Julie Rowe on Year of Polygamy Podcast

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_Gadianton
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Re: Julie Rowe on Year of Polygamy Podcast

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Symmachus wrote:Lots of great human beings don't have statues (I don't have one, for example)
I'll see that this oversight is corrected.
Lou Midgley 08/20/2020: "...meat wad," and "cockroach" are pithy descriptions of human beings used by gemli? They were not fashioned by Professor Peterson.

LM 11/23/2018: one can explain away the soul of human beings...as...a Meat Unit, to use Professor Peterson's clever derogatory description of gemli's ideology.
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Re: Julie Rowe on Year of Polygamy Podcast

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Gadianton wrote:
Wed Jul 08, 2020 8:53 pm
Symmachus wrote:Lots of great human beings don't have statues (I don't have one, for example)
I'll see that this oversight is corrected.
The only greater honor would be it to have it torn down by an angry rabble and thrown into the Great Salt Lake.
"As to any slivers of light or any particles of darkness of the past, we forget about them."

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Re: Julie Rowe on Year of Polygamy Podcast

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My point was not that statues are awarded to random schmoes for no reason, but that statues lack nuance. They don't specify what the person did that warranted a statue, and pedestals don't feature relief illustrations of the hero's failings. They show only the person themselves, without context. A statue in a public place of honor is an official civic declaration that whatever this person did, the TLDR version is, "This guy was great."

If the statue is thereby saying that when you add up all the positives and negatives of this person's life the balance is a big positive, then that's a problem because weightings change with time. They're not objective facts of history that need to be remembered but subjective judgements that every generation can and probably should reconsider. Just because the people who used to live here didn't see slaveholding as a big negative doesn't mean that we have to perpetuate that judgement today.

The fact that people who used to live here thought as they did may be a fact worth remembering; sometimes reminders of an evil past deserve prominence, like the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. I think the right way to do that is with modern monuments made for that purpose, rather than by simply letting the past have the last word.

Furthermore it seems to me that an authorized TLDR version does more than simply assert that a lengthy account has a positive balance. By omitting context in such a prominent statement, we declare that in this case context is unnecessary. A statue speaks for itself. It's not a feature that invites interpretation in relation to its surroundings. It's a human face that draws the eye in a scene, a landmark to which things are oriented.

The details aren't just omitted. By being left out in such a prominent statement they are explicitly declared to be unimportant. That's the whole point of the honor of a prominent public statue that just shows you, and not whatever you did. It says that because of those one or two great things you did, nothing else matters now, you are great, period. In that sense it's putting things on pedestals, not pulling them down, that is canceling culture.

Nobody today can actually re-write the past, after all. The people who used to live here got to look at the statues they liked all their lives. By putting up great big statues in the public places that their successors would frequent, they were trying to put their stamp on their future, our present. Why should they have a right to do that? It isn't their city now. They're all dead.
Symmachus wrote:
Wed Jul 08, 2020 4:55 pm
No, I don't deny that ideas ever motivate actions (though I am skeptical in the case of iconoclasm, as is clear from what I wrote; such anonymous uprisings are seized upon by the ideas people but not initiated by them). As I wrote, I don't think "ideas determine the nature of the action to be pursued." I don't think the urge to have alcohol constitutes an idea, and thus not a useful comparison (and anyway, knowing you have an urge to drink does not allow me to predict whether you will have a drink, what the drink will be, and so on, let alone any of the other consequences that come from drinking—do we attribute alcohol poisoning to the urge people have to drink to alcohol or to the actual drinking of it?). But as to motivation, my thinking remains the same as it was when I began responding on this thread: an idea may motivate some people, but I don't think the idea itself is an indicator of whether or not such people will be motivated by it.
People are motivated by lots of things, and indeed 83% of somebody's motivation to pull down a statue may well have been beer. I don't find it easy to distinguish categorically, though, between general courses of action like "redress past wrongs" and specific ones like "pull down this statue". I mean, zoom in on the statue-pulling and you can distinguish between the specific courses of action of tying the rope around the head instead of the arm. Where's the line, between general principles like redressing wrongs and specific "natures of the action" like hitching to different statue appendages, at which ideas cease to determine what people do?

I also find it hard to say that "Another beer would be nice" is not an idea but "Capitalists expropriate value from workers" is one. If pressed I could probably write an essay on the abstract theoretical implications in the desire for beer, or on the simple animal instincts underlying Marxism. Bet a beer I could.

