BOUGIE WOOGIE BABY: Additions and corrections to my most recent sincerism post.

Addition #1) I forgot to mention that the Misery essay Camassia links to sounds terrific (haven’t had a chance to read it yet) and very much gets at what I’m trying to do when I say that genre fiction can be more realistic than realism if your perspective is not that of the majority.

Addition #2) She’s also put up a really smart post exploring a) whether I’m just defending the cool pose, which I do think isn’t true though I can see where she’s getting that; and b) adding a bit of historical context.

Correction #1: As usual I was carried away by my rhetoric! I think it’s wrong to say that “…Christian translation should work, I think, the other way. In other words, in the translation from Pepper LaBeija’s language to Peter Sprigg’s, a Christian should seek to translate Spriggish into LaBeijan rather than visa-va-va-versa.” I’ll defend some degree of Spriggishness because I will always defend the bourgeoisie! I don’t want to join them, but I do realize that they are the people who make the world work, and the fact that I don’t share that vocation shouldn’t lead me to denigrate it. Besides which, my “LaBeijan” formulation suggests that Sophia herself may be found nestled comfortably within one subculture, which of course is not what I believe.

It would be more accurate to say that Christian translation should serve Truth at all times, and thus should introduce new and startling terms to both the Spriggish and LaBeijan dictionaries. And yet it’s worth noting that in most cases the minority/subcultural denizen will have a sharper understanding of the majority perspective than vice versa (and will get less credit for it). But yeah, Christ must radically reshape all of our perspectives, and we must accept no existing culture as sufficient.

Correction #2: Because I am a product of all the same cultural forces I decry, I twice used “choose” when I should’ve said something else. In the parenthetical “(I chose my leadership persona, so doesn’t that choice incorporate the persona into my ‘self’?)” I think “chose” should be “accepted” or “developed” or some other verb implying both unchosen elements and the work I did to shape those elements. (There are certain styles of leadership I can’t pull off, and I had to learn not to try them.)

And in the same paragraph, in the sentence, “It is leadership which guides you to the beauty or Beauty you could love enough to choose one set of syllogisms over another equally consistent,” “choose” should be replaced with “embrace.” I think that implies a greater degree of recognition rather than maximization of utils.