Category: Culture

Chaser. Wikipedia photo

A few days ago, the New York Times carried an obituary for a dog. The dog was Chaser, a border collie who was taught to understand 1,022 nouns. Here’s a link to the story:

Border Collie Trained to Recognize 1,022 Nouns Dies

I often wonder if I should be ashamed of my own thoughts. My thoughts in this case were that, in many cases, it is perfectly reasonable to value the life of an animal as much as the life of a human being. And — let’s admit it — we value the lives of some animals more than the lives of some human beings. Not everyone gets an obituary in the New York Times, but this dog did.

You may remember back in 2015, when Cecil the lion, a much-loved resident of a national park in Zimbabwe, was murdered in cold blood by an American big-game hunter. As outrage and grief poured out in social media, the usual small-minded moral scolds went to work, berating people for being concerned about the life an animal when so many people … [fill in the blanks with their personal cause]. I was so irked that I posted here about that at the time, with the argument that it is perfectly possible to have more than one moral concern at the same time.

One of the most mysterious subjects in metaphysics and biology is consciousness. We don’t know what consciousness is or where it comes from. But, one hopes, we have laid to rest the idea that animals are different from human beings in any essential way. They are just as conscious. They have a full range of emotions, just as we do. They love just as deeply. They are greatly troubled by fear and worry. They love their lives. The differences between human DNA and animal DNA are trivial.

Ask your average witless Christian whether animals have souls, and the answer will be that of course animals don’t have souls, that only humans have souls. Witless Christians who are more theologically inclined may then say something about how God gave us humans the fruits of the earth, to “harvest” as we please. That’s dominionism, one of the ugliest theologies there is. They actually apply the word “harvest” to animals.

But if the question of souls, whatever souls may be, is inherent in the nature of living things, as opposed to some magical ontological theological notion about which ancient and ignorant religionists knew more than we do, then it seems safe to assume that animals are not different from us in any essential way. If we have souls (a question I think we cannot answer), then they do, too. Consciousness suffices. Simply to be a living, feeling being is to have rights and claims on fairness.

According to the New York Times story, not only did Chaser know 1,022 nouns, he also understood sentences containing a prepositional object, verb and direct object. Chaser was able to learn so much language because border collies are a very smart breed and because his owner spent many, many hours teaching Chaser language. But everyone with a dog or cat knows that every dog and every cat learns enough language to manage daily routines. The more you talk to your dog or cat, and the older your pet gets, the more language your pet will learn.

My cat, Lily, now eleven years old, used to be terrified of the abbey organ because the organ can be quite loud. But after a while she developed a new routine whenever the organ is played. She goes to a table facing the organ console and watches. I soon learned that, if I play quietly, she likes the music (a collie I once had used to come and lie under the piano any time I played). And then I learned that Lily has a favorite song. That song is “Danny Boy,” which I play quite softly with velvety stops and tremulant, adding in some soft reed stops as the song develops. A couple of months ago, after I had played “Danny Boy,” I got up from the organ, and Lily was crying. She came to me, bumping her head against me, very emotional, crying the same way she had cried after I returned home from two weeks in Scotland. She understands, I believe, what that song means. It is a song about loss and grief, with the hope of reunion in some unknown world. The song expresses a feeling — a condition of the soul, if you will — and I believe that Lily understands that feeling just as well as we humans do. Because music is a universal language, she knows what “Danny Boy” means.

In John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, a book that I have mentioned here often, Rawls does not take up the issue of animal rights and fairness to animals. But he practically begs someone to do that work, which mostly remains undone. If you are familiar with Rawls, then you’re aware of his concept of “the original condition,” in which we arrange the world as though we can’t know before we come into this world what our circumstances will be — male, female, black, white, rich, poor, beautiful, ugly, smart, dumb. We would want the fairest possible world. It’s not at all difficult to add another condition to Rawls’ thought experiment. What if we didn’t know whether we would be born human or animal? Whether we were a wild animal, or a farm animal, or somebody’s pet, would make no difference.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we were the kind of society in which, in a presidential debate, we could talk about fairness for all living things, rather than the usual agenda based on increasingly mean and increasingly cruel right-wing talking points.

