Fr. Fox, behind the collar

Father Martin Fox, who posts the best Sunday sermons on the web at Bonfire of the Vanities, is the focus of the Cincinnati Vocation Office's latest video in a series called The Man Behind the Collar. We've had the good fortune to visit with Father Fox twice. Besides being an all-around interesting guy, he has the most pastoral sensibility of any priest I've ever met.



H/T Rich Leonardi.

Continuing Education Book Bleg

Back in the heady days of the beginning of this fiscal year (my company's fiscal year runs offset from the calendar year), when I as filling out my annual performance plan, I added a section for "personal and professional development" in which to assign myself to read books. Last year, I'd done this without authorization, and so the assignments were designed to fit my existing reading habits:

At least one book each from each of the following categories:
1) Literature
2) History
3) Philosophy or Theology
4) Science
5) Economics or Mathematics

This year, when I queued up the same performance plan item again, my boss sent it back with the advice that I try to be a bit more "relevant", with the result that I ended up with:

At least one book each from each of the following categories:
1) Economics
2) Mathematics or Statistics
3) Leadership

However, I'm promptly forgot about this less self-indulgent assignment, and so as I near the end of the fiscal year I realize that I've only hit the first of the three.

So, in the interest of not having to give myself a poor assessment on a strictly voluntary performance plan item (though given the show-off-ish nature of the assignment, perhaps it's no more than I deserve) I ask our knowing readers: Do you have any books you would particularly recommend which I could make the case fit 2) or 3)? These certainly don't have to be textbooks, and I'm prepared to make a creative case that something fits one of the requirements. (For instance, I've contemplated reading Machiavelli's The Prince again in order to cover "Leadership", if a better idea doesn't come along.)

Thoughts?

Road Trippin'

Gentle readers! Who lives along this route?


View Larger Map

Google gives three different routes; I'm not married to any of them, though I would like to pass through Blacksburg, VA, as upon a time it was my stomping grounds.

Raising Consciousness through Easy Virtue

I've been watching more than my usual share of movies lately -- a function both of feeling brain dead after a particularly busy and stressful couple weeks at work, and the fact that MrsDarwin (rounding the corner from first to second trimester) often crashes right after the kids do, leaving me with nearly bachelor levels of free time late at night. Last night I made an attempt at The Constant Gardener, though in the end I dropped it after a bit over half an hour. I was in the mood for something much more noir like, not the earnestly quiet improbability of recent John le Carre. (Now if someone would start making movies of Alan Furst novels, I'd be all over it.) I could take a story about Big Pharma running illegal human testing rings in the third world and killing beautiful young activists who see through their plans in a silly action movie sufficiently punctuated by explosions and chases , but it's rather uninvolving in a movie that takes itself deadly seriously.

But what struck me in particular was that Constant Gardener had the same inciting incident as a more entertaining movie I watched earlier this week, Iron Man. In both movies, the hero is a front man (either the quietly earnest Ralph Fiennes or the wildly amusing Robert Downey Jr.) for evil organizations without really knowing it, and his path towards eventual heroism begins when an attractive and earnestly progressive female reporter confronts him, asks uncomfortable questions, accuses him of apologizing for an evil organization, and then is next seen taking her clothes off with him in bed.

Tony Stark in Iron Man is protected by his loyal personal assistant Pepper Potts the next morning when she (in her own words) "takes out the trash" and so the Christine Everhart character is restricted to showing up at key intervals to ask Stark probing questions and move the plot forward.

Justin Quayle, on the other hand, has no such protector, and the quiet and polite Englishman soon finds himself in a sudden marriage-of-convenience with Tessa, the young activist who (after landing in bed with him after confronting him about the Iraq war in a press conference he was giving for another diplomat) demands that he take her with him to Africa where his next assignment is.

Two instances, of course, do not make a trend. I'm trying to think of other examples in which movie writers decided the best way to raise the consciousness of their male hero was to throw an idealistic female reporter at him, leading to salvation through one night stand. Thank You For Smoking would count, except that the anti-hero never turns around, he just gets out of his current difficulties and carries on.

Do we have a trend here? Perhaps this is the inverse of my long standing assumption that more traditional mores are likely to win out in the end because they perpetuate and are perpetuated by stable families: Progressive ideas are destined to win out because hot female proponents will sleep with anyone who doesn't agree with them. Then, after we spend the next two hours of screen time fighting big corporations, the world will be a better place. (This does seem rather rough on the men who already agree with progressive ideals, though. Do they get any time?)

