User talk:Cesar Tort

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Archive 1 - 2006 / 2008 ArbcomCase

1 Jesus
2 Light-years beyond the mortals' grasp
3 Psychohistory
4 unsigned
5 SRA

[edit] Jesus

Retrieved from Slrubenstein's talk page:

I have noticed that you are interested in the historical Jesus. Since 1987 I became interested in Morton Smith, especially his book Jesus the magician.

I know there has been a lot of controversy about The secret Gospel and the Clement letter. But that doesn't interest me much. The portrait that secular humanist Paul Kurtz (whom I know personally) presents about Jesus in The transcendental temptation, in which he mentions Smith's book, strikes me as realistic.

Do you hold a particular view on Smith? (BTW, I corresponded to him just before he died.)

—Cesar Tort 06:34, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

My understanding is that when he was in his prime, he was one of the most important historians of religion especially of Judaism during the Hellenic and Roman period. I believe his book on Jesus was respected, and still is only to the extent to which it is dated. There has been a lot of work by younger historians since he retired, and I think his writings have been supplanted by them (e.g. E.P Sanders and Paula Fredricksen) ... but I bet even newer and more current works on Jesus still cite him. He has been supplanted by younger historians of Judaism during the Hellenic/Roman period (e.g. by Shaye J. D. Cohen) but again I imagine even theystill cite him. I never knew him but don't doubt that in his day he was a great scholar. Slrubenstein | Talk 12:13, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

If you have handy a Harper & Row copy of Jesus the magician, page 27 describes a most realistic picture of who might have been the historical Jesus:

...a carpenter in Nazareth where his family lived, went back for a visit after he had set up as an exorcist, but was regarded with contempt by the townspeople and could do no miracle there. Even his brothers did not believe him, and once, at the beginning of his career, his family and friends tried to put him under arrest as insane. For his part, he rejected them, said that his true family were his followers, and had nothing to do with them through all his later career. This coherent and credible account is broken in the gospels into half a dozen fragments.

Curiously, deMause told me by e-mail a couple of years ago that Jesus could have been swaddled (Luke 2:7), i.e., badly abused as a baby (swaddling was an almost universal practice by then). Donald Capps has published an interesting psychobiography of an abused child Jesus.

—Cesar Tort 17:32, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

If you like Smith, I think you would really like Sanders. Slrubenstein | Talk 19:22, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

Sander's views on Paul look interesting. My favorite on this subject is Hyam Maccoby's The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity. —Cesar Tort 20:23, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Light-years beyond the mortals' grasp

Retrieved from User talk:Haiduc:

Hi Haiduc. Before he betrayed us with 2010: Odyssey Two for money, Arthur C. Clarke used to be my idol. I even corresponded to him in the 1990s. Now that he is dead, his ex lovers might start to speak out. Be patient. If the ephebophile claims are true, my educated guess is that sources will be forthcoming in the near future. Clarke was far way beyond mankind's grasp in many ways. Maybe that's why the Clarkives are to be published in 50 years... Cesar Tort 21:24, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

Too bad I do not have fifty years left in me! Haiduc (talk) 21:39, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

Indeed. Ceser, Clarke certainly let his name be attached to a lot of junk in his later years, over which we can only roll our eyes. I expect you realize he may have really needed the money, and maybe we can give him a little break about that. I have seen no sign that he lived in an ostentatious or extravagant way, and I think he must have needed it to keep himself going in the face of serious medical problems, and to maintain his extended family. I tend to sympathize, having some similar issues myself. I do hope nothing truly wicked about him emerges, but we will have to see about that. I think he was kind, at least, which I see as a central virtue. Best, Bill Wwheaton (talk) 18:11, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

By the way, someone put Occult into the Childhood's End page in place of Overmind, and after having a look around here I wondered if it might have been you. I was preparing to re-write the lead sentence myself, but I see someone has changed it, as if it were a typo (which I doubt very much). Anyhow, "Occult" in that sentence certainly troubled me, and if that came from you I would be interested to discuss it. It may be all about the definitions of words. -- B Wwheaton (talk) 19:45, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

No. It wasn't me. Clarke himself wrote in the new edition that he was skeptical of such claims.

Writing 2010 was a betrayal of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick and his fans. That's why you don't see mention of 2010 and the other Odysseys in most obituaries. Clarke didn't have to sustain an extended family. Two hired people would have been enough. After you write Hamlet, writing a sequel for money is treason. It's just nothing to do with the real Hamlet. Clarke should have asked permission to Kubrick. He didn't. Scott Meredith showed him the green bill and Clarke took it. I think it was Ezra Pound who said that everything that has been written for money is worthless. I agree. I told this to Clarke but he was old by then. Too bad that after Kubrick no one has filmed something similar. I wish I could do something to film Childhood's End but I don't know how to contact Kimberly Peirce. —Cesar Tort 20:23, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

Hi again, Cesar, I really love and admire your purity, even though I cannot quite agree. I think after writing CE and 2001, one should not be sentenced to being required to equal or surpass them for life. And that extended family was not his caretakers, they were his friends, adopted family. The later, lesser works are simply detached from the earlier monuments; is that so terrible? Even Shakespeare and Bach had a right to bad days. (I really know nothing about any betrayal of Kubrick; I might agree with you that he did badly on that, if I were more informed.)

