maphet's posterous

Unlike the acorn that grows into a tree without cultivation and encouragement, human beings don’t just do what they are naturally ordered to do. Or more accurately, we don’t automatically do it well and in a way that brings us the satisfaction that comes with living in accord with our natural propensities. We require cultivation, which is to say culture, which is to say “social policies.”

The free market libertarianism that largely guides the Wall Street Journal editorial page does not deny the need for cultivation and social engineering. It wants to engineer tax policy in order to encourage us to do what we’re naturally inclined to do, which is to work and invest and otherwise try to secure for ourselves a better and more secure financial future. But what that same philosophy denies is that human beings have a natural end beyond economic self-interest, which is why the editorials criticizing Santorum see an increased child tax credit either as an unfair preference for one lifestyle over others, or as case of misguided social engineering.

The consequences of medically abetted mass feticide are far-reaching and manifestly adverse. In populations with unnaturally skewed SRBs, the very fact that many thousands — or in some cases, millions — of prospective girls and young women have been deliberately eliminated simply because they would have been female establishes a new social reality that inescapably colors the whole realm of human relationships, redefining the role of women as the disfavored sex in nakedly utilitarian terms, and indeed signaling that their very existence is now conditional and contingent.

Moreover, enduring and extreme SRB imbalances set the demographic stage for an incipient “marriage squeeze” in affected populations, with notably reduced pools of potential future brides. China’s persistently elevated SRBs, for example, stand to transform it from a country where as of 2000 nearly all males (about 96 percent) had been married by their early 40s to one in which nearly a quarter (23 percent) are projected to be never married as of 2040, less than 30 years from now, according to a 2008 analysis by the demographer Zeng Yi and colleagues in the journal Genus. Such a transformation augurs ill in a number of respects. For one thing, unmarried men appear to suffer greater health risks than their married counterparts, even after controlling for exogenous social and environmental factors; a sharp increase in the proportion of essentially unmarriageable males in a society with a universal marriage norm may only accentuate those health risks. In a low-income society lacking sturdy and reliable national pension guarantees for the elderly, a steep rise in the proportion of unmarried and involuntarily childless men begs the question of old-age support for that rising cohort. Economists such as Gary Becker and Judge Richard Posner have hypothesized that mass feticide, in making women scarce, will only increase their “value” — but in settings where the legal and personal rights of the individual are not secure and inviolable, the “rising value of women” can have perverse and unexpected consequences, including increased demand for prostitution and an upsurge in the kidnapping and trafficking of women (as is now being witnessed in some women-scarce areas in Asia, as reported by Mara Hvistendahl in her new book Unnatural Selection).

Includes an interesting discussion on theories of why S. Korea reversed its trend.

But I think the main answer lies elsewhere. The real allure of Instagram was its photo “filters”—and the subsequent rise of filter culture. Filters help us see the world in a new way.

When Instagram launched, it offered 12 settings to augment users’ photos in ways that produced lovely and often surprising results. You’d take a picture, put on the Lomo-fi filter, and boom—the popping colors made an otherwise drab party picture emotionally vibrant. Or the Hefe filter—my personal favorite—which boosts contrast while reducing saturation, uncovering subtle details I don’t notice with my naked eye.

As I used the app more and more, something surprising happened: I became increasingly observant of the world around me. Walking to the subway the other day, I spotted a backhoe parked on a corner and got curious—what could I do with that? Presto: Hefe helped me turn it into the dirty claw of a weary dragon. Later that day, a filtered snap of my living-room floor revealed how it secretly looks like the wood on a country barn.

Though exposure of the every day lives and ministries of Christian men and women couldn’t be considered a necessarily bad thing, the potential for sensationalism and artifice seems all too possible. As Ed Stetzer of Lifeway Research told the Christian Post, “I see no problem with a pastor in a reality show if it shows pastors as real people, the church on a real mission, and the pastor can point to the real Gospel.” I guess if I were to pick one guy in America to show the rest how real Christians can be, and what the real Gospel is made of, I don’t think I’d have picked the permanently be-suited and smiling happiness guru that is Osteen.

Ayi

 

Author Amy Chua, and her husband, law professor and novelist Jed Rubenfeld, shared their thoughts about raising successful children, live at the New York Public Library.

Entire video is interesting (if I can get posterous to link to it) for

1. Amy Chua's self-deprecation

2. Her daughter's confidence

3. The question/story/testimony at 55:00

4. How Chua's hands off approach during high school sort of corresponds to historical demarcators of maturity

But if kids are unmonitored most of the time, then I wonder how well that works.  It strikes me as plausible that a world in which kids spend more time unsupervised requires a parenting style more reliant on swift punishment for detected wrongdoing than rewards for good behavior.

