The Needless Fear of Day Care - Judith Warner - Domestic Disturbances - Times Select - New York Times Blog

Playing the Mommy Card: Real and Unreal Work

The Needless Fear of Day Care - Judith Warner - Domestic Disturbances - Times Select - New York Times BlogI’ve got some good news to share. The latest word about day care from the nation’s largest, longest-running, highest-quality, mega-government-financed study is this: it doesn’t really matter much at all. That’s not, of course, what most newspaper headlines announced this week. They declared that new links had been found between day care and aggression, between day care and fighting, disobedience to teachers and, well, bad behavior in school generally, right on up to sixth grade.

So, a study indicates that there's no significant different between kids who've spent their early years in day care and those who've been raised by stay-at-home moms. But the media spins the insignificant, ambiguous difference in outcomes as a result indicating that day care is bad for kids.

Qui bono? Why is there a market for this spin? And why am I, apparently, the only person on the Internet who understands why there's a market for it?

It isn't hard to understand really. Most work stinks--and most women's work is especially stinky: it's mindless drudgery with nothing to learn, no chance to achieve, no result to show at the end of the day and no opportunity for advancement. You sit in a carrel taking phone orders. You sit at a terminal inputting data while your supervisor monitors every keystroke. You stand behind a checkout counter scanning groceries. That's what work is for most people--not some underclass minority who are especially oppressed, but most people and not just women. "Real Work" is mindless drudgery at high reps without anything to show for it, and women's work especially is physically constrained and closely supervised. It's being buried alive.

Every reasonable person will do everything in their power to avoid Real Work. That's why I got a PhD. Most women, and men, can't get PhDs and, in any case, there isn't enough Unreal Work--work that's interesting, challenging and produces results you can be proud of--to go around. For most women, the only way to escape Real Work is to plead child care responsibilities. Most women are desperate to hear that day care is bad for kids so that they can cite the statistics to justify getting out of work, and have a response to husbands pushing them out of the house. "Get your butt to Walmart, bitch, and get a job." "No, no Honey, it would be bad for the kids."

Between high school and college I worked as a clerk-typist for a bus company. I sat between Lois and Mrs. Kuhn who, though they weren't much older than me, were married and were trying desperately to get pregnant because it was the ticket out of the office. I saw that this wasn't a long term solution. Besides young women like them, doing what they could to get married and pregnant so that they could quit work, there were older women who were pushed back into the labor force after their children were grown. I realized that marriage and childbearing wouldn't do: the only way to avoid Real Work permanently was by getting the qualifications and credentials for Unreal Work--work that was interesting, challenging and produced some satisfying result. That's why I went to college, killed myself to get the highest possible GPA, and then went to grad school: to avoid boring work.

But that route isn't feasible for most women, or men, and there isn't enough Unreal Work to go around. So the only way most women can get out of work even temporarily is by playing the Mommy Card. Taking care of young children is bad, but the alternative is much, much worse and anything that will get you out of the pure hell of work even temporarily is a good thing. Is work really that bad? You better believe it is. The chattering classes, the tiny minority who have the incredible luxury of doing interesting work, don't recognize that but the overwhelming majority of the population for whom work is pure hell will do anything to avoid it even temporarily.

There's a market for bad news about day care because it's become the only chance women have to play the Mommy Card. That's why the Mommy Wars are going on--between that minority of women like me who've managed to avoid Real Work by getting Unreal Work and the majority of women, like Lois and Mrs. Kuhn, whose only chance for respite from the hopeless, mindless drudgery of Real Work is the Mommy Card.

R.I.P. Catherine Catt

Our 16 year old cat, CATherine, a.k.a. Kitty, died yesterday. Kudos and thanks to everyone at the South Bay Veterinary Hospital who have been wonderful to her and all our beasts.

Catherine was not a good cat. Red in tooth and claw, she decimated the local bird population, beat up other neighborhood cats and thought nothing of taking on our 75 pound lab. She regularly bit the hand that fed her--namely mine. She was spiteful and vindictive: when she got cat food that didn't suit her, she made a point of pooping all over the kitchen floor. She bit, scratched, growled, hissed, spit, sharpened her claws on furniture, sprayed and just plain didn't like us.

I know dogs go to heaven. I'm not so sure about cats but I hope they don't go to hell because Catherine was a thoroughly bad cat. And we miss her!

Saints of Ecology: F*** YOU!

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/22/garden/22impact.html

Welcome to Walden Pond, Fifth Avenue style. Isabella’s parents, Colin Beavan, 43, a writer of historical nonfiction, and Michelle Conlin, 39, a senior writer at Business Week, are four months into a yearlong lifestyle experiment they call No Impact. Its rules are evolving, as Mr. Beavan will tell you, but to date include eating only food (organically) grown within a 250-mile radius of Manhattan; (mostly) no shopping for anything except said food; producing no trash (except compost, see above); using no paper; and, most intriguingly, using no carbon-fueled transportation.

I have a Swiffer. It's a handy device for cleaning floors that runs on 4 AA batteries which power a squirt from a bottle of cleaning stuff. You put in the bottle, attach a disposable paper pad with velcro, and clean the floor with it. It's hopelessly wasteful but gets the floor clean without much effort.

It's unecological but I need all the help I can get. Somehow I don't have the talent for housework much as I wish and much as I try. I've bitten the bullet and hired cleaners to come in every two weeks but it's still beyond what most people can handle. I don't have any fetishes about germs--I just want to place to look ok and not shock people, but it's losing battle.

I don't have a big ecological footprint compared to most Americans. I drive a sub-compact, I don't use a dishwasher and, frankly, I only shower about once a week. I don't buy lots of stuff: my working wardrobe consists of 3 pairs of jeans I got about 4 years ago, tee shirts and assorted sweaters I got at yard sales. I turn off lights, including the lights in the ladies room in my hall. I don't mind sacrificing stuff but I will not sacrifice time or convenience.

An inveterate consumer of women's magazines, I have read innumerable articles about saving money and the environment. One of the themes is the Joy of Couponing: there are, apparently, women who make a hobby of collecting coupons, filing and organizing them, and swapping them with other hobbiests. Once a year or so they take all their coupons to the supermarket and buy two shopping carts full of brand name merchandise for 97¢. Another theme is Ecological Families. They spend all their spare time composting and sorting trash which they take to recycling centers so that on garbage day they don't have more than a grocery bag full of recalcitrant rubbish to be picked up.

I am just not going to do this stuff. I need to do my work and I also want to do things that matter to me in my spare time: improving my French, knitting, keeping up with the piano, and learning math. I am not going to spend my time clipping coupons or sorting trash. There are three kinds of people that get into this: housewives desperate to avoid getting pushed into the labor force, the idle rich and the idle stupid, which overlap. These are people who don't have the wit to use leisure productively or have to pretend that they're doing real work. Please, Massa Hubby, don't make me get a job at Walmart--I'm saving us all this money by couponing. Please don't kick me out; please, Massa, don't make me get a job.

I'm less sympathetic to the rich and the stupid, who take on shit work because they don't have the wit to do any better. If they aren't stuck with drudgery they haven't a clue what to do besides watching TV or staring at the walls because they're stupid so they look for boring shit work--collecting coupons or sorting trash. What a pity. The world is full of people like me and many, many others who've spent our lives fighting for all we're worth to avoid doing this drudge work. If we had their money and leisure, we'd know what to do with it.

