Children are Boring. Discuss

Half a century ago, in her Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir called woman “the victim of the species.” Actually, she included in her chapter on “The Data of Biology” the idea that all female mammals were thus disadvantaged. For instance:

The fish and the bird, which expel the egg from the body before the embryo develops, are less enslaved to their offspring than is the female mammal.

The name of the game, you see, is “autonomy.”

So when journalist Helen Kirwan-Taylor exclaims in print “Sorry, but my children bore me to death!” you can see where the idea came from when
“she argues provocatively that modern women must not be enslaved by their children.”

The thrust of Beauvoir’s life and work is that the data of biology should not get in the way of more important things, like autonomy, creative work, writing painting, sexuality, and all that sort of thing. In fact the central evil of the existentialism that she and J-P Sartre gave the world is “bad faith.”

That doesn’t mean lying, by the way. Writes Austin Cline:

According to Sartre, bad faith occurs when someone tries to rationalize our existence or actions through religion, science, or some other belief system which imposes meaning or coherence on human existence.

Translated, that means that it is wrong to use knowledge to explain the world, because almost all our knowledge of the world comes from other people.

The point of life is to be an autonomous creative, self-inventing individual, not a slavish follower of other peoples’ ideas. “In the absence of any fixed human nature or absolute, external standards, we must all become responsible for whatever choices we make.”

Obvious, the data of biology have a way of severely restricting this kind of freedom. In fact, we could say that the data of biology, which have exploded in the last half-century, tend to raise more and more questions about “the absence of any fixed human nature.” When it comes to nature vs. nurture, nature has been putting points on the board consistently for decades.

You can understand, again, why the feminists had to destroy Harvard President Larry Summers. If women are indeed different from men, and are indeed programmed by a fixed human nature to be child bearers and child nurturers, then the dream of perfect autonomy and equality and an end to underrepresentation in the professions and competitive occupations is a fantasy.

But Helen Kirwan-Taylor has a point. Children are boring, or rather, they are work, and they will suck everything out of you and then ask for more. It is much more fun to work with interesting intelligent adults in fashion journalism as she seems to do. Rich women since the dawn of time have opted to pay other people to look after their children.

It is just the bourgeoisie that has made a cult out of child-raising. The question is: Why? Why has the middle class made such a big thing out of childhood and parenting?

Washington State Supreme Court Upholds DOMA

With the 5-4 decision of the Washington State Supreme Court upholding the state’s Defense of Marriage Act, it looks like the gay marriage issue will move to an accommodation of gay partnerships and not the redefinition of marriage that the high court in Massachusetts mandated back in 2003.

The court’s majority decision (here and here) was split between three justices (Barbara A. Madsen, writing for Chief Justice Gerry L. Alexander and Charles W. Johnson) who said, hey, it is up to the legislature to redefine marriage and two more conservative justices (James M. Johnson and Richard B. Sanders) who argued a more forceful defense of heterosexual marriage, arguing that there is “a compelling governmental interest in preserving the institution of marriage.” On the other hand,

"I would hold that there is no rational basis for denying same-sex couples the right to marry," wrote Justice Mary E. Fairhurst, who was joined by Justices Tom Chambers, Susan Owens and Bobbe J. Bridge [in dissent].

Since six states, Connecticut, Georgia, Nebraska, Massachusetts, New York and Tennessee, recently upheld traditional marriage, it appears that a consensus is developing to require gay activists to go through the legislature for relief rather than the courts. That’s probably a good idea because there are, in fact, a host of issues around marriage, including government benefits, safety, fertility, adoption, that really should not be decided under duress after an activist court decision.

Three of the Washington State justices are up for reelection in the fall. They are Justices Alexander (voting in the majority) and Justices Chambers and Owens (dissenting).

Is Religion vs. Science a Red Herring?

While we battle in the public square about whether religious belief can coexist with faith in scientific method, some scientists just go ahead and believe in God anyway.
In The New York Times Cornelia Dean looks at the books of three scientists who came to faith. For instance,

In “The Language of God,” Dr. Collins, the geneticist who led the American government’s effort to decipher the human genome, describes his own journey from atheism to committed Christianity, a faith he embraced as a young physician.

Of course, Dean also gives us the latest from the religion-and-science-don’t-mix crowd, including Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) and Daniel C. Dennett (Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon).

Of course, just as the professors of faith cannot prove (except to themselves) that God exists, the advocates for atheism acknowledge that they cannot prove (not yet, anyway ) that God does not exist. Instead, Drs. Dawkins and Dennett sound two major themes: a) the theory of evolution is correct, and creationism and its cousin, intelligent design, are wrong; and b) a field of research called evolutionary psychology can explain why religious belief seems to be universal among Homo sapiens.

And, as Dean writes, these authors advance their ideas with something like “religious fervor.”

Of course, ever since Kant, we have been in the position where we can’t prove the existence, or non-existence of God. In fact, we can’t even prove the existence of reality. Anyway, they are two different problems.

