Driving around with out-of-town visitors this weekend, I was frustrated anew by the St. Louis area highway system. This town has more one-way interchanges than anyplace I’ve lived. Examples:
What I didn’t notice until I was complaining about this to a friend today is the common thread in all these examples: trying to get on a westbound freeway is awfully difficult. Considering St. Louis’s nickname and former role, that’s rather ironic.
Via Matt Yglesias, I find this rather goofy article, Polygamy Versus Democracy. Apparently there’s a prevailing opinion in legal circles that polygamy should be legally recognized, and this is Stanley Kurtz’s argument that it shouldn’t be recognized because it isn’t compatible with democracy.
I tend to agree that traditional patriarchal polygamy isn’t compatible with a liberal society - certainly not if it’s a cultural norm. Strangely, Kurtz never mentions one of the primary reasons this is so: the fact that, by definition, patriarchal polygamy involves making women a lesser class than men. When half your society doesn’t have the same rights as the other half, truly liberal government is pretty much impossible. The closest thing I can find to an acknowledgment of women’s oppression in polygamous societies is the remark that “polygamy opens the way to marital discord, divorce, and the consequent destitution and abandonment of women and children.” Of course, this phrasing implies that women are something to be taken care of, just like children, so I’m still not at all sure that the subjugation of women is a factor in Kurtz’s dislike of polygamy.
So why does he dislike it? Supposedly, of course, because it’s incompatible with democracy. He uses the Mormon society of the 19th century to demonstrate this.
Brigham Young was simultaneously head of the church, governor of the Utah Territory, and a member of the boards of major businesses. Young decided where his followers lived, the crops they grew, where they shopped, the professions they chose–and who they married. There was little government beyond the church’s structure. Religious leaders schooled their families privately, while most of the territory’s children remained illiterate. Elections were understood not as forums for debate and decision, but as occasions for popular acclamation of God’s choice.Underlying all this was a deeply communal ethic: Men and women were willing to defer to the church’s leadership for the sake of the broader Mormon society, even in so personal a matter as marriage–within which, of course, wives deferred to husbands.
(There’s another hint at women’s subjugation… but no exploration of how this might harm a society.) It seems fairly clear here that the theocracy was the problem, not the polygamy per se. I guess the argument is that polygamy fostered a communal ethic, which then led to acceptance of theocracy. But there’s not too much explanation of how that works, and I’m pretty sure it’s not a necessary condition. (See: Scientologists - not polygamous as far as I know, but happy to let their crazy church control their lives.)
Sure enough, Mormon resistance was broken by taking apart the theocracy first:
Attending to the social and economic foundations of Mormon power, Congress set out to break polygamist rule. By 1833, the disestablishment of churches in the American states was complete, and it had been accomplished partly by state legislatures’ setting limits to the churches’ business and property holdings. Congress now applied these standards to the Utah Territory, modeling its legislation on the original “mortmain” laws that had curbed church power in England. In this way, church control of Utah’s economy was dissolved, and erstwhile church property was used to fund public education, with a curriculum designed around democratic values.The result was capitulation. With the economic and social foundations of theocracy destroyed, a shooting war unwinnable, and the quest for statehood hanging in the balance, the Mormons renounced polygamy and set themselves on the path to democracy.
Perhaps theocratic rule by a nut was what led to the polygamous practices? No mention of that possbilitiy.
Some time later, Kurtz argues that successful polygamy depends on giving up individual autonomy:
This same emphasis on rules and hierarchy within a tightly bound group explains why the Bedouin children studied by Al-Krenawi turn out all right. Things get better when Bedouin kids grow up and receive surrogate parenting from their extended kin. But that depends on giving up what Al-Krenawi calls “the Western liberal conception of individual autonomy.” To get all that surrogate parenting, the Bedouin adopt an “authoritarian and group-oriented” identification with an extended family and tribe.
Cognitive dissonance at hearing “individual autonomy=good” and “identification with extended family=bad” from a conservative aside, this is probably the most persuasive argument he has. But two paragraphs later, we get this:
Yet the weakening or even disappearance of extended kinship groups from family life in the West poses a problem. If families aren’t going to be held together by collective honor, mutual obligation, and shared economic interest, how will they cohere? The answer is love. Exclusive affection for a unique individual is the structural foundation on which Western families are built. In polygamous societies, where marriages are arranged and wives and children live collectively, too much individualized love (for spouses or children) endangers group solidarity. Yet in a democratic society, individualized love is praised and cultivated as the foundation of family stability.
