Tribes-Related

Paul Zrimsek, commenting over at Ann Althouse:

Every NYT columnist is formed in the crucible of the memory of that first sneer.

(Related to David Carr's reference to Missourians and Kansans as "slope-headed," which everyone on Bill Maher's show laughed at nervously, and no one objected to.)

I looked up Zrimsek, and he doesn't have his own site, but his comments and numerous sites are marvelous. If there were an award for commenters. I would nominate him for it.

Incest and DNA

My son in Nome, referencing another grim situation that has come across his screen, said that the joke about the villages is that a virgin is defined as a girl who can run faster than her father. “The Villages” means almost entirely Native populations, Yupik and Inuit. I had heard the sad joke about other places many times – first, I think, about the peninsula counties of Maryland in the 18th C, though the reference was to being able to run faster than one’s uncle. The accusation has been made about Appalachian areas as long as I can remember (though those often took the form of cousin-marriage jokes), and I am starting to hear that incest is distressingly common in some African groups recently coming to America. There were towns and village sections of NH that were rumored to be incest-ridden – being familiar with the dark side of social histories in this state over the last 35 years, I can confirm that some of the rumors, at least, are true. (I have no sense there is any ethnic difference, BTW.) I had only heard of brother-sister incest in professional settings, never in news stories or general discussion, but that is being acknowledged recently. We have long known that step-relatives are far more risk to children than blood relatives, and the data are bearing this out.

We have lived in a swirl of rumor with little data all these years, and the excesses of recovered or implanted memory have added to the confusion. We have speculated whether certain cultures are more prone to incest, but our knowledge has been so limited that this has been irresponsible. I have suspicions on that score, but disbelieve them myself. We have identified some common themes that seem to be holding up – that older siblings are more likely to perpetrate on brothers and sisters when no father is present; that father-daughter incest is more common when the mother is unavailable, depressed, or loses to her daughter in some competition for power in the family; we have wondered whether particular dislocations of culture, such as expulsion or refugee status, create an increase because of the thoroughness of family breakdown, though that is only theory.

That drug and especially alcohol abuse co-occur is one of the strands of information we actually do know with confidence at present.

We are about to start knowing the answers to these questions. And some among us are going to be harmed by it and fight to insist it isn’t true. If whites of certain groups or subcultures show up badly, expect an increasing in them pointing out terrible things that black or Hispanic people do – unless of course there are subgroups of blacks or hispanics exposed under the same light. This will be knowledge we don’t want to have, but we will have it. I don’t know whether we’ll be able to disguise the truths on this one.

One note on how cultures that are either prone to such breakdowns or have such breakdown thrust upon them have been able to survive darwinian selection, given that more children with disabilities would seem to decrease group survival: think of it as natural selection in high gear, if tribes leave the weak behind. There will be little or no greater chance of exceptionally good genes for survival, but the bad genes will be expressed rather than being carried in secret, and weak lines culled. Rather chilling, even if one is considering our ancestors of 100,000 years ago. We may all have benefited from it.

Public Intellectuals

John Naughton at The Grauniad wonders why public intellectuals do not seem to be so prominent in modern times, and especially in Britain.

I have some theories on that, actually, but I can more easily tell you why Naughton is puzzled. He quotes some guys identified as intellectuals

The French polymath Pierre Bourdieu saw PIs as thinkers who are independent of those in power, critical of received ideas, demolishers of "simplistic either-ors" and respecters of "the complexity of problems". The Palestinian literary critic Edward Said saw the public intellectual as "the scoffer whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma, to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations".

I love Bourdieu (I should do a post on him as related to my thinking on tribes, as he was big into analysing social classes), but politically, he was the original anti-globalist liberal. And Said has little to recommend him in the way of intellect - but he is great at sneering at the West, insisting we do not understand his vibrant, ancient, and viciously barbaric and narcissistic culture. And he hates Israel, so we know he's sound.

Throughout the essay, Naughton keeps verging on the answer, as he notes that Sartre and de Beauvoir were later exposed as contemptible, that many of the lists of public intellectuals are weighted toward journalism, writers of fiction no one reads, and "critics" who don't seem to know about anything, but just talk about stuff as if they did. He wonders why the French have such respect for this group - which he approves of - while the Brits and Americans don't, especially, even though we are

a cockpit of vibrant cultural life and home to some of the world's best universities, most creative artists, liveliest publications and greatest theatres and museums.