But I digress. I rewrote the lead plot summary paragraphs of the Childhood's End article a few days ago, you might like to take a look. It was a quick and dirty job, but needed doing. All the best, Bill Wwheaton (talk) 04:02, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Hi Bill. Some time ago I edited such article in my own way.

I totally agree with you that we must tolerate, say, Newton's trappings with alchemy and his loonie interpretation of the Book of Revelation. However, this is a far cry from writing Hamlet II for money, thus betraying a masterpiece. Clarke could've easily made more money had he tried, thru his friendship with Kubrick, to find a director for his best novels. (Kubrick did ask him not to film the stupid novel 2010 by the way.) You can't write Hamlet II for money, resuscitating the prince of Denmark, even if you are Shakespeare. You simply can't.

I felt horrible when trying to read 2010: my most valued ideals had been betrayed for the sake of the green bill. I never wrote a strong letter to Clarke about the subject, but I felt tempted to do so...

—Cesar Tort 04:42, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I found your Karellen article at our first interaction. I liked it a lot, with a fine collection of what are to me the most moving excerpts from the book. I think the current Wiki article is not nearly as good. I doubt, given the wiki ground rules, that it ever will be improved to be as powerful as your collection of "good parts". ("Karellen" surely looks weird in that image; especially his ears--they almost come out of the side of his neck. The goatish connection, maybe? — though in Karellen's case, for most un-goat-like being.)

There are two big questions I would love insight into in my lifetime. First is whether the laws of nature can be understood in some finite representation. Gōdel's incompleteness theorem suggests to me that maybe no such finite "Final Book" of physics can exist, but I am not sure Gōdel is even relevant. But if it is infinite, then the sort of vertiginous revolutions we have seen in physics since 1895 may go on ad infinitum, and all bets are off. Of course that is my favored answer, as it suggests things will never be boring. The second is about the probability of Life emerging de novo from the non-living astronomical panorama we observe. At this point I think we have no rational basis at all for having an opinion. We could be the only life extant, from here clear out to the Horizon, nearly 13 billion light years away, and be looking at a vast desert. Or we could be looking at the lights of the Big City, teaming with every imaginable variety, filling every niche with adorable (and/or awful) creatures. The Bar Scene from Star Wars writ large. Here I also have a hope, which is that the styles and varieties of life, and of Mind too, go on without end, that there will always be new surprises and new vistas waiting for us. But God will be what God will be, I suppose. I think the clues we have are thrillingly suggestive, if a bit terrifying.

About 2010, etc, I guess we just have to disagree. Clarke gave us such a riches of ideas that I cannot fault him if the well ran dry towards the end; Ich habe genug.

Best, Bill Wwheaton (talk) 18:12, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

You may have'd enough about 2010 Bill, not me. Nobody on the planet has loved the film 2001 more than me, not even Piers Bizoni. What Clarke did was something like reviving Hamlet for money: an outrageous shame and a treason for people like us. I don't care at all if he fucked with teen boys. Believe me! But an unauthorized biography condemning his literary treason is in order. One of the reasons why I have zero contact with Clarke fans in the internet forums, and not even watch their pages, is because people don't want to see something so obvious. He is the only sci-fi writer I loved, the only one. Asimov et al's writing seem rubbish to me. There's an image in the first film of Batman when Jack Nicholson's clowns paint over with wide brush some masterpieces of great painters. One would except that sort of vandalism coming from a joker, but never coming from the author himself —for money! And that is 2010: Odyssey Two. —Cesar Tort 18:57, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

There may be more to the story about this than I know. I only read the book and saw the movie, and just thought it was nowhere near the standard set by CE & 2001. But I don't see how it diminishes the great works, that there were ordinary ones. That just seems to show that Clarke was human to me, not outrageous. Maybe I am too morally flabby, but I really don't get it. Bill Wwheaton (talk) 19:18, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

In literature there's a cliché: once and author finishes a great work, it's no longer hers.

It's difficult to convey my feelings unless you read my autobiography (a 275,000-word MS in Spanish), but I'll try the impossible task of summarizing it in a nutshell. If you are a Hamlet fan how would you have felt that, for money, Shakespeare wrote Hamlet Redivivus?

