What is Civilization? 2. Markers

Europeans attached definite markers onto the skeleton of “progress.”  Generally, of course, anything European was better than anything Indian.  (Though there are interesting stories about how Europeans came to adopt some Indian ways of life.  For example, it took time, trial, and error, for the French to learn the value of the canoe over the row boat.  It would be an interesting book to draw out the stories in a variety of areas.)

There is no agreed upon “essence” of civilization that Indians lacked and Europeans had, but certain clusters of attributes often appear.  Whites believed that in Indian culture the land was held by the community, individuals gained status by giving things away, the tribe demanded loyalty, nature was animated and perhaps worshiped, the legal system was rudimentary and based in nature or tradition, Indians were illiterate, and they fed themselves primarily by hunting and gathering.

Whites, by contrast, insisted on private property (especially with regard to land), that status is achieved by how much you can accumulate, that the nation-state deserved the highest loyalty, that nature must be conquered, that their own legal system was an achievement in dispensing justice, that reading and writing were fundamental to civilization, and that farming and ranching were appropriate occupations for civilized peoples.

If I had to define a “center” to these mutually exclusive lists, it would be the notion of land as private property.  Everything else is required to validate and ensure the security of private property.  John Locke would be proud.

Adams points out that the function of the Dawes Act of 1887 was to break up the loyalty to the tribe by parceling out the land of the Indian reservations to individuals.

Here again, a few notes:  First, to me these markers provide a very narrow take on what civilization is, but it does indicate that critiques of private property (Christian, Marxist, Anarchist, etc.) may in fact go to the heart of the American experiment.

Second, Christianity.  Europeans simply assumed, on the basis of long tradition, that theirs was a “Christian society” even a “Christian civilization” or a “Christian nation.”  Indians, then, would need to become Christians if they had any hope of being civilized. This take on Christianity is even more narrow, though whether Catholics (France, Spain, Portugal) or Protestants (Britain) were in charge seemed to make little difference in the approach to Indians.  This seems to me a strong indication of how thoroughly the church had become subject to the state.  More on this later.

Third, Europeans were always split on whether “civilized” just meant “white” such that neither blacks, nor Indians, nor Asians could ever truly participate in “civilization.”  Andrew Jackson, whose refusal to enforce the law as determined by the Supreme Court created the “Trail of Tears” [I still don’t understand why this did not create a constitutional crisis], said in his second inaugural address that the destruction of the Indians by the whites was exactly parallel to “the extinction of one generation to make room for another.”  That is, Indians, not even the Cherokee, those who had most adapted to the civilized American ways listed above, could ever be civilized.  So they died, but not of old age, the way one generation makes room for another.

What is Civilization? 1. Progress

David Wallace Adams, in Education for Extinction:  American Indians and the Boarding School Experience 1876-1928, (University of Kansas, 1995) says that the idea of civilization is “an idea almost deeper than ideology itself.” (p. 12.)  I don’t care for the “almost”, but I take this as the claim that ideology is itself in the service of civilization, and so the presumption of the nature and goodness of civilization is the one idea shared by all ideologies.

From the time Europeans and Indians first encountered each other, Europeans considered the Indians as “uncivilized”, that is as either savages or barbarians.  So, what were the markers of civilization? 

Most fundamental is the notion of “progress.”  Progress is movement along two axes simultaneously:  from lower to higher and from the past to the present.  This meant that when Europeans encountered Indians, they believed it was as if they had stepped back in time.  It also means that they step back into a state of being that is less desirable.  It is inconceivable to Europeans that an Indian way of life might be preferable to a European life. 

This map of progress could also be laid out geographically from the West to the East, with the East being the most civilized.  Further, Europeans thought of this progress as inevitable, either as a natural law or as the working out of divine favor.

