"decorating the house with 3 little ships on the mantle-place"
That is a *great* idea and why did nobody think of it before? You should definitely be in charge of "how the heck do I make bricks without straw from this new government-ordered holiday for Seasonal Farm Workers Suffering From Fatphobia Day" because you clearly have the right mindset for making traditions and celebrations!
Bede (writing in the 8th century) provides the only direct evidence for a goddess Eostre, which he mentions precisely in giving an etymology for "Easter", although others have argued on linguistic grounds for a dawn goddess with a name something like that. What Bede says is that the month (corresponding to our April) was known as Esoturmonath after the supposed goddess and that Easter was so called because it fell in that month.
Now, that doesn't make a great deal of sense to me. I'm not sure how Bede calculated the date of Easter, but in the current method Easter only falls in April about three-quarters of the time, and it's pretty odd (and confusing) to name a festival after the month in which it falls. If one keeps the *season* of Easter for 40 days after Easter Sunday, then that will usually include most of April, so perhaps it makes more sense if Esoturmonath is read as something like "Eastertide".
In any case, the name of the month wouldn't imply any extant devotion to the goddess, just as we say "Wednesday" without worshiping Woden.
Yes, I think by Bede's time, April was called "Eastermonth", but Bede believed that the festival was called after the month and not vice versa. Many ancient etymologies are very bad, so it certainly seems possible that he just made up the Eostre thing to explain the unusual name for the festival widely known as Pascha.
No, it absolutely is a bad process it's just that the stakes have gotten lower. Columbus Day was apparently an attempt to prevent future anti-Italian pogroms. Indigenous Peoples Day is apparently an attempt to acknowledge historical injustices...for some reason.
I identify with Coria so much here. There absolutely is an easy and simple solution (in theory), but neither Adraste nor Beroe is actually interested in finding a solution, the argument itself is the goal.
Adraste doesn't care whether Indigenous Peoples Day actually leads to tangible improvements in the lives of indigenous people, instead it's about signally where their sympathies lie.
Beroe also doesn't care about...celebrating explorers or whatever they were on about (if any other country has a national holiday for an explorer leave a comment please). Once again it is about signalling or trying to defend the group they were already a part of.
Coria is on the right track but doesn't quite have the best solution. As (almost) always with problems like this the best possible solution is to break apart the United States into about 15 smaller countries. There are simply too many people, spread across too wide an area, for one developed democratic state. Manufactured contestable points like this are a symptom.
Solutions like this sound impossible but really they are dismissed as "utopian" (as if that were a curse) because the A's and B's are too comfortable and their goal is just to continue the argument all while not realising that breaking up the US would give them what they really want: social cohesion without having to pick a side in pointless arguments.
Well, I think the drawbacks of dissolving the United States are many and obvious and don't need to be mentioned. So the only responses we get are about the advantages :)
That's a good point. I will put it into practice immediately and agree with you that breaking up the United States into any number of pieces >1 is a very bad idea.
In particular, as long as the US is all one country, this makes sure no part of the US will wage war on another part. (History tells us this is not an insurmountable obstacle, but the more obstacles the better.)
> so you don't *just* need 15 smaller countries, you also need people to sort themselves into them.
Yeah, and? If people are willing to support breaking up the US, they're willing to move to the appropriate new country (in sufficeint numebrs to make this work).
Where is my upvote button? I tried to report this comment as AWESOME.
But seriously, I have a simpler solution, legally. Take away the federal government's overreach. States should be independently governed, and the federal government should basically be just an arbitrator between states that have strong disagreements.
Everything in USA was already set up correctly until the Fed stepped in and became too big+powerful.
But also... what are the EU states thinking, trying their damndest to make the same mistake?
The older I get, the more reasonable this position sounds to me. Especially regarding the EU, as I am a native and resident of one of its major players and can see the strain from the inside.
"Anti-EU"-positions don't seem automatically ridiculous to me, but sadly they are often mixed with some kind of hardcore illiberal ideology (or quickly taken over by them).
>"Anti-EU"-positions don't seem automatically ridiculous to me, but sadly they are often mixed with some kind of hardcore illiberal ideology (or quickly taken over by them).
You mean like, say, not wanting your people to become a minority in their own homeland? Gasp! The horror!
Are you defining it by race, or a set of cultural norms? If the latter, it sounds like you just don't like competition. If you have the better culture you'll win. Countless examples throughout history. The Mongols conquering China and basically becoming Chinese for instance.
Yes, and cultures and ethnicities in fact do fight each other, along ethnic and cultural lines. For access to resources.
The current "liberal" norm is that every culture, race, and gender is to be celebrated and given space to develop, flourish and stay true to itself. Unless of course, that culture is a white one.
If these conflicts are done via PR war (and there's strong evidence that at least while the US stays the global military hegemon, even real wars are PR wars for the voters who get to decide how many cruise missiles get fired from USS Spitoon) then it should be viewed as a SHOCKING EMERGENCY for white people that they are not allowed to advocate for their own ethnicity even as every other race is getting special carve outs.
I think anti-EU positions make sense in Europe, where people mostly still have a strong national identity rather than a European identity. But it is utter nonsense in the US. Few people identify with their state - in fact, politics has gotten increasingly nationalized in recent years. It is common for people to move around the country. Personally, I have family in at least seven different states. Trying to split up the US is obvious lunacy, even before you get into the real issues.
A lot of people in the midwest do in fact identify with their state more than the nation. Notably though, if I’m understanding the general gist of the posts, is not splitting up the US to the degree of closed borders, merely lowering federal powers. (In this context, each state decides on recognized holidays instead of the central gov, and central gov may ie. say the number of minimum holidays.)
Wouldn't you still need a unified set of holidays for federal workers in order to avoid confusion? That sounds a lot like the status quo. It is *already* the case that state and federal holidays differ.
I think a lot of people identify with their state, and its unique traditions, like referring to distances by units of time, and “don’t like the weather? Wait five minutes!”
They don’t realize that the state is just this made up thing that affects a few minor laws and nothing else. It’s like the people who think San Antonio is a bigger city than Atlanta because they pay attention to these relatively meaningless lines on a map rather than the real regional cultural divisions.
I highly recommend doing more research; the cultural and legal differences between states is a far broader topic than I could cover in a post, but I can note a few key examples:
*Major differences in immigration and refugee policy
*Major differences in lgbt/discrimination law
*Taxes
*Alcohol
These cause cultural drift as populations change, and sometimes even the layout of cities is affected visibly when crossing a border between states. ie. States that held onto prohibition era restrictions on how retailers may sell alcohol longer still have districts built around specialized alcohol retailers (with some states still maintaining restrictions to this day). Other differences are less immediately visible and easier understood through statistics: ie. distribution of trans youth and adults vary _differently_ by state with a rough positive correlation on when laws and care availability changed in that state (rough since margins of error are pretty wide). Here's a map showing the two differing distributions: https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/subpopulations/transgender-people/
I do agree that for many regional cultural divisions, a different mapping than states would be more apt. I have major disagreements with how Woodward divvies things up, but his mapping provides an okay example visual:
Thing is, we don't really have a nation of blue states & red states. What we have, instead, is blue cities, red rural areas, and purple suburbs. Devolving more power locally would make San Francisco Democrats or Wyoming Republicans happier, but would leave Central Valley Republicans or Austin Democrats even unhappier than they are, so the next phase would be states breaking up and cities trying to become city-states with suburbs caught in a constant tug-of-war.
And when you step back and consider what the issues actually are, it seems even silly to consider. Do we really need to balkanize our highway system, water rights, establish a bunch of independent militias, all because some people would rather have Columbus Day and some would rather have Indigenous People's Day?
I dunno. I think a lot of the "we need to break up" sentiment just comes from being Too Online. It's trying to take symbolic contests, fought mostly on social media, and bring them into the real world. It might feel satisfying to the angriest of Culture Warriors, but I don't think it would really leave any of us in a better place.
What you USians need is to turn each state Senate into single-district statewide representative chambers, and make each representative of the House of Representatives directly matching their county or city as state Senates work today.
Senates, political parties, and representative democracy are all stupid. We need direct democracy voting on individual policy proposals (not junk drawer bills which package together dozens of unrelated policies).
>ut would leave Central Valley Republicans or Austin Democrats even unhappier than they are, so the next phase would be states breaking up and cities trying to become city-states with suburbs caught in a constant tug-of-war.
California and Texas would likely be broken up. And there would be movements of people after/during any break-up of the US to better match the new countries. If people are willing to support the US being broken up, they're willing to move state.
>And when you step back and consider what the issues actually are, it seems even silly to consider. Do we really need to balkanize our highway system, water rights, establish a bunch of independent militias, all because some people would rather have Columbus Day and some would rather have Indigenous People's Day?
No, this is just a high-level example of something vastly more fundamental. The left are increasingly forcing their ideology into the public school system and furiously opposing any efforts at school choice being a thing, and many people are rightfully extremely angry about this. This is an extremely fundamental issue - people trying to basically indoctrinate one's children. This isn't some online culture wars bullshit, this is people not wanting their children fucked with. The left have no interest in respectfully living and letting live - they're playing for keeps and forcing people to have no other option. Or take immigration. DC and blue states are preventing any meaningful measures being taken to secure the borders, but are also expecting anti-immigration southern states to shoulder most of the burden of immigration. Again, not a bullshit online culture wars issue.
>It's trying to take symbolic contests, fought mostly on social media, and bring them into the real world.
No, you're the one who's too online, because you're not seeing the real things happening in the real world.
As a lefty who grew up with Columbus day celebrations in public school in a place and time where fact-based sex ed & "dangerous" books were often banned, this is hilarious to me:
> The left are increasingly forcing their ideology into the public school system
"Indoctrinating" children in public school has been going on a long time. This is not new or a problem with "the left" alone. But perhaps you can take comfort in the fact that at least some children learn to think for themselves, in spite of the indoctrination.
Why is it hilarious to you ? The (American, Woke) left is indeed forcing their shibboleths into the public education system more and more, and observing that $NON_LEFT_GROUP has been doing it forever and in other places is irrelevant.
The public school system is indeed a pathetic indoctrination institution from the 19th century, but that doesn't mean it makes no difference to add 10 more catechisms to the pile does it? if you can't outlaw slavery at least make it illegal to abuse slaves.
I'm not sure I follow what you're saying, but first let me acknowledge. that I was making my point a little too light-heartedly to get it across, so let me restate my thesis: that the modern US does not have many problems that would actually be solved by dissolution.
Your reply seems to demonstrate that. You bring up education .. but K-12 education is already largely a state matter. Florida just famously revamped their state curriculum, and the federal government didn't really play a role there. How would secession impact that? Or do I misunderstand what you're saying? I'm trying for honest debate here, but if I come across as flippant, I apologize, it's not my intent.
On immigration, I think you have a stronger point, but I don't think it's quite as clear-cut as you suggest. It's easy to blame DC & blue states, but several of those blue states are also border states, while some of the biggest anti-immigrant moves and rhetoric are coming from opportunistic politicians in non-border states.
More to the point, there's been an effort nationwide to muddy the waters about what the problem is. The migrants who have led to the biggest policy controversies are not illegal border crossers, but rather legal asylum seekers. A border wall makes for a good rallying fight but it would not solve that issue. The people DeSantis flew to Massachussetts were not illegal crossers, nor are most of the people being bused to DC and elsewhere. So the complaints about them would ring more effectively if Republicans had an actual plan to reform our asylum system. As far as I can tell, they don't, and they didn't do much in the 2 years they had full control of the government.
To be clear, I agree it's a problem that needs to be solved, but I think the extent that it's a "major crisis" has been overblown relative to the "grandstanding politicians looking to score points" factor, which is why people like Greg Abbot act like the border wall is going to fix something that it's not going to fix.
We need to break up the cities into urban villages. It should be possible to fight city hall. People in the Blue zones like doing things at the federal level, because the federal government is more responsive and less corrupt than their "local" government.
> Everything in USA was already set up correctly until the Fed stepped in and became too big+powerful.
Counterpoint: the Commerce Clause (which is the means by which the Federal government arrogated most of its power to itself) is one of the USA's superpowers, because it allows a huge internal uniform market.
> But also... what are the EU states thinking, trying their damndest to make the same mistake?
They're mostly thinking "Hey, remember that world-spanning war we just had, that left the continent in ruins? And the one we had a few years before that? And the centuries of previous wars before that? How about we stop doing that, 'kay? 'Kay." But also "You know how the USA's giant internal market has made it an economic superpower? Let's get us some of that."
So you end up putting the Bundesbank and assorted French bureaucrats in charge of the whole continent? Um. Perhaps not the most brilliant of ideas (which may help explain recent electoral movements in Poland, Hungary, and Italy, and of course Brexit).
I didn't say it was a perfect plan, but that was the rationale :-) And I think it did help achieve peace in Europe, along with other organisations (chief of which, obviously, was the Red Army).
"Everything in USA was already set up correctly until the Fed stepped in and became too big+powerful."
And when was that, exactly? Because up until 1865 we had periodic threats to secede and attempts by states to nullify national laws on things like tariffs which clearly are within the constitutional list of federal powers, capped off with a massive Civil War. The war was so horrible that the reconquered area was ruled under outright military government for a while, and a radical faction took/was given power and implemented three new constitutional amendments which permanently subordinated the states to federal primacy. The conquered areas were too poor and backward for anyone to care about for a while after that, so there was national peace and harmony until mass media put their backward ways in front of everyone's faces again and oh god now we're here.
It's *HARD* to cram multiple cultures into a single state, and procedural safeguards only work until clever politicians, lawyers, and activists find some way to circumvent or subvert them, which happens pretty quickly.
I was thinking, as I read, that the correct way to solve the "Indigenous Peoples"-is-too-vague problem is to have 15 different holidays for 15 different indigenous peoples, each celebrated in the correct region of the US. (I wasn't actually thinking the number 15. I stole the 15.)
I admit I didn't go as far as to decide that the entire country should be split up to make this happen.
Alternately - and in distinctly American tradition - you commission a comic book featuring a superhero team where each is exemplary of one of the people of these continents. So you'd have Incaman, The Incredible Crow, Mary Sioux, Captain Clovis, Blackfoot Bill, Alcohuatl, etc.
Of course, as was anticipated in the OP, you then run into the problem of rampant stereotypes that everyone's uncomfortable with, not to mention merchandising wars, holiday cards clogging the landfills, etc. So it's probably better to keep this stuff out of culture. The world isn't some Sid Meier videogame.
Or you could have one holiday which is celebrated in regionally distinct ways, just like the rest of them. Lots of tribes do cool events, just look up what's going on in your region. This argument is pure bullshit: "Indigenous Peoples’ Day is observed by feeling vaguely guilty, making a big show of not celebrating Columbus Day, and making sure not to do anything fun or cultural related to Indigenous Peoples in any way, lest it offend someone."
One can choose not to do anything fun or cultural but there's no lack of options.
If “indigenous” means people who were dispossessed of their land by settler colonists, rather than just NIMBYs of any sort, then seems like a good idea. Wikipedia says:
Notable indigenous minority populations in Europe that are recognized by the UN include the Sámi peoples of northern Norway, Sweden, and Finland and northwestern Russia (in an area also referred to as Sápmi); the Uralic Nenets, Samoyed, and Komi peoples of northern Russia;[127] the Circassians of southern Russia and the North Caucasus; the Crimean Tatars, Krymchaks, and Crimean Karaites of Crimea in Ukraine; the Basques of Basque Country, Spain and southern France; the Sorbs of Germany and Poland, the Irish of the island of Ireland,[128][129] and the Albanians of the Balkans.
"Manufactured contestable points like this are a symptom."
It's the government's fault for manufacturing officially designated collective holidays in the first place. Just let everyone celebrate whatever they want, when they want.
The UK really has a leg up on the US here, with bank holidays. Nobody (as far as I am aware, other than maybe school children in non-progressive districts) actually "celebrates" Columbus Day. It's just a day off of school and/or work, with some furniture sales thrown in for good measure. The UK seems to realize that you can just, you know, give people an official three day weekend every so often for no particular reason.
This is it right here! Part of the reason we have "federal holidays" in the first place is to give government employees state-mandated time off (this may be a (revived) holdover from the medieval Catholic tradition of having festival days about once a month when it was illegal to work). They don't need fancy names. Just one three day weekend a month, please! Call it whatever you like.
Oh yes, this sterile, souless approach is much better than countries with REAL cultural holidays and traditions. All those countries who happily celebrate their holiday and express love and pride in their country and its traditions are fools - they should just have a "day off" which they can use to watch netflix and stuff.
> if any other country has a national holiday for an explorer leave a comment please
People in many countries celebrate Vostok 1 and/or STS-1 flights on April 12 (the holiday is known by various names, including Cosmonautics Day, Yuri's night, International Day of Human Space Flight, International Day of Aviation and Cosmonautics, etc).
I don't know which countries have it as a national holiday, but I suspect some do.
>Solutions like this sound impossible but really they are dismissed as "utopian" (as if that were a curse) because the A's and B's are too comfortable and their goal is just to continue the argument all while not realising that breaking up the US would give them what they really want: social cohesion without having to pick a side in pointless arguments.
The idea of social cohesion in the US is vastly more utopian than breaking up the US is. The culture wars aren't ending, and thinking they will either because both sides settle their differences or the left triumphs over the right is detached from reality. Splitting up the US is the cold pragmatist solution here.
I don’t get this at all. Often someone in San Francisco has more in common with someone in Atlanta than either do with people living 50 miles away from them. You can’t really carve up most of the US geographically to achieve social cohesion. Not is cohesion actually that great. I value different viewpoints, even if some aspects of that are sometimes maddening.
It might work out naturally. Pretty sure the land and air legs of the nuclear triad are all in red states, and the submarine leg is in blue, with the tricky exception of purple Virginia. (And San Diego is actually not blue, but we're assuming it doesn't get to secede on its own.)
Yes, that's what I said (or meant to say). But we're presuming they don't get to secede on their own, so San Diego has to go with California as a whole.
Re. "As (almost) always with problems like this the best possible solution is to break apart the United States into about 15 smaller countries. There are simply too many people, spread across too wide an area, for one developed democratic state.":
We tried that already with the Articles of Confederation in 1777, and it didn't work. It turned out that without a strong central government, we aren't powerful enough to repel an English or French invasion.
>As (almost) always with problems like this the best possible solution is to break apart the United States into about 15 smaller countries.
Or maybe 50 mostly independent states with their own governments, but still some limited federal government that addresses issues that concern interactions between them. In my opinion, we need to seriously curtail the massive overreach of the federal government and abuse of the commerce clause, and actually give the majority of political power back to the states. Probably not as much as was originally intended, the modern world is much more interconnected than it used to be, but much more than now.
I feel like Adraste missed two obvious counterpoints at the end there.
First, does anyone actually have the same level of sentiment about Columbus Day as they do about Christmas? As Beroe himself pointed out, it's an artificial holiday that was invented relatively recently. Not only is there a positive side effect of replacing it, but the negatives are almost certainly much lower.
Second, Columbus Day is a *federal* holiday. I think there's actually quite a good argument for replacing the federal holiday of Christmas with a secular alternative, since the government really shouldn't be endorsing a particular religion. Christians would still have their day off to celebrate Christmas the same as always and non-Christians can at least nominally be included by Winter Day or whatever. It's not like Christmas would be abolished, the government would just be taking a slightly more neutral stance toward it. Similarly, if people out there genuinely do celebrate Columbus Day, renaming it while retaining its status as a federal holiday lets those people still celebrate it while also allowing the US government to be nominally more inclusive to Native American citizens who justifiably hate Columbus's guts.
Put another way, I disagree with Beroe's point that we'll end up with sterile and meaningless holidays. *Federal* holidays could easily become sterile and meaningless, but they already kind of are. Real holidays will be celebrated exactly as long as people care about them.
I mean, American Christians did fine for 100 years without having their god's birthday celebrated by the government. I don't know why you're acting like it's some evil existential threat to Christmas. My whole point was that federal holidays and private holidays are obviously different things and should be held to different criteria.
>How much of the anti-Columbus Day agitation comes from your average guy on the reservation? I would bet you a shiny nickel that the vast majority of Native Americans could not possibly care less; this is being driven by political activists, generally with malevolent goals.
I had trouble finding direct polling of Native Americans about this. However, the map of states that have replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous People's Day correlates reasonably well with the map of states with high Native American populations, which seems like as good a proxy as any. I don't know what you could possibly mean by "malevolent goals", but I really recommend that you cut back on the melodrama. It can't be good for your blood pressure.
I suspect if you just polled them they could well be supportive of a change. I suspect if you polled the Chinese about changing Christmas to Spring Festival and celebrating it a couple months later they would also be supportive. But what is intensity of the feeling? For the topic at hand I'd expect to see evidence like people camping in protest in front of state legislature, demonstrations, indian nations making available funds for lobbying etc. All this may actually be happening i have no idea, just saying that polling is not going to be a good signal of whether people care.
The size of Chicago’s Columbus Day parade and the continuing efforts to have the Columbus statue (removed in 2020) returned to its place of honor point to “Yes” on the sentiment question, at least for an influential community here.
Only four years ago, the local Italian-American community successfully resisted efforts to rename Balbo Drive, a street in a prominent location named after a prominent literal Fascist (an early leader of the party who built Mussolini’s air force and ran large parts of North Africa before being shot down, poetically, by Italian air defenses).
They may win or lose on the statue or Columbus Day in the long run (the statue at least hasn’t yet been returned) since there are competing interests at play. But their fervor clearly isn’t casual. And if 80-odd years of Blackshirts being non grata in the US hasn’t led to a deal renaming Balbo Drive after Monteverdi or something, I’m guessing it’ll be a while before the rather newer turn against Columbus makes a dent in their enthusiasm.
I for one completely forgot about Columbus Day until this very post. It is a total nothing of a holiday, and I do not believe anyone who says otherwise.
I literally forgot one year and was wondering why the Disney trip I’d scheduled in “quiet” October had such huge crowds till someone reminded me.
But the parade goes right by my office. There are definitely people for whom it’s a Big Deal, and a penumbra of politicians and businesspeople who need to be seen honoring it by those people.
It really depends on how large the Italian population of your city is. It's like how I completely forget about St. Patrick's Day, unless I'm in Boston for it, where everything turns green. St. Patrick's Day does show that the local parades can continue, even if the Federal Holiday is no longer recognized.
This, I think, is a big part of the debate that both sides fail to get. Where I live, there's essentially no organized Italian American community, and in fact the Native American community is more visible (and certainly more organized).
Whereas I friends from college who, now, in their mid-30s, can't tell you whether they've ever even met a Native American, but lived in places where Columbus Day is a genuine thing.
Endorsed. Am I the only one here who remembers that Sopranos episode about this very topic? It's fiction, sure, but this was drawing on some real world sentiments.
Silvio wants to take action against Native Americans protesting the Columbus Day parade, believing their actions to be insulting to Italian-Americans. Without Tony's approval, he, Patsy, and Artie attempt to break up the demonstration, in which Little Paulie and several others are injured. Later, Ralphie threatens the protest leader, Professor Del Redclay, with publicizing the fact that Iron Eyes Cody, a popular Native American figure, is actually an Italian-American. Tony unsuccessfully appeals to Assemblyman Ron Zellman and to an Indian chief to convince Redclay to cancel the protest. However, the chief invites Tony and his crew to his casino. Both the parade and protest occur without mob intervention, which upsets Silvio. Tony forcefully argues to Silvio that his achievements came through his own abilities, not through his heritage, and scorns the idea that everyone belongs to a victimized group.
At a luncheon meant to instill Italian pride in women, the "mob wives" feel singled out when the speaker attempts to dissociate Italian culture from the Mafia. After the luncheon, Gabriella lectures Father Phil about how much the mob wives, especially Carmela, have given to the parish, and says he had no right to bring in a guest speaker who intended to shame them.
This leads to a position none of the three characters considered but which seems superior to all three: rebrand Columbus day after some *other*, cooler Italian. There are tons of options. Galileo would be my pick--even sticks with the basic theme of human striving into the unknown.
The theme of Columbus was not exploration - it was stop lynching Italian-Americans.
The concept of being an "Italian American" was formed in the US not in Italy which is arguably younger that the US, see timeline of Risorgimento.
I suppose I'd pick Mother Cabrini, but why pick just one.
If I were the philosophy monarch, I'd have a holiday every month on the 1st celebrating American pluralism. 10 for each of largest ethnicities (after every decenial census you'd recallibrate based on American Community Survey Ancestry Question), 1 for First Peoples and one in general for all immigrants.
In the 60s and 70s, Columbus day also started becoming important to so-called Hispanic communities (Do you think Mexican Americans cheer for the same teams in the World Cup as Guatemalan Americans? Central American community actively cheer against Mexico's team!)
In lieu of new holidays, why not just have a ceremonial secularized baptism right: A statute of Columbus is brought out once a year. Red paint is splashed on it symbolizing pasta sauce for Italians, salsa for Hispanic communities, and genocide. Then in the evening a parade carries the statute to the nearest body of water where it is light on fire and thrown into the water, symbolizing a proper disdain for worshiping or revering any particular individual. (My adopted home of Baltimore way ahead of the curve.)
Not gonna work, I'm afraid. Any rebrand will inevitably be understood as "boo Columbus" and not some spontaneous expression of admiration for Alessandro Volta or whomever.
The other problem, as pointed out by JDK above, is that you can't just replace Columbus with some random eminent Italian because the point is that Columbus uniquely represents a *connection* between America and Italy.
Italians didn't participate very much in the early phases of European settlement of North America, so unlike people of English, French, Swedish, Dutch, etc. descent, Italians in the late 1800s were seen as new arrivals lacking connections to American history and culture. I take it the symbolism of Columbus was by way of saying, "Look, we were here at the start! The OG Euro-American was an Italian dude! We have as much claim on the great Westward-expanding Indian-subjugating tradition as anybody!"
Obviously, many people today don't particularly care for that narrative. But for those who are still attached to it, substituting Galileo for Columbus isn't going to carry any of the same meaning.
Every year you trot out a statute of Columbus. He is baptized with red paint symbolizing pasta sauce(For Italian Americans ), salsa (go for Hispanic American) and blood (for the genocide of First Nations).
In the evening, he is spayed with silly string (spaghetti) and then thrown into the nearest body of water in reparation for sins.
Pizza, pasta and tacos are served with red wine for a St. Patrick Day like celebration of American pluralism.
Garibaldi spent some time in the US. Granted, maybe it would have worked better if he'd accepted the Major-General's commission he was supposedly offered by the Union during the Civil War. (He reportedly refused unless he was made commander-in-chief and given the power to abolish slavery.)
I am 37. I remember that some years around Columbus Day we would read about Columbus in school or otherwise have a Columbus-centered curriculum. I was an adult before I learned it was ever supposed to have anything to do with Italian-Americans, and I have still never seen this matter in real life.
Yeah but you grew up in California in the recent past, pretty much the definition of bland nonculture, since essentially everybody moved here within the last 50 years. If you'd grown up somewhere where there as 300 years of history with multiple overlapping waves of European immigration it might be different.
I grew up in Georgia, which has nearly 300 years of history. and the closest thing I ever saw to a Columbus Day celebration was being taught the mythologized account of Columbus's voyage in 1st grade, making some paper boat decorations, etc. And I don't think it was ever "celebrated" in any of the higher grades.
Carl Pham beat me to it -- I was just going to say that I'm not at all surprised if that connection hasn't ever really been a thing in Orange County, or maybe anywhere in CA for that matter.
It would have been a thing in San Francisco. Do you thing Pelosi didn't celebrate Columbus Day as an Italian thing in little Italy in Baltimore growing up.
Columbus Day is Italian American St Patrick's Day.
Cities with sons of Italy or garibaldi clubs always sponsoring parades. Alienate Italian American vote at your peril.
The fact that the Transamerica Bank Pyramid (formerly Italian-American Bank) sits at the base of Columbus Ave, the main diagonal artery of the Italian neighborhood of San Francisco, suggests that there’s at least one neighborhood in San Francisco where Columbus Day was likely a big thing.
I (not American, mind) didn't know Columbus Day was a thing at all, and when Beroe brought it up, I thought it was an alternate history idea Scott had made up to set up a reversal test.
Here's an even more extreme example: what about holidays that are not federally recognized, such as Mardi Gras? Depending on where in the US you live you may have never even heard of it, but down in New Orleans, Louisiana, depending on when Ash Wednesday falls, it can be a MONTHS long celebration filled with parades and partying. It gets raucous enough to be compared with Carnival in Brazil, while lasting longer. You'll usually have big celebrations depending on how big of a French/Acadian/Cajun population is in your state, which is why there's also a similar (though not quite as big) celebration in South Padre Island, Texas.
In terms of being a celebration that's a bit problematic, Mardi Gras is French for "Fat Tuesday", the Tuesday before the Christian holiday of Ash Wednesday, which is the start of Lent, a period of 40 days of fasting and personal sacrifice commemorating Jesus's 40 day walk through the desert while getting tempted by the devil. Fat Tuesday was created as a way to get all of your sins and gluttenous urges out of your system before that long period of denial, which honestly kind of defeats the purpose. The modern celebrations are known for getting WAY out of hand, to the point of inspiring an entire genre of pornography (GGW for those who are curious).
So people who celebrate it are basically negating whatever good that Lent will do for them, and potentially partying even HARDER than they would have overall had neither holiday been a thing.
>Beroe: What about “Indigenous People’s Day is offensive because indigenous peoples were frequently involved in slavery and genocide”?
Is not that rare in my experience, though it usually comes up in the context of genocide apologia rather than this specific argument about holiday names. Again I feel that Adraste missed an easier counter, which is that it's quite natural to pin Columbus's crimes on Columbus, while there's no reason to tar the average, non-evil indigenous person with the actions of the evil ones. It's also the case that Columbus's crimes aren't really separable from the achievement he's celebrated for, while the history and culture of indigenous peoples are certainly much larger than war and violence.
Societies that *never* practiced human sacrifice are probably in the minority (in the Americas as elsewhere) - and societies that were really, really into it, and can't get enough of it (like the Aztecs, or probably the Moches in Peru, but not the Incas) are the exception; if you do that to other people, they eventually rebel, and if you do it to your own best, strongest and brightest - well, that's not a good way to ensure your future, now, is it.
And Americans who talk about the indigenous are mostly referring to the tribes who lived on the territory of what's now the United States.
Some of these tribes were indeed capable of great violence, but not significantly different from contemporary Europeans, and nothing in comparison to the industrial-scale slaughter associated with the Aztecs.
In fact, I'm pretty sure the Aztecs were a far outlier in terms of violence in the Americas, even when you account for the sacrifice-friendly Mayans.
In fact, warfare among the more "warlike" Plains groups was highly ritualized: a way to get high honors was to literally touch your enemy three times in battle without hurting him, for instance.
Okay, but this certainly wasn't the case for, e.g., the Apache or Comanche. Indeed, the Plains Indians themselves did not fight this way against outside enemies — and even against each other, that was more of an ideal than the norm: they slaughtered each other plenty.
Absolutely more than closely-related European groups did to each other. Native Americans generally practised what's known as "first-system" war, which tends not to draw any distinction between combatants and non-combatants:
[i]"The oldest way of war was what Native North Americans called – evocatively – the ‘cutting off’ way of war (a phrase I am borrowing from W. Lee, “The Military Revolution of Native North America” in Empires and Indigines, ed. W. Lee (2011)), but which was common among non-state peoples everywhere in the world for the vast stretch of human history (and one may easily argue much of modern insurgency and terrorism is merely this same toolkit, updated with modern weapons). The goal of such warfare was not to subjugate a population but to drive them off, forcing them to vacate resource-rich land which could then be exploited by your group. To do this, you wanted to inflict maximum damage (casualties inflicted, animals rustled, goods stolen, people captured) at minimum risk, until the lopsided balance of pain you inflicted forced the enemy to simply move away from you to get out of your operational range.
The main tool of this form of warfare (detailed more extensively in A. Gat, War in Human Civilization (2006) and L. Keeley, War Before Civilization (1996)) was the raid. Rather than announcing your movements, a war party would attempt to advance into enemy territory in secret, hoping (in the best case) to catch an enemy village or camp unawares (typically by night) so that the population could be killed or captured (mostly killed; these are mostly non-specialized societies with limited ability to incorporate large numbers of subjugated captives) safely. Then you quickly get out of enemy territory before villages or camps allied to your target can retaliate. If you detected an incoming raid, you might rally up your allied villages or camps and ambush the ambusher in an equally lopsided engagement.
Only rarely in this did a battle result – typically when both the surprise of the raid and the surprise of the counter-raid ambush failed. At that point, with the chance for surprise utterly lost, both sides might line up and exchange missile fire (arrows, javelins) at fairly long range. Casualties in these battles were generally very low – instead the battle served both as a display of valor and a signal of resolve by both sides to continue the conflict. That isn’t to say these wars were bloodless – indeed the overall level of military mortality was much higher than in ‘pitched battle’ cultures, but the killing was done almost entirely in the ambush and the raid."[/i]
The Comanche weren’t a traditional indigenous plains group. They are the result of a group of mountain people that expanded onto the plains after European contact, started capturing and riding feral horses, and developed a new syncretic culture based partly on the culture of the plains Indians they displaced.
"Seven men were killed in the raid, though that does not begin to describe the horror of what Mackenzie found at the scene. According to Captain Robert G. Carter, Mackenzie’s subordinate, who witnessed its aftermath, the victims were stripped, scalped, and mutilated. Some had been beheaded and others had their brains scooped out. “Their fingers, toes and private parts had been cut off and stuck in their mouths,” wrote Carter, “and their bodies, now lying in several inches of water and swollen or bloated beyond all chance of recognition, were filled full of arrows, which made them resemble porcupines.” They had clearly been tortured, too. “Upon each exposed abdomen had been placed a mass of live coals. . . . One wretched man, Samuel Elliott, who, fighting hard to the last, had evidently been wounded, was found chained between two wagon wheels and, a fire having been made from the wagon pole, he had been slowly roasted to death—‘burnt to a crisp.’ ”" https://weaponsandwarfare.com/2019/03/07/a-new-kind-of-war-indian-wars/
Say what you want about 19th-century Europeans, but torturing captive civilians to death was not a common practice among them.
Torturing captive civilians to death was certainly something that happened in Europe, just like that particular raid happened in America. (Not that it was anything as common as it was in the 17th or 20th centuries, obvs.)
From Farb's Man's Rise to Civilization (2nd ed., 1978):
"The Plains Indians fought not to win territory or to enslave other tribes, but for different reasons. One conscious motivation was the capture of horses, which had a high economic value. Another kind of reason, less conscious but equally powerful, was that external strife served to unify the tribe internally. A tribe, especially one as fragile as the composite tribe unified only by non-kin sodalities, badly needed a common enemy as a rationale for its existence. A third motivation was the status that could be acquired through raiding, which was regarded as a game in which one’s exploits were graded according to the dangers involved. The exploit itself was known as the coup, a word borrowed from French trappers and originally referring to a "blow” struck by a brave against an enemy’s body with a special stick that was often striped like a barber pole. Eventually, "counting coups’’ came to mean an immodest recital by the brave of all his war deeds. These recitals went on endlessly. Each time a man achieved a new honor, he used it as an excuse to recount the old ones. If he lied about his exploits, though, or even shaded the truth a bit, he was immediately challenged by someone who had been along on the same war party.
Each Plains tribe had its own ranking for coups. Among the Blackfoot, stealing an enemy’s weapons was looked upon as the highest exploit. Among some other tribes, the bravest deed was to touch an enemy without hurting him. A much less important exploit usually was killing an enemy, but even that deed was ranked according to the way it was done and the weapons that were used. The whole business of counting coups often became extremely involved. Among the Cheyenne, for example, coups on a single enemy could be counted by several warriors, but the coups were ranked in the strict order in which the enemy was touched by the participants; who actually killed or wounded him was immaterial. Like a sort of heraldry, these deeds were recorded in picture writing on tipis and on bison robes. Among many Plains tribes, each coup earned an eagle’s feather, and the achieving of many coups accounts for the elaborate head-dresses of some war leaders.
Scalps taken from dead or wounded enemies sometimes served as trophies, but they were insignificant as compared with counting coups. Many Plains tribes did not take scalps at all until the period of their swift decline, which began in the middle of the last century. It has been commonly believed that all Indians took scalps, and that scalp-hunting was exclusively a New World custom. Neither notion is true. Herodotus, the ancient Greek historian, mentioned the taking of scalps by the Scythians, for example. In North America scalping probably existed before the arrival of Whites, but only in a few areas, primarily along the Gulf Coast. Some historians still question whether scalp-taking was a widespread aboriginal Indian practice in North America, or rather one learned quite early from White settlers.
Whatever its exact origins, scalp-taking quickly spread over all of North America, except in the Eskimo areas. The spread was due more to the barbarity of Whites than of Reds. Governor Kieft of New Netherland is usually credited with originating the idea of paying a bounty for Indian scalps, since they were more convenient to handle than whole heads and they offered the same proof that an Indian had been killed. By liberal payments for scalps, the Dutch virtually cleared southern New York and New Jersey of Indians before the English supplanted them. By 1703 the colony of Massachusetts was paying the equivalent of about $60 for every Indian scalp. In the mid-eighteenth century, Pennsylvania fixed the bounty for a male Indian scalp at $134; a female’s was worth only $50. Some White entrepreneurs simply hatcheted any old Indians who still survived in their towns. The French also used scalp-taking as an instrument of geopolitics. In the competition over the Canadian fur trade, they offered the Micmac Indians a bounty for every scalp they took from the Beothuk of Newfoundland. By 1827 an expedition to Newfoundland failed to find a single survivor of this once numerous and proud people.
Among the Plains tribes, apparently only the Sioux and the Cree placed great value on scalps; both tribes were late migrants to the plains from the East, where they probably learned the practice from Whites. Nor did the Plains tribes torture their captives as frequently as was once believed. The White settler who saved his last bullet for himself to avoid a horrible death usually took a needless precaution. Unlike the Indians of the eastern woodlands, the Plains Indians killed swiftly and cleanly. They looked upon the White custom of hanging, for example, as undignified and barbaric."
<i>Many Plains tribes did not take scalps at all until the period of their swift decline, which began in the middle of the last century.</i>
Many Plains tribes aren't actually well-attested till well into the nineteenth century, so any lack of evidence for scalp-taking before then might well be simply because we lack evidence for any of their customs.
<i>Some historians still question whether scalp-taking was a widespread aboriginal Indian practice in North America, or rather one learned quite early from White settlers.</i>
Given that no White country in the fifteenth, sixteenth, or seventeenth centuries took enemy scalps as a regular part of warfare, this idea is unlikely, to say the least.
<i>The spread was due more to the barbarity of Whites than of Reds. Governor Kieft of New Netherland is usually credited with originating the idea of paying a bounty for Indian scalps, since they were more convenient to handle than whole heads and they offered the same proof that an Indian had been killed.</i>
So it's OK to commit barbaric acts if there's a financial incentive to do so? I guess all those Europeans who participated in the slave trade, or killed natives and stole their land, are off the hook then.
<i>Unlike the Indians of the eastern woodlands, the Plains Indians killed swiftly and cleanly.</i>
A claim which is contradicted by numerous primary sources from 19th-century North America.
"Many Plains tribes aren't actually well-attested till well into the nineteenth century,"
The main point of the entire chapter is that Plains Indians were an ephemeral formation, a product of a crisis; of course several tribes were not well attested *as tribes* before the 19th century.
"Given that no White country in the fifteenth, sixteenth, or seventeenth centuries took enemy scalps as a regular part of warfare, this idea is unlikely, to say the least."
As the text itself shows, scalp-taking become quickly a colonial reality - a White practice. Were European colonists to dull to come up with it themselves? At any rate, we have a perfect example - much later in the 19th century, hand-hacking became a well-documented Belgian colonial practice in the Congo, introduced into a continent that did not know it, even though Europeans hadn't been hacking each other's hands ever since a rather distant past. Is that fact also unlikely?
"So it's OK to commit barbaric acts if there's a financial incentive to do so?"
That's clearly against the drift of the entire text.
Having looked into the matter more deeply (i.e., consulted Wikipedia):
"There is substantial archaeological evidence of scalping in North America in the pre-Columbian era.[22][23] Carbon dating of skulls show evidence of scalping as early as 600 AD; some skulls show evidence of healing from scalping injuries, suggesting at least some victims occasionally survived at least several months.[23] Among Plains Indians, it seems to have been practiced primarily as part of intertribal warfare, with scalps only taken of enemies killed in battle.[23] However, author and historian Mark van de Logt wrote, "Although military historians tend to reserve the concept of 'total war'", in which civilians are targeted, "for conflicts between modern industrial nations," the term "closely approaches the state of affairs between the Pawnees, the Sioux, and the Cheyennes. Noncombatants were legitimate targets. Indeed, the taking of a scalp of a woman or child was considered honorable because it signified that the scalp taker had dared to enter the very heart of the enemy's territory."[24]
Many tribes of Native Americans practiced scalping, in some instances up until the end of the 19th century. Of the approximately 500 bodies at the Crow Creek massacre site, 90 percent of the skulls show evidence of scalping. The event took place circa 1325 AD.[25] European colonisation of the Americas increased the incidence of intertribal conflict, and consequently an increase in the prevalence of scalping.[22]"
I would note that most of the posts here defending the "Indians were no more violent than Europeans" position have compared routine Indian treatment of captives (scalping, torturing to death, etc.) with European ways of dealing with specific, heinous criminals (e.g., mutilating people for committing treason). If the ways in which Natives treated their enemies *as a matter of course* or comparable to the ways in which Europeans treated enemies *in ways which were recognised as unusually brutal in the context of European society*, that kind of suggests that the Native societies were, on average, more violent than European ones.
But here we are getting far ahead of ourselves. Scalping existed in some Native societies; that we can agree on. In the colonial period, it became a matter of course both among colonists and natives, with official (monetary) encouragement from colonial authorities; the evidence for that is very clear. (Note that the money motice wasn't even there before.) Hence - well, nothing follows.
AFAIK the main point ekaborated by Farb has stood: Plains Indians societies of the 19th century were really something ephemeral, the result not just of introduced innovations (horses and guns) but also of a chain of falling dominos: groups fleeing from colonial expansion (and often what amounted to extermination policies; otherwise, why pay hard cash for the scalps of children?) in the East displaced other groups, which displaced other groups.
Whether the result was "worse" by tiday's standards than what existed previously I do not know. It's certainly the case that, in Europe, periods of crisis and violence (I brought up the Thirty Years' War because it intersects the esrly colonial period, but there are plenty of others) often gave rise to forms of systematic cruelty that were unknown or uncommon elsewhere, and might shocked your random Boethuk as much or more as they shocked us.
(And, again going by Farb, hanging - still a thing in the West until extremely recently - shocked Plains Indians. Acts are not ranked by their brutality in some objective, culture-independent order.)
<i>But here we are getting far ahead of ourselves. Scalping existed in some Native societies; that we can agree on.</i>
Not Farb, apparently: "Some historians still question whether scalp-taking was a widespread aboriginal Indian practice in North America, or rather one learned quite early from White settlers."
I don't know whether this was a defensible position back in the 1978 (all the Wikipedia citations seem to date from later, so perhaps archaeological evidence for pre-Columbian scalping wasn't yet available), but whether Farb's book is out-of-date or whether he was just ignoring evidence that made the Natives look bad, it suggests we should be cautious about accepting his conclusions.
<i>In the colonial period, it became a matter of course both among colonists and natives, with official (monetary) encouragement from colonial authorities; the evidence for that is very clear. (Note that the money motice wasn't even there before.)</i>
It's true, some colonists were sadly corrupted by exposure to the native practice of scalping.
<i>It's certainly the case that, in Europe, periods of crisis and violence (I brought up the Thirty Years' War because it intersects the esrly colonial period, but there are plenty of others) often gave rise to forms of systematic cruelty that were unknown or uncommon elsewhere, and might shocked your random Boethuk as much or more as they shocked us.</i>
The Adrastes of this world blame white peoples collectively for atrocities committed by their fellow whites, even when there are reams of evidence for other white people being shocked by this and engaging in long campaigns (sometimes literally -- cf. the West Africa Squadron) to stamp it out. I don't see why we should let Native Americans off the hook just because an imaginary "random Boethuk" "might" have been shocked by something.
<i>(And, again going by Farb, hanging - still a thing in the West until extremely recently - shocked Plains Indians. Acts are not ranked by their brutality in some objective, culture-independent order.)</i>
Hanging people is absolutely objectively less brutal than torturing them to death over several days, and if you don't recognise that, I'm not sure there's much point in continuing this conversation.
Well, if you are going to see protacted pain as the standard of brutality, then scalping isn't particularly brutal - in fact, if practiced upon the dead, it isn't brutal at all. No comparison to the related practice of flaying, which was meant to be slow and excruciating!
(BTW, hanging was neither quick nor painless before the introduction if the long drop. But that's probably orthogonal to its being perceived, and meant, to be disgraceful.)
Also, "sadly corrupted by the native practice"? I thought we were trying to keep some objectivity here. At any rate, it was not just some individuals being "sadly corrupted"; the practice was encouraged and propagated by Colonial authorities, because of how conveniently it coupled with bounty hunting.
That much seems to be confirmed. I implied fom the beginning that some of Farb may be outdated; the article on scalping from 1981 I linked to later is framed in part as a reply to Farb and some of his sources. It also confirms some of the other points.
(And isn't the adjudication of an objectionable practice to all "the Adrastes of the world", followed by a reiteration that one's not willing to do without it, a bit like what we are discussing? Collect scalps from the outgroup today!)
>Again I feel that Adraste missed an easier counter, which is that it's quite natural to pin Columbus's crimes on Columbus, while there's no reason to tar the average, non-evil indigenous person with the actions of the evil ones.
If you don't want to take the blame for the collective crimes of your race, then you don't get to demand a holiday in your honour for the collective accomplishments of your race.
That’s a weird rule. I thought we generally encourage people to identify with the good aspects of groups and discourage them from identifying with the bad aspects.
Anyway, no one gets to “demand” anything, or perhaps everyone can “demand” whatever they want, but both of those are beside the point. What we are talking about is what we collectively want to celebrate, whether or not people “demand” it. And my point is that it’s good to celebrate good things and bad to celebrate bad things, even if they are parts of one culture.
My point is that people advocating "Indigenous People's Day" aren't arguing for a celebration of the accomplishments of particular indigenous people, they're just throwing all indigenous people into one bucket and claiming to celebrate that. If the question at hand is whether the entire history of indigenous people collectively should be celebrated, then it seems very relevant to point out that large portions of that history were actually pretty terrible.
> there's no reason to tar the average, non-evil indigenous person with the actions of the evil ones
This doesn't work. Civilization works as a collective. Every Aztec farmer is a contributor to the horrors his or her civilization did, because his or her crops is one more basket of food and money to feed the system that committed the crimes. Every Aztec administrator doing the most boring ass and harmless paperwork is one more drop of oil in the vast machine that devoured innocent souls and conquered virgin lands.
This effect is also amplified at smaller distances : while you're "responsible" for the child labor and genocides that China does with the help of your money (which came from the taxes you paid to your government which is almost certainly indebted to China whatever it was, or the money you use to pay for chinese products which you almost certainly do even if you don't realize that), your responsbility is vastly diminished by the sheer distances and forces and interlocking systems involved, way way beyond your senses let alone comprehension let alone control. Meanwhile the Aztec society was smaller than modern Mexico, and the ritual killings was attended by at least thousands, even those who didn't attend prayed to the gods who (nominally) ordered the killings, dealt with and married those who attended and cheered, etc...
Come to think of it : if your argument is convincing to wokies, they would stop blaming modern whites for the atrocities their ancestors did 150\100\50 years ago. They can't use your argument because they are already committed to its inverse elsewhere in the culture war landscape. (Well, they can of course, they are not particularly averse to hypocrisy, but what I mean is that if they use it then they're being hypocritical and it's not their real reaon)
>It's also the case that Columbus's crimes aren't really separable from the achievement he's celebrated for
If we assume for a moment that the argument portrayed in Scott's parable is *really* about problematic holidays (it is almost always not, it's about signalling and ritualized language games), there is the uncomfortable fact that *Any* holiday whatsoever is going to be problematic in some sense or the other for some group of people or the other.
Give me a holiday that celebrate "Victory" over anything or anyone, and I can just innocently ask "Who or What are we victors over ?", and then get some popcorn to eat while observing you trying to answer without offending the descendants of the vanquished. It's like that old Herbert G. Wells quote :
>>It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have a huge variety of needs and dangers
Replace "intelligence" with "achievement" and it would still hold true. Achievement is compensation for all the ugly things you did to arrive at it. If you celebrate muslims, then you necessarily endorse and approve of all the atrocities that muslims and their societies has done to atheists and competing religious traditions from the day Muhammed smashed the idols till now and all the future ones they will almost certainly do to maintain and expand their culture, as well as all the hideous things said in the quran, the sunnah, the teachings of the Imams, etc.... Ohh, what did you just say ? Those crimes are not "central" to the muslims' existence as a group ? so you believe that an obscure and plagiarized tradition rose from an obscure and unknown desert cult to dominate 1.5 billion people purely by merit and persuasion? Not convincing.
If you celebrate victory over Hitler, then you necessarily endorse all the crimes the Allies had done to Germany and its people in order to win the victory during the war and rub it in after the war (bombing civilians - which is a practice that the allies started as far as I know -, raping german women by soviet soldiers, etc...). The centrality of those crimes to the Allied victory can be more debatable than the centrality of muslims' crimes to their religion's dominance, but, a very persuasive argument can be made that the 2 things I mentioned significantly degraded german ability and will to fight, which helped both the victory and the subsequent rule.
We humans are ugly, and our achievements are mostly ugly primate shit-flinging and pussy-fucking.
> Christians would still have their day off to celebrate Christmas the same as always and non-Christians can at least nominally be included by Winter Day or whatever.
This sort of fig-leaf secularism (like CE/BCE for dates) drives me nuts. Just acknowledge the culture you are in, and where these traditions come from!
> be nominally more inclusive to Native American citizens who justifiably hate Columbus's guts.
That's preposterous. Virtually all of the Native Americans alive today have partial European ancestry, and so would not exist were it not for Colombus. Most probably don't care, and of those who do care the ones I know celebrate Colombus day.
The culture I'm in supposedly values the separation of church and state. The founders of my country certainly did. Making the hypothetical winter holiday fall on December 25 is already a massive concession to Christianity. I don't know why so many Christians feel entitled to things they haven't earned when they're already given so much.
>"Virtually all of the Native Americans alive today have partial European ancestry, and so would not exist were it not for Colombus."
I'm not going to bother with your anecdotes, but surely you have to see that this argument is terrible. I exist because pogroms drove my great-grandmother out of Poland, causing her to meet my great-grandfather in America. Should I celebrate turn-of-the-century Polish racists? Obviously not, and there's even less reason for Native Americans to celebrate European colonization that reduced a culture they love to poverty and irrelevance.
"[T]he government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion"
From the Treaty of Tripoli, ratified unanimously by the Senate and signed by President Adams.
"When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it so that its professors are obliged to call for help of the civil power, ‘tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one."
Benjamin Franklin, in a letter to Richard Price. October 9, 1790
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof[...]"
The first line of the first amendment in the Bill of Rights.
You moved the goalposts and you're still wrong. Franklin was a founder and he made his view quite clear. The Treaty of Tripoli is US law, which is why I pointed out that it was ratified unanimously by the Senate, and the President who signed it was a founder. And finally, your interpretation of the Establishment Clause is far narrower than any evidence supports. It has always meant that the government cannot unduly favor one religion over another. This has been upheld by centuries of jurisprudence.
"I don't know why so many Christians feel entitled to things they haven't earned when they're already given so much."
This is that preposterous "level of science" graph with the valley for the "Christian Dark Ages" in comment form. If you think Christianity has been a drain on civilization, of course you think Christians are takers who deserve nothing that they have and certainly no more. Alternative take: Christianity is awesome, it's the best religion, it's the primary reason that Western civilization is great, and we should celebrate the hell out of it.
This isn't what I was saying. I was saying that individual Christians seem to think they deserve special treatment despite living in a secular society. Thanks for demonstrating. I'll never understand why people are proud of believing things that they know deep down are untrue.
Individual Christians living in a Christian society aren't getting special treatment; they're getting the same treatment as everyone else in the Christian society, most of whom are also Christians.
It's exactly one day out of 365.25, and you get it off, too, so you don't have to work; you get to spend the day eating Chinese food and kvetching. Now, you might complain that you don't really need Winter Chinese/Kvetching Day, and you'd prefer to have one of your actual holidays off. Fair enough. But in a Christian society, all the Christians in government employment are going to ask for Christmas off and nearly all private businesses that the government interacts with will be closed. Keeping a minimum number of general-schedule drones working on Christmas is probably a waste of the government's money.
What exactly do you think special treatment is? Non-Christians need to pay to observe their holidays, either by losing a day of PTO or a day of wages, and Christians don't. This is why even secularizing the name of the holiday and leaving it on December 25th would still be heavily favoring Christianity. The very least a secular government can do is not openly endorse one religious holiday over all others. This is especially true in a society that is increasingly *non*-Christian -- only about 2/3 of Americans are Christians, thankfully, which is a lot, but not nearly enough to justify giving Christian holidays special snowflake status.
But the society is obviously not secular, even now. Every single US president is a Christian of some kind (at least nominally), and swearing oaths of all sorts on the Bible is still the default in many contexts.
"Making the hypothetical winter holiday fall on December 25 is already a massive concession to Christianity"
I don't celebrate Christmas but I think it's basically a concession to reality. There's no universe in which things are open on the normal schedule in America on Christmas.
However in the interest of secularism, should we also change Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, because they refer to equally-fictional deities? Should we only exclude those with a significant following?
Would it not be more powerful to secularism to accept a mythological term _as_ and _because_ it was mythological? Not to mention more inclusive and culturally enriching?
<i>I don't know why so many Christians feel entitled to things they haven't earned when they're already given so much.</i>
Because the people who fought for the USA's independence and expanded it to its present borders were mostly Christian, the original settlers were Christians coming from Christian countries, and American culture is derived from a European culture which had been thoroughly christianised for a good millennium or so before the Jamestown settlement. In short, the USA as we know it was built by Christians, so if it's a matter of earning things, I'd say that they've earned the right to have their holidays recognised by the government if anyone has.
>The culture I'm in supposedly values the separation of church and state. The founders of my country certainly did. Making the hypothetical winter holiday fall on December 25 is already a massive concession to Christianity. I don't know why so many Christians feel entitled to things they haven't earned when they're already given so much.
Christmas is a European and European-American cultural tradition more than it is a religious holiday, and most of the the US population are Christian anyway.
And for goodness' sake - stop pretending you care about what the founders wanted or supported. People like you happily spit on them when it suits your agenda, but then suddenly you really care about it? What if they DID explicitly support a Christian government? Would you agree that we should have one? OF COURSE not. You would be using it to show how clueless and backward the founders were.
>Christmas is a European and European-American cultural tradition more than it is a religious holiday, and most of the the US population are Christian anyway.
Friend, it literally has Christ in the name. You don't think it's religious for the same reason fish don't know they live in water. If you leave your immediate social bubble, you might be surprised how many of your fellow citizens aren't part of this tradition.
>And for goodness' sake - stop pretending you care about what the founders wanted or supported. People like you happily spit on them when it suits your agenda, but then suddenly you really care about it? What if they DID explicitly support a Christian government? Would you agree that we should have one? OF COURSE not. You would be using it to show how clueless and backward the founders were.
Okay, I'm not sure where to start with this bit. If you scroll up an inch or so, you'll see that the person I replied to was citing the supposedly Christian nature of the US. No matter how I feel about the founders personally, their support of secularism in addition to the history of church-state separation in the country are obviously relevant to rebutting that point.
But on that point, you have no idea who I am or how I feel about the founders. Feel free to dig up posts I've made in the past and use them against me, but I don't think you'll have much luck. In the meantime, don't put words in my mouth.
And finally, even if I were the world's biggest hypocrite, it wouldn't make me wrong. Accusing someone of hypocrisy isn't actually an argument! It just kinda sounds like one. If you can't address my points on their own, don't comment.
<i>Friend, it literally has Christ in the name.</i>
Friend, the days of the week literally have Anglo-Saxon deities in their names, but Wednesday is not, in any sense whatsoever, a celebration of Woden.
<i>Okay, I'm not sure where to start with this bit. If you scroll up an inch or so, you'll see that the person I replied to was citing the supposedly Christian nature of the US. No matter how I feel about the founders personally, their support of secularism in addition to the history of church-state separation in the country are obviously relevant to rebutting that point.</i>
The Founders opposed the federal government setting up an established Church (not the state governments, though; Massachusetts, as I recall, had an established Church until the 1830s). They didn't oppose the government promoting a sort of generic Protestant Christianity, and the idea that the First Amendment requires a sort of French-style laïcité didn't become popular in US legal circles until the 1960s.
Christmas is a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ. Christians celebrate it not just in Europe and America, but all around the world. They sing songs about how "the Lord has come". They sing about the night he was born and the manger he was born in. They go to church and put on nativity plays. They also decorate big trees and pretend that a Christian saint drops off presents under them. It is a thoroughly Christian holiday. There are atheists who celebrate it with their families because those atheists have sentiment associated with Christian traditions; this does not make it a secular holiday, and the vast majority of celebrants are Christian. The fact that I even have to explain this makes me think you're a troll or not very good at introspection.
>The Founders opposed the federal government setting up an established Church (not the state governments, though; Massachusetts, as I recall, had an established Church until the 1830s). They didn't oppose the government promoting a sort of generic Protestant Christianity, and the idea that the First Amendment requires a sort of French-style laïcité didn't become popular in US legal circles until the 1960s.
I already argued against this above. It's clear that this is a very narrow view of the Establishment Clause that does not appear to have been held by the founders. Obviously they had less control over state governments, but Jefferson and Madison at least seemed to feel the same way about them. Madison wrote "We maintain therefore that in matters of Religion, no man's right is abridged by the institution of Civil Society and that Religion is wholly exempt from its cognizance." This was in response not to someone trying to establish an American church, but a bill proposing to fund a Christian school with Virginia state taxes. Jefferson coined the term "separation between church and state" in a context that clearly went beyond disestablishment. As far as promoting generic Christianity, Madison also wrote "Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects? that the same authority which can force a citizen to contribute three pence only of his property for the support of any one establishment, may force him to conform to any other establishment in all cases whatsoever?" This hardly seems like a ringing endorsement. No doubt modern jurisprudence isn't identical to 19th-century jurisprudence, but I have yet to see any evidence for your claim other than people on here just stating it like a fact.
> Making the hypothetical winter holiday fall on December 25 is already a massive concession to Christianity.
No, it's a concession to the fact that it wouldn't be a "hypothetical winter holiday," it'd be *Christmas.*
Christmas is by any objective standard a major feature of American culture, in ways that are quite independent of its also being a significant day of Christian observance. That's not to say Christmas doesn't have a specifically Christian significance; it does. But it's also deeply interwoven into American civilization in ways that would be unaffected by any hypothetical demise of Christianity.
Countless classic American films take Christmas as a setting or a theme, most of them having nothing in particular to do with religion. The wish to be "home for Christmas" (see: Meet Me in St. Louis; Die Hard) is something like America's Odyssean nostos, the core expression of a restless, mobile people's yearning for place.
Every December, the Top 40 FM station in your city -- or at least one of them -- ceases its usual programming of ephemeral hits and instead plays a completely different set list of songs familiar to Americans of all generations. The tradition of "Christmas songs" is the single biggest occasion on which contemporary Americans listen to the popular music that their parents and grandparents heard as children.
We have Christmas stories, Christmas foods, Christmas outfits, and obviously a whole iconography of Christmas that spans the culture from low to middle to high. It's not an endorsement of religion for the government to recognize that Christmas, qua Christmas, is a major part of the rhythm of American life and a major driver of American cultural creativity.
But insofar as it's right and proper for the government to do that, it doesn't need to -- indeed, shouldn't -- attempt to hide or scrub away the fact that one strand of Christmas's complex tapestry of meaning is its historic and continuing status as a part of the Christian liturgical calendar.
I'd turn your idea of "entitled," "earned," and "given" on its head. Christianity, whatever else you might think of it, gave us Christmas, and our overwhelming cultural consensus seems to be that Christmas is fucking awesome. Any observance of a Winter Holiday that's de facto piggybacking on how much people like Christmas ought as a matter of basic right and decency to call it by its proper name and not rob Christianity of its due credit for this contribution to our cultural commons.
Ah... I'm pretty sure that the pre-existing winter holidays like Yule are the source of the tree-decorating and gift-giving traditions that make up a huge amount of what Christmas is and feels like.
That's almost literally (or often literally) the same as saying that we should commemorate Rapist Day, since we all likely have a bit of the DNA of a rapist warlord (or rapist civilian) that came in at some point in the family line.
Haha, there's an episode of Clone High that completely skewers the fig-leaf secularism you're talking about. I highly recommend watching it if you hate that sort of thing:
Yeah, Italian-Americans tend to care about the holiday. Even if we didn't pick Columbus - note a WASP picked him for us. But by golly we'll take what we were given. And once something is given, the receiver generally doesn't want a gift taken back. (Do NOT insert culturally insensitive and unjust stereotyping slur here.)
(I will note that my mom would also sometimes let us skip school on 3/19, St. Joseph's day in celebration of being an Italian American. It probably is worth noting that the county of my childhood is named after St. Joe and since there was already a local tradition of celebrating Polish Americans (Dyngus Day) where we'd also get day off, a special day seemed appropriate.)
But I personally have no problem with the red paint thrown on Columbus statutes. I prefer to imagine it is ragu rather than blood. That kind of baptism would be a great permanent addition to the Holiday to symbolically remind us of pasta sauce and genocide.
Native Americans I've spoken to don't really have any opinion about Columbus - he didn't wrong *them*, he never even went as far north as Mexico - but they do have a low opinion of those who assume they're all one big great people who share culture and grievances and other such things.
Government holidays, along with government everything else, are not *supposed* to be sterile in opposition to/ignorance of American culture. This seems to be entirely invented, a post hoc interpretation of the increasingly sterile American culture *which is a deliberate effort* by the same people pushing things like Indigenous Peoples' Day.
I think that the government has pretty clearly staked out a position in recognizing cultural holidays at a federal level. Juneteenth would be a good example of this that also seems pretty non-problematic.
