The House of Lords, American-Style

In a recent online discussion of the foibles of academics (many of the participants in which were themselves of that persuasion) Professor Esolen made this comment:

I can divide academics into two groups -- and these do cross the political divide. There are those who know that academics can be a bunch of weenies, and those who are actually surprised that anybody would think of them as less than the natural rulers of the universe. It's as if they'd never entertained the suspicion that they aren't as smart as they think they are.

This made me recall The Admirable Crichton, which I saw as a boy.  The play showed an upper-class British family marooned on a desert island with their servants, among whom is the butler Crichton.  The pater familias attempts to assert his customary authority, but finds the accomplishments of a plump and well-served toff unequal to the situation's requirements.  The necessity of survival brings forward the highly competent butler as the natural ruler.  At the end of the play Crichton is the master, and his former lord, a servant. This is meant, I presume, to poke fun at the British upper class, but the point it makes goes deeper than that, and applies to comment above, in which Tony indicates the typical academic is like that British lord: too narrow, and frankly, too ignorant, to relate intelligently or usefully to the world outside his well-financed and well-fenced boundaries.  

If I were to make a general rule to address this situation it would be that no one should be given the opportunity to master specificities until he has shown competence in generalities, which would mean in the case of prospective savants that they should not be allowed to take a Ph.D. until they can wash their own clothing, make their own bread, and do five years' self-supporting labor (ten years for candidates in the arts and humanities) among those the academy encourages them to view as objects of pity or disdain.  

In the United States, much of the class system the Founders hoped to leave behind has been transferred to the academy.  It is typically American in that it is, at least in theory, meritocratic.  But, in its decline, especially, it carries every bit of the iron-bound exclusivity, narrowness, injustice, and power to harm that its denizens so typically allege of other entrenched social aristocracies. 

Along these lines I observe that the two remaining Democratic contenders for the U.S. President’s office have ineluctably become, despite their attempts to appear "of the people," the most prominent examples of this aristocracy's pity and disdain. One would think the Republican nominee well-advised simply to play himself while Senator Obama struggles hopefully up from slavery and Mrs. Clinton continues to fight hard for lil’ old cookie-bakers like herself.  

They are both, in their own ways, members of the nobility, coming to it in good American fashion through Harvard and Yale. This would not necessarily put them in bad odor with their constituents, except that in the fashion of their ideological kind they assume the stupidity of all lesser beings, and have been playing accordingly to the serfs historically attached to the Democratic manor. They would have done better without the proletarian pretension--an embarrassingly obvious mark of the elitist out for votes--but it’s too late for that now. We're too far along in the play.

Embryo Lottery & Other Moral Matters

On the Charles Osgood CBS Radion segment this morning I heard comments about in vitro fertilization and also a general rise in multiple births. It wasn't clear to me that they were saying the rise is all due to IVF; I think it would also include the use of fertility drugs as well. Anyway, a "doctor" tells how the implantation of multiple embryoes is a bit of a gamble, which we all know about: you implant three and hope one "takes." He bemoaned the fact that as yet we can't test an embryo first before implantation and get a reading on the likely success of "it"coming to a full-term birth.

When two or more of the embryoes "take" then he has to "break the news" to the couple. The mother, he said, is often happy with the news, while the father he always makes sit down first. The father's thinking about all those doubled and trebled bills. In the meantime, I am hearing about an increase in multiple births and an increase in infertile couples at the same time.

And then there are the "Unchosen Frozen," those left behind, that Bill Saunders wrote about in Touchstone a while ago. This is just one of many moral issues we face that are being ignored by our country.

At the airport yesterday I saw CNN advertising a segment with James Dobson on "Moral Decay?" in America. Right after that ad, they jumped to an ad for a segment on a mother giving her toddle pot to smoke. Are the two related? Also, there's a rise in prositution (here) , and sexual (and other sorts) of slavery around the world. I am not happy with the rise in fuel prices, but slavery should at least command as much attention from our political class. As well as "What are you thinking about frozen embryoes?"

"I'm Melting!"

     "I'll help you, my pretty," said the candidate today at a rally at a college in West Virginia, "and your little dog, too!"

     I saw it on a television at a pizza place out in the sticks.  Final exams in my courses are over, so I had a free afternoon, and used it to go biking with my son Davey out into the Rhode Island countryside.  We stopped for lunch at a little place called Pete's Pizza, where Pete had some rather gruff and backwoods things to say about the lady on the hustings.  "I'll make Big Oil pay," she said, probably pandering to the stupid and ill-informed, possibly stupid and ill-informed in her own right.  It is hard to tell, with the modern politician.  She promised instead to use biofuels and solar and wind to help make us energy-independent.  Whether that might include appending millwheels to the mouths of congressmen was left unclear.  "If we can put a man on the moon," she began, falling back upon her reminiscences of Shakespeare.  Yes, the old man on the moon argument a fortiori.  The idea is that if we can put a man on the moon, surely we can squeeze all the power we need out of the wind and the sun, and the Cubs can win the World Series.  Yet, in a way that the candidate did not see, the argument sort of works in this case.  We could put a man on the moon because we had the knowledge of physics to do it.  We also have sufficient scientific know-how to make oil cheaper.  I believe it is called "Drilling".

