Comments on: Corrections

By: roy belmont

roy belmont — Sat, 05 May 2007 04:07:11 +0000

Matthias- There’s a recursive path, where I say things, you misinterpret them, I reply to correct that, you misinterpret that, I reply again, and it goes on, spiralling every downward. Almost none of the sentiments or stances you’ve hung on me are accurate, or contained in what I said, and the little bit of argument you are making with what I did say is so filled with tropes and cliches I’m done with it. You keep presenting these binary choices and demanding things fit into them.
It isn’t linear, it isn’t binary, it isn’t a choice between grubby superstitious cavemen and super-clean rational hive-units. The contest isn’t between those stereotypes, it’s between lots of types of beings, competing for gene-space, just like always.

sg- There’s some pretty damning stuff available that points to people being turned into “permanent teenagers”, or worse, by advertising, which began marketing things to the so-called baby-boomers for the first time when they were in fact teenagers, who then began to think of themselves as special in that regard, and have now turned their learned and polished expertise on the next generations. So that ten year-olds are now a highly-prized marketing demographic. That I would find that Satanic, and its course hell-bound, shouldn’t be too surprising. The rest of your comment reads like cheap twaddle.

dr. slack- We’re “killing the planet” because of our heedless acceptance of personal gratification as ultimate life-goal, especially when it’s accompanying technological progress. When it’s drug-induced we condemn it, when it’s gained by pedal-to-the-metal acceleration, we celebrate it.
I’m not advocating a return to caveman days, or to patriarchal dominance on the family farm. I’m saying as clearly as I can that the bigotry leveled at those older ways of living is as pathological as racism or any other form of chauvinist prejudice.
The asinine conflating of all disagreement with the blind worship of technology into predictable Luddite cliches shouldn’t need clarifying, or rebuttal, but there you are.

By: Matthias Wasser

Matthias Wasser — Sat, 05 May 2007 01:13:52 +0000

If global warming wipes out humanity, the industrial revolution may or may not have been worth it.

(Depending on whether one considers the lives of humans without shallow, consumerist perks like political freedom, being able to choose when to have children, and not being a subsistence farmer particularly more worth living than that of whatever other biomass would take its place. I’d prefer a smaller and happier human population to a larger and more miserable one, and I suspect so would you, so.)

But please do not act surprised that when you talk about the unsustainability of the current world-order and how the old ways were so much better in a thread about gender roles and the freedom to have children when one wants, and people suppose you to be channeling Harvey Mansfield rather than Al Gore.

By: roy belmont

roy belmont — Fri, 04 May 2007 21:44:36 +0000

A. Old ways bad. List.
B. New ways good. List
All done.
Well, uh, there is the part about the old ways catalog being drawn from, you know, uhm, like thousands of years of events and experiences, cherry-picking only the bad, never acknowledging the good; and, uhm, uh, the new ways one being drawn from uh, what – 5 decades or less? And cherry-picking the good while never acknowledging the bad. Like the part where, uhm, global warming eats your, uh, family?
Your “vulgar, consumerist values” aren’t bad just because they’re vulgar and consumerist, they’re bad because they lead to the extinction of nearly everything but vulgar consumers, and even then…
I have no clear idea how you got intention and evolution put together from what I said, except probably that it was necessary to win the argument in your head.
What I said was evolution – key point – our adaptation to forces and pressures etc. outside our control, is how we got the big brain/quick-hand thing going. There’s a tacit assumption now that we have the wisdom and perceptivity necessary to direct our own evolution from here on out. It’s solipsistic, and has no substance but wish-fulfillment driving it.
Global warming would be the up-and-coming big rebuttal to that, but it has company, lots of it. You were given the African-savannah/rockets-to-Alpha-Centauri caveman/modern-man dichotomy by the same chauvinist assholes who gave you white-man-superior/brown-man-inferior. It’s an equally arrogant world-view, with racism replaced by something less identifiable, but just as bigoted.

By: Matthias Wasser

Matthias Wasser — Fri, 04 May 2007 19:19:45 +0000

Um, evolution doesn’t intend anything. It’s a name we give to certain patterns we expect to see for self-replicating entities. It’s not, like, conscious or anything, and even if it were, it wouldn’t particularly care about us.

