Friday, September 4, 2015
Jean de Bosschère
Trump and the National Mood
Matthew Yglesias:
The politics of America seem to be mainly about what we hate. Obama caught fire because he offered, instead, something for people to aspire to. But six years of watching him beat his head against the wall of the Republican Congress has left everyone even more cynical.
Republicans are Republicans because they hate Democrats, not because they love the GOP. Trump's insults-first approach to politics catches this mood.I would add that many Democrats I know seem mainly motivated by hatred of evangelical preachers and whining billionaires, rather than affection for the Democratic Party or belief in its platform. And many Americans don't bother to vote because they hate both parties.
The politics of America seem to be mainly about what we hate. Obama caught fire because he offered, instead, something for people to aspire to. But six years of watching him beat his head against the wall of the Republican Congress has left everyone even more cynical.
Sex and Fundamentalism
I dont know if any of you folks have been following the Josh Duggar scandal. He comes from the 19 Kids and Counting family, a big clan of fundamentalist Christians who belong to a cult founded by Bill Gothard. Gothard is a very strange character into big families (the "full quiver" movement), patriarchy, sexual purity, and nonsensical interpretation of the Bible.
The Duggars have lost their TV show and generally fallen from grace because it was revealed that as a young teenager, Josh molested his younger sisters and never faced legal consequences. Stories have been circulating about his "porn addiction," and just recently his name turned up on the list of Ashley Madison accounts.
But what I wanted to write about was the reactions of many liberals to this scandal. Here is one from The Huffington Post that can stand for a whole genre:
This seems so obvious to many people that they don't even bother defending it. They just assert that fundamentalist beliefs lead to screwed-up sexuality. But do we know any such thing? I submit that we do not. I am not aware of any evidence showing that fundamentalists are more likely to molest children than secular people are. I have the same creeped out reaction to Gothard's cult that many other secular people feel, but our finding Gothard loathsome does not mean that his teachings lead to child abuse. Child abusers come from all cults, creeds, races, and classes. The one thing they have in common is that many of them were abused themselves.
And as for the Ashley Madison thing, does anybody want to argue that secular people don't have affairs?
People like our HuffPost author assume that to "bottle up" all of our sexual feelings is "sick" and "dangerous." What does she think of the Dalai Lama? Is he sick and dangerous? He is just one of thousands of priests, monks, and nuns who have led quite happy lives and done much good for the world. In fact, so far as we can measure these things, the happiest people in the world are Buddhist monks. I don't actually know very much about Buddhist monasteries, and I assume that they have the same sexual troubles as Christian monasteries; but just because some people fail at chastity doesn't mean that it isn't a good choice for others.
Does high school sex really make people happier and better adjusted? I don't see any evidence of that, either.
Human sexuality is so complex, and so diverse, that I am skeptical of all generalizations about it. As for the notion that casting aside Victorian ideas about sex would lead to a society free from neurosis, I think the history of America since 1960 pretty well disproves it. I think the assertion that Josh Duggar ended up a sexual creep because of what his parents teach is dubious in the extreme. How could we possibly know?
But what really moved to to write about this is the gloating. Every time some fundamentalist preacher falls, liberals set up a raucous cheer that has always bothered me. Why celebrate any man's humiliation? The liberal reaction has something to do with "hypocrisy." It is obnoxious, people say, to go around criticizing others for doing what you do yourself. I suppose it can be. But none of us can live up to our moral principles all of the time; the only way live without any hypocrisy would be to have no principles at all. I suppose having principles is different from preaching about them, but preachers of morals are important people in many human societies -- it is a job that many people want someone to do, and are in fact willing to pay generously to support. So someone will do it. And some of those preachers will in action fall well short of their words. It doesn't strike me as anything worth getting excited about. Nor it is it any kind of philosophical threat to the Christian worldview, which holds that all people are sinners, and all will at some point fail. The failure of any one person, or even all people, to live up to a moral code or any other standard is not in itself an attack on that code. There is nothing wrong with aspirations.
What I wonder is, why do secular people care so much? I don't. I have zero interest in what fundamentalists say about morality; it affects me not one bit. Obviously in our society there are contexts in which we have to negotiate our diverse views about sexuality, viz., sex education in public schools. But as the remarkable change in the acceptance of homosexuality shows, the rest of us are perfectly capable of getting on with life regardless of what the Baptist preachers say.
