Ideological Fault Lines in (Post-)Mormonism

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Re: Ideological Fault Lines in (Post-)Mormonism

Post by Moksha »

I think of it as a blast from the past whenever Stem, Cinepro, and Yahoo Crockett post on the same thread. Imagine if Scott Lloyd was to show up and tell us that idjut was improper spelling? Then Shades could weigh in point out that idjut meant Elder in one of the Canadian indigenous languages. We would ask him where he found that and he could point to a stone box.

Sorry, just daydreaming on something that has no bearing on ideological fault lines.
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Re: Ideological Fault Lines in (Post-)Mormonism

Post by Analytics »

Symmachus wrote:
Fri May 28, 2021 4:29 am
It's simply not true that Republicans had nothing constructive to offer. I watched hours and hours of hearings on this on C-SPAN in 2009 and 2010, Analytics. Most supported the elements of the law that are still the most popular (especially the issue of pre-conditions). The Obama administration simply didn't need their votes, though, so didn't care about what they had to say and made it clear there were no concessions on offer…
This deserves a more detailed response.

It’s totally true that Obamacare was seriously flawed in many, many, ways. And its also true that members of the Republican thinking class had valid, constructive ideas for how it could be improved. However, the idea that the Obama administration “simply didn’t need their votes” and was unwilling to negotiate or offer concessions is a complete myth. Every congressman on the margins, regardless of political party, had immense influence in the negotiations. That is one of the reasons for the bill’s flaws—individual Democrats demanded, and received, crazy concessions, just as did the AMA and the AARP.

The fact of the matter is that Democrats did spend months and months negotiating on the details of the ACA with every Republican that was willing to negotiate. This turned out to just be Chuck Grassley (R) of Iowa, and Olympia Snow (R) of Maine.
In Obama’s own words:
”President Obama” wrote: Unsurprisingly, given the atmosphere, the group of three GOP senators who’d been invited to participate in bipartisan talks with Baucus was now down to two: Chuck Grassley and Olympia Snowe, the moderate from Maine. My team and I did everything we could to help Baucus win their support. I had Grassley and Snowe over to the White House repeatedly and called them every few weeks to take their temperature. We signed off on scores of changes they wanted made to Baucus’s draft bill. Nancy-Ann became a permanent fixture in their Senate offices and took Snowe out to dinner so often that we joked that her husband was getting jealous.

“Tell Olympia she can write the whole damn bill!” I said to Nancy-Ann as she was leaving for one such meeting. “We’ll call it the Snowe plan. Tell her if she votes for the bill, she can have the White House…Michelle and I will move to an apartment!”

And still we were getting nowhere. Snowe took pride in her centrist reputation, and she cared deeply about healthcare (she had been orphaned at the age of nine, losing her parents, in rapid succession, to cancer and heart disease). But the Republican Party’s sharp rightward tilt had left her increasingly isolated within her own caucus, making her even more cautious than usual, prone to wrapping her indecision in the guise of digging into policy minutiae.

Grassley was a different story. He talked a good game about wanting to help the family farmers back in Iowa who had trouble getting insurance they could count on, and when Hillary Clinton had pushed healthcare reform in the 1990s, he’d actually cosponsored an alternative that in many ways resembled the Massachusetts-style plan we were proposing, complete with an individual mandate. But unlike Snowe, Grassley rarely bucked his party leadership on tough issues. With his long, hangdog face and throaty midwestern drawl, he’d hem and haw about this or that problem he had with the bill without ever telling us what exactly it would take to get him to yes. Phil’s conclusion was that Grassley was just stringing Baucus along at McConnell’s behest, trying to stall the process and prevent us from moving on to the rest of our agenda. Even I, the resident White House optimist, finally got fed up and asked Baucus to come by for a visit….

[after months of negating] In a last-stab Oval Office meeting with the two of them in early September, I listened patiently as Grassley ticked off five new reasons why he still had problems with the latest version of the bill.

“Let me ask you a question, Chuck,” I said finally. “If Max took every one of your latest suggestions, could you support the bill?

“Well…”

“Are there any changes—any at all—that would get us your vote?”

There was an awkward silence before Grassley looked up and met my gaze.

“I guess not, Mr. President.”


I guess not.

