In praise of deviant women

Eve Tushnet links to a story by an Australian Catholic woman who has nine children. She goes into a screed in the middle against feminism and the Pill, and stuffs a paragraph with extraordinary statistics:

After 30 years and more of militant feminism, almost a quarter of women in the West never marry or have children, one in three pregnancies ends in abortion, and there has been an alarming rise in depressive illness and breast cancer. High divorce rates and the sexualisation of society, meanwhile, are having terrible effects on children. Despite the availability of the pill, there are more teenage pregnancies than ever.

Let's take the last claim first, since that one I know is wrong. The idea that teenagers are getting pregnant and having kids more than ever before has to be one of the most persistent myths of our age. I was discussing this on a message board a while ago and found some great CDC links that showed birth data by age going all the way back to 1960, but since then the CDC rearranged their website and seem annoyingly short on historical data. (The best they have now is a record of births, which is all raw numbers and no rates.) But basically what it indicated was that teen births have dropped steadily the whole time. The birth rate isn't the same as the pregnancy rate, and pregnancy data from before 1970 seems unavailable, but the latest American teen pregnancy data shows we are not at an all-time high with that either.

I am speaking of America, of course, and not the whole West. But I am also looking at Francis Fukuyama's The Great Disruption (a very interesting book, even if you don't agree with all of it), which points out that the whole Western world has followed the same pattern in the last 40 years: a dropping birth rate, and rising illegitimacy rate.

Teens have followed this general trend. While the overall teen birth rate has dropped, the unmarried birth rate has almost tripled. As I blogged some time ago, Western society has been extending childhood in the last century, creating the category of "teenager" as someone who's past puberty but not considered capable of taking on adult responsibility. If there seemed to be no teen pregnancy problem before, it was because the idea of 18-year-olds having families didn't seem so scary then.

Some conservatives have gone ahead and boldly promoted teen marriage, but this is not something society as a whole (or conservatives as a whole) are comfortable with. And there's another problem. One age category where fertility has gone up in the last 40 years is for girls under 15. So while I generally agree that a lot of older teens are kept in an artificial childhood for too long, you'd have a hard time explaining why a 13-year-old should get hitched.

All this is not to deny that there's a problem, but I think the reason why the myth persists that teen pregnancy is something new is that people are uncomfortable with the trade-offs societies have traditionally made with teen libidos, especially with regard to girls. Whether marrying them off, keeping them under lock and key, infibulating them or whatever, people's options have never been wonderful.

Anyway, the other statistics Shanahan cites are problematic mostly in the correlation-causation question. I don't know if it's really true that a quarter of all women in the West will never marry or have kids -- certainly that's not true in America, but in some parts of Europe cohabitation has displaced marriage to a large extent (the cohab rate for twentysomethings in Sweden is 44%, according to Fukuyama) and birth rates over there are very low. I don't know on what she bases the rise of "depressive illness," but mental illness stats are heavily swayed by the reporting and diagnosis rate (especially since it can be quite subjective to decide when someone is clinically depressed and when they're just down). The breast-cancer rate I assume she mentions because of the theory that the increase in breast cancer came because having fewer children means having more periods, which increases the risk of cell mutation and thus cancer. Even if that's true, that strikes me as not a very good reason to have a boatload of kids; and as the article I linked to points out, it could be just as well accomplished by being permanently on the Pill without doing the 28-day rotation.

But there's the larger question: did "militant feminism" cause all this? It's interesting to contrast this with Fukuyama's thesis. Fukuyama is also a conservative who takes a rather cautious view of both feminism and the Pill, but he doesn't think they appeared in a vacuum. In his view, there was a larger shift in the modern age that a) reduced the need and the economic incentives for having a lot of kids and b) turned paid labor from mainly physical to mainly mental, thereby removing men's advantage at it. That, combined with the Pill, meant women no longer had their traditional biological restrictions. This implies that while social forces allowed women to do certain things, it never forced them to.

Conservatives like Shanahan, or certain evolutionary psychologists like Robert Wright, can't really understand why women would go along with what should be against their nature, so they tend to assume women have been conned. Shanahan says:

The contraceptive pill was first marketed 30 years ago as a glossy package of fertility control and sexual freedom. But, like a series of boxes one inside the other, women (and not a few men) have begun to find that at the end there is nothing but an empty box. The feminist obsession with ‘career’, not motherhood, as the central element of women’s self-definition made fertility the enemy. Babies can really wreck your career. They consume your life and your heart...

The irony is that, despite the pill being pushed as an instrument for the liberation of women, its greatest beneficiaries are men. If anything encourages an abrogation of responsibility and an unwillingness to form lasting relationships, it’s the pill. But feminists aren’t going to admit that part of the trick. Instead they try to convince women that they can do it alone. Who needs a husband? Buy a turkey-baster, demand ‘the right’ to IVF — or frozen eggs.

Buried in the second sentence of the second paragraph is what to my mind is the key to the whole thing. The underlying assumption behind this and a lot of other writings of this sort is that there is a single conflict between men and women: he wants sex, she wants commitment. There's a lot of truth to that, of course. But it completely glosses over the possibility that women can also want freedom.

I was thinking when I was writing about abortion a while ago that you could probably do a quick-and-dirty test to predict what a woman's view of abortion would be. What do you fear more from a man: that he'll be irresponsible and abandon you, or that he'll control you and take over your life?

Most women fear both, but traditional gender relations tended to thrive on the former, while a great deal of Second Wave feminism was founded on the latter. The abortion debate crystallizes this nicely: the pro-choice side fulminates against invading and controlling women's bodies, while the pro-life side fears enabling sexual irresponsibility.

I think there's another factor that divides feminists from tradtionalists and ev-psych theorists, which is what you might call "deviation from the mean." Arguments based on the essential nature of woman -- whether it's based on Darwin or Eve -- tend to describe a prototype, an average. Yet women all deviate to various degrees. One accidental experience that helped me understand the older women in my family, and why they're feminists, was the 1960 movie Where the Boys Are. That film featured three college friends, each of whom has a "problem" in landing a husband: one's too tall, one's too athletic, and one's too intelligent. Since some women in my clan go 3-for-3 on that score, and most go at least 2-for-3, it's not surprising they hated that era.

The trouble with essentializing women is that it tries to squeeze such deviations into the norm, and that norm is often defined by how women are different from men. So if women naturally have a closer bond with their children than men, children become their only acceptable business. If they are less aggressive, than all aggressive occupations are unfeminine. And so on.

To my mind, feminism was the rebellion of abnormal women. And since I am a woman who is rather outside the mean in several ways, I sympathize. I think this becomes a problem only when you want to make the deviant into the norm, or deny that a norm exists. So that women like Shanahan -- who, historically speaking, is very normal -- start feeling like there's something funny about them.

I think the world's big enough for women who want nine kids and women who want none. Let's just stop trying to figure out who's a "real woman," OK?

A Christmas memory

Long ago, when my mother was pregnant with me, my family visited Ghana, in west Africa. While there they collected a whole lot of ethnic knickknacks that I grew up with around the house, including a drum, a mirror, and a lot of little statues.

One of the most interesting knickknacks was a creche. It had no background or manger or anything; it was just a set of little freestanding statues, maybe five inches tall, of Mary, Joseph, baby Jesus in a sort of bassinet, the three kings, an angel, a shepherd, a few sheep, and a ram with enormous horns (or maybe it was a goat -- clearly the African breeds are different). Everyone looked very African, so it provided quite a contrast to the creches I saw everywhere else.

We used to arrange the creche on the mantelpiece, but after a while we changed the fireplace and had no mantelpiece, so we tried a few other places. One year my mother and I set it up on an end table. We didn't pay attention to the fact that there was another African statue that was already there (since it was always there, we sort of didn't see it). The other statue was of a squatting man, who would have been about 10 inches tall standing up. In contrast to the robed creche figures, he wore almost nothing, and his face was decorated with marks (representing paint? scars?)

I don't know who the man was supposed to be, but once we set up the creche and stepped back, the effect was striking. He loomed like a giant behind the nativity scene.

"There's an African god, watching," my mother suggested.

"Yeah," I said, "wondering who this interloper is."

So we left it the way it was. And had, I am sure, the strangest creche in town.

For that which longer nurseth the disease

On Saturday evening I went out to dinner with a friend from San Francisco who had unexpectedly turned up, along with his sister and another friend of his. The sister was a medical resident who had recently done a stint in a hospital in South Africa, where she was overwhelmed by the magnitude of AIDS.

Her comments about it echoed what I've heard elsewhere: the culture in South Africa is totally unable to deal with HIV. The life expectancy of many young Africans is already so short, thanks to violence, malaria, and tuberculosis, that "dying of AIDS in 15 years is like dying of smoking in 50 years is for us." And there was, she said, a strange schizophrenic attitude toward sex, a mix of prudery and promiscuity. A typical woman would refuse to use condoms with here philandering husband because then he would think she was cheating, meaning he would leave and his income would go with him, and she and her children would starve.