Episcopal Church Rejects Demand for a 2nd Leadership - New York Times

The Episcopal Church declines the Trojan Horse

Episcopal Church Rejects Demand for a 2nd Leadership - New York Times

Responding to an ultimatum from leaders of the worldwide Anglican Communion, bishops of the Episcopal Church have rejected a key demand to create a parallel leadership structure to serve the conservative minority of Episcopalians who oppose their church’s liberal stand on homosexuality...Several bishops also said in interviews that they believed that the pastoral council arrangement was intended to strengthen the position of conservative parishes or dioceses that want to leave the Episcopal Church and take their property with them. The breakaway parishes could claim that they came under the new pastoral council guided by the primates, and that the council was the highest authority in the Episcopal Church’s hierarchy.

I can only imagine the bishops' marathon emergency meetings with their legal team to figure out the best strategy for holding onto Church real estate. Recognize the legitimacy of a "parallel leadership structure," and they don't even have a case if that "structure" awards church buildings and endowments to conservative congregations. Don't recognize the proposed "leadership structure" and they can at least duke it out in the courts, though getting kicked out of the Anglican Communion will certainly undermine the Church's case. But maybe deals can be cut behind the scenes. After all, ECUSA finances lots of these third world churches and so still has some leverage. It will certainly be entertaining to watch the bishops playing hardball--litigating, twisting arms, bribing and manipulating--while making the usual pious noises about "inclusiveness."

I have a dog in this fight, but my issue isn't sexuality. It's the more fundamental issue of authority and the Church's patronizing, manipulative treatment of its laity. The Church will not bend and will not even recognize that those who disagree about doctrine, policy or practice may be rational and informed, even if they are wrong. The assumption is that anyone who objects to the its program is ignorant, psychologically hung-up or just irrationally resistant to change, and that this can be fixed by "using psychology" or, failing that, playing power politics.

In the end, maybe it's I who was wrong--I, who wanted and expected the Church to be something it never was and was never intended to be. I was always puzzled, and irritated, by people who claimed to be "spiritual, but not religious, who bought into every sort of fashionable nonsense but rejected Christianity unworthy of serious consideration and who professed an aversion to "organized religion" and the "institutional church." It seemed to me that if you were going to be intellectually sloppy you might as well be a Christian. I could understand, and sympathize with tough-minded secular humanists like Russell, Ayer and Flew, and even the better sort of village atheists, like Dawkins, but I could never fathom why people who were soft-headed enough to buy into alternative medicine, self-help fads, astrology or what have you pooh-poohed "organized religion" and Christianity in particular. Occasionally I asked students why they had left the Church or rejected Christianity and the answer was always the same: "rules."

Now maybe I get it. When we talked about Christianity or the "institutional church" we were talking about two different things. When I talked about Christianity I meant church buildings and furnishings, liturgy, a body of art, music and literature, an historical story about councils and theological disputes, a collection of stories and myths, and a library of theology to explore and criticize; when they talked about Christianity they meant "rules" about what to believe and how to behave. When I talked about the "institutional church" I meant the organization that maintained the buildings and did the liturgy; when they talked about the "institutional church" they meant the hierarchy that made the rules about what to believe and how to behave. The romance of church history meant nothing to them, they weren't interested in theology or liturgy, and didn't think that the buildings were the essence of the Church: nice buildings were nice, and if the church had nice buildings that was a good thing in the way that it was good if libraries, schools or other public facilities had nice buildings. But that was not what the Church was all about--the Church in its essence was rules: authority, about what to believe and how to behave. And they didn't like it.

I don't like it either. Maybe now I understand. But I'm still furious at the church for dismantling that historical romance, which meant everything to me.

Decision-Making and Agency

I’m about to give a talk at a Law School class about a couple of my papers on “adaptive preference,” discrimination and women’s choices

One of the issues I discovered, re-reading them, is the question of how people make choices and the extent to which they believe, rightly or wrongly, that they have agency. Advising students about majors and future careers it’s always struck me how wildly optimistic they were and the extent to which they imagine that they have control over the way their lives would go. They seem to believe that the best predictors of how their futures will turn out are their choices and the efforts they make to achieve their goals. They’re highly privileged by world standards and even by American standards and have been propagandized from birth with the Great American Myth of self-effort and personal achievement. What is especially striking to me is that they never seem to assess their future prospects by considering the way in which the lives of people who are similarly situated go and judging the odds that they will have lives of a certain kind be reference to others like them.

I would bet that this is not the way most rational choosers operate. Most of us look at people who are, in relevant respects, like us—other women or men, other members of social group, others with similar academic records, SAT scores or credentials—and calculate the odds that our lives will go one way or the other by reference to how their lives go. We make our choices by playing the odds and don’t risk pursuing goals that we recognize are unlikely because others like us haven’t achieved them.

Nowadays about half of law school students are women. When I was growing up it was very different. I remember discussing career options with my mother once. That was when I learnt, to my dismay, that women couldn’t be vets. Women could be doctors, my mother said—they just couldn’t be surgeons. And women could be lawyers. There were in fact a few women lawyers and they were called “Portias” but they were rare.

So, as a rational but misinformed chooser, I wrote off veterinary medicine, which I would have liked to pursue, and law. It wasn’t that I doubted that I, or other women, could do these jobs, but the assumption that individual ability and choice simply don’t play much of a role in how our lives go. This, I think, is the way in which most people operate. First, we assume that there are a whole host of arbitrary, non-negotiable rules that are no more open to challenge than the laws of nature. Women couldn’t be surgeons or vets: that was just the way it was and their was no point thinking about it any further. Secondly, there were jobs that weren’t against the rules for women but which were highly unlikely—like law. It wasn’t worth trying because the odds were so low—not because of any individual characteristics one had, but because the odds were determined by how things went for others who were similarly situated. There were very few women lawyers so the odds of being a lawyer were low.

The fundamental assumption that I and. I think, most other rational choosers make is that individual characteristics like ability and effort simply do not play much of a role in determining the sort of lives we’ll live. We assume that we’re likely to live the same kind of lives as others who are demographically similar to us and that our choices are essentially choices to enter into lotteries. As rational choosers we choose amongst the lotteries where the odds are best, generally the least worst of a relatively narrow range of options.

This cuts both ways. Even though I assumed it wasn’t worth entering the law lottery, I also assumed that there were things that would just happen for me without any real effort on my part. I assumed I’d go to college because everyone I knew did. I assumed I’d play the piano because when I was growing up pianos were one of the normal pieces of living room furniture, like couches, and every adult woman could play—at least a little. So I ended up going to college and playing the piano—a little: it was inevitable.

Now when I teach applied ethics classes or read papers on “adaptive preference” and related issues, and when I argue with students or colleagues of a conservative bent, it’s clear to me that one our disagreements is a consequence of their failure to understand that this is the way in which most people make choices, in particular, about whether to invest in education or training and which job options to pursue. And unlike me, most of them are correct: they have little control over the way in which their lives will go and their efforts will not make much of a difference so the best they can do is choose lotteries where the odds are reasonably favorable. Women apply for pink-collar jobs because they recognize that their odds of getting them are good. They don’t apply for better-paying “men’s jobs” because they know that in most cases the rules are against it and that even where there are a few women in an occupation their odds of getting in are very low. It isn’t a matter of doubting their own abilities but simply a matter of playing the odds—they recognize that ability simply doesn’t matter: most jobs can be done equally well by almost anyone and most hiring decisions are arbitrary.

