The urge to merge
While sitting in a movie theater today, waiting for the picture to start, a friend and I were talking about technological convergence. (I'll blog about the actual movie later.) Back during the tech boom there was a popular idea that a single box would do everything -- Internet, word processing, audio, video, communications etc. Since the dot-com bust that hasn't been discussed as much, but to a certain extent it's still happening.
I was telling him how a while ago I interviewed the CEO of a company that makes components for DVD players, who was arguing that the DVD player would become that converged box. I think as far as entertainment goes, he's probably right. Already the DVD player is taking over the functions of the stereo; many players play CDs and mp3s nowadays. And some new players are capable of recording TV shows, thereby delivering the final death blow to VHS. (How this will compete with the TiVo format remains to be seen.) I can certainly imagine this souped-up player being the conduit for TV, movies, radio (both regular and Internet), and recorded music. Since music, video and computer files seem to be merging into one CD/DVD-type disc format, I can imagine that single disc being downloaded or recorded on in the main box and transported to walkabout players and car stereos.
As to whether this object will converge with the PC, I'm more doubtful. I've never tried them, but I suspect one reason set-top boxes never really took off is that TV sets aren't very friendly to text. People like video to be big, so you can sit a few yards back and watch, while text we like close up. And no electronic device has yet equalled the book in terms of reader-friendliness. I imagine that will get better with improved technology that will be less hard on the eyes. But my personal feeling is that text will be handled in a separate device from the audio/video box, and that device will be something like a laptop, since that's the most booklike format there is. You'd want some sort of connection between that and the DVD thingy, but I do think you want a separate screen.
Of course, who knows what future generations will want? I'm the lady who still has a record player, after all. But that's my two cents' worth.
Saturday, December 07, 2002
Friday, December 06, 2002
Beauty and the beast
The Village Voice reviews a new book about female competitiveness. The Ani DiFranco line it quote ("Everyone harbors a secret hatred/for the prettiest girl in the room") reminds me of my roommate in graduate school. She was a former model, and when I mentioned this fact to female classmates, the general reaction was pity. "Oh my God," said one woman, "you must hate her."
I didn't see much point in that, and indeed, living with her made me even less inclined to envy her. Her romantic history wasn't any better than any other single woman's I knew; if anything worse, because as a teenage model she had unsurprisingly attracted a lot of predatory men. I was a bit more surprised that she had a similar problem with dating that I've always had -- she was good at being friends with men, so they tended to see her more as a buddy than as a romantic prospect. That sounds strange coming from a model, but knowing her I could see how that could happen. There was a lot of the stringy tomboy in her, aggressive and direct, and not much feminine mystique.
She broke up with her boyfriend, in fact, while I was living with her. We weren't close enough for her to talk to me about it, but obviously it was extremely painful. I remember tiptoeing around the house, trying to be inconspicuous, while I heard her sobbing in her room. Whatever advantage beauty may give to starting things, it doesn't make the difficult business of human relations any easier.
Actually, the one area where resentment did sometimes spring up on my part wasn't over beauty but money. She had been modeling since she was 12 or something, and had made ridiculous amounts of money at a young age. Life as a medical student was a serious downgrade that she complained about rather a lot, and I was not inclined to feel sorry for her since she was still living better than I had for about the previous five years. But I realized that the money wasn't all good for her either, because here she was in her late twenties and she would probably never have that kind of income again. Instead of moving upward like most of us, she was heading down.
She had gotten interested in medicine from volunteering in some sort of emergency service. She discovered not only that she liked the adrenaline rush of all the running around (not surprising, since her favorite hobby was skydiving) but that it brought her spiritual fulfillment that she had never experienced in the modeling world. She was not happy with med school, though, and had serious doubts about whether she would practice medicine. I thought that, in terms of the job, she would probably have been happiest as an EMT, charging into danger zones and saving lives. But she didn't know how to live on an EMT's salary. And so whatever I could have envied her for, it tended to be complicated by reality. Like most things.
The Village Voice reviews a new book about female competitiveness. The Ani DiFranco line it quote ("Everyone harbors a secret hatred/for the prettiest girl in the room") reminds me of my roommate in graduate school. She was a former model, and when I mentioned this fact to female classmates, the general reaction was pity. "Oh my God," said one woman, "you must hate her."
I didn't see much point in that, and indeed, living with her made me even less inclined to envy her. Her romantic history wasn't any better than any other single woman's I knew; if anything worse, because as a teenage model she had unsurprisingly attracted a lot of predatory men. I was a bit more surprised that she had a similar problem with dating that I've always had -- she was good at being friends with men, so they tended to see her more as a buddy than as a romantic prospect. That sounds strange coming from a model, but knowing her I could see how that could happen. There was a lot of the stringy tomboy in her, aggressive and direct, and not much feminine mystique.
She broke up with her boyfriend, in fact, while I was living with her. We weren't close enough for her to talk to me about it, but obviously it was extremely painful. I remember tiptoeing around the house, trying to be inconspicuous, while I heard her sobbing in her room. Whatever advantage beauty may give to starting things, it doesn't make the difficult business of human relations any easier.
Actually, the one area where resentment did sometimes spring up on my part wasn't over beauty but money. She had been modeling since she was 12 or something, and had made ridiculous amounts of money at a young age. Life as a medical student was a serious downgrade that she complained about rather a lot, and I was not inclined to feel sorry for her since she was still living better than I had for about the previous five years. But I realized that the money wasn't all good for her either, because here she was in her late twenties and she would probably never have that kind of income again. Instead of moving upward like most of us, she was heading down.
She had gotten interested in medicine from volunteering in some sort of emergency service. She discovered not only that she liked the adrenaline rush of all the running around (not surprising, since her favorite hobby was skydiving) but that it brought her spiritual fulfillment that she had never experienced in the modeling world. She was not happy with med school, though, and had serious doubts about whether she would practice medicine. I thought that, in terms of the job, she would probably have been happiest as an EMT, charging into danger zones and saving lives. But she didn't know how to live on an EMT's salary. And so whatever I could have envied her for, it tended to be complicated by reality. Like most things.
Thursday, December 05, 2002
Camassia downgrades!
After coming close to this a few times before, I've finally decided to cancel my cable TV service. This is partly for financial reasons: in the last few months my rent was raised and my ethical eating kick has jacked up my grocery bill, while my employer has frozen our salaries for more than a year. And cable in my neighborhood is costly: about $50 a month, and that's not even digital.
My TV-watching habits have waxed and waned over the years, but lately they've definitely waned. The blogosphere is part of the reason for this, not so much because of the time spent blogging (as you can see, I'm not the most prolific blogger out there) as the fact that I'm reading more both to find things to blog about and because of books mentioned by other bloggers. (A few days ago when Telford brought up another book he wanted me to read, I drew the line: I'm already reading three books because of him, I'm not taking any more till I'm finished!) Also, going to church has given me more to do and think about. So TV seems a lot less interesting compared to the other stuff that's going on. I'm going to miss a few things, but it's not worth the money to me any more.
The way cable TV works is so...20th century. This business of having great blocks of channels that you pay for en masse, some of which you're never going to watch, seems to go against the general tech trend of personalization and choice. The competition, what with satellite and digital, seems to be pushing things even farther in that direction -- bigger and bigger packages with more and more channels at ever-higher prices. They may cost less per channel, but past a certain point, how much TV are you going to watch?
Speaking of tech trends, I'm keeping my cable modem. Now there's something that's worth the money.
After coming close to this a few times before, I've finally decided to cancel my cable TV service. This is partly for financial reasons: in the last few months my rent was raised and my ethical eating kick has jacked up my grocery bill, while my employer has frozen our salaries for more than a year. And cable in my neighborhood is costly: about $50 a month, and that's not even digital.
My TV-watching habits have waxed and waned over the years, but lately they've definitely waned. The blogosphere is part of the reason for this, not so much because of the time spent blogging (as you can see, I'm not the most prolific blogger out there) as the fact that I'm reading more both to find things to blog about and because of books mentioned by other bloggers. (A few days ago when Telford brought up another book he wanted me to read, I drew the line: I'm already reading three books because of him, I'm not taking any more till I'm finished!) Also, going to church has given me more to do and think about. So TV seems a lot less interesting compared to the other stuff that's going on. I'm going to miss a few things, but it's not worth the money to me any more.
The way cable TV works is so...20th century. This business of having great blocks of channels that you pay for en masse, some of which you're never going to watch, seems to go against the general tech trend of personalization and choice. The competition, what with satellite and digital, seems to be pushing things even farther in that direction -- bigger and bigger packages with more and more channels at ever-higher prices. They may cost less per channel, but past a certain point, how much TV are you going to watch?
