Who's Afraid of the Latin Mass--And Why?

http://www.getreligion.org/?p=2532

Pope Benedict XVI . . . authorized wider use of the long-marginalized Latin Mass, a move that delighted Roman Catholic traditionalists but worried others who fear the erosion of important church reforms...In a decree known as a motu propio, essentially a personal decision, the pope urged priests to celebrate a 1962 version of the 16th century Tridentine Mass when their congregations request it. Until now, priests could use the Latin Mass only with permission from their bishops, which was not always forthcoming.

At last, some good news! So, when do we get our 1928 Prayer Book back?

It's hard to understand why, instead of being completely delighted about the availability of another option, people are worried. Seems though that there are three reasons:

(1) The slippery slope. The worry is that the reinstitution of this liturgy is a symbolic gesture, signaling a larger conservative agenda that could have ramifications for clergy and theologians who are professionally dependent on the institutional church. Could be, but no reason that lay people should worry: neither their jobs nor their civil rights will be affected. They can enjoy the Latin Mass and do as they please. (2) Perfidious Jews. The head honcho of the Anti-Defamation League is in a snit because the liturgy for Good Friday includes a prayer for the conversion of the Jews. So what? Does anyone seriously believe that this little snippet, in Latin, will fuel a resurgence of Anti-Semitism? (3) The REAL worry: the Latin Mass is too religious. Here is the take of one of the commentators at this site:

I have never felt comfortable looking at priests’ faces when saying mass. It seemed such an intrusion into a totally personal experience. By the same token I would have felt incredibly violated if people watched my every expression while praying. The idea of priests facing the altar together with the congregation seems to me the most logical one since we are all praying to same God.

The focal aim of liturgical revision, the the RC church and in the Episcopal church, has been to wipe out this sort of introspective, individualistic piety--the flight of the alone to the Alone--to obliterate any sense of transcendence, and to eliminate everything juicy--anything that's exotic, fancy, aesthetically pleasing or emotionally intense and everything seriously pleasurable. Why?

First, plain puritanism: the idea that if it feels good it must be self-indulgent and wicked. Oh, we get a little bit of pleasure but only so long as it isn't too intense, has a moral, and redeeming social value. Sex is ok as long as you don't enjoy it too much and it has the redeeming social value of producing offspring, or at least "bonding." Liturgy is ok so long as it's jolly and cheerful, not thrilling or ecstatic, and promotes ecological concern and good attitudes about justice, freedom and peace.

Secondly, Communitarianism or, as the religious folk put it, "the horizontal dimension." They've been chanting the mantra for decades now: "corporate--good; individual--bad." This has been the driving force of liturgical revision for over 40 years--from the adoption of the first person plural form of the Creed, to the stinking, rotten Peace, to the priest facing the people--we, we, we, "the church is People", the church's goal is "community building." Within Protestant traditions especially this is a response to Paul, Augustine, Luther and Kierkegaard, and to popular evangelical Christianity--the sin-and-salvation religion, the idea of Christianity as a means to purification, personal salvation and the establishment of a "personal relationship" with Jesus. However liturgical reformers were locked into a false dichotomy and didn't realize that there were other alternatives to the sin-guilt-salvation you-and-me-Jesus model besides happy-clappy "community building."

Thirdly, the apotheosis of the quotidian: the idea that the distinction between the sacred and the profane had to be breeched and that religion had to be secularized--made insofar as possible to resemble ordinary life. According to the received view, religion was "escapist." By making it as plain and dull as ordinary life the Church would send the message that it wasn't just for Sunday, and that "real" religion was working for the good of the other in the secular city. Every grain of incense was bread from the mouths of the poor. Ideally churches would shut down and be sold off to finance social service projects. A righteous remnant of their members would meet in basement rec rooms to sing Cumbayah, share a simple communal meal, and plan the social service and political action projects which were what REAL religion was.

Finally, this whole project was driven by the dullness, anti-religious sentiment and utter obtuseness of liturgical reformers. They just didn't get mysticism or religious experience. The very idea that looking into someone's face when they were praying might be an intrusion or violation, as the quote above suggests, was just off their radar. They couldn't even fathom the idea that people might enjoy religion, that it might be intense, personal and blissful, a source of metaphysical thrills and the ecstasy of transcendence. These jerks don't have a clue. They imagine that the only alternative to the shit they've forced on us, the we-we-we jolly handshake mass is neurotic sin, guilt and salvation, and that their job as enlightened religious therapists is to get us out of that by making do us nicies and huggies.

Cold Feet on Global Warming

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/jenny_jones/2007/07/in_denial.html

I went to Fry's Electronics yesterday with my daughter to get an expensive gizmo she just had to have. I was overwhelmed not only by the kinds of expensive gadgets intended to do jobs that I didn't want done, but by the range of gadgets in each category and was, briefly, proud of myself for not owning, or wanting, any of this stuff.

But not for long, because I am a sinner--not because I'm rich and greedy, but because I'm (relatively!) poor and pressed for time. I eat meat and processed foods because they're cheap and because I don't have the time to prepare ecologically sound vegetarian fare. I drive to work because I can't afford a house close to my job and because I can't afford the 4 hours a day it would take to use public transportation. And, with three kids, I have in my day sent tons of paper diapers to our local landfill.

Diapers were an issue when my kids were babies. I remember one TV program featuring a Saint of Ecology who noted that though she and her husband were "child-free by choice" some of her best friends, who had "chosen to have a child," made a point of using environmentally-friendly cloth diapers which they washed themselves. I was seriously skeptical about whether it was her best friends who were sloshing the shit off of these cloth diapers in their toilets. During the tour of the compost pile behind her Connecticut saltbox home she explained the benefits of using organic cleaning products, compounded of lemon oil and beeswax, to maintain her antique furniture. I found myself in vigorous agreement with her housekeeper and her best friends' nannies that this woman should have been drowned at birth.

Rich women rarely notice the toll ecological correctness takes on the women who have to clean the shit off their kids' diapers and polish their dining room tables with beeswax. Men never notice. The babies have clean diapers and the dandy whole foods fruit and nut casseroles appear on the table: they haven't got the faintest idea of the time and energy it takes to scoop these beans and whole grains out of bins at the local organic food market, to soak and process them, and to cook them in elaborate recipes to make them fit for human consumption. It's easy enough to serve decent Anglo-Saxon fare if you aren't fussy: chicken, steak or pork chops on one third of the plate; instant mashed potatoes and canned veg on the others. Healthy, ecological or vegetarian food takes much more time, effort and imagination.

The real ecological burden however falls on the really poor--the low and middle-income countries. Locally, Mexico dumps raw sewage in the Tijuana River estuary. We hold our noses and despise them in the way that we despise fat working class wives who serve their families fast food after a long day behind the Walmart checkstand because they don't have the time or money to do better. China, which now bills itself as the world's factory, pumps out pollution. When I was there two years ago, after my dog (lab of course) ate my glasses I was pumping in eye drops every 15 minutes to make wearing contacts tolerable. What do you say to people who just want minimally decent lives, not the glitzy garbage at Fry's, who just don't want to spend all their waking hours working and crapping around with the business of life, who just want a little bit of leisure--and pleasure?

Years ago, as one of my professional duties, I had to put up Tom Regan, an animal rights activist promoting vegetarianism. I showed him the cheap generic canned goods in my cupboard and challenged him: if you vegetarians want to promote your agenda subsidize garbage like this so that we can eat cheap crap and I don't have to cook. If we, the privileged, want the luxury of glaciers and rain forests, we should pay for it. The Bad Guys aren't greedy pigs aiming for more Fry's products--they're decent poor people who want a decent life, and don't want to spend all their waking hours working to eat and eating to work.

Bombing

Two British National party members plotted to make bombs in readiness for a "civil war between races", a court was told yesterday. A former candidate for the party stashed boxes of chemicals at his home after buying them online at the instruction of a local dentist and fellow BNP member, jurors at Manchester crown court heard. However, the hoard amassed by Robert Cottage, 49, of Colne, Lancashire, came to light when his wife told her social worker she was scared that Cottage and 62-year-old David Jackson were planning to test chemical weapons in the local countryside...Ms Cottage said her husband had been very enthusiastic in the BNP, rising through the party's ranks during three years as a member and becoming a friend of its leader, Nick Griffin. Alarm bells began to ring when Cottage led her to understand that the chemicals were intended to harm the government or anyone who came unannounced to their home.

