Does this give you hope?
Alongside Twitter and Tumblr, we’ve also seen the proliferation of ultra-brief update sites like F My Life, Texts From Last Night, and My Life Is Average. They’re borderline-addictive to read, but a lot of the posts can be pretty depressing and/or depraved. I sometimes like to check out the sites It Made My Day and Gives Me Hope for more positive stories. IMMD makes me smile because the stories are so bizarre and funny, while GMH is more of the inspirational variety — so much so that it occasionally comes full circle around to sadness again. You know, kids with terminal cancer saying really sweet things to comfort their parents, formerly suicidal teens finding a reason to love life and finally stop cutting themselves, stories like this.
Lately GMH has been making me sad, but not quite for the usual reason. Here are a few recent, poignant examples of this depressing flavor of “inspirational.” All the bold and extra spacing is original, from the site.
Last Sunday, my dad was at a church service in Austin, TX. An obviously homeless man sat next to him in the pew.
During the offering, the man put $2 into the basket.
Selflessness GMH.
That’s right, we’re supposed to be hopeful about humanity because a man who really couldn’t afford it somehow scraped together some money to give to a church. Aren’t churches supposed to be helping the poor, not taking their money? I don’t know what it means to be “obviously homeless,” but I assume it means he appeared unwashed, with ragged or dirty clothes, and maybe seemed noticeably in need of medical or dental care. I’m pretty sure he could have put those couple dollars to better use at a laundromat, or Goodwill, or a grocery store. What’s the great thing the church is going to do with it — buy some new hymnals? Send some solar-powered audio Bibles to Haiti? Best case scenario, they put it towards a soup kitchen, a shelter, or other resources for the neediest in society. I think Jesus would want this man to keep his two dollars, this week and every week, at least until he is able to get his own life back on track. (Or for him to give away as much money to the church as possible, so God would make him rich. Either way.)
Today, the pastor of my church anounced that his 19-year-old daughter was pregnant out of wed-lock.
As the pastor’s wife began to cry, a little boy ran up to her and hugged her saying, “It’s okay! Babies are the best thing in the world, no matter what.” GMH
I’m sorry, no. It does not give me hope to think that this 19-year-old girl — just getting started with adulthood and figuring out what life she wants for herself — is going to be putting her life on hold indefinitely to raise a child she is probably nowhere near ready to care for, even if she had a stable partner to help, which it sounds like she doesn’t. It does not give me hope to think of the child who will grow up around grandparents (and presumably also parent/s) who were sorrowful and ashamed when they anticipated the baby’s birth, rather than proud and eager to move forward into a new and exciting part of their lives. Without further details, I am also left to assume that this girl probably missed out on anything resembling comprehensive sex education, at home or at school, all in the name of purity and devoutness. I am left to assume that if she had been more informed about how babies are made and not made, this whole thing could have been avoided. Look, I like babies too. Babies are great. But at some point we have to admit that being pregnant is not an awesome development for every female person at every point in time. Pretending otherwise is just sad.
I recently rung up a young boy and his mother. When he saw me at the register, wearing a hijab, he grinned broadly at me. As they were walking away afterwards, he tugged on his mom’s sleeve and said,
“Did you see her, ma? She’s gorgeous! I bet that’s why she’s all covered up.”
He GMH.
This anecdote fails to give me hope for precisely the reason it seems to give hope to others: this little boy is exactly right. I wouldn’t stop a woman from wearing a hijab if she really wanted to; I appreciate the importance of cultural history and tradition in some people’s lives. For some, the hijab is basically just a form of traditional dress, so who cares about where it came from. But it is important to remember that the origins of the tradition are pretty suspicious from a gender equality standpoint. There is no clear commandment in the Koran that women must cover themselves in precisely this way. The commonly cited passages sound more like suggestions, and are not specific. An ultimately more revealing passage can be found in the hadiths: “O Allah’s Apostle! I wish you ordered your wives to cover themselves from the men because good and bad ones talk to them.” Yes, by request rather than by divine order, these women (well, at least Muhammad’s wives) must be covered (in some way or other) because they are getting nonzero attention from men, and this ought to be stopped. That is the philosophy behind this tradition. So yes, it would seem that you are all covered up because you are too gorgeous to be seen by men around you. It’s nice that a little boy thought you looked pretty even though you were dressed differently than most of the people he saw in your store, but his comment is so emblematic of a larger problem that it doesn’t give me hope, it takes some of my hope away.
