I’m gearing up to post the continuation of the Grandmother Hypothesis, which I’ve been too busy to do proper justice to this week, but in the meantime here’s a news item that will set the stage.

First, a quiz.

1. What allows ev-psychos to get away with their cartoonish, Flintstones view of life in the Pleistocene, in which men controlled the resources and women were passive lumps trading sex for food?
2. What allows morons like Roy F. Baumeister to deliver a lecture on the topic “Women Have Never Contributed Jack-Shit to the Human Species Except By Giving Birth And Even That They Couldn’t Manage Very Well” without being shouted off the stage by an irate audience, disgusted by his ignorance?
3. What allows old-fashioned (read: sexist) archaeologists and museums to still get away with their obsolete “Man the Hunter” depictions of Paleolithic life?

The answer to all three questions is the same: the overwhelming cultural silence about the real role of women in our evolution and history.

Do you think articles like the following help?

Seafood led Early Man to come out of his shell

Ancient shells left in a cave 164,000 years ago suggest that a love of seafood and daytrips to the beach date back to the earliest days of mankind.

The discovery is so early in the history of Modern Man that the shellfish may mark the time when Homo sapiens first developed distinctive human behaviour.

~

The discovery of several species of shellfish in the cave puts back the date where mankind first treated the oceans as a larder by 40,000 years from 125,000 years ago.

Coastlines are recognised by scientists as likely migration routes and the discovery of how to exploit the shore for food would have been a factor in Man’s ability to colonise the rest of the world.

Researchers identified 15 types of marine creatures in the cave, which would have been about three miles from the coast when it was occupied. The remains of ancient fires indicate that the molluscs would have been cooked in their shells. The international team of researchers, whose findings were published in the journal Nature, said that it was likely that the transition to using beaches as a source of food was crucial to Man’s survival.

When our very language erases the existence of women, is it any wonder that our mental landscape is equally bereft?

It’s always offensive when ancient women are “disappeared” in this manner, but it is especially galling in this case since the behavior under discussion is shellfishing. Shellfishing, for chrissake, which is almost as strongly correlated with women as plant gathering — just as big-game hunting is correlated with men.

Look: everybody needs to be very careful about reading a gendered division of labor into the ancient past. But if ethnography is any guide at all to our Paleolithic ancestors, then gathering plants and shellfish has long been the kind of thing women typically do, just as big-game hunting is the kind of thing men typically do. (Let me note parenthetically here that net hunting, on the other hand, is a group-wide activity — men, women, young, old, everybody. And it’s a hell of a lot more productive than big-game hunting.) There are exceptions to these patterns, yes. Absolutely. But the patterns are still there.

These patterns are what enabled an earlier generation of blinkered archaeologists to create the myth of “Man the Hunter,” wherein everything really important in human evolution happened because men were getting together to hunt. Those old archaeologist dudes may have been right about men doing most of the big-game hunting, but they were wrong about said hunting being some all-powerful engine of change. After all, chimps hunt too. And real big-game hunting, with spear-wielding humans going after big animals, probably didn’t happen until long after our ancestors had become very, very smart.

The great reassessment happening in anthropology is the realization that the complex of behaviors that seem to mark the emergence of highly intelligent Homo are those activities that have always been associated with women: plant gathering and processing, communal resource acquisition and provisioning — including shellfishing.

More and more, when anthropologists think about intelligent hominids making the transition to modern humans, they’re thinking about women — women figuring out how to dig up tubers and prepare them so they’re edible, how to smash hard seeds and grind them into a mush the baby can eat, how to roast shellfish and turtles so the meat is easy to get to. How to get along with each other, talking things over, sharing tasks. How to work out the provisioning so new Mom can nurse the baby while Grandmother and Aunts pitch in with the tuber-digging and babysitting. How to exploit the environment and harness the power of group effort in a way our simian cousins never do.

Women’s work, people. Women’s work.

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Random Pedantry, Ev-Psych Bullshit on October 19, 2007, 12:43 am EST

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It started with a blurb I saw in the New York Times for October 5:

“Evolution’s Secret Weapon: Grandma. Far from burdening society, aging women may have ensured our survival.”

“Grandmother hypothesis,” I said to myself. “But why is it in the paper now?”

