Memorial Day

I have obviously been cleaning out my “draft posts” folder, stayed up too late, and just generally written too much (again).

Happy Memorial Day.  Remember to thank our military for your freedoms today.  The Founders wrote the words about the freedoms, but the military had to win them, and then defend them again in 1812.

Which, of course, gave us our National Anthem, written after the British bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore harbor in 1814.  (Here are the first and fourth verses, the most commonly sung.)

O say can you see by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave,
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

O thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved home and the war’s desolation.
Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the Heav’n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: “In God is our trust.”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

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New Reading…

Chai Ling was a leader of the Tiananmen Square protests.  Now, however, she is not agitating for democracy, but for the end of China’s abusive One Child policy.  (I’ll keep adding the “abusive”, although population control programs have always and everywhere been abusive.  Sooner or later, someone decides he’d like to get a bonus, so he’ll just force “a few” women to have sterilizations, then everyone else has to keep up their sterilization numbers, and then…  And we’ve done it in our country, too.)

Kathryn Lopez at Townhall wrote about Chai’s testimony on the One Child policy in Congress and in her book.  It is heartbreaking:

That she was a victim of the one-child policy didn’t dawn on her until a 2009 [Congressional] hearing… In that hearing, a woman named Wujian talked about her forced abortion under the one-child policy. …

“I was not prepared for her testimony,” Chai writes in her book. “I felt the pain and helplessness of Tiananmen when the tanks moved in on us. I felt the pain and helplessness of that horrible afternoon on the operating table when they performed the abortion on me without anesthesia.” She felt a “deep-rooted sadness” for a baby she would abort while married, after leaving China, having been so accustomed to it as a routine option. …

Chai Ling did not even fully realize what she was protesting in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the pain of tyranny having oppressed her — body, mind, and soul — in such deep and abiding ways, as her book makes clear. As she said on Capitol Hill this September: “We are here to report and mourn the loss of 400-plus million lives taken” under China’s one-child policy. “But I never realized until I was writing my memoir that three of those babies are mine.”

Abortion is dehumanizing — and not just to the unborn child whose life it ends. It’s degrading to the entire family, to society and civilization as a whole.

Sadly, the comments on the online article bear out that assertion.  While many wrote of their support for political action against China’s policies, one person wrote that the article was an “odd take” on the situation, since the only problem the poster saw was that Chai wasn’t free in her ”reproductive choices.”  Because, as long as you “freely” chose it, murder is ok?  (and she thought she was choosing this freely, at least her third abortion, so how free is free before it’s really free?)

Yet another person who didn’t read to the bottom before posting a comment, since the end of the article discusses the tendency of women to excuse those who pressured them into an abortion or failed to support them when they needed help.

Chai Ling’s book is A Heart for Freedom.  I will try to get to reading it soon.

But probably not on the plane to China.  I had a hard enough time biting my tongue last time in Tiananmen Square and in front of the guide (“Oh, Chinese don’t care much about abortion,” he dismissively told our adoption group.  Really?  Like the people who lynched the family planning officials last month, I wanted to say.  They seemed to care…).

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bin Laden is dead…

(Let’s just start here: Navy SEALs are awesome.  You should have known that already, but I’ll point it out again.)

I thought I’d be more excited, really.

As exuberant as Geraldo was on FoxNews, making the announcement (and he’s spent a lot of time with the troops and really feels what great news this is for them), I immediately thought, “Ok, but now what?”  (Followed by, “Hmm.  I hope he repented before he died, though I doubt it,” and then “Oh, no!  I’m not going to get to watch the recorded hours of beatification of JPII coverage because DH will be geeking out on SEAL team details for the next few days.  Crud!”)

Did we behead a dragon or a hydra?  Because there’s a difference. 

Behead a dragon, and it dies.  Chop off one of the hydra’s heads, and it grows a few more.  Al Qaeda is a whole lot more like the hydra; there are many local cells and local leaders.  The loss of the head of this loose organization may not be that significant to their operations.  Besides, bin Laden was on dialysis; the rest of the leadership had to know they needed to prepare for his death.

