Feminists behaving badly

Stuart Schneiderman believes the following rule should be inscribed over the doorway of every therapist's office:

The fact that you believe very strongly in something means that you believe in it very strongly. Nothing more. It also means that you have dispensed with liberality and the marketplace of ideas. It means that you have dispensed with pragmatic and rational thought. It also means that you are most likely wrong.

Schneiderman goes on to tell us about two marriages. In both cases the feminist wife is enraged to learn that her husband might vote for Donald Trump. In both cases the wife behaves badly, and Schneiderman explains why here.

What do women want in a marriage? What do men want?

Max Roser writes in Our World in Data about what men and women want in marriage.

Have you found a person who is good at disagreement?

Alain de Botton writes in the New York Times,

It's one of the things we are most afraid might happen to us. We go to great lengths to avoid it. And yet we do it all the same: We marry the wrong person.

...The problem is that before marriage, we rarely delve into our complexities. Whenever casual relationships threaten to reveal our flaws, we blame our partners and call it a day. As for our friends, they don’t care enough to do the hard work of enlightening us. One of the privileges of being on our own is therefore the sincere impression that we are really quite easy to live with.

Our partners are no more self-aware. Naturally, we make a stab at trying to understand them. We visit their families. We look at their photos, we meet their college friends. All this contributes to a sense that we’ve done our homework. We haven’t. Marriage ends up as a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating.

...We need to swap the Romantic view for a tragic (and at points comedic) awareness that every human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us — and we will (without any malice) do the same to them. There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness. But none of this is unusual or grounds for divorce. Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for.

...The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (he or she doesn’t exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently — the person who is good at disagreement. Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the “not overly wrong” person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.

...Romanticism has been unhelpful to us; it is a harsh philosophy. It has made a lot of what we go through in marriage seem exceptional and appalling. We end up lonely and convinced that our union, with its imperfections, is not “normal.” We should learn to accommodate ourselves to “wrongness,” striving always to adopt a more forgiving, humorous and kindly perspective on its multiple examples in ourselves and in our partners.

Read more here.

Is marriage as an institution struggling?

At the Daily Caller Scott Greer writes,

Marriage is in decline throughout the West, so should we be surprised cuckolding your husband is now just a thing a woman might have to do?

New York magazine’s “Beta Male” fully lived up to its pegged name Thursday when it released an article entitled, “Women Are Now Cheating As Much As Men, But With Fewer Consequences.” The piece, written by a woman, aims to answer the question as to why this phenomenon is occurring in the most sympathetic light possible.

The takeaway from this article is that men, upon entering marriage, should be fully ready for the chance that if they fail to satisfy their wives, she will cheat, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

...There’s not one, absolute reason for why marriage as an institution is struggling at the moment. There’s multiple factors. But the phenomenon of rising female infidelity shows that the new marriage seems like a terrible idea for all involved, and a return to traditional, imbalanced pairings may be a better model.

Read more here.

You become "ready" to do something by doing it!

Are you telling people you are "not ready to get married?" Dennis Prager writes at National Review,

...here’s a truth that young Americans need to hear:

Most people become “ready to get married” when they get married. Throughout history most people got married at a much younger age than people today. They were hardly “ready.”

They got married because society and/or their religion expected them to. And then, once married, they tended to rise to the occasion.

The same holds true for becoming a parent. Very few people are “ready” to become parents. They become ready . . . once they become parents. In fact, the same holds true for any difficult job. What new lawyer was “ready” to take on his or her first clients? What new teacher, policeman, firefighter is “ready”?

You become ready to do something by doing it.

...People didn’t marry in the past only because they fell in love. And people can fall in love and not marry — as happens frequently today. People married because it was a primary societal value. People understood that it was better for society and for the vast majority of its members that as many individuals as possible commit to someone and take care of that person. Among other things, when people stop taking care of one another, the state usually ends up doing so. Just compare the percentage of single people receiving welfare versus the percentage of married people.

