human-reference nouns through historical sound changes which led to them being thrown out of the original core “human-only” class); of the other four, three never refer to people, and the fourth is pejorative when used for people (typical human-reference members: “fool”, “coward”, “ugly person”, “slave.”)
* A tiny subset of all the West African languages that there are, though, of course.
…or… just temporal lobes, more likely.
Headaches aren’t pains in the lobes; the brain feels no pain.
No, but they’re pressure on the surrounding membranes, caused by swelling of the brain, which is in such cases caused by increased blood supply.
Jaynesian scholarship is not limited to one book written by Julian Jaynes that was published in 1976 but has involved coming on a half century of scholarship involving dozens of academics and researchers in various fields of study. The amount of evidence that has continued to accumulate in favor of his scientific theory is vast at this point. It’s not limited to a few examples from the anthropological record.
Jayne’s scientific theory is a set of testable and falsifiable hypotheses. He wasn’t interested in wild, irrational speculations. The whole point of his scholarship was to apply a broad scientific inquiry to an area of study that had largely been dismissed in science, that of consciousness. He came from a background in behavioral research and was dissatisfied with the state of science at the time.
https://www.julianjaynes.org/resources/
https://www.julianjaynes.org/resources/books/
https://www.julianjaynes.org/about/about-jaynes-theory/academic-scholarly-interest/
https://www.julianjaynes.org/about/about-jaynes-theory/critiques-of-jaynes-theory-a-general-pattern/
https://www.julianjaynes.org/about/about-jaynes-theory/critiques-and-responses/
https://www.julianjaynes.org/resources/supporting-evidence/
https://www.julianjaynes.org/about/about-jaynes-theory/summary-of-evidence/
https://www.julianjaynes.org/blog/category/supporting-evidence/
https://www.julianjaynes.org/blog/julian-jaynes-theory/julian-jaynes-is-not-for-the-intellectually-fainthearted/
https://www.julianjaynes.org/blog/julian-jaynes-theory/falling-between-the-cracks-jayness-defiance-of-scholarly-conventions/
https://www.julianjaynes.org/blog/julian-jaynes-theory/the-need-to-acknowledge-bicameral-vestiges/
@Owlmirro – You quoted Sapolsky. I’m only vaguely familiar with him, but I’ll respond to the general topic. The specific quote is Sapolsky asking about how does someone in a non-Western society tell when a tribal person (on the extreme end of the non-WEIRD) is crazy. In talking to the healthcare workers in these places, they answered: “They just act crazy.” That indicates these people have not interrogated where they’ve received their own views, what has shaped them, which just makes them typically lacking in self and social awareness.
Of course, all of these highly educated healthcare workers are more Westernized than the average non-Westerner, and likely exhibit more WEIRD mentality and biases. Would they know what ‘crazy’ was if they hadn’t been taught Western categories, perceptions, and culture of what is deemed ‘crazy’? Yet in some non-Western populations, such as in parts of Africa, an individual talking to themselves is not deemed crazy, dangerous, or even odd; though they’d surely be diagnosed as schizophrenic if they were hospitalized.
In many cultures, voice-hearing is within the range of normal behavior, that is to say they have a readymade cultural explanation that fits into their cultural worldview. The anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann, inspired by Julian Jaynes, researched voice-hearers in the United States and Ghana. Those in Ghana tended to hear voices that were friendly, kind, and helpful. Their voice-hearing was normalized as part of everyday experience and so was as generally positive and pro-social as talking to one’s family, friends, or neighbors. It was scary or freaky.
Daniel Everett, a linguist, has studied multiple tribal societies. He is most famous for his writings on the Piraha. He observed that among the Piraha there is no observed or recorded cases of depression, suicidality, or schizophrenia. Similarly, the nutritionist Mary Ruddick, in traveling around rural Africa, asked teachers about autism. The teachers stated that, though they knew what autism was, they had never seen it in any of their students. Such evidence indicates there is something cultural going on here, if people have different theories to explain it. We need to step outside of our own WEIRD social reality tunnel.
@bds
The local elaborated by “she hears voices at the wrong times”. Together with the impromptu goat butchering and the other extreme patternless and disruptive stuff, this was enough for the peer group or extended family to decide they could not provide sufficient care and dissuade or prevent her from injuring herself or another goat/human being (was she able to tell the difference and did her carers think she could?). It sounds like it was the call of her carers, and in any reasonable society (even WEIRD societies, even within the last 50 years were not always “reasonable”) she could obtain release and restitution for her ungentle handling when she calmed down and presented the case to an authority.
@PlasticPaddy – Those cultures were no longer fully non-WEIRD, much less traditional. They had already been influenced and disturbed by not only Westernization but modernization and industrialization, such as encroachment, poaching, conflict, environmental destruction, being pushed to marginal lands, introduction of new foods and drugs and diseases, etc. Traditional ways of dealing with diverse behaviors likely were already altered, compromised, or lost. The very presence of Western-style healthcare alone demonstrates that.
There are many cultures where possession or other altered states involve all kinds of behavior, occasionally violence without it being perceived according to WEIRD ‘madness’. In fact, many cultures, until they were Westernized, had no concept of ‘madness’ as such. Sometimes we have to go to historical records to see cultures prior to any Westernization or at least any significant Westernization. It’s hard, from the perspective of WEIRD bias, to take seriously what non-WEIRD was like prior to WEIRD globalization.
I’ll give another example. There was a Western travelogue of pre-revolutionary China. The author was specifically focused on religious Taoism. The practitioners would sometimes invoke possession by gods. It was considered risky as the gods were unpredictable and sometimes violent. There were incidents where people died. Yet apparently there was no WEIRD conception of insanity, whether or not there was an Asian conception. Anyway, it was considered understandable and acceptable within social norms.
Think about that, with China being one of the oldest and most advanced civilizations, but with little WEIRDness there until recent times. Then again, there is another factor. Thomas Talhelm has co-authored work on WEIRD, but also on mentalities in general. One famous study he did found that Chinese in the wheat-growing north were analytical and individualistic like Westerners, as opposed to holistic and communal like in the rice-growing south. What is interesting is that, in dietary research, wheat has been linked as an exacerbating factor of schizophrenia.
This is one of the many complex ways that WEIRD bias gets into everything. It’s not only a bias of ideas, beliefs, values, culture, thinking patterns, etc. It’s a difference of sociocultural environment in numerous ways. This is hard for us WEIRDos to see because we take all of the factors that make us WEIRD as normal. And increasingly because of Westernization, the rest of the world is being WEIRDified as well, eliminating counter-evidence. For example, Chinese (like Japanese) in urban centers, even in the south, are both eating more wheat and testing as more analytical and individualistic.
Maybe it would be helpful to broaden the context and so put it in perspective. Julian Jaynes’ scientific theory didn’t come from nowhere. It was based on generations of research in numerous fields: neurocognition, brain hemisphericity, anthropology, linguistics, philology, consciousness studies, etc. What made him unique mostly was that he refused to stay in his lane as an academic psychologist and former behavioralist researcher. Instead, he brought together diverse evidence that previously had typically been studied separately within scholarship.
To simplify, his hypothesis of bicameral mentality was a variation on a much older hypothesis, the bundle theory of mind. The opposite hypothesis is the ego theory of mind. Both are unproven hypotheses, in that there is no scientific consensus as yet on who is right, but both hypotheses are testable and falsifiable. Neither side can simply assume they are correct and those who disagree are wrong. The onus of responsibility for proving either hypothesis is on the side proclaiming and defending it. So, it’s not only Jaynes’ scientific theory we should interrogate with skepticism. We should be equally, if not more skeptical, about our own WEIRD bias that inclines us to the ego theory of mind.
This might even relate to the Eastern versus Western difference of mentalities, and specifically between wheat-growing (or eating) and rice-growing (or eating). The earliest proponents of the bundle theory of mind, in terms of extant records, were the ancient Buddhists, largely with rice agriculture and diet. Some argue that the philosopher David Hume inherited this view from Buddhist psychology by way of returning Christian missionaries he had contact with. Wherever it was coming from, other Western thinkers such as the philology-educated Friedrich Nietzsche and historian Henry Adams took on the bundle theory as well.
Since then, it’s been studied, researched, and defended by many others: Bruno Snell, E. R. Dodds, Eric Havelock, Daniel Dennett, Susan Blackmore, Tanya Luhrmann, John Geiger, Iain McGilchrist, Lisa Blackman, and many others. That isn’t even mentioning the dozens of Jaynesian scholars. It’s not a single field of study and so the various scholars come from different fields, mostly unfamiliar with or even unaware of each other’s area of expertise. It’s a broader understanding of the human psyche that has gained more credence, as the evidence keeps piling up.
@dbs
I am not sure how this relates to my reading of the narrated events and the local woman’s explanation as to the basis for her actions. I agree it is possible to view all parties as hopelessly WEIRD or “WEIRD-contaminated”, but since it is impractical to cleanse their society of WEIRDness without inadvertently introducing more WEIRDness or otherwise using coercive techniques (not just on one woman who kills a goat, but on everyone), what is your best alternative? Do you fault the local woman and the others for their actions in subduing the goat-slayer? Should they not have interfered, but instead accepted any further anti-social behaviour as they would a forest fire, landslide or other act of nature, only attempting to put themselves and their loved ones out of harm’s way?
The malapropism “behavioralist” suggests that its user has very limited grounding in cognitive science.
@Grumbly minor: The malapropism “behavioralist”
Nope, to my surprise. It is a Thing, albeit a paltry thing. Another example of inelegant variation teamed up with confused ideas.
#
Behaviouralism (or behavioralism) is an approach in political science that emerged in the 1930s in the United States. It represented a sharp break from previous approaches in emphasizing an objective, quantified approach to explain and predict political behaviour.[1][2] It is associated with the rise of the behavioural sciences, modeled after the natural sciences.[3] Behaviouralism claims it can explain political behaviour from an unbiased, neutral point of view.
#
Yet in some non-Western populations, such as in parts of Africa, an individual talking to themselves is not deemed crazy, dangerous,
Here in New York City, a very obviously WEIRD person is not considered crazy or dangerous if they talk to themselves either, particularly if they have a white cord sticking out of their ear. I myself have no such cord and yet have been talking to myself on the street (not to mention at home) for forty years and more without anyone coming to take me away (ho ho, hee hee, ha ha).
“In Boorioboola-Gha a man is presentable on occasions of ceremony if he have his abdomen painted a bright blue and wear a cow’s tail; in New York he may, if it please him, omit the paint, but after sunset he must wear two tails made of the wool of a sheep and dyed black.” I don’t do that either.
The teachers stated that, though they knew what autism was, they had never seen it in any of their students.
I know what it is too, but that doesn’t make me competent to diagnose it. (Unlike shingles.)
Those cultures were no longer fully non-WEIRD, much less traditional. etc.
That argument proves too much, for there are no cultures left, except possibly the North Sentinelese, that are unaffected by WEIRD societies. But if we stick to the original narrower definition, it obviously excludes such major world cultures as Russians and Han.
such as in parts of Africa
Which parts, exactly?
Schizophrenia is as common in Africa (at least in Ghana and Nigeria) as in Europe; it is woefully underdiagnosed and support for it is even more inadequate than in Europe and America. Those afflicted generally lead pitiful lives as outcasts: “village idiots” if they’re lucky. There is no wonderful magic realm of prelapsarian RD Laingian innocence where they are regarded as saints. That’s an exoticising fantasy.
I used to live there; I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I have talked extensively with a local psychiatrist about these very issues. He had done considerable work trying to address these problems. (In your view, I presume that his being a psychiatrist immediately invalidates his opinion.)
The local languages all have words that mean, perfectly straightforwardly, “mad.” This is not some mere artefact of translation, and the words quite certainly long antedate the European invasions.
I’ll respond to everyone in one fell swoop. And while I’m at it, I’ll add some other info following that. But before I get to my specific responses, I wanted to make one observation. It is amazing how hard it is to get many WEIRD individuals to admit or even become aware of how unusual is their own WEIRD mentality that they take as normal human nature that corresponds to objective reality, but even that assumption of a universal human nature and objective reality is a WEIRD bias. It’s amusing.
@PlasticPaddy – “I am not sure how this relates to my reading of the narrated events and the local woman’s explanation as to the basis for her actions.”
Well, I didn’t have any particular intention to relate all of my comments to your comments. I had my own independent reasons for commenting, more responding to the original piece above and the broader discussion in the comments section. I directed one initial response to you, but not necessarily having any strong opinion on the specific events you were narrating. I was using that as a jumping off point for a broader discussion.
“I agree it is possible to view all parties as hopelessly WEIRD or “WEIRD-contaminated”, but since it is impractical to cleanse their society of WEIRDness without inadvertently introducing more WEIRDness or otherwise using coercive techniques (not just on one woman who kills a goat, but on everyone), what is your best alternative?”
Based on the article, the topic at hand is bicameral mentality, Jaynesian consciousness, and the WEIRD. On that level, it’s first and foremost an intellectual inquiry. So, I had no intention of solving all of the potentially WEIRD-caused or WEIRD-affected problems in the entire non-WEIRD world. My purpose was simply to point out the facts of the situation, in order to distinguish actual examples of the fully non-WEIRD from that of WEIRD-influenced societies. Otherwise, we’d be simply further projecting our WEIRD bias on everything, using our own WEIRDness reflected back to us as proof that our WEIRDness is normal and universal.
“Do you fault the local woman and the others for their actions in subduing the goat-slayer? Should they not have interfered, but instead accepted any further anti-social behaviour as they would a forest fire, landslide or other act of nature, only attempting to put themselves and their loved ones out of harm’s way?”
I don’t necessarily fault anyone. All that I stated was that, looking at the anthropological record and other accounts, we know that various non-WEIRD societies have dealt with unusual and even violent behavior in numerous ways not requiring psychiatric intervention. Modern WEIRD-style mental healthcare is a fairly recent invention, not even fully existing in the West until a few generations ago. Until literacy and education and particularly higher education became the norm, most Westerners were fairly non-WEIRD as well.
@John Cowan – “Here in New York City, a very obviously WEIRD person is not considered crazy or dangerous if they talk to themselves either, particularly if they have a white cord sticking out of their ear.”
In that case, they aren’t actually talking to themselves. They are simply talking to another person who isn’t physically present at that same place. This has become so common that most people quickly realize that the individual isn’t talking to themselves, and so they don’t fit the category of insanity as defined by someone talking to themselves. That example is completely irrelevant to the discussion here, other than maybe in terms of media studies involving the affect on the human psyche and neurocognition (e.g., Marshall McLuhan), but I don’t think that angle has been brought up here by anyone, if it does relate to Jaynesian scholarship.
“I know what it is too, but that doesn’t make me competent to diagnose it.”
Yet another irrelevant comment, as the disagreement isn’t over either your expertise or my own. That is why we are, instead, discussing the work of scholars like Jaynes who are experts in their own fields of study, such as psychology. With that in mind, I’d note that the teachers Mary Ruddick spoke to were presumably trained in education, including what affects education. So, learning about autism would’ve likely been part of their formal training. That would be part of their field of expertise. It is probably safe to assume that it isn’t part of your field of expertise, but it’s appreciated that you admit your incompetence in this area. I too am incompetent and admit it openly. That is why I’m pointing to the evidence from those who are competent.
“That argument proves too much, for there are no cultures left, except possibly the North Sentinelese, that are unaffected by WEIRD societies. But if we stick to the original narrower definition, it obviously excludes such major world cultures as Russians and Han.”
Now that is a relevant comment, not to mention worthy and interesting, actually contributing to the present debate. It potentially could be a fair criticism. But I think it’s portraying the situation in too black-and-white of terms. There are plenty of traditional populations that, though not completely isolated, have almost entirely maintained their traditional cultures and lifestyles.
The Piraha, for example, have resisted two centuries of missionary apologetics attempting to convert them. They retain their lack of linguistic recursion, numeracy, linear time, etc; not to mention still demonstrating bundled mind, animism, 4E cognition, communal identity, voice-hearing, identity change, and what we would call spirit possession. It’s fair to refer to such a population as mostly non-WEIRD, if not absolutely unaffected by Western influences, and there are still plenty of such populations remaining.
@David Eddyshaw – “Which parts [of Africa], exactly?”
I have a close friend who is a Libyan refugee. His tribe is Dazaga and his family came from Sudan. He is an interesting example because he was diagnosed with schizophrenia after coming to the US. Yet he remembers that his grandmother spoke to herself when alone in rooms. She had spirit familiar. But there was no psychiatric framework and no mental health services used. She wasn’t considered insane, if unusual. Others in the family left her alone and didn’t talk about it.
They were already urbanized at that point, but his parents and grandparents had grown up as rural herders. So, they retained their rural culture, mindset, and practices. To put it in context, Westernization has been limited in that region, partly because of underdevelopment. Under Muammar Gaddafi, Libya was intentionally isolated from the West and education was discouraged, with a population that is some combination of illiterate and barely literate, the majority having been illiterate a half century ago. Literacy is central to both Jaynesian consciousness and WEIRD mentality.
The lack of schizophrenia, even when voice-hearing (hallucination) and voice-speaking (i.e., possession) is common, is also observed in other populations elsewhere, such as the Amazonian Piraha. Individuals will change personality, speak in other voices, and experience hallucinations. The entire tribe has apparently collectively hallucinated, once witnessed by Daniel Everett and his family. Yet none of these behaviors are treated as insane or even abnormal, even thought they would typically land a modern urban person, even in many non-WEIRD countries, in a hospital or psychiatric institute. Everett has stated that there is no known case of a Piraha with schizophrenia or depression, suicide, etc.
But part of it is simply a set of behaviors, when perceived differently, will be identified, labeled, and treated different. This sometimes leads to entirely different results when WEIRD-like mental healthcare isn’t involved: “Despite the scientific quest to universalise the experience of mental illness, the devil remains in the cultural detail. For example, as you’d expect in places where television is a rarity, schizophrenic delusions are often solely attributed to spirits, ghost possession or black magic, rather than the voice from the flickering box in the corner – and this can redefine the whole experience of illness and suffering. In the small rural villages of India, where people seek healing in temples rather than in a doctor’s surgery, this is not uncommon” (https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2003/03/13/2119456.htm).
Of course, from a WEIRD perspective, we tend to not take traditional perceptions at face value. For example, if someone of the South African Xhosa people claims to be bewitched, WEIRD psychiatry would call that delusional and possibly diagnose them as schizophrenic (Megan M. Campbell, et al, “The content of delusions in a sample of South African Xhosa people with schizophrenia”). But many people who hear disembodied voices otherwise live normal lives, particularly in societies where that is within acceptable social norms. So, what exactly makes that person mentally ill, other than the WEIRD perception imposed upon it? After all, even in the West, the mentally ill actually have lower violent crime rates than the general public. So, pointing to anecdotes of violent ‘mad’ people in traditional societies comes across as cherry picking and sensationalism, since that is not typical of voice-hearers in any society.
“Schizophrenia is as common in Africa (at least in Ghana and Nigeria) as in Europe; it is woefully underdiagnosed and support for it is even more inadequate than in Europe and America. Those afflicted generally lead pitiful lives as outcasts: “village idiots” if they’re lucky. There is no wonderful magic realm of prelapsarian RD Laingian innocence where they are regarded as saints. That’s an exoticising fantasy.”
But what if the rate of diagnoses precisely increases in correlation with the rate of schizophrenic-inducing conditions? You have no evidence to base your assumption on, as the availability of psychiatric data increases simultaneously also with modernization, urbanization, industrialization, globalization, and Westernization. To claim underdiagnosis is to argue that the lack of evidence is proof that the rate of schizophrenia being higher because you’re assuming that not only schizophrenia is a universal human condition, rather than culture bound, but that it also must be the same everywhere, such that any population lacking similar rates as the West must be underdiagnosed. This is rather circular thinking.
This isn’t “exoticising fantasy.” That is an uninformed or disinformed dismissal. This is an actual academic debate. Biological anthropologist J. S. Allen stated that, “Schizophrenia is apparently less common in traditional than in nontraditional societies, and the course of illness in these cultural settings may also be more benign” (“At issue: Are traditional societies schizophrenogenic?,” Schizophrenia Bulletin, Volume 23, Issue 3, 1997, Pages 357–364). Indeed: “A culture may interpret abnormal behavior as relating to some kind of voodoo or anger and may regard the symptoms as normal even though symptoms are consistent with schizophrenia” (“Culture-Bound Syndrome,” Encyclopedia of Social Measurement, 2005). Supporting this, the data shows that psychosis has increasing rates among urban youth in the US. Schizophrenia is a modern Western category. Some argue that it’s the result of an evolutionary mismatch involving maladaptive conditions, not something genetically inherent, essentialist, and determinist within the human psyche.
Tanya Luhrmann, inspired by Jaynes, has written how voice-hearing in non-WEIRD societies, even a more Westernized society like Ghana, often doesn’t lead to schizophrenic diagnosis. That is because voice-hearing is culturally perceived within normal human experience. In those societies that normalize voice-hearing, it is experienced more positively. The voices are friendlier and more helpful, rather than antagonistic and persecutory as they are in Western countries like the United States. If someone lives healthily and normally, as part of stable social norms, are they schizophrenic? Why are we to assume that everyone with verbal hallucinations is schizophrenic? If we make that assumption, then, sure, schizophrenic rates are higher everywhere. But that might be a false assumption that confirms our WEIRD bias.
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2017/05/30/urban-weirdness/
https://news.stanford.edu/2014/07/16/voices-culture-luhrmann-071614/
“I used to live there; I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I have talked extensively with a local psychiatrist about these very issues. He had done considerable work trying to address these problems. (In your view, I presume that his being a psychiatrist immediately invalidates his opinion.)”
I never made such a claim nor implied it. In accusing others as being anti-intellectual, you come across as anti-intellectual in refusing to intellectually engage an intellectual debate. Some Jaynesian scholars and advocates of similar or related theories are also psychiatrists. Psychiatrists supporting or speaking positively of Jaynes’ theory include: Paul Allen, Jan Dirk Blom, Kenneth Blum, T. Buchan, Dirk Corstens, Timothy J. Crow, Timothy J. Crow, Stanley I. Greenspan, Michael Lewis, Rachel L.C. Mitchell, Henry A. Nasrallah, Robert Pos, Leo Sher, Khalid Sohail, I.E.C. (Iris) Sommer, Rick Strassman, and Thomas Styron.
https://www.julianjaynes.org/about/about-jaynes-theory/academic-scholarly-interest/
https://www.julianjaynes.org/blog/julian-jaynes-theory/neuroscience-confirms-julian-jaynes-neurological-model/
Also, not agreeing with Jaynes, there aree psychiatrists like Iain McGilchrist with a different theory about the brain hemisphericity and the split psyche, though I don’t know his view on schizophrenia as culture bound. Guess what? Psychiatrists disagree with each other. God forbid! Heck, Jaynes himself was a psychologist and originally a behaviorist researcher who taught at Harvard, not exactly an intellectual lightweight who was out of his depths.
We’re not talking about conspiracy theorists, flat earthers, and such. This is part of respectable academic debate, not to be dismissed out of hand by those who are uninformed about said debate. If you’re not interested, don’t read about it. But it’s not a resolved issue yet. There is no consensus. Still, that doesn’t mean that, even if particular psychiatric labels are socially constructed, that it doesn’t indicate a real pattern within human neurocognition that could be culturally interpreted in many other ways. The available evidence and analyses indicate a complex social reality, and that requires us to bring to bear the complexity of our critical thinking skills.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_construction_of_schizophrenia
https://raggeduniversity.co.uk/2017/03/24/culture-bound-syndromes-mental/
https://blogs.canterbury.ac.uk/discursive/guest-post-the-manufacture-of-madness-why-social-construction-in-psychiatry-is-not-as-simple-as-it-seems/
https://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/2203/1/McCann_IsMentalIllness.pdf
“The local languages all have words that mean, perfectly straightforwardly, “mad.” This is not some mere artefact of translation, and the words quite certainly long antedate the European invasions.”
Words themselves change meanings over time. And any changes in society will feed back into language. Anyone even vaguely familiar with linguistics, etymology, and philology understands how meanings and definitions shift, often imperceptibly and sometimes quite quickly. Many indigenous words indicating something akin to ‘mad’ would likely have meant something far different generations or centuries ago, prior to any Western contact or other modern, etc influences. That would require an expert in each language to explore word usage, as it would be easy for a non-expert to project one’s own linguistic biases onto another language.
To really get at the root of this aspect, it might be best to turn to linguistic relativity, as that brings in the element of how language shapes our thought, perception, behavior, and identity. But all of that seems too far afield of this debate. Between you and I, this is not going to be resolved at the present moment. I honestly have no clue what various words that might or might not translate as ‘mad’ really mean in their original context prior to all foreign influences. But if you have some evidence about this area, I’d be willing to look at it. I’m always curious and open minded.
Some other things could be cleared up. Besides Jaynes’ scientific theory being about the bundle theory of mind, it’s also a scientific theory of media studies, linguistic relativity, and philology; along with neurocognition, neurological structures, etc — all being separate fields of academic study and/or scientific research. To be more accurate, it’s not a single scientific theory but rather a set of hypotheses where each stands alone. Some are more easily testable and falsifiable than others, but all of them can be analyzed according to the scholarly literature and evidence from the respective fields. To be specific, there are four independent hypotheses, where proving or disproving one doesn’t prove or disprove the others:
1) Jaynesian consciousness (J-consciousness) is an imagined inner mental space that is introspectable; i.e., inner voice of egoic individuality, or the ego theory of mind; not mere general awareness, sensory perception, or biological reactivity, nor the sum of thoughts). It is historically contingent, culturally specific, socially constructed, and mediated through language, metaphor, and analogy, specifically literacy and recursive application of the container metaphor of mind. It makes possible greater abstract thought, rationalization, long term planning, theory of mind (cognitive empathy, mind-reading), deception, etc.
2) Bicameral mentality is a variation of the bundle theory of mind and 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended), based on verbal hallucinations where one brain hemisphere spoke and the other listened. It had some similarities to animistic mentality that is common among hunter-gatherer tribes, as evidenced in the anthropological and other social science literature on voice-hearing, hallucinations, possession, personality change, trance, hypnosis, other altered states, schizophrenia, etc.
3) There is specific dating to the appearance and disappearance of bicameral mentality, followed by a specific dating of the appearance of J-consciousness. Bicameral mentality first emerged in the earliest agricultural settlements (with their death cults and temples), reached it’s peak in the city-states that followed, and then destabilized in the late Bronze Age with large, expansive, complex, and hierarchical empires; with it surviving only in remnants following that. After the Bronze Age collapse, J-consciousness began developing in Greece, Mesopotamia, and elsewhere, but wouldn’t first fully form as part of a stable social order until what some call the Axial Age. The transition was gradual and occurred in a different timeframe in other civilizations, possibly with bicameral mentality persisting much longer in some cases.
4) The neurological model for bicameral mentality is based on brain hemisphericity, as supported by brain imaging studies. If you go to the official website of the Julian Jaynes Society, you’ll find the evidence listed, described, and summarized (see linked articles in one of my comments above).
Part of the problem in most reviews of Jaynes’ book and discussions of Jaynes’ ideas is that J-consciousness is rarely understood correctly. J-consciousness consists of:
1) Spatialization: “The first and most primitive aspect of consciousness is what we already have had occasion to refer to, the paraphrand of almost every mental metaphor we can make, the mental space which we take over as the very habitat of it all. […] When we introspect (a metaphor of seeing into something), it is upon this metaphorical mind-space which we are constantly renewing and ‘enlarging’ with each new thing or relation consdousized.”
2) Excerption: “In consciousness, we are never ‘seeing’ anything in its entirety. […] We excerpt from the collection of possible attentions to a thing which comprises our knowledge of it.”
3) The Analog ‘I’: “A most important ‘feature’ of this metaphor ‘world’ is the metaphor we have of ourselves, the analog ‘I’, which can ‘move about’ vicarially in our ‘imagination’, ‘doing’ things that we are not actually doing.
The Metaphor ‘Me’: It’s a third person perspective of of the self.
4) Narratization: The individual creates stories about the analog “I” to create a sense of consistency, coherency, constancy, and continuity of Jayesian consciousness, but in reality very little of what we do happens in consciousness, and so that is why we require narratization to fill in the gaps to maintain the illusion of a singular self in total control by a singular ego.
5) Conciliation: “What I am designating by conciliation is essentially doing in mind-space what narratization does in mind-time or spatialized time. It brings things things together as conscious object just as narratization brings together things as a story. […] In conciliation we are making excerpts or narratizations compatible with each other, just as in external perception the new stimulus and the internal conception are made to agree. [example, because this one is odd]: If I ask you to think of a mountain meadow and a tower at the same time, you automatically conciliate them by having the tower rising from the meadow. But if I ask you to think of a mountain meadow and an ocean at the same time, conciliation tends not to occur and you are likely to think of one and then the other. You can only bring them together by a narratization. Thus there are principles of compatibility that govern this process, and such principles are learned and are based on the structure of the world.”
https://www.julianjaynes.org/about/about-jaynes-theory/overview/
http://www.fogbanking.com/julian-jaynes-on-what-consciousness-isnt/
You are evidently determined to interpret all other cultures than your own entirely in terms of a specifically Western ideology: viz Jaynesian bicameralism.
Where they fail to fit your preconceptions, your get-out-of-jail-free card is “Ah, but they’ve been corrupted by Western influence.”
Incidentally, nobody (in our cultures or others) thinks that talking to yourself is diagnostic of madness; accordingly, regarding talking to yourself as acceptable behaviour is not evidence for a bicameral mind.
When I talk, I talk exclusively to myself. It’s the only way to monitor whether what I say makes sense. There’s no relying on other people to understand what I say. More often than not they listen only to what they say, and not to me.
This makes socializing easy and pleasant. One learns so much by minimizing expectations.
J-consciousness is by no means distinguished by being difficult to understand, whether correctly or not. It is merely another matter of grandiose claims and small import.
No, it’s the null hypothesis.
Why only now, and why not in the rest of the West?
I… doubt anybody has claimed that schizophrenia is the only possible cause of verbal hallucinations.
I had one once. It was part of sleep paralysis instead of schizophrenia.
I don’t think this list is going to impress anybody here – I don’t think anybody reading this blog knows anywhere near that many psychiatrists. But that’s beside the point. Scientists are beside the point in science, appliers of the products of science even more so. What are their arguments?
BTW, you included Timothy J. Crow twice.
Unfortunately for Harvard, nothing of the part behind the comma follows from anything before the comma.
Yes, yes, yes – we’re instead saying Jaynes himself is uninformed about some of the things he’s been talking about.
What is that last word a typo of?
Uh… I imagined them next to each other instead.
How bizarre of a psychologist, of all people, to assume he knows how everyone else even just in his own culture thinks.
I’m getting a motte-and-bailey vibe here: accepting the obvious fact that mental disorders are in significant part culture-bound, or even the barely more debatable fact of cross-cultural variation in how one models one’s own consciousness, does not entail taking seriously the notion of a bicameral mind, much less Jaynes’ rather stretched attempts to read it into the Iliad (of all the texts he could have chosen).
It’s been many years since I read Jaynes, but I’m tempted to add that the enterprise of localising different aspects of consciousness in different hemispheres seems particularly unhelpful here. Zeus for the Homeric Greeks, or some bori-spirit in Hausaland, is not something localised in a specific part of one person’s head; on his own account it’s minimally an intersubjective reality, like “the English language” (which is not conveniently restricted to Broca’s or Wernicke’s areas) or “chess”.
Why only now, and why not in the rest of the West?
Indeed. Why not even in swathes of the U.S.?
The incidence of ‘diagnosed’ youth ADHD in the USA varies wildly across the country. Higher in middle-class areas with middle-class child psychiatrists. Presumably parents in less wealthy areas are too busy scratching a living to (afford to) take their kids to psychiatrists. (Curiously low in California, where you’d expect doting/flakey parents would be off for a diagnosis at the least behavioural/learning difficulties.)
@AntC
Sunlight. Are rates in northern Cal different to southern Cal?
To claim underdiagnosis is to argue that the lack of evidence is proof that the rate of schizophrenia being higher because you’re assuming that not only schizophrenia is a universal human condition
My claim was not based on anything so rarefied. Rather, whenever my African psychiatrist friend looked, he found much previously undiagnosed schizophenia. However, there are very few African psychiatrists per capita, especially looking at people outside major cities. It seems not unreasonable to conclude that there must be many people who are undiagnosed because there are far too few diagnosticians. This was not some cranky personal opinion of his own: he had been instrumental in trying to remedy this situation in cooperation with other psychiatrists in Africa.
I have no a priori opinion about the prevalence of schizophrenia in rural Africa, though I have been told that the received opinion in the past was that it was uncommon, on the (spurious) grounds that it was little reported; I imagine Laing-style fantasies about the nature of schizophrenia in general probably bolstered this. Your untroubled assumption that schizophrenia is a purely Western artefact of specifically modern stresses comes out of this mindset too, I think.
(Incidentally, I wonder why people imagine that being a subsistence farmer or herder is unstressful? Or that polygamous families are somehow less prone to creating anxiety than monogamous?* This is all exoticist fantasy.)
* They fuck you up, your mums and dad.
DM:
Unfortunately for Harvard, nothing of the part behind the comma follows from anything before the comma.
This is not the first time I have seen “behind the comma” from you David, and each time I am intrigued. One such occurrence (and another of related interest; both now in bold):
Standard would be “after the comma” (and “after its noun”). I find this use of behind among a few native Dutch and German speakers. It is very rare among native English speakers, but here is a 17C example in print.
No doubt the opposition of before and behind makes sense spatially in English, when before just means “in front of”. But we don’t use in front of temporally, do we? This connects with my interest in expressions such as those used here:
Such expressions can occasion confusion, as sometimes discussed online: here and here for example.
These are interesting too:
So are these concocted push-pull variants of the two given earlier:
Acceptability and meanings of these two? Is it always that re-assignment of a date toward the present is forward, and movement away from the present is back, in English? And in German, for example, verbis mutatis mutandis?
There was some discussion of DM’s use of “behind” and of terminology for moving dates a few years ago.
This is not the first time I have seen “behind the comma” from you David [M], …
Seems quite unexceptional to me — maybe slightly whimsical. I’m not only not a native Dutch/German speaker, I don’t speak Dutch at all; I speak German very badly.
we don’t use in front of temporally, do we?
Yes. I’ll bring this agenda item to the front of the meeting, because Bloggins needs to get away early.
“push-pull” of meetings also seems entirely sensible usage. I was forever doing that when I was trying to
herd catsorganise programming teams.You’re raising the shibboleth of “can occasion confusion”. I’m pretty sure there’s contexts for any expression to ‘occasion confusion’. That’s not grounds to avoid the expression; it’s grounds to avoid the context.
This is not the first time I find @Noetica to be suspiciously close to peeving. (And won’t be the first time you’ll promptly disclaim it with much wailing and gnashing of teeth.)
_If_ you’re not peeving, please try to avoid exactly the forms of ‘argument’ peevers use. ‘occasion confusion’ indeed!
Keith Ivey:
Ah, thanks. I’m not surprised it’s come up before (or in front, for that matter).
There can be no reasonable doubt that compared to “after the comma” the string “behind the comma” is extremely rare. The few hits in those ngrams are mostly non-examples, or demonstrably not from native speakers. These are easily found on Google:
Any sort of purely temporal in front of is also demonstrably rare; but of course many unusual and jargonistic things will be said, in a universe of a zillion utterances.
I’m still wondering what clear meanings (if any) people would assign to these that I ask about above:
To explicate the tension (which I had not thought I’d need to do):
Much here can occasion confusion. That, at least, has become more obvious! ♥
Such expressions can occasion confusion, as sometimes discussed online: here and here for example.
I see no confusion suggested at those links. [**] They seem to be coaching aimed at people who don’t speak English/or aren’t familiar with corporatespeak. Yes any variety of ‘in-group’ jargon can cause confusion to those outside the group.
Perhaps @Noetica doesn’t get invited to corporate meetings? Or at least not the variety that gets rescheduled and re-agenda’d?