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Re: Ideological Fault Lines in (Post-)Mormonism

Post by Analytics »

Symmachus wrote:
Mon May 31, 2021 4:25 pm
I can see [anti-patriotism being a knee-jerk reaction to Sean Hannity et. al.] to an extent, but I think this is not a function of partisan politics and reaction. The hostility to the United States is much deeper than that; it is a hostility to a lot more than just the United States, not a reaction to flag pins and "freedom fries."
Of course it depends upon who, specifically, we are talking about. I don’t personally know very many people who match what you are talking about here.
Symmachus wrote:
Mon May 31, 2021 4:25 pm
"Anti-marriage" churches? Yes, there's just opposed to marriage in general. Whatever. This as ideologically charged as anything in a conservative news-entertainment rag. Do you see how the framing works? Same-sex "marriage" is just taken as part of the ordinarily understood and widely practiced "marriage," which it is not for most people on this planet or even in this country. And as for the rest of this paragraph, the only criterion that people apply when it comes to church involvement in politics is whether they agree with the position a given church takes.
You can find the nomenclature as offensive as you want, but that’s besides the point. Issenberg’s point here is same-sex couples and their political allies fought for legal recognition of same-sex marriage because the Mormon Church and others on the right fought against it. I didn’t raise this as an example of politically neutral language. I raised it as an example of how people take positions based on tribal forces.
Symmachus wrote:
Mon May 31, 2021 4:25 pm
There is no shared conception across of what the good is across the whole, only within demographic and sub-cultural silos. All of this is item A.

Add this to the structural changes to politics, which is item B…candidates who are interested in problem-solving are discouraged from running at all because of this fact, and a significant portion of new house members (and even in the senate) instead use these institutions to build their own celebrity careers. Jason Chafetz is an excellent example, but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the champion brand-builder. The boundary, indeed, between entertainment and politics continue to blur...
Excellent points—we are generally on the same page here.
Symmachus wrote:
Mon May 31, 2021 4:25 pm
I'm sure that sociology has nothing to help here because sociology in the American context is completely politicized. This will be instantly obvious to a conservative who peruses the bios of your typical sociology department, especially the "public scholarship" that is all in vogue there. I don't know about game theory though. I know nothing about it, so I welcome your explanation of how that could explain these phenomena and predict where it is going.
Regarding sociology, I’m referring to the nature of the problem, not the competence of the members of this or that sociology department.
Dr Exiled wrote:
Sun May 30, 2021 5:40 pm
I agree that the problem is that corporate interests have too much power. Their goal is to maximize profits for shareholders which in turn equates into herding the masses into sales zones. I think the movement to tribalism and myth is reflective of how the english controlled India for years, playing one side against the other so the population wouldn't see who the real enemy was.

I'd like to see you expand on the game-theory model you suggest.
“Game theory” is just a more general and abstract way of describing what Symmachus referred to as “the coalition dynamics of electoral politics” which are driven by “structural incentives.” By way of contrast, classical economics posited that people were rational decision makers, and if you let free markets do their thing, supply and demand will shift prices to maximize production, produce the optimal ratio between guns and butter, and maximize everyone’s utility (subject to the constraints of a world defined by scarcity).

Classical economics provides a satisfying answer to the question Mikhail Gorbachev [didn't] ask when visiting London for the first time: Why does London have no queues for bread? Back in Moscow, our finest minds are working on the bread supply system, and yet there are such long queues in every bakery and grocery store. Please take me to meet the person in charge of supplying bread to London. I must learn his secret.

The problem with classical economics is that rational decision making doesn’t always lead to optimal results. Whether it does or not depends upon the specific situation. Game theory provides a framework for analyzing these other situations. The basic example of game theory is the prisoner’s dilemma. In this situation, the rational decision is for each suspect to rat on the other. However, this rational decision leads to suboptimal results.

A perfect example of this that is pertinent to the current conversation is America’s two-party system. Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson agreed that a two-party political system would be a terrible thing for America. Despite agreeing on this point, the first thing they did after ratifying the constitution was create the federalist party and the democratic-republican party.

The title of Lee Drutman’s book suggests a related example of game theory:

Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America.

Drutman argues that two-party systems are intrinsically instable, and suggests that before the mid 80’s, America really had a four party system—Conservative Republicans, Liberal Republicans, Conservative Democrats, and Liberal Democrats. It was only with the advent of cable news that the national parties got organized and formed strong national identities. When this happened identity politics became the main thing politicians argued about. RINOs and DINOs got pushed out of their respective parties, and we became a true two-party country.