On a positive note, I have to say that, of all President Obama’s speeches, I most admired his brief speech announcing the death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of U.S. SEALs.  It was short.  It was presidential.  The usual jabs, smirks, and nervous laughs were absent.  It covered what it needed to cover, lauded the U.S. armed forces, and didn’t play up the president’s role overmuch.  I wasn’t sure Obama had it in him, but this was a good speech when the whole world was watching.

(The president still spends like a drunken sailor with a new credit card (too much and on all the wrong things), so, no, liberal ladies of The View, I do not think Republicans are doomed in 2012.  One good decision does not make for a good presidency.  Besides, many of the factors and policies leading to this victory were things he campaigned against… but did a 180 on when he found out how the world really works.)

And the question remains: aside from a morale boost for the U.S., will bin Laden’s death be a game-changer, or just a footnote in a long, painful campaign?  Will this encourage lukewarm allies to be more helpful?  Will this discourage would-be al Qaeda members from joining or cause their support to wane?  Will the threatened retaliatory attacks materialize, or is it just bluster?  What about Pakistan?  Did they know he was there?  Will the U.S.’s action (without informing the Pakistanis for fear of someone tipping off bin Laden) undermine moderates in that government?

It remains to be seen.

(But Navy SEALs are awesome.)

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The mosque, Ground Zero, and Hagia Sophia

I’m sure everyone’s heard the brouhaha by now.  A giant “community center” (to include a mosque) is to be built within blocks of Ground Zero.  There is no nearby Muslim community to use the gym and other facilities.  Survivors and family members of the victims of 9/11 are upset (understandably so, I would say).  Various New York politicians are tripping over themselves to remind everyone that it is perfectly legal.

Except, as usual, they’re arguing against almost nobody.  The main argument isn’t that it should be illegal.

It should be unthinkable.  Especially if, as the imam claims, the community center is to promote understanding and peace between Muslims and the rest of the world.

Really?  So, you named the project after a mosque built as something of a victory monument in Muslim-occupied Spain?  That’s supposed to give me a nice, warm, fuzzy feeling about Islam?!?!

Oh, wait, that’s right: most of the Western world has completely forgotten its history.  I had a shocking conversation with some relatives of my husband (overseas missionaries, no less) who had absolutely no idea what had happened to the basilica of Hagia Sophia.  Tonight, Glenn Beck at least referenced the incident, although he mistakenly described the new mosque as being built on the church’s ruins (it wasn’t; they just slapped some minarets on it).

And just for questioning if the location of the proposed mosque is sensitive to the memory of 9/11, people are being called racist and bigoted.  Muslims are writing articles for the paper about how they worry about their children’s future in this country.

Well, look on the bright side: at least you aren’t a Christian with a Bible in Saudi Arabia.  Fr. Pacwa on EWTN just mentioned (ok, I’m weeks behind on the dvr) that two Filipino women had their heads chopped off recently for having a Bible.  Not preaching, not praying in public, just having a Bible in the country.  The many Filipino workers (mostly Catholic) in Saudi Arabia are forbidden from having a rosary, a Bible, or any prayer books.  People have been arrested for having private prayer meetings inside apartments, quietly, with all the curtains closed.  There are no Christian churches in Saudi Arabia.

There is a mosque in Rome.  There are areas of London where the police refuse to enter, allowing sharia law to rule.  The U.S. military has Muslim chaplains.

Somehow, I don’t think the Christians are the ones prohibiting free exercise of religion.

Back to the name.  The new community center was to be called Cordoba House.  (They changed the name when people started pointing out the associations.)

Doesn’t ring a bell?  Here’s a hint: does “cordoba” sound like an Arabic word?  Do you associate it with the Middle East… or Spain?

Cordoba, Spain was the site of the church of St. Vincent, started around 600 AD, partially built with stones and columns from an earlier Roman temple.  When the Muslims conquered Spain, the church was bought and reworked as a mosque.  Cordoba was the capital of Al-Andalus (the Muslims’ name for occupied Spain), and the mosque complex was within the caliph’s palace.  The main hall was used not just for religious training, but for the operation of the law within conquered Spain.  Thus, the mosque was not simply a religious building, but the heart of Muslim Spain.