The Rawls thought experiment is incredibly easy to apply to animals. Talk to a chicken, a cow, a lion, a dog, a bird, a whale. Ask them what they want, and what they would consider fair. You know what they would say.

The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World. J.P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams. Oxford University Press, 2006. 732 pages.

I have a standard riddle that I thought of years ago. I don’t think anyone has ever gotten the answer:

Name something that you use every day and that you couldn’t get by without. It has never cost you anything. It was made by humans. It is thousands of years old. What is it?

The answer, of course, is language. We totally take language for granted, like free air, free water, and free cats — all of which we’d be willing to pay huge sums for, if they were scarce. (People are already figuring out how to get us to pay for water. As for cats, mine was free, like all the best things in life. This time of year, you can probably get as many free cats as you want, if you’re in need of some.)

Language is an incredible gift left to us by our ancestors. But even as we use that gift, we quickly forget our ancestors. In The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, David W. Anthony points out that many of us can’t even name all four of our great-grandmothers. That’s how fast we lose knowledge of the past, at least in most western cultures. As an elder, one of the things I’ve noticed about young people — for example my own great-nieces and great-nephews — is that they rarely express any curiosity about now-dead relatives that my generation remembers and could tell them about, if they cared to know. In only three generations, most of us will be forgotten. That’s our payback, I suppose, for forgetting those who came before us.

As I have gotten older, I have become increasingly curious about my ancestors, whose experience probably was very similar to that of your ancestors. My curiosity has been inflamed by the cultural destruction that has occurred during the Christian era, which has made it much more difficult to imagine how our ancestors lived. Those who have read this blog, or my novels, are aware of my rage at the cruelty, and ugliness, and completeness, of Christianization. Except for a very few traditions such as a midwinter pagan festival, which we now call Christmas, our memory of the pre-Christian past is gone, like the memory of our ancestors. One might accuse me of romanticizing the pre-Christian past. Not by any means do I suppose that the pre-Christian past was a utopia. But I do think it’s clear that Christianity systematically demonized and disenchanted the natural world, replacing the collective wisdom of our ancestors with theologies and texts from old cults that are shocking in their poverty and infantility. We are the way we are today because we’ve forgotten any other way to be. I strongly suspect that humanity’s survival depends on whether we can regain an awareness of our dependence on the natural world and find a way to re-enchant and preserve the natural world.

The trajectory of Christianization, unsurprisingly, included the extinction of languages. In the case of the Mayan hieroglyphs, much of the destruction was intentional and was the work of a single Catholic priest. The extinction of Gaulish probably was more a product of Romanization than of Christianization, but in the last years of the empire there was not much difference between Romanization and Christianization.

Still, even robust living languages and their words and grammars are largely fossils, with components that are extremely old. In the last 200 years, historical linguists have developed methods that are remarkably good at tracing a language backward toward its roots. This brings us to the now-extinct language that we call Proto-Indo-European. Though it is a dead language, more than half the people on the planet today speak a language that is descended from Proto-Indo-European. Modern descendants include most of the languages of Europe and some of the languages of Asia, such as Hindi. Classical languages including Greek, Latin, the Germanic languages, the Celtic languages, and Sanskrit are all descended from Proto-Indo-European. Strangely enough, Latin and Celtic are actually close cousins in the Indo-European family tree, because the Romans and the Celts were neighbors in Western Europe. It was not until the 18th Century, as Europeans started encroaching on India, that Europeans discovered that Sanskrit is a relative of Latin and Greek and of the entire Indo-European language family.

