Tuesday, May 06, 2008

The Threat And The State Part 3: Juicing It Up

One of retired tennis star Andre Agassi's commercials for some camera company or other featured the tag line "Image is everything." Well, maybe not everything, but it does have an important role in the political dynamics of our time.

I speak here not of the engineered images of political figures, but of the images they contrive to present us, of our own condition. In this undertaking, the collaboration of allies in the Old Media, which still possess a preponderance of the channels of information and opinion distribution, is essential. Marshall McLuhan notwithstanding, the medium isn't entirely the message, but it does have a disproportionate power to impose filters and differential emphases. So enlisting the support of the right parties in the media is essential to any politician or interest group spokesman who wants to shape popular perceptions to his advantage.

***

Not long ago, in fulminating over a particularly heinous crime, I oriented a screed around the thesis that word gets around. Of course, given the nature of that crime, its perpetrators, and its victims, I was immediately castigated as a racist Neanderthal -- by persons so eager to show preferential treatment to one race, including automatic exculpation for the most horrible crimes, that the insult becomes a supreme irony. Every last one of those attackers missed the central point. In so doing, they strengthened my thesis beyond my own power to do so.

Word gets around. Really and truly. "Every secret is told, every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty." (Ralph Waldo Emerson) But the ways in which it gets around, the width of dissemination and the rates of transmission those ways offer, are as important as "the word" itself. They carry a message of their own, which sometimes eclipses the overt message they purport to transmit.

Political forces often channel a particular report into particular media, in the hope that it will conduce to the attainment of their agendas. For example, a politician might contrive to disclose information damaging to him personally, perhaps admission of an affair or a dubious association, through a minor print organ or a Web news service rather than allow it to appear first in a major national daily. If and when the story does reach the larger and more prestigious media, he has a chance to mitigate its impact by saying it's "old news." We saw an example of this in the Monica Lewinsky affair, which broke through Matt Drudge's Website and in the pages of the National Enquirer. I have little doubt that President Clinton's media allies hoped to contain the damage in this fashion; they knew that word would get around, but channeling the disclosure through two minor organs offered the possibility of dampening its long-term effects.

But when a story appears to support the priorities of a political force, we will see the reverse: minor matters and developments of ambiguous import will be played up beyond their significance, given front-page treatment by the most prestigious organs and thundered about on their editorial pages. The New York Times is particularly susceptible to this sort of perceptual engineering. The flap about the hole in the Arctic icecap a few summers ago is a case in point. The Times's editorial staff is unreservedly on board with the left-environmentalist agenda, and the "hole at the Pole" could be reported in a fashion suitable to the promotion of the "global warming" canard. The decision about treatment followed naturally. Its impact, despite the Times's subsequent qualification of the implications of the report -- it developed that the icecap hole is a seasonal, regularly observable occurrence -- was considerable.

***

Students of journalistic practice are taught early on about "framing." A story must be placed in a specific context -- the word "narrative" often appears here -- for it to make sense to the reader. An old chestnut I've used to good effect makes this plain:

Smith: "I was walking home today, and I saw a teenager rush at an old woman, knock her down, roll her along the street and slap her from head to toe."

Jones: "Horrible! That sort of thing should get him life in prison."

Smith: "Wait, did I mention that her clothes were on fire?"

That last sentence makes quite a difference to the "narrative," doesn't it? Without it, we've got the standard teenager-thug atrocity report that makes one want to see a policeman stationed on every corner. With it, we've got a mildly heroic story in which a young man comes to the aid of an accident victim. Had Smith wanted Jones to adopt the former "narrative," he would have omitted the last sentence completely...or delayed it for a few days, as the Times did with its admission that the hole in the Arctic icecap is a seasonal occurrence that's been observed for several decades.

When a threat appears useful to a political force, whether that force is inside or outside the State, it will attempt to engineer popular perceptions in a way that maximizes the threat. When data becomes available that mitigates the threat, the force will strive to marginalize that data, whether by controlling the style in which it's reported or by channeling the reportage through an organ of little influence or dubious reputation.

This need not be the result of conscious decisions on anyone's part. The barons of the news business are subject to "narratives" quite as much as the rest of us. Howell Raines's downfall over the Jayson Blair scandal illustrated that quite neatly. Raines had sold himself on the proposition that any doubts of Blair's integrity were the fruits of residual racism, and had to be resisted. When the truth became too obvious to shrug aside, it cost Raines his job. Similarly, various journalists have sold themselves so thoroughly on the irrefutability of some Cause that processes that operate below the conscious level dictate their approach to any story that bears on that Cause, whether positively or negatively.

This is in no regard so important as in the matter of the public's perception of threats.

***

Every threat possesses certain characteristics, which we probe with a series of questions:

• Who is threatened?
• To what extent?
• Who or what is doing the threatening?
• What's the time frame involved -- that is, if everything remains as it currently is, when will the threat eventuate in damage to the threatened party?
• What can be done to avert or mitigate it?
• By whom?
• What would the costs of the proposed action be?
• Can we foresee any unintended consequences?

If we can get trustworthy answers to those questions, we can classify and prioritize threats, and assign the responsibility for responding to them to the appropriate persons and institutions. Most germane to this essay is the set of answers that would legitimately classify a threat as belonging to the political sphere:

• Who is threatened? A large enough subset of the polity to justify a political response; preferably, everyone.
• To what extent? The threatened population could suffer severe, possibly lethal harm, if what's threatened were to come to pass.
• Who or what is doing the threatening? Either a nation, a sizable armed "non-state actor," or an impersonal natural force too large for a unit smaller than a government to address.
• What's the time frame involved -- that is, if everything remains as it currently is, when will the threat eventuate in damage to the threatened party? Soon; far too soon for individuals and private organizations responding to market incentives to fashion their own defenses.
• What can be done to avert or mitigate it? An effective response will require marshaling the resources of the polity.
• By whom? The government, of course.
• What would the costs of the proposed action be? Far less than the costs of "burying our heads in the sand."
• Can we foresee any unintended consequences? None of comparable importance, as long as the government is permitted to do its job.

When media organs contrive to force that set of answers on us through framing, filtering, or otherwise fitting the threat to a particular "narrative," they are engaged not in honest, objective reporting but in perceptual engineering. Its impact will be to expand State power at the expense of individual freedom. The conscious motives of the perceptual engineers might be largely wholesome. Even their subconscious motives might not be reprehensible; conviction penetrates the mind to an unknowable degree. But the thrust of their machinations cannot be denied: their work will enlarge the State and intensify its incursions into our lives and property.

Very rarely will anyone with a seat in the halls of power object to such treatment of the news. Some officials and aspirants to office will view it with delight; they're either already aligned with the Cause, or are willing to swarm aboard and ride it as high as it can take them. There's an obvious positive-feedback effect, as well: journalists and media organs that have proved helpful to some political force in the recent past will get favorable treatment from that force in the foreseeable future. At a time when most "investigative journalism" consists of waiting for a leak or a press release from some government bureaucracy, this effect is of considerable importance.

***

There is one category of threats whose promotion the State will frown upon: threats that arise from State expansion and encroachment. If the State is to profit from perceptual engineering, it must contrive always to be seen as the defense against threats, never as a source of them. So the positive-feedback effect on journalists acts in two ways: the mutual back-scratching one described immediately above, and the inverse discouragement and shutting-out of journalists and organs that seek to report on harms inflicted on private persons, private organizations, and the nation by the State itself.

More anon.

Monday, May 05, 2008

My Apologies

I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to each and every one of you reading this now for not taking the opportunity to apologize to each and every one of you on a previous occasion. The opportunity to apologize does not come around often enough—the recent spike in gas prices may have something to do with that, what with most apologies getting more or less the same mileage they did back in the 1970’s—and it was a truly unconscionable lack of judgment on my part not to have apologized at that time. One cannot apologize often enough these days, I think, and so I wish to reiterate my apologies for not having apologized when I should have apologized. As apologies go, of course, this isn’t a very good one, and I apologize for that, but then again, I am not a professional apologist with an advanced degree in apologetics, for which lack I would like to apologize at this time. I am an entirely self-taught apologist and so my apologies tend to be a little rough around the edges, and so I would like to again apologize for my inexcusable apologetic autdidactism.

