Because most philosophies that frown on reproduction don't survive.

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Repost: Catholics Can Do Halloween

[I had a spare day off I had to burn, so we were out and about visiting family today and then dashing back just in time for trick-or-treating in the freezing drizzle, but since I'm been running quiet lately, here's a timely repost.]

In my early days of elementary school, we lived in neighborhoods where my parents weren't sure about the wisdom of going trick-or-treating, so my early Halloween memories are of going to the Haunted House and Halloween Party put on in the parish hall, as a trick-or-treating alternative for similarly worried parents. This gave me the chance to charge around in costume with my friends from the parish school, bring home a massive haul of candy, and get scared silly by the Haunted House designed and staffed by the eighth graders and teachers. It was, as the phrase goes, good clean fun.

As such, I've found it odd, of late, to see Catholic parishes, schools and homeschooling groups start putting on "All Saints Day" parties on Halloween or on the nearest weekend as a sort of holy second best to the more goulish folk holiday. Children are encouraged to dress up as their favorite saint and religiously-themed games are played. (Toss the halo over the angel, go fishing with Noah, join St. George in attacking the dragon pinata, etc.)

These are all harmless enough, though as a kid I think I would have found them too goody-two-shoes-y to be fun (candy haul aside), and we've taken our kids to such parties most years because their friends are going and no kid wants to be left out of a get-candy-and-play-with-friends opportunity.

Nonetheless, I can't help a little annoyance at the idea of turning All Saints Day into low rent counter-programming to Halloween, when Halloween (All Hallows Eve) has its origins in the working of the Catholic folk imagination on All Saints Day and All Souls Day. Father Augustine Thompson provides a good summary:
The article goes on to describe how the fusion in America of various Catholic immigrant customs centering around All Hallows Eve and All Souls Day with the trick-or-treating-like customs from England which had evolved around Guy Fawkes Day, gave birth in the peculiar way that folk customs have the way of doing to modern, the modern American holiday of Halloween.

While it's perhaps in keeping with a Puritan ethic to be suspicious of goings on, there's really no reason why Catholics should be afraid to don a fun or scary costume, carve a jack-o-lantern, consume far too much candy, and then leave out a bowl of creme for the household hob or brownie in hopes that he'll take care of the clean up during the night.

Monday, October 29, 2012

Ethical Thought Experiments as Rhetorical Questions

I got involved, over the weekend, in an email discussion about moral issues which strayed, all too quickly, into ethical thought experiments. You know the sort:
A and B are standing by the edge of a cliff. The cliff edge under A is crumbling and she will surely fall to her death if B does not grab her hand. If B grabs her hand, she will almost certainly save her, but there is a small but unknown probability that B will either fall off the cliff with A or will be injured in the process of saving A. You are a third party, C, who is watching. You cannot help A or B, but you can legally require B to help A, or even physically coerce B into rending assistance. Is it moral for you to do so?
X volunteers to take part in an ethical experiment. He thinks it will be some simple classroom exercise, but instead he finds himself in a large room with only one exit. Blocking the exit is another person, Y who is tied to a chair sitting on a trap door. X can only leave he room by pressing a button which will cause Y to fall through the trap door into a meat grinder and be gruesomely killed. X is told that there is a 1 in 1000 chance that the roof will fall in and kill both of them before the experiment is over. If he pushes the button, he can go free but Y will be killed. If X waits till the experiment is over and the roof does not fall in, they will both go free. Is it right for X to push the button in order to be sure that he will be safe?
Yes, I wrote one of these. (Actually, I kind of touched up both, but I think my modified version of the one I didn't originate is still true to the original's point.) The only excuse I can make for my behavior is:

MrsDarwin was listening to me discuss the course of argument and remarked, "Of course, you're not going to change any minds with that argument. It's too abstract." She's right, of course.

It strikes me that these sorts of "thought experiments" tend to be more extended rhetorical questions than actual experiments. It's really a way to say "I think that the moral situation we're discussing is like this." As such, the response from the person challenged with such a hypothetical is usually not to answer the hypothetical but to challenge the thought experiment or propose an alternate one. There's some utility to this, so long as you're just trying to understand how you think about something differently rather than reach any kind of agreement. However, it seems to me that it's seriously problematic to discuss moral questions in a context other than the way in which people actually face moral questions.

Brandon on Till We Have Faces

Brandon's last fortnightly book was C.S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces, and he has a review up which provides some fascinating philosophical and historical context for it. A selection:

The whole thing is worth reading

This reminds me that I should re-read Till We Have Faces. I remember liking it a lot, but at the same time feeling like the religious twist at the end was a bit of a cop out. Our teenage selves are pitiless, and I wonder if I would still think that now. (I'm being purposefully oblique now, but spoilers are allowed in the comments so if such things bother you, beware!)

