Can You Say "Shibboleth"?

I've had the good fortune lately to go to a couple of fancy dinners. I call it good fortune because the company was good, not because the event was fancy. The food was not especially tasty, but it was presented with great style and pomp: it looked pretty. And then there was the silverware. My plate was surrounded by a garrison of forks, spoons, and knives. I had no idea which spoon to use for the soup, or which fork to use for the salad. Worse, there were glasses placed, with perfect symmetry, on each side of my plate. Which glass was mine? I chose the wrong one, of course, thus stealing my neighbor's glass. This breach of etiquette sent shock waves around the table, as each of my dinner companions had to use their neighbor's glass instead of their own. I apologized in my politest Arkansas accent, but if any of my dinner companions had decided I was a yokel, that probably didn't help.

All this would have bothered me if I were a more formal person. But I laughed it off, because I figure things like that shouldn't be taken too seriously. Knowing which fork to use--and speaking in a certain accent, for that matter--are nothing more than shibboleths. They don't have any particular purpose except to identify who belongs to a particular group...and who doesn't. Using the wrong fork immediately identifies me as someone who hasn't mastered the rules of etiquette. My accent identifies me as being from the hilly part of the south--not a region associated with sophistication in the average American mind. Linguists know that pronunciation is arbitrary, and has no intrinsic association with intelligence, but I can attest that people will judge you for having an accent like mine. The shibboleth is still in effect, no matter what the linguists say. But when I think about the origins of the term "shibboleth", I realize it could be a lot worse.

The word "shibboleth" comes from the Old Testament. In the late second millennium BC, the Israelites were still a set of quarrelsome tribes who hadn't yet united into the Kingdom of Israel. The Book of Judges tells how two Israelite tribes, the Ephraimites and Gileadites, went to war. The Gileadites defeated the Ephraimites, leaving many Ephraimites stuck in Gileadite country, east of the Jordan river. As they tried to cross back into their own country, the Gileadites stopped them at the river. The two tribes spoke the same language, but unfortunately for the Ephraimites, they had different accents. Judges 12:5-6 tells what happened next.

Whenever one of the fugitives of Ephraim said, "Let me go over," the men of Gilead would say to him, "Are you an Ephraimite?" When he said, "No," they said to him "Then say Shibboleth," and he said "Sibboleth" for he could not pronounce it right. Then they seized him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand of the Ephraimites fell at that time.

A fateful word, shibboleth, but not because of its meaning. Depending on who you ask, it meant either "ear of grain" or "torrent". The point was that Ephraimites said it differently than Gileadites, and that allowed the Gileadites to identify their enemies. Shibboleths have been used in warfare more recently, too. In World War II, Allied soldiers would distinguish Japanese soldiers from other Asians by asking them to say, "lollapalooza." Since the Japanese language doesn't distinguish the "L" and "R" sounds, the Japanese would say "rorraparooza"--a dead giveaway, often in the literal sense. A fictional shibboleth appears in the movie "Inglourious Basterds", where an Englishman posing as a German soldier is caught making a hand-gesture a German would never use.

Not all shibboleths are so deadly, or even particularly nasty. Accents, in-jokes, fashions, slang, musical preferences--all these things can function as shibboleths. Many of them are pretty harmless, and just used to distinguish some subculture, often distinct only in its sense of fashion or music. There are all kinds of pop culture shibboleths I haven't mastered, but no one is particularly mean to me because of that (there's the occasional snotty hipster, but life is too short to concern oneself with the opinions of snotty hipsters).

However, the shibboleths of formal etiquette can get nasty (though not usually downright murderous). Knowing your table settings is a shibboleth indicating whether you know the rules of etiquette, and that is historically a way of indicating whether someone is from the upper or aristocratic classes, because only people from those classes had the means to learn such things. That's why etiquette is full of rules that don't really serve any purpose except to differentiate people who know the rules from those who don't. The word "etiquette" actually means "tag" or "label" in French. Having etiquette labels you as being from the refined classes. It's a behavioral badge, but a badge nonetheless.

