Plumb Lines Talks Gay Tweens

As a special feature, we have two Plumb Lines contributors and a couple newcomers talking about what’s in the news.

KS: The sky grows darker yet, and the sea rises higher: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/magazine/27out-t.html?pagewanted=1&ref=us

DS: The article KS links to is extremely interesting. The weirdest angle is the ubiquitous bisexuality, which has fewer immediate political ramifications and so is talked about less, but is perhaps more ultimately significant than the mainstreaming of conventional homosexuality. The most telling quote in the article: “he’ll make out with anyone.” Might our society eventually come to see any orientation at all as an intolerable limitation of desire? I often think of that splendid line from Troilus and Cressida when contemplating these end-of-civilization moments: “And appetite, a universal wolf… must make perforce a universal prey, and last eat up himself.”

BHD: Encouraging tweens to cement a sexual identity is surely a kind of child-abuse.

DS: BHD, I would be interested to know whether you believe this to be true of heterosexual identity as well. Presumably we all find the article’s token conservatives’ lines about how tweens shouldn’t be thinking about sex at all unconvincing, but it’s unclear to me how one should in fact go about encouraging the cementing of a particular identity, if we think that one best, or discouraging cementing of identity without implicitly endorsing ‘experimentation,’ even if only experimentation of desire.

BHD: A good question, and one that I was thinking about shortly after I wrote that.

I think it’s healthy and prudent to promote tweens’ growing sense of masculine or feminine self; and my pet theory of psychosexual development predicts that this would tend to reinforce their heterosexual identity as an important but appropriately indirect effect. Parents and mentors should model distinctly masculine or feminine virtues. They should encourage tweens to look forward to and prepare for, and eventually embrace, the distinct privileges and responsibilities of their sex (whether these are dealt them by nature or by benign nurture or cultural fiat–the duties of marriage and parenthood being, however, always chief among them). They should more directly foster in tweens the kind of identity that doesn’t develop naturally–supernatural identity as a son or daughter of God, which elevates and perfects whatever other identities do develop naturally, and prepares them to deal adequately with any misshapen identities.

In short: father-son fishing trips; bar mitzvahs; other cultural and religious equivalents of these; and their feminine counterparts. Actually, I think this is less developmentally necessary for girls than for boys, which by the way may account for some of the qualitative differences between male and female homosexuality, but that’s all for another discussion.

WK: I agree with BHD that the most healthy sexual identity develops naturally. But to bring that point out a bit, perhaps the mere practice of self-consciously “cementing a sexual identity” is a bad idea for the vast majority of normal boys and girls. Other pursuits should take up all of a tween’s – and perhaps anyone’s – life, such as identifying one’s vocation, abiding by our responsibilities to God and man,  participating in wholesome endeavors among friends, growing in knowledge and wisdom of life (including the proper exercise of our sexual faculties), and fulfilling family and community duties. A good healthy sexual identity seems incidental to a life well lived, whereas a warped sexual identity often seems to be the result of hyper self-consciousness.

DS: The question hinges on what is meant by “natural,” I suppose. It seems true that a healthy sexual identity should generally develop unself-consciously. This doesn’t mean, though, that sexual identity could develop “naturally” in the sense of “independently of culture.” The mechanisms for the development of healthy sexual identity, some of which, I presume, are those that BHD described, seem to have altered, or to be no longer effective in the same way. The challenge, then, might be to make explicit what was formerly implicit — to preserve, or invent anew, mechanisms for the transmission of the right kind of sexuality from generation to generation. What’s particularly challenging is that these new kinds of mechanism must be oppositional, in that they must provide not just an unself-conscious, virtuous sexuality, but a mode of articulation with public perversity, a counter-discourse of desire. These mechanisms might turn out to be things like going on fishing trips, but I doubt it.

Keith Staples is a contributor to Plumb Lines

David Schaengold is a contributor to Plumb Lines

B. Higgins Dass is pursuing graduate studies in philosophy

Will Kane is studying law

Asked and Answered

“Is there some reason this is a bad idea?” asks Conor Friedersdorf, about his plan to plant fruit trees on city streets. Yes, there is. Most of the fruit will be unpicked, and will fall on the ground and rot. This will result in a greatly increased burden on muncipal street-cleaning employees. If many of them roll into sewers (the fruit, not the employees), as seems likely, actual disaster could ensue.

