The Anonymous Anthropologist

a single shot

George Washington's Pistol -- Notoriously inaccurate, it took 15 seconds to load a single shot.

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed. — The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, ratified 1791

They might have been smart men, those Founding Fathers, but they sure used some poor grammar. The sentence above is clearly lacking an initial preposition; something like Since would have been helpful. As a teacher, my inclination is to try to correct what’s wrong here:

Since a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

There. That’s better.

Now how about a little context? When this amendment was ratified in 1791, it had been less than ten years since the American Revolution and the fact of an English invasion at a time when an American military did not yet exist. There was nothing to be done but join the local militia to fight the British. There was no Army. There was, at the time, not yet The United States. There were independent entities (the colonies) in collaborative revolution against the same colonial power. They needed their guns, crappy as they were.

There is no threat of this occurring again in America.

We need not worry about invasion. No one wants to colonize us. We all know the threats are technological and economic; it’s not about land these days.

We have a nationalized military. If you want to defend your country, you can join it. They’ll give you a gun.

We have local law enforcement authorities. If you want to participate, you can join them. They’ll give you a gun.

The second amendment assumes a situation where a land invasion will compel individual Americans to grab their guns and run out into the streets to defend their lives and their land. At present, this is a highly unlikely scenario.

It cannot be used as a rationale for justifying the carnage that modern weapons have unleashed in our society. It is senseless and ignorant to pretend otherwise. The guns themselves have become several times more lethal.

If you want to argue that the Founders were genius enough to write standards that could be applied forever, I can counter-argue that they were actually genius enough to be so specific as to state exactly what the arms could be used for. The militia, obviously.

Perhaps they did foresee the future. They just never imagined we’d be so ignorant of the past.

¶ Posted 28 April 2012 † The Anonymous Anthropologist § Culture § Politics ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: guns

is there an app for the suicide hotline?

Factory Workers in Shenzhen, China, from http://sznewin.en.made-in-china.com/company-Shenzhen-Newin-Electronic-Co-Ltd-.html

I am a capitalist. I like making and spending money. I am unapologetic about my love of technology and gadgets, and I enjoy upgrading my computer and my cell phone when they cease to satisfy me. Hell, I work hard for my money and spending it at Best Buy keeps those kids employed, right? That’s the way that our economy works: If you have money, you owe it to your country to spend it.

I can’t help thinking, though, about all the people that are disabled, killed, and driven to suicide by my commitment to patriotism. I suffer from elitist guilt. In a global context, I am the 1%.

In Shenzhen, China, millions of Chinese kids (and I do mean kids) are thrilled to have relatively high-paying jobs, where the minimum wage is $240 a month for about an 80-hour work week. They are proud to be the first generation of their countrymen to live the capitalist dream. They get to work in a Special Economic Zone — a big, modern city set apart by the communist government for the clearly capitalist purpose of making money for China. They manufacture everything we buy, despite the fact that quite a lot of it is unavailable in their own country.

They do it all by hand, bending over the same table at the same dull task for 12 to 16 hours a day, day after day, week after week, year after year, until their hands are crippled by it. Men in their 20s can no longer hold chopsticks. Enough people were driven to jump from the heights of Foxconn’s production tower that the company put up nets to catch them; perhaps they looked up from the iPads they would never themselves possess and determined that life was not worth living? Would access to apps have saved them?

One thing is clear: These things happen because we allow them to. This is what free trade gets us – abusive and exploitative labor practices overseas. We make no demands of our trading partners, and they make no efforts to cater to our sensibilities. Why should they? What we see as inhumane, they see as perfectly normal. Nothing compels them to change anything.

All capitalists are moral relativists; they have to be. The only way we can do business with China is if we ignore the fact that they employ ten year-olds to work 16-hour days. That’s alright for them. The only way they can do business with us is if they block most of our commercial websites. That’s alright for us. The bottom line is, well, the bottom line.

The thing about capitalism is, it’s not a moral system. It’s about making money, not making nice. It’s great at fulfilling its purpose — profit-making — but don’t expect it to be kind. There is no benevolence in the free hand of the market, which is ordinarily found clenched around a fistful of cash. That’s why we can’t just leave it alone to regulate itself.

Damn it. I still want an iPad.