What is Acts 29?
You may recall Pastor Winfield Bevins from my post last week. Pastor Bevins’ byline on the Resurgence blog lists him as an “Acts 29 Pastor.” Curious as to what that was, I first tried to look up Acts 29 on Bible Gateway, but apparently it doesn’t exist. (Acts stops at 28.) So, I followed the link at the bottom of the Resurgence site to Acts 29 Network.
I couldn’t find any explicit explanation of the name on their site, but I assume their intention is to imply that their work is the “next chapter,” as it were, of the “Acts of the Apostles” (or the “Acts of the Holy Spirit,” whatever you prefer to call it). Their About section says that “Acts 29 Network exists to start churches that plant churches.” They go on to say that their intention is “to plant 1,000 new churches in the next 10 years.” (That’s one new church about every three and a half days, so… good choice not to have a starting date prominently displayed. Good luck with that!) The page explaining their doctrine says that they are “first Christians, second Evangelicals, third Missional, and fourth Reformed.”
Well, okay, so what does this doctrine actually say? Most of it is pretty straightforward. I did like the line: “First, we are Christians which distinguishes us from other world religions and cults.” Heh. Okay, if you say so. As Evangelicals they “believe the Bible to be the inspired, the only infallible, authoritative Word of God,” and you already know what I think about that subject. I’m curious which parts of the Bible they’re choosing to care about when they say that, as Missionals, they “believe that our local churches must be faithful to the content of unchanging Biblical doctrine,” and I also wonder how their churches can do that and simultaneously “be faithful to the continually changing context of the culture(s) in which they minister.” All the bullet points under the list for being Reformed sound pretty traditional to me; some other time I’ll look into what the term means in this context.
Of perhaps more note are the things which Act 29 Network does not endorse. There is a long list.
For example, they write, “We are not fundamentalists who retreat from cultural involvement and transformation, but rather missionaries faithful both to the content of Scripture and context of ministry.” They also write, “We are not liberals who embrace culture without discernment and compromise the distinctives of the gospel, but rather Christians who believe the truths of the Bible are eternal and therefore fitting for every time, place, and people.” (Aside: note the implication that “liberal” and “Christian” are mutually exclusive… also, that liberals don’t use “discernment.”)
First of all, I’m not sure I would say that fundamentalism is generally known for advocating retreat from attempts to transform culture. But even if we take that for granted, what exactly does it mean when they say they’ll be faithful to the context of ministry, if they think there is one set of rules for everyone at every time in every place? It sure sounds like they respect cultural differences, but they have two distinct bullet points in this list proclaiming that they are not “relativists.” I guess they remain faithful to the context of ministry by telling people to change only in the specific ways they need to. But they’re not fundamentalists! They just think the Bible has only one set of truths which absolutely everyone ought to live by!
They also have a statement called Acts 29 and Alcohol [PDF] which lists vomiting as among one of many sins resulting from drunkenness (citing three verses, none of which seem to really say that it’s a sin, just that it’s nasty). I guess you’re just out of luck if you get the flu or food poisoning!
But my favorite thing that Acts 29 Network doesn’t like, other than fundamentalists, liberals, and vomit, is egalitarianism. Yeah, that totally crazy notion that people should be treated as equals, with the same rights. In a blockquote so you can’t miss it:
We are not egalitarians and do believe that men should head their homes and male elders/pastors should lead their churches with masculine love like Jesus Christ.
