My body is opaque to the soul

Those who've been following the on-and-off dialogue between Telford Work and me may have noticed that my last post directed at him did not get answered. This is not because he hasn't wanted to, but because he's been so busy. (I think if I want prompt responses I'll have to wait till he gets tenure!) This week he's at a theology convention in the Great Frozen North, but before he left he told me he was planning to respond along the lines of a chapter by Nancey Murphy in a multivolume theology textbook he uses, and I was welcome to check it out.

I didn't expect to find this thing even in L.A.'s vast library system, and indeed I didn't. But I found another book by Murphy and some collaborators, called Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature. This looks at scientific work related to the mind, such as Darwinism, genetics and neuroscience, and attempts to reconcile it with the Christian view of the soul. I've only started the first chapter, but Murphy sets out the endgame:

The goal of the book is to demonstrate the possibility of an account of human nature that satisfies the demands of these many disciplines -- to show that the portraits sketched from these various disciplinary perspectives may all in fact be of the same "person." Each chapter in its own way points toward a view of the person that we call "non-reductive physicalism." "Physicalism" signals our agreement with the scientists and philosophers who hold it is not necessary to postulate a second metaphysical entity, the soul or mind, to account for human capacities and distinctiveness. "Non-reductive" indicates our rejection of contemporary philosophical views that say the person is "nothing but" a body...So the difficult issue is to explain how we can claim that we are our bodies, yet without denying the "higher" capacities that we think of as being essential for our humanness: rationality, emotion, morality, free will, and, most important, the capacity to be in relationship with God.

This isn't exactly what I asked -- my original argument with Telford was about the origin of evil. But there's enough of an overlap in the subject matter that I think the book could be productive. Minute Particulars has also been exploring this subject here and here, so look out for future posts as I read the book.

I already have one question though. Murphy starts out with a quick review of historic Western thinking about the soul, which is very interesting, but she evidently expects her readers to already know more than I do. So what the frick is the difference between an eternal soul and an immortal soul? This was apparently Augustine's idea, but she never explains what it means.

Mamma mia

Looking over last night's post, I get the feeling it was one of those very long posts that was also too short. I hit on three or four rather large subjects without really explaining them, and I think I was a bit too flippant in places.

My "quick-and-dirty abortion test" was meant to be somewhat facetious -- there are, of course, more reasons than that why someone would have a certain opinion about abortion. But I do think this is one important reason why the two sides tend to talk past each other. I expect that today, after the sexual revolution, problems with men have swung more toward irresponsibility/abandonment than a guy wanting a woman to become a Stepford wife. That's been true in my own experience with men, I have to say. This does not mean that the Stepford-wife fear was all made up, though, which a lot of anti-feminists seem to imply. For women who, as I said, deviate from the mean in certain ways -- being more intelligent, ambitious, aggressive, less nurturant, and so on -- I can imagine life as a suburban housewife must seem pretty deadening.

I should also say that one way that I deviate from the mean is my lack of desire to have children. I was thinking about this after the last time I saw Telford, because as we were talking and walking around the church he was carrying his baby with him. I treated the baby as if he were a backpack, but sometimes people we encountered would stop and dote on him, and I'd think, oh yeah, that's kind of the normal thing to do with a baby.

I don't know if I'm going to feel this way forever. I have never been married nor come very close to getting married, so maybe this is an emotional realm I just haven't been to yet. But one reason the article rubbed me the wrong way was its unspoken assumption that all women, or nearly all of them, want children. A quarter of women in the West will never have them, we're told ominously. But do they want to? And even if they do, how strongly?

I realize there was a book earlier this year alleging that feminism had convinced a lot of women to put off childbearing for careers, only to discover in their 30s that their fertility declined. But there have been some issues with the data, and even apart from that, I wonder how widespread the problem actually is. Only a fairly elite group of women have a "career" as opposed to just working, and in my experience only the hyperambitious really put off childbearing for that long for that reason. The unnamed TV journalist Shanahan cites regrets putting off childbearing for her career; but clearly this is an ambitious woman. If she'd had kids and slowed her career, would she be pining for her lost shot at being an ABC broadcaster?

Maybe if I don't have kids, one day I'll regret it. I don't know. There are a lot of things I could regret about my life later. But I do resent the implication that I or any other childless woman am so weak-minded that feminist brainwashing has overcome my naturally strong desire to reproduce. Real life is more complicated, more varied, than that.

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...