¶ Posted 20 January 2012 † The Anonymous Anthropologist § China § Culture § Economics ‡ Comments (1) ° Tagged: capitalism, China, free market

Agnorant in America

“Agnorant.” I love this word because it so completely encapsulates the essence of what it means to be a Republican today: That special combination of arrogance and ignorance that stands behind everything from American Exceptionalism to Snooky and The Situation. That way of plowing straight ahead through life with perfect conviction that you are always right in the face of constant proof that you are utterly wrong.

Agnorance: Perfect composure as you offer your opinion on something you know nothing about. Perfect faith that you know what is right for everyone and damn it, there should be a law. Perfect confidence in your own genius, which only you can see. Perfect blindness with regard to your own faults, mistakes, and history. Perfect command of the three facts that you know.

Every Republican on stage at a debate stands there as an icon of agnorance. Their histories hold only heroic deeds and good intentions; they forgive themselves their own mistakes without even acknowledging their occurrence. They all know what is best for America despite the fact that none of them knows that people didn’t coexist with dinosaurs.

They bought themselves a reality show to satisfy their narcissism; does that make us voyeurs?

I feel dirty, America.

¶ Posted 02 December 2011 † The Anonymous Anthropologist § Politics ‡ Comments (1) ° Tagged: conservative, politics, Republican

Pity the Fool

People of Penn State, you have my sympathy. You have just discovered that your community is not what you thought it was. Your heroes have fallen, your trust has been violated, and your memories have been tarnished. Everything has changed.

The sorrows are multiple. Children were abused, the abuse was reported, and then nothing happened. People were either in denial or actively engaged in covering up the crime. It’s bad enough that the abuse occurred, but the complete ethical failure of those wh0 knew about it to do anything at all is something else again.

If I were writing a play about a man who became a sort of surrogate father to thousands, I might briefly consider naming him “Paterno” — and then dismiss it as either too overt or too clever. His fall, at any rate, is a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. He is your Lear, Penn State, possessed of that same combination of determination and blindness that led the other to his fall: A fool; deserving of your pity, but a fool nonetheless.

¶ Posted 22 November 2011 † The Anonymous Anthropologist § Culture ‡ Comments (2) ° Tagged: Joe Paterno, Penn State

Let’s Undo the Time Warp Again

It’s hard to believe what’s going on in America. It’s like the second half of the 20th century never happened. Did I miss the episode where the plot got shifted to an alternate timeline? I hate it when they fuck with the timeline.

Seriously. I thought that legalized meant settled, as in no longer open for debate. I thought I could count on an America where abortion would always be safe and women would remain in charge of their own bodies. I thought that access to and use of birth control would never again be seen as anything other than sensible, especially in light of the now-legal alternative.

I thought that history equaled lessons learned, as in we’ll never make that mistake again. I thought that after the Great Depression, I could grow old feeling safe in the knowledge that I won’t have to sell apples in the street if I live past seventy – or blood if I lose my job. I thought that after the Civil Rights and anti-war movements of the sixties and seventies, after the Children’s March and Kent State, police officers would never again attack peaceful American citizens exercising their legal right to assemble.

I thought that science and rationality had won the battle with magical thinking, as in we don’t believe in ridiculous crap anymore. I thought that since antibiotics were an accepted thing, so was evolution, since they’re based on exactly the same principles. I thought that since the melting of polar and alpine ice and the flooding of low-lying lands is patently obvious to anyone looking, let alone living there, people would accept the fact that the climate is changing. I thought it was pretty clear that there isn’t a giant white man living in the sky somewhere, making all of this happen.

Clearly I was wrong. I encounter ignorance and arrogance on a daily basis, in the news and among my students. Ignorance of history and arrogance of belief. I’d like to believe that the sequence of history shows a straight line moving from brutality and stupidity toward kindness and enlightenment, but I can’t.

It’s just a jump to the left. . . and then a step to the right.

¶ Posted 19 November 2011 † The Anonymous Anthropologist § Culture § Politics § Religion § Science ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: abortion, birth control, civil rights, evolution, Healthcare

Mormon Mitt

Joseph Smith Translate the Book of Mormon by Looking into his Hat

Joseph Smith Translates the Book of Mormon by Looking into his Hat

I know I’m going to be out of line here, especially for an anthropologist, but why is talking about the fact that Mitt Romney is a Mormon off limits? I have a problem with this.

