Will Wiley

How can one know the truth of this unless they experience such an accident or leave the particualr hegemony?
How did you find out? How does one test whether what you've said is good or not?

spin

You're asking me too much when you talk about truth.

Mine was a somewhat tortuous route and perhaps it had to be. Among my interests is education and long ago I read books such as "How Children Fail" (John Holt), "Deschooling Society" (Ivan Illich), books by Basil Bernstein (who showed how language preparation within families destined children to do well or badly at school depending on social class), and numerous others all of which deal with how children learn, what they learn and how the school institution helps majority to fail. Political theory from Herbert Marcuse (One Dimensional Man) and translations of Antonio Gramsci, who gave us the notion of hegemony. They helped to place the performance of educational manifestations within a political framework. Gramsci was writing during the fascist period in Italy, so that he had clearer socio-political forces to observe when he developed his political insights, the most significant for us here I think are hegemony and repressive tolerance. Society has progressed a lot since Gramsci's period so that hegemony is far more subtle, but he let the cat out of the bag.

The notions can be read about so that we can at least get a theoretical understanding. Almost every idea you receive when you are young are outside your hands to choose. One educational model humorously expressed is the container model: teachers fill up students with ideas. But it's not just schools, your family fills you up. The media does it. Your games do it. While you can't function without content--you need language and an understanding of the social and natural world, emotional attachments and a sense of well-being--, the suppliers of content truly need to be benevolent in your formative years otherwise you can receive wads of shit that become part of your system for dealing with the world that prepare you to be good marks for sales, politics, that prepare you to repeat the structures of a society that may or may not function with its prejudices and biases.

It also helped that I spent several years in Europe away from staid alienated Anglo-Saxon society, but most people won't get that luxury.

If you get a chance to see the old John Carpenter film "They Live", it gives a one-dimensional look at hegemony. You will find out that you'll need glasses to see what's going on. You'll find out just how alien the people are who run society from your needs and desires. Appearances are deceiving. What you see is not what you get. Despite its low budget, it's by far the best film that Carpenter ever made.

And having common sense doesn't mean it's your friend.

A wiser person than I am (Neil Postman) says that people come with a built in crap detector and it is society's task to render it inoperative. The best thing one can do is to use it as often as possible, for, by using it, it doesn't fossilize. (A synopsis of Postman's essay is here and this seems complete. It's old but stunning.) I say to you, don't trust a word I say. Get that crap detector out and learn how to use it.

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spin

One dominant cultural value to consider: democracy. We believe it's the best thing since sliced cheese, but in fact there is no democracy in our societies. You never get the opportunity to form objective views as to the forces we must decide upon in politics. As I've already pointed out above schools help us fail, so we start off with impaired abilities to deal with our politics. We are given a bunch of morally dubious politicians who usually aren't interested in the citizens of their constituencies and we are fed on bullshit. The political institution is a farce and it corrupts most of principles the people we put there have. The bullshit factor is as grave. The sources for our information deliberately obfuscate reality, so that we have less useful information with them than without them. You might laugh at the survey that says Fox News viewers are generally less informed than other media sources. But that doesn't say how well the ordinary non-Fox News viewer is informed. Rupert Murdoch has made it his business to pervert political decisions through his media. (It's rather late now to nail his dong to the door.) But having a democracy is good. It separates us from the Arabs and the Russians and the Chinese and the Tralfamadorians. They don't have it, so we're better off. We need democracy: it gives us our freedom. With bars like Fox News who needs to be locked up? You vote for the politician so you get a say in the choices in politics and the lobbyists go and knock on the doors of the politicians and get what they want and what do you get?

:moonie:

It's a wonderful notion, democracy. Best political system in the world. Pity those who have it are prevented from using it.

This is just one of those cultural values that we have that manipulate us. Hegemony is filled with such marvels. What's important about hegemony is that you consent to it. You want to.

Where did I put my crap detector??

yalla

From spin above:
One educational model humorously expressed is the container model: teachers fill up students with ideas.

Its known as the 'jug and mug' approach.


Ah nostalgia.

spin

Yeah, love it.

There's also the gardener approach: the teacher pours education onto the young plant hoping it will absorb the nutrients so as to help it grow up strong, good citizens. It's a variation on the mushroom principle: keep them in the dark and feed them on bullshit. Hmm, come to think of it that's the Murdoch principle.