Westerners, of course, have long imagined Africans to be sexually looser than themselves. I expect this is because of a) lack of clothing, b) widespread polygamy, and c) racist belief that black people are more animalistic (thus justifying slavery and so on). But while you can't make sweeping generalizations about a place as diverse in Africa, it does seem that a lot of cultures there have a morbid fear of female sexual desire. The widespread practice of female genital mutilation in the north has gotten a fair amount of attention, but the south has its own version, dry sex. Although dry sex doesn't have the grotesque mutilation angle that FGM does, it actually seems more sexually deadening. I can't pull up the cite now, but I recall reading about a woman who interviewed hundreds of mutilated women in Sudan and found that most of them actually did enjoy sex; they didn't feel much in their genitals but could feel everywhere else, and sometimes developed a favorite spot that could get them off (rather like some paralyzed people do). That makes sense to me, since libido is hardly located in one place. But dry sex essentially guarantees that it's always going to hurt, and you can't enjoy the peripherals because you risk getting turned on.

Anyway, the other problem the resident faced in South Africa was general mistrust of Western medicine. This was understandable because they associated it with an abusive regime. But I also suspect that adopting Western medicine entails a massive shift in worldview. I don't know much about South Africa specifically, but I have heard that Bantu belief systems place a heavy emphasis on witchcraft. Most small-scale misfortunes like disease are attributed to the workings of some human enemy. In fact, I seem to recall that people are still accused of and sometimes killed for witchcraft in South Africa.

As we learned in the Western world, going from a witchcraft-based view of misfortune to a scientific one is quite a wrench, and it can take a while. It's interesting that in America, even though many people say they don't rust Western medicine and practice "alternative" medicine, nearly everybody accepts the basic precepts of Western medicine. Some people disagree that HIV causes AIDS for instance, but almost nobody disputes the fact that viruses exist, or that they cause illness. The belief that viruses are life-forms with their own agenda, and multiply and spread with total indifference to what kind of person they infect, is quite different from the concept that disease can be willed into you by another person.

The hardest thing about such paradigm shifts -- if I may use that nasty academic phrase -- is that they involve giving up the illusion of how to control things. This is as true of the sexual-relations aspect of the problem as it is of the medical problem. The idea that you can control women's desires by mutilating or drying out their genitals isn't just cruel, it's deluded. So is the idea that a faithful woman will never ask you to use a condom. These are, like witchcraft, superstitions -- by performing a certain ritual or obeying a certain taboo, you can control the uncontrollable.

We Westerners have our delusions of control about all kinds of things, God knows, so I'm not trying to be condescending here. Every culture has its own, but in different ways. The resident also said that not all of southern Africa was this pathological -- in Malawi, where she traveled briefly, there were billboards everywhere of the President warning people against dangerous behaviors. In South Africa, though, the delusions are killing huge numbers of people as we speak.

Down for maintenance

Sorry for the lack of posts, but I've been feeling under the weather. I'll rest up and read, which may give me something interesting to blog about later.

It's nice to have a theologian friend...

...both for when he tells you what you don't know and when he tells you your Bible study notes are just as lame as you thought. I actually hadn't been paying that much attention to the marginalia, but at that point I was puzzled as to why those particular proscriptions were chosen for Gentiles, so I looked at the notes and got even more more mystified.

I went to a different library today and found the NRSV study bible Telford mentioned. Just out of curiousity I looked up what it said about the same passage. It said something similar to Telford's second option: "In Lev 17:8-18:30 these regulations govern both Israel and outsiders who live within Israel; thus, James proposes a law for gentile Christians in keeping with Mosaic law but without imposing circumcision."

And it ain't condescending, either.

The fly

I have been debating with myself whether to post this, but it seems hardly anyone's been here lately, so what the heck. I had a dream last weekend that's been on my mind ever since. I was in a natural-history museum that I had been to before but that had recently been redone, and filled with large models of animals. There was a large room towards the front, right past the entrance way; and as I peered around the edge of the door, I saw the tip of a raised red-and-black leg.

I knew what it was. It was a huge model of a spider -- and I mean huge, the size of a truck -- attacking some sort of prey. Now understand that, in waking life, I am terrified of spiders. The movie scene that probably freaked me out more than any other was at the end of The Fly, when a fly with a man's head is caught in a spider web and about to be devoured, as he screams, "Help me!". It's cheesy, but man, I wasn't right for days after that.

So as you can imagine, I wasn't about to be able to look at this thing. I walked around and looked at other exhibits, even in the same room as the spider, but kept my eyes averted. When I tried to go deeper into the museum, though, I found it was closed, dark.

I can think of more than one reason why I had this dream at this particular time, but one of them, strangely enough, is Telford Work. I was deeply unhappy with his assertion that the origin of evil cannot be explained because it's senseless by nature: "I find the definition of evil as senselessness to be a profound Christian answer to the problem of evil's nature and origin. Sin contradicts the grammar of all good sense. It goes against every grain. It has no grammar of its own; it is grammatical error in creation. Any other answer is liable to turn evil into a form of good – dismissing or trivializing the radical seriousness of sin."

But my dream reminded me of the elephant, or the elephant-sized spider, in the room: evil makes all too much sense. When humans came to be, we were both predator and prey, born into violence, terror, pain, competition, and death. It is hard to see how we could have existed in that without "falling." And in fact, a traditional concept of the Garden of Eden, based perhaps on the "peaceable kingdom" idea, was that there was no predation in it. One interesting little fact I learned about early paleontology was that some theologians objected to classifiying extinct animals as carnivores or herbivores based on their physical traits. No ceature was created a meat eater, the theory went; all were vegetarians until original sin corrupted everything.

I am also reminded of a Stephen Jay Gould essay about a 19th-century field of thought, I think it was called "natural theology," that sought to learn about God through hs creation. As the essay described, it ran into trouble with the ichneumon fly, an insect that lays its eggs in the body of a caterpillar, and then paralyzes it so the larvae can eat it alive as they grow. In other words, this is an animal that survives by torture. Natural theologians had trouble figuring out what God had in mind with this.

This field is gone now, because, Gould concludes, nature and morality are two separate spheres. And this would all be very well, ifyou were a Buddhist or a Gnostic or a Manichaean and regarded the physical world as an evil that needed to be transcended. But the Christian idea -- inherited from Judaism -- is that God created the world, and therefore it's good.

Now, many people draw a distinction between animal cruelty and human cruelty by saying animals are merely following their instincts, whereas humans have a choice. But the mere presence of those instincts rather defies the idea that sin "goes against every grain." Acts between members of the same species like murder, rape, torture, war and even adultery (yes, those faithful pair-bonding birds sometimes cheat) are fairly common in animals and probably predate humanity by hundreds of millions of years. And we ourselves are animals; so connect the dots. Is saying that trivializing sin? I don't know, but I wonder how trivial it would seem if you were being impaled by a saber-toothed cat.

I do not mean to say that evil or selfishness is the only "natural" condition. As I said in yesterday's post, our sympathy with animals is as innate as our desire to eat them. But despite that post's cheerful conclusion, my dream reminds me that balancing one's predatory nature and one's empathic nature is never easy. And the slide between preying on animals and preying on each other is all too easy.

This goes to a basic problem I have with Christianity. There may well be a powerful force for good in the world. It might even have raised Jesus from the dead. But is it the omnipotent creator of this world? Eh. This world is not only full of nasty stuff, it would cease to exist without the nasty stuff. Many Christians seem to deal with this problem with almost a de facto dualism. C.S. Lewis envisions an extroadinarily powerful Satan; we live in "enemy occupied territory," in his words. When Telford speaks of sin, it seems more like an entity with its own consciousness than a mere set of human acts. It takes us over, enslaves us, cuts us off from all good. This seems to be drifting a loooong way from the idea of sin as a human rebellion against God. Are humans responsible for this whole world of violence, retroactively back to the Pre-Cambrian? Somehow, I doubt it.

The Fly

Little fly
Thy summer's play
My thoughtless hand
Has brush'd away.

Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?

For I dance
And drink & sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.

If thought is life
And strength & breath;
And the want
Of thought is death;

Then am I
A happy fly,
If I live,
Or if I die.

--William Blake

Nature's way

Speaking of people I totally agree with, I loved this article on animal rights from the New York Times this weekend. The author, Michael Pollan, expresses an idea I've had for a long time, but seem to share with few: we should not look at animal rights in terms of whether we kill them. The issue is how we make them live. So it is not necessary to become a vegetarian or refuse to wear leather, but the hellhouses we raise meat animals in are a blot on civilization.

