Please note that this is my last post at this address. Please check out http://www.glencram.com for my latest & greatest entries!
Niqabbed
Everyone has an opinion about the Quebec government allowing the expulsion of a Muslim woman from a language class for wearing her traditional garb, a niqab, or veil covering all of her face but her eyes. Now Quebec has for the past 50 years been pursuing an active (and generally quite justified) policy of protecting its language and culture in the face of an immensely dominant next door. I grew up there and though my ethnic group was the main target of these policies, I always felt that yes, if I was going to live in a place I really should try to speak the language and know something about its very rich culture and heritage. But no one ever tried to make me dress differently or give up my own sense of my background.
I live now in Toronto, arguably the most diverse and tolerant city anywhere, a model for the global culture of the future where everyone is accepted, welcome, and valued for their unique contribution. In agriculture, depending on a single crop is a recipe for disaster, as the 19th century Irish discovered. We have come a long way from the pure master race ideas of the last century.
And yet they linger. Sociobiology teaches us that people will still fear and distrust the stranger who does not quite fit in to our ideas of the ‘right’ way to look, speak and dress. And they especially do not like change. When a typical citizen of nazi Germany looked at a Jew, they saw someone who was actively plotting against all they held dear. A Mississippian in the 50s and 60s must have felt that his whole world was turning upside down when he saw blacks walking into white universities or drinking from white fountains. But when the war and the marches were over, and the laws changed, those attitudes were effectively gone within a generation, and the people who held them were consigned to the fringes of society. 10 years ago a woman in a niqab may have got a curious glance on a Canadian street. Now, after a decade of 9/11 hysteria, she is faced with fear and a call to strip off.
The justifications are varied. My favourite is that she may be a suicide bomber and concealing explosives. Well, it’s been a while since I read the Quran, and my memory may deceive me, but I don’t remember the verse that said that suicide bombers have to strap their bombs to their face! By that logic you would have to ban any clothes that were not skin tight.
The Quebec argument seems to be that she does not somehow fit in to Quebec culture. Well, they don’t ban anyone else’s national garb. And since Quebecois generally wear exactly the same generic Gap/Nike/Levi’s crap as everyone else in the global economy, it’s hard to see what national values they are defending. If they wanted to make it a condition of Quebec residence that everyone had to wear pure laine habitant clothes, complete with long red bonhomme toque, I don’t think such a policy would last long.
Another justification is that the veil symbolises oppression of women by a patriarchal Muslim culture. The implication is that the woman is forced to wear it and that given the choice she would dress in Gap/Nike/Levi’s just like any other decent Canadian woman. That may be true in some cases. Maybe in other cases it is her personal choice, it’s what she is comfortable with, and forcing her to take it off would be like forcing the average Canadian woman to parade down the street naked. Does it matter? Do Canadian women never dress to please their men? Forcing a Muslim woman with a jealous husband to unveil would only lead to her not being able to go out all, and no one would ever know.
Ultimately the people who support the niqab ban in Canada are the same as the people they think they are criticising. When pressed they will say they don’t want Canada to be like Afghanistan. Well when I think about Afghanistan, I think of a place where women (or men) don’t have the right to dress as they please, and I really would not want Canada to be like that!
Smells Good!
For some reason we were watching a show called Hoarders. It’s a reality thing about people who live surrounded by piles of shit because they can’t bear to throw anything out. I could somewhat identify as I have had, let’s say, trouble throwing things out because they may come in handy for some household or artistic purpose some day. My wife on the other hand has no trouble at all ditching anything showing the slightest sign of wear, no matter what’s in the pockets. I have learned a lot from her (not least that I’d better not let myself look worn out!). Anyway there was this poor woman (Shirley?) who, for some reason rooted in who knows what past trauma, felt obliged to buy any food item that seemed to be a good deal and, when she didn’t eat it, just leave it around the house to rot. She got very upset when they threatened to evict her because of the stink (she couldn’t smell a thing) and finally, with the encouragement of several mental health professionals, grudgingly accepted the offer of the show people to scrape the mould from the fridge and dispose of some of the less recently expired items. An especially poignant moment was her fond goodbye to a blackened, liquefying pumpkin that had graced her floor for some months (“You were a good pumpkin!”). And in the middle of the show was a commercial which ?coincidentally? echoed the same theme. A mother comes into her son’s messy room and starts sniffing around, declaring that everything stinks. So does she call in the shrinks and the cleanup crew to hose it out? On the contrary. She produces a spray bottle of Febreze and magically solves the problem. The room now smells fresh and is approved of by the local hot chicks. I don’t know why they didn’t just do the same for Shirley, but I guess the human interest factor would have been lost.
Shamanatomy
Here is my video. Music by Sainkho Namchylak, pix from Gray’s Anatomy (the original!):
Amazing how many parts we have, isn’t it?
Climate Change 2
Please read this:
http://www.skepticalscience.com
Again, just because somebody got overexcited in trying to persuade people of the reality of global warning does not make it a fraud. The science is there!
Creationism vs Evolution
Those fundamentalist creationists who maintain that evolution is “just a theory” will be delighted to know that I agree with them. A theory is the best overall explanation for the known evidence. Creationism has no evidence and explains nothing.