I wanted to be an apologist when I was a boy; all of my childhood heroes were apologists and I would have collected apologist bubble gum cards had someone manufactured them in those days. No one did, the times being benighted as they were, and so I had to settle for collecting the baseball cards of players having bad years. If there was a pitcher on a last place team who couldn’t find the strike zone if he was standing ten feet in front of it with a half-blind umpire behind the plate, I had his card; if there was a hitter who couldn’t hit the broad side of a fat babe’s butt with a 2 x 4, I had his card as well. Sometimes I collected good players, but only if they were on the disabled list with a pulled hamstring or a torn rotator cuff. I kept all of my baseball cards in an old shoebox my father called the litany of woes, because everyone in the box had an excuse for why they weren’t playing as well as they might that season.

As you’ve probably surmised by now, I did not get to be an apologist. My parents opposed the idea out of hand, pointing out that apologists, however well they did the job, got paid squat. This was true, of course; apologetics did not pay very well then. In addition to the poor pay, most people in those days regarded professional apologists as little better than sob sisters, PR men, and Red Sox fans. Mindful of these facts, my parents insisted that I find some more remunerative line of endeavor like dope peddling or swindling little old ladies out of their life savings. I apologized for not living up to their expectations, whereupon my father threw a fit and a Fig Newton at me and told me to shut up, he was sick of my apologies. He was like that sometimes. I remember one Christmas where he dressed up like Santa Claus (say what you will about him, Pop could do a mean Santa impression) and came down the stairs to his waiting children with a sack of toys thrown over his shoulder and then threw cans of string beans he’d gotten for half price at us. That was a wonderful Christmas, or so my brothers tell me; I had a pretty bad concussion so my memory of that day is a little fuzzy.

Now, at this point you’re probably wondering why I’m apologizing for just about everything under the son and, I’m sorry to say this, I’m wondering why you’re wondering. Explanations are so last century, after all; there hasn’t been a truly reasonable explanation for anything ever since Calvin Coolidge’s press secretary, C. Bertram Slemp, invented the cardboard tube that toilet paper comes wrapped around in 1897, but this hasn’t stopped people from looking for them. The modern apology, unlike many other art forms, and definitely unlike the classical apology, is about nothing at all. It is, in short, Seinfeldian in its philosophical provenance. You do not need to have done something wrong in order to apologize for it in this our postmodern Great Republic. Politicians spend a lot of time apologizing for one thing or another, especially during an election year, where if pandering for votes won’t work, a pol will grovel for them. I’m especially fond of pols apologizing for events that occurred years, sometimes centuries, before any of us were born. Still, it’s nice to know that their hearts are in the right place, even if all that and a couple of bucks will buy you is a ride on the subway.

In any case, I don’t think I would have made a very good professional apologist. In listening to my apologies on tape, I can tell that I lack the one great gift of the true apologist: sincerity. Yes, I can apologize all day long, and as a part of my work, I’ve often had to do just that, but the people I’m apologizing to can tell it’s all form and no substance. They can tell I am saying, I am terribly sorry for the inconvenience, sir, but that I’m thinking, buzz off, dumbass, and take your ugly wife with you. Sam Goldwyn had it right: if you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made. I just don’t have that in me, I guess.

UPDATE; I have been informed that Calvin Coolidge’s press secretary was not C. Bertram Slemp, but C. Bascom Slemp, C. Bertram Slemp being an alias for one Marvin Perlstein of Poughkeepsie, NY, who is wanted by the police in that city for conspiracy to kidnap the Smith Brothers’ beards and hold them hostage in return for the secret formula to the Smith Brothers’ world famous cough drops.  I apologize for the error.

I’m sorry, but this is cross posted with all the other apologies. I apologize for any inconvenience.

Sunday, May 04, 2008

Fran’s Sunday Ruminations: A Place To Stand

I never know what I'm going to write about on a Sunday morning until my fingers land on the keys. Truly, I never do.

***

Yesterday evening, the C.S.O. and I enjoyed an old favorite movie: Rebecca, starring Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, Judith Anderson, George Sanders, C. Aubrey Smith, and Leo G. Carroll, adapted from Daphne du Maurier's classic novel, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. It was a rare pleasure, being among Hitchcock's early triumphs, and superbly faithful to the story and tone of Miss du Maurier's book. Many a viewer is wholly captivated by the suspense elements of the story: Why did young widower Maxim de Winter marry "beneath him?" Why, given his great wealth, his social position, and his beautiful young wife, was he so perpetually grim? Why was his mercurial mood so often exercised at her expense?

Of course, the story ultimately reveals all the answers. But one who concentrates solely on these things is in danger of missing the larger, enveloping theme in which Miss du Maurier wrapped her story: the supreme importance of class divisions and distinctions to the English people in the period of which she wrote.

The evil Mrs. Danvers, longtime housemistress of Manderly utterly devoted to the memory of the late Rebecca de Winter, first shows her colors by maintaining a frigid distance from the new lady of the house, though the new Mrs. de Winter is from the same class as she. After all, one who has married an aristocrat -- in England, persons of great wealth and property have been deemed aristocrats even if they have no "official" title -- is expected to behave like one, most particularly by maintaining her reserve around the servants. Still, the new Mrs. de Winter persists in trying to befriend Mrs. Danvers and the rest of the staff; some of them show her a degree of polite reciprocation, but ultimately we are shown that the "belowstairs" folks will not have it. It endangers their place in society, a place guaranteed to them by birth and station, just as the de Winters' place is guaranteed to them by their fortune.

Americans struggle to understand the attachment of the "lower classes" to a class system such as that depicted in Rebecca. Why on Earth, we ask, would anyone cherish a social arrangement that locks him into a fixed position for his whole life, and inexorably predestines his children, and theirs, to occupy the very same rung on the ladder? The answer is embedded in one of the deepest of all human needs: our need for a place to stand which can never, ever be taken away.

A class system does limit the heights to which one can aspire, but it also guarantees a place to stand to each of its subjects. Though one's place might be the lowest of the low, it is nonetheless one's own: one's property, protected by social conventions more trustworthy than any legislated law. From that guaranteed station flow innumerable other certainties, most particularly a sure knowledge of what is expected of oneself, and what conduct will and won't be tolerated, by oneself toward others and by others toward oneself.

The rigidity of the arrangement allows its subjects a degree of relaxation, even of serenity, that Americans can barely comprehend. Through her depiction of Mrs. Danvers, who had become devoted to the late, gloriously beautiful, quintessentially aristocratic Rebecca de Winter despite Rebecca's thoroughgoing corruption and cruelty, Daphne du Maurier shows us how jealously some will defend it.

This is not a brief for a class system. It's an elucidation of something deeper. Read on!

***

There's no class system here in the United States, we tell one another. Americans rise or fall on the basis of merit, not birth or inherited property. Here in the Land of the Free, an individual is infinitely mobile, his place never fixed until the day he dies. Something like the story of Rebecca isn't possible here.

Yeah, right.

We have several sorts of classes here. Some are more penetrable than others, and of course some individuals resist being bound to any class regardless of what the rest of our society might think. All the same, at any given instant, each of us occupies a rung on the social ladder which defines what we may and must not do, and what we may and must not expect from the occupants of other rungs. We "learn our place," however persistent or ephemeral it might be, by adapting to our rungs. We learn our limitations by attempting to move from rung to rung. Socially, not occupationally or economically.

