I work as a carpenter around fifty hours per week. Another thirty or so, I devote to activities related to my socio-political writing. The rest of my time, I spend with my wife and children. Once or twice a month, I use this cathartic space to entertain myself with language as I work periodic anxieties and lamentations around into meaning and hope. And yet, the likes of Christine — who wouldn't know me from Dostoevsky — feel no compunction about entering my online home, as it were, and declaring:
I have inadvertently stumbled upon your blog and started reading through it - here's a suggestion for you - instead of feeling sorry for yourself like the world has somehow done you wrong and that we all owe you something. Stop wasting so much time on your precious blog whining about it and get out there and make the life for yourself that you feel you are entitled to.You are what's wrong with society - everyone is a victim and invited to the world wide pity party.
Suck it up and do something.
I suppose that in some worldviews, a hardworking and socially involved family man who now and then uses literary habits deliberately to work through unbidden morosities is what's wrong with society. Personally, I'm more concerned that folks who mistakenly believe they've a talent for decisive and life-redefining snap judgments (involving others' lives, of course) have a say in our nation's governance and in both their professional and private lives exert some sort of influence over other people.
Thank you, Christine. You've given me another depressing thought to overcome with words.
Click here for a streaming MP3 reading of the following. (Click here to download it.)
During my (paid) 15 minute break in the morning and my (not paid) half-hour lunch as a carpenter, I've leaned against gateways and taken in views that other families must spend generations accruing the wealth to enjoy. Workers can develop a feeling of temporary ownership of the empty mansions in which they toil for most of their waking hours, and for the average construction crew, there's nothing so humanizing of the young billionaire as cutting a hole for duct-work in his bedroom and finding his stash of naughty DVDs hidden on the tippy-top of a nine-foot shelf. Far from solidifying a kindred sense, however, these mild epiphanies that the rich and the working are all human — sharing traits both transcendent and base — make differences in standing and perspective even less comprehensible.
Many's the time I've turned to my younger coworkers — most, I suspect, not accustomed to such lunchtime conversation — and wondered aloud what effect it must have on the psyche to have so much. When I had a dog to walk, I would most nights pass a view that brought regular feelings of spontaneous gratitude to God for having created the world thus, and I owned neither the perch nor the view. I imagine that people born of great wealth must feel as if those views were created for them. Leisure time, fantastic settings, great privileges — such is life. Their life.
It can be difficult working in their ocean-front mansions during the families' in-town season. In winter, the rich are phantoms — no more real than when one sees them on television or reads of them in books — and one scarcely believes the groundskeepers that they exist at all. When they do stop by to review the projects' progress, they seem more like character actors in an elaborate illusion than living conduits of tremendous wealth. In the summer, the tradesman must watch, while he toils, as they enjoy their vacation from... what? Their lives are vacations. It would be edifying to follow them around for a while — here and wherever it is that they go in the fall — to investigate just what they do. They fill their houses with superfluous furniture; with what do they fill their days?
Don't get me wrong. Some such folk are wonderful people. I've recognized, in my time as a driver of nails, an exuded gratitude and respect when I'm the guy who can, for example, fix a door so that the dogs cannot sneak out and be mauled again by the coyotes that are attracted to the acres of open land. The experience of months of intensive doggy-care has exposed some vulnerability that I have the knowledge, skill, and tools to prevent from being chafed once more. But always interceding in such interactions is my knowledge, and their apparent ignorance, that with less labor than I am expending, they could fix the debt problem that has dogged me for over a decade.
Perhaps they are unaware of their own ability to fix doors, as it were, or maybe lifetimes of outreached hands have led them to do the math concerning the cost of too dramatically indulging a sense of responsibility. They would be able to solve a great many people's problems, and yet they aren't able to solve them all, so it could be that they learn early on (in youth, perhaps,
and subconsciously) not to burden themselves with finding their own boundaries for giving, taking instead those that society has defined. Our society, unfortunately, has defined them poorly, not only through the legitimization of avarice, but by its tendency to grab for, rather than apply pressure for, wealth.
It is a shame, and detrimental, that our too secular society seems intent on rubbing out the distinction between obligation and responsibility. Yes, responsibilities can be shirked, but explicit and enforceable obligations give the impression that responsibility ends with them. For a brief while — of which we under fifty sometimes hear tell — America seemed to have faith in the shapeless forces of cultural expectations, one of which held it a courtesy to allow others a chance to accelerate. Now, it appears that only coyotes and the fortunate carpenter may come and go past the walls that attempts to manage the distribution of wealth, and the stoked strategic concomitant of class envy, helped to inspire.
Having been mildly intrigued by the commercials for it, I recently watched V for Vendetta, and as Christian conservatives often observe in the world of contemporary art and entertainment, the particular fantasy most emphasized in film was the liberal fantasy of standing up against conservative tyranny.
The basic outline of the story is compelling (if common) enough. A budding dictatorial politician, while seeking to develop a biological weapon, creates a superhero who will one day topple his regime. The dictator follows a clichéd Hitlerian model both of method and of aesthetic and, in an absolutely believable progression, begins rounding up and executing opposition and activists. Even his portrayal as a religious demagogue is, if predictable and unimaginative, not distracting within the plot (perhaps because it is so completely predictable).
The jarring imposition of the writers' ideology makes its appearance, however, with the unexplained revelation of a homosexual holocaust. One can suppose that the authors leave it as understood that the dictator villified gays in order to tug at public sentiment and redirect proper righteous feelings away from himself. That's believable enough, given all that must be accepted for the sake of the story to that point, but what disrupts the theatrical illusion is the emphasis on the tribulations of that small group.
It also doesn't comport with trends that we actually find in reality (especially in England), which the writers would have us believe could in fact lead to the fantasy world that they have created. Witness:
A police force was caught up in a freedom of speech row after its officers arrested an anti-gay campaigner for handing out leaflets at a homosexual rally.South Wales police admitted evangelical Christian Stephen Green was then charged purely because his pamphlets contained anti-gay quotations from the Bible. ...
In recent months incidents have included a Metropolitan Police warning to author Lynette Burrows that she was responsible for a 'homophobic incident' after she suggesting on a BBC Radio Five Live programme that gays did not make ideal adoptive parents.
Another warning about future behaviour was delivered by Lancashire police who visited the home of a Christian couple after they complained about their local council's gay rights policies.
The Met Police in London also investigated former Muslim Council of Britain leader Sir Iqbal Sacranie after he gave an interview saying homosexuality was harmful. However, no prosecution followed in that case.
The Hollywooden would do well — not the least because it would make them better artists — to realize that emotions can be stoked from more directions than the right.
ADDENDUM:
I should temper this post with an acknowledgment that the source of my quotation, the Daily Mail, is also recently notable for apparently having concocted friction — or at least unjustifiably embellishing it — between Pope Benedict and an evolution-believing priest, Father George Coyne, Vatican Observatory head for nearly three decades. Indeed, the Mail article in question exposes itself as shoddy work by the incoherency of its storyline's logic.
I'm in the market, so to speak, for a relatively readable history of early civilizations — a survey or starting point for further study, whether in depth or chronology. Such things are apparently difficult to find, outside of the dessicated world of text books. At any rate, I figured I'd attempt the obvious route and see where the menues of Barnes & Noble might take me. Well, narrowing my results from history to world history to civilization - history to ancient civilization - history, I found the following top 10 recommendations:
Now, some of these books may or may not be interesting to the average reader of such texts, but I can't help but wonder: are we really that well informed about history that we've narrowed our interests to sexual orientation and women's lib? Or are we really that ignorant of history to have narrowed our interests to same?
Heck, I'd bet the average American reader would actually learn, from this list, that ancient Rome transitioned into Medieval Europe!
Discussion of whether Superman and Batman — superheroes adored by generations of boys — are homosexual. In The Providence Journal. And there's evidence:
When I mention all the commercial time that Warner Bros. has bought for the movie on the Logo cable channel, all three say this is pretty strong evidence that Warner's may think that Superman is gay. Logo bills itself as the channel for "Gay America."The Harley hat says the only comic-book hero she's sure is gay is Batman. Her friend to her right says she heard George Clooney during an interview say that he had played him as gay in Batman and Robin.
This must be what happens when the darker sides of a culture switch from masturbation to mastication.
Isn't it just too perfect that MTV's product challenger to the iPod would be called the "Urge"? Apparently, the company will offer a pricing structure with increasingly deep discounts as the content approaches pornography.
Michelle Malkin, conveying the hard-Leftism of the actress who played the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, asks:
Sort of dampens one's enthusiasm to see the next Narnia movie, doesn't it?
Not at all. What a perfect villain; I'm sure Mr. Lewis would approve — not the least because the subtext ads significance to the often questioned presence of Santa Clause in Narnia. One suspects that Tilda Swinton would block him from the public square, as well.
"Numbers don't lie," writes Leslie Wylie in the cover story of the latest Metro Pulse, "Abstinence Ed., Are Your Tax Dollars Funding an Agenda of Fear?" To an extent, of course, she's correct; it's usually the words and context around the numbers that introduce falsehoods. Take, for example, some of the particular numbers with which Wylie follows her assertion:
The country's teen pregnancy rate is 84 pregnancies per 1,000 females ages 15 thru 19, a much higher rate than in any other developed country (twice as high as in England or Canada, and nine times higher than the Netherlands or Japan). Fifty-six percent result of these pregnancies result in birth; 30 percent result in abortion; and 14 percent result in miscarriage.
