Visiting Stonehenge and Purchasing Spirituality

Alun Life, Politics 1 Comment , ,

I’ve remembered it’s com­ing up to that day again. I went to Stone­henge for the sol­stice once. I’m glad I went, but I doubt I’ll go again. There were a couple of big disappointments.

One was the lack of a vis­ible Eng­lish Her­it­age pres­ence. There were an estim­ated 20,000 people there who wanted some con­nec­tion to the past. I would have thought that was a good tar­get audi­ence for EH. At the very least there’s money to be made with the Sol­stice 2012 t-shirts to be sold. The offi­cial sol­stice blankets for those who for­got to bring one, sol­stice kagouls and umbrel­las for when it rains and so on. It’s also an excel­lent time to attempt guilt-tripping people into join­ing EH to sup­port access to ancient sites. They might have trouble with this last one as they’re not known for sup­port­ing access to Stone­henge on the sol­stice, but it’d be worth a try. The impres­sion I got (rightly or wrongly) was that EH had aban­doned the site for the night.

Drunk man standing on a stone at Stonehenge acting like an arse.

A rev­el­ler wel­comes the arrival of lager and, pos­sibly, the Sun.

The other was the sheer mess around the site. Every­one got a bag as they went in for their rub­bish. It doesn’t have to look like this. After all the fight­ing over access in the 1980s and 90s, is this a place people come are they here to cel­eb­rate or to conquer?

On the plus side I got a les­son in the dif­fer­ence between mod­ern Pagans and New Agers. The Pagans ten­ded to look dig­ni­fied and patient. Quite a few had their cere­mo­nial robes on, but not all. The easi­est ones to spot were those who’d let their beards down for the night.

In con­trast the New Agers were laden with mys­tical kit, and were often very purple. They’d looked agit­ated and annoyed. Every time someone elbowed in the ribs, she’d be wear­ing a pointy hat as if to com­pensate for the clothes she was wear­ing would ideally be on someone taller. There’d also be a purple scarf and purple jumper hid­den beneath at least half a dozen medal­lions. I should have heard them com­ing with the vari­ous eso­teric bangles and brace­lets they were wear­ing.
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Is ‘religion’ one of the hard historical archaeological problems?

Alun Featured, The Past 5 Comments , , , , ,

Michael E. Smith lays down an inter­est­ing chal­lenge at Pub­lish­ing Archae­ology: What are the hard prob­lems in Archae­ology? What ques­tions haven’t archae­olo­gists answered and aren’t likely to answer any time soon? A couple of ideas come to mind. I’ll start with the easier prob­lem to express.

Is an ancient his­tory or archae­ology of reli­gion a sens­ible project?

I’ve got an interest in ancient sci­ence, but one of the things most people research­ing ancient sci­ence would agree that sci­ence in the ancient world didn’t really exist. There’s some­thing that’s a more sys­tem­atic inquiry about nature, but some­thing like nat­ural philo­sophy would be a bet­ter descrip­tion for the clas­sical world. I’m not sure that the same term would work for other soci­et­ies because philo­sophy car­ries a lot of bag­gage too. So when aca­dem­ics talk about ancient sci­ence, there’s this under­cur­rent that we’re not talk­ing about sci­ence. Ancient sci­ence is not the same as mod­ern science.

I’ve got an interest in ancient reli­gion too. I’m not so inter­ested in the con­tent as such, more reli­gion in a socio-political con­text. That’s some­thing you can say that makes sense to mod­ern people. If you said the same thing in the ancient world they’d think you were mad. It’d be a bit like say­ing you’re inter­ested in fish, but only the ones that live in water. In the ancient world it was accep­ted that reli­gion was entwined with civic life. There’s a second prob­lem that what we call reli­gion has developed from its ancient roots.
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Alcman and the Cosmos of Sparta by Gloria Ferrari

Alun The Past No Comments , , , ,

AlcmanI wasn’t aware of this book till I saw a review appear on the BMCR feed. If you’re tack­ling any­thing to do with ancient Greece and Rome then it’s a good idea to keep an eye on BMCR as there’s a con­stant stream of reviews high­light­ing inter­est­ing books. I’m very glad I saw this as it’s spe­cific­ally use­ful to me because of a paper I’m pol­ish­ing for sub­mis­sion. How­ever it’s gen­er­ic­ally use­ful too because it’s a good book on the inter­ac­tion of astro­nomy, cos­mo­logy and reli­gion in archaic Greece.

The sub­ject of the book is the Parthenia (Partheneion) by Alc­man (Alk­man) a poet writ­ing in the 7th cen­tury BC. It describes part of a cere­mony to devote some­thing to a god­dess, pos­sibly Artemis though Bowra (1934:35) dis­agrees. He argues that ὀρθρίαι means at day-break rather than being a ref­er­ence to Artemis Orthia. This is pretty much the prob­lem with the Parthenia. It’s frag­ment­ary and even the frag­ments we do have are ambiguous.

There’s some astro­nom­ical ele­ment to the poem, but exactly what in the poem is astro­nom­ical and what is being offered is also debated. Everyone’s argu­ments about what the poem means stands or breaks on a sec­tion which Fer­rari calls ‘the most tor­men­ted pas­sage in this sec­tion of the song’. Thanks to Google Books, I can add the two rel­ev­ant pages below under Plei­ades, Hyades and Sirius so you can see what the prob­lem is.

The key pas­sage in near Eng­lish is some­thing like:

For as we carry ὀρθρίαι φαρος
The Πεληάδες rise and struggle against us
Like the star Sirius
through the ambro­sial night.

Depend­ing on how you trans­late the Greek words you get a dif­fer­ent outcome.

If you think φαρος is a robe or veil then you’re in good com­pany. This is known from other rituals. Usu­ally that means that people then trans­late ὀρθρίαι to describe Artemis Orthia, a vir­gin god­dess with an interest in chil­dren and child­birth. That makes Πεληάδες the Plei­ades. Many people then make this a spring fest­ival — and that for me is where this trans­la­tion breaks down.