Consider the family tree of English. English is a Germanic language brought to Britain by the Saxon people, who came from what is now northern Germany and Denmark. After the Norman Conquest, as elites from what is now France gained power in old England, they brought with them a huge vocabulary of Latin words that were assimilated into English. Today, the 1,000 or so most commonly used words in English are Anglo-Saxon, but as word use expands beyond those 1,000 common words, Latin, French, and Greek start to predominate.

What makes The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European such a fascinating book is that it explains how linguists have actually reconstructed much of the grammar and vocabulary of the now-extinct Proto-Indo-European language. You’ll need to read the book to get a feel for how this is done, but obviously it involves patterns in how languages change, looking at similarities in all the surviving Indo-European languages. (Though classical Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit are considered dead languages, they are very well preserved and well understood through a large body of surviving literature.) The book actually contains lists of reconstructed words in Proto-Indo-European, with the equivalent English word. These lists run to 100 pages! Can linguists be absolutely sure that they’ve reconstructed these words? Of course not. But confidence is high. One linguist claims to have used the same techniques to reconstruct Latin by working backwards from the Romance languages, claiming to have reconstructed the Latin vocabulary with 95 percent confidence and Latin grammar with 80 percent confidence.

There are a great many reconstructed words from Proto-Indo-European that speakers of English will recognize, such as mūs for mouse, or werĝ for work. If you speak a modern Romance language, then you will recognize many more.

So, what do the fossils in our language tell us about our ancestors? We can learn a great deal, obviously, from what they did or did not have words for. We know that the people who spoke Proto-Indo-European, from about 4000 BC to about 2500 BC, had words for horses, for farming equipment such as plows, for oxen and sheep, for wool, for milk, for weapons, for barley, for beer and mead, and for wheels, axles, wagons, and for all sorts of wild plants and animals. Archeologists tell us that Europeans before 8000 or so BC were foragers. It is safe to assume that the Proto-Indo-European language spread across Europe and parts of Asia as farming and herding spread and as people stopped foraging for a living. Still, even as people settled down to farm, there was still a good deal of travel. There are Proto-Indo-European words for roads, wandering, going astray, and hospitality. As the people settled into agrarian lifestyles, and as cities developed along the rivers and coasts, the Proto-Indo-European language began to divide into Germanic, Greek, Latin, Celtic, and so on. The process must have been very similar to how Latin divided into the Romance languages after the fall of Rome.

Linguistics, then, can tell us much more about our ancestors than we might at first think. There are some questions, though, to which linguistics cannot provide a definite answer. One of those questions is where the Proto-Indo-European language originated and what the migration routes were. As far as I can tell, scholarship that combined linguistics and archeology to shed light on the lives of early Europeans was fairly late to develop. As of now, the best book I know of on this subject is from 2007: The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. I’ve just started reading this book and will plan to review it later. But I want to mention four books here that I have chosen to help me get a feel for how the English we speak today can be traced backwards to the lives that our European ancestors lived up to 8000 years ago, and the languages they spoke. The other three books are listed below.

J.R.R. Tolkien, you will recall, was an Oxford philologist. It is very easy to romanticize prehistoric Europe as being a lot like Tolkien’s Shire, with the land of Rohan and its horse lords being a lot like the plains (or steppes) of eastern Europe and western Asia.

Despite its length and the technicalities of linguistics, this book is surprisingly easy to read. The only thing that stumped me — the same way that the math in books on physics stumps me — is that I mostly cannot follow the marks that linguists use to indicate pronunciation, or all the terms that linguists use for different types of vocalizations, such as labials, dentals, palatals, velars, labiovelars, sibilants, laryngeals, nasals, semi-vowels, etc. You’ll be able to follow the gist of this easily enough, though. I recommend watching some YouTube lectures on Proto-Indo-European, in which the speakers are linguists who have an incredible ability to produce the sounds that occur in human languages.

⬆︎ The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. David W. Anthony. Princeton University Press, 2007. 554 pages.

I’ve just started reading this book and will have a report later.

⬆︎ The Blackwell History of the Latin Language. James Clackson and Geoffrey Horrocks. Wiley-Blackwell, 2007. 324 pages.