There are multiple problems with two-party systems, the most fundamental of which goes back to psychology. Human beings have a natural tendency to divide the world into “us” vs. “them.” Two political parties reinforces the us-v-them mentality and the simplistic thinking and intolerance that accompany tribalism. “Them” winning becomes an existential threat to our very way of life, which directly leads to things like insurrections at the capital and elected leaders refusing to certify election results.
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Re: Ideological Fault Lines in (Post-)Mormonism

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Analytics wrote:
Tue Jun 01, 2021 2:00 pm
This deserves a more detailed response.

It’s totally true that Obamacare was seriously flawed in many, many, ways. And its also true that members of the Republican thinking class had valid, constructive ideas for how it could be improved. However, the idea that the Obama administration “simply didn’t need their votes” and was unwilling to negotiate or offer concessions is a complete myth. Every congressman on the margins, regardless of political party, had immense influence in the negotiations. That is one of the reasons for the bill’s flaws—individual Democrats demanded, and received, crazy concessions, just as did the AMA and the AARP.

The fact of the matter is that Democrats did spend months and months negotiating on the details of the ACA with every Republican that was willing to negotiate.
Yes, it's true: many concessions were made to Democrats who were in red states. Do you remember what concessions were made to Republicans?

Look, there were no substantive negotiations for a very obvious reason. And I mean substantive ones; not moderation of an extreme position. Do you remember what the first HR was? It was Medicare for All introduced by Conyers in January. That set the tone as the Democrats' starting point. I suppose that, yes, since Democrats backed off from the most extreme option (from the Republican point of view) you could interpret that as a concession, but I wouldn't see it that way. There were many amendments, including some introduced by Republicans that had to do with first-time home ownership for veterans of the US military. Most of them were things like that. The idea that there were substantive changes to win Republican votes is not serious. The whole folksy bi-partisan "every Republican that was willing to negotiate" was a complete kabuki theater for liberals who want to feel like they're, gosh darn it, just the good guys who want to do good. Republicans went along with it to a point. But the operative facts are stark here: Democrats controlled the House and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. The votes to be fought over were the blue-dog Democrats, not the Republicans.

The primary issue for Republicans, if you'll remember, was not any of the various levels of input in the dozens of House Resolutions on health care introduced throughout 2009 or the amendments at the margins done in committee but the CBO scoring, which was only preliminarily done a week or two before the final vote. It's hard to know whether they were sincere about that; Republicans will say yes, but I'm sure you will say they were not. In general, I think they were sincere in their desire not to expand government programs, perhaps because they are always unable to roll them back even when they have power, which means that temperamentally they would be opposed to the federal exchange program. Why do you think Democrats were opposed to block grants, though, as a compromise?

Anyway, this all came down to sheer will: Democrats were determined to pass health care legislation. Republicans could not filibuster this and knew there was no point, until after the Massachusetts election: that's when negotiations would have been meaningful. The minute Democrats lost their filibuster-proof majority, we had the test of whether they really were full of the bipartisan intent they claimed. And what happened then? The Democrats forced the issue by threatening reconciliation, which they carried out. I think Republicans were stunned by that, and it set the tone of the 2010s in politics.

My view of this, to summarize, is that Democrats were playing serious politics because—wouldn't you know it?—they're serious political operators and not Jimmy Stewart. I supported the bill and thought the Democrats played their hand pretty well, though I'm not sure the reconciliation move was so smart in hindsight. But I also don't buy the propaganda about it. Speaking of which:
President Obama wrote: Unsurprisingly, given the atmosphere, the group of three GOP senators who’d been invited to participate in bipartisan talks with Baucus was now down to two: Chuck Grassley and Olympia Snowe, the moderate from Maine. My team and I did everything we could to help Baucus win their support. I had Grassley and Snowe over to the White House repeatedly and called them every few weeks to take their temperature. We signed off on scores of changes they wanted made to Baucus’s draft bill. Nancy-Ann became a permanent fixture in their Senate offices and took Snowe out to dinner so often that we joked that her husband was getting jealous.

“Tell Olympia she can write the whole damn bill!” I said to Nancy-Ann as she was leaving for one such meeting. “We’ll call it the Snowe plan. Tell her if she votes for the bill, she can have the White House…Michelle and I will move to an apartment!”

