Culture Crash

That mainstream American culture is something of a train wreck is hardly news at this point, and that regard there's a certain wisdom to the approach, "Let the dead bury their dead," rather than having the brashness to be the one shouting, "Oh, hey, look! A body!" Still, occasionally one runs across things which are at the same time so sad and so indicative of our cultural ills one feels the need to comment. Such a case, to my mind at least, was this article from the most recent Atlantic Monthly suggesting that for the modern Homo suburbanicus middleclassus marriage is a failed idea which should be pretty much abandoned. Or as the cheery sub-headline succinctly put it: "The author is ending her marriage. Isn’t it time you did the same?"

The author is a 47 year old woman, a successful performance artist married to a musician, who after twenty years of marriage and two children find herself in the aftermath of an extramarital affair deciding that she really doesn't feel like doing the work to rebuilt a relationship with her husband.

Which is not to say I’m against work. Indeed, what also came out that afternoon were the many tasks I—like so many other working/co-parenting/married mothers—have been doing for so many years and tearfully declared I would continue doing. I can pick up our girls from school every day; I can feed them dinner and kiss their noses and tell them stories; I can take them to their doctor and dentist appointments; I can earn my half—sometimes more—of the money; I can pay the bills; I can refinance the house at the best possible interest rate; I can drive my husband to the airport; in his absence, I can sort his mail; I can be home to let the plumber in on Thursday between nine and three, and I can wait for the cable guy; I can make dinner conversation with any family member; I can ask friendly questions about anybody’s day; I can administer hugs as needed to children, adults, dogs, cats; I can empty the litter box; I can stir wet food into dry.

Which is to say I can work at a career and child care and joint homeownership and even platonic male-female friendship. However, in this cluttered forest of my 40s, what I cannot authentically reconjure is the ancient dream of brides, even with the Oprah fluffery of weekly “date nights,” when gauzy candlelight obscures the messy house, child talk is nixed and silky lingerie donned, so the two of you can look into each other’s eyes and feel that “spark” again. Do you see? Given my staggering working mother’s to-do list, I cannot take on yet another arduous home- and self-improvement project, that of rekindling our romance. Sobered by this failure as a mother—which is to say, my failure as a wife—I’ve since begun a journey of reading, thinking, and listening to what’s going on in other 21st-century American families. And along the way, I’ve begun to wonder, what with all the abject and swallowed misery: Why do we still insist on marriage? Sure, it made sense to agrarian families before 1900, when to farm the land, one needed two spouses, grandparents, and a raft of children. But now that we have white-collar work and washing machines, and our life expectancy has shot from 47 to 77, isn’t the idea of lifelong marriage obsolete?

Armed with her experience and the knowledge gained from a passel of books seeking to analyze the ills and possibilities of modern marriage, the author goes out for a "girls night" at the house of one of her friends, and discovers that her own thinking has touched off similar thoughts among her married friends:

But it is now our second Girls’ Night dinner since my horrifying announcement, and Rachel has eschewed Ian’s customary wine-club Bordeaux and is mixing some alarmingly strong martinis.

Leaning forward heavily across the bar, she swirls her glass and huskily drops the bomb: “I have to tell you—since we talked, I too have started thinking divorce.” “No!” we girls exclaim. With a stab of nausea, I suddenly feel as though now that I’ve touched my pool of friends with my black pen, a cloud of ink is enveloping them.

“You can’t!” Renata cries. “Ian—he’s the perfect father! The perfect husband! Look at this … kitchen!”

It’s true: the kitchen is a prime example of Ian’s contribution to their union. He based the design of the remodel on an old farmhouse kitchen they saw during their trip to Tuscany, and of course—carpentry being another of his hobbies—he did all the details himself, including building the shelves. One of the room’s marvels is how ingeniously and snugly all the specialty kitchenware is housed—the hanging copper pots, the garlic press, the mandolin, the lemon zester, the French press coffeemaker …

“Ian won’t have sex with me,” Rachel says flatly. “He has not touched my body in two years. He says it’s because I’ve gained weight.” Again, we stoutly protest, but she goes on. “And he thinks I’m a bad mother—he says I’m sloppy and inattentive.”

The list of violations unfurls. Last week, Rachel mistakenly gave the wrong medication to the dog, a mistake Ian would never make. She also forgot to deglaze the saucepan and missed the window to book the family’s Seattle flights on Expedia, whose chiming bargains Ian meticulously tracks.

Rachel sees herself as a failed mother, and is depressed and chronically overworked at her $120,000-a-year job (which she must cling to for the benefits because Ian freelances). At night, horny and sleepless, she paces the exquisite kitchen, gobbling mini Dove bars.

After spending a while diagnosing the problems with this friend's relationship, another speaks up:

“You know, it’s funny,” says Ellen, after a moment of gloom. (Passing note: Ellen has been married for 18 years, and she also, famously, never has sex. There were the hot 20s with Ron and the making-the-babies 30s, and in the 40s there is … nothing. Ellen had originally picked Ron because she was tired of all the bad boys, and Ron was settle-down husband material. What she didn’t know was that after the age of 38, thanks to Mr. Very Settled-Down, she was never going to have regular sex with a man again.)

“When marriage was invented,” Ellen continues, “it was considered to be a kind of trade union for a woman, her protection against the sexually wandering male. But what’s happened to the sexually wandering male?”

In our parents’ era, the guy hit 45, got the toupee, drove the red Porsche, and left his family for the young, hot secretary. We are unable to imagine any of the husbands driving anything with fewer than five seat belts.

“Ron only goes as far as the den,” Ellen says. “He has his Internet porn bookmarked on the computer.”

“Ian has his Cook’s Illustrated,” Rachel adds. “And his—his men’s online fennel club.”

The author sees hope in some rather bleak ideas:

So, herewith, some modest proposals. Clearly, research shows that what’s best for children is domestic stability and not having to bond with, and to be left by, ever new stepparent figures. Less important is whether or not their overworked parents are logging “date night” (or feeling the magic). So why don’t we accept marriage as a splitting-the-mortgage arrangement? As Fisher suggests, rekindling the romance is, for many of us, biologically unnatural, particularly after the kids come. (Says another friend of mine, about his wife of 23 years: “My heart doesn’t lift when she walks in the room. It sinks, slightly.”) If high-revving women are sexually frustrated, let them have some sort of French arrangement where they have two men, the postfeminist model dad building shelves, cooking bouillabaise, and ignoring them in the home, and the occasional fun-loving boyfriend the kids never see. Alternately, if both spouses find life already rather exhausting, never mind chasing around for sex. Long-married husbands and wives should pleasantly agree to be friends, to set the bedroom aglow at night by the mute opening of separate laptops and just be done with it. More than anything, aside from providing insulation from the world at large, that kind of arrangement could be the perfect way to be left alone.

As far as the children are concerned, how about the tribal approach (a natural, according to both primate and human evolution)? Let children between the ages of 1 and 5 be raised in a household of mothers and their female kin. Let the men/husbands/boyfriends come in once or twice a week to build shelves, prepare that bouillabaisse, or provide sex.

Or best of all, after the breast-feeding and toddler years are through, let those nurturing superdads be the custodial parents! Let the Type A moms obsessively work, write checks, and forget to feed the dog. Let the dads then, if they wish, kick out those sloppy working mothers and run effective households, hiring the appropriate staff, if need be. To a certain extent, men today may have more clarity about what it takes to raise children in the modern age. They don’t, for instance, have today’s working mother’s ambivalence and emotional stickiness.

In any case, here’s my final piece of advice: avoid marriage—or you too may suffer the emotional pain, the humiliation, and the logistical difficulty, not to mention the expense, of breaking up a long-term union at midlife for something as demonstrably fleeting as love.

I'd originally thought about quoting a little bit of the article and then writing a lot of analysis, but as I thought it over, I think that putting it out there -- like a cadaver on the dissection table -- with a few basic pointers may make things rather more clear.

A couple of things particularly struck me, though.

Foremost, I was utterly unsurprised when the one sex-starved woman mentioned her husband heading off into the den to watch his internet porn. It would little surprise me if the over-achieving husband has similar habits. In a world in which sex has been totally divorced from its biological meaning, why not retreat into the world of unreality? Why accept a real person with needs and moods and desires and a body which is the product of age, genetics and personal habits when carefully selected bodies can be seen doing anything one desires only a mouse click and a couple dollars away? This is the natural path down which one goes when one separates the mating urge from mating with one's mate.

The other thing that struck me as interesting was how an excessive emphasis on equality seemed to be driving unhappiness. The author talks about "co-parenting" rather than "parenting", and emphasizes down on the line all the tasks which she is perfectly happy to do in order to hold up her half of the household duties. Her friends over-achieving husband Ian is quick to blame his wife for not holding up her duties equally, on everything from feeding the dog to maintaining the body type he prefers. I'm not an absolutist about "traditional roles", although MrsDarwin and I have always felt strongly about maintaining a single income family with a full time parent at home, but the one thing I think is probably almost never healthy is a strong emphasis on doing everything equally in a marriage rather than having some sort of roles. If you both work full time careers, and both strive to do equal amounts of housework, parenting, cooking, etc., it seems to me that comparisons will almost invariably spring up.

