Surrender Monkeys or Simply Realistic?

I've just started reading The Collapse of the Third Republic, An Inquiry into the Fall of France 1940, by William Shirer and very quickly came upon an interesting question. In the Prologue, Shirer recaps the stunningly fast manner in which French resistance failed and the German conquerors swept in. He makes this note:

Most demoralizing of all to army units still trying to fight were the efforts of civilians to prevent them from offering further resistance that might damage their homes and shops. At one village on the River Indre the local inhabitants extinguished the fuses of explosives already lit by army engineers to blow the bridge there and slow down the German advance.

OK, surrender monkeys for sure, right?

I don't know. When you think about it, they might have been doing something truly rational. The country is crashing down around you and, to quote the Borg, "Resistance is futile." If resistance is futile, why should you suffer worse consequences than you're already facing? Why risk having your home, your business, your family become targets of enemy artillery when the battle is already lost? Salvage what you can and hunker down to wait for better days.

Still, to a lot of people I'm pretty sure that just doesn't sit well. If the enemy doesn't have to pay a price for their aggression, what is there to stop them from continued aggression? Resistance may be a matter of losing the battle but winning the war. Isn't that what happened to the U.S. in Vietnam? We won a lot of battles, but at high cost and eventually public outcry over the deaths of so many of our young men led to disengagement and withdrawal.

So do civilians have a duty to suffer along with those in the military when it is a matter of defending your own country?

What all of this brings to mind for me is the decision my wife took some years ago when her son was on a dangerous and potentially deadly path. She stepped in and took action intended to ensure that he survived, action he hated her for at the time. Her thinking was very clear. He might never forgive her and they might never have a relationship again, but at least he would be alive. For the French civilians, this could be stated as "Retreat and live to fight another day." You can't fight another day if you're dead.

Today, the son is still alive, grown up, and grateful to his mother for her courage. Perhaps some of the very same Frenchmen who snuffed the fuses later joined the underground and exacted their vengence on the Germans. There really is very little black and white in this world. Don't let anyone tell you differently.

Craniology and the Size of Helen Keller's Head

I'm reading The Story of My Life by Helen Keller and just came across an interesting couple of passages. This part is taken from Anne Sullivan's letters.

Helen's head measures twenty and one-half inches, and mine measures twenty-one and one-half inches. You see. I'm only one inch ahead!

I thought at first I misread it and she was referring to height, but no, it was just as you see above.

Then, just a little further on, in a different letter, she writes:

She will be seven years old the twenty-seventh of this month. Her height is four feet one inch, and her head measures twenty and one-half inches in circumference, the line being drawn round the head so as to pass over the prominences of the parietal and frontal bones. Above this line the head rises one and one-fourth inches.

And then she just goes on, no further explanation needed--at least not for her intended reader.

I was amused and thought this might be phrenology, a debunked pseudoscience popular back in Helen Keller's times, but my recollection was that phrenology was the study of the bumps on the head. Looking a little further, I'm guessing it is actually craniology, explained in Wikipedia as "A large skull meant a large brain and high intellectual capacity, and a small skull indicated a small brain and decreased intellectual capacity."

Do you ever wonder what people in the future will look back on in this age and laugh about?

Jesus Was A Mushroom - My Final Take

It has been slow going as I've been reading The Sacred Mushroom & The Cross but I'm ready now to give my appraisal of the basic thesis. Which is to say, I don't have a clue. Let me recap.

John Allegro, the author, makes the argument that Christianity got its start as a subterfuge used by ancient Jews to hide their true religion from the Romans. He argues that they created an imaginary fertility cult based around the usage of the amanita muscaria, or "magic" mushroom. Then, by an ironic twist, the "fake" religion caught on and took on a life of its own. I think this quote does a good job of summing this up:

The whole point of a mystery cult was that few people knew its secret doctrines. So far as possible, the initiates did not commit their special knowledge to writing. . . . When such special instruction was committed to writing, care would be taken that it should be read only by members of the sect. This could be done by using a special code or cypher, as in the case with certain of the Dead Sea Scrolls. However, discovery of such obviously coded material on a person would render him suspect to the authorities. Another way of passing information was to conceal the message, incantations, or special names within a document ostensibly concerned with a quite different subject.

Plant mythology, known for thousands of years over the whole of the ancient world, provided the New Testament cryptographers their "cover." . . . Those most deceived appear to have been the sect who took over the name of "Christian" and who formed the basis of the Church, the history of which forms no part of the present study.

So I repeat: I don't have a clue. The information Allegro presents seems well researched but I have a couple problems with it.

First, he bases the whole book on the foundation that a new understanding of the Sumerian language or some other translation capability allows researchers to grasp meaning that was not previously possible. Unfortunately, the explanation he gives as to the nature of this new understanding is, at least in my opinion, insufficient. What he says is:

The main factor that has made these new discoveries possible has been the realization that many of the most secret names of the mushroom go back to ancient Sumerian . . . For the first time it becomes possible to decipher the names of gods, mythological characters, classical dn biblical, and plant names.

Secondly, assuming this is all on the up and up, and there really is new information on which his thesis is based, there is no way that anyone who is not a serious scholar of ancient languages can judge his intrepretations. This stuff is so esoteric that there probably aren't 200 people in the world who have the knowledge to read what he says and challenge his hypothesis. The rest of us can only read what he says and say "That's an unusual and interesting argument but I don't have a clue about its validity."

Allegro makes the point that the book is written for the general public but perforce it was necessary to include a lot of technical data that would be outside the scope of the general reader. In my opinion, at least, he has failed to really reach the general reader. It may not be his fault. It may be that it is so esoteric that no one could cross that gap to really engage someone who doesn't have the background to evaluate what he's saying. But without the ability to evaluate the arugment, the only capability that remains is to plant the idea in the reader's mind and leave them thinking, again, "That's an unusual and interesting argument but I don't have a clue about its validity."

And that's where I leave it.

Where Does The Word "Hermaphrodite" Come From?

OK, as I researched this I found that the answer isn't quite as dang interesting as I thought at first but it's still worth discussing.

The word at issue here is "hermaphrodite." First, let's make sure everyone knows what it means. Wikipedia defines the word as "an organism that possesses both male and female sex organs during its life." As to the origin of the word, they have this to say:

In Greek mythology, Hermaphroditus or Hermaphroditos (Greek ) was the child of Aphrodite and Hermes. Born a remarkably handsome boy, he was transformed into an intersexual being by union with the nymph Salmacis. His name is the basis for the word hermaphrodite.

My point, the thing I found interesting about it, is that the word is a combination of Hermes and Aphrodite: hermaphrodite. It seems obvious when you know it but it sure never occurred to me. Not a big deal, just an interesting factoid. That's what this blog is all about.