“Consciousness-raising” and programs to programs to build self-esteem are a waste—or a cruel joke. Most people aren’t short on self-esteem: they simply recognize that their efforts, abilities and personal worth are largely irrelevant to their life-prospects. The poor women in the global south who Martha Nussbaum imagines are victims of “preference-deformation” and put up with bad conditions because they do not believe that they are worthy of better lives or think they have rights don’t prefer the lives they live: they believe, with justification, that they can’t do any better. There are 1000 arbitrary rules that constrain them and, they know that the odds that their lives will be any different from the lives of other poor women are very low indeed. Living on the edge, they can’t afford to assume risk and even investing in a lottery ticket for a better life is a cost they can’t afford given the odds.

Multiculturalist Racism

http://www.democratiya.com/review.asp?reviews_id=70

Some critics of multiculturalism argue that minority communities should assimilate into the mainstream, surrendering their cultural differences for the sake of a unified, egalitarian society. This approach is adopted by the French Republic, which treats (in theory, if not in practice) all its citizens as equally French and equally deserving of rights. It claims to be indifferent to difference. Unfortunately, however well intended, the French integrationist strategy seems to have failed. Witness the racial tensions and the rise of the far right National Front. Moreover, it is surely ethically wrong and socially impoverishing to demand the conformity of minority communities. Why should they be required to give up their cultural uniqueness? Would not the abandonment of difference inevitably lead to a reversion to the stultifying, suffocating social blandness of the Macmillan and Eisenhower eras? I say: Vive La Difference!

Do members of these "communities" want their "cultural uniqueness"? Why assume that conformity to the mainstream culture is an imposition or represents the "stifling homogeneity, blandness and conformism of monocultural societies"?

This article is half reasonable, noting that some minority cultures are misogynistic, homophobic and generally oppressive, and suggesting that tolerance for cultural practices that violate individual rights is morally unacceptable. I certainly agree. But the chief argument against multiculturalism is not that minority cultures are inferior or that they suppress individual rights, but that they are assigned on the basis of bloodlines and lock individuals into cultures with which they do not identify or want to identify.

The linked article comes out of the UK. If I were a Swedish immigrant to the UK, and certainly if I were the child of Swedish immigrants, I would not want my fellow citizens to expect me to celebrate St. Lucy's day in a candelabra headdress or eat lutefisk. I'd want to be 100%, unhyphenated British, to identify completely with the land and history, the place that was my home. I'd want that not because the culture of my ancestors was in any way inferior or in any way oppressive--surely Swedish culture isn't--but simply because it wasn't what I was, because it wasn't me. I wouldn't want to be chained to my genetic "roots."

But, of course, if I were a child of Swedish immigrants to the UK, or the US, I wouldn't be chained to my "roots": as Big Bill Broonzy had it, "if you're white, you're alright." If you're white in a white country, ethnicity is largely a matter of choice, and the extent to which you identify with an ancestral culture is a matter of choice. No one expects Sarkozy, the child of a Hungarian immigrant father and a mother, of Greek-Jewish extraction, to make a fuss about his ancestral cultures: he is French and that's that. But if you're brown or black it's quite a different matter. You had better make noises about black or brown "pride" and do a bit of ethnic else you'll be stigmatized as "self-hating" or "inauthentic." If you're Barak Obama you had better visit your father's ancestral village in Kenya and do black, or you won't be elected dog-catcher.

No one seems to ask whether people want the "cultural uniqueness" ascribed to them on the basis of ancestry or appearance, or whether the expectation that they will conform in some way to their ascribed minority cultures might not be more oppressive than conformity to the majority culture. No one dreams of asking whether they want La Difference. Surely some do but some don't. The issue is not primarily whether some cultures are inferior or oppressive, but whether individuals should be locked into any culture, good, bad or indifferent, by bloodlines. What is offensive, and racist, about multiculturalism is the assumption that ancestral cultures, good, bad or indifferent, define who individuals "really" are, and the expectation that individuals will identify with them.

SPLCenter.org: New Center Report: Foreign Guestworkers Routinely Exploited by U.S. Employers

Guestworkers

SPLCenter.org: New Center Report: Foreign Guestworkers Routinely Exploited by U.S. Employers

Guestworkers who come to the United States are routinely cheated out of wages; forced to mortgage their futures to obtain low-wage, temporary jobs; held virtually captive by employers who seize their documents; forced to live in squalid conditions; and denied medical benefits for injuries

We want immigrants of course: who else will do our dirty work? But we want them out of sight in Bantustans, and illegal or semi-legal so that they can’t make a fuss.

Here’s a nice review America Alone, a paranoid fantasy of Europe devolved into the continent of Eurabia, dominated by Muslims who have taken over by out-breeding the indigenous population and have established an Islamicist regime. In my reading for the multiculturalism book I’ve come across similar paranoid fantasies about the rise of the Nation of Aztlan in the American Southwest.

Neither Eurabia nor Aztlan are going to happen. But these visions and the policies they promote are self-fulfilling prophecies. We don’t like the way these people behave: they don’t speak the language of the country where they live or buy into its “values,” they live tribally and they have no commitment to the public good outside of their families and clans, they treat women like shit, they loiter in public places and live their lives outdoors in a way we find repellant, they live in squalor and their kids join the “rainbow underclass.” So we don’t want them around: we want them contained in Bantustans, housing projects or camps in ravines—so that they can do our dirty work and then disappear.

We worry that they’ll outbreed us and take over so that we won’t be able to live the kinds of lives we want to live: the whole country will turn into a squalid slum and the streets will be bazaars; there will be knots of young macho-males hanging around every street corner and convenience store, hassling women who go past and getting into brawls, hustlers hawking their wares and street vendors barbequing greasy meat for sale. The streets will be trashed, families will dump old refrigerators and cars on their front lawns, and sit outside at all hours of the day and night, on lawn chairs or stoops, playing loud music and screaming to one another in foreign languages. Let’s be honest: that’s what we worry about—that combination of foreignness and the generic culture of poverty.

But it’s precisely poverty and exclusion that perpetuate that behavior. If immigrants get decent jobs they move to the suburbs and mow their lawns. If they have a fair shot at economic and social integration into the larger community they learn English, educate their children and assimilate. It’s the assumption that they prefer to live as they do that perpetuates that “culture”: we, rightly, detest it so we exclude them and their exclusion perpetuates it.

I’ve been reading Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s memoir, Infidel. After picking up her new passport at the local post office Hirsi Ali turns heads by shouting in the street, “I’m Dutch!” She loves the tidiness and order, the safety, cleanliness and fairness of Holland and regards her escape from the third world as liberation—not only from poverty and danger, but from an oppressive culture. She identifies it with Islam but there she’s wrong: it’s the generic culture of traditional societies which, under the influence of urbanization, becomes the culture of poverty. She wanted out, and got out.

But I don’t think the difference between her and others who remain stuck in this oppressive culture is a matter of preference: she was smart enough and bold enough to take the risk of exit. Most aren’t—I wouldn’t be. People stick with their clans and tribes, and live accordingly, because it keeps them afloat: breaking out is a risk they can’t afford to take. Show people what is possible, not merely abstractly possible but possible for them, and make it seriously possible for them—wind down the risks of exit, promote integration—and they will go for it.

