Frequent Citations

It All Ends In Tears And The Breakdown Of Civilization As We Know It

Did your read this opinion article?

Let's set aside the tone of the article, except to say that the author's complete lack of objectivity and scientific integrity make me agree with Sheldon (Big Bang Theory) that the social sciences are bunk. It's also dreck as journalism.  There's nothing scientific or objective about it.

Let's also agree that all women are not and need not be the same. We make different choices. The world will neither end nor be the worse for it.

There are two points raised that I find particularly interesting.  One is that women with extremely high levels of income, education, intelligence, and capability opt to stay home to raise their children and manage their households.  The other is that the women of that social group live essentially segregated lives.

The article does nothing to help me understand whether these points are meant to be linked. Is there causation? Are they corollaries? Are they completely unrelated, and just happen to both pop up in this group of women? Does it matter?  I don't know (though I have my suspicions).  So, I set that aside too, and will treat them separately.

I haven't seen the stats, and I'd be interested to know how the sahm (stay-at-home mom) choice breaks across social strata, and how women of different social strata view that choice.  Some may view it as a pipe dream, others as a better option than paying for childcare that would cost more than the mom could make (that would be me, when I made that choice), others may view it as a lazy option (OH BOY are they wrong).  I suspect there are a million ways to think about it, and that economics are often, but not always, a major driver of the decision, whether for or against, and whether acknowledged or not.

Regardless, for these rich women it is an option.  They could hire a full time nanny and housekeeper and hold down a job themselves (a glamorous and well-paid one, of course)--and other women of that social group do. It happens. I've worked with some of them.  The author's implication seems to be that these smart and capable women are wasting their time being overinvolved in their children's lives.  That's a judgment call, but the fact (as in, lots of evidence has established this point) is that a child's environment, especially during the earliest years, is key to developing intelligence, life-long health, mental stability, language and analytical skills, and so on.  The brain needs good food at early ages to develop properly.  Children exposed to more words have larger vocabularies at younger ages. Et cetera, et cetera, and so forth. 

That was one reason I chose to stay home.  And it worked.  Yes, we were tremendously lucky in having healthy kids who seem to have lucked out in the gene lottery, but I'm going to go ahead and take some credit for their being early readers with broad vocabularies who are engaged in their environment, engaging to be with, and generally pretty solid citizens.  Their sanity they get from their dad, of course.

We were dirt poor (though well-educated) rather than rich, but I can understand extremely wealthy couples deciding that the best choices for their children would be for their smart mother to be their primary caregiver, for the kids to be involved in lots of enriching activities from the earliest possible age, and for the kids to go to the best possible schools.  Not everyone makes those choices, and I have no idea what I would have done if I'd had unlimited resources, although I've always said TFL would have been the better stay-at-home parent.  My only point here is that they're choices I can understand. (Not the part about being perfectly dressed and coifed when dropping a kid off at school, though, as meeting the minimum standard of dressed and coifed is often a challenge for me.)

More intriguing, and perhaps troubling, to me is the segregation. 

Parents of young children are often forced apart by competing time requirements.  The dads are often on the younger side, developing their career and working ludicrous hours.  The sahm are busy trotting the kids around, keeping the house together, doing their million and five tasks every day.  That was my experience, and that seems to be what the author implies in the article.  Even so, dads can carve out time to eat dinner with their kids and take their wives out on dates and generally be around from time to time.

So segregation is not a requirement of the lifestyle, if we're calling being an affluent family with a sahm a lifestyle.

But it does seem to happen.  What drives it, and is it healthy for anyone?  When I see segregation start to happen I become extremely wary.  Call me jaded, call me a cynic, call me a realist, but segregation often indicates a problem. Sure, we love to go off and do things with just us girls, but not always, and certainly not *exclusively*.  The more separation there is between men and women, the easier it is for each group to be dismissive of the other, to forget what their contributions are to a mutual life and relationship, because the mutuality of the life, and the relationship itself, becomes increasingly attenuated.

And once a spouse's attitude becomes dismissive, it's a short step to a breakdown of the family. Divorce, affairs, messiness, it all ends in tears. Which, if there were no children involved, would be unfortunate, but when there are children involved can become catastrophic at worst, supremely painful at best.  Who here hasn't seen this pattern somewhere amongst their friends, family, or acquaintances?

A dismissive attitude can also breed contempt, and that is REALLY bad for all women, everywhere. You think a guy's attitude toward his wife never bleeds over toward his female coworkers, consciously or subconsciously? I'd bet you my life savings you would be wrong. (That's $1.57, if you're interested.)

If I'm an investment banker trying to gain clout, or a businesswoman trying to climb into management, or a lawyer trying to make partner, that's the attitude that's going to be the death of my dreams.  The managing partner or CEO who loves his wife, or has daughters he wants to see succeed, he's much more likely to have a positive attitude about my capabilities and potential.  The one who treats his wife like an object and doesn't know his kids' names? He's not going to be helpful, and he may actively sabotage me.

I'm exaggerating for illustrative effect, but my point is that segregation does not bode well.  Segregation by choice can lead to enforced segregation. Segregation in one segment of society can seep into others.  And if nothing else, constant segregation can breed, eventually, contempt. 

