Touchstone Magazine - Mere Comments

Dying Young (or Sexually Transmitted Unease)

Real Ad:
"For the generation that refuses to get old"
Touch of Gray hair [just for men] treatment--"a little to show your experience, but not so much that it hides your vitality."
"Best news for boomers since the birth control pill."

Now, I turn the page (in June 2008 Popular Science):
Headlines: Medicine
Beyond the male "pill."
From remote-control fobs to ultrasound, male contraception goes high tech.
Four items: remote-controlled plug in the vas deference to stop the swimmers; an implant in the same location that converts radio signals to acoustic waves, causing expansion and blockage; a 15-minute procedure in which a doctor injects a gel (same location) that alters the pH of sperm-cell membranes so they dissolve; ultrasound to the testes for 10 minutes--heat scrambles the sperm-production process for about six months.

Boomers, of course, won't need any of this recent wave of good news. Just stick to the touch of gray (add one blue pill?), and voilá.

PS. The article also says:

Although 55 percent of men are willing to carry the burden of contraceptoin, no method exists between the two extremes: condoms (which fail an estimated 15 percent of the time) and vasectomy....

Whoa, 15 %? And they're telling this to kids, right, when they hand them out? For "protection"? ("Relax: You have only a 15% chance of ...".)

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The Road to Abolition

More on the technological challenges faced by biological (and spiritual?) man, in this article from the Daily Mail. The more we learn to do, whether well or badly, the more regulations and oversight will be needed, and since possibilities are multiplying, along with the potential for abuse, the regulation will be handled by others, by the few, the elite. CS Lewis said it better than I can in The Abolition of Man.

News Flash: Repeal of Prohibition in Chicago

Chicago still carries a reputation earned in the days of prohibition, that of bootleggers and mobsters distributing the illegal alcholic commodity, making money hand over fist and under the table. Perhaps Mayor Daley feared another outbreak of mob rule and shadowy speakeasies offering another recently prohibited item, so he persuaded the city to repeal its prohibition of foie gras. Now that foie gras is no longer prohibited, however, I predict a great contraband market in another delicacy that, interestingly, was nationally banned on the same day (was this deliberate?), potentially giving opportunity for rival gangs here and illegal joints to make a fresh killing : polar bear burgers. Back on the foie gras front, however, protests are planned to appeal the repeal of the prohibition and Chicago may earn a reputation as the city of great moral crusades at long last. You gotta love this place.

Condo Minions

Heard on the local news radio program tonight:

The Chicago condominium economy faces harder times than the general housing market and will likely take longer to recover. A local problem: a northside condominium cooperative has issued an eleven hundred dollar assessment to pay for long overdue painting and repairs. Some residents simply don't have the money. It's hard to bail out, however, and sell the $400,000+ condos, since they're not moving very fast. And some of the twenty-somethings that bought them are in catch-22 territory: can't sell, can't pay the bill, and thus, says a condo official, a lien will be put on the condo so they can't sell it anyway. What is this particular twenty-something couple supposed to do? "Well, I guess they're going to have ask mommy and daddy for the money," says he. And it's hard, he notes, to feel sorry for some of these twenty-somethings, once-proud owners of a $400,000+ condo and still proud owners of a BMW SUV, who somehow can't manage an eleven hundred dollar assessment. Tough, love.

Gaylifornia Dreaming

My Chicago Tribune alert brings me the latest court insanity, from the West Coast. Let's just close down our legislatures, burn or toss our voting booths, and swear fealty to the justices of the courts. Four to three, "gays" can "marry" out there.

Calling All Grammarians

     Ladies and gentlemen, I can't resist.  One of the real joys of learning the structure of an intellectual system is that you can say sensible things about it that go far beyond the terms you're taught in school.  Consider the following sentences:

I see dogs.
I kick dogs.
I breed dogs.
I buy dogs.
I like dogs.

Subject, verb, object, right?  All verbs in the active voice, right?  Anyone up for a discussion of the real relations here among the subject, the verb, and the object?  Let's not be fooled by the form.  Consider the following sentences, identical in form:

That lion looks ready to eat.
That pizza looks ready to eat.

I know, it doesn't have anything to do with theology, or politics, or culture.  But it likes me well ...

The Remains of the Boomer's Hollywood Day?

Here is a fascinating podcast with Barbara Nicolosi of Act One and Salvo's Bobby Maddex on Hollywood and films from 2007. Nicolosi is fascinating, insightful, provocative (she didn't like Bella) and funny. She thinks the Boomer's day is over and the Gen-X films up and coming and refreshingly different.

