YAWNS

There is a nifty new pop-soc term: Young And Wealthy, but Normal. YAWNS are Gen X and older Millennial men and women who work hard, are doing very well, and want to give back now. So they live simply, are charitable and green, and are basically decent people.

The term comes from the London Sunday Telegraph -- historically the conservative paper there -- noticing the trend among Britons. There is plenty of evidence of the phenomenon throughout the world's rich, including many in this country.

The Associated Press article, by Evelyn Nieves, cites Stanford sociologist David Grusky's view that an anti-materialist movement often follows a materialist one. One can see the Reagan era "I got mines" provoking a reaction today of "I give back."

I see the YAWN phenomenon as the private sector counterpart of the interesting Millenial finding I reported a few weeks ago that the most desirable employers for the high school class of 2006 were Google, Disney, the State Department, the FBI, and the CIA. To aging Boomers, these were the Enemy of their youth. To Millenials, though, they are agencies of building up the world.

YAWNS and future earnest Staties are both hopeful signs about the young generation of adults.

The "End of History" as a Means, Not an End

We have been considering Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man in our theory class. Students get that Fukuyama, and Hegel before him, do not mean that we could ever come to the end of the succession of events. But they do think that the long search of human History for the best way to organize society can come to an end. Fukuyama even believes that it has.

Fukuyama's argument is that capitalism and liberal democracy are the best way to organize the political economy of society. We have tried all the other options, and found the one that works best, compared to the practical alternatives. Societies that have achieved stable capitalist democracies can seek their fulfillment in post-historical existence. Societies that have not achieved stable democratic capitalism are still mired in history. Where they should try to get, though, is now clear.

What struck me about this argument is like something I noticed about Marx. For all Marx' opposition to bourgeois liberalism, his tantalizing view of the end and aim of life is really the same as theirs: individuals can do what they choose to do. Marx does not have a higher conception of what realizing our species-being would mean.

In the same way, Fukuyama, another kind of Hegelian, identifies democracy and capitalism as the best ways of organizing society without having any vision of what the aim or end of human existence is beyond the End of History. Democracy and capitalism are both technologies for sorting our competing individual desires. Neither leads to the good life as such, only a life with less conflict and fewer transaction costs. To be sure, capitalism promises greater wealth for society, and if democracy reduces bloodshed that is a very great improvement over the alternatives.

Still, the End of History would not give any clue about the telos or meaning of human existence. Hegel could answer that question, at least in an abstract way. The Westminster catechism famously answers the question, What is the chief end of man? with To praise God and enjoy Him forever.

The End of History is, in the end, vacuous about the Ends of History.

"I Love the World" - Great Gruntled Song

The Discovery Channel has a wonderful news song.

Boom-di-yadda!

Rev. Wright Gets the Main Point Wrong

Rev. Jeremiah Wright continued to explain himself this week at the National Press Club. He gave a learned address on the prophetic ministry of the black church. He then answered questions about the controversial sound bites that have been looped in the press. His answers were, I think, plausible explanations of what he was and still is arguing.

When he quoted others saying that America's "chickens had come home to roost" on September 11, he meant that the U.S. government had committed terrorist acts around the world and on its citizens over its long history, and now terrorist acts were in turn committed on the United States.

When he said that the AIDS virus might be have been created by the U.S. government and might have been used on American citizens, he cited the Tuskegee syphilis experiments as precedent.

And when he said that God damns America, he meant that God condemns the government of the United States for its past unrepented-of bad actions, including slavery.

Each of these points one could hear from leftist pulpits, pundits, and press any week of the year. Jeremiah Wright is an old '60s university radical, and like many others of his generation he sees the current administration and today's political culture as not fundamentally different from what that generation railed against 40 years ago.

I don't agree with Rev. Wright. Senator Obama does not agree with Rev. Wright. Senator Obama has said so. That story should die now.

There is one important point that we should not let go. Rev. Wright's premise in his remarks to the National Press Club is that the criticism of his views was not an attack on Jeremiah Wright, nor was it an attack on Barack Obama. Wright maintains that the criticism of his views is really an attack on the black church.

That is just wrong. No one would be interested in the views of an old lefty if he were not pastor to a potential president. We can know this is true because we do not see obsessive coverage of all the other old lefties, even old prophetic black church radicals, who say the same sorts of things that Rev. Wright does.

The black church is not under attack. And the black church is not identical with leftist critiques of the U.S. government. By making this claim, Jeremiah Wright is claiming to be much bigger than he really is. He got his 15 minutes because he is pastor to a potential president. Wright could have poured oil on the waters. Instead, he made the controversy a fight about himself. As a result, Senator Obama had to denounce some of the more extreme views of his former pastor.

Let it go.

Do Women Who Baby Their Husbands Want Babies?

A light advice piece in CNN.com's Living section shows women nurturing their husbands too much, to the point of treating them as babies. The experts they cite note that while this can work for some couples, it is generally a bad idea as it makes the men helpless and incompetent, or resentful. Or both.

