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 developing the policy, all people who think it likely that they'll want to either host a public event or protest one will be able to participate in the public debate with a view toward what they'd find acceptable from either position.
What isn't legitimate is an ad hoc solution such as conveyed on the video — with one officer following the group around telling the protestors that they can go anywhere because it's a public walkway, then telling its members that they can stand in a particular spot, and then other officers' coming in and arbitrarily ordering the protestors to retreat to a particular street.
As mentioned in the comments, WND clearly isn't an unbiased source, and the video could have been edited to exclude important factors. But as it appears on the tape, it looks as if the police were attempting to corral the group away from the event not in accordance with any particular law, but using various and shifting demands without assertions of law.
One of my fortunate discoveries, this fall, after I'd come to the stunning revelation that not all music with an explicitly Christian message is saturated with a trying-too-hard unctuousness, was Who We Are Instead by Jars of Clay. A review by Mark Joseph that I'd read in early August was absolutely glowing, and it ended by pointing to another revelation:
Among these [fans], ironically enough, is U2's front man Bono, who recently noted, "I've had their version of the song 'Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet' in my car for a year now, and you know what — it never has failed me yet."
Not surprisingly, given my past, I'd never heard U2 described in a Christian context before I began sifting through the Christian neighborhoods of the blogosphere, but apparently the theme has been there all along.
In the time since I read Joseph's review of Jars of Clay, the more-famous of the two bands has released what is being declared its "most conspicuously Christian record," and I can't help but wonder if there's been a Christian music equivalent of what the business folks call "upward management." Is the mainstream, commercial success of such bands as Creed, Sixpence None the Richer, and Jars of Clay beginning to make it acceptable again for pop/rock stars to express their faith? To come out?
That may or may not be the case, but the possibility does indicate a damaging bifurcation of faith and public life that has spread across more aspects of society than music. In a review of a previous album by Jars of Clay, Mark Joseph noted the band's fight to be treated "in the category that describes their music (pop/rock), not the category that describes their faith (gospel)." For too long, now, there has been religion and there has been culture, and one could fully integrate with one by becoming a stranger to the other.
That reality detracts from both aspects of our society, and it would be a mistake to see it as the work of only one side. Doug Giles describes the issue from the other angle:
Since God is the self-existent Lord of the universe and accountable to no one, he could have made the world in which we live completely beige. He could have been a minimalist who only shops at West End. He's God and can do what he wants. Instead, God dumped a lot of unnecessary splendor on us, expressly for our enjoyment. And you know what ... this freaks out the altar-call-driven, number-crunching, pragmatic, no-taste Church-goer because it seems that such expenditure is a waste of time, space and energy.
It sounds oversimple to say it, but at least part of life's purpose is to live, and arts and culture enhance that experience. The opposing reflection of this truism is that arts and culture lose their force without meaning and lose their coherence when disengaged from philosophy. Religion and culture oughtn't be kept distinct any more than they ought to be self-consciously melded. Each is ubiquitous in a person's life, and if we return to the practice of peering through life where they overlap most visibly, we will surely bring about a renaissance in the decades to come.
Back when Janet Jackson's Super Bowl striptease and Howard Stern's usual antics inspired the Senate to increase the fines for indecency to a level at which media corporations wouldn't sniff at the penalty,* Jeff Jarvis began a post titled "The Daily Stern: Taps for the First Amendment" as follows:
TEARING DOWN THE BILL OF RIGHTS: Religious fundamentalists, organized as a Dumb Mob, just dealt a deadly blow to free speech in America with legislators, cynical hypocrites, as their henchmen and media standing idly by, the short-sighted quislings.
Jarvis titled another post, specifically about reaction to the Super Bowl incident, "Book burners." To this rhetoric, somebody who disagrees with Jarvis's general position might be inclined to respond thus:
There is no religous war in America. That ended more than two centuries ago. And now we enjoy the benefits of that struggle. We should be grateful for that and stop squandering it with squabbles.
I didn't write that; Jeff Jarvis did. When religious citizens insist on a standard of propriety in the public square, their expression is "the organized effort of one Dumb Mob." When the argument is over religious displays in the public square, both sides need to "grow up and count their blessings" — and quietly put their creches "anywhere else." If only we could all develop Jarvis's fine-tuned sense of what is "silly" and what is "ridiculous." (Disallowing "an instrumental version of a Christmas ditty" receives the first adjective, but what about disallowing the lyrics to be sung?)
In Jarvis's view, "we are fortunate enough to have a First Amendment that guarantees our freedom to worship... yet we squander that fortune, that blessing, with silly, egotistical, show-off squabbles." I wonder what religious freedom amounts to, though, if the extent of worship — of religious expression — is not an open question. Jarvis (a Congregationalist whose sect's expression of theism is not generally targeted for restriction) has an understanding of the church-state relationship that is not incompatible even with radical secularism. But what of those who disagree fundamentally about the appropriate roles both of religion and of the law? Is it squandering the fortune of religious freedom to insist that citizens have a right to make their religion visible in their public capacity, even when others strenuously disagree, or does it contribute to that fortune?
There is no more expedient way to kill religion than to treat it as a private taste, a fashionable sensibility. Religion dies from silence. Among my most startling discoveries upon opening myself up to the possibility of faith was that people actually believe that stuff. What's more, thoughtful, reasonable, intelligent people believe that stuff! How is it possible that I could grow up not understanding this in a country in which 96% of citizens celebrate Christmas? I'd say that the answer is not unrelated to the willingness of people in '80s–'90s Northern New Jersey to be accommodating enough to say "happy holidays" so as not to offend.
Jarvis makes a puzzling statement when he says "millions around the world would die -- yes, die -- to enjoy" our freedom of worship. I'd suggest that submitting to death would be a counterproductive approach to enjoying anything in this life. As for securing religious freedom — broadly speaking — for others, accepting death has what might be called an extramundane precedent. The more insidious danger to religion and expression thereof is that we'll all learn to keep our lips prudently sealed about God out of concern that "He would roll His eyes"... you know, if He really existed.
* Jarvis argues that the amounts are such that he "can be bankrupted for making what is, in fact, political speech." Putting aside the what and whether of political speech, a wry chuckle is in order with the application of perspective. According to the Washington Post piece to which Jarvis links, the fine had been $32,500; frankly, that's more than enough to bankrupt somebody in my circumstances.
If Jarvis wants to argue that such fines ought to be relative to the person or organization that violates a particular rule or that there ought to be an explicit procedure for seeking mitigation, that would certainly be a reasonable suggestion — one that I'd support. It mightn't even be adequate that Sen. Conrad Burns (R-MT) added language to the penalty change in order to allow "the FCC to consider [smaller-market broadcasters'] size when assessing fines." But somehow, I think Jarvis would rather push for the removal of all fines than consent to making existing fines more fair.
The previous post has elicited recriminations to the effect that comparisons between homosexual activists and Islamicists are beyond the pale. Often, such reactions seem designed merely to shut down a sensitive debate. Be their intentions as they may, there's an important point to be made about them.
Mike Hubbard writes that it "seems especially repugnant, given that Islamic fundamentalists try to stone and murder homosexuals at every turn, for you to compare the two." His suggestion might be an appropriate response if I'd made a general equivalence between the two groups, but what I actually did was to address each group in the context of a particular issue. No matter how much any two groups despise each other, they still share the same world, and the actions of each will affect the other, as well as society at large. As commenter smmtheory puts it, ruling comparison of any sort out of bounds removes the ability to ask "what the possible outcome could be when two such totally divergent ideologies seek the same goal of redefining marriage."
Joel Thomas takes a moderately different approach from Hubbard: "You[, Justin], as a fundamentalist Catholic, may have more in common with Islamic fundamentalists than do gay activists." Putting aside the ambiguity of what constitutes a "fundamentalist Catholic" and my skepticism that the term applies to me, I'd say that Joel's assertion is possibly, if not likely, true.
Along a general spectrum of worldviews, I might be somewhat closer to Islamicists than is the average advocate for same-sex marriage. In such a case, it would be even more dangerous for me to bristle dismissively at delimited points of comparison. It might be true that taking certain of my views to a distorted extreme would approximate the views of Islamic fundamentalists. How else am I to find the line — and keep well away from it — unless I'm willing to be candid about comparisons?
The other option, one that is all too common in the modern West, is to be the deliberate opposite of a hated group. Unfortunately, as I began by pointing out, opposites can come around to supporting the same ends. I can only hazard to guess this, not knowing his politics, but there may be evidence of "coming around to the enemy's side" at the very beginning of Hubbard's comment:
Striving to change the nature of society, which both Islamists and gay activists are trying to do, is sometimes a necessary and useful process. The abolitionists of the 19th century were radically altering society, but I think, Mr. Katz, you agree with me that so terrible a society that allowed slavery needed to be changed. Indeed, it was the Christian thing to do.
That, to my eye, looks like a far more problematic comparison than anything I wrote. The question that ultimately arises is which of the two disagreeable camps — Islamofascists and Western conservatives — Western radicals choose to align with.
Not knowing what else to do with a comment from Stephen Gordon to a previous post of mine, I thought I'd just reprint it:
Chairm:Does the "theoretical person" have some person-like aspects but lacks a key component?The sole person-like aspect present at the moment of conception is a complete unique genetic code. Unlike the DNA in the gametes that came together to make the fertilized egg, it is not a direct copy of either the mother or the father. It is a new unique combination. It contains the complete instructions for making a new body.
One might argue that another aspect of this special cell is that it is human life. That it is alive, and human. Well, the gametes that came together to make the fertilized egg were alive and human too. Few pro-lifers would extend protection to those cells. The blood I have drawn for a physical is alive and human. I presume nobody here has a problem with testing blood.
I think the essential difference between the gametes before conception and the fertilized egg afterward is this new unique code.
There is another thing special about this cell. It is young. My child was born just as young as I was born. This is obviously very important. If age accumulated from generation to generation life wouldn't be around for long. But it doesn't.
This youth is one of the reasons that scientists are so excited about the possibility of embryonic stem cells. Let's say the day comes when we can grow replacement tissues with embroyonic stem cells. If the doctor used therapeutic cloning he could give the patient perfectly matching tissue that is youthful. I think that's pretty cool.
If a unique DNA code is sufficient to assign personhood status to this cell, then the debate is over. We agree that one person shouldn't be sacrificed to save another.
Mike S. said:
What criteria do you use to determine whether someone is or is not a person? When did you become a person?I don't think that this cell amounts to a person because a fertilized egg is simply genetic code plus a small amount of raw material. We are more than genetic code. My genetic programming would prefer me to spend every waking moment seducing as many pretty young women as I can - wedding vows be damned. But I don't. Why not? Because I am a person capable of making decisions independent of whatever urges biology gives me. The same cannot be said of that fertilized egg.
Something happened that made me a person sometime between now and back when a certain fertilized egg began dividing in 1969. When? I'm getting to that.
The issue is (and I've tried to frame this as neutrally as possible) "theoretical person v. the suffering person in front of us."No, the issue is, "is an embryo a theoretical person or is it a person?"How about: "Is this fertilized egg a person or not?"
The fact that you have good intentions and are a nice person doesn't change the fact that you are wrong. I could be, too, but you'll have to try and persuade me of that.Fair enough. I doubt I can. Not because I think you're too stubborn to see the light. I just recognize that it is very difficult to change minds on something a fundamental as when personhood begins. Reasoning through these things in a debate is a good way to understand our own positions too. So it's not a waste even if I fail to persuade you (or vice-versa).
By the way, that phrase "to see the light," refers to a point that societies have traditionally recognized personhood - birth. Seeing that first light or taking a first breath is still required in most places before a wrong that affects a baby is considered a wrong against the baby as a person.
For example, a drunk gets in his car and plows into a minivan carrying a pregnant mother. The mother lingers in a coma until she gives birth to her child and then she dies. If the child never takes its first breath, most states will not charge the drunk with two vehicular manslaughters.
That's a pretty arbitrary thing, isn't it? Let's say one man is driving at 0.1 blood-alcohol level. He has the accident I described, but isn't too drunk to hit his brake just prior to impact. Hitting his brake meant that less force was applied to the unborn child. The child was, therefore strong enough to take that one magic breath. The drunk gets charged with two manslaughters.
A second drunk has a 0.2 blood-alcohol level. He's passed out at the wheel when he hits the pregnant mom. The baby never takes a breath and so the drunk gets charged with one manslaughter.
Which drunk is guiltier?
It's partly in recognition of this sort of absurdity that states have begun passing laws that punish people who harm unborn children "as if" they had harmed a person. I think that's a good thing. In fact if it were up to me I would protect the embryo as a person all the way back to the point of differentiation.
Differentiation is a point about two weeks after fertilization where cells begin to be assigned specific duties. I mentioned in an earlier comment about how a fertilized cell can become one person, two people, part of a person, or no person. That commitment (to become 1, 2, half, or 0 people) is made at the point of differentiation.
Differentiation obviously occurs much earlier than Rowe v. Wade's first trimester. Most women don't even know they are pregnant at this early stage. Would I deny women who don't discover their pregnancy until later the right choose? Yes I would.
Mike, you are uncomfortable with the idea that society could decide whether a fertilized egg is a person. Who else is going to decide? God may have decided, but He's keeping it to Himself. Even if everyone in our country accepted the Bible as the inerrant word of God, there is no passage that specifically deals with this question. You seem to have decided there is some objective way to know that this cell is a person. Do you have some reason to believe it?
Both the difficulty of knowing what to do with this comment and the belief that it is worth addressing derive from my impression that Stephen has laid his weight on various arguments often made in the service of views with which I generally disagree. Like hopping from stone to stone across a stream, the various points skip over the currents of truth until they reach a headland adequate to declare the stream crossed.
The heart of the problem, it seems to me, comes at the end of Stephen's comment: "God may have decided, but He's keeping it to Himself." Is He? I'm feeling a little silly, so forgive my lapse into fiction:
Hedia tapped urgently on Simon's shoulder. Simon turned from his never-ending project and snapped, "What?" Hedia pointed to her throat and threw her mouth open as if taking a breathless gulp."Look, Hedia, if you've got something important to say, spit it out. I've got to get this project to the next stage soon, or I may have to change the whole idea. What is the matter?"
While Simon spoke, Hedia tugged relentlessly at her collar, almost stretching the fabric far enough that Simon thought the whole show bordering on indecent. But still she said nothing, merely clutching at her neck and whacking her palm on the bare skin above her breasts.
"Just tell me what is bothering you!" Simon demanded.
In attempting to discuss moral matters with Christians, and not just dismiss them using their own argot, one must understand their perspective. God is not silent on matters of moral weight. Rather, as St. Paul put it, His "invisible attributes" — from which we can derive morality — can be "understood and perceived in what he has made." The question, therefore, is not whether God has anything to say about a particular matter (despite popular belief, God and the Constitution do not function identically). The question is what He's already said via that which we can observe. And from that perspective, the gap between Stephen's logical stepping stones is conspicuous.
The effective equivalence of the fertilized egg and the gametes is a case in point. The fertilized egg is not unique merely in that it "contains the complete instructions for making a new body." It also sets about making that body. It is an organism that will, of its own volition, progress toward stages at which it is more recognizably a human being. Note Stephen's subsequent admission that "most women don't even know they are pregnant at this early stage." The young human being is not advancing according to the will of the mother, or the father. It advances on its own. The embryo, clearly, is "more than genetic code," as well.
I would suggest that this realization — this understanding of what God has made — is embedded in Stephen's privileging of differentiation. Since he's deprivileged the unique genetic code of the fertilized egg, then one could suggest that the egg and sperm are also differentiated cells of the same potential organism; Stephen knows something important happens at fertilization. Furthermore, since he's emphasized a grown person's ability to make "decisions independent of whatever urges biology gives" him, then differentiation is clearly no less arbitrary a milestone than the formation of unique DNA.
Stephen's more directed argument for aligning personhood with differentiation — that, before that point, the embryo "can become one person, two people, part of a person, or no person" — is an interesting one. In fact, I responded to the suggestion when he first made it, but apparently neglected to actually post the comment. Here, we return to the post by Phil Bowermaster with which this discussion began (emphasis in original):
Each time one of these procedures was done, this living human tissue would grow into a human being. Why would anyone insist that it has to grow into a different human being? Says who? My twin brother can't demand that he has a right to exist. I never have to create a clone in the first place. And if I do create one, I assert that I have the right (before it grows into a separate and distinct human being) to decide that it will be me, rather than him, when it grows up.
Bringing this notion back into the current context, it is clear that a human being's loss of his or her ability to split into multiple human beings at the stage where Stephen would begin personhood is merely a function of our limited technology. With cloning, even adults "can become one person, two people, part of a person, or no person." The cultural function of cloning, therefore, would appear not just to be the removal of the embryo's personhood, but the removal of everybody's personhood, unless that quality is simply made synonymous with the state of being a human being and begun at fertilization.
Especially when the air is filled with promises of miraculous drugs, arbitrary lines are simply not tenable. The conclusion that there's really no such thing as personhood, although obviously ridiculous, is one that atheists and postmodernists have come to for quite some time. As postmodernists understand, absent an absolute morality, the only measure becomes power, and the assertion of power is even less amenable to arbitrary restraints. Ultimately, there are two options: the one that God has left for us to see in what He has made, and the wrong one.
No doubt about it, this potential alternative to embryonic stem cell research, as described by Ramesh Ponnuru, can raise feelings that something must be immoral about it:
William Hurlbut, a member of the Kass council and a Stanford Medical School professor, suggests mimicking the results of a defective fertilization. Nature sometimes produces "teratomas," eggs without male genetic contributions that begin to divide and grow, even growing body parts such as hair and teeth. But these teratomas are not organisms: They lack the ability to organize themselves and to direct their own integral functioning and development. They are disordered growths, like tumors. Hurlbut suggests that we might be able to produce teratomas artificially and derive from them usable stem cells that are functional equivalents of embryonic stem cells.
I've italicized the sentence that, unless I'm misunderstanding the science, makes the proposal a morally licit one. Ponnuru expands on that critical point in his subsequent piece:
Some pro-lifers seem to be under the impression that a teratoma is a disabled embryo, so that Hurlbut is proposing deliberately to create disabled embryos. If what Hurlbut has in mind were the creation of embryos that have the capacity to direct their own organization and develop but, let's say, were designed to be unable to implant, they would have a point: those would be severely disabled embryos. Hurlbut's proposal, however, involves a scenario with no embryo at all.
Still, there's much to be said for weighting gut feelings of repugnance. Ponnuru acknowledges this, but he doesn't go far enough:
Repugnance can embody good reasons for objecting to something that we are not immediately or consciously aware of. When we feel repugnance, we should stop and try to think through whether it is telling us something. But repugnance does not always have something to teach us, and if we cannot find anything we have no reason for objecting.
The missing consideration, here, is that overcoming repugnance where there is no moral reason to object tends to decrease the healthy repugnance that accrues to similar instances in which there is a moral reason to object. Becoming acclimated to the creation-for-destruction of near-autonomous human life demystifies the same usage of actually autonomous human life to some degree.
The intellectual flip-side is that the principle that underlies the repugnance can be better defined if we manage to properly identify its source. Emphasizing the sentence that I italicized in the first blockquote above clarifies what makes a human being a human being at the point of conception. Winning that point not only whittles away at the argument and emotionally compelling rhetoric of advocates of embryonic stem cell research, but it also has implications for related debates, such as abortion.
I could be persuaded that I'm missing something key, either on a scientific or a moral basis. At present, however, I'd suggest that such proposals as Hurlbut's become associated, in the pro-life platform, with adult stem cell research. If we are right, in an ethical sense, then increased specificity in our explanations and our definitions is an ally, not an enemy. And if we can overcome squeamishness to reach the point at which right becomes wrong and offer compromise on the right side of that line, then we gain the ground of reasonableness.
Warren Throckmorton makes a good point:
In other words, 10th graders, we will tell you that applying condoms may prevent disease and pregnancy but we will not tell you that your long term sexual and emotional satisfaction may be enhanced by saving sex until marriage. The curriculum says in places that the only sure way to prevent disease and pregnancy is through abstaining but there is no mention that one's overall well being might be enhanced by waiting.Since you won't hear this in school, here are a few survey findings from research concerning abstinence. According to 1996 data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health, lower sexual activity among adolescents is correlated with higher levels of well being. In fact, sexually active girls are over three times as likely to report depressive symptoms than their abstaining counterparts and sexually active boys are over twice as likely to report depressive symptoms. Amazingly, these two groups report higher incidence of suicide attempts; boys in particular are at 8 times the risk for a suicide attempt if they are sexually active.
It's certainly possible that I chose not to absorb the information, but I don't recall ever hearing anything about the emotional benefits of waiting. Of course, the picture becomes less simple upon introduction of such information as this:
Fewer teens are engaging in sexual activity than in the past, and those that do are more likely to use contraceptives, the government said Friday.The National Center for Health Statistics said that for girls aged 15 to 17 the percentage who had ever had intercourse declined from 38 percent in 1995 to 30 percent in 2002.
For boys, the agency said, the decline was 43 percent to 31 percent.
One plausible suggestion is that Throckmorton and I are insisting on repeating a message that is already getting through, one way or another. Even to the extent that this is the case, though, I'd suggest that the need for more promotion of the benefits of waiting is advisable. The premises for this suggestion derive from two observations from the complete data (PDF).
The first is that it isn't, strictly speaking, true that "fewer teens are engaging in sexual activity"; in 2002, 1,089,000 more teenage girls and 1,101,000 more teenage boys reported having had sex than in 1995. It would be more accurate to say that the number of teenagers who have not had sex increased more than the number who have. That could represent a sexual trend, or it could represent a more general trend.
Which leads to the second observation: the leading reason for abstaining from sex was that sex would be "against religion or morals." (Surprisingly, this reason outstripped the second one, "don't want to get [a female] pregnant," by a greater margin among girls than among boys.) And among females who had experienced intercourse, 5.3% of those who declared religion as "very important" were "cohabiting, engaged, or married," compared with 3.0% who declared it "somewhat important" and a number too low to report who said "not important."
In other words, the data corresponds very neatly with the generally accepted trend of increasing religiosity. It also corresponds with the comparatively high fertility of religious families as opposed to secular families. It's possible (I'd say probable), then, that the improving statistics aren't a function so much of successful sex-ed programs as of cultural shifts. Referring back to Throckmorton's piece, it begins to look as if his advice is most needed by the segment of American society that is least likely to heed it.
Our nation's cultural divide is deepening, and I, for one, have no hesitation about which side I'd prefer my own children to grow up on.
A while back, Marty McKeever wrote on his now-defunct Vigilance Matters blog that homosexual activists have to maintain an unsustainable degree of ambiguity between their orientation's being a fact of nature and its falling somewhere within a range that might appropriately be called "choice." If it's a choice, then it's tougher to argue for civil rights in the way that racial minorities can. If it's a fact of nature, then we might develop a cure, or at least preventative measures.
The latter "if" is a bit more difficult to conceptualize and to discuss, in part because one suspects that the vehement preference of homosexual activists would be to treat the orientation as a fact of nature that we choose not to unravel. I don't attribute undue credibility to a recent study, but it does help to bring the "fact of nature" possibility into focus. (It brings the controversy into focus, too; note that it's an American study, but reported in a British newspaper.)
Women who take slimming and thyroid pills during pregnancy are substantially more likely to have homosexual children, according to research. ...The mothers of homosexuals were found to be up to eight times more likely to have taken such drugs, with the effect being strongest with daughters whose mothers took the drugs during the first three months of pregnancy. The discovery, to be published by researchers in America, backs claims that human sexuality is determined by genetic and biochemical factors at work during early pregnancy. ...
The results suggest that the effect of the drugs is strongest with female babies and when taken during the first three months of pregnancy, which accords with previous studies showing that sexual orientation is decided during this period. ...
Dr Glenn Wilson of the Institute of Psychiatry, London, and author of a forthcoming book on the origins of homosexuality, said: "These types of medication could have an effect on brain chemistry and research suggests that this is a major factor in determining sexual orientation."
Here's the question, to be asked and answered honestly: If women were made aware that a particular drug could cause homosexuality in their children, would they be less likely to take that drug? Some ultra-radicals might attempt to cast such a choice as homophobic, but I imagine even a majority of gay people would say the answer is "yes," less likely, and that that is an understandable decision.
Personally, I don't believe the "brain chemistry" is so directly determinative. For one thing, I'd suggest that the diet-pill finding, at least, could represent a skew in the study's sample in ways that go beyond the medication. And probably more importantly, I think it's likely that the brain chemistry is significant in that it affects various attributes — from mannerisms to abilities — that contribute to socialization that disposes a person to homosexuality.
I'm looking forward to Ramesh Ponnuru's Tech Central Station follow-up to yesterday's piece about some newly proposed scientific techniques to which opponents of embryonic stem cell research don't know how to respond. In my previous post, I suggested that engaging in the artificial creation of life through cloning will lead to the presumption that we have dominion over that life, even to the point of dictating its value purely with reference to ourselves.
The first of the technologies that Ponnuru cites seems likely to effect the same end from another direction:
The first, by two Columbia University scientists, claims that some of the embryos frozen at fertility clinics are already dead -- that is, they are no longer capable of directing their own integral functioning as unitary entities, nor do they any longer possess the capacity for development, even in the most hospitable of circumstances. But it may be possible to take usable stem cells from these embryos. Since they are already dead, the taking of the stem cells will not kill them (whereas taking stem cells from a live embryo would kill it). The proposal is for more research into figuring out how to identify which are the dead embryos and how to take usable stem cells from them.
Ponnuru suggests that this would create an immoral incentive, but that seems an understatement to me. It is currently legal to create embryos and to let them die. Insisting that they die of natural causes (if that term is appropriate) before scientists can harvest them barely adds a step to the sequence. As for the time limit that he suggests as a possible solution, I'll merely say that I hear echoes of the amnesty for illegals debate. The "wasted stock" of dead and dying embryos will simply mount again, and the same logic will apply.
The first procedure gives the cultural impression that it is merely looking for ways to tiptoe lightly over a principle, rather than avoid it. The second procedure, I'll agree with Ponnuru, "raises more complicated issues":
Nature sometimes produces "teratomas," eggs without male genetic contributions that begin to divide and grow, even growing body parts such as hair and teeth. But these teratomas are not organisms: They lack the ability to organize themselves and to direct their own integral functioning and development. They are disordered growths, like tumors. Hurlbut suggests that we might be able to produce teratomas artificially and derive from them usable stem cells that are functional equivalents of embryonic stem cells. Since human teratomas are not human beings, this research would involve no killing.
My gut reaction is that this technique is still a step too close, but I'll hold off on declarations until I have a chance to read Ponnuru's part two.
I'm glad to see, in the comments to a post in which I responded to some of his thoughts on cloning, that Phil Bowermaster takes others' speculation about the disposition of his soul seriously enough to take offense. I'm even more glad to hear that he now thinks that "there's plenty to regret" aboutthe post of his to which I'd responded. (However, I will note that the time for mitigation would have been when he republished it, or at latest when he saw the Instalanche heading toward him.)
The objection that he (understandably) maintains speaks to a difference of perspective that to Christians appears obvious, but to atheists and agnostics may seem obscure, nonsensical, or obviously false:
I am characterized as a monster, an advocate of slavery, a fiend who would casually redefine humanity to serve his own selfish purposes, and (if I read your last line correctly) Satan's agent here on earth. Not surprisingly, I take exception to these characterizations.
I won't respond on behalf of other readers, but Bowermaster is correct about the allusion in my last line — although he takes from it a connotation that I don't attribute to it. It seems to me a pretty clear consequence of life in a fallen world that each and every one of us is, at some point, an agent of Satan. To be sure, there are degrees, the worst being deliberate rejection of God for rejection's sake — self-aware enlistment with evil. I suspect such a thing is rare, and I don't think it's a suggestion that can be found in a fair reading of my post in Bowermaster's case.
In his case, the degree is akin to a grievous error. In seeking good, he inadvertently chooses evil. Real life, unfortunately, rarely presents us with the stark choice of a bluesman at the crossroads; rather, at some point, an error in motivation or in analysis steers us down the wrong path.
But we can always go back. There is no irredeemable evil. In this light, when somebody writes, as I did, that a particular line of advocacy "steers us toward playing" the Devil, it is a warning, not a condemnation.
The opposite end of the spectrum — the notion of "playing God" — falls to a similar difference in perspective:
At one point, only God had ever made a limb. Was it "playing God" to invent the first prosthetic leg? There was a time when only God had ever started a heartbeat. Was the first doctor who used electric resuscitating paddles "playing God?" And I can only assume that you think that in vitro fertilization is "playing God."
Well... yes, yes, and yes. But it was Bowermaster who treated the assertion that cloning "isn't playing God" as if that question were decisive. "Is," then no cloning; "isn't," then yes cloning. I was arguing from within his construction. As a matter of fact, in an important sense, I think we're called to play God. (We're created in His image, after all.) Forget limbs and heartbeats; when you uphold love for your children even when they appear to reject you, you're "playing God."
There's a point, however, at which playing God in a good way slides quickly to playing God in a bad way. At that point, doing as God does (potentially good) corrupts our thinking such that we believe we can claim the privileges of the divine (bad). In keeping with my previous post, one such claim is the right to "assert" dominion over the humanity of a twin whom one has created. The essential argument of many of those who oppose cloning is that the jump from deliberately creating life in an artificial fashion to asserting God-like control over its destiny is less a leap than a stumble.
I'd suggest that raising personal offense to the status of persecution is one of the ways in which modern society has eroded the barriers that keep us from such soul-slick turf. So I repeat: I'm glad that Phil cared to take offense, and I'm even more glad that he's "inclined to say let's go with [my] definition" of when life begins. But I'll still insist that harsh characterizations of his position are not so much a judgment as reminders of the one that is God's prerogative.