After the movie, one of the C.S.O.'s observations about the English class system struck me with particular force: Among the things the lower classes hated most, she said, was when a member of the upper classes departed from the behavioral envelope expected of him. It disturbed their certainties and undermined their unarticulated faith in the proposition that the privileged belonged in their positions. Thus, we have the phenomenon of servants rejecting companionable overtures from their masters, out of fear of the implication that neither one's place was firm or trustworthy. We have the matched phenomenon of servants collaborating with their masters in concealing egregious behavior that might bring shame upon their masters' class -- not for the masters' benefit, but for the servants' peace of mind.

An interesting inversion of this phenomenon applies to one of our American classes: the class we call "celebrities."

The word "celebrity" has acquired all sorts of connotations. I've often cracked wise, here and elsewhere, about "people who are famous for being famous," as any longtime Eternity Road reader will know. One of the most pungent of those connotations is that a celebrity is deemed guilty of dissolution and shameful self-indulgence, including disdain for the law, until proven innocent. The Paris Hiltons, Lindsay Lohans, and Brittney Spearses; the telephone-hurling Naomi Campbell and Russell Crowe; the drunken Mickey Rourke; the loudmouthed pugnacity of Sean Penn -- these and others have given "celebrity" its most recent coloration. Our Old Media strives to perpetuate and saturate that coloration with every word and picture it publishes.

Now let's consider the exceptions, and the way the Old Media, most powerful of all the forces that defend American class distinctions, treats those exceptions, both in their habitual behavior and when they depart from it.

Few actors, directors, or producers can equal the achievements of Mel Gibson. This superb actor and filmmaker is very nearly a pariah in Hollywood, because he defies the conventions of his class. He's a devout Catholic, unabashed about his faith and his fidelity to it, has been married to the same woman for many years and has apparently never strayed, dared to make a beautiful and deeply religious movie about the climax of Christ's life, and cares not one whit what anyone thinks about any of it. The Old Media, being deeply indebted to the entertainment world's power structure, has hardly had a word to say about him these past fifteen years, except for one event: his drunken-driving arrest, in the course of which he uttered a handful of slurs about Jews. That episode was trumpeted to the skies: See? They're all like this. Even the holier-than-thou specimens, when they think no one is watching.

The point of that burst of seedy publicity was twofold: first and less important, to run Gibson's image down; second and by far the more important, to preserve the iconic image of the American celebrity class as a hotbed of dissolution and self-indulgence. That image sells a lot of newspapers and gossip rags.

Another superb, under-publicized actor, Jim Caviezel, who played Jesus in Gibson's movie The Passion, should take note: Even the smallest slip and this could happen to you.

The current flap over Miley Cyrus's rather innocent photo spread in Vanity Fair is on all fours with this. Miss Cyrus -- "Hannah Montana" -- has achieved greatly. Given her fresh beauty, her talent, and her charm, the Old Media might have taken her up as a successor to the previous generation of pop princesses, endlessly detailing her doings to a mesmerized world. It hasn't, for one giant reason: Miss Cyrus is a publicly professing Christian who takes it seriously.

But those photos in Vanity Fair! Well, what about them? Suddenly, the Old Media are agog about Miss Cyrus's "shamelessness." Unfortunately, she and her father (country & western star Billy Ray Cyrus) have issued all sorts of obsequious apologies about them, even though there wasn't one single indecent thing about them. The suggestion that there might be a naked body under those sheets was enough to trigger the mantra once more: See? They're all like this. In five years she'll be partying without panties. The "Christians" are all hypocrites, no better than any of the others, and don't let anyone tell you differently.

The iconic image of female-celebrity-as-shameless-slut must be defended at all costs. Advertising revenues are at stake, yes, but there's more: celebrity journalism's place in the world, which depends critically on the maintenance of the celebrity class's image.

***

Class is about hierarchy; hierarchy is about having a place to stand. The message of Christ was explicitly anti-hierarchical, in which regard it cuts deeply into the worldview of our species. Surely some of us are better than others? Surely a hierarchy among men, sorting us into higher and lower on the basis of objective criteria, must exist? How can it not, when we are so plainly different from one another? If there is no valid hierarchy, how, then, does one locate one's proper place?

But there is a hierarchy: a true, firm, and supportive hierarchy, that cannot be overturned by the efforts or missteps of men. The problem lies in accepting it, for it allows no distinctions among men as men. Yet it is as important to our health as anything disconnected from physical sustenance could possibly be.

I wrote some time ago about the metaphysical junction at the core of the human animal: the fusion of our nature -- what we are -- to our individuation -- who we are. This might be the most important subject in all of Man's study of himself. It postulates that we have both mutable and immutable parts. It suggests that there exists a way to determine what we can change -- where we can improve ourselves -- how high we can hope to rise -- and which of our limitations are permanent and must not be tampered with.

Our limitations are what assign us to our place in any hierarchy. Whether intrinsic or imposed, they are what bounds our mobility, by definition. When we ponder temporal hierarchies such as the English classes, we soon realize that there's nothing absolutely immutable about any man's position. Any commoner can be knighted; any nobleman can be disgraced; any underclass can pull off a revolution. The hierarchy is only firm under existing conditions...if it's firm at all.

A genuinely firm hierarchy, trustworthy regardless of time, space, or circumstance, must be invulnerable to changes in any of those three things. That is, its roots must lie outside our temporal realm. If we can muster the courage to admit to our limitations, we can find our place in it quite easily:

• We are mortal;
• We are fallible;
• Our powers are limited.

The angels are not mortal, though they are fallible and their powers, though greater than ours, are still quite limited. They stand above us, having been created before us and being in direct communion with God. God is neither mortal nor fallible, and His powers are unbounded as we understand such things; thus, He stands above the angels, and of course above all other things as well.

Dare we look downward? Why not? The beasts are mortal, fallible, and punier even than we, having been denied the gift of reason. The vegetable world is lower still. (If you have a need to feel superior to something, perhaps that will satisfy it.)

But in this eternal hierarchy, place does not equate to privilege. Just because we're capable of something doesn't mean we're morally free to do it. An English gentleman of the Edwardian and earlier eras was, de facto, free to thrash a surly servant or molest a servant girl. Technically, it was assault; in practice, the law would not act against him. But we are not authorized to torment the beasts or wantonly despoil the forests. Similarly, the angels are not authorized to rampage freely among us, reaping lives and sowing suffering however they may. The eternal hierarchy grants us the security of a place to stand and the guarantee that it will be guarded for all time by One Whom nothing can overthrow.

Without that guarantee that our place is secure, we could conclude that God is merely the supreme Oppressor, rather than the Fount of all that is good. But the Creator loves us; were it otherwise, He would not have created the world, placed us in it, and given us the run of it.

***

At the time of Christ's Ministry, the Judaic religious authorities, with the connivance and support of the Roman occupying power, had made their religion a source of temporal power and class distinction. The resulting hierarchy featured a moneyed, privileged class, a lower one of traders, artisans, and shopkeepers, and a still lower one of peasants who could scarcely afford to feed their families, much less make the donations and sacrifices demanded as the price of entry to the Temple. Christ dismissed the entire structure; He went directly to the lowest of the low and taught among them without regard for property or stature. That, plus the extreme simplicity and lightness of His New Covenant, were what made him a deadly threat to the religious powers of His day.

But His message of liberation was simultaneously an earthquake under the feet. The Jews of Judea, for all their chafing under the rule of the Sanhedrin and the Pharisees, knew their place; it was theirs, and seemingly could not be taken away. How dare this itinerant preacher, dispossessed of the world and everything in it, followed by an equally ragtag band of former fishermen who depended for their lives upon the charity of strangers, tell the Chosen People of God that their hierarchy must give way to His newfangled egalitarianism, His Covenant of rules so few that one could count them on one's fingers? That sort of thing can get you executed for preaching without a permit.