That said, many street trees currently are fruit trees, just of a genetically modified variety that produces only very small and entirely inedible fruit. The Bradford Pear is particularly common.

-David Schaengold

Pro-life Fashion?

I’ve been told that being pro-life isn’t just about opposition to abortion, it’s also about the celebration of new life.  Well, here’s your party outfit:

“We want to highlight the belly,” says designer Marisol Rodríguez. “This is happiness that is showing through your clothes.”

If the clothing line’s design shows a fun-loving appreciation for new life, the way it is made is equally telling:

She was particularly troubled by high unemployment among women who are in their 50s — many of them fired from jobs despite their skills, but not yet eligible for retirement assistance, which begins at age 62. “What do you do when no one wants to hire you, and you still have to support your family and pay your rent?” Rodríguez asks.

Hoping to help this segment of the female population that has fallen through the cracks, the designer and her 63-year-old mother teamed up: they established a small workshop in Bogota that employs women in their 50s to hand-craft goods. Housed in a two-bedroom rental apartment, their Bogota Factory doubles as a showroom over which Rodríguez’s mother presides — people come in and see samples of clothing, knitwear and painted wood pieces, then place orders. Mother calls in workers on an as-needed basis (currently there are three women, paid an hourly wage), while daughter provides design and business expertise from afar [. . .]

The idea of expanding the business and exporting goods to Europe is tantalizing to Rodríguez, who is the first to admit that Bogota Factory’s small-scale, low-tech, labor-intensive operation is not the most efficient business model. Sending the fabric to a laser-cutting facility would certainly get the cotton cut faster, and with greater precision, than having a worker use a pair of scissors to execute the job by hand. Then again, the entire dress line could easily be produced overseas.

But for the designer and her mother, the aim is not to eliminate jobs locally, but rather to create them. They would like to be able to employ at least one more woman. Their immediate goal, however, is to offer their current workers a labor package that includes health insurance.

Need I say how (no doubt unintentionally) Catholic this all is?

Fun hood. The baby looks kind of like it is in a minimum-security baby prison . . . did I mention that these things only cost $30?

-Matthew Schmitz

The Decline of Acorn

During this time of the year my walk to the office is littered with bushel upon bushel of acorns, thrown about by the strengthening autumn  winds. They come primarily from the black and white oaks that line the lawns and sidewalks of this town and gown, at times in such quantities that they must be swept off the walkways. Along with leaves, maple seeds, and twigs, they are considered landscaping refuse, and will be entirely gone in a month or two.

In the early Middle Ages through the decline of the great medieval forests the fall season was the time for foraging; not for human beings, but for livestock, especially the semi-feral swine that normally fed on the daily household scraps during the winter and summer months. They would be driven out into the woods where they would feast for a few brief weeks on the one of the few harvests that required no labour, acorns, and would then be driven back into town to be butchered. While in general it would be a small disaster  to encourage local farmers to bring their pigs to town for the day, there was a time when the grazing of livestock was an important part of small town life. Schmitz’s noted the (now) unusual privilege of Professor Harvey Cox, Hollis Professor Emeritus of Divinity at the Harvard Divinity School, whose endowed chair granted him the right to pasture his cows on the Harvard Yard. Such a practice was common in colonial New England, where town greens functioned as common grazing land as much as areas for the training of militias and outdoor children’s games, three activities that have all but disappeared.

I believe an important part of integral human development is the daily presence of the various people, places, and things that are deeply involved in one’s own physical, psychological, social and spiritual flourishing. As we think about how to strengthen local community life, including local economies, we would do well to consider the absence of livestock  in our larger community and the wasted harvests under our feet, and reflect on why they will remain absent and wasted.

