Faceless Conversations

Kyle of Postmodern Papist has a post about the facelessness of blogging, and how the sense that one is not talking to a "real person" with a face seems inevitably to lead some people to behave much more beligerantly in the blogsphere than they would in real life.

It was occurring to me the other day that my online activities tend to fill gaps that I experience, from time to time, in my face-to-face existence.

I'd spent a fair amount of time on the early text-only forums and in long term email discussions back in the early-to-mid-nineties, when I was in high school -- to a great extent because my closest friends (those I could have intellectual conversations with) had moved away. During college, I pretty much completely abandoned the internet. But then afterwards, I gradually found myself slipping back into the habit, first on various forums, and later in the blogsphere. MrsDarwin and I, of course, talk all the time, about many of the same topics that end up gracing these "pages". But as our growing family and that of our friends results in our often not getting the chance to get together with other adult friends for a couple weeks at a time, the desire to find other means of conversation is strong.

In this regard, the faceless medium can (with the moral discipline to avoid flamewars) be a benefit in that one is able to toss out subjects for discussion which would be considered rude or threatening among any but the most intimate friends in real life. And indeed, there is a pleasant real-life follow through to such discussions, in that on the occasions that we have had the chance to get together with other bloggers in person, conversation tends to be easy and free even for those who write frequently about their introversion.

Unions vs. Free Elections

Former Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern has an editorial in this weekend's Wall Street Journal in which he break with current Democratic party orthodoxy by opposing the Orwellianly named "Employee Free Choice Act":

The key provision of EFCA is a change in the mechanism by which unions are formed and recognized. Instead of a private election with a secret ballot overseen by an impartial federal board, union organizers would simply need to gather signatures from more than 50% of the employees in a workplace or bargaining unit, a system known as "card-check." There are many documented cases where workers have been pressured, harassed, tricked and intimidated into signing cards that have led to mandatory payment of dues.

Under EFCA, workers could lose the freedom to express their will in private, the right to make a decision without anyone peering over their shoulder, free from fear of reprisal.

There's no question that unions have done much good for this country. Their tenacious efforts have benefited millions of workers and helped build a strong middle class. They gave workers a new voice and pushed for laws that protect individuals from unfair treatment. They have been a friend to the Democratic Party, and so I oppose this legislation respectfully and with care.

To my friends supporting EFCA I say this: We cannot be a party that strips working Americans of the right to a secret-ballot election. We are the party that has always defended the rights of the working class. To fail to ensure the right to vote free of intimidation and coercion from all sides would be a betrayal of what we have always championed.

Reading McGovern's piece, it struck me that there are really two ways in which an election helps prevent the undue intimidation of those voting.

The secrecy of your ballot is one element, but so is the fact that the election is held on a single day, and is then over. With the secret ballot, the voter is free from the fear of being subject to the vengeance of either a sore loser or a winning faction eager to weed out the disloyal.

But the fact that there is a single election day where one is only asked for one's decision once is also a key element for keeping elections fair and free. Imagine if, in the presidential election, the supports of one candidate could follow you around for weeks or months asking you to sign the list of votes for their candidate of choice. You might refuse dozens of times, yet if one time you gave in through fear, frustration, or simply desire to be left alone, that would be the vote that counted, not the dozens of refusals.

Just as our constitution assured that we will not be tried again and again for the same crime until a jury can finally be badgered into convicting us, the fact that an election takes place at a specific instant in time grants us freedom from undue influence. One can arguably intimidate 50% of the voters, but it's hard to intimidate them all at the same time.

Now with 81% More Man!

It's Friday, so why not something useless and mildly fun while I finish my lunch?

Some clever fellow has put together a little script which checks your browser history against a list of major websites' readership gender ratios and then estimates the likelihood that you are male or female. I am, it seems, fairly male, though with a bit of a feminine side:

Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 19%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 81%



Site Male-Female Ratio
google.com 0.98
wikipedia.org 1.08
amazon.com 0.9
cnn.com 1.35
blogger.com 1.06
nytimes.com 1.13
dell.com 1.04
merriam-webster.com 0.89
census.gov 0.9
realclearpolitics.com 1.82
nationalreview.com 1.74
economist.com 1.47
txu.com 0.72

(It's rather slow running it in IE.) It probably says a lot about family economic profiles that the most female site I've visited is our utility company.

And while we're on the subject of gender and the internet, you've doubtless seen this cartoon before:



MrsDarwin says she's the voice from outside the panel. And indeed, sticking my finger in the dike of sanity to try to hold back the rising tide is one of my ever present vices.

Outrage is Not a Virtue

**Language Warning -- Discussion of the use of an Anglo-Saxon-derived crudity follows**

There's a line of thinking -- or perhaps I should say "feeling" -- out there derived from the George Carlin school of philosophy which takes pleasure from asserting things according to the formula: I don't know what's more fucked up about the world: the fact that with all our wealth there are millions of people in our country who can't get enough food to eat, or the fact that most of you are more upset by the fact I said "fuck" than that there are millions of people starving.

The idea is, I suppose, that the area of suffering being called out is so appauling that there's no point in discussing it politely -- the comfortable need to be shocked from their complacency and so offensiveness is needed in order to spark the outrage that will beget virtue.

Myself, I'm rather dubious of the idea that outrage is capable of begetting virtue. Outrage seems to find its natural outlet in hate -- in searching for the guilty and finding a way to punish them. Picking a topic from my own side of the political spectrum (which seems only fair, if I'm to attempt to be honest in my critique): Those who quickly themselves into a trembling fury over abortion are generally not able to make themselves truly useful in an kind of pro-life work. If you consider screaming "How many babies have you killed today?!?!" at an abortion clinic worker to constitute a worthwhile activity, you're unlikely to be able to muster the empathy and open-mindedness to work calmly and helpfully with a girl who comes to a crisis pregnancy center still divided in her mind as to whether she should have an abortion.

Part of this is because action begets emotion. When we shout or use profanity or violent imagery in our speech, that very action makes us angry. It makes our blood flow, our temperature rise, and it triggers our natural urge to fight, not to calmly explain or kindly help.

