word nerge
In one of my very first posts on The Nerge, I ranted about how NASA Hates Me, which was about my attempting to fill out an astronaut application. More recently, I wrote that reading My Dream of Stars by Anousheh Ansari made me realize that my affinity for puking probably completely disqualified from ever making it into space. Most recently I read Mary Roach’s Packing for Mars, which unequivocally confirmed that I am woefully physically deficient in what it takes to be an astronaut, especially when it comes to puking and fidgeting.
I have to admit I did not read the book in its entirety. This is because Roach just adores all things repugnant. She loves to linger in details about corpses, shit, and puke. I guess this is no secret to anyone who has glanced at her book Stiff. But I was woefully unprepared for how much she writes about gore and ick and I have a pretty low tolerance for The Gross. This is despite the fact that I worked in animal surgery for a time and had to deal with many things gruesome, horrible or just yucky; somehow in that context I could handle it. (Except dog shit, which is the most disgusting substance on the planet. How thousands of owners spend their days picking it up is really beyond me. But anyway…)
Maybe it’s that I can handle it, or I can tolerate it when it has to due with animals who are not humans, but I really cannot read pages and pages about vomit, or gore, or dead bodies. I cannot. And as I read Roach’s book, I realized that if she even hinted at these topics, if therewas even a whiff of gross out, than a major turd bomb was imminent. And I learned to skip ahead. Thus, I read as much of the book as I could.
If I had left any hope of being an astronaut, this book snuffed them out. Although I am calm in emergencies and tense situations, I think at this point I’ve read enough about space being The Great Nauseator to convince me that space would be one long nausea roller-coaster for me. Also there’s the irrational animosity, something which astronauts and other normal folk experience from being in close quarters with a small group of people, but I experience just working in an office. I realized the bile I experience when my coworkers open their mouths and spew trite, boring words is completely irrational, and that they are nice people trying to have a conversation, but the hostility is tenacious. So I imagine that on the ISS I would experience murderous thoughts with abandon, especially since I couldn’t go hike in the Contact incessantly and pretending that I’m Dr. Ellie Arroway, minus the crush on Matthew McConaughey.
NOTE: In the following clip, you probably want to skip ahead to 1:30.
by Nell Irvin Painter
I am on a roll. I have read more great books this past year than in any previous year. Writers are coming up with great stuff, stuff that makes you re-examine your thoughts and ideas, and give you a few new ones. The History of White People is such a book.
Now, I did approach this book with a bit of know-it-all swagger in the vein of “Yeah, I know all notions of race our cultural and have been scientifically proven to have no biological basis, blah blah blah…” And one of the reasons that I think I know this is because I am very frequently perceived as being a different so-called race than the one I so-called am. I am a bit of genetic anomaly and do appear different from the rest of my family in terms of skin tone and hair texture, to the point that some people who meet me aren’t “sure what I am”. Interestingly enough, people often perceive me as whatever race they themselves are.
In any case, my presumption to know this topic well was crushed within the first few pages of reading. Although Painter does corroborate my knowledge by saying, “Today… biologist and geneticists… no longer believe in the physical existence of races”, she then goes on to blow me away with this thought:
“…human beings have multiplied so rapidly… by more than 32,000 times in 300 years. Evolutionary biologists now reckon that the six to seven billion people now living share the same small number of ancestors living two or three thousand years ago. These circumstances make nonsense of anybody’s pretensions to find a pure racial ancestry.”
Ah, that is brilliant. It’s so obvious and true when she says it — there is no way, numerically, that there can be any pure race. Just as I was recovering from that epiphany, she threw another one at me, which is the definition of who is Black. Now, we have all come to realize that Black does not mean skin color, as people identified as Black have all sorts of skin tones. She points that it is simply about genetic ties to African slaves. It makes no difference what you look like or talk like or what culture you have — it’s still all about the one-drop rule (which I previously referred to here).