First of all, there’s the tithing thing. I’m not comfortable with the idea that 10% of the President’s income would wind up in the hands of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. That’s the people’s money. That’s my money. I’d sooner see him spend it on another private jet than have him hand it over to a church. Any church. Something feels vaguely unconstitutional about it.

Second, anyone who believes in the literal truth of any religion is intellectually challenged in a manner that should disqualify him from seeking higher office. I’m sorry, but it has to be said: The miraculous foundations of every deist faith are patently ridiculous. This is easily explained by the fact that these things date to a time before the advent of science and technology, when humans beings were still in the intellectual Dark Ages. First they thought that the sun was pulled across the sky by an immortal charioteer; later, they were certain that a man had parted a river to allow his people to escape their captors. Still later, a virgin gave birth to the child of God, who then went on to turn water into wine.

Yeah, sure. Tell me another one. That’s what passed for knowledge in those days, before the scientific revolution. Before anyone was aware of the facts of reproduction, at least as far as the ovum was concerned. Back when people believed in alchemy and were busily trying to turn lead into gold. Back when being left-handed or epileptic was the work of the Devil, for crying out loud!

The Mormons are a special case because their faith dates to the 19th century, long after our intellectual awakening; they have no excuse for their ignorance. In the 1820s, an established con artist claimed to have received a series of revelations including the “fact” that Jesus Christ traveled to the New World after his resurrection, where he ministered to the Native Americans — who, by the way, were a lost tribe of the Jews who migrated there several hundred years before the birth of Christ. Never mind the fact that people have been present on this continent for a minimum of 10,000 years. And while the Old and New Testaments at least contain elements of history and records of real places, the Book of Mormon has a cast of characters acting in locales that do not actually exist. Joseph Smith wasn’t big on fact-checking the crap that came out of his hat.

It’s one thing to be a religious literalist, but it’s another thing entirely to base your politics on it. Politics cannot be faith-based; they must be reality-based. This does, of course, disqualify the entire Republican field at the moment. Mr. Romney, however, has the special distinction of membership in a Church that baptizes Holocaust victims and tells its people that they can themselves become gods. God himself, by the way, is an alien man from another planet.

As an anthropologist, I want to say that all religions are valid, legitimate and deserving of respect, but they do not represent a reality on which everyone can agree. They are composed of metaphors, allegories, histories, and outright fictions intended to bind a people together in a specific time and place, and they are not applicable outside of their own particular temporal, cultural, and geographic boundaries. They are best understood as products of and exclusive to the cultures that create them. They have no place in the politics of a modern, multicultural nation. You might as well go put your face in a hat.

¶ Posted 21 October 2011 † The Anonymous Anthropologist § Culture § Politics § Religion ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: biblical literalism, Joseph Smith, Mitt Romney, Mormons, politics, Republican

your major is a minor matter

Gov. who singled out anthropology degrees as job market losers has daughter with that degree – The Washington Post.

Florida governor Rick Scott just singled out anthropology degrees as especially useless for the job market. With government jobs making up more than 15% of Florida’s employment and an unemployment rate of 10.7% (http://www.bls.gov/lau/), it looks like the only really useful skill in Florida is knowing Rick Scott.

He is, of course, completely wrong. Nobody gets a job in their field straight out of college anymore, and everyone settles for whatever job they can find. Let’s be honest: There are plenty of unemployed engineers and math teachers. There are plenty of unemployed everything. A college degree means very little these days in terms of getting a job, but it’s still a necessity if you ever want to make a living. You might as well study what you love because unless it’s accounting or web design, you’re not going to get a job doing it.

I know why Rick Scott hates anthropology: It teaches evolution. It causes you to question your religion. It asks you to to critically examine things you take for granted. It insists that you give up your prejudices. Like all social sciences, it is secular, humanist, and progressive. It probably turned his daughter against him.

We’ll take it on the chin, we anthropologists, because unlike Scott, we know we make the world a better, smarter place. It’s easy for me, in particular, because I have a really good job. I wonder how long Scott will?