That's the list for identifying intellectuals, apparently.


(Explanation here.)

He mentions David Brooks as someone who should perhaps be included. For what, exactly? I despise Paul Krugman as a bigot, but he at least has some original claim of being an intellectual.

Here's the thing, John: Bourdieu and Said are right, in theory. That's what public intellectuals should be, and we can all see the value of their being that. But they aren't that, and consistently have not been. The intellectual classes have consistently come out in favor of ideas and regimes that result in lots of dead people and hungry people. They just sell out to different powerful interests, the ones that can get them writing gigs and potential bedmates. The rest of us poor yahoos, who admittedly just don't understand a lot of deep philosophical stuff and can barely keep our lawns mowed, have nonetheless at least not created that kind of damage. These intellectuals are clearly people who should not be left as night watchmen in a day camp.

The article did give me the idea of Paul Johnson's book for my wish list, thought. Except, Johnson is more solid than engaging as a writer.

"The Lesson Plan"

I know nothing about the Newport Beach Film Festival or of Libertas Film Magazine, but I found the experiment this documentary recalls intriguing. It fits both with my Tribes discussions and the recent MWBOT series.

Ron Jones, a puzzling mixture of grandiosity and naïveté, claims he intended this to be only a one- or two-day experiment, but it went on for at least a week. Other students remember a longer or shorter period (the incident was not well documented at the time). He admits he was so energized with the power and passion of his movement that he upped the ante each day, introducing new methods of mind control. On day 5, when he finally exposed the movement as a lesson meant to teach the students that they were no better or worse than the Germans, the young students fell apart in a fog of betrayal and emotional panic. The tearful interviews of his students 40 years later testify to the damage wreaked by the experience.

Trailer at the link.

New Pew

I have often linked to a 2005 Pew Research study that groups Americans politically according to factor analysis rather than direct questioning of ideology. It has been an interesting contrast to the usual red/blue/green political assignments in the media.

Now there is a new version. I have only glanced at it thus far, but expect the comparison to the 2005 version will be interesting.

Update: I should mention that I am aware of the large methodological difficulty with the Pew polls. They are telephone polls, with a low response rate. It may well be that a few of these categories have, for some reason, a high percentage of people who really like answering these things, while other categories contain those who refuse to participate at a higher level than the general population. So hold the numbers very lightly in your head while making comparisons. It is useful more as general guide to the attitudes and ideas that seem to associate with each other.

Social And Mating Behavior

A friend at church - quite obviously a parent who has watched her own children go through adolescence, as you shall see - refers to the large collection of teenagers congregating between the doors and the parking lot as The Mating Circle. I had had a similar idea before I had even heard she had said that, comparing them to flocks of birds in season: preening, flying off in small groups only to return, strutting, decked out in bright plumage. It is both appalling and charming, really. They can't seem to help it. They just do this. Like cranes or marmots or Red Handed Howler Monkeys, as soon as they become sexual able, regardless of whether they are conscious of any sexual interest, human children start displaying their genetic fitness and access to resources by leaping around, exposing fleshing, banging into each other, and trying to exclude others.

To those who immediately protest that there are other, less primitive qualities being displayed, I roll my eyes. Yes, of course this is an oversimplification, a cynical prism with which to view Princess and Junior. But as we spend our entire conversation about youth discussing them through the prism of encouraging responsibility, and planning for the future, and instilling values - as if they were reasonable creatures instead of those who we would make reasonable - can we just take a moment to drop the polite pretense that we use to try and instruct them and face what we are really up against? They just fall into this frightening behavior and they are completely unaware of it.

There was a South Park episode (Season 6: Episode 10) in which Bebe is the first girl to develop breasts, and suddenly all the boys in the neighborhood are playing outside her house, bashing each other, competing, acting like orangutans - and they have no idea why. They just do. The South Park creators are still politically correct enough to portray Bebe as having considerable insight into what is going on, but this is ludicrous. Anonymous, commenting on my Where Have All The Good Women Gone? post, described a young girl with half a skirt as if she knew what was up. Doubtful.