I clicked on the link and was surprised to see that the article was in the Health section. Not Science? Then I read on and realized that the slant was about menopause, with the hook being the recent talk given by Kristen Hawkes at a meeting of the North American Menopause Society (who knew there was such a thing?). Hawkes is the anthropologist behind the grandmother hypothesis, and the article helpfully included a link to an older piece in the Times that reported on the theory in more detail.

A much older piece, in fact; ten years old. The linked piece is from 1997, when the grandmother hypothesis (or rather the current Hawkesian version of it) was brand-new. And that piece was also in the Health section — actually the Women’s Health section. Not Science.

Maybe I need to stop for a moment here and explain just what the grandmother hypothesis is and why it’s important.

In a nutshell, the hypothesis is that grandmotherhood is a crucial development of our species. By remaining active for decades after menopause, our ancestral grandmothers were able to channel their energy into helping to provision their daughters’ children. From the standpoint of making sure their genes continued to propagate, this was an extremely effective adaptation. It also made it possible for women to have helpless infants (think big-brained human babies) and to have them fairly close together, since the young mothers could rely on their own mothers to help out with provisioning and childcare. Hawkes and her colleagues believe that this change in life pattern may have been the key adaptation that allowed Homo to flourish.

The grandmother hypothesis has been one of the most productive and influential theories in anthropology in the past 10 years. Hence my surprise at seeing it covered in the Health section of the Times, rather than Science. I mean, sure, menopause is part of women’s health and all that, but it’s a little like putting a geology piece on the Weather page.

Curious, I decided to search the Times archive to see if any of their other articles on the grandmother hypothesis had been run on the Health page instead of Science.

Guess what?

There haven’t been any other articles on the grandmother hypothesis. Not a single one. There’s just the one piece from 1997 in the Women’s Health section, and now this piece from last week, also in the Health section. One of the most exciting current theories in anthropology and human evolution, and the Times isn’t interested.

What the Times is interested in, apparently, is ev-psych pseudo-science about how women evolved to like men with flashy sports cars because life in the Pleistocene was exactly like The Flintstones. They’ve got lots of stories like that. Real anthropology? Actual science that offers groundbreaking new views of human evolution? Not so much.

Okay, screw the Times!

In Part 2 I’ll talk more about the grandmother hypothesis, what it is, and the impact it’s had on studies of human evolution.

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Random Pedantry, Ev-Psych Bullshit on October 14, 2007, 8:29 pm EST

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Caveat: I’m under-slept and under the weather and I probably ought to be under the covers, so this post will suck. My brain is all sludgy and shit. Read on at your peril.

(And yes, goddamnit, even Spirits get sick. It’s a metaphysical thing. Deal.)

Okay, notice anything about this picture?

When I was a kid I was utterly enthralled with paleontology. I started out grooving on dinosaurs, but when Lucy was discovered (ah yes, I remember it well) my fascination switched to human origins. I wanted to be Donald Johanson, or at least Tim White; I wanted to go to Olduvai Gorge and dig up hominid fossils and make startling discoveries. Then I grew up and realized that squatting for hours in the sun picking at the dirt with a tiny toothbrush was not really my thing.

What annoyed me even as a kid, though, was the androcentric Early Man presentation of all the material. It was always man this and man that, and endless pictures showing an endless series of males — always males — marching into the future:

A visitor from Mars would be forgiven for thinking that somehow all of our ancestors were male. I think one reason I liked Lucy so much was because she was (probably) a she. Other female fossils had been found before, but she was the first to be named and popularized unapologetically as female. As Lucy, not as the Ape-Man of Afar.

As a young feminist I was confident that all the androcentric bullshit would soon fade away; it would have to. “Humankind” would replace “mankind,” people would talk about early humans instead of early man, and evolution illustrations would sometimes show female figures progressing from simian stoop to upright stride.

Some of that has happened, yes. A little bit. But not nearly enough. The image at the top of this post was published in 2005. “Meet the Folks,” it says. Wouldn’t you know, they’re all still male.

Last week I received my copy of The Last Human, the new book of hominid reconstructions sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History. Since I’ve been feeling too sick to work for the past couple of days, I decided to cozy up in bed and read my new book. Jesus Fucking Christ, I should have made sure to have a puke bucket with me.