When I was a boy I wanted to become a second Kubrick. A major catastrophe, something as maddening as Sophie's Choice (all of this is in my autobio), prevented me from reaching my goals. In 1968 I was ten years old and went with my dad to see both 2001 and The Planet of the Apes (my father used to compose orchestra music and in the early 1960's he turned down a Warner & Bros. job to compose soundtracks). I loved the music of the Apes film, especially that of the desert and beach scenes, as well as Taylor's cursing of mankind at the end of the film.

A few years later I received my first big shock in a market society when, with enormous enthusiasm, with my cousin I watched Beneath the Planet of the Apes: a complete bullshit and betrayal of the first film.

For years I loved Clarke's statements that a sequel to 2001 was clearly impossible. Even my brother bothered me with jokes that Clarke was writing a sequel. I couldn't expect that my worst nightmares would became true in 1982 and for the same commercial reasons that bastardized the Apes film.

But there's more to this story...

—Cesar Tort 21:11, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Very interesting. Wish my Spanish was better. I discovered Clarke when I was in the hospital for 17 months between the ages of 11 & 14, getting a hip fixed up. I had lots of time to think, and a need for a wider view. Anyhow, it is always a pleasure to meet someone who has been affected by Clarke as importantly as I was, whatever our differences. CE has always had a strange emotional impact on me ("He writes like an angel..."), but the thing I really value Clarke for is his ideas, the vistas he opened up for me when I my horizons were just forming. All the best, Wwheaton (talk) 22:57, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

I read Childhood's End (CE) in 1984. CE was the book that most influenced my young mind. In fact, I became insane after reading it because I wanted to develop such powers; studied parapsychology and published in the journal of the Society for Psychical Research. When years later I learnt that ESP and PK probably don't exist I wrote to Clarke and he answered my letters.

The "CE stage" in my life is described almost at the end of my autob. It's impossible to convey a long, agonizing spiritual odyssey in the wiki. Only a novel, or even better a faithful autobiography, can do it. I can only hope I'll find a translator for my work before I die (I simply can't translate slang Spanish into slang English)...

Cesar Tort 01:32, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

I've never taken ESP or PK to seriously, but I think it may be just because I'm not sure what the words mean. Obviously we do not understand all natural law, so the possibility of phenomena outside of what we know is interesting, but surely not sensational. So, are ESP & PK supposed to be "outside of natural law"? Or what? You may be the the perfect person to clarify the concept, since I can no longer hope to get ACC drunk and have him explain it to me. I am pretty sure I can not define what the word "miracle" means, beyond just the folk meaning, of something wonderful and beyond ordinary understanding. What would it mean for something to be "outside of natural law"? I have no idea. Do academics working in the field agree about this? I'm fairly comfortable with the idea that our folk notions of time, and probably causality (therefore), cannot be "physically meaningful", but that just makes it a problem of human psychology and our lack of understanding, which I accept, at least in principle. I have an old college friend who might be a good translator for you. He is a journalist who has worked in Latin America a lot, currently living in Spain. Certainly knows his slang in English, and I bet in Spanish too. See [1], knock three times, and tell him Bill sent you. :) Bill Wwheaton (talk) 02:29, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Well, let's first try to find a publisher in Spain for the manuscript in Spanish and then think about a translation :)

As you know, thoroughgoing psi (i.e., ESP & PK) development by children was mankind's apotheosis in CE. The philosophical rationale for "psi" or "outside natural law" was developed by a few parapsychologists. For the moment only the late John Beloff's writings (my former editor for my psi stuff when I was a believer) come to my mind, though I haven't read parapsychology literature for about 15 years.

It's better not to get too philosophical here. Parapsychology is like speculating how to paint a house without even a solid wall in the property!

Cesar Tort 03:39, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Psychohistory

[edit] Cultural relativism etc.

I'm replying here so as not to clutter the Talk:Psychohistorical views on infanticide page.

One of the main issues here is your and deMause's misunderstanding of Cultural relativism. Cultural relativism is not a 'worldview' as such. It is essentially a tool employed so as to maintain objectivity while studying a particular culture. That in no way, shape or form means that an anthropologist agrees with or condones practices like warfare, female circumcision, or infanticide. However, in searching for how a particular culture operates from an insider's perspective (we call this the emic perspective) it is important not to bias research by imposing your culture's view of any given practice. It is only in this way that we can understand the question: Why?

You and he also seem to overlook the field of applied anthropology in which anthropological theory is used to solve problems in a culturally specific way. As is obvious, outlawing something like female circumcision has little to no effect on the practice, but if we study the practice by understanding the norms for that culture we figure out a way to inform cultures in ways that they will accept instead of trying to simply force our cultural perspective upon them (which has been disastrous historically).