And then there is the economic argument. Many single men, for example, say they are not ready to get married because they don’t have the income they would like to have prior to getting married. As responsible as this may sound, however, this is not a particularly rational argument. Why is marrying while at a low income a bad idea? In fact, marriage may be the best way to increase one’s income. Men’s income rises after marriage. They have less time to waste, and someone to help support — two spurs to hard work and ambition, not to mention that most employers prefer men who are married. And can’t two people live on less money than they would need if they lived each on his or her own, paying for two apartments?

In addition to economic benefits, the vast majority of human beings do better when they have someone to come home to, someone to care for, and someone to care for them. And, no matter how much feminists and other progressives deny it, children do best when raised by a married couple. There are, most certainly, superb single parents. But every superb single parent I have ever spoken to wishes they had had a spouse with whom to raise their children.

Throughout history, and in every society, people married not when they were “ready” to marry but when they reached marriageable age and were expected to assume adult responsibilities.

Finally, this statement reflects another negative trend in society — that of people being guided by feelings rather than by standards or obligations. We live in an Age of Feelings. Aside from the rational and moral problems that derive from being guided by feelings rather than by reason and values, there is one other problem. In life, behavior shapes feelings. Act happy, you’ll become happy. Act like you’re single, you’ll remain single. Act like you’re ready for marriage, you’ll become ready for marriage.

Do it, in other words. Then you’ll be “ready.”

Read more here.

God's country?

Patrick Buchanan writes in World Net Daily,

In America 2015, homosexuality, abortion on demand and same-sex marriage – shameful crimes in Ike’s America, mortal sins in the catechism of Pius XII – have become constitutional rights.

...These represent the values that define Barack Obama’s America, the values our officials defend at the United Nations, the values we preach to the world.

What Ike’s America saw as decadence, Obama’s America calls progress. And among its noisiest celebrants are our Catholic vice president, Joe Biden, and the Catholic leader of the Democratic Party in the House, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

...The church of Pius XII and John Paul II taught that the truths of the Ten Commandments brought down from Sinai and the truths of the Sermon on the Mount are eternal. Those popes also taught that a valid marriage is indissoluble, that homosexuality is unnatural and immoral, that abortion is the killing of the innocent unborn, an abomination.

Yet one reads regularly of discussions inside the Vatican to alter what is infallible church teaching on these doctrines to make the church more appealing to those who have rejected them.

In Cuba, Pope Francis declined to address the repression of the Castro brothers. Will he also avoid America’s moral crisis to chatter on about income inequality and climate change and find common ground with Obama?

Read more here.

Who had it right, Huxley or Orwell?

Neo-neocon mentions two masterpiece works of literature by Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-Four) and Huxley (Brave New World), and writes,

In the title of this post I mention Newspeak, Orwell’s name for the language changes fostered by the totalitarian regime in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The purpose of Newspeak was to limit freedom of thought and label unacceptable concepts as “thoughtcrime” and almost literally unthinkable. But in recent years I’ve often felt that our society is going more in the direction of Huxley’s Brave New World, in which the dystopia is clothed in a kinder, gentler facade.

It occurs to me that I may need to make explicit something that I think is already implicit here but might not be at all clear. This change in the traditional terms “husband” and “wife” is not supported by all gay people, many of whom are happy to finally be able to use the word. But the change in terms—spearheaded by the left, make no doubt about that—is part of a general plan of the left to change the definition of marriage and all it implies, and to reduce the power of the individual family and of individual choice as a whole, while adopting the guise of supporting the family by extending the right to marriage to gay people.

It’s an interesting act of jujitsu. After all, won’t extending marriage to gay people enhance the traditional concept of monogamy in marriage? Doesn’t it strengthen marriage?

It may strengthen something called “marriage,” but that “something” is less and less likely to include either the practice of faithfulness or even the goal of faithfulness as part of marriage. Of course, this trend was well underway long before marriage was something to which gay couples aspired, but the anti-family trend (as Huxley well recognized in the early ’30s, as seen in the excerpt from his work) has long been part of lefist social engineering. Many gay couples are not even aware of this, but leftist activists certainly are.

Read more here.