Before going further with this, I want to make two notes:  First, this is a typically Enlightenment approach to culture and tradition in general.  That is, on the Enlightenment critique, culture or tradition is the source of superstition and unjustifiable differences in power.  Therefore, (because they are nothing more than that) culture or tradition must be destroyed and replaced by rational laws.

Second, this is the very same argument we hear today when people say, “Welcome to the 21^st century” or when we consider people, arguments, or traditions “backwards.”  The geography has changed.   The North is more progressive than the South; both coasts are more progressive than “fly-over-country.”  But progress is considered just as inevitable, just as preferable, now in the name of pluralism.   

CLM again

"the delaminated view of the earth that characterizes western science." p. 112.  Nice turn of phrase.

Techne, Phronesis, and Archery

Working through Gadamer's Truth and Method today, specifically his account of techne and phronesis in Aristotle (Ethics Bk 6).  It occurs to me that the differences within the archery community are often differences between those  who see archery as a techne and those who see it in terms of phronesis.  That is, some archers are after a product, a high score.  The means for achieving that score are largely separable from the score itself.  So, any modification in equipment is open for consideration in order to achieve accuracy and consistency.  Others are after a certain experience or the execution of certain action performed well.  Almost everything about the experience may be deemed crucial to performing the action well, so that the means and the end are inseparable.  Archers of this school will tend to be conservative in the equipment choices and resistant to change, because what is open for negotiation is much smaller.  It seems to me that both "traditional archers" and Japanese kyudo archery fall into this second camp.
  

Notes on Requests and Freedom

One alleged point of difference between “Western” cultures and the cultures of indigenous hunter-gatherers (glossing over for the sake of simplicity the differences within both Western cultures and those we describe as hunter-gatherers) is this: When Westerners need something, they directly ask someone to get it for them; when hunter-gatherers need something, they state their own need, but they do not directly ask someone to provide for that need.

This difference is then glossed with an interpretation: Westerners don’t hesitate to tell others what to do, to give orders, to take charge, to assume that their needs are the ones that need to be met; hunter-gatherers leave their companions free to respond or to not respond to the stated need because nothing is directly asked of them. Westerners treat other people like domesticated animals; hunter-gathers treat the environment and other animals as persons deserving of respect. (See V.R. Cordova, How it Is: The Native American Philosophy of V.F. Cordova, p. 25-6., and Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling, and Skill, p. 69-70.)

Put in the terminology of speech act theory, requesting is an illocutionary act; in hunter-gatherer societies requesting is an indirect illocutionary act. The perlocutionary effects of requesting in these ways are exactly opposite: the effect of the one is to feel imposed upon, coerced, not trusted; the effect of the other is to operate in trust, freedom, and harmony.

The differences indicated and the meaning of those differences rely on associating direct requests with manipulation and indirect requests with autonomy and freedom.

In my experience these terms are correlated in the exact opposite way. That is, a direct request makes it clear what exactly is needed. It leaves the one asked free to respond with a “Yes, I can do that” or “No, I’m sorry I can’t.” It sets a parameter so that everyone can know whether the request has been filled or not. Conversely, an indirect request remains vague as to the nature of the need and so requires considerable powers of divination even among married couples, it does not call for a response as to whether meeting the need is within the power of the one within earshot, and finally it remains indeterminate as to whether the need has been met, for nothing has been directly requested and no interpretation has been confirmed. That is, direct requests seem more aligned with granting freedom to the respondee and indirect communication is more likely to feel manipulative.

Augustinian Phenomenology

Yet, though they [trees] and all corporeal things have causes which lie hidden in their nature, they do display their forms ... for perception by our senses; and so it seems that, even though they themselves cannot know, they nonetheless wish to be known. City of God, xi.27.

Programing

Why is "program" such a powerful metaphor when speaking of mental phenomena? I've never truly programed anything. Neither have most people. I'm reading a book published in 1974, and already it is talking about "programing the mind." 1974!

From Luther Standing Bear

"For it is the mothers, not the warriors, who create a people and guide their destiny."

