Add Homonym Attacks! #45
Ad Hominem: Appealing to personal considerations rather than to logic or reason.
Ad Hominem Attack: An argument that focuses on a personal attack as opposed to the subject in question.
Add Homonym Attacks!: The process by which one inserts a homophone and it bites you.
(It also serves as the title to Inside Pulse Beyond the Threshold’s representative column in the world of Critical Thinking, Science and Skepticism.)
Intro
It’s a little odd that this column appears in the gothy-metal section. It makes a bit more sense when I’m talking vampires or zombies or whatever, but today’s topic has very little in common with The Cure or even Pantera.
At least, I think.
Afrocentrism
Part of the problem with being a skeptic is that, when being honest, one tends to piss off a lot of people. Ironically, the fun of being a jackass comes from pissing off a lot of people. I admit to being both, and as such, I tend to frustrate and aggravate those around me.
I think I may have put a co-worker in a bad mood for all of last Friday.
You see, she started talking about the Greeks, saying, “You always hear about the Greeks, but you never hear about who they learned from. I mean, you hear about Aristotle, but who was Aristotle’s teacher? No one knows, right?”
Feeling particularly froggy that day, I had to answer, “Plato. Plato was Aristotle’s teacher.”
“Well who taught Plato then?”
“Classical texts say Socrates.”
“Well who taught him?”
“He was a wanderer, a peripatetic, and he learned by asking questions of those around him.”
Innovating the Socratic method was not a good enough answer for my co-worker, who immediately sprung into some of the more eccentric platforms of Afrocentirsm.
She explained, “You see, the Greeks and Romans and them, they all just copied the Egyptians. They stole the ideas of these black Egyptians. But they don’t teach that in school. Do you know why?”
Sometimes, answering a question honestly will get a person in trouble. Other times, it will merely anger adjacent people or end the conversation entirely. I blurted out such an answer:
“Because it’s nonsense.”
I tend to be more honest than sensitive. And the fact of the matter is that much of this nonsense is currently being taught at schools and universities. (But then again, contrary to what I was taught in History classes, Paul Revere never finished his ride, Eli Whitney didn’t actually invent the cotton gin, Betsy Ross sewing the American flag was a myth invented by her descendants, and so on. I guess the real untruths taught in history class aren’t nearly as intriguing as those things we simply invent.)
At any rate, the claims I was hearing then are no different than claims I’ve heard countless times before. Afrocentrism is, at it’s heart, a political movement meant to inspire African American nationalism first, while actually examining history a distant 52nd. I don’t really remember ends 2-51 offhand, but I’m sure one of my neighbors would be more than happy to tell me.
Afrocentrism teaches that ancient Egyptians were an advanced race of black Africans that are essentially responsible for all development in the Western world.
And the Eastern world.
Basically, THE WORLD.
White people stole more from black people than Rock ‘n’ Roll and their freedom.
The Skeptic’s Dictionary offers us this:
One of the more important Afrocentric texts is the pseudo-historical Stolen Legacy (1954) by George G. M. James. Mr. James claims, among other things, that Greek philosophy and the mystery religions of Greece and Rome were stolen from Egypt; that the ancient Greeks did not have the native ability to develop philosophy; and that the Egyptians from whom the Greeks stole their philosophy were black Africans. Many of James’ ideas were taken from Marcus Garvey (1887-1940), who thought that white accomplishment is due to teaching children they are superior. If blacks are to succeed, he said, they would have to teach their children that they are superior.
James’s principal sources were Masonic, especially The Ancient Mysteries and Modern Masonry (1909) by the Rev. Charles H. Vail. The Masons in turn derived their misconceptions about Egyptian mystery and initiation rites from the eighteenth century work of fiction Sethos, a History or Biography, based on Unpublished Memoirs of Ancient Egypt (1731) by the Abbé Jean Terrasson (1670-1750), a professor of Greek. Terrasson had no access to Egyptian sources and he would be long dead before Egyptian hieroglyphics could be deciphered. But Terrasson knew the Greek and Latin writers well. So he constructed an imaginary Egyptian religion based upon sources which described Greek and Latin rites as if they were Egyptian (Lefkowitz). Hence, one of the main sources for Afrocentric Egyptology turns out to be Greece and Rome. The Greeks would have called this irony. I don’t know what Afrocentrists call it.
In a nutshell, the big problem here is that a lot of there “data” on Egyptian Culture comes from pre-Rosetta stone sources. Terrason died in 1750. The Rosetta stone, which allowed us to decipher the Egyptian language wasn’t discovered until 1799. It was 1814 before the enchorial text was translated. The hieroglyphs would were next to be translated. The first complete English translation of the stone was published in 1858.
If pressed, many Afrocentrists get nuttier. Some will claim that the societies of India and Chinese cultures stole from black African culture. Others will claim that it was these black Egyptians that built the pyramids of the indigenous people of South America. My favorite group claims that the Egyptians were extraterrestrial in origin, had precognitive and psychokinetic abilities, and harnessed pyramid power.
Don’t get me wrong. Ancient Egypt is important to study. It is an important culture. Black Pride is a good thing. And well, every bit of nationalism is prone to exaggeration, to say the least. Feel free to gloss over the Ancient Egyptians’ poor ability to arithmetic with fractions; I don’t mind. But the thing is, if you want to enhance notions of your race by inflating the importance of an ancient culture –
Wait for it-
then you gotta make sure you have the right race:
Not only were the ancient Egyptians not Black, their nearest relatives are Europeans: “It is obvious that both the Predynastic and Late Dynastic Egyptians are more closely related to the European cluster than they are to any of the other major regional clusters in the world.” In one fell swoop, he drives a stake through the heart of Bernal’s argument, those of the Afrocentrists, and not a few Africanists. Relying on skulls, but not blood groupings or DNA, Loring Brace, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan, tells us that heads do talk and that the ancient Egyptians were closer, at least head-wise, to Germans and Danes than they were to Somalis, Ethiopians, Nubians or Berbers.
Whoops.