The Plei­ades are not like Sirius. They’re stag­ger­ingly unlike Sirius. Sirius is the bright­est star in the sky and the Plei­ades are an open cluster of faint stars that are like a smudge of light to the naked eye. If your eyesight’s good you can make out indi­vidual stars. That would sug­gest that’s it’s not the appear­ance that mat­ters but the tim­ing of their appear­ance. In that light, the spring fest­ival makes sense. In this period the Plei­ades first appeared in the morn­ing sky in May. The prob­lem is the ref­er­ence to Sirius. Sirius was set­ting in the even­ing sky at this time. It didn’t rise till July. This is why I can­not see how the poem describes a spring fest­ival. The pres­ence of Sirius seems to rule that out.

The altern­at­ive taken by a smal­ler group of people is that a φαρος is a plough. This would be Ferrari’s inter­pret­a­tion and Mar­tin West’s too who gen­er­ally has a big brain when it comes to lyric poetry. If a plough is being brought then this becomes an autumn fest­ival. There were many har­vests through­out the year, but the agri­cul­tural year restar­ted each autumn after the last har­vest with the plough­ing of the fields. This is astro­nom­ic­ally bet­ter because Sirius would have been vis­ible in the morn­ing sky which very neatly ties to ὀρθρίαι mean­ing day-break. That’s essen­tial because Greek reli­gious ritual often happened in the morn­ing or just before sun­rise. This doesn’t give me so much of a head­ache, as it’s phys­ic­ally pos­sible, but I still struggle with the Plei­ades being like Sirius. That’s why I’ve ten­ded to like a third option that Fer­rari mentions.

Πεληάδες doesn’t just mean faint open cluster of stars. It also means doves. If were ser­i­ous about want­ing to solve this puzzle then I’d be look­ing at dove migra­tion and his­tor­ical and archae­olo­gical evid­ence for hunt­ing. Birds tend to migrate in autumn, that works with φαρος as a plough. Song­birds also tend to fly at night. Trav­el­ling through the sky like Sirius through the night would be a bad simile, but less so than the Plei­ades as stars option to my ears. This would tie in with the kind of astro­nomy Hesiod prac­ticed. He didn’t just look at stars, but also at eco­lo­gical signs, like the migra­tions of birds and the beha­viour of other animals.

Don’t go invest­ing too much in my belief though. This is an opin­ion formed from a fairly small amount of read­ing. One of the things that makes this book so use­ful is that it draws on an extens­ive amount of evid­ence. You don’t have to agree with Ferrari’s des­tin­a­tion to see that the trip is worth­while. She also pulls in evid­ence from archae­ology and art as well as drama, espe­cially Eur­ip­ides. I think it’s spec­u­lat­ive work, but it’s cer­tainly not base­less speculation.

How­ever, I’m not fully con­vinced by the explan­a­tion. Nearly all the sup­port­ing evid­ence post-dates Alcman’s work by a long way. Eur­ip­ides was writ­ing in the fifth cen­tury BC. I think that’s import­ant because I think some­thing hap­pens to astro­nomy in this period. The fifth cen­tury is when Meton pins down his luni-solar cycle. It’s also a time when there’s a stronger sense of Hel­lenic iden­tity, partly as a reac­tion to the threat from Per­sia. I think the book is extremely help­ful for explor­ing what people in the fifth cen­tury thought about the con­nec­tion between the heav­ens and reli­gion. I want to believe that we can take this evid­ence and apply it back to sev­enth cen­tury Sparta. It would make my life so much easier, but I don’t think there’s the cer­tainty in the evid­ence to fix the Parthenia to the autumn. My opin­ion might change in the future. I found the text a bit, ha ha, lac­onic. It means I’ll have to read it a few times to get a bet­ter idea of some of the more subtle argu­ments. It’s not a badly writ­ten book and def­in­itely not delib­er­ately obtuse, but it is concise.

All in all though it’s very thought-provoking. It puts some flesh on to mod­els that try and con­nect reli­gion and astro­nomy. It means that ritual isn’t just about the mater­ial, but also about how it’s used. It would be inter­est­ing to see if any­one else had evid­ence approach­ing the same prob­lem from the oppos­ite dir­ec­tion. A sur­vey of temples to see if there’s some sort of archae­olo­gical cor­rel­ate with the astro­nom­ical beha­viour might be useful.

Bowra, C.M. 1934. ‘The Occa­sion of Alcman’s Partheneion’ The Clas­sical Quarterly 28(1): 35–44 [↩]

Religious Accommodation is a Political Issue

Alun Politics 2 Comments , ,

Mooney and Kirshenbaum wordled

Mooney and Kirshen­baum wordled

I’ve been sat on this post for a couple of weeks. One reason for not put­ting it up is I’ve been busy and this post might annoy a few people. Kick­ing off a dis­cus­sion and then ignor­ing it is impol­ite, so it has had to wait. Another reason is that it’s another post on whether (and how) aca­dem­ics should accom­mod­ate reli­gious beliefs. There’s been a lot of posts on this else­where because of Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s invective-sodden pub­li­city howl for their book Unscientific Amer­ica. Mooney and Kirshen­baum believe that people should show respect for reli­gious beliefs, and any athe­ist who dis­agrees is engaged in acts of viol­ence. There’s a rich vein of irony to be found in the head­line of their recent LA Times piece. You may won­der if they’re on a cru­sade for respect for a spe­cific reli­gious tra­di­tion rather than all of them. There’s many people who’ve writ­ten many posts about flaws in Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s reas­on­ing. Many of them are good, but I’m not inter­ested in simply adding a ‘me too’. At best it’s bor­ing. At worst its cow­ardly mob-following — and boring.

Still it’s pos­sible there could be some­thing to debate. By nature I prefer to work with people than against them. I’d like to say it’s because I’m such a nice per­son but I’m prob­ably con­fus­ing lazi­ness with nice­ness. Life is easier if you don’t have to work against people. If accom­mod­a­tion of reli­gious beliefs works then that’s so much less work to do. So what would an acco­mod­a­tion­ist stance look like?