[**] The first link seems to a) be a discussion amongst mostly non-native speakers; b) lead on to pages of first-class bullshit about language. I’d be ashamed to link to it in pursuance of any claim whatsoever.
And right there in former days at the Hattery (my bold):
Perhaps this early hatter was not invited to enough jargon-inculcating meetings, during formative months in early career. I wonder how long finance remained the Field of Mars?
In the same thread we find David Eddyshaw holding forth (not holding back, note) on another perennial and skunked confusable in English:
I’m sure that’s been discussed elsewhere chez Chapeau. It’s a favourite of mine.
@Noetica
I took “behind the comma” as interpreting the text as an ordered visual sequence to be processed sequentially. I believe you can be in front of / before or behind / after someone in the queue, and figures can appear before, in front of and after (maybe also behind for some speakers?) the decimal point.
That’s as may be, PPaddy. For myself, in the absence of context and cross-language background knowledge I’m not confident that I could ascertain which was intended by “behind the comma”: to the left or to the right of it (with reference to my own point of view as reader)? I’d need to know where I am situated within the sentence (or before or after its playing out as a whole, in whatever space sentences play out). That’s even more tricky than the standard temporal uses of bring forward and push back, in which cases we can normally locate ourselves in some sort of a present time.
Sub specie aeternitatis infinitatisque nothing is behind or before (or after or in front of) anything else, ugye?
How does this work with musical notes (written or sounded)? Does anyone ever say “The G comes behind the F#”? If they did, what would it mean? (And if a lion said it?)
Actuality precedes Potentiality in Being, Time and Dignity.
As you’ve reminded us in this forum at least twice before, Stu. How very Aristotelian of you (see Physics, Metaphysics, and … De Anima, I think. To say nothing of Aquinas. These days I prefer my metaphysics of possibility and necessity in Ulysses (“jejune jesuit”) mode. From “Nestor”:
From “Scylla and Charybdis”:
Well, since a comma is a spatial feature of written text rather than a temporal one, I automatically stayed in that way of looking at it.
Interestingly, that’s handled differently: vorverlegen (literally “prepone”) and vorziehen (lit. “pull to the fore”) mean “move to an earlier date”, verschieben (schieben literally “shove”, “push”; ver- “per-“, “mis-” and a few other things) means “move to some other date” that can be earlier or later; there’s no verb for moving something to an explicitly later date (“postpone”).
I agree that looking at it spatially makes sense, but I guess I view the characters as standing in a row facing me, rather than in a line with each letter facing the one before it. If people are standing in a row facing me, and B is to the right of A, then B is after A when I’m looking across the row, but not behind A.
English is hopelessly muddled in this. You look back on things that came before, and you look forward to things that come after.
(Kusaal is consistent: the past is in front, and the future is behind.)
Hebrew has made a point of following the Kusaal example.
@Noe: As you’ve reminded us in this forum at least twice before, Stu.
It’s a precessional conundrum especially for you, dollink, not a reminder for the masses. Looks like I made it too cryptic.
Actuality “precedes” in time, so it is temporally behind Potentiality as seen from the present moment (from where else !). But in the procession of Dignity, Actuality goes first, so it is in front of Potentiality as seen at the present moment.
Aristotle does not get enough love.
It is amazing how hard it is to get many WEIRD individuals to admit or even become aware of how unusual is their own WEIRD mentality that they take as normal human nature that corresponds to objective reality,
That may be true, but this is hardly the place to find it.
but even that assumption of a universal human nature and objective reality is a WEIRD bias.
So Confucianist Chinese is a WEIRD culture? Funny, when it was neither Western, (broadly) educated, industrialized, rich (by modern standards), nor democratic.
In that case, they aren’t actually talking to themselves. They are simply talking to another person who isn’t physically present at that same place.
That’s a reasonable assumption, but it might be wrong. In my case, it is wrong. In any case, the point of the Boorioboola-Gha quotation (Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary s.v. “presentable”) is that a WEIRD person is perfectly capable (even if not an anthropologist) of writing New Yorkers under the same sign as non-WEIRD people.
That example is completely irrelevant to the discussion here
So you say.
I’d note that the teachers Mary Ruddick spoke to were presumably trained in education, including what affects education. So, learning about autism would’ve likely been part of their formal training. That would be part of their field of expertise.
Diagnosing autism is in the field of expertise of psychiatrists and clinical psychologists, not teachers. Jaynes was neither, so he would have no special competence. However, even having a special competence is not enough to necessarily make sense. Linus Pauling was a world-class molecular biologist, but his ideas about Vitamin C were crackpot.
He is an interesting example because he was diagnosed with schizophrenia after coming to the US. Yet he remembers that his grandmother spoke to herself when alone in rooms.
I too speak to myself when alone in rooms. So did my father. Both of us were WEIRDos and certainly did not have bicameral minds.
When I talk, I talk exclusively to myself.
“In one thing you have not changed, dear friend,” said Aragorn: “you still speak in riddles.”
“What? In riddles?” said Gandalf. “No! For I was talking aloud to myself. A habit of the old: they choose the wisest person present to speak to; the long explanations needed by the young are wearying.”
Higher in middle-class areas with middle-class child psychiatrists.
Hardly. Highest in the Inner South, which is not particularly a middle-class area (in any case, cities have middle-class areas, states don’t).
Looks like I made it too cryptic.
Weave on, Studude – so venerable as to have assisted Socrates at the debriefing of Alcibiades. Weave the fabric of your choice. These “that are young / Shall never see so much, nor live so long”. We must at all costs keep things sufficiently obscure.
Give my love to Aristotle – and τῷ Ἀσκληπιῷ ὀφείλομεν ἀλεκτρυόνα.
I don’t find Sapolsky’s posturing quite as amusing he he himself seems to. No doubt he enjoys gently mocking (as he supposes) the ways of amusing foreigners in general.
Now he’s grandly announced that “We don’t have free will.” Glad that’s settled!
If we have free will, we don’t have any choice about having it. I find that rather constraining. On the other hand, if we can choose to have free will, what’s all the flap about ?
Sapolsky wrote:
“I’m really, really, really trying not to sound like a combative jerk in the book,” he said.
Huh, trying sounds like willing.
My favorite quote of the day is from Saul Lieberman introducing a lecture by Gershom Scholem:
“Nonsense is nonsense, but the history* of nonsense is scholarship.”
* or did he say “the study”?
There’s also a story that Liebermann himself was the author of the saying, and later projected it back on Scholem.
Whatever. Here‘s some background:
#
In the middle of the 19th century, German Jews with a rationalist cast of mind founded what they called the “Wissenschaft des Judentums/Science of Judaism,” an attempt to submit Judaism to the rigors of such academic disciplines as philology, history, and literary criticism.
Part of the Haskalah and closely allied with the nascent Reform movement, the Wissenschaft thinkers were engaged in spirited apologetics, arguing for the long and proud history of their people. One of the elements of that history of which they were less than proud was Jewish mysticism. Historians like Leopold Zunz and key founding members of the Reform movement like Abraham Geiger and the Conservative movement’s Zecharias Frankel were dismissive of Kabbalah and its forebears and openly contemptuous of Hasidism, which embarrassed them with what they felt was its boisterousness, credulity, and superstition. This was the state of things when a young graduate student named Gershom Scholem decided to write a thesis on Jewish mysticism.
Scholem (1897-1982) tells a story about his early research that sums up the position of mysticism in Judaic studies in Weimar Germany. He was directed to a prominent rabbi who was considered an expert on Kabbalah. Scholem visited the rabbi in his home, saw the many books, and asked the rabbi about them. He replied, “This trash? Why would I waste my time reading nonsense like this?”
That conversation, Scholem always said, made him realize that this was a neglected field in which a dedicated scholar could make a mark. He explained his interest in Jewish mysticism to Herbert Weiner, “I’ve done my research in this history of the Kabbalah simply because I loved Judaism and wanted to show that mysticism was a legitimate part of this Judaism. Not some strange flower, but an indigenous growth.”
#
The link Stu gave to Robinson is a loose paraphrase of Scholem’s 1922 visit to Prof. Philip Bloch in his home in Germany, recounted in Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth (Schocken Books, Harry Zohn ET) page 150.
“After all, we are both _meshugga_,” he said . He showed me his kabbalistic collection, and I admired the manuscripts. In my enthusiasm I said, quite naively: “How wonderful, Herr Professor, that you have studied all this!” Whereupon the old gentleman replied, “What, am I supposed to read this _rubbish_, too ?” That was a great moment in my life.”
Now he’s grandly announced that “We don’t have free will.”
I refute it thus. (Or do I?)
Neuroscientists seem to be particularly prone to the delusion that they understand philosophy ex officio.
(At least, the attention whores among them do. No doubt there are plenty of worthy neuroscientists plugging away doing humble but valuable work in their backrooms somewhere.)
Sapolsky has stumbled on the (age-old) variant that asserts that there can be no such thing as moral responsibility because we have no free will. He should read a nice easy introduction to Calvinism, but I am afraid that he is predetermined not to.
attention whore
Only yesterday a cute German equivalent for that came up that I hadn’t heard in a while: Rampensau. It’s a bit animalist, of course, but no curb swallows are harmed.
I refute it thus. (Or do I?)
No, because that was Sam’s refutation of subjective idealism. His refutation of compelled will did not involve an argumentum ad lapidem (this is a thing), and was, “Sir, we know our will is free, and there’s an end on’t.”
For myself, the issue of free will does not arise, because I do not believe in consciousness as something objective (obviously there is a perception of consciousness, but I hold that to be an illusion).
I am aware of SJ’s priority …
However, it is possible for a single experiment to refute more than a single hypothesis, though I agree that this may be methodologically undesirable. However, when funding is tight, it may be necessary to economise in these matters. (I would like to point out that I received no external funding for this project.)
Do you hold that the subjective is, ipso facto, illusory? (If so, what do you understand by “illusory”? We may perhaps not be disagreeing about substantive issues.)
We may perhaps not be disagreeing about substantive issues.
Let me encourage both of you to disagree solely about substantive issues. That makes the discussion much easier to follow. It may be necessary to meet off-stage to reach a basic consensus about terms, before resuming the performance. The public is here for the play, not for squabblings over the script, which traditionally are covered later in a “Making of …” sequel.
I suppose it’s possible that this is one of those “experimental” plays showing closely scripted disarray. Then everything’s ok.
I mean pretty much what is meant by
mamelon[*] and ravelinoptical illusion: it is not the case that a pair of Müller-Lyer arrows have shafts of different lengths, even though it appears to you[*] that they do. By the same token, it seems to me that I am conscious, but I think that this is a misperception on my part. See Dennett’s Consciousness Explained for detailed explanations.[*] The Mamelon was a breast-shaped hillock near Sevastopol on which the Russians built a redoubt, eventually stormed by French and British troops. According to WP, the British, who attacked the outskirts, lost 30 officers and 350 other ranks. This is the first I have heard that there were anywhere near so many ranks in the British Army as that.
[**] I use a second-person pronoun because I am very insensitive to the illusion. The arrow shafts appear to me to have the same lengths (as in fact they do), even though I have blue eyes and have always lived in a “carpentered environment” (see the link).
I attribute this to having radically different acuities of vision (20/30 or 6/9 right, 20/200 or 6/60 left), which means that my eyes had become markedly exotropic (wall-eyed) by the time I was seven. Corrective lenses and eventual surgery helped, but by that time I was pretty much looking at things with one eye at a time, though I can force my eyes to converge with some effort. For the most part, seeing is not believing for me, but in the case of this and related illusions, it is.
@jc
Maybe you mean that the unitary “self” is for you an illusion and that your existence is an emergent property constructed continuously from memory and sense impressions, with some kind of selection/arbitration. It would be hard to refute such an idea, but I think you need to add something to avoid falling in to an existentialist morass (and to explain some of your behaviour, which may not be entirely consistent with a naive denial of consciousness).
However, it is possible for a single experiment to refute more than a single hypothesis, though I agree that this may be methodologically undesirable.
I have just now learned that prior to the introduction of lawyers into the English trial process in the 1720s and ’30s, in criminal trials “the same jury would listen to successive unrelated cases, then retire to consider them all, returning the verdicts as a batch.” I find that to be methodologically undesirable as well. (As I said when posting the LRB letter on Facebook: “Having served on juries, I can attest that it’s hard enough to keep the details of a single case straight.”)
By the same token, it seems to me that I am conscious, but I think that this is a misperception on my part.
Like PP, I find that hard to credit as written and think you must mean something else. Being conscious is pretty much the only thing that is self-confirming.
@ JC … it seems to me that I am conscious, but I think that this is a misperception on my part…
I think I recognize this, in the metaphor* of consciousness as the surface of an ocean of rumination, where you can sometimes sense concepts assembling themselves, foresee things – storms, mental weather… in its depth, or on the horizon. It’s occurred to me that all serious ratiocination takes place while asleep, that in waking life
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waking_Life
all we’re doing is executing the program we planned out in our dreams.
?* surface : volume :: consciousness : the self
I’ll just drop in here what Peter Hankins says: “If consciousness is an illusion, what is it that’s being fooled?”
In this case I think that one can escape from the apparent paradox by saying that, although “illusion” in the Common Speech does imply a conscious faller-for the-illusion, that here it is being used in a technical sense of “failure of a perception to correspond to an objective* reality.”
“Perception”, again, need not imply a conscious perceiver; this is related to the point I was recently making in moaning about the inappropriateness of the term “observer” in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_(quantum_physics)
Indeed, if one is (like Dennett) in fact committed a priori to the view that consciousness must be an illusion, because of an erroneous belief that otherwise one is committed to mysticism or believing in ghosts in machines**, all words like “illusion” and “perception” must be interpreted in this Pickwickian sense, and the everyday senses have to be regarded as a mere form of speech, contaminated by the very delusion from which the Enlightened have freed themselves.
* “Objective” is, one suspects. smuggling the conclusion into the premises, though.
** This is a rhetorical trick, essentially: “you must accept my explanation, however counterintuitive or plainly wrong-headed it may appear, if you are unable to come up with an alternative that I will not call mysticism. What are you, a Fundamentalist of some sort?” Essentially “You must accept my evidently wrong analysis instead of saying that no satisfactory solution is currently apparent.”
It is possible, of course, that if I were clever enough actually to understand Dennett’s argument, I would be persuaded by it that my consciousness is an illusion: I would then Go Mad from the Revelation, and begin to believe that my consciousness is an illusion.
It is likely (therefore) that my inability to follow his reasoning is in fact a beneficent provision of a wise Nature to prevent this unfortunate outcome. (Less teleologically, those who can follow the argument are at a significant reproductive disadvantage.)
It’s occurred to me that all serious ratiocination takes place while asleep, that in Waking Life all we’re doing is executing the program we planned out in our dreams.
There sure seem to be a lot of people with insomnia out there.
I prefer serious ratiocination direct from the farmer, which alternates with the sleep of reason. They call it crap rotation.
those who can follow the argument are at a significant reproductive disadvantage.
(Nice girls don’t go out with Philosophical Zombies.)
(Nice girls don’t go out with Philosophical Zombies.)
That is a theme related to the wonderful short story The Whore of Mensa, to which JC recently drew my attention.
@ Stu
I like small-batch artisanal ratiocination …
Социализм плюс электрификация равняется коммунизму
says Google, my wife isn’t sure about accusative vs instrumental…
It’s dative: S + E is equal to K.
As seen here in 2011.
Maybe you mean that the unitary “self” is for you an illusion and that your existence is an emergent property constructed continuously from memory and sense impressions
So far so good.
with some kind of selection/arbitration
In the sense that there is a decision process, yes; in the sense that there is a Central Arbitration Bureau, no. Decisions about what’s real are also an emergent property of the network, and it can be fooled.
“the same jury would listen to successive unrelated cases, then retire to consider them all, returning the verdicts as a batch.”
I suspect this was a hangover from the original function of a jury after Henry Two migrated this institution from Normandy to England. The jury was convened to answer the questions of the court not because they initially knew nothing and were presented with evidence by the parties, but because they were the neighbors and were presumed to know everything. “In the last reign, who held Blackacre?” “Does John the Smith do villein service for his forge, and if so, is he personally a villein or a free man?” “Have the boundary stones between Blackacre and Whiteacre been moved, and if so, who moved them?” “Who is the father of Alicia’s daughter?” “In the fight between George and Frank at Midsummer Fair, who struck the first blow?” Etc.
Being conscious is pretty much the only thing that is self-confirming.
Optical illusions seem pretty self-confirming too. Try talking yourself out of one sometime. “I know those shafts are the same length!” So you do, but they still look up to 30% different.
It’s occurred to me that all serious ratiocination takes place while asleep, that in waking life
I think that’s a little extreme. The evidence is, though, that rather than deciding to act and then acting, we act first and then find out what we have decided.
what is it that’s being fooled?
The system as a whole. Dennett’s Multiple Drafts Model” is well-explained in Wikipedia, and yes, it explains consciousness away. Chalmers’s complaint that “Dennett has produced no more than a theory of how subjects report events” is true, and requires only a “So what?” What more do you actually want?
See also the Systems Reply to Searle’s Chinese room problem, which is that the man doesn’t know any Chinese, it’s the whole system of man+instructions that does. (Searle’s rebuttal that in that case the man can just memorize all the instructions is preposterous: nobody can keep in their heads all the instructions a computer would need to translate Chinese perfectly, or even imperfectly.)
here it is being used in a technical sense of “failure of a perception to correspond to an objective* reality.”
I don’t think so. That’s just part of the evidence that the perception of consciousness doesn’t always align with what we say is the content of our consciousness. Most of the time the perception of consciousness serves us well, just as most of what we see is not an optical illusion.
(continued in the next comment)
Being conscious is pretty much the only thing that is self-confirming.
Optical illusions seem pretty self-confirming too.
“This insect is pretty big.” “The universe is big too!” I have no idea what optical illusions might be supposed to have in common with consciousness. I repeat, to feel that one is conscious is to be conscious, in much the same way as 1 = 1. Your comparison (or Dennett’s) seems to me pure flimflammery.
Indeed, if one is (like Dennett) in fact committed a priori to the view that consciousness must be an illusion
I really don’t think he is; I think he’s a lot more humble than my imperfect representation (or even his imperfect representation) might cause you to think.
“you must accept my explanation, however counterintuitive or plainly wrong-headed it may appear, if you are unable to come up with an alternative that I will not call mysticism. What are you, a Fundamentalist of some sort?”
Of that charge I will absolve him. He is very careful to say that his theory is a scaffolding to be kicked away and replaced with something much more convincing in times to come.
I would then Go Mad from the Revelation
I’m here to tell you that that species of Going Mad is really not so bad. “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” And furthermore, “whenever any Individual Rejects Error & Embraces Truth a Last Judgement passes upon that Individual”.
Nice girls don’t go out with Philosophical Zombies.
On the one hand, there are no P.Z.s. On the other hand, we are all P.Z.’s. (Hagbard Celine hands you his business card. On one side it says “There are no enemies anywhere.” On the other, it says, “There are no friends anywhere.” After you think about both sides for a while, he carefully splits the business card into two thinner halves and writes on the insides in fine calligraphy, “There are no / gurus anywhere.”) He shows you this, glues the two halves back together so as to hide the third message, and puts the business card away.)
I never had much use for Nice Girls anyhow.
I repeat, to feel that one is conscious is to be conscious, in much the same way as 1 = 1. […]
That’s what your networks say. My network disagrees. Mostly.
I don’t particularly enjoy getting involved in discussions of consciousness, but I will give my reminder that Searle’s Chinese room problem does not concern translating Chinese, but rather answering questions posed in Chinese, a significantly harder task and thus traditionally felt to be more interesting as a way of exploring what it means to “think.” However, recent developments have placed the difference in a rather different light. It turns out that it may not actually be that much more difficult to bullshit answers algorithmically than to produce translations. The interesting issues (to whatever extent one thinks they actually still are or ever were interesting) now seem to hinge a lot more on the “bullshit” part.
By the same token, it seems to me that I am conscious, but I think that this is a misperception on my part.
“I think, doctor, but I am not.”
(IIRC, a few weeks ago, one of the systems on the server mentioned at that link had to deal with a new addition who semi-jokingly declared that she didn’t exist, and proceeded to disappear. She was fortunately recovered by her other headmates, but really didn’t like the experience.)
Being conscious is pretty much the only thing that is self-confirming.
It might sometimes be nontrivial to tell, though, whether the consciousness you are currently using is in fact yours, especially if there are other candidates in the same brain (as previously discussed in this thread, under “tulpamancy”).
In other words, cogitatur, ergo cogitatur. Perhaps Mrs. Gradgrind had the right idea.
Decisions about what’s real are also an emergent property of the network, and it can be fooled.
Indeed so; this is how the Mandela effect happens, and on a larger scale it’s how fictive headmates can believe (and even appear to have memories of) their source backstories.
but I will give my reminder that Searle’s Chinese room problem does not concern translating Chinese, but rather answering questions posed in Chinese, a significantly harder task and thus traditionally felt to be more interesting as a way of exploring what it means to “think.”
…but also a task that is much easier to imagine being automated; indeed for sufficiently simple questions it requires little more than a database query.
(TIL that True Knowledge, a project from the late 2000s/early 2010s that attempted to do this for as many databaseable questions as they could, had since been acquired by Alexa. Wolfram Alpha also does a good approximation.)
“As of the census of 2010, there were 1,594 people, 659 households, and 441 families living in the village. The population density was 1,180.7 inhabitants per square mile (455.9/km2). There were 720 housing units at an average density of 533.3 per square mile (205.9/km2). The racial makeup of the village was 95.4% White, 0.4% African American, 0.3% Native American, 0.6% Asian, 2.2% from other races, and 1.1% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 4.5% of the population.”
– Wikipedia, on the village of Random Lake, Wisconsin; you could do this in Swedish or Cebuano just as easily as in English if you had a base text to stick the numbers into and maybe some rules on how to decline the words.
…looks like my comment on consciousness had too many links and/or too many edits, because I can’t see it any more.
I guess I’ll do just the last part for now, since it was the most hurried in the original (I forgot to add it until the editing period started) and it really deserved an expansion anyway…
[EDIT: I didn’t really do it justice, because after some point I forgot what I wanted to say.]
but I will give my reminder that Searle’s Chinese room problem does not concern translating Chinese, but rather answering questions posed in Chinese, a significantly harder task and thus traditionally felt to be more interesting as a way of exploring what it means to “think.”
Turns out it’s sometimes even easier to automate, though; depends on how narrow the questions are. For example, if all you need is to look up people’s phone numbers, you just need a phone book, an alphabetical table (…nontrivial for Chinese, admittedly*), and instructions on which part of the text is the phone number; very much doable in a room.
(I’ve done similar things myself for some football results; it sounds really impressive to look up football scores in Hungarian, but one doesn’t need rather much Hungarian to tell which part in the description is the score.)
True Knowledge (apparently since acquired by Alexa) was a 2007 project (piddling along until 2012) that had attempted to do this for a wider range of questions, via a database vaguely resembling Wikidata combined with an attempt to convert users’ questions into something that can be done as a set of database queries. (It was probably the latter that’s the hard part, in thinking terms, and indeed True Knowledge sometimes failed in it.)
To a large extent, WolframAlpha includes a project to do a similar thing, though now that it had (probably) incorporated neural networks it probably isn’t as good at it.
And then there’s the numerous bot-created articles on Wikipedia…
*) this actually might make the experiment neater; it’s possible to imagine replacing the full alphabetical order table with an instruction of how to tell whether a character is before or after the one you’re looking for in alphabetical order, and such an instruction would probably be shorter than the table!
The experience of consciousness is not like an optical illusion at all. If it is an illusion, it is more like mistaking the number 43 for a rabbit and feeding it some lettuce, or mistaking a bus for influenza.
To call this an “Illusion” is to mask fundamental unalikeness.
Dennett’s conclusion should be used as a reductio ad absurdum, and lead to a search for logical errors in his reasoning, and/or unthinkingly adopted false premises. Not to acceptance.
Quite. One can doubt that other consciousnesses exist — it is childish and pointless, but people manage to do it, or at least claim they do — but to doubt that one’s own exists is incoherent.
@ JC : The evidence is, though, that rather than deciding to act and then acting, we act first and then find out what we have decided.
Yes, life is a crapshoot, and everyone makes snap decisions, but my own sense is that many of our defaults are worked out (and continually revised by Systems Maintenance) while we sleep. [William Gibson and I suspect that dreams may be communications from versions of ourselves in adjacent timelines…]
`Systems Maintenance’ => what (I think) Bayesians mean by `updating our priors’…
The evidence is, though, that rather than deciding to act and then acting, we act first and then find out what we have decided.
AFAIK some of it is mostly only because the process of deciding takes up quite a few milliseconds to play out properly, and in a lot of situations you don’t really have this many milliseconds to devote to decision, so some preliminary actions have to be sent quickly and then you can figure out exactly why you would have done that.
(IIRC in some extreme cases the processing has to occur in other body parts, because there’s not even enough time to send the signal to the head and back.)
What we experience as the “present moment” is actually quite a complex construct, obligingly provided for us by a lot of preprocessing we’re unaware of: its relationship to the actual temporal ordering of physical events is quite variable. (I suspect that it is rumination on such matters, which actually are accepted physiological facts, which has led Sapolsky to suppose that he has grasped the Truth about Free Will.)
For what it’s worth, I think that consciousness exists to enable free will, and that the medium of free will is consciousness’s ability to focus (freely!) on one or another aspect of the environment. When our focus changes, so does our subjective world, and our actions toward that world then follow deterministically from our freely chosen focus. This helps explain why people like Sapolsky or (the early) Libet think that they’ve proven neurologically that our actions are determined: they’re looking at the wrong point in the process.
My views on free will in general (not this interpretation in particular) have been strongly affected by an online PDF by a pair of biologists, which I had bookmarked on my old work computer but whose names no amount of focusing on my part has been able to pull up. They adduce evolutionary advantage and have a pleasingly straightforward writing style.
Of course “consciousness” means more than one thing. When John Cowan said consciousness is an illusion, I disagreed strongly, but now it seems he means that the unitary self is a construct, which is another kettle of anatman entirely.
My views on free will in general (not this interpretation in particular) have been strongly affected by an online PDF by a pair of biologists, which I had bookmarked on my old work computer but whose names no amount of focusing on my part has been able to pull up. They adduce evolutionary advantage and have a pleasingly straightforward writing style.
If you do retrieve it somehow, please share; I’m sure I’m not the only one around here who would be interested.
Perhaps Mrs. Gradgrind had the right idea.
…in retrospect, that description as applied to thinking/consciousness is (almost) exactly what dissociation is.
Googling /free will biology evolution pdf/, I find that the topic has been addressed quite a bit by both voluntarists and determinists, but I don’t spot the names I’d recognize, probably because it was quite a few years ago.
I note sardonically that when I say I don’t believe in consciousness, you all say “Oooh”, but when the gentleman in black velvet who tells us about J-consciousness (a special case) above, we all agree that it doesn’t exist.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda …
Hypotheses non fingo
hypotheses non sunt fingenda praeter necessitatem. That’s a cardinality constraint, not a hypothesis. Multiplication has not yet even been defined.
Illegitimati non carborundum.
I learned it with illegitimatis. The ablative of agency or whatever (“by them”).
mistaking a bus for influenza
I got run over last weekend, and still haven’t quite recovered.
He thought he saw a Banker’s Clerk
Descending from a Bus,
He looked again and saw it was
A Hippopotamus.
“If this should come to dine,” he said,
“There won’t be much for us!”
I learned it with illegitimatis. The ablative of agency or whatever (“by them”).
Only version I ever learned starts with illegitimi, though I vaguely recall that other versions exist.
As it happens, Wikipedia agrees; however, I do not recall where I got the phrase from, and it might well have been Wikipedia itself.
(I could swear I’ve mentioned it, but apparently that comment was lost in a browser crash.)
Only version I ever learned starts with illegitimi
Same here.
As the Wikipedia article says, in The Handmaid’s Tale it’s “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum” for some reason.
The commander explicitly says that’s not actually Latin.
Sure, and neither are any of the other versions.
It’s especially the look-alike carborundum that grates on me. An 18th century trademark, but even if it also were a legitimate Latin gerundive, it’s not a finite verb. (And -u- as a thematic vowel is not regular in any of the conjugations, I think, so even though eundum, secundum also look like gerundives, their present stems are too unlike to give a good base for analogizing the verb for carborundum. carboror, anyone?)
(gerundivus seems to be from gerendum, the gerundive of gero 3. So no -u-, but a red herring. If a 3rd conjugation gerundive, carborundum would stress the penult and a change to -u- would be irregular innit).
Nolite te carborundum esse illegitimis
It’s especially the look-alike carborundum that grates on me
I think it belongs to that species of cockeyed Latin which includes virii as the plural of virus. The idea being that if you want to make some pseudo-Latin but your Latin is no good, make it obvious that the ugliness is intentional.
Concerning the relationship between sleeping and waking, a recent SMBC opens up a new perspective .
My illusion persists completely unchanged when I close one eye or the other while looking at the arrows.
That’s not remotely what my dreams are like, if that’s what you mean.
Uh, I lack that. All my conscious attempts to ignore anything outside my skull cause inability to focus on anything at all.
My illusion persists completely unchanged when I close one eye or the other while looking at the arrows.
As expected. The point is that I grew up not seeing in depth, which meant that I saw things flat.
@David Eddyshaw
“You are evidently determined to interpret all other cultures than your own entirely in terms of a specifically Western ideology: viz Jaynesian bicameralism.”
That is your assumption about me, which doesn’t match the reality. That is the problem of assumptions. My view is based on a wide swath of psychology, sociology, anthropology, ethnography, consciousness studies, neuroscience, philology, linguistics, media studies, philosophy of mind, etc. Jaynes’ writing and other Jaynesian scholarship represents a small portion of what I’ve read, studied, and written about.
As for Western ideologies, I’m the one hear who specifically pointed to the problem of a WEIRD bias (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic). In fact, I read Joseph Henrich’s book on the topic along with various scholarly articles discussing it. That is part of the point. Jaynesian scholarship has also been done by non-Western scholars and, in some cases, on non-Western populations.
“Where they fail to fit your preconceptions, your get-out-of-jail-free card is “Ah, but they’ve been corrupted by Western influence.””
No. That is just being honest. If you were familiar with WEIRD bias and the replication crisis, you wouldn’t be so dismissive. I’m not even arguing Jaynes is write about everything. It’s more that the evidence of such thinkers offers a challenge to conventional views.
“Incidentally, nobody (in our cultures or others) thinks that talking to yourself is diagnostic of madness; accordingly, regarding talking to yourself as acceptable behaviour is not evidence for a bicameral mind.”
I never claimed talking to oneself could be taken alone as proof of psychiatric diagnosis. Part of the point of this alternative view is one can hear voices and even talk back to them without being crazy, as insanity is a particular cultural understanding.
Voice-hearers in many societies are treated as normal and assimilate just fine into society. Tanya Luhrmann did a study showing this by comparing voice-hearers in the U.S. and Ghana. The main thing I was hoping for was that other commenters would even bother to look at the evidence at all.
@Stu Clayton
“J-consciousness is by no means distinguished by being difficult to understand, whether correctly or not. It is merely another matter of grandiose claims and small import.”
Few here have demonstrated they actually understand J-consciousness. Without looking it up, how many of the anti-Jaynesian critics even accurately define J-consciousness? My previous description of it was not even a full definition. There is a lot more to it (e.g., container metaphor), as has been covered in some scholarly papers. But one would have to be intellectually curious to learn about it.
@David Marjanović
“No, it’s the null hypothesis.”
It’s interesting that you apparently consider your personal beliefs and biases as the ‘null hypothesis’ simply because they conform to the conventional beliefs and biases of your culture. Why is WEIRD culture the null hypothesis. Have you considered non-WEIRD people might consider non-WEIRD culture as the null hypothesis?
“Why only now [“psychosis has increasing rates among urban youth in the US”], and why not in the rest of the West?”
There is no reason to assume it’s only happening now. And I implied no such thing. but there are many reasons that might be causal: increasing population concentration, increasing chemical exposures, dietary changes, media violence and mean world syndrome, etc. Even inequality causes major problems (Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett, The Inner Level; & Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder). If more broadly than just psychosis, in their book “Invisible Plague,” E. Fuller Torrey and Judy Miller wrote about a worsening epidemic of mental illness:
“At the end of the seventeenth century, insanity was of little significance and was little discussed. At the end of the eighteenth century, it was perceived as probably increasing and was of some concern. At the end of the nineteenth century, it was perceived as an epidemic and was a major concern. And at the end of the twentieth century, insanity was simply accepted as part of the fabric of life. It is a remarkable history.”
But you can find people pointing out this pattern long ago:
“The alarming increase in Insanity, as might naturally be expected, has incited many persons to an investigation of this disease.”
~John Haslam, 1809
On Madness and Melancholy: Including Practical Remarks on those Diseases
“Cancer, like insanity, seems to increase with the progress of civilization.”
~Stanislas Tanchou, 1843
“It cannot be denied that civilization, in its progress, is rife with causes which over-excite individuals, and result in the loss of mental equilibrium.”
~Edward Jarvis, 1843
“What shall we do with the Insane?”
As for the rest of the West or any where else for that matter, I never claimed it wasn’t happening there and, instead, only isolated to the U.S.. Psychosis rates likely are increasing in many places. I just stated U.S. data because I happened to know about it.
“I don’t think this list is going to impress anybody here – I don’t think anybody reading this blog knows anywhere near that many psychiatrists. But that’s beside the point. Scientists are beside the point in science, appliers of the products of science even more so. What are their arguments?”
I wasn’t attempting to impress anyone. I was merely seeking fair and honest dialogue, not expecting dismissiveness. Scientists are not besides the point in science. It’s by naming scientists that we can refer to specific areas of research and theory. Scientific studies don’t magically happen. They are done by specific scientists. But that is why I also linked to a bunch of specific evidence, of which apparently no one here bothered to look at.
“Unfortunately for Harvard, nothing of the part behind the comma follows from anything before the comma.”
Maybe you think you are smarter and more informed about psychology than all Harvard psychologists combined. It must be wonderful to have such a high opinion of yourself. But anyway, I’m not holding up only Harvard psychologists. I’ve looked into the work of numerous scholars from various universities. I don’t know how you make the logical leap that you can determine the value of scholarship by the university a scholar works at.
“Yes, yes, yes – we’re instead saying Jaynes himself is uninformed about some of the things he’s been talking about.”
We wouldn’t know that from your comments or that of other critics here. There has yet to be an engagement with the evidence of Jaynesian scholarship. But I have no desire to go through it all in detail. There are probably dozens of scholarly books and hundreds of scholarly articles on Jaynesian scholarship. Either look at the evidence or don’t. I won’t spoon feed it to anyone.
“How bizarre of a psychologist, of all people, to assume he knows how everyone else even just in his own culture thinks.”
How bizarre for someone to think they know how a psychologist thinks while uninformed and misinformed about that psychologist’s scholarship. If you had bothered to inform yourself, you’d know Jaynes’ doesn’t speculate about all societies but only very specific ones. His theory of the bicameral mind primarily applies to agricultural societies during the Bronze Age. That is it.
@Lameen
“I’m getting a motte-and-bailey vibe here: accepting the obvious fact that mental disorders are in significant part culture-bound, or even the barely more debatable fact of cross-cultural variation in how one models one’s own consciousness, does not entail taking seriously the notion of a bicameral mind, much less Jaynes’ rather stretched attempts to read it into the Iliad (of all the texts he could have chosen).”‘
It’s irrelevant what vibes you get. We are discussing evidence here or at least I was attempting to do so. What entails “taking seriously the notion of a bicameral mind” is actually knowing what you’re talking about. But if you dismiss something before even learning about it, there is no way to move the debate forward.
If you were familiar with Jaynes scholarship, you’d know that his book posited multiple separate and independent hypotheses. Proving or disproving any of them could say nothing of the others. As for the Iliad, he was drawing upon the scholarship of others, specifically of philologists whose entire field of studies is that of ancient texts. You might want to read those philologists, if you care to make an worthy counter-argument.