When the Christians retook Spain, they turned the mosque into a cathedral.  This summer, calls escalated for the bishop to allow Muslims to worship in the building again.  (The article fails to tell you much.  Some of the comments are just sad.  “But we’re all God’s children!” people gush.  Great.  Tell the Muslims that.  Tell the beheaded Filipinas that.  Tell the dead wives and daughters all across Europe and now the U.S. who were killed by their fathers or brothers for disgracing the family by being too Western.  Hagia Sophia is not a this-for-that deal: it is an example of how the Muslims cry about fairness and sharing when it benefits them… but never when it benefits Christians whose churches were seized.  Christianity is not about gushy, “I just love everyone!” mush; it is about truth.  If I love you, I will tell you where to find Truth, not just smile and wish you, “Have a blessed day!” as your father chops your head off because you’re wearing blue jeans.  And then wish the father a blessed day, too, without being judgmental, of course.)

Several people have argued that the mosque near Ground Zero is simply following in the tradition of Muslims building mosques on the sites of their conquests.  The name, the location far from any Muslim community, the lack of sensitivity to 9/11, the anti-American statements of the imam, the mysterious funding trail (which, like the money trails of various radical mosques and madrassas around the U.S., is probably going to lead straight back to the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia), etc. all seem to argue for the point that this is a victory monument.

Arguing against, we have only the word of the imam, who says he just wants to promote understanding.  Of course, he also said that he wants to bring sharia law to America and that America is worse than Al Qaeda.

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Big Government, Big Business

For quite a while, I’ve suspected that most of our major ”this vs. that” comparisons don’t really work.

If you take the extremes of the political spectrum, you have communism on the left and fascism on the right… except that they look an awful lot alike.  I’d say the line of the spectrum actually wraps around behind, so that the two extremes blend into each other.

Lately, in U.S. politics, the Democrats have been condemned as the party of Big Government.  Your other option is the Republicans, labelled as the party of Big Business.  Except that Big Government and Big Business increasingly seem to be playing at fighting each other and more often seem to be colluding.

Some choice, huh?

As I mentioned (but haven’t put on my What I’m Reading page), I am finishing up Hilaire Belloc’s Crisis of Civilization.  More on that forthcoming, honest.  But, for tonight, I’ll settle for a short quote:

… common upon the lips of the Socialists a generation ago, to which allusion has already been made– “Let the big businesses grow; the nearer they become to monopolies, the more easily shall they be taken over by the State.”

Why do I suspect that the Socialists quit saying it because the plan was going well and they just didn’t want to call attention to it?  Belloc also argued that as big businesses eat up their smaller competition and become increasingly huge and distant, most people will lose any sense of difference between oppression by Big Business and domination by Big Government, completely forgetting that neither one was supposed to be big in the first place.

But it’s not like our government has taken over any that many all of the big businesses lately…

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Too true to be funny

I was trying to verify the attribution on a different quote and found this one instead, from one of the syndicated editorial writers I almost always read:

Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.
- Thomas Sowell

I would add, “Followed by strenuous attempts to villify what worked as evil, or, at least, awful.”

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Historic Patterns?

Inside one of my high school history folders, I wrote a quote: “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”  Several people are said to have said it, in slightly varying versions, from Socrates to Winston Churchill.  The quote I wrote under it was from the famous historical theorist, Hegel: “From history, we learn that people don’t learn much from history.”

While skidding down the slippery slope, is it too late to matter that some people are starting to look around and say, “Hey!  We’re heading downhill!  When did that happen?”  Or, as the t-shirt says, “Where are we going?  Why is it so hot?  And what’s with the handbasket?”

As I mentioned, I am reading Hillaire Belloc’s Crisis of Civilization, which, in part, discusses the course of history and Christianity.  Rome, Belloc (and plenty of other historians) says, rotted from the inside.  Romans would no longer join the army; it was given over to mercenaries and barbarians.  The culture and arts had fallen significantly from their high point.  Belloc dismisses the idea of the “fall of the Roman Empire” as a bit of theatrics by historians; the empire, he asserts, gave everything over to the barbarians rather freely long before the empire technically fell.

Belloc diagnosed the late Middle Ages with the same affliction: the spiritual heart was weakening, long before the material or political realities showed the decline.  As with the Roman empire, more and more police or military action became necessary to hold things together as the spiritual foundations of a unified society began to fracture.