Outrage, and the ranting that stems from it, also tends to make us unattractive to others -- most particularly those who are not yet sure if they agree with us. When we talk with those we disagree with about that issues we consider vital, our desire should be that they convert, or at least come to understand that our viewpoint has real virtues to it. Accusing someone of being a Nazi, or hating the poor, or wanting to kill the unborn, or not caring about the born not only fails to achieve that, but it makes the listener less likely to pay any attention to what comes after.

Thus, outrage seldom achieves its theoretical object -- changing the other's mind. And it should be no source of pride in an of itself, because it gives nothing to alleviate the suffering one seeks to end. Returning to the example I provided at the beginning, it may be that millions of people going hungry is more shocking than the use of profanity, but since the use of profanity does nothing to feed the hungry, it's unclear how a world with a million hungry people is improved by declaring it "fucked up". A lack of food is made no better by removing civility as well.

Should have mentioned this at the time...

A few days ago, Sheila Kippley at NFP and More kicked off a series of posts for World Breastfeeding Week by reprinting a piece on contemplation I wrote shortly after my two-year-old was born.

Education and American Progress

Gene Expression Classic had a post last week linking to a David Brooks column about America's history of educational excellence, and it's leadership in the world economy. Brooks set the stage as follows:

Why did the United States become the leading economic power of the 20th century? The best short answer is that a ferocious belief that people have the power to transform their own lives gave Americans an unparalleled commitment to education, hard work and economic freedom.

Between 1870 and 1950, the average American’s level of education rose by 0.8 years per decade. In 1890, the average adult had completed about 8 years of schooling. By 1900, the average American had 8.8 years. By 1910, it was 9.6 years, and by 1960, it was nearly 14 years.

As Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz describe in their book, “The Race Between Education and Technology,” America’s educational progress was amazingly steady over those decades, and the U.S. opened up a gigantic global lead. Educational levels were rising across the industrialized world, but the U.S. had at least a 35-year advantage on most of Europe. In 1950, no European country enrolled 30 percent of its older teens in full-time secondary school. In the U.S., 70 percent of older teens were in school.

America’s edge boosted productivity and growth. But the happy era ended around 1970 when America’s educational progress slowed to a crawl. Between 1975 and 1990, educational attainments stagnated completely. Since then, progress has been modest. America’s lead over its economic rivals has been entirely forfeited, with many nations surging ahead in school attainment.

This threatens the country’s long-term prospects. It also widens the gap between rich and poor. Goldin and Katz describe a race between technology and education. The pace of technological change has been surprisingly steady. In periods when educational progress outpaces this change, inequality narrows. The market is flooded with skilled workers, so their wages rise modestly. In periods, like the current one, when educational progress lags behind technological change, inequality widens. The relatively few skilled workers command higher prices, while the many unskilled ones have little bargaining power.

Brooks goes on to discuss the "skills gap" which has allowed the US economy to continue becoming more and more productive, in great part as the result of technological innovation created and used by the educated elite. (Just under 30% of the US population aged 25-34 has a bachelor's degree or higher.) Brooks argues that the US educational system lost steam and direction in the 60s and 70s, resulting in our relative loss of global competitiveness since that time (the US remains one of the strongest economies in the world, but it's not as much stronger than the rest of the world as it used to be). I think his analysis on why this happened and what to do about it gets a bit more spotty, though:

...Using his own research, Heckman also concludes that high school graduation rates peaked in the U.S. in the late 1960s, at about 80 percent. Since then they have declined.

In “Schools, Skills and Synapses,” Heckman probes the sources of that decline. It’s not falling school quality, he argues. Nor is it primarily a shortage of funding or rising college tuition costs. Instead, Heckman directs attention at family environments, which have deteriorated over the past 40 years.

Heckman points out that big gaps in educational attainment are present at age 5. Some children are bathed in an atmosphere that promotes human capital development and, increasingly, more are not. By 5, it is possible to predict, with depressing accuracy, who will complete high school and college and who won’t.

I.Q. matters, but Heckman points to equally important traits that start and then build from those early years: motivation levels, emotional stability, self-control and sociability. He uses common sense to intuit what these traits are, but on this subject economists have a lot to learn from developmental psychologists....

Brooks argues that for the long term, the "skills gap" is the largest single contributor to inequality and thus middle class angst, much more so than energy prices and globalization. However, since it's hard to fix the education system, no one is emphasizing it much, though he says:

...[I]t’s worth noting that both sides of this debate exist within the Democratic Party. The G.O.P. is largely irrelevant. If you look at Barack Obama’s education proposals — especially his emphasis on early childhood — you see that they flow naturally and persuasively from this research. (It probably helps that Obama and Heckman are nearly neighbors in Chicago). McCain’s policies seem largely oblivious to these findings. There’s some vague talk about school choice, but Republicans are inept when talking about human capital policies.

It seems to me that there's a serious lack of imagination here. If, as Brooks cites Heckman to say above, many of the educational/developmental problems that we're seeing appear by age five, it's hard to see how public education policies (including Obama's desire to have full 0-5 public education available) are going to make the difference. Public schools and public daycares (or private ones, come to that) are not well suited to forming the minds of those under five so that they will be good learners and stable personalities in the years to come. That's what families are for. So if we're seeing children who by age five are already seriously unsuited to learning and stability, what we're seeing is probably at least as much family and cultural break-down as an educational one.

TangoMan of Gene Expression points out that part of the problem in this regard may center around immigration.

Having an immigration policy which pulls in tens of millions of 6th grade educated, Spanish-speaking immigrants is a policy that creates inequality. Goldin and Katz would do well to control for immigrant status, legal and illegal, in the ranks of the low skilled.... [D]emography matters. When we celebrate diversity and when we hold all cultures to be equal then we discount the importance that cultural practices, traditions and views have on real world factors, like education and economic productivity. Heckman notes that "some children" benefit from family practices that promote human capital development, but that many don't. I'm willing to wager that racial and cultural factors correlate to a good deal of this disparity....It's fantasy to posit that the skills gap is independent of group measures of human capital stock. ParaPundit shows the dismal embrace of higher education by Hispanics even after 4 generations in the US.