Think of her as a type of wren. She does this, and she doesn't know why. This is why girls argue with their mothers - well, some mothers, anyway (I hold the mom in that comment more responsible). The mother looks and says "You are communicating to every male of our species "I want to mate." The daughter responds in outrage that this is not so, she is just trying to be fashionable, so as not to be unpopular. To her, the general social minimum, set by the other young wrens in the flock, means that she absolutely cannot dress like her mother. She does not see her own mating display, she sees that it is far less than those Other Girls, who she disapproves of as much as you, Mother.

Also boys, crashing into trees for no apparent reason, BTW. Same thing. And it strikes long before actual puberty, when they still find girls icky. Nature prompts them to display pre-heroic behavior as a warmup for horrible societies in which 14 year old boys actually do have to be heroic.

I'm about to bring the water level up to the throat, boys and girls, so those of you young 'uns who feel you have seen through this and are above it, beware.

The Mating Circle is also a Social Circle, of course, which is what makes it complicated. The social circle aspect pushes you to fit in with your age cohort, which in historical terms is as important as fitting in with your family and the larger society - maybe more. When your life expectancy is 40 and no one has enough to leave an inheritance, the people who you will go into battle with, or work with, or bear your children in the company of, or will still be alive when you take sick at age 25 and your kids are still under 10, are a more precious resource than the parents who are telling you that your skirt is too short or the swimming hole is dangerous. Fit in, but stand out. It's hard to be young, and parents who see that your biological imperatives have to be modified for a society that requires you to pass algebra don't simplify it. We battle against mighty forces.

The circle is complicated in much more subtle ways. The girl who stands aloof because she is an academic, who won't lower herself to be like the (shameless) other girls - just another type of plumage, to attract males of the subspecies she prefers. The girl helping her mother with the lemon squares instead? Same thing. Just a different plumage. The boys hanging around the electronic equipment discussing new technology? It's a subset of the social circle, with an unconscious eye to the mating circle.

So all you Arts & Humanities girls, so taken with the boys who really "get it" about what the New Woman is all about - they are just doing whatever it takes to get laid find a suitable mate, just like all those tiresome rednecks shooting at bottles. (The latter are just looking for a different type of wren.) It's just the plumage for your subspecies. As good A&H males, they have learned, with no consciousness of the act whatsoever, what attitudes help them fit in with the A&H tribe, and what A&H girls like.

I don't fault them for that, not only because I was that guy, but because they aren't calculating sociopaths. All the young of our species look out over the territory and sense at some deep level where their best chances are. The problem is that they calculate this through a primitive prism of Life Expectancy = 40. Adults have to inject, from earliest years, that they will actually live to be 100 and live in a culture that requires them to find a job and keep it, so passing in your Civics homework is valuable. The kids that appear from our perspective to understand that are actually only the subspecies which has discovered that A's are a plumage I can acquire better than most, and attracts a subspecies that has no interest in guys who can ride a mechanical bull. Those guys discover other types of masculinity displays, such as cross-country skiing or being a back-to-the-lander who knows how to make and market organic maple syrup. It's the same thing. And the femininity displays of the girls in that tribe are emphatically not eyelashes or fawning and giggling - those disgusting displays are for another, inferior subspecies - but are present nonetheless.

And lest you think I am criticising you for this, remember that I raised my sons to be attracted to this alternative femininity precisely because it is not prom queen style. (Be wary, though. In distancing yourself from that, you can cut yourself off from the obvious in favor of the rarefied. The village idiot knows that what generically attracts women to men and men to women never really goes away, and must be relied upon. Assistant Village Idiots still need to be reminded that the exalted qualities "above" the primitive are not separate from, but founded on, the primitive. Moderns think otherwise because they hope something other than reality is true.)

All this grim cynicism will be tied into the Book of Proverbs in the near future, BTW. God is very realistic as well as very righteous. We give lip service to thinking Him far more righteous than we, but secretly hold the view that we are more realistic. Not so. This was all foreseen long ago.

