tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-66125638673904907752024-03-05T19:29:33.141+00:00JourdemayneUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger71125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612563867390490775.post-72413632749819706722014-05-23T11:36:00.001+01:002014-05-23T11:51:16.504+01:00Porn in depth ... or maybe not<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">About
ten years ago I was making a composite Photoshop graphic and </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">wanted
the naked torso of a woman to start. Lucky old me – Mr J
is a sculptor with loads of photographic reference. “I need a
picture of a woman’s breasts, this sort of shape, this sort of
angle” I said to him, confused by his slackening jaw. “Deb” he
replied, “you must be the only person I know with an internet
connection who doesn’t know how to find tits.”</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Fair
enough … I’ve got better at it. I think we can agree the internet
has boobs aplenty, although accurately <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23030090" target="_blank">measuring porn traffic and content</a> is problematic</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">.
So all that bandwidth isn’t devoted to watching kittens after all.</span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">The
subject of Tyger Drew-Honey’s recent BBC3 <i><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0441whb" target="_blank">Tyger Takes On …</a></i></span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">
was porn – specifically, the effect it may be having upon his
generation. Better known to most as the oldest kid from <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00fq31t" target="_blank"><i>Outnumbere</i>d</a></span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">,
Tyger is a contemporary teenager, so he has grown up with the kind of
access to hardcore images that previous generations could only dream
of. In addition, his parents were well-known workers in the industry:
his porn-performer and producer father’s stage name is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Dover" target="_blank">Ben Dover</a>, and his mother <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linzi_Drew" target="_blank">Linzi Dre</a>w was an adult model,
porn-performer and one-time editor of <i>Penthouse</i>.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Change
in the industry in the last twenty years has been massive and
technology-driven. The factors that have made porn so easily
available have also dismantled entry barriers into the industry, and
pushed prices considerably southwards. A female porn performer to
whom Tyger spoke to at an award ceremony lamented the fact that
anyone thinks they can be a porn “star”; Ben Dover mourned an
abandoned studio: “The Marie Celeste of the porn world – a
metaphor for the porn world today”.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Understandably,
nobody in protected professions likes progress which strips them of
their monopoly, but the reality is that just as anyone with a satnav
is potentially a taxi-driver, anyone with genitals and a lack of
inhibitions is now potentially a porn performer. But before we get
the violins out, we should remember that this is not a decline in
porn – quite the contrary - just decline of big money due to
reduced exclusivity of distribution.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background: #ffffff; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">This
is where the habitual use of the term ‘star’ for any person who
commits their fornicating to film is palpably ridiculous: a ‘star’
is a person who has a brand. Stars have clout, control over their
careers, merchandising and contracts. In fact, very few porn
performers get to this point, and they don’t <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-what-female-porn-stars-get-paid-for-different-types-of-scenes-2012-11" target="_blank">earn</a> a huge amount on
their way</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">.
I think I’d probably want more than eight hundred quid (minus my
agent’s 15%) for filmed anal sex, especially since the</span><span style="color: navy;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">internet does not have
amnesia</span><span style="color: navy;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">. </span></span>
</div>
<div style="background: #ffffff; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">But
enough of the effect on the industry’s participants: the intended
thrust of the programme was the effect the output porn has on people
who have grown up with it.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">It is
used, predictably, as an instructional manual: “Take that video and
do it on a bird” inarticulated one young man … which is great in
the event the porn he consumes reflects what his lover wants. In an
industry whose majority output is consumed by men, is that likely?</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Is it
possible to become addicted to porn? I have my doubts, but I suppose
addiction is compulsion in relation to a normal but condensed
stimulus. If cocaine is a condensed stimulus to a dopamine hit, is
porn condensed sex? One contributor commented upon the number of
times “I’ve been with a girl and wished I was at home with porn”.
“Yep – I’ve been out with women like that” piped up Mr J. A young man called Randeep took up boxing to keep occupied and
away from porn: well, if you’re going to watch someone get battered
around the ring …</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">But I
can’t be as jocular about the coercion and violence. An anonymous
contributor habitually watched rape-porn with her boyfriend and they
found themselves replaying the scenes: sexual violence had become
normalised. She’s clearly not happy with what happened but “I
don’t feel like I’m his victim … I feel like I’m porn’s
victim”.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Is this
an excuse too far? Her euphemistic </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">phrasing
- “anal sex without permission” – suggested she has a
vocabulary to displace the blame. The word she needed was ‘rape’.
Correlation and causation are devilishly tough to disentangle, but
women were being violated for a long time prior to rape-porn. It’s
hard to believe that a man of his generation could be so oblivious to
the issue of consent. In a reasonable world he’s culpable, whether
he’s been watching porn or cartoons.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Tyger
concluded that “maybe my own sex life has been informed by porn”.
He felt “slightly robbed” by a three minute erotic dance which
cost twenty quid. If you can have steak for free, sizzle at four
hundred quid an hour probably is a bit steep. “The fantasy of porn
is helping us to disconnect from the reality of sex” he concluded.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">So …
worth an hour of your time? Given that there are some extremely
presentable <a href="http://www.bbk.ac.uk/psychology/our-staff/academic/belinda-brooks-gordon/belinda-brooks-gordon" target="_blank">people</a></span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">
who inform authoritatively on sex issues this programme seemed to be
less an incisive examination of real issues than a vehicle for
someone who’s accrued</span><span style="color: navy;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">ace meeja contacts and
some great <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2618295/My-parents-millions-porn-Now-warping-minds-generation-Outnumbereds-teen-star-VERY-unconventional-upbringing.html" target="_blank">PR outreach</a> virtue of The Daily Mail</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">.
If you’ve watched existing quality pieces such as Lisa Rogers <i><a href="http://documentarystorm.com/the-perfect-vagina" target="_blank">The Perfect Vagina</a></i></span><span style="color: navy;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">watching someone pick
the low-hanging fruit of interviewing their own Mum and Dad may not
satisfy.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612563867390490775.post-75242227720558233332013-01-13T12:33:00.001+00:002013-01-13T13:22:45.097+00:00Numinous Neuroses?The British Journal of Psychiatry published an <a href="http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/early/2012/11/15/bjp.bp.112.112003.abstract" target="_blank">interesting paper</a> on their website in November but, to judge by the recent coverage, the PR has only just hit the newsrooms.<br />
<br />
Professor Michael King and his team looked at people with differing supernatural beliefs - no beliefs; conventional religious and ‘spiritual’ – to see whether there were any correlations between these states of belief and mental illness in <i>Religion, spirituality and mental health: results from a national study of English households</i>. They found that: “Spiritual people were more likely than those who were neither religious nor spiritual … to have abnormal eating attitudes … generalised anxiety disorder … any phobia … or any neurotic disorder … They were also more likely to be taking psychotropic medication”.<br />
<br />
Not good for the ‘spiritual’ people then.<br />
<br />
I liked the <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9774259/Spiritual-people-at-higher-risk-of-mental-health-problems.html" target="_blank">Telegraph</a>’s reporting, but thought that <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2255894/Spiritual-people-likely-mentally-ill-think-life-meaning.html" target="_blank">The Daily Mail</a> and The <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/01/02/mental-health-spirituality-eating-disorder-drug-abuse_n_2394538.html?utm_hp_ref=uk" target="_blank">Huffington Post</a>’s coverage were more open to misreading with: “Being spiritual may give life deeper meaning, but it can also make you more susceptible to mental illness“ and “Being spiritual may give life deeper meaning but it can also mess up your mind” respectively.<br />
<br />
So does being ‘spiritual’ cause neurosis?<br />
<br />
William James, often called one of the ‘Fathers of Psychology’, contributed the idea of ‘religious genius’ to the fledgling subject of religious psychology at the turn of the twentieth century, when he drew a distinction between what he termed ‘pattern-setters’ and those who follow ‘a second-hand religious life’. Several scales to measure different ways of being religious have followed and they reflect (in something of a development away from James) that there are simply different ways of being religious: ways that probably reflect underlying personality traits and biology as well as life-experience.<br />
<br />
Allport and Ross’s 1967 ‘Religious Orientation Scale’ draws a distinction between people it considers ‘extrinsically’ religious who are broadly more likely to go through the outward observances and convention associated with religion, and the ‘intrinsically’ religious who are broadly more likely to have integrated religious/spiritual considerations into their daily lives and thought processes. It’s fair to say the intrinsic/extrinsic scale is disputed by some: it has been added to with other dimensions and different scales have been created. But the very existence of such discussion confirms our intuition that a loner, new-age, mysticism convert is probably getting something other from her beliefs that an habitual, from-birth, congregant. King’s paper uses ‘intrinsic’ and ‘extrinsic’ several times, so this is an issue that the authors are certainly aware of, if not the journalists who commented upon it.<br />
<br />
In short, it’s thought that the personality correlates of people who go freelance for their metaphysical lives may be different. For example, <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=tJ4PtqEssQkC&pg=PA174&lpg=PA174&dq=kahoe+1974&source=bl&ots=NSKVwV9FGY&sig=jQfElrDGGpK-41peXHHU2eZaaQQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=KXvlUIyjNIHB0QXkmIDQCA&ved=0CEMQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=kahoe%201974&f=false" target="_blank">studies</a> have shown variations in such things as dogmatism, authoritarianism and locus of control (the expectation of being able to control the things that happen to you).<br />
<br />
So it may well be that underlying personality characteristics give rise to both mental health outcomes and a person’s chosen form of religion or spirituality, rather than the spiritual beliefs themselves leading directly to bad mental health. As King’s paper put it: “Another possible explanation for our finding concerning people with a spiritual life view is that they are caught up in an existential search that is driven by their emotional distress.”<br />
<br />
In any case, the differences the study found in OCD, phobia, depression, anxiety and so forth are small: around one or two percent in most cases.<br />
<br />
I suppose my concern is that the coverage could be misused used by unethical institutional religions to suggest that religious enquiry in and of itself can lead to bad mental health, in rather the same way that the US Evangelic movement feared Satanism itself during the 70’s ‘<a href="http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Satanic_Panic" target="_blank">Satanic Panic</a>’.<br />
<br />
Actually, there are two stories I would sooner have picked out from this paper. <br />
<br />
The first is that are differences in findings between the UK and the US. The study “…fails to confirm North American evidence that holding a religious understanding of life provides protection against mental disorders”. It’s not clear whether this is a methodological or environmental issue – are the US and UK so different in their religious practices and outcomes?<br />
<br />
The second is that there is a lot more boozing and drug use among the ungodly than the religious, but no significantly greater unhappiness. Now that’s a headline.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612563867390490775.post-80961464361494479462012-12-23T10:47:00.000+00:002012-12-23T17:37:23.295+00:00What's the Harm?<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<![endif]--><span style="font-family: Arial;">It is very hard not to feel
the deepest sympathy for everybody involved in the Neon Roberts case. <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-20619096" target="_blank">Neon’s story</a> hit the headlines earlier this month when a judge took the highly unusual
step of identifying him publicly to help him to be located after his mother had
taken him to prevent radiotherapy following surgery.</span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Neon has <a href="http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/cancer-info/utilities/Glossary/news-medulloblastoma" target="_blank">medulloblastoma</a>.
I’m not a cancer-specialist but you can search for information on it easily
enough. It’s a serious condition, which seems to have a serious chance of a
cure … provided the help gets to you before the rapidly developing tumour does.
It’s a metastasising cancer which means that it can spread easily, in this case,
through the rest of the brain and spine, which is presumably why it is
necessary to deliver radiotherapy to the whole brain rather than just the
operation site.</span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I cannot begin to imagine
what it feels like to discover that your child has cancer and may die. Sally
Roberts and her estranged partner must be going through hell.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">This week, a judge ordered
the radiotherapy to go ahead. Sally Roberts had objected on the basis that
there may be side-effects – which is undoubtedly the case – and that
alternative treatments may help, which is far less certain. She appears to have
cited several which may be promising for the future, but which are not
sufficiently well-developed or standardised yet; or else therapies which are
used for other cancers and don’t have a track-record with medulloblastoma. The
list includes: immunotherapy and photodynamic therapy. Also cited were boron
capture therapy about which <a href="http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/cancer-help/about-cancer/cancer-questions/boron-neutron-capture-therapy-for-brain-tumours" target="_blank">Cancer Research </a></span><a href="http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/cancer-help/about-cancer/cancer-questions/boron-neutron-capture-therapy-for-brain-tumours" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Arial;">UK</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial;"> says that “there are concerns that [it] causes
severe side effects”.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Again, I’m no cancer
specialist, so let’s leave that to them. <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/dec/21/neon-roberts-radiotherapy-mother-wishes" target="_blank">The Guardian</a> reported that: “Lawyers
representing the doctors told the court the experts listed by Roberts appeared
to have little or no expertise in treating medulloblastoma, with one having
apparently based his description of it from the internet or newspaper
cuttings.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The possible side-effects of
radiotherapy Neon may face include deafness, reduction of IQ and stunted
growth. However, this is not predictable. He may be OK, or affected only mildly.
As the judge pointed out, the only real choice right now is between
radiotherapy and death.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">This story has been picked
up on various places, random examples <a href="http://anh-europe.org/news/government-tyranny-vs-parental-rights-in-the-uk" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="http://elspethr.wordpress.com/2012/12/22/radiotherapy-rape/" target="_blank">here</a>, on the ‘net as a parental
rights versus heavy-handed government coercion issue. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Sally Roberts’ comment along
these lines, apparently made to the <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2251927/Cancer-boys-mother-Sally-Roberts-defiant-court-rules-Neon-radiotherapy.html" target="_blank">Daily Mail</a>, (and assuming for a moment that
this <i>is</i> faithfully and properly reported) was: “I feel
backed into a corner. It is taking away my human rights as a mother. Neon is my
son. How dare the state impose their treatments on my son? They are not
allowing me as the mother to make these decisions.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><i>This is an
unequivocally wrong way of looking at it</i>.</span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Parenthood is a relationship
involving responsibility for a child but not ownership of it. Neon Roberts is
not his mother’s chattel; he is a unique human being with rights of his own.
Even if parental rights trumped a child’s rights – and they don’t, for very good
reason – Neon has two parents, one of whom has consented to the radiotherapy. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">For examples of why parental
rights don’t trump children’s rights, you can look at <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/malaysia/9458611/Malaysian-toddler-killed-in-exorcism-ritual.html" target="_blank">exorcism</a>,</span><a href="http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=swan_19_1" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> medical neglect</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial;"> and <a href="http://www.desertflowerfoundation.org/en/australia-parents-charged-over-babys-genital-mutilation/" target="_blank">genital mutilation</a>.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Sally Roberts is just wrong
about her rights over Neon, but she at least has the excuse of being in emotional
turmoil right now; an excuse that the libertarian-strand alt-med bloggers do
not. I can’t criticise her for her desire for the best for her son and her fear
for his future after radiotherapy. At the same time, we must remember other
parents – every bit as loving and courageous – have gone through this and
decided it is right to go ahead with the radiotherapy. Ms. Roberts’ fervour
does not make her right about medicine.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I previously reproduced some
<a href="http://jourdemayne.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/changing-face-of-anti-vax.html" target="_blank">vintage </a></span><a href="http://jourdemayne.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/changing-face-of-anti-vax.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Arial;">US</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://jourdemayne.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/changing-face-of-anti-vax.html" target="_blank"> anti-vax</a> leaflets and quoted a Mrs. Carolyne
Burns from 1927 who refused to have her son vaccinated, despite it being a
prerequisite for school attendance. Mrs Burns said:<br />
<br />
<i>“I demand the right of a public school education for my boy and I can’t see
why he shouldn’t get it. I object to vaccination and I won’t submit my boy to
such a dangerous practice.</i> <i>It is un-American and unconstitutional to
force this pus into the system of a healthy child … the school won’t accept him
and I won’t have him vaccinated. What can I do?”</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">So this is tragic, but it’s
not new. Incidentally, the vaccine to which Mrs. Burns was so averse was the
polio vaccine, surely one of the candidates for ‘most significant disease
intervention in human history’ award (… when they decide to invent it!)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Perhaps the most tragic thing about the Roberts family situation is that life
occasionally offers you a choice between something shit and something even shittier.
When life gives you lemons, sometimes all you can make is grimaces.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The human desire to
personify an amorphous, generalised threat is readily observable in
supernatural folklore, and it serves to provide the satisfaction of something
specific to focus upon and rail against – a scapegoat. Again from The Mail,
Roberts apparently claims that she will sue if Neon does suffer side-effects as
a result of radiotherapy: “I will be holding them all accountable — everyone
who has been involved in his treatment. The judge, the doctors, my former
husband — the lot of them”.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">But the fact is, Neon has
cancer, and there may be no consequence-free outcome available. That isn’t his
father’s fault, nor his doctors’, nor the judge’s.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">You may have had an
experience in your life which left you limp with impotence, your only choice
being the acceptance of loss. I know I have.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I use Sally Roberts’ quotes
from The Mail here as illustrations of the experiences and feelings of a person
in a corner and in pain. I feel bad for her. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The people I don’t feel bad
for are the people on alt-med sites who promote non evidence-based therapies as
effective interventions. There’s more on the <a href="http://www.quackometer.net/blog/2012/12/will-any-homeopath-say-homeopathy-is-no-substitute-for-radiotherapy.html" target="_blank">Quackometer</a>. The next time someone
asks you “where’s the harm in it”, perhaps think of the false hope that de
facto medical neglect can bring. </span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612563867390490775.post-60372929542398224512012-07-31T16:45:00.000+01:002012-07-31T16:45:42.540+01:00Setting Own Goals?<b><span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">An only
half-serious memoir of flailing, derision, ostracism and black-eyes</span></b><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">At
school I was OK at maths and English, so it didn’t bother me much
th</span><span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">at I turned into a prototype
dodo during PE. My parents, friends and especially netball team-mates
totally accepted that I just wasn’t a sporty type. Chief among the
unbagsied, I was usually inflicted upon whichever team complained
least loudly, and my impotent flailing confined to the back of the
gym/pitch/court.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">The good
news abo</span><span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">ut a confession of this
type is that I can feel through the ether the many of you who are
nodding and empathising. I don’t know if there are published goals
for games lessons in school – you know, enjoyment of sport, desire
to participate even without the threat of detention - but to judge by
the Health Survey for England (cited <a href="http://www.aso.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2012/03/2012-Statistics-on-Obesity-Physical-Activity-and-Diet-England.pdf" target="_blank">here</a>, p 31) they</span><span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">
don’t work. Using a device called an accelerometer to measure
physical activity the survey found that a miserable 6% of men and 4%
of women achieve the government’s recommended weekly physical
activity level. As a nation, we are melding with our office chairs
and sofas. Evolution will soon provide us with stain-resistant
upholstery.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">The good
news for me is that I was very, very lucky. My brother started Judo
and I fancied giving it a go. I sat my O-level mocks with matching
black-eyes from my first grading, and the real exams with a repeat
pair from Aikido, taken up at a similar time. I was clearly enjoying
myself too much to care that I looked like a racoon. Weight training
to help with strength followed and, eventually, took over. I even
spent a year being a health-instructor until I realised that the
tedium of being asked how to make bums smaller was going to lead to
madness or violence. At the age of twenty-seven I learned to swim,
and now I run.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">I must
add that I do all of these things very badly</span><span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">
indeed. Except the Aikido … I was alright at that. But everything
else was, and is, done despite the miserable lack of attainment. I
have learned to like exercise for its own sake: in other words,
exactly the opposite way it was taught at school.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">A quick
breeze over a <a href="http://www.uel.ac.uk/londoneast/research/documents/lasting-legacy.pdf" target="_blank">report</a> from the University of East London</span><span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">
(p56) about
the expected legacy outcomes of L<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">o</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">ndon
2012 considers the Olympic Games’ effects in terms of employment,
skills tourism, house prices and so on. And it also addresses what
is, in my opinion, an oft-repeated canard – that the sight of
sporting excellence may precipitate a nation to undock from its soft
furnishings and head out to the nearest playing field. It says:</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;"></span>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">The
Olympic Charter aims to encourage and support the development of
sport for all … There is an intention towards a virtuous circuit:
sport for all feeds elite sport which, in turn, it is hoped, will
inspire more people to participate. Trickle down and knock on effects
are assumed with the affective charge of the Games, the role models
of the athletes, the infrastructure and expertise mobilised in
putting the Games on and extensive global broadcasting of Olympic
sport all key ingredients in the process.” </span></blockquote>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">So –
</span><span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">plenty of good intentions. But
the report’s conclusions are refreshingly unhyperbolous when it
considers the real evidence: “</span><span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">
.. there has been a paucity
of studies on post-Games participation in sport and whether an
Olympic</span><span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;"> Games provides a short
or longer term bounce for community participation in sport”. Where
changes have been perceived in the past: “… the Olympic Games are
likely to have been one factor amongst many …”</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">A</span><span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">ll
of which makes me ponder on a strand of thought that unites both
school games and the Olympics – the assumption that greatness and
achievement motivate spectators to participate.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">I think
it probably does exactly the opposite.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">There’s
an apocryphal anecdote that </span><span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">George
W. Bush was appalled that fifty percent of Americans were below
average intelligence. The use of the tale is not to prove that Dubbya
is as thick as the most afflicted of his countrymen – he probably
didn’t say it – but it does encapsulate that sad truth that in
order for some to excel, others can’t. In the case of elite sport,
that’s most of us.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">Yet
we’re left with a durable bit of cultural software from nineteenth
century public schools that runs in a seemingly un</span><span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">interruptible
loop: sport, pain, humiliation, virtue, sport, pain …</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">The
psychology of motivation has been studied a great deal in the era
between the brutality of Eton’s height-of-empire playing fields and
our present obesity epidemic. I’m personally very fond of Stanford
psychologist <a href="http://www.sde.ct.gov/sde/lib/sde/pdf/cali/praisespring99.pdf" target="_blank">Carol Dweck’s work on praise and motivation</a> in which
she encourage</span><span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">s parents and
teachers to give accolades for process rather than outcome. Dweck’s
experiments suggested that those praised for their intelligence
seemed to regard it as a fixed quality and to be more conservative in
their future choices; in trying to retaining their ‘clever’
status, they did things that made them look clever all the time,
sometimes missing out on trying harder tasks, disappointments,
reversals and the opportunity for problem-solving that those things
all bring. It seems that if you can instead get hooked on ‘process’
(and thereby tenacity), a decent level of attainment will follow
anyway. It’s hard to focus on something over a long period of time
and remain too bad at it.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">In fact,
when you get into process, you stand a chance of experiencing one of
the most pleasurable things known to man that doesn’t involve
ch</span><span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">ocolate – a condition
labelled by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as ‘<a href="http://www.psy-flow.com/sites/psy-flow/files/docs/flow.pdf" target="_blank">flow</a>’. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">Flow
occurs when you are completely absorbed in a task: you can lose time
and even your sense of self. It’s been called other things too,
such as ‘in the zone’, and we were</span><span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">
certainly aware of the notion in martial arts.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">Flow
didn’t really figure in </span><span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">our
incongruously-named athletics sessions at school, during which we
were each timed or measured performing explosive and aspirational
feats for which there had been absolutely no preparation. As wilted
and asthmatic teenagers collapsed with burning lungs and pulled
hamstrings, the crimplene-tracksuited gym-teacher assiduously filled
out the Amateur Athletics Association paperwork. It was only later,
when I did my stint assisting others in gyms, that I wondered how
many of my clients would have expired on the spot if I did the same
thing with them.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">But the
data were there – the results.</span><span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">
We hadn’t learned to enjoy, but we had been successfully measured.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">That</span><span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">
danger of applying labels, with the attendant tendency to indelibly
mark, has been usefully explored in other contexts too. Everyone who
has explored cognitive-behavioural therapy for depression has
encountered the idea that “depressed right now” is a description,
and “depressed” or “depressive” are potentially
self-fulfilling prophecies. I know that I didn’t regard myself as
“bad at netball this session”, but as “inept at any kind of
physical activity whatsoever”.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">My Judo
club ran three squash courts too, so the squashies and the judos
often met in the bar area. My PE teacher and I encountered each other
one evening, mutually alarmed. “How amazing to see you here” she
said to me. “I never had you down as a physical type”. </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">So the
jock/nerd dichotomy wasn’t just me then.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">If I’d
had the speed or the wit, perhaps I’d have responded to her cheek
by pointing out that disliking standing in the drizzle in very little
more than your underwear while having a wet netball smack you in the
face probably isn’t all that bizarre.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">It
strikes me that there are many dimensions to being active</span><span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">.