But, uh, if you want to live with a higher model of the good than our vulgar, consumerist values like “longer lives are better” and “people should have autonomy in their major life choices,” feel free. I don’t understand how your particular African savannah gets internet access, but hey, whatever makes you happy.

By: roy belmont

roy belmont — Fri, 04 May 2007 19:06:59 +0000

Alphie-
Inasmuch as every prior state of the world can be said to have led directly to this one, and whereas this one, at this moment, is widely acknowledged to be a “bad” one, at least so far as it is not a “good” one, though of course any good any of us have known in our own lives is from this world and this one only, making it an ambivalent judgment at best – still, it can be said, rationally, if not honestly, that there never was a “good” state that the world could have been found to be in, because it all came down to here, now.
Sort of like the way no one can be condemned for “having destroyed the earth” or “having destroyed humanity”, because by the time it’s happened conclusively there won’t be anyone human there to accuse. Until or unless it happens it will always only be speculative, and vulnerable for that reason, and easily argued away.
That same logical train goes round and round its little track whenever someone tries to point to an earlier time as holding more of what’s to be desired in human existence, and someone else smirkingly or smugly points out that whatever point on the timeline you pick there were great gobs of awful things back then: slavery; plagues; ignorance; discriminations of various and virulent sorts; much lack of basic freedoms; short lives of long brutal toil.
People recoil in horror from the statistics of childhood mortality rates just a hundred and fifty years ago, yet calmly stare at the screen as the news flashes by that cars are killing more children today than anything else is.
One of the techno-chauvinists’ main bombards is the relative lack of disease these days, the awfully much higher death rates from disease back in the bad old days, longer life spans now etc.
This is presented as an inarguable good, because it is, in an atomized, consumerist sense. Just as someone who’s hungry getting a nice big meal is an inarguable good. Whether it is a universal good, however that might be defined, keeping in mind it can defined right out of the conversation, remains to be seen.
There are those who say, and with some substance, that there are too many of us now for the way we’re living, that the problems that rise toward us are inherent in those “good” things and how many of us there are enjoying them.
Bearing in mind that evolution’s where we got the brains to make things so much nicer, bearing in mind that evolution meant a certain volume in the death rate was required, bearing in mind that evolution as so constructed was not under our control, but rather we were forced to submit to those larger forces that shaped us and gave us the big brains and delicate quick hands we now employ. Some reflection might show the contrast between other times and now in a way that’s not quite so one-sided and easily dismissed.
Which is the mirror you seem to have missed on your way into the room.

By: Matthias Wasser

Matthias Wasser — Fri, 04 May 2007 15:45:35 +0000

People should have kids at 20, and pass them on to their (40 year old) parents to raise.

This is a very sensible idea. It’s also never going to come to pass, since we’re almost certainly going to make people fertile forever before we change parenting expectations that much, but it would have been a nice path to take.

A related question – what if the expectation was dropped that our partners-in-parenting will be our partners-in-romance?

By: CJColucci

CJColucci — Fri, 04 May 2007 15:37:46 +0000

I make no claim to any insight whatever on the emotional issues surrounding the “biological clock” problem except to acknowledge that they are real and serious. But even for those whose emotional needs can be satisfied by raising children rather than bearing them, through adoption, the “stage of life” issues remain. Adopting a young child after, say, 40, raises all sorts of timing problems—physical dotage, matching of expense and income cycles, and the like—to which I referred, admittedly somewhat facetiously, in my original post.

By: chris y

chris y — Fri, 04 May 2007 15:29:47 +0000

Michael Bérubé @6: you should really get your colleagues on this site to publish a health warning about textile markup.

By: harry b

harry b — Fri, 04 May 2007 14:51:18 +0000

I haven’t adopted, or tried to adopt, but have talked to lots of people who have, in the UK and the US, and across several decades (my entire sample). Here’s my completely anecdotal findings. When abortion was illegal, or very difficult, there were lots of potential adoptees, and adoption was a buyer’s market; it was relatively easy to adopt and adoption agencies were relatively uninstrusive, because they knew that some home was better than none. With the rise in abortion, and the rise in infertility, the supply of potential adoptees shrunk relative to the increasing demand from the infertile (and there were also, from sometime in the 70s, complicated issues about race-matching, which made it harder than it should have been for white parents to adopt black kids, though that seems to have improved a lot). The consequence: agencies are extremely intrusive, setting very high standards for adoption, and treating parents who want to adopt in a way that is sometimes very demeaning. Have a kid biologically and there are no qualifications needed at all.