And still we were getting nowhere. Snowe took pride in her centrist reputation, and she cared deeply about healthcare (she had been orphaned at the age of nine, losing her parents, in rapid succession, to cancer and heart disease). But the Republican Party’s sharp rightward tilt had left her increasingly isolated within her own caucus, making her even more cautious than usual, prone to wrapping her indecision in the guise of digging into policy minutiae.

Grassley was a different story. He talked a good game about wanting to help the family farmers back in Iowa who had trouble getting insurance they could count on, and when Hillary Clinton had pushed healthcare reform in the 1990s, he’d actually cosponsored an alternative that in many ways resembled the Massachusetts-style plan we were proposing, complete with an individual mandate. But unlike Snowe, Grassley rarely bucked his party leadership on tough issues. With his long, hangdog face and throaty midwestern drawl, he’d hem and haw about this or that problem he had with the bill without ever telling us what exactly it would take to get him to yes. Phil’s conclusion was that Grassley was just stringing Baucus along at McConnell’s behest, trying to stall the process and prevent us from moving on to the rest of our agenda. Even I, the resident White House optimist, finally got fed up and asked Baucus to come by for a visit….

[after months of negating] In a last-stab Oval Office meeting with the two of them in early September, I listened patiently as Grassley ticked off five new reasons why he still had problems with the latest version of the bill.

“Let me ask you a question, Chuck,” I said finally. “If Max took every one of your latest suggestions, could you support the bill?

“Well…”

“Are there any changes—any at all—that would get us your vote?”

There was an awkward silence before Grassley looked up and met my gaze.

“I guess not, Mr. President.”


I guess not.
Well, if Obama says he would let Olympia Snowe rewrite the whole bill and that he would move out of the White House, I guess we should believe he was sincere. And have you got Olympia Snowe and Chuck Grassley's side of this, as well? This is reporting private conversations that, no surprise, makes Obama look the hero. It is the typical self-justification and self-praise that every political memoir contains. I'm not sure why you find it convincing evidence of anything other than Obama's view of himself. And by the way, the way this is presented is misleading: Snowe and Grassley were 2/10 Republicans on the Finance Committee at the time. It is not as if any Republican in Congress (or Democrat for that matter) could just waltz into the oval office to negotiate and of all 250 or whatever only these two showed up. That's a distortion of how this worked.

My view of Obama comes from Jonathan Alter's two books on him. Both of those are favorable to a fault, but one thing jumped out at me and seems confirmed by several other accounts, namely, that Obama had little patience for real negotiation. I once heard Dick Durban defending Obama to Democrats in Congress who thought he wasn't paying enough attention to what they needed for projects that weren't of huge moment to him. Durban's explanation was along the lines of "Barack wants to spend time with his family in the evenings, not schmooze congress people." He humiliated even Democratic congresspeople, whom he viewed as mere grand-standers, perhaps forgetting that they also represented voters and had voters to answer to. That was a big part of Chuck Grassley's stated reasons for his opposition, if you'll remember, so I'm sorry I find this whole account less than believable. You can see this in how he frames the meeting: there is no mention of what any voters anywhere, just leadership, congressional personalities, and "the Republican Party" and its "rightward tilt." Snowe's seat was filled by Angus King, which tells you that Maine's voters weren't exactly tilting rightward.

But Obama was a great manager of meetings: he liked short and well-defined agendas and wanted decisions made by the end of the meeting. He hated the endless debates and discussions of the Clinton people. Once the right decision was in view, it should pursued, and once made, it should be followed. End of discussion. I think that made him an effective executive, particularly once the Democrats lost the House and especially after they lost the Senate. In another era, that would have been highly valued in a president. But in an era where congress is dependent on the presidency because of that office's cultural dominance, it was a serious deficiency. His self-portrait here is charming but is quite different from the perception of even many of his supporters. There is a strong case to be made that Obama broke the Democratic party.
You can find the nomenclature as offensive as you want, but that’s besides the point. Issenberg’s point here is same-sex couples and their political allies fought for legal recognition of same-sex marriage because the Mormon Church and others on the right fought against it. I didn’t raise this as an example of politically neutral language. I raised it as an example of how people take positions based on tribal forces.
I don't find the language offensive so much as tiresome in its manipulation. The idea that the churches began a crusade against gay marriage out of the blue and thus precipitated the activism in support of its legalization is an absurd one. As I recall, there were some same-sex couples who sued the state of Hawaii for the right to marry and the Church attempted to join the state's side in that lawsuit. They were denied standing, and to support their appeal, they crafted the Proclamation on whatever it was so that they could claim this was some deeply held belief. That is its own kind of absurdity, but I can't take a sociologist like Issenberg seriously in surmising that this would have fizzled out or not been an issue if it hadn't been for church's opposition, as if churches aren't representative of segments of society. And it denies that there was any interest in this among gay couples and activist groups, which is flat out wrong. Health insurance benefits for partners, for example, became an issue in the 1980s and 1990s during the AIDS epidemic, and the necessity of winning legal recognition to claim such benefits is when the notion of "civil union" came into being. Some Scandinavian countries had already introduced that in the late 1980s or early 1990s. To recall and more accurately rewrite the quote you provided, it was not the churches who denied gay couples marriage; it was the state. So no, I don't really see this as tribal. Don't you think it's possible that different people and different groups can have genuine points of disagreement from other people and groups?