After discussing these things briefly, Painter gets on with her examination of White people. Originally, in Europe, there was no concept of race. In the origins of Western civilization, a.k.a. Greece and the Rome (okay, she actually starts with the Scythians), there were concepts of geography and inhabitants having corresponding temperaments. People who lived in cold climates were harsher, the Celts were fierce, things like that. But as time went on, philosophers and politicians of the day kept remixing and refining these thoughts to suit their needs. And their needs were always about keeping certain people as the underclass.
One idea, which is hard to even follow, is the continual white-washing (pun intended) of Greek and Roman history. Since the statues of these civilizations were white, it was assumed that the people who created them were lily-white. Even though there was evidence that pigmentation and color was used in the creation of these statues and had since been lost, the evidence was ignored in order to create various convoluted theories of Whiteness. One such theory of “the blond ancient Greek narrative” as Painter calls it is that the people who lived in Greece and Italy are NOT the descendants of the Ancient Ones; for the Ancient Ones must have been blond-haired and blue-eyed for that is what is superior and good. Therefore, Germans are the real descendants of the of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and the modern Greeks and Romans — who knows where the hell they came from? And who cares, since they are not White? At least, not before the 20th century.
Not everyone in this country is aware that American slavery is not so literally black and white. Their were White slaves. There were Black slave owners. But even beyond that, who was considered White was changed over time. The Irish were not considered White people for some time. When they were depicted in the press of the day, they were drawn with ape-like features in a state of drunkenness. Both the Irish and “Negroes” were consistently depicted as dim-witted and simian. The majority of Irish immigrants decided that they had to make a strong statement to separate themselves from “Negroes” and move up the social ladder, and they did this by strongly endorsing slavery in The South. Their strategy worked, and they were eventually accepted as “White.”
Then there was also all the pseudo-science of Whiteness. This included an obsession with skull shape and sizes and absurd charts of how White different Europeans were. Of course, the terms for Whiteness have changed throughout time, including terms like “Teutonic” , “Aryan”, and “Caucasian”, the last coming from a long-standing myth that the people (particularly the women) of the Caucuses were the most beautiful in the world. Beauty indicates God’s favor, and the folks developing theories of Whiteness were quite sure that the paler and blonder someone was, the more beautiful they were, and therefore the more superior.
The History of White People has many more examples of the ridiculous/horrible history of race in Europe and the U.S. I tell you it is worth your time to read about all of these in this pain-staking well-researched book. Although we all live under the specter of racism and its terrible consequences, this book clearly shows that racism is not about genetics and only about intimidation and repression.
There’s very little evidence that I actually existed on this planet as a child, but I do have a couple of mementos. One is the first book I could read by myself, Baby Farm Animals. The first page I could ever read is pictured here, Baby Calf. Which might explain why I became I vegetarian.
My jaw dropped when I saw this book for the first time. I saw the huge gold letters proclaiming BEDWETTER and a very funny photo of Sarah Silverman. I immediately figured she could not have *really* been a bedwetter, because it was inconceivable to me that someone with such a shameful past would actual not only publish a book about it but name the book as such. But, indeed, as I leafed through I saw that this was an autobiographical account of her childhood and her experienced with dreaded night-time pee.
I am not a big Silverman fan, as she vacillates between uproariously funny and just plain annoying. But I thought I’d read this book because, as you may have divined, I was a bedwetter too.
Even today, decades later, I feel a profound sense of shame when I admit this. I still have not been able to overcome the deep sense of humiliation, even though I understand intellectually that it wasn’t my fault nor was there anything wrong with me. I grew out of it, but later than many, living in constant fear of exposure.
Reading through Silverman’s close calls with being publicly exposed was more frightening to me than The Blair Witch Project, because I remembered my own near misses and the possibility losing all social standing when I already stood on very shaky ground.
Frankly, the rest of the book where she grows up (and out of it) and achieves fame is less interesting. I enjoy reading about folks overcoming adversity and becoming stronger, but I think Silverman is just too young to write a convincing retrospective on events that occurred only a few years before.
There are many of us who end up emotional and psychological weakened by our childhood. Some childhoods are truly horrific, and some just run-of-the-mill crummy. My later childhood featured a steady decrease in self-confidence that started from age 10 and bottomed about around age 16. For about three years I had no friends, and during those years or so had almost no meaningful conversations.
