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The exact definitions of common pejoratives, shorn of their origins in metonymy and synecdoche, is often a puzzling matter. What is the difference between a prick and an asshole? We know the difference in the original, physical context. But in practical meaning? Do we even mean anything more precise than bad person
?
Some non-metonymous common words are also hard, in practice, to distinguish. Do you hate So-and-So, or merely loathe him? People are often vague about their word usage in cases of hatred and loathing.
Let me offer a simple solution. You might wish to harm (perhaps even kill) someone you hate; you simply wish to avoid someone you loathe.
And, in my usage (when I bother using the terms, which is rare), prick is someone you are likely to hate; asshole someone you loathe. A prick forcibly enters a situation and upsets it; an asshole merely stinks up the place, and ain't pretty.
To engage in euphemism, and replace the references to the original synecdoche, a prick is someone who bursts a bubble. He deliberately causes harm, even if to something so ephemeral as a good mood, a bubble.
Alas, I can't do that bit of euphemizing with asshole
; that's a pretty narrowly indicative pejorative, pointing to a body part with no synonyms you can play with, so to speak. They're all anus, bunghole, etc.
Were we, like birds, reptiles, and monotremes, to have only one orifice for expelling urine and feces — that is, had humans a cloaca — this would not likely even be a problem.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | April 2, 2006 | permalink
Unmitigated Mercantalism,p. 148
Years ago, working at a company that provided certain specific Internet services, I had access to the passwords clients used to access their accounts. I needed it for troubleshooting, and never abused the privilege. Of course, it was a bad system in that passwords are supposed to be completely private, but it was the system we had.
The thing I noticed most were the common numbers used by the clients as passwords.
The most common number, even more common than 1776 (the official beginning year of the First American Revolt of Secession) or 1492 (the year Columbus discovered America)? 1066, the year of the Norman Conquest.
I was pleased to discover this, pleased for the cultural knowledge evident behind this artifact. Especially pleased since several of these clients I knew to be of African-American descent, and thus having no obvious connection to the events themselves.
But this is not a case of cultural imperialism. It's a case of recognizing cultural significance. These men, even those of black skin color, were and are speakers of the English language, and 1066 is a very important year in the development of the English language. (Though not as important as you might expect; but that's another matter.)
Incidentally, I've never cared much for the name Norman,
but I prefer it to Norm, and had I been named Norman, I would likely have adopted the word Conquest
as my last name.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | April 2, 2006 | permalink
adaptationto the requisites of perfect social life, when all men would be free because all would be altruistic. But things bad in themselves, such as the coercive state, are not wholly bad because they both express an imperfect human nature and help to socialize it. Spencer is thus able to explain phenomena that earlier radical moralists had merely condemned.
Social Darwinism Herbert Spencer See: The story of man
A holiday greeting from The Economist has just come to my attention. Entitled The story of man
and written (as is usual for that august journal) anonymously, it is about modern Darwinism, and the oh-so-rosy picture it paints of humanity. But what it mainly is a series of outrageous falsities about Herbert Spencer, the true father of Social Darwinism, though not of the doctrine described under that moniker by the author of the Economist's holiday essay.
What's said about Herbert Spencer in the opening shows that the author has never read Spencer, at least not his sociology, not his ethics, not his writing on population, not . . . well, let's start over, from the beginning:
IN THOSE parts of the planet that might once have been described asChristendom,this week marks the season of peace on Earth and goodwill towards men. A nice idea in a world more usually thought of as seasoned by the survival of the fittest. But goodwill and collaboration are as much part of the human condition as ill-will and competition. And that was a puzzle to 19th-century disciples of Charles Darwin, such as Herbert Spencer.
Poppycock.
survival of the fittestin a discussion of human population in 1852 (the actual coinage came later), and was a committed Lamarckian before Darwin published word one on the subject. He defended evolution as
The Development Hypothesisabout that same time, wrote a book on the evolution of nervous systems and the mind, called The Principles of Psychology, in 1854 (later revised and expanded), and two years before Wallace and Darwin became infamous, wrote a precis of his evolutionary position, called
Progress: Its Law and Cause.
the survival of the fittestwas all that was necessary to explain the slow evolutionary advance of organisms in their developing environments. Well, Spencer never quite bought that idea. When Weismann broached natural selection theory as all that was necessary to explain damn near everything, Spencer balked. He became, in effect, the first neo-Lamarckian. (There remain biologists who hold the notion, though they are in the minority, and mainly work on epigenetics. Spencer should be given no credit for their work, of course.)
