Sorta political: Reasons for hope

Politically and economically, we are in a very bad place right now. The political problem lies not with the elected leaders but with the public. We—meaning Canada, the United States—are currently faced with a public that is stupid and ill-informed and, apparently, likes it that way.

Governments have gotten themselves so heavily into debt that some sort of crisis which will severely damage public confidence in institutions is now inevitable. They got that way because the public keeps imagining it can have its cake and eat it too and therefore keeps voting for governments that make irrational promises about things such as free medical care, social security and mythical untaxed rich people who can be made to pay for it all. This is scary because who knows what insane ideologies will arise in the wake of this coming crisis.

Economically speaking, it's harder to judge. Maybe growth is just around the corner. It could happen and recoveries tend to start when most analysts are still pessimistic. That said, the future is not clear and I think another recession is more likely than a recovery at this point. 

The short term, however, is looking a whole lot better than it as just a  few days ago. It looked, for a while, like Obama was going to get his way and use a manufactured crisis over the supposed fiscal cliff to 1) hammer home some really stupid policy and 2) still get to blame his opponents when these policies, inevitably, failed. And it seemed like the stupid party (Republicans, just in case you didn't know) were not only not going to fight him, they were actually going to make his life easy.

And then every thing started to go in exactly the opposite direction of where they seemed to be going. The first positive hint showed up in the New York Times. It was an article saying that it was time to ditch the constitution. Seriously! This provoked a lot of outrage but it was really a confession of weakness. When people start talking that way, what their really telling you is that their immensely frustrated because they realize they are not going to get their way.

The second hint showed up in a conversation I had with a stockbroker I know. He's pro-Obama—contrary to what you might guess, most people in the financial services industry are. He opened his remarks by telling me he liked Obama and thought the only reason some people opposed him was racism. This stuff went on a while and I let him go, having learned the hard way that people are not willing to be rational on this point. I was, to tell the truth, only half paying attention, nodding politely and thinking of a way to change the subject when I realized that the whole tone of the discussion had changed somewhere along the way.

He said, "The think that has me worried is Biden. Why did they turn to him? I understand the reasons, Biden has got the contacts, he can make the thing happen. But this Biden! If he is better placed to do this than Obama then maybe, I mean Obama's a nice guy and I support him, but it's like they're admitting he isn't very good, that he hasn't got the negotiation skills to do the job."

Well, now we know, that's exactly the problem! With greater opportunity to get their way than any lefty has had since 1963, Obama and company screwed the pooch. No, things are not going well for the voices of reason yet but the immediate danger has been headed off.

It looked like the darkest hour. It looked like the Democrats were shrewd, devilish political manipulators who were going to get there way. It looked like the Republicans were going to be destroyed by a bunch of lily-livered establishment politicians who'd "compromise" their way to total destruction of their party. And then the whole thing fell apart. For a change it was the Democrats who were the stupid party/ And it turns out that the irrational idiots were not establishment Republicans but establishment Democrats who were unable to stomach any spending cuts at all.

As I say, we go right back to it next morning and there will be losses ahead but this was the dark night. This was the night where we all went yo bead expecting to see Saint Paul's bombed by the blitz only to wake up and find it still standing. Things are looking good.

Update: Don't just take my word for it. Here is what one of Obama's biggest fans has to say:

Watching the president operate with a kind of political leverage he won't soon again enjoy has not been a very encouraging experience.

Never before has so much adulation been heaped on and ope in vested in a mediocrity as uninspiring as Obama. And look out, progressives are not prudent people. As it becomes clearer and clearer that their fantasies aren't coming true (again!), you can be sure that some of them will turn to violence. They always have before.

Grumbling

Benedict [the monk, not the current pope] regards grumbling as a serious sin; not less than twelve times murmuratio is named in the Rule as a serious threat to the community.