I’ve been thinking about this recently because of the recent rash of teen suicides being reported, mostly because they are being bullied for being queer.
Queerness, among your average blockhead teens, is still considered a shameful, laughable state-of-being, deserving of relentless ridicule. The blockheads are small in number but make up for it in loudness and a trail of toadies.
So, I was not a gay teen, but I was considered a “dog” i.e. homely girl, which meant any boy could ridicule me at any moment for being “ugly”. Which they did on occasion. So, I can’t imagine what life would have corroded into if, in addition, my secret shame of bedwetting came to be public knowledge. I do know that life would have become unlivable.
I think it my time it was much more fashionable to have an old-fashioned nervous breakdown, where you just lay down in your bed and did not get up for long periods of time. I suppose that’s the route I would have taken if things had gotten worse. In the chaste world I grew up in, I never heard of anyone killing themselves, so the idea wouldn’t have occurred to me.
Suicide is contagious. When K & I were in Ireland last spring, we found out there had been a rash of suicides in the area we were staying. The scenery was gorgeous and quiet, and yet people were continuously killing themselves. These people were not particularly bad off; some had children. There was no real explaining it.
So, if this sad pattern could occur in a place that seems really wonderful to me, so much so would a suicide contagion occur in hopeless teens.
I hope that with all the Internet access available to kids now, that some of these queer children will be saved by a video they saw on It Gets Better or they made a phone call the Trevor Project. I feel afraid though that some kids are so isolated, alone, and feeling desperately unlovable that they won’t reach out.
And as for folks for Silverman or me, we were not bullied queers, and somehow we lived through adolescence and depression and went on to be strong adults. And this strength that I found in myself and helped grow over time is one of the things I like best about myself. If my 15-year-old self could see me now she would not believe how wonderful life can be. I am living beyond my old dreams, but in the end they were they dreams of a child.
How the Developing Brain Creates Supernatural Beliefs
Finally! I book to answer my burning question, “Why, in an age where scientific information is so readily available, to people prefer to belief in irrational ideas?” By irrational ideas I’m referring to religion, new-age mumbo jumbo, crummy appropriations of Native American beliefs, UFOs, etc. It boggles my mind that someone would prefer creationism — for which there is no proof, to evolution — which has almost limitless proof. The Science of Superstition sets out to answer this question with the following hypothesis: Because the human brain is made that way.
Bruce M. Hood, who is a professor of child development and cognitive development, cites numerous studies in this helpful book of how humans perceive and interpret their surroundings from 12 hours old, through various childhood ages, and adulthood. In these studies, he shows that humans have a natural propensity to “fill in the blanks” when information is missing, whether visually or experientially. For a visual example, he uses this illustration called a Kaniza figure. Both babies and adults see the square that isn’t actually there. *
Experientially, humans continually try to perceive patterns in a seemingly random world. They create rituals to try control a world that they cannot. Children easily create lucky charms or personal rituals to help them overcome fear. I remember that when I was three, my parents felt I was old enough to go to the bathroom alone in the middle of the night. Since this frightened me, I took a impulsively toy with me. But then, since one toy made me feel less afraid, I figured if is good, two is better. As time went on, I had to collect more and more toys until finally one night I did not make it to the bathroom in time. When I realize what I had done, I started to cry, and one parents or another appeared and assessed the situation. They kindly suggested I leave the toys behind in the future, which I did to avoid future embarrassment. I use the example because he coincides with Hood’s hypothesis that humans naturally develop ritual behavior (collecting toys to ward off unknown harm) and magical thinking (that I can control unknown harm — the bad –through toys — the good).
As we mature and develop rational thought, we never really rid ourselves of this type of thinking. Hood cites studies that show that we actually spontaneously have supernatural thoughts (his term for magical thinking) but actually expend energy to suppress these thoughts and act on the more rational one. It happens instantaneously, and we usually are not aware that we suppressing anything.