Well, that sheds some light on this mysterious no-girls-allowed event that Act 29 is apparently promoting in Columbus, OH called Act Like Men. I know many evangelical Christians think wives should be subservient to their husbands, but I always thought “egalitarian” was an unambiguously positive word. If you were going to say that you didn’t think men and women have equal worth, I’d expect you’d find some more positive way to say it. Maybe you “believe in traditional gender roles,” or perhaps you “believe in celebrating the naturally different strengths of men and women.” Both of those are crap (the first slightly more than the second), but at least they don’t sound so blatantly awful. It’s really demonstrative of exactly how anti-woman this group is, that they don’t even perceive a negative connotation from saying, “We are not egalitarians.” Even a genuinely stingy person would probably describe themselves as frugal instead.
I know that some people are less than thrilled when I do these “somebody is wrong on the internet” kind of posts. To be honest, it’s not my favorite thing either. But it feels important. This isn’t just somebody; this is a large group of somebodies trying to start a new church every three or four days. This is truly a network of organizations, spread out all over the world. The Resurgence blog, just one part of the Acts 29 Network, has a sidebar promoting their Facebook page where they have over 14,000 fans. They have more fans than Fareed Zakaria, even if you add together the page for just himself and for his CNN show. I know that’s a silly, random measure, but I think it’s enough to say that if it’s worth discussing Zakaria’s opinions here, it’s worth discussing Acts 29′s.
Also, I hope that a couple of those 14,000+ fans, and some prospective future ones, stumble across this post and give it some real thought. Does this group’s belief system really make sense to you? (If so, please explain it to me.) Is this really the kind of group you want to be a part of?
Rooting for the team
Are you registered with a particular political party because you agree with their platform? Or do you agree with their platform because you’re a member of that party?
Do you follow a particular religion because you agree with its teachings and its characterization of the world? Or do you agree with its teachings because you’re a follower of that religion?
Is your goal to find ideas that you agree with, or to make your team the winning team?
This is part reflection on Friday’s post and the comments that followed it, and part inspired by some other things I’ve been noticing lately. Students wearing T-shirts that look like university sports fan gear but turn out to be promoting their religious student group. Pundits on TV talking about how to reform the Republican party’s image, or how to make the GOP more appealing to young people or to non-white people. The Catholic church trying to entice some Anglicans back into Catholicism. And of course, Democratic senators more willing to gut their health care plan in exchange for an extra vote or two than they are to advocate for and explain their original plan.
There’s nothing particularly logical about people’s allegiances to sports teams, and that’s okay. Maybe you root for a team because they represent your city, or a city you used to live in, or a city you wish you lived in. This is completely arbitrary, though at least it makes some intuitive sense. But plenty of people don’t root for their “home team,” opting instead to support the one with better stats and more success. Others like cheering for the underdog and deliberately pick a team with a history of failures. There are plenty of even more arbitrary reasons for picking your favorite team. I used to love the Florida Marlins and the Colorado Rockies solely because I liked their logos the best. (I was about 9, and I liked teal and purple. What can I say?)
Arbitrariness is okay in choosing a sports team to root for, though, because they don’t matter. Sorry, Yankees and Phillies fans, but it’s pure entertainment, with no actual ramifications. That’s why I think it’s so pernicious when people treat their other associations in life as though they were sports teams.
Political parties are alliances of people whose core values and ideas are similar enough that they feel they can cooperate to create the best policies for the country. There’s nothing magical about them. There’s no pledge you’re forced to take when you register as a member of one party that you have to support their platform forever and ever, even if you change your mind. The way it’s supposed to work is, you make up your mind about your political philosophy and then you try find a party you’re willing to ally yourself with. And perhaps you don’t find one. That’s okay too.