The article is such a mess, unfortunately, that I don't think it can advance any analysis of these questions.  And how much of what she discusses is restricted to, or caused by, the world of the ultra-rich?  Who knows?

In other news: I'm alive. Family's alive. New job is busy as bad people continue to do bad things at big companies. Yay, job security.

 

Opinionated, Judgmental, or Right?

The NYT runs the interesting opinion piece from time to time. See here.

To much of which I say a firm AMEN. And everything hereafter is my nattering on, as is my untrammeled right, and you might find not one original thought. So take away my "Amen" and find something more interesting to read while I shake out my writing fidgets.

To wit:

a student in one of my English classes was chastened for his preference for Shakespeare over that of the Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat. The professor challenged the student to apply a more “disinterested” analysis to his reading so as to avoid entangling himself in a misinformed gesture of “postcolonial oppression.”

This right here is how literature profs earn themselves a bad name.  I've no idea who Danticat is, and he might be a stellar writer, but the whole point is I don't know--whereas I do know that Shakespeare (or another man by the same name)(joke) was a hugely influential writer whose work had a profound formative effect on our very language and continues to inspire and awe us today.

All of which is beside the point that instead of taking the student to task for "postcolonial oppression," whatever that might be, the professor could have encouraged thoughtful discussion of how we form our preferences and why, and what it was, specifically, that the student preferred in Shakespeare's work.  And with that, the professor would have taught, perhaps, a little bit about critical thinking and how to develop and hold one's opinion. And *that* seems to be much lacking in today's world. "I like [current pop star]." "Why?" :::crickets:::  That's one of the points the author makes, yes?

In the end, though, whether one prefers Shakespeare to a modern writer of any stripe is just a matter of taste, for which there is, famously, no accounting; but whether one prefers, just for example, candidate X or Y should be far more than a matter of taste.

It should be a matter of fact, to the greatest extent possible. This is the candidate's positions on a, b, and c. This is the candidate's history with respect to women, minorities, difficult questions from the press. This is when the candidate has lied, or has refused to lie. And while at a certain point one might resort to instinct or whathaveyou when making a decision as to a candidate's character, and how that character is likely to influence future decisions and actions, a great deal of fact should go into all of that.

In this regard, I see a major difference between waffling, mal-formed opinions on art or music or food or even, dare I say, yarn, and moral judgments.

Because morals, I would argue, apply to facts; and while we might fuss and fight around the edges, there are certain moral standards on which most of humanity agrees most of the time.  Murder (however defined) is wrong. Abusing the helpless. Piracy. Theft. Plaids with stripes. Like I said, we might fuss and fight around the edges (who is really helpless? what's the difference between piracy and privateering under letters of marque?) and, sadly, human history is rife with blood spilled over questions people consider central, mostly related to religion but sometimes also greed (borders and such), but we all make moral judgments all the time and a startling number of them are probably not really hard calls.

Or they shouldn't be.  If every point of view deserves equal weight, including that of the thief, well, we have got problems.

... we millennials labor to relish those differences and distances separating individuals, exalting difference at all costs.  We anxiously avoid casting moral judgment. Because with absolute truths elusive, what claims do we have to insist that our moral positions are better than those of someone from a different nation or culture?

If we want to turn our backs on the predominating theme of historical judgments, that different means inferior if not simply bad, great. GREAT. As someone who would generally be very much on the wrong end of such judgments, I'm all in favor of not automatically judging something as bad because it's different. But I think what the author is getting at--and I could be wrong, but hey at least I'm forming an opinion--is that we can't throw out that old paradigm and not substitute something new. Perhaps the new paradigm needs to be one of questions rather than assumptions (good luck with that because, psychologically speaking, assumptions are how we manage daily life without going around the bend). What it cannot be, however, is a wholesale acceptance of what anyone puts forth.

Because at the fringes (if not at the heart of everything), there's some weird stuff going on, and some of it is just bad. Morally, profoundly, simply bad. If we accept evil (to use a loaded word) because someone else likes it, where will we be?  And if we can't form and express an opinion that it is bad, how can we stop it? And who will suffer as a result?

Moral truths may be elusive (some of you may disagree), but that is not the same as nonexistent. Forming an opinion about certain things may be hard--and, frankly, we don't all need to have opinions on every single thing so it's sometimes unnecessary--but lauding a position because it's different is no better than denigrating it just because it's different. In both instances, judgment and discernment are abandoned.

Well.  I always did like Diogenes. That troublemaker.

Numbers Numbers Everywhere

More science and math classes should be taught with this kind of quirky enthusiasm, no?

 

 

On Short People

I often refer to young children as short people. Well, they are.  And I confess that I am not always fond of them.

I've given the subject a fair amount of thought over the years, actually, and generally the antipathy comes down to two issues.  One, they're often covered in unpleasant and sticky substances.  This ick factor is, obviously, easily solved and not always the child's fault.