This may be something of a factor, but frankly, there was plenty of immigration in the first half of the 20th century, and in the 19th, and those immigrants often had much less than a 6th grade education. But there is, clearly a stark difference. Schools thrived even among the immigrant communities (whether they were often seen as the means to improving your economic status) during the period that Brooks identifies as the boom time of American education and economic expansion. Not only the public schools, but the Catholic school system, Hebrew schools, etc.

Given the 60s/70s inflection point at which we seem to see a downturn in American education (and the appearance of the "skills gap") I can think of two clear areas for improvement:

Rediscovering Education -- By almost any standards, our public education system fell apart in the 70s. Educational theories came and went, and it became fashionable to suggest we should only teach what is "relevant" to students. Traditional ideas of the Three Rs and classical liberal education were left behind as wonky ideas ranging from the "new math" to "Afrocentric curriculums" were attempted. In many ways, the broader educational system has never recovered, in part because administrators and teachers are now almost all people who received non-educations back in the 70s, 80s and 90s. And anyone who deals with todays college students can attest that 12 years of education often results in someone with no logical skills, poor reading comprehension, and no writing ability. And that's among the half of high school students who actually go on to attempt college! We desperately need a return to basics: reading, writing and arithmetic in the early grades; the liberal arts and sciences in the later grades.

The Family as Foundation -- Just as importantly, however, we need to develop the cultural understanding that parents and families hold the primary responsibility for educating their children. Much of the education, after age five or so, may often go on in schools with teachers, but parents are still responsible for providing children with the understanding that education is important and worth doing, and providing them with the family support, motivation and help to be successful in education.

And for too many people, the two income family in which both husband and wife have full time "fulfilling careers" while raising their children is not only the normative way of life, but the only imaginable way of life. Some families may have little choice in that matter, in that where they live and how much they earn require both parents to work. But there is, I think, a need to recenter cultural expectation (especially for the earliest years of a child's life) to see child rearing and early education as something that deserves the full time attention of a parent if at all possible. (Something which, at least in the corporate world that I find myself in from eight to six, seems an alien concept to many.) Professional help is all very well, but it can never be as personal and as concentrated as that of a parent or other relative.


Clearly, there's much room for improvement in US education, both culturally and institutionally. However, I'd disagree with Brooks as to where we need to look for solutions on the political spectrum. First of all, our biggest problems are cultural, not policy. And so the solutions we need most involve cultural change which can perhaps be advocated by politicians, but can certainly not be ennacted by them. Much though we often wish to solve our problems by simply electing some particular politician, I don't think this is one that politicians can solve for us. And to the extent that it is, I don't see an emphasis on parents taking primarily responsibility for education and a return to classic liberal education as being something we're going to see out of the Democratic party any time soon. Seeing as what we need in our education is a rollback of much of the progressive educational theory of the last fifty years, it would seem an odd thing to come from the left. Also, too many proposals from the left (and, indeed, from the mainstream right) put the focus on the professionals: testing, schools, public daycare and pre-K, etc. These might be nice-to-haves, but they do nothing either to change our understanding of what education is, or to bring families back to the center of education. That, indeed, seems to be something that simply does not fit in the current political axis -- and which is advocated by occasional voices of both the intellectual left and right, but few in the political or party establishment.

Finally, I think we may need to ask ourselves: At what point does a "skills gap" become inevitable? I'm sure that we can do a much, much better job at education and culture than we do now, but is there some point we could take our technology and economy to where a significant percentage of the population is simply not capable of keeping up?

I don't really want to think that, as I find the idea of IQ and objectively limited intelligence unappealing. I would prefer to think that everyone is capable of being highly intelligent and educated if given the right upbringing and education. And yet, I'm not sure that this tabula rasa view has support in reality. Is it possible that in a highly technological society a "skills gap" becomes inevitable at some point?

Book Stash

We had cleared the bookshelves during the recent floor upheaval, and so it seemed pointless to reduce the stalagmite of books forming on my bedside table. However, an earthquake of small feminine origin recently leveled the stack, and that in conjunction with the dust settling downstairs has convinced me that it's finally time to repatriate all the wanderers. Here's a view of the accumulated strata, from top layer down:

Bureaucratic hassles at the parish level: Baptismal edition

Here's the quiz of the day for Catholic parents: how long does it take you to schedule a baptism at your parish?

In the last months of my last pregnancy, I called up our parish to try and schedule the baptism. We had a tricksy time frame with godparents graduating from college and only having a few days of time overlap to be in the area, so I wanted to get in good and early. Baby was due in March, and we needed the baptism in May. The parish secretary said, "Oh no, we don't even have any classes available until June." No class, no baptism.

So I spoke with a priest who'd just been moved from our parish to a parish about 20 miles away, and he scheduled the baptism right then, over the phone, for the day we needed. We didn't have to take the baptism class, and I made sure I got the paperwork he needed to the office in good time.

Now it's time to schedule another baptism. As before, I'm starting before baby is born because it's very important to us to have the baptism as soon as possible. I'd like to do things the right way because Darwin is on parish council and it seems important to set an example, and yet I'm running into the same hassles. Seeing as once again both my godparents are coming in from out of state, it's important to me to be able to set a date as soon as possible, but one can't schedule the baptism until one's taken the class, which one can't even sign up for without the proper paperwork from the godparents, who need to know the baptism date so that they can take time off work and buy plane tickets... And then there's the issue of requiring a birth certificate, which, as I hope to have the baby baptized two weeks after the class (which we can't take until next month, four days before baby is due), is simply not going to be possible.

I appreciate the need to ensure that parents and godparents take their responsibilities seriously, and I can understand that our priest doesn't want to be granting exceptions left and right, but the laid-back time frame on which the parish seems to operate seems to de-emphasize the vital importance of baptism to a child's soul. I don't want to wait a year or six months or three months -- I want my child baptized right away. Even in these technologically advanced times, children can die unexpectedly. I'm not willing to take the chance of pushing out baptism until some parish bureaucrat has ticked off every last box on the checklist. For now I'm going to try and work with the system, but if takes pulling a few strings to ensure that my child's soul is cleansed of original sin as quickly as possible, then so be it.