The only problem with America today

Gavin McInnes writes at Taki's Magazine,

The basic tenets of the liberal narrative include: Women are thriving in the workforce since being freed from the prison sentence that is the housewife’s life. Southerners are stupid, racist rednecks who are proud of slavery. Undocumented workers are hardworking people who love their families and are just coming here for a better life. Islam is a religion of peace; the extremists are only acting like that because we made them that way. Gender is a construct. Gays are madly in love and can’t wait to devote themselves to the bliss of matrimony. Blacks are struggling a little, yes, but that’s because “systemic” racism is “alive and well” today and cops are out to get them. The only problem with America these days is white men.

Some women thrive at work. I find they’d be much happier at home shaping lives. They sweat the small stuff better than men. However, when we book the conference room and it’s Linda’s turn to contribute an idea, the guys inevitably have to sympathy-nod and say, “Yes, that could work” while pretending to write down her totally unfeasible idea. At home, the kids are with an immigrant nanny who doesn’t really get Western culture and has abandoned her own kids back in the Third World. Women say they’re empowered and wouldn’t want to have kids as they shovel so much affection on their dog, you worry they’re going to get married.

The South still has Southern belles and bucks tradition less than us Northerners. The media assume racism is included in these values but they’re wrong. Southerners are no more racist than the black people they’re accused of hating. They are the nicest people I’ve ever met and the only time I’ve seen one mad is when someone else crosses him. When your car breaks down in New York, you better have a charged phone because no strangers are going to help you out. In the South, having a broken-down car is like being in the Beatles. You’d need a riot hose to stave them off. They don’t want to keep the Confederate flag because they’re proud of slavery. They want to keep it because you said they can’t.

...Extremist Muslims pour into America while cringing with disgust at our culture. Their culture includes honor killings, throwing acid in your daughter’s face, molesting children, and tossing gays off of buildings. The only foreign policy gays, women, and children have is “Please don’t hurt me.” Muslims aren’t beheading people as a result of workplace violence. They’re doing it because the Koran says, “Smite ye above their necks”. Why are we pretending otherwise? Because of hate? It looks like hate-a-phobia is even more dangerous for gays than homophobia.

What’s more homophobic than saying you can’t be gay? When we give a boy hormone blockers so he won’t be traumatized by puberty, we’re telling him he must be a woman if he feels like one. No, he’s not. He’s a fag. You don’t cheer when a mentally ill ambisexual maims himself. You encourage him to find a boyfriend who will accept him for who he is. I know this because here in the city we see trannies every day. They’re not redefining gender. They’re spiraling toward suicide.

If you think the transgendered are normal and gays want to get married, you’re not going outside. Marriage has a lot of benefits for gays like getting your spouse’s health care and pension, but it also comes with a lot of work. “For better or for worse” means you can have some bad months, even bad years. Fortunately, you make it through those times because you want to be there for your children. Take kids out of the equation and add in people you want to fuck and monogamy is just not possible. Most gays concede this and have come up with new terms like “monogamish.” In other words, they’re redefining marriage. Unlike the pundits on TV such as Jon Stewart, I actually know gays. There are so many homos at my place upstate we call it a GAYted community. I’m also married to a fag hag so they regularly fill up my apartment in the city, too. They don’t want to get married. They want to party. The only ones screaming about equality are a handful of annoying nerds nobody gives a shit about (look at the guy who got Brendan Eich fired). Real homos aren’t tweeting about social justice. They’re in Paris, fornicating. LGBT isn’t an alliance. It’s a hodgepodge of outcasts who have absolutely nothing in common with one another. LG needs to cut BT loose. B is lying and T’s insane.

This week, a black professor at the University of Memphis was supposedly fired for saying the Charleston, S.C., shooting was the result of whites being “conditioned” from childhood to hate blacks. In the past she’d said she will “come for you” if you have “racist lies…in your head.” When this narrative gets wings, we see cops shot and the American flag burned. After the shooting, many feared a race riot would break out in South Carolina. I’ve been to Charleston many times and despite the population being about 50/50 black and white, it felt like the least racist city in the Union. Even hanging out at the “slave market” was charming. That’s what we saw after the shootings. They recognized that it wasn’t about guns or the flag or some other made-up narrative injected into the equation. They ignored the pundits and showed support for one another because they knew the reality of Charleston has very little to do with “systemic” racism. When we ignore the government and the pontificators, we thrive. When we refuse to let the authorities boss us around or mother us, we prosper. This is what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they wrote the Constitution. In short, the more honest America is, the better it does.