The error is in the "is": Her U.S. data is from the year 2000. Number-people will note that it is currently 2006. The international comparisons, meanwhile, if the Guttmacher Institute's relevant fact sheet is evidence, are from the "mid-1990s." Undeterred by matters of tense, Wylie allows Corrine Rovetti, director of the Knoxville Center for Reproductive Health, to run with the stats:
As did the representatives from PPA [Planned Parenthood Association], Rovetti points to studies that have been done that disprove the effectiveness of abstinence-only education. "As a developed country, we still have the highest rates of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease," she says. "That's a travesty. It's frightening. I can't overemphasize enough what a dangerous approach the abstinence-only program is."
And it's the abstinence-only advocates who have "an agenda of fear"? Considering that the article emphasizes the federal funds allocated toward abstinence-until-marriage education by the Title V program — which wasn't implemented until 1997, the first of at least seven years in a row during which the proportion of high school students who had had sex at least once (PDF) was below 50% — it may be a bit premature to panic.
Via Instapundit.
One thought from gay-rights activist Chai Feldblum in that Maggie Gallagher piece lodged itself in my mind yesterday afternoon and evening:
Sexual liberty should win in most cases. There can be a conflict between religious liberty and sexual liberty, but in almost all cases the sexual liberty should win because that's the only way that the dignity of gay people can be affirmed in any realistic manner.
The reference to "sexual liberty" feels displaced from modern reality. If the Internet has proven anything, it is that, with the (perhaps temporary) exception of pedophilia, sexual liberty is nearly total. As a matter of law, there are virtually no boundaries on sexual practice, as long as they are consensual and (for the time being) not performed in full view of a non-consenting audience.
For her statement to have any coherency, Feldblum must mean "liberty" from the consequences that come from others' judgment. What she's placing in conflict, therefore, are:
Relationships are reduced to the type of sex that their members have, all are leveled, and that equivalence becomes enforced by law — even to the point of prohibiting the free exercise of religion. The activists' argument then becomes, in the words of Human Rights Campaign president Joe Solmonese, that discriminatory practice X "has nothing to do whatsoever with faith." There's a type of madness in this logic:
Perhaps even today we stumble on the next bullet:
For her part, Feldblum attempts to skirt the issue with a neutral view of essentials:
"It seemed to me the height of disingenuousness, absurdity, and indeed disrespect to tell someone it is okay to 'be' gay, but not necessarily okay to engage in gay sex. What do they think being gay means?" she writes in her Becket paper. "I have the same reaction to courts and legislatures that blithely assume a religious person can easily disengage her religious belief and self-identity from her religious practice and religious behavior. What do they think being religious means?"
But to truly believe in that neutrality would require the conclusion that the sexual orientation category is at best legislatively protected, while religion is constitutionally protected. Even agreeing with Feldman's view — which I do not — would require a focus on constitutional amendment, not on courts and regular legislation. There is an unmistakable haze around Feldblum's analysis of which liberty "should win": Should win as a matter of current law, or should win according to some emoted political principle that the people of, by, and for whom the government exists have not willingly taken as their own?
This thoughtless procession is in keeping with the underlying absurdity of appealing to "sexual liberty" as grounds to change the meaning of marriage. Marriage — especially in the degree to which expectation and validation are involved — is intimately tied to the curbing of sexual appetites. It is therefore not surprising that we find, in the conflict between religious liberty and sexual liberty, the mechanism whereby unleashing the sexual drive has served to enslave us.
The ever insightful Paul Cella writes:
... in fact prejudice — that is, prejudgment — is a neutral thing, which can indeed issue in oppression, but can also issue in liberation. To cultivate in men a prejudice against some abiding error, or against some recurrent evil, is to free them from oppression, not set the yoke of it upon them.
Just so, the sexual liberationists are bound by the dictates of their driving motivation, which isn't the sex itself, but the rationalization and justification of it and absolution of those who engage in it. Theology, politics, civil philosophy, economics — all — must accommodate the sexual behavior. If that means undermining the Constitution for the formless benefit of affirming "the dignity of gay people," so be it. If it means tripping up and forcing out those people and practices that carry a dwindling torch of authority from our ancestors, so much the better.
The greater evil lies not in the visceral sin, but in the desire to excuse it, for though it may carry simplicity's tone, one cannot help but hear indications that the rationalization, the justification, and the insistence on absolution have much less to do with the "for what" than with the "from whom." In the context of privacy, Cella points to proof of the lifelong adolescence of the modern culture, in the person of those who "really think Larry Flynt is a free speech hero." They are correct only inasmuch as "free speech" translates as "sticking it in the eye of some parent-figure authority. "
Not even an actual authority, but a facile caricature of a representative of a messenger from an authority whom much of Western Society rejected so long ago that it doesn't remember the sincere, warm assurance that the rules are not restraints, but steps toward transcendence. Those who would recast liberty as freedom from the guiding hand of others' judgment would do well to ponder, as they jerk themselves away, whether it is possible to have dignity while tumbling.
Shortly after 2:00 p.m. today, I'll be discussing Israel's recent euthanasia law with Howie Barte on WHJJ, 920 on the AM radio dial.
I wasn't sure on which blog my latest post belonged. Being about the social and administrative culture of Brown University, and local liberals' reaction thereto, it's the sort of thing that I generally mention here. But since it's so very Rhode Island, I put it on Anchor Rising.
Quiet as it's been 'round here, there's been some talk about the doom and gloom among conservatives. I've put up some relevant thoughts, incorporating a short speech on blogs that I gave today, over on Anchor Rising.
My latest FactIs column, "The Premises of the Culture of Death," ponders a theme upon which I can't quite land my finger. Something about things not meaning what they mean in pulsing cultural conversation that lacks substance.
This, by the way, is my final FactIs column. I'm very grateful to the folks who produce the 'zine for giving me the opportunity, and for doing so with such consistent courtesy and encouragement. But timing is as it is, and the need to prepare my house (and household) to accommodate another child in the spring — as well as the need to support that house (and household) — will leave me unable to devote sufficient time to a regular, polished, deadlined column.
My latest FactIs column, "When Plan B Becomes Plan A," suggests that something is awry when a drug that requires a prescription for low concentrations is on track for over-the-counter status in higher concentrations. Of course, Plan B is a "birth control" pill; such does sex — and the consequences thereof — skew Western minds.
My latest column, "Life in an Unfinished World," takes up the evolution v. intelligent design dispute. The religious-like fervor of those who oppose intelligent design raises the question of whether they think any aspects of society rightly impinge on science. Contrary to frequent insistence that intelligent design be taught — if at all — in religion or philosophy classes, no more important lesson can be taught to American schoolchildren than that science has culturally and methodologically defined boundaries.
"Breaking the Glass Taboo," my latest column for TheFactIs.org, responds to Providence Journal editorialist M.J. Anderson's nostalgia for the days of the Baby Boomers' youth and to recent research finding that removing men from the home can be part of a recipe for creating "exceptional" boys.
I didn't go into this in my column, but have you ever noticed that "progress" increasingly seems like a bend around the cultural track back to our primal days? Well, consider what it would imply for men's behavior if society accepted the notion that fathers needn't be bound to the children whom they beget.
My latest column for TheFactIs.org — "Reasoning with the Id" — responds to a recent piece by Lee Harris. To summarize too drastically, Harris seeks to find a place for tradition in a world of reason. Me, I think is more accurate to stress that rationality already exists in a world of tradition.
After the twelfth of the twenty-four episodes of Lost's first season, religious viewers thought they'd taken another step toward inclusion in mainstream culture, as represented by television and film. (Or at least one religious viewer did.) Lost treated religion seriously — acknowledging it as part of the society in which we live. Without a tone of sneering irony, as is expected in one direction, and without the feel of saccharine sincerity, as is expected in the other, two characters prayed to the "Heavenly Father" right at the end of a hit show that isn't definingly faith-based.
Well, by the two-hour season finale, it seemed as if Lost's creators had banned the word "God" except as an expression of emphasis. I can't help but wonder, as I have in my latest column for TheFactIs.org, whether "Religion's Gone Missing on 'Lost.'"
I disagree with John Podhoretz's disappointment in the season finale of Lost:
The two-hour final episode answered absolutely nothing. Not one thing. Basically, it appears that the series' creators simply threw all sorts of things out there to tantalize people and then had absolutely no idea where to go with it or what to do. This is a very, very bad idea. The audience for "Lost" will abandon the show over the summer and it will creak out a few more months until it is deservedly cancelled. Audiences will go for a sucker punch once, but no longer. Bye bye "Lost." It's been lousy to know ya.
Podhoretz may or may not have a better understanding than I do of the primetime television audience. (I'd wager on the "may.") But there's room to argue that he's applying the wrong standard to the show: it isn't so much of a seasonal series as a long-running epic. The significant difference, in my characterization, is that the former emphasizes the what happened, while the latter has the more artistic emphasis on what does it mean.