Some people get excited by distance, some by time, some by scores.
Some people like to be in teams of one and some like larger groups.
If you’re not competitive, that’s fine. I used to volley on
squash courts for hours with a friend. No scoring. Load of fun.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">Indications
are that key public bodies already know that the Olympic Games aren’t
going to improve gross-national-fitness by itself. This <a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_2115925226">report from</a></span><span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.london.nhs.uk/news-and-health-issues/press-releases/2009-press-releases/experts-analyse-likely-impact-of-london-2012-olympics-on-physical-activity" target="_blank"> NHS London</a> says: “This research shows that just having the 2012
Games in London will not automatically create a health legacy. So NHS
London is launching … the ‘Go London’ programme to realise our
ambition of improving health through increasing levels of physical
activity.”</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">Judo was
my very short-lived gateway drug which enabled me to overcome the
twice-weekly exercise aversion sessions at school</span><span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">.
I was very fortunate.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">Danny
Boyle’s Olympic opening ceremony was stunning. And this week I’ll
watch the gymnastics because I find it amazing and beautiful. Perhaps
there are elements of the games you’ll be drawn to watch too.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">But we
shouldn’t believe any of the hogwash about the Olympics enciting us
to become athletes. The simple human pleasure of enjoying and being
in control of your body is far too important to be left to peddlers
of mirages. </span>
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612563867390490775.post-532549096824972382012-06-23T15:31:00.000+01:002012-06-23T18:59:39.860+01:00Psychics and Princes<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"></span></b><span style="font-family: Arial;">My great-grandmother was
psychic.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Everybody knew it. If a
member of her extended family paid an impromptu visit from even a great
distance, like </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">London</span><span style="font-family: Arial;">, they were greeted with a friendly smile and a
dinner that was already virtually at the table. “I knew you were coming”, she’d
say. She was known for having ‘a way’ with animals, to the extent that she
could pick up and offer comfort to a dog who had been fatally injured in the
street, without getting bitten.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">She was never subject to rigorous
testing for her gift, and that was a blessing really. To have had it revealed
that meals cooked for large families inconspicuously subdivide to accommodate
unexpected guests, or that simple kindness on the part of the human (or closeness
to death of the animal) produces a mundane - if touching - pieta, would have
compromised her identity in a very painful way.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Her family functioned around
the notion of her powers and performed their roles to support and nourish it. Most of
them had flickering encounters with the other-world themselves, but were
naturally subordinate to their mother in their abilities during her lifetime.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">My father tells me about a
time he went to see a stage-spiritualist who sat with her assistant. These
ladies’ status seemed to be directly proportionate to their size, and a psychic
wearing what appeared to be a chintz tarpaulin was evidently a very powerful
creature indeed. As the star-psychic inhaled prior to bestowing her first
insight, her skinny assistant broke in with a baseless voice in a </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">Lancashire</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> accent: “I can see a black and white cat – has anybody lost a black and white cat?” </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The formidable priestess
shot her a daggered look, and she was right to, because the monkey was taking a shot at being the organ-grinder. This was not enthusiasm – it was a
takeover bid.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">In a world where there are
no exterior ways of denoting your status – no qualifications, no protected
professional titles, no career ladder and demarked skills and experience, no
gold jewellery nor designer adornments, no foreign holidays to boast of nor
flash cars to drive, a person must attain their rank with the sheer force of
their personality. If the criteria for their assets and virtues are
unmeasurable except by the support of their cohorts, that is all for the
better. Being psychic was, and is, a recourse open to people who have few other
ways of differentiating themselves.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">A person like this can <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">be</i> instead of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">do</i>.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Unfortunately for her very
hard-up family, my great-grandmother never had the commercial nous to go the
Helen Duncan, Doris Stokes or Psychic Sally route. There must have been
thousands of Elizabeth Archers all over the </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">UK</span><span style="font-family: Arial;">, women whose social status derived in good part from
their mystical powers. That family was poor, in a way we have difficulty
imagining today. My grandmother and her brother had to go to the beach to
collect sea-coal for the fire. They didn’t have enough to eat and neither did
their younger siblings. They were given charity shoes in front of their classes
at school, but not frequently enough to permit their growing feet to avoid
being cramped into forming hideous bunions. It was the Great Depression, and life was
largely shit. It has frequently been observed that religious-spectrum ideas can
be potent comforters and compensators, which is why we see those in most need
of comfort and compensation investing in them.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">As arduous exams and
professional paths are, surely it is better to live in a world where you can <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">do</i> instead of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">be</i>?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">A story in <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2162398/Prince-William-turns-30-Will-forced-ditch-job-loves-royal-destiny-calls.html" target="_blank"><i>The Daily Mail</i></a>
this week caught my eye. Apparently, Prince William is considering whether he
will sign up for another three-year tour of duty as a Sea-King helicopter
pilot. But is the call of royal duties threatening to divert the Prince’s chosen
path?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The feature writer suggests
that the Prince’s personal yearnings lie with his career. Apart from the fact
that it has cost a small fortune to train him, he seems to like his job – a job
that is all about <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">doing</i>.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">But the Royal Family exists
by virtue of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">being</i> paradigm – we
don’t vote for the Queen. Prince William’s dilemma* is a very modern
illustrations one of the rarer modern examples of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">being</i> versus <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">doing.</i> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">This model must cause them a
great deal of pain as individuals. Prince Philip was famously made to give up
his career in the Navy, and Princess Margaret’s privileged and empty life
showed on every line of her face at the end. The Duchess of Cambridge is noted
for having never had a recognisable job. The reason for this is a mystery, but
if it was on advice from the Palace, I think they were very, very wrong. She
married just in time to lose the ‘Waity Katie’ label, a hallmark of her
indeterminate identity. But in times to come it may count against her.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I very much hope that Prince
William signs up for another tour. Contrast these pictures: on one side, the
capable man at the controls of a Sea-King helicopter; on the other, a person dressed
for an absurd pantomime, bearing more than a passing resemblance to a child
playing dressing-up with a blanket and foil-covered chocolate money for medals.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWuuUlvyfxcU1586YtFHu9AxuSjksiDgLlTteBZALicfnztGo2t3VAOrVn4eIDaPFAOGSZ9H1I9NqRTfFsGmgLLQUqxLCIznsqobAEhunSYDZPMgSOfIeaPkIN7JU4XC6bFZux5T9CGVQN/s1600/PrinceWilliam.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="171" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWuuUlvyfxcU1586YtFHu9AxuSjksiDgLlTteBZALicfnztGo2t3VAOrVn4eIDaPFAOGSZ9H1I9NqRTfFsGmgLLQUqxLCIznsqobAEhunSYDZPMgSOfIeaPkIN7JU4XC6bFZux5T9CGVQN/s320/PrinceWilliam.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Albeit that they represent
different ends of the social scale, there is personal mystique in being a
Prince or a psychic – and both are equally ridiculous. It seems that being a
Prince may unfortunately also be painful.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">* Assuming of course, that
it exists in reality rather than in the imagination of a newspaper feature
writer. Whether it is an issue now, however, it certainly will be at some
point.</span></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612563867390490775.post-25399536215823472402012-06-09T14:45:00.001+01:002012-06-12T14:40:39.855+01:00High Stakes<span style="font-family: Arial;">The more observant of you
will have noticed that vampires have been in the news. No, not bankers.
Although the droll current-affairs metaphor does apply, Voltaire got there
first: describing the vampires he had seen in </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">London</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> and </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">Paris</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> in his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dictionaire
Philosophique, </i>he wrote "there were stock-jobbers, brokers, and men of
business, who sucked the blood of the people in broad daylight; but they were
not dead, though corrupted. These true suckers lived not in cemeteries, but in
very agreeable places." </span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-18334106" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Archeologists in </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">Sozopol</span><span style="font-family: Arial;">, </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">Bulgaria</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial;"> have excavated a couple of graves whose inhabitants
had been pinned to the ground through their hearts with iron rods. Better safe
than sorry, I suppose. Staking is such perfect
horror-film fare that it’s hard to believe that it happened in real life too,
but it truly did.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEir2is9cqLJFtmLmeDX2JUdXOo0ryZtBORdmjoVN2VAxS3KynIs6V2xsvq7Y2sK5iaFNnXnYr946clQ6v9VgO_Iq2KVOKAytJC4pAaxrsdK_xAPWFMGhmLmvtEGFa2kZIFg0jORT4yOGTxg/s1600/sozopol.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEir2is9cqLJFtmLmeDX2JUdXOo0ryZtBORdmjoVN2VAxS3KynIs6V2xsvq7Y2sK5iaFNnXnYr946clQ6v9VgO_Iq2KVOKAytJC4pAaxrsdK_xAPWFMGhmLmvtEGFa2kZIFg0jORT4yOGTxg/s1600/sozopol.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Vampires erupted onto
Western European consciousness in the early 1700s, but that is not to say they
were invented then. The Ottoman Turk and Austrian Empires had been slogging it
out for centuries, and when the Austrian Empire finally prevailed over the
Balkans, they found themselves administrating over local peoples who had quaint
local customs, like mutilating corpses.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">A rash of alarmed reports came back, asking how to deal with the phenomenon. To Roman
Catholic Austria, desecration of the dead was not just unhygienic – it was sacrilege.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">But where there’s repulsion
there’s usually titillation too. The response to the new tales of the undead
varied, from learned shock and outrage, to ardent and morbid curiosity. Incidentally, this is worth noting for those today who believe "horror" to be a modern and corrupting -
pardon the pun - interest.</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">As early as the first decade
of the eighteenth century, the Sorbonne<span style="font-size: x-small;"><sup>1</sup></span> in </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">Paris</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> had passed two resolutions prohibiting the
decapitation of accused vampires.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6612563867390490775" name="sdfootnote41anc"></a>
And Eighteenth century western Europe avidly consumed the vampire stories that
streamed in from the east. The case of the vampire Arnod Paole and his numerous
victims was one of the first to be seized upon; it was enthusiastically retold,
and was the subject of a best selling leaflet at the </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">Leipzig</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> book fair of 1732.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Arnod Paole had died when he
had fallen from a hay wagon and broken his neck. His case was recounted in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Visum et Repertum</i>, a report which had
been commissioned by the authorities of the Austrian Empire and written by
regimental medical officers Fluckinger, Sigel and Baumgarten.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Paole had been born and died
in the </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">village</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> of </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">Medvegia</span><span style="font-family: Arial;">, north of </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">Belgrade</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> in </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">Serbia</span><span style="font-family: Arial;">, but he had spent part of his life away as a soldier
serving in what was then called ‘Turkish Serbia’. After his service, he had
returned home, married and bought a farm. Although he was remembered as a
pleasant man he was said to have had a sombre air, which was attributed to an
incident that he mentioned during his travels; he had claimed to have been
troubled by a vampire, and had used the folk remedy of eating earth from its
grave and smearing himself in its blood to be free of it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">After his death, some of the
villagers said they had been bothered by Paole, and four were reported to have
died by his actions. Forty days after his burial, he was disinterred. Reported
in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Visum et Repertum</i>, his body was
found not to be corrupt: </span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">"They found that he was
quite complete and undecayed, and that fresh blood had flowed from his eyes,
mouth and ears; that the shirt, the covering of the coffin were completely
bloody; that the old nails on his hands and feet, along with the skin had
fallen off, and that new ones had grown; and since they saw from this that he
was a true vampire, they drove a stake through his heart, according to their
custom, whereby he gave an audible groan and bled copiously. Thereupon they
burned the body the same day to ashes and threw these into the grave."<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6612563867390490775#sdfootnote21sym#sdfootnote21sym"></a> </span></div>
</blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Paole's four ‘victims’ had
also been disinterred and treated the same way since they would be tainted and
could turn into vampires themselves. Clearly we have the notion of contagion
here.</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">But the deaths did not stop
there. In the three months leading up to the arrival of the medical officers,
(five years after Paole’s death) another seventeen people died after short
illnesses of two or three days, and one had claimed to have been bothered by
the spirit of one of the recently dead before she expired. It was reasoned that
the curse of vampirism had managed to persist via the meat of the local cattle
and sheep, whose blood Paole must therefore have sucked. The officers were thus
able to witness the disinterment of more bodies, as the latest rash of vampires
were dealt with.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">A woman named Stana had died
at the age of twenty after a three day illness following childbirth. Her baby
had not survived for long, and had been buried but then pulled out of its grave
by dogs and partially eaten. Stana had been sufficiently worried about the
vampire (and had perhaps suspected it for the death of her baby) to smear
herself with its blood as a protection against it. But to judge by her pristine
condition in the grave three months after her death, this measure had not been
effective. Liquid, rather than coagulated, blood was found in her vessels, her
viscera were fresh and her nails on one hand were new. The only part of her
which had succumbed to the grave was her uterus, inflamed and malodorous with
the placenta still in place (giving an indication what why she actually died). </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Another woman named Ruscha
had been buried with her child soon after parturition. Six weeks and five weeks
later respectively, the mother and the baby both had fresh blood in their
thoracic cavities and hearts.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">An old woman named Miliza
had died at the age of sixty, around three months previously. Having spent her
whole life looking lean and spare, she now conversely appeared to be plump and
healthy in death. Like the others, her blood was liquid and her viscera were
fresh. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">A twenty year old woman who
had been dead for over two weeks was found to be fresh with a flushed and ruddy
complexion. When she was moved, fresh blood flowed from her nose. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">In total, all the people
above plus two teenage boys, one pre-pubescent girl, a woman, a man, a baby and
an old man were found in a vampiric state. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">All the vampires' heads were
severed from their bodies, the carcasses were burnt and the ashes were thrown
into the river </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">Morava</span><span style="font-family: Arial;">. Two mothers and their babies, and a man in his
twenties were also exhumed but had decomposed sufficiently to allay suspicion.
They were replaced back in the ground without further desecration.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Paole’s case illustrates
perfectly that vampires were a phenomenon associated principally with two
things: epidemics, and failure to decompose in the predicted manner.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The 17<sup>th</sup> century
Greek Roman Catholic Priest Leone Allaci wrote:</span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">"If at any time an
unwonted mortality occurs and persons begin to die when there is no epidemic of
sickness to account for it, the citizens shrewdly suspecting what the cause may
be, proceed to open the graves of those who have been recently interred." </span></div>
</blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Ernest Jones<span style="font-size: x-small;"><sup>2</sup></span> provided a list of some of the most alarming outbreaks of vampirism: in </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">Chios</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> 1708; </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">Hungary</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> 1726; Medyuega and </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">Belgrade</span><span style="font-family: Arial;">
1725; </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">Serbia</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> 1825; </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">Hungary</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> 1832. These coincided with fatal epidemics - plagues.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">A recently as 1898, people
on the </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">Island</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> of </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">Kynthos</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> believed that vrykolakas – Greek vampires - brought consumption. Regional variants, such as the
Bosnian lampir, were associated with plagues and the Greek word ‘Nosopheros’
(from where the Balkan word Nosferatu derives) means plague carrier.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">In a very peculiar twist, Balkan/Greek
type folkoric practice in response to consumption also occurred in late
nineteenth century Rhode </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">Island</span><span style="font-family: Arial;">, </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">USA</span><span style="font-family: Arial;">. Go <a href="http://www.jourdemayne.com/vodcasts" target="_blank">here</a> for my vodcast on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Vampires of </i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Rhode Island</span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">.</span></i></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">As for the ‘undecomposed’ element
of Paole and his victims, we can fruitfully turn to the science of
decomposition – a science to which most people throughout history have not had
access. It's worth starting with
an account by a travelling French Botanist, Pitton de Tournefort from his</span><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> <i>Relation d'un Voyage du Levant</i> of 1717</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">,</span> who had the
opportunity of seeing a vampire examined on the </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">Island</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> of </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">Mykonos</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> in 1700.
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">A quarrelsome and unpleasant
man had been found dead in a field, and buried as normal. Two days after his
burial, he was seen striding around the town at night. He entered houses and
made a great nuisance of himself, upsetting furniture and extinguishing lights.
Like many other ‘vrykolalas’ – Greek vampires - he did not suck blood directly,
but he terrified the wits out of the living.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Masses were said, but since
the disturbances did not stop and were so widespread, that it was decided to
exhume his corpse on the ninth day after burial.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6612563867390490775" name="sdfootnote32anc"></a>
De Tournefort witnessed the examination which was carried out by the town's
butcher whom he described as "old and ham-fisted". The butcher's aim
was to find the heart of the vrykolakas, for which he began a search in its
abdomen. After a time spent sorting through the corpse's entrails, it was
suggested that he needed to breach the diaphragm to enter the thorax, after
which the corpse's heart was successfully extracted. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Unfortunately by now the
stench was overwhelming. Incense was burnt, but the pungent fumes mingled with
those of the corpse and the onlookers became so excited that they swore the
palls of smoke emanated from the corpse itself. The terror mounted until all de
Tournefort could hear was the word ‘vrykolakas’, repeated many times by the
people in the Church and in the square outside it. The group who had initially
found the man's corpse in the field added to the hysteria by recounting that
when they had found him, he was not as stiff as a corpse should have been, but
supple instead.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">"I am certain that if
we had not ourselves been actually present, these folk would have maintained
that there was no stench of corruption" wrote de Tournefort, a stench that
meant, having secured a place quite close to the body, "we were retching
and well 'nigh overcome". The butcher claimed that the innards were warm
and that the blood on his hands was fresh; De Tournefort and his associate
countered that the warmth was no more than the warmth of putrefaction like that
of a dung heap, and that the blood was nothing more than a stinking mess. But
despite this reasoning, the people still took the heart to the seashore and
burnt it.</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Far from being subdued, the
spirit became more restless than ever, terrifying everyone except, de
Tournefort sardonically adds, "the consul in whose house we lodged". </span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">De Tournefort believed the
whole thing to have been "an epidemical disorder of the brain, as
dangerous as mania or sheer lunacy". Clearly, no amount of reasoning would
have convinced the people of Mykenos that there was not a vrykolakas in their
midst, but with two parallel interpretations of the same event – the locals’
and De Tournefort’s - we can perceive a
cognitive bias which directed people to see putrefying warmth as life,
decomposing sludge as blood, and incense as a spirit emanation from a vampire
body.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Paul Barber’s excellent
<i>Vampires, Burial and Death</i> has a chapter devoted to normal post-mortem changes
that can be mistaken for vampirism. I recommend the book. After you’ve eaten.</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Stana, Ruscha and her baby,
Miliza, the twenty year old woman and Paole himself all had ‘liquid blood’
which in some cases flowed from their noses (and in all likelihood, all other
of their bodily orifices).</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Barber reminds us that blood
coagulates in corpses, but liquefies again. Then, quoting Mant, he writes:</span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">“The gases in the abdomen
increase in pressure as the putrefactive processes advance and the lungs are
forced upwards and decomposing blood escapes from the mouth and nostrils”</span></div>
</blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Stana was round and
healthy-looking in the grave, but bloating from post-mortem bacterial gases
would account for that, as it would account for the Paole’s “audible groan” as
he was staked.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Paole’s twenty year old
female victim’s “flushed and ruddy complexion” was quite common in vampirism
too. Lividity in corpses occurs where the blood vessels break down, emptying
now decaying blood cells into tissue where they can cause dark staining. If a
person was suspected of being a candidate for vampirism, they were often buried
face-down, which produces significant facial ‘flushing’.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The suppleness of De
Tournefort’s vrykolakas was remarked upon by the people who found him. But
rigor-mortis passes, usually after thirty six hours or so although the process
gets delayed by the cold.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">In fact, temperature has a
massive part to play in general. As I pointed out with Mercy Brown in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Vampires of Rhode Island</i>, if a
person dies and the winter and is buried in freezing soil, buried in a shallow
grave because the ground is too hard to dig a deep one, or kept them
above-ground in a freezing mortuary, the corpse is not likely to decay
particularly rapidly.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Death during epidemics
provided another variable which contributed to the revenant myth – the idea
that, as French Monk Augustin Calmet put it, "certain persons after death chew in their graves and demolish
anything that is near them, and that they can be heard munching like pigs".<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6612563867390490775" name="sdfootnote13anc"></a> This munching occurred especially
at times of plague.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I covered this in a <a href="http://jourdemayne.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/vampire-of-venice-and-incidentally-why.html" target="_blank">previous blogpost.</a> To summarise: the bodily
parts that were eaten by ‘vampires’ in their graves were those parts which
would decompose first, such as entrails and finger ends. And the phenomenon was
most likely to occur in late summer and autumn, the peak season for plague deaths.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">While we can look this stuff
up on the internet, most people throughout history have not observed the
decomposition of corpses for the very good reason that they are sources of
contagion. It’s unhygienic. They were left with nothing but hearsay and folklore
to combat epidemic death.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I wonder what happened to the
corpses in Sozopol? We can infer that the people were likely to have died during a
time of plague. Perhaps the village had employed the folk diagnosis
used across Southern Slav areas of walking a completely white or black virginal
horse that had never stumbled, ridden by a virginal man around the graveyard.
