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November 04, 2003
Bright Be that as it may, it will be instructive to see if bright catches on. It certainly addresses the negativity problem: as The Chronicle of Higher Education has noted, "not incidentally, the word makes [atheists] all seem exceptionally smart." Still, the annals of semantic substitution of this sort—in which a name change is proposed for an entire group of people, and everyone goes along—are not voluminous. During the past few decades we have seen gay largely replace homosexual, and Native American replace Indian. Underprivileged has supplanted poor people. We no longer have housewives—we have homemakers.As an agnostic liberal I find all this renaming of peoples to be incredibly annoying. I suppose at least I'll find out to some small degree what it's like to be a Negro or a dwarf... But to my surprise and joy our narrative evolves quickly into this sort of thing: In the god-drenched eras of the past there was a tendency to attribute a variety of everyday phenomena to divine intervention, and each deity in a vast pantheon was charged with responsibility for a specific activity—war, drunkenness, lust, and so on. "How silly and primitive that all was," the writer Louis Menand has observed. In our own period what Menand discerns as a secular "new polytheism" is based on genes—the alcoholism gene, the laziness gene, the schizophrenia gene.[...biochemists' narrow field of vision notwithstanding.] Must start reading The Atlantic more regularly. It's in the sidebar, you know... [permalink | reply | tb ]
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