It seems to me that people who felt secure about their own ideas would not be so interested in what fundamentalists say. To care is to accord the preachers exactly the authority they crave, the authority to judge you. If you feel judged by fundamentalist preaching, perhaps you need to look carefully into your own heart and figure out why. Because lashing angrily back at them, and partying it up when one is revealed as a philanderer, is a strange way to stand up for secular values.
The only thing I feel about Josh Duggar's humiliation is sadness; sadness for the girls he molested, for all parents who have to confront such behavior from their children, for his wife, for his siblings who thought they were part of something positive and godly. There is nothing to celebrate here, and no grist for any kind of systematic attack on Christian morality or child-rearing. Bad things really do happen to good people. To believe that hypocrites deserve to be publicly humiliated, or that parents who teach abstinence deserve a child molester for a son, is exactly the sort of Old Testament morality that I want to get away from.
The Duggars have lost their TV show and generally fallen from grace because it was revealed that as a young teenager, Josh molested his younger sisters and never faced legal consequences. Stories have been circulating about his "porn addiction," and just recently his name turned up on the list of Ashley Madison accounts.
But what I wanted to write about was the reactions of many liberals to this scandal. Here is one from The Huffington Post that can stand for a whole genre:
But the Ashley Madison account? The affairs? The strippers? I only have one thing to say on that front -- Duh.Etc.
Of course he behaved that way. He was kept from a normal life, a normal childhood, a normal upbringing. He was raised to believe that the natural, healthy feelings he was having about sexuality were wrong. He was taught that there shouldn't even be any kissing until marriage. Are you kidding me? Think about that for a minute -- telling an adolescent that they are to bottle up all of their healthy, happy sexual feelings because they are "bad" and "wrong." It's sick. It's dangerous. And, obviously, it's escalating all around.
In fact, I believe it was that very upbringing that lead him to the criminal behavior with his sisters. He was taught that victims were to blame. He was taught that women were put on this earth to serve men. He was taught that life barely existed outside of the four walls of his family home. What on earth did we expect to happen?
This seems so obvious to many people that they don't even bother defending it. They just assert that fundamentalist beliefs lead to screwed-up sexuality. But do we know any such thing? I submit that we do not. I am not aware of any evidence showing that fundamentalists are more likely to molest children than secular people are. I have the same creeped out reaction to Gothard's cult that many other secular people feel, but our finding Gothard loathsome does not mean that his teachings lead to child abuse. Child abusers come from all cults, creeds, races, and classes. The one thing they have in common is that many of them were abused themselves.
And as for the Ashley Madison thing, does anybody want to argue that secular people don't have affairs?
People like our HuffPost author assume that to "bottle up" all of our sexual feelings is "sick" and "dangerous." What does she think of the Dalai Lama? Is he sick and dangerous? He is just one of thousands of priests, monks, and nuns who have led quite happy lives and done much good for the world. In fact, so far as we can measure these things, the happiest people in the world are Buddhist monks. I don't actually know very much about Buddhist monasteries, and I assume that they have the same sexual troubles as Christian monasteries; but just because some people fail at chastity doesn't mean that it isn't a good choice for others.
Does high school sex really make people happier and better adjusted? I don't see any evidence of that, either.
Human sexuality is so complex, and so diverse, that I am skeptical of all generalizations about it. As for the notion that casting aside Victorian ideas about sex would lead to a society free from neurosis, I think the history of America since 1960 pretty well disproves it. I think the assertion that Josh Duggar ended up a sexual creep because of what his parents teach is dubious in the extreme. How could we possibly know?
But what really moved to to write about this is the gloating. Every time some fundamentalist preacher falls, liberals set up a raucous cheer that has always bothered me. Why celebrate any man's humiliation? The liberal reaction has something to do with "hypocrisy." It is obnoxious, people say, to go around criticizing others for doing what you do yourself. I suppose it can be. But none of us can live up to our moral principles all of the time; the only way live without any hypocrisy would be to have no principles at all. I suppose having principles is different from preaching about them, but preachers of morals are important people in many human societies -- it is a job that many people want someone to do, and are in fact willing to pay generously to support. So someone will do it. And some of those preachers will in action fall well short of their words. It doesn't strike me as anything worth getting excited about. Nor it is it any kind of philosophical threat to the Christian worldview, which holds that all people are sinners, and all will at some point fail. The failure of any one person, or even all people, to live up to a moral code or any other standard is not in itself an attack on that code. There is nothing wrong with aspirations.
