Tag: Twitter

Word of the Day: “lapidation”

November 18, 2019 • 10:15 am

by Greg Mayer

Brian Leiter has drawn attention to a “working paper” by Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor and former Obama administration official. Entitled “Lapidation and apology“, Sunstein’s paper argues for a reinvigoration of the figurative usage of a rather obscure word: “lapidation”. Defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “The punishment of stoning to death”, it has been used figuratively since at least 1864, and Sunstein proposes a figurative usage of it as apropos for the digital age’s twitter mobs, pile-ons, and ‘cancellations’. As Sunstein begins,

Groups of people, outraged by some real or imagined transgression, often respond in a way that is wildly disproportionate to the occasion, thus ruining the transgressor’s day, month, year, or life.

His abstract continues,

To capture that phenomenon, we might repurpose an old word: lapidation. Technically, the word is a synonym for stoning, but it sounds much less violent. It is also obscure, which makes it easier to enlist for contemporary purposes.Lapidation plays a role in affirming, and helping to constitute, tribal identity. It typically occurs when a transgressor is taken to have violated a taboo, which helps account for the different people and events that trigger left-of-center and right-of-center lapidation. One of the problems with lapidation is that it often accomplishes little; it expresses outrage, and allows people to signal their identity, but does no more. Victims of lapidation might be tempted to apologize, but apologies can prove ineffective or even make things worse, depending on the nature of the lapidators.

According to Sunstein, a lapidation is always wrong:

Can lapidation be justified? As defined here, it cannot be.

The reason is that lapidation, even if not based on an outright falsehood or misconception, is characterized by the excess and disproportion of the reaction. Thus, one might disagree over whether a particular case is a lapidation, but it would be incoherent to ague that a lapidation was deserved.

Sunstein also introduces the delightful term “lapidation entrepreneur” for those who promote lapidation; HuffPo is “lapidation entrepreneur” central!

Sunstein lists five paradigmatic cases of what he considers lapidation: Ronald Sullivan‘s non-renewal as house dean at Harvard’s Winthrop House; the dismissal of sociologist Noah Carl from Cambridge University; death threats against Ilhan Omar; Elizabeth Warren being called “Pocahontas” by Donald Trump; and Al Franken‘s forced resignation from the Senate.

As the links to the names on these examples show, all of them have come to our attention here at WEIT. I’m not sure that I would concur with Sunstein’s evaluation of how well each exemplifies his usage, though. Franken’s life has been ruined; Carl’s academic career has taken a serious hit, from which he may or may not recover; and Sullivan has suffered publicly at the hands of Harvard, but he is of sufficient stature and accomplishment to weather these insults. All these fit what I take to be Sunstein’s point, but the cases of Omar and Warren seem different. The death threats against Omar are intolerable, and ‘disproportion’ doesn’t even begin to get at what’s wrong with such threats, but she seems not to have experienced any loss of political influence or support. And the crude insults of, and uninformed attacks on, Warren seem not to have derailed her campaign. Perhaps they do fit Sunstein’s schema if we take note of the lower end (“day, month”) of his temporal scale, and as he rightly notes, “Even if a few stones are thrown, people might hurt.”

A note on where Sunstein posted his working paper, SSRN.com: I gather from Sunstein’s paper that it is an unreviewed draft of something he might eventually publish. It contains what might be charitably described as infelicities of wording (and less charitably as errors), and his account of Franken, one suspects, would be different were it written now in the light of Jane Mayer’s reporting. There’s also some briefly described survey research, which might be more interesting or compelling if more fully set out, as one would expect in an academic paper. I’ve seen similar sorts of not-quite-ready things on this website before. I hope Sunstein will finish up his paper and get it published.

More levity from Deepak

December 2, 2014 • 7:14 am

The Deepakity still hasn’t learned that I don’t read Twi**er, and he’s still tw**ting at me.  I find this out only if I look at my alternative email account (which I do rarely), or someone tells me.  Here’s one that came yesterday:

Screen shot 2014-12-01 at 7.57.22 PM

 

Deepak is flogging his new book, and he’s tweeting about it all over the place (as if he needs more sales!). If you go to the article he mentioned at SFGate, “Why physics needs God but God doesn’t need physics,” you’ll see a piece that begins like this:

Recently I created a brief storm on Twitter by throwing out questions that physicists can’t answer. Twitter allows you to contact famous physicists directly, and it’s predictable that a handful will become irritated and even riled up if you dare to challenge them. “What happens in physics stays in physics” is their motto, apparently. But I’m on tour for a new book, The Future of God, and for decades, ever since the publication of books like The Tao of Physics and God and the New Physics, it’s become evident that physics can’t escape its meeting with God.

I don’t mean the clash between belief and atheism. What I cover in the book, and what makes some physicists with famous names turn ad hominem and outright abusive, is something else. They are going to need God to solve some fundamental questions about reality. Even more irritating to them, God exposes the current crisis in physics. After promising us that physics will one day have the answer for where the universe came from, what it’s made of, and where human beings belong in the cosmos, today physics may actually be farther away from an answer than ever. Such is the nature of the crisis.

What is physics missing? METAPHYSICS! That is, physics can’t answer the Big Questions™, which to Deepakity include these:

What does it mean to exist?
How do we know things?
What makes reality real?

And Deepakity asserts that answering these questions requires a comity of both physics and metaphysics, for he sees (as does E. O. Wilson) that the answer to the questions “Why am I here?” is a historical one.

Well, fine and dandy, and physicists are working on that. But Deepakity argues that a pure naturalistic answer doesn’t suffice. We need God! And who is this God? Here Chopra begins to morph into Karen Armstrong:

In The Future of God I argue that there is a version of the deity that isn’t a patriarch sitting above the clouds but rather a God defined as the source of consciousness, and as such, the deity isn’t a myth, a matter of faith, a divine Father or Mother–in fact, such a God cannot be captured in words or images. God is pure “meta.” Physics needs such a God in order to find the higher order of answers that will rescue it from crisis.

He then bangs on about the importance of consciousness, and how that’s beyond science, but I needn’t say more, for reader Grania has translated the whole short article into English that the average person can understand. Her translation:

Scientists laugh at me on Twitter when I troll them in my desperate need for attention and validation.
But I don’t care, because I am right because in my head I can imagine that I am right; therefore I am right.
Scientists don’t get metaphysics. But metaphysics is totally science because it has the word “physics” in it. However, science can only answer “how” questions, not “why” questions. Therefore my thoughts are superior to their thoughts.
Now behold my mighty word salad and despair, you scientist you:
“[P]hysics needs God, and if God in fact is the source of consciousness–transcendent, immutable, without beginning or end, timeless, a field of infinite possibilities–it’s obvious that God doesn’t need physics. The beauty of this realization is that this field of infinite possibilities exists in us. It is here, now, and always. It is our very essence.”
That’s pretty much it, and the last paragraph is indeed Chopra’s: a holotype specimen of his obscurantist thinking. Thanks to Grania for doing the heavy lifting.