I think the thing about Christmas that I haven’t seen said is that it’s not a purely religious holiday anymore. Yes, it originates from christianity, but where I grew up everyone celebrated Christmas even for most agnostics/atheists. So, acting as though it’s “just a religious holiday” and not actually a pretty significant cultural tradition that manages to break past religion seems weird to me.
"JUNETEENTH NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE DAY" symbolically celebrates the emancipation of slaves in the US, not just an event in Texas. The emancipation of slaves is not a "cultural event", it is a political event.
Even if technically the complete emancipation in US did not occurred until after the June 19, 1862 Act ending slavering in "territories" nor as a result of the June 19, 1865 event in Texas, but when the 13th Amendment was official adopted on December 18, 1865 or perhaps when a treaty with Creek nation ending slavery by that tribe was signed on June 14, 1866.
Let me try to clarify what I was saying, so that we can see whether we still disagree
I agree that the emancipation of the slaves is a political event.
But, the celebration of the emancipation of slaves on June 19th originated from a cultural group holding a celebration on that day. It certainly isn't ubiquitous across America to celebrate the emancipation of slaves on juneteenth, or necessarily even at all. Exactly when all slaves were freed is pretty debatable, but it's a reasonable day to stake out for celebration.
Jesus/Jeshua von Joseph/whatever you want to call him was probably a real person who led a political life, so his birth is a political event (much like the birth of MLK, though not necessarily in the same way).
The celebration of his birth arose from a cultural group celebrating his birth. It certainly isn't ubiquitous across America to celebrate his birth though. And exactly when he was born is pretty debatable, but December 25th seems a pretty reasonable day to stake out for his celebration.
The US Government has apparently decided that it is worthwhile to protect these holidays. I imagine that it's a mixture between 1) a large portion of the population wants that day off and 2) politicians believe it's important that people can take that day off to celebrate the thing that's celebrated on that day.
It seemed pretty reasonable to me to call both of these events "cultural" in that they were predominantly celebrating events that only a particular cultural group in the US celebrate. I would agree that it would be wrong to call either of them purely cultural, since one is rooted in religion/history and the other is rooted in US history, but I think it's also wrong to act as though neither of them is also helping to enshrine a celebration valued by a group in the US.
In the comment I was replying to, I felt that the commenter was trying to only consider the religious, and not the cultural significance, of Christmas, which was what I was trying to push back on. I would say that Juneteenth has both cultural and historic significance, and didn't mean to imply otherwise.
The public celebration of a person is generally hagiography.
But the celebration of the birth of Jesus is not really hagiography. It is pedagogic and deeply connected with a critical event of belief. God in one person being human. The existence of one God with three persons is ahistorical (it is out of time) but the actual incarnation is a historical (in time) event of belief from conception to death and resurrection. Christmas commemorates a concept: Transcendent becoming Immanent.
That the political has coopted the theological (note the order of operation) cannot be in any way adequately discussed in this type of forum. Perhaps someone could do a book review of Ed Goerner's Peter and Caesar; The Catholic Church and Political Authority (1965) as a starting point. But it is as lifetime of thinking.
The distinction between cultural and political is equally complicated.
The people in Texas who uniquely began celebrated Juneteenth were celebrating both a cultural and political event. As it expanded beyond Texas and the particular community of descends of those freed on 6/19 it took on a political character.
Part of the complex history is the confusion about to whom the EP applied - a majority still don't understand it's limited scope to the treasonous states attempting to cede. The nitty gritty of another 6/19 event: freedom in territories, state constitution events (eg Maryland post war but pre 13th amendment), the 13th Amendment, and the Indian treaty were and are lost on the populous and even many legislators.
The federal holiday converts what began as a parochial cultural event into a national political event.
Note the conversion of the cultural to political is neither magic waiving nor algorithmically certain operation. The political can revert to the cultural and the path back is not always the same.
(Some people have imagined that mlk day is culturally holiday.)
And then there is economic cooption.
Is Labor Day about labor or is it about selling stuff on sale.
Is Christmas hagiography, pedagogy or economics of consumerism or the political cooption of the spiritual.
Dana: Coria, you have a good idea, but you're completely failing to understand the point of holidays. As Beroe said, they're about *myths*. They're about us, the living. Family and togetherness and gratitude. Gifts and joy and light. Renewal and hope and unsubtle metaphors. You can't just take a whole list of the most important figures: you need to start with the archetypes, the emotional goals, the *vibes*, and once you've assigned those, warp some reasonably close historical figures until they fit. Now, we'll toss Sanger, because that's complicated, and we're left with Columbus, Einstein, Edison, Washington, MLK, Disney, Franklin, Jonas Salk, Norman Borlaug, Susan B Anthony, and Louis Armstrong. Exploration, genius, dedication and entrepreneurship, bravery and honor, sticking to convictions in the face of overwhelming provocation, entertainment and joy, science and statesmanship (and we'll stick this one where Easter used to be), moral courage and innovation, and art. That's a pretty good list! But Salk and Borlaug take basically the same place, and that's already covered by Franklin. So as much as I respect your desire to honor the best and most important Americans, I can't agree with it. This is, incidentally, an argument for Henriette Lacks: she adds a theme and a tone that a list exclusively of the great and powerful can never capture.
You had my grudging interest, and could have persuaded me further, until you brought up Lacks. Our heroes ought not be post-mortem consulation prize fantasies, constructed out of whole cloth. There ought to be something there, and we ought to resist the invention of more, at the beginning.
Let the generations to come falsify her life into some godmother/birthing Goddess of Science, not us who are close enough to the beginning to recognize the manipulation.
I think it's exactly the opposite; Lacks is important *because* of the different tone. She's a stand in for the idea that many things we enjoy and benefit from are a result of using people in ways they didn't necessarily consent or agree to, and I *do* think that's worth formally recognising one day a year.
To add a little more; it was the inclusion of Disney that initially rubbed me the wrong way (it feels odd to celebrate what is still a for profit corporation), but I've come around to it because Disney is indeed a good stand in both for the profit motive which has driven so much prosperity as well as the entertainment and worldwide appeal of American culture.
Edison would fit most of that role nicely. Of course he gets credit mostly for things his employees did, but he did plenty of things himself (including inventing the phonograph), whereas Disney, if I remember correctly, couldn't draw.
I remain unpersuaded. I won't go further here, because this comment section is preordained to touch too many third rails, and I shall stop adding to it here, but I ask that you consider what other 'people used in ways they don't consent to' you have in mind, and if that group is as global as it might be.
For that matter, it was only Lacks's cervix that did service, the rest of her was of no use to posterity at all. It seems a slippery slope (so to speak) to accord hero status to individual organs, we might end up worshipping Sophia Loren's tits.
Eh. This is phrased a hair less charitably than I would have- Lacks was a wife and a mother and her life had value. But it was pretty much the same general human value and ordinary heroism that we all display - it was the cancer cells that were extra ordinary.
I actually interpreted the point as being a generalisation of the Cristobal Colon / Christopher Columbus point that A was making; indigenous peoples day is a terrible day because it doesn't actually celebrate anything in particular (I, for one, think a holiday involving fry bread, dancing, and thankfulness to nature would be great, but that's a whole other topic). Rather, the semi-mythical Colombus was chosen as an avatar for cultural values of bravery and discovery. Dana just applies that to a wider range of values.
Re: frybread - I learned from its Wikipedia article that it's actually not a traditional Native American food, but is said to have been invented in the 1860s in times of government oppression and limited ingredients. Apparently several Native Americans have spoken out against the way it's perceived as an authentic Native American food.
I'm fine with the "myth" thing but it seems like a reason to not go with historical figures, or with someone like Jesus, someone who's mostly legendary even if a real person.
If it's a real person then we have to argue over the actual shit they did. People talk about MLK like a legendary figure but we have all his writings and, like, his advice column in Ebony magazine where he told women whose wives cheated that it's their fault.
Basically if they're recent enough that you have their advice column, they're not distant enough to boil them down to a myth.
> This is, incidentally, an argument for Henriette Lacks: she adds a theme and a tone that a list exclusively of the great and powerful can never capture.
This gives me an even better idea: pick eleven dead individuals purely at random out of the gravestone registry. Maybe pick a different twelve every year. Celebrate them, whoever they are, because they probably did some good things, and some bad things, just like the rest of us.
Honestly I think the US does far too much celebrating of individuals already. You start with the USS George Washington and pretty soon you've got a USS George H. W. Bush and a Nancy Pelosi public school.
A part of me wants to point out the frequent allegations of anti-semitism directed at Walt (and, yes, you'll see plenty of articles breathlessly talking about how they're unproven), but I think the bigger part of my negative reaction to this comes from discomfort at having a federal holiday named after an extant corporation.
The Disney corporation doesn't need the federal government's help in metastasizing through all of pop culture, it's doing that plenty well on its own.
An extant corporation that has consistently lobbied for copyright extension beyond the point of all reason, robbing the world of countless derivative works that could have been.
The Modernist list (echoes of Comte, really) suggests we should create and celebrate the mythical character Armstrong, jazzman and astronaut extraordinaire. I'm all for it.
Coria at least avoided the false dichotomy but came up with a worse alternative. We need a way to ensure that a new holiday would be popular enough that people would forget all about the old holiday.
I suggest a contest. Contest entries should not only name the holiday but suggest fun activities for that day. The judges should be kids. They try out contest entries by actually having the holiday and reporting back on whether it was fun.
I don't think Coria's alternative is worse as such, if it is seen as a first stage in planning. Some Modernist neighborhoods are actually well-thought out and nice to live in, Soviet New Year did catch on, and so did Christmas (was: Sol Invictus), etc. But right, one needs to propose and listen, or, to put it in a more hard-headed way, test it with focus groups.
Apropos Soviet New Year, I’ve been told the Ukrainian tradition is to decorate the tree with a) candles, and b) small wrapped fireworks, to be removed and set off outside on New Year’s Eve.
The friend who described this mentioned that her mother as a child had once gotten a bit confused as to the decorating procedure, with pyrotechnic results.
(Ukraine, demonstrating how metal it is: "We’ve endured the Mongols, Hitler, Stalin, and Putin. Filling our living rooms with wood, gunpowder, and fire is our idea of a relaxing family holiday.")
As someone who went through the Kiwi flag referendum contests are fucking awful. Experts are better.
First form a group of experts to figure out what the goals really are, then form several other groups of experts to each come up with proposals, then take the best ones to the public for their seal of approval (and buy-in).
Isn't that exactly what happened with the Kiwi flag referendum? Out of 1000+ submissions, the "experts" picked 40, which happened to include none at all which retained the Union Jack. Then the people picked their favourites among those, and then they decided that actually they'd rather have the original.
It seems to me that a more minimalist change which kept the Union Jack but replaced the red southern cross with a fern (either on blue or black) would be the obvious solution to minimise change while resolving the clash with the Australian flag, but that was never shortlisted.
While reading the dialogue, my first thought was that replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples' Day could be balanced with a new Rome Day on April 21. (Assuming additional holidays are cost-free, which they aren't.) Rome Day would presumably assuage Italian-Americans, not to mention many conservatives. Kids would probably have fun dressing up as gladiators.
But that just displaces the feeling of being neglected onto Greek-Americans, who might then ask why they aren't also getting a kid-approved holiday with hoplite costumes.
Rome Day? As a Calabrian American, I'm kind of laughing.
"Rome" is not a symbol for "Italian" or "Italian American". "Italy" is a symbol for "Italian".
Is DC the symbol for the psychosocial experience of "American"?
And we should be cognizant that "Italian American" is something that is created in America. It is not really the same thing as diaspora.
Being a Polish American, Greek American, Irish American are not things that are created in Poland, Greece and Ireland. It is created here in the U.S. in a complex recursive network of family, food, custom, language, places and shared "symbols".
The full phenomenology of ethnicity is a epistemic, social, and pneumatic experience mediating reality as mechanism for preventing alienation and for promoting the necessary capacity for solidarity as we answer the uniquely human questions: who am I and who are.
If DC was once the center of an empire that was the largest in its day and stood for ~2000 years more or less in various forms, I think that yes, Americans wouldn't object to being symbolized by it*. I think the bigger problem would be the people who would start digging up the crimes of the Roman Empire and using them as justification that we shouldn't name a holiday after it, and they won't be disappointed.
* : (I'm neither an American nor an Italian, but I substituted a bunch of important cities that were once Ancient capitals of empire but are now just cities in my country, and yeah, it doesn't make it any difference)
The context is that some Italian-Americans profess offense at the replacement of Columbus Day, so it seems that we're taking Italian-American identity as a given. Sophisticated though it may be, telling people 'You can't be offended because your identity is contingent' is probably not an effective way of assuaging them.
'Rome Day' is a reference to ancient Rome.
Christopher Columbus is associated with Genoa (and Spain). Italy the country is associated with the northerner-dominated political class and a major regional gap in living standards. Ancient Rome seems less divisive - remember that all free Italians held citizenship from c. 90 BC.
In his book Unto the Sons, Gay Talese explores the Calabrian vs Italian and Calabrian-American vs Italian-American issues. I don't think he claimed that only Italians from Lazio feel like heirs of ancient Rome. He portrayed the contemporary divisions in Italian identity as medieval, i.e. post-Roman, in origin.
If you hail from the Arbëreshë or the Griko, the above may not apply.
Pretty good. The only (minor) omission I think is the observation of the annoyance of the narcissism of the weak ally of an anti-holiday effort. If you have some personal reason to deeply hate Columbus, the historical figure -- his ancestors chopped off the hands of your ancestors, an Italian once betrayed your sister, whatever -- then I can respect your attempt to erase the man. Similarly, if you are passionately commited to the holiday because you think Italians get stereotyped as sister-betrayers too easily, or you think it concretizes the social value of honoring courage and daring (better than an "All Explorers' Day") then I can respect that, too. Banzai, and let the best shibboleth dominate by and by.
The person who is a weak ally of a holiday defense squad is being tediously tribal, but people are like that, and it's hard to expect more. But the person who is a weak ally of an anti-holiday movement is often a giant narcissist seeking attention. "You're all ignorant morons because you haven't thought of [insert tangentially relevant historical fact]. Only I with my massive brain/social conscience have seen it, and hereby bring this enlightenment to you. You may now gasp in wonder and admiration." Feh.
Bringing up Status Quo Bias in an argument about a tradition seems ridiculous to me. You can try to found a new tradition but you can't just create a pre-existing one, it will never be a tradition to the founding generation.
Beroe misses the point that Blue Tribe just got Juneteenth as a federal holiday so they can hold their horses for a bit. Personally I don't mind Juneteenth becoming a federal holiday as it was already an actual thing, and I wouldn't want it renamed to "Federal Holiday - Mid June" out of spite.
During Yugoslav wars while trying to take the famous historical city of Dubrovnik, Serbian armed forces would often joke they intend to make the city "more beautiful, more older" ('Još lepši, još stariji') once they occupy it.
So perhaps you can change the idea of what is the old tradition with enough AK-47s and bottles of Sljivovica
Agreed. When it comes to, among other things, traditions, I'd counter with "Reality has a Status Quo Bias!", because changing the Status Quo has inherent disadvantages. You lose all the social inertia the status quo has, and if you can't replace it, you're worse off than before, regardless of whether a world where new tradition seamlessly replaces old tradition would be preferable. Even if you can, there will be costs, and friction during the transition period.
I actually think Juneteenth itself is pretty good as holidays go - snappy name, good semi-mythologized event to peg it to, traditional ways to celebrate it.
I am however annoyed that it became a federal holiday mostly as a stick to beat Trump over the head with for being so churlish as to host a political rally on June 19th, a day that had zero special meaning to anybody outside of a very regional culture prior to that rally.
However if I was a jerk I'd point out that it became a national federal holiday despite it only pertaining to a minority interest group, whos votes happen to be very important to the Left, and could be construed as celebrating the defeat and oppression of another American group that is current a shadow of its former self (the south). Yes the southerners were 'bad guys' but the 'indigenous peoples' had larger empires with more slaves and a much higher body count.
In my opinion it's extremely hypocritical to defend Juneteenth while attacking Columbus day.
Well, ideally the federal holiday would be like “Emancipation Day” and tied to either the Emancipation Proclamation or 13th Amendment ratification dates, but Juneteenth rose originally in an organic (if parochial) fashion so I’m okay with it being the “end of slavery” celebration that caught on (just annoyed that it went from obscure to ubiquitous the way it did in 2020 mainly to smear Trump).
Basically I think it’s totally fine to have some sort of celebration of the Union surviving the Civil War, but I actually agree with you that to do so directly would be needlessly polarizing. Celebrating the end of slavery is a totally fine thing to add to our civic religion though.
I think making up "Emancipation Day" instead of Juneteenth would serve no purpose but to be an insult to black people and a tradition of theirs. Exactly like scrapping Columbus day
I wondered about that a while back, and it turns out that pretty much every date associated with the Emancipation Proclamation or the 13th Amendment doesn't work.
Emancipation Proclamation: issued on January 1. We're *not* doing a new holiday on New Year's Day.
13th Amendment passed by Congress: January 31, 1865. So only two weeks or so after Martin Luther King Day.
13th Amendment ratified: December 6, 1865, smack between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Juneteenth is a little closer to July 4 than ideal. But a summer holiday in a month that lacks one (sorry, Flag Day!) is a much better bet than any of the above. August would probably be better still, but there's not so much as a single state ratifying the 13th in August to hang it on.
I mean maybe that’s given by some as a slightly more defensible official reason. But Juneteenth went from “obscure regional holiday” to “thing we’ve obviously always been aware of and sensitive to” because Trump had a rally scheduled on Juneteenth in OKC. Lots of thought pieces and talking heads came out about about how insensitive this was near the site of “Black Wall Street” and on that date. I think most people were like “what the heck is Juneteenth?” until that controversy.
I'm pretty sure the actual thought process was "we need to do something to show support for racial justice/BLM/etc. - hey look, there's this convenient existing holiday tradition we can use".
For what it's worth, the company I worked for *already* decided to give us Juneteenth off in 2020, which would have had to have been very last minute indeed if it were a response to the Trump rally.
Incidentally, while searching online for this, I found the following on Politco:
---
Despite Trump’s claim that the holiday was not well-known, his White House has released a statement — attributed to the president and first lady — commemorating Juneteenth for each of the three years he’s been in office, a fact that surprised Trump when, according to the Journal, he paused Thursday’s interview to ask an aide if she had heard of Juneteenth.
“Oh really? We put out a statement? The Trump White House put out a statement?” he responded. “OK, OK. Good.”
Though the president’s rally has brought renewed attention to the date, weeks of unrest following a series of police killings of unarmed black men had already begun to fuel a new corporate, state and local government push to make Juneteenth a holiday for workers as part of the ensuing racial reckoning taking place in the United States.
The same for the critique of nostalgia- I have personal nostalgia for Christmas, but I also have a sort of generational nostalgia for the Christmases of the past. There's a sense of humanity and togetherness that I feel when I think about, eg., the Christmas Truce that I wouldn't feel if it was 'The Winter Festival Truce'. Christmas means something to me that it also meant to them and we are thus connected across time.
You could extend that point to resurrecting ancient traditions or globalizing existing ones, and I'm not sure I disagree with those conclusions.
“All of our best holidays have begun as anti-holidays to neutralize older rites. Jesus was born in the spring; they moved Christmas to December to neutralize the pagan Solstice celebration. Easter got its name because it neutralized the rites of the spring goddess Eostre.”
I’m assuming this is a deliberate troll, but I’m still looking forward to Deiseach weighing in here. 🙂
I don't think Christmas has ever been *that* important as a Church holiday. Not unimportant, mind you, first among the saint's days, let us say, but not anywhere near the importance of Easter. So I don't think suggesting that Christ was actually born on some other day is likely to provoke much reaction. I believe the Church itself has debated the question more than once.
The English word "Easter" was certainly not invented by the Church, and the idea that it was chosen to steal a minor pagan celebration -- long abandoned at the time the idea that "Easter" was connected with Eostre was proposed -- is pretty dubious. The feast was (and still is) called "Pascha" in both Greek and Latin, the latter of which was (and still is) the official language of the Church.
For what it's worth, Britannica suggests (contra Bede) that a more reliable hypothesis of its etymology lies in Old High German "eostarum", which is the plural of "dawn" (obviously related to "ost" = "east") because the Church referred to the whole season of Easter (not just the day itself) as "time of many dawns".
I don’t have a dog in the fight myself. But the usual argument for “Jesus was born in the spring” is based on shepherds being out with their flocks for lambing, and a longstanding regional breed of sheep reportedly has its lambing time in December-January.
(Whether the shepherd story is true is another question, but without it I don’t know if there’s any reason to prefer the spring.)
So, the reason for the shepherds in the fields were the sheep, and in the western tradition, sheep are managed a bit differently than in the mideast. Sheep in the west were more likely to be managed so as to lamb in late winter to early spring, and to be allowed to wander further more or less unsupervised during the gestational period (not kept barn confined because the flock needed to eat.)
Once lambing got close, the sheep would be more confined *or* the sheep owners would go out from the houses and villages and join the shepherds in caring for the sheep during this intense period.
As I understand it, and as the article highlights, in the Mideast cultural and ethnic groups would keep huge herds and move with them. They would *always* be out in the fields with their sheep, so the western translation would not apply.
There is also the timing effect. In the west, agriculture has allowed enough feed to largely prevent low energy anesterus, where the female can't be bred because she has insufficient energy reserves. (This is in part because Western agriculture doesn't migrate flocks nearly as much.) In this case, the sheep come into season based on day length, starting in July-ish, very strong in August & September, and trailing off in January. (This is a biological function of sheep and goats, shared with deer. Cows don't have this seasonality, horses breed in spring/summer.)
Western tradition also has the rams kept separate, delaying breeding (and hence lambing) to account for late winter lamb-killing weather.
Tropical breeds of sheep and goats have a reduced response to daylength, but respond more vigorously to feed intake.
...all of which is to say 'if you go off the sheep, Jesus was probably born in the Dec-Jan time frame, but the Western thinkers who object and say Spring have reasons for thinking so.'
Also, until Dickens, Christmas wasn't a huge holiday. (Dickens also reportedly crashed the Christmas goose sector in England, in favor of imported turkeys.)
It might not have been as big as it was now, but I think there is at least some evidence there was something extra to it before Dickens. https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/war-christmas
Tl;dr Parliament tried and failed to force Christmas into a more protestant form. Even when they used the army.
I always thought we knew he was born on December 25th, because that's why all the hotels in Bethlehem were booked up so they got stuck in the stables - it gets really busy at Christmas.
That would also explain why the wise men brought him gifts - they probably weren't going to, then they realised they were all going to meet on Christmas day.
I think the "co-opting pagan traditions" explanation is unnecessary because there's obvious symbolic reasons for Christmas to occur on the winter solstice.
If you were celebrating the birth of someone who called themselves "the Light of the World", who symbolically brought light into a dark world, what day would you pick? ("Our closest approximation to his actual birth" is one choice, but suppose you decided to value symbolism over historical precision, because you're running a religion not the Smithsonian.)
The darkest night of they year, the point at which light begins to gradually come into the world, is a really obvious choice - especially to pre-modern people who were much more constrained by the darkness/light cycle than us in our age of constant, convenient electric illumination. It's natural to want to celebrate at the part of the year where it stops getting darker, and tying in the symbolism of the Incarnation just makes a lot of sense.
It's possible the existing pagan celebrations played a factor, but it's not really necessary to explain the selection of the date.
The only pagan festival on Dec 25, that of Sol Invictus, isn't mentioned until several decades after the first surviving mention of Christmas being on Dec 25, and after Christians became a visible and well-known group in the Empire.
If anything, then, it's likely that the pagan festival was an attempt to neutralise the Christian one, rather than vice versa.
Supposedly the earliest calculation of December 25 as Christ's birth day was determined by adding 9 months to the Feast of the Annunciation, which has always been celebrated March 25, and marks the (much more important than Christmas) day on which the Archangel Gabriel told Mary she was going to bear the Son of God.
Yeah, the three theories wikipedia lists are 1) March 25 + 9 months, 2) solstice symbolism, 3) co-opting paganism. (The earliest reference to this theory seems to be a millennium later in the 12th century)
Apparently the logic for March 25 is that it was calculated to be the day that Jesus died (easier to calculate since it was Passover), and Jewish tradition held that great people lived for exact, whole number of years. (i.e. were conceived and died on the same day)
I note that neither: “Nazis can hold rallies hailing Hitler, and when you challenge them, they can claim they’re talking about a mythical Hitler who, mythologically, did good things but not bad things.”
or: “That means that continuing to do so doesn’t pass a reversal test for status quo bias.”
includes a link to A Parable On Obsolete Ideologies. Probably for the best, even though it would be very relevant here.
Samuel Johnson's 'Debates in the Senate of Lilliput' might be the first good poet's use of 'Columban' to describe British settlements in the Americas as Columbian. Johnson was anti-colonialism all his life.
To nitpick the argument though, I think it veers off after:
Beroe: Okay, okay, I admit that was indeed an extraordinarily hostile rephrasing. Maybe it’s not exactly the same as what you said. Maybe it’s more - the way that the idealistic thing you said will inevitably get implemented in real life?
Adraste: And you’re not being idealistic with your argument that we should never celebrate any holiday for anyone who has ever been associated with bad things? Except for Columbus, an exception you still haven’t even slightly explained?
But Beroe isn't arguing we should never celebrate any holiday for anyone who has ever been associated with bad things, Adraste is arguing that, and Beroe is arguing that that standard is unattainable, as evidenced by Adraste's indigenous people's day failing his own standard. Adraste somehow manages to confuse Beroe by accusing him of holding Adraste's position, proving that his own argument is stupid ... and then moving on without changing his position?
Exactly, the argument is not "we should never celebrate anything that can be associated with bad", it's "you can't disqualify A by associating it with bad and bring as a replacement B which is associated with equally bad or even worse".
This is a really really really good point, I think you nailed it. I feel like without this being mentioned, it doesn't even really feel like a steelman of Beroe's actual position. I almost feel like Scott should addendum this in.
As somebody who is not a native American (and not a Native American either), I don't see a particular value for Columbus day for myself. I mean, I know about the mythos of Columbus, but if instead it'd be Benjamin Franklin day or Thomas Jefferson day or Plymouth Rock Worship day I wouldn't feel any difference.
But one thing I must object to here is that valuing the tradition by imagining its creation ex nihilo is the same as valuing it in the cultural context. If we wanted to create a human language, to be used for communication by majority of the world, be employed as pretty much unofficial official language of Science and Technology, and somebody would propose English as a candidate - they'd be laughed at, and maybe forcibly committed if they insisted. That does not imply we should spend all available effort to move away from English to some well-constructed Volapük. I am hearing some people crying out "jes ĝi faras!" right now but for the majority I think it's not the case. And if you did want to make such language, decreeing that starting Day X, every scientific paper is to be published in your favorite artificial language is probably not the best way to approach it. It would be lauded by some enthusiasts but would piss of many more people, I think, and be enormously destructive.
"Jes ĝi faras" is bad Esperanto - a word-by-word translation of "Yes it does!". "Fakte jes" would be idiomatic and correct.
The "choice" of English (or, really, a subset of English) among scientists is pragmatic; I don't think many tears would be shed for it if there were a 50- or 100-year-long transition period to Dutch, Esperanto, Swahili or Japanese. (Not *many*: algebraic geometers everywhere are still attached to French, and lack of knowledge of German can be a stumbling block on those occasions when you have to access the really old (prewar) literature - Russian is less of an issue, since the Soviets translated much of their best stuff themselves, but it can still be a barrier.)
The language is codified primarily in a book "Fundamento de Esperanto" and the later additions are managed by "Akademio de Esperanto" (that's how you get words like "komputilo", "kvantummeĥaniko"). So idiomatic may also mean: this is how the author invented it, and for over hundred years the speakers are okay with using it like that.
Japanese likely not a good candidate. I mean if we only used the kanas, the spelling probably is better than English (it's hard to do any worse), if we ignore missing sounds that many Europeans are used to, but the grammar seems to be more complicated, and if we go to kanji that'd be really tough. Esperanto seems logical and easy but somehow nobody wants to actually use it. Dutch probably would be about the same as English, no idea about Swahili.
French has better spelling than English. In English, you don't know how to pronounce a word from its spelling, nor can do you know its spelling from its pronunciation. In French you generally get one of those directions (spelling -> pronunciation), though not the other.
Why do you say "somehow" as if there's no possible costs associating with learning and using an artificial language instead of one you already speak and is widely spoken elsewhere?
>The "choice" of English (or, really, a subset of English) among scientists is pragmatic; I don't think many tears would be shed for it if there were a 50- or 100-year-long transition period to Dutch, Esperanto, Swahili or Japanese.
The majority of the world's most important scientists speak English but do not speak those three languages. It would be an enmorous imposition to teach the untold millions of potential scientists and science users a different language to use for science and there would be no beenfit from it, and this isn't even to mention that everyone would basically have to learn one of those languages in order to be merely able to comprehend the science.
English *emerged* as the language of science (it wasn't "chosen") because the majoirty of the world's most important science was done by English speakers. A disproportionate number still speak English natively, English is widely learned for economic and political reasons, and the language of non-anglosphere major scientific countries is not spoken much elsewhere i.e. China.
Such a transition to a language like Swahili could only ever possibly occur by fiat. It's not going to emerge naturally, because Swahili-speaking scientists are irrelevant and largely already speak English anyway. It would have to be something imposed on the world and on science and the only possible motivation for this would be far-left ideological reasons and absolutely not for practical reasons, which means, yes, people would be massively put out by it and would rightfully resist such a measure.
This is silly. First of all, it's clear that Swahili was brought here for the sake of example (or science-fiction); do people actually believe there's any chance of its being imposed by "left-wing ideologues" and "irrelevant Swahili-speaking scientists"?
In the early 20th century, it was certainly not the case that most of the world's most important science was done by *native* English speakers. (That may not be the case even now.) Many of the scientists that left Nazi Germany were far from fluent in English at first. English became the standard due to a combination of reasons - commercial and political dominance, political upheaval elsewhere; it was certainly not something that arose because of some sort of natural dominance of English speakers, or an already existing dominance by people who spoke it as a second language (would that mean that it became dominant because it was dominant?). Of course it was not the outcome of a conscious plan either - but for many scientists it was in fact an imposition from the outside.
>This is silly. First of all, it's clear that Swahili was brought here for the sake of example (or science-fiction); do people actually believe there's any chance of its being imposed by "left-wing ideologues" and "irrelevant Swahili-speaking scientists"?
No, nobody believes it, but you brought this example up to make a point about the world. That point is wrong. And your comment has done absolutely nothing to show that this isn't the case. There's no possible path to Swahili organically becoming the language of science the way English did, meaning the only way it could happen is if it were literally forced on people in an unnatural way (BY English speakers, not even Swahili spakers themselves). This is not what happened with English.
> but for many scientists it was in fact an imposition from the outside.
Only in the sense that they wanted access to the wealth and prestiege offered by English speaking societies. If anything, it was an imposition from the INSIDE in that Hitler imploded German-speaking Europe and they had to leave.
And again, this makes your comparison with Swahili pointless. Kenya is never going to become some scinetific or economic powerhouse where we will decide to learn Swahili to avoid being left behind. Because that's what would have to happen to make it comparable to English becoming the language of science.
>No, nobody believes it, but you brought this example up to make a point about the world. >That point is wrong. And your comment has done absolutely nothing to show that this isn't >the case
You obviously have not even understood the original point, as you would have if you had bothered to actually read what was in front of your eyes. (Who and what are you, anyhow?)
>> but for many scientists it was in fact an imposition from the outside.
>Only in the sense that they wanted access to the wealth and prestiege offered by English >speaking societies.
This seems callous; I would imagine that the main motivation of most people leaving Germany for the US in the 30s was some combination of "to survive" and "to avoid being complicit".
Is this really an accurate portrayal of how English came to prominence as an international language? My impression was more that Britain conquered a lot of places, and then once it had a worldwide foothold in that way, it became a useful language that people started learning.
So my impression would be more that Kenya would have to conquer a couple nations on most continents and then have some Swahili-speaking country remain as an economic powerhouse
Nonsense. You're certainly correct that Germany runs a close second, indeed so much so such that American PhD students in organic chemistry as recently as the 70s and 80s were obliged to learn to read German, but overall it's no contest, the most influential physical science from circa 1750 on was done in England, with the United States gradually taking over in the mid 20th century. The French were very much in the running right until they cut their own throat (in some cases, e.g. Lavoisier, quite literally) by the narcissistic auto da fé that followed the Revolution.
I think we may be able to guess your field. There are others in which the UK (let alone the US) was a backwater until the beginning of the 20th century, and then took quite a while to catch up (indeed there are fields where the UK never caught up, though of course the US surpassed it, and all others).
France did fine in many ways, thanks in part to institutions that were created in Napoleonic times, or in some instances at the height of the Revolution (though they were much changed in what followed).
Like what? Name a scientific field, other than organic chemistry, which I've already mentioned belonged to the Germans in the 19th century, in which some country other than the US or UK was the leading light between 1800 and 1950, say.
Amerindian was a term created ex nihilo that avoids the problems of both American Indian and Native American. Perhaps you could use it or perhaps it is just easier to not bother.
Replacing English entirely is a step too far even for someone like me, but perhaps gradual spelling reform and/or other improvements are not?
I liked Amerindian when I first encountered it in the 70s, but apparently the people so described never did. Last I heard polling them in the US gets “American Indian” first and “Native American” second, though it’s always possible that’s changed.
(And I expect it’s different in Canada with “First Nations” ranking higher there, though whether it’s #1 I can’t guess.)
First Nations is doubly wrong -- the tribes of Canada are not nations (if words are to keep their traditional meanings rather than having new ones made up whenever convenient), and the ones that existed circa 1604 were almost certainly not the first ones.
I'm not sure that's entirely correct. I think the word "nation" originally was not as synonymous with "state" as it is today, and originally meant a group of people strongly connected by blood (hence the origin in the Latin verb "to be born", and the common usage of "nation state" in history to describe states that *were* more similar to nations than, say, Austria-Hungary.)
I would guess it's probably because the original use corresponded more closely with "tribe" that a number of Native American tribes called themselves "nations" when they first put their name into English, e.g. the Navajo Nation, the Sioux Nation, the Penobscot Nation, and so forth. My impression is that Native Americans don't think of something like "the Navajo Nation" as synonymous with its territory, or even with its state apparatus, but more with "all of us people who have Navajo blood."
So the meaning of "First Nations" is probably mean to be more "first tribes that occupied this land" than anything to do with sovereign entities, and that seems pretty consistent with the original meaning of the word. Whether there were tribes in Canada before those that claim that status is a separate anthropological question about which I know nothing.
I think if we were trying to be careful, yes we would need to do some research. While it's generally agred there were no humans here at all before the last glacial maximum (20-25k years ago), the earliest settlement of North America is still a subject of research and debate. There could have been multiple waves of invasion -- which would support your argument that none of those now extant could've been first -- or maybe not. It's two big continents, and 20,000 years isn't that much time to settle every corner, walking the whole way. Perhaps people just expanded into a vacuum and there wasn't so much of the kind of waves of overlapping invasion that Europe has had, in which case it would be possible that some of the American Indian tribes *are* direct descendants of people who walked across the Beringia land bridge.
" Medieval universities were cosmopolitan, with students from many different domestic and foreign regions. Students who were born within the same region usually spoke the same language, expected to be ruled by their own familiar laws, and therefore joined together to form the nations.
In the University of Paris there were the French, Normans, Picards, and the English, and later the Alemannian nation. Jean Gerson was twice elected procurator for the French natio (i.e. the French-born students at the university) in 1383 and 1384, while studying theology at Paris. Also at Paris, Germanic speakers were grouped into a single nation.
The various nations in Paris often quarreled with one another; Jacques de Vitry wrote of the students:
"They affirmed that the English were drunkards and had tails; the sons of France proud, effeminate and carefully adorned like women. They said that the Germans were furious and obscene at their feasts; the Normans, vain and boastful; the Poitevins, traitors and always adventurers. The Burgundians they considered vulgar and stupid. The Bretons were reputed to be fickle and changeable, and were often reproached for the death of Arthur. The Lombards were called avaricious, vicious and cowardly; the Romans, seditious, turbulent and slanderous; the Sicilians, tyrannical and cruel; the inhabitants of Brabant, men of blood, incendiaries, brigands and ravishers; the Flemish, fickle, prodigal, gluttonous, yielding as butter, and slothful. After such insults from words they often came to blows."
And the north/south divide has a long tradition:
"The students who attended the medieval university in Oxford arranged themselves into two constantly quarreling nations who were called the australes and the boreales. The australes originated from south of the River Trent and was the more powerful of the two nations. The Welsh were also considered part of the australes, along with scholars from the Romance lands. The boreales came mainly from the north of England and Scotland.
The nations at Oxford were eventually disbanded in 1274 in an effort to maintain peace in the town."
And it’s not as if any term under consideration is rigorous. Obviously there’s no connection to India, and the literal meaning of “native” applies to all non-immigrants. No one uses “aboriginal” (which appears to have some baggage from its use in Australia) and “indigenous” seems to be used in a broader sense.
At some point all you can do is settle on some arbitrary term. Which history suggests will often undergo a treadmill of replacement as later generations get dissatisfied and look for an arbitrary term they like better.
See also Oriental->East Asian, which replaces one word for “east” with another, tacked onto a Classical term for the Anatolian peninsula that got generalized to most of a continent.
But sometimes one term stops being polite and another starts, and polite people will move with the current. Other times there’s an effort to make that process happen with limited success. (E.g., the very small number of people so described who prefer Latinx thus far.)
When and whether to make a switch is always a judgment call, though some calls are easier than others.
Never heard of any of the AI/NA people ever even mention that term, nor it mentioned in any context related to them. Not that I that well versed into their affairs, but I've met some and listened to more speak (including on political affairs), and even more spoken about them, and that's the first time I even learn such a term exists. I think it is safe to conclude it is not enjoying wide popularity.
"It was just as the 1914 War burst on me that I made the discovery that 'legends' depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally on the 'legends' which it conveys by tradition. (For example, that the Greek mythology depends far more on the marvellous aesthetic of its language and so of its nomenclature of persons and places and less on its content than people realize, though of course it depends on both. And vice versa. Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &c &c are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends.)"
Esperanto has legends in the same sense that Scouts or Communists have some: about the primitive Volapük ancestors, the slithering Idoist traitors, etc.
And so it relates to the holidays too. Whatever Columbus' faults as a person were, which I am sure were numerous, he has a mythos standing behind him (or, by now, in front of him - nobody really cares much about his person anymore). "Indigenous People Day" has... blah. I mean woke culture I guess has been trying to create their own mythology, but I think right now it's about 90% of performative wokeness for the sake of wokeness and 10% about actually thinking about Indigenous People (which Indigenous People btw? There are many, and I suspect they aren't all alike and interchangeable). Maybe it'll change in 50 or so years, but right now it doesn't seem to have any cultural clout behind it.
I hate the cliche of Columbus being a symbol for The Discoverer because
(a) The Vikings and probably the Chinese (this one is from dubious memory of something I read so I might be wrong) got there before
(b) He died not realizing that this was an entirely new continent, it's one thing that he discovered it by accident, are you really a "discoverer" if you don't actually recognize that you have *uncovered* a new thing ?
(c) There are no virtues in the discovery process, there is nothing extra smart or brave about Columbus, he's just a dumbass with a wrong map (even by the standards of the time) and an ability to persuade the monarchs. Is this what you want to celebrate in an explorer, ignoring the best available info and sucking up to authority ?
It doesn't really matter. St. Nicolas of Myra probably didn't fly on a sled driven by magic reindeer (citation needed) and haven't kept good vs. naughty lists for all kids in existence.
Yeah, I don't really care about the celebrations angle, Columbus isn't celebrated where I live and a bunch of dumb things are, including a religion I don't believe in, I just let people be happy.
I'm against his mythos in ordinary discovery-themed conversations. For an analogy, imagine if every time generosity or reward is involved somebody mentions Santa Claus, it gets very tedious very fast.
More and more, I believe holidays should be about celebrating and highlighting principles we value (like gratitude, generosity), not individual people or events. Ideally, they are aptly timed too, so a celebration of light comes at the darkest or brightest time of year, and a celebration of gratitude falls around harvest time.
Then, a good holiday is given color and meaning through rituals and myths that “show, don’t tell” the importance of those values and principles, and give the celebration the necessary “weight” and importance.
Christmas/New Year, Easter, Thanksgiving and many more traditional holidays got this right a long time ago (even if at least two of those have become far to dominated by the myth of the man). I don’t expect that’s because old cultures were wise enough to just know how holidays were supposed to work. I suspect it’s the other way around, that getting it right makes the holidays more sticky.
As such, I think both Colombus Day and Indigenous People’s Day fails.
So, incidentally, does 4th of July. Don’t get me wrong: It’s a good holiday, but instead of being a celebration of democracy, which maybe should have come on or near Election Day (or the other way around), it has become “big family picnic day” – which may also be important, but not as important as the thing we’re meant to celebrate.
It’s probably not a bad idea to have a holiday to celebrate adventure in the US, and one to celebrate diversity and inclusivity, and maybe a day or three to feel ashamed of how our ancestors treated each other, to commit to raise out own kids to be better than that, and to forgive each other. (And no, your particular blood line or skin tone will not get you out of that one.)
But if we want to make them sticky, let’s not name them after real, fallible people (even the best ones, like MLK), but something less vulnerable and more aspirational. Then, let’s make sure we build a structure of relevant rituals and sacrifices on top of it – and it can’t just be a parade with bag pipes. Ideally – but this is a bit much to ask of modern people – it’s something that requires a sacrifice, that brings home that the thing we value isn’t free. (No, not a bloody sacrifice. It could be a 24-hour fast, or keeping stores closed for a day, or slowing Internet down to 2G speeds for a day, or an expectation that people donate a day’s worth of work. Something relevant, though.)
When we anchor our holidays to our values, rather than specific events and individuals, we can tell myths about Columbus and his accomplishments, alongside stories about his cruelty and his inability to estimate the circumference of a globe, without celebrating him as a person. We can celebrate and share knowledge about all the peoples we want to include, in a way that can be true and real, and that fits modern and ever-evolving sensibilities.
And, over time, our stories can be filtered and the bad myths naturally replaced by better myths, that do a better job of representing the idea we want to hold on to. That will help us celebrate civil rights and democracy and shared history in a way that still allows us to tell amateur historians and contrarians to sit down, STFU and not ruin it for everybody else.
I agree that family and fun make holidays sticky and enjoyable. But it’s not an either–or proposition.
Thanksgiving and New Years has managed to keep both. Christmas and Easter less so, but they can probably still be salvaged (from family to family or more broadly in the culture) for those who want.
The danger of focusing too much on the enjoyable parts of the holiday, that make it sticky, is that it may end up like Halloween, which was supposed to be about remembering and honoring the dead, but has lost pretty much all its original meaning to the super-stimulus / evil demon that is candy.
But at least, with Halloween, we kept some of the evocative imagery, so there’s a strong Memento Morí aspect to it. As such, Mardi Gras/Carnival may be an even better example of a holiday gone full-sticky. It was supposed to be about the upcoming fast, but has become Halloween for more adult pleasures, and seems to have been completely decoupled from the temporary renunciation of such pleasures that was supposed to follow.
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I got inspired by your comment, however, and got thinking about how I would design an enjoyable, relevant and sticky holiday to celebrate American Democracy (in addition to July 4th, not replacing it):
First, I’d put the holiday to Election Day. The most important ritual I’d want to include would be voting, but that should be wrapped up in other traditions that are enjoyable, and ideally relevant to democracy.
I’d make Election Day a public holiday and probably move it to a Wednesday, so everyone would have the day off, while disincentivizing going away for a long weekend. Also, it might be nice to rename it e.g. Democracy Day, so it’s about celebrating the larger principle and idea, not just doing the one action.
Then we’d have to normalize a certain culture around it:
People would have to agree that the only “right” way to celebrate the day, would be to start the day by getting together with friends and/or family for a large breakfast, with foods from all around the country, around a table decorated with flags etc. (This tradition gets everyone to participate, and gets voter turnout up.)
At least one TV channel would have a tradition of inviting a respected person to give a short speech about democracy, followed by a montage of children from around the country say what they love about democracy and the bill of rights, and what they want for the country. Cute, funny and perfectly designed to spark non-contentious conversation around the breakfast table. (Purpose of a tradition like this: Get everyone to agree on the basics, make differences of opinion to seem innocent, keep a feel-good atmosphere.)
After breakfast, everyone travels as a group to the polling place, wearing flag pins, maybe dressed in a flag shirt and flag hat if you’re that kind of person. It’s supposed to be fun and festive (and create unity around symbols of America.)
Once there, everyone gets a number, so they don’t have to stand in line. Instead, while the adults wait for their turn to vote, they mingle with friends and neighbors. Local organizations (like the PTA) have organized games for the children, and there are food stands where you can buy finger food and (non-alcoholic) drinks. The school band plays The Star-Spangled Banner and mangles Born in the USA. (Purpose: Voting should be a very enjoyable and social thing to do.)
The actual voting is separated from the mingling, and is a quiet and solemn affair, in the presence of officials dressed in formal attire – it should feel serious and sacred.
But the party goes on outside.
After voting, people go back home. There may be time for a nap. There is no reporting on exit polls or results for any district until the polls close across the state. Instead, TV shows a classic movie or two about resolving differences without shooting each other or blowing up cars. Teenagers complain that it’s the same movies every year. Adults laugh and say that’s exactly the point. (Purpose: This defuses a bit of tension, creates a sense of predicability and security from year to year, and emphasizes that democracy is about getting along despite our differences.)
When the results start coming in, there are lots of snacks already on the living room table, and at least a few TV channels have made itstheir Election Day coverage a family-friendly broadcast, peppered with skits and relevant history lessons and biographies in-between live updates, instead of just wall-to-wall repetition and projection. (This makes watching the results come in enjoyable and interesting for everyone, and a thing families do together.)
When the polls close in Hawaii, there are fireworks show in Honolulu and DC. It’s a reminder that the US is one big country, and it marks that the election is a fait accompli, and that now all that remains is the counting. (No more arguing, please.)
Everyone then shakes hands, hugs, or calls and texts good friends, and in the spirit of concession and compromise, they all tell each other “it could have been worse” – and then say something that would actually have been a lot worse than the likely outcome of the election. (Making a point out of accepting the outcome, and still standing together, even if the election doesn’t seem to be going exactly as we hoped, embracing democracy in the bad as well as the good.)
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I hope you noticed I’m not 100% serious, but I think it’s not only possible, but desirable, to be more conscious of what we wish to celebrate, and more deliberate about how we go about it. 😀 Not in a totalitarian way, where all this is imposed by The Party, or designed and put into action by some Illuminati-like conspiracy, but in a way where we all help deliberately and thoughtfully create the culture we want to live in.
The one quibble people will have with this is the very strict laws about "no ANYTHING within 500ft of the polls (to prevent biasing the voters)." How do you suggest the festivities escape that particular issue?
If it were up to me, I’d lean towards repealing rules like that. The intensions seem good, but the implementation is outdated and heavy-handed. It’s enough for me if the actual Chamber of Voting is kept clean.
I agree with some version of this. But also the people who are really into MLK day will need to accept that, for most people, they will spend approximately 0 time on that day thinking or caring about MLK or civil rights.
When it started being enacted, a friend said "Mark my words, one day we'll see ads for the Martin Luther King Day White Sale."
I suspect the reason that hasn't (as far as I know) come to pass has at least as much to do with "white sale" fading as a term for a January sale on linens, and the decline of department stores (and newspaper ads) generally.
I think most people don't spend time doing much of anything on MLK Day. I think if you change it to a nicer time of year it'll change from "nothing" to "spending time outside", and under no circumstance be, for most people, a Day of Reflection.
> More and more, I believe holidays should be about celebrating and highlighting principles we value (like gratitude, generosity), not individual people or events.
I think this is worth exploring, and doesn't deserve short shrift. And if the thought experiment extends to replacing all holidays, it's worth considering other cultures' and nations' holidays as data points.
I have a (limited) familiarity with Japan's holidays, for example. They have national public holidays like Greenery Day, Mountain Day, and Marine Day (not for the military, but the oceans); Children's Day, Respect for the Aged Day; and Culture and Sports Days. No doubt for most citizens these are just days off of work, but hey—that's true here too.
There's still some holidays in the set that might incite criticism in certain circles (Showa Day, Emperor's Birthday), but on the whole, the palette of Japanese holidays has a markedly different tone than America's.
As I’ve become increasingly atheistic/anti-religious I’ve thought a lot about what existing holidays mean to me, and which holidays I would observe if I could pick my own with no concern for the culture at large. I thought a bit about holidays from other cultures, but I don’t know enough about them, so I ended up (entirely hypothetically so far) inventing some of my own, and reverting to some pagan ones.
But in the thought experiment I give myself a limit of 3-4 major holidays and 8-9 minor days and long weekends sprinkled throughout, so as not to lose the entire year to holidays. It’s an interesting exercise in thinking through what I truly value, how I prioritize things, and how it all relates to the passing of time.
I agree with this but would go further: the best holidays tend to be those that arose naturally, not intentionally designed to glorify some person or idea. If I were king I'd delegate holidays to the Wiccans.
Take Christmas: celebrating the birth of Jesus would not normally indicate decorating a pine tree and exchanging presents. It's a pagan midwinter celebration that got co-opted by the Christians, and would still be a damn fine holiday even if we collectively decided to forget about the Christian aspect. Halloween, as celebrated, is still Samhain in all but name. Easter "Magical rabbit hides eggs" is entirely orthogonal to the resurrection of Christ. Thanksgiving is a fall harvest festival.
If we want to celebrate <demographic of the month>, I'd much rather import some of their emergent holidays, than declare <demographic> Day. I'd be genuinely excited for Holi or Tanabata or Hathisesthata, in the same way I'd be disappointed or oblivious for Indian/Japanese/Indigenous American Day.
As someone who lives in a country with "early May", "late May" and "August" holidays, I assure you that having figured out the optimal number of holidays, you don't need to go on to the next step of agreeing historical figures to celebrate. You can just have holidays there.
Both Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples' Day are fake holidays which, as far as I can tell, lack proper rites, as if people can just raise a mental flag to say "I'm celebrating Columbus" or "I'm celebrating indigenous peoples". Just give people the day off. If they happen to feel like celebrating something particular on the occasion, then they may.
I've heard many Brits say "On holiday" where I interpret them to mean "On vacation".
Americans tend to refer to "days off" or "vacation" or "out of office days", and reserve "holiday" for "days off that are associated with a specific festival or religious observance". As in: "How was your Thanksgiving/4th of July/Christmas holiday break?"
I've rarely heard any non-regular-Church-goers refer to Easter as a holiday in the US, though, despite it having a secular festival revolving around kids, eggs, bunnies and chocolate. Not sure if that's my irreligious subgroup or if holiday needs to have the intersection of "festival or religious observance" AND "day off from the office".
It appears that the British use "holiday" for what Americans would call "vacation" as well as "holidays". Over here, a holiday is a specific day (Christmas, Fourth of July, etc.) not just any time you're not working.
From a UK perspective it wouldn't occur to me to connect "holiday" with "religious/civic observance" except etymologically, partly because I think we (generally) sit lighter to both our civic and religious observances, and partly because of the term-of-art "bank holiday".
Bank holidays in the UK come in variety of types:
1) Actual day of religious or civic observance, e.g. Christmas Day, Good Friday, or the recent extra one we had for the Queen's funeral. People might or might not take part in the observances these days mark, or course.
2) Day connected with observance but not used by anyone for particular observance, e.g. Easter Monday.
3) Day historically connected with observance but now not, e.g. the "late May bank holiday" which used to be the Monday after Pentecost, i.e. they used to be category 2 but now function as category 4.
4) Day just because a day off is wanted, e.g the August bank holiday.
Categories 1 and 2-4 differ in how they are used, and by different people. However, all of these categories share common assumptions about what businesses are open, who gets the day off etc.
Additionally "holiday" is used (a) in the sense of schools not being open, e.g. "the summer holidays", (b) by extension, people taking time off around those times or for family reasons "Christmas holidays" (days off typically taken between Christmas and New Year), (c) being "away on holiday", i.e. "vacation". Although to me (old fashioned and/or posh) "vacation" only means to me the same as "holiday" in sense (a).
A "day off" in the UK implies something particular to me or to a small number of people, as in "I am taking a day off on Friday", with the implication that there's no wider participation.
They're pretty orthogonal in my opinion. Asking somebody if "is _ a holiday for you" is asking if they celebrate it, not if they get the day off of work (although context matters). And there are common days off that people wouldn't consider a holiday.
There are 5 major holidays that every office closes for (New Year's Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas).
There are holidays that some but not all have the day off for (e.g. Martin Luther King Jr. Day, President's Day, Juneteenth, Columbus Day, Veteran's Day).
There are days off for many that aren't holidays (day after Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve).
Then there's events like Halloween, which a major focus of culture and celebration (to the point of people decorating their yards a month in advance) and yet nobody gets them off at all.
That's May Day, Whitsun and... ok I don't know where the August one came from. So it's Flora, St. Walpurga and the Holy Ghost that we get days off for.
"In the very unlikely chance that, a hundred years from now, the descendants of Aztecs are powerful and privileged, but the descendants of their sacrificial victims are marginalized..."
But they don't come with days off, so they are, at best, 2nd class "Days" whereas Columbus Day or Indigenous People's Day are 1st class days. It boils down to status games.
Sure. But whose fault is that? If enough people actually started celebrating Arbor Day or Flag Day on the day that the government is literally telling you to celebrate trees and flags, it would turn into a day off. Not my fault that the tree and flag people don't care enough about their holiday to get anyone's attention.
The whole post is about political factions trying to vie for attention and how those in power should consider the lobbying efforts - I don't know what point you are trying to make.
Lots of people want one, it's just that the people in power don't find it useful. It doesn't buy off any politically powerful group so there's no point.
The US has four public holidays that people actively celebrate: Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's Eve and (to a lesser extent) the Fourth of July. Everything else is a sop to some politically powerful group.
Taking away holidays from one group and giving them to another group is just culture war by other means: Columbus Day may have been added as a sop to Italians but it is being taken away as an attack on White people in general.
People are rarely enthusiastic about celebrations of abstract concepts, and only sometimes about abstract classes of people (hence May Day and Labor Day but I think that's about it). We are most enthusiastic about celebrating specific important events, hence Independence Day and Armistice Day that morphed into Veteran's Day in the US, specific classes of people well known to us, hence Decoration Day for the Civil War dead that morphed into Memorial Day, and for specific popular heroes, usually leaders through difficult times, hence Washington and Lincoln's Birthday which merged into President's Day to accommodate MLK day when it became necessary to introduce.
I would say the overall theme is one of gratitude for the ending of suffering, or for those who led the people through dark times. In general the celebration of positive things, or people who have contributed positively more than helped evade or terminate negative things, just doesn't elicit the same kind of powerful response. That just seems to be human nature: we are more grateful for avoiding calamity than enjoying prosperity. We are more likely to remember the person who saved our life from a speeding car than the person who gave us a nice raise at work.
Good counterexample, I like it. Certainly suggests there is some additional sublety here. An interesting wrinkle on this is that neither of those are very public holidays -- there are no parades, no speeches by politicians, big public displays, and people don't get off from work. They are some kind of strange holiday that is celebrated privately, like birthdays, but which we agree to all do on the same day.
>Can't we have science day, friendship day, music day etc. Celebrating good things that are expressed by most humans to varying extents?
These are hollow, artificial holidays that nobody feels any emotional connection to. You fail to understand the point of these holidays. If this is the route we're taking, just call them federal holidays and be done with it. Nobody is celebrating "science day". Most people do not give two shits about science generally (brainless lawn signs saying "we trust science in this house" notwithstanding) and they're certainly not attached enough to it to care about a "science day" beyond their enjoyment of a day off.
And the type of "science" that would be celebrated on "science day" would be an ever greater mythological form than the Columbus celebrated by some today
This really helped clarify for me why I like the dialogue format so much: if the author is arguing a straw man, it's much easier to identify in a dialogue format than in a traditional essay argument type argument (I found I understood how I disagreed with Plato more when his straw men made terrible arguments explicitly). Alternatively, if the author is intellectually honest (as here) the characters are allowed to give good points on each side.
I don't think the factual basis of holiday figures is as irrelevant as Beroe makes it out to be. I think the inspirational quality of the holiday can be indirectly affected by it.
Take Columbus Day. Say a kid gets inspired by the spirit of exploration and progress the mythical Columbus is supposed to embody, and wants to be just like him. Maybe she wants to find a scientific falsehood people in the modern day believe, and show everyone it's wrong, just like mythic Columbus did with the flat earth. Now how does she go about doing that?
Mythic Columbus knew the world was round, when everyone else thought it was flat. But how did he know? I don't think the stories say. He just knows somehow. And how did he know the earth was small enough that sailing around it was feasible, and his crew wouldn't die of thirst long before he crossed the ocean? Again, the myths don't concern themselves with that detail.
So mythic Columbus just knows, because he's a mythic explorer. You can't learn to be a mythic explorer, you just are one. Hearing stories about mythic Columbus can't teach you to be like him.
Now imagine if instead of Columbus day, we celebrated, say, Eratosthenes day, in recognition of his factually real accomplishment of figuring out the circumference of the earth. How can you be like Eratosthenes? Well, the stories, and the writings of the real Eratosthenes, are happy to tell you! You do it by inventing a really clever experiment involving shadows, and being sufficiently obsessed that you actually pay someone to walk from Alexandria to Syene and count how many steps it takes, so you can calculate the distance between them.
Historical figures who accomplished real, great things for humanity can teach you things. Because of their factuality, their achievements make sense, they are reducible to components. Their stories contain real evidence of what you need to do, how you need to think, how you ought to live your life, if you want to achieve great things yourself. To me, that just seems like a much more substantial and filling kind of inspiration than the kind you get from mythic explorers like Columbus.
Kids don't want their holidays to be schoolwork, especially not math. Columbus went places and saw new stuff, things kids can imagine they're doing when they're running through a forest. If you're trying to replace him, it should be with another adventurer. Lewis and Clark, or Magellan, or something.
>Now imagine if instead of Columbus day, we celebrated, say, Eratosthenes day, in recognition of his factually real accomplishment of figuring out the circumference of the earth. How can you be like Eratosthenes?
Nobody knows or cares who that is and his acheivements are not the sort of thing people rally around. Columbus isn't great for demonstrating the earth isn't flat. It's all that exploration and discovery of new world and laying the way for America's founding that any ever cares about.
What you're saying is just another example of obivilious rationalist projection. You think other people think like you and something like calculating the cirumfrence of the world is something to rally around because of the scientific brilliance of it all - that's not how most people work.
Why, I take umbrage at the "oblivious projection" part. I'm perfectly aware that most people don't think like me, thank you very much. I'm merely trying to rectify that unfortunate circumstance.
More seriously, it was just an example. If you want your holidays figures to be about adventuring brilliance or political brilliance or literary brilliance or whatever instead, by all means. But I think the same principle applies. Real brilliant people have a depth and quality to their brilliance that mythical figures somewhat struggle to emulate.
>Jesus was born in the spring; they moved Christmas to December to neutralize the pagan Solstice celebration.
Ok, I'll bite. No-one knows when Jesus was born. The clues in the gospels are sparse and contradictory. The Nativity wasn't widely celebrated as a festival until the fourth century.
Hippolytus of Rome put the date at 25 December in the early 3rd century. He writes (in the Commentary on Daniel), "For the first advent of our Lord in the flesh, when he was born in Bethlehem, was December 25th, Wednesday, while Augustus was in his forty-second year, but from Adam, five thousand and five hundred years. He suffered in the thirty-third year, March 25th, Friday, the eighteenth year of Tiberius Caesar, while Rufus and Roubellion were Consuls." It's probably not a coincidence that this places the Annunciation on 25th March, coinciding with the date given for Good Friday. At any rate, Hippolytus isn't fixing the date of a festival. If anything, he's concerned with fitting Christ's chronology to Daniel's prophecies.
Saturnalia fell on 17 December and continued until 23 December. The festival Dies Natalis Solis Invicti did fall on 25 December, but this is itself a late invention, not attested earlier than 354, but plausibly instituted by Aurelian (who created the cult of Sol Invictus), who reigned 270-275. That of course postdates Hippolytus, so while it remains possible that the Church ultimately fixed 25 December as the date of the Nativity to compete with Aurelian's festival, it's equally possible that Aurelian chose the date in an attempt to suppress nascent Christian celebrations on that day.
It's worth pointing out, as well, that there were an awful lot of pagan cults in the ancient Mediterranean -- as well as the big ones like Jupiter, Juno, etc., you also had the mystery cults, and local deities worshipped in a particular city or region. Hence, unless there's some kind of demonstrable linkage or borrowing going on, it's not necessarily significant that a Christian festival is on or near the date of a pagan festival -- literally every day on the calendar would be on or near the date of a pagan festival somewhere or other.
The Puritans were anti-Christmas in part because they didn't think we knew when Jesus was actually born (the other part is because it was a fun Catholic-style holiday where people got drunk and made mischief).
Something that would be interesting to thing about / that I can’t grasp clearly right now is how holidays that start as political/religious events like Indigenous Colombus Day or Christmas or May Day eventually turn into Big Family Picnic/Dinner/Long Weekend Day and end up losing their intended significance, while still contributing to bringing us together. I mean, even Christmas, it used to be religiously minor, and the church was more interested in Easter, but it somehow caught on in the population, was gradually stripped of its religiously significant stuff* and now is hardly a religious holiday at all. And yet it’s the stereotypical example of what we like in holidays, that they bring us together, are traditions, etc.
I guess it may have to do with the actual underlying beliefs: May Day where I’m from used to be huge among workers, because they had a strongly shared working-class culture, but is now only a long weekend for anyone other than very committed trade unionists and left-wing student activists. However, even when it was really big, it never really seems to have caught on among non-working class people. That’s kind of a problem if you want your holidays to help your nation-building, because having holidays built upon specific examples of people, behaviours, what-have-yous, is good for that, but harder than to agree on than a Day of Generally Not Being Too Much of an Asshole, or a Day of That Specific Foodstuff that The Whole Country Thinks Tastes Great, or something.
* Before the 1950s in France, Christmas still had important religious elements including the fact that the presents were mostly brought to children by the Little Jesus, who in the 1950s was gradually replaced by Father Christmas/Santa Claus, leading to the following wonderful anecdote:
In 1951 in Dijon, clerics burned at the stake a straw effigy of Santa in protest against the de-christianization of Christmas. Just so you know it happened and can have fun imagining what it looked like.