The problem of reality is the problem of the “is.” How can we know reality, and how reliable is our knowledge? Since Kant we have gradually come to grasp that all we can have is a view of reality that is good until updated.

The problem of God is the problem of the “ought.” What is our purpose; what should we do; what is the meaning of the universe?

To understand the problem of the “ought” we should go to the man who was both a Catholic priest and a top twentieth century physicist: Georges Lemaître. He was the guy who invented the Big Bang Theory of Creation. It is worth reading what John Farrell writes about him.

Back in the early 1930s, the Nobel Laureate Paul Michael Dirac had a chance to discuss the expanding universe with Lemaître. Dirac was an atheist, and yet later he recalled, "When I was talking with Lemaître about this subject and feeling stimulated by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion. However Lemaître did not agree with me. After thinking it over he suggested psychology as lying closest to religion."

Now this is a very disturbing idea, and it cuts across the grain of the usual science vs. religion controversy represented by the books discussed by Cornelia Dean.

What is Lemaître saying? I would argue that he is saying that religion and psychology are both about the human soul, what it means to be a human. Science and creation are really secondary issues. The big issue is: how should I live my life? That applies both at the immanent level of how to treat the other people in your life, and at the transcendent level of what’s it all about?

In other words, forget arguing about the “is.” Evolution vs. Intelligent Design is a blind alley. The big questions are about the “ought.” And whether God exists or not, each one of us acts and lives our life based upon some faith, conscious or unconscious, in the meaning and the purpose of life.

Very often we act against our understanding of the meaning and purpose of life. But that is another story.

Humiliation After Humiliation

Are we in a war with the Islamists? Andrew C. McCarthy is worried that we don’t really take the Islamists seriously. But they are very serious about us. There is no doubt about what Sheikh Nasrullah, leader of Hezbollah, thinks. It’s war, war to the death.

“We consider [the United States] to be an enemy because it wants to humiliate our governments, our regimes, and our peoples. Because it is the greatest plunderer of our treasures, our oil, and our resources.... This American administration is our enemy. Our motto, which we are not afraid to repeat year after year, is: ‘Death to America!’”

No doubt there are thousands of Levantine antiquities in American museums that ought, in the fullness of time, to be returned to their lands of origin. But plundering oil and resources. Please! When paying $75 per barrel?

The real beef, of course, is the humiliation, the way it all went wrong and Islam became not the glorious expanding fist of God but a collapsed cultural backwater sustained only by the heroin of oil revenues.

The refusal of the United States to take the Islamists seriously, and to brand them as an enemy—the complaint of McCarthy—is not necessarily negligence: it is yet another humiliation for the Arabs of the Middle East.

As the Israelis uncover the surprising extent of the military infrastructure in southern Lebanon we can understand the meaning of all those reports from Iran about workers not getting paid for months at a time. Now we know where the payroll money went. It was sent to Lebanon to build up Hezbollah. And now a lot of it is being blown to blazes. Another humiliation.

If we review all the brave revolutions of the last century that promised death to America and death to capitalism we can observe a common problem. After all the fighting words there came the problem of delivering. And in every case the revolutionaries never had the power to carry out their boasts. The Bolsheviks wasted the fruitful land of Russia. The Nazis didn’t have the economic and military power to conquer Russia. Mao nearly starved China to death trying to become a world power by selling the seed corn of China’s peasants.

You have to wonder. How close is Iran to economic ruin? All these foreign adventures don’t come cheap.

It is relatively easy to find soft spots in the world and entice teenage thugs into the streets. But you have to create a power base if you really want to strut in the world.

The record of the last century is that if you want to lead a powerful nation then you need to create a powerful, capitalist economy, featuring a free people. It is a lesson that the Chinese seem to have learned in the last generation.

It seems to be the one thing that the Islamists cannot bring themselves to do. It is the final humiliation that the Islamists cannot even begin to face.

GDP Up 20 pct. You Gotta Problem With That?

How much economic growth is enough? Writes Pete du Pont,

In the past 33 months the size of America's entire economy has increased by 20%--or, as National Review Online's Larry Kudlow put it, "In less than three years, the U.S. economic pie has expanded by $2.2 trillion, an output add-on that is roughly the same size as the total Chinese economy."

You gotta problem with that? A lot of Americans seem to, since a majority of Americans give President Bush low marks for his stewardship of the economy.

Don’t worry. The federal government has shared in the bounty. Revenues are soaring. In fact the revenue increases are obscene.

Federal tax receipts increased by 15%-- $274 billion--last year and 13%-- $206 billion--in the first nine months of this fiscal year, which, as the Journal points out, means the nine-month increases for the past two years represent the highest growth rates in 25 years. Looking ahead to the end of this fiscal year, total inflation-adjusted government receipts will likely be 23% above 2003 when the Bush tax cuts were signed into law.

You would think that the Democrats would at least be pleased about that.

Yes, those Bush tax cuts are really helping the economy surge ahead, and they are even cutting taxes in the states, although not in the Soviet of Washington, of course.