Friday, October 26, 2012

Just stop


Also, no more, no more of this:





Thursday, October 25, 2012

The Problem with the "Pregnancy is Work" Argument For Abortion

Over at The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates reprints a post that he wrote two years ago which he considers to be a strong argument for the unrestricted "right to choose" abortion. This argument is basically that pregnancy is hard and sometimes dangerous work, and that women should thus not be forced to do it if they don't choose to.


Every day women choose to do the hard labor of a difficult pregnancy. It's courageous work, which inspires in me a degree of admiration exceeded only by my horror at the notion of the state turning that courage, that hard labor, into a mandate. Women die performing that labor in smaller numbers as we advance, but they die all the same. Men do not. That is a privilege.
He says that since writing this, his feelings have only become more one sided on this issue:
I no longer have "deep problems" with the termination of fetal life. I don't think it's my place. I don't think I have much right to any qualms. I will never be pregnant. I will never be subject to the many biological functions that precede pregnancy and the ones that follow. I cannot know what it is to subject my body to such a process for the benefit of another. I don't believe everyone's opinion should be weighed equally. Some people carry more than others.
The thinking here seems to be that the work of being pregnant is so great that only those who have experienced it (or could) can really have an understanding of what it means. Now my first thought was: If one sees pregnancy as the big dividing line here, are women who have been pregnant more or less likely to support the "right to choose"? I consulted the General Social Survey to see if I could find out. Sure enough, all the data one needs is in there. I focused in on the question ABANY: "Please tell me whether or not you think it should be possible for a pregnant woman to obtain a legal abortion if: g. The woman wants it for any reason?" This is part of a series of questions in the survey which ask whether abortion should be legal for any reason (this question) and if it should be legal in certain specific situations (not able to afford another child, doesn't want more children, serious health problem for the mother, etc.) I filtered my data to look at women only and then I broke the data out by the number of children the woman had. The results are interesting, and basically what I expected:
Bold numbers are percentages, regular text represents absolute numbers.
Women who do not have any children (I'm not able to filter on whether they may have experienced miscarriages or abortions, but in general this should be the group of those with the least experience of pregnancy) are the most likely to support abortion on demand. Women who have experienced pregnancy (and the new life which it represents) are less likely to support abortion on demand. I tried separating the data out for married women and never-married women, but the views are almost exactly the same.

But what about the most extreme "hard case" situations? I pulled similar data for two questions in the survey dealing with pregnancy in cases of rape and pregnancies that severely threaten the health of the mother. As in the population as a whole many more women support abortion being legal in these situations. This table shows support for abortion being legal in cases of rape:
This one shows responses to the following question: "206. Please tell me whether or not you think it should be possible for a pregnant woman to obtaina legal abortion if: The woman's own health is seriously endangered by the pregnancy?"
This last is somewhat different from the others in that support for legal abortion in cases of serious health risk to the mother is virtually the same among women who have 0, 1 or 2 children, but then falls off progressively among women with three or more children. I tried splitting this out by how often she attends religious services, but while women who attend religious services weekly or more than once a week are much less likely to support abortion in cases of serious health risk than women who seldom or never attend religious services, the shape of the pattern is similar with women with 0, 1 or 2 children having fairly similar opinions and then increasing opposition to abortion as the number of children goes up from three.

While this doesn't mean that pregnancy isn't a unique and difficult experience, it seems to show that experiencing pregnancy does not make women more likely to support the "right" to "terminate a pregnancy". Indeed, it appears that pregnancy generally makes women less likely to support abortion. If, as Coates suggests, we left the question up to the veterans of pregnancy, abortion would be restricted more than it currently is.

"We Happy Few"

Today is St. Crispin Day, which we remember with Harry's rousing speech from Henry V:

The speech itself is invigorating, but listening to Kenneth Branagh almost singing the lines is glorious.

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

The Clever Economics Behind Romney's Tax Plan

One of the things which the candidates sparred over repeatedly in the debates was Romney's tax plan, on which Obama has repeatedly charged "the math doesn't work".


Democrats seem to want to suggest that some sort of secret poison pill would be slipped into the plan such that either the middle class would get a tax increase (while the rich would get a tax break) or such that the deficit would go up because fewer tax revenues would be collected. What this tends to miss is that the president does not get to unilaterally pass a tax plan. He has to ask Congress to pass one along the lines of what he would like. I think it's highly unlikely that Congress will pass anything that is a net tax increase on the middle class (or, indeed, anyone) if it's dominated by the GOP, as seems likely, especially if the election has gone well enough for the GOP to put Rommney in the White House. That Congress would pass a plan that increases the deficit is more likely (goodness knows they've done it before) but the president himself isn't exactly standing on a good record in that regard either so that argument seems something of a wash.