"Something that would be interesting to thing about / that I can’t grasp clearly right now is how holidays that start as political/religious events like Indigenous Colombus Day or Christmas or May Day eventually turn into Big Family Picnic/Dinner/Long Weekend Day and end up losing their intended significance, while still contributing to bringing us together."
Take it one step further. The best and highest meaning and usage of holidays is to be Big Family Picnic (or whatever else) Day. The part where it's named after someone or something is a way to gild the Picnic thing with aspects of our national civic religion. But the day off is the thing.
The holiday names are the highlights of the story we tell about ourselves. Jesus, the Revolution, soldiers, pilgrims, MLK, New Years Eve (OK maybe not that one...). So people want to put their "stuff" in the highlight reel. But the actual effect of holidays is to give people time off.
"In 1951 in Dijon, clerics burned at the stake a straw effigy of Santa in protest against the de-christianization of Christmas. Just so you know it happened and can have fun imagining what it looked like."
I'm imagining the legendary/apocryphal Japanese misunderstanding of Christmas as represented by a crucified Santa. (Snopes' opinion is "probably not": https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/santa-cross)
I could (could have?) cared less about Columbus Day until Mariano A. Lucca started pushing for a greater recognition of it as a holiday and the whole Italian American “thing” blew up with the popularity of “The Godfather” stirring the gravy. Still could care less. But this post is both fun to read and enlightening.
"Oppressed peoples only get one day of the year, while their oppressors get the other three hundred and sixty four! We should have an Oppressed Peoples Month! No, an Oppressed Peoples Season! No, an..."
> suppose we were to replace Christmas with another holiday that tested equally well in focus groups. It had just as much potential for holiday specials, provided just as much of an excuse to get together with family, even had delightful mythological characters who, starting ex nihilo, would have just as much appeal as Santa. Would you feel like something had been lost?
I have had weird feelings reading this. I am from Russia, and this precisely what has happened here (without focus groups though). In soviet era, Christmas was banned as too religious, and replaced with New Year celebrations (in the night from 31st of December to the 1st of January), which are as massive a holiday as Christmas is in the US. For New Year, families come together, decorate a spruce tree (which is called a New Year Tree rather than a Christmas Tree), and give each other presents which are supposedly distributed by Grandfather Frost, who is totally not Santa Claus despite being an old jolly bearded guy giving the presents. (He has evolved from the East Slavic mythology rather Cristianity, so while he was briefly banned, the soviet government was much less strict about that, as, in accordance with the post, they feared Pagan opposition much less than Christian opposition). And Christmas in Russia is mostly celebrated by people who are indeed religious.
And yes, in Russia we are kind of without tradition with regard to national holidays, because all the main ones are at most soviet-era old. The most popular are The New Year, The International Women's Day and the Day of Protectors of the Fatherland (Progressives in Russia have been to change the nature of both of them for years: to make the Women's Day more about feminism and awareness of Women's rights, rather than flowers, beauty and "We wish you to smile more and to be a decoration of your work team"; and to demilitarise the discourse around the Protector's day and just turn it into Man's Day, like it works in school, where girls give boys gifts for Protector's Day, and boys give girls gift for Women's Day), and the Labour Day and Victory Day (the has also been attempted to get demilitarised for years, to be turned from belligerent weapons demonstrations into a day of grief for those who have died in WWII, of whom there are a few in practically every Russian family history). So yeah, we live in a country with a short tradition of holidays, and there are lots of clashes around them.
Also, I have just read on Wikipedia that in Ukraine there is a movement to change the focus from New Year to Christmas again, because New Year is associated with the Soviet past. I don't have any personal evidence on whether this is true, however.
Ironically, folding Christmas traditions into Novyi God led to what American Christians call "keeping Christ in Christmas" - Novyi God absorbed all of the commercialism, secularization and Pagan undertones from Christmas, leaving it a purely religious observance.
Then again, USSR had 7th of November as the day of the Great October Revolution (due to calendar change). It was a huge celebration, one of the main state holidays. After the fall of USSR, they tried to replace it with 4th of November's "Day of People's Unity". It is still half-heartedly celebrated, but mostly in a "yay, we're not going to work/school" day - nobody's quite sure what and how should be celebrated during this holiday. Supposedly, it's meant to remind us of how Russians driven Polish forces from Moscow in 1612, but I don't think anyone cares about that very much. Informally, I know people still prefer 7th of November as a kind of "let's ironically celebrate Communism as a 'fuck you' to oligarchs and the West'-day.
"I am from Russia, and this precisely what has happened here (without focus groups though). In soviet era, Christmas was banned as too religious, and replaced with New Year celebrations (in the night from 31st of December to the 1st of January), which are as massive a holiday as Christmas is in the US. "
That's funny, in that quirks of history way, because this is similar to the reasoning behind New Year's Day (or rather, Hogmanay) being the big Scottish end-of-year holiday. When the Reformation happened and the Presbyterians gained power in Scotland, they purged the old traditional church holidays as Way Too Papist, including Christmas. But people still wanted to celebrate, so the secular holiday of Hogmanay which was also celebrated became the new focus of "drinking, staying up late, and partying".
Coria's proposal seems like it comes from a super weird place in terms of the understanding of culture it implies.
For as much as holidays are secularized in modern societies, and particularly in American culture(s), one thing I got in part from your recent-ish post on Pride and 4th of July celebrations, is that, if you look closely and don't let yourself be blinded by your preconceptions of what you *should* be seeing, it's plain as day that the animating spirits are usually the same old deities that humans have been throwing parties for for millennia, plus some younger gods that emerged out of the Enligtenment.
Here it's the myth of the frontier, of the brave explorer setting out for the unknown, which casts its shadow in the shape of a colonizer, a transgressor of boundaries who re-casts the world he discovers in his own image VS the myth of multiplicity and difference, of the beauty and inherent worth of the world in all of its particularities, which casts its shadow in the dissolution of the individual, which exists as individual insofar as it posits itself against that multiplicity.
When I think about the discourse around national holidays in terms of these symbolic undercurrents, even the apparently silly arguments often don't seem as trivial anymore. We have a kind of unresolved mythological contradiction in our culture, and people don't agree on what the pantheon should look like in some pretty crucial places.
Coria's apparently rational solution of just celebrating random people who happen to be well-loved by the average modern American also can't help you here, since the process by which you decide what to celebrate is what tells you what you really celebrate.
If you come up with a totally rational system for what your national holidays should be, and rationality is the sole determining factor, then all of your national holidays will ultimately be a celebration of rationality, and people who worship other gods in their hearts (freedom, justice, forgiveness, tradition, progress, etc.) aren't going to feel represented by that.
They'll know with every festival they attend that in your nation there is only one true god, and any other virtues are only valid insofar as they are justified through him.
Not that the god of truth doesn't have a strong claim to the title of one true god, but if you trick people into worshipping him, you're really just tricking them into worshipping the god of tricking people into worshipping things if it serves the greater good.
Do you think Pride (as chronicled by SAS in the post you referenced) is the celebration of a ancient deity, or a new Enlightenment deity?
The obviously first guess is new, a god of tolerance, a god who dethrones the gods of the old sexual superstitions. Someone opposed to this new celebration might consider "Pride" to be literally that: a celebration of the ancient demigod Narcissus. But I'm not sure if there ever was a cult around Narcissus.
I'm going with Old God, with a twist. Specifically, Pride has the trappings of an anti-fertility cult, and man has been celebrating fertility gods forever.
I'm pretty sure the Indigenous People’s Day side would hate the mythological Columbus as well, since he still represents the Great Man conception of history. Asking them to imagine a good colonist is like asking leftists to imagine a good billionaire - the archetype is hopelessly corrupted. Even in a sanitized version of the myth where natives do not exist, Columbus' journey still led to widespread ecological damage to the Americas.
(Amusingly, I've recently become aware of the I-don't-know-how-serious idea of Genghis Khan being an ecological hero, since his decimation of world population caused a noticeable reduction in carbon emissions. So maybe being pro-Human is overrated nowadays.)
Yeah, Italian-Americans tend to care about the holiday. Even if we didn't pick Columbus - note a WASP picked him for us. But by golly we'll take what we were given. And once something is given, the receiver generally doesn't want a gift taken back. (Do NOT insert culturally insensitive and unjust stereotyping slur here.)
(I will note that my mom would also sometimes let us skip school on 3/19, St. Joseph's day in celebration of being an Italian American. It probably is worth noting that the county of my childhood is named after St. Joe and since there was already a local tradition of celebrating Polish Americans (Dyngus Day) where we'd also get day off, a special day seemed appropriate.) Dyngus Day is also now combined with Solidarity Day, a parallel celebration of local black Americans. And of course there were always St. Patrick's day events given the Irish at the local French school.
But I personally have no problem with the red paint thrown on Columbus statutes. I prefer to imagine it is ragu rather than blood. That kind of baptism would be a great permanent addition to the Holiday to symbolically remind us of both pasta sauce and genocide.
We need symbols of benign granfallons, if only as a slapstick program to be "lonesome no more".
Lacking such benign symbols as salve for alienation, it is easy to turn to putting on red MAGA hats or joining a gang or adopting KKK identities or storming the Capitol.
Dyngus Day is an attractive day for a holiday because it's the day after Easter Sunday, thereby serving as roughly analogous to New Year's Day: the day when we all recover from the previous day's celebration.
I'm not an American but from what people say, aside from some Italian-Americans nobody cares that much about Columbus Day for the sake of Columbus (correct me if I'm wrong). In that sense if it suddenly disappeared and was magically replaced with another holiday nothing much would be missing - people would still get their day off. The problem is that trying to replace it with an anti-holiday (as you say) comes across as "the status of your ingroup should be lowered, and ours raised". So it's not so much a matter of losing Columbus himself as not wanting to seen to lose a symbolic cultural battle.
As a data point, most Americans don’t get Columbus Day off. Federal workers and a large minority of states’ government workers do, but my sense is it’s pretty uncommon for non-government employees.
I would go further and say that nobody cares about *Columbus* for the sake of Columbus. I find the vilification of him every bit as annoying as the exaltation of him, since it always comes from people who clearly have no genuine interest in the history of the age of exploration, the conquest of the Antilles, or the Caribbean indigenes.
Personally I find Columbus interesting because he seems to have just been a WEIRD individual, psychologically. Late in his career, he started having a belief that he was chosen by God for some divine mission, which put off his Spanish contemporaries--they started calling him "pharaoh" and treated him as some discredited mad prophet. On his third voyage he discovered the mouth of the Orinoco River and concluded that it must flow from the Garden of Eden.
In his recent book Andres Resendez suggests plausibly that the Spanish rule over the Tainos was more brutal even than previously supposed: he thinks that the Old World disease epidemics couldn't have plausibly arrived in the New World early enough to account for the quick population drop-off of Hispaniola, and that therefore the slave labor impositions themselves must have done it. I don't know if this is true but it's worth taking seriously.
Against this, I will note tentatively that I've read several books about Columbus and the Spanish Caribbean, and--though I may be mistaken here--I don't recall any of the really lurid and sensational accusations made against Columbus in popular media ever even being mentioned in any of them, including individual books whose authors are no defenders of the man. On the other hand there are often nonspecific references made to wild and baseless accusations made against him by the various Spaniards of Hispaniola during Francisco Bobadilla's inquest, which historians generally have concluded are just them making shit up because they had their own, personal reasons for disliking Columbus' rule of the newly-discovered territories. I suspect [though again, I could be wrong] that the cutting-off-of-hands stuff may be included within this package, of BS which serious historians have known about for a century but have rightly concluded are probably-
... false slander, but which are lovingly quoted by less scrupulous writers of pophist books e-zine articles with obvious axes to grind.
To repeat a third time: I'm not sure if this is so. But if it is it places into doubt the universal claim that Columbus was "bad even for his time". Most books I read seem to imply that the average Spanish landholder was worse than him. The man was a slaver, yes, but honestly if that alone puts you off so much I recommend against reading about any historical person before a couple centuries ago.
If anyone knows about this issue in more detail I'd like their input.
I feel like Leif Erikson Day is an under appreciated compromise. First and most importantly, his expedition is the one that first closed the circle of human exploration into a loop around the entire world. Second, while he wasn't a saint he wasn't a monster either. Misunderstandings created conflicts with the native Americans but all things being equal he preferred to peacefully trade with them.
😂 That is also where I first heard about Leif Erikson Day! (In fact, I think it's the first time I heard about Leif Erikson at all)
But while I was in college I learned from Tumblr, to my surprise, that it is in fact an actual day, occuring on October 9: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leif_Erikson_Day. Apparently it's observed in some communities with a lot of Scandinavian-Americans.
We could replaceit with Dantedì or Fermidì (if we insist that the celebrant eventually became American)! Recall that when Fermi achieved fission the code message Compton (in Chicago) relayed to Conant (in Washington) was "the Italian navigator has landed in the New World."
I don't have the information in front of me, but my understanding is that a December birth for Jesus aligns with what Luke writes about the birth of John the Baptist. Basically: John's father was a priest, we know when he would have been "on duty" at the temple and away from home, Luke says that Elizabeth got pregnant upon his return, in her sixth month Mary visited her with news that she was pregnant. Apparently this works out to around December.
Perhaps! I'm not too familiar with it because I don't care beyond idle curiosity. They only time I get into the question of when Jesus was ACKCHULLY born is in these "Christmas is a rip off off Yule" discussions.
Anyway, I note that the earliest day in October is closer to December 25 than December 25 is to the first day of Spring.
The question of "which holidays?" is of course, at base a question of power.
From this, Indigenous People's Day (and Colombus Day a century and a half earlier) are exercises in virtue signaling, but the reason that these gestures signal(ed) virtue in the first place is because they conform(ed) to the class ideology of the hegemonic classes at the time.
In other words, the hegemonic class (the Professional Managerial Class In 2022 and the Propertied Gentry in 1890) gets to decide what is normative, what goes without saying. For that matter, this is why celebrating Colombus Day is today seen as a bit retrograde. You need to get with the program.
A couple centuries ago, almost nobody would have questioned that some were born to rule and others to serve.
It's weird how bloodlessly you describe this - "a bit retrograde," "get with the program," as if the belief that certain groups of people are inherently born to serve is just a matter of aesthetics, rather than, you know, the ideological foundation for some really horrible things.
You are reading things into my comment that aren't there, as I said nothing about aesthetics.
That said, the dispassionate tone was intentional. Not so long ago, people would be horrified at our moral choices and ideologies, and I am trying to avoid injecting my own values into the discussion.
>You changed “society is preventing pogroms against a marginalized group” to “left-wingers are cynically milking people for their votes”, so yes, I would say it is substantially different.
At this point, my pre-conception makes A's argument kinda baffling. How many pogroms, since 1977 (the creation of IPD, apparently) did american natives suffer? This seems to be straight up "making up a problem to which agreeing with me is the solution".
>the Mongols are celebrating him for fine, pro-human reasons like bravery and tactical brilliance - so we let it pass.
I'm ready to bet the Mongols are celebrating him for being a great conqueror, which is a similar reason for why I'd celebrate Colombus if I were a white american: because he was a great explorer who granted my peoples an entire continent to strive in. If he had, in fact, found a powerful Cipangu or Cathay already holding the land he discovered, his fame would have been a blip, a name you learn in class & remember for trivial pursuit nights, but not "two state capitals, a big river, 3 spacecrafts and a godess".
Overall, really, B is unconvincing, but A is ludicrous. I'd almost suspect Scott wrote them to make C's insanity more appealing.
Yes, it is weird to imply that the Mongols share the thoroughly modern westerners' approach of carving out the Good Things (as judged by thoroughly modern western standards) done by historical figures and celebrating those while qualifying them with "of course he did many bad things too" and are not celebrating Genghis Khan's most obvious feats.
It does seem like that's in part what they're doing, though. Their highest civilian award is the Order of Genghis Khan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Genghis_Khan) the criteria including "includes building and developing a democratic society, familiarizing other countries with Mongolian culture and/or art and promoting the name of Mongolian culture in the world."
That sounds a lot like "the Good Things of Genghis Khan, while downplaying the other stuff".
Obviously, that one award is not The Totality of Modern Mongolian Thought On Genghis Khan, but it does seem like this is a real factor in how they portray/think about him.
I think "democratic" is definitely an incredible stretch, but a lot of people like to point out that the ways in which the Mongols were progressive and "brought the world together".
It's not just a "Mongolia talking about themselves" thing, either. Dan Carlin's opening bit in his series on the Mongol Empire is talking about how so many books nowadays focus on the "positive" parts of the Mongol Empire, that they connected the East and the West, and how progressive they were on some points (e.g. religion).
But you can't deny that they sure "familiarizing other countries with Mongolian culture".
The Mongols are celebrating Chinggis Khaan for nationalistic reasons, and that is completely understandable: you've got China breathing down your neck, you want to celebrate a local Big Conquering Hero who also kicked Chinese butts.
"Mass mediated culture died with the first TCP connection. Arguments over what 'we' should do end up elucidating that there may be no such thing as 'we', and to the extent that it exists, it is certainly no longer programmable as it once was."
Celebrating (or more accurately, "observing" because no one is having a heap big party, except for the Canadians) Indigenous People's Day is not quite about having an anti-holiday to neutralize Columbus Day. It's not a perfect particle-antiparticle reaction that gives off useful energy. It's a humiliation ritual. When you have vanquished your foe, you must smash his idols and desecrate his holy places. It's a practice as old as civilization. Columbus is an idol of the oppressive system that has been defeated. Some holdouts may not accept that they have been defeated, but the grinding of Columbus idols into dust will show them.
A, B, and C seem to accept as a given that Columbus was a horrible, vicious person. This may be the case, but nearly all of the horrible things he supposedly did were reported by a single source, a Spaniard named Francisco de Bobadilla who was sent (in 1499) to evaluate how things were going. Most of his negative information was supplied by enemies of Columbus. Needless to say, there is a great deal of back and forth controversy about the truth of Bobadilla's assertions.
Columbus was probably no worse than your average adventurer in terms of evil. What he is celebrated for is opening the "new world" to the "old world," and vice versa. He found it and publicized it. It was one of the most consequential events in the last thousand years. That puts him way ahead of anyone else in the explorer league. If his voyage and exploration had ended like Leif Ericsson's, we would not celebrate him.
By the way, in Columbus' time, no one believed the Earth was flat. The issue that made it hard for Columbus to get support was that essentially all learned people believed the Earth's circumference was around 24,000 miles, following Eratosthenes. Columbus believed it was much smaller (or at least pretended to believe that) and therefore provides a shorter voyage the to "Indies."
If Bobadilla was right, Columbus is potentially an inflection point in human evil though. The accusations against him were viewed as totally unacceptable at the time, but subsequent colonisation of the Americas followed the pattern he set. That may just be an inevitable response to incentives (silver mines + easily enslavable indigenous population = sucks to be you pal), but if he'd been a bit more humane the general attitude of later colonists might have been different.
I think it's more a matter of incentives -- if you have mines and an easily-enslavable indigenous population, your incentives are to enslave the natives and set them to work in the mines. Given this, I don't think you can really blame either man for "setting the pattern" for later colonialism. Even if Columbus himself was pure as the driven snow, and even if Bobadilla had accurately reported this, people would still have had the idea of enslaving natives to work in the mines, because it was such an obvious way to get rich quick.
This is nonsense and hilariously euro-centric. Genocide and slavery have been common throughout history and yet only Europeans are considered especially evil for it.
Thinking Europeans are collectively evil is confined to the American lunatic fringe, and basically everyone agrees that genocide and slavery are fairly evil. The point is that Europeans won and European culture became hegemonic so what other cultures were doing historically doesn't really matter.
Medieval Europeans were also comparatively humane (not a huge achievement), and could plausibly have just extended feudalism to North America. To the extent the Spanish Empire was worse than that, I think it's plausibly down to Columbus.
Why is Einstein on the list of notable americans? He lived in the US for only the last 22 years of this life, long after the creative period of his career which happened in Switzerland and Germany.
Why not? American law and custom generally runs that someone who chooses to become American is as American as someone born here (except for eligibility to be president).
More broadly, everyone wants to associate with the admirable and disassociate with the shameful. (The counterpart to “Austria convinced the world that Mozart was Austrian and Hitler was German.”) My alma mater has a t-shirt of its Nobel laureates, which is a mix of undergrads, grad students, faculty, and for all I know people who passed through campus to use a pay phone. It can take “credit” for some more than others, but why should it make finer distinctions?
Yeah that's a little weird. If you want to celebrate early great American minds in physics, the obvious examples are Josiah Gibbs (who invented classical statistical mechanics) and Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford) -- interestingly, a loyalist who was driven out by the Revolution -- who first proposed that heat was a form of energy, and not a material substance. Both men were born in the US and both inventions had and continue to have profound effects on science worldwide.
Well if celebrating physicists is aim, then it ought to be Enrico Fermi Day because the intent of Columbus Day has always been to celebrate Italian Americans not explorers or conquistadors or imperialists.
That some non Italian American picked an explorer, conquistador, imperialist to placate fearful and angry Italian American whose brothers were lynched is the twist of how symbols can change over time in how they work to collectively mediate and create social reality.
Well, it's certainly true Fermi did more notable work than Einstein after he moved to the US, but it's also true his greatest work in fundamental physics (i.e. not bomb physics) is probably when he was still in Italy. I was also just trying to come up with people who are indisputably American because they were born and reared there, and also made rather foundational contributions, and are earlier than the 20th century.
The older I get, the more acceptable I think it is to judge people's morals based on the time they lived in. Columbus was cutting hands in a historical period when everybody with power was cutting hands, including our very ancestors.
Pithily, we should judge people by the standards of their society, and societies by the standards of our own. It's okay to say that the Aztecs were immoral by our standards, but not to pick on some particular human-sacrificing priest who was only doing his job. It's okay to say that First Century Rome was immoral by our standards, and also that Caligula was immoral even by First Century Rome standards.
From what I've read, Columbus was criticized in his own time, and Queen Isabella ordered Columbus to return to Spain after he "gifted" her a bunch of captive natives to be kept as slaves, because Isabella was against enslaving the natives.
I suspect the real imposition here isn't (just) us imposing our morals on the past, it's that people are imposing a standard narrative about "wokeness" and "evolving standards" onto the actual historical situation, which was more complicated than "people used to think he's a hero, now they think he's a villain".
To be fair, Isabel was like 'wtf do you mean you just made me the royal owner of thousands of slaves?!?!' That it was done, and done by lots of people, doesn't mean that everyone was cool with it, esp as state policy.
I'm not a Christian and I shouldn't interfere in your internal squabbles, but didn't Arius basically just have a different opinion on some incredibly obscure Christological distinction that 99.9% of Christians today wouldn't even know the orthodox position on anyway, and wouldn't care if they did know? Jesus had one nature and two wills vs. one will and two natures or something? Why the continuing animosity?
Because the idea of Santa Claus decking someone over an obscure theological issue is fucking hilarious, Scott.
But to answer the question you were actually asking: the implications of Arianism for Mariology, which provides a sharp distinction between Catholicism/Orthodoxy and most Protestantism, are huge. If you're debating Mary's role in salvation, which we Catholics/Orthodox think is major and most Protestants don't (and which we fight about on the internet the way you fight about buying mosquito nets) you eventually run into the Christological answer given by Arius. If Jesus isn't fully God, then Mary can't be the mother of God, which we think is an important title, with a corresponding entitlement to special reverence.
By all means, please enter our debates, though! Catholicism welcomes the intellectual contributions of Rationalists, because Catholicism is the most rational thing that exists.
"Because Catholicism is the most rational thing that exists."
This is true even if it is impolite to say it out loud.
The idea that the pagan tribes of Europe or even the Romans get to the so-called enlightenment and rationality (which in the end messed itself up by immanitizing the eschaton) without Christianity is basically impossible.
Lucretius was a first-rate poet, but a third-rate (if that) philosopher. Many (most? It's been a while since I read him) of the arguments in De Rerum Natura are not just fallacious, but obviously so.
"If you're debating Mary's role in salvation, which we Catholics/Orthodox think is major and most Protestants don't (and which we fight about on the internet the way you fight about buying mosquito nets"
Hoo boy yeah, in the past I've broken a lance or two with Reformed/Calvinists insisting that Mary's role was pretty much that of a human incubator (or, if we're going to be modern in our references, one of the women contracted by fertility clinics to be the surrogates for the rich Westerners' pregnancies) and that any importance ascribed to her ended as soon as she popped out the Holy Sprog.
And I'm not even more than luke-warm in Marian devotion, I am much more inclined to the Blessed Sacrament, but that kind of "yeah, well, she was only a woman" makes me want to belt out the Magnificat at full volume as well as siccing the Franciscans on them:
EDIT: And yeah, the Mariological and Christological doctrines are closely tied, when 'reformers' start chipping away at the Marian doctrines, they end up chipping away at the doctrines around the divinity of Christ, and that's how you end up with the "Jesus was Just Some Guy, y'know, but his important message was that it's nice to be nice and we should all be nice" type of 'Christianity' (Kevin Smith absolutely nailed it on the head with Buddy Christ, who doesn't bear the wounds of the Crucifixion but can be mistaken for the traditional icon of the Sacred Heart, though this heart is unpierced by thorns and is not burning).
Christianity without the divinity of Christ, as a person of the Triune God, is not Christianity. The highest-profile modern followers of Arian theology are the LDS and JW movements, which I'm grateful to note are pretty broadly acknowledged to be outside the pale of historic, Biblical Christianity. Confused, well-meaning adherents of these systems, I would engage warmly. Leaders who are actively seeking to lead more and more people astray with their anti-Biblical nonsense, I wouldn't mind seeing punched in some circumstances.
Soapbox answer:
The issue at stake with Arius and at Nicaea was far greater than the sort of discussions which you reference there, Scott; simply put, the question was whether Jesus was himself divine, or whether he was a created being; like us, albeit greater. This is a point on which Scripture is emphatic, and it teaches that our salvation rests upon what we hold to be the historical event of Jesus, the eternal, uncreated Son of God, dying for the propitiation of His people's sin, and rising again to eternal life; an act effective only if carried out by the God-Man (to borrow a term). My associate there referenced the implications upon Mariology, but setting that area of (major) disagreement aside, there is firm agreement between we of the Reformed tradition and our Catholic brethren on the utmost importance of Christ's identity (indeed, one of the greatest expositions of all this came from the pen of St. Anselm of Canterbury).
Side note: if anyone should read this and think, "Oh, this ridiculous Trinity business again; how wearying", I would commend you Dr. Michael Reeves' book "Delighting in the Trinity", which is a clearer and more wonderful exploration than I would previously have thought possible.
Responded to "Highlights From The Comments On Columbus Day" with this after this comment was featured, but I'll add it here as well:
LDS/"Mormons" are not Arians. It's understandable to make that mistake -- the church originates from the same historical context as the Jehovah's Witnesses, who pretty clearly believe that Jesus is a created being, and is similarly outside mainline Protestantism -- but we are not. The "Mormon" heresy is in fact opposite: the belief not that Jesus was created, but that man was not created. Joseph Smith (LDS founder) says, speaking of the spirits of man: "Is it logical to say that the intelligence of spirits is immortal, and yet that it had a beginning? The intelligence of spirits had not beginning, neither will it have an end. That is good logic. That which has a beginning may have an end. There never was a time when there were not spirits". He holds that man is essentially uncreated, though he is elevated and ennobled by God as Father. Man, then, is indeed on a level with Christ -- this is the heretical thought -- but not because both are created, but because neither is. LDS thought diverges from mainline Protestantism not because Christ is brought too low in the Arian manner but because man is elevated too high; it is understood that every man is a God in the making and that God Himself was once a man like ourselves. But none of these beings are created, all are eternal.
It is alright if one considers that all this puts "Mormons" outside the umbrella of Christianity, but it is incorrect to say that LDS doctrine is Arian.
I'm sorry, you are correct. I would contend that Christ ultimately is brought too low in LDS theology, as is the Father, through their emphatic denial of the divine attribute of immutability, but you are right, the heart of the issue is not Arianism, there being a significant difference between their position of 'there was a time when he was not [God]' and Arius' assertion that "there was a time when he was not [in existence]". My apologies.
I'm not sure why you're treating "Jesus was created and he was not the same person as God" and "Jesus was eternal and he was God" as the only two possible points of the compass. Later Arians may have gone as far as saying Jesus was not quite God; but I remember reading that Arius fought against this as a misrepresentation of his actual doctrine, which was *simply* that Jesus had come into existence at a specific point in time rather than having always existed. Whether or not the man himself argued this point, it seems a worthy point to argue.
As near as I can tell, unless you make a bunch of other unjustified assumptions, this needn't imply he's lesser than the other three persons of the Trinity/"not really God". Utter bastardisation to follow, but we could, straightforwardly, imagine an originally-singular God "splitting" at a specific point in time into three "equal" "parts".
One could even reject the conventional idea of the Trinity but still have a bounded-in-time Jesus "really" "be" "God", simply by saying that there was only ever one God; that in 1 BC He somehow "duplicated" himself, sending a perfect platonic double of his essence ("the Son") into a human body for thirty years while the other half ("the Father") continued to exist in whatever non-physical way He existed beforehand; and after Jesus ascended, the 'two Gods' recombined into one being again.
(Now, I know there are statements in the Gospels which nix this by suggesting that Jesus somehow had a distinct existence from the Father for at least as long as the Earth existed. This is just a thought experiment to demonstrate the myriad of ways in which "Jesus started to exist at a specific point in time" *doesn't* seem to logically, necessarily imply "Jesus wasn't God and was more like some archangel-like thing".)
Ultimately the anti-Arian version of this debate seems to start from a premise that all aspects of God must be wholly eternal (not just without end but without beginning), or else they're not really aspects of God, and I just don't see where that's coming from. Surely the Burning Bush was God when it spoke to Moses, and surely that doesn't imply the Bush always existed before that event?
The attributes of God's eternality and immutability are both Biblically demonstrable and long defended from a philosophical standpoint, particularly where ontology is concerned. In a conversation about Christianity, any statement to the effect that, say, "Jesus is not eternal, but he is God" would be a nonsense statement; common ground must first be established regarding what the word "God" really means.
The assertion that the bush through which God spoke to Moses itself became God during that encounter shocks and bewilders me. Would we then say that the mountain of Sinai itself became God as his voice was heard by Israel? Or even that Moses or Aaron somehow assumed his being when speaking his words, by his authority, attested by his supernatural power? Again, the word "God" must be defined. All (I think) of the previous comments in this thread assumed a traditional Christian understanding of his nature. With that understanding, they make sense, but this question of the burning bush does not.
With the Burning Bush idea, I was saying that one could hypothetically construe "Jesus Christ" as no more or less than the name given on Earth to a meat-puppet that was temporarily animated by the (eternal) spirit of the Almighty. i.e. God's consciousness spoke through the Bush, and later God's consciousness acted through the miraculously-born human body borne by Mary; in both cases the vessel was temporary but was, in fact, devoid of a "personal" identity to the degree that we're just dealing with God in a particular, temporarily-donned guise.
Now, I know this isn't how any mainstream branch of Christianity likes to think of Jesus. But do you agree that this would be a particular framework where "Jesus is not eternal, but he is God" is a sensible statement, consistent with the philosophical arguments for the eternity of "God"?
Ha, ha, ha, well you know - it's the tiny details that make all the difference. A lot of the early heresies were precisely that kind of very fine-grained theological exaltation, but it's a bit more vital than that - whatever Arius himself may have believed, it was the Christological doctrines of what came to be called Arianism that were important.
And that led to the kind of "99% of Christians wouldn't even know the difference" claims by its followers, who were really in a dominant position for a long time, who solved the problems of "how can Christ be God and man?" by adopting the solution that the Father alone was the eternal God, and the Son was created by Him, was not existing from all time, and though unique and exceptional, was more akin to one of the angels (this is a very simplified version) or was just an exceptional unique human who was elevated into being the Son of God (even more simplified version).
So if you have God who is God and alone, and then the special intermediary who is not (fully) God or a created (g)od, then you have the door into things like Islam - where Jesus is a great and venerated prophet, but not the Messiah or son of God, and Mohammed is the greatest and final revelation, or Unitarianism, or Mormonism (this is the really big deal about why Mormons are not considered Christians even though they say they follow Christ and accept the Bible and all the rest of it).
Imagine someone saying "Look, I don't get this squabble between you Jews and the Christians. Don't you all fundamentally believe the same things about God anyway? Who cares if this one guy was or wasn't the Messiah, heck you even have one sect of your guys who firmly believe their leader was the Messiah and you haven't declared them non-Jews! Why the continuing animosity over some incredibly obscure distinction?"
"The whole great history of the Arian heresy might have been invented to explode this idea. It is a very interesting history often repeated in this connection; and the upshot of it is in that in so far as there ever was a merely official religion, it actually died because it was merely an official religion; and what destroyed it was the real religion. Arius advanced a version of Christianity which moved, more or less vaguely, in the direction of what we should call Unitarianism; though it was not the same, for it gave to Christ a curious intermediary position between the divine and human. The point is that it seemed to many more reasonable and less fanatical; and among these were many of the educated class in a sort of reaction against the first romance of conversion. Arians were a sort of moderates and a sort of modernists. And it was felt that after the first squabbles this was the final form of rationalised religion into which civilisation might well settle down. It was accepted by Divus Caesar himself and became the official orthodoxy; the generals and military princes drawn from the new barbarian powers of the north, full of the future, supported it strongly. But the sequel is still more important. Exactly as a modern man might pass through Unitarianism to complete agnosticism, so the greatest of the Arian emperors ultimately shed the last and thinnest pretense of Christianity; he abandoned even Arius and returned to Apollo. He was a Caesar of the Caesars; a soldier, a scholar, a man of large ambitions and ideals; another of the philosopher kings. It seemed to him as if at his signal the sun rose again. The oracles began to speak like birds beginning to sing at dawn; paganism was itself again; the gods returned. It seemed the end of that strange interlude of an alien superstition. And indeed it was the end of it, so far as there was a mere interlude of mere superstition. It was the end of it, in so far as it was the fad of an emperor or the fashion of a generation. If there really was something that began with Constantine, then it ended with Julian.
But there was something that did not end. There had arisen in that hour of history, defiant above the democratic tumult of the Councils of the Church, Athanasius against the world. We may pause upon the point at issue; because it is relevant to the whole of this religious history, and the modern world seems to miss the whole point of it. We might put it this way. If there is one question which the enlightened and liberal have the habit of deriding and holding up as a dreadful example of barren dogma and senseless sectarian strife, it is this Athanasian question of the Co-Eternity of the Divine Son. On the other hand, if there is one thing that the same liberals always offer us as a piece of pure and simple Christianity, untroubled by doctrinal disputes, it is the single sentence, 'God is Love.' Yet the two statements are almost identical; at least one is very nearly nonsense without the other. The barren dogma is only the logical way of stating the beautiful sentiment. For if there be a being without beginning, existing before all things, was He loving when there was nothing to be loved? If through that unthinkable eternity He is lonely, what is the meaning of saying He is love? The only justification of such a mystery is the mystical conception that in His own nature there was something analogous to self-expression; something of what begets and beholds what it has begotten. Without some such idea, it is really illogical to complicate the ultimate essence of deity with an idea like love. If the moderns really want a simple religion of love, they must look for it in the Athanasian Creed. The truth is that the trumpet of true Christianity, the challenge of the charities and simplicities of Bethlehem or Christmas Day never rang out more arrestingly and unmistakably than in the defiance of Athanasius to the cold compromise of the Arians. It was emphatically he who really was fighting for a God of Love against a God of colourless and remote cosmic control; the God of the stoics and the agnostics. It was emphatically he who was fighting for the Holy Child against the grey deity of the Pharisees and the Sadducees. He was fighting for that very balance of beautiful interdependence and intimacy, in the very Trinity of the Divine Nature, that draws our hearts to the Trinity of the Holy Family. His dogma, if the phrase be not misunderstood, turns even God into a Holy Family."
Thank you; that Chesterton quote is fabulous. I'm put in mind of a C.S. Lewis lecture in the "God in the Dock" collection, where he posited, with aid of a literary quote, that liberal attempts to help the church out by cutting away the "vestigial mythologies" of the faith actually serve to rob it of truth and power, making it something wholly other than what it means to be.
"'Would not conversation be much more rational than dancing?' said Jane Austen's Miss Bingley. 'Much more rational,' replied Mr. Bingley, 'but much less like a ball.'"
I think most Christians today know that Arianism is false because they recite the Nicene creed every Sunday, and it includes believing "in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of his Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father."
The Order One Common Worship rubric for Holy Communion, following the sermon, reads, "On Sundays and Principal Holy Days an authorized translation of the Nicene Creed is used, or on occasion the Apostles' Creed or an authorized Affirmation of Faith may be used." In Order Two the rubric following the gospel(!) reads, "The Creed is used on every Sunday and Holy Day and may be used on other days also." What follows in black is the Nicene Creed.
GIRM 68 reads, "The Creed is to be sung or said by the priest together with the people on Sundays and solemnities. It may be said also at particular celebrations of a more solemn character."
I somehow had not heard of that film, but I'll have to find it. Looks like a riot. Ironically, the only depiction of Christ out there which I really do approve of is the one in "Ben-Hur", which was clearly a primary touchstone for the Coen brothers, though the film within the film definitely sounds like one of which I would not approve.
European's first reaction to "Indigenous People's Day": that's a real dick move guys. Not to Columbus, but to indigenous people.
Native Americans should 100% get a day. But putting that day on the anniversary of when white people showed up and started wiping them out seems really... white-centric (I live in the right-wing universe, so I don't know the lingo - I assume there's a word for this). You'll be celebrated on the day we discovered you! It's also kind of insensitive, along the lines of celebrating Japan day on the anniversary of the Hiroshima bomb. It's also a bit random to celebrate US Native Americans on the day that Columbus discovered an entirely different part of North America.
Galaxy brain take: if I were Cherokee or whatever, I think I'd be more offended by this than Columbus day.
The main thing is that Native Americans are a pretty invisible group who are, because of history, generally living in bad situations. (Drive through some of the Nations out West if you want to be depressed.) What can we do to maybe improve that situation?
Stop caring about groups of people and start caring about individuals.
Once you do this, the question becomes not "How can we solve the problems of this whole group of people" but "How can we this particular guy solve his problems, and also how can this gal here solve her problems?"
As for how an individual can solve their problems the solutions are usually the same: move to a more economically productive area, get a job, maybe a better education, don't waste money on booze or drugs, get married to someone stable, et cetera.
Different groups of people are different and cannot be helped in the same way. If you imagine they are, you will be perpetually confused as to why native americans categorically do much, much worse in school than east asians. What's the problem? Bad teachers? Not enough funding? But it works for Asians!
Because there are a lot of different goals under that umbrella. Ending Jim Crow? Successful. Integrating schools? Successful. Ending police brutality? Eh... still working on that one. But I don't see why it should be any more unachievable than the rest of the things black people have achieved with protest and collective action.
Ah. So you meant to write "solve *some* of the problems, but not enough to keep people from rioting in the streets or forego the necessity of legally oppressing one group to 'correct' historical wrongs to another group more than half a century later."
OK. But consider me deeply skeptical that you will *ever* achieve a solution that satisfies your standards, using your methods, if they cost this much and work so slowly. Ever wonder if maybe you're going about it the wrong way?
In what sense are they invisible? Maybe if you live in San Francisco, but I've been in southwest grocery stores where I was the only non-red man there. You can't live in Albuquerque or Flagstaff and be *unaware* of Native Americans. Some tribes are definitely on the poorer side, which would be more remarkable if that wasn't true about assorted random demographic chunks of the country in general -- Appalachian whites can be just as poor, as can Mississippi blacks -- but some tribes are quite the opposite: supposedly the Morongo Casino pays out $15-20k per month to every enrolled member[1]. This seems more like a mildly patronizing stereotype from the 70s than an accurate modern summary of the experience of a large varied collection of people in many different situations.
>The main thing is that Native Americans are a pretty invisible group who are, because of history, generally living in bad situations.
Is history why all gorups with recent hunter-gather ancestry generally live in bad situations, or is it the fact that they evolved to live very different lifestyles from people with thousands of years of agricultural history?
China has Single's Day and Japan celebrates "White Day" that is all about giving white-colored gifts. Japan also celebrates Christmas with eating Kentucky Fried Chicken and playing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and without the slightest care about the thing that Save Our Christmas people think is Christmas.
It's mildly surprising that Columbus Day hasn't yet been appropriated with Columbus representing modern American entrepreneurship: Silicon Valley billionaires who promised something they couldn't deliver but nonetheless were able to obtain massive amounts of venture capital.
The demotion of Columbus Day is analogous to the demotion of Confederate Civil War monuments, in that both represent cultural heroes to one group of Americans and genocide to another group of Americans.
I'd never imagined Indigenous Peoples Day as celebrating IP outside the United States, but substitute Comanche for Aztec and the blog argument still works.
Adraste's point about the movement of Easter and Christmas are so historically inaccurate it is infuriating. Tim O'Neill has written pages on why this is complete nonsense from a historical perspective. A lot of the post-hoc rationalizations about why Christians would or would not have been motived to do this ignore mountains of historical data that it was not a cynical ploy to replace one cultural celebration with another.
Please stop recycling these tropes about Christian holidays.
"Jesus was born in the spring; they moved Christmas to December to neutralize the pagan Solstice celebration. Easter got its name because it neutralized the rites of the spring goddess Eostre."
These two are related, so I'm going to deal with them together. To the first, "kind of", to the second, "not just nope but heck nope!"
The Tangled Question of Easter:
Saying that Easter "neutralised the rites of the spring goddess Eostre" needs to be unpacked. The milder reading is "everyone was having such a blast celebrating Easter that they forgot about Eostre". The stronger reading is "Easter was invented to replace Eostre's cult" (this can be a Pagan and Wiccan claim, though not solely and not completely). You know who I'm going to quote on this one:
So! First of all, we have to figure out "Was there even a goddess Eostre?" and the evidence for that is pretty thin. Ironically in this context, the reason English-speaking world talks about "Easter comes from Eostre" is due to a work by the Christian monk the Venerable Bede (now Saint Bede, having finally been canonised in 1899, 1,164 years after his death in 735. He's been called "the Venerable" for so long that that is how he is still generally referred to). Bede was a skilled linguist and translator, and one of his important works was De temporum ratione/The Reckoning of Time:
This is important, because it tackles the question of how to compute the date of Easter, which was A Very Big Important Problem for the church calendar. I'll get back to this when considering the first part, about when was Jesus born, but let's stick with Easter for the minute. As well as showing off his scholarship and learning about Greek, Roman, Hebrew and other measures of time, "He gives some information about the months of the Anglo-Saxon calendar."
Buckle up, kids, this is where we take off. When Bede was talking briefly about the Anglo-Saxon calendar, he mentioned Eostre or rather the month name derived from her:
"The Old English deity Ēostre is attested solely by Bede in his 8th-century work The Reckoning of Time, where Bede states that during Ēosturmōnaþ (the equivalent of April), pagan Anglo-Saxons had held feasts in Ēostre's honour, but that this tradition had died out by his time, replaced by the Christian Paschal month, a celebration of the resurrection of Jesus."
And that is it. That is the *only* place anyone talks about or mentions Eostre (that we have records of). So where did we get Bryan Singer's [American Gods](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv83-BzdOEE) "hey, Jesus stole your month, girl"? Invented out of whole cloth, more or less. The 18th-19th century craze for going back to Ze Ancient Authentic Native Folk Traditions involved a lot of folk etymology, even by the scholars of the day, and they went a bit wild with Eostre.
Do we even know for sure that she is associated with spring? Not definitely, it's an assumption because her month was in the Northern European spring season. Rabbits (should be hares, as in 'mad as a March hare' because hares mate in spring), eggs and the like are all spring related, but we don't even know that decorating eggs for Easter *is* an Eostre tradition, rather than a Christian one; the same way eggs, milk, butter and sugar are used up on Pancake Tuesday/Shrove Tuesday/Mardi Gras, before Lent begins, then decorating eggs which could once again be eaten freely in Spring once Easter came is likely to be as much Christian as anything else.
Side note: out of curiosity, I looked up when the first chocolate Easter eggs were introduced:
"Chocolate eggs first appeared at the court of Louis XIV in Versailles and in 1725 the widow Giambone in Turin started producing chocolate eggs by filling empty chicken egg shells with molten chocolate. In 1873 J.S. Fry & Sons of England introduced the first chocolate Easter egg in Britain. Manufacturing their first Easter egg in 1875, Cadbury created the modern chocolate Easter egg after developing a pure cocoa butter that could be moulded into smooth shapes."
So, chocolate Easter eggs is a late 19th century creation, like many of our current traditions.
So "Easter got its name because it neutralized the rites of the spring goddess Eostre" is like saying "We celebrate the Fourth of July, with its anti-monarchical emphases, to neutralise the honours paid to Julius Caesar". You could more easily say that "Passover neutralises the rites of the spring goddess" because of the connections with the Vernal Equinox and the Christian feast of the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Christ. I don't think anybody is going to argue (but who knows? I have not plumbed the depths of all the Internet) that "The Jews totally invented Passover just to take over the established celebration for Eostre".
Which brings us back to the Easter dating controversy, part of which was that some places in the early Church celebrated it at the same time as Passover was being celebrated, and there were others who wanted to make it very distinct that "We're not Jewish and this is not a Jewish feast". Another large part was calendar drift, hence the various works on "this is how you work out what day it falls on" since Easter is a moveable feast, which returns us neatly to St. Bede and the Anglo-Saxons 😀
Now, taking the first part, second, when was Jesus born? The short answer is, we don't know, we can't even say He was born in the spring since nobody had an exact time or date. What happened was that Easter was always the most important feast of the church calendar, and the celebration of the birth was a much more minor event (partly because of the theology, partly because we had a definite date for Easter). Theories of the time held that important and celebrated individuals had symbolic and important dates in their lives, and that the date of death of such a person was related to the date of their birth.
This would mean that you would be celebrating both Christ's birth and death on the same dates, which would be confusing - it does happen sometimes, that March 25th (Lady Day) which has been set as the date of the Annunciation is also the date of Good Friday (Easter being a moveable feast) so both are celebrated, or commemorated, at the same time, as in Donne's poem when the same thing happened in 1608:
And to quote his description of Mary, mother of Christ:
"She sees at once the Virgin Mother stay
Reclused at home, public at Golgotha ;
Sad and rejoiced she's seen at once, and seen
At almost fifty, and at scarce fifteen ;
At once a son is promised her, and gone ;
Gabriell gives Christ to her, He her to John ;
Not fully a mother, she's in orbity ;
At once receiver and the legacy."
Confusing, yes? So the Easter date of the definite death of Christ was maintained, and the spring date was given to celebrate His conception (not birth). Move on nine months from conception to birth, which brings us neatly to December and the proper distance between the two.
That the Winter Solstice is in this period probably is important, but was it picked to "neutralize the pagan Solstice celebration"? As I said, yes and no; the Easter distinction was more important, but that people were familiar with a winter festival probably didn't hurt either (I don't lean too heavily on the Sol Invictus thing since that's really about winter festivals in general, not direct "the Church took this particular feast over").
“in 1725 the widow Giambone in Turin started producing chocolate eggs by filling empty chicken egg shells with molten chocolate.”
This is widely reported, but I can’t find a cite and AFAICT chocolate was a beverage till the mid-19th century. Which makes me at least skeptical that a widow in Turin was making chocolate candy more than a century earlier.
The last paragraph seems important to me in terms of helping people think through this narrative more: if you are a culture, you probably have winter festivals! If your culture becomes Christian, those festivals *will become* something else!
Now, if you're a historian, it becomes really easy to tell a story where Christmas 'was based on' a previous winter festival, because that sounds REALLY darn similar to "well, it was this, then it became this when Christianity came in". But the actual mechanics for this, as noted above, are extremely anodyne, and have no significance at all for debates about the significance of Christmas!
I’m not sure the other examples of “Anti-Holiday” given are really “anti” the same way Indigenous Peoples Day is. Moving Easter and Christmas to sit on top of existing pagan holidays was more like “we’re a proselytizing religion trying to make converts in a place where the people demand a big winter solstice and spring equinox party, so let’s bolt some Christian mythology onto the existing pagan traditions, that way everybody gets to have the same party but we can say the prayers are going to Jesus now. Win-win!” Hanukkah, kind of the same thing - the people demand a big end of year holiday, so let’s bolt on the nearest Jewish holiday and make that one a big deal.
The “invented from whole cloth to make people feel guilty” nature of IPD is I think unique. If you wanted an analogue to the other “anti-holidays”, IPD would need to co-opt existing Columbus Day traditions so the people celebrating CD aren’t put out. But a) no one really celebrates CD anymore outside of a few Italian-American communities, and b) the IPD equivalent would be a big parade and feast that the same people promoting IPD would find to be offensive cultural appropriation.
“Sacagawea Day” is actually a good idea, in that a day to celebrate Indian and European cooperation and exploration would be a much better way to co-opt CD. Everyone can have a big party and not feel guilty. Then again our national religion already has an Indian European cooperation myth, and we use it for Thanksgiving.
So really the right thing to do would to just be to let Columbus Day die off, but we can’t do that because government workers will be pissed about having a contractual day of paid leave in October removed.
I’m aware of the controversy, but regardless of whether Christmas and/or Easter are literal drop in replacements for predicting pagan holidays, I think the “weak version” of my argument would still apply: Christmas and Easter are celebrated in parts of the calendar that have significance in lots of non-Christian traditions, and the way they are celebrated includes some elements borrowed from pagan traditions. It would have been useful, in absorbing these pagan cultures, to have a Christianized repository for their cherished traditions that could reasonably be fit into a Christian framework.
Most of the "pagan traditions" in Easter and Christmas aren't attested until centuries or millennia after Europe was Christianised. E.g., Christmas trees are first attested in 16th-century Germany; there's nothing whatsoever to link them with pre-Christian pagan practices.
There's no direct link, but "nothing whatsoever" seems a bit strong. There's plausibly some psychological connection, of the form, humans like green trees in mid-winter.
I still think the folks that came over on the iced up Bering Strait should have dibs. The Mayflower? Really? That’s so 17th century. Common Era no less.
People might have crossed the land bridge at different times, as the ice ebbed and flowed, but I would take some convincing that people arrived earlier by a different route.
I'm always amused at the take on Christian history that are casually thrown out for glib, um, galaxy-brained bon mots. In this case, pretending that St. Nicholas just sorta up and attacked some poor rando at Nicaea. But it does make for good copy amongst the non-religious crowd I suppose.
Many of the Galaxy-Brain takes on Christian history originated not in atheism or in broad anti-Christian sentiments, but in the Protestant communities that were most interested in rejecting Catholic customs. Easter and Christmas commemorate biblical events but the Bible does not say "celebrate Christmas/Easter." A fundamentalist, biblically literalist Christianity has no room for Christmas, because there's no record of the Apostles throwing Jesus a birthday party.
So in rejecting the Pope and Catholicism, certain Protestants also rejected the extrabiblical customs that the Catholics liked. And what better way to show that they should be rejected than alleging that these customs are pagan?
Then the Euphoric Neckbeard crowd adopted these arguments because as a class they're not nearly as smart as they think they are. The rest is (bad) history.
I would perhaps amateurly read it as an attempt to provide more evidence (if you believed it) that the Catholic Church was corrupt and cynical ("Look! They chose these dates for pure political reasons!") and not as powerful as one might think ("They *had* to choose these dates, to achieve their ill-gotten mindshare"), both of which were central Protestant tenets during and for a long time after Luther.
The thing about good memes -- and these are among the best -- is that they're so easy to believe they persist almost regardless of any actual evidence pro or con.
Which means these mythologizations of historic institutions are weirdly appropriate in a discussion begun around the mythologization of historical figures.
I'm high up on the anti-woke scale, but OK with Columbus being cancelled...this dialogue did a nice job of fleshing out why. The enslaving and genociding is inextricable from his success. On the other hand, "Indigenous People's Day" is a little cringey for reasons also delineated, but what can you do? Everyone needed their mid-October holiday I guess? But could we have pushed it back to Nov. 1 as a recovery day from Halloween?
>The enslaving and genociding is inextricable from his success.
There was no "genocide" of native Americans unless you use the term is an extremely expansive sense. The majority of the decline in native American population since European arrival has been thorugh disease and outbreeding - mitochondrial DNA evidence shows very few Amerindian lineages have been lost.
And thinking that slavery makes European-Americans bad is the epitome of special pleading.
That the germ theory of disease was not accepted does not mean that people were so blind as not to notice, empirically, that some diseases were apparently transmitted by what we would call fomites. (I say "apparently" because that belief was sometimes mistaken; people would think that a disease could be spread by a cloth shipment, say, whereas we see that it had to be aerosols, vectors or something else - of course there can be lice in cloth.)
What's probably more relevant is that the bulk of the depopulation by disease among Native Americans happened well before there was any significant direct contact between most of the affected tribes and European settlers. Disease brought from Europe apparently went through the coastal and Midwestern tribes like wildfire, spread among them by their own intertribal contact, well ahead of the Europeans themselves even knowing they were there, so it had nothing to do with any early deliberate attempt at biological warfare.
What I think you might want to emphasize, in response to the original comment, is that to use the word "genocide" in this case is disingenuous, if not sneakily deceptive. We normally reserve that word for some *deliberate* extinction of people -- the intention matters a great deal.
I think it's true the Europeans were responsible, in some indirect sense, for enormous death and suffering among the native populations of North America -- I've read arguments that up to 90% of the population snuffed it through the so-called Columbian Exposure to European germs -- but this isn't a "genocide" in the usual use of the word, because nobody planned it, nobody intended it, and nobody could even have foreseen and prevented it, since (as you point out) there was no germ theory that would have allowed European explorers and colonizers to realize the danger they posed to native populations through the germs they (unawaredly) carried.
I think the appropriate response to the horrific suffering and death of the American peoples as a result of the Columbia exchange is not an attempt to crow about the evils of Yt PPL, but a solemn recognition of the global holocaust we dodged.
Because while there are a lot of reasons why the death toll was so one-sided, there is no reason that the American villages and cities could not have nurtured a few devastating diseases of their own, which might have gone across Europe and Asia like the Black Death...only twice as bad.
Odds were that there would be bad death loss from the exchange, and that the Americas would take the brunt of it, but it also could have been much, much worse.
Good point. Syphillis came from the Americas, IIRC, and before modern treatment was an extremely nasty way to go; but as an STD it’s not super transmissible.
Genocide is as much about attempting to wipe out a culture as it is about killing people. It's certainly true that strenuous and somewhat effective efforts were made to wipe out indigenous cultures as well as abusing and killing a lot of people.
I think that misrepresents the actual history. People weren't interested in *wiping out* Native American culture -- indeed, it was honored and appreciated far and wide from the very beginning[1] -- what they wanted to do was have the Native Americans fit into the larger culture that was enveloping them, id est, sorry but you can't go make war on a neighboring tribe when they piss you off with stealing your cattle ,and collect a few scalps, because we call that murder, and what you want to do is go to court and sue for damages instead.
More problematically, you can't just randomly wander over all this land and hunt animals -- particularly those placid ones with a brand -- because we have this shtick called "private property" and you're expected to abide by its restrictions. We make legally binding agreements by writing them down on paper in this language, which you'll need to learn to read and write, and we have complex laws that are also written down by a legislature far away, and you can't just go to the chief and complain in person, orally, when some functionary somewhere or other doesn't follow them right -- again, we have courts for that, you need to write these complex papers and file them, and as a last resort we have elections, which you'll also need to learn about, since it's not the way you govern yourselves. And so on.
It was certainly all very strange, and without doubt it did have an enormously destructive influence on Native culture, because it was so different and incompatible at so many junctures. But the intent was not to be destructive, it was just not sufficiently accommodative. (Although the concept of "reservations" was some kind of attempt to throw up hands and do a "separate but equal" solution, so people weren't unaware of the magnitude of the problem.)
It's not even clear what an appropriate accommodative solution would have looked like, even with the benefit of 20/20 historical hindsight. The cultures were deeply incompatible in so many ways. The only obvious solution would be to just stop the westward expansion of the United States partially or entirely, and leave the Native tribes alone on one or more vast tracts of good land. Keep the Los Angeles area a marshy basin, say, dotted with villages, drying fish, and roaming tribes -- no oil wells, no airports, no gigantic shipping port, no vast concrete megapolis.
That seems a bit unrealistic. So what else should have been done? I am underwhelmed with glib century post-facto condemnation that doesn't attempt to appreciate the extremely difficult problem of any kind of marriage of cultures so profoundly different. One can readily point to any number of individual injustices, certainly, and we could parachute in better solutions to any number of them -- but this does not really address the overarching problem -- which is the cultural incompatibility -- so however many we discovered and remediated, in the past or the present, more would always arise, because the root cause would be alive and kicking.
I don't propose to know any good solution to the mess, and I acknowledge as much as anyone the human tragedy involved, but I'm deeply skeptical of any kind of simple analysis and simple assignment of black and white hats.
---------------
[1] The role of Ulysses S. Grant is notable here: he was a fierce champion of Native American rights, and he was a popular and powerful President. So it's not like the problem was dismissed at the highest levels, or that the Native tribes did not have a sympathetic and powerful ears.
Boarding schools (also referred to as Residential schools, and more recently, assimilation camps) were institutions run by the federal government and churches within Canada and the United States with the intention of absorbing Indigenous peoples into dominant Western culture, by displacing them from their culture. Between the late 1800s through the late 1970s, most prominently, Indigenous children were forcibly and violently removed from their families to attend these Residential Schools, with some Native families even being coerced by the federal government and the Catholic Church into reluctantly handing their children over. During this time there were over 350 schools operating within the United States. By 1920, there were 20,000 children attending the schools, with the number tripling by just 1925. "
This matches everything I've heard about those schools, and I wonder where you got your beliefs.
It would be one thing to teach English, and another as really happened to forbid children from using their own languages.
I will also note that the Catholic Church has a history of turning what I suspect were ordinary bad people into torturers and murderers. No, not all Catholics, and not all the time, but the Church doesn't seem to have good inhibitions against that sort of thing.
Yeah sorry but (1) NPR is about as far from a cooly objective source on the history of minorities as you could find. Might as well cite the Epoch Times on an evaluation of the policies of the Obama Administration, and (2) if it were a consistent and broad-based policy, there would've been no such thing as a reservation, nobody would ever have portrayed Indian culture sympathetically in fiction or media, John Marshall would never have ruled the way he did in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (futile as that turned out to be), and so on.
I'm in 100% agreement that the policy from early on was assimilation -- and one can debate the wisdom of that back and forth, and I'm not a priori sympathetic to either direction -- and I don't doubt that aspects of that were poorly or wickedly implemented, I've already agreed regardless of intent it factually had a destructive effect on Native culture, and I'm sure there were a host of individual acts of cruelty -- and more than one person in power thought the only good Indian was a dead one.
But all that does not add up to genocide. It's nowhere near a steady and broadly accepted policy of just wiping them out and erasing the culture completely. There are plenty of historical examples of unquestioned genocide, I think we need to reserve that word for such cases, lest the word become as debased and meaningless as "racism" has.
Your line of argument is indirect-- do you know about actual schools or other programs which were efforts to preserve native cultures while teaching European/ American cultures?
I know someone who grew up on a reservation and bears a serious grudge for the emotional damage his relatives took at residential schools.
Do we need federal holidays at all? It seems like their main significance in closing governmental offices that are supposed to be serving the public. If you want federal employees to have days off, just give them vacation days that they can take without shutting down services that the public can need.
[I realize employers may not take kindly to too many employees taking voluntary vacation days simultaneously, but that seems like a minor employment policy issue, whose solution need not be official federal holidays.]
And would there be any loss to "culture" from not having Columbus day be federally recognized? Or any holiday for that matter? Columbus's enduring cultural resonance is probably a function of kids learning about him in history - not the federal holiday.
Similarly, it seems unlikely that Christmas would lose its cultural significance were it not an official federal holiday, but rather merely a day on which many if not most employees chose to spend with family, doing Christmasy things.
Speaking of Christmas, it seems odd to omit discussion of the centuries of horror unleashed by Christians and Christianity in a discussion about a holiday celebrating the birth of Christianity. It seems like an even stronger example of point about Columbus - that the perception of figures, events, or movements, can differ radically from group to group, and from dry history to living cultural endurance.
There’s a pretty clear coordination advantage to a day on which everyone (or “everyone”, since emergency services and some other things continue to operate) are off at once.
Disadvantages too, but not enough that getting rid of, say, Thanksgiving as a national holiday in exchange for a floating day off would get much political traction.
As it is, there’s ongoing tension about the ramp up in Black Friday and pre-Black Friday retail activity that means an increasing number of workers find themselves in that “essential” basket.
I would like to point out that casually dumping on Christians for “unleashing centuries of horror” is cringe. The same could be written about every other world religion and ideology (especially “Rationalism” originating from the French Revolution), but in this time and place it smacks of cheap outgroup bashing for status signaling.
I don't think there's much clout to be gained here through dumping on Christianity. I regard the Gray Tribe (as it exists on SCC/ACX) and religiosity, broadly speaking, as fargroups. Perhaps not exactly, but certainly coming here to dump on the historical record of Christianity evidences poor room-reading, particularly because when it manifests in its mildest conceivable form ("Easter is an adoption of a pagan holiday") it's laughably false. I would think that SAS's post about the sequential rise and fall of left-leaning internet subcultures (evolution vs. creationism, atheism broadly, feminism, and BLM) would have made it clear that Fedora-Tipping Atheism long ago reached the status of "cringe."
"Speaking of Christmas, it seems odd to omit discussion of the centuries of horror unleashed by Christians and Christianity in a discussion about a holiday celebrating the birth of Christianity. "
Truly, Heinrich is indeed a proponent of "You know it's Indigenous People's Day, right, not Columbus Day?" as he lectures one and all on the horrors of colonialism but doesn't do anything that positively celebrates Indigenous Day, such as shawl-dancing or playing lacrosse or parching corn or wearing body paint because that would be Problematic.
"Similarly, it seems unlikely that Christmas would lose its cultural significance were it not an official federal holiday, but rather merely a day on which many if not most employees chose to spend with family, doing Christmasy things."
