Thessaly's Tooth

For several months I have been made to feel more bemused than festive by the unseasonably early onset of the various holiday seasons. I did not feel like purchasing Halloween candy in August, Santa-themed gift items in late October, Valentine’s Day paraphernalia in early January, or St. Patrick’s Days stuff…at any time, really. I’m a St. Patrick’s Day agnostic, I guess. The man himself is pretty interesting, as was his confession. But St. Patrick’s day isn’t.
I’m no more Irish than Patrick himself was, and while I have no problems with Ireland or the holiday, I have no interest in dressing in green (not flattering), messing about with representations of leprechauns (creepy little things), or eating corned beef and cabbage (doesn’t sound very good). Furthermore, I’m not a big fan of beer or of dying the Chicago River green, since it already is anyway. Besides, by this time I’m pretty tired of doing things about holidays. Let me know when July 4 is coming, and I’ll do something about that, maybe–but perhaps I spoke to soon, probably when I go to Meijer today I’ll find patriotic gift bags and firecracker-shaped candles confronting me.

I seem to break stuff more than most people do. I don’t remember my parents, for example, ever breaking any kitchenware in the 31 years I’ve known them. But I seem to break things on a fairly regular basis. Just a few weeks ago I fumbled a glass vase and it shattered all over the counter; and the other day I made a majestic sweeping motion with my arm as I went into the kitchen, and there went the coffee carafe all over the floor.
Once you’ve broken a glass item in your apartment, you might as well declare it a superfund site and just move. Glass is so difficult to clean up. You can’t just vacuum it, you have to vacuum and then go over the floor with a damp paper towl or something, and still there will be glass. After I’d gotten the carafe all taken care of, I looked on the internet for tips on cleaning up glass, and learned that I should never, ever pick up broken glass with my bare hands or tiny microscopic pieces would adhere to me. So I’ve probably been endangering other humans and domestic animals with my glassy hands ever since.
Also, it’s ridiculously difficult to find replacement carafes for coffee makers. Andy tried it and brought home one that looked right but wasn’t. I looked it up on the good ol internet (I could easily be replaced by the internet and I think you’d all see a vast improvement), and wrote down a bunch of meaningless numbers that might help me identify the right one.
With the result that this is the second day in a row in which I have had no coffee. Such a thing has never happened before, or at least not for a long time.

Lileks discussed this article yesterday (you have to skip past all that stuff about his daughter). I feel that I am equally qualified to comment on the article as him–although I am not a parent, and he is; I am female, and even have been known to lie awake replaying the odd conversation in my head, though I’m trying to cut back on that sort of thing.
In any case, I feel there is a fundamental problem with the author’s argument. This is that the problem which is described is a different one from the problem for which a solution is offered. Both of these are real problems, but because of this disjunction, one of them goes undescribed and the other goes unsolved.
p.s. You will find a more well-thought-out commentary by a better-qualified author here. If you’ve grown accustomed to the sort of uninformed rambling that goes on around my blog, though, read on.

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Cold Mountain is not, in my opinion, a particularly good choice for Valentine’s Day viewing with your spouse or significant other. Never mind why, just trust me. As to whether i’d recommend watching it at another time or in other company, it depends on whether or not you have 2.5 hours to kill, and aren’t interested in feeling too happy.

We got a flyer advertising a new “health club” in the mail today. I hate gym, and I always have, from the time I was the slowest kid in class, the last to be chosen for any kind of team. In grade school, gym was the only class in which I ever received an “unsatisfactory” grade. I couldn’t climb a rope, couldn’t do a chin-up, couldn’t run around the playground three times without stopping (as I was annually requested to do for the Presidential Fitness test (I don’t know what I ever did to the President that led him to torment me so).
In Junior High, the torment was increased to a new level with our introduction to the institution of the Weight Room. The Weight Room was a sort of airless, windowless closet in which a lot of crummy weight equipment, encrusted with decades of teenage sweat and dirt, was stashed. Weight Room, like all the gym classes, was co-ed. I still cannot fathom what advantage a thirteen-year-old tubby, geeky girl with glasses and a boy haircut was supposed to have derived from being made to assume a variety of embarassing positions on weight equipment, to the accompaniment of crappy 80s pop music and a thorough critique of her physique and personal worth, the latter provided by the 13-year-old boys. LPS has a lot to answer for.
All the gyms I have encountered since then–and believe me, these have been as few as possible–have been characterized by these same basic elements: a disgusting smell, a disgusting film over all the equipment, disgusting loud music, and having to arrange myself in disgusting positions while disgusting males look on.
The state no longer has the power to make me go to the gym. Why on earth would I pay $1225 to voluntarily go to one?

So, I haven’t had much to say here lately. There isn’t much to say, really. Just been working at the job and dissertation. I haven’t had any Brilliant Thoughts to share with you lately, but don’t worry, I’ll rush right to my keyboard just as soon as one comes along.
I’ve been reading Seinfeld and Philosophy. It is pretty amusing, and makes me feel happy because I am familiar with the pop culture in question. Since about the turn of the millennium, I’ve become old, and no longer have any idea what’s going on. American Idol? I have no clue, other than vague memories of who Paula Abdul is.

I’ve started a new job this week and am scrambling to finish a dissertation proposal draft. Also have a few annoying bureaucratic paperwork things to take care of. Busy, busy.
Here’s a somewhat funny article which mentions the U of C. I think she’s overstating the rudeness of Hyde Park, but on the other hand I have no idea why I’m defending Hyde Park. Most academic types (judging by myself), at least, aren’t ignoring you; they simply have no idea where they are or what’s going on around them. Occupational hazard.

