Courtship is a Proper Model of the Dialectic

In one of my periodic attempts to understand Hegel, I came across the most memorable of his several attempts to explain what he means by the dialectic. He says that the relation of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis is like that of bud, blossom, and fruit. This is a gripping visual image, especially now in the blooming spring.

Every analogy has its strengths and weaknesses. The strength of this image is that it helps show how the synthesis preserves the essence of the stage that came before, while utterly transcending its form. Moreover, it is clear how each succeeding stage requires the destruction of the previous one. The weakness of this image, though, is that bud and blossom are not antithetical; the blossom is not generated by the negation of the bud.

I think a great deal about marriage and children, especially now in the blooming spring when I teach my family life class. It occurred to me in talking to a student that we have before us a much better analogy for the dialectic: the courtship of a man and a woman which brings forth a baby. Now, a men and woman are not opposites, but complements. And courtship much better captures the back and forth and back and forth of how a dialectical opposition gets worked out in history -- much better than the image of a sudden, violent Revolution does.

And there is no model of synthesis better than a baby.

Now, the birth of a baby does not annihilate the parents. This may be a way in which the analogy actually illuminates the original notion. When we apply the dialect as an abstract idea, we act as if the thesis and antithesis were annihilated in the generation of the synthesis. In fact, though, among intellectuals the thesis and antithesis never really die, even if the main narrative of history has moved on with the synthesis.

In a larger sense, though, the child does end the parents' existence; they cease to be fully separate beings. The essence of the parents is sublated (a world that is not better English than the German word it is supposed to translate) into the child. The child carries forward the combined, complementary essences of the parents, now transformed into a new thing.

And this new thing seeks, and usually finds, its complement in the next courtship.

Almost-a-Bishop Wins in Paraguay

Fernando Lugo, a Catholic "bishop of the poor," has beaten the ruling party candidate in Paraguay. This is a bigger deal than it sounds: the Colorado Party has ruled for 60 years. They worked with one of the worst Latin American dictators ever (which is saying a great deal), then succeeded him when democracy finally was established.

Priests are forbidden to hold political office by the Catholic Church, so Lugo renounced his church office in order to run. The church rejects his resignation. I expect they will leave that issue alone while he tries to fix a corrupt government and a deeply skewed economy.

I wish him, and Paraguay, well. I hope he doesn't feel obliged to be completely anti-American.

Bruce Springsteen - Elitist

A parody commercial.

Breaking News: Sam Nunn Endorses Obama

Former Georgia Senator Sam Nunn has endorsed Barack Obama, and will serve on his foreign policy advisory committee. Nunn is the exemplary "blue dog" Democrat and elder statesmen. The Georgia wing of the Gruntled family reports that Dems there want Nunn to be Vice-President.

The Gravitas Wagon is gathering steam ...

Counting Your Blessings Makes You Happier

Mrs. G. sent this one to me under the lovely heading, "Peer-reviewed gruntle!"

A study by R.A. Emmons and M.E. McCullough in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people are happier when they articulate each day what they are grateful for. In an experiment, both psychology students (reasonably healthy) and neuromuscular disease patients (with something serious to be unhappy about) were asked to write down each day a list of things they were grateful for. After two or three weeks, both groups were happier.

Breaking News: The Boss Endorses Obama

Bruce Springsteen, my musical lodestar since I was a teenager, has endorsed Barack Obama.

After the terrible damage done over the past eight years, a great American reclamation project needs to be undertaken. I believe that Senator Obama is the best candidate to lead that project and to lead us into the 21st Century with a renewed sense of moral purpose and of ourselves as Americans.

Amen.

Divorce Costs Taxpayers $112 Billion Per Year

And that is just in this country. And this is just a minimum estimate of the direct costs.

This is the conclusion of a new report from the Institute for American Values, The Taxpayer Cost of Divorce and Unwed Childbearing. It was released today to coincide with the important civil religion holiday of Tax Day.

I will work through the details of this report in other posts this week.

A Great Teacher's Last Lecture

Randy Pausch is dying of cancer. He gave the best "last lecture" I have ever read. As a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, he has done some amazing things in the computer world. What gripped me the most, as a teacher, were the extraordinary things he did to push students to push themselves to learn, and to honor and appreciate them when they did. More, he has a noble vision of the university clearing the way for students and teachers to work together to push themselves to learn. The whole speech moved me to tears as it has others.

The teaching stories are the best. I will give you a couple of the other tales and wisdom, told with gratitude, that give a flavor of his tone.

