Revolutionary Republicanism: 1776

        In 1976, for the US Bicentennial Celebration at Miami University (Oxford, Ohio), I was asked to speak on … well something relevant. At the speech, I looked out at an audience far larger than I’d expected — at least one Speech teacher had required attendance — and started out with a thoroughly-rehearsed ad lib on how I was from Chicago and Chicagoans rejected the elitist concept that one had to be an expert to talk usefully on a subject, “OR, Chicagoans rarely let our ignorance get in the way of shooting off our mouths. And tonight I’m going to shoot my mouth off on the Declaration of Independence as a revolutionary document, far more revolutionary than most of us recognize.”

        And I proceeded to talk about something I did know about: from around Shakespeare’s time the Homily — a canned sermon — on Obedience to Authority and “An Exhortation concerning good Order, and obedience to Rulers and Magistrates.” 

 

        On the basis of Holy Scripture and Natural Law, the writers of the Homilies were convinced that

Almighty God has created and appointed all things in heaven and on earth and all about, in a most excellent and perfect order. In heaven, he has appointed distinct and several orders and states of Archangels and Angels. In earth he has assigned and appointed Kings, Princes, with other governors under them, in all good and necessary order. […]  The sun, moon, stars, rainbow, thunder, lightning, clouds, and all the birds of the air, keep their order. The earth, trees, seeds, plants, herbs, corn, grass, and all manner of beasts keep themselves in order […].

Human beings also have all parts both within and without, like soul, heart, mind, memory, understanding, reason, speech, with all and singular corporal members of our body in a profitable, necessary, and pleasant order: every degree of people in their vocation, calling and office, is appointed to them their duty and order: some are in high degree, some in low, some Kings and Princes, some inferiors and subjects, priests, and layfolk, masters and servants, fathers, and children, husbands and wives, rich and poor, and everyone needs the other, so that in all things God, in good order, is lauded and praised, without which no house, city or commonwealth can continue, endure or last. For where there is no right order, there reigns abuse, carnal liberty, enormity, sin and Babylonian confusion.

Take away Kings Princes, Rulers, Magistrates, Judges, and such estates of God's good order, and no one shall ride or go by the highway un-robbed, no one shall sleep in their own house or bed un-killed, no one shall keep their spouse, children, and possession in quietness, all things shall be in-common, and there must needs follow all kinds of mischief, and utter destruction of souls, bodies, goods and social well-being. But blessed be God, that we in this realm of England, feel not the horrible calamities, miseries, and wretchedness, which all they undoubtedly feel and suffer, who lack this godly order: and praised be God, that we know the great excellent benefit of God shown towards us in this behalf, God has sent us his high gift, our most dear Sovereign Lord the King, with a godly, wise and honourable counsel, with other superiors and inferiors, in a beautiful and godly order.

        I have no doubt that somewhere in the back of a church or two, some rebellious soul was mouthing silently the subversive old rime, from John Ball, and the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, “When Adam delved and Eva span, / Who was then the gentleman?” I.e., when Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden to earn their livings by toil like digging and spinning — “From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude,” serfdom and exploitation, “came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men” (“naughty” was a much more powerful word back then). Still, the orthodox, non-heretical, traditional, obvious view was that the universe was a Great Chain of Being, running from the hand or footstool of God down through the orders of the angels to the stars and planets, and then humans in our order, and down through plants and animals to the minerals and down to your basic rock. Everything in its order, held together by the love of God for all and the love of each conscious creature for those above and below, and by our sense of different obligations to those above and below.

 

        This “most excellent and perfect order” had been obvious among the educated (and otherwise privileged) since the time of Aristotle.

 

        Human hierarchy was part of this “godly order”; human love and obligation was natural.

