Polite Kid

Well, why not resume my regular blog posts with a topic that is certain to be elicit sharply differing responses: Daniel Hannan -- who is himself controversial even on the right, expresses his opinion that the King James Bible is the greatest translation of all time.
I agree with him.
First, though, every time I make a reference to Hannan, someone will chime in that he is not on our side, not to be trusted, etc. I know his flaws and I may not agree with everything he says but he is right about many things. And he expresses himself with a clarity that is refreshing, especially by contrast with our forked-tongued American politicians and talking heads.
As for his high view of the King James Bible, that is, today, a controversial subject among Christians, and even non-Christians seem to feel strongly about it. There was a time when the King James Bible was THE version of the Bible for English-speaking people, although there have been others held in high regard, such as the Geneva Bible, which was the preferred translation for the Puritan fathers in this country. Actually the two versions seem very close, being both of them based in large part on the translation by Tyndale.
For being a partisan of the KJV, I have at least once been accused of 'bibliolatry', of worshipping a book rather than the Living God, which I think is a rather over-the-top accusation. To prefer that translation and to believe it inspired is not 'worship'. Tellingly, my liberal friend has used that same term as some of the conservative Christians who are negative toward the King James version.
So there are those who ridicule pro-KJV Christians, and then there are those who assert that 'the only way to get the real thing is to learn Koine Greek and Hebrew; the translations are flawed.' The fact is most people do not know Koine Greek and are not likely to learn it. Are we then left without a true version of the Bible, being deficient in ancient languages? Apparently so, according to these people. Apparently only the learned and the intellectually superior, then, can really read the Bible, since translations are not reliable.
Oddly the people who claim that all the existing translations are inadequate or flawed are often the people who claim that the latest 'modern' version is the best yet. The problem with that is that there are umpteen versions now, and new translations coming out every other day, it seems. That trend looks like going on indefinitely. It must be a profitable business for a number of people, this constant re-translating of the Bible and selling all the many new copies. And now of course there are Bibles aimed at every demographic. There are those hip new Bibles written in slangy modern American English, with some kind of trendy-looking covers to appeal to the young: Bibles covered in denim, or in Gothic-looking black, with fashionable typography. Then there are the Bibles especially for women, for blacks, for mothers, for dads.
It's all about packaging. But I've read through many of these upstart translations, and I find them to be lacking. The translations may have shed the archaic, old-timey style of the King James, but they are written in colorless, dull prose. The phrasings are often clumsy and awkward. They are flatfooted and unmemorable. Whatever you may say of the King James, it is written in a way that stays in the mind. Perhaps it's gone out of style to memorize Scripture, but it is infinitely easier to remember whole passages from the KJV than to learn and retain the same passages in the insipid prose of one of the newfangled translations.
Style, of course, is not all that matters -- though it does help to remember and retain the Scriptures, and it does add to the pleasure of reading. What matters is that with the more modern translations, somehow key meanings are changed, and it is just coincidental, I am sure, that certain passages having to do with homosexuality, for instance, are translated differently. For instance, in 1 Corinthians 6:9, the references to homosexuals are changed in certain versions to 'homosexual offenders' or 'prostitutes', in other words, homosexuality in and of itself is suddenly not condemned.
The newer versions, written by committees of 'scholars' with appropriately PC views, often subtly, or not-so-subtly, alter the passages which are not acceptable to 21st century sensibilities. Politics, consciously or not, affects the changes that are made.
And in the quest for a 'perfect translation', have these 'improvers' in fact undermined for all time the idea that Scripture is inspired and not subject to a consensus, and not to be re-written every time fashions change, to suit the times?
If we admit that 'errors were made' in the KJV then errors have been made in all other translations, too, and will be made in every proposed new version. I suppose this does not really matter in that most professing Christians these days do not believe that Scripture can be inspired or inerrant, or that God can preserve it.
Hannan's piece is about the superior style of the King James Version, its greatness as literature. There was a time when in English literature classes, the KJV was studied as literature. I remember one of my college English lit professors including the Book of Job as one of the greatest pieces of literature in our language. But that is not PC today; I expect the Book of Job is replaced in the curriculum by something by one of the black female writers.
Regardless of whether we like or prefer the King James Bible, or even know it, we have all heard phrases and words from it; it is part of our linguistic heritage just as is Shakespeare. Of course to a Christian it is more than just another well-written book, and much more than a museum piece.
I didn't even read the comments at Hannan's blog; I looked at the first few and it appears that there are the usual detractors and scoffers along with a few pedants. I'd rather not read it; it would only leave me feeling more discouraged about the state of our post-Christian and post-Western world. And right now I need something more encouraging.
Hannan finishes his piece with this rather odd paragraph:
The English and their kindred peoples are, in my experience, rather less spiritual than Arabs, and it would not occur to them to make an equivalent claim. None the less, the Authorised Version stands as perhaps the greatest translation of all time. The day will eventually come when our power dwindles, and all our pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre. But as long as English is spoken, and our canon preserved, ours will never be just another country.''
The Arabs more 'spiritual' than we are? I am not so sure about that. And if the English-speaking countries are consigned to the dustheap of history, to use the cliché, then the KJV will not outlive us because those who will inherit the earth will discard it, along with all of our heritage. There will surely be a dark age if the West and especially the Anglosphere falls.

