Thursday roundup

 Francis X. Maier of the Ethics and Public Policy Center has a piece called "My Kind of Antichrist." The title had me scratching my head until I grasped the contour of his argument. What he's referring to is how the Enemy impacts each of us individually. After looking at the notions of a personal antichrist put forth by Robert Hugh Benson and Romano Guardini, in which a human figure proves to be the crafty architect of the world's ills, Maier gets to wha we really need to be attentive to:

These weeks between Baptism of the Lord and Ash Wednesday belong to Ordinary Time on the Church calendar. They’re a kind of Great Plains on the Christian wagon train to our real home. They’re where everyday life happens; where the choices are made and the directions are set for our final destination. In other words, they matter. The Antichrist of Benson, Solovyov, and Guardini may one day show up on the human horizon; the Devil has a taste for grand melodrama. It appeals to his pride. But such things are not for us to know, and speculating on them is an indulgence and a waste.

Instead, we might all of us, and each of us these days, profitably read the First Letter of John, especially 4:1-6 and 2:1-6. It turns out that “antichrist” comes in all shapes and sizes. As John says, it’s the spirit of all things not of God. Which means that my kind of antichrist – and yours – is the sin we find easiest to absolve or ignore in ourselves; the sins hardest to resist and most congenial to our appetites. Their name, if we’re honest, is Legion.

And admitting that is the first step toward making Ordinary Time, conversion time.

At his Substack, Ted Goia posits that, by the broad set of criteria by which we need to consider a city's musical importance, we should elevate one above the other contenders:

Which city is our best role model in creating a healthy and creative musical culture?

Is it New York or London? Paris or Tokyo? Los Angeles or Shanghai? Nashville or Vienna? Berlin or Rio de Janeiro?

That depends on what you’re looking for. Do you value innovation or tradition? Do you want insider acclaim or crossover success? Is your aim to maximize creativity or promote diversity? Are you seeking timeless artistry or quick money attracting a large audience? 

Ah, I want all of these things. So I only have one choice—but I’m sure my city isn’t even on your list.

My ideal music city is Córdoba, Spain. 

But I’m not talking about today. I’m referring to Córdoba around the year 1000 AD. 

At Law & Liberty, Rachel Lu exhaustively, and by process of elimination, zeroes in on what she thinks an airtight definition of a woman is.

Along the way, she gives a measured assessment of what she thinks Matt Walsh got right and got wrong in searching for the answer to this question:

Right-wing polemicist Matt Walsh got in on the conversation this year with a documentary simply titled What is a Woman?  It’s a “hostile engagement” piece in the tradition of Fahrenheit 9/11, presented as a kind of ideological exposé in which Walsh skewers the gender-ideology gurus with ease. I dislike this genre, mainly because it opens such wide pathways to dishonesty and distortion. A documentary, by its nature, cherry-picks details to create a smooth narrative. It is a singularly terrible medium for exploring hot-button topics like this. Still, I mostly agree with Walsh on substance, and he did a fairly good job of illustrating some of the deep contradictions in modern gender theory. 

I still had one major complaint. When a documentary is titled with a question, I read this as an implicit promise to answer that question. But he doesn’t, or not really. Supposedly Walsh is a guy who just “likes to understand things,” and he presents that wide-eyed faux-curiosity to the activists and gender theorists. If understanding is really the goal of this film though, it ends in tragedy. Walsh chuckles at Jordan Peterson’s observation that a man who wants to know what a woman is should “marry one and find out.” Then he returns home to his own wife, preparing food in their kitchen, and poses the question to her. She tells him nonchalantly that a woman is, “An adult human female… who needs help with this jar of pickles.” Cue the laugh track. 

Call me a no-fun feminist, but I’d have preferred an answer thoughtful enough to stand on its own, sans pickle gag. I think the audience deserved that, after watching Walsh crusade around like a truth-in-gender Socrates, demanding honest responses to “the question you’re not allowed to ask.” I realize, of course, that the plebeian ending was very deliberate. Walsh wants to imply that sensible, grounded people should not need to pose this question. They know what a woman is, just like their grandparents and great-grandparents before them. From the mouths of sandwich-making housewives, we can still receive commonsense truths now forgotten by our “learned scholars.” I get it. But I still do not approve.

It’s clear enough, certainly, that most humans historically would have laughed at Walsh’s title question. And they did know what a woman was, at least in the sense that they were able to distinguish men from women with a high degree of accuracy. Even today, most people can do this, despite the changed names and puberty-blocking medications. Most of us can tell when the clerk in the frilly pink blouse is a man, even if the name tag reads “Jessica.” We don’t say anything. But we can tell. Gender ideology feels insidious in part because it asks us to “forget” or decline to notice things that we all really see and understand.