An answer can be found in a book chapter by Kyle S. Van Houtan and Stu­art L. Pimm: “The Vari­ous Chris­tian Eth­ics of Spe­cies Con­ser­va­tion”. It’s a dis­cus­sion of an attempt to use theo­logy to under­stand some of the more reality-proof Chris­tian groups in an attempt to change policy on con­ser­va­tion. If you’re expect­ing a laugh-a-minute decon­struc­tion of the paper then you’re in for a dis­ap­point­ment. It opens with a quote from Wil­liam Placher which argues mor­al­ity has very little to do with reli­gion. Whether or not you agree with them Van Houtan and Pimm are clearly on speak­ing terms with reality,

The prob­lem addressed by Van Houtan and Pimm is the res­ist­ance to envir­on­mental cam­paigns by fun­da­ment­al­ists. Fun­da­ment­al­ists identify one of the evils of sci­ence in gen­eral is the lack of a moral imper­at­ive. Whether or not you’d describe Chris­tian fun­da­ment­al­ists as moral is irrel­ev­ant here. Their per­cep­tion of sci­ence is that it is, at best, a moral vacuum. This con­trasts with eco­lo­gists who see their work as hav­ing a strong moral base. The first dif­fi­culty iden­ti­fied by Van Houtan and Pimm is lan­guage. If you’re in a nar­row mind­set where only Chris­tian­ity is moral then iden­ti­fi­ably unchris­tian lan­guage is clearly used to describe immoral activ­ity. It’s a small step from Evol­u­tion, which is obvi­ously the work of the Devil, to Eco­logy. This puts Eco­logy firmly on the side of the apes. If you believe in angels this is a dealbreaker.

…[E]thics in non­theo­lo­gical lan­guage will be worse than unat­tract­ive to Christians—such eth­ics will be inco­her­ent. Theo­lo­gical lan­guage is what gives Chris­tian eth­ics intel­li­gib­il­ity. As a res­ult, cas­u­ally using “nature” or “biod­iversity” in place of “cre­ation” is incred­ibly sig­ni­fic­ant when con­sid­er­ing Chris­tian envir­on­mental ethics.

Van Houtan and Pimm p119

This is clearly dead centre in Mooney and Kirshen­baum ter­rit­ory. We have a sci­en­tific­ally illit­er­ate audi­ence. We have a crisis for which there is clear sci­entific evid­ence; Van Houtan and Pimm would like to save up to a third of the planet’s spe­cies from extinc­tion in the next cen­tury. We also have lan­guage iden­ti­fied as a major factor in pre­vent­ing action. It would seem that sci­ence com­mu­nic­a­tion is urgently needed, but to whom? After a brief sur­vey which shows that the planet’s eco­sys­tem def­in­itely is in danger. Van Houtan and Pimm move on to tack­ling the Chris­ti­ans. They are clear that Chris­ti­ans are plural.

This is one of my bug­bears. It’s cer­tainly easy to rail against stu­pid Chris­ti­ans, but stu­pid­ity is not a require­ment for many Chris­tian sects. The idea that Chris­ti­ans are mor­ons is not just a case of lazy fram­ing by non-Christians. It’s a polit­ical gam­bit by fun­da­ment­al­ists too. If I’m head evan­gel­ist for the Church of Chris­tian Lun­acy then I won’t cam­paign against the teach­ing of sci­ence because it’s Lun­atic policy. I’ll say that the cam­paign against sci­ence is a Chris­tian mat­ter. This is a subtle attempt to pull Cath­ol­ics and Prot­est­ants into the fight on my side because there’s the implic­a­tion that if you don’t accept this Lun­atic idea, you’re not really a Chris­tian. It works because, as Van Houtan and Pimm make clear, there isn’t really lead­er­ship from the Churches on eco­logy. There are many dif­fer­ent pos­i­tions. To make things easier Van Houtan and Pimm neatly con­struct a four-fold typo­logy of eco­lo­gical positions.

  • Earth­keep­ers. These are the people who see stew­ard­ship of the planet as an imper­at­ive, based on their read­ing of the bible.
  • Skep­tics. These people see no con­ser­va­tion crisis. This would include the South­ern Baptist Church and Focus on Fam­ily. These are the people who see Eco­logy as junk science.
  • Pri­or­it­isers. These people do not value eco­lo­gical mat­ters as much as other con­cerns. For instance con­ser­va­tion is a good thing accord­ing to the Assem­blies of God, but you don’t want to really push it too much, else you’ll end up with New Age Earth worshipping.
  • The Indif­fer­ent. The people who take no position.
Van Houtan and Pimm p129-131

This recog­ni­tion of the diversity of Chris­tian pos­i­tions mat­ters if you’re look­ing for a pos­it­ive action:

Exper­i­ence teaches that, when par­ti­cipants in two dif­fer­ent fields of know­ledge meet, they will have sym­met­rical views. For example, when eco­nom­ists meet eco­lo­gists, the former have a detailed draw­ing of the eco­nomy and a single, simple box for “eco­logy,” whereas eco­lo­gists have a detailed draw­ing of envir­on­mental pro­cesses and a single, simple box for “the eco­nomy.” This seems the case for reli­gion and the envir­on­ment. Those con­cerned with the prac­tical issues of pro­tect­ing the envir­on­ment are likely to see the mul­ti­fa­ceted prob­lems of their trade, but view reli­gion, eth­ics, and the church as single and mono­lithic. The reverse is also common.

Van Houtan and Pimm p131

This is a use­ful insight. Again I think it could sup­port the Mooney-Kirshenbaum pro­pos­i­tion that pub­lic Athe­ism harms Sci­entific com­mu­nic­a­tion because, if people like Richard Dawkins are the most prom­in­ent sci­ent­ists, the obvi­ous label on the Sci­ence box is ‘god­less’. We there­fore have a start­ing pos­i­tion for rebuild­ing sci­ence com­mu­nic­a­tion. What do Van Houtan and Pimm give use as tools for work­ing on that? I’ll dis­cuss this in full below.

