Swarming the Pub(l)ic Square:

A continuing survey of the farce; or, where the folks are given the last word; or, a pointed laugh

by Gassalasca Jape, S. J.

aving returned at last to his office in Crim Tartary, and availing himself of his superior’s speediest carrier pigeons, Fr. Gassalasca Jape, S.J. (Pantagrueliste and Controversialist Extraordinaire giving aid and comfort to Misfit Traditionalists everywhere) has resumed his regular business of reformative suggestions for sinners and heretics all, hammer and tongs. He recounts at length his Amazonian sojourn with the Pirahã and subsequently with North American moralistic-therapeutic-biblical-experimentalists. Along the way, Fr. Jape exhorts the One True Church to learn to save souls from the abyss without recourse to mathematics. Next he inadvertently visits a “mega-church,” gets lost and befuddled in its restroom facility, breaks the Buddhist monastic law against stehpinklen, and Gerhard Schroeder warns him of the penalties. Finally he opines on the Naugle-Heller debate and contemns the editors of Christianity Today and Books & Culture to a purgatorial reward amid mighty blasts of his trump against whiggish evangelicals, the therapeutic church, “worldview studies,” and more.

Understanding the Pirahã
Lost in the Mega-Church: Sitzpinkeln oder Stehpinkeln?
The World-View of A Gelical Prufrock
A Mighty Blast of the Trump Against the Monstrous Rule of Evangelical Women
The Outrageous Ideas of Mark Noll

Understanding the Pirahã

For roughly the last half of 2004, I found myself on a singularly bizarre mission, and I do not doubt I was sent on it for largely punitive reasons by my superiors who enjoy (as do I) the humor of Will Self’s fiction, particularly “Understanding the Ur-Bororo” from The Quantity Theory of Insanity.

Far more daunting than the fictional Ur-Bororo are the very real Pirahã. The main source of amazement about them to the academic world (and a stumbling-block to the Church) is their inability to count. The Pirahã lack numbers in their language. The most they are capable of is “one-ish” (which may mean one, two or three), “two-ish” (which may mean two, three, or four), “few,” and “many.” “More” or “less than” do not exist; they are alien concepts. Five can be distinguished from eight, but not five from six. Only one other tribe, the Mundurukú, has a similar facility, but they actually have a number–just one–“ebadipdip,” but it may mean three, four, five, or six. (Usually it is just four.) Astonishingly, all the Pirahã adults have proved incapable of learning the most basic mathematics after months of lessons. Moreover, the Pirahã have no creation myths, no fictional tales of any kind, no memory of events that go back more than two generations, and no interest in the future.

In one anthropologist’s view, despite their efforts and expressed interest in learning, the Pirahã have evolved a protective cognitive barrier between their minds and any abstract thought. This barrier is based in a fundamental principle of survival:

The principle is that the Pirahã see themselves as intrinsically different from, and better than, the people around them; everything they do is to prevent them from being like anyone else or being absorbed into the wider world. One of the ways they do this is by not abstracting anything: numbers, colours, or future events. This is the reason why the Pirahã have survived as Pirahã while tribes around them have been absorbed into Brazilian culture.

Thus it is a calculated but unconsciously willful ignorance that has enabled the Pirahã to survive as a community with their linguistic-cultural integrity.

This trait both disturbs and appeals, for it has crossed my mind that perhaps the Pirahã are, in some ways, superior to most Western Christians who are at once radically absorbed with the forces of secularism, materialism and the prevailing Culture of Death while also proving themselves incapable of much abstract reasoning. Indeed, they might be better without it, if knowledge only makes men unhappy, as it’s often been said. But then again, the Pirahã are not ignorant in areas where most of us are. Few modern folk have the skill and familial-communal resources to build their own homes, hunt, farm, fish, procreate and raise their offspring in such ways that also sustain and renew the community and its skills and resources. Untoward influences on the radically dependent life are inevitable because so much is needed for its mere survival, and the business of living must be carried out on terms set by outsiders of one kind or another. Of course it is a devil’s deal to choose between concrete skill and cultivated abstract thought. Tragically their glorious synthesis has not been seen since the first reformations of the church with the development of the various Monastic rules…

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