To be sure, my mother was actually quite well watched--by all the other mothers on the block.  But while you could be quite sure that an adult would report it if they saw your kid doing something really wrong, it's much less likely that they're going to tell you that Sally deserves her tidyness gold star for the afternoon because she threw her litter in the garbage can.

All that monitoring and incentivizing probably is better at turning out kids who are able to successfully negotiate the hierarchical American university system. But crotchety as I am, I find it sort of creepy--and anecdotally, as the first generation of what David Brooks calls "Organization Kids" enters the workforce, employers are apparently complaining that they have an outsized sense of entitlement combined with a difficulty coping with unstructured tasks.  Obviously, I'm not advocating a return to an era of brutal beatings.  But I'd like to think that there's some alternative to raising children in a sort of well-padded, benevolent police state where no action is too small or large that it can't be managed with an appropriately placed gold star.

“You’re never the same again,” Oprah has said about the experience of being raped as a child, but there was more to come. She would be molested and raped, repeatedly, through early adolescence, by other grown men, including the boyfriend of a cousin who was living with Oprah’s mother, and by her favorite uncle. “It was just an ongoing, continuous thing,” she has said; “I started to think ‘This is the way life is.’” She became, as a very young adolescent, wildly promiscuous, getting into all kinds of trouble, including, at 14, becoming pregnant. “You can’t stay here,” her mother said, in a rare spasm of concern about the sexual propriety of her household, and so she was sent to live with her father. He was not apprised of his daughter’s condition, and Oprah had barely walked through the kitchen door before he announced the house rules: “I would rather see a daughter of mine floating down the Cumberland River than to bring shame on this family,” he said to her pointedly.

“He’s saying that to me, and I know that I am pregnant,” she remembers now; “so I’m thinking, ‘Well, I’m just going to have to kill myself.’” She made some half-hearted attempts, swallowing detergent at one point, but without success. The little girl with such high hopes for herself seemed to have come early to the end of the road, but then—imagine this as your one bit of good fortune, your 10th-grade miracle—the baby died, a few weeks after birth. It was her second chance, the sudden, glorious rebirth of the dream. It was a straight line, pretty much, from there to Oprah’s success in school, at college, in her first jobs on radio and television, to her own show and the building of her empire.

Some heartbreaking stories from surprising sources: Oprah, Shania Twain, Maya Angelou. Makes me fear even more for my daughter.

Some of this reflected his immense personal charm, his willingness to debate with Baptists and drink with Catholics and be comradely to anyone who took ideas seriously. But there was something deeper at work as well. American Christian intellectual life is sustained today, to a large extent, by the work of writers very much like Hitchens — by essayists and journalists and novelists and poets, from G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis to W. H. Auden and Evelyn Waugh, who shared his English roots, his gift for argument and his abiding humanism.

Recognizing this affinity, many Christian readers felt that in Hitchens’s case there had somehow been a terrible mix-up, and that a writer who loved the King James Bible and “Brideshead Revisited” surely belonged with them, rather than with the bloodless prophets of a world lit only by Science.

In this they were mistaken, but not entirely so. At the very least, Hitchens’s antireligious writings carried a whiff of something absent in many of atheism’s less talented apostles — a hint that he was not so much a disbeliever as a rebel, and that his atheism was mostly a political romantic’s attempt to pick a fight with the biggest Tyrant he could find.

But, ironically, their embrace of the power of the liberal state to further their conservative concerns has worked against them. Evangelicals, in keeping with their penchant for sweeping reform and their tendency to look past the Church to America, took naturally to the grand political strategies of the nascent religious right.

This was, Hart insists, in large part a devil’s bargain. The expansion of the modern liberal state and the free market has come at the expense of mediating institutions, communities, and distinctive traditions and values. Instead of pouring much of their energy into federal politics and too quickly signing on to the GOP’s embrace of libertarian economics, evangelicals should have been more wary of the unintended consequences of wielding the forces of modernity to advance “conservative” ends.

Much better, to Hart’s mind, would have been more sustained attention to the particular cultural goods and traditions that conservatives value, much of which has little to do with national politics. Concern for the health of these little platoons got evangelicals back into politics in the first place, and it’s at this level that Christians’ public and political mission itself should be focused.

Really need to get this book. Seems like a fun read.