The fact is that we did get some answers in the finale, after a fashion, but they were clues to the plot's direction rather than the filled in blanks that Podhoretz wanted. We've gotten a glimpse of the "they" who whisper in the jungle. We know which child they were after. We've seen that the mysterious hatch, rather than opening directly into some sort of spaceship, goes deep into the island. More thematically, the writers gave us a glimpse of a probable central tension to define the next season, if not the show itself: faith versus science.
The show's audience might be inclined, therefore, to give it at least another season. The decisive factor thereafter will be whether viewers get the sense that the writers are just stringing them along or are actually going somewhere. Podhoretz's assessment is already that the writers are luring the audience from episode to episode with empty noises. The nature of the show and the way in which it has begun and progressed, with a limited cast within a delineated setting, suggest intentions other than running for the maximum number of seasons.
Me, I've got another complaint — a "scandal" to use Podhoretz's word — about the season finale, but I might use the topic for my next column... (To be continued.)
Part of what makes a danger of modern approaches to addressing public policies that bear on "progress" is that we tend to view them on an individual basis, and when we do realize that they are tangential to each other, we hesitate to follow the implications but so deeply. (Sometimes the hesitance results from the complexity, sometimes from the sense that we'll be proven wrong in what we want to believe.)
My latest column for TheFactIs.org dwells on the intersection of embryonic stem cell research, "right to die" trends, socialist healthcare schemes, and radical life extension. Ultimately, I don't think any of these issues can be fully appreciated without consideration of the others. (And many others, but one can only do so much in fewer than 1,000 words.)
It speaks volumes about the rigidity of modern liberalism that Community College of Rhode Island sociology and philosophy professor David Carlin (whose political alignment I do not know) didn't bother to list the fourth option for liberal Catholics disappointed in Cardinal Ratzinger's transition to Pope Benedict:
These disillusioned liberals will follow one of three courses: Some will remain Catholic and be depressed by the whole situation; some will join a church that better suits their idea of what a church should be (e.g., the Episcopal Church); and some will drift away from institutionalized religion altogether, and instead practice their own private forms of Christianity.
That a learned man wouldn't even consider it a possibility that some "disillusioned liberals" would reassess their views to conform with the consistent teachings of the Church suggests that sociologists and liberals, as well as the Church, might want to consider ways to put that fourth option back on the list.
It may have taken the oxymoronicism of Christianity and constitutional pessimism, but National Review has found a secular utopian in John Derbyshire:
Conservatives are not supposed to believe that human beings are the helpless instruments of blind Historical Forces. We are supposed to be the people who celebrate humanity in all its knotty and unpredictable variety, and in the power of the individual human will to transform the world. Did not John Paul II himself challenge, and help defeat, those who claimed the mandate of History? Yes, but that only adds a gloss of irony to his larger failure.Looking back across the past few decades, it’s hard not to think that post-industrial modernism is headed all one way, everywhere it has taken a firm grip. Pleasure-giving gadgets and drugs are ever cheaper and more accessible. The distresses of life, especially physical sickness and pain, are gradually being pushed to the margins. As scientists probe deeper into the human genome, the human nervous system, and the biology of human social arrangements, that divine spark of person-hood that we all feel to be the essence of ourselves is being chased along narrower and darker passageways of the brain and the tribal folkways. Happiness itself, it seems, is genetic. And all this is headed…where?
We all know the answer to that one. It is headed to Brave New World.
Society is in a bizarre state indeed when the dour are resolving themselves to an impending world of untrammeled happiness:
So far as it makes any sense to predict the future, it seems to me highly probable that the world of 50 or 100 years from now will bear a close resemblance to Huxley’s dystopia — a world without pain, grief, sickness or war, but also without family, religion, sacrifice, or nobility of spirit.
I'm not sure whether it's an indication of deeper pessimism about human beings, but Derbyshire discounts humanity's ability to screw things up. In other words, he implicitly concedes human nature as something that will go softly into that good night. A recent scene makes me question the assumption: While sitting for a moment after a hard day's work last week — feeling the contentment that can only come with the completion of exhausting labor — I became whelmed with love for my three year old daughter and her unmitigated joy at life. Just as the contentment was tinged with pain, so was the love tinged with sadness.
We may be entering an era of bland happiness, but I'd suggest that the "risk death to taste life" ethos of the '60s was a dark manifestation — perverted as so much was during that period — of something intrinsically linked to religion, sacrifice, and nobility of spirit. In short, we will not be content to be content.
But even that odd consolation views our society as an isolated ecosystem. It ignores outside forces, including most profoundly God. Christianity's hope is intriguingly carried within a form of worldly pessimism. We must die, and the world must end, but those are good things. Are we to believe that God will cease to call those whose society has dragged them into false heaven? Are we to believe that He will cease to shape the world toward His own ends?
Human nature will answer the call to which it is so innately tuned. God will act in the world, and surely we've only just begun to appreciate the extent to which John Paul II was evidence of that action. Our actions and words will carry into the spotless future, and even behind a veil of palliatives, humanity will wonder what truth we had.
PROEM:
For a page design that might be easier to read, click "Turn Light On" at the top of the left-hand column.
What is the opposite of "pragmatic"? Noah Millman suggests "principled," but that doesn't seem quite right. A person can be a principled pragmatist, emphasizing practical steps toward a goal without permitting that goal to reduce principle to a nicety.
The opposite of "pragmatic," in common usage, is "idealistic." Compromising, working the system, somebody who is pragmatic seeks efficient means toward some objective — a good that offers justification. Somebody who is idealistic, in contrast, behaves as if the objective requires only a declaration, with all obstacles simply invalid. Pragmatism describes realistic means toward an end; idealism presents a peremptory end in search of means.
This correction, though it may seem quibbling, has implications related the column by Jonah Goldberg to which Millman is responding. Although he doesn't go into great detail about the mechanism, Goldberg's central observation is that raising pragmatism to a principle — making it Pragmatism — has undesirable consequences, chief among them Relativism and overweening protection, even celebration, of the deviant willing to exist in a ridiculous reality.
Missing the mechanism, Millman interprets Goldberg's argument as saying that "Pragmatists drained us of belief in Truth, and once we stopped believing in Truth we no longer could make distinctions." Consequently, free speech has degenerated into an absolute right to deviant expression and only a conditional right to political speech because we "no longer jealously defend our ancient liberties."
That isn't the implication of Goldberg's thoughts, as I read them. He begins by describing Oliver Wendell Holmes's legal theorizing as an attempt to cut through moral superfluities in order to apply the law more efficiently. In part, this requires the discernment of an ideal or, in Holmes's words, an "external standard" personified in a "reasonable man" — a hypothetical "intelligent and prudent member of the community."
The problem, as Ben Franklin quipped around the time of our nation's founding, is that "a reasonable Creature [can] find or make a Reason for every thing one has a mind to do." With a "reasonable man" at its head, what Goldberg calls the "collective intelligence" can concoct whatever rules it wills. A moral society requires a standard that is external to the community itself, hence the importance of moral language in the law. Pragmatism is best kept as a strategy in the service of, not a guide to, truth.
As such a guide, Millman explains, Pragmatism holds that the "meaning of any statement... is limited to the consequences of that statement in terms of action." The pragmatic truth of a stated belief, in other words, depends on what it accomplishes in the believer. Therefore, a belief that enables a person to achieve some desirable end — peace of mind, motivation, fortitude — is pragmatically true for that person.
This approach is fine, as long as we're aware of its limitations. If belief in an eternal soul increases one person's sense of purpose, while disbelief in eternal soul allows another to justify impulsive behavior, we may know what's pragmatically true for each of them, but we've no basis for coming to a conclusion about whose belief is correct. To answer the question of whether the soul is, in fact, eternal — or at least which truth society ought to prefer — would require some external criterion that this Pragmatism doesn't provide.
Pragmatism, however, smuggles in the implicit sense that there is no relevant truth beyond itself. Millman presents an example when he suggests that if the concepts of "individuals, rights, the people, the nation are real... they are only pragmatically real." The consequence of that "only" is that, if nobody behaves as if something exists, then it is not pragmatically real, and theoretically, any truth, anything conceptual, can be ignored.
Pragmatism becomes, in a word, Relativism. To the argument that the eternal soul is a reality because it acts in bringing comfort, the Pragmatist qualifies that belief therein is "only" pragmatically true. But the trick works in reverse. If not believing makes real the nonexistence of such things as eternal soul and rights, then that is "only" pragmatically true.
It begins to become apparent that Pragmatism is not pragmatically true in most cases. Being aware that one's belief in eternal soul may only be true because it brings comfort undermines the comfort. Understanding that disbelief may only be true inasmuch as it justifies impulsive behavior lessens its utility as a justification. Believing that rights are only real if we act as if they are real invites behavior that takes advantage of their underlying unreality.
As Millman admits, this presents the moral Pragmatist with a difficulty. After wading through all of the practical consequences of Pragmatism, it appears that one must resolve, having duly acknowledged it, to ignore it in order to allow perpetuation of a good end. Millman refers to an "elect" who "know that much of what we believe is... only true pragmatically, ... because it works, not because it's True in some absolute sense unrelated to human psychology." Morality keeps society functioning, so those "smart people" who realize that it's hooey pretend that it's not.
For Pragmatism to deserve its capital-P, however, its adherents must believe it to contain Truth. Goldberg quotes Charles Beard as saying that "the means can make the ends." For Pragmatism to be pragmatically true, it must have a practical outcome, so what truth does it make?