When I was here studying to get my Ph.D. and I was taking something called the theory qualifier, which I can definitively say is the second worst thing in my life after chemotherapy. [laughter] And I was complaining to my mother about how hard this test was and how awful it was, and she just leaned over and she patted me on the arm and she said, we know how you feel honey, and remember when your father was your age he was fighting the Germans. [laugher] After I got my Ph.D., my mother took great relish in introducing me as, this is my son, he’s a doctor but not the kind that helps people.

Work hard. I got tenure a year early. Junior faculty members used to say to me, wow, you got tenure early. What’s your secret? I said, it’s pretty simple. Call my any Friday night in my office at ten o’clock and I’ll tell you.

Show gratitude. When I got tenure I took all of my research team down to Disneyworld for a week. And one of the other professors at Virginia said, how can you do that? I said these people just busted their ass and got me the best job in the world for life. How could I not do that?

A book of the lecture has been made to benefit the pancreatic cancer research foundation. The full transcript of the lecture is here.

Debbie's Hammer

The weirdest thing you will see today:

Debbie Reynolds, in full '60s cool, singing "If I Had a Hammer."



This was made by Debbie Reynolds' own production company for the Scopitone video jukeboxes, a '60s craze that didn't survive the decade. I can't find an exact year.

Update: In response to a query, Scopitone expert Bob Orlowsky wrote:

I don't have an exact date, but it was made sometime between the end of 1964 and the first half of 1965. It's great, isn't it?

Indeed.

The Church Doesn't Help Divorcing Kids

Elizabeth Marquardt told the Centre College audience yesterday one sad finding from her study of children of divorce: among those who were active in a church at the time that their parents were divorcing, only a quarter reported that anyone from the church talked to them or tried to help them deal with the divorce.

Divorced kids report that rarely do people try to talk to them or hear about their loss and pain when their parents divorce. This is sad when most people in general do it, but tragic in the church.

Some church people at the lecture went away with a conviction to do better.

The New Divorce Stigma

Elizabeth Marquardt, author of Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce, has been lecturing at Centre College this week. This morning in my family class she offered an idea that I had not heard before.

In the old days, children of divorce were stigmatized. This sentiment is pretty much gone -- she says she never experienced it personally, and the students likewise do not tell me of any stigma they express or experience. The standard view is that it is not the child's fault. This is very sensible.

However, it is becoming widely known among people who study and talk about marriage that children of divorce are more likely to divorce themselves. This is so despite the fact that divorced kids usually hate divorce, and vow not to inflict it on their own children.

Hence the new divorce stigma: children of divorce are sometimes treated as damaged goods on the marriage market.

It is important to say that most divorced kids who marry do stay together. Divorced kids are more likely to divorce, but are not destined to. And any individual can be the exception to the trend, even much stronger trends than this one.

The answer to the new divorce stigma is not to deny the risk. It is true: divorced kids are more likely to divorce. Rather, the answer is to turn that passion to make marriage work into the foundation of constant communication about the marriage.

Fight divorce with good marriage.

Sex-Starved Wives

Michelle Weiner Davis is interviewed in Time on her new book of this title. The empirical core of the study is a survey of 1000 married women, 60% of whom reported that they wanted sex at least as much, if not more, than their husbands. I would be curious to know if men differed in this by age, or by how long they had been married. This is not as helpful a statistic as it should be. In fact, I would guess that a survey of husbands would report the same result - 60% of men would report that they wanted sex at least as much or more than their wives. What we need is the spread -- more, the same, less. I would be curious to know if men differed in this by age, or by how long they had been married.

Nonetheless, Davis' main point is that men are not always filled with sexual desire. Their desire for their wives is affected by how they feel about their marriage, how they feel in general, and, sometimes, for physical reasons. And women often want sex for reassurance about the relationship, so they may well want it more than their husbands precisely when their emotional bond is most strained.

Sex on the Brain Makes Men Take Bigger Risks

A nifty study by Brian Knutsen and Camelia Kuhnen found that men bet higher when shown images of sexy women.

I don't know whether this means they were trying to get more resources to improve their odds of winning the desirable woman, or whether, on the contrary, the very thought of immediate sex made them throw prudence to the winds.

Honey-Colored Nation

I heard two great phrases this week that mark the generational change America is undergoing as the Race Question turns into the thousand ways of living our national ethnicity.

Jon Henke, of the libertarian QandO Blog, reprinted his post of 2006: "Martin Luther King: The Last Founding Father."

And in some other blog, which I can not now find, someone described today's America, Obama's America, Gen-X America: we are a "honey-colored nation."

Poobah

This one is all from Mrs. G.