We started homeschool this week (not that we actually stopped for the summer), and we sacked the library of almost every documentary on Greece that they had.  So, come mid-afternoon, when everyone’s patience (and my voice) are wearing thin, we pop in a DVD and learn about Greece.

Today’s DVD was on Athens as the first important democracy.  The program had major issues; it comes across like they’re trying to demonize democracy by pointing out all the *awful* things Athens did while a democracy (wars, no women’s rights, slavery) vs. the modern world’s allegedly idealized view of the Golden Age of Greece.  (Really?  I always remember hearing both sides…  This is why there’s a lot of my commentary involved in these DVD sessions.  Pirates, I pointed out to the kids, were totally democratic.  They elected their own captains, voted on where the ship should work, etc.  That democratic tendency didn’t make the pirates nice people, nor does it invalidate the idea of democracy, just because less-than-perfect societies have used it.  Therefore, Athens being warlike and slave-owning, like every society around them, does not invalidate their ideas on democracy.)

More to my point, though, was the discussion of how the democracy ended.  The initial impetus to self-rule was deteriorating.  Athens had acquired an empire and was spending money marked for defense on its own monuments.  The cracks in the foundations were starting to show.  The DVD held up everyone’s favorite how-messed-up-is-that moment, the condemnation to death by poison of Socrates.

Strangely, I looked at this differently than I ever had before.  I thought of Belloc.  Greek society knew there were cracks developing that would undermine everything they’d created; Socrates’ execution may have been more of a justified attempt to keep their society unified than we’d like to allow.  (Remember, we’re getting most of our info on the whole affair from one of his students, who idolized his teacher, and was understandably outraged at what happened to someone he respected.)

Socrates preached the questioning of everything… which sounds good, until everyone starts questioning everything.  Socrates didn’t deny the gods, and he knew the questioning had to lead to answers, but did all of his listeners understand that?  Did Athens truly see Socrates as dangerous to the foundations of their society?  Were they right to be seriously concerned?  And was Socrates an example of the increasing resort to force as a society loses its grip on unity, where before he would’ve simply been argued against or incorporated into more acceptable modes of thought or speech?

Does our own society have a foundation anymore?  I look at what passes for Christian literature in most bookstores and I’m not sure we’re even as Christian as we think we are, if people are buying this stuff (and many people are, or the publishers wouldn’t keep printing it).  “America is great” is no longer universally accepted; while it is not yet universally denied, it is almost universally doubted, which is practically the same thing.  Every interest group goes its own way, fights for its own members, forget everyone else.

Everyone questions everything… but hardly anybody is actually looking for answers.  We’re told we shouldn’t be looking for answers; everyone has their own path, you have your truth and I have mine, how could you be so judgemental as to say objective truth exists?, etc.  You can’t build a foundation on the questions.

Greece, Rome, medieval Christendom… they all rotted out from within before they visibly fell.  Well into what hindsight would call their declines, most people thought everything was still ok.  The vestiges of social capital of society’s strong centuries disappeared slowly enough that the top of the slippery slope was masked.

So many times, my DH and I have looked at each other and sighed, “If we have to explain why this is wrong and write a law, we’ve already lost.”

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Monomania

I was watching The Apostle of Common Sense on EWTN a while back (when they were showing the new season, not the re-runs) and caught G.K. Chesterton (or, more accurately, a reenactor presenting Chesterton and Dale Ahlquist commenting) on Islam.  GKC argued, partly, that Islam’s problem is that it is a Christian heresy and, like many heresies, had a kernel of truth… which it then made the only truth.

In short, Islam, Chesterton said, is a monomania: the initial focus may be true (there is only one God and He deserves obedience), but it is not the only truth, and, in absence of other truths, can actually become something false.

An e-mail newsletter (that I don’t know why I don’t unsubscribe from) tonight caused me to revisit Chesterton’s comments on heresy and monomania.  Most of the newsletter was devoted to a discussion of why women should not wear pants.  Ever.  Pants are (and I would argue most of these points) far inferior to skirts/dresses in comfort, utility, style, modesty, propriety, etc., and no Christian man should allow his wife or daughters to wear pants if he can in any way help it.  I even ran across a collection of “Plain” Catholics; they dress like the Amish, work on family farms, avoid politics, shun modern conveniences, etc. in an effort to find a closer relationship with God.