Calling it tribal strikes me as the technocrat's rhetorical trick whereby they set themselves above ordinary concerns and ordinary people: "those people are tribal and irrational, but I have allegiance only to facts and data because I am rational."
Regarding sociology, I’m referring to the nature of the problem, not the competence of the members of this or that sociology department.
Yes, it is a social problem, if that's what you mean, but what I am saying is that sociology as a field is not competent to address it because it is so politicized. It's the academic field you go into if you want to a be a professional activist.
The problem with classical economics is that rational decision making doesn’t always lead to optimal results. Whether it does or not depends upon the specific situation. Game theory provides a framework for analyzing these other situations. The basic example of game theory is the prisoner’s dilemma. In this situation, the rational decision is for each suspect to rat on the other. However, this rational decision leads to suboptimal results.
Applied to politics or culture, who gets to decide what is rational and what is optimal? There are different kinds of rational decision-making, and the problem I have with the technocratic approach is that it denies any interest in crass political disputes or genuine metaphysical differences (e.g. abortion) while in fact stealthily re-introducing them under terms like "rationality" and "optimal" because someone has to decide what these mean.
Drutman argues that two-party systems are intrinsically instable, and suggests that before the mid 80’s, America really had a four party system—Conservative Republicans, Liberal Republicans, Conservative Democrats, and Liberal Democrats. It was only with the advent of cable news that the national parties got organized and formed strong national identities. When this happened identity politics became the main thing politicians argued about. RINOs and DINOs got pushed out of their respective parties, and we became a true two-party country.
Ok, so there was the Great Depression and World War II, and then Cable News. Nothing else happened? This is incidentally completely backwards. Parties today are much less powerful and less centrally organized than they were in the past. Conventions used to matter; primaries didn't. It is the reverse today, and that is one reason that someone like Trump can capture the nomination of a national party and probably will again.

I'm not sure, though, that we yet have genuine identity politics in this country, though perhaps we are witnessing its formation.
There are multiple problems with two-party systems, the most fundamental of which goes back to psychology. Human beings have a natural tendency to divide the world into “us” vs. “them.” Two political parties reinforces the us-v-them mentality and the simplistic thinking and intolerance that accompany tribalism. “Them” winning becomes an existential threat to our very way of life, which directly leads to things like insurrections at the capital and elected leaders refusing to certify election results.
If it is a natural tendency, then it will happen no matter what. This also happens in political cultures with multi-party parliamentary systems. I have suspicions about this for the reasons I mentioned: every technocratic proposal of a "rational" solution designed to circumvent this or that thing about human psychology is always politics by other means. I know we see this differently, but I would just summarize my comments here by saying that I don't think the political situation is sufficiently explained by looking at politics alone. These kinds of ostensibly wonk-ish discussions are the most insidious because they pretend to be the opposite of the thing their proponents despise but are in fact merely another instantiation of it. I guarantee you that if we banned cable news and had a constitutional amendment establishing four national parties, complete with a Drutman commission to ensure sufficient numbers of conservative democrats and republicans to match the liberal democrats and republicans, we would just end up with an informal system of liberals vs. conservatives (both of which are a species of liberal anyway). Most likely, the Drutman commission would manipulate things so that its favored side wins.
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Re: Ideological Fault Lines in (Post-)Mormonism

Post by Moksha »

Symmachus wrote:
Tue Jun 01, 2021 10:19 pm
... it was not the churches who denied gay couples marriage; it was the state. So no, I don't really see this as tribal.
Might the State of Utah be an outlier to this assertion?
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Re: Ideological Fault Lines in (Post-)Mormonism

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Democracies with proportional representation do not seem to develop two-party systems, and it's not so hard to see why. I can't think of any other countries, though, that have such an extreme two-party system as the United States. Even in the many parliamentary democracies that have first-past-the-post representation by district, it's common to have just two major parties but rare not to have one or more minor ones that sometimes are important.