With the arrival of tomorrow's (Thursday's) edition of the University of Rhode Island's student paper in my emailbox, I discovered a barely broken story that might turn into a big deal, but might simply fade away. Thinking that it oughtn't fade away, I posted about it on Anchor Rising.
The Student Senate at the school made a last minute (before the break) move to change its rules about recognizing student groups. Simultaneously, it's begun cracking down on at least one Christian group that wears its religion on its bylaws, so to speak.
From the little that's available on this story, I suspect it's the sort of thing that justifies a bit of an uproar (even if only Rhode Island–sized).
Listen to the sweet sound of the crack of James Lileks' bat:
If you believe that puddle-deep self-obsessed people engaged in two-backed beast construction is somehow the most illustrative example of the human condition, I suppose the movie will strike you as high art, but the notion that trivial people screw a lot and argue afterwards is as illuminating as the fact that dogs don't get married after they knock paws.
Periodically, you'll hear an artsy (yet well paid!) type try to spin his/her wares as a commentary about the superficiality put on display. I've stopped buying the spin; sheer volume has made it all too clear that the artistes are mining triviality for lessons — or perhaps excuses — beyond "don't be like this."
(It doesn't help that one rarely learns that the authors and producers of the supposed cultural commentary live in such a way as to suggest a critical perspective on their material.)
Patrick Hynes has started up a Web site to campaign on behalf of The Passion of the Christ for the Oscars.
It's a shame that such campaigns are necessary in general, for ostensibly merit-based awards. So much more so when the uphill battle is caused by something other than obscurity.
I like Michelle Malkin's Christmas crusade idea:
I am hereby launching the Lump of Coal campaign. Later today, I will box up a lump of charcoal, mark the package "MERRY CHRISTMAS!" and send it to the Denver Mayor in protest of his idiotic policy. Please join me in doing the same (and if you take a photo of your creatively designed package, I will link/post).
You know, that ought to be an initiative from either one of those groups already in place to work to preserve our Christian heritage or a new group. (I notice that lumpofcoal.com is still available.) As Michelle's follow up reveals, the nascent movement has already met with success.
The only thing I'd worry about is that the organization would come under investigation for terrorism. After all, the Post Office asks, with every package, "Anything breakable, flammable...?"
Greg Wallace tells the story of a man whom he's been solicited to help recover from a sex-related collapse of his life (part one and part two):
"You know this guy," he said. "He works for the State Police. He got involved in pornography years ago, graduated to the Internet, hooked up with someone there and about five years ago she left her husband to be with him. After five years of him living a double life, he couldn't handle the pressure anymore, tried to break it off, the woman told everything to his wife, who wound up in the Stress Center yesterday for around-the-clock observation."
A whole range of factors have to bleed together for somebody to let his life get to this stage. It's the fashion to redefine sexual "addiction" in terms akin to substance addiction, but that obscures the degree to which the problem is psychological and, therefore, spiritual — in a series of bad decisions and the willful stirring of sensation. As Greg writes in part two:
He became sexually active at a pre-pubescent age; the Song of Songs says "don’t awaken love before its time," and while I believe that has a specific context in scripture, I believe it also applies to God's plan for our sexuality – that there is a time and place of His intention for us to discover what he has designed as a gift for us. When that plan is derailed, then all bets are off. The young man's sexuality – already supercharged by premature exposure to sensation – was heightened by exposure to pornography, which continued unabated for many, many years.Prolonged exposure to pornography dulls the senses. It takes more and more stimulation over time to achieve satisfaction. What started out with magazines and videos graduated to the Internet. And as the senses continued to shut down, he began to look for more effective ways to achieve the same level of satisfaction. When he hooked up with a woman on the Internet, it was like striking a match to tinder.
Psychological association, I've come to believe, is part of the reason pornography viewing escalates and voyeurism makes the leap to action. One of the reasons advertisers pay so much money to associate pop songs with a product is that the song will thereafter evoke thoughts about the product. Similarly, a person's emotional reaction to a particular scene in a movie will affect how that person feels about something reminiscent of that scene in life.
The more scenes, plots, sounds, and so on that we — individually and socially — associate with sex, the more there is in the average day to arouse sexual feelings. Those feelings build up, and temptation, being more constant, becomes more difficult to resist.
Phil Bowermaster endeavors to "straighten" the public out on two issues on which it is "desperately misinformed." Well, not to be shy about admitting my state of mind, I've been feeling askew, lately, so let's see what Phil's got to say about issue #1, cloning:
It isn't magic. It isn't playing God. It isn't new.Nature creates human clones all the time in the form of identical twins. Reproductive cloning would be nothing more than producing a late-arriving identical twin. Not the same person. The camera doesn't steal your soul, and neither will a clone. As I said, there are social reasons why this might not be a good idea, but can we please for the love of God get the idea that there is something uncanny or "spooky" about cloning out of our heads? There isn't.
Okay, so let's follow it straight through. Phil begins with three assertions, the middle of which is that cloning is not "playing God." His first bit of supporting argument is that... hmmm... I can't claim an inside view of Mother Nature's ontology, but as a theist, it looks to me as if Phil is suggesting that cloning isn't playing God because, well, God clones twins. Curious; doing as God and only God has done is not playing God. Noted.
Moving along, while I'll agree that it would be harmonious with the love of God to refrain from describing Him in such pagan-sounding language as "spooky," it seems to me that Phil's argument that doing as God does is not "playing God" raises a question: can cloning be "new" and "spooky" because we've never done it before? We lack the capacity to unleash a force approximating a supernova, but I suspect even Phil would agree that the technology would be "new" when it first came about. And I for one think the human race's having access to such a power would be somewhat beyond spooky.
But perhaps this sort of thinking is just an indication of the "desperately misinformed" foundation of my logic. So let's forge on, taking the straightened out path and understanding that doing as only God does is not "playing God," that doing something that we've never done before is not "new," and that doing something arguably "a: seeming to have a supernatural character or origin... b: being beyond what is normal or expected" (M-w.com) is not "uncanny."
Issue #2 is "the human development cycle," about which Phil quotes another blogger as follows:
In my book, a human is someone you can converse with, who can think, feel pain, and suffer the effects of Alzheimer's or heart disease. An embryo has none of those characteristics.
Again, excuse my askew thinking, but that seems like an awfully limited definition of "human." Most loosely understood, it would seem to exclude anybody who is currently unconscious; strictly understood, it would also seem to exclude anybody who isn't currently suffering "the effects of Alzheimer's or heart disease." I suppose the blogger, with the pseudonym of "Reason," means to imply a modifier akin to "possibly at some future date." But if that's the case, I have to admit that I don't see why an embryo wouldn't count. One needn't wait much longer to converse with an embryo than with a newborn. Maybe Phil can clarify:
It [an early-stage human being"a mass of undifferentiated stem cells"] doesn't have a head or a heart or a nervous system. Those things start to kick in around week five, and take recognizable shape somewhere around week eight.
I see. The "it" isn't a human being until somebody adds a head or a heart or a... hey, wait a second. Who does add those things? Well, inasmuch as the it develops those parts of its own volition, it seems to make the most sense to give the it the credit. But if it can advance itself along the stages, what justifies drawing the Line of Personhood before an accomplishment that the it just hasn't managed to get around to, yet? Phil's next paragraph appears to begin with the intended answer:
If we, as a society, can define humanity as starting somewhere after the fourth week of embryonic development, we open up the possibility of tremendous medical advances.
Okay, I think I'm starting to catch on now. It isn't some stage of development whereby either the new life or nature draws a line; rather we, "as a society," draw the line because it suits us to do so. Just get over that hump of believing that lines ought to lie where we find them drawn, and it's all easy moral sailing from there. Or is it?
A few years from now, it may be possible to create an embryonic clone of myself. ... Let's consider that embryo at four weeks. If I put it in the right environment, that blastocyst might grow into my identical twin brother. It isn't my twin brother now. It's just some growing tissue taken from my body and an egg I borrowed from somebody else. ...... If I am injured or get sick, part of this collection of cells will be reintroduced into the organism from which it came — that would be me — to help it recover. As I age, more of the cells might be introduced to help counteract the effects; still others might be put on a new developmental path towards being a finished "part": a heart or a set of lungs or a new pair of eyes.
Here's a question: what if we discover that it's more effective to allow the it to get "a head or a heart or a nervous system... or a set of lungs or a new pair of eyes" started? Can we do that? Can we, as a society, just decide that a clone's life starts after the eighth week... or the eighth year? It'd be for all the right reasons; we don't want real (i.e., suffering) persons to die. And after all, the fact that a clump of cells begins to breathe at a certain point "doesn't mean it's the only place where the line can be drawn, or even the best place."
Well, I think I'm straightened out, now, and frankly, I'm a bit spooked by the small number of paragraphs that it takes to get around to this:
Why would anyone insist that it has to grow into a different human being? Says who? My twin brother can't demand that he has a right to exist. I never have to create a clone in the first place. And if I do create one, I assert that I have the right (before it grows into a separate and distinct human being) to decide that it will be me, rather than him, when it grows up.
Perhaps a refusal to offer free will to life that we create is what steers us clear of "playing God." Forgive my "superstitious dread," but I can't help but feel that it steers us toward playing somebody else.
(via Instapundit)
I certainly do wonder what drives the anti-abstinence crowd. I don't mean the general impetus — that's easy to give a name to — but the specific ideas of which they are in pursuit. To what degree is sex, per se, their motivation? Looking at the picture accompanying the Washington Post's article about the Rep. Henry Waxman's crusade against abstinence programs, I shudder to imagine lasciviousness as his motivation. Perhaps the true motivation is money; in one way or another, every profession from the entertainment biz to the welfare industry is invested in sex.
Some would surely object that Waxman is merely investigating the allocation of federal dollars to groups that misinform their young charges, and I'm sure he's managed to uncover legitimate errors in some materials somewhere, as well as suggestions with which he disagrees. Still, the degree of spin involved within such reports themselves and then, further, in the media raises the question of what one couldn't taint with the same treatment. On top of the highlighting of the absolute-worst findings, consider this sentence from Ceci Connolly's WaPo piece:
The report concluded that two of the curricula were accurate but the 11 others, used by 69 organizations in 25 states, contain unproved claims, subjective conclusions or outright falsehoods regarding reproductive health, gender traits and when life begins.
The previous paragraph explains that each curriculum is used in at least five programs, of unknown type. Washington Post readers have no way of knowing which are most egregious, how frequently those are used, which of the three types of flaws were discovered in each, what those flaws represented, or in what capacity the curricula are even used. Turning to the full report (PDF), for one example, we observe that an erroneous claim mentioned twice in the WaPo article, once in the very first paragraph — that half of gay teens are HIV positive — came from a misleading chart in a curriculum that just barely made the study. It was used by five organizations — precisely the arbitrary minimum chosen to achieve the arbitrary number of 13 "commonly used curricula."
As for the report itself, there's just too much that could be dissected to address, but here's one of my favorite bits:
Although religions and moral codes offer different answers to the question of when life begins, some abstinence-only curricula present specific religious views on this question as scientific fact. One curriculum teaches: "Conception, also known as fertilization, occurs when one sperm unites with one egg in the upper third of the fallopian tube. This is when life begins." Another states: "Fertilization (or conception) occurs when one of the father's sperm unites with the mother's ovum (egg). At this instant a new human life is formed."
First, note the glaring absence: the report explains that "religions and moral codes differ," but what does "scientific fact" have to say on the matter? I've found this to be among the most frustrating elements of the abortion debate; as a point of fact, the unique human life begins at conception. The organism formed at that time will move through various stages that together represent the human life.
But back to the boundaries of this report. We've just heard a complaint that the curriculum teaches a religious view, but if we back up a few pages, to the description of the groups that are using these curricula:
The eleven curricula are used in 25 states by 69 grantees, including state health departments, school districts, and hospitals, as well as religious organizations and pro-life organizations.
Stop the government! Religious and pro-life organizations are using materials that support a religious and pro-life worldview!
Here's another gem:
Instead, some of the curricula provide distorted information on cervical cancer, suggesting that it is a common consequence of premarital sex. For example, the teaching manual of one curriculum explicitly states: "It is critical that students understand that if they choose to be sexually active, they are at risk" for cervical cancer. Another curriculum asks, "What is the leading medical complication from HPV? Cervical cancer." Neither of these curricula mentions that human papilloma virus (HPV), though associated with most cases of cervical cancer, rarely leads to the disease, nor that cervical cancer is highly preventable when women get regular Pap smears.Other curricula advise that condoms have not been proven effective in blocking the transmission of HPV and that "no evidence" demonstrates condoms' effectiveness against HPV transmission. According to the CDC, however, evidence indicates that condoms do reduce the risk of cervical cancer itself, a fact which both curricula omit. These curricula also say nothing about the importance of Pap smears.
First paragraph: some curricula are wrong to suggest that HPV leads to cervical cancer. Second paragraph: other curricula are wrong to say that condoms prevent HPV transmission... because condoms do reduce the risk of cervical cancer... somehow.
Keep in mind, by the way, that all of the material for these curricula — from books to teachers' guides to accompanying newsletters — were pored over for this 22-page report. I spent a short while working in the textbook industry, and I'd suggest that a government-sponsored fact checker could produce at least that length report checking any dozen curricula on any given topic. That would include, as implied by Emily of After Abortion, the "standard obstetrics textbook" that supposedly proves wrong a claim about abortion and infertility.
An interesting tangential question is how weighty a report a government probe could accumulate fact checking the mainstream media. Here's Ms. Connolly:
Nonpartisan researchers have been unable to document measurable benefits of the abstinence-only model. Columbia University researchers found that although teenagers who take "virginity pledges" may wait longer to initiate sexual activity, 88 percent eventually have premarital sex.
Actually, as I discovered back in March, that 88% of abstinence-pledgers who fornicate corresponds with 99% of non-pledgers who fornicate. One wonders whether the cause of researchers' difficulty measuring benefits is the person wielding the ruler.
Representative Joe Pitts only gets it partly right: Waxman's study was ideologically driven, but the Washington Post and other media groups probably weren't naive in their touting of it. They've products to sell, after all, and a worldview of their own to bolster.
Keep up the push Senators!
Senate Republican leaders plan to move legislation next year to protect the Boy Scouts of America from attacks by liberal groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union over government ties to the organization, which has an oath that acknowledges God.
Based on my limited knowledge of the actual legislation, it looks like the right thing to do, a proper assertion of the relationship between government and religion, and a political winner.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist introduced legislation this month stipulating that no federal law, directive, rule, instruction or order should limit any federal agency from providing support to the Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts, including meetings held on federal property."To this legislator, the ACLU's continued attacks on the Boy Scouts is starting to become its own form of persecution," said the Tennessee Republican, a former Scout, in a floor speech Nov. 20.
He tried to get the measure through the Senate by unanimous consent in the waning days of the congressional session, but Senate Democrats rebuffed him.
It's unlikely that the Democrats will have the last rebuff, on this one.
You've probably seen this, but it's the sort of thing that ought to be passed along even beyond what its palpable immediate importance might require:
A hospital in the Netherlands -- the first nation to permit euthanasia -- recently proposed guidelines for mercy killings of terminally ill newborns, and then made a startling revelation: It has already begun carrying out such procedures, which include administering a lethal dose of sedatives.
Of all the pieces about Theo Van Gough assassination, Andrew Stuttaford's "How Enlightenment Dies" is among the most compelling:
Crucially, the Dutch appear to have abandoned teaching the mutual tolerance, however rough-and-ready, that is essential to the functioning of a free society. Instead they opted for the walking-on-eggshells sensitivities of multiculturalism, and a state of mind in which open debate, if someone somewhere could deem it offensive, was a danger, not a delight. In a country that was drawing many of its immigrants from traditions where notions of tolerance had little or no part to play, the consequences should have been obvious. If liberal democracy is to survive in all its noisy acrimony, all of its citizens — even the most disaffected, even the most devout, even the B's — need to develop a thick skin. In Holland, nobody showed them how. To Van Gogh, multiculturalism was farcical. And for Van Gogh it was a farce that turned lethal.
I offer that quotation by way of partial response to a comment that Zein Cesar Majul made upon my previous mention of Van Gogh. The truth is, with its patchwork excuse making and accusational reversal, I'm not sure how to respond to this:
Perhaps the reason we don't have incidents such as the killing of Van Gogh is because as a society, we are much more "accepting" of how other cultures behave. Moreover, most thinking people make a distinction between cultural modalities and general ideal constructs such as Islam, Christianity and Judaism. Van Gogh chose to generalize from a specific cultural practice common to many societies both muslim and non-muslim and label it as "Islam." Muslim jusrists have over the years spoke out against forced marriages and female circumcision. This has had little effect, as most educational institutions in muslim countries have become secularized and those that are not, will not deal with issues that are socially controversial. The muslim community (over a billion strong) has more than its fair share of fanatics. By definition, a fanatic may not be reasoned with and will adhere only to his own code of conduct. Van Gogh left himself open to all comers in this regard. Perhaps the Netherlands should institute polygraph tests for immigrants and asylum seekers to ascertain if they are of firm intention to abide by the laws of the society they are moving to and pledge fealty to its government and institutions.As an afterthought, perhaps we are just more used to this kind of stuff. The USA is a rather violent place where perhaps more killings like this occur than we are aware of or care to remember. How long will it be before we all forget what the Oklahoma bomber's motive was?
Wesley Smith's piece on NRO a few days ago is worth the time of anybody concerned about euthanasia — particularly those who lean toward supporting it in some cases:
But beneath the weirdness, the shenanigans of Nitschke and his suicide groupies should serve as a warning to the rest of us about the potential consequences of legalizing assisted suicide. United States advocates like to pretend that legalized facilitated death will always be limited to the actively dying when nothing else can be done to alleviate suffering. But this is highly unlikely. Once one accepts the noxious notion that killing is an acceptable answer to the problem of human suffering, how can it possibly be limited to the terminally ill?...In fact, this is precisely what has happened in the Netherlands. After more than 30 years of permitted euthanasia, the category of the Dutch killable has expanded steadily; it now includes the depressed, the chronically ill, and the disabled, including infants who are born with birth defects. And now, the Dutch parliament seems set on lowering the age of consent to be killed to twelve years old.
Westerners, particularly Americans, have a tendency to approach problems with a practical view toward facilitating people's happiness. We're rule-benders and latitude-givers. That attitude is wonderful — Christian — but only if we maintain firm footing on first principles when we put it into action.
It's a good thing we have the ACLU. Otherwise, the military might be able to offer explicit support to an organization that teaches uniformed boys teamwork, survival skills, and... reverence. (Yeah, the type that involves God.)
The Pentagon has agreed to warn military bases worldwide that they should not directly sponsor Boy Scout troops, partially resolving claims that the government has improperly supported a group that requires members to believe in God.The settlement, announced Monday, came in a 1999 lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, which says American military units have sponsored hundreds of Boy Scout troops. ...
The settlement does not resolve other ACLU claims involving government spending that benefits the Boy Scouts, such as money used to prepare a Virginia military base for the Boy Scout Jamboree and grants used by state and local governments to benefit the Boy Scouts, [ACLU legal hit-man Adam] Schwartz said.
These aren't even lawsuits to secure similar recognition for similar groups; they simply target the Boy Scouts for the reason that it has a religious foundation. By what insane definition is that not religious discrimination? Here's a quick and easy test for anybody who's in doubt about the objective, here: would the ACLU object to a similar group that didn't have the religious principles? No.
So when are people going to get sick of these radical fundamentalists?
Suggesting to fellow conservatives that enabling a Kerry presidency would have been a too-risky attempt at "creative destruction," John Derbyshire writes of the "wreckers loose in our own society":
It is those wreckers that most concern me: the arrogant judges, the academic deconstructors, the teacher-union multiculturalists, the media guilt-mongers, the love-the-world pacifists, the criminal-lovers and family-breakers, the inventors of bogus rights and destroyers of cherished traditions, the haters of normality and scoffers at restraint, the enterprise-destroying litigators and pain-feelers.I do not fear that American civilization will be brought down by Osama bin Laden, or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, or any foreign force at all — not even (if you will permit me a quick sarcastic poke in the eye to my paleo friends here) not even by the arch-fiend himself, Ariel Sharon! I do fear that this country might be made unfit to live in, as the country of my birth has been, by a misguided and corrupt humanitarianism, sentimental wallowing in past wrongs both real and imagined, and class and race resentment petted and nurtured by opportunistic tax-eaters.
As it happens, there's yet another study out today in the land of Derb's birth that brings home for this father of two young girls what Derb's emailer meant in suggesting that England is "unfit to live in or raise children in":
The number of Londoners suffering sexually transmitted diseases has risen by more than a third, new figures reveal.They show that cases of infections soared between 1997 and last year, from 169,721 cases to 228,641. The final figure could be higher as some clinics have still to submit information.
That article alludes to the higher rates of chlamydia among men and women in their early twenties. A 2002 study (that I noted at the time) of a clinic in London is a bit more specific (emphasis added):
The study also revealed that girls under 16 were three times more likely to contract sexually transmitted diseases than older women.One in five had chlamydia, a symptomless disease which can cause infertility, and almost one in 10 had gonorrhoea, which also poses a threat to fertility by damaging fallopian tubes and can increase the chances of suffering an ectopic pregnancy.
And in 2003:
The highest-rate of infection was among 16- to 19-year-old women and 20- to 24-year-old men but health experts fear it is "the tip of the sexual iceberg".
As much as sorely losing liberals, such as Marcia Lieberman of Providence, might suggest that my attitude isn't "truly modern" and is typical of our "backward nation," my fatherly instinct is to prefer the U.S. — with its backward progress — in a comparison of trends, at least in the symbolic area of sex. Encouragement of oral sex, attractive perks for teenage pregnancy, and parent-avoiding morning-after pills distributed to eleven year olds at school don't seem to be working out too well elsewhere in the Anglosphere.
Glenn Reynolds quotes as follows from an article about a developing medical procedure:
Three years ago Elisabeth Bryant believed she would be blind for the rest of her life. “I couldn’t see anything,” she says. Now, although her vision is not perfect, she can see well enough to read, play computer games and check emails.Bryant has retinitis pigmentosa, an eye disease that has blinded four generations of her family. What has saved the sight in one of her eyes is a transplant of a sheet of retinal cells. The vision in this eye has improved from 20:800 to 20:84 in the two-and-a-half years since the transplant – a remarkable transformation. . . .
There is a catch, of course. The sheets of retinal cells used by the team are harvested from aborted fetuses, which some people find objectionable.
Professor Reynolds seems to believe that this undermines certain pro-lifers' debate points, although his source doesn't follow the blog etiquette to provide at least one example of a so-called "It's not as though fetal tissue grafts are really medically promising" argument. (The link that Colby Cosh provides on that quotation actually goes to the above-quoted article.) Personally, I find the paragraph following the blockquote to be the most relevant, both to the moral issues and to Cosh and Reynolds's reaction:
One accusation of those opposed to using fetal tissue is that women might be tempted to have abortions to provide tissue to restore their own sight or that of relatives. "People are going to claim that we are promoting abortion," says Norman Radtke, the surgeon who carried out the transplants at the Norton Audubon Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky.
When it comes to medical technology, of one thing we can be sure: the next one hundred years will present us with plenty of situations in which we must decide whether desirable ends justify immoral means. As emotionally difficult as it will be to insist that some radiant paths must be left untrodden, we must acknowledge, now, that blindness to moral demands is a degenerative disease.
I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry at an email that Mike Adams shares today:
Based on the facilities that we have in (deleted), our recommendation and request is that both gendered bathrooms on the second floor of (deleted) be made gender-neutral. By this we mean that people of all genders be able to use either of the multi-stalled restrooms on the second floor. The urinals that are currently in one of these bathrooms will be shut down.
I'm also not sure whether to despair or hope. It's sad that the question can even be asked with a straight face (no pun intended), but don't you find it at least conceivable that some not insignificant number of men who are disinclined to join the battle over marriage — for whatever reason — would decide that the "tolerance" movement has just gone too far the day they walk in what used to be a men's room and discover cardboard barricades on all of the urinals?
Why is it that those who place "tolerance" toward the top of their personality résumés seem so often not to understand what the quality actually entails? Being tolerant of another person — interacting with that person so as not to cause offense — means understanding his views and considering them in how and when one approaches sensitive topics. It isn't toleration, for one thing, to tell somebody whom you've hurt by poking a sore spot that you ought to be able to poke because he oughtn't consider the spot to be sore.
Another Jonah Goldberg emailer (a group that's beginning to become a candidate for its own NRO-moderated blog) offers the latest instance of what has been a common example, lately:
I think a better example would be if Cheney's daughter happened to be a convert to Islam or Judaism, and the Bush administration was pursuing laws that somehow limited the rights of religious expression. (I know we're playing with some way out there hypotheticals right now, but bear with me.) If Kerry pointed out that Jews/Muslims were human beings with the right to express their religious affiliation and pointed to Cheney's daughter as an example of that, would that be shameful? There's nothing wrong with being a member of a religion, and there's nothing wrong with being gay. The difference in opinion on this issue stems from whether people think being gay is shameful, embarrassing, or unfortunate in the first place.
Before addressing the point, we must clear up a couple of slips or sleights (whichever they happen to be). Note, first, the equation of supporting the codification of the status quo (traditional marriage) with pursuing laws that would do something that is not currently done (further infringement on religious liberty). This conflation is characteristic of the arguments of those who advocate for same-sex marriage: they act as if it wouldn't be a change, speaking as if the Federal Marriage Amendment would remove a right that homosexuals have historically enjoyed.
Note, second, that the emailer lists two specific religions in his analogy but names the affront as against "religious expression" generally. The difference may seem minimal, but the emotional tug of the thing changes if we correct for this problem: suppose John Kerry were a Muslim, Atheist, or even a Protestant and his daughter were notable for being a Roman Catholic. What would be the reaction if, asked about school choice in a debate, President Bush brought up her name in a response suggesting that Kerry favors anti-Catholic discrimination by excluding religious schools from voucher programs, insinuating that he and the daughter were united against Kerry? Or up the emotional ante: what if the moderator had asked about fuel efficiency, and President Bush had mentioned John Edwards's son, who died in a car accident, as a presumed supporter of large, solid automobiles? (Goldberg gives some other examples toward the end of a recent column.)
Getting back to tolerance, it seems to me that a person who is compassionate with respect to differences would avoid the arsenal of logical leaps, anachronisms in cultural reality, and (especially) fundamentalist insistence that all arguments must be approached as if that person's view were undeniably correct. Now, I don't know how the Cheney family handled Mary's coming out. I don't know what their Thanksgiving dinner discussions involve. Nonetheless, I can say that Jonah's emailer shows utter contempt for the other side and its ability to think in something other than black and white when he writes:
There's nothing wrong with being a member of a religion, and there's nothing wrong with being gay.
Is there no religion for which membership would be something wrong? More precisely, is there no approach to religion that could be wrong? Even just a sensitive topic within a family? Apparently, a great many part-time spokesmen for gay rights believe there to be something wrong with subscribing to a religion that believes homosexual impulses ought to be resisted and treated as an urge to sin. And apparently, that particular something is so wrong that to so much as leave the possibility open indicates hypocrisy, at best, and bigotry, at worst.
There's nothing wrong with having feelings of attraction toward people of one's own sex, and there's nothing wrong with wanting to define one's own view as objective reality. The difference of opinion on the former count stems from whether people think the attraction is contrary to what is evident in the way in which God formed us. The difference of opinion on the latter count stems from whether people are even willing to admit that that's what they're doing.
That's the question that crosses my mind when I read such letters as that which Mr. Benjamin Morton of East Greenwich, Rhode Island, sent to the Providence Journal to offer his fellow citizens a refresher on a certain brand of history, popular among elite academics. I've italicized a couple of choice sentiments:
Imagine historians in a world where Hitler had won World War II excusing him for the slaughter of millions by extolling his vision of gaining new territory for a superior race. The genocide of Native Americans claimed far more people than the Holocaust, but this is easily written off by the morally certain culture that carried out the atrocities.Contrary to Bowden's rosy picture, the United States has not ended war but, rather, made it more violent and prevalent. It did not end slavery until after much of the rest of the world did so. And it is still immersed in religious fundamentalism as groups bomb abortion clinics and try to bring back prayer in public schools.
Bowden's outright racism toward Native Americans and Muslims deserves the violent response now brewing across the Muslim world. This racism is not the answer to terrorism -- it is the cause. When I read words like his I fear for our world, just as much as when I hear a tape from Osama bin Laden.
Bowden's whitewashing of America's cruelty and his incitement to violence will bring both upon us.
Speaking of OBL, didn't one of his tapes say something about people's reaction to a strong horse and to a weak horse?
ADDENDUM:
By the way, remember when it was all the rage for Morton's ilk to say such things as, "Of course terrorism is horrible, but..."? Well, it occurs to me that they never — or rarely, at best — qualify their anti-Americanism in that way, as in, "Of course America has done some good things in the world, but..."
One of my students complained, yesterday, when I informed him that, if he wanted back the remote control car that I had just taken away in the final minutes of the day, he would have to walk down the stairs with the class and then back up with me. Apparently, he had to walk home, and this extra bit of exercise would be just a bit too much, making him "collapse halfway home." Two relevant flashbacks:
In a fantastic rant, Michele Catalano pinpoints the moment when Western Civilization decided to smother itself to death:
You know when the world went to hell? When Coca Cola decided to teach the world to sing. The second that commercial came out, a death knell sounded across the playgrounds and schoolyards of America. Parents everywhere, suckered in by the feel-good lyrics and hand-holding sappiness of the commercial felt an awakening of sorts. All those who missed the hippie train of the 60's were going to jump on the Free to be You and Me train of the 70's, and ride it hard.
Ride it hard, but with fifteen layers of padding.
