What should we make of style?

 I’m thinking about writing because a young fellow I know is working on his first big story. It’s a story about a couple of kids who have to grow up in rough circumstances. I got interested in the characters as the writer was talking.

He’s at the point where he’s thinking of style. Does the story work better in first person or third? How do you know?

I had a professor in college who loved Erasmus and made us read him. Erasmus published a textbook called Copia: Foundations of an Abundant Style. One of the chapters is a demonstration: He wrote the same simple sentence 195 ways, each variation subtly different.

Raymond Queneau wrote the same short story 99 times in Exercises in Style. Each telling is different.

I’ll admit that I’ve written a story in first person and then rewritten it in third to see what it would look like. And I like to tinker, which is all trial and error.

But this focus on style is foreign to me. I invariably get interested in a story and forget about style or I fail to get interested in the story and abandon it.

I want to know the story, and so I appreciate a writer whose sense of style relies on clarity and brevity.

A short lesson on writing

 The shortest writing lesson might come from Chekhov.

He once said: “I can speak briefly on long subjects.” Just follow that example.

Then again, I once asked my father what made for good writing.

He replied: “Short words. Short sentences.”

A project to remember people who were enslaved

 My friend Phil Latham has started Identifying Slaves, a project to collect and publish information on people who were enslaved.

It’s a subscription service, $5 a month. Each piece includes several short stories, drawn from public records. Each is about a person, each with a name — often only one. Each has a little information about a life. 

It’s heartbreaking. We know so little about the human beings who were treated so unjustly — and of course that lack of information was a choice. People who were enslaved were given little attention, little consideration, for a reason. People doing the enslaving didn’t want to think about what they were doing.

We know little. But it seems doubly wrong to forget what little we do know. That, too, would be a choice.

When he started doing research, Phil said the information was overwhelming. Hard to read, he said, and yet hard to stop reading. I’ve had the same reaction.

If you’d like to see a sample, you’ll find it here:

https://substack.com/profile/13854354-phil-latham

Can you have an identity when everyone claims it?

 Yesterday’s note was about a study led by Daryl R. Van Tongeren, a social psychologist at Hope College. The paper is “Religious Residue: Cross-Cultural Evidence That Religious Psychology and Behavior Persist Following Deidentification.”

In brief: The “nones” — people who do not identify as religious — are not all alike. People who were once religious but no longer are — the “dones” — are cognitively different from people who have never identified as religious.

I’m fascinated by the paper. One thing I want to think through is how religious identities are acquired. The authors mentioned parents and how children are influenced by adults who sacrifice for their beliefs and values.

Those behaviors that cost something are known as CREDs, credibility enhancing displays. When children see adults taking a moral stand even when it hurts, they take note.

My reservation about this account is that religious identity was murky in the environment I grew up in. Almost all the people in that environment claimed to be religious. The Civil Rights Movement, the great moral issue of my childhood, was not fought between those who identified as religious and those who did not. The movement was supported and opposed by people who claimed to be religious.

The biggest acts of courageous moral behavior I witnessed as a child were by religious people. So were the most despicable acts of hypocrisy.

In that day, people who were not religious didn’t advertise that fact in the rural South.

The philosophers in ancient Greece argued about the nature of the primal stuff of the cosmos. If everything is made of “earth,” you have to jiggle that concept of a solid to explain fluids like blood and gases like air. If air is the primal stuff, and everything is made of air, you have to jiggle the concept to explain things like swords and mountains. One philosopher eventually suggested that the fundamental substance be called “the boundless.” Trying to fit all experience into one concept stretches the concept until it’s meaningless.

And so the ancient philosophers blundered into the troublesome Problem of the One and the Many.

A concept of religious identity — at least the version I grew up with — strikes me as that kind of problem. A concept of religious identity that includes both great moral courage and despicable hypocrisy isn’t really a concept at all.

I’m not sure what that says about identity. And I’m not sure what kinds of identity are possible from that kind of environment.

The difference between 'nones' and 'dones'

 Does religious belief leave a residue?

That’s not a rhetorical question. Some psychologists think you can get at that question empirically and that the answer is “yes.” Religious belief does leave a residue when it’s gone.

I’ve been reading a paper by Daryl R. Van Tongeren and his colleagues and am trying to decide what to think.

Tongeren’s team is interested in the increasing secularization of some societies, particularly in the number of people who identify as nonreligious. These folks are known as “nones” in popular culture.

The researchers’ hypothesis was that nones are not a homogenous group — that those who are never religious are cognitively different from those who were once religious but are done with it — the “dones.”

Psychology is one of many glaring holes in my education. But I can see that the notion of identity is central to any notion of psyche, person or personality. We invest a lot in forming identities. Once an identity has been formed, changing it — “deidentifying,” as the researchers say — is a big deal.

According to the study, you can see the difference in self-reported levels of prosociality, that it, behaviors intended to benefit others beyond oneself and one’s family. 

People that self-identify as religious report that they donate more time and money than people who were never religious. People who were formerly religious fall in between.

The authors take this as a residual behavior. They found consistent differences in these behaviors that would allow you to predict whether someone identified as religious, never religious or formerly religious.

The authors also identified residual beliefs. You’d expect that people who identify as religious would report stronger positive associations with God than those who were never religious. People who were never religious don’t have anything to report at all. People who are formerly religious fall in the middle.

Predictably, people who are formerly religious report the highest negative associations with God. Again, people who have never been religious just don’t have anything to report, good or bad. So people who identify as religious fall in between. (The Bible has characters, like Jacob, who fight with God or his representatives. Even those who claim a relationship say it’s not always rosy.)

I found the report fascinating. I’m still thinking.

• Source: Daryl R. Van Tongeren, Hope College; C. Nathan DeWall, University of Kentucky; Zhansheng Chen, University of Hong Kong; and Chris G. Sibley and Joseph Bulbulia, University of Auckland, “Religious Residue: Cross-Cultural Evidence That Religious Psychology and Behavior Persist Following Deidentification,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Personality Processes and Individual Differences, 2021, Vol. 120, No. 2, 484 –503.

A place can change the way you see the news

 I wonder how my view of the world is influenced by this place, the barrio along Zarzamora Creek.

The state and national newspapers were full of accounts of Donald Trump’s speech in Conroe.

But in this neighborhood, people are focused on other things. People mark Jan. 31 as the date of the start of the Pecan Shellers Strike in 1938. It was led by a 21-year-old woman named Emma Tenayuca.

Workers were paid a pittance for their labor. One day, 12,000 just stopped cooperating with a system that wasn’t fair.

The Trump speech was the usual "Make America Great Again." The observances in this neighborhood recalled how "great" America was in 1938: segregation, discriminatory voting laws, economic injustice. 

People around here haven't forgotten any of that.

The case of Russell's teapot

 Yesterday’s note was about the American logician C.S. Peirce’s account of belief. Bertrand Russell got to a similar point with a parable.

Imagine that someone asserts that there is a china teapot orbiting the Sun between Earth and Mars. It’s too small to be picked up by a telescope.

We can imagine such a thing: the assertion violates no logical laws.

But verifying the truth or falsity of that claim is a practical impossibility.

What do you make of the claim? Russell’s point is that the burden of proof is on the person making the claim. You, the person on whom the claim of credibility is being made, are not obligated to do anything.

You are not obligated to accept or reject the claim. You’re not obligated to do — or, in this case, believer — anything at all.