“It’s been many years since I read Jaynes, but I’m tempted to add that the enterprise of localising different aspects of consciousness in different hemispheres seems particularly unhelpful here. Zeus for the Homeric Greeks, or some bori-spirit in Hausaland, is not something localised in a specific part of one person’s head; on his own account it’s minimally an intersubjective reality, like “the English language” (which is not conveniently restricted to Broca’s or Wernicke’s areas) or “chess”.”
Maybe you should’ve stopped at admitting you hadn’t read Jaynes in a while. Your recollection is obviously vague, at best. You aren’t even using ‘consciousness’ in the way Jaynes defined it. And that is probably the single most important to understand before anything else can be discussed.
@David Eddyshaw
“whenever my African psychiatrist friend looked, he found much previously undiagnosed schizophenia. However, there are very few African psychiatrists per capita, especially looking at people outside major cities. It seems not unreasonable to conclude that there must be many people who are undiagnosed because there are far too few diagnosticians. This was not some cranky personal opinion of his own: he had been instrumental in trying to remedy this situation in cooperation with other psychiatrists in Africa.”
There are some unquestioned assumptions and biases to unpack there. But I’ll just point out that your referring to someone who is looking for schizophrenia. In some traditional African cultures, hearing (disembodied) voices and speaking to them has been considered within the range of normal and functional behavior for centuries and maybe millennia. Many such people are able to live without any problems.
As Tanya Luhrman found in her research, Ghanian voice-hearers tended to have positive perception and experience of the voices they heard, such as hearing encouragement and advice. This fits the more ancient sense of a daimon. Is it mental illness if it’s not dysfunctional and has been assimilated in a healthy way with the culture? Why would we diagnose, medicate, and institutionalize them when they are doing just fine?
“I have no a priori opinion about the prevalence of schizophrenia in rural Africa, though I have been told that the received opinion in the past was that it was uncommon, on the (spurious) grounds that it was little reported; I imagine Laing-style fantasies about the nature of schizophrenia in general probably bolstered this. Your untroubled assumption that schizophrenia is a purely Western artefact of specifically modern stresses comes out of this mindset too, I think.”
I have no personal opinion. All I can report is what others have said. But I haven’t a clue about data or analysis. I’d suspect the data is simply lacking. That said, we don’t have to merely speculate, as we have other kinds of scientific evidence. We do know that schizophrenia has increased in the West. And we know that schizophrenia is correlated to dietary changes.
Diets that are keto, wheat-free, etc have been studied as effective treatments in reducing and reversing schizophrenic symptoms (Dr. Chris Palmer, Brain Energy; & Dr. Georgia Ede, Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind). Also, according to studies, populations that eat more wheat have higher rates of schizophrenia. Offhand, I don’t know what are the present and historical rates of wheat consumption in different countries.
“Incidentally, I wonder why people imagine that being a subsistence farmer or herder is unstressful? Or that polygamous families are somehow less prone to creating anxiety than monogamous?* This is all exoticist fantasy.”
Why? Look to the anthropological records. It’s not merely about stress in some vague sense but what kinds of stress. There are stressors that humans evolved to deal with and stressors that are new. Consider the research on violent media and mean world syndrome. Most subsistence farmers and herders don’t get a lot of exposure to violent media.
Or consider high rates of inequality that cause chronic stress that directly correlates to mental illness rates (Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett, The Inner Level; & Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder). Many small-scale traditional societies intentionally maintained low inequality (e.g., tribal meat-shaming).
@John Cowan
“So Confucianist Chinese is a WEIRD culture? Funny, when it was neither Western, (broadly) educated, industrialized, rich (by modern standards), nor democratic.”
I don’t know that Confucianist Chinese is making universal claims about all humans everywhere. But even if that was the case, my claims about a WEIRD bias akin to this never stated anything about it being limited to a WEIRD bias. Portraying it that way is plain confused or unfair. My point remains true, which is obvious for anyone who has much familiarity with the social sciences.
“Diagnosing autism is in the field of expertise of psychiatrists and clinical psychologists, not teachers. Jaynes was neither, so he would have no special competence.”
Sure, teachers aren’t professionally trained to diagnose autism. But if we are to be honest, we’d have to admit that many teachers are professionally trained to identify such things as autism. As for Jaynes, I never made any claim about him and autism, since he probably never wrote about it. I have no clue what point you were trying to make.
M zua, fʋ gɛɛm nɛ!
I stumbled upon this theory in an effort to understand the origin of religious practices. The theory doesn’t satisfy me but neither does any other theory I’ve seen.
In my view, the main problem with all theories about the origin of religious practices, visions and the like is that they operate on a philosophically atheistic framework: they implicitly assume that spirituality boils down to a delusion of some sort and we just need to understand the exact mechanisms involved in producing and reinforcing the delusion. But maybe the assumption is wrong. We should seriously entertain the possibility that a metaphysical realm exists, that the world truly has a divine foundation, and is replete with divine beings or spirits. Yes, quacks and charlatans have existed and have exploited the religious feelings of populations. But that doesn’t prove that all people held to be spiritually gifted like holy men, seers, oracles and magicians were quacks.
Linguist Daniel Everett documented the case of an Amazonian tribe without any of the trappings we associate with religion like ritual, magic, shamans, or creation myths. But despite their complete lack of all that they were able to see spirits. In one case, Daniel observed the entire tribe simultaneously seeing a spirit in an everyday non-ritual context. Daniel himself could see nothing, neither could his family. But the tribesmen, all of them, insisted that it was there and acted as if it was there.
It is impossible that an entire tribe experienced the same hallucination at the same time. They saw something that was completely real but that Daniel’s senses weren’t equipped to see.
This suggests to me that:
1. The tribesmen (Pirahã) possess a neurological or cognitive baseline that naturally allows them to perceive spiritual phenomena—something that most modern humans may have lost or dulled.
2. As humans became increasingly civilized, urbanized, and abstract in their thinking, ritual and religion emerged as tools or technologies to recreate or simulate what earlier people could access directly and effortlessly.
3. Therefore, ritual-based religiosity isn’t the origin of spirituality, but a compensatory adaptation—a way to recover access to spiritual perception in a world where the natural capacity was fading.
The Pirahã may have had their neurological development shaped by their sensory-rich, highly present-focused lifestyle, allowing forms of perception that urbanized or abstract-thinking minds filter out.
Their language, famously lacking recursion and tense, reinforces a “here and now” consciousness—potentially supporting direct phenomenological openness to spiritual perception.
Practices like fasting, meditation, prayer, or asceticism might be seen not as “unlocking” new abilities, but as reclaiming or clearing away the mental noise that came with civilization—reversing the effects of language, distraction, ego, and conceptual overload.
Stone Age people (and tribes like the Pirahã) may have lived in a naturally animistic state, perceiving spirit and presence in all things.
Formalized ritual, priesthoods, temples, and doctrines may have appeared later—as humans began losing touch with direct experience and needed mediated techniques to re-enter sacred awareness.
We should seriously entertain the possibility that a metaphysical realm exists, that the world truly has a divine foundation, and is replete with divine beings or spirits.
Why? The fact that (most) people seem to feel a need for such a thing has no bearing on whether the thing exists.
Perhaps I should remind you that every attempt to prove such things (photographing ghosts or whatever) has failed miserably; we just have to take them on faith. Which is fine if you like taking things on faith, but some of us don’t.
We should seriously entertain the possibility that a metaphysical realm exists, that the world truly has a divine foundation, and is replete with divine beings or spirits.
OK, you have your hypothesis. The next step could be to propose tests of it.
Mozi said: “If from antiquity to the present, and since the beginning of man, there are men who have seen the bodies of ghosts and spirits and heard their voice, how can we say that they do not exist?”
The argument is not airtight, of course: men throughout history have seen mirages in the desert, but that doesn’t force us to postulate pools of water. It is nevertheless a striking cross-cultural universal.
@lameen
If we ask what “heard” and “seen” mean, we then have to conclude that in that sentence they mean “in a way recording devices (and some human witnesses) are unable to replicate”. So we are probably back with faith.
I’m sadly lacking in the intellectual curiosity needed to sustain an inquiry into the Jaynes philosophy. But since the topic was raised, did anyone read the New Yorker article a week or two on a case of schizophrenia completely cured seemingly as an ancillary effect of a cancer treatment.
Truly fascinating.
@Jerry, I think the idea is that “delusion” is a more specific claim [hypothesis] than “not a delusion, but something [anything] else”.
@LH, love.
I mean, people who say that since they can’t measure love with a thermometer, the whole concept is delusional and has no place in scientific man’s thinking are a minority and do not form the mainstream in science.
@languagehat Humans don’t have an inborn need to engage in religious behaviors. The example of the Piraha clearly shows that no anthropological or physiological need to engage in religious activities or beliefs exists. Still, they see spirits (without ‘believing’ in them or ‘working’ with them) and they see them in contexts that eliminate all possiblity of hallucination. For them spirits are as real as trees.
The reason most people in their natural state are theists (unless trained to think otherwise by atheistic philosophies) is because the existence of a divine foundation to the world can be inferred by healthy common sense. No ‘science’ can explain the most fundamental ontological question: ‘why does something exist instead of nothing?’ This question can only be approached (not answered) by inferring a metaphysical realm that influences our own realm in the same sense that unobserved dark matter influences ordinary matter.
You don’t need detailed knowledge to infer that the coarser, earthier and heavier matter that forms stuff like stones and soil originated in the accretion of finer, loftier and lighter matter. You don’t need specialist knowledge to infer that the seas, the land and the air were once undifferentiated, that they emerged from elements thrown in the same cooking pot until an equilibrium was reached. You don’t need remarkable insight to infer that a universe with differentiable dimensions such as ours came from a realm that is metaphysical and without differentiable dimensions. Healthy minds understand those facts instinctively. Atheism, empiricism, positivism and the so called ‘scientific method’ are just perversions, they represent a ‘non-binary’ and ‘nuanced’ understanding of philosophy.
The universality of belief in the spirit world clearly suggests that sentient immaterial entities do in fact exist. Universally held views of reality are not based on subjectively mediated impressions but objective truths. Primitive cultures see spirits because they do exist, they just possess the necessary neurodevelopmental and psychological equipment to register them, and we don’t. Civilized life can’t give you the acute senses of the savage.
Psychotic people really are infected by evil spirits as all traditional cultures believed. Holy men were historically attested to be able to cure them. The well attested inability of modern science to do the same suggests that psychotic behavior has spiritual, not physiological causes. All modern science can do to ‘treat’ psychosis is essentially to fry the nervous system with poisons, killing the patient slowly. Psychiatry is therefore practically a pseudoscience. If we don’t believe that a soul (psyche) exists, it’s no wonder that we’re clueless about how to treat it.
Traditional cultures believed that character defects associated with what we today euphemistically call neurodivergence (the right word is simply stupidity) come from imbalances in the soul that could only be treated by the psychological expertise of sages. Our culture however doesn’t believe in absolute ontological truths. We have been conditioned to think like philosophical relativists so we don’t really believe wisdom exists in an absolute sense. No wonder then that our own sages (we call them psychologists) are clueless when it comes to treating various forms of stupidity. Psychology is therefore a pseudoscience too.
We know that ancient cultures believed that communication with the divine requires actual training and expertise like any other craft, science or occupation. You couldn’t just claim to be haruspex, you had to be trained in the discipline by competent authorities. The ancients made a clear distinction between genuine practitioners of crafts like divination and ritual work who deliver effective results and quacks who pretend to have expertise they don’t in order to swindle people. Today we just assume that all esoteric crafts are make-believe and quackery. But in fact, this impression exists because true religious expertise has been partially or fully lost just as many other technologies and crafts (Egyptian blue, Greek fire etc.) disappeared.
A serious investigation into metaphysics requires finding practitioners of esoteric crafts all over the world, receiving intensive training by them and observing the effectiveness of their workings. Getting an electronic device to track spirits is ridiculous. Spirit sighting requires the use of spiritual faculties that of course no technical instrument can be made to possess.
Whoever wants to ‘test’ if the numinous exists and what the actual origins of religion are should throw garbage books like that of Jaynes away and seek out actual practitioners of esoteric crafts.
I think the idea is that “delusion” is a more specific claim [hypothesis] than “not a delusion, but something [anything] else”.
I don’t see that in what Charles Jaeger wrote. But I’d respond the way Hat did: attempts to demonstrate the existence of that “something else” have all failed, so I prefer the hypothesis that the people who have honestly reported such things are mistaken (not necessarily delusional).
Incidentally, I agree with Charles that (supposed) perception of spirits or whatever, and interaction with them, probably preceded rituals and myths. But I’m not an expert.
A scientist says “I love” (and says it sincerely), thinks in terms of love, models subjective realities of others in terms of love, but it is outside of those sciences that rely on measurements for her.
This does not, I think, mean, that honest study of love is impossible. (I’m not telling it is possible either)
Honest (and even useful) study of properties of mathematical objects is possible – even though all are imagined if not imagiinary (but not delusional) and many will strongly disagree with the claim that love is “imaginary”.
A stronger claim would be that there is a reality which is shared (accessible to more than one person) but can’t be measured [with anything but a human mind].
(I’m not making this claim, merely saying that such a reality is distinct from the measurable reality)
This hypothesis doesn’t work because the Pirahã are, to the best of our knowledge, unique. Their neighbors in the same jungle, hunting, fishing and gathering just the same, have creation myths, believe the world is replete with divine beings, and try to communicate with or learn about their realm in rituals, some of which are conducted by specialists (“shamans”, whatever).
It looks to me like religion (in some broad sense of that word) is the human baseline, and the Pirahã once had a Cārvāka or a Diagoras who convinced them this was all poppycock.
I don’t know; mass hallucination is supposed to be a thing. However:
Or they saw something moving in the bushes that he wasn’t trained to see, and for lack of another explanation they defaulted to “ghost”, especially when one of them started it.
Putting all the following together:
– sensory illusions;
– dreams;
– sleep paralysis;
– the fact that pattern recognition and attribution of agency are overly sensitive because the descendants of those who saw a leopard that wasn’t there in the nearest bush are still among us while those who didn’t see one that was there are extinct;
I think that’s plenty to explain where religion (very broadly construed) comes from and why it’s nearly universal.
(I had sleep paralysis once. It felt entirely real, rather unlike a dream, and if I hadn’t read about the phenomenon beforehand I’d still be scared 20 years later.)
@Jerry, “seriously entertain the possibility” is hardly much more than “we (or: I) don’t have a good reason to believe it isn’t true”.
And his “delusion” sounds to me more specific than your “mistake”*. Yes, you differ here: you think, we (or: you) do have such a reason.
___
*Of course “mistake” is less specfic. I make a claim X, the answer is “yes” or “no”. Mary says “‘no’ is a mistake”. John says “or ‘yes’ is a mistake”. No way to tell whose hypothesis is more specific without analysing X.
That one’s actually easy. Nothing, a perfect vacuum, is perfectly symmetric; it has no entropy. Any particle in it will reduce the symmetry. And so, nothing decays. It’s radioactive.
Uh, by perfectly measurable gravity?
“Attested” is doing a lot of work here. Holy man shouts at evil spirits for an hour or three, psychotic break calms down, holy man leaves, next psychotic break comes a few days later?
…or by people who claimed they were competent authorities, or were believed to be competent authorities for some reason or another.
Well, isn’t that convenient.
Seriously, why should that be so?
Whoever wants to ‘test’ if the numinous exists and what the actual origins of religion are should throw garbage books like that of Jaynes away and seek out actual practitioners of esoteric crafts.
Go ahead. Reliable cures of psychosis would be a good test and incidentally could make someone a lot of money. Video of Everett’s reported experience with the group of Piraha would be nice, not just to see whether it really happened and to look for the spirit, but also to see whether two or more people appeared to notice the spirit independently of each other. Modern recording equipment could make many tests possible without directly recording the supposed numinous beings and maybe even without having skeptics present (sometimes cited for the failure of such experiments).
Incidentally, “neurodivergent” is not a euphemism for “stupid”. I’ve known intelligent people considered neurodivergent.
It looks to me like religion (in some broad sense of that word) is the human baseline, and the Pirahã once had a Cārvāka or a Diagoras who convinced them this was all poppycock.
Assuming we can trust Everett’s account (and what else do we have to go on?), I think we have to go a little further: it’s not just that they don’t want to talk about divine beings, they also refuse to talk about dead people they haven’t personally encountered. Surely their hypothetical Diogenes didn’t convince them that great-grandparents are poppycock as well? Viewed as a whole, the behaviours Everett sums up as the Immediate Experience Principle feel more like the result of some kind of serious trauma than of robust philosophical debates.
Incidentally, “neurodivergent” is not a euphemism for “stupid”. I’ve known intelligent people considered neurodivergent.
I thought the euphemism for “stupid” was “neurotypical”. (I jest, I jest!)
You don’t need detailed knowledge to infer that the sun revolves around the earth or that disease is caused by demon possession. Healthy minds understand those facts instinctively.
Charles, you said
“The theory doesn’t satisfy me but neither does any other theory I’ve seen.”
And then you deliver a speech in its support without any reservations. Why?
Anyway, I do sympathise to a certain point LH objected to above.
I’m not confident it is the point Charles is making, though.
“Most people feel a need for such a thing” – this means something to me (and it means a lot).
Also the idea that “either it can be measured, or it shouldn’t be taken seriously or be a part of our model” is silly, it is not “either … or … “, and love is a good example.
Some awkward commentary on particularly strange-feeling sections…
There are some unquestioned assumptions and biases to unpack there. But I’ll just point out that your referring to someone who is looking for schizophrenia. In some traditional African cultures, hearing (disembodied) voices and speaking to them has been considered within the range of normal and functional behavior for centuries and maybe millennia. Many such people are able to live without any problems.
The line between schizophrenia and plurality is very thin, with the latter being prone to being diagnosed as the former; I suspect that many such people could have actually been (in modern terms) plural rather than schizophrenic. (This is Scott Alexander’s “tulpamancy” explanation.)
And of course if someone is looking for schizophrenia, they’d be prone to diagnose autism as it too; this is common practice in Russia, apparently not as uncommon as I expected in Israel, and I see absolutely no reason why it wouldn’t be any less of a thing in Africa. (More so, if the doctors there aren’t very familiar with the diagnosis of “autism” yet.)
[It’s not implausible that in the West these days things go too far in the other direction, with things-that-are-not-ASD getting diagnosed as ASD because that’s the popular thing these days. I suspect probably not a lot of actual schizophrenia, though.]
character defects associated with what we today euphemistically call neurodivergence (the right word is simply stupidity)
There are several dimensions of neurodivergence, very few of which are significantly positively correlated with anything that can be reasonably called stupidity (…except, I guess, in the EQ sense). Indeed very many neurodivergent people (especially in the ASD area) are smarter than average.
That said (this goes for both responses) neurodivergence is extremely complicated, and a large amount still remains to be studied. I’m sure that in another few decades we’ll find out that what we lumped together as “ASD” or “ADHD” or whatever is actually dozens of different interacting things (and, likely, that the general population actually tends to have at least a few of these).
DM, if listening to Quranic recitation for a couple hours once in a few days could make me happy, I would of course do it.
(Or more if I want to learn Tajweed:-))
Not Diogenes – Diagoras the Godless. But I don’t think there’s anything special about dead people there. In a documentary (on YouTube) I once watched Everett tell the story of how he tried to start converting them:
“This Jesus guy – did you ever see him?”
“No.”
“But your father must have seen him?”
“No.”
“Then why’re you telling us about him?”
There simply seems to be an assumption that the distant past is irrelevant.
There simply seems to be an assumption that the distant past is irrelevant
The Pirahã are evidently adherents of Henry Ford style modernity.
I imagine that they also believe that there’s no such thing as Society, so they are also natural neoliberals.
Neoliberals are also known for seeing Invisible Hands at work, generally imperceptible to those from other cultures.
“This Jesus guy – did you ever see him?” / “No.” / “But your father must have seen him?” / “No.” / “Then why’re you telling us about him?”
i’m rather inclined to suspect – relying on everett, yes, but with a practically homeopathic amount of critical distancing – that what was at issue was that everett’s answer to the last question was laughably unsatisfying to his interlocutors for reasons that could easily have had nothing to do with temporality or evidentiary criteria. i mean, missionaries come up with all kinds of epicycles to explain away rejection of truths they consider self-evident, and very few of them have much to do with their targets’ actual reasoning even when the cultural distance is very small (i’m thinking of my frequent encounters with ChaBaDniks in my neighborhood, for example).
with a practically homeopathic amount of critical distancing
Yeah. Everett is so conspicuously not one of us we’re simply not going to share our most sacred stuff. Or what started as a bit of a tease (enough with all these pointless questions!) has grown into an enormous shared hoax. Evangelists’ lines of pseudo-innocence are rather easy to spot coming.
‘why does something exist instead of nothing?’ pfah!
OTOH are the Pirahã aware of other tribes (that are much more like us), and that those speak mutually incomprehensible languages. Does that not need some explanation?
> since the topic (of schizophrenia) was raised (again), did anyone read the New Yorker article a week or two ago on a case of schizophrenia (which had lasted decades) completely cured seemingly as an ancillary effect of a cancer treatment.
Bumping this just in case it was missed amidst all the Jaynesing.
Yeah, something about Everett’s facile manner of Proof By A Really Startling Anecdote really is reminiscent of religious disputations.
An effective way of ‘bumping’ is to provide a link, pref to an archived/non-paywalled version.
(I know the Hattery has an extraordinarily generous interpretation of ‘on topic’, but I’m failing to see any language-y angle, beyond the usual trick-cyclists euphemisms.)
@Nimrod . In one case, Daniel observed the entire tribe simultaneously seeing a spirit in an everyday non-ritual context. ..
It is impossible that an entire tribe experienced the same hallucination at the same time.
It’s entirely possible that one observer (Everett) entirely failed to interpret what was going on, because of his culturally-/religiously-determined preconceptions. I see religious Trump supporters being equally suggestible/blind to what’s plainly in front of them.
did anyone read the New Yorker article a week or two ago on a case of schizophrenia (which had lasted decades) completely cured seemingly as an ancillary effect of a cancer treatment.
AntC provided a link; here’s an archived one for those without subscriptions.
I’m failing to see any language-y angle, beyond the usual trick-cyclists euphemisms
Doesn’t matter; I wouldn’t have posted about it, but it’s fine if it comes up in the thread — I thought it was a well-done piece and encourage any interested parties to check it out.
Schizophrenia has come up in this thread.
Well, define “need”. Another Everett anecdote is he tried to talk about creation, pointed at the jungle and the river and such, and asked who had made all that (or how it was made, I can’t remember). Answer: “These things were not made.”
“Nothing new under the sun” – “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end” – is not an impossible philosophical position to have.
Positing a Creator to “explain” why there is something rather than nothing has always struck me as egregious question-begging. It never ceases to surprise me that apparently sensible Christians have felt that this move might ever be useful in evangelism. Even Paul does not argue from Creation to a Creator, though he channels a contemporary trope in stating that the (benign) character of the creator is evident in creation. YMMV.
The Pirahã seem to be cross-culturally fairly unusual in not believing in any sort of creator already. (The Kusaasi, fairly typically in West Africa, hold that Win created the universe.) But I doubt whether create often has the same meaning here as with the Christian paradoxical ex nihilo (a doctrine which is not present in Genesis, either.)
Buddhism posits that the universe is uncreated and eternal. Also, basically, illusory, which seems fair enough.
the (benign) character of the creator is evident in creation. YMMV.
Indeed. How many places in the world are currently far from benign? How many invoking the God of Abraham and the God of Mohammed — with the God of Jesus as a side-play.
You’re suggesting “in the beginning God created …” is a victim of poor translation?
I had gone back through the thread, which may talk about schizophrenia more than any other single topic, but I didn’t realize that most of that was from 2023.
A new biological explanation of (some types of) schizophrenia is relevant to that discussion, if less so to what has come since.
I think of psychology as a field somewhere between art and immature science, with diagnoses and categories very much in flux. Part of the argument above was that the confusion about what is schizophrenia undercuts the very idea of the Western approach to the mind, a context in which clarifying a particular segment of schizophrenia behaviorally and in terms of causes and cures is really interesting.
The article was fascinating for itself even if it hadn’t been relevant.
Thanks, AntC, for providing a link.
Another way to state what seems to be the same: “nothing” and “something” isn’t a 1 : 1 comparison. There’s only one way for there to be nothing; there are, at least for practical purposes, infinite ways for there to be something. So, first, it’s improbable for there to be precisely nothing to begin with; and, second, any change from nothing – any quantum fluctuation – will end up at something, while almost any change from anything will still end up at something.
I guess there’s Thomistic logic involved: being eternal is a “logical” part of perfection, so if we already know the Creator is omnimax, it makes sense He’s eternal as part of that; that means He doesn’t need to be created (unlike This Vale of Tears), and we escape from “turtles all the way down”.
You’re suggesting “in the beginning God created …” is a victim of poor translation?
Yes, of course. “In the beginning of God creating the heavens and the earth, the earth was all higgledy-piggledy, with darkness all over the abyss, and a mighty wind hovering over top of the water.” So there was definitely already stuff when God started to construct the universe out of it.
And of course if someone is looking for schizophrenia, they’d be prone to diagnose autism as it too; this is common practice in Russia, apparently not as uncommon as I expected in Israel, and I see absolutely no reason why it wouldn’t be any less of a thing in Africa.
Autism was normally conflated with schizophrenia in the US until I was in my thirties at least.
So, first, it’s improbable for there to be precisely nothing to begin with; and, second, any change from nothing – any quantum fluctuation – will end up at something, while almost any change from anything will still end up at something.
I’m inclined to agree that “Why is there something and not nothing?” isn’t an interesting question, but your argument doesn’t make any sense to me. If there’s nothing, no existence, then no change can happen.
I am a theist but the idea that humans have an innate need to engage in any sort of religious activity or belief is patently false and we don’t need to point to the Piraha to prove that. The Piraha just prove that a) spirit sighting isn’t necessarily connected to religious ritual dances/psychotic mentalities/hallucinogenic substances etc. and b) spirit sighting existed in the stone age and preceded the later foundation of religious institutions in the context of centralized agricultural societies.
To demonstrate that religion (however defined) isn’t natural to humans we need only point at the millions of people in Western, para-Western (Japan, Korea etc.) and formerly Communist non-Western societies that are staunchly secularist. Their existence alone conclusively disproves the notion that religion is natural to humans. There may be evidence that religious activity is good for humans in some respects but there’s no evidence that it is necessary for humans to function. Humans are just animals. Some animals may be seen to engage in quasi-spiritual behavior (like elephants visiting the graves of relatives) but clearly they don’t need a spiritual system. Why should humans need it?
But if they don’t need it how do we explain the ubiquitous presence of religious activity in all traditional cultures? And there’s another problem we have to think about: ancient sources clearly suggest that most ancient people were much like us: they weren’t interested in spiritual pursuits and they didn’t take seriously the concept of divine retribution or the concept that vice is spiritually harmful (the sin concept). They were just interested in enjoying the banal, vicious pleasures of life and a reading of Plato clearly shows that most of his contemporaries rejected the existence of an afterlife, mocked pious people and weren’t interested in living a virtuous life. These facts undercut the common philosophical notion (already attested in ancient Greece) that the true function of religion is to scare people into being moral and thus enable society to function properly. Religion clearly fails consistently at doing this so this can’t have been its purpose.
How then do we explain the survival and persistence of religious behavior if most people evidently aren’t seriously interested in doing whatever religious authorities encourage them to do? The answer is: because spirituality actually works and from time to time people do notice that. People who consult genuine practitioners see the effectiveness of their workings. Those who engage in it themselves notice some sort of tangible beneficial effect. Religions that are ideologically based on fraudulent preachers, authority figures, patriotic duty, obsessive moralism and the like inevitably decline quickly in popularity and cultural inertia helps them survive only as blunt and ineffective instruments of control. I understand why secular people would think that this is the actual essence and origin of all religion but they’re wrong.
When I was once praying to Jesus and begging him to give me his grace I suddenly saw with my mind’s eye a continuous stream of light pulling me in inside a tunnel and I got a feeling that felt much like an orgasm (without any intimation of lust) but more powerful. The feeling was so intense and fulfilling it moved me to tears so hot it felt as if my eyes were being boiled.
Why is protestantism is so spiritually weak compared to other traditions like orthodox Christianity? Because in Orthodox Christianity holy men still exist and are still venerated as miracle workers. Their example motivates the masses to be more pious than they otherwise would be and this motivation leads them to concrete experiences such as the one I described. Why does belief in Islam remain strong? Because Islam is intensely spiritual and like ancient religions it places a strong emphasis on orthopraxy, not only orthodoxy. It forces people to do 5 prayers a day. You might think that this is oppressive but those (few) who actually perform them enjoy the ritual deeply and feel nourished by it in a way they can’t rationally explain. The reason they feel nourished by it is because spiritual nourishment does in fact concretely exist in a way that is clearly distinct from the simple kick of ego-based psychological gratification that popular psychologists advocate. It is possible to communicate with the divine even in a very basic and amateurish form.
If you want to test my claim just go ahead and do some religious and ascetic work yourself. Religion is sustained on the basis of fulfilling feelings and experiences, not beliefs.
There’s no reason to think that neurodivergence and stupidity aren’t correlated. The fact that someone scores high on an IQ test doesn’t mean he isn’t stupid. Stupidity is a spectrum of maladaptive and vicious behavior and those who score highest in such behavior are neurodivergent. Virtually all pathologies known to psychology can be traced to neurodivergent patterns. Atheism, though not officially a pathology, is itself a form of neurodivergence. Belief in it changes the neural structure in deviant ways that decrease genetic fitness, which is why atheists reproduce less and commit suicides at higher rates.
Einstein may have had a very IQ but the disgusting way he treated his wife reveals a very maladaptive mind. His belief in socialism as well as his simplistic beliefs about nationalism (measles of mankind) also suggest a severe lack of astuteness. You can be intelligent but not astute.
Heliocentrism has been inferred since antiquity using basic techniques even if it remained a minority opinion until the modern era. The fact that the earth is a sphere was worked out even earlier. A common Latin expression for world (terrarum orbis) means the sphere of lands. The ‘calcatio’ motif showed emperors placing their foot on a sphere, symbolizing world domination. The presence of foul organisms in the air was inferred from rotting substances and from the fact that their ingestion could cause diseases as well as from wounds getting infected unless cauterized. Educated inference and experience created the body of knowledge we call science. The fact that most actual pioneers were regarded as lunatics by their peers shows how the advance of knowledge is driven by irrational intuitions and the bold desire to explore the unconventional, not philosophical ideas about epistemic methodology which are useless. The creation of the university institution was the only true innovation since antiquity in the way we produce and disseminate knowledge. But the university institution has clear religious origins in monastic traditions.
The fact that modern people in this oh so enlightened age still make such ridiculous errors in their thinking as mistaking the Roman xylospongium for the ancient version of toilet paper or thinking that the practice of circumcision has no detrimental effect on the enjoyment of sexual intercourse shows that no ‘scientific method’ can teach you to be astute.
His belief in socialism as well as his simplistic beliefs about nationalism (measles of mankind) also suggest a severe lack of astuteness. You can be intelligent but not astute.
Well, you gave me a good laugh, so thanks for that!
“These things were not made.”
what this means would seem to entirely depend on the semantics of whatever’s being translated as “made”! if the core meaning is “constructed by human action”, then it’s entirely compatible with even the most literalist christian theology; if it’s “came into being”, it’s incompatible with any modern materialist conception of the world. and of course there’s a ton of territory inbetween.
and, as i would’ve thought was common knowledge in this day and age, nationalism is not the measles of mankind. it is the mumps.
But that isn’t a simpler, stabler state than “something”.
Well, I tried, but you haven’t addressed that.
Source: trust me, bro.
Good for you, and of course similar experiences have been reported for thousands of years – but most people never have any, no matter how honestly they believe or how intensely they pray/meditate/whatever. The simplest explanation is that your experience is a feature of you, not of Jesus or any spiritual world in general.
I’ve read a number of accounts from Protestant Americans who had spiritual experiences as intense as yours. I’ve… actually not read a single one from the Orthodox side, but they’re probably on the internet less.
You’ve never met a Bosnian who only keeps the first and the last day of Ramadan, have you…
Ah, so these few people actually seek this out; they’re no different from the very few Catholics who do exercitia or the rather more Protestants who attend a charismatic American megachurch. It’s not that Islam pushes them to do this, it’s that it offers it – like many other religions – and a few people avail themselves of that offer.
I fail to see what’s so hard to explain about this. They feel they have ultimate approval. Surely that feels good?
Atheism is a belief the way not collecting stamps is a hobby.
It’s lack of belief.
Why are there still Czechs and East Germans, then? I’m surrounded by little children here in Berlin (population 2/3 godless).
What do you mean by “astute”, then?
The circle of lands.
Not so. The oldest university in continuity with the current tradition is Bologna, where people who wanted to learn Roman law put their money together and hired a few teachers. The church-sponsored, theology-heavy universities followed soon after.
Did you know that, at first approximation, only Jews, Muslims and Americans are circumcised? What you’re railing against in that sentence isn’t science, it’s America.
What you’re railing against… isn’t science, it’s America.
words to live by!
Эх.
Einstein is always my example of a silly genius. “Silly” refers to that a good half of my friends (or of math students in a good university) are better at math than him. But… but… but… but:)
(This half of my friends is also better at math than me:-))
“Bosnia”
Given the decades of Soviet atheism, Russian and Kazakh Christians and Muslims would be rather extreme examples. We even may have an advantage (we know WHY we believe) but we were not raised in a religious envoronment. I don’t know about Bosnia, but socialism could have affected them too.
I already told more than once about Bourguiba’s unsuccessful attack on Ramadan – in Arab Muslim Tunisia. Of course Tunisian nationalists or how do you call them are not the only ones around to think that religion is an obstacle, so the history of Islam in Arab countries is similarly complicated. But we’re more extreme.
I’m not sure I understand either Charles’s point or David’s objections.
Charles says that:
Some people are religious.
Some people are not.
Yes. So…? So he says it is not natural, and I don’t understand what he means.
Charles and David agree that religion gives something to its practicioners.
Are they arguing then over whether this “something” is cool or uncool?
His belief in socialism … suggest[s] a severe lack of astuteness
We are evidently dealing with an American here …
Wiktionary lists “crafty, shrewd, wily, knowing” as synonyms. Charles could be thinking that Einstein’s belief in socialism may be related to his abject failure in turning his insights into power and money.
Drasvi: Are they arguing then over whether this “something” is cool or uncool?
They are arguing about whether this “something” is a feature of the world or of the human brain.
@drasvi My point is that religion works whether for simply advancing psychological wellness or for producing supernatural phenomena of various kinds. And that’s why religion in its various forms survives and endures, not because human nature requires it. But not all traditions are equally valuable. Protestantism and Catholicism are in decline not because of the influence of secularism in the societies they exist in but because of their own mediocre leaders and teachings. Orthodox Christianity is in a better shape because it has more leaders with spiritual expertise in its ranks. Why was the German army better in WWI and WWII? Because it likewise could draw from a greater reservoir of expertise and featured a higher officer to soldier ratio than rival armies.
Why does Islam endure? Because its emphasis on orthopraxy allows it to give to the masses some basic spiritual training. Sparta was militarily mediocre. Why was it then superior to other armies in its immediate environment for a while? Because in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king. The Spartans bothered to do some basic exercises and the other states didn’t. Islam has the same advantage. It forces its adherents (especially those in its Arab strongholds) to do some basic training and other religions don’t. In Islam neglecting the 5 daily prayers isn’t considered just a sin like any other but an act that is tantamount to apostasy. The only thing that stands between the pious and the infidel are the 5 prayers, Mohammed said.
You with the Serbo-Croat name, if religion is hardwired in human beings (which I don’t believe) then everyone should be able to have some sort of feel-good experience that makes them religious, right? Why don’t you go ahead and try to do some serious spiritual training to replicate the experience just for the fun of it? You remind me of my grandma who complained of leg pains and said that most women like her cannot move swiftly but neglected to mention that she spent her life sitting on her ass all day. If you don’t do any spiritual training you won’t see any effects whatsoever and you won’t be convinced that the effects emerge outwardly, not inwardly. Period. The problem is with your laziness and your unwillingness to test claims you are prejudiced against, not with religion.