 

        It’s a beautiful and useful view, especially from the top. From the bottom … well looking up, the human part might look more like a multistory outhouse, if one were so privileged as to own an outhouse. And if you lost faith in that “godly order,” well you were “an heretic,” and if you acted or even spoke aloud that loss of faith, you were open to a charge of treason and finding yourself, if male, hanged, drawn, and quartered, or, if female, burned alive. So if there were any doubts, most people probably kept them quiet, and they were lost to history; and this orthodox view of hierarchical society came down to the time of the American Revolution, and parts last to this day.

        Seriously.

            

        If you play Twenty Questions, you begin with “Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral?,” and in that order because, ultimately, that is the order in the Great Chain of Being. If you talk of “higher” and “lower” animals, higher and lower in terms of what? Possibly in terms of a simplistic idea of evolution, more likely in terms of the Great Chain of Being and the possibility of drawing a firm line and making radical distinction between humans as “the paragon of animals” and “a little lower than the angels” — and the rest, many of whom you probably want someone to kill and skin and cook or pluck and cook and feed you, without your feeling guilt. (Well, unless you prefer cooking, or killing them, yourself.)

 

        Against such well-established doctrine, it’s difficult to argue, and Thomas Jefferson and the guys didn’t bother. Instead, in the subversive tradition of John Ball, they offer a competing creation myth, if not for the universe, then for human society — and like John Ball find justification for rebellion against “the unjust oppression of naughty men.”

So now, please read again:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Yo, Leftish Atheists — Cool It for a Bit: Organizing Against Trumpism

“Be diligent in the study of Torah, and know how to answer an Epicurean.”

—   Rabbi Elazar, Pirkei Avot (Sayings of the Hebrew Fathers)

And an Epicurean scientific materialist should know how, and when not to, answer a rabbi.

—   Rich Erlich

The context here is the rise of Trumpism in the United States, following a trend toward right-wing, authoritarian movements in Europe and elsewhere. My fear is the rise of an articulate successor to US President Donald J. Trump, a successor who is truly charismatic and can lead a genuine Mass Movement; my hope is that decent people can soon get a broad coalition to oppose such a movement, and defeat it.

Given that most Americans, indeed, most adult human beings, follow some sort of faith; given that most adult Americans strongly oppose “hate speech” but also dislike “political correctness”; given that “social justice warrior” has gone from a mildly hyperbolic compliment to a rebuke — given such fairly hard facts, I want to at least talk at some of my comrades on the Left and ask them, for a while, to tone down their language — and, on some subjects, for a bit, to shut up. 

Such a request is, let’s say, a problem for me as a recovering academic and Life Member of the ACLU.

Such a request will be problematic for the spiritual descendants of Abolitionists and war resisters and, at a great distance, the Prophets of old: people in the US Puritan tradition, but without the black clothing, big buckles, and (usually) God. 

So I’m going to go at this issue carefully and at a long length for one of my blog posts, making a few passes at the topic.

Pass 1: The story goes that the great scholar and scientist Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace, once explained to the Emperor Napoleon his  (Laplace's) theory for the origin of the solar system. The Emperor complained that Laplace had described creation without ever mentioning God, to which Laplace responded (in the story), "Sire, I do not need that hypothesis."

And that (without the "Sire") is the proper scientific response. Whether or not God exists is not testable, but it is an inelegant, unparsimonious, and a clear violation of "Occam's Razor" to introduce so large an element as God into an argument unless necessary — really, really necessary.

            When God might be useful, is for a bit later. For now, let’s just stick with the Laplace principle. Any sentence beginning “Science proves” is bullshit-ish ‘because “Science” is too abstract to prove much, and the scientific method doesn’t exactly give final proofs of anything for what we experience as the real world. It’s the discipline of theology, not any of the sciences, that studies God; so don’t say “Science proves there is no God” or get into such arguments at all. What various sciences and their pre-scientific precursors have done over the last couple or so centuries is make God increasingly irrelevant for explanation of natural phenomena. And for big questions like free will and “Why is there anything rather than nothing?” — the God hypothesis isn’t very useful. (Strict Calvinists strongly believe in God, not necessarily free will. That God willed the universe to be as opposed to not be, just puts the mystery one step back: "And why would God necessarily prefer Being to Non-Being"? Plus, the description in Genesis is the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos, without explaining out of what Nothingness the Chaos arose.)