Edwards for President!

Raising the Bar
The Democrats swept to victory in 2006 by delivering an economically populist, antiwar message. When the Campaign for America's Future asked voters to name the three most important issues of the election, "Iraq" topped the list, followed closely by "gas prices and oil companies" and "health-care costs." In 2004, 53 cents of every dollar in salary increases went to the top 1 percent of earners. Inequality has gotten so bad that even George W. Bush has given a speech decrying its rise and the attendant spike in CEO pay.

In short, it would seem an ideal moment for the class-conscious son of a millworker. But populism is traditionally a hard sell in American presidential politics, even when the timing is fortuitous, and Edwards has compounded that problem by declaring war on poverty as well. That's not exactly a proven combo for winning the nation's highest office, and the electorate may not want to hear such harangues from a mansion-dwelling lawyer worth tens of millions of dollars. But it's been a long time since a presidential campaign featured a populist as authentic as Edwards, and he's spent a long time proving his talent for winning over skeptical groups of ordinary Americans. For Edwards, those groups used to be called juries. Today they're called voters.

I’m not sure that Edwards has much of a shot, but he’s my man: the only presidential candidate (or pre-candidate) since Hubert Humphrey who is on message. The message of the Left is economic populism, supported by a welfare state and social engineering. That is all the law and the prophets.

This message was drowned out during the noise of the Vietnam era when the Left became inextricably linked to the anti-war movement and subsequently muddled with various forms of identity politics until no one was sure what the Left was all about. At best it was a laundry list of projects that reflected the preoccupations of the coastal, urban elite: abortion rights, gay rights, multiculturalism, gun-control and, probably more than any specific agenda, the ethos of that elite including their thinly-veiled disdain for the white working class. Conservatives, predictably, jumped in and persuaded “middle Americans,” that they were the true populists by promoting Culture Wars.

Will the lower classes actually believe Edwards? I doubt it. The dogma that government is the problem not the solution is too firmly entrenched and the lower classes are convinced that the only benefit government can provide for them is “tax relief.” But I still support this guy if for no other reason than to get a hearing for the old time religion of the Left. Maybe in a decade or two people will catch on.

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | This is idiocy, not feminism

Goddess Day at St. John's

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | This is idiocy, not feminism

I am not saying that there should be total homogeneity in what we discuss on women's day...What is not relevant is fun-packed dancing from around the world, spice workshops and fashion shows. Fashion is to international women's rights as Agassi kitchen utensils are to gay rights. Yes, some women are interested in fashion; some gay men own more than one brightly coloured fish slice. But it is an outrage against people who take liberties seriously - who embody the core of feminism by interpreting it as a war that hasn't been won until it's been won for all women - to trivialise these matters...It's this kind of hijacking of meaningful collective action that did for the women's movement in the first place, that made today's young women think you could believe in equal pay as a regular person, but as soon as you called yourself a feminist you had to stop shaving your legs and start eating pulses. Tell stories and dance as much as you will - but not on International Women's Day. Make your own day of celebrations. Call it Gullible Idiots Unite. Have it in April.

I still get email from my (former) church and couldn't resist saving this one (and it's real--I couldn't make this up):


Goddess Day

Saturday, October 15th
8:30 a.m. til 4:00 p.m.

St. John’s Church
760 First Avenue, Chula Vista

A day created to empower and celebrate women, individually and collectively.
This conference will include: speakers, music, dance, chair massage, labyrinth, gourmet lunch, shopping and renewal. (Cost: $30 includes all)

Keynote: Rev. Rhonda McIntire, “The Universal Feminine”

Presenters: World-Renown Artist, Eleanor Wiley, “Creating Your Own Sacred Prayer Beads”

Mary Cruz, Sharp Chula Vista Medical Center Community Outreach Director, “Breast Cancer What Every Woman Has to Know”

Spend time with holistic professionals:
Lori Gritz, Acupuncturist, presents the Wellness Toolbox
Ruby Grosso, Labyrinth Facilitator

Vendors:
The Healthy Spirit Gift and Bookstore
Scents of San Diego Homemade Soaps
Paula McCarten Jewelry
Granny’s Gifts (unique potions, brews and wands)
Mary Kay Cosmetics
Weekenders Clothing
Cookie Lee Jewelry

To Register or for More Information:

Call: Susan O’Shaughnessy 619-482-8872
The Healthy Spirit 619-427-1210

I thought the point of feminism was to liberate us from femininity, to fix things so that we could get guy jobs and didn't have to crap around with labryrinth-treading, chair-massage and little herbal teas. But look at this: here we have the new presbyter as the old priest writ large: a woman priest lecturing housewives on the ewig weiblich--health, jewelry, make-up and scented homemade soaps.

I got involved in the Church and, for the first time in years, in the Real World outside of Academia, when my kids were at the parish day school. I realized straightaway that I'd have to relearn all the Real World Rules about what women could, should and should not do. I made some faux pas. After our church burnt down we had to move furniture to the parish hall. I got into the spirit of things and was cheerfully shoving around stuff when I stupidly got onto moving a spinet piano along with about half a dozen young working class males. This piano was on wheels and I'd had no problem moving it together with an elderly lady who was even shorter than me in the past. But when we'd gotten across the courtyard to our destination, one of the guys yelled at me, "What are you trying to prove?" He immediately apologized and I didn't turn a hair, but I felt like I'd been socked in the stomach.

After that, I was careful. When the rector announced that he needed volunteers to paint the parish hall, I rode by and checked to see that there were women working before I got out with my rags and paint brushes. Later, when he solicited volunteers to dig for an underground pipe I packed a shovel in my van but was careful to check out the scene first. There were a bunch of young working class males in tee-shirts, conferring as they leant on their shovels. I drove by and went home, filing away the maxim: "women may paint but may not dig."

This is trivial, compared to the problems most women face--in particular, getting decent jobs at decent pay. But it's irritating. Women always have to be cogniscent of what is gender-appropriate, understand when an invitation to everyone really means men only. This is one of the petty vexations of being female: ALWAYS having to worry about whether a particular behavior is "ok for a woman" and understanding where the no-go areas are. Some seem to know the Rules instinctively, but not me--I invariably screw up and am embarrassed.

I was driving through a residential neighborhood when I got a flat. I ran out, grabbed the jack and spare tire and set to work. As I was loosening the lug nuts I realized the people on the porch of the house in front of which I was parked were watching and talking about me. They worried that I'd be offended if they offered to help. The take was, again, that I was trying to prove something, to make some feminist statement. I realized that I was supposed to have asked them if I could use their phone to call AAA (but I don't have AAA). I was in a sweat. Like everyone who has ever changed a tire I knew that the last lug nut would stick. I knew that I would stand on one side of the wrench, bouncing up and down to dislodge that nut, praying that it would come loose, while the crowd on the porch watched.

Incredibly, it didn't stick. I got all the lug nuts off, changed the tire and drove off. But it was a close call.

Anglican Schism—Not (Yet?)

The archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, kept the worldwide Anglican communion together, at least in the short term, but at the cost of imposing unprecedented sanctions on the US Episcopal church to force it to abandon its liberal policies towards gay people. A communique issued late last night after a fraught five-day meeting in Tanzania of the primates - archbishops and presiding bishops of Anglicanism's 38 provinces - laid new ground rules for the US church and gave it until September 30 to comply. The plan allows, effectively, for the setting up of a church within a church in the US with the appointment of a senior cleric to oversee dioceses which feel unable to accept the Episcopal church's liberal leadership.