As for religion, I don’t know. Obviously my perspective is that we should all be searching for truth, and we shouldn’t be afraid to abandon a belief system if we find it to be false. Also obviously, though, most religions teach that there is something “magical about them,” and that you have to believe things that seem like falsehoods or you are committing a grave sin. Still, if your religious beliefs mandate that you accept that pi is exactly 3 or that ancient people sailed from the Middle East to the Americas (twice!) or that… no, I don’t know how to sum this up in a single phrase…. Anyway, my point is that hopefully there’s some line at which most people would say, “This religion cannot be true, and I will leave it to go look for a true one now.” (…And perhaps you don’t find one. That’s okay too.) Plenty of people do go on personal religious quests, and convert to new religions sometimes multiple times. I’m sure I’m not alone in my assessment that this is an important question to answer for oneself.
The real goal—in both these cases—is to pin down the truth about the way the world works and the way it ought to work. It’s not about cheering as loudly as possible for whatever interpretation of things you happened to hear first; that won’t lead us to a better society in any sense. If your team has good ideas, those ideas should be all the promotion you need. If people aren’t interested in your ideas, don’t look only to marketing some kind of “team spirit.” Sure, that’s useful to get people’s attention at first, but what you really need are better ways of explaining your ideas. Or perhaps it’s the ideas themselves that need a makeover.
Bad news from Israel
I heard this story on NPR’s Morning Edition yesterday, and can’t get it out of my mind. Sheera Frenkel reports:
FRENKEL: Every night, David, who asked not to be called by his real name, patrols this and other neighboring Jewish settlements. His mission is to find Arab-Jewish couples and break up their dates.
DAVID: (Through translator) My heart hurts every time I see a Jewish girl with an Arab. It’s extremely upsetting. I asked myself: How did we get to this situation? How did we descend to this level? It is a serious step backwards, in our eyes.
FRENKEL: David is the leader of a group of vigilantes that goes by several names, including Fire For Judaism and Love of Youth. They say they number between 30 and 40 men and patrol the streets each night. Officially, they’re on the lookout for any mixed couples, but T.S.(ph) a member of the group who often serves as David’s driver, says the problem lies solely with Arab men dating Jewish girls.
This is terrifying and unbelievable. Perhaps you, like me, have been lulled into complacency thinking that the days of Jim Crow laws and the like are behind us as a species, but this is happening today, in a modern democracy. Now, there will always be some crazy isolationist fringe groups out there, and many people certainly do disapprove of their own children dating outside of their own culture or religion. It’s not hard to imagine that a couple people would feel so motivated as to walk around outside and yell some threatening things. Some people are jerks. But while this isn’t Jim Crow, it’s happening on a large scale. In Pisgat Ze’ev alone, there are apparently around three dozen men on patrol every night, and this is happening in many other cities as well. According to NPR, at least one of those cities possesses a government-run dating patrol, not vigilantes. This is serious.
On another level, this terrifies me because the Jews I know are American Jews, and I think that the result (in the US at least) of years of oppression and minority status is that Jews are particularly aware of the importance of protecting minority rights and personal freedoms. Somehow, it seems that if anyone would understand the danger of society embracing an ideology like that of these dating patrols, it ought to be the citizens of the Jewish state.
I haven’t been able to find any evidence that any high government officials in Israel have come out opposing these patrolling mobs, or of police crackdowns against them. I hope they get their act together on this soon.
How useful is dialogue?
One of the things that’s made me too exhausted to blog lately is a real-world manifestation of some of my blogly endeavors. I’ve been having these long, philosophical conversations with some of my Christian friends about exactly what their religion means to them (I was happy to find that these friends were open to such discussions!) and I read an extremely large portion of the Bible over the course of about a week in order to be more informed. My original goal in this was to broaden my own horizons and understand how intelligent people justify unproven and unfounded beliefs to themselves, and if I was lucky, to communicate some appreciation of how atheists are capable of being thoughtful, moral people even while not believing in God and/or Jesus. I’m not sure I got anywhere.