     Well, that wasn't the stupidest part of her speech.  "You should be able to afford a college education!" she shrilled out, and it never occurred to her, for once, to apply her socialism to price gougers that make the oil companies look like Albert Schweitzer and Mother Teresa.  When I enrolled at the ol' mater ferox, Princeton, back in 1977 (I am dating myself, I guess), tuition was $8000; room and board added about $1800 more.  That was it.  No nasty student fees, either.  Back in 1940, four years at Harvard cost a little less than one and a half years of the median American household income.  Read that sentence again carefully, and consider who was probably making that median income: a plumber, a grocer, a farmer.   If Harvard's prices were comparable now, what would the sticker read?  Maybe $60,000?  A little more?  For four years, no less.  Multiply by four the cost of my first year at Princeton, and you come up with about the same deal.  My father, who sold insurance and did all right, but was nowhere near being a rich man, could have paid for all four years, including room and board, with a little less than a year and a half of his gross pay.

     So then, I'm finally seeing the Socialist Light!  Why not put price controls on Harvard?  That place doesn't need all that money; Harvard has more money than many a nation in the world, never mind schools.  Cap the price!  Better yet, lower it, by force -- and watch as the lesser schools are compelled to lower their prices in turn.  Or lower them all, on a sliding scale.  You can do it, Hilaria Regina!  You have the technology.  Threaten to kill their accreditation.  Withhold all government grants, or government-backed loans.  Send in the National Guard.  The Constitution?  Isn't that the scrap of parchment used as a model for the pretty designs on the bathroom tissue in Washington?  No one cares about the Constitution.  The Constitution won't pay for a college education.  It won't even pay for a college miseducation.

     "But Mr. Esolen," one might protest, "don't price controls always distort the market?  Don't they result in weird gluts, or hoarding, or shortages?"  Yes, they do -- but in this case they might not.  If, for instance, I know that the Committee on Public Safety has recommended price caps on slaughtered pigs, and if those prices won't reimburse me for my time, effort, and outlay, I'll put my money elsewhere and let the porkers starve.  You want a pig -- fine, here's what's left of a pig.  But the typical academic is not comparable to a pig-dealer.  The pig-dealer is a practical man of affairs.  He can tan hides, maybe, or sell goat's milk, or something.  The typical academic, were it not for that massive public welfare program known, I think, as Mister Ed, would be on a streetcorner with his mortarboard turned up, singing snatches of Proust for nickels and dimes from bored passersby.

     So, my green candidate, leave Big Earl alone.  He's actually given us a few things people want or need.  Go after Big Ed.  After all, it doesn't matter whether a policy works, so long as it's enforced from above.  With skywriting, too.  "Surrender, Harvard!"  How I would love to see that day.

He Wants Us to be Alone

Or: Seeking the Sounds of (SETI) Silence.

Nick Bostrum writes at MIT's Technology Review about extraterrestrials: Where Are They? He hopes they don't turn up, for it would mean bad news for Man. It's an interesting article from a number of vantage points. (I've my own ideas about his Great Filter, and I think it's all Good News. But he's not writing about that.) Anyway, it's a bit out of the ordinary, but provocative.

What's In a Name?

     Last night I met a perfectly friendly and intelligent young couple, both graduates of my mater ferox, Catholics both, with a young daughter whom they intend to teach at home.  The wife told me cheerfully that she'd recently attended a small reunion of local Princetonians, and she was the only woman present who was a "stay-at-home mom."  That's the phrase that people use, and I wasn't going to quarrel with it then -- we were milling about after a graduation ceremony in honor of ten homeschooled seniors.  We had a few jests at the absurdity of believing that to spend most of one's time in the company of someone deeply beloved, free to read or play music, or to put the home in trim for one's own use or for hospitality or for the pleasure of someone else deeply beloved, or to go outside for what she called, putting emphasis on the unusual phrase, "fresh air," is somehow a great sacrifice, worthy to be acknowledged by solemn nods from those who are not making it.  Her friends, she said, mainly employed nannies, and as far as I can see, the name "nanny" is given to someone who will temporarily treat one's child with a certain amiable kindness, but who will move on in a year or two, and who will therefore not be a deeply felt part of the child's life.  In other words, the nanny is not really a nanny, but, to pick up the bitter phrase from Hemingway, isn't it pretty to think so?  It occurs to me that the friends are the ones making the sacrifice -- or are making their children make the sacrifice.