Wait just a minute. Families aren’t held together by collective honor, mutual obligation, and shared economic interest? I thought those were a huge part of why people do form families! While love is a wonderful thing, it can’t be the only basis for a marriage or family. Love doesn’t conquer all, folks. Expecting it to do so is a significant factor in the current high divorce rate - if you don’t love each other any more, why stay married? Especially if you’re not supposed to hold your family together with honor, obligation, or economic interest!
After reading that, I had to google to make sure this guy is actually a conservative. He is! And in an NRO article from just last week, I found the following:
Consider Anthony Giddens, the most influential sociologist in Britain, and arguably all of Europe. Giddens’s 1992 book, The Transformation of Intimacy, with its famous notion of “the pure relationship,” is the text most frequently invoked by European demographers to explain trends like parental cohabitation and same-sex unions.Giddens’s point is that modern marriage is slowly being divested of connections with anything beyond the purely emotional bonding of adults. It used to be that the love of husband and wife was only part of the picture. Men and women were held together by love, but also by economic interdependence, and a shared commitment to parenthood. But gradually, says Giddens, the marriage alliance is becoming less and less about a shared project of prosperity and parenting. Increasingly, marriage is being reduced to a strictly emotional connection between two adults: “the pure relationship.”
For Europe’s demographers, Giddens’s idea of the pure relationship makes sense of why so many parents now avoid marriage. When having a child turns into an experiment that might possibly lead to marriage, rather than a reason to get married in the first place, you know that marriage has been narrowed into an identification with the adult love relationship. Gay marriage fits in here, as well. When gay-marriage advocates define marriage, they carefully confine themselves to the adult love relationship, insisting that parenthood has no intrinsic connection to marriage.
He goes on to argue that this trend is undermining the traditional family, which, after all, does require commitment and economic interdependence beyond just love. If you accept Kurtz’s argument in the Weekly Standard article that “individualized love is … the foundation of family stability” and individual autonomy is key in a democracy, maybe it’s gay marriage and not the traditional family that’s truly compatible with democracy!
My head is hurting from trying to wrap my mind around these arguments. So that’s the end of the substantive criticism, but there are two more ridiculous quotes that I can’t resist including.
Of course, liberal law professors aren’t defending polygamy out of affection for patriarchy. Their goal is to establish the principle that individuals have the right to create and define their families as they see fit. Ultimately, that would put same-sex marriage, polyamory, nonsexual group partnerships, and even singlehood on a par with traditional marriage, resulting in the effective abolition of marriage itself as a legal status.
O NOES! Singlehood might become just as accepted as marriage? The horror! (I thought we’d long ago stopped calling people old maids and bachelors….)
You can’t send the message that marriage means fidelity when even a small portion of recognized marriages are polyamorous.
Sorry to break it to you, but currently a small portion of marriages ARE polyamorous. There are a whole bunch of people out there who are legally married to each other but sleep with other people. (Many of them even organize their marriages that way on purpose.) I don’t think that’s harmed the general conception of marriage. Oh, the problem would only happen if the outside relationships were recognized by the government? Mr. Kurtz, what kind of conservative are you?
Via Amanda at Pandagon, I find that apparently, a fairly sizeable proportion of the feminist blogosphere has been expressing discomfort at the news of a new no-period birth control pill. You see, periods are natural, and so we shouldn’t suppress them. Furthermore, doing so would be giving in to the patriarchy’s definition of female=gross. Amanda’s takedown is good. (My quick and dirty summary: what’s “natural” anyway? A way of dodging actual arguments, is what. And I don’t need a man to tell me that blood-soaked clothing is, yeah, kinda yucky.)
Reading comments at Pandagon and some of the linked blogs, I find that several people took the position that if a woman has really painful periods, it’s OK to stop them, but if she just wants convenience or thinks blood is gross, that’s not a good enough reason. Um, isn’t feminism supposed to be all about not judging women’s choices and giving them control over their own bodies?
At least three times in the past week, I’ve turned the car radio to NPR and been stuck listening to talk about The Da Vinci Code. I don’t get it. It’s a bad movie based on a worse book. What’s to talk about?