Christ told them to judge the tree by the fruit it bears. We have two thousand years' fruit of the Christian hierarchy before us. Compare it to all the temporal hierarchies and codes that have infested the world, before Him or since. How stands His structure in your eyes? And how comfortable do you find your place in it?

May God bless and keep you all.

Saturday, May 03, 2008

Footnotes to “Where are the men?”

The Curmudgeon has been tirelessly writing for the last few days about a problem I have been thinking (and writing) about for some time - namely, the severe degradation of our traditional notions of masculinity and femininity and the concomitant vulgarization of our sexual mores.  As I have written before, I have to come conclude through observation on my college campus that these two processes have dome great damage to the psyches of many of my peers, and I myself have not escaped entirely unscathed.  To judge from the articles the Curmudgeon has linked to, the older generations, even the significantly older generations, have not escaped the consequences of de-masculinization and de-feminization either.  Unfortunately, analysis of this problem, as with so many things dealing with sex and gender, is often one-sided.  Indeed, we can see clear evidence of such in the blatant projection of the two female authors who have been the objects of the Curmudgeon’s thorough deconstruction - they ask, “Where are the manly men?” as if that question does not also immediately imply its counterpart, “Where are the feminine women?” That species too appears endangered in much of the United States.

Perhaps the connection between the two questions is not immediately obvious to these women.  No doubt there are also many men wondering about the second question without stopping to consider the first.  After all, projection is a very human quality.  The truth is, de-masculinization and de-feminization are parallel, complementary processes.  Once one begins, the other must logically follow.  Given that our current situation is unique in history, it is an open question whether they will also reverse in tandem, or if such a thing is even possible given the technological innovations such as oral contraceptives that seem to have precipitated our current spiral.  In either case, because I feel I might be making a controversial argument, and one that was only implicitly made in my previous piece, I wish to explicitly lay out my reasoning.

---

I begin with the premise that all human beings are endowed with the knowledge of a set of idealized sexual characteristics written into the natural law by God Himself.  Even if we are reluctant to posit the intervention of a deity, my premise would not be damaged for we can certainly make a reasonable inference from the axioms of modern evolutionary theory that sex is a fundamental division in most of the planet’s organisms, and certainly in humans.  If one is reminded that our sex is written into our genetic codes such that we can predict with nearly 100% accuracy the sex of an individual just by examining one pair of his or her chromosomes, this conclusion becomes inescapable.  I will leave aside the exceedingly rare cases of genetic sex disorders as I do not wish to derail my argument, and in any case they do not do serious damage to its validity.

I further adduce evidence for this beginning premise based on the fact that art and literature has always, traditionally at least, been able to easily pick out the essential qualities of the idealized man and woman.  They are so obvious that they do not even bear repetition - only those raised by wolves could escape being exposed to the traditional tropes of masculinity and femininity.  Unlike the charlatan post-modernists and post-structuralists in our midst, I cannot dismiss these tropes merely because they are just that - literary forms have an origin and a purpose that transcends the petty ideological goals that most of these “scholars” ascribe them to.  If they were actually so fickle, we would expect a much greater variation over time; in fact, we are struck by their similarity, even in the underground homosexual literatures embodied by Sappho we find constant repetition of the qualities and characteristics that make a man or a woman desirable.  This suggests to me that our idealized conceptions of gender cannot be damaged even by homosexuality.  In fact, the very fact that I find that conclusion somewhat surprising shows how far we have come along in the processes of de-sexualization, for they have just as surely altered the mores of homosexuality just as they have heterosexuality. A quick investigation into the nature of homosexuality among the ancient Greeks will be sufficient to show this.

From this premise I conclude that our essential ideas of sex are unchanging - just as Natural Law decreed that it was wrong for Abel to kill Cain even though God had not yet passed the Ten Commandments to Moses, we cannot escape these ideas by ignorance; ignorantia legis neminem excusat, as the Romans used to say - ignorance of the law excuses no one.  What does change is the attention we pay to natural law, whether we choose to give credence to what we subliminally believe or whether we choose to consciously override it.  And make no mistake, it requires conscious effort.  It requires work, and as Mr. Schwarz demonstrates, a healthy dose of doublethink to believe what radical feminists and their equally radical male allies say about gender and sexual relations is true.  I know - for awhile I believed it.

Why then do we do it?  There are many reasons.  The Curmudgeon has highlighted many of the larger, non-human forces such as the Pill driving our daily absurdities.  To them, I would append the classically human weakness of prioritizing selfish personal pleasure over other pursuits.  We were not meant to deny pleasure, but nor were we meant to make it our sole motivation.  Before the advent of innovations like the Pill, it was fairly hard to do that with regards to our sex lives because the consequence was sufficiently obvious and painful that even the most ignorant could grasp it.  Condoms and the Pill changed all that, and now I can proceed to the most important part of my argument, which is to supply the missing link between the sexual revolution and our notions of gender.

Our gender is not just something that we sense about ourselves, it is also acted out, or performed in the post-structuralist parlance.  Many of our expressions of masculinity and femininity can change without doing damage to our overall conception of our genders - for instance, I adduce little evidence that the re-channeling of male aggression from military pursuits to business pursuits in the modern world has fundamentally changed the way men see themselves.  We must not forget, however, that the purpose of our sexual differentiation is not merely to “provide a little spice to the world” but is to reproduce.  We are this way because that is how we propagate, and most of our most fundamental yearnings turn on that necessity; hence, God’s commandment to Adam and Eve to “go forth and multiply” was less about packing the world with a bunch of believers, as the cynic might have it, and more a command to fulfill ourselves as humans.  It is therefore no surprise that much Hebrew literature endows the married mother with almost supernatural qualities, for she, unlike the maiden, is a fulfilled human.

The foregoing makes the conclusion that how we express our sexuality is fundamental to how we view our gender.  I said that it takes work to believe what radical feminism has to say about gender.  The Pill has made it much easier.  As we have come to devalue sex, it was absolutely inevitable we would come to devalue the ideal qualities of our respective genders.  Romantic love, which only springs from sexual denial at the outset of a relationship and serves to heighten our sense of sexual identity, is all but unheard of these days outside the films which forlornly memorialize it.  Sex now usually comes within weeks of the first date, if it even takes that long.  In many cases, particularly on college campuses, sex is actually how the relationship begins.  Virginity, once considered an essential, if often not realized, virtue of a young gentleman or lady, is now mostly scorned, and it is common practice to have sex simply because one “doesn’t want to be a virgin anymore.” I know, I’ve been there and participated believing many of the things feminism, my peers, and pop culture told me about sex.  I only began to meditate on these arguments once I began to feel cheated by the whole sordid game.  Certainly, it would be a distortion of history to claim that the vast majority of people held off sex fastidiously until marriage before the pill, just as it would be ignorant to claim that teenage males before the mid-twentieth century weren’t horny bags of hormones ready to jump on the first minimally acceptable moving object.  However, the change in the perception of chastity from being an admirable virtue to an object of derision does matter, and with respect to the latter observation the difference between then and now is that we find this behavior acceptable and even encourage it.

---

Much of the foregoing will probably be obvious to the astute readers of this website, but in a culture where it is now acceptable to hand out condoms and oral birth control to 12-year olds, it is important to state this argument explicitly.  There are many here among us who feel that what you do with your sexuality, unless you are unfortunate enough to contract an incurable STD, will have no effect on your outlook, personality, or life prospects, and it certainly has nothing to do with how you see your gender.  This belief is laughable, but many subscribe to it and then wonder why they are unable to achieve a fulfilling relationship with the man or woman they started sleeping with a week after they met.  The fact is that the mis-use and over-use of sexuality is both unmanly and un-feminine, and because our conception of our gender, our ability to perceive and reach for the ideal characteristics we all have written into our hearts is very much wrapped up in our sexuality, the decoupling of sex from procreation and consequences by technology has done enormous damage to our gender identities.  However, because the physical pleasure is so immediate and palpable we are participating quite willingly in the complete disordering of our souls and psyches.  We respond by rationalizing our lack of fulfillment to other causes, but until we confront the impact of our sexualities on our conceptions of ourselves, we are hopelessly stuck in a rut, and the dual processes of de-masculinization and de-feminization will remain with us.