Lu concludes by saying that if we define a woman as the adult human being who is equipped o bear children, it actually liberates women and opens the door to productive conversations about the potentialities of all people:

The functional-reproductive definition can help with the fractious issue of gender stereotypes. It liberates us both from needlessly restrictive stereotypes, and from gender-equality crusades. One need not conform to common stereotypes to be a woman, and yet, it should not alarm us to find that some stereotypes broadly hold. I myself prefer football to fashion, and philosophy to party planning; I recognize that this is somewhat unusual for a woman. So what? Most people are outliers in one way or another, and this need not be either laudable or shameful. People are unique. In social settings, we may sometimes find ourselves leaning on “soft stereotypes,” simply because we don’t have time to get to know every person intimately. However, if we properly recognize the difference between defining features of sex and more incidental broad-based trends, we should be able to cultivate some flexibility, abandoning inapplicable stereotypes as we get to know particular individuals. 

Moving beyond the realm of etiquette, we can see that sex has real social and ethical implications, which the functional-reproductive definition makes clear. Men have a stronger sex drive, while women’s biological role in reproduction is far more arduous. Those two facts fundamentally explain why women have sex-specific vulnerabilities, which must be accounted for in both law and culture. Women sometimes need sex-specific protections against the possibility of male predation, and human societies must also compensate somehow for their disproportionately-heavy reproductive burden. Mothers need help, and fathers need to be encouraged to develop relationships with their offspring. The human race has long had a solution to both problems: marriage.

In modern times, we have also become more sensitive to the potential for women’s opportunities to be limited unreasonably when protection becomes the overwhelming social priority where their sex is concerned. Motherhood is a very good thing, but it does not exhaust the full range of women’s potentialities. Women’s sports exist because it seems fitting, in an opportunity-rich society, to cultivate and celebrate the athletic potentialities of both sexes. Women, as a group, are a bit slower and weaker than men, but the female body was built to run, jump, throw, and swim, just like the male body. Women’s sports showcase and develop the female body, which is why it is unjust to allow a man to win the top prizes. That undercuts the purpose of the sport, just as a men’s race would be rendered pointless if a horse were permitted to win first prize. 

Sex is biological, but it goes beyond biology precisely because human reproduction is very important. Children need protection and nurturing, and adults need to learn to respect both their own, and the opposite sex’s, sexual and reproductive powers. But we also need to learn not to reduce people to their reproductive potentialities. Women are more than wombs, just as men are more than Darwinian “selfish genes” seeking to leave the greatest possible number of offspring. Sexed bodies have real significance, but this is just one aspect of human life; people are much more than just representatives of their sex. It can be difficult to understand all of this in a society that is obsessed with identity, and deeply confused about sex and reproduction.

That’s why it is important to define “woman.” The goal is not to vanquish ideological enemies with a knockdown conversation ender. Instead, the conversation should start right here.

At The Public Discourse, Joshua Spalding has a piece called "Don't Immanentize the Eschaton." The title comes from a William F. Buckley quip, which in turn comes from a thought from Eric Voegelin:

Buckley coined the phrase “don’t let them immanentize the eschaton” after reading Eric Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics, which stated that “a theoretical problem arises . . . when Christian transcendental fulfillment becomes immanentized.” While Buckley’s witty slogan distilled something important from Voegelin’s opaque argument, Voegelin’s concept was never intended as some “gotcha” soundbite for conservatives to use against liberals. Voegelin’s concern with immanentizing the eschaton was part of his broader and lifelong project to better understand the intersections of history, politics, and religion.

What can we do in our own time to not immanentize the eschaton?

Christians must make a clear and unequivocal distinction between the historic Christian faith and the misleading political religion that is more pervasive on the right that anyone seemed to realize. We should start by heeding conservatives’ longstanding warnings about immanentizing the eschaton. Then, I suggest the following strategies.

1. Speak truth. “Within this eschatological view of politics,” John Jalsevac explains, “truth claims are no longer approached as facts to be adjudicated by applying old-fashioned rules of logic and evidence, but rather as tests of loyalty—spiritual loyalty.” Mass media targeting specific audiences magnify this problem, allowing each side to marshal their sources, contributing to further entrenchment. Finding a way out of this environment is daunting, but it starts with telling the truth. Truth has inherent power; the more truth is spoken, the easier it becomes to speak. Perhaps no one grasped this better than Eastern bloc dissidents like Aleksandr Solzenhitsyn and Vaclav Havel, who were sustained through their long nights of suffering under Communist regimes by the conviction that living in truth is never in vain.

