"She Don't Tell Me To"

Our local country stars, Montgomery Gentry, have a fascinating new love song. The characters in their songs are usually tough, conservative guys, unreconstructed men's men. In their latest outing, they start from a traditional masculine theme of independence and not taking orders, a point of pride that is particularly strong among Appalachian men in our region.

The narrator tells of his "goin' my own way attitude." The chorus begins:

Any other woman I know would have tried,
To control me and it would be over.

But, the whole song is about how this stubborn guy, with more than a little self-destruction in him, keeps doing decent things for her and because of her – picking flowers, coming home early, going to church -- "'cause she don't tell me to." This is a subtle step in the dance of courtship and marriage.

The key line, I think, is

An' she don't even know,
That she keeps me lookin' for the next right thing to do,
But she don't tell me to.

Is Gay Essentialism a Fad?

Don Browning and Elizabeth Marquardt's essay in The Meaning of Marriage offers some "liberal cautions on same-sex marriage."

In the discussion of sex, it is normal now for liberals to automatically translate that term into "gender." The prevailing liberal theory is that no feature of masculinity or femininity is rooted in the biology of men and women. Everything is a social construction.

Everything, that is, except sexual orientation. When it comes to sexual orientation, liberals become essentialists again. Advocates of homosexuality are increasingly drawn to the idea that sexual orientation is a biological fact, not a social construction (and certainly not a choice). Therefore, society must accommodate to all sexual orientations and "get used to it."

Browning and Marquardt point out that the logic of modernization is dissolving all claims of fixed relations and innate or essential qualities. Even the deepest and most ancient of essential differences, those between fathers and mothers in marriage, are subject to the acids of social constructivism. It may be premature to fix the flag of same-sex marriage to homosexual essentialism today; the same modernizing theory that all identities are just social constructions may sweep it away tomorrow.

Marriage as a Sacred Vow

[In the next set of posts, I will work through the essays in a rich new book, The Meaning of Marriage, edited by Robert P. George and Jean Bethke Elshtain.] [Sorry for the delay - Blogger was down.]

Roger Scruton, a noted British cultural commentator, starts his analysis of marriage from sexual desire. He says our culture is debasing sexual desire into a game of physical sensation pursued for pleasure. Really, though, sexual desire is a desire for the other person. Further, men and women are so contrasting and complementary in their natures that something as strong as sexual desire is necessary to bridge the gap, to make us desire the Other person.

Desiring the other person who complements us opens the way to becoming a new kind of being, different and in some respects greater than we would otherwise be. But to become this new status, it is not enough to be joined merely physically, and it is not enough to be joined for a moment.

Marriage, in its inner nature, says Scruton, is a vow. It is not just a promise, and it is certainly not just a contract. Promises are for a time; contracts can be fulfilled. A vow, though, is an eternal change of status. This is why marriage is sacred in its internal meaning, because through marriage we participate in an eternal transformation.

Scruton is a famous curmudgeon in Britain, and in the manner of British curmudgeons, expects the worst from America culture. He knows he is arguing against the grain of elite opinion in our society, even if most people feel the sacred sense of marriage as he does. He expects that the courts will impose a different definition of marriage, under which "marriage" is whatever contract for sex individuals want to make. Moreover, he expects that once this elite opinion has been imposed in law, it will be imposed just as thoroughly by the thought police of political correctness.

I am not as pessimistic as Scruton (I am more gruntled). I am impressed, though, with his deeper reading of sexual desire and the vow of marriage. I also think he is right that we are on the verge of enshrining in our law a much shallower, more self-serving and hedonistic understanding of sex and marriage.

Which is why we need to have a clear and open discussion of the deep meaning of marriage, without thought police and political correctness.

Missing Pretty White Women

The news covers missing pretty white women obsessively. Anderson Cooper tries to answer for the news media about why this happens. He writes:

I've never, not even once, seen a story spiked because the victim was not attractive enough or the wrong race. But I've seen plenty of stories fall by the wayside, pushed down and out of the show, because a consensus develops that says, "You know, I don't think our viewers are very interested in this case." Is that racism or realism?