Of course, etiquette can be more than just a set of shibboleths. It can also give people guidelines for being polite and thoughtful. But that purpose can be lost in the minutia of social rules. The shibboleth function of etiquette, when you think about it, is not very polite and thoughtful at all, at least to the people it excludes. Arbitrary social rules are also a burden for the people who know them, because life would be simpler (and often less expensive) if they didn't have to bother with them. People will work very hard to appear better than others.

It's odd how notions of good behavior are still bound up with old notions of class, or even old-world aristocracy. Think about the word "classy", as in, "That was a classy thing to do." "Classy" didn't originally mean "thoughtful and admirable", but "what a person from the higher classes would do". Today we think of a "gentleman" as a man who has good manners, but once it simply meant somebody who didn't have to work with his hands, or even work at all, regardless of how polite he was. The word "courtesy" originally meant "the proper way of acting at court." Americans still say certain behaviors are "noble" even though we have never had a class of noble men and women here. The aristocracy often weren't very noble, anyway, if by "noble" you mean "well-behaved and honorable". In fact, the oldest noble families in Europe first became nobles by fighting brutal wars.

The problem with confusing good, thoughtful behavior with class-based shibboleths is that class divisions don't necessarily reflect good behavior. In fact, most people today would say that a rigid, hereditary class system is a form of societal injustice. People aren't members of the upper classes because they have good manners, but because they were born in certain families, or made a lot of money and bought their way in. As the old saying goes, "Make money and the world will conspire to make you a gentleman." Making your money in a gentlemanly way is optional, and often counter-productive.

I don't mean to bash the upper classes here. I've known people from the upper classes who were truly noble, but I've also known some who used social niceties as a weapon to shame others.  I don't care how "well-bred" they are, those people can be as mean as scorpions in a skillet.

The point of all this is that we need to disentangle true courtesy from arbitrary shibboleths, and politeness from class and wealth. If some rule of etiquette makes life more pleasant, or shows thoughtfulness and respect toward other people, then let's keep it. If it's merely a shibboleth, good for nothing but distinguishing one group of people from another, then toss it in the garbage, where it belongs. I'm all for refinement and politeness when it serves a real purpose. After all, people can be pretty nasty creatures when they aren't taught manners, and the current parenting style ignoring rudeness strikes me as a horrible idea. But what's also a horrible idea is continuing to use arbitrary rules to distinguish people based on social class. If we could root out shibboleths masquerading as manners, and focus on actually being nice, thoughtful, and honorable, the world would be a simpler and kinder place. As Emily Post herself said: "Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter what fork you use."

Beyond Belief

I haven't posted in a while, partly because of holiday travels, but mostly because I've been composing my thoughts in private messages to some of my friends. After I wrote a post about the idea of God, I got into discussions with some more conservative Christian friends, and very interesting discussions they've been. One thing that came up is the importance of beliefs versus actions. For many Protestants, it is belief alone, not actions, that determines whether you go to heaven or hell. If you believe that Jesus is the son of God, and that he died to atone for your sins, that is what gets you into heaven. Being a good person is important, but it's not what decides your fate in the afterlife. The official doctrine of many Protestant denominations is that if you live a good life, devoting yourself to helping others, but don't accept Jesus as your savior, you'll go to hell.

Clearly, whether this is true or not is a matter of no small importance (for the record, I don't think it is, for all kinds of reasons). So I was debating my evangelical friends about it. Why, I asked them, does God care so much about what we believe? Why doesn't he care as much about what we actually do? It was an interesting debate, but I don't want to discuss Christian theology in this post. What I want to talk about here is the relative importance of belief versus actions, not in a religious sense (because I'm not religious), but in the context of a secular ethics that doesn't require belief in the supernatural. Contrary to what the Mike Huckabees and James Dobsons of the world will have you believe, religion has no monopoly on morality.