Since Pragmatism challenges the objectivity of any principle that's coupled with a rational goal, it devolves into an idealism of whim. It is, itself, Pragmatically true only for causes that don't require willful belief, for impulses. Providing, as Millman applauds, "warrant for... reasoning to a premise from a conclusion," it is an efficient philosophy for achieving irrational desire. This is why a pragmatic approach to law wound up allowing profanities, but disallowing political speech. It wasn't that "Pragmatism drained us of belief in Truth," as Millman suggests; rather, it was that Pragmatism makes Truth out of whatever an individual or a political cohort wants, whether that means kinky sex or unthreatened power.
The importance that Holmes placed on the "marketplace of ideas" ceases to be a matter of Truth, and other points of view can be dismissed. Insisting that the ideal must be pragmatically correct, its advocates turn their blame on others for not being sufficiently true believers. An undesired outcome (e.g., men's disproportion in mathematics departments) is taken as conclusive proof of the suspected and invalid cause (sexism). Conflicting speech is invalid because it hinders the new ideal. That seems to be Jonah's argument: that Pragmatism leads to Relativism in a perpetual cycle of corrupt idealism. Pragmatism is a razor that cuts clear through to mushy primal impulses.
Of course, we've learned to the detriment of generations that human beings can behave as if things that are True are not — for a time. Jumping off a cliff, one can deny gravity for a brief moment and then deny that falling indicates moving toward something until... well, splat.
Not to pick on M. Carrie Ruo of North Providence, RI, but her letter to the Providence Journal too perfectly captures an impulse behind the Kill Terri crowd:
For centuries, the husband has been given "God-like" authority over his own family. How many wives have gone to their relatives, priests and other conservative counselors, complaining of abuse from their husbands, only to be told that they should stay in the marriage because it is God's will -- that they should obey their husbands and pray?In the recent elections, we were told time and again that marriage is between a man and a woman, which conveys exclusive rights to the husband and wife over each other's affairs. Why then, did the same conservatives wish to strip away Michael Shiavo's rights? Last I read, he was still married to Terri.
The hypocrites have made the husband king, but now want to take away his crown, simply because they don't like his decision. Too bad.
What's the argument? That Terri Schiavo had to die because conservatives wish to preserve the opposite-sex definition of marriage? That an objectionable view of spouses' positioning relative to each other that has largely faded in the Western world requires us to honor that precedent for a modern man who wanted his disabled wife dead? I could be reading too much into this, but it seems to me that this particular manifestation of adolescent psychosis offers partial explanation for Western liberals' sympathy for the most retrograde practices of Islamic fundamentalists.
For too many, liberalism has devolved into an ideology for feeling one's own rightness, as compared to the wrongness of Western (particularly Christian) conservatives. If the highest sin that conservatives can commit, in the eyes of liberals, is hypocrisy, then some withdrawn feeding tubes and the slithering of the burkqa onto the Western street are a small price to pay in order to wield the scarlet H.
Even in Terri Schiavo's final moments, a central contradiction of those who thought she should "be allowed to die" surfaces:
Felos disputed the Schindler family's account. He said that Terri Schiavo's siblings had been asked to leave the room so that the hospice staff could examine her, and the brother, Bobby Schindler, started arguing with a law enforcement official.Michael Schiavo feared a "potentially explosive" situation, and would not allow the brother in the room, Felos said. "Mrs. Schiavo had a right to have her last and final moments on this earth be experienced by a spirit of love and not of acrimony," the lawyer said.
Isn't the whole argument, vis-à-vis the legitimacy of killing her, that she can't experience anything? Perhaps the atrociousness of Felos's grammar indicates an attempt on his part to gloss this contradiction with ambiguity.
What is there to say? I'm too tired to sort it all out, just now, but Don Hawthorne's got a good post over on Anchor Rising. My mind keeps coming back to two related things: First, Mort Kondrake on Brit Hume's show tonight emphasized that the controversy over Terri Schiavo was just a part of the broader cultural battle going on, confirming (I think) that many who felt so strongly that she must die did so because it would represent a defeat for those who wanted her to live. And second, one of the central skirmishes in that cultural battle is defining how restricted citizens are from "imposing" their will on each other.
There's a whole lot of contradiction on the second point. As I've been trying to explain to a local commenter to an older post on Anchor Rising about sex ed, it is incorrect to claim that one can separate government and religion (broadly viewed). I hope to write more on this aspect tomorrow. For now, suffice to say that I'm unimpressed by Sheila Lennon's referring to the American Catholic Church as a "splinter group" in a post directly after one that's about right-wing militias' plans to storm Terri's hospice.
What a mess it all is. But it's a mess from which Terri Schiavo is now, we hope and pray, free.
I've posted a broader thought based on the Schiavo case over on Anchor Rising. If you're inclined to comment, feel free to do so here or there, if you'd like a change of scenery.
I'm extremely busy, but I wanted to take a break to direct your attention to two stunning columns by Peggy Noonan. The first is about the "amazing story of how Ashley Smith stopped Brian Nichols's killing spree." The second explains why, if "Terri Schiavo is killed, Republicans will pay a political price."
For a guest column on TheFactIs.org, a news and commentary site sponsored by the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute and the Culture of Life Foundation, I've expanded on my thoughts related to Stanley Kurtz's Policy Review piece about population decline and the possible social strategies for dealing with it.
The bottom line is that life is a yes-or-no question.
At the end of a series of posts (up from here) reacting to a Time magazine cover story about differences between men and women, brainwise, Stanley Kurtz notes that it appears to be a foregone conclusion that, when we can "tweak" brain functions, we should:
The new interest in brain biology is a two edged sword. It has raised legitimate questions about social constructionist orthodoxy. Those questions ought to be debated. But the new brain biology is itself on shaky ground and should not be treated as an alternative orthodoxy, much less as a license to tamper with the human brain.
Kurtz is right that we're "headed for dangerous times." Medical science is entering a range of promises that all too many people find irresistible. It has been harmful enough, these many decades, that social engineers have been plunging our society into cultural changes. We should all shudder to think about the possible results when biological engineers begin doing the same.
Frankly, I had no idea how to react to Brown professor William F. Wyatt's recent piece in the Providence Journal, "Million Dollar Baby revealed," so I thought it only fair and reasonable to share my perplexity with you:
The movie is thus a Western of the traditional sort, with cowboy replaced by trainer and filly replaced by fighter. The action is transferred from the ranch to the city, from the corral to the ring.Unless conservative commentators object to putting down injured horses, they can have no objection to this film. The Academy clearly approves. My job is done.
Judging from Mr. Wyatt's place and line of work, it seems probable that the tongue-in-cheek piece is either an example of a liberal's mocking conservatives while actually proving their point or an indication that liberals are coming back around to agreement with conservatives by circuitous routes. Perhaps it indicates unrecognized confusion between the two. After all, how could a professor of classics emeritus fail to bristle at the reduction of humanity (a woman, no less!) to the status of metaphor for an animal slave?
Having almost no experience with nor knowledge about Hunter Thomson, I had nothing to say about his suicide. But I imagine my thoughts would have been much like Jeff Jacoby's:
Could anything be more ghoulish and egotistical than making your unsuspecting wife listen while you put a bullet through your skull? Absolutely: making your unsuspecting wife listen while you put a bullet through your skull — and your son, daughter-in-law, and grandson are just a few yards away. Juan Thompson was in a nearby office when his father blew his brains out in the kitchen. Winkel Thompson and 6-year-old Will were playing in the living room next door. It takes a real sadist to arrange his suicide so that his loved ones are forced to hear him die. But what kind of degenerate inflicts something so traumatic on a child of 6? ...How striking is the contrast between Thompson's tawdry death and the excruciating struggle of Pope John Paul II, whose passionate belief in the sanctity of life remains unwavering, even as Parkinson's disease slowly ravages him. The pope's example of courage and dignity sends a powerful message, but the chattering class would rather talk instead about why this stubborn man won't resign. Meanwhile they extol Hunter Thompson and are itching to know — are his ashes really going to be fired from a cannon?
Periodically, rhetoric or circumstances — or rhetoric about circumstances — raise questions about the degree to which modernity has unconsciously relied upon its cultural, moral, and emotional heritage without its believing non-believers' realizing it. Even in the most secular groups and nations, to what degree has assessment of social dynamics and human nature been founded in the lingering effects of millennia of religious morality? And what happens if those effects wear off?
In a post from October, I suggested that a morality founded in self-interest ultimately makes it advisable at least to perpetuate a belief in God. While one can develop self-interest into a long-term community view, doing so introduces a sort of gamble whereby we acknowledge that it is in self-interest to form social covenants, pledging to sacrifice if needed, but hoping that the benefits will outweigh the sacrifices. To ensure that there are members willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, it benefits the society to cultivate an irrational (or suprarational) morality.
Certainly theistic religion is foremost among such moralities, but a recent comment from Dan Carvin doesn't contradict the point:
During World War II, thousands of Russian soldiers gave up their lives to liberate their homeland from the Nazi invaders. While it is impossible to know how many of these soldiers subscribed the official atheist beliefs, certainly many of them were, and they didn't require a belief in God to give up their lives for their families and communities.