So this is the deal, and you can read even more about it, and about what everyone else has to say about it at Thinking Anglicans

What does this mean? I suppose it discourages litigation over church property for the time being and, at least for now, peels off some moderate conservatives and gets them back to the table. But the bottom line is the same, so it’s yet another attempt to stall until everyone simply gets sick of the whole thing—which is unlikely to happen. The pot will keep boiling and is virtually guaranteed to spill over again when that Sept 30 deadline comes. Then there will be more mopping up operations, more conferences, more negotiations, and more stalling and fudging.

In the real world there has been a new intellectual mini-trend advocating atheism but no one in the Church seems to have noticed. Dawkins book, The God Delusion has been on the NYTimes bestseller list for 5 or 6 months but neither liberals nor conservatives in the Church seem to care because as far as I can see they just aren’t interested in religion. They’re interested in sex, in a variety of moral, social and political agendas, and in institutional politics and power plays. A pox on both their houses. I come from the liberal house so I can understand what went on there—but I doubt that conservatives were doing any better.

I dragged on in the Church for 30 years, as fashions changed but the fundamental assumption, that religion was unimportant, uninteresting and untenable did not change. What was the Church for? First, it was a facility to provide people who were idle and lonely, with busy-work, social contact, and a bogus sense of purpose. This was called “empowering the laity.” Secondly it was a vehicle for promoting politically correct views about social issues, the environment and, of course, sex. This was the rationale for the Church’s continued survival: to provide idle, lonely people with social contact, activities and a sense of personal worth and to push social and political agendas.

Promoters of the gay rights agenda in the Church got into the business because they didn’t believe religion was important. They didn’t believe that maintaining buildings as holy places was important. They didn’t believe that liturgy was important, except as means to “community-building” and a vehicle for inculcating politically correctness. They believed that what was important was proclamation—promoting their pet doctrines to the world. Their pet project for the past 15 years was proclaiming the gospel of “inclusiveness” and they overplayed their hand through sheer arrogance: they couldn’t imagine that anyone would have either the power or the intellectual credibility to pose a serious threat.

The Episcopal Church should never have gotten into this business in the first place. No one paid any attention to the official view on gay sex or cared any more than they cared about official doctrine on heterosexual cohabitation. The Church gave tacit approval and there was no point in making an issue of it. But TEC painted itself into a corner: now backing down on same-sex unions and the ordination of sexually active homosexuals would constitute an expression of disapproval—tacit approval isn’t possible any longer.

They’re stuck, and have just postponed the showdown. When the deadline comes they’ll either have to go with the program, selling gays down the river, or else it’s back to go—more fighting, stalling and fudging, power plays, politicking and legal action. The only difference on this round will be the existence of a conservative “church within the church” on the ground, in the US, with official standing in TEC, to make things even worse. Remember, you read it here first.

Book finished!

I finished my book! I had notes, snippets and a long proposal, but basically wrote the thing, 80,000+ words, from just after Christmas until yesterday. I'm beat! I dread, though, having to go through and fix up the footnotes, which are legion.

I got into a little trouble with the publisher though--they made me take down the 9 chapters I had up at my site. So there's now a message there saying that the book is in progress. However I'll check with the publisher to see if it's ok for me to send around chapters for comment. If so I'll email stuff on request. I have it in the form of separate MSWord files for the Introduction and 11 chapters that follow.

The plan was to publish the book in January 2008. But I beat the publisher's May 1 deadline by 2 1/2 months so maybe they'll get it out sooner. Dunno. I've never written a book before. I'm just really, really happy!!!

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | This isn't about guns

The Glamour of Barbarism

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | This isn't about guns

Back in the Bronze Age everyone was a barbarian. The fundamental theorem of barbarism is: women breed—men fight. Some corollaries are: female achievement consists in having as many babies as possible, preferably male, and is rewarded by respect in the community, improved status in the home and security in old age. Male achievement consists in beating up other males and having sex with as many women as possible, preferably impregnating them. Its reward is prestige, power and wealth, including a stable of concubines.

Male barbarism is glamorous. I don’t know whether that’s because it’s been glamorized in literature from age of the epic to the age or rap, or because we have an innate tendency to find it attractive, and so glamorize it. For whatever reason, it’s wrapped up with romantic notions of honor and courage and confers prestige.

In affluent countries, barbarism only survives in a few isolated pockets—primarily among the underclass in urban slums. There we can see the world Homer described close up, without the literary varnish, and most of us don’t like it. But we still glamorize the young barbarians, the contemporary epic heroes.

Commentators on the linked article, describing the shooting of a 15 year old black kid, agonize over how to explain the fact that it’s disproportionately black males who are involved in this kind of violence. Is it poverty, the absence of male “role models” in single-parent families, discrimination, rap lyrics, the welfare state? No one can figure out why it’s disproportionately blacks who engage in violence—lots of Asians are poor but they aren’t as likely to shoot one another; middle class white kids listen to rap and fanticize but don’t do these things. N4White writes:

My nephew's a white, 13 year old kid, born in Tottenham, but raised in white, middle class, suburban Hertfordshire. He's a big Hip-Hop fan and he and his mates record their own tracks at a mate's house. He was playing me stuff the other day and every track made references to him and his mates "shanking" or shooting people for lack of respect. Loads of references to dealing, banging on about the number of women they had on the go etc. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

He's a lovely kid, does well at school, has a very close and loving family etc but he seems to aspire to living on some sort of grim estate and a life of murder. When I asked him why him and his mates were rapping about all this stuff, he told me "...it's life. That's how life is." Eh? He's a school kid in Welwyn Garden City! He's no more likely to shoot someone than I am, but it does worry me that he thinks there's something inherently cool about the gang life... black kids at school are thought of as being hard and therefore cool regardless of what they're like as individuals, and a lot of white kids aspire to being like the black kids they know or see about - cos then folk will think they're cool. Unfortunately, from my own observations it would seem that a lot of those black kids aspire to the gang life.

Dead on, but I think it needs to be spelled out. This is racism: young black males are typecast as barbarian heroes, a role that confers prestige. 13-year-old white kids from middle class suburbs may fanticize but can’t actually play that role convincingly any more than I could play Othello. They just don’t look right. Moreover, most don’t have the opportunity and by the time they’re old enough to be seriously bad they recognize the opportunity costs.

But black kids “regardless of what they’re like as individuals” are typecast and can step right into the prestigious Bad Black Dude role. They don’t even have to make much effort: lots of people just assume they’re barbarians unless they make an significant effort to show they aren’t. Most don’t become barbarians, but some do—and they do because, unlike most middle class white kids, they can.

Hip-hop didn’t create that role. It only gives literary form to a pervasive cultural myth that casts young black males in the role of barbarian heroes. Censoring it won’t help. I don’t know what would. Of course poverty, discrimination and the disorganization of lower class life contribute, but there’s also the pervasiveness of cultural racism, that persists in spite of all the good will in the world. It isn’t only, or maybe even primarily hard racism—discrimination in employment and other practices that lock in poverty—though there’s certainly enough of that. It’s soft racism, the assumption that young black males will be “hard and therefore cool,” not just by aspiring adolescents but by white liberal adults who are at once scared and titillated, and who imagine that it would be “racist” to condemn young black males for playing the barbarian hero role into which they’re typecast by racist mythology.