2. Stop demonizing others. The apocalyptic politics of an immanentized eschaton divides people into sheep or goats, children of light or children of darkness—actual language that was heard at the rally-turned-riot. “If only it were so simple!” cried Solzenhitsyn from behind the Gulag’s barbed-wire: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

3. Demote politics. When people find their core identity and ultimate purpose in politics, no one really wins. Politics turns into a Nietzschean battle for survival. Historically, Christians have recognized the subsidiarity of politics and the primacy of other, more foundational aspects of human flourishing: family, community, and church. Demoting politics to a secondary position can help us recover individual responsibility and vibrant personal agency—and the meaning found in these more basic aspects of the human experience.

The American Enterprise Institute's Ruy Teixeira has two important pieces recently.

At UnHerd, he looks at "Joe Biden's False Optimism." Despite some legislative wins and  favorable turns of events on the world stage, it's not all sweetness and light for the president. Those pesky cultural issues, which Trumpists screech about in the most boneheaded manner, are real, of concern to a lot of voters, and are not going away.

At his Substack, he concludes his three part series entitled "From Environmentalism to Climate Catastrophism." I'd encourage you to read parts one and two as well. He traces the arc of that devolution over the past several decades. He arrives at a conclusion similar to the one he expresses in the above piece. Democrats are going to have to ignore the alarmists and get on board with solutions that acknowledge that normal-people energy forms - oil, coal and natural gas - will unavoidably be the big players in the mix for the foreseeable future.

Nicholas Goldberg, writing at the Los Angeles Times, says if Gavin Newsom is seriously considering a run at the presidency, he's going to have to come up with a career narrative that sidelines his obviously privileged background:

The story he’s been stuck with is neither uplifting nor, to use the popular phrase, relatable.

So he’s out to fix it. Which is probably why he’s getting more personal, telling more anecdotes and trying to recast himself as someone who faced and overcame obstacles in his day.

“A child of divorce and dyslexia, trying to find my bearings” is how he described himself at age 10 or 11 in his unusually personal inaugural addressearlier this month. He described his mom, juggling three jobs. The difficulties he faced in school.

“I couldn’t read, and I was looking for any way to ditch classes,” Newsom said. “I’d fake stomach aches and dizziness. I’d bite down on the thermometer in the nurse’s office trying to make the temperature rise past 100.”

The emphasis on family history and personal challenges was “a departure from past speeches,” reported The Times.

Newsom described how his great-great-grandparents came from County Cork “during the first years of California’s statehood.” The first William Newsom, he said, was a working-class Irish immigrant who became a San Francisco beat cop.

I'm not saying it's not all true. No doubt it is. But it certainly appears to be part of a search for a compelling, curated back story that suggests not everything came so easily — one that humanizes him and normalizes him for voters. If he does eventually decide to run for president, expect his stump-speech bio to be rehashed in a campaign autobiography that lays it all out on the printed page.

“What’s the first thing you need to do when you’re running for president or thinking about it? You tell your story,” Katie Merrill, a Democratic political strategist, told The Times.

(Expect to read less in that book about the affair he had with his campaign manager’s wife when he was mayor of San Francisco and how he sought treatment for alcohol abuse. That’s not the kind of overcoming-adversity story voters are looking for.)

By the way, I’m not blaming Newsom for any of this. Personal narratives are an age-old part of politics.

Why do voters crave them? Partly because overcoming obstacles in life is honestly admirable. But also because humans respond to stories more than they do to policies, statistics, polemics, resumes or canned rhetoric. And because we all love a Horatio Alger, up-from-humble-beginnings tale.

Finally, I have a few essays of my own to steer you to. At Precipice, my latest is entitled "The Deadly Idea That It's a Done Deal: Have We Validated Nietzche's Assertion That 'God Is Dead, and We Killed Him"?

My latest two at Ordinary Times are "Notes on the Delicious Art of Arguing" and a eulogy to Jeff Beck.

 

 

 

Sex differences, the fading of the family and the atomization of post-American society

 I've had one of those experiences over the last couple of days in which I've come across multiple articles that, taken together, present a theme.

Yesterday I read the Real Clear Investigations piece by urbanist Joel Kotkin and American Enterprise Institute scholar Samuel J. Abrams entitled "The Rise of the Single Woke (and Young, Democratic) Female." It's a statistics-rich deep dive into how "childless women are joining African Americans as the Democrats' most reliable supporters."

Their power is growing thanks to the demographic winds. The number of never married women has grown from about 20% in 1950 to over 30% in 2022, while the percentage of married women has declined from almost 70% in 1950 to under 50% today. Overall, the percentage of married households with children has declined from 37% in 1976 to 21% today.  

