Abortion: Career is Not The Meaning of Life

In the New Yorker Katha Pollitt writes about how abortion has changed the arc of women's lives.

Access to legal abortion, whether as a backup to birth control or not, meant that women, like men, could have a sexual life without risking their future. A woman could plan her life without having to consider that it could be derailed by a single sperm.

Most women don’t enter fields that require years of graduate-school education, but all women have benefitted from having larger numbers of women in those fields.

See, I think that the idea of women "having a sexual life" is a lie. It is only men that can separate sex from love and marriage and children. I'd say that the more that a woman has a sexual life the more miserable she is likely to be.

See, I think that the idea of a woman "plan[ning] her life" free of the derailleur "single sperm" completely misunderstands what life is all about. Any woman with half a brain is going to steer clear of rogue "single sperms."

See, I think that the idea that "all women have benefitted" from having more women in fields that require graduate-school education is a ridiculous conceit.

So I think that Katha Pollit is full of it.

Of course, I understand where she is coming from. I get that from German sociologist Georg Simmel and his talk about women coming into the public square and adjusting it to suit "a more feminine sensibility."

I think that the fact of men being perfectly happy with "having a sexual life" and using women as masturbatory appliances is the reason we have marriage laws and that we used to regard abandonment and divorce as scandalous and disgraceful. Before the glories of the sexual revolution.

I think that any plan of life that does not include the generation and raising of children at its center is a foolish plan of life, and a plan for misery and despair.

I think that any notion that more women in certain educated fields is a Good Thing misses the point. What we observe about the work force is that women tend to enter and dominate fields that involve person-to-person communication and caring. Men predominate in fields that involve danger and things. Doesn't mean that the opposite can't happen, but certainly it should give us pause before applying government force to direct outcomes.And men have careers because that is how you get laid and get to marry high-status women.

I'm watching 56-Up, the latest in the TV documentary Up Series following the lives of 14 Brits born in 1957, and checked up on every seven years since. The lefty BBC producers picked a diverse bunch of youngsters from children abandoned in a orphanage to total rich kids with plummy accents. You could tell that the BBC thought they were getting ready to celebrate the wonderful lives of working-class kids that were in the process of benefitting gloriously from the wise and compassionate post-War welfare state. Only it didn't turn out like that.

And, after watching 56-Up, which looks at the kids that are now 56 years old, I'd say that abortion and contraception and the sexual revolution have played merry hell with the lives of pretty well all the kids except the richest ones. But that's just my opinion.

And the richest ones did well not because of their parents' riches but because of the upper-middle-class culture they inherited and breathed into their very souls.

However, in 56-Up almost all the kids are now entering a dignified late middle age, even the ones that went through what I would call welfare-state-hell for years.

See the difference between the right and the left is that we righty racists, sexists, and homphobes think that the folks migrating into the city from the country should be taught the culture of the middle class and its responsibility culture. They should not be encouraged to remain in a working-class or lower-class ghetto, or the neo-feudal culture of the welfare state, because that is not the way to wive and thrive in the city and the market economy.

So I think that Katha Pollit is clueless, and ought to watch the Up Series from start to finish and then answer the obvious question: why are we spending political and cultural bandwidth worrying about high-class women like her when the white working class is dying of despair? And the black community is marinating in self-pity. And gays are the worst bigots on the planet.

But others may differ.

On the Receiving End of the Ruling-Class's Cultural Narrative

The Big Problem for conservatives is that we are nowhere to be seen when it comes to establishing the cultural narrative. It is liberals and lefties that decide what story to tell about who we are and how we got there.

And anyone that has a clue about religion and history and myth knows that the chap that gets to tell the story gets to rule the nation.

So I've been watching a series of P.D. James's Adam Dalgliesh mysteries from a DVD set that I picked up on 50% off day at HalfPrice Books.

My takeaway is that James fillets 1980s Britain with almost savage determination. It's a wonder to me that she ever got the accolades and the handle she did. Many of her mysteries are set in government or quasi-government offices. And most of the offices are not exactly run with professional skill and devotion to the mission. Almost all the police officers in the series, apart from the incandescent poet Dalgliesh, are at best lazy time-servers and at worst evil and corrupt.

Put it this way. If you've run through the Dalgliesh mysteries you wouldn't be shocked to read the latest on the late Alfie Evans, that the NHS children's hospital in which Alfie died was noted for its mistakes and incompetence and that it seems likely that mistakes and incompetence played their part in the death of Alfie.

But then over the weekend I got to watch the start of Unforgotten Season 2, an ITV mystery series created by Chris Lang about cold murder cases. Here we have a crack London police investigative team led by a woman and seconded by DI Sunny Kahn. We have an earnest Muslim woman teacher of Shakespeare trying to get a school principal's job. And we have a gay couple with their darling little daughter.