"He thinks there's a war going to happen with the culture, the Asian culture and the white culture and that Tony Blair and President Bush are scheming against people," she said. Ms Cottage added that her husband and Jackson were "solid" friends who met regularly to chat about politics, the BNP and Hitler.

Our daughter flew back from the UK two days ago, just after the bomb scare at Glasgow Airport. When our son was last in the UK he arrived in London the day after 7/7. I suppose this should make me nervous but it doesn't really: stuff happens.

Today in the NYTimes, Tom Friedman speculates that the root cause of these shenanigans is in Islamic "self-identity" rubbed raw by "humiliation and atomization" and urges Muslims (not any particular Muslims--just Muslims) to straighten up and fly right:

Of course, not all Muslims are terrorists. But it’s been widely noted that virtually all suicide terrorists today are Muslims. Angry Norwegians aren’t doing this — nor are starving Africans or unemployed Mexicans. Muslims have got to understand that a death cult has taken root in the bosom of their religion, feeding off it like a cancerous tumor.

By the same reasoning, I--and Tom Friedman--should understand that a death cult has taken root in the bosom of White Culture. Of course, not all white people belong to the BNP but it's been widely noted that virtually all white supremecists are white. Looking back nostalgically to the age of innocence before 9/11, when it was the IRA that planted bombs, though we understood that not all Irish Catholics were terrorists it was widely noted that virtually all IRA bombers were Irish Catholics.

Islamicism is the latest oppositional identity statement, filling the vacuum left by the collapse of Marxism: Che is dead and, worse, passe; long live Osama bin Ladin. Of course Marxism was ecumenical and anyone could join whereas it's difficult to get on board with Islamicism unless you have proper ethnic credentials--though not impossible: there are converts like shoe-bomber Richard Reid and John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban. And there are lots of fellow-travellers.

It's all the same old crap, compounded of romanticism, political idealism, personal grievance and the universal desire to do violence, linked at one end to third world politics and at the other to organized crime. There's something for everyone--from educated ideologues and political radicals, like Mohamed Atta and the Glasgow Airport bombers to cranks and loonies like Mr. Cottage to the legions of young lower class males looking to do violence, flattered by attention from journalists and counterculture chickies, and delighted to be valorized as freedom fighters.

Of course it's "the longest war." But it's not a war against Islamicism, much less Islam, any more than it's a war against Communism, the IRA, the Basque nationalists or some amorphous thing called Terrorism. It's the war against Human Nature and, in spite of temporary setbacks and border skirmishes, the Enlightenment is still winning big. Really? You bet. I have have less chance of getting caught in a terrorist attack than I do of being hit by lightening, and very little chance of dying by violence. My husband doesn't beat me. I don't have to worry that bands of brigands will raid my leafy suburb or that competing tribes will rape and pillage. I don't spend all my waking hours eating to work and working to eat. My life, like the lives of most citizens in affluent countries and increasing numbers in developing countries, is radically different from the lives of billions of humans who came before us and immeasurably better.

There is no real philosophical problem of understanding what the Good Life is: wealth, technology and civil order are what make life good. The serious problem is not philosophical but technical and, therefore, much much harder: it's a matter of eliminating poverty, improving technology, and promoting good government. The idea that the problem is ideology or, more grandly, that there is some deep problem inherent in the human condition, is a self-serving evasion because the technical problem is so very hard and because we aren't willing to share our wealth. There will always be a minority of malcontents, lunatics and criminals. For the overwhelming majority of the human race however the answer is crass materialism--it's simply a matter of spreading it.

Atheist Chic

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118247644823044329.html

Summer beach-reading season is just beginning, and already several books have broken out from the pack, such as Walter Isaacson's biography of Albert Einstein, and Conn and Hal Iggulden's "The Dangerous Book for Boys." But the biggest surprise is a blazing attack on God and religion that is flying off bookshelves, even in the Bible Belt..."This is atheism's moment," says David Steinberger, Perseus's CEO. "Mr. Hitchens has written the category killer, and we're excited about having the next book."

I'm old enough to remember when it was pet rocks and plant consciousness. Of course, atheism isn't just silly and it's probably true--though I'm wagering that it isn't. The annoying thing is that the Hitchens, Dawkins, et. al. have have hit the charts by recycling arguments and critiques that have been commonplace for centuries. Is it really possible that anyone in the Western world hasn't heard these arguments ad nauseum--from Hume, Russell, and Flew, or the pop versions from H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis?

Moreover, in the US especially atheism has been for generations a marker of social status and an automatic admission to the intellegencia. Which of us who has any pretensions hasn't discovered in high school that simply making skeptical noises and trotting out the standard critiques of religious belief English teachers would write laudatory comments on your papers ("I can see you're really thinking!") give you good grades? Religion, like food preferences, hobbies, decor and fashion, is a class marker: there are those disgusting fat fundamentalist rednecks who stuff their fat, ugly faces with greasy junk food, watch Nascar races, and plant pink flamingos in front of their trailers--and then there are us, the secular elite.

Of course religion doesn't make us any better--or worse. There were the Crusades and the Inquisition, Naziism, Stalinism and Fascism; apart from such ideologically motivated programs people have always fought and killed, raped and pillaged, for land, for wealth, and just for the hell of it. People are by their nature violent and enjoy violence. We are also tribal and mark people off as Our Own or Other by tribal and clan affiliation, by race, language and kinship, by ideology, by religion, by the football teams we support or the gang colors we wear. It's all the same: religion is just another marker of affiliation: if it weren't religion, it would be something else. And when there's a decline in religious superstition--visions of angels and saints, the image of Jesus on a tortilla or the Virgin Mary on a watermelon secular superstition takes its place--UFOs, auras, chiropractic, astrology, and every sort of quack medicine and psychotherapeutic self-help regime. We are, by our nature, violent, tribal and credulous.

Of course it would be better if we weren't that way--that was the message of the Enlightenment. And we can improve. Education and affluence make us better people--cosmopolitan, critical and less violent. But achieving that improvement isn't a matter of getting rid of religion any more than it's a matter of getting rid of football teams, Nascar races or nation-states. It's a matter of detachment, universalism, and the critical assessment of our beliefs and practices.

Why is this atheism's "moment"? I suppose because everyone is nervous about jihad, sick of fundamentalists' campaigns to promote creationism and undermine stem-cell research and tired of right-wing politics. Even more so I think because in the developed world, even including the US, Christianity has effectively collapsed from within. The public cult has been replaced by sport, the saints by celebrities. The myths are dead: people don't know the stories anymore. Secular gurus pump out the wisdom literature--self-help books took off when religion ceased to be an effective force in people's lives. Metaphysics has been suspect since Kant and policy-makers in mainline denominations have been, effectively, atheists for years--contemptuous of the religious belief and practice of the laity and working overtime to dismantle the cults, to debunk the myths, and to preserve the institutions that pay them by remaking them as social service organizations and political action groups.

These liberal churches are going extinct because they've jettisoned what people want out of religion. The only religious option left is gross superstition--fundamentalist Christianity and, for the elite, a syncretic mish-mash of commercialized New Age products. It's a pity I'll be dead 2 centuries or so from now when we'll be able to see how this all plays out. It's reminiscent of the world of late Antiquity. The elite were skeptics at most. The cults of the old city gods, the "classical" deities, were little more than civic rituals. With the old city gods effectively dead, Oriental cults flooded in and merged with the native superstitions of the peasantry, which had always been bubbling under the surface, and one of those cults, Christianity, took over.

What will happen to us? What will come out of this Hellenistic mish-mash? I doubt that it will be anything like the Church of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, at least not in the global north. Secular governments are too strong and stable to cede power to an international religious institution and there isn't the critical mass of illiterates to keep the superstitions going. Religion will have its ups and down, but the trend will be down until most of the population is completely secular, completely detached from any religious tradition and clueless about the very idea of religious belief or practice, and only a small minority, a single-digit percentage, dabbles in various flavors of "spirituality."

What a bummer! I suppose most people don't see it that way because all they've ever seen of religion is the bad stuff and the dull stuff--the stupid rules and constraints, the threat of punishment in this world and the next, the sickening sentimentalities, dull preaching and platitudes. As one student put it, "you don't associate Christianity with mysticism." They don't associate it with the spooky, the frisson, the thrill of transcendence, with the romance of history, or even with high art and aesthetic pleasure. Christianity has been so thoroughly gutted, that few will see its collapse as a loss.