The most egregious case of missing pretty white woman syndrome is not the blonde in Aruba or the drowned wife in California, but Pvt. Jessica Lynch, captured in Iraq. A pretty, blue-eyed blonde in uniform, the Barbie soldier, didn't just get obsessive news coverage, she got a full-scale rescue mission, which almost killed the Iraqi doctors who were helping her.

What was not obsessively covered, what was barely mentioned, was that Spc. Shoshana Johnson was also captured that day. She fought back, was injured, and also later rescued. When she returned to the States, she was discharged on disability. She is solid and gracious in interviews, and defends Lynch from falsehoods that have been told about what she did and said.

Why isn't she famous, too? She's black, and not half as cute as Jessica Lynch.

Is that racism or realism? It's racism.

Could Women Thrive at Yale if They Could Respect Their Househusbands?

The current issue of the Yale alumni magazine explores how much having kids, or trying to have kids, contributes to the still-low numbers of tenured women at Yale. Yale (and Harvard and Princeton) famously give no advantage to their junior faculty when they come up for tenure – they still have to prove they are the best in the world. Getting a Ph.D. – now obligatory in the Ivies – and writing books and articles for tenure come at the same time as the baby-having window. Indeed, those fifteen years or so can completely obliterate the body's time to have kids.

Men do not have the same problem. Why? Because they have wives who take the lead with the little kids when their husbands are doing what it takes to get tenure in the Ivies. So why don't women find husbands who would act like those kinds of wives? The first reason is that such men are harder to come by. The more difficult reason is that, as a rule, women want to marry men who achieve at even higher levels than they do.

The most difficult reason, though, seems to be that it is just much harder for women to fully respect men who stay home and take care of the kids.

That is a deeper revolution than more childcare can solve.

How Big is the "Spiritual But Not Religious" Market?

A favorite social category that sophomores who have been through their first religion class use to describe themselves is "spiritual, but not religious." This is a hard category to pin down, especially since religion and spirituality are almost identical except for what they imply about your connection to a religious institution.

Recently the Higher Education Research Institute complete a massive survey (40,000+ respondents) on “Spirituality and the Professoriate.” If any group would be interested in adopting such a nuanced identity, it would be professors. So, what did the survey find?

The study defined the highly spiritual professors this way:
Seeking out opportunities to grow spiritually,
considering oneself a spiritual person, and
having an interest in integrating spirituality into one’s life.

By this standard, 43% scored high, 15% low.

They then asked how many professors considered themselves religious. Not surprisingly, more than two thirds of the highly spiritual professors also considered themselves highly religious.

Only 13% of the highly spiritual professors said they were not at all religious.

13% of 43% = 5.5% of all professors consider themselves "spiritual, but not religious."

Five and a half percent ain't zero, but it sure doesn't look like a sign that "religionless spirituality" is the next big thing, even among this unusually irreligious group.

Dubai Ports World is no Worse Than The Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company

Having a Dubai firm run our ports is not less foreign or dangerous that having a London firm run out ports. The objection to Dubai Ports World was entirely that the ultimate owners were Arabs who wore Arab dress. That is racism.

If we don't distinguish between good Arabs and bad Arabs (and the thousand shades of indifferent Arabs), we will make our relations with all Arabs worse. This will come back to bite us right away.

For example, Mohammed Taheriazar, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill student who tried to run over a group of fellow students did so because all Americans are enemies of Allah. We think he is deranged because he does not distinguish between Americans who are enemies of whichever terrorist faction he identifies with, and ordinary beer-swilling American students who had not given his cause a second thought.

If we are really interested in peace around the world, we should be looking for people in every country and nationality who we can work with. When every nation knows some "good Americans" and we know some "good (fill in the people)" in every nation, the world will be safer and more stable.

The Opposite of Generativity, Take Two

My query the other day about what is the opposite of the "culture of generativity" brought several interesting responses. Annie at Ambivablog noted that in Erik Erikson's schema, where the idea of generativity as a life stage, the opposition that he names is "stagnation/self-absorption." This gets the opposition right, from one perspective, but does not get the positive spin that I was looking for. Annie suggests "self-realization," which I think is about right.

