civil whatnow?

More historical agnorance from Tom Toles:

How ironic. To make the point that there really is a civil war taking place in Iraq, he appeals to the Establishment name for a conflict that was not a civil war by any definition that existed before 1860.

Iraqi factions are fighting for power over each other. That’s a civil war.

The southern states were not trying to conquer Washington DC and rule the North.

Even if you support the Union invasion of the South, even if you think Abe Lincoln was a hero and that the good guys won, simple decency and the most basic level of intellectual honesty should force you to recognize that it was a war of secession; it was no more a civil war than was the conflict of the 1770s.

dream come true

(Bill Watterson was, of course, making the opposite point.)

man bites dog

Did anyone else have this experience in school?

I encountered the phrase “Man Bites Dog” in 2 different English classes, taught by 2 different English teachers, who used it to illustrate 2 very different points — possibly incompatible points.

In a class on writing, it was used to make a point about “hooks”:
No one will read a story called “Dog Bites Man” but most will read a “Man Bites Dog” story.

Whereas the linguistics teacher, in talking about why it’s important to be able to parse and diagram sentence structure, made a point I later encountered in a psychology class as well, which is that most people can’t correctly read the sentence “Man bites dog.”

They turn it around in their heads to “Dog bites man,” or to “Man bitten by dog.”

right

Right-wing anarchist, Joseph Sobran (converted from William F. Buckley conservatism to radical libertarianism by Murray Rothbard, if I’m recalling properly), tells us:

I often ask liberals to explain what they mean by right-wing, a term they apply to everything they dislike, even principles that have nothing in common, such as anarchism (opposition to all government) and fascism (government without limits), as well as conservatism (government within carefully defined limits), not to mention monarchism, oligarchy, plutocracy, nativism, militarism, laissez-faire capitalism, theocracy, libertarianism, feudalism, neoconservatism, and a hundred mutually incompatible other things. What common denominator can they possibly share? How can they all be “right-wing”? No liberal has ever been able to tell me.

freedom from thought

New Jersey high schooler, libertarian, and occasional LRC contributor Max Raskin addresses today one of my main topics: the schooling of history (1, 2, 3, 4):

For most students, history is that easy “A” class, requiring little more than memorization to do well. For me, it is a class that has demonstrated a truth that I now know all too well — the government is relentless in its self-gratifying publicity campaign, and will stop at nothing to promote itself, often at the expense of the truth. Its textbooks read as hagiographies, substituting thoughtful analysis for blind reverence. [I'm pretty sure he means either "substituting thoughtful analysis with blind reverence" or "substituting blind reverence for thoughtful analysis ."]

This is about as concise a statement of the thesis as I’ve seen:

Seeing as it has historically been the government who has taken away liberty through its expansion, historians who portray such growth in a favorable light are inserting their own anti-freedom beliefs.

And here’s exactly what I (a) wish I’d suffered more of back in school, and (b) want to keep my son from having to struggle with:

Now this all sounds good in principle, but what to do when I am in class, being lectured by someone I disagree with? Do I raise my hand at misinterpretations I see? Do I speak once a class, delivering a short speech that attacks the textbook’s main bias of the day (because it would take oh so long to go over them all)? Do I write essays on why the test’s answer key supports fascism and the end of western civilization? Or do I quietly resign myself to a silent anguish of knowing that nothing I can say will ever mean anything to these people?

[...]

Am I wrong in pointing out the flaws with my teacher’s approach to antitrust legislation? How could predatory pricing exist when under Rockefeller the price of Kerosene fell from a dollar to ten cents per gallon? Or the price of steel rails under Carnegie fell over 140 dollars per ton? Why should these “trusts” be punished if they raise the standard of living by cutting costs and raising real wages? Of course they shouldn’t be.

Why should I have to subscribe to my textbook’s “Whig” theory of history? What if I believe that history is not an inevitable progressive march upwards? What if I believe that capitalism and liberty [are] what made America great, not governments and interventionism?

sic tees

Stephen Carson points me to this shirt and asks,

proud to be misnomerian

I’m proud to be an American.

I won’t try to defend that pride: it’s based mostly on things I had no responsibility for and no control over, which puts the pride in the same camp as many other collectivist emotions, but I can’t pretend I don’t feel it just because I think it’s irrational.

One of the things I’m proud about is that “American” is a contested word — contested by another entire continent (not to mention 2 other nation-states on my own continent). There’s something very fitting to me about the label being so over- and underdefined.

No one calls me a United Statesian, even though that would be a more accurate description of my official statist citizenship.

Another thing I’m proud of about the American label is that it comes from the phenomenal PR genius Amerigo Vespucci — not because he discovered anything, but because his maps and stories promoted curiosity and fantasy about this New World back in the Old World. (And I’m proud to descend from the cultural and economic history of that Old World.)

We United Statesians somehow managed to get primary claim to the term “American” even though Amerigo’s maps were of SOUTH America. The nerve of us.

Meanwhile, the people of the extended gene pool of those the Pilgrims feasted with are called Indians (unless you’re politically correct enough to call them “Native Americans,” which would make you a sequacious numskull, since the term literally means anyone born in America — wherever that is (as you know, my own favorite term is Amerindividual, but that’s not very helpful, since I’m a native-born Amerindividual myself)). They’re called Indians because Columbus thought he found them in India. To distinguish them from the real Indians in real India, they came to be called American Indians, which still begs the where-is-America question.