Excuse me for being a history major, but I have to point out that the Victorians managed to consider ankles scandalously sexy, in spite of the skirts swishing above them.  The Middle Ages and Renaissance, for all their yards and yards of fabrics, had their share of affairs and “loose women”.  Free love hippies wore floppy bellbottoms, which could nearly be a split skirt.  And plenty of electricity-free, women-in-dresses, family-farm-inhabiting people of the late 1800′s were losing God, too.

The question is the interior attitude; it’s much harder to change and much more difficult to gauge if you’re getting anywhere.  Which, I suppose, is why it’s easier to go for the monomania: “If only we could get women back in skirts, we could reverse the massive decline in the culture in general and sexual morality in particular…” 

The thought ranks up there with the Latin-only argument.  I appreciate the use of Latin in the mass (and I wish my parish would use it more than twice a year) and I certainly think a whole lot more reverence in the average mass is a very necessary thing.  While I myself do not attend a Latin-mass parish, I understand that some people prefer the tradition of the mass in Latin.  The problem (and part of the reason that I don’t attend the local Latin-only parish) is that some people (not sure if they’re the majority or the vocal minority) loudly proclaim that, “If only we could get the mass back in Latin, then everything would be okay again.”

The problem isn’t the Latin.  If it were, the fall from “okay” wouldn’t have been so sudden and steep.  Nuns and monks wouldn’t have been abandonning their vows of chastity and service and marrying each other, bishops wouldn’ t have been openly instructing their flocks to ignore the pope’s call to continue to forsake artificial contraceptives, and the CCD programs wouldn’t have devolved into “Kumbaya”-singing, fluffy-headed, can’t-we-all-get-along, theology-lacking disasters so fast.

The problems were already there.  The Latin hadn’t changed, which fooled some into thinking nothing had really changed yet, but we don’t call church councils for nothing.  Make no mistake: the Latin-praying church had problems, and Rome knew it.  And so we got Vatican II… which, given the underlying spiritual rot of large chunks of the Church, was neither well implemented nor well taught.  It’s ok; we’re Catholics, we understand history (or should), and we should remember that there were more Arian heretics after the Council of Nicea than there were before and it took a while to convince all of them of the orthodox position.

As soon as the call went out from Vatican II to start acting like adults again and think about your faith with at least the amount of brainpower you apply to your job and other adult activities… well, a lot of people apparently realized they didn’t know how to.  Or didn’t want to.  “I liked it better when the mass was in Latin, and you couldn’t understand anything,” complained a character in a movie.

It’s not the skirts, it’s not the Latin.

It’s not even stay-at-home moms, although I would argue we’re getting closer to the problem there.  In a C-FAM newsletter tonight (yes, another newsletter; I was cleaning out the inbox), the discussion turned to the current UN meetings of the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Descrimination Against Women (CEDAW) committee.  The Russian delegation explained that by encouraging women to avoid abortion and instead have children (critical, since Russia is currently on a horrific demographic downturn), they had managed to a) get the number of abortions below the number of live births and b) decrease maternal mortality.  The UN conference was unimpressed and promptly began to ask if the Russians have considered the awful consequences of not getting women back into the workplace quickly enough after childbirth, and, BTW, have they implemented better transgender medical care yet?  (I’m not sure I even know what that’s supposed to mean…)

Then the committee turned to the *important* task of needling Fiji on decriminalizing prostitution for adult sex workers and making marriage available to homosexual couples.  Aren’t you glad the U.S. is fully funding its UN obligations again?  That’s your tax dollars at work, right there.  I’m sure the Fijians are grateful.

The problem is much bigger than skirts, Latin, and stay-at-home moms.

All are good things, but all can be done for the wrong reasons, and done badly.

They’re also only symptoms showing the decay underneath.  Fixing the symptom but not the decay is like whitewashing a tomb (wait, I’ve heard that somewhere…).

I’m currently reading Hillaire Belloc’s Crisis of Civilization.  He discusses the rise and flowering of Christendom through the first half of the Middle Ages: the triumphs of unity, Gothic cathedrals, literature, etc.  Something happened, though, in the late Middle Ages: unity remained on the surface, but the spirituality was weakening and the unity was breaking up, even as material progress continued.  So, people thought things were sort of okay, even as Christendom was rotting from the inside out.  Belloc suggests it was a form of old age, where the Church started failing to fight the necessary, ongoing fight for renewal.  The result was the Reformation and the destruction of Christendom as a real unity.