ADDENDUM:
In a confluence of thought and scenery, as I put this post together, I just happened to catch a bit of the lyrics of "Apple a Day" from David Wilcox's excellent CD Into the Mystery (of which I have an autographed copy):
When you get there life is easy
Winning every game you play
But every day is just the same
Nothing lost and nothing gained
Same old re-run on some child-proof stage
So they say: Vacation in Eden
Bring an apple a day
(Dust in the Light, where angry rants lay down with Christian folk-rock.)
In a reflection upon the ten-year anniversary of The Bell Curve, John Derbyshire runs afoul of the principles of our nation, I'd say, when he writes:
We Americans are averse to inquiring too deeply into human abilities, for fear that what we might find would contradict the founding principles of our nation, principles we naturally hold dear. In that sense, the human sciences are in their very nature un-American. Science doesn't care what you wish. You may wish that the sky were a crystal dome, or the earth hollow, or the living species unchanging through all time; science calmly, patiently, and irrefutably tells you that none of these things is the case.
I suppose certain points could be raised as evidence on that argument's behalf, although they'd be recent and superficial for the most part. It's indisputable, for example, that a certain feelgoodism has swept the land, but as is evident in our capitalism, Americans tend to consider success — at whatever — to be its own proof of human abilities. Many Americans like to believe, as Derb suggests, that "anybody can be anything," but in its purer form, the declaration is results-driven, and never divorced from effort. Work hard enough, the promise goes, and (perhaps more importantly) find your own path to an end, and you can achieve success in reasonable proximity to an ideal.
Tiger Woodses are a special breed, to be sure, but making them the disproof of the anything that anybody can be takes a narrow view of what we mean by "anything." The American dogma — and yes, it involves idealism — requires that one find a strategy for playing golf that fits one's unique talents and expend enough effort in practice to allow that unique approach to become decisive. The odds improve greatly, obviously, the broader "anything" becomes, whether clubhouse champ is adequate or, taking a different tack, starting/funding/running/covering a professional golf tournament counts as having "made it" in golf.
The distinction is foundational. I reply to Derb that the fact that human beings are differently abled is in no way contradictory to "the founding principles of our nation." Note what those principles state:
We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights...
The equal endowment is the rights. We are self-evidently equal, even as we are self-evidently not equally capable of any given task. Human abilities — endowments of brain, brawn, or bucks — are not the measures of value or of importance. This is why, beyond his odd hint that America's self-evident truth is just a wish about which science doesn't care, the contradiction that Derb cites does not exist:
Personally I believe that the contradiction between core American ideals and the results now pouring in from the human and biological sciences is resolvable, and that a properly scientific approach to the human sciences, and a widespread popular understanding of them such as Herrnstein and Murray attempted to promote via their book, would strengthen and improve our society, not weaken it.
The "contradiction" is not "resolvable" in exactly the same sense that the "contradiction" between science and religion is not "resolvable." These problems are not resolvable because they are not problems. In the American vision, which has, admittedly, blurred in recent decades, human equality supercedes anything that science could possibly tell us, just as God incorporates material reality and is felt mostly in the Why that science cannot touch.
It is a shame that the American intelligentsia smeared Herrnstein and Murray's book before their message could sink into the national psyche to help form a strategy for addressing disparities that may arise in the future. But the basic truth of the matter is that, while science can help us to identify and solve problems, the conviction that they are, indeed, problems must come from elsewhere.
Science, therefore, is only "un-American" to the extent that it presumes to tell us what equality means, not in a narrow context, but as a measurement of value. The reason that The Bell Curve met with such a heated reception was that the book's opponents believed its yardstick to offer a measurement of just that, value, rather than simply of intelligence. To their everlasting credit, the authors took the different approach of beginning with the American principle that all men are created equal and then looking to their research for ways to avoid Americans' forgetting it.
Jonah Goldberg posted an email earlier today posing a question that, as Jonah mentions, one hears often from homosexuals with some conservative leanings on particular issues:
What's a gay conservative to do? See, I agree with republicans on things like low taxes, free market reform, privatization, smaller government, foreign policy, and the war on terror. Unfortunately. the party caters to a constituency that pretty much defines me as an abomination and takes every effort to cast the "homosexual agenda" as anti-family and anti-american. In election years, this rhetoric becomes even more hateful, and now there's an entire constitutional amendment trying to keep me in my place.
Upon taking a moment to notice that the emailer is pretty much defining religious/social conservatives as hateful and bigotted, it becomes clear that he wishes to play the guilted compassion card in such a way as to marginalize an opposing, but larger and more historical, Republican constituency. It's not an argument from principle; it's an argument from emotional pressure. Granted, that's an approach that has accumulated undue force in modern times, but how does one respond to the following except with a wry "boo hoo":
They make it crystal clear they don't care about my vote under any circumstances. It's like the republicans labor under the illusion that we will all eventually go away and not have to be dealt with.
That's an intriguing construction. The first sentence is flatly untrue; Republicans would welcome "the gay vote" — as long as it is based on shared principles rather than capitulation to demands that the party simply cannot afford politically. Then, contrasting with the woe-is-me appeal, the second sentence offers a veiled warning. That implicit refusal to compromise isn't the only thing that's veiled; note what also lies behind the gay rhetoric:
On the other hand, I disagree with almost every "non-social" policy (I agree on abortion, death penalty, gay rights, and school vouchers with the democrats; pretty much whatever the religous wing of the republicans is for, i oppose) on the democratic platform.
The parenthetical at first caught my attention because it made me muse at the complete social platform with which the "gay thing" seems so often aligned. But there seems to be a deeper current, here. The complaint is of gay conservatives' political homelessness, and the plea is to treat homosexuals as people — as people who matter enough to address. However — if I may disassociate a word from a cliché — the homosexuality appears to be a wedge to open the way for an entire worldview that is wholly incompatible with the religious conservative perspective. Since the orientation is taken as immutable, it follows that the opposing perspective must go.
This factor plays in multiple directions, but it very often seems that sexual matters have this effect. Encouraging a narrowly linear way of thinking that accords with strong urges, they allow fundamental shifts to pass as a matter of course, the gathering earthquake unnoticed beneath the rocking of the bed.
Earl of the many blogs has been cross-posting an appeal to assist with some legal research intended to help preserve Terri Schiavo's life.
Remember her? She's the disabled woman in Florida whose husband is so intent on starving her to death that he's pushing the state's judiciary to go toe to toe with Governor Jeb Bush.
Frankly, I'm ashamed to have gone so long without mentioning the case. Even in the face of travesty, it's difficult for enough people to stay on top of any given issue for long enough to thwart those who have a permanent, non-negotiable interest in pursuing the immoral option. That's no excuse, of course. Until somebody tells Mr. Schiavo and the Florida judiciary that enough is enough — their countrymen have deemed them wrong — the moral side of the battle must maintain its strength.
When I wrote a post on the issue of Indian reservation gambling in Rhode Island, I was essentially thinking out loud. Marc Comtois rightly called me on some of the content of that post, and although I still thought the risk of a casino to be far below other problems in the state of Rhode Island, I did reevaluate my position.
The reassessment found a foundation, today, in a piece by Gary Bauer. I hadn't realized how extensive and culturally significant the trend of Indian casinos has become:
The petition to the high court was filed by four card clubs and two charities in the San Francisco Bay area — operations that stand to be driven out of business by a nine-acre urban "reservation" conveniently created for an Indian tribe and its investors just off a major interstate near San Francisco.Many people, including the U.S. Congress and Supreme Court who helped effectuate IGRA in 1988, might be shocked to see that the financial "winners" from Indian gambling include very few Indians. Rather, the "winners" are oftentimes savvy, non-Indian investors, large public casino-operating companies that manage operations for the tribes, and a handful of very wealthy Indians who are aggressively working to exclude other tribes from the action.
Matters of questionable ethics are like that, though: the door can't be cracked open, even for reasonable license. In the case of mega-casinos, it hardly even represents a gamble to predict that any allowance will be pushed and wedged to open the way for, as Bauer calls it, "casino culture."
Over in the Corner, Ramesh Ponnuru wonders, while considering the truism that "blue states subsidize red ones," whether part of the reason is that "a significant military presence reddens an area," thus bringing both federal funds and Republican voters to it.
While Rhode Island is hardly representative for military states, we do have a rather significant Naval presence, particularly on the island on which I've spent most of my time as a citizen. (For example, National Review writer Mackubin Thomas Owens teaches at the Naval War College, which is attached to a large base.) Yet, ours is among the most liberal states in the nation, and even those employed by the military, with a material interest in the military bent of the country's leadership, often vote with their region rather than their occupation.
I'd say that military presence and redness represent one of those intricate relationships involving a web of causes and effects. Rugged, open land breeds a rugged individualism, and rural areas lend themselves to community activities, often involving religious organizations; in this day and age, both of these tendencies translate into Republican voters. More generally, the country attracts and forms a certain sort of worldview, part of which is the devotion to one's own group. Hubs for international communication, interaction, and travel seem about as far away as the other countries, themselves.
Simultaneously, rugged, open land is particularly attractive to several branches of the military. This is true, first, in a geographic sense: the landscape assists in military operations, for both training and strategy. It is true, second, demographically: likely recruits are nearby and will feel at home in rural settings.
Ramesh concentrates on political explanations, which certainly play a role, but I'm not sure the political, cultural, or anyotheral considerations can be teased out of the reality, here. Somehow — but not surprisingly — I find myself recalling something from his journal that Peter Robinson posted in the Corner back in June:
Journal entry, May 2001: Ever since my talk with Judge Clark, I've found, a picture keeps coming to mind. Ronald Reagan is on horseback, riding along the exposed ridge at the southwestern corner of his ranch. When he reaches the high point where the helicopter pad once stood, he reins in his mount. He gazes up at the enormous vault of the sky. He feels the rushing wind against his face. He looks east, following the shape of the land as it tumbles down and away, spreading to form the green bowl of the Santa Ynez Valley. Then he shifts in his saddle to look west, taking in the endless, dazzling ocean, the Channel Islands misty in the distance. And then he whispers, "Glory to God."
That's a pretty apt (if oblique) summary of the dynamic in question.
You've probably seen it, but if you haven't read VDH's piece on the fall of the "bankrupt generation," go do so; if you've read it, read it again. For those who've read it twice already, here are the parts relevant to this entry's point:
Commentators have envisioned Rather's fall as symbolic of a "paradigm shift" and the "end of the era" — an event that has crystallized the much larger and ongoing demise of the old establishment media. Allegories from the French Revolution and the emperor without any clothes to the curtain scene in The Wizard of Oz have been evoked to illustrate Rather's dilemma and the hypocrisy of all that went before. We have come a long way since the 1960s: The once-revolutionary pigs taking over the manor are now bloated and strutting on two legs as they feast on silver inside the farmhouse. ...But the regime is crumbling on campuses as well. Too many university professors in the humanities dropped long ago their allegiance to the disinterested search for truth, or to teaching students facts and methods. ...
The U.N. also seems to be going the way of CBS. Only a little over a quarter of our citizenry feels that the organization reflects American values. ...
Those who profess to be Democrats are reaching historically low numbers. Many prominent Democrats are hypocrites... Being rich and a lawyer helps too. Most prominent Democrats and their enablers are either lawyers or multimillionaires, and now often both.
Although I'm loath to turn from a vicious foe while he still has more power than he does lucidity, and although I wouldn't declare the fight over, it's increasingly clear that the Left is sinking. As it does so, it will drag our culture painfully toward the vortex, but the heat of battle is over; now we need only survive the fallout.
But history does not end here. There are plenty of swimmers in the water, and plenty of ideological dinghies have pulled away. Those with certain sympathies with the Right — whether military, economic, or broadly intellectual — have switched sides and have long been working to defeat their mutiny-ridden former vessels. Some of them, to be sure, have fully integrated, helping to evolve conservative thinking along the way.
Despite it all — all the confusion and the anticlimactic struggle — it behooves those of us who emphasize religion in our lives and who are socially conservative to look toward the new battle. How much longer we'll have more in common than in difference with the libertarians among us, we cannot know. However, I'd suggest that the redefinition of the sides will come more quickly than we expect, and that we'd do well to begin laying the groundwork for defense. For, by our natures, we will surely continue to be motivated more to guard what's good than to destroy what's evil — as much as the two overlap.
Some of our most effective and generally persuasive arguments will be split in two, and we must consider, beforehand, why the more viscerally pleasing half is a dangerous totem when severed from the more spiritually fulfilling half.
In line with thoughts about barriers to communication, I got a glimpse of what it means to be Man in the eyes of some women, yesterday.
During a lull in a long teachers' meeting in the afternoon, some of the women involved with the after-school program were discussing a female student who'd taken to giving little strip shows for the boys. Half-listening, as I graded math quizzes, I heard the names of two of the lads from my class as among the spectators, and I looked up from my scatterplots to ask, "How old was the girl?"
The reaction was not, let's say, quite what I expected. One of the women stood up, as if in confrontation, as she answered, "Four years old." I stumbled through a mild barrage of incredulous quips and returned to my work, mumbling something about having not been listening.
A short while later, it occurred to me: at least some of the ladies had heard my question as a leering expression of interest in the performance, rather than the children. What a pall of suspicion must envelop men, in some women's view, that such an innocent and obvious question resounds lustful! It brings to mind Zona Douthit's intriguing piece from the first Redwood Review, "Battles & Wars," about a girl's formative experiences when it comes to males. It seems we're warring tribes by nature, men and women.
(A suggestion with tremendous implications for the importance of the marriage debate, I'd say.)
Crouched down at eye-level with my two-month old daughter, a man to whom I'm disjointedly related said, "I just can't understand how anybody could hurt them."
My sister-in-law's mother's second husband is a notable presence at family gatherings. Last year, my not-quite-two-year-old daughter stared at him for the entirety of her cousin's party: "Santa Claus!" Well, perhaps a modified Santa. I'm not sure what his religious practices are, but he gives the impression of a Biker for Christ. He's a gentle, jovial man who wears a hard-rocker's t-shirts, and when I took his comment as less of an incredulous assertion than a spark for intellectual discussion, I quickly realized my mistake, although his reaction supplied by far more wisdom than my rambling.
I related to him an anecdote that a child-protection professional of some sort had told the auditorium full of teachers in which I sat a couple of years ago as a grade-school computer instructor:
A harried single mother of a young boy and a newborn, desperately had to run to the store around the corner from her apartment. Her son was playing quietly, and the newborn was sleeping, so she asked the very friendly guy across the hall just to stand in her apartment and keep an eye on things for five minutes — no more than ten. He protested that he didn't know anything about watching children, but she assured him that he need only be concerned with obvious and desperate dangers and left him there.Time passed. Five and ten minutes came and went. Fifteen. Twenty. At about thirty minutes, the baby stirred. At thirty-five, she began to scream, and her brother suggested that the neighbor pick her up. He did so — nervously — and bounced her around a little. She kept crying.
After another ten minutes, the brother informed his agitated babysitter that mommy usually gave his sister a bottle when she cried, so the man found an empty bottle, went to the refrigerator, and filled the bottle with nice cold whole milk. The baby's body didn't take it well, and the screaming escalated. Then the phone rang.
The mother, as it turns out, had enough outstanding tickets that, when she was pulled over while rushing to the store, the policeman arrested her. In the process of it all, she proved unable to contact her neighbor immediately. And when she finally managed to do so, the screaming baby, and the whining brother, and the ringing phone were all too much, and the panicked neighbor threw the baby against the wall. She stopped screaming.
"There's something about their screams that touches a very deep chord," I concluded.
"Yeah, to help them! Not to throw them against the wall!"
I stammered the beginning of a response, but couldn't quite make things come together, under the sudden pressure of feeling that I'd seemed to be making excuses. What I tried to express was that the deep instinct sparked by a baby's cries is to do something. When there is nothing to be done, or nothing that works, blood pressure rises and one's sense of desperation with it. It took me until my second child to be able (somewhat) to have the presence of mind to run down the checklist of possible actions, conclude that nothing is seriously wrong, and resign myself to the cries. A person with absolutely no experience or psychological preparedness to assess and answer a baby's needs would feel only frustration and an undefined urge to make it stop.
The reason I stammered my response last Saturday afternoon (apart from the few empty-stomach beers that I'd had) was that I began to wonder, even as I spoke, whether there mightn't be a broader statement there. How much of our society's corrosive discombobulation could be described as a frustrated response to our disconnection from instinct and from the embrace of God? Having suppressed and denied our natures and He who formed them, we have no channels for strong pulls that we do not understand, and so we lash out, trying to silence the aggravation.
It won't work, though, because the call is inside of us, and with each lashing we know less what it truly requires.
If I were able to assign required reading for y'all, a brilliant article to which reader Mike S. directed my attention would be it. "Supremely Modern Liberals," by James Hitchcock, is more than worth your time, long as it is.
On first reading, it seems to encompass just about every concept toward which conversation on this blog has tended, lately. Even the wheat thing fits in — as a nearly perfect example of the way in which emotions are tugged to change policies in such a way as to undermine the basic ideas and beliefs behind those policies, under the radar and with minimal review of the original reasoning.
Hitchcock's essay has the feel of a quick explanation of a much larger theory, and much of it requires further exploration. I've printed it out with the intention of reading it again when I've got a chance. Still, it's already pulled my calling into sharper focus, so perhaps it could do the same for you.
Although it's a broad veer from the specifics about which I was writing, and although the person to whom I was responding (Jeremiah Lewis) is by no means a secularist, Ben Bateman's comment to my first post about the Roman Catholic requirement of wheat in the Eucharist raises an interesting area of thought:
You've got a good point on the secularists' urge to redefine and reduce everyone else's traditions: Communion bread can be anything that looks vaguely bread-like. Marriage can be any coupling of two human beings. We can recognize no distinction between adoptive parents and biological parents. Procreation means maximum numbers of babies. Homosexuality must not only be tolerated, but normalized.Wasn't there a story a few months back where either California or the feds were trying to punish Catholic churches or hospitals for refusing to provide employee benefits that include birth control? And wasn't there a story about the State of New York trying to force Catholic hospitals to perform abortions?
There's a common thread here, but I can't quite articulate it properly.
Given the totality of Ben's previous comments, here and elsewhere, I'm somewhat suspicious that he's being facetious in professing an inability to articulate a common thread. In essence, it's that secularism has become a form of religious fundamentalism itself, and in its "neutral" disguise, it is crowding out all theologies that disagree. Others can nominally believe in that God thing... as long as they don't insist on behaving as if He really exists, particularly as long as they don't insist on founding public behavior on that belief.
The particular threat of creeping tolerance lies in the power of what can be seen — without denying their goodness when rightly applied — as the three fronts of a perfect storm:
As these three fronts have coalesced in modern times, the thinking goes something like this: a person wants to do something and convinces himself that there is no reason that he oughtn't. According to individual freedom, he has a right not to be forcibly restricted by law from doing it, and according to the code of "tolerance," others must respect his decision and not use any social, economic, or even personal means to force him to reconsider, even to the point of disallowing expression of disapproval.
Complexity enters the picture when one realizes that everything involves tradeoffs; one person's individual freedom inherently restricts other people's individual freedoms. Often others' freedoms are expressed as group rights — as in holding that the individual has a right to live in a group or society that adheres to certain principles. As Ben has suggested before (if I may paraphrase a comment that I'm too tired to seek, just now), group rights find their most fundamental form in the central principles to which we must adhere on a national level, involving the validity of our system of government (founding documents included) and some basic agreement about the structures of reasoned debate.
What has happened is that sensibility and emotion (visceral) are twisting and redefining tolerance and good will (moral) in such a way as to demand that the law guard against etiquette's being breeched (political). People who don't feel that others are sufficiently following the moral dogma of respect for differences — which really codes an ideological sameness behind superficial distinctions — are trampling on freedom in order to force compliance. To be fair (and charitable), most of them probably don't realize that they are doing so; they think they're just expanding the universe of niceness, and if we all just respect other people's space (in each other's own reality), then we can all live together and do everything we each want to do... if only those intolerant people will relent on the things that they want to do, which are very mysterious (superstitious, even) and not very gratifying.
Striving to step outside of the inescapable assumptions on which our worldviews are founded, and simplifying the sides into competing claims of rights, what is happening is that the breadth of activities that must be tolerated as individual freedoms for one side keeps expanding, while for the other side, it keeps shrinking. For example, we all should agree that homosexuals have a right not to be persecuted. Recently — and I agree with the result, if not the mechanism — they cemented their right to do what they wish, sexually, in the privacy of their own homes.
Now, however, the definitive expression of homosexuality itself is being broadened to require tolerance for same-sex marriage, to the extent that the public sphere not be permitted to make any distinction between such relationships and opposite-sex relationships. Denial of this tolerance — refusal to redefine the institution of marriage, for example — is pushed under the growing umbrella of "persecution," where it joins, in the partisan's mind, the continued resistance to the inclusion of sexual orientation within hate-crime laws (hate speech in some contexts).
Switch directions. Of course Christians don't have a right to force others, by law, to adhere to their particular religious practices or to persecute them for not doing so. But now they're coming under attack for allowing their religious beliefs to inform the way in which they wield whatever force they carry as members of society — whether in determining who they'll hire or what benefits they'll offer, deciding what projects they'll take on or what services they'll offer (as in hospitals), or judging the application of law to moral issues such as abortion.
As Ben alludes, the California Supreme Court has ruled that Catholic Charities isn't sufficiently religious to qualify for exemption from a state requirement that employers offer contraception if they offer prescription coverage; the Salvation Army of New York faces the loss of millions of dollars in city contracts unless it offers domestic partner benefits; similar stories increasingly pepper the modern landscape. Essentially, the definitive expression of Christianity itself is being constrained from including the right to act publicly according to one's conscience.
The range of life in which a religious person is allowed to act as if what he believes is actually correct is being constantly cut back. So, as the respect due to homosexuals moves from tolerance for their desire, to tolerance for their acts, to public recognition and approval of their relationships, the respect due to Christians is slipping back from tolerance for the public acts informed by their religion, to tolerance for their private-sphere decisions based on religious belief, to tolerance for their profession of belief. You can believe that God frowns on homosexuality, but you aren't allowed to conduct yourself as if that's actually true.
So, in that sense, Ben's expansion on my complaint about some people's treatment of the wheaten bread controversy is entirely appropriate. (It would be unfair to include Jeremiah in what follows, I think.) Catholics are free to believe that Christ is literally present in the Eucharist; they are free to believe that the Holy Spirit has guided the institutional Church in its deliberations about what its religion requires (although, of course, our humanity often gets in the way). But if the Church invalidates a girl's rice Communion (chosen in lieu of the available, and valid, alternative of the wine) because its institutional precedent suggests that Christ mightn't have been literally present in the Eucharistic simulacrum, well, that's just taking this belief thing too far.
Adjusting the picture of the modern world to incorporate the value given to otherhood and orgasms, one might come to see James McGreevey as the representative of a last minute coup against egalitarian progress. The white, male lawyer turned politician, with a BA from Columbia, a law degree from Georgetown, and a master's degree from Harvard, was nothing if not ambiguous in his coming out announcement. From the full text of his speech (linked by Patrick Sweeney):
Throughout my life, I have grappled with my own identity, who I am. As a young child, I often felt ambivalent about myself, in fact, confused. ...Yet, from my early days in school, until the present day, I acknowledged some feelings, a certain sense that separated me from others. But because of my resolve, and also thinking that I was doing the right thing, I forced what I thought was an acceptable reality onto myself, a reality which is layered and layered with all the, quote, good things, and all the, quote, right things of typical adolescent and adult behavior.
Yet, at my most reflective, maybe even spiritual level, there were points in my life when I began to question what an acceptable reality really meant for me. Were there realities from which I was running? ...
At a point in every person's life, one has to look deeply into the mirror of one's soul and decide one's unique truth in the world, not as we may want to see it or hope to see it, but as it is.
And so my truth is that I am a gay American.
So, when a boy, he was in a state well known to males at that stage: confusion. At "points in" his life — not always, not hounding him at every step, weighing on his every decision, only at his "most reflective, maybe even spiritual" moments — he wondered whether he had run to, I guess, an unacceptable reality. Now, at 47, he has "decided" his "unique truth." At the risk of asking a question with an answer that is supposed to be obvious: by what definition is this man "gay"?
He's offered a number of allusions to the "gay narrative"; he's apparently had the implicated sexual encounters; he's made an assertion. But then again, there are those two wives and a daughter with each. He mentions loving them. His juggling of "truths" doesn't quite come around to an admission of having "lived a lie," as the saying goes. Would anybody (who is not intellectually chained to an agenda) be surprised if this manifestly corrupt lawyer-politician announced a different truth in a few years?
But let's exclude political calculation in order to think more generally. If traditions and community can box a homosexual into living the '70s, '80s, and '90s as a straight, procreative man — one for whom divorce is not apparently beyond question — why couldn't lust and a different community, as well as the differing response to infidelity when committed across "orientations" and the politically convenient "victim class" status, give a heterosexual the license to live as a "gay American" for a time?
This is why, as much as I might agree with most of her conclusions, I have to wonder whether it is accurate for IrishLaw to write, of McGreevey, "at least he's being honest." Now, for my purposes here, I don't wish to enter the field of topics ranging from other homosexuals' experiences to the proper course of action for McGreevey to take with his family (see the addendum below). However, in clicking through IrishLaw's discussion with fellow law students, I came across exactly the statement around which skepticism ought to begin to center. From Chris Geidner:
I do not at all think his adultery can be written off, however, as the same as a heterosexual man cheating on his heterosexual wife with another heterosexual woman. This is not because gay relationships are somehow different, but rather that the reasons -- as many former spouses of gay people could discuss -- why a closeted gay man cheats on his wife are different.
I submit that this asserted truth of sexual politics is pervasively accepted and known in our society. Moreover, it needn't be a consciously cut escape hatch for a midlife affair in order for it to have an effect. In a culture that has endeavored to diminish the inherency of the link between sex and procreation and to erase the stigma of sodomy and homosexual sex, the differing reaction to a particular form of infidelity surely factors into a man's mullings as he struggles with temptation.
That considered, step back and view the fullness of the picture of the modern aristocrat, appropriately tinted in accordance with the power of otherhood and orgasms. Doesn't it look like James McGreevey (if not the actual man, then at least the public perception of him)? Having benefited, imagewise, from his marriages, having fulfilled the instinctual demand to create future generations, having experienced the family-man life, this posterboy for elite post-modernism has opened the way for a subsequent life of renewed bachelorhood — and perhaps evaded public anger at his corruption, to boot.
ADDENDUM:
Obviously, one's judgment of McGreevey's proper course of action from this moment on is jumbled up with one's views on marriage, family, and even life. For Geidner, who uses the "living a lie" language that McGreevey did not, the ideal of honesty that the governor would be teaching his daughters by henceforth living as a gay man is a positive benefit to them, far outstripping any benefits that they might garner by his proximity and fulfillment of a traditional role.
McGreevey, to put it mildly, has complicated the abstract discussion by introducing a second marriage and giving each daughter a different mother. However, it seems to me that the bottom-line, can't-be-trumped reasons to treat marriage as sacrosanct — sickness and health, riches and poverty, and realizations of orientational otherhood notwithstanding — are twofold:
Geidner doesn't so much as entertain the possibility that somebody in McGreevey's position could remain married to his wife without being "a lying, closeted gay husband" (and father). Conveniently, that leaves out the path that I consider to be the moral, if most difficult, one. Namely, whatever one's sexual identity might be, entering into marriage and having children are, themselves, declarations of identity that, for the sake of progeny and public, stand above whatever epiphanies might follow.
About a year ago, Rush Limbaugh suggested on his radio show that what makes a certain segment of the wealthy espouse destructive liberal policies is that, deep down, they don't feel as if they deserve the wealth that they've got. Although, running through a mental list of top-tier actors and pop stars, one mightn't be inclined to argue against their feeling that way, it seemed to me a little too easy of an assessment, the way Rush put it.
Well, if subtlety of thought — or at least of expression of thought — was the deficit that I felt needed to be addressed before I'd accept the claim, Will Wilkinson has contributed the necessary amount, albeit from a different direction:
[John] Rawls' conception of desert leaves us with a picture of society where all the rewards have been spread around essentially by chance. Some folks are conceived under the lucky star of Pitt-like looks, Hawkingesque IQs, Gatesian trust-funds and Brazeltonian baby care. But most poor souls were born under uglier, stupider, meaner stars. Those of us who won the genetic and social lottery will naturally try to rationalize our great good luck. We will turn up our calloused palms and tell of the blood and sweat on our every red cent. Yet from the "perspective of the universe," in which self-serving appeals disappear into the vastness of impartiality, the distribution of rewards in our lotto-world appears entirely arbitrary. If a bag of money falls into your lap, that doesn't mean it's really yours.
Wilkinson goes on to argue that where Rawls went wrong was with his "claim that it is our 'considered judgment' that the consequences of our natural endowments are not deserved, because our natural endowments are not themselves deserved." Our considered judgment, which is ultimately determined by our horse sense (forgive the too-apropos cliché), is just the opposite. Ability and work do create desert. Thus derives our opportunity to play psychoanalyst of philosophers and limelight socialists: What skews them away from a principle that seems so obvious to the rest of us?
There are other routes to the same aversion, of course, than the guilty neurotic's conclusion that filmed dress-up oughtn't an emperor's fortune make. Some folks understandably like the argument that they deserve equivalent income because those who earn extra don't deserve extra. Others like the comfort of espousing socialism disguised as philanthropy. Others just take the ideological fashion without worrying about whether it's correct.
And then, if I may step a bit far out on the plank of speculation, there is the group from which those who devise the fashionable anti-meritocratic logic likely come. These are the people who believe that their merit has been overlooked. In a world in which such broadly accessible qualities as optimism, affability, confidence, and a willingness to exert one's self are the components of (quote/unquote) "merit," surely the very notion of merit must be ill conceived.