What I’m sure I succeeded at is making myself much more angry about problems with Christianity and religion in general that I used to just chuckle at and toss aside, and much more frustrated with people who I know are smart enough to analyze complex ideas but who seem unable to escape the mental compartment they’ve built around their religious beliefs. There’s no way that people’s moral beliefs are actually formed by Christianity’s teachings, because they’re able to cast out any unsavory (to them) messages and follow only the ones they like, but they can’t see this in themselves. They construct elaborate webs of language that prevent them from noticing any contradictions in their ideas or behavior. This same web deflects any questions I might ask, turning the conversation into a meandering stream of non-answers and platitudes. Aside from this, I had just read all the nasty things that the Bible says about nonbelievers and was trying to start some dialogue about that, but they all seemed indifferent to its offensiveness.
At the same time, I’m sure they mean well. They genuinely do believe what it is they’re claiming to, and it’s difficult to question what you really do perceive to be undeniably true. Sam Harris recently published a paper on this, which I read about over at Friendly Atheist. The basic outcome of the study, which used fMRI while asking participants to respond to statements as either true or false, was that the brain responds the same way to “regular” facts as it does to religious beliefs. That is to say, a believer knows the fact of God’s existence and a nonbeliever knows the fact of God’s nonexistence in the same way, neurologically, that they both know that the sun rises in the morning and that water is wet.
So what are we supposed to do? Keep on ignoring it? I don’t feel like I can ignore it when politicians justify their laws based on their supposedly religious morality, when people proclaim their religious judgments in everyday conversation, when people come up to me as I walk around campus and shove papers about Bible study groups in my face, heck, when I have to look at people’s happy T-shirt slogans and Facebook status updates about how Jesus loves everybody and prayer will fix everything. If everybody else gets to express their side, I want to express mine. At the same time, the dialogue seems futile. Nobody’s going to change their mind, and it doesn’t even feel like we’re speaking the same language. It just makes me exhausted and depressed, and obviously that’s no good either.
What do you think?
Questionable Ethics #3
Welcome back to another edition of Questionable Ethics, where we demonstrate to Randy Cohen and the rest of the New York Times Magazine staff that ethics aren’t something you can simply decree. Let’s get right to it; here’s this week’s column and here’s the first letter.
My daughter, in her late 20s, has a same-sex partner. Most of our very large, very Catholic family knows this except my husband’s parents.They have a summer home, and their rule is that nonmarried children and their opposite-sex partners may not share a bedroom. My daughter and her partner often claim a small room for two, and her grandparents regard the girls, who live together, as good friends. My younger daughter thinks it unfair that she and her boyfriend must sleep in separate rooms. We have a family reunion coming up. Should I say something to my in-laws about my older daughter? NAME WITHHELD
Cohen says that it’s unethical for the writer to out her daughter without her knowledge or consent (unless some crazy monster threatens the globe, but can only be stopped by a lesbian). That seems straightforward enough. Then he goes on to assert that the daughter should “adhere to that rule or find another place to stay.” Sounds like a reasonable call, but what does it mean to adhere to the rule?
Perhaps the daughter and the girlfriend ought to admit that they are “nonmarried” and claim separate rooms. This will be confusing to everyone, since they have been sharing a room in the past. It effectively forces them to come out to the grandparents, which we’ve agreed is an unethical thing to do. (Ditto if they opt out and find their own room. What for? everyone will ask.) Additionally, the odds are pretty small that this family lives in a state where it is possible that this couple can currently become married. So they can’t stay in separate rooms as a nonmarried couple, and they can’t share a room as a married couple. It’s hardly ethical to compel a person to comply with a paradoxical rule like this.