The thing about this tax plan which is actually interesting, and which isn't being discussed (probably because it takes more than one minute of shouting to convey) is how it's designed to increase the amount of income available to be taxed, and in a way much more clever than the somewhat stale "tax people less and they will make more money" argument. This supply side argument is true, and we've seen examples of it working in history, but although tax cuts do tend to result in pre-tax incomes going up as people seek to increase the income that they make more of, the effect is pretty mild when the existing tax rates aren't absolutely confiscatory. Thus, you might actually see total tax revenues go up cutting the top marginal rate 20% from 80% to 64%, because if 80% of your incremental earnings are being taken away you have little incentive to find ways to increase your earnings. You're better off finding ways to enjoy leisure with the earnings you already have. However, cutting the top rate 20% from 35% to 28%, it's a lot less clear that people would increase their incomes enough more to actually lift total tax revenues.

In a good post over at EconLog the other day, David Henderson digs into the different incentives that wage earners experience when their tax rates are cut:
When the government cuts a marginal tax rate, and that's all it does, that cut has two effects in opposite directions: a substitution effect and an income effect.

The substitution effect is to make leisure more expensive. If you're facing a 35% marginal tax rate (MTR), for example, and the rate is cut by 20% to 28%, your "price" of leisure rises by (72 - 65)/65, or 10.8%. When the price of a normal good rises (and leisure is a normal good), you buy less of it. So people work harder.


Empirically, the substitution effect tends to outweigh the income effect slightly for men and strongly for married women. This means that cuts in MTRs alone will tend to increase income somewhat for men and a fair amount for married women. That was the effect of Reagan's cuts in MTRs in the early 1980s.
Now, I'm certainly not one to say that the government has a need to maximize the amount of total tax revenues it takes in. Maximizing the size of government is not an end unto itself, and it can actually cause all sorts of problems. So in the abstract, one might argue that if lowering marginal tax rates were to cause incomes to go up, we should simply do that and find a way for the government to get by with a little less. However, the fact is, right now the government is spending far, far more than it takes in. Even the most aggressive responsible budget cutters (emphasis on responsible here -- there are some silly plans out there that claim they can cut spending by huge percentages right off) need tax revenues to remain fairly stable in order to get the budget balanced.

Well, it turns out that by cutting marginal tax rates but also cutting deductions so that the who balance out, you can have the substitution effect that Henderson describes without having the income effect. The rate cuts and deduction cuts are perfectly balanced, so your income is exactly the same as it was before. You don't "feel richer", and so you don't have the incentive to rest on your laurels and enjoy your newfound wealth. However, the substitution effect does come into play. If you have the opportunity to make more, less of that incremental income will be taken away in the form of taxes, and you'll get to keep more of it. The reward for making more is higher, and so (all other things being equal) people will tend to do it more.

And, of course, if this does result in incremental total income for citizens, that incremental income will be taxed (at the new lower rates) and result in incremental tax revenue which can be used to close the deficit. Thus, a tax reform that was essentially revenue neutral (people pay the same taxes each year) but which decreased marginal tax rates and deductions would have the same stimulative effect on incomes that a tax cut would have, but wouldn't present the deficit risk of significantly decreasing tax revenues and counting on economic growth to make up for that gap.

The plan really is quite clever, which makes it a shame that no one is willing to talk about it except in tiresome soundbites.

Monday, October 22, 2012

The Emergency Compliment Generator

Having a bad day? Yeah, I know. What you need is an emergency compliment:
Your hair smells like freshly cut grass.
Does that do it for you? No? Well, head to the Emergency Compliment Generator and fish for something else.
You think of the funniest names for wi-fi connections.
There. I feel better now.

h/t Calah

Bearing on the Liberal Arts

Bearing has a longish post on the Liberal Arts (in response to recent discussion here) which I strongly recommend.

Sticking By The Electoral College Regardless

As we move into the final stretch of the election, with the national polls virtually tied, the small but real possibility looms that we could once again see one candidate win the electoral vote and the other win the popular vote. Were this to happen, it would probably be Obama winning the electoral vote (through holding on to Ohio which is virtually essential to realistic Romney victory scenarios) while Romney won the popular vote.

If this happened, we could certainly count on hearing some conservatives make arguments against the electoral college. Before the heat of the moment, let me just go on the record now and say that's a bad idea. For all its quirks, I'm a supporter of the electoral college system, and conservatives have long defended it with good reason. Ditching that history in the heat of a close election would be a rather base road to travel.