The power of ideas is not limited to conscious deductions from explicit axioms. People are motivated by all kinds of subtle nudges and cues. We're all swimming in a big river that has lots of sources. That doesn't mean that a little effluent upstream doesn't matter.
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Re: Julie Rowe on Year of Polygamy Podcast

Post by _Kishkumen »

Dear Symmachus,

Your latest response to me is one for the ages. Your discussion of the "great satan," etc., is very illuminating. I am better for having read it. There is a lot in your post to unpack and unfortunately I am short on time right now, but I want you to know that your efforts in writing that were not in vain. It is a lovely and very educational post. Your slide into the fourth century CE was masterful. It is stuff like this that makes me want to protect MDB's data forever. This may be a little backwater part of the internet, but some lovely and very interesting things have happened here, and your participation is a key component of that. Thank you.
"Petition wasn’t meant to start a witch hunt as I’ve said 6000 times." ~ Hanna Seariac, LDS apologist
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Re: Julie Rowe on Year of Polygamy Podcast

Post by _Symmachus »

Physics Guy wrote:
Thu Jul 09, 2020 9:34 am
My point was not that statues are awarded to random schmoes for no reason, but that statues lack nuance. They don't specify what the person did that warranted a statue, and pedestals don't feature relief illustrations of the hero's failings. They show only the person themselves, without context. A statue in a public place of honor is an official civic declaration that whatever this person did, the TLDR version is, "This guy was great."

If the statue is thereby saying that when you add up all the positives and negatives of this person's life the balance is a big positive, then that's a problem because weightings change with time. They're not objective facts of history that need to be remembered but subjective judgements that every generation can and probably should reconsider. Just because the people who used to live here didn't see slaveholding as a big negative doesn't mean that we have to perpetuate that judgement today.

The fact that people who used to live here thought as they did may be a fact worth remembering; sometimes reminders of an evil past deserve prominence, like the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. I think the right way to do that is with modern monuments made for that purpose, rather than by simply letting the past have the last word.
Statues do lack nuance, but they don't lack context in the way that you describe. The original people who put the statue up, for whatever reason, were not usually unclear as to why they were doing so and what many of their contemporaries who understood or shared that context thought it about it. The problem is that statutes are static but cultures aren't. Statues are memorials, which means they are meant to evoke a memory. If the culture no longer has the memories around it or wishes to reject the memories, then obviously the context has changed or will change, and thus the statue will make no sense. I would guess that most people have no idea why most monuments exist, at the least in the United States (it's not like the US has ever been a monument-building culture anyway. It strikes me how old most of the statues are), but this will happen to any memorializing object, even Holocaust Memorials (except that those memorials are, like the one in Berlin, usually attached to a museum, because they would otherwise have even less context than an equestrian statue with some bearded rider).

Your last paragraph I don't quite understand: we shouldn't let the past have the last word, but yet we should design memorials so that the interpretation of them will be fixed for future generations? Wouldn't future generations then find themselves beholden to the past, with its last word? In your way of thinking about this, what would be wrong with a future generation tearing down a Holocaust Memorial if the context has changed so that the Holocaust is seen as a good thing? Why would you want to control how a future generation in a different context gets to view a memorial that you approve of in the present?

You can see the problem with relativism as a guide here if you only apply it selectively to the cases that you disapprove of.
Physics Guy wrote:
Thu Jul 09, 2020 9:34 am
Furthermore it seems to me that an authorized TLDR version does more than simply assert that a lengthy account has a positive balance. By omitting context in such a prominent statement, we declare that in this case context is unnecessary. A statue speaks for itself. It's not a feature that invites interpretation in relation to its surroundings. It's a human face that draws the eye in a scene, a landmark to which things are oriented.

The details aren't just omitted. By being left out in such a prominent statement they are explicitly declared to be unimportant. That's the whole point of the honor of a prominent public statue that just shows you, and not whatever you did. It says that because of those one or two great things you did, nothing else matters now, you are great, period. In that sense it's putting things on pedestals, not pulling them down, that is canceling culture.
I don't really disagree with your description of how statues are insufficient as repositories of historical memory. But statues are not meant to be works of history, and this view of things, while eloquent, seems to miss why people put up statues. People feel the need to memorialize other humans; maybe that's dumb, I don't think it's to control the past so that future generations are somehow forever trapped by it by disguising the reality of nuance and complexity (that strikes me as a very Foucauldian interpretation, but acolytes of Foucault think everything is about power and control, and consequently their intepretations are almost always overwrought: like all dogmatists, they start with a valid line of argument but then end up using it to strangle any meaningful attempt to understand). I mean, tombstones lack nuance, but that's their not their point. The emotion behind that is not an emotion susceptible to context and nuance, so it seems to me quite irrelevant to point out that statues don't have that. I don't think memorials have that by nature because it will always have to be explained; there can be a visual cue that can lead you to the books or the tour guide but it won't be inherent. It might feel that way to the initial generation, but you're gonna need actual words to do that a certain point. The idea that past people had it in mind to control the future by putting up statues seems a bit of stretch precisely because statues are meaningless without some other cultural control in place that tells you how to interpret them.