The Brotherhood of Man

Darwin and I watched How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying last night. I'd never seen it before, but I did recognize the signature song The Brotherhood of Man. Back when we lived in California, while waiting for Darwin to complete his two-hour commute home, I used to park my more and more vastly pregnant self in front of re-runs of the Drew Carey show. Every now and then the cast would break out into a musical number, one of which was The Brotherhood of Man. (For whatever reason, the two seconds of choreography in which the guys dancing down the stairs slapped their knees has remained indelibly engraved in my mind.)

So, for Friday:

What Are the Chances?

A bloke in the UK modifies the Drake equation (used to calculate the likelihood of our contacting an alien civilization) to calculate the likelihood of his finding a girlfriend in London. His final conclusion:

So, what this means is that there are 10,510 people in the UK that satisfy these most basic criteria for being my girlfriend. That is 0.00017% of the UK and 0.0014% of Londoners, which doesn’t seem so bad. On a given night in London, there is greater than a 1 in 1000 chance that I will meet an attractive woman between the ages of 24 and 34 with a university degree. Of course this does not take into account the fraction of these women that will find me attractive (depressingly low), the fraction of these women who will be single (falling with age) and, perhaps most importantly, the fraction of these women who I will get along with. Including such factors would greatly reduce the above figure of 10,510. A rough estimate puts the number of potential girlfriends accounting for these three additional criteria (1 in 20 of the women find me attractive, half are single and I get along with 1 in 10) at 26. That’s correct. There are 26 women in London with whom I might have a wonderful relationship. So, on a given night out in London there is a 0.0000034% chance of meeting one of these special people, about 100 times better than finding an alien civilization we can communicate with. That’s a 1 in 285,000 chance. Not great.

Quote of the Day: Hayek on Individualism

From "Individualism: True and False" (1946)

...[T]he state, the embodiment of deliberately organized and consciously directly power, ought to be only a small part of the much richer organism which we call "society," and that the former ought to provide merely a framework within which free (and therefore not "consciously directed") collaboration of men has the maximum scope.

This entails certain corollaries on which true individualism once more stands in sharp opposition to the false individualism of the rationalistic type. The first is that the deliberately organized state on the one side, and the individual on the other, far from being regarded as the only realities, while all the intermediate formations and associations are to be deliberately suppressed, as was the aim of the French Revolution, the noncompulsory conventions of social intercourse are considered as essential factors in preserving the orderly working of human society. The second is that the individual, in participating in the social processes, must be ready and willing to adjust himself to changes and to submit to conventions which are not the result of intelligent design, whose justification in the particular instance may not be recognizable, and which to him often appear unintelligible and irrational.
...
Quite as important for the functioning of an individualist society ... are the traditions and conventions which evolve in a free society and which, without being enforceable, establish flexible but normally observed rules that make the behavior of other people predictable in a high degree. The willingness to submit to such rules, not merely so long as one understands the reason for them but so long as one has no definite reasons to the contrary, is an essential condition for the gradual evolution and improvement of the rules of social intercourse; and the readiness ordinarily to submit to the products of a social process which nobody has designed and the reasons for which nobody may understand is also an indispensable condition if it is to be possible to dispense with compulsion. That the existence of common conventions and traditions among a group of people will enable them to work together smoothly and efficiently with much less formal organization and compulsion than a group without such common background, is, of course, a commonplace. But the reverse of this, while less familiar, is probably not less true: that coercion can probably only be kept to a minimum in a society where conventions and tradition have made the behavior of man to a large extent predictable.

This essay is one of twelve collected in Individualism and Economic Order.

Parental Dilemmas

As I snuggled next to my sleeping 16-month-old son last night, I pondered the great questions that afflict parents of boys:
1) How can I keep him always this safe and warm and secure, without having him always nestled in my armpit?
2) What can I do to get this boy to keep his pants on?

Credit Cards and Market Intelligence

The other day I ran into a link to this NY Times article about credit card companies using information about what people buy to attempt to "profile" customers and see who is likely to default on their consumer debt. I'm not sure if I'm particularly cynical or hard hearted, but I don't find myself as shocked as I gather the author is that credit card companies would do this. Credit card debt is unsecured, and so if someone declares bankruptcy, they often get almost nothing. Because of this, credit card companies are often willing to write off 50% or more of what someone owes in order to keep them from declaring bankruptcy.