What I wonder is, why do secular people care so much? I don't. I have zero interest in what fundamentalists say about morality; it affects me not one bit. Obviously in our society there are contexts in which we have to negotiate our diverse views about sexuality, viz., sex education in public schools. But as the remarkable change in the acceptance of homosexuality shows, the rest of us are perfectly capable of getting on with life regardless of what the Baptist preachers say.
It seems to me that people who felt secure about their own ideas would not be so interested in what fundamentalists say. To care is to accord the preachers exactly the authority they crave, the authority to judge you. If you feel judged by fundamentalist preaching, perhaps you need to look carefully into your own heart and figure out why. Because lashing angrily back at them, and partying it up when one is revealed as a philanderer, is a strange way to stand up for secular values.
The only thing I feel about Josh Duggar's humiliation is sadness; sadness for the girls he molested, for all parents who have to confront such behavior from their children, for his wife, for his siblings who thought they were part of something positive and godly. There is nothing to celebrate here, and no grist for any kind of systematic attack on Christian morality or child-rearing. Bad things really do happen to good people. To believe that hypocrites deserve to be publicly humiliated, or that parents who teach abstinence deserve a child molester for a son, is exactly the sort of Old Testament morality that I want to get away from.
Thursday, September 3, 2015
Ai Weiwei: Recent Work
Tieli wood (iron wood) from dismantled temples of the Qing dynast (1644-1911) and iron parallel bars.
Wednesday, September 2, 2015
The Latest Threat from China
Science reports:
To safeguard China’s rarely seen military aircraft—the Chengdu J-20 and Shenyang J-31 fighter jets—from the risk of damage by accidental bird strikes, or birds sucked up into high-performance jet engines, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has trained a squadron of male rhesus macaques to search and destroy nests near an unnamed airfield, or airfields, in northern China. . . .What is Obama doing about this danger? We must not let there be a trained monkey gap!
PLA taught the macaques to scramble up trees and dismantle nests by pulling out twigs, airbase commander Wang Yuejian told China Daily in May: “Our statistics show that the two monkeys have taken out about 180 nests over the past month." In late August, Han Bing, political commissar of an unnamed airbase, bragged to the paper about the novel approach: “Using macaques to disperse birds has low costs and risks with high efficiency, and this is a first in the world."
Swearing Off Outrage Journalism
Noah Millman:
I can remember when outrage fueled me, rather than leaving me enervated. In the wake of the attacks of 9-11, every terrifying piece of news felt like it was essential. When I was a more conventional right-winger, every outrage by the “other side” confirmed me in my convictions, and every time the “other side” got outraged it confirmed to me that their perceptions were deeply biased, their priorities deeply confused. But it’s not like that outrage fueled any, you know, action, much less any understanding. All it fueled was – a feeling.I agree completely: grievance is a dangerous drug, to be used with great caution, not poured over our daily bread like antibiotics in chicken fed.
Outrage is a kind of drug, one that gives the illusion of involvement, of caring, when really derives its power from an emotional and informational distance that the stories themselves then strive to deepen, laying the groundwork for the next piece of outrage porn to do its work. And thus proceeds an addictive cycle. . . .
Outrage, like cheap vodka, which once seemed to reduce my inhibitions and make me feel strong and confident, now makes me feel a bit ill, and puts me to sleep.
Summing Up the Republican Primary
Apparently some of Mitt Romney's friends are saying that their guy is the only one who can stop Trump. As for the current crop of mainstream candidates:
"These guys like Walker and Perry, they were big deals in their states, but you get them onto the national stage and it's a different story," a former Romney adviser told me. "It's like they were in middle school, and now they're freshmen in high school and they're getting their faces slammed in the toilets."You know Trump would love that image.