Did you see Chris Matthews ask Barack Obama what’s going to happen after the primaries are over? And Obama saying then “the poobahs will have to decide?” I hooted.

Of course, since it’s a word I learned in family conversation, I hadn’t ever looked it up, and Trilby and Endub wanted more information. Thus:

Grand Poobah is a term derived from the name of the haughty character Pooh-Bah in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado. In this comic opera, Pooh-Bah holds numerous exalted offices, including Lord Chief Justice, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Master of the Buckhounds, Lord High Auditor, Groom of the Back Stairs, and Lord High Everything Else. The name has come to be used as a mocking title for someone self-important or high-ranking and who either exhibits an inflated self-regard, who acts in several capacities at once, or who has limited authority while taking impressive titles.

The expression "The Grand PooBah" was first introduced on the television show "The Flintstones." Fred Flintstone and his friend Barney Rubble were members of the Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes Lodge No. 26. A high ranking elected position within this organization is Grand Poobah or Grand Imperial Poobah.

The character Howard Cunningham on the TV series "Happy Days" was a Grand Poobah of Leopard Lodge No. 462 in Milwaukee.

In the "Darkwing Duck" episode "The Secret Origins of Darkwing Duck", the title character's nefarious uncle attempts to blackmail his planet into making him "Grand Poo-bah of the World" with a giant laser.

Mokey, a primary character in the Jim Henson TV series "Fraggle Rock," wishes to join "The Secret Society of Poobahs" in an episode of the same title.

Any time you’re linking superdelegates to Gilbert and Sullivan, Fred Flintstone, Howard Cunningham, Darkwing Duck’s nefarious uncle, and Mokey the Muppet, you may not have thrown a punch, but you’ve thrown one hell of a pie.

Homeland Generation

The generations discussion by Richard Delano of Lifecourse.com that I reported on yesterday was mostly about the Millennial generation, born 1982 to 2002. He did let on, though, that they were trying on a nickname for the generation born after that: the Homeland Generation. Conceived after 9/11 and born in 2003 or later, their experience is likely to be different from that of the Millennials before them. And if the Lifecourse four-generation pattern holds, the Homeland generation should be like the Silent generation.

Millennials' Favorite Jobs

I just attended a very interesting lecture on the Millennial generation, today's young people, given by Rick Delano of Lifecourse. This is the firm founded by Bill Howe and Neil Strauss, whose work on generations I have written about before.

The Millennial generation, born 1982 - 2002, are an upbeat, standards-seeking, group-oriented, parent-following generation. They are so unlike the Gen Xers at the same age. One of Delano's interesting findings: the Millennials, now voting in their first few elections, are twice as likely to vote as the Xers were at the same age.

One finding really struck me. When the 2006 high school seniors -- the eldest Gruntled child's class -- were asked which employers they would most like to end up with, their choices were, in order:

1. Walt Disney
2. Google
3. U.S. Department of State
4. Federal Bureau of Investigation
5. Central Intelligence Agency.

(Aging Boomers, remember to retrieve your jaws from the floor.)

Good Compendium of Marriage Odds-Making

Time has a decent short article. FYI.

Eat Less Junk Internet

Another insight from the Posse Plus Retreat.

Students spend hours browsing the internet. Facebook, YouTube, TV shows, jokes, and occasionally a bit of news. They have extended their late night hours from midnight to 2. This is bad enough. They are more tired than students have always been, and avoid morning classes even when they need the subject.

The worst part of a steady diet of junk internet is that it fills your brain with trivia and drives out more important stuff. It is not simply the time that we -- students and non-students -- spend on this stuff, but the lost opportunity for better content. An hour on news and political blogs, or art sites, science speculation, religious devotions, even just social rants and grievances, is a richer diet than a steady stream of the mental equivalent of Cheesy Poofs.

I like humorous videos as much as the next person, and check I Can Haz Cheezburger? daily. Nonetheless, junk internet should be taken in moderation, just like every other kind of junk food.

Social Responsibility is the Work of Collective Actors

This weekend we had the retreat of the Posse Scholars and their guests. The theme was "social responsibility." The group was a wonderful collection of energetic young people who want to do good. The general thrust of our discussions was to find practical ways to be socially responsible right now.

As I was reflecting on this conversation, I was struck by an idea that I had not fully articulated before: social responsibility is carried out by collective actors. Individuals change the world by creating collective actors and working together. Students offered several examples of individuals who have made a difference in the world. In each case, though, a few moments' reflection made clear that they did not act alone.

Wanting to change the world yourself is a good start. But actually doing it requires that you also develop the skill of working with others. Collective actors can be responsible for re-ordering the world responsibly.