¶ Posted 12 October 2011 † The Anonymous Anthropologist § Anthropology § Politics ‡ Comments (3) ° Tagged: anthropology, Florida, Rick Scott, unemployment

The Shadow of a People

We are so bipolar. Left or right, liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, secular or religious, pro-choice or anti-abortion, straight or gay, NAACP or KKK. We are a nation of diametrically opposed frequent fliers, forever on the right or left wing of something. We seem to have an inability to hit the middle, or to want to be anywhere near it.

Lately I’m having a hard time understanding the attitude of Congressional Republicans without resorting to a summary dismissal of them all as essentially evil. I’m good, they’re bad; I’m sane, they’re crazy; I’m patriotic, they’re borderline treasonous. I give a damn about people and they only care about money. Lévi-Strauss was so right: The world is a mass of binary oppositions.

I used to wonder about Germany. How could a single culture have produced such extremes of genius and madness, of creativity and destruction? How could the same people who gave us the Reformation have given us the Holocaust? What kind of intense cognitive dissonance must they have endured?

Now I wonder about Israel. How can the descendants of the displaced have gone on to displace another people? How can those who were once walled into ghettos watch their sons and grandsons build new walls? How can the exiles of Europe subject another people to the constant indignity of multiple checkpoints and “papers, please?”

What happened in Germany was this: After the devastating losses of World War I — losses of life, capital, and dignity — the people were so depressed and downtrodden that they allowed the most extreme among them to gain political control. The angry, righteous rhetoric of these extremists was so compelling because it projected both the confidence of certainty and the exercise of power, two absences felt profoundly by the German people at the time. The genius and the madness, the creativity and the destructiveness, were all always there. Jung said it: The shadow is the seat of creativity. Both are always there. It’s just a question of which side is dominating at the time.

Now, read the above paragraph and substitute “Israel” for “Germany,” “World War II” for “World War I,” “the Israeli Settler Movement” for “these extremists,” and “Jewish” for “German.” The shadow is currently dominating.

I’ll save you the trouble of further translation and provide it for you here in dystopic fashion:

What happened in America was this: After the devastating losses of the Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan Wars — losses of life, capital, and dignity — the people were so depressed and downtrodden that they allowed the most extreme among them to gain political control. The angry, righteous rhetoric of these right-wing extremists was so compelling because it projected both the confidence of certainty and the exercise of power, two absences felt profoundly by the American people at the time.

What happens next?

¶ Posted 11 October 2011 † The Anonymous Anthropologist § Culture § Politics § The Middle East ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: bipolar, Congress, Holocaust, Israel, Jews, Lévi-Strauss, Middle East, Palestine

God made me fittest

It’s not easy teaching evolution to evangelicals. The internal inconsistencies are mind-boggling. They enter the classroom secure in the knowledge that God created them, yet they believe in “survival of the fittest.”

I tell them: Darwin’s theory was about biology, specifically reproduction. Simply put, some individuals have genetic traits that give them advantages in a particular environment, while others have disadvantages. This is a matter of luck, not superiority. When sea turtles hatch, all at once by the thousands, the birds are standing there, waiting. Those who hatch first become dinner, while those who hatch later stand a better chance of making their way past the sated birds to the sea. This is about luck, not ingenuity. Individuals who happen to possess the right combination of traits for their moment in time and their place in space will be more successful at passing on those traits; those who don’t, won’t. Over time, as the traits that work best are passed on and the ones that don’t fit are filtered out, the species adapts to fit its environment. If the environment changes, the rules change, and different traits are encouraged — and so much for your “fitness.”

They have no problem with any of this. It doesn’t threaten their belief system in the slightest.

I tell them: “Survival of the fittest” is an incorrect interpretation of Darwin’s theory. First, it’s not about survival; it’s about reproduction. You can live forever but if you fail to reproduce, evolution doesn’t give a damn about you. Second, fitness is relative to the environment, changeable, and largely a matter of luck. It’s not about how smart or strong you are; it’s about whether or not you have an opportunity to pass on your genes. Think about the sea turtles. Third, Darwin may have used the phrase, “survival of the fittest,” but he didn’t coin it; we have the philosopher Herbert Spencer to thank for that. Spencer never intended it as an alternate explanation for the biological facts of Darwin’s theory. He meant, from the very beginning, to apply the phrase to his theory of society — which was a bit of predictably racist, imperialist, 19th-century nonsense. It held that the English were “civilized,” while the Africans were “savages.” “Survival of the fittest” has been handy ever since as a perfect justification for capitalism and colonialism. It normalizes white privilege and economic hegemony while relieving us all of the burden of assisting those less fortunate than ourselves. Let nature take its course. Only the strong survive. Might makes right. Every man for himself.