My debates with my Christian friends put the issue of belief/action into sharper focus for me. I was asking them why belief itself is so important, but then I thought: Wait a minute...I think belief is important too! I'm always railing against the kind of relativism that says reality is socially constructed, and therefore truth is relative to one's culture. Sure, some things (money, national borders, etc.) are socially constructed, but not everything is. I think there is an objective reality, that it was around for billions of years before humans were, and that it's important for our beliefs to match that reality as well as possible.

But why is it important? Why do beliefs matter? Well, I've always maintained that they matter because we act on them. It matters whether you believe, for example, that animals are automatons who can't feel pain and suffering. If you believe that, you'll be more likely to treat them as such--leaving them out in the rain on a cold night, for example. If that belief is factually wrong (and I'm pretty sure it is) then your actions will be ethically wrong, because you'll be causing them suffering.

But while debating with my friends, I realized that if beliefs matter because of how people act on them, then actions, not beliefs, are doing the moral heavy lifting. Action is where belief runs into morality, isn't it? How can a belief you don't act on have a moral consequence? These questions bring me up short, because my knee-jerk attitude is that correct belief is important whether it has ethical consequences or not. I want to understand this world I find myself in as best I can, and to the extent that my beliefs are wrong, I have failed. If I went along with a some of my more New Agey friends and believed in astrology, and if that belief never had any ethical impact (which is unlikely) does that mean it's OK to believe in astrology? Lord, no! Because it's not true, doggonit! Why go through life thinking something that's not true, if you can help it?

Still, I have to admit that it's much more important to be right about beliefs with moral implications than those without them. If I told you that a hummingbird is a direct descendant of a dinosaur--that it IS a dinosaur, in strict phylogenetic terms--I'd be telling you the mainstream scientific theory of the origin of birds. Most dinosaurs went extinct, and the rest evolved into birds. But if you look at that hummingbird and say, "Dinosaurs?! No way!", it won't be the end of the world. You'll probably be an equally good person whether you believe it or not.

All these questions reminded me of the viral image at the top of this post, which I had seen making the rounds on the internet a few weeks before my debate over heaven, hell, and belief. I decided to get more of my friends' input on the whole question, so I posted the picture on Facebook, and asked: True or false? When I first saw the picture, I thought, "Wow, that's a good point". I even felt a little chastened, because I certainly do more thinking than charitable volunteering.  But not everyone agreed with me. One friend said "False", maintaining that "if you do the right thing for the wrong reason you're not being a good person". Another friend agreed, saying that if a racist and a non-racist act exactly the same way, the non-racist is still a better person. These seem like valid points to me, and I might not have thought about them otherwise (which is one reason I think dialogue is so important, but that's another blog post).

Another friend said the statement was false because your beliefs are what determine your actions. That's a good point, too, but it's not always true. For example, I truly think I would be a better person if I didn't eat meat, especially from animals raised inhumanely, like the chickens I see crammed into cages on trucks going down the interstate. But I love meat, and I hate to cook, and I go on eating meat at fast food joints. Yes, I set up an automatic withdrawal to donate a few bucks to the Humane Society every month, in the hope that they will work to make factory farming more humane, but I still eat those chicken sandwiches, with a small side order of guilt every time.  I'm NOT acting on my beliefs, and I don't act on them several times a week. So, it's true that beliefs are important, but it's not true that right beliefs necessarily lead to right actions, and that's really the whole point of the words on the chalkboard.