The Pew Research Center notes that since 1960, single-person households in the United States have grown from 13% to 27% (2019). Many, particularly women, are not all that keen on finding a partner. Pew recently found that “men are far more likely than women to be on the dating market: 61% of single men say they are currently looking for a relationship or dates, compared with 38% of single women.”  

There’s clearly far less stigma attached to being single and unpartnered. Single women today have many impressive role models of unattached, childless women who have succeeded on their own – like Taylor Swift and much of the U.S. women’s soccer team. This phenomenon is not confined to the United States. Marriage and birthrates have fallen in much of the world, including Europe and Japan. Writing in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, columnist Emma John observed that, “Singleness is no longer to be sneered at. Never marrying or taking a long-term partner is increasingly seen as a valid choice.”  

Their demographic status has fostered a sense of affinity among them:

Distinct from divorced women or widows, these largely Gen Z and Millennial voters share a sense of collective identity and progressive ideology that sets them apart from older women. More likely to live in urban centers and to support progressive policies, they are a driving force in the Democratic party’s and the nation’s shift to the left. 

Not just a shared sense of affinity, but grievance as well:

Attitudes are what most distinguish single women from other voters. An American Enterprise Institute survey shows that married men and women are far more likely than unmarried females to think women are well-treated or equally treated. As they grow in numbers, these discontented younger single women are developing something of a group consciousness. Nearly two-thirds of women under 30, for example, see what happens to other women as critical to their own lives; among women over 50, this mindset shrinks to less than half.  

Now, just as there are more unmarried females, there are also more unmarried males. Do they share this we-gotta-stick-together ethos? Not so much:

This perception of linked fate stands in contrast to survey results regarding single men, who report that they are increasingly disconnected from each other while women bond more closely. 

Now that more than half of all higher-education students are women, the we-all-gotta-stick-together tenor is becoming increasingly institutionalized:

. . . a feminist agenda has become increasingly de rigueur in colleges. According to the  National Center for Education Statistics, the number of women’s and gender studies degrees in the United States has increased by more than 300% since 1990, and in 2015, there were more than 2,000 degrees conferred. There are widespread movements to establish women’s centers almost everywhere, even as men are abandoning college and university life in record numbers, and those who remain are hit with messaging about behavior and status from diversity, equity, and inclusion offices along with various student life offices that regularly call them toxic, aggressive, and born misogynists.  

This demographic doesn't just take a family-life-is-not-for-me-but-you-do-you approach, No, it's out to change public perceptions at large about family:

More recently, anti-family attitudes have become more pronounced. “Queer studies” often advocate replacing the “nuclear family” with some form of collectivized childrearing. Progressive groups like Black Lives Matter made their opposition to the nuclear family a part of their basic original platform, even though evidence shows family breakdown has hurt African American boys most of all.  

It turns out that Bell and Toffler were pretty prescient:

We are witnessing, as sociologist Daniel Bell noted a half century ago in “The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society,” a new type of individualism, unmoored from religion and family, something fundamentally transforming the foundations of middle-class culture. This echoes what the popular futurist Alvin Toffler in 1970 described as a growing immersion in work at the expense of family life. He envisioned a revolution in marriage that would result in a “streamlined family,” and, if children are in the picture, relying on professional child-raisers. The ideal of long-term marriage would give way, he expected, to more transient relationships and numerous partners at different stages of life.  

There seems to be a strong correlation between the economic status of single females and their view of government's role:

There is a clear economic divergence between married and unmarried women, if for no other reason than that two incomes provide more resources and children present different demands. There are plenty of renting couples and home-owning singles, but married people account for 77% of all homeowners, according to the Center for Politics. Married women tend also to do far better professionally and economically, and their rate of marriage has remained constant while those without spouses have declined by 15% over the past four decades, notes the Brookings Institution. Single-parent households, they find, do far worse. 

This economic reality impacts political choices. Not part of an economic familial unit, they tend to look to government for help, whether for rent subsidies or direct transfers. The pitch of Democratic presidents as reflected in Barack Obama’s “Life of Julia” and Joe Biden’s “Life of Linda” – narratives that advertised the government’s cradle-to-grave assistance for women – is geared toward women who never marry, with the occasional child-raising addressed not by family resources but government transfers.  

And then there's the impact of "the big sort":

The divisions between married and unmarried women are reenforced and amplified by the geographic divisions in the country – what some call “the big sort”– as Americans increasingly settle into distinct communities of likeminded individuals. Urban centers, for example, are particularly friendly to singles. In virtually all high-income societies, high density today almost always translates into low fertility rates, led by San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, and Boston. In urban cores like Manhattan, single households constituted nearly 50% of households, according to American Community Survey 2019 data.

