Cults: what's good and what's bad about them

 In some circles, it seems, the word "cult" denotes something that is automatically assumed to be bad, and some people who make this assumption use it to denigrate groups that they don't like, while others seem to think that the word should not be used at all because they see it as derogatory. 

I find this attitude rather strange, and it seems to be difficult to discuss it. The people who think like this seem to simply take the line "It's a bad word, don't use it. End of discussion," or "it's a bad thing, so I'm just calling a spade a spade."

So what is a cult?

Is it a useful word for describing a bad thing, or a bad word used to indoctrinate people into thinking that something good or neutral is a bad thing?

My Concise Oxford Dictionary defines "cult" as follows:

cult n. system of religious worship; devotion, homage, to person or thing (the ~ of)

To determine whether any given phenomenon is a cult, therefore, one must determine whether it is a system of religious worship, or whether it involves devotion to a person or thing. These are fairly objective criteria, and it should be easy to determine whether a phenomenon is a cult or not.

When one has established that a phenomenon is a cult, determining whether it is good or bad is far more subjective. That would depend on whether one thinks that what is worshipped, or what receives the homage and devotion, is worthy of it.

For example, there are two books that I would like to read on the cult of the saints. One is The Cult of the Saints by St John Chrysostom, which is a series of sermons on the lives of Christian saints, and the other is The Cult of the Saints: its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity by Peter Brown.

In both these books the word "cult" is used in its proper and legitimate sense, and it is in no way pejorative. St John Chrysostom, in particular, regards the cult of the saints as a good thing. I too regard the cult of the saints as a good thing.

I do believe, however, that there can be, and are, bad cults. A few years ago I discussed the cults of two unscrupulous businessmen who became politicians, one living and one dead. I discussed the cults of Cecil Rhodes and Donald Trump in the course of reviewing a book called The Cult of Rhodes.

In my view these cults were bad, because I did not think that Cecil Rhodes or Donald Trump were worthy of such homage or devotion. Your view may differ. You may think that one or both of them were saints, or, even if not actually saints, at least worthy of homage or devotion. So opinions on whether the cults of these men are good or bad may differ.

But opinions on whether the adulation of these men, Trump while he is still alive, and Rhodes after he died, constitutes a cult also seems to be a contentious matter.

The word "cult" has, mainly in the 2nd half of the 20th century, been misused to describe "new religious movements", "minority religions" and various other groups of people. A recent book dealing with this misuse is 'Cult' Rhetoric in the 21st Century, and the description on the GoodReads site is as follows:

This book focuses on how 'cult rhetoric' affects our perceptions of new religious movements (NRMs).

'Cult' Rhetoric in the 21st Century explores contemporary understandings of the term 'cult' by bringing together a range of scholars from multiple disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, psychology, and religious studies. Ranging from the 'Cult of Trump' and 'Cult of COVID', to the campaigns of mass media, contemporary 'cult' rhetoric has become hybridised and is common vernacular for everyday people. The contributors explore these issues by analysing how NRMs have developed over the past decades and deconstructing the language we use to describe these movements.

I can see several problems in the description, but there's no way I can afford to buy the book. and owing to bureaucratic bunglings at the Unisa Library I no longer have access to an academic library so I can't get hold of it that way.

Religious organisations and groups, whether new or old, usually have cults, which they practise, but it is rather misleading to say that they are cults. All Christian bodies, for example, practise the cult of Jesus who is called Christ. Some of them practise the cult of the saints, mentioned earlier.

Cults may be either good or bad, depending on whether you judge the object or person worshipped or to which or to whom homage and devotion are paid is worthy of it. But it is high time we stopped using the word pejoratively, or demanding that it be banned simply because it assumed to be pejorative. 

 

What is Extremism?

The use of terms like "extremism" and "extremist" seems to be increasing, but frequency of use seems to be inversely proportional to clarity of meaning.

Most people who use the terms frequently seem to think extremism is a bad thing, but they rarely say what it is that they are denouncing as bad.

I assume, since the opposite of extremism is moderation, middle-of-the road, mediocrity or sitting-on-the-fence, that people who denounce extremism favour vagueness, and not holding strong opinions about anything. One gets the impression that the role model for anti-extremists is Wither, the deputy-director of N.I.C.E. -- the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments in C.S. Lewis's novel That Hideous Strength.

