#3 - The Sadness Of NPR Christmas

This is one of the most-visited because I have pushed it hard over several Christmases. So sue me. I think I was on to something.
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Update 2018: Because of the discussion of Unitarians, and Richard Johnson's link in the comments to a blog post complaining about Garrison Keillor's treatment of them, I thought I would bring forward this post from 2006 (reprinted 2012) and another from 2007, below. They aren't about Unitarians, but do touch on the idea of who we criticise, and whether it is affectionate or not.  The Unitarian pastor at Richard's link has picked up that Keillor, in writing about Unitarians and Christmas, is no longer being kind. I remember that essay and its controversy when it came out, and it was surprisingly traditionalist about Christianity for Keillor, and I wondered what had come over him, climbing all over Jews and Unitarians like that.  One would expect him to be closer to the other side of the controversy. Theologically and culturally, he probably was (is). Yet he was a professional nostalgist, and those groups had been changing the mix at Christmas for a long time. He still had affection for the Christmases of his youth, as he remembered them.

I am not impressed with the Unitarian pastor's assertions, BTW, though she does seem like a nice enough person.  What Unitarians were like 150-200 years ago is irrelevant to today, far less relevant than for churches with more stable doctrine. Early Unitarians still had a lot of Jesus going on, they just defined him as not a part of any Trinity. Also, you will note that she was fine with Keillor making fun of other groups for years - he turned bitter around the early 90's, so she had been okay with a lot of his venom - but only drew the line when it was her own group. Well, we all tend to be like that.  But we should try to be better, also disliking unfair criticism about people who aren't us.
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Year-round, NPR tends to the bittersweet, the witty rather than uproarious, the world-weary rather than the cynical, the poignant, the melancholy, the wistful. These are the attitudes of the Arts & Humanities crowd, roused to righteous anger only against those who try and rouse them to righteous anger, charmed by everything but tending to observation rather than full-bore participation. NPR has the best describers of the vignettes of daily life, of which Garrison Keillor is the archetype.

Christmas kills them. They can access faith only via nostalgia, and that well soon runs dry. Real traditions include Mom, and going to church, and immersing yourself in that whole crowd of idiot relatives. Far better to have your Christmas carols instrumental, where the mood can grip you without the trouble of the lyrics. The programs at NPR are dignified, properly appalled at the deterioration of the season into commercialism and "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer;" into the violent games or garish decorations.

This works well enough for that percentage of their audience that still holds to the Christian faith. We fear no nostalgia, and deplore many of the same things about the season. Instrumental carols and lights that don't blink are fine with us. Their secular audience must be okay with this approach as well. Perhaps with NPR guiding the tour they can trust that however close the bus gets to the edge of the road it will not go over into actual religious assertion. They can stay in their seat and admire the view.


I don't have the same sense in my bones for what the Jewish storytellers are experiencing, but it seems much the same. They grew up slightly alienated from the culture's holiday, but having something of their own to build nostalgia around. Now they seem alienated from that as well. And those who had little or no faith tradition - they're trying to find something worth saving in all this. Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, and a sixpence in your shoe - which is supposed to be for weddings, but they all try to make a holiday out of the same sort of homey elements.

Emotional distance has its advantages, and these makeshift Christmases don't seem to be tragic. There is a sort of courage about them, and shafts of real joy, and the nobility of those who refuse at least to be hypocrites. But story after story in December, as these deeply artistic and sensitive people try to capture the season, carries the theme of searching, of something missing, of arranging the dried flowers as beautifully as possible because no new ones will bloom.

Those of us who are believers are tempted to throw up our hands and say "Oh for Pete's sake! Relent for just a few days a year and allow yourself to be immersed in the faith of your youth. You'll get more out of Christmas that way. It'll do you good. Why is Jesus the one thing you can't keep?" But I think it is our own inattention to the season, our own taking it for granted, that causes us to think this way. We are so aware of how many things pull us away from Christ at Christmas that we have forgotten how dangerous it is for those outside to look in. They sense, as we should know but have forgotten, that to step inside might mean never coming back. If emotional distance does not bring warmth, it at least brings memories of warmth, with no danger of burning. 

Lenore From San Fran

Reprinted from 2007.

A Garrison Keillor rerun had a News From Lake Wobegon about Lenore, a libertarian from San Francisco.

