A Better Assembly Parable

So... it turns out that infographics are waaay too much work for some-one as lazy and inconsistent as me, as such this post (and most subsequent posts) will probably lack them :-(.

And now for our scheduled programming...

Having checked my page-views history thing, I realised to my surprise that my blog is occasionally read by non-South Africans (go internet!!). This means that I may have to explain some terminology and backstory before any of the following has context.

South Africa used to be a ruled by a super conservative Christian government. I was not alive during this time but if you want to find out more you can wikipedia apartheid. There were many important social consequences of the struggle. Other people bitch about that enough. What this post is about is the old "white" school system. Specifically, the old system was pretty heavily committed to bludgeoning the small impressionable masses with Christian ideology. All schools had bible studies as a compulsory subject, and what's known as assemblies which were essentially a combination between the weeks news and a scaled down sermon and hymn session.

(pictured above, loving thy neighbour)

Naturally when the new government came into power, there was a much stronger emphasis on racial and religious acceptance and freedom. It was decided that schools should be secular, but they were still run by the same people, so Bible Studies were simply converted into a new subject "Life Orientation", which over time actually gained a secular curriculum. Assemblies stayed though. I have nothing against Christianity as such (I'm not), but I don't think that anyone has the right to try to push their own religion and morals on other peoples children, and they just happen to be the group that this particular gripe tends to stem from.

Now, I went to 5 different schools and the level of secularity did vary quite drastically, and the people I'm about to comment on are actually amongst the better of them, because at least they tried and didn't just read from the bible like most of the others did. This implies that suddenly, instead of having a source book of fairly broad moral parables to quote, the teachers and administrators need to instead find other sources. One answer is to simply make up the stories, and the other is to take stories from chain e-mails and the more obfuscated metaphors from modern church services.

Notice how, it is simply taken as given, that it is the responsibility of the school system to imprint a set of morals on other peoples' children. This is because morality is universal (totally). So we have people, who aren't in the habit of thinking all that much about morality trying to bring across their view points in a way simplistic enough for a 6 year old to grasp, but with symbology strong enough to grip an older child. As such, there are no new parables being made up and all of them seem to be traceable to chain e-mails.

This often leads to direct translation of dualistic moralism into baby drivel. The worst case being an assembly parable I once heard, which was basically about how we should give people "warm fuzzies" as opposed to "cold pricklies". Why people thought to pass on this simplistic and basically pointless moral metaphor, boggles me. Almost as much as the fact that some-one got this in their in-box and actually thought "I can't think of anything more creative or politically correct than this".

(moral dualism)

The other major consequence is the Americanisation of the stories. The American conservative Christian population has much higher internet penetration (a picture of "internet penetration" may violate the terms of use) than the South African conservative Christian population. As such there are many fairly unrelatable metaphors that crop up. Specifically in terms of environmental metaphors based on species of creatures and plants that simply don't live in Africa, like bears and wolves and redwood.

(not Africa)

The other thing, is that (probably white) American's seem to have a trepidatious fascination with the folklore of the Native American people, and will often try to hide unrelated stories behind the wisdom of some figurative "Indian Chieftain". In South Africa, we have our own local people, with their own rich history of folklore for us to ignore and maladapt to our laboured moral metaphors.

In an attempt to show how little effort it would actually take to adapt one of these stories into a better form, I will now take a fairly typical example, and bit by bit make it better :P. I've heard this story at assemblies at at least 3 different schools: "A young child/brave asks his father/chieftain, 'Why is there evil in the world?', to which the father/chieftain responds: 'Inside each of us are two wolves, one made up of {list of undesirable philosophical abstracts} and the other made up of {list of desirable philosophical abstracts}'. 'The two are locked in mortal combat, determining the fate of your soul'. The young child/brave looks away in contemplation, then turns to the father/chieftain, 'Which wolf wins?'. 'The one that you feed the most.'"

What strikes me first about this story, is that the teller essentially gets to lump whatever traits they like into the litany of each wolf. As if all moral view-points imply others. I wouldn't be surprised to hear the evil wolf summarised as {greed, arrogance, ill-will, atheism, lust, anger, hatred} and the good as {benevolence, temperance, prudence, love, homophobia}. This is more a consequence of the black and white dualistic moralism, inherent in the people who select the stories.

(Moral Dualism)

The first thing I would do to fix the story, is take away the moral dualism, by converting the duel between two wolves into a larger melee of more appropriately separate forces, which may ally as they choose. Like maybe temperance and love could band together and kick homophobia in the nads, while greed and petty dissatisfaction gnaw on sincerity. That would be waaaay cooler than just 2 wolves which are poorly veiled metaphors for good and evil. Of course this means that you probably won't have the situation where one wolf wins, so much as you'll have a pack dynamic forming where some ideas are dominant and others are discarded. More like actual wolves, and well, actual people too. This would necessarily make the "determining your fate" thing kind of arbitrary. Yes, your decisions based off of your complex experiences and emotions, will affect how your life turns out. So the whole thing will be less "Feed your heaven wolf" and more "I have an army of wolves inside me!! Badass." (again, terms of use is all that's saving you)

After that, all that needs to be done is to Africanise it, by replacing the chieftain with a Sangoma and the wolves with lions.

(First Infantry Division "non-Conformity")