"incredibly unbelievable" means something that is good

George Eliot

Lately my daughter and I have been watching a lot of period pieces depicting the world of Victorian novels.  Soon we will watch the third of six episodes of George Eliot's Middlemarch.  What strikes me about these works is the range of language available to the writers and their reading audiences.  The English language of the 19th C was a very precise tool that could describe extremely complex ideas with very few words, and a range of emotions and feelings with words long gone from our 21st C collective vocabulary. 

I notice it in students' essays.  Particularly if they are required to describe the quality of something, they have at their disposal adjectives that really mean either good or bad.  'Awesome' means good, and 'awful' means bad.  'Fantastic' means good, and 'terrible' means bad.  'Incredible', 'unbelievable', and 'sick' all mean good, and 'lame', 'mean' and 'gay' mean bad.   It is as if we have taken litmus paper to our rich and complex arsenal of adjectives and decided to render them either acids or bases. 

Before Christmas last year, Kira prepared for her SAT's by writing previous SAT exams.  She made a list of words that she did not understand, and together we sat down and studied them.  She learned words like 'capricious', 'coquettish', 'dilletante', 'ineffable', 'bombastic', 'disingenuous'.  We spent the next few days trying to enter these words into our everyday conversations, and it was a lot of fun.  However, the fact that she soon will be an adult, and had never learned these words is meaningful. 

In contrast, during Shakespeare's time, the Rose and the Globe theatres were filled with representatives of the entire class system, and Shakespeare's language, filled with nuance and humour and cleverness, was understood and enjoyed right across the social spectrum. 

What is it in our society that has allowed the standard of our language to degrade so precipitously from even, say, the 1920's?   What is going on?  It is as if we have all drunk from a well poisoned with something that has made us stupid.  How can two words - awesome and awful - have been twisted to mean 'good' and 'bad' respectively?  How can the word 'gay' go from meaning something really quite wonderful to meaning 'bad'?  Why is it that athletes, role models for so many, cannot get more out of their language than 'Obviously, it was incredibly unbelievable!'   These athletes experience stimulation on an order and in a quantity beyond what most human beings will ever experience in a lifetime, and yet they are completely unable to express their viewpoints beyond 'It was good'.  Were their language skills even remotely close to their athletic skills, we as an audience might live for a moment in the world of people so naturally gifted.  We might get to see what it was really like scoring that goal, beyond the fact that 'it was good'. 

We are letting down our ancestors who constructed and then bequeathed to us a wonderfully flexible and powerful language.  Can anyone tell me what has happened?  Because what has happened is bad, not good.

My phone versus Galileo's telescope

My Samsung Captivate Smart phone

We live in a time of remarkable technological advances.  Denise and I upgraded to smart phones last month, and I have yet to plumb the depths of all the cool things that it can do.  In addition to a telephone, it has a really good still and video camera, GPS receiver, mp3 and video player, WiFi for full access to the Internet, and Bluetooth for easy connection to other devices.  It seems to combine some of the most important inventions of the 20th Century in a gadget the size of my palm.  And yes, it works on an Android operating system developed by Google, and therefore has access to thousands of free applications easily found and downloadable.  I have spent several evenings simply exploring the potential of amazing and free 'apps'. 

But is it really that big of a technological leap?  Certainly the GPS and internet applications on my smart phone are new.  However, when I was a kid my parents had telephones, used still and movie cameras, and played music on a record player.  When it comes down to it, my smart phone is really much of the same technology only packaged in one unit and much, much smaller.  As for other differences, my parents drove around in cars, boarded planes to cover long distances, shopped for food in large grocery stores, lived in subdivisions, watched television and movies.   Our lives today are really not that much different.

Hard Times

But there are other times in western civilization when technology seemed to change much, much more the way people lived.  For example, in the 19th Century, the invention of the railroad increased peoples' transportation by an order of six times in a single day, a more modern medicine recognized germs as the causes of infection and because of it saved millions of peoples' lives, an industrialized work place required people to work in horribly dark and unhealthy sweat shops and factories, industrialized cities expanded in size by two and three times in a generation, and harboured the conditions for largely un-policed and rampant crime, lethal toxins, and all sorts of dark activities that exploited women, the poor, the weak, and the young. 