My goal for 2013 is to withdraw further (but not completely for that cannot be done) from the world. It is better to bluntly and frankly oppose the indefensible state of our culture than to sit around grumbling about it.

The quote is from The Rule of Benedict for Beginners by Wil Derske. I am not an expert on Benedictine discipline, so I can't say how accurate Derske's interpretation is. On the whole it strikes me as a little too worldly. But Benedict himself is solid gold.

Forgiveness

Whenever anything good gets trendy with public intellectuals I get worried. Lately forgiveness has become a big thing and, in their usual fashion, the sort of people who write "think pieces" for the press have made what seemed like a pretty straightforward good seem quite dubious. I haven't a lot of say about the subject just yet, except that it troubles me a whole lot that I keep reading about forgiveness being something good for the person forgiving as opposed to the one who needs to be forgiven.

For now, I only recommend a good piece on the subject by Theodore Dalrymple, a teaser follows:

One would not expect a person who talks so much of forgiving herself to have anything valuable to say about forgiveness. She does not consider the possibility that incontinent forgiveness, deemed good in itself regardless of the act to be forgiven or the attitude of the person to be forgiven, means that no human behavior is beyond the pale, that nothing is unforgivable. This is to turn forgiveness into a kind of inalienable human right of the wrongdoer (a profoundly un-Christian view, incidentally).

A little light culture: A few words in favour of traditional dating culture

Over at a site called Thought Catalogue, a writer who signs herself Megan Boyle has made a list of all the people she had sex with. If you read the whole thing, you'll quickly notice certain patterns begin to emerge.

Here, for example, are some key lines from her descriptions of her first five ten lovers:

1. "I was convinced that this ruined my life for awhile, but I don’t feel that way anymore."
2. "Never kissed me, unless I asked."
3. "Sex was kind of routine, but okay, he was a mechanical kisser."
4. "I had a big crush on him, but he didn’t want to date me."
5. "We hooked up twice. We were really good friends. I wish we hooked up more. I wish we were still friends."
6. "It only happened once. It wasn’t good."
7. "Derek was Jess’ ex-boyfriend and one night we stayed up all night talking, I forget how that happened. ... It was dry and unmotivated, I remember thinking “why am I even doing this?”
8. "It was really good, I was very attracted to him and he was a great kisser. I had a big crush on him that didn’t go away for awhile."
9. " I was drunk and I didn’t want to and I think I started crying and made him stop."
10. "He was persistent and I think I was really bored the whole time."

This is a real train-wreck of a life that Megan has going. The obvious question is what is wrong?

Before getting to that, though, we need to discuss what isn't going wrong, that is to say the things here that might appear like alarm bells that aren't.

• I don't think, for example, the fact that some of her early sexual experiences were disasters is a problem. This is pretty normal and I suspect most women (and men) have at least one truly horrible, pride-destroying encounter in the past.
• It is also not significant that two of her lovers, such as #5 above, are other women. (She also admits to two others but doesn't seem to think they really count.) Again, this is probably normal. It's not something most women are going to be inclined to talk about, first of all because they are ashamed and second of all because guys would get cheap thrills from hearing about it. My experience, however, is that a lot of the women I have gotten to know really well have, like Megan, confessed to such a thing and I suspect that the the ones who haven't are probably just being discreet. Furthermore, while we don't talk about these things, it's pretty obvious that our culture long ago accepted that this is a pretty normal part of a girl's sexual development and accommodated itself to it.*
• I also don't think we should read too much into the crude betrayals or lack of concern for the greater impact of her sexual choices (such as having sex with her friend's ex-boyfriend or her ex-boyfriend's two brothers) that Megan reports. It's obviously a problem that she does these things and seems to do them over and over but they are a symptom of a disease rather than the disease itself.
• I also don't think it's a problem that Megan's most satisfying sexual experiences have clearly been with men who pushed her to do things she wasn't quite sure she wanted to do. She is, not surprisingly, in denial about this. I suspect an awful lot of women are like her. There is a life lesson for women here but I don't think that is the root cause of her problems.