Hillary's Feminist Problem

http://www.alternet.org/story/55300/

When I was having babies midwifery was all the rage. Feminists pointed out that the patriarchal medical establishment had squeezed them out, and that that was unfortunate because they generally did a better job delivering babies. This was probably true. Midwives were more specialized and more experienced, and they didn't come to the job with their hands dirty from treating infected patients. Midwives had clearly gotten a raw deal.

However by the time I was in the birthing business, women were flooding into med school and joining the patriarchal medical establishment. They posed a Feminist Problem: should we support women or women's ways? should we glad that women were now doctors or should we still be angry that ob/gyns, including women, had squeezed out midwives?

To me this was a no-brainer. When Jackie Robinson broke the color-barrier in major league baseball, the old Negro League collapsed. If you can play in the majors there is no point in preserving an alternative institution whose sole purpose is to provide a place for players who've been excluded from the major leagues. If women could be ob/gyns there was no point in promoting an alternative, sex-segregated profession. Women's ways are nothing but a response to exclusion: there is nothing good about outsider status.

Not everyone agreed. After being outsiders for millennia it seemed some women had come to believe their own rationalizations and had the idea that outsider status was not only unobjectionable but positively desirable. We're repeatedly cautioned about the temptations of selling out. Feminism, we're told, has gotten beyond the old liberal campaign to enable women to play the male game. But why, I wonder, is this beyond? We still don't have a level playing field, we're still disadvantaged, still face discrimination but these people talk is if the war has been won and it wasn't worth fighting in the first place. I have a sneaking suspicion that the valorization of women's ways and outsider status is a symptom of battle fatigue: the fight has gotten tough, the remnants of sex segregation are difficult to dislodge and in the current political climate affirmative action is in bad oder.

Enter Hillary, the leading Democratic candidate, the tough, professional, mainstream politician, a political insider "playing the male game." So long as she was an outsider (of sorts), exercising power from within a traditionally female role as First Lady feminists loved her because that was what feminists were supposed to do: empower outsiders as such, elevate the status of women's roles and get respect for women's ways. When she became an insider, however there was a feminist problem and the old feminist sore opened up: should feminists support women or women's ways?

At a more abstract level this is the dispute that underlies discussion of multiculturalism. Here is a disadvantaged group whose members have been denigrated and excluded. That's bad. But where do we go from here? Prove that their role, culture, ethos, way of doing business is just as good or better than the mainstream from which they've been excluded and, indeed, that they're in some privileged epistemic position in virtue of their outsider status, or level the playing field and enable them to join the mainstream? Multiculturalism or assimilation? Midwives of female ob/gyns? Comparable worth for traditional women's work or access to traditionally male jobs? Improved and refurbished ghettos or integration?

Hillary isn't my favorite Democratic candidate because I'm a monomaniacal liberal: the only issue I care about is the economic one--social safety nets and progress in the direction of a welfare state. Yeah, I'm against the war, and I'm pro-choice, and I'd like to see better policies concerning the environment. But I don't really care about these issues. I'm still for Edwards. He won't get the nomination and I'll vote for any Democrat who does--because any Democrat will push us a little further in the direction of the welfare state, and even a millimeter is worth it. But what I like most about Hillary is precisely the fact that she's running as a political insider, playing the male game and winning.

Rant: Why I Hate Continental “Philosophy”

Well, not all philosophy written by continental Europeans: I do like Frege. And not even all Continental Philosophy: Brentano is ok. I mean the obscurantist bs written by Continental “thinkers” that’s supposed to address the human condition. I had an encounter with someone who was into Levinas that set my teeth on edge and this got me to thinking what it is that makes me so flat out angry about these Continental “philosophers.” Here it is:

(1) Their prescriptions for living the good life are wrong-headed and promote human misery

(2) Their moral recommendations are self-serving and promote self-deception and

(3) They are dogmatically convinced (or claim to be) that anyone who rejects their way of doing business, analytic philosophers in particular, are political conservatives

Philosophy is the true wisdom that saves us—not by cranking out maxims and prescriptions but by inculcating a way of thinking and operating that enables us to live well and do the right thing. Here is the Wisdom that saves (“a” is for “analytic”)

(1a) The Deflationary Strategy: everything is more manageable than it seems, more amenable to reason, analysis and plain commonsense, and in more cases than you imagine, fixable. If you’re depressed, anxious or feel that life is “meaningless” then either (a) you’re confused or (b) you suffer from a chemical imbalance. Get clear about what you want and how to get it. Take up a hobby, get more exercise, organize your office space, etc. If this doesn’t work take a pill or have a drink. We aren’t grand, tragic figures: we’re animals who are happiest working, exercising, making things, putting things in order, playing, setting reasonable goals for ourselves and achieving them.

Here is the adolescent self-dramatization that damns (“c” is for “continental”)

(1c) The Inflationary Strategy: everything is less manageable than it seems, nothing is amenable to reason, analysis is deceptive, commonsense is shallow and the whole idea of “fixing” things is wrong-headed. If you’re depressed, anxious or feel that life is “meaningless” then you’re a deep thinker who sees Reality as it really is and are suffering from existential angst. Enjoy your misery: life is tragic and you’re a hero.

Then there’s ethics:

(2a) We can’t make the world perfect but we can improve it and make people better off by improving the material conditions of their lives. Send money to Oxfam and work politically for the establishment of a socialist welfare state. This is expensive and the more you pay the better off other people will be—and, of course, the worse off you will be. There is no free ride: doing the right thing is tough.

Maybe the alternative that bothers me here isn’t so much the Continental alternative as such but the pious one:

(2c) All you need is Love. Kiss lepers. Work in soup kitchens. Giving money isn’t enough—in fact it may be beside the point. People need dignity, respect, love and compassion. And you need to be informed and involved. This is cheap—in fact dignity, respect, love and compassion are free!

(3c) Returning to Continental “philosophy,” the most vexing thing of all is their smug assumption that if you don’t buy their dogmas, you don’t buy their leftist political agenda. Levinas Woman objected to the discussion of free-will we where having because she had some bee in her bonnet about “collective responsibility.” As far as I could gather the idea was that if we didn’t have this sense of collective responsibility we wouldn’t be moved to fight injustice: “I’m not (individually) responsible for colonialism (slavery, the Holocaust, etc.) so there’s no reason why I should work to rectify these injustices.”

This seems to be an empirical claim at the bottom of this—that I won’t be motivated to fix things unless I am, in some sense, responsible for their being broken. But it’s false. My family regularly trashes the house and I clean up after them. I’m furious at them: they shouldn’t behave this way and I tell them so (though not often because it’s futile). I’m not responsible for the mess, individually, collectively or in any other way, but I clean it up because I want the house to look good. I want things to be neat, organized and efficient. I’m not responsible for poverty, racism or colonialism but I’m going to work to fix these injustices because I want the world to be neat, organized and efficient. I don’t care these injustices came about or who’s to blame—I just want them fixed and I’m prepared to pitch in.

Authenticity: "It's One of Those Counterfactuals"

http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=06&year=2007&base_name=post_3945#comments

"Authenticity" as it figures in the political arena cashes out to being a regular guy like me. But "like," as we know, is both vague and ambiguous. We ask: (1) like in what respect and (2) which respects matter and how are they weighted when it comes to assessing likeness simpliciter?

Suppose I'm a regular guy. George Bush is like me because he cuts brush at his Crawford "ranch." John Edwards is not like me because he gets $400 haircuts. But if I had George Bush's bucks and weren't interested in impressing folks like me for political purposes, I wouldn't be cutting brush, so in that respect Bush is not like me. And if I had Edwards' bucks, I'd live in a big house and get $400 haircuts. Counterfactually, Edwards is just like me.

[A]assertions of "authenticity" are not only feeble tautologies that are worthless as criteria of value. As Krugman points out, this focus -- with the focus on the haircuts of John Edwards being the most recent example -- on balance cuts strongly against progressive politics. Although there's no reason that a wealthy person can't advocate policies that help the poor -- FDR came from considerably greater means than Reagan -- suddenly any politician with lots of money (i.e. any politician who could be a serious national candidate under the current system) can be tarred as "inauthentic" if they propose progressive economic policies (although a rich actor renting a pickup as a campaign prop is good enough for a Republican to be "authentic.")