Maybe this daughter simply can’t win with her grandparents. They disapprove of her sexual orientation, they disapprove of sex before marriage, they disapprove of same sex marriage. Yet she is (I assume) in a caring, committed, long-term relationship with someone she wants her extended family to get to know. At some point, one may certainly argue, the daughter is justified in defying rules which are oppressive and unfair. The spirit of the law her grandparents have laid down is that committed relationships are important, and promiscuity is to be discouraged. She is obeying the spirit of the law, and harming no one by ignoring the letter.
On a different course, one might point out that it’s unlikely the grandparents have no idea that these two young women are a couple. They’ve lived together for years. The friend always comes along on family trips, and is coming to a family reunion. I’ve never had that kind of relationship with a roommate, and I don’t know any people who have. One could suggest that the most ethical thing to do is to encourage the daughter to explain the situation to her grandparents, and allow the grandparents to decide which of their “family values” is most important: no homosexuality, no sex before marriage, or actually valuing your family.
Letter number two:
I locked my bicycle to a fence outside my building a few times over two weeks. One morning, it was gone. My landlady had the police remove it, claiming she tried to alert the owner by letting the air out of the tires. She left no note. At the precinct, an officer said she told them the bike had been there for three months. Fortunately, I reclaimed it undamaged. Unfortunately, the police cut the locks: replacement costs are $150. Should my landlady cover that? NAME WITHHELD, NEW YORK
Cohen claims that while the landlady had the legal right to have the bike removed, the ethical thing is for her to replace the broken locks and apologize. However, several points of fact are left ambiguous here. Perhaps they were trimmed out of the letter before publication. I am left wondering: does the fence count as part of the rental property? If so, then surely the writer is entitled to use it, just as one would have use of a lawn or a driveway that came along with a rental. Unless there was a clearly signed and established rule that bikes were not to be chained to the fence, it’s no more ethical (or legal) for the landlady to take the bike than it would be for her to go into the writer’s apartment and walk away with the television set. Of course, the entire building is technically the landlady’s property, but these rights of (reasonable) use are what is signed over in the lease.
If the fence is somehow distinctly part of the landlady’s property—for example, the writer rents a room or two in the landlady’s house, and all the other rooms in the house are considered solely hers—then it would appear that she acted completely within her rights and behaved appropriately. If you leave a bunch of your personal stuff on your neighbor’s porch without informing them, you effectively gave them your stuff. They have no obligation, legally or ethically, to tape a sign on it and wait ten days to see if anyone claimed it. That would actually seem kind of crazy. They are free to throw it away if they want to. The landlady’s actions could be seen as analogous to that sort of situation.
In the absence of answers to these questions, I don’t see how it’s possible to determine who is at fault, and who owes what to whom, and I don’t see how Randy Cohen can purport to have such authoritative knowledge on what is ethical here.
Think before you speak
An interesting story was brought to my attention by this Penny Arcade comic. Typically, Penny Arcade is about video games and the gaming community (of which I consider myself to be on the periphery), though they do occasionally cover topics of more general interest. This is one of these occasions, and the topic is the Think B4 You Speak campaign which aims to stop people from using the word “gay” as a derogatory term. There’s a news post that goes with the comic that explains what the cartoonists were thinking when they drew this.
I gather from that news post that Tycho is in favor of GLSEN (the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, which is running the campaign along with the Ad Council) and groups like it, and in favor of their general goal of tolerance of and respect for people regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity. I am, as well. I say this up front because I’m wary of being misunderstood (or encouraging readers to misunderstand someone else) on a sensitive topic like this.
The Think B4 You Speak campaign includes some print ads and some radio and TV ads. Three of the print ads they have on their site are structured in the same basic way: a teenager’s face fills most of the background, and text covers their face, saying:
- That’s so “jock who can complete a pass but not a sentence.”
- That’s so “cheerleader who like, can’t like, say smart stuff.”
- That’s so “gamer guy who has more videogames than friends.”
An inset at the bottom of the ad says, “Think that’s mean? How do you think ‘that’s so gay’ sounds? Hurtful. So, knock it off.”