- P. Langdale Hough

Monday Movie Still: Amarcord

- David Schaengold

McDaniel on Small Communities

As I mentioned last week, there has been an interesting back and forth between Sam Gregg (Acton Institute) and Stefan McDaniel (First Things Magazine) on free trade. I was curious about Stefan’s response to Gregg’s criticisms of small communities, but concluded that without further details about the types of small or large communities they were both considering, further discussion would be less fruitful. However, lest the discussion here at Plumb Lines falter, my friend Stefan was kind enough to offer some additional thoughtful reflections on small communities:

The modern situation generally presents us with a choices not between perfection and imperfection but between human problems and inhuman problems. The characteristic problems of small and medium-sized communities, such as narrowness, xenophobia, and insufficient regard for the particular interests of individual persons are immemorial. But so is the standing risk of spousal and child abuse wherever families have significant autonomy and privacy. Yet most of those with a robust understanding of human flourishing would not only reject the argument that the family should therefore be dismantled, we would not even judge this fact a good reason to be neutral or lukewarm toward the family. The integrity and strength of the domestic realm is so basic a condition for the proper formation of persons and for social health in any conceivable situation that we must support it energetically. It is fundamental, and I don’t see how anything fundamental could fail to represent a net gain in any case whatever. I am prepared to argue vigorously that small and medium-sized communities are similarly fundamental. The relatively new state of perpetual social and economic turbulence that we call the global society (with its global market) can make no such claim–unless Gregg believes there was practically no human flourishing anywhere in the world until the mid eighteenth century. I have known representatives of the worst in small/medium communities and of the worst in the new global commercial society. I have known bigots and narrow-minded fools and I have known cosmopolitan nihilists. I have no doubt about which distortion of the human personality is more radical. The former type is aggravating, a loudmouth, perhaps dull and feckless and probably very dangerous as a member of a mob. He wants some experience of the wider world or perhaps a deepened religious understanding, but is still very recognizably human in most values, motives, and understandings. But the latter seems to need an exorcism. Of course, he feels no particular hostility towards dark-skinned people, women, or Jews and he is very hygenic, well educated, polite, hard-working, creative, law-abiding; he has travelled widely and speaks German and French. To judge by the values most characteristic of capitalist societies (I refer of course to real, existing societies rather than the hypothetical one that would have the common decency to obey Adam Smith) he is a jewel of our civilization. But his lack of interior principle, guiding purpose, or commitment (thinly veiled by a bubbly surface of urbane glibness) chills the spine. He is capable of anything because he cares for and feels in principle bound by, nothing in particular. He is nothing but a consumer and cynical producer/prostitute; he is a bad parent and a bad citizen. He is more to be feared, and more to be pitied, than any bumpkin.

There has clearly been, as Wendell Berry would observe, a gain associated with globalization, but it is very, very unclear how much of that gain has been net. Wherever the global society makes a claim against the national and (especially!) regional and local, the burden of proof is emphatically on the global society.

While I revel in Stefan’s argument (indeed, I detect the indelible mark of the Dialogues in these two “forms”, or perhaps the stock personae of Plautus or Terence), his opening observations are most important. It is certainly the case that every community offers its share of virtues and vices, and so I (and Stefan) find Gregg’s critique falling a bit flat. Gregg should make the more pointed argument that the globalised society is in fact the better, the more natural, social situation for true human flourishing, and the virtues and vices faced is such a society are of a different  degree and “lesser” type than those found in other, more provincial societies. I know too many political philosophers who are fruitlessly struggling to brush aside the significance of the polis not to recognize how  very challenging it is to make this argument, but it needs to be made if we are going to understand some of the intense challenges facing the individual, the family, the corporation, and university, and the state in this era.

- P. Langdale Hough

You Might Suck

Speaking from experience, Ivy-League students don’t often hear truth like this. From the Daily Princetonian:

I hate to say it, Class of 2013, but some of you might suck. Some of you might at this moment be on a crash course with a future of hurting people and leaving society the worse for your presence . . .

We will not all go on to be the next Nash or Sotomayor or Forbes. Very few of us will even come close — and whether you will be a “great” might already be out of your control. Always in your control, however, is whether you are good. Whether you cheat on your spouse, disappoint your friends, harm your country, or break the Honor Code — these are things forever in your hands. You’re at Princeton, but so what? In the words of Han Solo: “Great, kid. Don’t get cocky.”

-Matthew Schmitz

America’s Greatest City-Hater

At the New Republic’s new urbanism blog The Avenue, Jennifer Bradley takes issue with Thomas Jefferson’s placement on a recent list of history’s hundred greatest urban thinkers. The textual evidence, she notes, is damning. Jefferson wrote frequently about the noxious moral effects of cities and condemned them as inimical to true self-governance.