"Nobody can rewrite the past, yet let's remove the imprint of the past because all those people are dead" seems like a call to rewrite the past. People rewrite the past all the time, in part by forgetting it. If there is any value at all to memorials and statues, it is that they can evoke questions, once the original context is gone: "what the hell is this, and why is this here?" That is true of any object or mental construct bequeathed us by those dead people. If answering this leads people to question the continued benefit of keeping one in a public place and removing it, fine. After all, why should we continue to pay professors to teach physics and research questions that don't have an immediate payoff? Maybe that was fine when those dead people built that social arrangement, but it's really in our way now, and we could use the funding, as well as the office space, for more pressing questions. Why should we let our present social needs be hemmed in by a social structure invented by the Prussian bureaucrats in the 19th century, all of whom were white men? Tear it down. All of it.

See, this is where I part ways with the "ideas" people who are attempting, from the comfort of a home office, to provide theoretical cover to lawlessness. I really don't have interest in statues per se, particularly statues in places I've never been or that I've never seen or heard of, and especially statues of people I've never heard of. I seriously doubt most people in this country care about any but a handful of monuments. And I agree that statues have no nuance to them, but neither do the groups of people tearing them down in such an obviously lawless fashion. You think this is really about statues and nuance? This is an iconclastic moment, not a bunch of art historians arguing over the blunt social presence of statues, and when I think of iconoclasm, whether in 5th century Alexandria or 8th century Byzantium or 16th century Europe, I see a phenomenon that is usually accompanied by severe social disruption and violence. Maybe the iconoclasm is a symptom, but not treating the symptom worsens whatever the underlying condition is. What is going to be on the chopping block when they are done with the statues?

Perhaps the destruction of statues is not necessarily that much of a problem in the United States, which contains a population that remembers nothing, knows little, and has been nowhere else. It could all be a vast and hysterical cosplay by the over-credentialed and underemployed (I also find it interesting that they're mostly young, not usually a healthy social sign). But what is really disturbing to me is to see people with large media platforms and substantial cultural presence and who are in positions to know better—and who are in many cases paid to know better—out there providing permission structures for all of this in a grand show of post hoc rationalization: dressing up vandalism as some kind of intellectual argument. Supposing this is the reaction to an underlying condition, ignoring the symptom is bad enough, but no good can come from arguing that the symptom is actually beneficial. So what's the next symptom we'll be told is actually a good sign by the Vox-types? What next act are they going to justify? When elites begin justifying extra legal violence as they are now justifying vandalism, then we'll be entering some pretty dangerous territory, and I'm already seeing some troubling signs that that is where we're headed. Still, I hope it goes no further than a silly argument over whether statues are nuanced or not, but I fear such arguments are not just beside the point but missing it in a way that could be spectacularly destructive.
Physics Guy wrote:
Thu Jul 09, 2020 9:34 am
People are motivated by lots of things, and indeed 83% of somebody's motivation to pull down a statue may well have been beer. I don't find it easy to distinguish categorically, though, between general courses of action like "redress past wrongs" and specific ones like "pull down this statue". I mean, zoom in on the statue-pulling and you can distinguish between the specific courses of action of tying the rope around the head instead of the arm. Where's the line, between general principles like redressing wrongs and specific "natures of the action" like hitching to different statue appendages, at which ideas cease to determine what people do?
I don't think we disagree here. I don't think ideas are necessarily determinative of action, although I can think of some exceptions.
Physics Guy wrote:
Thu Jul 09, 2020 9:34 am
I also find it hard to say that "Another beer would be nice" is not an idea but "Capitalists expropriate value from workers" is one. If pressed I could probably write an essay on the abstract theoretical implications in the desire for beer, or on the simple animal instincts underlying Marxism. Bet a beer I could.
I have tried to avoid getting entangled in the question of just what an idea really is. I suppose it could be any mental conception at any point in time in any individual mind; I have been using it more along the lines of the post I was originally responding to, which is something like a complex of assumptions about the world that structure how we interpret its phenomena (this was about cosmic dualism, originally). The desire for beer does not fit that to me, but I can see how we can understand that too as an idea. A philosopher like Gadianton, illustrious Dean of Cassius University and winner of the decennial and prestigious "Best Person to be Stuck in an Elevator With" award from the Cassius Alumni Association, could perhaps be of some help here.