What matters to people: actual or counterfactual similarity? I suspect the latter. Leaving political playacting aside, think of how most of us feel about privileged individuals who repudiate privilege--not out of some bizarre religious conviction or sacrificially in order to provide benefits to the rest of us but because they're jaded, want to experience the life the other half (or 99/100ths) live or even, out of some misguided sense of solidarity, want to live like us. We resent it. What are these people playing at? We resent the Universe for being organized in such a way that privileges we'd appreciate and use to advantage are wasted on them, and we transfer that resentment to them.

When rich college kids (like me) demonstrated in Chicago at the 1968 Democratic convention, the Chicago cops, who would have loved to have had the chance to go to fancy colleges and were working hard to see to it that their kids had the chance, busted our heads in. Real blue collar workers were outraged by rich hippies pretending to be working class. More recently, when a journalist went for a stroll in Kabul wearing a burqa the was surrounded and threatened by Afghan women in burqas, who recognized that she was a Westerner by her running shoes, outraged that she was voluntarily doing what they had to do and didn't want to do. When another journalist, black and African but visibly overweight, was "embedded" with a poor family in rural Ethiopia to share their life and report, the entire village was outraged and only, grudgingly, accepted him when he persuaded them that he was "doing a study."

Even if we resent rich people for not sharing their wealth or powerful people for undermining our prospects, we don't resent them for enjoying their wealth and power because that is exactly what we would do in their position. Absent overriding conditions--doing a study, giving excess wealth to the poor, embracing poverty for the Kingdom of God's sake--we resent them for not being like us. it's the counterfactuals that matter.

Counterfactuals, unfortunately, are invisible. The public sees Bush doing what they do and Edwards doing things they can't afford to do--they don't notice those other possible worlds. However it would be easy enough for politicians to draw their attention to them instead of pretending that they're actually just regular guys who cut brush and drive pick-ups. "Now y'all listen up: you bet I live in a big, fancy house, get $400 haircuts and hire other people to do yard work. I was lucky, worked hard, and got rich. I live exactly the way you would if you lucked out, as I did, and got rich. And I'm gonna work to see to it that you do better and have more opportunities to get the good stuff I got and to enjoy it. Where's the beef?"

Building White Trash Nation

I went to a City Council meeting last Tuesday to speak in favor of a resolution to keep Walmart Superstores out of our local market. The room was packed with Walmart workers bussed in to speak in opposition. Waiting my turn, the woman next to me passed a sign-up sheet on lined notebook paper to me, which they’d signed to confirm attendance.

In addition to employees, there was a contingent of fellow-travelers, all elderly, morbidly obese, disabled or Hispanic, who gave testimony about Walmart’s benefits to the poor and oppressed. They were outraged that the rich, the elite, the big union leaders and the professors (yup, they said professors) wanted to deprive them of the only place they could afford to shop: even if we didn’t need Walmart, they did they said.

Well yes, but how do you explain in two minutes, with the egg time going, that even if Walmart benefited them in the short run on balance it did more harm to them and lots of other people in the long run by driving down wages in competing firms and forcing manufacturing jobs off shore, expanding the class of low wage workers who couldn’t afford to shop anywhere else. Henry Ford paid his workers well so that they could afford to buy Ford cars. Good unionized jobs that paid decent wages grew the middle class. Walmart pays its workers miserably so that they have to shop at Walmart, growing its market share and creating an ever larger class of low wage workers.

Without intervention as far as I can see the cycle will continue until Walmart effectively becomes the government of a nation within the nation with its own separate and unequal institutions. For some time now Walmart has been trying to expand into the banking business so that it can issue pseudo-credit cards for Walmart shopping to customers who aren’t eligible for real ones. It isn’t hard to imagine a dystopian future in which a minority of the population with education and skills, who don’t work for Walmart, its direct competitors or suppliers, get on with business as usual imagining that they still live in America while perhaps 2/3 of the population are citizens of Walmart Nation, shopping at Walmart with their Walmart-issued pseudo-credit cards. This is exactly the sort of privatization I suspect conservatives want.

In one respect this arrangement would be highly advantageous to me. I don’t work at Walmart or at any of its direct competitors. Walmart will not force my wages down or send my job off shore. And I’ll be able to shop at Walmart for bargains subsidized by its low wage employees and sweat shop workers in the third world. That is, after all, the American way. So why am I not happy about it?

I suppose I object to it on moral grounds. It means a lot less utility overall. Mainly I think I object because I am a snob. I don’t like lower class people. I want to live a world where everyone is upper middle class—educated, liberal and articulate. A European style welfare state would go a long way toward creating that world. The money is there: it’s only a matter of redistributing it and providing the education, social environment and services to make everyone a Bo-Bo in Paradise. Instead we’ve chosen to build White Trash Nation so that a very small ultra-elite can enjoy vast wealth and power and much larger class of educated professionals can live high on cheap consumer goods. Walmart has solved the problem of off-shoring service-sector jobs by creating the third world on American soil, an American colony in America for our benefit.

Years ago I went on a Moonie conference in Puerto Rico. The Moonies, trying to buy credibility, provided all expense paid trips to the spectacularly lavish Dorado Beach Resort for academics. Most of us had never seen anything like it. We spent a few hours a day reading one another papers in the customary fashion—I got a publication out of it—and the rest of our time eating, drinking, playing and swimming in the Gulf of Mexico which, on New Years Day, was as warm as dishwater. I’ve always been a bicycle explorer so I rented a bike and pedaled around town. The third world started immediately outside the gate, where the staff who cleaned the place, served us and tended to our needs lived in houses that were, at best, modest. I thought as I biked around that this must have been what Cuba was like before the Revolution and that it was likely why there was a Revolution. I didn’t feel guilty—just embarrassed. I found it distasteful.

It was nice to pig out for a few days but I don’t want to live like that in my own country.

The Democratic Faith Show

Edwards, Clinton and Obama Describe Journeys of Faith - New York Times
Intimate discussions of politics and religion have long been the province of Republican candidates for public office. But on Monday night, the three leading Democratic presidential hopefuls — former Senator John Edwards and Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton — opened up at an unusual televised forum about their faiths, the role of prayer in their public and private lives and the ways that religion informs their views on policy and government.

This is sickening. If these candidates have any serious religious convictions--which I doubt--being trotted out to make noises about their "faith" and the role of prayer in their lives by their groomers and handlers, suitably packaged in folksy evangelical terms, must have set their teeth on edge. Edwards and Clinton of course have an advantage, being Southerners who presumably grew up speaking the language.

I flashed back to a TV documentary on the American health care system, showing a fundraiser for a kid with leukemia who needed a bone marrow transplant. It was a jolly fun fair, with rides and entertainment. The boy with leukemia was riding around on a miniature train wearing an engineer's cap on his bald head, displaying a forced smile, waving to the audience, looking very, very sick. He died a few days later.

This is how you appeal to the American public, by these degrading sentimentalities--dying children performing at carnivals, like medieval beggars displaying their deformities, to get treatment that anywhere else in the civilized world would be a public service, a candidate for high political office giving testimony about how his "faith" helped him deal with the death of his teenage son and his wife's cancer.

The public was grossed out by a Dutch reality TV show in which a terminally ill woman was to select one of three patients to receive her kidneys. It turned out to be a hoax intended to call attention to the shortage of donated organs. I suppose the Dutch got it: if you don't do the reasonable thing and sign those donar cards you're doing to have patients displaying their deformities on TV for entertainment. I wonder if Americans got it--or if we can expect TV shows like this that aren't hoaxes. We used to have them when I was a child. I remember two: Queen for a Day and It Could Be You. Bedraggled, whining housewives competed, telling their tales of woe, and the most miserable won money and kitchen appliances.

I hope the Faith Show works for the Democrats. I have nothing against it in principle since, of course, I have no principles--other than the Principle of Utility. It seems a shame though that to achieve ends that every reasonable person should support, political candidates and leukemia patients should have to put on these humiliating displays and, even worse, that this is what moves the American public. Here we have the dictatorship of the proletariat--demanding soap operas, circuses and tent revivals. Where else would a candidate for head of government ingratiate herself to voters by claiming--truly or falsely--that she prayed to lose weight?

Abortion: The hysteria which divides the US

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2600479.ece

Anti-abortion campaigners in the US will tell you their crusade is about the sanctity of life. But really it is about upholding a singularly unhealthy tendency in American public life - the exploitation of a divisive social and ethical issue to further the ambitions of a single political party...abortion has been the Republican Party's best tool for enlisting grass-roots support...The problem is that the majority of Americans support the notion of a woman's right to choose.