Perhaps I'm betraying a sort of naiveté in admitting it, but I found a short piece by Ramesh Ponnuru, related to stem-cell research, absolutely astonishing. As with the family featured in the episode of Primetime that I described last week, the Kallsen family found their way toward advocacy for embryonic stem-cell research when their children — two girls, in their case — were diagnosed with diabetes. They even went so far as to travel to Washington, D.C., to meet with their congressman, Republican Mark Souder. And then:
Souder was "very, very gracious," says Kallsen. But he said that he supported adult-stem-cell research, not research that killed human embryos. The fact that embryonic-stem-cell research involved destroying human embryos came as news to Kallsen and his family. "Basically, it was a learning experience for us. We were not well informed about all of the issues. We're all pro-life and...we had not done enough research on our own to understand that if we were promoting embryonic stem-cell research that's the opposite of pro-life. We were so interested in finding a cure that we weren't looking at how it's done." Kallsen also now believes that adult-stem-cell research is more promising than he had thought at the time of the meeting.
I'm not faulting the Kallsens, but really: think about that. Think about the extent of misunderstanding, or only partial understanding, that must surround this issue if it is possible for those actively pushing for one side, in the year 2004, not to know the alternatives that the other side supports. More than that, imagine the perplexing gap of silence that people must perceive when they don't even know the opposition's reason for opposition!
As a general matter, I'm inclined to agree with Nicholas von Hoffman that one ought to be suspicious of bipartisanship, "because 'bipartisan' really means a put-up job, a behind-the-scenes deal, something in which the fix is in between the two political parties," as he puts it in the New York Observer. However, any consonance is snuffed out with his closing paragraph, which is stunning in its sudden revelation of the declaration toward which all that came before seems to have been built:
Much of the [9/11] commission's writing revolves around misunderstanding Muslims or presuming to understand Muslims on the thinnest of evidence when some effort might have been spent understanding ourselves. Less attention should have been paid to Muslim "extremism," which is hardly an undiscussed topic in the United States, and more devoted to Judeo-Christian extremism. Christianity is a one-god-one-truth-and-we-Christians-own-it type of religion. Leaving aside abstruse arguments over the separation of church and state, a more immediate danger to the peace of the world is an America whose policies are controlled by the intolerant spirit which lurks in this religion and from time to time dominates the civic life of its practitioners. You don't have to be a Muslim to wonder if the highly organized Christian elements in the United States hold the levers of power and drive policy. It sticks out all over this report, which seems to neutral, agnostic eyes as a battle plan by one religion to destroy another. That's all fine and well, but when holy wars are fought, there is hell to pay.
Ah yes, those "neutral, agnostic eyes," when this species of agnosticism clearly stands, if not as atheism, then as a strong faith that everybody else is wrong and oughtn't behave as if they might be right. This is not to say that I believe von Hoffman to have assessed the global culture war correctly. In fact, I'd suggest that his adherence to the dogma asserting Christian intolerance (while Islam is merely misunderstood) taints his analysis.
Chillingly, a correspondent happened to bring von Hoffman to my attention shortly after I'd come across Barbara Nicolosi's comments after researching for a screenplay about the Spanish Civil War:
The divisions in Spain which set up the war were very complex, but the real crux came down to secularism vs. Christianity. Fueled from the social Darwinism of the universities, the intellectuals in Spain went around for a few decades before the war insisting that religion was anti-modern and an enemy of progress. For many of these folks, "Christian" became a hated adjective, synonymous with ignorant. The greatest fury was directed against the moral authority of the Church. How dare the Church constrain anyone in any way with the outrageous suggestion that some things are good and other things are evil?!In the elections of 1931, the secular side finally obtained some power, and within days, a disgusting and violent attack on the Church was unleashed. Over 100 churches were burned and gutted. Mobs desecrated cemeteries, convents, seminaries and religious schools. Priests, nuns, and anybody displaying religious devotion were assaulted.
Then, the laws started coming. A call was made for "complete separation of Church and State"...which, on the lips of secularists always means stomping all over the citizenship rights of religious people. The Church was forbidden to operate educational institutions. Church property that was not directly connected to the maintenance of the members of a religious institute was confiscated. No fault divorce was legalized. All cemeteries were secularized. (What is it with Spain and cemeteries? So much of the rage of the secularists was directed at cemeteries. They really got off on exhuming dead nuns and priests and desecrating the bodies. Something in the air maybe? Somebody help me...). There was other stuff too, like suppressing the Jesuits and withdrawing clerical wages.
What's next when "intolerance" becomes the marker of lessened humanity, a gap for the crowbar of restriction? I suppose defining "intolerance" is next, then defining it again, and again.
Since the American Bar Association's attempt to force its not-so-nuanced worldview on the rest of the country has come up, this would seem worth noting:
In order to permit Catholic and other faith-based health-care providers to remain religious while serving critical public functions, state and federal legislators have often provided "conscience" protection that permits religious-based health-care providers to opt out of programs or treatment that they find objectionable. For example, even though they often treat patients receiving Medicare or Medicaid, religious-based hospitals are permitted by federal law not to provide abortion services or referrals.It is this core exercise of religious conscience — and the government's accommodation of it — that the ABA finds so objectionable. Citing studies with titles such as "When Religion Compromises Women's Health Care: A Case Study of a Catholic Managed Health Care Organization," the ABA argues that the religious practices of Catholic health-care providers, both individual and institutional, deny needed health services and information to patients, especially women. Its singles out certain Catholic health care-providers, such as Fidelis Care New York, a Catholic health-care system that provides Medicaid services to the residents of 33 New York counties — services that might otherwise not be available were it not for the faith-based outreach. What crime has Fidelis committed that merits the attention of the nation's bar association? It refuses to provide certain "family planning services" to its patients or refer patients for such services — services that contravene the core teachings of the Catholic faith.
Marty McKeever took the plunge and answered the question, "How will marriage be destroyed, and what part will gay marriage play?" The post was certainly worth Marty's effort to write, and it's worth others' effort to read. However, apart from recommending the essay, something that an opposing commenter, Scott, wrote tied with another aspect of the larger debate that I've been meaning to mention. The following blockquote spans two comments, at the ellipsis, the first part directed at Marty, and the second to another commenter, Jim Price:
If you do not like gay marriage, then don't marry a man. Instruct your kids not to marry the same sex. ...Grit your teeth all you want Jim, in the end, I win.
Your morals aren't mine, you see, thats your problem. You see the world in black and white only. I'm smart enough to understand gray.
Whether or not you like it, I will be married, to a man and in the end you'll be a George Wallace footnote.
Its harsh but its the truth Jim.
You can type on a message board until your fingers turn blue but I will win, and you know what, heterosexual marriage will survive. I'm sorry you're not smart enough to see through the fundraising doomsday scenarios that you've been fed but keep sending those checks to James Dobson if it makes you truly happy.
You're a speed bump, not a wall.
The personal insults and active belittling of his opposition suggest to me a mindset that won't stop at the equilibrium of "you do your thing, I'll do mine." Indeed, most of Scott's comments to the post at hand include some reference or other (in aggregate) to "the unwashed simpletons in flyover country." The rhetoric may be of mutual liberty, but the language is of the sort that brings into question the worthiness of the other side to possess their share. To the extent that those people continue to have power in one form or another — whether influence or property — in a post–same-sex marriage world, it's easy to imagine Scott and his ilk thinking it not overbearing to impose correction of their errors.
For further exploration of this point, we can turn to no less un-stupid a person than Eugene Volokh:
But in any event, one should acknowledge that the "It doesn't hurt you, so why should you object?" argument omits an important point: The broad array of gay rights proposals would restrict the liberty and equality of those who oppose homosexuality -- and this array is more of a package deal than we might think, since the more proposals the gay rights movement wins on, the easier (generally speaking) it would be for it to win on other proposals.We might be able to envision a regime of optimal liberty, where the rights of both homosexuals and those who oppose homosexuality are equally respected -- many libertarians, for instance, would do so by distinguishing restrictions on government action from restrictions on nongovernmental action. But even if we can identify a point that we ourselves endorse, that point may as a practical matter be politically unstable, so that if the gay rights movement gets to that point (wherever the point is), it will in practice end up also getting more, and cutting into the liberties of others.
The Marriage Debate blog post that quotes from Volokh's entry also links to his follow-up entries, which branch in different directions. It would seem that there are aspects of grayness quite apart from the dubious accuracy of Scott's assertions about heterosexual marriage's future.
Indeed, the claim of a reasoned complexity of perspective among those who advocate for further normalization of homosexuality is beginning to appear as an easily removed robe. And perhaps those opposing the process can be forgiven for wondering whether the American Bar Association let the cloak slip a little, and prematurely, when it proposed changing its ethics policies in order to ban judges from joining groups that "discriminate" against gays. As the relevant commission leader, Mark Harrison, put it, the object is to "make sure that judges aren't viewed as bigots." What groups would make such a view possible is up in the air. The National Guard? The Boy Scouts? The Catholic Church?
Volokh dubs it "pretty sad" that "[m]aybe we do have, as a practical matter, a choice between a regime that suppresses the liberties of homosexuals and benefits those who don't approve of homosexuality, and a regime that benefits homosexuals and suppresses the liberties of those who don't approve of homosexuality." Sadder still, in my view, is that society's choice between these two paths is appearing more and more likely to be made not on the basis of which tilt is ultimately better for future generations, in the complicated summation of effects, but which group has the power and will to force the wheel and make of the opposition a speed bump — rather than a legitimate marker of a speed limit.
I intend this post merely to offer a quick reply, without expectation of further discussion, to Eric Muller's response to my post about Michelle Malkin's exchange with him. Mostly the point worth making is that we continue to speak with different emphases in ways that complicate dialogue. Writes Muller:
I'll say little about Justin's speculations and assumptions about my politics, my tone ("breathless aggression," "untempered condescension," etc.), my approach to history, and the appropriateness of my shouldering the respresentation of my cohort of "so-called scholars" on The Academic Left.
Rereading my post, I don't see a single instance of speculation about Muller's politics or approach to history. Given my interests and area of most competence, my emphasis is on the way in which the various parties approach their debate and the likely effect that those approaches will have on the more immediate public discussion. In essence, I'm lamenting, in accord with Glenn Reynolds, that the historical argument is "hijack[ing] the discussion of what to do today" and hoping to redirect what's already been said.
The first step toward doing so is to make the participants cognizant not only of their relative locations along the spectrum of understanding, but also of how the public will perceive them. Tone, in short, is not something about which a reader offers "speculations and assumptions," but something about which he testifies. Indeed, the sentence after the one from which Muller draws his parenthetical quotations explicitly disconnects how something reads from the author's frame of mind while writing it.
As I suggested at the close of my initial post, Malkin's turf along society's path toward assessment and reapplication of its past inherently makes her genre of writing more action than review. She has determined that the internment of Japanese people in America plays centrally in a cultural aversion to the sort of measures that the War on Terror necessitates — in a phrase, ethnic profiling. To overcome that aversion, she has to challenge a popular perception of history's lessons fostered, in large part, by scholars (who are, yes, predominantly Left-leaning).
To be sure, I'm at a disadvantage in that I haven't read Malkin's book, and I intend to do so when possible. (Funds and time remain tight.) It may be, therefore, that I'm not being balanced in my criticism, but with a view toward the book's effect, it seems to me that Muller has helped to ensure that those who lean toward Malkin's position will be repelled from, rather than drawn toward, a thorough understanding of history and its implications. They are less concerned about the past than the present; they have less time for reiteration of the cautions that the past has rightly instilled than for the overcaution that has wrongly accompanied them.
Suggesting, as Muller does, that "Michelle could defend narrowly-tailored profiling measures without taking on the additional burden of defending the wholesale eviction and detention of an entire ethnic group from the West Coast during World War II" evinces (surprise, surprise) a rather academic application of historical argument to political debate. Similarly, insisting that Malkin must be judged primarily as an historian because she devoted the bulk of her book — which genre and purpose require to be something less than an academic tome — to the historical accounts that she's questioning is to ignore the setting of the debate.
As I understand Michelle's intention, it was to spur the realization that the received wisdom in this area can be challenged — in turn, that the sense, in our collective gut, of what can and cannot be justified under current circumstances can be questioned. We're a long way from being a society in which In Defense of Internment could plausibly be put forward as stealth advocacy for gathering up American Muslims. And Mullen's dark insinuations that Malkin must be doing so are sure to evoke the impression that laymen, rightly or wrongly, have that scholars might withhold the truth about history because they believe that the rest of us will take it as an excuse to repeat its worst parts.
In response to some sparring between Michelle Malkin and a couple of academics, Lance McCord writes the following:
[Eric] Muller wrote the way that he did because he's a blogger, and a scholar. As a blogger, he's writing what's happening. What was happening in this case was a guy who knows an awful lot about the Japanese-American internment reading a book on that subject, and thinking while he's reading. As a scholar, he's likely more interested best understanding the subject than in winning some ideological point.
Leave aside contrary evidence as to Muller's inclination toward point scoring. Although I've done no controlled studies of the matter, I've a strong suspicion that the great majority of American citizens — particularly those who take an interest in academics' fare — have quite a different impression about scholars' ideological motivation. The existence of a market for Malkin's book about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, which sparked the bickering, ought to be evidence enough that this is so. And frankly, neither McCord's assumption of transcendent interests nor Muller's method of debate is likely to do anything but further the impression.
Consider the outright exhortative tone into which Muller lapses during his first spate of complaints about the book on the Volokh Conspiracy:
When you think of the Japanese American internment, what do you picture? People living in the desolate high desert, in tarpaper barracks, under military guard, right?Do you know how that happened? Do you know how it happened that Japanese Americans ended up spending years in desert camps under military guard, unable to leave without clearance?
One hears either a breathless aggression in response to verboten dissent or an untempered condescension, or both. Whether or not these qualities of his writing grew from his actual state of mind — and subsequent posts on his own blog suggest that they might — Muller's tone can only remind the public why it has been gradually losing esteem for men and women "of learning." Consider, for example, his emphasis on the speed with which Malkin researched and wrote her book (italics Muller's):
I can't imagine how Michelle--or, indeed, anyone--could have done the primary research necessary to understand the record, let alone "correct" it in the manner the book attempts to do, in five or six years, let alone in one. Especially while doing anything at all in addition to researching the book (such as writing a nationally syndicated newspaper column). To tell the story correctly, a person would need to sift through thousands and thousands of pages of archival material from all over the country and then piece bits together into a coherent story.
What Muller has done, here, is to disallow every stage through which a society interprets its history and applies it to the present except the most exhaustive — and therefore the most exclusive — stage, the one on which he concentrates. I don't think it presumptuous to suggest that there might be a degree of turf-protecting in Muller's approach, and there may be some jealousy at Malkin's likely sales figures. Such reactions are misplaced, and in failing to respect the different roles that people can take, they contribute to general distrust of academics.
Nobody can deny that so-called scholars, who lean overwhelmingly to the Left, have influenced the public perception of the episode of American history at question, and that the perception, in turn, has influenced current policy. Commentary is therefore mandated across the spectrum. Although he quotes a paragraph from Malkin's book saying something different, Mullen harps particularly on the notion that Malkin intends to "correct the record." Perhaps that phrase carries differing connotations in the history biz, but one needn’t rewrite the entirety of something to correct it; pointing to an omission can suffice.
On the other end, nobody will mistake Malkin for an historian. As far as I can tell, it is clear within the book — let alone within the broader context of Malkin's career — that she is a political writer. Coming from political commentary, her emphasis will be on the areas of the complete picture that most affect current policy. And frankly, she will find a lot of public sympathy for her sense that those are precisely the areas in which the "historical narrative" has been most skewed.
Unless they wish to further alienate a populace that already harbors suspicions that professionals who study the past are selective and politically motivated in their work, those experts who believe Malkin's summary to be incorrect and who fear its implications for current policy are going to have to treat her more seriously. If she is so easily dismissed, they should have no trouble incorporating her contrary findings into the pictures that they advance. Forcing the "experts" to do so is, I suspect, a key motivation behind Malkin's book; her genre of writing is more action than review, after all.
ADDENDUM:
If you've not yet hit the end of your interest in this exchange, Mullen responds here, and I address his post here.
Moral culpability is not entirely lashed to a measurement of distance, and finding excuses not to look along the line of likely outcomes of a given decision, far from absolving one of responsibility, is itself an immoral act. That, in a nutshell, is my response to a point in the comment section of this post. After I'd suggested that knowing homosexual couples is irrelevant "to whether same-sex marriage is intelligent or dangerous public policy," liberal periodic commenter Angie wrote:
I believe that people who are arguing against SSM do not know any gay couples. If you socialized regularly with gay couples--benefits, dinner parties, workplace--you would not be too popular if they knew you were writing hundreds of thousands of words on the computer daily about why THEY should not get married while you yourself are married and enjoying the benefits of that. And besides that, you'd have a face and a personality to add to the subject matter. Not just a logical analysis. Similar to how I believe most pro-life advocates either cannot bear children or they have a loving partner who will support them emotionally and financially should an accidental pregnancy occur. Just another way to think about these issues which leaves out the legal/logic/ethic speak and brings real humans into the picture.
Reread this sentence:
If you socialized regularly with gay couples--benefits, dinner parties, workplace--you would not be too popular if they knew you were writing hundreds of thousands of words on the computer daily about why THEY should not get married while you yourself are married and enjoying the benefits of that.
I have no doubt that this is true. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if confronted with evidence that those hundreds of thousands of words have contributed, directly and indirectly, to my current state of semi-employment. But unless Angie is offering an enciphered explanation for her taking the wrong position, the reality of interpersonal influence is irrelevant both to the substance of the issue and to the moral responsibility to take the right position. It is a sign of the apathetic turpitude of our times that precisely her formulation likely underlies the tacit responses to this sort of matter across our society. One would think that liberals, of all people, would applaud a principled stand against the demands of social pressure.
Furthermore, it's simply to state the factual to note that the activists and their friends in the media have ensured that the same-sex marriage cause will not lack for sympathetic faces and personalities, piled on top of decades of cultural-elite effort to normalize homosexuality generally. And that's entirely apart from the people who've contacted me personally over the past few years, as well as those whom, yes, I do know. I can only ascribe it to a baseline spiritual desperation, in our society, that so many have brushed off the wisdom that broad decisions can be skewed if made while embroiled, or by those who are embroiled. Whether the topic is homosexuality, abortion, or any other matter with emotional weight, it remains true that we ought not — cannot — leave out the "legal/logic/ethic speak" that becomes more difficult as we approach the adverse consequences of choosing the correct path.
Look, reason tells me that human life begins at conception and that, for the sake of society, for the sake of humanity, we must hold to the moral principle that human life is uniquely and individually valuable. Destitution, much less inconvenience, is not sufficient justification for taking another's life — no matter what rhetoric we might employ to depreciate that life. Similarly does reason tell me that marriage is central to the health of our society as well as — and this is important — the well-being of those most dependent upon our social foundation. Reason also suggests that same-sex marriage, especially within our modern context and considering the mechanisms through which it is being thrust into the law and the culture, will further the corrosion of the institution.
If any group that must be factored into these decisions lacks for the sympathy that flows from "a face and a personality" it is those who have yet to be born. (Consider the enthusiasm with which pro-lifers have met increasingly detailed sonogram pictures.) It is easy to respond to the pull of loved ones' desires; it is somewhat less easy to hear the pleas of the countless people who will inherit whatever society we manage to bequeath. To blind one's self to the latter through deliberate focus on the former compounds moral travesty upon moral error.
Although the interior link leads to paid-registration content, Michelle Malkin's summary in a post about vaccinating children caught my eye:
On a related note, I was quite interested in this story about a scheme being considered in Britain to mandate vaccination of children against future drug addiction. The vaccines are currently under development; they are expected to become available in two years, at which point they could be required.
This scheme has the too-sweet smell of an idea that is sure to have unintended consequences — a seemingly good-hearted "initiative" that winds up having the opposite effect than intended. As a man with what might be characterized as a moderately addictive personality, I can attest that the threat of addiction can be a significant disincentive to drug use.
When crack hit the scene in the '80s, it was certainly well understood among my young peers that part of its danger was the associated Russian roulette of instant addiction. The shadow of that prospect always lingered around the drug and, I'm sure, bled into gut feelings about other drugs, particularly generic cocaine. Except for marijuana, one had the sense that experimentation with drugs was potentially life changing and permanent before it even became a question of deliberate habituation. What is the likely effect when that daunting impression is no longer a reality?
I suspect that experimentation will increase, and that physical addiction's conjoined twin, emotional addiction, will prove to be the tougher monster to defeat. What cure will be available when a nation of adolescent druggies thinks it can stop any time it wants?
From the Providence Journal:
The teens came from as far away as Maryland and from nearby Pawtucket, numbering more than 2,700, wearing T-shirts, body art and baseball caps and looking very much a cross section of American youth.But many of these teens are different. They define themselves, not by their tattoos or nose rings, but by daring, they say, to do what is considered in many high schools to be unequivocally uncool: Being openly...
You know, the adjective that I've left off the end of that quotation certainly isn't the one that those who define our popular culture would lead you to expect. But then, such expectations have been drastically disconnected from actual experience for many years, at least in the Northeast, and at least since I was in high school in the late '80s and early '90s — and even throughout my time in elementary school. The quality that those kids are compelled to diminish in their young public lives is — of course — being religious:
[Philip "P.J." Shea, 18, of Pawtucket,] plans to keep this most recent card locked in a safe in his bedroom. "I made a promise to myself that I would stay a virgin until I'm married," Shea said.Some of his high school friends don't get it. Shea doesn't care. What's important is that most of the boys under that tent understood the need to fight the temptations of alcohol, pornography, premarital sex and all the other "lies the devil whispers," as Righteous B put it.
Welcome to Steubenville East, a two-day Catholic youth conference at LaSalette Shrine.
Toward the end of the conference, a priest asked anybody considering entering the priesthood or religious life to step forward. He then asked the crowd not to single them out when they returned to their schools so that they wouldn't be discouraged. I know that, when I was that age, I wouldn't have been afraid to mock them, nor would I have expected any consequences for doing so, through either social pressure or disciplinary action. Little would I have known that believers have a source of support of which the approval of peers is but a faint echo:
A stocky teen with a surfer's air, [Geoff] Edwards said he has been religious since he was a child. He said some people tease him about being religious. "But it's nothing compared to the suffering that Jesus Christ went through."
Actually, it's probably more true that a tacit understanding would have been my motivation.
Michelle Malkin directs attention to a Mark Steyn column in which Mr. Steyn quotes an interesting reaction to Governor Schwarzenegger's comment, "If they don't have the guts to come up here in front of you and say, 'I don't want to represent you, I want to represent those special interests, the unions, the trial lawyers, and I want them to make the millions of dollars,' if they don't have the guts, I call them girlie men":
Up in Sacramento, they weren't happy. The governor's remark was 'as misogynist as it is anti-gay,' complained Mark Leno, a San Francisco assemblyman and chairman of the legislature's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Caucus. 'By playing to certain voters' discomfort with gender and sexuality, the governor has exposed himself as a divider, not a uniter.' 'Blatant homophobia,' agreed state senator Sheila Kuehl, also of the LGBT Caucus. 'It uses an image that is associated with gay men in an insulting way, and it was supposed to be an insult. That's very troubling that he would use such a homophobic way of trying to put down legislative leadership.'
Apart from the pro forma outrage, the comment that I italicized seems a good example of that sort of modern thinking that gets reality exactly backwards. How is it that the man who is basking in his strong masculinity and mocking a presumed lack thereof in his opposition is playing to "discomfort with gender and sexuality"? It would seem that the governor is more comfortable with those concepts than are the whiners and that his comment would appeal to voters who are similarly secure in their belief that men ought to be men.
I upset more than a few acquaintances, a while back, by voicing the theory that, as an underlying cause, Kurt Cobain killed himself because he realized that he didn't have the talent to make the kind of music that he wanted to make. I mention this less to evoke ire or agreement than to show that I'm not defending a personal hero when I suggest that Marc Comtois is a bit hard on Nirvana's deceased front man. In tandem, Marc is a bit hard on the generation in which we are both included (although I think I'm closer to its tail).
I recall that, even as a huge Beatles fan, I never really understood Sting's described experience of hearing "Love Me Do" for the first time. Sitting by the pool when the song came on the radio, he and his friends spontaneously began to dance, and they knew that something new had arrived. Although Soundgarden and Alice in Chains had paved the way for the Seattle bands, it was Nirvana that managed the big breakthrough, and I imagine the feeling of hearing the band for the first time was much the same — albeit expressed with moshing rather than dance.
I was sitting in my leather swivel chair, attempting to study for finals, chatting with my friend Rich on the telephone, when the video for "Smells Like Teen Spirit" came on the computer monitor that I had wired to receive cable TV. We both stopped talking. Something new had arrived.
Marc is entirely correct that Pearl Jam was a better band in just about every respect, but it is perhaps for that very reason that Nirvana claimed the movement. I've never taken the time to explore the specifics as a matter of music, but the aptly named "grunge music" caught something that other genres couldn't reach. It was full of angst, yes, but it was an angst in contrast to the direct aggression of other variations of hard rock. It was almost like '70s singer/songwriter meets heavy metal.
The added element, which Nirvana personified, might be as simply characterized as having to do with confusion. That's why it was such a big deal — a "cool" thing — that nobody could understand what Cobain was saying. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" centered around unintelligible vocals expressing indecipherable lyrics, over chords distorted beyond recognition. Even Cobain's hair, granting mere glimpses of his face, was part of the message.
So, certainly, both those who "got it" and those who didn't are justified in suggesting that the generational experience to which grunge was the soundtrack was frustration at having nothing to be angry about — adolescent energy without anything on which to focus. That analysis is justified, yes, but I'm not so sure it's accurate. Marc, for example, in listing some issues from which Gen X was free, overlooks the entire range of society from whence derived the angst:
This is especially because Cobain's fan base was mostly comprised of a generation that had nothing to REALLY get upset over (like in the past with "The Bomb" and "Vietnam" or now with "Terrorism") so they focused on those aspects of Pop culture that made them feel like part of a larger "movement." The cynicism and "reality" espoused by Cobain, et al spoke to a generation that really didn't have much to b-i-t-c-h about. The Berlin Wall had fallen down, Communism was kaput, Clinton was president and believed in a place called "Hope," etc. Self-righteous angst influenced by postmodern relativism became the new "it" thing.
The fact that the Boomer Generation still largely controls the public discussion is likely contributing to a lethargy of revelation, so our entire society is still a bit confused about the source of all of that angst. But I submit that its real — and legitimate — origin was precisely that area of revolution for which geopolitical turmoil offered cover.
My generation was the first to grow up in a culture in the process of dismantling itself. Divorce, abortion, an ever-increasing emphasis on sex coupled with an epidemic of a mysterious and deadly disease, relativism, ingrained opposition to organized religion and other sources of moral ballast, among many others across the spectrum of daily life. And yet, we were not offered the opportunity to be angry about the sources of our pain and confusion, because they continued to be promoted as good things. There was nowhere to turn for rebellion, because it was rebellion that ailed us, although we did not see it then, and many still do not see it now.
But I think the lengths to which Gen X collectively took its angst woke many of us up, and even here, Cobain played his destined role. He died at twenty-seven, like those Boomer martyrs Jim, Jimi, and Janis. As I recall, his mother lamented that her son had "gone and joined that stupid club." Much more profoundly than breaking the first-name pattern, Kurt claimed the list not through the symbolic excesses of the Sixties, but in a violent suicide... probably resulting from the drug culture that grew out of those excesses.
Moreover, if I may revive my theory, his limited talent furthers the shift. From the selfish point of view of the popular culture, his wasn't the death too soon of the guitar genius or the classic voice or the (debatable) poet rocker. He was spent — too much the personification of the zeitgeist to redefine himself.
The trend that he did die too soon to fulfill was the reclamation of those priorities that had been sold to his generation as inconsequential choices. He married young for a superstar. He had a daughter. Would the man who wrote "I wanted a father, but all I got was a dad" have failed to live up to his responsibilities? His suicide — the ultimate parental failure — provided one answer, cutting through the jumble of drives and desires in a final rejection of them all.
But his generation may yet provide another, more hopeful answer. Marc asks:
If the predominance of teen pop and rap are an indicator of what sells, could this mean people of my generation, the old looking-for-a-reason-to-be-angst-ridden Gen Xers are simply not paying attention? If not, what are we paying attention to?
In the sense that he means the questions, Marc's answer is, essentially, "the news." He answers in a slightly different sense, just before that, when he implies September 11 as our cause. These observations are probably correct, but for my part, I think it covers more of the truth to suggest that we're paying attention to growing up, to tracing our parents' path back toward home, picking up that which they discarded along the way so that we can stop feeling "stupid and contagious."
Jeff Miller notes something that has only recently begun to attract my attention, so to speak:
It use to anger me the amount of skin displayed on magazines as you approach the checkout lane or what I call "temptation aisle." Taking possession of my eyes looking neither right or left like I was being sung to by the sirens. I read a tip on a Carmelite list serve where they suggested instead of getting angry that to spend the time praying for the publishers and those involved.I do wish that stores had a policy that posters and full sized advertisement displayed would have to conform to the same clothing standard as the shoppers.
Of course, it's an "old man" thing to be stunned by magazine covers, although I'm far from old, yet increasingly stunned. Also of course, that characterization is a component of the movement that Jeff calls "the slutification of our socieity." Really, not so many decades ago, the magazine covers that now stand at child's-eye level at the checkout counter would have been considered little short of pornography. That the magazines are ostensibly geared toward women just makes their marketing that much more bizarre.
Praying for the publishers might be one way to redirect one's thoughts upon noticing the defined curve of some starlet's inner thigh, but there are plenty of others who could use those prayers. Perhaps it's being a father — perhaps it's being a father of girls — but I find myself reacting like an antiquated feminist. All those full-color glossy photos, those interchangeable heads above interchangeable figures, they're just bodies. To the extent that they're actual people, they are actual people consenting to be just bodies.