Sheshbazzar

One hegemony that I grew up with, was that impressed social maxim that being a 'Christian'= being a good person. And anyone who was not a Christian was bad or a was least defective.

I had been so thoroughly indoctrinated into that small town mid-western hegemonic view, that I never even thought to question it in the least until I was in my late 20s and with two children of my own.
The first instance that began to open my eyes started as a neighborhood squabble over a stolen motor-scooter.
I had bought my son a new bright red Honda Spree, and after a few days of ownership we awoke one morning to find our storage shed broken into and of course his Honda was gone.

Quite naturally we called the Police to report it missing, and they immediately sent a officer out to investigate. The officer soon determined that it had been carried off for a short distance so as to leave no track, and then wheeled through several back yards. He was able to easily trace its path directly to the garage of the person who had taken it.
Now I was a good neighbor and well understood that kids will be kids, and was content that the scooter had been recovered and no hard feelings.
Oh but was I in for a rude awakening!
His mother and sisters were soon in our backyard, The boy who had taken it was now in trouble, and it was all our fault! They were swearing up a storm at us.

Now this would normally be just a typical neighborhood squabble....
But in this case the family in question attended the very same Church as we did, and had for years, long before we had moved there.
Without much thought I replied to their cursing with; 'That is no way for a good Christian lady to be talking' ....To which I got the reply that left me speechless; 'What made you think we are Christians?'

For the first time in my life I got a strong inkling that every 'Christian' I had so long peacefully sat with in Church were not necessarily always 'good' people, and that there were reasons the people called 'Christians' were there that had nothing at all to do with belief in the Bible.

That was the beginning, and the first of series of events that made me recognize that hegemony. I began to take closer notice of those around me, and to question the shallowness of their knowledge of the Bible, and bit by bit, disappointment piled upon disappointment, I began to extract myself from that old religious hegemonic view, eventually evolving from 'some Christians are dishonest and nasty', to the view that the religion of 'Christianity' itself, by its very nature is corrupt, dishonest, and nasty. A construct of blatant lies so configured as to prey upon mankind's deepest fears, and to harness the herd instinct.
Or rather, a flock of bird-brains who given opportunity, will attack and peck to death any that do not conform to the hegemonic 'flock' mind of there being a historical Jesus that must be shoved down the throats of their fellow man at any cost.

And leaving 'Christianity' or denying being a 'Christian' seems to make no difference at all to many, some just have to push that old Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! hegemony regardless.
I say fuck em all.

rlogan

The way I see the interaction between the two of you is that he puts forth a clear and intuitively obvious idea, which is met by incessant "you aren't explaining" or "you aren't clear". Or "didn't define".


It would be wonderful to see statements not starting off with "If", when a practicioner in the field is telling you not just that it is possible - I have named exactly the test to use in this circumstance. But for the first time someone dropped the brick wall and because of that this is the furthest I have ever been able to go with this, so thank you:


The Davidson and MacKinnon J-test is a procedure by which two competing explanatory models that are "non-nested" can be tested against one another. Non-nested means that neither model is a subset of the other. When one is a subset of the other some mundane tests can be used and it isn't relevant so let's not waste time on them. This is clearly a non-nested situation. We will apply it in this example to the book of Mark.

Step 1 is to take one model as the null hypothesis, so just to get started let's say it is the hypothesis that a writer distant in place and time from the alleged events is combing through the septuigint version of the Hebrew scriptures along with Josephus to construct Mark.

You observe how much explaining of the text that does, and then ask this question: How much more of the remainder of the text is explained by the alternative hypothesis that Jesus was historical?

Remove from the story, in other words, all those things motivated by Hebrew scripture and a knowledge of the region from secondary sources. The have been explained. Now the crucial matter: What additional explaining of the remaining text is provided by Jesus being a historical person? The answer is close to or equal to zero.

Then you switch the roles of the null and the alternative. Examine how much of Mark is explained by Jesus being a historical person. This actually highlights the methodological error of so many "historicists": because what they do is reject what is in Mark and propose something that isn't even in Mark instead.

Almost no explaining is done by this model, and a tremendous amount of the important data in Mark is instead residual material awaiting to be explained by something else. So we roll in our alternative hypothesis and ask how much of the residual material is explained. Pretty much all of it in terms of what is relevant to the theology and proving up Jesus as the Christ.

Now, two alternative hypotheses can both reasonably explain an event. That is why you give both models the chance to do their explaining before you bring in the alternative to do the residual explaining.