Speaking of tech trends, I'm keeping my cable modem. Now there's something that's worth the money.
Paterfamilias
Nice article about modern fatherhood in First Things. It makes a good point about working mothers:
For all the talk about the newness of women working outside the home, it's almost as new to have men working outside the home, at least in large numbers. I don't envy the lot of the premodern woman, but it does seem like the industrial age put more distance between husbands and wives than ever before. It's not so surprising that some women wanted to go out where the men are, and that some even came to see men as an alien tribe whose interests were opposed to theirs.
Nice article about modern fatherhood in First Things. It makes a good point about working mothers:
In the premodern world of the traditional family, life was predominantly agricultural. While the mother cared for the young children and supervised the chores of her older daughters in the home, the father worked in the fields along with his older sons, usually within walking distance of the front door. The nuclear family would come together for meals and social gatherings, frequently joined by members of the extended family who, when they did not reside under the same roof, usually lived nearby.
For most of us, things are very different today. For all the hype about “telecommuting” in the 1990s, the fact remains that the overwhelming majority of people travel outside the home to work—a journey often involving a substantial real-world commute. Moreover, most Americans now live in suburbs, far away from extended family members. Ever since the 1950s, a woman choosing the life of the stay-at-home mom has faced the prospect of isolation far more profound than would have been typical in earlier times. After her husband walks out the door in the morning, she is usually left alone with only her child for company. Such a life is hardly traditional; nor is it, for many women, appealing. And understandably so.
For all the talk about the newness of women working outside the home, it's almost as new to have men working outside the home, at least in large numbers. I don't envy the lot of the premodern woman, but it does seem like the industrial age put more distance between husbands and wives than ever before. It's not so surprising that some women wanted to go out where the men are, and that some even came to see men as an alien tribe whose interests were opposed to theirs.
Tuesday, December 03, 2002
The ghost in you
By email, Telford also answered my question about the difference between an immortal soul and an eternal soul:
I encountered that idea only recently, and it makes a lot more sense of Judgment Day than the usual version. If everybody's assigned to heaven, hell, purgatory or whatever upon death, what's the point of doing it all over again? But it does put a different cast on "resurrection." Since the bodies of most people who've ever lived have dissolved into the biosphere, the dead wouldn't be so much raised as re-created. They would be brought back into existence from nonexistence. Somehow this reminds me of the Star Trek episode where Scotty gets rematerialized 80 years after he disappeared in a transporter accident. But I digress...
Speaking of the body/soul question, Minute Particulars wrote about it again today. (This is what I love about the blogger geeks I hang out with; you want an analysis of the Aristotelian dualism and transmigration of souls in a comic strip, MP is your man.) I assume that as a Catholic he follows the eternal-soul model, which is still a bit murky to me. Like Telford he opposes body-soul dualism, but in this post he refers to "the soul separated from the body and then subsequently informing a glorified body." I gather this is the Catholic interpretation of St. Paul's lines: "What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body...So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable." (I've moved on in my NT reading to the letters of St. Paul; more blogging on that later.)
Despite being an anti-dualist, MP believes there is a soul that can be transferred from one body to another. Telford, I assume, would regard the creation of a different body as creating a different person, but one that is related to the former person as a plant is to its seed. What this means exactly I don't know, and what this means for the damned I really don't know (these seems to me to lead logically to annihilationism), but I haven't got to Revelation yet, so I'll hold off.
By email, Telford also answered my question about the difference between an immortal soul and an eternal soul:
Oh, and the immortal soul of Origen (like the Highlander) can't be
destroyed. It is preexistent and not necessarily related in any
important way to the body. The eternal soul of Augustine and much other
Christian tradition is a creation whose end is physical embodiment and
whose eternity depends on God's grace. Immortal souls, no. Eternal
souls, maybe. I myself tend towards holism: my 'soul' is linguistic
shorthand for my 'self', which seems to be entirely material. When I
die, I'm nowhere but in the casket until resurrection day. Anabaptists
called that 'soul-sleep'. It solves a lot of metaphysical problems (but
not all).
I encountered that idea only recently, and it makes a lot more sense of Judgment Day than the usual version. If everybody's assigned to heaven, hell, purgatory or whatever upon death, what's the point of doing it all over again? But it does put a different cast on "resurrection." Since the bodies of most people who've ever lived have dissolved into the biosphere, the dead wouldn't be so much raised as re-created. They would be brought back into existence from nonexistence. Somehow this reminds me of the Star Trek episode where Scotty gets rematerialized 80 years after he disappeared in a transporter accident. But I digress...
Speaking of the body/soul question, Minute Particulars wrote about it again today. (This is what I love about the blogger geeks I hang out with; you want an analysis of the Aristotelian dualism and transmigration of souls in a comic strip, MP is your man.) I assume that as a Catholic he follows the eternal-soul model, which is still a bit murky to me. Like Telford he opposes body-soul dualism, but in this post he refers to "the soul separated from the body and then subsequently informing a glorified body." I gather this is the Catholic interpretation of St. Paul's lines: "What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body...So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable." (I've moved on in my NT reading to the letters of St. Paul; more blogging on that later.)
Despite being an anti-dualist, MP believes there is a soul that can be transferred from one body to another. Telford, I assume, would regard the creation of a different body as creating a different person, but one that is related to the former person as a plant is to its seed. What this means exactly I don't know, and what this means for the damned I really don't know (these seems to me to lead logically to annihilationism), but I haven't got to Revelation yet, so I'll hold off.
Said the spider to the fly
Telford has part one of his response to my weird dream post. Obviously I have to wait for part two before I can respond, because he hasn't really addressed the core question yet. But I do want to point out that, at least among the scientists I've read, the emphasis on savagery isn't as monolithic as he makes it sound. There's debate about this between scientists as well as between scientists and theologians. In fact, there's always been a bit of Rousseauian romanticism among zoologists, particularly studiers of the great apes.
That's why I was careful to avoid using language like "struggle for survival," or speculating overmuch about the past. You can get carried away with that sort of thing. But one thing that was striking about the spider dream was that it was so terrifying and yet it depicted something so ordinary. It's the sort of thing you can see happen in your own house. So why could I not bear to look?
Telford has part one of his response to my weird dream post. Obviously I have to wait for part two before I can respond, because he hasn't really addressed the core question yet. But I do want to point out that, at least among the scientists I've read, the emphasis on savagery isn't as monolithic as he makes it sound. There's debate about this between scientists as well as between scientists and theologians. In fact, there's always been a bit of Rousseauian romanticism among zoologists, particularly studiers of the great apes.
That's why I was careful to avoid using language like "struggle for survival," or speculating overmuch about the past. You can get carried away with that sort of thing. But one thing that was striking about the spider dream was that it was so terrifying and yet it depicted something so ordinary. It's the sort of thing you can see happen in your own house. So why could I not bear to look?
Touch
When I was at church yesterday we were told to do something we'd done only once before when I was there: hold hands in prayer. Holding hands with strangers is a little odd, especially if you're not actually praying. But I think one of the things that attracted me to Pentecostalism was that, compared to more mainline denominations, it doesn't seem to be afraid of touch.
Last week I blogged about the sexual vibe I was feeling during baptism and communion, but I think touch is just as important when it isn't sexual. Our culture inherited from its Northern European forbears an aversion to touching; Americans travelling to places like southern Europe, the Middle East or Latin America tend to notice a lot more casual contact. We Anglos tend to see nearly all touching as sexually charged, but I think part of being a mammal is needing touch for its own sake. It's a shame we deprive ourselves.
In the Bible, descriptions of people's actions tend to be kept to a bare minimum, but you get hints this is a pretty high-touch culture. Grown men embrace, kiss, and cry on each others' shoulders. At the Last Supper one of the disciples is "leaning on Jesus' bosom." (Or at least, that's what the King James Version says; now that I look it up, the NRSV just says he was "reclining next to Jesus," so infer what you will.) Either way, Jesus spends a lot of time touching people, so clearly the habit of not touching people in church is a later development. It's nice that the Pentecostals brought it back. I've heard that in charismatic sects where people fall over from the Spirit and that sort of thing, there are designated "catchers" to make sure they don't get hurt. The CA doesn't do stuff like that, but you could also see the importance of touch in the baptisms I mentioned before. If you're being totally immersed, you need someone -- in this case, two people -- to hold you. Kind of like life.