A thinking person might be forgiven for noting the big-budget facilitation of profitable psychoses, phobias, and complexes. A religious person is sure to be forgiven for seeing something more sinister, even, than unethical pursuit of corporate revenue.
In a comment exchange about discrimination by gender in, yes, that same post, Gabriel Rosenberg writes:
I do not get upset when men are turned away as surrogate mothers provided that women who cannot carry the child are also turned away. I do not get upset when women are turned away from a sperm bank, provided that men who cannot ejaculate or also turned away. In these cases the line is not being drawn on gender, but rather on the ability to do something. As I noted, in the marriage case it is not the inability to procreate that is the cause for refusal.
At a certain point, it seems to me, matters of discrimination come down to identity. Can a woman be a husband? A father? Of course not, and in neither case is the inability limited to the matter of procreation. If it is the identity that is under attack, we move toward Prof. Rosenberg's next paragraph:
It is not irrational at all for you to suggest that men make better male role models, and if you are looking for a male role model I would suggest you find a man. Being a good male role model is not a legal requirement of spouse. And some people might prefer to find a person who is a good role model as a human being--a person who models what a human being should do, and not what certain gender roles should be.
Ah, how we go 'round and 'round in this debate. Spouses may not be required to be "good male role models" in order to marry, but it is currently the law — rightly so — in most places that one of the two who enter into the relationship culturally most full of the potential to land the members in the central-role-model position of parents be a male role model. Those "some people" who prefer other arrangements are free to make them, but society is "looking for a male role model" in one member of each married pair. Moreover, society would confirm that intention if allowed to vote on the matter.
This would be particularly the case, I imagine, were the question phrased in these terms. Perhaps the public could be made to see the extreme underbelly of the ideology that same-sex marriage will usher in. The example embedded within the professor's quip is of a world in which one cannot impose views about "what certain gender roles should be" because the society demands that we ignore what the gender attributes actually are.
As far as I can tell from coverage to date, Maggie Gallagher has found the one adult child of same-sex parents who feels this way:
Why does she oppose same-sex marriage? "It's not something that a seal of approval should be stamped on: We shouldn't say it is a great and wonderful thing and then you have all these kids who later in life will turn around and realize they've been cheated. The adults choose to have that lifestyle and then have a kid. They are fulfilling their emotional needs -- they want to have a child -- and they are not taking into account how that's going to feel to the child; there's a clear difference between having same-sex parents and a mom and a dad." ...A few years back, she watched "20/20" interviews with children like her. "They were asked questions like: 'Are you happy? Do you love your parents?' I don't think it's fair to ask them those questions. These are their parents. They aren't going to say they are suffering, because they don't want to make their parents feel bad."
For some reason, while I did the dishes this morning, I recalled that after-school special with Scott Baio, The Truth About Alex. A very similar film came out a few years later about another masculine jock who proved to be homosexual. I wonder, if one did a broad study, how homosexuality would rank against other issues about which the entertainment and education industries sought to indoctrinate my generation. My guess is that the environment would be number 1 by a wide margin. The next two would probably be race and homosexuality, although in what order, I honestly couldn't say.
The more my worldview shifts away from the one with which I emerged into the adult world, the more I see how the various influences on me as a child shaped my understanding of the proper ideas and positions. It would be interesting to find some way of developing a rough picture of what has happened to the politics of my generation as it has aged. It has seemed to me that there's a dramatic split, although leaning toward the conservative side, as the gloss spattered across the world begins to tarnish in the air of real life. In opposition are those who've chosen to layer propaganda on pabulum.
Could the "many worlds" feel of modern society come down to a simple matter of several indoctrinated generations growing up and either coming to believe that what they'd universally been taught was wrong or continuing along the same path of thought? Whatever the case, this is part of why I'm skeptical of claims about the inevitability of same-sex marriage when those who are currently in formation take society's reins. They're still in the machine, and just as importantly, they're still in a land of moderated responsibility.
And here, again, we see an edge of the Big Issue that is too large to describe except in pieces, where various discrete matters come into contact. For one thing, perhaps there is something related in the fact that the socialist systems of more-liberal Western nations serve to moderate the responsibility of adults by softening the consequences of decisions and failure. For another thing, we might have the opportunity to form some inkling of opinion trends in a world with drastically expanded lifetimes and the extended adolescence that would likely follow.
I'm aware that I'm drifting, here, but perhaps I've found a tangle worth sorting out while I paint, today.
Yeah, what better way to fight AIDS than to further cultural salaciousness by performing in the nude:
Singer Macy Gray has promised to perform naked to raise money for charity.The outrageous star says she will appear in nothing but a pair of Jimmy Choo heels at her London gig today!
She will reveal all to raise cash for the Elton John Aids Foundation.
Next up: supporting world peace by mauling the drummer on stage.
Gambling, of itself, isn't sinful as far as I'm concerned. Yes, having a somewhat addictive personality, I've noticed the aftertaste of the temptation that it represents. Yes, the first notable scene that I came across upon entering Foxwoods Casino's parking lot in Connecticut when I was in college was an older couple — cusp of retirement, I'd say — crying in each other's arms.
Still, a night of roulette, blackjack, and slot machines, with a reasonable expense cap, isn't wrong or corrosive in the way that a night costing the same amount at a brothel would be. For some patrons, the all-you-can-eat buffet is the more seductive opportunity for excess.
So, I've been more or less ambivalent about the matter of allowing a Rhode Island tribe to build a casino on its land. For one thing, I know families that have suffered the consequences of a gambling addiction facilitated by just the Jai Alai enterprise in Newport, so any state policy toward a full-blown casino can't stand on anti-gambling principle. If the objection is to the greater draw that a casino would have, then it seems to me that regulating size is the logical answer.
For another thing, as much as I don't believe gambling to be an undeniable sin, I'm not comfortable with governments' seeing it as a source of revenue. Whether or not a casino yields a public profit seems to me irrelevant to the yes/no question of whether one ought to be allowed in the state. Of course, as Marc Comtois points out, Connecticut is finding that its casinos are expensive for the surrounding areas. This, however, seems another cause for creative regulation, to pass the expenses on to the company. Making area security, road repair, and adequate employee housing and education direct costs of doing business would prevent shuffling of the bill to local communities that receive inadequate reimbursement from the state government, which collects the revenue.
Perhaps the strongest argument against a casino is that it would attract a bad element from elsewhere and would concentrate Rhode Island's homegrown hoodlums. To be honest, I'm not sure that this wouldn't be true of any major attraction, regardless of its nature. Moreover, I was amazed at the distance that Foxwoods-goers had to travel through town roads to find the joint, so it could be that choice of location and direct access to a highway would answer most of the concerns of nearby towns.
It's probably a flippant attitude to take, but I have to admit amusement at the degree to which this issue traps various parties — many already corrupt — in their own decisions. From what I understand, other gambling facilities have been buying not just legitimacy, but special deals from the state's politicians. For its part, beyond the addiction to revenue from gambling in the form of lotteries endemic among states, Rhode Island has mainlined its fixes from Jai Alai and the Lincoln Park dog track. On top of this must be layered the strange arrangements that America and its states have made with Indian tribes over the centuries.
So, ultimately, I agree with Marc that it is for the people of Rhode Island to decide whether they want a casino to be a partially defining aspect of their state. And it's for the various parties to either regulate or find ways to compete as they're able. Which way I'll vote, I'm not yet sure. Allowing a casino could prove to be a bitter pill of disruption that will help to knock the state back on track.
ADDENDUM:
Sorry if this post isn't as strong and/or clear as it probably should be. As you can tell, I'm still working out my thoughts.
Leveraging her perspective as a coastal, urban, lawyer, Christian woman, Kimberly of IrishLaw has taken up the online conversation concerning what women want in men (and why they aren't finding it). One issue that Kimberly notes as false is the notion of competition: "If men embody traditionally masculine virtues, that must threaten women's ability to also be successful, independent, and strong." This dynamic within the job marketplace nicely encapsulates a matter of society-wide self-deception: if masculine qualities are thought to make for success, those qualities must be suppressed as a factor among men and encouraged among women.
One of my wife's friends, arguably the most attractive among them, considers herself to be in competition with men to a sometimes ridiculous degree. A running half-joke between us, for a few years, was that she intended to beat me in an arm wrestle. For that to have ever been possible, either I would have had to deteriorate beyond recognition, or she would have had to take extreme biological measures, destroying much of what is feminine in her physique. (She claimed to have beaten sturdy men in the past, but she blushed when I wondered aloud how many had asked for her phone number afterwards.) It may be harder to admit, because it's easier to deny, but surely this general difference isn't limited to physical attributes.
My anecdote isn't meant to suggest that men don't exist whom my wife's friend couldn't best palm-to-palm, nor that there aren't women who could beat me. Similarly, most careers don't lend themselves exclusively to one gender or another. However, they may require qualities that come more naturally to men or to women. We've grown accustomed to wincing at the notion that our sex or gender might affect who we are in ways that, in turn, limit some choices, but what we seem to have overlooked in inculcating this reflex is that limiting choices can mean expanding others.
In reverse, the more-constructive question isn't whether women can out-male men, but whether womanhood can be made an asset. As Kimberly writes:
Women can be feminine and still be strong and independent; men can be masculine and not threaten the success of others... Was there a way to just be successful women and not act like men? Is there a way for men not to fall into the stereotypes of promiscuity, or the faux confidence of the metrosexual, and be good men?
It's a matter of developing ourselves as who we are, rather than redefining who we ought to be. Therefore, Kimberly puts her finger directly on the problem with an insight that didn't occur to me in this context (whether because of gender or personality is up for debate):
The difficulty, of course, anymore is that it's hard to find the right models for how to be confident women and honorable men. Children who grow up without fathers desperately lack role models for how to become real men, and no matter how loving mothers are or how hard they work, it's hard for women to provide that model.
Mothers and fathers can, through effort, diminish the detrimental effects of a child's lacking a parental mirror, but at parents' incalculably subtle degree of influence, women aren't as naturally suited to the occupation of fatherhood, and vice versa. And it is this very subtlety — indescribable, but detectable — that seems to be the certain something that the questing singles have been at a loss to articulate. In other words, dating and its shifting difficulties, although often portrayed as frivolous, connect with our individual and collective essences.
Hugo Schwyzer, whose thoughts I found via Marriage Debate blog, adds another piece toward comprehension of these tumbling matters of gender, parenthood, friendship, competition, and attraction:
Opposite sex friendships are especially appealing to the young, and not merely because they often offer the "spice" of sexual attraction. What is most appealing is the freedom from the competition and the judgment that so many young men and women feel in the presence of their same-gender peers. But invariably, those who have no close friends of their own sex feel at a loss at certain critical life points. In order to lead healthy lives, we have to work to overcome our own fears about being judged by those of our same sex. We're going to need folks beside us who know what it is like to live incarnate as a man or a woman. What makes me a man is more than my Y chromosome and my genitalia -- it is a thousand thoughts, feelings, experiences that so many of my brothers know so well. Men need each other, desperately.And if there is one thing I have come to know with near-certainty, it is that men who have other men (not just boys) in their lives to love them and hold them accountable make much better husbands and lovers, fathers and brothers to the women around them.
In that respect, one might justifiably suggest that Kimberly's (and my) appeal to Christ as a male role model is partly, or especially, necessary in a world of androgynous wishful thinking in the service of lust and egos. Far from diminishing the Divine Role Model to a sort of second best, this observation provides some explanation for why there is so much overlap between traditional and religious. If we follow our roles — our callings — to the fullest extent, we will naturally complement each other, and our material world will naturally complement the spiritual one to which we've been so busy building barriers. We deny this, as we have for decades, at our peril.
Look. I'm not going to express the first thought that came to mind when I read this front-page article from the Providence Journal, because if I did, I'd be sure to raise ires all over the place. Nonetheless, that at which we laugh today tomorrow can bring our tears:
BEAVER, the animal psychologist who is president-elect of the American Veterinary Medical Association, says that years ago, the dog was "the protector of the farm. Then it became the dog in the backyard; now it's the dog in the house. And as we are living closer to them, their relationships with us become much closer."And as the culture has changed, legislatures and the courts are now starting to amend the way they look at companion animals. Historically, courts have allowed a pet owner who brings a lawsuit to recover only the "market-value" of the animal. But in 2000, Tennessee became the first state to pass a law giving a pet owner the right to collect damages for loss of companionship. Two years later, Illinois passed a similar law. A bill has been introduced in the Colorado legislature to allow people to seek damages of as much as $100,000 for loss of companionship of a pet.
Ah-hum. Read the whole article for a more-thorough sense of how creepy this could get.
ADDENDUM:
Martin Grace quotes the part of the Projo piece that hints at the leap from "clearly... not a relative" to, well, I guess to "close enough."
Star Parker, president of the Coalition for Urban Renewal and Education (CURE), sees the ACLU and — if I may coin a term — other ACLUddites as in ideological competition with her organization:
My constituency is the poor, particularly the African-American poor, and I have a far different sense of what this community's problems and needs are than does the ACLU. ...As the civil-rights movement became politicized by ACLU-type liberals, values and personal responsibility were displaced by victimization politics. The result has been a social catastrophe in the African-American community. Thanks again to ACLU-type liberals, public schools that black children are forced to attend have purged all traditional values from education and, as a result, children have no clue why they are there and what the point is in education. These children are already most likely severely disadvantaged by coming from broken homes, also the product of the political purge of traditional values.
Acknowledging that it's on the same Web site, I can't help but wonder whether a piece by Maggie Gallagher indicates that a movement is afoot:
Hear, for example, the extraordinary remarks by Democratic Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C., at a recent Brookings Institution conference on marriage and the black church. Calling attention to the low rates of marriage among African Americans, Norton warned:"My friends, we are seeing a sea change in African-American life. It cannot continue or we will not continue as a viable people. I just want to put it as starkly as I can. We've got to get the attention of our community and our country. It is impossible to overestimate what has happened to our community in only a single generation or two and what might then happen in my son's generation if it continues at this pace."
She said it. I didn't. When the marriage idea becomes weak enough, the very idea of perpetuating ourselves as a people is called into question.
Gallagher goes on to suggest — predictably, but no less correctly for being so — that increasing the number of church-going men will do much to remedy the problem. You can read both of these women's articles for specifics, but I want to leap to a different topic that's come up, of late, because I think there's a larger point to be made, pivoting on this passage from Gallagher's column:
Men are supposed to model for their children the love of God, for their wives, the love of Jesus Christ. Men who recognize a critical "masculine" role in family life are probably freer to enter into stereotypically "feminine" realms, such as emotionally expressive family life. If you want to turn men into good family men, you have to tell them that men matter to women and children.
Brace yourself for a bit of a cultural atmosphere shock. Although the topic feels a bit less weighty than the matter of fatherless children in poverty, consider Marilyn Zielinski's complaint:
I think almost any man can be sexy, can become a good flirt, can learn to attract women, if he is truly willing to. Like most social skills, the general principles aren't that mysterious, and are quantifiable if you pay attention.... But most men don't really want to be sexy; they want sexy to be them.
Essentially, Ms. Zielinski's assessment is that men don't give any indication that they care enough about potential mates to improve themselves. They settle in to who they are, and the opinion of a hypothetical future spouse isn't sufficient motivation to become someone better:
Instead, single men in my experience behave as if the only life possibilities are being the way they are, or acting. The idea of growth and change don't make the radar.
I don't think that's as true as Zielinski suggests. Actually, it might be more accurate to say that it is more true than she supposes. She notes single females' openness toward asking themselves, "What am I doing wrong?" The answer, to my personal experience, is usually pursuing the wrong guys. Although it's often my advice to single female friends, I'm not necessarily talking about looking for hidden diamonds by observing a table of men and gravitating toward the quiet-but-not-shy one in the middle of the group. Look at Zielinski's examples of some men's deficiencies: don't listen, don't have a "real job," boring, not fashionable.
As one of Eugene Volokh's male friends writes, it's not surprising that men seek to conform to the ideal that they've observed women to want. Volokh's friend concentrates on success/money/power, but one can find a modern male stereotype developed in response to each of Zielinski's complaints:
Of course, as Volokh himself notes, for "professional coastal urban women," the demand is that these all be layered on top of success. Nonetheless:
Those women also want more: A certain kind of behavior, attitude, whatever it is that they see as sexy (still a mystery to me, by the way).
Lastly, Geoffrey Murry chimes in with the gay perspective, approaching the same conclusion from a slightly different angle:
I find it is often a man's resoluteness in the face of what I shall call here adversity that makes him sexy. It is his adamantine surety of place as he strides into a room that makes him noticed. Were he to be engaged in the constant questioning of himself that Marilyn suggests, I reckon it might be more difficult for him to pull this off. ...The straight man (the metrosexual and Marilyn's dream men aside) rarely goes to this length, and it is the imperfection in his appearance that gives it the veracity of the virile.
Dare I suggest that the conclusion to which all of these people are gravitating is that rich women want what poor women so desperately need? The educated professionals of Volokh's correspondence will likely reject the idea, including protestations from the women (for all I can say) that they are most definitely not interested in such men, but that need only mean that the oversight is mutual between the seekers and sought. Aren't the women looking for a certain mold of the religious man?
It's difficult to see because our culture has disconnected the markers from the substance. As a consequence, women isolate the various qualities and misconstrue their import. Men respond by donning the shadow of real self-improvement.
Volokh notes the seemingly unattainable state of being in which one adjusts "oneself so successfully that it looks like one isn't trying to adjust oneself at all." I see ultimately the insouciance of manifest self-improvement as it derives from a focus on something higher. Men will not lose motivation if they are striving for the approval of God, rather than of a woman, and yet, if that God demands a sacrificial devotion to the woman, the man will listen, will see through her eyes, and will seek to provide for her.
The key, therefore, is a sense of responsibility that transcends contractual obligation and a faith that challenges will be met. The same view must permeate couples' lives that becomes flesh and blood in the form of the child begotten (not made) through them. Men and women need to remember that they matter to each other, not as mutual prey, but as mutual support toward a state of grace. And in this way, they bring vibrancy to an impotent culture flaccid with displaced victims.
In a follow-up to "How Long Should People Live?," Glenn Reynolds addresses some of the concerns that I'd raised. Most significantly, he reins in the discussion, giving the range about which he's talking:
Short of immortality, though, it wouldn't be surprising to see people's healthy lifespans extended well past the century mark. A doubling of the biblical threescore-and-ten is certainly not beyond reason. But would such an accomplishment be a blessing, or a curse, from society's standpoint?
For my part, I was responding to lives' being much longer than that, considering that Reynolds's first piece spent the first few paragraphs talking about the reversal of aging. The second concern to which Reynolds responds is meatier, engaging in, rather than just setting the terms of, the discussion:
... perhaps a dramatic lengthening of lifespans would yield stagnation and resentment. Older people would entrench themselves in their positions, while juniors would fester with no real hope of getting ahead. Progress would dry up as creative minds wasted their best years in uncreative apprenticeships, under the sour scrutiny of their elders. The result: a dull, uncreative gerontocracy.
Suggesting that "we've pretty much done that experiment already," with no ill effects, Reynolds points out that life expectancy has increased by thirty years since 1900. The lesser tweak that I would apply to that statistic is that, given the history of the last century, a good portion of that gain has probably been among the groups less likely to have access to leadership positions in which to settle.
Data by economic class is understandably difficult to come by, but breakdowns by sex and race (PDF) offer a suggestion of what might be found. From 1900 to 2000, women gained 3.4 more years than men did; blacks out-gained whites by 8.9 years. I don't think I'm assuming to much to suggest that the poor/rich split would be at least that large. In other words, the entrenchment "experiment" hasn't been run to the degree that a similar gain over the next century, to 103 by 2100, would entail — let alone Reynolds's outside number of 140.
More significantly, perhaps, there are at least two substantive differences in the decades of life that have been gained versus those that would henceforth be gained. First, most of the improvements thus far have had to do with illness and basic health, not deterioration, and one need only look to Ronald Reagan to see that human beings are capable of active, creative contribution to society through their seventies. Will the same be true when a 100-year-old has as many years left as a 70-year-old does now? Second, even if capability increases with life expectancy, not only would new generations face a longer wait for existing career vacancies, but the number of people who would live to the age that once was "old" would increase tremendously. Not only would 70 become 100, but the number of 70-year-olds would explode.
The notion of making younger generations wait longer ties into an indication that these profound changes open holes even as we try to grasp certain aspects. Note the parenthetical:
One might object to longer lifespans on other grounds -- perhaps Leon Kass's argument that death is a "blessing," and that the finitude of life is what inspires us to achieve great and daring things. And maybe that's true (though the young are famously unreflective of death, and yet also the ones most likely to attempt great and daring things).
As I asked last time, how long do we want adolescence to extend? Do we really want 40-year-old teenagers? This problem overlaps with the previous: if careers are going to extend outward at the high end, we'll have to find some maturing occupation for those at the other end. Put differently, I'm not sure how much responsibility there is to go around, and I have to confess apprehension about the type of adults who would emerge from post-post-post-graduate education regimes.
All of this converges in a threat to the only irreducible requirement that Reynolds mentions: "I think that the fear that longer lives will lead to more rigidity and less creativity is unlikely to come true, at least so long as we continue to embrace democratic capitalism." Whether we add decades to early life or late life, or both, we end up with large segments of society that require some degree of public support and wield significant political force.
Reynolds mentions increasing turnover among CEOs, second and third careers, and older law-school students, but surely that's an exclusive cut of society. Will those over 65, representing nearly half of the total population, accept late-life careers handing out stickers at Wal-Mart, or will they attempt to rig the system in their favor? Perhaps society could attempt to buy off the older half with promises of healthcare and retirement subsidies, but somebody's going to have to manage the social scheme. At some point, as the elderly are displaced, the power will shift to the younger population, who may see the bribed seniors as an unjust drag on the system. Herein lies one potential source of the "death aplenty" that Reynolds mentions.
I've only offered a handful of issues that came quickly to mind, but many more exist, and some that will emerge are impossible to guess from our current vantage point. At the end of the day, it seems to me that dramatic economic and cultural adjustment will be an inevitable consequence of rapid increases in life expectancy. That democratic capitalism will survive the transition is by no means ensured. Neither is our humanity.
I've been intending to note Gabriel Rosenberg's response to my post that pointed out two "of the trail markers along the slippery slope that supporters of Lawrence assured us did not exist." One of those markers was a footnote in an ACLU brief that referred to teenagers' "well-established" right to make personal decisions about sex and marriage. Rosenberg quotes a sentence from the first paragraph of the footnote and writes:
Note that this is still an equal protection argument. Under federal law there is generally two ways in which an equal protection claim can force a heavy burden on the state to justify its unequal treatment of individuals. One way is if the differential treatment was based on some suspect classification like race, or in this case, gender. That is the main argument being made here. The other way, though, is if the subject matter of the unequal treatment concerns a fundamental right.
We're dealing with shades of rhetoric, here. I merely claimed, following the Kansas Attorney General, whom Clayton Cramer quotes, that this is a glimpse of an argument that may be brought into play later in the culture wars. Here's the paragraph of the footnote that Rosenberg doesn't provide (see sheet 23 of this PDF):
In addition, the exclusion in the Romeo & Juliet law must satisfy heightened scrutiny because it provides gay teenagers with differential access to a fundamental right. While a teenager's constitutional rights are more limited than an adult's rights, and while the state is more likely to have a significant or compelling state interest that justifies intruding upon a teenager's rights, it is well established that teenagers — including gay teenagers — have a due process liberty interest in being free from state compulsion in personal decisions relating to marriage, procreation, contraception, family relationships and sexual intimacy; it is also well established that laws that burden a teenager's liberty interest must be narrowly tailored to advance a compelling governmental interest unless they advance "a significant state interest that is not present in the case of an adult."
Returning to Rosenberg's post, I was pleased to see that frequent commenter Ben Bateman had already made the core of the rebuttal that I intended to offer:
The concern is not that the ACLU is literally arguing for legalizing pedophilia in the Limon case. It doesn't work like that. It hasn't worked like that. The point is that footnote 4 attempts to introduce the foundation for a future move to legalize pedophilia. If a court agreed with and cited the above quote as a correct statement of law, then it would be much easier for some future court to extend that logic just a little further and conclude that laws against pedophilia aren't narrowly tailored enough, don't meet a rational basis test, or whatever excuse they want to use. ...I think you're too smart not to understand how that language could be used to legalize pedophilia. You just don't think that the courts would actually do it. And just like in Lawrence and Goodridge, the courts won't tell you that they're going to do it until they've done it. So I guess you won't believe it is happening until it has already happened.
I would add that the subsequent citations in the ACLU footnote claim precedent for two points. First, that "minors have liberty interest protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment." Second, that Lawrence established "that liberty interest in personal autonomy includes matters of private, intimate conduct and protects gay people just as it protects heterosexuals."
Responding to Ben, Rosenberg admits that he thought Lawrence "would be [decided] on equal protection grounds and expressly not overturn" Bowers v. Hardwick, a case upholding sodomy bans. It seems to me that much the same move is coming together for age-of-consent laws. As much as he insists on keeping the footnote in context, Rosenberg ignores the other "marker" in my post, which pointed to a comment in a judge's dissent to a statutory rape case involving a mentally retarded adult. The judge wrote:
Expert testimony at trial also suggested an invitation to apply one's own moral framework to JH's sexual choice. In explaining why JH's consent was not valid, the prosecution's non-medical expert on sexually abused, mentally retarded individuals testified that whereas JH sees "sex" as merely a physical act, "If you ask, you know, anyone else what sex was or what intercourse is you see an entire picture. You see the candles, the wine, the dating, you know, whatever else goes on. With her sex is just one quick spur of the moment thing."That the state may not burden a particular sexual choice out of distaste or disagreement is the central holding of Lawrence.
Now look back at the precedent in the ACLU footnote. The first confirms minors' due process rights; the second specifically extends those rights to include sex, which, in essence, is the expanded ruling that Rosenberg hadn't expected in Lawrence. They may not, ultimately, prove necessary, but we can add in a couple of other factors to give an idea of areas from which the "unthinkable" ruling might come.
Consider, first, the possibility that the judge's dissent in the adult rape case may someday be vindicated in another ruling elsewhere. Consider, second, parental consent laws for abortion; the ACLU footnote lumps procreation and contraception with intimate conduct. In 1990, Hodgen v. Minnesota, the Supreme Court found that a state could only require notification of both parents if a court could bypass the requirement. Justice Stevens opined:
The State has no legitimate interest in conforming family life to a state-designed ideal by requiring family members to talk together. Nor can the State's interest in protecting a parent's interest in shaping a child's values and lifestyle overcome the liberty interests of a minor acting with the consent of a single parent or court.
So, if Lawrence is found to invalidate laws that step in when mentally retarded adults consent to sex, mental capacity (much less maturity) becomes less rational of a basis to render consent legally impossible, the bias being construed as merely inapplicable "distaste or disagreement." Justice Stevens diminishes "a parent's interest in shaping a child's values and lifestyle" in comparison with the child's liberty interests in the context of abortion. And the ACLU lashes contraception and procreation with sexual conduct, while arguing that minors' due process rights cover "private, intimate conduct."
Suppose a case like the Kansas one for which the ACLU submitted its brief reaches the Supreme Court. Hop, hop, hop. Lawrence Jr.
We're still searching for the Fountain of Youth, we humans, and given that they are less and less a silent constituency, it isn't surprising that secularists are leading the charge. Last week, Glenn Reynolds took up the cause.
To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what his argument is with respect to Americans' desire for radical life extension. He notes that "although a few bluenoses sniff at such efforts to hold back the clock, it's pretty obvious that an awful lot of people feel otherwise." On the other hand, the ideas that "human beings are somehow bad, and that death is somehow good... are, [he's] sure, fairly widespread," without even exhausting the "room for the willies."
So, bottom line, are people for it, or are they creeped out by the idea? Or is it that the government should make people pay for the technology before they want it so they can realize that they really do want it when it's a done deal? I'm not sure, but if somebody of Glenn's politics is arguing that the government should fund something for the reason that nobody will voluntarily contribute enough money, the topic merits investigation.
Perhaps one reason pharmaceutical companies aren't investing in research for this prize is that they believe that their chances of maintaining the ability to sell — at a profit — would be next to nil. Could such a technology withstand the pressure to provide it to all? I won't pretend to have a basis even to guess how that would play out, as an economic matter, but it is very easy to imagine the manufacture and distribution of the product becoming a central focus of our society.
Viewed at that level, it seems to me that Reynolds misconstrues the substantive objection. It isn't that "death is somehow good," but that it simply is. To humanity, mortality is central. It isn't that living through the last days of loved ones and facing the inevitability of our own doesn't "suck," but that it makes us who we are. As true as it may be that we continually change who we are, changes of the magnitude about which Reynolds seems to be speaking raise an important question: how inhuman are we willing to become to become superhuman?
As a man of faith, I believe loss thereof to be the greatest threat of all, and the potential for eternal life on Earth certainly changes the immediacy of seeking eternal life with God, to say the least. Michael Williams suggests that, "since many Christians believe in what is called 'eternal security'... the chances of any individual eventually accepting Christ go way up as they live longer." Without delving into Michael's theology, with which I disagree, long, highly manipulatable life begets a frame of mind. Suffice to say that believing that one cannot become "unsaved" in a life that extends toward forever is a perilous combination.
Whether explicitly or implicitly, however, many people don't accept such arguments from faith. Nonetheless, as often is the case, something inadvisable for reasons of religious faith also manifests perniciously in other ways, and the potential for turmoil socially and culturally with radical life extension is tremendous. Will emotional and intellectual adolescence, for example, extend into our fifties? For how long would people work? If you think the AARP is powerful now, imagine the first decade during which there are more people — more generations — over 65 than under! What happens when society's various leaders — in government, in business, in scientific fields — live forever? What will the ambitious folks who would have risen to fill vacated positions do, and how inextricable will the prejudices of their elders become?