I’m too sludgy-brained today to go into all the problems with the book, but let me share a little of my joy with you. The nomenclature the authors have chosen for the lifeways scenarios is just horrendous. (The lifeways scenarios are the little fictional “day in the life” episodes designed to show how each of the creatures lived.) All the hominids are referred to as man-apes, apemen, or men, depending on the genus. This does absolutely nothing for clarity and simply sounds offensive. They go with the relentless man terminology even when the text is referring to females, so you have female men, or an ape-man and a female ape-man sitting next to each other (paging Samantha Bee), or a group of men, no modifiers, even though the rest of the story indicates that some of the “men” in the group are female.

But what’s even more bizarre is the chapter on Homo floresiensis. Back when H. floresiensis was discovered, all the big media outlets ran with the same illustration:

The only problem was, the type specimen was a female. “Flo,” the discoverers called her. The papers should have run with a reconstruction of a female H. floresiensis; that would have made sense. Flo, the little lady of Flores; Flo the hobbit. What’s wrong with that? Why was it necessary to transform her into a male? Do even prehistoric females have cooties?

In The Last Human, the H. floresiensis reconstruction is, thankfully, of a female, which is unsurprising given that these reconstructions are advertised to be as realistic as latex and human imagination will allow. Here’s a picture.
But dig it: the lifeways scenario they include in the text isn’t about her at all. Instead, the scenario is entirely about a male Homo floresiensis. In fact, the whole thing is unmistakably based on that bogus illustration that ran in all the papers, the one with the manly little dude carrying a giant rat. We are treated to the (imaginary) thoughts of this (imaginary) mature male as he goes about his day: catching the rat and slinging it over his shoulder, thinking about women (whom he regards as possessions that can be stolen), about his sons, about his mighty deeds as a mighty hunter — in other words, your basic 1960s-era male anthropologist’s Caveman Fantasy masquerading as science.

“Flo” — the real fossil, the little lady of Flores — is nowhere on the scene. I guess she’s one of those possessions waiting back in the cave for Mighty Man to bring home the rat.

2007 and they’re still doing this.

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Random Pedantry on September 26, 2007, 12:08 pm EST

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A friendly reader has asked my opinion on yesterday’s Salon piece about the womenpriests movement in the Catholic Church:

The hierarchy insists that the church has a constant tradition of ordaining only men. But what about Junia the apostle and Phoebe the deacon, in the Epistle of St. Paul to Romans? What about those tomb inscriptions for “Leta presbitera” and “Guilia Runa, woman priest”? What about Bishop Theodora, über-apostle Mary Magdalene…?

To which the diehards respond by putting their fingers in their ears and saying, “I can’t hear you”:

Not surprisingly, church spokespeople vigorously denounce the movement for women’s ordination. William Donahue of the Catholic League has dismissed the ordained women out of hand and declared their supporters to be “mad feminists” from “the asylum.” In an e-mail response to my specific questions, director of communications Robert Lockwood called the rich concrete evidence of women’s ordination “archaeological myth-making of the Da Vinci Code variety” and “hardly relevant.”

Aside from the fact that members of the batshit-crazy ultra-conservative Catholic League are not “church spokespeople,” this pretty well captures the controversy. So who’s right?

The pro-women’s ordination people, of course. Modern scholars recognize now that early Christianity had a remarkably radical gender-egalitarian component. (Well, as much as anything can be “recognized” about the lost past; what I’m going to say here represents the best historical reconstruction.) Probably Jesus’s core followers consisted of his brother James, Mary Magdalene, some guy named Cephas/Peter, and a few others — possibly more women than men. (The quaint notion of the Twelve Apostles is considered a late invention of the Gospel writers, created to provide a match with the Twelve Tribes of Israel.) At this remove nobody can really be sure what Jesus was about, but something that comes through pretty strongly in the earliest relics of his movement is an extreme leveling of traditional distinctions: between rich and poor, between male and female, between Jew and gentile.

For quite awhile after Jesus’s death women continued to be treated as equals — Paul refers to women as apostles, and their names are prominent in the fledgling religion. When the inevitable splintering of the movement began, different trends emerged: certain groups reverted to a more traditionally Jewish male-dominated structure, while others continued to embrace a philosophy of gender equality. There was, by the way, quite a bit of divergence in early Christianity, with many competing sects and great disagreement as to what the whole thing meant, who Jesus was, how followers should behave, and so forth.