When I was at church yesterday we were told to do something we'd done only once before when I was there: hold hands in prayer. Holding hands with strangers is a little odd, especially if you're not actually praying. But I think one of the things that attracted me to Pentecostalism was that, compared to more mainline denominations, it doesn't seem to be afraid of touch.
Last week I blogged about the sexual vibe I was feeling during baptism and communion, but I think touch is just as important when it isn't sexual. Our culture inherited from its Northern European forbears an aversion to touching; Americans travelling to places like southern Europe, the Middle East or Latin America tend to notice a lot more casual contact. We Anglos tend to see nearly all touching as sexually charged, but I think part of being a mammal is needing touch for its own sake. It's a shame we deprive ourselves.
In the Bible, descriptions of people's actions tend to be kept to a bare minimum, but you get hints this is a pretty high-touch culture. Grown men embrace, kiss, and cry on each others' shoulders. At the Last Supper one of the disciples is "leaning on Jesus' bosom." (Or at least, that's what the King James Version says; now that I look it up, the NRSV just says he was "reclining next to Jesus," so infer what you will.) Either way, Jesus spends a lot of time touching people, so clearly the habit of not touching people in church is a later development. It's nice that the Pentecostals brought it back. I've heard that in charismatic sects where people fall over from the Spirit and that sort of thing, there are designated "catchers" to make sure they don't get hurt. The CA doesn't do stuff like that, but you could also see the importance of touch in the baptisms I mentioned before. If you're being totally immersed, you need someone -- in this case, two people -- to hold you. Kind of like life.
Monday, December 02, 2002
Google me this
A popular blog pasttime is looking at your tracking software to see what Google phrases people might have typed in that turned up your site. Not surprisingly, this post attracted a few deves (I won't repeat what they wrote, lest I attract more deves!). But today somebody hit on me in search of "Augustine's philosophical views on cheating." I wonder if that was one of Telford's students...?
A popular blog pasttime is looking at your tracking software to see what Google phrases people might have typed in that turned up your site. Not surprisingly, this post attracted a few deves (I won't repeat what they wrote, lest I attract more deves!). But today somebody hit on me in search of "Augustine's philosophical views on cheating." I wonder if that was one of Telford's students...?
The nine billion names
Interesting column in the Boston Globe about the formation of Hinduism from a dizzying variety of local cults into a relatively coherent religion. The author says British scholars had a lot to do with it:
There seems to be a trend lately of articles discovering the Western (mis)interpretations of Eastern religions: I blogged a while ago about this in regard to Buddhism, and the Atlantic discussed similar theories about Confucianism a few years back. All this emphasizes the point that, from the standpoint of general religious practice in world history, Christianity is weird. Obviously Judaism and Islam bear a family resemblance, and perhaps it was contact with these that led Europeans to think that all "advanced" religions follow the model. But if you go afield of the Judaic faiths, things get radically different.
The columnist makes an interesting comparison when he says India when the British came was "not unlike the pagan chaos a Christian from the eastern provinces of the Roman empire might have encountered in the West just before Constantine's conversion." Hinduism probably is a lot like Europe would have been had Christianity not taken hold. Hindus tend to deal with the multifarious gods by regarding them as incarnations of higher gods, who are in turn incarnations of the Brahman, who incarnates everything. The Romans started similarly accommadating different gods by equating other peoples' gods with their own -- not only the Greek gods (Jupiter/Zeus, Juno/Hera, Venus/Aphrodite etc.) but all the ones they encountered. "First and foremost, Mercury is regarded as the inventor of all the useful arts, the protector of routes and travellers," Julius Caesar wrote about the Gallic pantheon. "After Mercury, they worship Apollo, Jupiter, Mars and Minerva. They think of these gods in roughly the same way as other peoples." Caesar didn't bother writing what the Celts actually called their gods -- he knew who they were.
The Romans recognized what Carl Jung figured out 2,000 years later: there are certain common characters and stories that turn up in folklore around the world. But in the European case they might have actually been related. One of the oldest and most mysterious Germanic gods is called Tiw (or Tiuz or Ziu, depending on the source), known to us mainly for giving his name to Tuesday. Scholars have noticed the resemblance of the name to other primary Indo-European gods such as Zeus and the Sanskrit Dyaush. It also may be the root of the generic Latin word for god, deus, and its feminine form, diana. Kind of funny to think all the Latin masses are invoking the name of a pagan god, isn't it?
Anyway, if some foreign power had showed up and seen all this, they could conceivably have taken the various equivalent gods and the works of Greek philosophy and the epics of Virgil and Homer and the Eddas and whatnot and welded it into some sort of coherent worldview. Heck, it might have happened by itself, given time. But a strange thing happened along the way...
Interesting column in the Boston Globe about the formation of Hinduism from a dizzying variety of local cults into a relatively coherent religion. The author says British scholars had a lot to do with it:
These scholars organized their impressions of Indian religion according to what they were familiar with at home: the monotheistic nature of Christianity and its exclusive claims to truth. When confronted by diverse Indian religions, they tended to see similarities among them. They assumed that different religious practices could only exist within a single overarching tradition.
They also had a strong literary bias. They thought that since Christianity had canonical texts, Indian tradition must have the same. Their local intermediaries tended to be Brahmans, who alone knew the languages needed to study such ancient texts as the Vedas and the Bhagavad-Gita. Together, the British scholars and their Brahman interpreters came up with a canon of sorts, mostly Brahmanical literature and ideology, which they began to identify with a single Hindu religion.
There seems to be a trend lately of articles discovering the Western (mis)interpretations of Eastern religions: I blogged a while ago about this in regard to Buddhism, and the Atlantic discussed similar theories about Confucianism a few years back. All this emphasizes the point that, from the standpoint of general religious practice in world history, Christianity is weird. Obviously Judaism and Islam bear a family resemblance, and perhaps it was contact with these that led Europeans to think that all "advanced" religions follow the model. But if you go afield of the Judaic faiths, things get radically different.
The columnist makes an interesting comparison when he says India when the British came was "not unlike the pagan chaos a Christian from the eastern provinces of the Roman empire might have encountered in the West just before Constantine's conversion." Hinduism probably is a lot like Europe would have been had Christianity not taken hold. Hindus tend to deal with the multifarious gods by regarding them as incarnations of higher gods, who are in turn incarnations of the Brahman, who incarnates everything. The Romans started similarly accommadating different gods by equating other peoples' gods with their own -- not only the Greek gods (Jupiter/Zeus, Juno/Hera, Venus/Aphrodite etc.) but all the ones they encountered. "First and foremost, Mercury is regarded as the inventor of all the useful arts, the protector of routes and travellers," Julius Caesar wrote about the Gallic pantheon. "After Mercury, they worship Apollo, Jupiter, Mars and Minerva. They think of these gods in roughly the same way as other peoples." Caesar didn't bother writing what the Celts actually called their gods -- he knew who they were.
The Romans recognized what Carl Jung figured out 2,000 years later: there are certain common characters and stories that turn up in folklore around the world. But in the European case they might have actually been related. One of the oldest and most mysterious Germanic gods is called Tiw (or Tiuz or Ziu, depending on the source), known to us mainly for giving his name to Tuesday. Scholars have noticed the resemblance of the name to other primary Indo-European gods such as Zeus and the Sanskrit Dyaush. It also may be the root of the generic Latin word for god, deus, and its feminine form, diana. Kind of funny to think all the Latin masses are invoking the name of a pagan god, isn't it?
Anyway, if some foreign power had showed up and seen all this, they could conceivably have taken the various equivalent gods and the works of Greek philosophy and the epics of Virgil and Homer and the Eddas and whatnot and welded it into some sort of coherent worldview. Heck, it might have happened by itself, given time. But a strange thing happened along the way...
Sunday, December 01, 2002
Save As...
Telford is impressed that I put up with his familial distractions when we visited today. I have to say, it doesn't bother me because I feel like I'm the intruder.
I've actually never been friends before with someone who had kids. Single people and family people tend to run in different circles. I suppose this is one of the barriers that the Internet overcomes. So I was never quite sure how to deal with the family, but they have been awfully good at dealing with me. Telford's wife has been very cool about everything, and the kids basically ignore me, which is OK because I ignore them back.
I've wondered, actually, what his children think of me, if they think of me at all. When I was a child, my parents' friends were mostly other parents, as you might expect. There was no one like me hanging around. I don't know if the little Worklings know why I periodically come along and peel their father away from them, or if they figure it's just one of those inexplicable adult things. When you're a kid there are an awful lot of those, aren't there?