Tom Strong, on the other hand, thinks that is still too condescending. He suggests "culture of fairness" as the right opposite to the culture of generativity. I will grant him that this notion is more positive – but I don't think it is really matched up with its alleged opposite. Strong's definition is that:

if you dig for the core value here, that's what you're going to find - whether the issue is abortion, or euthanasia, or gay marriage. It's about respecting other people's right and ability to make the best choices for themselves.

No, I just don't see it. Strong is arguing for respecting other people's individual choices. The idea of a culture of generativity, though, is that the society as a whole makes and cherishes life, especially in the form of children. Such a culture has all kinds of room for individuals who make other choices. But if the culture passes the tipping point from generativity to the other thing, it will die. No matter how well the remaining selves realize themselves.

Church Burnings Hit Close to Home

Today's topic is a little off my normal beat. Yesterday three students were arrested for setting fires at nine churches in Alabama. Two of them are students at Birmingham Southern College, and the third had been before transferring to the University of Alabama. I don't know these guys personally, but I could.

Birmingham Southern College is the opposite number to Centre College, where I teach. Both are classic small liberal arts colleges. Both are church-related, Methodist in the case of BSC, Presbyterian in Centre's circumstance. Both are part of the Associated Colleges of the South, an association of the premier liberal arts colleges of the South. I don't know these guys, but I easily could – I have students just like them.

The early accounts say that all three are pranksters and aspiring actors. They were almost certainly drunk when they set the first fires – the official condemnation by the Birmingham Southern president implies as much. An unnamed witness quoted in all the news reports, no doubt a friend of theirs, said the fires were "a joke that got out of hand."

How do we make sense of this? When the story first broke, the reaction of the press and most attentive middle-aged people was that these fires were racially motivated. Church destruction near Birmingham naturally suggests white racists, possibly in hoods, burning black churches. But the story couldn't play that way – the churches were mostly white Baptist congregations out in the country.

Now that the culprits have been caught, the story may unfold a different way: reckless rich kids with no respect for faith arrogantly destroy working-class people's treasures. They were caught through the records of the new SUV tires of one of the three, a doctor's kid who had taken the other two for a night of deer shooting. We don't have a statement from the miscreants themselves yet, so it is too early to tell, but this is my best guess about what happened.

The condemnation by the college's president and the head of security tried an alternate theory: kid's today are worse than they used to be. "We increasingly see," President Pollick and Chief Youngblood wrote, "young adults throughout our nation incapable of distinguishing between healthy and destructive conduct." Now, collecting young people, especially young men, who engage in destructive conduct is something that colleges have specialized in since the dawn of the university. I don't think things are any worse now than they ever were in that regard.

I am a silver-lining seeker. Here is the silver lining I see in this story. The headline on this story today is not "Methodist College Students Burn Baptist Churches." To even write it seems a silly idea. And that is a blessing to count.

The Opposite of Generativity

The President criticizes the "culture of death." This is a cousin of pro-lifers calling their opponents pro-abortion or even pro-death. It has not spawned a full answer, though, in the way that "pro-choice" is the alternative value promoted by the proponents of legal abortion.

Lately Maggie Gallagher and others have been using the phrase "culture of generativity." This phrase has been especially useful in the discussion of the abysmally low birth rates in Europe and Japan.

Which has me wondering: what is the opposite of the culture of generativity?

I think it must be the culture of consumption. This is in line with economist Gary Becker's view that children should be viewed as "consumer durable goods" like washing machines, which adults might choose to own if it gives them utility.

Is that that right opposition? I welcome your comments.

Rage Makes You Unhappy

The family study of the moment is by sociologists Brad Wilcox and Steven Nock. In “What's Love Got to do With It? Equality, Equity, Commitment and Women’s Marital Quality,” in the current Social Forces, they found that most married women are happiest when their husbands are emotionally engaged in the marriage. This was true regardless of whether the division of labor at home or in income was equal or not. This finding also held whether the wives described themselves as traditional or progressive.

