Have You Ever Read Moby Dick?

I finally read Moby Dick, the 1851 novel by Herman Melville. It is famous for being famous. It is one of the best examples of the kind of novel that nobody could ever publish today. It gets interesting about page 700. It is filled with hortatory language in which Melville is quite literally and vigorously preaching to the readers, “O ye foolish mortals,” over and over. Melville injects drama into scenes with none, but in the exciting climax of the book—somewhere after page 700—Melville uses the passive voice: “The harpoon was darted.” The characters are memorable but do not seem real, especially when they are reciting long soliloquies, using words such as uninterpenetratingly. Instead of developing characters, Melville usually just describes them; he calls Captain Ahab “monomaniacal” about four dozen times. Whole chapters of textbook-like information are inserted right into the midst of the plot. There is no consistent point of view; he throws in things that Ishmael could not possibly have seen, such as what goes on at the captain’s table. The book is full of errors (such as assuming that gold tarnishes), which the editor of the volume I read had to correct. For example, did the ship have a steering wheel, or a tiller? Melville is inconsistent.

Of course, it has some very bold and striking features, starting with the first line, which everyone knows: “Call me Ishmael.” And Melville pushes the limit of what a novel can be, in ways still considered daring. Some of the chapters are in the form of a dramatic script, Enter Ahab and all that. I wish editors would let writers get away with that today. And much of the language is astonishingly beautiful and creative. Just one example from near the beginning: An ice palace made of frozen sighs. Try writing something better than that.

And it has some unforgettable scenes, such as Ahab catching the ball-lightning on his harpoon, or the sharks around the whale-boats in their final attack, and Moby Dick bristling with harpoons of previous unsuccessful attacks, and the dead “Parsee” who was being dragged around by Moby Dick bobs up from the deep. And then, Queequeg’s coffin, transformed into a life-buoy, springs up from the very center of the vortex in which Moby Dick drew down the ship. And then, in the final irony, Ishmael (the lone survivor) is rescued by the very ship that Ahab refused to help. These fine scenes get lost in Melville’s clutter.

But perhaps the most striking thing, especially at the time it was published, is Melville’s direct assault on cherished religious assumptions, which is why I am writing about it in this blog. The whole novel is imbued with an awareness of a spiritual significance of the world, especially when he considers the “watery part of the world” that most writers and readers knew little about. Everything—not just Ahab vs. Moby Dick—is a symbol of good vs. evil, and strength vs. strength. It is certainly not atheistic or materialistic. But Melville does focus squarely on upsetting nineteenth-century American Christianity. For example, we violently kill whales to get oil for lamps to “illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.”

The first and most striking example of this is how Ishmael meets Queequeg, the barbarian from some imaginary Pacific island. When Melville calls him a cannibal, this is apparently just a general epithet. Queequeg is introduced in the most frightening way. Ishmael discovers that he must share a bed with him! And yet he develops an intimate friendship with this “savage.” Queequeg spears steaks with his harpoon, and goes into a trance worshipping his little idol. And yet, what does Melville, through the character of Ishmael, say about him? “Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian,” and, “I’ll try a pagan friend…since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy.” Ishmael has to deal with his own prejudices, then ends up comparing Queequeg to George Washington. Then he has to decide how to respond to Queequeg’s demand that he bow before the idol, something that conventional Christians would say would send his soul to hell. But he rationalizes that to do the will of God is worship, and God’s will is the golden rule, and so out of love for Queequeg he bows before the idol. Alas, very soon, Ishmael seems to care nothing for Queequeg, hardly talks with him, seems to show no emotion when Queequeg almost dies of a fever, and then when he actually does die at the end (spoiler). In fact, all three harpooneers are heroically strong, and all three are of racial origins that Melville’s white American readers might despise: Queequeg; Tashtego the Native American; and Daggoo the African. Even though Melville described Daggoo as a “negro-savage,” he said, a “…white man standing before him seemed a white flag come to beg truce of a fortress.” There is also the little black boy Pip, who was a tragic figure, and the insane Ahab kept imagining Pip with him, and talked to him after he was dead. Melville notes that, in Alabama, a whale’s oil would sell for thirty times the price that Pip would bring.