Kotkin and Abrams go on to statistically show that married women are not in ideological lockstep with the SWFs. They tend to identify as conservative more frequently. Divorced women, too.

And this plays out as a collectivism-versus-focus-on-opportunity-and-economic-growth dichotomy:

Public policy may have a strong influence on this dynamic. The single, the unattached, and the unmarried are already demanding state provisions to guarantee “affordable” urban housing, more money for transit, and steps toward a guaranteed income for individuals – all of which will, in turn, provide incentives to remain unattached. In contrast, the demands of family-oriented voters may be more focused on economic growth, safety, improving basic education, and ways to save money for their offspring.  

The piece I encountered this morning, by Mary Harrington at UnHerd, takes a more predictive view of this development. It's entitled "A Sex War Is Coming."

It notes that that AWFLs (affluent, white, female liberals) have successfully completed a Gramscian long march through the institutions:

. . . technological advancements have delivered new opportunities for well-qualified knowledge workers of both sexes, even as the same changes have automated and de-industrialised away the physically more arduous work previously performed mostly by working-class men. This virtualisation of work has, overall, benefited women much more than men.

Accordingly, women have seized the opportunity. American colleges have been majority-female since the late Seventies, and today, women outnumber men at undergraduate level in most colleges, with the disparity as large as 60%-40% in some elite institutions. And this has turned out a steadily compounding supermajority of knowledge-class women, which forms an increasingly heavy-hitting part of the rising Virtual elite.

The gradual extension of ever more spheres of work to relatively equal participation is, to a great extent, an effect of the transition away from physical toward knowledge work — but is routinely framed as “progress” in an abstract sense. In suggesting a more material interpretation of this change, I’m not making the opposite argument, that this represents decline. More women in public life is not in itself a bad thing, unless you really are a misogynist. But as female graduates have embraced professional life across knowledge-economy and bureaucratic roles, and their influence has compounded over time, this shift has redrawn the political map in important ways — not least by tilting visible public discourse Left, in ways that only ambivalently reflect the electorate overall.

At undergraduate level, women are especially heavily represented among arts and social sciences courses – topics so overwhelmingly progressive that only 9% of undergraduates vote Republican. These overwhelmingly Left-wing female graduates then cluster in the institutions that set and manage social and cultural norms, such as education, media, and HR. In American nonprofits, for example, 75% are female, while HR, the division of corporate life most concerned with managing the moral parameters of everyday working life, is two-thirds female.

And those progressive graduate women who aren’t busy shaping public morals via nonprofits and HR departments are busy doing so for the next generation in schools: 76% of American teachers are women. Inevitably, given that all US states require teachers to hold at least a bachelor’s degree, these are also uniformly drawn from the female demographic most likely to be very liberal.

When Meghan McCain’s husband talked about how the Democrats will soon be dominated by “millennial girlboss energy” types and described the prospect as “crazytown”, progressive firebrand Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez was strictly correct to point out that women make up less than a third of the Senate, and millennials only 7%. But this is to miss the point.

The AWFL demographic, relatively underrepresented in the Senate, is overrepresented across media, journalism, nonprofits, HR departments, academia, and school teachers. Their views can expect enthusiastic signal-boosting and institutional support from such bodies. They’re also the demographic most overwhelmingly likely to vote Democrat. No wonder their political priorities increasingly shape Democratic political platforms: their high visibility makes it easy to mistake them for the entirety of the Left.

This makes AWFLs inclined to get involved with transgendered people's "rights," given their vested interest in blurring distinctions between the sexes, so as to disseminate the notion of any and all being equally suited to any kind of occupation or societal opportunity, 

It's also behind their stake in abortion:

. . . such women are structurally dependent on medical interventions to keep their bodies free from the rigours and long-term obligations of pregnancy, childbirth and dependent children. In other words: for AWFLs overall, abortion really is an existential issue. And making the midterms a referendum on that issue appears to have paid off. For suburban women, and indeed the electorate overall, it seems gas prices remain some way downstream of the tech-enabled reproductive “freedom”that knowledge-class Clinton feminists routinely frame as a precondition for personhood as such.

An observation after reading both articles: the highest-paying occupations (engineering, IT, finance, which are at present still male-intensive) are not necessarily the most culturally influential. The thing to pay attention to is the continuing proliferation of jobs that shape our institutions' priorities. And men aren't filling those jobs too much. Not even married women. 