UPDATE: You guys have some crazy stories in the comments, but I defy you to top Opinionated Homeschooler's anecdote:

But my friend got it worse from our parish. Her godparents, like all of her family, were Cuban refugees. They had no sacramental records, as Castro wasn't going to fax them over. The parish flat refused to allow them to stand as godparents. She is outraged to this day.

Please Apostacize Over Something Big

Over the last few weeks, I've run into a couple of online personalities who have declared themselves to be apostacizing over the Church's teaching on "pelvic issues" such as homosexuality and birth control. This has always bothered me a bit, but it took me a while to sort out exactly why.

As Christians and Catholics we believe some rather incredible things. We believe that the universe in all its beauty and vastness and order was created by God. We also believe that God created us in His image, making us rational creatures with immortal souls. We believe that we sinned and separated ourselves from God, and that to heal this rift between us and our maker, God became man and walked among us. We believe that God allowed himself to suffer and die a humiliating death on the cross, that He rose after three days to show us how he held power over sin and death, and that He gave a Church, guided by the Holy Spirit which preserves His teachings on Earth and provides us with the sacraments which nourish us with God's grace. We believe that we are called to live according to Christ's teachings and that by the act of uniting our wills with God we can be unit with him for eternity in heaven.

We claim to believe all these things, and we have before us the example of many holy men and women who have given their lives, either in service or in suffering and martyrdom, for the faith. By accepting these claims and beliefs, we unite ourselves with something beautiful and incredible, we claim membership in a Church that claims to have been founded by God and to be guided and preserved from error by Him. We pledge ourselves to hold these truths even unto death. And we are united through the Church with priest and religious who have given up the natural human cycle of family and reproduction in order to devote themselves entirely to God's work, to the next world.

If someone has truly accepted all these unlikely and radical beliefs, if someone is truly prepared to live the faith and if necessary die for the faith, does it make any sense at all to renounce it over its teachings about sexual morality?

If we have really believed all of these rather incredible things about God and His creation of the universe and incarnation and suffering and death and resurrection and founding of the Church, shouldn't we be prepared to sacrifice much more than our sexual ambitions for that belief?

The sad fact is, all too often we believe rather cheaply. What does it cost us to say or feel, "Oh yeah, I believe that." And yet if we really think about what a major act believing something such as the Catholic Faith is, we should consider believing in the Faith in the first place to be the great decision. And if we are ready to be serious about the idea that the Catholic Church teaches the truth, than living out that truth should seem a rather little thing compared to the grandeur of what we are asserting to be true.

Miracle Bleg

I know that there's a fairly detailed process, involving bringing in a couple of doctors to see if any strictly natural process is involved, for verifying medical miracles in regards to canonization. However, I'm having trouble finding detailed information about specific verified miracles. Does anyone know of a good online resource that provides a decent amount of detail on both the Vatican's verification process and some recent miracles that have been verified?

Giant Man-Eating Bugs Bore Me!

So we felt like watching a movie last night. This is an increasingly rare occurence, as we're usually too tired or preoccupied these days to tie up two hours of our precious free time post-girl-bedtime. But last night we tied up three hours watching King Kong, and all I can say is that Peter Jackson owes me back the extra hour with which he padded his bloated movie.

Peter Jackson does lavish spectacle well -- we've all seen Lord of the Rings. Perhaps he does better work when he's presented with a plot-heavy saga to whittle down into nine 0r so hours of screen time. But his King Kong is thirty minutes of plot jam-packed into three hours of increasingly distancing special effects extravaganza. A bit of action in a movie gets one's adrenaline pumping. Strata after strata of over-the-top dinosaur stampedes and ape chases and Kong fighting men and Kong fighting three dinosaurs at the same time with a girl in his hand! so ossified our suspension of disbelief that by the time giant insects and spiders and tapeworms were devouring our heroes and one guy was using a machine gun to shoot hordes of scorpions off another guy, we were yawning and checking the time. And this from the people who spent a tense half-hour in a stand-off with a single cockroach just hours earlier. (Now that was a situation with real dramatic potential.)

Oh Peter Jackson. What happened? I wanted to like your movie. But why the character development for the ship's crew who suddenly fall off the screen in the last hour? Where did all the natives of the island come from and disappear to? Why the massive and unneccesary plot holes in what should have been such a compact story? Why couldn't we see more of Colin Hanks' production assistant, who was the only character I cared about? How on earth can anyone make a movie that winds up with me skipping past a scene a guy being eaten by multiple huge tapeworms not because I'm horrified but because I'm numbed by the preceding interminable action sequences? The mind boggles.

Perhaps in my old age I'm getting jaded, but when I chose to spend an evening of my valuable spare time with a movie, I like to be entertained or challenged or at least somewhat involved. Is that too much to ask of the exact same production team that made Lord of the Rings?

Trickle Down Economics and Me

A couple weeks ago, MrsDarwin and I drove by the tea shop in the "old down town" of our area (a single street with difficult parking which is not within walking distance of anywhere and not easy to get to, but features a dozen picturesque old buildings on each side of the street and the public library down at the end) and saw that it was closing its physical premises and becoming an online-only business. "That's really too bad," we said. "It was nice to have a tea shop around here."

Of course, if all the people who thought the tea shop was nice were like us, it's no surprise that it closed. I went there once and spent about $50 buying MrsDarwin a tea pot and a variety of loose leaf teas for her birthday two years ago. MrsDarwin had stepped in a few times to meet someone over a pot of tea. Between the two of us we probably spent less than $100 there over the four years that it was there.

The difficulty, of course, is that one only needs to blow $25 on a tea pot every so often. And loose leaf tea (and theirs was rather expensive) is often more of a pain to deal with. So most of the time we just used the boxes of Twinings that we could pick up at the supermarket when we were doing all our other shopping. With friends like that, no wonder the tea shop decided to close its physical doors.