Labels: Bible, Christendom, English Heritage, English Language

At the BBC website, there is an interesting short video having to do with Cecil Sharp's diaries. I can't embed it here, but you can click on the link to see it.
For those who may not know who Cecil Sharp was, as the video explains, he was a scholar in the early 20th century who collected traditional English folk ballads, and his search for still-extant old ballads took him to the Appalachian Mountains, where he found many, many English ballads still preserved.
I've written about Sharp and his work in the Appalachians previously, and this page has excerpts from his diaries. They make interesting reading.
''My experiences have been very wonderful so far as the people and their music is concerned. The people are just English of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. They speak English, look English, and their manners are old-fashioned English. Heaps of words and expressions they use habitually in ordinary conversation are obsolete, and have been in England a long time.
I find them very easy to get on with, and have no difficulty in making them sing and show their enthusiasm for their songs. I have taken down very nearly one hundred already, and many of these are quite unknown to me and aesthetically of the very highest value. Indeed, it is the greatest discovery I have made since the original one I made in England sixteen years ago.
This last week I spent three whole days, from 10 A.M. to 5.30 P.M., with a family in the mountains consisting of parents and daughter, by name Hensley. All three sang and the father played the fiddle. Maud and I dined with them each day, and the rest of the time sat on the veranda while the three sang and played and talked, mainly about the songs. I must have taken down thirty tunes from them and have not yet exhausted them. one ballad, The Cruel Mother, is by far the finest variant, both words and tune, which, in my opinion, has yet been found.
Of course, I am only at the beginning of things yet. I have been here seventeen days, but it looks as though I shall bring away with me a large amount of extremely valuable stuff, which when published will create a very great deal of interest in certain circles. Although the people are so English, they have their American quality that they are freer than the English peasant. They own their own land, and have done so for three or four generations, so that there is none of the servility which, unhappily, is one of the characteristics of the English peasant. With that praise, I should say that they are just exactly what the English peasant was one hundred or more years ago.''
Yes, Virginia, there were English-descended people in Appalachia. I know it's all the fashion to say that everybody there is/was descended from these fiery, warrior-like, fighting Scots-Irish, but Cecil Sharp found English people there.
In any case, for anybody who cares about our heritage, this is fascinating and rather poignant material. We do have a distinctive heritage, and it is being lost by the hour.
The short video is worth a look and a listen, and the linked website is interesting reading. Hat tip, by the way, to the Frank at the Kinist Forum for the link to the BBC video.

