A-Ring's Place in the Sun

Friday, September 26, 2003

 
I thought this was hilarious.
A-Ring 12:08 PM

Monday, September 15, 2003

 
I have a ton of friends who have spent time in Sweden, and who are always harping about how Canada needs to be more like Sweden. How refreshing, then, to read this article in today's National Post.
A-Ring 10:39 AM

Saturday, September 13, 2003

 
My roommate is one of those people who really looks down on people who watch a lot of TV or who haven't read a lot of great literature. We have tendencies to get into arguments about things like the artistic merit of the Backstreet Boys. You see, years ago, I decided that I just don't care what sophisticated people tell me what to like and what not to like.

How refreshing, then, to see this article by Tom Utley, finally admitting that, following a fateful encounter with Leonardo's Madonna of the Yardwinder, he didn't really like it, or most of other high culture.
A-Ring 5:30 PM

Wednesday, August 13, 2003

 
You may have gathered from my lack of posting that I am currently on my huge one-month vacation.

Reasons it’s great to be back in Saskatchewan:

-Sunsets like this every night.
- My friends here actually show up when they say they are going to show up – not 1-2 hours later.
- The fine products the Columbia Brewing Company of Creston, British Columbia. Also, the fact that liquor stores are open 24 hours a day is a nice touch.
- The nonstop summer events here in the City of Bridges : I have been to the Saskatoon Exhibition , the Fringe Festival and will soon be at Folk Fest and Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan.
- Ground beef is incredibly cheap because of Mad Cow Disease, so I've been eating a ton of it.
- Great summer fun at the Kenosee Superslides and assorted beaches throughout the province.
- Jogging here.
A-Ring 1:14 PM

Sunday, July 27, 2003

 
PART V OF MY HUGE POST ON ACADEMIA

Well, I’ve been typing for a few hours now, and am really only scratching the surface of the issues here, but since I don’t want to write an entire book on this topic (at least not right now – maybe someday during my career as an academic), let me sum up on my thoughts about where we as Christians should stand in this entire debate. A few observations:

1. All Christians must be essentialists in the sense that we believe that human beings do have an inborn nature.
2. However, unlike the world, which takes the existence of an essential human nature as a justification for human behaviour, Christians can never do that. All people are born with original sin, sinning is in accordance with our nature, but this does not mean that sinning is right.
3. I also think that structuralists and post-structuralists can teach us a lot about how to confront essentialists, especially evolutionary psychologists, in a compelling manner.
4. I feel that a lot of the post-strucuralist arguments about how opinions are formed and how behaviour is created in our society need to form the basis of an effective theory of evangelization.
5. I think we need to wrestle with questions about how we can create a society that doesn’t exclude people in the course of defining normalcy.

Well, again, I could go on and on, but I think I’ll end there

A-Ring 4:57 PM

 
PART IV OF MY HUGE POST ON ACADEMIA

The post-structuralists took this to the next level, focusing not only on static linguistic structures but on the power relationships that go into creating language in the first place. (Post-structuralists are more likely to speak of “discourses” than “languages”: languages are fairly constant over time, whereas different “discourses”, or ways of talking about something, can change much more frequently.) Thus, there is a focus on not only what is being said, but also on who is doing the talking and why. We need to realize that the most powerful person in a society is the one with the authority to define what is considered “normal”. People will then modify their behaviour in order to conform more closely to what they are told is normal. Thus, the evolutionary psychologist who claims that promiscuity is a natural part of being a man is in fact indirectly the cause of men being promiscuous; the theologian who told a woman she was naturally weak and submissive is indirectly the cause of women being weak and submissive; and so forth. This prompts post-structuralists to says things like (“Discourses produce the behaviours they contrive to explain.”)

A second concept closely related to post-structuralist thought is that of “otherization”. That is to say, a behaviour can only be defined as “normal” in relationship to an “abnormal” behaviour, an “other”. Thus, post-structuralists see the “abnormal” as playing a crucial role in constructing behaviour and have conducted studies on the “other” within and without society: defining who is insane is a crucial part of defining what is reasonable; determining who is a criminal is a crucial part of deciding who is a good citizen; deciding what is abnormal sexual behaviour is a crucial part of deciding what is normal sexual behaviour; and so on. However, just as “normal” behaviour is “called into being” through its definition, so too is “abnormal” behaviour. At the same time that the majority in a society is trying to reach the point of “normal” (even more explicitly, in order to reach that point), they need to create the abnormal behaviour in a certain segment of the population so that they can define their behaviour against that standard. Thus, post-structualists will say things like “Our society must produce criminals in order to produce good citizens.”

A-Ring 4:56 PM

 
PART III OF MY HUGE POST ON ACADEMIA

Put another way, essentialism ultimately becomes a question of freewill. If my nature is a given, if I have an inborn tendency to behave in a certain way, then that is a prescription to act a certain way, isn’t it? How can you fight your essence?

Anti-essentialist positions, therefore, take an entirely different starting point. Having questioned the source of the essentialists’ authority, they end up by seeing any essentialist description of human nature not as a real description of human nature so much as a projection of society’s values.

Let’s start with the structuralists. Basically, the structuralist position came down to this: human behaviour is governed not by what human beings are but by what human beings believe and think. All human thought is governed by the conceptual tool of thought: language. Thus, in order to understand and explain human behaviour, we need a thorough understanding of the underlying structures of language. What this structural analysis reveals is that human beings get boxed in to various modes of behaviour depending on the various languages available to them. (Language, of course, being defined not merely in terms of English, French, Chinese, and so forth, but also in terms of the “languages” available within each of these languages, such as the “language of theology” or “the language of the law” or “the language of politics”.) Thus, we are left with linguistic structures instead of an innate human nature, with a set of “social constructions” viewed through the prism of language instead of an inborn essence.