I, too, found bloix’s comment helpful.

And I also had the thought ozma had at the time, about the direction of the meanness (and kieran made a comment implying something of the sort early in that thread). The meanness seemed no less obnoxious to me directed that way than it would have been if it had been directed at the longing for a child.

This is worse than michael’s anecdote. I’ve a friend much younger than me whom I’ve known since she was 4. We played ping pong a lot when she was around 10 or 11 (and I in my mid-twenties). At 12 we ended a very hard fought game (I’m not bad, actually, but she was suddenly brilliant) which she won by 3 points. She looked at me with daggers in her eyes, said, resentfully, “You let me win!” and stomped off. She was wrong. Lesson: you can’t win with teenagers whatever you do.

By: Doctor Slack

Doctor Slack — Fri, 04 May 2007 14:26:43 +0000

sg: People have trouble finding the Perfect Relationship because they’re Just Not Trying Hard Enough? Gah.

Roy: bloix’ comment is perfectly fine. Sorry to pick on you, but the “we’re killing the planet because we’ve abandoned the old gender roles” theme strikes me, by contrast, as making no sense whatsoever. Maybe you could clarify.

By: bad Jim

bad Jim — Fri, 04 May 2007 08:43:31 +0000

I can still see my brother on a motorcycle, with his firstborn daughter seated in front of him, both helmetless, she laughing delightedly, of course. They were fearless then.

Now I can’t even imagine him putting his putative, yet unborn, son into a carseat in his little sports car. Not when his mother is driving a Prius. There may be a minivan in their future.

By: SG

SG — Fri, 04 May 2007 07:17:24 +0000

Roy, call it insipid and flighty of me but I don`t intend to live my life as if the “Gender roles that in their old configurations were necessities” might still be needed. I live my life as if they were dead, buried and no longer on my mind. Until, of course, some concern troll pops up to remind me that really young people are oh so silly, and don`t they realise that they need to be careful with all these new-fangled inventions which will turn them into permanent teenagers? They haven`t, they don`t and they won`t, but thank you for categorising my determination to live my life differently to you so charmingly.

By: alphie

alphie — Fri, 04 May 2007 07:17:02 +0000

Out of curiosity, roy, could you pinpoint for us when the world was in a “good state?”

By: roy belmont

roy belmont — Fri, 04 May 2007 06:15:28 +0000

Telling that a comment as compassionate and thoughtfully heartfelt as #12 gets dissed by the flighty and insipid sg.
It’s true this whole discussion, and our marriages and child-rearings, takes place within a social context that is brand-new, whose parameters are untested, that has as well corollaries that are not only proving themselves semi-dysfunctional in the short run, but are demonstrating a terminal velocity of heedless long-term damaging change that would, if it were intentional, be scarily malevolent; yet it’s the given within which all these musings occur. The world is not in a good state, and the way we live is why. Yet that’s where we court and marry, and bear and raise our young.
All this new stuff, untried, unproven, but all taken as how things are, appropriate, inevitable. Like cars in the street. Less than a hundred years old and the world is dying out from under us because of them.
And there it is right there – it’s not going to stay like this, no matter what we do. Of all the things that can be said, that’s undeniably true.
Gender roles that in their old configurations were necessities are now assumed to have changed irrevocably, because the conditions that necessitated them are gone. Assumedly forever.
It’s not that I agree completely with bloix, but the articulate sincerity she’s presented needs confirming. Especially contrasted with the compensatory sports-as-gender-assay pathology of berube and sg.

By: SG

SG — Fri, 04 May 2007 01:54:00 +0000

Hey John, who said anything about gloves? We`re talking about disciplining children here, right?

Mr Berube, I don`t know anything about Say Anything, but if you kicked the TV it counts. Maybe you should watch more Bush press conferences to facilitate this (though surely that won`t impress your son!)