Even the premises of Glenn's own argument lose their substance in the presence of their conclusion. Consider his assertion that "birthrates have a much bigger impact on population growth than life expectancies." It makes sense that this would be the case, because births compound, within the count of living people, while deaths do not. For one thing, as far as I'm aware, longevity, not being the consequence of immediate action, doesn't vary as much.
More significantly, even if a generation is born that will live for an additional ten, or even twenty, years, it will not overtake the previous generation. In other words (just picking a number), if the average life expectancy for the parents birthing a new generation now is 80, and the next will live to 90, the previous will be gone long before the subsequent reaches even 80. In contrast, ultra-longevity means, essentially, that birthrates would compound indefinitely. All births would effectively represent one continuous generation.
Simple economics provide additional reason for concern: the more of something we have, the less value it has. This applies to years of life. One reads of survivors of traumatic events who take each day to be a gift. If those gifts stretch out beyond our sight into the future, how precious will each be?
I suspect, too, that we'd become more hoarding of our lives as a whole. The more emphasis we put on mounting years, the less we'll sacrifice for others, but the more we'll demand. Without the tangible inevitability of death, anything that conceivably impedes our lives is elevated by lack of comparison. Perhaps this will be limited to health issues, adding fuel to the ideological conflagration currently consuming the tobacco industry and with sparks stinging fast food; I'm inclined to predict that it will extend to the incidentals of life, those lesser things that we hoard, as well.
This ties into a second point, one that belief in God makes more poignant, but that can ring true without it. The ills of a society already pawing around in dark to fill its emptiness can only be exacerbated when there is much, much more emptiness to fill. The depreciation of each year may inflate the perceived value of diversions, benign and malignant.
I don't share Clayton Cramer's emphasis on death as an escape from the future. Still, the potential is tremendous for communal corrosion when individual desire effects fundamental changes to what it means to live. We who choose, one day, to forgo the waters of material eternity may be justified in having as our epitaph: "Mourn not for me, but for yourselves."
When such decisions are a reality of life, we will make them individually, and I don't think I'd support laws setting life limits. Governments could institute any number of policies toward that end, and experience suggests that they would tend to be arbitrary, unjust, and indicative of nothing so much as unequal influence. In the meantime, at the very least, our government oughtn't be used to make objections irrelevant in retrospect.
This afternoon, Ramesh Ponnuru opined:
I didn't much like President Bush's eulogy. The best example of the kind of false note he struck was the following line: "He believed that bigotry and prejudice were the worst things a person could be guilty of." I doubt that Reagan believed that proposition, and if he had, his holding of that view would not have been praiseworthy. I am sure, on the other hand, that Bush believes this proposition, or thinks that he does.
However, in his tribute Lane Core quoted something similar from Reagan's debate with Bobby Kennedy:
Now, I happen to believe that the greatest part of the problem lies in the hearts of men. I think that bigotry and prejudice is probably the worst of all man's ills the hardest to correct. ...... people in positions like ourselves like the Senator and myself, like the President of the United States, can do a great deal of good, perhaps almost as much as proper legislation, if we take the lead in saying those who operate their businesses or their lives on a basis of practicing discrimination and prejudice are practicing what is an evil sickness.
A couple of hours after the original post, somebody emailed Ponnuru pointing out that President Bush's sentiment was a direct quote from one of Reagan's letters. Personally, I think he put it better in the debate — in subtle, but extremely important ways.
In the formulation from the debate, Reagan's notion of "ills" and the view toward correction makes of prejudice an error to be righted. And that accords with Reagan's subsequent prescription of public pressure. The formulation that Bush quoted puts forward the idea of prejudice as an action worthy of guilt, to be punished. This is the difference between culture-honing argument and hate-crime legislation, which ends specific discussion and encroaches on the next point and the next, until it's a crime to disagree on tangentially related matters.
I like to think that, had the question been put this way to Ronald Reagan, he'd have clarified in the direction of his debate statement. But then, I'm biased.
Craig Henry points out the first peep of an — shall we say — unforeseen consequence of the Supreme Court's Lawrence decision. Clayton Cramer explains (bold added):
For all that supporters of Lawrence talk about love, commitment, and relationship, the fact of the matter is that by scrapping all notions of sexual morality between adults, Lawrence is opening the door to scrapping laws intended to protect an adult with the mental capabilities of a child from exploitation by a guy who barely knew this woman. Does anyone find it unlikely that the same reasoning won't be applied to strike down child molestation laws (as the ACLU has already tried--and failed--to do)?
The internal link goes to a post that highlights a footnote in a man-boy statutory rape case in which the ACLU opined that "teenagers have a well-established 'liberty interest in being free from state compulsion' in making personal decisions about sex and marriage." With these two arguments, we glimpse some of the trail markers along the slippery slope that supporters of Lawrence assured us did not exist. (Note, particularly, the conflation of "sex and marriage.")
This is the danger of activism — and ultimately legislation — through the judiciary: laws created by a legislature can discriminate in the scope of their terms; the application of them cannot. So, when the judiciary rejects or redefines the stated scope, the flimsy wall of words is breached. The sad, human truth, I suspect, is that we've so lost our sense of what "discrimination" means that many of those pushing to strike sodomy laws in the courts probably didn't realize that they were doing so.
As a comment to my post linking to his TCS piece on war in Sudan, Andrew Morse poses some questions:
As I was writing the Sudan piece, I had some thoughts that you may be better suited to run with. From a purely political perspective, there is no reason why Sudan cannot be stable. The climate is not so harsh that people are fighting one another to get the means needed for basic survival. There is a fairly strong semblance of regional/local organization. There is a bunch of competing interests, with no one group able to gain an overwhelming edge, ala the Baathists in Syria or Iraq. So why has civil war grown out of this situation, as opposed to some sort of civil pluralism?As best as I can figure, it's because of the absence of a simple idea: loving thy enemy.
If the idea of loving your enemy is indeed the missing piece, the ramifications are frightening. Is this planet truly headed to some kind of post-Christian era? If it is, will the idea of loving your enemy disappear from the general population? And if that idea is disappearing, is the war in Sudan a relic of the past, or a harbinger of the future?
As a Christian believer, I don't foresee an entirely post-Christian future as a matter of faith. Happily, that faith corresponds with my intellectual suspicions.
A core support of the belief that we can move beyond Christianity is that we don't need it. To believers, obviously, the effort is doomed as a matter of reality; to deny Christ, one must submit to an ever-expanding series of delusions, or at least distractions. To non-believers and quasi-believers, distractions are the central requirement — distractions not from the reality of God, but from the reality of death and meaninglessness. However, perhaps the more relevant requirement is to construct a system of belief that either makes morality moot or creates some other plausible basis for it.
Mootness of morality, in its turn, requires either infinite intricacy of exceptions or stubborn cessation of questioning at some arbitrary point. Similarly, the option of an alternative basis for morality, also being arbitrary, must expand essentially toward God or stand rigid on a "just because." Within Christianity, a strain exists that corresponds to post-Christian notions, and it is exactly "love thy neighbor" (or "love thy enemy") that facilitates it, as an excuse against action — "love" as worldly indulgence.
All of these approaches carry a more basic requirement, rooted not in our intellectual life, but in life itself. The prerequisite for a post-Christian society, ultimately, is that no threat can reach such a point of urgency as to necessitate struggle. This applies to our love for ourselves and our battle with sinful and dangerous urges; a post-Christian view cannot exist where the consequences of laxity are intolerable. On the level of whole societies, the fallen nature of mankind will result in the need to fight, kill, die. But will an ideology that shies even from making others feel ashamed — indulgent love — think anything worthy of death? No, and people will need one that can meet a mortal threat.
Back when folks could say such things, when I was in either grade or middle school, a history teacher explained that Islam, taught a certain way, is the perfect war religion. Submission to God is coupled with eternal rewards for forcing others to submit to God, or killing them if they refuse. From a Christian perspective, this fanaticism is like an insurmountable desire, justifying the gravest sin. The First Commandment is "thou shalt have no other Gods before me."
In the modern West, the most corrosive tendency is to fight for the acceptance of base urges. The greatest sin is to strive to redefine sin as neutral or as virtue, to make a god of desire. In the case of radical Islam, the god is God. The sins involved in imposing the religion are not just neutral, not just virtues, but commandments themselves. Allowed to spread, this ideology will win by its disproportionate determination.
One can imagine those who oppose the war to push back this conflagration, or who are using events for political gain, thinking that they will (or would) fight for what they believe in if it proves necessary. If the neocons turn out to be right about the necessity of war, then these people will support it when it becomes clear. The truth is, however, that they assert this at a safe distance, across which lie skewed ideas of what is real in the world. When the fight becomes sufficiently palpable, they will cave, because whatever lust they had — whether a lust for political power or for aberrant sex — will not be as strong as the lust for Allah's reward.
So, Sudan. "Relic of the past" and "harbinger of the future" bleed together in our cyclic history. Perhaps Sudan is the past reasserting itself as if intending to become the future. If that past isn't folded into our present while still limited in its geographic scope, then it will be the future. I don't think that will happen, but neither do I believe this to be the worst fight to come. Radical Islam is a stark enemy to battle. Even if it advances beyond the boundaries I would predict, the result will be dark days, but not permanent darkness, because freedom would be understood by contrast.
The real threat will arise when "love thy enemy" is not a missing piece, but a hollow talisman. A large segment of Western society is living off the moral capital of its Christian roots, getting away with immorality, but that won't last through generations. As lust and greed begin to seep through seemingly caulkless boards, society will sink to a point at which a critical mass seeks to right it. Others will fight back. There is no half-sunk; sin becomes addictive, requiring ever greater acceptance, placing ever greater demands not only on the sinner, but on those who would deal with him.
In this respect, liberals themselves have done the most to undermine their, and our, greatest strength: discourse. Without an a priori value placed on honest, frank, and intellectually open discussion, right and wrong become a matter of power, which in this case means strength of desire. Sins breed strong desire, and they expand in definition. We're already seeing human life being cast as a commodity. At some point, traditional ethics will transform, for some, into a mortal threat worthy of death, but in the name of life. This will infuse the post-Christian ethos with a mortal cause, a motivation, making it anti-Christian.
For those who hold fast to faith, the time of that threat's manifestation can be filled with more promise than despair. Still, we are called to work against it. And we've more immediate concerns, anyway.
ADDENDUM:
Speaking of struggling, I did with this post. In a nutshell, what I was trying to say is that post-Christian ideologies are unstable and weak. If they are dominant for multiple generations, the society will crumble. More likely, in our case, they will face an external threat and will either submit or make recourse to Christianity (or another established, strong religion, such as Judaism).
What we're getting in Sudan and the Middle East, according to my construction, is a view of a pre-modern clash of cultures. The southern region of Sudan is largely Christian, as I understand, and was assisted by Christians around the world, particularly in the United States. What if, to be somewhat ridiculous, southern Sudan had been populated by post-modern relativists? I'd say that, if sheer lopsided power doesn't stop the expansion of radical Islam, it will overwhelm nations that don't have — or reclaim — firm, transcendent belief in God.
The more significant danger, in the long run, will be a turn of events that infuses post-Christianity with motivation on the order of belief in God. The lingering sense of charity and inalienable rights will be perverted in such a way as to justify drastic measures to expand. It's easier to fight an enemy who declares his hatred for you; it's more difficult to fight one who speaks in terms soothing to the Western ear.
Ocean State Blogger Marc Comtois quotes some comments about the United States' "losing the peace" in post-WWII Europe. He then suggests that certain people consider lessons from history — even the facts of actual, flesh-and-blood current events — to be absolutely irrelevant:
The media and much of the elite academics did not want this war. They view war throught lens of Vietnam and can conceive of nothing good to be gained from war. They hold rhetoric dear and can conceive of no situation in which force is necessary. Failure to persuade is never the fault of the intransigent antagonist, it is always the failure of wronged protagonist. Deep in their hearts, they hope for failure in Iraq so that they can say "I told you so."
And if all works out as well as it will if such people fail in their schemes, will they understand — just as deep in their hearts — what their breathtakingly selfish pessimism says about them? Or will they just throw another layer of paint on the cracking edifice?
Ben Bateman responded to this post in a way that deserves elevation above the comment section:
The communication gap runs deeper than most conservatives realize. The gap between right and left has grown to the point that they're effectively separate cultures. The problem is not just that right and left begin the discussion with different premises and arguments. Right and left don't even agree on how the discussion itself should work.Western Culture has specific ideas about how we should resolve disputes. It starts with the idea that truth exists, and every reasonable person's goal is to act in accordance with it. The trouble is that people disagree about what the truth is on any particular subject. So we try to move closer to truth through intellectual discourse. We present facts and arguments. We try to persuade the other side and at the same time leave ourselves open to being persuaded. Ideally, we don't care whether our side wins or their side wins; what's important is that one side, and usually both sides, are better off from the effort because their opinions moved closer to truth.
This idea of intellectual discourse is one of the proudest achievements of Western Culture. It's so axiomatic to conservatives that they have trouble imagining how anyone could reject it. Yet it's almost unique to Western Culture. Most cultures do not share it. They believe that the side with more power will—and should—prevail in a dispute.
And a growing number of Americans agree with some form of that view. For decades it has been fashionable for academicians to deny that truth exists at all. They have convinced a great many Americans of that view, despite its obvious internal contradictions. A natural consequence of that idea is to destroy the traditional understanding of intellectual discourse. If truth doesn't exist, then there's no point in pursuing it. For these people, everything is about power, including conversation.
If your only goal is power, then it makes sense to pretend to engage in traditional intellectual discourse. Doing so softens up your targets and makes them more receptive to what you're going to say. But that doesn't mean you're actually participating in the discourse in the sense of opening your own mind up to what the other side is saying. You're like a missionary in darkest Africa: You're glad that the other side will let you try to convert them, but converting to their view is simply not possible.
Most liberals don't consciously agree that there is no such thing as truth, but they often believe it subconsciously or hold views that amount to the same thing: Truth is defined by whoever has the power; truth exists but we can't know anything about it; truth exists but it's different for each person; or truth exists but it doesn't matter in a moral sense. These and many variants amount to the proposition that truth doesn't exist. The mind's capacity for self-deception is limitless.
The painful conclusion for conservatives is that there's no point pretending to have a traditional intellectual conversation with someone who doesn't share your idea of what an intellectual conversation should be. They are not part of your culture; they have rejected it. They have embraced the much more primitive and historically common idea that the only important goal is power. If facts will get them power, they're happy to embrace them. But if the facts are inconvenient, then lies, half-truths, and personal insults will do just as well.
To keep your sanity as a conservative debating liberals, you need to be ready to rise above the specific topic and look at the conversation itself. You need a clear idea of the rules of traditional intellectual discourse. If the liberal you're talking to won't abide by those rules, dump 'em and find another one. As conservatives desperate to preserve the country, we don't want to admit to the depth of the divisions within it. We would like to imagine that every reasonable-sounding American shares our cultural traditions, especially those as fundamental a intellectual conversation. But the fact we can no longer ignore is that a great many do not.
In an entry (which is worth reading on its own merits) about the media's and others' disregard of history, Marc Comtois quotes a perspicacious observation by Peggy Noonan:
It occurs to me that all young people who graduate from elite American universities now want to go into communications. It's a whole generation that wants to communicate. ...I see no sign they are going to start thinking anything truly unusual for their time and generation--that religious conversion can be a wholly beneficial and life changing event, for instance, or that breaking with liberal orthodoxy might be the beginning of wisdom.
It must leave them finding it a challenge to speak of their beliefs in an interesting way. They often seem to fall back on attitude--wit, irony, poking fun at the thick-witted--in place of sustained thought, or meaning. And still they want to communicate for a living. I think of this problem as "big mike, no message." They are trained in the finest points of communication, but when they turn on the microphone, they have nothing serious to say.
Marc mentions Bill Maher as typical and suggests:
The problem for these new graduates is that, while they are aware that spouting tired clichés won't set them apart and get them noticed, they don't have the means, the intellectual or critical training, to question the "liberal orthodoxy" they were taught in academia. All of their training has been one-sided. Conservativism and tradition have been chastised, belittled and demonized. How could any thinking individual even consider them?
Both Marc and Noonan refer to the necessity of "Deeply Held Beliefs" for powerful communication, but I think a lack of it is more extensively relevant than either implies — as a cause as well as a difficulty. What the big-mike-no-message type wants, as evidenced in practice, is not so much to communicate as to declare — to proselytize. That urge, paradoxically, results from a lack of belief.
There's a self-defeating neurosis that I've noticed in myself and others whereby one mimics a behavior that follows from an understanding or quality that one lacks. Since the quality does not derive from the behavior, the person begins to feel as if everybody is similarly faking it and forecloses the possibility that the content exists apart from, let alone prior to, the medium.
They speak because they wish to hear, but in speaking so persistently, they can hear only themselves.
Even apart from the explicit attack on Christianity, that the ACLU has succeeded in dictating modifications to the L.A. county seal makes me furious. It went without even a fight! Well, if government by litigation is going to be the standard, the people of L.A. county should threaten to sue for disenfranchisement and violation of due process rights. Something.
That some sort of response wouldn't lack for public support, location notwithstanding, is indicated by the fact that the case has even James Lileks taking the Christian-conservative side, unprompted (emphasis in original):
Imagine if the seal had two female mythological symbols of Peace and Progress, holding hands, and a religious group sued because they said this was a clear example of the state promoting lesbianism. "But, um, historically and allegorically, that's not what it's about." Don't care! We're offended! We bleed, you heed: Take it off! No one would give them a second thought, nor should they. But when the ACLU musters a phalanx of lawyers to erase a historical symbol from the city seal, the burghers quail. The burghers fold. In the end the national anthem is John Cage's "4'33," which gives everyone an interval of empty silence in which they can construct their own appropriate sentiments.
Lileks wonders who "can look at world where some madmen want to shove a crescent down our throats and decide that the most important thing they're going to do is take the crosses off the city seal." The answer is ideologues with an agenda that is larger in scope than defending the sensibilities of two heterodox, but vocal, citizens in a county.
As I said when I first noticed this story, such ideologues need only twist an issue around to phrase somebody's desire in terms of rights, and no democratic principle can stand in the way. We're seeing it with the erasure of Christianity from the public square of the United States, we saw it with abortion, and we're seeing it again with same-sex marriage.
It's probably true that arguments about disenfranchisement would be wide of the mark. But this isn't too small of an issue to bring into the voting box; a spine that proves absent for relatively minor matters is more likely than not to be just plain absent.
The blogging duo over at Banterings has taken up the topic of modest clothing. Gary notices that the hipsters at Seventeen magazine have the fashion-world version of the libertine's inability to understand the abstentious. The internal blockquote is Gig Solif Schanen, fashion editor of the magazine, addressing a trend toward less-revealing clothes among some girls:
We like to call this new girl Miss Modesty. It's such a different feeling but still very pretty and feminine and sexy. It's just a little more covered up. It's kind of like a sexy take on a librarian. I think people are tired of seeing so much skin and want to leave a little more to the imagination.Uh, hello? What are you talking about? You're completely missing the point! It's not another way to look sexy. "Sexy" is the problem. Just let them be girls. Of course, if Seventeen magazine were to see the light it would be the end of their magazine.
That's a bit like the nutrition editor at a fast-food industry magazine calling a trend toward home cooking "the new unhealthy." "It's kind of like the glutton's take on a nutritionist."
Two posts later, Banterer Nick points out a company in Utah called Modest by Design. It may be that I haven't been shopping for a while, mostly just wearing what's given to me, but the men's line, at least, looks pretty standard. Still, the company's name alone is a selling point; perhaps they should brand their clothes more conspicuously.
Austin Bay's farewell entry of May 18 has been much on my mind ever since:
Removing Saddam began the reconfiguration of the Middle East -- a dangerous, expensive process, but one that will lay the foundation for true states where the consent of the governed creates legitimacy and where terrorists are prosecuted, not promoted. The job of building New Iraq falls on the Iraqi people, but they have a precious opportunity, one supported by government civilians and contractors, volunteer workers and, of course, the uniformed military personnel serving with the U.S.-led coalition.It is my privilege to join that group for the next few months. I know the hardest burden in this deployment will be borne by my wife and daughters. I thank them for their sacrifice.
Because I was born with two clubbed feet, there has never been a time when I wasn't aware that I was 4-F; as Merriam-Webster puts it, that means "classification as unfit for military service." In other words, it has never even been a matter of choosing not to enlist — a matter of rejecting the call to serve. For most of my reckless youth, I considered that to be an instance of good fortune. And I still do, although in a different way: in the way that the cleansing from sin of an adult baptism makes it a matter of luck to have once been an unbaptized atheist. The good fortune is in not having to face the reality of unmitigated shortcomings, whether cowardice, selfishness, or sin.
Just as one must remember, however, that being an unbaptized atheist surely contributed to sin, which contributed to misfortune, which defined much of the starting point for adult life, one must understand that never having had to consider the most potent form of service to one's country contributed to a larger attitude of service's avoidance. Put more simply, 4-F was — and continues to be — an excuse, at least on my part, piled on top of many others, until what is excuse simply cannot be peeled away from what is reason.
To each his own, and we're all called in different directions. But a citizen who sacrifices less profoundly must sacrifice more, and for longer, until every excuse has been hammered into a reason in retrospect. The life not risked is not thereby absolved of the responsibility to be a life given over. If my legs prevented my carrying what burden a commanding officer might have place upon my shoulders, then my mind and fingers must work until an equivalent service has been rendered.
So, on this Memorial Day, we who have not served ought, by duty, to thank those who have — not just for their sacrifices, but for setting the bar so high. What they have given — what you have given — is an example of such weight as to inspire a lifetime of continual striving according to the individual callings of the rest of us.
Whether he intended it or not, Austin Bay speaks more broadly than just the war against the terrorists when he writes that "every American, in some form or fashion, is part of this war." And although each of us contributes to humanity's larger struggle, we rightly pause to thank and to honor those who have fought directly to establish the foundation from which the battles of the mind may be waged.
Music critic Dave Marsh makes a culturally telling comment on the back cover of the Ted Hawkins CD — The Next Hundred Years — with "Ladder of Success" on it:
When [Hawkins] declares that you can't get anywhere without "connections," in his "Ladder of Success," he's speaking a simple truth which becomes more convoluted only when you realize how utterly simply he means it: He genuinely believes contact with God possesses more power than contact with mammon. This complex simplicity lends his songs their sense of strangeness and eccentricity.
Personally, I get more of a sense of strangeness from the fact that this comment was printed in full promotional view on the CD in question. And what eccentricity it indicates in an industry when it apparently stands as an oddity that somebody actually believes God to be more powerful than money.
I'm behind today because I got caught up with a long, but absolutely fascinating, piece about the degree to which online virtual-reality fantasy games are becoming almost small nation states:
[Economics professor Edward Castronova] gathered data on 616 auctions, observing how much each [virtual] item sold for in U.S. dollars. When he averaged the results, he was stunned to discover that the EverQuest platinum piece was worth about one cent U.S. — higher than the Japanese yen or the Italian lira. With that information, he could figure out how fast the EverQuest economy was growing. Since players were killing monsters or skinning bunnies every day, they were, in effect, creating wealth. Crunching more numbers, Castronova found that the average player was generating 319 platinum pieces each hour he or she was in the game — the equivalent of $3.42 (U.S.) per hour. "That's higher than the minimum wage in most countries," he marvelled.Then he performed one final analysis: The Gross National Product of EverQuest, measured by how much wealth all the players together created in a single year inside the game. It turned out to be $2,266 U.S. per capita. By World Bank rankings, that made EverQuest richer than India, Bulgaria, or China, and nearly as wealthy as Russia.
It was the seventy-seventh richest country in the world. And it didn't even exist.
As the self-contained worlds of such games have aligned with real-world systems and attitudes, they've not surprisingly moved toward the core influences on society. As the objects and "lives" in them begin to have real value, the games seem to me to be moving out of the phase during which it was possible to talk about a utopian reality in which everybody begins from equal footing and advances based on effort and merit. Human nature is too complicated, and intractable.
In some ways, the virtual worlds can be likened to a newly discovered, inhabited and intellectually modern, country — like an island paradise. Whatever tenuous dreamworld has been enabled by the absence of physical pain and mortality is drained through interaction with the wider world. The major difference, although the article doesn't go this in depth, is that these worlds have powerful "gods" — the designers and administrators — with control over every detail of the internal reality. One doesn't expect, for example, that a jealous god will wink an island nation out of existence as external economies make inroads, but such a thing is still possible in the games.
The formulation of the people who run the games as gods points to an interesting trend. The common (simplified) view of theology's progress in human history is from sort of mechanical gods spiritually connected to specific things in the world; through the concept of powerful deities who aren't much different than comic book superheroes, replete with human-like foibles and passions; followed by distinct, often competing, "forces"; and ultimately to the all-powerful God of the monotheistic faiths. The virtual gods have gone in the reverse.
At present, they are like the ancient Greek gods. They can dictate certain rules of nature, transform objects, make things (like money and goods) appear and disappear, but the medium in which they work imposes restrictions. However, as our legal system begins to assert rights to regulate — if the game owners choose to continue to allow the expansion of the games — they will become somewhat less powerful, even, than world leaders. If a head of state pushes a button and annihilates a civilization, he faces only what consequences other nations or his own people are able to force. Were the game owners to do the same, they'll eventually be criminally liable, at least for lost money.
What this really means, though, is that, as the gods of the games shift toward their actual humanity in power, as the games become more a component of this world, the God of the games becomes the real God. And that raises some intriguing ethical questions. Primary among the answers, I would suggest, even before the questions begin to be asked, is that excessive immersion in a virtual world threatens one's soul, inasmuch as it moves one's consciousness an implementation of reality further from God.
How significant would charity within EverQuest be if it came at the expense of, for example, depriving children of an active father? Not very, I'd say. But turn that question around a bit, and an answer to the real-world parallel must be more intricate: how significant is charity of the body that comes at the expense of the soul?
Economics isn't the only field that can find a model in these games, but I don't know how much our secular society will like the theological and philosophical conclusions to which the virtual worlds may lead.
(via Shiela Lennon)
It looks as if, since I felt compelled to say something, I should have just gone ahead and made my point about comparisons between the Family Research Council and the Nazis. Trey, the blogger who suggested the comparison, has clarified, but without answering my unvoiced concern:
Do I believe the rhetoric of hate and demonization that the FRC uses has the possibility to increase violence and legal discrimination against my family? Yes, most defininitely. Just as I believe child pornography endangers children and extreme violence on TV numbs us to real violence (I'm sure Mr. Katz would agree.. as would the FRC, so why doesn't the FRC see what they are doing?), the speech the FRC uses against gays is a danger both now and in the future. Their rhetoric is indeed comparable to that the Nazis used against Jews.
I wonder if Trey has actually read through the disgusting Nazi propaganda from which the selective quotes of his source for the comparison were drawn. If he has, I'm at a loss to understand how he could fail to see how the equivalence abets evil through its diminishment with one hand and inflicts unjust harm with the other. Here's a taste:
When the agricultural Egyptian population prepared to defend itself against these foreign usurers and speculators, they emigrated once again, and plundered their way into the "Promised Land," where they settled and mercilessly pillaged the lawful and culturally-advanced inhabitants. ...Here, the ultimate mixed race that is the Jews developed over the centuries from the oriental-preasiatic racial mixture, with a hint of the negroid - foreign to us Europeans, born from totally different kinds of racial elements, different from us in body and above all in soul. ...
In the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, they spread from Eastern Europe like an irresistable tide, flooding the towns and nations of Europe - in fact, the entire world. ...
Then (1918/19) the Jews seized their chance. They came to the forefront, pretending to be faithful citizens, deeply disturbed about the fate of the German people. ...
While millions of established Germans were unemployed and in misery, immigrant Jews acquired fantastic riches in a few years - not by honest work, but by usury, swindling, and fraud. ...
Supposedly their so-called religion prevents the Jews from eating meat butchered in the ordinary way. So they let the animals bleed to death. ... It would otherwise been inconceivable, considering the well-known German love of animals, that Jews until recently were able, without being punnished, to torture innocent and defenseless animals. ...
Under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, Germany has raised the battle flag of war against the eternal Jew. ... "but rather the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!"
One doesn't know whether to laugh or vomit. During the part about suffering animals, the image is of laughing men. Other images are of maps plotting the Jews' infiltration of the world. According to the film, Jews are responsible for just about every crime. "The common language of international thieves comes not without reason from Hebrew and Yiddish."
The film, in short, creates an extended, mythic history of the perfidy of Jews, with sickly humorous juxtapositions of images and text, with lies stoking a paranoia such that annihilation is presented as a reasonable option. For Trey's "evidence," aligned next to the various statements and false statistics are comments from people involved with the FRC. All are out of context; many deal with demographics; many express opinions about behavior; many are indistinguishable from sources that can't be called anti-gay by any stretch. Here's another Nazi nugget:
Fifty-two out of every 100 doctors were Jews. Of every 100 merchants, 60 were Jews. The average wealth of Germans was 810 marks; the average wealth of Jews 10,000 marks.
That's aligned with Robert Knight of the FRC (from 1994):
Homosexuals are among the most economically advantaged people in our country. Research by marketing firms shows that as a group homosexuals have higher than average per-capita annual incomes ($36,800 vs. $12,287), are more likely to hold college degrees (59.6 percent vs. 18 percent), have professional or managerial positions (49 percent vs. 15.9 percent...
And here's the Providence Journal reporting on the first-ever survey — by a pro-gay group — of Rhode Island homosexuals:
81.1 percent have obtained a bachelor's degree or higher, versus 25.6 percent of all Rhode Islanders. ...77.2 percent work full- or part-time, versus 64.7 percent of all Rhode Islanders.
The specific numbers are debatable, to be sure, but the point is that citing them in the context of testimony that a group doesn't need special protections is quite another matter from citing them to instill fear and promote annihilation. Trey's source goes on like that. To Nazi claims that Jews essentially orchestrate global crime, the source compares quotes about pedophilia and sodomy. Included is a sentence from Robert Knight, saying, "Twenty-one states have laws prohibiting sodomy," which was true at the time.