Now I’ve dis­cussed that, the next obvi­ous ques­tion is why do Van Houtan and Pimm say so little about sci­ence com­mu­nic­a­tion given they’re talk­ing about eco­logy? The reason is that they’re aware of the audi­ence they’re talk­ing to. The issue, even for those who’d style them­selves as sci­entific scep­tics, is not sci­ence. It’s reli­gion and polit­ics. They really go to town on this dis­cuss­ing the links between right-wing polit­ical groups and the nut­tier Chris­tian fac­tions. They cri­ti­cise the Corn­wall Declar­a­tion and its reli­ance on tech­no­lo­gical fixes to vari­ous inconveniences:

Over­ex­ploit­a­tion is not a con­cern because the abil­ity to extract nat­ural resources increases with tech­no­lo­gical advances. One assumes that even biod­iversity loss can be mit­ig­ated through bio­tech­no­logy. If spe­cies drift close to extinc­tion, surely their pop­u­la­tions can be bolstered through Jur­as­sic Park–like efforts… Are we to believe these argu­ments? More import­ant, is there a bib­lical cause to do so?

Van Houtan and Pimm p134 (My emphasis)

This makes sense within the frame where Van Houtan and Pimm are work­ing. As far as I’m con­cerned the defin­it­ive state­ment bib­lical state­ment on eco­logy is purely of his­tor­ical interest. The idea that I should care about it as a guide to mod­ern liv­ing makes my men­tal gears crunch. If I were a Chris­tian like Pimm and – pre­sum­ably – Van Houtan, I would see things dif­fer­ently, as they make clear in their conclusion.

Cer­tainly, there are paths of envir­on­mental eth­ics that are sec­u­lar, some of which are cer­tainly unfaith­ful to both the Hebrew and Chris­tian por­tions of the Bible. For those of faith though the primary con­cern is not nature itself nor human­ity, but obed­i­ence to the scrip­tures. The remain­ing chal­lenge then, requires theo­lo­gians to teach the scrip­tures, eco­lo­gists to meas­ure the state of the envir­on­ment, and both to work in con­cert… We do not call for a bap­tiz­ing of sec­u­lar agendas—either lib­eral or conservative—but rather obed­i­ence to God’s word.

Van Houtan and Pimm p136-7

I think, as far as it tackles the prob­lem iden­ti­fied by Van Houtan and Pimm, their paper makes com­plete sense. This is about gal­van­ising mil­it­ant Chris­ti­ans and you don’t do that with sci­ence. It’s an approach brings eth­ical prob­lems of its own and a polit­ical cost. For example, Van Houtan and Pimm show the import­ance of the bib­lical char­ac­ter of the mes­sage in its deliv­ery — but who deliv­ers it? Could a young black woman deliver this mes­sage to a white pat­ri­archal church in Flor­ida? That’s a par­tic­u­larly poin­ted ques­tion, but accom­mod­at­ing the prin­ciples of vari­ous churches means that you state argu­ments from per­sonal rev­el­a­tion or pre­ju­dice should replace argu­ments backed with evid­ence in pub­lic debate. Sci­ence is about evid­ence so while this approach might work polit­ic­ally by get­ting a res­ult, in the longer term it is anti­thet­ical to sci­ence com­mu­nic­a­tion. Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s policy of accom­mod­a­tion sinks.

Prob­ably.

It’s hard to be cer­tain because this example isn’t men­tioned in their book. This is a bit odd.

Stu­art Pimm cer­tainly is men­tioned in Unscientific Amer­ica. He’s thanked for his com­ments on the book. It’s pecu­liar that he didn’t think to men­tion that he’d been involved in the kind of reach­ing out to science-resistant people that Mooney and Kirshen­baum were after. It’s par­tic­u­larly odd because Pimm is a Pro­fessor of Eco­logy at Duke Uni­ver­sity. Sheril Kirshen­baum, I’m told, is a Mar­ine Bio­lo­gist at Duke Uni­ver­sity. I’m not sure what her mar­ine bio­lo­gical work there is, because the only men­tion of her research I found was a ref­er­ence to her Sci­ence of Kiss­ing but it’s likely she would have come into con­tact with quite reg­u­larly Pimm as she’s lis­ted as being part of Pimm’s work­ing group.

One of the recur­ring cri­ti­cisms of Unscientific Amer­ica is that it’s shal­low and super­fi­cial. I think the above is a case in point. I have some dif­fi­culties with Van Houtan and Pimm’s paper, I don’t think it tackles the polit­ical envir­on­ment of Chris­tian­ity par­tic­u­larly well. As they men­tion, dis­cuss­ing the fund­ing of the far-right Chris­tian groups, there are bit social and polit­ical factors behind this. I think there’s inter­play between reli­gious belief and polit­ical fund­ing. The impres­sion I get from Van Houtan and Pimm is closer to a Patron/Client rela­tion­ship. That’s not an entirely fair cri­ti­cism though. For a start it’s the old chest­nut “They didn’t write an entirely dif­fer­ent paper that I wanted them to write.” It’s also not the end of the con­ver­sa­tion. I think their ideas could be use­fully picked up and developed or applied to other con­texts. It lays out a pos­it­ive argu­ment which you can dis­cuss. Bruis­ing their Reli­gion, the com­par­able chapter in Unscientific Amer­ica, in con­trast says much more about their per­sonal blog-warring than it does about reli­gion and sci­ence in the USA. Mooney and Kirshen­baum may, or may not, agree with Van Houtan and Pimm’s ana­lysis but it’s clearly a missed oppor­tun­ity that they didn’t think to men­tion it.