That particular article actually makes a much bigger deal of any controversy that may exist because of this, as news sources often do. Let me put it this way: People wear different hats when doing different things. If you don't study something objectively then you are not going to get useful data. Anthropologists are perfectly capable of studying a culture objectively one day while on the next are equally capable of recognizing that there are injustices in said culture.--Woland (talk) 18:40, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

This last sentence, "anthropologists are perfectly capable of studying a culture objectively one day while on the next..." sounds a bit schizophrenic to me.

Just curious: did you read the Robert Godwin article I called you attention to? I mean —and here in my talk page I can talk in the most blunt, politically incorrect way— it's pretty obvious for me that, because of many Muslims' childrearing ways, Jewish people (in general) belong to what deMause calls a superior psychoclass.

This has nothing to do with race. It only means the level of psychological integration among the Jews (or in the case of Muslim terrorists the level of psychological dissociation) that a particular mode of childrearing causes.

I would be most interested to know your opinion about Godwin's article, The land that developmental time forgot.

—Cesar Tort 19:01, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

This last sentence, "anthropologists are perfectly capable of studying a culture objectively one day while on the next..." sounds a bit schizophrenic to me.

Maybe so, but that is just good science. Science is nothing without objectivity. Academic research must be undertaken without personal feelings, beliefs, etc that may cloud one's perception.

I did read the article and basically found it to be so offensive and disturbing that I really don't know what to say about it. It makes many many many invalid and untested assumptions which makes me seriously question the level of scholarship of Godwin. If time allows I'll try to give a more scholarly critique in the next few days. --Woland (talk) 19:17, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

It's amazing that we seem to be living in the very antipodes, Woland. To me it's an obvious category error to use the method of science to understand the humanities. Science is the study of the empirical world. Physics is its paradigm. You must be objective in hard sciences, yes. But humanities are impossible to understand without subjectivity.

I'll give you a single example. I have read some books on the Holocaust. But the only one which actually got me there was a confessional book, Gene Church's telling of Jack Oran's (born as Yakoff Skurnik) story: his horrific experiences in Auschwitz. I met Skurnik at a Houston conference in 1996 about those experiences. Without this sort of emotions and subjective testimony, an academic textbook on the Holocaust is like a black-and-white film. Only the emotions of a victim bring the film to real color —and life.

—Cesar Tort 20:40, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

That sounds like oral history to me which I also think is pretty cool but I think what you're getting at is the difference between qualitative and quantitative data. I agree that some parts of the social sciences lend themselves better to qualitative data but (1) that doesn't mean that there aren't other areas that lend themselves better to quantitative data and (2) it doesn't mean that we can't gather and interpret qualitative data using the scientific method. There is a really good book (well, really good for people with an anthropology background, but it's pretty readable I think for people who don't have that background) called Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology by H. Russell Bernard that gives an excellent overview of this. Essentially he identifies three norms of science that must be adhered to if we are going to call whatever it is we're doing 'science.'

These norms being that science must be objective, methodological and reliable. By objective we mean that we are explicit about our measurements so that findings may be subject to peer review where potential bias can be pointed out. The method of science is based on three assumptions, (1) that there is an objective reality, (2) reality can be understood and studied through direct observation and (3) material explanations are sufficient explanations for natural phenomena. The final norm is that science must be reliable. That is to say, as Bernard writes, that what is true in Detroit is just as true in Vladivostok. So, as I said, there is no reason why we can't gather things like ethnographic information (which are sometimes better at expressing themselves qualitatively; see Franz Boaz )while adhering to the norms and methods of science. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a strict positivist by any means but I do consider myself to be a scientist at heart.

Personally I like Survival in Auschwitz.--Woland (talk) 17:35, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

I have no objection to Bernard's criteria as summarized above. Maybe we are getting closer. One of my favorite books is The Gulag Archipelago. It may be said that Solzhenitsyn managed to merge superbly both qualitative (subjective) and quantitative (objective) data. This is the method used by deMause. I cannot understand why, after its firsts paragraphs, you found his essay On writing childhood history that he started "to take a horribly wrong turn". —Cesar Tort 18:48, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Off the top of my head:

I discovered I simply could make no sense at all of what Roheim and others were saying. This was particularly true about childhood. Roheim wrote, for instance, that the Australian aborigines he observed were excellent parents, even though they ate every other child, out of what they called "baby hunger," and forced their other children to eat parts of their siblings. This "doesn't seem to have affected the personality development of the surviving children, Roheim said, and in fact, he concluded, these were really "good mothers. [Who] eat their own children.(6) Doubtful that eating your sibling could fail to be traumatic, I began to question the rest of Roheim's happy aboriginal childhood" thesis. I turned to the publications of other ethnographers, and found little help, other than a confirmation of the cannibalism of Australian infants. It was only when I began publishing a new scholarly journal, The Journal of Psychological Anthropology, and was able to publish psychoan-thropologist Arthur Hippler's first-hand observations of an Australian aborigine tribe, that I learned what Roheim had left out:

(1) Relying on an ethnography from the early 20th century is probably a bad idea for many reasons, (2) It is easy to see from his writing why deMause is "Doubtful that eating your sibling could fail to be traumatic..." namely that he is viewing it through the lens of his culture and what his culture says about 'cannibalism.' I don't think that it is intentional but there is a serious bias here that borders on ethnocentrism, even if it is unconscious.

