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Three is a magic number
I recently finished a disappointing book, a poorly conceived and executed study on the significance of the number three in sociology (Bálint Balla, Die Zahl Drei und die Soziologie, Hamburg: Krämer, 2008). What made the book especially frustrating was not its lack of editorial quality, its murky epistemology, or its unjustifiably high price (almost 23 euros for a 150-page paperback), but that it could have been a decent book. Although it may not sound that way, I respect Professor Balla for acting on his idiosyncratic research interest. That takes guts. I just wanted him to push further.
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Human bodies will forever keep the dictators awake at night with a mixture of love and hatred. Fleshy human bodies are the vessels of ingratiation but are also the tools of sedition. Without these bodies the rulers would have nothing to rule over. However, what fills them with silent dread are associations amongst these human bodies. From the perspective of an autocracy, “excessive closeness” between two human bodies is not permitted because it may set off a sort of avalanche effect—it may cause “excessive closeness” between even more and more human bodies which will set off “excessive closeness” between innumerable human bodies. Dictators despise this sort of outcome. Associations between human bodies are the source of their paranoia and will forever keep them worrying awake at night.
This is the autocracy’s Achilles’ heel; they are delighted when with the wave of a hand they can control gatherings of people such as reviews of the troops or patriotic assemblies. What they fear the most are gatherings of people that they cannot control with the wave of a hand, such as any manner of protests, such as twitterers’ scrutiny of the case of the three Fujian netizens who were wrongly accused, or such as the two grass mud horse banquets that were held last evening.
”— Xu Hui (许晖), “The Symbolic Association of Grass Mud Horses”
Here’s a paragraph I just started to write that will probably not make it into the final version of this paper. It felt good to write it though.
In the past twenty years, since the decline of secularization theory, a self-proclaimed “new paradigm” has had a stranglehold on debates within the sociology of religion. Kicking promising efforts to rekindle the vision of classical sociological thought in the subdiscipline into the dustbin (e.g., Turner, Religion and Social Theory), these scholars dismissed any intellectual concern beyond a narrowly defined understanding of “scientific explanation” and welcomed economic colonization with open arms.
“I know it is all very strange. From the height of eight hundred years ago, or of eight hundred years hence, our age must look incredibly odd. We call the twelfth century ascetic. We call our own time hedonist, full of praise and pleasure. But in the ascetic age the love of life was evident and enormous, so that it had to be restrained. In an hedonist age pleasure has always sunk so low, so that it has to be encouraged. How high the sea human happiness rose in the Middle Ages, we now only know by the colossal walls they built to keep it in bounds. How human happiness sank in the twentieth century our children will only know by extraordinary modern books which tell that it is a duty to be cheerful and that life not so bad after all.”
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton
“The temporary decline of theology had involved the neglect of philosophy and all fine thinking; and George Bernard Shaw had to find shaky justifications in Schopenhauer for the sons of God shouting for joy. He called it the Will to Live—a phrase invented by Prussian professors who would like to exist, but can’t. Afterwards he asked people to worship the Life-Force; as if one could worship a hyphen.”
— Gilbert Keith Chesteron
Clifford Stoll was right
Recently we all got a good laugh out of a Newsweek article, “Hype Alert: Why Cyberspace Isn’t, And Never Will Be, Nirvana,” written in 1995 by the otherwise brilliant Clifford Stoll. Even Stoll himself seemed to get a bit of a laugh out of it after Three Word Chant disinterred it and Boing Boing broadcast it to its worldwide audience. But I am going to jump to his defense.
You can’t say race in German
What a ridiculous thing to say: You can’t say race in German. After all, Germany more than any other country in the world has a history of sorting people by racial criteria, excluding people from citizenship on the basis of race, or judging certain races fit or unfit for life. To this day, German citizenship law still is based almost exclusively on the principle of jus sanguinis. Germans in several cities buy medicine in pharmacies called Mohrenapotheke. How, then, could it be impossible to say race in German?
I don’t even mean that it is not permissible, due to reigning notions of political correctness, to use the word race in the German language. That may be a part of it, but on a more profound level, there is no word for the idea of race in the German language anymore. That is, there is no way to talk certain modes of difference or alterity.
A seventy-five-year-old response to textbook revisionism
Earlier this month, the disheartening news from Texas reached us that conservatives there won a decisive vote to put a right-wing spin on social studies textbooks. Future textbooks will stress the Christian roots of American society, the positive impact of Republican political philosophy, and the superiority of American capitalism. Such attempts to rewrite history in order to bolster hegemonic arrangements are nothing new, so we can draw on some of the history that the right would like to see submerged for a forceful response to this decision.
If history is going to be scientific, if the record of human action is going to be set down with the accuracy and faithfulness of detail which will allow its use as a measuring rod and guidepost for the future of nations, there must be set some standards of ethics in research and interpretation.
If, on the other hand, we are going to use history for our pleasure and amusement, for inflating our national ego, and giving us a false but pleasurable sense of accomplishment, then we must give up the idea of history as a science or as an art using the results of science, and admit frankly that we are using a version of historic fact in order to influence and educate the new generation along the way we wish.
It is propaganda like this that has led men in the past to insist that history is “lies agreed upon”; and to point out the danger in such misinformation. It is indeed extremely doubtful if any permanent benefit comes to the world through such action. Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?
Those words are by W. E. B. DuBois, and they were written in 1935 in response to the misrepresentation of the Reconstruction era in contemporary history textbooks. It was not unusual to read pronouncements such as the following: “Although the Negroes were now free, they were also ignorant and unfit to govern themselves.” Or: “These men knew not only nothing about the government, but also cared for nothing except what they could gain for themselves.” Or: “In the exhausted states already amply ‘punished’ by the desolation of war, the rule of the Negro and his unscrupulous carpetbagger and scalwag patrons, was an orgy of extravagance, fraud and disgusting incompetency.”
Further into the essay, DuBois writes these invocative lines:
The most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history is the transportation of ten million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent into the new-found Eldorado of the West. They descended into Hell; and in the third century they arose from the dead, in the finest effort to achieve democracy for the working millions which this world had ever seen. It was a tragedy that beggared the Greek; it was an upheaval of humanity like the Reformation and the French Revolution. Yet we are blind and led by the blind. We discern in it no part of our labor movement; no part of our industrial triumph; no part of our religious experience. Before the dumb eyes of ten generations of ten million children, it is made mockery of and spit upon; a degradation of the eternal mother; a sneer at human effort; with aspiration and art deliberately and elaborately distorted. And why? Because in a day when the human mind aspired to a science of human action, a history and psychology of the mighty effort of the mightiest century, we fell under the leadership of those who would compromise with truth in the past in order to make peace in the present and guide policy in the future.
May we not be led by the blind and make a spurious peace with the present.