Even over here, the shops can barely wait for St. Stephen's Day before they start having the 'January' sales. If Christmas Day were not an official holiday, most employees would have no choice about staying home to celebrate it, the same as with Sunday working. The shops would want their workers in to encourage sales for the people who weren't working, and if it's on a weekday, most employers would prefer if they could have their workers as well.
<i>Speaking of Christmas, it seems odd to omit discussion of the centuries of horror unleashed by Christians and Christianity in a discussion about a holiday celebrating the birth of Christianity.</i>
As opposed to whom, secularists? The French Reign of Terror killed more people in ten months than the Spanish Inquisition managed in 356 years, and the numbers aren't even close (c. 17,000 as opposed to c. 2,800).
Federal holidays exist basically to put pressure on employers nationwide to allow pretty much everyone to take off during certain very popular holidays, such as July 4 and Christmas, without enduring the cutthroat scheduling rights/seniority fights that employees in business that do stay open have to endure. You have to have a powerful case that you *cannot* close on those days, e.g. you're a hospital ER room, for line employees to be pretty OK with fighting over who gets to take 12/24 and 12/25 off.
This dates from an era when the balance of power between labor and management on work schedule was tilted toward the latter, and is perhaps still relevant in those flyover regions where people are not (yet) contractors who earn $250k/year writing Javascript interfaces to vast databases.
What's interesting is that Columbus Day is pretty much *only* a federal holiday, unlike the others. The private sector mostly doesn't get Columbus Day off.
Instead of celebrating flawed individual people, we should reserve holidays for uncontroversial advancements, like Indoor Plumbing Day or Pre-Sliced Bread Day. Problem solved.
BTW, Columbus' whole voyage was premised on his belief that everyone else had overcalculated the circumference of the globe and therefore Asia was really only a few thousand miles off the coast of Europe. So he was a contrarian who got everything wrong but still succeeded. Better lucky than smart is the lesson, I guess.
Of course he could easily have been right in many other ways. It just so happens that the Americas are a long thin continent stretching almost all the way from North to South and blocking travel from Europe to Asia, but just about any other arrangement of land would have provided both a place to replenish supplies and an easier route to Asia.
Very Interesting. Apparently Toscanelli pitched the western voyage project to the Portugese in 1474 and was turned down. Otherwise, we might be arguing about whether we should celebrate "Toscanelli Day" or Indigenous People's Day.
"The Florentine mathematician, astronomer and cosmographer Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli (1397-1482) is probably best remembered for his proposal in 1474 to the Portuguese court of a scheme to sail west as a shortcut to reach the fabled Spice Islands in the east. Toscanelli never made it across the ocean, but his proposal did inspire Columbus, who took Toscanelli’s map with him on his first transatlantic voyage in 1492. This map shows how the Genoese navigator was not only inspired by Toscanelli, but also misguided by his underestimation of the Earth’s circumference. The error led Columbus to think he had reached Cipangu (Japan) instead of a whole new, unknown continent lying in between Europe and Asia." https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/295-cathay-here-i-come-sailing-west-to-go-east/
Not a *probable* arrangement. For obvious reasons -- lighter mobile continental plates sitting atop a semifluid mantle on a spinning sphere -- the continents tend toward the Equator, and your circumnavigable ocean routes end up in the nasty stormy high latitudes.
"Allow me to try a hostile rephrasing of your point. There is no such thing as genuine heroism worth celebrating, or traditions worth keeping - only raw power. "
I love this. And this article in general. So many brilliant arguments presented in a fun way.
I don't think replacing "Columbus Day" with "Indigenous People’s Day" is very politically savvy, if the goal is anything but "maximizing controversy". From the other comments, I read that Columbus Day is for the Italian Americans what St. Patrick's Day is for the Irish American.
If it turned out that St. Patrick was Problematic (because he was anti snakes or whatever), then just gradually renaming it for some other famous Irish person or thing would be the way to go. Replacing it with Orange Snake Day will probably not be very successful.
Then again, the assumption that the goal of the people in favor of renaming might mostly be to minimize offending minorities might be overly charitable. Optimizing for controversy fits well with my model of how the culture war works. "Who cares if some privileged white minority uses this day to celebrate their heritage rather than colonialism. Causing a big stink will raise so much more awareness."
I think there is a relevant Simpsons episode about the founder of Springfield and if he should be celebrated even though he was a pirate in reality or something.
Oh, they're diluting down the religious element very greatly, it's Paddy's Day now or even Patrick's Week as the Dubliners try to get tourism revved-up by having St. Patrick's Festival for five days:
So it's a bank holiday, drinking, maybe standing in the cold and rain to watch a brief and not very glamorous local parade, and that's about the cultural side of it (wilting bunch of shamrock on your lapel optional). Mostly it's an excuse to get a ton of our politicians out of the country as they go abroad to various nations on 'trade missions' and of course the all-important Buttering Up Current US President with the crystal bowl of shamrock (Biden's Irish heritage has been a great advantage for us here). That Cheltenham usually coincides with the day so they have a legitimate excuse to fly over to Britain for the racing is very handy, too (for them and for us, as the plain people of Ireland get to have the place to ourselves mostly while the government and as many other local politicians as can scrape a place on the jamboree depart the suffering nation):
This doesn't even get into the question of what exactly an "indigenous" person is. Is a Quechua person in Maine, thousands of miles and a continent away from his homeland, an "indigenous" person?
My impression is it's basically an umbrella term for the peoples of the New World -- more precisely, those whose first sustained contact with the advanced agrarian societies of Afro-Eurasia took place after the start of the gunpowder era. So the "original" (in that sense) peoples of the Americas, Australia, and the Pacific, along with a few less strictly "New World" cases like the pre-1400 inhabitants of the Canary Islands.
I think the common usage is that insofar as you trace your ancestry to one of those peoples, you're an "indigenous" person, regardless of whether you've since moved to Kennebunkport or Singapore or wherever.
One perhaps *could* define it that way, but in practice it is all over the place. I often see the Sami referred to as the "indigenous" people of Scandinavia, notwithstanding the fact that they don't actually seem to have been there any longer than the other native populations.
The Sami, like some of the peoples of Siberia, seem like a trickier edge case, but I think using the term still makes sense given my suggested definition. E.g., the Sami, unlike the other inhabitants of Scandinavia, were basically unaffected by the Black Death, meaning they existed outside the economic system of urbanized, technologically advanced Afro-Eurasia. It's not a case of "no contact" with that system in quite the same absolute sense as, say, the Aztecs, but I can see the justification for putting the Sami on the "indigenous" side of the line.
I've seen suggestions that the coastal populations of Sami were significantly affected by the bubonic plague. And much of Africa would fall on the "indigenous" side of your distinction, but Africans are seldom referred to as "indigenous peoples."
I definitely agree that some of the usage seems inconsistent. Maybe calling the Sami indigenous is more misleading than not, I really don't know.
As for Africa, I do often see "indigenous" used to distinguish people like the San from later-arriving Bantu-speaking groups (who I think did tend to have some connection to the broader world economy, albeit often fairly attenuated).
So maybe it's that the concept is similar, but used in the African context mainly with reference to an earlier process of contact and colonial expansion, Bantu as opposed to European.
To bring this around a bit to the original point, I note the presidential proclamation creating IPD as a federal holiday defines the word as including "American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians." I suspect the intention here is to recognize the descendants of people who are in situ in the present day 50 states (no Samoans, etc). But the genesis of the holiday in activist circles concerned the "Indigenous Populations in the Americas." The disconnect is between those two poles.
In fact, the Sami seem to have arrived in Scandinavia several centuries *after* the ancestors of the Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians did, so if we're listing Scandinavian peoples by indigineity they'd be near the bottom.
Certainly wouldn't be the first time I've failed to make any sense, but you're going to have to give me a little more to go on than that, as to which part is confusing to you.
Despite this being a pretty fantastic dialogue, I can't help but think you started from the pun of "Columbian exchange" and worked backward from there.
Question for UK or Commonwealth readers: What's the discourse around Guy Fawkes Day like these days?
I feel like it's an interesting counterpoint to this discussion. Columbus Day was created expressly as a means of promoting acceptance of a Catholic population in a heavily Protestant society. It existed as a blandly uncontroversial, largely unnoticed holiday for 90 years or so before turning into a culture war flash point, especially in recent years.
Guy Fawkes Day was created to celebrate England's identity as a Protestant state and show hostility to Catholicism. It spread to the colonies and was centuries a vehicle for anti-Catholic sentiment. Then at some point -- maybe after the Troubles? -- it settled down into what people apparently decided was just a fun innocuous affair with fireworks or something.
Is there some sort of model there for how a holiday can be declawed of its past divisiveness without needing to be completely rebranded or detached from all historical meaning? Or do people still fight over Guy Fawkes and I just don't hear about it here in the USA?
Bonfire Night/Guy Fawkes Night was a mainly *English* thing: "Remember, remember, the Fifth of November".
In Ireland, we had Hallowe'en for our autumn/start of winter festival, and Bonfire Night and fireworks were never a thing here (to the point that they are still illegal, and there are warning ads played on the radio about the dangers of them right about now). I can't speak for Northern Ireland, but the Twelfth is their day/week for marching, bonfires, and 'kick the pope':
Scotland, I imagine, was much the same as Ireland re: Hallowe'en but that easily mixed in with Bonfire Night. So mostly it's a British thing now about setting off fireworks and lighting bonfires, with little political overtones (I'm not even sure they keep up the tradition of burning an effigy, though better-informed can correct me).
TL;DR: It's not a problem any more, at least in England.
I'm a Catholic from a long-standing English Catholic family, living in Sussex, which is pretty much the heartland of aggressively anti-Catholic bonfire celebrations in England. The weekend before last I took my family to watch one of the two dozen bonfire night preparatory marches in our village, and was joined by two other Catholic families. We have been doing this since I was a child; there's no sense at all that this is any more an anti-Catholic thing and instead is very much a "burning stuff is cool and fun" celebration. I do know one super-hardcore Catholic (he doesn't believe the Pope is the Pope, which is a whole other thing) who claims to find it offensive, but I think we're down to the lizard-people-quotient here. Most modern Brits you ask would struggle to give you *any* historical detail about bonfire night and would probably not even know that Guy Fawkes was Catholic.
"would probably not even know that Guy Fawkes was Catholic."
Really?
I privately have imagined that Catholic brits secretly celebrated GF as martyr, even if actually death was fall breaking neck instead of being hanged, quartered and burned as originally intended by those Protestants.
"I’ll just be standing over here in the corner in case you decide you like truth and goodness."
I think Adraste and Beroe could agree to celebrate "Let's Beat The Stuffing Out Of Coria Day".
As for suggested historical figures, next year Coria will be tut-tutting some of the selected, just like Adraste with Columbus Day, so here goes with my best "but why do you hate truth and goodness?" dying duck impersonation:
"There are plenty of lists of the greatest historical figures. Taking this one, selecting for only Americans or America-related people, and removing people too similar to each other, we get Columbus, Einstein, Edison, Washington, MLK, Disney, Franklin, Jonas Salk, Margaret Sanger, Susan B Anthony, and Louis Armstrong. We could combine it with this list of people who saved the most lives, of which the Americans are Maurice Hilleman, Henrietta Lacks, Jonas Salk, and Norman Borlaug - I think a good consensus list for both influential and moral might replace one of Columbus, Sanger or Franklin with Borlaug, and keep the rest."
Columbus is already on the no-no list. As for the rest -
Einstein. No-no, or have you already forgotten his sexism, misogyny, and stealing the work of his wife?
Edison - tsk-tsk. Relentless self-publicist, mired in controversies over who actually first invented the inventions he claimed, took the credit for discoveries made by employees, and involved with inventing the electric chair. Do you really want to honour someone who ghoulishly profited off the death penalty, bearing in mind the carceral state that disproportionately punishes minorities?
Washington - George or Carver? If the first, no-no again. Enslaver who, while not quite as bad as Thomas Jefferson, was still bad. Read this reparative creative work by a Nebula award winner and get educated:
Franklin - as in Ben? As in the Founding Fathers? Who were all racists, remember, who founded the Electoral College so slave-holding states could be represented, and this is why we never had the First Female President who would have brought about the Green Economy utopia :
No no no. MLK was a notorious womanizer (and supposedly encouraged a rape), Salk was in favor of mandatory vaccines *and* experimented on animals and disabled children while developing his vaccine, and Armstrong is like some kind of paragon of white privilege, in addition to being a Boy Scout (boo!), frat boy at Purdue (double boo!), and Navy pilot who helped out with the neocolonialist Korean War.
Best to stick to modern mythology: we can have Leia Organa Day, T'Challa Day, Maud'Dib Day -- with the advantage that if any of these become questionable due to evolving mythology, they can easily be retconned by expert CGI reconstruction or a new film. Real people are so...messy.
I find it hard to tell whether the reference to the nonsense about Einstein "stealing" the "work" of his first wife (who failed at an exam to become a teacher, twice) is ironic or not. (On a second read - it probably is.) I suppose the fact that nonsense gets repeated in a blog sponsored by what used to be a good popular science magazine is a relevant fact in and of itself.
What is anybody's beef with Ben Franklin in particular, anyhow?
I think both Adraste and Beroe are assuming that "culture" is some unchanging thing, and that modifying traditions/holidays/etc is inherently negative. America's treatment of Native Americans (including both demonization and idolization) has been a significant part of its culture since its founding, and I think this holiday changing merely reflects our culture's changing attitudes. As such, the change preserves culture, rather than undermining it.
In my experience it isn't a handful of elites. It is the culture of "blue America" represented pretty honestly. Now "blue America" certainly has more cultural power than "red America", which you could argue is unfair, but I definitely think this represents a real cultural force.
Oh come on, people say this about literally everything in the culture wars. Our Side is made up of Real Americans, all independent thinkers who somehow all independently converged on the right ideas, Their Side is a monolithic hive mind with no original thoughts, getting its marching orders from out-of-touch elites who aren't Real Americans like us.
I don't believe the people saying it about Columbus Day any more than I believe it for anything else. People really do think that Christopher Columbus was a terrible person, it's not hard to find them!
I most commonly encounter "we have a tradition of abandoning our traditions" as and unprincipled exception from soi-disant Catholic traditionalists who like modern changes to doctrine and liturgy. Interesting to see it somewhere else for a change.
I'm not sure if it's true that Columbus Day was invented as a sop to Italian-Americans or not, but it has become a more general celebration of the European discovery and settlement of the Americas. This (rather than Columbus' own personal failings) is why "they" want to take it away, and it's why White Americans take attacks on Columbus Day as attacks on themselves.
Shifting the celebration to Mayflower Day gives us a day that we can celebrate the European settlement of the Americas while avoiding controversy around the less nice aspects of Colombo himself. It also has the advantage of being directly relevant to the USA rather than to some nearby islands. One slight problem is that the Mayflower landed on 11-11 which is already a holiday, but shifting it to the day the Mayflower left England (September 6) seems like a good compromise that gives a much-needed late summer holiday.
Are you saying we would BUCKLE under their weight?
(At the risk of ruining the joke, I am very worried for the joke itself because I'm not sure if other people think of pilgrims as buckle-delivery systems in the same way I do.)
That would still run into problems; the Pilgrims are associated with Thanksgiving, and I think that gets the usual crop of articles, same as with Christmas-and-Easter, about how 'this celebration is not what you think it is and didn't happen the way you've been told it happened':
So a second holiday celebrating the arrival of the Colonizers would not be well-received by the kind of people who insist that it should be Indigenous People's Day and not Columbus Day and gush over The 1619 Project:
Perhaps, I didn't look over the comments diligently enough, but when discussing made up holidays, no one cited Frank Costanza's "Festivus" (for the rest of us)?
[quote]Adraste: And you’re not being idealistic with your argument that we should never celebrate any holiday for anyone who has ever been associated with bad things? Except for Columbus, an exception you still haven’t even slightly explained?[/quote]
It leaves Beroe in a weird spot. Adraste says he can't celebrate Columbus day, that they are in conflict because he does. The usual reason for that is that Adraste-types say we can't have a holiday for any historic figure who ever did a bad thing. He points out an inconsistency between that statement and what the other person wants him to do, which is that the holiday the other person is trying to replace this guy's with is for flawed people as well.
Scott lets Adraste look at that and go "Now you are the person demanding we cancel holidays and replace them unless people sinless. And the burden of proof is on you, not me, the person who made the demand".
If Beroe has to defend both his position and Adrastes, he's in trouble - how could he possibly win? A good example of the implications are within the article; he doesn't NEED the Chrisanta Clausllumbus argument at the point he uses it; at the point the ball is still in Adraste's court to prove he isn't just stoking racial conflict using an inconsistantly applied principle.
I'm not sure if the US realises how unusual it is to have holidays for historical figures at all.
I had a look through all the public holidays of the other G20 countries. If we exclude "current monarch" and various long-dead religious figures, the only other two countries I found with national days to celebrate historical figures are Argentina's Martin Miguel de Guemes Day and Mexico's Benito Juarez day.
Maybe - I wouldn't be surprised at least to find we are an outlier. It doesn't seem to matter much to the argument being had here, though; Adraste would be thrilled to find Columbus day had been rededicated to a minority scientist or something.
Well, the proliferation is a modern thing, and I have no good explanation for it. But for donkey's years there were only two, Washington's and Lincoln's birthdays, and in both cases the honor isn't too high, given a good case can be made that each man was personally responsible for the survival of the Republic at a critical juncture.
This is incomplete and incorrect. Secular governments didn't have holidays because religions had Holy Days, and Christianity (pre reformation, Catholics after) has a calendar chock full of saints days.
"Labor Day was invented to screw up Communists’ attempts to coordinate around May Day as a labor protest holiday."
This is an interesting one, because the Communists themselves were appropriating a traditional holiday. May Day has been celebrated all over Europe forever:
Though this article claims it was picked by the American labour movement because of a strike that took place on 1st May:
"(T)he date was chosen in 1889 for political reasons by the Marxist International Socialist Congress, which met in Paris and established the Second International as a successor to the earlier International Workingmen's Association. They adopted a resolution for a "great international demonstration" in support of working-class demands for the eight-hour day. The date had been chosen by the American Federation of Labor to continue an earlier campaign for the eight-hour day in the United States, which had been the cause of a general strike beginning on 1 May 1886, and culminated in the Haymarket affair, which occurred in Chicago four days later."
In 1955, the Church dedicated the 1st May to St. Joseph the Worker as a counterbalance to the socialist/communist/labour holiday. So everybody has been getting in on the game of "who can take May Day for their own?"
I can readily believe the Marxists chose May 1 to get in the face of traditional May Day celebrations, since the latter were centered around agricultural bounty -- even today May 1 is pretty much when you expect to put the corn in the ground -- and they were deeply hostile to the independent successful farmer. I can see them saying we are going to replace that fucking kulak maypole with the glorious hammer[1] of the industrial worker, whom they saw as a better representative of the ideal prole, much less likely to question the wisdom of the Party.
In 1870, Pope Pius IX declared Joseph patron of the Universal Church and instituted another feast, a solemnity to be held on the third Sunday of Eastertide. Joseph always associated with workers.
Zigliari (made Cardinal by long time friend Pope Leo in 1879 -same year as George's P&P) is known to be drafting for Leo an encyclical on the rights of workers. Zigliari part of Thomistic revival. See McInerny, Ralph (1968). Cardinal Manning, also involved with draft.
In 1889 the Marxists pick May 1, in part to coopt Catholics.
Rerum finally issued in May 1891.
In 1955, Pope Pius XII introduced in its place of the 1870 feast, the feast of Saint Joseph the Worker on 1 May as an ecclesiasical counterpart to the International Workers' Day on the same day
Well, disobliging the Church would be a serendipitous twofer for the Bolshies. Guess the Church had the last laugh, though, given the nontrivial role of Karol Wojtyla in the demise of the Warsaw Pact.
A line of argument that Beroe hints at but never directly articulates is that the very concept of “Indigenous People” is extremely Eurocentric, something you would expect Adraste to be sensitive to.
For one thing, the people in question aren’t necessarily “indigenous” (or especially “First People”). What they actually are are just the people who happened to be here when the European colonists started arriving. There are actually thousands of years of many evolving and warring cultures that rose and fell since the “first people” actually arrived.
The “indigenous” that the Europeans encountered were not in every case particularly old cultures. “Oxford is older than the Aztecs” for example, and of course our primary conception of the Plains Indians involves them chasing bison on horses, which of course are an animal that didn’t exist in North America until the Spaniards brought them. Not America, but the “indigenous” Māori of New Zealand only got there 400 years before Cook did.
Now, the Australian Aboriginals, THOSE dudes are Indigenous.
For another thing lumping them all into “Indigenous People” is a remarkably arrogant act of cultural flattening for diverse peoples that differed greatly in their cultures and lifestyles and quite often didn’t particularly care for the other groups of Indigenous People around them.
>Now, the Australian Aboriginals, THOSE dudes are Indigenous.
Depends how you define it. Their ancestors were homo sapiens before they migrated to Australia, so they didn't literally come to be human in Australia, though significant genetic change obviously took place over the past 40,000 years.
I define it as they probably have a really strong argument to “direct lineage to ancestors that really were the first humans to get to where they currently live, a very very long time ago”
> Hanukkah was originally a minor celebration of a third-tier Bible story; American Jews bumped it up several notches of importance in order to neutralize Christmas.
This is incorrect: The Hanukkah story is post-biblical. Regarding how it got elevated in the US, I'm not sure the explanation given is correct either. :/
The Hanukkah story was not included in the Hebrew Tanakh, but it is very much biblical, insofar as 1 and 2 Maccabees are recognized as part of the Old Testament by the majority of Christians (including Catholic and Orthodox).
But I agree that calling Hannukah "a minor celebration of a third-tier Bible story" is misleading. It's a celebration of a mythologized revolution, an account of which made its way into the Christian Old Testament.
But I think the characterization of how Hannukah was elevated in the US is pretty accurate.
There's clearly some connection with Christmas, but I'm not sure "neutralise" is right word. Clearly the increased emphasis on Hanukkah *hasn't* neutralised Christmas, and I doubt anyone thought it would.
Kinda, right? One of the bigger challenges to my religious observance is the treatment of Advent as "Christmas Season" rather than a penitential season. And then of course it's very hard to celebrate Christmas through the octave, until Epiphany, and - if we're really feeling festive - until Candlemas.
If I were organizing holidays from the top down on a purely utilitarian basis, I would force everyone to celebrate Christmas the way they do in December but in January when everything is so much bleaker. Most of December would be dark and bleak without Christmas, but at least you'd be coming off Thanksgiving, and the beginning of winter has some novelty to it. We're not all sick of snow yet.
Well, the priest wears purple. It is penitential season.
I keep my nativity up until the Epiphany.
I think that RCC should change feast to align with Eastern Church , January 7 (as tip of hat to reunion - create some new cardinals from the Eastern church, too, who could come or not come when then next pope is selected.). This would also take us out of the secular celebrations feeding consumerism.
December is not bleak since the creation of electrified homes. Candlemas - total pagan thing that the church tried and tried in early years to stamp out candle use and finally gave in with candlemass to coopt the pagan and unsafe candle play.
To me, it seems like "Indigenous Peoples' Day" as a US holiday ought to be focused specifically on the indigenous people who live (or lived) within the area that is now the US, and the ways in which their knowledge and customs influenced the development of modern American culture. So any objection concerning indigenous people living elsewhere (Aztecs, Incas) doesn't strike me as particularly relevant.
I think it's also worth pointing out that we do have a longstanding holiday in November that already celebrates that specific thing (the contributions of specific indigenous people to early settlers in the US and their influence on development of modern American culture). But, strangely enough, that holiday isn't a particularly popular one nowadays...
I think it's generally anti-republican (little r) to have holidays celebrating specific people in general. President's Day or Independence Day or Labor Day or whatever are a better model for civic holidays. They celebrate events or traits or broad groups but not specific people. And it has the added advantage that there is neither a mythical or real person at the center so you are reduced to fighting over the general principle. Yes, there's a fight over Independence Day but it's a fight over whether the country itself is good. Which is a more interesting and relevant fight than whether Christopher Columbus specifically was X or Y. (Which ends up being a stand in for something modern anyway.)
Speaking of, when are the Rationalists going to get together and make a holiday?
We could rename Columbus Day as Colonial Day, and use it to estimate the amount of wealth extracted from colonized nations by all the colonizing empires. But then we should do a second calculation of the amount of wealth that might have been extracted by the 'exploited' nations, if they had had the technology and will to monetize their wealth themselves.
It could be argued that the United States colonized New Spain's northern frontier and exploited its minerals, but they had to counter raiding, financial failures, etc. Do the Americans colonizers apologize to Mexico and New Spain's colonizers, who apologize to the Apache, who ran off the Tohono O'odham, who inherited the land and its resources through several cultures that came before, stretching back maybe 14,000 years?
We might use the day to discuss the colonialism of Amazon and Facebook, MacDonald's and Disney.
>We could rename Columbus Day as Colonial Day, and use it to estimate the amount of wealth extracted from colonized nations by all the colonizing empires.
1. Europeans spent far more on their African colonies than they ever got out of them. Particular individuals got wealthy, but as far as th empires are concerned they were largely an economic drag. They persisted as long as they did out of a combination of A, national pride in having an empire, B, failing to understand that it was unprofitable or expecting it would eventually become profitable and C, for later years in British colonies they thought they could build functional democratic societies.
2. What does "extract" mean? Most of America's wealth was not "extracted" from the US in the traditional sense. Most of its wealth came from industrial might, not extractive industries. The natives were deprived of their land - not the wealth that Europeans generated with it.
>But then we should do a second calculation of the amount of wealth that might have been extracted by the 'exploited' nations, if they had had the technology and will to monetize their wealth themselves.
This makes no sense. "If they had the technology" - the whole point is that they didn't! Most of America's wealth is stuff that wouldn't exist if Europeans never showed up, so the Europeans did not deprive them of this stuff by colonizing America. You can oppose colonization for other reasons, but "they took the natives wealth" (beyond land) isn't one of them. There would be no factories or corportations or universities in the US if no foreigners ever showed up.
"Jesus was born in the spring; they moved Christmas to December to neutralize the pagan Solstice celebration."
Incorrect, we have several extant letters from early Church authors debating about when exactly Christ's birthday is. There is an ancient Jewish tradition that prophets died on the same day they were conceived. So, as Jesus died on March 25th, he was assumed to have been born nine months later, December 25th.
"Easter got its name because it neutralized the rites of the spring goddess Eostre." Only in Germanic countries, in the rest of the world it's still called the Paschal Mass or Pascha. So while this might be true, it doesn't follow that "All of our best holidays have begun as anti-holidays to neutralize older rites." The Paschal Mass was celebrated centuries before the Christianisation of Germany.
This post showed me some holes in my map of US culture outside the little CA slice I was raised in.
The idea that anyone cared much about Columbus day (aside from culture war objections to Indigenous Peoples day) is pretty new to me, I'm going to look further into the history of it later. I didn't even associate him strongly with Italy....
The framing of Indigenous Peoples as a holiday celebrating those cultures seems a little off. In my experience (19 y/o going to public but extra blue tribed schools) it was always more of a solemn remembering-a-genocide situation. Plus, as a kid even in elementary on Columbus day (it hadn't been renamed yet) we just learned a little about how colonialism sucked. Whatever it's called, to me it's always been a day where we get talked to about colonialism sucking, then we get a three-day weekend. I don't think it matters much what it's called, federally. My college is giving me IP's day off, my HS always listed it as IP's day, to the point I was mildly surprised to learn that the government listed it as Columbus day.
Growing up in red-state suburbia in the 80s and 90s, (in an area with very few Italian-Americans) Columbus was regarded as a hero, a notch or two below George Washington. The first time I was told that I was supposed to hate him, I was in HS in the late 90s, and it was from an unpopular activist-type kid.
However, I’ve never in my life been exposed to anything happening on Columbus Day. It’s not even a day off work or school, just a thing on the calendar.
I propose: "National history is complicated day" Where we can have discussions like this one and more and instill in our children the vital concept that the past is a foreign country! It could have fun rituals like everyone taking turns lionizing some historical figure and then someone else can read off a script why that figure was a moral monster in favor of some other figure and the next person in line can then read off a script tearing down that figure and so on and so on.
Norman Borlaug day for the win! I think I’m going to start celebrating a few of these alternate holidays in my family. Imagine how much better our society would be if people associated actually excellent historical figures with cake and parties and spending time with family.
I celebrate the treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo and all the US veterans who faught in a war that ended with the nation nearly doubling its territorial footprint. And because of those men, I was born in that area as a free American.
This post made me happier than most ACT posts in recent memory. Thank you.
Object level: I never liked Columbus Day, and the a-historicity of Chicago's Elementary School encomia to Columbus gave me the creeps a decade before I read Orson Scott Card's Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus (which is a surprisingly deep and interesting story about the power of charismatic people to affect history in random directions).
Spoiler: this novel did not redeem Cristóbal Colón in my eyes, but it did get me thinking about the holiday in pretty similar ways to how Scott is discussing them, here.
I wrote a Petrov day ceremony booklet (http://petrovday.com/), and unironically support meritocratically allocating holidays to people who deserve it.
That said, I don't think Henrietta Lacks deserves a holiday. Not because cancer research isn't important. Nor because I think giving a cell culture is insufficiently virtuous. Rather, I think Henrietta Lacks should not be honored because I hold a grudge against HeLa, the microorganism that descends from her cancer. It is most famous not for its positive contributions to cancer research, but for invading and ruining cancer research on other cell lines. I don't think this kind of Petri-dish-invasion imperialism should be celebrated!
in related/unrelated news, in my state here kids had a day off last week for Yom Kippur. Jews are a small single digit % of the population here, smaller than several other communities. Other than political clout it bewilders me why that day should be made a holiday for everyone. Also what happens when every other community starts demanding the same for their holidays.
We all work less! A good thing! We developed multicultural competence! A good thing!
Maybe we even get fusion foods. Taco Bell has brought back the Mexican Pizza for this October. Presumably to celebrate Columbus Day: Italians, Hispanics and Capitalism.
Malcom Gladwell had an interesting podcast about taco bell and pat Boone, if I'm recalling correctly.
Actually no. That day is a school holiday only, so nobody gets to work less except teachers (a profession known for having few days off otherwise), but parents have to scramble for special childcare arrangements for a day that has no meaning for most of them.
And now a transplant to Baltimore County, the schools are closed for Yom Kippur. It wasn't that observant Jewish Americans demanded the holiday. It's that the were places where significant amount of children weren't showing up to school. So they made it a school holiday.
The courts are closed for Columbus Day and state offices but notwithstanding it being a federal and state holiday, the University of Maryland is not off, because they take that day and add it to December holidays: so celebrated on 12/28. Same with Presidents' Day celebrated on 12/27, Veterans celebrated on 12/29.
Ok fine, i think we're headed into pretty intractable differences of opinion on work and unions. I've read your reply but am going to stop the discussion here before it becomes unproductive.
>Maybe if I believed that we could create an even better explorer holiday - one honoring Neil Armstrong, maybe - I could be convinced to part with Columbus Day
You know what? Let's do it. The rationalist community already has Stanislav Petrov Day and Smallpox Eradication Day, let's make July 20th Neil Armstrong Day. Who cares if it didn't affect us directly? You already made the case that the myth is more important than the facts. The moon landing is such a defining, myth-making moment of progress that people to this day say "If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we...?" as a way to express their disappointment with human progress. It's the day we celebrate humanity's aspiration to always travel farther and faster, to explore the unknown. And we can celebrate it with a guy who really did set foot on untouched land, rather than a guy who planted flags on someone else's land and pretended it was untouched.
>I’m sorry, you may be right about the history, but Indigenous Peoples’ Day is just not a very good holiday. Indigenous Peoples are just too vague and diverse to have any real attachment to them.
Take a page from The Oatmeal and celebrate Bartolome de las Casas, a contemporary of Columbus who fought for the rights of the natives: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/columbus_day
Think it should be fine for Whites to celebrate Columbus Day for their ancestors conquering this beautiful land and for Native Americans to observe Indigenous Day to lament their ancestors losing it. It used to happen in ancient times. The day some empire conquered some major city would be a feast day while the inhabitants of that city might observe it as day of mourning.
Are Italians White?: How Race is Made in America (2003)
And see: How the Irish Became White, Ignatiev (1995).
Ignatiev might be best read in connection with Amiable with Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem, Claude McKay
And with exploration of Marx thoughts on lumpen proletariat. He got the idea of ethnicity all wrong.
I honestly never knew about the New Orleans pogrom in 1892, and definitely would have never guessed that the largest lynching in American history was directed at Italians. I feel like that’s some important context that is completely ignored in the conversation around Columbus Day.
There's an HBO movie about it from the 90s with Christopher Walken. Not bad, from what I recall. Anyway, that's always been my main source of knowledge on this topic.
As a boomer and Italian American, I am kind of stunned that so many don't know about lynching of Italian Americas and the explicit connection between Columbus Day and Italian Americans.
But I knew the late Msgr. Baroni the founder of the National Italian American Foundation and grew up with the scholars involved in the neighborhood and ethnic movement of the 60s and 70s and so probably have discounted the uniqueness of my personal experiences and private study.
But boomers and older Italian Americans all know that Columbus Day is about Italians not about Columbus.
I suppose people also do not know about Notre Dame students fighting with the KKK nor about the violent and deadly riots in Niles Ohio between the KKK and Italian Americans.
I was stunned a few years ago that a friend from Tulsa did not know about Tulsa Massacre which was common knowledge to me. He told me his black Tulsa friends didn't even know about it.
I encourage everyone to do the minimal amount of work necessary to prove this false:
"Indigenous Peoples’ Day is observed by feeling vaguely guilty, making a big show of not celebrating Columbus Day, and making sure not to do anything fun or cultural related to Indigenous Peoples in any way, lest it offend someone."
Most populated areas have interesting cultural events for this holiday. Don't be a lazy bitch like Beroe, go do or see something cool.
I live in a medium-large Southern city. The only planned IPD-related event I can find by googling and looking through local events calendars -- including ones put out by tribal groups -- is one of the state parks doing an educational demonstration on arrowheads that isn't even on the actual Day.
The news reports I can find from last year's "festivities" just describe the mayor holding a news conference with tribal leaders and talking about the Fight for Equality and the Need for Change. There's no hint of any sort of grassroots celebration, nor of any sense that such a thing would be desirable or even appropriate. I did find some "Here's 6 Great Things to Do in [City] on Indigenous Peoples Day" type articles, but the suggestions are all about it being a good occasion to go visit this monument or that historic site -- none of which seem to be doing any sort of special IPD programming -- and feel appropriately nebulously bad about the whole thing.
Based on that little bit of research, Beroe's description sounds pretty accurate to me.
Sorry for the late reply. The arrowhead event sounds cool, even if it wasn't on the day itself (many events aren't b/c weekends tend to be a better time to draw crowds). Here are some examples of other events in southern cities, many of which don't sound depressing at all! These are all from the first 5 Google results of ""indigenous peoples day" events 2022 "[city],"" so maybe the event calendar sites you were using suck, or your city is especially boring.
Story Time in the Forest (Atlanta)
Multi-activity event at a Nature Center (Houston) Activities included:
- Live Demos
- Vendor Village
- Demos of replica Akokisa tools making, native plants and wildlife, & interpretive talk on the coastal prairie ecology
- Throughout the day visitors can join in the construction of a Akokisa-style winter home constructed of thatched palmetto
Event with salmon bake, drum performances, circle dancing (Jackson)
Event with live entertainment, a stickball tournament, art contest, and more (Oklahoma City)
The Language of Clay: Catawba Indian Pottery & Oral Traditions (Charlotte)
I will admit there were two cities where I didn't find anything fun in the top 5 Google results (Tallahassee, Nashville). I'm guessing these cities still had *something* going on, but probably not much, not as well advertised, or the websites have all been taken down since the events were almost 4 months school.
"Most populated areas have interesting cultural events for this holiday."
Citation, please! What 'most populated areas'? What events? We have Culture Night here in Ireland, and some people may well go to it, but most people don't, or only use it as an excuse for drinking.
So who are the most areas celebrating Indigenous Day and what do they do, and is it really more than a handful of the Usual Suspects congratulating themselves on the wonderful lecture series they ran? Outside of reservations and organisations associated with Indigenous Peoples, I mean: what white/black/brown/yellow people are celebrating this and how?
Sorry for just now seeing this, and for having a US-centric outlook. To be honest it never occurred to me that anywhere outside the Americas would even have either Columbus Day or Indigenous Peoples Day (although the latter certainly makes sense in many parts of the world). By "most populated areas" I meant "most metro areas in the US" - basically any American city or large town. Many smaller towns have events too, as reservations tend to be located in rural areas.
I'm not sure why you're asking about things "outside... organizations associated with indigenous peoples." Events put on by those groups, for the general public, are exactly what I'm talking about.
I suppose "interesting" is a matter of taste, and lectures wouldn't do it for most people (though I expect people in this comment section are more pro-lecture than the general public). There are Indeed plenty of "usual suspects" lectures, but if those don't interest you there are lots of other options: dance performances, dramatic storytelling, crafting demonstrations and workshops, culinary events, film festivals, special museum exhibits, concerts, markets. These are all things I (a white person) have enjoyed in various non-reservation communities over the years. If nothing in that vein is interesting to a given person, then I would guess that for them there is no such thing as an "interesting cultural event," and as such my comment wouldn't really apply.
Culture Night sounds cool! Maybe "most people" don't go but 1.1 million on an island with a population of ~5 million is a helluva turnout. Granted the 1.1# is from their website, so grain of salt, but that's probably still *hugely* popular even if inflated.
Finally, I generally like your posts but c'mon, you can do better than "citation, please" for something you could easily Google yourself.
I wonder whether Columbus Day is the only reason everyone learns about Columbus. The Americas we care about started in 1620. Columbus seems a lot like *South* American history, which is like a single unit in high school otherwise.
I think Beroe may be wrong about us being incapable of creating good holidays anymore. First, Pride celebrations seem pretty fun, genuine, and widespread despite being superficially similar to the example of Heritage Celebration Month. Secondly, Juneteenth isn’t entirely new but is new federally and at least is a pretty great, singular event to mythologize and celebrate. I don’t really know what to do for it yet, but it seems like the right foundation that’s not generic and is heroic. Lastly, we’re importing some of the greatest holidays from elsewhere like Holi that have awesome celebrations. So I’m quite optimistic that future holidays will be at least as awesome as Columbus Day and maybe something will come along that can topple the greatest American holiday, Halloween.
"First, Pride celebrations seem pretty fun, genuine, and widespread despite being superficially similar to the example of Heritage Celebration Month."
But only insofar as they become family-friendly, big parades with floats and streamers and bands and dancing. If the fight over "keep Pride as a celebration of LGBT sexuality" continues, you may have some families happy to let their small kids see leather and BDSM and puppy and pony play, but a lot won't be so certain about "let's go to the Pride parade" then. I could see it splitting into two events: the bland, corporate one where politicians ride in open-topped cars during the parade while the straights wave rainbow flags and then the raunchy stuff for the real Pride happens in side-streets or marked-off areas.
I think it’s a missed opportunity for us to have holidays dedicated to Fear and to Love but none to other emotions. What about a Social Awkwardness day? You could go to “haunted” houses that contain people trying to make small talk with you about sports you don’t follow. I imagine Guilt could be covered well by existing holidays, maybe combining Earth Day with Lent? Pride has been taken already, so sadly we won’t really get a holiday about self aggrandizement. Loneliness gets smuggled into Valentine’s Day or really any major holiday when you’re alone - but maybe we need to find a way to celebrate it for those that aren’t already lonely, just as Halloween creates fright in those not generally afraid. An Uncertainty day would probably be popular to the rationalist community. How about a Lost in an Unfamiliar Place day? Celebrate by going to a new city and turning off your GPS and asking strangers for directions. Actually that one sounds like a great idea with growing importance.
The kind of replacement universal festivals as described in R.H. Benson's "Lord of The World":
“I take it that it is homage offered to Life,“ said the other slowly. “Life under four aspects – Maternity corresponds to Christmas and the Christian fable; it is the feast of home, love, faithfulness. Life itself is approached in spring, teeming, young, passionate. Sustenance in mid-summer, abundance, comfort, plenty, and the rest, corresponding somewhat to the Catholic Corpus Christi; and Paternity, the protective, generative, masterful idea, as winter draws on.... I understand it was a German thought.“
Oliver nodded. “Yes,“ he said. "And I suppose it will be the business of the speaker to explain all this.“
“I take it so. It appears to me far more suggestive than the alternative plan – Citizenship, Labour, and so forth. These, after all, are subordinate to Life.“
The new festivals were "the four new festivals of Maternity, Life, Sustenance and Paternity, celebrated on the first day of each quarter."
So that would make them
Maternity – 1st December (replaces Christmas)
Life – 1st April (replaces Easter)
Sustenance – 1st July (replaces Midsummer/Harvest festivals)
Pride is already a holiday about self-aggrandizement, it's just reserved for only certain parts of society – which is... oddly apposite, for a pride-based holiday.
This was fun. Thanks. It's kinda sad that the celebration of Italian culture in America has Columbus attached to it. Dyngus day and St. Patrick's day are better in that regard. The great thing about Dyngus day and St. Paddy's (here in Buffalo NY) is that on those days everyone (who wants to be) is Polish or Irish and can join the party. All ethnic celebrations should be like that. (The 'cultural appropriation' stuff just seems silly to me.)
On a side note is there anyone saying that holding our heroes of the past to todays standards is also silly. I think it's a much better to use these 'apparent human failures' ( I sat for 5 minutes trying to find the right words here... no luck) as a window into the mindset/ culture of the past. (I do like the image of the mythical Columbus, thanks for that.) We are all sinners, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't love each other.
Cultural holidays are great. We eat their food and dance to their music and we feel one with each other... I've got a dream of an African American cultural holiday. It involves using the n word lovingly.. but it's hard to say more.
1. We should have 24 federal holidays: two per month. (Work is overrated.)
2. Presidents Day - why? Do we have a legislators day or judges day.
3. The Day of the Unknown Immigrant in lieu of Columbus Day.
4. The Day of the Unknown Native American in addition to 3.
5. MLK Day. Sigh, we should celebrate non-violent protest, we should celebrate civil rights, we should remember all victims of violence. But should we engage in secular hagiography?
6. Holidays are holy days. But what things are really "holy" in a secular state. What are the "symbols" that are important? What things are worth teaching via the symbol of a holiday.
Political
First Amendment Day
Executive Day
Legislative Day
Judicial Day
Constitution Day
Jury Day
Presumption of Innocence Day
Due Process Day
?
Sociological
Immigration, aboriginals, the abolition of slavery, pluralism, equality, solidarity, work, leisure, safety, the prevention of injury and death,?
Personal
Sacrifices of military, sacrifices of heroes, mothers, fathers, children, ?
>Presidents Day - why? Do we have a legislators day or judges day.
It's halfway between Washington and Lincoln's birthdays, because those were already holidays. They got consolidated so that the government could make the holiday always fall on a Monday. So it's two specific presidents we're celebrating.
It's a little more complicated than that. Lincoln's Birthday was never a federal holiday, although it is or has been an official state holiday in several states. Up until 1970, Washington's Birthday was observed on his actual birthday (Feb 22), but Congress changed the holiday to the third Monday in February, making the holiday the last Monday before Washington's actual birthday (between Feb 15 and Feb 21) and making Washington "First in war, first in peace, and first to have his birthday juggled to make a long weekend". This also puts the holiday, as you say, in between Lincoln's birthday (Feb 12) and Washington's actual birthday.
As a federal holiday, the official name is Washington's Birthday (Observed), but most states have it designated on their holiday calendars as either Presidents' Day or some variant on Washington and Lincoln's Birthday.
Well we could in principle hagify Congress, individually or collectively, if we didn't tend to think they were a bunch of cowardly dickheads who do stuff like turn a remembrance of The Indispensable Man into a bland porridge of opportunities for ski trips and staying out late Sunday. I'd say they missed their best chance circa Henry Clay.
If we're looking to replace Columbus Day with a celebration of someone associated with the European exploration and colonization of the Americas, then it might make sense to narrow it down slightly to *English/British* exploration and colonization, since that's more America-specific and it sidesteps the problem of Columbus being clearly the most significant foundational figure for overall European exploration.
The main names that leaps to mind off the top of my head are Walter Raleigh, John Cabot, Myles Standish, John Smith, and William Penn. Plus natives who had substantial roles in peaceful collaboration with early English colonists: Pocahontas, Powhatan, and Squanto. Off the bat, I'd eliminate Squanto and Standish since they're redundant with Thanksgiving, and then eliminate Pocahontas, Powhatan, and Smith since their story requires even more whitewashing and mythologizing than Thanksgiving.
Of the remaining people, Raleigh wins the established name recognition test by a large margin, while Penn is probably the most personally laudable of the three (Raleigh being a convicted pirate and war criminal, and Cabot being something of a blank slate due to paucity of contemporary accounts of his life and voyages). Cabot has the advantage of being a suitable hero-figure for Italian Americans in lieu of Columbus, as Cabot was an Italian mariner (probably born in either Naples or Genoa, and later became a naturalized Venetian citizen) who took service as an explorer for Henry VII.
More whitewashing for Powhatan than for Pocahontas and Smith, I should think. The English massacred the (iirc?) Kecoughtans after the starving winter, but that was after Smith had left so he had nothing to do with it. Powhatan was an effective leader whom I admire, but those who are concerned with judging historical individuals by modern sensibilities should probably know that he had the entire Chesepioc tribe annihilated man woman and child. The kidnapping of Pocahontas was hardly a general "whites vs Indians" affair either, since it also involved the Patawomecks who were in the anti-Powhatan faction; and I personally think that the affection between Pocahontas and John Rolfe was likely genuine.
Bravo! This was pretty interesting. A lot of unexpected arguments on both sides.
There were a few bits that annoyed me though, like when Beroe says "At least we got a real historical figure who we can have feelings about.", even though her position is that Columbus Day is not celebrating a real historical figure in the first place.
Incidentally, while reading this, I imagined two guys having the argument even though both characters were given female names. I wonder what that says about me.
It's not super hard to infer the sex of a writer, usually[1], and it's usually very hard for a writer of one sex to write truly persuasively from the point of view of the other. If I put a few paragraphs of any of the dialogue above into a "gender guesser"[2] it concludes both are male. Of course, it was written by a male, so this is no great surprise[3].
--------------------
[1] Try guessing the sex of the writer of journal/newspaper articles while you're halfway through. I would say I get it right at least 3/4 of the times I try.
[3] I've never been able to fool one of these programs, even if I try my best to write like a woman. I have great admiration for fiction writers who can write sufficiently like the opposite sex to not excite eye rolls from the genuine article.
Alternative "logical" way to decide what holidays to have: never mind what people did in the past, who do we *want* to celebrate now? You could have a big vote using something clever like Condorcet voting to try to avoid anything that too many people hate, and get a list that empirically reflects our current desires.
Of course, in Britain we'd end up with a Boaty McBoatface Day, but that's just what you have to live with.
1. I would think a graph of numbers of Nobel Prize winners in the physical sciences per country does count as observational evidence! Crude, to be sure, but then what wouldn't be.
2. There is (in my book) a real tendency that shows up in the revolutionary calendar, the decimalisation of everything (including the proportion of students to be admitted to École Polytechnique and École Normale - btw, see https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2016.20757), Auguste Comte (who, incidentally, was Coria in the dialogue), etc., it is
(a) a tendency rooted in the Enlightenment,
(b) not nearly as dominant, ever, as you may make it out to be.
In particular, if you talk to anybody sufficiently familiar with the French research system, and mention Napoleon, you will hear about his creation of Grandes Écoles, not about any supposed allegiance of his to some sort of universal guiding principle.
3. Thanks for the link. Feynman starts out being funny (if a bit overly simplistic) and then shows unfamiliarity with how many mathematicians work. Of course mathematicians are guided by intuition, special cases, etc. If a difference is to be made, it is that they get to choose what those special cases are, rather than having them dictated by (previous understandings of) physical reality.
The part about holidays being created to counter other holidays is questionable. Putting Christmas on December 25th, for example, might have had more to do astronomically with the winter solstice, or it might have been drawn from the belief that Jesus was both crucified and conceived on March 25th. Another theory, which is somewhat ironic if I'm using the word right, is that the date of Christmas was originally taken directly from Hanukkah.
Andraste presents it as fact that Jesus was actually born in the spring, but I don't know if there's conclusive proof of that. I think the date is a matter of both theological and historical/archaeological controversy.
It's possible that he's correct (that is, that Jesus was born in the spring, and his birthday party was moved to December to screw over the Pagans) but I'd consider it to be one valid theory among many, or perhaps one contributing cause among several, rather than the sole proven cause.
(On the actual subject of the post, briefly: I think the concept of a holiday to remember defeated or forgotten peoples is cool. Aztecs and their victims, or for other continents, maybe ancient Carthage, the Greco-Bactrians, the Tocharians, and so on. I find the politics behind Indigenous Peoples Day tiresome, but I can see some genuine appeal in the concept.)
I apologise, but as a non-American this entire debate is so insanely weird. Inventing a culture (which is essentially what is going on here) by committee, Socratic dialogue, or by using analytics or focus groups is farcical.
FWIW, there doesn't need to be a link between what is a "government mandated extra day off" and a cultural event. In the UK, the later 20th century saw a reorganisation of the "bank holidays" to fall more evenly. That's why we have "late May bank holiday" and "August Bank Holiday" which have no symbolism attached to them. I don't see why Columbus Day couldn't just be designated October Public Holiday and you can do what you like on the day...
I think the explanation is that "it was believed in ancient times" (I've never found evidence of this) (I also haven't looked for evidence) that great men died on the date of their conception. To be born in late December, Jesus would've been conceived in late March.
If I hypothetically construe the word "millionaire" as referring to any representative of the set of all glasses-wearing persons, would it be a sensible statement to say that I am a millionaire?
To answer the complaining question "What should people even do on indigenous people day", it seems as obvious as it seems fated that it will not be widely done: actually visit a local indigenous people cultural center of some kind, or otherwise spend time learning about your local indigenous people, their history, and their current biggest problems.
When Czechoslovakia was created after WW1, the left held the position that religion and the church was a relic of Austria-Hungary. So a group of members of parliament proposed a law to cancel all religious holidays and enact new "national" holidays (May 1, July 6, October 28, the greatly reduced number of holidays should have been compensated by a paid vacation of one week/year). Unsurprisingly, the proposal did not succeed.
War elephants. If that isn't enough of a reason, then no reason will suffice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Beth_Zechariah
"decorating the house with 3 little ships on the mantle-place"
That is a *great* idea and why did nobody think of it before? You should definitely be in charge of "how the heck do I make bricks without straw from this new government-ordered holiday for Seasonal Farm Workers Suffering From Fatphobia Day" because you clearly have the right mindset for making traditions and celebrations!
Spaghetti bolognese feels like the ultimate celebration of Italian culture with American ingredients.
Maybe make it turkey bolognese with a side of potatoes and corn.
Without the Pontifex Maximus to insert intercalary holidays where they are needed, the calendar would inexorably shift forwards over the years.
Do you feel the same about Juneteenth?
Bede (writing in the 8th century) provides the only direct evidence for a goddess Eostre, which he mentions precisely in giving an etymology for "Easter", although others have argued on linguistic grounds for a dawn goddess with a name something like that. What Bede says is that the month (corresponding to our April) was known as Esoturmonath after the supposed goddess and that Easter was so called because it fell in that month.
Now, that doesn't make a great deal of sense to me. I'm not sure how Bede calculated the date of Easter, but in the current method Easter only falls in April about three-quarters of the time, and it's pretty odd (and confusing) to name a festival after the month in which it falls. If one keeps the *season* of Easter for 40 days after Easter Sunday, then that will usually include most of April, so perhaps it makes more sense if Esoturmonath is read as something like "Eastertide".
In any case, the name of the month wouldn't imply any extant devotion to the goddess, just as we say "Wednesday" without worshiping Woden.
Yes, I think by Bede's time, April was called "Eastermonth", but Bede believed that the festival was called after the month and not vice versa. Many ancient etymologies are very bad, so it certainly seems possible that he just made up the Eostre thing to explain the unusual name for the festival widely known as Pascha.
Lucus a non lucendo.
I feel like the third character really should've been Cadmus, given that Adraste and Beroe both appear in the story of Sémélé.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9m%C3%A9l%C3%A9
Apparently the guy who wrote the text wandered in from the spin-off subreddit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_Houdar_de_la_Motte
These two comments make me feel like I'm back in the author's notes for Unsong
(Alternatively: This is not a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence)
Nerds!!!
So it's less that this is a bad process per se, and more that we've gotten worse at making holidays?
No, it absolutely is a bad process it's just that the stakes have gotten lower. Columbus Day was apparently an attempt to prevent future anti-Italian pogroms. Indigenous Peoples Day is apparently an attempt to acknowledge historical injustices...for some reason.
I identify with Coria so much here. There absolutely is an easy and simple solution (in theory), but neither Adraste nor Beroe is actually interested in finding a solution, the argument itself is the goal.
Adraste doesn't care whether Indigenous Peoples Day actually leads to tangible improvements in the lives of indigenous people, instead it's about signally where their sympathies lie.
Beroe also doesn't care about...celebrating explorers or whatever they were on about (if any other country has a national holiday for an explorer leave a comment please). Once again it is about signalling or trying to defend the group they were already a part of.
Coria is on the right track but doesn't quite have the best solution. As (almost) always with problems like this the best possible solution is to break apart the United States into about 15 smaller countries. There are simply too many people, spread across too wide an area, for one developed democratic state. Manufactured contestable points like this are a symptom.
Solutions like this sound impossible but really they are dismissed as "utopian" (as if that were a curse) because the A's and B's are too comfortable and their goal is just to continue the argument all while not realising that breaking up the US would give them what they really want: social cohesion without having to pick a side in pointless arguments.
Well, I think the drawbacks of dissolving the United States are many and obvious and don't need to be mentioned. So the only responses we get are about the advantages :)
That's a good point. I will put it into practice immediately and agree with you that breaking up the United States into any number of pieces >1 is a very bad idea.
In particular, as long as the US is all one country, this makes sure no part of the US will wage war on another part. (History tells us this is not an insurmountable obstacle, but the more obstacles the better.)
That just tells you that many of the commenters here are too online :-)
Wow, I can't believe I'm actually agreeing with trebuchet on something.
A lot of problems can be papered over if the money is good.
It's when the money starts to run dry that the knives come out.
> so you don't *just* need 15 smaller countries, you also need people to sort themselves into them.
Yeah, and? If people are willing to support breaking up the US, they're willing to move to the appropriate new country (in sufficeint numebrs to make this work).
That’s a big “if”. They’re not actually that interested in this.
Where is my upvote button? I tried to report this comment as AWESOME.
But seriously, I have a simpler solution, legally. Take away the federal government's overreach. States should be independently governed, and the federal government should basically be just an arbitrator between states that have strong disagreements.
Everything in USA was already set up correctly until the Fed stepped in and became too big+powerful.
But also... what are the EU states thinking, trying their damndest to make the same mistake?
The older I get, the more reasonable this position sounds to me. Especially regarding the EU, as I am a native and resident of one of its major players and can see the strain from the inside.
"Anti-EU"-positions don't seem automatically ridiculous to me, but sadly they are often mixed with some kind of hardcore illiberal ideology (or quickly taken over by them).
>"Anti-EU"-positions don't seem automatically ridiculous to me, but sadly they are often mixed with some kind of hardcore illiberal ideology (or quickly taken over by them).
You mean like, say, not wanting your people to become a minority in their own homeland? Gasp! The horror!
What is "your people"?
Are you defining it by race, or a set of cultural norms? If the latter, it sounds like you just don't like competition. If you have the better culture you'll win. Countless examples throughout history. The Mongols conquering China and basically becoming Chinese for instance.
Can we maintain this without biting the bullet of "sorry colonized peoples, I guess your culture was just inferior"?
Yes, and cultures and ethnicities in fact do fight each other, along ethnic and cultural lines. For access to resources.
The current "liberal" norm is that every culture, race, and gender is to be celebrated and given space to develop, flourish and stay true to itself. Unless of course, that culture is a white one.
If these conflicts are done via PR war (and there's strong evidence that at least while the US stays the global military hegemon, even real wars are PR wars for the voters who get to decide how many cruise missiles get fired from USS Spitoon) then it should be viewed as a SHOCKING EMERGENCY for white people that they are not allowed to advocate for their own ethnicity even as every other race is getting special carve outs.
I think anti-EU positions make sense in Europe, where people mostly still have a strong national identity rather than a European identity. But it is utter nonsense in the US. Few people identify with their state - in fact, politics has gotten increasingly nationalized in recent years. It is common for people to move around the country. Personally, I have family in at least seven different states. Trying to split up the US is obvious lunacy, even before you get into the real issues.
A lot of people in the midwest do in fact identify with their state more than the nation. Notably though, if I’m understanding the general gist of the posts, is not splitting up the US to the degree of closed borders, merely lowering federal powers. (In this context, each state decides on recognized holidays instead of the central gov, and central gov may ie. say the number of minimum holidays.)
Wouldn't you still need a unified set of holidays for federal workers in order to avoid confusion? That sounds a lot like the status quo. It is *already* the case that state and federal holidays differ.
https://rpstranslations.wordpress.com/2018/02/15/the-confusing-list-of-holidays-in-the-united-states/
I think a lot of people identify with their state, and its unique traditions, like referring to distances by units of time, and “don’t like the weather? Wait five minutes!”
They don’t realize that the state is just this made up thing that affects a few minor laws and nothing else. It’s like the people who think San Antonio is a bigger city than Atlanta because they pay attention to these relatively meaningless lines on a map rather than the real regional cultural divisions.
I highly recommend doing more research; the cultural and legal differences between states is a far broader topic than I could cover in a post, but I can note a few key examples:
*Major differences in immigration and refugee policy
*Major differences in lgbt/discrimination law
*Taxes
*Alcohol
These cause cultural drift as populations change, and sometimes even the layout of cities is affected visibly when crossing a border between states. ie. States that held onto prohibition era restrictions on how retailers may sell alcohol longer still have districts built around specialized alcohol retailers (with some states still maintaining restrictions to this day). Other differences are less immediately visible and easier understood through statistics: ie. distribution of trans youth and adults vary _differently_ by state with a rough positive correlation on when laws and care availability changed in that state (rough since margins of error are pretty wide). Here's a map showing the two differing distributions: https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/subpopulations/transgender-people/
I do agree that for many regional cultural divisions, a different mapping than states would be more apt. I have major disagreements with how Woodward divvies things up, but his mapping provides an okay example visual:
https://www.businessinsider.com/the-11-nations-of-the-united-states-2015-7
However, all the folks I have spoken with about this will attribute their regional culture to their state if they need a quick shorthand.
Thing is, we don't really have a nation of blue states & red states. What we have, instead, is blue cities, red rural areas, and purple suburbs. Devolving more power locally would make San Francisco Democrats or Wyoming Republicans happier, but would leave Central Valley Republicans or Austin Democrats even unhappier than they are, so the next phase would be states breaking up and cities trying to become city-states with suburbs caught in a constant tug-of-war.
And when you step back and consider what the issues actually are, it seems even silly to consider. Do we really need to balkanize our highway system, water rights, establish a bunch of independent militias, all because some people would rather have Columbus Day and some would rather have Indigenous People's Day?
I dunno. I think a lot of the "we need to break up" sentiment just comes from being Too Online. It's trying to take symbolic contests, fought mostly on social media, and bring them into the real world. It might feel satisfying to the angriest of Culture Warriors, but I don't think it would really leave any of us in a better place.
We need to destroy communication and transport technology until such over structures are simply impossible.
That's when the Mongols come for you!
Khan 2024!
What you USians need is to turn each state Senate into single-district statewide representative chambers, and make each representative of the House of Representatives directly matching their county or city as state Senates work today.
We had that - it was ruled unconstitutional for reasons I still don't understand.
We did?? Do you have a link for this?
Senates, political parties, and representative democracy are all stupid. We need direct democracy voting on individual policy proposals (not junk drawer bills which package together dozens of unrelated policies).
>ut would leave Central Valley Republicans or Austin Democrats even unhappier than they are, so the next phase would be states breaking up and cities trying to become city-states with suburbs caught in a constant tug-of-war.
California and Texas would likely be broken up. And there would be movements of people after/during any break-up of the US to better match the new countries. If people are willing to support the US being broken up, they're willing to move state.
>And when you step back and consider what the issues actually are, it seems even silly to consider. Do we really need to balkanize our highway system, water rights, establish a bunch of independent militias, all because some people would rather have Columbus Day and some would rather have Indigenous People's Day?
No, this is just a high-level example of something vastly more fundamental. The left are increasingly forcing their ideology into the public school system and furiously opposing any efforts at school choice being a thing, and many people are rightfully extremely angry about this. This is an extremely fundamental issue - people trying to basically indoctrinate one's children. This isn't some online culture wars bullshit, this is people not wanting their children fucked with. The left have no interest in respectfully living and letting live - they're playing for keeps and forcing people to have no other option. Or take immigration. DC and blue states are preventing any meaningful measures being taken to secure the borders, but are also expecting anti-immigration southern states to shoulder most of the burden of immigration. Again, not a bullshit online culture wars issue.
>It's trying to take symbolic contests, fought mostly on social media, and bring them into the real world.
No, you're the one who's too online, because you're not seeing the real things happening in the real world.
As a lefty who grew up with Columbus day celebrations in public school in a place and time where fact-based sex ed & "dangerous" books were often banned, this is hilarious to me:
> The left are increasingly forcing their ideology into the public school system
"Indoctrinating" children in public school has been going on a long time. This is not new or a problem with "the left" alone. But perhaps you can take comfort in the fact that at least some children learn to think for themselves, in spite of the indoctrination.
Why is it hilarious to you ? The (American, Woke) left is indeed forcing their shibboleths into the public education system more and more, and observing that $NON_LEFT_GROUP has been doing it forever and in other places is irrelevant.
The public school system is indeed a pathetic indoctrination institution from the 19th century, but that doesn't mean it makes no difference to add 10 more catechisms to the pile does it? if you can't outlaw slavery at least make it illegal to abuse slaves.
At this point, I would like to introduce these two facts:
1) In schools in the UK, a daily act of divine worship is a legal obligation.
2) The UK is one of the least religious countries in the world.
I'm not sure I follow what you're saying, but first let me acknowledge. that I was making my point a little too light-heartedly to get it across, so let me restate my thesis: that the modern US does not have many problems that would actually be solved by dissolution.