What surprised me about this account is that they did not indicate whether these couples had children. A wife who babies her husband (or dog, or the neighbor's kid) would seem to me to be sending signals that she is very ready for children. If she continued to baby her husband while also babying her baby, then I would worry.

Polygamist Sect Knocks Up the Girls, Dumps the Boys

The Texas Child Protective Services Department, which has charge of the hundreds of children taken in a raid on the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints, a polygamist sect, said that 60% of the girls under 18 were either pregnant or had already had children.

Even more ominously, CPS does not know what the sect did with most of the teenage boys. While there are equivalent numbers of boys and girls under 13 - 196 and 197, respectively - the ratio of teenagers is very skewed. There are 53 girls aged 14 to 17, but only 17 boys.

It is typical in polygamist sects that many young men are expelled, so the older men can marry all the girls.

The coming weeks will no doubt bring bad stories of teenage boys born at the Yearning for Zion ranch living on the streets in Fort Worth - or worse.

Television News is an Oxymoron

Elizabeth Edwards had a fine editorial in the New York Times, "Bowling 1, Health Care 0," about the paucity of substance in the television news coverage of the presidential campaign. I agree with her entirely. I think, though, that she is a little off the mark in blaming the television journalists for this. I blame television as a medium.

Television is a good medium for showing pictures. It is best at fires, explosions, earthquake damage, and shooting. Most news is not well conveyed in pictures. The news is best conveyed in words about non-visual events. The best news show on television is Jim Lehrer talking to a few informed reporters and news makers, slowly and carefully. It is very boring television -- unless you want to find out what is going on.

Cable television does a bit better than the networks, because they can talk a long time. Most of the time they just have reporters spouting their opinions. But Chris Matthews can have a broader range of reporters than a network show can, and can take more time with newsmakers. The cable shows also keep reporting numbers whenever they have them, which is useful.

Really, though, even for numbers we are better off with print sources. As for analysis of complex propositions -- such as the competing health care proposals that Elizabeth Edwards wrote about -- only text sources will do.

I will go a little further. I think that television as a medium can only reach up to the upper-middle brow. Usually, of course, it aims much lower, where it dominates. Even public television confines itself to the limits of middle-brow convention, lest it offending its funders.

For my money, the most intellectual television network is C-SPAN. They put on powerful people talking, or smart people talking, and very occasionally a smart powerful person, talking. Their book show is the best because their host is the best informed and least self-promoting. Their coverage of events is the best because they do not insert themselves at all, aside from selecting the event. I wish C-SPAN covered every real event that I want to see. Wouldn't it be great to have C-SPAN cover the Olympics? No nationalism, no chauvinism, no human interest fluff, and they would show all the events, not just the ones the U.S. can win.

The most important television news show is "The Daily Show," which says volumes about how much real news television can convey.

Rev. Wright Defends Himself, Mostly Successfully

Rev. Jeremiah Wright was interviewed by Bill Moyers for the first time since the sound bites of his old sermons have been making news.

Wright noted, justly, that you can't understand any preacher's point from just a few seconds out of the middle of a sermon. The larger context of the "chickens coming home to roost" sermon after 9/11, for example, was not quoting Malcolm X, but rather a white ambassador who was quoting Malcolm X (and on Fox News, of all places, to Fox's discomfort). He was explaining that to the hijackers, the United States had engaged in a long string of violent acts against innocents -- a string that Wright enumerated. Some items on his list were more just than others. Wright got the biggest reaction from the congregation when he cited enslaving Africans, and the least when he named bombing Hiroshima. He did not say that the 9/11 attacks were just, but he did think that anyone who understood the dark side of American history could understand why our enemies might think they had a just cause.

As for the "God damn America" sermon, Moyers showed a longer clip leading up to the notorious soundbite. The theme of the sermon was that all governments lie, change, and fail. Wright gave examples from the Bible and the history of other nations, before listing the failings of America. He said these failings, which mostly concerned government violence against the innocent, could not be blessed by God, but condemned. Wright explicitly put himself in the tradition of the Biblical prophets who called God's condemnation down on Israel in order to get the nation to repent. In the interview, after seeing the clip, Moyers and Wright had this exchange:

BILL MOYERS: What did you mean when you said that?

REVEREND WRIGHT: When you start confusing God and government, your allegiances to government -a particular government and not to God, that you're in serious trouble because governments fail people.

So the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is a fiery preacher who roots himself and his congregation in the black liberation theology tradition. In a Christian context his incendiary comments make more sense. This context was left out of the clips. The clips were made by the political opponents of Barack Obama, not by people who cared one way or the other about Jeremiah Wright and his large, active, and successful church.