Read more here.

Do you really need government's permission?

Do you think the State should be in the business of issuing marriage licenses? Should your personal relationship be subject to government permission? This week, the Alabama state Senate passed a bill that would end the practice of licensing marriages in the state.

Introduced by Sen. Greg Albritton (R-Bay Minette), Senate Bill 377 (SB377) would end state issued marriage licenses, while providing marriage contracts as an alternative. It passed through the Alabama state Senate by a 22-3 margin on May 19.

“When you invite the state into those matters of personal or religious import, it creates difficulties,” Sen. Albritton said about his bill in April. “Go back long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away. Early twentieth century, if you go back and look and try to find marriage licenses for your grandparents or great grandparents, you won’t find it. What you will find instead is where people have come in and recorded when a marriage has occurred.”

SB377 now moves to the state House, where it must pass through the House Judiciary Committee before it can receive a vote on the House floor.

Read more here.

Why are men avoiding the altar?

Suzanne Venker writes at Fox News that

According to Pew Research Center, the share of American adults who’ve never been married is at an historic high—and men are more likely than women to have never made it down the aisle (23% vs. 17% in 2012).

What gives? Why are men here and abroad avoiding the altar in spades?

1. Because they can: Men used to marry to have sex and a family. They married for love, too, but they had to marry the girl before taking her to bed, or at least work really, really hard to wear her down. Those days are gone.

When more women make themselves sexually available, the pool of marriageable men diminishes. “In a world where women do not say no, the man is never forced to settle down and make serious choices,” writes George Gilder, author of "Men and Marriage."

Scoff if you wish. Call me a fuddy-duddy. But how’s that new plan working out?

2. Because there’s nothing in it for them: What exactly does marriage offer men today? “Men know there’s a good chance they’ll lose their friends, their respect, their space, their sex life, their money and — if it all goes wrong — their family,” says Helen Smith, Ph.D., author of "Men on Strike." “They don’t want to enter into a legal contract with someone who could effectively take half their savings, pension and property when the honeymoon period is over.Men aren’t wimping out by staying unmarried or being commitment phobes. They’re being smart.”

Unlike women, men lose all power after they say “I do.” Their masculinity dies, too.

What’s left of it, that is. In the span of just a few decades, America has demoted men from respected providers and protectors of the family to superfluous buffoons. Today’s sitcoms and commercials routinely paint a portrait of the idiot husband whose wife is smarter and more capable than he.

...

If the man refuses, we call him, as Smith notes, a “commitment phobe.” But is that fair? Perhaps these men know all too well that women initiate the vast majority of divorces — anywhere from 65-90 percent, depending on demographics. And when they do, they take the kids with them and hang hubby out to dry with the help of a court system that’s heavily stacked in their favor. In the past, Mom got the kids because she was home with them doing the thankless, unpaid, mountainous work associated with that role. Today, neither parent is home, so there’s no reason the default custodial parent should be Mom.

So remind me, why would a man marry today?

No, really. What’s in it for him?

Read more here.

What is marriage about?

Kevin D. Williamson believes that civil marriage law is about where babies come from, not

the sexual and emotional interests of adults.

...the 21st-century ethic labors to elide the differences between men and women, between what we once called marriage and what we now call marriage and what we will probably call marriage after the Supreme Court gets done with it. If gay couples want to share property, designate their partners in medical, legal, and financial matters, etc., then the law should accommodate them. If they seek blessings for their unions, there are those who would bless them, and those who — so long as the First Amendment holds — would exercise their right to choose not to. But that is not what civil-marriage law is there to do. It is not about the fulfillment or happiness of married people. It is about where babies come from. Those who believe that to be an “unreasonable” position arrive at that conclusion mainly by refusing to consider the position at all. Instead, they dismiss it as hypocritical, illogical, etc.