Your reply seems to demonstrate that. You bring up education .. but K-12 education is already largely a state matter. Florida just famously revamped their state curriculum, and the federal government didn't really play a role there. How would secession impact that? Or do I misunderstand what you're saying? I'm trying for honest debate here, but if I come across as flippant, I apologize, it's not my intent.
On immigration, I think you have a stronger point, but I don't think it's quite as clear-cut as you suggest. It's easy to blame DC & blue states, but several of those blue states are also border states, while some of the biggest anti-immigrant moves and rhetoric are coming from opportunistic politicians in non-border states.
More to the point, there's been an effort nationwide to muddy the waters about what the problem is. The migrants who have led to the biggest policy controversies are not illegal border crossers, but rather legal asylum seekers. A border wall makes for a good rallying fight but it would not solve that issue. The people DeSantis flew to Massachussetts were not illegal crossers, nor are most of the people being bused to DC and elsewhere. So the complaints about them would ring more effectively if Republicans had an actual plan to reform our asylum system. As far as I can tell, they don't, and they didn't do much in the 2 years they had full control of the government.
To be clear, I agree it's a problem that needs to be solved, but I think the extent that it's a "major crisis" has been overblown relative to the "grandstanding politicians looking to score points" factor, which is why people like Greg Abbot act like the border wall is going to fix something that it's not going to fix.
But I welcome your thoughts, seriously.
We need to break up the cities into urban villages. It should be possible to fight city hall. People in the Blue zones like doing things at the federal level, because the federal government is more responsive and less corrupt than their "local" government.
Democrats need real democracy.
https://rulesforreactionaries.substack.com/p/rule-6-break-up-the-blue-zones
> Everything in USA was already set up correctly until the Fed stepped in and became too big+powerful.
Counterpoint: the Commerce Clause (which is the means by which the Federal government arrogated most of its power to itself) is one of the USA's superpowers, because it allows a huge internal uniform market.
> But also... what are the EU states thinking, trying their damndest to make the same mistake?
They're mostly thinking "Hey, remember that world-spanning war we just had, that left the continent in ruins? And the one we had a few years before that? And the centuries of previous wars before that? How about we stop doing that, 'kay? 'Kay." But also "You know how the USA's giant internal market has made it an economic superpower? Let's get us some of that."
So you end up putting the Bundesbank and assorted French bureaucrats in charge of the whole continent? Um. Perhaps not the most brilliant of ideas (which may help explain recent electoral movements in Poland, Hungary, and Italy, and of course Brexit).
I didn't say it was a perfect plan, but that was the rationale :-) And I think it did help achieve peace in Europe, along with other organisations (chief of which, obviously, was the Red Army).
We already tried that, back in the 1700s. It didn't go well.
"Everything in USA was already set up correctly until the Fed stepped in and became too big+powerful."
And when was that, exactly? Because up until 1865 we had periodic threats to secede and attempts by states to nullify national laws on things like tariffs which clearly are within the constitutional list of federal powers, capped off with a massive Civil War. The war was so horrible that the reconquered area was ruled under outright military government for a while, and a radical faction took/was given power and implemented three new constitutional amendments which permanently subordinated the states to federal primacy. The conquered areas were too poor and backward for anyone to care about for a while after that, so there was national peace and harmony until mass media put their backward ways in front of everyone's faces again and oh god now we're here.
It's *HARD* to cram multiple cultures into a single state, and procedural safeguards only work until clever politicians, lawyers, and activists find some way to circumvent or subvert them, which happens pretty quickly.
Preach on, brother!
Amen.
Scott's article is a fascinating exercise in maximally steelmanning two culture war camps, by the way.
I was thinking, as I read, that the correct way to solve the "Indigenous Peoples"-is-too-vague problem is to have 15 different holidays for 15 different indigenous peoples, each celebrated in the correct region of the US. (I wasn't actually thinking the number 15. I stole the 15.)
I admit I didn't go as far as to decide that the entire country should be split up to make this happen.
Alternately - and in distinctly American tradition - you commission a comic book featuring a superhero team where each is exemplary of one of the people of these continents. So you'd have Incaman, The Incredible Crow, Mary Sioux, Captain Clovis, Blackfoot Bill, Alcohuatl, etc.
Of course, as was anticipated in the OP, you then run into the problem of rampant stereotypes that everyone's uncomfortable with, not to mention merchandising wars, holiday cards clogging the landfills, etc. So it's probably better to keep this stuff out of culture. The world isn't some Sid Meier videogame.
Or you could have one holiday which is celebrated in regionally distinct ways, just like the rest of them. Lots of tribes do cool events, just look up what's going on in your region. This argument is pure bullshit: "Indigenous Peoples’ Day is observed by feeling vaguely guilty, making a big show of not celebrating Columbus Day, and making sure not to do anything fun or cultural related to Indigenous Peoples in any way, lest it offend someone."
One can choose not to do anything fun or cultural but there's no lack of options.
There's a lot more than 15 different recognized tribes though, and then you get into questions about celebrating historical tribes too.
I would ask the champions of Indigenous Peoples Day if they would also like to see it introduced in European countries, and if not, why not.
If “indigenous” means people who were dispossessed of their land by settler colonists, rather than just NIMBYs of any sort, then seems like a good idea. Wikipedia says:
Notable indigenous minority populations in Europe that are recognized by the UN include the Sámi peoples of northern Norway, Sweden, and Finland and northwestern Russia (in an area also referred to as Sápmi); the Uralic Nenets, Samoyed, and Komi peoples of northern Russia;[127] the Circassians of southern Russia and the North Caucasus; the Crimean Tatars, Krymchaks, and Crimean Karaites of Crimea in Ukraine; the Basques of Basque Country, Spain and southern France; the Sorbs of Germany and Poland, the Irish of the island of Ireland,[128][129] and the Albanians of the Balkans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples#Europe
Perhaps it should be renamed 'anti immigration day', following the principle that prevention is better than cure.
"Manufactured contestable points like this are a symptom."
It's the government's fault for manufacturing officially designated collective holidays in the first place. Just let everyone celebrate whatever they want, when they want.
The UK really has a leg up on the US here, with bank holidays. Nobody (as far as I am aware, other than maybe school children in non-progressive districts) actually "celebrates" Columbus Day. It's just a day off of school and/or work, with some furniture sales thrown in for good measure. The UK seems to realize that you can just, you know, give people an official three day weekend every so often for no particular reason.
This is it right here! Part of the reason we have "federal holidays" in the first place is to give government employees state-mandated time off (this may be a (revived) holdover from the medieval Catholic tradition of having festival days about once a month when it was illegal to work). They don't need fancy names. Just one three day weekend a month, please! Call it whatever you like.
Oh yes, this sterile, souless approach is much better than countries with REAL cultural holidays and traditions. All those countries who happily celebrate their holiday and express love and pride in their country and its traditions are fools - they should just have a "day off" which they can use to watch netflix and stuff.
"Just let everyone celebrate whatever they want, when they want."
People don't want this, therefore it's not a practical answer to the problem.
> if any other country has a national holiday for an explorer leave a comment please
People in many countries celebrate Vostok 1 and/or STS-1 flights on April 12 (the holiday is known by various names, including Cosmonautics Day, Yuri's night, International Day of Human Space Flight, International Day of Aviation and Cosmonautics, etc).
I don't know which countries have it as a national holiday, but I suspect some do.
>Solutions like this sound impossible but really they are dismissed as "utopian" (as if that were a curse) because the A's and B's are too comfortable and their goal is just to continue the argument all while not realising that breaking up the US would give them what they really want: social cohesion without having to pick a side in pointless arguments.
The idea of social cohesion in the US is vastly more utopian than breaking up the US is. The culture wars aren't ending, and thinking they will either because both sides settle their differences or the left triumphs over the right is detached from reality. Splitting up the US is the cold pragmatist solution here.
I don’t get this at all. Often someone in San Francisco has more in common with someone in Atlanta than either do with people living 50 miles away from them. You can’t really carve up most of the US geographically to achieve social cohesion. Not is cohesion actually that great. I value different viewpoints, even if some aspects of that are sometimes maddening.
Do the nukes get evenly distributed among the 15?
It might work out naturally. Pretty sure the land and air legs of the nuclear triad are all in red states, and the submarine leg is in blue, with the tricky exception of purple Virginia. (And San Diego is actually not blue, but we're assuming it doesn't get to secede on its own.)
San Diego and Norfolk are both relatively purple for cities.
Yes, that's what I said (or meant to say). But we're presuming they don't get to secede on their own, so San Diego has to go with California as a whole.
Re. "As (almost) always with problems like this the best possible solution is to break apart the United States into about 15 smaller countries. There are simply too many people, spread across too wide an area, for one developed democratic state.":
We tried that already with the Articles of Confederation in 1777, and it didn't work. It turned out that without a strong central government, we aren't powerful enough to repel an English or French invasion.
>As (almost) always with problems like this the best possible solution is to break apart the United States into about 15 smaller countries.
Or maybe 50 mostly independent states with their own governments, but still some limited federal government that addresses issues that concern interactions between them. In my opinion, we need to seriously curtail the massive overreach of the federal government and abuse of the commerce clause, and actually give the majority of political power back to the states. Probably not as much as was originally intended, the modern world is much more interconnected than it used to be, but much more than now.
I feel like Adraste missed two obvious counterpoints at the end there.
First, does anyone actually have the same level of sentiment about Columbus Day as they do about Christmas? As Beroe himself pointed out, it's an artificial holiday that was invented relatively recently. Not only is there a positive side effect of replacing it, but the negatives are almost certainly much lower.
Second, Columbus Day is a *federal* holiday. I think there's actually quite a good argument for replacing the federal holiday of Christmas with a secular alternative, since the government really shouldn't be endorsing a particular religion. Christians would still have their day off to celebrate Christmas the same as always and non-Christians can at least nominally be included by Winter Day or whatever. It's not like Christmas would be abolished, the government would just be taking a slightly more neutral stance toward it. Similarly, if people out there genuinely do celebrate Columbus Day, renaming it while retaining its status as a federal holiday lets those people still celebrate it while also allowing the US government to be nominally more inclusive to Native American citizens who justifiably hate Columbus's guts.
Put another way, I disagree with Beroe's point that we'll end up with sterile and meaningless holidays. *Federal* holidays could easily become sterile and meaningless, but they already kind of are. Real holidays will be celebrated exactly as long as people care about them.
I mean, American Christians did fine for 100 years without having their god's birthday celebrated by the government. I don't know why you're acting like it's some evil existential threat to Christmas. My whole point was that federal holidays and private holidays are obviously different things and should be held to different criteria.
>How much of the anti-Columbus Day agitation comes from your average guy on the reservation? I would bet you a shiny nickel that the vast majority of Native Americans could not possibly care less; this is being driven by political activists, generally with malevolent goals.
I had trouble finding direct polling of Native Americans about this. However, the map of states that have replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous People's Day correlates reasonably well with the map of states with high Native American populations, which seems like as good a proxy as any. I don't know what you could possibly mean by "malevolent goals", but I really recommend that you cut back on the melodrama. It can't be good for your blood pressure.
I suspect if you just polled them they could well be supportive of a change. I suspect if you polled the Chinese about changing Christmas to Spring Festival and celebrating it a couple months later they would also be supportive. But what is intensity of the feeling? For the topic at hand I'd expect to see evidence like people camping in protest in front of state legislature, demonstrations, indian nations making available funds for lobbying etc. All this may actually be happening i have no idea, just saying that polling is not going to be a good signal of whether people care.
The size of Chicago’s Columbus Day parade and the continuing efforts to have the Columbus statue (removed in 2020) returned to its place of honor point to “Yes” on the sentiment question, at least for an influential community here.
Only four years ago, the local Italian-American community successfully resisted efforts to rename Balbo Drive, a street in a prominent location named after a prominent literal Fascist (an early leader of the party who built Mussolini’s air force and ran large parts of North Africa before being shot down, poetically, by Italian air defenses).
They may win or lose on the statue or Columbus Day in the long run (the statue at least hasn’t yet been returned) since there are competing interests at play. But their fervor clearly isn’t casual. And if 80-odd years of Blackshirts being non grata in the US hasn’t led to a deal renaming Balbo Drive after Monteverdi or something, I’m guessing it’ll be a while before the rather newer turn against Columbus makes a dent in their enthusiasm.
I don't believe you.
I for one completely forgot about Columbus Day until this very post. It is a total nothing of a holiday, and I do not believe anyone who says otherwise.
I literally forgot one year and was wondering why the Disney trip I’d scheduled in “quiet” October had such huge crowds till someone reminded me.
But the parade goes right by my office. There are definitely people for whom it’s a Big Deal, and a penumbra of politicians and businesspeople who need to be seen honoring it by those people.
It really depends on how large the Italian population of your city is. It's like how I completely forget about St. Patrick's Day, unless I'm in Boston for it, where everything turns green. St. Patrick's Day does show that the local parades can continue, even if the Federal Holiday is no longer recognized.
This, I think, is a big part of the debate that both sides fail to get. Where I live, there's essentially no organized Italian American community, and in fact the Native American community is more visible (and certainly more organized).
Whereas I friends from college who, now, in their mid-30s, can't tell you whether they've ever even met a Native American, but lived in places where Columbus Day is a genuine thing.
Endorsed. Am I the only one here who remembers that Sopranos episode about this very topic? It's fiction, sure, but this was drawing on some real world sentiments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_(The_Sopranos)
Silvio wants to take action against Native Americans protesting the Columbus Day parade, believing their actions to be insulting to Italian-Americans. Without Tony's approval, he, Patsy, and Artie attempt to break up the demonstration, in which Little Paulie and several others are injured. Later, Ralphie threatens the protest leader, Professor Del Redclay, with publicizing the fact that Iron Eyes Cody, a popular Native American figure, is actually an Italian-American. Tony unsuccessfully appeals to Assemblyman Ron Zellman and to an Indian chief to convince Redclay to cancel the protest. However, the chief invites Tony and his crew to his casino. Both the parade and protest occur without mob intervention, which upsets Silvio. Tony forcefully argues to Silvio that his achievements came through his own abilities, not through his heritage, and scorns the idea that everyone belongs to a victimized group.
At a luncheon meant to instill Italian pride in women, the "mob wives" feel singled out when the speaker attempts to dissociate Italian culture from the Mafia. After the luncheon, Gabriella lectures Father Phil about how much the mob wives, especially Carmela, have given to the parish, and says he had no right to bring in a guest speaker who intended to shame them.
"He was gay, Gary Cooper?"
Come on, if your over 55 and an Italian American Columbus Day was and is a thing.
It was never really about Columbus it was about being Italian American.
And we were ignorant about the historical Columbus and his brother. We also smoked, used leaded gas, and didn't wear seatbelts.
This leads to a position none of the three characters considered but which seems superior to all three: rebrand Columbus day after some *other*, cooler Italian. There are tons of options. Galileo would be my pick--even sticks with the basic theme of human striving into the unknown.
Galileo never visited the Americas.
The theme of Columbus was not exploration - it was stop lynching Italian-Americans.
The concept of being an "Italian American" was formed in the US not in Italy which is arguably younger that the US, see timeline of Risorgimento.
I suppose I'd pick Mother Cabrini, but why pick just one.
If I were the philosophy monarch, I'd have a holiday every month on the 1st celebrating American pluralism. 10 for each of largest ethnicities (after every decenial census you'd recallibrate based on American Community Survey Ancestry Question), 1 for First Peoples and one in general for all immigrants.
In the 60s and 70s, Columbus day also started becoming important to so-called Hispanic communities (Do you think Mexican Americans cheer for the same teams in the World Cup as Guatemalan Americans? Central American community actively cheer against Mexico's team!)
In lieu of new holidays, why not just have a ceremonial secularized baptism right: A statute of Columbus is brought out once a year. Red paint is splashed on it symbolizing pasta sauce for Italians, salsa for Hispanic communities, and genocide. Then in the evening a parade carries the statute to the nearest body of water where it is light on fire and thrown into the water, symbolizing a proper disdain for worshiping or revering any particular individual. (My adopted home of Baltimore way ahead of the curve.)
Not gonna work, I'm afraid. Any rebrand will inevitably be understood as "boo Columbus" and not some spontaneous expression of admiration for Alessandro Volta or whomever.
The other problem, as pointed out by JDK above, is that you can't just replace Columbus with some random eminent Italian because the point is that Columbus uniquely represents a *connection* between America and Italy.
Italians didn't participate very much in the early phases of European settlement of North America, so unlike people of English, French, Swedish, Dutch, etc. descent, Italians in the late 1800s were seen as new arrivals lacking connections to American history and culture. I take it the symbolism of Columbus was by way of saying, "Look, we were here at the start! The OG Euro-American was an Italian dude! We have as much claim on the great Westward-expanding Indian-subjugating tradition as anybody!"
Obviously, many people today don't particularly care for that narrative. But for those who are still attached to it, substituting Galileo for Columbus isn't going to carry any of the same meaning.
I've suggested though solution.
Every year you trot out a statute of Columbus. He is baptized with red paint symbolizing pasta sauce(For Italian Americans ), salsa (go for Hispanic American) and blood (for the genocide of First Nations).
In the evening, he is spayed with silly string (spaghetti) and then thrown into the nearest body of water in reparation for sins.
Pizza, pasta and tacos are served with red wine for a St. Patrick Day like celebration of American pluralism.
Garibaldi spent some time in the US. Granted, maybe it would have worked better if he'd accepted the Major-General's commission he was supposedly offered by the Union during the Civil War. (He reportedly refused unless he was made commander-in-chief and given the power to abolish slavery.)
I am 37. I remember that some years around Columbus Day we would read about Columbus in school or otherwise have a Columbus-centered curriculum. I was an adult before I learned it was ever supposed to have anything to do with Italian-Americans, and I have still never seen this matter in real life.
Yeah but you grew up in California in the recent past, pretty much the definition of bland nonculture, since essentially everybody moved here within the last 50 years. If you'd grown up somewhere where there as 300 years of history with multiple overlapping waves of European immigration it might be different.
I grew up in Georgia, which has nearly 300 years of history. and the closest thing I ever saw to a Columbus Day celebration was being taught the mythologized account of Columbus's voyage in 1st grade, making some paper boat decorations, etc. And I don't think it was ever "celebrated" in any of the higher grades.
Carl Pham beat me to it -- I was just going to say that I'm not at all surprised if that connection hasn't ever really been a thing in Orange County, or maybe anywhere in CA for that matter.
It would have been a thing in San Francisco. Do you thing Pelosi didn't celebrate Columbus Day as an Italian thing in little Italy in Baltimore growing up.
Columbus Day is Italian American St Patrick's Day.
Cities with sons of Italy or garibaldi clubs always sponsoring parades. Alienate Italian American vote at your peril.
The fact that the Transamerica Bank Pyramid (formerly Italian-American Bank) sits at the base of Columbus Ave, the main diagonal artery of the Italian neighborhood of San Francisco, suggests that there’s at least one neighborhood in San Francisco where Columbus Day was likely a big thing.
When schools were not off, in 60s and 70s, my mom Italian American (parents born in Italy) would let us stay home.
We also all knew he sailed for Spain and probably wasn't really Italian.
Mario Cuomo was asked by the first law firm if he could change name to Mark Conrad!
In the 80s at law firm interview, I was asked how a "pollack" would fit in at silk stocking firm. I have Polish last name. I walked out.
I am Italian and I stand by what I said.
> First, does anyone actually have the same level of sentiment about Columbus Day as they do about Christmas?
Is easily answered with an emphatic no.
Ok, you're "Italian" but are your "Italian American"? And if American how old are you?
Yes Italian American, over 30.
My parents and grandparents have also never celebrated Columbus Day as far as I know.
Keep in mind I mainly objected to the notion that it was anywhere near the relevance of Christmas, which I think is pretty self evident.
I (not American, mind) didn't know Columbus Day was a thing at all, and when Beroe brought it up, I thought it was an alternate history idea Scott had made up to set up a reversal test.
I learned something today.
Here's an even more extreme example: what about holidays that are not federally recognized, such as Mardi Gras? Depending on where in the US you live you may have never even heard of it, but down in New Orleans, Louisiana, depending on when Ash Wednesday falls, it can be a MONTHS long celebration filled with parades and partying. It gets raucous enough to be compared with Carnival in Brazil, while lasting longer. You'll usually have big celebrations depending on how big of a French/Acadian/Cajun population is in your state, which is why there's also a similar (though not quite as big) celebration in South Padre Island, Texas.
In terms of being a celebration that's a bit problematic, Mardi Gras is French for "Fat Tuesday", the Tuesday before the Christian holiday of Ash Wednesday, which is the start of Lent, a period of 40 days of fasting and personal sacrifice commemorating Jesus's 40 day walk through the desert while getting tempted by the devil. Fat Tuesday was created as a way to get all of your sins and gluttenous urges out of your system before that long period of denial, which honestly kind of defeats the purpose. The modern celebrations are known for getting WAY out of hand, to the point of inspiring an entire genre of pornography (GGW for those who are curious).
So people who celebrate it are basically negating whatever good that Lent will do for them, and potentially partying even HARDER than they would have overall had neither holiday been a thing.
Interesting. This is the first time I've heard of anyone actually celebrating Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples Day. I'm serious.
Oh, and this argument:
>Beroe: What about “Indigenous People’s Day is offensive because indigenous peoples were frequently involved in slavery and genocide”?
Is not that rare in my experience, though it usually comes up in the context of genocide apologia rather than this specific argument about holiday names. Again I feel that Adraste missed an easier counter, which is that it's quite natural to pin Columbus's crimes on Columbus, while there's no reason to tar the average, non-evil indigenous person with the actions of the evil ones. It's also the case that Columbus's crimes aren't really separable from the achievement he's celebrated for, while the history and culture of indigenous peoples are certainly much larger than war and violence.
Societies that *never* practiced human sacrifice are probably in the minority (in the Americas as elsewhere) - and societies that were really, really into it, and can't get enough of it (like the Aztecs, or probably the Moches in Peru, but not the Incas) are the exception; if you do that to other people, they eventually rebel, and if you do it to your own best, strongest and brightest - well, that's not a good way to ensure your future, now, is it.
And Americans who talk about the indigenous are mostly referring to the tribes who lived on the territory of what's now the United States.
Some of these tribes were indeed capable of great violence, but not significantly different from contemporary Europeans, and nothing in comparison to the industrial-scale slaughter associated with the Aztecs.
In fact, I'm pretty sure the Aztecs were a far outlier in terms of violence in the Americas, even when you account for the sacrifice-friendly Mayans.
In fact, warfare among the more "warlike" Plains groups was highly ritualized: a way to get high honors was to literally touch your enemy three times in battle without hurting him, for instance.
Okay, but this certainly wasn't the case for, e.g., the Apache or Comanche. Indeed, the Plains Indians themselves did not fight this way against outside enemies — and even against each other, that was more of an ideal than the norm: they slaughtered each other plenty.
More than closely related European groups did to each other? A society where groups genuinely try to annihilate each other is not sustainable.
Absolutely more than closely-related European groups did to each other. Native Americans generally practised what's known as "first-system" war, which tends not to draw any distinction between combatants and non-combatants:
[i]"The oldest way of war was what Native North Americans called – evocatively – the ‘cutting off’ way of war (a phrase I am borrowing from W. Lee, “The Military Revolution of Native North America” in Empires and Indigines, ed. W. Lee (2011)), but which was common among non-state peoples everywhere in the world for the vast stretch of human history (and one may easily argue much of modern insurgency and terrorism is merely this same toolkit, updated with modern weapons). The goal of such warfare was not to subjugate a population but to drive them off, forcing them to vacate resource-rich land which could then be exploited by your group. To do this, you wanted to inflict maximum damage (casualties inflicted, animals rustled, goods stolen, people captured) at minimum risk, until the lopsided balance of pain you inflicted forced the enemy to simply move away from you to get out of your operational range.
The main tool of this form of warfare (detailed more extensively in A. Gat, War in Human Civilization (2006) and L. Keeley, War Before Civilization (1996)) was the raid. Rather than announcing your movements, a war party would attempt to advance into enemy territory in secret, hoping (in the best case) to catch an enemy village or camp unawares (typically by night) so that the population could be killed or captured (mostly killed; these are mostly non-specialized societies with limited ability to incorporate large numbers of subjugated captives) safely. Then you quickly get out of enemy territory before villages or camps allied to your target can retaliate. If you detected an incoming raid, you might rally up your allied villages or camps and ambush the ambusher in an equally lopsided engagement.
Only rarely in this did a battle result – typically when both the surprise of the raid and the surprise of the counter-raid ambush failed. At that point, with the chance for surprise utterly lost, both sides might line up and exchange missile fire (arrows, javelins) at fairly long range. Casualties in these battles were generally very low – instead the battle served both as a display of valor and a signal of resolve by both sides to continue the conflict. That isn’t to say these wars were bloodless – indeed the overall level of military mortality was much higher than in ‘pitched battle’ cultures, but the killing was done almost entirely in the ambush and the raid."[/i]
https://acoup.blog/2021/02/05/collections-the-universal-warrior-part-iia-the-many-faces-of-battle/
The Comanche weren’t a traditional indigenous plains group. They are the result of a group of mountain people that expanded onto the plains after European contact, started capturing and riding feral horses, and developed a new syncretic culture based partly on the culture of the plains Indians they displaced.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comanche_history
"Empire of the Summer Moon," a biography of a 19th century Comanche band leader, starts with a couple chapters
"Seven men were killed in the raid, though that does not begin to describe the horror of what Mackenzie found at the scene. According to Captain Robert G. Carter, Mackenzie’s subordinate, who witnessed its aftermath, the victims were stripped, scalped, and mutilated. Some had been beheaded and others had their brains scooped out. “Their fingers, toes and private parts had been cut off and stuck in their mouths,” wrote Carter, “and their bodies, now lying in several inches of water and swollen or bloated beyond all chance of recognition, were filled full of arrows, which made them resemble porcupines.” They had clearly been tortured, too. “Upon each exposed abdomen had been placed a mass of live coals. . . . One wretched man, Samuel Elliott, who, fighting hard to the last, had evidently been wounded, was found chained between two wagon wheels and, a fire having been made from the wagon pole, he had been slowly roasted to death—‘burnt to a crisp.’ ”" https://weaponsandwarfare.com/2019/03/07/a-new-kind-of-war-indian-wars/
Say what you want about 19th-century Europeans, but torturing captive civilians to death was not a common practice among them.
Torturing captive civilians to death was certainly something that happened in Europe, just like that particular raid happened in America. (Not that it was anything as common as it was in the 17th or 20th centuries, obvs.)
It happened, but it wasn't standard procedure like it was among the Comanche or Apache.
Not sure about 19th century, but torturing civilians was definitely a common practice in 17th century Europe. https://acoup.blog/2022/07/29/collections-logistics-how-did-they-do-it-part-ii-foraging/
From Farb's Man's Rise to Civilization (2nd ed., 1978):
"The Plains Indians fought not to win territory or to enslave other tribes, but for different reasons. One conscious motivation was the capture of horses, which had a high economic value. Another kind of reason, less conscious but equally powerful, was that external strife served to unify the tribe internally. A tribe, especially one as fragile as the composite tribe unified only by non-kin sodalities, badly needed a common enemy as a rationale for its existence. A third motivation was the status that could be acquired through raiding, which was regarded as a game in which one’s exploits were graded according to the dangers involved. The exploit itself was known as the coup, a word borrowed from French trappers and originally referring to a "blow” struck by a brave against an enemy’s body with a special stick that was often striped like a barber pole. Eventually, "counting coups’’ came to mean an immodest recital by the brave of all his war deeds. These recitals went on endlessly. Each time a man achieved a new honor, he used it as an excuse to recount the old ones. If he lied about his exploits, though, or even shaded the truth a bit, he was immediately challenged by someone who had been along on the same war party.
Each Plains tribe had its own ranking for coups. Among the Blackfoot, stealing an enemy’s weapons was looked upon as the highest exploit. Among some other tribes, the bravest deed was to touch an enemy without hurting him. A much less important exploit usually was killing an enemy, but even that deed was ranked according to the way it was done and the weapons that were used. The whole business of counting coups often became extremely involved. Among the Cheyenne, for example, coups on a single enemy could be counted by several warriors, but the coups were ranked in the strict order in which the enemy was touched by the participants; who actually killed or wounded him was immaterial. Like a sort of heraldry, these deeds were recorded in picture writing on tipis and on bison robes. Among many Plains tribes, each coup earned an eagle’s feather, and the achieving of many coups accounts for the elaborate head-dresses of some war leaders.
Scalps taken from dead or wounded enemies sometimes served as trophies, but they were insignificant as compared with counting coups. Many Plains tribes did not take scalps at all until the period of their swift decline, which began in the middle of the last century. It has been commonly believed that all Indians took scalps, and that scalp-hunting was exclusively a New World custom. Neither notion is true. Herodotus, the ancient Greek historian, mentioned the taking of scalps by the Scythians, for example. In North America scalping probably existed before the arrival of Whites, but only in a few areas, primarily along the Gulf Coast. Some historians still question whether scalp-taking was a widespread aboriginal Indian practice in North America, or rather one learned quite early from White settlers.
Whatever its exact origins, scalp-taking quickly spread over all of North America, except in the Eskimo areas. The spread was due more to the barbarity of Whites than of Reds. Governor Kieft of New Netherland is usually credited with originating the idea of paying a bounty for Indian scalps, since they were more convenient to handle than whole heads and they offered the same proof that an Indian had been killed. By liberal payments for scalps, the Dutch virtually cleared southern New York and New Jersey of Indians before the English supplanted them. By 1703 the colony of Massachusetts was paying the equivalent of about $60 for every Indian scalp. In the mid-eighteenth century, Pennsylvania fixed the bounty for a male Indian scalp at $134; a female’s was worth only $50. Some White entrepreneurs simply hatcheted any old Indians who still survived in their towns. The French also used scalp-taking as an instrument of geopolitics. In the competition over the Canadian fur trade, they offered the Micmac Indians a bounty for every scalp they took from the Beothuk of Newfoundland. By 1827 an expedition to Newfoundland failed to find a single survivor of this once numerous and proud people.
Among the Plains tribes, apparently only the Sioux and the Cree placed great value on scalps; both tribes were late migrants to the plains from the East, where they probably learned the practice from Whites. Nor did the Plains tribes torture their captives as frequently as was once believed. The White settler who saved his last bullet for himself to avoid a horrible death usually took a needless precaution. Unlike the Indians of the eastern woodlands, the Plains Indians killed swiftly and cleanly. They looked upon the White custom of hanging, for example, as undignified and barbaric."
<i>Many Plains tribes did not take scalps at all until the period of their swift decline, which began in the middle of the last century.</i>
Many Plains tribes aren't actually well-attested till well into the nineteenth century, so any lack of evidence for scalp-taking before then might well be simply because we lack evidence for any of their customs.
<i>Some historians still question whether scalp-taking was a widespread aboriginal Indian practice in North America, or rather one learned quite early from White settlers.</i>
Given that no White country in the fifteenth, sixteenth, or seventeenth centuries took enemy scalps as a regular part of warfare, this idea is unlikely, to say the least.
<i>The spread was due more to the barbarity of Whites than of Reds. Governor Kieft of New Netherland is usually credited with originating the idea of paying a bounty for Indian scalps, since they were more convenient to handle than whole heads and they offered the same proof that an Indian had been killed.</i>
So it's OK to commit barbaric acts if there's a financial incentive to do so? I guess all those Europeans who participated in the slave trade, or killed natives and stole their land, are off the hook then.
<i>Unlike the Indians of the eastern woodlands, the Plains Indians killed swiftly and cleanly.</i>
A claim which is contradicted by numerous primary sources from 19th-century North America.
"Many Plains tribes aren't actually well-attested till well into the nineteenth century,"
The main point of the entire chapter is that Plains Indians were an ephemeral formation, a product of a crisis; of course several tribes were not well attested *as tribes* before the 19th century.
"Given that no White country in the fifteenth, sixteenth, or seventeenth centuries took enemy scalps as a regular part of warfare, this idea is unlikely, to say the least."
As the text itself shows, scalp-taking become quickly a colonial reality - a White practice. Were European colonists to dull to come up with it themselves? At any rate, we have a perfect example - much later in the 19th century, hand-hacking became a well-documented Belgian colonial practice in the Congo, introduced into a continent that did not know it, even though Europeans hadn't been hacking each other's hands ever since a rather distant past. Is that fact also unlikely?
"So it's OK to commit barbaric acts if there's a financial incentive to do so?"
That's clearly against the drift of the entire text.
Having looked into the matter more deeply (i.e., consulted Wikipedia):
"There is substantial archaeological evidence of scalping in North America in the pre-Columbian era.[22][23] Carbon dating of skulls show evidence of scalping as early as 600 AD; some skulls show evidence of healing from scalping injuries, suggesting at least some victims occasionally survived at least several months.[23] Among Plains Indians, it seems to have been practiced primarily as part of intertribal warfare, with scalps only taken of enemies killed in battle.[23] However, author and historian Mark van de Logt wrote, "Although military historians tend to reserve the concept of 'total war'", in which civilians are targeted, "for conflicts between modern industrial nations," the term "closely approaches the state of affairs between the Pawnees, the Sioux, and the Cheyennes. Noncombatants were legitimate targets. Indeed, the taking of a scalp of a woman or child was considered honorable because it signified that the scalp taker had dared to enter the very heart of the enemy's territory."[24]
Many tribes of Native Americans practiced scalping, in some instances up until the end of the 19th century. Of the approximately 500 bodies at the Crow Creek massacre site, 90 percent of the skulls show evidence of scalping. The event took place circa 1325 AD.[25] European colonisation of the Americas increased the incidence of intertribal conflict, and consequently an increase in the prevalence of scalping.[22]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalping#Intertribal_conflict
So it seems the idea that scalping was introduced by Whites is no longer tenable, if indeed it ever was.
I would note that most of the posts here defending the "Indians were no more violent than Europeans" position have compared routine Indian treatment of captives (scalping, torturing to death, etc.) with European ways of dealing with specific, heinous criminals (e.g., mutilating people for committing treason). If the ways in which Natives treated their enemies *as a matter of course* or comparable to the ways in which Europeans treated enemies *in ways which were recognised as unusually brutal in the context of European society*, that kind of suggests that the Native societies were, on average, more violent than European ones.
But here we are getting far ahead of ourselves. Scalping existed in some Native societies; that we can agree on. In the colonial period, it became a matter of course both among colonists and natives, with official (monetary) encouragement from colonial authorities; the evidence for that is very clear. (Note that the money motice wasn't even there before.) Hence - well, nothing follows.
AFAIK the main point ekaborated by Farb has stood: Plains Indians societies of the 19th century were really something ephemeral, the result not just of introduced innovations (horses and guns) but also of a chain of falling dominos: groups fleeing from colonial expansion (and often what amounted to extermination policies; otherwise, why pay hard cash for the scalps of children?) in the East displaced other groups, which displaced other groups.
Whether the result was "worse" by tiday's standards than what existed previously I do not know. It's certainly the case that, in Europe, periods of crisis and violence (I brought up the Thirty Years' War because it intersects the esrly colonial period, but there are plenty of others) often gave rise to forms of systematic cruelty that were unknown or uncommon elsewhere, and might shocked your random Boethuk as much or more as they shocked us.
(And, again going by Farb, hanging - still a thing in the West until extremely recently - shocked Plains Indians. Acts are not ranked by their brutality in some objective, culture-independent order.)
<i>But here we are getting far ahead of ourselves. Scalping existed in some Native societies; that we can agree on.</i>
Not Farb, apparently: "Some historians still question whether scalp-taking was a widespread aboriginal Indian practice in North America, or rather one learned quite early from White settlers."
I don't know whether this was a defensible position back in the 1978 (all the Wikipedia citations seem to date from later, so perhaps archaeological evidence for pre-Columbian scalping wasn't yet available), but whether Farb's book is out-of-date or whether he was just ignoring evidence that made the Natives look bad, it suggests we should be cautious about accepting his conclusions.
<i>In the colonial period, it became a matter of course both among colonists and natives, with official (monetary) encouragement from colonial authorities; the evidence for that is very clear. (Note that the money motice wasn't even there before.)</i>
It's true, some colonists were sadly corrupted by exposure to the native practice of scalping.
<i>It's certainly the case that, in Europe, periods of crisis and violence (I brought up the Thirty Years' War because it intersects the esrly colonial period, but there are plenty of others) often gave rise to forms of systematic cruelty that were unknown or uncommon elsewhere, and might shocked your random Boethuk as much or more as they shocked us.</i>
The Adrastes of this world blame white peoples collectively for atrocities committed by their fellow whites, even when there are reams of evidence for other white people being shocked by this and engaging in long campaigns (sometimes literally -- cf. the West Africa Squadron) to stamp it out. I don't see why we should let Native Americans off the hook just because an imaginary "random Boethuk" "might" have been shocked by something.
<i>(And, again going by Farb, hanging - still a thing in the West until extremely recently - shocked Plains Indians. Acts are not ranked by their brutality in some objective, culture-independent order.)</i>
Hanging people is absolutely objectively less brutal than torturing them to death over several days, and if you don't recognise that, I'm not sure there's much point in continuing this conversation.
Well, if you are going to see protacted pain as the standard of brutality, then scalping isn't particularly brutal - in fact, if practiced upon the dead, it isn't brutal at all. No comparison to the related practice of flaying, which was meant to be slow and excruciating!
(BTW, hanging was neither quick nor painless before the introduction if the long drop. But that's probably orthogonal to its being perceived, and meant, to be disgraceful.)
Also, "sadly corrupted by the native practice"? I thought we were trying to keep some objectivity here. At any rate, it was not just some individuals being "sadly corrupted"; the practice was encouraged and propagated by Colonial authorities, because of how conveniently it coupled with bounty hunting.
That much seems to be confirmed. I implied fom the beginning that some of Farb may be outdated; the article on scalping from 1981 I linked to later is framed in part as a reply to Farb and some of his sources. It also confirms some of the other points.
(And isn't the adjudication of an objectionable practice to all "the Adrastes of the world", followed by a reiteration that one's not willing to do without it, a bit like what we are discussing? Collect scalps from the outgroup today!)
>Again I feel that Adraste missed an easier counter, which is that it's quite natural to pin Columbus's crimes on Columbus, while there's no reason to tar the average, non-evil indigenous person with the actions of the evil ones.
If you don't want to take the blame for the collective crimes of your race, then you don't get to demand a holiday in your honour for the collective accomplishments of your race.
Columbus Day never about generic European exploration, from the beginning about Italian Americans.
I can't tell whether this is supposed to be a counter-argument to my point or not.
That’s a weird rule. I thought we generally encourage people to identify with the good aspects of groups and discourage them from identifying with the bad aspects.
Anyway, no one gets to “demand” anything, or perhaps everyone can “demand” whatever they want, but both of those are beside the point. What we are talking about is what we collectively want to celebrate, whether or not people “demand” it. And my point is that it’s good to celebrate good things and bad to celebrate bad things, even if they are parts of one culture.
My point is that people advocating "Indigenous People's Day" aren't arguing for a celebration of the accomplishments of particular indigenous people, they're just throwing all indigenous people into one bucket and claiming to celebrate that. If the question at hand is whether the entire history of indigenous people collectively should be celebrated, then it seems very relevant to point out that large portions of that history were actually pretty terrible.
> there's no reason to tar the average, non-evil indigenous person with the actions of the evil ones
This doesn't work. Civilization works as a collective. Every Aztec farmer is a contributor to the horrors his or her civilization did, because his or her crops is one more basket of food and money to feed the system that committed the crimes. Every Aztec administrator doing the most boring ass and harmless paperwork is one more drop of oil in the vast machine that devoured innocent souls and conquered virgin lands.
This effect is also amplified at smaller distances : while you're "responsible" for the child labor and genocides that China does with the help of your money (which came from the taxes you paid to your government which is almost certainly indebted to China whatever it was, or the money you use to pay for chinese products which you almost certainly do even if you don't realize that), your responsbility is vastly diminished by the sheer distances and forces and interlocking systems involved, way way beyond your senses let alone comprehension let alone control. Meanwhile the Aztec society was smaller than modern Mexico, and the ritual killings was attended by at least thousands, even those who didn't attend prayed to the gods who (nominally) ordered the killings, dealt with and married those who attended and cheered, etc...
Come to think of it : if your argument is convincing to wokies, they would stop blaming modern whites for the atrocities their ancestors did 150\100\50 years ago. They can't use your argument because they are already committed to its inverse elsewhere in the culture war landscape. (Well, they can of course, they are not particularly averse to hypocrisy, but what I mean is that if they use it then they're being hypocritical and it's not their real reaon)
>It's also the case that Columbus's crimes aren't really separable from the achievement he's celebrated for
If we assume for a moment that the argument portrayed in Scott's parable is *really* about problematic holidays (it is almost always not, it's about signalling and ritualized language games), there is the uncomfortable fact that *Any* holiday whatsoever is going to be problematic in some sense or the other for some group of people or the other.
Give me a holiday that celebrate "Victory" over anything or anyone, and I can just innocently ask "Who or What are we victors over ?", and then get some popcorn to eat while observing you trying to answer without offending the descendants of the vanquished. It's like that old Herbert G. Wells quote :
>>It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have a huge variety of needs and dangers
Replace "intelligence" with "achievement" and it would still hold true. Achievement is compensation for all the ugly things you did to arrive at it. If you celebrate muslims, then you necessarily endorse and approve of all the atrocities that muslims and their societies has done to atheists and competing religious traditions from the day Muhammed smashed the idols till now and all the future ones they will almost certainly do to maintain and expand their culture, as well as all the hideous things said in the quran, the sunnah, the teachings of the Imams, etc.... Ohh, what did you just say ? Those crimes are not "central" to the muslims' existence as a group ? so you believe that an obscure and plagiarized tradition rose from an obscure and unknown desert cult to dominate 1.5 billion people purely by merit and persuasion? Not convincing.
If you celebrate victory over Hitler, then you necessarily endorse all the crimes the Allies had done to Germany and its people in order to win the victory during the war and rub it in after the war (bombing civilians - which is a practice that the allies started as far as I know -, raping german women by soviet soldiers, etc...). The centrality of those crimes to the Allied victory can be more debatable than the centrality of muslims' crimes to their religion's dominance, but, a very persuasive argument can be made that the 2 things I mentioned significantly degraded german ability and will to fight, which helped both the victory and the subsequent rule.
We humans are ugly, and our achievements are mostly ugly primate shit-flinging and pussy-fucking.
Seems reasonable.
> Christians would still have their day off to celebrate Christmas the same as always and non-Christians can at least nominally be included by Winter Day or whatever.
This sort of fig-leaf secularism (like CE/BCE for dates) drives me nuts. Just acknowledge the culture you are in, and where these traditions come from!
> be nominally more inclusive to Native American citizens who justifiably hate Columbus's guts.
That's preposterous. Virtually all of the Native Americans alive today have partial European ancestry, and so would not exist were it not for Colombus. Most probably don't care, and of those who do care the ones I know celebrate Colombus day.
The culture I'm in supposedly values the separation of church and state. The founders of my country certainly did. Making the hypothetical winter holiday fall on December 25 is already a massive concession to Christianity. I don't know why so many Christians feel entitled to things they haven't earned when they're already given so much.
>"Virtually all of the Native Americans alive today have partial European ancestry, and so would not exist were it not for Colombus."
I'm not going to bother with your anecdotes, but surely you have to see that this argument is terrible. I exist because pogroms drove my great-grandmother out of Poland, causing her to meet my great-grandfather in America. Should I celebrate turn-of-the-century Polish racists? Obviously not, and there's even less reason for Native Americans to celebrate European colonization that reduced a culture they love to poverty and irrelevance.
"[T]he government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion"
From the Treaty of Tripoli, ratified unanimously by the Senate and signed by President Adams.
"When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it so that its professors are obliged to call for help of the civil power, ‘tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one."
Benjamin Franklin, in a letter to Richard Price. October 9, 1790
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof[...]"
The first line of the first amendment in the Bill of Rights.
This is not controversial.
You moved the goalposts and you're still wrong. Franklin was a founder and he made his view quite clear. The Treaty of Tripoli is US law, which is why I pointed out that it was ratified unanimously by the Senate, and the President who signed it was a founder. And finally, your interpretation of the Establishment Clause is far narrower than any evidence supports. It has always meant that the government cannot unduly favor one religion over another. This has been upheld by centuries of jurisprudence.
"I don't know why so many Christians feel entitled to things they haven't earned when they're already given so much."
This is that preposterous "level of science" graph with the valley for the "Christian Dark Ages" in comment form. If you think Christianity has been a drain on civilization, of course you think Christians are takers who deserve nothing that they have and certainly no more. Alternative take: Christianity is awesome, it's the best religion, it's the primary reason that Western civilization is great, and we should celebrate the hell out of it.
This isn't what I was saying. I was saying that individual Christians seem to think they deserve special treatment despite living in a secular society. Thanks for demonstrating. I'll never understand why people are proud of believing things that they know deep down are untrue.
Individual Christians living in a Christian society aren't getting special treatment; they're getting the same treatment as everyone else in the Christian society, most of whom are also Christians.
It's exactly one day out of 365.25, and you get it off, too, so you don't have to work; you get to spend the day eating Chinese food and kvetching. Now, you might complain that you don't really need Winter Chinese/Kvetching Day, and you'd prefer to have one of your actual holidays off. Fair enough. But in a Christian society, all the Christians in government employment are going to ask for Christmas off and nearly all private businesses that the government interacts with will be closed. Keeping a minimum number of general-schedule drones working on Christmas is probably a waste of the government's money.
What exactly do you think special treatment is? Non-Christians need to pay to observe their holidays, either by losing a day of PTO or a day of wages, and Christians don't. This is why even secularizing the name of the holiday and leaving it on December 25th would still be heavily favoring Christianity. The very least a secular government can do is not openly endorse one religious holiday over all others. This is especially true in a society that is increasingly *non*-Christian -- only about 2/3 of Americans are Christians, thankfully, which is a lot, but not nearly enough to justify giving Christian holidays special snowflake status.
But the society is obviously not secular, even now. Every single US president is a Christian of some kind (at least nominally), and swearing oaths of all sorts on the Bible is still the default in many contexts.
"Making the hypothetical winter holiday fall on December 25 is already a massive concession to Christianity"
I don't celebrate Christmas but I think it's basically a concession to reality. There's no universe in which things are open on the normal schedule in America on Christmas.
This does not seem state-related.
However in the interest of secularism, should we also change Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, because they refer to equally-fictional deities? Should we only exclude those with a significant following?
Would it not be more powerful to secularism to accept a mythological term _as_ and _because_ it was mythological? Not to mention more inclusive and culturally enriching?
<i>I don't know why so many Christians feel entitled to things they haven't earned when they're already given so much.</i>
Because the people who fought for the USA's independence and expanded it to its present borders were mostly Christian, the original settlers were Christians coming from Christian countries, and American culture is derived from a European culture which had been thoroughly christianised for a good millennium or so before the Jamestown settlement. In short, the USA as we know it was built by Christians, so if it's a matter of earning things, I'd say that they've earned the right to have their holidays recognised by the government if anyone has.
>The culture I'm in supposedly values the separation of church and state. The founders of my country certainly did. Making the hypothetical winter holiday fall on December 25 is already a massive concession to Christianity. I don't know why so many Christians feel entitled to things they haven't earned when they're already given so much.
Christmas is a European and European-American cultural tradition more than it is a religious holiday, and most of the the US population are Christian anyway.
And for goodness' sake - stop pretending you care about what the founders wanted or supported. People like you happily spit on them when it suits your agenda, but then suddenly you really care about it? What if they DID explicitly support a Christian government? Would you agree that we should have one? OF COURSE not. You would be using it to show how clueless and backward the founders were.
>Christmas is a European and European-American cultural tradition more than it is a religious holiday, and most of the the US population are Christian anyway.
Friend, it literally has Christ in the name. You don't think it's religious for the same reason fish don't know they live in water. If you leave your immediate social bubble, you might be surprised how many of your fellow citizens aren't part of this tradition.
>And for goodness' sake - stop pretending you care about what the founders wanted or supported. People like you happily spit on them when it suits your agenda, but then suddenly you really care about it? What if they DID explicitly support a Christian government? Would you agree that we should have one? OF COURSE not. You would be using it to show how clueless and backward the founders were.
Okay, I'm not sure where to start with this bit. If you scroll up an inch or so, you'll see that the person I replied to was citing the supposedly Christian nature of the US. No matter how I feel about the founders personally, their support of secularism in addition to the history of church-state separation in the country are obviously relevant to rebutting that point.
But on that point, you have no idea who I am or how I feel about the founders. Feel free to dig up posts I've made in the past and use them against me, but I don't think you'll have much luck. In the meantime, don't put words in my mouth.
And finally, even if I were the world's biggest hypocrite, it wouldn't make me wrong. Accusing someone of hypocrisy isn't actually an argument! It just kinda sounds like one. If you can't address my points on their own, don't comment.
<i>Friend, it literally has Christ in the name.</i>
Friend, the days of the week literally have Anglo-Saxon deities in their names, but Wednesday is not, in any sense whatsoever, a celebration of Woden.
<i>Okay, I'm not sure where to start with this bit. If you scroll up an inch or so, you'll see that the person I replied to was citing the supposedly Christian nature of the US. No matter how I feel about the founders personally, their support of secularism in addition to the history of church-state separation in the country are obviously relevant to rebutting that point.</i>
The Founders opposed the federal government setting up an established Church (not the state governments, though; Massachusetts, as I recall, had an established Church until the 1830s). They didn't oppose the government promoting a sort of generic Protestant Christianity, and the idea that the First Amendment requires a sort of French-style laïcité didn't become popular in US legal circles until the 1960s.
Christmas is a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ. Christians celebrate it not just in Europe and America, but all around the world. They sing songs about how "the Lord has come". They sing about the night he was born and the manger he was born in. They go to church and put on nativity plays. They also decorate big trees and pretend that a Christian saint drops off presents under them. It is a thoroughly Christian holiday. There are atheists who celebrate it with their families because those atheists have sentiment associated with Christian traditions; this does not make it a secular holiday, and the vast majority of celebrants are Christian. The fact that I even have to explain this makes me think you're a troll or not very good at introspection.
>The Founders opposed the federal government setting up an established Church (not the state governments, though; Massachusetts, as I recall, had an established Church until the 1830s). They didn't oppose the government promoting a sort of generic Protestant Christianity, and the idea that the First Amendment requires a sort of French-style laïcité didn't become popular in US legal circles until the 1960s.
I already argued against this above. It's clear that this is a very narrow view of the Establishment Clause that does not appear to have been held by the founders. Obviously they had less control over state governments, but Jefferson and Madison at least seemed to feel the same way about them. Madison wrote "We maintain therefore that in matters of Religion, no man's right is abridged by the institution of Civil Society and that Religion is wholly exempt from its cognizance." This was in response not to someone trying to establish an American church, but a bill proposing to fund a Christian school with Virginia state taxes. Jefferson coined the term "separation between church and state" in a context that clearly went beyond disestablishment. As far as promoting generic Christianity, Madison also wrote "Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects? that the same authority which can force a citizen to contribute three pence only of his property for the support of any one establishment, may force him to conform to any other establishment in all cases whatsoever?" This hardly seems like a ringing endorsement. No doubt modern jurisprudence isn't identical to 19th-century jurisprudence, but I have yet to see any evidence for your claim other than people on here just stating it like a fact.
> Making the hypothetical winter holiday fall on December 25 is already a massive concession to Christianity.
No, it's a concession to the fact that it wouldn't be a "hypothetical winter holiday," it'd be *Christmas.*
Christmas is by any objective standard a major feature of American culture, in ways that are quite independent of its also being a significant day of Christian observance. That's not to say Christmas doesn't have a specifically Christian significance; it does. But it's also deeply interwoven into American civilization in ways that would be unaffected by any hypothetical demise of Christianity.
Countless classic American films take Christmas as a setting or a theme, most of them having nothing in particular to do with religion. The wish to be "home for Christmas" (see: Meet Me in St. Louis; Die Hard) is something like America's Odyssean nostos, the core expression of a restless, mobile people's yearning for place.
Every December, the Top 40 FM station in your city -- or at least one of them -- ceases its usual programming of ephemeral hits and instead plays a completely different set list of songs familiar to Americans of all generations. The tradition of "Christmas songs" is the single biggest occasion on which contemporary Americans listen to the popular music that their parents and grandparents heard as children.
We have Christmas stories, Christmas foods, Christmas outfits, and obviously a whole iconography of Christmas that spans the culture from low to middle to high. It's not an endorsement of religion for the government to recognize that Christmas, qua Christmas, is a major part of the rhythm of American life and a major driver of American cultural creativity.
But insofar as it's right and proper for the government to do that, it doesn't need to -- indeed, shouldn't -- attempt to hide or scrub away the fact that one strand of Christmas's complex tapestry of meaning is its historic and continuing status as a part of the Christian liturgical calendar.
I'd turn your idea of "entitled," "earned," and "given" on its head. Christianity, whatever else you might think of it, gave us Christmas, and our overwhelming cultural consensus seems to be that Christmas is fucking awesome. Any observance of a Winter Holiday that's de facto piggybacking on how much people like Christmas ought as a matter of basic right and decency to call it by its proper name and not rob Christianity of its due credit for this contribution to our cultural commons.
Ah... I'm pretty sure that the pre-existing winter holidays like Yule are the source of the tree-decorating and gift-giving traditions that make up a huge amount of what Christmas is and feels like.
That's almost literally (or often literally) the same as saying that we should commemorate Rapist Day, since we all likely have a bit of the DNA of a rapist warlord (or rapist civilian) that came in at some point in the family line.
I wonder what the parades would look like?
https://youtu.be/Cg11a84c_K0
I would like to invite you to join my new club, CRIAL, or Committee to Restart Italian-American Lynching.
Haha, there's an episode of Clone High that completely skewers the fig-leaf secularism you're talking about. I highly recommend watching it if you hate that sort of thing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chgtzxbdpYQ
Yeah, Italian-Americans tend to care about the holiday. Even if we didn't pick Columbus - note a WASP picked him for us. But by golly we'll take what we were given. And once something is given, the receiver generally doesn't want a gift taken back. (Do NOT insert culturally insensitive and unjust stereotyping slur here.)
(I will note that my mom would also sometimes let us skip school on 3/19, St. Joseph's day in celebration of being an Italian American. It probably is worth noting that the county of my childhood is named after St. Joe and since there was already a local tradition of celebrating Polish Americans (Dyngus Day) where we'd also get day off, a special day seemed appropriate.)
But I personally have no problem with the red paint thrown on Columbus statutes. I prefer to imagine it is ragu rather than blood. That kind of baptism would be a great permanent addition to the Holiday to symbolically remind us of pasta sauce and genocide.
Native Americans I've spoken to don't really have any opinion about Columbus - he didn't wrong *them*, he never even went as far north as Mexico - but they do have a low opinion of those who assume they're all one big great people who share culture and grievances and other such things.
Government holidays, along with government everything else, are not *supposed* to be sterile in opposition to/ignorance of American culture. This seems to be entirely invented, a post hoc interpretation of the increasingly sterile American culture *which is a deliberate effort* by the same people pushing things like Indigenous Peoples' Day.
I think that the government has pretty clearly staked out a position in recognizing cultural holidays at a federal level. Juneteenth would be a good example of this that also seems pretty non-problematic.
I think the thing about Christmas that I haven’t seen said is that it’s not a purely religious holiday anymore. Yes, it originates from christianity, but where I grew up everyone celebrated Christmas even for most agnostics/atheists. So, acting as though it’s “just a religious holiday” and not actually a pretty significant cultural tradition that manages to break past religion seems weird to me.
Juneteenth is NOT a cultural holiday!
"JUNETEENTH NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE DAY" symbolically celebrates the emancipation of slaves in the US, not just an event in Texas. The emancipation of slaves is not a "cultural event", it is a political event.
Even if technically the complete emancipation in US did not occurred until after the June 19, 1862 Act ending slavering in "territories" nor as a result of the June 19, 1865 event in Texas, but when the 13th Amendment was official adopted on December 18, 1865 or perhaps when a treaty with Creek nation ending slavery by that tribe was signed on June 14, 1866.
Let me try to clarify what I was saying, so that we can see whether we still disagree
I agree that the emancipation of the slaves is a political event.
But, the celebration of the emancipation of slaves on June 19th originated from a cultural group holding a celebration on that day. It certainly isn't ubiquitous across America to celebrate the emancipation of slaves on juneteenth, or necessarily even at all. Exactly when all slaves were freed is pretty debatable, but it's a reasonable day to stake out for celebration.
Jesus/Jeshua von Joseph/whatever you want to call him was probably a real person who led a political life, so his birth is a political event (much like the birth of MLK, though not necessarily in the same way).
The celebration of his birth arose from a cultural group celebrating his birth. It certainly isn't ubiquitous across America to celebrate his birth though. And exactly when he was born is pretty debatable, but December 25th seems a pretty reasonable day to stake out for his celebration.
The US Government has apparently decided that it is worthwhile to protect these holidays. I imagine that it's a mixture between 1) a large portion of the population wants that day off and 2) politicians believe it's important that people can take that day off to celebrate the thing that's celebrated on that day.
It seemed pretty reasonable to me to call both of these events "cultural" in that they were predominantly celebrating events that only a particular cultural group in the US celebrate. I would agree that it would be wrong to call either of them purely cultural, since one is rooted in religion/history and the other is rooted in US history, but I think it's also wrong to act as though neither of them is also helping to enshrine a celebration valued by a group in the US.
In the comment I was replying to, I felt that the commenter was trying to only consider the religious, and not the cultural significance, of Christmas, which was what I was trying to push back on. I would say that Juneteenth has both cultural and historic significance, and didn't mean to imply otherwise.
The public celebration of a person is generally hagiography.
But the celebration of the birth of Jesus is not really hagiography. It is pedagogic and deeply connected with a critical event of belief. God in one person being human. The existence of one God with three persons is ahistorical (it is out of time) but the actual incarnation is a historical (in time) event of belief from conception to death and resurrection. Christmas commemorates a concept: Transcendent becoming Immanent.
That the political has coopted the theological (note the order of operation) cannot be in any way adequately discussed in this type of forum. Perhaps someone could do a book review of Ed Goerner's Peter and Caesar; The Catholic Church and Political Authority (1965) as a starting point. But it is as lifetime of thinking.
The distinction between cultural and political is equally complicated.
The people in Texas who uniquely began celebrated Juneteenth were celebrating both a cultural and political event. As it expanded beyond Texas and the particular community of descends of those freed on 6/19 it took on a political character.
Part of the complex history is the confusion about to whom the EP applied - a majority still don't understand it's limited scope to the treasonous states attempting to cede. The nitty gritty of another 6/19 event: freedom in territories, state constitution events (eg Maryland post war but pre 13th amendment), the 13th Amendment, and the Indian treaty were and are lost on the populous and even many legislators.
The federal holiday converts what began as a parochial cultural event into a national political event.
Note the conversion of the cultural to political is neither magic waiving nor algorithmically certain operation. The political can revert to the cultural and the path back is not always the same.
(Some people have imagined that mlk day is culturally holiday.)
And then there is economic cooption.
Is Labor Day about labor or is it about selling stuff on sale.
Is Christmas hagiography, pedagogy or economics of consumerism or the political cooption of the spiritual.
Exactly. Where is Santa Claus in the bible again?
Some people celebrate it in a religious manner (nativity scenes, etc.), many don't.
Dana: Coria, you have a good idea, but you're completely failing to understand the point of holidays. As Beroe said, they're about *myths*. They're about us, the living. Family and togetherness and gratitude. Gifts and joy and light. Renewal and hope and unsubtle metaphors. You can't just take a whole list of the most important figures: you need to start with the archetypes, the emotional goals, the *vibes*, and once you've assigned those, warp some reasonably close historical figures until they fit. Now, we'll toss Sanger, because that's complicated, and we're left with Columbus, Einstein, Edison, Washington, MLK, Disney, Franklin, Jonas Salk, Norman Borlaug, Susan B Anthony, and Louis Armstrong. Exploration, genius, dedication and entrepreneurship, bravery and honor, sticking to convictions in the face of overwhelming provocation, entertainment and joy, science and statesmanship (and we'll stick this one where Easter used to be), moral courage and innovation, and art. That's a pretty good list! But Salk and Borlaug take basically the same place, and that's already covered by Franklin. So as much as I respect your desire to honor the best and most important Americans, I can't agree with it. This is, incidentally, an argument for Henriette Lacks: she adds a theme and a tone that a list exclusively of the great and powerful can never capture.
This is great, and certainly on first blush, strikes me as a much better proposal!
It hits the key points of both the holidays debate and the statues debate: what are we celebrating, and why?
You had my grudging interest, and could have persuaded me further, until you brought up Lacks. Our heroes ought not be post-mortem consulation prize fantasies, constructed out of whole cloth. There ought to be something there, and we ought to resist the invention of more, at the beginning.
Let the generations to come falsify her life into some godmother/birthing Goddess of Science, not us who are close enough to the beginning to recognize the manipulation.
I think it's exactly the opposite; Lacks is important *because* of the different tone. She's a stand in for the idea that many things we enjoy and benefit from are a result of using people in ways they didn't necessarily consent or agree to, and I *do* think that's worth formally recognising one day a year.
To add a little more; it was the inclusion of Disney that initially rubbed me the wrong way (it feels odd to celebrate what is still a for profit corporation), but I've come around to it because Disney is indeed a good stand in both for the profit motive which has driven so much prosperity as well as the entertainment and worldwide appeal of American culture.
Edison would fit most of that role nicely. Of course he gets credit mostly for things his employees did, but he did plenty of things himself (including inventing the phonograph), whereas Disney, if I remember correctly, couldn't draw.
I remain unpersuaded. I won't go further here, because this comment section is preordained to touch too many third rails, and I shall stop adding to it here, but I ask that you consider what other 'people used in ways they don't consent to' you have in mind, and if that group is as global as it might be.
Certainly amongst the most harmless examples of benefitting from someone without their consent in the grand scheme of things.
For that matter, it was only Lacks's cervix that did service, the rest of her was of no use to posterity at all. It seems a slippery slope (so to speak) to accord hero status to individual organs, we might end up worshipping Sophia Loren's tits.
Eh. This is phrased a hair less charitably than I would have- Lacks was a wife and a mother and her life had value. But it was pretty much the same general human value and ordinary heroism that we all display - it was the cancer cells that were extra ordinary.