Anyway, I was never very good at "parallel processing" to begin with. I like to do one thing at a time. This is rather a handicap for a reporter, but if I'm on something that's important to me I stick with it and ignore distractions. So I'm not about to go wandering off to other apps. Plus I think I got used to the interrupted style of talking from doing it with my mother. For many years I've been having long philosophical conversations with her too, but like most mothers she's got too many things going on at once. So I've learned the art of gently corralling the train of the discussion ("So anyway, you were saying that..."). That's the way it is when you talk to parents, even your own.
Telford is impressed that I put up with his familial distractions when we visited today. I have to say, it doesn't bother me because I feel like I'm the intruder.
I've actually never been friends before with someone who had kids. Single people and family people tend to run in different circles. I suppose this is one of the barriers that the Internet overcomes. So I was never quite sure how to deal with the family, but they have been awfully good at dealing with me. Telford's wife has been very cool about everything, and the kids basically ignore me, which is OK because I ignore them back.
I've wondered, actually, what his children think of me, if they think of me at all. When I was a child, my parents' friends were mostly other parents, as you might expect. There was no one like me hanging around. I don't know if the little Worklings know why I periodically come along and peel their father away from them, or if they figure it's just one of those inexplicable adult things. When you're a kid there are an awful lot of those, aren't there?
Anyway, I was never very good at "parallel processing" to begin with. I like to do one thing at a time. This is rather a handicap for a reporter, but if I'm on something that's important to me I stick with it and ignore distractions. So I'm not about to go wandering off to other apps. Plus I think I got used to the interrupted style of talking from doing it with my mother. For many years I've been having long philosophical conversations with her too, but like most mothers she's got too many things going on at once. So I've learned the art of gently corralling the train of the discussion ("So anyway, you were saying that..."). That's the way it is when you talk to parents, even your own.
Friday, November 29, 2002
The marrying kind, part 2
When I blogged yesterday about Noah's gay-marriage post I hadn't read all of the Stanley Kurtz article he was responding to (my bad) so I didn't think of another form of "polygamy" Kurtz suggested -- gay people who form families with surrogate mothers and inseminators and whatnot. Those families do exist, though again I can't imagine they'd be that common. And perhaps the larger point is, they already exist even without official sanction.
Anyway, as promised, on to no-fault divorce. Noah's objection to it stems from his fundamental vision of marriage:
The first question that sprang to my mind was: what community are we talking about here? Family and friends? Church? Town? State? Country? I ask this because both Noah and Kurtz want to enforce marital norms at a high level -- state or even federal government -- but I don't know if that does much of anything if the lower-level community isn't doing the same. In fact, I can tell you from my own background that some local communities have rather different norms.
Noah seems to think you can influence these subcultures by changing the law, but I doubt it. I would think that for people who see love and family as a private business, the idea that marrying would mean a pact with the government as well as the spouse would make them less likely to get married in the first place, and more likely to shack up. Indeed, the whole shacking-up trend seems to have started from a feeling that the institution of marriage is a sort of state imperialism upon private life. If the state acts too imperialistic, that might only drive more people away from it.
I suppose you could see this as a good thing for marriage, in that it would mean only the people who agree with the covenant model would do it. But I am assuming (though they don't exactly say so) that the societal interest both these guys are positing in marriage is the proper rearing of children, and in particular the prevention of broken and single-parent homes. And it's true that children from those homes are more likely to be trouble to society, whether through crime or welfare (though the latter is less true since 1996). But of course, if more people are cohabiting instead of marrying, that will mean more single parents, not fewer.
And really, the single-parent problem isn't with the affluent shacker-uppers I would know. The larger mass of single parents out there are poor. And with them it seems that the problem isn't so much divorce as failure to marry in the first place. So again, it's hard to see how changing divorce law would help.
It's not that I don't sympathize with how Noah feels. It's that the divorce-law approach is all stick and no carrot. For a lot of couples the local family-friends-church community isn't really there, or if it is there it's not very helpful. The dispute I personally have with the it's-all-private view of couplehood is that it yields a kind of Darwinian attitude towards love: if things go wrong, that's your problem. Sink or swim. To have the state then come along and say, things went wrong but you still can't split up, is not going to make these relationships any healthier.
So I think it's the change and dissolution of local community, not divorce law, that's pushing family toward the matrilineal model Noah indicated. The state is a blunt instrument, and can't really handle the delicate business of relationships. Without the support for good marriages at the intimate level, I fear the law would only trap people in bad ones.
When I blogged yesterday about Noah's gay-marriage post I hadn't read all of the Stanley Kurtz article he was responding to (my bad) so I didn't think of another form of "polygamy" Kurtz suggested -- gay people who form families with surrogate mothers and inseminators and whatnot. Those families do exist, though again I can't imagine they'd be that common. And perhaps the larger point is, they already exist even without official sanction.
Anyway, as promised, on to no-fault divorce. Noah's objection to it stems from his fundamental vision of marriage:
Marriage is a covenant between two individuals and between those individuals and the society. It is a social institution that involves the entire community, and not just the individuals in question. As such, to allow it to be dissolved at will is a crime against the community.
The first question that sprang to my mind was: what community are we talking about here? Family and friends? Church? Town? State? Country? I ask this because both Noah and Kurtz want to enforce marital norms at a high level -- state or even federal government -- but I don't know if that does much of anything if the lower-level community isn't doing the same. In fact, I can tell you from my own background that some local communities have rather different norms.
Noah seems to think you can influence these subcultures by changing the law, but I doubt it. I would think that for people who see love and family as a private business, the idea that marrying would mean a pact with the government as well as the spouse would make them less likely to get married in the first place, and more likely to shack up. Indeed, the whole shacking-up trend seems to have started from a feeling that the institution of marriage is a sort of state imperialism upon private life. If the state acts too imperialistic, that might only drive more people away from it.
I suppose you could see this as a good thing for marriage, in that it would mean only the people who agree with the covenant model would do it. But I am assuming (though they don't exactly say so) that the societal interest both these guys are positing in marriage is the proper rearing of children, and in particular the prevention of broken and single-parent homes. And it's true that children from those homes are more likely to be trouble to society, whether through crime or welfare (though the latter is less true since 1996). But of course, if more people are cohabiting instead of marrying, that will mean more single parents, not fewer.
And really, the single-parent problem isn't with the affluent shacker-uppers I would know. The larger mass of single parents out there are poor. And with them it seems that the problem isn't so much divorce as failure to marry in the first place. So again, it's hard to see how changing divorce law would help.
It's not that I don't sympathize with how Noah feels. It's that the divorce-law approach is all stick and no carrot. For a lot of couples the local family-friends-church community isn't really there, or if it is there it's not very helpful. The dispute I personally have with the it's-all-private view of couplehood is that it yields a kind of Darwinian attitude towards love: if things go wrong, that's your problem. Sink or swim. To have the state then come along and say, things went wrong but you still can't split up, is not going to make these relationships any healthier.
So I think it's the change and dissolution of local community, not divorce law, that's pushing family toward the matrilineal model Noah indicated. The state is a blunt instrument, and can't really handle the delicate business of relationships. Without the support for good marriages at the intimate level, I fear the law would only trap people in bad ones.
Wednesday, November 27, 2002
The marrying kind
Noah Millman has another good post about intelligent design, and another making a conservative case for gay marriage. In the latter post, Noah raises an issue that comes up a lot in these discussions: if you allow gay marriage, what's to stop polygamy? Or any weird arrrangement among people who claim to love each other?
Noah has a complicated answer involving child-raising, but I always thought this objection was a bit of a red herring. The reason I think this doesn't matter is that, even if the option were available, so few people would actually do it.
I think conservatives fear polygamy for two reasons: its prevalence in world history, and the propaganda of sexual revolutionaries. As to the latter point, I grew up in basically the heartland of the sexual revolution, and I can tell you, propaganda ain't practice. I do not personally know anyone who's successfully managed to pull off a polyamorous relationship, in the sense of having more than one partner of equal intimacy. The more usual arrangement is a pairing that allows a certain amount of adultery, but even that tends to get riven with jealousies. There are people who claim they can do it, but I just don't think this is a model that's going to conquer the world. For most people, it fights their own emotional nature.
So what about polygamy in world history? I think that's largely the product of two (related) things: patriarchy and pro-natalism. You can see both of these at work in probably the best-known example of a polygamous society, the Hebraic one of the Old Testament. Everyone is clearly obsessed with having as many children as possible. God's promise to Abraham isn't heaven or eternal life, but progeny: "as many as grains of sand on the beach." There was also the dubious business with the handmaids.
This is the norm in a lot of agrarian societies, and it's not hard to see how it would lead to polygamy. With every wife a man adds on, his descendants increase exponentially. This also explains why polygamous societies almost always are really polygamous only for men. Reproductively speaking, women have nothing to gain with multiple husbands, and men have everything to lose.