It’s also worth return­ing to the box. Not all Chris­ti­ans are stu­pid. Van Houtan and Pimm are very clear about that and talk about tak­ing their mes­sage to spe­cific Chris­tian groups. They do not, as far as I read the chapter, argue that all the pub­lic should be treated like they’re in the remedial class. In the mean­time since I star­ted writ­ing this Mooney and Kirshen­baum have pub­lished an art­icle in the LA Times. Hav­ing pre­vi­ously cri­ti­cised Dawkins for being an athe­ist in the pub­lic sphere, they now cri­ti­cise him for being a sci­ent­ist in the pub­lic sphere. I know Chris­ti­ans who hate what Dawkins says, or at least what other people say Dawkins says. Non­ethe­less they have a keen interest in sci­ence and are per­fectly cap­able of cop­ing with Evol­u­tion and sci­ence in gen­eral without any pat­ron­ising allow­ances. Van Houtan and Pimm’s model has the soph­ist­ic­a­tion to leave room for them. I much prefer fol­low­ing a policy that states reli­gious people are not inher­ently more stu­pid than atheists.

A tomb is a machine for remembering

Alun Politics, The Past No Comments , , , ,

marsala

Some blog posts are a long time in the writ­ing, but this sets a new record for me. Around May 2000 I was try­ing to think of a way of rip­ping off Le Corbusier’s quote A house is a machine for liv­ing in with regard to tombs.

It’s not a pos­i­tion I’d strongly defend. Tombs do other things as well. They mark ter­rit­ory to new­comers who may not know the local land. They’re a way of appro­pri­at­ing resources and pos­i­tion for the indi­vidual, if they plan their funeral while they’re alive.

If you want to be poetic, they also could be time machines. Once you have a set­tle­ment with a concept of deep roots, then it becomes pos­sible to think about pro­ject­ing your influ­ence bey­ond your own life­time. You can touch the future from a dis­tance, but if that works, it only works in the memor­ies of the liv­ing. It’s might seem a fanci­ful idea, but it’s spelled out in the earli­est sur­viv­ing history.

This is the dis­play of the inquiry of Hero­dotus of Hali­carnas­sus, so that things done by man not be for­got­ten in time, and that great and mar­velous deeds, some dis­played by the Hel­lenes, some by the bar­bar­i­ans, not lose their glory…

One of my super­visors has already writ­ten some­thing along sim­ilar lines about reach­ing out bey­ond the human life­time. The archae­olo­gical record is messy and often not in fine enough res­ol­u­tion to dis­tin­guish between one gen­er­a­tion and the next. Find­ing those dif­fer­ences is going to be harder when you start think­ing about how people tried to blur those bound­ar­ies.

It’s an idea I’d like to return to, but for now I’m just mak­ing this as a note to myself.

Starlight Expressed

Alun Science, The Past No Comments , , , , , , , , , ,

This very briefly intro­duces the stat­ist­ical method I used to ana­lyse the Greek temples of Sicily for astro­nom­ical align­ments. It’ll be the basis for a paper On the Ori­ent­a­tions of Greek Temples in Sicily. The whole thesis will be made avail­able later via Open Access some way or another. I would say via the Brit­ish Library’s EThOS sys­tem, but I’ve had no luck with that.

Astronomy and the Oracle of Delphi

Alun Featured, Science, The Past No Comments , , , , , , ,

This is (what I hope is) the final ver­sion of the Delphi present­a­tion. It briefly cov­ers the ground that formed the basis for Know­ing when to con­sult the oracle at Delphi. There’s more unpub­lished mater­ial, but rather than try­ing to pro­duce Delphi II, I’m going to make it part of the forth­com­ing Calendrical Cal­ib­ra­tion paper.

Science is interesting. If you don’t like it, it’s your problem not mine.

Alun Politics, Science 4 Comments , ,

Statistics
I’ll admit not every­one is inter­ested in the world around them.

Here’s a site I like, The Hall of Ma’at. I don’t read it as much as I’d like because my read­ing tends to be RSS based. Still, it means that when I do remem­ber to visit their forum there’s plenty of inter­est­ing stuff. I’ve just learned about The Chocol­ate Hills. As well as being fas­cin­at­ing geo­logy, that thread also includes a bit of mock­ery. It’s an inter­est­ing place. They’ll have vis­it­ors who have found the exact ali­ens which built the pyr­am­ids every so often, and they’ll listen. On the other hand I don’t see them com­prom­ising on the need for evid­ence. If you’re wrong or mak­ing stuff up, you will know about it.

The founder, Kat Reese, is an inter­est­ing per­son. She con­trib­uted a chapter to the book Archae­olo­gical Fantas­ies. Not all of Mem­oirs of a True Believer is vis­ible at Google Books, but cer­tainly there’s enough. She puts her­self under the micro­scope and tells of her move­ment from altern­at­ive his­tor­ical beliefs to more main­stream archae­ology. One of the key dif­fer­ences she sees between pop­u­lar altern­at­ive archae­ology authors and the aca­dem­ics is that the altern­at­ive authors see this as a polit­ical debate. It’s not about the science.

Claims about the past are about people, so they’re often polit­ical. How­ever, so to are claims in other pseudos­ciences. You get pro­nounce­ments on health policy from the many and var­ied quacks shun evid­ence as a means for determ­in­ing med­ical care. I’ve recently seen people com­plain­ing about the LCROSS impact on the Moon who care deeply and pas­sion­ately, though not quite to the extent that they vis­ited NASA’s site on the LCROSS to find out what the mis­sion is about. NASA’s research on the effects of the LCROSS impact is a prob­lem if you don’t know any­thing about lunar geo­logy but you want to argue against them. You could learn, but that’s time con­sum­ing. It’s much easier to argue that NASA simply don’t know any­thing about the Moon. This is about stand­ing up to author­ity which, along the way, means tak­ing down Science.

Now, here’s the head-spinning bit.

When Deepak Chopra makes his appeals to send him more money he doesn’t do it because of mys­tic ooki­ness. He does it based on appeals to quantum phys­ics. I’m using the word ‘based’ in a com­pletely incor­rect sense there. Chiro­pract­ors get stroppy about being next to other New Age prac­ti­tion­ers. Homeo­paths don’t refer to them­selves as magi­cians. They give each other degrees and not just any degrees but BScs. Oh yes, the days when sci­ent­ist could visit the lav­at­or­ies in the Arts block and smugly write “Arts degrees, please take one,” next to the toi­let paper dis­penser are over. If there’s so much oppos­i­tion to sci­entific reas­on­ing, why do cranks make their claims in pseudo-scientific lan­guage?