Generally, (aside from starving people doing it out of necessity) cannibalism (or anthrophagy, literally: people eating) can be lumped into two (maybe three) categories. (1) It is often performed as an insult to enemies or (2) there is what we call funerary cannibalism which is essentially the eating of the dead as sign of reverence (sometimes people let it rot for awhile before trying to gag some of it down). If you wanted to create a third category for something like, "cannibalism as a way to absorb the power/spirit of someone" that would probably work too but this may be more of a subcategory for the other two. Case in point; the cannibalism practiced by the Australian aborigine tribe looks like a combination of 2 and 3. One of the interesting things is that cultures who practice (or used to) anthrophagy don't see themselves as 'cannibals' at all and in fact often use it as an insult when talking about their enemies. To the cultures that practice it it is simply a part of life. Other cultures simply do not always have the same 'hang-ups' that we do.

That example is really just a random selection. To me much of what he is saying rests on assumptions and assertions that he makes because of his cultural bias and his fixation on Freud (who also made a lot of assumptions and assertions). Similar comments could be made about his assumptions about incest. The thing about incest is that it is defined differently for different cultures who have different ideas about kinship and who you could marry or not marry or even be in close proximity to (with the Yanamamo it's considered incest if you're even relatively close to or make eye contact with your mother-in-law.

This is what I mean by "wrong turn." By starting out with assumptions he loses his ability to be objective.--Woland (talk) 20:16, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

To begin with, had you read the entire article you would have hit the passage in which deMause explains how he distanced himself from Freud as to the myth that childhood was much happier in the past.

As to incest —and cannibalism!— you talk about "ethnocentrism"; that "to the cultures that practice it is simply a part of life", and that deMause "is viewing it through the lens of his culture".

I am sorry but you are mistaken. You are forgetting the pov of the sacrificed child. As Fitz John Porter Poole commented in a 1983 article published in The Ethnography of Cannibalism about the New Guinea cannibals:

Having witnessed their parents' mortuary anthropophagy, many of these children suddenly avoided their parents, shrieked in their presence, or expressed unusual fear of them. After such experiences, several children recounted dreams or constructed fantasies about animal-man beings with the faces or other features of particular parents who were smeared with blood and organs.

Sometimes I wonder, Woland, if you have indeed read the archived 2002 flame war in talk:Early infanticidal childrearing. Here is a passage from my selection of that flame war:

And the interpretation of child abuse in the case of infants is acultural. Infants do not have culture so are incapable of "interpreting" anything through a cultural filter. And yet again, you persist in ignoring the child's point of view, as if the rationalization of the child abuser mattered to them. Only anthropologists care about how the members of the primitive culture rationalize their behaviors. Anthropologists are just very bizarre people, and about as relevant to most people's view of what constitutes child molestation as experts in the paranormal. The relevant experts in the area are developmental psychologists. –Ark [2]

—Cesar Tort 22:57, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

(1) I did read much of that flame war but I wasn't aware that it was required reading for this course. Perhaps in the future you could write it on the syllabus. Mostly what I read was Ark foaming at the mouth and generally being uncivil, as such I saw no reason to bring it up.

(2) I also read where deMause rejected some of the ideas of Freud (I also think it's fairly obvious from the ideas he has that differ) however, what I was getting at is that they share ideas (in the philosophical sense) about why people are the way they are, what factors play into it, and how it can be studied. That is to say that they share a certain heuristic perspective as well as a similar metatheory perspective.

(3) In regards to New Guinea cannibals, I was talking specifically about Australian aboriginal cannibalism, if only to illustrate a point, that being that he was starting out with an assumption based on his enculturation.

I'm not sure where this conversation is going at the moment but I have a few points that I feel I need to clarify.

Perhaps the biggest underlying assumption of cultural anthropology is that culture is an adaptation that humans (well, their ancestors) developed which turned out to be pretty successful. Now, there is differing opinion as to whether every single aspect of any given culture is adaptive (and people are constantly testing this) but for the most part cultures are in fact adaptations to the local environment. Getting back to cultural relativism, anthropologists are not trying to be apologists for child molesters, people/cultures who kill/neglect their children or people who fly planes into buildings. The underlying question(s) of cultural anthropology could be something like: If culture is in fact an adaptation to local environments (1) what would we expect to see if this were true and (2) how do we go about testing and what kind of data would confirm this observation? What I'm trying to say is that we generally predict not only that cultural norms will be different cross-culturally but also that members of that culture will react to those norms in culturally specific ways. Example: If culture is adaptive then I predict that cultures with a higher infant mortality rate have fewer resources than those with lower infant mortality rates. These cultures will adopt culturally specific ways to deal with the loss of children (like not naming them until x age).