"I do the dishes every night, but she hasn't swept the floor in three days."
"I end up having to help the kids out with homework while she just takes them out to fun activities which cost lots of money."
"I make more money, but he's always going out to lunch as if money were no object."

And on, and on. Perhaps I'm an unusually unpleasant person, but in a work environment I can't help constantly measuring myself against the other people who are "doing the same thing I'm doing". This can be pretty harmless at work so long as one keeps a lid on it. After all, it's just work, and we get to walk away at the end of the day. But when you bring this same tendency towards competition into a marriage, I can see nothing but trouble coming of it. There it seems to me that it's very important to have complementary but different roles -- not do everything together as "co-parents". This doesn't have to be some kind of radical partitioning. But if one of your major goals is, "We'll make equal money, do equal work, and have equal fun," I think conflict will almost invariably result. Marriage is meant to be based on complementarity, not measured equality.

Finally, I'm reminded of something one of my Indian co-workers said when someone asked her how it was that she'd remained happily married for 20+ years to a man she only met ten minutes before her wedding. "You just tell yourself you don't have any other options," she said. "If you really believe that, it helps you avoid starting problems that will make you want out." At this point in modern America's divorce culture, it's very hard to tell yourself that there are not other options, but I think that rebuilding that mentality -- not just as in "I'd better put up with this, because there's no way out" but rather "I had better make sure that I'm easy to live with, because if I cause problems there is no way out of them" -- is probably the only real path back towards marital stability and sanity in the wider culture.

The Problem of Plenty

It is oft observed that we have a consumption problem. Various people come at this from various angles. Health experts warn that we have an obesity epidemic. Religious leaders warn that consumerism can be a threat to one's real moral priorities. Environmentalists warn that we are consuming the earth's resources at an unsustainable pace.

All of these are true to one extent or another. The fact of the matter is, the human animal is not well set up to deal with situations of long term abundance. In nature, lack almost invariably follows abundance in the natural cycle, and so our evolutionary heritage tends to tell us, in the presence of obvious plenty, "Eat up now, there may be nothing later." For animals this is likely to be the case. The plants which are in season now will not be later, and the predator who has made a kill one day may well not another. For us, however, this can lead to certain problems. We humans have so mastered nature that we now find an abundance of food and other resources available to us at all times, and in this situation our natural instinct of "if you've got it, use it" does not stand us in good stead.

Nor does this consumption instinct apply only to food. We bring our same set of instincts to a host of other things which technology and wealth have made it possible for us to have at low cost. We are certainly not incapable of planning for the future, and denying ourselves things because we think it either prudent or moral to do so, but in general when it seems like we can have more enjoyment at the moment without an obvious and fairly immanent cost that we're hesitant to pay, we do so.

Many people profess themselves worried about the effects of burning fossil fuels on the Earth's climate, but few of these people choose to not own televisions, computers and refrigerators, turn off the AC during the summer, never travel, or completely avoid cars and shipped goods. At most, they use these things a little less.

More generally, it's easy to look up at some higher income level and think, "If I made X, I'd really have everything I needed to take care of my family. I'd just save and/or donate the rest." And yet, as one's income increases over time, one's "needs" almost invariable increase apace.

The above problems may not seem terribly pressing from a moral perspective, at least in the short term, but when we think about "cost" more broadly, we can start to see how the abundance in our modern society can cause serious social problems. For instance, the fact that people are so much wealthier in modern developed nations than at any previous point in history, and that this wealth allows us to set up "safety net" programs to provide for those who may find themselves temporarily without means, means that in turn that people have less need to rely on their families and communities for support. Surely, no one consciously thinks, "I have a good job and a house, so it doesn't really matter if I tell off my cousin whose wife I can't stand and stop visiting my grandmother who always lectures me about how I live my life," but the fact of abundance makes the lessening of these ties more possible.

Likewise, the availability of modern birth control makes the case of chastity much harder to make than in the past. Sure, it would be great if people were as willing to behave well out of a desire to follow moral prescriptions as out of fear of an unexpected pregnancy, but observation of the results would seem to indicate that one of these forces is rather stronger in its action on most people than the other.

I know of no solution to this dynamic. It does not seem to me at all desirable (or even possible) that we simply decide, "Oh, well then we'll produce less and be less wealthy." The same instincts that make it difficult for us to restrain ourselves from consumption in times of plenty make it even more difficult for us to purposefully be less productive than we can. And yet we should certainly be aware that our condition of plenty provides us with a situation in which it is much more difficult for us to exercise certain kinds of restrain, and gird ourselves for the struggle.

Capitalism -- When People Sell Things I Don't Like

With the garden currently shooting up, I've found myself again disposed to read gardening and food related books. I finished reading The Omnivore's Dilemma last week, and aside from a few gripes in regards to Michael Pollan's understanding of economics, I enjoyed it quite a bit. On the last run by the library, I picked up a copy of Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. The idea of moving out onto acreage and growing much of one's own food is something that I find interesting. I enjoy gardening, I enjoy cooking gourmet food, and I think there's a cultural and psychological value to remaining in touch with the way that humans have gained food for themselves in past centuries.

However, Kingsolver is far more passionate (and less balanced) in her jeremiads against "industrial food" than Pollan, and more prone to denunciations of what "capitalism" has done to our food culture. Indeed, so much so as to crystallize for me a trend among those who denounce "capitalism" and its impact on Western Culture. Kingsolver had just reached the crescendo of a complaint in regards to large seed companies peddling hybrids and genetically modified strains, when she turned to the subject of heirloom vegetable varieties, and her joy at paging through lengthy seed catalogs full of heirloom seeds.

...Heirloom seeds are of little interest to capitalism if they can't be patented or owned. They have, however, earned a cult following among people who grow or buy and eat them. Gardeners collect them like family jewels, and Whole Foods Market can't refrain from poetry in its advertisement of heirlooms....

So you see, when large agribusiness firms sell farmers seeds for field corn which are genetically modified to repel pests,
that's capitalism. But when catalog and internet businesses build a thriving niche selling heirloom vegetable seeds, and Whole Foods ad men wax poetical over $7/lb tomatoes, that's... Well, it certainly can't be capitalism, can it? Not if it's good.

In some circles, "capitalism" becomes such a scare-word that people forget what it means. Free markets and private ownership allow the satisfaction of a variety of wants: both mainstream farmers' desire for crops which are bug resistant, and organic gardeners' desire for true-breeding, non-hybrid varietals with colorful lineages; both Wal-Mart and Whole Foods.

Indeed, what doesn't allow for this kind of preference driven diversity is a centralized top-down system. For all that slow-food and local-food advocates rail against the "industrial agricultural complex", there's in fact plenty of room for buying local food from quirky, sustainable-practice farmers in our current "capitalist" system. Their real nightmare would be not capitalism, but the sort of central planning which briefly had its day in this country under FDR's New Deal, when the Schechter Brothers served jail time for the horrific sins of following strict Kosher guidelines, allowing customers to pick which poultry to buy based on what looked healthy, and giving customers a good price.

A preference driven system such as free market capitalism does leave us to suffer the pangs of seeing people buy things we think they ought not (and the changes in the culture that result therefrom), but whose of us who are in any sense in the cultural minority should hesitate to rail against capitalism, when it is free markets which allow those of us with niche-y tastes to see our needs met as well as those of the mainstream culture.

Overwork in the Age of Multi-tasking

The weekend's WSJ had an interesting article about work hours -- the hours that people think they work, and the hours they actually do.

Over the past two decades of rapid technological deployment and globalization, it has become an article of faith among the professional set that we work sweatshop hours. Sociologist Juliet Schor started the rumor with her 1992 book, "The Overworked American," which featured horror stories of people checking their watches to know what day it was.

Then God created the BlackBerry and things got worse. In late 2005, Fortune's Jody Miller claimed that "the 60-hour weeks once thought to be the path to glory are now practically considered part-time." In late 2006, the Harvard Business Review followed up with an article on "the dangerous allure of the 70-hour workweek," calling jobs that required such labor the new standard for professionals. The authors featured one "Sudhir," a financial analyst who claimed to work 90-hour weeks during summertime, his "light" season. He's got nothing on a young man I met at a party recently who told me he was working 190 hours a week to launch his new company.

It was a curious declaration; I would certainly invest in a start-up that had invented a way to augment the 168 hours that a week actually contains. The young man turned out to be kidding. But he felt overworked, and so he indulged in some workweek inflation. Research shows that this is a common affliction among anyone claiming to work more than 50 hours a week. Indeed, almost no one claiming to work 70-, 80- or 190-hour weeks is actually doing so. This doesn't make Summer Fridays any less sweet. But it does raise the question of why our perceptions of work are so different from the reality.

Sociologists have been studying how Americans spend their time for decades. One camp favors a simple approach: if you want to know how many hours someone works, sleeps or vacuums, you ask him. Another camp sees a flaw in this method: People lie. We may not do so maliciously, but it's tough to remember our exact workweek or average time spent dishwashing, and in the absence of concrete memories, we're prone to lie in ways that don't disappear into the randomness of thousands of answers. They actually skew results.

That's the theory behind the American Time Use Survey, conducted annually by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The ATUS, like a handful of previous academic surveys, is a "time diary" study. For these studies, researchers either walk respondents through the previous day, asking them what they did next and reminding them of the realities of time and physics, or in some cases giving them a diary to record the next day or week.