The Return of Simon Magus
20 years ago I started to write a novel about the life and times of the original AntiChrist, Simon Magus. This fascinating character was originally mentioned in the Book of Acts in the New Testament as a rival to Jesus, who offered to buy the Holy Spirit from St Peter and was soundly rebuked. In later apocrypha he became a symbol for heresy, associated with the Gnostic alternative to Christianity which rejected the Old Testament God as a monstrous demon, and engaged in magical duels with the apostles, culminating in his abortive demonstration of flight before the emperor Nero. He claimed to be the great power of God, and was accompanied by a former prostitute who was his holy wisdom. My novel is intended to tell his side of the story, incorporating elements of all the mythologies of the time and ranging over the whole known world. On a personal level, the novel deals with many things which have obsessed me: the appeal of and need for religion, the origins of Christianity, history and mythology in general. As I said, I started it 20 years ago, wrote furiously for about 3 years, and have not done much since. Maybe I said all I had to say in those pages I did complete? I don’t think so. Other things distracted me, but it may be time to get back to it. Anyone reading this who would like to know more can check http://simonmagus.com for some excerpts. If you like it, let me know. I could use the encouragement.
Climategate
My response to a friend who, having heard about the Climategate scandal, decided that global warming was discredited:
Climategate is real but so is warming. Carbon trading is a big scam, but that does not mean the problem is not a reality. Natural forces produce CO2 and hence warming trends, but human activity disrupts the normal feedback cyles and magnifies it into a runaway train. The figures are clear that if CO2 production continues at its present, or even significantly reduced, rates, there will be global disaster. What would be a tragedy would be if those people who committed to preventing that were persuaded to give up because of some overenthusiastic scientists who wanted to push things too fast. Put punitive taxes on the overproducers and stop letting them dictate the discussion!
The evolution of consciousness
I have been thinking for a long time about the evolution of consciousness: how did it emerge in the human species and I guess where is it going?
The first thing I have to do is to define consciousness. Usually when we think of it, we think of it as something which distinguishes us from the animals from which we came. It seems to me that everyone who tries to analyze it comes up with a different definition, so that the subject itself becomes lost in confusion. There is a philosopher named Chalmers who tries to analyze it in terms of “philosophical zombies”. These are beings whose outward behaviour is identical to our own, yet who have no consciousness, by which he seems to mean that they do not have a real experience of the world. They do not experience, for example, the “purpleness” of a coloured object, or the chocolately taste of chocolate. Yet they react to it in a way which makes it seem as if they had. It is an extreme manifestation of behaviorism ( a behaviorist being one who ”thinks he has no thoughts, and believes he has no beliefs”). Yet how could they possibly react to something that makes no impression on them? Why would they? He goes on to say that they fact that we can imagine such beings means they could exist, but that I can’t believe. We can imagine travelling faster than light, but as far as we know the universe won’t let us.
It seems to me that a more useful model to analyze these questions is the figure of Kaspar Hauser, a child discovered to have been raised possibly by wild animals and therefore deprived of human language during his formative years. What did Kaspar see when he saw something purple? Obviously he saw and experienced the essence of purpleness, but what did it mean to him? He could use it to distinguish, say, a purple berry from a green one, and his experience could tell him that the green was sour and inedible while the purple one was sweet and good. The difference from us is that he did not have a word for the difference in colour, and we do. We can extend that concept to other things, to all sorts of aesthetic and practical considerations, but could he? Did he for that reason like purple things in general more than others? Would the concept of a favourite colour have any meaning? I think not, because the idea of “favourite” did not exist for him. He was an animal, a “lower animal” in old speak, because he did not have language.
I am rambling. But what I am trying to say is that consciousness as we understand it, that thing that distinguishes our mental processes from that of other animals is language. It is a system of organizing thoughts in an efficient manner in order to accomplish more than we could without it. Human language has many characteristics which put it far above other systems of communication, and it evolved in us in a complex manner until it reached the incredibly powerful facility we all have today. We can see its traces in the archaeological record, faint and elusive hints which tell us that something was happening in our brains which allowed an increasing “control” over our environment. From the first tools, rocks used to crack bones and maybe heads, to the conscious shaping of those rocks into specialized objects for particular tasks, to today’s Internet, jet planes and atom bombs, the history of consciousness is one of developing ways to talk about things and categorize them, but was this the driving force for evolution? The social function is probably a majorl force, forming bonds with others and persuading them to do what we want.
What is consciousness? One definition might be “the brain’s way of letting itself know what it’s doing.” Most of our actions are only made known to us after the fact. During a conversation, do we know what we are going to say when the other stops speaking? The interplay of a conversation can be surprising to the participants, as they only know, from memory, how they responded after they have done it. And of course they usually accept it as the logical thing. They said it, after all, so it must be right. But the initial response was unconscious in that they did not (usually) plan it out consciously before they said it. A vast amount of processing power, more than the most powerful computer, went into formulating that response while the other was talking, first? the meaning, and then the putting into an intelligible response using both the universal laws of language and then the rules and vocabulary of one’s own dialect of that language. And then they know what that response is, and are committed to it. There is usually no time for reflection, however, because the other has already processed it and is uttering their own response. The same of course can be said about animal conversations, which certainly exist on a lower level, but the animal, as far as we know, does not reflect on it later.
A topic I will be pursuing here, a sort of thread of history, is to speculate (without any real evidence) on the stages of the evolution of language and hence consciousness. One way to do this might be to ask when the first time was that something happened. For example, what (and when) was the first time that someone
- had a thought in words? I would say sometime after the words themselves existed in common usage
- said “I (or everyone) will die”
- realized the connection between sex and birth
- lied (apparently chimps do this)
- gave a group of things a number
- asked a question (who, when, where…?)
- said something was big, green, good
- used a metaphor
? etc. Which of these were used by homo habilis, erectus, sapiens?
This is the beginning of my speculation. Comments welcome.