I will read this book after The Horse, the Wheel, and Language. I’m curious to know how Latin differs from Proto-Indo-European, and maybe why. We do know that Proto-Indo-European had a complex case system, like Latin. But what puzzles me is why speakers of languages such as Latin put up with such complexity. We know that the Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, etc.) started out as dumbed-down Latin. All, or least most, of the Romance languages trashed or greatly simplified Latin’s six cases of nouns — nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, and vocative. It makes me dizzy just to list them.

⬆︎ The French Language. Alfred Ewert. Faber and Faber, 1933. 440 pages.

I’ve had this book for a good many years. After I learned to read French, I became curious about how French had developed from Latin. For example, where did those weird nasal vowels in French come from? Ewert attributes such things to “the persistence of linguistic habits of the Celtic population,” which is hardly surprising. But you can see that I am trying to work backward on the English branch of the language tree: English -> French -> Latin -> Proto-Indo-European. I wish I could read German. Alas, I cannot.

Here’s a little puzzle for you if you’ve read this far. Do you know the meaning of the English word adumbrate? If you do, you can give yourself an “A” and skip the next paragraph. Otherwise, let’s puzzle out how you can figure out what adumbrate means without having to go look it up.

To figure it out, you don’t even need to know the meaning of the Latin infinitive adumbrare. Nor do you need to know that the Latin word adumbrate (it’s four syllables in Latin, ah-doom-brrah-tay, I think) is the masculine participle of the verb adumbrare in the vocative case. All that is good to know. But a language-lover will see the three parts of the English adumbrate without even slowing down in reading. There is the prefix ad-, the root umbra, and the suffix –ate. I bet you’re onto it already, because you know what an umbra is — that which an umbrella has underneath it. The Latinate prefix ad– means to go toward or to draw to. The root umbra means shadow. The suffix –ate turns the word into a verb. So, adumbrate means to throw something into shadow.

“Tintern Abbey and Elegant Figures,” by Samuel Colman, 1780-1845

Conservative minds are obsessed with institutional decay. They can’t stop writing books about it. To the conservative mind, change is an existential threat, as though the Dark Ages were a utopia that we must return to.

Do you remember William F. Buckley Jr.’s famous quote? “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop.”

Consider Niall Ferguson’s The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die. Or consider another book that is regarded as a classic among conservatives, Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life. I have not read these books (nor am I going to).

The church knows that people are leaving it, particularly young people. The American church knows that, in Europe, secularization is decades ahead of secularization in America. Church people see where it’s going. Though there are those in the church who can reconcile religion with social change, most church people cannot. Those with conservative minds cannot conceive of the possibility that the church itself might be a two-thousand-year-old problem that society is finally beginning to solve — by ditching the church. Instead, the Manichean mind (which can only see the church as good), believes that the decline of the church reflects (and is actually caused by) a surge in the wickedness of the world. They believe that they are in a culture war, and that they are losing. Their panic and their desperation is leading to debate among the faithful about the church giving its blessing to ugly tactics to try to stop the losses. The tactics aren’t new, but the blessing would be.

It is shocking to observe that it isn’t just Trump voters in flyover country who are in on this. It’s also theologians and Christian intellectuals.

The Atlantic is alerting us to what’s going on with a piece published this week, What a Clash Between Conservatives Reveals. Alan Jacobs, the author of the Atlantic piece, is drawing our attention to an article published last month in First Things, “America’s most influential journal of religion and public life.” The article is by Sohrab Ahmari, a converted Catholic of Iranian descent. Ahmari writes:

Civility and decency are secondary values. They regulate compliance with an established order and orthodoxy. We should seek to use these values to enforce our order and our orthodoxy, not pretend that they could ever be neutral. To recognize that enmity is real is its own kind of moral duty.