Even Ken Ham, the man who pushes the line that the Bible is inerr­ant, pro­motes his sci­ence cre­den­tials on Answers in Gen­esis. He’s got a Bachelor’s degree from QIT. Why on earth would you need a sci­ence degree if you say the answers can all be found through Bib­lical study? The answer is import­ant for sci­ence communication.

People love science.

It’s recog­nised as one of the best meth­ods for learn­ing about the world around you. A lot of people find the world around them quite inter­est­ing. Added to that is test­ing of ideas and abil­ity to weed out bad ideas that makes sci­ence attract­ive. When nutri­tion­ists are push­ing their pill sup­ple­ments they’re not inter­ested in ‘another way of know­ing’. They’re eager to equate them­selves with sci­ence because that makes their work fact. When people want to belittle evol­u­tion, they don’t refer to evolution’s sci­ence base. Instead evol­u­tion is a reli­gion or a faith pos­i­tion. It sug­gests to me that polit­ical groups are aware gods can­not com­pete with sci­ence as explan­a­tions for a lot of the pub­lic. If faith was as import­ant as it’s cracked up to be then call­ing evol­u­tion a reli­gion wouldn’t be a put-down. Sim­il­arly global warm­ing den­iers don’t say that sci­ence can­not be used to exam­ine cli­mate change. Instead they say vari­ous argu­ments are aren’t sci­entific. Very few people dis­miss an argu­ment by call­ing it sci­entific because even, if you don’t like it, sci­ence has a repu­ta­tion for work­ing out what is true.

That’s why I think expli­citly tag­ging polit­ics onto sci­ence could detract in some way from the sci­entific mes­sage. In Kat Reese’s chapter she’s open that what worked for her was the emphasis on veri­fi­able facts, and the dif­fer­ence in method between the sci­entific and the pseudo-scientific archae­olo­gists. It’s a great selling point. If that’s the case ped­dling reli­gion as con­trib­ut­ing to or being a part­ner in sci­entific find­ings is not only dis­hon­est, but also con­fus­ing the pub­lic about what sci­ence is. Reli­gion can cer­tainly be an inspir­a­tion, but so can the works of Shakespeare and no-one argues that Shakespeare is an essen­tial part­ner in ques­tions about the universe.

That doesn’t make advocacy wrong. Janet Stem­wedel put it much bet­ter than me in say­ing sci­ent­ists (and aca­dem­ics as a whole) are not all after the same thing.. That might include lob­by­ing for a more eco­lo­gic­ally respons­ible pos­i­tion or against reli­gion infringing human rights. But these are polit­ical aims. Mooney and Kirshen­baum are appeal­ing for people who have dif­fer­ent polit­ical view to them to talk about some­thing else. The fact they don’t see why this might be a prob­lem shows a wor­ry­ing lack of aware­ness of soci­ety. Per­son­ally I’m not inter­ested in whether you believe in a god or not. I def­in­itely don’t feel any respons­ib­il­ity to (de-?)convert people. I already have enough respons­ib­il­it­ies. My interest starts when someone claims their beliefs limit what I can do without any jus­ti­fic­a­tion other than a vague feel­ing. That is also polit­ics rather than science.

So what can you do for sci­ence com­mu­nic­a­tion? I think It can be helped by people shar­ing tac­tics, but the requires accept­ing the diversity of sci­ent­ists or pub­lic. It could be help­ful to share what works and what doesn’t in dif­fer­ent con­texts. On the other hand if you insist your polit­ical beliefs are in fact a com­ment on sci­ence, you’ll end up with a self-destructive row which does no-one any good.

That’s my attempt to start mov­ing to some­thing pos­it­ive. I don’t think someone’s a fail­ure just because they don’t appeal to every­one. If the long tail means any­thing we should be shar­ing and cel­eb­rat­ing all the small suc­cesses as well as the a-list. Except me, if I am a suc­cess, because whenever I get a traffic spike I always think, “Bloody hell, what have I gone and said now?”

Science is Cultures

Alun Politics, Science 1 Comment , ,

I was walk­ing across a bridge one day, and I saw a man stand­ing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said “Stop! don’t do it!“
“Why shouldn’t I?” he said.
I said, “Well, there’s so much to live for!“
He said, “Like what?“
I said, “Well…are you reli­gious or athe­ist?“
He said, “Reli­gious.“
I said, “Me too! Are you Chris­tian or Buddhist?“
He said, “Chris­tian.“
I said, “Me too! Are you Cath­olic or Prot­est­ant?“
He said, “Prot­est­ant.“
I said, “Me too! Are you Epis­co­palian or Baptist?“
He said, “Baptist!“
I said,“Wow! Me too! Are you Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?“
He said, “Baptist Church of God!“
I said, “Me too! Are you Ori­ginal Baptist Church of God , or are you Reformed Baptist Church of God?“
He said,“Reformed Baptist Church of God!“
I said, “Me too! Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, reform­a­tion of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, reform­a­tion of 1915?“
He said, “Reformed baptist church of god, reform­a­tion of 1915!“
I said, “DIE, HERETIC SCUM!” and pushed him off.

Emo Phil­lips demon­strates no-one is gen­er­ic­ally ‘religious’

I had 2000 words on Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s blog­ging typed up. I was going to leave it for my own files, then I was going to work it in a blog post. Since then there’s been a bit of a melt­down on the Inter­sec­tion. That means I’m not going to pick through most of their con­tra­dic­tions. There’s plenty of other people doing that and at worst, if I do it badly, it’s going to feed into the they’re vic­tims of the big blog­ger / bul­ly­ing PZ in the national media argu­ment (delete as appro­pri­ate). They’re the two pop­u­lar frames for the argu­ment, and being seen in one or the other pretty well rail­roads you into one sid­ing or another.