It seems to me that, in regard not just to animals but to nature in general, we in the industrial world have developed something of a whore/Madonna complex about it. Either it's something to be casually used for our own pleasure, or it's so sacrosanct we should feel guilty about even wanting to touch it. But either way we are imposing a deeply unnatural view on it:

...human morality based on individual rights makes for an awkward fit when applied to the natural world. This should come as no surprise: morality is an artifact of human culture, devised to help us negotiate social relations. It's very good for that. But just as we recognize that nature doesn't provide an adequate guide for human social conduct, isn't it anthropocentric to assume that our moral system offers an adequate guide for nature? We may require a different set of ethics to guide our dealings with the natural world, one as well suited to the particular needs of plants and animals and habitats (where sentience counts for little) as rights suit us humans today.

To contemplate such questions from the vantage of a farm is to appreciate just how parochial and urban an ideology animals rights really is. It could thrive only in a world where people have lost contact with the natural world, where animals no longer pose a threat to us and human mastery of nature seems absolute. ''In our normal life,'' Singer writes, ''there is no serious clash of interests between human and nonhuman animals.'' Such a statement assumes a decidedly urbanized ''normal life,'' one that certainly no farmer would recognize...

Surely this is one of the odder paradoxes of animal rights doctrine. It asks us to recognize all that we share with animals and then demands that we act toward them in a most unanimalistic way. Whether or not this is a good idea, we should at least acknowledge that our desire to eat meat is not a trivial matter, no mere ''gastronomic preference.'' We might as well call sex -- also now technically unnecessary -- a mere ''recreational preference.'' Whatever else it is, our meat eating is something very deep indeed.

Right. Our relationship with nature is a long-term one -- a marriage, really. To go vegetarian isn't so much to harmonize yourself with nature as to abstain from it. Yet raising animals under torturous conditions is also against our nature. As Pollan points out, if we actually saw where most of our meat came from, most of us wouldn't eat it. We have a natural sympathy with beasts. To deny it is to deny our own humanity.

I've felt this way for a long time but didn't know what to do about it. Fortunately, there are some others out there who feel the way I do. Pollan refers to Free Farmed, a project the American Humane Association started two years ago to indicate which foods passed their standards for humane farming. In fact I was so inspired by this I went to Whole Foods today to try and find some of it.

I did find some Free Farmed food there, as well as some brands that claimed to be humane but were not actually labeled FF (though given how young the project is, they just may not have gotten around to everybody yet). Being in an organic food store, though, reminded me of how scrambled people's fears of modernity are. Very few labels mentioned treatment of animals; instead there was a lot of technophobia. "Our beef is raised without hormones, antibiotics or pesticides! Safe and healthy!" All these newfangled things you don't understand must be bad for you. But antibiotics are one of the great blessings of our age, in my opinion. Likewise, pesticides came about to get rid of real blights. They both can be abused, but so can anything. And there's no evidence organic food is better for you. All this fear of threats to physical health brought by technology, when we are healthier than anyone in history. It's our spiritual health we have to worry about.

The quiet storm

In contrast to the rather polemical article on the subject I linked to yesterday, a column in the Palm Beach Post comes closer to my own feelings on the subject of women at Augusta. Also, apparently I need to correct something I said earlier: apparently the club didn't start admitting blacks 30 years ago, they did it in 1990. Holy smokes.

The ladies in the house

What They're Writing, which you might call the A&L Daily of golf, today is all over the controversy about whether to admit women to Augusta National Golf Club. Currently women can play rounds there, but they can't play in foursomes with men, and they cannot become members. A little while ago the head of the National Council of Women's Organizations complained about this, and a major flap ensued. Lately Augusta's chairman, Hootie Johnson, has come out to say he isn't budging. It would ruin the culture and the comraderie, he says. Fraternities can be all male, the Boy Scouts can be all male, why not Augusta?

I do not know, and cannot know, what it is that men get from being in environments without women. I went to an all-female college and i would not do it again, but some women liked it, and I don't see liking a single-sex milieu as inherently bad. But columnist Mark Bradley, while a bit hyperbolic, hits the problem on the head:

"We're a private club," he says. "And private organizations are good." But a private organization that plays host to an annual public spectacle is private no longer. Either the Masters stops charging admission and ejects the media and tosses out the TV cameras and becomes a tournament played for the personal enjoyment of its members, or Augusta National must admit a woman. If you want to be private, lock the door to all those who don't know the secret knock. Otherwise you're a private organization only on those days you choose to be, which is to say you're a band of hypocrites.

Augusta is legally private, of course, and should not be otherwise. But it's very much part of the public face of golf. And I don't think this is a message golf should be sending.

I'm biased, of course, being a woman who loves golf. But that's just the point: there are a lot of us. Most sports favor men by nature, because of the physical differences between the sexes. This is true of golf too, but less so. The female baseball leagues disappeared and the female basketball leagues are just starting, but female pro golf has been around for decades. Men and women play together in professional events and around the local links (except at Augusta, apparently). With all the female support out there for the game, why is Augusta shafting women? I'm sure when they started admitting blacks 30 years ago that disrupted the culture too. But they got over it.

Eating blood, and other amusements

When I started having theological discussions with Telford Work I realized I suffered a certain handicap in my ignorance of the New Testament. All I'd read up to that point was the synoptic Gospels. So I said I'd read the rest of it, which I have been doing, sloowwly. This weekend Telford dropped a not-so-subtle hint in an email: "If you run into something you want to blog about, I'm sure it'll ignite a nice juicy discussion...."

Well, I don't want to start a big theo-debate right now -- they are always interesting but a bit emotinally draining -- but there was one thing I was curious about. I should say, before I go on, that the translation I'm currently reading is the New Living Translation. I was actually hoping to find an NIV but the library didn't have it, so I made do. Anyway, the NLT is almost like one of those Bibles for Kids, written in very simple modern English with extensive and somewhat condescending annotations. The passage I was wondering about is from Acts 15, where the apostles are trying to figure out how much the converted Gentiles have to follow Jewish law. James finally declares: "And so my judgment is that we should stop troubling the Gentiles who turn to God, except that we should write to them and tell them to abstain from eating meat sacrificed to idols, from sexual immorality, and from consuming blood or eating the meat of strangled animals. For these laws of Moses have been preached in Jewish synagogues in every city on every Sabbath for many generations."

The annotation for this passage says about the dietary restrictions: "These practices were offensive to Jews and made it particularly hard for them to have table fellowship with Gentiles. We, too, should be sensitive the feelings of others. All Christians must abstain from sexual immorality, emphasized because it was a prominent sin in the Gentile world."

So it sounds like the dietary rules were simply matters of courtesy that don't apply to all Christians at all times, while the sexual immorality rule does. I was wondering a) what the basis for this interpretation was, b) why those practices were especially offensive to Jews as opposed to all the other laws of kosherness and cleanliness, and c) whether there were disputes about sexual morality at the time that James was trying to settle. Any thoughts?

This one's for my mom...

...and everyone else who's recently been to grad school and suffered through bad postmodern writing. You've gotta love the opening quote: 'The essays that the graduating BAs would submit with their applications were often brilliant. After five or six years of PhD work, the same people would write incomprehensible crap. Where did they learn it? They learned it from us.'

Mixed metaphors: the grand finalists

Eugene Volokh posted his favorite mixed metaphor this morning: "This field of research is so virginal that no human eye has ever set foot in it."

I emailed him my own personal favorite, which turned up in an AP wire story about Fiji a couple years ago: "The council made its decision under the gun of a wave of protest that seemed to be spinning out of control."

Another triple-header!

Into the Mistic

Ron Rosenbaum takes down the increasingly unhinged Gore Vidal. At his best, Rosenbaum is an engaging mix of the ace reporter and the lit-crit nerd -- both of which I aspire to -- and here he goes into nerd overdrive about a certain TV show:

"Misting" is a term I favor because it has less of a built-in ideological agenda, and because it derives from that genius product of self-subverting American pop culture, Mystery Science Theater 3000, whose fans are known as "Misties." MST3K, as it’s known, made brilliant literate comedy out of the informal American practice of talking back to bad movies, to bad pop culture in general, showing and simultaneously ridiculing some of the schlockiest examples of world cinema. And insinuating into the Tapestry of Badness its own subtextual weave of pop referentiality—hypertexting hilariously on the run.

MST3K was quite the concept, and it certainly had its brilliant episodes; the treatment of Fire Maidens from Outer Space was one of the funniest things I've ever seen on TV. A lot of the time, though, I kept having this nagging feeling it could be better, that it wasn't quite hitting the mark. But MST3K is more an attitude than anything else. It was the show that took the audience's side, and made a fraternity of all the cranky lone wiseasses out there. A lot like blogging, really. And so the attitude lives on, even after the show is gone.