That's why this test can work out so many different ways. Both models might explain well over 90% of the data alone, leaving almost nothing residual to account for. The complete two-step test is going to be indeterminant in this case.

But when you have one model doing a lot of explaining and another model doing very little, then both sides of the test are going to point to a winner. In the above, the null hypothesis of the author combing through the Septuigint and shoe-horning what he knows from Josephus does so much explaining that nothing additional is explained by a historical person.

When you switch the roles of the null and alternative for Round 2, almost nothing is explained by the historical Jesus hypothesis, and most of Mark is residual to it: awaiting to be explained. That job is done by the hypothesis of the author combing through the Septuigint and what he knows of the area from Josephus, making geographical errors as a consequence of his secondary rather than primary knowledge, etc.

The kinds of things necessary to construct a numerical data set are exactly how to count things, like whether it is number of verses, number of words, or whether to categorize it by distinct ideas, etc.

You can also weight data, and this seems like a situation where that can apply. For example, the resurrection. This is the core idea of Christianity. It is extremely important to explain this. The hypothesis of combing through the Hebrew Bible explains that data in the gospels. That data is thrown out by adherents of the historical Jesus hypothesis because historical people don't cheat death.

That is how it applies. It isn't an "if". This is the exact test you would use to discriminate between these two hypotheses for the construction of Mark.

J-D

When I want to know something, I ask questions. Somehow you seem to be interpreting the fact that I'm asking you questions as a sign that I don't want to know. If I didn't want to know, I wouldn't be asking you questions.

As I explained before, what would help to crystallise the notion for me would be illustrative examples. The material you have pointed me to all discusses the notion in general terms, without illustrative examples. I always find generalised abstract concepts easier to grasp when illustrated by specific examples.

In this particular instance, it seems to me that the obvious examples to use as illustrations would be ones specifically relevant to this particular discussion. Since you are the one suggesting that the notion of hegemony is relevant to this particular discussion, it seems obvious that you're the person to ask for them. But if for some reason you think it would be more constructive to point me at other specific illustrative examples of the general concept, by all means go ahead.

J-D

Are you saying that you have actually applied this statistical test, or are you saying what the result would be without having actually applied the test?

rlogan

I've published and served as a referee on papers using the J-test, and I did a bunch of Monte Carlo work when it first came out because I was very, very interested in how it would do in the presence of serial correlation, omission of relevant explanatory variables, and some other typical problems in modeling. I found it to be more robust than I thought, and had far better discriminatory power than I expected. Even when models seem to do an excellent job by themselves with high R-Squared, F, and t-stats in a regression context the J-test blew it out of the water with a better competing alternative. That's because any explanation does better than no explanation, but when one explanation has to be compared directly to the explanatory power of another - now it has to beat a worthy opponent instead of no opponent.

Intuitively, juries do this without the mathematics. The defense has some kind of innocent explanation for the evidence before the jury. If that was all the defendant had to do then there wouldn't be many convictions. But instead, the prosecutor has a very different story explaining the evidence. When the defense is unable to explain some of the evidence like the fingerprints on the murder weapon, the jury ends up rejecting his story even if he can explain away 90% of the other evidence. There is that residual data that his model is unable to explain, whereas the prosecution can explain it: he was holding the murder weapon.


Because of this experience with it I know just by my familiarity with this subject and applied work that it is going to be a rejection of one in favor of the other in the high 90% confidence level or if you prefer way less than the 10% critical level. More like less than 1%. Because I published my first paper using this methodology in 1986 whereas I didn't start looking into the historical Jesus problem until 2003. Everyone is a Bayesian including me, so my priors in this case were strong belief in the historical Jesus.

As I learned more I was continuously doing just what I am telling you: Looking at the explanatory power of one versus the other. With something this overwhelming it is perfunctory to go through the mathematics, but what would be valuable in doing so is I am certain it would be a clinch on a refereed journal article in a real peer-reviewed publication.

In your own area you have colleagues you send papers to, or you do seminars, or have co-authors you are working with so wherever you are weak you have people with strengths to compliment you. And in consulting you have people paying you $150 an hour to estimate stuff so I can work for 30 days like a dog to get something done and I have motivation to do it.

When you put an idea forward to a group like this (the only one I have) and what you get back is discouraging, offensive, or just "duh..." then you don't have any incentive to go through the tedium of doing it formally.