            So, on scientific grounds, don’t argue religion: “I don’t need that hypothesis” is all you need to say. And if religious sorts press the issue, they are the problem, not you.

Pass 2: Leftish Faith

Note: If you want a more respectable source than a retired English professor’s blog, see Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2015) on Natural Rights, and some of Mr. Harari’s follow-up writing.

            In 1976. for the US Bicentennial Celebration at Miami University (Oxford, Ohio), I was asked to speak on … well something relevant. At the speech, I looked out at an audience far larger than I’d expected — at least one Speech teacher had required attendance — and started out with a thoroughly-rehearsed ad lib on how I was from Chicago and Chicagoans rejected the elitist concept that one had to be an expert to talk usefully on a subject, “OR, Chicagoans rarely let our ignorance get in the way of shooting off our mouths. And tonight I’m going to shoot my mouth off on the Declaration of Independence as a revolutionary document, far more revolutionary than most of us recognize.”

            And I proceeded to talk about something I did know about: from around Shakespeare’s time the Homily — a canned sermon — on Obedience to Authority and “An Exhortation concerning good Order, and obedience to Rulers and Magistrates.” 

            On the basis of Holy Scripture and Natural Law, the writers of the Homilies were convinced that

Almighty God has created and appointed all things in heaven and on earth and all about, in a most excellent and perfect order. In heaven, he has appointed distinct and several orders and states of Archangels and Angels. In earth he has assigned and appointed Kings, Princes, with other governors under them, in all good and necessary order. […]  The sun, moon, stars, rainbow, thunder, lightning, clouds, and all the birds of the air, keep their order. The earth, trees, seeds, plants, herbs, corn, grass, and all manner of beasts keep themselves in order […].

Human beings also have all parts both within and without, like soul, heart, mind, memory, understanding, reason, speech, with all and singular corporal members of our body in a profitable, necessary, and pleasant order: every degree of people in their vocation, calling and office, is appointed to them their duty and order: some are in high degree, some in low, some Kings and Princes, some inferiors and subjects, priests, and layfolk, masters and servants, fathers, and children, husbands and wives, rich and poor, and everyone needs the other, so that in all things God, in good order, is lauded and praised, without which no house, city or commonwealth can continue, endure or last. For where there is no right order, there reigns abuse, carnal liberty, enormity, sin and Babylonian confusion.

Take away Kings Princes, Rulers, Magistrates, Judges, and such estates of God's good order, and no one shall ride or go by the highway un-robbed, no one shall sleep in their own house or bed un-killed, no one shall keep their spouse, children, and possession in quietness, all things shall be in-common, and there must needs follow all kinds of mischief, and utter destruction of souls, bodies, goods and social well-being. But blessed be God, that we in this realm of England, feel not the horrible calamities, miseries, and wretchedness, which all they undoubtedly feel and suffer, who lack this godly order: and praised be God, that we know the great excellent benefit of God shown towards us in this behalf, God has sent us his high gift, our most dear Sovereign Lord the King, with a godly, wise and honourable counsel, with other superiors and inferiors, in a beautiful and godly order.

            I have no doubt that somewhere in the back of a church or two, some rebellious soul was mouthing silently the subversive old rime, from John Ball, and the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, “When Adam delved and Eva span, / Who was then the gentleman?” I.e., when Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden to earn their livings by toil like digging and spinning — “From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude,” serfdom and exploitation, “came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men” (“naughty” was a much more powerful word back then). Still, the orthodox, non-heretical, traditional, obvious view was that the universe was a Great Chain of Being, running from the hand or footstool of God down through the orders of the angels to the stars and planets, and then humans in our order, and down through plants and animals to the minerals and down to your basic rock. Everything in its order, held together by the love of God for all and the love of each conscious creature for those above and below, and our sense of different obligations to those above and below.