In fact, Melville’s spirituality is a challenge to American Christianity of his day (and ours). Melville saw God in everyone, not just white Christians. “Thou shalt see it [the presence of God] shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike…His omnipresence, our divine equality!” Even the idea of the dignity of the common man was relatively new in literature. Melville considered humans overall to be “noble and sparkling”. He says, “Heaven have mercy on us all—Presbyterian and pagan alike—for we are all somehow cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.” Therefore, he could only conclude, “…hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling…” an idea which cannot be taken seriously if you believe that God is love. True savages, says Melville, are found in the shadows of churches. He contrasts Ishmael’s religion with Stubb’s nihilism; Stubb said, “…think not, is my eleventh commandment, and sleep when you can, is my twelfth…”

Part of Ahab’s tragedy is that he considered his pursuit of Moby Dick to be the ultimate religious reality, starting with a sort of eucharist with the pewter urn, and rum in the goblet ends of the harpoons. The harpooneers and the whole crew are a sworn holy army against the devil, which is the white whale.

But I think a whole tradition has arisen in which scholars have tried to read as much symbolism as possible into this book, even more than Melville himself put in. In the library copy I read, someone wrote marginalia in chapter LXVIII. These notes said that the skin of the whale was God: “Where is He? What is He?” Then the reader noted that the skin was the Word of God.  The heiroglyphical marks inside the blubber was “rejection of Christ’s God, focusing on pagan.” Melville noted that blubber allowed the whale to be comfortable in all seas and at all times, but the marginalia-scribbler added, “all expansive like God, awe—God is good even to whales who cannot understand. The whale had great abilities like God/Jesus.” The warm whale was in the world but not of it, as a Christian should be. And so on. This thick jungle of notes was written only for this one chapter. Some pious reader out-Melvilled Melville, but couldn’t keep it up for the whole CXXXV chapters.

Well, there it is. I distilled the religious significance out of the 724 pages, and it will be archived here for any time you want to refer back to it.

The Bible and Medicine

I have noted before that fundamentalists get all worked up about evolution and how it contradicts their inerrant interpretation of the Bible, while they do not seem at all upset by medical science and psychology, which contradict their fundamentalist assumptions even more. I wish now to present some actual data to back up this claim.

The Gospels of the New Testament contain numerous accounts of Jesus healing the sick and casting out demons, sometimes simultaneously. In several places (Matthew 10:1; 10:8; 23:24; Mark 1:32; Luke 6:17; 8:2) the writers describe Jesus as healing diseases, pains, demoniacs, epileptics, and paralytics—demons are thrown right into the list of diseases. In many cases, but not all, demon possession is indicated as the cause of disease. This being the case, creationists should reject medical science which attributes contagious diseases to germs and other diseases to things that have gone wrong inside the body. They have not, however, done so.

What I wish to do now is to provide a complete list of Jesus’ healings, and indicate which ones were and were not attributed to demon possession. In order to do so, I have tried to determine which of the parallel Gospel accounts refer to the same event, so as not to double-count them. And here they are (demonic events in bold).

	Event	Matthew	Mark	Luke	John
1	Healing a leper	8:1	1:40	5:12
2	Centurion’s servant	8:5		7:1
3	Peter’s mother-in-law	8:14	1:29	4:38
4	Same day: demoniacs	8:16
5	Gadarene swine	8:28	5:1	8:26
6	Forgave the paralytic	9:2	2:1	5:17
7	Resurrected ruler’s daughter	9:18	5:21	8:40
8	Woman with hemorrhage	9:20	5:24	8:43
9	Two blind men	9:27
10	Dumb demoniac	9:32		11:14
11	Man with withered hand	12:10	3:1	6:6
12	Blind dumb demoniac	12:22
13	Canaanite woman with demon daughter	15:21	7:24
14	Epileptic boy falling into fire	17:14	9:14	9:37
15	Blind men near Jericho	20:30	10:46
16	Demoniac near Capernaum		1:21	4:31
17	Deaf dumb man, Decapolis			7:31
18	Blind man at Bethsaida		8:22		9:1
19	Young man in his funeral			7:11
20	Another woman with flux			13:10
21	Man with dropsy			14:1
22	Ten lepers			17:11
23	Official’s son				4:46
24	Lame man at Bethsaida				5:2

I cannot be sure of some of the classifications; item 23 might be the same as item 2, but I have erred on the side of caution in favor of fundamentalists; item 2 refers to a servant, item 23 to a son, which most of us believe could just be a garbled transmission of the account, but fundamentalists do not believe such a thing is possible in the Bible. I have omitted the famous account of Lazarus, since it was considered an example of a resurrection, not a healing.