I agree, and it would have been better put as "the rest of her was of no greater use to posterity than any of the rest of us uncelebrated peasants."
Dana sounds a lot like Beroe to me.
I actually interpreted the point as being a generalisation of the Cristobal Colon / Christopher Columbus point that A was making; indigenous peoples day is a terrible day because it doesn't actually celebrate anything in particular (I, for one, think a holiday involving fry bread, dancing, and thankfulness to nature would be great, but that's a whole other topic). Rather, the semi-mythical Colombus was chosen as an avatar for cultural values of bravery and discovery. Dana just applies that to a wider range of values.
Re: frybread - I learned from its Wikipedia article that it's actually not a traditional Native American food, but is said to have been invented in the 1860s in times of government oppression and limited ingredients. Apparently several Native Americans have spoken out against the way it's perceived as an authentic Native American food.
MLK was a plagiarist and a serial philanderer. Toss him.
"Michael King Jr. was a plagiarist and a serial philanderer. MLK is a hero of the civil rights movement" is, I think, the next beat.
I'm fine with the "myth" thing but it seems like a reason to not go with historical figures, or with someone like Jesus, someone who's mostly legendary even if a real person.
If it's a real person then we have to argue over the actual shit they did. People talk about MLK like a legendary figure but we have all his writings and, like, his advice column in Ebony magazine where he told women whose wives cheated that it's their fault.
Basically if they're recent enough that you have their advice column, they're not distant enough to boil them down to a myth.
> This is, incidentally, an argument for Henriette Lacks: she adds a theme and a tone that a list exclusively of the great and powerful can never capture.
This gives me an even better idea: pick eleven dead individuals purely at random out of the gravestone registry. Maybe pick a different twelve every year. Celebrate them, whoever they are, because they probably did some good things, and some bad things, just like the rest of us.
Honestly I think the US does far too much celebrating of individuals already. You start with the USS George Washington and pretty soon you've got a USS George H. W. Bush and a Nancy Pelosi public school.
>Disney
A part of me wants to point out the frequent allegations of anti-semitism directed at Walt (and, yes, you'll see plenty of articles breathlessly talking about how they're unproven), but I think the bigger part of my negative reaction to this comes from discomfort at having a federal holiday named after an extant corporation.
The Disney corporation doesn't need the federal government's help in metastasizing through all of pop culture, it's doing that plenty well on its own.
An extant corporation that has consistently lobbied for copyright extension beyond the point of all reason, robbing the world of countless derivative works that could have been.
The Modernist list (echoes of Comte, really) suggests we should create and celebrate the mythical character Armstrong, jazzman and astronaut extraordinaire. I'm all for it.
I’m Australian, and I’d absolutely go for Armstrong day. Three cheers for Louis! Three cheers for Neil! Two cheers for Lance!
One overextended cheer for Stretch.
Kudos; the subtle humor is sublime 😄
This Holiday Has Been Passed Down Our Family Line For Generations.
Happy Listicle Day, In Recognition Of These 17 Repugnant Things You Won’t Believe We Used To Celebrate!
Hah, nice, I get it!
I completely impartially approve of this, for some highly mysterious reason.
Damien Chazelle would be into that.
Brilliant idea. Armstrong Day should be a real thing.
We could celebrate it with arm wrestling contests
Thrasymachus really won this debate.
I get the reference, but why do you say that? :)
Ethics could never transcend power, and that's why we have to pretend that it does.
I was also struck while reading this piece by what a power game holidays are.
Coria at least avoided the false dichotomy but came up with a worse alternative. We need a way to ensure that a new holiday would be popular enough that people would forget all about the old holiday.
I suggest a contest. Contest entries should not only name the holiday but suggest fun activities for that day. The judges should be kids. They try out contest entries by actually having the holiday and reporting back on whether it was fun.
I don't think Coria's alternative is worse as such, if it is seen as a first stage in planning. Some Modernist neighborhoods are actually well-thought out and nice to live in, Soviet New Year did catch on, and so did Christmas (was: Sol Invictus), etc. But right, one needs to propose and listen, or, to put it in a more hard-headed way, test it with focus groups.
Apropos Soviet New Year, I’ve been told the Ukrainian tradition is to decorate the tree with a) candles, and b) small wrapped fireworks, to be removed and set off outside on New Year’s Eve.
The friend who described this mentioned that her mother as a child had once gotten a bit confused as to the decorating procedure, with pyrotechnic results.
(Ukraine, demonstrating how metal it is: "We’ve endured the Mongols, Hitler, Stalin, and Putin. Filling our living rooms with wood, gunpowder, and fire is our idea of a relaxing family holiday.")
As someone who went through the Kiwi flag referendum contests are fucking awful. Experts are better.
First form a group of experts to figure out what the goals really are, then form several other groups of experts to each come up with proposals, then take the best ones to the public for their seal of approval (and buy-in).
Which worthwhile holidays came from experts?
Isn't that exactly what happened with the Kiwi flag referendum? Out of 1000+ submissions, the "experts" picked 40, which happened to include none at all which retained the Union Jack. Then the people picked their favourites among those, and then they decided that actually they'd rather have the original.
It seems to me that a more minimalist change which kept the Union Jack but replaced the red southern cross with a fern (either on blue or black) would be the obvious solution to minimise change while resolving the clash with the Australian flag, but that was never shortlisted.
Recent changes to logos seem reminiscent of Tartaria, but without the excuse of labor costs.
While reading the dialogue, my first thought was that replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples' Day could be balanced with a new Rome Day on April 21. (Assuming additional holidays are cost-free, which they aren't.) Rome Day would presumably assuage Italian-Americans, not to mention many conservatives. Kids would probably have fun dressing up as gladiators.
But that just displaces the feeling of being neglected onto Greek-Americans, who might then ask why they aren't also getting a kid-approved holiday with hoplite costumes.
Rome Day? As a Calabrian American, I'm kind of laughing.
"Rome" is not a symbol for "Italian" or "Italian American". "Italy" is a symbol for "Italian".
Is DC the symbol for the psychosocial experience of "American"?
And we should be cognizant that "Italian American" is something that is created in America. It is not really the same thing as diaspora.
Being a Polish American, Greek American, Irish American are not things that are created in Poland, Greece and Ireland. It is created here in the U.S. in a complex recursive network of family, food, custom, language, places and shared "symbols".
The full phenomenology of ethnicity is a epistemic, social, and pneumatic experience mediating reality as mechanism for preventing alienation and for promoting the necessary capacity for solidarity as we answer the uniquely human questions: who am I and who are.
If DC was once the center of an empire that was the largest in its day and stood for ~2000 years more or less in various forms, I think that yes, Americans wouldn't object to being symbolized by it*. I think the bigger problem would be the people who would start digging up the crimes of the Roman Empire and using them as justification that we shouldn't name a holiday after it, and they won't be disappointed.
* : (I'm neither an American nor an Italian, but I substituted a bunch of important cities that were once Ancient capitals of empire but are now just cities in my country, and yeah, it doesn't make it any difference)
The point is that an "Italian American" is not formed or created as a concept/identity/ethnicity in Italy.
"Italian" <> "Italian American"
The context is that some Italian-Americans profess offense at the replacement of Columbus Day, so it seems that we're taking Italian-American identity as a given. Sophisticated though it may be, telling people 'You can't be offended because your identity is contingent' is probably not an effective way of assuaging them.
'Rome Day' is a reference to ancient Rome.
Christopher Columbus is associated with Genoa (and Spain). Italy the country is associated with the northerner-dominated political class and a major regional gap in living standards. Ancient Rome seems less divisive - remember that all free Italians held citizenship from c. 90 BC.
In his book Unto the Sons, Gay Talese explores the Calabrian vs Italian and Calabrian-American vs Italian-American issues. I don't think he claimed that only Italians from Lazio feel like heirs of ancient Rome. He portrayed the contemporary divisions in Italian identity as medieval, i.e. post-Roman, in origin.
If you hail from the Arbëreshë or the Griko, the above may not apply.
Pretty good. The only (minor) omission I think is the observation of the annoyance of the narcissism of the weak ally of an anti-holiday effort. If you have some personal reason to deeply hate Columbus, the historical figure -- his ancestors chopped off the hands of your ancestors, an Italian once betrayed your sister, whatever -- then I can respect your attempt to erase the man. Similarly, if you are passionately commited to the holiday because you think Italians get stereotyped as sister-betrayers too easily, or you think it concretizes the social value of honoring courage and daring (better than an "All Explorers' Day") then I can respect that, too. Banzai, and let the best shibboleth dominate by and by.
The person who is a weak ally of a holiday defense squad is being tediously tribal, but people are like that, and it's hard to expect more. But the person who is a weak ally of an anti-holiday movement is often a giant narcissist seeking attention. "You're all ignorant morons because you haven't thought of [insert tangentially relevant historical fact]. Only I with my massive brain/social conscience have seen it, and hereby bring this enlightenment to you. You may now gasp in wonder and admiration." Feh.
Bringing up Status Quo Bias in an argument about a tradition seems ridiculous to me. You can try to found a new tradition but you can't just create a pre-existing one, it will never be a tradition to the founding generation.
Beroe misses the point that Blue Tribe just got Juneteenth as a federal holiday so they can hold their horses for a bit. Personally I don't mind Juneteenth becoming a federal holiday as it was already an actual thing, and I wouldn't want it renamed to "Federal Holiday - Mid June" out of spite.
It's magnificently apt that "Jacob" should point out the inevitable Thermidorian reaction.
During Yugoslav wars while trying to take the famous historical city of Dubrovnik, Serbian armed forces would often joke they intend to make the city "more beautiful, more older" ('Još lepši, još stariji') once they occupy it.
So perhaps you can change the idea of what is the old tradition with enough AK-47s and bottles of Sljivovica
Agreed. When it comes to, among other things, traditions, I'd counter with "Reality has a Status Quo Bias!", because changing the Status Quo has inherent disadvantages. You lose all the social inertia the status quo has, and if you can't replace it, you're worse off than before, regardless of whether a world where new tradition seamlessly replaces old tradition would be preferable. Even if you can, there will be costs, and friction during the transition period.
I actually think Juneteenth itself is pretty good as holidays go - snappy name, good semi-mythologized event to peg it to, traditional ways to celebrate it.
I am however annoyed that it became a federal holiday mostly as a stick to beat Trump over the head with for being so churlish as to host a political rally on June 19th, a day that had zero special meaning to anybody outside of a very regional culture prior to that rally.
I agree completely, Juneteenth is fine.
However if I was a jerk I'd point out that it became a national federal holiday despite it only pertaining to a minority interest group, whos votes happen to be very important to the Left, and could be construed as celebrating the defeat and oppression of another American group that is current a shadow of its former self (the south). Yes the southerners were 'bad guys' but the 'indigenous peoples' had larger empires with more slaves and a much higher body count.
In my opinion it's extremely hypocritical to defend Juneteenth while attacking Columbus day.
Well, ideally the federal holiday would be like “Emancipation Day” and tied to either the Emancipation Proclamation or 13th Amendment ratification dates, but Juneteenth rose originally in an organic (if parochial) fashion so I’m okay with it being the “end of slavery” celebration that caught on (just annoyed that it went from obscure to ubiquitous the way it did in 2020 mainly to smear Trump).
Basically I think it’s totally fine to have some sort of celebration of the Union surviving the Civil War, but I actually agree with you that to do so directly would be needlessly polarizing. Celebrating the end of slavery is a totally fine thing to add to our civic religion though.
I think making up "Emancipation Day" instead of Juneteenth would serve no purpose but to be an insult to black people and a tradition of theirs. Exactly like scrapping Columbus day
I wondered about that a while back, and it turns out that pretty much every date associated with the Emancipation Proclamation or the 13th Amendment doesn't work.
Emancipation Proclamation: issued on January 1. We're *not* doing a new holiday on New Year's Day.
13th Amendment passed by Congress: January 31, 1865. So only two weeks or so after Martin Luther King Day.
13th Amendment ratified: December 6, 1865, smack between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Juneteenth is a little closer to July 4 than ideal. But a summer holiday in a month that lacks one (sorry, Flag Day!) is a much better bet than any of the above. August would probably be better still, but there's not so much as a single state ratifying the 13th in August to hang it on.
That’s unfortunate. Maybe do April 9, call it “Reunification Day” with no further elaboration and leave it at that.
April 9 is exactly Easter next year, and is always going to be pretty nearby. :-)
Sounds like a decent day to be in a bar wearing a brown coat.
I thought it was made a holiday as a reaction to George Floyd's death? This is the first I'd heard anything about it being Trump related.
I mean maybe that’s given by some as a slightly more defensible official reason. But Juneteenth went from “obscure regional holiday” to “thing we’ve obviously always been aware of and sensitive to” because Trump had a rally scheduled on Juneteenth in OKC. Lots of thought pieces and talking heads came out about about how insensitive this was near the site of “Black Wall Street” and on that date. I think most people were like “what the heck is Juneteenth?” until that controversy.
I'm pretty sure the actual thought process was "we need to do something to show support for racial justice/BLM/etc. - hey look, there's this convenient existing holiday tradition we can use".
For what it's worth, the company I worked for *already* decided to give us Juneteenth off in 2020, which would have had to have been very last minute indeed if it were a response to the Trump rally.
Incidentally, while searching online for this, I found the following on Politco:
---
Despite Trump’s claim that the holiday was not well-known, his White House has released a statement — attributed to the president and first lady — commemorating Juneteenth for each of the three years he’s been in office, a fact that surprised Trump when, according to the Journal, he paused Thursday’s interview to ask an aide if she had heard of Juneteenth.
“Oh really? We put out a statement? The Trump White House put out a statement?” he responded. “OK, OK. Good.”
Though the president’s rally has brought renewed attention to the date, weeks of unrest following a series of police killings of unarmed black men had already begun to fuel a new corporate, state and local government push to make Juneteenth a holiday for workers as part of the ensuing racial reckoning taking place in the United States.
The same for the critique of nostalgia- I have personal nostalgia for Christmas, but I also have a sort of generational nostalgia for the Christmases of the past. There's a sense of humanity and togetherness that I feel when I think about, eg., the Christmas Truce that I wouldn't feel if it was 'The Winter Festival Truce'. Christmas means something to me that it also meant to them and we are thus connected across time.
You could extend that point to resurrecting ancient traditions or globalizing existing ones, and I'm not sure I disagree with those conclusions.
>Bringing up Status Quo Bias in an argument about a tradition seems ridiculous to me.
Exactly! It misses the entire point of what tradition is.
This reeks of souless rationalists not understanding things as well as they imagine they doand their extremely faulty theory of mind.
“All of our best holidays have begun as anti-holidays to neutralize older rites. Jesus was born in the spring; they moved Christmas to December to neutralize the pagan Solstice celebration. Easter got its name because it neutralized the rites of the spring goddess Eostre.”
I’m assuming this is a deliberate troll, but I’m still looking forward to Deiseach weighing in here. 🙂
I don't think Christmas has ever been *that* important as a Church holiday. Not unimportant, mind you, first among the saint's days, let us say, but not anywhere near the importance of Easter. So I don't think suggesting that Christ was actually born on some other day is likely to provoke much reaction. I believe the Church itself has debated the question more than once.
The English word "Easter" was certainly not invented by the Church, and the idea that it was chosen to steal a minor pagan celebration -- long abandoned at the time the idea that "Easter" was connected with Eostre was proposed -- is pretty dubious. The feast was (and still is) called "Pascha" in both Greek and Latin, the latter of which was (and still is) the official language of the Church.
For what it's worth, Britannica suggests (contra Bede) that a more reliable hypothesis of its etymology lies in Old High German "eostarum", which is the plural of "dawn" (obviously related to "ost" = "east") because the Church referred to the whole season of Easter (not just the day itself) as "time of many dawns".
I don’t have a dog in the fight myself. But the usual argument for “Jesus was born in the spring” is based on shepherds being out with their flocks for lambing, and a longstanding regional breed of sheep reportedly has its lambing time in December-January.
(Whether the shepherd story is true is another question, but without it I don’t know if there’s any reason to prefer the spring.)
https://www.fao.org/3/p8550e/P8550E01.htm
So, the reason for the shepherds in the fields were the sheep, and in the western tradition, sheep are managed a bit differently than in the mideast. Sheep in the west were more likely to be managed so as to lamb in late winter to early spring, and to be allowed to wander further more or less unsupervised during the gestational period (not kept barn confined because the flock needed to eat.)
Once lambing got close, the sheep would be more confined *or* the sheep owners would go out from the houses and villages and join the shepherds in caring for the sheep during this intense period.
As I understand it, and as the article highlights, in the Mideast cultural and ethnic groups would keep huge herds and move with them. They would *always* be out in the fields with their sheep, so the western translation would not apply.
There is also the timing effect. In the west, agriculture has allowed enough feed to largely prevent low energy anesterus, where the female can't be bred because she has insufficient energy reserves. (This is in part because Western agriculture doesn't migrate flocks nearly as much.) In this case, the sheep come into season based on day length, starting in July-ish, very strong in August & September, and trailing off in January. (This is a biological function of sheep and goats, shared with deer. Cows don't have this seasonality, horses breed in spring/summer.)
Western tradition also has the rams kept separate, delaying breeding (and hence lambing) to account for late winter lamb-killing weather.
Tropical breeds of sheep and goats have a reduced response to daylength, but respond more vigorously to feed intake.
...all of which is to say 'if you go off the sheep, Jesus was probably born in the Dec-Jan time frame, but the Western thinkers who object and say Spring have reasons for thinking so.'
Also, until Dickens, Christmas wasn't a huge holiday. (Dickens also reportedly crashed the Christmas goose sector in England, in favor of imported turkeys.)
It might not have been as big as it was now, but I think there is at least some evidence there was something extra to it before Dickens. https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/war-christmas
Tl;dr Parliament tried and failed to force Christmas into a more protestant form. Even when they used the army.
The Puritans in the American colonies likewise repeatedly tried to tamp it down, which suggests an active and durable tradition.
https://www.history.com/.amp/news/christmas-13-colonies-puritans
I always thought we knew he was born on December 25th, because that's why all the hotels in Bethlehem were booked up so they got stuck in the stables - it gets really busy at Christmas.
That would also explain why the wise men brought him gifts - they probably weren't going to, then they realised they were all going to meet on Christmas day.
I thought they were late, so those were belated Christmas presents.
i wonder whether after learning his wife had given birth Joseph went to a Chinese restaurant for a celebratory toast
I think the "co-opting pagan traditions" explanation is unnecessary because there's obvious symbolic reasons for Christmas to occur on the winter solstice.
If you were celebrating the birth of someone who called themselves "the Light of the World", who symbolically brought light into a dark world, what day would you pick? ("Our closest approximation to his actual birth" is one choice, but suppose you decided to value symbolism over historical precision, because you're running a religion not the Smithsonian.)
The darkest night of they year, the point at which light begins to gradually come into the world, is a really obvious choice - especially to pre-modern people who were much more constrained by the darkness/light cycle than us in our age of constant, convenient electric illumination. It's natural to want to celebrate at the part of the year where it stops getting darker, and tying in the symbolism of the Incarnation just makes a lot of sense.
It's possible the existing pagan celebrations played a factor, but it's not really necessary to explain the selection of the date.
The only pagan festival on Dec 25, that of Sol Invictus, isn't mentioned until several decades after the first surviving mention of Christmas being on Dec 25, and after Christians became a visible and well-known group in the Empire.
If anything, then, it's likely that the pagan festival was an attempt to neutralise the Christian one, rather than vice versa.
Supposedly the earliest calculation of December 25 as Christ's birth day was determined by adding 9 months to the Feast of the Annunciation, which has always been celebrated March 25, and marks the (much more important than Christmas) day on which the Archangel Gabriel told Mary she was going to bear the Son of God.
Yeah, the three theories wikipedia lists are 1) March 25 + 9 months, 2) solstice symbolism, 3) co-opting paganism. (The earliest reference to this theory seems to be a millennium later in the 12th century)
Apparently the logic for March 25 is that it was calculated to be the day that Jesus died (easier to calculate since it was Passover), and Jewish tradition held that great people lived for exact, whole number of years. (i.e. were conceived and died on the same day)
I am partial to William Tighe's argument that the date of Christmas results from combining efforts to determine the date of Good Friday with an ancient tradition that prophets died on the anniversaries of their conceptions or their births: https://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=16-10-012-v&readcode=&readtherest=true . But the date and breadth of the tradition aren't clear, so it may not be so: https://jimmyakin.com/2014/11/integral-age-update.html
How predictable I am! 🤣
Only in the best possible way. 😉
"this list of people who saved the most lives" isn't a link, so I don't know what the list says.
Thanks, fixed.
I note that neither: “Nazis can hold rallies hailing Hitler, and when you challenge them, they can claim they’re talking about a mythical Hitler who, mythologically, did good things but not bad things.”
or: “That means that continuing to do so doesn’t pass a reversal test for status quo bias.”
includes a link to A Parable On Obsolete Ideologies. Probably for the best, even though it would be very relevant here.
Samuel Johnson's 'Debates in the Senate of Lilliput' might be the first good poet's use of 'Columban' to describe British settlements in the Americas as Columbian. Johnson was anti-colonialism all his life.
The part where Coria entered the argument had me in stiches. This is brilliantly written.
To nitpick the argument though, I think it veers off after:
Beroe: Okay, okay, I admit that was indeed an extraordinarily hostile rephrasing. Maybe it’s not exactly the same as what you said. Maybe it’s more - the way that the idealistic thing you said will inevitably get implemented in real life?
Adraste: And you’re not being idealistic with your argument that we should never celebrate any holiday for anyone who has ever been associated with bad things? Except for Columbus, an exception you still haven’t even slightly explained?
But Beroe isn't arguing we should never celebrate any holiday for anyone who has ever been associated with bad things, Adraste is arguing that, and Beroe is arguing that that standard is unattainable, as evidenced by Adraste's indigenous people's day failing his own standard. Adraste somehow manages to confuse Beroe by accusing him of holding Adraste's position, proving that his own argument is stupid ... and then moving on without changing his position?
Exactly, the argument is not "we should never celebrate anything that can be associated with bad", it's "you can't disqualify A by associating it with bad and bring as a replacement B which is associated with equally bad or even worse".
+1
This is a really really really good point, I think you nailed it. I feel like without this being mentioned, it doesn't even really feel like a steelman of Beroe's actual position. I almost feel like Scott should addendum this in.
As somebody who is not a native American (and not a Native American either), I don't see a particular value for Columbus day for myself. I mean, I know about the mythos of Columbus, but if instead it'd be Benjamin Franklin day or Thomas Jefferson day or Plymouth Rock Worship day I wouldn't feel any difference.
But one thing I must object to here is that valuing the tradition by imagining its creation ex nihilo is the same as valuing it in the cultural context. If we wanted to create a human language, to be used for communication by majority of the world, be employed as pretty much unofficial official language of Science and Technology, and somebody would propose English as a candidate - they'd be laughed at, and maybe forcibly committed if they insisted. That does not imply we should spend all available effort to move away from English to some well-constructed Volapük. I am hearing some people crying out "jes ĝi faras!" right now but for the majority I think it's not the case. And if you did want to make such language, decreeing that starting Day X, every scientific paper is to be published in your favorite artificial language is probably not the best way to approach it. It would be lauded by some enthusiasts but would piss of many more people, I think, and be enormously destructive.
"Jes ĝi faras" is bad Esperanto - a word-by-word translation of "Yes it does!". "Fakte jes" would be idiomatic and correct.
The "choice" of English (or, really, a subset of English) among scientists is pragmatic; I don't think many tears would be shed for it if there were a 50- or 100-year-long transition period to Dutch, Esperanto, Swahili or Japanese. (Not *many*: algebraic geometers everywhere are still attached to French, and lack of knowledge of German can be a stumbling block on those occasions when you have to access the really old (prewar) literature - Russian is less of an issue, since the Soviets translated much of their best stuff themselves, but it can still be a barrier.)
...Esperanto has idioms? How? Where is Esperanto being spoken enough to acquire idioms?
> Where is Esperanto being spoken enough to acquire idioms?
Mostly here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Esperanto_Congress
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Youth_Congress
If someone is curious what Esperanto looks like in written and spoken form, check this:
https://dvd.ikso.net/pagxo/en/libro.html
https://dvd.ikso.net/pagxo/en/muziko.html
The language is codified primarily in a book "Fundamento de Esperanto" and the later additions are managed by "Akademio de Esperanto" (that's how you get words like "komputilo", "kvantummeĥaniko"). So idiomatic may also mean: this is how the author invented it, and for over hundred years the speakers are okay with using it like that.
Japanese likely not a good candidate. I mean if we only used the kanas, the spelling probably is better than English (it's hard to do any worse), if we ignore missing sounds that many Europeans are used to, but the grammar seems to be more complicated, and if we go to kanji that'd be really tough. Esperanto seems logical and easy but somehow nobody wants to actually use it. Dutch probably would be about the same as English, no idea about Swahili.
<i>the spelling probably is better than English (it's hard to do any worse),</i>
*French has entered the chat*
French has better spelling than English. In English, you don't know how to pronounce a word from its spelling, nor can do you know its spelling from its pronunciation. In French you generally get one of those directions (spelling -> pronunciation), though not the other.
>but somehow nobody wants to actually use it.
Why do you say "somehow" as if there's no possible costs associating with learning and using an artificial language instead of one you already speak and is widely spoken elsewhere?
>The "choice" of English (or, really, a subset of English) among scientists is pragmatic; I don't think many tears would be shed for it if there were a 50- or 100-year-long transition period to Dutch, Esperanto, Swahili or Japanese.
The majority of the world's most important scientists speak English but do not speak those three languages. It would be an enmorous imposition to teach the untold millions of potential scientists and science users a different language to use for science and there would be no beenfit from it, and this isn't even to mention that everyone would basically have to learn one of those languages in order to be merely able to comprehend the science.
English *emerged* as the language of science (it wasn't "chosen") because the majoirty of the world's most important science was done by English speakers. A disproportionate number still speak English natively, English is widely learned for economic and political reasons, and the language of non-anglosphere major scientific countries is not spoken much elsewhere i.e. China.
Such a transition to a language like Swahili could only ever possibly occur by fiat. It's not going to emerge naturally, because Swahili-speaking scientists are irrelevant and largely already speak English anyway. It would have to be something imposed on the world and on science and the only possible motivation for this would be far-left ideological reasons and absolutely not for practical reasons, which means, yes, people would be massively put out by it and would rightfully resist such a measure.
This is silly. First of all, it's clear that Swahili was brought here for the sake of example (or science-fiction); do people actually believe there's any chance of its being imposed by "left-wing ideologues" and "irrelevant Swahili-speaking scientists"?
In the early 20th century, it was certainly not the case that most of the world's most important science was done by *native* English speakers. (That may not be the case even now.) Many of the scientists that left Nazi Germany were far from fluent in English at first. English became the standard due to a combination of reasons - commercial and political dominance, political upheaval elsewhere; it was certainly not something that arose because of some sort of natural dominance of English speakers, or an already existing dominance by people who spoke it as a second language (would that mean that it became dominant because it was dominant?). Of course it was not the outcome of a conscious plan either - but for many scientists it was in fact an imposition from the outside.
>This is silly. First of all, it's clear that Swahili was brought here for the sake of example (or science-fiction); do people actually believe there's any chance of its being imposed by "left-wing ideologues" and "irrelevant Swahili-speaking scientists"?
No, nobody believes it, but you brought this example up to make a point about the world. That point is wrong. And your comment has done absolutely nothing to show that this isn't the case. There's no possible path to Swahili organically becoming the language of science the way English did, meaning the only way it could happen is if it were literally forced on people in an unnatural way (BY English speakers, not even Swahili spakers themselves). This is not what happened with English.
> but for many scientists it was in fact an imposition from the outside.
Only in the sense that they wanted access to the wealth and prestiege offered by English speaking societies. If anything, it was an imposition from the INSIDE in that Hitler imploded German-speaking Europe and they had to leave.
And again, this makes your comparison with Swahili pointless. Kenya is never going to become some scinetific or economic powerhouse where we will decide to learn Swahili to avoid being left behind. Because that's what would have to happen to make it comparable to English becoming the language of science.
>No, nobody believes it, but you brought this example up to make a point about the world. >That point is wrong. And your comment has done absolutely nothing to show that this isn't >the case
You obviously have not even understood the original point, as you would have if you had bothered to actually read what was in front of your eyes. (Who and what are you, anyhow?)
>> but for many scientists it was in fact an imposition from the outside.
>Only in the sense that they wanted access to the wealth and prestiege offered by English >speaking societies.
This seems callous; I would imagine that the main motivation of most people leaving Germany for the US in the 30s was some combination of "to survive" and "to avoid being complicit".
Is this really an accurate portrayal of how English came to prominence as an international language? My impression was more that Britain conquered a lot of places, and then once it had a worldwide foothold in that way, it became a useful language that people started learning.
So my impression would be more that Kenya would have to conquer a couple nations on most continents and then have some Swahili-speaking country remain as an economic powerhouse
Nonsense. You're certainly correct that Germany runs a close second, indeed so much so such that American PhD students in organic chemistry as recently as the 70s and 80s were obliged to learn to read German, but overall it's no contest, the most influential physical science from circa 1750 on was done in England, with the United States gradually taking over in the mid 20th century. The French were very much in the running right until they cut their own throat (in some cases, e.g. Lavoisier, quite literally) by the narcissistic auto da fé that followed the Revolution.
I think we may be able to guess your field. There are others in which the UK (let alone the US) was a backwater until the beginning of the 20th century, and then took quite a while to catch up (indeed there are fields where the UK never caught up, though of course the US surpassed it, and all others).
France did fine in many ways, thanks in part to institutions that were created in Napoleonic times, or in some instances at the height of the Revolution (though they were much changed in what followed).
Like what? Name a scientific field, other than organic chemistry, which I've already mentioned belonged to the Germans in the 19th century, in which some country other than the US or UK was the leading light between 1800 and 1950, say.
Amerindian was a term created ex nihilo that avoids the problems of both American Indian and Native American. Perhaps you could use it or perhaps it is just easier to not bother.
Replacing English entirely is a step too far even for someone like me, but perhaps gradual spelling reform and/or other improvements are not?
I liked Amerindian when I first encountered it in the 70s, but apparently the people so described never did. Last I heard polling them in the US gets “American Indian” first and “Native American” second, though it’s always possible that’s changed.
(And I expect it’s different in Canada with “First Nations” ranking higher there, though whether it’s #1 I can’t guess.)
First Nations is doubly wrong -- the tribes of Canada are not nations (if words are to keep their traditional meanings rather than having new ones made up whenever convenient), and the ones that existed circa 1604 were almost certainly not the first ones.
I'm not sure that's entirely correct. I think the word "nation" originally was not as synonymous with "state" as it is today, and originally meant a group of people strongly connected by blood (hence the origin in the Latin verb "to be born", and the common usage of "nation state" in history to describe states that *were* more similar to nations than, say, Austria-Hungary.)
I would guess it's probably because the original use corresponded more closely with "tribe" that a number of Native American tribes called themselves "nations" when they first put their name into English, e.g. the Navajo Nation, the Sioux Nation, the Penobscot Nation, and so forth. My impression is that Native Americans don't think of something like "the Navajo Nation" as synonymous with its territory, or even with its state apparatus, but more with "all of us people who have Navajo blood."
So the meaning of "First Nations" is probably mean to be more "first tribes that occupied this land" than anything to do with sovereign entities, and that seems pretty consistent with the original meaning of the word. Whether there were tribes in Canada before those that claim that status is a separate anthropological question about which I know nothing.
I think if we were trying to be careful, yes we would need to do some research. While it's generally agred there were no humans here at all before the last glacial maximum (20-25k years ago), the earliest settlement of North America is still a subject of research and debate. There could have been multiple waves of invasion -- which would support your argument that none of those now extant could've been first -- or maybe not. It's two big continents, and 20,000 years isn't that much time to settle every corner, walking the whole way. Perhaps people just expanded into a vacuum and there wasn't so much of the kind of waves of overlapping invasion that Europe has had, in which case it would be possible that some of the American Indian tribes *are* direct descendants of people who walked across the Beringia land bridge.
Yeah, "nations" comes from mediaeval universities:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_(university)
" Medieval universities were cosmopolitan, with students from many different domestic and foreign regions. Students who were born within the same region usually spoke the same language, expected to be ruled by their own familiar laws, and therefore joined together to form the nations.
In the University of Paris there were the French, Normans, Picards, and the English, and later the Alemannian nation. Jean Gerson was twice elected procurator for the French natio (i.e. the French-born students at the university) in 1383 and 1384, while studying theology at Paris. Also at Paris, Germanic speakers were grouped into a single nation.
The various nations in Paris often quarreled with one another; Jacques de Vitry wrote of the students:
"They affirmed that the English were drunkards and had tails; the sons of France proud, effeminate and carefully adorned like women. They said that the Germans were furious and obscene at their feasts; the Normans, vain and boastful; the Poitevins, traitors and always adventurers. The Burgundians they considered vulgar and stupid. The Bretons were reputed to be fickle and changeable, and were often reproached for the death of Arthur. The Lombards were called avaricious, vicious and cowardly; the Romans, seditious, turbulent and slanderous; the Sicilians, tyrannical and cruel; the inhabitants of Brabant, men of blood, incendiaries, brigands and ravishers; the Flemish, fickle, prodigal, gluttonous, yielding as butter, and slothful. After such insults from words they often came to blows."
And the north/south divide has a long tradition:
"The students who attended the medieval university in Oxford arranged themselves into two constantly quarreling nations who were called the australes and the boreales. The australes originated from south of the River Trent and was the more powerful of the two nations. The Welsh were also considered part of the australes, along with scholars from the Romance lands. The boreales came mainly from the north of England and Scotland.
The nations at Oxford were eventually disbanded in 1274 in an effort to maintain peace in the town."
What does "had tails" mean in this context?
Well, at least we know the combative and intellectually rigid nature of the college-aged is not novel.
And it’s not as if any term under consideration is rigorous. Obviously there’s no connection to India, and the literal meaning of “native” applies to all non-immigrants. No one uses “aboriginal” (which appears to have some baggage from its use in Australia) and “indigenous” seems to be used in a broader sense.
At some point all you can do is settle on some arbitrary term. Which history suggests will often undergo a treadmill of replacement as later generations get dissatisfied and look for an arbitrary term they like better.
See also Oriental->East Asian, which replaces one word for “east” with another, tacked onto a Classical term for the Anatolian peninsula that got generalized to most of a continent.
But sometimes one term stops being polite and another starts, and polite people will move with the current. Other times there’s an effort to make that process happen with limited success. (E.g., the very small number of people so described who prefer Latinx thus far.)
When and whether to make a switch is always a judgment call, though some calls are easier than others.
Never heard of any of the AI/NA people ever even mention that term, nor it mentioned in any context related to them. Not that I that well versed into their affairs, but I've met some and listened to more speak (including on political affairs), and even more spoken about them, and that's the first time I even learn such a term exists. I think it is safe to conclude it is not enjoying wide popularity.
One problem with spelling reform is that there are many different dialects of English.
Relevant Tolkien quote from a 1956 letter!
"It was just as the 1914 War burst on me that I made the discovery that 'legends' depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally on the 'legends' which it conveys by tradition. (For example, that the Greek mythology depends far more on the marvellous aesthetic of its language and so of its nomenclature of persons and places and less on its content than people realize, though of course it depends on both. And vice versa. Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &c &c are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends.)"
Esperanto has legends in the same sense that Scouts or Communists have some: about the primitive Volapük ancestors, the slithering Idoist traitors, etc.
There's also the fake folklore in "Rakontoj prapatraj pri nia lando antaŭ multaj jarcentoj kiam okazemis mirindaj aferoj", which you can read here: https://pages.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/eo/rakontoj/rakontlisto.html
And so it relates to the holidays too. Whatever Columbus' faults as a person were, which I am sure were numerous, he has a mythos standing behind him (or, by now, in front of him - nobody really cares much about his person anymore). "Indigenous People Day" has... blah. I mean woke culture I guess has been trying to create their own mythology, but I think right now it's about 90% of performative wokeness for the sake of wokeness and 10% about actually thinking about Indigenous People (which Indigenous People btw? There are many, and I suspect they aren't all alike and interchangeable). Maybe it'll change in 50 or so years, but right now it doesn't seem to have any cultural clout behind it.
I hate the cliche of Columbus being a symbol for The Discoverer because
(a) The Vikings and probably the Chinese (this one is from dubious memory of something I read so I might be wrong) got there before
(b) He died not realizing that this was an entirely new continent, it's one thing that he discovered it by accident, are you really a "discoverer" if you don't actually recognize that you have *uncovered* a new thing ?
(c) There are no virtues in the discovery process, there is nothing extra smart or brave about Columbus, he's just a dumbass with a wrong map (even by the standards of the time) and an ability to persuade the monarchs. Is this what you want to celebrate in an explorer, ignoring the best available info and sucking up to authority ?
It doesn't really matter. St. Nicolas of Myra probably didn't fly on a sled driven by magic reindeer (citation needed) and haven't kept good vs. naughty lists for all kids in existence.
Yeah, I don't really care about the celebrations angle, Columbus isn't celebrated where I live and a bunch of dumb things are, including a religion I don't believe in, I just let people be happy.
I'm against his mythos in ordinary discovery-themed conversations. For an analogy, imagine if every time generosity or reward is involved somebody mentions Santa Claus, it gets very tedious very fast.
As far as I can tell, Columbus Day is big for Italian-Americans and nobody else cares about it.
More and more, I believe holidays should be about celebrating and highlighting principles we value (like gratitude, generosity), not individual people or events. Ideally, they are aptly timed too, so a celebration of light comes at the darkest or brightest time of year, and a celebration of gratitude falls around harvest time.
Then, a good holiday is given color and meaning through rituals and myths that “show, don’t tell” the importance of those values and principles, and give the celebration the necessary “weight” and importance.
Christmas/New Year, Easter, Thanksgiving and many more traditional holidays got this right a long time ago (even if at least two of those have become far to dominated by the myth of the man). I don’t expect that’s because old cultures were wise enough to just know how holidays were supposed to work. I suspect it’s the other way around, that getting it right makes the holidays more sticky.
As such, I think both Colombus Day and Indigenous People’s Day fails.
So, incidentally, does 4th of July. Don’t get me wrong: It’s a good holiday, but instead of being a celebration of democracy, which maybe should have come on or near Election Day (or the other way around), it has become “big family picnic day” – which may also be important, but not as important as the thing we’re meant to celebrate.
It’s probably not a bad idea to have a holiday to celebrate adventure in the US, and one to celebrate diversity and inclusivity, and maybe a day or three to feel ashamed of how our ancestors treated each other, to commit to raise out own kids to be better than that, and to forgive each other. (And no, your particular blood line or skin tone will not get you out of that one.)
But if we want to make them sticky, let’s not name them after real, fallible people (even the best ones, like MLK), but something less vulnerable and more aspirational. Then, let’s make sure we build a structure of relevant rituals and sacrifices on top of it – and it can’t just be a parade with bag pipes. Ideally – but this is a bit much to ask of modern people – it’s something that requires a sacrifice, that brings home that the thing we value isn’t free. (No, not a bloody sacrifice. It could be a 24-hour fast, or keeping stores closed for a day, or slowing Internet down to 2G speeds for a day, or an expectation that people donate a day’s worth of work. Something relevant, though.)
When we anchor our holidays to our values, rather than specific events and individuals, we can tell myths about Columbus and his accomplishments, alongside stories about his cruelty and his inability to estimate the circumference of a globe, without celebrating him as a person. We can celebrate and share knowledge about all the peoples we want to include, in a way that can be true and real, and that fits modern and ever-evolving sensibilities.
And, over time, our stories can be filtered and the bad myths naturally replaced by better myths, that do a better job of representing the idea we want to hold on to. That will help us celebrate civil rights and democracy and shared history in a way that still allows us to tell amateur historians and contrarians to sit down, STFU and not ruin it for everybody else.
I agree that family and fun make holidays sticky and enjoyable. But it’s not an either–or proposition.
Thanksgiving and New Years has managed to keep both. Christmas and Easter less so, but they can probably still be salvaged (from family to family or more broadly in the culture) for those who want.
The danger of focusing too much on the enjoyable parts of the holiday, that make it sticky, is that it may end up like Halloween, which was supposed to be about remembering and honoring the dead, but has lost pretty much all its original meaning to the super-stimulus / evil demon that is candy.
But at least, with Halloween, we kept some of the evocative imagery, so there’s a strong Memento Morí aspect to it. As such, Mardi Gras/Carnival may be an even better example of a holiday gone full-sticky. It was supposed to be about the upcoming fast, but has become Halloween for more adult pleasures, and seems to have been completely decoupled from the temporary renunciation of such pleasures that was supposed to follow.
- -
I got inspired by your comment, however, and got thinking about how I would design an enjoyable, relevant and sticky holiday to celebrate American Democracy (in addition to July 4th, not replacing it):
First, I’d put the holiday to Election Day. The most important ritual I’d want to include would be voting, but that should be wrapped up in other traditions that are enjoyable, and ideally relevant to democracy.
I’d make Election Day a public holiday and probably move it to a Wednesday, so everyone would have the day off, while disincentivizing going away for a long weekend. Also, it might be nice to rename it e.g. Democracy Day, so it’s about celebrating the larger principle and idea, not just doing the one action.
Then we’d have to normalize a certain culture around it:
People would have to agree that the only “right” way to celebrate the day, would be to start the day by getting together with friends and/or family for a large breakfast, with foods from all around the country, around a table decorated with flags etc. (This tradition gets everyone to participate, and gets voter turnout up.)
At least one TV channel would have a tradition of inviting a respected person to give a short speech about democracy, followed by a montage of children from around the country say what they love about democracy and the bill of rights, and what they want for the country. Cute, funny and perfectly designed to spark non-contentious conversation around the breakfast table. (Purpose of a tradition like this: Get everyone to agree on the basics, make differences of opinion to seem innocent, keep a feel-good atmosphere.)
After breakfast, everyone travels as a group to the polling place, wearing flag pins, maybe dressed in a flag shirt and flag hat if you’re that kind of person. It’s supposed to be fun and festive (and create unity around symbols of America.)
Once there, everyone gets a number, so they don’t have to stand in line. Instead, while the adults wait for their turn to vote, they mingle with friends and neighbors. Local organizations (like the PTA) have organized games for the children, and there are food stands where you can buy finger food and (non-alcoholic) drinks. The school band plays The Star-Spangled Banner and mangles Born in the USA. (Purpose: Voting should be a very enjoyable and social thing to do.)
The actual voting is separated from the mingling, and is a quiet and solemn affair, in the presence of officials dressed in formal attire – it should feel serious and sacred.
But the party goes on outside.
After voting, people go back home. There may be time for a nap. There is no reporting on exit polls or results for any district until the polls close across the state. Instead, TV shows a classic movie or two about resolving differences without shooting each other or blowing up cars. Teenagers complain that it’s the same movies every year. Adults laugh and say that’s exactly the point. (Purpose: This defuses a bit of tension, creates a sense of predicability and security from year to year, and emphasizes that democracy is about getting along despite our differences.)
When the results start coming in, there are lots of snacks already on the living room table, and at least a few TV channels have made itstheir Election Day coverage a family-friendly broadcast, peppered with skits and relevant history lessons and biographies in-between live updates, instead of just wall-to-wall repetition and projection. (This makes watching the results come in enjoyable and interesting for everyone, and a thing families do together.)
When the polls close in Hawaii, there are fireworks show in Honolulu and DC. It’s a reminder that the US is one big country, and it marks that the election is a fait accompli, and that now all that remains is the counting. (No more arguing, please.)
Everyone then shakes hands, hugs, or calls and texts good friends, and in the spirit of concession and compromise, they all tell each other “it could have been worse” – and then say something that would actually have been a lot worse than the likely outcome of the election. (Making a point out of accepting the outcome, and still standing together, even if the election doesn’t seem to be going exactly as we hoped, embracing democracy in the bad as well as the good.)
- -
I hope you noticed I’m not 100% serious, but I think it’s not only possible, but desirable, to be more conscious of what we wish to celebrate, and more deliberate about how we go about it. 😀 Not in a totalitarian way, where all this is imposed by The Party, or designed and put into action by some Illuminati-like conspiracy, but in a way where we all help deliberately and thoughtfully create the culture we want to live in.
This sounds so awesome!
The one quibble people will have with this is the very strict laws about "no ANYTHING within 500ft of the polls (to prevent biasing the voters)." How do you suggest the festivities escape that particular issue?
If it were up to me, I’d lean towards repealing rules like that. The intensions seem good, but the implementation is outdated and heavy-handed. It’s enough for me if the actual Chamber of Voting is kept clean.
That's also why MLK day should be moved to the anniversary of the "I Have a Dream" speech. Better weather makes for a better holiday.
https://www.upi.com/Business_News/Security-Industry/2004/01/18/Commentary-How-to-make-MLK-day-universal/UPI-59931074458580/
I agree with some version of this. But also the people who are really into MLK day will need to accept that, for most people, they will spend approximately 0 time on that day thinking or caring about MLK or civil rights.
When it started being enacted, a friend said "Mark my words, one day we'll see ads for the Martin Luther King Day White Sale."
I suspect the reason that hasn't (as far as I know) come to pass has at least as much to do with "white sale" fading as a term for a January sale on linens, and the decline of department stores (and newspaper ads) generally.
Do people really spend their time thinking about those things on MLK Day as it is?
I think most people don't spend time doing much of anything on MLK Day. I think if you change it to a nicer time of year it'll change from "nothing" to "spending time outside", and under no circumstance be, for most people, a Day of Reflection.
> More and more, I believe holidays should be about celebrating and highlighting principles we value (like gratitude, generosity), not individual people or events.
I think this is worth exploring, and doesn't deserve short shrift. And if the thought experiment extends to replacing all holidays, it's worth considering other cultures' and nations' holidays as data points.
I have a (limited) familiarity with Japan's holidays, for example. They have national public holidays like Greenery Day, Mountain Day, and Marine Day (not for the military, but the oceans); Children's Day, Respect for the Aged Day; and Culture and Sports Days. No doubt for most citizens these are just days off of work, but hey—that's true here too.
There's still some holidays in the set that might incite criticism in certain circles (Showa Day, Emperor's Birthday), but on the whole, the palette of Japanese holidays has a markedly different tone than America's.
Yes.
As I’ve become increasingly atheistic/anti-religious I’ve thought a lot about what existing holidays mean to me, and which holidays I would observe if I could pick my own with no concern for the culture at large. I thought a bit about holidays from other cultures, but I don’t know enough about them, so I ended up (entirely hypothetically so far) inventing some of my own, and reverting to some pagan ones.
But in the thought experiment I give myself a limit of 3-4 major holidays and 8-9 minor days and long weekends sprinkled throughout, so as not to lose the entire year to holidays. It’s an interesting exercise in thinking through what I truly value, how I prioritize things, and how it all relates to the passing of time.
I agree with this but would go further: the best holidays tend to be those that arose naturally, not intentionally designed to glorify some person or idea. If I were king I'd delegate holidays to the Wiccans.
Take Christmas: celebrating the birth of Jesus would not normally indicate decorating a pine tree and exchanging presents. It's a pagan midwinter celebration that got co-opted by the Christians, and would still be a damn fine holiday even if we collectively decided to forget about the Christian aspect. Halloween, as celebrated, is still Samhain in all but name. Easter "Magical rabbit hides eggs" is entirely orthogonal to the resurrection of Christ. Thanksgiving is a fall harvest festival.
If we want to celebrate <demographic of the month>, I'd much rather import some of their emergent holidays, than declare <demographic> Day. I'd be genuinely excited for Holi or Tanabata or Hathisesthata, in the same way I'd be disappointed or oblivious for Indian/Japanese/Indigenous American Day.
As someone who lives in a country with "early May", "late May" and "August" holidays, I assure you that having figured out the optimal number of holidays, you don't need to go on to the next step of agreeing historical figures to celebrate. You can just have holidays there.
Both Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples' Day are fake holidays which, as far as I can tell, lack proper rites, as if people can just raise a mental flag to say "I'm celebrating Columbus" or "I'm celebrating indigenous peoples". Just give people the day off. If they happen to feel like celebrating something particular on the occasion, then they may.
Found the brit. Those are days off not holidays.
Also a Brit, and would say these are both "days off" and "holidays". Would be interested in the US usage as to what the difference is?
I've heard many Brits say "On holiday" where I interpret them to mean "On vacation".
Americans tend to refer to "days off" or "vacation" or "out of office days", and reserve "holiday" for "days off that are associated with a specific festival or religious observance". As in: "How was your Thanksgiving/4th of July/Christmas holiday break?"
I've rarely heard any non-regular-Church-goers refer to Easter as a holiday in the US, though, despite it having a secular festival revolving around kids, eggs, bunnies and chocolate. Not sure if that's my irreligious subgroup or if holiday needs to have the intersection of "festival or religious observance" AND "day off from the office".
It appears that the British use "holiday" for what Americans would call "vacation" as well as "holidays". Over here, a holiday is a specific day (Christmas, Fourth of July, etc.) not just any time you're not working.
Helpful and interesting, thank you.
My thoughts on typical UK usage:
From a UK perspective it wouldn't occur to me to connect "holiday" with "religious/civic observance" except etymologically, partly because I think we (generally) sit lighter to both our civic and religious observances, and partly because of the term-of-art "bank holiday".
Bank holidays in the UK come in variety of types:
1) Actual day of religious or civic observance, e.g. Christmas Day, Good Friday, or the recent extra one we had for the Queen's funeral. People might or might not take part in the observances these days mark, or course.
2) Day connected with observance but not used by anyone for particular observance, e.g. Easter Monday.
3) Day historically connected with observance but now not, e.g. the "late May bank holiday" which used to be the Monday after Pentecost, i.e. they used to be category 2 but now function as category 4.
4) Day just because a day off is wanted, e.g the August bank holiday.
Categories 1 and 2-4 differ in how they are used, and by different people. However, all of these categories share common assumptions about what businesses are open, who gets the day off etc.
Additionally "holiday" is used (a) in the sense of schools not being open, e.g. "the summer holidays", (b) by extension, people taking time off around those times or for family reasons "Christmas holidays" (days off typically taken between Christmas and New Year), (c) being "away on holiday", i.e. "vacation". Although to me (old fashioned and/or posh) "vacation" only means to me the same as "holiday" in sense (a).
A "day off" in the UK implies something particular to me or to a small number of people, as in "I am taking a day off on Friday", with the implication that there's no wider participation.
That all seems correct to me.
They're pretty orthogonal in my opinion. Asking somebody if "is _ a holiday for you" is asking if they celebrate it, not if they get the day off of work (although context matters). And there are common days off that people wouldn't consider a holiday.
There are 5 major holidays that every office closes for (New Year's Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas).
There are holidays that some but not all have the day off for (e.g. Martin Luther King Jr. Day, President's Day, Juneteenth, Columbus Day, Veteran's Day).
There are days off for many that aren't holidays (day after Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve).
Then there's events like Halloween, which a major focus of culture and celebration (to the point of people decorating their yards a month in advance) and yet nobody gets them off at all.
That's May Day, Whitsun and... ok I don't know where the August one came from. So it's Flora, St. Walpurga and the Holy Ghost that we get days off for.
"In the very unlikely chance that, a hundred years from now, the descendants of Aztecs are powerful and privileged, but the descendants of their sacrificial victims are marginalized..."
The descendants of Montezuma are dukes in the peerage of Spain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_of_Moctezuma_de_Tultengo
But among Mexican states, Tlaxcala isn't too poor and marginalised
Love this dialogue, and I appreciate hearing the perspectives espoused both there and in the comments! :)
If your going to design new holidays, why stick them to a particular historical figure?
Can't we have science day, friendship day, music day etc. Celebrating good things that are expressed by most humans to varying extents?
Cat day.
An excellent idea. Now we just need to get the humans on board.
We literally have all of those things already and no one gives a hoot.
But they don't come with days off, so they are, at best, 2nd class "Days" whereas Columbus Day or Indigenous People's Day are 1st class days. It boils down to status games.
Sure. But whose fault is that? If enough people actually started celebrating Arbor Day or Flag Day on the day that the government is literally telling you to celebrate trees and flags, it would turn into a day off. Not my fault that the tree and flag people don't care enough about their holiday to get anyone's attention.
The whole post is about political factions trying to vie for attention and how those in power should consider the lobbying efforts - I don't know what point you are trying to make.
The question was "why can't we have a holiday for The Science™️?" and the answer is "because nobody wants one."
Lots of people want one, it's just that the people in power don't find it useful. It doesn't buy off any politically powerful group so there's no point.
The US has four public holidays that people actively celebrate: Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's Eve and (to a lesser extent) the Fourth of July. Everything else is a sop to some politically powerful group.
Taking away holidays from one group and giving them to another group is just culture war by other means: Columbus Day may have been added as a sop to Italians but it is being taken away as an attack on White people in general.
People are rarely enthusiastic about celebrations of abstract concepts, and only sometimes about abstract classes of people (hence May Day and Labor Day but I think that's about it). We are most enthusiastic about celebrating specific important events, hence Independence Day and Armistice Day that morphed into Veteran's Day in the US, specific classes of people well known to us, hence Decoration Day for the Civil War dead that morphed into Memorial Day, and for specific popular heroes, usually leaders through difficult times, hence Washington and Lincoln's Birthday which merged into President's Day to accommodate MLK day when it became necessary to introduce.
I would say the overall theme is one of gratitude for the ending of suffering, or for those who led the people through dark times. In general the celebration of positive things, or people who have contributed positively more than helped evade or terminate negative things, just doesn't elicit the same kind of powerful response. That just seems to be human nature: we are more grateful for avoiding calamity than enjoying prosperity. We are more likely to remember the person who saved our life from a speeding car than the person who gave us a nice raise at work.
Mothers day. Fathers day. Also celebrate abstract groups of people.
Good counterexample, I like it. Certainly suggests there is some additional sublety here. An interesting wrinkle on this is that neither of those are very public holidays -- there are no parades, no speeches by politicians, big public displays, and people don't get off from work. They are some kind of strange holiday that is celebrated privately, like birthdays, but which we agree to all do on the same day.
>Can't we have science day, friendship day, music day etc. Celebrating good things that are expressed by most humans to varying extents?
These are hollow, artificial holidays that nobody feels any emotional connection to. You fail to understand the point of these holidays. If this is the route we're taking, just call them federal holidays and be done with it. Nobody is celebrating "science day". Most people do not give two shits about science generally (brainless lawn signs saying "we trust science in this house" notwithstanding) and they're certainly not attached enough to it to care about a "science day" beyond their enjoyment of a day off.
And the type of "science" that would be celebrated on "science day" would be an ever greater mythological form than the Columbus celebrated by some today
Yeah. People worshiping SCIENCE [TM]. That could actually be a problem.
This really helped clarify for me why I like the dialogue format so much: if the author is arguing a straw man, it's much easier to identify in a dialogue format than in a traditional essay argument type argument (I found I understood how I disagreed with Plato more when his straw men made terrible arguments explicitly). Alternatively, if the author is intellectually honest (as here) the characters are allowed to give good points on each side.
I don't think the factual basis of holiday figures is as irrelevant as Beroe makes it out to be. I think the inspirational quality of the holiday can be indirectly affected by it.
Take Columbus Day. Say a kid gets inspired by the spirit of exploration and progress the mythical Columbus is supposed to embody, and wants to be just like him. Maybe she wants to find a scientific falsehood people in the modern day believe, and show everyone it's wrong, just like mythic Columbus did with the flat earth. Now how does she go about doing that?
Mythic Columbus knew the world was round, when everyone else thought it was flat. But how did he know? I don't think the stories say. He just knows somehow. And how did he know the earth was small enough that sailing around it was feasible, and his crew wouldn't die of thirst long before he crossed the ocean? Again, the myths don't concern themselves with that detail.
So mythic Columbus just knows, because he's a mythic explorer. You can't learn to be a mythic explorer, you just are one. Hearing stories about mythic Columbus can't teach you to be like him.
Now imagine if instead of Columbus day, we celebrated, say, Eratosthenes day, in recognition of his factually real accomplishment of figuring out the circumference of the earth. How can you be like Eratosthenes? Well, the stories, and the writings of the real Eratosthenes, are happy to tell you! You do it by inventing a really clever experiment involving shadows, and being sufficiently obsessed that you actually pay someone to walk from Alexandria to Syene and count how many steps it takes, so you can calculate the distance between them.
Historical figures who accomplished real, great things for humanity can teach you things. Because of their factuality, their achievements make sense, they are reducible to components. Their stories contain real evidence of what you need to do, how you need to think, how you ought to live your life, if you want to achieve great things yourself. To me, that just seems like a much more substantial and filling kind of inspiration than the kind you get from mythic explorers like Columbus.
Kids don't want their holidays to be schoolwork, especially not math. Columbus went places and saw new stuff, things kids can imagine they're doing when they're running through a forest. If you're trying to replace him, it should be with another adventurer. Lewis and Clark, or Magellan, or something.
By all means, I imagine stories of real adventurers have a lot to teach about how to be a good adventurer.
>Now imagine if instead of Columbus day, we celebrated, say, Eratosthenes day, in recognition of his factually real accomplishment of figuring out the circumference of the earth. How can you be like Eratosthenes?
Nobody knows or cares who that is and his acheivements are not the sort of thing people rally around. Columbus isn't great for demonstrating the earth isn't flat. It's all that exploration and discovery of new world and laying the way for America's founding that any ever cares about.
What you're saying is just another example of obivilious rationalist projection. You think other people think like you and something like calculating the cirumfrence of the world is something to rally around because of the scientific brilliance of it all - that's not how most people work.
Why, I take umbrage at the "oblivious projection" part. I'm perfectly aware that most people don't think like me, thank you very much. I'm merely trying to rectify that unfortunate circumstance.
More seriously, it was just an example. If you want your holidays figures to be about adventuring brilliance or political brilliance or literary brilliance or whatever instead, by all means. But I think the same principle applies. Real brilliant people have a depth and quality to their brilliance that mythical figures somewhat struggle to emulate.
This is fantastic - but you are entering a world of pain when you mention Eostre . . . https://historyforatheists.com/2017/04/easter-ishtar-eostre-and-eggs/
We should have a ‘Debunk the Eostre Myth’ day. It’s already celebrated regularly by many people.
Glad others decided to debunk that particular bit of midwit received wisdom. I get tired of doing so, over and over.
>Jesus was born in the spring; they moved Christmas to December to neutralize the pagan Solstice celebration.
Ok, I'll bite. No-one knows when Jesus was born. The clues in the gospels are sparse and contradictory. The Nativity wasn't widely celebrated as a festival until the fourth century.
Hippolytus of Rome put the date at 25 December in the early 3rd century. He writes (in the Commentary on Daniel), "For the first advent of our Lord in the flesh, when he was born in Bethlehem, was December 25th, Wednesday, while Augustus was in his forty-second year, but from Adam, five thousand and five hundred years. He suffered in the thirty-third year, March 25th, Friday, the eighteenth year of Tiberius Caesar, while Rufus and Roubellion were Consuls." It's probably not a coincidence that this places the Annunciation on 25th March, coinciding with the date given for Good Friday. At any rate, Hippolytus isn't fixing the date of a festival. If anything, he's concerned with fitting Christ's chronology to Daniel's prophecies.
Saturnalia fell on 17 December and continued until 23 December. The festival Dies Natalis Solis Invicti did fall on 25 December, but this is itself a late invention, not attested earlier than 354, but plausibly instituted by Aurelian (who created the cult of Sol Invictus), who reigned 270-275. That of course postdates Hippolytus, so while it remains possible that the Church ultimately fixed 25 December as the date of the Nativity to compete with Aurelian's festival, it's equally possible that Aurelian chose the date in an attempt to suppress nascent Christian celebrations on that day.
It's worth pointing out, as well, that there were an awful lot of pagan cults in the ancient Mediterranean -- as well as the big ones like Jupiter, Juno, etc., you also had the mystery cults, and local deities worshipped in a particular city or region. Hence, unless there's some kind of demonstrable linkage or borrowing going on, it's not necessarily significant that a Christian festival is on or near the date of a pagan festival -- literally every day on the calendar would be on or near the date of a pagan festival somewhere or other.
The Puritans were anti-Christmas in part because they didn't think we knew when Jesus was actually born (the other part is because it was a fun Catholic-style holiday where people got drunk and made mischief).
Something that would be interesting to thing about / that I can’t grasp clearly right now is how holidays that start as political/religious events like Indigenous Colombus Day or Christmas or May Day eventually turn into Big Family Picnic/Dinner/Long Weekend Day and end up losing their intended significance, while still contributing to bringing us together. I mean, even Christmas, it used to be religiously minor, and the church was more interested in Easter, but it somehow caught on in the population, was gradually stripped of its religiously significant stuff* and now is hardly a religious holiday at all. And yet it’s the stereotypical example of what we like in holidays, that they bring us together, are traditions, etc.
I guess it may have to do with the actual underlying beliefs: May Day where I’m from used to be huge among workers, because they had a strongly shared working-class culture, but is now only a long weekend for anyone other than very committed trade unionists and left-wing student activists. However, even when it was really big, it never really seems to have caught on among non-working class people. That’s kind of a problem if you want your holidays to help your nation-building, because having holidays built upon specific examples of people, behaviours, what-have-yous, is good for that, but harder than to agree on than a Day of Generally Not Being Too Much of an Asshole, or a Day of That Specific Foodstuff that The Whole Country Thinks Tastes Great, or something.
* Before the 1950s in France, Christmas still had important religious elements including the fact that the presents were mostly brought to children by the Little Jesus, who in the 1950s was gradually replaced by Father Christmas/Santa Claus, leading to the following wonderful anecdote:
In 1951 in Dijon, clerics burned at the stake a straw effigy of Santa in protest against the de-christianization of Christmas. Just so you know it happened and can have fun imagining what it looked like.
"Something that would be interesting to thing about / that I can’t grasp clearly right now is how holidays that start as political/religious events like Indigenous Colombus Day or Christmas or May Day eventually turn into Big Family Picnic/Dinner/Long Weekend Day and end up losing their intended significance, while still contributing to bringing us together."
Take it one step further. The best and highest meaning and usage of holidays is to be Big Family Picnic (or whatever else) Day. The part where it's named after someone or something is a way to gild the Picnic thing with aspects of our national civic religion. But the day off is the thing.