But there is one group of Americans who have not been converted to the virtues of tax cuts. And we mean, as we always do here at the Road to the Middle Class, tax rate cuts. Who is that mean-spirited, negative, reactionary group? Who else, but Congressional Democrats.

Today the Democratic Party is so vehemently opposed to income tax cuts that when President Bush's reached their final vote in May 2003, only 4% of Democratic legislators (2 of 48 senators and 7 of 205 representatives) voted "yes."

Naturally, the New York Times is not to be outdone by their pals on Capitol Hill when it comes to railing against tax rate cuts.

[V]arious New York Times editorials called them "economically unsound," claimed that "they will increase the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars" and said they were unlikely "to stimulate the wallowing economy."

No doubt the Times editorialist was confusing the national economy with the Old Media economy. As of this writing, there doesn’t seem to be anything that can stimulate that economy.

Let’s finish up with some more numbers. Because the wallowing MSMers certainly won’t talk them up, we will.

Reducing the capital gains tax rate from 20% to 15% increased capital gains tax receipts by 79% from 2000 to 2004. Cutting the dividend tax rate by more than half--from 39.6% to 15%--increased dividend tax receipts by 35% from 2002 to 2004. And corporate tax receipts have nearly tripled since 2003, reaching $250 billion for the past nine months, 26% higher than the same period last year.

With all that money flooding into the federal coffers I’d say that it is time to repeal the Death Tax.

As composer Giuseppe Verdi said to his librettist, Piave: “Cut, cut, and cut again!”

Can the Left Abandon Appeasement?

Back in 2004 the German writer Henryk Broder wrote to Welt am Sonntag to say that “Europa - dein Familienname ist Appeasement!” Interesting how he used the English word. The German for appeasement, according to Google, is “Beschwichtigung.” Yes. It means what you think it does. “Europe, thy family name is appeasement.”

Subsequently, Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Axel Springer, publisher of Die Welt, wrote a stinging amplification: “Europe - Thy Name is Cowardice.”

But let us be charitable to our liberal and lefty friends. Their whole belief system is predicated on the moral necessity of appeasement towards the oppressed and the marginalized, beginning with the working class in 1850. What else would they do?

It was a belief system that worked well for them for over a century. And it also gave them enormous political power.

But the question now before us is: Should we continue the policy of appeasement when it is the Muslim immigrants to Europe and the mad mullahs of Iran that are demanding it?

The saving grace of the old appeasement was that the workers, and after them the blacks, women, and gays, were in the last analysis loyal citizens of their nation states. But the Muslims immigrants may not be. Their first loyalty may be to their faith not to their adopted country.

If that is the case the wages of appeasement is not going to be merely a large public sector and economic stagnation, but something rather bloody.

But can the left change its belief system and its whole way of life in response to the new challenge?

In Israel, according to Dennis Prager, the left that was critical of Israeli policy in the occupied areas of Gaza and the West Bank has all of a sudden changed its tune. Writes Amos Oz, Israeli author and leftist:

"Many times in the past, the Israeli peace movement has criticized Israeli military operations. Not this time. . . . This time, Israel is not invading Lebanon. It is defending itself from daily harassment and bombardment of dozens of our towns and villages. . . . There can be no moral equation between Hezbollah and Israel. Hezbollah is targeting Israeli civilians wherever they are, while Israel is targeting mostly Hezbollah."

But has the mainstream left in Europe or in the United States reached the tipping point where they can no longer continue down the road of appeasement? Don’t hold your breath.

Is The West Too Soft To Be Ruthless?

Conservatives are taking a look today at the meaning of “proportionality.” Asks John Podhoretz:

What if liberal democracies have now evolved to a point where they can no longer wage war effectively because they have achieved a level of humanitarian concern for others that dwarfs any really cold-eyed pursuit of their own national interests?

Or you could wonder, with the more pungent Mark Steyn, what to do in your state when

the bumper stickers proclaim confidently, War Is Not the Answer.

It’s true, Steyn writes, war is not the answer. War is the question: “[I]s what you are worth defending?”

“You may not be interested in war,” said Trotsky, “but war is interested in you.”

The logic of appeasement is that it is the logical course of action for a people that does not yet realize how interested war is in them. Only when they catch up with reality do they switch from appeasement to resistance.

Podhoretz asks the question:

Could World War II have been won by Britain and the United States if the two countries did not have it in them to firebomb Dresden and nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

The answer is that in the 1930s they did not have it in them to firebomb innocent civilians. It took the crucible of war and the London Blitz to rile them up enough to find ruthless warriors like “Bomber” Harris and Curtis LeMay that had it in them to carpet bomb German and Japanese cities.

After the war, of course, those with delicate sensibilities could start second guessing, and build distinguished academic careers building the nuanced case that the strategic bombers, the ruthless men of action, were monsters.

The point is that in today’s war we are not “there” yet. We are not to the point where we are willing to go ruthless in the War on Terror.

For the Israelis, of course, that point has already been reached. If they do not take out Hezbollah then they are saying that it is OK to rain missiles on the Israeli heartland. For them the years of proportionate response are over.