I won’t keep you in suspense. What makes this LWYEB edition special is this first link: The Power of Speech
When Daniel Everett first went to live with the Amazonian Pirahã tribe in the late 70s, his intention was to convert them to Christianity. Instead, he learned to speak their unique language – and ended up rejecting his faith, losing his family and picking a fight with Noam Chomsky.
Now, let me just mention up front that I don’t think that the article necessarily supports the position that ‘It’s wrong to try and convert tribal societies’. I’m not a big fan of proselytizing indigenous people, but I don’t see that this article bears directly on it. And, as romantic as the story is, one has to enjoy the romance without letting go of the old critical thinking faculties. It isn’t clear that this has settled the question of Chomsky’s universal grammar (a proposition I have always personally found suspect). It certainly hasn’t settled the question of whether “shallow time” (my words) leads inexorably to paradise (Zen Buddhist maxims aside). It doesn’t settle the question of whether Everett’s or any other version of religion passes a reasonable standard of evidence, or that the Piraha maintain high standards of evidence, generally speaking. But whatever else it may be, the article is a trip worth every penny of the fare. And the audio is fascinating, too!
Was Billy the Kid’s father killed at Chickamauga? In case you local folks were wondering, his eyes are listed as blue – not green.
Guns and sexism don’t mix.
My chuckle of the day right in the middle of a good popular science article: Love on the Rocks:
Another example of mutualism can be seen in the relationship between some algae and some fungi. While this relationship is not “love,” it might be fun to think of it as such. Some might even say that algae and fungus took a “lichen” to each other.
Yuck Yuck Yuck.
Them Grecians liked them some Noah.
If you’ve made it to this point, then perhaps you’ll be pleased to learn that the first link wasn’t the whole reason that this is special linky post. The last link bookends nicely: Reasoning about Stories
Modern citizens are atomized masses of equal individuals held together-to the extent they are held together-only by the force and sway of laws. They can hold themselves together by an internal desire rather than external coercion only if they know the truths that all of them hold in common; and those truths cannot be mere maxims, which are abstract, “portable,” and in some sense placeless. The truth of a national community may be manifested by traditions and customs, but it is founded on narrative, myth, or story. When we all hold the same stories in our heads and hearts, this account runs, we shall share in something more profound than an abstract moral and legal consensus; we shall take on roles in an epic of blood.
[...]
From quite a different tradition, Alasdair MacIntyre’s world-changing tetralogy, beginning with After Virtue (1980), instructs us that ethical thinking, and indeed all reasoning, is teleological in nature. When our reason sets to work, it is always thinking in terms of a telos, an end, a purpose; reason always envisions a kind of story about how someone discovers and gets to the purpose for which he was made. If one cannot think about what the story of a good man’s life looks like, if one cannot imagine the flourishing, happy man whose image is the fulfillment of that life, then one can hardly begin to ask the ethical questions about good and evil that confront us daily in our own life stories.
[...]
The inherently narrative basis of reality and reason, then, is something that remains in effect regardless of our own arguments about it or discussions of it. We may well argue about the importance and moral authority of this story or that one, but we never escape the condition of mythos. Burke was correct to equate the modern scene with the tragic stage, and to follow the Bard more boldly in hinting that all the world is a stage.
As they say, read every word.
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