Few theists would discard the notion that the state (or community) can substitute for God as the "greater thing" for which people will sacrifice. Indeed, apologists often employ that very attempt as evidence that humanity requires meaning — usually adding that atheistic nationalism has claimed more lives with less humanitarian benefit than other, theistic, religions. Carvin faults religious morality for its susceptibility to multiple interpretations ("It's ALL moral relativism"), but variations of that flaw apply to nations, ethnicities, and any other basis for group identity. Worse yet, rooting morality in an extant entity, rather than a being or concept external to tangible society, merely makes morality subject to the immediate needs of that entity.
More to the point, as I put it in the above-mentioned post, a problem arises over time when more and more people figure out the game. I challenged the reader to "show me a soldier who would lay down his life in full awareness that he has merely lost the lottery in a necessary cultural illusion." It doesn't answer the challenge to cite soldiers from a mid–twentieth century culture that had simply recast that illusion in the image of ideological nationalism. Where is the non-theistic morality in a world of relativism and radical individualism that will encourage a thinking man (or woman) to lay down his life in the service of a worthwhile end?
Here, Carvin might retreat to the more personalized concept of "expanded self-interest" that preceded his extrapolation of self-interest to the "clan, or whatever group they belong to":
Self-interest is not just interest for the self. The urge to procreate extends self-interest toward our spouses and children. This is why parents willingly give up a great deal, including body organs in some cases, for the well being of their children.
This argument may have long historical currency, but what of a culture in which parents don't willingly give up "a great deal" for their children — to the extent of not giving them life in the first place? After all, we're having this discussion within a society in which millions of parents and non-parents alike elevate the individual's "choice" above even the very lives of children already conceived. Addressing Western culture beyond the United States, it is becoming increasingly untenable to argue that "the urge to procreate" inherently scuttles the urge to keep self-interest narrowly focused on the self.
A piece by Stanley Kurtz in the current Policy Review traces the interplay between these various forces when it comes to precipitous population decline. With the exception of resignation, Kurtz organizes possible cultural reactions to that demographic shift into two camps: "at least a partial restoration of traditional social values" or "a radical new eugenics." In the former case:
Economic decline could force people to depend on families instead of the state. A religious revival could restore traditional mores. And a revised calculation of rational interest in light of social chaos could call the benefits of extreme individualism into question.
And in the latter:
... the end of the nuclear family would come through a further development of our growing tendency to separate pair-bonding from sex and procreation. Especially in Europe, marriage is morphing into parental cohabitation. And in societies where parents commonly cohabit, the practice of "living alone together" is emerging. There unmarried parents remain "together" yet live in separate households, only one of them with a child. And of course, intentional single motherhood by older unmarried women — Murphy Brown-style — is another dramatic repudiation of the nuclear family. The next logical step in all this would be for single mothers to turn their children over to some other individual or group for rearing. ...... objections to the human exploitation inherent in surrogacy could actually propel a shift toward artificial wombs. Of course, that would only complete the commodification of childbirth itself — weakening if not eliminating the parent-child bond. And if artificial wombs one day become "safer" than human gestation, insurers might begin to insist on our not giving birth the old-fashioned way.
These two broad reactions to demographic changes relate to two broad approaches to morality. To be sure, a person could argue that the alignment isn't perfect; a "revised calculation of rational interest" need only mean that people have children as a retirement investment, proving the point about "expanded self-interest." More likely, I'd suggest, is that the reconstruction of traditional activities from a position of rationalism will tend to contribute to, not merely coincide with, a religious revival. With the momentum of the nihilistic avalanche arrested, God will be found in the family.
Whether that proves to be the case or not, the two worldviews that begin to emerge give starkly different impressions. In my bias, the first feels involved and organic:
The second, in contrast, feels aloof and artificial:
I'm writing broadly, of course, and again, my lists are drenched in my own beliefs. But despite such disclaimers, these strike me as being more or less the two directions in which society and individuals can head. The former admits a wrong turn and retraces its steps, hoping to address legitimate objections to the tradition that had filtered into modern times; the latter continually invests its hopes in decisions already made, in part as reactionary functions of the same objections.
It has been my experience that the culture at large underestimates the depth and cost of these cumulative investments. Whatever conclusions individuals come to, those from Generation X down have raw personal experience with the truth that a progressive culture hurts, and it seems doubtful that too many young adults will be content to revel in the pain.
It would require more ground than this essay can advisably cover to flesh out my assertion of pain, but the point consolidates well in a passage that Amanda Witt quoted from a speech by secular humanist Natalie Angier:
For a while, Katherine [now eight years old] was terrified about death. We'd be driving along in the car, and all of a sudden she'd start screaming in the back seat. What's wrong, what's wrong? We'd ask, thinking we had to pull over for a medical emergency. I've just been thinking about death! She'd cry. I don't want to just disappear! To die forever and that's all, that's the end. This happened a few times, each time, out of nowhere, she'd start to wail. We'd tell her whatever we could to comfort her, that she will live a long, long time, and that they're inventing new drugs that will, by the time she grows up, help her live even longer, a couple of hundred years, who knows; she'd live until she was pig-sick of it. And we'd tell her that nothing really disappears, it just changes form, and that she could become part of a dolphin, or an eagle, or a cheetah, a praying mantis. She'd have none of it. She knew she wouldn't be aware of her new incarnation. She knew she probably wouldn't remember her life as Katherine, and that loss of self she found impossibly sad. As do I, the loss of her, the loss of myself. As do all of us. Learning how to die is one of the greatest tasks of life, and it's one that most us never quite get the hang of, until we realize, whoops, not much of a trick here, is there. Not much of a choice, either.... lately Katherine seems to have gotten past those terror jags. She hasn’t had an outburst for the past year or two.
I recall having those "terror jags," and my experience is that atheists don't so much "get past" them as find ways to suppress them. Sometimes several years would pass between waves of soul-deep realization about "the truth of what death means" (as I thought at the time). When realization came as a splash rather than a wave, I would induce a little fake-reflexive shiver, giving me an opportunity to laugh at my silliness and get my mind on a different track. Thus I lasted about a decade and a half on the promise that I'd just somehow find a way to accept death.
For some, acceptance comes as an activistic denial — seizing on the hope that Angier offered to her daughter: well, "they're inventing new drugs," and they'll keep you going long enough to realize that you don't want to live forever. You'll get so sick of life that you'll welcome oblivion! Again, this is a matter of personal impressions and experience, but I've come to suspect that there is a chasm between the cavalier atheists of mature age and the children that they raise.
People who were raised with the understanding that there is — or legitimately could be — a God, build their atheism on the subconscious foundation thereby laid; moreover, they have a sense of community; their formative years were spent in a more traditional, and traditionally religious, society. People raised as atheists lack both the subconscious sense and the social experience. The appeal to the claim that, in Angier's words, "[m]atter is neither created nor destroyed, and we, as matter, will always matter, and the universe will forever be our home" cannot tap into the religious comfort of eternity because that comfort has never been experienced. The earthy scent in the graveyard doesn't evoke memories of comforting feelings; there are no memories, so the scent becomes associated with the graveyard. The child "will have none of it."
Just so, it may work for discrete individuals to leverage the ego as an external anchor for morality. Carvin claims to be "morally mature" — not needing the crutch of religion, "useful for moderating the behavior of the morally immature." Angier expresses pride in her daughter's second reason for liking atheism (after not having "to waste Sundays going to pray"): "I'd rather do things myself than have somebody else do them for me. If somebody gets sick, I wouldn't just pray to god he or she gets better, I would try to buy some medicine for them, to help them get better." What happens when there are no religious believers to whom to match morality? More importantly, what happens when the tone becomes set by those who don't care whether they're called "morally immature" any more than a desert scorpion cares about the "river of life"?
Those raised in a society that sees its cultural, moral, and emotional heritage as an academic interest, and often with scorn, have no recourse to the strength that their elders in the previous generation or two don't even realize was imparted unto them. We can no longer hear God's whispers, so we must instead listen for His call.
I find myself curious about Providence Journal editorial boarder M.J. Anderson. I know from some brief reviews of her brand-new book, Portable Prairie: Confessions of an Unsettled Midwesterner, that she's the daughter of South Dakotan journalists and went to Princeton in the '70s. I know from elsewhere that she began as a reporter for the Providence Journal in 1981. But the things that I'd like to know are of a more personal nature.
I don't wonder such things out of voyeurism or twisted lechery. Rather, it has seemed to me, as I've grown older, that much of the sexual revolution is built on personal lies — distortions, at least — and I wonder what might linger behind Anderson's recent celebration of Alfred Kinsey. One can imagine, for example, the feeling of titillation mixed with pride at superior knowledge that a Midwestern Ivy Leaguer must have felt in an academia in the thrall of revolution. Closer to the Velvet Underground than to "Okie from Muskogee." Considering her shared hope, with Kinsey, "that we might throw off a crippling sense of sin, and understand how profoundly we are not just moral beings but physical ones," one wonders what crippling sins Anderson has thrown off, and what were the effects. After all, we're talking Kinsey, here — a man "appalled at how little [literature on human sexuality] was based on empirical evidence."