I must be a real Angeleno now

Today for lunch I decided it was time to try out a Southern California institution: In N Out Burger. I don't generally like fast food, especially not burger joints, but I've heard so much rhapsodizing about this place that I had to check it out.

The verdict: it's pretty good. The fries were indifferent but the burger was a good burger. And for $3.50 or so, it's quite a rib-sticking meal; about six hours later, I'm barely starting to get hungry again. But I'm still not that much of a burger-and-fries person, so despite what my co-worker warned me, I don't think I'll get addicted to it.

Some L.A. blogger, I think it was Matt Welch, remarked a while ago that you don't see that many branches of national fast-food chains in L.A. because there are superior local ones. In N Out Burger is one, as is the Mexican chain El Pollo Loco. (I think Fatburger is local too, though I wouldn't swear to it.) I don't know why L.A. would be the breeding ground for such places. I'd guess it's a combination of critical population mass, car culture, and popular tastes that take lowbrow food seriously. I couldn't imagine this happening in Manhattan, for instance, though they certainly have enough people. But that's just a guess.

Office heat report

Well, it was nice in the morning. I could smell the heating when I came in -- that heavenly aroma of hot metal and burning dust with a faint overtone of gas. (I'm serious -- it smells good when you've had no heat!) Then it warmed up though -- I think the high was 73 today -- and the air conditioning kicked in. I neglected to mention on Saturday that the other reason the office is freezing is the highly aggressive air conditioning. It's an all-season refrigerator. But at least the weather's getting colder, meaning I might actually get warmer...

A momentous announcement

This weekend, though I am not there personally to witness it, my office is getting heat.

I suppose there would be two common reactions to this statement:

1) Your office had no heat? How did you survive?

2) Southern Californians need heat?

Attitude 2) seems to be common among builders, who must be from elsewhere. Yes, it does get cold here. Not frigid, but when you show up for work at 7:30 and it's 43 degrees out, you do need heat.

Having no heat is pretty rare even here, but architectural indifference to the weather is not. So many buildings, including the one I now live in, have little or no insulation and drafts everywhere. Even up north, where winters are colder and wetter. When my family moved to NorCal in the early '70s, our new house, which was about 15 years old, had no insulation. My father put in most of it himself. (Just in time for the energy crisis.)

The irony is that indoors it's often more comfortable in colder places than it is here. When my father lived in Vermont he would laugh when I complained how freezing my office was. But his house there was built like Fort Knox. You could sit in the living room in a T-shirt and gaze out at the snow. And it actually cost less per month to heat the place than the California house.

Still, it's not like I wouldn't rather be here than there. And I should point out that most of these shoddy buildings were made in the era of cheap energy. I hope that nowadays, builders are a little more clueful about these things. Hey, even my office is catching on!

Consumed

Eve Tushnet has a correspondent who's apparently an expert on the history of home economics. The blogosphere turns up experts on everything, it seems.

How many schools still have courses in home economics, or consumer science, or whatever you want to call it? Inasmuch as I understand what it is, it seems like it would be useful for both sexes. I've certainly known a lot of singles with little idea of how to manage money, deal with food or take care of clothes. Moreover, when they marry or live together, this creates a lot of domestic tension. There's no need to describe the conflicts money causes. And I get the feeling, from what I've heard, that one reason men don't do as much around the house as women (if they haven't purposely divided the labor that way) is that they don't feel as competent at it. Women often reinforce this by criticizing them when they try. (The one time I lived with a guy we were actually the reverse, so I feel men's pain here.)

The trouble is that these types of courses are usually elective, and the people who elect to take them aren't the ones who need them. If I could do high school over, I'd take a quarter of auto shop. I didn't take it because I wasn't interested in cars, but of course I would one day own a car, and get jerked around by mechanics because I don't know squat. Likewise, I suspect home-ec courses are filled with people who would be interested enough to teach themselves about it, and not people who have no natural feel for this sort of thing and therefore need instruction.

High school is like that: the really useful courses are seen as minor at the time. When I dropped out of drama halfway through the semester I decided to fill up the quarter with a typing class. Might come in handy someday, I thought...

Luscious Jackson moment

It's just a rainy day
Ain't got no games to play
So come on over, babe
We'll bug out anyway

Camassia goes global!

Now that I have a Sitemeter I can see the still-paltry number of people who visit my site and where they're coming from. Most of them I already know, but today somebody turned up from the time zone UTC +6, which is way off in central Asia. Welcome, stranger! Of course, given the weirdness of the Internet, this could be somebody in Bakersfield whose server is routed through Kyrgyzstan for some reason ...

Innocents abroad

There's been a lot of critical self-examination going on among Democrats since the election, some of it very useful. A Washington Monthly article (via Flit) considers the party's inability to form a coherent national-security policy. The author, a former Clinton speechwriter, blames this on a basic lack of interest; people don't become Democrats because they're interested in military issues, they do it for the domestic policy. To the extent that the left is interested in foreign issues it's been focusing on liberal subjects, like ending apartheid and relieving poor countries' debts.

I've been frustrated by the same things for about 10 years -- ever since Gulf War I, really. I was at an East Coast college at the time, and I was appalled at how many educated lefties there not only didn't know much about Iraq and Kuwait, they didn't see why they had to know. Bush was off on a military adventure abroad, it involved oil, and that was all they needed to know to oppose it. Then as now, there were anti-war activists who were much more informed, but the insularity really bugged me.

There's always a human tendency to see every conflict abroad in terms of the conflicts at home. Certainly during the Cold War, many on the right tended to look favorably on anyone who was fighting Communists, when the realities on the ground were often more ambiguous. The left has fallen into the same trap, and when you look at the conflicts they do get interested in, you can see how. Ending apartheid was easy to understand because it reflected the fight against segregation in America: black vs. white, rich vs. poor is something Americans can relate to. In Yugoslavia the Serbs made the mistake of using the phrase "ethnic cleansing," which set all sorts of liberal alarm bells off. In Israel, we have a group of people who came largely from Europe moving into territory already inhabited by non-Western peoples, bringing to many minds the oppression of Native Americans by white people. In Tibet we have a place and a culture that still carries a certain hippie cachet, being oppressed by people who shot down a group of idealistic student protesters.

There are two problems with this approach. One is that it leads you to ignore problems that don't look familiar. The Hutu and the Tutsis in Rwanda have no counterparts in the West, and it was never that obvious why they were killing each other. Likewise, many African governments have been and still are as oppressive as South Africa but attracted little attention. Today, many people are rightly wondering why campuses are circulating divest-from-Israel petitions when so many other Middle Eastern countries are doing worse to their citizens.

But the other problem with analogizing too much is that it makes you distort your view of the problem itself. The Israeli situation differs from American colonialism in many, many ways. And I fear that many people who sign up for the Free Tibet campaign are defending a counterculture dream of Tibet rather than the reality. Despite the theoretical pacifism of its religion, Tibet's history is as violent as most other places'.

In other words, when it comes to foreign policy, there's no replacement for doing your homework. You have to deal with the otherness of the rest of the world; casting some simple master narrative over it like "communists vs. freedom" or "rich vs. poor" or "West vs. everybody" does not prepare you for the complex situations that are going to come up. And saying "If it doesn't fit my paradigm, I'm going to ignore it" really doesn't help.

Gutless, but not without a sense of humor

Pen from The Gutless Pacifist wrote me a nice email saying he did not take offense from my post. He also mentioned he told Hauerwas himself about his blog this week, so if the man has actually seen all this he's surely amused to see himself cast as Dr. Evil. Hi, Professor! :waves:

Peace with the peace-lovers

The Gutless Pacifist is understandably ambivalent about my earlier post about him. I was kidding, of course, but it's worth asking why I thought finding another Hauerwassian blogger was so funny. And really, I think, I was laughing at my own ignorance.

As I have mentioned elsewhere on this blog, I'm from a couple generations of Godless Americans, and am by education, geography and practically everything else firmly on the blue-state side of the culture war, part of what politicized fundamentalists love to hate. Yet there has long been a sort of collusion between "my people" and their archenemies that the fundamentalist version of Christianity is the true one: as Bruce Bawer put it, "that this is authentic religion, while anything else is just a watered-down version of the same thing." I knew liberal Christians, but they often dismissed large parts of the Bible, which tended to support the view that secular humanists lie at one end of a spectrum with the Christian right at the other, and everyone else is somewhere in between. This, of course, affirms to secularists why they're secular.

So while I admit I know little of Hauerwas (he's on my reading list, along with about 463 other people), what I gathered about him through Telford was that this was a guy who managed to tick everyone off. Not through insults or stupidity, but by defying these single-axis definitions that lefties and fundies have agreed upon. I really admired that, even if I didn't agree with everything he said. But for some time Telford has been sui generis to me; I have never known anyone like him. So when I came across the Gutless Pacifist, I was surprised. There are more of them! I should not have been shocked, but I was still laboring under my old stereotypes.