I’m aware Frames are deeply unpop­u­lar with some sci­ence blog­gers. If you’re not famil­iar with them, they come from an opin­ion piece in Sci­ence, Fram­ing Sci­ence, by Nis­bett and Mooney which argued that sci­ent­ists should com­mu­nic­ate their work in a social con­text, or frame, which res­on­ated with the pub­lic. To social sci­ent­ists the idea that texts have social con­texts is a mundane obser­va­tion. To sci­ent­ists who entered the sci­ences because they were inter­ested in sci­ence rather than cul­ture, this is per­haps less obvi­ous. At its most basic the mes­sage is “know your audi­ence”, which appears in more or else every book on present­a­tion I’ve read. Where Fram­ing Sci­ence went fur­ther is that it seemed to assume that sci­ence was polit­ical and com­mu­nic­a­tion was advocacy. My opin­ion was that sci­ence was polit­ical, with a small p, but that the cul­ture in sci­ence was built around try­ing to min­im­ise that effect to cre­ate a neut­ral product. As far as I know there’s no expli­citly social­ist Law of Grav­ity. Nis­bett and Mooney failed to either real­ise or con­vin­cingly acco­mod­ate how anti­thet­ical to some notions of sci­ence their pro­posal was. Either Frames are non­sense, or their meth­ods were an example of doing Frames badly.

Spin on to 2009 and Mooney and Kirshen­baum are advoc­at­ing a change in prac­tice in some sci­ent­ists. That’s per­fectly reas­on­able. No-one I know thinks sci­ence com­mu­nic­a­tion is per­fect. One of their stated tar­gets is to change the beha­viour of sci­ent­ists who are unsym­path­etic towards reli­gious belief. This isn’t irra­tional. They give reas­ons and come to a con­clu­sion. Whether or not you agree with them isn’t the prob­lem. If you do think the New Athe­ists should turn down the volume then how do you go about it? Telling the people you want to per­suade that they’re bad people and their narrow-mindedness is harm­ing Sci­ence isn’t the method I’d choose.

If I were to argue that the biggest bene­fit to sci­ence com­mu­nic­a­tion would be for PZ Myers to stop attack­ing reli­gion (to pick a totally ran­dom example), then I’d want to frame my mes­sage so that it res­on­ated with people like PZ Myers. I might argue that aggress­ive debate with a pub­lic which isn’t used to evidence-based debate as part of every­day life is polar­ising. This is a prob­lem if you occupy a small minor­ity pos­i­tion because the prob­lem is polit­ical rather than sci­entific and polit­ics is about quant­ity rather than qual­ity. I’d pre­face my argu­ment with data to show it wasn’t some­thing I pulled out of the air. This is because even if you think New Athe­ists are dog­matic it’s part of their self-image that they aren’t, so data would play well with them. If New Athe­ists genu­inely aren’t dog­matic then they can exam­ine the data any­way, so it’s win-win. Of course if the data doesn’t exist to sup­port the pro­pos­i­tion I might want to ques­tion if my pos­i­tion was sound.

Mooney and Kirshen­baum have adop­ted a some­what dif­fer­ent tac­tic. They’ve aggress­ively gone after PZ Myers, omit­ting some details Myers thinks are import­ant in their dis­cus­sion. Even if Mooney and Kirshen­baum are entirely cor­rect in what they say this still a cata­strophic fail­ure of frame if they intend to alter Myers’ beha­viour. This fail­ure is being com­poun­ded on their web­log. I’m left won­der­ing who the tar­get of the frame is. In the­ory it looks fine. Mooney and Kirshen­baum are the prag­matic sci­ent­ists who are fed up with the God Wars. That’s a frame which should appeal to a lot of athe­ists who can’t be bothered with reli­gion because they have no interest. How­ever the dis­cus­sion of how the New Athe­ists are Bad People, pulls it right back into that argu­ment. The only way that could make sense is if Sci­ence is a monoculture.

That’s where SEED magazine is wrong. Sci­ence isn’t Cul­ture. Sci­ence is Cul­tures, plural, with dif­fer­ing motiv­a­tions, meth­ods even social beha­viour. Phys­i­cists will often pub­lish to pre-print serv­ers and work from those rather than wait for formal pub­lic­a­tion in a journal. Other sci­ent­ists wouldn’t. I’ve lost track of how many dif­fer­ent defin­i­tions dif­fer­ent dis­cip­lines have for the word ‘agent’. I’ve vis­ited one com­bined depart­ment where people iden­ti­fied which sub-field you were work­ing in by see­ing what you were drink­ing. One group drank beer, one group drank wine and the third drank to for­get. Throw in com­plic­at­ing factors like per­sonal polit­ical views and sci­ent­ists are not a homo­gen­ous bunch. You can’t reach every­one, and you don’t even need to try. You can pick your fights.

The same assump­tion of a homeo­gen­ous (and pass­ive) audi­ence is seen else­where. Many com­ments have argued that Dawkins prob­lem is that he isn’t Sagan. Sagan was respec­ted. Sagan bridge sci­ence and reli­gion. Sagan reached 500 mil­lion people with his shows. Basic­ally Sagan is the Chuck Nor­ris of sci­ence com­mu­nic­a­tion. No-one seems to have added that the world has moved on. When Sagan at his peak there were three tele­vi­sion sta­tions in the UK. It’s com­mon for a Brit­ish house­hold to have hun­dreds now. I don’t know how dra­matic the change has been in Amer­ica. Also there’s addi­tional factors like the rise of the web. Broad­cast­ing is now sat along­side many-to-many com­mu­nic­a­tion. These days niche pro­gram­ming is the norm and people will search out the niches they want. I’d like to say the 60s and 70s were a golden age of com­mu­nic­a­tion with people like Jacob Bro­nowski or James Burke being appre­ci­ated for their mas­ter­ful per­form­ances of sci­entific poetry. Yet I can’t help won­der­ing if one of the reas­ons many people watched was because the only altern­at­ive was hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with their partner.