Flat Earth Societies

     That's what conservatives are accused of running, as you all know.  Recently I was poking around in John Dewey's How We Think, one of those works by the mild-mannered destroyer of classical education that shows the uses of believing that people who lived long ago were imbeciles.  Dewey says that before Columbus sailed the ocean blue, everyone believed that the earth was flat.  Now they know it's round.  Actually, it isn't round, either, and Columbus thought it was sort of egg-shaped, but you get the point.  In the old days, Dewey says, in his long descent from Kant, people didn't think on their own, which is to say they didn't perform empirical experiments, but accepted "truths" from tradition, "truths" such as the flatness of the earth.  So, in teaching children, he says, in his even longer descent from Francis Bacon, we have to sever them even from the opinions of their own parents, so that they may learn to think on their own.  "So that they may learn to think on their own," wrote thousands and thousands of teachers, nodding in unison.

     Yet people of Columbus' day knew perfectly well that the earth was round.  So did people of Dante's day.  So did the ancient Greeks and Romans.  The only prominent thinker I know of who did not believe, necessarily, that the earth was round, was the materialist and empiricist Epicurus.  He thought the earth might well be a flat disk, because it sure looked flat.  He didn't care whether it was flat or round -- he was not a mathematician or an astronomer, Epicurus -- so long as we didn't believe that the gods were in charge of it.  But Dewey didn't even know enough about the Middle Ages to come up with a decent slander against them.  How any editor could let him get away with the embarrassing mistake is hard to see.

     It's one of the characteristics of the "progressive" strain in the West, the slander of one's ancestors.  A strange phenomenon, really, and as far as I know it's pretty peculiar to the west.  Architects in the Renaissance coined the term "Gothic" to describe the most splendid buildings ever to grace the earth; the term means "fit for barbarians."  The philosophes of the eighteenth century, when they were not laughing at the messiness of Shakespeare or the barbarisms of Dante, looked at the art of Tintoretto, Rubens, Carracci, Caravaggio, Reni, Borromini, El Greco, Bernini, and all the rest, and called it "Baroque," meaning "grotesque".  We for our part have had some hearty laughs at the supposedly straitlaced and intellectually dormant Victorians -- from that age that gave us Newman, Arnold, Macaulay, Ruskin, Mill (well, we could have done without Mill), Browning, Carlyle, Dickens, Lord Acton, and Pater.  In fact I think you could define "modern progressivism" as that ungrateful urge to exalt oneself by belittling one's forebears.  Or, to look at it in a more malignant light, it is the urge to separate the little people from their cherished traditions, so that you can do with them what you like.  "No, we don't believe that the earth is flat!  We just follow every word that comes from the mouth of CNN."   

The Tragic Death of Bunny-Wunny

Yesterday as I turned out of the library parking lot I found myself facing an SUV that had been coming toward me, stopped dead in the road. The driver was a woman perhaps in her early thirties, and I could clearly see a look of horror on her face, her eyes wide, knuckles clenched on her mouth. Then I saw what she was looking at. In the street between us a magnificent red-tail hawk was moving the carcass of his freshly killed prey, a mature rabbit--something you don't see every day up close. It was heavy work. He grasped it with his talons and lifted it a few feet at a time toward a lawn where he could begin his meal. The lady looked a me as though we were witnessing the Holocaust together, and I smiled back.

I am a gardener, and regard that hawk, as well as a number of creepy, crawly, squishy, slithery, warty, bitey things as my friends and helpers. I cheer the hawk. I raise a toast to him. I hope he comes up to Racine and has a look at our worthless cat (no--I take that back). The reason the lady can regard rabbits (if she does) as fuzzy-wuzzy, widdle cutesy bunnies, whose deaths by predation are tragic, instead of as a plague of noisome, verminous pests, is because our friend the hawk is on the job, keeping their numbers down to the place where they can still be regarded as "nice." Ask any Australian about this.