Having reaffirmed the comparison, Trey offers a hypothetical:
A national media-exposed political advocacy group which has a prominent purpose (large portion of its web site and media appearances) of opposing Christian rights to marriage, employment protection, and discrimination. To oppose these rights to Christians, this group make many claims about them. Christians have an agenda to undermine the national and social structure and destroy the nation. They must be stopped. Christians are violent and cruel people and are known to physically abuse their spouses. Christians are a a danger to children and a very large portion of them are pedophiles, abusing their own children and others' children both sexually and physically. Christians are disease-ridden and spread diseases throughout the population. Christians are increasing in number and recruiting others to their peverted lifestyle when we should be converting them away from their vile beliefs and eliminating them.
Were I in the mood to joke, I'd suggest that Christians face such a group — the ACLU. Were I feeling philosophical, I'd suggest that, even in the extremity, Trey has removed the heart of what it means to be a vibrant and variegated society by conflating the elimination of beliefs and the elimination of people.
But the truth is that I'm exhausted by the impossibility of resolving even what ought to be a simple matter of observation. I'm exhausted by the amorphous meaning attributed to "discrimination" — by the idea that it could make me a Nazi not to believe in "employment protection" for homosexuals when, in all but very narrow circumstances, I don't believe in "employment protection" for anybody.
Look, the reason I didn't go through this the other day is that I have a strong suspicion that doing so publicly will negatively affect my job search, considering my region and the sort of work I'm looking for. Owing to distortions very much like those comparing the FRC to Nazis, it's all too easy for "right-thinking" people to quickly section off those who disagree. Maybe in some nuanced way I'm not a patent bigot, the hirer might concede, but perhaps the suspicion is enough to save the hour of an interview.
So, as I sit here, before wrapping up a day spent auctioning CDs to pay bills and sending letters and email to anybody who might be able to help me find work that will, in some tangential way, further my career rather than put it on hold, wondering whether I wasn't better off without a public platform, back when I could divulge my opinions only to those whom I trusted with the information, I empathize with Trey's concerns:
... the words used by the FRC demonize me, my partner and my daughter and by doing so increases the dangers we have to face as individuals and as a family.Until Mr. Katz and others recognize the hateful speech and rhetoric of demonization the FRC uses and calls for an end to it and acknowledges the danger it can and does pose for me and my family, then civil discourse becomes difficult if not impossible.
If they do not recognize the danger the FRC's rhetoric poses to me, then they become just another person who stands aside and says 'I didn't do it'.
I empathize more than he knows.
Columnist Eugene Kane recently criticized Bill Cosby for the star's remarks about personal responsibility in the black community:
In recent years, Cosby seems to have eschewed his role as "America's Favorite Dad" in favor of "Black America's Favorite Curmudgeon."There are more than a few reports of Cosby acting cranky at public affairs, as he criticized black rappers, black actors, black people in general for failure to live up to his standards. ...
Still, there's always a sense of uneasiness whenever somebody like Cosby uses the same language some whites use to justify their racism. ...
Sometimes, beating up on defenseless people is just being a bully.
Well, Mr. Cosby gave Mr. Kane a call, and the resulting column raised my admiration for both men and offers some reason to hope that racial divisions and the problems that they help to perpetuate are on the slow path toward resolution:
So when the phone rang and it was none other than Cosby on the other end of the line, frankly, I was pretty intimidated.That didn't last long.
"Mr. Kane? First, what I want to say is this is not an argument, this is a discussion." ...
At 66 years old, Cosby said he had become frustrated at the dysfunction of some blacks, and the downward path many black communities have traveled. ...
A man who has donated millions of dollars to charity - much of that in the name of educating black children - shouldn't have to defend himself to someone like me.
Perhaps, however, Mr. Cosby's having done so will be a small furtherance of one role that he has played throughout his career — as a bridge between cultures. Hopefully folks like Mr. Kane — of all races — will see that the bridge goes both ways, and the views that Cosby is espousing aren't necessarily cover for racism when voiced by whites.
For our part, we can always benefit from reminders that others come to discussions with their own presumptions, and they aren't necessarily unjustified.
I'm beginning to think that the objective, indicated in its name, of the American Civil Liberties Union is to unify all judgments of civil liberties under the control of a limited few. The organization is truly beginning to let slip the fanaticism according to which it operates:
The American Civil Liberties Union wants to take religion out of the Los Angeles County seal. ...At issue is the seal designed by the late Supervisor Kenneth Hahn that contains a tiny cross symbolic of the Catholic missions that are so much a part of the county's history.
In a letter to the supervisors, ACLU Executive Director Ramona Ripston says the cross is unconstitutional and has given them two weeks to act.
The ideologues who have taken control of the ACLU (assuming they haven't always had it) will not be satisfied until they have erased Christianity from American history. Eugene Volokh has more on the seal in question, including a picture. Personally, I think a county ought to be able to display religious symbols as religious symbols, but that's a fair debate, and one that can take its time resolving. But when a powerful, well-funded organization persists in picking through the documents, symbols, and monuments in every crack of the American governmental system, it's time for reasonable citizens to disavow the group.
The frightening part is that the L.A. county controversy is a parlay, for the ACLU, of success at changing public self-definition through raw intimidation:
The genesis of the spat began with a controversy about the city seal of Redlands, which contained a cross. Last February, two Redlands residents complained to the ACLU that the cross was a religious symbol. ACLU lawyer Ben Wizner wrote to the city that the U.S. Supreme Court had declared such symbols on government logos and seals unconstitutional.Redlands capitulated when faced with a lawsuit and ordered the cross removed from every city logo.
Here's more on that controversy, including a picture. The objection of two residents was sufficient to modify the shared symbol of the town. Civil liberties for two means that all process, all votes, all consensus is moot. Twist some matter around to phrase one's desire in terms of rights, and no democratic principle can stand in the way.
The only pertinent question is how we begin to wake up our neighbors to the creeping legistopoly.
Wesley Smith's piece, "The Wrong Tree," makes so important an argument that I've refused to let it fall off my To Blog list since May 13:
Fortunately, embryonic stem cells are not the only potential source for regenerative medical treatments. There are also adult stem cells, umbilical-cord-blood stem cells, and other cellular-based treatments that do not use embryos at all. Here we see a completely different picture emerging. Under-reported by the ESCR-besotted mainstream media, many of the diseases that embryonic cells are supposed to treat may be ameliorated with adult-stem-cell and related therapies far more quickly. ...The thrust of the research now seems indisputable: While certainly not yet a sure thing, and noting that much work remains to be done in animal and controlled human studies, barring unforeseen problems adult-stem-cell and related therapies may be potent sources of new and efficacious medical treatments in the years to come. Just as significantly, these therapies are likely to be available far sooner than embryonic-stem-cell treatments, since adult and related therapies do not appear to cause tumors, would not be rejected, and do not have to be maintained indefinitely in vitro, because they would come from patients' own bodies.
It's certainly possible that I've missed some of the coverage, but it seems as if there's a peculiar devotion to the more morally objectionable form of stem-cell research. If that impression is correct, it could be that this debate brings with it all the baggage of the Culture War. Or perhaps there's an element of insistence among a certain crowd that they can't be told what they are allowed to do. Or perhaps there's something more sinister at play.
I knew Dale Munschy, a piano-playing employee of the music department, when I was at the University of Rhode Island. I found him very friendly and always quick to encourage student musicians. However, his politics look to be a whole 'nother matter:
While addressing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel, of Nebraska, argued for the restoration of compulsory military service, stating that such a move would compel "our citizens to understand the intensity and depth of challenges we face."Senator Hagel asked, "Why shouldn't we ask all of our citizens to bear some responsibility and pay some price?"
I would ask George W. Bush -- who couldn't think of having made a single mistake -- the same question.
Although I can guess some of the ideals that he likely holds and policies that he likely prefers, I don't know enough about the rest of Dale's politics to say whether this applies to him. But it's been one of the strange twists of this thirty-year echo of the Vietnam anti-war movement that the same class of people — probably some of the very same folks — who fought so hard to end the draft are now beginning to call for its reinstatement.
Do you think it's been discussed, in some Lefty meeting somewhere, that succeeding in ending the draft is turning out to have been a long-term tactical failure? It just doesn't have quite the emotional force to stoke fears about the possibility of the possibility of the possibility of being sent off to war.
Susanna of Cut on the Bias has given some thought to trends in the movement to normalize homosexuality:
I've watched over the last two decades as homosexuality has been aggressively pushed into the public scene as not just an acceptable alternative lifestyle, but actually one that is not alternative at all - just another way of being, as legitimate and unremarkable as heterosexuality in all its benign and not so benign manifestations. The tragedy of the spread of HIV and AIDS was seized upon and used relentlessly as a tool to force acceptance of homosexuality in the name of compassion. For those interested in such things, and we all should be as it affects our daily lives, it's been a textbook case of social engineering.And now the final phase of normalization is moving toward completion - legal sanction of gay marriage. Once that's been accomplished, there really are no more official steps needed. There will continue to be major pockets of objection, but those will be marginalized by the mainstream media and the social liberals in power in government and education.
Susanna isn't optimistic about the way in which the movement's momentum will manifest once the most prominent of the laws that homosexuals consider oppressive are erased. In particular, she believes that those who continue to refuse, as a private matter of freedom, to normalize homosexuality will begin to draw the spare fire. "The sanctity of the individual's right to make choices about where to work and what to do is [in the present culture] greater than the sanctity of someone else's religious beliefs."
While I'm not as pessimistic as Susanna about the chances of halting the charge for SSM, or at least redirecting its subsequent thrust, previews of the next phase are on the rise:
Before they could get one of their trademark 10-foot wooden crosses fastened together, two men were arrested by Dayton police officers on charges of disorderly conduct at yesterday's Gay Day gathering. ...Both also expressed concern because they say they were arrested on private property, across the highway from the gathering at the park, and without being read their Miranda rights.
To be fair, I don't know the specifics or the background of this particular instance, but circumstances that would justify the arrest are far from obvious. Moreover, it's a story on a growing list.
Despite it all, though, it bears asserting: sometimes it's easier to be Christian where being Christian isn't easy. Susanna notes in an update that we should remember prayer. I would add to that we should also remember promises.
Can we talk candidly, here?
I remember the day that Mr. Keith foiled the plans of every boy in his eighth-grade sex ed class by informing the girls that "blue balls" isn't all that painful and goes away quickly. With that inside information arriving on top of the graphic pictures of genitalia infected with various painful-looking diseases, we young males came to believe it was Mr. Keith's objective to scare us away from sex — or, more specifically, to scare the girls away from us. (And that was before he showed us home video of his child's birth...)
Apparently, the "experts" in Britain have found that Mr. Keith had it all wrong:
Encouraging schoolchildren to experiment with oral sex could prove the most effective way of curbing teenage pregnancy rates, a government study has found.Pupils under 16 who were taught to consider other forms of 'intimacy' such as oral sex were significantly less likely to engage in full intercourse, it was revealed.
Not to beat around the... umm... not to put too fine a point on it: until I've had a chance to peruse the currently unpublished study, I simply don't believe its conclusions. For one thing, the language involved is all-important. Is oral sex included in statistics about children who are "sexually active"? If not, it could be that rates of children engaging in non-intercourse sexual behavior have skyrocketed. That could increase the spread of disease and lead to a subsequent explosion in full sex and pregnancy, as teenagers continue to experiment and, not accustomed to condoms in their "usual" activities, don't bother with them.
Indeed, according to This Is Exeter, every high school in Exeter is participating in the program, yet the city's pregnancy rate for girls between fifteen and seventeen was 44.4 per 1,000 women in the latest study, above the national average of 43.8. Although, how this relates to the "A Pause" program is difficult to say:
Dr John Tripp of the Department of Child Health at Exeter University said: "We can't show reductions in pregnancy rates because it is not easy to collect that data."But we can show precursors which you would expect to be linked to reductions in teenage pregnancy rates.
"For example, we can show that young people who have taken the A Pause programme rate sex as less important in relationships, are likely to have better information about sexual issues and are less likely to have experienced intercourse by the time they are 16."
On the basis of these generic tidbits, subjectively offered by teenagers, the Guardian piece that is linked above reports:
Now the government will recommend the scheme, called A Pause, to schools throughout England and Wales following the success of the trial in 104 schools where sexual intercourse among 16-year-olds fell by up to 20 per cent, according to Dr John Tripp of the Department of Child Health at the University of Exeter, who helped to design the course.
The article isn't clear about the method of discerning that drop. The program provides an evaluation survey in the final year, but This Is Exeter also mentions data from anonymous national surveys of 16-year-olds. It's difficult to say, then, how direct the findings are. It isn't difficult to say, however, that said findings are blurry, even at the level of hard numbers. Pace the Guardian, what looks to be the same category of data from This Is Exeter is a bit different:
The 'A Pause' course - which has been piloted at 130 schools around the country including all the Exeter high schools - has been criticised for encouraging promiscuity among the under 16s. ...Results showed the number of sexually-active teenagers from schools where the A Pause course had been taught had fallen by up to 12 per cent.
More schools, less improvement. What explains the difference? Don't know. I do know, however, that these stories ought to serve as a wakeup call to parents everywhere, whose duty it is — I must concur with Michael Williams — to teach their children how to behave responsibly and "what true intimacy means, not how to get each other off to slake their momentary lusts."
But parents are part of, and giving kids options other than intercourse doesn't address, the problem. As I pointed out in January, 45% of single pregnant teenage girls in Britain wanted to become pregnant or didn't care, thanks largely to benefits for teen mothers. In that post, we met seventeen-year-old mother Katie and her friend from Swindon:
"We are not like your generation," her friend says. "We get taught how to do it. When I was 14 we were shown a video in school that told us all about sexual positions. And it said that we should consider oral sex if we were a bit unsure about going all the way."
How far into this thicket are the "experts" going to march their country in an effort to avoid the obvious?
PROEM:
Thanks to Prof. Reynolds for linking to me in a post that was already must-reading. For anybody new to this blog: for an easier-to-read page layout, click "Turn Light On" at the top of the left-hand column.
Wednesday is off to a slow start, mostly because of time spent attempting to process a post from Sheila Lennon on her Providence Journal blog. It's about Nick Berg's murder — or partially about it:
Nick Berg, according to first reports, died for the sins of the Abu Ghraib.To those who are sorry only that the photos came out, I can only say there were no photos from German concentration camps, but truth came out anyway. Germany has never recovered from what was done in its name in secret there.
There's not a lot of high ground left for anybody to claim right now. If Donald Rumsfeld was having a bad week already, Michael Berg is going to make it a lot worse.
White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said the tape shows the "true nature of the enemies of freedom." He said those responsible have "no regard for the lives of innocent men, women and children." It sounds hollow and simplistic in the light of Abu Ghraib.
I fear that we are on the brink of an ideological civil war in this country far worse than the one tore families apart -- over Vietnam -- in the '60s.
Al Qaeda isn't mentioned. Berg "was beheaded in Iraq"; he died for America's sins, as if to balance some cosmic scales. What that indicates about the murdered and desecrated contractors in Fallujah, I don't know; the latest video is treated in isolation from everything except Abu Ghraib and the Patriot Act. The only appearance of the word "terrorist" comes when Ms. Lennon quotes Nick's father, Michael, from a radio interview after he had heard about his son's death:
It goes further than Donald Rumsfeld. It's the whole Patriot Act. It's the whole feeling of this country that rights don't matter any more because there are terrorists about.Well, in my opinion "terrorist" is just another word like "communist" or "witch" -- it's a witch hunt. This whole administration is just representing something that is not America. Not the America I grew up in.
That's simply... stunning. Look, we all should rightly have a high threshold to criticism of the Bergs, at this time, and to an extent, that means letting anti-war (and anti-Bush) forces leverage Mr. Berg's words for their own cause. To be sure, Michael Berg was among them even before his son was detained on March 24. Lennon notes a Free Republic posting that reprints a March 20 list of people endorsing A.N.S.W.E.R.'s call to "End colonial occupation from Iraq to Palestine and everywhere!" Michael Berg, in conjunction with his son's business, is on it.
Ms. Lennon pivots on Free Republic, quoting a post from the site that dismisses Abu Ghraib in context of Berg's murder, to move toward the "ideological civil war" point quoted above. Apparently, she was unable to bring herself to provide her readers with a link to the post, itself, but searching it out, one might notice that the second comment to it was an objection. In contrast, I can't think of a single instance in which Ms. Lennon has criticized the zealots on the left. Ted Rall, for one example, has escaped censure. So has Air America hostess Randi Rhodes, who suggested that President Bush ought to be shot (while reciting the Hail Mary). Civil war, indeed!
One wonders what, precisely, Lennon fears about a civil war, considering that she blithely compares the misconduct of some soldiers at Abu Ghraib with centrally orchestrated mass murder in Nazi concentration camps. If Iraq is "tearing America apart," Ms. Lennon, you and other members of the mainstream media, with your constant blaming of America and nostalgia for Vietnam, are certainly tugging hard on one side of the rift.
You may have come across it, already, but Linda Chavez's column about the co-ed military in the context of Abu Ghraib prison is definitely worth reading:
Military service has become heavily sexualized, with opportunities for male and female soldiers, sailors and Marines to engage in sexual fraternization, which, though frowned upon -- and in certain circumstances, forbidden -- is almost impossible to prevent.So what does this have to do with those pictures of mistreated prisoners? Take a look at the faces of those soldiers again, especially the female soldiers. They look less like sadists than delinquents. They look like they're showing off at some wild party trying to impress everybody with how "cool" they are. What they are doing is despicable, but they seem totally oblivious.
Very well put: "They look less like sadists than delinquents." That sentence gets to the essence of the mixture of emotions that the pictures evoke; in some ways, this particular dark side is peculiarly American. It isn't just what the soldiers are doing, but that they're enjoying it — not like a torturer relishing his work, not even like Alex and his droogs out for a little twenty-to-one, but like partiers out on an pseudo-innocent tear, as if the prisoners were statues at an S&M tourist stop.
This seems to be a rare topic on which both the institutional military and the Left are in line, neither wishing to accept the questions as legitimate. Nonetheless, as Rich Lowry observes, it's getting difficult to ignore:
Consider Pfc. Lynndie England, who is famous for holding the leash over the naked Iraqi detainee. Well, it turns out she wasn't supposed to be mixing with detainees at all, but ended up doing so in visits she paid to her boyfriend. This is how the New York Post reported it today: "There, the young reservist was not supposed to oversee detainees, her family claims. Her role was to process and fingerprint Iraqis."She would regularly visit her fellow reservists assigned elsewhere in the prison, including her boyfriend, Spc. Charles Graner, 35, one of six reservists from the Maryland-based unit now facing court-martial.
Army officials confirmed yesterday that she is pregnant. The baby is known to be Graner's child.
ADDENDUM:
Pregnant? Wasn't she smoking in one of those pictures?
Look, I agree that the military, especially, is such that the responsibility for errors and problems climbs pretty easily up the chain of command. But I think Seymour Hersh let slip, on O'Reilly, a major cultural differentiator that speaks volumes about the worldview of a segment of Western society:
I believe the services have a -- look, the kids did bad things. But the notion that it's all just these kids [doing these things]... The officers are "in loco parentis" with these children. We send our children to war. And we have officers like that general, whose job is to be mother and father to these kids, to keep them out of trouble.
The "kids" and "children" talk I'm sure wouldn't be appreciated among the men and women serving our country, and it's a standard talking point of the Left to hammer the terms. The more dangerous implication is that the military — war — is like some campus excursion.
If Americans want to infantilize their sons and daughters as they enroll in ever-elongated academic pursuits, that's fine. I think we've gone too far in erasing real childhood and extending adolescence well into midlife, but I can understand the impulse. However, the error is exponentially more grievous when that ethos is transferred to our warriors.
Nick Schulz, editor in chief of Tech Central Station, has continued his pattern of requesting that some of the better posts in the blogosphere be submitted to him as articles. Such is the case with Paul Cella's piece therein, slightly modified (I think) from a must-read blog post suggesting that complete freedom to drag our culture toward the stained sheets of prurient insanity is actually a perversion of our Constitution.
I'm delayed in noting the second installment of a scientific, photographic inquiry by Bill of INDC Journal. Worth a look, especially if you could use a laugh. (Macroglossius lunarius afrikanusbadcreditus... ha!)
A bit less funny is his photo-rich account of the "pro-choice" rally that ended in a bloody foot for one pro-life crasher. This exchange, in which Bill engaged with a would-be censor as he chased after the forcible removal of the pro-lifers trying to get pictures, is creepy on many levels:
Me: (with quite a bit of aggression) Get your f***ing hands off of me right now, and yes, I can take pictures!Her: Are you with THEM?!
Me (Pushing past her and continuing to snap away): NO, I'M NOT WITH THEM!
Her (Continuing to follow me): You can't take pictures of me, I've gotten death threats, been on death lists!
Me: I don't want to take pictures of you, and you're going to be on another one in a second if you don't get the Hell away from me ...
Had I the presence of mind, I think I'd have suggested to the woman that a large portion of my generation has been on death lists. And many will never know how close they came to being included.
Back in September, I mentioned the U.K. youth trend of "sex texters" — kids sending text messages to arrange rendezvous. One might think that mobile phone companies would prefer to disassociate themselves from stories with titles like "Huge rise in sex diseases." To the contrary, Marty McKeever notes that at least one such company seems to have decided that the profits will be greater taking the opposite tack:
In scenes reminiscent of Meg Ryan faking an orgasm in When Harry Met Sally, Christina [Aguilera] arches her back and screams. She was paid a reported $1million for four hours' work. The singer simulates sex in the ad for Virgin Mobile which is so risque it won't be shown in America.
Marty puts the increasing... ahem... textual behavior in context of larger trends in England, such as gang activity, particularly involving sexual assault. Perhaps I'm overtired, but I can't help but think that limitless text messaging is a great way to pass along limericks:
In Britain, the phone comp'ny, Virgin
Will shrug off the crimes it is urgin'
To just make a buck
It'll teach kids to huck
And turn clueless par'nts into sturgeon
Paul Cella has written a must-read post about depravity and the First Amendment. It's too good to pull out quotes, but here's a little flavor and a point worth independent consideration:
In short, the class of people that still, even at this late date in the progress of egalitarian leveling, retains a considerable bulk of the political power in this country — that is, traditional families with children — got a good look at what awaits their children from the entertainment industry, and reacted as sober citizens of a republic do to brazen depravity. The revelation could not be undone by all the silver-tongued rhetoric about the First Amendment in the world. Clear-headed parents will not be argued into enslaving their children to vice. A predator is not beheld with equanimity by the prey. ...The faction that captures through some beguiling sophistry the legislation of the country, and removes a large and crucial issue from consideration by placing it above the public debate, has subverted the Constitution; and made of itself the nation's illegitimate Legislator. It is not that free speech should be obliterated, but rather that its lineaments should be subject, like every other issue between men of good faith, to the deliberation and scrutiny of the Republic — as, indeed, it has usually been — with the attendant imperfections and errancy of any activity of men here below.
(via Craig Henry)
Jeff Miller offers yet another example that Canada continues to slip into surreality:
Homeschooling parents in a Canadian province have been ordered to stop using religious-based materials or other "unofficial" resources when they teach their children at home. ...The British Columbia Education Ministry insists the order is merely a "clarification" of the rules it laid out in September 2002, which said distance-education students had to follow the same rules as regular students. ...
With regard to faith-based resources, it stated: "Districts must ensure that students are not using religious materials or resources as part of the educational program and that parents are not being reimbursed for using religious materials or resources with students."
Doesn't this seem like exactly the sort of outcome that would be dismissed, if predicted beforehand, into the "don't be ridiculous you paranoid religious nut" category? What has apparently happened is that the Langley school district created a program to enable it to continue collecting per-student funding of $5,408 by offering homeschooling parents about $600 (or about 11% of the money attached to their children) and a provincial certificate upon graduation.
Only in an environment of bureaucratic greed and secular fundamentalism is such a statement as this possible:
"If a district receives full funding for a student, the student is not being home-schooled," the [British Columbia Education Ministry ] stated.
Fair enough. How about sending the full $5,408 directly to the home-schools?
Joseph D'Hippolito quotes, in the Jerusalem Post, Civilita Cattolica vice-director and political commentator, Fr. Michele Simone:
For Simone, invading Iraq "lent support to the impression that the West... intends a new colonization of Islamic countries, aimed at taking control of their oil, on the pretext of wanting to bring 'democracy'... without realizing that, at least for Islamic fundamentalism, 'democracy' takes the sovereignty away from Allah and transfers it to the 'people,' which for a Muslim believer is an act of 'impiety.' "
Joseph's article focuses on an "intellectual schizophrenia" within the Catholic Church, but the same struggle plays out across Western society. The difficulties that the West is having concocting an approach to the Islamic world may be, in large part, the result of people's tendencies to see among others what they see among themselves and to believe that others are behaving as they, themselves, would behave.
To the extent that those in the Middle East believe the West is bent on dictatorial rule, it is because that is the regime under which they have lived. Similarly, those who have been such rulers, believe that we seek to take over their dominion for our own benefit, just as they would like to conquer the West for their own. If democracy "takes the sovereignty away from Allah," it does so by taking power from Allah's self-appointed spokesmen.
On our end, folks who encourage a soft approach for handling the Middle East believe that blather about universal equivalence and respect for differences, by which the Western elite has conquered its own masses, will wend its way into the struggle with Islamic society. At best, this strategy would require centuries of sitting through low-grade casualties; with the advent of technologies to murder thousands and millions of people at a time, the "at worst" is much more likely.
Luckily, the wall of blather had already been proving ill suited to the United States, which was beginning to push back against the pressure of creeping socialism even before 9/11. Belief in absolute truths, if maintained, is proof against artificial enclosure. Unfortunately, the elite view has overtaken many of those who are meant to be the caretakers of our Truth. In a broad view, it is the stark choice between possible responses that radical Islam presents to the West — precisely along lines of internecine discord — that makes our decision of such critical importance.
Religious leaders should be resolute in a belief that God's sovereignty exists through "the people" — and impressions be damned. Unfortunately, the West has already been using a pretext of democracy — involving its form but not its substance — to chip away at this sovereignty in the name of material wealth and physical comforts (symbolized, if you like, in oil).
As for the struggle across cultures, sometimes the only way that understanding can bridge a barrier of mutual incomprehension is for one side to act. Think of a dog with a thorn in its paw; only after the stranger holds it down and removes the thorn will it realize the good intentions. That outcome is much preferable, all around, to the opposite intention of shared pain.
In addition to posting a touching statement by John McCain, Marc Comtois writes:
[Pat Tillman's] death is no more tragic than the hundreds of others, but his is an example of someone who had it all, but gave it up to serve his country. He is only one example of those who fight for us.
The reminder is well taken and important to make. However, a compatible point that I haven't seen made is that it's probable that Tillman played, for the average enlistee, the same role that stars play for the average American, when a real or perceived connection exists. Although their decision to serve their country requires no additional objective or social validation, that somebody leaves a privileged life behind in order to stand at their side surely helps to validate that decision on a personal level.
It may be his name and his face that will be seen everywhere for the next few weeks, but it is no less all of the rest of our bearers of freedom whom we honor.
Michael Williams put something so well that it demands quotation. The boldface is his:
Many of the problems with our government arise from well-meaning people who reject the quaint notion of morality. They just can't encourage people to behave morally, so they chip, chip, chip away at the tiny freedoms that make immorality dangerous. They want to prove that the benefits of goodness can be separated from actual goodness. But they're wrong, and the result of their belief is the ridiculous, contradictory mess we've got now.
It's a bit like treating the symptoms; the disease will eventually manifest in a more dangerous form that is untreatable. Having not thought it through, I have to put this vaguely, but it may be that Michael's diagnosis points to the central difference between libertarians and small-government conservatives.
Libertarians, generally speaking, don't think it's the government's place to regulate people's behavior because they don't think it's anybody's place to do so. Conservatives understand, even if not explicitly, that handing responsibilities to government removes them from people; the government is almost invariably a poor administrator, and citizens are only too inclined toward a poverty of responsibility.
However, we're pretty far gone down the wrong path through this minefield, and I believe that the law is required, in some limited cases (drawn with maximal specificity), as a crutch to help our moral legs to heal. Most directly, a difficult balance must be struck between adhering to principle and struggling to block enemies who aren't so restrained. More subtle a reason can be found in another post on Michael's blog.
The Christian Pepperdine University turned down two proposals from student Grant Turck to create pro-gay campus groups. Michael writes:
Pepperdine doesn't hate Mr. Turck, but they don't want him to form an organization based around excusing/promoting/glorifying behavior they see to be morally wrong. The administrators would likewise certainly reject clubs whose purposes were to promote the acceptance of extramarital heterosexual sex, theft, lying, gossip, or any number of other behaviors that are contrary to standard Christian theology. Not because Christians hate or fear people who do these things, but because they don't want to contribute to their acceptance.
In a way of looking at it, what Turck is doing is demanding that Pepperdine behave as a government, in the ideal, would behave. Indeed, Aaron, to whom Michael links, raises the increasingly malignant factor of public funds. In a society setting aside special punishments for "hate crimes" and posting a list of groups protected from discrimination even in private capacities, one side, withdrawing its hand from legislation on pure political principle, will eventually find that hand cuffed, if ethical principle is to be maintained.
This brings us back around to the quest to procure the fruits of goodness without the quality's actual existence. Turck wants access to the school's resources without having to change that environment such that resources would be offered. Others want employment with companies or apartments from landlords without the company's or landlord's actual approval.
Something quite the opposite of good would seem the likely result of this practice, which transforms freedom into little more than a right to hurt or superficially help one's self.