In other words, the TV series is all about the ruling-class's cultural narrative, normalizing the cultural agenda of the ruling class and boosting their "little darlings."

Hey, that's the whole point of a ruling class; you get to set the stage with your favorite cardboard heroes and your chosen cartoon villains. And there ain't nothin' we deplorables can do about it.

There happens to be an actual cultural history of Britain out there. It is the Up Series, an ITV documentary series about a cohort of Brits that were seven-year-olds in 1964 when the first episode  was broadcast.

The idea of the Up Series was clearly to show the triumphant success of the post-WWII welfare state and spotlight the rising working class and show them to advantage against the over-privileged toffs. So the first episode shows three delightful working-class girls in the bright-and-cheery living-room of their "council house" (public housing), while three rich boys are shown in all their insufferable snobbishness. In the middle are a bunch of middle-class kids and one boy-of-color.

Only the whole thing went wrong. The upper-class twits all hit the marks set by their helicopter moms and went on to successful lives and careers. The upper-class daughter of divorce got her act together after an angry teenage period and married a good man. But the sparkling working-class girls all ended up as single-parents living in a shabby squalor. The ordinary middle-class kids kinda faded away; the earnest boy who wanted to help the world gave up teaching South Asians at government schools in the East End of London and switched to teaching in a private school. But Tony, a fists-first working-class kid from the East End of London grows up to become a London taxi-driver and an Essex Man -- i.e. working-class that has moved out to the suburbs. The key thing about Tony was that he belonged to the good old British criminal class, and his dad was in jail when he was seven. I wonder if his dad's underworld connections gave Tony the inside track to get his foot into the London taxi cartel.

Do you see what I am getting at? Having buried the old white working class, and bollixed up the dutiful middle class, the ruling class imports a whole new population from the Caribbean and South Asia and drive their former "little darlings" to despair.

So in the BBC TV series Last Tango in Halifax, the white working class woman played by Nicola Walker (the heroine police inspector in Unforgotten), is clearly in a mess because of her own character deficiencies. Indeed the only Good Person in the Halifax series is the POC lesbian girl-friend of the white school principal.

Now, I don't really blame the TV series creators for telling the ruling-class's narrative. Apart from the fact that it would be career suicide to tell the true story, I doubt if any of the folks with the connections and the track record to put together mass-media vehicles can ever be anything other than Good Soldier Schweiks going along with the ruling-class narrative.

For an alternative to the ruling-class narrative you need a writer like P.D. James, who worked full-time through the Fifties and Sixties in the government bureaucracy, first in the NHS and then in the Home Office, supporting her disabled husband. An unknown author can create a new narrative, and if it takes off and she becomes a best-seller, then she has achieved a cultural fait-accompli.

Or you need an unfortunate accident like the Up Series, that shows up the abject failures of the ruling-class idiots, but only if you have eyes to see.

We conservatives dream of a possible world where our narrative would get the respect it deserves. But really we are whistling past the graveyard. What happens in real life is that the ruling-class goes on pushing its narrative and favoring its latest "little darlings" until one day it runs out of other peoples' money, an accident reveals its incompetence and folly and the whole project lands on the dust-heap of history.

And the one thing for certain is that the "little darlings," past, present, and future, will be hardest hit.

The Plague of Fake Politics

When you are part of the ruling class -- or even a ruling-class wannabe -- you want to do ruling-class things. And what a ruling class does is politics.

In our age the ruling class is the so-called educated class that first emerged in the Enlightenment and first got its hands dirty in the French Revolution. Then, in the 19th Century we saw the emergence of Educated Youth, the Marxes and the Engels of the time, well-born young men that chose politics as a way to advocate for the lower class.

Thus was born today's over-under politics where the wealthy and the well-connected use the underclass as a tiger-paw to maul the middle class. Marx was the son of the best lawyer in Trier and Engels was the son of a textile baron sent to England to keep an eye on Daddy's business.

The thing is that this sort of politics is fake. Marx and Engels were not advocating for the rights of well-born scions, they were advocating for the workers. Er, what would rich kids like that know about the needs of the workers? Because the telling thing about Educated-Youth activism is that it seems to require All Power to the Scions! In our day we are talking about graduates of selective colleges making their chops as "community organizers" for a year before moving on to a liberal foundation and then a career in electoral politics. Fake politics is great for the well-born scions. And that is the point.

So now we have the fake "caravan of Central American migrants" organized by the usual crew of liberal church groups. Sorry fellahs, but glomming onto a group of Central Americans and using them as camera bait is not "activism;" it is fake politics. It is US liberals looking for an issue on which to perform activism and create meaning for themselves.