We might get all macho, of course, and argue that the problem is that Megan just hasn't met a good lover. That isn't completely crazy as we all tend to learn more from our successes than our failures and you have a big problem if you don't have any successes. But Megan has had good lovers. The problem is that she hasn't managed to have a satisfactory relationship outside of sex with them.

There, I think, we have the relevant symptom. And we can begin to see where those women who defend traditional dating culture have a point. Look at some selected lines from her descriptions of some more of her lovers and I think you'll see the problem:

• "Then I thought I was in love with him and we had sex one night. He gave me an orgasm. Then I told him I was in love with him and he rejected me."
• "I broke up with him and treated him poorly towards the end, then immediately regretted it and drunk dialed him a lot. I regret a lot with him. We met at the wrong time."
• "We sometimes had ‘dates,’ which were confusing. I was never sure if they were dates or we were just hanging out, but 97% of the time they would end in sex."
• "We had a lot of fun together, he would make me breakfast and dinner and liked to be sung to. It felt like a relationship but it wasn’t. I wanted it to be, so I ended it."
• "He mumbled a lot and didn’t make eye contact. I tried to get him to leave for about two hours and he finally did at four in the morning. Never responded to his text messages or calls after that."
• "I was the aggressor. I wanted to date him. We had sex maybe twice, but a lot of nights we would make out or I would blow him and he would tell me to go to sleep. ... He never went down on me."
• "He only mentioned to me once that he had a girlfriend, and it was to tell me that they broke up, but I inferred that it was probably a more ‘complicated’ situation than that. We hung out and hooked up a few times this summer, but I wasn’t sure if it was a ‘just sex’ thing and honestly I’m tired and bored of wondering this all of the time with guys, so I wasn’t motivated to find out what he thought." 

The thing that really jumps out at you isn't so much the life lessons to be taken from these experiences but Megan's stunning inability to take them. It doesn't help to be really "savvy" and experienced about sex if you don't have a clue about basic relationships. Getting to the sex before you have the other stuff worked out is the problem. What women like Megan need is a return to traditional dating.

I mention above that it is women who defend traditional dating culture and that is important. Men, for the most part, don't have any brief for traditional dating culture because we don't tend to think there is anything in it for us. It's a feminist issue.

That is a jarring notion and I doubt many feminists see it that way but it is.

The second problem here is one of a lack of self respect. I said that I thought the horrible experiences Megan describes here are pretty normal and I don't think these are a product of the sexual revolution of the hook up culture. In the first ten lovers listed above, there are three guys whom she ends up having sex with even though she doesn't want to.

What is new is not that these sort of things should happen to women—bad things happen to everyone—but that we live in a  culture where no alternative exists, a culture where a "date" means, "We'll hang out a bit and then we'll go back to your place and you can blow me and I won't reciprocate and I'll tell you to go to sleep so you'll stop bothering me afterwards". And when he does this over and over again, the only response Megan has is to consider it "confusing" as opposed to what it really is which is abusive and manipulative.

This also should be a feminist issue but it isn't for this isn't date rape. The problem here isn't guys who didn't understand the meaning of "no" but of guys who were never told "no"**. Megan needs a sense of self worth that will enable her to grasp that she is too good for a guy who doesn't want to kiss her. If you have to ask a guy to kiss you, he shouldn't be taking your clothes off.

In her notes at the bottom of the piece, Megan notes that her oral sex giving-to-receiving ration is 9:3. Actually, it's worse than that as she seems to acknowledge other men whom she gave completely un-reciprocated oral sex to that she doesn't think count as people she had sex with. Again, I can see how a girl might do this once or twice just to get the experience. (I use the term "girl"rather than "woman"  intentionally.) What is missing is any learning process leading her to realize that what she has is too precious to keep doling it out.