I wonder, though, if Jefferson’s thought is more amenable to modern urbanism than Hamilton’s, his famously pro-city rival. Hamilton supported effective technocracy and centralized planning projects, while Jefferson supported local organizing and as much direct democracy as possible. Perhaps we can recognize in these two rival systems of thought a foreshadowing of the confrontation between Robert Moses (#23 on the list) and Jane Jacobs (#1 on the list)? Aren’t Jefferson’s values, especially the idea that community participation is good in itself, the ones upheld in successful urban neighborhoods, while the Hamiltonian technocrats have decamped for the suburbs, whose muncipal governments strive to be nothing more than efficient deliverers of services?

-David Schaengold

The Balance of Dependence

We will be dealing with the decay of that unstable isotope, the nuclear family, for a long time to come. The members of my generation suffered through the chaos of  divorce, remarriage, and custody battles while enjoying some of their rewards (two Christmases!). Now, the balance of dependence is tipping. The first Boomers entered their 60s two years ago. By 2030, the population over age 60 will have increased by 75 percent, with much of that number coming from the “me generation.” As boomers enter their second childhood, we are seeing a great historical irony: the uncertainty and chaos they inflicted on their children is about to be felt by them.

Our society has never been very clear about what obligations a grown child has towards his aging parents. But in the case of the Boomers, the question becomes exceedingly complex. What responsibilities of care does one have toward a stepfather? Toward a parent with more than one set of children? Forget the question Who will get the kids? It’s now Who gets stuck with the grandparents?

This is why I can’t quite agree with this comment on First Thoughts:

The original WSJ article and Schmitz’s addendum miss the point by advocating for “lifelong communities” where the elderly co-mingle with multiple generations. All the advantages they want for the elderly are met if parents, or widowed singles, live with or near their children and grandchildren. Building communities, or incorporating the elderly into communities, sidesteps the issue. No fruit stand customer, no matter how friendly, will attend to these “fogeys” as their health declines. Only a family member can do that. Just because the youngers are too selfish to bother and the elders are too selfish to entrust themselves to their children doesn’t mean we shouldn’t push for the ideal and morally correct solution. Families should stay together, especially as they age.

Of course selfishness is the problem, but if we were able to extinguish that vice, there would be no need for good public policy nor, for that matter, the Cross. The challenge is to promote patterns of living in which largely but not exclusively self-interested people make good choices. So to say that children should just have parents move back in with them is not enough. The single-family dwelling in an auto suburb doesn’t do a good job of accommodating the extended family, no doubt because it was never designed to do so. People who already drive their children to soccer practice don’t want to also drive their aging parents to the bingo parlor.

I would love to see families welcome grandparents into their homes, but those grandparents will desire varying measures of privacy. They will want to venture out and visit with their peers. Having a wider web of community interaction — promoted in part by a mixture of housing that includes smaller, single-person dwellings and walkable streets — actually strengthens individual families by relieving some of the pressure they have to bear and under which they so often break.

-Matthew Schmitz

Quote of the Day

John Maynard Keynes:

“The two most delightful occupations open to those who do not have to earn their living [are] authorship and experimental farming.”

I never took Keynes to be the Wendell-Berry type.

-Matthew Schmitz

Protecting Life

A rugged fetal heart rate monitor could save thousands of lives in the developing world:

. . . robust form and hyper-simple interface are combined with sophisticated Doppler ultrasound technology that allows rural healthcare workers to track the cardiac response of babies in the womb and during birth. One minute of cranking by hand generates enough battery life for 10 minutes of use.

-Matthew Schmitz

The Fogey Economy

From the Wall Street Journal:

Active-adult communities and assisted-living facilities exist to mitigate some of the drawbacks of growing old on a cul-de-sac. That said, the vast majority of older adults don’t want to move. Fully 85% of surveyed individuals age 50-plus told AARP, the Washington-based advocacy group, that they wish to remain in their communities for as long as possible. And those communities, invariably, want the same thing: a strong mix of ages, interests and abilities among residents.

