![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I know you're all dying to know about our All Staff Training Day event, the conclusion of all the drama around management, unruly staff, and Orson Scott Card.
Let me start by saying that without a doubt, it was the best ASTD I have been to.
It turns out that when you get a lot of people pissed about something, they come to your event full of energy and ideas and snark, and you can bond over that instead of awkward small talk. Was this the sneaky trick to boost our morale and liking for our coworkers at the expense of the relationship between workers and leadership? If so, then well played, management. Well played.
I honestly expected not to say much about Orson Scott Card's speech. I expected it to be about the process of writing, or of getting published, or insight into one or more of his books -- all of which might be interesting, but hardly fascinating gossip fodder. We were told he was going to talk about his writing, or the writing process, or general authorhood -- the kind of things you'd hire an award-winning author to talk about.
He started by discussing the eating habits of baboons.
From there, via a long and winding path, he reached language development. I believe that the point of his talk was "Language makes us different from other animals, and stories are cool", but I can not say so with any certainty.
So. He started with baboons, and the amount of time they spend eating, and therefore not talking. He moved on to human's being group hunters, benefiting from being social animals. So far, so good -- if totally out of left field. The hunting thing was marred by harping on innate gender differences, but, hey, very early humans did have more of that, so whatever. There was a bit more on development of language and how it aided early humans (up 'till this point it sounded like a Stephen Pinker book with less hedging around the evo-psych), and suddenly Exhibit A of the power of language was:
If you're feeling charitable at this point you may suspect that he was trying to make the point that our cultural baggage, both good and bad, is carried via language. You shouldn't be charitable. He went on to say of course women pick guys based on cars, because while men are all interested in fucking as many women as possible, women want either the biggest, scariest guy, or the one who's rich. With additional assertions that abused women stay with their abusers because a man who can abuse is also a man big enough and strong enough to protect you from other men.
I shit you not.
(My automatic NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE defensive response to 99% of all Evolutionary Psychology had well and truly kicked in by this point, btw, and I was live-tweeting it).
BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE.
After a bit about how awesome it was that women could talk while babies were stuck on their tits because they weren't busy chewing leaves (he really is fond of baboons) he wandered into how we were all human and empathy is beautiful (a tad ironic considering he's an anti-gay-rights activist) and illustrated the idea of empathy by referring to New Testament stories as if everyone in the room could be assured of knowing the context,* so the story itself didn't need explaining (there was also a bit about how 'everyone skips part X of the book of Mormon, ha ha', but he did acknowledge that only mormons would get it).
He moved onto written language, with stops at the Great Vowel Shift and a detour to "Change is good! Change is natural!" (I must assume he was referring to linguistic, not societal, change). Then back to written language and the wonder of alphabets and syllabaries.
Now, there's a pretty solid argument to be made that an alphabet (the concept, not necessarily ours) is the most flexible way to efficiently communicate a language, so I had no problem when he said that the alphabet was more efficient than ideograms. You have to memorize a hell of a lot more symbols to be literate in ideographic language, it's harder to manage loan words, etc.**
But.
He decided to enforce his point by saying:
...which is about the time I switched from 'disgruntled muttering' to 'repressed maniacal laughter.' It got very loud inside my head: "ASIANS DO NOT EAT BROTH WITH CHOPSTICKS! EUROPEANS DO NOT HAVE A MONOPOLY ON THE SPOON! EVERY ONE EVERYWHERE USED KNIVES FOREVER! YOU CAN DRINK SOUP FROM A MUG OMG IT WILL BLOW YOUR MIND!"
He spent awhile back on what I presume was his original point; that language is an amazing thing, and that the written word allows us to have 'conversations' and feel the power of language despite great distances or centuries. There was a lot of obligatory-for-library-talks stuff about how awesome books were, how awesome we were.
And, oh, yeah, somewhere in there he pointed out the fact that naming conventions generally morph such that 'masculine' names become feminine-acceptable, and that this is an indicator that unfortunately sexism still exists. Which, y'know, is TRUE, but I think a better indicator that it exists is the way he dissed hypothetical Edna up there and reduced all the wimmins to defining ourselves by what we look for in a baby daddy. JUST A THOUGHT.
And that was Orson Scott Card's talk.
On all technical levels he was an excellent speaker. He has presence, he has flow. He knows delivery. He made some jokes that were genuinely funny, and he can do self-deprecating humor. The talk felt like one long digression over-all, but he was always engaging.
He's very clearly an intelligent man -- an intelligent man so absolutely trapped in his own small world that he doesn't have the faintest concept that what he's saying isn't absolute truth. It was a perfect example of the blindness of privilege; a veritable mountain of unexamined assumptions heaped on each other to form a speech.
[Stay tuned for the second installment, when I regale you with stories of Father Pete, the Benedictine Comedian, and other wacky hijinks!]
*HR did schedule ASTD on Yom Kippur, so none of the Jewish staff were present. At least one less minority who didn't know what the hell he was talking about was saved it! Way to go, HR. You never cease to amaze.
**There are also benefits, like the fact that Mandarin speaking people and Cantonese speaking people can read each others' writing.
Let me start by saying that without a doubt, it was the best ASTD I have been to.
It turns out that when you get a lot of people pissed about something, they come to your event full of energy and ideas and snark, and you can bond over that instead of awkward small talk. Was this the sneaky trick to boost our morale and liking for our coworkers at the expense of the relationship between workers and leadership? If so, then well played, management. Well played.
I honestly expected not to say much about Orson Scott Card's speech. I expected it to be about the process of writing, or of getting published, or insight into one or more of his books -- all of which might be interesting, but hardly fascinating gossip fodder. We were told he was going to talk about his writing, or the writing process, or general authorhood -- the kind of things you'd hire an award-winning author to talk about.