The holiday names are the highlights of the story we tell about ourselves. Jesus, the Revolution, soldiers, pilgrims, MLK, New Years Eve (OK maybe not that one...). So people want to put their "stuff" in the highlight reel. But the actual effect of holidays is to give people time off.
"In 1951 in Dijon, clerics burned at the stake a straw effigy of Santa in protest against the de-christianization of Christmas. Just so you know it happened and can have fun imagining what it looked like."
I'm imagining the legendary/apocryphal Japanese misunderstanding of Christmas as represented by a crucified Santa. (Snopes' opinion is "probably not": https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/santa-cross)
Enjoyable.
I could (could have?) cared less about Columbus Day until Mariano A. Lucca started pushing for a greater recognition of it as a holiday and the whole Italian American “thing” blew up with the popularity of “The Godfather” stirring the gravy. Still could care less. But this post is both fun to read and enlightening.
Why not “Slaves and Oppressed Peoples Day”?
You may enjoy this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw.
>Still could care less.
Couldn't
>Why not “Slaves and Oppressed Peoples Day”?
If you don't see why an "oppressed peoples day" would be a terrible idea...
Merely taking the snowflake view the the ultimate extreme.
"Oppressed peoples only get one day of the year, while their oppressors get the other three hundred and sixty four! We should have an Oppressed Peoples Month! No, an Oppressed Peoples Season! No, an..."
> suppose we were to replace Christmas with another holiday that tested equally well in focus groups. It had just as much potential for holiday specials, provided just as much of an excuse to get together with family, even had delightful mythological characters who, starting ex nihilo, would have just as much appeal as Santa. Would you feel like something had been lost?
I have had weird feelings reading this. I am from Russia, and this precisely what has happened here (without focus groups though). In soviet era, Christmas was banned as too religious, and replaced with New Year celebrations (in the night from 31st of December to the 1st of January), which are as massive a holiday as Christmas is in the US. For New Year, families come together, decorate a spruce tree (which is called a New Year Tree rather than a Christmas Tree), and give each other presents which are supposedly distributed by Grandfather Frost, who is totally not Santa Claus despite being an old jolly bearded guy giving the presents. (He has evolved from the East Slavic mythology rather Cristianity, so while he was briefly banned, the soviet government was much less strict about that, as, in accordance with the post, they feared Pagan opposition much less than Christian opposition). And Christmas in Russia is mostly celebrated by people who are indeed religious.
And yes, in Russia we are kind of without tradition with regard to national holidays, because all the main ones are at most soviet-era old. The most popular are The New Year, The International Women's Day and the Day of Protectors of the Fatherland (Progressives in Russia have been to change the nature of both of them for years: to make the Women's Day more about feminism and awareness of Women's rights, rather than flowers, beauty and "We wish you to smile more and to be a decoration of your work team"; and to demilitarise the discourse around the Protector's day and just turn it into Man's Day, like it works in school, where girls give boys gifts for Protector's Day, and boys give girls gift for Women's Day), and the Labour Day and Victory Day (the has also been attempted to get demilitarised for years, to be turned from belligerent weapons demonstrations into a day of grief for those who have died in WWII, of whom there are a few in practically every Russian family history). So yeah, we live in a country with a short tradition of holidays, and there are lots of clashes around them.
Also, I have just read on Wikipedia that in Ukraine there is a movement to change the focus from New Year to Christmas again, because New Year is associated with the Soviet past. I don't have any personal evidence on whether this is true, however.
Ironically, folding Christmas traditions into Novyi God led to what American Christians call "keeping Christ in Christmas" - Novyi God absorbed all of the commercialism, secularization and Pagan undertones from Christmas, leaving it a purely religious observance.
Then again, USSR had 7th of November as the day of the Great October Revolution (due to calendar change). It was a huge celebration, one of the main state holidays. After the fall of USSR, they tried to replace it with 4th of November's "Day of People's Unity". It is still half-heartedly celebrated, but mostly in a "yay, we're not going to work/school" day - nobody's quite sure what and how should be celebrated during this holiday. Supposedly, it's meant to remind us of how Russians driven Polish forces from Moscow in 1612, but I don't think anyone cares about that very much. Informally, I know people still prefer 7th of November as a kind of "let's ironically celebrate Communism as a 'fuck you' to oligarchs and the West'-day.
"I am from Russia, and this precisely what has happened here (without focus groups though). In soviet era, Christmas was banned as too religious, and replaced with New Year celebrations (in the night from 31st of December to the 1st of January), which are as massive a holiday as Christmas is in the US. "
That's funny, in that quirks of history way, because this is similar to the reasoning behind New Year's Day (or rather, Hogmanay) being the big Scottish end-of-year holiday. When the Reformation happened and the Presbyterians gained power in Scotland, they purged the old traditional church holidays as Way Too Papist, including Christmas. But people still wanted to celebrate, so the secular holiday of Hogmanay which was also celebrated became the new focus of "drinking, staying up late, and partying".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hogmanay
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5xZ9s_71BY
Coria's proposal seems like it comes from a super weird place in terms of the understanding of culture it implies.
For as much as holidays are secularized in modern societies, and particularly in American culture(s), one thing I got in part from your recent-ish post on Pride and 4th of July celebrations, is that, if you look closely and don't let yourself be blinded by your preconceptions of what you *should* be seeing, it's plain as day that the animating spirits are usually the same old deities that humans have been throwing parties for for millennia, plus some younger gods that emerged out of the Enligtenment.
Here it's the myth of the frontier, of the brave explorer setting out for the unknown, which casts its shadow in the shape of a colonizer, a transgressor of boundaries who re-casts the world he discovers in his own image VS the myth of multiplicity and difference, of the beauty and inherent worth of the world in all of its particularities, which casts its shadow in the dissolution of the individual, which exists as individual insofar as it posits itself against that multiplicity.
When I think about the discourse around national holidays in terms of these symbolic undercurrents, even the apparently silly arguments often don't seem as trivial anymore. We have a kind of unresolved mythological contradiction in our culture, and people don't agree on what the pantheon should look like in some pretty crucial places.
Coria's apparently rational solution of just celebrating random people who happen to be well-loved by the average modern American also can't help you here, since the process by which you decide what to celebrate is what tells you what you really celebrate.
If you come up with a totally rational system for what your national holidays should be, and rationality is the sole determining factor, then all of your national holidays will ultimately be a celebration of rationality, and people who worship other gods in their hearts (freedom, justice, forgiveness, tradition, progress, etc.) aren't going to feel represented by that.
They'll know with every festival they attend that in your nation there is only one true god, and any other virtues are only valid insofar as they are justified through him.
Not that the god of truth doesn't have a strong claim to the title of one true god, but if you trick people into worshipping him, you're really just tricking them into worshipping the god of tricking people into worshipping things if it serves the greater good.
I don't think celebrations of explorers are all that traditional. The US is unusual in the frontier being an important part of our self-conception.
Do you think Pride (as chronicled by SAS in the post you referenced) is the celebration of a ancient deity, or a new Enlightenment deity?
The obviously first guess is new, a god of tolerance, a god who dethrones the gods of the old sexual superstitions. Someone opposed to this new celebration might consider "Pride" to be literally that: a celebration of the ancient demigod Narcissus. But I'm not sure if there ever was a cult around Narcissus.
I'm going with Old God, with a twist. Specifically, Pride has the trappings of an anti-fertility cult, and man has been celebrating fertility gods forever.
I'm pretty sure the Indigenous People’s Day side would hate the mythological Columbus as well, since he still represents the Great Man conception of history. Asking them to imagine a good colonist is like asking leftists to imagine a good billionaire - the archetype is hopelessly corrupted. Even in a sanitized version of the myth where natives do not exist, Columbus' journey still led to widespread ecological damage to the Americas.
(Amusingly, I've recently become aware of the I-don't-know-how-serious idea of Genghis Khan being an ecological hero, since his decimation of world population caused a noticeable reduction in carbon emissions. So maybe being pro-Human is overrated nowadays.)
Exactly.
What if we made Columbus a lesbian black woman ?
A nice story.
Yeah, Italian-Americans tend to care about the holiday. Even if we didn't pick Columbus - note a WASP picked him for us. But by golly we'll take what we were given. And once something is given, the receiver generally doesn't want a gift taken back. (Do NOT insert culturally insensitive and unjust stereotyping slur here.)
(I will note that my mom would also sometimes let us skip school on 3/19, St. Joseph's day in celebration of being an Italian American. It probably is worth noting that the county of my childhood is named after St. Joe and since there was already a local tradition of celebrating Polish Americans (Dyngus Day) where we'd also get day off, a special day seemed appropriate.) Dyngus Day is also now combined with Solidarity Day, a parallel celebration of local black Americans. And of course there were always St. Patrick's day events given the Irish at the local French school.
But I personally have no problem with the red paint thrown on Columbus statutes. I prefer to imagine it is ragu rather than blood. That kind of baptism would be a great permanent addition to the Holiday to symbolically remind us of both pasta sauce and genocide.
We need symbols of benign granfallons, if only as a slapstick program to be "lonesome no more".
Lacking such benign symbols as salve for alienation, it is easy to turn to putting on red MAGA hats or joining a gang or adopting KKK identities or storming the Capitol.
Dyngus Day is an attractive day for a holiday because it's the day after Easter Sunday, thereby serving as roughly analogous to New Year's Day: the day when we all recover from the previous day's celebration.
Well, anybody who really knows about Dyngus Day would know the "recovering" happens on Easter Tuesday.
Dyngus Day elitism is not the flex I expected, but I'm amused that it exists.
Have you ever been to Dyngus Day in South Bend, Indiana?
I've never been to any Dyngus Day, but for the sake of fighting with you: I hear that the Buffalo one is the best
Do I know you?
RFK came to South Bend not Buffalo!
Buffalo obsessed with involuntary wet t-shirt contest aspect of pagan misunderstanding of baptism.
This is the best thing I've read in quite a while. Thanks, Scott.
Superb! This is your old voice Scott, keep 'em coming!
I'm not an American but from what people say, aside from some Italian-Americans nobody cares that much about Columbus Day for the sake of Columbus (correct me if I'm wrong). In that sense if it suddenly disappeared and was magically replaced with another holiday nothing much would be missing - people would still get their day off. The problem is that trying to replace it with an anti-holiday (as you say) comes across as "the status of your ingroup should be lowered, and ours raised". So it's not so much a matter of losing Columbus himself as not wanting to seen to lose a symbolic cultural battle.
As a data point, most Americans don’t get Columbus Day off. Federal workers and a large minority of states’ government workers do, but my sense is it’s pretty uncommon for non-government employees.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/10/11/working-on-columbus-day-it-depends-on-where-your-job-is/
I would go further and say that nobody cares about *Columbus* for the sake of Columbus. I find the vilification of him every bit as annoying as the exaltation of him, since it always comes from people who clearly have no genuine interest in the history of the age of exploration, the conquest of the Antilles, or the Caribbean indigenes.
Personally I find Columbus interesting because he seems to have just been a WEIRD individual, psychologically. Late in his career, he started having a belief that he was chosen by God for some divine mission, which put off his Spanish contemporaries--they started calling him "pharaoh" and treated him as some discredited mad prophet. On his third voyage he discovered the mouth of the Orinoco River and concluded that it must flow from the Garden of Eden.
In his recent book Andres Resendez suggests plausibly that the Spanish rule over the Tainos was more brutal even than previously supposed: he thinks that the Old World disease epidemics couldn't have plausibly arrived in the New World early enough to account for the quick population drop-off of Hispaniola, and that therefore the slave labor impositions themselves must have done it. I don't know if this is true but it's worth taking seriously.
Against this, I will note tentatively that I've read several books about Columbus and the Spanish Caribbean, and--though I may be mistaken here--I don't recall any of the really lurid and sensational accusations made against Columbus in popular media ever even being mentioned in any of them, including individual books whose authors are no defenders of the man. On the other hand there are often nonspecific references made to wild and baseless accusations made against him by the various Spaniards of Hispaniola during Francisco Bobadilla's inquest, which historians generally have concluded are just them making shit up because they had their own, personal reasons for disliking Columbus' rule of the newly-discovered territories. I suspect [though again, I could be wrong] that the cutting-off-of-hands stuff may be included within this package, of BS which serious historians have known about for a century but have rightly concluded are probably-
... false slander, but which are lovingly quoted by less scrupulous writers of pophist books e-zine articles with obvious axes to grind.
To repeat a third time: I'm not sure if this is so. But if it is it places into doubt the universal claim that Columbus was "bad even for his time". Most books I read seem to imply that the average Spanish landholder was worse than him. The man was a slaver, yes, but honestly if that alone puts you off so much I recommend against reading about any historical person before a couple centuries ago.
If anyone knows about this issue in more detail I'd like their input.
I feel like Leif Erikson Day is an under appreciated compromise. First and most importantly, his expedition is the one that first closed the circle of human exploration into a loop around the entire world. Second, while he wasn't a saint he wasn't a monster either. Misunderstandings created conflicts with the native Americans but all things being equal he preferred to peacefully trade with them.
Hinga dinga durgen!
(I assume you're at least partially referencing spongebob: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irpw8A5WRyk)
😂 That is also where I first heard about Leif Erikson Day! (In fact, I think it's the first time I heard about Leif Erikson at all)
But while I was in college I learned from Tumblr, to my surprise, that it is in fact an actual day, occuring on October 9: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leif_Erikson_Day. Apparently it's observed in some communities with a lot of Scandinavian-Americans.
Columbus Day was never about Columbus.
It was about Italian Americans.
Maybe it should have been called William Paca and Caesar Rodney Day. But no one knew or knows who they are.
We could replaceit with Dantedì or Fermidì (if we insist that the celebrant eventually became American)! Recall that when Fermi achieved fission the code message Compton (in Chicago) relayed to Conant (in Washington) was "the Italian navigator has landed in the New World."
The best bit was the end. That *is* how we make philosophical progress.
This is a fantastic exchange. I only want to interject that the folk history of Christmas being intentionally established on December 25th in order to capitalize on the pagan holiday is disputed by biblical historians. Here is a decent exploration of the matter by Yale Divinity School professor Andrew McGowan: https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/people-cultures-in-the-bible/jesus-historical-jesus/how-december-25-became-christmas/
I don't have the information in front of me, but my understanding is that a December birth for Jesus aligns with what Luke writes about the birth of John the Baptist. Basically: John's father was a priest, we know when he would have been "on duty" at the temple and away from home, Luke says that Elizabeth got pregnant upon his return, in her sixth month Mary visited her with news that she was pregnant. Apparently this works out to around December.
I thought I saw an article that used exactly that argument to argue for an October birth for Jesus.
Perhaps! I'm not too familiar with it because I don't care beyond idle curiosity. They only time I get into the question of when Jesus was ACKCHULLY born is in these "Christmas is a rip off off Yule" discussions.
Anyway, I note that the earliest day in October is closer to December 25 than December 25 is to the first day of Spring.
The question of "which holidays?" is of course, at base a question of power.
From this, Indigenous People's Day (and Colombus Day a century and a half earlier) are exercises in virtue signaling, but the reason that these gestures signal(ed) virtue in the first place is because they conform(ed) to the class ideology of the hegemonic classes at the time.
In other words, the hegemonic class (the Professional Managerial Class In 2022 and the Propertied Gentry in 1890) gets to decide what is normative, what goes without saying. For that matter, this is why celebrating Colombus Day is today seen as a bit retrograde. You need to get with the program.
A couple centuries ago, almost nobody would have questioned that some were born to rule and others to serve.
It's weird how bloodlessly you describe this - "a bit retrograde," "get with the program," as if the belief that certain groups of people are inherently born to serve is just a matter of aesthetics, rather than, you know, the ideological foundation for some really horrible things.
You are reading things into my comment that aren't there, as I said nothing about aesthetics.
That said, the dispassionate tone was intentional. Not so long ago, people would be horrified at our moral choices and ideologies, and I am trying to avoid injecting my own values into the discussion.
Our/your values, and the dissonance of Columbus Day with said values, are exactly why we're having this discussion.
That's not actually what my comment was about, but whatever.
Tecumseh Day.
Thank you. That, or Crazy Horse, or Chief Joseph.
(The US Army already celebrates Geronimo.)
But Tecumseh, yeap.
>You changed “society is preventing pogroms against a marginalized group” to “left-wingers are cynically milking people for their votes”, so yes, I would say it is substantially different.
At this point, my pre-conception makes A's argument kinda baffling. How many pogroms, since 1977 (the creation of IPD, apparently) did american natives suffer? This seems to be straight up "making up a problem to which agreeing with me is the solution".
>the Mongols are celebrating him for fine, pro-human reasons like bravery and tactical brilliance - so we let it pass.
I'm ready to bet the Mongols are celebrating him for being a great conqueror, which is a similar reason for why I'd celebrate Colombus if I were a white american: because he was a great explorer who granted my peoples an entire continent to strive in. If he had, in fact, found a powerful Cipangu or Cathay already holding the land he discovered, his fame would have been a blip, a name you learn in class & remember for trivial pursuit nights, but not "two state capitals, a big river, 3 spacecrafts and a godess".
Overall, really, B is unconvincing, but A is ludicrous. I'd almost suspect Scott wrote them to make C's insanity more appealing.
Yes, it is weird to imply that the Mongols share the thoroughly modern westerners' approach of carving out the Good Things (as judged by thoroughly modern western standards) done by historical figures and celebrating those while qualifying them with "of course he did many bad things too" and are not celebrating Genghis Khan's most obvious feats.
It does seem like that's in part what they're doing, though. Their highest civilian award is the Order of Genghis Khan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Genghis_Khan) the criteria including "includes building and developing a democratic society, familiarizing other countries with Mongolian culture and/or art and promoting the name of Mongolian culture in the world."
That sounds a lot like "the Good Things of Genghis Khan, while downplaying the other stuff".
Obviously, that one award is not The Totality of Modern Mongolian Thought On Genghis Khan, but it does seem like this is a real factor in how they portray/think about him.
Lol, that's far beyond the "good things of ghengis khan" - it's retroactively applying things to him that are absolutely unapplicable.
I think "democratic" is definitely an incredible stretch, but a lot of people like to point out that the ways in which the Mongols were progressive and "brought the world together".
It's not just a "Mongolia talking about themselves" thing, either. Dan Carlin's opening bit in his series on the Mongol Empire is talking about how so many books nowadays focus on the "positive" parts of the Mongol Empire, that they connected the East and the West, and how progressive they were on some points (e.g. religion).
But you can't deny that they sure "familiarizing other countries with Mongolian culture".
The Mongols are celebrating Chinggis Khaan for nationalistic reasons, and that is completely understandable: you've got China breathing down your neck, you want to celebrate a local Big Conquering Hero who also kicked Chinese butts.
Also it is very cool music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qr0WT-3TiZ4
Turks celebrate imperialist leaders and its not because they fear imperialism from others.
The ghost of Hal Finney enters the chat:
"Mass mediated culture died with the first TCP connection. Arguments over what 'we' should do end up elucidating that there may be no such thing as 'we', and to the extent that it exists, it is certainly no longer programmable as it once was."
When did Finney say something like that?
Just now, he channeled through the multiverse and took over my fingers using an exploit prevalent in anyone who has used psilocybin mushrooms.
Well this is just great. Holding a torch for Coria over here.
Celebrating (or more accurately, "observing" because no one is having a heap big party, except for the Canadians) Indigenous People's Day is not quite about having an anti-holiday to neutralize Columbus Day. It's not a perfect particle-antiparticle reaction that gives off useful energy. It's a humiliation ritual. When you have vanquished your foe, you must smash his idols and desecrate his holy places. It's a practice as old as civilization. Columbus is an idol of the oppressive system that has been defeated. Some holdouts may not accept that they have been defeated, but the grinding of Columbus idols into dust will show them.
Morrison enters the fray:
A, B, and C seem to accept as a given that Columbus was a horrible, vicious person. This may be the case, but nearly all of the horrible things he supposedly did were reported by a single source, a Spaniard named Francisco de Bobadilla who was sent (in 1499) to evaluate how things were going. Most of his negative information was supplied by enemies of Columbus. Needless to say, there is a great deal of back and forth controversy about the truth of Bobadilla's assertions.
Columbus was probably no worse than your average adventurer in terms of evil. What he is celebrated for is opening the "new world" to the "old world," and vice versa. He found it and publicized it. It was one of the most consequential events in the last thousand years. That puts him way ahead of anyone else in the explorer league. If his voyage and exploration had ended like Leif Ericsson's, we would not celebrate him.
By the way, in Columbus' time, no one believed the Earth was flat. The issue that made it hard for Columbus to get support was that essentially all learned people believed the Earth's circumference was around 24,000 miles, following Eratosthenes. Columbus believed it was much smaller (or at least pretended to believe that) and therefore provides a shorter voyage the to "Indies."
If Bobadilla was right, Columbus is potentially an inflection point in human evil though. The accusations against him were viewed as totally unacceptable at the time, but subsequent colonisation of the Americas followed the pattern he set. That may just be an inevitable response to incentives (silver mines + easily enslavable indigenous population = sucks to be you pal), but if he'd been a bit more humane the general attitude of later colonists might have been different.
And if Bobadilla was wrong, then _he's_ the monster, the lies he told about Columbus set the tone for the subsequent colonisation of the Americas.
I think it's more a matter of incentives -- if you have mines and an easily-enslavable indigenous population, your incentives are to enslave the natives and set them to work in the mines. Given this, I don't think you can really blame either man for "setting the pattern" for later colonialism. Even if Columbus himself was pure as the driven snow, and even if Bobadilla had accurately reported this, people would still have had the idea of enslaving natives to work in the mines, because it was such an obvious way to get rich quick.
This is nonsense and hilariously euro-centric. Genocide and slavery have been common throughout history and yet only Europeans are considered especially evil for it.
Thinking Europeans are collectively evil is confined to the American lunatic fringe, and basically everyone agrees that genocide and slavery are fairly evil. The point is that Europeans won and European culture became hegemonic so what other cultures were doing historically doesn't really matter.
Medieval Europeans were also comparatively humane (not a huge achievement), and could plausibly have just extended feudalism to North America. To the extent the Spanish Empire was worse than that, I think it's plausibly down to Columbus.
Even if he were no more evil than other conquistadors, that would still be shockingly bad.
Why is Einstein on the list of notable americans? He lived in the US for only the last 22 years of this life, long after the creative period of his career which happened in Switzerland and Germany.
Why not? American law and custom generally runs that someone who chooses to become American is as American as someone born here (except for eligibility to be president).
More broadly, everyone wants to associate with the admirable and disassociate with the shameful. (The counterpart to “Austria convinced the world that Mozart was Austrian and Hitler was German.”) My alma mater has a t-shirt of its Nobel laureates, which is a mix of undergrads, grad students, faculty, and for all I know people who passed through campus to use a pay phone. It can take “credit” for some more than others, but why should it make finer distinctions?
Yeah that's a little weird. If you want to celebrate early great American minds in physics, the obvious examples are Josiah Gibbs (who invented classical statistical mechanics) and Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford) -- interestingly, a loyalist who was driven out by the Revolution -- who first proposed that heat was a form of energy, and not a material substance. Both men were born in the US and both inventions had and continue to have profound effects on science worldwide.
Well if celebrating physicists is aim, then it ought to be Enrico Fermi Day because the intent of Columbus Day has always been to celebrate Italian Americans not explorers or conquistadors or imperialists.
That some non Italian American picked an explorer, conquistador, imperialist to placate fearful and angry Italian American whose brothers were lynched is the twist of how symbols can change over time in how they work to collectively mediate and create social reality.
Well, it's certainly true Fermi did more notable work than Einstein after he moved to the US, but it's also true his greatest work in fundamental physics (i.e. not bomb physics) is probably when he was still in Italy. I was also just trying to come up with people who are indisputably American because they were born and reared there, and also made rather foundational contributions, and are earlier than the 20th century.
Well, Fermi was certainly more of an American (and a US citizen) than Columbus was!
Indeed. If memory serves Columbus never set foot on (future) American soil.
The older I get, the more acceptable I think it is to judge people's morals based on the time they lived in. Columbus was cutting hands in a historical period when everybody with power was cutting hands, including our very ancestors.
Pithily, we should judge people by the standards of their society, and societies by the standards of our own. It's okay to say that the Aztecs were immoral by our standards, but not to pick on some particular human-sacrificing priest who was only doing his job. It's okay to say that First Century Rome was immoral by our standards, and also that Caligula was immoral even by First Century Rome standards.
From what I've read, Columbus was criticized in his own time, and Queen Isabella ordered Columbus to return to Spain after he "gifted" her a bunch of captive natives to be kept as slaves, because Isabella was against enslaving the natives.
I suspect the real imposition here isn't (just) us imposing our morals on the past, it's that people are imposing a standard narrative about "wokeness" and "evolving standards" onto the actual historical situation, which was more complicated than "people used to think he's a hero, now they think he's a villain".
Special pleading unless you are going to condemn the much more widespread and intensive use of slavery elsewhere.
Okay, slavery outside of the Americas was also bad. Now what?
To be fair, Isabel was like 'wtf do you mean you just made me the royal owner of thousands of slaves?!?!' That it was done, and done by lots of people, doesn't mean that everyone was cool with it, esp as state policy.
Are you accusing me of special pleading because of something Queen Isabella did?
Many people are pointing this or that out about the Christmas discussion, but it looks like the most important point has yet to be mentioned:
Arius had it coming. The practice of punching those supposed church leaders who are his theological descendants should be normalized and celebrated.
The punching of Arius is one of those "it didn't happen but it should have" moments from history.
Exactly
Not punched, slapped. But a lot of people who liked the idea and shared it around improved it a bit by having St Nicholas punch Arius' lights out.
I'm not a Christian and I shouldn't interfere in your internal squabbles, but didn't Arius basically just have a different opinion on some incredibly obscure Christological distinction that 99.9% of Christians today wouldn't even know the orthodox position on anyway, and wouldn't care if they did know? Jesus had one nature and two wills vs. one will and two natures or something? Why the continuing animosity?
Because the idea of Santa Claus decking someone over an obscure theological issue is fucking hilarious, Scott.
But to answer the question you were actually asking: the implications of Arianism for Mariology, which provides a sharp distinction between Catholicism/Orthodoxy and most Protestantism, are huge. If you're debating Mary's role in salvation, which we Catholics/Orthodox think is major and most Protestants don't (and which we fight about on the internet the way you fight about buying mosquito nets) you eventually run into the Christological answer given by Arius. If Jesus isn't fully God, then Mary can't be the mother of God, which we think is an important title, with a corresponding entitlement to special reverence.
By all means, please enter our debates, though! Catholicism welcomes the intellectual contributions of Rationalists, because Catholicism is the most rational thing that exists.
"Because Catholicism is the most rational thing that exists."
This is true even if it is impolite to say it out loud.
The idea that the pagan tribes of Europe or even the Romans get to the so-called enlightenment and rationality (which in the end messed itself up by immanitizing the eschaton) without Christianity is basically impossible.
Lucretius maybe.
Lucretius was a first-rate poet, but a third-rate (if that) philosopher. Many (most? It's been a while since I read him) of the arguments in De Rerum Natura are not just fallacious, but obviously so.
Ok but he understood that you shouldn't be superstition.
"If you're debating Mary's role in salvation, which we Catholics/Orthodox think is major and most Protestants don't (and which we fight about on the internet the way you fight about buying mosquito nets"
Hoo boy yeah, in the past I've broken a lance or two with Reformed/Calvinists insisting that Mary's role was pretty much that of a human incubator (or, if we're going to be modern in our references, one of the women contracted by fertility clinics to be the surrogates for the rich Westerners' pregnancies) and that any importance ascribed to her ended as soon as she popped out the Holy Sprog.
And I'm not even more than luke-warm in Marian devotion, I am much more inclined to the Blessed Sacrament, but that kind of "yeah, well, she was only a woman" makes me want to belt out the Magnificat at full volume as well as siccing the Franciscans on them:
https://www.motherofallpeoples.com/post/the-franciscan-mariological-school-and-the-coredemptive-movement
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSHlz966Rl8
In solidarity with the other lung of the Church on this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ObDw_Px0Co
EDIT: And yeah, the Mariological and Christological doctrines are closely tied, when 'reformers' start chipping away at the Marian doctrines, they end up chipping away at the doctrines around the divinity of Christ, and that's how you end up with the "Jesus was Just Some Guy, y'know, but his important message was that it's nice to be nice and we should all be nice" type of 'Christianity' (Kevin Smith absolutely nailed it on the head with Buddy Christ, who doesn't bear the wounds of the Crucifixion but can be mistaken for the traditional icon of the Sacred Heart, though this heart is unpierced by thorns and is not burning).
Short answer:
Christianity without the divinity of Christ, as a person of the Triune God, is not Christianity. The highest-profile modern followers of Arian theology are the LDS and JW movements, which I'm grateful to note are pretty broadly acknowledged to be outside the pale of historic, Biblical Christianity. Confused, well-meaning adherents of these systems, I would engage warmly. Leaders who are actively seeking to lead more and more people astray with their anti-Biblical nonsense, I wouldn't mind seeing punched in some circumstances.
Soapbox answer:
The issue at stake with Arius and at Nicaea was far greater than the sort of discussions which you reference there, Scott; simply put, the question was whether Jesus was himself divine, or whether he was a created being; like us, albeit greater. This is a point on which Scripture is emphatic, and it teaches that our salvation rests upon what we hold to be the historical event of Jesus, the eternal, uncreated Son of God, dying for the propitiation of His people's sin, and rising again to eternal life; an act effective only if carried out by the God-Man (to borrow a term). My associate there referenced the implications upon Mariology, but setting that area of (major) disagreement aside, there is firm agreement between we of the Reformed tradition and our Catholic brethren on the utmost importance of Christ's identity (indeed, one of the greatest expositions of all this came from the pen of St. Anselm of Canterbury).
Side note: if anyone should read this and think, "Oh, this ridiculous Trinity business again; how wearying", I would commend you Dr. Michael Reeves' book "Delighting in the Trinity", which is a clearer and more wonderful exploration than I would previously have thought possible.
Responded to "Highlights From The Comments On Columbus Day" with this after this comment was featured, but I'll add it here as well:
LDS/"Mormons" are not Arians. It's understandable to make that mistake -- the church originates from the same historical context as the Jehovah's Witnesses, who pretty clearly believe that Jesus is a created being, and is similarly outside mainline Protestantism -- but we are not. The "Mormon" heresy is in fact opposite: the belief not that Jesus was created, but that man was not created. Joseph Smith (LDS founder) says, speaking of the spirits of man: "Is it logical to say that the intelligence of spirits is immortal, and yet that it had a beginning? The intelligence of spirits had not beginning, neither will it have an end. That is good logic. That which has a beginning may have an end. There never was a time when there were not spirits". He holds that man is essentially uncreated, though he is elevated and ennobled by God as Father. Man, then, is indeed on a level with Christ -- this is the heretical thought -- but not because both are created, but because neither is. LDS thought diverges from mainline Protestantism not because Christ is brought too low in the Arian manner but because man is elevated too high; it is understood that every man is a God in the making and that God Himself was once a man like ourselves. But none of these beings are created, all are eternal.
It is alright if one considers that all this puts "Mormons" outside the umbrella of Christianity, but it is incorrect to say that LDS doctrine is Arian.
I'm sorry, you are correct. I would contend that Christ ultimately is brought too low in LDS theology, as is the Father, through their emphatic denial of the divine attribute of immutability, but you are right, the heart of the issue is not Arianism, there being a significant difference between their position of 'there was a time when he was not [God]' and Arius' assertion that "there was a time when he was not [in existence]". My apologies.
All good—your points are all fair. Theological discussion is practically all about nitpicking so when I saw the chance to do so I felt I had to do it!
I'm not sure why you're treating "Jesus was created and he was not the same person as God" and "Jesus was eternal and he was God" as the only two possible points of the compass. Later Arians may have gone as far as saying Jesus was not quite God; but I remember reading that Arius fought against this as a misrepresentation of his actual doctrine, which was *simply* that Jesus had come into existence at a specific point in time rather than having always existed. Whether or not the man himself argued this point, it seems a worthy point to argue.
As near as I can tell, unless you make a bunch of other unjustified assumptions, this needn't imply he's lesser than the other three persons of the Trinity/"not really God". Utter bastardisation to follow, but we could, straightforwardly, imagine an originally-singular God "splitting" at a specific point in time into three "equal" "parts".
One could even reject the conventional idea of the Trinity but still have a bounded-in-time Jesus "really" "be" "God", simply by saying that there was only ever one God; that in 1 BC He somehow "duplicated" himself, sending a perfect platonic double of his essence ("the Son") into a human body for thirty years while the other half ("the Father") continued to exist in whatever non-physical way He existed beforehand; and after Jesus ascended, the 'two Gods' recombined into one being again.
(Now, I know there are statements in the Gospels which nix this by suggesting that Jesus somehow had a distinct existence from the Father for at least as long as the Earth existed. This is just a thought experiment to demonstrate the myriad of ways in which "Jesus started to exist at a specific point in time" *doesn't* seem to logically, necessarily imply "Jesus wasn't God and was more like some archangel-like thing".)
Ultimately the anti-Arian version of this debate seems to start from a premise that all aspects of God must be wholly eternal (not just without end but without beginning), or else they're not really aspects of God, and I just don't see where that's coming from. Surely the Burning Bush was God when it spoke to Moses, and surely that doesn't imply the Bush always existed before that event?
The attributes of God's eternality and immutability are both Biblically demonstrable and long defended from a philosophical standpoint, particularly where ontology is concerned. In a conversation about Christianity, any statement to the effect that, say, "Jesus is not eternal, but he is God" would be a nonsense statement; common ground must first be established regarding what the word "God" really means.
The assertion that the bush through which God spoke to Moses itself became God during that encounter shocks and bewilders me. Would we then say that the mountain of Sinai itself became God as his voice was heard by Israel? Or even that Moses or Aaron somehow assumed his being when speaking his words, by his authority, attested by his supernatural power? Again, the word "God" must be defined. All (I think) of the previous comments in this thread assumed a traditional Christian understanding of his nature. With that understanding, they make sense, but this question of the burning bush does not.
With the Burning Bush idea, I was saying that one could hypothetically construe "Jesus Christ" as no more or less than the name given on Earth to a meat-puppet that was temporarily animated by the (eternal) spirit of the Almighty. i.e. God's consciousness spoke through the Bush, and later God's consciousness acted through the miraculously-born human body borne by Mary; in both cases the vessel was temporary but was, in fact, devoid of a "personal" identity to the degree that we're just dealing with God in a particular, temporarily-donned guise.
Now, I know this isn't how any mainstream branch of Christianity likes to think of Jesus. But do you agree that this would be a particular framework where "Jesus is not eternal, but he is God" is a sensible statement, consistent with the philosophical arguments for the eternity of "God"?
Ha, ha, ha, well you know - it's the tiny details that make all the difference. A lot of the early heresies were precisely that kind of very fine-grained theological exaltation, but it's a bit more vital than that - whatever Arius himself may have believed, it was the Christological doctrines of what came to be called Arianism that were important.
And that led to the kind of "99% of Christians wouldn't even know the difference" claims by its followers, who were really in a dominant position for a long time, who solved the problems of "how can Christ be God and man?" by adopting the solution that the Father alone was the eternal God, and the Son was created by Him, was not existing from all time, and though unique and exceptional, was more akin to one of the angels (this is a very simplified version) or was just an exceptional unique human who was elevated into being the Son of God (even more simplified version).
So if you have God who is God and alone, and then the special intermediary who is not (fully) God or a created (g)od, then you have the door into things like Islam - where Jesus is a great and venerated prophet, but not the Messiah or son of God, and Mohammed is the greatest and final revelation, or Unitarianism, or Mormonism (this is the really big deal about why Mormons are not considered Christians even though they say they follow Christ and accept the Bible and all the rest of it).
Imagine someone saying "Look, I don't get this squabble between you Jews and the Christians. Don't you all fundamentally believe the same things about God anyway? Who cares if this one guy was or wasn't the Messiah, heck you even have one sect of your guys who firmly believe their leader was the Messiah and you haven't declared them non-Jews! Why the continuing animosity over some incredibly obscure distinction?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chabad_messianism
Here comes the Chesterton quote:
"The whole great history of the Arian heresy might have been invented to explode this idea. It is a very interesting history often repeated in this connection; and the upshot of it is in that in so far as there ever was a merely official religion, it actually died because it was merely an official religion; and what destroyed it was the real religion. Arius advanced a version of Christianity which moved, more or less vaguely, in the direction of what we should call Unitarianism; though it was not the same, for it gave to Christ a curious intermediary position between the divine and human. The point is that it seemed to many more reasonable and less fanatical; and among these were many of the educated class in a sort of reaction against the first romance of conversion. Arians were a sort of moderates and a sort of modernists. And it was felt that after the first squabbles this was the final form of rationalised religion into which civilisation might well settle down. It was accepted by Divus Caesar himself and became the official orthodoxy; the generals and military princes drawn from the new barbarian powers of the north, full of the future, supported it strongly. But the sequel is still more important. Exactly as a modern man might pass through Unitarianism to complete agnosticism, so the greatest of the Arian emperors ultimately shed the last and thinnest pretense of Christianity; he abandoned even Arius and returned to Apollo. He was a Caesar of the Caesars; a soldier, a scholar, a man of large ambitions and ideals; another of the philosopher kings. It seemed to him as if at his signal the sun rose again. The oracles began to speak like birds beginning to sing at dawn; paganism was itself again; the gods returned. It seemed the end of that strange interlude of an alien superstition. And indeed it was the end of it, so far as there was a mere interlude of mere superstition. It was the end of it, in so far as it was the fad of an emperor or the fashion of a generation. If there really was something that began with Constantine, then it ended with Julian.
But there was something that did not end. There had arisen in that hour of history, defiant above the democratic tumult of the Councils of the Church, Athanasius against the world. We may pause upon the point at issue; because it is relevant to the whole of this religious history, and the modern world seems to miss the whole point of it. We might put it this way. If there is one question which the enlightened and liberal have the habit of deriding and holding up as a dreadful example of barren dogma and senseless sectarian strife, it is this Athanasian question of the Co-Eternity of the Divine Son. On the other hand, if there is one thing that the same liberals always offer us as a piece of pure and simple Christianity, untroubled by doctrinal disputes, it is the single sentence, 'God is Love.' Yet the two statements are almost identical; at least one is very nearly nonsense without the other. The barren dogma is only the logical way of stating the beautiful sentiment. For if there be a being without beginning, existing before all things, was He loving when there was nothing to be loved? If through that unthinkable eternity He is lonely, what is the meaning of saying He is love? The only justification of such a mystery is the mystical conception that in His own nature there was something analogous to self-expression; something of what begets and beholds what it has begotten. Without some such idea, it is really illogical to complicate the ultimate essence of deity with an idea like love. If the moderns really want a simple religion of love, they must look for it in the Athanasian Creed. The truth is that the trumpet of true Christianity, the challenge of the charities and simplicities of Bethlehem or Christmas Day never rang out more arrestingly and unmistakably than in the defiance of Athanasius to the cold compromise of the Arians. It was emphatically he who really was fighting for a God of Love against a God of colourless and remote cosmic control; the God of the stoics and the agnostics. It was emphatically he who was fighting for the Holy Child against the grey deity of the Pharisees and the Sadducees. He was fighting for that very balance of beautiful interdependence and intimacy, in the very Trinity of the Divine Nature, that draws our hearts to the Trinity of the Holy Family. His dogma, if the phrase be not misunderstood, turns even God into a Holy Family."
Thank you; that Chesterton quote is fabulous. I'm put in mind of a C.S. Lewis lecture in the "God in the Dock" collection, where he posited, with aid of a literary quote, that liberal attempts to help the church out by cutting away the "vestigial mythologies" of the faith actually serve to rob it of truth and power, making it something wholly other than what it means to be.
"'Would not conversation be much more rational than dancing?' said Jane Austen's Miss Bingley. 'Much more rational,' replied Mr. Bingley, 'but much less like a ball.'"
I think most Christians today know that Arianism is false because they recite the Nicene creed every Sunday, and it includes believing "in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of his Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father."
Ah, how I wish that more churches would include the regular recitation of creeds in their worship...
I have never been to a church which didn't include the regular recitation of the creed in its worship.
And I've never been to a church which did. It's funny how different peoples' experiences can be.
The Order One Common Worship rubric for Holy Communion, following the sermon, reads, "On Sundays and Principal Holy Days an authorized translation of the Nicene Creed is used, or on occasion the Apostles' Creed or an authorized Affirmation of Faith may be used." In Order Two the rubric following the gospel(!) reads, "The Creed is used on every Sunday and Holy Day and may be used on other days also." What follows in black is the Nicene Creed.
GIRM 68 reads, "The Creed is to be sung or said by the priest together with the people on Sundays and solemnities. It may be said also at particular celebrations of a more solemn character."
I can't recall ever hearing that recited in church.
Scott, you can always play this like the rabbi played by Robert Picardo in “Hail Cesar”
“Eh, I haven’t an opinion.”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LNEAgGC-S4s
I somehow had not heard of that film, but I'll have to find it. Looks like a riot. Ironically, the only depiction of Christ out there which I really do approve of is the one in "Ben-Hur", which was clearly a primary touchstone for the Coen brothers, though the film within the film definitely sounds like one of which I would not approve.
It really has some funny moments. There are scenes I can just think about and break out laughing.
Gotta watch that lest I get a reputation for Captain Queeg like instability. :)
European's first reaction to "Indigenous People's Day": that's a real dick move guys. Not to Columbus, but to indigenous people.
Native Americans should 100% get a day. But putting that day on the anniversary of when white people showed up and started wiping them out seems really... white-centric (I live in the right-wing universe, so I don't know the lingo - I assume there's a word for this). You'll be celebrated on the day we discovered you! It's also kind of insensitive, along the lines of celebrating Japan day on the anniversary of the Hiroshima bomb. It's also a bit random to celebrate US Native Americans on the day that Columbus discovered an entirely different part of North America.
Galaxy brain take: if I were Cherokee or whatever, I think I'd be more offended by this than Columbus day.
The main thing is that Native Americans are a pretty invisible group who are, because of history, generally living in bad situations. (Drive through some of the Nations out West if you want to be depressed.) What can we do to maybe improve that situation?
Stop caring about groups of people and start caring about individuals.
Once you do this, the question becomes not "How can we solve the problems of this whole group of people" but "How can we this particular guy solve his problems, and also how can this gal here solve her problems?"
As for how an individual can solve their problems the solutions are usually the same: move to a more economically productive area, get a job, maybe a better education, don't waste money on booze or drugs, get married to someone stable, et cetera.
Lack of utilities on reservations is a group problem.
That's a town problem, and should be solved in whatever way we have conventionally solved the towns-without-utilities in the past.
Different groups of people are different and cannot be helped in the same way. If you imagine they are, you will be perpetually confused as to why native americans categorically do much, much worse in school than east asians. What's the problem? Bad teachers? Not enough funding? But it works for Asians!
What was the Civil Rights Movement, if not a successful effort to solve the problems of a whole group of people?
If it was successful, why do we have BLM riots and affirmative action 60 years later?
Because there are a lot of different goals under that umbrella. Ending Jim Crow? Successful. Integrating schools? Successful. Ending police brutality? Eh... still working on that one. But I don't see why it should be any more unachievable than the rest of the things black people have achieved with protest and collective action.
Ah. So you meant to write "solve *some* of the problems, but not enough to keep people from rioting in the streets or forego the necessity of legally oppressing one group to 'correct' historical wrongs to another group more than half a century later."
OK. But consider me deeply skeptical that you will *ever* achieve a solution that satisfies your standards, using your methods, if they cost this much and work so slowly. Ever wonder if maybe you're going about it the wrong way?
In what sense are they invisible? Maybe if you live in San Francisco, but I've been in southwest grocery stores where I was the only non-red man there. You can't live in Albuquerque or Flagstaff and be *unaware* of Native Americans. Some tribes are definitely on the poorer side, which would be more remarkable if that wasn't true about assorted random demographic chunks of the country in general -- Appalachian whites can be just as poor, as can Mississippi blacks -- but some tribes are quite the opposite: supposedly the Morongo Casino pays out $15-20k per month to every enrolled member[1]. This seems more like a mildly patronizing stereotype from the 70s than an accurate modern summary of the experience of a large varied collection of people in many different situations.
-----------------------
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2007/04/12/the-last-shall-be-first
>The main thing is that Native Americans are a pretty invisible group who are, because of history, generally living in bad situations.
Is history why all gorups with recent hunter-gather ancestry generally live in bad situations, or is it the fact that they evolved to live very different lifestyles from people with thousands of years of agricultural history?
Enter Jared Diamond.
Instead of perpetuating the myth of the Great (Wo)men of history - celebrate great events instead.
http://www.mattglassman.com/?p=2789
Instead of Columbus or Armstrong or Sacagawea celebrate Expanding Frontiers and throw in all of them and more.
China has Single's Day and Japan celebrates "White Day" that is all about giving white-colored gifts. Japan also celebrates Christmas with eating Kentucky Fried Chicken and playing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and without the slightest care about the thing that Save Our Christmas people think is Christmas.
White Day is just a second copy of Valentine's Day.
I thought his name was Cristoforo Colombo?
That was the detective in the rumpled rain coat.
Four quick comments:
It's mildly surprising that Columbus Day hasn't yet been appropriated with Columbus representing modern American entrepreneurship: Silicon Valley billionaires who promised something they couldn't deliver but nonetheless were able to obtain massive amounts of venture capital.
The demotion of Columbus Day is analogous to the demotion of Confederate Civil War monuments, in that both represent cultural heroes to one group of Americans and genocide to another group of Americans.
I'd never imagined Indigenous Peoples Day as celebrating IP outside the United States, but substitute Comanche for Aztec and the blog argument still works.
Why do we celebrate Labor Day by not working?
Labor Day would not be a very good "thank you for your contributions" if we didn't even give laborers a day off!
Adraste's point about the movement of Easter and Christmas are so historically inaccurate it is infuriating. Tim O'Neill has written pages on why this is complete nonsense from a historical perspective. A lot of the post-hoc rationalizations about why Christians would or would not have been motived to do this ignore mountains of historical data that it was not a cynical ploy to replace one cultural celebration with another.
Please stop recycling these tropes about Christian holidays.
"Jesus was born in the spring; they moved Christmas to December to neutralize the pagan Solstice celebration. Easter got its name because it neutralized the rites of the spring goddess Eostre."
These two are related, so I'm going to deal with them together. To the first, "kind of", to the second, "not just nope but heck nope!"
The Tangled Question of Easter:
Saying that Easter "neutralised the rites of the spring goddess Eostre" needs to be unpacked. The milder reading is "everyone was having such a blast celebrating Easter that they forgot about Eostre". The stronger reading is "Easter was invented to replace Eostre's cult" (this can be a Pagan and Wiccan claim, though not solely and not completely). You know who I'm going to quote on this one:
https://historyforatheists.com/2022/04/easter-pagan/
So! First of all, we have to figure out "Was there even a goddess Eostre?" and the evidence for that is pretty thin. Ironically in this context, the reason English-speaking world talks about "Easter comes from Eostre" is due to a work by the Christian monk the Venerable Bede (now Saint Bede, having finally been canonised in 1899, 1,164 years after his death in 735. He's been called "the Venerable" for so long that that is how he is still generally referred to). Bede was a skilled linguist and translator, and one of his important works was De temporum ratione/The Reckoning of Time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reckoning_of_Time
This is important, because it tackles the question of how to compute the date of Easter, which was A Very Big Important Problem for the church calendar. I'll get back to this when considering the first part, about when was Jesus born, but let's stick with Easter for the minute. As well as showing off his scholarship and learning about Greek, Roman, Hebrew and other measures of time, "He gives some information about the months of the Anglo-Saxon calendar."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bede#Historical_and_astronomical_chronology
Buckle up, kids, this is where we take off. When Bede was talking briefly about the Anglo-Saxon calendar, he mentioned Eostre or rather the month name derived from her:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%92ostre
"The Old English deity Ēostre is attested solely by Bede in his 8th-century work The Reckoning of Time, where Bede states that during Ēosturmōnaþ (the equivalent of April), pagan Anglo-Saxons had held feasts in Ēostre's honour, but that this tradition had died out by his time, replaced by the Christian Paschal month, a celebration of the resurrection of Jesus."
And that is it. That is the *only* place anyone talks about or mentions Eostre (that we have records of). So where did we get Bryan Singer's [American Gods](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv83-BzdOEE) "hey, Jesus stole your month, girl"? Invented out of whole cloth, more or less. The 18th-19th century craze for going back to Ze Ancient Authentic Native Folk Traditions involved a lot of folk etymology, even by the scholars of the day, and they went a bit wild with Eostre.
Do we even know for sure that she is associated with spring? Not definitely, it's an assumption because her month was in the Northern European spring season. Rabbits (should be hares, as in 'mad as a March hare' because hares mate in spring), eggs and the like are all spring related, but we don't even know that decorating eggs for Easter *is* an Eostre tradition, rather than a Christian one; the same way eggs, milk, butter and sugar are used up on Pancake Tuesday/Shrove Tuesday/Mardi Gras, before Lent begins, then decorating eggs which could once again be eaten freely in Spring once Easter came is likely to be as much Christian as anything else.
Side note: out of curiosity, I looked up when the first chocolate Easter eggs were introduced:
"Chocolate eggs first appeared at the court of Louis XIV in Versailles and in 1725 the widow Giambone in Turin started producing chocolate eggs by filling empty chicken egg shells with molten chocolate. In 1873 J.S. Fry & Sons of England introduced the first chocolate Easter egg in Britain. Manufacturing their first Easter egg in 1875, Cadbury created the modern chocolate Easter egg after developing a pure cocoa butter that could be moulded into smooth shapes."
So, chocolate Easter eggs is a late 19th century creation, like many of our current traditions.
So "Easter got its name because it neutralized the rites of the spring goddess Eostre" is like saying "We celebrate the Fourth of July, with its anti-monarchical emphases, to neutralise the honours paid to Julius Caesar". You could more easily say that "Passover neutralises the rites of the spring goddess" because of the connections with the Vernal Equinox and the Christian feast of the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Christ. I don't think anybody is going to argue (but who knows? I have not plumbed the depths of all the Internet) that "The Jews totally invented Passover just to take over the established celebration for Eostre".
Which brings us back to the Easter dating controversy, part of which was that some places in the early Church celebrated it at the same time as Passover was being celebrated, and there were others who wanted to make it very distinct that "We're not Jewish and this is not a Jewish feast". Another large part was calendar drift, hence the various works on "this is how you work out what day it falls on" since Easter is a moveable feast, which returns us neatly to St. Bede and the Anglo-Saxons 😀
Now, taking the first part, second, when was Jesus born? The short answer is, we don't know, we can't even say He was born in the spring since nobody had an exact time or date. What happened was that Easter was always the most important feast of the church calendar, and the celebration of the birth was a much more minor event (partly because of the theology, partly because we had a definite date for Easter). Theories of the time held that important and celebrated individuals had symbolic and important dates in their lives, and that the date of death of such a person was related to the date of their birth.
This would mean that you would be celebrating both Christ's birth and death on the same dates, which would be confusing - it does happen sometimes, that March 25th (Lady Day) which has been set as the date of the Annunciation is also the date of Good Friday (Easter being a moveable feast) so both are celebrated, or commemorated, at the same time, as in Donne's poem when the same thing happened in 1608:
http://my-albion.blogspot.com/2016/03/upon-annunciation-and-passion-falling.html
And to quote his description of Mary, mother of Christ:
"She sees at once the Virgin Mother stay
Reclused at home, public at Golgotha ;
Sad and rejoiced she's seen at once, and seen
At almost fifty, and at scarce fifteen ;
At once a son is promised her, and gone ;
Gabriell gives Christ to her, He her to John ;
Not fully a mother, she's in orbity ;
At once receiver and the legacy."
Confusing, yes? So the Easter date of the definite death of Christ was maintained, and the spring date was given to celebrate His conception (not birth). Move on nine months from conception to birth, which brings us neatly to December and the proper distance between the two.
That the Winter Solstice is in this period probably is important, but was it picked to "neutralize the pagan Solstice celebration"? As I said, yes and no; the Easter distinction was more important, but that people were familiar with a winter festival probably didn't hurt either (I don't lean too heavily on the Sol Invictus thing since that's really about winter festivals in general, not direct "the Church took this particular feast over").
And here we end!
“in 1725 the widow Giambone in Turin started producing chocolate eggs by filling empty chicken egg shells with molten chocolate.”
This is widely reported, but I can’t find a cite and AFAICT chocolate was a beverage till the mid-19th century. Which makes me at least skeptical that a widow in Turin was making chocolate candy more than a century earlier.
The last paragraph seems important to me in terms of helping people think through this narrative more: if you are a culture, you probably have winter festivals! If your culture becomes Christian, those festivals *will become* something else!
Now, if you're a historian, it becomes really easy to tell a story where Christmas 'was based on' a previous winter festival, because that sounds REALLY darn similar to "well, it was this, then it became this when Christianity came in". But the actual mechanics for this, as noted above, are extremely anodyne, and have no significance at all for debates about the significance of Christmas!
"if you are a culture, you probably have winter festivals!"
"Hogfather" is all about this 😀
What about anti-festivals?
https://youtu.be/2zH0E1uNviQ
I’m not sure the other examples of “Anti-Holiday” given are really “anti” the same way Indigenous Peoples Day is. Moving Easter and Christmas to sit on top of existing pagan holidays was more like “we’re a proselytizing religion trying to make converts in a place where the people demand a big winter solstice and spring equinox party, so let’s bolt some Christian mythology onto the existing pagan traditions, that way everybody gets to have the same party but we can say the prayers are going to Jesus now. Win-win!” Hanukkah, kind of the same thing - the people demand a big end of year holiday, so let’s bolt on the nearest Jewish holiday and make that one a big deal.
The “invented from whole cloth to make people feel guilty” nature of IPD is I think unique. If you wanted an analogue to the other “anti-holidays”, IPD would need to co-opt existing Columbus Day traditions so the people celebrating CD aren’t put out. But a) no one really celebrates CD anymore outside of a few Italian-American communities, and b) the IPD equivalent would be a big parade and feast that the same people promoting IPD would find to be offensive cultural appropriation.
“Sacagawea Day” is actually a good idea, in that a day to celebrate Indian and European cooperation and exploration would be a much better way to co-opt CD. Everyone can have a big party and not feel guilty. Then again our national religion already has an Indian European cooperation myth, and we use it for Thanksgiving.
So really the right thing to do would to just be to let Columbus Day die off, but we can’t do that because government workers will be pissed about having a contractual day of paid leave in October removed.
You should read the comments a bit more to learn why Christmas and Easter weren't set on their dates for the reasons you think they were.
I’m aware of the controversy, but regardless of whether Christmas and/or Easter are literal drop in replacements for predicting pagan holidays, I think the “weak version” of my argument would still apply: Christmas and Easter are celebrated in parts of the calendar that have significance in lots of non-Christian traditions, and the way they are celebrated includes some elements borrowed from pagan traditions. It would have been useful, in absorbing these pagan cultures, to have a Christianized repository for their cherished traditions that could reasonably be fit into a Christian framework.
Most of the "pagan traditions" in Easter and Christmas aren't attested until centuries or millennia after Europe was Christianised. E.g., Christmas trees are first attested in 16th-century Germany; there's nothing whatsoever to link them with pre-Christian pagan practices.
There's no direct link, but "nothing whatsoever" seems a bit strong. There's plausibly some psychological connection, of the form, humans like green trees in mid-winter.
Kind of irrelevant because he's replying to the reasoning offered by Scott
My belief is that Indigenous People's Day should only be celebrated in Kenya (or maybe Tanzania), because people aren't indigenous to anywhere else.
I still think the folks that came over on the iced up Bering Strait should have dibs. The Mayflower? Really? That’s so 17th century. Common Era no less.
I’ve been watching that. It will be interesting if they present a more fleshed out compelling argument.
People might have crossed the land bridge at different times, as the ice ebbed and flowed, but I would take some convincing that people arrived earlier by a different route.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-the-out-of-africa-theory-out/
I'm always amused at the take on Christian history that are casually thrown out for glib, um, galaxy-brained bon mots. In this case, pretending that St. Nicholas just sorta up and attacked some poor rando at Nicaea. But it does make for good copy amongst the non-religious crowd I suppose.
Many of the Galaxy-Brain takes on Christian history originated not in atheism or in broad anti-Christian sentiments, but in the Protestant communities that were most interested in rejecting Catholic customs. Easter and Christmas commemorate biblical events but the Bible does not say "celebrate Christmas/Easter." A fundamentalist, biblically literalist Christianity has no room for Christmas, because there's no record of the Apostles throwing Jesus a birthday party.
So in rejecting the Pope and Catholicism, certain Protestants also rejected the extrabiblical customs that the Catholics liked. And what better way to show that they should be rejected than alleging that these customs are pagan?
Then the Euphoric Neckbeard crowd adopted these arguments because as a class they're not nearly as smart as they think they are. The rest is (bad) history.
I would perhaps amateurly read it as an attempt to provide more evidence (if you believed it) that the Catholic Church was corrupt and cynical ("Look! They chose these dates for pure political reasons!") and not as powerful as one might think ("They *had* to choose these dates, to achieve their ill-gotten mindshare"), both of which were central Protestant tenets during and for a long time after Luther.
The thing about good memes -- and these are among the best -- is that they're so easy to believe they persist almost regardless of any actual evidence pro or con.
Which means these mythologizations of historic institutions are weirdly appropriate in a discussion begun around the mythologization of historical figures.
I'm high up on the anti-woke scale, but OK with Columbus being cancelled...this dialogue did a nice job of fleshing out why. The enslaving and genociding is inextricable from his success. On the other hand, "Indigenous People's Day" is a little cringey for reasons also delineated, but what can you do? Everyone needed their mid-October holiday I guess? But could we have pushed it back to Nov. 1 as a recovery day from Halloween?
>The enslaving and genociding is inextricable from his success.
There was no "genocide" of native Americans unless you use the term is an extremely expansive sense. The majority of the decline in native American population since European arrival has been thorugh disease and outbreeding - mitochondrial DNA evidence shows very few Amerindian lineages have been lost.
And thinking that slavery makes European-Americans bad is the epitome of special pleading.
"Disease" is kind of glossing over deliberate attempts to spread smallpox to the natives, isn't it?
That the germ theory of disease was not accepted does not mean that people were so blind as not to notice, empirically, that some diseases were apparently transmitted by what we would call fomites. (I say "apparently" because that belief was sometimes mistaken; people would think that a disease could be spread by a cloth shipment, say, whereas we see that it had to be aerosols, vectors or something else - of course there can be lice in cloth.)
The smallpox blankets story is something that did happen once, as a deliberate and probably unsuccessful attempt. https://www.history.com/news/colonists-native-americans-smallpox-blankets
What's probably more relevant is that the bulk of the depopulation by disease among Native Americans happened well before there was any significant direct contact between most of the affected tribes and European settlers. Disease brought from Europe apparently went through the coastal and Midwestern tribes like wildfire, spread among them by their own intertribal contact, well ahead of the Europeans themselves even knowing they were there, so it had nothing to do with any early deliberate attempt at biological warfare.
Well, "blood libel" isn't really appropriate, unless you actually believe that it's something that actually happened once.
What I think you might want to emphasize, in response to the original comment, is that to use the word "genocide" in this case is disingenuous, if not sneakily deceptive. We normally reserve that word for some *deliberate* extinction of people -- the intention matters a great deal.
I think it's true the Europeans were responsible, in some indirect sense, for enormous death and suffering among the native populations of North America -- I've read arguments that up to 90% of the population snuffed it through the so-called Columbian Exposure to European germs -- but this isn't a "genocide" in the usual use of the word, because nobody planned it, nobody intended it, and nobody could even have foreseen and prevented it, since (as you point out) there was no germ theory that would have allowed European explorers and colonizers to realize the danger they posed to native populations through the germs they (unawaredly) carried.
As noted below - no, didn't happen that way.
I think the appropriate response to the horrific suffering and death of the American peoples as a result of the Columbia exchange is not an attempt to crow about the evils of Yt PPL, but a solemn recognition of the global holocaust we dodged.
Because while there are a lot of reasons why the death toll was so one-sided, there is no reason that the American villages and cities could not have nurtured a few devastating diseases of their own, which might have gone across Europe and Asia like the Black Death...only twice as bad.
Odds were that there would be bad death loss from the exchange, and that the Americas would take the brunt of it, but it also could have been much, much worse.
Good point. Syphillis came from the Americas, IIRC, and before modern treatment was an extremely nasty way to go; but as an STD it’s not super transmissible.
Genocide is as much about attempting to wipe out a culture as it is about killing people. It's certainly true that strenuous and somewhat effective efforts were made to wipe out indigenous cultures as well as abusing and killing a lot of people.
It's a bit unfair - and disrespectful of the natives and their agency - to think that the wiping out attempts only went one way.
I think that misrepresents the actual history. People weren't interested in *wiping out* Native American culture -- indeed, it was honored and appreciated far and wide from the very beginning[1] -- what they wanted to do was have the Native Americans fit into the larger culture that was enveloping them, id est, sorry but you can't go make war on a neighboring tribe when they piss you off with stealing your cattle ,and collect a few scalps, because we call that murder, and what you want to do is go to court and sue for damages instead.
More problematically, you can't just randomly wander over all this land and hunt animals -- particularly those placid ones with a brand -- because we have this shtick called "private property" and you're expected to abide by its restrictions. We make legally binding agreements by writing them down on paper in this language, which you'll need to learn to read and write, and we have complex laws that are also written down by a legislature far away, and you can't just go to the chief and complain in person, orally, when some functionary somewhere or other doesn't follow them right -- again, we have courts for that, you need to write these complex papers and file them, and as a last resort we have elections, which you'll also need to learn about, since it's not the way you govern yourselves. And so on.
It was certainly all very strange, and without doubt it did have an enormously destructive influence on Native culture, because it was so different and incompatible at so many junctures. But the intent was not to be destructive, it was just not sufficiently accommodative. (Although the concept of "reservations" was some kind of attempt to throw up hands and do a "separate but equal" solution, so people weren't unaware of the magnitude of the problem.)
It's not even clear what an appropriate accommodative solution would have looked like, even with the benefit of 20/20 historical hindsight. The cultures were deeply incompatible in so many ways. The only obvious solution would be to just stop the westward expansion of the United States partially or entirely, and leave the Native tribes alone on one or more vast tracts of good land. Keep the Los Angeles area a marshy basin, say, dotted with villages, drying fish, and roaming tribes -- no oil wells, no airports, no gigantic shipping port, no vast concrete megapolis.