The horse would have refused to cross the vampire graves, leading to the corpses
being exhumed.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Staking is an extremely
prosaic way of simply keeping a corpse in its grave. It’s a rather large pin.
While many traditions emphasise the importance of the material – hawthorn for
some, iron for others – piercing the corpse would have let the gases out and
stopped post-mortem shifting and popping. Bear in mind that these people did
not have coffins.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Vampires, like all other
unnatural predators, serve as scapegoats. They provide a way of communities
feeling powerful in the face of insurmountable events: there is knowledge,
there are rituals. It means that people can <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">do
something</i>, where there is otherwise nothing that can be done.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Vampires were officially-designated
'outsiders', and it’s observable that such discreet populations within the main
one are useful to the human psyche, and oft-created. Given that people have
hanged witches, burned heretics and tortured foreigners, perhaps we should
applaud the vampire-believers for their humanity in only multilating their
scapegoats after they were dead.</span><br />
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Footnotes: </span></span><br />
<br />
<div class="sdfootnote-western" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: x-small;">1 The Sorbonne </span><span style="font-size: x-small;">was founded as a theological college -
and was not given to University of Paris until 1808</span></div>
<div class="sdfootnote-western" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="sdfootnote-western" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
<div class="sdfootnote-western">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">2 Ernest Jones (1949) <i>On the Nightmare</i> The Hogarth Press Ltd, London p. 122. </span></div>
</div>
<div class="sdfootnote-western" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="sdfootnote-western" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">3 </span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Mant ed. <i>Taylor's Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence</i> p. 147, quoted in Barber <i>Vampires, Burial and Death</i> p. 115.</span></span></div>
<div class="sdfootnote-western" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br /></div>
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612563867390490775.post-53010071101818810662012-03-19T19:23:00.011+00:002012-03-19T21:33:18.521+00:00Profanity and Nuptials, or, Get Your Hands Off My Language<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:snaptogridincell/> <w:wraptextwithpunct/> <w:useasianbreakrules/> </w:Compatibility> <w:browserlevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif][if !mso]><object classid="clsid:38481807-CA0E-42D2-BF39-B33AF135CC4D" id="ieooui"></object> <style> st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } </style> <![endif][if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial;">Mr J has been researching World War I this week. One of the things which has given him most grief is trying to ascertain authentic swear-words from the trenches. We have such a pleasing range today meaning you can take your pick from the blasphemous (“Jesus Christ”) to the whimsically old-fashioned, and thus relatively unimpactful (“bloody thing”). Confusion really arises when you consider our best swearwords (those Anglo-Saxons must have hammered their thumbs a lot). Words like “fuck” and “cunt” can be either deeply offensive or even incredibly amiable, depending entirely upon context. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial;">Paterfamlias J came partially to the rescue with a recording from Old Uncle Harry, made in the ‘70s. On this recording, Uncle Harry had rather quaintly caught himself saying “bloody” and asked if swearing was OK. We took that to mean that, to an essentially Edwardian man like Uncle Harry, “bloody” was quite a rude word.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial;">As an aside, poor Uncle Harry had been frustrated in his chief ambition of shooting his superior officer in the head by a fellow soldier who had jumped in and threatened to do it first. His verbal self-censorship was the only blip in a fully-flowing narrative involving plentiful accounts of gassing, carnage and death, so it wasn’t that he lacked the stomach for grim reality.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial;">Some suggest the origin of the adjective “bloody”, used in an expletive context, is a corruption of ‘By Our Lady” which would make it blasphemous. It certainly seems that at religious times, invocations of God and his cohorts were the most serious variety of verbal outburst.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial;">Conversely, Mr J. says it seems that the word “fuck” was used so casually in the trenches that it was only its omission which panicked people. If you were told to pick up your gun, you knew that someone was short of the time to get the intensifier “fucking” in there, and that the situation was formal and serious.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial;">So we can see that words have changed over the years, and that this trend is intimately connected with the zeitgeist – the ‘concept-soup’ in which we mentally swim; our intellectual, emotional, cultural agar.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial;">Blasphemous swears have become less serious for many of us, because religion does not have the same influence over our lives.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial;">English is a pervasive language in the world. This is, no doubt, because of the country’s ardour for empire at a certain critical point in history. I’m sure there are good and bad things to be said for this spread of the language (and I can take neither blame nor credit, having sprouted from the gene pool, but not having been actually there). </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial;">But I’d propose that having English as your first or second language is a cool thing because it’s so avowedly and proudly evolving. We do not have the equivalent of L'Académie Française (whose pronouncements are not, and cannot be, binding in any case), standing like an etymological Cnut against a tide of reality. If you don’t know that “wicked” can mean cool, awesome or impressive, you’re just either old or you don’t get out enough.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial;">In short, if enough people use it in a certain way, it gets into the dictionary. The rules are dictated by the useage, and the useage changes. This is a good thing.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial;">Take the word “marriage” as another example. In medieval times, Canon law accepted that people could be married by their declaration towards each other. In practice, the landed and wealthy needed firmer contracts than that because of the money and power at stake. But no doubt, many simpler folk simply took up with each other, sans clergy or witnesses to bless their arrangement. ‘Common Law Marriage’ a.k.a. staying together ‘til you’re too exhausted to escape, was common throughout </span><span style="font-family:Arial;">Europe</span><span style="font-family:Arial;">.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial;">This changed during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation where both sides seemed to want things formalised. The Catholic Church required that a priest and witnesses be present for a legal marriage, This was during one of the meetings of the interminable Council of Trent (nearly two decades, in case you were wondering – I think they let people out for sandwiches and the loo). In </span><span style="font-family:Arial;">England</span><span style="font-family:Arial;">, we had Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act which did a similar thing about a century later.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial;">Today, marriage also doesn’t have to be a religious ceremony. In the </span><span style="font-family:Arial;">UK</span><span style="font-family:Arial;">, the marriage must be conducted by a person, or in the presence of a person, authorised to register marriages. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial;">In practice, this means that if you go to the local Anglican Church, the vicar may have the relevant certificate; if you go the registry office, you’ve definitely got a one-stop-shop; if you go the local Wiccan group you’ll need a space blanket for later (those people keep taking their kits off in the moonlight) and a visit to the registry office to make it all official. At my brother’s wedding they had the Catholic priest to do the religious bit and the registrar to do the official paperwork bit.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial;">The practice of marriage, as well as the formalities validating its creation, has changed a great deal. In medieval times, people married very young, no doubt so they could produce children before they expired of pillage, plague or starvation (or childbirth, paradoxically). One of my favourite historical characters, Eleanor of Aquitaine, was first married at the ago of 13 or 15 – both under-age by current reckoning. Plenty married younger.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial;">A cursory look at the dynastic marriages of the nobility also shows that a woman’s consent was not particularly necessary. Aristocrats and social climbers would throw their daughters at men higher above them in the social hierarchy. Girls weren’t encouraged to think that they had a say in the matter. Because they didn’t.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial;">This is another reason I like Eleanor of Aquitaine. She managed to get an annulment from her first (and unhappy) marriage to the King of France and arrange a new one with a bloke she fancied – the man who would become Henry II. The physical journey after her divorce and before her new marriage, incidentally, speaks of a woman flying like the wind to avoid dynastic rapists, men who would have grabbed her and violated her in order to be the new master of her lands, possession being nine-tenths of the law and all that.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial;">Which leads on to another massively changed nuance of marriage: in most places, marriage meant that a man could force his spouse to have sex with him. Rape within marriage was a contradiction-in-terms. The phrase “irrevocable consent” was often used in this context (it has other legal applications too). </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial;">Famously, Sir Matthew Hale pronounced in 1736 that a “husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife, for by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband, which she cannot retract”.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial;">So we can see that words change over time and that that is a useful thing. We can also see, with even a cursory look (and this is just stuff I can think of off the top of my head – perhaps you can tell), that the concept of marriage itself has changed considerably. I haven’t even gone into all the historical invocations not to marry for love or lust, the increasing romanticism during the 18<sup>th</sup> and 19<sup>th</sup> centuries.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial;">So, we’re happy with words that evolve. We’re also happy with the many, many changes that history has brought to our meaning of marriage (anyone for the legal rape of a 12 year old, given by her father to a thirty-year old? – thought not).</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial;">So why are so many people distressed that the term may now come to encompass the union of gay couples? The government’s plans to legalise gay marriage has met with howls of protest from religious groups, religious groups who are trying to both determine useage of a word <span style="font-style: italic;">that belongs to us all</span>, and to claim that “marriage” has meant one thing since its inception.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial;">Religious bodies will not be required to provide gay marriages. They are not the legal authorities over marriage except in countries like </span><span style="font-family:Arial;">Saudi Arabia</span><span style="font-family:Arial;">. Neither do they have provenance over the way we use our words.<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial;">It is inhumane to deny gay couples equality. I never want to hear another religous apologist tell me that their beliefs are primarily about ethics ever again.</span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612563867390490775.post-2339831457088694982011-10-28T16:38:00.003+01:002011-10-28T16:41:55.163+01:00Sleep Paralysis: Leave Your Comments HereFollowing on from the article on Sleep Paralysis at <a href="http://www.jourdemayne.com">Jourdemayne</a>, here is the section for comments and recollections.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612563867390490775.post-83938130357135628112011-09-21T17:51:00.002+01:002011-09-21T17:52:57.273+01:00Time to Move ...Thanks for following me on Blogger. I've now moved to another platform so I can provide a few more bells and whistles. Please some to visit me at<a href="http://www.jourdemayne.com"> jourdemayne.com</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612563867390490775.post-12670594437349673682011-08-14T17:45:00.007+01:002011-08-14T19:26:41.699+01:00The Heart of DarknessI grew up in Southall.
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<br />It was OK: not much wrong, not much right. I remember listening to a chocolate advert’s jangling soundtrack which proposed we were in the ‘sophisticated 70s’. I wondered how we would remember it in retrospect, and came up with the perfect word: “grey”. I know that seems strange of an era characterised by Marc Bolan, Bowie and Slade.
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<br />But the decade went out with a bang. In 1979 the far-right organisation The National Front exercised their democratic right to hold a St George’s Day meeting … in Southall. With the area housing one of the largest Asian populations on the country it was clear and deliberate provocation. The special needs teacher Blair Peach was murdered a short distance from the town centre where police, white racists and young Asian men clashed.
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<br />As a thirteen year-old, I was very intimidated by the sight of shops barricading themselves in anticipation. There was an eerie silence, completely out of place during the day. No people, no dogs, no cars, no life at all, except that behind twitching curtains.
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<br />Of course, it was hardly the last riot of the era. There was Handsworth, Brixton … Toxteth happened half a block from my cowering grandparents.
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<br />I started to pick up how serious things were getting last Monday via Twitter. We switched on the TV and were astonished. And at around midnight, the news started to come in that people were rioting in Ealing. Ealing!
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<br />By then, it had been an hour or so since our neighbour’s car had been turned on its side and left in the road. Our neighbours called the police and were in favour of leaving the car in situ, for evidence. But Mr J is a great believer in the ‘<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/03/broken-windows/4465/">broken window theory</a>’ and has plenty of experience turning cars back the right way up again to boot. So with our other neighbour and two groups of young Asian men who appear to have been patrolling the area and who stopped to help us, the car was returned to its normal orientation.
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<br />I directed the traffic around the obstruction but, frankly, anyone who can’t see a medium-sized group of men turning a red car over in a well-lit street should probably have their driving licence suspended pending a trip to Specsavers.
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<br />The damaged car was put onto our driveway to discourage further mischief and was picked up within the hour by a tow truck arranged by next-door’s insurance – good service! The driver had come via Ealing Common and had had to run a red light to avoid becoming mired in a group of what he estimated at around two hundred fractious people who he felt would have over-run him had he slowed down and stopped.
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<br />The Ealing bit was where it all started to go a bit strange for me. While it’s not quite the Elysian suburb with free-running Ambrosia that the media sometimes implied, it does have high property values and not much social housing in the centre. The disaffected underclass would have to bus in, unlike with parts of Islington, Westminster and Stoke Newington (where I have also lived).
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<br />The next day, I saw people I recognised being interviewed on the TV. The indignant and traumatised licensee of a bar I used to frequent described how she hid in the kitchen with her sons while people looted her alcohol and till. I think the moment her bar was hit may be caught <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiOKWBOUqSk">here.</a> And <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNuAq1CBB98">here</a> is a parallel street where looters tried to break into a Bang & Olufsen shop.
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<br />Mr J and I stayed up ‘til about 3, by which time it had been reported that an electrical appliance shop in West Ealing had been targeted too. When we thought it unlikely that anybody else would turn over any more cars outside the house, we went to sleep.
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<br />The next day, the streets were heavy with police. Friendly police. But anyone under the impression that they may get another night of free licence would have been emphatically disabused.
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<br />Although an officer I spoke to said he was worried that looters may target businesses in Southall, I thought it one of the areas least likely to be surrendered. As somebody put it on Twitter: “Turkish and Asian groups have stood up to & chased off rioters. Bloody immigrants. Coming over here, defending our boroughs & communities.” <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/09/london-riots-fighting-neighbourhoods">This</a> referred to Turkish and Kurdish shopkeepers who protected their property in parts of north London. <a href="http://yfrog.com/h62ncccj">This</a> is what looters would have faced in Southall. Plus, as I’ve mentioned, we were assisted by what I’m sure were groups of young Asian men out on patrol.
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<br />It’s not that I haven’t seen riots in my lifetime, it’s not that they haven’t been very close by, it’s not that I haven’t been on demonstrations that got scary, and it’s definitely not that I don’t recognise the very serious issues that our poorest neighbours face. I’ve written about it <a href="http://jourdemayne.blogspot.com/2009/10/its-question-time.html">here</a>.
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<br />In addition to that, I think we all recognise that the young are being hit disproportionately in this recession. The uneducated young have very few unskilled jobs beckoning and the educated young can look forward to a few more certificates and a lot more debt before a similar (though probably ultimately, less precarious) fate. Basically, there aren’t very many young people who occupy the intersections in the Venn diagram of wages, affordability of debt and affordability of housing.
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<br />But while I will talk ‘til I’m blue on the face about those three things: housing expense (due to rarity); less purchasing power of salary for the young; increased starter debt to even get a stake in the game – these riots still seem different.
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<br />In the days that have followed, we have seen some of the perpetrators have their five minutes – but in a magistrates dock. Like a demented child’s song, a postman, a Para and a ballerina paraded before us to face the music. No matter how hard my deju vu kicked in the other night, there is something different about his one.
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<br />All riots at all times have involved looting. It’s too much to ask that there will be no opportunism at a time of even the most principle-driven protest. But here, the thieving and violence was higher in the mix. All the other riots I can recall had a political heart with a penumbra of criminality. To look at the targets of summer 2011, it seems the other way around.
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<br />Is it the stuperous ennui of materialism? Is it hi-tech poverty, where people are philosophical about food inflation running at <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/8352810/Food-inflation-UK-has-highest-rate-in-Europe.html">4.9%</a> but aspire to a gadget with seventy ring-tones and an app for rating your farts? Did a phalanx of Yahoos, bored in the commercial breaks between ‘Britain’s Got Talent’, ‘Big Brother’ and ‘X-Factor’ go out to look for pretty stones and come back with a laptop and enough iPhones to draw attention to themselves on eBay? It seems that many eyes were bigger than many bellies on that night, as numbers of large-screen TVs were found the next morning, abandoned at wheezing-distance from their originating shops.
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<br />So what should we make of it?
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<br />I think the first thing is to remember that summer rioting is not that uncommon, and that it takes a very small number of people to make a very large impact. I think we should also remember that it isn’t just ‘the young’: we turn a generation into an alienated, feared fifth column at our own peril. The streets were full of young volunteers on ‘<a href="http://londonist.com/2011/08/wombles-needed-how-to-help-with-the-riot-cleanup.php">womble day</a>’, cleaning up with everybody else.
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<br />Basically, I agree with those who think that there was a massive criminal component to these events, and the solution for that is normal, measured justice. No cutting off social media, no bringing in the army, no evictions for being a <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/12/london-riots-wandsworth-council-eviction">council tenant</a> whose son could probably do with a very strong intervention. Now that the police are actually apparent, they appear to be doing a perfectly good job, and it’s has been pointed out by many before me that Twitter was as much a force for good as evil.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2adWx5GOc15PR5FItsGJ0pQhePKAoJGSM3gQWHIAUV6TbM81tMmPOpCSyYJobsuSdPzUARDenprmrz1nkEeQ5Yw_cW1MOXId9r7ycPPlT4Vl8Q4AUYqgO6dAUdDdkg2frV0pkyMaCpydi/s1600/heartofdarkness2.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 215px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2adWx5GOc15PR5FItsGJ0pQhePKAoJGSM3gQWHIAUV6TbM81tMmPOpCSyYJobsuSdPzUARDenprmrz1nkEeQ5Yw_cW1MOXId9r7ycPPlT4Vl8Q4AUYqgO6dAUdDdkg2frV0pkyMaCpydi/s320/heartofdarkness2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5640763403626951394" border="0" /></a>
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<br />But simultaneously there is a very serious political heart to our present situation and it’s getting worse. The poor are getting poorer and somebody has pulled every other rung out of the ladder upwards.
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<br />Joseph Conrad’s seminal ‘Heart of Darkness’ (1899) famously inspired ‘Apocalyse Now’. Its theme was that the dark situations in the world parallel and reflect the darkness inside ourselves. Ideally then, we’ll address both the gripping anomie of those who think it’s OK to break a shop window for designer T-shirts, and those who have been disinherited of any real agency in their own lives.