KGB: For Old Time's Sake

From the Forum 18 news service. A summary:

Belarus: KGB Pressure Orthodox Not To Venerate Soviet-Era Martyrs

Belarus discourages the commemoration of Orthodox Christians killed for their faith by the Soviet Union, Forum 18 News Service has found. Today's KGB secret police have sought to have icons of the New Martyrs, as they are known by the Orthodox Church, removed from Grodno Cathedral. Russian Orthodox Deacon Andrei Kurayev told Forum 18 that "Some comrades from the local KGB asked local clergy why they were inciting the people in such a way." While there was no official order to remove the icons - "it was on the level of a chat" - Kurayev reported that Bishop Artemi (Kishchenko) of Grodno and Volkovysk refused to take them down. "He told the KGB that he couldn't rewrite history." KGB officers also often monitor visitors to Kuropaty, where New Martyrs are probably among mass graves of Stalinist repression victims, a local Orthodox source told Forum 18. The act of going there - even to light candles - is "fraught with tension" with the current Belarusian regime, according to the source. An Orthodox chapel planned for the site has never been built.

(Apparently the Communists didn't kill any Christians? Or if they did, let's not talk about it.)  The full story is here.

Federalism & States: Competition

This is an easy can of worms, but I've been thinking about it since I read a new edition of Guns, Germs, and Steel (a gift). While this book about "the fates of human societies" has a very flat and what seems to me utterly deterministic evolutionary view underneath it, I appreciated considering some of the facts of human history and prehistory. (One claim: in a 1,000 years a migrating group of 100 could become a population of 10 million. So in 1,000 years the Americas, for example, might have that many people from a small migration.)

But the one thing that sticks in my mind comes from an observation the author, Jared Diamond, makes toward the end in a discussion of societies, institutions, and businesses relating to the effect of centralization versus total freedom in "group organization" on innovation:

If your goal is innovation and competitive abilitty, you don't want either excessive fragmentation. Instead, you want your country, industry, industrial belt, or company to be broken up into groups that compete with one another while maintaining relatively free communications--like the U.S. federal government system, with its built-in competition between our 50 states.

If only that were as true as it might have been some years ago; we have to admit the growing federalism and concentration of state power in Washington, often a recipe for trouble. Will local economies and serious regional differences remain (or return?) so that the word "state" means something more than a cluster of zip code numbers? Other than higher sales and income taxes (or no income taxes, what are the serious and beneficial differences right now between states? Are they in danger from centralization? Are our "states" really states?

Mothers’ Day

In this morning’s Mothers’ Day sermon the pastor was speaking of the plight of unmarried mothers, noting their dramatically increasing number during the last several generations, and the suffering so many of them and their children must endure. One notes that, given the statistics, a great number of them must have come themselves from intact homes. Somewhere along the line they became convinced they had a better way than their parents or grandparents, that they could as readily find happiness outside of traditional ways of doing things as within. They and their children are now paying for the error.

One has little doubt, however, that what led to this felt right at the time. It is important to take note of this phenomenon: the powerful illusion, under temptation, that evil is in fact good.

When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate . . . .

She was thoroughly convinced that, whatever God was alleged to have said, eating of that fruit felt as right as anything could: Here was nourishment for the body, mind, and soul, pleasurable and promising in every sense she could at that moment imagine. Against all this, the word and warning of God seemed purely arbitrary. Given the state of mind she had let herself be led into, there was no comprehensible reason for the prohibition; indeed, all reason and desire was on the other side. It felt so very right, so she ate the fruit, then shared it with everyone else in the world.

My point here is not to single out the woman; indeed, St. Paul makes it clear that the man’s fault was greater, since he was not deceived, as she was. It is simply to make the point that deep, positive, thoroughly reasoned belief that something which stands against the apparently meaningless, unnecessary, and deeply questionable (especially under the circumstances) command of God, is a gateway to fathomless, unforeseen misery and death.

God knows what he is talking about, and so do those who point us to “traditions” that originated with him, our sincerely held opinions about how right it all feels be damned.

Obviously a great many young people are in bad situations because their parents or grandparents screwed up. I would assure them:

(1) If you are a member of a stupid, messed up family, you are not required to be stupid and messed up yourself. It’s your choice, like it was theirs. God Almighty is on the side of everyone who wishes to have a clean conscience and an orderly, love-filled life, where people make promises that they keep.

(2) Not everyone is messed up, and not everyone who looks good is a hypocrite. While your fool parents were out doing the things that messed them up and gave you a rotten start, others were trying to live by God’s rules, and were mostly successful. The failures and screw-ups, if you haven’t noticed, hate them, because they’re half-mad with jealousy, and will do anything they can to make them look bad. You can join them, or you can join the others. You can’t belong to both groups, but you can quit one side and join the other, right now. If you’re tired of being good, you can go bad instantly. If you’ve had it with badness, climb right up on God’s lap and stay there as long as you like. I’ve seen hundreds of people go in either direction.