One could write an alternative to Hegel's philosophy of history on the basis of this statement.

“The experience of freedom has not been valued equally throughout history and across cultures. Even today freedom is out of sync with other highly desirable states of being, such as happiness, belonging, glory, or intimacy. While those states suggest unity and fusion, freedom has an element of estrangement that does not by definition exclude engagement with others in the public world but makes it more unpredictable.” Svetlana Boym, Another Freedom: The Alternative History of an Idea. University of Chicago Press, 2010, p. 2.

Plagiarism, flattery, and the internet

Earlier this month (August 2010), Stanley Fish addressed the question of what it is to plagiarize & what’s wrong with plagiarizing in his Opinionator blog. Fish understands plagiarism to be using “words that were first uttered or written by another without due attribution”; and he understands that act to offend against the code of behavior that belongs to a particular guild. The guild in question is the academic one, where attribution is expected. There’s no moral question about the offense, any more than there is about breaking the rules of golf while you’re playing. Neither the rules of golf nor those of the academic guild have moral weight; they simply describe what you need to do if you want to perform that activity.

This is all abundantly & elegantly correct, in the usual Fishian deflationary mode. It should be borne in mind by Catholic thinkers, who have a tendency to get morally over-excited about this topic. It should also encourage us (we Catholics, that is) to ask whether the nature of the intellectual work we are called to do, in the methods & goals of which we should train our students, requires us to forbid & penalize plagiarism, defined as Fish does, with the same degree of enthuiasm as does the academic guild. It seems to me that we should not: a properly nuanced understanding of tradition, & of our capacities for thought, speech, & writing as gift, leaves little room for the categorization of plagiarism as an offense. It should & could be one of the distinctives of the Catholic intellectual life that we are altogether less exercised about plagiarism than our pagan counterparts.

There is a nice & deeply Catholic point here. Fish is not a Christian, even though he knows more theology than most Catholics, and understands it better. His clarity about what plagiarism is & what’s wrong with it (& especially about what’s not wrong with it) helps us Catholics to see with greater clarity than we likely otherwise would the lineaments of our own intellectual practice. As always, the Church needs the intellectual work & witness of those outside herself as stimulus to provoke and lead her to a fuller understanding of what she is and does.

(this post was plagiarized from paul j. griffiths) (I just couldn't do it straight, so I created a logical conundrum instead!)

The Onion

http://www.theonion.com/articles/deranged-gunman-opens-fire-on-shooting-range,17468/

On Burying our Nuclear Waste in the West

"It has happened over and over again that promised land or holy land by one reckoning is wasteland by another, and we assert the sovereign privilege of destroying what we would go to any lengths to defend." Marilynne Robinson, "Wilderness"

Critique of Utilitarianism

"Let Benthamism reign, if men have no aspirations…" John Henry Newman, A Grammar of Assent, p. 88.

Lives of Significance

"Significance can, of course, be a misleading description of the lives that got my attention. Significance suggests importance. It suggests lives that make a difference and that demand acknowledgment. But the lives of significance that I began to notice were not significant in any of those ways. Rather, they were lives of quiet serenity, capable of attending with love to the everyday without the need to be recognized as "making a difference." Stanley Hauerwas, Hannah's Child

A Different Kind of Logic Course

I'll be teaching Logic next semester. I've taught the standard courses before. They are often more like math classes than philosophy classes. I want to teach not just mathematical logic, but the philosophy of logic, from Parmenides to the present. Topics: Mythos and Logos; Greek philosophy through Aristotle; Stoicism?; Descartes and Leibniz; Kant and Hegel; Frege, Husserl, Russell, and Dewey; propositional logic; Boole, Cantor, Godel. Any suggestions?