Your view of atheism is theoretically naive. Atheism is a spectrum spanning different belief systems and has been attested in various forms since remote antiquity. It’s a component of a series of related materialistic worldviews.
Yes, the East Germans (those exist only in fragments today) and the Czechs are degenerate alcoholics who hardly reproduce and the poisoned legacy of Communist occupation is at fault here. Nations in such a sorry state won’t survive for long as distinct identities and in fact the East Germans have all but disappeared. If America and America alone hadn’t saved the enslaved nations of the Soviet Union from the onslaught of the Germans the Slavic nations of the East would hardly exist today at all, save in the sense of ‘slave’, which etymologically comes from the word Slav. And if America alone hadn’t liberated them from their Soviet and Yugoslav prisons the connection between their ethnonym and the etymology of slave would still apply. These are the brute facts.
Socialism doesn’t work whether in its harsh or its more cuddly forms. This is no theory, it’s been proven. Society requires strict political hierarchies and material inequities to maintain the basic moral standards that uphold civilization as well as the basic standards of mental and physical health in its population. If the society is poor, a fair distribution of resources leads to famines and death. If the society is richer a fair distribution makes most people greedy and insatiable and this makes the society lose discipline and cohesion, leading to degeneracy, inefficiency (reproductive inefficiency too) and eventually poverty.
If people struggle to survive on what they earn like in modern America then that’s the problem of an inefficient justice system that allows commerical dishonesty, hustling, tax evasion and financial fraud to go virtually unpunished. And the reasons these behaviors go unpunished are complex but ultimately boil down to the country’s bad system of governance which is based on democracy and extreme demagoguery. People reached a consensus that democracy doesn’t work already in antiquity after the disasters that Athenian democracy wrought woke them up from the Periclean pipe dream. Wherever democracy rears its ugly head, Communism always shows up in its footsteps. We see Aristophanes mocking ideas similar to Communism that popped up in his society as a potential answer to the ills of the existing democratic system, similarly to how modern ‘progressive’ Americans naively imagine socialism will save them from their plutocratic system. Oh well, If young people today wish to repeat failed experiments because they can’t stand their bigoted grandpa or bosses who have no ’empathy’, well let them go ahead, they’ll learn the hard way. History will give them a better idea of what ‘lack of empathy’ really means.
“You remind me of my grandma who complained of leg pains and said that most women like her cannot move swiftly but neglected to mention that she spent her life sitting on her ass all day.”
This is a rather harsh statement and does not argue well for the benefits of spiritual training for the speaker of it.
@PlasticPaddy If you consider that harsh then you guys clearly have become softies and that’s no good omen. If we’re soft no wonder injustice thrives.
Being spiritual doesn’t mean being a harmless idiot in my book.
Wherever democracy rears its ugly head
Ah. He’s one of those.
The Piraha just prove that … b) spirit sighting existed in the stone age and preceded the later foundation of religious institutions in the context of centralized agricultural societies.
No, the Pirahã cannot be used to prove that. The Pirahã cannot be used as a proxy for “stone age people”. There is no reason to assume this small group of 800 people represents any greater truth about human development. It’s highly doubtful the same culture has just continued in stasis for 20,000 years, nor can we make any conclusions based on their technology since their culture is quite different from other human cultures we know about at a similar technological level. We don’t know anything about where the Pirahã came from or how old their culture is. It’s a small tribe. Maybe the Pirahã are the descendants of traumatized survivors of one of the vanished pre-Columbian agricultural societies whose outlines can still be discerned in the Amazon. Maybe they are descended from a group of abandoned children cast off a few hundred years ago. There’s no way to know.
Mr Jaeger has not seen fit to provide us with much detail of his specific spiritual path, but, recalling that “by their fruits ye shall know them”, one can tentatively conclude that it is highly effective in promoting self-esteem and broad stereotyping, but rather less effective in promoting self-awareness (much less awareness of others.)
I don’t have time to gather my thoughts on the five prayers right now, unfortunately, but suffice it to say that you won’t get far trying to understand practice by looking at fatwas alone.
The Spartans bothered to do some basic exercises and the other states didn’t. Islam has the same advantage. It forces its adherents (especially those in its Arab strongholds) to do some basic training and other religions don’t.
[…]
If America and America alone hadn’t saved the enslaved nations of the Soviet Union from the onslaught of the Germans
Wow, you really don’t know anything about anything! At least you’re providing some amusement.
If America and America alone hadn’t saved the enslaved nations of the Soviet Union from the onslaught of the Germans
The modern trend of denigrating the British Empire and Commonwealth’s substantial and probably decisive contribution to Germany’s defeat in WWII is a pet peeve of mine. It’s anachronistic and shows a lack of understanding of the contemporary military and industrial capabilities of the combined British Empire and Commonwealth, which were significantly greater than Nazi Germany, and still exceeded the USSR and rivaled the U.S. in many ways. Most importantly though the British deserve huge props for standing up to German aggression against Poland in the first place, which neither the U.S. nor the USSR were willing to do. Britain’s continuous control of the waters around Festung Europa and the sky above it from late 1940 onward meant that the German war effort was eventually doomed to sputter and fail, just like Napoleon’s Europe. Germany dedicated significantly more resources (not manpower but industrial, raw material and financial resources) fighting Britain and the Dominions than it invested in attacking the USSR. In retrospect maybe that seems shortsighted but the Hitler saw Britain as the real enemy right up to the point Soviet troops were entering Königsberg. Britain emerged from the war substantially weaker than the US or the USSR, true, but that doesn’t mean we should take an anachronistic view or glorify Soviet or American nationalist propaganda.
While your main point is of course correct, it’s absurd to claim that Britain did more to defeat Hitler than the USSR. The Soviet victories are not just nationalist propaganda.
(Interestingly, Stalin also saw Britain as the real enemy right up to the point German troops crossed the border — or rather, until he accepted that fact, which he initially saw as disinformation.)
the British Empire and Commonwealth’s substantial and probably decisive contribution to Germany’s defeat in WWII
A war that lasts 6 years of attrition (after Hitler’s initial offensives failed to secure the territory) boils down to economics. Britain could draw on the Empire for supplies and simultaneously use its Naval power to blockade German supply routes.
That blockade would have been much more drawn-out were it not for the USSR being a continual drain on Hitler’s Eastern flank.
So all have won and all shall have prizes of a wrecked post-war economy, from which neither Britain nor USSR have recovered. (But Germany has ??)
Speaking from said Commonwealth, can we please have our butter back now: the price is bloody killing us.
>>the British Empire and Commonwealth’s substantial and probably decisive contribution to Germany’s defeat
>absurd to claim that Britain did more to defeat Hitler than the USSR
It was a close run thing. Was there any contribution that wasn’t “decisive”.
@cj
You perhaps think of yourself as a spiritual stormtrooper. But the “Irish” view would seem to be that spirituality is more about enduring, caring and helping than about preaching, censuring and attacking. Again one might say, as with the Moslem prayers, this is quite often honoured in the breach.
@Lameen
Is it fair to say that dietary laws and other strictures of observance have helped Jews and Moslems to maintain a sense of identity/community unconnected (at least, for many people) with any religious feelings? Or is the sense of identity more independent from any commitment to practice?
Yes: “spiritual” does not equate to either “higher” or “good.” It all depends on what you’re being spiritual about. Many a fascist is “spiritual.”
@Vanya The Piraha are the last remnant of the Mura peoples, others have been assimilated or died off. The Piraha themselves will probably be assimilated completely in a few generations. There is no evidence that the Piraha are ‘traumatized’ and other such dramatic nonsense. Everett lived with them for decades and described them as the happiest people he has ever met. Another guy who came with him for research noticed how they smile all the time and reasoned that they must be the happiest people on earth. I am aware that there is this trend in scholarship to point out that modern hunter gatherers aren’t the same as stone age people but this is nonsense. The reason this trend appeared is because modern hunter gatherers expose the leftist fantasies of stone age utopias and noble savages as nonsense and verbose scholars try to find rhetorical walk-arounds to help them sustain their illusions. There is no serious reason to believe that hunter gatherers observed by ethnologists and missionaries in the modern era don’t live the same essential lifestyle as stone age communities thousands of years ago situated in similar ecological environments. Likewise there is no substantial difference between a village in Oman in the 1900s and an Arabian village at the time of prophet Mohammed.
That worthless criminal Stalin said that without US participation victory would have been impossible for the United Nations and he was right, and more realistic than his leftie admirers and the militarily incompetent Britons who couldn’t even defeat Andrew Jackson. The US decided both world wars. Without astronomical US aid and millions of US troops on the ground the Germans could have easily mopped the floor with anyone in Europe (including that stupid island up there) in BOTH world wars. They had both the resources and the military virtue to do it, a virtue that rival armies couldn’t even approach.
I mentioned how belief in the ‘scientific method’ doesn’t make you smart. In fact, dogmatic belief in it makes people less astute. Sexologists tell you that circumcision doesn’t affect sexual intercourse. Bullshit. It does affect it, negatively. This is why the custom arose, to make intercourse less pleasurable for both men and women and discourage promiscuity. In harsh desert environments where the custom originated, fights over women could destroy entire tribes.
Rub the top section of your index fingers against each other. Now rub the middle section of your index fingers. Feel any difference there? That’s the difference modern sexology claims doesn’t exist. And you believe them, because in your head, they represent authority. Because, after all, you aren’t the freethinker you think you are, you’re just flattering yourself.
degenerate alcoholics who hardly reproduce
must be all the circumcision* in /checks notes/ central europe?
this is, however, the most elliptical screed against judeo-bolshevism i’ve yet encountered, though not really the most subtle! but it sure does hit all the contemporary high points: the sociobio/evopsych garbage, the nazi-fetishism, the weird (W.E.I.R..D.?) gymnastics to make True Science and Genuine Occultism compatible**, etcetera.
i might suggest model railways as an alternate hobby for these kinds of chuds, but it’s counterindicated, since they’re exactly the ones who still believe the fascists’ propaganda about on-time trains.
.
* it’s always odd when the anti-circumcision stuff is the only sensible thing a chud can manage to say (especially when it’s this blatantly about the You Know Whos, but the chud in question doesn’t even have the honesty to say so).
** not actually difficult when you’re arbitrarily deciding what counts as True and Genuine, but damn do they all always make it look soooo hard!
Yep, rozele.
Also [deleted insult about rubbing middle section of the index finger – but use your imagination]
Really good, and really funny, rozele.
There is no serious reason to believe that hunter gatherers observed by ethnologists and missionaries in the modern era don’t live the same essential lifestyle as stone age communities thousands of years ago situated in similar ecological environments.
There are many obvious reasons, but the most compelling is that they don’t even live the “same essential lifestyle” as each other. The Piraha are strikingly different from their Amazonian neighbours in material culture and in social organisation – that’s one of Everett’s best-argued points. But hey, if you’re capable of convincing yourself that “there is no substantial difference between a village in Oman in the 1900s and an Arabian village at the time of prophet Mohammed”, then I guess believing all hunter-gatherers are essentially the same must be a piece of cake.
@rozele: Evolan/Perennialist, would you say? Or some more distant offshoot of De Maistre? The odd anti-Slavic animus seems like it should be diagnostic of some specific current of what may loosely be called thought.
Charles Jaeger: In harsh desert environments where the custom originated,
Is this science? What’s your evidence for that? There’s obviously some geographic correlation after the Islamic expansion, but that was long after the custom originated. The pre-diaspora jews weren’t a desert people.
And where did the custom(s) of female genital mutilation begin?
fights over women could destroy entire tribes.
Is there any evidence that circumcised men fight less over women than those with intact foreskins? Do men fight less over genetically mutilated women? Is there even any evidence of correlation between measured sexual pleasure from (heterosexual) intercourse and interpersonal violence?
How is an internal conflict more damaging in a desert than any other extreme human environment? Is there evidence supporting the claim?
You remind me of my grandma who complained of leg pains and said that most women like her cannot move swiftly but neglected to mention that she spent her life sitting on her ass all day.
She’s not alone. People sink into their sofas when their legpains grow, and the feedback loop begins. One reason this happens to women is untreated complications of childbirth. Similar effects as female genital mutilation. One reason it’s condemned harshly is misogynism.
Being spiritual doesn’t mean being a harmless idiot in my book.
That spiritual idiot who came up with the “turn the other cheek” line should have been nailed to a pole and left out to dry,
Is it fair to say that dietary laws and other strictures of observance have helped Jews and Moslems to maintain a sense of identity/community unconnected (at least, for many people) with any religious feelings? Or is the sense of identity more independent from any commitment to practice?
I think it’s more that religious identity gets deeply intertwined with identity more generally, to the point of being able to persist even after strictures of observance are abandoned. I remember Akbar Ahmed’s anecdote about visiting Kazakhstan soon after the fall of the USSR. He starts chatting with some people, and reveals that he’s Muslim. They’re thrilled: “So are we, brother! Hey, here, have some vodka with us!”
I don’t think you can reliably deduce a lack of religious feelings from a lack of practice either. Deep religious feelings may induce stricter observance, or just more frequent repentance; strict observance may reflect deep religious feelings, or just pedantry and pride.
Of course it did, but the stereotype is older. (Like… there’s a joke about simply declaring pork “lamb” and eating it.)
The patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church is a complete and total moron who has no idea about the rest of the world.
That’s not surprising – like all Orthodox bishops, he’s a monk. He hasn’t interacted with the rest of the world all that much.
So. What, if anything, do you mean by “in better shape”? What, even, do you mean by “decline”?
Why wouldn’t it??? The only halfway comparable religion that ever died out is Manichaeism, and that one died out amid massive political upheavals along the eastern half of the Silk Road.
Nice save!
Uh… I guess so… but… are you perhaps under the impression that I ever said religion is hardwired? It’s not, and I never said it was. I mean what I say, and I don’t mean what I don’t say.
Again, I live in Berlin and pass through the whole length of the Czech Republic at least six times a year (this year it’s been seven times already). Why do you talk about things you have no idea about?
Do you know where the birth rate is really extremely low? South Korea. A quite noticeably spiritual place where the women are emancipated but the men still aren’t, so they don’t fit together. Italy had a less extreme version of that around 30 years ago.
Not in the sense you need, i.e. biologically died out. Not even in the sense of becoming indistinguishable from West Germans, who are, for example, still religious at a higher rate.
I can’t even ask you what that proof is as long as you haven’t defined socialism for us. I can come up with five different definitions, all of which have been in actual use (by self-identified socialists even).
Is Denmark a hellhole, or is it unfairer than the US?
I see your Pericles and raise you Condorcet. Democracy works fine if a majority of the voters understands what it’s voting for. In other words, there needs to be a functioning education system. Athens lacked that. The US has one, but it’s got giant holes…
Even afterwards, the Soviets never quite trusted that the decline of the British Empire they were watching was real. When Stalin died, Beria “was hastily accused of being a British spy, arrested and executed, not necessarily in that order” – not an American spy, tellingly. And Putin today occasionally makes noises that show the same mindset.
Germany never had a Thatcher and most certainly never had a Truss!
You misunderstand. The idea is not that the Pirahã alive today are traumatized; as you correctly state, they’re not. (Well, at least not yet.) The idea is that their highly, highly unusual culture that basically refuses to consider anything too far removed from immediate experience began as a deliberate break with the past.
Less dramatic examples of this (very) general phenomenon are not unknown. The English civil war had a major impact on philosophy, for instance.
And yet, the Pirahã are strikingly different from literally all other hunter-gatherers ever studied.
…I’m… deeply impressed by how many unrelated things you conflated in this single sentence.
– Without direct US participation, victory in WWII would have taken a few years longer. If the US had not even supplied the USSR, it would have been really difficult, though probably still not impossible.
– Even though we were talking about WWII, you switch the topic to the Korean War without so much as a comma. Korea is where the United Nations, founded in 1948, were a side in the war.
– Between 1812 and 1945 there was rather a lot of time, don’t you think? I know the generals always prepare for the last war, but the generals who led the British military in WWII hadn’t been born yet in 1812; maybe not even their grandparents.
Again, only in America.
In fact, almost certainly not even there; you’re just stuck half a century in the past.
Look, if you want to argue with the voices in your head, do that in your head. If you want to argue with us, you can’t argue with the voices in your head and slap our names on them. That doesn’t work.
No.
Instead, there is apparently evidence that male circumcision reduces the (already rather low) probability that a single act of intercourse leads to pregnancy. So if everyone is circumcised, the patriarch still gets to impregnate all his wives (just a few days later than otherwise), but if he’s cuckolded, chances are better that nothing even happens, so his reputation remains intact.
That said, the effect of subincision* is even stronger, and while that’s practiced in an unpredictable semidesert, it’s part of hardly patriarchal cultures where there is no big boss with a harem.
* If you don’t already know what that is, I recommend you don’t look it up.
While the vodka in the example is probably a lack of Islamic practice, that isn’t necessarily so. From what I’ve read, the prohibition of drunkenness used to be interpreted as just that, and wine was produced and consumed in North Africa in the Middle Ages until more cautious interpretations took over. Rakı never went away in Turkey and its neighbors, neither did arrak in Indonesia, and aren’t they both the same Arabic word?
The Mormon prohibition of “hot drinks”, by the way, is most widely interpreted as a ban on caffeine, and indeed many Latter-Day Saints abstain religiously from caffeine. But several other interpretations exist in the community, including the literal one that makes cold coffee perfectly OK.
My point is that, yes, deep religious feelings can and routinely do induce stricter observance – but observance of what exactly is less predictable.
Why do you talk about things you have no idea about?
The poor chap has to talk about something, after all!
@Lameen: without re-reading, i’m getting an Identity Evropa kind of vibe, with strong overtones of the jordan peterson zone. so definitely some evola in the mix (though likely not directly), along with some of the tradcath/sedevacantist stuff that feeds into the far right obsession with Orthodoxy as the Strongest and most Crusadery christianity, and i’d guess some anthroposophy or something similar, given the iffiness on the status of the spiritual plane and certainty about the effectiveness of esoteric practice (that combination could just be the right flavor of QAnon, though?). and some of the more specifically nazi-adjacent 100% Americanism, clearly – which is always a trip! but certainly contemporary internet-mediated eclecticism, whatever the particular blend of influences.
@DM: a tiny quibble (which may be relevant to Lameen’s question, though i’m not certain what it means): part of why the UN ended up with that name was that (at least in the u.s.) during the war “the Allies” were also sometimes referred to as “the united nations”. the locus classicus is probably the 1942 hit by dmitri shostakovich and harold rome (!), “United Nations on the March”.
@DM …I’m… deeply impressed by how many unrelated things you conflated in this single sentence.
Seconded. I’m feeling bad (as kinda the resident strident atheist) I’m not finding the time to read let alone take apart this stream of non sequiturs. Y’all are doing a splendid job at the turkey shoot.
Suffice to say that the atheist-hunter seems to be claiming a surprising depth of knowledge of Atheists and Atheism, none of which describes me nor even the ‘Four Riders’, let alone the diversity in Atheism (it’s a broad church).
We can all experience deep transcendental, intensely personal moments (as Christopher Hitchens has described). There’s no need to tie those to your or any God, though I’m not objecting if you do — the experience is in its very nature not susceptible to rational critique. Providing you don’t exploit it as ‘justification’ for oppressing those who don’t share it.
@Balkan surname
The leadership of the orthodox Church is as world savvy as any other religious institution. Without savviness the institution wouldn’t have survived across countless centuries. I don’t know how much the Russian bishop knows about the world and who gives a shit anyway? He’s not a diplomat or a scholar (as if most of those know anything about the world) but a religious leader. At any rate his support of the Russian regime is wise. The Russian church relies on that regime for its salaries.
The Orthodox church is in a better shape because it has a greater percentage of followers who genuinely respect the institution compared to rival churches in other countries. It is that simple. Why do people with your ‘progressive’ mentality have to seek nuance upon nuance in everything? It’s the mental equivalent of a dog unable to stop sniffing around.
So I suppose your theory is that Islam endures and remains vital because religions that promote beliefs similar to Manichaeism speak to human nature in some special way that rival religious systems can’t? And if that’s true why shouldn’t religion be natural to humans? Isn’t a belief system that is dualistic and lacks nuance quasi-metaphysical by definition?
I said that the Czechs don’t reproduce well, that they’re alcoholics and morally degenerate and I am right on all counts. Their birth rate is well below replacement, alcohol consumption per capita is ludicrously high and anybody who doubts the third can test the claim themselves. There’s nothing special about Czechia in that regard, all formerly socialist countries are high in moral degeneracy. Why are most German Nazis Ostdeutsche? Because they didn’t receive a good education in school? No, it’s because a life lived in squalor often forces people to take up manly ideologies, while a life of softness and effeminacy promotes slothful ideologies. I don’t even know what you’re blubbering about in regards to South Korea and its supposed spirituality. South Korea is a highly Westernized secular country.
Denmark is not socialist. It’s just another boring Western country with generous welfare policies. Generous welfare policies are bad because they make people soft but they aren’t the same as socialist redistribution. Hard socialism is Soviet-style socialism. Soft socialism is Yugoslav-style socialism. Social democracy essentially originated as a scam to fish out working class votes. It’s an entirely system-conforming ideology that rhetorically caters to the mentality of the most lazy and sensitive parts of the European electorate.
What culture? The Piraha don’t have any culture whatsoever. They are just a lazy bunch of savages so incompetent they can’t even make a fishing boat. If you don’t have a material culture worthy of the name why the hell would you have a non-material culture like creation myths? They live by hunting and gathering, some horticulture, trade with outsiders and the generosity of the Brazilian colonial state. All of these survival strategies except the latter existed in the stone age. The point is that a population of modern primitives that lives in a similar ecological environment to a population in the stone age still offers a reliable window into the past. The Piraha don’t differ much in their mode of life from the few other savage remnants of the Amazon except that the other groups have had to try harder to make a living and are thus more mentally advanced. The Piraha prove that human beings are capable of descending to a monkey-like state if the ecological environment and good fortune allow them easy access to the necessities of life.
There is zero, absolutely zero, good reason to believe that the Soviet Union could have defeated the Germans despite what you or the likes of Putin want to believe. I never mentioned the Korean War so no idea what the voices in your head told you I said. The term United Nations originated in WWII, first used by Roosevelt in 1942. Stalin said that without US participation in the conflict, the ‘United Nations’ meaning the Allies, would have lost to the Axis. And this is completely true. So while everybody helped, it was the US (with minimal help from Britain) who made the actual difference.
I mentioned Andrew Jackson to point to the fact that the British have an embarrassing record of military incompetence and that the idea of British chauvinists that they made a significant contribution to the defeat of the Germans, a far more competent adversary, is nonsense. How could it possibly escape your notice that this is what I meant? You went and told me that Andrew Jackson was a long time before WWII? No shit.
And no I am not under the firm impression that you believe religion is hardwired. I actually thought it quite likely that you don’t believe that since that’s what most atheists prefer to believe. My point was that if religion is not hard-wired, then what causes belief in it to be so widespread in your opinion? And if not all people can have spiritual experiences no matter how hard they try (and you claimed that even though you obviously have no interest in trying) then why has belief in supernatural visitations or spirits been nearly universal across all cultures in your opinion?
Sexology in America and Australia (but also in Britain where circumcision isn’t widely practiced anymore) insists that circumcision has no effect on sexual intercourse whether positive or negative. European sexology is not interested in the issue since Europeans don’t practice it but I am not aware of any work by European sexologists that discourages the practice on sexual grounds. There is a debate on whether the practice has any tangible medical benefits and most people outside America agree that it hasn’t.
@You with the Scandinavian name
Circumcision is far older than the pre-diaspora Jews. It has been found in mummies as early as 3100BC. It’s unclear where the practice originated but an origin among Afro-Asiatic speakers seems very likely. The ancestors of Afro-Asiatic speaking groups came from arid environments. Like many taboos, the practice may have had origins connected to ideas of ritual purity and unrelated to practical concerns. But taboo practices regardless of their origin tend to survive if they confer some practical benefit and to die out if they don’t.
Your question is as if asking: is there any evidence that denatured alcohol and ugly labeling in bottles discourages drunkenness? Well no, but it’s entirely reasonable to think so. Although official sexology denies the idea (for politically correct reasons) circumcision dulls sexual pleasure for both genders. This removes some of the excitement of practices like masturbation and causal sex, which makes chastity norms easier to follow and helps the tribe get along more smoothly (at the price of genital smoothness). The amazing reproductive success of Afro-Asiatic peoples points to wise customs.
I never wished to insinuate that the practice of circumcision is bad. So all of you who think I am an anti-Semite because I don’t think democracy is a serious way to administer a complex society are off the mark. And if anyone is curious, I am uncut and also not American but an ethnic German from Transylvania. I don’t follow any particular spiritual path but I have experimented with many and have had some tangible spiritual experiences that convinced me atheist and relativist views of reality are bullshit.
@German surname: You sure are wordy.
@David M.: I haven’t been following the controversy over circumcision of newborn babies, but Wikipedia says
The citations are all more recent than 2010. I didn’t try to figure out what was American and what wasn’t.
Can we be sure Mr. Surname isn’t an AI? The wordspray of barely-connected ideas is kinda suggestive. What became of Elon Musk’s after its abusive persona got a sock in it? Is this perhaps the next development in beta testing?
Aha! We’re onto you, Herr Surname!
AntC: perhaps the next development in beta testing
Don’t call it beta!
If “amazing reproductive success” refers to the widespread (both among Europeans and some Jihadist ideologues) idea that Arabs with their many children will replace Europeans with their few children, then no. Marriage age goes up, number of children goes down. The resulting figures recemble Europe (the actual mechanisms behind them are different). Couples with many children are common in the poorest Arab countries.
I don’t know why everyone believes in it and no one will look up the stats:-/
I’m sure, even anti-Islamophobic Europeans picture a couple surrounded by a horde of babies:)
By “everyone” you mean Charles Jaeger. Nobody else here is saying that.
Though… Maybe if I ask a Tunisian (the average number of children), she too will give me stats from 90s.
LH, I mean many many many many many people I heard it from. Also this perception is a perception, not a stance. If Arab perception is similarly biased (I mean the number of children, not “fall of the European civilisation”, but who knows, maybe the fall too?), I won’t be surprised. Yes, if someone loves to speak about it, likely she does so in support of some ideology.
The Orthodox church is in a better shape because it has a greater percentage of followers who genuinely respect the institution compared to rival churches in other countries
I am guessing Mr Jaeger has spent very little time in Orthodox countries. I can’t speak for Greece, but the Russian church is very unhealthy and is seen by many Russians as deeply corrupt and compromised. The quality of the clergy is possibly even lower than in late Tsarist times, when it was notoriously bad and poorly educated. I have also spent a lot of time in Romania recently, and the Orthodox Church there has still has a hold on a lot of people for nationalist and traditional reasons but meeting a sincerely devout Romanian in educated circles is not common. I have a similar impression of the Serbian Church, although I can’t claim much expertise there. Honestly, the Catholic Church, for all its failings and scandals, still seems far healthier and likely to survive into the 22nd century than Orthodox Christianity. At least the leadership in Rome is transnational and can make a plausible claim to serve God and not whatever right wing political party happens to be running the country.
ah! a siebenbürgen bürger!
if i were only him, i could say “that explains a lot!” – i’m not, however, so i won’t even bother to comment on the Antient Esoterik symbol littering the mid-century fraktur-carved tombstones of the region.
it’s possible that our Free Hunter has a view of Orthodoxy that has more to do with the AUR than the romanian church itself, or perhaps with the branch of the (noncanonical/self-recognized) Montenegrin Orthodox Church that knowingly ordained* nazi satanist nikola poleksić a/k/a Dark Imperivm of the Order of 9 Angles (for background).
.
* and may or may not have recently defrocked, following the latest schism.
Getting meaningful comparative data across countries on religiosity v. secularity and whatnot is difficult and making predictions about future vitality based on current data even more so. FWIW this 2018 Pew thing ranking European countries by percentage of population that is “highly religious” skews more heavily Orthodox than I might have expected. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/12/05/how-do-european-countries-differ-in-religious-commitment/ OTOH, I’ve seen other rankings that put Poland and Slovakia ahead of the rest of the continent. To what extent those who are not personally particularly devout respect the institution and its importance seems the sort of thing easy to ask survey questions about but hard to get really reliable data on, although impressionistically Greece has scored high on that metric without even having to have undergone Communist occupation. And of course that sort of “outside” support is likely to be for motives easy to dismiss as merely nationalistic or whatnot and can then collapse when political/cultural winds shift (as in Ireland).
The Romanian Church recently beat the Vatican to the punch in the race to be the first to have an “official” Gen X saint, viz. St. Elizabeth (Elisabeta) of Pasarea (1970-2014).
Maybe it’s just good old Mendelssohn line (or whatever it is called for gentiles), South and East Europe vs. West and North and battling for the center (which, not being a Compass Direction doesn’t deserve capitalization).
I had no idea – thank you!
Mr. Jaeger here wants to believe it, so he actively refuses to look up the stats; tomorrow he’s going to grumble that they’re all wrong while refusing to explain why. Wanting to believe, and trying to convince yourself that something that sounds good is actually true, is strong and manly, you see, while actually caring about the truth, trying to find out if something that sounds good (or bad!) is actually the case, will make your dick fall off – not just the foreskin.
Yes; however, they can see that the children of Islamic immigrants have on average no more children themselves than anyone else here.
Seipel line?
Is Denmark a hellhole? Yes, especially for people with strange mixes of French first names and German family names. They’d better keep out.
Arab stats are interesting. The number of children is not really. All it means is “Arabs are not exceptional”.
But it is interesting that girls in Libya married in 18 in 70s and in 29 in 90s. Without a change in attitudes to love (I’m not saying “sex” because being a couple is many, many more things) outside of marriage that is a true catastrophe. It is interesting that the “Arab world” (quotemarked because quoted) is the leader in say, women in universities.
I’d have never learned this from journalists or people who read them, watch them and talk about same things.
And THAT is annoying.
I don’t think it is different for our countries. We similarly don’t know them. With the Arab world it is crazy, because ennumerable people think their problem is “women can’t receive education because child marriages” (and imagine those babies): the divergence between imaginary reality and the actual reality is almost comical.
Yes, knowing an Arab immigrant couple and counting their children is good, but looking up stats is too a good idea, and not difficult at all, and I’m annoyed that people (simply “people”) usually prefer the imaginary reality of journalists.
Misperception of Charles (one person) bothers me less.
Looking at actual birth rate figures, the most effective factors in promoting a high birth rate right now would seem to be extreme poverty, civil war, and being landlocked. I look forward to pro-natalists making pilgrimages to Niamey, Kinshasa, and Kabul to learn the secrets of their success.
… and of those three, being landlocked doesn’t hold if you control for the other two.
To be fair, the pronatalists are working on the introduction of extreme poverty for the masses. And many of their pronouncements suggest an enthusiasm for civil war.
@Trond, don’t tell me Liechtenstein and Uzbekistan (distance to sea: two borders) won’t dominate the world.
(Unless they unite and fight a Pakistan-style war).
But Liechtenstan and Uzbekistein are good names anyway.
Pakistein, Afghanistein, Kyrgyzstein…
Afghanistan is a rather stony place… while Liechtenstein is on a floodplain!
Proximity to government is enough to ensure institutional survival.
Nobody told him that, it seems. He keeps making stupid pronouncements about the world at large that insult his intelligence and that of every single one of the people whose spiritual needs he’s supposed to care for.
It is really, really not wise for a religious institution to depend on an authoritarian government for its salaries. Pope John Paul II (aka “America and America alone”) was able to play an important role in the downfall of, to stick with your terminology, socialism by convincing people that they could do this and they shouldn’t be afraid. Patriarch Kirill ought to do the same from a moral point of view, but he couldn’t even if he wanted to. That’s not wise. And the ecumenic patriarch in Constantinople could only do such a thing if the Ministry of Religious Affairs in Ankara okayed it. That’s not wise either.
That alone counts as being in a better shape? Or do you mean “because” literally and still aren’t trying to explain what “in a better shape” means?
I’m a scientist. (Here’s my number.) Sniffing for nuances is literally what I do. What I think of your refusal to even consider their existence I already said last night.
No, my theory is that religions, especially religions with universalist claims and missionaries, don’t just fade out on their own as you seem to believe. They endure as long as nothing stops them, and only rather special circumstances are capable of that. No further explanation is necessary. Even Mandaeans are still among us.
…oh, did you think that’s all Manicheism was? It was a full-fledged religion with all the trappings, even monks and nuns. Of course it was metaphysical.
In part, yes, because the teaching of history in socialist countries was quite bad…
Again, I’m in Berlin. Squalor is something different. The main factor seems to be living in a precarious state: having stuff, but being afraid of losing it. The xenophobes and the outright Nazis come in, give people someone to blame for this situation, and collect the votes.
I’m sad you have such a sad view of men, though.
Yeah, and it has a birth rate way lower than Czechia or anywhere.
Basically you wrote the answer yourself: you would still have a non-material culture, it just wouldn’t be worthy of the name by the unexplained criteria of one Charles Jaeger.
Actively refusing to care about distant times or places it itself a cultural trait. Staying up and talking instead of going to sleep, and reinforcing this by saying “don’t sleep, there are snakes”, is a cultural trait, too. Having separate sound systems for men and women is a cultural trait… you may not like it, but that’s what a culture looks like.
Again, the others all have religions with creation myths, deities, souls, everything. Only the Pirahã don’t.
I’m afraid you’re making that up. They live in the same “green hell” as all their religious neighbors.
So the whole eastern front never happened…? I did explicitly mention the American material support for the USSR, without which it really might not have happened, at least not like this.
I understand perfectly well that this drivel is what you meant. I’m saying it’s obviously nonsensical to assume that “the British” couldn’t have learned anything across a hundred thirty years – they weren’t even the same individuals, so “learning” isn’t even the right word here!
Fuck, the Ukrainian military was shit in 2014, and ten years later it fought “the world’s #2 army” to a standstill. In many cases these are the same individuals who learned a lot in rather little time.
I answered that question in this comment that you seem to have overlooked.
I said “most people never have any”, not “not all people can have” – but that doesn’t matter; as long as people believe somebody had a real supernatural experience, that’s enough, regardless of whether they believe they themselves can have one, too.
The aridity isn’t that old, though. The Sahara was savanna surprisingly recently; if circumcision originated afterwards (3100 BC was indeed afterwards), it must have spread as a fashion between speakers of the branches of Afro-Asiatic, which separated from each other much earlier.
@dm
Cool publications!
Is “calibration sausage” a term of art?
It’s pointless to argue with a cultist of this type* by citing actual evidence. Or, indeed, at all.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/07/08/pig/
* Arguing with a cultist of my type by citing evidence is deeply frustrating but not totally pointless. I’ve learnt a lot from such arguments … and even changed one or two of my actual opinions … (unimportant ones, obvs …)
So, more like trying to play chess with a very intellectual gorilla …
Apropos of which, while few (if any) people seem to have been brought into Christianity by rational argument, there are plenty of people who will say that they were argued out of it …
Dan Everett actually seems to be an example, kinda: gave up on his own belief when he concluded that it was completely impossible to transpose it into the medium of Pirahã culture. Seems illogical to me, or at least a kind of missed opportunity to learn what is really central to Christianity, as opposed to cultural accretions. Perhaps it might have helped if his own Christianity had been more Kierkegaard and less Moody Bible Institute. Perhaps even a bit of Bultmann …
However, it seems like his then-wife’s response to all this was quite different.
But such speculations by outsiders are by nature ill-informed (and impertinent: apologies to the Everetts.)
They are just a lazy bunch of savages so incompetent they can’t even make a fishing boat.
If we are going to take the ability „to make a fishing boat” as a literal criterion of non-savagery then most modern Americans also fail.
If we want to take general boat building innovation and boating skills over the centuries as a marker of civilization than Hungarians including Transylvanians, are among the most savage people in Europe and have a very primitive civilization compared to the Polynesians or the Taino.
