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Topic
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Impressive research! There’s a lot provided in the data-rendering and have only done a first pass.
Observations
*> the first decline of Biblical “jargon” appears soon after the so-called Glorious Revolution in England.
*> a brief reprise in the decline appears during the French revolution-Napoleonic era.
*> decline resumes in earnest post-revolutionary France, and during the emergence of a new ideology proper which will export the revolutions throughout the 20th century (and into the 21st century, culturally). This last point may open up possibilities for discussion.
Critique
Category error: ideologies.
Christianity is not an ideology, it is a religion. One might say: religion > culture > ideology.
Economics is hardly a full-fledged ideology. It is an expression, a tool of, (competing) ideologies perhaps, and even competing schools within an ideology but is essentially just a tool of the powerful (as CasP itself takes pains to demonstrate with the Chicago school etc). Once a question within moral philosophy it has typically since been a pseudo-science. As a scholar within CasP I know you know this.
However, the themes or topics intrinsic to economics (if meant more generally as say, the redistribution of wealth) are hardly foreign or obscure to Christianity. Economics are all over the place in the bible and in the writings of the Church up to the present day. This is to address an observation within the paper that admits Christian (limited to biblical texts, for some reason) language naturally excludes modern economic nomenclature simply due to chronology. Of course, but it does not exclude the topics and therefore not the discussion. Well, what are words without a discussion? Data? But even the rendering of words as mere data incorporates, even reifies them, ideologically.
Am I overstating or misreading if I seem to observe the thesis weighs the words in question equally (that is, not at all), thus rendering them quantifiable? That words are mere data? I get (I think) that you are more concerned about the relative usage and popularity of these words. But something about this whole process has me uneasy. Is it possible for language to be mere data? If I survey the contents of my room and notice many books and one wife must I conclude the books are more valuable?
The Church (and hence Christianity) has had much to say than simply Biblical texts on a wide range of topics, including economics. I wonder why you limited your sample source to Biblical texts.
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Hi Scott,
Thanks for the comments. Glad to know people are interested in this research. Some thoughts.
Christianity is not an ideology, it is a religion. One might say: religion > culture > ideology.
I’ve never been one to worry much about definitions. But I would probably put those words in a different order, at least in my understanding of human behavior.
Start with culture. It is everything that we do … the entire corpus of ideas and behaviors that constitute a society. Culture’s always have an ideological component (or many ideological components). Historically, religion (i.e. belief in a supernatural God) was the most important ideology. Today, the dominant ideology is secular.
To your main point, yes counting words is a very crude way of capturing an ideology. Counting words is not a substitute for actually reading and engaging with ideas. That said, we can do far more expansive analysis with word frequency that would be possible by reading the actual literature. I mean like 10 order of magnitude more data. I think there’s something to be said for that breadth.
Am I overstating or misreading if I seem to observe the thesis weighs the words in question equally
Yes and know. To define jargon, I weight words by their relative frequency in the text corpus. To count the frequency of this jargon in mainstream English, I just sum the relative frequency of these jargon words. Different jargon words contribute differently to the sum, based on their own frequency.
Note that I also use a different measure called the language similarity index. This measures the similarity of the entire corpus. So it absolutely does not weight each word equally.
Is it possible for language to be mere data? If I survey the contents of my room and notice many books and one wife must I conclude the books are more valuable?
I’m not sure I understand the question. Anything can be ‘mere data’. It’s what we do with the data the gives meaning. The point with word frequency is that it reveals what we’re talking about. From there, we can infer values … but with obvious difficulties. For example, I might talk a great deal about wars because I abhor them, not because I like them.
The Church (and hence Christianity) has had much to say than simply Biblical texts on a wide range of topics, including economics. I wonder why you limited your sample source to Biblical texts.
Very true. Likewise, economists have much to say other than what is in undergrad textbooks. But we have to start somewhere. I don’t think anyone would disagree that the Bible is the core of the Christian canon, or that econ textbooks are the core of the economics canon. If we want’ to do more nuanced analysis, we can select different parts of the canon.