Another friend made an excellent point, which is worth quoting in full:  "I think perhaps it's worded wrongly to make what I assume is the intended point. It should say something like "beliefs themselves aren't enough to make you a better person. Behavior / action is required as well." I.E. you can believe we need to care for the homeless all day long, but actually have to donate to / volunteer at the soup kitchen for those beliefs to matter." This highlights a big problem I've noticed in our soundbite age: catchy slogans aren't subtle enough to capture the complexity of reality, but subtle, thoughtful statements, alas, rarely go viral (this might explain a whole lot about our world, and I'm not just talking about the internet era). Of course, her main point is that the words on the chalkboard present a false dichotomy. Both belief and action are important, especially since beliefs determine actions so much of the time. But the point of the picture is still a good one, and I'm glad it made the rounds. You can believe all day that poverty is awful, but that won't do anything unless you actually get up and try to do something to help.

So, am I actually volunteering at a soup kitchen? No. I'm sitting here writing, trying to work out what I believe, instead of getting off my butt and making myself useful. I tend to indulge my cerebral self, spending a lot of my free time reading and writing about life's questions, big and little. And to some extent, I think that's justified, because beliefs and ideas really do matter. People act on their ideas, so it's important to spend some time thinking about what you're going to act on.  Since that's true, thinking and writing can be valuable actions, because it can influence not only how you act, but how others act. Ideas aren't just powerful because they can influence one person's actions. Ideas spread and multiply, so one person can have an idea that can spread throughout the world, and cause a lot of good or a lot of bad. I've never had one of those ideas myself, but you never know, and besides, if I can gain a few insights this way, and perhaps encourage other people to have even better insights, or question potentially harmful beliefs, that's worthwhile. (That's an important point for this discussion, actually. When it comes to beliefs that cause harmful actions, the actions are the most important thing, but in a negative way. It would be better not to act on those beliefs).

Still, I probably spend too much time thinking, and not enough time doing. I've always liked the Buddhist parable where people are asking the Buddha metaphysical questions of the sort he had little time for: "Is the world infinite or finite? Does the soul exist after death?" He told them they were like a man who has been shot with a poisoned arrow. Before letting anyone remove it, the man wants to know who shot him, what family his assailant came from, what kind of poison is on the arrow, and so on. By the time he answers all these questions, he'll be dead. What he needs to do right now is forget about them, and yank that arrow out.

It's a good point. Endless speculation about unanswerable questions won't make the world a better place. Of course, some unanswerable questions become answerable if you keep at them long enough. "What is the sun made of?" was once unanswerable, but eventually it was answered (by science, it should be pointed out, not philosophy or religion). Still, speculation can only get you so far. Belief can only get you so far, even if you know for a fact that you're right. What makes ideas and beliefs matter most is the impact they actually have. I don't always remember this, but I should try to. And then I should try to do something about it.

The Dragons in my Back Yard

When I lived in Colorado, I was always looking out in the distance. I paid attention to big things there--geological formations, clouds deflecting off peaks, mountain ranges visible from eighty miles away.  Even the animals I watched tended to be big and showy, like elk, bighorn sheep, and the occasional black bear.  Now I live in Louisiana, where you don't see wide, craggy vistas or herds of elk.  So I've adjusted my focus downward, paying attention to small things--to tiny little swamp flowers, the geckos on my porch ceiling; the brawling, sex-crazed house sparrows that live under my eaves.  These things may not seem as dramatic as a snow-capped mountain range, but the difference in majesty is really more in our heads than out there in the world.  Compared to the gulf that separates the smallest subatomic particles from clusters of galaxies--each big enough that human history is not long enough for light to cross it--a sparrow and a mountain range are practically the same size.  Besides, while a mountain may have many moods, depending on the angle of light and the season, it doesn't behave.  It doesn't stand up and meet life head-on, the way the most miniscule insect does.  Small things have their own majesty, and we're all surrounded by their tiny, life-and-death dramas.

The other day, for example, I stepped out my back door and saw a green anole lizard (Anolis carolinensis) creeping across a windowsill.  It was hunting, moving its head back and forth to focus on something in a leafy vine about a foot away.  Then it leapt into the leaves, narrowly missing a wasp, which flew away hurriedly.  The anole missed that wasp, but I've seen them munch down others like popcorn.  I'm duly impressed.  A full-grown green anole is only about 7 inches long, tail and all, which means leaping a foot to catch a wasp is equivalent to me leaping ten feet to pounce on a rattlesnake.  Anoles are formidable beasts, I don't care how big they are.