Tycho’s reaction?
…Bigots and stupid kids speak this way expressly to promulgate the root concepts or to provoke a reaction. Telling them to “knock it off,” as this campaign hilariously does, is like exposing your belly to these wolves.
Lexically speaking, the word Gay is a battleground of warring meanings, uses, and baggage. The fact that the slur has retained its power – for all parties involved – is evidence that the conflict is ongoing, and that its destiny is not yet established. I have tremendous support for them in their aim: the wresting of language, which is identity, from the unworthy foe. If you want to hunt this kind of game, though, you need bigger ordnance.
This criticism is an important one. The ads come off as almost wimpy, merely pointing out that people’s feelings are hurt. That’s often the goal, “to provoke a reaction,” to make people feel insulted. The target audience may just think: “So what?”
My take on this campaign, however, would come from a slightly different angle. You might recall what I wrote about the Spread the Word campaign (against the word “retarded” as an insult), basically explaining that there is a negative quality to mental retardation that leads to its use in a derogatory context. For most people who use “gay” to mean “bad” or “stupid,” homosexuality itself is a negative quality. (Sure, there are some people who say it unthinkingly, but my sense is that they are a minority. I don’t know of any statistics on this; maybe I’m wrong. The lines given to the character of Gabe in the comic strip do illustrate basically what I imagine to be typical. He knows what he’s talking about when he says “gay.”) If you go back and read over those poster slogans, you’ll see that they all do refer to negative qualities: being unintelligent or illiterate or unliked by others. They didn’t choose to stop at, “That’s so cheerleader” or “That’s so jock” or “That’s so gamer”—they had to add extra phrases to make the statements actually sound insulting.
The point of this whole thing, as I understand it, isn’t just to stop people from insulting people. It’s to teach people that “gay” shouldn’t be an insult. To achieve that, you need to show that it’s just a descriptor, a part of some people’s identities. Maybe the posters would be better if they said things like, “Ugh, that’s so 27-year-old guy from Michigan.” Really basic, using innocuous qualities, but obviously intending to convey disgust. Then the point you’re making is a bit more clear: how would you like it if someone used your identity as an insult?
Of course, none of this erases the deeply held beliefs that many people have about homosexuals being condemned to hell. And there will probably always be some straight people who feel squeamish about homosexuality, simply because the orientation is unappealing to them. I think the best that society can hope for from this campaign and others like it is to establish that some things are off limits. You might personally be happy that you’re not a different religion or of a different ethnic background, because some of their traditions and customs don’t appeal to you, but that doesn’t make it okay to mock people who do belong to those groups. We need this rule to apply to sexuality as well.
It’s not clear that this campaign, as it is, is counterproductive, though… maybe at worst, just unproductive. Tycho wrote that “the conflict is ongoing, and that its destiny is not yet established.” This is the next phase of the conflict, the next statement in the social dialogue. It doesn’t have to end the conflict, but there’s nothing wrong with strategizing in the meantime about the most effective next step.
Attempting equality
My life is insane lately, and I really don’t have much time for blogging. I’ll hopefully be back for real in mid-to-late August. In the meantime, I thought you readers would find this image (from Fail Blog) interesting:
Two dolls for sale, identical in every way except skin and hair color—and price. The black doll is about two dollars cheaper than the white doll. Ridiculous! I was glad to see such a picture identified as a “fail.”
It got me to thinking, though, about the studies cited in Brown v. Board of Education and recreated by ABC News and others, which I read about not too long ago at Sociological Images. While it maybe less universal than it was a few decades ago, many black children will simultaneously identify a black doll as the one that looks like them and identify a white doll as the one that looks “nice” and “pretty.” You might expect that children would typically want to play with dolls that look like them, but white dolls tend to sell faster to people of all skin colors. (I remember an essay written by a woman who worked in an upscale toy store about how she had an easier time selling the broken, scuffed, white demo doll than the brand new non-white versions of the same doll. If I can find a link to that, I’ll stick in an update here.)