A secondary finding was that self-described progressive wives are less happy than traditional wives, no matter what the arrangement of work and household chores. The Slate article commenting on this study, by Meghan O'Rourke, is entitled "Desperate Feminist Wives: Why wanting equality makes women unhappy." In the discussion of this article at the Family Scholars Blog, on the other hand, one respondent argued that "conservatives are happier because their circle of concern extends no farther than themselves."

A good marriage makes most people happy. If you enjoy a happy marriage, this does not mean that you are selfish. Happy marriages enable all kinds of people, left, right and center, to do good things in the world. I think "progressives" are less likely to feel happy even in a good marriage because they think they ought to feel outraged.

But the pleasure of righteous indignation comes at a cost: rage makes you unhappy.

The Bonfire of the Assets

Married people accumulate wealth. Married men, especially married fathers, work harder and save more. Waite and Gallagher, in The Case for Marriage, report that marriage is like a 12% annuity. Each year spent unmarried in adulthood decreases your likely total wealth by 3.5%. Married people build wealth better that singles or cohabiters.

Widows and divorced people lose wealth over time. Divorced men stop working harder, as a rule, once they get divorced. Divorced women are likely to end up with 1/3 less wealth than they would have if they had remained married.

Most American families show an upward trajectory in wealth, in class, and in status. Pick just about any American family: if they have even three generations of solid marriages and at least as much education as their predecessors, the youngest generation will be wealthier.

Divorce stops that upward trajectory. Divorce usually means running two households on the same income that used to support one. Moreover, assets are typically lost, split, even destroyed along with the marriage. In the typical case, he will live less well than he did before, materially and socially. She will make a household with the kids that has much less income per capita than they had before, and is not likely to generate wealth for a long time, if ever. If the family started out working class, they are likely to end up poor. This is most of what the "feminization of poverty" means.

If the mom has kids without any marriage at all, the downward financial spiral is likely to begin at day one, before there are any assets to burn.

Look at any extended family tree, and compare the branches. The one with the most enduring marriages is likely to be the richest.

A Minister's Conscience and the Church's Rules

Jane Spahr has been trying to get thrown out of the Presbyterian ministry for decades. She was ordained as minister in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the large, mainline edition of the Presbyterians, more than 30 years ago. Along the way, though, she decided to divorce her husband and take up with a woman, while keeping her status as a Presbyterian minister. The church, meanwhile, clarified its traditional position that the Bible says homosexual practice is a sin. Since Presbyterian ministers take a vow to be guided by the Bible, as well as by the rules of the church, Spahr might have resigned from the ministry in 1978, when this "definitive guidance" on church doctrine was first made.

Jane Spahr, however, decided to be a "lesbian evangelist" in the church – informally at first, but these days as her official job. She has been trying to provoke discipline ever since. In 1992 the church courts decided that she could not take a new job as a pastor of a Presbyterian congregation because she did not accept the church's rules. However, that court also said that, since she had been ordained before the rule was officially stated, her ordination was grandfathered in. She now works for an organization called That All May Freely Serve, which exists to overturn the Presbyterian Church's understanding of what the Bible says about homosexual practice.

Since being turned down for a pastorate, Spahr has been trying to provoke prosecution by performing same-sex "marriages." These ceremonies are not recognized by either church or state. Spahr even went to Canada to try to perform a legal same-sex marriage, but it turned out she had failed to get a license to perform weddings in Canada, so they didn't count, either. The Presbyterian Church has had several constitutional amendments on whether ministers could perform same-sex weddings, and each time majorities of church voters from across the country have said no.

Spahr, who says she has performed hundreds of same-sex weddings over the past thirty years, was tried in her own presbytery of Redwoods in California last week. On March 3rd the presbytery's judicial commission (church court) acquitted Spahr.

Here is the really important part: the church court agreed that Jane Spahr had violated church law for ministers. However, they ruled, 6 to 1, that she was “acting within her right of conscience in performing marriage ceremonies for same-sex couples.” The court declared that the church's constitution offers a "definition, not a direction.” This line of reasoning threatens to dissolve the whole denomination. As the presbytery's attorney, Stephen Taber, put it, "You have a situation where any minister anywhere can claim, 'My conscience tells me I can sleep with 16-year-old girl outside my marriage vows,' and who's to question his conscience?"