...Back in the 1990s, using 1985 data, researchers John Robinson and his colleagues compared people's estimated workweeks with time-diary hours. They found that, on average, people claiming to work 40 to 44 hours per week were working 36.2 hours -- not far off. But then, as estimated work hours rose, reality and perception diverged more sharply. You can guess in which direction. Those claiming to work 60- to 64-hour weeks actually averaged 44.2 hours. Those claiming 65- to 74-hour workweeks logged 52.8 hours, and those claiming workweeks of 75 hours or more worked, on average, 54.9 hours. I contacted Prof. Robinson recently to ask for an update. His 2006-07 comparisons were tighter -- but, still, people claiming to work 60 to 69 hours per week clocked, on average, 52.6 hours, while those claiming 70-, 80-hour or greater weeks logged 58.8. As Mr. Robinson and co-author Geoffrey Godbey wrote in their 1997 book "Time for Life," "only rare individuals put in more than a 55-60 hour workweek."
...
There are many reasons for such discrepancies. The first is the gray definition of much white-collar labor. If you're watching "Talladega Nights" on a flight to a conference, are you working? Is reading the Taste page of The Wall Street Journal in your office work? Anyone claiming an 80-hour workweek is definitely putting both in the "yes" category -- though this mode of calculation is going to result in more generous estimates than an observer might tally.

The second reason people overestimate is that they discount exceptions that don't fit the mental pictures they create of themselves. If you work four 14-hour days, then quit after 8 hours on Fridays, you'd think a "usual" day was 14 hours, meaning that you work 70-hour weeks. But you don't. You work 64 -- maybe. ... You might have worked on weekends. But here we tend to overestimate time devoted to small, repetitive tasks. People think they spend far more time washing dishes than they do. Likewise, if you pulled out your BlackBerry 10 times over the weekend, you might give yourself credit for several hours of work, even though each incidence took five minutes. Total time? Less than one hour, even though you feel as if you're in work mode 24/7.

I think it's particularly appropriate that I'm posting these excerpts between meetings at work. An element of this overestimation which the author touches on above with the reverence to reading the taste page at work is that the modern professional work environment often makes it much easier to intersperse work and leisure in a nearly seamless fashion.

The same technology which makes it easy for me to answer questions from fellow employees in India at 11PM also makes it easy for me to pop up a web browser when my computer is taking to long to run a complex query and read an article from First Things, or to type out a blog post in the fifteen minute chunk of time I have before going to a meeting. As well as making our work more efficient, computers also give us more chances to recreate while we're working. So even in a week when I may spend 60 hours in the office building (something which is blessedly rare these days) I may well have spent five or even ten of those hours reading, going to lunch, talking to MrsDarwin on the phone and so on. "Flex time" gives us much craved freedom, while at the same time putting larger swaths of time overall in the "work" bucket.

Whether this is good or bad is probably mainly a matter of temperment. I'm probably happier with this kind of mix than I would be doing concentrated work on a factory line for seven hours a day with two half hour breaks. Others, I'm sure, would rather work intensively from 6AM to 2PM and be done.

A Classicist's Memorial Day

As MrsDarwin mentioned, we've been listening to an audio book of Robert Fitzgerald's translation of the Iliad while driving in the car lately. By chance we heard one of my favorite sections of the Iliad this weekend, and it struck me especially on this weekend when, in the American civil calendar, we recall those who have served our country and especially those who have died in its service.

One of the things one quickly notices reading acient works is how many of the oldest works that survive, from a range of cultures, focus on war. The Iliad and Odyssey, of course. Gilgamesh and Beowulf both focus on great heroes who struggle to defeat supernatural monsters. The Nibelungenlied centers on an extended feud that becomes a veritable bloodbath. Etc.

Some might observe, somewhat cynically, that this is simply because all of these originate in cultures ruled by warrior elites, and that it was natural for this audience to patronize storytellers to fill their leisure hours and equally natural that their favorite topic should be the exploits of their own kind. This may be true to an extent, but I think there's an explanation rooted much more deeply in human nature than that. So much of our greatest fiction, today as in the ancient world, centers on conflict, violence and death because these things bring the ordinary dramas of human life into much greater urgency and import. A man may go to work every day because he wants to provide for and protect his wife and children, but if the day comes when he's summoned up to risk his life in battle to protect them, the sense in which he is ready to sacrifice himself for them is thrown into sharp relief. Similarly, the terrors of war make all the more precious the blessings of peace. In Homer, this is often expressed through extended references to times of peace, juxtaposed with the incredible violence of bronze age battle. For example:

There the screaming and the shouts of triumph rose up together
of men killing and men killed, and the ground ran blood.
As when rivers in winter spate running down from the mountains
throw together at the meeting of streams the weight of their water
out of the great springs behind in the hollow of the stream-bed,
and far away in the mountains the shepherd hears their thunder;
such, from the coming together of men, was the shock and the shouting.
(Iliad 4: 450-456, Lattimore trans.)

Though overall I didn't love the book, I was struck by a similar example of war's power to make us long for peace in Ian McEwan's Atonement where he has something along the lines of (quoting from several years memory, since I don't have the book at hand): How many thousands of children were conceived in mind on the roads to Dunkirk, as countless men offered God their bargains: "I'll marry her as soon as I get home. And buy a cottage, and take care of her, and stay home at nights, and we'll have three children and take them to church every Sunday, if only you'll let me reach the sea alive."

This section comes from Book 6 of the Iliad, as Hector returns briefly from the field of battle to the city to ask the women of the royal household to offer sacrifices to the gods that the Trojans will be successful in the current battle. Before going out again to fight, he seeks out his wife, who has been watching from the walls.

Keep in mind as you read it, as the Greek audience would also have known ahead of time, that before much longer (though not this day) Hector will indeed be killed in battle, and that when the city is taken his young son will be hurled from the walls of the city to his death, and Andromache made a slave and concubine to the son of Achilles, the man who had killed Hector.

Hector left the house by the same route he’d come,
through the well-built streets, across the mighty city,
and reached the Scaean Gates, beyond which he’d go
out onto the plain. There his wife ran up to meet him,
Andromache, daughter of great-hearted Eëtion,
who’d included a large dowry with her.
Eëtion had lived below forested Mount Placus,
in Thebe, king of the Cilician people. She’d become
married wife to Hector of the shining helmet.
Now she met him there. With her came the nurse,
holding at her breast their happy infant child,
well-loved son of Hector, like a beautiful star.
Hector had named him Scamandrius, but others
called him Astyanax, lord of the city,
because Hector was Troy’s only guardian.
Hector looked at his son in silence, with a smile.
Andromache stood close to him, weeping.
Taking Hector by the hand, she spoke to him.

“My dear husband, your warlike spirit
will be your death. You’ve no compassion
for your infant child, for me, your sad wife,
who before long will be your widow.
For soon the Achaeans will attack you,
all together, and cut you down. As for me,
it would be better, if I’m to lose you,
to be buried in the ground. For then I’ll have
no other comfort, once you meet your death,
except my sorrow. I have no father,
no dear mother. For lord Achilles killed
my father, when he wiped out Thebe,
city with high gates, slaying Eëtion.
But he didn’t strip his corpse—his heart
felt too much shame for that. So he burned him
in his finely decorated armour
and raised a burial mound above the ashes.
Mountain nymphs, daughters of aegis-bearing Zeus,
planted elm trees all around his body.
I had seven brothers in my home.
All went down to Hades in a single day,
for swift-footed lord Achilles killed them all,
while they were guarding their shambling oxen
and their white shining sheep. As for my mother,
who ruled wooded Thebe-under-Placus,
he brought her here with all his other spoils.
Then he released her for a massive ransom.
But archer goddess Artemis then killed her
in her father’s house. So, Hector, you are now
my father, noble mother, brother,
and my protecting husband. So pity me.
Stay here in this tower. Don’t orphan your child
and make me a widow. Place men by the fig tree,
for there the city is most vulnerable,
the wall most easily scaled. Three times
their best men have come there to attack,
led by the two Ajaxes, the sons of Atreus,
famous Idomeneus, and Diomedes,
Tydeus’ courageous son, incited to it
by someone well versed in prophecy
or by their own hearts’ inclination.”

Great Hector of the shining helmet answered her:

“Wife,
all this concerns me, too. But I’d be disgraced,
dreadfully shamed among Trojan men
and Trojan women in their trailing gowns,
if I should, like a coward, slink away from war.
My heart will never prompt me to do that,
for I have learned always to be brave,
to fight alongside Trojans at the front,
striving to win fame for father and myself.
My heart and mind know well the day is coming
when sacred Ilion will be destroyed,
along with Priam of the fine ash spear
and Priam’s people. But what pains me most
about these future sorrows is not so much
the Trojans, Hecuba, or king Priam,
or even my many noble brothers,
who’ll fall down in the dust, slaughtered
by their enemies. My pain focuses on you,
when one of those bronze-clad Achaeans
leads you off in tears, ends your days of freedom.
If then you come to Argos as a slave,
working the loom for some other woman,
fetching water from Hypereia or Messeis,
against your will, forced by powerful Fate,
then someone seeing you as you weep
may well say:

‘That woman is Hector’s wife.
He was the finest warrior in battle
of all horse-taming Trojans in that war
when they fought for Troy.’