There is evidence that at least some Hungarians own hovercraft.
If Wikipedia is to be believed Hungary, even in its pre-Trianon incarnation, lies well outside the native range of the freshwater European eel. So it’s not clear where those Hungarians keep those hovercraft. They may be rentals.
But their number is too small.
No, and I don’t think it’s caught on since. I wanted to put in a reference to “how the sausage is made” and keep it short…
I took it as they actually convinced him that “these things were not made”, or at least that there’s no reason to take for granted that they were and then build on that assumption.
@David
From a spiritual point of view (my point of view) the Christian church as an institution is useful for one thing only: to produce holy men. Jesus says in the gospels that whoever isn’t willing to abandon all material and familial ties to the world is unworthy to be called his disciple. He also spoke of a way to recognize his true disciples: ‘they drive out demons, drink poisons and don’t die etc.’ so in effect Jesus says that his true disciples have the supernatural abilities of holy men. The mission of a true Christian is therefore to become a holy man i.e. achieve theosis through ascetic practices. The first stage is for the practitioner to purify his soul, the second to receive the illumination of the Holy Spirit and the third to achieve sainthood/glorification/theosis.
From this point of view the Church is just a training ground for saints and a place where those who have at least reached the first stage can dispense their blessings to the masses through the performance of the traditional sacraments and through schooling the masses in Christian virtue. In my opinion the Orthodox Church does a far better job at producing quality personnel and saints than rival churches and this has always been true though I concede that in recent centuries the standards have sunk very low even there. When I am referring to the ‘leaders’ of the Church I am actually referring to the saints and to the spiritually gifted parts of the clergy, those who have at least achieved the first stage of purification, not to the bishops and the patriarchs, most of whom are corrupt and spiritually incompetent.
People that are ignorant, corrupt and spiritually incompetent are of course useless and harmful to any institution, especially the church. But a church institution must at any rate include in its ranks people that are NOT holy men. Like any other organization the church requires money to survive and it must secure this money somehow. Hence, it needs administrators and it needs to cultivate good diplomatic relations with the local rulers, no matter how vicious or corrupt they are. Obviously, holy men cannot attend to those secular duties.
Throughout its history the Orthodox Church has had to face many practical challenges. For one, the fact that it managed to convert a good portion of the Slavophone world was no small feat.
At some point the Greek emperors de facto abandoned the Orthodox church and converted to Catholicism in an attempt to elicit Western arms and money. The rumor that the leaders of the Orthodox Church treacherously caused or hastened the demise of Constantinople by secretly collaborating with the Ottomans to protect themselves from Catholic encroachment may have some basis in reality. This would be an example of a Church leadership doing what it must do in order to self-preserve. The fact that it then managed to keep the faith alive and vibrant in the shadow of an Islamic monarch is again no small feat.
When the Germans occupied Greece, the monks of Athos requested a meeting with Nazi officials and sent letters flattering Hitler. They wanted to protect themselves and the turf of the Greek Church from the Bulgarians and to curry favor with the new German rulers. Another example of a religious institution being pragmatic.
The Catholic Church had the luxury of not being under Communist occupation. It isn’t heroic to encourage people to rebel when it’s safe to do so. The Russian Church today may have spiritually or even intellectually unremarkable people at the helm but it must survive somehow. So I can’t see why supporting Putin isn’t the wise thing to do for them. In some situations servile leaders are the best leaders because they are the ones who guarantee survival the best. Are servile people intellectually mediocre? No shit.
I don’t see any reason to believe that the Catholic Church played any serious role in the demise of the Soviets. My view is that the Soviets brought it on themselves. The very wicked but pragmatic Beria had realized early on that the Soviets couldn’t compete with the Americans. By the time of Gorbachev everybody in Moscow that wasn’t stupid had realized this too. But Gorbachev couldn’t come up with realistic solutions to stabilize the system because he tried to imitate an idealistic version of Lenin that never existed. The real Lenin would have been able to stabilize the situation and save the Communist party and the state. So American pressure led to a political and economic impasse, the Soviet leaders made the wrong decisions and that’s it.
Western aid to the Soviets in WWII wasn’t just supplementary, it was the root cause of their success. There’s countless angles this can be argued from. For example, virtually every truck in the Soviet army was Western. Without these trucks they wouldn’t have the mobility to breach the German lines and reach Berlin. The astronomical casualties of the Soviets (which remained staggering to the very end) don’t prove that they are responsible for the Allied victory. The Chinese likewise suffered astronomical casualties fighting the Japanese. Are they responsible for the defeat of the Japanese empire? Only a fool would claim that and indeed I’ve seen a pro-Soviet Stalinist Balkan fool on X claim that the Chinese deserve greater credit for Japan’s defeat than the US.
The silly idea that the Soviets who were in reality economically and militarily incompetent starvelings defeated the greatest army that the world has ever seen, the army that the combined might of France, Britain and the US fought to a stalemate in WWI, is the most enduring piece of Stalinist propaganda today.
The British have in recent centuries a long track record of military defeats that contrasts comically with their vocal chauvinism. Just as they stupidly claimed (and still do) that they won WWI, now they claim that they won WWII. Andrew Jackson (hardly a military genius) is important in the long list of people who gave them a bloody beating because in terms of the casualty exchange ratio he managed to inflict on them the worst defeat they ever suffered.
I took it as they actually convinced him that “these things were not made”
Maybe so; I’m not familiar with the details. (If so, it seems a poor reason to me; but then it would, wouldn’t it?)
He wouldn’t be the first missionary who lost his faith once he appreciated just how very culture-bound his own understanding of it was. (Less sensitive – or less open-minded – missionaries are immune to this, though it does not reflect to their credit.)
In reality, I imagine that these things are really pretty multifactorial, and singling out any one thing is either a kind of shorthand or an ex post facto rationalisation.
A lot of missionary organisations do a poor job of preparing people for such things. Sometimes their actual doctrines impede them from doing so. (Karma, perhaps …)
The Russian Church today may have spiritually or even intellectually unremarkable people at the helm but it must survive somehow. So I can’t see why supporting Putin isn’t the wise thing to do for them.
“Do not deceive yourselves. If any of you think you are wise by the standards of this age, you should become “fools” so that you may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight.”
If you were a Muslim, you would be a Madkhali.
Says WP:
Seems like the Islamic analogue of Trumpodulia (though with Trumpodules, it’s more “especially” than “even.”) You can see why the US would channel funding to them.
That fine “spiritual” leader Kyrill belongs to the same coven:
I find it hard to think down to the intellectual level of someone who interprets such creatures as paragons of spiritual strength. Charitably, his education may have been so inadequate that he has yet to grasp the meaning of the core concepts involved.
Oh, the Markan Appendix. You’re aware it’s not there in the oldest known manuscripts and thought by most experts (maybe all by now) not to have been part of the original text?
And funny, because there is not one doctrinal difference between the Greek and the Bulgarian church, so what they were protecting “from the Bulgarians” was not their faith or anything spiritual whatsoever. There’s not even a ritual difference like there is with the Old Believers of Russia!
Uh, it was safe for the pope personally, except when he visited Poland which he did in 1979, 1983 and 1987, but surely you didn’t believe there weren’t any Catholic priests in Poland who repeated the pope’s messages to their faithful… oh, look, a martyr, murdered in 1984 by the local copy of the KGB.
Contributed indirectly, by playing a major role in ending their influence in Poland, weakening them two years before their end. Check out the blockquote at the end of this section and this whole section.
I see no reason to think so, and I note you don’t mention any. As far as I can see, anybody in charge of the Soviet Union at that time would have had two choices: let it crumble between his fingers, as Gorbachov unintentionally did, or order a bloodbath, which might not even have worked.
I’m well aware; that’s why I’ve said twice in this thread that without this it would have been very difficult.
Indeed not; the huge numbers were a byproduct of incompetence. As a tactic, however, throwing huge numbers of people at the front to die worked – the front moved all the way to Berlin (and beyond).
WWI and WWII are not remotely comparable, though. The armies weren’t the same, despite containing some of the same people; the tactics, the strategies, the materiel – all different. That’s how WWI ended up as stationary trench warfare (except that Lenin abolished the eastern front in late 1917) while WWII was all maneuver warfare all the time.
I didn’t even know that. I suppose Everett is the only one who has had the means, motive and opportunity to go public.
the army that the combined might of France, Britain and the US fought to a stalemate in WWI
Historical nonsense that smacks of Dolchstosslegende
The German military (army and navy) completely collapsed in the fall of 1918. The Homefront was also disintegrating under the effects of years of blockades and pointless deaths – the population was literally starving in some parts of Germany and large cities were facing revolutionary levels of discontent. Once the U.S. entered the war in a serious way the Western Front fell rapidly.
Not to mention the fact that the Allies, with fairly little direct U.S. support, had brought both the Austrian-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires to the brink of complete collapse by spring of 1918, nullifying the benefits to Germany of Russian disintegration. Even if Germany had held somehow on the Western front, southwestern Germany was completely exposed to invasion by late 1918. Germany actually managed to negotiate fairly decent terms for itself at Versailles all things considered.
He [Everett] wouldn’t be the first missionary who lost his faith once he appreciated just how very culture-bound his own understanding of it was. (Less sensitive – or less open-minded – missionaries are immune to this, though it does not reflect to their credit.)
(Trying to get some intelligible observations amongst the mudspray[**] of pig-wallowing …)
Is ‘losing’ something the mot juste here? Can you be merely rationally-persuaded to faith such that you can be rationally persuaded out of it? I thought there needed to be some communion with the ‘spirit’/ecstasy/transcendent experience. What Hitchens called the ‘numinous’, I ref’d above — his point being it’s not necessarily a religious experience.
How does someone persuaded out of faith then explain that transcendent experience? I’m not expecting it was necessarily a Pauline blinding flash, more a kind of growing awareness.
[**] which is why it rapidly ceases to be a spectator sport.
In observable fact, the great majority of people imbibe their religion as a part of their culture (which in the case of evangelical Christians, typically involves the cultural expectation that you will have a “conversion experience”, usually as a teenager.) So the issue is peripheral for most people, even missionaries (who tend to be atypical even for their own communities.)
Religions vary in the degree to which they even can be separated from culture even in principle. (Hard to imagine what Kusaasi “religion” would actually be, apart from Kusaasi culture in general – and the Kusaasi are much more typical of the range of humanity in this than any kind of Christian or Muslim is.)
Christianity made a non-trivial cultural leap right at the start, and is probably near one end of this distribution: which has unfortunately not stopped generations of missionaries assuming that the accidental features of their specific culture were integral to Christianity.
Personally, I don’t find any of the purported arguments even for the existence of God in any way convincing, and consequently would interpret the statement of anyone that they came to believe in any form of Christianity by ratiocination very implausible (quite apart from the specifically doctrinal objections you allude to.) I think such people are greatly underestimating the role played by their own cultural preconceptions.
One of my favorite figures that explains a lot of the end of the First World War was that by around May 1918, the Americans were landing about a quarter million fresh troops in France every month. And they could have kept that up for years.
Following their victory in the East, the Germans rushed to bring the manpower thus freed up to bear in the West, through the Spring Offensives. They knew that once the Americans started landing in numbers, they had no chance. But even had the Spring Offensives been more successful, it would be hard to see how the German Empire could have survived much longer. All the old great autocracies of Central and Eastern Europe were brought down by the war. The German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Turkish Empires all collapsed.
Christianity made a non-trivial cultural leap right at the start, …
Christianity? The biggest leap I see is to monotheism — which happened at some early stage in Judaism — plus a bunch of weird practices more-or-less designed to make followers conspicuously different from their neighbours. I guess Judaism had to enforce cultural coherence during the exiles.
(I’m currently in Taiwan: all of the temples/shrines express more-or-less the same culture — to the extent there’ll be a mini-Buddha tucked away in a Taoist temple, etc. All? except the Churches.)
Yes, I loved the cheerful cultural/religious mixture in Taiwan.
The German military simply ran out of supplies. One day the soldiers in their trenches were told “it’s over, come home”, but they weren’t told why. They were rather perplexed – it’s not like they had lost some big battle of the sort they had just been taught about in school…
That’s going to be fun when it happens to Russia in a few months.
Yeah. Out of a rural Jewish context into the big-city Hellenistic world right at the start.
That wasn’t a leap, it happened very gradually (and arguably still isn’t completed for a lot of American fundies). Keywords: “henotheism”, “monolatrism”.
Arguably, mainstream Judaism’s was a much smaller step. Most places had their tutelary god. Knowing human nature, I’d guess that believing the gods of other cities were powerless or false was not uncommon. Christian Judaism’s leap was to take a tutelary god and make it universal. Though the times were ripe.
The teachings of Jesus weren’t unique in the ancient world but there was novelty there too.
Yeah. You could describe traditional Kusaasi as “monotheists.” It’s all in how you decide to translate the key word win in the various contexts it appears in. In other words, such a descrlption can be made both perfectly accurate and virtually meaningless at the same time. Heisenberg religion!
On monolatry: nobody worships Win (the unique Creator of the universe); in fact, proverbs specifically tell you not even to pray to him/her/it/whatever.
DE, Russia fought many wars (others fight too), this one is not our first. And when we (and others too) fight, some people say and some are even expected to say: we’re good guys, we’re for good, we’re against evil.
What’s the problem with Cyrill:
1. that he is one of those “people”
2. that this war is worse or otherwise different
3. that he said something worse?
I have a problem with 2. This war is different in that it is fought against Ukrainians and not Arabs or Africans. For this reason, I don’t think that anyone who says “this war is evil” is similar to me. Putin says that war in Gaza is evil, perhaps even sincerely – and? So what if this person (who calls the Ukrainian war evil) is another Putin?
I want to know why it is evil for her.
Or why she criticises Cyrill (I’m sure he commented on our other wars too).
Remembered how I bought a diskette subscribed “Wolfenstein 3D with karateists”.
(a double mystery. The spelling, and that karatists have nothing to do with this game)
On monolatry: nobody worships Win (the unique Creator of the universe); in fact, proverbs specifically tell you not even to pray to him/her/it/whatever.
Interesting. Do the Kusaasi pray to anybody? Or thank anybody?
@David It doesn’t really matter. All the canonical gospels despite all variations and inconsistencies are authentic attestations of the spirit of the first Christian communities. The same idea is echoed in Luke 10:17-19, and Matthew 10:7-8, 16-20. If a Christian cannot perform wonders, he hasn’t become an adept, he doesn’t possess the certificate of Christ.
In Eastern Christianity All Saints Day is celebrated on Sunday after Pentecost. This is when according to tradition the Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles and thus created the first Christian illuminati. If you haven’t received the visitation of the Holy Spirit, you are still a neophyte. It is through the Holy Spirit, bestowed to them by Christ after spiritual graduation, that the saints are able to perform miracles.
I think this reading of Soviet options is too deterministic and essentially frames the fall as inevitable. Even though I am an anti-Communist and it would suit me to agree with you, I don’t think it’s so simple. It doesn’t explain why other such regimes like China and Cuba survived. What the Soviet Union needed instead of Gorbachev was a wicked Beria-like figure who could preserve the system through reforms and clever propaganda: abolish the perverse ‘non-binary’ economic system that wicked idiot Stalin had created and simply adopt the fundamentals of a normal commercial economy like private property rights, a stock market, foreign direct investment with no obstacles to the enrichment of foreigners, call it all ‘genuine socialism’ and ruthlessly crack down on any and all attempts to introduce democracy and pluralism of opinion. Why wouldn’t that have worked? It worked okay in China.
The popular idea that WWI represented static warfare while WWII represented maneuver warfare is quite at odds with the facts. Both wars were decided using conventional struggles for fortified positions.
Insofar as tactics went, the war on the Eastern Front was curiously parallel to North Africa: enormous advances that, no matter how successful and dramatic, failed to destroy the retreating armies, the decisive battles being conventional struggles for fortified positions. Although at first blush the conflict seemed to sustain the idea of breakthrough operations, by the time of Stalingrad it had become clear enough that these had failed, and the Red Army offensives that followed were by and large a repetition of the same tactics that General Brusilov had used to good effect in WWI: broad-front attacks systematically forced the enemy into continuous retreat.
The Americans invaded, pushed the German lines all across the Western Front with enormous firepower and that’s how WWII was decided. To win the war the Germans would have had to crush Russia before the Normandy landings. They failed to do that not because failure was inevitable but because of a combination of factors: enormous Allied help to the Soviets (they effectively donated a whole new army to them), Stalin’s willingness to slaughter his citizenry and his hapless soldiery to the last man (and woman because the Red Army used female units on a large scale), and the Germans’ own strategic errors. For example, Hitler made the serious error of removing some of his finest elite units in the middle of Citadel to send them elsewhere. Citadel was his last chance to deliver a blow to the liver of the vile Soviet regime.
As Tolstoy’s use of the hapless Austrian General Mack illustrates perfectly, cleverness can become its own trap. So it was in July 1943, when Hitler announced he was stopping Citadel, not because he was particularly concerned about the loss of Sicily, but because he had leapt to the conclusion that the Allies would launch precisely the sort of bold stroke he had expected a year earlier, invading Italy or the Balkans.
Von Manstein saw that as confirmation of his essential correctness in arguing that the offensive should have been mounted in May: he reckoned that by mid-July the Red Army already would have been beaten in the field. Whether von Manstein was right is an interesting question with no easy answer, but Hitler grasped the crux of the matter. It would take several months to get the heavy armored units into Italy and the Balkans, even without their equipment. If there were to be German units in position to resist an Allied invasion, they would have to begin redeployment immediately, and the Germans would have to hope that the Allies waited a few months before mounting their third major offensive.
By attributing to the Allies the same bold moves that he himself favored, Hitler did more than pay them a compliment they didn’t deserve. He did himself in, and in that peculiarly military way that Tolstoy described, a sort of strategic version of outsmarting yourself. His concerns about an Allied offensive in the western Balkans and Italy led him to deploy German units to both areas.
The effect was to cripple the eastern army groups. The problem was not just armor. German industry was not able to equip the army with the armored, tracked, and wheeled vehicles it needed to be a truly mechanized force. However, it was capable of producing enough of these vehicles to equip its elite units, whose combination of firepower and mobility had enabled them to check the ponderous and slow-moving Soviet offensives.
The army high command’s concept of a strategic defensive in the east, its ability to deliver what von Manstein had termed ‘backhand strokes,’ depended heavily on being able to move these core units to threatened sectors. So when Hitler began stripping them away, he not only ended any chance for offensive operations, he crippled the army’s defensive capabilities as well. Without the powerful armored units, army group commanders lacked the mobile armored reserves that could snuff out Soviet units that broke through.
This need was becoming all the more pressing since Hitler had already been picking away at the Luftwaffe, deploying its units to the south long before he began to worry about an actual invasion. As a result, the Germans no longer had the absolute mastery of the air that they had enjoyed in the two years of the war, which had enabled them to annihilate Soviet units that otherwise would have broken through and moved to exploit their success.
Unlike his French counterpart in May 1940, who was convinced that he had no air force whatsoever, the perception of the German foot soldier in the east was that the mere appearance of German planes overhead would send the Soviet aircraft scuttling off. However, by mid-1943 their appearance could no longer be relied on. The Luftwaffe was more overstretched than the army. Its transport capabilities had never recovered from the losses during 1940-41, nor was it able to replace its aging fleet of cargo planes with designs that were adequate for the tasks at hand.
@Vanya It was true that the armies of the two German Empires were melting away. But their armies were still entirely on enemy territory, and they were still surprisingly intact. Too intact for their broken opponents to contemplate fighting them further on their own. With 345.000 men killed or missing, the BEF that had survived Third Ypres had perished during the spring and summer of 1918. The same could be said of the French, who had 340.000 men either dead or missing in this same period, or about twice the comparable German losses. Without Pershing’s two million Americans, there was no army capable of beating Germany. Wilson’s terms became the Allied terms.
I don’t see how it smacks of the Dolchstoß narrative to claim that the Americans decided the outcome of WWI. Also, you make the serious error of underestimating the material aid the US provided for the Entente. Without it the British and the French wouldn’t have the firepower to continue marching their troops to the meat grinder. Germany had synthetic fertilizers and didn’t need to fear starvation. The thing is that there was simply no way to deal with Pershing’s troops so when Wilson offered them the chance to capitulate, they wisely took it and the Kaiser conveniently – and prudently – forced the Social Democrats to take responsibility for the surrender. This move ensured that the conservatives would eventually return to power but the Junkers couldn’t have foreseen the unpleasant surprise of Hitler.
I now remember how to sum up JPII’s contribution to the end of communism: the bumper-sticker-or-something that says “Free your mind, and your ass WILL follow.”
Rather, “my god can beat up your god”. Basically sportsball fandom.
In faraway Rwanda traditionally, there’s a similarly deistic creator who created the universe, handed it over to lesser deities, retired, and hasn’t done anything since; he is not omnipresent, does not hear prayers and is not going to help you.
Luke 10:19 strikes me as metaphorical. Maybe the author of the Markan Appendix took it literally…
Matthew 10:8 is clear, but doesn’t say anything about surviving poison or suchlike. Matthew 10:16 mentions snakes in a completely different context – snakes were believed to be particularly smart, somewhat like owls or foxes in our culture.
Fair enough; sheer distance from the goings-on in East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary must be part of the difference – China wasn’t directly involved in and affected by those places the way the USSR was. After all, that was how it was possible to sweep the entire Tian’anmen massacre under the rug; the USSR couldn’t have done such a thing in the late 80s.
For Cuba, it must be isolation and the peculiarly vengeful attitude of US foreign policy at the time. For North Korea, it is isolation. Vietnam has gone the Chinese way. Laos I honestly don’t know, but it’s certainly isolated.
Funnily enough, that’s because Hitler made it so. He could have ordered his armies to just pass by Leningrad, Stalingrad and Moscow, isolate them and take them later. But no, he insisted on besieging them for their symbolic value. So he turned WWII into WWI and began to lose it. Agreed about Brusilov.
Well, it wasn’t the Holodomor, but the winter of 1916/17 was called “the turnip winter” because the food rations distributed to civilians were getting not just smaller but very monotonous. The farmers’ sons were at the front… and I would guess the factories for synthetic fertilizers were mostly making synthetic explosives by then.
Do the Kusaasi pray to anybody? Or thank anybody?
“Thank” and “pray” are actually translated in the Bible by the same verb, pʋ’ʋs, which seems on the basis of everyday convesation to have the core sense “thank.”
“Pray” in the sense “earnestly request something” is bɛlim, but the Kusaasi don’t much care to beg, either people or spiritual entities. (M bɛlimnɛ* is sometimes given as a translation for “Please”, but Kusaasi don’t throw it about like “please” at all: they say M pʋ’ʋsya “Thank you” often, but the real equivalent of “please” is – zero.)
Kusaasi sorta negotiate with (lesser) wina, looking for favours in return for favours (this seems to be human default “religion”, and is basically the religion of most US “Evangelicals” too, as far as I can make out.)
The proverb I was alluding to (among others of a similar tenor) goes
Dim nɛ Win, da tu’as nɛ Winnɛ.
“Eat with God, don’t talk with God.”
where Win is (in this context) the Creator. I think the idea is that to think you could engage in conversation with the Creator of the universe is to get seriously above yourself.
*”I’m begging” literally. I think it’s probably a calque of W African English-lexifier creole a bɛg, which does mean “Please.” There are other such calques.
You could describe traditional Kusaasi as “monotheists.”
I looked that up before writing, and concluded not — or not in the sense of the religions of the God of Abraham, because
Kusaasi sorta negotiate with (lesser) wina, …
Then to pitch the weirdness in the faux-naive terms we’re suffering in this thread: why did the One Creator make evil, pain, suffering? They’re more readily explained as from the incompetence/malice/fickleness of lesser wina/Baal/Mephistopheles/etc.
I should pray to the benevolent wina, whilst acknowledging they’re not in anything like complete control.
In Taiwan as a marine-based culture, everybody whatever their nominal religion[**], also prays to Mazu the defied form of a shamaness, for a calm sea and prosperous voyage through life.
[**] except the Christians, of course.
okay, i’m waaaay behind, but the saint-factory thing actually makes perfect sense to me – it’s exactly the same ideological position as “the nazis were definitionally the greatest army that ever existed” (despite their defeat. which makes them definitionally not. but that’s kinda the whole point.) they’re both pure expressions of the fundamental eugenic mindset, which is that what counts is the practice of purity-as-strength. the point of religion is practicing purity to breed the Strongest Men; that army is strongest which has the Purest Practices. a level of coherence that most chuds fail to achieve.
Out of a rural Jewish context into the big-city Hellenistic world
this is actually what i’m most skeptical about. my impression (from reading boyarin, shaye j.d. cohen, and a few others) is that by the time there’s anything that we would even vaguely recognize as jewishness, where it was was in exactly those hellenistic cities. and whether you think of them traditionally as emigrés or more critically as communities growing rapidly by affiliation, that’s certainly where the first jewish people were. the Noble Shepherd / Farmer bit was really just a bit: very much like the bush dynasty’s “texan” status (kinda literally, if you look at the maccabees – a thoroughly hellenized dynasty claiming legitimacy through anti-hellenism). but look right below the surface, and you have the prophets tearing down the asherahs from the (rural) high places, and “man of the soil” as a pejorative.
i tend to think that christianity’s big innovation was the idea that you could be a religion – the possibility of separating beliefs-and-rituals from ethnos. jewishness was very easy to enter into in this period, which was its diasporizing strength, but you did still end up becoming a jew. christianity was a collectivity you could enter without having to change your other affiliations.
—
confidential to the Noble Hunter (College High, class of ????):
you did notice that your narrative of the east-is-red-ern front made the german defeat depend on soviet victory, right? that was the thing you said made them unable to defeat your Holy Alliance, after all.
why did the One Creator make evil, pain, suffering?
I don’t think this really arises as a problem in the Kusaasi scheme of things. Why wouldn’t they have? Even to think of this as problematic is to reveal a whole set of European cultural assumptions about God (whether believed in, or not.)
@rozele:
Yes, I think that’s true. (Both Christianity and Islam were essentially urban religions from the start.) But I was thinking not so much of urban versus rural, or “Hebrew” versus Hellenist, but kosher versus treif. (That seems to align with the point you are making yourself there.) That rejection of a surely important cultural component of the parent religion is foundational to Christianity (half the New Testament is about justifying it, and trying to give that rejection a moral significance of its own.)
the point of religion is practicing purity to breed the Strongest Men
It’s an interesting inversion of goal and means – the church as Hogwarts, basically. Most traditional approaches to religion, very much including Christian ones (cf. the story of Simon Magus), are well aware that “wonders” and “supernatural abilities” are not the monopoly of any one side; Sufis, at least, even emphasise the danger of being distracted by them from the real work.
More like the Church as the Kincora Boys’ School. The tragedy of such noble efforts to school boys (I believe it is fair to exclude women, as CJ seems to talk about “holy men”, and the only woman he mentions is his grandmother, who appears not to have the right stuff –a holy warrior unable to move their ass would only be of limited use) is that evil degenerates, some of them agents provocateurs, invariably infiltrate the schools, causing the noble enterprise to fail and incur undeserved disrepute.
@DE: Thanks for answering my question. Very interesting.
the point of religion is practicing purity to breed the Strongest Men
Hard to conceive of a more debased and impoverished notion of “religion.” A religion fit only for steroid abusers …
However, as an adherent of an actual real religion, I prefer it when people of this type at least have the courtesy to invent their own, rather than attempt to parasitise mine.
@JF:
You’re welcome. I’ve learnt a lot myself about my own cultural preconceptions from what I’ve learnt about Kusaasi ones. I only wish I knew more about Kusaasi culture than I do. These cultures haven’t been looked at by professional ethnologists much at all, alas. I’m very much an amateur here.
Very good point. I meant that the gospels place the origin story in rural Galilee and even make explicit we’re supposed to think of Galilee as a rural backwater, but of course that’s not the whole story and easy to play up for the whole humility aspect. There’s not much rural in the story of Paul except the road to Damascus and perhaps Galatia…?
A great way to put it.
Yay, an excuse to link to Spartans Were Losers.
Up to a point (Exodus 7–8). Aaron turns his rod into a snake, “now the magicians of Egypt, they also did in like manner with their enchantments.” The Nile turns to blood, the magicians do likewise (…even though the Nile is still blood at that point…). “And Aaron stretched out his hand over the waters of Egypt; and the frogs came up, and covered the land of Egypt. And the magicians did so with their enchantments, and brought up frogs upon the land of Egypt.” But finally, “Aaron stretched out his hand with his rod, and smote the dust of the earth, and it became lice in man, and in beast; all the dust of the land became lice throughout all the land of Egypt. And the magicians did so with their enchantments to bring forth lice, but they could not:” – perhaps because there wasn’t any dust left in Egypt, but that hadn’t stopped them turning the Nile to blood. “Then the magicians said unto Pharaoh, This is the finger of God: and Pharaoh’s heart was hardened, and he hearkened not unto them; as the LORD had said.” Four more plagues follow, and the magicians aren’t even mentioned anymore.
Up to a point
Yes, definitely. The Qur’an (e.g. 20:56-73) tells the story a bit differently, but with the same moral: the magicians do accomplish supernatural wonders, but Moses (AS), by God’s help, can do things they recognise as beyond human capacities. In the Qur’an, this leads the magicians to convert to his religion; in the Torah, conversion of outsiders seems to be off the agenda.
On the other hand, both Christianity (cf. Revelations 13:13) and Islam (if only in hadith, e.g Muslim 54:20) envisage evil people/beings successfully performing amazing miracles specifically in order to lead people astray. Anyone tempted to choose their religion on the basis of “supernatural abilities” should bear this in mind.
@David
Hitler or no Hitler you can’t conquer a country just by maneuvering around and ignoring the strongholds of the enemy. Armies need strongholds to keep themselves supplied and establish a base from where they can carry coordinated attacks.
Despite Allied aid, Hitler had three chances to achieve some sort of partial victory in the East. The first chance was in 1941. If he had not attacked Greece and begun Barbarossa in May the operation would have succeeded in the way it was originally intended.
Here’s why: although casualties in the Greek campaign were negligible, equipment losses were serious. The Germans had deployed nearly half of their armored divisions and a third of their mechanized divisions. Neither category had anything like the vehicle strength required, and after two weeks of mobile warfare, more than one-third of the wheeled vehicles were out of action because of mechanical failures. Mobile warfare in Greece’s rough terrain was particularly hard on tires and treads, two items in short supply. Among the many failures of German tank design was a woefully insufficient tread life. The relatively short distances the tanks had to travel in Poland and France masked this deficiency. But the dash through Greece made it all too obvious.
After three weeks of such movement, a German tank needed a complete overhaul, and the time between the end of Marita and the onset of Barbarossa simply didn’t allow for the level of maintenance the tanks demanded. For that matter, it hardly allowed for the divisions to get to their new start line. As it was, one of the armored divisions was still stuck in Bulgaria when the attack began in late June.
Although overall casualties were light, airborne casualties were a serious problem. In every campaign thus far, the Wehrmacht had made use of airborne troops through some combination of parachute, glider, and transport-plane delivery. But the losses in Crete meant that Barbarossa would have to proceed without an airborne component, in precisely the situation where it would have had the greatest impact.
Of all these setbacks, the loss of time was the most significant. In northern Russia there was only a limited period of good weather between the cessation of the spring thaw and the onset of fall rains, basically a 110-day window that began about the middle of May. Because of 2 decades of Communist uselessness, Russian roads were still generally unpaved, and a great many of them lacked even the most rudimentary of weather-proofing, a covering of crushed rock. The logic of meteorology was compelling. A war of rapid movement was over once the rains came, which meant, in this conflict, the middle of September at the latest. By delaying Barbarossa until the end of June, the Germans lost a crucial third of their window. Nor should it be forgotten that in their mindless aerial attack on Britain, Hitler and Göring had decimated the Luftwaffe.
The second chance was in 1942-1943. If the Soviets hadn’t managed to relieve Stalingrad they wouldn’t have been able to supply their forces and carry on the war. There is a very simple way in which the Germans could have thwarted all Soviet attempts to relieve it: a strategic bomber force such as the Allies had but the Germans had failed to develop after Walter Wever passed away.
The Ural bomber Wever had envisioned would have been an absolutely decisive weapon in Russia. While the tactical air arm gave the army command of the battlefield, the strategic bombers would deprive the Soviets of the ability to produce weapons and ship them, together with reinforcements, to the front. The strategic bomber, in other words, would give the Germans the same advantage over their enemy that the British and the American air forces would enjoy over the Germans in summer 1944.
There were key differences, however, and these were all to the advantage of the Germans. The Soviet air defense system was, by comparison with both the German and the British systems, rudimentary. In the enormous open spaces of the Soviet heartland, population centers were spread out: there was little chance of confused aircrews unloading their bombs on the wrong target, as was frequently the case in Britain and western Europe. If a section of track was hit or a bridge destroyed, rail traffic would come to a halt until it could be repaired. There were no alternative routes available. The rail lines frequently skirted population centers, so could be pounded from the air without the risk of murdering thousands of civilians.
Even without the bombers the Germans could still have gained the upper hand. Hitler admitted to von Manstein that the defeat at Stalingrad was his responsibility, as indeed in one sense it was: not only had he let von Reichenau talk him into giving that sorry excuse of a commander and traitor Paulus command of the 6th Army, but in fall 1942, he had reduced the striking power of his armies in the east by shifting key units to the west in response to potential threats there.
In so doing he had crippled the Wehrmacht in three different but vital areas: the SS super-unit he had sent to France (the Leibstandarte) was easily the equal of the Großdeutschland. Its presence on the Eastern Front would have vastly increased the hitting power of the combat units there. Given how close von Manstein got to Stalingrad, even with the cobbled-together forces available, the notion that if he had additional units he would have broken through is hardly speculative. Much of the success of those units was based on the careful integration of tanks with infantry and tactical aircraft. Hitler had subtracted both of those components as well.
The last chance was in the summer of 1943. Despite an early victory against the inept Yanks at Kasserine Pass, in Tunisia, in February 1943, Germany and Italy had lost the fight for North Africa by May. The next Allied move would be an amphibious invasion of some part of western Europe, probably Italy. But temporarily, Germany had the luxury of a one-front war. If it could smash the Red Army in a battle of annihilation, the military situation would dramatically reverse itself. Nor was this wishful thinking: the problems the Allies had encountered in North Africa did not bode well for their ground operations.
So Erich von Manstein, who had emerged as the strategic genius of the Eastern Front after his conquest of the Crimea and his victory at Kursk at the start of the year, proposed an ambitious plan. He had noticed not only that the Red Army was addicted to large-scale offensive operations but that once the operations began, they seemed unable to bring them to a halt. It was an uncanny repetition of the British and French disasters of WWI, when operations would continue long past the point where it was obvious they couldn’t possibly succeed, and were simply piling up bodies. But in WWI the Germans had never had the luxury of fighting only one enemy on one front, so they had lacked the resources to take the next step, luring the attacking forces further into the void and then smashing them with a massive flank attack.
Von Manstein was correct in his appreciation of Soviet tactics, and correct in his assessment of the chances of success. But the high command had never forgiven him for his audacity in going to Hitler in 1939-40 and proposing his own offensive plans; their resistance was almost automatic. So instead of an audacious stroke delivered against an off-balance enemy, the Germans decided on a repeat of Zhukov’s Mars and Jupiter operations. There was a great bulge in the line between Orel and Kharkov: the Germans would attack from both sides, pinch it off, and destroy the trapped Russians.
Although the Germans were now beginning to equip themselves with serious armor, and their expertise in combat greatly excelled the Red Army’s, all the same objections applied to Citadel as had applied to Mars. So the German plan was yet another attack into a salient that, even if successful, would represent one more in a series of Soviet catastrophes and be of only tactical significance. Given the size of the Soviet forces engaged, Citadel would hardly bring Stalin’s war machine to a halt. Von Manstein’s idea, on the other hand, held out that promise: his plan, if successful, would have split Russia in two and driven the armies to the south of the offensive back onto the Sea of Azov, east of the Crimea, where they would have been bottled up and unable to continue any serious fight.