I'm inclined to suspect that it's the extreme American separation of powers that has the strong two-party system as its unintended consequence. In most democracies around the world the executive administration can be dismissed at will by the legislature, which is dominated by a single chamber. This total concentration of power in any legislative majority seems paradoxically to promote multiple parties.

All opposition parties being equally powerless, there is no incentive for them to unite or to remain united. A majority party in contrast has the power to do whatever it wants; it therefore soon offends the majority of the electorate, which is never united on more than one or two issues. After the next election, this year's majority becomes next year's opposition; if it doesn't happen this time, it certainly will before long, and the longer one party holds power the longer the backlash against it will persist afterwards.

The churning cycle of power and impotence seems to keep the political landscape broken up.
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Re: Ideological Fault Lines in (Post-)Mormonism

Post by Physics Guy »

Morley wrote:
Mon May 31, 2021 5:35 pm
No one will ever write the perfect poem (or, as I used to argue, be able understand what the hell Faulkner is saying). Dismissing literacy by suggesting that most everyone can read is the same sin as shrugging off math as arithmetic. Don't you think?
Suppose that you could only access Faulkner in a translation into hieroglyphics. Wouldn't you agree that this would add a long and steep initial phase to your learning curve?

Of course there are feats of understanding in the humanities that are as difficult for humans to achieve as any feats in science. If that were not so, there would be a flood of people who could have been top scientists snatching up all the endowed chairs in the humanities easily instead by grabbing that low-hanging fruit. And then after that the understanding feats would be equal. The actual case, of course, is that precisely this scenario has already happened, and in both directions, continuously all along. The invisible hand keeps everything equal, every advantage is already priced in, picking stocks is a random walk.

Human effort and talent costs are not the only measures of performance, however. Suppose that you start with Faulkner in English and my version is the hieroglyphic one. We both labor for months on our texts; I match your sweat drop for drop. Yet every milestone I reach also corresponds to one you passed long before me. I figured out that first word; so did you, much more quickly. I hammered out the first sentence—you did that faster, too. The crudely parsed English version that I proudly present at the end of my work is the same basic gist that you grasped in the first ten minutes. The insights you attained after that are about questions I have not yet imagined.

By hypothesis for the sake of argument we applied equal effort and skill to our tasks. You came further because my task was harder, not in the impossible sense that it required more effort for the same amount of effort, but in the really possible and quite objective sense that you did everything I did much faster, and did much more than I did.

This I contend is the situation with the natural sciences. The learning curve is steep at the start, in the sense that it is much harder to deliver anything even slightly useful in science than it is in the humanities. Eventually there is an ignition, a takeoff, where the effort pays off and wonders appear. There's a long empty runway before that, where all you're doing is trying to get up to speed with the language. And it's a language that no human learns as a child.

In the end I guess my views are as autobiographical as anyone's. When I started college I planned on doing a double major in physics and English, but I changed my mind when I realized how much better I was at English than physics. I knew full well that I was only an ignorant undergrad in English but my skill in physics, as an undergrad major, was like my skill in English from primary school.

Listening to discussions between colleagues in the humanities and social sciences has always seemed like watching professional teams play, in a sport I've sometimes played in the park. Sometimes it's even like watching a cooking show, where I can believe I could produce something similar, after a few tries and with lots of mess, if I follow them closely. Listening to discussions among chemists or biologists or mathematicians, in contrast, is like watching surgery. I have no idea what all that stuff is except it all looks quite scary and I would not dare to try it.
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Re: Ideological Fault Lines in (Post-)Mormonism

Post by huckelberry »

Physics Guy wrote:
Thu Jun 03, 2021 4:25 pm
Morley wrote:
Mon May 31, 2021 5:35 pm
No one will ever write the perfect poem (or, as I used to argue, be able understand what the hell Faulkner is saying). Dismissing literacy by suggesting that most everyone can read is the same sin as shrugging off math as arithmetic. Don't you think?
Suppose that you could only access Faulkner in a translation into hieroglyphics. Wouldn't you agree that this would add a long and steep initial phase to your learning curve?