The problem for the Democratic party is that Americans do not support women's right absolute to choose abortion in all circumstances, at any stage of pregnancy and without any restrictions. And they shouldn't. There's surely a morally significant difference between an embryo and a viable, late-stage fetus. It's debatable whether even given that difference there should be an outright ban on late-term abortions, but it's still a difference that any reasonable person will regard as morally significant.

Political rhetoric aside, no one really buys the idea that abortion is simply and uncontroversially a purely self-regarding action or that controversy about abortion is really nothing more than a debate about women's "right to choose." Abortion is an animal rights issue. We ask: do these organisms have, at any given stage of development, rights that override women's right to choose? and, if so, under what conditions? We don't worry about killing germs, swatting flies or even salting slugs. There's controversy about whether culling the deer population or slaughtering cows and pigs for food is morally ok. There's even more controversy about the conditions under which it would be morally permissible, or obligatory, to put down a dog or cat.

This is the way in which most people who are not ideologues of the left or right correctly "frame" the abortion issue. Even in America, very few people seriously believe that slugs or blastulas--or trees--have rights. However, very few people anywhere seriously believe that putting down a dog or aborting a late-term fetus is simply a harmless "choice." And they shouldn't believe that.

In response to conservatives' wedge strategy, the Democratic Party has gotten itself locked into the position that this way of framing the question, means victory for the Religious Right, and that any restrictions whatsoever on the availability of abortion are a dangerous slide down the slippery slope to an outright ban. Moreover, abortion is popularly identified as THE central feminist issue (because, I suspect, "pro-choice" is easier to sell to the public than the enforcement of anti-discrimination regulations or affirmative action). This has alienated lots of Americans who might otherwise support the Democratic Party's policies, discredited feminism and put liberal Catholic politicians in a close to impossible position. If the Terri Schaivo affair and the current administration's idiot opposition to stem cell research are a drag on Republicans, this no-compromise-no-surrender view on abortion discredits Democrats.

The linked article, from a UK newspaper, suggests that Brits, and presumably Europeans generally, who haven't so far regarded abortion as a central political issue or opposed all restrictions on the availability of abortion as features of a fundamentalist, anti-feminist conspiracy, should look to the US as a model. I don't think so.

Beer and Wine: Reflections on Iceland

http://www.slate.com/id/2167422/pagenum/all/#page_start
Field Maloney was online at Washingtonpost.com on Thursday, May 31, to examine the factors that have boosted wine's popularity over beer, the options brewers have for reclaiming the lead, and whatever other questions readers have about alcoholic beverages.

Gimme wine any day! Cheap wine is a glut on the market here in California and better than French vin ordinaire because, I'm told, software moguls with bucks retire early and set up gentleman farmers' vineyards. Good for them.

During Chaucer's time ordinary folk drank wine. Britain only became a beer/spirits culture during the Little Ice Age. Funny culture us--certainly not Mediterranean but not truly Nordic, a tertium quid like hyenas, neither dogs nor cats. Funny language, English, a Germanic language with a vocabulary that comes largely from Latin, either directly or via French--except for the most common vocabulary items and "little words"--and a grammar that veers toward Chinese. In China, our translator said that when Chinese linguists started working on developing a formal grammar for Chinese they took English as a model because it was the "big" language that had the grammar closest to Chinese--very analytic.

I became disillusioned about our Northern roots after, unexpectedly, spending 3 weeks in Iceland. My husband had a heart attack on the plane coming back from England, which was diverted to Reykjavik where I stayed while he was in hospital. The only thing I liked about Iceland was the weather--cold, very windy, dramatic and changeable. The language was terrible. The book I got cheerfully announced that almost all verbs in Icelandic were irregular. Even as a native English speaker with a little German I couldn't make out anything. I went to the University looking for the philosophy dept hoping to hook up and do something productive but I couldn't find it: you'd think "philosophia" or something like that but it turns out that philosophy is "heimspecki"--worldview. I kind of like that. At the hospital, my husband was in the "heartsdeild" (sp?)--the heart department: Icelandic doesn't pick up Latin or Greek for technical terms. I figured out that "kvennadeild," women's department, was gynecology--queen, woman, kvenna (genitive)--but it was only just before we left that I realized that "naturhereingangur" (sp?) on the sign above the entrance to the hospital I used didn't refer to some exotic disease but just meant "night entrance"--night's going-in doer.

The culture was worse--so near yet so far. I felt much more comfortable in Kenya. The Icelandic don't queue. It took me quite a while to figure out how to get served in stores as I politely held back while everyone else bumped ahead of me. They are also glum and observe long silences when they have nothing to say. I couldn't figure out what the doctors were trying to tell me because they seemed, by my lights, so pessimistic. In the US it would be, "Wow, you have terminal cancer, but don't worry, you'll live to be 100! This is a challenge! Make you a better person--what a jolly experience!" In Iceland it was more along the lines of, "Um, you have an ingrown toenail. Here are all the technical details. This will hurt."

The worst of it I remember was breakfast at the hostel where I stayed--which was a wonderful place http://www.guesthouse.is. Stay there if you visit! I got coffee, and saw two pitchers labled "mijlk" and "surmiljk." I immediately pored the surmilk into my coffee--obviously I thought, cream: the top of the milk. But it was some sort of "sour milk"--buttermilk or liquid yogurt. Beware of this stuff. It clots in coffee and tastes terrible. That was when I decided, unilaterally, that English was a Romance language and that our manifest destiny lay with the South. South! The climate is awful and they stand too close--though in my experience all non-English-speakers stand too close and also are not sufficiently bonded with dogs--but the language is intelligible, at least in writing, they don't serve this shit, and you can make out what they're up to even if you don't approve of it. Drink wine!

"The Greek empire extended as far as the olive--the Roman as far as the vine." And that definitely didn't include Icelend. The vine grew in England before the Little Ice Age and Romans ruled up to Hadrian's Wall. Even if we have a Germanic language, sort of, we're wops. Screw beer--drink wine!

Multiculturalism and Social Capital

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_capital

This is a mainly a note to myself. "Social capital" seems to be one of those trendy notions like "framing" that lots of us use without having in mind any clear definition but which are at least suggestive at the start for pointing toward a line of inquiry.

What strikes me looking at this Wikipedia article is the absence of any discussion of how social capital adds up--if indeed it does--and more fundamentally what the bearers of social capital are: individuals, groups or what? We can think of individuals as having social capital to the extent that they're "connected" but the connectedness of individuals within various subgroups doesn't necessarily enhance the social capital of a society as a whole, if we can talk about societies as bearers of social capital. In fact the opposite seems to be the case: multicultural societies that consist of lots of cohesive clans or tribes are low on trust and public-spiritedness and high on corruption.

I think something like what I'm after is captured by the distinction between "bonding" and "bridging" social capital--the street gang vs. the block association. Groups that are bonded compete against one another and to that extent diminish the social capital of the larger society in which they figure; groups that embody "bridging" social capital enhance the social capital of the wholes of which they're parts.

"Think globally--act locally" assumes that local groups typically generate bridging social capital: (1) that they'll cooperate with other groups rather than compete and (2) be inclusive rather than exclusive when it comes to membership. We think of civic organizations, whole food coops, and such. Anyone interested in the activities or goals of the group can get in, and the group cooperates with other groups. But clans, tribes and ethnic "communities" are exactly the opposite of that. They're by their nature exclusionary since membership is based on bloodlines, and maintain their cohesiveness by exclusion and competition. "We take care of our own." We compete for turf and other scarce resources with comparable groups to benefit our members, and in order to provide significant benefits we have to restrict membership--there's only so much stuff to go around.

Maybe the fundamental mistake of multiculturalists who advocate the salad bowl rather than the melting pot is thinking of ethnic groups on the model of civic organizations, coops and the like, as repositories of bridging rather than bonding social capital. Each group will operate its own ethnic restaurants and produce its own float for the Fourth of July parade. But this is precisely NOT how ethnic groups operate: if they did they wouldn't be ethnic groups but voluntary cultural preservation societies. There's nothing objectionable about cultural preservation societies if they admit anyone who has an interest in ethnic cookery, dance and costume and if their business is participating in "ethnic faires," reading and discussing the history of their chosen group, learning about the language and so on. But real "ethnic communities" are not voluntary associations and, even if they engage in cultural preservation as a side line their main business is to access political power and gain economic clout in order to get apprenticeships, jobs, contracts, grants and other scarce resources for their members. To this end they promote bloc voting and operate patronage systems.