            This “most excellent and perfect order” had been obvious among the educated (and otherwise privileged) since the time of Aristotle. 

            Human hierarchy was part of this “godly order”; human love and obligation was natural.

            It’s a beautiful and useful view, especially from the top. From the bottom … well looking up, the human part might look more like a multistory outhouse, if one were so privileged as to own an outhouse. And if you lost faith in that “godly order,” well you were “an heretic,” and if you acted or even spoke aloud that loss of faith, you were open to a charge of treason and finding yourself, if male, hanged, drawn, and quartered, or, if female, burned alive. So if there were any doubts, most people probably kept them quiet, and they were lost to history; and this orthodox view of hierarchical society came down to the time of the American Revolution, and parts last to this day.

            Seriously.

            If you play Twenty Questions, you begin with “Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral?,” and in that order because, ultimately, that is the order in the Great Chain of Being. If you talk of “higher” and “lower” animals, higher and lower in terms of what? Possibly in terms of a simplistic idea of evolution, more likely in terms of the Great Chain of Being and the possibility of drawing a firm line and making radical distinction between humans as “the paragon of animals” and “a little lower than the angels” — and the rest, many of whom you want someone to kill and skin and cook or pluck and cook and feed you, without your feeling guilt.

            Against such well-established doctrine, it’s difficult to argue, and Thomas Jefferson and the guys didn’t bother. Instead, in the subversive tradition of John Ball, they offer a competing creation myth, if not for the universe, then for human society — and like John Ball find justification for rebellion against “the unjust oppression of naughty men.”

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Now earlier I mentioned that there are times when God can get useful … and this one is a biggy, with that bit about being created equal and created endowed by our Creator “with certain unalienable Rights.” That requires some long leaps of faith. First, that a Creator-God exists, that that God created us and somehow cares about us, and that that God created us equal in some sense, and “with certain unalienable rights.” But get rid of a Creator, and then what? If we have rights, where do they come from? And if we’re equal, equal in what sense? 

            Believing in a Creator is a leap of Faith; that the Creator would care about us, takes the jump into the Absurd — but that absent that Creator that we have some sort of rights from … Nature? That’s also a leap into the absurd, and the idea that we’re equal is just, to put it politely, “counterfactual,” or “ingenious” in a very negative sense of the word.

            Personally, I believe in human rights, and believe strongly. But that’s belief, an act of faith. If you also believe in human rights, that far you too are a person of faith. That makes you no worse than those who believe in the Great Chain of Being, and in some practical ways probably a good deal better; but your belief in equality is built on the same ontological sand pile as their belief in hierarchy. 

            You probably also believe in the American Republic and quite likely the American Nation, which Harari points out are imagined or “imaginary communities”; and you probably believe in corporations — “fictive persons” — and the value of money, including paper money that has just about no value outside the belief that such fancy paper has value. 

            So don’t get snarky with God-believers, with “How can you believe …?” Not if you believe in other people’s belief in money enough to take paper for goods of actual value — and not if you believe in your nation enough to say you’d die for it.

Pass 3

            I spent some forty years teaching and doing scholarship, and before that I did a little bit of science; so let’s say I’m fond of truth and that I rather compulsively try to lay truth upon people. There are times, though, when one can assert one’s truth quickly and then shut up, or just avoid various topics of conversation. 

            Specifically here, if you want people to face courageously the human condition and throw away their crutches of ridiculous beliefs — okay, good; but please face up to what you are asking, and please note that dropping their faith and facing the universe without it, may exact a price some highly useful potential allies are unwilling to pay. 

            3.A

            In African Genesis(1961), Robert Ardrey recounts a theory from the early 1940s: The Illusion of Central Position. According to the theory, this illusion "is the birthright of every human baby." A baby boy enters the world and "Bright objects appear for his amusement, bottles and breasts for his comfort. His groping consciousness finds no reason at all to doubt the world's consecration to his needs and purposes. His Illusion of Central Position is perfect" (African Genesis144; ch. 6). With maturity, however, the illusion is undercut and the child and then the man comes to a truer perception of his place in the scheme of things.