“Where Are The Men?” Part 2: The Differentiation Of A “Species”

As Cassy Fiano and Dr. Melissa Clouthier struggle to qualify their original arrogances, it's occurred to your Curmudgeon that there's a little-discussed phenomenon in the mix that deserves proper exploration. Indeed, it's observable every day, virtually everywhere in America, but is commented on so seldom that one might easily take it for a taboo subject. Yet it's at the core of the "problem" the cited harridans, and women who agree with them, are obsessed with.

Your Curmudgeon will call this phenomenon differentiated masculinity.

A species faced with sharply heightened survival pressures is prone to differential specialization. That is, not all the members of the species will adapt in the same way. Regional sub-populations will pursue adaptive strategies that depend critically upon local factors. In the case of subhuman creatures, the principal influences are climate and the availability of food. In the case of humans, the influences are more likely to be political, social, economic, and technological.

Of course, some adaptations will be more visibly successful than others; some sub-populations will dwindle and vanish. But remember that in this context, "vanish" is a word with two interpretations. The more easily grasped one is that the sub-population will die off, leaving no representatives in the region. The less easily grasped one is that the local survivors will "go underground;" their adaptations will be for disguise from predators they can't defeat in an overt contest.

The adaptations of the sexes to changes in the environment have been several. Not all of the consequences of those adaptations are easily understood. But that's why your Curmudgeon is on the job. First, let's review a critical fragment of American history.

***

It seems inarguable that American men have been put under increased survival pressures these past few decades. Most of the behaviors and predilections that characterized American men in 1950 have been sharply castigated at the very least. Many have actually become illegal; some are penalized monetarily, whether through taxation or some other avenue.

The crescendo of these pressures was sharp. From about 1960 to 1975, the milieu in which American masculinity had functioned was radically transformed. Your Curmudgeon's selection of 1960 as his base year stems from the most socially powerful technological development in human history: the debut of oral contraception.

Tom Bethell, in one of his columns on "The Hive," quotes an unnamed "veteran of the Cold War:" “We were worried about the Bomb, when we should have been worried about the Pill.” Though your Curmudgeon dissents from some of Bethell's inferences, there's no possible doubt that convenient, effective oral contraception, which made family planning infinitely less problematic, also remade the American sexual landscape from top to bottom. The discoveries we made in the years that followed stand as an object lesson to persons who believe that the sexes, apart from one's ability to conceive and bear a child, are absolutely identical. (Yes, yes, it's a lesson they've refused to absorb.)

For centuries uncounted before the Pill, one of the possible consequences of sex had been conception, with all it implies. Conception is both the grail and the Gorgon of female sexual desire. Women are biologically predisposed to want children; indeed, their bodies are prone to all sorts of maladies if they refrain from conceiving, bearing, and suckling a child. Yet childbearing causes a woman to cross a threshold that forbids retreat: the door into motherhood.

Motherhood is so different from the stage that precedes it that we might validly deem mothers to be a subspecies of female Mankind. Motherhood changes a woman's body in important ways. Her fundamental drives diverge from those of non-mothers. Her priorities are radically different. Her relations with men, including the father of her children, must change as well. All of this is objectively beyond dispute.

Women cannot help but be aware of this. Many women fear it. Pain, risk, and the renunciation of youthful pleasures and latitudes are involved. Quite a number of women are unable to imagine that the fulfillments of motherhood are worth what they cost. Time-preference and risk-aversion, two of the most important concepts in economics and game theory, are deeply involved. Women being personally (not politically) far more conservative than men, a preponderance of American women have employed the Pill to defer, bound, and limit their "motherhood exposure." Many eschew motherhood altogether.

The Pill was one of the driving factors in another, equally important development: the removal of the legal penalties and social stigma from abortion. For despite its 99%-plus effectiveness, the Pill suffers one of the classical limitations of all contraceptive methods: if you forget to take it, you'll get knocked up.

Any number of women have succumbed to this "fault" in oral contraception. But unlike its predecessor technologies, the Pill seemed to offer a guarantee of effectiveness. That the guarantee is conditional upon proper use is far too often dismissed as irrelevant.

The Pill brought America a wholesale change in sexual availability. First it was by wives to their husbands; later, as the moral and psychological transformation of Baby Boom America proceeded, by unmarried women to their male admirers. The unqualified embrace of physical pleasure as a God-given right, seemingly invulnerable to the classical consequences of sexual indulgence that had made "shotgun wedding" a part of our informal social lexicon, could only come after women had internalized the notion of guaranteed consequence-free sex, and had granted social acceptance to the irresponsible sexual aggression of men.

Careless use of the Pill gave rise to an explosion of "oops!" pregnancies. The guarantee was shown to be illusory; to defend the right to sex without costs, something had to be done. That something came in 1973, with Justice Harry Blackmun's infamous decision in Roe v. Wade.

***

Other factors were in operation during the fateful years. Most prominent was the sharp increase in "the cost of living well." Steady increases in Americans' tax burden and sustained post-war inflation had us pondering what we might do to keep our standards of living rising. No, most of us weren't conscious of the drivers as such; we merely knew at month's end that the bills were getting harder and harder to meet. The commonest solution, in those years, was to send the Missus to work.

American women's entry en masse into the labor force did two things: it increased the Gross National Product by about 70%, and it completed the transformation of women's attitudes toward sex and motherhood. The lady of the house was no longer "of the house" in any important sense; she had become a co-breadwinner with her husband. This new role swiftly eclipsed a wife's traditional priorities as mother and homemaker.

Young women came to think of wage labor as their proper destination. Upon leaving high school or college, they looked immediately for employment, rather than for husbands to cherish, children to nurture, and hearths to tend. True, they continued to give lip service to marriage, motherhood, and homemaking for a time. But full-time wage labor makes motherhood and homemaking rather more difficult.

His responsibilities had never before included homemaking, and of course he is incapable of motherhood. Her newly adopted responsibilities made homemaking a lesser priority, and traditional motherhood a nearly unendurable burden. She was now as tired as he at the end of the day. Suddenly sex, the consequence-free pleasure they both believed had been guaranteed them, was often unthinkable by reason of irritation or fatigue. For him to spend his free time on traditional male frivolities while she was stuck with the cooking, cleaning, and laundry became a thorn in her flesh. She began to withhold her body, and to make demands. He reacted with incredulity and resentment.

It often seems that the rapid development of improved, more affordable homemaking technology ought to have offset the resulting tensions more than it did. Greatly improved, far less expensive vacuums, washers and driers, dishwashers, self-cleaning ovens and the like did objectively and substantially reduce the burden of homemaking. But the major bone of contention wasn't the actual labor or time involved; it was women's perception of iniquity. The perception was in all major regards correct. Prior generations of women had not been expected to contribute financially to the family income, while the breadwinner role had been held to excuse their husbands from homemaking duties. The balance had been thrown off, and husbands, for the most part, declined to help correct it. The war between the sexes had begun.

Radical feminists and their fellow-travelers seized upon the new conflict with a glee properly described as obscene. The American woman, they proclaimed, was "the new nigger," ruthlessly oppressed by the patriarchal capitalist power structure. The men in her life were insincere in their professions of love and devotion; their true interest was in exploiting her body, her earning power, and her selflessness. She had every right to rise as high as she liked, but was being "held down" by a masculinist conspiracy designed to "keep her in her place." Whether the conspiracy was conscious or unconscious made no difference; the time had come for her to regard him as her enemy.

Men who dared to differ with this portrayal of gender relations were vilified as "sexists," an epithet designed to join "racist" as an equal in the hierarchy of villainy.