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<br />Because the next time English cities riot, we may be facing both riot-shoppers and a more traditional crowd - people with deep and genuine grievances who are at the end of their tethers. They would be a formidable combination.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612563867390490775.post-89987293427260868132011-06-22T17:43:00.045+01:002011-07-25T12:49:25.442+01:00The Vampires of Rhode Island<span style="font-weight:bold;">Part 1</span><br /><br />Watch the podcast first:<br /><br /><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/XfWNHmqjOYs" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="349" width="425"></iframe><br /><br />If your browser is having difficulty with embedding, just go <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfWNHmqjOYs" target="_blank">here</a>, and come back afterwards.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Part 2</span><br /><br />So here is a series of historical events, and a title: ‘The Vampires of Rhode Island’.<br /><br />We should probably start by covering the ‘vampire’ part.<br /><br />The contemporaries and friends of Mercy Brown, Sarah Tillinghast and the other unfortunate victims never referred to them as vampires: the term has been retroactively applied (perhaps first in 1979 in a local newspaper article) and applied from 'above' (by the writer of 'The Vampire Tradition' and Geroge Stetson - see below for both). Not all supernatural draining creatures are called vampires by the communities which experience them, but we moderns like the word and apply it pretty indiscriminately.<br /><br />But it’s not irrelevant or inappropriate – although many of the contemporary locals find it annoying.<br /><br />The original vampire of folklore came from central and eastern Europe. It came to the attention of the west at the beginning of the eighteenth century, but The Austrian Empire had expanded that era. This means the multiple reports may be understood as bemused westerners observing and reporting upon a folk practice that was probably already well-established within its own locale.<br /><br />The two most oft-repeated vampire accounts are of Arnod Paole and Peter Plogojowitz, both from Serbia in vampire heartland.<br /><br />The characteristics of a vampire attack are as pretty much as follows:<br /><br />1 The ‘vampire’ is a person who has died suddenly, or violently, or of a ‘draining’ disease.<br />2 They are quite often, but not always, disliked in life<br />3 A series of epidemic deaths follow the death of the original ‘vampire’<br />4 When examined, the ‘vampire’ corpse isn’t found to be ‘suitably’ decomposed. There may be liquid blood in the vessels, viscera or around the mouth. The corpse may have moved in the grave, or ‘moaned’ when moved<br />5 The first victims are often the family of the ‘vampire’<br />6 The victims die in a pattern of what we would recognise as epidemic death<br /><br />Eighteenth century New Englanders did not use the term ‘vampire’, but a few of them apparently performed rituals which would not have been out of place in Ottoman Serbia. This means one of three things:<br /><br />1 Under certain circumstances, groups of people will spontaneously create rituals with similar characteristics: it’s a human constant<br />2 This was a common Europe-wide way of treating the dead in times of epidemic death and we only don’t know about it now because proper records weren’t kept<br />3 This bit of folklore was transmitted to New England some time around the eighteenth century, and was employed in desperate times.<br /><br />The first point hits near the mark. Unnatural Predators do preoccupy people who are in extreme difficulty. But the ‘human constant’ theme that arises is the scapegoat. Digging up the dead is a little too specific a meme. Unfortunately, we sometimes blame the living too. Bookmark this site for 'Witch-Hunts', planned for the future.<br /><br />The second thought is clearly wrong: if digging up the dead was common across Europe, why were the Austrians so repelled by it that they took to writing aghast official documents about Arnod Paole and Peter Plojogowitz? We have records of the most bizarre folk rituals, from throwing toad bones for divination, to marching lines of cattle between bonfires. <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Chronicle-Folk-Customs-Guide-Traditions/dp/0600595951/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1308664638&sr=1-2">Here is a fun book</a>, full of them.<br /><br />It is unlikely that this could have passed so completely under the radar for so long.<br /><br />The third thought is probably the most likely. The anonymous author of ‘The Vampire Tradition’ (an article in the Arnold Collection of the Providence Public Library) thought that the tradition may have been carried by a group of French Hugenots who arrived in the area of the Rhode Island Vampires at the very end of the seventeenth century (There are more details <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Food-Dead-Trail-Englands-Vampires/dp/0819571709/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1308663159&sr=8-1">here</a> p183)<br /><br />H. P. Lovecraft integrates this idea into his story, 'The Shunned House':<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">The swarthy Etienne Roulet, less apt at agriculture than reading queer books and drawing queer diagrams, was given a clerical post in the warehouse at Pardon Tillinghast’s wharf.</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">It was freely intimated by old wives that his prayers were neither uttered at the proper time nor directed toward the proper object</span> <div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><a href="http://www.classicreader.com/book/3801/2/"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Shunned House</span></a></span> <span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><br />H. P. Lovecraft (1924)</span></span><br /></div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJR7zahyphenhyphenAX5634VFV6jZX6R0ubW1zv9K2uzTWmjSH_O7uQl6Ky57W_zBcPdxLp2XVJc-QDtHxG2sPm96Ch5Y8HS3tdXBB1A6BN8PsrpEuqa9CfqdUikppM7ZUpzRih0PuXvHYbY-Wva7-b/s1600/shunnedhouse2.jpg"><img style="float:center; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 282px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJR7zahyphenhyphenAX5634VFV6jZX6R0ubW1zv9K2uzTWmjSH_O7uQl6Ky57W_zBcPdxLp2XVJc-QDtHxG2sPm96Ch5Y8HS3tdXBB1A6BN8PsrpEuqa9CfqdUikppM7ZUpzRih0PuXvHYbY-Wva7-b/s320/shunnedhouse2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5621094724985988418" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Lovecraft called his character ‘Roulet’ after a man who had been tried and convicted of werewolfism in 1598 in Caude, France.<br /><br />That would mean there was about a century between the arrival of the Hugenots in Rhode Island, and the first ‘vampire’ – Rachel Harris. It’s feasible that the folkore passed from the immigrant community to the locals in that time.<br /><br />To be sure that they were the real vectors, it would be nice to know how and why the Hugenots had taken up an eastern European tradition with such gusto, and whether there are other examples of it in Hugenot communities.<br /><br />If there's no trace of such a thing, there may be a third, as yet unidentified, community which is responsible: the whole subject could do with more research.<br /><br />So, moving on from the ‘v’ word, we are left wondering why these occurrences happened where and when they did. If the meme had been transmitted to New England by some means, why didn’t it happen everywhere and at all times?<br /><br />Let’s look at four things: the first is the history of the area, the use of its land and resources.<br /><br />This part of New England was very prosperous in the late sixteen and seventeen hundreds. The soil is rocky but fertile, and decades of hard labour by slaves, indentured men, tenant farmers and independent locals, so called ‘Swamp Yankees’, led to the stones being pulled from the earth to create the miles of dry stone walls which are still everywhere. To an English traveller, this makes the region seem quite un-American and frankly more evocative of the stony parts of England like Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Cornwall.<br /><br />The population of the area peaked in the late 1700s. But after that, the young and vigorous left for better prospects elsewhere, either in the towns and cities, or in the expanding territories to the west.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">The region referred to, where agriculture is in a depressed condition and abandoned farms are numerous</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">…</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">Farm houses deserted and ruinous are frequent, and the once productive lands, neglected and overgrown with scrubby oak, speak forcefully and mournfully of the migration of the youthful farmers from country to town.</span> <div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">‘<a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/aa.1896.9.1.02a00020/pdf">T</a></span></span><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/aa.1896.9.1.02a00020/pdf">he Animistic Vampire in New England</a>’</span></span> <span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><br />George Stetson (1896)</span></span> </div><br />So by the 1800s, parts of New England embodied the depressed and darkly haunted environment described by the American Gothic Romantics like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe and H P Lovecraft.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjM_gJvXCKgxnmB_WRH1lVWIFc6hGByayzP557t5e_DBTjJMaxW8VLyuaPaC8Fuum0NfLmmacMweAVgJmJq53sO7TVT5SfWS0y6W9YgkUb_dW6xD80iGzKYiRTsHVvMjs0M0B5gbo9GNjim/s1600/gothicwriters.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 174px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjM_gJvXCKgxnmB_WRH1lVWIFc6hGByayzP557t5e_DBTjJMaxW8VLyuaPaC8Fuum0NfLmmacMweAVgJmJq53sO7TVT5SfWS0y6W9YgkUb_dW6xD80iGzKYiRTsHVvMjs0M0B5gbo9GNjim/s320/gothicwriters.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5621090392239286130" border="0" /></a></span><br />Lovecraft even referred directly to Mercy Brown in one of his stories:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">As lately as 1892, an</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> Exeter Community exhumed a dead body and ceremoniously burnt its heart in order to prevent certain alleged visitations injurious to the public health and peace</span> <div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://www.classicreader.com/book/3801/2/">The Shunned House</a></span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">H. P. Lovecraft (1924)</span></span><br /></div><br />Secondly, there is the specific nature of religiosity in the area. This isn’t Puritan heartland – that’s further north. Rhode Island was characterised by a more frontier, independent religious quality, self-authoring and authorising. Among the sectarians and free-thinkers, the Quakers and the Shakers, there was a spiritual life in which folk-practice coexisted with recognisable, conventional religion.<br /><br />The independent Rhode Islanders felt free to turn to ancient beliefs, not regarding them as incompatible with either science or religion.<br /><br />This independent form of living is apparent in the numerous family burial plots, such as that of the Tillinghasts, rather than central town graveyards. That may also mean that there were a great many more exhumations than we know about, as they could have been done free from outside scrutiny.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">By some mysterious survival, occult transmission, or remarkable atavism, this region, including within its radius the towns of Exeter, Foster, Kingstown, East Greenwich, and others, with their scattered hamlets and more pretentious villages, is distinguished by the prevalence of this remarkable superstition</span> <div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">‘</span><a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/aa.1896.9.1.02a00020/pdf">The Animistic Vampire in New England</a><span style="font-style: italic;">’</span></span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">George Stetson (1896)</span></span><br /></div><br />T<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjk9XtokSr-tDnq0uuAp-RhNaEC6AIh9dPXB7-JOCEYijOtBuPs3mmqHfTYelp2V2OToGhyhjIx2SvDtay66mVfoyYrUvVku5UHx0NbwjvB1k99qjuS6-dtXiJWC8y6UFOa2p3dC2qx1Q5u/s1600/robertkoch.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 157px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjk9XtokSr-tDnq0uuAp-RhNaEC6AIh9dPXB7-JOCEYijOtBuPs3mmqHfTYelp2V2OToGhyhjIx2SvDtay66mVfoyYrUvVku5UHx0NbwjvB1k99qjuS6-dtXiJWC8y6UFOa2p3dC2qx1Q5u/s320/robertkoch.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5621090522785767394" border="0" /></a>hirdly, there’s the issue of epidemic death, specifically death from tuberculosis.<br /><br />The tuberculosis bacillus was discovered by <a href="http://nobelprize.org/educational/medicine/tuberculosis/readmore.html">Robert Koch</a> in 1882. It was, and is, a disease that associated with poverty, and the poor, cramped conditions of industrialisation.<br /><br />There were no significant medical interventions ‘til the widespread use antibiotics in the 1940s, but by then the disease had already started to decline through improving social circumstances and routine pasteurising of milk, one method of transmission. Even now, it’s not a simple disease to cure or eliminate.<br /><br />Because of the long, slow draining death process, consumption appears as a central theme with many folkloric Unnatural Predators, including fairies and the vampires of Eastern and central Europe.<br /><br />Just like many other places at this time, New England was becoming industrial and encountering new public health problems such as TB. Even those who lived rural lives were probably living at close quarters with their family and livestock. They may also have been relatively poor and malnourished.<br /><br />The fourth issue here is that the bodies had not decayed as one would have thought. They appeared to show signs of ‘life-in-afterlife’. However, knowledge about the massive variability of post-mortem changes is a modern luxury. You and I can Google the effects of temperature, soil pH and micro-organisms upon decomposition. But nineteenth century people buried their dead quickly for the very good reason that they were a source of contagion.<br /><br />As odd as it seems, liquid blood at the mouth and in the viscera are not as exceptional in corpses as you might think. The relationship between the folkore of the undead and post-mortem processes are covered in this excellent book by <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Vampires-Burial-Death-Folklore-Reality/dp/0300048599">Paul Barber</a>. In the particular case of Mercy Brown, as we have seen, she could even have been stored semi-frozen in a crypt.<br /><br />So, the eighteenth century inhabitants of Rhode Island witnessed an epidemic of a disease against which they were powerless, a disease that passed freely among family members. Death is contagious.<br /><br />Without modern knowledge about decomposition, specific signs like liquid blood in the heart ‘living blood’ as it was called, were taken as an indication that the loved one hadn’t quite passed over to the other side. They remained in shadowy form, draining the life from those who remained.<br /><br />Ingesting the blood or body of powerful enemy to placate it is an ancient and reasonably common ritual. Charlemagne even took the trouble to make it illegal, as it was a fairly common measure taken against witches. It’s an attempt at communion. Even established religions perform the same ritual today.<br /><br />So somehow, maybe via French Hugenots, a meme passed from one community to another.<br /><br />People aren’t daft, but they do get desperate. I think it would be unfair to think of the participants of these rituals as gullible yokels. George Brown was apparently unconvinced that the exhumations would work, but was persuaded to try it by neighbours. See p21 <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Food-Dead-Trail-Englands-Vampires/dp/0819571709/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1308663159&sr=8-1">here</a>. He can’t have been the only New Englander to reluctantly submit to the last resort.<br /><br />Rest in Peace, Mercy Brown.<br /><br /><blockquote>She bloom'd, though the shroud was around her,<br />locks o'er her cold bosom wave,<br />As if the stern monarch has crown'd her,<br />The Fair speechless queen of the grave,<br />But what lends the grave such lusture?<br />O'er her cheeks what such beauty shed?<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">His</span> life blood, who bent there, had nurs'd her,<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">The living was food for the dead!</span></blockquote><div style="text-align: right; font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size:85%;">Old Colony Memorial and Plymouth County (Massachusetts) Advertiser<br />May 4th 1822<br /></span></div><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">Massive 'thank-you's to:<br /><br />Karl Derrick. Makeup effects supervisor, successful author and screenwriter. Also cameraman and enthusiastic supporter of Jourdemayne.<br /><br />Arnie Koch is an awesome New York based techie-bod, logistics guy & pizza homing device. This would have been very hard without him.<br /><br />John Rael is an LA based actor, director and skeptic. Have a look at some of his <a href="http://skepticallypwnd.com/">hilarious podcasts</a>.<br /><br />'Reversion' by Stone Idols is an ambient album by Rob Jenkins, Martin Smith & Neil Cowley. It’s my very favourite music to write to. Please support the music by downloading it <a href="http://www.blogger.com/www.stoneidols.co.uk/stone-idols/index.html">here</a>.<br /><br />Further reading:<br /><br />For more background on the Rhode Island Vampires, I recommend <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Food-Dead-Trail-Englands-Vampires/dp/0819571709/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1309610370&sr=8-1">this</a> by folklorist Michael Bell.<br /><br />I LOVE <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Albions-Seed-British-Folkways-Cultural/dp/0195069056/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1309610473&sr=1-1">this book</a> about the differerent waves of immigration onto north America, and the cultures that accompanied them.<br /><br />A facsimilie of George Stetson's classic essay from The American Anthropologist is available on the 'net <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/aa.1896.9.1.02a00020/abstract">here</a>.<br /><br />It's always worth reading Montague Summers for the purple prose and utterly confabulated extras. He covers the Rhode Island vampires in <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Vampire-His-Kith-Kin-ebook/dp/B001C0WHN0/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1309610565&sr=1-4">this book</a>.<br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612563867390490775.post-82550449912330158052011-05-28T17:00:00.016+01:002011-05-29T17:31:01.275+01:00Sanity & Violence, or, What Happens in the Courts When Gods Outsource Smiting?Two news stories have caught my attention this week. In one, four men were jailed for an attack on Tower Hamlets religious studies teacher Gary Smith. There are news reports <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8538804/Men-who-beat-up-RE-teacher-were-terrorist-suspects.html">here</a> and <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1391166/Four-Muslims-battered-man-teaching-RE-girls-jailed-danger-extreme-religious-beliefs.html">here</a>. And a statement on The Met’s website <a href="http://content.met.police.uk/News/Five-jailed-for-teacher-attack/1260268985587/1257246741786">here</a>.<br /><br />It was horrific. Mr Smith’s face was deliberately slashed from his mouth corner to his ear. He suffered leg wounds, a fractured skull, bleeding on the brain, a shattered jaw and was unconscious for two days.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA2TH5MNfAZihMOfcKLnODvmR8TGTutUUyG4NiZuiaqh32YTRc-kPjKwufySqQNfOBgleHTKIoTKZYzvOUY-q3UeTklLygpXgQtqkWuF_ZtmTGC27UmX8lYDnLe7_nzSUQ56UR0AeP3GKI/s1600/TH4.jpg"><img style="float: left; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 229px; height: 287px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA2TH5MNfAZihMOfcKLnODvmR8TGTutUUyG4NiZuiaqh32YTRc-kPjKwufySqQNfOBgleHTKIoTKZYzvOUY-q3UeTklLygpXgQtqkWuF_ZtmTGC27UmX8lYDnLe7_nzSUQ56UR0AeP3GKI/s320/TH4.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5612064363809658706" border="0" /></a>It must be harder than I realise to get an attempted murder charge to stick. Akmol Hussein, 27, Sheikh Rashid, 27, Azad Hussain, 26, and Simon Alam, 19 were sentenced for causing grievous bodily harm with intent.<br /><br />The attack was clearly premeditated and at least one of the assailants had mentioned death as an objective:<br /><br />On the premeditation: the group succeeded on their third attempt. Superintendent Colin Morgan of Scotland Yard said:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">"This was an unprovoked and premeditated attack by a group of men who were carrying weapons. Mr Smith was struck without warning, and was subjected to an appalling level of violence with no opportunity to defend himself.”</span><br /><br />And just before the attack Azad Hussein said:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">“Does everyone remember the drill? One time, bang, bang, bang, bang”</span><br /><br />On the objective of death: Akmol Hussein had been recorded saying:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">“This is the dog we want to hit, to strike, to kill.”</span><br /><br />Fortunately, Hussein’s car had been bugged in an investigation into a suspected terrorist network. Unfortunately, the police didn’t get any information prior to the assault.<br /><br />Gary Smith had invoked the gang’s ire by teaching Islam, along with other major world religions, in national curriculum lessons.<br /><br />Akmol Hussain had said:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">"…he's mocking Islam and he's putting doubts in people's minds…How can somebody take a job to teach Islam when they're not even a Muslim themselves?"</span><br /><br />And after the assault he had said:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">"Praise to Allah. At that time nobody was there...Bruv, I don’t care about prison as long as I’m doing it for the deen [religion] of Allah...you know what, he's not going to get up"</span><br /><br />At Snaresbrook Crown Court, Judge Hand said:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">“You believed there was a higher authority to which you were responsible and that authority dictated you must attack Mr Smith"</span><br /><br />I was equally fascinated by the case of Lorraine Mbulawa, who had stabbed her mother four times in the arm and once in the face at their home in May 2009. There'a an account <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/8532833/Mercy-for-witchcraft-girl-told-to-stab-mother.html">here</a>.<br /><br />Mbulawa had had a dream:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">"… that seemed a bit real. It was my grandma and dad's youngest sister, Charlotte. Like they were right at the foot of my bed … my grandmother said my mother was responsible for the death of my father and I had to do the honourable thing to my father by killing my m</span><span style="font-style: italic;">other"</span><br /><br />She had put on some dark clothes, gloves and a makeshift balaclava, and gone into her mother’s room with the intention of killing her.<br /><br />Mbulawa was cleared of attempted murder but found guilty of unlawful wounding at Leicester Crown Court in February as reported by the <a href="http://www.thisisleicestershire.co.uk/news/Trance-teen-cleared-mother-murder-bid/article-3188038-detail/article.html">local paper</a> on February 5th.<br /><br />She and her family are Christian and from Zimbabwe, where belief in witchcraft is pretty well endemic. In sentencing last week, Mr Justice Keith reiterated what had emerged in the trial, that Mbulawa and her family believed in the power of the occult, in spirit possession and that she was not responsible for what she had done. He said that her mother:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">"… believed spirits can enter the body and make you do things that otherwise you would not have done”</span><br /><br />Despite her mother saying that Mbulawa was not “her real self” while conducting the attack, the jury made their opinion known by rejecting the option of finding her not guilty by reason of insanity – an option they did have. As Mr Justice Keith pointed out:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">"In convicting Lorraine of unlawful wounding the jury must be treated as having rejected her claim of being in a dissociative state. The jury treated Lorraine as if she knew what she was doing at the time of the attack"</span><br /><br />In addition, she had been assessed by a psychiatrist who had found her to be sound.<br /><br />The sentences handed down in these two cases are markedly differerent. Of Gary Smith’s attackers, three will serve at least five years and maybe more; the fourth will serve a minimum of four years, maybe more. The details are at the bottom of the page <a href="http://content.met.police.uk/News/Five-jailed-for-teacher-attack/1260268985587/1257246741786">here</a>.<br /><br />Lorraine Mbulawa has presumably been on some sort of remand (I don’t know if it was custodial) since May 2009, as her contact with her mother has been supervised and she is only now allowed to return to the family home to live. She has been given a 12 month custodial sentence suspended for 18 months. She must also do 120 hours of unpaid work and attend supervision to help her understand her beliefs so she could deal with any supernaturally inspired violent urges in the future.<br /><br />These contrasting sentences may be attributable to several factors.