Without this pressure, monogamy (albeit imperfect monogamy) seems to be the human norm. It's interesting to note that, although polygamy is the rule for agrarian societies, monogamy is the rule for hunter-gatherers. As with those of us in the industrial age, they have no great motive to have a lot of kids (indeed, their nomadic lifestyle means they can't handle too many babies). So as with us moderns, their marriages are based mainly on personal affection.
This doesn't mean that polygamy, if it were allowed here, would never happen. Obviously, some people are doing it already. I just don't think it's any real threat to the monogamous model, so we shouldn't worry about it. For that matter, the same is true of gay marriage. Some conservatives, weirdly, seem to agree with the sexual revolutionaries that enforced Judeo-Christian values are all that keep us from total sexual chaos (or freedom, depending on how you look at it). But I don't think the available evidence supports that.
Noah is correct, I think, that conservatives' real beef with the way marriage is headed is precisely that it has become based largely on personal affection. This would generally push marriage away from polygamy rather than towards it, but it does push it toward things like gay marriage and more frequent divorce. Noah says that the real battle should be with divorce laws, since those have more to do with the actual destruction of marriages than gay marriage ever would. I think that's a more internally consistent position, though I see problems with that too. However, right now I'm getting tired and headachy, so I'll blog about later...
Noah Millman has another good post about intelligent design, and another making a conservative case for gay marriage. In the latter post, Noah raises an issue that comes up a lot in these discussions: if you allow gay marriage, what's to stop polygamy? Or any weird arrrangement among people who claim to love each other?
Noah has a complicated answer involving child-raising, but I always thought this objection was a bit of a red herring. The reason I think this doesn't matter is that, even if the option were available, so few people would actually do it.
I think conservatives fear polygamy for two reasons: its prevalence in world history, and the propaganda of sexual revolutionaries. As to the latter point, I grew up in basically the heartland of the sexual revolution, and I can tell you, propaganda ain't practice. I do not personally know anyone who's successfully managed to pull off a polyamorous relationship, in the sense of having more than one partner of equal intimacy. The more usual arrangement is a pairing that allows a certain amount of adultery, but even that tends to get riven with jealousies. There are people who claim they can do it, but I just don't think this is a model that's going to conquer the world. For most people, it fights their own emotional nature.
So what about polygamy in world history? I think that's largely the product of two (related) things: patriarchy and pro-natalism. You can see both of these at work in probably the best-known example of a polygamous society, the Hebraic one of the Old Testament. Everyone is clearly obsessed with having as many children as possible. God's promise to Abraham isn't heaven or eternal life, but progeny: "as many as grains of sand on the beach." There was also the dubious business with the handmaids.
This is the norm in a lot of agrarian societies, and it's not hard to see how it would lead to polygamy. With every wife a man adds on, his descendants increase exponentially. This also explains why polygamous societies almost always are really polygamous only for men. Reproductively speaking, women have nothing to gain with multiple husbands, and men have everything to lose.
Without this pressure, monogamy (albeit imperfect monogamy) seems to be the human norm. It's interesting to note that, although polygamy is the rule for agrarian societies, monogamy is the rule for hunter-gatherers. As with those of us in the industrial age, they have no great motive to have a lot of kids (indeed, their nomadic lifestyle means they can't handle too many babies). So as with us moderns, their marriages are based mainly on personal affection.
This doesn't mean that polygamy, if it were allowed here, would never happen. Obviously, some people are doing it already. I just don't think it's any real threat to the monogamous model, so we shouldn't worry about it. For that matter, the same is true of gay marriage. Some conservatives, weirdly, seem to agree with the sexual revolutionaries that enforced Judeo-Christian values are all that keep us from total sexual chaos (or freedom, depending on how you look at it). But I don't think the available evidence supports that.
Noah is correct, I think, that conservatives' real beef with the way marriage is headed is precisely that it has become based largely on personal affection. This would generally push marriage away from polygamy rather than towards it, but it does push it toward things like gay marriage and more frequent divorce. Noah says that the real battle should be with divorce laws, since those have more to do with the actual destruction of marriages than gay marriage ever would. I think that's a more internally consistent position, though I see problems with that too. However, right now I'm getting tired and headachy, so I'll blog about later...
When I look at the world
Rachel Cunliffe is grooving on some U2 lyrics. Yep, that's pretty much the story of my life...
Rachel Cunliffe is grooving on some U2 lyrics. Yep, that's pretty much the story of my life...
Tuesday, November 26, 2002
Name that deviance
Somehow, I've fallen way behind on my New Yorkers. It's not that I meant to, but this great pile of them seems to have materialized overnight. Which is my way of explaining why I'm just now commenting on an article from the Oct. 28 issue, on a Vermont town's battle with skinny-dippers.
Only it's not called skinny-dipping now, apparently; it's "clothing-optional recreational swimming." I note this because it seems that ever since the counterculture brought certain habits into general view, their practitioners have given them the clunkiest, most bureaucratic-sounding names imaginable. What used to be called "open marriage" or "swinging" has turned to "consensual non-monogamy." When I lived in San Francisco, this S&M group turned up at the gay-pride parade who called themselves, as I recall "People for Consensual Power Exchange."
What I also remember about the group was that they, like their name, seemed totally drained of eroticism. They were walking along in leather and chains, with one person (lighly) flagellating another and someone else be led by a leash, but they were smiling and waving like Miss America contestants. The church service I went to on Sunday was sexier than these folks. What this says, I think, is that sooner or later every fun activity is going to be taken over by the committee people.
I expect that America has a lot of people who swim nude, or swing, or do bondage, without being part of any movement or "scene." But every subset of the population has its organizers and club-formers, the sort of people who would be on the PTA or the neighborhood association. And part of this personality type is a yen for numbingly accurate language. In the New Yorker article, a leader of the skinny-dipper faction says, "I don't call myself a nudist, and most people who participate in nude recreation don't call themselves nudists. Although one in four Americans, based on a Roper poll, go skinny-dipping, it's something people like to keep private about themselves. A 'nudist,' by way of Webster's belongs to a cult. And I'd hardly call one in four Americans doing something cult behavior. The proper term is 'naturist,' which I don't mind, but, basically, I despise labelling of any type. I'm simply not clothing-obsessed."
There's a palpable insecurity under this. I doubt most people would think of a nudist as part of a cult, but clearly what's unusual about him and his friends is not that they swim naked but that they do it with each other (and, at this particular lake, sometimes hundreds of people). But clearly he doesn't like being thought of as weird. He seems to be saying, "This is perfectly normal, and if you don't think so, there's something funny about you -- you're clothing-obsessed."
I felt a similar insecurity underlying the People for Consensual Power Exchange, and that was what made them even weirder. It's like they were worried about what Middle America would think of them. It's just a little consenting power exchange between adults -- it's not like we're sickos or anything! I felt like saying, look, there's nothing politically correct about S&M, it's dark and deviant, and that's exactly why you like it. So give it up already.
Somehow, I've fallen way behind on my New Yorkers. It's not that I meant to, but this great pile of them seems to have materialized overnight. Which is my way of explaining why I'm just now commenting on an article from the Oct. 28 issue, on a Vermont town's battle with skinny-dippers.
Only it's not called skinny-dipping now, apparently; it's "clothing-optional recreational swimming." I note this because it seems that ever since the counterculture brought certain habits into general view, their practitioners have given them the clunkiest, most bureaucratic-sounding names imaginable. What used to be called "open marriage" or "swinging" has turned to "consensual non-monogamy." When I lived in San Francisco, this S&M group turned up at the gay-pride parade who called themselves, as I recall "People for Consensual Power Exchange."
What I also remember about the group was that they, like their name, seemed totally drained of eroticism. They were walking along in leather and chains, with one person (lighly) flagellating another and someone else be led by a leash, but they were smiling and waving like Miss America contestants. The church service I went to on Sunday was sexier than these folks. What this says, I think, is that sooner or later every fun activity is going to be taken over by the committee people.
I expect that America has a lot of people who swim nude, or swing, or do bondage, without being part of any movement or "scene." But every subset of the population has its organizers and club-formers, the sort of people who would be on the PTA or the neighborhood association. And part of this personality type is a yen for numbingly accurate language. In the New Yorker article, a leader of the skinny-dipper faction says, "I don't call myself a nudist, and most people who participate in nude recreation don't call themselves nudists. Although one in four Americans, based on a Roper poll, go skinny-dipping, it's something people like to keep private about themselves. A 'nudist,' by way of Webster's belongs to a cult. And I'd hardly call one in four Americans doing something cult behavior. The proper term is 'naturist,' which I don't mind, but, basically, I despise labelling of any type. I'm simply not clothing-obsessed."