This, they hate. “I like survival of the fittest,” they protest. “It’s right. You shouldn’t change it.” They never see the irony.

¶ Posted 02 October 2011 † The Anonymous Anthropologist § Culture § Science ‡ Comments (1) ° Tagged: anthropology, college, Darwin, education, evangelicals, evolution, Social Darwinism, survival of the fittest

quit blaming the Jews

A Cartoon from Akhbar al-Khalij, June 9, 2008

When progressives and others protest the pro-Israel policies of the US, they typically assign blame to the Jews, a.k.a., the “Zionist Lobby.” This is depressingly true to historical patterns: The Jews are consistently perceived as controlling everything from the media to the government. Well I’ve got news for you: It’s not the Jews. It never has been. They’re just such an incredibly convenient scapegoat in a world dominated by Christians.

Jews make up something like 2.5% of the general population of the US, and the great majority of them are secular and non-practicing. They are also typically highly educated, liberal, and progressive. I’m convinced that most secular American Jews are horrified by Israel’s settlement activities and disgusted by its suppression of Palestinian rights. They are embarrassed by association with it.

The small minority of pro-occupation Jews make up less than 1.5% of the American populace – do you really think they have enough money between them to pull the puppet strings on foreign policy? That’s just ridiculous. Rupert Murdoch is not Jewish; either are the Koch brothers. The 111th Congress was 8.4% Jewish and 84.8% Christian, and the Tea Party Caucus in the House alone is currently 45% evangelical. So who’s really running the show? Clearly it’s the conservative Christians. Just look at the legislation they’ve been working on: Not a single jobs bill, but lots of renewed interest in outlawing abortion.

Christian conservatives have taken over the American government. Republicans since Reagan have used their faith as argument and justification for their policies. Lately they hold suspect any among them who do not express both a belief in creation and the firm denial of science, particularly where it applies to climate theory. A good many of them, men like former attorney general John Ashcroft, are biblical literalists who fully expect the rapture to occur during their lifetimes and see current events in the Middle East as the fulfillment of biblical prophesy. Simply put, the Jewish homeland must exist if conditions for the rapture are to be met. Men like this don’t worry too much about the future because the world is ending anyway, but they do need to assure the survival of Israel.

From the very beginning, it has always been Christians who felt connected to the holy land as a site for pilgrimage and were loathe to see it in the hands of Muslims. While to them, the Old Testament is the source of original truth, the Qur’an is a post-Christian heresy. The state of Israel was in fact made possible first by the Balfour Declaration and later by the UN partition of Palestine. While Britain had from its very beginning a tradition of religious pilgrimage to Palestine and a desire to see it avoid Muslim control, the UN was moved to do something after the Holocaust drove home the fact that Jewish safety could not be assured in anything but a Jewish land. Were it not for this commitment by Christians to support and preserve the Jewish state, it likely would not exist.

Today conservative Christians continue the traditions of pilgrimage and Islamophobia. Missionaries went into Iraq before the smoke from our bombs even cleared, claiming humanitarian missions while their supporters spoke of the war as a “crusade.” Because we live in the shadow of the millennium, some Christians are genuinely puzzled as to why the rapture has not yet occurred; indeed, they anticipate its imminent arrival. They attribute earthquakes and dead birds to the wrath of God, as if the scientific revolution had never occurred. The Republican party is now dominated by people who think like this, despite the fact that they actually constitute a small minority of the country. They are, however, the majority block of primary voters.

It is in fact the minority of a minority that is currently steering the ship of American foreign policy, but it’s not the Jews. It’s the apocalyptic Christians who aren’t just waiting for the rapture, but are actively working to assure it.

I have a theory: The rapture has already happened; it’s just that they all got left behind.

¶ Posted 23 September 2011 † The Anonymous Anthropologist § Politics § The Middle East ‡ Comments (1) ° Tagged: anti-semitism, apocalypse, Christians, Israel, Jews, Koch brothers, liberal, Palestine, progressive, rapture, Republican, Rupert Murdoch, Zionist