Because the gulf between American Christians and even moderate Middle Eastern Muslims is sufficiently wide to prove fallacious the direct comparison that some insist on making nonetheless, this is the sort of thing that one does well to back into. In exploring the incompatibility of Western and Muslim culture, Rev. Donald Sensing offers an opening:
There are many points of contention and conflict between Arab Islam and the West, but the chief religious contention is not really between Islamic Arabs and Christian or Jewish Westerners, but between Islamic Arabs and scientific-materialist Westerners.Because of the supremacy of the sciences in western thought, western culture has become caught in a cycle of ever-increasing changes. Western societies contend with an exponentially increasing pace of cultural changes. However, the pace and kinds of changes that we adapt to (with greater or lesser difficulty, to be sure) are exactly the changes that fundamentalist Arab Muslims correctly believe would destroy basic structures of their society which they believe are the divinely-commanded.
Sensing veers toward the faults of Muslim culture, citing the Allah-ordained treatment of women. But it seems plausible to me that the extremes of decadence in our modern culture exacerbate the differences to such a degree as to hinder progression toward equality and democracy in the Middle East. With Western pop culture achieving levels of effrontery that go far beyond what even mildly traditional religious Americans will accept, it is all too easy for Muslims who might otherwise constitute a basis for democratic reforms to turn away out of a sense of fatalism.
I'll admit that, in all the recent argumentation about pornography, I came close to suggesting that, to some degree, cracking down on smut would assist the War on Terror. This suggestion might draw the response that placing any sorts of limits on obscene "speech" in the context of that war would be giving in to the terrorists. But that's surely the opposite of the truth. The terrorists and the tyrants want nothing more than for the United States and Europe to remain frightening lands of debauchery from which even the most quiescent Muslim would recoil.
I daresay that our own ancestors mightn't have taken some of the eminently just steps toward equality and freedom had there been as dramatic an example of where that path could lead as we now represent.
In the same Impromptus, Jay Nordlinger notes an email from Holland that deserves its own post. I'm quoting pretty extensively, but I don't see any way to capture the enormity of the thing without doing so:
Indeed here in Holland there is a discussion at the moment about bestiality, and I think I know your view on this matter. Because of my work, I know an elderly man living alone in an apartment (the institution of marriage has been practically dead since the Sixties, so we are confronted with many aging singles). I know you know it's coming, so, yes, here it is: This man has a dog. ...Now, Diana always sleeps on his blankets, but I am quite sure she sometimes sleeps under his blankets. So what have we here? A pervert, a criminal?!
Here in Holland there are many intensive pig-breeders (I hope this is the right word!). They keep thousands of pigs in appalling conditions, and after a short unlife these pigs are slaughtered. I am sure God the Father never wanted His Creation to be perverted like this.
I wrote you this (I always read your column, I sometimes agree) because you think too often in black and white. Of course this does not mean that I condone bestiality; in fact, it makes me rather ill. But after the dog for the blind and the dog for the handicapped, I think the time has come for the dog for the lonely.
Every single issue as it arises in its progressive turn will be possible to cast in casuistry that appeals to common principles. It simply isn't possible to throw one's analogistic net out far enough to capture an example for which this isn't true. Homosexuals may be offended when others suggest that the legal, federal toppling of behavioral standards laws for their benefit will lead to such things as bestiality, but they'd better be prepared to explain why the inevitable arguments put forward by Mr. Nordlinger's correspondent won't stand. We put animals to work — and worse — so why ought the impossibility of consent prevent other activities?
I wish it weren't so, but I think we're just about out of room to wiggle around the basic question of whether it is even legitimate to claim that accepting spiritually corrosive behavior as beyond reproach (even if not beyond nausea) will harm our society in palpable ways. People seem to believe that, when others approach with requests that seem implausible at present, their arguments will be laughably simple to dismiss by any standard. Not so.
Who wants to tell a lonely old man that he's a disgusting pervert? Far from that, Western society's problem, in this vein, is that it's beginning to legislate to prevent anybody from even giving the emblematic old men the idea that there could possibly be anything wrong with lifting those blankets.
There's certainly a disparity of expertise between myself and David Bernstein, so it's probable that my objection to the following paragraph from a post on the Volokh Conspiracy is more directed at the events to which he makes reference in Canadian law than at him. After mentioning a column by John Leo that notes the pending ban on statements conflicting with the homosexual agenda, Bernstein writes:
Fifteen years ago, when I was in law school, supporters of hate speech rules argued that there were no slippery slopes, that Holocaust deniers' and pornographers speech could be restricted without damaging the First Amendment. In Canada, they started making exceptions to their constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech just fifteen years ago. Those cases involved Holocaust deniers and pornographers, and now it's illegal to quote biblical condemnations of homosexual acts. No slippery slopes, indeed.
"Hate speech" and pornography are different in their fundamental natures. The slippery slope from restricting Holocaust denial to restricting religious objections to homosexuality is clear, requiring only the expansion of what is considered to be a hateful opinion. Pornography is generally understood to involve images, and laws can be constructed to specify it as such.
It's true that the difficulty in differentiating pornography from artwork can mirror similar difficulties arising from the use of language (such as incitement to violence against versus legitimate criticism of), but that doesn't justify, much less necessitate, legal leaps from one to the other. So, I'd need more concrete explanation of the slope in Canada to believe that the inclusion of pornography with "hate speech" isn't superfluous. For one thing, our experience in the United States places the two potential restrictions in opposition, as part of the conflict between religious traditionalists and behavioral libertines.
Bernstein may very well be among those more intelligent and principled First Amendment absolutists who are consistent in their application of arguments. If so, that makes him exceptional. Many of those who assert a right to do and say whatever they want extend that right to include a freedom from unsolicited criticism. Although I would respond to warnings not to break some sort of "no law" barrier regarding freedom of expression by declaring it delusional to believe that barrier not already breached, I do hold the government to be a potentially dangerous mechanism through which to enforce such public standards. That doesn't mean that our current circumstances can't be such that recourse to government is justified.
When the public finds itself no longer able to assert its principles and create reasonable restraints on behavior through religious expression, those who hold individual liberties above all else — up to (and perhaps including) the end of the world — shouldn't be surprised when that public begins believing it worthwhile to express those principles and assert those restraints through the only means that remain: laws and law enforcement. Libertarians can't simultaneously seek to drain religious, and other ethics-based, institutions of their public power and insist that government isn't the best public institution through which to manage ethical standards.
When a Church that attempts to reinforce its teachings — through its own practices and speech and for a politician who ostensibly cares — is treated as if it is overstepping boundaries of church and state, don't be surprised when followers of that Church begin voting to translate their beliefs into legal statutes. When freedom of speech and religion begins to be treated as freedom from censure and from others' declarations of morality, and when government begins to be leveraged to enforce the expanded freedom, don't be surprised that the moral majority will begin to push back.
Apparently, there's actually a national precedent for white supremacist groups' "advertising" by littering leaflets. So perhaps my skepticism about such an incident at URI turned out to be potentially unfounded, this time:
The National Alliance Web site encourages visitors to print copies of racist, anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic fliers, similar to those found on the Kingston campus, Drapeau said. Fliers from a German-based neo-Nazi organization, the NSADAP, were also found scattered on the Kingston campus, Drapeau said. ...Residents in several towns north of Boston awoke last month to find National Alliance fliers opposing gay marriage and Israel scattered throughout their neighborhoods. Several other Massachusetts towns received white-power and "love your race" fliers last year, according to the Web site of a local newspaper, the Georgetown Record.
Similar National Alliance fliers have appeared within the past two years in Kennebunk, Maine, near St. Petersburg, Fla., and in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, according to Web sites.
I'm still a bit discomfited by the reaction to the fliers. The unhealthy fear is highlighted by the pathetic strategy of the group and the marginal status that it indicates. As New England ADL director Robert Leikind notes:
"The power is the shock value, confirming that there are people out there with this kind of hatred, working to spread these views," he said. "But it's important to keep it in perspective. Proponents of these views are very marginal in our community."
It's the inherent granting of power to foolishness that makes the ultrasensitive campus temper so potentially harmful.
Keeping with foolish tempers and potentially harmful power, the Newport Daily News follows up on a story that I thought I'd blogged, but that I can't find, now. For background, Castaways recently made news when it opened as the first gay bar in Newport, and this occurred shortly thereafter:
Lionel Pires, 48, and Alan Dillabough, 39, were in their second-floor apartment above Castaways, located at 28 Prospect Hill St., when they were wakened March 13 about 2:35 a.m. Dillabough called 911 while Pires opened a window and looked outside. He saw a man, who ran up Prospect Hill Street toward Spring Street when Pires yelled to him.Police were at the nightclub within minutes. They found nine holes punched through the two 4-by-8-foot windows at the front of the building. The glass, which was reinforced with diamond wire, lay in jagged pieces on the sidewalk and scattered throughout the bar.
The case was assigned to Rosa, who interviewed neighbors and other potential witnesses. One neighbor reported hearing a man making "anti-gay remarks," Bestoso said.
Breaking windows, for any reason, is just dumb, offensive, and unsettling. What caught my interest with the vandalism story when I first saw it was that, in this region, any anti-gay animus would have been barely less of a fluke than a random window breaking. We're informed that the arrested suspect is a 23-year-old automechanic, but the only mention of motive is that he'll likely be charged with a hate crime:
"I believe the prosecutor will be asking to invoke the Hate Crimes Sentencing Act upon conviction," Lt. Norman G. Bestoso, the Police Department's public information officer, said this morning.That means that if Lungarelli is convicted of vandalizing the nightclub, and a judge finds beyond a reasonable doubt that the crime was motivated by hatred for homosexuals, Lungarelli will serve at least 30 days in the Adult Correctional Institutions in Cranston.
I oppose hate crime laws, particularly with mandatory jail time. Frankly, I can't think of a better way to push somebody down a wrong track that he may or may not have already started on and to increase his hatred — generally and for the specific group regarding which he was sentenced — than to send him to prison for the first time.
Nonetheless, to gain some perspective, I looked at the Rhode Island statute covering vandalism. There's a maximum fine of $1,000 and/or incarceration of 1 year, with the only mandatory punishment for first-time offenders being 100 hours of community service. However, there's also a provision that this particular statute applies only to vandalism not specifically covered elsewhere, and here's the statute covering breaking windows:
Breaking lamps or windows. — Every person who shall willfully break any lamp, lantern, or window shall, for every lamp, lantern, or window broken, be fined not exceeding two hundred dollars ($200).
So, breaking the window merits a relatively small fine. However, if that one neighbor is believed, or if Lungarelli confesses that he uttered aspersions, a full month in jail will follow automatically, with no hope of suspended sentencing or probation. What Lungarelli did was wrong, obviously, as well as exceedingly stupid, and $200 might actually be light (although I imagine he'd be made to pay for the damage, as well). But because of the group status of the bar's owners, he could face a 30-day nightmare.
I wonder if littering is a misdemeanor.
Well, despite my staying up way too late honing my response to Eugene Volokh's post on the future "what if" of a government crackdown on porn, it looks like I only reached the level of linkless "several other correspondents" in his follow up post. That'll learn me.
Instead, Volokh addresses a post by Clayton Cramer that more or less accepts the terms of the debate: that the central objects of the crackdown are the determined porn viewers. The broadest view Cramer takes is at the end:
Professor Volokh has fallen into the traditional libertarian trap: the assumption that a law must be 100% effective to be worthwhile. It only has to influence people at the margin to change their behavior in a positive direction, without introducing counterproductive behaviors. I am not convinced that the Justice Department's current efforts (assuming that they are accurately portrayed) are necessarily the best way to do this--but I am also not convinced that they are intrinsically doomed to failure.
Volokh acknowledges the argument that the crackdown will limit "the availability of porn through non-Internet commercial channels," answering, "But so what?" Again, he shifts the perspective back to seekers of porn:
But the respectability of the channel is not, I think, high on many porn consumers' lists of desired characteristics. And any tiny decrease in consumption may well be offset by an increase, for instance as people who are used to seeing porn videos on cable will find they need to get good Internet connections instead, and, once they get them, will realize that they can get much more online than they ever could from the cable company.
As I've already suggested, the argument of the first sentence actually stands in opposition to the complaints that obscenity prosecutions will infringe on the individual liberties of those consumers. If the exit of Fortune 500 companies and mainstream media conglomerates from the porn industry makes only a "tiny" difference in the level of those customers' consumption, then they've got no reason to object to it.
However, the second sentence does put forward a new point that relates to my argument: that removing porn from cable will drive people toward better Internet technology, through which they'll discover more and worse material. But forces unrelated to pornography are bringing that technology to American households, anyway. Those already hooked on smut will doubtless find their way to its online providers. Meanwhile, fewer people will become acclimated to the material through traditional media, and forcing it into a lawless realm will likely translate into a starker difference between people's comfort and the porn that remains available.
Is Volokh really stating that cutting something from the public square will make no difference? Probably not. However, he is claiming the inevitability of the objectionable outcome that he described yesterday. To salvage that point, he writes, today:
Still, my post wasn't just about that: Rather, I was asking what the government's likely next steps would be. One possibility is that the government prosecutes some U.S. pornographers, sees some apparent success as hotels and cable channels stop running porn, notices that people are still using lots of Internet foreign-distributed porn, and decides "OK, we've done all we really can. Sure, all our prosecutions aren't really changing people's consumption, but that's fine. We'll either keep going with the futile prosecutions, or close up shop."The other possibility, though, is that the government isn't going to be happy just with the limited effects that Cramer and the others describe. Remember that the planned prosecutions are of the producers, not of the cable companies and hotels, which after all are also distributing porn and thus potentially legally liable -- this makes me doubt that the government's ambitions are limited to blocking the hotel and cable distribution.
First of all, I'm not sure from where Volokh draws the notion that "planned prosecutions" are limited to producers. The article that everybody's been citing seems strongly to imply the opposite — or at least that distributors will be made aware that they aren't secure. Beyond that, these paragraphs may represent a fundamental difference of worldview, in that libertarians view government expansion as inescapable and, therefore, invalidating all government action. If that's the case, then there isn't much utility to engaging in debate, because the possibility of expansion is always available from their point of view. Of course, the flip side is that the possibility of expansion of abhorrent trends in society is always available to those who wish to place a governmental barrier somewhere along the spectrum.
But assuming that discussion is possible at some middle point, it seems that Volokh has overlooked an important contributor to what "the government" is going to accept for results: citizens. Surely, as the tendrils of smut pull back from venues that the average American encounters everyday, everywhere, support for broadly intrusive measures against an unseen, behind-closed-doors proliferation will diminish. When the crackdown reaches the point of which Volokh warns, in other words, the perceived need to continue will no longer exist, because the objective of the majority of Ashcroft's supporters will have been met — just about 100%.
In that respect, it seems to me that those wishing to secure individual rights to access any desired content err in placing their blockade so far beyond the door. Making the disagreement one of first principles from the very outset will only diminish their weight down the road should the effort go forward — which it is and which it will.
Honestly, pornography is not high on my list of topical priorities. Nonetheless, believing my opinion to be correct, a sufficient challenge merits an escalation. Mark Kleiman provides such a challenge when he proclaims, "Using Eugene Volokh's mind to figure out why a crackdown on porn is a bad idea seems a little bit like using a howitzer to swat a fly." It's an interesting simile. Under most circumstances — against most flies — a howitzer probably wouldn't be a very effective tool.
Knowing Professor Volokh's intelligence to be difficult to overstate, I nonetheless see some hope for the fly. Here's the ostensibly unanswerable rhetorical with which Volokh ends the post in question (which Glenn Reynolds calls must-reading for the Justice Department):
I'm asking: How can the government's policy possibly achieve its stated goals, without creating an unprecedentedly intrusive censorship machinery, one that's far, far beyond what the Justice Department is talking about right now.
Unfortunately, Volokh never explains what he's taking those "stated goals" to be. He opens with the acknowledgment that there is "porn of all varieties out there on the Internet," he talks of blocking "cyberporn," and his scare scenario — wherein married couples are lured to phony Web sites and thereafter jailed — is built around the Internet as the playing field. However, the article that caused the uproar yesterday characterized the "goals" thus:
Nothing is off limits, they warn, even soft-core cable programs such as HBO's long-running Real Sex or the adult movies widely offered in guestrooms of major hotel chains.Department officials say they will send "ripples" through an industry that has proliferated on the Internet and grown into an estimated $10 billion-a-year colossus profiting Fortune 500 corporations such as Comcast, which offers hard-core movies on a pay-per-view channel.
Unless Volokh intends to argue that Comcast would substitute foreign suppliers for its porn needs, his entire analysis would seem to be founded on a false premise. In defending the latter party in Community Standards v. the Individual, Volokh presumes that the former's goal is the inverse of the latter's desire — that the crackdown's motivation is defined by a desire to limit the individual. In his entire post, the only mention of anybody besides porn creators and their determined customers is an unexplained reference to "the viewers' neighbors" toward the end of the post.
Individualizing the harm that the Justice Department seeks to prevent certainly would change the calculation. I would agree with Volokh, in fact, that an effort to actually prevent anybody from watching porn ever would require measures that are much too intrusive for whatever net gain in morality such an overly exuberant policy might seek to bolster. It is reassuring, therefore, that Justice Department anti-porn lawyer Bruce Taylor evinces a more measured, strategic objective:
Once it becomes obvious that this really is a federal felony instead of just a form of entertainment or investment, then legitimate companies, to stay legitimate, are going to have to distance themselves from it.
If that plays out as it likely would, there would be no need for Volokh's hypothetical future in which the government becomes "outraged by the 'foreign smut loophole.'" Any loophole would not open out onto the field of basic cable; it wouldn't enable commercials for the illegal products; it wouldn't erase the boundary for magazine content. In other words, the investments driving porn's mainstreaming would dry up. Moreover, accidental viewers, viewers who watch only when they come across it, and viewers who are only willing to make minimal effort to find it will drift out of the audience for porn.
Therefore, unless Volokh predicts the utter failure of the Justice Department's efforts — which he does not do — it would seem incorrect to declare as inevitable a future in which "U.S. consumers keep using exactly the same amount of porn as before." The only way that prediction could hold is if he limits the definition of "consumer" strictly to devoted users of Internet porn. Happily, for those folks, Volokh offers an argument that their individual freedoms wouldn't be objectionably limited:
And even if overall world production of porn somehow falls by 75%, which strikes me as nearly impossible, will that seriously affect the typical porn consumer's diet? Does it matter whether you have 100,000 porn titles (and live feeds) to choose from, or just 25,000?
So, parents and people desiring to avoid corrupting material will no longer face the forces pushing them toward isolation or capitulation. And, as Eugene Volokh argues, those who wish to acquire porn will not face negatory limits on their choices. Sounds like a win-win scenario to me.
As longer-term readers may recall, back in October, the University of Rhode Island had an instance of anti-Semitic graffiti on a Jewish girl's dorm room door. Although they apparently caught some of the culprits, I've never been able to find any information about them, and as I noted at the time, the treatment and explanations of the administration raised some questions of their own.
Well, the student paper today reports another incident:
University of Rhode Island Police said that they had found literature promoting hate towards black, Hispanic and Jewish people on campus yesterday, but had not identified any potential suspects.Robert Drapeau, URI director of public safety, said that police received their first phone call about the flyers targeting the groups shortly after 11 a.m. Officers began removing the literature, which Drapeau said was only found on campus roads. Drapeau himself had found the flyers on Beard Hill and the intersection of Lower College Road and West Alumni Avenue.
It appeared as if someone had dropped the flyers on the road from their vehicle, he said. He said there were no witnesses and there were no reports of any person-to-person distribution or any pamphlets being posted anywhere.
Drapeau said that police had not determined if URI students were involved in the act. ...
Drapeau said police were looking into action that could be taken against individuals involved, but were unsure if they were protected by free speech.
The nature of the content — at least as conveyed in the article — seems more explicitly to point to white supremacists. Of course, these things have to be viewed with suspicion, these days, and it does seem a peculiar way intentionally to distribute sincere literature, but there isn't enough evidence to say, yet.
More importantly, however, it ought to be shocking that a college director of public safety is "unsure" whether fliers are protected by free speech. One shudders at a university atmosphere in which students' reaction to opinions, even propaganda, that they don't like, conveyed through littering, is to call the police rather than just throw it out. The student reporter didn't even think to call a political science prof. to ask about the puzzling matter of free speech!
It's astonishing, and perhaps dangerous, the level of fear that the students — and the entire university — must have of hostile and stupid rhetoric. Be wary, ye academics; some among your herd may be attracted to the mysterious power of the unmentionable, and others may become so meek as to succumb quickly when first they encounter it for real.
Sorry for the absence of posts during the day, today. It was a bit of a blur, between work, illness, and all the talk about pornography. There's much worthwhile discussion in the comments to the previous post, if you're interested. It seems to be the topic of the day (or "days"), too.
Greg, the Hobbesian Conservative, catalogues some of the instances of inappropriate material seeping into the culture, from comic books to commercials. and outlines some answers to the question of who is hurt. Meanwhile, Craig Henry collects some links on the topic, including this from Jessica's Well:
What say we get together an organized campaign to mail to Mr. Jarvis' home one Playboy, Penthouse, or Hustler every day? I mean, he doesn't have to open his mailbox, does he? If he does he can always not look at what is there. And if he can't be there 24 hours a day to keep his kids from getting at the stuff, well.....I guess a little more supervision is in order at the Jarvis household.
Better yet, let's start spam, flier, billboard, commercial, and PR campaigns pushing hardcore religion — not only dogmatic material, but encouragements toward foreign missions — into the homes of libertarians and libertines. We all know how well received the pushers at the airports were. For me, unfortunately, the "larger meaning," "personal revelation," and "restrained proselytizing" things can be a bit of a handicap in the escalation of effrontery.
And here's Bryan Preston explaining why the anti-anti-porn whining is misguided and suggesting that winning the War for Porn by electing John Kerry might just prove a Pyrrhic victory:
Now, as to the porn effort itself, it's probably worth noting (though the libertarians probably won't acknowledge it) that all the Bush administration is doing is returning to enforcing laws that the Clinton administration did not enforce. In their 30 year history, the relevant laws that the FBI is using here have been enforced for 20. The Clinton administration stopped enforcing them ten years ago, and porn exploded into the gigantic global enterprise it is today, with the porn spam and pop ups on the web and all that assaulting behavior. The Bush administration is restoring enforcement, nothing more. If you don't like that, libertarians, get the law changed.And vote for Bush. He's still the best chance you have at winning the war and thus maintaining your rights.
I'd add to Bryan's analysis that we don't have to lose the war against Islamism for our rights to fall away. If Kerry were to pull back the War on Terror, and if terrorists were to follow the troops back within our borders, civil liberties would be the first casualty. (And the socialists in the Democratic party are more substantively censorious, anyway.)
The more-difficult surprise comes from Michael Williams:
The government won't be able to eliminate pornography; there will always be "earthly things" to distract us from the holy thoughts and purposes God created us for. As a Christian, I must depend on God daily to give me the strength to focus my mind on the course he has laid out for me, ignoring the tempting scenery that could so easily lure me off the path.
For the fully formed adult, this might be true. (Although, even then, the problem can get to the point of such constant bombardment that one can barely take the prudent steps to avoid temptation during times of weakness.) However, our entire culture contributes to the formation of future generations, and easing the difficulty of doing so in a moral way clearly ought to be among the various factors that we balance in constructing our society.
There is a line at which the individual spirit becomes a personal matter, capable of being assisted by others only within relationships of various sorts. However, this view of the whole admits that, on the other side of that line, action through our sole institution that is entirely shared, our government, comes into play. I would prefer that religion weren't struggling to remain in the public square. Many of us would prefer that more leverage had been left with states to accommodate irreconciliably stark differences in worldview within the borders of the United States. But that's not the world that God has given to us to inhabit.
Everything Michael suggests is correct, in other words, but it's true as a foundation, not as a self-contained political and philosophical structure.
PROEM:
Thanks to Prof. Reynolds for the link; his willingness to facilitate broad debate is one reason he's at the center of it all. Let me offer just a quick note to any newcomers that the design of this page can be changed for readability by clicking "Turn Light On" at the top of the left-hand column.
Glenn Reynolds thinks a Baltimore Sun report on Justice Department efforts against pornography indicates a poor political decision for the Bush administration. According to the Sun:
Lam Nguyen's job is to sit for hours in a chilly, quiet room devoid of any color but gray and look at pornography. This job, which Nguyen does earnestly from 9 to 5, surrounded by a half-dozen other "computer forensic specialists" like him, has become the focal point of the Justice Department's operation to rid the world of porn.In this field office in Washington, 32 prosecutors, investigators and a handful of FBI agents are spending millions of dollars to bring anti-obscenity cases to courthouses across the country for the first time in 10 years. Nothing is off limits, they warn, even soft-core cable programs such as HBO's long-running Real Sex or the adult movies widely offered in guestrooms of major hotel chains.
Frankly, without a direct quote, I'm not inclined to take claims about the extent of the effort — branching into soft-core stuff on HBO — at face value, particularly when put forward by a reporter, Laura Sullivan, who would write this paragraph:
The law itself rests on the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision in Miller vs. California, which held that something is "obscene" only if an average person applying contemporary community standards finds it patently offensive. But until now, it hasn't been prosecuted at the federal level for more than 10 years.
Got that? The law's existed for more than 30 years, and "until now" federal prosecutors haven't leveraged it... except during the first two decades. But the substantive point, as Reynolds puts it, is that those computer agents would be better allocated elsewhere:
I blame John Ashcroft. No, really, this time I mean it. And if the Administration thinks that this is a good use of their "computer forensics" experts, then they must have decided that terrorists aren't a threat any more.
Six "specialists" are working on something other than terrorism, and that's a signal that the War on Terror has been abandoned? Ms. Sullivan doesn't give us more of an idea of the cost than "millions," which is a pretty broad range, but how many millions not devoted to the multibillion-dollar effort of national defense indicate unduly skewed priorities?
Be the price tag whatever it is, it seems that the Justice Department isn't the only party that can be accused of thinking pornography more important than the war. Reynolds quotes from an email:
I voted for Bush and donated to his campaign and have been looking for reasons to support his reelection. But when I saw your post, I snapped. I just made a small donation to the Kerry campaign...and, living in Massachusetts, I have no reason to be thrilled about Kerry.
Apparently McCain's odd (political) comment about Kerry's not being "weak on defense" has given this emailer license to think that the porn/war decision isn't really a tradeoff. That's quite a bit of weight to put on a politician's Thursday-morning-TV equivocation, if you ask me.
So here's a thought: if the public really is as enamored of smut as Ashcroft's critics believe, why not campaign to change the law? If porn is such an obviously good, or at least neutral, thing, why sidestep the actual issue — involving those six guys and some unknown millions of dollars — by substituting rhetoric about the war? Come out from behind the computer desk and lance the issue head on.
Sullivan describes one of the effects of the law's non-enforcement over the past decade thus:
The strategy in the 1980s resulted in a lot of extreme pornography - dealing in urination, violence or bestiality - going underground. Today, with the Internet, international producers and a substantial market, industry officials say there is no underground.
Rather than funding a ridiculously horrible candidate for President on the hopes that he won't enforce the law, supporters of this activity should redirect their funds toward a campaign to leave no law to enforce. The effort ought to make for some interesting signage.
ADDENDUM:
To comment on a related post over on Instapundit, I don't believe the AMA has found any evidence that watching other people have sex reduces one's risk of prostate cancer. Moreover, by looking for ways to strengthen and encourage marriage, the Bush administration is actually protecting the prostates of American men. Studies show (and experience confirms) that married men are much more sexually active.
Dogs will eat just about whatever they are thrown, and Scooby Doo was a dog. Most adults will know what Shaggy's excuse was. In fact, that knowledge is one of those "discoveries" that make teenagers so willing to believe that the Beatles put backwards messages on their albums. From speaking in spelling, to writing in script, to Bugs Bunny's innuendos, grown-ups communicate over the heads of children so often and so deliberately that the adolescent can't be entirely sure when he's reached the end of the deception.
Bill Hobbs notes that Hollywood's adults are apparently no longer content to leave subversion unstated:
Blake Wylie spotlights the unconscionable decision by Warner Bros. to include a scene in the new Scooby Doo 2 movie that portrays "huffing" - inhaling nitrous oxide - in a humorous light. Wylie provides a link to a clip from the movie. In the scene, "Shaggy" huffs nitrous oxide from a whipped cream can.
Yeah, everybody's joked about Shaggy's zonked demeanor. But only the pathetic losers who run the entertainment industry would trample the joke — and give children dangerous ideas — by explaining it in context.
It's one thing to include puzzling dimensions that require explanation and may spark curiosity. It's another to provide instruction. This should be a big deal.
ADDENDUM:
Wylie has noticed that the people involved in the first Scooby Doo movie pulled back from the edge. Here's the actor who plays Shaggy about the first film:
Is Velma gay? Is Shaggy high? Are ( Fred and Daphne ) hooking up? All those jokes were in there, but we found at the end of the day it was more important to go the other way ... and that was to be more family oriented.
I guess they figure they've gotten past the parents' firewall by the time a sequel is released.
John Leo makes some observations constituting a reminder to be careful what groups you support:
Call this mission creep. A group starts out with a clear mandate that commands respect across most of the political spectrum. Gradually it moves to a broader and vaguer agenda, typically heading left. John O'Sullivan, columnist and former editor of National Review, offers us an explanation, which he calls O'Sullivan's First Law: "All organizations that are not actually right wing will over time become left wing." As examples, he cites the American Civil Liberties Union, the Ford Foundation, and the Episcopal Church. ...Leo's amendment to O'Sullivan's First Law: Any organization with "women" or "girls" in its title will tend to become part of the cultural left in general and the abortion lobby in particular.
So what do you do when your daughter's Girl Scout troop begins honoring Planned Parenthood chiefs and preaching the normality of abortion, masturbation, and homosexuality? Personal