Perhaps a better solution, and one finding favor in more circles, is the idea of “retrofitting” suburbia and developing, as seen on the drawing board in Fayetteville, “lifelong communities.” Such projects typically involve taking a neighborhood or site within an existing town or suburb and creating a compact, walkable community—one with alternatives to single-family homes, such as condominiums or row houses. Ideally, older residents in large homes will have the option of downsizing and remaining in a community where they can access restaurants, shopping and other amenities and services on foot.

I recently spent a week in the Mercat Sant Antoni neighborhood of Barcelona. It’s not hip, but it is wonderful. Responsible for both of these facts is the unusually high number old people. They are everywhere, and they effortlessly mingle with the young and middle-aged people one is accustomed to seeing about town. Interestingly, these elderly people perform an economic role essential to the life of the neighborhood that no one else can fill. They run small stands selling fruit, or meat, or cloth that do enough business to supplement a retiree’s income but wouldn’t be able to support most middle-aged persons. The old people enjoy the chance to interact with younger people as vital members of the community, and the community enjoys services that would not be otherwise available. This is what I like to call “the fogey economy.” The fact that it exists almost nowhere in America means fewer services and higher prices.

We conservatives have little business decrying euthanasia unless we also stand against the elimination of old folks from our everyday experience. This, not Obama’s health plan, is our society’s significant step towards doing away with the elderly. Even if our beloved geezers  aren’t in danger, we should not accept having them sequestered in nursing homes and “assisted-living facilities.” In some areas today, one is hard-pressed to find any old people at all other than the gentleman who welcomes you as you enter the local Walmart. He’s nice, but where are all his friends?

Perhaps I shouldn’t worry since I’m only in my twenties, but the communities that are built over the next forty years will be of two kinds: ones in which my friends and I are able to grow old while remaining part of society, or else ones from which we are ejected once we start wetting beds and breaking our formerly hipster hips.

—

Update: Joe Carter kindly links to my post but sees a problem in my claim that we “have little business decrying euthanasia unless we also stand against the elimination of old folks from our everyday experience.”

I’ll admit that I was a bit carried away by my enthusiasm for our elders. It is better to oppose the culture of death only in its late stages than not at all. That said, I want to start at the beginning and fight it all the way down the line.

-Matthew Schmitz

Republicans Push for More Transit

At last:

“These individuals came all the way from Southeast Texas to protest the excessive spending and growing government intrusion by the 111th Congress and the new Obama administration,” Brady wrote. “These participants, whose tax dollars were used to create and maintain this public transit system, were frustrated and disappointed that our nation’s capital did not make a great effort to simply provide a basic level of transit for them.”

A spokesman for Brady says that “there weren’t enough cars and there weren’t enough trains.” Brady tweeted as much from the Saturday march. “METRO did not prepare for Tea Party March! More stories. People couldn’t get on, missed start of march. I will demand answers from Metro,” he wrote on Twitter.

-Matthew Schmitz

Unbelievable

I was a Congressional Page in 2002-2003. Those were the days when Congress authorized the president to invade Iraq, when Mark Foley ran free and Tom Delay ruled the House.  Delay was obviously a much more skilled political operator than most of his colleagues, but I had no idea he had this in him.

-Matthew Schmitz

Rights of Corporations and the NYT

Volokh notes an internal inconsistency in the NYTimes editorial on corporate rights. My hunch is that one would simply argue that the press is a corporation specially defined by its exemption to rule.

- P. Langdale Hough

Building a Culture of Life

How to build a culture of life? With bricks and mortar.

One of the truths to which this site is devoted is that the way we organize our physical environment both reflects and shapes culture. Anyone who wants to effect our culture should then pay close attention to the way our built environment is structured. It is time abortion opponents absorbed this lesson. In his classic work, A  Pattern Language,  Christopher Alexander makes the crucial observation:

The existing obstetrics service in most hospitals follows a well outlined procedure. Having a baby is thought of as an illness and the stay in the hospital as recuperation. Women who are about to deliver are treated as “patients” about to undergo surgery. They are sterilized. Their genitals are scrubbed and shaved. They are gowned in white, and put on a table to be moved back and forth between the various parts of the hospital. Women in labor are put in cubicles to pass the time with virtually no social contact. This time can last for many hours. It is a time when father and children could be present to provide encouragement. But this is not permitted. Delivery usually takes place in a “delivery room” which has the proper “table” for childbirth.