So I apologize to both you guys if I sounded insulting. I kid because I love. Really.

He said, she said

Charles Murtaugh makes a good point, but with a poor example:

Another key to understanding the left's decline is its inability to see any political reality beyond power relations. Presumably Yglesias favors abortion rights, and other "women's issues" -- actually, I think he does so to a fault. Does this make him less of a "white man"? There are only two interpretations: either he's suborning his own interests in domineering women's uteri, so that he can use their vote for something he does care about, or else he honestly cares about women's rights in spite of his own malehood. I'm generous enough to assume it's the latter -- i.e. that sympathy, that cardinal human virtue, allows him to transcend his ethnic/sexual identity. Why can't liberals give conservatives the benefit of the doubt, then? There are pro-life women, after all: are they either deluded, or just playing along to get tax cuts, or is it possible that they can see a moral world outside their autonomous selves?

Who says men have no self-interest in abortion? I'm reminded of some knucklehead who showed up at a pro-choice rally once with a sign: "Abortion: The Right to Get Laid." Even if you're not that crude, obviously unwanted children can be a burden to men as well as women, if not as much of one.

Actually, this underscores Charles' point. Not only does seeing politics as a power struggle between groups limit your vision, it can make you define the groups wrong. Back in college I read a sociological study of abortion activists, and as I recall both sides were predominately women. So it may be a "women's issue," but in the sense that it's women who feel most passionately about it, not in the sense that women are all lined up on one side and men on the other.

Are pro-life women transcending self-interest? Interesting question. The study (which I'm afraid I cannot directly cite, since I've forgotten the authors and the publication by now) indicated that pro-life activists were more likely to be religious (duh) but also mostly of lower socioeconomic status than the pro-choice women. Fulfilment was not through work, which was low-paying drudgery for them; it was in their role as mothers, and in their ability to create at home a haven from the heartless, selfish consumerism of the outside world. Abortion was an invasion of modernity into a place it didn't belong.

I'm going by 12-year-old memory here, but that was the general idea. I was thinking of that study, in fact, when I wrote the earlier post about why some religious conservatives oppose globalization. The tension between capitalism and Christianity was never more apparent than there. So Charles was correct in saying they might "see a moral world outside their autonomous selves," but I don't think they felt they were going against their self-interest. Their self-interest lay in being something other than an autonomous self. (Whether they're entitled to make this worldview into law is another question, which I will not discuss now...)

You don't say

Telford has a stalker. Well, I might think that if it happened to me, but obviously I'm way too cynical.

Upgrade

Thanks to Minute Particulars for helping me get tracking software for the site. One of these days I'm going to add a blogroll and maybe comments, but one thing at a time. I've made it to the '90s ... I'll get to the 2000s any day now ...

So, Camassia, why haven't you blogged about the election?

Because my co-workers won't shut up about it, that's why. Some of my colleagues are rather fond of political debate. That's all very well, except that after three years in the place I pretty much know what everyone's going to say, and they say it so LOUD.

I keep wanting to go over and say, "Do you have any idea how BORING you are?" I haven't, but I have a feeling I will. Not that it's a good idea, but I do things like that.

Awful poetry moment

So last weekend I wrote a sentimental post about my address book. But trust me, folks, it could have been a lot worse.

Within you and without you

Minute Particulars has more about the dichotomizing of inward and outward life that he (like Telford Work) blames on Enlightenment philosophers. He extends this to the mind/body division. I had no idea I'd tripped over such a hot topic, or I might have worded things more carefully. The original distinction I was trying to make was between voluntary and involuntary sin, but I think Telford misunderstood my point and I misunderstood his response. But sometimes even mistakes in the blogosphere can set off interesting discussions. With Charles Murtaugh talking about "embodiment," this might turn into a trend.

Save the mamas

In my last post I relied on my fuzzy memory to say that the rate of death in childbirth without modern medicine is about one in 50 births. Today the AP reported the rate in Afghanistan is one in 62, so I guess that's about right. Shockingly, in one province it runs at one in 15. The articles I've seen don't explain why, but that seems like way more than even nature intended.

By the way, the article throws off a statistical remark that's one of my little pet peeves: "dying in childbirth accounts for nearly half of all the deaths of young women." I hear that formulation for various stats: murder is the leading cause of death for young black men in X city, AIDS is the second-leading cause of death for young Hispanics in some other place, etc. It sounds scary, but the fact is that any cause of death for young people is going to be awful. They don't die peacefully in their beds (and if they did, that would be alarming, too!). So it doesn't mean a whole lot -- the larger question is how many young people are dying, period.

The price of brains

Charles Murtaugh has been posting lately on what he calls "embodiment" or what I think of as, "You can't fight biology." In his latest post he considers the funciton of pain in childbirth:

He's quite right that it's ridiculous to assert that women deserve to feel pain in delivery, but this doesn't mean that we should rush into making delivery painless. I know little about childbirth, apart from what female friends and relations have told me, and even less about anesthesia, so once again I hope a real expert like Medpundit will correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression is that there is still no way of giving birth painlessly. I wonder if this is because if a woman couldn't feel pain during delivery, she wouldn't have enough information to know when to push, how to breathe, etc. In other words, the pain may well be hardwired into the process, and if we tried to eliminate it totally we would end up with many more unhealthy birth events.

A book I have, Carl Sagan's The Dragons of Eden, addresses this question:

So far as I know, childbirth is generally painful for only one of the millions of species on Earth: human beings. This must be a consequence of the recent and continuing increase in cranial volume ... Childbirth is painful because the evolution of the human skull has been spectacularly fast and recent.

Now this book is 25 years old, and written by an astronomer, not a biologist. But I've heard similar things elsewhere; that the maternal mortality rate is naturally higher for humans than for other primates. (Without modern medicine it is shockingly high, at something like one in 50 births.) If birth really isn't painful for other animals, then maybe the pain has no real function. It's just not a big enough disadvantage to outweigh the benefit of bigger brains. As Charles says, close enough for gubmint work.

On it goes

Eve Tushnet picks up where I left off with Telford Work. I'm glad I wasn't the only one totally confused by the justification-by-works thing. She also links favorably to some of my posts (thanks, Eve!).

Speaking of Telford, today I ran across a guy who seems to be his twin, the Gutless Pacifist. Another devout Protestant pacifist fan of Stanley Hauerwas, he even signs off with "grace and peace," which is how Telford signs off his emails. No coincidence, it seems: they both studied under Hauerwas, and apparently even knew each other at Duke. So is this Hauerwas guy turning out a bunch of Mini-Me's, or what?

The great divide

Another Net event I'm a bit late to was a discussion between Jason Rylander and Matthew Yglesias about the obsolesence of the political left/right labels and what they should be replaced with. In his most recent post on the subject, Jason concludes:

Despite all the political rhetoric to the contrary, I think America has reached a general consensus on the proper amount of economic regulation in society. Certainly there will be debates on the margins--sometimes important ones, but neither a truly deregulated nor truly socialistic economy will ever come to pass in America. And though running against government makes for good political ads, the reality is that congressional Republicans are nearly as likely to vote in favor of government programs as are Democrats.

The truly great schism in American politics is cultural. It's urban v. rural, gay v. straight, religious v. secular, abstinance v. sex ed. It's racial politics, immigration, language. It's identity v. assimilation. Even on the world stage, cultural differences are as responsible for conflict abroad as are economic policies. Our national parties don't reflect this. I'm not suggesting we are headed for some kind of culture war, ala Pat Buchanan, though the rise of fundamentalism sometimes makes me wonder.

I think he has a point, but I would add that economic issues can also be cultural. Geitner Simmons had a good example of this in a post where he pointed out that opponents of globalization aren't just neo-hippie types but include a lot of religious conservatives. Jason frames the economic debate as government vs. private sector, but the anti-globo conflict is more about local community vs. any large, distant, powerful entity -- whether it's a government or a business. So the conflict is partly about business exploiting the workers, but more about consumerism brought by business destroying culture. The economic and cultural conflicts are inseparable.

What distinguishes the lefty anti-globos from the righty anti-globos is that the former want to protect premodern cultures while the latter want to actually live in them. This divides them on some matters of domestic policy. But this distinguishes them both from those who want to see Western individualism and capitalism triumph over all. Whether modernity's discontents can organize into a political force remains to be seen. One reason the left traditionally turned to government to ameliorate the effects of capitalism, I think, is that it's the only force with countervailing power. If you mistrust them both, you'd better believe in God, because that's about the only thing powerful enough to stop them.