That seems a bit unrealistic. So what else should have been done? I am underwhelmed with glib century post-facto condemnation that doesn't attempt to appreciate the extremely difficult problem of any kind of marriage of cultures so profoundly different. One can readily point to any number of individual injustices, certainly, and we could parachute in better solutions to any number of them -- but this does not really address the overarching problem -- which is the cultural incompatibility -- so however many we discovered and remediated, in the past or the present, more would always arise, because the root cause would be alive and kicking.
I don't propose to know any good solution to the mess, and I acknowledge as much as anyone the human tragedy involved, but I'm deeply skeptical of any kind of simple analysis and simple assignment of black and white hats.
---------------
[1] The role of Ulysses S. Grant is notable here: he was a fierce champion of Native American rights, and he was a popular and powerful President. So it's not like the problem was dismissed at the highest levels, or that the Native tribes did not have a sympathetic and powerful ears.
https://www.kqed.org/education/535528/the-lasting-impact-of-native-american-residential-schools#:~:text=Boarding%20schools%20(also%20referred%20to,displacing%20them%20from%20their%20culture.
Boarding schools (also referred to as Residential schools, and more recently, assimilation camps) were institutions run by the federal government and churches within Canada and the United States with the intention of absorbing Indigenous peoples into dominant Western culture, by displacing them from their culture. Between the late 1800s through the late 1970s, most prominently, Indigenous children were forcibly and violently removed from their families to attend these Residential Schools, with some Native families even being coerced by the federal government and the Catholic Church into reluctantly handing their children over. During this time there were over 350 schools operating within the United States. By 1920, there were 20,000 children attending the schools, with the number tripling by just 1925. "
This matches everything I've heard about those schools, and I wonder where you got your beliefs.
It would be one thing to teach English, and another as really happened to forbid children from using their own languages.
I will also note that the Catholic Church has a history of turning what I suspect were ordinary bad people into torturers and murderers. No, not all Catholics, and not all the time, but the Church doesn't seem to have good inhibitions against that sort of thing.
Yeah sorry but (1) NPR is about as far from a cooly objective source on the history of minorities as you could find. Might as well cite the Epoch Times on an evaluation of the policies of the Obama Administration, and (2) if it were a consistent and broad-based policy, there would've been no such thing as a reservation, nobody would ever have portrayed Indian culture sympathetically in fiction or media, John Marshall would never have ruled the way he did in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (futile as that turned out to be), and so on.
I'm in 100% agreement that the policy from early on was assimilation -- and one can debate the wisdom of that back and forth, and I'm not a priori sympathetic to either direction -- and I don't doubt that aspects of that were poorly or wickedly implemented, I've already agreed regardless of intent it factually had a destructive effect on Native culture, and I'm sure there were a host of individual acts of cruelty -- and more than one person in power thought the only good Indian was a dead one.
But all that does not add up to genocide. It's nowhere near a steady and broadly accepted policy of just wiping them out and erasing the culture completely. There are plenty of historical examples of unquestioned genocide, I think we need to reserve that word for such cases, lest the word become as debased and meaningless as "racism" has.
Your line of argument is indirect-- do you know about actual schools or other programs which were efforts to preserve native cultures while teaching European/ American cultures?
I know someone who grew up on a reservation and bears a serious grudge for the emotional damage his relatives took at residential schools.
What are your sources about residential schools?
Do we need federal holidays at all? It seems like their main significance in closing governmental offices that are supposed to be serving the public. If you want federal employees to have days off, just give them vacation days that they can take without shutting down services that the public can need.
[I realize employers may not take kindly to too many employees taking voluntary vacation days simultaneously, but that seems like a minor employment policy issue, whose solution need not be official federal holidays.]
And would there be any loss to "culture" from not having Columbus day be federally recognized? Or any holiday for that matter? Columbus's enduring cultural resonance is probably a function of kids learning about him in history - not the federal holiday.
Similarly, it seems unlikely that Christmas would lose its cultural significance were it not an official federal holiday, but rather merely a day on which many if not most employees chose to spend with family, doing Christmasy things.
Speaking of Christmas, it seems odd to omit discussion of the centuries of horror unleashed by Christians and Christianity in a discussion about a holiday celebrating the birth of Christianity. It seems like an even stronger example of point about Columbus - that the perception of figures, events, or movements, can differ radically from group to group, and from dry history to living cultural endurance.
There’s a pretty clear coordination advantage to a day on which everyone (or “everyone”, since emergency services and some other things continue to operate) are off at once.
Disadvantages too, but not enough that getting rid of, say, Thanksgiving as a national holiday in exchange for a floating day off would get much political traction.
As it is, there’s ongoing tension about the ramp up in Black Friday and pre-Black Friday retail activity that means an increasing number of workers find themselves in that “essential” basket.
I would like to point out that casually dumping on Christians for “unleashing centuries of horror” is cringe. The same could be written about every other world religion and ideology (especially “Rationalism” originating from the French Revolution), but in this time and place it smacks of cheap outgroup bashing for status signaling.
I don't think there's much clout to be gained here through dumping on Christianity. I regard the Gray Tribe (as it exists on SCC/ACX) and religiosity, broadly speaking, as fargroups. Perhaps not exactly, but certainly coming here to dump on the historical record of Christianity evidences poor room-reading, particularly because when it manifests in its mildest conceivable form ("Easter is an adoption of a pagan holiday") it's laughably false. I would think that SAS's post about the sequential rise and fall of left-leaning internet subcultures (evolution vs. creationism, atheism broadly, feminism, and BLM) would have made it clear that Fedora-Tipping Atheism long ago reached the status of "cringe."
"Speaking of Christmas, it seems odd to omit discussion of the centuries of horror unleashed by Christians and Christianity in a discussion about a holiday celebrating the birth of Christianity. "
Truly, Heinrich is indeed a proponent of "You know it's Indigenous People's Day, right, not Columbus Day?" as he lectures one and all on the horrors of colonialism but doesn't do anything that positively celebrates Indigenous Day, such as shawl-dancing or playing lacrosse or parching corn or wearing body paint because that would be Problematic.
"Similarly, it seems unlikely that Christmas would lose its cultural significance were it not an official federal holiday, but rather merely a day on which many if not most employees chose to spend with family, doing Christmasy things."
Even over here, the shops can barely wait for St. Stephen's Day before they start having the 'January' sales. If Christmas Day were not an official holiday, most employees would have no choice about staying home to celebrate it, the same as with Sunday working. The shops would want their workers in to encourage sales for the people who weren't working, and if it's on a weekday, most employers would prefer if they could have their workers as well.
<i>Speaking of Christmas, it seems odd to omit discussion of the centuries of horror unleashed by Christians and Christianity in a discussion about a holiday celebrating the birth of Christianity.</i>
As opposed to whom, secularists? The French Reign of Terror killed more people in ten months than the Spanish Inquisition managed in 356 years, and the numbers aren't even close (c. 17,000 as opposed to c. 2,800).
Federal holidays exist basically to put pressure on employers nationwide to allow pretty much everyone to take off during certain very popular holidays, such as July 4 and Christmas, without enduring the cutthroat scheduling rights/seniority fights that employees in business that do stay open have to endure. You have to have a powerful case that you *cannot* close on those days, e.g. you're a hospital ER room, for line employees to be pretty OK with fighting over who gets to take 12/24 and 12/25 off.
This dates from an era when the balance of power between labor and management on work schedule was tilted toward the latter, and is perhaps still relevant in those flyover regions where people are not (yet) contractors who earn $250k/year writing Javascript interfaces to vast databases.
What's interesting is that Columbus Day is pretty much *only* a federal holiday, unlike the others. The private sector mostly doesn't get Columbus Day off.
Instead of celebrating flawed individual people, we should reserve holidays for uncontroversial advancements, like Indoor Plumbing Day or Pre-Sliced Bread Day. Problem solved.
BTW, Columbus' whole voyage was premised on his belief that everyone else had overcalculated the circumference of the globe and therefore Asia was really only a few thousand miles off the coast of Europe. So he was a contrarian who got everything wrong but still succeeded. Better lucky than smart is the lesson, I guess.
It was less about the size of the globe and more about the size of Asia.
Columbus didn't make his own wild-ass guesses about geography, he followed Toscanelli, who vastly overestimated the size of Asia and (as a smaller effect) slightly underestimated the size of the globe. His map put Japan roughly where Mexico is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paolo_dal_Pozzo_Toscanelli#/media/File:Atlantic_Ocean,_Toscanelli,_1474.jpg which makes the western route there look a lot more appealing.
Of course he could easily have been right in many other ways. It just so happens that the Americas are a long thin continent stretching almost all the way from North to South and blocking travel from Europe to Asia, but just about any other arrangement of land would have provided both a place to replenish supplies and an easier route to Asia.
Very Interesting. Apparently Toscanelli pitched the western voyage project to the Portugese in 1474 and was turned down. Otherwise, we might be arguing about whether we should celebrate "Toscanelli Day" or Indigenous People's Day.
"The Florentine mathematician, astronomer and cosmographer Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli (1397-1482) is probably best remembered for his proposal in 1474 to the Portuguese court of a scheme to sail west as a shortcut to reach the fabled Spice Islands in the east. Toscanelli never made it across the ocean, but his proposal did inspire Columbus, who took Toscanelli’s map with him on his first transatlantic voyage in 1492. This map shows how the Genoese navigator was not only inspired by Toscanelli, but also misguided by his underestimation of the Earth’s circumference. The error led Columbus to think he had reached Cipangu (Japan) instead of a whole new, unknown continent lying in between Europe and Asia." https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/295-cathay-here-i-come-sailing-west-to-go-east/
Not a *probable* arrangement. For obvious reasons -- lighter mobile continental plates sitting atop a semifluid mantle on a spinning sphere -- the continents tend toward the Equator, and your circumnavigable ocean routes end up in the nasty stormy high latitudes.
I could definitely get behind Willis Haviland Carrier Day, celebrated either at the beginning of summer or on the hottest day of the year.
"Allow me to try a hostile rephrasing of your point. There is no such thing as genuine heroism worth celebrating, or traditions worth keeping - only raw power. "
I love this. And this article in general. So many brilliant arguments presented in a fun way.
I don't think replacing "Columbus Day" with "Indigenous People’s Day" is very politically savvy, if the goal is anything but "maximizing controversy". From the other comments, I read that Columbus Day is for the Italian Americans what St. Patrick's Day is for the Irish American.
If it turned out that St. Patrick was Problematic (because he was anti snakes or whatever), then just gradually renaming it for some other famous Irish person or thing would be the way to go. Replacing it with Orange Snake Day will probably not be very successful.
Then again, the assumption that the goal of the people in favor of renaming might mostly be to minimize offending minorities might be overly charitable. Optimizing for controversy fits well with my model of how the culture war works. "Who cares if some privileged white minority uses this day to celebrate their heritage rather than colonialism. Causing a big stink will raise so much more awareness."
I think there is a relevant Simpsons episode about the founder of Springfield and if he should be celebrated even though he was a pirate in reality or something.
Oh, they're diluting down the religious element very greatly, it's Paddy's Day now or even Patrick's Week as the Dubliners try to get tourism revved-up by having St. Patrick's Festival for five days:
https://stpatricksfestival.ie/
So it's a bank holiday, drinking, maybe standing in the cold and rain to watch a brief and not very glamorous local parade, and that's about the cultural side of it (wilting bunch of shamrock on your lapel optional). Mostly it's an excuse to get a ton of our politicians out of the country as they go abroad to various nations on 'trade missions' and of course the all-important Buttering Up Current US President with the crystal bowl of shamrock (Biden's Irish heritage has been a great advantage for us here). That Cheltenham usually coincides with the day so they have a legitimate excuse to fly over to Britain for the racing is very handy, too (for them and for us, as the plain people of Ireland get to have the place to ourselves mostly while the government and as many other local politicians as can scrape a place on the jamboree depart the suffering nation):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheltenham_Festival
This doesn't even get into the question of what exactly an "indigenous" person is. Is a Quechua person in Maine, thousands of miles and a continent away from his homeland, an "indigenous" person?
My impression is it's basically an umbrella term for the peoples of the New World -- more precisely, those whose first sustained contact with the advanced agrarian societies of Afro-Eurasia took place after the start of the gunpowder era. So the "original" (in that sense) peoples of the Americas, Australia, and the Pacific, along with a few less strictly "New World" cases like the pre-1400 inhabitants of the Canary Islands.
I think the common usage is that insofar as you trace your ancestry to one of those peoples, you're an "indigenous" person, regardless of whether you've since moved to Kennebunkport or Singapore or wherever.
One perhaps *could* define it that way, but in practice it is all over the place. I often see the Sami referred to as the "indigenous" people of Scandinavia, notwithstanding the fact that they don't actually seem to have been there any longer than the other native populations.
The Sami, like some of the peoples of Siberia, seem like a trickier edge case, but I think using the term still makes sense given my suggested definition. E.g., the Sami, unlike the other inhabitants of Scandinavia, were basically unaffected by the Black Death, meaning they existed outside the economic system of urbanized, technologically advanced Afro-Eurasia. It's not a case of "no contact" with that system in quite the same absolute sense as, say, the Aztecs, but I can see the justification for putting the Sami on the "indigenous" side of the line.
I've seen suggestions that the coastal populations of Sami were significantly affected by the bubonic plague. And much of Africa would fall on the "indigenous" side of your distinction, but Africans are seldom referred to as "indigenous peoples."
I definitely agree that some of the usage seems inconsistent. Maybe calling the Sami indigenous is more misleading than not, I really don't know.
As for Africa, I do often see "indigenous" used to distinguish people like the San from later-arriving Bantu-speaking groups (who I think did tend to have some connection to the broader world economy, albeit often fairly attenuated).
So maybe it's that the concept is similar, but used in the African context mainly with reference to an earlier process of contact and colonial expansion, Bantu as opposed to European.
To bring this around a bit to the original point, I note the presidential proclamation creating IPD as a federal holiday defines the word as including "American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians." I suspect the intention here is to recognize the descendants of people who are in situ in the present day 50 states (no Samoans, etc). But the genesis of the holiday in activist circles concerned the "Indigenous Populations in the Americas." The disconnect is between those two poles.
In fact, the Sami seem to have arrived in Scandinavia several centuries *after* the ancestors of the Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians did, so if we're listing Scandinavian peoples by indigineity they'd be near the bottom.
> with the advanced agrarian societies of Afro-Eurasia took place after the start of the gunpowder era
???
Certainly wouldn't be the first time I've failed to make any sense, but you're going to have to give me a little more to go on than that, as to which part is confusing to you.
Despite this being a pretty fantastic dialogue, I can't help but think you started from the pun of "Columbian exchange" and worked backward from there.
Question for UK or Commonwealth readers: What's the discourse around Guy Fawkes Day like these days?
I feel like it's an interesting counterpoint to this discussion. Columbus Day was created expressly as a means of promoting acceptance of a Catholic population in a heavily Protestant society. It existed as a blandly uncontroversial, largely unnoticed holiday for 90 years or so before turning into a culture war flash point, especially in recent years.
Guy Fawkes Day was created to celebrate England's identity as a Protestant state and show hostility to Catholicism. It spread to the colonies and was centuries a vehicle for anti-Catholic sentiment. Then at some point -- maybe after the Troubles? -- it settled down into what people apparently decided was just a fun innocuous affair with fireworks or something.
Is there some sort of model there for how a holiday can be declawed of its past divisiveness without needing to be completely rebranded or detached from all historical meaning? Or do people still fight over Guy Fawkes and I just don't hear about it here in the USA?
Bonfire Night/Guy Fawkes Night was a mainly *English* thing: "Remember, remember, the Fifth of November".
In Ireland, we had Hallowe'en for our autumn/start of winter festival, and Bonfire Night and fireworks were never a thing here (to the point that they are still illegal, and there are warning ads played on the radio about the dangers of them right about now). I can't speak for Northern Ireland, but the Twelfth is their day/week for marching, bonfires, and 'kick the pope':
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twelfth
Scotland, I imagine, was much the same as Ireland re: Hallowe'en but that easily mixed in with Bonfire Night. So mostly it's a British thing now about setting off fireworks and lighting bonfires, with little political overtones (I'm not even sure they keep up the tradition of burning an effigy, though better-informed can correct me).
TL;DR: It's not a problem any more, at least in England.
I'm a Catholic from a long-standing English Catholic family, living in Sussex, which is pretty much the heartland of aggressively anti-Catholic bonfire celebrations in England. The weekend before last I took my family to watch one of the two dozen bonfire night preparatory marches in our village, and was joined by two other Catholic families. We have been doing this since I was a child; there's no sense at all that this is any more an anti-Catholic thing and instead is very much a "burning stuff is cool and fun" celebration. I do know one super-hardcore Catholic (he doesn't believe the Pope is the Pope, which is a whole other thing) who claims to find it offensive, but I think we're down to the lizard-people-quotient here. Most modern Brits you ask would struggle to give you *any* historical detail about bonfire night and would probably not even know that Guy Fawkes was Catholic.
"would probably not even know that Guy Fawkes was Catholic."
Really?
I privately have imagined that Catholic brits secretly celebrated GF as martyr, even if actually death was fall breaking neck instead of being hanged, quartered and burned as originally intended by those Protestants.
"I’ll just be standing over here in the corner in case you decide you like truth and goodness."
I think Adraste and Beroe could agree to celebrate "Let's Beat The Stuffing Out Of Coria Day".
As for suggested historical figures, next year Coria will be tut-tutting some of the selected, just like Adraste with Columbus Day, so here goes with my best "but why do you hate truth and goodness?" dying duck impersonation:
"There are plenty of lists of the greatest historical figures. Taking this one, selecting for only Americans or America-related people, and removing people too similar to each other, we get Columbus, Einstein, Edison, Washington, MLK, Disney, Franklin, Jonas Salk, Margaret Sanger, Susan B Anthony, and Louis Armstrong. We could combine it with this list of people who saved the most lives, of which the Americans are Maurice Hilleman, Henrietta Lacks, Jonas Salk, and Norman Borlaug - I think a good consensus list for both influential and moral might replace one of Columbus, Sanger or Franklin with Borlaug, and keep the rest."
Columbus is already on the no-no list. As for the rest -
Einstein. No-no, or have you already forgotten his sexism, misogyny, and stealing the work of his wife?
Work of first wife: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-forgotten-life-of-einsteins-first-wife/
Cruelty to second wife: https://allthatsinteresting.com/elsa-einstein
Edison - tsk-tsk. Relentless self-publicist, mired in controversies over who actually first invented the inventions he claimed, took the credit for discoveries made by employees, and involved with inventing the electric chair. Do you really want to honour someone who ghoulishly profited off the death penalty, bearing in mind the carceral state that disproportionately punishes minorities?
https://theconversation.com/thomas-edison-visionary-genius-or-fraud-99229
Washington - George or Carver? If the first, no-no again. Enslaver who, while not quite as bad as Thomas Jefferson, was still bad. Read this reparative creative work by a Nebula award winner and get educated:
https://firesidefiction.com/the-secret-lives-of-the-nine-negro-teeth-of-george-washington
Disney - Walt? No-no again, remember "Song of the South":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of_the_South#Controversies
Franklin - as in Ben? As in the Founding Fathers? Who were all racists, remember, who founded the Electoral College so slave-holding states could be represented, and this is why we never had the First Female President who would have brought about the Green Economy utopia :
https://time.com/4558510/electoral-college-history-slavery/
Margaret Sanger - not everybody likes Margaret Sanger and her work, but they're only right-wing religious bigot -ists and -phobes, so eff 'em!
Susan B. Anthony - no-no again. Pro-Temperance Movement (the Prohibition of its day) and anti-abortion.
MLK, Salk and Armstrong don't seem to have anything against them, but you never know what secrets might come to light. Better not take the chance!
No no no. MLK was a notorious womanizer (and supposedly encouraged a rape), Salk was in favor of mandatory vaccines *and* experimented on animals and disabled children while developing his vaccine, and Armstrong is like some kind of paragon of white privilege, in addition to being a Boy Scout (boo!), frat boy at Purdue (double boo!), and Navy pilot who helped out with the neocolonialist Korean War.
Best to stick to modern mythology: we can have Leia Organa Day, T'Challa Day, Maud'Dib Day -- with the advantage that if any of these become questionable due to evolving mythology, they can easily be retconned by expert CGI reconstruction or a new film. Real people are so...messy.
I find it hard to tell whether the reference to the nonsense about Einstein "stealing" the "work" of his first wife (who failed at an exam to become a teacher, twice) is ironic or not. (On a second read - it probably is.) I suppose the fact that nonsense gets repeated in a blog sponsored by what used to be a good popular science magazine is a relevant fact in and of itself.
What is anybody's beef with Ben Franklin in particular, anyhow?
I think both Adraste and Beroe are assuming that "culture" is some unchanging thing, and that modifying traditions/holidays/etc is inherently negative. America's treatment of Native Americans (including both demonization and idolization) has been a significant part of its culture since its founding, and I think this holiday changing merely reflects our culture's changing attitudes. As such, the change preserves culture, rather than undermining it.
In my experience it isn't a handful of elites. It is the culture of "blue America" represented pretty honestly. Now "blue America" certainly has more cultural power than "red America", which you could argue is unfair, but I definitely think this represents a real cultural force.
Oh come on, people say this about literally everything in the culture wars. Our Side is made up of Real Americans, all independent thinkers who somehow all independently converged on the right ideas, Their Side is a monolithic hive mind with no original thoughts, getting its marching orders from out-of-touch elites who aren't Real Americans like us.
I don't believe the people saying it about Columbus Day any more than I believe it for anything else. People really do think that Christopher Columbus was a terrible person, it's not hard to find them!
I most commonly encounter "we have a tradition of abandoning our traditions" as and unprincipled exception from soi-disant Catholic traditionalists who like modern changes to doctrine and liturgy. Interesting to see it somewhere else for a change.
My actual suggestion would be Mayflower Day.
I'm not sure if it's true that Columbus Day was invented as a sop to Italian-Americans or not, but it has become a more general celebration of the European discovery and settlement of the Americas. This (rather than Columbus' own personal failings) is why "they" want to take it away, and it's why White Americans take attacks on Columbus Day as attacks on themselves.
Shifting the celebration to Mayflower Day gives us a day that we can celebrate the European settlement of the Americas while avoiding controversy around the less nice aspects of Colombo himself. It also has the advantage of being directly relevant to the USA rather than to some nearby islands. One slight problem is that the Mayflower landed on 11-11 which is already a holiday, but shifting it to the day the Mayflower left England (September 6) seems like a good compromise that gives a much-needed late summer holiday.
Isn't this just Thanksgiving? I don't know if we can handle two Pilgrim-related holidays.
Are you saying we would BUCKLE under their weight?
(At the risk of ruining the joke, I am very worried for the joke itself because I'm not sure if other people think of pilgrims as buckle-delivery systems in the same way I do.)
I agree - also, September 6th is around Labor Day, which is already a holiday.
That would still run into problems; the Pilgrims are associated with Thanksgiving, and I think that gets the usual crop of articles, same as with Christmas-and-Easter, about how 'this celebration is not what you think it is and didn't happen the way you've been told it happened':
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/thanksgiving-myth-and-what-we-should-be-teaching-kids-180973655/
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/400-years-on-pilgrims-get-reality-check
So a second holiday celebrating the arrival of the Colonizers would not be well-received by the kind of people who insist that it should be Indigenous People's Day and not Columbus Day and gush over The 1619 Project:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/11/25/how-america-outgrew-the-pilgrims-440603
https://time.com/5910755/mayflower-plymouth-meaning/
Perhaps, I didn't look over the comments diligently enough, but when discussing made up holidays, no one cited Frank Costanza's "Festivus" (for the rest of us)?
Can we air our grievances now?
I'm bothered by a couple iterations of this:
[quote]Adraste: And you’re not being idealistic with your argument that we should never celebrate any holiday for anyone who has ever been associated with bad things? Except for Columbus, an exception you still haven’t even slightly explained?[/quote]
It leaves Beroe in a weird spot. Adraste says he can't celebrate Columbus day, that they are in conflict because he does. The usual reason for that is that Adraste-types say we can't have a holiday for any historic figure who ever did a bad thing. He points out an inconsistency between that statement and what the other person wants him to do, which is that the holiday the other person is trying to replace this guy's with is for flawed people as well.
Scott lets Adraste look at that and go "Now you are the person demanding we cancel holidays and replace them unless people sinless. And the burden of proof is on you, not me, the person who made the demand".
If Beroe has to defend both his position and Adrastes, he's in trouble - how could he possibly win? A good example of the implications are within the article; he doesn't NEED the Chrisanta Clausllumbus argument at the point he uses it; at the point the ball is still in Adraste's court to prove he isn't just stoking racial conflict using an inconsistantly applied principle.
I'm not sure if the US realises how unusual it is to have holidays for historical figures at all.
I had a look through all the public holidays of the other G20 countries. If we exclude "current monarch" and various long-dead religious figures, the only other two countries I found with national days to celebrate historical figures are Argentina's Martin Miguel de Guemes Day and Mexico's Benito Juarez day.
Maybe - I wouldn't be surprised at least to find we are an outlier. It doesn't seem to matter much to the argument being had here, though; Adraste would be thrilled to find Columbus day had been rededicated to a minority scientist or something.
Most countries aren't founded de novo by distant foreigners the way America was.
Well, the proliferation is a modern thing, and I have no good explanation for it. But for donkey's years there were only two, Washington's and Lincoln's birthdays, and in both cases the honor isn't too high, given a good case can be made that each man was personally responsible for the survival of the Republic at a critical juncture.
This is incomplete and incorrect. Secular governments didn't have holidays because religions had Holy Days, and Christianity (pre reformation, Catholics after) has a calendar chock full of saints days.
"Labor Day was invented to screw up Communists’ attempts to coordinate around May Day as a labor protest holiday."
This is an interesting one, because the Communists themselves were appropriating a traditional holiday. May Day has been celebrated all over Europe forever:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Day
Though this article claims it was picked by the American labour movement because of a strike that took place on 1st May:
"(T)he date was chosen in 1889 for political reasons by the Marxist International Socialist Congress, which met in Paris and established the Second International as a successor to the earlier International Workingmen's Association. They adopted a resolution for a "great international demonstration" in support of working-class demands for the eight-hour day. The date had been chosen by the American Federation of Labor to continue an earlier campaign for the eight-hour day in the United States, which had been the cause of a general strike beginning on 1 May 1886, and culminated in the Haymarket affair, which occurred in Chicago four days later."
In 1955, the Church dedicated the 1st May to St. Joseph the Worker as a counterbalance to the socialist/communist/labour holiday. So everybody has been getting in on the game of "who can take May Day for their own?"
I can readily believe the Marxists chose May 1 to get in the face of traditional May Day celebrations, since the latter were centered around agricultural bounty -- even today May 1 is pretty much when you expect to put the corn in the ground -- and they were deeply hostile to the independent successful farmer. I can see them saying we are going to replace that fucking kulak maypole with the glorious hammer[1] of the industrial worker, whom they saw as a better representative of the ideal prole, much less likely to question the wisdom of the Party.
---------------------
[1] The sickle was always a cynical lie.
In 1870, Pope Pius IX declared Joseph patron of the Universal Church and instituted another feast, a solemnity to be held on the third Sunday of Eastertide. Joseph always associated with workers.
Zigliari (made Cardinal by long time friend Pope Leo in 1879 -same year as George's P&P) is known to be drafting for Leo an encyclical on the rights of workers. Zigliari part of Thomistic revival. See McInerny, Ralph (1968). Cardinal Manning, also involved with draft.
In 1889 the Marxists pick May 1, in part to coopt Catholics.
Rerum finally issued in May 1891.
In 1955, Pope Pius XII introduced in its place of the 1870 feast, the feast of Saint Joseph the Worker on 1 May as an ecclesiasical counterpart to the International Workers' Day on the same day
Well, disobliging the Church would be a serendipitous twofer for the Bolshies. Guess the Church had the last laugh, though, given the nontrivial role of Karol Wojtyla in the demise of the Warsaw Pact.
A line of argument that Beroe hints at but never directly articulates is that the very concept of “Indigenous People” is extremely Eurocentric, something you would expect Adraste to be sensitive to.
For one thing, the people in question aren’t necessarily “indigenous” (or especially “First People”). What they actually are are just the people who happened to be here when the European colonists started arriving. There are actually thousands of years of many evolving and warring cultures that rose and fell since the “first people” actually arrived.
The “indigenous” that the Europeans encountered were not in every case particularly old cultures. “Oxford is older than the Aztecs” for example, and of course our primary conception of the Plains Indians involves them chasing bison on horses, which of course are an animal that didn’t exist in North America until the Spaniards brought them. Not America, but the “indigenous” Māori of New Zealand only got there 400 years before Cook did.
Now, the Australian Aboriginals, THOSE dudes are Indigenous.
For another thing lumping them all into “Indigenous People” is a remarkably arrogant act of cultural flattening for diverse peoples that differed greatly in their cultures and lifestyles and quite often didn’t particularly care for the other groups of Indigenous People around them.
>Now, the Australian Aboriginals, THOSE dudes are Indigenous.
Depends how you define it. Their ancestors were homo sapiens before they migrated to Australia, so they didn't literally come to be human in Australia, though significant genetic change obviously took place over the past 40,000 years.
I define it as they probably have a really strong argument to “direct lineage to ancestors that really were the first humans to get to where they currently live, a very very long time ago”
This is a good point.
> Hanukkah was originally a minor celebration of a third-tier Bible story; American Jews bumped it up several notches of importance in order to neutralize Christmas.
This is incorrect: The Hanukkah story is post-biblical. Regarding how it got elevated in the US, I'm not sure the explanation given is correct either. :/
It is a pretty big deal over one of God’s less dramatic miracles.
The Hanukkah story was not included in the Hebrew Tanakh, but it is very much biblical, insofar as 1 and 2 Maccabees are recognized as part of the Old Testament by the majority of Christians (including Catholic and Orthodox).
But I agree that calling Hannukah "a minor celebration of a third-tier Bible story" is misleading. It's a celebration of a mythologized revolution, an account of which made its way into the Christian Old Testament.
But I think the characterization of how Hannukah was elevated in the US is pretty accurate.
There's clearly some connection with Christmas, but I'm not sure "neutralise" is right word. Clearly the increased emphasis on Hanukkah *hasn't* neutralised Christmas, and I doubt anyone thought it would.
Hanukkah is mentioned in John 10:22-23.
Advent is Hanukkah stretched out?
Kinda, right? One of the bigger challenges to my religious observance is the treatment of Advent as "Christmas Season" rather than a penitential season. And then of course it's very hard to celebrate Christmas through the octave, until Epiphany, and - if we're really feeling festive - until Candlemas.
If I were organizing holidays from the top down on a purely utilitarian basis, I would force everyone to celebrate Christmas the way they do in December but in January when everything is so much bleaker. Most of December would be dark and bleak without Christmas, but at least you'd be coming off Thanksgiving, and the beginning of winter has some novelty to it. We're not all sick of snow yet.
Well, the priest wears purple. It is penitential season.
I keep my nativity up until the Epiphany.
I think that RCC should change feast to align with Eastern Church , January 7 (as tip of hat to reunion - create some new cardinals from the Eastern church, too, who could come or not come when then next pope is selected.). This would also take us out of the secular celebrations feeding consumerism.
December is not bleak since the creation of electrified homes. Candlemas - total pagan thing that the church tried and tried in early years to stamp out candle use and finally gave in with candlemass to coopt the pagan and unsafe candle play.
To me, it seems like "Indigenous Peoples' Day" as a US holiday ought to be focused specifically on the indigenous people who live (or lived) within the area that is now the US, and the ways in which their knowledge and customs influenced the development of modern American culture. So any objection concerning indigenous people living elsewhere (Aztecs, Incas) doesn't strike me as particularly relevant.
I think it's also worth pointing out that we do have a longstanding holiday in November that already celebrates that specific thing (the contributions of specific indigenous people to early settlers in the US and their influence on development of modern American culture). But, strangely enough, that holiday isn't a particularly popular one nowadays...
Yes they celebrate it in October in Canada but I think they might call it something different so as not to infringe on the copyrighted original.
Gratitude Day, or something.
>and the ways in which their knowledge and customs influenced the development of modern American culture
Which is to say, not that much.
Just want to remind everyone that "Indigenous Peoples" are currently 574 separate tribes in the US alone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_federally_recognized_tribes_in_the_United_States
The fact that [this list](https://wmich.edu/mus-gened/mus150/biography100.html) includes Bill Gates but not John von Neumann or Alan Turing makes me mildly suspicious of it.
Bill Gates was more influential than von Neumann. There are a lot more ergregious names on this list than Bill Gates.
Might depend on whether you think MS Word or thermonuclear weapons have had a more profound influence on the history of the last 100 years.
The list is apparently from 1999, so you could say he "was" influential at the time. It just didn't last, [insert generic warning to avoid recentism].
I think it's generally anti-republican (little r) to have holidays celebrating specific people in general. President's Day or Independence Day or Labor Day or whatever are a better model for civic holidays. They celebrate events or traits or broad groups but not specific people. And it has the added advantage that there is neither a mythical or real person at the center so you are reduced to fighting over the general principle. Yes, there's a fight over Independence Day but it's a fight over whether the country itself is good. Which is a more interesting and relevant fight than whether Christopher Columbus specifically was X or Y. (Which ends up being a stand in for something modern anyway.)
Speaking of, when are the Rationalists going to get together and make a holiday?
A rationalist-holiday invention contest could be fun. :)
Well, that clears things up considerably! Thank you for the education on the King(or previously) the Queen’s English.
We could rename Columbus Day as Colonial Day, and use it to estimate the amount of wealth extracted from colonized nations by all the colonizing empires. But then we should do a second calculation of the amount of wealth that might have been extracted by the 'exploited' nations, if they had had the technology and will to monetize their wealth themselves.
It could be argued that the United States colonized New Spain's northern frontier and exploited its minerals, but they had to counter raiding, financial failures, etc. Do the Americans colonizers apologize to Mexico and New Spain's colonizers, who apologize to the Apache, who ran off the Tohono O'odham, who inherited the land and its resources through several cultures that came before, stretching back maybe 14,000 years?
We might use the day to discuss the colonialism of Amazon and Facebook, MacDonald's and Disney.
They might've been horrified by the savagery of Christian pogroms, tortures, and executions and jumped back on their ships.
>We could rename Columbus Day as Colonial Day, and use it to estimate the amount of wealth extracted from colonized nations by all the colonizing empires.
1. Europeans spent far more on their African colonies than they ever got out of them. Particular individuals got wealthy, but as far as th empires are concerned they were largely an economic drag. They persisted as long as they did out of a combination of A, national pride in having an empire, B, failing to understand that it was unprofitable or expecting it would eventually become profitable and C, for later years in British colonies they thought they could build functional democratic societies.
2. What does "extract" mean? Most of America's wealth was not "extracted" from the US in the traditional sense. Most of its wealth came from industrial might, not extractive industries. The natives were deprived of their land - not the wealth that Europeans generated with it.
>But then we should do a second calculation of the amount of wealth that might have been extracted by the 'exploited' nations, if they had had the technology and will to monetize their wealth themselves.
This makes no sense. "If they had the technology" - the whole point is that they didn't! Most of America's wealth is stuff that wouldn't exist if Europeans never showed up, so the Europeans did not deprive them of this stuff by colonizing America. You can oppose colonization for other reasons, but "they took the natives wealth" (beyond land) isn't one of them. There would be no factories or corportations or universities in the US if no foreigners ever showed up.
You've made a good argument here, I think. But colonialism was a great investment for Spain and the Netherlands.
Why would we want to celebrate colonialism?
"Jesus was born in the spring; they moved Christmas to December to neutralize the pagan Solstice celebration."
Incorrect, we have several extant letters from early Church authors debating about when exactly Christ's birthday is. There is an ancient Jewish tradition that prophets died on the same day they were conceived. So, as Jesus died on March 25th, he was assumed to have been born nine months later, December 25th.
"Easter got its name because it neutralized the rites of the spring goddess Eostre." Only in Germanic countries, in the rest of the world it's still called the Paschal Mass or Pascha. So while this might be true, it doesn't follow that "All of our best holidays have begun as anti-holidays to neutralize older rites." The Paschal Mass was celebrated centuries before the Christianisation of Germany.
Great post!
So what? Who cares?
This post showed me some holes in my map of US culture outside the little CA slice I was raised in.
The idea that anyone cared much about Columbus day (aside from culture war objections to Indigenous Peoples day) is pretty new to me, I'm going to look further into the history of it later. I didn't even associate him strongly with Italy....
The framing of Indigenous Peoples as a holiday celebrating those cultures seems a little off. In my experience (19 y/o going to public but extra blue tribed schools) it was always more of a solemn remembering-a-genocide situation. Plus, as a kid even in elementary on Columbus day (it hadn't been renamed yet) we just learned a little about how colonialism sucked. Whatever it's called, to me it's always been a day where we get talked to about colonialism sucking, then we get a three-day weekend. I don't think it matters much what it's called, federally. My college is giving me IP's day off, my HS always listed it as IP's day, to the point I was mildly surprised to learn that the government listed it as Columbus day.
There was no "genocide" except in the most expansive sense of the word.
Growing up in red-state suburbia in the 80s and 90s, (in an area with very few Italian-Americans) Columbus was regarded as a hero, a notch or two below George Washington. The first time I was told that I was supposed to hate him, I was in HS in the late 90s, and it was from an unpopular activist-type kid.
However, I’ve never in my life been exposed to anything happening on Columbus Day. It’s not even a day off work or school, just a thing on the calendar.
I propose: "National history is complicated day" Where we can have discussions like this one and more and instill in our children the vital concept that the past is a foreign country! It could have fun rituals like everyone taking turns lionizing some historical figure and then someone else can read off a script why that figure was a moral monster in favor of some other figure and the next person in line can then read off a script tearing down that figure and so on and so on.
Norman Borlaug day for the win! I think I’m going to start celebrating a few of these alternate holidays in my family. Imagine how much better our society would be if people associated actually excellent historical figures with cake and parties and spending time with family.
I celebrate the treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo and all the US veterans who faught in a war that ended with the nation nearly doubling its territorial footprint. And because of those men, I was born in that area as a free American.
This post made me happier than most ACT posts in recent memory. Thank you.
Object level: I never liked Columbus Day, and the a-historicity of Chicago's Elementary School encomia to Columbus gave me the creeps a decade before I read Orson Scott Card's Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus (which is a surprisingly deep and interesting story about the power of charismatic people to affect history in random directions).
Spoiler: this novel did not redeem Cristóbal Colón in my eyes, but it did get me thinking about the holiday in pretty similar ways to how Scott is discussing them, here.
I wrote a Petrov day ceremony booklet (http://petrovday.com/), and unironically support meritocratically allocating holidays to people who deserve it.
That said, I don't think Henrietta Lacks deserves a holiday. Not because cancer research isn't important. Nor because I think giving a cell culture is insufficiently virtuous. Rather, I think Henrietta Lacks should not be honored because I hold a grudge against HeLa, the microorganism that descends from her cancer. It is most famous not for its positive contributions to cancer research, but for invading and ruining cancer research on other cell lines. I don't think this kind of Petri-dish-invasion imperialism should be celebrated!
in related/unrelated news, in my state here kids had a day off last week for Yom Kippur. Jews are a small single digit % of the population here, smaller than several other communities. Other than political clout it bewilders me why that day should be made a holiday for everyone. Also what happens when every other community starts demanding the same for their holidays.
What happens when "others" "demand" holidays?
We all work less! A good thing! We developed multicultural competence! A good thing!
Maybe we even get fusion foods. Taco Bell has brought back the Mexican Pizza for this October. Presumably to celebrate Columbus Day: Italians, Hispanics and Capitalism.
Malcom Gladwell had an interesting podcast about taco bell and pat Boone, if I'm recalling correctly.
Actually no. That day is a school holiday only, so nobody gets to work less except teachers (a profession known for having few days off otherwise), but parents have to scramble for special childcare arrangements for a day that has no meaning for most of them.
Growing up it CD was not always a school holiday. But my mom would give us the day off to celebrate as Italian American.
In South Bend, the unions negotiated Dyngus Day ( Easter Monday - Polish American St. Patrick's Day) as a paid holiday.
Part of me says don't be complaining about childcare arrangements unless you're part of a union. In which case complain to your union.
Don't panic, organize!
And now a transplant to Baltimore County, the schools are closed for Yom Kippur. It wasn't that observant Jewish Americans demanded the holiday. It's that the were places where significant amount of children weren't showing up to school. So they made it a school holiday.
The courts are closed for Columbus Day and state offices but notwithstanding it being a federal and state holiday, the University of Maryland is not off, because they take that day and add it to December holidays: so celebrated on 12/28. Same with Presidents' Day celebrated on 12/27, Veterans celebrated on 12/29.
Ok fine, i think we're headed into pretty intractable differences of opinion on work and unions. I've read your reply but am going to stop the discussion here before it becomes unproductive.
Ok.
But are you against ALL holidays because of your personal childcare issues and relationship with your freely chosen employer?
>Maybe if I believed that we could create an even better explorer holiday - one honoring Neil Armstrong, maybe - I could be convinced to part with Columbus Day
You know what? Let's do it. The rationalist community already has Stanislav Petrov Day and Smallpox Eradication Day, let's make July 20th Neil Armstrong Day. Who cares if it didn't affect us directly? You already made the case that the myth is more important than the facts. The moon landing is such a defining, myth-making moment of progress that people to this day say "If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we...?" as a way to express their disappointment with human progress. It's the day we celebrate humanity's aspiration to always travel farther and faster, to explore the unknown. And we can celebrate it with a guy who really did set foot on untouched land, rather than a guy who planted flags on someone else's land and pretended it was untouched.
>I’m sorry, you may be right about the history, but Indigenous Peoples’ Day is just not a very good holiday. Indigenous Peoples are just too vague and diverse to have any real attachment to them.
Take a page from The Oatmeal and celebrate Bartolome de las Casas, a contemporary of Columbus who fought for the rights of the natives: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/columbus_day
Think it should be fine for Whites to celebrate Columbus Day for their ancestors conquering this beautiful land and for Native Americans to observe Indigenous Day to lament their ancestors losing it. It used to happen in ancient times. The day some empire conquered some major city would be a feast day while the inhabitants of that city might observe it as day of mourning.
"Whites" what is that?
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/12/opinion/columbus-day-italian-american-racism.html
The piece is kind of a riff on a book:
Are Italians White?: How Race is Made in America (2003)
And see: How the Irish Became White, Ignatiev (1995).
Ignatiev might be best read in connection with Amiable with Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem, Claude McKay
And with exploration of Marx thoughts on lumpen proletariat. He got the idea of ethnicity all wrong.
But see: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/03/22/sorry-but-the-irish-were-always-white-and-so-were-the-italians-jews-and-so-on/
I honestly never knew about the New Orleans pogrom in 1892, and definitely would have never guessed that the largest lynching in American history was directed at Italians. I feel like that’s some important context that is completely ignored in the conversation around Columbus Day.
There's an HBO movie about it from the 90s with Christopher Walken. Not bad, from what I recall. Anyway, that's always been my main source of knowledge on this topic.
As a boomer and Italian American, I am kind of stunned that so many don't know about lynching of Italian Americas and the explicit connection between Columbus Day and Italian Americans.
But I knew the late Msgr. Baroni the founder of the National Italian American Foundation and grew up with the scholars involved in the neighborhood and ethnic movement of the 60s and 70s and so probably have discounted the uniqueness of my personal experiences and private study.
But boomers and older Italian Americans all know that Columbus Day is about Italians not about Columbus.
I suppose people also do not know about Notre Dame students fighting with the KKK nor about the violent and deadly riots in Niles Ohio between the KKK and Italian Americans.
I was stunned a few years ago that a friend from Tulsa did not know about Tulsa Massacre which was common knowledge to me. He told me his black Tulsa friends didn't even know about it.
I encourage everyone to do the minimal amount of work necessary to prove this false:
"Indigenous Peoples’ Day is observed by feeling vaguely guilty, making a big show of not celebrating Columbus Day, and making sure not to do anything fun or cultural related to Indigenous Peoples in any way, lest it offend someone."
Most populated areas have interesting cultural events for this holiday. Don't be a lazy bitch like Beroe, go do or see something cool.
I live in a medium-large Southern city. The only planned IPD-related event I can find by googling and looking through local events calendars -- including ones put out by tribal groups -- is one of the state parks doing an educational demonstration on arrowheads that isn't even on the actual Day.
The news reports I can find from last year's "festivities" just describe the mayor holding a news conference with tribal leaders and talking about the Fight for Equality and the Need for Change. There's no hint of any sort of grassroots celebration, nor of any sense that such a thing would be desirable or even appropriate. I did find some "Here's 6 Great Things to Do in [City] on Indigenous Peoples Day" type articles, but the suggestions are all about it being a good occasion to go visit this monument or that historic site -- none of which seem to be doing any sort of special IPD programming -- and feel appropriately nebulously bad about the whole thing.
Based on that little bit of research, Beroe's description sounds pretty accurate to me.
Sorry for the late reply. The arrowhead event sounds cool, even if it wasn't on the day itself (many events aren't b/c weekends tend to be a better time to draw crowds). Here are some examples of other events in southern cities, many of which don't sound depressing at all! These are all from the first 5 Google results of ""indigenous peoples day" events 2022 "[city],"" so maybe the event calendar sites you were using suck, or your city is especially boring.
Story Time in the Forest (Atlanta)
Multi-activity event at a Nature Center (Houston) Activities included:
- Live Demos
- Vendor Village
- Demos of replica Akokisa tools making, native plants and wildlife, & interpretive talk on the coastal prairie ecology
- Throughout the day visitors can join in the construction of a Akokisa-style winter home constructed of thatched palmetto
Event with salmon bake, drum performances, circle dancing (Jackson)
Event with live entertainment, a stickball tournament, art contest, and more (Oklahoma City)
The Language of Clay: Catawba Indian Pottery & Oral Traditions (Charlotte)
I will admit there were two cities where I didn't find anything fun in the top 5 Google results (Tallahassee, Nashville). I'm guessing these cities still had *something* going on, but probably not much, not as well advertised, or the websites have all been taken down since the events were almost 4 months school.
I see no reason to do anything 'IPD' related, when there are already annual powwow celebrations/fairs of long standing in my area.
"Most populated areas have interesting cultural events for this holiday."
Citation, please! What 'most populated areas'? What events? We have Culture Night here in Ireland, and some people may well go to it, but most people don't, or only use it as an excuse for drinking.
https://culturenight.ie/
So who are the most areas celebrating Indigenous Day and what do they do, and is it really more than a handful of the Usual Suspects congratulating themselves on the wonderful lecture series they ran? Outside of reservations and organisations associated with Indigenous Peoples, I mean: what white/black/brown/yellow people are celebrating this and how?
Sorry for just now seeing this, and for having a US-centric outlook. To be honest it never occurred to me that anywhere outside the Americas would even have either Columbus Day or Indigenous Peoples Day (although the latter certainly makes sense in many parts of the world). By "most populated areas" I meant "most metro areas in the US" - basically any American city or large town. Many smaller towns have events too, as reservations tend to be located in rural areas.
I'm not sure why you're asking about things "outside... organizations associated with indigenous peoples." Events put on by those groups, for the general public, are exactly what I'm talking about.
I suppose "interesting" is a matter of taste, and lectures wouldn't do it for most people (though I expect people in this comment section are more pro-lecture than the general public). There are Indeed plenty of "usual suspects" lectures, but if those don't interest you there are lots of other options: dance performances, dramatic storytelling, crafting demonstrations and workshops, culinary events, film festivals, special museum exhibits, concerts, markets. These are all things I (a white person) have enjoyed in various non-reservation communities over the years. If nothing in that vein is interesting to a given person, then I would guess that for them there is no such thing as an "interesting cultural event," and as such my comment wouldn't really apply.
Culture Night sounds cool! Maybe "most people" don't go but 1.1 million on an island with a population of ~5 million is a helluva turnout. Granted the 1.1# is from their website, so grain of salt, but that's probably still *hugely* popular even if inflated.
Finally, I generally like your posts but c'mon, you can do better than "citation, please" for something you could easily Google yourself.
Just call them all National Holidays. There's one a month in Canada, which seems like a good number. I think they call them Bank Holidays.
I wonder whether Columbus Day is the only reason everyone learns about Columbus. The Americas we care about started in 1620. Columbus seems a lot like *South* American history, which is like a single unit in high school otherwise.
I assume you're simply mixing up the dates of the Jamestown and Plymouth Rock colonies. The former was established in 1607.
I think Beroe may be wrong about us being incapable of creating good holidays anymore. First, Pride celebrations seem pretty fun, genuine, and widespread despite being superficially similar to the example of Heritage Celebration Month. Secondly, Juneteenth isn’t entirely new but is new federally and at least is a pretty great, singular event to mythologize and celebrate. I don’t really know what to do for it yet, but it seems like the right foundation that’s not generic and is heroic. Lastly, we’re importing some of the greatest holidays from elsewhere like Holi that have awesome celebrations. So I’m quite optimistic that future holidays will be at least as awesome as Columbus Day and maybe something will come along that can topple the greatest American holiday, Halloween.
"First, Pride celebrations seem pretty fun, genuine, and widespread despite being superficially similar to the example of Heritage Celebration Month."
But only insofar as they become family-friendly, big parades with floats and streamers and bands and dancing. If the fight over "keep Pride as a celebration of LGBT sexuality" continues, you may have some families happy to let their small kids see leather and BDSM and puppy and pony play, but a lot won't be so certain about "let's go to the Pride parade" then. I could see it splitting into two events: the bland, corporate one where politicians ride in open-topped cars during the parade while the straights wave rainbow flags and then the raunchy stuff for the real Pride happens in side-streets or marked-off areas.
I think it’s a missed opportunity for us to have holidays dedicated to Fear and to Love but none to other emotions. What about a Social Awkwardness day? You could go to “haunted” houses that contain people trying to make small talk with you about sports you don’t follow. I imagine Guilt could be covered well by existing holidays, maybe combining Earth Day with Lent? Pride has been taken already, so sadly we won’t really get a holiday about self aggrandizement. Loneliness gets smuggled into Valentine’s Day or really any major holiday when you’re alone - but maybe we need to find a way to celebrate it for those that aren’t already lonely, just as Halloween creates fright in those not generally afraid. An Uncertainty day would probably be popular to the rationalist community. How about a Lost in an Unfamiliar Place day? Celebrate by going to a new city and turning off your GPS and asking strangers for directions. Actually that one sounds like a great idea with growing importance.
👍
Please send your report to your local Situationist collective.
The kind of replacement universal festivals as described in R.H. Benson's "Lord of The World":
“I take it that it is homage offered to Life,“ said the other slowly. “Life under four aspects – Maternity corresponds to Christmas and the Christian fable; it is the feast of home, love, faithfulness. Life itself is approached in spring, teeming, young, passionate. Sustenance in mid-summer, abundance, comfort, plenty, and the rest, corresponding somewhat to the Catholic Corpus Christi; and Paternity, the protective, generative, masterful idea, as winter draws on.... I understand it was a German thought.“
Oliver nodded. “Yes,“ he said. "And I suppose it will be the business of the speaker to explain all this.“
“I take it so. It appears to me far more suggestive than the alternative plan – Citizenship, Labour, and so forth. These, after all, are subordinate to Life.“
The new festivals were "the four new festivals of Maternity, Life, Sustenance and Paternity, celebrated on the first day of each quarter."
So that would make them
Maternity – 1st December (replaces Christmas)
Life – 1st April (replaces Easter)
Sustenance – 1st July (replaces Midsummer/Harvest festivals)
Paternity – 1st October (replacing Hallowe’en)
Pride is already a holiday about self-aggrandizement, it's just reserved for only certain parts of society – which is... oddly apposite, for a pride-based holiday.
This was fun. Thanks. It's kinda sad that the celebration of Italian culture in America has Columbus attached to it. Dyngus day and St. Patrick's day are better in that regard. The great thing about Dyngus day and St. Paddy's (here in Buffalo NY) is that on those days everyone (who wants to be) is Polish or Irish and can join the party. All ethnic celebrations should be like that. (The 'cultural appropriation' stuff just seems silly to me.)
On a side note is there anyone saying that holding our heroes of the past to todays standards is also silly. I think it's a much better to use these 'apparent human failures' ( I sat for 5 minutes trying to find the right words here... no luck) as a window into the mindset/ culture of the past. (I do like the image of the mythical Columbus, thanks for that.) We are all sinners, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't love each other.
Or like Paczki day in Detroit, where every can "be" Polish.
https://youtu.be/WhVUjar905E
Cultural holidays are great. We eat their food and dance to their music and we feel one with each other... I've got a dream of an African American cultural holiday. It involves using the n word lovingly.. but it's hard to say more.
I don't know what my reaction was *supposed* to be, but I felt like I was agreeing with Beroe for most of the exchange?
This was awesome. More dialectical posts like this please.
1. We should have 24 federal holidays: two per month. (Work is overrated.)
2. Presidents Day - why? Do we have a legislators day or judges day.
3. The Day of the Unknown Immigrant in lieu of Columbus Day.
4. The Day of the Unknown Native American in addition to 3.
5. MLK Day. Sigh, we should celebrate non-violent protest, we should celebrate civil rights, we should remember all victims of violence. But should we engage in secular hagiography?
6. Holidays are holy days. But what things are really "holy" in a secular state. What are the "symbols" that are important? What things are worth teaching via the symbol of a holiday.
Political
First Amendment Day
Executive Day
Legislative Day
Judicial Day
Constitution Day
Jury Day
Presumption of Innocence Day
Due Process Day
?
Sociological
Immigration, aboriginals, the abolition of slavery, pluralism, equality, solidarity, work, leisure, safety, the prevention of injury and death,?
Personal
Sacrifices of military, sacrifices of heroes, mothers, fathers, children, ?
>Presidents Day - why? Do we have a legislators day or judges day.
It's halfway between Washington and Lincoln's birthdays, because those were already holidays. They got consolidated so that the government could make the holiday always fall on a Monday. So it's two specific presidents we're celebrating.
No, they were consolidated to make space for MLK day.
On edit: welp, so not exactly like that.
It's a little more complicated than that. Lincoln's Birthday was never a federal holiday, although it is or has been an official state holiday in several states. Up until 1970, Washington's Birthday was observed on his actual birthday (Feb 22), but Congress changed the holiday to the third Monday in February, making the holiday the last Monday before Washington's actual birthday (between Feb 15 and Feb 21) and making Washington "First in war, first in peace, and first to have his birthday juggled to make a long weekend". This also puts the holiday, as you say, in between Lincoln's birthday (Feb 12) and Washington's actual birthday.
As a federal holiday, the official name is Washington's Birthday (Observed), but most states have it designated on their holiday calendars as either Presidents' Day or some variant on Washington and Lincoln's Birthday.
Helps explain why we don't have Congress Day, though.
We don't have a Congress Day because apparently hagiography remains important even in a secular state.
Well we could in principle hagify Congress, individually or collectively, if we didn't tend to think they were a bunch of cowardly dickheads who do stuff like turn a remembrance of The Indispensable Man into a bland porridge of opportunities for ski trips and staying out late Sunday. I'd say they missed their best chance circa Henry Clay.
Correct history.
If we're looking to replace Columbus Day with a celebration of someone associated with the European exploration and colonization of the Americas, then it might make sense to narrow it down slightly to *English/British* exploration and colonization, since that's more America-specific and it sidesteps the problem of Columbus being clearly the most significant foundational figure for overall European exploration.
The main names that leaps to mind off the top of my head are Walter Raleigh, John Cabot, Myles Standish, John Smith, and William Penn. Plus natives who had substantial roles in peaceful collaboration with early English colonists: Pocahontas, Powhatan, and Squanto. Off the bat, I'd eliminate Squanto and Standish since they're redundant with Thanksgiving, and then eliminate Pocahontas, Powhatan, and Smith since their story requires even more whitewashing and mythologizing than Thanksgiving.
Of the remaining people, Raleigh wins the established name recognition test by a large margin, while Penn is probably the most personally laudable of the three (Raleigh being a convicted pirate and war criminal, and Cabot being something of a blank slate due to paucity of contemporary accounts of his life and voyages). Cabot has the advantage of being a suitable hero-figure for Italian Americans in lieu of Columbus, as Cabot was an Italian mariner (probably born in either Naples or Genoa, and later became a naturalized Venetian citizen) who took service as an explorer for Henry VII.
More whitewashing for Powhatan than for Pocahontas and Smith, I should think. The English massacred the (iirc?) Kecoughtans after the starving winter, but that was after Smith had left so he had nothing to do with it. Powhatan was an effective leader whom I admire, but those who are concerned with judging historical individuals by modern sensibilities should probably know that he had the entire Chesepioc tribe annihilated man woman and child. The kidnapping of Pocahontas was hardly a general "whites vs Indians" affair either, since it also involved the Patawomecks who were in the anti-Powhatan faction; and I personally think that the affection between Pocahontas and John Rolfe was likely genuine.
I think some of the specific "anti-holiday" claims you've made surrounding Christmas and Easter are refuted in the Atheist History Blog.
Bravo! This was pretty interesting. A lot of unexpected arguments on both sides.
There were a few bits that annoyed me though, like when Beroe says "At least we got a real historical figure who we can have feelings about.", even though her position is that Columbus Day is not celebrating a real historical figure in the first place.
Incidentally, while reading this, I imagined two guys having the argument even though both characters were given female names. I wonder what that says about me.
It's not super hard to infer the sex of a writer, usually[1], and it's usually very hard for a writer of one sex to write truly persuasively from the point of view of the other. If I put a few paragraphs of any of the dialogue above into a "gender guesser"[2] it concludes both are male. Of course, it was written by a male, so this is no great surprise[3].
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[1] Try guessing the sex of the writer of journal/newspaper articles while you're halfway through. I would say I get it right at least 3/4 of the times I try.
[2] e.g. https://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.php
[3] I've never been able to fool one of these programs, even if I try my best to write like a woman. I have great admiration for fiction writers who can write sufficiently like the opposite sex to not excite eye rolls from the genuine article.
Alternative "logical" way to decide what holidays to have: never mind what people did in the past, who do we *want* to celebrate now? You could have a big vote using something clever like Condorcet voting to try to avoid anything that too many people hate, and get a list that empirically reflects our current desires.
Of course, in Britain we'd end up with a Boaty McBoatface Day, but that's just what you have to live with.
1. I would think a graph of numbers of Nobel Prize winners in the physical sciences per country does count as observational evidence! Crude, to be sure, but then what wouldn't be.
2. There is (in my book) a real tendency that shows up in the revolutionary calendar, the decimalisation of everything (including the proportion of students to be admitted to École Polytechnique and École Normale - btw, see https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2016.20757), Auguste Comte (who, incidentally, was Coria in the dialogue), etc., it is
(a) a tendency rooted in the Enlightenment,
(b) not nearly as dominant, ever, as you may make it out to be.
In particular, if you talk to anybody sufficiently familiar with the French research system, and mention Napoleon, you will hear about his creation of Grandes Écoles, not about any supposed allegiance of his to some sort of universal guiding principle.
3. Thanks for the link. Feynman starts out being funny (if a bit overly simplistic) and then shows unfamiliarity with how many mathematicians work. Of course mathematicians are guided by intuition, special cases, etc. If a difference is to be made, it is that they get to choose what those special cases are, rather than having them dictated by (previous understandings of) physical reality.
Does Borlaug Day exist? I would actually be really happy to celebrate that one, his story excites me
The part about holidays being created to counter other holidays is questionable. Putting Christmas on December 25th, for example, might have had more to do astronomically with the winter solstice, or it might have been drawn from the belief that Jesus was both crucified and conceived on March 25th. Another theory, which is somewhat ironic if I'm using the word right, is that the date of Christmas was originally taken directly from Hanukkah.
Andraste presents it as fact that Jesus was actually born in the spring, but I don't know if there's conclusive proof of that. I think the date is a matter of both theological and historical/archaeological controversy.
It's possible that he's correct (that is, that Jesus was born in the spring, and his birthday party was moved to December to screw over the Pagans) but I'd consider it to be one valid theory among many, or perhaps one contributing cause among several, rather than the sole proven cause.
(On the actual subject of the post, briefly: I think the concept of a holiday to remember defeated or forgotten peoples is cool. Aztecs and their victims, or for other continents, maybe ancient Carthage, the Greco-Bactrians, the Tocharians, and so on. I find the politics behind Indigenous Peoples Day tiresome, but I can see some genuine appeal in the concept.)
Apparently NYC now acknowledges the day as both Indigenous People's Day and Italian Heritage Day: https://portal.311.nyc.gov/article/?kanumber=KA-03240. I support this
I apologise, but as a non-American this entire debate is so insanely weird. Inventing a culture (which is essentially what is going on here) by committee, Socratic dialogue, or by using analytics or focus groups is farcical.
FWIW, there doesn't need to be a link between what is a "government mandated extra day off" and a cultural event. In the UK, the later 20th century saw a reorganisation of the "bank holidays" to fall more evenly. That's why we have "late May bank holiday" and "August Bank Holiday" which have no symbolism attached to them. I don't see why Columbus Day couldn't just be designated October Public Holiday and you can do what you like on the day...
I think the explanation is that "it was believed in ancient times" (I've never found evidence of this) (I also haven't looked for evidence) that great men died on the date of their conception. To be born in late December, Jesus would've been conceived in late March.
If people really are fretting about "What can I do for Indigenous People's Day?", consider donating to the Navajo & Hopi Resiliency Fund:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/nhresiliency
It grew out of their work doing fundraising and volunteer efforts during Covid.
If I hypothetically construe the word "millionaire" as referring to any representative of the set of all glasses-wearing persons, would it be a sensible statement to say that I am a millionaire?
No. Sense is not built atop nonsense.
To answer the complaining question "What should people even do on indigenous people day", it seems as obvious as it seems fated that it will not be widely done: actually visit a local indigenous people cultural center of some kind, or otherwise spend time learning about your local indigenous people, their history, and their current biggest problems.
When Czechoslovakia was created after WW1, the left held the position that religion and the church was a relic of Austria-Hungary. So a group of members of parliament proposed a law to cancel all religious holidays and enact new "national" holidays (May 1, July 6, October 28, the greatly reduced number of holidays should have been compensated by a paid vacation of one week/year). Unsurprisingly, the proposal did not succeed.