Mind the Gap

Important mainstream media outlets have consciously decided not to cover the newsworthy trial of Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia abortionist accused of killing babies who survived botched terminations.  I previously posted about this trial earlier this month.  To fill in the media coverage gap, let me point to a few pieces that stand out.

Nietzsche and Foucault on Domination

Michel Foucault is justifiably regarded as a Nietzschean thinker.  In Madness and Civilization, Foucault adapts Friedrich Nietzsche’s genealogical method of inquiry and extends Nietzsche’s idea that “in all events a will to power is operating” (“Second Essay:  ‘Guilt,’ ‘Bad Conscience,’ and the Like,” in Genealogy of Morals, 514). Influenced by Nietzsche, Foucault interprets the history of madness in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries as attempts to control or dominate others, especially when society’s morals are perceived to be violated or threatened. 

Emerson and Kant on Enlightenment

Ralph Waldo Emerson's cultivation of self-reliance in his essays both breaks with and continues in some important ways the Enlightenment tradition, particularly that outlined by Immanuel Kant. The breaks are not insignificant, but ultimately Emerson stands more firmly within the basic Enlightenment project than outside of it.

Freud and Woolf on Art

In Civilization and Its Discontents (1929), Sigmund Freud argues that “[l]ife as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments, and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures” (CD 23). Art is one such “palliative,” one that features prominently in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927). Whereas for Freud art is merely one means of substituting pleasure for the pain of reality by escaping reality, in Woolf’s novel art also has a palliative function, but it intersects with and merges with reality to induce pleasure, satisfaction, and intimacy within it.

Cochrane's Alternative Maximum Tax

Today is the national tax filing deadline, tax day.  And today John H. Cochrane of the University of Chicago wants to start a national conversation about a maximum tax.  I will oblige him to some extent by linking to his blog post, which also appears as an opinion column into today's Wall Street Journal.

An inch of difference?

What difference does an inch make?

That is really the question raised by this USA Today column, "We've Forgotten What Belongs on Page One."

The author writes about the events that form the basis of an ongoing trial in Philadelphia about infanticide performed routinely by a physician. The question surrounds the seemingly artificial, in the author's eyes, distinction between what is moral and what is legal:

...whether [the doctor] was killing the infants one second after they left the womb instead of partially inside or completely inside the womb — as in a routine late-term abortion — is merely a matter of geography. That one is murder and the other is a legal procedure is morally irreconcilable.

So an inch makes the difference between what is illegal and what is legal, between permissible termination of a life and the impermissible termination of it.

The details that emerged during the trial and that are described in the column are just horrifying.  The trial seems to highlight the real dispute at issue:  not when does life begin but when does life become socially valuable?

Our enlightened society and its legal system have an answer. An inch makes all the difference.

Ralph Waldo Emerson is famous for writing in his essay "Self-Reliance" that "[a] foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers..."  Apparently, little statesmen are also wont to adore foolish inconsistencies.  And it reflects the smallness of their minds.

Talk to Them

I am currently reading a book by two MIT professors, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, about poverty.  The book is Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty.  It is a good read, and it seeks to cut through some of the major ideological divides.  The poles are often referred to as those of Columbia University's Jeffrey Sachs, who argues that more foreign aid can eliminate poverty traps around the globe, and New York University's William Easterly, who argues that aid hurts more than helps because it prevents necessary self-agency, undermines and corrupts local institutions, and hinders the proper functioning of market forces (see pp. 3-4).  All of these authors, Banerjee and Duflo included, have a different, sometimes competing way of assessing and fighting global poverty.

Enter a different sort of prescription for tackling poverty, which so often disproportionately disadvantages children:  talking.

"The Power of Talking to Your Baby" is the title of a short post entry by Tina Rosenberg in yesterday's New York Times Opinionator section.  The entire post is worth reading.  But I'll reproduce the main points of the research she reports.  In prior posts (here, here, here, and here), I have touched on poverty and economic class differences. The research that Ms. Rosenberg discusses is noteworthy because it, like some of my prior posts, highlights the correlation of aspects of family life to poverty.

All parents gave their children directives like “Put away your toy!” or “Don’t eat that!” But interaction was more likely to stop there for parents on welfare, while as a family’s income and educational levels rose, those interactions were more likely to be just the beginning.

The disparity was staggering. Children whose families were on welfare heard about 600 words per hour. Working-class children heard 1,200 words per hour, and children from professional families heard 2,100 words. By age 3, a poor child would have heard 30 million fewer words in his home environment than a child from a professional family. And the disparity mattered: the greater the number of words children heard from their parents or caregivers before they were 3, the higher their IQ and the better they did in school. TV talk not only didn’t help, it was detrimental.

Hart and Risley later wrote that children’s level of language development starts to level off when it matches that of their parents — so a language deficit is passed down through generations. They found that parents talk much more to girls than to boys (perhaps because girls are more sociable, or because it is Mom who does most of the care, and parents talk more to children of their gender). This might explain why young, poor boys have particular trouble in school. And they argued that the disparities in word usage correlated so closely with academic success that kids born to families on welfare do worse than professional-class children entirely because their parents talk to them less. In other words, if everyone talked to their young children the same amount, there would be no racial or socioeconomic gap at all. (Some other researchers say that while word count is extremely important, it can’t be the only factor.)