<br /><br />For one, the victim impact statements each both case will have been very differerent. Gary Smith’s injuries were more severe and he may never completely recover. He is unlikely to be sympathetic to his assailants’ world-view or motivation. Sibusisiwe Mbulawa, by comparison, had lesser injuries and feels she understands her daughter’s behaviour completely.<br /><br />Another is the likelihood of perpetrating again in the future: Gary Smith’s assailants were united by a life-principle that would be likely to lead to further violence and which will be highly difficult to erase. The judge clearly feels that Lorraine Mbulawa, by contrast, can be taught to deal with her worldview in a way that will reduce her chances of perpetrating in the future.<br /><br />Remorse will have been another factor. It’s hard to see how the Tower Hamlets four could have plausibly pleaded moral anguish after their celebratory conversation was recorded. Mbulawa, on the other hand, told police of her intention to kill herself after she had killed her mother.<br /><br />Culpability may have been yet another issue. Despite the jury’s rejection of the notion that Mbulawa may have been insane at the time of the attack, Mr Justice Keith said:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">"Lorraine believes she was doing what the spirits told her to do which reduced her culpability significantly …”</span><br /><br />whilst also still laying the responsibility at her feet:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">“… since she knew what she was doing she should have fought against what she was told to do"</span><br /><br />Acting under duress – compulsion from outside – is a defence in law. But the law restricts itself to agents such as blackmailers, people who have kidnapped your granny and so forth. Spirits don’t count, and that’s fine by me.<br /><br />And I detect yet another consideration, from left of field. Mbulawa is simply more attractive, in every respect. Mr Justice Keith said:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1SQmMeCp_0Zvjphwd8YkWfXBWK_2NSGe_L0lXRi4lAh-P_fEWX5bgHmBOkhwZXWbuSZb2OvPMmUExvoIeZ5eqx3mQbEgyIqE8_-KgHzh5x4fcEEZ2RLdj5p2WeFbt40agnjXSHiIwk8o0/s1600/LM.jpg"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; cursor: pointer; width: 174px; height: 257px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1SQmMeCp_0Zvjphwd8YkWfXBWK_2NSGe_L0lXRi4lAh-P_fEWX5bgHmBOkhwZXWbuSZb2OvPMmUExvoIeZ5eqx3mQbEgyIqE8_-KgHzh5x4fcEEZ2RLdj5p2WeFbt40agnjXSHiIwk8o0/s320/LM.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5612064536596147874" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;">"I believe she's a young woman with much going for her. She struck me as being unusually confident and assured, also not unintelligent with a degree of charm and poise”</span><br /><br />She is young, pretty, was an A-level student and, unlike the Tower Hamlets four is not the embodiment of a current much-feared archetype, the regressive jihadist.<br /><br />Yet for all their differences, these two crimes have one very significant theme at their hearts: people who were judged by the courts to be mentally competent were motivated to potentially murderous acts under the influence of utterly unprovable supernatural worldviews.<br /><br />I spent an interesting afternoon once with a senior police officer who deals with occult-related killings. His interest in the precise nature of beliefs was limited: his focus was on whether or not an actual crime had been committed. For that, I think he deserved great professional credit: like Elizabeth I, he had: “no desire to make windows into men's souls”.<br /><br />But clearly, thought processes do matter – and to the courts too. Psychological evaluations that assess culpability and fitness to stand trials <span style="font-style: italic;">must</span> make windows into men's souls. To a certain extent, we can determine culpability and the likelihood of re-offending using those windows.<br /><br />We choose the parameters of our rationality, and those parameters move from time to time. If we commit a crime under a popular delusion, we are more likely to be judged sane. With a social animal like us, it’s actually quite reasonable: the sharing of a doctrine, a cognitive concensus, is certainly a measure of our integration with our community, if not our grasp of objective physics. A person motivated to murder for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ereshkigal">Ereshkigal</a> would be ancient Iraq’s religious fanatic, today’s whackjob.<br /><br />Perhaps this is another area where Mbulawa gets off as being mad rather than bad in the UK. We’re more familiar with jihadism, but the witchcraft paradigm has been under the radar ‘til recently.<br /><br />James House, for the prosecution, had noted that:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">"Her mother has expressed a belief in the power of spirits common in the culture of Zimbabwe … had it happened there, her daughter would have been treated by a medicine man and would have been exorcised"</span><br /><br />Gilbert Nyambabvu in ‘New Zimbabwe’ <a href="http://www.newzimbabwe.com/news-4421-Lorraine%20Mbulawa%20the%20law%20and%20spirits/news.aspx">concurred</a>:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">“… Lorraine’s story would have befuddled few, if any, Zimbabweans”</span><br /><br />So - here are a handful of modern perpetrators who have acted under the influence of bizarre, unprovable tenets. If you look to history, they’re not short of company: witch-hunters, inquisitors and crusaders abound. Few of them were, by the standards of the own times, mad.<br /><br />It would be wrong, and in any case impossible, to legislate for anti-social supernatural beliefs. But given the potential for harm, we can reasonably stop these beliefs being monetised. The prospect of revenue creates a motivation for promotion. I suggested that payment for deliverance from witchcraft should be illegal <a href="http://jourdemayne.blogspot.com/2010/08/englands-child-witches.html">here</a>.<br /><br />And the law already has provision for actual violence, inspired by a variety of motives, rational and irrational. Meanwhile, we are left with cases that leave us horrified ... and bemused.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612563867390490775.post-70942441777555326242011-05-16T09:23:00.010+01:002011-05-16T09:54:58.218+01:00Thoughts & TheologyOn May 13th, Oxford University website posted a <a href="http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/news_stories/2011/110513.html">press-release</a> entitled “Humans 'predisposed' to believe in gods and the afterlife” and summarised as:<br /><br />“A three-year international research project, directed by two academics at the University of Oxford, finds that humans have natural tendencies to believe in gods and an afterlife.”<br /><br />Newspapers had already covered the study’s progress. You can see “Children are born believers in God” from The Telegraph’s religion section <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/3512686/Children-are-born-believers-in-God-academic-claims.html">here</a> and “Why do we believe in God? £2m study prays for answer” from The Times <a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article3393198.ece">here</a>.<br /><br />‘The Cognition, Religion and Theology Project’ was supported by a 1.9mGBP grant from the Templeton Foundation and run by Psychologist Dr Justin Barrett and philosopher Professor Roger Trigg who “directed an international body of researchers conducting studies in 20 different countries that represented both traditionally religious and atheist societies.”<br /><br />Dr Barrett had been quoted as saying that they were: “… interested in exploring exactly in what sense belief in God is natural”.<br /><br />And it would be strange, I suppose, if such a thing as belief in the supernatural was not natural, given how widespread it is.<br /><br />It’s a thought many have pondered: why do we as a species come up with these ideas, again and again. The father of psychology William James wrote about a quality he called ‘religious genius’.<br /><br />He noted that religious instigators: “have often shown symptoms of nervous instablility … exhalted emotional sensibility .. and presented all sorts of peculiarities which are ordinarily classed as pathological”<br /><br />For James those others who follow on from these primary agents have what he called a ‘second-hand religious life’. He seems to have regarded it as a form of intellectual contagion from a concentrated source.<br /><br />However, the prevailing theories about religiosity have changed since James’ day. Charismatic individuals certainly have shaped some of the specifics of our notions about the supernatural, but a spontaneous sense of it seems to be more evenly distributed among the population than he thought.<br /><br />There are a couple of ideas about how we’ve become a supernatural-seeking species.<br /><br />The first is that belief in a transcendent power confers an advantage upon a group. This would make religiosity a primary quality for survival by, for example, enhancing commitment to the group. One of the most notable poularisers of this theory was the father of sociobiology E O Wilson who said: “Men would rather believe than know”.<br /><br />But there are several detractors to this theory, people who don’t believe that group selection is anywhere near as important a factor in survival as has been claimed. Which would leave the ‘God as an Adaptive Trait’ theory looking a bit wan.<br /><br />The second – and probably more currently popular - way of looking at the issue is to see superstition and religion as byproducts of evolution.<br /><br />Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and population geneticist Richard Lewontin co-opted the architectural term 'spandrel' to define something which didn’t originate by the direct action of natural selection but which later became usefully employed for a different function.<br /><br />So is god somehow a side-effect of our cognitive machinery, an accompaniment to evolution?<br /><br />David Hume <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dialogues-Concerning-Natural-Religion-Classics/dp/0140445366/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1305534725&sr=8-5">wrote</a> that: “We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice and goodwill to everything, that hurts or pleases us”.<br /><br />Taking indistinct stimuli from the environment and making them into something recognisable is a phenonmenon know as pareidolia; it’s how the Virgin Mary gets onto so many pieces of toast. Either that, or she’s got a really good agent.<br /><br />Hume was pointing out what many others have noticed before and since – we see things that aren’t there and then often ascribe personalities and intentions to them.<br /><br />Dr Barrett’s term for this kind of thing is a hyperactive (or hypersensitive) agency detection device” a HADD.<br /><br />Philosopher Daniel Dennett <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dialogues-Concerning-Natural-Religion-Classics/dp/0140445366/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1305534725&sr=8-5">puts it</a> that we have an:<br /><br />‘Intentional stance’ and that means identifying “agents with limited beliefs about the world, specific desires, and enough common sense to do the rational thing given those beliefs and desires”<br /><br />So, we can realise there are other things in the universe and that they have intentions that may differ from ours. To read someone else’s mind, you need a thing called theory of mind.<br /><br />This term was created by David Premack and Guy Woodruff who defined it as:<br /><br />“... the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc.—to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires and intentions that are different from one's own”<br /><br />You can imagine how useful this is: it helps us to predict what others are going to do and want. It helps us to understand that they have a theory of mind about us in turn.<br /><br />The issue with these agent-detection and prediction abilities is that they’re very hard to turn off. A false positive is probably not often dangerous – whoever got hurt for mistaking tree bark for a face? But a false negative is dangerous – how often do you get to ignore a hungry tiger?<br /><br />Another way in which we get to see a world of our own making is to have a preference for purpose-based explanations. Psychologist Dr. Deborah Keleman of the Child Cognition Lab at Boston University is the expert here. Her work on children showed they had preferences for what she called teleo-functional explanations.<br /><br />Why is polar bear fur white? So the bear can blend in with the snow (rather than because it lacks pigment).<br /><br />What’s more, she found that children displayed what she called promiscuous teleology – that is applying to purpose-based explanations to both living and natural-but-inanimate things alike.<br /><br />So do we naturally grow out of this kind of reasoning, or do the physics lessons at school have an effect after all?<br /><br />Keleman’s work on uneducated adults among the Romanian Roma showed that giving up purpose-based explanations as we grow, is a cultural phenonomenon, not a natural event. Left to our own devices, we’d probably all be adult animists, searching for motivations of seen and unseen agents in our environments.<br /><br />I’ve noticed this a great deal in my study of the folklore of the macabre. People really aren’t stupid. They know that events have proximal causes. It’s the search for meaning which helps to create the agent.<br /><br />The anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard spent a great deal of time with a central African tribe, the Azande. One day, a house collapsed on someone; villagers knew that termites had undermined house but that wasn’t the question. Why had it happened when that particular person was sitting there?<br /><br />They weren’t answering the question "how?". They were answering the question "why?". I've covered the kind of encumberances these two very different questions have <a href="http://jourdemayne.blogspot.com/2010/09/you-only-get-answers-to-questions-you.html">here</a>.<br /><br />It reminds me of medieval Europeans who felt leprosy to be a disease associated with moral degeneracy. You could probably have proved the existence of disease-causing micro-organisms to our ancestors, but it may not have stopped them asking why. Why now? Why him? Why here?<br /><br />This is hardly even a start on the factors which predispose us to intuit the supernatural. If you’re interested in more you could do a lot worse than buy Bruce Hood’s ‘<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Supersense-Superstition-Religion-Science-Belief/dp/1849010307/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1305534887&sr=1-1">Supersense</a>’.<br /><br />So if a sense of the supernatural is a side-effect of our biology, will ghosts and gods, phantoms and fairies always be with us?<br /><br />Dr Barrett, a Christian himself, was quoted as saying that "If we threw a handful on an island and they raised themselves I think they would believe in God."<br /><br />But I think this is going far too far. For one thing, that term 'god' rather than 'gods' – monotheism is the exception rather than the rule in religion. And perhaps our island-bound handful would have day to day interactions with ancestors rather than gods, in the manner of traditional African religion.<br /><br />I think it would be fairer to say that they would likely end up with a supernatural model of their environment, as well as a natural one.<br /><br />As anthropologist Pascal Boyer <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Religion-Explained-Instincts-Fashion-Ancestors/dp/0099282763/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1305534940&sr=1-1">wrote</a>:<br />“Having a normal brain does not imply that you have religion. All it implies is that you can acquire it, which is very different”Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612563867390490775.post-80015260993892314302011-03-21T18:30:00.018+00:002011-03-28T13:14:54.882+01:00Mrs. GodThis weekend '<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1367981/Atheist-Dr-Francesca-Stavrakopoulout-BBC-face-religion.html">The Daily Mail</a>' ran a story which was mined from a ‘Radio Times’ article promoting ‘<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00zsbwv">The Bible’s Buried Secrets</a>’, which is being aired on Tuesday nights on a primetime BBC2 slot.<br /><br />The article warns us that there are a couple of controversial conclusions about to be broadcast. They include that Eve was not the first woman, and that the ancient Hebrew God had a wife.<br /><br />“I spent several years specialising in the cultural and social contexts of the Bible and I discovered that Yahweh, the God we have come to know, had to see off a number of competitors to achieve his position as the one and only god of the ancient Israelites” writer/presenter Dr Francesca Stavrakopoulou was quoted as saying.<br /><br />For purposes of even-handedness and apoplexy, Anne Widdecombe was consulted for her comments. Clearly influenced by the "My dad's bigger than your dad" school of dialectic, she said:<br /><br />"I would guess that most other theologians will demolish her theory in three seconds flat."<br /><br />For a well-educated woman, she can be a terrible twerp. That is to say, someone ought to tell Miss Widdecombe not to hold her breath for more than three seconds, nor Dr Stavrakopoulou to get too excited about her Services-to-Originality. These ideas are quite old-hat and very well supported.<br /><br />One of the keys to understanding historical Judaism is to remember that it -unlike its fellow middle-Eastern monotheistic monoliths, Christianity and Islam – was not created, condensed and made canon within a short period of time.<br /><br />In their respective histories, Christianity and Islam have provided multiple instances of coercive consensus: think of the myriad movements where fellow believers have been outcast as apostates and heretics for espousing a fractionally factional view.<br /><br />The creation of Judaism was more gradual, the steering of polytheistic peoples through revelation of many prophets who included Noah, Abraham, Isaac and Moses. As Raphael Patai wrote:<br /><br />“In view of the general, human, psychologically determined predisposition to believe in and worship goddesses, it would be strange if the Hebrew-Jewish religion, which flourished for centuries in a region of intensive goddess cults, had remained immune to them”<br /><div style="text-align: right;"><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hebrew-Goddess-Jewish-Folklore-Anthropology/dp/0814322719/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1300676862&sr=8-1">p 25</a><br /></div><br />(Incidentally, if you think blogging doesn’t cause suffering, just try to write ‘Patai’ without your spell-checker jumping in to change it to ‘Patio’. Three times.)<br /><br />Eve first:<br />The text of Genesis 1:27 "male and female he created them", indicated to the early rabbis that both genders were created simultaneously. But since Eve was generated from Adam's rib later on (Genesis 2:22), it seemed that Adam must have had another wife before her. Some even identified her as the Mesopotamian-derived Lilith, who was probably an aspect of the goddess Innana.<br /><br />This contradiction between paragraphs that rub shoulders with each other in the Old Testament is not unusual. Genesis shows clear signs of being assembled from two or three versions - some say more - to the point where respectable Biblical scholars have identified clear voices and given them names. ‘J’ is the ‘Yahwist’ voice (so called because it refers to God as ‘Yahweh’), concentrates on ancestral narratives and divine promise of land. ‘P’ is the ‘Priestly’ voice which stresses ritual and observance. ‘E’ is the ‘Elohist’ which refers to God as ‘Elohim’ and is concerned with dreams and prophecy.<br /><br />There’s a good round up of the various theories in <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Oxford-Companion-Bible-Companions/dp/0195046455/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1300677028&sr=8-4">here</a>. From what I can gather, there isn’t much debate about whether different people contributed to the books, but whether they were edited together in a ‘block’ or ‘interweaving’ fashion.<br /><br />This ‘multiple and sometimes contradictory contributors’ factor is one of the most lucid illustrations of why the Bible should not be used as the precise technical manual that it clearly isn’t.<br /><br />And God’s Wife?<br /><br />Robert Graves touches lightly on the feminine inherent in the Biblical god <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/White-Goddess-Historical-Grammar-Poetic/dp/0571174256/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1300677412&sr=1-1">here</a> but if you’re really interested, you’re just going to have to spring for <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hebrew-Goddess-Jewish-Folklore-Anthropology/dp/0814322719/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1300676862&sr=8-1">this</a>.<br /><br />Patai (not Patio) considers the Canaanite origins of the female in Hebrew mythology with Asherah and Anath, whom he considers to have influenced the development of the Hebrew ‘Shekhina’ – the palpable manifestation of God’s presence on earth. He then goes on to investigate the ‘Matronit’, a Kabbalistic entity.<br /><br />These female numinous persons are not explicitly mentioned in the Pentateuch/Torah - the first five books of the Old Testament (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy). But that’s not too surprising as the documents, although derived from earlier works, were probably assembled into their modern format at the relatively late date of the end of the fifth century BCE. By this time, if there were any tweaks, they were done in a more Patriarchal environment.<br /><br />For Patai, the female re-emerges in the Jewish mystical movements of The Kabbala in the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries (not the recent self-help movement which claims inspiration from it). It comes from the inherent grammar in the Torah (Hebrew words have a gender) and the presence of these themes in the ambient culture. It’s not the only time that an earlier theme is carried under the radar to re-surface later. As he writes:<br /><br />“The best known, though not always readily acknowledged, example of this type of transformation is the re-emerence of the ancient Near Eastern mythological feature of divine triads … in the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity”<br /><br />Despite the strong wording in the quote from earlier in this blogpost, it would probably be unfair to claim that Dr Stavrakopoulou thinks she’s the first on this territory. It would be a miracle if an academic of her <a href="http://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/theology/staff/stavrakopoulou/">stature</a> wasn’t aware of all the work which has gone before. The DM article is from a Radio Times article, and bears a lot of ‘PR placement’ marks. If I wanted high viewing figures I’d have done exactly the same thing, and a press release is not as considered a document as an academic paper.<br /><br />In other words, she’s probably more humble than the PR person at the BBC is on her behalf.<br /><br />Besides which, it’s obvious that God must have a wife. Who else would wash his pants?<br /><br /><br />PS Just watched this on the BBC iPlayer. Excellent. Really looking forward to the others. Dr Stavrakopoulou does a great job of contextualising the Biblical myths in their historical reality.<span style="text-decoration: underline;"><br /><br /></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkob6YG5e4SGsmQApFnQmI8Gp0sAN0zZBdgZLh5AXqKR4lvA5osZHfHu_7Az3KP2DbxnNUxOjfYXgAGfnX-8cNDQpHZuZm0yuisRHVAXc-reg8kcVmKT6CbdRlj7RU8VOIdKvT_iW723QA/s1600/jourdemayneb%2526w.jpg"></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612563867390490775.post-61927450487167300812011-02-19T13:20:00.007+00:002011-02-19T16:40:40.947+00:00Too Many Ghosts Spoil the Broth?I was one of the lucky people who spent the 5th and 6th of this month at <a href="http://www.qedcon.org/">QED</a>, Manchester. Apart from a minor fit of apoplexy trying to decode Manchester’s city centre roads to enter the car park and later being soaked by a bus (I'm serious - I looked like one of those car wash mops) I loved the whole weekend.<br /><br />It’s been interesting to read people’s online musings on the event. I think we all agree we’d like them to organise it again next year.<br /><br />But there’s another strand. How many ghosts are too many?<br /><br /><a href="http://networkedblogs.com/egIiO">Andy Russell</a> wondered if it was “<span style="font-style: italic;">A little bit too ghosty …</span>”<br /><br />“<span style="font-style: italic;">Of the 12 1 hour sessions in the main hall, 2 were about ghosts (maybe 2.25 if you count the bits in Bruce Hood’s talk). I guess ghosts are quite fun and there are some serious issues related to them (e.g. exploitation of vulnerable people) but it felt like a bit too much. Surely there are other issues we should be thinking about?</span>”<br /><br />And Tom Williamson <a href="http://www.skepticcanary.com/2011/02/09/reflections-on-qedcon/">wrote</a>:<br /><br />“<span style="font-style: italic;">I’ve never got the skeptical ghost hunting thing (ghosts don’t exist, move on)</span>”<br /><br />Hayley Stevens <a href="http://ratherfriendlyskeptic.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/the-ghostly-token/">replied</a> that:<br /><br />“<span style="font-style: italic;">Skepticism in ghost belief and ghost research is as relevant as any of ‘type’ of skepticism out there, not to mention the fact that skepticism in general DOES think about other issues way more than ghosts. Alt med for example, gets HUGE coverage, as does creationism, anti-vaccination, the list is endless…</span>”<br /><br />There have been <a href="http://www.skepticcanary.com/2011/02/18/ghosts-and-the-scope-of-skepticism/">apologies all-round</a> which is a great credit to the manners and mutual respect of the relevant parties. It seemed to me that the ghost complaints reflected an enthusiasm for other areas of scepticism rather than just a judgement upon us supernatural-obsessed types.