As I see it, this is where anthropologists differ from psychohistorians. It is difficult for me to wrap my brain around why (1) psychohistorians think that anthropologists discount the individual. In fact one of the general rules when studying a culture is to first study the smallest unit possible (i.e. the individual) and then work your way up. This isn't always possible but its a good rule of thumb. Big theories in any field tend to talk about the larger effects but that doesn't mean that the individual isn't studied and taken into account. (2) Why psychohistorians accuse anthropologists of this and then turn around and make large generalizations themselves about child-hood cross-culturally is beyond me.

So far as I can parse, what psychohistorians are saying is: that all humans share an intrinsic perspective on things like cannibalism, incest, abuse etc and that how pervasive these things are in a given culture will determine how far along they are on a progressive ladder. I'll stop now because I'm just babbling. --Woland (talk) 16:08, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

No: psychohistorians don't say that all humans share an intrinsic perspective on things. Here in my town, almost half millennia ago Sahagún was shocked to see that some parents killed and ate their children with zero sense of guilt or remorse. What psychohistorians do say is that the level of empathy is differential among cultures. Yes: this is similar to 19th century evolutionary anthropology. But it's quite different. You say above "if culture is in fact an adaptation to local environments...". Psychohistorians would say that culture is an adaptation to a given psychogenic mode of childrearing.

Of course, we agree to disagree :) Cesar Tort 17:07, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the clarification,though to some extent I feel we are using different terminology for the same thing(s). --Woland (talk) 02:33, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Racism

The United States pours out more green house gases than any other country. This proves that Americans are fixated at the anal stage. What are green house gases but our own waste, and we derive great pleaure from observing, measuring, sometimes pretending to hold in, then releasing our reenhouse gasses; obviously greenhouse gasses = shit. As Freud remarked shit = money = death. It is quite clear that greenhouse gases = death as they are literally killing the planet and will cause more and mor ehuman death. They also equal money as the main justification for our not signing the Kyoto protocol is the econoic costs of regulating our emissions. It is no surprise that just as the US reaches its peak as one of the world's wealthiest and economically most powerful countries, we lose control of our ability to control our waste. I think we realize that the economic prosperity we enjoy is hollow, really does ewual death, and this being the case we may as well enjoy the real thing, the production of death. In this we are less evolved that Muslim countires. Slrubenstein | Talk 01:03, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

I agree with everything you have said above except the last sentence. We can imagine how this world would be if Islamic terrorists could nuke cities (the US did it twice, yes, but then it was World War II).

Yes: I admire Al Gore's efforts about what you say. I take this as an opportunity to show what psychohistorians hold. Most of them believe that some Democrats (again, I think in Al Gore) belong to a more evolved "psychoclass" than those of the Republican right, who are only concerned about shit profit. Ironically, it seems that both of us belong to a similar American psychoclass (I lived about five years in the US): at least with regard of taking care of the environment.

—Cesar Tort 02:49, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

Global warming will destroy most life on the planet, and reduce human society and population levels to the paleolithic (e.g. the last ice age). Terrorists using nucelar weapons will kill only a fraction of all human deaths in WWII. even using biological weapons they would probably kill only a fraction of those who died from the Black Death. In the January 21 issue of The New Yorker there is a profile of Mike McCannell, the new Director of intenlligence for the US; he states clearly that Islamic terrorists are not even the threat to the US that communism or fascism was. This is not to minimize the loss of life in any terrorist attack. But American's regression to a stage when all they could do was consume and play with their own shit, and identify the accumulation of shit with wealth, is destroying most life on earth. We are far more regressive and uncivilized than Islamic terrorists (let alone all the Muslims who are not terrorists). Slrubenstein | Talk 10:52, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

May I call to your attention what User:Aetheling wrote yesterday about Lawrence Keeley's War Before Civilization in this talk page? What matters is not bare numbers but proportions of deaths per population quantity. Muslim terrorists have killed more Iraq civilians willingly than the collateral damage —i.e., Iraq civilians were not the target— of US bombings during the Iraq war. And what about China's greenhouse gases and the statistical projections of such gases that are to be expelled in India in the near future? Surely the US is not the only devil here. —Cesar Tort 16:48, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Cultural relativism (continued)

Thank you for the welcome. I will probably create a real user page in the near future :).

However, you mistake my meaning. I did not mean to debate what psychohistorians thought about cultural relativism, or whether cultural relativism is good or bad - I merely commented that "cultural relativism" as a phrase has different meanings for anthropologists and non-anthropologists. While people from outside the discipline seem to believe that "cultural relativism", as spoken of by anthropologists, is akin to moral relativism, they are (usually) mistaken. While there probably are a few anthropologists who champion something that could be seen as that kind of relativism (there are fringe people in every discipline), it is most certainly not a majority view.