Friday, October 19, 2012

Liberal Arts: Adapting to Modernity

Last week I tried to expand a bit on the concept of the Liberal Arts as "the skills of a free man". I described the purpose of the ancient and medieval liberal arts education as being to develop a general and adaptable set of skills that allowed the liberally educated person to understand and reason about the world, and I attempted to contrast this type of education from being trained to perform some one task or set of tasks well.

The classic set of liberal arts is: Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, Astronomy

Some of these disciplines are defined rather differently now than they were in the pre-modern world, and the modern world presents its own particular challenges to understanding, so I think it's worth thinking a little on how one might update this list. The following is rather unrigorous, but hopefully the exercise of thinking it through is illustrative even if the conclusions are far from the last word.

History and Literature
In the classic liberal arts, one would have read and memorized a lot of this during one's early education, and since grammar and rhetoric were taught in the context of examples, one would also have studied much of the best historical, literary, legal and political writing of the age as part of learning grammar and rhetoric. Further, I'd argue that context in the doing and writings of people in other times and places is essential to help free one from some of the modern world's assumptions about how the world works.

Writing and Rhetoric
Not only is the ability to write and speak clearly and persuasively essential to communicating to others one's own ideas, but the process of writing or speaking in an organized and persuasive fashion can help one refine and improve one's thinking. Further, understanding persuasive and reasoned discourse can serve to help one see through the ruses of those who misuse those arts.

The ability to use logic remains as essential as in the ancient world, and the ability of think about ethical and metaphysical issues in some manner other than "feelings" is equally so.

I found my background in studying Greek and Latin surprisingly useful in mastering skills such as programming. While I certainly don't think that one must study the ancient languages, it seems like the process of learning how to express or understand thoughts conveyed in a language other than one's own allows to learn things about how thought relates to language that it's hard to learn any other way. In that regard, I feel like one of the major gaps in my education is that I never learned to speak a foreign language fluently (Greek and Latin being read rather than spoken languages, at least the way I learned them.)

This is an area where I wish I'd learned more when I was in school, though I've been able to make up some ground since. I went through calculus in high school, but I was self-teaching using the Saxon textbooks, and I never took any college level math classes, which I regret. I think one key element is that one should get far enough in math and geometry to deal with proofs and see the way in which logic and mathematics meet up: that there are abstract concepts which are absolutely provable which we can then turn around and see reflected in how the world works. Also, given the extent to which we live in a mass society in which statistics and probabilities are constantly discussed, I think freedom in the modern world almost requires a certain basic understanding of statistics and probability. Otherwise, one finds oneself at the mercy of those who use (or misuse) these arts.

Science (Physics, Chemistry, Biology, etc.)
Again, this is an area discussed so commonly (and receiving so much reverence) in modern society that some understanding is, I think, essential to the free life. Especially essential, I think, for those who are acquiring only a passing familiarity with science would be a conceptional and process understanding: how he scientific method works, what it's capable of determining, etc. Also, enough of the basics of physics, chemistry and biology to see how it ties in with the mathematics and geometry one has learned.

The more abstract elements of Computer Science and Engineering
Again, for the non-specialist, I think the key elements here would be on concepts that have more general conceptual application and that intersect with other fields. Thus, for instance, understanding how physics and geometry drive machine and architectural design elements. Some understanding of the problem solving methodology and process development aspects of engineering. The basic grammatical concepts of computer programming would also seem key (algorithms, loops, etc.) I'm tempted to say that some understanding of database concepts (normalized data, relating tables through keys, etc.) is also of general application, but I kind of suspect that this is over-reaching.

Political Science, Economics, Anthropology
Here I hesitate a bit, because it can get kind of sketchy pretty quickly how much can actually be known from the social sciences. However, there are definitely concepts and approaches to analysis that should be learned here.

What to make of these?

I think it could be useful to take a whole post to look at how the concept of a liberal arts education relates to real higher education as we find it these days, rather than taking this post to absurd length to try to address that as well. But let me at least touch on a couple things.

The scope here is necessarily very wide. The concept, after all, is of a general and adaptable education. I think the breadth is important. Fr instance, looking back at my own education I do regret that I took no college level math, science, computer science or economics. I've picked up amounts of these since, but I feel like I had a lopsided emphasis in my own education.

At the same time, different people have different interests and abilities, and so it seems clear that different people would put far more emphasis on certain areas of the liberal arts than others. This seems fine and indeed very good. I don't want to try to make a case against specialization in study (I think there's a particular value to having a field of specialization and knowing one subject area quite well) but in keeping with the idea of a liberal education it seems to me there has to be some breadth as well as depth.