He started by discussing the eating habits of baboons.
From there, via a long and winding path, he reached language development. I believe that the point of his talk was "Language makes us different from other animals, and stories are cool", but I can not say so with any certainty.
So. He started with baboons, and the amount of time they spend eating, and therefore not talking. He moved on to human's being group hunters, benefiting from being social animals. So far, so good -- if totally out of left field. The hunting thing was marred by harping on innate gender differences, but, hey, very early humans did have more of that, so whatever. There was a bit more on development of language and how it aided early humans (up 'till this point it sounded like a Stephen Pinker book with less hedging around the evo-psych), and suddenly Exhibit A of the power of language was:
"If your friend tells you 'Fred's taking Edna to prom, heh heh, wonder why,' you know it's because Edna's easy. But if the friend says 'Edna's taking Fred t prom, heh heh, wonder why,' you know it's because he's rich and has a car! Why? Because of gossip!"
If you're feeling charitable at this point you may suspect that he was trying to make the point that our cultural baggage, both good and bad, is carried via language. You shouldn't be charitable. He went on to say of course women pick guys based on cars, because while men are all interested in fucking as many women as possible, women want either the biggest, scariest guy, or the one who's rich. With additional assertions that abused women stay with their abusers because a man who can abuse is also a man big enough and strong enough to protect you from other men.
I shit you not.
(My automatic NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE defensive response to 99% of all Evolutionary Psychology had well and truly kicked in by this point, btw, and I was live-tweeting it).
BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE.
After a bit about how awesome it was that women could talk while babies were stuck on their tits because they weren't busy chewing leaves (he really is fond of baboons) he wandered into how we were all human and empathy is beautiful (a tad ironic considering he's an anti-gay-rights activist) and illustrated the idea of empathy by referring to New Testament stories as if everyone in the room could be assured of knowing the context,* so the story itself didn't need explaining (there was also a bit about how 'everyone skips part X of the book of Mormon, ha ha', but he did acknowledge that only mormons would get it).
He moved onto written language, with stops at the Great Vowel Shift and a detour to "Change is good! Change is natural!" (I must assume he was referring to linguistic, not societal, change). Then back to written language and the wonder of alphabets and syllabaries.
Now, there's a pretty solid argument to be made that an alphabet (the concept, not necessarily ours) is the most flexible way to efficiently communicate a language, so I had no problem when he said that the alphabet was more efficient than ideograms. You have to memorize a hell of a lot more symbols to be literate in ideographic language, it's harder to manage loan words, etc.**
But.
He decided to enforce his point by saying:
"It's like chopsticks. Some people manage with chopsticks just fine, I know, but I can't eat soup with them! You just can't eat soup with chopsticks. So, I'm sorry, but a fork, knife, and spoon are just better."
...which is about the time I switched from 'disgruntled muttering' to 'repressed maniacal laughter.' It got very loud inside my head: "ASIANS DO NOT EAT BROTH WITH CHOPSTICKS! EUROPEANS DO NOT HAVE A MONOPOLY ON THE SPOON! EVERY ONE EVERYWHERE USED KNIVES FOREVER! YOU CAN DRINK SOUP FROM A MUG OMG IT WILL BLOW YOUR MIND!"
He spent awhile back on what I presume was his original point; that language is an amazing thing, and that the written word allows us to have 'conversations' and feel the power of language despite great distances or centuries. There was a lot of obligatory-for-library-talks stuff about how awesome books were, how awesome we were.
And, oh, yeah, somewhere in there he pointed out the fact that naming conventions generally morph such that 'masculine' names become feminine-acceptable, and that this is an indicator that unfortunately sexism still exists. Which, y'know, is TRUE, but I think a better indicator that it exists is the way he dissed hypothetical Edna up there and reduced all the wimmins to defining ourselves by what we look for in a baby daddy. JUST A THOUGHT.
And that was Orson Scott Card's talk.
On all technical levels he was an excellent speaker. He has presence, he has flow. He knows delivery. He made some jokes that were genuinely funny, and he can do self-deprecating humor. The talk felt like one long digression over-all, but he was always engaging.
He's very clearly an intelligent man -- an intelligent man so absolutely trapped in his own small world that he doesn't have the faintest concept that what he's saying isn't absolute truth. It was a perfect example of the blindness of privilege; a veritable mountain of unexamined assumptions heaped on each other to form a speech.
[Stay tuned for the second installment, when I regale you with stories of Father Pete, the Benedictine Comedian, and other wacky hijinks!]
*HR did schedule ASTD on Yom Kippur, so none of the Jewish staff were present. At least one less minority who didn't know what the hell he was talking about was saved it! Way to go, HR. You never cease to amaze.
**There are also benefits, like the fact that Mandarin speaking people and Cantonese speaking people can read each others' writing.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 01:46 pm (UTC)From:I guess in order to maintain the cognitive dissonance necessary to be that against LGBT people, you have to maintain a whole distorted worldview structure to support it.
no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 05:56 pm (UTC)From:I think a lot of people don't suffer cognitive dissonance because they're amazing at compartmentalization, basically. Not something I could manage.
no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 02:47 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 04:40 pm (UTC)From:In regards to OSC, this is exactly what I expected from him. I'm mostly impressed that you could be coherent about it after; my cortex would have seized up at his first crap and I'd have been unable to process anything that came after.
Stasia
no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 05:48 pm (UTC)From:He had enough stuff that was random rather than offensive -- going back to baboon mutterings, for instance -- that my brain had enough chance to process his most recent pronouncement before moving on to the next. It's the only way it wasn't coming out my ears.
Work today is great. Even the people who thought we had our panties in a twist and were taking things too personally are walking around saying "What just happened? What was that? Was that what it was supposed to be?"