That’s one of the reasons why the opponents of same-sex marriage are going to lose that fight. The second reason is that even if same-sex marriages were outlawed nationally, a return to the status quo ante would represent only another kind of defeat: The regime of no-fault divorce, the normalization of nonmarital parenting, abortion on demand, and the rest, which far precedes any move toward same-sex marriage, also constitutes a model of marriage organized around the sexual and emotional interests of adults rather than around the wellbeing of children.

Read more here.

Protecting your marriage

Thanks to Ann Voskamp I have found a new blog to enjoy. It is called the House of Hendrix. Allison Hendrix has written a wonderful post detailing nineteen ways to protect your marriage. Read it here.

The challenge of liberal dogmatism requires a united and robust response

Paul Diamond writes:

This time we are not hearing the voice of tyrants, but the siren call of equality, diversity, and freedom from sexual prejudice and discrimination. What reasonable person would not want this? Anyone who opposes this, so the argument goes, must be a bigot and should be denied their human dignity (because such a person denies dignity to others).

In the midst of these developments, the intrinsic value of free speech has been lost, and government and quasi-government institutions seek to tell us what we can say, and even what we can think. In the process, the rule of law is subverted to this cause.

My American friends tell me that they have the First Amendment; and it is still strong. But we should not underestimate what judges can do. In my cases on the wearing of crosses at British Airways and at Exeter Hospital, a total of 13 British judges denied that the Christian cross was a manifestation of religion. In another case, a tribunal recently held that Sunday was not a core component of the Christian faith. These decisions were reversed either in Europe or in national courts, but an appeal was required on these basic issues.

The price of citizenship in the United Kingdom is indeed high for the religious adherent. In a case I took to the European Court (McFarlane v United Kingdom), Mr. McFarlane was dismissed for the mere expression of opposition to same-sex marriage, although he could have been easily accommodated in his work as a relationship counselor by only counseling different-sex couples. In another case, a housing trust worker was disciplined and demoted for expressing the view of belief in marriage.

The new liberal dogma says that a Jew or Christian is a bigot if they do not believe in the homosexual agenda.

The challenge of liberal dogmatism, like the challenge of national and international socialism before it, requires a united and robust response.

Please read more here

The hookup culture

Why are these young men and women in Britain not getting married as often as in previous years? Dalrock opines that is because

A young man in the UK who wants to have sex with the most attractive women has a very obvious rational choice, and that is to become the douchebag Britain’s young women crave. This is without even considering the hostility towards husbands and fathers in the family courts, churches, and the culture at large.

What do you think?

I guess she told him!

Source

Does the government need to be in the marriage business?

News9.com - Oklahoma City, OK - News, Weather, Video and Sports |

Thanks to Memeorandum for linking to the Oklahoma video and story.

Not a dream

Some excerpts from several essays by David Warren:

How many people have said, “I am basically a good person,” without noticing that no one ever asked? And it is true that real monsters are a small minority, though I often think they are closer to being saved.

What we haven’t confronted, is that very emptiness, that loneliness, that hopelessness — together with the self-pity that explains it all away. For the modern man is a childless orphan, and the modern woman is a modern man, and this goes double when they are married to each other.

An example would be the sanctity of human life. Once it is grasped that it is wrong to kill people, as a way to solve your problems, and that a human is human from the moment he is conceived, opposition to abortion naturally follows. That is why it is incumbent on every faithful Catholic to oppose abortion, as he would otherwise oppose murder. This can’t be optional. It is incumbent, too, on every other one of us: on every Christian, and as it happens, on every decent human being regardless of religious affiliation. For in every other religious tradition of which I am aware, the sanctity of life is in some way affirmed. Even the Dalai Lama will tell you that abortion is evil, and against divine law.

Similarly, once some notion of the connexion between sex and babies has been grasped, it is no longer possible to dismiss moral guidance. Nothing so elemental to the condition of human life than our means of reproduction could be otherwise than shouting with moral significance; and far from being a side issue, sexuality is at the heart of all human relations.

The contemporary teaching that it is merely a source of pleasure — so incredibly crass — has consequences that are unambiguously evil. Consequences that can be spelt out rationally, step by frigging step. Which were in fact spelt out, very rationally, in Humanae Vitae, by the late Pope Paul. (I know this because as a clever young atheist, I read it through repeatedly, with the intention of mocking it; and could find in it not one connective that was logically unsound, and became thereby convinced, even as an aspiring young Helot, that contraception could not possibly be correct.) A rule remains a rule, and continues to be a rule, until someone can show an internal contradiction.