Changing Tastes

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/12/nyregion/12group.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all

You guys think giving up the homosex habit is tough? Try quitting cigarettes. So far I haven't been able to do it permanently, not that I don't keep trying, and trying and trying. I don't think there's anything morally wrong about smoking--it's just the costs, risks and consequences that get me down. A pack costs $5.52 and, at 1+ packs a day that's real money. It's a little less if I buy by the carton, but then I'm committed to smoking another 10 packs. People regard smoking as a dirty habit, my kids condemn me, it messes up my teeth (and my dentist and dental hygienist make sure to have moralistic little conversations about it while I'm sitting in the chair with my mouth full of their machinery); I don't care for the risk of lung cancer; and I smell.

If there were a pill or a talk therapy or brain zap that could stop me you had better believe I'd try it. Not that I think others should take advantage of such a procedure if they don't mind the costs, risks and consequences. De gustibus.

Why is sexuality such a loaded issue? If you like men, fine; if you like women, fine. Who cares? If you're living in circumstances where homosexuality is socially acceptable and it isn't inconsistent with your moral convictions, fine--no reason to try to change your sexual preferences. If you want to be a Mormon or a fundamentalist then maybe you have a reason to want to change your sexual tastes. Fine also. Why is this supposed to be a bad? What's the big deal?

Years ago when I lived back in New York a friend whose family was working class set out to learn to like ballet. We went to a performance together at Lincoln Center and I was bored to death. I don't have any interest in dance and have no desire to learn to like it. By now however I suppose she's learnt to like ballet. Good for her. I have no interest.

Why is this whole business about sex and sexual preference so loaded? It always seems to me that people who imagine that they're liberal on these matters are still dogged by idiot, puritanical doctrines. The perennial theme that sexual orientation is innate and unalterable is a case in point. Who cares? If a heterosexual person set out to cultivate same sex desires in order to have more scope for sexual pleasure I think that would be a reasonable thing to do--all things being equal, the more sources of pleasure you have the better off you are. I suppose I'd be better off if I liked ballet because it would be yet another source of pleasure, but I've got enough pleasures, I don't like ballet and I'm too lazy to cultivate the taste. Maybe I'd be better off if I were sexually interested in other women, but I'm not, never have been and have no interest in cultivating the taste. Given what I'm like, it would probably take a very substantial effort to cultivate either of these tastes and I doubt that I'd succeed, but I have no real interest in trying.

I suppose I understand why this business of sexual preference is loaded: it's the consequence of 2000 years of moralism and puritanism, the idea that sex is a bigger deal than ballet, and that sexual tastes are a bigger deal than tastes in entertainment. Liberals though are just knuckling under to this view instead of being honest, with themselves and others, and telling the real story--that it just plain doesn't matter whether you have sex with members of the opposite sex or members of the same sex, that it doesn't matter whether you like men or women or both, any more than it matters whether you like ballet or not. Promoting the doctrine that sexual orientation is innate and unalterable seems like nothing more than caving into conservatives: don't blame us--we can't help being gay; ought implies can.

I suspect that sexual orientation is like handedness--innate but amenable to modification--but that like handedness it probably isn't worth changing. I'd suspect also that it's a matter of degree and that some people are ambidextrous--and that the ambidextrous are truly blessed. If however this is the way it is we should be honest about it and not pander to puritanical fundamentalists by pretending that sexual tastes are a bigger deal than handedness or a taste for ballet.

What's Left?

Comment is free: Nothing left of Nick
Cohen's misfortune is that his book has appeared at the very moment when the arguments of the real left - the anti-war left, the only left worth the name - the left that mobilised hundreds of thousands of Americans to demonstrate against their government in Washington last weekend (an event I was honoured to be able to participate in) in favour of national independence, international law and against imperial aggression are being spectacularly vindicated - a vindication that is mainly of value as a call to further action against war and injustice.

I'm still trying to get ahold of this book--everyone else seems to have a copy and the reviews are coming thick and fast. It seems dishonest to comment before I actually read it but I do think I get the drift. Besides, this is my blog and I can speculate if I want to.

When I was in Kenya, after crossing the equator to the Southern Hemisphere, the first thing I did was run to the nearest bathroom to see if the water really spun down the drain in the opposite direction. The drain, like most things in Kenya, didn't work very well and, as far as I could see, the water just went straight down very slowly with a good deal of burping, gurgling and hiccoughing. I put this down to it's being so close to the equator that there was no clear result.

Politically, things don't spin in the same direction that they do in the UK on this side of the Atlantic and that may be why Cohen's book and the criticism it's gotten seem peculiar to me. "The anti-war left, the only left worth the name" is especially puzzling to me as an American because here in the US there's so much more for the Left to do.

We don't have any social safety nets to speak of in the US. You use up your unemployment or go beyond the the 5 year lifetime cap on welfare, now known as "Temporary Aid to Families" and your own other option is begging--if you're lucky, from family members, if not at the entrance to your local supermarket. Your social worker may be able to get you on Disability, which pays minimally if you can produce documentation to show that you have some chronic mental or physical illness but otherwise you're on your own. The Salvation Army may help out. We don't have the National Health. If you aren't insured, you go to the nearest hospital emergency room for routine doctor's visits--they can't turn you away. If you have some income, they'll arrange a payment scheme, if not they'll just pass the cost of your visit--many times more than it would have been if you'd just gone to a doctor (which you can't afford) on to paying customers, that is to say, on to their insurance companies.

We have a huge growing gap between the rich and the poor and the world's biggest gap between the pay of corporate CEOs and hourly workers. Of course it depends on which CEOs you're looking at and which hourly workers but whichever groups you choose to compare the difference between the gap in US and other countries is huge. In one study, adopting one set of criteria, American CEOs were paid 532 times the salary of average hourly workers in their firms whereas, by the same criteria, the figure in Japan was 11 times. No other country went beyond double digits.

The US, never particularly generous, turned hard right in 1980, when Reagan was elected and has been going further right on bread-and-butter issues ever since. Apart from the demolition of New Deal programs virtually all the policies intended to counteract the affects of discrimination against women and minorities have been taken down. School bussing to achieve racial balance went early on and schools have become increasingly segregated. Affirmative action is almost gone and anti-discrimination regulations are rarely enforced.

I'm stuck here because of my job. If I were an engineer or a nurse or had any skills that would get me a job somewhere else I wouldn't live in the US. The US is, by my criteria, a hellhole. These social policies are contrary to my deepest moral convictions. The essence of Left as I understand it is the commitment to establishing a cradle-to-grave welfare state. Everything else is peripheral and non-priority, so I am not going to get excited about one war more or less.

I do, of course, oppose the Iraq war. I demonstrated against it at the sabre-rattling stage, and would have joined the demonstrators in D.C. if it were feasible. To repeat--because I don't think anyone will notice what I just said unless I repeat it again and again or shout: I OPPOSE THE WAR IN IRAQ!!! I oppose the current regime's assinine, ham-fisted, idiotic, destructive foreign policy.

