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.

Miers or Less: The Fight Goes On

President Bush
nominated
White House counsel Harriet Miers this morning to be an Associate Justice on the United States
Supreme Court. And conservatives are underwhelmed.

Conservatives want a nominee that can stick it to the Democrats and teach them a lesson. But the
President is clearly signaling that he doesn’t want a knockdown drag out fight. The Roberts nomination
seemed to have been made on the basis of going as conservative as possible without provoking the
Democrats to a fight. And the Miers nomination has to be seen in the same light.

Conservatives should understand that the big problem on the Supreme Court is not in the
character and beliefs of individual
nominees and whether they get turned into liberals by their years on the court and by the need
to be liked and win
“Strange New Respect” from the Washington media. The challenge is for conservatives to create the judicial atmosphere that makes
the conservative philosophy the default position for a go-along-to-get-along justice.

If conservatives want to win on the court, year in year out, no matter who gets on the court, then
we must win in the battle of ideas. When that happens the swing votes on the court, the Souters and
the Kennedys, will weathervane over to our side.

It is easy, when your guy is in the White House, to imagine that he can fire a magic bullet and
change the court to your liking. Reality is not so easy.

Reality is getting up every morning and going to work, determined to change hearts and minds, one at a time, issue by
issue.

The Underclass: Remember Them?

Charles Murray published Losing Ground twenty years ago. In it he told how social policy had created the non-working underclass out of the old working class, a world of fatherless families that lived without working.

Now with Hurricane Katrina we have suddenly rediscovered the underclass. And we will likely pull out a few of the old palliatives to make it go away.

The underclass is not going away. It is still getting bigger, Murray writes. The measure of the size of the underclass is the rate of criminality. “The crime rate has been dropping for 13 years. But the proportion of young men who grow up unsocialized and who, given the opportunity, commit crimes, has not.” The crime rate is down because we have tripled the population of our prisons.

Criminality is the most extreme manifestation of the unsocialized young male. Another is the proportion of young males who choose not to work. Among black males ages 20-24, for example, the percentage who were not working or looking for work when the first numbers were gathered in 1954 was 9%. That figure grew during the 1960s and 1970s, stabilizing at around 20% during the 1980s. The proportion rose again, reaching 30% in 1999, a year when employers were frantically seeking workers for every level of job.

Although we have reformed welfare, we have not shrunk the underclass. That is because we have not shrunk the number of fatherless families.

Think of this. In the United States we have our unsocialized underclass males. In China they have the surplus males from the folly of the One Child policy. In Eurabia they have millions of disaffected males: underclass European males and alienated Muslim males. What do you think will become of all those angry males?

Nuclear Power Could Save the Planet

As we all know, our American liberals see themselves as the “reality-based” community that believes in science rather than religious superstition and myths. If so, they will be interested in the emerging science of hormesis, the idea that small quantities of toxins, even those that kill at high concentrations, may actually be beneficial.

The principle was demonstrated by Dorothy L. Sayers in her Lord Peter Wimsey mystery, Strong Poison. The not-very-lovely mystery novelist Harriet Vane is accused of poisoning her lover, the avant-garde novelist Philip Boyes, with arsenic. But it turns out it was the oily family lawyer Norman Urquart what done it. Over several months he had ingested small quantities of arsenic and developed a tolerance for the poison. So when he shared an omelette with Philip Boyes that was laced with the stuff, Boyes died in horrible pain while he experienced no ill effect.

It turns out that small amounts of nuclear radiation are beneficial too. Theo Richel reports that they are reducing the estimates of death from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Right now, it is estimated that about 4,000 people will die prematurely from exposure to Chernobyl. But it may be that the estimate of excess deaths will be one day be reduced to a deficit, because “many people in the area [will] not have cancer as a result of their extra doses of radiation.”

Only about 140 people around the reactor received very high doses (28 of them died as a result), the rest of the population received an extra dose that was lower than normal background radiation

The notion that any exposure to nuclear radiation would increase cancer death arose in a report in 1958 analyzing cancer deaths among the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The more radiation, scientists found, the bigger likelihood of cancer death.

But the question is, what happens as you lower the radiation dose. Does the likelihood of cancer
reduce slowly toward zero?

Some people had received an amount of radiation that was about 50-100 times the normal, natural, background radiation that the rest of the Japanese receive (about 2.5 milliSieverts/year). In this group of so called Habakushas (bomb survivors) they could not find enough cancer deaths to create a decent statistic that showed radiation is carcinogenic even at these low doses. So the straight line of dose and effect suddenly stopped.

But the scientists didn’t say, well, we don’t know what happens at low doses. Instead, they extended
their graph and invented a hypothesis called LNT (Linear no threshold). Radiation was dangerous all
the way down.

But maybe they were wrong.

In the past half century it became clear that there are many places on earth where
background radiation is 50, 100 or more times higher than the sea level average of 2.5 milliSievert...
In all these places epidemiological studies were started and they produced a
remarkably consistent picture: the people there have either the same or a slightly lower chance
of cancer compared to their
less-irradiated countrymen. They live just as long or a little bit longer.

You can see that this rather makes a mess of the nuclear meltdown hypothesis, celebrated on stage
and screen. If Chernobyl caused no excess deaths, except for the people actually at the reactor attempting
to contain the meltdown, then why are we worried about radiation from nuclear plants and from
nuclear waste disposal sites?