<br /><br />But it’s a fair point and one that does deserve a reply. Why do we continue to expend so much time and energy on the supernatural when the area has been so well studied and debunked?<br /><br />Some skeptics like ghost debunking; some like alt-med debuking; some prefer creationism debunking. I suspect that these differences arise from individual personality traits, quirks and preferences. And that’s OK. Those of us who rationally channel our inner-Goth would appreciate a few really high points in a weekend of other sceptical subjects.<br /><br />But it also strikes me that as much as ghosts and other supernatural phenomena have been debunked, so have many alt-med practices and it doesn’t stop people spending money on them.<br /><br />Alt-med is a hydra, and its endurance is probably due to the fact that it satisfies people in a certain way. They get something for their money, otherwise they wouldn’t spend it. Buying a feeling is still a commercial transaction.<br /><br />In fact, I wonder whether current alt-med thrives due to the personality traits of the middle-classes: self-assertion – a certain Protestant self-reliance and independence; a mistrust of authority as being ‘better’ than oneself; a desire for devolvement of power to the patients themselves. These are personality traits which would have gotten you a clip ‘round the ear in a medieval village, but job promotion in a modern commercial environment.<br /><br />Unfortuately, advanced technology and theory takes the cooperation and resources of many. The results are suitably potent. But that may be unsatisfying to the modern human need to remain, even a little, in control of your own fate. The fact is, you can’t cure cancer by yourself any more than you can get to the moon by yourself.<br /><br />In this case, our human personality and social traits are worth studying because they apply across the board. Studies of alt-med must eventually come to analyses of why many so people in a modern context keep returning to it.<br /><br />It’s been useful process for mainstream medicine too, which is now practiced in a far more sensitive, more participatory and less patriarchal way than before.<br /><br />Do you remember when <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ez3BFGXR02A">Blackadder went to the quack</a>?<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3nEPVRAxIaXVLkMaPW8tnzx4dmLyihRnUZqcncA1cgesL3sPKf5Nhu3KR32O8r_Pd3xZcqUItvPprl6dq56bT3AExP8u2M2olV_f5QbDoiqZkjym-vnZmGP-LNTsJFeczZmaCFxrWUON5/s1600/ba3.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 314px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3nEPVRAxIaXVLkMaPW8tnzx4dmLyihRnUZqcncA1cgesL3sPKf5Nhu3KR32O8r_Pd3xZcqUItvPprl6dq56bT3AExP8u2M2olV_f5QbDoiqZkjym-vnZmGP-LNTsJFeczZmaCFxrWUON5/s320/ba3.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5575390690767122402" border="0" /></a><br />Because he went in the sixteenth century, he was prescribed leeches. The famous Dr. Hoffmann of Stuttgart was the foremost expert of the age (and also, co-incidentally, the largest producer of leeches in Europe).<br /><br />Blackadder could have been prescribed magnet therapy in the eighteenth century and ‘The Water Cure’ in the nineteenth. Charles Darwin was an unfortunate recipient of The Waters and the cure sounds considerably more grim than having a few little live blood bags dangling from your nethers.<br /><br />The nature of quackery changes and several fads have truly been discredited. And as I said, I think the enormous popularity of alt-med may be significantly due to social context, several elements of which are ephemeral.<br /><br />But religion and the supernatural are slightly different. We’re hardwired for them. Good quality study of the supernatural must endure because, when every other fad has passed, it is the one thing to which we, as a species, always return.<br /><br />It has been said that the difference between ghosties and ghoulies is that it doesn’t hurt when you get a kick in the ghosties.<br /><br />But, on the contrary, I think that people are quite resistant to ghost, vampire, werewolf, blood-sucking revenant, kind god, capricious god (pick the belief-type appropriate to your culture) debunking. That’s because it’s a factory setting that requires a great deal of education to de-install. Ghosts et al are simply more enduring than homeopathy, chiropractic for asthma and magnets for menopause. (To complain about fanny magnets – arf, arf - see what Simon Perry has written <a href="http://adventuresinnonsense.blogspot.com/2011/02/what-to-do-about-boots.html">here</a>.)<br /><br />In general, we skeptics are united by the desire to perceive our world in the most rational way possible – even though we’re meat-puppets and our impartiality probably has its limits.<br /><br />But as a species, we do have a preference … and that is to believe in the supernatural. So we’ll always need the tools to discuss this one intelligently and persuasively.<br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Addendum:</span><br />Help one of the next generation of ghost-hunters! - that is to say, a student of the human mind who wonders why we believe in such things. It takes just a few minutes to <a href="http://tinyurl.com/4o6ssm8">complete a survey</a> for Goldsmiths student Aaron Shalan who would is studying factors associated with paranormal belief.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Addendum 2:</span><br />More on this at <a href="http://thethoughtstash.wordpress.com/2011/02/18/the-skeptic-community-is-diverse-and-thats-a-good-thing/">The Thought Stash</a><br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612563867390490775.post-76592754389581576192011-02-14T11:50:00.005+00:002011-02-14T12:11:23.328+00:00Trouser Removal & Underwear Inspection: Security for the Modern TravellerThose of you fascinated at the attempted removal of <a href="http://jackofkent.blogspot.com/2011/02/my-trousers-and-airport-security.html">David Allen Green's trousers</a> at the airport last week may want to know about uninvited strangers rifling through my underwear.<br /><br />Just before Christmas, I returned from the US. I had a skull in my hand-luggage and the airport security guard swabbed it for narcotics and/or explosives. The lovely security lady's smile barely flickered when I explained that it was Mr J's Christmas present. The whole thing was done in my prescence and I was glad they were taking their responsibilities seriously.<br /><br />Then I got home, opened my hold luggage and found this:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOqOIyxeQd9DAfYQpFfTzoE6xUB1KfNro5JSgbNBw78_BbDMk92HMhRQsFlrZIJ82-SfajBY-4bCGuFWf01ENLuRZ9m6yNA7c_kXLa2QsBrvniCEQdDV7HqO7l1toAed00mRQjvri-xQcX/s1600/tsa.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 131px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOqOIyxeQd9DAfYQpFfTzoE6xUB1KfNro5JSgbNBw78_BbDMk92HMhRQsFlrZIJ82-SfajBY-4bCGuFWf01ENLuRZ9m6yNA7c_kXLa2QsBrvniCEQdDV7HqO7l1toAed00mRQjvri-xQcX/s320/tsa.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5573512445932600146" border="0" /></a><br />Basically, it said that my luggage had been rifled in my absence. And what's more, if they had broken the locks to do this, that was my problem.<br /><br />Anyone else find that really creepy?<br /><br />I really don't mind them looking at luggage. They should! But since I was waiting in departures for two hours, you'd think they'd have had a few minutes to get me to the Rifling Room to help.<br /><br />I'd be highly aggrieved to be prosecuted for carrying anything when I'd no proof it hadn't been placed there by a third party. And I'd be really pissed off to buy a new case every time I made a trip because someone had trashed the locks to inspect my toothpaste.<br /><br />We all know that governments use paranoid times to enact the powers they'd like to have anyway. But this one is really, I'll use the word again, creepy.<br /><br />I don't mind who rifles through my underwear. But I'd prefer if they had the manners to wait 'til I'm there.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612563867390490775.post-3418790882731312122011-02-13T15:41:00.007+00:002011-08-08T11:27:11.137+01:00Exorcism: Ancient & ModernToday, I'm thinking about exorcising. Not running on the spot – that’s a good thing.<br /><br />I’m talking about dislodging demons.<br /><br />For the self-sufficient there is the one-day course approach. Very reasonably priced at fifty-nine pounds, this was offered recently by <a href="http://www.theatlantisbookshopevents.com/page4.htm">Atlantis Bookshop</a> in London. Their ‘leading expert’ David Goddard has been ‘an authorized exorcist for over 20 years’.<br /><br />In touch with the spirit world or the spirit cabinet – I really don’t know. I didn’t go.<br /><br />But I was relieved to discover that the syllabus included how to distinguish between possession and mental ill-health. Absolutely vital that.<br /><br />This autonomous approach would probably suit the kind of people who crochet their own bedspreads, change their own engine oil and so forth.<br /><br />On the other hand, if you’re keen on authority, you know, the sort of person who calls in an electrician to change a plug fuse, you can go with a recognised establishment, with training courses and titles, such as the Catholic Church.<br /><br />In November 2010 Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois organised a two-day conference on exorcism attended by 56 bishops and 66 priests. The New York Times noted that there is a lot of cynicism surrounding the issue of exorcism in the US today and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/13/us/13exorcism.html">wrote that</a> “efforts to interview the (delegates) on Friday were unsuccessful”.<br /><br />Not quite as shy, is Father Gary Thomas, the Catholic exorcist for the Diocese of San Jose, who has been <a href="http://www.catholicworldreport.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=236:doorways-for-the-devil&catid=54:catholic-world-report-2011&Itemid=72">interviewed</a> for this month’s ‘Catholic World Report’. His previous exposure in the media has included being the subject of Matt Baglio’s book (& now a movie) ‘The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist’.<br /><br />The piece is entitled ‘Doorways for Demons’ and carries a photo of Father Thomas bearing a lightly constipated grin. He tells us that there were about half a million exorcisms in Italy. Per year, that would be an impressive feat not to mention a significant aspersion upon the moral fibre of a nation of around sixty million souls. Perhaps he means the aggregate of rituals for which the Vatican has records.<br /><br />But personally in five years, he claims to have met with 100 people and performed 40 exorcisms on about five of them.<br /><br />Perhaps it's like waxing - perhaps you have to keep going back.<br /><br />He says:<br />“… there are more and more Catholics involved in idolatrous and pagan practices. That’s really why there’s more demonic activity.”<br /><br />Also:<br />“A lot of parents today have no critical eye of faith with which to even recognize the dangers their children are in. A lot of this is going on with the Internet.”<br /><br />In the study of witchcraft and demon-related beliefs, there’s a great deal of energy put into discussing whether such belief systems are, to use the lingo, ‘bottom-up’ or ‘top-down’. Are the authorities forced to deal with what are actually rank and file experiences, or do they precipitate or interpret such experiences further down the social ladder from themselves by their expectation of them.<br /><br />I think most historians believe that there’s evidence of both.<br /><br />Just for the moment, let’s think about witch trials in England, say.<br /><br />Prior to the eighteenth century belief in witchcraft was probably pretty endemic, but really got out of hand when traditional social structures started to crumble in the Tudor era. Witches were often deeply impoverished people who had asked for charity but had been refused. If the refuser subsequently had some misfortune, they blamed the alleged witch. Let’s face it, the refuser did sort of deserve it. It’s quite a clear case of projected guilt.<br /><br />Then local constable or magistrate would get involved.<br /><br />Bottom up. It’s an oft-repeated pattern.<br /><br />But you can perceive sinister hints in witch-hunting history about top-down phenomena too. A couple of the most celebrated English witch trials had highly educated men at their centre and it’s even questionable whether the trials would have stood, without the educated input and manic focus of these people.<br /><br />In 1589, ten year old Elizabeth Throckmorton, who had recently moved to Warboys, accused her new neighbour Agnes Samuels of being a witch. Elizabeth appears to have been epileptic and quite ill. But her afflictions, characterised by massive fits, sneezing and channeling demons, were soon communicated to four of her sisters and eventually, several of their extended household.<br /><br />Elizabeth’s Uncle was Henry Pickering. He was an educated man from a prominent family. And at this early stage in his witch-hunting career he conducted systematic experiments with his niece to demonstrate real demonic possession. He also took Elizabeth to live with him for a spell, made copious notes and eventually gave evidence at the trial of Agnes Samuels, her daughter and her husband.<br /><br />In the case of the Lancashire Witches of 1612, Justice of the Peace for Pendle, Roger Nowell, interviewed a young woman named Alison Devize who’d been accused of bewitching a peddlar.<br /><br />Roger Nowell was a Puritan whose professional remit included seeking out religious nonconformists (recusant Catholics, basically).<br /><br />Alizon talked about her black dog – her family seems to have been fond of animals and this was unfortunately a characteristic attributed to witches. Somehow, in the telling of the story, the black dog became her familiar. Alizon may even have been trying to displace the blame from herself to the dog for the peddlar’s illness which was probably a stroke.<br /><br />Another of the witches, an old woman known locally as Chattox, told Nowell of a ‘thing like a Christian man’ who had asked for her soul many years ago. In the religious turbulence of her lifetime (bear in mind she was probably in her 70s by 1612) - he could even have been a religious proselytiser of either Puritan or Catholic stamp. But Nowell interpreted him as the devil himself to whom Chattox had sold her soul.<br /><br />Via Nowell’s questioning, the Lancashire Witches’ accounts conformed to the scholarly beliefs contained in such books as the Malleus Malificarum, William Perkins ‘Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft’ and King James’ ‘Demonology’.<br /><br />The interviewees inadvertently confirmed a highly evolved metaphysical schema that Roger Nowell knew in detail and which they likely didn’t.<br /><br />Agnes Samuel, her husband John and their daughter Agnes were hanged in 1593. Ten of the Lancashire witches including Alizon Devize and Old Chattox were hanged in 1612.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHP9ITwFUE-R1ONeznPDQDQ2dvRpGyaYu-8clukboy2pG6BdPdXngSAAFLjiD_FkT_g6BDAh4MM9FBLCUjhqS5e9jXvFKANBtNK4LWo0h3wyIwG-kpslD0tJ8DuF-3sLKFeCPu4hvmLg0a/s1600/lw.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 271px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHP9ITwFUE-R1ONeznPDQDQ2dvRpGyaYu-8clukboy2pG6BdPdXngSAAFLjiD_FkT_g6BDAh4MM9FBLCUjhqS5e9jXvFKANBtNK4LWo0h3wyIwG-kpslD0tJ8DuF-3sLKFeCPu4hvmLg0a/s320/lw.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5573206927849382738" border="0" /></a><br />Those deaths were caused by, as much any other factor, highly earnest and highly educated men labouring under a gross misapprehension.<br /><br />As historian Keith Thomas wrote: “men seldom seek a high degree of proof for what they already believe to be true”<br /><br />He also notes about cunning men – men who found witches, that it was in their: “… interest to diagnose witchcraft, after all, because they had a near monopoly of techniques for dealing with it”<br /><br />Does that ring a bell given how we started?<br /><br />In 1602 there was an exchange between Lord Chief Justice Anderson and a Dr Jorden who was defending Elizabeth Jackson against charges of having bewitched Mary Glover. The Lord Chief Justice seemed unsatisfied that Jorden thought Glover’s condition neither fabricated nor amenable to medical intervention.<br /><br />“Then in my conscience” he said “It is not natural”.<br /><br />It’s nice that modern exorcists like freelance demonologer David Goddard and Father Gary Thomas take account of the possibility of mental illness before they get the paraphernalia out. Father Gary has a psychologist, a psychiatrist and a medical doctor on his team.<br /><br />But, despite Lord Chief Justice Anderson’s protestations, just because we can’t cure it yet, it doesn’t mean it’s not natural. And if you were suffering from an as-yet undiagnosed condition which led to mental distress, do you think a man confirming your belief in the dreadful powers of Satan and all his little fiery minions would make your anxiety worse or better?<br /><br />History clearly shows us that highly educated and sometimes well-intentioned people can precipitate the most dreadful of consequences.<br /><br />Be nice if it wasn’t still relevant, wouldn’t it?<br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">This blogpost was first done as a podcast for </span><a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://poddelusion.co.uk/blog/">The Pod Delusion</a><span style="font-style: italic;"> at </span><a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://www.qedcon.org/">QEDcon</a></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612563867390490775.post-33775116964758169122010-12-12T20:03:00.006+00:002010-12-12T20:23:47.150+00:00Evidence-Based Job SeekingI get several pictures of very attractive young women sent to me every week.<br /><br />No, I haven’t finally activated my month’s free trial of BiCuriousMatch.com. I am the MD of a company which produces makeup effects and props for film and TV, and we get lots of CVs from graduates.<br /><br />Either being 22 and female is an intrinsically gorgeous state, or they don’t let mingers into art school. Every candidate I get to see would turn heads rather than stomachs.<br /><br />The CV thing puzzled me for ages. Then I thought it must be to try and get an edge in what is, admittedly, a male dominated profession. You can’t blame a girl for using everything she’s got. By my age you’re not expected to include a photo with a job application or they might think you’re addled and have confused your resumé with your Meals-on-Wheels application.<br /><br />But when you’re young and junior, could your appearance weigh more heavily in your favour?<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUpqGVvXNyVfWow3Si7qysDY7xz_CuSpqpL0Rwveur8VlHWPbQ_dzZe-ay6hdNCZtqFLu8rUem0KtytYF9EE4CLMbiti1VZ91JK2TuC2F5BzLZGxn2YZhsEUmVlgd6WC1afzU2CtMnx4WQ/s1600/whogetsthejob.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 203px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUpqGVvXNyVfWow3Si7qysDY7xz_CuSpqpL0Rwveur8VlHWPbQ_dzZe-ay6hdNCZtqFLu8rUem0KtytYF9EE4CLMbiti1VZ91JK2TuC2F5BzLZGxn2YZhsEUmVlgd6WC1afzU2CtMnx4WQ/s320/whogetsthejob.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5549892300989902002" border="0" /></a><br />I finally asked a graduate who was working for us. She’d been hired on recommendation, BTW. I didn’t see her CV ‘til she showed it to me and asked for feedback.<br /><br />It turns out the reason all the CVs all look similar and all include a photograph in the same place is not because they have used Microsoft PimpMySkills<span style="font-size:78%;">TM</span>. It’s because someone comes in before they finish Uni. to teach a one day course. This person solemnly assures them that a photo is the way employers “will remember you and differentiate your CV from someone else’s.”<br /><br />Hmmm.<br /><br />A few years ago, at the beginning of the internet explosion, I used to put commercial websites together. At dinner one night, a teacher friend told me excitedly that she’d been on a website course at work and been told a critical piece of information: don’t put the words "child" and "play" in the meta-tags for fear of attracting paedophiles.<br /><br />Now, spending a whole day teaching web design to naïfs back in the day when it would have taken you all the way up to coffee break – max - to say that you close a tag with a backslash must have left some poor bastard with another three quarters of his consultancy fee to justify. But did he have to scrape the bottom of that particular barrel? He could have spoken to one of my art graduates about designing good user interfaces, for example.<br /><br />I mean, sometimes you can just tell that someone’s making it up for the sake of something to say, especially if they’re being paid by the hour.<br /><br />Today, I read an article which has a bearing on the photo issue.<br /><br />The New York Times has a piece on ‘<a href="http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/beauty-discrimination-during-a-job-search/?ref=healthupdate&nl=health&emc=healthupdateemb2">Beauty Discrimination During a Job Search</a>’ based on a paper ‘<a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1705244">Are Good Looking People More Employable?</a>’<br /><br />Ruffle and Shtudiner of Ben-Gurion University noted in their abstract that:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">“Job applicants in Europe and in Israel increasingly embed a headshot of themselves in the top corner of their CVs”</span><br /><br />So they “sent 5312 CVs in pairs to 2656 advertised job openings.” One of the CV’s had no picture attached - but its compatriot contained a picture of either an attractive man or woman, or a “plain” man or woman.<br /><br />I’m guessing they’re using the term “plain” in a politically correct way to denote “unattractive” as opposed to “unremarkable”. The terms “minger”, “munter” or “ten-pinter” probably don’t get you cited in the appropriate journals.<br /><br />The first interesting thing to notice is that there was a difference in results according to whether the CVs were sent to an agency or directly to the potential employers.<br /><br />Female beauty didn’t seem to matter hugely to agencies, whose ‘no photo’, ‘plain’ and ‘attractive’ rates for women are in a similar ballpark. Not identical, but close.<br /><br />Male beauty, however, made a big diff to the agencies. If you take the 13.5% ‘no picture’ as a baseline, then being fit gives a man a 7.3% edge, and being frightful reduces his chances by 5.2%. Not nice.<br /><br />And if the CVs went directly to potential employers?<br /><br />The results for males look like a slightly squished down version of the ‘agency’ result. ‘Plain’ gives worst results, ‘attractive gives the best and ‘no piccie’ is in the middle. There’s only a 5% difference maximum & minimum values.<br /><br />So good-looking men always do better when they send a photo. The degree to which their gorgeousness counts just depends on whether they’re going through an agency or not.<br /><br />If you’re a male and not so easy on the eye, just avoid the visuals.<br /><br />The interesting results come when we get to ‘potential employers’ and ‘women’.<br /><br />Ready for this ladies?<br /><br />‘No piccie’ does best of all. Tagging slightly behind - so slightly that the results could come out differently in repeated study - is the ‘plain’. And nearly 6% behind ‘plain’ is … ‘attractive’.<br /><br />So if you are stunning and female, don’t send a picture to a potential employer, no matter what the one-day consultant twerp at uni. says.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgp0Vfy6oh1KrCNKo0s6KP3ASvDD9bAFh6A5tIGbHQP9Q3bmDZbQShbVAzu9YIq0RSDgS0ydkMFuC_b74yu5SbJ_VCSMmmseEKz4_HabutBh-RT7-YHaty8GtkKv7W-glKmkQQUcestrAHS/s1600/CVs2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 234px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgp0Vfy6oh1KrCNKo0s6KP3ASvDD9bAFh6A5tIGbHQP9Q3bmDZbQShbVAzu9YIq0RSDgS0ydkMFuC_b74yu5SbJ_VCSMmmseEKz4_HabutBh-RT7-YHaty8GtkKv7W-glKmkQQUcestrAHS/s320/CVs2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5549892371666563202" border="0" /></a>Ruffle and Shtudiner attribute this skew to the initial CV screening HR department done by people who were usually female, between 24 and 36 and often single.<br /><br />They go on to conclude that discrimination against attractive women was therefore influenced by envy “when confronted with a young, attractive competitor in the workplace.”<br /><br />Ouch. What happened to the sisterhood?<br /><br />In my own business, I’d still actually recommend the photo route for pretty young women. As I said, it’s a male dominated world and we don’t really have formal HR departments. And if you land on my desk I’ll pay more attention to your folio than your fizzog.<br /><br />But for the corporate sphere, a babe had better wait ‘til she’s hungover before taking the photo or else not send one at all.<br /><br />There are two substantive issues here for me.<br /><br />The first and hopefully most obvious point is that it shouldn’t really matter whether you’re a honey or a honey monster. The “employers will remember your CV by your photo” strikes me as one of the most conspicuous outbreaks of bollocks I’ve heard for a while. Photos are to see what you look like, and what you look like shouldn’t matter.<br /><br />I recently spoke to a US news-reporter who had been displaced in favour of – literally – a beauty-queen-news-reporter. Even if she looked like Jabba the Hut (she doesn’t), would it have affected the journalism?<br /><br />Secondly, who the hell are these people giving out advice in unis., advice which flies directly in the face of the evidence? Who is paying them and why?<br /><br />I’ve spoken to several people here in the US (I’m here for a short spell) and they’re taken aback at the thought that photos should be attached to anything other than crime scene reports. But their anti-discrimination attenae are a bit more finely tuned than ours.