Towards the end of the first century, the mainstreaming of the religion began in earnest. It had become clear that, pace Jesus and early Paul, the world was not actually going to end anytime soon, and so the most prominent Christian groups began shedding their radicalism and accommodating their religion to life in the Roman Empire. That’s really what spelled the downfall of women in the church, because gender equality was simply too radical for the mainstream culture. It had to go — think the Mormons jettisoning polygamy as the price of joining American society.

In the second century there continued to be a plethora of competing Christian sects, but the gender-egalitarian groups were becoming more and more marginalized. The mainstream church fathers, who strongly favored male supremacy, were positioning themselves as the voice of orthodoxy, and they did not hesitate to criticize all other forms of Christianity as “heretical.”* The war continued on paper, with the canonical gospels and the letters of Paul being re-worked to downplay women’s roles. Virtually all of the anti-woman passages in Paul are late forgeries created to justify the new policy of subordinating women. Other texts were also edited — and paintings even effaced — to remove the evidence of female apostles.

By the time Christianity was adopted as the state religion of the Roman Empire, 300 years after Jesus’s death, the evidence of the early days had been sufficiently suppressed that the few remaining egalitarian sects could be safely ridiculed as freakish heretics. Or as William Donahue says, “mad feminists” from “the asylum.”

*There was more at stake than just the role of women. The struggle to define what was “orthodox” and what was “heretical” encompassed many issues, ranging from the profound to the prosaic.

Posted by Violet under Random Pedantry, Godbags, Religion on August 1, 2006, 2:39 am EST

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At long last! Part 1 on Christianity and Part 2 on Islam were ages ago — the Planck era, I think — and I apologize for the unaccountable delay in delivering Part 3. Let’s just blame it on alien abduction and leave it at that.

Part 3 is much longer than Parts 1 and 2, largely because I feel obligated after such a long wait to offer a little more than bullet points. Actually it’s too long — way, way too long, despite several attempts to edit it down to blogular dimensions and remove academic language. At any rate, what I’m focusing on here is actually the origin and history of Israel up to the period when the books of the Bible began to be written. The subsequent development of Judaism as a religion I’ll leave aside. (And I beg the indulgence of those who know this subject well; I’m writing here for a general audience.)

You know, of course, the biblical version of events: The patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob). The Twelve Tribes (descended from the twelve sons of Jacob). The bondage in Egypt and the Exodus. Moses and the Ten Commandments. The Conquest. The rise of the monarchy — Saul, David, Solomon — followed by the split into two separate kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The fall of Israel to Assyria; the fall of Judah and Babylonian Captivity.

Of that sequence of events, only the last sentence and a half corresponds to what modern scholars consider history. Everything before that is legend, with the transition from folklore to fact occurring somewhere during the monarchy.

This should not be surprising, since none of the Bible was actually written until the 7th century B.C.E., shortly before the little kingdom of Judah was conquered by Babylon. In other words, the Bible came to life as the last gasp of a people, a nation, on the edge of oblivion. The priests and scribes who wrote and compiled these books were deliberately fashioning a sacred mythology to unify the nation, and they pulled in everything floating in the cultural consciousness — folklore, hero legends, etiological myths, scraps of historical annals from the court, even their own Temple regulations. Like all pre-modern people, they created a simplified fantasy-version of history that matched their own contemporary sensibilities of how things must have been. Most particularly, they retrojected their own monotheistic worship of Yahweh deep into the past, when in fact that was a very late development.

It was this literary masterstroke that ensured that the people of Israel (really just Judah by that time) would maintain a strong sense of themselves as an ethnic, religious entity, despite the inevitable death of their nation-state. It’s a remarkable story they put together. Most of it just isn’t true.

On to the deconstruction!

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Violet under Random Pedantry, Religion, Recommended on May 19, 2006, 4:30 am EST

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Over in the Today’s lesson thread, which drifted into a discussion of Dworkin, rape, and male dominance, Mandos made the following comment:

Frankly, whoever rocks the cradle rules the world. Whoever has control over reproduction has a lot of power. Under conditions of noncoercion, women have control over reproduction and hence massive social power simply due to that fact. Men are necessarily peripheral in at least some subtle way. The only society I know of in which marriage does not at all take place (the Moro?) demonstrates this relatively well—as well-off or badly off as it may be, men are still somehow psychologically secondary due to the lack of social control over reproduction.