I believe this translates to: Christians should make use of incivility and indecency if that’s what it takes to “enforce our order and our orthodoxy.” If I’m reading it correctly, then isn’t that the evangelical rationale for seeing Donald Trump as having been sent by God?

As Jacobs makes clear in the Atlantic, not all conservative Christians agree with Ahmari. Still, it seems to be taken for granted by all conservative Christians that we of the “secular left” are not “playing fair in the culture wars.” This unfairness from the secular left is never explained.

In any case, a mind that believes that it has not just the right, but a duty, to enforce its notions of order and orthodoxy on the rest of us — whether with or without civility and decency — is a mind that is too primitive for a discussion about fairness. A mind like Sohrab Ahmari’s can believe that he’s defending the church. But what he’s really doing is driving the better people away, hastening the rot.

H.L. Mencken. Portrait by Carl Van Vecten, 1932, Library of Congress

To see similarities between snark and gun violence is wrong of me, I admit. Both are epidemic. But one is deadly, and the other merely wounds. But I had been thinking about two different posts that I might write here, one on snark, and the other on shooting guns (forthcoming, later). In that state of mind, I came across a long piece in this morning’s New York Times by Gregory Gibson. The piece is A Gun Killed My Son. So Why Do I Want to Own One?

The piece is beautifully written. It reflects the soul-searching and self-awareness that the author has gained in his years-long quest (it definitely was a quest) to come to terms with the senseless, wasteful death of his son, a college student. But, if you read this piece, don’t expect a clear conclusion wrapped in vellum and tied with string. It’s a lot of questions with few, if any, answers.

So it is with irony, snark, and smarm. A lot of culture pieces have been written on these three things in the past twenty years. You can take sides if you want, just as you can take sides on the heated subject of gun control. Or, like the author of the gun piece in this morning’s New York Times, you might see that, the closer you look at the subject, the more complicated it becomes.

The cultural warfare over irony, snark, and smarm started around 1999 with a young man named Jedediah Purdy. We first heard about Purdy in a New York Times article, “Against Irony,” that was published on Sept. 5, 1999. Not long after that, when Purdy was only 24, his first book was published, For Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Today. Almost overnight — among the literati, anyway — the subject of irony became a battleground, like gun control. There were those who wanted to (and did) rip the liberal and kind-hearted Purdy to shreds with snark and irony. And there were those (like me) who have followed Purdy’s career ever since.

It was more than ten years later when Purdy took a direct hit from a nuke dropped on him by Tom Scocca. The piece was “On Smarm,” published at Gawker in December 2013. It’s a long piece, and Scocca expends quite a few paragraphs to take Purdy apart with snark. I’ll quote only the first and last paragraphs here:

First paragraph:

A Fable From the Age of Smarm: Once upon a time, in the high hills of West Virginia, there lived a young man named Jedediah Purdy. Jedediah was fond of animals and of taking long walks through the woods; he liked to eat fruit that was not entirely ripe. His parents had gone into the hills to get away from electricity and the corruptions of civilization, to raise their children apart from “the hollowness of mainstream living,” as the New York Times Magazine put it. They built their own home and slaughtered their own pigs.

Last paragraph:

Jedediah Purdy is now a professor at Duke Law [later Columbia] and has been a visiting professor at Yale Law, the school at which he got his own J.D., after he graduated from Harvard, after he graduated from Exeter. For this, pigs were butchered. Such are the fruits of renouncing the mainstream.

Personally, I find Scocca as irksome as Scocca finds Purdy. But I must agree with Scocca that irony — and even its weaponized version, snark — can serve (like guns) a noble and defensive purpose if in the right hands. However, no background check and permit are required to employ the weapon of snark against people. Anyone can do it.

Scocca reminds us of the enduring power that snark and irony can have when discharged by those who are morally sane and gifted as writers:

One curious fact about this long view is that it’s quite untrue. I can’t recall ever, unless compelled by duty, rereading a Malcolm Gladwell article. What I have reread is Mencken on the Scopes Trial, Hunter Thompson on Richard Nixon, and Dorothy Parker on most things—to say nothing of Orwell on poverty and Du Bois on racism, or David Foster Wallace on the existential horror of a leisure cruise. This belief that oblivion awaits the naysayers and the snarkers shouldn’t survive a glance at the bookshelf.