Little Orphan Annie liked to exclaim, "Leaping lizards!" but I didn't actually know lizards leaped until I moved to Louisiana.  Arkansas has plenty of skinks and fence lizards, and while they can scamper away like a rifle shot, I don't ever remember them launching themselves through the air.  I was amazed the first time I saw an anole do it.  I was also amazed, sitting on my porch swing in Baton Rouge, to see a bright green anole climb out of some leaves onto a brown limb, and then fade into the limb by changing color.  Until then, I had assumed the brown ones and the green ones were two different species.

Some people call anoles chameleons, but the two aren't closely related. Both are predators who live in trees and bushes, but they have very different styles of hunting.  True chameleons creep along as motionlessly as they can, moving mainly their eyes--one eye scanning one direction, while the other goes its own way, as if it's connected to a different brain.  Anoles, by contrast, are stalkers. They move like cats, creeping sinuously down limbs and up walls.  True chameleons always have a look of  half-deranged melancholy on their faces, their eyes rolling like they're about to crack under life's pressures.  Anoles, by contrast, look focused, with a gaze that seems intelligent (though they're probably not terribly bright creatures). If you get close and watch them, they'll watch you back, fixing you with a look that seems to say, "I see you, primate--don't try anything."

Sometimes, in the spring, they'll position themselves in a prominent spot and unfurl the dewlap under their chin, trying to impress the opposite sex. The females have white dewlaps, but the males have striking pink ones, specked with little white spots.  Male anoles are tough guys, who guard their territories like prospectors watching for claim jumpers. When two males meet, it's on: they raise an otherwise-invisible crest down their neck and back, puff out their throats, and gape at each other like tiny alligators.  This transforms them into bigger, more formidable creatures; like little dragons, with patches of black warpaint appearing behind each eye.  They circle each other, turning sideways to look as big as possible, pausing to do little pushups of machismo.  As with many other territorial animals, they're better off settling disputes by bluffing and posturing, rather than fighting and risking injury.  So, some of these encounters end when the combatants decide they've established the boundaries of their territory, or when one decides it had better back down. But the scars on their noses shows that real fights do happen, and they can be vicious.  They lock jaws and try to wrench each other's heads around, while their sides heave with the effort.  Eventually, the loser retreats, and the winner expands his territory a across a little more of the yard.



Big or small, it's a rough world.  Back in Colorado, I would go camping in the fall and listen to the elk bugle at each other all night.  At first I was shocked at how primal--how mortal--the sound is.  Here are animals weighing well over a thousand pounds, bellowing at each other across the darkness, just like they did when my ancestors were stalking mammoths across some glacial plain. Those elk have never known anything but wilderness, and they're not playing around. At first I thought of that sound as otherworldly, because it's so foreign and eerie.  But that's wrong. It's very much of this world--the real world out there in the wilderness, a world without police or laws.  Our world is the more artificial one.  While I'm all for that contrived layer of law and safety we've built for ourselves, living in it can make you go a little numb.  It's good to look back into that wilderness.  It's good to feel, at least secondhand, the real weight of that fierce, ancient world.

Now, you may be thinking, "Wait, weren't we talking about lizards here?"  Well, sure, it does seem a little silly to use such language to describe a backyard lizard rumble, but for them the stakes are every bit as high as for those elk in the mountains.  The distinction is a matter of my perspective, not theirs.  To them, my backyard is the wilderness.  Even in the most urban settings, if you shift your focus down to the small things, you realize you're surrounded by wild country.  If you don't see its majesty, that's just human bias--a sort of bigotry of scale. You can find natural grandeur anywhere, if you look close enough.