The term "trickle down economics" is mostly used for derisive purposes, and yet at root, there's a very real process that it describes. As we spend out money, we determine which businesses make money, and which don't. And that in turn determines which businesses expand, keep their current employees, and hire more, and which businesses lay off employees or close up entirely.

This idea that one is responsible, though one's spending habits, for other people's livelihoods is a bit hard for me, as I come from a background (and we maintain a family culture) which puts a fair amount of emphasis on thrift. As a family, we go out to dinner or order pizza perhaps once a month, and MrsDarwin and I make it out to have a "date night" dinner together at a nice restaurant perhaps five times a year. If these practices were universal, I'm assuming we'd have far, far fewer restaurants available to choose from -- because most would be out of business. Thus, our ability to go to restaurants at all is subsidized, in a sense, by those whose eating out habits we'd consider rather profligate.

In other cases, our spending habits to reflect more clearly the sort of economic landscape we'd like to see. We put a fair amount of money into used bookstores each year, and enough new books to give book publishers a boost as well. We eschew prepared food makers, but are willing to shell out money for artisanal cheeses, bakery breads, micro-brew beers and scotches and bourbons from small distilleries. On the other hand, there would be a lot fewer clothing makers if most people were like us. And fewer electronic gadgets.

Something that was striking me particularly the other day, however, was how our choices and preferences affect people who might hope to make their living working directly for you. For instance, I'm of a distinct minority among my co-workers in that I do not have a "yard guy" or yard service to cut my lawn, trim my trees and shrubbery, etc. I do all my own yard work, partly out of a conviction that a man should tend his own yard, and partly because I don't see the inconvenience of spending a couple of Saturday mornings a month working on the yard as something it's worth $80/mo or more to avoid. Similarly, we try to do all the home repairs and improvements possible ourselves. We've done all our own paining, installed our own hardwood floors and tile, etc.

I tend to think of this doing the work yourself rather than "making someone else do it" as showing a respect for hard work and getting things right -- and yet for those who seek to make their livings from doing yard work or installing floors, my preferences amount to denying them employment. When I install my own floors at the cost of my free time, I essentially insert myself into the labor market at a cost of 2 beers/day and thus drive out anyone who might have competed for me for my business.

Of course, I'm a minimal danger to the wider flooring industry, because knowing what hard work it is I'd never volunteer to do this kind of work for someone else -- except perhaps as an even exchange of my help on that for help on my own projects at some later date. But it did get me wondering if those who consider it immoral to pay less than a certain dollar amount per hour for a given type of work would consider my insistence on using free labor (and thus not hiring anyone) to be immorally denying to work to someone who needs the money. If it's wrong to hire a "scab" for lower wages instead of a union member, is it doubly wrong to get the work down without hiring anyone? (But then, it'd dangerous to try to predict what people one disagrees with would think: one is too tempted to make them look foolish since they look foolish to one.)

May I Say Tribe?

Two and half years ago, when the situation in Iraq was pretty much at its worst Bush's popularity was already headed steeply down (though not yet as low as it is now), I was talking to one of my very liberal friends, and he commented: "You Republicans enjoy it now. We'll take back congress at the next election, and there is no Republican on earth who could win the presidency after eight years of Bush. He's destroyed your party for a generation."

"What if we nominate McCain?" I asked.

He considered. "There's no way. McCain is the one Republican I would consider voting for -- and that means you people would never elect him. Maybe he'll switch parties when we take over."

Well, here we are. And now my liberal friends assure me that "this is not the McCain we knew." He's "McSame". He's "Bush's third term". He's "McFossil". He's a "batshit insane" warmonger who wants to start World War III. And yet four years ago, when he called out Michael Moore in a speach at the Republican convention, Moore claimed he was hurt and said the he liked McCain and admired him. Senator John Kerry reportedly wanted McCain as a running mate.

What happened here? So far as I can tell, McCain is still very much whatever he always was. I'm not myself a fan, but he does have an Old Roman sort of virtue that I admire to an extent. He is not a principled conservative, or indeed an adhereant to any intellectually defined political or economic philosophy. But he is clearly a firm believer in honesty, honor, and service to the Civitas. He's devoted his life to the Res Publica, and I think he would probably do less damage to the country and the world than Obama -- though I suspect that if he is elected it will be longer before a real conservative is able to win back the presidency than if we have a Democrat in the White House. (However since we vote for the good of the country rather than the party -- I will probably vote for him.)

However, McCain has lost all his support from across the aisle because electoral politics is not just a matter of competing political philosophies -- it is also a matter of tribalism. While there are very real and important differences of political, moral and economic philosophy between the two major parties in America, the tribalism of party membership at times seems to have equal or greater force in fueling debate.

Tribalism can cut both ways. Although he sustained a good bit of criticism from conservatives, President Bush did not have the fight from congressional Republicans over No Child Left Behind, the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit or the creation of the Department of Homeland Security that any Democratic president would have recieved over such massive increases in government power and beaurocracy. In that case, tribalism protected him.

Over the years, McCain has received much admiration from liberal and moderate quarters -- but in an election year (and with a new, younger media darling for the Democratic nominee) his proposals (even some very liberal ones which I do not like, such as his cap-and-trade carbon policy) are being ignored or greeted with derision. Tribalism requires that any policies put forward by the presidential nominee of one party be scorned by members of the other party -- even if they themselves advocated similar proposals in the past.

The tribal lense also affects how people view the world. For instance, expect many Democrats to be much less worried about government wiretaps and the continued presence of US troops in Iraq if Obama is president rather than McCain. Similarly, expect a number of Republicans who have been curiously quiet on such issues to recall that they don't trust the government and don't want it doing wiretaps, and that they don't think that US troops should be used for open-ended nation-building exercises, if Obama wins.

And notice how it is always whichever party is out of power which is able to notice what things are going wrong (or may go wrong) with the economy -- while those in power may recognize are problem here or there, but are sure it is only the result of the cycle and we're doing everything we can.