Now the stakes have been raised to a higher level. The issue in the inevitable appeal of the verdict is no longer what Jane Spahr did, but what the presbytery's judicial commission did. If a presbytery can decide that the church's constitution doesn't apply to its ordained ministers if the don't want it to, then we have a constitutional crisis.

The silver lining of this mess is that the Presbyterian Church at the highest level may make clear that the whole church makes its constitutional rules, not six judges in California. In that sense, this case is much like the disastrous ruling by a handful of California judges that "In God We Trust" is an unconstitutional motto.

I think it likely that the higher church courts will reject this decision by the presbytery's judicial commission. And on that day, Jane Spahr will finally get her wish – to be a martyr. At that point, she can become a minister of the gay-friendly United Church of Christ – something she could have done decades ago.

More on this story as it unfolds.

The Constitutional Right to Pets

It is always both fun and kind of depressing to test people's knowledge of Important Stuff versus pop culture. The latest is a study that compared how many people could name all five First Amendment freedoms with how many could name all five members of the cartoon Simpson family. The result (muffled drum roll, please):

First Amendment: .001%
Simpsons: 22%.

The most fun and mysterious part of this study was that a fifth of those surveyed thought that the first amendment protected their right to have pets.

This clearly betrays ignorance of the Constitution. It is not the First Amendment that protects our right to pets, but the Second. After all, what would be the use of having a right to bear arms, if you did not also have a right to the rest of the bear?

Too Rich to Live

European fertility is collapsing. No country in Western Europe has enough babies to sustain its population. For stability, a population needs 2.1 children per fertile women. France and Ireland are doing well to reach fertility rates of 1.7. Britain and Sweden at least make it to 1.5 – a rate that cuts the population in half in less than three generations. Austria and Italy have sunk to 1.3, which should halve their population in a generation or so.

The United States, as in many things, is halfway between Europe and the global South in vitality measures. Our birthrate as a whole has gone back up to almost replacement level, at 2.06. Yet within the United States, several states have European-like rates of no marriage and no kids -- California, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and, especially, Massachusetts.

Maggie Gallagher reports these figures, from demographer Ron Lesthaeghe, in her February 28 syndicated column. She notes a correlation between the places that don't produce enough babies and the leaders in legalizing same-sex marriage.

I noticed a different correlation. The places without enough babies – to which we can add Japan (fertility rate: 1.32) – are also the richest places on earth. The low fertility states in America are also the richest ones. As I noted in "Should We Skip Kids in Order to Get Rich?" economists have already noticed that you will probably end up richer if you don't have kids. These demographic numbers suggest that rich nations are, in effect, making the same calculation.

Whoever dies with the most toys, still dies. Whichever nation has the most toys but the fewest kids, dies from the earth.

Boys Will Beat Boys

The New York Times has a popular story by Katy Butler on a new study of sibling violence. All siblings push and shove sometimes, but in 14% of the cases studied they found repeated beatings, usually by a big brother. David Finkelhor and John Caffaro, co-authors of "Sibling Abuse Trauma," found that sibling abuse was most common when disengaged parents headed large families composed entirely of closely spaced boys.

Siblings compete for parental attention, and first-borns often feel entitled to more attention than their little brothers and sisters. When the parents are not paying much attention anyway, the competition would be even fiercer.

This study put me in mind of another fascinating finding about families composed entirely of boys: the youngest boys are much more likely to be gay. No one really knows why this is so, but speculation centers on a conflict between the mother's female hormones and her sons' male hormones, with the mother's hormones getting stronger with each boy baby in her womb. In a series of studies, Ray Blanchard and colleagues found that each additional older brother increases the odds of homosexuality by approximately 33%.

The new study on sibling abuse did not address the siblings' sexual orientation. Putting the two pieces of research together, though, suggests a bad scenario: in a big family of boys, with no parents paying attention, the eldest beats on the little brother, especially if the young one is more effeminate. Scary and sad.

The Power is Yours (3 of 3)

[This is concluding section of guest blogger Megblum's post on meliorism.]