Someone will say that,
and it will bring still more grief to you,
to be without a man like that to save you
from days of servitude. May I lie dead,
hidden deep under a burial mound,
before I hear about your screaming,
as you are dragged away.”

With these words,
glorious Hector stretched his hands out for his son.
The boy immediately shrank back against the breast
of the finely girdled nurse, crying out in terror
to see his own dear father, scared at the sight of bronze,
the horse-hair plume nodding fearfully from his helmet top.
The child’s loving father laughed, his noble mother, too.
Glorious Hector pulled the glittering helmet off
and set it on the ground. Then he kissed his dear son
and held him in his arms. He prayed aloud to Zeus
and the rest of the immortals.

“Zeus, all you other gods,
grant that this child, my son, may become,
like me, pre-eminent among the Trojans,
as strong and brave as me. Grant that he may rule
Troy with strength. May people someday say,
as he returns from war, ‘This man is far better
than his father.’ May he carry back
bloody spoils from his slaughtered enemy,
making his mother’s heart rejoice.”

He placed his son in the hands of his dear wife.
She embraced the child on her sweet breast, smiling
through her tears. Observing her, Hector felt compassion.
He took her hand, then spoke to her.

“My dearest wife,
don’t let your heart be sad on my account.
No man will throw me down to Hades
before my destined time. I tell you this—
no one escapes his fate, not the coward,
nor the brave man, from the moment of his birth.
So you should go into the house, keep busy
with your proper work, with your loom and wool,
telling your servants to set about their tasks.
War will be every man’s concern, especially mine,
of all those who live in Troy.”

Having said these words,
glorious Hector took his plumed helmet in his hands.
His beloved wife went home, often looking back,
as she went, crying bitterly. She quickly reached
the spacious home of Hector, killer of men.
Inside she met her many servants and bid them all lament.
So they mourned for Hector in his own house,
though he was still alive—they thought he’d not come back,
he’d not escape the battle fury of Achaean hands.
[Iliad 6:390-502 from Ian Johnston's online translation of the Iliad.]

Picturesque and Primitive

From last weekend's Wall Street Journal, an article on the not-yet-crowded heritage treasures in the world:

As dawn breaks on top of a mountain near the China-Vietnam border, hundreds of water-filled rice terraces reveal themselves, clinging to the mountainside in geometric patterns in every direction. The rising sun, reflecting off the water, turns some of the terraces bright shades of orange and gold. Then solitary figures appear, black against the rising sun -- peasants with their water buffaloes hitched to wooden plows.

It's one of the most spectacular sights on earth, and local tourism authorities have capitalized on it by building a series of viewing platforms and a big parking lot. But this morning, three cars are parked there and only six people are on the mountaintop, including one woman, from the region's Hani ethnic minority, selling boiled eggs.

From the Grand Canyon to the Tower of London to Angkor Wat, 878 places around the world have been named World Heritage sites by the United Nations, through its Unesco agency. Each year, the World Heritage Committee names some 20 new sites, whose unparalleled cultural or natural significance makes them "irreplaceable sources of life and inspiration." The designation brings benefits including advice and sometimes funds to help protect the historic, artistic or natural treasures at each site. But fame has its price, and in this case it's the inevitable arrival of tourist crowds, souvenir sellers and exhaust fumes, which can undermine even the most impressive place.

If ever a site deserved World Heritage designation, Yunnan's Hani Rice Terraces would be it. China proposed them for consideration last year, but they haven't been selected yet -- making them a tourist's dream, a majestic setting to view and photograph without a tour bus or trinket seller in sight.

Now I've got to say, this sounds to me like a fascinating a beautiful sight. Not only because of the fascinating geometry of the rice terraces -- like a real-life topo map -- but because it presents a view, to my mind both beautiful and inspiring, of how thousands of human beings have interacted with this area over hundreds of years. These rice terraces are not mere abstract shapes nor are they done for the purpose of artistic expression (though the result is aesthetically attractive). Rather, they represent the collective striving of many individual farmers over many years to provide food for their families. These shapes represent hundreds of years of men and women giving their energy and sweat to provide for their families. And out of it all emerges an order which in a sense expresses the human urge to go out into the world and subdue it in order to provide for ourselves and our loved ones. It is a concretization of the drama of survival -- and a far more attractive one than an overpass or a silicon chip factory.

And yet, much though I would find it fascinating to stand where this picture was taken and look out over the rice terraces, there's something that disturbs me a bit about the idea of preserving this area as a world heritage site. One of the things that is so beautiful about this vista is that it is a living landscape: well kept rice fields, farmers and their water buffalo already at work as the sun rises. And yet, the fact that it is a living landscape means that there are thousands of farmers living at levels barely above subsistence, grinding out a living with primitive technology.

I'm glad that this view is still beautiful, and I don't necessarily like the idea of the overlook being crowded with fast food restaurants and trinket sellers -- and yet the fact is that these farmers' children would be better off in many wells selling trinkets and owning fast food stands than they are now wading through rice fields with water buffalo. And yet, maintaining the view would mean keeping them in the fields while someone else made a better living selling stuff to tourists from the developed world who want to come look at some primitive beauty.

The modern developed world is not necessarily attractive -- though it includes un-thought-of beauties like anti-biotics, hot showers, and houses with a floor rather than dirt -- and there's a certain picturesque quality to a life lived "more in touch with nature." However, being in touch with nature is often a romantic way of describing being in the dirt, and hungry, and prey to sickness and backbreaking work. We should be careful about wanting to see that perpetuated on people who might prefer economic development to an undeniably beautiful view.

No Guarantees

I was struck by this Megan McArdle post, of which I will go ahead a quote a large chunk:

Guess what, honey? You're not entitled. You can do everything right, and the universe doesn't owe you anything. Neither do your fellow taxpayers. If there is any way to save the banking system without paying you $2 million a year, I will do it, not because I hate you and want to rob you, but because I don't want to pay more than I have to. You may have come across this concept in business school. At Chicago, we called it "a market".

The real problem with investment bankers goes deeper, and is the problem of the entire upper middle class: we have come to believe that complying with the rules produces excellent results as by some natural law. In school, if you do your work, teacher gives you an A. It comes to seem like a sort of a natural law: if you have a good education and work hard, the universe is supposed to reward you. After school, the upper middle class gravitates towards careers with very well defined advancement hierarchies: medicine, law, finance, consulting, where this subtle belief is constantly reinforced.

True, a lot of people fall by the wayside in the up-or-out structures of most of the top firms. But that was always true--the whole idea that you deserve to be rewarded for your hard work always involved ignoring the entirely undeserved natural endowment of intelligence and social capital that most upper-middle-class kids are given by their parents. The people who stay in the system and make it to the upper levels do not see it as mostly the product of luck; they view it as the just reward for all their hard work and sacrifices.

I include myself in this group. When I was laid off for a long time in 2002, I felt as betrayed by the universe as if the law of gravity had suddenly ceased to operate. I had worked hard, gone to an excellent business school, and I was supposed to have a job, just as an apple thrown into the air falls back to earth. I was angry, but also deeply shaken, by the notion that I could work hard, do everything right, and still end up unemployed.

We're watching the entire investment banking industry go through what I endured seven years ago. They aren't going to be paid so well in the future, even though they made the colossal mistake of giving up the best years of their lives to the finance industry. It feels--and it is--massively, nearly unfathomably unfair. On the other hand, that's a pretty good description of the universe: massive. nearly unfathomable. unfair.

Just ask any manager at Chrysler with two swell kids and a nice house in a Detroit suburb.

Anyone who has a halfway decent job is incredibly lucky--and yes, journalists and academics, complaining that it isn't fair you don't get paid much, that includes you. If your IQ had been forty points lower, or Mom had been on drugs, or you'd been born in Africa, you'd be spending your days doing hard, disgusting manual labor. The difference in utility between your salary and an investment banker's is trivial compared to the difference in utility between your salary and a Bangladeshi farmer's.

So for all the bankers annoy me, their pay--and its difference from mine--doesn't outrage me. The difference between their pay and that of a physical therapy assistant or an auto line worker doesn't outrage me. No one deserves their pay, so I can hardly be angry at the folks on Wall Street for taking what they could get. And so I wonder why so much of the commentary on Wall Street--not on the pay caps, but just on Wall Street in general--focuses on how much they were paid. Would it have been better if they had only been paid a third, or a tenth, or a twentieth as much? Would that make the recession significantly more enjoyable for the rest of us?

They made colossal mistakes, to be sure. But if you thought that high compensation was supposed to guarantee no errors, I have the same response to you that I have to the bankers: the universe does not owe you anything in the way of guarantees.

This fits with one of my pet intellectual hobby horses: that in modern society we have lost touch with the reality that life is often beyond our control. That one works hard does not necessarily mean that one's labor will bear fruit. That one is a good person does not mean that bad things won't happen to you.

Through most of human history, this reality was constantly impressed upon us by the fact that most people lived by subsistence farming, which meant they were constantly at the mercy of the weather, pests, diseases, etc.