A-Ring 4:55 PM

 
PART II OF MY HUGE POST ON ACADEMIA

The great attraction of the essentialist position is that it makes it easy to explain human action. The great danger is that it provides simplistic explanations of complex phenomena. Thus, it is hardly surprising that the twentieth century saw a reaction against a number of old essentialisms. For example, the old “scientific” racialism, which explained the differences between the races by explaining that people of different races had different inborn characteristics (the “blacks are naturally lazy” school of thought) has been totally decimated in the academy, and will, thankfully, never again rear its ugly head. Similarly, the school of thought that women are naturally less intelligent or morally sound than men, have been thoroughly discredited.

However, the twentieth century also saw the establishment of a new, more academic brand of essentialism. Freudianism and Jungian psychoanalysis, in particular, strove to explain human behaviour in terms of innate drives: the sex drive, the power drive, the maternal instinct, and so forth. This type of explanation, though, is ultimately question-begging: “If all people have a sex drive, why have so many throughout history opted to remain lifelong virgins?” “If all women have a maternal instinct, why have so many had abortions or even committed infanticide?” Freud’s great breakthrough was his idea of repression and sublimation, which sought to explain how the basic human drives can be channeled into seemingly unrelated areas.

The most important essentialists in the academy today are probably the evolutionary psychologists. They have advanced a number of suggestions that human beings have an essence which can be analyzed by looking at the Darwinian reasons for human action. The functional properties of human nature have arisen because of natural selection in response to the set of concerns faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors: finding mates, avoiding predators, and so on. Evolutionary psychology is an amazingly sophisticated essentialist theory but still suffers from the reductionism inherent in all essentialisms.
The twentieth century has also been notable for its challenge to essentialism (including evolutionary psychology). The main criticism which can always be leveled at essentialist thinking is: How do we know that what you are describing is really human nature? Are you really explaining human behaviour or are you just justifying a set of behaviours of which you approve? After all, everybody loves to be told that their particular behaviour is natural. The old scientific racialism was very comforting because it said to white people, “It’s not your fault that black people are so poor. It’s just part of their nature. It’s the natural order of things, and can’t be helped.” It’s very comfortable for a man to hear, “It’s natural for you to want to have sex with a lot of women. It’s your Darwinian nature to want to spread your seed.” But is it right?

A-Ring 4:54 PM

 
PART I OF MY HUGE POST ON ACADEMIA

Well, I for one am sick and tired of non-academics making fun of academics for using “language nobody can understand” and “getting involved in pointless debates” and whatnot. As a student in the humanities (specifically history), I am profoundly interested in these debates, and I think it very odd that more people aren’t absolutely fascinated by this debate. So, in order to pique your interest, here is my brief overview of the extremely important debates happening today in humanities, social sciences, and human sciences faculties across the country:

Although these debates may sometimes appear to turn on pretty small or irrelevant points, these points all feed in to a bigger set of questions: Why do human beings behave the way they do? What motivates human behaviour? Does human nature exist? What is the role of society in shaping the individual? Or, as the Psalmist succinctly put it: What is man?

I will start by dividing the academy into 2 groups: essentialists and anti-essentialists. Basically, the difference between the two comes back to the old nature vs. nurture debate. An “essentialist” is someone who believes that there is an innate human nature, that we are born with a set of drives which will eventually play themselves out in the social sphere, but which remain basically universal, and thus constitute the “essence” of being a human being. An “anti-essentialist” (a.k.a. a “social constructivist”), on the other hand, believes that most (I don’t know any scholar that goes so far as to say all) human behaviour is determined by the social arena and the socialization process.

A-Ring 4:54 PM

Friday, July 25, 2003

 
Well, after his tearful apology on the floor of House of Representatives, I guess I can forgive Bill Thomas.
A-Ring 5:17 PM

Wednesday, July 23, 2003

 
I don’t often blog about history books I’m reading, but I just came across a footnote in Giovanni Levi’s Inheriting Power that I think is very smart stuff. I quote:

The current explanations of the rise of the modern state are often based on a broad perspective that tends to undervalue the role of local society and local realities in conditioning the political characteristics of nations as a whole. This is not exclusive to explanations based on notions of ongoing development that see the formation of the state as a stage present in all instances of modernization… Some positions, although they accentuate the progressive extension of state monopoly of authority and social control, consider the central power able to exercise a uniform dominion, hence to impose uniformity. Change in the role of the various social classes happens within a substantially static framework [e.g. Lawrence Stone]…Still other positions view the development of a worldwide capitalistic market as the fundamental reality that explains the position of the various nations at the center or at the periphery of the overall system of exploitation. They tend in this manner to annul all local differences that are not determined by variables completely extraneous to the social structure of the society in question [e.g. Wallerstein]…

What I think should receive greater emphasis is that the structure taken on by the newly forming states in the transition phase between feudalism and capitalism was to a large extend determined, in its successive political aspects, by the way in which the actual individual local peasant situations reacted to the development of both a market economy and the central power’s system of procurement, distribution and control. [e.g. Tilly, Moore]… What resulted from the interplay between centralization and conflict within the various social groups becomes the fundamental mechanism for the differentiation and characterization of political systems. The strength of the state derives from the controlling role given to it, perhaps unwillingly, by the dominant groups, according to their abilities, the power they wielded, and their economic orientations. However, when the enormous diversity of peripheral situations over which the state must exert its own power is undervalued, the conditionings that derive from this are underestimated as well.

A-Ring 9:32 PM