We’re still on that downwards slide.  The disasters of credit, wage slaves, wealth inequality, lack of moral restraint on business or culture, government taking over everything, etc. that Belloc was discussing are many times worse than they were in his day.  I think the only thing that would surprise him about today’s culture is that, somehow, we’re still standing.

The monomanias of “Can’t we just reinstate X?” or “If we could only get people to go back to Y…” aren’t going to fix things.  Even forcing women to be stay-at-home moms in life-long marriages again wouldn’t fix things if we didn’t change hearts first to understand why the woman in the home stabilized society.

It’s harder than monomania.  It isn’t one thing, it’s everything.

And it starts with the heart.  Yours.  Mine.

You can’t see it.  You can’t check it off the list; it’s an ongoing thing.  You can’t verify its progress in society in a year like you could if it was just skirts or Latin mass or even eliminating the UN (although that last one would help a lot).

Monomania is easier, but it isn’t life.

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July 4, 1776

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Preamble to the Declaration of Independence

Our rights do not come from the king.  They do not come from any government, whether monarchy, democracy, republic, or whatever other pattern, chosen or forced on a nation.

At her confirmation hearings in the Senate, Supreme Court nominee Elana Kagan said that she admired the Declaration and the Constitution, but did not consider that there are pre-existing rights before a government is constituted.  On further questioning, she clarified that she does not deny that there are rights that pre-exist the Constitution and Declaration, but simply that she, as a judge, would only consider the rights established in our founding documents.

The problem, I think, is that our founding documents explicitly appeal to those allegedly ignorable pre-existing rights to justify what they were doing.  Many of the rights we hold dear were not created by our founding documents, but were simply acknowledged as already existing and demanding the respect of the government.  The founding fathers were appealing to a higher court than the king.

That higher court did not vanish with the establishment of the United States of America.

All governments are imperfect.  All governments, sooner or later, will pass.  The “laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” do not.  Kings used to be solidly aware that they would answer to God for their behavior.  As with any other Christian, each king was free to choose whether the idea of that future divine judgment would change them for the better or not.  Those who chose to gamble that God would stay silent at least had to deal with the Catholic Church.  It was never omnipotent, but no country could escape the pope’s notice; flaunt morality far enough, and there would be consequences, at least spiritually.

The Reformation made the pope’s power look ever more ignorable.  Never again would an emperor or king be forced to change a policy or kneel in the snow outside the pope’s castle, seeking forgiveness.  Some would call this an improvement, but the idea of absolute monarchy comes after this change, not before.  When there is no real restraint from God, when any king can pretend that his interpretation of God’s will is the final one, well, there is very little left to keep any government in line… and every temptation to claim the king (or president) is above any law, consequence, or consideration of the desires of the people he governs.

So, when America’s founding documents were written, the founders sought to instill a bit of the fear of God into the future politicians and presidents.  A bit of restraint, to remember that the president is not the king, is not immortal, is not the giver of morality, but only the enforcer of laws.

And that our rights may not be rescinded by the government because they are not from the government.

These are not throw-away phrases, irrelevant to the modern practice of law, as Ms. Kagan seems to hold it; it is the foundation of our government.

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Do we respect work?

Do we respect the work, or only the money it generates?  I mean really respect it, not just pay lip service.

A while back, I ran across a Rod Dreher article on the book Shop Class as Soul Craft by Matthew Crawford.  (The essay which formed the seed for the book, “Shop Class as Soul Craft” is shorter than the book… but not short.)  Dreher talked about his father who attended college, worked a desk job he detested, and reveled in mechanical work all weekend: he bought the idea that college was the required ladder to success, even though he would have been much happier in a more blue collar line of work.  (It reminded me a great deal of my own dad’s tendencies and history.)

Although there is an issue of forcing students into college track classes who don’t belong there by aptitude and/or inclination, and certainly issues of white collar job vs. blue collar job levels of respect, I would argue that the problem is larger: we don’t respect work.