And the same goes for the March for our Lives movement that features the teenagers from Parkland as its media bait. Kids don't have the experience and the connections to mount huge rallies in Washington DC. It takes well-connected professional activists and well-connected billionaires. It is fake politics. It is not about "gun violence," which is mainly a problem in black inner cities; it is all about creating meaning in the lives of well-born, well-connected liberals: fake politics.

Next week is going to be Town Hall for our Lives, featuring the same stand-up kids in front of cameras. Sorry liberals; this is fake politics, once again.

If all this stuff is fake politics, what is real politics? I will tell you. It is some whacko guy running for president and discovering a whole demographic that none of the fake activists had ever thought of representing.

The problem with all this educated-class fake politics is what comes later. It is what I call the "little darlings" problem.

Suppose you are Marx and Engels and you want revolution for the working class. Or you are Beatrice Webb and you want legislation mandating labor unions and social services for the working class. Just trust us, they said, and we will change the world for you and protect you.

Only they didn't. Marx and Engels and their adepts Lenin and Stalin and Mao and Castro and Chavez led the workers into a maelstrom of starvation and killing. Beatrice Webb and US liberals led the workers into a box canyon by promising cradle-to-grave jobs and welfare. But now the working class in England and the US is dying of despair because the world they were taught to live in has collapsed. Go watch the Up Series if you want to see this happen in real time. There are no more lifetime jobs in manufacturing; there are no more secure union jobs except in government. The glorious movement to lift up the working class was not about the working class at all; it was all about the power and the glory of the Marxes, the Lenins, the Webbs, and the college-taught "activists" luxuriating in the activism culture of today.

The same thing has been happening with the women's movement, run by well-born women that fancied a life that was more than marriage and children. No problem, girls, except that, for some reason, the women of today are less happy that the women of the Fifties. Why would that be? Could it be that most women -- well-born women educated at selective colleges excepted -- want marriage and children and a part-time job? Has anyone asked them?

Here's what I keep coming back to. It is that, in this age of politics-with-everything we have grasped the wrong end of the stick. The record of the last 200 years is that the day-to-day work of human social cooperation can best be left to the market in goods and labor, with sensible laws to encourage faithful dealings and reward trust. It is not a good idea to marshal people into political tribes and teach them to trust their leaders. Political leaders are like the generals of armies. They get to go home to a well-earned retirement; it is their foot soldiers and caravaner migrants that get to pay the bills of their leaders with their lives.

Instead of teaching gullible teenagers and migrants to trust in their leaders we should be teaching people to understand and master the bourgeois bargain. The bargain is simple: it is your job to figure out how to contribute to society with your mind and your body, and then do something about it. And don't think that the job is over once you have found your first job. The world changes, and we all need to change with it, or else end up on the dust-heap of history. Sure, "society" can help, and government has role to play. But what if the government is wrong? What if government's health care programs make health care impossibly expensive?  What if government schools don't prepare our children for the real world? What then?

There's a cute piece today by Christopher DeGroot, who sneers at Kevin D. Williamson for sneering at the white working class for not getting with the program and doing something about it when the good old jobs started to fade away.

The problem is that the white working class made its mistake a generation before the jobs started drying up in the Seventies. Their mistake was the trust the activists of fake politics who "cared about people like you."

No they didn't. All politicians care about is your vote. All the activists care about is your body showing up at their "peaceful protest." And that is all.

49 Up: Oral History as it Happens

Forty years ago Granada TV in Britain broadcast a documentary, Seven Up, about the lives of twenty children, then aged seven. It was to be a narrative about class, showing how class was destiny. To make the point absolutely clear they anchored the show around three boys and three girls. They showed us three dreadfully conceited boys from a fancy London private school and three charming working class girls from the East End of London.

Last month in Britain they broadcast 49 Up, interviewing the same children at the age of 49. Jonathan Freedland reviews it in The Guardian. Here in the United States we will probably have to wait for the DVD. You can get the DVD of the previous five episodes, The Up Series, at Amazon.

Of course, the hoary left-wing narrative about class has been utterly demolished, not least because Britain has become overwhelmingly middle class in the last half century. Instead what emerges unbidden in every frame is a completely different narrative: “The Consequences of the Welfare State.” You can say, roughly speaking, that the closer each child lived to the welfare state, the more their life suffered. All the middle-class children that went to private school have done well. But the kids that went to government schools, or bust up their marriages and went on welfare—they have not done so well.

So the question is: what was all the money and all the promises and all the social programs about? When it has all led to blighted lives and social decay?

But that is a conversation the producers of The Up Series are not willing to have. They may not even be aware that it is a conversation it is possible to have.