The charges in The Economist, if not borne of ignorance, are a lie. They could hardly be further from the truth.
It was Spencer, an early contributor to The Economist, who invented that poisoned phrase,survival of the fittest. He originally applied it to the winnowing of firms in the harsh winds of high-Victorian capitalism, but when Darwin's masterwork,On the Origin of Species, was published, he quickly saw the parallel with natural selection and transferred his bon mot to the process of evolution.
Spencer did not apply the notion first to the winnowing of firms
— it's a good guess, but it's just not true. He applied it, let's be frank, to human beings in competition for sustenance, and showed how this led to increased coöperation, which led to . . . well, let me let J.D.Y. Peel explain:
A Theory of Population(1852) put forward the view that population pressure, far from being the obstacle to human perfectibility, is its only guarantee, since it alone forces organisms to be fit to survive and encourage more elaborate forms of coöperation — a truly Godwinian revenge on Malthus. J.D.Y. Peel, Introduction, Herbert Spencer on Social Evolution (University of Chicago Press, 1972)
After reviewing the Malthusian debates, it is apparent to me that Spencer's take best tracks human experience since that time, not Malthusian ones, and certainly not Marxian ones. The hopeful view, the view about increased complexity of coöperation, is, in fact, what has happened. If there is to be a general immiseration of mankind, it will not be the result of population pressures. (Socialism, allegedly designed to prevent the immiseration of the masses, has so far been the best method found to ensure said immiseration.)
As a result, he became one of the band of philosophers known as social Darwinists. Capitalists all,
At this point, one could, on principle, stop reading. The writer knows nothing of the intellectual currents of 19th century Britain, much less of Europe and America. There were many socialists and imperialists and anti-capitalists who developed Social Darwinist
strains of their ideas. This is clear even in anti-capitalist Hofstadter. Yes, in America the laissez-faire ideas were dominant. They were not so dominant elsewhere (like in Germany), and appeals to Darwin's mantle were quite common, even amongst socialist. And didn't Marx himself tried to make some connections between his materialistic historicism and Darwinian evolution? (The parallels were not lost on many of his followers, in any case.)
they took what they thought were the lessons of Darwin's book and applied them to human society. Their hard-hearted conclusion, of which a 17th-century religious puritan might have been proud, was that people got what they deserved — albeit that the criterion of desert was genetic, rather than moral.
Genetic? Genetics did not become part of Darwinian thought until the early 20th century. Oh, well, no biggie, I guess.
The fittest not only survived, but prospered. Moreover, the social Darwinists thought that measures to help the poor were wasted, since such people were obviously unfit and thus doomed to sink.
Well, there was an element of mistrust of helping people too much. But Spencer wrote a whole, huge section of his Principles of Ethics on the importance of charitable aid (a form of positive beneficence,
in his terminology), and he was often vexed when people misquoted him on this subject. He did not think it made sense to let people starve. He also did not think it made sense to force other people to help them live without ever having to work. Spencer tried to strike a decent, workable middle ground, a solution proportionate to the problem, not one of hysterically induced overkill (socialism or the welfare state).
Sadly, the slur stuck. For 100 years Darwinism was associated with a particularly harsh and unpleasant view of the world and, worse, one that was clearly not true — at least, not the whole truth. People certainly compete, but they collaborate, too. They also have compassion for the fallen and frequently try to help them, rather than treading on them. For this sort of behaviour,On the Origin of Specieshad no explanation. As a result, Darwinism had to tiptoe round the issue of how human society and behaviour evolved. Instead, the disciples of a second 19th-century creed, Marxism, dominated academic sociology departments with their cuddly collectivist ideas — even if the practical application of those ideas has been even more catastrophic than social Darwinism was.
Yes, the slur stuck because socialists and leftists made it stick. They were relentless in their lies and overstatements about what Spencer (in particular) advocated. It stuck because hacks like The Economist's anonymous writer blithely write as if their prejudices or whatever rumors they've accumulated determined what their opponents believed, rather than actually bothering to read them to learn what it is they actually wrote.
The new direction in Darwinism is barely new at all. In fact, to me it looks almost like a Spencerian revival. Even our anonymous contributor suggests as much:
The new social Darwinists (those who see society itself, rather than the savannah or the jungle, as thenaturalenvironment in which humanity is evolving and to which natural selection responds) have not abandoned Spencer altogether, of course. But they have put a new spin on him. The ranking by wealth of which Spencer so approved is but one example of a wider tendency for people to try to out-do each other.
But there's a problem here. Where in Spencer does he portray ranking by wealth as some sort of ultimate standard? I can't find it. Spencer, in old age, was asked what American culture lacked. And what it lacked, Spencer said, was the gospel of relaxation.