I know what this system is like because I was brought up with it and I can't think of any arrangement that's more effective in undermining public-spiritedness, transparency and trust--social capital on the large scale.

War Without End
select.nytimes.com/2007/05/28/opinion/28krugman.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

[T]he nightmare of the Bush years won’t really be over until politicians are convinced that voters will punish, not reward, Bush-style fear-mongering. And that hasn’t happened yet.

Here’s the way it ought to be: When Rudy Giuliani says that Iran, which had nothing to do with 9/11, is part of a “movement” that “has already displayed more aggressive tendencies by coming here and killing us,” he should be treated as a lunatic. When Mitt Romney says that a coalition of “Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda” wants to “bring down the West,” he should be ridiculed for his ignorance. And when John McCain says that Osama, who isn’t in Iraq, will “follow us home” if we leave, he should be laughed at.

But they aren’t, at least not yet. And until belligerent, uninformed posturing starts being treated with the contempt it deserves, men who know nothing of the cost of war will keep sending other people’s children to graves at Arlington.

But would it fly? Of course not. The myth of the Bad Guys out to get us out of sheer malevolence, because they want to make us as badly off as they are, is too entrenched. It's rooted in the Christian tradition, articulated most powerfully in Paradise Lost and transubstantiated from theological dogma to political agenda during the Cold War. I remember what it was like as a child, imagining that the Communist world was a huge, prison camp, where everyone was under constant surveillance and masses of people in gray uniforms marched in lockstep to gray factories where they spent all their waking hours shoveling coal into furnaces: it was the conventional vision of Hell.

The myth remained intact after the Berlin Wall fell and it was inevitable that we would find some other Bad Guys to plug into the template. International Terrorism was it, and it was remarkable how quickly we were able to assign all the attributes of the Communist Enemy to the Islamicist Enemy. The Enemy wasn't motivated by ordinary human concerns or rational self-interest but by an insane sado-masochistic ideology so negotiation was impossible. The Enemy was out to obliterate all individuality so, just as we used to watch Soviet soldiers goose-stepping in parade, hoards of Chinese in identical pajamas waving identical little red books, we could watch masses of Muslims prostrating themselves simultaneously. The Enemy brainwashed its constituents by censorship, propaganda and the rote learning of ideological texts--the Marxist-Leninist canon, the Little Red Book or the Koran.

But, good Lord, who would have thought that Muslims could be plugged into that template? Muslims were Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, the Arabian Nights, sultans, vizers and harems, Omar Khyam, Saladin and Grenada, Casablanca and Il Seraglio, magic lamps, genies, golden domes and date trees--and, at their very worst, algebra!

So much for democracy...
www.nytimes.com/2007/05/27/magazine/27wwln-idealab-t.html

Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University, has attracted notice for raising a pointed question: Do voters have any idea what they are doing? In his provocative new book, “The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies,” Caplan argues that “voters are worse than ignorant; they are, in a word, irrational — and vote accordingly.” Caplan’s complaint is not that special-interest groups might subvert the will of the people, or that government might ignore the will of the people. He objects to the will of the people itself...To encourage greater economic literacy, he suggests tests of voter competence, or “giving extra votes to individuals or groups with greater economic literacy.”

I'm on with that, though I'd be nervous about just what "economic literacy" is supposed to be. But would it be paternalism? Roughly, paternalism means preventing people from getting what they want "for their own good" but that poses the question of what is is to prefer a given option. If we go with ordinary usage I think people do operate according to an "informed preference" notion: we talk about what people "really" want and that assumes, if not perfect information, enough to make decent educated guesses.

Some people have enough information but make what most regard as bad decisions anyway. Some know the costs and risks of smoking but smoke anyway. Stopping them would be paternalistic. However if Caplan is correct, when it comes to policy most voters don't have a clue:

Caplan’s own evidence for the systematic folly of voters comes from a 1996 survey comparing the views of Ph.D. economists and the general public. To the exasperation of the libertarian-minded Caplan, most Americans do not think like economists. They are biased against free markets and against trade with foreigners. Absurdly, they think that the American economy is being hurt by too much spending on foreign aid; they also exaggerate the potential economic harms of immigration.

The foreign aid issue is the most glaring: some time back a survey indicated that the average guess Americans made about the percentage of GDP the US spends on foreign aid was 23% when it's a little over 0.1%. There was also a poll indicating that 17% of Americans believed that they were in the wealthiest 1% of the population and another 17% were confident that that some time in their lives they'd get there.

Now this is simply factual error that could easily be fixed--not a matter of religious beliefs, "values," or tastes. The remarkable thing is that politicians, obsessed with focus groups, spin, and propaganda have been so reluctant to set people right by stating, and repeating, simple facts. It would be easy enough to set citizens straight on these matters: charities make a fuss about how "for just pennies a day" you can feed a village or send a child to school--why don't politicians? Are Americans opposed to taxes as a matter brute fact or do they simply assume that taxation isn't cost effective? Seeing how it looks from the ground it looks like the latter. Here is the public, imagining that they pay almost a quarter of their income in taxes to feed, clothe and shelter ungrateful "natives" without much effect, and even more to finance local "welfare queens," while "for just pennies a day" private charities do a better job without waste and corruption.

Sometimes though it isn't simple facts but educated guesses about the consequences of various policies. Still, politicians seem peculiarly bad at getting inside the heads of voters and maybe more importantly refuse to recognize that they're rational choosers with legitimate goals. Americans recognize that the US health care system is broken but resist a single-payer system. Why? Because they imagine that it will impose a huge financial burden (not taking into account the savings on private insurance schemes and improvement in efficiency) and that what they'll get is rationed, meatball medicine: long waits for appointments and every visit to the doctor's office like a trip to the DMV, shuffled through an impersonal system, waiting in a grim holding pen to get perfunctory attention from government functionaries--like black-and-white films of immigrants on Ellis Island being screened for TB.

They imagine that immigrants will turn their neighborhoods into dangerous slums, reeking of greasy food, with families sitting outside at all hours of the day and night screaming to one another in foreign languages, young toughs hanging on street corners harassing women and dirty little shops lining the streets. They believe that Bad Guys, domestically and abroad, are out to get them and that only brute force, and lots of it, will keep them in check. They believe that lowering the drinking age and legalizing marijuana will turn the country into the beach at Spring Break. They believe that strictness, corporal punishment and rote learning will make their kids decent, educated, productive citizens. They believe that taxes are little more than tribute to politicians and don't pay for any services that benefit them apart from police, prisons and the military, that government by its nature is corrupt and inefficient, that grassroots efforts, volunteerism and neighborliness will solve social problems, and that common people exercising commonsense can always do better than experts and careerists. They believe--judging from a pro-Walmart propaganda film--that Walmart is a benefactor of the working class and that rich elitist liberals, offended by Walmart on aesthetic grounds, want to close down cheap, efficient big-box stores to make way for over-priced boutiques and health food shops.

If I believed any of these things I'd vote differently--but I don't. Maybe I'm mistaken about some of the facts. One way or the other though it is a matter of facts and not of "values" or tastes, and that can be fixed.

No Free Ride

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=bumpy_ride

Clark, Morgan Steiner, and others are telling women on the playground that they won't get trapped staying home and can always go back to work. Such good news -- if only it were true. In the only actual quantitative study (meaning the kind of data collected according to generally accepted scientific methods from a statistically meaningful set of subjects), Sylvia Ann Hewlett's Center for Work-Life Policy found recently that just a little more than half of women who wanted to return to full-time work ever found full time work at all. And these weren't just any potential re-employees. The women in the center's study were "highly qualified," meaning they had earned nothing less than bachelors' degrees with honors or professional or graduate degrees...Not only do highly qualified, eager women not always get full time work, other studies have shown that the women never get back full time jobs comparable to the ones they left. Hewlett's data shows that you lose 37 percent of your earning power if you're off more than three years. Morgan Steiner's article places the point of no return at ten years.

I figured that out when I was 17--why is it so hard? Working as a clerk-typist at a bus company it was pretty obvious that the only alternative to a career was a job. My co-workers were young women, trying desperately to get pregnant so that they could quit and middle-aged women, forced back to work when their kids were grown. I went to college, and grad school, and made a career for myself, to avoid ever, ever having to to a job again.