It is the custom of some Christian bishops to sign their official correspondence with a self-designation like "the humble mediocrity", or words to that effect, and this might give the impression that the Christian faith is anti-extremist, until one reads the words in the Revelation of St John the Divine:

And unto the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write; These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God; I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth. Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked: I counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in the fire, that thou mayest be rich; and white raiment, that thou mayest be clothed, and that the shame of thy nakedness do not appear; and anoint thine eyes with eyesalve, that thou mayest see.

Whatever the Church of Laodicaea was back then, it certainly could not be accused of extremism, but its lack of extremism brought not praise, but denunciation. And people like Christian saints seem to have bee characterised by extremism. Most of us mediocrities admire them, but do not really seek to emulate them. That would be over-the-top. The safest position is a moderate disapproval of evil, and a moderate approval of good, but nothing extreme, you understand. 

Being extremist is, in fact, neither intrinsically good not intrinsically bad. It is not being it extreme that is good or bad, but rather what you are being extreme about.

Extremism and extremist are weasel words. Avoid using them, and be wary of people who use them too much. Those who are extremely anti-extremist are themselves being extremist.

Bloated job titles and other examples of diseased language

There's an outfit called TGIF (Thank God It's Friday, in case you didn't know) that holds weekly Christian discussion meetings in the Seattle Coffee Shop Brooklyn Mall at 6:00 am on Fridays. I've been to a few of them when the topic has interested me, and I get the weekly notices of topics to see whether they may be of interest. This week's notice had some comments on inflated job titles, which I thought were worth sharing:

Job title inflation: It started when the guy who fixed my washing machine introduced himself as the Maintenance Engineer, only to be trumped by the plumber who became a Drain Surgeon. Run-of-the-mill assistants are now Facilities Administrators, 1-person organisations are headed by CEOs or Presidents, and Churchianity has seen a few (self-appointed?) Apostles of Faith and Anointed Prophets. The herbalists whose pamphlets you get given at the traffic lights are all "Dr" or "Prof", except for the one who promotes himself as "Almighty Healer, Spirit from the Mountain and the Head of all Healers Herbalists in Africa" (sic).

Job title stuffing has resulted in descriptors like Chief Executive Twitterer, Manager of Deep Web Research, Central Interactions Architect, Lifestyle Design Coach, Person-Centred Transition Facilitator, Global Troubleshooter, Head of Knowledge Creation, Psychological Wellbeing Practitioner, and Dynamic Paradigm Orchestrator. Soon, movers and shakers might become (respectively) Location Change Management Specialists and Arthymic Oscillation Technicians. [1]

While on the topic of language and usage, I also recently saw this on Facebook:

And while we were on holiday recently we stopped for lunch at Maxi's Cafe in Bethal in Mpumalanga, and there we saw this sign.

I used to know that as the "greengrocer's apostrophe", but Maxi's isn't a greengrocer.

Oh well, at least I'm not seeing "a waist of time" as much as I used to see it online in the early 1990s, so some things are improving.

As the saying went in the early 1990s, "Put knot yore trussed inn spell chequers."

Seth's Blog: Solving problems (vs. identifying them)

Someone pointed me to this blog post: Seth's Blog: Solving problems (vs. identifying them):

Often, we're hesitant to identify a problem out of fear we can't solve it. Knowing that we have to live with something that we're unable to alter gives us a good reason to avoid verbalizing it--highlighting it just makes it worse.

While this sort of denial might be okay for individuals (emphasis on might), it's a lousy approach for organizations of any size. That's because there are almost certainly resources available that can solve a problem if you decide it's truly worth solving.

In my experience, people opt for avoiding both identifying problems and solving them. Instead of doing either of those things, they simply "address" the problem.

Talk nicely to the problem and it will go away.

If that doesn't work, then don't call it a problem, call it an "issue".

No problem.

EU bans claim that water can prevent dehydration

It has long been known that bureaucratic language is diseased language, and this is just one of the latest instances of it

EU bans claim that water can prevent dehydration - Telegraph

Brussels bureaucrats were ridiculed yesterday after banning drink manufacturers from claiming that water can prevent dehydration.

NHS health guidelines state clearly that drinking water helps avoid dehydration, and that Britons should drink at least 1.2 litres per day

EU officials concluded that, following a three-year investigation, there was no evidence to prove the previously undisputed fact.

Producers of bottled water are now forbidden by law from making the claim and will face a two-year jail sentence if they defy the edict, which comes into force in the UK next month.

Last night, critics claimed the EU was at odds with both science and common sense. Conservative MEP Roger Helmer said: “This is stupidity writ large."

The actual text, from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), which has been discussed in the alt.usage.english newsgroup is a true masterpiece of bureaucratic obfuscation, a classic example of bureaucratese.