Clearly, at that point, they face a huge amount of risk. They make up for that with interests rates much higher than you'd pay on secured debt, but even so I find it hard to blame them for wanting to gather what information they can based on customer activity to decide whether to extend someone more credit, or rein them in.

Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on the Theme by Thomas Tallis

Many of my favorite pieces of music I associate with the night sky. This is because my father, who was throughout my life a planetarium director, often used his favorite pieces of music as background during planetarium shows. Being the oldest, I frequently had the chance to tag along to planetarium shows, and sit under the dome, listening to my father's voice. And so now, when I hear something like Ralph Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on the Theme by Thomas Tallis I find myself thinking of the constellations, and I also find myself oddly misty about the eyes.

Random Linguistic Thought

Is it just me, or is English one of the few European languages which does not roll its R's in some way? I wonder why that is.

No More Debt, in theory and in practice

A few weeks ago Darwin's favorite economics podcast, EconTalk, featured Megan McArdle, a libertarian blogger he reads frequently. The topic was Debt and Self-Restraint, and a good portion of the podcast was devoted to McArdle discussing how she'd worked out of debt by establishing a budget, using cash instead of credit cards, and paying off loans as fast as possible. Of course these are pretty basic principles, McArdle allowed, but "pretty basic" does not translate into "universally followed". Even we, who consider ourselves basically financially savvy, found ourselves writhing guiltily as we pondered our lack of firm budget and our reliance on credit cards as our normal financial tool.

McArdle had been inspired to financial self-control while researching Dave Ramsey for an article she wrote for The Atlantic. We had never heard of Dave Ramsey, but it seems he's a financial guru with a radio following of 3 million listeners. So we bought Ramsey's latest book The Total Money Makeover (on Amazon, using a credit card), and read and discussed it over the holidays. In the book Ramsey says that people tell him that his book was the first one they'd read in ten years, and (to be honest) it does read rather at that level, but his process in a nutshell is:

1. Quit using credit cards
2. Make a budget in which every last dollar of income is accounted for.
3. Save $1000 as an emergency fund.
4. Start paying down debt (except your mortgage) with every extra dollar, starting with your smallest debt. Pay the minimum on all other debts.
5. As you pay off a debt, roll that money into paying off your next smallest debt.
6. Once your debt is paid, save a larger emergency cushion, perhaps equal to three months income.
7. Pay off your mortgage at an accelerated rate.
8. Invest, Give, and Have Some Fun with your money.

Our debt, we thought, lay in four categories: Student Loans, Mortgage, The Van, and The Dryer. In an act of self-delusion, perhaps, we never considered ourselves in credit card debt because we pay off our card each month. But, as we contemplated moving to an all-cash system, we had to confront what we knew intellectually but hadn't considered practically: that, if you pay your card on the due date each month, you're really two months in arrears. You have the month you're currently spending on, and the previous month for which you have the statement and the bill. This works out fine if you intend to keep paying your statement balance every month, but if (as we have for years) you do all your spending on the card, then when you decide that you want to switch to an all-cash economy you're faced with, well, debt.

So. Today is the first payday of the new year, and it's the day for the switch. We plan to follow Ramsey's basic outline, except that we're not going to pay down the smallest debt (the dryer -- which is at zero interest for another 8 months anyway) first. First, we're going to get out of credit card debt.

UPDATE: (A word from Darwin) The really tough thing, contemplating all this, has been accepting the idea of ceasing to use the credit card, going to an all cash budget, and then paying off the credit card over a series of months as a debt. I don't think I'd realized up until I contemplated this how much of my pride is wrapped up in the words "I don't carry a balance." Sure, at several points in our marriage, after a major expense (giving birth, etc.) we'd carried a credit card balance for a couple months, but in each case we'd budged very aggressively until we were back to paying off the entire credit card every month. I drew a lot of pride and satisfaction from thinking (when I read about how the average household carried 10K+ in credit card debt) "But we don't have a problem, we don't carry over a balance." thus putting ourselves in the group who cash in credit card rewards (in our case, we get Amazon gift certificates equal to 1% of our purchases) while never paying interest or fees.

The kicker, however, was realizing that if we ever had a major financial emergency (like if I lost my job) we'd have between one and two months complete spending already out there. Suddenly we'd be carrying a pretty substantial balance. And so we gritted our teeth and made the decision to step off the carousel voluntarily now, rather than finding ourselves pushed off at a time when it would represent a major crisis rather than a budgeting choice.