None of which is to say that there aren't very real points which are made, and sincerely meant, by the most partisan. (And certainly, I can be one of the more partisan at times.) But especially for the six months leading up to the presidental election every four years, one can expect much of the political discourse to be more about tribe than about principles.

Peak Oil -- When Do Equations Break

A couple times over the last several months readers have emailed me to ask if I have any thoughts on Peak Oil. For those not familiar with the idea, Peak Oil is the idea that at some point the world oil production will (as production at any individual oil field eventually does) reach its peak and begin to fall off. This in itself is not a controversial idea. So far as we are aware, oil is a finite resource, and we certainly are having to drill deeper, travel farther, and work harder to continue to produce more oil every year. Eventually (whether in a year or a hundred years) it makes sense that he'd hit a practical maximum point and the annual production would fall off from there one.

But if the idea that global crude oil production will eventually peak and go down is uncontroversail, the term "Peak Oil" is generally used to refer to something a bit more specific and a bit more controversial which we might refer to more specifically as the Catastrophic Peak Oil theory.

The question here is: how quickly would oil production fall off after the peak, and how much would the increase slow before reaching peak. And also: how well can the world economy cope with stalling and then falling oil production.

Those who take the Catastrophic Peak Oil theory seriously believe that it will stall fairly suddenly, and then begin to drop fairly steaply (or that the world economy is ridigly incapable of adjusting to a more gradually stall and fall.) By this theory, the entire world economy might collapse, with trade breaking down, cities being abandoned, a billion people or more around the world starving, and technology falling back 150 years or more.

Clearly, this preys on some of our most basic fears as members of an affluent society. In an agricultural, subsitence society, fears were basic and can be well summarized by a reading of ancient mythology. Would the weather be good -- or would there be drought or flood? Would the plants grow? Would pestilence wipe out half the village? Would war break out?

Today we live in a society with a highly specialized economy, and so much of what we deal with looks a little like magic. Food shows up in the supermarket. Gas is available at the pump. Money spits out of the ATM. A credit card can buy you almost anything. And yet, because the systems which deliver all these things are too complex to understand in all their details, we can't help but harbor (even if far below the surface) a certain fear: What if it all stops working? What if we go to the pump and there's no gas? What if we go to the store and there's no food? What if the whole magical system suddenly just stops?

The Catastrophic Peak Oil theory appeals to these fears. But is it likely?

My tendency is to think that the economic laws that drive our economy are more flexible than we sometimes imagine. And we are simply so far above the subsistence level in our society that we could go through a fairly catastrophic economic reorganization without starving. (Cuba's sudden oil dearth when the Soviet Union collapsed perhaps provides a micro example of how we might cope with such a peak oil situation.) So I'm fairly optimistic about our prospects, even if the global oil peak turned out to be fairly soon.

The point where equations potentially fail to capture a situation, however, is when change is very sudden. If oil levels off and begins to decrease over the course of a decade or more, we might go through some pretty hard times, but we'd find other energy source and/or tighten our belts and we'd be fine. The point where it's very hard to predict how we'd do is if oil peaked in a truly sudden fashion. Imagine that one day all the Saudi oil fields just stopped, like a spigot turned off. That's the sort of event that we really can't project the outcome of based on a supply/demand economic model. Fortunately, it's probably the sort of situation that's pretty unlikely to happen.

We Always Live in the World We Have

We live in a democratic republic, and having been formed by the culture of such a country, we are used to putting a lot of thought and passion into the question of what the nature of our governing systems and laws should be. This is, overall, a very good thing, as I think it breeds a sense of collective responsibility for us to think seriously as a nature about how we should govern ourselves. And yet, the temptation that comes with that is to view a certain set of government policies and systems as essential to the good or virtuous life.

Especially for those of us who are particularly interested in the political process, passions can run sufficiently high that we begin to see certain political goods as necessary for human thriving. The man of the right begins to think that life without certain political freedoms is barely worth living. The man of the left convinces himself it is impossible to live a moral and satisfying life without certain structures of social justice.

And yet, one of the liberating aspects of studying history is to discover that people are people throughout history. The personal concerns, struggles and triumphs of individual people through many times and places bear more similarities than differences. And from the Christian perspective, men and women have struggled to live in accordance with Christ's teachings in a wide variety of societies: oppressive and free, secular and religious, rich and poor, tolerant and persecuting.

None of which is meant to undermine the importance of struggling to achieve the best political order that we can. As the experience of many centuries has shown us, the culture and political institutions can provide a powerful incentive for virtue, or for vice. Yet we must do so with the clear understanding that no political order will make everyone virtuous, nor will any political order force everyone to be corrupt. Improving the social order is at best a means to an end.

Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For

[with apologies to U2]

Nearly thirty years of experience going to mass every Sunday (though I suppose the first few hardly count since I'm sure I spent the time squirming around under the pew in the fashion that I am constantly trying to discourage our offspring from doing) allows one to build up certain habits of expectation. Thus, after having heard a great number of sermons, one comes to realize that a sermon which begins, "When I was growing up, my favorite comic strip was Peanuts. And in one of my favorite Peanuts strips..." one is likely headed in for a rather disjointed ride. It's not Peanuts per se which is the problem, but that it often seems that when one starts out with pop culture reference chosen for its utter generality (Peanuts, Gilligans Island, etc.) the reason is that the homilist isn't actually all that sure what the readings are about, and so has picked the most general possible interpretation.

I am one of those people who, when he reads a book or sees a movie which fails to live up to the potential of its premise, can't seem to help endlessly revising the work in my head after the fact trying to figure out how it could have been good. Indeed, MrsDarwin and I sometimes spend rather more time discussing movies and books that were not quite good than ones that were. And so this week I found myself pondering the gospel reading rather more than I might have had the homily been more focused.

The parable of the treasure in the field has always struck me, despite its brevity, because as with the parable of the dishonest steward, we have here another story that essentially centers around crooked business dealings. In this instance: a case of insider trading. Some fellow is digging around in a field not his own and discovers that a treasure has been buried there. Obviously, it's not his, and he doesn't know whose it is, but he wants it. So he takes all that he has and buys the field. (One assumes that since the owner sells, the owner must not know the value of the treasure either.) The fellow thus turns a tidy profit because he knew more about the value of the field than did its previous owner.