Did it take rape to create a system in which men are no longer peripheral? This to me is the disturbing question.

What we’re getting to here is the origin of male dominance, which is one of my favorite questions. I’ve been noodling over it for most of my life. What Mandos is saying, I think, is that motherhood gives women automatic power that renders men somewhat peripheral in the natural order of things. And indeed, four out of five anthropologists agree (that’s a joke; actually I think most anthropologists agree). But does that lead to male dominance? And is male dominance inevitable?

To answer the last question first: no, male dominance is not inevitable. And several decades of anthropological work have made it possible to sort out the social conditions under which it arises.

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Posted by Violet under Feminist Theory, Random Pedantry, Gender Issues, Recommended on May 7, 2006, 12:19 am EST

156 Comments »

You’ve probably seen this, as it was making the rounds of the blogosphere last week: it’s the sculpture of Britney Spears giving birth by “shock artist” Daniel Edwards. Edwards specializes in prankish celebrity art, and no doubt he dubbed this sculpture a “Monument to Pro-Life” as a ploy for maximum publicity. I haven’t been able to find an explanation for why Edwards put Charlize Theron’s face on what’s supposed to be a sculpture of Britney Spears, but maybe the guy is a better publicity hound than artist.

So you’ve seen that — but have you seen this? It’s what popped into my mind as soon as I saw the Britney piece:

It’s probably the most famous parturient-woman sculpture in the world, at least if you’re interested in Neolithic archaeology. It’s a mother goddess from Catal Hoyuk in Turkey, and it dates from the 7th millennium B.C.

The elements of the two sculptures are similar, despite the vast differences in tone. Both depict pregnant women in the act of giving birth. The Catal Hoyuk piece shows the newborn’s head (a rather shapeless lump) emerging from between its mother’s thighs. The Britney sculpture allegedly shows her baby’s head crowning, though there don’t seem to be any rear-view photographs to verify that. The animal motif is also there: Britney is posing on a bearskin rug, while the Catal Hoyuk goddess is flanked by two lionesses.

But it’s the differences that are telling. The reason Britney’s emerging infant is visible is because she has her ass up in the air in a submissive sexual position, whereas the Catal Hoyuk goddess is seated majestically on a throne. Britney’s bearskin rug supposedly symbolizes her pinup past, while the Catal Hoyuk lionesses are a common ancient motif indicating royalty and power over nature. Britney is depicted as being sexily slender, showing not even an ounce of pregnancy plumpness. The Catal Hoyuk goddess is corpulent, representing her boundless fertility to nurture life.

It’s interesting how things have changed, isn’t it?

P.S. Thanks to TxFeminist for the Britney link.

Posted by Violet under Random Pedantry, Gender Issues on March 28, 2006, 6:20 am EST

8 Comments »

That’s the headline on a piece in the Boston Globe about how the Mormons are all upset over the new HBO show, “Big Love.” (Plot: Renegade Mormon husband has three wives. “I Dream of Jeannie” times three!)

Anyway, the poor old crazy Mormons are worried people will get the wrong idea about their religion. They want people to know the truth! So, as a public service to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, I thought I’d help them get the truth out. Here are a few tenets of their faith:

• Native Americans are all descended from the ancient Israelites, who immigrated to the continent in 600 B.C. in wooden submarines. Before that, the place was unpopulated.
• God lives on a planet that orbits a star called Kolob. Apparently God is a flesh-and-blood person, a high-achieving former human who reached god status by obeying the dictates of his god.
• Once Mormon men get to the highest level of heaven, they too become gods and get their own planets to rule over. They also get harems and can procreate as many spirit children as they like.
• Mormon women are not eligible for heaven unless they are married. Whether they actually get to heaven seems to be entirely up to their husbands, who have to pronounce a secret magical formula to bring their wives over to the spirit side once they die. (I guess if the wives die first their spirits hang around in limbo or something.)
• Mormons who have been enrolled in the Temple are required to wear magic underwear (called “garments”) at all times. The garments can only be removed for bathing, sex, and sports. According to Mormon folklore, the garments have been known to protect the wearer from all sorts of bodily harm — even bullets.