International De-lurker Day!

I looked for a graphic for this post, but it seems the two "De-lurker Day" badges are slightly less than savory...

Anyway, apparently it's International De-lurker Day! So, if you lurk around the site, come on out and say hi in the combox. Especially if you're international.

h/t to Bearing.

Pope John Paul on How to Live

"It is not wrong to want to live better; what is wrong is a style of life which is presumed to be better when it is directed towards "having" rather than "being," and which wants to have more, not in order to be more but in order to spend life in enjoyment as an end in itself."

--Pope John Paul II

(h/t to Happy Catholic)

A Republic of Masters

Over the last few months, I've been gradually working my way through a set of lectures on the history of the United States by professors Staloff and Masur of the City College of New York -- emphasis on the gradually as several months and 22 lectures in I'm around at around 1800.

One of the things that has been striking me is the discussion on the ideas about how a republic ought to function current among the colonists and the Founders' generation. In early America, it was generally only male property owners who could vote -- sometimes with an additional limitation on how much property you had to own. This was not, however, out of a desire to exclude the poor and empower the rich. (Though one could certainly see it that way, and I'm sure that some people did.) Rather, it's purpose was to assure that only "masters" had a voice in the running of the republic(s). I use the term "master" not in reference to slavery, but in an almost feudal sense. A master was a man who owned property in the sense of owning some means of support: an estate, a farm, a business, etc. But this wasn't just a position of power, it was also one of responsibility. A master was expected to assure the well-being of all those who worked for him or lived in his household/estate. Sometimes, these were one and the same. A master craftsman might well have one or two apprentices living in his house, with his family. Journeyman laborers might live in the shop, or also in his house. Even if his workers lived under another roof, a master was not merely an employer, he was also a patron and head of household to all who depended on him.

Thus, only masters were permitted to vote as a way to minimize the power of the wealthy masters over poorer masters (or farmers or craftsmen who owned property but weren't rich enough to employ anyone.) It was assumed that all those in a master's household would follow the master in his politics, and so if you had universal male suffrage, you would have been giving more votes to the masters who had more workers.

Further, since someone was not a master was in a state of dependence, it was assumed that allowing such a person to vote would present him with too much of a temptation to vote self-servingly: to support policies which would better his own condition rather than policies which would be to the common good. Masters, it was believed, would be able to be able to set self interest aside when guiding a republic, because they already had their basic needs assured. (Clearly a somewhat optimistic idea, but there it is.) This is one of the things which led the founders to recoil from "democracy" (which they equated with mob rule) while embracing the idea of a republic.

Now, one could theorize that this was always a fiction, that the idea of a republic ruled by masters with the common good in mind was a story that people told themselves in order to justify giving power only to the relatively well-off. But I'm not sure that this would be a believable claim. The revolution itself (and the escalating series of protests which led up to the actual revolution) gave ample opportunity for an oppressed and numerous underclass to gain power and demand universal suffrage (and through that suffrage, policies to economically limit the masters and better themselves.) This did not happen. And I think one fairly decent explanation for why is that the idea of masters taking care of their dependents worked -- at least enough of the time that a majority of non-masters were not ready to create social disturbance and disrupt the system.

That this set of obligations within society worked moderately well at the time would explain, in part, why the Founders placed such great emphasis on political liberty -- because non-state mechanisms were already functioning to assure the basic well being of society. It was over the coming decades, as employers grew larger and began to abandon the idea of being masters in the feudal sense, that those without property turned increasingly to the state for protection. Industrialization, a mass society, and a breakdown in traditional social obligations would lead future revolutionaries to seek a direct relationship between the individual and the state in order to assure basic needs -- something which at the time of the American Revolution it was assumed would be met through existing social structures of mutual obligation, and through escape valve of a massive and sparsely settled continent spreading out to the west of the colonies, where those feeling dispossessed could go seeking to become their own masters.

Happy Real Epiphany

20
C + M + B
10

Wishing all of our readers a blessed Epiphany.

Continuing Education

I gather I'm late to the game here, as it was rated on CNN's top 50 sites of 2009, but this is a really cool site. I'd run into Yale's free online video courses a couple years ago. These are not simplified public outreach courses designed for non-students, they are complete college courses by highly rated lecturers which are filmed while being taught and then made available as a whole on the web.

AcademicEarth aggregates those Yale courses along with more video courses from other top level universities. There are currently about 130 courses available.