Nonetheless the theory grants that should a man ever attain a state of total maturity — ever come to see himself, in other words, in perfect mathematical relationship to the tide of tumultuous life which has risen upon the earth and in which we represent but a single swell; and furthermore come to see our earth as but one opportunity for life among uncounted millions in our galaxy alone, and our galaxy as but one statistical improbability, nothing more, in the silent mathematics of all things—should a man, in sum, ever achieve the final, total, truthful Disillusionment of Central Position, then in all likelihood he would no longer keep going but would simply lie down, wherever he happened to be, and with a long-drawn sigh return to the oblivion from which he came. (145; ch. 6)

And we can add today that our universe may be only one among several or many or an infinite number of universes, and that whether our universe peters out through entropy or reduces to nothingness in The Big Crunch, our universe is doomed; so even if a human being gained galactic glory, that, too, would be, in terms of the Big Picture, fleeting. Definitely, totally fleeting, and trivial. 

            Similarly, in The Big Picture, for the value of the human species, let alone any individual human. 

            3.B

            In the Book of Ecclesiastes, Koheleth, the Preacher, decides, "[…] as regards men, to dissociate them [from] the divine beings and to face the fact that they are beasts. For […] the fate of man and the fate of beast [are] one and the same fate: as the one dies so dies the other, and both have the same lifebreath; man has no superiority over beast, since both amount to nothing. Both go to the same place; both came from dust and both return to dust. Who knows if a man's lifebreath does rise upward and if a beast's breath does sink down into the earth?" (Tanakh 1985; cf. KJV 2000: 3.18-21). That last question is rhetorical: no soul in ancient Jewish theory — that was an Egyptian and Greek idea — but “lifebreath,” and the lifebreath animating human beings and what we consider the “lower” animals is the same: not doggy heaven but oblivion or Sheol: “the grave” or “pit,” with maybe a kind of amorphous semi-existence. And taking such a hard-nose, hard-ass, hard-look view at the world, Koheleth doesn’t lie down and die but cries out on life’s “Emptiness, emptiness! All is emptiness!” And chasing after the wind (Eccl. 1). 

            And such an analysis can be pushed beyond Existential despair and into some nasty conclusions in ethics.  

3.C

You want to put that Epicurean on steroids and get a truly rigorous materialism? Well, the Marquis de Sade is far out of date in his science and was far, far out of his mind — psychopathic serial killer and all — but he was strong on intellectual daring and pushing an idea to its conclusions. "What we call the end of the living animal," Sade notes in a very long philosophic pause from a pornographic novel, what we call death and killing of a human or other animal (or plant) is not "a true finis" — end, goal — "but a simple transformation, a transmutation of matter, what every modern philosopher acknowledges as one of Nature's fundamental laws" ("Manners" section of " Yet Another Effort Frenchmen, If You Would Become [Real] Republicans" 1795). Modernizing the argument: Kill someone, bury the corpse, let it rot, dig it up, and weigh it, and the biomass of the human remains, and the feeding putrefactive bacteria, maggots and such will show no significant loss of weight. If you feel that a living human being is superior to a mass of putrefactive bacteria (and I certainly hope you do), how is that feeling any more than the product of our "small human vanities," species chauvinism, and "stupid notions of pride"?

            Which gets us back to human rights and, more deeply, human value. If you believe in human value, you believe in human value. 

            If God exists and cares one way or another about a recent species on an unremarkable planet in a rather banal galaxy, and if that care is love for what in some sense He/She/It has created and created in some sense in His/Her/Its image — yeah, we humans have value. Or you can skip the mystic stuff and just believe without a whole lot of evidence that in a huge universe and maybe multiverse not just our species but individual humans have some sort of significant value.