Pretty nutty, huh? And there’s lots more. It was hard for me to pick which parts to highlight; it’s all comedy gold. And since Mormonism is less than 200 years old, it’s extremely easy to look back and see what Joseph Smith was up to when he invented this rot.

Basically, Smith was the L. Ron Hubbard of his day, an imaginative faker who managed to parlay his fantasies into a religious following. He started out as a treasure-hunter and storyteller, and struck pay dirt when he combined the two by claiming he’d dug up some gold plates with the Book of Mormon inscribed upon them in ancient Egyptian. No one ever saw these gold plates but him, and Smith spent several years “translating” them through his hat. Literally, through his hat: He would sit behind a blanket and pretend to look at the gold plates, while his amanuensis sat on the other side. (This of course kept the scribe from hipping to the fact that there weren’t really any gold plates.) Smith would then “translate” by talking through his hat, which contained magic translating stones. I know, I know.

The result (the Book of Mormon) is an obvious hodge-podge of ideas current in 1820s America — speculation about Native Americans, theories of the Lost Tribes of Israel, fascination with ancient Egypt, and Universalist theology. It’s full of historical impossibilities and written in a style that obviously (and ungrammatically) attempts to mimic the English of the King James Bible.

Just as with L. Ron Hubbard, many of Joseph Smith’s contemporaries realized that he was a huckster. It didn’t take long before exposés were published showing that Smith had plagiarized his ideas from other writers. Many, perhaps most, of the early converts faded away. The hardcore believers who remained formed the nucleus of a cult that is now 12 million strong. Which just goes to show: it only takes a handful of rubes to found a successful church.

Based on how Scientology is growing, I expect in another hundred years (or less!) it will be as big as the Mormon church is now. Maybe bigger. The only reason Mormonism is more respectable than Scientology is because it’s older. The longer a religion is around — no matter how wacky it is — the more acceptable it becomes. And as its origins fade into the misty past, it becomes harder and harder to see the creaky, crazy, cultish beginnings.

It’s worth remembering that when we think back to the origins of other revealed religions — like Christianity. Christianity must have seemed hilariously nutty to contemporary Romans: everybody gets to live forever if they just believe a crucified Jew rose from the dead? Why? How the fuck does that work? Makes about as much sense as talking through a magic hat.

(Which reminds me — I never did finish my series on “Religions Evolve.” I posted Part 1 and Part 2, and then The Deluge came (here and here) and my little blog was overrun. After the storm subsided it’s not entirely clear what kept me from posting Part 3, but one theory that’s been gaining traction lately is that I forgot. Sigh. I’ll try to fix that this week.)

Technorati Tags: Mormons, LDS, Big Love

Posted by Violet under Random Pedantry, Godbags, Religion on March 13, 2006, 7:33 am EST

67 Comments »

Updated 2/10/06: now with a better illustration of the new dinosaur, courtesy Jyllands-Posten.

Isn’t this a gorgeous animal? Sometimes, when the world is too much with us — late and soon, getting and spending, hating cartoons — it’s a relief to plunge one’s head back into the Happy World of Science. This beautiful creature, as I’m sure you’ve read in the news, is the 160-million-year-old crested dinosaur discovered in northwest China. It’s thought to be an early relative of T. Rex.

It’s a little known fact, but back when Dr. Socks was a young footlet, she considered a career in paleontology. Alas, that career option was dropped along with archaeology when she discovered that she didn’t really want to spend 15 hours a day squatting in the dust under a blazing sun. But thank heavens for those who do!

Back when the dinosaur/bird controversy was raging, I was firmly on the side of the angels and Bob Bakker. I loved the idea of renaming the whole class Dino-Aves. That hasn’t caught on, but at least the Class Aves (birds) is now commonly included in the Super-order Dinosauria. Taxonomy in this area remains contentious and kind of head-splittingly complex.

Of course, Bob Bakker is most famous for his argument that dinosaurs were actually warm-blooded. It took years for that idea to get traction, but consensus has come around to seeing at least the therapods as warm-blooded — especially feather-covered little guys like this new one.