Galileo at his telescope

Perhaps Galileo's telescope changed things far more dramatically than a gadget ever could today.  He did not invent the telescope, but he was the first to point it at the stars.  His first telescope in 1609 magnified about 10 times, the same as most binoculars used today, and later on he developed a 30 times telescope.

Galileo looked up through his telescope at a time when the educated elite of the time were largely 'Scholastics': that is, they relied on and used the words and opinions of authorities often long dead to present their arguments.  "Ah yes, but St Jerome builds on St Augustine's idea in a way that St Thomas Aquinas does not."  In the realm of science, all of the various fields were explained in the works of Aristotle, who managed to draw them all together into one coherent 'world system'.  If people since Aristotle had different ideas about certain aspects of science, their ideas probably would not take hold unless they could replace Aristotle's entire system of science.  Nobody was able to do that, and so Aristotle's scientific ideas for the most part were held from the 4th C BC through to the Renaissance. 

A generation before Galileo, Copernicus had published his views on a heliocentric universe, and used theory and good common sense to back up his arguments.  Galileo, with his telescope, began to observe things that revealed one inconsistency after another in the Aristotelian universe, and at the same time underline the veracity of the Copernican system.  The moon, he observed, was not a perfect sphere, but was covered in mountains and valleys.  Venus went through 'phases' as did the moon, there were four moons orbiting Jupiter, the sun had 'spots' and orbited on an axis that was skewed like earth's, and the 'fixed stars' (beyond the planets) were very, very far away and seemed to be stationary.  All of these things refuted aspects of the Aristotelian astronomical system, and when Galileo published his findings in Italian rather than Latin, the plot thickened.  

The Scholastics were very religious.  This was at a time of the Protestant Reformation, and at first, most of the dissent for the Copernican system was coming from that quarter. These early Protestants were very fundamentalist: in fact, one of the reasons leading to the reformation was that the Church was not literally following the words of the Bible.  Contrary to a Copernican system, the Book of Joshua related how Joshua had made the sun stand still.  If the sun was not moving but the earth was, how could Joshua require the sun to stop when it was already stationary?  Also, the Bible placed the earth in the centre of the universe, with everything set up to serve mankind: the sun lit our days and allowed crops to grow, the moon gave us light at night, and the stars allowed navigation.  A Copernican system treated earth as simply another mundane planet.  Further, in a geocentric universe, hell was in the centre of an earth that was corruptible, and heaven was outside the nine perfect celestial spheres that contained the moon, sun, planets and fixed stars.  If the sun was the centre, and the earth just another planet, where were the unique places for hell and heaven? 

And then things began to go wrong for Galileo in his own Catholic Church.  His work, written in Italian, was understandable to anyone who could read and did not require Latin training. At that time, the Jesuits controlled the educational system and they closely guarded this privilege.  Galileo directly threatened this power by making learning available through channels outside Jesuit control. The enemies Galileo had made early in his career rose to positions of power in the Jesuit hierarchy, and eventually led a sustained attack against Galileo.  In the end, Galileo was made to recant his views and he spent his remaining days muzzled under house arrest.

However, even though both Catholics and Protestants tried to repress the teaching of the Copernican system, Galileo had broken the field wide open.  Within a few generations, the educated people of western civilization had embraced a heliocentric universe.  Galileo's telescope resulted in humans perceiving themselves no longer on a stationary sphere in the centre of the universe, but rather on a planet revolving daily on a skewed axis, over a year long orbit around our sun.  It is difficult to imagine a greater change in worldview.  Today we all accept that we are on a moving planet because that is how we are taught when we are young.  However, imagine having to come to grips with this reality later on in life. 