So: A broad alliance is necessary to resist what looks like a resurgence of fascistic rule, maybe moves toward outright fascism; and necessary for that alliance — parallel to the entry into US politics of Vietnam Veterans Against the War by the US in Vietnam — necessary for that alliance will be religious folk, and the more Evangelical the better. And so for good, Machiavellian, pragmatic reasons, people of faith should be cultivated, not pushed away. And, I hope I have shown, there are considerations that should make it possible for sensible atheists and agnostics to work with faith folk honestly, without hypocrisy. 

            It just takes a little humility.

            “Know how to answer an Epicurean [materialist],” Rabbi; and responsible Leftist materialists should know how to talk to rabbis and other people of faith enough to get them to resist Trumpism, and to plan how to do it.

“Solidarity Forever!”, people; or at least until the current crises in the American Republic have settled down.

Know Your Place (3 Nov. 2013 [on OpenSalon])

"When Adam dug and Eve spun, / Who was then a gentleman?"

{Genteel folk do no manual labor.}

— From John Ball's Sermon to the Rebels,

Peasants' Revolt, 1381 (modernized, with a note)

            This is going to be a "fun" entry, I promise, and eventually a personal essay about me, but first —

            Back before it was fashionable, about 400 years before it was fashionable, the priest John Ball preached that "From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men," with "naughty" a good deal more powerful a word than it is now. John Ball's rebellious congregation was eventually betrayed by England's King Richard II, who had promised redress for their grievances, and Ball was either hanged (unpleasant enough, given the use of the "short rope") or hanged, drawn, and quartered, which, in this version of the story, King Richard took care to attend and watch in all its gore. Following custom, other rebel leaders were executed, "As may be both due vengeance to themselves, / And wholesome terror to posterity," in an instructive line from the Elizabethan play of Gorboduc. "Oh you wretched men," and "detestable," too, King Richard apostrophized, "You who seek equality with lords are not worthy to live." And he pronounced this curse upon them, one he was ensuring would come true: "Villeins you are" — unfree serfs, one step above slaves "and villeins you shall remain."

            Or at least they remained serfs for another century or so, as feudalism progressed into capitalism and the serfs became free peasants.

            It's just that they remained poor, generally, and definitely unequal to lords or gentlemen and ladies, or rich merchants or guildsmen, or others of their, the peasants', betters.

            So it was, and so it had been for time out of mind, and so it was something natural for most people: at least "most people" who were more or less in charge of the status quo and definitely not those in charge of, or participating in, peasant revolts, slave revolts, organizing of communities of runaway slaves and Indians, and/or guerilla warfare against those claiming to be, by laws of God and Nature, one's betters.

             The most elegant statement of the hierarchy theory went back at least to Aristotle and in its Christian form celebrated what came to be called a, or The Great Chain of Being, which organized the universe in a pretty much linear hierarchy running from the footstool of the Lord — where you got the highest rank of angels — down through humans, lower animals, vegetables, and minerals, to your lowly rocks, or most-lowliest rock.

            It was a pretty good theory in some ways, at least in that it put human society within Nature, put human relationships in terms of bonds of obligation and gratitude, and organized the universe through love — God's love to start with, then all the natural love all God's critters naturally felt for one another.

            For the lives of most people, however, the theory sucked, and it was a good day for humanity when Thomas Jefferson and other members of the respectable slave-owning class returned to John Ball's subversive ideas and presented a creation myth to compete with The Great Chain, a generous myth wherein all men were and "are created equal" and are endowed by a Creator unnamed with "unalienable rights." The hypocrisy of Mr. Jefferson and many of his colleagues is still dazzling after all these years, but their ideas were magnificent, if nowadays getting complex.

            'Cause hierarchy is still with us, and not just when kids play Twenty Questions by the old rules and start with "Animal, vegetable, or mineral?" — in that order — or when we humans look down on "lower animals" and other organisms.