Evidently a lot of people think the book is an important expose of Church teachings. I don’t know if these people didn’t notice that it was in the Fiction section, or what, but just because ignorance is widespread doesn’t seem to me to be a reason for NPR to waste airtime on it. Perhaps they’ve decided to try appealing to the masses rather than the elites? If so I’ll start listening to the classical station.
There are few things I hate more than web sites that move when I don’t tell them to.
My new favorite thing is the Firefox Flashblock extension. It replaces all Flash content with a blank box with a play button in the middle, so you can view the content only if you wish to. Meaning no more Flash ads flying over the text you’re trying to read. (I don’t block ads in general, since I want the sites I visit to make money, just ones that interfere with my use of the pages I’m trying to read.)
Hat tip to Radagast. (The ScienceBlogs tornado ad he mentions was the trigger of an polite but extremely angry email I wrote to their webmaster. Haven’t heard back, but the ad is gone at least.)
Alex at Marginal Revolution posts about the finding that “average” looks are beautiful; in other words averaging pictures of many people together produces a picture more attractive than most of the sources. There are several theories for this; for example, people’s prototype conceptions of things tend to be averages of the actual instantiations, or this is a result of stabilizing selection, or symmetry (produced by averaging out random asymmetries in individuals) is attractive. I don’t know; any or all of those could be true, and I’m not going to say that average isn’t attractive. But the particular picture given in the MR post doesn’t convince me. Go look at it. Why do you think the bottom faces are more attractive than the top ones?
The most striking thing I see is a significant difference in skin tones. The top picture on the female side is of an individual with a pretty patchy complexion. Her forehead is shiny, her nose is red, and the skin around her cheeks and chin is blotchy. She looks like a person of normal attractiveness in a very unflattering picture.
The bottom female picture has perfectly even skin. Very few people have skin like that naturally. It’s definitely something that people tend to find attractive; I know that, particularly in women, clear unblemished skin is one of the most attractive features to me. Probably there’s an evolutionary reason for that; I’ve heard that it signifies health and lack of parasites, which sounds reasonable.
It’s also very strongly reinforced by our culture: you’ll see models and actresses with unusual features, but very rarely do you see one with skin that hasn’t been made up and airbrushed to perfection. And in fact, that’s what the bottom picture looks like: someone of fairly average attractiveness (perhaps slightly more than the person in the top picture) whose photo has been airbrushed to within an inch of its life.
I ran a funny sequence of errands yesterday.
My car’s left headlight has been out for a week or so, and I finally got around to picking up a replacement bulb. So I spent half an hour or so rooting around under the hood to change the bulb. It wouldn’t have taken so long, except that I couldn’t see what I was doing (very small space - how do men fit their hands in there?) and the spring that holds the bulb in place was so stiff I couldn’t figure out how to unlatch it because it didn’t give in any direction, and I didn’t want to break it. Once I got the old one out, I was more successful putting the new one in, though it still took quite awhile to force the spring into place. I must have looked frustrated, because a very nice gentleman with very few teeth stopped by to ask if I needed any help. It turned out that I didn’t, because just as I was explaining what I was trying to do, I got it into place, but I appreciated the offer.
Then I washed my hands with the napkins and water bottle I had in the car, and went to the fabric store to buy supplies to make curtains for my apartment. (The fabric I got is gorgeous, by the way. I’ll have to post pictures once the curtains are up.)
It probably says something about me that I was so tickled about doing these particular errands back-to-back.
Actually, the rest of the day’s errands involved getting keys copied at Home Depot and buying bread, milk, and vegetables at the grocery store, so maybe it was just Grownup Errands Day.
For quite some time, I’ve been encouraging female friends to ask their doctors for emergency contraception prescriptions at regular office visits. Most people don’t wait until they’ve cut themselves to go buy bandages; they keep them in the medicine cabinet just in case. Similarly, any woman who’s of reproductive age should probably have emergency contraception (EC, available under the brand name Plan B) on hand. Thanks to politically-motivated decisionmaking at the FDA, emergency contraception is still a whole lot harder to get than bandages. (Even women who choose not to be sexually active should consider getting EC; there are plenty of reports of women who are denied access to the medication after being raped.)