Galileo's careful observations, predictions, and testing of predictions with more observations also helped to pioneer a scientific method that was to change western civilization forever.  Scholasticism would take successive blows by figures like Galileo, Kepler and Descartes, and it would fade away during a new Age of Science. 

And so, while my smart phone is very cool, when placed against Galileo's telescope and other gadgets in history, it is but a dwarf standing on the shoulders of giants.

Astrology

Astrology, for the most part (Hitler's cronies notwithstanding), is a harmless past-time, and so I don't have a problem with it.  However, for three reasons I don't think that it can predict events in the future.  There are simply too many intangibles. 

First of all, the precession of the earth's axis through its 26,000 year cycle means that there is a distinct 'wobble'.  Those stars in constellations rising with the sun in its ecliptic are not the same stars that rose with the sun when the zodiacal signs were first identified in antiquity.  The period December 21 to January 21 is known as 'Capricorn'.  In 200 BCE, on my birthday, January 5th, the sun did indeed rise in the house of Capricorn.  However, it now rises in Saggitarius.  The whole zodiac is out of whack due to the precession of the earth's axis.  All those people who read their horoscopes thinking that they are in fact Capricorns, are wrong.  They are more likely to be Saggitarians. 

It is true that heavenly bodies influence events on earth.  The moon's gravity creates tides in our oceans, and the sun has the effect of creating seasons in places north or south of the earth's equator.  Surely the planets and distant stars will also affect the earth and the life that lives on it. Indeed, humans are over 98% water: how can we not be affected?  However, much of astrology seems to be based on the moment of a person's birth, and not on the moment of his or her conception. At the time of conception, perhaps the influence of heavenly bodies could pre-determine or shape a person's personality.  The problem here is that the time of a person's birth is largely not a question of nature, but rather is subject to cultural imperatives, like diet, exercise, state of mind, stresses to mind and body.  One simply cannot parse the cultural variables away from the positions of the stars at the time of a person's birth.

Third, astrology is a field which seems to present predictions that either are not proven or are unproveable.  For example, I might read a horoscope in a newspaper and find that on this day, the numbers 8, 10, and 14 are somehow lucky for me.  This is using inductive reasoning: because of the position of the stars (data), we can make a prediction for future events.  However, we tend not to see deductive reasoning in the field of astrology.  The readership is never surveyed to see whether those that are born under that particular sign found the numbers 8, 10, and 14 to be lucky on that day.  If in fact this prediction were true, then a certain number of people who fall into that category should have found those numbers lucky.  However, to my knowledge, astrological hypotheses are not put through these types of scientific tests.  Followers seem to rely on 'belief' and 'faith' that these predictions are true, and so astrology would more easily be placed into the category of 'religion' than 'science'.

However, since Copernicus and Galileo, our knowledge of the universe and our physical place in it has been growing exponentially.  Perhaps one day, through the use of powerful satellite-based telescopes and supercomputers, we might be able to link the effect of stars on human personalities.  One might have to work out a series of times of conception, and collect data on personality traits among those who were born at a cerain instant in time.  Once done, one might then test such predictions against new data to see whether the hypotheses stand up.  A body of predictions linked to empirical data might then be compiled, and predictions applied to people who are born at times in the future when the heavenly bodies are positioned in similar ways.  At that point, 'astrology' might pass into the realm of science.

An evening with Stuart McLean

A Master Story-teller

Last evening's concert ranks as one of my favourites.  Denise and I saw Stuart McLean and his accompanying musicians at the Tidemark in Campbell River.  Because I have wanted to see him in person for so long, I made sure to get to the ticket counter when it opened, many months ago: Denise and I sat front row centre.

Stuart was taping a show to be aired on CBC's The Vinyl Cafe on the last Sunday in November.  Behind the stage was an enormous map of Canada, and on it were push-pins and names of the places he had been on this tour.  He seems to have started on the eastern sea-board, and has made his way across Canada, visiting little towns like 'Iqaliut' in the North-west territories, 'Drumheller' in Alberta, and 'Smithers' in BC. 