No matter, the whole affair, despite some excesses and errors, at least managed to undermine the vitality of the Soviet monstrosity and reduce its life span. It also created an Iliad-like epic that is sure to inspire countless new generations of heroes. At some point in the future a third German attempt to dominate Europe will surely succeed. There won’t always be an American cowboy around to save the incompetent.
so many words to dance [anything a squirrel can do to a log] what actually happened: your methhead heroes got their asses kicked by the soviet armies, and lost the war because of it. the u.s.s.r then proceeded to have one of the more impressive postwar recoveries in history, and lasted another fourish times the entire lifespan of your favorite thousand-year reich*.
coulda/shoulda/woulda is only in your head, Cheapshot** – and that’d be true even if your particular fantasies were anything but jerkoff material for Securitate wannabes.
the facts is the facts.
.
* could a russian deng xiaoping have stretched out its lifespan even more? sure, why not, but if we’re playing those games, if ebert hadn’t been a shortsighted fool soviet germany and soviet russia would’ve been in some kind of federation by the early 1920s and there wouldn’t’ve been a Waffen-SS for Siweberjers to volunteer for en masse.
** does this snap work for anyone who hasn’t spent too much time in a bar with curt mast’s elixer on tap?
Charles Jaeger wrote:
>If Hitler had only… [14,00 word essay]
I know man. I still think about that time in 7th grade when if I had stepped over the ball but then passed to my teammate on the right, he would have scored, we would have won the junior high championship and I surely… [14,000 other things had to go right] would have ultimately signed with Tottenham and played for the US national team.
>But the high command had never forgiven him for his audacity in going to Hitler in 1939-40 and proposing his own offensive plans
Weird interpersonal shit getting in the way of good plans? That’s the sign of a shitty high command, don’t you agree, Chuck? Even if we accept for sake of argument your theory that it would have worked.
“If it weren’t for their mistakes, their plans would have gone perfectly” is the dumbest fucking argument I’ve ever heard. It’s also reminiscent of the old Monty Python skit. Talk show, host and three guests.
Host: “These three men came inches away from world domination, and were all foiled by one man, James Bond. Now what would you do differently if you had a chance to try again.”
1st Guest – “If you’re close enough to drop a Tarantula on him, you’re close enough to shoot him.”
2nd Guest – “I probably wouldn’t have labeled the self-destruct button on my death ray.”
3rd Guest – “I question the need for a self-destruct button on the death ray.”
Yeah, bottom line is like the Nazis, they weren’t that good, and their idiocies were baked into their strengths.
I mean, one of the biggest ifs is “if the Germans had not driven away all those good Jewish nuclear scientists, many of whom (pre-Hitler) just wanted to be accepted as good Germans…”
Why did the Nazis get that so utterly wrong? It was in their nature.
Charles Jaeger: … traitor Paulus
That’s a take.
By the Battle of Kursk, the Germans were outnumbered, even before units were redirected to southern Europe (where they were desperately needed). The Germans could have won at Kursk, if everything had gone their way, but that wasn’t going to bring them back to the gates of Moscow. The best case scenario for the Germans would have been stagnation on the eastern front, rather than continued intense hostilities. The longer the fighting stayed hot, the worse the German position became, since the Soviets could make good their losses in a way the Germans would never again be able to.
The liberation of France was coming inevitably in 1944 as well. With fewer demands on the Wehrmacht in the East, the could have held off the Americans, British, and Canadians longer in the West. But that would meant the war in Europe would have ended the same way as in the Pacific, with “a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.” Conventional and nuclear bombing would have laid waste to even vaster swaths of Axis territory than they did.*
@rozele: I understood the Cheapshot reference, even if my direct personal experience is very limited.
* It is darkly ironic that so many people in the inter-war years thought that bombardment of civilian population centers would end the next great powers war; and ultimately it did, but it took the development of nuclear weapons. The conventional bombing that so terrified people in the 1920s and 1930s proved unable to destroy war industries or cow civilian populations.**
** Except the Dutch, but that was very early on, and they repented of their error.
You can be stupid without being evil, but it’s hard to imagine any form of evil that doesn’t take an at least equal amount of stupid. And that’s banal, really. Humanity is an interconnected system. The planet is a larger interconnected system. We can discuss the finer shades of the definition of evil, but part of it is “willfully causing harm”. The more harm you create, the more you hurt the system that supports you, and the less you can harvest from it. That feedback loop grows shorter and more efficient as the interconnected system evolves to isolate or copy you. Either way, you lose.
(There’s a no true Scotsman argument in there. I hope nobody will notice.)
There’s no scenario in which the Soviets would not have collapsed without Allied aid. And there’s no scenario in which the Soviets are responsible for the Allied victory, the Americans alone are. The Eastern front only really imploded after the Western front collapsed.
But even as things stood, Hitler could still have achieved some victory in the East that would have allowed him to crush the Anglo-Americans. That his troops were superior to whatever the Americans and the British had was proven adequately in the field of battle. If the loss of the Romanian oilfields hadn’t crippled their industry and mobility, the Germans could have crushed the Anglo-Americans with ease. But the reason the Soviets managed to get so far as to reach the oilfields in the first place is entirely attributable to American aid.
That the Germans did not manage to prevail in the East was not an inevitability, the way it’s usually framed by retrospective prophets but a failure that they are responsible for. So the insinuation that I am presenting my nation as the victim of circumstances is not true. We have the integrity of character to admit that we made errors in morality, judgement, strategy and method and to take full responsibility for them. In contrast, those who support the victors obviously don’t have this integrity of character which is why their ideologies and states won’t last long in the scheme of things. We were defeated in war but it’s already evident that our enemies have rotted in peace.
We managed to come up with more complex technologies than the nuke. It wouldn’t have taken us long to develop it even without your precious fleeing professors. The idea that the nukes single-handedly forced the surrender of Japan is not true anyway.
@Trond:
It’s easy to suppose that people are incompetent when in fact, they are not aiming at competence in the area in question at all. DOGE, for example, is as incompetent a way of curbing government waste as could well be imagined: but its purpose is not, in fact, to curb waste at all. It is entirely successful in its actual purpose, which is to damage the functioning of democratic (as opposed to oligarchic) institutions.
Accusations of incompetence here fatally miss the point. These fuckers are evil, not stupid. Taking them for stupid is falling for the sleight-of-hand.
[That’s not to say that stupidity is altogether absent. Musk, for example, seems to have genuinely believed that the purpose of DOGE really was to cut waste. But Musk is not the sharpest oligarchic knife in the box.]
“There’s no scenario in which I am not right about everything, because I am The Smartest Guy in the Room!”
>There’s no scenario in which the Soviets would not have collapsed
The scenario in which the Soviets would not have collapsed is every scenario in which German decision-makers continued making dumb mistakes that flowed inevitably from the flaws in their understanding of people and the world.
They didn’t delay Barbarossa perversely. They delayed it because “Slavs are stupid, brutal, subhuman and will collapse immediately. Of course they will collapse as soon as the mighty German army attacks.” Had von Manstein prevailed, this failure would have come out in other ways.
You may recognize this flaw in yourself if you look hard — they were the kind of people who could write off “the Czechs” as “degenerate alcoholics.”
As Wikipedia rather dryly puts it:
Treating it like it was a sideshow, rather than the most important and decisive theater of the Second World War is absurd.
@languagehat: Needz mor KONGO.
I’m adding, because calling Friedrich Paulus a “traitor” really seems to have pissed me off. Not that I have any particular affection for Paulus. He was not a good guy. I will just remind remind everyone what the official determination of the German Army is about the five “traitor” officers executed in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock:
@David: I don’t claim that stupidity is the cause of evil, or that evil can’t be accompanied by intelligence, but as we see in the discussions of the fascist and communist dictatorships of the 20th century, their stupid persistence meant that they also engineered their own demise. Less stupid systems might have avoided that. But if so, they would also have been less evil.
“We have the integrity of character to admit that we made errors in morality, judgement, strategy and method and to take full responsibility for them.”
Are you using “we” to include yourself and the Third Reich?
Placing errors in “morality” on the same level as errors in “strategy” when talking about Nazi Germany is easily the most disgusting thing I’ve read today (cue the Nazi telling me I’m a soft effeminate snowflake or something).
@Trond:
Arrogance, certainly, directly damages understanding. Understanding is impossible without at least some degree of humility. Someone who can never admit to error (even to himself*) is stupid in a particularly characteristic way.
I’m with Brett at 5:12 pm, BTW. The thing about Nazis, as individual people, is that they are quite extraordinarily BORING. And as for me, I am always up for more KONGO …
* Statistically appropriate pronoun.
Surround them with a minimal amount of troops while the rest moves on. Then wait.
Hitler didn’t want to wait. He made the whole army stop there because he wanted those three cities first. That wasn’t possible.
Yes, yes – what, if anything, is your point with this?
Two whole paragraphs on a hypothetical. What is the point of this thought experiment? Is there even one?
Are you for real? When WWII was over, Stalin was the Red God.
In hindsight, the whole thing prolonged the Soviet Union. The USSR even got an industrial boost from factories taken apart in Germany and put back together on Soviet soil, not to mention a bunch of scientists (not as many as the US got, but still). This helped mitigate the effects of the tragicomically bad incentive system the regime of Lenin and then Stalin had created, which had already stifled so many potential successes.
Is there really no way to put this in Comic Sans?
You know, until late February of 2022, we had a regular commenter here who, like you, seems to have believed that mentalities are heritable and immutable or something like that, or that humans are categorically unable to learn from the mistakes of their great-grandfathers and are doomed to repeat them forever.
He was Russian. Putin’s propaganda is what has been trying to turn WWII into an Iliad-like epic – with a happy ending of sorts (the most colossal victory of all times!), but with sacrifice orders of magnitude beyond any other – and is currently trying to inspire a new generation of heroes from it.
I speak of him in the past tense because he vanished in a puff of Putin platitudes when Putin started the invasion. I would not be surprised to learn that he’s resting in pieces somewhere southeast of Bakhmut.
That is where you belong if you refuse to learn that other people can learn that starting a war is, y’know, wrong. That is where you will end if you’re particularly effective in getting what you want, and where you will drive milions of other people even if you’re only a quarter as effective as that.
You haven’t been to Germany in decades, have you? If you came here and said shit like that outside a few pubs or a bunch of AfD party centers, people would turn on you immediately.
Unless maybe if you nuke the entire German education system, there is not going to be a third German attempt to conquer Europe. I can say this with unusual certainty. I’m writing this in Berlin, I have eyes and ears and even a nose. (Oh, and, German is my native language.)
L’internationale, quoi.
But don’t forget Poland…
Ah, the paradox of honor. Even if you’re dumb enough to believe it’s inherently a good thing, it still gets in the way of good things; in extreme cases, everyone dies. Welp, compose an epic about what utterly stunning heroes the dead were and sing it, I guess.
Sarcasm off. Honor is for Klingons.
Are you sure you haven’t underestimated the sheer scale of things here? No overstretched supply lines from Germany to the Urals – with partisans all around?
If you really believe anything was anywhere near that simple, I can’t help you. Even within the same war, militaries learn. Unless, of course, their ideology is strongly enough against that.
Wait, what is your nation?
Who is “we”? Were you even born in 1945?
So you identify with mid-20th-century Nazis, call them “we”, and… manage not to know that the Nazis did try to build a nuke. They managed to get some fission going, briefly, yes. They never managed to go beyond that. That would have required what they called “Jewish physics” – and gigantic resources that only the US had.
It pretty much is, though. The nukes evaporated the effectiveness of Japan’s propaganda, which was saying that the only way to conquer Japan was to kill every single Japanese person, and it’s impossible to kill 100 million people, therefore Japan was invincible. Suddenly it no longer mattered if you believed the first premise. The second premise is wrong.
Yes, I know, Stalin was coming, fresh off the abovementioned most colossal victory of all times or whatever. His troops did actually invade Japanese conquests in Manchuria and Korea successfully. That they were perceived as an immediate direct threat to the Japanese mainland is less likely.
No surprise there. Fascism is violently against thinking things through. It is the triumph of will over reason, the metaphysical certainty that reality, logic and math WILL simply go away if you just shout over them loudly enough. (If they’re still there, shout louder.)
until late February of 2022, we had a regular commenter here […]
Which one was that?
If wishes were tanks, then Nazis would ride Eastward once more – and lose again, because the whole racial purity/essentialism obsession means they’d sooner massacre people by the millions than let them become part of the Volk, which is one heck of an incentive for them to fight back. It would be comforting to be able to generalise this, but unfortunately, deeply evil movements are not always that stupid.
Setting aside all the rivers of nonsense from Herr Hunter, one tidbit is true: without the atomic bombings, the Japanese Empire probably would have surrendered around the same time that it did.
In the discussions among the war cabinet that led to surrender, the consideration that seems to have weighed heaviest wasn’t the atom bomb. (The final decision was made the night of Aug 14-15; they’d scarcely had time to begin to get clear reports of what had happened at the faraway cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the 6th and 9th, let alone to really absorb any implications.) Nor was it the entry of the USSR into the war. (The Japanese army in Manchuria was in trouble; but for the Red Army to cross the sea and invade would have been a tough operation.) Rather it was what the decision-makers euphemized as “the domestic situation”.
In other words: the fact that Japan, cut off from its overseas colonies, was running short of food and short of fuel — and short of fuel meant short of transport capacity for food grown domestically to get to the cities. That means the people in cities were in danger of going hungry — or, from the leaders’ perspective, were in danger of either fleeing to the countryside to find food (and abandoning their urban work in the industries of war), or rioting. From the war cabinet’s meeting room, under the palace grounds at the center of Tokyo, it’s understandable that the prospect of urban riots would be the most frightening threat of all.
You can read some of this here, and in particular the last blockquote of this section:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan#12_August
“If wishes were tanks” – sounds scary.
(but I value dreams and object to such an exchange:))
I don’t see how someone can maintain that the German invasion had no effect in shortening the Soviet Union’s life.
In ascending order of importance, the war had four catastrophic effects on the Soviet Union: the enormous physical damage to the infrastructure, the diversion of scarce resources caused by Stalin’s desperate efforts to move Soviet industry out of German reach, the negative impact of his systematic forced relocations of entire populations, and the demographic holocaust that resulted from the deaths of tens of millions of Russians, primarily and almost exclusively those from western, or European, Russia. Although it is possible that the state might have survived one of these, taken together, they reinforced the downward spiral that was in turn exacerbated both by the applications of Marxist doctrine and the Leninist-Stalinist depredations of the decades before the war.
Stalin decreed widespread destruction in the occupied zones, and as the German retreat began in 1943 very little was left intact. Valuable (and in the case of the USSR, extremely scarce) farmland was contaminated by chemical residue (from explosives) and lubricants, the soil compacted by the pressure exerted on it by military vehicles, the isolated farmsteads and small villages destroyed. The net effect is actually worse than aerial bombardment.
A comprehensive and systematic analysis of the resulting damage is at this point impossible, but the isolated evidence seems persuasive. For example, there was the startling collapse of the electrical grid. Although the Soviet data is highly questionable, in 1940 the official figure for the total electricity output of what would become the occupied zone was slightly over 2.5 million kilowatts. When the Germans looked into the generating situation they discovered that there were only 300.000 kilowatts available. Although it is impossible to verify the Soviet figures, the data suggests widespread destruction no matter how the official figure is adjusted.
The German-occupied zone produced one fourth of the total electricity generated in the USSR, which gives a rough idea of its importance to the country as a whole: the wealthiest, most populous, and most developed part of the country had been lost, including the areas that produced, by one reasonable estimate, about two thirds of Soviet coal, iron, steel, and aluminum. The depth and breadth of the destruction of human and physical resources in what had been the wealthiest and most developed portion of the Soviet Union is appalling. So the proposition that in itself the damage was a burden that eventually proved too much to bear is a reasonable conjecture. It is probably overlooked by analysts because most people are unaware of just how much of the Soviet Union the Germans rolled over in 1941-1942. True, the German advance was eventually stopped before Moscow and Leningrad, but only after the Germans had occupied what was essentially an entire country, and indeed, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, no fewer than six separate countries came into being that lay inside the former German zone.
The access allowed foreigners was less rigorously controlled in those countries, so it was possible to measure the extent of the recovery from the war, albeit in a highly subjective way. But even superficial inspections revealed an infrastructure that was still scarred from the war. What one saw looking across the Wall into East Berlin from the West was not entirely misleading: surprisingly large parts of the city of Dresden still consisted of ruins or overgrown lots half a century later. Even driving down the streets of prosperous towns it was easy to see buildings still in ruins, walls pockmarked with shell splinters.
The state of affairs inside the Soviet Union was much worse. Indeed, the varying rates of recovery of the countries behind the Iron Curtain was one of the chief irritants for the Russian nomenklatura. As the years rolled by they had increasing difficulty in understanding why the quality of life in East Germany and Czechoslovakia, and even in Hungary and Poland, was so much better than in Russia itself.
There were many causes for the lag in the reconstruction of the USSR, but one of them was the result of the decisions Stalin made at the start of the war, to relocate industries and forcibly remove entire populations. Those decisions had long-term effects both on the infrastructure of the country and on its demographics, all of them negative or disastrous. Combined, they went a long way toward ensuring that the country would never fully recover from the heavy blow occasioned by the war.
With proper development of the transportation infrastructure, those inefficiencies could have been remediated to a great extent, and in the years before the war, the Bolsheviks had duly touted such projects, just as they had talked at great lengths about the need for the mechanization of agriculture and the electrification of the countryside. The extent to which anything of value had actually been accomplished is unknowable, but anecdotally, the evidence suggests that serious development and modernization were pretty much still where they had been in 1914, aside from a few grandiose projects whose value was both highly questionable and of extremely limited impact.
But behind the banners and slogans of modernization, surprisingly little had been accomplished. The various Soviet schemes of the 1920s and 1930s emphasized the importance of railroads, and this emphasis was duly invoked to explain the appalling condition of the road system as well as its startling inadequacies: until the 21st century there was no all-weather road equivalent to the Trans-Siberian rail line built by czarist engineers.
The lack of a road system worthy of the name, a constant problem for the invading Germans, had hardly helped the Red Army as it stumbled westward, and was one reason for its frequent halts, pauses that enabled the embattled Germans to regroup, and thus raised the Soviet death toll considerably. Given that foreigners were not allowed to drive on it (and very few Russians were allowed to drive outside the USSR), the appalling state of the road system was unnoticed. When the journalist Serge Schmemann visited his family’s ancestral village in the 1980s, he found that ‘the road to Koltsovo was paved only after my first visit in 1990; before that, there were days when the nearest town, Ferzikovo, 8 miles away, could be reached only by tractor.’ And this was in an area less than 150 kilometers southeast of Moscow.
Although the emphasis on rail lines was used to explain the lack of all-weather roads, the rail lines too were problematic. By 1939, for example, the amount of railroad track had increased by only about 35.000 kilometers since 1917, and much of the existing 100.000 kilometers was for various reasons unusable. Given the enormous expanse of Russia, this was markedly insufficient: before the start of the First World War, France had 60.000 kilometers of track and the United States, whose area was more directly comparable, had nearly 400.000.
So the base from which the USSR had to start rebuilding the most developed and the most devastated parts of the country was already extremely low, which meant that enormous resources were required. Stalin’s relocations drained off those resources and put enormous strains on a system that was already woefully inadequate, badly maintained, and poorly thought out.
So Stalin’s decision to relocate such a major part of the Soviet industrial base, although justified at the time, was a great step backward in the long term. The industries thus relocated could not simply be moved back to the west once the war was over, and the evidence, scanty as it is, suggests that neither Stalin nor his heirs ever thought about doing that. So the development of the eastern interior of Russia, begun out of wartime necessity, continued apace, resulting in monstrous inefficiencies of human and physical resources. By contrast, in Poland and East Germany, the two countries most devastated by the war, not only was the physical infrastructure more highly developed to begin with, but the new and smaller borders dictated that whatever resources there were could be utilized more efficiently.
Stalin’s other great decision involved the forcible relocation of millions of Soviet citizens. These massive population shifts have been documented only recently, so neither the magnitude nor the implications have been realized. Magnitude: the number of Soviet citizens forcibly shifted from their home territories to the interior eventually amounted to around three million souls, the culmination of a drastic resettling of the Soviet state that by Stalin’s death had resulted in the physical removal of about six million people. The number of human beings involved is actually significantly higher, because while entire ethnic groups were being exiled from their traditional areas, others, presumably more politically reliable or ethnically acceptable, were being dragooned into the vacated space.
Although in all probability Stalin would happily have let those 3 million people starve to death, and that may well have been his intention, his heirs were less inhumane. Khrushchev actually worried about feeding the population sufficiently, and starting in the 1960s the government bombarded its citizens with statistics purporting to show how their standard of living was increasing, as in some measure it was.
The disastrous agricultural situation was not helped by the false ideas about agronomy championed by Lysenko in the 1930s. That fundamental wrong turn, discussed in the opening chapter of this study, insisted that a crop that could flourish in only one area could be transplanted into any other area. Not only was that not true, but the areas in question were parts of the country where there was a basic reason why settlements had traditionally been sparse: neither Siberia nor Kazakhstan (the two major destinations) was particularly hospitable. At best they could support limited numbers of people, and those relatively sparse numbers had adapted their lifestyles accordingly. Not even a rich agricultural area could easily take the shock of such wholesale migrations, much less one that was already marginal.
The idea of the development of the hinterlands of central and eastern Russia, and the concomitant decentralization of industry, was, like the obsession with industrialization per se as the magic wand that would improve the standards of living, part of a process that had begun before the war. But the massive relocation of people and resources during the war accelerated the process considerably, straining an economy that was already staggering under the burden of fixing the damage in the wealthiest and most populous section of the country.
Finally, there was the human cost. One of the warrants that expose the idea that the Russians defeated the Germans as a patriotic myth is the startling and dramatic imbalance between the number of dead Russians and dead Germans, the inference being that traditional accounts of great Soviet victories and a triumphant Red Army are the stuff of legend. To what extent can it be argued that those 27 million dead Russians, taken in concert with the enormous destruction wreaked on the countryside’s infrastructure, became a significant factor in the collapse of the Soviet state?
Such an argument would be complex and technical by definition. It is not made any easier by the realization that the census data after 1937 was falsified, and that there was no census at all until 1959. Historians trying to measure the impact of the Thirty Years War have more data, and more reliable data, to work with. Although Stalin’s successors no longer executed those who brought them bad news, the habit of making the data fit the plans announced by the state continued. Consequently, it was not until the 1980 census data reached the West that enough of a trend line was established to see the dramatic negative impact of what Stalin had called the ‘Great Patriotic War’ on the Soviet population.
The losses during the war were now clearly visible, because in the 1980 census there was a severe deficit of males aged 55 and over. The effect of WWII is also reflected in the deficit of births in 1940 to 1945, reflected in the pinching of the pyramid in the 35-39 age group of both men and women. The effects of the war can be seen in the data from the 1959 and 1970 census on the percentages of males by age group. These differences appear in all the Slavic and Baltic republics, but not in the Transcaucasian and Central Asian republics. This probably reflects the much heavier military losses suffered in the northern areas. The extraordinarily high rate of loss in the males resulted in a noticeable drop in the birth rates, and this drop was most marked in those areas of the country most affected by the war.
There were three practical consequences of this deficit on postwar Soviet society. First, one of the unintended consequences of Stalin’s forced relocations was to strain the Soviet economy severely. Those moves, when taken with the severe deficit in the population of European Russia, dramatically increased the percentage of the population at the eastern and southern peripheries of the state. Their increasing share of the population led them to demand more resources, which in turn meant a further diversion of increasingly scarce assets into the edges of the country and away from its traditional center of western, or European, Russia (including Belarus and Ukraine).
Second, Stalin’s wartime deportations had the understandable result of reducing entire populations to the sort of abject dependency that would require generations to overcome even in a state with lavish resources to devote to their improvement. But the state lacked those resources, particularly in terms of manpower. That deficit affected successive cohorts of the able-bodied males who formed the core of the Soviet Union’s workforce, as well as its military manpower pool. That shortage in turn lowered industrial and agricultural productivity: there was simply not enough skilled labor available to produce what any modern society required, the third practical consequence of the war.
As early (or late) as the 1970s, Emmanuel Todd had noticed the disastrous consequences of the Soviet economic system, which he compared with the reality of a science fiction novel. The inherent unworkability of the system was now exacerbated by the manpower shortage. Agriculture provides us with a succinct example of how the two negative tendencies, one in population, the other in the basic structuring of the state, combined.
The early Soviet leadership was aware of the inefficiencies of Soviet agriculture, which, employed twice as many people as Germany or the United States, but whose productivity was only about four fifths as great. One of the solutions fashioned was to mechanize agriculture. Not only was it intended to replace human labor with machines, but the idea was to build very large machines, thus reducing the labor costs still more.
Superficially this solution mimicked what was going on in the West. By and of itself it might have eventually been made to work, but in consequence, agricultural productivity became more and more dependent on machine operators for tractors, harvesters, and transport vehicles, and the mechanics to keep them running. But it was precisely that category of the Soviet workforce that had been hit hardest by the war, and in the areas that were most suited to the growing of basic crops.
The result was a slowly developing death spiral, the dimensions of which went unnoticed until the very end of the regime’s life. Todd who in 1976 predicted that the system would collapse by the end of the 1980s, was regarded with derision, but events proved him right.
@drasvi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_wishes_were_horses,_beggars_would_ride
“If wishes were tanks” – sounds scary.
I guess I should clarify that this is a not particularly witty play on the English saying “If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.”
Thanks! I know the saying and recognised it. But it still sounds scary:)
A few short remarks about Paulus from my notes that get right to the point.
The point man for the northern side of the great pincer movement directed by von Weichs at Army Group B was Friedrich Paulus, commander of the 6th Army, a force that was comprised of four allied army groups: two Romanian, one Hungarian, and one Italian. Paulus was charged with driving to the Volga. Since in order to get to that river he had to cross the Don, which was to the west of the Volga, in effect his troops would cut off European Russia from its warm water outlets. With the war in the Pacific, it would be no exaggeration to say that Stalin would be cut off from the outside world completely. Given its position as the key city astride the southern leg of the great Russian river, Stalingrad, historic Tsaritsyn, was the key to the operation. If Paulus could reach that city, seize control of it, as well as the adjacent stretches of the river, and then hold it, Stalin would slowly strangle to death.
Although von Weichs, as a cavalry officer from the Great War, could justifiably be presumed to be the very man to direct such a bold foray, when one surveys the ranks of the senior German commanders, it would be difficult to find a general less suited to the task of conducting what was basically a cavalry raid on a colossal scale than Paulus.
His military career had been almost entirely as an adjutant or a staff officer, and it was as this last that he had come to the attention of von Reichenau, who, after he had assumed command of the now defunct Army Group South, had persuaded Hitler to let Paulus assume command of the 6th Army.
Career officers like Paulus exist in every army, the key difference here being that by all accounts, within the context of his assigned duties, Paulus was more than competent. Given that he went down in military history as the first and only German general to surrender his forces at the end of a battle, there is no shortage of criticism of the man, and much of it is justified. However, the short of it is that he was, like many staff officers, temperamentally unsuited to be a field commander, and a great deal of the responsibility for the German defeat at Stalingrad is traceable to his waffling.
The problem emerged quickly enough in fall 1942, as Paulus threw away one of the great German advantages in combat, its speed of maneuver. That speed was particularly important on the Eastern Front, given the cumbrous maneuvering of the Red Army, the inexperience of its commanders, and its excessive dependence on orders from Stalin. The trick was to get to the objective before the Russians could organize a defense of it, and that was particularly important when it came to Russian towns and cities. German commanders understandably preferred not to have to fight their way building to building, and Hitler had been incensed at von Bock’s surprising decision to do just that at Voronezh.
The problem, both at Voronezh and then at Stalingrad, was that in both cases the cities not only straddled a river, but did so at the most logical crossing point. Bypassing the city and sealing it off was thus not so easy as it might appear at first glance. If the Germans and their allies crossed the river above and below the city, enveloping it from three sides, their bridgeheads across the river would not only be vulnerable to flank attacks, but the city itself would become a staging area for attacks, what a German general in a previous war had called a postern gate, an opening in a fortification that enabled the defenders to sally forth and surprise the besiegers.
There were only two ways to prevent powerful counterattacks from developing. The first was to use your mastery of the air to deliver such crippling blows in your enemy’s rear that his attacks either were completely destroyed before they could be launched or broken up so thoroughly that they could easily be beaten off. The other tactic was to move so quickly that by the time the enemy had organized his attack, your bridgeheads had been expanded so dramatically that you had the room to maneuver and parry his blows.
In their earlier campaigns, up to and including summer 1941, the Germans had used both simultaneously. But increasingly, the Luftwaffe was unable to carry out the air-to-ground support that was required. As we have seen, part of this failure was that by summer 1942 its forces were dispersed all over Europe, a tendency that was accelerated by the Allied determination to open a new front, the airspace over Germany. But the main reason, once again, goes back to the failure to get a heavy long-range bomber into service, the Ural bomber project that had languished after Wever’s death.
No, the nukes didn’t convince the Japs to quit. To blast this argument I’ll drop three nukes of my own in rapid succession: three specific questions with three specific answers.
1. Without the atomic bombs and without the Soviet entry into the war, would Japan have surrendered before November 1, the day Operation Olympic was scheduled to begin?
The United States Strategic Bombing Survey, published in 1946 concluded that Japan would have surrendered before November 1 without the atomic bombs and without Soviet entry into the war. This conclusion has become the foundation on which heterodox historians have constructed their argument that the atomic bombs were not necessary for Japan’s surrender. Since Barton Bernstein has persuasively demonstrated in his critique of the Survey that its conclusion is not supported by its own evidence, I need not dwell on this supposition. The main objective of the study’s principal author, Paul Nitze, was to prove that conventional bombings, coupled with the naval blockade, would have induced Japan to surrender before November 1. But Nitze’s conclusion was repeatedly contradicted by the evidence provided in the Survey itself. For instance, to the question, ‘How much longer do you think the war might have continued had the atomic bomb not been dropped?’ Prince Konoe answered: ‘Probably it would have lasted all this year.’ Bernstein introduced numerous other testimonies by Toyoda, Kido, Suzuki, Hiranuma, Sakomizu, and others to contradict the Survey’s conclusion. As Bernstein asserts, the Survey is ‘an unreliable guide.’
The Japanese leaders knew that Japan was losing the war. But defeat and surrender are not synonymous. Surrender is a political act. Without the twin shocks of the atomic bombs and Soviet entry into the war, the Japanese would never have accepted surrender in August.
2. Would Japan have surrendered before November 1 on the basis of Soviet entry alone, without the atomic bomb?
Japanese historian Asada Sadao contends that without the atomic bombs but with Soviet entry into the war, ‘there was a possibility that Japan would not have surrendered before November 1.’ To Asada the shock value was crucial. Whereas the Japanese anticipated Soviet entry into the war, Asada argues, the atomic bombs came as a complete shock.
By contrast, Bernstein states: ‘In view of the great impact of Soviet entry … in a situation of heavy conventional bombing and a strangling blockade, it does seem quite probable — indeed, far more likely than not — that Japan would have surrendered before November without the use of the A-bomb but after Soviet intervention in the war. In that sense … there may have been a serious ‘missed opportunity’ in 1945 to avoid the costly invasion of Kyushu without dropping the atomic bomb by awaiting Soviet entry.’
The importance to Japan of Soviet neutrality is crucial in this context. Japan relied on Soviet neutrality both militarily and diplomatically. Diplomatically, Japan pinned its last hope on Moscow’s mediation for the termination of the war. Once the Soviets entered the war, Japan was forced to make a decision on the Potsdam terms. Militarily as well, Japan’s Ketsu-go strategy was predicated on Soviet neutrality; indeed, it was for this reason that the Military Affairs Bureau of the Army Ministry constantly overruled the intelligence section’s warning that a Soviet invasion might be imminent. Manchuria was not written off, as Asada claims; rather, the military was confident that Japan could keep the Soviets neutral, at least for a while. When the Soviets invaded Manchuria, the military was taken by complete surprise. Despite the bravado that the war must continue, the Soviet invasion undermined the confidence of the army, punching a fatal hole in its strategic plan. The military’s insistence on the continuation of war lost its rationale.
More important, however, were the political implications of the Soviet expansion in the Far East. Without Japan’s surrender, it is reasonable to assume that the Soviets would have completed the occupation of Manchuria, southern Sakhalin, the entire Kurils, and possibly half of Korea by the beginning of September. Inevitably, the Soviet invasion of Hokkaido would have been raised as a pressing issue to be settled between the United States and the Soviet Union. The United States might have resisted the Soviet operation against Hokkaido, but given the Soviets’ military strength, and given the enormous casualty figures the American high command had estimated for Olympic, the United States might have conceded the division of Hokkaido as Stalin had envisaged. Even if the United States succeeded in resisting Stalin’s pressure, Soviet military conquests in the rest of the Far East might have led Truman to concede some degree of Soviet participation in Japan’s postwar occupation. Whatever the United States might or might not have done regarding the Soviet operation in Hokkaido or the postwar occupation of Japan, Japanese leaders were well aware of the danger of allowing Soviet expansion to continue beyond Manchuria, Korea, Sakhalin, and the Kurils. It was for this reason that the Japanese policymakers came together at the last moment to surrender under the Potsdam terms, that the military’s insistence on continuing the war collapsed, and that the military accepted surrender relatively easily. Japan’s decision to surrender was above all a political decision, not a military one. Therefore, even without the atomic bombs, the war most likely would have ended shortly after Soviet entry into the war — before November 1.
3. Would Japan have surrendered before November 1 on the basis of the atomic bomb alone, without the Soviet entry into the war?
The two bombs alone would most likely not have prompted the Japanese to surrender, so long as they still had hope that Moscow would mediate peace. The Hiroshima bombing did not significantly change Japan’s policy, though it did inject a sense of urgency into the peace party’s initiative to end the war. Without the Soviet entry into the war, it’s not likely that the Nagasaki bomb would have changed the situation.
Anami’s warning that the United States might have 100 atomic bombs and that the next target might be Tokyo had no discernible impact on the debate. Even after the Nagasaki bomb, Japan would most likely have still waited for Moscow’s answer to the Konoe mission.
The most likely scenario would have been that while waiting for the answer from Moscow, Japan would have been shocked by the Soviet invasion in Manchuria sometime in the middle of August, and would have sued for peace on the Potsdam terms. In this case, then, we would have debated endlessly whether the two atomic bombs preceding the Soviet invasion or the Soviet entry would have had a more decisive impact on Japan’s decision to surrender, although in this case, too, clearly Soviet entry would have had a more decisive impact.
Richard Frank, who argues that the atomic bombings had a greater impact on Japan’s decision to surrender than Soviet involvement in the war, relies exclusively on contemporary sources and discounts postwar testimonies. He emphasizes especially the importance of Hirohito’s statement at the first imperial conference, the Imperial Rescript on August 15, and Suzuki’s statements made during cabinet meetings. This methodology, though admirable, does not support Frank’s conclusion. Hirohito’s reference to the atomic bomb at the imperial conference comes from Takeshita’s diary, which must be based on hearsay. None of the participants who actually attended the imperial conference remembers the emperor’s referring to the atomic bomb. The Imperial Rescript on August 15 does refer to the use of the ‘cruel new bomb’ as one of the reasons for the termination of the war, with no mention of Soviet entry into the war. But during his meeting with the three marshals on August 14, the emperor referred to both the atomic bomb and Soviet entry into the war as the decisive reasons for ending the war. Moreover, the Imperial Rescript to the Soldiers and Officers issued on August 17 refers to Soviet entry as the major reason for ending the war and makes no reference to the atomic bomb. In contemporary records from August 6 to August 15 two sources (the Imperial Rescript on August 15 and Suzuki’s statement at the August 13 cabinet meeting) refer only to the impact of the atomic bomb, three sources only to Soviet entry (Konoe on August 9, Suzuki’s statement to his doctor on August 13, and the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Officers on August 17), and seven sources both to the atomic bomb and Soviet involvement. Contemporary evidence does not support Frank’s contention.