For those who think I am wildly overstating this case, consider: the girls I dated in high school and college, including my bride of 34 years, would be at the far extreme of distancing themselves from the stereotypical goddesses of popular culture of the day, and I at the far extreme of demonstrating that I was not of the hypermale stereotype of same. Yet they all, even though they had no interest in sex (at least with me, which I will compliment myself by thinking was faintly generalisable), wore thigh-high dresses or smallish to very-small two-piece bathing suits, addicted themselves to historical romances, or otherwise let feminine display leak out - and I, sensitive, androgynous, and artistic male, nonetheless took insane physical risks, pretended to a high pain threshold, and wore my jeans spray-paint tight. As did all their friends and my friends in the AP and eastern college culture we inhabited.



Just for fun, look at your local middle-school through college acquaintances through those eyes this week. Even the denial of masculine and feminine roles is but the embracing of them in another form, unconsciously displaying the number of blinks that their subspecies of firefly mates with.*

*The reference is to Madeline L'Engle's Arm of the Starfish, in which Kali Cutter, a wicked temptress by Christian YA fiction standards, attempts to deceive Adam by convincing him she is not really in league with her evil father, but is good and wants to be on his side. A female character, who sees through Kali, warns Adam that firefly subtypes blink their proper number of times to attract a suitable mate - there are two-blink and four-blink fireflies - but that when none are available, they blink a different number of times to attract the wrong type, which they eat. Our two older sons grew up on the analogy of firefly blinks - that subspecies identify themselves by blinking a certain number of times, and one should stick to girls who gave off the right number of blinks. We didn't stress that part about being eaten by false-blinkers.

Wedding

We attended a wedding and reception, which always make me weepy and irritated, alternating.

Before I get started, I will note the high point of the reception. I had remembered that the bride and her sister were competitive Irish step dancers, but didn't connect that to the table of eight young women who just didn't look like Grove City, somehow. I'm not implying anything disapproving by that. They looked perfectly nice young women. About 45 minutes into the regular dancing, the floor was suddenly cleared, the music changed, and they exploded into a choreographed routine. Which looks rather different when it comes on you by surprise and the girls are either in gowns or look-at-me dresses. Much cheering and rhythmic clapping, everyone leaving their tables to circle the dance floor for this.

Hold that image, it connects to the serious part.

When I attend a wedding ceremony, I am always struck by the idea that this is grand re-enactment of all weddings, as if the weight of a thousand, a million, a billion village weddings is all focused again on this point. The bridegroom is all grooms, watching his almost-wife being ushered down to him. Those are two village mothers who have known each other since their own girlhood embracing as they give their most precious possession to each other. The groomsmen seem always the same mix - half of them nervous, half with just a few more years on them and calm, solid. All fade in contrast to the colorful maidens opposite.

This is every older sister, herself recently married, toasting the bride; this is every father dancing with his daughter. And we, we are the village. Odd to think so now, in an era when well over half the group traveled great distances to be here, but it is so nonetheless. For today, at least, we are a village. We participate in the great secular mystery of union which Our Lord took up and transformed into some impossible expression of sacred love and what our arriving to be with Him forever will be like. For the descriptions in the Revelation seem like nothing so much as a wedding reception. Dancing is not described (Baptists will be surprised, but they'll adjust pretty quickly. We'll all be surprised at something and adjust pretty quickly), but twenty-four elders with their own song, other groups singing songs of special appropriateness to them, unison casting down of crowns - it has a folk-dance appearance, if you can see it. Food and drink, and all described repeatedly as a wedding feast.

I didn't have any of this sense of universality when Jonathan and Heidi married, and am certain I had none of these thoughts when I married myself. That would be foolish and contradictory, that those at the point where the myth concentrates should back off from their duty, so to speak, and dilute themselves into the universal. As further sons marry, I doubt I will...well, I don't know, so I shouldn't say. Who knows what I will think. I'll get teary, but also laugh a lot. More than that I can't predict.

I must owe much of this to having been in Fiddler On The Roof. It's all Tzeitel's wedding. But that is in itself the explanation. We look at a Jewish wedding a hundred years ago and half a world away but we recognise everything about it. The customs are different, the clothes are different, the music is different, but none of that matters. Those are the accidents around the substance, in Aristotle's terms. "Sunrise, Sunset" used to be played frequently at receptions, though I haven't heard it for awhile. Yet a think another song from that show would be better. Except you can't dance to it, so it will never catch on.