There's a palpable insecurity under this. I doubt most people would think of a nudist as part of a cult, but clearly what's unusual about him and his friends is not that they swim naked but that they do it with each other (and, at this particular lake, sometimes hundreds of people). But clearly he doesn't like being thought of as weird. He seems to be saying, "This is perfectly normal, and if you don't think so, there's something funny about you -- you're clothing-obsessed."
I felt a similar insecurity underlying the People for Consensual Power Exchange, and that was what made them even weirder. It's like they were worried about what Middle America would think of them. It's just a little consenting power exchange between adults -- it's not like we're sickos or anything! I felt like saying, look, there's nothing politically correct about S&M, it's dark and deviant, and that's exactly why you like it. So give it up already.
I must be in a nitpicky mood today...
First I went after Aziz Poonawalla's etymology (see the comments). Then I read Tony Woodlief's essay on Whitakker Chambers, and all I could think was, there are no "Hollywood beach houses," because Hollywood has no beach! The Hollywood Hills are where movie stars live...the beach houses are in Malibu...
I should say, lest anyone get the wrong idea, that I think Aziz's website is really cool. Islam is probably the major world religion I know least about, and he's an invaluable source of smart, learned commentary on it. (Tony's website I've been to less, but it looks interesting. Great design!)
First I went after Aziz Poonawalla's etymology (see the comments). Then I read Tony Woodlief's essay on Whitakker Chambers, and all I could think was, there are no "Hollywood beach houses," because Hollywood has no beach! The Hollywood Hills are where movie stars live...the beach houses are in Malibu...
I should say, lest anyone get the wrong idea, that I think Aziz's website is really cool. Islam is probably the major world religion I know least about, and he's an invaluable source of smart, learned commentary on it. (Tony's website I've been to less, but it looks interesting. Great design!)
Sunday, November 24, 2002
Under the water
I went back to the Christian Assembly today, sans Telford this time, but the service was of added interest. It was a special Thanksgiving service that included about 20 people getting baptized. I'd never seen a baptism before, even the infant kind.
The CA baptizes by full-body immersion, which didn't surprise me -- the soaking, messy, over-your-head-and-up-your-nose method is pretty much how they do everything. Watching this I remembered a former boyfriend of mine who briefly attended a Church of Christ, but left when he was told his childhood Methodist baptism by sprinkling was not going to save him, and he had to be rebaptized by immersion. I don't blame him for getting annoyed at the idea that his immortal soul depended on such minutiae, but what I observed at the church must definitely be different from the genteel infant drizzling that he probably got. The mood was excited, charged, frankly kind of sexy. The baptizees were practically vibrating with anticipation as they came to the pool; one young man about to get dunked suddenly looked at the congregation and broke into a huge, mischievous grin, as if he were about to get lucky in a big way. ("Hold him under for a while," the pastor advised drily.)
I was maybe thinking along these lines partly because there was communion before the baptism. This was my fifth trip to the CA, and it was the first time they'd done communion. There's something creepily erotic about putting someone's flesh and blood in your mouth, even if only symbolically. I do not say this to imply there's anything smutty about it, but it's just a bit disconcerting to be brought up against the intimacy of Christian practice. When you spend your time interpreting Bible passages or debating the problem of evil it's easy to forget. Heck, I'm sure a lot of Christians take communion without thinking about the full implications. But for me, watching from within but from the outside, the metaphor of the bride and the bridegroom never seemed more vivid.
I went back to the Christian Assembly today, sans Telford this time, but the service was of added interest. It was a special Thanksgiving service that included about 20 people getting baptized. I'd never seen a baptism before, even the infant kind.
The CA baptizes by full-body immersion, which didn't surprise me -- the soaking, messy, over-your-head-and-up-your-nose method is pretty much how they do everything. Watching this I remembered a former boyfriend of mine who briefly attended a Church of Christ, but left when he was told his childhood Methodist baptism by sprinkling was not going to save him, and he had to be rebaptized by immersion. I don't blame him for getting annoyed at the idea that his immortal soul depended on such minutiae, but what I observed at the church must definitely be different from the genteel infant drizzling that he probably got. The mood was excited, charged, frankly kind of sexy. The baptizees were practically vibrating with anticipation as they came to the pool; one young man about to get dunked suddenly looked at the congregation and broke into a huge, mischievous grin, as if he were about to get lucky in a big way. ("Hold him under for a while," the pastor advised drily.)
I was maybe thinking along these lines partly because there was communion before the baptism. This was my fifth trip to the CA, and it was the first time they'd done communion. There's something creepily erotic about putting someone's flesh and blood in your mouth, even if only symbolically. I do not say this to imply there's anything smutty about it, but it's just a bit disconcerting to be brought up against the intimacy of Christian practice. When you spend your time interpreting Bible passages or debating the problem of evil it's easy to forget. Heck, I'm sure a lot of Christians take communion without thinking about the full implications. But for me, watching from within but from the outside, the metaphor of the bride and the bridegroom never seemed more vivid.
Saturday, November 23, 2002
My body is opaque to the soul
Those who've been following the on-and-off dialogue between Telford Work and me may have noticed that my last post directed at him did not get answered. This is not because he hasn't wanted to, but because he's been so busy. (I think if I want prompt responses I'll have to wait till he gets tenure!) This week he's at a theology convention in the Great Frozen North, but before he left he told me he was planning to respond along the lines of a chapter by Nancey Murphy in a multivolume theology textbook he uses, and I was welcome to check it out.
I didn't expect to find this thing even in L.A.'s vast library system, and indeed I didn't. But I found another book by Murphy and some collaborators, called Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature. This looks at scientific work related to the mind, such as Darwinism, genetics and neuroscience, and attempts to reconcile it with the Christian view of the soul. I've only started the first chapter, but Murphy sets out the endgame:
This isn't exactly what I asked -- my original argument with Telford was about the origin of evil. But there's enough of an overlap in the subject matter that I think the book could be productive. Minute Particulars has also been exploring this subject here and here, so look out for future posts as I read the book.
I already have one question though. Murphy starts out with a quick review of historic Western thinking about the soul, which is very interesting, but she evidently expects her readers to already know more than I do. So what the frick is the difference between an eternal soul and an immortal soul? This was apparently Augustine's idea, but she never explains what it means.
Those who've been following the on-and-off dialogue between Telford Work and me may have noticed that my last post directed at him did not get answered. This is not because he hasn't wanted to, but because he's been so busy. (I think if I want prompt responses I'll have to wait till he gets tenure!) This week he's at a theology convention in the Great Frozen North, but before he left he told me he was planning to respond along the lines of a chapter by Nancey Murphy in a multivolume theology textbook he uses, and I was welcome to check it out.
I didn't expect to find this thing even in L.A.'s vast library system, and indeed I didn't. But I found another book by Murphy and some collaborators, called Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature. This looks at scientific work related to the mind, such as Darwinism, genetics and neuroscience, and attempts to reconcile it with the Christian view of the soul. I've only started the first chapter, but Murphy sets out the endgame:
The goal of the book is to demonstrate the possibility of an account of human nature that satisfies the demands of these many disciplines -- to show that the portraits sketched from these various disciplinary perspectives may all in fact be of the same "person." Each chapter in its own way points toward a view of the person that we call "non-reductive physicalism." "Physicalism" signals our agreement with the scientists and philosophers who hold it is not necessary to postulate a second metaphysical entity, the soul or mind, to account for human capacities and distinctiveness. "Non-reductive" indicates our rejection of contemporary philosophical views that say the person is "nothing but" a body...So the difficult issue is to explain how we can claim that we are our bodies, yet without denying the "higher" capacities that we think of as being essential for our humanness: rationality, emotion, morality, free will, and, most important, the capacity to be in relationship with God.
This isn't exactly what I asked -- my original argument with Telford was about the origin of evil. But there's enough of an overlap in the subject matter that I think the book could be productive. Minute Particulars has also been exploring this subject here and here, so look out for future posts as I read the book.
I already have one question though. Murphy starts out with a quick review of historic Western thinking about the soul, which is very interesting, but she evidently expects her readers to already know more than I do. So what the frick is the difference between an eternal soul and an immortal soul? This was apparently Augustine's idea, but she never explains what it means.
Mamma mia
Looking over last night's post, I get the feeling it was one of those very long posts that was also too short. I hit on three or four rather large subjects without really explaining them, and I think I was a bit too flippant in places.