Lest we let the Europeans get too smug about this absurd tangle of longstanding misnomers, let me point out that France and England are both named for German tribes (which isn’t so much a misnomer as it is a little confusing), Scotland literally means “The Land of the Irish,” (and Ireland does not mean the Land of Ire — though it sure sounds like it does), and finally, the name “Spain” comes from the Phoenician word I-Shaphan, meaning “The Island of Hyraxes.” Is Spain an island? No. What’s a Hyrax, you might ask? Wikipedia tells us that they are any of 4 species of small, thickset, herbivorous mammals living in Africa or the Middle East — but not in Spain. That’s like naming my part of the world “the satellite of penguins.”

I’d love to hear more examples of misnomerian nationalities.

obvious hypocrisy?

While I’m recanting, I want to take back something I posted just last week:

Monday, November 20, 2006

moron hypocrisy

“more on” hypocrisy (but you knew that)

From today’s Doonesbury:

As with pinko tax-dodgers, it’s important not to get so caught up in the obvious hypocrisy of the chickenhawks that we fail to identify which part of the hypocritical combination is the evil part.

I think I was wrong. Not only is the chickenhawk’s hypocrisy not obvious, I don’t think it’s hypocrisy.

Gary Trudeau seems to be anti-war; so am I. Trudeau seems to dislike the chickenhawks; so do I. But while I condemn their values and their power, I think it’s wrong to imply that their values are internally inconsistent.

Let me try a parallel: it would be hypocritical to support the War On Drugs while you and your trust-fund buddies have coke parties, but is it hypocritical for someone to support the War On Drugs without joining the police force?

The hypocrisy of the first case is based on an implied universal: it’s wrong to do drugs (and of course on the further-implied universal that it’s right to use coercion against anything that is wrong). But saying that you support a particular activity on the part of the government does not imply that you think everyone should work for the government.

Supporting a particular war does not imply that everyone should be a soldier; there’s no hypocrisy in cheering on the bloodshed from the safety of home. It’s evil, but it’s not hypocritical.

The War On Drugs is wrong. The war in Iraq is wrong. But I was wrong to imply that those who disagree with me are automatically guilty of intellectual dishonesty.

paleologism

This week’s theme at AWAD was practical words — words you can easily use in conversation or writing.

Floccinaucinihilipilification wasn’t one of them.

---

Update: In case you don’t read the comments, I’m going to copy part of iceberg’s here:

floccinaucinihilipilification < flocci- a tuft of wool or bit of lint + nauci- a trifle + nihili- nothing + pili- a hair + fic < facere make + ation the act of: "the act of making worthless."

expensive ignorance

Another confession of my own historical ignorance (but not agnorance this time):

Charley Reese writes on LRC today about the “Expensive Ignorance” of today’s college students. He starts out with the unsurprising results of a recent survey. These things have been coming out for years and the media loves it because it gives good sound bite: e.g., “Some 75 percent couldn’t identify the purpose of the Monroe Doctrine,” and “nearly 50 percent didn’t recognize the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence.”

My confession is that I had to double-check the Monroe Doctrine. My wife had a similar reaction. Manifest Destiny, wasn’t it? expanding across the continent?

Well, yes and no. The result was territorial expansionism, but the doctrine is simply the claim that European activity in “the Americas” is the business of the US government. This seems to be an explicit rejection of George Washington’s warnings against foreign entanglements.

Like so many other examples, the doctrine was seen as liberal because it was anti-colonial. The result of course, was the Roosevelt Corollary and the Truman Doctrine.

I wonder if my poor memory of the specifics is a product of time and laziness, or if I get to blame this one on my teachers. The fact that my wife’s semi-memory was the same as mine — “something about expanding across the continent?” — implies to me that it’s the teachers.

Charley Reese blames them explicitly:

I think this is a residue of the 1960s and 1970s. If you ever wondered where the Vietnam Era’s anti-war demonstrators and hippies went, the answer is to universities and media offices. They were of a mind that it is more important to knock America than to explain it, but education should be about explanation, not polemics or politics.

I need to think about that. The thesis strikes me as right but not entirely right.

I know that the Civil Rights era of the 20th century changed how the so-called Civil War was taught. (Apparently the claim that it was “all about slavery” would have seemed cartoonish to students in the 1950s and earlier.)

But did the Baby Boomers really shift the whole emphasis of history and foreign events from complexity and explanation to taking sides and jumping to conclusions?

If American students in the 1950s perceived the war of the 1860s as complex, I don’t think they had the same perspective on the war of the 1940s.

Historical Revisionism as a movement goes back to the 1920s, where its emphasis was to critique the Establishment claims of the Treaty of Versailles. You don’t get much more dumbed-down black-and-white than Woodrow Wilson’s version of events.

I’m not ready to dismiss Reese’s thesis, but the history and economics of schooling seem like plenty to explain an ignorant mass of college students. The “Vietnam Era’s anti-war demonstrators and hippies” are neither necessary nor sufficient.