Caught My Eye

From David Corn:

“On Thursday, Capitol Hill Republicans, a day after taking control of the House, intend to read the U.S. Constitution on the floor of the House of Representatives. This is, of course, a stunt designed to position the GOPers as the party that really, really, really cares about constitutional government. But the exercise is the showy equivalent of wearing a flag pin..."

They really hate them those flag pins. They just can't drop it. Just keeps leaking out.

Needs To Be Said

Sometimes you will catch me railing against patients who aren't all that ill, and just need to get a grip. The older male social workers in my department have what we call our "Buck up, little soldier" speech.

But the danger on the right side of the blogosphere is much more toward denying that mental health issues are all that serious - that everyone should be getting the "Buck up little soldier" speech. I've seen that at Maggie's more than a few times (in the comments, not the posts). This is infuriatingly stupid.

There are conditions, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and autism, that are so patently physical that people who even remotely suggest otherwise I lose respect for immediately. But even the more controversial items, such as depression or PTSD, are seldom conditions that one can just ignore or resolve to have a better attitude about to overcome. Some people, sure. I've seen plenty. Get a grip. Enroll in a local Get A Life program. Snap out of it. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. All the cliches. But it simply isn't all of them. Major Depression is real and serious. PTSD can create havoc with people for their entire lives. It is not only ignorant, but cruel to suggest otherwise.

Any of y'all who are still holding to that idea - if you ever have a kid with schizophrenia, you will be humiliated to the point of suicidality to remember the cruelty you have inflicted on genuinely suffering people who you dismissed.

Update: The comment thread suggests the recent post of mine, The Cost.

Two Revisitings

Sometimes after an idea bounces around in your head awhile, a new angle or better example occurs to you. Not a disagreement with what you thought earlier, but an expansion.

In the infamous post which attracted 60 comments (no. link.), a disputant made the comment that 70-80% of gov't spending was a transfer of wealth from men to women. The idea was so moronic that I didn't even bother to correct it at first, and others on the thread seemed to be doing a good job without me anyway. (I did eventually break down on the 61st comment and put the whole thing to rest with some force, BTW, which I should have done immediately.) The heart of the argument seemed to be that men pay in more to Social Security, etc, and women draw out more.

That's how it's done, of course. We guys pay in money to a separate account labeled FROM MEN, and we all collectively get moral credit for that. Then the various governments at every level shift 70-80% of that over into another account labeled TO WOMEN, from which those general freeriders draw at will. Those few other women, who happened to contribute, just have to endure the shame of it. Because they're women, after all, and that's what they deserve. You won't see that in the budget, of course. It's a secret. The other 20-30% of the budgets go to fund all the minor items like schools, police, defense, courts, infrastructure - that sort of thing.

In imagining that, I thought of the "worst" individual examples, from the old days when we could enforce patriarchy without any of this nonsense from the weaker sex. I thought of the very traditional model, perhaps the one our parents had, of a man who went out and worked all his life, wife never employed outside the home, who retired at 65 and died at 70. His wife lived to be 80. This is the guy, according to the complaint, who is getting the rawest deal of all. He paid in lots, his wife didn't (for we are conveniently ignoring the economic value of her labor for this complaint); he collects for 5 years, she for 15. I imagined putting these wealth-transfer numbers in front of a bunch of those guys down at the lodge in the 1950's to try and evoke some outrage.

Not gonna happen. Those guys would have looked at the numbers and said "Yep. That's exactly how we want it to be. Don't change a thing." And those are the ones, according to the complaint, who are getting ripped off the most.

If they don't have a problem with it, I don't see why anyone else should.

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During the 2004 election, a liberal told me quite angrily that he was voting for Kerry because he loved his children and cared about their safety. Well, the implication that the rest of us don't love our children is pretty stupid and insulting, and I am amazed that a supposedly intelligent person (he is a moderately-prominent local attorney) lets such foolishness emerged from their mouths without editing. There is next the irony that his children (who we know) are among the unlikeliest people to end up in the military, and certainly not in combat infantry units, so George Bush and his ilk, always sending us into illegalwarsbasedonlies, is not going to measurably affect the safety of his children all that directly. I am not even going into the radical idea that some wars might actually make us safer, or at minimum, avoiding some wars might actually increase our danger.