As a man born around the time that Anderson walked the halls of my (then-future) home state's most highly acclaimed school, I grew up and learned about sex entirely within the culture that was the legacy of Kinsey and the sexual revolution. In high school, as a college dropout, and then as a frat boy, I've witnessed the escalating perversion that can result when the assumption is that everybody is, and should be, living "normal" sex lives (which is to say, without limits). Ironically, I found it a great relief to discover that it simply wasn't true that everybody was living more promiscuously and managing to be better adjusted than I was.
I've learned that, of my '60s-nostalgic elders, many evince a self-inflicted ache at having lived fairly mundane lives; although contemporaneous with a supposed mass liberation of the libido, they have no experience outside of the dreaded traditional structure. Either they are bitter at being cheated, or they take on faith that one could live more wildly than they and achieve the same degree of contentment (think Al Gore, with his stable nuclear family and his radical views on what family should mean for others). Either way, they have no personal basis to advise Kinseyism.
Others of my elders appear, having been hurt by their lifestyles, to be striving to further justify them, rather than correct them. The deceptive hope is that the deviancy in their own lives — whether divorce or infidelity or homosexuality — can simply be defined as "normal," thereby washing away the sting. And still others are simply perverts. Kinsey, from what I've read, was one of these last.
I realize that Anderson's is an opinion piece, but certain sentences beg for journalistic exploration. Among Kinsey's latter-day supporters, one often hears the blurring admission that he was a "flawed man," but perhaps a word or two could have been spent explaining this:
Around the same time, owing to difficulties he and his wife encountered when first married, he began studying the literature on human sexuality. ...He and his wife were both openly intimate with other partners (men included, in Kinsey's case). Their example led to some irreparable wounds among his associates, whom he encouraged to experiment.
To understand the humorous turn of those last two sentences, one must have read a 2003 piece by Janice Shaw Crouse:
In his personal life, Albert Kinsey was promiscuously bisexual, sado-masochistic, and a decadent voyeur who enjoyed filming his wife having sex with his staff.
Encouraged to experiment, indeed! Returning to Anderson for more serious matters, consider the disclaiming passive voice with which she begins the following:
Although his methodology was later faulted, he induced millions to consider that the range of "normal" behavior was much broader than they had assumed, and included homosexuality.
Faulted for what, pray tell? Well, we can turn to Janice Shaw Crouse for enlightenment:
He used over 300 children, including babies, in his studies of female orgasm. Some critics legitimately accuse Kinsey of child molestation. The American Board of Pediatrics argues that his data are not the norm; that he used unnatural stimulation and, even then, did not prove his point. Using pedophiles, he charted the length and frequency of infants' and children's supposed "orgasms." ...In terms of subjects, Kinsey used volunteers — a practice that scholars decry because of the selection bias it introduces. Many psychologists say that exhibitionists and unconventional sexual experimenters are the most likely respondents, thus distorting the results of the studies. A quarter to nearly half of Kinsey's subjects were prisoners, hardly reflective of the general population. Plus, over 1,400 of his subjects were sex offenders. Kinsey's samples were skewed in other ways as well: His subjects were overwhelmingly single when less than a third of the population was single during the 1950s, and they were also predominantly college educated.
Perhaps the most offensive aspect of Kinsey's supposedly "scientific" method was his definitions. He classified prostitutes and cohabiting females as "married" women, and then claimed that 26 percent of married women committed adultery.
Such are the subjects whom Anderson applauds for having redefined "the range of 'normal' behavior." She writes that "post–sexual revolution, it is almost impossible to imagine the relief Kinsey's reports must have inspired," and the wry reader might think to agree that many a pedophile, prisoner, and prostitute must have been much relieved to be blended with the prudent suburban housewife.
So, I can't help but wonder what induces the likes of M.J. Anderson to raise up Alfred Kinsey. Is it a deliberately blind adulation of a cultural icon — a better-informed version of the ignorance from which Che Guevera benefits? Is defense of Kinsey really just the outward manifestation of defense of the waning side of the culture war? Or is there something more personal, psychological, behind the spin? To be sure, Anderson is far from the only person to whom this applies, but the habit of defining the cultural norm without offering empirical evidence in the form of personal experience can be, as Kinsey might have agreed, appalling.
In this respect, a more balanced study of Kinsey himself might benefit our body of knowledge, if only we could push beyond the reflex that leads us to blame "a repressive society" when even a flawed, faulted, adulterous, sado-masochistic scientist becomes depressed.
A few days ago, reader Nosy emailed me the following in response to my posts on sex ed. (here and here):
Here is something to ponder. There is no one teaching "safer gangbanging". That is, no one even for a minute suggests that children and teenagers should be taught "Don't get into a gang, but if you do, here's some suggestions that might keep you from becoming a drug addict or getting killed..."No, what is taught is something else: "Do not join a gang. Do not socialize with people you know to be in a gang. Do not go to places where gang members are known to hang out. If you are in a gang, get out now, we will help you leave."
Isn't that "Gang Abstinence"? Shouldn't we be more realistic, and accept the fact that some teenagers will experiment with gangs, and teach them how to have a safer gang experience, rather than just teach this simpleminded "Don't do it" stuff? Aren't we just setting our kids up for failure, when they are tempted to join a gang and don't know how to be a gangbanger safely?
Well, a post by John Hawkins doesn't quite prove the new maxim that contemporary society undermines the possibility of satire, but it comes close:
The story of young Devin Brown should be a cautionary tale about what happens when you fall in the wrong crowd, but is instead being used as a way to attack the police. Brown, a 13 year-old "eighth-grader at a magnet school for gifted youth," started hanging out with gang bangers,"Friends and neighbors said the teen had recently begun skipping school and spending time with gang members after his father's death last year. They insisted, however, that he wasn't in a gang."It's a bad crowd he was starting to hang with but he wasn't a gang member yet _ and I say yet," said Kevin Mitchell, a gang prevention specialist who knew Brown and himself a former gang member.
... Instead of carping about the police, who's asking what this kid's parent was doing while he was hanging out with gang members? Why aren't we hearing calls for the police to crack down on the gangs?
Here are the details:
According to police, Garcia and his partner were on routine patrol near Gage and Grand avenues when they saw the driver of the maroon Toyota Camry run a red light. The officers followed the car onto the Harbor Freeway and then tried to pull the driver over.A three-minute chase ended when the driver lost control of the Toyota and drove onto the sidewalk. The officers then parked their patrol car behind the Toyota.
A 14-year-old passenger fled, but was later apprehended. When Devin, who was driving, allegedly backed into the officers' car, Garcia opened fire.
One can hear the thought in the air: if only he'd been taught how to conduct safe grand theft auto. Truly, I'm not making light of this heartbreaking incident, but whether the misguided reaction to tragedy is to blame the police or to offer but-if-you-do guidance to other children, the result will be more loss, not less.
Without requiring a lawsuit or public debate, and almost without the knowledge of its mayor, the city of Providence removed a Ten Commandments monument that had stood in Roger Williams Park for more than four decades. I've explored the fanaticism involved over on Anchor Rising.
Whether or not they're correct, I love coming across intriguing explanations for sayings and traditions such as that explained by Ukraine president Victor Yushchenko and reported by Jay Nordlinger:
Then he claims that the toast — the act of toasting — originated in Kiev, anciently. You see, the most popular method of eliminating one's opponents was poison. (This, of course, is all too meaningful, coming from Yushchenko.) So you clinked your glasses extra hard, so that some of his drink would spill into yours, and some of yours would spill into his.
Tell me if you've heard another explanation, but this one may be too good to check.
I'm putting off high dudgeon regarding the latest on the terrorism-related interrogation front, but an email that Jonah Goldberg paraphrases makes me wonder how far from any sense of real life the entire debate has drifted:
One reader argued that we should be bothered by any attempt to separate a man from his God. How would you feel, he asked, if American soldiers were forced to witness a crucifix being desecrated or a Torah being destroyed?
As Goldberg suggests, it's an interesting question. I'd suggest that it's one that American Christians are universally qualified as experts to answer. Well, having subjected myself to such torture afresh, I'd suggest that if we're going to become so concerned about the religious sensibilities of potential enemies of our country, then we'd best abolish the National Endowment for the Arts.
Multiple angles of the following spin from Pamela Madsen, executive director and founder of the American Fertility Association, "an advocacy group for fertility patients," is head-thrashingly hard to swallow:
Isn't it a travesty that American couples are forced to leave our great nation because only 14 or so states require insurance companies to treat infertility? Less-developed countries, nations struggling with war, understand the importance of family. What does it say about the value we put on families and children?
But I'll leave aside the implication of requiring — by law — anybody who offers insurance to cover particular services or treatments in order to hone in on this morally contemptible attempt at a social guilt trip:
Less-developed countries, nations struggling with war, understand the importance of family. What does it say about the value we put on families and children?
The specific context is a trend toward Americans' seeking in vitro fertilization treatments to other countries to cut expenses:
... help came through a call to Dr. Sanford Rosenberg, a fertility specialist in Richmond, Va., who had started a program capitalizing on lower medical costs overseas. By using an egg donor from Romania and having the eggs fertilized in Bucharest and shipped back to the United States, the Butuceanus cut their costs to $18,000, including enough fertilized eggs for repeated efforts. ...The vast majority of Americans who are infertile look for help close to home. A small number, though - no one keeps an official count - are seeking help in places like South Africa, Israel, Italy, Germany and Canada, where the costs can be much lower, becoming in essence fertility tourists.