The point here is that seven of the 24 healings were specifically described—in all the parallel accounts available—as the casting out of demons. This is 29 percent. If you count the stories separately, 14 out of 46 involve demons, which is 30 percent. That is, in roughly one-third of the healings, exorcism was involved. In one of them (14), clear symptoms of epilepsy are described.

And yet biology curricula at taxpayer-supported colleges and universities never include demonology. Never. Certainly not one-third of the courses, or one-third of any course, or even a single mention. Nor do medical schools. How can creationists put up with this? Why doesn’t the Oklahoma legislature pass bills that require OU Health Sciences Center to at least include demonology as one possibility to be mentioned in their courses about infectious disease and endocrinology and neurology? And psychology! Let’s not even get into psychology! All the things the Bible attributes to the spirit, psychologists attribute to the brain!

Lest you think that I looked through the Gospels just to find ammunition against creationists, let me assure you that I looked through them (I have read them several times) with great enjoyment. When I read about the life and sayings of Jesus, I am really uplifted. His words, even though processed by oral transmission for over two centuries before being written down, are astonishing and refreshing—in marked contrast to the grim negativity of the gun-toting modern fundamentalists, whom I believe would drive Jesus out of their churches. Maybe the fundamentalists should actually read Jesus’ words, which flatly contradict most of their political opinions.

You might want to read the Gospels. At least, how can you resist reading about the woman with the demon daughter?

Stages of Conquest

The Native American nations have suffered nearly complete conquest by the descendants of white Europeans, both from the outside and from the inside. From the outside, by physical conquest, and from the inside, by conversion to religious views that tend to justify white superiority. Not much is left except the glowing coals of cultural identity and even these can be, as in the case of my own Cherokee tribe, which is more white than red, very dim.

There have been at least three stages of this conquest. Starting over 500 years ago, Europeans came to North and South America and began killing and enslaving natives, taking their land, and introducing diseases that decimated their populations. This mostly occurred on the east coast. Many Native American tribes moved westward to get away from this conquest. This resulted in a westward push, in which eastern tribes pushed other tribes toward the west, compressing them and forcing them into conflict. Many of the intertribal conflicts were therefore caused indirectly by Europeans.

In some cases, smaller tribes took refuge with larger ones, merging with them even if they kept their own cultural identity. Therefore by the 1800s the larger tribes contained smaller ones. For example, the Coushattas, Yuchis, and Natchis were compressed into the Muskogee Creek tribe, and some of the Ottawas, Quapaws, and Delawares into the Cherokee tribe. This was the first stage of conquest: Europeans compressed smaller tribes into the larger ones.

The second stage was when the United States conquered the larger tribes. For the Cherokees and Muskogees, this was the Trail of Tears during the 1830s. When the Cherokees and Muskogees (as well as three other tribes) were forced into what is now Oklahoma, the remnants of the smaller tribes went with them. When what became Indian Territory was divided among the “Five Civilized Tribes,” individuals of the smaller tribes had allotments within the land of the larger tribes. To this day, you can find Quapaws living among Cherokees in northeastern Oklahoma, and Yuchis with the Creeks. For years, driving between Durant and Tulsa, Oklahoma, I passed through Wetumka, a little town which happens to be the headquarters of the Alabama Quassarte Tribal Town. I did not know it existed until they got a storefront building and painted a sign on it. I searched online to find out who they were. Quassarte is a variant form of Coushatta.

We often think of this second stage of conquest as the first: independent tribes got conquered by Europeans and later Americans. But in many cases, smaller tribes were conquered by Americans only after Americans had forced them to take refuge with larger tribes.