Of course there are feats of understanding in the humanities that are as difficult for humans to achieve as any feats in science. If that were not so, there would be a flood of people who could have been top scientists snatching up all the endowed chairs in the humanities easily instead by grabbing that low-hanging fruit.
Physics Guy, I tip my hat to your efforts and work developing a working understanding of physics. I know there is specialized understanding which is necessary and not easy. I think there are important, critical values for people in the developing understanding of Physics which are justification for the effort. Well I suspect curiosity and enjoyment of the climb are also justification.

I believe this discussion started with a little matter over what academic achievements best qualified a person for later occupations. A large effort makes a recommendation but I am reminded of pictures in past couple years of people in a long crowded line moving up the last thousand feel of Everest. I see that as repellant mess even if it is still a big climbing endurance test.

Rather tha a test I am happier thinking of the different values inherent in understanding in Physics on the one hand and on the other the opening of experience with Faulkner. I can even concede physics is more demanding over a longer period of time. Still let us have both. If not for each individual but amongst us.
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digression warning just for fun.

Morley , I can sympathize with your Faulkner comment. I tried to make it through The Bear a number of times over the span of a bunch of years. I finally completed it last fall. Previously I would stop ,emotionally stymied, when the bear stands and disembowels Boon the dog. It was not just feeling for the dog but the sense of darkness that I could not understand . How does this story end with the banging of a train taking the forest and the man beating his rifle raving about ownership? Perhaps there is no understanding of the dark mystery in the story, it works its way into your consciousness.

In college the Kesey book Sometimes a Great Notion had a sort of semicult following. I suggested to an English professor I was on friendly terms with that he read it. He did and said it was interesting but sort of derived from the Bear and not really as good. Now I can see what he saw. In the Bear is a revealing of a corrosive power like the river in Sometimes a Great Notion. (I liked the Kesey book enough that I was horrified by the movie turning the darkness of Northwest rain into a sunny California day and loosing the dark dimension in the story)

Ok I still have not finished all of the Go Down Moses stories. A couple of years ago I started "Was" and was blocked on the second page with the announcement:"discovering that Tommy's Turl had run again". Perhaps I am slow but , what is a Turl? I tried looking in google. no turls. I gave up on the story for a while thinking for all I know its southern talk for a goat or perhaps a batch of boiled turnip greens. Ok I finally figured out that Turl was Tommy's slave.
It may be that Faulkner uses mystry as a weapon.
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Physics Guy
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Re: Ideological Fault Lines in (Post-)Mormonism

Post by Physics Guy »

It's been a long time since I read Go Down, Moses but I remember liking it. If "Was" is the one with the poker game then it might have been my favourite story in the set. Playing poker with Amadeus McCaslin, that ain't gamblin'. I figured the point was that Turl must have been the crucial part of the trick.

All I remember now about "The Bear" was the notion of this good-for-nothing misfit of a man who was actually really good at something—killing a big and dangerous bear with just a knife—that would have made him a great hero in ancient times but that in the modern world meant almost nothing. I thought it was a good story because it seemed to show the tragedy of a hero born long after his time, while also showing how awful that time must have been, for such a man to have been a hero in it.

I may well have misunderstood the stories when I read them or remembered them all wrong now. I liked some things about Faulkner's writing enough to have read several of his books but I think I must have blitzed through the novels pretty quickly because I hardly remember anything about them now except that they were depressing.
I was a teenager before it was cool.
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Re: Ideological Fault Lines in (Post-)Mormonism

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Physics Guy wrote:
Mon Jun 07, 2021 1:23 pm


I may well have misunderstood the stories when I read them or remembered them all wrong now. I liked some things about Faulkner's writing enough to have read several of his books but I think I must have blitzed through the novels pretty quickly because I hardly remember anything about them now except that they were depressing.
Physics Guy, Faulkner is so clearly a subject derail here that it is fortunate we both have memory limits on the subject. don't ask about Sound and the Fury, I would have to reread it to remember. I enjoyed Was, it is almost comedic burlesque. Well it almost brought a smile and Turl connected with is love focus.
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