Without Soviet participation in the war in the middle of August, the United States would have faced the question of whether to use the third bomb sometime after August 19, and then the fourth bomb in the beginning of September, most likely on Kokura and Niigata. It is hard to say how many atomic bombs it would have taken to convince Japanese policymakers to abandon their approach to Moscow. It is possible to argue, though impossible to prove, that the Japanese military would still have argued for the continuation of the war after a third or even a fourth bomb.
Could Japan have withstood the attacks of seven atomic bombs before November 1? Would Truman and Stimson have had the resolve to use seven atomic bombs in succession? What would have been the impact of these bombs on Japanese public opinion? Would the continued use of the bombs have solidified or eroded the resolve of the Japanese to fight on? Would it have hopelessly alienated the Japanese from the United States to the point that it would be difficult to impose the American occupation on Japan? Would it have encouraged the Japanese to welcome the Soviet occupation instead? These are the questions no one can answer with certainty.
On the basis of available evidence, however, it is clear that the two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki alone were not decisive in inducing Japan to surrender. Despite their destructive power, the atomic bombs were not sufficient to change the direction of Japanese diplomacy. The Soviet invasion was. Without the Soviet entry into the war, the Japanese would have continued to fight until numerous atomic bombs, a successful allied invasion of the home islands, or simply continued aerial bombardments, combined with a naval blockade, rendered them incapable of doing so.
@DM is right. The war probably did prolong the Soviet Union’s existence. Not only materially. By the mid 1960s, when it had become obvious to most observant people that Soviet Communism was failing badly as an economic system and falling dangerously behind the West, the Victory in the Great Patriotic War basically replaced Marxism-Leninism as the true organizing ideological principle around which the whole country revolved. Arguably this switch was well underway by the late 1940s, although the demolition of the Stalin cult caused some hiccoughs. Without the war, it’s unclear how long the Party leadership could have justified the economic disaster caused by collectivization and central planning, and the increasing relative poverty of the Soviet Union relative to the West, even compared to the situation in 1913.
The centrality of the GPW to Russian identity has also been critical to allowing Putin to claim legitimacy for his own nominally very anti-Communist system/ideology, as the true and sole heir of the USSR and its military tradition.
I posted something where I am arguing against the idea that the nukes forced the leaders of Japan to surrender and explain the true causes. Where is it?
It’s not in moderation or in the spam folder; are you sure it’s not up there somewhere among the millions of words you’ve already posted? You might try to shorten your comments out of consideration for those who (unlike me) are still trying to keep track of your arguments.
I can confirm the anomaly: there were two comments by Charles.
@Lameen, drasvi: I noted a few years ago that, “If wishes were horses” (or something else, in nonce appearances), represents an unusual type of grammatical utterance. In an aphorism like that, only the first part needs to be said in order to convey the whole meaning. Moreover, some people who know the abbreviated expression and its meaning may actually be unfamiliar with the full, complete-sentence version.
I mentioned another one, “‘I see,’ said the blind man,” in this thread.” To keep the discussion in separate threads, I’ll add “A word to the wise” and “When in Rome” (probably a lot of people know the continuations) and a quotation but not an aphorism, “trip the light fantastic” (I’ll bet a lot of people don’t know “Come, and trip it as you go / On the light fantastic toe”).
I can confirm the anomaly: there were two comments by Charles.
Interesting. The only explanation I can think of is that he accidentally deleted one while trying to edit it. (This is not an accusation, just all I can come up with.)
Many jokes that my friends and I exchange (I don’t mean jokes that are retold, the folklore – I mean ad hoc jokes that we invent) are invitations to imagine something, absurd or fantastic, which is funny when you picture it.
I never did that to horses, but immediately did it to Lameen’s tanks:) Pictured everyone’s wishes turning into tanks. That’s why “scary”.
Speaking of scary things (and of Vanya’s comment):
Putin indeed advertised celebrations of The Victory Day, and this was accompanied by unusual enthusiasm of people. Not “Soviet” people, but those who were 20.
In 2003-4 I was seriously scared by it. I felt that they are actually celebrating a heroic feat (my natural question was: do they believe it must be repeated?), that the war for them is not a horrible catastrophe anymore.
(However, I don’t think I agree with Vanya’s analysis)
@drasvi: Quest of the Three Worlds begins with: “Consider the horse.”
Charles Jaeger, August 12 4.44 am: “The disastrous agricultural situation was not helped by the false ideas about agronomy championed by Lysenko in the 1930s. That fundamental wrong turn, discussed in the opening chapter of this study, insisted that a crop that could flourish in only one area could be transplanted into any other area.”
Where are you copy-pasting all this stuff from?
Are you using “we” to include yourself and the Third Reich?
yes, he is. the man is a nazi. that’s been pretty clear from jump.
Where are you copy-pasting all this stuff from?
A good question, and please stop doing that; it’s just insulting to dump truckloads of somebody else’s words on us. Take the trouble to write your own screeds, and try to keep them short.
I’m just wondering if and whose opinion those screeds are supposed to change. If there’s an assumption of a huge horde of lurkers in support, I’m afraid there’s a disappointment coming. Virtually everyone who has posted in the last year has already expressed their disgust and I don’t see that statistic changing.
I mean, you’d think the fact that people from all sorts of national, political, and religious/irreligious backgrounds have joined in mocking his ideas would give him pause, but probably not.
my natural question was: do they believe it must be repeated?
Evidently, yes; Algeria in the 90s is another example of where that path can take you.
Where are you copy-pasting all this stuff from?
Apparently a “revisionist” history by John Mosier, a professor of English in New Orleans, with the very sober and scholarly title of “Deathride: Hitler vs. Stalin”. This adds plagiarism to Herr Jaeger’s already lengthy list of sins -unless, of course, he is a pseudonym for Mosier.
We are accustomed to a better class of kook here at the Hattery.
KONGO!
SFReader, in this thread.
That’s a well documented reason for why so many people who didn’t actually love Stalin all that much followed his call to fight anyway: if you fight, you have a high chance of dying in combat; if you win, there’s a high chance Stalin returns to his prewar practice of having arbitrary but high numbers of people randomly accused of being saboteurs or counterrevolutionaries and shot; but your chance of survival isn’t zero. If the Nazis get you, your chance of survival is zero; either they kill you right away or they work you to death (probably in the armament industry or something else war-related). The Nazis said that out loud, so there was very little room for doubt indeed.
…and then you go on and on about how bad the Soviet political-and-economic system was at reconstruction, at dealing with the damage from the war.
Weren’t West Germany and Austria similarly destroyed? Industrial cities were carpet-bombed, after all, and the war memorials have the opposite format of those in France, with short lists of dead from WWI and long lists of dead from WWII. How much of the lasting damage to the USSR was really due to the aftereffects of the war, and how much to the politico-economic system? How much of the Wirtschaftswunder was due to the European Community for Coal and Steel while the USSR’s priority was isolation in the interest of regime stability?
…and then you end up making a completely different point: that the war was not winnable for the Nazis – and still wouldn’t have been if Hitler hadn’t ordered to seize Lenin- and Stalingrad along with Moscow immediately for their symbolic value.
Yeah. I keep saying that, for Putin, the USSR was just the Second Russian Empire – and now he wants a Third. It should be pretty clear by now that the reason he wanted to join the KGB when he was a teenager wasn’t enthusiasm for dialectical materialism, but Russian nationalism.
Oh, that is possible. The “delete” button is just in the prominent position where you’d expect the “save changes” button to be. (And vice versa.) I’m pretty sure I once accidentally deleted one of my shorter comments that way and had to write it from scratch back when this software version was new.
…and if I remember it right, one or two Russian propagandists have said that out loud. Unfortunately I can’t remember who, and I have no idea how far up the hierarchy this goes.
Thank you @Lameen
More interestingly, “Mosier is a former film critic and serves on Cannes Film Festival committees”. I’m sure that could generate much of Hattic interest.
My sense is that Mosier, like too many Anglo-American historians, is too focused on the Western Front when looking at WWI. Any assertion that the Germans could have won without American intervention needs to account for the economic and subsequent military collapses of the Austrian and Ottoman Empires. The Allies were clearly winning in the Balkans and on the Isonzo by 1918. Germany had no answer for that and no free troops to send to protect Vienna or even Munich at that point.
Well, Bulgaria was doing quite well on the Russian front. Some say that the abandonment by Bulgaria’s allies on the Salonika front is what decided the defeat in WWI. But Bulgaria’s cavalry, which was very effective on the Russian front would not have been very effective in the mountainous southern front. Maybe if Greece had not joined the war on the side that it did, things would have been different.
My sense is that Mosier, like …
Aww don’t let’s play guessing games. Presuming Lameen’s diagnosis is correct, what we’ve seen is Mr Plagiarist’s selective editing of a ‘revisionist history’, without any of the caveats I’d expect from an academic, and especially without any citations to evidence.
If Plagiarist is so unprincipled as to post screeds without attribution, they’re well capable of mis-representing Mosier.
I’ve stopped reading this thread, but I will if I have to — but I don’t want to learn new terms for morons, which I have, almost — not not just here. It’s a recurring, tiring routine. What are they called now? Chads? Chuds? Chds? Tankies? Limonovists? Duginsts? Eurasianists? Zhirinovsists? Sovereign citizens? Q-anon? Lebedevskis? I can’t keep up with this bullshit. Even my memory has limits. This has been going on for 30 years now.
I woulnd’t be surprised if some… I’m sure my imagination is not good enough.
I found Mosier’s blog; it repeatedly goes on about how Iran’s goal is to establish a “Sufi Caliphate”. One of the defining features of Shiism is rejection of the concept of a Caliphate. So I doubt Mosier needs much misrepresentation, though I’m sure this chud, as rozele put it, would be happy to provide some.
On a more LH-worthy note, where does this word “chud” come from? Is it based on the all-purpose Hindustani insult “bahen-chod”?
It’s not plagiariasm, it’s simply called doing your homework. I don’t make stuff up, I rely on notes collected from various sources I trust. Not one of them is a ‘Nazi’ source by the way. The arguments I posted against the idea that the nukes forced Japan’s surrender are mostly based on the work of Tsuyoshi Hasegawa. I might post later if I have time.
@Vanya Germany had no answer to that because it had to deal with two million American troops it couldn’t hope to defeat. WWI was decided on the Western front, not in Italy and Bulgaria. The English and the French opened other fronts because they were frustrated by their lack of progress in the West. The Germans were better in WWII because they were better in WWI too. In fact, they were better in WWI. That’s why German officers in WWII loved to complain that the soldiers they commanded in WWI had been better trained.
@David The destruction caused by the war in the East cannot be compared to the destruction caused in the West. Western Europe also had the inestimable advantage of receiving American money. Even Greece, a country so incompetent it couldn’t even provide boots to its soldiers, was able to raise the living standards dramatically because of American help. How could one expect that the premier repository of European technical and organizational excellence, Germany, wouldn’t quickly rise up if given aid?
The reason the Soviet Union wasn’t workable wasn’t just the ‘non-binary’ economic system which Khrushchev had made more unworkable after he abolished the artels and relaxed the brutality necessary for it to function without complications.
The Stalinist system remains stable and resilient in North Korea even in the face of a brutal international isolation which is a testament to its workability if its leaders won’t relax brutality the way the post-Stalin ‘Mäuschen’ did.
The deeper reason was the inability to remedy the damage of the war. It’s the four factors I mentioned. Even if someone insists that these factors somehow wouldn’t have mattered if the USSR was as democratic as Sweden (as if it would have been possible to run a multi-ethnic empire on such a cute system), the fact remains that it was the war that caused them.
Everybody that hates Communism (or at least its crimes because I know that most of you in your heart believe socialism could have worked if Marx had been interpreted ‘correctly’) should give thanks to the Germans that launched the greatest crusade in history against it. Communism can’t be defeated with easy democratic rhetoric or corrupting the Communists with money, which is why it survives just fine in the greatest Asian country and continues its system of the slavery of the nation to the party. Not only have you democrats not destroyed Communism there, you have actually made it stronger.
@Lameen
Mosier has a blog? Link?
@Lameen:
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/chud
The etymology as acronym thing is always suspicious, but in this case it looks plausible enough.
From Mosier’s blog musings (from March this year):
He helpfully tells us elsewhere that the Nazis were Socialists, because the name of the NSDAP gives the game away. (Yes, he really does.That’s his whole argument.)
Oh, and Stalin was a “wily Ossetian.” Fine distinctions between different kinds of Foreigner are not the concern of the Superior Man, it seems.
I don’t think he needs a lot of misrepresentation.
“Sufi accomodation” sounds quite restful for a weekend break. I wonder what Mosier imagines that “Sufi” means? I think he supposes it to mean “Shia” (!) But then, eleswhere it comes to light that he supposes that Hamas is a Shia organisation, and that Gaza is a centre of Shia Islam.
But the ignoramus writes with the kind of smug certainty that readily convinces ignorant teenage basement-dwelling keyboard warriors. He’s also given to bewailing the wilful blindness of, well, everyone but himself. A Jordan Peterson type, I reckon.
It’s not plagiariasm, it’s simply called doing your homework.
“They accused me of arson, murder, and jaywalking. I object: I would never jaywalk!”
“It’s not plagiariasm, it’s simply called doing your homework. I don’t make stuff up, I rely on notes collected from various sources I trust. Not one of them is a ‘Nazi’ source by the way.”
Funny that Charles(?) defends himself like that, seeing as doing actual homework that way gets you called before a disciplinary inquiry. (And to plead in mitigation that “not one of them is a ‘Nazi’ source” would certainly be novel, but perhaps not all that mollifying.)
*David E
Was Eugen Dühring not a socialist? He was actually and he is generally recognized as a forerunner of ‘national socialism’. Socialism is not a monolith but a current of thought from the 19th century that includes non-Marxist and non-leftist thinkers. In fact some of the Marxist critique of liberalism is based on tropes originally found in ancien-regime style conservatives.
Socialism is in essence the idea that individual freedom should be curtailed in pursuit of an ideal that concerns the whole of society. Nazism can be seen as a form of socialism where the ideal is the cultivation of national virtue. It is based on the monopoly of power by a single-party apparatus and features concentric circles of power with fluid boundaries between them, each revolving around a heroic individual. In the innermost circle lies the dux. The heroic individuals try to establish independent fiefdoms and compete with each other for the favor of the dux. This is not a bad representation of how things actually worked in Nazi Germany.
Economically, Nazism is based on the rejection of mass production techniques and focuses on smaller family-run enterprises producing in a slow artisanal pace. The reason Nazi Germany didn’t manage to compete well with the democracies in armaments production had to do with this economic system.
@Carlos What you are doing is simply a puerile character assassination attempt. You are trying to find excuses to dismiss a complex thinker as a crank just because he uses what you take to be the wrong signal words. How pathetic. Actually engaging with his arguments would be a lot more difficult than that. If you think you are so intellectually superior to the man I dare you to go to his blog and point out his errors to him.
I found Mosier’s blog; it repeatedly goes on about .. So I doubt Mosier needs much misrepresentation, …
Good grief! So I see.
He’s stark raving bonkers. I withdraw and apologise.
It’s not plagiariasm, it’s simply called doing your homework. I don’t make stuff up, I rely on notes collected from various sources …
You’re not really even trying, are you? (Apparently) unintentional self-mockery doesn’t get close to the “better class of kook” we expect.
LOL
“colorless green ideas sleep furiously”
And then you don’t cite them. Instead, you pass the text off as your own. You mentioned your “notes”, but you failed to say that these “notes” are copied from a book.
That’s plagiarism. If I did that, my career would be over. *poof* gone.
See, that’s exactly what I’m saying. The Marshall Plan was offered to the eastern European countries, too. Stalin forbade it. That means he was the reason the destruction from the war wasn’t overcome – the war itself was not the reason.
You’re old enough to have watched a number of countries become repositories of technical and organizational excellence. Japan, South Korea, now China…
It didn’t work with the brutality either; the brutality just covered that up.
If you call a series of famines “working”, you still have to ask how Stalinist that monarchy in the third generation really is. Juche is an extremely right-wing militaristic ideology that says the North Koreans are the best because they’re the only ones whose race is pure.
You’re agreeing with me and twisting yourself into a Brezel to pretend otherwise. The USSR and West Germany were largely destroyed in the war; West Germany got back on its feet and has been prospering, thanks to freedom, international cooperation and American help; the USSR still wasn’t done reconstructing when it ended, thanks to tyranny, international isolation and refusal of American help. The war is not the difference between the two.
Well, it wouldn’t have been an empire then, would it. There doesn’t seem to be an obstacle to running a confederation of comparable size on a very cute system indeed.
You’re really desperate to discuss with the people in your head instead of with us, aren’t you.
I’m sure that’d be a whole lot easier…
Hilarious.
That’s particularly funny after you restricted socialism to Leninism five days ago.
Louis XIV: le socialisme, c’est moi !
Don’t you notice you just switched from the narrowest possible definition of “socialism” to one so absurdly wide it encompasses everything that isn’t comically libertarian?
Seriously, I’m having fun here.
lolwut
Thyssen
Krupp
IG Fucking Farben
“smaller family-run enterprises”
Look, it doesn’t matter how complexly one thinks about Gaza being Shia when it isn’t. There is no point in engaging with arguments when the arguments are about fiction. Mosier falsely claims to be writing history, not Game of Thrones fandom.
The Stalinist system remains stable and resilient in North Korea even in the face of a brutal international isolation.
The Kims have generally been able to count on Chinese and Russian assistance whenever their backs were to the wall. The genpop is isolated from the West, but the NK elite has plenty of international connections and uses them adroitly to earn money and keep the regime in power.
Socialism is in essence the idea that individual freedom should be curtailed in pursuit of an ideal that concerns the whole of society.
By that definition you could call MAGA socialist. Which maybe explains why some of the Dear Leader’s foreign policy ideas and concerns about “the Deep State” seem lifted from a 1970s leftist plan to destroy American soft power and overseas influence.
Another comment where I reply to David M. just disappeared. I posted again but it says ‘duplicate comment detected’.
so absurdly wide it encompasses everything that isn’t comically libertarian?
Wider than that, actually. Even libertarians believe that “individual freedom should be curtailed in pursuit of an ideal that concerns the whole of society” – notably, the sanctity of private property. This definition literally makes Ayn Rand a socialist. (But Nazis are socialists too, so evidently at least some socialists count as good folks, despite their “severe lack of astuteness”?)
There is no point in engaging with arguments when the arguments are about fiction.
To translate this into terms that SS-stans might be capable of understanding: if you pick up a book about WWII and the first page is about how Hitler was a tricksy Swiss who was fighting to establish a Jesuit Holy Roman Empire, are you going to soberly read on and figure out what complex thoughts the author might have to offer about his chosen topic, or are you going to burst out laughing and permanently erase the author from the list of people you might conceivably be willing to take seriously?
@David M.
I didn’t cite because I know by experience that people won’t even bother to look into something if it can be identified as coming from a source they are not willing to trust. And what happened confirms me: you guys heard a name and immediately concluded that he is a crank because of nonsensical reasons. He wrote a book called ‘deathride’=the title is lurid=that proves he’s unserious.
You seriously think that Mosier doesn’t know that the Palestinians are mostly Sunni? C’mon. Hamas exists (or rather existed) because Iran is funding it. It’s an Iranian puppet. The ultimate aim of Iran is to establish a Sufi empire. This sounds strange because of false ideas about Sufism.
Existing in both Sunni and Shia Islam, Sufism is not a distinct sect, as is sometimes erroneously assumed, but a different method of approaching and understanding the Islamic religion. Academic studies of Sufism confirm that Sufism, as a separate tradition from Islam apart from so-called pure Islam, is frequently a product of Western orientalism and modern Islamic fundamentalists.
Historically Sufi movements have been associated with socialist aspirations and that’s what Mosier is alluding to. Post-Shah Iran is simply the latest such incarnation.
@David M
Wasn’t Krupp run by the Krupp family? German enterprises were just glorified Mittelstand companies. And it’s true that the German industry wasn’t capable of true mass production no matter how strange that sounds to the ignorant.
You (not me) is confused about how I understand socialism. Here’s the definition of socialism I use: first, I reject the notion that social democracy is socialism in any real sense. It is simply a form of liberalism (in the European sense of the word) with ‘progressive’ cultural preferences. The real or imagined successes of those Danish alcoholics can’t be attributed to some imaginary socialism in Denmark.
Socialism is any ‘totalitarian’ system (angeschlossenes System is my preferred term) that tries to curtail the cultural and economic freedom of the masses in the pursuit of collectivist goals. It doesn’t matter what these goals are. For Nazism the stated goal was improving the national stock morally and physically, protecting the masses from modernist degeneracy, safeguarding traditional values and norms and allowing the heroic character of the individual (the superman) to flourish. It also envisaged a Germanized European Empire as the only way for Europe to maintain its freedom and dignity.
Another comment where I reply to David M. just disappeared.
I just checked the spam folder and found it; I also found the earlier (Japan/nuke) comment, which wasn’t there the first time I looked. I have no explanation (all hail Akismet!), but they’re now restored to the thread.
You guys (not me) are confused about how I understand socialism. Here’s the definition of socialism I use: first, I reject the notion that social democracy is socialism in any real sense. It is simply a form of liberalism (in the European sense of the word) with ‘progressive’ cultural preferences. The real or imagined successes of those Danish alcoholics can’t be attributed to some imaginary socialism in Denmark.
Socialism is any ‘totalitarian’ system (angeschlossenes System is my preferred term) that tries to curtail the cultural and economic freedom of the masses in the pursuit of collectivist goals. It doesn’t matter what these goals are. For Nazism the stated goal was improving the national stock morally and physically, protecting the masses from modernist corruptions, safeguarding traditional values and norms and allowing the heroic character of the individual (the superman) to flourish. It also envisaged a Germanized European Empire as the only way for Europe to maintain its freedom and dignity.
Thanks for writing a comment that’s no longer than it needs to be; I appreciate it.
Great Nazisplaining there. “Historically Sufi movements have been associated with socialist aspirations” is especially cute. Tell it to the Barelvis, or the Moroccans; it should get you a good laugh, or an indignant rant, depending on your addressee’s sense of humour. The idea that Iran wants a Sufi empire (let alone “caliphate”) isn’t dumb because Sufis are peace-and-love flower children (they aren’t); it’s dumb because Sufi brotherhoods barely even figure among the current Iranian regime’s primary channels of influence across the region, and are not notably popular among its leadership either.
Who did you plagiarise the paragraph starting with “Existing in both Sunni and Shia Islam” from, btw? Can’t be bothered to Google again.
isn’t dumb because Sufis are peace-and-love flower children (they aren’t)
Usman ɗan Fodiyo himself, not chiefly famous for his quietism, belonged to the Qadiriyya. (This no doubt explains his often-remarked-upon socialist aspirations. It is unfortunate that a twist of fate prevented the Shehu from reading Marx, with whom he would assuredly have found much in common.)
I’m quite impressed by the purity of ignorance displayed by this fellow. But it’s so implausibly transcendent that I suspect that this is trolling rather than honest-to-God genuine stupidity.
And let’s not forget Imam Shamil, the Naqshbandi Sufi sheikh who set the Caucasus aflame.
But it’s so implausibly transcendent that I suspect that this is trolling rather than honest-to-God genuine stupidity.
No, no, he sounds quite genuine to me.
Who did you plagiarise the paragraph starting with “Existing in both Sunni and Shia Islam” from, btw?
It’s from the Wikipedia article on Sufism.
So in the very comment where he justifies his plagiarism by claiming commenters here won’t consult a source they mistrust – he plagiarises Wikipedia.
You might want to take a look at this
https://www.leidenislamblog.nl/articles/a-13th-century-sufi-socialist-revolution
About Nazi industry, wasn’t Krupp run by the Krupp family? German enterprises were just glorified Mittelstand companies. And it’s true that German industry wasn’t capable of true mass production no matter how strange that sounds to those who haven’t looked into the matter.
Well done – you managed to find one Sufi-connected peasants’ revolt, some 600 years before the concept of “socialism” was even invented. Mabrouk! Keep it up – you might accidentally learn something en route. Or you could save yourself some time by realising that your trust in Mosier was misplaced and looking for a better-informed guide to Middle Eastern politics. But learning how the world actually works doesn’t give quite the same thrill as dreaming about alternate timelines where every nation is doomed eternally to act out its singular essential nature, does it?
No, we’re not some kind of monolith here. I don’t care if there’s “deathride” in the title of his book; he’s writing about something rather dramatic, so why not have a dramatic title. No, it’s his claim that Hamas and Gaza are Shia that destroys his credibility. Has that guy been to school?
And how hard to find is the quotation mark button on your keyboard!?!
Is that a typo for abgeschlossenes?
That’s the third definition you’re giving us. All three contradict each other.
I’m perfectly happy to accept that this third definition is your best attempt so far at expressing what you really mean, and the other two were mistakes (…or they were contained in stuff you plagiated without even reading it). But why don’t you just say so? Is it somehow beyond you to accept that you don’t always express yourself with 100% clarity?
“Private corporations are private” is all you’re saying. No, these corporations weren’t owned by the state. I can’t see how that’s relevant to their size.
I can’t find them, neither by scrolling up nor by searching for “atom” (including “atomic”), “nuclear”, “nuke” or “Japan”.
Woops! I rescued them from the spam folder but forgot to then approve them in the moderation queue. Thanks for checking and alerting me; they should be up there now. (The Japan/nuke one is VERY LONG.)
In the interests of fairness, I thought I’d double-check whether Mosier really claims Gaza is Shia. Here are his words:
To be clear, unlike in Yemen or Lebanon, Shia do not exist “in reasonable numbers” in Gaza; they’re a tiny minority, and have never played any visible role in any Palestinian national movement. As you might therefore expect, no Palestinian movement, including Hamas, has ever advocated for, or wanted to see, the establishment of a Shia theocracy in Palestine. It would be uncharitable to suspect him of actually believing that only Shia care about Palestine, but wishful thinking can be a powerful drug.
Mosier evidently feels that if you get the broad picture right, mere factual details are unimportant. And it has been granted unto him to apprehend the broad picture directly, unmediated by the laborious processes of research necessary for scholars of lesser ability than his own …
The “Sufi” thing in the bit I cited is really weird in its peculiar detachment from any kind of factual reality. I suspect that to Mosier, virtually any Islam-related term is a pejorative, and that to use the words with any attempt at actual accuracy would be an unmanly surrender to the Saracen hordes, worthy only of an effeminate European. To attempt to understand is to surrender. Ignorance is Strength …
Similarly with “Ossetian” for Stalin. The misnomer is deliberate and intended to function as an insult*. (Surely even one as plainly ill-informed as he does in fact know that Stalin was an ethnic Georgian? I mean, somebody even published Mosier’s books …)
The idea is like deliberately mispronouncing a foreign name to signify your contempt for the bearer.
* Why he has it in for Ossetians is unclear. But it must be conceded that many Ossetians are definitely not Americans, and consequently not quite the thing.
Missed “largely thanks to American blundering in the 1970s, assumed control over Iran.” There was I, thinking that the dominance of Shia in Iran was something to do with the Safavids
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safavid_conversion_of_Iran_to_Shia_Islam
and all along, it was the Americans! With their CIA time machines! How like them!
(Just as well the CIA never engineered the removal of an Iranian prime minister and a subsequent military coup. That might have created a bit of lasting ill-feeling on the part of Iranians toward the US and its allies. But happily, no: the problems were all down to Jimmy Carter in the 1970s.)
…just… wow.
Also, 1953 in the 1970s as mentioned. More later.
Without gettting into specifics, I am somehow reminded of the Yiddish joke about writing נח (‘Noah’) with seven spelling errors.
I’m not convinced someone with all these other opinions thinks of the overthrow of Mossadegh as a blunder. I’m guessing Mosier instead means that Carter blundered in failing to find a way to keep the Shah in power. A view I don’t share, but it does relate to the 70s.
I’ve no doubt Mosier does indeed mean that. It reflects the juvenile superficialty of his geopolitical analyses, even when they are not based on pure fantasy, like his remarkable “Sufi” delusion.
He reminds me a bit of those tedious neurophysiologists who believe that expertise in neurophysiology automatically makes you an expert in the philosophy of mind. Except that they do tend to be genuine experts – within their own fields.
It’s a wonder the current US regime has not offered him a job as a policy expert. Perhaps he is not very telegenic.
(If I could ask a q from the cheap seats.) Iran is now the chief funder of Hamas terrorism, consistent with the ‘destruction of Israel’ narrative. Humanitarian aid to Gaza not so much, consistent with wiping out non-terrorist Sunnis.
So if we say
Shia theocracyIranian dominance over the region, is that so wide of the mark?Hamas is Sunni, and has been supported mostly by Sunni Qatar. Other than that…
“no Palestinian movement”
Hezbollah.
Hezbollah is not a Palestinian movement.
(If I could ask a q from the cheap seats.)
A lot of the coverage of the conflict would leave one with this impression, but the reality is a bit different.
Iran would no doubt like to see Iranian dominance over the region. Hamas, not so much; it’s happy to accept help from Iran or anyone else, but its ideology is basically Ikhwani, and fundamentally incompatible with Iran’s. Iran’s sectarian support for Assad after 2011, in particular, created visible, though downplayed, tension with Hamas.
As for humanitarian aid to Gaza – what exactly is Iran supposed to do about that? There’s enough food sitting in trucks on the borders of Gaza for everyone and to spare; the reason people are starving is because the Israeli government refuses to let almost any of it in. Donating more food or money just means more of it will go to waste. Not all situations are amenable to an apolitical aid-based solution.
On an entirely linguistic note: It has annoyed me that since about 1990, journalists have laconically referred to the Gaza Strip as “Gaza.” When they actually want to talk about main settlement* for which the Strip is named, this necessitates the pleonasm “Gaza City.”
* Site of the second, and least known, of the three strongman stories that were collected under the name of “Samson.”
journalists have laconically referred to the Gaza Strip as “Gaza.”
While Arabic makes the distinction in this case (at least in formal contexts), there are several countries for which it does not: Algeria and Algiers are both al-Jazā’ir, Tunis and Tunisia both Tūnis, Kuwait and its capital both al-Kuwayt. In traditional/popular usage, Syria and Egypt could be added to the list.
As far as I understand, the Gaza Strip is pretty much a single city of two million people at this point…
The comment on the capitulation of Japan is actually interesting to read. (A bit light on presentation of evidence, but doing that right can’t be done this side of book length.) It argues that the combination of the nukes with the Soviet entry into the war is what caused the capitulation and its timing; without the nukes, the capitulation would still have happened “before November 1”; without the Soviets, well, the last two paragraphs contradict each other, the first of them saying it’s unclear if 3 or 4 or 7 nukes (which, it is never mentioned, the US didn’t have) could have done the job by Nov. 1, and the second paragraph stating with confidence that Japan would have continued to fight till it was rendered incapable of doing so. I suppose that’s what you get when you copy & paste from different sources.
It is emphasized that the Japanese leadership pinned all sorts of hopes and delusions on the USSR. It is also assumed that the USSR could have conquered Manchuria, half of Korea, the Kurils and even part of Hokkaido before Nov. 1, an interesting contradiction to the emphasis in other comments on how utterly destroyed the USSR was at that point.
These considerations are not mentioned.
The other comment still isn’t there. Or maybe it was restored early enough that I saw it and replied to it already?
Y, I know. But.
Or who do we mean by “Palestinians”?
Arabic-speaking Christian or Muslim people expelled by Israel or controlled by it?
(I don’t mean, of course, the argument “why won’t you call them, say, ‘Egyptians'”, I mean same problem that I have with “Arabs” or “Russians”)
the Gaza Strip is pretty much a single city of two million people
Does it still count as a city when most of the buildings are rubble? Seems like an interesting semantic question.
same problem that I have with “Arabs” or “Russians”
Sure, “nationalities” have fluid boundaries. You can come up with borderline cases easily enough – a person with one parent Muslim and the other Jewish, a Circassian or Kabyle whose great-grandparents sought refuge in what was then a nice peaceful corner of the Ottoman Empire, that one guy who converted from Islam to Judaism then got shot by the IDF anyway… But Hezbollah is not actually a borderline case, at all. They don’t consider themselves Palestinian, and neither does anyone else.
@Lameen
With Palestinians there is a special problem. For example, one could counter a comparison of Israel with apartheid S. Africa with the observation that the Knesset includes Palestinian delegates, which has no real parallel in the SA Apartheid regime. Whether your interlocutor would consider these delegates to be Palestinians would depend on what is meant by Palestinian.
But that is irrelevant to the point at issue; as Lameen says, Hezbollah is not a borderline case at all.
@David M. Sorry about the fact that I am not using quotes but I am actually commenting from a phone (I’m abroad on holiday so no access to my computer) and I find it cumbersome to bother with keeping the text neat and pretty. It’s difficult to even scroll down as I am writing so you can imagine how it is.
The argument doesn’t come from many sources. It’s from Tsuyoshi Hasegawa’s book ‘racing the enemy’. There’s no contradiction. The reason Japan was convinced to surrender is the Soviet invasion alone. The bombs injected a sense of urgency but didn’t convince the military leadership to quit the war and accept the Potsdam terms. They believed that Japan had much to gain if Stalin could mediate on their behalf. Without the bombs and without the Soviet invasion Japan would not have surrendered and the American invasion of the home islands would have begun in November as planned.
Stalin was stupid not to save the Japs and hand over China and Korea to them. This would have created an alliance of evil against the US that would be tough to beat. Instead, the USSR ended up wasting resources on a Communist China that became its enemy.
I never claimed that the USSR was not militarily powerful, it was just no match for the fascist alliance of Europe that Hitler put together. It is not surprising that Stalin easily rolled over the Japs given his enormous preponderance in equipment. The Japs excelled as light infantry (and I doubt there was a braver soldier on the planet than the Jap) but they had little going on to fight a modern war.
The blockade argument doesn’t carry a lot of weight. Estimates from US planners at the time suggested that starving Japan out would take time, possibly one or two years.
Angeschlossenes is correct. It’s meant in the sense of connected or plugged system. A ‘totalitarian’ government attempts of ‘connect’ all spheres (education, justice etc.) of society to a centralized political organization. In this respect Nazism and really existing socialism were of course the same thing.
You seem to think socialism=when enterprises are not privately owned but ‘private ownership of the means of production’ is a notion that originated in socialist discourse. It implies that there is an alternative that could be construed as ‘social ownership of the means of production’. In fact, the only workable alternative is state ownership but state ownership simply transfers the ownership to a political clique who then employs corrupt means to profit from this ownership. The use that Russia’s elite makes of the country’s nationalized oil industry is a classic example.
So practically, private ownership is unavoidable. If you circumvent the market mechanism through state ownership, you still end up with de facto private ownership but also massive corruption, so the enterprise rots from within, fails to work properly, leading to eventual bankruptcy.
In a totalitarian regime like that of Hitler the only businessmen allowed to survive were those that are party members. So while Krupp was officially a privately owned enterprise in practice the Hitler regime could force it to do anything it wanted. In fact Krupp relied on the regime for its survival. The point is that you can’t have actual freedom as an entrepreneur if you don’t have democracy. Whether you live under the right-wing or the left-wing variant of socialism, the result is the same: you get no economic freedom and as a result you encounter hard limits to how wealthy you can get.
Socialist-inspired policies sadly exist in many European countries and they are the basic reason the continent has become economically and politically incompetent vis-a-vis America. But the presence of socialist policies and the existence of a socialist state are two different things. Social democracy can be understood as a socialist parasite in a symbiotic relationship with a democratic society. Without the democratic society the parasite can’t exist. So the difference between social democracy and actual socialism is that the former requires democracy to enrich itself while the latter is like a fungus that infects the brain of the body politic, takes control of it, turns it into a zombie and slowly kills it off.
@other commentators
Stalin was Ossetian by paternal ancestry though raised in Georgia.