In Victor David Hanson's lyric Fields Without Dreams about the vineyard in Calibornia's central valley which his family has owned for four generations, there's a scene in which he talks about how farmers confront nature's caprice. Hanson and his neighbors all grow grapes for raisins. To make raisins, the grapes are picked and laid out on drying trays to dry in the hot California sun. If it rains while your grapes are still out on trays, you lose the whole crop to a sodden, fermenting mess. If you pull your grapes in from drying too soon, they get lower raisins that sell for less. So each fall the growers are all watching the weather reports, looking at the skies, and judging when to pull their raisins in. One year Hanson and his brother rush to bring all the raisins in at the chance of a storm. Their old-timer neighbor leaves his out, convinced it won't actually rain. It does. And Hanson sees the old farmer the next day, looking over the ruin of his entire harvest and contemplating whether he'll take out one more loan to try to keep the farm or just sell out. "I just didn't think it would rain," the old man says.

Today, very few people in our country have to battle nature's capriciousness for their daily bread.

Expect to be Offended

My wife subscribes to the local Catholic homeschooler email list, and although I don't usually dip into the innumerable messages that pour in (most of them more lifestyle and education focused, so far as I can tell) I occasionally read a thread that catches my eye.

This week there's been much discussion of an Envoy magazine article about how a mother took her twelve-year-old in for a check up and was shocked and angered when the doctor asked if he could speak to the girl privately for a few minutes, and during the course of that asked the girl if she was sexually active and if she needed a prescription for birth control. The moms on the list exchanged similar stories, and were indignant not only that birth control was offered but that their teenagers were routinely asked if they did drugs, had sex, etc. Why, everyone wanted to know, would any reasonable doctor ask to speak to a teenager alone about these topics? Surely a mother should always know everything there is to know about these topics.

Needless to say, I'm not crazy about the idea of my three daughters being offered birth control and quizzed about their experiences when they become teenagers. But at the same time, I think the outrage is overblown. As Catholics we often talk about how we are counter-cultural. And we are. But when you're counter cultural, you can hardly be surprised when the fact that you do not fit in the mainstream culture is often thrown into relief. It ill befits us, I think, to act like the Muslim parents whose stories are gleefully fun by a certain stripe of website when they sue over pictures of Piglet (Pigs are dirty! How could you offend my child by showing one?) or dogs.

I recall fielding these questions myself as a youth. I too a certain amusement in the doctor coming in with her multi-page questionnaire and long explanation of how all this would remain confidential, only to have her ask. "Are you sexually active?" "No." (flips two pages.) "Have you experimented with illegal drugs?" "No." (flips two more pages.) "Smoked?" "No." "Alcohol?" "Only wine with my parents." "Well, that was quick. Do you have any questions you want to ask me or should we invite your mother back in?"

It's indeed a sad commentary that starting to ask kids if they're using drugs and having sex at age 12-13 is reasonable, but given a culture in which the majority of kids have had sex with multiple partners by age 17, and many kids experiment with drugs and alcohol in their mid teens, it's hardly surprising.

Perhaps I'm overly idealistic, but I don't think many children who are otherwise well brought up in the faith will be corrupted and fall from grace as a result of a few embarrassing questions from a doctor. Though it does certainly serve as a reminder of something that our children will be well aware of anyway -- that they live in a different world from that of many of their peers. And for many children in the wider culture, whose parents do not know half of what their children are doing, a few words from a doctor about the risks involved in their actions may be all to the good.

One hopes that some day our culture will come to its senses enough that it will no longer seem reasonable to discuss these topics with boys and girls in their young teens, but in the mean time we can hardly congratulate ourselves on being counter-cultural without feeling the strong current of the culture flowing against us.

The Age of Data

As someone who earns his daily bread and crumpets by doing data analysis, yet has a deep affection for the worldviews of times past, it has struck me more and more of late that "data" has become a term granted incredible reverence in our modern world. Constantly I hear people who are educated and move within educated circles, but who have no particular understanding of data itself, insist that they must be "shown the data" to believe something.

Some little while ago I asserted in conversation about youthful sexual morality that it was entirely possible for a young person to, should he or she so choose, remain chaste until marriage. "The data doesn't support that," I was told. When I responded that data on the topic merely showed that many people do not so choose, but that it was nonetheless entirely possible to pursue this course (and mentioned my own experiences and those of a few friends by way of example) I was informed tendentiously that, "The plural of anecdote is not data."

Others address problems which might rightly be addressed via data, but have no understanding of what data means. "It's shocking that in this day and age half our students are still below average in reading ability," I was once told. I'm afraid I laughed.

Or slightly more less obviously foolish, "The bottom 20% of earners don't make any more, after you adjust for inflation, then they did twenty years ago." This is true in a certain statistical sense, but it fails to account for the fact that individual people move through these classifications quite fluidly. The nineteen-year-old who was in the bottom 20% ten years ago is by no means necessarily still there now.

From my vantage point as a producer of data, it strikes me that the illusion under which far too many people labor is that data itself tells you something, and that it tells you this clearly and with authority.

Data is a highly modern phenomenon. When William the Conqueror commissioned the Domesday book in 1085, it took a year to complete and the feat of cataloging with relative accuracy all the people and their property in England was so remarkable that it is remembered to this day. The project required sending people out on horseback throughout the kingdom to interview people and write down the results over the course of a year, and no one attempted anything of similar scale again in England for several hundred years.

Today computers and telephones not only make it easy to collect census and survey data, but all manor of transactions (performed on computers) pour out fast quantities of data as a sort of golden waste product. In a modern corporation such as the one I work for, it is impossible to sell people things and ship them out without in the process producing so much data about who bought what, when, and for how much, that we "data monkeys" are challenged to drink in half the available insights from the firehose stream of information turned upon us.

Data sits out there in tables: thousands or millions of records of individual facts or events which those of us who access them can sum and average and graph and flip this way and that in pivot tables. Sitting at my computer I can take millions of rows of data which are the by product of a week's worth of consumer electronics orders and in an hour or two's worth of work in Access and Excel tell you how often certain products were bought together, what people think is a good price for a 42" TV, or whether a glossy insert in the weekend newspaper sells more digital cameras than our website. The sorts of functions I can run against a data set in moments represents levels of analysis that would almost certainly have been impossible more than fifty years ago. In the days when people really did wear green eye shades and sharpen pencils, it would simply not have been possible to gather and casually experiment with hundreds of thousands of rows of data in the way that I so casually do every day.

The fact that there is simply so much data around in the modern world allows us to investigate all sorts of interesting questions using data. But what must be realized is that "data" is simply the collection of lots of individual records about individual events. It may not be the plural of anecdote, but the it is the plural of event. And data does not itself have obvious meaning. One must seek to find some sort of pattern in it, and that pattern may not be right, in the sense that it may well not accurately describe the experiences or motivations of most or any of the people who were involved in the individual events whose descriptions are now "data".

And this is what people need to understand about data. Data is not the deeper essence of the universe, the real world of which mere events are but an imperfect instantiations. Rather, data represents the partial leavings of reality. Traces of past events. Footprints and shadows. Clues left behind by the real events, which can only at times be accurately deduced from them.

There are amazing insights that can be gained from data analysis, not only about present day events, but about the past. (Some fascinating historical research I've read lately has been based on analysis of data built off the centuries of data recorded in parish registries from throughout Europe, now entered into databases by historians.) But these insights are only good to the extent that a good analyst is able to correctly identify patterns which reflect reality.

I'm glad that we live in the age of data. All other things aside, I find it fascinating to play with, and it gives me a good living. But given the modern obsession with data as a defining source of truth, people need to see through the hype and recognize what data actually is and isn't. Data is simply the collection of a set of records which tell you "someone did this" or "this person had this characteristic". By looking at the frequency with which people did some given thing or possessed some given trait, we can learn some very interesting things. But data can never answer qualitative questions for us, though it may provide us with the inputs to make qualitative judgments.

Data cannot tell you what people are capable of or what they should do, but it can tell you what people often do do. Data cannot tell you what the best health care system is, but it can tell you the life expectancies of people with various illnesses in different countries, the average cost of treatments, or the average wait times for procedures. Data cannot tell you what marriage is or what culture has a desirable family structure, but it can tell you who gets divorced and how frequently. And data cannot tell you how accurately data answers all the worlds problems -- though there is data on how much more data we produce very year. Indeed if the data I've seen on that point is accurate, the age of data is just beginning.

Rationality and the "Paranormal"

Ross Douthat links to a post by John Derbyshire over at Secular Right responding to a recent survey finding that belief in God, heaven and hell is near universal and belief in angels, demons, ghosts and UFOs is quite common, while only 47% of the US believes in evolution. (Let's leave aside, for now, the question of whether it makes any sense to compare "belief" in a scientific theory with belief in God.)

Derbyshire asks:

What do people actually mean by any of this? Do they actually conduct their lives on the working assumption that the next stranger they meet may be an angel, a ghost, Satan, or a UFO crewman? (Ans: Obviously not.) How many could give a coherent account of the theory they reject? (Ans: Vanishingly few.) What does “believe” actually mean in this context? (Ans: Nothing very functional.)

Douthat's answer is, I think, very much on base. He concludes:

But if you want to understand what, if anything, a person means when he says he believes in demons or angels or ghosts, the simplest baseline answer is this: He means that if confronted with an encounter or an experience that seems demonic or ghostly or angelic and asked to rationalize it, he will be inclined to give credence... to the possibility that the encounter is, in fact, what it appears to be.