The New York Times article by Felicia Lee from which I've drawn the above quotations emphasizes countries that make Madsen's "struggling with war" comment a little inapt, but "places like" is an extremely open phrase. As difficult as it may be for many in our secular culture, take both sides of the long-running debate between progressives and traditionalists seriously for a moment: What relevance does the fact that 44.5% of Romania's population lives below the poverty line have?
One particularly compelling moral thicket with any IVF that involves egg donors is the treatment of women as egg farms. That women should not be dehumanized in service of the procedure is almost universally understood, and in the United States, it would hardly be unreasonable to suggest that women's dominion over their own bodies has pushed public opinion over the line to legality. There remains something, well, creepy about taking advantage of poverty or the less devastating financial need of young college students to acquire their eggs, but most Americans will understand their right to consent.
Now move this moral balance to Romania, where trafficking in women is widespread and "children in Bucharest are easy prey for child prostitution tourists." Among those willing to sell entire women, separating their eggs is merely maximizing profits. Under poverty so crushing that children must turn to selling sexual favors, the ability to freely consent to egg donation cannot so easily be taken for granted.
Ms. Madsen would surely qualify her statement, if asked, and one must always be wary of extrapolating views from short quotations placed in a specific context in newspaper reports. Nonetheless, to step on such people in order to fling advocacy rhetoric concerning the value that Americans "put on families and children" raises questions about the value that the advocates place on such moral considerations as human dignity.
Something in a recent Catherine Seipp piece sounded familiar:
Still, there are talented writers working on unsuccessful shows as well as hits. So what goes wrong?"Promising shows are cancelled immediately if they don't get good numbers," a TV writer friend, who's currently employed on a successful network drama, griped to me when I asked about this, "never getting the chance to find their voice and audience, as Cheers, Hill Street Blues did under [former NBC programming chief] Brandon Tartikoff, largely because he was in last place then and had little to lose. Sadly, these days even a last-place network has itchy trigger fingers, so thick is the fear in the business today."
Back in the feudalistic days of the 1990s, a common complaint among musicians — famous and anonymous alike — was executives' lack of willingness to allow, let alone help, an artist to develop, slowly building an audience and defining a personal style. Instead, the complaint went, to get into the business often required a built-in following, and to stay in the business required the avoidance of sales lulls during periods of artistic experimentation.
Then came the Internet to stir up the business model. From the musician's point of view, the Internet provides a way to build that necessary following and perhaps to circumvent the industry altogether, depending on priorities. From the audience's point of view, the Internet provides a means to explore beyond the big-budget packaging, as well as to circumvent, legally and illegally, the exorbitant prices to acquire the desired material of artists who aren't sufficiently compelling to justify whole album purchases. If artists are going to attract listeners online, in part through free samples, and if fans are going to insist on being persuaded to spend money by the music that the artist makes available, then the need for the various stages of middlemen diminishes.
In light of their differing sales models, the television industry is, if anything, more vulnerable to the technology and ethos of the Internet. The music business requires purchases, tickets, and attendance, requiring physical activity on both sides of the transaction. The television business requires nothing more than continued habitual usage of a living room fixture; revenue comes through advertising or, at most deliberate, through subscription.
Now imagine a world in which the initial viral marketing of South Park had involved URLs, instead of bootleg videos, being passed from dorm room to dorm room.
As somebody who's fiddled with video blogging (vlogging), I'd suggest that the TV folks aren't as immune to the flattening effects of the Internet as they may think. With lower costs for disk space and bandwidth, as well as production software that's mostly already on the market for reasonable prices, as well as the business models developing around blogging, online television shows are probably inevitable. First among amateurs, then malcontents, then mainstream writers et al. frustrated with the business. The threat doesn't end there, though.
Among the most intriguing developments that I've noticed in my five years of editing high-tech market research has been the efforts of such players as Microsoft to get computer content onto the family television set. Whether wireless or through cables, television is only streaming video, after all. Why not use similar technology for various applications, most significantly Web access? The same result is progressing from the other direction, as well, with a desire to make movies and television "clickable" to enhance the content and to open up a channel for related sales. (Like a Desperate Housewive's blouse? Click on her and order one.)
As the technology advances, viewers will be able to watch streaming online content right on the very same televisions that they use for big budget schlock. Furthermore, the big companies may help to transform the feel of television viewing toward that of Web browsing.
This future may — or may not — be distant, but the suits would be well advised to make a cultural asset of their ability to open space for talented people to develop their art now, while that remains only one of the advantages that their money can buy.
The comments to my post about Andrew Sullivan's then-and-now rhetoric have taken a turn that I didn't anticipate, but that merits a response. To get right to it: I don't think homosexuality is a disease. Disease implies a cure, and I think such a thing is neither possible nor desirable to seek.
Most folks who don't believe that homosexuality should be "favorably acknowledged" will likely agree that "disorder" is more apt. This is not the least because, rather than a "cure," it implies "reordering," suggesting a painstaking process that, by necessity, entails voluntary participation on the part of the subject.
Over the years, the gay movement has woven counterculturalism into its self image, so pushing too strenuously for participation in, essentially, deconstruction of their own identity only affirms gays' inclination to withdraw. That's the tough part of the discussion (and it ought to be a tough discussion), and in my view, it's the best argument for same-sex marriage.
Of course, I believe that the argument is still inadequate, given current circumstances (in part because of that countercultural streak).
It's a healthy habit to always keep in mind that kooks, generally speaking, probably don't believe themselves to be kooks. You'll get poseurs, of course, but honest-to-goodness kooks think what they're saying is plausible. I find it particularly important to recall this truth when something that I find interesting — provocative, even — generates absolutely no response. You know, sort of like the previous post.
Certainly some thoughts therein sound kooky. But that could be the shorthand that I used to describe a general progress in the future. "Secular nihilism" and "Islamic fundamentalism" are not actual entities battling over the soul of Europe. Scientists aren't (probably) going to begin rounding up fundamentalists and zapping the zeal out of their faith.
That isn't how things that seem kooky but prove true come about; rather, each step looks perfectly plausible — perhaps a stretch, but plausible nonetheless. Imagine scientists isolate the region of the brain that physiologically results in psychological fortification through faith and learn how to manipulate it. At the same time, the demographics of the continent change such that nations finally are forced to discard their multicultural fetish.
The discarding will come with especial ease if unhappy nihilists begin seeking to fill irreligion's gap. Under such circumstances, and given Europeans' leavened version of free speech, it isn't inconceivable that fundamentalism-based actions or declarations could be defined as "extreme" and trigger mandatory treatment. (It would be for the fundamentalist's good, of course.)
This is only one quickly conceived storyline; I'm just speculating... and trying to figure out how far from the kook border I currently stand.
Believers have long wanted science to return to an internal culture with proper respect for religion, but this isn't quite what they've had in mind:
Top neurologists, pharmacologists, anatomists, ethicists and theologians are to examine the scientific basis of religious belief and whether it is anything more than a placebo.Headed by Baroness Greenfield, the leading neurologist, the new Centre for the Science of the Mind is to use imaging systems to find out how religious, spiritual and other belief systems, such as an illogical belief in the innate superiority of men, influence consciousness.
A central aspect of the two-year study, which has $2 million (£1.06 million) funding from the John Templeton Foundation, the US philanthropic body, will involve dozens of people being subjected to painful experiments in laboratory conditions.
Jeff Miller and his commenters have highlighted two disturbing aspects of the experiment. The first is the impression, the subjects' consent aside, that "scientists" are torturing Christians presumably with impunity. The second is to be found in this paragraph from the news story:
The study is considered of vital importance in the present world climate, given the role of religious fundamentalism in international terrorism. A better understanding of the physiology of belief, the conditions that entrench it in the mind and its usefulness in mitigating pain could be crucial to developing counter-terrorist strategies for the future.
The obvious implication is that those who think this study is "of vital importance" wish to discover "the physiology of belief" in order to reduce it to what might be seen as acceptable levels through scientifically developed techniques. But see if the impression doesn't deepen — and darken — while you ponder a question that Paul Cella posed to his readers:
What is preferable — that Europe continues on its path of secular nihilism, with the crushing weight of multiculturalism descending in an ever-drearier enervation; or that Europe becomes Islamic?
Perhaps we American theists, watching from the sidelines, have been too quick to assume that secular nihilism would passively prostrate itself to Islamic fundamentalism. We all understand secular nihilism (or whatever you prefer to call it) to be a faith in its own right — its greatest lack being the fortitude that positive* faith provides. It seems to me that the envisioned "counter-terrorist strategies" (whatever they are) could evolve to remedy this weakness in two ways: The mettle can be sapped from theistic faiths. Or it can be artificially generated in an atheistic faith, whether for political or military combat.
This is the stuff of science fiction, to be sure, but cultural clashes of continental proportions seemed, until recently, to be the stuff of historical fiction. Either way, maybe our culture's dabbling in surrealism was part of a divine plan to prepare us for the future.
* I use "positive," here, in the descriptive sense, opposite "negative," not in the sense of attributing value.
ADDENDUM:
A graph of E.U. demographics that Dan Drezner posts on his blog gives some perspective about what the future holds for Europe — and not mitigating perspective.