Seven Quick Takes


Yes, the sheet music for John Cage's 4' 3". I'd like to teach this one to the kids, but I'm wondering whether I should buy five copies, or have them share one.


Wikipedia on versions of the 4' 33" score:




The so-called Second Tacet Edition: same as the First, except that it is printed in Cage's calligraphy, and the explanatory note mentions the Kremen manuscript. Edition Peters No. 6777 (i.e., it carries the same catalogue number as the first Tacet Edition)



A friend has assured me that this is really the best version of 4' 3".


I'm a tea drinker, and my brand is Twinings. I just bought a box of their Prince of Wales Tea, which is urbane and charming and not too strong. And then today I read the blurb on the side of the box: This exquisite tea was originally blended by Twinings for HRH The Prince of Wales in 1921, who later became King Edward VIII.

Great. I've been sipping Abdicator's Brew.


The girls have been paging through The Laura Ingalls Wilder Songbook: Favorite Songs from the Little House Books. Our favorite song is Green Grows the Laurel, a simple, haunting melody. However, the arrangement must be very old. I can't find anyone singing the same tune under that name. The closest I've come is this lovely performance by Sandy Denny:


There is no Take 6.


There is nothing more soothing, when one has a headache, than being kissed on the forehead.

Thursday, October 18, 2012

The Other Side of Cultural Despair


 Note: I haven't read the article in question







Grab your smelling salts; the repression is getting positively Victorian!

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Some Quick Post Debate Thoughts

Dear Gov Romney and Pres Obama,




Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Tuesday Afternoon Read-Aloud

For commenter Jenny: here's how most reading aloud here really sounds. This is half of Fin M'Coul by Tomie dePaola, and in keeping with the Irish theme, baby played the part of the wailing banshee.

Monday, October 15, 2012

The View from the Porch

I stepped out onto the back porch this afternoon to toss the trash in the big can, caught some movement out of the corner of my eye, and looked up to see two men in the playhouse at the bottom of the yard.

I think they were as startled as I was. I called hello, and one of them peered over the roof from the back.  We stared at each other for a moment.

On the one hand, they didn't look very old -- perhaps under 20. And the one I could see clearly looked sheepish and surprised. On the other hand, there is absolutely no reason that anyone should be on my property, in the playhouse, at 2:00 PM or at any time. In the playhouse.

"You'll need to leave right now," I said clearly, "or I'll call the police."

"Just let us get our stuff," the one guy mumbled. The other guy climbed out the window at the side of the playhouse, hauling a big backpack. Why the window, when he could have walked out the door with less trouble? They weren't moving fast enough to suit me, so I stood on the back steps and watched as they shuffled off into the green belt behind our house -- platted for an alley that was never paved -- and paused behind the garage. I went in the house and counted ten, and they still lingered behind the garage. The kids were bouncing up and down under my elbows, asking, "What is it, Mom? Who are those guys? What were they doing?" I got the phone and dialed 911.

I've only called 911 once before, and that was during the boiler fire and I don't remember much about it except that we all had to leave our house in pajamas on a freezing November morning. Here's what happens. The dispatcher asks for your address, then the number of the phone from which you've called, and then what your emergency is. I explained -- maybe it wasn't an emergency, but I wanted to be sure. The guys had by this time wandered up toward the backyard of the house behind us, and it was probably nothing, but I was going to report it anyway.

I remember at the time of the fire that I heard the sirens while I was still on the phone with the dispatcher. This time there wasn't such a rush -- the officer arrived five minutes later, so we had time to straighten the entryway ("Julia! Put this Encyclopedia of Guns in the library, and shut the door!"). She arrived, checked out the playhouse and behind the garage, and came up to the back porch where the peanut gallery was hanging, agog, over the bottom half of the dutch door.

"I didn't see anything," she said, "but anyone could get on the roof of your garage from back there." This is true, but I can't do anything about that.

She surveyed the masses with mild surprise and said, "I hope these aren't all yours."

"Yes, ma'am," I said. "We're homeschoolers, and home all day, which is why I don't like to see men in my backyard."

She told me to call immediately if I saw them again, and headed off. Of course I didn't see them again. Why should I? Why would anyone come back to the spot where they were busted? But I kept watching. all afternoon. I lurked by the kitchen windows. I obsessively checked my email and Facebook just to feel that other people, people I knew, were in some sense around me. I called Darwin, but he wasn't available. By the time I found myself staring out the back door, twisting and untwisting my scarf, I had to shake myself. It's not as if anything happened. I never felt threatened at any time. I wasn't scared. But the backyard, which had always felt so sheltered and innocuous, was suddenly territory. From the windows I patrolled the playhouse (why would anyone want to be in our playhouse?), the garage, the opening in the fence that leads to the greenbelt. I was acutely aware that the garage -- never shut because the doors are so big and unwieldy -- had tools in it, and that the van is always unlocked. I checked all five exterior doors downstairs and made sure that they were all secure.