Peace

Telford Work gives a thorough response to my last theo-post. I feel a little better now about it, so I'll just add a few comments:
--You're not causing me pain. Clearly we are divided not only by personality but by a lot of philosophy courses, which I never regretted not taking until I entered the blogosphere, I have to say. But I wrote to you about these things in the first place partly because of your formidable learning. Given that I'm not paying any tuition, I'm getting quite a deal.
--Your comment about the expectation of self-control is a good one, and reminds me of another excellent Noah Millman post (although since Noah is Jewish, I'm not sure what this says about it being a Christian thing).
--I would like to visit the question of involuntary sin at some point. Right now I feel like I've been hogging all your blogspace, and I hope I'm not boring everybody, so I'll give it a rest.

You learn something every day

Who knew there were gay sheep?

In other news...

So while I was absorbed in theology, address-collecting and grog the last few days, there was some good Web stuff going on. One of my favorite blogs belongs to Charles Murtaugh, Harvard research fellow in some meganerd subject (cell biology?), who always has interesting reading. On Thursday he linked to an article by British prison doctor Theodore Dalrymple about the startling cases of malnutrition he's seen among the inmates. Most of these came from drug abuse, not surprisingly; but a large minority, he says, are people who simply don't seem to know how to feed themselves. He meets young men who never have proper meals, scraping by on meager rations of soft drinks, chocolate, potato chips. No wonder they're so malnourished their teeth are falling out.

Dalrymple blames this on family breakdown. The young men he sees come from extremely troubled homes -- or no home -- where they were not properly fed, where eating became "a solitary vice, something done almost furtively, with no pleasure attached to it and certainly not as a social event." He scoffs at the explanation apparently offered by the British left that poor neighborhoods are "food deserts" where the supermarket chains sell only junk food, if anything.

At this distance I can't evaluate how either theory applies to Britain, but this brings up a subject I've wondered about for a long time: how much do you need to train children to eat? One unusual thing about how my parents raised me was that they didn't believe in telling us kids what to eat and what not to eat. (My father didn't want to be, in his own phrase, a "food nazi.") As a result, we did a few things others would regard as dangerously decadent: my sister didn't eat vegetables at all, and I remember Saturday mornings when we would grab the cookie jar and have "breakfast" in front of the TV. But for the most part, we ate fine. We're both big on fresh fruit, yogurt, and other healthy stuff. So when I'd have dinner with other kids and see some of the battles they'd have with their parents over food, I thought, sheesh, what a pointless waste of time. Like kids would kill themselves with scurvy or kwashiorkor if their parents didn't tell them how to eat.

According to Dalrymple, though, some people are doing just that. There is, however, a big difference between how I grew up and how the inmates grew up. Until my parents split up when I was 14, we had dinner together every night. My mother packed my lunch every school day. And my parents' eating habits were pretty good, which gave us examples to follow. These poor young men had no such guidance or modeling.

The lack of instruction inflicts more damage on some people than others, I expect. Some people just don't have very big appetites, and so with limited money they deprioritize food. Stress and depression also make some people undereat (just as they make some overeat), and one suspects these young criminals are seriously unhappy. And of course, when you're malnourished you feel lousier, keeping the vicious cycle spinning. (I suspect that's the reason for the results of the study Dalrymple starts with: malnourished inmates are in worse moods, making them more prone to arguing and thus violence.)

So I think to some extent, children do need to learn to eat. I still don't like the overcontrolling tactics I've seen some parents use, and I really disapprove of this you'll-eat-it-and-be-grateful thing. I knew a guy whose mother would beat him if he showed up for dinner when it was cold (ruined!), which is just wrong. I also think that, with the wonderful variety of foods available to Americans these days, it shouldn't be too hard to feed kids a balanced diet that they'll actually like. (I say this as one who hasn't actually had kids, of course...)

Actually, navigating the abundance is probably the big task for eaters in the Western world now. Dalrymple's patients, as he points out, have reverted to a hunter-gatherer existence, but unlike their ancestors they have quick-fix junk foods to gather that satisfy their tongues but not their bodies. In a way, parents have the same challenge when they're trying to head off obesity; they need to train children to choose. In a New Yorker article a couple years ago, Atul Gawande pointed out that weight-loss programs have a long-term record of unremitting failure -- unless the patients are children. They can learn, and they do learn.

Mad about you

I started reading this article about letters to Mad Magazine at work today, and had to stop for fear people would notice me laughing. My personal favorite:

I was once a miserable but fairly intelligent human being. But since reading your magazine, I have changed into a happy little moronic beast. While I am on the subject, I would also like to mention the transformation in my physical anatomy. I now have three eyes.

— Shirly D. Blieden, no address (#11, 1954)

A spadeful of spacetime

I am in most respects a creature of the computer age, but one thing I'd never gotten around to doing was creating an electronic address file. Oh, I would throw an email address into the Yahoo "book" once in a while, but for whatever reason I tended to rely on my memory of email addresses and would type them out. And I never put in anyone's street address or phone number. I kept all that the old-fashioned way: in a little book that I carried around. And this weekend I paid the price for my antiquation: I lost the book.

That book had a long history. I got it as a gift in high school, I don't remember for what occasion. It was one of those presents that I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to when I first got it, because I just stuck to the haphazard methods I'd been using all along to keep track of people. And when you're a kid, you don't have to do much; your parents do a lot of that, and the school directory does most of the rest. So starting to use the address book was part of growing up for me, of forming my own life.

I'm sure the book wasn't made to last as long as it did. It was a real mid-'80s teenage-girl item, a tiny cardboard thing with blue-and-white diagonal stripes and a little attached pencil. The pages were just ruled like notepaper; there wasn't anything as fancy as boxes. But I just kept using it, and using it. When I finished college and formed a group of young single friends in San Francisco, I was the only person who had an address book. They tended to stick with the scraps-of-paper-by-the-phone method, so not surprisingly they were always asking me for each other's numbers. (I suspect the fact that most of these friends were male had something to do with it!) I kept the book in my purse, which meant it was pretty much always with me. It made me an eminently useful person to be around.

The book was a real record of my life these past 15 years -- going through classmates, friends, boyfriends, teachers, relatives, co-workers, dates that didn't go anywhere, businesses I used to work for. Most of the data in there was probably out of date; it is, after all, a time in your life when a lot of people come and go, and everybody moves around. Nobody in my immediate family is still living where we were when I started. I remember I had one page that was filled up by one friend who kept moving -- I just kept putting new numbers under the old ones.

I've been contacting everybody whose info I need to replace, and it's not a very long list. It's kind of sad how many people are gone for various reasons, but I have always been more about quality than quantity in relationships anyway. And actually this has been a chance to renew contact with some people I'd let lapse but who, when I thought about it, I really do want to keep up with.

When I emailed my grandfather to ask for his information, he wrote me a reminiscence about his address book, which is twice as old as mine. In the early '70s he and my grandmother came back from an assignment abroad and bought fancy matching leather books with gold monograms. "She still has hers put away safely," he wrote, "but mine gets full exposure to loss, defacing, watersoaking (I once fell out of a Sunfish with it my pocket. A blurred mess!) and hard use. It still smells, faintly, like leather. And when I misplace it, which I do pretty regularly every six months or so, I go nuts."

I'm busy building an electronic file for all the information, but I also bought a replacement book. A much more grownup and up-to-date one, in hunter green faux leather, and little boxes for everything including email and mobile phone numbers. Telf thinks I should get a Palm Pilot instead, but I like having a book. It lives your life with you in a way a computer doesn't; it's a connection to your past selves. Besides, could a Palm Pilot survive going overboard from a Sunfish?

Sins of the heart

I didn't mean to say that Telford's argument about love and hate was "sophistry," -- I was talking about his earlier dismissal of the question of the origin of evil. This is what I get for rambling so far off the main subject of the post, and I apologize. I was also sort of kidding about Orwell; I understand the point he was trying to make, it's just an idea that's so open to abuse. Actually, it seems like our interpretation of the Luke passage is basically the same: the "hate" is supposed to be a transitional state on the way to a higher love. (Eve Tushnet asks an interesting question about this: what does this say about how you treat nonbelieving family and friends? Is Telford supposed to be hating me? If so, he's not doing a very good job of it!)

I do want to address this idea of "psychologizing sin" and the interpretation of Matthew 5:21. I don't want this to turn into dredge-up-my-pet-peeves-with-Telford week (I'm sure I have my own annoying habits he could name!) but I am getting a bit frustrated by how here and in a lot of his other replies to me he diagnoses some objection of mine as being a product of cultural brainwashing. This seems to be a common attitude among professors; I got it from my lefty profs when I was in college, and getting it from a righty evangelical prof isn't any less annoying. I mean, obviously the way I think is affected by the culture I grew up in, and I'm always happy to see different ways of looking at things. But it's insulting to my capacity for independent thought; it often assumes larger schema in my head that aren't actually there; and it unnecessarily complicates things.