I think this is one of the basic areas in which materialists and non-materialists talk past each other a great deal. There's a sort of creation myth of mythology, religion and folklore that moves about in secularist/materialist circles (perhaps given that these are materialist circles we really should use Dawkins' terminology and call it a meme) that all forms of "superstition" are in fact attempts explain how the world works. Thus, belief in God is really just an attempt to explain "how things got here" in the absence of scientific knowledge on the topic. Belief in angels or demons or ghosts or any number of folkloric characters is simply a way of explaining phenomena which people didn't understand the physical causes of. Or perhaps a way of reading causation into something which is actually random -- an over-active sense of pattern recognition.

However, I think part of the real difference here is that people have strongly different ideas about how unlikely it is to experience something that is non-material. For some people, the idea that the sun danced at Fatima or that late stage cancer could completely vanish as a result of miraculous means is so unthinkable that even if one receives multiple testaments to such a thing having happened, one concludes that there must be some completely unknown (or highly unlikely) physical explanation which is what "really happened."

But the difference is not so much between people who look for "real explanations" for things and people who don't, but rather between people who discount all non-material explanations and those who don't.

Needless to say, there is still plenty of room for disagreement. I've often had fellow Christians relate to me small "miracles" which I would tend to assign as simply being coincidences. But again, that's a difference primarily attributable to my placing a different likelihood on supernatural intervention in certain issues than some other people do.

One of the primary charges often leveled against religious believers is that they are irrational -- but I think the key difference to understand here is that believers in various forms of non-material creature or phenomena do not fail to understand cause and effect, or fail to look for rational explanations, it's simply that their ideas of what is a possible cause for a given effect are difference from those of the committed materialist. Whether the materialist's commitment to all phenomena having material explanations is justified by anything other than choice is less clear to me.

Is "Planned" a Dirty Word for Catholics?

Taking a quiet Saturday morning to catch up on reading the newspaper, I was perusing a WSJ article on the lost virtue of prudence in our modern American society when I came across this jarring note:

The puzzling thing is that, under normal circumstances, our Americanus prudens should be flourishing. By looking ahead and exercising self-control, these unassuming homebodies tend to do well in school, form solid families and make lots of money -- which they compulsively save, tucking it away in banks or mutual funds (once-sturdy institutions recently found by scientists to be hollow). The prudent have only the children they can afford -- prudential parenthood is inevitably planned -- but these offspring tend to thrive thanks to a stable home environment in which education is emphasized.

This threw me because the most financially prudent people I know at work are those with single incomes and large families -- while the most imprudent are generally DINKs who take several packaged vacations a year and insist that pet insurance is so expensive on their treasured dogs that they can't imagine how they could possibly afford to have children on a combined income of a mere 200k+ a year.

And yet, as I think about it, it's not that I think prudence plays no role in one's decisions about having children, but rather that I have a strong immediate reaction against ever discussing having a child as being "planned" or otherwise with anyone other than other committed Catholics I already know to share my beliefs about the nature of sexuality and marriage.

By chance I'd had a conversation with a young co-worker a few days before that had thrown this into relief for me.

Coworker (who had just been talking about how her "clock was ticking" but her boyfriend seemed in no hurry to propose): "I can't believe you've got four kids already. Are you guys done?"

Darwin: "Oh, I don't know. Probably not."

Coworker: "Oh my gosh! How many are you going to have?"

Darwin: "We'll just have to see. My wife is the oldest of six, so she's hoping to have a large family."

Coworker: "Are you guys Catholic or something?"

Darwin: "Well, yes."

Coworker: "Oh, okay. That makes sense. I mean, if you think God says you'll go to hell if you use birth control, that would explain having a lot of kids."

Darwin: "Ummmmm..."

Coworker: "I mean, I want to have a large family. But for me, large is four kids. I guess for you guys it's just however many children God sends?"

[pause followed by topic change]

I found myself unable to quickly come up with answers near the end of this conversation because of two conflicting things that I wanted to express yet couldn't think how to reconcile without making the conversation much more long and personal than I would have liked. On the one hand, "just however many children God sends" is not, I think, a very accurate description of married Catholic life as we know it in our family. Certainly, there is an element of being open to whatever happens. The use of NFP is not always exact (or easy), and one can be surprised. And yet, I think there is a valid part for prudence to play for a Catholic married couple. There are serious considerations that a married couple takes into account in regards to finances, the wife's health, and their ability to deal with the kids they already have well. None of this means that one imagines oneself to be in complete control of the situation, but one does try hard (and usually successfully) to do what is best for the family in "planning" when to get pregnant and when to wait.

Not only does "just however many children God sends" not accurately describe the experience of being a Catholic married couple (or our experience, at any rate) but an additional concern is that it doesn't produce a very attractive view of what that Church has to say. (And while many people know that traditional Catholics don't use birth control, few in the outside culture seem to know that modern NFP exists and works.) The teaching, it seems to me, is not at all that one must do no planning and simply wait to see how many children appear, but rather that sex and procreation and intimately connected and that in order to avoid having children one must forgo sex at certain times.

And yet explaining all this, and how it works, is not something that I find myself eager to do with a female co-worker in what started out is a casual cube-to-cube conversation.

"Planning" one's children is something which I (and I think many orthodox Catholics) strongly associate with the contraceptive culture and with explamations of, "Oh my gosh, I couldn't possibly have another. Two is so hard!" And so when asked these questions I generally only feel comfortable with saying something like, "You never know" or "It could happen". Because the only other option involves explaining far more about married Catholic sexuality than I'd really like. And yet, I fear that this inability to discuss the Catholic approach to "planning" (out of hesitation to get into lots of messy details of how NFP works) makes it all the more difficult to spread our understanding of marriage and sexuality to the wider culture. An understanding which society could probably use to hear a bit about.

Thou Trollop!

While I'm sticking my neck out making observations about the modern phase of the "war between the sexes": I've been darkly amused to note of late in some interdepartmental struggles at work that despite all other changes in social expectation, disparagement of a woman's virtue remains a standard means of attempting to neutralize social rivals.

More specifically, many female co-workers seem to consider it a particularly effective attack to suggest that another female co-worker only gets ahead because she flirts (or, it is darkly implied, does more than flirt) with male managers. Once this weapon is used a few times against a given woman, those circling in for the kill settle down to, "Did you see that v-neck she was wearing today? I mean, that's a veeeeeeeee neck."

While I understand that using sex appeal for gain is socially understood as being far worse than giving it away for free (especially by those who lack it), I get an odd sort of culture shock hearing the same kind of derision vented against immodesty that I used to hear from very buttoned-up Catholic homeschoolers in high school being voiced by women who I know cohabit with their boyfriends or remain open and active on "the scene".

Despite all the fears and boasts that society has lost all sense of propriety, Mrs. Grundy remains active even in modern society.

Sexual Selection and Modern Dating

The other day my beautiful wife emailed me a link to this City Journal article entitled "Love in the Time of Darwinism" by Kay S. Hymowitz about the selective pressures which the modern dating environment places on the mating pool. It seems the same author had written another article earlier this year entitled "Child-Man in the Promised Land" about the phenomenon of single men in their twenties and even thirties who, rather than shouldering the "grown up" interests of their forefathers a generation or two before, linger in an extended adolescence of playing video games, watching cartoons and gross-out comedies, and seeking only uncommitted sex rather than marriage on the dating scene. In response to this first article, the author had received numerous emails from young men informing her that the reason that they behaved that way was essentially that the actions of the women on the dating scene left them little other choice. Hymowitz sums up their reaction this way:

Their argument, in effect, was that the SYM [single young male] is putting off traditional markers of adulthood—one wife, two kids, three bathrooms—not because he’s immature but because he’s angry. He’s angry because he thinks that young women are dishonest, self-involved, slutty, manipulative, shallow, controlling, and gold-digging. He’s angry because he thinks that the culture disses all things male. He’s angry because he thinks that marriage these days is a raw deal for men.

And so this article is basically an investigation into how accurate this complaint is.

As with many such articles, what follows is a mix of anecdote, analysis and mild titillation. Hymowitz essentially takes the position that in a society with no fixed paradigm for what what women can or should have as expectations in dating, women on the modern dating scene often simply choose to expect that men fulfill whatever expectations they happen to have at the moment:

But then, when an SYM walks into a bar and sees an attractive woman, it turns out to be nothing like that. The woman may be hoping for a hookup, but she may also be looking for a husband, a co-parent, a sperm donor, a relationship, a threesome, or a temporary place to live. She may want one thing in November and another by Christmas. “I’ve gone through phases in my life where I bounce between serial monogamy, Very Serious Relationships and extremely casual sex,” writes Megan Carpentier on Jezebel, a popular website for young women. “I’ve slept next to guys on the first date, had sex on the first date, allowed no more than a cheek kiss, dispensed with the date-concept altogether after kissing the guy on the way to his car, fucked a couple of close friends and, more rarely, slept with a guy I didn’t care if I ever saw again.” Okay, wonders the ordinary guy with only middling psychic powers, which is it tonight?