For the rest of the afternoon, the young man, who has a four-year-old's sense of humor, thought it funny to bellow that there was a man in the back yard. And every time he said it, I had to check. Because the view from the porch isn't so idyllic today.

Newsflash: Being a Subject Different From Subjecting

It is, perhaps, one of the perennial temptations of the apologist to get too clever by half, to allow the phrase to defeat the argument. A particularly dangerous tactic in this regard is the tactic of reversal, in which the apologist takes the accusation leveled at him and replies, "Why yes I do. And that's a good thing!" Marc Barnes of the Patheos blog Bad Catholic finds himself floundering in this rhetorical tar pit in a recent post in which he attempt to fend off the accusation that traditional morality seeks to "enslave" women, subjugate them, make war on them, etc. He writes:
The liturgical chants and battle-cries accompanying and bemoaning the war on women are true in an erotic context.

The man who loves does wish to “control a woman’s body,” with an ardor rivaled only by his desire for the beloved to control his own. For what on earth is the sexual act, if not an attempt to control the body of the beloved? This is obvious in the physical sense, as the lover tries to “control” the other’s body into experiencing ecstasy, but it is also true when considering the nature of sex itself: If sex is the ultimate physical expression of erotic love, and love is desiring the good of the beloved, than sex — in its fullest — is the physical attempt to bring the beloved to his or her ultimate good, and thus an obvious attempt to control.

Similarly, the lover does desire a “slavery for women,” and for one woman in particular, a desire overwhelmed only by his desire to be enslaved by her.
Now, maybe I'm just a stodgy old married guy, but I don't actually think that slavery is a very good analogy for love. But let's leave that aside for a moment and accept the standard poetic conceit. Here's the problem: There's a big difference between offering yourself as a slave to someone and wanting them to do the same to you, and wanting to enslave someone. It's the difference between gift and domination. A relationship could work well in which each person wishes to serve the other's every desire: in which, according to the chosen metaphor, each person is a slave to the other. But that only works if they both want to be the slave. If, in any relationship, one or both members want to be the master while the other is the slave, you have a recipe for strife and unhappiness in abundance, not to mention a fair amount of cruelty.

This, really, is the problem with the metaphor. It's all very well for the poet to say, "I want to be your slave," but if his beloved takes him up on the offer by behaving like a slave owner, the poet is going to be dreadfully unhappy. (Which, come to that, brings us to another whole genre of often tiresome poetry.) Even if we accept the metaphor of wanting to be a slave to the beloved, a loving relationship is one in which each wants to be a slave to the other, but neither wants to enslave the other. Being a slave is not the same as enslaving, it's the opposite.

The same problem comes with the attempt to turn "control a woman's body" into a positive. Sex in which both man and woman strive to control each other's bodies is not going to work out well. In seeking to "control" one seeks to make the other do what one wants. If we assume that the lover wants his beloved to get what she wants (say, sexual release) one might assume this would work out to the same thing. But in actual interactions between people "I want to make you do what you want" is very different from "I want to give you what you want".

The inversion and capture method of apologetics is appealing in its cleverness, but the fact is that there are a lot of expressions that you really won't want to capture and make your own, indeed that you can't make your own without expressing your beliefs as something rather distasteful. In this case, terms like "control a woman's body", "enslave women" and "war on women" are not terms that Christians should seek to adopt and turn to positive meaning. It doesn't come off as some clever turn of phrase that makes one appreciate Christian love and a Christian understanding of sexuality in a new light. It just comes off as too clever by half and makes Christian morality sound vaguely nasty.

Interior Castle for the Young

In honor of the feast day of St. Teresa of Avila, we read the first chapter of Interior Castle, in which Teresa uses an image of the soul that the girls found congenial: a castle made of a single diamond. Teresa is an engaging and easy writer, and this first section is a very accessible introduction for children to her thought.

* * *
















Find the rest here.

They Don't Make Them Like That Anymore

Yesterday was the hundredth anniversary of Theodore Roosevelt (running for another stint as president against his own Republican Party under the Bull Moose Party banner) was shot while on the campaign trail yet refused to seek medical attention until after he had delivered his 90 minute speech.


Only after he completed his speech, he spoke for 90 minutes with blood running down his shirt, did he consent to go to a hospital. The bullet could not be removed from his chest and he carried it in him for the rest of his life. He was off the campaign trail for a scant one week, a week in which his opponents, sportsmanlike, also left the campaign trail out of respect for him. What a man! No matter one’s political views, and Roosevelt held a diverse group of views certain to both offend and inspire virtually all portions of the American political spectrum today, it is hard not to admire him. As one of his enemies once said about him, “A man would have to hate him a lot, not to like him a little!”
At the link above Donald McClarey provides more details on the indomitable TR.