For reduction of disease risk claims, the beneficial physiological effect (which the Regulation requires to be shown for the claim to be permitted) is the reduction (or beneficial alteration) of a risk factor for the development of a human disease (not reduction of the risk of disease). However, undersupply with water would not be considered as a risk factor for dehydration (the disease) in this context as the beneficial alteration of the factor (increased consumption of water) is not a beneficial physiological effect as required by the Regulation.

Can you make sense of that?

I can't.

But the bigger danger, it seems to me, is that while we are straining at the gnat of bureaucratic jargon, we can overlook the camel of the privatisation of water implied in the term "drink manufacturers".

The claim that I refuse to accept is not the one complained of by the bureaucrats. It is the claim that there are "drink manufacturers" who are in a position to make such claims in the first place.

The only "drinks manufacturer" I recognise in that sense is God, who makes rain to fall on the just and the unjust alike.

Atheists who reject that as naive "creationism" are, of course, free to disagree. Perhaps for them "drinks manufacturers" are a product random evolution. Viva Coca Cola! Viva! Viva capitalism! Viva!

Give a dog a bad name

"Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me."

Such was the reply often given to playground taunts and insults in my youth.

But a recent discussion on the alt.usage.english newsgroup puts a new slant on it.

People were discussing the remake of the film The Dam Busters, a true story of how the British attacked German dams in WW2 by using an ingenious technique to drop bombs where they would be most effective.

Apparently the remake hit a snag.

Squadron Leader Guy Gibson, who led the raid, had a pet dog, a black Labrador called "Nigger", and it was decided to use the dog's name as a code name to indicate that the first raid had been successful.

The WikiPedia page on the film, and the proposed remake, describes the problem as follows The Dam Busters (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

The British Channel 4 screened the censored American version in July 2007, in which the dialogue was dubbed so as to call the dog Trigger, this screening taking place just after the planned remake was announced. For the remake, Peter Jackson has said no decision has been made on the dog's name, but is in a "no-win, damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don't scenario", as changing the name could be seen as too much political correctness, while not changing the name could offend people. Further, executive producer Sir David Frost was quoted in The Independent as stating: "Guy sometimes used to call his dog Nigsy, so I think that's what we will call it. Stephen has been coming up with other names, but this is the one I want." In June 2011, Stephen Fry mentioned in an interview that the dog would be called Digger in the remake to avoid offending modern audiences. In September 2007, as part of the BBC Summer of British Film series, The Dam Busters was shown at selected cinemas across the UK in its uncut format.

The discussion on alt.usage.english was mainly concerned with the issue of the dog's name. The original name is now regarded as offensive in America, so using it might harm the film at the box office. But changing the name of the dog would be historically inaccurate.

Discussion went back and forth for a while, and eventually someone said:

I don't see what harm it does to change the dog's name consistently in the dialogue, just so people don't repeatedly cringe until it gets run over. (I haven't seen the original film; I'm trusting what someone else said in this thread.) They could put a note up at the beginning or end of the film briefly explaining the deviation from historical accuracy.

And Peter Brooks of Cape Town made a comment that put the whole discussion in perspective:

Cringe? There's a film showing people getting ready to kill tens of thousands of innocent civilians by drowning and people watching it cringe because of the name given to a dog? What kind of perverted system of values could lead to that?

Another Wikipedia article describes the results of the first raid Möhne Reservoir - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

The resulting huge floodwave killed at least 1579 people, 1026 of them foreign forced labourers held in camps downriver. The small city of Neheim-Hüsten was particularly hard-hit with over 800 victims, among them at least 526 victims in a camp for Russian women held for forced labour.

Kentucky Fried Quidditch

6 Harry Potter Films According to Someone Who Never Saw Them | Cracked.com: "If you're anything like me, you've never read a Harry Potter book or seen a Harry Potter movie. Statistically speaking, you are nothing like me, as the latest installment of the Potter franchise is already poised to smash all relevant box office records, everywhere. (I should make it clear that when I say, 'relevant box office records,' I mean, 'only box office records that pertain to The Dark Knight.') Despite my lack of interest in and familiarity with the franchise, I'm not against the idea of it and I don't hate the people who love it or the cultural impact it's made (even though being a non-fan when a new movie comes out sort of feels like being the only Jewish kid during Christmas time). This franchise just missed me completely."

Franchise? What do you mean franchise?

No wonder you've never seen it -- it's a film, not a Bic Mac.

One you see at the bioscope, the other you buy at a hamburger joint.

Hat-tip to whatisname.