Truth and Prejudice, and Steven Runciman

I've read a lot of historians who have the best reputations, who've written over the course of the past 2,500 years, in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, French, German, English and some other languages, and the one who has impressed me the most, by far, is Steven Runciman, born 1903, died 2001. (The historians wrote in those languages. In the case of Greek, Hebrew, Arabic and some other languages, I've read them in translation.) At the beginning of Chapter I of his first book, The Emperor Romanus Lecapenus & His Reign, published in 1929, Runciman lays out a lot of what his career is going to be about. He begins:

"In the battles between truth and prejudice, waged on the field of history books, it must be confessed that the latter usually wins."

So right away, he admits that he's fighting an uphill battle which he doesn't expect to win.

 

Also right at the beginning of his first book, he lays out the field of battle where he's going to struggle to put the facts across and defeat prejudice. It's a field my brother and I have often discussed recently: the image, in the West, of the Eastern Roman Empire (usually referred to in the West as Byzantium), after the Western Empire fell. Runciman describes how crude, warlike Westerners, the Crusaders, came into contact with Byzantium and found

 

"[...]a society where everyone read and wrote, ate food with forks and preferred diplomacy to war."

  

Runciman states flatly, here at the beginning of his first book, that up until shortly before his own time, prejudice had trounced truth even in the best history written in the West when it came to Byzantium. And then he spent a very long and brilliant career backing up this flat statement. Rather than admit that Byzantine society was more advanced in many ways than their own, Western historians made "byzantine" an adjective meaning decadent, flabby, lazy, cowardly, cunning, etc, etc. Runciman's mentor JB Bury (1861-1927), a pioneer in bucking this pervasive trend, went so far as to refuse to even use the term "Byzantium" to refer to the Eastern Roman Empire after the Western Empire had fallen. 

 

Bury, Runciman and some like-minded Western historians have made some headway in changing the attitudes of historians, and somewhat less, so far, in the consciousness of the general public. It's still quite common to encounter very well-educated Westerners who talk of the fall of the Roman Empire in AD 476, who refer to the Catholic Church before the Reformation, and Catholicism plus Protestantism since then, as "the whole of Christendom," completely ignoring Greek Orthodoxy, not to mention the Coptic, Syriac, Ethiopic, Armenian and Nestorian churches who never acknowledged Catholic or orthodox supremacy.

It seems to me, now, simple enough to recognize that, for example, the Romans who were represented at Jerusalem by Pontius Pilate and a garrison of soldiers in the time of Christ did not go anywhere in AD 476, and to grasp why Christians who already had their own written languages were not inclined to accept either a Latin or a Greek spiritual overlordship. 

But did I see any of this before people like Runciman and Bury pointed it out to me? No, of course I didn't, any more than I saw how obviously Gothic cathedral towers, all built after the Crusades began, mimic Muslim minarets, before that was pointed out to me.

You have to see a truth first. Then it can become obvious. Not the other way around. Which usually means that someone else has to point it out to you. 

Anabaptists, Mennonites, Amish, Pietists, Brethren *and Calvinists

In the part of northern Indiana I come from, there are quite a few Amish, and also quite a few members of the Church of the Brethren, the church in which I was raised, and also several other denominations which have "Brethren" in their names: Conservative Grace Brethren, Fellowship of Grace Brethren, Dunkard Brethren and others.

The Church of the Brethren and the Amish both are Anabaptist denominations. Anabaptists are pacifists. They do not believe in infant baptism. The children of their congregations grow to a certain age, and then they may be baptized and join the church, or not, supposedly of their own free will and with no coercion. I'm sure that the actual measure of coercion varies greatly from congregation to congregation, and from one family to another within that congregation. I have to say that, in my own particular case, as I no longer hold certain religious beliefs with which I was raised, most of my extended family, and other Brethren whom I happen to meet, have continued to accept me as I am, with a really remarkable lack of either judgment or shunning.

Anabaptists split away very early from the main Lutheran church. The first Anabaptist martyr, Felix Manz, was drowned by Lutherans in Zurich in 1527. That's just six years after Luther himself, then a Catholic monk, was declared a heretic. Lutherans wasted no damn time at all in persecuting their own heretics.

Mennonites are also Anabaptists.

The Amish are named after the Anabaptist leader Jakob Amman, born 1644, died early 18th century. The Mennonite church goes all the way back to one of the very first anabaptist leaders, Menno Simons, born 1496, died 1561.

However, the Church of the Brethren are not directed descended from that very first group of Anabaptists. Rather, it came from the Schwarzenau Brethren, who left Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinist* churches and joined the Anabaptist movement during the 17th and 18th centuries. Alexander Mack was an early leader of the Schwarzenau Brethren.         *Calvinists do not call themselves Calvinists. They call themselves members of the Reformed Church. They are extremely annoying nit-pickers who love to correct people about things that don't mean shit, such as that they (supposedly) are not Calvinists.