Naturally, all you folk in the “reality-based” community will be eager to understand the emerging
science of hormesis, and you will want to seek additional information here and here.

Imagine. Maybe hormesis points the way to solving the nightmare of global warming. Instead of burning
fossil fuels to power our cars and homes and destroying the planet, we could use nuclear power.
Because hey, a little extra radiation might do us good. And it could save the planet.

Liberal Guru Dies. Who Knew?

M. Scott Peck, author of perennial bestseller The Road Less Traveled, died on September 25 of cancer. “Life is difficult,” he wrote. It is a series of problems and we gain the wisdom to overcome them by discipline (and also through love, growth, religion, and grace). Who, among the reading classes of a certain age, has not read his book, or known what it was about?

Appearing as it did in 1978, Peck’s book was well-timed to offer a way for the baby-boom generation to sober up after the binge of the Sixties without actually admitting that their dissipations were rather more than harmless adolescent pranks.

But who knew? You wouldn’t know it from the obituary in The New York Times. You’d only get a hint of it in the obituary in The Washington Post. In fact, you’d have to go to the obituary in The Daily Telegraph to learn that Peck was not quite the paragon of wisdom he presented in his book.

On the contrary,

Peck himself was, by his own admission, a self-deluding, gin-sodden, chain-smoking neurotic whose life was characterised by incessant infidelity and an inability to relate to his parents or children.

In the end, his wife divorced him and two of his three children wouldn’t speak to him.

Hey, nobody is perfect. But it is still a remarkable thing that in all these years as a bestselling author, lecturer, and celebrity, there was never a scandal about the rather significant gulf between Peck’s philosophy and his life. If he had been a fundamentalist preacher and had written a best-seller on the Christian life, we can be confident our liberal friends would know about his every pecadillo and be able to recite chapter and verse of his misdeeds to us upon request. And also without request.

It’s the great double standard of our age. Conservatives that fall off the wagon are hypocrites and frauds. Liberals that don’t live up to their principles are merely human.

And that’s how it should be, after all.

Ballroom Dancing? At College?

Half a century after rock-and-roll ate pairs dancing for lunch, it looks like
ballroom dancing is making a comeback—at the university.
Liz Lightfoot reports that Oxford and Cambridge Universities in England
are getting serious about an annual ballroom dancing competition between the two
schools.

It has become so serious that

Cambridge University has appointed its first permanent
ballroom dancing coach as
the activity becomes the latest campus craze.

It is not before time. The bump and grind of rock-style dancing means nothing.
How about dancing plastered up against a dancing partner as you whirl around the
dance floor? Said Chris Horner of Cambridge University:

"It’s strange that male dancers pressed against a beautiful
woman are supposed to be gay while sports where 15 men run around holding
on to each other or getting
sweaty together in the showers are seen as manly,"

Actually, as an experienced Argentine Tango dancer, I’d say that the
prospect of pressing up against a beautiful woman is more enticing
than the actual experience.

The University: Sickness Unto Death

It’s university week as various opinion media trot out their annual state of the academy pieces. In
James Piereson’s
The Left University we saw a picture of the university drawn using the German historical method,
penciling out the progress of the academy from teacher of absolutes to liberal research institution to the current
left university that amounts to an establishment of secular religion.

On the other hand,
Victor Davis Hanson shows the university as a corrupt institution approaching terminal
sickness, or as we Kierkegaardians say, sickness unto death. You can tell there is something wrong by
comparing the antics of today’s college presidents with the giants of the university’s golden age: men
like “Woodrow Wilson (at Princeton), Robert Hutchens (at Chicago) or James Bryant Conant (at Harvard).”
Today’s presidents are pigmies by comparison.

There’s the infamous trashing of Harvard President Summers by the Harvard faculty for daring to suggest informally that
there might be innate differences between men and women.

There’s “Denice Denton, the newly appointed chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz,
heralded Mr. Summers’s public humiliation as a `teachable moment.’” Maybe there is a teachable moment
also in discussing
the shenanigans surrounding her appointment. Her partner got herself a six-figure job at the
university and a move-in allowance in the deal. What’s all that about?

And what about University of Colorado President Elizabeth Hoffman?

She recently resigned, ostensibly following athletic scandals, but more
likely as a result of the uproar over Ward Churchill. We remember him now as the strange
professor who compared the 3,000 murdered in the Twin Towers and Pentagon to "Little Eichmanns,"
supposed cogs in the military-industrial wheel who deserved their fate.

It turned out that everything about Churchill was a lie: his Native American ancestry and his academic
achievements.

But none of these worthies hold a candle to new Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau of the University of
California at Berkeley. On taking up his office

the chancellor complained that Berkeley has fewer Native American, Hispanic,
and African-American students enrolled than it should--the campus was only 3% black, 9.5%
Hispanic, and 0.4% Native American, in
contrast with about 45% Asian-American and about 33% white.

The chancellor blames the underrepresentation of traditionally marginalized minorities on Proposition
209 that banned racial quotas in state government.

"I personally don’t believe that most of the people who voted for 209 intended this consequence."

Oh really. But it really doesn’t matter what the people intended, chancellor. As a famous United States
Attorney General often used to say: “It’s the law.” Your job, as a government functionary, is to obey
the law. For changing the law we have legislatures and elections, initiatives from the people, and all
that stuff.

You wanna change the law? Run for election.