Stuart McLean, if you do not know of him, is a master story-teller.  We were lucky to hear two new stories last evening, stories that involve, as all his stories do, a fictional family living in southern Ontario.  Stuart weaves into his stories a combination of humour and humanity. His characters are flawed, sometimes impossibly funny, and often very, very sweet. I listen to Stuart on those wonderful Sunday's when I have found time to mow the lawn, weed the garden, work in my shop, and focus as Stuart takes me by the hand to another place.  Sometimes I have to sit down and simply give myself over to a fit of laughing, trying to catch my breath, as Stuart tickles me relentlessly. Other times, I need to brush away a tear before anyone around me notices.  Stuart can do that to me inside of a few minutes: I'll be laughing uproariously, and then find that I need to focus intently on something on my work bench.  I think the power of his stories lies in this particular recipe.

I think that we are set up as a species to enjoy hearing someone tell us stories.  When my children were little, we seemed to spend hours everyday reading stories.  In fact, they would prefer having a story read to them over just about anything else.  They wanted to cuddle up, one under each arm, listen to my voice, and look at the pictures as we all embarked on an adventure.  For some reason, they seemed to prefer books that we had read over new books.  Sometimes Kira would comb the hair of a doll as she listened, grooming her baby, seemingly unaware of the generational link between father, daughter, and dolly. 

In some way, and although difficult to prove, we might be genetically hard-wired to listen to stories as a way of learning our primary languages.  Our babies want to listen to stories perhaps as a way to continue the seemingly impossible task of learning a language from scratch within a couple of years. However, the joy of listening to stories stays with us beyond childhood.  We spent a couple of million years as food foragers sitting around camp-fires at night, presumably listening to people tell stories.  Socially, such events may have been a 'social glue', bonding together ever more strongly the group.  It could be that those individuals who did not care for taking part in such social exercises, and tended rather to go off on their own, fell out of the gene pool from which we are all descended.  Also, such stories helped to explain mysteries, such as why things were the way the were, where things came from, what it is all about. And so, story-telling may have allowed us to learn language, bring our group of people closer together and therefore give it more survival power, and explain those things otherwise unexplainable.  In short, it might not be too far a stretch to say that we are human because we like to hear stories.   

Stuart McLean is light-hearted, funny, and he seems to have a knack for discovering the quirkiness and generosity of the human spirit. In a way he steps out of time.  He might indulge in a modern colloquialism, but when he does, it is to make some sort of point.  He appealed to the 89 year old in our audience, as well as to the youngest, a five year old girl named Ella, and everyone in between.  His skill in developing pace, tension and a really good joke builds a trust between him and his audience that his plot lines will resolve, that irrelevancies will be minimized, and that there is an overarching theme to his stories.  He allows the people in his audience to simply sit back, relax, and let the master weave his wonderful story.  Although telling his stories in 2010, one can imagine him telling similar stories to a group of kinsmen sitting around the fire in 2,000,000 BC.

A Pro Forma World

Stuart McLean

I have been noticing lately that our society is increasingly treating certain things as mere formality.  The obvious example of this is tipping a waiter at a restaurant.  It seems that we are expected to tip at least 15%, regardless of the service.  A friend of mine who happens to be a waiter has told me that getting 'stiffed' by a customer (not getting tipped), is a huge financial blow.  Not only are the base per hourly wages very low, but the person who has not tipped has taken the time away from a customer who would have tipped.  This means that in order to show that we are very pleased with the service, we need to tip in excess of 15%.  In real terms, what it means for me is that when paying the bill, I simply hit the '15%' button for the tip, the calculator works it out, and I sign on the dotted line.  Gone, it seems, is the reward system for exceptionally good service.  It has all become institutionalized. 