A Roman Tin Ship Found Off Brittany
Lead and the Dark Ages
Victoria Lautman, India's Stepwells
Dating Demography
Jon Birger has been researching the demography of dating and marriage in America, and has come up with some interesting statistics:
The main cause of the Mormon imbalance seems to be that far more Mormon men leave the faith than Mormon women, leaving churches full of unattached women. (Atheists, by contrast, are about 70 percent male.)
Among certain ultra-Orthodox Jewish groups around New York, there is talk of a "Shidduch Crisis," from the Hebrew word for marriage match. Single women far outnumber single men. But the demography seems to be completely different than that of Mormons. The cause is that Orthodox men are increasingly willing to wait longer before marrying and to marry someone substantially younger than they are. Plus, the population is growing by about 4% a year, so if men are marrying women three years younger the female cohort is 12% larger than the male.
There are also some weird geographic imbalances, which have to do with the availability of work. Certain American counties have as many as twice as many single men as women -- these are mostly places with major military bases, or lots of drilling for oil and gas. Others have twice as many single women as men.
It seems like a big lesson in how unnatural, in many ways, modern society has become. As we find more and more ways to divide ourselves up -- by religion, politics, lifestyle, etc. -- it becomes ever harder for everyone to find a mate.
Multiple studies show that college-educated Americans are increasingly reluctant to marry those lacking a college degree. This bias is having a devastating impact on the dating market for college-educated women. Why? According to 2012 population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, there are 5.5 million college-educated women in the U.S. between the ages of 22 and 29 versus 4.1 million such men. That’s four women for every three men. Among college grads age 30 to 39, there are 7.4 million women versus 6.0 million men—five women for every four men.And this may have a significant influence on the culture:
Lopsided gender ratios don’t just make it statistically harder for college-educated women to find a match. They change behavior too. According to sociologists, economists and psychologists who have studied sex ratios throughout history, the culture is less likely to emphasize courtship and monogamy when women are in oversupply. Heterosexual men are more likely to play the field, and heterosexual women must compete for men’s attention.And things are even worse for women in certain religious groups. In Utah, there are now 150 single Mormon women for each 100 single Mormon men. One result is that Salt Lake City leads the nation is cosmetic surgery, especially breast enlargement.
The main cause of the Mormon imbalance seems to be that far more Mormon men leave the faith than Mormon women, leaving churches full of unattached women. (Atheists, by contrast, are about 70 percent male.)
Among certain ultra-Orthodox Jewish groups around New York, there is talk of a "Shidduch Crisis," from the Hebrew word for marriage match. Single women far outnumber single men. But the demography seems to be completely different than that of Mormons. The cause is that Orthodox men are increasingly willing to wait longer before marrying and to marry someone substantially younger than they are. Plus, the population is growing by about 4% a year, so if men are marrying women three years younger the female cohort is 12% larger than the male.
There are also some weird geographic imbalances, which have to do with the availability of work. Certain American counties have as many as twice as many single men as women -- these are mostly places with major military bases, or lots of drilling for oil and gas. Others have twice as many single women as men.
It seems like a big lesson in how unnatural, in many ways, modern society has become. As we find more and more ways to divide ourselves up -- by religion, politics, lifestyle, etc. -- it becomes ever harder for everyone to find a mate.
The Syrian Catastrophe
In just 4 years, over half of Syria’s population of 22 million has been killed, displaced or fled the country.
--Paul Kirby
--Paul Kirby
Tuesday, September 1, 2015
Trump Understands the Modern World
I was just reading an essay about Hillary Clinton's defensive approach to politics, which has partly been forced on her by 25 years of attacks and partly seems to be natural to her. Hillary is tough, but criticism gets to her. She lashes back, or tries to limit access to her actions and thoughts by tricks like using a private email account while Secretary of State. Her basic platform is defensive: she is defending women's rights, worker's rights, Social Security.
Now compare Donald Trump. Trump's public record contains a hundred times more scandal, slander, and skullduggery than Hillary's. Does he care? No. Does he have any interest in defending his past actions, say, when he pulled the plug on the struggling Atlantic City casino he launched with so much fanfare and taxpayer support? No. Does he apologize? No. Has he made any effort to limit the public's access to his life, or his decision-making process? No. "Here I am," he says. "Take me or leave me, but don't ask me to change."