I'm not all that upset about imperialism as such though. What matters is the establishment of a welfare state. If an imperial power takes over and establishes one, in the US or elsewhere, I think that would be a good thing. Better a benevolent foreign despot treating colonial subjects to bread and circuses than a democratically elected regime under which people are begging in the streets. So, if the EU were to raise an army, invade the US and establish social democracy I would throw roses at the tanks. What matters is quality of life--not who runs the show.

I suppose once you have the National Health and social safety nets, once you know you aren't going to be begging at the freeway entrance or bankrupted by major illness you can afford to gas on about the evils of colonialism. Having forgotten what it's like to live in a hellhole like the US, to work without a net, you might imagine that the anti-war left is the only left worth the name. It's easy to forget what it was like to live like this, the overwhelming risk and chronic insecurity for those of us who are lucky and the pure misery for those of us who aren't. But anyone in the US should recognize that there's plenty for a left that's worth the name to do here besides worry about war, imperialism or, more generally, about foreign policy.

Israeli Racism

Israel's Arab problem hits home | Salon.com

Here's something, just fastfood for thought while to stall on writing the intro to my book. An Arab Israeli, with the best possible qualifications, was turned down from Israeli pilot training because he was an Arab.

Please tell me, someone out there, if you are out there, why Israel is able to get away with this blatent racism. I'm not even talking about any right of return for Palestineans who were displaced and are now living in refugee camps outside of Israeli territory. I'm talking about a million Arabs who are Israeli citizens.

Yes I know it isn't, as it were, racial racism because, yes I know the many Israelis are now Jews from the middle east who are brown, and that some are Jews from Ethiopia who are black. But racism in the relevant sense doesn't necessarily track skin color: it's a matter of discriminating against people on the basis of ancestry or assignment to some kinship group--not necessarily a "visible minority." You would think these Israelis would know about that--the Holocaust was, after all, strictly white on white genocide. "Aryans" had to do geneology to prove who they were and Jews had to wear yellow stars so that they could be identified. And, I'm sorry to be cynical here, but Americans and others were especially upset about this particular genocide because it was white people who were getting killed. In fact, it was in many cases white middle class people who were getting killed.

Maybe it bothers me because I'm just a crude Consequentialist. I don't care about backward-looking considerations or about compensation for past injustices. The Jews may have had a lousy deal since 70 AD culminating in the Holocaust but that doesn't buy a free pass for this kind of racism. BAD, BAD, BAD--as I tell my lab when he gets up on the couch. Not that he listens. He gets down as soon as he hears me coming down the stairs in the morning, rolls his eyes upward so you can see the whites at the bottom and puts back his floppy ears. I still know what he's up to.

One of the few passages I remember from the OT is Moses giving the Israelites a pep talk just after they get out of Egypt. Moses says, "Remember you were sojourners in the land of Egypt, and the Egyptians treated you harshly so..." So? There are two ways to go with this: (1) Turnabout is fair play--this is a fraternity ititiation. You got trashed so now you can trash them! or (2) You know what it felt like so don't do it to other people.

Moses went with (2).

The Multicultural Mystique

Well, I've just finished my book The Multicultural Mystique: The Liberal Case Against Diversity. I would be most grateful for comments.

I've beat my May 1 deadline by 3 months, so that's probably good. I just hope that I can use that time to get comments so that I can respond and revise given all that time I've bought for myself. So if anyone out there is still reading my blog, please help me out!

I suppose I'm blowing my cover here because you can easily track back to find out who I am from the page I've linked. But I think most people know who I am anyway. I do want to note that the views I've expressed in my blog and in the book don't represent the views of my university and also that this blog resides at a remote location, not my university server.

There's been all sorts of crap coming down these days suggesting that we academics are running a racket--overpaid, underworked, secure in our jobs so that we aren't "accountable" and given to promoting politically correct nonsense. Let me tell you it ain't so. The book I have up at this link is inflamatory and very politically incorrect: if I didn't have tenure, there is no way I could have put this up without risking my job and probably losing it. If I didn't have an academic job I wouldn't have had the time or resources to write it. What I've written is, I believe, important--not only for me to say but for people to read. Without the academic system that gives me resources, time, and safety to do this I couldn't have done it, and neither could my brother and sister academics who write stuff like this have done what they do.

Views of America

BBC NEWS | Have Your Say | What do you think of US policy?: "US policy affects the rest of the world. Therefore the US should allow the rest of the world to vote for the US President."

What a good idea! The rest of the comments at this site, are good too--and not surprising.

More on our India simulation game

I've just gotten back from the second day of our historical simulation of India on the Eve of Independence.

At this point it's 1945. Hardline Muslims have walked out of our talks at Simla. We, Gandhi and Congress, demanded that the Brits quit India immediately and called a referendum. We won but Muslims and our two representatives from the princely states, from Hyderabad and Kasmir voted against us, and there is rioting in the streets. My aim is to avoid partition, but it doesn't look like we can achieve that unless we provide written assurances that Muslims will get, at the very least, proportional representation in the form of seats in the national assembly guaranteed to Muslims. Dr. Ambedkar, respresenting the majority of Untouchables also demands representation. We, Gandhi, can't give in on that one (but I H. E. think it would be a good idea).

For me, out of character, this has been a frustrating and enlightening experience, and one that's very important for me given both my current project on multiculturalism and my ongoing discussion with my best friend, who's been in Kenya for the past 14 years, about colonialism.

Off the cuff, it seems to me that it's a mistake to regard "colonialism" as single kind of phenomenon that can be forced into the same template wherever it occurs. In subsaharan Africa, nation states that were part of a technologically advanced, literate culture took over territories that were, for the most part, backward, tribal and illiterate. This was like the Roman conquest of Gaul and other barbarian kingdoms and chiefdoms in norther Europe. In India, two of the world's high civilizations duked it out. This was like the Moorish conquest of Spain. So in some respects it's harder to see what should have happened in India.

It's easy to see, for me at least, what should happen in Africa. The barbarians in Gaul were Romanized and became French. They didn't become Romans, or Italians, but like the barbarians in other parts of northern Europe they were grafted into the high civilization of the Mediterranean--first into the Roman Empire, then into Christendom--and eventually became equal partners, each nation playing variations on a common theme. It's not so clear what should have happened in Spain. This is all terribly big picture and naive, but why not have some fun?

It's almost disconcerting to get out of character after playing the Game for two days. But if I, H.E. were myself in India, I wouldn't have wanted the British out. I would have wanted further evolution toward dominion status. By the time of independence, India was already largely independent at the local and provincial level. I would simply have wanted more representation at every level of the Indian Civil Service, the obliteration of all color lines, and special rights and accommodations for religious minorities and Untouchables, guaranteed and enforced by the British. I would also have wanted the power to determine economic policies, tariffs and the like, to promote industrialization and see to it that the British couldn't keep India underdeveloped, as a source of raw materials. I would certainly have been utterly opposed to Gandhi's idiotic vision of an India of 10,000 self-sufficient rural villages maintained by agriculture and cottage industries.

I suppose I react violently and adversely to that vision because I grew up in the Counterculture and am reacting to the unimaginative, romantic take on 10,000 villages supported by organic farming and crafts. Unimaginative because very few people who enthused about this program could imagine what daily life in the long term was like in such villages or comparable communal arrangements. It's lots of fun to rough it for a week or two, camp out with your nice REI gear--with your cell phone, access to showers on the camp grounds and your camper for quick trips to town if you get the munchies or if you need tampax. It's fun to grow a garden and make salad from your own fresh veg, to do some basket-weaving, throw a pot or two and even get into spinning. That's as far as Romantics can see--they can't imagine what it would be like week after week, year after year, for your entire life to grow your own food, spin your own yarn, make your own baskets, without any means of communication with the world outside, without transportation, without doctors, dentists or Western medicine and without any chance of getting out.