If it’s true that there is no defense against an idiot with a gun other than a non-idiot with a better gun, then it’s also true that there is no defense against an idiot with snark other than a non-idiot with better snark. Though I have done my best to stay away from places (and people) in social media where the snark flies like bullets, not infrequently I still find myself caught in the crossfire, or hit with a stray round of snark. What do I do? I fire back almost as a reflex. I’m a sharpshooter when it comes to snark.

But I do wish to draw a line. Just as we (we Americans, anyway) live in a gun culture, we also live in a snark culture. But, for the sake of our mental health (and our relationships), we’d better have some safe space. We all need people in our lives who not only will never use irony and snark against us, but who also will come to our defense.

I have spent a great deal of time over the years editing not only what I have written myself, but also what others have written. Post-Purdy, I have developed an editing mode that I call “snark detecting.” Most of the time (and here I find myself agreeing with those whom Scocca berates as smarmy) I find that snark and irony greatly weaken a piece of writing. I often quote a friend who is a very fine writer as saying that there is no sin for a writer worse than insincerity. Except for those emergency occasions when some snarky idiot needs to be lit up, outsnarked, and taken out of action with superior snark, I think we’d all do well to employ our snark detectors and edit out the snark.

Writers and editors often talk about tone. But we are all writers now, because we all use email. Tone can be difficult to control. When writing anything that could be touchy, I try to take the time to reread what I’ve written just for tone. For example, consider this line, which is taken from an actual business email sent to me relating to a publishing project:

Do we need to talk, again, about division of labor?

Note how the two commas around the word “again” change the tone from reasonably neutral to remonstrative and slightly snarky. Yes, I took offense (though I did not respond with snark).

I have a not-exactly-tacit agreement with one of my friends to never use irony with each other, let alone snark. In fact, several years ago, when in a casual remark he employed a touch of irony (not against me, though) I didn’t understand him and had to ask him what he meant. Irony-free zones, I would argue, are necessary for our mental health.

If I have a conclusion, it’s about where I draw the line. I detest irony and snark. These days, irony is as inescapable in our popular culture as snark is in our political culture. (In popular culture, think of “The Big Bang Theory” — all snark all the time, and anti-intellectual snark at that. It was almost violent in its snarkiness. I didn’t find it the least bit funny.) Occasionally I hear couples snark at each other in public, as though we as a society are normalizing the Big Bang theory of relationships. I think to myself, there goes a relationship that is in its last season. Intimacy and supportiveness cannot survive against snark, though society can. And regardless of what it says about me as a person, anyone who snarks at me on Facebook (or at an auto parts store) can expect a blast of snark in return, aimed right between the eyes, because civility is no defense against snark (no matter what they say in smarm school).

If snark was fatal, as guns can be, then I would be pretty dangerous. But I would like to think that I also know when not to use it. I carry snark as a concealed weapon. Outside our safe spaces, where snark flies like the bullets of angry and unstable white men, you never know when you might need it.

An aside: In searching the Internet for photos of one of America’s greatest curmudgeons, H.L. Mencken, I was surprised to find the one above. He is sitting at a piano (who knew?), with an open book of music. A little Googling shows that Mencken was a pianist, and that he played regularly with a group of musicians who called themselves “The Saturday Night Club.” They got together to drink and play music. What is that piece of music on the piano in front of Mencken? No matter how much I zoom in, I can’t read the title. But it looks like German to me. The arrangement is clearly for voice with piano accompaniment. My guess is that it’s a book of Schubert lieder. Knowing that Mencken was a musician helps, I think, to understand why Mencken’s snark and irony were so beautiful and so effective as cultural and political commentary. He was an artist at it.