Finally, let us consider how we can embrace meliorism in our lives. In theory, the easiest part of the solution should be simply accepting the belief that human action can improve the course of the world. However, our outlooks are not as simply modified as our choice of breakfast cereal; rather, we must be convinced of a viewpoint’s validity. If we can, at least for the moment, accept the premise that melioristic beliefs are legitimate, we can explore some potential ways to use our newfound faith in human abilities. Once we accept this premise, there are three steps to using meliorism: identifying a problem, organizing, and taking action.

Consider your interests, talents, and concerns in choosing your focus. Perhaps you are concerned about the course of our government, worry about the plight of the needy in your community, or simply wish to improve the lives of those around you. This problem may take an unconventional form: in the movie "Clueless," Beverly Hills princess Cher Horowitz stretched herself with her earth-changing charity work addressing a problem that is all too often ignored in our society: the plight of the unpopular. In the tradition of the great social innovators, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Cher took time out of her busy schedule of shopping, parties, and looking adorable to make over a clumsy, flannel-clad new student. We, like Cher, can almost certainly find an issue that concerns us and address the problem.

The next step in pursuing improvement in the world is organizing. Anthropologist Margaret Mead once wrote, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Though one person can have an impact, the efforts of a concerned group can be much greater than the sum of their individual efforts. This organizing can take place within the framework of an existing group, such as the Salvation Army, the Red Cross, or a political campaign, or alternatively, may consist of gathering a new and distinct group of people.

The final step is both the simplest and the hardest: taking action. It is at this point that we must, as the endless barrage of Nike ads urge us to “Just do it.” This action need not be complicated. A November 2005 article in People magazine reported on the story of Delonzo Yurcek, a seventeen-year-old former foster child from Kalamazoo, Michigan who was adopted at age eight. Delonzo remembered the embarrassment of arriving at school each year without paper and pencils, and didn’t want other foster children to suffer the same fate. So he, his siblings, and his adoptive parents organized a group called Backpacks for Kids to give foster children who might otherwise go without backpacks filled with school supplies. They raised money with garage sales and Kool-Aid stands, and in their first year alone, they were able to give backpacks to three hundred kids. Delonzo’s simple generosity reflects this solution: he saw a problem, got together a group, and took action.

Now that we know the reasons we do not accept meliorism, the problems of rejecting this outlook, and finally, have looked at how we can embrace meliorism, we can begin to step out into the world with fresh eyes. Our actions can have a positive impact on the world, but only when we act. So the next time you face some problem in society, do something about. As Captain Planet said “the power is yours.”

The Power is Yours (2 of 3)

[Today we continue with Megblum's essay on meliorism.]

Next, let’s consider the problems of rejecting meliorism. Because some degree of meliorism is essential for the furtherance of a democratic society, we can easily lose sight of our democratic ideals. At its most basic level, political participation is an expression of meliorism, an act of faith in the idea that our actions can affect the course of our city, state, or country for the better. According to political science professors George C. Edwards III, Martin P. Wattenberg, and Robert L. Lineberry, one of the primary factors motivating people to vote is a high sense of political efficacy, the belief that they can effect their government. This is a quintessentially melioristic belief, in that it is a belief in the ability of people to effect a positive change in the world. When potential voter’s senses of political efficacy decline, voter turnout plummets, and democracy suffers.

Perhaps the most obvious effect of the rejection of meliorism is the loss of all the good that can come of meliorism in action. Charitable and humanitarian action is, at its heart, motivated by a desire to make a change for the better in the world. In 1966, the World Health Organization set for itself a lofty and ambitious goal: worldwide eradication of the deadly disease smallpox, according to 1998 PBS report. Though a vaccine had been developed over a hundred years before, smallpox continued to kill millions of people every year in forty-four countries, including some of the world’s poorest nations. The Smallpox Elimination Project, an offshoot of the WHO, went to work and slowly but surely saw country after country report their final case of smallpox. The group was so successful that in 1979, a global commission declared that the dreaded disease had been eradicated. If the men and women who worked for eradication had not believed they could make a difference, countless lives would have been lost and smallpox would still terrorize the globe.