The Schwarzenau Brethren are part of a larger Protestant movement emphasizing pacifism and a personal understanding of God, known as Pietism. 

Right from the first, denominations split off from the Schwarzenau Brethren. There are some churches called "Brethren" which did not come from the Schwarzenau Brethren, and a lot which did. There were numerous splits during the 1880's and afterward. It gets really complicated. The Church of the Brethren, the church of my family, one of the Brethren denominations who chose the "progressive" path rather than the rejection of modernity, adopted that name in 1905, changing from German Baptist Brethren. Which denomination is the true inheritor of the Schwarzenau Brethren, and which have left their path, is, I am fairly certain, a matter of some dispute, and often highly influenced by which denomination one happens to belong to or feel most sympathetic to.

A Product Listing on Amazon

Years ago, for some period of time, I was obsessed with a problem Amazon was having: they weren't accurately listing the languages in which many of the books they sold were written. Books written in Latin with English prefaces were listed as English; books written in Greek with Latin prefaces were listed as Latin; books written in Latin with facing-page English translations might be listed as Latin or English. The thought of accurately describing a book's language with more than one word, such as "Latin primary text with English facing-page translation, English introduction, footnotes and commentary" seemed to be right out of the question. Whatever computer program Amazon used to fill in the"Language" box in the "Product details" section, below "Publisher" and above the ISBN's and dimensions and weight -- the very idea that a book might be in more than one language, did not seem to compute. The details given for dimensions and weight for all sorts of items sold on Amazon, not just books, continue to be equally divorced from reality, to the point where the information given on the amazon is so unreliable as to be useless.

I actually tried to get a job at Amazon correcting these language descriptions of books. The attempt did not go well. Eventually I was able to just let it go and get on with my life.

Last year I got ahold of Jean-Pierre Mahe's edition of the Coptic fragments of the Perfect Discourse from the Nag Hammadi library and the Armenian Hermetic Definitions, published in the city of Quebec in 1982.

 

So, that's an ancient primary text in Coptic, with, on the facing page, a French translation and passages from the Latin Asclepius almost as lengthy as the Coptic text, showing the relationship between the Coptic and Latin texts; and an ancient primary text in Armenian with facing-page translation in French; with a lengthy introduction and commentary in French, not to mention a bibliography as impressively polyglot as you might imagine. 

How would I fill in that line: "Language," in the product description, if I were Emperor of all Amazon? I think maybe something like: "primary texts in Coptic and Armenian, with ancient Latin for comparison with the Coptic, and facing-page translations and introduction and commentary in French."

That doesn't describe every single thing in this book, but I think it comes close enough to give a potential reader a fairly accurate idea of what would be facing them, if they wanted to read this book.

Amazon describes the language of the book as "English."

Now, I couldn't get away with calling this description 100% inaccurate, because of a few items in English in the aforementioned impressively polyglot bibliography, and a few brief citations from those several English items. Still, it is about as far as an exhaustive modern critical edition -- two critical editions, actually -- can be from being English. The publisher's name, the name of the series in which this volume appears -- Bibliotheque copte de Nag Hammadi -- the copyright notice, all are in French.

Languages in Prefaces

In the 4th edition of the Vulgate, the Latin version of the Bible traditionally used by the Catholic Church, published by the Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft in 1994, there are prefaces to the first and 4th editions, in Latin, then in German, French and English. Just to be clear: this is the 4th edition of the Vulgate to be published by the Deutsche Biblegesellschaft. Many, many editions were published by others long before 1994, okay? This post is just about the Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft. Okay!

In the Bibelgesellschaft's 2nd edition of the Septuaginta, the Greek translations of the Old Testament made by Jews in and/or around Alexandria in the 3rd and/or 2nd century BC, published in 2006, there are forwards to the 2nd edition in German, English and Greek, in that order, and then the forwards and introductory material to the first edition, first in German, then in English, Latin and Greek.

In their 27th edition of the Greek New Testament, published in 2007 with corrections but otherwise identical to the 1993 27th edition, there is a brief foreword to the 27th edition in German and then in English, and then a lengthy introduction, likewise first in German and then in English.

In the 1997 5th edition of the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (so called because the Gesellschaft is headquartered in Stuttgart), the Hebrew Bible, of the Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, there are forwards to the fifth and then to the first edition, first in German, then in English, French, Spanish and Latin. Then come many pages of Latin abbreviations. Then a few pages in which some of those abbreviations are translated into English. If I pretended that I was presently capable of explaining just exactly what all of these abbreviations are, I would be a fraud.

Why I Still Write With Ink on Paper

 

For one thing, I don't even know what a Remarkable or a Supernote is, to quote someone asking on Reddit why people still write in paper notebooks. I'm 61 years old, I'm a writer, and I resisted even using a typewriter until I saw the Internet in 1997. As with many other people, that changed things a bit for me, and I started using keyboards more than I had. But I still write a daily journal in ink in a paper notebook that fits in a pocket. Partly because I'm old, sure, but also for other reasons. 