In this case, I don't think you need to drag Kant and Freud into the picture to understand where I'm coming from. The idea of "sinful thoughts" seems to be a pretty standard Christian concept, including thoughts that you never act upon. And while I don't know Greek, I assume that words like "love" and "hate" included emotional states, even if they were more action-oriented than in the current use. I am really not sure from Telford's description how important he thinks emotions are; on the one hand he implies that you can "love your neighbor" even if you are feeling emotional repugnance towards him, and on the other he speaks of the "root cause" of sin. He almost seems to be implying that an emotion doesn't really exist without an action, which in my personal experience is absurd.

In fact, I think personal experience is a lot of what's dividing us here. Telford is very "left-brained," in his own words; he also seems to me to be fairly extroverted, both in the colloquial sense of being sociable and in the literal sense of being "turned outward." I'm not that way; I've always been introverted, right-brained, imaginative and emotional, which has generally meant that I've had a vivid and very distracting inner life that is sometimes only tangentially related to the outer one. I do not think my culture "trained" me to be that way; it would, in fact, be a lot easier for me to live in this culture if I weren't. Moreover, if any culture encourages the importance of the inner life, it isn't the West. I'm reminded of a paper I did on the Bhagavad-Gita when I was in college, where I remarked upon the fact that the Indian attitude places a huge emphasis on the inner life, to the point where it almost doesn't matter what you're physically doing, and how different this was from the Western Christian approach.

Indian thinking can take this to an extreme, saying that the physical world is an irrelevant illusion, and I'm not going to go that far. I also know I could do with a bit more outward-turning, since inner life can frequently turn to self-absorption (a trait of mine that Telford has been extremely patient with, I should add). But the point is that thoughts and emotions that are never acted upon are as real to me as those that are; sometimes they are overwhelming. This is why I don't like the way Telford keeps holding up the Hebrew culture of the time as the standard against which others are measured; like every culture, it seems to me, it favored some personality types over others. A God who does not consider the inner life important, who does not have a way of dealing with powerful and tormenting emotions, is not a God who understands me very well and could hardly be my creator.

Anyway, about the Matthew passage. I can't read Greek, but I have read a few different translations of that passage by now, and they all express the same basic idea: if you look at a woman with lust you have committed adultery already. You've committed it only in your heart, but you've committed it. Now it's true, as Telford says, that to look at someone is an action. But it is not ordinarily a sinful action; moreover, it's an unavoidable action, unless you're a hermit. What makes it sinful is the emotion. It is not surprising that many people have interpreted this to mean that having a thought or feeling a feeling can be a sin in itself.

There's also still the question of human nature here, but now that I think about it that will lead the whole thing off in another direction, and this post is already huge. Sticking to one topic per post seems like a good idea...

If the sky can crack, there must be some way back

So when I posted yesterday I was stressed out, running a fever and drinking grog -- a great concoction for chasing away fever chills, but not for coherent posting. Sorry if I rambled off. I guess most people who think about theology have their little obsessions they keep coming back to; certainly that seems true of most theo-bloggers. I keep coming back to human nature, the problem of evil, and hell.

Telford has periodically told me I focus on the wrong things, and should concentrate on the main Christian imperative: loving God, my neighbor, and myself. But it's not like that command is simple, or like everyone agrees on what it means. As I said yesterday, emotions are not chosen, so I can't simply decide to start loving because it seems like a good idea. First of all I need to know who God, my neighbor and myself actually are, which is why I harp on these questions of human nature and whether God is good. Second, there is the question of what we mean by love. If you're going to say things like God hates by loving, we obviously have to tread very carefully here.

Anyway, I realize that yesterday's post also goes against my general rule not to bring up sex in theology discussions unless it's directly relevant, because it has a way of sidetracking things. I was using it to illustrate a point. What you believe is part of someone's nature and what you believe to be a product of sin goes right to the question of how you love them. It is not a small point.

Happy Halloween!

I don't have much to do these days on Halloween, alas -- not a kid any more, no kids of my own, no kids even knocking on my door. I think the last interesting Halloween I had was back in college, when I lived in a dorm with three "witches." I assume they were Wiccans; I don't recall them using the word, but they seemed like your basic goddess-worshipping neopagans.

So on Halloween, one of them announced to the floor that they were having a religious festival that night, so we should not be alarmed if we heard any strange noises coming from their room. I spent the evening reading and ignored them. But later another woman in the dorm, who was definitely maturity-challenged, said she got so frightened at the idea of what they might be doing in there that she sneaked over and tried to tape their door shut.

"You tried to tape the door shut?" I asked incredulously.

"Yes!" she said, looking completely freaked. "And then while I was doing it, the door started to open! And I ran away as fast as I could!"

There's quite a contest going on here for which is silliest: being a witch, believing that witches actually have powers, or believing those powers can be stopped with tape. No wonder I don't miss college.

It's a thin line...

It's nice to know that Telford Work's family is in better health -- at least I assume they are, since he's resumed his usual posting rate. It's also nice to know that he didn't cut my previous post to ribbons. In fact, we basically seem to be in agreement:

Camassia's language of being "imprisoned" isn't far away here. What imprisons sinners is love: not the love by which Jesus endured the cross for the sake of his God and his flock, but lesser loves of family, flag, and fortune. Far from strengthening us, these get in the way. They sap our strength to follow him bearing our own crosses. They turn our grand projects of fidelity into half-built monuments to failure. They are inferior troops for the battle. Only by renouncing these encumbrances, as David renounced Saul's armor, do we affirm and participate in Calvary's victory and find the deepest community of all.

Yeah, that was what I meant. But I still think he doesn't directly address the question of why this requires hate. Detachment from your family's emotional and financial neediness would seem to require, well, detachment, but hate is a pretty undetached emotion. Telford's own examples of the word from elsewhere in the Bible imply exclusion, repulsion, abuse, cursing and disrespect, which surely Jesus doesn't mean you to exhibit toward your family forever. Telf says himself a few paragraphs later that he feels "called to show Christlike love" towards his family, which is rather different from hate.

Or is it? In an earlier post, Telford tried to reconcile an Old Testament call to hate God's enemies with Jesus' call to love them:

The inconvenient part of this psalm is actually key to getting the whole thing right. Jesus took on the alienation of sin that has been making us enemies of God and each other, and overcame it through friendship. He identified with this enemy of God, and all the rest of you too, taking our alienation into his very relationships with God the Father and God the Holy Spirit, and healing it by the power of his love. He hated me – not just my sin, but my self, twisted by sin, bound by it and a servant to it – by loving me unconditionally and breaking sin's grip.

"He hated me by loving me unconditionally." The snarky secular humanist in me wants to ask if this means that war is peace and freedom is slavery. But on the other hand, I sort of entertained the idea that freedom is slavery in an earlier post of my own, so I shouldn't be hasty.

I suppose the emotion being described here is familiar to anyone who's ever said (or wanted to say), "I love you, but I hate what you've become." Usually we say that to an old friend, relative or lover who's fallen prey to addiction, mental illness or just become embittered by misfortune. There's a sense that the person isn't being his "real" self, what he can be or should be, and is destroying what you love about him. I have felt this, and it's a hard thing. Is it unconditional love? Do you know his "real" self, or is that just what you want him to be? It can be tough to disentangle your desire to help from your desire to control.

In the Christian narrative, this is pretty much the attitude God has toward humanity: we were close once, but we lost our way, so he sends his son to administer some tough love. But it brings up the same question, even bigger: what IS our true nature? This is why Telf and I had this long email discussion, which we have both mentioned in passing, about the story of the Fall. I was trying to understand how Christians can believe that humans could have been created perfectly by a perfect God, and yet fallen so badly. After flirting with an idea that humans were merely "unfinished," Telford finally said that sin cannot have an explanation, because sin, by its nature, doesn't make sense. But wherever it came from, it didn't come from God.

This seems like sophistry to me, frankly, and I'm not satisfied with it. Telford doesn't care, because he's convinced that Jesus provided such evidence for God's goodness as to overwhelm everything else. But it seems to me that Jesus' extreme goodess is only evident if you already accept the backstory; otherwise, his sacrifice means nothing. And what you believe to be true human nature makes all the difference in how you treat people. For instance, different denominations have wildly different treatments of homosexuals based on whether they think God created them that way or that this is an aspect of sin from which they need to be liberated. We heterosexuals can feel similar, if less severe, sorts of conflict: is it really natural (or possible) to not only avoid sex outside marriage but not even want it?

I am wandering off the original topic here, but everything we talk about seems to come back to this. We do not choose to have our emotions; we can choose what to do about them, but not whether we have them. Yet because of certain of our emotions, apparently, we deserve to burn in hell. The line between hate and love becomes very blurry indeed.

Civilization launched by a bar tab

An interesting page on the history of writing (western writing, anyway) remarks: "It's tempting to claim that the development of a writing system was necessitated by the need to keep track of beer, but perhaps we can be satisfied that it was just part of it."