But if you look at the attorney's comment in another sense, in the tribal sense of who runs the country and gets the best jobs, he's got a point. He is quite dramatically a part of the elite, and he is defending his childrens right to rule by keeping his tribe in power. They're smart kids and would likely do well under just about any American government, of course, but you get the idea.

The Rally To Restore...Vanity?

There is a post by far-left Mark Ames making the rounds, The Rally To Restore Vanity: Generation X Celebrates Its Homeric Struggle Against Lameness, because the concluding paragraph of his overlong rant encourages liberals to spit on libertarians because they are "enemies of the state." Ann Althouse (plus Stephen Green, via Instapundit*) finds some things in the essay worth attending to however, and not merely as a bad example to be aware of. Ames has sensed correctly one of the driving forces behind the Stewart/Colbert rally, and is furiously angry about it.

Some additional comments to Ann's about Mark's piece from from eXile: As he is 45, Ames learned about the 60's protest movements secondhand, when the mythology of their sincerity, courage, and nobility was already in place. He contrasts the liberals following fashion now with the liberals seeking justice then. It ain't so. First, there was a sharp decline in purity of motive from the civil rights movement to the antiwar movement. Even Jesse Jackson was sincere then. I don't mean to paint either movement as pure or impure. There were bandwagoners and attention-whores in the civil rights movement and deeply sincere seekers after justice in the antiwar movement. But there was a general decline. And in both, there were those whose aim was always the downfall of the American system, who insinuated themselves into the confidence of decent people - piggybackers willing to latch on to anything that looked as if it might cause trouble. The numbers of these latter were small but determined.

Also, one might pause to consider the sincerity of the politics of popular performers in any generation. They were increasingly prominent (only a few folksingers at the beginning of the civil rights movement; everyone on the radio by the late 60's, most of TV and Hollywood by the late 70's. Evidence for my first point in itself). Authenticity is so easy to fake onstage.

Note, BTW, that Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert are the same age as Ames. Not an accident.

The current generation of retro-infatuated hippies, in its fascination with the music and styles of the 60's rather than its ideals, might send Ames over the edge, but he needs to bear in mind that it wasn't much different in 1969. The myth of the early heroes of the struggle is standard in all movements. There was genuine concern for equality, for peace and justice, but there was a lot more concern for being noticed, getting high, and getting laid. (Yes, even among all those churchy social justice types.) Not to pick on the left exclusively for that. That is true of their opponents and of all political movements in safe places. It's human nature.

Second, because Ames is in the anti-corporate left, he still sees liberals as half-hearted versions of his more radical self, who can be rallied by appeals to stiffen the backbone and gird up the loins. In trying to shame them into standing up to The Man, he has not noticed that they are The Man. Corporations and billionaires and lobbyists are as likely - perhaps more likely - to support Democrats now, in the interest of tidying things up under nice government control influenced by them. They are likely to agree with the left about abortion and gay marriage, affirmative action and universal health care, global warming and talking nice to our enemies customers. Employees of insurance companies and health care corporations are not philosophically opposed to poor people getting health care. They are philosophically opposed to going out of business. Many of them, by their actions, care far more about poor people getting medical care than he does. The sweetheart Wall Street deals are cut by Democrats now, even more than Republicans. They are not liberals who have wandered off the reservation and need to get back to their roots. These are their roots.

Ames has allowed Democratic branding to becloud what he sees more clearly than most. There is a rhetoric of association that Democrats use in branding their product that Mark Ames has swallowed whole. Of course there are cigar-smoking fat cats who hate what Mark Ames stands for, caring only about money and not the least squeamish about corruption. But that divide is no longer left and right. That was years ago. The movements have changed, the ground has shifted. The roles have not reversed, but they are no longer clear. Friends at nonprofits may tell him differently, but look at their funding sources. They have a personal stake in party politics.

*There was an old New Yorker cartoon by Edward Koren, of a wealthy NYC couple in a book-lined apartment. He is is bearded, in a bathrobe, with a pipe. She has the Sunday NYTimes scattered around her chair and says "Paul's got an article in the magazine section. Ann's book is reviewed by Dick. Buddy has a short piece on the Op-Ed page. Roy has something in the travel section, there's an essay by Norman on Matthew's new movie, and a letter on endangered species by your mother." Evidence even in 1968 of the echo chamber that increasing became the liberal elite. Is the blogosphere now doing the same thing?