***

The picture has changed quite a bit since the heyday of Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer, Catharine MacKinnon, and Andrea Dworkin. The gender-war feminists are definitely on the skids, while the equity feminists, such as Christina Hoff Sommers and Tammy Bruce, are on the ascendant. But the processes of the late Twentieth Century, beginning in 1960, worked psychological and cultural changes that have resisted all attempts at amendment.

Among those changes is the regionalization of both masculine and feminine archetypes.

Populations and glaciers have this in common: they often seem to be quite still, yet are in definite motion. A glacier "moves" by growing at one end and sloughing at the other. Often, so does a population.

The phrases "red-state America" and "blue-state America" should be familiar from the political context in which they originated. Along with the political preferences of those regions go a number of other attitudes and patterns. Over the past twenty or thirty years, Americans have gravitated toward the region they find most congenial by reason of social and cultural attributes. More conservative types have moved into the "red" inland and southern regions, while the more liberal ones have inclined toward the "blue" coasts and Canadian border states. The patterns that characterize inter-gender relations in those regions are markedly different.

"Blue" America is the bastion of political correctness, where the suggestion that men and women differ in significant ways that fit them for different roles is reflexively denounced. "Blue" America produces most of our media darlings, our working women, our divorces, and our abortions. "Blue" Americans show little interest in religion. "Blue" American families tend to be small. The children thereof enjoy relatively lavish lifestyles. Nearly all aspire to college, and to places in the white collar world. There's little interest in military service among "blue" teens and young adults.

"Red" America strikes the "blue" denizen as a throwback to some pre-Enlightenment time. Though many "red" American wives work outside the home, the percentage is considerably smaller than in the "blue" zone. "Red" America produces few celebrities, but nearly all our workers-with-the-hand: farmers, construction workers, workers in "smokestack" industries, and artisans of all sorts. "Red" Americans are almost as religious as their great-grandparents were. "Red" American families are on average larger than "blue" ones; divorce is considerably less prevalent among them. "Red" children aren't as well supplied with pocket cash, designer clothes, or iPods. A greater proportion of "red" kids elect to go to work after high school, or into the armed forces.

These differences are accompanied by quite considerable differences in manifestations of masculinity and inter-gender relations.

"Red" American men haven't gone entirely unaffected by the changes of the recent past, but they've retained a greater degree of public confidence, approbation, and latitude than their "blue" compatriots. Their adaptation has been to filter the environment, dismissing and excluding persons, things, and notions that clash with their worldview and their preferences. They're largely unabashed about their delight in traditional male diversions, and insusceptible to suggestions that traditional masculinity is somehow an affront to women's dignity or well-being.

The self-protective instincts of men trapped in "blue" America have caused them to adapt by "going underground." They don't exactly hide their masculinity, but they downplay it in public, in the workplace, and in general social intercourse. They allow it to rise to the surface only when highly confident that they're surrounded entirely by friends -- male friends. They share a deep distrust of women's tendency toward "solidarity with their sisters" at their husbands' expense. Among other things, a man's carelessness about expressing himself can cost him a divorce, loss of his children, a sexual harassment lawsuit, or in extreme cases, a stretch behind bars wearing a bright orange jumpsuit.

Differentiated masculinity -- the Balkanization of American manhood and its outward expressions according to the influences that prevail in the local environment -- is one of the central sociological facts of our time.

***

We hear "where are the manly men?" plaints from "blue" women far more often than from "red" ones. The "red" ones have far less difficulty finding them because, in their neck of the woods, men don't feel a need to camouflage themselves. In "blue" America, failing to conceal your masculinity can cost you your family, your job, and your freedom. But concealment is not suppression, and it's certainly not abnegation. The chameleon looks like a twig, but that doesn't mean he is one.

There are other aspects of the problem to be explored, for example the explosion of single-parent families (usually mothers), which have bequeathed us hundreds of thousands of young men to whose upbringing no mature masculine influence has contributed. Your Curmudgeon would not deny that such things can give rise to undisciplined and perverse forms of masculinity: homosexuality, sexual indolence and confusion, misogyny, and thuggishness of all sorts. Our coastal cities testify to that fact far too eloquently. But his central thesis is that within the male, the masculine will forever lie. It cannot be suppressed, for it is powered by our origin in God Himself -- yet another of the foundation stones of the West the gender-war feminists and their allies have striven to shatter.

As usual, C. S. Lewis said it best:

"Yes," said the Director. "There is no escape. If it were a virginal rejection of the male, He would allow it. Such souls can bypass the male and go on to meet something far more masculine, higher up, to which they must make yet a deeper surrender. But your trouble has been what the old poets called Daungier. We call it Pride. You are offended by the masculine itself: the loud, irruptive, possessive thing -- the gold lion, the bearded bull -- which breaks through the hedges and scatters the little kingdoms of your primness as the dwarfs scattered the carefully made bed. The male you could have escaped, for it exists only on the biological level. But the masculine none of us can escape. What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it." [From That Hideous Strength]

Friday, May 02, 2008

Woodpushers’ Corner: A Comeuppance

"Come on!" I said. "Play me! I've learned more from playing you than from all your teachings rolled together!"

"All right," he said. "On two conditions."

"Name them," I said.

"First, I get to play White."

"Okay."

"Second..." He hesitated, as if he was thinking up something really evil. "The loser has to annotate and post the game."

"What? Why the loser?"

"Because," he said, grinning, "I'm already used to annotating your games, and if you win, you'll have to suffer through my backbiting commentary on our mutual mistakes. It will serve you right."

"Oh, okay. Let's do it!"

And we did:

Fran knows the Sicilian very well, so I figured I'd throw him a curve. In this variation, Black almost always castles Kingside. I had other ideas.

Fetiche the big thinker has wandered into a setup where White, not Black, has all the play on the Queenside. Because my King Bishop is undeveloped, White can now threaten a5, which would fatally weaken the dark squares around my King.

Ow! ...Rxa6 is answered by b5, opening the b-file against my King. I started to wonder if I'd wandered into something he'd been holding in reserve for a while.

"That sinking feeling" grows stronger and stronger. My Queen is embarrassed; there are no good squares for her. It dawned on me at this point that White's pieces are all in the game, while my King Bishop and King Rook are on the sidelines.

A beautiful move, and very contradictory to the usual course of a Sicilian: the c-file is supposed to belong to Black, damn it all!

Once the Queens are exchanged, White's two fast Queenside passed Pawns will win for him, especially given a player with Fran's endgame technique.

I think I've been spanked and sent to my room. But with Fran holding the paddle, it's a pleasure.

(Next time, beloved!)

Thursday, May 01, 2008

“Where Are The Men?”

Your Curmudgeon has pretty much written off most of the female commentators in the world, both printed and pixelated. Those that grace this dive are the exceptions to the prevailing patterns. The preponderance of the rest are either vicious shrews, or stupid, or willfully ignorant, and a fair number combine all three of those virtues to an unendurable degree. So when your Curmudgeon encounters one who's intelligent, knowledgeable, sensible, and fair-minded, there is much rejoicing here at the Fortress of Crankitude...until said commentator lets the mask slip.

Here is the giveaway emission from your Curmudgeon's most recent disappointment.

Let those...thoughts percolate at the center of your brain for a moment or two, Gentle Reader. If you're a woman and find yourself in agreement with them, your Curmudgeon severely doubts you'll be an Eternity Road reader for much longer. If you're a man and find yourself in agreement with them, that you're here at all, reading these words, is the eighth wonder of the world, right after Victoria Beckham's bosom.

