Servile Conformist

The Cult Of Individuality

Just another symptom of a very sick American culture:

 

The Most Influential Books That Have Impacted Me: # 3

3. Sir Richard Francis Burton's 'Personal Narrative Of A Pilgrimage To Al-Madinah and Meccah'

Burton is no philosopher in a strict sense, but he is a keen student of the human subject. An accomplished solider, explorer, linguist, and translator he also has amateur hats in anthropology (particularly in ethnography) and religious studies. The guy was a genuine badass with too many exploits to cover here, but one I need to mention is his trip to Medina and Mecca disguised as a Muslim so he could study the Hajj pilgrimage. That is some serious gumption.

Burton tried several disguises before settling on portraying himself a Sufi Sheikh hailing from Afghanistan. How an Englishman could trick other Afghanis into thinking he was a fellow countryman is beyond me, but he reports that he did it on several occasions. Using tricks of folk magic and hypnotism, he earned his keep as a healer, helping perfectly healthy people overcome imagined ailments with some soothing words, tonic water, and a variety of other harmless placebos he had become acquainted with as “oriental curiosities”.

Burton’s writing seems to take Horace’s advice of: “You’ll write wonderfully, if by a deft selection make a familiar word look new.” To the current social sciences, his writings are just the antiquated scribbling of a Victorian Englishmen stuck in his times, but his wit and style are hard to match. His talent of observation cuts through a lot of the cross-cultural static that would inhibit most Western observers of Arab subjects. Consider this selection on the natives of Medina (from Chapter 21):

 

Behold David: His name was much academically elite

The man smiling back at you on the right is none other than the (in)famous David Nutting of the Alpha and Omega institute. He has been in Minnesota as of late, giving talks at Universities on the issues surrounding the Evolution/Creation debacle that crops up every now and again in American courts and is the galvanizing issue that binds most active secularists together. I attended one of David’s presentations on a lark (his better half was feeling ill and I wish her a speedy recovery), but ended up being the only person from my local SSA branch to attend. This left me with the burden of reporting the event and the end result is this blog post.

To those readers not familiar with me or my blog, I want to remove any pretense of objectivity. I’m an atheist who has little interest in the current debates that surround these issues, nor do I care about persuading people to join my cause. I don’t have much interest in the natural sciences outside its intersections with philosophy and religion and do not even begin to have the knowledge needed to deal with the various claims that Mr. Nutting brought up in his presentation. No need to go getting mixed up in the business of my betters, I say.

What I hope to provide is some insight and feedback that others can use to reflect on, and what knowledge I do have I’ll certainly bring to the table when appropriate.  So with that in mind…

 

 

Atheism + Outdated thinking.

So I’ve gotten a few requests to share my thoughts on a so called “New Wave” of atheism called Atheism+. I’ve hesitated because I really don’t want to add to the dog pile of criticism that seems to be a war of conflicting personalities. I’ve finally relented and I’ve decided to post my thoughts because I wasn’t seeing anything that really reflected my thoughts being put out by anyone else (sure as shit ain't this or that).

The best place to start is with my friend Dan Finke, in a post describing his visit to my school he made mention of a lively discussion he and I had at lunch:

 

Behold: Thy Ministry Man.

I came across this video on Facebook the today from a Christian apologist on Youtube who goes by the name Mr. Ministry Man, and I was fascinated by it, though not for the content itself:

 

Thoughts from class: Cultural Anthropology

    I was sitting in my Cultural Anthropology class the other day, and the professor asked the class how many of us are feminist, and only two people raised their hands. The Professor was shocked, and openly wondered why so many of her students (the majority female no less) were not feminists.  I had suggested that perhaps the term had become too saturated and no one in here felt comfortable enough to profess a belief in something they didn’t properly understand. The Professor gave me an incredulous look that signaled her assessment of my explanation, and had a student look feminist up in the dictionary, which yielded the following, “the doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men” . She asked again, “Why aren’t you all feminists?”

    I thought she made my point rather well, but I didn’t pursue it further. There is a tendency for activists of any cause to distill their ideals down to its barest simplicity, and reframe the position in terms that just about any person can identify with. A classic example is the position of Pro Life in the abortion debate, that position is described in a such a way that the negation of it is to be Pro Death or in the very least, against life itself. Those are not the kind of terms people wish to associate themselves with, while just about anyone, despite their views on abortion would identify as Pro Life.

    As the class progressed, the Professor began unpacking what exactly it means to be a feminist, and how this commitment to feminism begins to color how one begins to critically assess their own culture in terms of gender and sex equality. She could not have explained a hermeneutic of suspicion more clearly, with even a discussion of how one might perceive male hegemony in even women wearing high heels.

    I thought her examples were great and that they reaffirmed my own sneaking suspicion that feminism isn’t so simple, and that the concept requires much more unpacking than what a dictionary provides. A person might consider themselves feminist with their own notions of what kind of equality they’d like to see, but I don’t doubt that same person might outright reject a feminist understanding of social criticism or literary theory.

    For me, all this raises meta-questions about the discipline of cultural anthropology. Are there meta-discussions about the methods one is supposed to use in studying one’s own culture? It’s one thing to study gender issues in small populations that exist on the edges of dominant cultures, but surely those same methods fall short when applying them to our own culture. Durkheim thought one could study religion without judging it, but I think the enlightenment project of reaching objectivity in the social sciences is long since dead, and it is much more fruitful to take a careful inventory of the baggage one brings to a study, instead of leaving it at home. How much more does that apply to the study of the culture you exist in and identify with?