So what should we make of this? Is it the store’s fault that there is higher demand for one product than another? It makes a twisted kind of sense to shift prices like this, if your goal is to move more of the black dolls in your inventory. Higher demand of any product leads to higher prices for it, and lower demand encourages sellers to lower their prices. I still think the message that it sends, that depicting a black person is worth less than depicting a white person, is far too repugnant to justify the pricing. What do you think?
UPDATE: A commenter over at SocImages, in a post of theirs about this one (thanks for noticing, guys!), figured out the source of the story I had forgotten above. It’s from “This American Life,” by Chicago Public Radio, in an episode from January of this year. Go here to read about it or listen to the recording.
Left Behind
Remember that series of Left Behind books, the novelization of the book of Revelations? Did you know that they actually made it into a computer game? If you’re surprised by that, maybe you should sit down, because they have actually just released a sequel to the computer game. Apparently, the people are clamoring for more!
I’m not sure exactly who is clamoring or why, because the first game was not received well. And not just because of the premise. As this review on Gamestop said,”games are typically based on outlandish ideas, so it’s unfair to dismiss this one based on religious grounds.” The beginning paragraph of the review sums it up nicely, though:
Don’t mock Left Behind: Eternal Forces because it’s a Christian game. Mock it because it’s a very bad game. The real-time strategy/adventure game from Left Behind Games based on the best-selling series of novels from Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins will even let down born-again types who expect the Rapture to beam them up to heaven any day now. Nobody has enough faith to endure a game with such a hokey story, terrible mission design, serious problems with the interface and graphics, and loads of crippling bugs.
I don’t really have high hopes for Left Behind II, but something caught my eye in the press release. Left Behind Games, Inc. says, “Rather than the usual ‘winning’ by using weapons and killing the enemy, players are rewarded when their characters use the power of influence to bring about good rather than destruction.” That is the method of gameplay, as you may have already seen from the Gamestop review, and as described on the company’s website. (Warning: for some reason, a woman’s voice reads the first paragraph content aloud when you click.) It just seemed a little strange to me that the press release also described “skirmish battle multiplayer maps.” Skirmish? Battle?
The release also says that
[CEO Troy] Lyndon’s personal view is that the approach incorporated in all of Inspired Media games can help to counteract the violence affecting gamers, who have acted out aggressively in real-life.
I’m so tired of this. Yeah, yeah, maybe some kid who played Grand Theft Auto ran into a pedestrian in his parents’ car, and maybe some kid who loved to watch pay-per-view wrestling hit his brother in the head with a chair. But what if some kid who loved Superman jumped off his garage roof—so no more fictional flying? What if some kid who wanted to be just like the Little Mermaid and drowned in the backyard pool—no more fairy tales? We can hurl anecdotes at each other all day and never get anywhere. The fact is, the set of people who commit acts of violence does intersect with the set of people who play video games, because lots of people play video games. There are also many people who do violent things who do not play video games. One does not categorically cause the other.
I’m dismayed, but not surprised, by this idea that killing the enemy in a game set upon a fictional premise is very bad, but a brainwashing crusade is totally great. (From the Gamestop review: “your goal is not to wipe out the enemy as in a typical RTS game but to convert as many neutrals and baddies as possible by raising their spirit level. … [Units] steadily lose spirit unless they’re bolstered with regular prayer.”) I mean, sure, you’re not wielding a gun, but it’s still awfully aggressive! The fact that even they describe it as a “skirmish” and a “battle” betrays their knowledge of this. And if you start from Lyndon’s premise that people emulate what they do in video games… well, I’m glad hardly anyone will be playing this one.
Guest post at The Big Stick
I have a guest post up at The Big Stick today, on Judge Sonia Sotomayor and her comments about making better decisions as a “wise Latina woman.” Check it out!
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