Friday, October 12, 2012

Friday Night Read-Aloud

For commenter Laura: here I am reading a chapter from our current book, Little Women. It doesn't have lots of variation, but it does have the virtue of being quite short.

Thursday, October 11, 2012

I'm not watching the debate

...but somebody must be, so feel free to clue me if if I'm missing anything awesome.

Prudential Judgement













On Reading Aloud

Leah Libresco recently linked to a series in the Atlantic about new ideas for teaching writing, and noted in particular this post about one low-performing school examining students' poor writing skills and coming to the conclusion that students couldn't write because they could not understand fairly basic grammatical concepts such as conjunctions:



“Although George …”





On reading this, I wondered, "What are these students hearing at home, and have they ever encountered this kind of language from people other than teachers (if even from them)?"

Over dinner, I tried the "although" experiment with my three older ones, using prompts from our current read-aloud, Little Women.

Eleanor, 10: Although Amy loved to draw, she didn't know how to sculpt.

Julia, 9: Although Jo liked Teddy, she didn't want to marry him. Although Meg loved her children, her children were sometimes bad.

Isabel, 6, in a silly mood: Although Beth was a baby, she never cried in her life.

Bonus, from Jack, 4: Although Teddy didn't want to marry Beth, he kissed her on the lips.

Everyone: JACK!

It seems to me that regardless of what is being taught in school, young children will absorb the language they hear at home. Darwin and I do tend to speak in grammatically accurate and complex sentences, but we also have a natural human tendency to simplify our speech for everyday use. That is why reading aloud has pride of place in our homeschooling paradigm: besides being a fine method of packing lots of literature into little heads, it's a wonderful format for presenting more formal structures of speech and complex arrangements of ideas in an enjoyable and memorable way. I've also found that having the children recount the plots of novels we've read over extended periods aids in retention and comprehension. Reading aloud also introduces children to a richer world of thought than their limited reading comprehension allows them to access on their own, as well as preparing them to read these books one day.

No small part of successful reading aloud, however, is having a good reader to interpret the works, to use inflection and emphasis to set off grammatical clauses, and to make clear what can be obscure on the page. Most people are capable of reading aloud at the level of speaking what is written, but anyone who has listened to a trained and experienced reader knows the wealth of nuance and detail they can bring to a work, whereas anyone who's ever had to listen to poor reading knows that even the finest words can be made tedious by someone who either doesn't understand what they're reading or is unable to present those words well.

Reading aloud is something particularly dear to my heart, not only because I like reading in general and because it's essential to our homeschooling, but because it is how I use, every day, my liberal arts studies and my degree.

I've followed the recent chat about the economic value of a college education, and of studying the liberal arts, with mild curiosity but little desire to engage in the discussion. This is in part because it's not a topic on which I have much angst. My degree, as long-term readers will know, in in theater -- English with a drama concentration, to be precise, since Drama did not become a major proper until after my time at Steubenville. Never at any time, in my short theatrical career, did I make more than minimum wage on any show I teched. Speaking at a personal financial level, my life choices make it unlike that I will ever make enough money using the skills I gained through my drama studies to recoup my investment. However, by the most utilitarian calculations, studying the liberal arts at college was an economic boost for me because it placed me in Darwin's path and helped make me attractive to him, and he makes more than twice what I would likely make on my own, even had I been working these past ten years. Yes, I incurred debt -- I had some aid, but my parents could afford to pay scarcely any of my tuition or expenses -- but we've always been able to make the payments, and we're on track to pay it off next year. So, college was a path to my own economic success, even though I'm outside the workforce.

Some people have objected that really, education is wasted on 18- and 19-year-olds because they simply don't have the commitment to study or the drive to better themselves that comes with age. I don't agree. I was no great shakes at acting when I was in college, despite studying it rather intensively. Although I could easily pick up the history of theater and the theory and structure of directing, I didn't have at that time the physical confidence to be comfortable on stage, and I spent a lot of time wondering what on earth my professor meant when he enthused about "changing the other" or "vulnerability". But I've had eleven years since graduating to internalize what I learned and to apply each realization ("Oh, now I get it!") to honing my own craft, which happens to be educating my children through reading aloud.