Related to that, persistence sure works with Megan. Keep pushing and you'll get her even if you are an obvious creep such as the guy who wouldn't kiss her, or the guy who wouldn't/couldn't make eye contact, or the guy who followed her home the night she didn't want to have sex but she let him anyway. A little of what used to be called "playing hard to get" and what would more accurately be called "holding out for what you are worth" would go a long way here.

When you do the math, she has had these twenty-three partners (plus some "don't counts") in 60 months, or five years. But don't write her off because she is exceptional or because you think she is a slut. There are lots of women like her and anyone who went to college anytime in the last four decades has seen women like her.

And I'm quite sure she isn't a slut. To be honest, I think she'd be happier if she were a slut because a slut would hold out for better sex than Megan has gotten. She's just a lost and confused little girl living in a culture where the game is all rigged against her. The people who rigged it meant well but it didn't work out.







* As incorrect as it is to point this out, it's also obvious that our culture does not think this is okay for boys (although it obviously happens sometimes anyway). Our culture not only ignores situations where there is a serious risk of sex between adolescent girls and young women, it actively creates such opportunities and we just don't do that for boys.

** Feminists do recognize this on some level and you can see this in amount effort to make all sorts of things that are not "no" count as the same as if the woman had said "no". This, not surprisingly, has led to incredible abuse beginning with the ongoing fantasy of pretending that college campuses are rape factories where more women are supposedly raped than we find in the most crime-ridden  neighbourhoods. What feminists fail to note or appreciate is that our culture has put women, especially women at universities, in a position where they have to explain and justify their "no" instead of simply stating it. The problem is not that men fail to understand no but rather that every "no" gets greeted with an actual or implied "why not?" as the burden of proof has been shifted to women. You can see this in Megan above who reports finding herself in the middle of sex before it occurs to her to ask "Why am I doing this?" Women were better off when the default position was "no" such that both the man asking for a  "yes" and the woman who might grant it would have to justify that answer to themselves and to one another.

Friendship, sex and morality addendum

 By the way, anyone who reads the "science" article I linked to in my earlier post will notice I ignored one major conclusion:

Men were much more attracted to their female friends than vice versa. Men were also more likely than women to think that their opposite-sex friends were attracted to them—a clearly misguided belief. In fact, men’s estimates of how attractive they were to their female friends had virtually nothing to do with how these women actually felt, and almost everything to do with how the men themselves felt—basically, males assumed that any romantic attraction they experienced was mutual, and were blind to the actual level of romantic interest felt by their female friends.

I ignored that mostly because I think this "science" is bogus junk science, as is pretty clear if you note the sarcasm in the original post. Above and beyond that, I'd like to remind you of a bit of genuine science wherein men and women were hooked up to sensors that measured their level of sexual arousal and shown sexual images. At the same time, they were given pads where they were asked to record their subjective feelings of arousal to see how these corresponded with the objective readings. Then men's objective and subjective responses corresponded very closely.

All was different with the women. No matter what their self-proclaimed sexual orientation, they showed, on the whole, strong and swift genital arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women with men. They responded objectively much more to the exercising woman than to the strolling man, and their blood flow rose quickly — and markedly, though to a lesser degree than during all the human scenes except the footage of the ambling, strapping man — as they watched the apes. And with the women, especially the straight women, mind and genitals seemed scarcely to belong to the same person.

Mind and genitals scarcely seemed to belong to the same person! Remember that any time you hear or read reports of what women say they are or are not aroused by. Live long enough and you will eventually get bored of stories of women having affairs with people they insisted they weren't attracted to. I know it's not nice to keep pointing it out (as I do) but women are often very poor judges of what does or does not turn them on.

Friendship, sex and morality

"Science" is at it again, telling us things we should have been able to guess without being told:

New research suggests that there may be some truth to this possibility—that we may think we’re capable of being “just friends” with members of the opposite sex, but the opportunity (or perceived opportunity) for “romance” is often lurking just around the corner, waiting to pounce at the most inopportune moment.