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has just launched a campaign called “Ask Me” to encourage women to ask for EC prescriptions before there’s an emergency. This is a great move by ACOG. Of course, it would be better if physicians would ask their female patients if they’d like EC, but until that happens, patients should take the responsibility for asking. That way, you can fill your prescription ahead of time (by mail or out of town, if you live in an area where it’s difficult to obtain) and have it on hand just in case you need it.
Also, while I would of course never suggest taking medicine for which one does not have a prescription, it’s worth noting that the only reason Plan B is not currently available over-the-counter is the aforementioned political struggle at the FDA, and so there’s no medical reason why you couldn’t share your prescribed EC with a friend in need. I am sure, however, that the ACOG would not approve of such an action.
As an endnote, a very useful website about EC is maintained at Princeton. It offers peer-reviewed explanations, phone numbers to get EC if you need it, and instructions for using standard birth-control pills as an emergency contraceptive regimen.
Yesterday, the Young Scientists Program’s physics teaching team visited a local school to teach ninth-graders about electricity and magnetism. It was quite the experience.
When we first got there, we were all pretty worried about how it would go - the students were supposed to be taking a quiz, but they were all loudly talking, getting out of their seats, making comments on the quiz questions, and that sort of thing. Two girls were braiding one another’s hair, and one boy was sitting on the windowsill without any pretense of participating in the class. Other students, who were apparently having recess, threw basketballs at the windows and yelled at the students inside. It’s no wonder the public schools don’t have very good outcomes; I couldn’t concentrate in that environment, and I was very interested in what we were doing. I’m impressed that the kids learn anything at all.
We had planned to give a short introduction to the class as a whole, then split them into groups to visit different activity stations we set up. We quickly realized that wouldn’t work; not only were they not paying attention to what the speaker was saying, he couldn’t even be heard over the din. So the introduction was shortened further and we split into groups. Things greatly improved at that point.
I had worked with a couple of classmates to develop a circuits activity. We built little circuit boards with a couple of 9-volt batteries, two sizes of resistors, and a few lights (cannibalized from a string of Christmas lights with a blown fuse), plus wires with alligator clips on the ends. I wrote a handout that explained the basics of circuits and gave the students steps to follow, with questions about what was going on at each step.
Once we got our students, we realized that the handout wasn’t going to be the best way to keep their attention, so we gave them a really brief introduction to circuits (heavily relying on a water-flow analogy) and then led them through connecting a battery-resistor-light bulb circuit. They were all really excited when their light bulbs lit up.
Most students quickly realized that the lights were nowhere near their maximum brightness, and asked how to make them brighter. So we encouraged them to experiment with what they saw on their boards to see what they could do. Usually they tried switching from a 50-ohm to a 100-ohm resistor, which made the light nearly go out. So we explained the difference in the two resistors.
At this point, some students couldn’t figure out what to do next, so we talked through the water analogy and explained why connecting two resistors in parallel would let more current flow. Other students realized that skipping the resistor altogether would make the light really bright, and so we had to convince them not to do that. We weren’t always quick enough, though, and about one student in three burned out his or her light bulb. Luckily we’d brought the rest of the string for spares.
It was a lot of fun watching the students figure out what they were doing, and even argue over who got to connect the next wire. Several of them were impressed that I could easily figure out what had gone wrong in their circuits and fix them, so they asked how I’d learned to do that. I told them about being a computer engineer, and some of them said they thought that sounded like fun! I tried to encourage them to pursue that idea; some of them really were quite good with circuits.
I think everybody had a very good time. Hopefully the students learned something as well.
On Saturday I spent some time with ice on my knee (which still hasn’t made significant progress, but that’s another story). I was lounging and reading on the couch while doing this, so eventually I got sleepy and tired of having a cold knee. I set the ziploc bag of ice on the tray table and took a nap.
Sadly, the ziploc bag was not exactly watertight, and my ice melted while I was asleep, leaking out onto everything else on the tray table. Most of those things were impervious to water, except my calendar, which got awfully soggy. I arranged it out to dry, but that’s slow going as the pages stick together.
So I’m temporarily calendarless, which is a very uncomfortable feeling. 30boxes is great, as long as I can remember appointments long enough to get to a computer and enter them, which I can’t. And I keep my to-do list in my paper calendar, so that’s neglected as well. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing!