Black Light: The Julian Barrett

A college friend of mine has released a CD recently - kind of Johnny Cash meets Sid Vicious while wallowing in the penumbra of popular culture. It's not a new thing for him, though it might be for you. Listen to The Julian Barrett or Winocreep, and read a little about the voice behind the mike.

These lyrics are not happy, though they are often blackly funny, and some lines are downright blasphemous (or so it would seem). Why, then, does it strike me as being somehow - brace yourselves, this might sound moralistic - good? I don't just mean technically. They're definitely well-written songs, but then that's a different matter. This I'd say is both. I don't have an answer, this is how it is at the moment. Theories don't fit at this time; better to let it cook a while and see what comes out. I just want to enjoy the music. Thoughts come of their own accord.

(Image gleefully swiped from http://www.crawlspacerecords.com/photosmay.html.)

What Education Points To

This entry will likely evolve as it sits there. I just had to post the topic, which I'd like to develop further.

Aristotle, one of the greatest thinkers ever, had his finger right on the pulse of life when he wrote:

No one will doubt that the legislator should direct his attention above all to the education of youth; for the neglect of education does harm to the constitution. The citizen should be moulded to suit the form of government under which he lives. For each government has a peculiar character which originally formed and which continues to preserve it. The character of democracy creates democracy, and the character of oligarchy creates oligarchy; and always the better the better character, the better the government. --Politics, 1337a10-16

In other words, teach your children into the state. If you want to see what a state is really up to, don't look at the overt workings - this may well be misleading - rather, look at the schools. I think it would give a far more accurate reading, if only we read it with clear eyes.

What are they doing in the schools of the most powerful nation in the world? If you know, please drop me a line. I'm currently on another continent, so it's hard to tell. I've got my ideas, but prefer to chew on them for a little while...

Statistics aren't everything, but they are a good indicator of performance (provided they don't get twisted to an agenda). According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the leading scorers tend to come from Japan, Korea, and Finland. The U.S. clocks in around the middle. Of course it isn't a simple matter, but one cannot help questioning why this is. And I can't help asking - to what purpose are students in various countries educated? This does not show up on any standardized test; it calls for deeper study.

The Most Moral Weapon Ever Invented?

Just happened to find a write-up published on Boing Boing on Samuel Cohen, a fascinating read for various reasons. For those who don't know who he is, Cohen invented the neutron bomb. It sounds absurd, wacky, and peripheral - but there are some core insights on the military and politics to be gleaned from this little bit. Yes, there is the whole discussion of the game theory behind deterrence policy - i.e. let's assume the other guy is ready to push The Button, so we'd better scare him out of that - but there is more to it than that. More can surely be had from reading Cohen's own book, Shame. It's not available on Amazon.com, but the UK branch has it.

One thing interesting is Cohen's rationale for inventing the device. He was a member of RAND, the first think tank and perhaps the think tank. A passage:

Sam Cohen might have remained relatively unknown, troubled by ethical lapses in government and the military but unable to do anything about them, if he had not visited Seoul in 1951, during the Korean war. In the aftermath of bombing sorties he witnessed scenes of intolerable devastation. Civilians wandered like zombies through the ruins of a city in which all services had ceased. Children were drinking water from gutters that were being used as sewers. "I'd seen countless pictures of Hiroshima by then," Cohen recalls, "and what I saw in Seoul was precious little different. . . . The question I asked of myself was something like: If we're going to go on fighting these damned fool wars in the future, shelling and bombing cities to smithereens and wrecking the lives of their surviving inhabitants, might there be some kind of nuclear weapon that could avoid all this?"

Years later, after he finally got backing to develop it, the design of the bomb was reworked, effectively dissolving Cohen's intent.

One bit is very mistaken, however, but also very revealing:

The bomb would still kill people--but this was the purpose of all weapons.

That's not true. The purpose of weapons, and war, never was to kill the enemy but to overpower them. And you don't have to kill to accomplish that. The ammunition of military rifles is steel-jacketed, whereas hunting rifles use bullets with copper jackets. Why? Steel-jacketed bullets will just pass through the body, wounding but not necessarily killing. Brass-or copper-jacketed rounds, however, are softer and are slowed down more by the body upon contact. Why not just use hunting ammo then? After all, it's more lethal - and don't you want to kill 'em? No. If you kill a bunch of enemy soldiers, the other has to recruit more soldiers; but if you wound a bunch of soldiers, they have to recruit more and nurse the casualties - a significantly more expensive , exhausting, demoralizing consequence. When they can't afford to keep it up, they surrender. (We're assuming, of course, that the opposition doesn't consider leaving the wounded alone as a viable option.)

The military is to the government as the fist is to the brain. War is above all a political tool; people often forget this, as they're hung up on the killing thing. Even Mr. Cohen forgot this to an extent, which gives you an idea as to the force of conceptions on our thinking. I didn't realize the real aim of war until I read Sun Tzu; when a WWII veteran explained to me the thing about bullets, it only confirmed that. He knew the purpose too. What is needed is to see things with a fresh eye, so that the stale ideas we inherit have no undue power over our minds. If you can put 2 and 2 together, you're reasoning just fine. The thing to be concerned about is to see.

(Image ruthlessly hijacked from www.shadowfist.com/html/gallery/cardgallery7.htm)

The 3 Rs: Rantin', Ravin', & Rippin'

The older I get, the less patience I have with complacency, especially when it comes to education. I've seen two news items in two days that have gotten my blood boiling - that's a lot of blood!

One article was an op-ed piece by Johan Huizinga (not of Homo Ludens fame). You can find it here.

It wasn't the article per se that I disliked - I rather liked it - what I disliked were the troubling situations he brings up and how they're dealt with - or not dealt with, as it were. It was also the one comment by a reader who simply got the wrong idea about it. Satire can be quite subtle, and it seems she missed the irony. I posted a rebuttal there that was...well, sharp and lacking in subtlety. (It should go up in the next few days, I expect.)

My problem was in unraveling the subtleties of Huizinga's article for my response. There's quite a bit going on there; he touches on the complexities of things today, which is why it's hard to just say he means the opposite. One thing we often do is equate simplicity with ease; really, we should know better. They are not the same thing, not by a long shot. Some of the most difficult things are the simplest. Try just sitting in one place for ten minutes, and focus on your breathing. Nothing else going on around you, just sit and concentrate. That's about as simple as you can get, but I don't believe for a minute you'll find it easy.

In my opinion, talk about education problems has no place for subtle wit that can be (mis)taken at face value. That's my only qualm with the piece. It's too easy for someone to misread it, and if that someone is a school admin - well, they could walk away thinking they're doing a good job. I doubt that would happen, but it's apparent that misinterpretation of the satire does happen.

The other piece has to do with a new book that argues against homework. There's an interview with the one of the authors of The Case Against Homework on MSNBC.

In the book Sara Bennett argues that homework is a waste of time. Any homework. The claim is that the quantity of homework has no correlation to achievement, which is measured by teachers' tests. But if the interview is any indication of the content of the book, it has a wildly off-target thesis.

The interview centers on reading. Her example is that reading novels for school is bad because of the attendant tasks - looking up words, answering questions after each chapter. The reasons it's so bad is that there is a method imposed on reading, a method which has no place. More precisely, it's the teacher's view on reading that gets imposed. As Ms. Bennett puts it, "You don't want to be interrupted every five minutes when you're reading or when you're watching a great movie." The reading experience is being taken away from the students.

Am I the only one who sees the glaring contradiction here? First they're talking about the worthlessness of homework - how invalid the very idea of homework is - and then they're talking about the kind of homework that's being doled out! Ms. Bennett doesn't have an issue with homework but with the quality of the homework, but in making her case she's throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

According to her, teachers don't have a clue as to why they assign any homework. They weren't trained on it, they weren't told its importance. They were told to just do it, and they just did it. (What good little Nike-wearing sports.) What does that tell me? The homework lacks any direction, there is no purpose to it. But who's to blame, the homework, the teachers who thoughtlessly assign it, or the trainers who never bothered to explain its purpose, or how it's to be done?

Ms. Bennett says that American schools are currently in "testing mode" (which she never explains), and homework is the teachers' way of foisting unfinished lessons onto the students. Does this sound like homework is inherently evil, or is the current practice evil?

Now I don't disagree with everything Ms. Bennett says. She does state that a family dinner is the most important factor in academic success. I don't deny this; in fact I agree that families don't spend enough time in the same place at once (dare I say it?) communicating and getting along. I also agree there is a profound problem with the way education is being conducted. But I also think that she's wrongly diagnosed the problem.

OK, here's where my unsolicited advice comes in.

Problem #1: teachers don't know what homework's all about. Solution: teach them!

Problem #2: Educators don't know what would constitute good homework assignments. Solution: find out! Ask what you want students to get out of a lesson, and what they want to get out of a homework assignment. Then ask how to get those results. Do research, experiment with different approaches, formats, exercises, etc. Then and only then are you in a position to judge homework as a whole.

Problem #3: Students see homework as a waste of time. Solution: explain it to them! and give 'em meaningful assignments, for cryin' out loud. Kids aren't stupid. Of course they'll complain about how meaningless it is, because it is meaningless. They don't see the point because there isn't any point. Craft the assignments with a little bit of care, tell them how it should be done, and why. If possible, demonstrate the payoff.

Problem #4: Teachers palm unfinished assignments off as homework. Solution: stop it, stop it, stop it! How freakin' hard is that to figure out? If you don't finish a lesson, something has to be changed - the timetable, the class hours, the number of students, whatever. But expecting students to teach themselves is irresponsible when it's done in this manner. Yes, you want to get students to be independent thinkers. This is not the way to do it.

Now I know what one objection will be: "But we don't have enough teachers, and the ones who are there are overworked and underpaid." Sounds like we've finally got some real problems. Part of the difficulty is a lack of funding, true. But throwing money at something won't solve it (though it will make teaching more attractive from one point of view). There are a number of things to be attended to, all at once, which means there's no easy solution. Practical matters, such as the number of teachers or the size of classrooms, need to be juggled alongside pedagogical matters. I cannot say there's a quick fix; I can only say that the case against homework is but a symptom of a crisis in the schools, and we need to do something about it pronto.

A deeper problem is the very attitude we have towards schools, education, and teachers. This is no small matter: it goes right to the core of our value system. It is well known that America has an anti-intellectual streak a mile long, which does not speak well for us as a culture. People of an intellectual bent face strong opposition (usually subtle, sometimes not so subtle).

Take nerds, for example. You know them, the ones who actually like chemistry class, the ones who enjoy doing (yeccch) math. The stereotypes of these guys getting picked on by jocks - it's true! Granted, several can hold their own, but they've got support from family and their environment; many don't have that. Where does all this happen? The good ol' U.S. of A. Now here I am in Belgium, have been for a few years now - do I see nerds? No. Why not? The bias against intellectual pursuits isn't there. I won't say kids here are perfect, but they don't have to deal with the sort of thing I grew up with; either it's such a minor happening or it doesn't exist here at all.

Now if we red-blooded Americans took a sober look at ourselves, and asked what really counts for us, what are we going to say? If we ask, What sort of future do I want my children to live in? how are we going to answer? It's time to start thinking about where we want to go, rather than complain about how we're not getting anywhere.

(Image shamelessly stolen from www.hellofriend.org/parents/homework.html)

A Note to Fellow Readers

If you haven't done so already, take a moment now, and think about what happened five years ago today. Put yourself there, looking out of the gaping hole in the side of the building, high over New York City. And remember that, for their sake.

For those of you who enjoyed the last entry (see below), we'd like to thank you for your support. However, those coming here expecting me to be some authority on religion are bound to be disappointed. I'm hardly an authority there, or on anything for that matter. Really. There are plenty of folks out there far more competent than me, with better souls to boot. Here's one, a good friend of mine:

http://www.oregonlive.com/weblogs/religionblog/

You'll find a lot to chew on. Do check it out.

The Barbarians Go South Again

Here is an article in Newsweek concerning a recent wave of prominent thinkers plugging atheism:

1=8535">http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14638243/site/newsweek/?GT1=8506>1=8535

The authors focused on there are Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris. Apparently it was written because all these guys are publishing their arguments at the same time. What irritates me, however - what irritates me enough to interrupt the work I should be doing - is how juvenile their notions of religion and God are. Without exception, they speak as if Christianity were on the same par as superstition: God is this vindictive old guy with a white beard who sits in heaven and makes us suck up to Him. (The last bit is Dawkins's phrase, not mine, and I think all the others mentioned in the article would agree.)

Harris is explicitly mentioned as taking up a literal reading of the Bible, which doesn't speak well of him. By this stance Harris implies that any non-panliteral interpretation is just hedging. But clearly there's a lack of sensitivity to the text. I see no reason why it must be taken completely literally or metaphorically, and there are no reasons given in the article for any particular reading.

I get the feeling that most arguments against the validity of the Bible come from people who are very uninformed about the Good Book, reading it selectively, partially, or not at all.

The same questions are posed. If there's a God, how can there be evil in the world? Really, this question presupposes a lot; it's a loaded question, in fact, which is why I dislike it. Presumably God would not allow disasters, either natural or man-made, because He's so gosh-darn good. But because these do occur - well, how could there be a God? So goes the reasoning.

I don't know about you, but when I was younger, there were a lot of things I didn't understand about my parents. If they didn't think or act as I would've liked them to, they were idiots. And they were idiots because their actions didn't make sense to me. Looking back, though, I see they had good reasons for what they did. I can't say I think everything they did was perfect, but I can see why they acted as they did, and in a lot of cases - dare I say it? - it's a good thing they didn't do what I wanted.

Now, if it's so easy to understand that fact, why isn't it so easy to see it in religious thinking? Maybe God knows something we don't? - what a concept! Maybe God doesn't have to play by our rules. Indeed, why should He? I'm not saying I can sit back and cheerfully watch all the hell on earth around us today, like some Dr. Pangloss, only that the combined intellect of those atheists - the combined intellect of the human species, for that matter - is pretty paltry when held up against the wisdom of God.

Another bit that annoys me is when they say that believers get their ideas out of a book:

They ask: where do people get their idea of God? From the Bible or the Qur'an. "Tell a devout Christian ... that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible," Harris writes, "and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever."

Granted, some people do have a notion of religion this simplistic and sheeply. But for anyone who has a sense of religiousness at all, they know this is not the case. The question of where people get their idea of God is another loaded one; in fact it's not even the question it claims to be. What the atheists imply is that religion is purely a textual matter - if it weren't for the Bible or the Qur'an, we wouldn't be religious. Don't believe me? Check it out: the book by my bed "was written by an invisible deity"! Human beings could not have written it out of a response to some phenomenon, no-siree Bob. Religious experience doesn't exist, and if it did it would obviously be chalked up as delusional.

The question "Where do people get their idea of God?" deals more with how our thinking about God has been conditioned, not with the original source of the idea.

What we find here, then, is a position that is unassailable - unbeatable because it refuses to fight. Walled itself up in its own circle of logic, it is impenetrable. Kind of like conspiracy theories.

What I find most striking about the so-called debate is how much religious thinkers have developed over the years, and how little the atheists have come along. They marshall up the same tired questions, the same evidence, and draw the same conclusions. If this were a real debate, they might listen to the opposing side and learn something from them, if only in an attempt to convince them of the error of their ways.

But they don't, and that's telling. What it tells me is that they have simply ignored religious thought, preferring the sanctuary of their own fantasy-image to actual research. If they had, the article mentioned above would probably have included new material, new questions, new refutations. There isn't any of this.

Is this what passes for enlightened thinking? Is this what's called progress? Looks more like regress to me.

(Image brashly cribbed from www.nivbed.com/junk/ancient_garbage/)

Activity, Clean and Alive

"But there is also hope in this: music invents itself through musicians working on behalf of music, rather than themselves. This is healthy music, and can be experienced as such. After listening, or playing, one feels stronger and cleaner. No elaborate metamusics is needed to demonstrate this, for it can be simply experienced. The question for the musician is this: do I become alive playing this? For the audience, it is: do I become alive listening to this?" - Robert Fripp, "The Act of Music." Via 10 (1990), p. 88.


I finished my workout last night, feeling pleasantly drained as usual. Nothing much - pushups, pullups, Hindu squats, and so on - I'm clawing my way out of sedentary life, you see. As I cycled home from the playground, the word bubbled up: clean. That's how I felt, and there was no other way to put it.

Clean is the way I feel after a good workout, when it's not too hard but still challenging. It's always been that way, even back when I was practicing tae kwon do, though I never used that word. But there it was last night, and it reminded me of the article by Robert Fripp; you can see he uses the same adjective to describe the experience of playing music. Or listening to it.

Looking back on other moments, I become aware of other times when the idea of clean has come to the fore. And its opposite. Whenever I saw Natural Born Killers, I felt dirty. That is a movie that shouldn't have been made. It's not the violence; I've seen equivalent levels of that in films, but it doesn't register the same way. No, something else in its treatment of violence strikes me as unsavory and - well, let's just say it - wrong. The soundtrack is enough to bring on the feeling of being soiled.

Of course when we act in a way that is wrong, we often say we feel dirty, and want make a clean breast of it. This is such a commonplace, there's no need to hunt for citations. Rituals of purification work on this notion of cleaning - inwardly, outwardly or both. Sometimes that takes on the form of going through the dirt as part of the cleansing, purging. Catharsis.

Having an interest in logic, I can't help considering cleanness in terms of consistency. There's an element of it there too: if we consider Mary Douglas's definition of dirt as "matter out of place", the notion of coherence is unmistakable. Things have their place in relation to one another, and so a misplaced item runs against the order of things.

Which brings me to another, connected sensation - the sensation of conflict. This takes on several forms, depending on the degree and nature of conflict. A paradox piques by its apparent self-opposition, but we don't feel it to be painful; rather, the pique is exciting, stirs us to action. There is dissonance, to be sure, but somewhere at bottom there is a coexistence of the two notes; the dissonance isn't absolute. Contradiction, however, presents us with a dissonance that is absolute, hence intolerable. "Stand there! - no, don't stand there!" Oh, make up your mind! It hurts to be pulled this way and that. We've all been there.

Before I veer too far from the topic at hand, let me just say I'd like to go deeper into the matter. That I'm not alone in noticing the sensation of cleanness in relation to action suggests that there's something important to it in our experience. The phenomenology of cleanness and dirtiness needs to be addressed, if it hasn't been already. If anybody out there knows of studies in this matter, let me know. I'd be very grateful.

The Divining-Rod

[This is a short short story I wrote last year, one of my last. It gives a window on my view of the human condition; it was born out of a thought, so you could say it's a vessel for propaganda, but hopefully it stands on its own as a story.]

Dr. Jude Theodore awoke one morning late September. He awoke a different man. He gazed at a red leaf that had lighted on the window sill, then turned to his wife and said, “I’m not going to work today.”

“Not going?” she exclaimed. “Why not?"

“I don’t need it. Nobody needs it. We know enough already."

“Know enough?”

“Enough. Plenty. We could go on just like this for the rest of our lives and not ask for anything more. Live like kings.”

“And queens,” she added.

Dr. Theodore phoned the laboratory: “I’m not coming in today.”

“No?” said the assistant. “Not feeling well?”

“No, not really.”

“Well, take it easy, but come in as soon as you feel better.”

But he did not come in. Not the next day, not a few days later, not a week later. His wife brushed her auburn hair before the mirror every morning, wondering when he would snap out of it.

“Why don’t you go back to work?” she asked one day.

“We know too much. First we looked for homes, then we made them. We hunted for food till we learned to grow it. We weren’t happy killing one man, we had to find a way to kill thousands. Worlds we make and worlds we kill: that’s playing God, that’s why we find things out. We know too much.”

A week later she found him sitting by the window, eyes closed, brow furrowed like a wadded piece of paper. He seemed to be listening to the naked branches in the wind.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Setting an example,” he said.

“What are you doing?”

“Forgetting.”

He did not get up from that chair, not later that day, not the next day, not after a week.

She found him there, gazing out the window through the branches. She sat down across from him. Again she asked, “What are you doing?” All she received for an answer was a blank sheet of a look.

She would bring food to him, but he just stared at it, uncomprehending. She wept, shook him, screamed at him, pleaded for him to snap out of it, but – he did nothing. For a time he shook his head when she spoke, but even that disappeared.

One morning, as snow was falling in clusters onto the window sill, she sat down across from him; she stared, mumbling, “Who are you? What’s happened? Why?” Frost gathered on the pane, each question hanging like the steam of her breath. But she knew the answers inside: He is Dr. Jude Theodore, my husband. He is forgetting. We know too much. Soon they too began to fade. By nightfall she was silent, silent save for her breathing; and when the sun rose they still sat there, a king and his queen, gods among gods.

On a Battle over Voices

"I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb." - Herman Melville, letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, 17 Nov. 1851. Correspondence, vol 14, The Writings of Herman Melville, ed. Lynn Horth (1993).

I was asked by a friend what I thought about Moby-Dick: did I find it hard to read? Well, I said, it is somehow very nineteenth-century, but that's nothing - it's an amazing book. Why ask? I was curious. Then my friend told me about a debate surrounding two competing German translations of the work; one is very difficult but "close" to the original, the other a freer rendering but more readable. Which one was better? Fellow translators in Germany seem to favor the latter more. Why?

The discussion seemed to pool around the mixing of styles, my friend explained, especially in the voice of Captain Ahab. The joining of high diction and low, using Biblical rhetoric and Shakespearian talk along with the language of sailors, and -

- Wait a minute, I said, what Shakespearian talk? Well, all the Thou arts and Thees, my friend replied.

Oh no. Problem. That was not Shakespeare's talk, it was Nantucket's. Nantucket dialect in the 19th century was peculiar in this respect, retaining that archaic style. Ahab wasn't the only one to use Thees and Thous; the whole damn town did that. Several characters in the book, and in real life as well. This is no secret; Melville comments on this trait, mentioning the source of that peculiarity in the process:

"The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation." -Moby-Dick, ch. XIV "Nantucket"

Hardly Shakespearian, and hardly restricted to the voice of Ahab.

What does this mean? What does it mean, that translators never picked up on the speech pattern, so clearly marked, of a community? Were all these translators stupid? I don't think so. Did every one of them skip this chapter? I hope not. What I suspect is that Ahab's voice drowned them out. He is a singular character, so striking and overwhelming that they listened to him and forgot entirely about all the others who had used similar words before him.

You may be wondering why I'm so worked up about this issue. For one thing, I love Moby-Dick; there's good reason why it's still around. A pet peeve of mine is when people - especially critics, who should know better - knock the book for being a stylistic failure. How can they say that? Ahab talks one way in one scene, another way in another scene. So it's artistically wrong to portray a complex character?? My friend related this from the online discussion about it, and I couldn't believe my ears. A work of art exists for its own logic, not the expectations of critics. I hate that presumptuous attitude.

Another thing I hate is seeing widespread misunderstanding when it simply needn't exist. As seen above, there is proof positive that one claim of the debaters is unfounded. If that passage weren't enough, all they need to do is read the other characters who speak in the same way.

Before you think I'm being arrogant here, you're only half-right. I'm chiding myself and them equally. I make the same errors, which is probably why I get so irritated when I come across this sort of thing.

That mixing of styles, my friend continued, doesn't that seem post-modern to you? Then, responding to that very question, added: The same thing happens in the Persian Letters by Montesquieu. And in Robinson Crusoe there are those interminable descriptions of the guy growing corn, or building a hut! Isn't that post-modern too? So the technique isn't so new after all.

Right. And I'm not sure what counts as post-modern, nor do I think we can clearly tell what would really distinguish the period as such. We're too close to it. We may think we know it, and we should certainly try to articulate that perspective, but I don't really believe we have the clearest eye on ourselves - precisely because we are caught up in it. A hundred years from now, historians may carve up the 20th century into three periods, or five, or whatever. Or post-modernism might be replaced by some other term that captures the essence. But our opinions will still be valuable to them; for they will be able to know how we saw ourselves, and can see just wildly wrong we were.

Moby-Dick was not a literary success when it was published, my friend said, or in Melville's lifetime. I would chalk this up as evidence that we do not know our own time. None of us. What works will last as masterpieces? If Melville's own generation did not recognize the genius of that wicked book, and if they were as human as us, can we truly say we have a clearer self-estimate?
In my opinion we are as deluded as any generation has ever been, maybe even more so. For an age when we profess to be more pluralistic and inclusive, we sure do act arrogantly. In honor of being so humble in our self-estimate, we honor ourselves still more. We know better, we judge more fairly: that's quite an honor. Progress goes forward, we learn from our mistakes. It doesn't take long to poke and prod the semblance before the usual suspects come reeling outbetraying our unstated belief that we are the bearers of truth, over and above our predecessors.

Is this new? Hardly. I dare say it's the human condition. My take on this soon to come.

(Image ably nicked from www.whalecraft.net/Whaling_Books.html)