One already suspects he knows little about them if he thinks that’s their usual habitat, but I imagine there are a few, and one or two, perhaps, might somehow have moved to a prarie town in Minnesota. The oddity of such a possibility sets in high relief the trouble with storytellers: you can make the characters do whatever you want to illustrate your prejudices. Reality is no restraint.

That is technically true of all fiction, of course, and rather like its definition. But fiction is valued for the true insights it provides, the summing up of many stories in a single story, the distillation of many characters into a single character. Even wild and fantastic stories have as their aim showing how persons might act or should act in an improbable situation. Fantasy and sci-fi might be particularly good at this delineation, as they attempt to show basic human nature in extreme situations. CS Lewis, a fantasy writer, remarked that school stories, for all their appearance of common reality, were in fact founded on the unhealthy fantasies of adolescents, pining to be what they never can.

Keillor, then, has been marvelous at capturing in miniature two larger cultures: small town Minnesota and the arts culture as it is lived by people in America. He can do these skillfully because he knows these cultures – he has lived in them. Norwegian bachelor farmers, beleaguered clergymen, eccentric relatives, and people who dream of living elsewhere were the cast of characters of his childhood; moderately successful wordsmiths and musicians people his adulthood.

When he brings in people from outside these cultures and drops them into either of the two he knows, he deceives himself. He spins their stories as if from their point-of-view, with standard writer’s omniscience about what they think at what motivates them. But he gets them completely wrong. His rant about what Lenore thinks of her students, or her readiness to shoot a suspected intruder because of her own fevered imagination, has no ring of truth about any libertarian I have ever met or read. What it does resemble is the stereotype that liberal Democrats have about libertarians. Keillor thus believes he is entering into the thought process of a person different from himself, but is actually only entering into the thought processes of his audience. His skill in inserting homely details obscures a basic point: he hasn’t the faintest idea what he is talking about.

It is a moment of mutual self-congratulation on the stage, as Garrison and friends reassure themselves that they’ve seen through what those others believe. They know.

Come to think of it, whenever Keillor brings in people from elsewhere – youth evangelists from Georgia, priests from Las Vegas, Republican brothers-in-law, anyone from California or Texas, they are not only cartoons, but quite specifically the precise cartoons that his two cultures believe automatically.

Thanks Gary – I don’t think I would have quite figured out how inaccurate you are about all characters outside of a narrow range if you hadn’t been so magnificently wrong about this one.

Garrison Keillor

I stopped following him much somewhere in the 1990's, as he went into a bitter period.  His making fun of people no longer had affection underlying it, and the genuinely good lines that kept coming were not worth the irritation it took to get there.  It retroactively poisoned some of his earlier work for me, though there were things I could still enjoy. In the last few years either I have softened or he has, and I feel more well-disposed toward him.

This essay from over a decade ago in Virginia Quarterly softens my opinion even more.  It addresses his religious beliefs and approach directly, and brings in some things I did not know. A sample:

Sounds like a church service, doesn't it? Protestant, to be sure, and unless one wants to count Powdermilk Biscuits as the bread of communion, noneucharistic as well, but a kind of church service nonetheless. The people assemble weekly both in the hall and around their radios. Musicians on stage take the place of choir and organist, with the audience often invited to join in the singing. The messages and greetings that Keillor reads midway through the program are not unlike church announcements, letting people know how others in the gathered family are doing. All this culminates in good Protestant style with Keillor's sermon, er, monologue, which sounds like it is being born in the pulpit but actually is well prepared and even lasts the prescribed 20 minutes. "All comedy is preaching," Keillor has said, "but it can't show its hand." As for the particular brand of preaching and worship that A Prairie Home Companion represents, "Our show down deep in its heart is a gospel show."

Keillor

Garrison Keillor is just this moment doing his Writer's Corner, or whatever-it's-called, on NPR. He mentioned Anne Rice, giving his usual precis about upbringing, plus her Facebook announcement leaving the Catholic Church and organised religion.

Let me assure you he would never have mentioned Ms. Rice when she was a horror writer - it would have been beneath him to sully an NPR arts and letters segment with such. It would also have been unlikely to the point of invisibility that he mentioned her upon her conversion and fictionalised biographies of Christ. And Keillor would be the most, not least likely of the NPR stable to touch on that topic.

It is just such a shame that the Religious Right is so intolerant, isn't it?

Garrison Keillor Gets It Right

Or, The Not-So-Telling Detail.