            In terms of social and political power, the hierarchy issue has gotten increasingly fascinating, in a train-wreck sort of way, as income- and, more importantly, wealth-inequality have so greatly increased in the US of A. Given how much the top (say) 1% or .1% or .01% can do directly on their own, without government help or hindrance, given how much government help and prevention of hindrance one can buy with that kind of money — we again live under a ruling elite not all that different in small size and considerable influence from the political class when King Richard II was betraying and executing rebels in the late Middle Ages. Elites nowadays are more subtle, of course — drawing and quartering is definitely gauche — but still there is a sense in which, in terms of power, there is again a thin layer of Them and that large mass of The Rest of Us.

            And there I'll leave that now-cliché thought to ferment and fester and get to those more "fun" and personal topics.

            'Cause hierarchy and the urge to "hierarchize" is still with us among the 99 or 99.99 or whatever percent, and it's going to get expressed in increasingly weird ways as the mass of us have increasingly less significant power differences and rapidly decreasing contact with the real royals and nobles of the 21^st century.

            Part of what we're going to do is more of what we've done habitually in modern times in ranking one another. I liked Tom Wolfe's phrase "status sphere," which is a more clever way to refer to what sociologists from Max Weber on would call "status groups" or something similarly non-clever. After we've divided up seriously into classes or other actually-existing and competing groups, we subdivide into different areas in which we can have a definite status, and preferably high and secure status. Sometimes, this is pernicious, as with people feeling racially or ethnically superior. Often, though, it's just harmlessly silly, as when James Franco and Stephen Colbert earn high status among Tolkien-geeks for their incredible knowledge of Tolkien trivia, or when I got a momentary status bump at a convention of SF scholars in knowing the name of the one actor who'd received an Academy Award for a role in a science fiction film (Cliff Robertson, playing Charly Gordon in Charly, 1968). And then there's that great moment of convoluted ironies and brilliant ambiguities in the episode "Kelly Knows Something" on Married, with Children (8.26 [22 May 1994]). Before his daughter, Kelly, replaces him, Al Bundy competes on a sports trivia show, and, as the scene is burned into my memory — possibly incorrectly; I couldn't find this scene on YouTube — as I recall the scene, Al does very well indeed. Then the MC says to him something like, "Given your spectacular knowledge of sports trivia, I assume you have no life"; and Al responds, without missing a beat, but speaking too close to the microphone, "That is correct; I have no life."

            I'm sure almost all the audience for Married understood and generally appreciated sports trivia, but they could still laugh at Al Bundy for being quite so expert at it: such expertise went along with "I have no life."

            My major experiences with status games lie somewhere between the utterly somber and depressing — slavery, serfdom — and the amusing.

            As an graduate student, I sometimes helped out my father around the car wash he managed by pumping gas, and on occasion got hassled by guys who had no one in the world to hassle except the pump jockey at the car wash. (Yes, Virginia, there were once people who'd pump gas for you; they can still be observed in the US State of Oregon.) I took to wearing my overalls fashionably open to the waist, with my Cornell sweatshirt under it, and responding to the hassling with "Excuse me, gentlemen, is there a problem?" — and watched them strip their figurative gears moving to re-place me in the American social hierarchy. My girlfriend at the time had the same experience with the women she served in the bargain-basement sweater section of a major department store. (Yes, Virginia, there were once salespeople in ordinary stores who'd help customers find stuff.) She got the same hassling and used a similar bit of social-caste jujutsu: Those who look down their noses at people doing service jobs deserve to have those noses twisted a bit.

            Such experiences were mostly funny.

            Only partly funny was the quite competent ranking of teachers at the U of Illinois in Urbana in the late 1960s. There were multiple-choice portions of the survey forms, but more important were the spaces for comments and the fact that the comments were summarized by student editors who were quite good at what they did.