I’m just waiting for some fundamentalist Bible thumper to announce that these fossils were planted by the devil to lead the faithful astray. Then maybe someone will draw a cartoon of the dinosaur with Mohammed’s head on it, and we’ll have nuclear war.

Posted by Violet under Random Pedantry, Various and Sundry, Cartoons on February 10, 2006, 12:39 am EST

36 Comments »

John Lewis Gaddis has a new book out called The Cold War: A New History, in which he eulogizes Reagan as a visionary and the winner of the Cold War. Salon’s review of the book offers the following tidbit:

When John Lewis Gaddis, a history professor and expert on the conflict, teaches Yale undergraduates about the Cold War, “hardly any of them remember any of the events I’m describing.” His students, he reports, “have very little sense of how the Cold War started, what it was about or why it ended in the way that it did.”

Exactly. And that’s why revisionists like Gaddis are able to get away with this crap.

• Reagan didn’t win the Cold War; if anything, he prolonged it by years. Gorbachev began pushing for reform in the early 80s, and Reagan’s reactionary bluster actually gave the Kremlin hardliners ammunition to maintain the status quo.

• Reagan didn’t beat the Soviets by outspending them; the Soviets weren’t trying to keep up with us at all. They had long since abandoned the arms race, betting (accurately) that there was almost no chance of a hot war with the U.S.

I was at the IMF in the early 90s, working with the Russians and the newly independent republics. Those folks would have laughed their asses off if somebody had told them that Ronnie Reagan was responsible for the fall of the Soviet Union. When I first heard Reagan referred to (on TV) as the guy who had “won the Cold War,” I almost choked to death on my coffee. It was Republican revisionism, pure and simple.

As Goebbels said, if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth. Think of that whenever somebody tells you that Ronald Reagan won the Cold War.

Posted by Violet under Random Pedantry on January 28, 2006, 1:33 am EST

6 Comments »

In “Religions Evolve, Part 1,” I offered up 10 random truths about Christianity. In that post, I listed 10 well-accepted conclusions about Christianity that have emerged from the past two centuries of scholarship. Now I’ll try to do the same for Islam — except I’ve got 17 random truths, and the scholarship is more controversial.

Modern critical study of Islam is in its infancy. The techniques scholars have used to analyze the Hebrew and Christian bibles are only now being brought to bear on the Koran, with extreme resistance from Muslims. Modern historical analysis of the origins of Islam is equally new, and equally resisted. Islam is basically where Christianity was in the 19th century – critical scholarship is beginning, but the work is fiercely opposed by the Islamic establishment and virtually unknown to the faithful masses.

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Posted by Violet under Random Pedantry, Religion, Recommended on January 23, 2006, 8:14 pm EST

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P.Z. Myers is lamenting that a new myth-busting documentary from Richard Dawkins isn’t available here in Godbag America. Seeing as I’m a random pedant with an interest in this sort of thing, I’ve decided to offer up 10 Random Truths about Christianity. Next up: Islam, and then Judaism!

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Posted by Violet under Random Pedantry, Religion on January 10, 2006, 4:14 pm EST

21 Comments »

Yesterday afternoon I was reading H.L. Mencken’s dispatches from the Scopes trial. Yesterday evening I was reading Ibn al-Rawandi on the historicity of Islam. Note these two passages:

H.L. Mencken on the Christian fundamentalist mindset:

“[These] people are simply unable to imagine a man who rejects the literal authority of the Bible. The most they can conjure up, straining until they are red in the face, is a man who is in error about the meaning of this or that text. Thus one accused of heresy among them is like one accused of boiling his grandmother to make soap in Maryland.”

Frithjof Schuon (quoted in al-Rawandi) on the Islamic fundamentalist mindset:

“..the average Muslim [has] a curious tendency to believe that non-Muslims either know that Islam is the truth and reject it out of pure obstinacy, or else are simply ignorant of it and can be converted by elementary explanations; that anyone should be able to oppose Islam with a good conscience quite exceeds the Muslim’s imagination, precisely because Islam coincides in his mind with the irresistible logic of things.”

It’s a commonplace to note that fundamentalists everywhere are siblings under the skin. I was just amused by coming across these two passages so close together.

Posted by Violet under Random Pedantry, Godbags on January 9, 2006, 1:36 pm EST

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