People who only worked to get richer and richer, up the scale of the social ladder, were missing out on the point of it all: pleasure, happiness. And relaxation was as much a part of the deal of life as was work. Though a financial success late in his career, I see no evidence that he worshipped at the altar of the almighty dollar — or pound.
I'm even skeptical of this:
Human nature is not, to use another of Spencer's favourite phrases (though one he borrowed from Tennyson, his poetical contemporary), red in tooth and claw, and societies built around the idea that it is are doomed to early failure.
I've read quite a lot of Spencer's writings, and do not remember him quoting this phrase. Maybe he did. But I've my doubts. The ratio of error to truth in this essay, at least regarding Spencer, is so high that I wouldn't be surprised if this, too, were something the author merely made up to sound good.
But any suggestion that Spencer, an anti-imperialist whose prime sociological category was between militant and industrial societies, was a proponent of red-in-tooth-and-claw
social life must be resisted as the very opposite of the truth.
That the magazine who employed Spencer for years would, 150 years later, print such inaccuracies about him, is a late-in-the-game twist of the knife. Spencer has been ill-treated by scholars, most of whom, after all, were leftists who rarely bothered to read the work of the man they hated. Writers for The Economist, however, should have no such excuse. The editors, I hope, have been shamed by many scholarly letters of rebuke.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | April 3, 2006 | permalink | ThinkingMatters
Darwinism Herbert Spencer See: The Man vs. The Economist
Jesse Walker blogged my attack on The Economist, yesterday, defending Herbert Spencer from the unreading heirs of his former employer.
One anonymous Reason Hit and Run reader criticized me, in turn:
Virkkala overstates his case. He complains that the Economist writer implied that Darwin came before Spencer because he the article says that Spencer was adiscipleof Darwin, but the article explicitly says that some of Spencer's work was released before Origin of Species. Virkkala might argue that the article uses the word disciple improperly, but the author of the article clearly has essentially the same opinion of the relationship between Spencer and Darwin as Virkkala.
Hmmm. Just a word usage disagreement? Calling Spencer Darwin's disciple is something I'd never do. And it's not just a question of priority. Spencer's ideas were distinct. And his approach to doing science was nowhere near as careful as Darwin's, let's admit it! So I just don't see a disciple relationship there.
But on matters of priority, Spencer is surely to be seen as before Darwin, and doesn't that preclude discipleship? How do I overstate the case of Spencer's non-discipleship? I wouldn't call Alfred Russel Wallace Darwin's disciple; he was a co-discoverer of natural selection as a mechanism for evolutionary change. So why call Spencer, who was (a) well-known as a proponent of evolution as a fact to be explained, prior to Darwin's breakthrough work, (b) a precursor to natural selection theory, having used it in human population theory, and (c) never, in any case, an adherent to natural selection theory as adequate to explain evolution (always insisting that it was only
a partial explanation — which Darwin, too, admitted, but which Spencer argued for more forcefully).
To call Spencer a disciple of anyone is to misconstrue his originality and his personal psychology. He was his own master. (This is not to say he was right. He was independent and distinct. That's enough for the current debate.)
But there's something else at stake here. Spencer is often called (as the author in The Economist did call him) a Social Darwinist. There's something very dubious about that designation, something that shows a deep ignorance about the filiation of evolutionary ideas in the 19th century. Contemporary sociologist Jonathan Turner has even argued that Darwin could be, with greater propriety, called a biological Spencerian
than Spencer a social Darwinist
!
This sort of argumentation, however, only cleans up from previous intellectual messes. It doesn't get us far enough. We need to consider the issues that Darwin and Spencer brought to our attention, reconsider the theories and evidence that they advanced, and then compare them to further evidence and distinct hypotheses.
The reasons I keep bringing up Spencer? In part because some of his ideas are surprisingly good; also because there's been a whole set of taboos directed against Spencer and some of the ideas associated with him, and those taboos must be broken, allowing the ideas to be freely debated; and (well, confess it) it's fun to take a much-abused curmudgeon from a distant time and use knowledge of his writings to beat know-nothings over the head for their ignorance, ignorance that could have easily been avoided had they resisted fashion and actually read this same, much-maligned philosopher, psychologist, and sociologist, Herbert Spencer.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | April 4, 2006 | permalink | ThinkingMatters
development recycling See: Lower Columbia Economic Development Council
As far as I can tell, it's the job of economic development councils
to increase the reliance of regions on government, mainly by substituting private and community investment with higher-level government subsidies. But, if my local EDC's slogan proves accurate, there may be something more ominous going on!