Sure, we respect money, but that isn’t the same thing as work.  Yes, we normally pick a line of work with an eye to being paid on a regular basis, but, hopefully, we also chose the work because we loved (or at least liked) it, because we found it fulfilling, etc.  Work chosen solely on the basis of money to be earned will be a drudgery.

Which is how I wound up absolutely miserable as an engineering major: yes, I let myself be pushed into engineering because it was highly practical and bankable, and history is not.  In spite of some aptitude for math and science, however, I detested engineering, and that made every class an exercise in misery for me.  (Which is exactly how my husband, who started and finished as an engineer, felt about his required English classes.)  It wasn’t just a question of aptitude, but of inclination.

I had the freedom to change majors, even the freedom to choose to be a housewife after I finished my committment to the Navy.  Most people, however, feel pressure (especially economic) to aim for the most consistent, high paying job they can find, whether or not it’s something they enjoy.  Surveys consistently report that about three fourths of women with young children would rather be home.  We all know people who have spent decades in desk jobs they hate when they would be much happier working with their hands.

If we respected all work, someone would still have to be the garbage man.  Even Crawford apparently still works for a think tank; I’m guessing that part-time at the think tank still pays better than full-time at the motorcycle repair shop.  It’s nice to say you appreciate hands-on work, but it’s a lot easier to say it when you have a high-paying job to finance your dabbling.

I had been mulling this over for a bit after getting about halfway through a book on the history of housework in the U.S. before deciding that the author was so biased that she wasn’t really making any interesting points.  (Or the interesting points I was getting were not the ones she thought she was making, as in, “She’s arguing for these schemes which didn’t work, but mocking a popular homemaking writer of the era by intentionally misinterpreting her… what is she afraid of: an honest argument?”)  It also helps to have the internet: in spite of the author’s assertions that the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments condemned housework as degrading and inherently slave-like work, it actually doesn’t.

The fundamental problem with feminism as it is currently pushed is that it does not respect work any more than the allegedly male-controlled culture it sought to supplant.  In an effort to create respect for “home economics” as a science, the first casualty was any respect that had been eked out for housework: housewives had to be portrayed as old-fashioned, un-scientific, and inefficient… and therefore in need of improvement from the new home economics professionals.  Quickly, the professionals also realized that they could make a lot more money selling products to housewives rather than just telling them how to do laundry better with what they had.  Housework became merely a function of spending enough money to “do it right”, and the housewife was nothing more than head consumer.  Why respect that?

Especially early on, some feminists even argued for houses without kitchens or laundry rooms, so that those “slavish” tasks could be outsourced, leaving women free to explore their horizons.  Of course, what that would have meant, and has certainly proved to mean now, is that upper class women would be free to explore their horizons with fabulous, exciting jobs outside the home.  Lower class women would be “free” to become laundresses, cooks, and child care workers, working long hours at hard work for meager pay, since this would be only the “mindless”, “slavish” tasks others thought beneath them.  Many women would remain unable to pay for someone else to do those things for them, leaving the poor to do all their own ”slavish” work plus the work of the upper class women who had the money to disdain such mundane things as child care and laundry.

What should have happened, IMHO, was an increase in respect for menial work.  Most women now do housework, and almost all women were solely housewives at the beginning of the feminist movement, so the first step towards respecting women would seem to be respect for the work they do.  Unfortunately, the feminists seemed too fixed on getting women admitted to colleges and competing in respected professions with men; they couldn’t waste time on telling men to appreciate that their wives cooked, cleaned, raised children, and washed clothes so that their husbands could go do that career.

So, you get modern feminists screeching about women “wasting” their degrees and forecasting the end of scholarships for women if more women don’t skip the “mommy track” and just keep working.  (So, now, I’m not just deciding to “waste” my degree, I’m betraying every member of my gender who might need a scholarship in the future?)  Of course, the wonderful, uplifting, fulfilling jobs feminists are always holding out as examples almost all require a college degree.  They conveniently ignore the fact that many women, like many men, will hold boring, menial, low-paying, and repetitive jobs… for which they will get precious little appreciation.

I don’t know that some think-tank guy playing at motorcycle repair in his spare time is really going to improve the lot of motorcycle mechanics in general, and the feminists have successfully denigrated the work most women do, in favor of  promoting careers outside the home.

It’s nice to talk about appreciating all work, but do we really?

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