I wonder if this is not the future of politics. The 24-hour glare of modern public life has driven many politicians into a shell, afraid to do or say anything that might later be held against them. Trump understands that this is self-defeating. Yes, everything that important politicians do is noted and may show up in an attack ad, but Trump is showing that to pay too much attention to such things only erodes your public standing. By paying attention to criticism, you only make yourself look weak. By concealment, you only make it look like you have something terrible to hide. All the other Republican Presidential candidates have hewed to the party line with grim rigor, and the tiniest deviations require profuse explanations or apologies. Trump's positions are all over the map, and some them (raising taxes on the rich, expanding Medicare) are supposed to be death for any Republican. Does he apologize, or explain? No. As a result, he looks strong and the rest of the field look like sheep.
Like Mitt Romney, Trump has changed positions on important issues. But unlike Romney, who went into a weird sort of denial about it, Trump just says "I changed my mind."
Trump is a bizarre messenger, but his message may be important. Politics has been for a long time -- centuries? -- the art of carefully crafting a public image. What the voters saw had to be micro-managed and polished to a shine, regardless of what was happening backstage. Marital problems had to be buried, outbursts of temper staged in back rooms. But the era when FDR could hide his polio, and Kennedy his affairs, is over. With every passing year, it becomes harder and harder to hide anything about our lives from the probing world. In twenty years we will have people running for president whose entire lives are documented somewhere online, from their sorority stunts to their exaggerated resumes to everything they said in their first campaigns for city council. At some point they will be faced with awkward stuff dragged out of their pasts. Maybe emails will be hacked, twitter accounts probed, sins exposed. The winners will be the ones who wave all this away and push brazenly onward. To be defensive about past baggage will be a sure recipe for defeat.
Trump's bizarre, narcissistic campaign is showing how this is done.
Now compare Donald Trump. Trump's public record contains a hundred times more scandal, slander, and skullduggery than Hillary's. Does he care? No. Does he have any interest in defending his past actions, say, when he pulled the plug on the struggling Atlantic City casino he launched with so much fanfare and taxpayer support? No. Does he apologize? No. Has he made any effort to limit the public's access to his life, or his decision-making process? No. "Here I am," he says. "Take me or leave me, but don't ask me to change."
I wonder if this is not the future of politics. The 24-hour glare of modern public life has driven many politicians into a shell, afraid to do or say anything that might later be held against them. Trump understands that this is self-defeating. Yes, everything that important politicians do is noted and may show up in an attack ad, but Trump is showing that to pay too much attention to such things only erodes your public standing. By paying attention to criticism, you only make yourself look weak. By concealment, you only make it look like you have something terrible to hide. All the other Republican Presidential candidates have hewed to the party line with grim rigor, and the tiniest deviations require profuse explanations or apologies. Trump's positions are all over the map, and some them (raising taxes on the rich, expanding Medicare) are supposed to be death for any Republican. Does he apologize, or explain? No. As a result, he looks strong and the rest of the field look like sheep.
Like Mitt Romney, Trump has changed positions on important issues. But unlike Romney, who went into a weird sort of denial about it, Trump just says "I changed my mind."
Trump is a bizarre messenger, but his message may be important. Politics has been for a long time -- centuries? -- the art of carefully crafting a public image. What the voters saw had to be micro-managed and polished to a shine, regardless of what was happening backstage. Marital problems had to be buried, outbursts of temper staged in back rooms. But the era when FDR could hide his polio, and Kennedy his affairs, is over. With every passing year, it becomes harder and harder to hide anything about our lives from the probing world. In twenty years we will have people running for president whose entire lives are documented somewhere online, from their sorority stunts to their exaggerated resumes to everything they said in their first campaigns for city council. At some point they will be faced with awkward stuff dragged out of their pasts. Maybe emails will be hacked, twitter accounts probed, sins exposed. The winners will be the ones who wave all this away and push brazenly onward. To be defensive about past baggage will be a sure recipe for defeat.
Trump's bizarre, narcissistic campaign is showing how this is done.
The Sun Temple of Vasagard
Fascinating. The enormous investment late Neolithic people made in religion, astronomy, and burial of the dead never ceases to amaze me.