But two, they often add being ill-mannered to the sin of being a bit dull, and that is far less easily remedied and, frankly, far more annoying (and this from someone with quite a low tolerance for ick).  Parents who allow their children to run wild, to utter shrill shrieks when there is no blood gushing, to interrupt adult conversations when there is no emergency and without politely attempting to gain attention first, and who otherwise abdicate any responsibility for instilling self-control and a sense of appropriate behavior, are not doing their children any favors.  It's a harsh world; people who grow up without being able to exercise self-control and adapt to subtle social cues will likely suffer the consequences.

I quite like snuggly infants, and I don't mind teenagers (as a rule) and sometimes quite like them too.  It's all that time in between that can be difficult.

Of course I don't endorse being mean to children, or humiliating them for amusement.  Such tactics are ineffective--and morally reprehensible.  I simply think that one should treat children more or less as one does a good dog: firmly, consistently, and with lots of love and baths.  The difference is that one must explain situations to a child, so that the child can learn and apply such lessons. A dog's language and reasoning capacities don't seem to be quite up to that level.

The Veil

Friends of mine were quoting Aristophanes this morning. (Don't I have wonderful friends?)

In Lysistrata, there's a moment of bitter truth:

I categorically decline to shush
for some confounded woman, who wears--as a constant
reminder of congenital inferiority, an injunction to
public silence--a veil!
Death before such dishonor!

The truth--it should go without saying--is that this is man's perception, willfully blind and self-interested.  And I well recall, from my childhood, men who still thought this to be true.

We never did get along well.

When France passed the law banning full-face veils in public places, Boy asked me what I thought and was, I think, somewhat shocked when I said I was all in favor of the ban.  This snippet of Aristophanes goes a long way toward explaining why. "A constant reminder of congenital inferiority, an injunction to public silence--a veil!" Indeed.

Moreover, France's culture is different from ours. (Some would say it is different in that they *have* it, but that's too easy a shot, no?)  In France, historically a generally mono-religious country, fraternity has been among the highest values, at least since the revolution.  It is also a far more secular culture.  Here, a country that from the first was a shelter for those seeking religious freedom, liberty has historically been the highest value.

Can you be brothers with someone who willfully hides their face from you? Can you be free if you are prohibited from practicing an aspect of your religion?

Can we support interpretations of religion that denigrate half of society?

What would remain if we didn't?  Who would decide?  Would the efforts just backfire?

I don't know. But ever since I read those lines of Aristophanes, they ring through my head every time I see a veiled woman.  The pain of old resentments can fade, but the determination they foster stays on, digging in its heels.

Fall Saturdays

We went for a ride Saturday, up the Palisades and around West Point.  The sky was clear, the air was crisp, the mountains were still green, football was happening, and there was no better place to be than on a motorcycle.

I love the fall.

In other news: I left work just after 9 pm tonight, people.  Crazy early!!! I got to knit while I watched the Giants beat the Rams, even. 

Sang Froid and Schadenfreude

TFL and I were discussing my favorite news story about the news this morning (so meta!) and it quickly turned into a discussion of meaning of schadenfreude, which I said was the reaction of many to Murdoch's current situation, and sang froid, which TFL pointed out could also encompass a certain cold-blooded rejoicing in the downfall of one's enemy.

He's got a point. But I still think the word we're looking for here is schadenfreude. Which, I must point out, my iPhone spells for me.

That's right--I'm posting from my phone as I walk to work. I knew I got this toy (I mean important communication device) for a reason.

When You Want Revenge

Think of Lord Byron, he who brought a bear to college because there was a rule against bringing dogs.

This article (warning: somewhat crude) has some pretty funny tales of revenge.  Note the captions under the pictures.  I had known about Arlington, of course, but most of the other stories were new to me.

Revenge: go big or go home.

(And no, I'm not feeling particularly vengeful, but I happened to see this story and it made me laugh.)

Time Off For Good Behavior

I've been set free! That is to say, I'm taking a few days off of work.

My big plans are to sleep, mail a couple of packages, do some light reading, watch a movie or five, and knit.

I am the most exciting person you know.

Sometimes You Go with the Flow

Sometimes everything flows over you.

I turned around and it was the end of October.  I have no idea how that happened except I have a vague impression of rarely leaving the office for months.  But I know somewhere in there my parents came to visit and we had a lovely time.

I'm sitting in my chair at home, now, with my feet on the ottoman, surrounded with papers for a brief I'm rewriting overnight.  I've gotten through an inch of case law and have another inch of papers to read and mess of a brief to correct, and a 10:30 meeting tomorrow morning (meaning sleeping in will not be an option).

Dogness is snoozing on the couch recovering from paw surgery.  She ripped a claw back while playing frisbee with TFL and the vet had to cut it off.  She got this cute rain cover for the bandaid--black, of course.

TFL got promoted to a position that entails a lot less fun, a lot more stress, and more hours.  Weirdly, he did not get a pay raise.  I am nagging him on a near-daily basis (those days I see him) to do something about that.  Feel free to join in the fun.  We have kids in college to pay for!  And, apparently, vet bills.

And with that, you're pretty much up to speed on my life.  But what's going on with your lives, dear readers?  Just because I don't write doesn't mean I don't care!  (Eww, triple negative.  I'll avoid that in the brief.)