Last evening, Denise and I went to see Stuart McLean (more on him in the next post) in concert at the Tidemark theatre in Campbell River.  Stuart (I call him by his first name, because he feels like a family member) has an easy way about him, and entertained us with various stories, and his accompanying musicians played wonderful blues music throughout the evening.  Granted, his performance was different than other performances in that it was a CBC radio broadcast to be aired on the last Sunday of November, but nevertheless, Stuart did something that I have not seen in a very long time: he did not do an encore.  Instead, he thanked the audience for our support, he had his supporting musicians take a bow, and thanked all of the people working behind the scenes to make it work.  Then, after Stuart had the musicians and the audience sing a few choruses of 'You are my sunshine', he gracefully left the stage, the house lights came on, and we all left.

Many in the audience, it seemed, wanted, or at least expected more, and they stood and clapped, even though the house lights were on and people were moving out of the exits.  One could almost hear them saying: "Really, Stuart, this is not how it is done.  You leave, we stand and clap, you come out for some more, then leave, we stand and clap, you come out for one last kick at the can, then leave again, and then we clap... at that point and not one second sooner, the house lights come on." 

However, Stuart is unwilling to go through the pro forma, perfunctory and silly formalities that have accreted to the edges of modern entertainment.  The last thing he said to us before he left the stage was: 'Go home to your families.'  Good for you, Stuart.

Food Foragers and Institutionalized Religion

!Kung bushmen of the Kalahari

Today's lecture in cultural anthropology covered the characteristics of the food forager way of life.  Our ancestors carried on this way of life for at least 2 million  years before we began, a mere 10,000 years ago, producing food.  Midway through the lecture I was struck by something out of the blue. 

Before the momentous switch in subsistence, food foragers lived as those who still exist live now.  Today's food foragers live in small groups, cooperate with each other, share all their food, are egalitarian, have little to no personal possessions, are nomadic, and pursue for most of everyday what we would call leisure activities, including story telling, dancing, and singing. 

Sometime after the beginning of food production, when our populations became more sedentary and started to rise dramatically, we began to 'institutionalize' all sorts of things like politics and religion and markets. The thought bubbling under the surface today was that there are many many similarities between the food foraging way of life and the kind of life prescribed by many institutionalized religions today.

For example, it seems that institutionalized religions are intent on bringing adherents together into communities, many of which are at a small scale (a parish, for example), and the people of these communities are encouraged to cooperate with each other, and help each other out when and where possible.  Such religions also preach an equality of people under a god/s, or goddess/es, and some of them profess the importance of not getting too attached to material objects.  Such religions also have rituals that include story-telling, dancing, and singing. 

It seems that, at least in some ways, institutionalized religions attempt to bring us back as much as possible to the lives we spent as food foragers for over two million years.

And taking this a step further, I wonder about Judeo-Christianity's Creation Myth set in the Garden of Eden.  Adam and Eve are happy gatherers until the fruit is eaten, at which point they are banished to a life of tilling the soil and raising livestock, or in other words, food producing.  Perhaps within these pages we see the 'paradise' of food foraging, and the punishment of food production, and perhaps a religion's goal to bring people somehow back to a not completely forgotten paradise of the food foraging way of life. 

The Real 'New Year'

I can understand why January 1st was chosen to mark the beginning of a new year... it must have had something to do with the tilt of the earth, and days becoming noticeably longer by January 1st after the nadir of the winter solstice.  It could be that on this December 31st, as I sit with friends and family and we reminisce and make resolutions for the coming year, I may feel differently than I do now.

However, at this point, the beginning of September seems a far more realistic 'New Year' than a cold, dark, rainy January day.

Most of my life has been spent gearing up for a new session in September, either as a kindergartener, high schooler, university student, or professor.  The rhythm of the year naturally tends towards relaxing as far as can be done in August so that one can be as fresh as possible for the all important first few weeks in a term.

The day after Labour Day is a time of rejuvenation: people at work are inspired, full of energy, and hopeful for the future: there is nothing quite like the feeling of the first few weeks at a college.

Also, the kids have begun school and their various after school activities. A new season of soccer for Aidan is in full swing, and Kira's karate begins next week. 

Last, but certainly not least, my favourite TV shows begin their new seasons soon, including NFL on Sundays, House, 30 Rock, and Glee.