(3) While life can be very hard, misery is not inevitable. What life’s normal misfortune and tragedy does to people depends on what kind of people they are, not on the mere fact of misfortune and tragedy.

(4) The happiness of inward peace comes from obedience to God, and has nothing to do with your level of material prosperity--nothing whatever. Success or failure in the things that count has absolutely nothing to do with how much you own. Truly great people can be rich or poor; the same is true of the truly bad.

(5) God doesn’t stop people from messing up, and paying for the consequences. If he made a policy of this, he’d have to kill everybody, right now. The license he gives them to mess up is the same one he gives them to do right, succeed, and enjoy the rewards of success. It’s called freedom, and he takes it very seriously. He did not make us robots, but beings like himself, who are defined by their choices. (Sirius Black said that to Harry Potter, didn't he?) He made people for infinite happiness, whether they like that idea or not.

(6) God is not impressed with the excuse that you had a bad start in life. He’s no more against you than he is for those who, also through nothing they did, had a good one. They can, and frequently do, become screw-ups. Some of the best people who ever lived had bad starts; some of the worst ones had piles of advantages. Also remember that many people who had good starts took advantage of them and became good people like their parents, and many who had bad parents, stayed bad themselves. God gives us many lessons in nature; which ones apply are up to us. On one hand, caterpillars become butterflies; on the other, big pigs make little pigs.

(7) Anyone who wants to come to God has to believe (a) he exists, and (b) that searching for him is worth their time and effort. That’s in the Bible, but it stands to reason. You want to be a clever little atheist? OK, go ahead--God has never stopped anybody who wanted to. He will provide enough evidence for you to believe that he exists, if you want to, and evidence that he doesn’t, if you don’t. He’s not interested in forcing people to believe in him against their wills. (Freedom, remember?) You get to choose which evidence to believe, and that’s something that comes from deeper inside you than just your brain or your guts.

Once you decide you’re going to believe he exists, though, you can’t just sit on your duff, congratulating him on his existence and yourself on believing in it. You’ve got to spend the rest of your life--eternity, in fact--in a never-ending journey deeper into him. (He’s big enough for that.) This journey, like all others, begins with a single step. In the case of some it’s one they continue with their families, in case of others, it's the first step out of messed-up-ness. But remember that the formerly messed-up, spurred on by a strong desire to get away from the smell, can move very fast indeed, once they’re up on the road.

What's In a Name, II

     An article from the UK has recently made our e-mail rounds, wherein a Scottish author decries the softness and moral flabbiness of contemporary British men.  Boys aren't given exemplars of courage to emulate, he says.  Someone on our list then commented that the author wasn't even enough of a man to give his sons a genuine marriage to grow up in, as the article said that he lived with his "partner" Trudi.  But I was suspicious, having heard my sister the social worker refer to her husband as her "partner," making him sound like a lesbian lover or something.  It turns out indeed that the man is married.  "Partner" then must be a piece of editorial despotism and dogmatism.  If Oliver and Owen call one another "partners," then Oliver and Trudi must, too -- even if they in fact do not, and even if "partner" is a grossly inadequate term for what they are.

     Why is it inadequate?  It expresses a flattened and diminished view of marriage.  It is at once more interpersonal, and more impersonal, than "friend," even in the casual American use of that word.  A partner, in its most basic meaning, is someone with whom I partake of a certain good that can be shared out.  A partner to a business arrangement is one who is expected to contribute a certain amount or type of work, in return for which he receives a certain share of the profits, or shoulders a certain share of the losses.  Partners can, of course, be close friends, yet the partnership is only a vehicle for the attainiment of practical ends, which may be quite separate or even incompatible, from partner to partner.  Nor need there be only two partners.  If there are five or six, one may leave the partnership without causing the business to suffer unduly.  And partners may be exchanged, one for another.  Because the partnership admits of more members than does friendship, and because the rights and duties are mutually binding and explicitly set forth (in contracts, for instance), it is in a sense more interpersonal than friendship is; but no one would ever say that he longs to give his heart to a partnership, or that the partnership is worth more than the sum of its value to each individual partner.

