pick up the pieces of the ghost in the attic that'll never quite leave

On campus, one of the things one occasionally notices are the lists for the debate competitions held by the two largest student societies, the Phil and the Hist.

I've been spitting furious since I saw the two propositions that it is thought appropriate to debate for fun this week. This House Believes "That Gay Marriage Undermines Family Values" and "That Man Has Dominion Over The Animals."

I know that college debating societies are an old, old tradition. But is it really too much to ask that they practice their debating skills on propositions which do not require that one side (the Yes side, in this case) argue from hurtful, entitled, unethical assumptions?

Words mean things. Treating subjects which affect the lives of real people as topics for what is, essentially, a game, shows critical lack of empathy. Not to mention a critical lack of awareness of the harm done by repeating poisonous, unethically based arguments. Whether or not one actually believes them - whether or not one is only trying to score points - someone in one's audience might take this more seriously.

(As a point of principle, I believe that in front of an audience, one should never make an argument in which one does not truly believe.)

The first debate proposition is hurtful and poisonous to civil dialogue. No one's "family values" are harmed by committed loving relationships. Not unless one is a bigot, or a misogynist who finds the possibility of a relationship of equals threatening to his self-image. Emasculating, even! (But there's no virtue in dominance, merely constant insecurity.) To propose it as the subject of a debate suggests that both sides have potentially equal claim to validity. Which is to say, that one might with equal virtue and equal aplomb argue for and against the civil rights - the right to isonomia, as the ancient Greeks might say, an equal share in the law - of one's fellow citizens.

This is not right.

The second proposition is perhaps less hurtful, but no less problematic. The formulation of the proposition implies a religious or Victorian-progressive rational for "Dominion," and the use of the "Man" as shorthand for the entire human species is troubling. And as for the word dominion itself...

Dominion, as we all know, is derived from the Latin dominus, "lord," "master." The word dominate also derives from this root.

These words aren't just sounds. Each one carries a specific semantic significance, both in its bare dictionary definition, and in the evocative, implied overtones - the poetics of speech, if you will. "That Men have Lordship over the Animals" (if we interpret the proposition in terms of its implied, as well as its overt, meanings) is neither a neutral proposition, or a neutral formulation. That men may tame, train and kill at will - for as the proposition is formulated, it does not allow the question of ought to enter - is not a morally neutral position for which to argue. It is a position of entitlement, and ultimately, by semantic implication, a destructive one. To have dominion over is close kin to dominate, and dominate is an ugly, violent verb. One dominates through force, not through consensus, or negotiation, or live-and-let-live.

Words mean things. Treating these propositions - these statements - as a game severs them from their actuality, from the thing itself, the lived experience which the words signify. Detached from their living reality, to the debators they may have no actualised meaning, no true weight and freight and significance.

Just words. But words are how we explain the world to ourselves, how we articulate our understanding. By implying false equivalencies, equal ethical weight, when debate is treated as a game where words and statements have no true effect, that understanding is poisoned.

That's a good quarter of the problem with politics. But I suppose that's a rant for another day.

pick up the pieces of the ghost in the attic that'll never quite leave

On campus, one of the things one occasionally notices are the lists for the debate competitions held by the two largest student societies, the Phil and the Hist.

I've been spitting furious since I saw the two propositions that it is thought appropriate to debate for fun this week. This House Believes "That Gay Marriage Undermines Family Values" and "That Man Has Dominion Over The Animals."

I know that college debating societies are an old, old tradition. But is it really too much to ask that they practice their debating skills on propositions which do not require that one side (the Yes side, in this case) argue from hurtful, entitled, unethical assumptions?

Words mean things. Treating subjects which affect the lives of real people as topics for what is, essentially, a game, shows critical lack of empathy. Not to mention a critical lack of awareness of the harm done by repeating poisonous, unethically based arguments. Whether or not one actually believes them - whether or not one is only trying to score points - someone in one's audience might take this more seriously.

(As a point of principle, I believe that in front of an audience, one should never make an argument in which one does not truly believe.)

The first debate proposition is hurtful and poisonous to civil dialogue. No one's "family values" are harmed by committed loving relationships. Not unless one is a bigot, or a misogynist who finds the possibility of a relationship of equals threatening to his self-image. Emasculating, even! (But there's no virtue in dominance, merely constant insecurity.) To propose it as the subject of a debate suggests that both sides have potentially equal claim to validity. Which is to say, that one might with equal virtue and equal aplomb argue for and against the civil rights - the right to isonomia, as the ancient Greeks might say, an equal share in the law - of one's fellow citizens.

This is not right.

The second proposition is perhaps less hurtful, but no less problematic. The formulation of the proposition implies a religious or Victorian-progressive rational for "Dominion," and the use of the "Man" as shorthand for the entire human species is troubling. And as for the word dominion itself...

Dominion, as we all know, is derived from the Latin dominus, "lord," "master." The word dominate also derives from this root.

These words aren't just sounds. Each one carries a specific semantic significance, both in its bare dictionary definition, and in the evocative, implied overtones - the poetics of speech, if you will. "That Men have Lordship over the Animals" (if we interpret the proposition in terms of its implied, as well as its overt, meanings) is neither a neutral proposition, or a neutral formulation. That men may tame, train and kill at will - for as the proposition is formulated, it does not allow the question of ought to enter - is not a morally neutral position for which to argue. It is a position of entitlement, and ultimately, by semantic implication, a destructive one. To have dominion over is close kin to dominate, and dominate is an ugly, violent verb. One dominates through force, not through consensus, or negotiation, or live-and-let-live.