My "quick-and-dirty abortion test" was meant to be somewhat facetious -- there are, of course, more reasons than that why someone would have a certain opinion about abortion. But I do think this is one important reason why the two sides tend to talk past each other. I expect that today, after the sexual revolution, problems with men have swung more toward irresponsibility/abandonment than a guy wanting a woman to become a Stepford wife. That's been true in my own experience with men, I have to say. This does not mean that the Stepford-wife fear was all made up, though, which a lot of anti-feminists seem to imply. For women who, as I said, deviate from the mean in certain ways -- being more intelligent, ambitious, aggressive, less nurturant, and so on -- I can imagine life as a suburban housewife must seem pretty deadening.
I should also say that one way that I deviate from the mean is my lack of desire to have children. I was thinking about this after the last time I saw Telford, because as we were talking and walking around the church he was carrying his baby with him. I treated the baby as if he were a backpack, but sometimes people we encountered would stop and dote on him, and I'd think, oh yeah, that's kind of the normal thing to do with a baby.
I don't know if I'm going to feel this way forever. I have never been married nor come very close to getting married, so maybe this is an emotional realm I just haven't been to yet. But one reason the article rubbed me the wrong way was its unspoken assumption that all women, or nearly all of them, want children. A quarter of women in the West will never have them, we're told ominously. But do they want to? And even if they do, how strongly?
I realize there was a book earlier this year alleging that feminism had convinced a lot of women to put off childbearing for careers, only to discover in their 30s that their fertility declined. But there have been some issues with the data, and even apart from that, I wonder how widespread the problem actually is. Only a fairly elite group of women have a "career" as opposed to just working, and in my experience only the hyperambitious really put off childbearing for that long for that reason. The unnamed TV journalist Shanahan cites regrets putting off childbearing for her career; but clearly this is an ambitious woman. If she'd had kids and slowed her career, would she be pining for her lost shot at being an ABC broadcaster?
Maybe if I don't have kids, one day I'll regret it. I don't know. There are a lot of things I could regret about my life later. But I do resent the implication that I or any other childless woman am so weak-minded that feminist brainwashing has overcome my naturally strong desire to reproduce. Real life is more complicated, more varied, than that.
Looking over last night's post, I get the feeling it was one of those very long posts that was also too short. I hit on three or four rather large subjects without really explaining them, and I think I was a bit too flippant in places.
My "quick-and-dirty abortion test" was meant to be somewhat facetious -- there are, of course, more reasons than that why someone would have a certain opinion about abortion. But I do think this is one important reason why the two sides tend to talk past each other. I expect that today, after the sexual revolution, problems with men have swung more toward irresponsibility/abandonment than a guy wanting a woman to become a Stepford wife. That's been true in my own experience with men, I have to say. This does not mean that the Stepford-wife fear was all made up, though, which a lot of anti-feminists seem to imply. For women who, as I said, deviate from the mean in certain ways -- being more intelligent, ambitious, aggressive, less nurturant, and so on -- I can imagine life as a suburban housewife must seem pretty deadening.
I should also say that one way that I deviate from the mean is my lack of desire to have children. I was thinking about this after the last time I saw Telford, because as we were talking and walking around the church he was carrying his baby with him. I treated the baby as if he were a backpack, but sometimes people we encountered would stop and dote on him, and I'd think, oh yeah, that's kind of the normal thing to do with a baby.
I don't know if I'm going to feel this way forever. I have never been married nor come very close to getting married, so maybe this is an emotional realm I just haven't been to yet. But one reason the article rubbed me the wrong way was its unspoken assumption that all women, or nearly all of them, want children. A quarter of women in the West will never have them, we're told ominously. But do they want to? And even if they do, how strongly?
I realize there was a book earlier this year alleging that feminism had convinced a lot of women to put off childbearing for careers, only to discover in their 30s that their fertility declined. But there have been some issues with the data, and even apart from that, I wonder how widespread the problem actually is. Only a fairly elite group of women have a "career" as opposed to just working, and in my experience only the hyperambitious really put off childbearing for that long for that reason. The unnamed TV journalist Shanahan cites regrets putting off childbearing for her career; but clearly this is an ambitious woman. If she'd had kids and slowed her career, would she be pining for her lost shot at being an ABC broadcaster?
Maybe if I don't have kids, one day I'll regret it. I don't know. There are a lot of things I could regret about my life later. But I do resent the implication that I or any other childless woman am so weak-minded that feminist brainwashing has overcome my naturally strong desire to reproduce. Real life is more complicated, more varied, than that.
In praise of deviant women
Eve Tushnet links to a story by an Australian Catholic woman who has nine children. She goes into a screed in the middle against feminism and the Pill, and stuffs a paragraph with extraordinary statistics:
Let's take the last claim first, since that one I know is wrong. The idea that teenagers are getting pregnant and having kids more than ever before has to be one of the most persistent myths of our age. I was discussing this on a message board a while ago and found some great CDC links that showed birth data by age going all the way back to 1960, but since then the CDC rearranged their website and seem annoyingly short on historical data. (The best they have now is a record of births, which is all raw numbers and no rates.) But basically what it indicated was that teen births have dropped steadily the whole time. The birth rate isn't the same as the pregnancy rate, and pregnancy data from before 1970 seems unavailable, but the latest American teen pregnancy data shows we are not at an all-time high with that either.
I am speaking of America, of course, and not the whole West. But I am also looking at Francis Fukuyama's The Great Disruption (a very interesting book, even if you don't agree with all of it), which points out that the whole Western world has followed the same pattern in the last 40 years: a dropping birth rate, and rising illegitimacy rate.
Teens have followed this general trend. While the overall teen birth rate has dropped, the unmarried birth rate has almost tripled. As I blogged some time ago, Western society has been extending childhood in the last century, creating the category of "teenager" as someone who's past puberty but not considered capable of taking on adult responsibility. If there seemed to be no teen pregnancy problem before, it was because the idea of 18-year-olds having families didn't seem so scary then.
Some conservatives have gone ahead and boldly promoted teen marriage, but this is not something society as a whole (or conservatives as a whole) are comfortable with. And there's another problem. One age category where fertility has gone up in the last 40 years is for girls under 15. So while I generally agree that a lot of older teens are kept in an artificial childhood for too long, you'd have a hard time explaining why a 13-year-old should get hitched.
All this is not to deny that there's a problem, but I think the reason why the myth persists that teen pregnancy is something new is that people are uncomfortable with the trade-offs societies have traditionally made with teen libidos, especially with regard to girls. Whether marrying them off, keeping them under lock and key, infibulating them or whatever, people's options have never been wonderful.
Anyway, the other statistics Shanahan cites are problematic mostly in the correlation-causation question. I don't know if it's really true that a quarter of all women in the West will never marry or have kids -- certainly that's not true in America, but in some parts of Europe cohabitation has displaced marriage to a large extent (the cohab rate for twentysomethings in Sweden is 44%, according to Fukuyama) and birth rates over there are very low. I don't know on what she bases the rise of "depressive illness," but mental illness stats are heavily swayed by the reporting and diagnosis rate (especially since it can be quite subjective to decide when someone is clinically depressed and when they're just down). The breast-cancer rate I assume she mentions because of the theory that the increase in breast cancer came because having fewer children means having more periods, which increases the risk of cell mutation and thus cancer. Even if that's true, that strikes me as not a very good reason to have a boatload of kids; and as the article I linked to points out, it could be just as well accomplished by being permanently on the Pill without doing the 28-day rotation.
But there's the larger question: did "militant feminism" cause all this? It's interesting to contrast this with Fukuyama's thesis. Fukuyama is also a conservative who takes a rather cautious view of both feminism and the Pill, but he doesn't think they appeared in a vacuum. In his view, there was a larger shift in the modern age that a) reduced the need and the economic incentives for having a lot of kids and b) turned paid labor from mainly physical to mainly mental, thereby removing men's advantage at it. That, combined with the Pill, meant women no longer had their traditional biological restrictions. This implies that while social forces allowed women to do certain things, it never forced them to.
Conservatives like Shanahan, or certain evolutionary psychologists like Robert Wright, can't really understand why women would go along with what should be against their nature, so they tend to assume women have been conned. Shanahan says:
Buried in the second sentence of the second paragraph is what to my mind is the key to the whole thing. The underlying assumption behind this and a lot of other writings of this sort is that there is a single conflict between men and women: he wants sex, she wants commitment. There's a lot of truth to that, of course. But it completely glosses over the possibility that women can also want freedom.