Tangled lines

Over the last several years, I have operatively adopted an historicist account of human nature (ala Hegel, Gadamer, Sartre, Ortega). For many (Sartre and Ortega included, I think) that account is opposed to view of natural law in which the goals and basic structures of human nature are given not by human decisions or by human history but by something more grand in which humans participate. I think Hegel and Gadamer would have a more nuanced position here than Sartre or Ortega allow – that is, while remaining basically historicist, they can incorporate an account of “nature” into that account rather than leaving it as a contradictory opposite.

So, now I’m rethinking my thoughts from the standpoint of primitivism, which completely reconfigures the relation between nature and history On the primitivist account, human nature is a product of millions of years of evolution (so evolution provides a broadly historicist framework, but not in the sense of history used by the thinkers above). “History” (in the narrow sense of the word used by historicists) began only about 10,000 BC, and that is not enough time for any real biological change in humans. So we are all basically what we were in the Paleolithic age; our bodies, our minds -- our nature – is best suited to the environment and life “we” had then. So, the primitivist essentially makes a natural law case for human ethics.

Questions: In what senses is the primitivist case different from a natural law account of human nature? What are the advantages of an historicist account of human nature that we would lose and need to rethink if the primitivist case seems convincing? Has anyone written a critical review comparing the theoretical frameworks of Alasdair MacIntyre’s Dependent Rational Animals with the more historicist framework assumed in most of his other writings?

The Hunter-Gatherer of History and the Indian of Faith

I attended an N.T. Wright conference this weekend. I've been reading the works of Calvin Luther Martin, a historian of White-Indian relations. It strikes me that there are closely parallel issues in Life of Jesus studies and histories of Indians: 1) Most generally: History comes to the subject matter with a philosophy of history and a set of methods that constitute its epistemology. However, in spite of its self-assurances, there are signs that the real subject matter escapes. This failure eventually rebounds onto the practice of history itself as inadequate to the subject matter. More specifically: 2) Both Jesus and the American Indian seem to operate within a radically different experience of time than that assumed by an Enlightened philosophy of history. 3) Both Jesus and the American Indian operate out of motives that remain opaque to the assumptions of rational, economic behavior. And 4) the sources by which we know these things are themselves puzzling and must be reinterpreted out of their own world and into our if we hope to make any headway.

Bambi 2: Message

These changes made possible or necessary by the change in medium already have the ability to transform the story. Disney studios also made other alterations that make Satlen’s Bambi and Disney’s Bambi into different, even competing, stories.

Salten’s story, written in the aftermath of the Great War, takes death as its central theme. Nature is “red in tooth and claw.” Predators kill and eat, prey are killed and eaten. The animals, the plants, and even the leaves of trees anxiously anticipate their own deaths, and they talk about their impending demise. While humans, called “Him,” seem to be either a god or devil, He too dies, as Bambi sees at the end. Bambi voices the theological moral of the story: “There is Another who is over us all, over us and over Him [Man].” Man and the Forest are reconciled within the circle of life and death beneath the care of One who is above it.

Disney’s Bambi, produced during the preparations for and beginning of the Second World War, presents Nature as a calm and peaceful harmony (except for the scene in the winter where Bambi’s mother feeds him bark off of the trees.) All of the animals are friends; the crotchety owl looks down from his perch with grandfatherly affection on the gathering of rabbits and mice. As the story editor Perce Pearce says in a planning meeting: “There’s nobody swooping down and eating someone else….” In the realm of nature, there is no death, only birth and life. Disney isolates and focuses Death onto one character, Man. Pearce, again: “their one common enemy is Man. That’s the conflict there—and keep it simple.” Simple, indeed. Death disappears from Nature. What had been a death scene in Salten, the two falling leaves, becomes the beautiful passing of autumn into winter. All dialogue about anxiety in the face of death disappears, and in its place … music. And Man is always the devil, never a god. In contrast with Salten, Disney offers no resolution of the conflict between Man and Nature, Death and Life. “It is about surviving in the forest.” This is part of the reason Roger Ebert describes Disney’s Bambi as “a parable of … nihilism, and despair”; it paints reality as a “world of death and violence.”