This is how sweeping change happens to post-American society as most of us are busy distracting ourselves. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I suppose, like all else, Western civilization has to have a shelf life

 You've surely noticed that I don't use LITD to weigh in on every last instance of gender insanity severing the last strand of the gossamer and hopelessly frayed thread by which civilization hangs. Not only are instances that get news coverage daily occurrences now, it's in our faces in our daily lives. I've had students in my community college courses for several semesters now who put pronouns in their profiles. Got a business email a few weeks ago, and the person with whom I was corresponding did the pronoun thing. 

But occasionally, a development must be remarked on. The Cambridge Dictionary's "update" of the definition of a woman qualifies:

Cambridge Dictionary has updated its definition of “woman” to include anyone who “identifies as female” regardless of their sex at birth. 

The online dictionary recently added a supplementary definition of a “woman” which includes transgender people. 

It now states that as well as definitions including an “adult female human being”, a woman can also be “an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth”. 

It gives the examples: “She was the first trans woman elected to a national office” and “Mary is a woman who was assigned male at birth”.

The Dictionary’s editors made the changes after studying patterns of how the word “woman” was being used across society, and concluded that the new definition is one that English learners “should be aware of”.

This pretty much makes it official that use of the term "woman" in this second portion of the definition is commonly accepted usage of this formerly commonly agreed-upon English-language word.

This is utter madness. 

Twenty damn years ago, the notion that we'd be here was laughable.  

We have taken two of the most basic elements of what it means to be human - sexuality and language - and completely obliterated them.

Just as the momentum of our material advancement as a species has accelerated over the past three centuries, so has that of our spiritual sickness. The amount of time it took for the West to go from Rousseau to the Romantics to Marx has been shrunk to the blink of an eye in which we've gone from Obergefell v Hodges to this move. 

I don't know what to say beyond what I've said here. I'm not here to exhort you to join some activist group that thinks it has the magic formula for reversing this. If any one of them was effective, we wouldn't be at this grim juncture. 

Pray, I guess.

That's always a good idea. 

And don't acquiesce. There will come a day, if it hasn't arrived, when you will have to decide whether to use the term "they" in reference to an individual person in some situation in which you're leaving a permanent record. What will you do?

What's happening is as historically profound as anything I've experienced in my life, and I was there for the rash of assassinations in the 1960s and the moon landing. We're shredding our birthright by the minute.

You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so do you.

- Acts 7:51 

Sunday roundup

 Daren Jonescu is a writer I agree with more often than I disagree with him. Sometimes I do indeed wonder where he is coming from, but there is no such perplexity regarding this piece entitled "A Border Dispute." He's spot on:

“Why should the world risk nuclear annihilation over what is essentially just a border dispute between Russia and Ukraine?” So ask the Glenn Greenwalds and Tucker Carlsonsof the world. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that such people are not being directly instructed by the Kremlin to pose the question that way, but that it represents their sincere, independent view of the situation. How shall we answer them?

How, that is, shall we answer a question deliberately framed so as to obscure or deny most of what we actually know about the nature and development of the situation: about its recent antecedents and parallels, about the explicit statements and aspirations of the Russian president, about the past century of Russian brutality against neighboring countries, about the moral and rhetorical distinctions between the Western democracies and a strongman tyranny under the lifetime control of a former KGB officer who openly pines for the glory days of the USSR, about the obvious one-sided reasons for the continued “cold war atmosphere” between Russia and the NATO countries today, about the ongoing war of terror and mass murder against the civilian population of a sovereign country? 

BTW, the Ukraine invasion is making Russian TV weirder and scarier by the day. 

I'm utterly certain that I'm a Christian, but prayer is something I still head-trip about. (That may just be one more manifestation of my tendency to overthink everything.) I did find this piece by David Deaval at The Imaginative Conservative  titled "Deepening Prayer and Hearing God'sVoice" helpful in that regard.

At the Wall Street Journal, Jason Riley shows how "BLM's Anti-Police Racket Is Coming Undone."

At The Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan engages with listeners to his podcast. A taste:

This next listener dissents over the Haidt convo:

I try not to be a scold, but sometimes the temptation is too great. Early in your talk you talked about how you didn’t understand young kids these days — why they are killing themselves at a high rate, since everything for them is so much better than it was in the old days. It sounds just like all of us old guys not getting youngsters. Haidt did talk about how he learned to approach unfamiliar cultures like an anthropologist — a good place to start for us old folks. 