I wrote this like two weeks ago and never posted it, for reasons which will soon be apparent to those of you who choose to read on. It’s like a recycled post, and recycling, as we all know, is indeed good.
Andy asked me yesterday why I preferred Mozilla as a web browser to Safari. Four main reasons: 1. Safari has no drop-down menu of recently visited sites, 2. it doesn’t automatically highlight the url when you click the thing to type something else, 3. when it decides to suggest a url it thinks you want based on what you’re typing, there’s no simple way to reject its selection, and finally 4. google has a separate little thing to type in up there. Not only do you have to think about where to go when you want to search something, but your search term just sits up there for all to read until you erase it. Yesterday, Andy laughed at me when he looked over my shoulder and saw I had been searching “butt portion ham shank.” It was advertised in Meijer, and I wanted to know what on earth it was. I had always thought ham was just ham, but turns out there’s a lot I don’t know. Focus!!!!!

One can “know” something through faith, and one can “know” something through the rigorous testing of the scientific method, or the amassing and weighing of evidence which is the method of the humanities and social sciences. These are at least three different means of arriving at knowledge; are the types of knowledge they produce also different? Which method is superior, for which purposes? And when the knowledge arrived at by these three are different, how do we judge between them?
For the religious person, there is an obvious answer: knowledge through faith is superior to the others, and if the others contradict what we “know” through faith, they are wrong. In actual practice, however, the relationship is more complex and different people of faith arbitrate between the above in different ways.
What I study is essentially Biblical archaeology. Most of those within my discipline prefer the more PC term Near Eastern archaeology, but since my studies have encompassed a significant amount of Biblical studies as well as archaeology and history, I might as well call it that. The archaeological evidence, as it attests to the period of history treated in the Bible, at certain points stands clearly in conflict with the biblical history; and overall the way the Bible is treated is as a human document. In fact, there really isn’t a way to combine what I know by faith with what I know by scholarship; the two can’t always mix. What I present as knowledge in scholarship must be evidence-based; what I know by faith can’t be evidence-based, or it wouldn’t be faith. As a Christian, how do I deal with this?
There are a few different possible approaches:
(1) Compartmentalization: Don’t allow the two to mix. One part of one’s brain is the faith part, that hears and believes the Bible and what one hears in church; the other evaluates claims based on the evidence and processes accepted by one’s discipline. Don’t give the two any ground on which to fight it out, since in fact there is no common ground on which the two can engage.
(2) Complementarity: Scholarship is a supplement to faith, but if they contradict each other, one of two approaches must be taken: deny the scientific consensus by attempting to use science (as in creation science); or allow that science may have the facts, but the Bible has the spiritual truth behind the facts (a more mainstream interpration of evolution vs. creation).
(3) Humility: The Bible is the Word of God, a gift from our Lord. Our rationality is also a gift from the Lord. They can’t be separated, but our rationality along with the rest of our lives must be put under God’s yoke. Our minds and understanding are too small to understand the whole truth, and they are beset by sin so that both our natural understanding and our understanding of God will be flawed, even though God graciously reveals Himself through both. If there is a conflict between the Bible and science, it doesn’t mean either is wrong; it means that our understanding is imperfect.
So far, my belief by faith and scholarship hasn’t come into direct conflict. I’ve had to parrot off the documentary hypothesis on exams, but nobody demands that I actually believe it.

The second book about which I wish to write (point taken, Mr. Rau :), mentioned in the post below, is The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, by a couple of guys who write for The Economist. It’s a fairly big book, and I’m somewhat impressed with myself for having gotten (most of the way) through it, but the plane trips to and from California over Thanksgiving can be credited with that.
I thought it was quite interesting. The main argument is that America has grown steadily more conservative over the last 40 years (the Clintons notwithstanding), and the book explains why and how this has occurred. It also explains why American conservatism is a unique phenomenon, very different from what conservatism is in other parts of the world: for example, conservatism in America is linked to individualism and desire for independence from government, rather than oligarchy and skepticism about “progress” as it is in Europe. Also, while America is in general much more conservative than Europe, regarding issues such as official separation between church and state it is much more liberal.
I learned quite a bit about the disparate strands which have combined to make conservatism what it is now; for example, the accession to authority of the neo-conservatives, who have developed an interventionist foreign policy contrary to the isolationist classic conservatism. It also described other aspects of changing conservatism; such as the rather dramatic shift to a more socially conservative outlook within three generations of the Bush family. The writers consider the future of American conservatism as well, whether the trend toward conservatism is likely to continue, or whether the tenuous coalition between such factions as the socially conservative Christian Right and anti-government-interference entrepreneurs is bound to eventually rupture.
The book is very readable (it has to be if I managed to get through 400 pages or so of talk about politics), and most pleasantly after the presidential election, is completely devoid of name-calling, muckraking, and loonball ad hominem attacks toward either the right or left. The writers do not hesitate to point out discreditable aspects of conservatism, for example the compromises with racism made by the Republican party in order to win over the formerly Democratic southern whites. On the other hand, the book does not insist on viewing conservative principles such as personal responsibility, individualism, and traditional religious values as merely false consciousness covering up a desire to return to the age of robber barons. The writers offer what seems to me a fairly even-handed description of conservatism, and conclude that, whether for better or worse, conservatism is currently the more dynamic and relevant movement in America, and stands a good chance of continuing to be so.
I think the book would be eye-opening to conservatives in learning about how the movement came to be, potential conflicts within conservatism, and the role conservatism is playing and can play in America. I think that liberals might learn more about the self-understanding of conservatives and also their understanding of liberalism, and hence how the message of liberalism could be brought to red-staters in a way that seems relevant to them. Perhaps the book might even show both liberals and conservatives the uniqueness of America, and how our goals and even underlying attitudes are similar however much we might appear to be divided on the surface.
Next up is What’s the Matter with Kansas?, which I have previously had occasion to mention.