The third stage occurred when Americans swindled from the Natives the land allotments that the government had given them. In Oklahoma, this occurred immediately before and after statehood in 1907. For example, the conquered Creek people were given land allotments, with the Yuchi and Coushatta among them, but white swindlers, in collusion with white judges, quickly took these allotments away from them. In many cases they did so by forged deeds that claimed the Natives had sold the land to them; or, the white land speculators lied about the amount of money they were paying for the land by conveniently misplacing a decimal point so that the Native seller ended up getting only one-tenth as much money as he or she was promised. In many cases, Native children (and adults) were placed under “guardianship” and the “guardians” kept most of the money for themselves. In a few cases, the swindlers got the Natives to leave the land to them as heirs, and then they killed the Natives. In such ways, the large tribes were conquered a second time, and the small tribes a third time.

This is the reason that many Natives in Oklahoma live in desperate poverty even though their land allotments a hundred years ago often contained rich reserves of oil. And this poverty is evident if you drive through Native communities in the midst of rich oil land. Consider Wetumka, the city where the Alabama Quassarte Tribal Town is located. For the first few years I drove through, nearly every building I saw was dilapidated. Then new buildings began to arise, very fancy and rich amidst the rubble of the old buildings. The first was, of course, a bank. Next came two buildings associated with providing medical care to the Natives. You see, many of the Native Americans rely on health care at government expense because they are poor; and they are poor because white Americans stole their land.

The Americans who stole the land reaped immense private profits, but the conquered Natives must now be assisted at public expense. Private corporations got the profits, while the taxpayers ended up with the costs. This happens a lot. For example, tobacco corporations got rich while taxpayers paid medical expenses of people who got cancer and emphysema. It was not until the tobacco lawsuit that was settled in 1999 that the tobacco corporations ever paid any money for the damage that their products did, and then only a small portion of it. A similar thing will soon happen with global warming: the Koch Brothers get rich from oil and carbon pollution, but when it comes time to build sea walls to keep the rising ocean waters out of Miami, it will be at public expense. But when you see the poverty of Native American communities, you see the human face of private profits at public expense, and the lingering evidence of the white conquest of Native American nations.

Compromise

Just posted: a Darwin video about global warming and soil, with a mole joke at the end...

And now more about global warming.

I would like to think myself a scientific and ethical purist, offering no compromise regarding what the right thing to do is. So with regard to something like global warming, I would like to think that there should be no compromise between the forces of greed, which almost seem to rejoice in pouring extra carbon into the atmosphere, and the forces of altruism, which rejoice in leaving a better world for the future.

But we live in a world of compromise. We can hardly avoid it, if we are on the grid and participants in the national and world economy.

I was reminded of this recently when I was reading articles from an environmental news website. The ENN website (recently defunct, it appears) constantly posted articles about the dangers of global warming, and the ways in which the Keystone XL pipeline will accelerate it by bringing large amounts of high-carbon oil from Canada down into Texas, where much of it will be processed for export. At the top of the web page there was an advertisement from none other than Trans Canada, the sponsor of the pipeline. The ad claimed that the pipeline was environmentally safe and would promote energy independence. That is, the advertisement and the content from this website contradicted one another.

But Trans Canada was willing to pay for the advertising, without which ENN might not be able to continue operation. There are plenty of ads from sources with legitimate environmental credentials (several environmental MBA programs, for example), but apparently not enough.

I cannot pretend to know whether ENN should accept money from the very corporations it consistently condemns. This blog costs and earns nothing, so I do not have to answer this question for myself.

Does Anybody Really Believe in Hell?

Conservative Christians claim to believe that everyone who disagrees with any of their doctrines (and presumably, intertwined with them, their political beliefs) will be condemned to uninterrupted torture literally forever in Hell. And it is the God of Infinite Love that will make this happen.

This is such an outrageous doctrine that nobody really believes it. If you can believe that a God of Love can do this, then you have the ability to totally jettison all mental faculties. Conservative Christians (and perhaps extremist Muslims too, I don’t know) claim to believe it, but they don’t. They simply cannot make themselves really believe it. If they did, they would be relentless in their attempts to get us to repent of being Democrats. They would not just denounce us but keep doing so in a desperate attempt to rescue us from infinite eternal torture. When one of them talks to me, friendly banter is more likely to come from their mouths than condemnation. And I believe that none of them would be themselves willing to be the people who subject us to eternal torture. They simply would not be able to stand over us and keep us at the end of a poker and roast us and listen to us scream forever. They probably couldn’t do it for five minutes.

That is, they—even the most ferocious of them—are more loving and merciful than they believe God to be.