This from an article entitled "Men and Women Can't Be 'Just Friends'".

The thing we should notice right away is how morally evasive the language is in that quote. The "opportunity" is lurking? This as if an opportunity for "romance" is something that happens to you, as if "opportunity" was an intentional, willful being waiting to trip you up, as opposed to, for example, something you yourself might be held accountable for.

Again and again we're told that sexuality is a major part of our personality and yet again and again we read articles that treat the practical consequences of this as if they were unexpected discoveries. Heterosexual men are attracted to women. We are attracted to all desirable women. And heterosexual women are attracted to all desirable men plus they have the added complication of sometimes being attracted to other women in a way that heterosexual men are not attracted to other men. There are no exceptions. It doesn't matter that the person in question is someone you are not supposed to be attracted to—that she is just a  friend, that he is your best friend's boyfriend, that she is your niece, that he is your son—the attraction is there and it is real.

There are powerful social taboos in place to help keep these things from getting out of hand but don't kid yourself, take them away and all hell would break loose.

And it is important to remember that the more you care about a person, the stronger the erotic pull will become. Remember the old line about the girl who has personality? Well, it's true. Years ago I read an interview with a photographer named Peter Gowland, who was famous for what used to be known as "glamour" photography. He said he made a point of evaluating a model before he got to know her because personality was so powerful that it blurred his ability to judge whether a woman was "objectively" beautiful. And it's just as true in your life—the very things that make friendship better make the sexual attraction stronger.

We comfort ourselves with the notion that sex is a purely physical thing and that the intellectual and spiritual aspects of friendship are something else. The truth is that these things make us more attracted to one another. Any real friendship between a man and a woman will increase the sexual attraction between them.

You wouldn't guess this following the culture because Hollywood treats the intellectual and spiritual as the opposite of erotic but watch carefully the next time you see two people fall in love and you will see that it is just these things that make the erotic possible. But in real life a relationship based on shared interests has more real erotic power. Any time your lover tells you that he or she spends time with another person because they can really talk, you need to worry.

Religious moralists make the same mistake from the other end of the telescope. They worry that fantasy sex is the enemy of erotic love, failing to see that fantasy sex only works because it systematically excludes the possibility of a real relationship. It's the real relationship that we need to be careful about. If your wife helps herself reach orgasm by imagining she is chained to the wall of a dungeon while men in leather masks have their way with her then you have nothing to worry about and she has nothing to feel guilty about. If, on the other hand, she sits on the couch and moons about how her work partner Joe, if she wishes he was there so she could really talk about things, then you both have a problem that needs to be fixed right away.

I started off by saying that science was merely telling us something we all already knew and that is what should comfort us. Our sexuality really is omnipresent and we are, or should be anyway, comfortable with dealing with the consequences of this. Romance and sex aren't opportunities that lurk around the corner; they are choices we make. You can make them consciously or you can drift into them. You can allow a friendship to just develop and suddenly find yourself kissing the person and wonder how things got this far. This happens all the time.

Or you can choose to be consciously aware of what you are doing and develop the sorts of habits and and practices that will ensure such a thing doesn't happen.

The odd thing is that the better not provoking erotic love when it is morally required that you should not, the better you will be at making it happen when you really want to.

The Feast of Stephen and universalism

If you worship at the North Pole or the shopping mall, the Feast of Stephen might be a bit of a mystery to you. In popular culture it gets a brief mention at the start of the Christmas carol "Good King Wenceslas"

Good King Wenceslas looked out,
on the Feast of Stephen

If you wonder enough to look it up, you'll find that means December 26.

Even good Bible-believing Christians don't spend a lot of time thinking about Stephen. For most he shows up as a footnote in the story of Paul.  In Acts, we learn that Paul, still called Saul at this point, approves of the stoning of Stephen. The way the story gets spelled out, that tends to become the proof that Paul/Saul really was a bad guy before becoming Paul the Apostle, who is a certified good guy.