Far and away the best argument for allowing Kid Rock to play at inauguration-related events is, as expressed in an email that I received this morning, "he's good enough to play for US armed forces on his USO tour; so he's good enough to play for the President of the United States."
Our troops certainly deserve our support and admiration, and anybody who offers that support in tangible ways deserves acknowledgment. Still, I don't believe that the acknowledgment originally extended to Kid Rock is as simple a decision as many have suggested. And it's made all the more difficult by the fact that conservatives and Republicans don't exactly have expansive representation among household-name entertainers.
The bottom line is that there has to be a cost for debasing our culture as Kid Rock and his ilk have done. It's unfortunate, in my view, that the marketplace does not exact that price, but outside of a certain range of Republicans, the marketplace is not invested with inerrancy. The cost for preying upon and thereby encouraging the rebellious immaturity of the young (and some among the older) has got to be — at the least — a loss of respectability.
In the case of entertaining our troops, exceptions must be made for the reason that the focus is on them, not the performer. Considering the sacrifices that they are making and the work that they are doing for the benefit of us all, much more weight should be given to the principle that what they want is what they get.
But when it comes to celebrations of the President's reelection, respectability — and the statement that each facet of the celebration makes about the President's principles — has to be considered. Moreover, we must foster the sort of culture in which those who've made the choice to trade respectability for lucre understand that to have been a real and actual choice.
Paul Cella notes a case in Australia that ought to act as a red flag in all areas currently or potentially afflicted with the multiculti PC cult of "tolerance." Rober Spencer reports:
One of the pastors, Daniel Scot, is Pakistani. He fled his native land seventeen years ago when he ran afoul of the notorious Section 295(c) of the Penal Code — which mandates death or life in prison for anyone who blasphemes "the sacred name of the holy Prophet Muhammad." It's a treacherously elastic statute that has been and is often used to snare Christians: cornered and made to state that they don't believe Muhammad was a prophet, they then find themselves charged with blasphemy.Scot went to Australia, only to run afoul of that nation's new religious vilification laws. Last Friday, Judge Michael Higgins of The Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal found him guilty of vilifying Islam in a seminar hosted by his group, Catch the Fire Ministries. The judge noted that during the seminar, Scot stated that "the Quran promotes violence, killing and looting." In light of Qur'anic passages such as 9:5, 2:191, 9:29, 47:4, 5:33 and many others, this cannot seriously be a matter of dispute. Muslims have pointed to verses in the Bible that they would have us believe are equivalent in violence and offensiveness, or have claimed that the great majority of Muslims don't take such verses literally; but it takes a peculiarly strong resistance to reality not only to deny that such verses are there, but to charge one who pointed them out with religious vilification.
In the comments to Cella's post, Australian reader Dave defends Higgins's decision on the grounds that "the two plantifs did not distingush between extreme Muslims and the Muslim religion in general, thus inspiting hatred against the Muslim community as a whole." That strikes me as a dangerously fine line to force people to walk in assessing other groups' religious doctrines. What, for instance, should the judgment be if the "extremists" of a religion have strong arguments that their method of practice (to be euphemistic) is rooted in foundational texts? Is Daniel Scot a criminal merely for lack of a disclaimer?
Attempting to answer a question that Cella posed to him concerning Christians' ability to judge variations of Muslim theology, Dave merely brings the problem into sharper focus:
In terms of judging, here's a simple rule of thumb: Extremists kill others and justify it in terms of religion. Moderates discuss religous ideas without killing people.
But where's the line? A mullah could "discuss" with his followers the glory that awaits those who sacrifice themselves in violent jihad. Would that be moderate? One could follow threads of culpability multiple degrees of separation from the actual coreligionists who "kill others and justify it in terms of religion."
At the very least, what "vilification" laws do is to prevent people outside of a religion from applying pressure to supposed moderates both to repudiate the extremists and to explain to them (and the world) why their interpretation of the shared texts and traditions is wrong.
The Washington Post's Ceci Connolly is fretting that, as Jeff Miller puts it, more women "during childbearing years are actually at risk of bearing a child." Connolly reaches the heart of the cultural matter in this paragraph:
Although unintended pregnancies can be welcome surprises, the danger from a public health and societal standpoint is that many of the women are financially or psychologically unprepared for parenthood at that point in their lives.
Jeff is correct to note that it bodes ill that a segment of society thinks that "pregnancy is a danger to public health and society." Even accepting the "danger" characterization, however, there's a more basic issue that arises when it becomes front page news that "the number of women who had sex in the previous three months but did not use birth control rose from 5.2 percent in 1995 to 7.4 percent in 2002" — especially when no effort was made to determine how many of those women were hoping for or at least open to pregnancy.
The fundamental issue, here, is the practical dimension of ensuring that even women who are or might be open to childbearing use contraception every time they have sex. The culture would either have to increase the priority given to not having children, or it would have to ensure that contraception and sex are so thoroughly associated with each other that potentially procreative sex seems unnatural.
Come to think of it, that actually sounds like a cultural movement that's been around for quite a while. Self-centered, youth-worshipping people who find it necessary for both spouses to work in order to maintain a comfortable lifestyle are easy to categorize as "financially or psychologically unprepared for parenthood"; make birth control absolutely free, as the Post article goes on to promote, and folks will have less reason to even think of ceasing it.
Alternately, we could strive for — oh, I don't know — a culture that promotes emotional maturity and a morality-based value system founded in religious faith and that privileges an economic system that makes parenthood more universal in its financial viability.
Barbara Nicolosi has noticed the furtherance of some related themes:
The thing with evil is, it never relents. It never sleeps. It never retreats. It never pauses to catch its breath.That's what I was thinking last Thursday while watching the last half of ER which featured an absolutely compelling and iron-clad dramatic defense for euthanasia....
I don't believe in media conspiracies, but it is amazing how everybody in the worlds of mainstream media and entertainment seem to get "on message" so fast. So, this week, for example, on Wednesday, I heard House minority leader Nancy Pelosi note on CNN that there really isn't any looming crisis in Social Security, and that the whole thing has been raised by the GOP to scare young people. Then, most of Wednesday and Thursday, AOL has the lead headline, "Bush says There is a Looming Social Security Crisis." "Hmmmm..." I thought. "Since when, don't we all agree that Social Security is in trouble?"
Then, I catch the ER episode on Thursday night, and I started to see the next horizon. It all fits together for anyone who wants to see it.
You see it, I trust?
Rebecca Hagelin makes a good point:
When it comes to other topics -- smoking, drinking, drug abuse -- we don't hesitate to give our children the benefit of an unambiguous "no." We tell them flat out that they shouldn't do it. If anyone said, "But kids are going to drink any way, so let's show them how they can minimize the effects of a hangover," most parents would suggest that that person have his head examined.Yet who can deny that the same logic (or lack thereof) lies behind the push for "comprehensive" sex ed?
I'm actually for lowering the drinking age and, in the interim, using a bit of common sense when it comes to older kids and drinking. But Hagelin's basic point applies to any number of topics. They're going to cheat anyway... they're going to drive recklessly anyway...
Be sure to watch the video linked in this WorldNetDaily article about the arrest and prosecution of Christian demonstrators at an event for Philadelphia homosexuals:
The four are part of 11 demonstrators who went before the Philadelphia Municipal Court in a preliminary hearing this week. Judge William Austin Meehan Tuesday ordered four of the Christians to stand trial on three felony and five misdemeanor charges. If convicted, they could a maximum of 47 years in prison. ...Eight charges were filed: criminal conspiracy, possession of instruments of crime, reckless endangerment of another person, ethnic intimidation, riot, failure to disperse, disorderly conduct and obstructing highways.
As far as I can tell, almost all of the charges apply at least in equal measure to the gay activists, none of whom were arrested or charged with anything. First, the Christian group required police to break up an arm-linked human barrier to the event that spanned the sidewalk (obstructing highways). Next the Christians were followed around by a cluster of activists sporting huge pink signs — to enclose the Christians within moving walls — and blowing whistles to drown them out (possession of instruments of crime, ethnic intimidation, failure to disperse, and disorderly conduct). And apparently, the treatment of the Christian demonstrators was planned and announced beforehand (criminal conspiracy). As for reckless endangerment and riot, those seem completely without merit all around.
The "ethnic intimidation" charge is the most outrageous. A handful of Christians were entirely surrounded by stone-faced activists and moving amid shouted quips from the crowd, including from a speaker on the stage of the event. Furthermore, the Christians were the clear and singled-out focus of the authorities on the scene. The Orwellian twisting of principle is best consolidated in a statement from one of the police officers to the Christian group's leader: "There's going to be no need for their pink signs, because you're not going to have your signs."
ADDENDUM:
Robert Walker-Smith makes a point in the comments that is worth further discussion:
At the major local such event (in San Francisco), such protestors are given a clearly demarcated area to pray in, wave their signage from, and so on, separated from the parade proper by barricades and a line of police officers. Thus, no such incidents - which seems to bother the parade participants and organizers not at all. And the protestors are there every year.
That seems to me a perfectly legitimate strategy for a municipality to balance the demands that are justly made of public space. In fact, it's probably advisable, given the extreme differences in worldview of our nation's citizens. In dev