And with years of practice, I am a good reader. I love acting out different roles, coming up with unique voices for the characters, and using tactics and intentions to convey motivation and subtext (and how much easier is reading a book, which often lets you on what the characters are thinking and doing, than a script in which you have to interpret everything for yourself!). I love interpreting the grammatical structure of convoluted sentences. I love the technical challenge of making narration flow, of following the cadence of the author's voice, of reading clearly, smoothly, and distinctly without being ponderous or treacly. I love using my education to pick up on historical, cultural, religious, philosophic, and scientific references in what I'm reading, and then explaining those to the children. And what a wealth there is to be discovered in Dickens, Alcott, Augustine, Homer, St. Therese, and Shakespeare even before one is old enough to read them to oneself!

I love listening to other people's reading, analyzing what is good in their style to apply to my own, and taking their flaws as reminders of what I still need to work on in my own reading. I love watching my children absorbed in a story and to know that they enjoy and understand what they hear. I love to hear them recount, sometimes word for word, what I've read. Most of all, I love to hear them reading aloud clearly and comfortably because they're following my model.

And that's what I'm doing with my economically impractical, financially unfeasible college education: reading aloud to my children.

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Liberal Arts: The Skills of the Free Man

I want to see if I can clarify and expand a bit my thinking on the Liberal Arts, broadly defined, and their place in education, particularly post-secondary education.

First off, I think some discussion of terminology is in order. When people talk about "liberal arts majors" in modern colleges, they generally seem to mean people who major in English, History, Philosophy, Art, Religious Studies, etc. Thus, in disputes about education, you'll sometimes hear someone say something along the lines of "You want a liberal arts education? Go to the library if you want to read the classics!" Or some particularly easy general math or science course will be dismissed as "for liberal arts majors" when talked about by students actually majoring in Mathematics or in one of the sciences. However, even in current formal usage, "liberal arts" still designates a wider range of skills than this more colloquial usage. Miriam-Webster defines "Liberal Arts" thusly:
1. the medieval studies comprising the trivium and quadrivium

2. college or university studies (as language, philosophy, literature, abstract science) intended to provide chiefly general knowledge and to develop general intellectual capacities (as reason and judgment) as opposed to professional or vocational skills
I rather like Google's definition for conciseness:
1. Academic subjects such as literature, philosophy, mathematics, and social and physical sciences as distinct from professional and technical subjects
This range of disciplines reflects the original list of the Seven Liberal Arts which derives from the 5th Century Roman writer Martianus Capella: Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, Astronomy

To the modern eye, this seems like a wide and somewhat odd collection of skills, and I would not say that a modern liberal arts education should necessarily mirror the original Seven Liberal Arts in exact detail. However, I think there is a useful general point do be derived from them. The seven liberal arts represented the education of a generalist. It was an advanced education. In late antiquity someone getting a liberal arts education would have mastered both Latin and Greek, and gained the ability to write and speak fluently in a variety of genres: Political speeches, poetry, history, etc. The student would have mastered formal logic and the major philosophical schools of the time, including an understanding of science (natural philosophy), ethics, and metaphysics. The student was also expected to master mathematics and geometry at a fairly high level. If you've worked a bit of Euclid, this wasn't exactly "math for liberal arts majors", it's fairly hard core stuff. And the modern equivalent of Music and Astronomy as the Ancients dealt with them would arguably be the hard sciences.

What made these "liberal arts", the skills of a free man? Some of these related directly to the responsibilities of a citizen taking part in ancient civic life: rhetoric, for example, was key to the political campaigning and legal wrangling which was a common part of aristocratic life in antiquity. More broadly, however, these are general skills. Someone who has only a specialist's education in some given trade is thus limited to his chosen profession. He is, in some sense, educated to be an implement. An education in the liberal arts is suited to a free man because they provided a general foundation on which one can quickly develop a more practical expertise on any of a number of subjects. So the liberal arts are those skills suitable to a free man because they are adaptable, allowing him to turn to any of a number of subjects and have sufficient knowledge and adaptability to master them.

Further, the idea of a liberal arts education is based on an understanding of the human being as a rational creature. We have a human need to understand questions of "why" and "ought", not just "how". As such, it's suitable to the human person to develop the skills that allow us to reason about the human condition and about the problems we face in our lives and in society at large.

The liberal arts are skills that provide us with the ability to understand the things that surround us and reason about them. As such, some degree of liberal arts are (at least if we take seriously the idea that we all share a human dignity rather than being by nature either "servile" or "ruler" in type) necessary skills for all of us.

What that leaves open is the question of what relation (if any) the liberal arts bear modern education at various levels, and since I've already spent far too much time on this post, I'll try to begin addressing that in another post.

Tuesday, October 09, 2012




And let the man that calls it be the caller;
And, in his calling, let him nothing call


"Thanks to your Majesty; give me the Money;
Let me alone to find my self a Honey"


Go ye and read.