[To be concluded tomorrow]

The Power is Yours (1 of 3)

[This week we welcome guest blogger Megblum, eldest Gruntled child. A veteran of Kentucky's forensics (speech) leagues, her senior oratory was so appropriate for The Gruntled Center that I will serialize it over the next three days. Enjoy.]

As a child, I was fascinated by the mid-nineties cartoon "Captain Planet." Five children, from different cultures, continents, and contexts, each endowed with a special power, would come together to fight the evils of global corporations and pollution. When the children touched rings, they could summon Captain Planet, a sort of baby blue Super-Man figure, who would summarily destroy whichever evil polluting tyrant was threatening the global ecosystem that week, usually a vaguely pig-like character with a helpfully descriptive name, like Looten Plunder or Sly Sludge. The good captain would helpfully encourage the children to become eco-crusaders at the end of each of episode, with the cheerful motto: “the power is yours!”

What Captain Planet was perhaps unconsciously advocating was meliorism, an ideological view point in between the traditional extremes of optimism and pessimism. Webster’s defines meliorism as “the belief that the world tends to become better and that man can aid its betterment.” Meliorism rejects the idea that the world is either inevitably slipping down the drain or on a perpetual upswing. Instead, it offers up the idea that, through our action, we can make the world a better place. It is time for us to embrace a melioristic outlook on the world. Today, we will look at the reasons we do not accept meliorism, the problems of rejecting this outlook, and finally we will look at how we can embrace meliorism in our lives.

First, let us examine why we reject meliorism. Because we live in a mass society, it is hard for us to believe that our actions as individuals can have an effect on the millions of people that live even in just our country. Eighteenth-century British statesmen and social theorist Edmund Burke offered the idea that we, as people, learn to love the small groups we exist within, which he termed “little platoons” because within these limited spheres we feel that we can have a significant effect. However, it is difficult for us to believe that, once we step outside our little platoons, we can have an effect in a truly global society.

The logical outcome of our inability to believe that our actions can have an impact is a crisis of motivation. Imagine, for example, you are walking down the street and you see a piece of litter on the side of the road. It would be easy to say that since you cannot possibly pick up all the candy wrappers and fast-food bags in the world, it doesn’t really matter if you pick up this particular piece of trash. If it doesn’t matter whether you pick up this particular piece of litter, why do it? This kind of thinking is self-defeating, because it rests on the false binary that, in order for a melioristic action to be worthwhile, it must solve a problem. However, virtually all major change occurs through small, incremental steps, rather than through decisive, conclusive actions. If an action can have an effect, however small, it can be worthwhile. Imagine what could happen if each of us in this room picked up just one dirty Coke can a day, every day for a year. We would not clean up the streets of the world, but we could make a difference in our own communities, and that would be something.

[To be continued ...]

An Ideology That Justifies Breaking Things

Young men in groups like to break things. Most are restrained by decency and their moms to not do it very often, and not with other people's stuff. But they still want to. They are always in the market for an ideology that would make it a good thing to go out and break other people's things. If they think they are protecting something precious – family, country, faith – you can get up a mob of angry young men in an instant. They will march down a handy street and break windows, burn cars, and beat up anyone remotely connected to The Enemy.

Which brings us to the Cartoon Riots. All over the world we have had Muslim mobs, mostly young men, rioting, burning, breaking, beating. All things Danish, previously among the least offensive objects in the world, are targets for destruction. Guys who sold Danish flags made money selling them to the mob, so they could be burned.

It is safe to say that 99% of the rioters had never seen the cartoons. They just heard that a Danish newspaper had printed some cartoons that made fun of the prophet Mohammad. In this country that would lead to angry letters to the editor of the paper. I have seen the cartoons. If the paper had run them without any indication that they were supposed to represent the prophet Mohammad, you would never know. They look like ordinary depictions of bomb-throwing Arabs that you can see in any Western paper in any given week. If they had said that they represent some guy named Mohammad, not THE Mohammad, sensitive people, Muslim and otherwise, would have tut-tutted and turned the page.

The guys who are making the cartoon riots wanted to have a riot. You can find guys like that in every market and bar and lounging place in the world. Different mobs have different triggers, but none of them require much to set them off.