And in the depths, likewise, the principle of marriage must still be affirmed, no matter how many of the mad may oppose it. One woman and one man must be courageously vindicated. Deep, and deeper than that.

While it has entirely escaped media attention, the most massive public demonstrations on this continent are pretty much invariably the various annual marches against abortion — in which I have observed that females outnumber males, and the young outnumber the old, often by quite large margins. For the mainstream media, ten sign-waving feminist old crows can be important breaking news. But ten thousand marching young women, proclaiming Christian truth to their indifferent surroundings, does not quite rise to sending a junior reporter. This is how things are, and it is that craven media that impinges on public consciousness hour by hour, and day by day, de-moralizing and corrupting.

From my own experience on the pro-life “front line,” for instance walking along with fifteen thousand or more mostly young people in Ottawa a couple of years ago — and past e.g. the CBC television stand, whose cameras were trained on a small handful of old-crow feminist counter-demonstrators for the footage they would actually be using — I should like to make an observation.

First, a joyous observation, of how invigorating it was, to be in the company of so many ebullient and purposeful young. These were, in the main, the products of the catechism classes I was mentioning above: bright and cheerful young faces in contrast with the grim and cheerless I pass on the sidewalks every day. The same comment for events such as the Papal Youth Days, when quite literally millions of the children of good Catholic homes, or converts, are assembled. I wish to say about them nothing snide, but rather how much I love them.

At the Rose Dinner, in Ottawa, in the evening after the spring pro-life march, I had the opportunity to speak with quite a few of my much younger companions in arms. And again: they were impressive, case by case, as I was coming to see them not as a mass, but as many fine and particular faces, each already with a complex life story, and not one an interchangeable happy-clap zombie, of the sort the media stereotype portrays — though not entirely from malice. (In my experience, the overwhelming majority of journalists belong to a self-consciously brahmin, “progressive” social class, which eschews contact with those it considers “lower,” i.e. the worker bees and water-carriers of the “flyover country,” whose views could hardly matter to them.)

They were young, very young to my now ageing eyes, but in their ebullience we are all made timeless. Not only did I converse, I overheard them chatting about what “young people” chat about, as everyone chats: from out of the fodder of their daily lives. And in this mush, I heard so many of the clichés of the media also being mindlessly repeated, and saw the flip gestures that go with them. They, too, had inherited the wind from a godless society, and blew the wind on without even thinking. They had thought through their principles, and were basically obedient, as most young people are — whether it is to authority or to fashion. Still, do they have the deeper instinct, and the fortitude with the instinct, sometimes not to obey? To stand alone, under real and excruciating peer pressure, without external support, against the overpowering Zeitgeist?

And it was more in overhearing little unthinking remarks that I inwardly wept for them.

To be sure, they had the rules down. I did not meet one who could not articulately expound why he (or more usually she) was “protesting” against abortion. Yet that very word “protesting” gave part of the game away.

Nor really do I think that there was one whose firm belief was not rooted in the connexion between sex and babies. Nor, possibly, even one who did not therefore follow the connexions on through a range of other Christian teachings. They’d been taught, well enough.

Yet still there was something that seemed missing from them; something that curiously had not yet gone entirely missing, even from the hippies who were my own contemporaries in youth — self-conscious “fashion hippies” who had inherited many more of the “social conventions” and “unquestioned beliefs” of their “square” post-war parents than they could ever realize.

“Rules” were being “questioned,” way back then. And yet, viscerally, they were still being followed. The profound idea of “one man, one woman” was often outwardly rejected, even volubly rejected, but it was still viscerally there. It would take another generation of media indoctrination, lewd commercial advertising, and the ministrations of Nanny State, to root the very instincts of Western Civilization out of their souls and bowels. All that my own generation had lost, in the first instance, was the power of resistance, founded ultimately on those old unquestioned rules that told one through one’s conscience when one was doing wrong.