Why bring up this not particularly honorable exchange?

Plato argues that no one ever desires anything other than the good -- and thus any object of desire must (at least in the mind of the desirer) be good. Thus, one can (and Christ in several parables does) take positive lessons from an otherwise negative example. Our treasure hunter may not be treating the field owner very honestly, but he has identified what is to his mind the greatest possible good: a tremendous treasure. In pursuing this good, he is ready to risk everything. He sells all that he owns.

Picture selling everything you own for a moment. I know the things I'd find hard to give up: my books, our furniture, our house, our computer. Picture selling absolutely everything you own, because you desperately want to have enough money to buy that field.

And keep in mind, our treasure hunter does not yet know for sure that the owner doesn't know about the treasure. He may refuse to sell. He may sell, but dig the treasure up and take it with him before vacating the property. Yet our treasure hunter is so focused on the good that he has found, so bent on owning the treasure, that he is willing to risk everything he owns on the chance of attaining the treasure. He sells everything.

The owner does indeed sell, and the hunter attains the treasure that he desired. He is now far more rich than he ever was before, and can buy back the possessions that he sold -- or even better ones. Yet now we can, as Christians, flip the story around and ask ourselves: Was this enough for him? Now that he owns the treasure, is he permanently and abidingly happy? Has he found his purpose in life?

It seems to me that the story cuts two ways.

On the one hand, the example of this treasure hunter spurs us on. He was willing to risk up everything, sell every possession that he owned, in order to attain the treasure. If we believe, as our faith tells us, that the prospect of eternal life in heaven is before us, should we not be equally ready to offer up all that we own, all that we hope for, in order to attain the Kingdom of God?

On the other, there seems to be an implicit contrast between this man's treasure and the eternal treasure that we are called to seek. He was willing to give up everything he owned, and yet what did he get? Gold? Silver? Precious stones? Just some cold hunk of matter that sat on a shelf. Like the treasure hunter, we are often ready to make great sacrifices in work, time and money for material gain. And yet, no amount of material gain will permanently slake our thirst. Our hearts are restless, Lord, until they rest in you.

And so even as we admire the utter devotion with which the man in the parable sought after what he imagined to be the highest good, we must ask ourselves: Is this kind of intensity to be lavished on things which will not, in the end, make us truly happy? And so we also recognize that the treasure hunter's zeal is misplaced. Our greatest efforts and sacrifices should be directed towards, not some treasure buried in the ground, but what will happen to us after we are buried in the ground.

Human Life

Papal Encyclicals are traditionally named after their first few words, rather than given a title. (This must give the popes good cause to seriously consider a good strong opening rather something something along the lines of "It has often been observed..." or "In my last encyclical I discussed...")

Pope Paul VI's encyclical issued forty years ago today began: Humanae vitae tradendae munus gravissimum, ex quo coniuges liberam et consciam Deo Creatori tribuunt operam, magnis semper ipsos affecit gaudiis, quae tamen aliquando non paucae difficultates et angustiae sunt secutae.

Roughly speaking: Human life, the passing on of which is one of the gravest responsibilities from which spouses freely and knowingly take on the work of God the Creator, the which always gives them great joy, but also not a few difficulties and a shortage of security.

Given that the Church is often accused of ignoring science and the wonders of human advancement, and that the Church's opposition to birth control is one of the most frequently cited examples of this, it is ironic that the Church's stance on sex and birth control is essentially a restatement of indisputable biological fact: Sex exists, at a biological level, for the creation of children. That's why we have "reproductive organs". Certainly, sex (now that it exists) fills several other purposes as well, but its primary purpose is indisputably reproduction.

The question that faced and continues to face humanity is what to do about this in the face of modern technology which allows us to strip that reproductive function (with degrees of success depending upon the method) out of the sexual act. Starting at the turn of the last century, and with gathering speed with each passing decade, the wider society embraced artificial birth control and the split between sex and human reproduction that this new technology allowed.

The results of this split are still being sorted out, and I suspect that it will be near the end of the new century before we begin to see with any clarity what a society in which sex is only optionally tied to reproduction looks like. With typical progressive zeal, few in the secular realm seemed to imagine at the time (from what I can tell) that anything but good could come from giving people the ability to regulate their fertility with relative certainty through cheap and widely available technology. Surely, people would live just as they had before, but with the ability to make sure they had children only when they were ready to lovingly care for them. How could this be anything but a blessing?

Lots of people with a supposedly rational and naturalistic view of the universe apparently imagined that changing a fundamental element of human physiology (which from a strictly naturalistic point of view must clearly be one of the biggest shapers of human society and culture) would leave existing social structures intact while allowing people to be just a bit more free and joyful in their sexuality. It did not prove to be so. People may not consciously think, "I will get married and be faithful to my spouse because having sex with lots of partners before and outside of marriage might result in having children who would not be raised in a stable family environment." And yet, at a naturalistic level, one of the primary reasons for marriage itself and for chastity before and faithfulness during it is that a stable family environment is required in order to raise the children which naturally result from sex. (Picture, if you can, that there was something we were capable of doing as humans that was as pleasurable and produced as a strong a sense of union as sex -- and yet which never resulted in any consequences other than physical pleasure and emotional closeness. Would society have organized itself in such a way as to require that one shared this act only within monogamous relationships?)

Paul VI, on the other hand, courageously and contrary to the advice of many who had their fingers upon the pulse of the world, reaffirmed in Humanae Vitae that human life is, as God's creation, meant to work a certain way. That sex results in new life is not some accident or medical deficiency to be "cured" by new medical technology, but rather the way in which humans were meant to cooperate in God's creative work. The reproductive potential of intercourse is inherent and essential to it, and to actively remove that potential changes the act in a fundamental way.