Words mean things. Treating these propositions - these statements - as a game severs them from their actuality, from the thing itself, the lived experience which the words signify. Detached from their living reality, to the debators they may have no actualised meaning, no true weight and freight and significance.

Just words. But words are how we explain the world to ourselves, how we articulate our understanding. By implying false equivalencies, equal ethical weight, when debate is treated as a game where words and statements have no true effect, that understanding is poisoned.

That's a good quarter of the problem with politics. But I suppose that's a rant for another day.

Books 2010: "Who is the doctor in this city now?"

Now that I have the previous post off my chest...

Books 2010: 110-111


110. Cherie Priest, Dreadnought.

Set in the same continuity as Boneshaker, and startlingly different. When nurse Mercy Lynch learns that her estranged father has fallen ill, she sets out to travel across the American continent to see him, through an alt-hist steampunk nightmare of the American Civil War. Now with extra added zombies!

I liked this book a lot, though not as much as I wanted to. Jarringly, Priest - while remaining in Lynch's point of view - sometimes jumps from referring to Lynch as "Mercy" to calling her "the nurse." Not very very often, but often enough to jolt me out of the reading experience. The battle and travel and details of the setting are convincing to me, but because of its structure, the book feels a little off-balance in terms of tension and resolution. And the climactic zombie encounter did not satisfy me sufficiently, as it appeared to end too quickly. I think I was hoping for a book as claustrophic as Boneshaker and got a completely different experience. It's probably not helped by my ambivalent attitude towards people who set out to reconcile with their estranged fathers.

(Personally, I might visit mine if he bothered to tell me he was dying? But only in order to have the satisfaction of telling him to his face that he was a complete and utter shit. And possibly making sure it hurt. Issues. I have them.)

Anyway. It's a good book. And I really liked the battle scenes and Mercy's encounters with other travellers. The black lady with the restaurant franchise, the boy with the club foot, Miss Theodora Clay. They stand out.


non-fiction

111. Robin Mitchell-Boyask, Plague and the Athenian Imagination: Drama, history and the cult of Asclepius, Cambridge, 2008.

I don't have the chops to discuss whether or not this book works. It looks in very technical detail at the fifth century BC tragedies (with a title like that, I was hoping for a diachronic survey, but alas no) which use a nosological vocabulary, and relates them both to the plague at Athens recounted in Thucydides (probably striking first in 430 BC) and to the construction of the Asklepion on the south slope of the acropolis, directly behind the theatre of Dionysos (c. 420 BC).

Table of Contents.

Most useful from my perspective is probably chapter three, "The language of disease in tragedy," which itemises the uses of loimos, plague, and nosos, sickness, in tragic drama. Loimos appears to be a much more fraught word than nosos, which is useful to know. Also useful is the discussion of Euripides' Heracles in chapter eight, which points out that at the end of that play, Theseus tells Heracles he is no longer Heracles, "because he is ill." Which is a statement which bears much thinking about, as an articulation of the effect of illness on the self.

Anyway.

Books 2010: "Who is the doctor in this city now?"

Now that I have the previous post off my chest...

Books 2010: 110-111


110. Cherie Priest, Dreadnought.

Set in the same continuity as Boneshaker, and startlingly different. When nurse Mercy Lynch learns that her estranged father has fallen ill, she sets out to travel across the American continent to see him, through an alt-hist steampunk nightmare of the American Civil War. Now with extra added zombies!

I liked this book a lot, though not as much as I wanted to. Jarringly, Priest - while remaining in Lynch's point of view - sometimes jumps from referring to Lynch as "Mercy" to calling her "the nurse." Not very very often, but often enough to jolt me out of the reading experience. The battle and travel and details of the setting are convincing to me, but because of its structure, the book feels a little off-balance in terms of tension and resolution. And the climactic zombie encounter did not satisfy me sufficiently, as it appeared to end too quickly. I think I was hoping for a book as claustrophic as Boneshaker and got a completely different experience. It's probably not helped by my ambivalent attitude towards people who set out to reconcile with their estranged fathers.

(Personally, I might visit mine if he bothered to tell me he was dying? But only in order to have the satisfaction of telling him to his face that he was a complete and utter shit. And possibly making sure it hurt. Issues. I have them.)

Anyway. It's a good book. And I really liked the battle scenes and Mercy's encounters with other travellers. The black lady with the restaurant franchise, the boy with the club foot, Miss Theodora Clay. They stand out.


non-fiction

111. Robin Mitchell-Boyask, Plague and the Athenian Imagination: Drama, history and the cult of Asclepius, Cambridge, 2008.

I don't have the chops to discuss whether or not this book works. It looks in very technical detail at the fifth century BC tragedies (with a title like that, I was hoping for a diachronic survey, but alas no) which use a nosological vocabulary, and relates them both to the plague at Athens recounted in Thucydides (probably striking first in 430 BC) and to the construction of the Asklepion on the south slope of the acropolis, directly behind the theatre of Dionysos (c. 420 BC).

Table of Contents.

Most useful from my perspective is probably chapter three, "The language of disease in tragedy," which itemises the uses of loimos, plague, and nosos, sickness, in tragic drama. Loimos appears to be a much more fraught word than nosos, which is useful to know. Also useful is the discussion of Euripides' Heracles in chapter eight, which points out that at the end of that play, Theseus tells Heracles he is no longer Heracles, "because he is ill." Which is a statement which bears much thinking about, as an articulation of the effect of illness on the self.

Anyway.