How can any woman smart enough to get a good BA or graduate degree imagine, in the teeth of all empirical evidence, that after ten years off she will be able to hop back onto the fast track, into an interesting, well-paid career? It's hard enough to get interesting work even if you're right out of school pushing full steam ahead. After ten years out, the luckiest women, who've managed to snag high-yielding husbands (and avoided divorce), will spend the rest of their lives assing around, selling real estate part time. Most though will end up doing boring, dead-end, pink-collar drudge jobs for the rest of their working lives. Most people, women and men, spend their lives doing rotten, boring drudge work--and the only way to avoid that is to fight like a demon for a career.

Maybe what bothers me even more than the idiocy of this fantasy is the sense of entitlement that of women who imagine that they can pick up where they left off--the implicit assumption that the rules are different, and should be different for women. No one imagines that a man who dropped out to bum around at 30 should be able to take up where he left off ten years later. There aren't enough good jobs or good lives to go around, and if you want one of those very few good jobs you have to fight for all you're worth and sacrifice. If you choose to take ten years off, you pay for it--and that is as it should be, whether you're male or female, whether you spend those ten years traveling around the world, chaffeuring the kiddies to soccer practice, or lying on the street in a drunken stupor.

"Sopranos" wrap-up: Uncomfortably numb | Salon Arts & Entertainment

"Sopranos" wrap-up: Uncomfortably numb | Salon Arts & Entertainment
Tony flies to Vegas to get some peace. We see him eating dinner alone, sitting by a pool. Finally, he looks up a hooker who slept with Christopher, then tells her Christopher is dead. The two end up sleeping together (no surprise there) and then talking honestly. They smoke a joint, and suddenly it seems that Tony may be trying to crawl inside of Christopher's experiences. He asks the girl about the time she took peyote with Christopher, and then she and Tony take the drug together and hit the casinos, looking dazed. Instead of losing all of his money as you'd expect, Tony goes on a huge winning streak, then falls down on the floor, suddenly struck that Christopher is dead and gone and he can't even feel happy over his good fortune. Will Tony ever feel happy again?

I missed the first part of this episode so a complete literary critique will have to wait. But I want to go on record as betting that this Las Vegas episode is a fantasy. Tony gets to Vegas instantly, as if by teletransportation. Everything that follows is wish-fulfillment and yet hollow: the glitzy hotel, reminiscent of the hotel in purgatory after Tony was shot, great sex with a dark lady (always trouble for Tony), effortless gambling wins and a drug that gives instant insight into the riddle of the universe.

There are lots of clues. After telling the dark lady that Chris is dead, Tony leaves and the door closes but then, without any transition or explanation, Tony is in bed with her. And it turns out that she's working her way through college as a stripper--Tony's ideal woman. She's either the same actress or a reasonable facsimile of the Italian girl next door who Tony hallucinated years earlier. She's also a refugee from the Vietnam era youth culture that Tony missed: long dark hair, a couple of joints in a box by her bed and some peyote to spare. Tony takes an unconvincing drag on the joint and is immediately stoned: life isn't like that.

There's no plausible explanation for anything that happens other than Tony's own half-formed desires, uninformed, conventional notions about some life he's missed and a fantasy of recovering lost youth. It's a flat cartoon, like his notion of college: "fraternity parties, you know, frat boys--the way back to college for A.J." he tells Carmela. Tony's never been a frat boy or been to a fraternity party--he's just heard of such things. Here's the hippie college girl he heard of when he was young: instant sex with no hassles, providing drugs that instantly produce insight into "how it all works." Never tried these psychedelic drugs, but they give you insights into the Universe, right?

The only question I have is: where is Tony, really? Did he really kill Chris? I suspect he did. But did he really walk away from the accident? I suspect he didn't. Is he really in hell--at least temporarily? The story line is reminiscent of an old Twilight Zone episode where a gangster, who's a gambler, is shot and ends up in a dream-world where everything goes his way--he always wins at roulette and women fall into his arms effortlessly. After he realizes that it's perfectly awful, because without uncertainty or effort, none of this is any fun he dials up "Pip," the "guide" who took him to the place and asks why he ended up in heaven rather than "the Other Place." And Pip responds, "So what makes you think you're not in 'the Other Place.'"

The Sarkozian Buzz

What happens now in France is of crucial importance for all of us who wish to escape from the neo-liberal race to the bottom. Two choices face us, the emulation of the American model, long working hours, pitiful minium wage, zero welfare state, brutal exploitation and denial of citizenship to migrant workers, or the sort of resistance we saw last year in France to the CPE employment law.

Sarko wins--what a bummer.

I suppose everyone has to try sado-conservatism once. An occasional dose might not hurt: a little buzz of entrepreneurship and the adrenalin rush of risk-taking. The problem is addiction. Once the buzz wears off you want more to recapture the thrill and pretty soon there isn't any thrill--just chronic insecurity, endless drudgery and the costs of containing an unproductive, anti-social underclass: the American model.

At that point there's no turning back. Try to cut down and you get the shakes so you shoot up again, increasing the dose, just to avoid the withdrawl symptoms.

It's an expensive habit. A free-enterprise health care system costs more than the National Health and sado-conservative social programs for the lower classes--prisons and the military--are expensive in human as well as monetary terms. Americans however are prepared to pay much more for these programs, which they regard as a necessity, than for education and social safety nets. The lower classes clamor for them: prisons provide service sector jobs for unskilled workers and the military provides opportunities for education and training. Ambitious working class kids sign on for four years and, if they aren't shot dead, get funding for college when their hitch is up. Of course it would be a lot cheaper to provide these benefits without maintaining a massive standing army and going to war regularly to justify its existence. But who's counting? Not addicts, who are notoriously bad at weighing costs, benefits and risks.

No one thinks they'll become addicted when they shoot up. Apart from the underclass, who are socially isolated and don't vote, most Americans believe that they're in the top 10% of the population, the best and brightest, who will get the buzz and not the addiction--the few who will benefit from an inegalitarian, high-risk system rather than the many who will get stuck with the chronic insecurity and grinding drudgery, fighting to keep afloat.

Of course, in a sado-conservative society admitting, even to yourself, that you are in the bottom 90% rather than the talented tenth at the top is taboo. Once the system is established, no one (except socially isolated, politically inert members of the underclass) dares to think that they might benefit from social safety nets and more egalitarian arrangements, so the system perpetuates itself, promoted by the overwhelming majority of Americans who believe that only the Other ("welfare recipients," the poor, minorities, immigrants) will benefit from a welfare state.

Our Founder said: "know thyself." For any individual, the odds are 9 to 1 against his being in the talented tenth so, for any given individual, there is a very high probability he will do better in a more secure, more egalitarian system. Taking Our Founder's wisdom to heart, I think it's highly unlikely that I am a member of the minority (whatever its size) that would do better in an high-risk sado-conservative meritocracy than in a welfare state. I want those social safety nets and leveling programs, that social engineering, state interference and regulation for me--not for some inferior or "disadvantaged" Other.

Watching Sarko's triumphant motorcade through Paris I see that the French are getting that first rush. Lucky for them that they despise us and so are unlikely to emulate the American model or go on to full-blown addiction.

Foreign Policy: Seven Questions: Between God and Atat�rk

What is Secularism?

Foreign Policy: Seven Questions: Between God and Atat�rk

FP: In the West, it is usually assumed that modernization, secularism, and democracy naturally go together. Is that the case in Turkey?

AM: Turkey is rather different in this way. It differs from a lot of Western countries in that the religious tend to come from poorer segments of the population. And obviously because the secularized minority realizes that it is a minority, it wants the powers of the majority to be somehow or other circumscribed. It wants limits to be set.

Sounds familiar here in the US. But what does it mean? In the US, with separation of church and state on the books for over 200 years and, perhaps more importantly, a free church tradition and the legacy of Protestant pietism, we don't regard political secularism as a threat to religious belief or practice. Religion in this tradition is personal matter, detached (at least in principle) from politics and public policy--a matter of metaphysics and "private morality."

I don't understand what "secularism" is supposed to mean within the context of Turkey or the rest of the Muslim world or, for that matter, in France, as cited in the article. Does it mean the repudiation of metaphysical claims and religious practice or just anticlericalism and the relegation of religion to the private sphere? Does that distinction even make sense to people in the Islamic world, in traditionally Catholic countries or other places where religious belief and practice are inextricably bound up with clericalism and social/political agendas set by religious authorities, without a history that comes from the Reformation and the whole Pauline/Kierkegaardian take on religion as "inwardness"?