There’s no longer one audi­ence, there’s many. Any­one arguing that there is just the one true way to reach those audi­ences is only going to sat­isfy one audi­ence. For instance some other people have held up Gould as a com­par­ison to Dawkins. Gould really doesn’t move me, but then I have no interest in base­ball. I’d hope there’s room for a more inter­na­tion­al­ist approach to sci­ence com­mu­nic­a­tion than Amer­ic­ans com­mu­nic­at­ing exclus­ively with Amer­ic­ans, Bri­tons with Bri­tons and so on. It’s yet another layer of com­plex­ity. That’s why I’m wary of Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s cri­ti­cisms of strongly athe­ist sci­ence com­m­un­ci­ation. But equally it also means that reject­ing some com­mu­nic­at­ors because they’re ‘appeas­ers’ is going to miss some of the pub­lic. If we want sci­entific soci­et­ies and aca­demia to sup­port com­mu­nic­a­tion then acknow­ledging the import­ant of diversity would be helpful.

Sorry for the lack of links. I’ve cobbled this together at the last minute because what I had was far worse and even longer to make a simple point. I’ll try and add more links in tomorrow’s entry where I’ll try and make a pos­it­ive case for ignor­ing reli­gious sens­it­iv­it­ies (or even chal­len­ging them) in sci­ence communication.

The Negative Influence of PZ Myers

Alun Featured, Politics, Science 4 Comments , , , , ,

Supermassive
Does a super­massive blog illu­min­ate or des­troy?
Photo (cc) Dana Berry.

There’s a new flap going through a few Sci­ence blogs fol­low­ing the pub­lic­a­tion Unscientific Amer­ica. One chapter of the book* argues that New Athe­ists in gen­eral and PZ Myers in par­tic­u­lar are dam­aging sci­ence com­mu­nic­a­tion by being out­spoken athe­ists. Reli­gious people will flatly reject sci­ence if they’re told by people like Myers that sci­ence and reli­gion are incom­pat­ible, say Mooney and Kirshen­baum. There’s plenty of prob­lems with state­ment. Are reli­gious people really that fra­gile? There’s also the prob­lem that Mooney believes that sci­ence and reli­gion are com­pat­ible, though he’s never made it clear exactly what he means by com­pat­ible. I think he’s demon­strably wrong, and I’ll show that in the future. For the sake of argu­ment I’ll con­cede his point. If this is the case then Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s asser­tion that athe­ism need­lessly turns people off sci­ence is plaus­ible. It’s pos­sible Myers is hav­ing a neg­at­ive effect on sci­ence com­mu­nic­a­tion by pick­ing an unne­ces­sary fight. Even so, it’s not a certainty.

I can’t remem­ber how or when I star­ted blog­ging. The earli­est entries in this blog have been re-dated to later dates. The ori­ginal reason was that a blog was an easy way to keep a note of what I was think­ing. Lots of people start a blog, but con­tinu­ation is a dif­fer­ent mat­ter. One of the fea­tures of blog­ging is you tend to read more blogs to see what other people are writ­ing. One of the entries I read was this The proper rev­er­ence to those who have gone before. It a post on deep time, the dis­tance back to the earli­est human ancest­ors. It’s pretty much what Mooney and Kirshen­baum would argue against. Myers com­pares the two thou­sand years of Chris­tian his­tory to the time scale of Narioko­tome boy and con­cludes that the Bible comes up short in describ­ing the pro­fund­ity of the human jour­ney. You may agree or dis­agree. Mooney thinks that Myers’ defin­ing moment was his muck­ing about with a cracker. Someone else in one of the com­ment threads thought it was him get­ting thrown out of a show­ing of Expelled. When I think of Pharyn­gula I think of the writ­ing on posts like that or Nio­brara Some­times I try and put up some­thing like that, but not often because get­ting it wrong frus­trates me. That may change in 2010 (not the frus­tra­tion, the lack of effort).

There were other early influ­ences like Early Mod­ern Notes and Respect­ful Insolence. It’s an ongo­ing pro­ject so other blogs come and go which have an effect, like North­state Sci­ence. There’s also plenty of oth­ers. If you’d said in 2004 that other major influ­ences would include a blog on the Levant or another on Mil­it­ary His­tory I’d have thought you were mad. I have a par­tic­u­lar pit of loath­ing for tele­vi­sion pro­grammes about the Amer­ican Civil War. Yet in all these cases the writ­ing by blog­gers has shown me how wrong my super­fi­cial impres­sions about these vari­ous fields are. My use of images reflects Aydin Örstan’s work on Snail’s Tales. I don’t have his skill, so I work round that. This web­log doesn’t exist solely because of PZ Myers, but it is part of a diverse eco­sys­tem. I’m happy it’s that way. I’d hate to be writ­ing Pharyn­gula II, but this site would be a dif­fer­ent place if Pharyn­gula didn’t exist. So would many oth­ers like the Digital Cut­tle­fish, which is another site I’d highly recom­mend if you’re inter­ested in writing.

In turn I’m told this web­log has influ­enced oth­ers. Like any good eco­sys­tem there’s a series of inter­ac­tions in food web, and some parts are subtly con­nec­ted to oth­ers in ways that are not obvi­ous. That doesn’t mean that because my web­log exists Pharyn­gula is a Good Thing. I know someone two three+ people who deeply dis­like this web­log. How­ever, it does mean that simplistic state­ments about social effects are opin­ions rather than being remotely close to facts. It becomes even more dif­fi­cult to say if you con­sider the pub­lic as a diverse group in their own right who may respond to the same mes­sage in dif­fer­ent ways.

I can say that PZ Myers one of many people who has caused my writ­ing to improve, It’s pos­sible that if he never exis­ted I’d still think it’s a won­der­ful life, but I’d need evid­ence for that rather than an assertion.

*If you want to read it it’s chapter 8. Visit Amazon.com or .co.uk and use the Look Inside fea­ture to search for Bruis­ing their reli­gion. The res­ults, and use of the back and next but­tons will enable you to read most of it.

+I’m temp­ted to apply for mem­ber­ship of one of those tribes which doesn’t recog­nise any higher num­bers and just describes them as many.

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