The profound insufficiency of such places for hosting one of the most important events in family and communal life was wonderfully illustrated by a recent episode of Mad Men. The show’s hero, Don Draper, spends the entirety of his new child’s delivery not with the mother and family, but  rather sitting in a sterile waiting room with an utter stranger and their mutual friend Johnnie Walker. Such things have changed since the ’50s, but nowhere near enough.

Those who wish to promote an ethic of life should replace the “delivery rooms” of today with free-standing communal birth places. Rather than treating pregnancy as a sickness to be prevented by contraception and cured either by abortion or delivery, these structures would be designed to reflect the wonder and respect with which each new  life should be welcomed. A just society will outlaw the intentional killing of the unborn, but in the absence of a consensus in favor of restricting abortion, this is one area where progress can be made.

Crazier things have been done: the Young Men’s  Christian Association implemented its reformist vision through a nation-wide building plan. A vast number of currently existing medical facilities were built by private, morally motivated parties, with Catholic  institutions alone accounting for 18% of America’s hospitals. The feasibility of constructing birth places is demonstrated by the success of these past efforts. They should be built first in only a few locations and then, after  a sufficient period of experimentation and improvement, constructed  in every community. A first step would be to assemble a panel of architects, doctors and laymen–mothers and  fathers–who would solicit designs and craft a general plan that could be adapted to local needs.

This may sound like a whimsical proposal, but  the way we structure our communities can be–and in this case in fact is–deadly serious.

-Matthew Schmitz

Monday Movie Still: Enfants du Paradis

Marcel Carné’s Enfants du Paradis is sometimes called the French answer to Gone with the Wind, but it would be more apt to call it cinema’s answer to Père Goriot. A distinctly Balzacian atmosphere pervades the work, and one of the characters, the infamous criminal Lacenaire, even looks a bit like him.

In this still below, Jean-Louis Barrault portrays a pantomime. The mime intends to hang himself with the bit of string he is holding, but the girl wants to play jump-rope with it instead:

-David Schaengold

The Storm of Unreason

Worried by the growing radicalism of political rhetoric? So was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 40 years ago:

Stalinoid rhetoric of apocalyptic abuse on the left, and its echoes on the right, have created a public atmosphere of anxiety and portent that would seem to have touched us all. It is with every good reason that the nation gropes for some means to weather the storm of unreason that has broken upon us.  The Public Interest, Fall 1969.

As bad as the summer of ’09 was, its legacy is unlikely to be anywhere near as pernicious as the Summer of Love. At least I certainly hope the tea parties won’t be remembered as our decade’s Woodstock.

-Matthew Schmitz

Libertarians and Transit

Speaking of falsely libertarian views on transit, Cato Fellow Randal O’Toole has just put out a report recycling some of his familiar attacks on transit. In July, Ryan Avent offered an assessment of O’Toole’s efforts:

O’Toole was without friends in a room of leaders that finally seemed to grasp how planning had gone wrong in the last half century. At this moment — with vehicle miles traveled falling, with central city population growth rates increasing as suburban growth rates fall, and with central city housing prices showing resilience as exurban neighborhoods continue to experience rapid decline — Cato’s myth of sprawl as the American dream seems more hollow than ever.

As Avent goes on to point out, libertarians should oppose regulations that, in much of the country, have made building walkable, mixed-use settlements illegal.

-Matthew Schmitz

A Slow Education

My fellow conservatives continue to senselessly oppose the kind of family-friendly, community-strengthening transit policies they should be championing. More evidence that conservative thinking on transit is destined for a head-on collision with reality comes from Arizona. There the Goldwater Institute has been embarrassed by its opposition to a wildly successful light rail system in Phoenix. From today’s Times:

Among the many detractors — and they were multitudinous — who thought a light rail line in this sprawling city would be a riderless $1 billion failure was Starlee Rhoades, the spokeswoman for the Goldwater Institute, a vocal critic of the rail’s expense. “I’ve taken it,” Ms. Rhoades said, slightly sheepishly. “It’s useful.”

She and her colleagues still think the rail is oversubsidized, but in terms of predictions of failure, she said, “We don’t dwell.”

-Matthew Schmitz