In the end, though, I think Obama was just in his overall assessment. Wright, now several years retired, formed his views and his preaching style at a time when things were much worse in America for African Americans. Wright has missed the way in which many things have changed for the better. Obama does not share Wright's views about America, and neither do I. I don't regard Wright's views as centrist, and I am sure he would not thank me if I did. But I think Rev. Wright, like each of us, should be judged by his full sermons and his own expressions of his views, not the attack clips assembled by enemies.

Defecating the Candidate's Qualities (While Dancing)

From a story on the WMAZ-TV website today, re Georgia senatorial candidate Rand Knight:

"Knight supporter, Beth Perera says "I think it is important for people to have a face to face encounter with the candidates otherwise it is just a list of names on a ballet and people can't defecate any special qualities about a candidate unless they actually meet them, talk to them, ask them questions."


(Thank you, mother-in-law)

"Expelled" Makes Ben Stein the Michael Moore of the Right

Michael Moore makes great propaganda films. They start with some good grievances, ask some tough questions, then throw in a lot of other stuff, including ambushes and cheap shots, to give the impression of adding weight to the argument. They are fun to watch. They have been so successful that they lead to an interesting insight: documentaries are the medium of the left in the way that talk radio is the medium of the right.

Ben Stein has offered a rightish propaganda doc in the Michael Moore mold. "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" starts with a just grievance. Several respectable scientists had their careers ruined for even suggesting that Intelligent Design was worth considering as a scientific issue. He interviews the aggrieved scientists, talks to a few of the people who ruined their careers, and makes a plea for actual free speech and scientific openmindedness in the academy. This is a worthwhile cause, and Stein does a competent, though not excellent, job in explaining the issues and exposing the guilty.

However, Stein then drifts off to muddled examination of the connections between Darwinism and eugenics, even Nazism. He has a running metaphor that political correctness in the scientific establishment concerning Darwinism is like the Berlin Wall erected by brutal totalitarians. This is all unnecessary and distracting from his main point.

I am glad that the issue of academic political correctness has been raised, and partly exposed in this case. This is a scandal that could do with a good airing -- starting with centrists becoming aware that there is a scandal here.

And I hope that this film means that there will be more conservative documentaries at least as competent as Michael Moore's liberal ones. That will level the playing field, and bring delight to doc nerds like me.

My further hope, though, is that the quality of political documentaries rises all around.

Eat Breakfast, Have Boys

Fiona Matthews of the University of Exeter is the lead author of a tantalizing new study showing that mothers who eat more and eat better around conception are more likely to have boys. The mother's diet does not change the sex of developing embryos, but does seem to affect whether male embryos implant and develop.

Eating breakfast cereal seemed to be one of the stand-out correlates of having more boys. There has been a steady drop in the number of boys born in industrialized countries, which correlates with more women skipping breakfast and eating low-calorie diets.

This study is based on correlations. No one knows exactly why it works. I expect this finding will be kicked around a dozen times by contradictory follow-up studies. This is as it should be -- that is how science advances.

In the meantime, moms who want a son should stock up on oatmeal.

Nazi Saboteurs as a Precedent for Gitmo

In 1942 we caught 8 Nazi saboteurs landing on U.S. soil to blow things up. The leader of the group turned himself in and gave away the whole show. They were all quickly tried before a military tribunal. Six were executed and one who helped betray the group was given life. The leader, who came to the FBI and dumped $84,000 on the assistant director's desk to finally get his attention, was given 30 years.

Two things strike me as important about this case for our current war on terror.

First, the saboteur turned himself in because he was confident he would not be tortured.

Second, the spies were given timely trials with real counsel.

I think their sentences were proportionate. At their trial, all eight said they were forced into the mission by the Nazis, and never intended to go through with their mission. However, in the brief time before they were caught, six of them did nothing but spend their mission money on high living. They were executed.

The two who agreed to betray the mission differed in how quickly they acted. The one who dithered got life, later commuted to deportation. The one who actually made repeated efforts to contact the FBI got 30 years, also later commuted to deportation. I think he might have been given more recognition for his efforts to mitigate, especially after the war.

The mission failed so utterly that Hitler decided to stop a planned sabotage attack.

J. Edgar Hoover, not surprisingly, covered up the fact that the spies had turned themselves in, and had to keep coming back and insisting that they were really spies in order to get the bureau to listen.

What does this have to do with our war on terror? The 9/11 attackers spent the weeks before the attack in wild living at bin Laden's expense. Perhaps if they had been assured that they would not be tortured or executed, one of them might have betrayed the group. That is very hard to unravel now, especially since the Bush administration's commitment to torture was not clear at that time.

Now, though, it is clear that the current administration tortures and defends torture, as well as suspending habeas corpus, denying counsel, and endlessly delaying trials. This discourages would-be enemy agents from turning themselves in. We would do much better to apply American standards of justice to our enemies precisely because they would not do the same to us. We can win hearts and minds, win the clash of civilizations, and prevent future 9/11s by being the best Americans we can -- not the worst.

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.