In some cases, though, this is the type of thinking we that is the root to many false ideas we stubbornly hold on to as adults. And for some adults it is easier to just believe the magical thinking and not work on developing rational thought. This is why some people are naturally drawn to religion and some are not. It is easier to believe in an all-seeing all-knowing god than random chaos. It works better for the typical human mind.
Of course, some people are not encouraged or repressed from developing rational thought, and instead encouraged to believe specific myths of ideology. Although sometimes a person who has only been encouraged to believe supernatural thoughts breaks away to follow rational thinking, often people don’t have the impulse, desire or courage to do so. And yet other people, raised without much supernatural thought, will be drawn to religion as an adult, simply because it brings them comfort.
Hood spends some time in his chapter “The Biology of Belief” exploring two things. One is that some people are naturally skeptics and some are believers, and that this can be traced to the amount of dopamine production in their brain. Whether the level of dopamine effects the person’s outlook or vice versa isn’t conclusively shown, although Hood seems to feel that it’s just a biological predisposition.
The other part of the chapter talks about the phenomenon that all people experience which is that someone is watching him. This is where his logic gets fuzzy. He claims that since this is a universal feeling that all people have without being taught, it is a prime example of the brain’s tendency towards imaginary occurrences. However, he quotes a study which showed that on average people can tell whether they are being watched or not even if they have no other cues to guide them. But since science can not show a way how that could be happening, it could not be happening. Somehow the data is flawed. Ahem? That idea is what’s pretty flawed. Could it be that it is happening, but science just doesn’t have a way to measure how? I think we all know that ignoring data that doesn’t fit your hypothesis is the antithesis of science.
A type of thought that Hood explores more successfully is the idea that inanmate objects can be imbued with the good or bad qualities of the owner. His favorite example is asking people if they would wear a sweater that was owned by a murderer. Most people will not put the sweater on. However, clothing worn by people we love, whether celebrities or relatives, is highly desirable. Many family arguments, sometimes never to be resolved, are about the division of a deceased relative’s cherished belongings. Objects of sentimental value are irreplaceable even if they themselves are inherently worthless. This is a better example of a non-religious supernatural thought that appears fairly spontaneously in humans. This type of thinking can extend beyond the personal to a group. For example, observant Jews cannot touch objects on the Sabbath which would lead them to do acts that are forbidden on the Sabbath. Since Jews cannot light fires on the Sabbath, matches are forbidden (muksah). In my experience with this custom, it was pretty easy to start thinking of the word muksah to mean tainted.
One obvious flaw I found in Hood’s thinking is that humans construe order out of a random universe. Babies will take objects and put like with like. Human brains like categories, order, and patterns and will impose them on their surrounding. But… who said the universe is random? Events that occur to us personally may seem random, but the universe itself is nothing but ordered. In fact, it’s the very orderliness of it that makes people think of divine origin, a mastermind, or gods behinds its creation. It is so ordered it is very difficult to think of it as being created randomly without forethought. Which is where a lot of religion comes from: the question “Who made this incredibly well-designed world?”
Of course, I don’t agree with everything that Hood puts forth in this book and find some holes in his thinking. But science, unlike many religions, is not stagnant but ever-evolving. Evolution is built into it because it’s based on human curiosity and exploration. Religion is based on ideas that are not supposed to change. It’s the permanence and eternalness of it that brings people comfort.
But outside of science and religion, there are thoughts about life and death and the universe that are brought about by wonderment and exploration. Many of these ideas we may have sound irrational but maybe, just maybe, it’s because science hasn’t figured out how it works yet. Like knowing when you’re being watched. Hood’s book does not take into account that there are still many, many things yet to be discovered through science and some phenomenon that today look like scientific impossibilities might yet be measured and observed.
For the most part, though, The Science of Superstition is a good book to start understanding why someone you know is more interested in astrology than astronomy and similar irrational pursuits. And, if you still want to participate in a religion after reading the book, his site has this handy and humorous chart on which one to pick.
*Apparently, babies get quickly bored when shown the same image over and over and stop paying attention to it. So they measure the babies attention to diagrams to see if they think they are seeing the same thing (drawings of square vs. the Kaniza emergent square).