Sufism is far more than a mystical sect. It’s actually the Islamic equivalent of socialism and that’s what Mosier means. The incident I linked to may have happened 600 years ago but it isn’t an isolated one. What do you think the Turkoman uprising of Shahkulu against the Ottoman Sultan Selim was? It was a Sufi-inspired rebellion. The mystical Sufis are the Marxist/anarchist hippies of the Muslim world while the Shia theocrats are the ‘serious’ down-to-earth Sufis. It’s the difference between the anarchists, the poets, the lazy intellectuals on one hand and Stalin on the other.
If doesn’t matter that Hamas is Sunni. Its weapons come from Iran so to the extent that a Palestinian state exists, it exists as a Shia parasite in a Sunni body.
Religious identity is determined by that of the manufacturer of one’s guns.
I suppose one can still find some laughs among the horror.
It follows inevitably from the insane troll logic of the argument that Israel (armed by the US) is a Christian fundamentalist parasite in a Jewish body. [Analogous points are quite often made in leftist anticolonialist discourse. Might this be a point of potential agreement?]
The troll is of course spot on in recognising that the primary aim of Socialism is mystical union with God. I’ve often raised this point at branch meetings, but I keep being ruled out of order by the chair. I blame Sufi theocrat entryists, more interested in building the Socialist Caliphate than in personal enlightenment. No wonder we’re losing the working class.
Wikipedia says
Unless there’s more about that than is at Wikip, I’d say that an unproven or even a proven claim that Stalin’s great-grandfather was Ossetian doesn’t justify calling him an Ossetian. He was certainly much more a Georgian.
I expect this is the one-drop rule. Even just one possibly Ossetian great-grandfather disqualifies you from being a real Georgian. Purity of Essence!
@Brett
It is funny they are going back to the grandfather. My understanding is that S’s father enjoyed alcohol to the point of neglect of family and work. S’s mother held everything together, with the help of a particular friend (I think he was a priest), who was like a second father to young S. There was something about S forbidding his mother to publish her memoirs and/or for Politburo members to have any contact with her. Someone else will know more about this.
an unproven or even a proven claim that Stalin’s great-grandfather was Ossetian doesn’t justify calling him an Ossetian.
Speaking of ambiguity, the claim doesn’t justify calling Stalin an Ossetian. I’m sure everybody understood it from context, but I’m feeling guilty.
@PP: I think you meant me, not Brett. It’s an interesting confusion, maybe based on remembering that he’s a physicist and I teach physics?
ETA: But now I’m expecting to find out that Brett wrote something about Stalin’s great-grandfather and his comment mysteriously disappeared.
S.’s ggf was not quite “maybe Ossetian”. He maybe lived in an Ossetian village. He could still have been Georgian.
Unless he bought his guns from Ossetians.
@jf
Sorry. I think I was just going between threads and forgot who made the comment.
Happens to us all. Sometimes I forget a comment *I* made.
@pp: No need to apologize—I didn’t mind. Thanks for the explanation.
i can’t remember (and wouldn’t want to spoil the fun, in any case) whether the protagonist considers ossetians or the ingush the bad guys in le carré’s Our Game – the one that isn’t Evil, is of course Pure and Noble (as is always the way with Savage Mountain Peoples).
The logic is clearly impeccable: Sufism is the Islamic equivalent of socialism, the Iranian regime is socialist (just as anarchists, Nazis, and lazy academics are), therefore its theocrats must secretly all be Sufis, no matter what they pretend in public. Perhaps, along the lines of al-Yusi’s anecdote, they managed to obtain mystical instruction from a long-lived genie who had personally studied under the Prophet, thus obviating the need to join an existing tariqah or obtain an ijazah from mere humans.
Religious identity is determined by that of the manufacturer of one’s guns.
Clearly the sentiment is sound, but why such an anthropocentric phrasing? The weapons are Shia, and that’s what counts – who cares about the beliefs of their impermanent human assistants?
(Looking at Mosier’s blog, I actually think that’s kind of what’s going on – he’s attempting to analyse the latest round of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as if it were a purely military affair, for which all you really need to know is which monolithic “side” has which weapons where.)
Yes, that’s what I meant by my remark about neurophysiologists. Mosier believes himself to be an expert (if not the expert) in military history, and imagines that this automatically gives him special insight into all of politics.
To be fair, other kinds of expert, including genuine ones, have quite often imagined that their own specialism can explain everything (apart from the odd minor detail.) Economists, for example …
(Anthropologists, of course, are perfectly correct in this belief, but – perhaps fortunately – seldom wish to share their deeper insights with the laity.)
Oh. You know, you’re under no obligation to comment right now. Feel free to enjoy your holiday and regale us with your well-sourced insights once you’re back home. We can wait – this thread already has an 11-month gap between October 2023 and October 2024, and a 10-month gap between October 2024 and your first comment.
“Alliance of evil” sounds about right! Stalin’s empire and the Japanese one had nothing in common other than being evil. 😀 Their ideologies made them instant enemies that were able to hold off from attacking each other immediately, but no more than that.
Stalin supporting Stalinists in China was only logical. He couldn’t have known that Maoism would diverge from Stalinism in the 50s and end up becoming an enemy.
Connected to what? Plugged into what? An was angeschlossen? I should perhaps recommend verbundenes System.
(It’s not obvious from my name, and I’m not from Berlin, but I’m a native speaker of German.)
Who is “you”? I haven’t offered a definition of “socialism” at all. (I can still offer a number of different ones if you’re interested; I can’t say I prefer any of them, though – I don’t care whether I count as a socialist.)
Uh, I agree with all of that, but it contradicts these claims you made yesterday:
“Economically, Nazism is based on the rejection of mass production techniques and focuses on smaller family-run enterprises producing in a slow artisanal pace. The reason Nazi Germany didn’t manage to compete well with the democracies in armaments production had to do with this economic system.”
“Wasn’t Krupp run by the Krupp family? German enterprises were just glorified Mittelstand companies.”
Anything socialist about this pro-Safavid rebellion? Was the collectivist goal for society mystical union with God under Shah Ismāʿīl I? Is there even anything Sufi-inspired about the rebellion, or are you just counting the Sufi background of the Safawiyya?
(Features Kartli and Kakheti.)
Insane Troll Logic.
He couldn’t have known that Maoism would diverge from Stalinism in the 50s and end up becoming an enemy.
Well, Stalin was dead by then and Mao (not without reason) maintained that it was the SU that had diverged from Stalinism. Whether Stalin would have approved of Mao’s later policies is a moot point.
I am actually commenting from a phone (I’m abroad on holiday so no access to my computer)
Pathetic. No excuse whatsoever. I’m pecking on a phone, put quotes in italics or blockquotes, put links to attribute what I quote from refs, and citations. And I found Mosier’s blog fine.
Curiously you did manage to take screeds of “deeply flawed” history texts on your so-called holiday.
Per @DM’s note on your timing: you woke this topic from months-long slumbers to comment about stone-age peoples and then military history three-quarters of a century ago.
Presumably you’ve no friends to ‘enjoy’ the holiday with? I suggest you could spend the time more profitably learning how to be civilised.
Gaza strip is 365 square kilometers.
Moscow is 877 – I mean Moscow within the ellipse. In Wikipedia:Moscow the area is much, much larger.
I repeated this to my Russian friends to explain how truly horrible is Israeli campagn (worse than the Russian-Ukrainian war*, and worse than they imagine). I’m not sure if I succeeded**.
The city of Gaza is Very Large. Was Large in 1970. And a small town in 50.
And when you cross its nominal borders you are… in another city which has grown there. The difference is nominal. And when not nominal, whatever it is that makes the city of Gaza “Gaza” (and not another city in the strip) has little to do, I think, with Gaza of 1950.
So there WAS a point in distinguishing between the city of Gaza and the area around it in 1970, but I found that when I talk to my friends, “strip” in “Gaza strip” is not informative – and so I say “Gaza”.
___
*the whole Russian-Ukrainian war is a greater catastrophe because it has been fought for three years.
** Putin takes the Palestinian side, and I don’t know if Russians who’re against the war take the Israeli side.
Personally, I think it is immoral to take sides there (maybe unless you’re a Jew or Arab? Or maybe not).
First, nether side recognises that the other side are human beings.
Second, they both are trapped. They WILL have what they have.
…and it’s also an interesting contradiction to this:
which you posted here just a week earlier. Was this another plagiate you didn’t read before copying & pasting it here?
All true. Summer is finally here for real (I wonder if the Gulf Stream is down…), and the heat is getting to me.
Talking of bizarre revisionist history of the WWII defeat of Japan, it was apparently thanks to the Chinese Expeditionary Force led by Xi Jinping, or something.
The Grauniad’s fact-checkers seem to be AWOL.
I can’t find where the article says anything like that. But the very title begins with “China and Britain shared a mission to fight aggression and fascism” – while, right now, China is rewarding both by flooding Russia with dual-use goods…
If you will host a guest column from the Chinese ambassador, you probably don’t get to check his … erm, facts.
The Economist, normally rightwing but sane, sometimes has guest columns from batshit US regime apparatchiks. I suppose it’s educational, in a gawping-at-car-crashes kind of way.
Pericles as bad guy is comparatively unusual for far-right internet keyboard warriors. Athenian foreign policy during the period leading up to the Peloponnesian War was totally amoral and focused entirely on feeding Athenian power, with zero concern for the rights of subjects or “allies.” US fascists usually approve of that kind of thing. And only an all-male minority of “pure” Athenians actually had votes under the democracy: surely a model for the US? This fellow has been misled by the word “democracy”: this was not the modern bad kind of democracy, which, as we know, inevitably leads to Communism and Sufism. It was a manly, pure democracy, with plenty of slaves, and all respectable women kept in purdah.
(The Athenians were a bit woke on homosexuality, admittedly, but not nearly as bad as the Spartans …)
this was not the modern bad kind of democracy, which, as we know, inevitably leads to Communism and Sufism.
Made me laugh, and now I’m imagining Stalin as a Naqshbandi sheikh.
The classical Athenians made two important and positive contributions to human advancement. One was that they documented their culture and history. Dispassionate recording of historical events was a revolutionary idea. Herodotus was not from Attica, but his works would almost certainly have been lost had not Athenian readers recognized they were worth preserving. And they next generations of historians, like Thucydides and Xenophon, were Athenian through and through.
The other Athenian innovation was the idea of democracy and egalitarianism. Athens was not good about implementing those ideals. However, without the experimentation of people like Cleisthenes and Pericles, who believed in democracy guided by oligarchs, true moral democracy in Boeotia would not have developed.
Personally, I think the Athenians made even more than two lasting contributions to human advancement …
It was (incidentally) a key point of the Athenian type of democracy that public officials should be selected by lot, not elected (various dodges were in place to avoid some of the more egregious problems with this.)
The US system of appointing officials because they’ve been TV hosts may be an attempt to replicate this. It is encouraging to see that even in the very heartland of oligarchy, the democratic spirit yet lives.
@Brett, I’m afraid, there is a whole sequence of filters.
You name one of them (“Athenian readers”). There are also medieval readers.
While nobody would maintain that the Bible is a “dispassionate recording of historical events” (well, nobody round here, anyhow), it is very striking that it portrays the great patriarchs and kings as, by and large, pretty dreadful people. David is hardly represented in the sort of way that a Babylonian king presents himself. And Moses is not presented like the Thus-Gone is in Buddhist texts.
Sima Qian would have some title to feel aggrieved at the idea that the concept of objective history all originated with Herodotus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sima_Qian
There are also medieval readers
My favourite example of this dynamic was first pointed out to me when someone (unfortunately, I forget who) wrote of the … incongruity … of pious Irish monks carefully recording the tales of the heathen headhunter Cú Chulainn.
It is a pity that mediaeval European monks seem not to have appreciated Latin bonkbuster novels much. Bits of the Satyricon, and the Golden Ass, but not a lot more made it through the filters …
@de
These Irish monks would be well able to provide good theological reasons for reading the Red Branch saga as a religious allegory (and for a small fee, would have found a genealogy connecting you, Cú Chuallain, Parthallán and Noah). This is another example of the bookish, inhibited individual worshipping the bloodthirsty man of action.
@David M.
Connected to the messianic cult they call party and its all-powerful charismatic leader. I prefer angeschlossen to verbunden because the Nazis themselves loved to use propaganda terms strongly connected to modern technology like Gleichschaltung or Anschluss. See Vokabular des Nationalsozialismus by Cornelia Schmitz-Berning.
And here’s the obvious connection to Sufism. Shahkulu presented himself as a messianic leader, just like the crazy mullahs of Iran. Ask chatGPT the question: ‘is there any perceptible messianism in the way the mullahs of Iran present themselves?’ The answer is revealing. Ismail, the Shah that the rabble-rousing prophet was the kulu of, also had an obvious affinity with modern Iran: him being twelver. On what political basis was Shahkulu able to rouse the masses of Turcomans against the Sultan? On much the same basis that enabled Trotsky to mobilize masses of peasants against their Czar. There was also an unmistakable racist and classist flavor in the rebellion. Shahkulu berated the Ottomans for largely abandoning their Turkic and nomadic roots and mixing with traditionally Christian populations. All socialist movements are racist and classist. Contemporary American socialists are racist in that they hate whitedom and westerndom and classist in that they hate the ‘ruling class’ by which they just mean the rich and successful.
Unlike the left-wing variant of socialism, the right-wing variant of the Nazis emphasized traditional values. One of those values was the confinement of women to motherhood. When Speer took over the armaments ministry and became the man responsible for directing German industry he suggested that the efficiency of production could dramatically improve if women were made to work. But this conflicted with Nazi ideology so the idea wasn’t implemented. Another of these values was xenophobia. All traditional cultures were xenophobic to a marked degree and made sharp distinctions of status between citizens and non-citizens. A primitive version of that is seen even in the Piraha who make a sharp distinction between their clever selves and the ‘crooked heads’. The xenophobia of the Nazis deprived them of the ability to integrate foreigners and war captives into their culture and to resist the allure of canards and hateful myths. Foreigners that are motivated to work and succeed are always a boon to the economy and you need a strong economy to mass-produce the equipment required to win a modern war.
So democracy, by fully disregarding traditional values (as well as the utopian fantasies of left-wing socialism) secures certain economic advantages that allow it to prevail in wars. But this doesn’t mean that democracy is a workable system. The basic reason that democracy is unworkable (which is why it always had a short shelf-life historically) is that its rejection of traditional values comes in conflict with some fundamentals of human nature. This generates certain imbalances in society that lead to political instability. The system most in accord with human nature in my opinion is an absolute monarchy led by a dynasty, featuring a relatively poor aristocracy, and sanctioned by religious authorities. No other system has a decent chance at sustaining a true thousand-year Reich.
In Europe we don’t have such a political tradition. The greatest problem with the grossly overvalued Roman empire was its inability to build a coherent system of dynastic rule which led to horrific civil wars being so endemic. This structural fault is attributable to the pseudo-republican pretensions of the regime’s ideology. Augustus, probably the most overrated politician in history, built this system. Unfortunately, he was a complete buffoon, none of his policy decisions being sensible. The fact that his Julio-Claudian dynasty was such a monumental failure is no accident.
@AntC I am happy for you Freundchen. Never forget to quote and link, veryy important. But I won’t bother to learn how to do that right now because I’m bored. Your example inspires me though.
> The US system of appointing officials because they’ve been TV hosts may be an attempt to replicate this
The anti-US stuff does get tiresome. Maybe if it was more clever…
I shall aspire to greater cleverness, as you suggest, though at my time of life, the prospects of success are not encouraging.
I feel that a certain dissatisfaction with the current American regime (as opposed to all Americans) on the part of us poor foreigners is currently not completely unjustifiable. Alas, your political dysfunction does not harm Americans alone.
It appears I was wrong to ascribe this particular troll to your country, however. Apologies. We do indeed have plenty like him in Europe too.
The day I see “Ask chatGPT the question… The answer is revealing…” as a source reference in a published paper, is the day I will turn off the computer and go live on fruits and bugs on a desert island.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=eEep67akIn4
The anti-US stuff does get tiresome.
I (an American) find it perfectly appropriate. But then I’ve felt that way for most of my life (since, say, 1967, when I came to a mature realization of WTF was going on in the world).
Nor has your political dysfunction harmed you alone. Meanwhile, we have another thread where people are casually discussing the pleasures or dissatisfactions of spending time in Dubai, where there are actually slaves, but it’s seemingly widely perceived in Europe as just a shimmering new place to go. Gee, let’s hold the World Cup there!
To the degree our dysfunction has such an impact on Europe, you should be asking yourselves why. How, 80 years after World War II, can it be that your security institutions were so weak that Russia could attack a democracy on the border of Europe and you didn’t have the resources or will to address it, and left the collective defense significantly to the US to fund and manufacture? Decades of childishness, lectures like “the US is so warlike, you make all those violent movies.” And of course, a German willingness to profit by using the excuse of the Holocaust to avoid the costs of self-defense.
To beat Trump, Biden or Harris needed at least one win. Failure on many fronts, including Ukraine, was an important part of what happened. Europeans were key architects of failure in Ukraine.
Britain spent three decades avoiding building a real economy, the better to focus on catering to the whims of oligarchs. The ownership of the Premier League would look a lot like my Interpol extradition list.
The anti-NATO stuff from Trump is bizarre, fascist-friendly and gross. And surprisingly popular. But the frustrations it feeds on are directly related to European political irresponsibility.
But despite that, I don’t spend time in every fucking thread hurling sarcasm at Europeans. I mostly let it go. Doctor, heal thyself. Go chastise your countrymen for vacationing in Dubai.
Not sure what brought that on; I guess this thread inspires bile.
Hat, you’re American, and it makes perfect sense for you to focus on things you see wrong here. And yes, there are many truly fucked up things going on.
If you were wildly focused on what was wrong in Britain, Germany and Brussels, commenting far more often on that than on things in your own sphere, I’d consider that bizarre and tiresome.
But the US is the 800-pound gorilla; what we do has a lot more influence on people in Britain, Germany and Brussels than what happens there does on us. I’m not a bit surprised or annoyed that people elsewhere focus on us and our increasingly crazed and dangerous behavior; if I were them I would do the same. Ignoring an insane gorilla rarely ends well.
And here’s the obvious connection to Sufism. Shahkulu presented himself as a messianic leader, just like the crazy mullahs of Iran.
Okay, so now the criterion for Sufi-hood is presenting yourself as a messianic leader. Sadly, most Sufi shaykhs (never mind, say, Junayd or Rabia al-Adawiyya) aren’t Sufi enough to satisfy this very rigorous definition, contesting themselves with nothing more ambitious than the odd personality cult. Maybe this Lebensraum-lover can write them a spiritual guidebook to put them back on track. But the loss can be compensated for, to some extent, by the astonishing discovery that such luminaries as Atatürk, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Muhammad ibn Abdalwahhab, and Khomeini were essentially Sufi. All their very public efforts to curb Sufism were evidently merely intended to delude naive observers.
This is another example of the bookish, inhibited individual worshipping the bloodthirsty man of action.
Not quite the same thing, but one thinks of religious students in zawiyas across the Sahara carefully memorising pages of racy pre-Islamic poetry – how else are you to master really proper Arabic, after all?
Britain spent three decades avoiding building a real economy, the better to focus on catering to the whims of oligarchs. The ownership of the Premier League would look a lot like my Interpol extradition list
Yes indeed. I can’t say that I feel in any way personally aggrieved by your pointing this out. Do carry on. I can give you some tips about Starmer to keep you going.
The difference is that our political dysfunction has little effect on the US, and in general is of relatively little world significance or wider interest, whereas the US is busy undermining democracy across Europe, with (as you rightly say) the enthusiastic support of our own oligarchs and racists. US dysfunction is, unfortunately, a global concern.
Americans should beware of taking criticism of their foul government personally just now. Unless they identify with its objectives. In which case, I hope they take it very personally indeed.
[Mostly ninja’d by Hat]
@ryan
One explanation for Europe’s failure to intervene in conflicts like former Yugoslavia and the Ukraine is domination by sneering socialists who prefer spending taxpayers’ money on no-hope losers, who would be rightly left to sleep in doorways in an enlightened country. Another reason could be aversion to “shitting in one’s own back garden” (Putin is notably not averse to this). The U.S would seem fortunate in not having to deal with deadly conflicts on its own borders.
Interesting how you managed to avoid my point about Ukraine and simply restate that your dysfunction has little impact on us. You’re simply wrong. To the degree our politics has a greater impact on you, the reason is mostly what I stated – decades of puerile politics in Europe, allowing the US to foot bills for you. So again, the thing is to avoid obsessing on foreign politics and instead, obsess on your own.
I have no reason to be wary of taking foreign criticism of our institutions personally. Your criticisms are not helpful or constructive. You aren’t particularly informed by an understanding of the American electorate, so you inevitably only parrot things you’ve heard, highlighting things for entertainment value and morality plays rather than their actual impact in American politics. I have a keen awareness of what has gone wrong and why.
The culture of sarcasm to avoid self-reckoning has been one important factor. Silly insults like “foul” make it difficult for people of common sense to suggest “those foul people do have a small point, and maybe if we dealt with that, we’d remove the anger of the sector of the electorate they’re cynically catering to.”
Nothing truer has been said about the American political system in decades than when Brad Raffensperger said “we don’t have an epidemic of vote fraud, nor an epidemic of vote suppression. What we have is an epidemic of lies about vote fraud and vote suppression for political gain.”
At every level, each side cackling about the lies of the other side to shirk the need to recant their own cynical lies, or ever build anything that works.
I think Hat may be on to something. This thread is Cursed. It may have been built over an Indian burial ground.
This thread is Cursed
It’s undeniably entertaining and all having a Nazi around to mock, but it doesn’t do wonders for the vibes.
I wonder if the post topic itself does have something to do with it, though. I can imagine that the idea of a qualitative leap in consciousness occurring within historic times could be particularly fascinating to people who like the idea that foreigners might not really be conscious in the same sense as themselves.
Yes, I wondered that too. I felt that came out a bit in the Sapolsky-related stuff, as well.
Ah well, it was fun while it lasted. Let’s all go have a drink at Maxie’s and let the Nazi talk to himself.
Do they have Guinness?
Of course, and with a good slow pour! You think I’d suggest a place that didn’t have Guinness?
Stout fellow!
Why accuse each other over who’s fault it is that Russia has invaded Ukraine? What does it matter?
Russia is militarily and economically incompetent. Thanks to American help, it’s clearly losing the casualty exchange ratio, it’s running out of equipment and won’t be in any position to threaten Europe in the foreseeable future. If the democracies weren’t so deficient in common sense and leadership, if they weren’t so afraid of Putin’s nuclear threats and whatever his latest ‘red line’ is, they could have sent a Western army in Ukraine years ago, crushed the invaders and recaptured everything, including Crimea. In fact, they could have forced Russia to pay a huge war indemnity to Ukraine and even cede pieces of its own territory to it.
The reason Europe can’t arm itself is actually its own socialist policies which keep it poor vis-a-vis America. You need huge sums of money to rearm and money doesn’t grow on trees. The Americans have the money because they are effectively the only ones in the world who were spared the wisdom of Saint Marx and Saint Bernstein. Despite the best efforts of American socialists to import this wisdom there too, this won’t happen. The Americans may be culturally illiterate but when it comes to economic literacy they are the best. And economic literacy is more important than any other form of literacy. Also their binary two-party presidential political system is more rational than our own, a ‘non-binary’ multiparty parliamentary system. Their legal system is also more effective at punishing criminals. Whereas the American legal system effectively destroys the prospects and social mobility of those it incarcerates, reducing them to second-class citizen status, and even profits off the inmates, the European one simply sends the criminals on a taxpayer-paid vacation.
Thankfully, they Americans have been subsidizing our socialist laziness by allowing us to levy tariffs on their products while they didn’t levy tariffs on our own. But that policy is changing now.
So anyway, a duck walks into a bar…
As I said – Insane Troll Logic.
You’re not even trying to make sense.
Anschluss works as a term because it’s obviously short for Anschluss an das Deutsche Reich. An angeschlossenes System would have to be connected to something else – and that’s missing. Having internal connections is just not what the word means. Again, I’m a native speaker.
…you believe AI stands for “artificial intelligence” instead of “artificial idiocy”, don’t you.
No, we are not living in Star Trek. We have not reached the point at which you can ask a computer something and expect to get a reliable answer.
What LLMs (Large Language Models) do instead is generate plausible-looking text. That’s all they do; that’s all they can do. If you tell them to write a legal brief, they write something that looks like a legal brief, complete with what looks like references to what looks like court cases. And then someone checks, and finds no such court cases exist. The LLMs don’t understand the difference. They don’t understand literally anything.
DeepSeek even tells you “I’m holding the physical book in my hands” if you tell it its output is wrong!
Look, you can’t retroactively make Mosier less ridiculous than he is. You can’t make saying Khamenei wants a Sufi caliphate less ridiculous than it is. It’s just not possible. You’re only wasting pixels.
Oh, that’s why you’re wasting pixels: you’re trolling! You don’t even believe your stupid shit, you just want to make people upset because you find that funny!
Look at the cute little trollboy pretending to be a neoreactionary just a few days after referring to Nazis as “we”.
What if I told you… that that’s not our goal…
We did. It was, shall we say, cut off in 1793.
He’s not your buddy, pal.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
There are no European security institutions other than NATO. This attempt ended in 2011; EU members now have an obligation of “solidarity” to each other, but that does not extend to actual fighting, because there are neutral countries in the EU (Ireland, Austria, and until recently Sweden & Finland).
The stated purpose of NATO was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”. The third part worked so well that the first came to depend entirely on the second.
Entirely predictably, you’re talking past each other: Ryan is talking about Europe, DE is talking about the UK.
That was a very convenient thing to say for him (the secretary of state of Georgia) and his boss-and-predecessor, Brian Kemp. I’m afraid it looks a lot like a blatant lie. Kemp had just been elected governor of Georgia right after having, in his capacity as secretary of state, removed hundreds of thousands of names from the voter rolls for the stated reason that the people in question hadn’t voted in the last few elections. Not only is it a priori unlikely that all of them had moved or died since the last purge, there’s evidence to the contrary. The first two Google results for kemp voter rolls are this and this.
Anyway. I just came [comment actually written last night] from an Irish pub run by Pakistanis. Other than Guinness, Irish Red, Magnum cider etc. etc., they have great food from half the world but not Ireland.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I agree up to the beginning of this quote. I’ve long thought that Putin’s war, his power and his life are highly likely to end on the same day. Once the war is over, Putin will be useless to the rest of his mafia, but he’ll know way too much. He’s going to be found dead the next morning under extremely, extremely mysterious circumstances – unless he manages to flee to the one place where his life is safe: the Hague.
The question is how to get Putin to lose the war without feeling so acutely threatened that he figures his options are 1) nukes and likely death or 2) certain death. No, it’s not likely that anyone would actually carry out orders to nuke “the collective West” or any part thereof; and most of the six thousand nukes probably don’t even work anymore; but I wouldn’t want to gamble with that kind of thing and find out the hard way. Supporting Ukraine to the point that it can reconquer Crimea seems a lot safer for everybody than Finns cashiering St. Petersburg and Poles surrounding Moscow.
That was actually a meme in 2022: “Now Putin is gonna find out why we don’t have universal healthcare!”
trololol
You’re not enjoying your holiday, are you.
@Lameen, LH,
When I said “I know. But.” I meant Hezbollah and that guy quoted by Lameen.
When I asked who do we mean by “Palestinians”, I was curious (but I didn’t mean that guy).
Lameen says no one calls Hezbollah “Palestinians”. If I extract an answer to my question from his words, it will be “people that are called ‘Palestinians’ are called ‘Palestinians'”.
Not too useful:) I spoke about the reality behind the name.
Either “Palestinians” are simply people of the region (like “North Africans”) – or, if they are “a people”, they were formed in the 20th century (like “Algerians”) and what forms them is not “their state” (unlike “Algerians”) but something else. And an important part of this something else is, I think, Israel.
Either way, to say that Hezbollah are very much not Palestinians and nothing to talk about here you need to try hard to focus on names and forget the reality.
They do belong in a conversation about “Palestinian movements”.
@drasvi: In general, Palestinians are normally understood as the Arab inhabitants of the post-WW II British mandate of Palestine and their descendants, whether they currently live there or in exile, as long as they identify as Palestinians (e.g., AFAIK, some Arabic speaking groups in Israel (pre-1967 territory) don’t or didn’t always identify as Palestinians.)
Hizbollah claims solidarity with the Palestinian cause and fights Israel, but it’s overwhelmingly a movement of Lebanese Shiites and its main raison d’être was fighting the Israeli occupation in South Lebanon. So I wouldn’t call it a Palestinian movement. Otherwise, if every armed group claiming to fight for the Palestinian cause is a Palestinian movement, where do we draw the line? Are the Houthis a Palestinian movement? The Iranian revolutionary guards?
They do belong in a conversation about “Palestinian movements”.
No they don’t. They belong in a conversation about the issues involved in the Palestinian problem, sure, but words have meanings, and they are not Palestinian.
…did I delete my own comment this time when I edited it?
@LH, if you ask for a стул (“chair”) and I bring a кресло (“armchair”) you’ll likely be satisfied.
Nevertheless I won’t call it a стул.
The analogy here is that when a claim is made about “Palestianian movements”, Hezbollah may qualify (like a кресло may qualify when you request a стул).
The meaning of the word “Palestinians” is what I want to understand. You’re talking about the usual referents of this word, and I know, more or less, who are the referents (who are called so and who aren’t).
…did I delete my own comment this time when I edited it?
You sent it into moderation, and I rescued it.
drasvi, there are long entries on WP about “Palestinians”, “Palestinian identity” and more. Given the charged subject, I imagine they are well-edited and reasonably balanced.
Another good non-borderline case is the people of the Golan Heights. They’re occupied by Israel (indeed, their land has been annexed by it), but they’re not Palestinian – they’re Syrian. Likewise, the Bedouin of Sinai did not suddenly become Palestinian in 1967 then revert to being (very marginalised) Egyptians after Camp David – they were Egyptian all along. The borders that matter for this purpose are those of Mandate Palestine, not those of Israel.
Before 1967, the majority of the population of the Golan Heights was sedentary Bedouin, almost all of which were forced to flee to Syria (along with the Circassians and other smaller groups). If they had stayed, perhaps they, like other Bedouins now in Israel, would have considered themselves Palestinian. Those that remained were mostly Druze, who now form the majority non-Jewish population there. In recent years more Golan Druze have pursued Israeli citizenship, but I either way, I imagine their primary identity is Druze, ahead of either Syrian or Israeli. Since there is not one canonical Druze homeland, that situation seems very stable.
Yay, thanks!
Well, either that, or the opposite, but certainly nothing in between.
… and says: “Quack open the champagne, Al. We’re getting peace in the Middle East.” And the bartender says: “Sorry Donald, that was fake news.” And Donald says: “Ukraine then! Do I look as if I care?”
@Lameen, then what you mean is their status. No more, no less.
I don’t think that in 1967 Bedouin of Sinai would have agreed that they are “Egyptians” in anything else.
But when I speak about “Palestinian movements” I mean more. “African” in “African rivers” means “found in Africa” and nothing more, but the role of “Palestinian” here is different, not “movements of people with this status”.
I also think, not all people of Gaza [strip] are what you call “Palestinians”.
When the city was controlled by Egypt people must have come from various places.
Or wait. It was United Arab Republic in 1967. Then the Bedouin were “Arabs”.
They would have agreed with this designation:)
He’s not your buddy, pal.
Thanks @DM. I’d already taken that as sarcastic.
I think we’ve established the dude would rather carry on trolling than go enjoy a cold one (or a dark one) with any sort of Freund.
BTW
according to chatGPT just now. Anything else you ask it about Messianism is likely to be just as … “interesting”.
(Disappointing: I thought we’d got past all that months ago with ‘r’s in ‘strawberry’.)
But when I speak about “Palestinian movements” I mean more
You are of course free to define terms as you see fit, but you’re just going to confuse everybody else.
… “Sham pain it is, right …” grumbles the bartender sotto voce (his real name is AI, not Al, but he’s been stuck with Al ever since an unfortunate OCR mishap in an earlier iteration on his father’s side). And he says, not wanting to lose his livelihood and be escorted from his bar with 15 minutes’ notice: “Right, of course. Everything you say is fine by me. Chill! It’ll be ready in two minutes, three minutes, four minutes or five minutes. Look, all the ICE we need is already to hand.”
goose steps into the bar…
@David M.
Angeschlossenes System is simply short for an die Partei angeschlossenes Machtsystem. Haven’t you heard someone saying angeschlossenes Bad or angeschlossenes Unternehmen? If you heard someone saying that would you ask him ‘angeschlossen an was?’ C’mon. I didn’t grow up speaking my German dialect outside the home (I grew up in Canada) but I know the standard German language well.
Sure, ChatGPT can’t replace human intelligence but it’s a useful aid to human intelligence.Twelver Shia is as close to Sufism as anarchism is to communism. The main point of criticism that the regime has against Sufism is that it doesn’t accept Imam-based authority. It’s the same problem that communists have with anarchists: they don’t accept party authority.
Indeed, Putin has found the hard way how powerful the American arsenal is. American support and material aid is the main reason Putin lost (aside from Russian incompetence). And the reason it’s powerful is because America has the money to spare. If it wasted that money on socialist policies, it wouldn’t have it.
If a Western army reconquered the lost territories in Ukraine this would humiliate Putin in the eyes of the whole world and possibly lead to his downfall. The approach you favor (wait it out and let Putin continue to kill civilians in a futile attempt to terrorize the population into submission) will allow Putin to devise a way to weasel out of the conflict and use his propaganda apparatus (which is quite effective to be honest) to put the best possible face on his defeat.
I don’t believe that Putin is as vulnerable as you suggest. He has spent over two decades building his power apparatus and he has handpicked all the people he works with, selecting the most mediocre and subservient. They don’t have the guts to remove him. When Stalin had a nervous breakdown in 1941 and barricaded himself in his dacha none of his minions had the guts to oust him. The point is: don’t underestimate the manipulative intelligence of dictators. They know how to insulate themselves.
Charles Jaeger, this is, despite what you seem to think, not a history/politics blog but a language/literature blog. I’ve allowed occasional discussions to drift into the political realm, but not in order to have endless arguments that will never be resolved. You are not going to convince anyone here of any of your ideas, and I would ask you to go find one of the uncountable other internet venues to do whatever it is you’re doing. And everyone else, I would request that you not interact with CJ; it doesn’t do any good, and the whole mess makes me not want to read my own blog.
No problem, I won’t comment on political issues anymore. I am not trying to convince anyone. It’s ok if arguments never get resolved. In fact, it’s normal. If arguments could be resolved by argument alone no wars would ever happen.
charlesjaeger2.blogspot.com is available…
Freundchen is only ever sarcastic. Sportsfreund and Freund der Blasmusik are ambiguous without context.
No, because context clears these up. That’s not so for a political system. And once again you couldn’t help contradicting yourself – originally you said the connections were all internal, not to anything external like you now say the party is.
It may yet get there, but it hasn’t reached that point. At its most useful, it’s a grotesquely bloated search engine – and you still need to click on the links to the search results.
At its most useful, it’s a grotesquely bloated search engine
The most effective use I’ve seen for it so far is as a proofreader for L2 English – a use case where simply looking for the most probable sequence of tokens is often exactly what you need, and truth is irrelevant. But I’ve almost entirely avoided it tbh – the hallucinations thing really puts me off.
I don’t think that in 1967 Bedouin of Sinai would have agreed that they are “Egyptians” in anything else.
Fair, but they certainly wouldn’t have called themselves Palestinian. Arab, of course, but I wonder how they’d have used the term… When I was in Siwa, I had a Bedouin friend who regularly asked “How are the Arabs of Siwa?” He wasn’t being racist – “Arabs”, to him, just meant something like “regular folks”, never mind what language they might speak at home.
It is useful and helpful to distinguish pro-Palestinian movements from Palestinian movements. Plenty of movements around the world, spanning the gamut from Hezbollah to Palestine Action, can plausibly be classed as the former, allowing the latter to be reserved for actual Palestinian efforts.