The Catholic teaching which he reaffirmed is not, as some critics claim, that women are baby-making machines or that it is immoral to have sex if you can't get pregnant at the present moment. Rather, the Church's acceptance of NFP but rejection of birth control and sterilization amounts to saying: Remain human. Play by the rules we were given. Our bodies are meant to work the way they work. And if you want to avoid having children, you will have to at the very least have less sex.

This is not necessarily easily lived out, even for those of us who accept it, since we cannot help but imbibe the modern ethos in which the sex life has nothing to do with creating human life. Yet this difficulty that we experience is essentially that of living as humans are -- rather than becoming one of that artificially created new race of the optionally fertile. And since we choose to continue living a human life, rather than a sex life, we know roughly what our social institutions and familial relations will continue to look like. We will continue to live as humans have always lived.

How exactly those who have chosen to live a sex life instead of a human life shall eventually sort out their society remains to be seen.

I Dream of Craigslist

About ten years ago, I went into the Mission in Steubenville, OH, looking for a desk. I had the budget of a college student supporting herself on a minimum-wage campus job, and the tastes of the yuppie demographic specifically targeted by Pottery Barn. The Mission was (and still is, for all I know) a second-hand store that rambled all the gutted shell of a once-ornate Victorian manse -- perhaps in reflection of the decline of the Steubenville area, which once had one of the highest per-capita incomes in the country in the grand days of steel and the mob. Styles were changing in the Ohio River Valley, and the Mission was jam-packed with stuff people had cleared out of grandma's sitting room or attic. Unfortunately, even at fire-sale prices most of the elegant pieces were well out of my reach, but I did find a cute little corner desk with an old fashioned drawer handle and a veneer top on which I could and did set drinks.

The corner desk held up fairly well over the years, but with the advent of small children who would sit and kick it while watching a movie on the computer, it became time for something more sturdy. However, second-hand stores are passe now with the redecorating crew. If you want to buy used, you've got to turn to the local Craigslist.

Spending a few days scouring Craigslist reveals much about your own tastes. I've found that I will almost automatically click on any listing (regardless of item for sale) which contains the following terms:

• vintage (this one is often disappointing -- people try to foist their burnt-orange 70s-era couches on innocent buyers by labeling them "vintage")
  
• antique
• solid wood
• green (the color, not the environmental designation)
• armoire (unless designated as pine)
• Pottery Barn (yes, I'm a sucker)
• victorian
• craftsman
• queen sleigh bed (in honor of the bed that the roach destroyed, still not replaced)
  

Terms that repel me:

• southwestern
• rustic
• pine
• Eurway (ultra-svelte modern is not my style, it seems)
• IKEA
• plaid

When designations coincide -- "Solid wood pine plaid victorian couch from IKEA!!!" -- I skip it. The seller is obviously crazy.

I also skip any ad without a picture. It boggles the mind how anyone thinks they're going to sell a $700 dining room set without providing an image for the prospective purchaser to consider. What am I, crazy? I'm not even looking for a dining room set, and it annoys me.

As it happens, Craigslist provided us with a desk: a old teacher's desk remaindered by the Boston public school system, and as sturdy as you like. It was a bit battered, but Darwin sanded it down and refinished it, and I scrubbed the drawer handles with steel wool until they shone. It looks pretty fine, and I'll put up a picture if I can ever find the cable for the digital camera.

And I have a corner desk, medium honey tone with veneer top, one leg kinda wobbly but still works okay, if anyone's interested.

A Secular Kingdom

I am, perhaps, the last person in the Catholic blog world to get around to reading Benedict XVI's book Jesus of Nazareth. However, I am finally getting the chance to read it, and yesterday I struck a section which seemed so clearly to summarize some of the trends that I have seen that I wanted to type it up and post it whole:

Then there was a shift to Christocentrism, to the doctrine that Christ is the center of everything. But it is not only the Church that is divisive -- so the argument continues -- since Christ belongs exclusively to Christians. Hence the further step from Christocentrism to theocentrism. This has allegedly brought us closer to the community of religions, but our final goal continues to elude us, since even God can be a cause of division between religions and between people.

Therefore, it is claimed, we must now move toward "regnocentrism," that is, toward the centrality of the Kingdom. This at last, we are told, is the heard of Jesus' message, and it is also the right formula for finally harnessing mankind's positive energies and directing them toward the world's future. "Kingdom," on this interpretation, is simply the name for a world governed by peace, justice, and the conservation of creation. It means no more than this. This "Kingdom" is said to be the goal of history that has to be attained. This is supposedly the real task of religions: to work together for the coming of the "Kingdom." They are of course perfectly free to preserve their traditions and live according to their respective identities as well, but they must bring their different identities to bear on the common task of building the "Kingdom," a world, in other words, where peace, justice and respect for creation are dominant values.

This sounds good; it seems like a way of finally enabling the whole world to appropriate Jesus' message, but without requiring missionary evangelization of other religions. It looks as if now, at long last, Jesus' words have gained some practical content, because the establishment of the "Kingdom" has become a common task and is drawing nigh. On closer examination, though, it seems suspicious. Who is to say what justice is? What serves justice in particular situations? How do we create peace? On closer inspection, this whole project proves to be utopian dreaming without any real content, except insofar as its exponents tacitly presuppose some partisan doctrine as the content that all are required to accept.

But the main thing that leaps out is that God has disappeared; man is the only actor left on the stage. The respect for religious "traditions" claimed by this way of thinking is only apparent. The truth is that they are regarded as so many sets of customs, which people should be allowed to keep, even though they ultimately count for nothing. Only the organization of the world counts. Religion matters only insofar as it can serve the objective. This post-Christian vision of faith and religion is disturbingly close to Jesus' third temptation.
Jesus of Nazareth, 53-55

Riparians at the Gate

A newer blog to watch, recently added to the blogroll, is Riparians at the Gate, written by Jennifer Fitz. Jennifer writes some very good stuff on economics and historical issues from a level-headed Catholic perspective -- and she has also taken up the laudible approach of pacing herself to a specific publication schedule. Would that I had the discipline to do the same (and use the resuling free time wisely.)