Welcome to the Lower Columbia River in scenic Southwest Washington...
...where you become part of our natural resources.
Travelers, beware. We mulch.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | April 5, 2006 | permalink | ThinkingMatters
philosophical anarchism individualism See: The True Constitution of Government
I've been extra-busy with work, so not blogging. But today I came across something that resonated well with some other things I'd been thinking about, so I thought I'd put it down. This is the thesis of Stephen Pearl Andrews, an individualist anarchist from 19th century America:
Protestantism, Democracy, and Socialism are identical in the assertion of the Supremacy of the Individual,—a dogma essentially contumacious, revolutionary, and antagonistic to the basic principles of all the older institutions of society, which make the Individual subordinate and subject to the Church, to the State, and to Society respectively. Not only is this supremacy or SOVEREIGNTY OF THE INDIVIDUAL, a common element of all three of these great modern movements, but I will make the still more sweeping assertion that it is substantially the whole of those movements. It is not merely a feature, as I have just denominated it, but the living soul itself, the vital energy, the integral essence or being of them all.
Now, this trilogy of social movements is obviously ill-selected. The idea of the sovereignty of the individual is central to liberalism, not democracy, and certainly not to socialism. But the reader may determine the validity of that part of his thesis by reading the rest of Andrews's work.
But what about Protestantism? He has a point. In rebelling against priest-ridden Catholicism, and its general hierachical view of society that the Catholic Church promoted, Protestant Christians embraced a grand entelechy: individualism. The individual is the focus. In Christianity, it's the individual's relationship to God that counts; not his or her relationship to a priestly intercessor. The only intercessor is Christ.
Or so the doctrine of the priesthood of believers runs.
Pursewarden, in The Alexandria Quartet, somewhere refers to himself as a Protestant, purely in the sense that I protest
(quoting from memory). And in doing so, he asserts his own sovereignty.
The secular translation of this Protesting attitude is intellectual sovereignty, the kind of doubt that is encouraged by not accepting any authority. A person must understand something to learn it. While Protestantism argued for the assertion of individual faith, intellectual sovereignty, concealed in the great intellectual rebellion, became an attack on faith as such.
Of course, we all accept things as gamblers do, on risk; yes, we depend on others to understand and exlain and defend and even prove some beliefs. As Daniel Dennett recently explained, most of us believe in E=mc2, but few of us really understand it, and only a few understand it well.
But the sovereign intellect is one that insists on what terms these gambling beliefs are to be wagered, and which other beliefs require evidence and complete compreshension.
I have been a sovereign intellect, good or bad, since the day in third grade I became ashamed of my parroting of a nonsensical story I'd heard from my elders about dinosaurs. After that day, I'd never let others' authority over me determine my beliefs. I would set others standards.
After sovereignty of intellect, there comes sovereignty in the world, practical soveriegnty, where one owns oneself,
takes responsibility for one's actions, and has a large scope of freedom in which to act, among other sovereigns.
I see this idea as only somewhat implicit in democracy, but very much so in liberalism, and not at all in socialism (which I see as a theory of collective plunder and bullying; there's no good in it). The idea of the sovereignty of the individual is not socialism, of course, but individualism. It is the seed from which libertarianism has bloomed.
One could argue that sovereign individualists are egoists, but I won't; I think that a misuse of language. And it raises a bevy of unecessarily vicious argumentation and paints the sovereignty of individuals into too dangerous and negative a light.
Better to use the nearly synonymous terms self-ownership and self-government, to very related concepts that are, even in the extensive liberatarian literature on the subject, rarely integrated or related.
One could further argue that sovereign individuals are not men, as such, but overmen, supermen. Nietzsche argued that mere humans are so unimpressive in their herdishness, foolishness, and cowering fear that they are basically incapable of sovereignty. Only a few are; those who do transform themselves to the higher level are no longer human, all-too-human.
I doubt this. I suspect that most people treated as sovereigns become capable of running their lives. Even a moron is capable of basic wisdom. And so, too, a welfare addict of today could become a responsible worker of tomorrow, body and intellect allowing.
And it's not just welfare addicts who are today's last men.
There will always be some who are, in the words of Aristotle, natural slaves, people who must be run
by others. I say, let them be, and find whatever voluntary relationship allows them to recoil from individual responsibility. Marriage does for most. Cultic religion does well for some others. Abject failure will be the course of others.
And, of these, we may shed a tear. But let's not bend over backwards for them. Those incapable of running their lives must be helped by those who love them, or who like running others' lives. For the rest of us, we'll just leave them alone.