As I wrote on the discussion page of Psychohistory, cultural relativism is, for anthropologists, a research methodology, not a moral stance. So if your average anthropologist says that he/she/lamp is all in favour of cultural relativism, that is most probably what he/she/lamp is talking about. The present article misrepresents anthropology, which is why I would like to see it changed

from:

"Psychohistorians also believe that the extreme cultural relativism proposed by many anthropologists is contrary to the letter and spirit of human rights.[9]"

to something like this (changes bolded):

"Psychohistorians also believe that the extreme cultural relativism that they feel many anthropologists champion is contrary to the letter and spirit of human rights.[9]"

Your claim that many anthropologists propose extreme cultural relativism is unsourced as is. The thing that your source says is that the source believes that anthropologists are what they are, not that that is what the discipline actually is. It may seem like a subtle nuance, but I think it's a very important one.

-R2 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.184.161.226 (talk) 10:09, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Curious. The stuff I read in the 2007 Encyclopedia Britannica in the article anthropology says that anthropology "resists universal values of any kind" regarding cultures. Take a look at this.

[edit] Re: wikiquotes

Hey. You asked me to take a look at the wikiquotes from deMause. I'm answering here, to avoid crowding the talk:Psychohistory page.

It's very hard for me to really form an opinion on those quotes because I don't know the context. I haven't read deMause myself. However, a few comments:

-he seems to have a polemic relationship to traditional historiography and anthropology. In order to differentiate Psychohistory from existing disciplines, he is exaggerating and concentrating on the differences, as opposed to the similarities between it and other disciplines. He is seizing on extreme cases of stuff (for example cannibalism, which I seriously doubt has been particularly common anywhere except possibly Papua New-Guinea, where I think it was mainly practiced in war, against the enemy), and arguing based on them. I think he risks a straw man argument there, but I can't say, as I don't know the context around those quotes.

-I do not agree with the psychological way of looking at culture: which is to say that society starts at the level of the individual and does not really transcend it, and that people think in the same categories and the same ways cross-culturally. I don't mean to be ridiculous here: all people know love, hate, fear, pain, and so on, but the way that they experience and interpret these feelings are not identical. This is basically what the cultural relativist argument a la anthropology is: people have culturally encoded systems of meaning, which have to be approached from the inside to be understood.

-HOWEVER. Regardless of culture, or what constitutes happiness for a given person or group, some universalist values can certainly be stated. I believe that rape, death, torture and so on are - for everyone - equally degrading. This is the place where relativism ends, and things like human rights - enforced universally - step in.

-This might sound like a slightly schizophrenic position, and to some degree it is, but absolute relativism or absolute universalism, however satisfying they might theoretically be cannot be defended. Absolute universalism is always one particular, often Western way of thinking, that is enforced a priori and thrust on everyone else. No questions are asked, and the voices of other cultures and peoples are silenced. I cannot see this as something desirable. On the other side of the coin, absolute relativism is equally detestable: a situation where one cannot make moral judgements, and every group and people can only be approached by their own standards. This does not really lead to any real freedom, but rather apartheid: every people becomes a thing sui generis, impossible to understand or interact with. This is also a ridiculous position, because we must admit that we are all humans: there are definetely a great many things, both physical and mental, that we all share.

-What does this leave us with? Vagueness, a kind of ill-defined middle ground between relativism and universalism, where you hang somewhere in between. At least for an ethnographer, you cannot adopt brutal universalism, because at that point you are telling your informants who they are and what they represent, rather than trying to inquire about their cultural world. If you choose complete relativism, you are taking a rather callous, and morally questionable stance. So between arrogance and indifference, there's really no chance but to take the middle ground, and move from between one pole and the other.

-Hrrr. That was pretty unclear. I can point you at an article that explains this a whole lot better than I ever could. This kind of movement between relativism and universalism is characteristic especially of human rights anthropology, and I would argue the human rights regime as a whole. Even though human rights are committed to a certain universalism, the way in which they are adapted and actually implemented on the field, far from the gleaming pristine halls of European law courts, has a certain degree of flexibility, just like any other legal code.

-R2 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.184.161.226 (talk) 08:19, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

Yes: this is a huge subject. Impossible to discuss in talk pages. In talk:psychohistory I only wanted to make the point that, though anthropology in Finland (I see your I.P.s) might have become civilized, we have pretty Neanderthal relativists here in Mexico. Psychohistory is not about the old British universalism, based on social, economic and technology progress; it's based on observing the less abusive forms of childrearing (and therefore, the less dissociated peoples that such childrearing creates in different societies). Of course, deMause's model has its problems. User:Aetheling has posted interesting comments on this subject here and here. —Cesar Tort 09:12, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

I think my sympathies still lie more with Woland and his comments above on this talk page. I'm not personally a huge fan of combining psychoanalytic/psychological complexes and stuff with ethnography focused on the level of society. The school of thought that I represent holds that there is more to society than the individual, and that there are emergent social forms that cannot be reduced back to the individual; thus, categorizing a culture or society through psychological means becomes problematic.