This raises a number of questions, and much could be said even before those questions are answered.  I am suspicious, for instance, that early-age word usage by parents accounts entirely for later academic success disparities among students. I think it may be one reason, and may be an important one.

More generally, the notion that talking to one's children in their earliest years might have long-term effects would seem to be as intuitive and obvious as it is apparently lacking in many homes.  Getting some families to talk more to their children, however, will not be as simple as informing them that it is important to do so.  This is not a quick fix.  Background challenges involving the social structure of these welfare children's home, particularly the single-parent nature of so many of them, will also be necessary.

I have not read the full paper by Professors Hart and Risley, but it would be interesting to know whether they also examine the correlation of decreased word use to children in single-parent homes.  Does word use go up or down depending on the household's marital structure, in other words?  If it goes down in single-parent homes relative to two-parent homes, then this study would be additional evidence that family structure, as well as what takes place within it, has a predictive effect on the presence and prevalence of poverty in the United States.

This study from the 1990s is stimulating, but it is only one window into a complex problem.

Hookup Culture and Same-Sex Marriage

A fascinating book review appears in today's Wall Street Journal.  The review is by Emily Esfahani Smith of a new book by Donna Freitas called The End of Sex:  How Hookup Culture Is Leaving a Generation Unhappy, Sexually Unfulfilled, and Confused About Intimacy.

The review includes an interesting suggestion, which I had not seen before but makes perfect sense.  It is that there is a high positive correlation between the increased use of technological devices among youth -- which replaces, removes, or corrupts traditional human interaction (a la Sherry Turkle, Nicholas Carr, and many others) -- and the rise of hookup culture on college campuses. (Previous posts here and here provide a summary of Prof. Turkle's ideas.)

Something else worth pondering is a point that Prof. Freitas makes about the culture of sex on college campuses, here summarized by Ms. Smith:

In other words, many college students, who in philosophy class would surely recognize the ethical imperative not to use other people as means to an end, do so every night in their dorms. This selfishness is why, as Ms. Freitas argues, the hookup culture is intimately related to sexual assault. In both, one person uses another to satisfy a sexual or social desire without any regard for what that other person wants, needs or feels. 

Now, one might counter that the sex is consensual and so there is no assault. But the idea underlying the claim of selfish sexual use that disregards what another person "wants, needs, and feels" goes deeper than this.  It is more holistic.  The assumption seems to be that this sexual activity is done in the absence of thinking about what sex is, what it does relationally, and what it is part of holistically.   And absent these fundamental considerations, hookup sex is personally utilitarian to the extreme and, at bottom, immoral.

Professor Freitas may not go so far as I just put it (i.e., say that hookup sex is immoral), but that is apparently her instinct.  And there is something to that notion.

This discussion of campus sexuality is revealing, it seems to me, for the contours surrounding, and the connections to, the same-sex marriage debate that is now current.  Proponents of same-sex marriage tend to defend it on the basis of a "rights" argument, that it is an individual and civil right to be able to marry whomever one may wish.  But this line of argumentation, while it needs to be considered, may be similar to the hookup sex culture in this way:  it tends to assume something about the fundamental issue of what marriage is, and perhaps like hookup sex culture it misses the point.

Arguing for same-sex marriage may not always include explicitly a definition of what marriage is, but there is certainly an assumed definition, which is really a re-definition.  Redefining marriage from the conjugal view to include same-sex partners turns on the idea that marriage is simply a relationally satisfying forum, one that exists for the pursuit of the happiness, or the fulfillment of desires, of those persons involved.  One full expression of this revisionist view is given by S. Girgis, R. George, and R. Anderson:

Marriage is the union of two people (whether of the same sex or of opposite sexes) who commit to romantically loving and caring for each other and to sharing the burdens and benefits of domestic life. It is essentially a union of hearts and minds, enhanced by whatever forms of sexual intimacy both partners find agreeable. (my emphasis)

What if sexual intimacy according to whatever form that partners find agreeable turns out to be deleterious and misguided, as Prof. Freitas argues about hookup culture?  What if the potential form that sexual intimacy takes in marriage is in fact constitutive of marriage itself properly practiced?

I don't know Prof. Freitas's view of the same-sex marriage question, and I am not suggesting that she would support a conjugal view of it.  Based on the review, I doubt she would.

My main contention is simply that if one is going to discuss the merits or legitimacy of different forms of sexuality -- hookup culture on college campuses and marriage itself (because sexuality has been viewed as intrinsic to marriage) -- one needs to be candid about this:  the fact that the discussion is about, or should really be about, what sex or marriage is most basically.  And everyone in the conversation needs to be willing to engage substantively in that discussion.

The preoccupation with a supposed individual right of same-sex persons to marry obscures the logically prior and necessary question of the basic definition of marriage upon which the exercise of any right depends.  Moreover, if someone is confused about what something is and what it is a part of, as in the case of hookup culture, then the doing of that thing will have deleterious and misguided results.

To adapt the subtitle of Prof. Freitas's book, what if same-sex marriage ends up leaving a generation and its posterity confused about intimacy and what marriage really is?