Bernard-Henri Levy is one of the few French intellectuals who excoriates his countrymen for their Anti-Americanism (the other would be Jean-Francoise Revel). He likes Americans. Garrison Keillor is an Upper Midwestern sentimentalist who has over the years come to have contempt for more and more of his fellow citizens. So when GK reviews a book by BHL, the first thought is I'm going to be cheering for the latter and annoyed at the former, right? No way. Not this time, anyway.

I missed the review when it came out, but Steve Sailer just reprinted it, and it's worth noting. Authors like to find the telling detail, the artful little bit that they noticed and you didn't that sums everything up. Levy has a bunch of telling details about American culture - and he gets them wrong. He notices an important little something that he believes will just speak volumes to Europeans about what we are like. Keillor skewers:

At the stock car race, Lévy senses that the spectators "both dread and hope for an accident." We learn that Los Angeles has no center and is one of the most polluted cities in the country. "Headed for Virginia, and for Norfolk, which is, if I'm not mistaken, one of the oldest towns in a state that was one of the original 13 in the union," Lévy writes. Yes, indeed. He likes Savannah and gets delirious about Seattle, especially the Space Needle, which represents for him "everything that America has always made me dream of: poetry and modernity, precariousness and technical challenge, lightness of form meshed with a Babel syndrome, city lights, the haunting quality of darkness, tall trees of steel." O.K., fine. The Eiffel Tower is quite the deal, too.

But every 10 pages or so, Lévy walks into a wall. About Old Glory, for example. Someone has told him about the rules for proper handling of the flag, and from these (the flag must not be allowed to touch the ground, must be disposed of by burning) he has invented an American flag fetish, a national obsession, a cult of flag worship. Somebody forgot to tell him that to those of us not currently enrolled in the Boy Scouts, these rules aren't a big part of everyday life.

He blows a radiator writing about baseball - "this sport that contributes to establishing people's identities and that has truly become part of their civic and patriotic religion, which is baseball" - and when, visiting Cooperstown ("this new Nazareth"), he finds out that Commissioner Bud Selig once laid a wreath at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington, where Abner Doubleday is also buried, Lévy goes out of his mind. An event important only to Selig and his immediate family becomes, to Lévy, an official proclamation "before the eyes of America and the world" of Abner as "the pope of the national religion . . . that day not just the town but the entire United States joined in a celebration that had the twofold merit of associating the national pastime with the traditional rural values that Fenimore Cooper's town embodies and also with the patriotic grandeur that the name Doubleday bears." Uh, actually not. Negatory on "pope" and "national" and "entire" and "most" and "embodies" and "Doubleday." ...

Bombast comes naturally to him. Rain falls on the crowd gathered for the dedication of the Clinton library in Little Rock, and to Lévy, it signifies the demise of the Democratic Party. As always with French writers, Lévy is short on the facts, long on conclusions. He has a brief encounter with a young man outside of Montgomery, Ala. ("I listen to him tell me, as if he were justifying himself, about his attachment to this region"), and suddenly sees that the young man has "all the reflexes of Southern culture" and the "studied nonchalance . . . so characteristic of the region." With his X-ray vision, Lévy is able to reach tall conclusions with a single bound.

And good Lord, the childlike love of paradox - America is magnificent but mad, greedy and modest, drunk with materialism and religiosity, puritan and outrageous, facing toward the future and yet obsessed with its memories. Americans' party loyalty is "very strong and very pliable, extremely tenacious and in the end somewhat empty." Existential and yet devoid of all content and direction. The partner-swapping club is both "libertine" and "conventional," "depraved" and "proper." And so the reader is fascinated and exhausted by Lévy's tedious and original thinking: "A strong bond holds America together, but a minimal one. An attachment of great force, but not fiercely resolute. A place of high - extremely high - symbolic tension, but a neutral one, a nearly empty one."

And what's with the flurries of rhetorical questions? Is this how the French talk or is it something they save for books about America? "What is a Republican? What distinguishes a Republican in the America of today from a Democrat?" Lévy writes, like a student padding out a term paper. "What does this experience tell us?" he writes about the Mall of America. "What do we learn about American civilization from this mausoleum of merchandise, this funeral accumulation of false goods and nondesires in this end-of-the-world setting? What is the effect on the Americans of today of this confined space, this aquarium, where only a semblance of life seems to subsist?" And what is one to make of the series of questions - 20 in a row - about Hillary Clinton, in which Lévy implies she is seeking the White House to erase the shame of the Lewinsky affair? Was Lévy aware of the game 20 Questions, commonly played on long car trips in America? Are we to read this passage as a metaphor of American restlessness? Does he understand how irritating this is? Does he? Do you? May I stop now?

These telling details - playwrights like them, novelists and filmmakers and poets and comedians all like them. They are so delicious, to both writer and reader, that we forget they are often wrong. Insanely, wildly wrong. Because we want that sort of thing to be true, the wise nod of the head and the efficient summary, we will swallow almost anything.

First Amendment Cases

David French has a good article about recent challenges to First Amendment rights, which these days are usually about trying to shut down the rights of conservatives to express opinions.  His take is that these ridiculous challenges end up strengthening 1st A precedents, but are still concerning because they are relentless.  The Walls Are Strong, But the Cannon Fire Is Real.

WRT the students at religious colleges who object to policies unsupportive of LGBT rights, French points out that no one made them choose those colleges, and there are plenty of schools which would agree with their POV they could have gone to.  I am reminded of Garrison Keillor's summary of  Father Emil's yearly sermon on birth control, "If you didn't want to go to Chicago, why did you get on the train?" It is a line I have used many times over the last thirty years, as it applies to so many things.

I miss 1980s Garrison Keillor, by the way. A quiet brilliance, but hatred overcame him.

Kohlberg

Because Lawrence Kohlberg's theories of moral development came up over at Staffan's discussion of Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind, I thought I would repost my comments from 2009. This essay was a middle one in a series about the reasonable ideas of primitive liberalism, and how I believed they had gone wrong.

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Correction: This series on the key values of progressives was supposed to be an attempt to look at the origins of said values - the good thing each was originally based on before going awry. I didn't do that here, going negative right from the start. I'm not sure what I'm going to do about that now that I've noticed it. I don't like going back and editing a published post except for typos.

In the mind of an arts and humanities progressive, conservatism is a developmental stage on the way to becoming a liberal. While this is not intellectually very rigorous, it is nonetheless understandable. From the POV of an articulate young person moving out of the nest and into adulthood via AP classes and college, there is even something natural about the social progression. This is part of why I describe liberalism as a social rather than intellectual phenomenon. Socially alert children pick up on the cues in their environment. Their first forays into adult environments are often at colleges, where the surrounding adults are overwhelmingly liberal. It is thus easy to conclude that the old world with dumb people is conservative, the bright new one liberal. This is doubly true for those who went to Christian schools, then secular (or lite Christian) colleges.

This pattern was often described by people who grew up rurally or in small towns in my generation and just before it. They revelled in coming to a place where people liked discussing ideas instead of corn prices and altar guilds, where people read things, were sophisticated, and knew things about the world. Garrison Keillor does a great sendup of this with his Flambeau family (paragraph 9 if you're in a hurry). Keillor can poke fun at it because he understands it. So do I.

There was a long succession of authors in the 20thC who wrote about leaving their stultifying boyhoods in Ohio.

I actually want to write about Lawrence Kohlberg, but before I go away from the general observation above I want to highlight a large weakness in the partly-conscious reasoning of those who I described above. The adults at a college are not a representative sample, not of grownups in general, nor even of thoughtful, sophisticated adults. They are just the first ones we encounter. If you stay in certain fields, they will be most of the adults you ever encounter. And they are emphatically not representative of mature adults, averaging a little on the downside of the bell curve in that category.

Lawrence Kohlberg's theory of moral development was taught in my college intro psych course. He was a student of Piaget's and his moral development ladder had a great deal of Dr. Jean's thinking, especially in the first few stages. The first stages were to avoid punishment, then receive rewards; the middle stages were to be thought of as a good person, then to obey the rule because it was the rule - this fourth stage was called, significantly at the time, the Law and Order stage; the fifth stage was more integrative, weighing various costs, principles, and abstract justice.

I still recall the illustration for the sixth stage: Jesus, Gandhi, and MLK Jr. floated up in clouds - Jesus being on top, presumably to avoid offending people in 1973 - the caption informed us that these were people who had transcended usual moral thinking, and developed new moral constructs. They were Stage Six in moral development, attained by But A Few.

Bleah.

Even in my nominally Christian state, it was clear that this was just fuzzy liberalism, trying to piggyback the pacifist Mahatma and the assassinated civil-rights leader on Jesus's reputation. Jesus didn't bring much to morality that was new. He highlighted some OT principles, and extended a few - then he lived them, which was fairly rare, and was crucified for them , rarer still. Gandhi was a fraud, and King was himself a Christian, unlikely to suggest that he had added anything new to Christ's teaching.