I would not bet against you, in any case, and I look forward to your essay, "Budweiser Blues: A Marxist Critique of the (De-)Alcoholization of Heternormative Working Class Identity in Nonbinary Breweries." See how easy humanities graduate seminars can be? They're practically write-by-numbers. Do ten of those of around 30 pages, take a few exams in which you regurgitate whatever you remember of list of books, then finally write 200-300 page version and we'll give you a PhD after we discuss it over snacks (act now, and you can deduct 50 pages of bibliography and use 12 pt font, double-spaced, in your footnotes). We'll give you 5-8 years and pay you around $100,000 to do it. (thank god for Prussian bureaucrats!)
Physics Guy wrote:
Thu Jul 09, 2020 9:34 am
The power of ideas is not limited to conscious deductions from explicit axioms. People are motivated by all kinds of subtle nudges and cues. We're all swimming in a big river that has lots of sources. That doesn't mean that a little effluent upstream doesn't matter.
Yes, that is very much what I have been arguing. It seems we agree on this.
"As to any slivers of light or any particles of darkness of the past, we forget about them."

—B. Redd McConkie
_Symmachus
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Re: Julie Rowe on Year of Polygamy Podcast

Post by _Symmachus »

Kishkumen wrote:
Thu Jul 09, 2020 1:11 pm
Dear Symmachus,
....
I cannot quote praise that I don't deserve, but that doesn't mean I can't thank you for it. Please know that my feeling is reciprocal.

And I agree that this place is one of most interesting parts on the internet; I was pretty disheartened when it disappeared for a while this past Spring. There are only few times a year when I have significant time to respond to posts that my interests me, but I had got used to reading through new threads a few times a week.
"As to any slivers of light or any particles of darkness of the past, we forget about them."

—B. Redd McConkie
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Re: Julie Rowe on Year of Polygamy Podcast

Post by _Physics Guy »

Symmachus wrote:
Thu Jul 09, 2020 5:12 pm
Statues do lack nuance, but they don't lack context in the way that you describe. The original people who put the statue up, for whatever reason, were not usually unclear as to why they were doing so and what many of their contemporaries who understood or shared that context thought it about it. The problem is that statutes are static but cultures aren't. Statues are memorials, which means they are meant to evoke a memory. If the culture no longer has the memories around it or wishes to reject the memories, then obviously the context has changed or will change, and thus the statue will make no sense. I would guess that most people have no idea why most monuments exist, at the least in the United States (it's not like the US has ever been a monument-building culture anyway. It strikes me how old most of the statues are), but this will happen to any memorializing object, even Holocaust Memorials (except that those memorials are, like the one in Berlin, usually attached to a museum, because they would otherwise have even less context than an equestrian statue with some bearded rider).
I accept the qualification that statues usually had context when they were first put up and that most of the people who lived around them then were probably happy to honor the figures whom the statues represented, whether or not we'd agree with that honoring now. My point was, as you say, that statues outlast their context.

Maybe most people in the past did know the flaws as well as the merits of their heroes; I'm not sure about that but let's suppose it was so. Perhaps people who were around when the statues went up had soberly weighed up the flaws and the merits and concluded that the balance was positive enough to warrant admiration. Or perhaps they somehow understood that although the statues showed only the heroes themselves, that was merely a convention of statuary, and the meaning of the prominent public statues was really only to commemorate the great things that the heroes had done, without implying any assessment whatever of the heroes' careers as a whole, or their characters.

Even in those optimistic cases of past society, people today who knew all the same things about these former heroes might well disagree that the balances were positive enough to warrant statues, or that it was appropriate to commemorate a great deed with a statue of a doer who had also done too many other things that were anything but great. If past generations were entitled to put up the statues, people today are surely entitled to revise those past judgements and pull the old statues down.