"Where are the men?" Miss Fiano demands to know. Right under your leaky nose, lady. There are plenty of us. Your detector just isn't good enough to sniff us out. Maybe you live in some politically correct enclave where the menfolk keep their manliness to themselves and one another, out of concern for their sexual prospects. Or maybe you haven't learned about supply and demand yet. You see, manly men -- the sort that genuinely cherish the role of protector and provider; the sort that really will jump in front of a speeding truck to save an endangered woman or child; the sort that let feminist crap roll off their backs and do as they know a man should, free of concern for what's au courant among the glitterati -- don't disclose their identities to harridans of any stripe. Neither the ones who run men down at every opportunity, nor the ones who are constantly asking where all the men are.

A woman who wants manly men around her has to act like a womanly woman: the sort of woman who would appreciate and care for a manly man. That requires a supportive attitude, not a critical one. When he comes home tired, she must comfort and sustain him. When he comes home wounded, she must bind him up and encourage him back into battle. No man, be he ever so masculine, wants to be continuously judged against some abstract standard of manliness, like a dog at a dog show. That puts us off our feed; we automatically seek more congenial surroundings. Ever heard about the fly-catching superiority of honey over gall?

By far the greater number of American men are manly men. By far the greater number of American women are whiny, self-absorbed children in adult bodies, demanding to "have it all" even if they haven't got the wherewithal to obtain any of it. Because men's need for female acceptance and support is great, we make excessive allowances for this imbalance.

Modern American women want wealth and comfort, but dislike to work for it and castigate their men for working overtime. They decline to have children, because of the havoc it would raise with their figures, their "careers," and their social schedules. They dislike the idea that a man might be truly wearied out by his breadwinner's labors, yet their own forays into the labor market leave them stunned by the demands for exertion and commitment. They want beautiful, well-kept homes, but consider that a charge upon their husbands' time and effort rather than their own. In short, they see themselves as the center of the universe, and are offended when the men in their lives don't oblige by revolving around them.

These are the symptoms of pathological immaturity.

Listen up, little girls, and your Curmudgeon will tell you a tale of a womanly woman: the sort a manly man would be proud to call his own.

She grew up in abject poverty, in a land where ability, conspicuously displayed, was more likely than not to mark one for death. She struggled for bare subsistence practically from the day of her birth, for her father was long gone, and her mother was psychotic from repeated multiple rapes. Despite her enormous intelligence and courage, her townsfolk treated her as a pariah, not on her own account, but because of her mother.

At age fifteen, a few days after she'd buried her mother with her bare hands, she built a raft, provisioned it as best she could, climbed aboard it, and pushed off into the open sea. Some weeks later, half dead from hunger and exposure, she made landfall in Hong Kong, and began a slow, painful evolution from starved, homeless Vietnamese urchin to what she is today: an American businesswoman, highly respected by her clients, who has to turn down requests for her services because the demand is so great.

That young woman came to America because she met an American man who was in Hong Kong on business, and was dazzled by his quality. He urged her to come to the United States, assuring her that he was nothing special -- that among his countrymen were any number as worthy as he, or better.

That young woman is known here at Eternity Road as Fetiche Nouvelle. Your Curmudgeon asked her recently if what she was told by her American acquaintance in Hong Kong struck her as true. She said yes, emphatically and without hesitation. She said the men of her birthplace are worms by comparison.

Despite her physical slightness, Fetiche is a womanly woman, the sort a manly man would seek for a mate. She doesn't hold herself cheap. She doesn't lower her standards for mere companionship or physical gratification. She pays for what she wants out of her own pocket. She cuts her own path through the world, exactly as the I-am-woman-hear-me-roar types would like to claim they do, but as pitifully few of them actually do -- and almost none without constantly complaining about "boys' clubs" and "glass ceilings." She's still single because she wants a man of intelligence, courage, and integrity equal to her own; given her extraordinary gifts, such men are rare even here in America. But she meets people at their own level. She never denigrates anyone of lesser stature, and she never dismisses anyone for not being what she thinks he "ought" to be. Someday her man will arrive, and she will recognize him, and the two of them will bond inseparably. She's worth a million of you whiners who claim to be desperate for a real man but unable to find one.

The next time you feel inclined to disparage anyone, Miss Fiano, compare yourself to Fetiche. Can you equal her courage, her perseverance, or her generosity of spirit? If so, why are you bitching? If not, how dare you cast aspersions on half your countrymen, struggling to do the best they can in a milieu that's become shriekingly hostile to what God and nature sculpted them to be?

Grow up. Or shut up. Either would suffice.

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Woodpushers’ Corner: Tempo And Temperament

Anyone who reads the chess posts here knows I'm a little more aggressive than most other players. As I mentioned not long ago, Fran has been trying to moderate that tendency of mine. Maybe it's working...

I like the Sicilian Defense from both sides of the board, Most White players don't really appreciate its possibilities, and most Black players play it as if they were reading from a book. Fran, who knows a lot more opening theory than I do, says this is the Scheveningen Variation. Black has to brace for a Kingside attack; White must beware of invasion against his relatively denuded Queenside. But in a position where one side's King is under fire, two things matter more than anything else: tempo and temperament.

I was surprised by this gift of tempo. White has possibilities against the Black d-Pawn as well as on the Kingside, and Black has just helped him along. The Queen has to retreat; 11...Qb4 is answered by 12. a3, trapping the Queen.

Black felt he had to prevent White's 13. e5, but this further weakens the d-Pawn and creates a structure that practically demands a mating attack.

Black must now choose between losing the d-Pawn and putting his Queen completely out of play. He should probably give up the Pawn and hope for counterplay in the aftermath, but he proves to be...impatient!

It seems that 13...Be6 was a fatal gift of tempo. Black must now lose a Rook or be mated.

When I showed this to Fran, he clucked and shook his head. "9...a6 was mandatory. It looks like he confused this variation with one of the more aggressive ones. But I'm glad you didn't throw the kitchen sink at him."

"There was no need, was there?" I said.

"No, there wasn't," he said, grinning.

I guess I'm learning.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

The Threat And The State: Avoiding Devil Theories

The most important need, in analyzing something as perverse as the alliance of a government with those forces against which it's supposed to protect us, is to avoid attributing the perversion to the deliberate maneuvers of a specific group of individuals. Historians and sociologists call such a hypothesis a devil theory.

The phrase is apt, for a devil theory implies wildly disproportionate power to shape the course of history in a relatively small and compact group. But such theories are appealing, because one of their other implications is that, once that group can be identified, it can be eliminated, and the problems for which it's responsible will be eliminated with them.

Political discourse has always been susceptible to devil theories. In recent years, their importance has been divided between attack campaign tactics -- the challenger accusing the incumbent of being personally responsible for whatever ills he claims to see in society -- and exculpation -- a partisan blaming the failures of his party's espoused policies on a particular officeholder or set of officeholders, to avert scrutiny from the policies and their logical foundation.

As attractive as they are, devil theories usually contain their own refutations. The proof is by contradiction: if there were a powerful devil, or devil-group, its actions and their consequences would distinguish it from the persons around it. Thus, it could be found and done away with, and the institution it had afflicted would thereafter return to health. Yet this almost never happens.

Grappling with the persistent characteristics of an institution, whose membership changes over time, requires attention to the incentives that act on those members by reason of their affiliation with it.

The incentives that act upon a private institution -- that is, one that has no extralegal privileges -- arise from its goals, its design, and its environment. To remain viable, it must profit, but whatever it seeks, others are likely to value about equally. It will be liable for any violations of the law. It's unlikely to be unique; competition will constrain its actions in several ways. Those pressures will cause it to filter out persons inclined to acting illegally, or in a fashion its competitors could use against it. Not perfectly, but well enough to keep it level with its competitors and, in the most common cases, out of trouble with the law.

The incentives that act upon a government are, of course, rather different. Governments make, interpret, and enforce the law, usually without much concern for the possibility of serious resistance. A government has no competition within its "jurisdiction," except for the possibility of insurrection or civil war. It need not be profitable in the usual sense. Worst of all, under the prevailing doctrine of sovereign immunity, there's no way to bring a government or its agents to book for whatever wrongs it might commit. Armed agents of the State are very seldom held liable for deeds that would cost private parties a decade or more in prison; witness the conclusion of the recent "Sean Bell" trials.