I was thinking when I was writing about abortion a while ago that you could probably do a quick-and-dirty test to predict what a woman's view of abortion would be. What do you fear more from a man: that he'll be irresponsible and abandon you, or that he'll control you and take over your life?
Most women fear both, but traditional gender relations tended to thrive on the former, while a great deal of Second Wave feminism was founded on the latter. The abortion debate crystallizes this nicely: the pro-choice side fulminates against invading and controlling women's bodies, while the pro-life side fears enabling sexual irresponsibility.
I think there's another factor that divides feminists from tradtionalists and ev-psych theorists, which is what you might call "deviation from the mean." Arguments based on the essential nature of woman -- whether it's based on Darwin or Eve -- tend to describe a prototype, an average. Yet women all deviate to various degrees. One accidental experience that helped me understand the older women in my family, and why they're feminists, was the 1960 movie Where the Boys Are. That film featured three college friends, each of whom has a "problem" in landing a husband: one's too tall, one's too athletic, and one's too intelligent. Since some women in my clan go 3-for-3 on that score, and most go at least 2-for-3, it's not surprising they hated that era.
The trouble with essentializing women is that it tries to squeeze such deviations into the norm, and that norm is often defined by how women are different from men. So if women naturally have a closer bond with their children than men, children become their only acceptable business. If they are less aggressive, than all aggressive occupations are unfeminine. And so on.
To my mind, feminism was the rebellion of abnormal women. And since I am a woman who is rather outside the mean in several ways, I sympathize. I think this becomes a problem only when you want to make the deviant into the norm, or deny that a norm exists. So that women like Shanahan -- who, historically speaking, is very normal -- start feeling like there's something funny about them.
I think the world's big enough for women who want nine kids and women who want none. Let's just stop trying to figure out who's a "real woman," OK?
Eve Tushnet links to a story by an Australian Catholic woman who has nine children. She goes into a screed in the middle against feminism and the Pill, and stuffs a paragraph with extraordinary statistics:
After 30 years and more of militant feminism, almost a quarter of women in the West never marry or have children, one in three pregnancies ends in abortion, and there has been an alarming rise in depressive illness and breast cancer. High divorce rates and the sexualisation of society, meanwhile, are having terrible effects on children. Despite the availability of the pill, there are more teenage pregnancies than ever.
Let's take the last claim first, since that one I know is wrong. The idea that teenagers are getting pregnant and having kids more than ever before has to be one of the most persistent myths of our age. I was discussing this on a message board a while ago and found some great CDC links that showed birth data by age going all the way back to 1960, but since then the CDC rearranged their website and seem annoyingly short on historical data. (The best they have now is a record of births, which is all raw numbers and no rates.) But basically what it indicated was that teen births have dropped steadily the whole time. The birth rate isn't the same as the pregnancy rate, and pregnancy data from before 1970 seems unavailable, but the latest American teen pregnancy data shows we are not at an all-time high with that either.
I am speaking of America, of course, and not the whole West. But I am also looking at Francis Fukuyama's The Great Disruption (a very interesting book, even if you don't agree with all of it), which points out that the whole Western world has followed the same pattern in the last 40 years: a dropping birth rate, and rising illegitimacy rate.
Teens have followed this general trend. While the overall teen birth rate has dropped, the unmarried birth rate has almost tripled. As I blogged some time ago, Western society has been extending childhood in the last century, creating the category of "teenager" as someone who's past puberty but not considered capable of taking on adult responsibility. If there seemed to be no teen pregnancy problem before, it was because the idea of 18-year-olds having families didn't seem so scary then.
Some conservatives have gone ahead and boldly promoted teen marriage, but this is not something society as a whole (or conservatives as a whole) are comfortable with. And there's another problem. One age category where fertility has gone up in the last 40 years is for girls under 15. So while I generally agree that a lot of older teens are kept in an artificial childhood for too long, you'd have a hard time explaining why a 13-year-old should get hitched.
All this is not to deny that there's a problem, but I think the reason why the myth persists that teen pregnancy is something new is that people are uncomfortable with the trade-offs societies have traditionally made with teen libidos, especially with regard to girls. Whether marrying them off, keeping them under lock and key, infibulating them or whatever, people's options have never been wonderful.
Anyway, the other statistics Shanahan cites are problematic mostly in the correlation-causation question. I don't know if it's really true that a quarter of all women in the West will never marry or have kids -- certainly that's not true in America, but in some parts of Europe cohabitation has displaced marriage to a large extent (the cohab rate for twentysomethings in Sweden is 44%, according to Fukuyama) and birth rates over there are very low. I don't know on what she bases the rise of "depressive illness," but mental illness stats are heavily swayed by the reporting and diagnosis rate (especially since it can be quite subjective to decide when someone is clinically depressed and when they're just down). The breast-cancer rate I assume she mentions because of the theory that the increase in breast cancer came because having fewer children means having more periods, which increases the risk of cell mutation and thus cancer. Even if that's true, that strikes me as not a very good reason to have a boatload of kids; and as the article I linked to points out, it could be just as well accomplished by being permanently on the Pill without doing the 28-day rotation.
But there's the larger question: did "militant feminism" cause all this? It's interesting to contrast this with Fukuyama's thesis. Fukuyama is also a conservative who takes a rather cautious view of both feminism and the Pill, but he doesn't think they appeared in a vacuum. In his view, there was a larger shift in the modern age that a) reduced the need and the economic incentives for having a lot of kids and b) turned paid labor from mainly physical to mainly mental, thereby removing men's advantage at it. That, combined with the Pill, meant women no longer had their traditional biological restrictions. This implies that while social forces allowed women to do certain things, it never forced them to.
Conservatives like Shanahan, or certain evolutionary psychologists like Robert Wright, can't really understand why women would go along with what should be against their nature, so they tend to assume women have been conned. Shanahan says:
The contraceptive pill was first marketed 30 years ago as a glossy package of fertility control and sexual freedom. But, like a series of boxes one inside the other, women (and not a few men) have begun to find that at the end there is nothing but an empty box. The feminist obsession with ‘career’, not motherhood, as the central element of women’s self-definition made fertility the enemy. Babies can really wreck your career. They consume your life and your heart...
The irony is that, despite the pill being pushed as an instrument for the liberation of women, its greatest beneficiaries are men. If anything encourages an abrogation of responsibility and an unwillingness to form lasting relationships, it’s the pill. But feminists aren’t going to admit that part of the trick. Instead they try to convince women that they can do it alone. Who needs a husband? Buy a turkey-baster, demand ‘the right’ to IVF — or frozen eggs.
Buried in the second sentence of the second paragraph is what to my mind is the key to the whole thing. The underlying assumption behind this and a lot of other writings of this sort is that there is a single conflict between men and women: he wants sex, she wants commitment. There's a lot of truth to that, of course. But it completely glosses over the possibility that women can also want freedom.
I was thinking when I was writing about abortion a while ago that you could probably do a quick-and-dirty test to predict what a woman's view of abortion would be. What do you fear more from a man: that he'll be irresponsible and abandon you, or that he'll control you and take over your life?
Most women fear both, but traditional gender relations tended to thrive on the former, while a great deal of Second Wave feminism was founded on the latter. The abortion debate crystallizes this nicely: the pro-choice side fulminates against invading and controlling women's bodies, while the pro-life side fears enabling sexual irresponsibility.
I think there's another factor that divides feminists from tradtionalists and ev-psych theorists, which is what you might call "deviation from the mean." Arguments based on the essential nature of woman -- whether it's based on Darwin or Eve -- tend to describe a prototype, an average. Yet women all deviate to various degrees. One accidental experience that helped me understand the older women in my family, and why they're feminists, was the 1960 movie Where the Boys Are. That film featured three college friends, each of whom has a "problem" in landing a husband: one's too tall, one's too athletic, and one's too intelligent. Since some women in my clan go 3-for-3 on that score, and most go at least 2-for-3, it's not surprising they hated that era.
The trouble with essentializing women is that it tries to squeeze such deviations into the norm, and that norm is often defined by how women are different from men. So if women naturally have a closer bond with their children than men, children become their only acceptable business. If they are less aggressive, than all aggressive occupations are unfeminine. And so on.
To my mind, feminism was the rebellion of abnormal women. And since I am a woman who is rather outside the mean in several ways, I sympathize. I think this becomes a problem only when you want to make the deviant into the norm, or deny that a norm exists. So that women like Shanahan -- who, historically speaking, is very normal -- start feeling like there's something funny about them.
I think the world's big enough for women who want nine kids and women who want none. Let's just stop trying to figure out who's a "real woman," OK?
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