Romantics are unimaginative: they effuse over the natural beauty of rural settings, the crafts, the coming of age ceremonies and potlatches, but can't imagine what it would be like to live your entire life without traveling more than 20 miles from your native village--if that--without having access to a virtually unlimited supply of books and paper, without meeting people you haven't known all your life, walking through a city, eating fruit out of season or listening to Bach

What me, Gandhi?

USD History News: Conference at USD: "Reacting to the Past: History as Hypothesis"

I'm just home from the first day of a history role playing game, India on the Eve of Independence. It's been terrific, but exhausting, experience and terrific pedagogy. I'd love to take a class like this--but I wouldn't have the guts to teach it!

When I got my assigned role a couple of weeks ago, half of Gandhi (2 of us are playing him) my heart sank, until I realized that by playing a role I found unsympathetic I might actually learn something. So I immersed myself in the literature and the more I read the more unsympathetic I became. His vision for India, the policies he promoted and, most deeply of all, his whole "philosophy of life" are utterly and diametrically opposed to everything I believe--and feel. It's been a very tough part, though I'm giving it everything I've got.

At the most fundamental level it's his picture of the world and our place in it that I find most alien. First, a moral universe in which the fundamental category is duty and wellbeing, insofar as it figures at all, is a byproduct of doing one's duty. To me, duty is just a means for distributing individual wellbeing. Secondly, the notion of individuals as parts of a grand scheme of things which which they are fundamentally in harmony if they play the game properly and do the duties that come with their particular place in the cosmos and social order.

To me, the grand scheme of things imposes constraints on individuals, who achieve wellbeing by fighting it, mastering it, subduing it. If I have a picture it's of individual agents as atoms, or maybe better, the nuclei of atoms, surrounded by a sphere of freedom, the little bit of the world within our power to dominate. These spheres press against one another, like bubbles in a foam. We each try to expand our sphere of freedom pressing against the spheres of others, and we all press against the constraints imposed by Nature, red in tooth an claw.

Now, there is no way of adjudicating between two pictures that are so fundamental level. My picture is indefensible, but so is Gandhi's. All we can do is work out the ramifications of these fundamental commitments and aim at consistency. That, in any case, is what I'm trying to do with Gandhi.

Given Gandhi's fundamental picture, his program is a consistent consequence--his repudiation of Western ways and opposition to industrialization, his vision of an India of 10,000 self-sufficient villages where people farm and do crafts, his education program for training children to play their roles within this scheme. Yet still it seems appalling, the narrow, constrained, dull lives he envisions for most of India's 400 million citizens--weaving the 1000th basket, and the 10,000th basket, and the 100,000th basket until they die--and, presumably, are reincarnated to weave even more baskets. Somehow "spirituality" is supposed to fill the void in these otherwise dull, empty lives, but I can't see how. I suppose it's consistent with the Hindu idea that our aim is to escape this treadmill--but why would anyone want to make life a treadmill, to relegate people to this emptiness and tedium, pain and drudgery, when other options are feasible?

The answer I suppose is that it's all tedium, pain and drudgery: we can decrease the pain but it's still there; we can decrease the reps, but we're still repeating the same tasks--it's just that the cycles are longer. The village craftsman throws 2 pots an hour--I teach two logic courses a year. Big difference. But it is a big difference because if the cycles are long enough we don't get bored, and if the tasks are complex enough we can change them and improve them--there's the possibility of achievement. In the grand scheme of things neither the pots nor the logic courses matter: the sun will explode into a red giant and all this will be wiped out and, beyond that, the material universe will expand, then contract and collapse. But who cares about the grand scheme of things. I will get personal gratification, I will feel a sense of achievement, I will enjoy myself.

What me, Gandhi?
USD History News: Conference at USD: "Reacting to the Past: History as Hypothesis"

I'm just home from the first day of a history role playing game, India on the Eve of Independence. It's been terrific, but exhausting, experience and terrific pedagogy. I'd love to take a class like this--but I wouldn't have the guts to teach it!

When I got my assigned role a couple of weeks ago, half of Gandhi (2 of us are playing him) my heart sank, until I realized that by playing a role I found unsympathetic I might actually learn something. So I immersed myself in the literature and the more I read the more unsympathetic I became. His vision for India, the policies he promoted and, most deeply of all, his whole "philosophy of life" are utterly and diametrically opposed to everything I believe--and feel. It's been a very tough part, though I'm giving it everything I've got.

At the most fundamental level it's his picture of the world and our place in it that I find most alien. First, a moral universe in which the fundamental category is duty and wellbeing, insofar as it figures at all, is a byproduct of doing one's duty. To me, duty is just a means for distributing individual wellbeing. Secondly, the notion of individuals as parts of a grand scheme of things which which they are fundamentally in harmony if they play the game properly and do the duties that come with their particular place in the cosmos and social order.

To me, the grand scheme of things imposes constraints on individuals, who achieve wellbeing by fighting it, mastering it, subduing it. If I have a picture it's of individual agents as atoms, or maybe better, the nuclei of atoms, surrounded by a sphere of freedom, the little bit of the world within our power to dominate. These spheres press against one another, like bubbles in a foam. We each try to expand our sphere of freedom pressing against the spheres of others, and we all press against the constraints imposed by Nature, red in tooth an claw.

Now, there is no way of adjudicating between two pictures that are so fundamental level. My picture is indefensible, but so is Gandhi's. All we can do is work out the ramifications of these fundamental commitments and aim at consistency. That, in any case, is what I'm trying to do with Gandhi.

Given Gandhi's fundamental picture, his program is a consistent consequence--his repudiation of Western ways and opposition to industrialization, his vision of an India of 10,000 self-sufficient villages where people farm and do crafts, his education program for training children to play their roles within this scheme. Yet still it seems appalling, the narrow, constrained, dull lives he envisions for most of India's 400 million citizens--weaving the 1000th basket, and the 10,000th basket, and the 100,000th basket until they die--and, presumably, are reincarnated to weave even more baskets. Somehow "spirituality" is supposed to fill the void in these otherwise dull, empty lives, but I can't see how. I suppose it's consistent with the Hindu idea that our aim is to escape this treadmill--but why would anyone want to make life a treadmill, to relegate people to this emptiness and tedium, pain and drudgery, when other options are feasible?

The answer I suppose is that it's all tedium, pain and drudgery: we can decrease the pain but it's still there; we can decrease the reps, but we're still repeating the same tasks--it's just that the cycles are longer. The village craftsman throws 2 pots an hour--I teach two logic courses a year. Big difference. But it is a big difference because if the cycles are long enough we don't get bored, and if the tasks are complex enough we can change them and improve them--there's the possibility of achievement. In the grand scheme of things neither the pots nor the logic courses matter: the sun will explode into a red giant and all this will be wiped out and, beyond that, the material universe will expand, then contract and collapse. But who cares about the grand scheme of things. I will get personal gratification, I will feel a sense of achievement, I will enjoy myself.