But more than this: told one through the same conscience when one was doing right. And sometimes, filled the soul with some distant echo of a pleasure, that was our Lord’s pleasure in the creation of His world.

Conscience still exists, however poorly formed, or twisted. The propensity to guilt will always be there, so long as we are human. As well, the propensity to moral satisfaction, however twisted that becomes. But what one ought to feel sorry for, or badly about, or thoroughly ashamed by, can be quite substantially altered by the intervention of ceaseless propaganda, and ruthless fashion, and the inversion of a system of reward and punishment through the social engineering of the State.

We have faith, of a kind, shaken sometimes even by minor earth tremors. We have faith vested essentially in a political order; in the belief that, where problems arise, they can be solved, and our “human spirit” (which is incidentally no material thing) will ultimately rise to the occasion. We are, in the voice of every political commander, “the people of this great nation,” and we are repeatedly assured that we will prevail.

Failing which, we fall into utter despair. For we have no other faith to fall back on, when the earth indeed trembles and our artificial tower comes tumbling down. And, whether or not it is in our strictest modern sense “historical,” the story of Babel in Genesis tells us what will be our fate.

If there is one use for the calendrical New Year, it is provided, unintentionally, through the media, and through the accidents of social life. Towards the end of the old year, and bleeding into the new, we are exposed to a higher density of “signs of the times” than at any other time of year. Partly this is a by-product of the media habit of looking backward and forward: precisely twelve months back and twelve months fore. It is an arbitrary thing, but usually their cycle is twenty-four hours, or less with the advance of consumer electronics. Christmas, now for many years an essentially secular holiday, with little pretense of Christian thanksgiving but a modicum of “traditional” good cheer, adds more to this density. In some moments, even for those whose Christian affiliation evaporated before childhood, there are juxtapositions, contrasts.

In the media, or if you will, at a Christmas Party, or on New Year’s Eve, a lot of human experience can be compacted into a very small space, and much quickly passes before our eyes and ears. One has glimpses of the radical opposition between good and evil, beauty and ugliness, the true and the false, exhibited as if on signboards that anyone can read.

There is, especially in cold northern countries, a kind of post-partum depression that sets in after the holidays have passed. The weather plays some part in this: we who live in the vast conurbations do not look with relish on the next few months. In the countryside, a fresh snowfall can be uplifting; can be the making, for instance, of a “white Christmas”; in the city it can only mean service delays, traffic hell, dangerous sidewalks. The let-down after excessive eating and drinking comes into this, too: the sense that the party is over, and it is back to work for us.

But I think something deeper also contributes to our sense, however mildly it is taken, of emptiness, loneliness, hopelessness.

I had a dream like this, the other evening. A baby was lying in the snow and slush. He’d been left there, accidentally discarded. People were busy, they were passing him by. I thought, he is cold, he has fallen on the sidewalk. Some woman must have dropped him on her way home. She’ll want to have him back, I must get him to her. But it was Christmas, there were legs on all these shoppers; the baby on the sidewalk kept sliding out of reach. I was trying to tell them, but no one could hear me; I could not even hear myself. Why can’t these people see there is a baby? A living baby, right at their feet? Why does no one stop for this baby, why doesn’t someone pick him up? And I awoke, thinking, “Jesus!”

But what I refer to is not a dream.

Disincentives to male reliability and self-sacrifice

Have we moved from a marriage based model to a child support based model? Dalrock thinks so. He links to James Taranto, who responds to an article in City Journal by Kay Hymowitz. Taranto writes,

The culture’s unrelenting message–repeated in Hymowitz’s article–is that women are doing fine on their own. If a woman doesn’t need a man, there’s little reason for him to devote his life to her service. Further, in the age of no-fault divorce, “reliable husbands and fathers” not infrequently find themselves impoverished by child support and restricted by court order from spending time with their children.

In a world of female independence and limitless options, traditional family life is both less attractive and more elusive--for men and women alike--than it used to be.

Boys and young men are no less rational, or capable of adapting to incentives, than girls and young women are. They are, in fact, adapting very well to the incentives for female power and independence--which inevitably also serve as disincentives to male reliability and self-sacrifice.