But what of Stephen himself who was stoned to death?

We were discussing mental illness and suicide here the other day in the comments. The popular view that all suicides are mentally ill came up. It is a view without much evidence to back it up. There are, of course, suicides who suffer from mental illness such as depression or bipolar syndrome. There are many more people, however, who show no signs of mental illness and commit suicide. In fact, the majority of suicides show no signs of mental illness before killing themselves.

The popular retort to that, which I heard for the first time way back in Grade 6, is that only someone who was mentally ill would commit suicide and that, therefore, the suicide itself was all the proof we need. You can't argue with someone who pushes that kind of circular logic. That said, a few reminders are due.

The first is to point out that the argument really is circular and, therefore, invalid. The claim is that suicide is the result of mental illness and the proof that suicides were mentally ill is that they committed suicide. This is no argument at all. People who make this claim are really only saying that they really, really want to believe that all suicides are the result of mental illness.

From that flows the second reminder. For if we ask ourselves, "Why are they so determined to believe this?"  the answer is pretty clear. Everyone can see that suicide is an awful thing. To kill yourself because you see no hope is the ultimate sin of despair. Thus the desperate need to believe that the people who do this are mentally ill. And if there is no outward evidence of mental illness, they'll invent it claiming that there must have been something, perhaps only a temporary bout of it at the moment of suicide.

What is happening here is a desire to avoid the existence of real moral evil in ourselves. These days we have no trouble imagining real moral evil in those with who we disagree politically. My friends and family bombarded Facebook with moral denunciations of Wayne Lapierre in the days leading up to Christmas. To read what they wrote you would think that Lapierre was like Hitler. But that there is real moral evil in anyone else outside these cartoonish effigies (Lapierre the man bears no resemblance at all to the straw man all my friends and family hate with such passion) is something no one wants to face.

And it is telling that we describe Hitler as a "madman" after all—evil that needs to be diagnosed isn't really evil.

That belief, that real people aren't really evil, is called universalism. It comes out in the claim that perhaps no one is in hell or that we can at least hope that no one is there but it is really rooted in a deep fear of confronting evil in our own hearts. The need to have cartoonish effigies to hate goes hand in hand with this fear.

It's worth considering, in that regard, that the Church makes a point of remembering Stephen, the first Christian martyr, on the day immediately following the day it celebrates the birth of the baby Jesus. The people who stoned Stephen to death were scared of him because of what he believed.

And they stoned him. In the modern world we have sanitized the death penalty. Whether we approve of or reject capital punishment, we see it simply as a matter of whether a person deserves death for what he has done. For most of human history, simply being killed would have been seen as getting off easy. Punishments like stoning and crucifixion were not meant merely to kill the person. They were meant to humiliate and destroy him, to quite literally dehumanize him, in front of others. That is still the way it is done in large parts of, for example, the Muslim world.

The point of making the death as horrible as possible was to win the moral battle and not just to kill one person. It was to create a horrible moral drama that would put the person killed even further into the wrong as you killed him. When the Elizabethan English killed Catholics, for example, they would slowly strangle them on a rope until they were just short of death and then pull them down and do further cruel things to them such as disembowelment. They sought to destroy all hope in the mind of the person they were killing, as well as in any of his supporters who might be watching.

(It's worth noting, by the way, that no human instinct more closely related to this than the hatred of Lapierre that swamped Twitter last week.)

Is there a hell and are there people in it? Well, if it was up to human beings, the answer is "yes". We've made it and we have put people through it. But would God do this? For all eternity?

It seems to me that it is enough to know that I might end up there and that the only thing standing between me and the gates of hell is God. I don't have an argument for that. It is what I want to believe.

In any case, we celebrate today, the death of a man whose killers did everything they could to send him to hell.