Labels: American Music Traditional Music, Appalachia, English Heritage

In the discussion of my earlier post on 'Founding Stock heritage', the question arose: would we be better off today had our colonial English ancestors not seceded, and instead remained under English rule? Or perhaps we would be better off if we had stayed a colony and presumably been granted dominion status like Canada, or been part of some kind of united English North America? (I am paraphrasing and adding a little of my own elaboration, but I think the spirit of the inquiry is intact in my version.)
I did a little ruminating on this question overnight, and a few questions arose in my mind. I suppose we might look at Canada as it exists now, and ask if our history would parallel theirs had we not become independent.
That thought led to the question in my mind: how is it that the Canadians differ in significant ways from Americans? We all are "children of a common mother".
I suppose Canada is the country that, superficially at least, is most like the United States. I have often thought that if I were to live in another country, Canada would be the one that would require the least cultural adjustment. Granted, when I first thought of that, I was quite liberal, and as I've moved rightward, back to the truths of my upbringing, Canada has become even more liberal. So I would not feel as much at home politically there. However, Canadian people, in my experience, are very congenial and polite, though I know many of them resent America's imperial politics and 'gun culture'. At the same time, many right-wing Americans disdain Canada for its liberalism.
But how did the differences between Canadians and Americans come to be? We did start out as English colonies, and we had similar mixes of settlers, from the British Isles as well as from France. So how did it come to be that our colonial ancestors became restive and rebellious and began to resist rule by our cousins in London, while the Canadians retained their allegiance to the Crown, and did not agitate for independence?
I often stress the role of genes in character and behavior. We are not too dissimilar from our Canadian brothers in our ancestral origins -- or we weren't, at first. And we did share a common culture in our British roots and our English language. Yet we seem to have grown apart.
One other commonality between the U.S. and Canada is our history with the 'indigenous peoples'. We share the frontier experience. According to some historians, our experience of the frontier, of the vast open spaces, of the conflict with the Indians -- these things made Americans the people they are, what with our 'rugged individualism' and our attachment to our right to bear arms.
''The Frontier Thesis, also referred to as the Turner Thesis, is the argument advanced by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 that the origin of the distinctive egalitarian, democratic, aggressive, and innovative features of the American character has been the American frontier experience. He stressed the process�the moving frontier line�and the impact it had on pioneers going through the process. In the thesis, the frontiercreated freedom, by "breaking the bonds of custom, offering new experiences, and calling out new institutions and activities."
Some people are adamant that Americans' fighting spirit comes from our 'Scots-Irish blood', you know, the 'born fighting' image.
Lately, however, it seems that the American 'spirit' of resistance is curiously absent, unless you count the Tea Parties, which is rather sad.
However, we and the Canadians have taken different turns.
This page gives some information on Canada's demographics.
Here, you can see a breakdown by ethnicity.
My impression has always been that Canada has quite a lot of Scottish blood, perhaps more, in proportion to population, than America. And the statistics seem to indicate that.
Why, then, are they not the fighters and the rebels? Canada also has a fair amount of Irish-descended people. Surely all this 'fiery Celtic blood' should have made the Canadians more feisty, but overall we tend to think of Canadians as a very pacific people.
Genetics and culture don't seem to account for much of the difference between us. Or can it be that the stereotypes of the 'Celtic' peoples are not altogether true?
Whatever the reason, America and Canada diverged, culturally and politically. And it seems that the Canadian government is now even more attached to, and enamored of, multiculturalism and diversity than our benighted government.
So paradoxically, though we and Canada diverged, we are becoming similar in our 'diversity' and multicultural, polyglot populations. Isn't it strange how 'diversity' breeds uniformity?
I think it's a little futile to think about how we might have been better off had we stayed under English rule, or how we might have fared had we and Canada been merged into one political unit.
'We' wouldn't have been 'we', then, or would we? Things would have taken a different course. But we will never know, will we? Unless, of course, the globalist overlords openly proclaim the 'North American Union' that they have been engineering for decades. Then both we and Canada will be united in some polyglot mixed-multitude political unit, bearing little to no resemblance to the countries we've known and loved.
Overall, I think it was better that our Founding Fathers won our independence. Being governed by those closer to us, in a smaller-scale government (as existed at the beginning of our Republic) is preferable to being governed by a far-off government which is usually not in touch with the needs or concerns of a group of subjects across the ocean. As H.P. Lovecraft noted in the essay I quoted earlier, there was not any anti-British xenophobia involved in our secession. We were all of the same people; it was not like casting off foreign rule, as some would make it.
It is unfortunate -- no, it's tragic, that our Republic as it was originally founded could not be maintained. I say it could not be maintained, because our Founders were very explicit that the system they set up was not suitable to a rabble or a group of disparate peoples. They said that the system would not be suitable to any but a moral and religious people -- which we have not been for some time now. And most people who give any thought to these things know that a representative government depends on the people being reasonably educated and literate, informed, and responsible. Does this describe our current American electorate?
So our Republic has been gutted from the inside, by a number of factors, and it's to be determined whether it can be salvaged, or whether it is even desirable to salvage it.
It's certainly interesting to ponder over ''what if?'' -- what if we had not become independent? But we can never really know how things would have turned out.
But perhaps thinking about these things -- such as what made America the country it has become? -- will give us opportunity to think about where we are going, and how we can avoid the gross mistakes of the past.
I feel sure that if our colonial fathers could have foreseen what would become of their country, perhaps they would not even have bothered to shed their blood to create it. And that is a bitter realization.

Labels: American Character, American History, American Revolution, Canada, English Heritage