In fact, young men face a bewildering multiplicity of female expectations and desire. Some women are comfortable asking, “What’s your name again?” when they look across the pillow in the morning. But plenty of others are looking for Mr. Darcy. In her interviews with 100 unmarried, college-educated young men and women, Jillian Straus, author of Unhooked Generation, discovered that a lot of women had “personal scripts”—explicit ideas about how a guy should act, such as walking his date home or helping her on with her coat. Straus describes a 26-year-old journalist named Lisa fixed up for a date with a 29-year-old social worker. When he arrives at her door, she’s delighted to see that he’s as good-looking as advertised. But when they walk to his car, he makes his first mistake: he fails to open the car door for her. Mistake Number Two comes a moment later: “So, what would you like to do?” he asks. “Her idea of a date is that the man plans the evening and takes the woman out,” Straus explains. But how was the hapless social worker supposed to know that? In fact, Doesn’t-Open-the-Car-Door Guy might well have been chewed out by a female colleague for reaching for the office door the previous week.

The result, according to Hymowitz's analysis, is thus that men eventually decide that women are essentially out for whatever they happen to want at the moment (which in cases like some of those above certainly appears to be the case) and so decide they might as well seek to find tactics for getting whatever they want out of life (in this case: video games, sex and fart jokes.) The result is what Hymowitz describes as a Darwinian struggle in which both men and women seek tactics to get what they want out of the other without giving commitments or putting up with behaviors they don't want.

While I recognize that any "struggle for survival" has in our culture come to be referred to as "Darwinian", I can't help finding this a rather peculiar use of the term, since to the extent that all of this churn in the dating world is intended to be entirely sterile it really has nothing to do with "reproductive success". Hymowitz says

No, the problem with the Darwinian tenor of the Menaissance is neither antipathy to women’s equality nor a misguided reading of female nature. It is an uncompromising biological determinism that makes no room for human cultivation. We are animals, the new Darwinians seem to say; get used to it. They define manhood as alpha-style toughness and unsentimental promiscuity. And in that spirit, they cultivate manipulation, calculation, and naked (in both the literal and metaphorical sense) self-interest. “Nature doesn’t care about hurting people’s feelings,” explains dating coach Mike Pilinski. “It cares ONLY about reproductive success.”

And yet one of the things that strikes me about this described system is that while it is a struggle shaped by the ways in which certain tactics achieve or fail to achieve their goals, it is a wholly un-natural situation. The whole reason why the scene that the article describes is even able to exist is that modern technology allows people to totally separate (or at least, imagine that they are totally separating) sex from its traditional context of producing offspring.

And in that regard, when I read this sort of thing (which apparently the parents on our local Catholic homeschooling email list are forwarding around with proclamations of how this seals their determination never to allow their children to date) I can't help wondering how real and widespread a phenomenon is actually being described here. I don't doubt that the people interviewed in the article, and in the books and studies quoted in the article, exist. But what percentage of the population has actually experienced anything like this sex-saturated primal struggle to get everything one wants without compromising any of one's own desires? Perhaps it's huge and I've somehow managed to live in a small corner of the Catholic sub-culture where I missed it. However, my impression is that while the dating scene described in the article doubtless exists among people of a certain income and background, in certain areas of the large cities throughout the US, for most people the post-sexual-revolution dating scene is one in which most people end up having sex before marriage, but nonetheless fairly quickly find themselves in long term relationships where they have children, share bank accounts and argue about who left the dishes undone.

There must be, it seems to me, a strong pull towards a moderately "traditional" lifestyle inherent within the human person simply because we are creatures made to associate sex with the closeness necessary to form a family able to nurture the children which naturally result from it. So to the extent that the culture described in this article is widespread (rather than just a good story for scaring parents and exciting those who wish they knew what bars the interviewees were hanging out at), I don't see how it could be sustainable. It's a culture which one can only bring new people into the world by leaving, and as such it seems like something that would naturally burn itself out fairly quickly. Even in the present of birth control technology which is obviously socially disruptive, if people are indeed going to keep reproducing and having anything vaguely resembling a stable family culture, this kind of sub-culture must be either very small or very transitory.

As Christians, our duty is to make it clear through word and example what the sane alternative is.

Why Read Fiction

Quite some time ago, bookmarked a posting on the First Things blog because it reflected comments I'd heard from several other quite intelligent people my age that I've run across:

A few days ago our editor, Joseph Bottum, observed with a shake of his head that none of the many Junior Fellows at First Things in recent years reads novels with any regularity.

I had to confess I was no exception, thus perfecting his despair. “The dominant Western literary form for the past two hundred years” he said “but you all say, ‘Nope, we’re done with that.’”

Why is this? I can’t speak for anyone else, but, for my part, I just don’t get drawn into fictional narratives the way I did as a child.

I turned towards the philosophical and historic in my mid-teens, which gave me Plato’s kind of impatience with lying poets. At some point I found that I had to force myself to turn the next page because I really did not care in the least what happened to imaginary persons. The only narratives I now read with easy pleasure are travelogues, histories, and biographies, packed as they are with the red meat of the real.

But I’m making a good-faith effort to regain a taste for novels. I’ve started with Jane Austen, hoping that the goodly helping of edification will help me painlessly transition from my addiction to propositional truths to a healthy appreciation of the formal properties of a well-wrought story. I’ve read Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility and am now in the middle of Persuasion. She’s quite as wise, perceptive, and delightfully ironic as everyone says, but I’m still having the hardest time staying interested in the plot.

Now, I don't share Mr. McDaniel's hang up in this regard at all, though I do find that I don't read as much fiction as I used to as a teenager. But as I say, several good friends have surprised me by expressing similar opinions. Helene Hanff who wrote 84 Charing Cross Road and Q's Legacy, two of my favorite books about books, observes at one point in 84, "I never can get interested in things that didn't happen to people who never lived."

Some of this is, I think, simply a matter of personal taste. However I wonder if some of it also has to do with a modern idea of what fiction is. There are two contradictory ideas of fiction which I hear often:

1) I am the author and I have created this story, which is mine and is precisely what I say it is, for your entertainment. Read it and be diverted.

2) The author has created a text which does not necessarily have an inherent meaning. You as the reader must encounter this text and determine what it means to you.

Both of these, if one actually internalizes them, strike me as rather boring. If a story is simply something which a particular author thought up in wholly artificial fashion and presents to you for amusement, what exactly is the point? Why should I care that that author made up that particular sequence of unreal events? If the story does not have meaning in and of itself -- if meaning is something that I apply myself -- why should I care about the story? Clearly, anything worth knowing is already in my head, and reading the story is like staring at an uncarved block of stone and imagining a sculpture.

On the question of why we read and write fiction, the works of ancient authors like Homer and Virgil have always struck me as interesting. Both to some extent, I think, believed in the myths they were recording. (Virgil less so than Homer, and neither in a literal sense, perhaps.) Yet both knew they were making up the details of these stories as they went along. And their readers in the ancient world both knew that the stories they were hearing or reading had been composed by human authors, and also believed that they in some sense reflected real stories about the gods and heroes.

The key insight here, I think, is that worthwhile fiction describes something that is at root true -- indeed it shows reality in a more distilled fashion than actual observation -- even if the details are made up. When fiction ceases to be seen as describing something true, it ceases to be worth reading.

Weary of Wonkery

Whether the next four years are spend under an Obama administration or a McCain administration, one thing that may be said with certainty is that conservatives are going to have to do some serious thinking over that time in order to come up with an agenda that can bring conservatives back into political success -- and bring the GOP back into something like conservatism. Either administration will be enough to make principled conservatives cringe -- though I think that an Obama one would visit greater damage upon the country.

There are lots of contenders out there wanting present the new conservative policies that will bring the GOP back to relevance. Ross Douthat is very much at the forefront of that, with his Grand New Party out in bookstores.

And there are plenty of interesting proposals out there from a consumption or flat tax to a per capita income tax to private retirement accounts replacing Social Security to college scholarship programs for public service programs to proposals for a radical overhaul of the US elementary education system. Many of these are interesting, some of them are admirable, and perhaps a few are good ideas. And yet as one combs through all the contenders for the next killer platform plank, a certain weariness sets in, at least for this particular conservative. Because the fact is that policies are not our daily bread. Indeed, ideally, government policies should have fairly little impact on our daily lives. We should be able to go through most days busy with the doings of our families, churches and businesses and not really have it impinge on us often what state or country we live in.

This, it seems to me, is the dilemma of the policy wonk -- and the conservative one in particular. Perhaps this is otherwise for progressives (I leave it to our principled progressive readers to speak to that point) but for conservatives the activities and policies of the state ought not impinge on one's daily life much. The state should keep us from being attacked, but not involve us in unneeded conflicts; help those in desperate need because of natural disaster, unemployment or illness, but not insert itself and its programs into the normal and natural cycle of life, work, education and leisure; enforce laws and punish crimes for the common good, but not seek to proscriptively rule every aspect of citizens lives.

In this regard, the conservative movement is in a difficult position if it seeks to bring itself back to prominence through coming up with exciting new policies that everyone will love, because at a fairly basic level, the remolding society through detailed government policies is fundamentally un-conservative. (And also, I would argue, unrealistic.)

So conservatives are faced with a difficult task as they find their way again and seek to rebuild their movement: We must present a politically attractive and viable message while at the same time convincingly communicating to people that not every problem is a nail for which the federal government is the ideal hammer. This is hard, especially when running for federal office, in that one's message then becomes, "Vote for me. I'll present a vision for our country in which I can't fix all your problems."

When running against someone whose message is essentially, "Vote for me; I can fix all your problems." This requires that one be a much better communicator and a communicate a much more attractive cultural vision than one's opponent. And right now, the opposing candidate is a very good communicator.