To suppose that people today know all the context around those former heroes, and have made carefully reconsidered judgements, is of course considerably more optimistic even than supposing that past people knew all the context. Insofar as context is now missing, though, I think it's more justified, and not less, to remove the old statues.
Your last paragraph I don't quite understand: we shouldn't let the past have the last word, but yet we should design memorials so that the interpretation of them will be fixed for future generations?
We may not be able to stop our future successors from degenerating to the point of, say, celebrating the Holocaust, but perhaps our monuments can be one means of trying to prevent that, by guiding the thoughts of future generations. Perhaps people in the past were likewise trying to guide our thoughts; they were entitled to try. It may also be that our future successors are better than we are, and abhor things that we now stupidly admire. We should do our best to create only monuments whose legitimacy will last as well as their substance, but no generation is entitled to impose its monuments on futurity just because it put the statues up first. Statuarium semper reformandum.
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Re: Julie Rowe on Year of Polygamy Podcast

Post by _Physics Guy »

Symmachus wrote:
Thu Jul 09, 2020 5:12 pm
Statues do lack nuance, but they don't lack context in the way that you describe. The original people who put the statue up, for whatever reason, were not usually unclear as to why they were doing so and what many of their contemporaries who understood or shared that context thought it about it. The problem is that statutes are static but cultures aren't. Statues are memorials, which means they are meant to evoke a memory. If the culture no longer has the memories around it or wishes to reject the memories, then obviously the context has changed or will change, and thus the statue will make no sense. I would guess that most people have no idea why most monuments exist, at the least in the United States (it's not like the US has ever been a monument-building culture anyway. It strikes me how old most of the statues are), but this will happen to any memorializing object, even Holocaust Memorials (except that those memorials are, like the one in Berlin, usually attached to a museum, because they would otherwise have even less context than an equestrian statue with some bearded rider).
I accept the qualification that statues usually had context when they were first put up and that most of the people who lived around them then were probably happy to honor the figures whom the statues represented, whether or not we'd agree with that honoring now. My point was, as you say, that statues outlast their context.

Maybe most people in the past did know the flaws as well as the merits of their heroes; I'm not sure about that but let's suppose it was so. Perhaps people who were around when the statues went up had soberly weighed up the flaws and the merits and concluded that the balance was positive enough to warrant admiration. Or perhaps they somehow understood that although the statues showed only the heroes themselves, that was merely a convention of statuary, and the meaning of the prominent public statues was really only to commemorate the great things that the heroes had done, without implying any assessment whatever of the heroes' entire careers or characters.

Even in those optimistic cases of past society, people today who knew all the same things about these former heroes might well disagree that the balances were positive enough to warrant statues, or that it was appropriate to commemorate a great deed with a statue of a doer who had also done too many other things that were anything but great. If past generations were entitled to put up the statues, people today are surely entitled to revise those past judgements and pull the old statues down.

To suppose that people today know all the context around those former heroes, and have made carefully reconsidered judgements, is of course considerably more optimistic even than supposing that past people knew all the context. Insofar as context is now missing, though, I think it's more justified, and not less, to remove the old statues.
Your last paragraph I don't quite understand: we shouldn't let the past have the last word, but yet we should design memorials so that the interpretation of them will be fixed for future generations?
We may not be able to stop our future successors from degenerating to the point of, say, celebrating the Holocaust, but perhaps our monuments can be one means of trying to prevent that, by guiding the thoughts of future generations. Perhaps people in the past were likewise trying to guide our thoughts; they were entitled to try. It may also be that our future successors are better than we are, and rightly abhor things that we now stupidly admire. We should do our best to create only monuments whose legitimacy will last as well as their substance, but no generation is entitled to impose its monuments on futurity just because it put the statues up first. Statuarium semper reformandum.
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Re: Julie Rowe on Year of Polygamy Podcast

Post by _Symmachus »

Maybe most people in the past did know the flaws as well as the merits of their heroes; I'm not sure about that but let's suppose it was so. Perhaps people who were around when the statues went up had soberly weighed up the flaws and the merits and concluded that the balance was positive enough to warrant admiration. Or perhaps they somehow understood that although the statues showed only the heroes themselves, that was merely a convention of statuary, and the meaning of the prominent public statues was really only to commemorate the great things that the heroes had done, without implying any assessment whatever of the heroes' careers as a whole, or their characters.
It seems uncontroversial to me to say that the bolded part best reflects the ethos of statue-building. They are not meant for analytical nuance. I don't think even the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin is analytically nuanced. I see nothing controversial either in replacing or removing statues because people no longer know or care or respect the original reason for their being set-up. I'm not sure we're that far apart on this. Also, vandalizing statues is not exactly an act of analytical nuance, as I'm sure you'd agree. I was not trying to defend statues set up in most cases more than 100 years ago commemorating people that hardly anyone even remembers. I'm saying it's about something else, as in the case of most iconoclastic movements.
"As to any slivers of light or any particles of darkness of the past, we forget about them."

—B. Redd McConkie
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