-R2 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.184.161.226 (talk) 15:32, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

I do agree that psychoanalysis is nonsense; that deMause's writing is weakest when he speculates about the motivations of the US going to war, and that, like international politics, there are other emergent forms from mere individual motivations, etc. However, his model is strongest when trying to explain schizoid personalities among the cultures. I for one have read about the pre-Columbian past of Mexico. It's all too clear to me that anthropologists in the INAH have no clue whatsoever about why the pre-Columbian people in Mesoamerica institutionalized human sacrifice like no other culture has. The politically correct explanations of sacrifice in current anthropology are dumb. Only by understanding people in our times who also have the drive to serially murder it is possible to understand native Americans or what deMause calls the "infanticidal psychoclass". Have you read Infanticide? This is the article which has received most of my edits in Wikipedia. But as I said, the subject is huge for discussion in a talk page. —Cesar Tort 16:37, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

By "the drive to serially murder..." I meant that criminologist Lonnie Athens developed a theory about how a process of brutalization by parents or peers that usually occurs in childhood results in violent crimes in adulthood. Richard Rhodes' Why They Kill describes Athens' observations about domestic and societal violence in the criminals' backgrounds. The same applies to entire infanticidal societies and their childrearing practices, believe it or not :) —Cesar Tort 09:44, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] unsigned

When I make a comment and then quote something long, I sign after my comment, not after the quote, so that it's clear where my comment ends. It's intentional. Stop putting "unsigned" after the quotes. Thanks, -PetraSchelm (talk) 00:02, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

Review the talk guidelines. Signatures cannot go at the middle of a post. —Cesar Tort 00:13, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

They're not in the middle of a post, and I'll sign where I think it is most appropriate for readability and clarity viz long quotes. Get over it.-PetraSchelm (talk) 00:15, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

Very insteresting concept: not signing posts where experienced wikipedians sign. It will get pretty confusing I guess... Cesar Tort 00:22, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] SRA

I agree about the believers. I've been away, though. Is there any specific section that could do with my input now? forestPIG 14:34, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

WLU has been doing it so well that he may only need a little help in the talk page (he feels he loses much time in talk and prefers serious work in namespace itself). I am reluctant to do so because in the previous year I posted quite a few rants against the pov-pushers. On the other hand you are comparatively new to this page. If User:ResearchEditor (formerly known in the wiki as "AbuseTruth") posts huge complaints in talk, a good response may be in order. —Cesar Tort 15:17, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

I know about AT, and the unfortunate number of believers. I'll try to work with them, though. Some others - eleland, Haiduc, AnotherSolipsist, ScienceApologist - have all been active in keeping these editors in check throughout the child abuse articles. The problem is consensus, and we're not getting it all too often. I would encourage all of us to add these articles to our watchlist, so that the CA articles will suffer less from advocacy. If you want to sort this out, please get back on my talk page. forestPIG 15:42, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

The problem is not child advocacy. As you can see in my user page, it's my main interest. The problem are people who cannot distingush between real abuse and unreal abuse (SRA, sexual abuse during UFO abductions, etc.). Some advocacy of children's rights is counter-productive since false memories and bizarre claims abound in the field. My educated guess is that many survivors are displacing the abuse they suffered in childhood and become pov pushers in the wiki. Unfortunately I'm really busy for the moment and am only reading the exchanges between the pov-pushers and his critics in several talk pages. —Cesar Tort 17:08, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply. By CA, I do not mean advocacy, but abuse. Some editors (as well as promoting unreal abuse - e.g. SRA with flying horses and devil clowns) are also overstepping the mark on other abuse, or abuse-related articles. For example, Pedophile. forestPIG 17:16, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

Agreed. Petra, who also edits in SRA, eliminated recently a phrase in the Pedophile article claiming it was OR (actually, it was a clarifying phrase). I didn't revert because our little affair in SRA, where she said I was harassing her (I wasn't). I would never dare to edit that article. It's perhaps one of the most trolling places in Wikiland. —Cesar Tort 20:05, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

User talk:Cesar Tort

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Contents

[edit] Jesus

[edit] Light-years beyond the mortals' grasp

[edit] Psychohistory

[edit] Cultural relativism etc.

[edit] Racism

[edit] Cultural relativism (continued)

[edit] Re: wikiquotes

[edit] unsigned

[edit] SRA

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