[Cross posted]

The Sound of Silence

It's struck me on a few occasions lately how little used I am to not having anything to do.

Earlier this today I arrived in a conference room three minutes after the start time for the meeting I was rushing to, and found myself alone. Knowing who else was supposed to attend, I was pretty sure that they would show up eventually, but I had nothing in hand but my cup of coffee -- my laptop and notebook having been left behind at my desk since I didn't think I would need them at the meeting. It was oddly disconcerting to sit there with nothing to do, to read, to listen to for five minutes until people showed up.

I think this effect must especially kick in when one is in a man made environment -- a white walled corporate conference room being a prime example. My car radio died a while back, and since my normal commute (when I use my car -- which due to laziness and tight scheduling is unfortunately most of the time) is under ten minutes, I haven't bothered to get it replaced. But when I have to drive in to Austin or otherwise drive more than ten minutes, I run into exactly the same sort of phenomenon -- with an urge to either call someone or put in one earbud from my iPod or otherwise do something to relieve the silence.

It's not exactly silence that I find difficult. I'd be perfectly happy in a silent conference room with a book to read or an internet connection so I could browse or write. But after a time one becomes used to always having some sort of mental or sensory input. Reading or listening to music or writing or talking or experiencing all the little sights and sounds of the natural outdoors -- all of these provide grist for the mental mill. But that unnatural silence of a blank white room -- or even the instinctual sights, sounds and reflexes of long distance driving -- leave someone used to the constant interaction of the modern world feeling curiously restless.

Carnivores But Not Killers

I had to run out and do some errands during lunch, and then picked up a hamburger to eat at my desk. These two facts cause me a little reflection because up here north of Austin, when you drive around on the interstates you constantly see cattle out eating in their fields, even here in what is in effect suburbia. Indeed, as I sit here in my corporate office building, if I headed out the door and walked across the street and down the road, perhaps a fifteen minute walk, I could gaze across a barbed wire fence at cattle grazing.

However, though I very much enjoy a good hamburger or steak on occasion, I have never killed and cleaned a cow -- or any other food animal. I don't have any particular objection to doing so. Indeed, it seems to me that at some point in my life I should go hunting or help slaughter farm animals, simply in order to have an appreciation for how this everyday act of eating meat ties in with the greater fabric of life and human experience in other times and places.

I suspect that a solid majority of Americans, especially city-dwellers, have never killed and cleaned their own meat. (Sure, lots of people hunt -- but think its a minority, and probably a shrinking one.) And I can't help wondering if after a generation or two that that starts to change cultural attitudes on a range of issues -- some of which would seem at first to be only tangentially related to food.

Do "Family Values" and "Pro-Life" Clash?

Ross Douthat has been examining the odd phenomenon of a number of left leaning commentators suddenly realizing in retrospect that they thought there was value to the old "family values" approach by conservatives, only to lament that it has now been destroyed from the inside by those villainous pro-lifers.

In a Jacob Weisberg piece in Slate entitled, "Whatever Happened to Family Values?" we hear:

In fact, these two conservative social goals—ending abortion and upholding the model of the nuclear family—were always in tension. The reason is that, like it or not, the availability of legal abortion supports the kind of family structure that conservatives once felt so strongly about: two parents raising children in a stable relationship, without government assistance. By 12th grade, 60 percent of high school girls are sexually active or, as Reagan put it, "promiscuous." Teen-pregnancy rates have been trending downward in recent years, but even so, 7 percent of high-school girls become pregnant every year. And the unfortunate reality is that teenagers who carry their pregnancies to term drastically diminish their chances of living out the conservative, or the American, dream....

Give the anti-abortion extremists credit for living their principles. If they weren't deadly serious, they wouldn't sabotage their party's political prospects or sacrifice so many other values they hold dear for the sake of denying exceptions in cases of rape and incest. But Sarah Palin's pro-life extremism is as ethically flawed as it is politically damaging to the GOP. By vaunting their pro-life agenda over everything else, conservatives are abandoning one of their most valuable insights: that intact, two-parent families are best for children and for the foundation of a healthy society....

Remember Murphy Brown? I always thought the former vice president was on solid ground when he called it morally irresponsible to encourage women without the TV character's resources to embark on child-rearing on their own. In today's GOP, Quayle wouldn't condemn Murphy Brown. He'd call her up to the stage and salute her for choosing life.

Yes, you just heard the Editor In Chief of Slate Magazine say that Dan Quayle was right about Murphy Brown. Nor is Weisberg alone in this tactic.

Leon Wieseltier writes at The New Republic:

...The world is aflame and we have been pondering the knocked-up daughter of a pert and uncannily confident Alaskan mediocrity who was elevated to a national ticket for the purpose of changing the conversation. The Republicans wanted a new conversation, and they got one. Juno in Juneau! The anthropological harvest has been rich: what a carnival of double standards Palin provoked. I was unaware of the tender feelings of conservatives for sex outside of marriage.... Some commentators have detected moral relativism in the untroubled, even edified conservative response to the obstetric developments in the McCain campaign; but I see something even more sinister. I see the teleological suspension of the ethical. You remember the teleological suspension of the ethical. It is the recognition that, whereas there is morality in religion, religion is not the same as morality, and may justify an exemption from morality. I know of no religion in which this handy power of extenuation is not used. The telos, in the case of Bristol Palin, is life; and a fine telos it is. The casuistry goes something like this: since there are no unwanted babies, there are no unwanted pregnancies. "It can sometimes result in the arrival of new life and a new family," Gerson cheered. For "evangelical Christianity (in most modern forms) is not about the achievement of perfection." If evangelicals are so exquisitely conscious of our creatureliness, why have they devoted so many decades to reviling the imperfections of others? If they are, as Gerson says, "about the acceptance of forgiveness," why do they diabolize difference? The fecundity of Bristol Palin is a windfall for Jesus, but the fecundity of black girls is the doom of the republic. Spiritually speaking, the forgiveness of oneself or of one's own is a smaller attainment than the forgiveness of the other or of all. My friends, the politics of virtue is a vice.

And yesterday the Editor in Chief of the National Enquirer had an editorial piece in the Wall Street Journal, attempting to defend the importance of the sort of muckraking that his venue is known for, fired a few passing shots of a similar variety:

Unlike during the Edwards affair, the mainstream media instantly joined the fray, questioning Mr. McCain's people about the report and triggering Mrs. Palin to announce that her teenage daughter was pregnant. After a collective right-wing gasp, the only sound that could be heard clearly was erasers furiously dragged over the "family values" section of the Republican Party platform....

In this fractious environment, politics has made for more than strange bedfellows. Witness Mr. McCain greeting Levi Johnston and quickly becoming buddies with the 18-year-old hockey player who impregnated the daughter of his running mate.

Mr. McCain presumably did not have a copy in his pocket of the recently adopted platform of the Republican Party, which contained within its instructive gospel of morality and values: "We renew our call for replacing 'family planning' programs for teens with increased funding for abstinence education, which teaches abstinence until marriage as the responsible and expected standard of behavior. . . . We oppose school-based clinics that provide referrals, counseling, and related services for abortion and contraception."

Now, it's political season, so one must expect people to try to score their points, whether they make any sense or not. But given how proud all these authors seem of this talking point, I can't help wondering if they actually believe what they are saying. If so, they've long misunderstood what it is that the "family values" crowd is about. And badly.

All of these writers seem to believe that conservative Christians believe in some sort of outcome-base morality -- in which it is having a child while not being married that is wrong. In their imaginations, Christians then use these distinctions to divide the world into "good people" and "bad people". Good people white, married married and have three children and a dog. Bad people are dark, have children out of wedlock, and collect government assistance.

Perhaps there are a few people like that in existence, but it's certainly not what most conservative Christians are like. Rather, Christians belong that in any given situation, some choices are right, and some are wrong. Having sex before marriage is one of those things that we think is wrong -- but once it's been done, destroying the evidence (especially when that evidence comes in the form on an innocent human life -- is not what we believe is the right thing to do.

Nor is the predicament that the Palins find themselves in one which is unfamiliar to active Christians. Most of us have several friends in our local churches who have an oldest child whose birthday is separated from their anniversary by less than nine months. Truth, conversation and repentance are all central themes in Christianity. And so Christians will seldom have a problem with people who have made mistakes, so long as they acknowledge the truth and resolve to attempt to live in accordance with it.

And this is where the "culture war" differences come in. Christians do insist that having sex before marriage is wrong. And that intentionally choosing a "lifestyle" of single parenthood is not only wrong, but irresponsible. And that abortion is the taking of innocent life. All of these have to do with what action is the right or wrong thing to do in a particular situation. Christian morality is action-based, not outcome-based. Thus, while having pre-marital sex is wrong, the right thing to do next is not whatever it is that creates the appearance of not having had premarital sex, but rather whatever is actually right to do in the new circumstances.

Religious conservatives are not, thus, saying that it was right or good for Governor Palin's daughter to have premarital sex -- but having done so, getting married and raising the baby is definitely a choice that religious conservatives approve of. And in that it reflects an understanding that childbearing and family are the natural context for sex, it is in fact a "pro-family" approach.

That so many authors think otherwise simply serves to underscore how little they understood about religious conservatives in the first place.