My oldest kid shared a grad student office with another grad student from India who had two questions about the US: "what is religion?" and "what is curry?" Curry powder, according to Amartya Sen is a British invention: there are lots of spicy Indian dishes that we call "curry" and subcontinental chefs operating in the UK and elsewhere keep inventing more to appeal to Western tastes, but the idea of curry as a particular kind of dish is alien in South Asian. The idea of "religion" as a package of metaphysical beliefs, cultic practices and a code of personal conduct, detached from ethnic affiliation and a social/political agenda is apparently alien too. It would have been alien also in classical Greece and, I suspect, may still be alien in regions where Protestant Christianity never took hold.

Funny business. Liberal Protestants used to condemn conservatives as pietistic and "escapist," for being obsessed with personal experience and personal "salvation" to the exclusion of social or political agendas. Real Christianity they said had a social and political agenda. But when conservative Christians announced their social and political agenda, commandeered the media to promote it and engaged in political activism, liberal Protestants were outraged because it was the wrong social and political agenda.

I used to fantasize a dream world of Mediterranean Folk Catholicism, with churches and shrines thick on the ground, processions in the streets, legends of the saints, lawn statuary, holy days and customs, icons, myths and a thousand pretty little pieties--religion as a system of outward and visible signs. But religions that are attached to outward and visible signs become inextricably linked to secular social arrangements; and more often than not they get hooked into political agendas and develop authoritarian systems. It takes professionals to put on the show and money to keep it running. Moreover if social arrangements collapse or there are political realignments, if the rules change or the authorities are discredited, religion does down. When the Greek city-states collapsed, the classical Greek city gods went down; when the power of national churches was broken in "old Europe," religious belief and practice declined to the vanishing point.

Is it possible to have Mediterranean Folk Catholicism or a reasonable facimile in a secular state?

Akinola and Ecstasy

How to wire your brain for religious ecstasy. - By John Horgan - Slate Magazine

Our current mystical technologies are primitive, but one day, neurotheologians may find a technology that gives us permanent, blissful self-transcendence with no side effects...Shulgin, the psychedelic chemist, once wrote that a perfect mystical technology would bring about "the ultimate evolution, and perhaps the end of the human experiment." When I asked Shulgin to elaborate, he said that if we achieve permanent mystical bliss, there would be "no motivation, no urge to change anything, no creativity." Both science and religion aim to eliminate suffering. But if a mystical technology makes us immune to anxiety, grief, and heartache, are we still fully human? Have we gained something or lost something? In short, would a truly effective mystical technology—a God machine that works—save us, or doom us?

Good Lord, what a question! Of course it would save us, and of course we would still be "fully human." This is like asking whether, by taking advantage of some dream technology that made us immune tooth decay, which eliminated drilling and pulling, we would still have "real teeth." The whole purpose of change and creativity is to eliminate anxiety, grief and heartache and, ideally, promote bliss. Plug me in!

Until the technology is developed however the most reliable ways to achieve mystical experience are recreational drugs and religion. According to the article, only about one third of the population has experienced mystical bliss and that seems a damn shame. It's a pity that the drugs that induce these blissful experiences aren't legal and readily available. If people are prepared to assume risk to get these experiences, I don't seen any compelling reason why the state should stop them other than plain puritanism. I would bet though that even if a completely risk-free mechanism for inducing mystical bliss were available the same puritans who are intent on keeping recreational drugs illegal will see to it that it's banned--just as they they strive mightily to see to it that people aren't going to get mystical experiences out of religion either.

I joined the Church to get mystical bliss and sometimes I even managed it. Meditation never did anything for me but the Church had the props to turn me on: good music, good architecture, fine writing and all the sensual, spooky stuff of high church. But for the past 30 years the liberal puritans have done everything in their power to minimize mystical bliss by pulling the props and undermining the kind of belief in transcendence that facilitates mystical experience.

Nowadays, the only alternative to liberal puritanism is conservative puritanism, which is even worse. Here is an article on the unwelcome American visit of the Most Rev. Peter Akinola, Archbishop of Nigeria and Pope Presumptive of conservative Anglicans. Akinola's followers believe in transcendence, and some even conduct services according to the eminently transcendent old Prayer Book, but they are much more interested in sex. They want to see to it that there's less of it around and, in particular, that gay men and lesbians aren't getting any of it, for much the same reason that liberal puritans want to restrict access to mystical experience. I suppose neither bunch wants to eliminate bliss altogether, whether sexual or religious: they just want to minimize and control it, restrict it to 10 minutes of transcendence around Communion or heterosex within marriage, and make sure that no one gets it unless they pay their dues.

I used to be more sympathetic to conservatives because they believed in God and seemed to think that theology was interesting and important. But when the crunch came it was apparent what their real concerns were. There was no schism when Bishop Pike ridiculed the Trinity as "a sort of committee God"--he was honorably retired, presumably with a hefty pension. Bishop Spong didn't even have to retire when he announced that theism was not only false but completely implausible to any educated person. That was fine--it was his views on sexual ethics that raised protests. And now, the schism in the Church at bottom is not about theology but about sexual behavior and more broadly about competing social agendas. For partisans on both sides what is important about the Church is the way of life it promotes and a range of moral and political issues.

None of this is the Church's business and the Church is now collapsing because it stuck its corporate nose into a place where it didn't belong. The Church's business is theology and mystical experience--and it isn't doing its job. Fortunately, I can do theology on my own, with the help of my colleagues and the Society of Christian Philosophers (which I take every opportunity to link and advertise). As for mystical experience it looks like I'll have to wait until neurotheologians develop a stick I can plug into my brain.

God, Guns and Guts

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usguns/Story/0,,2059726,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=1

President George Bush arrived on the campus for a memorial service attended mainly by staff and students, questioning continued of the slowness of the college authorities and police to react to the first incident and failure to lock down the campus, cancel classes and properly alert students to the danger. But there was almost no debate in the US about a need for gun control laws - even among the staff and students.

"God, Guns and Guts Make America Great" according to the old bumper-sticker you used to see in Red States.

Why do we like guns so much? Because we think we live in Mogodishu. Somalis won't lay down their weapons because they know that if they give up their firearms but others don't they'll be shot by thugs or members of rival clans. If you live in a failed state, or a corrupt, impoverished Third World country, you can't count on the state to maintain public order or protect you so you rely on God, guns and guts and take care of your own.

Quite a number of Americans believe that every state, the US included, is a failed state--that government is the problem not the solution. They're convinced that individual citizens and the private sector can always do things better--in the teeth of empirical evidence to the contrary. They believe that the Market will do better at promoting the general welfare than a welfare state and that individuals and the private sector--citizens with guns and vigilantes--will do a better job in maintaining public safety than any government programs, including restrictions on the availability of lethal weapons. They rely on God, guns and guts.

Cho Seung-Hui, a homocidal maniac and Virginia Tech undergraduate, had "multiple firearms, not just the Walter P22 and Glock handguns he used in the killings" even though guns were banned on campus. Would this mass murder have been averted if Virginia had had more stringent gun control regulations so that murderous lunatics would not be able to build arsenals or would it have been better to have students and faculty were armed so that once Cho started shooting someone could have taken him out?

There's no a priori answer: gun control means fewer guns, fewer murderous lunatics and common or garden variety thugs with guns, so less need for respectable citizens to defend themselves; no gun control means more guns for lunatics and thugs, but more respectable citizens with guns to shoot them before they shoot us. It's an empirical question which way things will break, and the experience of affluent countries comparable to the US suggests that fewer guns for everyone make everyone safer than escalating the domestic arms race. But which way we bet depends on whether or not we believe that state regulations and agencies can keep us safe and that, apart from a few crazies like Cho, people are not out to do violence.

We don't believe that, and it isn't primarily criminally insane Korean undergraduates that we're worried about. We believe that there is an underclass out to do violence which cannot be salvaged or improved but only, at best, controlled and contained. We believe that the only way to keep safe is by isolating and segregating them, imprisoning as many as we're able, and moving away as far as we can from their turf--to remote exurbs and, if we can afford it, gated communities. We don't think the America is like France, Sweden or the UK--we think the US is like Somalia, or like Kenya where anyone who can afford it lives in a gated community or compound patrolled by security guards, or like other Third World countries where an impoverished underclass engages in crime and violence and everyone relies on God, guns and guts to protect themselves. And that is a self-fulfilling prophacy.