<br /><br />They feel, rightly I think, that photos for jobs can be a minefield of prejudice. I bet Ruffle and Shtudiner would agree.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612563867390490775.post-88302860732744744142010-12-02T04:28:00.008+00:002010-12-02T21:48:46.221+00:00Prostitution Law ReformThis is a guest blogpost from Anthony Burn. Anthony was a lobbyist for the New Zealand Prostitute Collective, which successfully campaigned for a private members bill to be passed into law in NZ in 2003.<br /><br />Anthony couldn’t make it to <a href="http://westminster.skepticsinthepub.org/">Westminster Skeptics in the Pub</a> on 18th October 2010 when Dr Belinda Brooks-Gordon and Dr Brooke Magnanti aka 'Belle de Jour' spoke on ‘The Law and Policy of Sex Work’ which I chaired.<br /><br />(There’s a podcast of the evening <a href="http://poddelusion.co.uk/blog/2010/10/21/westminster-skeptics-belinda-brooks-gordon-and-brooke-magnanti/">here</a> and a <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2010/10/sex-work-policy-westminster">New Statesman article</a> by David Allen Green, convenor of Westminster Skeptics, who put the evening together.)<br /><br />But over a pint or two of Pinot Grigio, Anthony kindly agreed commit his experience to pixels. And here it is:<br /><br /><br />Jourdemayne asked me to write this article after we had a conversation about the issue of prostitution law reform in the UK. I was excited to hear that some advocates for law reform were basing their proposals on the New Zealand model, a model that I was intimately aware of, having been hired as an advocate and lobbyist for the New Zealand Prostitute Collective, who successfully campaigned for Tim Barnett’s private members bill to be passed into law on June 25th 2003.<br /><br />My role was to firm up public support for the bill critical to helping Tim lock in members of parliament who had previously supported the bill, but who were now wavering in the face of a ferocious alliance of radical feminists and churches, lead by the Christian lobby group Maxim. Maxim were a thorn in the side of any socially progressive movement in New Zealand, styling their tactics and presentation on American Christian right groups such as Focus on the Family.<br /><br />The reform bill enjoyed its own broad coalition of support from liberal churches, victim support groups, and a wide array of public health groups. This support was at least as deep as the opposition's, but it was also quieter, and there was a real danger that the only voices the MPs would hear in the decisive three weeks before the final vote was the sky-falling-in stridency of the opposition.<br /><br />By the time of the final vote, the New Zealand media was identifying the prostitution law reform bill as the most intensely lobbied piece of social legislation since the passage of the homosexuality law reform bill twenty years earlier.<br /><br />Maxim and their cohorts were very adept at grasping the media megaphone and providing the kind of lurid, exaggerated claims that write their own headlines. My favourite piece of Maxim nonsense was the claim that legalizing prostitution would lead to brothel owners expounding the benefits of prostitution as a career choice at school career days. It should come as a surprise to no one that no school fairs have been visited by brothel owners since the bill passed.<br /><br />If anything, the radical feminist objection to the bill was even more strident than the religious groups. One memorable moment just before the vote occurred in an interview between Tim and New Zealand television media personality Pam Corkery, a staunch feminist implacably opposed to the bill.<br /><br />In a memorable exchange Pam accused Tom of authoring the most anti-women piece of legislation in New Zealand's history, and not stopping there, accused Tim of being intrinsically and irredeemably anti-women because he was openly gay. Tim did a very good job of laughing this accusation off, but what puts this exchange in context is that Pam Corkery had made her name championing myriad social causes, including many opposed by Maxim, and had once been a member of parliament for the most left-wing party in New Zealand. In almost any other circumstance Pam and Tim would have been on the same side of an issue, and yet Pam made the nastiest and most personal attack on Tim of the whole campaign.<br /><br />This underlines the resonance of the emotional associations that prostitution triggers in many people’s minds, drawing together the strangest of bedfellows on the side of the opposition. It should also act as a warning to the UK advocates of reform of the many faceted vehemence they would face in the UK.<br /><br />A small but noteworthy example of this was Harriet Harman’s support for the Swedish model of prostitution law reform that was also supported by some opponents of the New Zealand bill. The Swedish model was rejected by reform bill advocates because in Sweden it only exacerbated the problems of the current law by criminalizing the clients rather than the sex workers, thereby driving prostitution even further underground and compounding all the ills of the status quo, increasing the instances of unreported rape, rampant drug use, and increased HIV and other STD infections. Far from being a solution it only compounds the problem, yet it has always found favour with some feminists because it targets predominately male clients over female sex workers.<br /><br />Tim included in his final speech a quote from Dr Basil Donovan, Head of Sydney’s Sexual Health Service:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">“With the sole exceptions of the Cultural Revolution in China and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the law surrounding prostitution has no effect in its prevalence. Laws seeking to restrict prostitution merely promote corruption, brutality and sexually transmitted infections”</span><br /><br />So how would the world look like to the average UK citizen if a law like this was passed? It would remain virtually unchanged to most of us who do not frequent the sex industry. The only truly viable sign of change in New Zealand for most people was the reduced presence of risqué massage parlour signs since the new law gave local bodies new powers to regulate advertising related to sex work.<br /><br />But for UK sex workers the world would change dramatically as it did for New Zealand sex workers, and key to that transformation would be the sex workers’ relationship with the state. As Tim said in his comments prefacing the final reading of the bill:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">“Under the Bill they (sex workers) will be under a public health umbrella. They will have the opportunity for an employment contract, the certainty of an Occupational Safety and Health Code, a safer-sex focused environment to work in. They will have new protection from a stronger law against coercion. Workers aged under 18 will not be criminalized, but their clients face longer sentences than under current law, with less opportunity to successfully defend themselves”</span><br /><br />If there is one key campaign lesson I would immediately draw from the New Zealand experience is that the debate over prostitution reform can be highly emotive, sensational and irrational. Arguments in favour, therefore, have to be ready to provide irresistible case studies embedded into highly compelling emotional narratives to counter the emotional fire storm that comes from the opposition. Though these emotional arguments have to be made, they can and should ultimately be located back in the kind of entirely rational, pragmatic arguments that cemented my own personal support for reform.<br /><br />An example of how this was effectively deployed in the debate over the bill was when Tim and the Prostitutes Collective provided a key waverer with a highly evocative case study of how the status quo was not working in her own constituency. They brought the MP into direct contact with the victims in that case study with the result that, on the night of the debate, the waverer supported the bill and cited the victims she met as the reason why she changed her mind.<br /><br />A key emotive argument made on the night in New Zealand was made by Georgina Beyer, the world’s first transsexual MP and previously world’s first transsexual Mayor. Georgina recounted how, in the days when she was still a male prostitute on the streets, she was violently raped by a male client who avoided prosecution because Georgina knew if she approached the police about the rape she also would be prosecuted because of her profession.<br /><br />Georgina said that voting for the reform bill that night would help put a stop to all the rapes of the Georges and Georginas out there, people who were too afraid to turn in their attackers because of the Victorian 'blame-the-victim' mindset of the current law.<br /><br />Making resonant, emotive laden arguments for Prostitution Law Reform would be even more critical in a UK context, because prostitution law reform is exactly the kind of emotional political football that red-tops like 'The Sun' love to kick around for maximum shock value.<br /><br />After Tim read the New Zealand Prostitution Reform bill a final time, a conscious vote was taken, with the bill passing by a single, solitary vote - 60 votes to 59, with one key, brave, abstention by the solitary Muslim MP in the New Zealand parliament.<br /><br />Since that momentous (and wildly celebratory) night seven years ago, the bill has been law, and it has wrought a positive change in sex worker health, safety, rates of drug use, working conditions, worker benefits, and ability to leave the occupation at will. Needle exchanges and sexual health clinics also report a positive uptake by sex workers since the police no longer provide examples of needles and condoms as the evidence required to prosecute sex workers for their occupation in court.<br /><br />I hope that the UK advocates for prostitution law reform continue to champion the New Zealand example as the way to remove outdated, biased, largely unenforced law, which leaves real problems untouched and nurtures harm.<br /><br />I wish them the very best of luck in negotiating the minefield to bring about positive change in the world’s oldest profession, in the very society that brought us the Victorian moral mindset.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612563867390490775.post-88641056608945481442010-11-20T22:24:00.003+00:002010-11-21T19:32:57.687+00:00Intelligence Squared: Stop Bashing ChristiansIntelligence Squared events are always fun. They attract prominent and often witty speakers. This one was no exception.<br /><br />“Stop bashing Christians: Britain is Becoming an Anti-Christian country” took place in Kensington on November 3rd. The event was actually very well attended given that it was a Bob Crow day. That’s like a bank holiday, but with even less public transport ;-)<br /><br />Anyhow, the motion was supported by Former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord George Carey, columnist Peter Hitchens and writer Howard Jacobson.<br /><br />And it was opposed by Geoffrey Robertson QC, Matthew Parris and Benedictine Friar Dom Antony Sutch, who has a career in laconic stand-up if the monk thing doesn’t work out.<br /><br />At the start of the evening, the vote was: for 275; against 183; undecided 181. Given that the swing vote is the one to win at these things, there was a decisive gain to be had by one side or the other.<br /><br />George Carey was uninspired; Geoffrey Robertson was charismatic and amusing; Howard Jacobson was polished, funny and indulged in unforgivable levels of sophistry; Matthew Parris was clear and lucid; Peter Hitchens was … well you’ve read his Mail columns; Dom Antony Sutch was reasonable and hilarious. For the purposes of dry-cleaning, does a monk’s habit count as a military uniform or a ballgown? The dry-cleaner was as confused as you are at this moment.<br /><br />George Carey pointed out that the majority of people in this country are self-declared Christian, but he saw “worrying signs that the Christian faith is being pushed to the margins”.<br /><br />He went on to cite several recent situations which would be familiar to most people who glance at newspapers or the ‘net. Gary McFarlane, a senior Relate counsellor had been dismissed for refusing to offer sexual guidance to homosexual couples; nurse Shirley Chaplain who was asked to remove her cross at work; Islington Registrar Theresa Davies who refused to conduct same-sex civil partnerships; Owen & Eunice Johns who were disallowed from fostering children because of their religious belief that homosexuality is wrong.<br /><br />“My concern is that the religious rights of individuals are now being trumped by other rights” he summarised.<br /><br />Geoffrey Robertson QC opened by saying that the Pope had been “fawned upon by politicians”. He continued that “… the protests were all polite and good humoured with the exception of the sour faced Paisley-ite Protestants from Northern Ireland proving … the only people who are bashing Christians in this country are their fellow Christians”.<br /><br />He characterised the Synod activity regarding women and gays as “puerile debates” and went on to list many ways in which Christianity, far from being bashed, was actually highly privileged in Britain.<br /><br />As for Gary McFarlane, who had been cited previously by George Carey (the Archbishop had also given evidence on his behalf), Robertson pointed out that the codes of ethics of both ‘Relate’ and ‘The British Association of Therapists’ disallowed discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. And Gary McFarlane belonged to and was thereby required to adhere to these codes.<br /><br />“These cases are not bashing Christians” Robertson concluded. “They’re making sure that idiosyncratic and bigoted Christians don’t bash gays and other minorities at the public expense.”<br /><br />Howard Jacobson started with a hyperbolic list of the putative benefits of Christianity.<br /><br />“When Christianity … found you, you were warring gangs of troglodytic tree-worshippers for whom spirituality meant dancing around a goat in maxi-dresses … whose highest architectural ambition was the arrangement of big stones in small circles … From that, Christianity refined you into the people who built Ely cathedral, who listened to the music of Purcell & Handel, who spoke a language subtle and profound enough to make possible the plays of Shakespeare … without Christianity … the very temper of the English mind … would be less sophisticated”<br /><br />While I fully appreciate that Mr. Jacobson’s standpoint was artfully designed to ride on a wave of wit – and he is a droll speaker – the conflation of wit and wisdom was too complete to forgive … or even disentangle.<br /><br />If we assume that even just fifty percent was intended as fact, it was still tosh. Sorry.<br /><br />But “… it was the French” who rescued the British from Wode, protested Matthew Parris.<br /><br />As for goats and maxi-dresses, I’ve written about the insufficiency and impartiality of historical records regarding nature of pre-Christian religious practices in the British Isles <a href="http://jourdemayne.blogspot.com/2010/10/druid-network.html">here</a>.<br /><br />And the proposed direct causal relationship between Christianity and complex cultural ephemera is too ridulous to bother rebutting. Let’s just ignore the collapse of empires, the progress of epidemics, climate and economy.<br /><br />Jacobson reminded us of John Dunne’s: “ … infinitely subtle matrix which makes each of us so implicative in the lives of others that damage is impossible to guage”.<br /><br />On which non-sequitur he finished.<br /><br />Howard Jacobson had mentioned an incident in which Matthew Parris had leapt into the Thames to save a dog. He had attributed the moral motivation for this to the Christian minset.<br /><br />Parris opened with a reposte:<br />“I believe, as Christianity and Judaism do not believe, that dogs have souls”.<br /><br />Parris started by disputing the Christian perspective as the starting point for morality and law. He rejected the divine authority of any rulebook on at least two levels: firstly, the rules in relation to specific issues such as abortion, homosexuality, birth control and so forth; and secondly, the notion that the Christian god ordains human morality.<br /><br />Christians and non-Christians alike should have an equal say in political ethics he continued.<br /><br />Paris continued with examples of the way in which religion has not offered the tolerance it now pleads for itself, concluding:<br />“Their gods care little for your freedom … give them the tolerance they would never give you, but watch them like a hawk and give them not an inch more”<br /><br />With what may have seemed like whimsy, the chair introduced Peter Hitchens as “a man for whom faith has been a constant feature throughout his life”. Hitchens’ past fervour for international socialism and revolutionary Trotskyism, and his present belief in Anglican Christianity were thus framed as different locations on one continuum.<br /><br />But I think it was actually an incisive insight.<br /><br />Several people have developed psychological models of religiosity. They categorise things like whether a person is likely to have transcendental experiences; whether their religious thoughts are likely to permeate other situations in their lives; whether they regard the prime value of religious affiliation as social order.<br /><br />For Peter Hitchens take a quick look at Extrinsic Religiosity in Allport and Ross’s ‘Religious Orientation Scale’.<br /><br />Hitchens seems to be, more than a Christian, a believer in belief.<br />“Many who did not believe in God recognised the social benefits” he said.<br />“Such people as Matthew [Parris] regard Christianity’s prohibitions too high a price to pay for the great benefits we receive at its hand”, and:<br />“A nasty new tribal group-think is undermining the faith on which are based a unique ordered liberty of our society: its gentleness, its tolerance, its freedom, its literature, its art, its music … its law and its language”<br /><br />They are: “those who like to live with its benefits but will not pay its dues”<br /><br />Dom Antony Sutch is a monk who does not believe that we are becoming a nation of Christian-bashers.<br />“We’re living in a society that is bashing everybody” he intoned mournfully.<br /><br />He also made an interesting point not made by others:<br />“We’re getting to the point where the media have all the headlines and we say “It must be the case”.”<br /><br />Does the media aggravate these stories? Maybe.<br /><br />The evening carried a few interesting themes.<br /><br />The conflation of non-Christian and anti-Christian was addressed. Dom Anthony Sutch pointed out that the new movement:<br />“… may disagree and argue about certain Christian beliefs, but it is not anti-Christian”<br /><br />He went onto say: “One of the things that worries me more than anything is Christians getting at other Christians. But if you’re a Christian getting at a Christian, you’re not anti-Christian”.<br /><br />There was also a certain failure, particularly with George Carey it seemed, to appreciate the degree to which Christianity is already privileged:<br /><br />The Church of England, said Geoffrey Robertson “.. loves to sit undemocratically at the heart of The Establishment”, enjoying privileges with education and tax laws.<br />Parliament starts every day with a prayer by an Anglican Chaplain; Church of England courts are paid for by the taxpayer because the Church is established; the monarch is its head and the archbishops are appointed by the Prime Minister; vicars live without paying Council Tax.<br /><br />There are also twenty-six Lords Spiritual in the House of Lords – all Anglican. Neither did the recent White Paper on Lords reform suggest getting rid of them.<br /><br />Archbishop Carey defended the Lords Spiritual system to a ripple of laughter. He protested that he had tried to get the RC Bishop of Westminster appointed too but the Vatican had declined.<br /><br />Matthew Parris was also eloquent on the degree to which Christianity has institutional advantages including exemptions from discriminatory laws in employing staff, and the fact that political party leaders regularly give privileged access to religious believers<br /><br />“Their real complaint is that they’re not getting their way anymore” he said. “Theirs is the self-pitying whimper of a dog that off its leash in a dominating pack would hound other creatures again without mercy”<br /><br />Peter Hitchens, on the other hand, believed that the powerful non-Christian movement “seeks itself to be dominant”.<br /><br />During questions, he went on to offer a chilling warning to us all. They (the new movement):<br />“… will leave a space … for fundamentalist Islam … where Christianity used to be … that’s where it’s all going”.<br /><br />This, as though it was indisputable that social ecology has a mandatory niche - the religious niche, which will suck powerfully, destructively & indiscriminately when occupied by a vacuum.<br /><br />But fervent religiosity is not a mandatory niche, surely – a gap to be plugged with a benign entity to displace a more malignant version?<br /><br />In fact, Matthew Parris reminded us of what could really lurking in the fringe. And for this, we do not have to turn to our own paranoia but to history:<br />“Ask Galieo, ask Luther, ask Darwin about intolerance” he said. The Roman Catholic Church was an institution which “… when it could, burnt its critics at the stake, excommunicated intellectual or moral challengers, suppressed or subverted science itself …”<br /><br />He also quoted John Clare’s ‘Ode to a Fallen Elm’:<br />‘So thy old shadow must a tyrant be<br />Bawl freedom loud then oppress the free’<br /><br />That religion is a secondary construct rather than a primary state was visibly lost on Peter Hitchens and Archbishop Carey. Secularists are not asking for special treatment. They’re asking for a level playing field, without privilege for anyone. Howard Jacobson was inordinately more sophisticated, pleading that, as he put it, “Judeo-Christianity (has) a way of describing us to ourselves”.<br /><br />Summarising, Geoffrey Robertson said that Britain is becoming a non Christian, but not an anti-Christian society. Dom Anthony Sutch said that society is becoming secular but not intolerant.<br /><br />And the vote at the end of the evening? The ‘fors’ went from 275 to 216, the 'againsts' went from 183 to 378, and the 'undecideds' were reduced from 181 to 48. That probably means that 133 previously undecided people had swung to the idea that ‘we are not becoming a Christian bashing country’ … and so had 59 voters who had previously thought that we were.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612563867390490775.post-3952038051256111452010-11-19T15:58:00.006+00:002010-11-25T16:24:10.611+00:00Evolving Darwin Play SetLook what I got for a pressie!<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6hEzB906n_W6eeGhdgBFhnLnOgdhI-_MWJHyRooNfgOL9Osyrh1oV9HTlrA_rqMGQi5IdkI-2kX-USdXO1V1bqJxXbKscdiWqumiNfev4pL5kzpJ6_g6XTQWk89DFj9H-hkC88_n1yOpM/s1600/evolvingdarwin2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 157px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6hEzB906n_W6eeGhdgBFhnLnOgdhI-_MWJHyRooNfgOL9Osyrh1oV9HTlrA_rqMGQi5IdkI-2kX-USdXO1V1bqJxXbKscdiWqumiNfev4pL5kzpJ6_g6XTQWk89DFj9H-hkC88_n1yOpM/s320/evolvingdarwin2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5541290965572851202" border="0" /></a>Darwin evolves from pond slime to a chimpy-looking hominid to a nineteenth century gentleman.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEzGiKi4QpD8Yl1TOtgdLm8VJsJWo508cQlskHfwW71yfZlKbd0m7uSglz1Cumj_kYirBzWSD0L8uIbRMG5wfVC5IQPKdVGt9LGzMrtV1wkZq1YRsPmkIde5hX9-pZARCK7fM0KHSt9GGq/s1600/evolvingdarwin.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 181px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEzGiKi4QpD8Yl1TOtgdLm8VJsJWo508cQlskHfwW71yfZlKbd0m7uSglz1Cumj_kYirBzWSD0L8uIbRMG5wfVC5IQPKdVGt9LGzMrtV1wkZq1YRsPmkIde5hX9-pZARCK7fM0KHSt9GGq/s320/evolvingdarwin.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5541290872619665026" border="0" /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612563867390490775.post-6156043580767617932010-11-13T18:49:00.004+00:002010-11-13T19:37:36.159+00:00Skeptics in the City of AngelsBusiness has brought me to LA for a few weeks.<br /><br />The up-side of going west through eight time zones is that you get up early enough to go for a run. The downside is that by dinnertime, you're slumped with your face in your food.<br /><br />And speaking of eating: been busy this week, so I just bought a pile of frozen, microwaveable Mexican food. I think it's going to be a while before I can look another chimchanga in the face. Today, I am going to go and buy a vegetable.<br /><br />Mr Jourdemayne and I once took a very long trip to see a writer. We were too off-schedule to stop for a meal, but had been told there were provisions at the other end. After two hours of greetings and enough rum to launch a Saturn V - all endured without fainting - we were presented with the comestibles.<br /><br />It was the repast of an eighteenth century central European peasant married to a nail technician from a trailer park in Alabama. There was every kind of salted and preserved meat you can imagine. All seemed to end in 'am': ham, spam ... plus jerky.<br /><br />And cheese and onion crisps.<br /><br />And ONE sprig of parsley.<br /><br />Mr Jourdemayne and I both fixed upon the parsley. Our eyes darted back challengingly to each other, and then that music from 'The Good, The Bad and the Ugly' played in the background.<br /><br />I might have imagined that last bit.<br /><br />I was as fast as a cat, but he was a fast as a faster cat. Mr Jourdemayne whipped the parsley away. He took the time to triumphantly roll it around his lips, Ermentrude-like, before sucking it down with a vigorous vacuum that made all our ears pop slightly.<br /><br />The hostess looked at us resentfully. I think she kept the parsley for dressing. I don't think we were supposed to eat it. The speed with which Mr Jourdemayne ingested the thing, it may actually have been astro-turf parsley. We'll never know.