(Via Jeff Strain)

A glimpse of the male psyche

Jim Henley writes an account of last weekend's antiwar protests that includes this aside:

We joined the march near its head but bailed out to find a place to, well, pee. (A thick shrubbery. There's just something extra satisfying in peeing where you're not supposed to, isn't there, men?)

Oh, the temptation to do a cheap Darwinian analysis about territorial marking or something. But there are some places I'd just rather not go...

East meets West

A New York Times article describes briefly how Buddhism as we know it in the West came about through a 19th-century reform movement, and does not resemble the highly ritualized, paganish and theocratic forms that grew up in Asia. This was not a surprise to me, but I was a little thrown off by this paragraph:

Nontheistic, nondogmatic, nonviolent, emphasizing individual practice rather than institutional membership or obligations, the Buddhism expounded by, say, the Dalai Lama fits nicely with a modern, largely Western world view based on science and respect for the individual. Maybe that explains why it seems to attract so many physicists and psychotherapists.

I got to know the Buddhism they're talking about (like any mystical California teenager, I suppose), but I don't know that the fit with modernity is quite as neat as that. Buddhism doesn't conflict directly with science the way that Christian creationism does, but it does conflict with science in a larger sense. To Buddha the physical world is illusion, and to get too entangled with it or interested in it, as science does by its nature, will only lead you down the wrong path. Likewise the individualism isn't the same as Western individualism -- it's true there's not the emphasis on community that there is in Christianity, but the ultimate goal is to conquer your ego.

The affinity with the modern West makes sense though, in a different way. My religion professor in college (who had an interesting perspective, being from Japan but raised a Christian) pointed out that there's a strong resemblance between Buddhism and existentialism. I don't know much about existentialism, but apparently they share the same gloomy diagnosis of existence: it's full of suffering, everything is temporary, and it's basically meaningless. But Buddha claimed you could reach a mental state that would release you from this misery -- a much more hopeful outlook than existentialism offered. So the reformed version of Buddhism resonates with many modern intellectuals' feeling that the world is a godless chaos, but also has a way out.

(Via Eve Tushnet.)

All the honeys making moneys

I don't know why Glenn Reynolds said this Washington Post story was about "angry young white males," or why The Cranky Professor had to play mindread-the-reporter with it. It quotes one expert in passing saying that some men like Ben Farmer, the focal character, are "alienated and angry," but that does not seem to be the main point, since Ben himself is not angry. Instead, it seems to be making the reasonable point that society has become so focused on the college degree that it hasn't left many resources for those who don't have the time, money or inclination to get one.

This is a subject I've been thinking about for a while. My mother used to teach school -- mostly middle school -- and now is a professor of education, and we've talked about this. Strangely enough, despite the fact that we both have graduate degrees, we agree that college isn't for everybody.

Last winter we were talking about Ty Tryon, a 17-year-old golfer who made it through qualifying school for the PGA Tour. For those of you who aren't familiar with golf, that's an astonishing achievement -- that tour is basically home to the top 200 or so golfers in the world. But there was a huge contoversy in the golf world about whether Ty was old enough to be doing this. He was rushing, some people said -- he shouldn't try to grow up too fast, he was too young to handle the Tour, he should enjoy being a kid, he should try college.

The arguments brought into vivid focus for me just how bizarre our expectations of American youth are. If we think Ty is immature, wouldn't holding an adult job among adults help fix that? Where did we get this idea that kids learn to be adults by hanging out mostly with people their own age? Why do we criticize them for being irresponsible and get scared when they actually take on responsibility? Do these people really remember high school as being all carefree and happy? If I'd had an escape route into the adult world when I was 17, I would have taken it in a heartbeat.

Ty was, of course, taking a much more glamorous job than Ben in the article, but they're both suffering from a cultural prejudice against physical work. As one of Ty's defenders pointed out, if he'd been a computer whiz who'd been hired by Microsoft at age 17, no one would have worried. Yet even though the PGA Tour offers more money and prestige than 99.999% of white-collar jobs out there, people were still worrying that by skipping college he was cutting himself off from something. "The PGA Tour will always be there," remarked Curtis Strange. "What's the rush?"

The answer would be: college will always be there, but his game might not be. I think that another misconception people are laboring under is that what you do in your early twenties will determine the rest of your life. It's based on the old industrial-age model where you go through school, get a job and stay in that career until retirement. But many people's lives aren't like that any more. I finished high school, took a year off, went through college, worked for four years, then went to grad school to get my journalism degree, then worked again. My mother is a more extreme example: she got her master's, was a housewife and raised kids for 20 years, got divorced, became a schoolteacher, got her doctorate, and now teaches college. America is full of stories like that.

But I think the most important factor here is the confused attitude toward young people that I mentioned earlier. As Thomas Hine described in American Heritage a few years ago, the whole concept of a "teenager" is less than 100 years old, as is the idea that a 17-year-old is too young to act like a grownup. It's understandable that you don't want to burden your kids with too much too soon, but the downside to an extended childhood is feeling powerless and ineffectual. My favorite quote from the WaPo story:

"You see these clothes I'm wearing?" he asks. "I bought them. These shoes I'm wearing? I bought them. That car out there? I'm paying for it."

It's a matter of pride and obligation that richer people can't understand.

Au contraire. I'm a doctor's daughter and make a lot more than this guy, but I understand perfectly. I remember when I first started working, the little thrill I got out of earning and spending my own money. Even paying bills was exciting. It wasn't about physical luxury -- my standard of living was and still is below what I grew up in -- it's about power. When you're a kid you have to ask for everything, and hope your parents will be generous. When you're an adult you don't have to rely on generosity: people give you money because you can give them something that they need. And what you buy with the money is yours and yours alone.

Not everybody feels this way. Certainly I know some people who wish college could have gone on forever and see the work world as suffocating. But for me -- and for Ben, and for Ty apparently -- it's school that's suffocating. When you're a student you're always in that "kid" role; you get no immediate reward for your work except the approval of your elders, and just when you master something you're thrown into another class where you're a total novice. Not until pretty late in grad school do you get to be the expert, have the power, or produce anything anyone really wants.

Another quote that struck me was from Ben's girlfriend: "He says when we have kids, he wants to be the kind of dad he never had." How many 19-year-old guys are saying things like "when we have kids"? A lot of them seem petrified at the prospect of making any kind of commitment. Yet precisely because he likes adulthood, preferring work to studenthood and commitment to playing around, people think there's something funny about him. Who's got the problem here?

Visitors

I didn't quite mean for this blog to become so preoccupied with theology, but my life seems to be full of it these days. Today I went to church again, but a different one from last week. A friend from San Francisco is visiting to see his girlfriend (and me) and they're prospecting for a church they can both attend if he moves down here. The one we went to today is a local branch of the Evangelical Covenant, which my friend now attends in San Francisco.

The girlfriend has an interesting story in her own right. She's from Indonesia, but her family is Christian and of Chinese descent. Though they escaped the bouts of violence that have sometimes been inflicted on that community, they did suffer mundane discrimination in things like employment. So when she was in her late teens everybody decamped to southern California. They had no idea where to go to church, though. In Indonesia there are Catholics and Protestants, but nothing like the array of sects that live together in America. So they went to every church in the neighborhood, seeing all sorts of practices they'd never seen before, until they finally settled on some generic evangelical church whose name I forget.

Anyway, the Evangelical Covenant gives its local churches a lot of latitude in doctrine and practice, so I expected it might be different from the S.F. version. I was surprised, though, at how much it resembled the Pentecostal church I attended last week. The S.F. church was fairly traditional and restrained, with a structured service and an old-fashioned choir. This church had a rock-type band that enthusiastically led the group in song for about half the service, followed by a sermon and benediction with prayers sprinkled around. The general feel was more casual and emotional than in S.F. It affirmed what I've heard about the enormous influence of Pentecostalism -- even among denominations that don't actually practice it.

We chatted with pastor beforehand. He said this was the last in a series about commitment, and warned that it might be alarming. Actually, I felt he was talking about something like what I was talking about in my last post: the idea of surrendering everything to God. He tackled the strange passage from Luke: "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters--yes, even his own life--he cannot be my disciple." That line does sit uneasily with the Ten Commandments, not to mention Jesus' general emphasis on love. The pastor reconciled it by saying it was a comparison: just as a big building would seems small if you put it in the Grand Canyon, love of family would seem tiny compared to the love you need to have for God.

I wonder. I'm no theologian, I'm not even a Christian, but I feel like hatred is different from "small love." If I had to say what it means, it's that the hatred he speaks of isn't supposed to be permanent. You can't commit yourself totally to God unless you've become dissatisfied with everything, including yourself. You can't seek release until you realize you're imprisoned, and you hate being imprisoned. But once you're free, you're free of the hatred also.

That's my guess. I'll let Telford cut it to ribbons.

This is a test post...