While I agree with you about the proliferation of gender types, it was not so long ago that homosexuality raised the same kinds of questions that you ask, and it was looked at the same way. Some people questioned the reality of such a thing, or saw it as a simple choice that perverse people made, or as a psychiatric illness that required treatment, and of course as a crime. I don’t think you intend to imply any of those things, but you do seem to veer in that direction. How people’s identity is created is still an open question — and someday we may know more. 

That said, I agree with you that medical interventions for children is very very premature and should not be happening. Let people grow up first. 

You seem to imply that biology supports a simple dichotomy, but sexual expression is more complex than that. As for cultural/religious acceptance, Joseph Campbell, in The Hero Of A Thousand Faces, discusses some civilizations that saw gender as fluid and containing both male and female elements.

One more thought: although Plato then, and others now, did raise questions about democracy, I fear that the Republican answer is to emulate the worst counter-examples, such as their current infatuation with Orbán’s near dictatorship. Prof. Haidt mentioned Karen Stenner’s work, The Authoritarian Dynamic, in which she reports that 20% of the population has an authoritarian personality type. She also talks about the conditions that stimulate it to express itself — fear and anxiety, the kind that is stirred up by demagogues and unscrupulous politicians, namely Trump. Stenner’s book also has suggestions on how to tamp down the fear. Maybe a conversation with her is in order.

Thanks for the tip. My best response to my reader’s first point is probably at the beginning of my chat with Bari, where I try to make distinctions between the gay and trans movements, and why the conflicts are inevitable and intrinsic. As for fluid gender, I agree! I don’t believe in a gender binary, just a sex binary. In fact, one reason gender expression exists at all — and is comprehensible at all — is precisely its tension with a fixed, binary biological reality. 

But I also think this over-states the relevance of “gender identity” for the vast majority of humans. Most of us don’t get up every day thinking of how we are a man or a woman and where we fit on a spectrum — because we don’t really have many conflicts. This looms much larger for trans people for whom it is a daily challenge, and to a lesser extent for gay people whose affect contrasts with the stereotypes of their sex. But for most of us, our gender expression is simply our personality packaged in a binary form of biology. And this isn’t just on a scale of Barbie to G.I. Joe. And seeing it that way — as gender ideology does — strikes me as a regression, not a way forward.

And, now, in case LITD isn't enough of a BQ fix, herewith some recent contributions to other venues:

At Merion West, I assert that "The Term Woke Is Losing Its Punch." 

At Ordinary Times, I examine the cultural impact of the Rhythm changes:

Far and away, the most famous and utilized contrafact is the chord changes to “I’ve Got Rhythm” by George Gershwin. He composed this tune for the 1930 musical Girl Crazy. 

What it introduced into American music was the I-VI-II V7 chord sequence, with a cycle-of-fourths middle-eight section that starts two steps above the key of the song and allows a resolution, in eight bars, to the key.

It’s hard to overestimate the importance of this codification to the development of American popular music, and, indeed, popular culture.  

The entire form, or sometimes just the A section with a different middle eight, shows up all over the place.

It’s come to be known as the Rhythm changes.

Certainly it’s been used with other melody lines in jazz. Charlie Christian’s “Seven Come Eleven” is over the Rhythm changes, as is “Oleo” by Sonny Rollins, and I’m only scratching the surface. 

It’s been used in a pop context as well.

I give three examples of that context: the Flintstones theme, "Sherry" by the Four Seasons, and "Like Love" by Andre Previn, and why they are artifacts from a time when post-America was America, and had a sense of vitality and loveliness. 

My second-most recent piece at OT is "Confessions of a Rock and Roll History Teacher."

At Precipice, my Substack, I return to a theme I frequently write about there: the infinitesimal piece of real estate on which a non-Trumpist conservative stands. 

And my second-most recent piece there is titled "Disney."

Well, that ought to keep you out of mischief on this first Sunday of May.

 

"You will get your mind right" is a road to nowhere, but tyranny always is

 I'm not saying it's easy. Speaking out against the glaringly fallacious assumptions that permeate all aspects of post-American life requires courage. It entails professional and social risks that most people, understandably, aren't willing to take on.

Not only do the risks include getting fired, losing friends and family estrangement, there is the matter of perceptions of the risk-taker being mistaken. Because so many who do choose to speak out take up the shield of - what shall we call it? Neo-Trumpism? The New Right? - if one is decidedly not in that camp, it can be hard to mount one's defense.

But years of saying little, or sticking one's neck out in some particular instance, only to get burned and then retreat to relative silence, has allowed the dismantling of what we knew to be true about the universe we inhabit to metastasize to the point that it leaves nothing unaffected. 