<br /><br />I like vegetables, and today I'm going to buy one.<br /><br />But what of last night? I went to see <a href="http://www.meetup.com/skeptics-136/calendar/15334552/">Drinking Skeptically, LA</a> at their usual meetup, and what a friendly bunch of people they are. It's one of the many wonderful things about skepticism, that we can go to so many cities and find friends very easily.<br /><br />This Brian Hart, assistant organiser and Invesigator with the <a href="http://www.iigwest.com/">Independent Investigations Group</a>.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2cHsMX1hDgsjQbwIrcgpE36p-U9ObcyEDJUEPZ8FJTvU9FJYDxOeCDnim_Yp2D9uB_nQbUXstcjKF-VRMRiuKpaGAGyAAzZH60x2uj1rlH5Phmz7pGBuEULT0xTJZOvNRAiBineKDcEXS/s1600/sitpla1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 230px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2cHsMX1hDgsjQbwIrcgpE36p-U9ObcyEDJUEPZ8FJTvU9FJYDxOeCDnim_Yp2D9uB_nQbUXstcjKF-VRMRiuKpaGAGyAAzZH60x2uj1rlH5Phmz7pGBuEULT0xTJZOvNRAiBineKDcEXS/s320/sitpla1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5539118462631610850" border="0" /></a>And this is Derek Bartholomaus, who created the <a href="http://www.jennymccarthybodycount.com/Jenny_McCarthy_Body_Count/Home.html">Jenny McCarthy Bodycount</a>.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3zIvhSuH-RyYs-Mn6nZLt1WML3oYZ_FxysjsTSyDqnf60z2QNS8Di5Z3uSH6vKVSERfae_h4Z9PgPlqfuf6RwqAOvtPyjTQpXYhMPy8MKspGeNhzgk_mtONwVq_Qhk2V0joBA_r8EGCaq/s1600/sitpla2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 262px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3zIvhSuH-RyYs-Mn6nZLt1WML3oYZ_FxysjsTSyDqnf60z2QNS8Di5Z3uSH6vKVSERfae_h4Z9PgPlqfuf6RwqAOvtPyjTQpXYhMPy8MKspGeNhzgk_mtONwVq_Qhk2V0joBA_r8EGCaq/s320/sitpla2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5539118959761403810" border="0" /></a><br />Thanks to everybody for making me feel so welcome. See you all again soon.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612563867390490775.post-22319278862599535682010-10-23T11:29:00.009+01:002010-11-09T16:33:34.386+00:00Hallowe'en WeekThank you to everybody who came to say 'Hi' at The Literary and Debating Society at the National University of Ireland on Thursday November 28th. The debating society's motion: 'This House Believes in the Other Side' was defeated.<br /><br />I also had a wonderful evening at Goldsmiths on Tuesday 26th, where I spoke about '<strong style="font-weight: normal;">Demons and Nightmares: Why do People Believe in the Malign Supernatural?' There's an audio version <a href="http://skeptic.org.uk/archive">here</a><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><br /></span></strong><strong style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://www.gold.ac.uk/apru/speakers/abstracts-1011/#d.en.22058"></a><br /></strong>And we had a lot of fun at the Westminster Skeptics First Birthday/Hallowe'en Party on November 1st too.<br /><br />What a great Hallowe'en week!<br /><strong style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"></span></span><a href="http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=203939300182&v=app_2344061033&ref=ts#%21/event.php?eid=142180092470356&index=1"></a></strong>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612563867390490775.post-21191088506311256832010-10-10T10:02:00.004+01:002010-10-10T12:10:09.721+01:00The Druid NetworkOn September 21st, the Charity Commission published its <a href="http://www.charitycommission.gov.uk/Library/about_us/druiddec.pdf">decision</a> in respect of <a href="http://druidnetwork.org/">The Druid Network</a>’s application for charitable status.<br /><br />The ‘yes’ hit the news networks a few days later at the beginning of this month, for example the <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/8036952/Druidry-recognised-as-religion-in-Britain-for-first-time.html">Telegraph</a>, the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11457795">BBC</a> and <a href="http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/Strange-News/Druidry-Officially-Recognised-As-A-Religion-Under-British-Charity-Law/Article/201010115750110?f=rss">Sky News</a> where it rather <span style="font-style: italic;">un</span>charitably appeared under their ‘strange news’ category.<br /><br />The Druid Network is not the extant organisation to represent Druidism, but it’s the only one currently with Charity Status.<br /><br />This should not be misunderstood as an aspersion upon any Druids or Druidical Institutions though. Other organisations may just not want charitable status. <a href="http://arthurpendragon.ukonline.co.uk/druid.html">King Arthur Pendragon</a> (I’m guessing he changed his name by deed poll) was reported by the BBC as saying that:<br /><br />“<span style="font-style: italic;">… he would not be seeking charitable status for his own order - the Loyal Arthurian Warband - as it was a political wing and therefore had no need to be recognised as a charity</span>”<br /><br />King Arthur sounds like friendly and self-effacing kind of a bloke to judge from the interviews I’ve read over the years:<br /><br />“<span style="font-style: italic;">I'm Arthur Pendragon and if people want to believe I'm some nutter who thinks he's the reincarnation of King Arthur that's their choice</span>”<br /><br />In fact it’s hard to dislike Druids in general. They seem full of good intentions, keen on environmentalism, rejecting of consumerism as a route to happiness and King Arthur likes cider – all sterling qualities.<br /><br />They esteem personal revelation on the way to enlightenment, they seem to appreciate the cultivation of knowledge over received dogma and to practice meditation.<br /><br />If I was forced to choose between one of the Abrahamic faiths and modern Druidry, it’d be a millisecond before I was down the pub with His Majesty.<br /><br />But King Arthur was also quoted by the BBC as dropping what I regard as the biggest neo-pagan clanger – claiming provenance of his religion from the original Celtic social class of two millennia ago.<br /><br />“<span style="font-style: italic;">We are looking at the indigenous religion of these isles - it's not a new religion but one of the oldest</span>”<br /><br />We actually know very little about the Celtic Druids. Most of the written evidence comes from Julius Caesar’s ‘Commentaries on the Gallic War’.<br /><br />Caesar’s Gauls had structured societes with a military class and a priestly one, which “is in great honour among them”. The Druids seem to have been in charge of administering justice:<br /><br />“<span style="font-style: italic;">For they determine respecting almost all controversies, public and private; and if any crime has been perpetrated, if murder has been committed, if there be any dispute about an inheritance, if any about boundaries, these same persons decide it; they decree rewards and punishments</span>”<br /><br />Caesar continues that the Druids were knowledgeable about calendars and astronomy and they spent very long periods (twenty years) committing their most sacred doctrines to memory, although they used Greek letters to write upon more mundane matters.<br /><br />But there was an uncivilised facet to this nation: the Druids practiced human sacrifice.<br /><br />“<span style="font-style: italic;">The nation of all the Gauls is extremely devoted to superstitious rites; and on that account they who are troubled with unusually severe diseases, and they who are engaged in battles and dangers, either sacrifice men as victims, or vow that they will sacrifice them, and employ the Druids as the performers of those sacrifices; because they think that unless the life of a man be offered for the life of a man, the mind of the immortal gods can not be rendered propitious, and they have sacrifices of that kind ordained for national purposes</span>.”<br /><br />And here is where we get our legend of the Wicker Man, a giant human-shaped container stuffed with live sacrificial victims. They:<br /><br />“ <span style="font-style: italic;">… have figures of vast size, the limbs of which formed of osiers they fill with living men, which being set on fire, the men perish enveloped in the flames. They consider that the oblation of such as have been taken in theft, or in robbery, or any other offence, is more acceptable to the immortal gods; but when a supply of that class is wanting, they have recourse to the oblation of even the innocent.</span>”<br /><br />This combination of civilised and uncivilised traits may have been intended demonstrate to the Romans back home that the Gauls were simultaneously a people worth the effort of conquering but also barbaric and in need of Roman cultural influence.<br /><br />In other words, Caesar’s account has to be regarded as, at least in part, propaganda. Without decent objective verification of the facts, we just don’t know.<br /><br />Druidic divination by human sacrifice was also described by first century BCE Greek historian Diodorus Siculus:<br /><br />"<span style="font-style: italic;">There are also certain philosophers and priests surpassingly esteemed, whom they call Druids. They have also soothsayers, who are held in high estimation; and these, by auguries and the sacrifice of victims, foretell future events, and hold the commonalty in complete subjection … when they deliberate on matters of moment, they practise a strange and incredible rite; for, having devoted a man for sacrifice, they strike him with a sword on a part above the diaphragm: the victim having fallen, they augur from his mode of falling, the contortion of his limbs, and the flowing of the blood, what may come to pass, giving credence concerning such things to an ancient and long-standing observance</span>“<br /><br />But we know so little of Diodorus’ life, whether he travelled and whether he gathered his accounts first hand, that it’s fair to draw the more probably conclusion that he worked from documents and may have been repeating hearsay.<br /><br />Strabo’s ‘Geography’, covering the same subject, writes in such a conspicuously similar fashion that it seems highly likely they were both repeating from the same source. They both mention that Druids had the power to stand between armies and halt hostilities if they thought the fight unjust. And Strabo re-mentions Caesar’s Wicker Man.<br /><br />Strabo did travel extensively, but he lived from around 63/64 BCE to 24 CE. In other words, he was around twenty years old at the death of Julius Caesar (100 BCE 15 March 44 BCE). His travels and writing post-dated the extirpation of the Druids and the chances of collecting first-hand data (although he may have spoken to old campaigners).<br /><br />There are other classical sources but we don’t need to go through them exhaustively. Basically, I’m trying to demonstrate that our knowledge of the real, ancient Druids is patchy, propagandist and/or second hand.<br /><br />I’m not at all upset, by the way, at the notion that they practiced human sacrifice. They may have, they may not have. Iron Age human sacrifice is reasonably well evidenced by corpses such as <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bog-People-Iron-Age-Preserved-Classics/dp/1590170903/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1286129664&sr=8-1">Tolland Man</a>.<br /><br />And for those with such a sanctimonous dismissal of other’s murderous practices, the Romans would have done well to remember that Gladiatorial combat probably started at the time of the Punic Wars as a barely glossed human sacrifice, a part of funerary ritual.<br /><br />The point about Druidic human sacrifice is – we don’t know.<br /><br />Druids turn up later in Irish folkore. But their role and identities were reduced, by the coming of Christianity, to sorcerers. Druids get a bad rap ‘til the early modern era, at which time we see the buds of a Romantic reinvention.<br /><br />Modern Druidism has had many players over the centuries: people like antiquarian and proto-archaeologist John Aubrey (1626 – 1697) for whom the ‘Aubrey holes’ of Stonehenge are named; antiquarian, freemason, doctor and vicar William Stukely (1687-1785) and Welsh propagandist, antiquarian and poet Edward Williams (1747 –1826).<br /><br />So was our nation’s true religion under wraps for all that time, safe in the hands of a few initiates who, continuing the practices of their antecedents, memorised all their sacred knowledge and left no texts?<br /><br />Did they only emerge when it was safe to do so? Is modern Druidry an authentically original, rather than reinvented, tradition?<br /><br />Margaret Murray (1863 – 1963) was an Egyptologist who is now mainly remembered for her ‘Witch-Cult Hypothesis’. Her books ‘The Witch Cult in Western Europe’ (1921) and ‘The Gods of the Witches’ (1931) proposed that the ‘Old Religion’ had gone underground but had survived intact. Covens worshipped a horned god and the sacrifice of a ‘Divine King’ figure could be seen in such historical events as the death of William Rufus and Thomas Beckett.<br /><br />However, Murray’s theories are now very unfashionable and have, to be frank, been thoroughly discredited. She felt that the witch trials of Europe’s sixteenth and seventeenth ‘Great-Witch-Hunt’ era were an attempt by the Christian authorities to extirpate a genuine underground movement.<br /><br />However, there are alternative, and far better, explanations of the witch hunts. Like so many human dynamics and behaviours, the Witch Hunts are too subtle and complicated for one definitive answer.<br /><br />But the post-Reformation tension between Catholicism and Protestantism probably had a huge part to play, as did the economic changes of the early-modern era in which traditional means of social support and charity changed.<br /><br />Where there are highly plausible explanations for one theory and virtually no evidence for another, Occam’s razor must be evoked. Sorry Margaret.<br /><br />And this, I feel, must go for Druidism too.<br /><br />Writing to his friend Lord Cecil about a trip to York in 1570, Archbishop Edmund Grindal expressed his dismay about the tenacity of Catholicism in the north of England:<br /><br />“<span style="font-style: italic;">He lamented that holy days and feasts were still celebrated, beads were told and ‘they offer money, eggs etc. at the burial of their dead</span>’”<br /><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lancashire-Witch-Craze-Preston-Witches/dp/1859360254/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1286701807&sr=8-3">p 102</a><br /><br />Offerings for the dead are undoubtedly a vestigal manifestation of pre-Christian religious practices. Catholicism was, and is, undoubtedly a more magical religion than Protestantism. But this does not mean that the people of whom the Archbishop disapproved were self-consciously practicing anything other than that which they would have called Christianity.<br /><br />At Easter, I eat a lot of dark chocolate eggs, but that makes me a gannet – not a pagan.<br /><br />James Frazer, in the Golden Bough (1890) identified traces of the Old Religion all over Europe.<br /><br />He cites ‘Druidical festivals’ such as the making of ‘need fire’ on Beltane - May Day, a ritual which was regarded as a prophylactic for disease. (‘Need’ fire is ‘new’ fire from first principles rather than from an existing ember.) In Ireland, Frazer recalls that the May Day rituals in which cattle were driven between two need fires had been conducted ‘within living memory’.<br /><br />He also cited recent festivals of the time in Douay & Dunkirk where a giant figures made of osiers (wickerwork) were taken through the street, driven by men enclosed inside them.<br /><br />But the closest Frazer gets to Murray’s recondite religion is to write:<br /><br />“<span style="font-style: italic;">… that is, among a Celtic people who, situated in a remote corner of Europe and almost completely isolated from foreign influence, had til then conserved their heathenism better perhaps than any other people in the West of Europe</span>”<br /><br />This is far from suggesting that there was a coherent spiritual underground, an authentic and self-conscious maintenance of a two thousand year old tradition.<br /><br />It’s not a claim that is repeated by ‘The Druid Network’ from what I can gather from their website, which is very sensible of them.<br /><br />Their founder, Emma Restall Orr was associated with the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids which founded by Ross Nichols in 1972.<br /><br />There are a several Druidic groups, and the recent history of the movement has a little of the ‘People’s Judean Front’ about it. But then so do most groups & movements, I suppose. I’ve seen it many times, and you probably have too.<br /><br />Jo Brand said that Wiccan is Old-English for basket-case. I repeat it here because it’s a funny joke and I like Jo Brand.<br /><br />But I’ll qualify that by reminding you that, frankly, they don’t believe in anything sillier than any other religions, perhaps less silly than many. As I said, just picture me and King Arthur in the pub …<br /><br />But despite scoring well on the ‘no sillier’ index, should we be granting charitable status to Druids? Or any other religious groups for that matter?<br /><br />Watch this space for part 2.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612563867390490775.post-77364313900945711062010-09-26T17:31:00.012+01:002010-09-26T21:30:30.423+01:00The Changing Face of Anti-Vax<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj18-NoayXMKRH6hz5P4_yKSyleB9PpY_ow9GP7hOgVZqvWIDfheS9EE_2aJtGegZVCAUxmgTNsbA2dXNjD9xMKr3F-He2mVpLMFkYTtFDYeOeMol3GW-iju4OSQUtBJdMZVapzvhzfDHWv/s1600/Montagu.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 148px; height: 195px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj18-NoayXMKRH6hz5P4_yKSyleB9PpY_ow9GP7hOgVZqvWIDfheS9EE_2aJtGegZVCAUxmgTNsbA2dXNjD9xMKr3F-He2mVpLMFkYTtFDYeOeMol3GW-iju4OSQUtBJdMZVapzvhzfDHWv/s320/Montagu.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5521260915018963266" border="0" /></a>Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was a very well-travelled eighteenth century aristocrat whose husband was appointed ambassador to Istanbul. Fortunately for us, she was also a prolific letter writer. Her legacy is still <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Turkish-Embassy-Letters-Wortley-Montagu/dp/1853816795">in print</a> today.<br /><br />Lady Montagu had been scarred badly by a bout of smallpox in her youth. She was fortunate; many who contracted smallpox at the time, like her own brother, died.<br /><br />So when she found out about a Turkish procedure to safeguard against severe smallpox, she had her son treated. She went on to introduce the habit to some of the upper classes in England, the Royal children among them. This was against considerable resistance from the medical profession of the time, but I’ve written about exactly how useful they were in that era <a href="http://jourdemayne.blogspot.com/2009/09/ignominious-history-of-now-noble.html">here</a>.<br /><br />‘Variolation’ is the introduction of a small quantity of the milder of the two forms of smallpox – Variola minor – into a subject. Given that the dose was tiny, that it was of the mild form of the disease and that it may have been administered via a cut in the skin (rather than by inhalation), the effect was to produce antibodies against future infection, but not the full-blown disease.<br /><br />Edward Jenner later used cowpox pathogens to achieve the same result. Both of these procedures are inoculation – introduction of live pathogens – rather than vaccination which uses ‘dead’, attenuated or partial viruses.<br /><br />I write ‘dead’ in quotes because I seem to remember that the concept of life as applied to viruses has some considerable philosophical encumberances. It’s fascinating, but we don’t need to worry about it for the purposes of this blogpost.<br /><br />Smallpox has now been eradicated. It probably exists somewhere in a military laboratory. Let’s hope the custodians are on our side.<br /><br />Major efforts are being made in polio eradication too and the fight has gone well but for several setbacks, one of which was a conspiracy epidemic in Nigeria where people thought that vaccination made girls sterile. Memes can kill.<br /><br />In the UK variolation was made illegal in 1840, but that was OK because the same act of Parliament provided for a free vaccine which had been developed since Lady Montagu’s day. In 1853 vaccination of small children became mandatory, and other acts covering other classes of person came in later.<br /><br />In the late 19th/early 20th century, there were get-out clauses of varying efficacy for those with conscientious objections to vaccination. But by then, they were far less likely to suffer anyway, since they would have benefited from the prophylactic effect of herd immunity – everybody else’s vaccinations.<br /><br />In the USA in 1905, Jacobson vs Masachusetts reached the Supreme Court where it was determined that states had the authority to impose compulsory vaccination. Sometimes, the rights of the few must submit to the rights of the many.<br /><br />Which seems to have created quite a backlash at the time. I was in New York a couple of weeks ago and went to a couple of flea markets in the Chelsea district. It’s between the old meatpacking district and Hell’s kitchen. If you don’t think that sounds too salubrious, it wasn’t. Now however, it’s been yuppified and you can buy vintage brass sconces for $275 (They were pretty, but I didn’t).<br /><br />Instead, I went for a few copies of ‘The Quest’: September 1926, February and April 1927’s editions. ‘The Quest’ had been published in Brooklyn for ten cents a copy, and its mission had been ‘against compulsory vaccination and animal cruelty’.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeq5imfujUJC1McRHvT3yzTZLAvTRdjSZRSzB17URhG76wFOeS2sN9LfIeuNjBzNF7Mve9Uk5kTmidMkZeJgAZP-N0ZMhk9lhBS7Ai_M_fcV4lnjt1_hzGhDJ3ktk5IjNwJZDyDeUGTQxk/s1600/quest.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 154px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeq5imfujUJC1McRHvT3yzTZLAvTRdjSZRSzB17URhG76wFOeS2sN9LfIeuNjBzNF7Mve9Uk5kTmidMkZeJgAZP-N0ZMhk9lhBS7Ai_M_fcV4lnjt1_hzGhDJ3ktk5IjNwJZDyDeUGTQxk/s320/quest.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5521267301672042210" border="0" /></a><br />This really was a niche publication. I’ve Googled it and have had a very hard time finding out much about the magazine or the publisher. But I can tell you that Louis S Siegfried seems to have published at least one other other anti-vax publication (Spivak, John L. The Medical Trust Unmasked: The Story of a Gigantic Conspiracy - Louis S. Siegfried,1929, 1930, 1961 – a first edition seems to go for about USD25) and may have spent some time in jail for his beliefs.<br /><br />Here is an article he wrote asking ‘<a href="http://www.jourdemayne.com/vaccination/TheQuestFeb1926p13.pdf">Is Vaccination Harmless</a>’.<br /><br />In the April 1927 pamphlet we read the case of Mrs. Carolyne Burns who refused to have her son vaccinated. The Department of Education had complained that he could not attend school. Mrs Burns said:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">“I demand the right of a public school education for my boy and I can’t see why he shouldn’t get it. I object to vaccination and I won’t submit my boy to such a dangerous practice.</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">It is un-American and unconstitutional to force this pus into the system of a healthy child … the school won’t accept him and I won’t have him vaccinated. What can I do?”</span><br /><br />Mrs Burns was found not guilty – although quite how, I’m not sure.<br /><br />February 1927 has a page on ‘What Physicians say about VACCINATION’, opposite a page which entreats people to ‘Stop Pus Squirting’.<br /><br />Page 5 covers the furore surrounding a leading article in the Lancet (September 4th and October 9th 1926?) in which a causal link was claimed between death due to encephalomyelitis (inflammation of the brain and spinal-cord) and vaccination.<br /><br />It’s a fascinating piece of social history. I’ve put a couple of pdfs here so you can read if you’re interested.<br /><ul><li><a href="http://www.jourdemayne.com/vaccination/TheQuestApr1927p1">The Dangers of Vaccination as Told By a Medical Doctor</a><br /></li></ul><ul><li><a href="http://www.jourdemayne.com/vaccination/TheQuestApr1927p13-15.pdf">Vaccination Predisposes to Other Diseases</a><br /></li></ul><br />The three oft-repeated errors in ‘The Quest’ are argument from authority (there appear to have been plenty of anti-vax doctors willing to write), confusion of correlation with causation and conspiracy theories citing vested interests who were allegedly pushing vaccines for financial gains.<br /><br />Plus ca change, huh?<br /><br />I’m not sure whether the vaccinations I received as a child were administered under a legal compulsion. It wouldn’t have made a difference though. My grandmother’s and mother’s generations saw whooping cough, polio and tuberculosis first hand. They couldn’t believe their luck that these conditions and others could be prevented safely and for free.<br /><br />But it seems we’re now taking our good health for granted. Despite the evidence that vaccinations are safer than outbreaks, anti-vax is on the rise in a generation which has not experienced much epidemic disease.<br /><br />Andrew Wakefield’s 1998 'Lancet' paper drawing a link between autism and vaccination has been discredited, but large swathes of the confident middle classes – ‘over-Googled people’, as they were described to me at a US <a href="http://jourdemayne.blogspot.com/2010/09/funny-who-you-bump-into.html">vaccination drive recently</a> - are refusing to have their children protected.<br /><br />I love vintage publications and enjoy reading the voices from history. It's interesting to see that anti-vaxers have gone from being doctors (in Lady Montagu's day), to anti-federal individualists, some with religious interests (early 20th century) to middle-class worriers with benzadrine-type levels of Google usage.<br /><br />But wouldn't it be nice if the anti-vax message of ‘The Quest’ wasn’t still so current?Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4