            Two things: (1) The head editor called me up one day and said, more or less, "All right, Erlich, you win. Since we've done the ratings you've come in last, dead last, every time, for the entire University faculty for 'Professorial Dignity.' But your students keep writing comments in the margins, and we get little essays in the mail and a couple phone calls and finally someone came in and asserted vigorously that, yeah, you had no professorial dignity whatever but a lot of human dignity — so we're dropping the goddamn category. Okay?!" (2) As a teaching assistant or glorified TA — my official titles got complicated — just starting out, I was competing with full professors who'd taught for decades and were experts in their fields. At least one was a bloody mad genius who managed to run discussion classes with ninety people. The evaluations book assigned teachers decile rankings that were exactly the divisions that were statistically appropriate, and from students' point of view a teacher is a teacher is a teacher, and if they can get top-tenth, wildly-praised full professors and not some newbie TA, hell, yeah, they should go for them.

            Still, I was a 20-something beginner competing with some folk who also competed for things like Nobel Prizes.

            Anyway, such fancy-schmancy, statistically valid, labor-intensive, and expensive evaluations didn't last long with the cutbacks in higher-ed funding starting in the 1970s. During most of my teaching, evaluation was on an absolute scale — not literal ranking — using "instruments" that the mathematically-literate members of the Miami University administration had to know were only marginally valid; but by the time I retired, such evaluations had been augmented (for student they'd been supplanted) by "Rate My Professors" and its on-line clones.

            "RMP" — top rank among the raters — allows professors to fire back, and, apparently, the prof-rating people read their mail. They removed a low rating for me when I pointed out that I was sure the student disliked my teaching, except he — I'm pretty sure it was a guy — was complaining about a course I'd never taught. And I don't mean getting the course number wrong; I mean it was a course I'd never taught, and if I had done so he'd have every right to complain since it wasn't in my field. And it looks like they took down all the rankings for me when I pointed out I'd retired in 2006 (at 12:01 AM on 1 July, not that the event was dead center in my consciousness for a few years).

            Professors can now go on line and discover whether or not they're among the top teacher in the country (in the world?) and the world rank of the schools they teach at or — which makes me feel better — the ones they graduated from. (When the Chair of my Department told me I had "a second-rate mind," I countered, "Yeah, but I'm at a third-rate university." He didn't argue the point, and now I could point to numbers, largely bull-shit numbers, but significant for prestige, and numbers he'd credit more than either of us should since we both got our PhDs from a high-ranked school.)

            But the winner for me is in my new trade of Hollywood whore wannabe, or maybe more exactly Hollywood pimp, since I'm semi-officially a producer, and part of a producer's job is fixing up talent. (Insert joke here on complaints from pimps who don't want to be classed with movie producers.) I can go to Internet Movie Database-Pro — I'm "slaved" to my boss's account and don't have to pay for it — and check out STARmeter™ and learn that as of 10 PM Pacific time on 2 November 2013 and for about a week around that, Richard D. Erlich was #527,975 among pretty much all the people who've every been in the movie biz: "STARmeter rankings," saith the STARmeter™ portion of the site, "provide a snapshot of who's popular based on the searches of millions of IMDb users." In case you're curious, current #1 among actors: Jamie Dornan, whose Fifty Shades of Grey is about to come out as I write; current #1 actress: Chloë Grace Moretz, whose Carrie (2013) was recently released. Steadier in rankings — and STARmeter™ provides graphs — Angelina Jolie: 116; Sandra Bullock: 9; William Shakespeare: 9,859. (Being dead might get you off of Rate My Professor, but STARmeter™ has stricter standards.)

            "Know your place" was the advice given to subordinates for several centuries, and a lot longer than that counting the thought in languages that preceded modern English. In the first couple decades of the 21^st century, and increasingly, we can know that politically our place isn't too bad if we have the education, time, and money to read and write blog posts; but if you're reading this you're certainly not among the 1% or so of people who really count: Salon.com provides me with user data, and it's a safe bet really rich people aren't reading anything on Salon.com and certainly not among the few — if tasteful, insightful, and intelligent — people who read me. 

            How few readers I get is also reported: another ranking.