At Least I Know I'm Free: A Myth That Unites

I was talking with a relative recently who was telling me about an incident a while back where the maintenance staff at the building he worked at had gone on strike and were picketing the building. Emails had gone out from the building management telling people not to get into arguments or cause incidents with the picketers, and it became a source of quite a bit of topic around the office. My relative was amused to hear expressed several times the sentiment, "That's what makes our country different from the rest of the world. Here, they have the freedom to hold a protest like that."

It if, of course, true that they have the freedom to picket their employer here. However, that's not necessarily a contrast with the rest of the developed world. They could do the same in thing in Canada, or the UK or France or Germany, etc. There is, as my relative pointed out, a tendency at times for Americans to assume that because our country was very consciously founded in order to secure certain freedoms, that this means that people who don't live in the US don't have the same freedoms. Obviously, some don't. One's freedom of political and economic expression is severely limited if you live in North Korea or China or Cuba or some such nation. But there are many other countries in which people enjoy basically all the same freedoms that we do.

This American tendency to assume that we are the only ones to enjoy the freedoms outlined in our Bill of Rights is something which very much annoys many people who consider the US to be dangerously nationalistic, or who would prefer that we see the US as just one other region, not better or worse than others. They have, thus, a strong reflex to squelch these kinds of slightly misguided patriotic outbursts when they hear them.

I do not argue that it's better for people to be ignorant of the legal conditions in other countries than otherwise, but there is, I think, a certain virtue to Americans' tendency to see America finding its uniqueness in being "conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men were created equal".

Americans have traditionally identified our freedoms a defining characteristics of what it means to be an American. As Lee Greenwood song that seemed to be playing all the time a few years ago went, "I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free."

Before people get angry about Americans acting like they have a monopoly on freedom, however, they should keep in mind that all countries are built around some sort of uniting characteristic. The US is moderately unique in that its uniting characteristics are abstract and essentially philosophical: ideas about political freedom and limitted government as laid out in the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, as well as a host of other writings ranging from Common Sense and the Federalist Papers to the Gettysburg Address and the I Have A Dream speech. Other countries tend to be founded fairly explicitly on the basis of a ethnic or cultural commonality. This idea that any unified cultural group deserves it's own country in some deep and important sense can lead to a great deal of conflict, especially when two culturally separate groups live mixed together (Israel and the Palestinians, Northern Ireland, the Balkans, etc.) or when a culturally dissimilar group has traditionally been incorporated into a country run by some larger groups (as with the Basque independence movement in Spain or the conflict over whether Russia should control Chechnya).

I'd much rather have Americans occasionally displaying ignorance about the civil rights available in other countries when talking about how essential they see freedom as being to our republic, then have people building their sense of identity and patriotism around being of suitably Arian stock, or some other sort of ethnic or cultural characteristic. Freedoms are something which not only can, but should, be extended to all people who live within our borders, and as such I can think of no better characteristic to base a sense of national identity. A sense of identity rooted in our political liberties not only makes it harder to interfere with the liberties themselves (which is doubtless a good thing) but also provides a unifying potential which is quite the opposite of the more traditional ethnic and political sources of national identity.

Mahna Mahna!

My sister and I have been singing the song from the Muppets all week -- the one that starts off with the guy bellowing, "Mahna Mahna!" So I resolved to search it on youtube and see the original.

"How are you going to find it?" she asked. "By searching for 'mahna mahna'?"

"Sure," I said. And lo and behold, when I started typing "muppets", youtube offered me a variety of options, the second of which was "muppets mahna mahna". So without further ado, here's "Mahna Mahna".

Feast Day Grumblings

It inordinately annoys me that driving up "church row" (the street on which our church is situated has a Presbyterian church, a Bible church, an Episcopal church, and our Catholic church) I saw the Episcopalians advertising on their sign board an Epiphany service which is actually on Epiphany. Whereas we, of course, have Epiphany today, on the tenth day of Christmas so as to celebrate it on the nearest Sunday.

Sigh...

I understand the bishops' desire to have people actually at mass to hear about feast days, and thus to move them to nearby Sundays, but treating a feast day like a bank holiday to be rounded off to the nearest convenient day (especially a feast day which has always been celebrated specifically on the twelfth day after Christmas) seems to take away rather from the importance of the feast as well.

So if you can forgive my reactionary tendencies, I shall be wishing everyone a joyous epiphany on the sixth.