I'm going to leave the global-climate discussion for another time, because that would be one too many rabbit holes to bring into the present argument. I will just say that the intimidation and defamation going on on that front has worsened every bit as much as it has in the two areas I do want to discuss. If you assert that the global climate is not in a state of crisis requiring humankind to abandon its advancement, your presence in polite company is brought into question.

But my focus here is identity politics militancy. 

The plain fact is that the individual human being's race and/or sexuality has been made the most important thing about him or her. It was not always thus. As I've discussed elsewhere, Ethics and Public Policy Center fellow Carl R. Trueman has written an entire book on the centuries-long process by which humankind has convinced itself that people could invent themselves. Prior to that, it was assumed, certainly by both Judea-Christian teaching as well as Greek philosophy, that human nature was fixed and that people needed to look outside themselves to determine what made for a well-lived life.

But the insistence on being able to declare that we are whatever we say we are, and having that respected by others, has now been codified into decree. One cannot insist to the contrary without getting into official trouble. 

The Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (or, as our acronym-enamored age has deemed it, DEI) movement has left no institution beyond its reach.

The U.S. State Department has made the embrace of it a requirement for career advancement, and it's not the only federal-government entity to make it unavoidable to people working within it. 

The K-12 education establishment has found a way to work around the stigma that has begun to attach to the term Critical Race Theory by talking up "Ethnic Studies" - actually more than just talking up. Taking an ethnic-studies course is a requirement for graduation in California. 

But the two concepts are intertwined:

“CRP” [culturally relevant pedagogy] is a concept pioneered by Gloria Ladson-Billings, the academic who introduced Critical Race Theory to K-12 education. In Critical Race Theory in Education: A Scholar’s Journey Ladson-Billings defines the core tenets of CRP as a “focus on student learning, development of cultural competence, and promotion of a sociopolitical consciousness.”

As parents have seen, CRT spreads through slippery language games. “Cultural competence” sounds like it should mean “getting along well with people from other backgrounds.” Maybe sometimes it does. But other times, it is defined as antonym for “color-blindness,” i.e., for treating people without regard to the color of their skin. Similarly, “sociopolitical consciousness” could mean “civic knowledge and spirit.” Or it could mean a very particular kind of politicized spirit.

In general, Ethnic Studies can take one of two forms: (1) Multicultural Ethnic Studies, which focuses on the positive historical contributions of minority groups; or (2) Liberated Ethnic Studies, which leverages race to push partisan political arguments about “identity,” “power,” and “social justice” rooted in Critical Race Theory ideology.

The codification of DEI into an imposition of rules and even laws is not confined to coastal areas or the federal level of government. 

There is a city, with a manufacturing-based economy (that is, it's not some insular bubble of egghead-ism), in the heart of an ostensibly rock-ribbed red state in which local government, the local community college, the local K-12 school district, hospital, newspaper, major employers and religious coalition have banded together to coordinate efforts to impose DEI on all aspects of daily life. 

The message is clear: You will be made to put your fellow human being's demographic classification front and center in your dealings with him or her. 

And what exactly is the end product of this way of interacting with each other supposed to be? As Glenn Loury and John McWhorter point out, economics, or natural sciences, including mathematics, are objectivity-based modes of inquiry. To speak of a "black economics" or "black math" is to spew an absurdity. Or, to address the cultural level, after we've celebrated the music, foods and modes of dress of other nationalities and ethnicities, we're faced with the same old question of how all those various peoples are going to address the human condition.

Then there's sexuality. I've gotten myself into some rabbit holes lately with articles I've written, as well as my chimings-in on comment threads and Twitter threads with my use of the term "basic architecture of the universe." There is one, and I've asserted, and am doing so again right here, that we've spent the last ten years, thirty at the outside, obliterating it. 

If one asserts that there are two sexes comprising the human race - and the preponderance of plant and animal species, actually - and that they were designed - that's right, designed - to get together to make more of that species, one must be prepared to wade into the weeds with recitations of statistics about chromosomal outliers that are somehow supposed to have as much weight as the plain fact of duality the air before our eyes. 

You know, "male and female He created them," and all that. Ah, but if one brings even a hint of Judeo-Christian substantiation into the conversation, something else becomes clear: a pervasive attitude along the lines of "oh, come on, you're not going to drag outmoded doctrine into this, are you?"

Well, you see, it's the Judeo-Christian angle that elevates the discussion above the biological facts about procreation. Love and the centrality of family to a heathy society are part of the equation. A damn important part, I'd say.

I'll conclude with the point that I always arrive at. I reiterate it here, because it's chilling to really take in and reflect on.

We're stepping onto completely uncharted terrain. Since we've tossed away the guideposts, there's no telling what the lay of the land looks like down this road.