The consequences of allowing these incentives to operate are easily foreseen. Except in the rarest cases, they don't result in the elevation of a single devil-figure, or a compact devil-group, to an unassailable height of power. Far more often, they give rise to a pyramidal structure, customary in hierarchical bureaucracies, where altitude in the pyramid is proportional to one's ambition and inversely proportional to one's moral scruples. The man or men at the top will be incrementally more grasping and ruthless than those immediately below them, but not so much so as to differ in kind. Should that topmost figure or group be ejected from its place, the one imediately below will rise smoothly into the open positions.

Compare this to the premise that a devil-group responsible for the corruption of the State awaits discovery and ejection, after which right and justice will prevail. That's a far more attractive notion, for two reasons. First, it allows us to "put a face on the enemy," at least in prospect, which gives us someone to hate. Second, it promises an end to our labors, after which no further purgative effort will be required of us.

In America's current situation of besiegement, we are tempted to blame our troubles on the inadequate responses of the administration elected to power. But were Saint Michael to replace the president and Saint George to replace the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, our circumstances would not be materially improved. Single individuals are incapable of steering a government by force of will. The bureaucracies beneath them would neuter them almost effortlessly, in obedience to the institutional incentives that raised them to where they sit. Conversely, installing Adolf Hitler in the Oval Office and General Tojo as Secretary of Defense would not make a great deal of difference. Shifting a bureaucracy of tens or hundreds of thousands requires more than amorality and determination.

Clearly, the avoidance of devil theories is critical to successfully countering those forces that give rise to tyranny, corruption, and social strife. Less obviously, denying the defenders of a regime the privilege of invoking a devil theory to explain the failure of their preferred policies is critical to constructive discourse on political principles and the soundness of policies based on them. The Soviet regime did not kill millions because of Josef Stalin, but because the premises of Communism, pursued to their logical conclusion, demanded it. America's "permanent government," founded on Civil Service rules and sovereign immunity, fails to act effectively against the major threats to our nation not because of evil will, but in obedience to the incentives that arise from those foundation stones.

More anon.

Sunday, April 27, 2008

Fran’s Sunday Ruminations: The Smallest Drop Of Wine

Overheard at a dinner table, location unspecified:

"Mommy? Is God really within each of us?"
"Of course He is, sweetheart!"
"Well, I hope He likes Brussels sprouts."

Out of the mouths of babes...

***

Recently I've been musing over certain aspects of Catholic doctrine, most particularly the Miracle of Transubstantiation, the one and only "mass-produced" miracle sanctioned by the Church. It's core Catholic dogma that the host becomes the flesh of Christ, and the wine His blood, and that we who partake of the Eucharist are quite literally doing as He commanded us to do:

Then the Jews who were hostile to Jesus began complaining about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven,” and they said, “Isn’t this Jesus the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” Jesus replied, “Do not complain about me to one another. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day. It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ Everyone who hears and learns from the Father comes to me. (Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God—he has seen the Father.) I tell you the solemn truth, the one who believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that has come down from heaven, so that a person may eat from it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats from this bread he will live forever. The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

Then the Jews who were hostile to Jesus began to argue with one another, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” Jesus said to them, “I tell you the solemn truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in yourselves. The one who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. The one who eats my flesh and drinks my blood resides in me, and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so the one who consumes me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven; it is not like the bread your ancestors ate, but then later died. The one who eats this bread will live forever.” [John 6:41-58]

The Transubstantiation is not a matter of form. The form of the wafer and wine remain as they were; only their substance changes. Form, here, subsumes all the temporal properties of those items. Putting a Transubstantiated host or a cup of Transubstantiated wine into a mass spectrometer would tell us nothing about the presence of Christ within it. The change is on a par with the Last Supper, where -- according to the Gospel accounts, at least -- the bread and wine He gave to His disciples appeared to their senses to remain unchanged.

That's a pretty subtle miracle, a lot less showy than raising the dead or healing the crippled and blind. But it's the sort of miracle that's appropriate to ordained mortals and the sustenance of faith. For Christ did not intend that anyone should be brought into His flock, or kept there, by a conjurer's arts. The visible miracles He performed during His time of ministry were seed corn for the faith of the ages to come.

The central point is this: Christ demanded no sacrifices of others. Except for the first Eucharist, every one of Christ's miracles, from the wine of Cana to the resurrection of Lazarus, was a celebration and veneration of life. His only sacrifice was of Himself.

The Eucharist was not a sacrifice, except in the symbolic sense. Our commemorative recreation of the Eucharist, though we call the bread and wine a "sacrifice," is nothing of the sort. It certainly isn't an offering of flesh, the only sort of sacrifice first-century Jews would have sanctioned. Rather, it's the invocation of Divine authority by an ordained priest, to allow us to experience the most intimate imaginable union with Our Savior, just as His Apostles did. We get back infinitely more than we give.

A Communion host is a small item. You don't go home from Mass feeling physically full. Nor will the sacramental wine get you tipsy. Indeed, at those Masses where the Blood of Christ is shared with the congregation, it's customary merely to allow the Transubstantiated wine to wet one's lips. For it's not the quantity that matters; the merest crumb of host, the smallest drop of wine, are sufficient to recreate the miracle of the Eucharist, wherein the Redeemer commemorates His sacrifice of Himself for our sakes.

Isn't that how it should be? The Son of God, who deigned to suffer the limitations of the flesh for our sakes, is infinitely far above us in the grand Scheme of things. He, together with His Father, holds the world in His hand. There are billions of us; there is one of Him. Yet His sacrifice suffices to save us all.

***

"Sin is cruelty and injustice; all else is peccadillo." -- Robert A. Heinlein, Glory Road

On Saturday, April 19, Pope Benedict XVI celebrated a special Mass for American clergy at Saint Patrick's Cathedral in New York. During his homily, he told the three thousand attendees, priests, nuns, and bishops all, "I am a sinner, as you are. I thank you for loving me and praying for me."

In all probability, no better man than Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, walks the Earth at this time. An intellectual titan who has served God for more than sixty years and has risen to the highest office of our Church, he is nevertheless a humble and grateful man. If he is willing to nominate himself as a sinner, the rest of us have little reason to think ourselves any better.

I struggled with the notion of innate human sinfulness for a long time. As Anthony Boucher once wrote, it's difficult to imagine why God in His perfection would have created anything less than Himself. Yet it is so. But it's worth a bit of reflection on why it's so.

Human individuality in thought and deed is our defining characteristic. As Ayn Rand put it, we are creatures of volitional consciousness. But to be individual is to be perpetually in competition with others in innumerable ways. Thus, we are under continuous temptation to treat those around us as means to our own ends.

Alongside that, we are capable creatures: "project pursuers," in Loren Lomasky's phrase. We conceive of goals, undertake to reach them, and quite frequently succeed. Being individuals, isolated from one another within our skulls and only dimly able to conceive of God, success has an unfortunate tendency to go to our heads. Instead of being grateful for the gift of life and thought, we exalt ourselves over our trivial accomplishments. We imagine ourselves to be more significant than we really are, forgetting that not one atom of our substance is truly of our own making. We disdain to give thanks.

Sin is a simple matter, really. It's either the willful denial and denigration of God and our debt of gratitude to Him, or it's the abuse of others. All else is about context, form, and detail. But it is written into our natures as individually conscious entities, capable of responding only to our own desires, fears, and beliefs, that we should be continuously susceptible to temptation -- and that all of us, now and then, will succumb.

But Christ has renewed us all. From the beginning of our species to the last breath of the last of us who'll ever live, His sacrifice of Himself powers the salvation of Man. The promise of Redemption inheres in the smallest drop of wine.

May God bless and keep you all.