Unbelievably, it was only recently that I became aware of the cornerstone of the civil rights movement in the country: the great Dorothy Height. It was when Lisa Jackson tweeted this on March 8:
Packed house 4 Women’s Day event @ White House. Lots of powerful women of all ages & I’m sitting nxt to Dr Dorothy Height!
I thought, who is this person that Lisa Jackson (a person I admire) greatly admires? And when I started reading about her, I could not believe I didn’t know about it her. I felt very embarrassed. I remedied the situation by immediately getting her autobiography out of the library.
I highly recommend this book for several reasons.
One is that Dr. Height wrote this when she was 91. It’s rare that you get to read a book where someone looks back over decades and decades of their long life with such clarity.
Another is that if you don’t read this book, you are missing out on a huge chunk of history of the many decades that led up to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, most of which Dr. Height was the primary catalyst for along with Mary McLeod Bethune. Indeed, the civil rights movement may have never happened if these women hadn’t been laying the groundwork thirty to forty years before.
Third, you will be amazed what one person can achieve in a lifetime, albeit a particularly long one.
Fourth, if this book doesn’t inspire you to make the most out of your life, nothing will.
Lastly, after you read this book, it will be blindingly clear that the only reason that Dorothy Height is not a well known name is because she is a woman. And that is a crying shame, and shows how far we have left to go in the advancement of women.
I do find it strange, though, that just after I finished reading this book, she passed away. Really an odd synchronicity.
First of all, I apologize to my readers (you know who you are) that the theme for my site keeps disappearing and now seems to have vanished. So the site doesn’t look the way it should, and I will have to spend some time someday getting it back to normal.
Now back to our regularly scheduled program.
*WARNING: IF YOU FIND CURSE WORDS OFFENSIVE, DON’T READ THIS POST*
If you don’t know what I think is the best word in the English language is, then you have not been paying attention, have you? That word would be “fuck.” This is an amazing word that can be a noun, verb, adverb, adjective (okay with “ing”) — yes, pretty much every part of speech *and* it always packs a punch. It’s wonderfully versatile and expressive simultaneously. In fact this is all well documented in a favorite book of mine, English as a Second F*cking Language. I bought that book at least ten years ago and it is still great fun to read.
Still, I didn’t really appreciate the wonderfulness of this word until the other night. When K & I watch a DVD at home that’s in English, I’ve taken to subtitling it in French if the option is available. Because that’s what nerds do.
This evening we were watching a film Cadillac Records which has quite a bit of cursing in it. After a while I noticed that in French there is no distinction in the translation between “asshole” and “motherfucker”. There seems to be only one word for this category of insult; there is nowhere to go when you wanted to add some emphasis. To me, there’s a big, big difference between the two. Asshole is pretty casual, but I would only use motherfucker under extreme circumstances. In fact, I can’t say I’ve ever actually said it to another person; I’ve only used it to speak ill of someone *not* in the room, and even then, very rarely. Or at least I’ve used it a lot less since the Obama administration began.
Further, I noticed that there is no adjective/adverb like “fucking” or “the fuck”, i.e., “What the fuck is this?” Or , “Are you fucking crazy?” If you want to add emphasis/be vulgar, you have to use variations on words like whore or shit. Let’s face it, those words just don’t carry as much weight. After a while of this, I felt pretty sorry for the French. I am very fond of their language, which is why I’m killing myself trying to learn the damn thing, but their cursing just seems, well, lame.
Now, admittedly when someone has limited vocabulary in general and uses “fuck” and variations thereof as every other word, it loses its power and just sounds bad. Be that as it may, when it comes to cursing, ENGLISH FUCKING RULES.
Today’s French lesson
connard
asshole
*not to be confused with canard which means duck
I read this interview with Maurice Sendak in Newsweek and found it absolutely hysterical. When he talks about the source for the monsters of Where the Wild Things Are — his relatives from the old country — I recalled my own experiences being poked and prodded by relatives under the guise of affection. Those old cousins *were* a little scary. And I suppose my own urges to pinch and squeeze others affectionately is the last remnant of the dead culture of the shtetl. The next generation of American Jews have lost all the strangeness of the ancestors.