But it's not just the religious or the marrieds or the people who have guardians ad litem who fail to be sovereign individuals. Lots of people avoid autonomy. Every one of us do, in some ways. (Walter Kauffmann's Without Guilt and Justice is quite good on this, really excellent dealing with the many ways people find to avoid intellectual, moral and other forms of personal autonomy.)
For the most part, I prefer dealing with people who are sovereigns of their own little domains. And if I treat a perfect fool as if sovereign, well, that's a useful fiction in a free society, no more damaging to my integrity than my answer of Great!
to the banal imposition of How are you?
I am often not great, or even fine.
But I may be, soon.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | April 12, 2006 | permalink |
The japeries of Marcel Duchamps and similar champs of dada and the like have called our attention to the importance of the frame.
They've done so, often, by framing artifacts of industrial or everyday life rather than fine artwork. Because of this, they present a challenge. Because of the preponderance of the absurd and the inartful, many of these framings do not constitute fine art. But as zenlike koans, these framings remind us of something very important. Artistic works are framed as such, and that framing is important. How important?
I am sure there's a great deal of discussion in the postmodernist academic world about this subject. I've read little of it. So what follows is not a scholarly discussion, but a critical common-sense one. Here we go:
Many of my friends proclaim that this or that work, or performance, in art, is ridiculous.
Often they proclaim this of something I enjoy immensely. I try to understand why they judge this or that as worthy of ridicule, while I would categorize it as sublime. And my best explanation is that, sans the frame, everything alien can seem ridiculous. Or invasive. Or banal. Or what-have-you.
One friend hates the John Boorman film The Emerald Forest; my father thought it dumb. And the other day, as I watched it for the umpteenth time, I took a metaphoric step backwards, and viewed the lore and rite of the Amazon natives in that film not as I usually do when watching it, as charming and fascinating and with growing excitement, but as I probably would if I met them in real life. Ridiculous!
More than most people, I see the ridiculous in the particular customs even of my own people and time. The contingent, the haphazard purposes and functions, the conflicting meanings even of a hug or a handshake strike me as odd and sometimes funny.
Most people, presumably, find their own cultural norms inherently sensible, but foreign ones mysterious, ridiculous, or even threatening. Unaccustomed as they are to treating the ones they trade in as mere particular habits and not universal truths,
they become uncomfortable around the other forms. The alien rite is seen as alien, and not something to wonder at, but something to dismiss.
So, for this type of person, the more committed to the norms of our society, or the society he or she inhabits, and the less comfort with alien forms, the less likely, I think, he or she will be able to appreciate different behaviors in narrative art.
When one reads a novel, views a movie, attends the opera, one has to frame out — bracket out, Husserl might say (and did say, in another context) — a number of personal values as to everyday ethics and rite. For instance, in everyday life, I consider nothing more intrusive than a camera TV pointed at a grieving parent's face and a reporter asking the question, How do you feel about the death of your son?
None of your fucking business, is how the parent should respond, perhaps with added violence. I am deeply disturbed the lack of privacy and space given, on the news, to people suffering horribly.
Similarly, I do not want to see the sexual activities of any relative or casual friend. Some things I need to be kept private.
And yet I have no such problem watching the private sufferings and joys of fictional characters in any of the major narrative art forms. Why? I say: the frame. Knowing that it's just play
in some sense dissolves the normal taboos. Some aspects of morality you must leave at the theater door.
We all have trouble with this frame, and each of us has a different level of where the frame can and cannot work. I suspect that many aesthetic disagreements are frame issues. I know many people who complain that this or that action in a movie or book is not how people act.
They demand some standard of plausibility to action, and insist that this standard holds true in the real world. They can't bracket out this concern when viewing art. And yet extremely odd actions fill the world of literature to a surfeit. So much art is ridiculous to them.
For my part, I find the actions and values of so many human beings as so alien to my own that I find the question of plausibility rarely even coming up. And the novelty of framed actions and values within a story so compelling, that I'll no doubt forgive a lot.
The extension of the importance of the frame to music is another matter, and yet even it applies. There are people (myself among them, on occasion) who find certain activities, like singing in public, so artificial as to be taboo-breaking in real life. But when I succeed in framing out neurotic obsessions about behavioral artificiality (after all, there's nothing more artificial than music, and yet few arts seem as pure and natural, like a crystal or a breeze or a hurricane), the art I experience (or even perform) is amazingly moving.
But, if I step out of the frame, ridiculous!
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | April 19, 2006 | permalink
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