     It's too bad, besides, that we have that moniker, "stay-at-home mom."  It sounds rather like "stick in the mud," and is used with something of the same modest embarrassment as is the faintly insulting "homebody."  It seems to describe somebody who lacks the imagination to do anything other than stay at home.  I'll get to "mom" in a moment.  But the first thing to note is the assumption that everybody automatically has a "home" to stay at or not to stay at, that being the question.  Really?  I guess everybody has a house, but a home is a different thing.  When I was a graduate student I slept in a dormitory room, and then I shared a house with a couple of guys, and then I rented a house by myself, but in no case did I live in a home.  Home was where I went for a while when school was out.  The young woman does not, in fact, "stay" at a home that preexisted her decision not to leave it.  Her dwelling there has made it a home.  It's an old fashioned way to look at it, I know, but haven't we all been invited into plenty of houses that are as sterile and as un-homely as a hospital, or a faculty lounge, or a waiting room at a brokerage firm, with standard prints on the walls and silk flowers on the table?

     Then there's that word, stripped of reverence and of deep ontological significance, "mom".  It's affectionate, but for that very reason it shouldn't be used among strangers -- unless the point is that we don't take it seriously.  My children call me Daddy, but I don't go around calling myself a daddy, because I'm more than that, and so are the other men who have children and take care of them.  They are fathers.  Their wives are mothers.  We are commanded to honor our fathers and mothers.  We may do so within the family by calling them Daddy and Mommy, if the circumstances fit.  We cannot do so by calling ourselves daddies and mommies, unless we are talking baby-talk to toddlers. 

     The good woman I met, then, is not a stick-in-the-mud mommy, or a stay-at-home mom.  She is a mother who takes care of her child at home.  I'll add, too, that the term "stay-at-home mom" marks an interesting and no healthy shift from the older "housewife".  That is, the woman's role is defined in terms of what she does for her children, not what she does for her husband or for her husband and children together.  Her primary duties as a married woman are, in this pseudo-conservative vision, to her children.  But that doesn't accurately describe what she is in that home, or what her actual devotion to her husband is -- and the couple I met seemed very happily married.

     I'd been thinking about language for a couple of days; one of the best students I've ever had told me that the "hooking up" anti-culture was endemic on my campus, and we are far from a secular place, at Providence College.  If a Shakespeare or a Dante were revived for the sole purpose of coining a term that would well describe the boredom, the cynical hopelessness, the failure to rise to the height of fullblooded lust, the contemptuous familiarity with the opposite sex, the supine submission of the human act to the social machine, the easygoing willingness to use or be used as a spittoon -- the quizzical look with which you would regard the rare couple holding hands or walking arm in arm or, what was the word people used to use, ah yes, "flirting" -- he could not have come up with a better one than that.  You hook up, and hang up. 

Age of Transgendered Consent

Belatedly, a link to a story in the Philadelphia Inquirer about a public school facing the challenge of a 9-year-old boy who needs to dress like a girl because he really is a girl--on the inside. Some parents were upset that their children would have to be instructed about transgenderism. Later on the article talks about sex-change surgery:

Paul McHugh, a psychiatrist and professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who studied sexual reassignment surgery in the 1970s, said a school's decision to support a student's transition could have long-term psychological consequences.

"They do not have a right to stop the child, but it's different when they gather everyone around and say, 'Johnnie is Jeanie,' " he said. Society, he added, should not support the decision of an immature person.

There is no evidence that the transition ultimately helps the person, he added.

McHugh said he reached his conclusions after studying the issue for 30 years, especially in the 1970s, when Hopkins was pioneering sexual-reassignment surgery.

"People came to us saying that if we changed them, we'd solve all their problems," he said. "So we changed them, and their problems remained."

I heard McHugh speak at a conference, where he basically repudiated all the "sex change" theory of the 1970s, based on the evidence. He noted how sex change surgery, perhaps all (?) was no longer being done in the states but in places like Thailand. Now there's a recommendation.

Monstrous But Ignored

My friend Logan Gage writes over at the First Things blog about modern day slavery, "A Crime So Monstrous," the title of a new book on the subject:

“Here, 600 miles from the United States, and five hours from the desk of the UN Secretary-General,” summarizes Skinner, “you have successfully bargained a human being down to the price of the cab fare to JFK.” Benavil even offered fake adoption papers to transport the girl to the United States. This took place not in the remote past but in October 2005.

This is an issue that is not going away, is growing, and a sign of something broken in the world, and ought to be more compelling than something like global warming. Ditto abortion. But we've already seen how that issue flies.

Truth With/out Love

A question I would like to raise in response to this CNN link, sent by Gregory Laughlin, is how are Christians to express love with truth, as opposed to truth without love, as is claimed by this manifesto to be released on Wednesday. It addresses once again the failure of certain evangelicals "(religious right"?) to engage the culture properly, with political implications. Some would argue that when it comes to expressing love in the forum of public discourse, the best one can do is to simply tell the truth. Have political candidates and legislators and public officials routinely been criticized for arguing their policies or presenting facts without love? Of course Christians are called to the speak the truth in  love. (How do you do that on a news program?) Should we look to the manifesto when it comes out for some clues on how to express truth with love?