     Now it's been one of the aims of feminism, from its earliest days, to reduce marriage to a partnership -- although in the time of Brook Farm and other experiments against reality that reduction was brushed over with a Claude Lorraine type wash of "spiritual harmony" and other sweet flights of fancy.  Later feminists, betraying a crassness that would have made Jeremy Bentham blush, called for the housewife's monetary remuneration for services rendered.  But a marriage is not a partnership.  Jesus never spoke of it that way.  When a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves unto his wife, they two, he said, "become one flesh."  Partners don't become one flesh; they become a business concern, or maybe a social club.  The oneness of the flesh suggests that something else has come into being, an order that is a great good in its own right, to which both husband and wife give their devotion, even as they give their devotion to one another.  This order, this marriage, is not the sort of good that can be parceled.  If you leave a marriage, you can, by law, take the house with you, but you cannot take half a marriage, or half the good of the marriage.  You can no more cut the love and duty of husband and wife in half, than you can cut a child in half; a feat which the divorced attempt to perform anyway.

     But the newspaper has decided upon "partner," to avoid offending homosexual partners.  Here's a case, though, where linguistic obfuscation should be a clear sign that something's not right.  Why couldn't they refer, instead, to an Owen and Oliver as husband and husband, or to Olivia and Ophelia as wife and wife?  It's because everyone still understands that husband and wife imply one another, and -- we may still have a residual understanding of this -- imply that order greater than both, the union of man and woman in one flesh.  So people use "partner."  Yet consider the unintended implications of that word.  A few years ago, I heard one of the guests at a party introduce a young man at his side as his "partner."  In that context it can only mean, "This is my partner in sexual intercourse."  Yes, we know that husbands and wives sleep together.  But that is as an expression of the whole order to which they have devoted themselves.  A young man who introduces a pretty lady as his fiancee or his girl friend does not, even in our day, necessarily imply anything about the bedchamber.  But "partner"?  "Friend" would do far better -- and would be, I think, more accurate.

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?

Touchstone: Award Winner

For the 4th year in a row, Touchstone has been awarded Best in Class for the Journal category by the Associated Church Press in their annual Best of the Christian Press awards. Touchstone won 6 other awards in the competition as well. Here are the results with some of the judge's comments. Award of Excellence is "first place," Merit is "second," and Honorable Mention is "third." All articles were published in 2007.

Best in Class: Journal
Judged by Ken Waters

Award of Excellence: Touchstone. David Mills, editor. “The premise of this publication—mere Christianity—is backed by a variety of excellent content. The ability to provoke dialogue with readers—Esolen’s piece on Esther comes to mind—is a real gift. It means people are reading and interacting with the content. The design is simple, but pleasing.”

Editorial Courage
Judged by Andrew Herrmann

Award of Merit: Touchstone for “All God’s Children’’ by James M. Kushiner and David Mills, May. “An unusual topic that challenges conventional wisdom. The point is well made and, given the current view on family size, courageous in its presentation.”

Personal Experience, First Person Account: Long Format
Judged by Nancy Fitzgerald

Award of Merit: Touchstone for “Eating Light” by Emily Stimpson, June. “Skillfully written, this piece examines our cultural ambivalence about food and eating, and places it in a eucharistic light, going beyond lip service into the meaning of one of the central elements of Christian faith.”

Media Review Section
Judged by Robert O. Wyatt

Award of Merit: Touchstone for Reviews edited by David Mills, March and May.
“A wide range of reviews of important books from a broad and generous conservative viewpoint.”

Critical Review
Judged by Robert O. Wyatt

Award of Merit: Touchstone for “Leftovers” by David Mills, December. “A tough perceptive critique of Diana Butler Bass’s Christianity for the Rest of Us, a study of alternate, emergent forms of the community church. The reviewer summarizes the book fairly and points to weaknesses in the congregations Bass praises: reliance on a strong central leader, absence of attention to sexual ethics, and the dismissal of traditional formulations of the faith.”

Humor Written
Judged by Joel Kilpatrick

Award of Excellence: Touchstone for “The Minister’s Cabinet” by Christopher Bailey, June. “A perfect bit of writing. Avoids all common mistakes of humor writing such as overstatement, cheek, and over-reliance on funny lines rather than funny situations. Author understands that great humor is mostly about characters and relationships. This one fires on all cylinders with great lines and a depth of back story.”

Devotional/Inspirational, Long Format
Judged by Victoria M. Tufano

Award of Merit: Touchstone for “Death Unplugged” by Paul Gregory Alms, March. “The article contrasts death as it is viewed in contemporary and previous secular culture with death in the Christian tradition. By recounting the language surrounding illness and death that has become so familiar to most of us, and then analyzing it, the author lays bare our attitudes toward death. He then reasserts the wisdom of the Christian tradition.”