On that front, something I’ve been meaning to do is digitize the Real-World Economics Review catalogue and see how the frequency of heterodox jargon has changed over time.
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On second pass —
You introduce ideology as essential. You then dive into what you feel must be done with it. But I seem to have missed your definition of it. What I find instead is an assumption. The assumption seems to have decided that every culturally-collective idea is an ideology. Like religions or tribal myths.
An effect of this particular definition is that it then makes culturally-collective ideas flat and interchangeable. Or, relative to each other. Following this, it apparently nullifies any need for further discussion of such ‘ideologies’, for ideology is made synonymous with whatever any large body of people (say a culture or nation or tribe) happen to subscribe to, for whatever reasons.
In broader terms, humans are a cultural species, which means that our behavior is driven in large part
by our collective ideas. How and why these ideas evolve is poorly understood.To clarify, our ideas are collective because we are cultural? Or are we cultural because our ideas are collective? If the former, why are we cultural? If the latter, why are our ideas collective?
Later, you state:
Accepting that economics textbooks promulgate an ideology, then their secular language becomes
significant. Why? Because in the past, most successful ideologies were tied to religion. The reason for
this connection is easy to understand. The crux of an ideology is that it presents a myth about the social
order….I’m curious how you arrived at this, when earlier you stated that the genius of collective ideas was “poorly understood”. You seem to feel it is perfectly understood.
[EDIT REASON: I was writing as your were posting! So this is not a response to your post as I have not seen it yet]
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A response to your post —
Anything can be ‘mere data’. It’s what we do with the data the gives meaning.
Yes, I think you understood my analogy. If I was unhappy with my wife the books may increase in value. 🙂
I mean, CP goes into depth explaining between nominal and real pricing. Same thing. Even with algorithms, of course. In fact, I think algorithms are likely the least trustworthy means of gaining an overview because: the nature of computing allows for huge sample sizes which by nature require ever more nuanced interpretations into mathematical formulae. To me the assumption is based upon the Cartesian notion of the so-called quantum world which — does just that: seeks or pretends to describe the real in mathematical formulae, to the point where it is now: mistaking the mathematical formulae for reality (Wolfgang Smith has written a lot on this)./rant
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I don’t think anyone would disagree that the Bible is the core of the Christian canon…
Well,
see, the Bible is composed as we know of the Old and New Testaments. The Old is canonical as it pertains to the cultural and historical and theological developments that gave birth to Christianity (Hebrew/Ancient Judaic). The New is Christianity itself. The New however, is mostly composed of the four gospels, with most of the rest being letters.
The basic point is if you want the core of Christianity you would need no more than the four gospels. However, this restricts your sample even more of course thus making your research results even more, well, stilted. For example, even though say some of the economic practices contained in Psalms or Deuteronomy are of course biblical and therefore, according to your usage, representative of Christianity, they are, at least mostly, irrelevant to general Christian practice (Deuteronomy in question pertaining to the use of livestock, the rights and privileges of the priestly class, sabbatical years, pertaining to cities of refuge, etc.)
So a possible refinement you may wish to consider for advancing this research area (which I agree, it is an ambitious start) is both narrowing and expanding your Christian word inputs to the New Testament (and include the letters by all means) and also Church texts. Also try researching non-Church, scholarly works by Catholic scholars and philosophers. Thomas Aquinas being the obvious example.
And the legislative and courts systems of Catholic European states, particularly those of the pre-modern era. I would imagine the documentation there would be massive.
A perhaps controversial source would be among the modernist school of historical criticism congealing in the Church towards the end of the 19th century. And of course the non-modernist scholars, many of which unfortunately are obscure to Western mainstream scholarship due to the severe rise to dominance of liberal ideological censorship within Western campuses and curriculums.
Yet again, let us not forget, this so-called secular, post-Christendom state and its institutions extends of course from the Catholic state. Even now, much of the language and concepts in place, though increasingly secularized, originated within the Catholic state.
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