My five-year-old reaction was appropriate after all.

Bambi 1: The Medium

For my fifth Christmas, this would be Christmas of 1968, my parents gave me and my older sister an LP of the sound-track of Bambi. A few days later, my Mom put the record in the player so we could listen. The album came with a large picture book, and we kids flipped through the pages, wide-eyed, as we followed the sound. We heard the opening chorus of “Love is a song that never ends” and later the “Drip, drip, drop, little April showers…” We heard the stags charging through the meadow and followed along flipping through the pictures. And then we heard the shotgun fire, and young Bambi calling out “Mother!” “Mother!” My sister and I wailed. We stopped only to catch our breath, and then we wailed some more. We shut off the record player and tried to comfort ourselves. Dad returned from a long hard day at work a short-time later. He was disgusted that a Christmas gift could send his children into such despair and his home into such chaos. Too late did he learn that Bambi, of all things, was not appropriate for children. Or rather, as children, maybe especially as children, we knew exactly what Bambi was saying.

Now, as an adult, I want to look at how the animators at the Walt Disney Studios constructed the movie to see (1) what they intended to say, (2) what the movie actually says, (3) whether I (still) consider it persuasive, and finally (4) what criticisms or alternatives I might offer.

Disney loosely based Bambi and the Great Prince of the Forest on a book by Fritz Salten, Bambi: A Forest Life. The different mediums both required and allowed the film-makers to tell the story in a different way. The message is more than the medium, however. Disney did not shy away from a creative reworking of the material, such that the two Bambies tell different stories.

The change in mediums does partially determine Disney’s message. Salten’s book, literally composed of words, carries the story through descriptions and through dialogue. Disney’s film, by contrast, “is an essentially silent movie: a wordless, rhythmical ballet performed to an orchestral accompaniment.”

The Silver Anniversary edition of Bambi gives viewers access to comments made in the planning meetings for the film. Those comments show Disney animators keen to push the envelope of their current understanding of an animated motion picture.

The animators applied lessons learned from previous Disney projects. Prior to Disney cartoons could be only cute and funny. Their aesthetic required that they be short, unrealistic comedies. Extreme forms of violence become funny when animated as a cartoon. (Itchy and Scratchy illustrate this principle on The Simpsons.) Snow White (1937) and Pinocchio (1940) had already enabled viewers to experience real beauty in a cartoon. Likewise, Disney found that a strong villain on a big screen with a good script, animation, and music allowed a cartoon to portend even tragedy. With Fantasia (1940) the studio tried to match the depth and power of Bach, Tchaikovsky, Dukas, Stravinsky, Beethoven, and Shubert with animation on the big screen. They learned the power of music as a tool different from either dialogue or animation.

They learned the difference between “what is felt” and “what is seen.” They dropped as much dialogue as possible out of the film. Likewise, they made judicious choices on what they would communicate through music rather than animation. In Bambi, two “characters” and one event directly benefit from these previous projects.

Bambi opens with a pan of a dark, sometimes out of focus, multi-plane shot of the forest. The animators understand that the forest is itself a character in this story, and they want it to be “mysterious,” merely hinted at; they want it to be felt rather than seen.

The second character to be felt but not seen is Man. The Disney editors took every image of individual people out of the final version. (Only a shot of a distant hunting camp remains.) Instead of showing some individual, the film indicates the presence of Man “by ominous, lurching music.”

The death of Bambi’s mother is the event that happens entirely off-screen. We know she died because we heard the music, we heard the shot, and we hear Bambi’s cries of “Mother!” The old stag’s “Your mother cannot be with you anymore” merely confirms what we already know. The animators knew they were making the scene more powerful by not showing Bambi’s mother falling. They knew they were “really gonna hit them [the viewers] hard.”

"This is a species of the sublime for which the sight of the boundless prairies of the interior of North America is renowned." Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation. Section 39, p. 204.