Overcoming the Shame of the Holocaust
I have been working my way through Saul Bellow's collected essays, among which is a lecture Bellow gave in 1988 about being a Jewish writer in America. Bellow comments at length on a passage from the memoirs of Lionel Abel, which offers a view of Israel and the Holocaust that I can't remember ever seeing expressed in quite this way. Abel:
But this is also very troubling, for two reasons. First, it portrays the events in Palestine as a drama entirely about the Jews, a sort of Old Testament story in which only the Jews matter and everyone else is just scenery. Second, it summons up a vision of the world as a chicken coop or baboon troop in which the dominant animals beat up on those beneath them, who salve their emotional wounds by immediately finding some lesser animal they can beat up on on, and so on down the hierarchy until the bottom hens and baboons have to find some smaller organism (worm, mouse) on which to displace their own humiliation. There was much more to the founding of Israel than that; it was the realization of a 2000-year dream, and the achievement of an effort toward which many Jews had been working for two generations. The Holocaust showed to many Jews the importance of setting up a Jewish state somewhere to serve as a refuge should the pogroms begin again.
But the notion that military defeat is a moral humiliation that can only be redeemed through victory is deeply rooted in humanity, and we need to do what we can to banish it from our world.
During the war I of course heard accounts of the Nazi terror. But I had no real revelation of what had occurred until sometime in 1946, more than a year after the German surrender, when I took my mother to a motion picture and we saw in a newsreel some details of the entrance of the American army into the concentration camp of Buchenwald. We witnessed the discovery of the mounds of dead bodies, the emaciated, wasted but still living prisoners who were now being liberated, and of the various means of extermination in the camp, the various gallows and also the buildings where gas was employed to kill the Nazis victims en masse.Bellow:
It was an unforgettable sight on the screen, but as remarkable was what my mother said to me when we left the theater. She said, 'I don't think the Jews can ever get over the disgrace of this.' She said nothing about the moral disgrace of the German nation . . . only about a more than moral disgrace, and one incurred by the Jews. How did they ever get over it? By succeeding in emigrating to Palestine and setting up the state of Israel.
I too had seen newsreels of the camps. . . . My reaction to this was similar to that of Mrs. Abel -- a deeply troubling sense of disgrace or human demotion, as if by such afflictions the Jews had lost the respect of the rest of humankind, as if they might now be regarded as hopeless victims, incapable of honorable self-defense, and arising from this, probably the common instinctive revulsion or loathing of the extremities of suffering -- a sense of personal contamination and aversion. The world would see the dead with a pity that placed them at the margin of humanity.Bellow disagreed with Abel about some of his interpretations of how these events played out, but he agrees about the essential thing:
What was certain was that the founders of Israel restored the lost respect of the Jews by their manliness. They removed the curse of the Holocaust, of the abasement of victimization, and for this the Jews of the Diaspora were grateful and repaid Israel with their loyalty and support.I find this fascinating. On the one hand it makes perfect sense. World War II was a great drama on the theme of power -- the Nazis had the power and used it however they wanted, until they were torn down by the even greater power of the Russians and the Americans. It was an age of hard thinking, a time when pity was shoved aside by naked force. The kind perished and the strong survived. Of course many Jews felt redeemed from their victimhood only when Jews acquired real power of their own.
But this is also very troubling, for two reasons. First, it portrays the events in Palestine as a drama entirely about the Jews, a sort of Old Testament story in which only the Jews matter and everyone else is just scenery. Second, it summons up a vision of the world as a chicken coop or baboon troop in which the dominant animals beat up on those beneath them, who salve their emotional wounds by immediately finding some lesser animal they can beat up on on, and so on down the hierarchy until the bottom hens and baboons have to find some smaller organism (worm, mouse) on which to displace their own humiliation. There was much more to the founding of Israel than that; it was the realization of a 2000-year dream, and the achievement of an effort toward which many Jews had been working for two generations. The Holocaust showed to many Jews the importance of setting up a Jewish state somewhere to serve as a refuge should the pogroms begin again.
But the notion that military defeat is a moral humiliation that can only be redeemed through victory is deeply rooted in humanity, and we need to do what we can to banish it from our world.
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