I'm fascinated by other technologies besides pens on paper which are no longer generally considered cutting-edge. For example, mechanical watches: watches with no electricity, no batteries, powered by a spring. Revolvers as opposed to semiautomatics. Internal combustion engines, even though I'm a hair-on-fire climate activist. We should all be driving EV's or not driving at all. But I understand some of the resistance to change on this matter, the resistance which isn't built on ignorance, but on love for technologies which are being phased out. 

My brother, 59 years old, an automotive engineer and executive, tells me that offices often no longer have what we used to call office supply rooms: rooms full of paper and paper-related items such as pencils and pens and tape and staples.

So people our age are becoming odd, and started becoming odd long before we noticed it, I'm quite sure, writing in our paper pocket-sized notebooks with our fountain pens, which we clip in our waistcoat pockets alongside our pocket watches, sighting down the long barrels of our single-action revolvers while the barkeep fetches the ice-cream from the icebox for our sarsaparilla sodas, with our Model-T's idling outside besides the troughs, startling the horses. 

But there's more to it, and you don't have to be old to enjoy a good pen. I'm still very new to the pen and notebook subreddits, and so I still don't understand why everybody hates Cross pens. I still don't hate them. A two-piece Cross Bailey like the one in that picture, nice and heavy, with its rollerball and luxurious deep blue lacquer, nice and heavy, writing in a Zequenz signature notebook, is a sensual pleasure, a luxury many can afford, especially if they're no longer blowing money on gasoline. 

The EV Backlash in Wyoming and Boston

In Wyoming, it's typified by the new proposal in the state legislature -- a proposal which apparently is already dead -- to ban all sales of new EVs in the state by 2035. 

 

When a recent opinion piece in the Boston Globe refers to the backlash against EVs, by contrast, it's talking about the effort to ban all cars, regardless of powertrain.

I'm actually disappointed that the Wyoming EV ban is not gathering steam. I looked forward to urging EV enthusiasts to drive around Wyoming rather than through it, and to pointing out how people, and how few vehicles of any kind, are in Wyoming, so stop debating them on Reddit about whether EVs have enough range yet to be practical, and ignore them instead. I was joking when I said that the way to react to the Wyoming EV ban was to build a wall around the state -- but only partly joking. EVs are getting more and more positive reactions from the majority of the Earth populace. I say, let's get on with the EV transition, and the solar and wind transition, and just drive around those who are resisting the transition until they finally see all the advantages of joining in. 

Meanwhile, 510 EVs are already owned and registered in Wyoming. I suppose we ought to take a moment and acknowledge those EV owners. Well, maybe much more than a moment. On Reddit, instead of the ongoing feuding with the above-mentioned people who claim that EVs don't have enough range -- many of whom, perhaps most, are of course trolls -- we should focus more attention, and support, moral support if nothing else, on the people who actually own and drive EVs out there where all those trolls keep saying it can't be done. 

Ignore the trolls. Shine a light on EV owners in Wyoming. Report more on how they're getting it down out there. Photos. Details. CHARGING STATIONS MAPS! Might turn out to be just the kick in the pants needed by those in, say, Pennsylvania or Oregon, who claim that EVs ares still not a viable option for them.

The Right Watch

Some people -- who seem to be real old-money -- say that a man either should not wear a watch when wearing a tuxedo; or he should wear a simple 18 karat yellow gold dress watch with a white enamel face and no second hand, on an unobtrusive black leather strap.

Clearly, a lot of people either never heard the rules or are intentionally breaking them. Almost all of the male movie stars at the Oscars, and a few of the ladies, wear tuxedos. How many of them break the rule about the watch? Just about all of them, I think, or at least all of them who wear watches. I googled George Clooney because I thought he might have accidentally overheard the rule around 2005 or so. He's either never heard the rule, or he defies it.

George Clooney broke the rule AT HIS WEDDING.

I don't know whether James Bond has ever followed that rule.

And so maybe those old-money people, when they see video of movie stars in tuxedos with glaringly incorrect watches, over and over. And they sigh, "Oh well, movie stars just aren't our sort of people! Still"

Or -- maybe most old-money people have HEARD of the rule: either no watch or plain gold watch on black strap with tuxedo -- but, like many of the rest of us, they don't CARE much about following those old rules, and are sort of worried about their friends and relatives who still do, obsessively.

Fashion rules like the "correct' watch to wear with a tux, are useful in EXCLUDING people: one quick glance and you can see they don't belong to your class. They're a code, like a secret handshake.

What I'm unsure about is what present-day old money thinks about these rules. Are they clinging to them as snugly as ever, and do I know few or actually none of their names?

Or are they, quite frankly, attempting to broaden the gene pool?

I was about to say that Prince Harry had made a good health choice when he married an African-American, Meagan Markle, but I googled Meagan Markle first, and sure enough, Princess Meagan, one of America's most very white African-Americans --- is a direct descendant of King Henry III of England.