It was a really sappy Jesus, too, such as was common in 2nd grade Sunday School books. Pretty good picture of MLK, though.

Kohlberg kept going, eventually founding a "just community" in a Cambridge highschool, dedicated to teaching children how to be liberals, and he still has followers in psychology today. He also has critics, including feminist Carol Gilligan, who noted that his test groups were all young,relatively wealthy American males, who might not be representative of humanity. Kohlberg's cross-cultural studies had some merit, but his data was strongest for the first few stages, which correlate fairly well to Piaget's cognitive development. This creates a "Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor, king hereafter" prophecy. Macbeth is already Thane of Glamis. The witches who know that Macbeth has already been promoted to Cawdor by the king, prophesy this and add the prophecy that he will be king. When Macbeth learns he is now Thane of Cawdor, he thinks the prophecy is coming true - it must be right that he will be king!

Kohlberg's early stages parallel Piaget's, so that by the time we get to #4, we are thinking "the pattern is true! Look how well it works," which predisposes us to think that #5&6 are well-supported also. They aren't. There are just all kinds of problems. Articulate sociopaths turned out to score in Stage Five or even Six more frequently than nice people who worked, stayed married, and had no criminal records. Retesting people in later years revealed that some of the Stage Fives had inexplicably slipped back into Stage Four. Rather than conclude that they might know something he didn't, Kohlberg called these 4+. Gilligan's observation that women had been left out of the picture (she originated the theory that women have a different moral reasoning, based not on rules but relationships, which is woefully unsupported, but at least plausible) turns out to be a specific instance of a larger cultural bias.

You can see why the idea of growing out of a rules-based morality would appeal to college students, who are really good at rationalization and have many things they would like to do that are against the traditional rules. I observe, for example, that when kids discover heavy petting they suddenly wonder whether all these church rules might be wrong, rather than the reverse order. Ditto abusable substances and all manner of popular social practices.

Progressives often equate conservative principles with something they believed in childhood. They were supposedly taught that America was always right, but they learned to see through that; that the free market is a selfish, me-first attitude; and that people who are different than us are automatically bad, which they learned in college wasn't true. In my most recent discussion with my uncle, with a back-and-forth about Liz Cheney's criticism of Obama's international speeches, he scoffed that my belief that America was very much in the right during the Cold War would be something he would fail on an eighth-grade essay. I thought his choice of insult significant.

Stonehenge Tunnel

There is a controversy about the preservation of the Stonehenge site that seems so obvious to me that I must not quite understand one side (of at least three) of it. 

"Since 1991, 51 proposals have been considered for improving the A303 in the area and to remove it from the Stonehenge site." So, as I recently just wrote, there's your first problem right there. Everyone agrees it needs to be fixed, no one agrees on what the fit should look like. 

There is the opinion of the archaeologists looking long term.  There is the opinion of the people who live in the area, for whom these roads are "the route that I take to work," or to shopping, or to check in on Gramps every day. I think I get both of these.  The former says "there is not just one site, there is an array of sites in the area, and they are irreplaceable.  Take the course, no matter how expensive and inconvenient, that maximises flexibility for learning about the people who lived in these places over thousands of years. The latter group takes the position that history and prehistory are just fine, but we live here right now. Why should the lives of the living matter less than the lives of the dead? As an excellent example of this, many decisions were made during WWII about where to place military bases or how to move troops or materiel across the landscape.  That seems distant, unimportant and unnecessary now.  Yet at the time it was very legitimate arguement "We aren't going to even have a nation, and our conquerors are going to destroy everything of our history.  So don't tell me how important this pile of stones or pots or bones is.  They are only important in the context of everyone living in peace and sending the daughters of rich parents to Oxbridge to study this. Other Englishmen, though less important in your eyes, don't much care about the details.  They want their England to survive for another generation for their children. Stonehenge nice, but England better. And why is this costing two billion pounds when the original estimate was one-tenth that? This group seldom articulates its position well, and therefore gets made fun of as boors who don't care about science or history or Quality Things in general. 

They therefore get thrown in with what we might call the shallow conservationists, whose position is not much defensible at all, but often have strong feelings, an ability to conjure, and some influence. They want things to look like Merrie Olde England, dammit, and be able to march right up and see Stonehenge whenever they damn well please without interference from government or uni people with their (possibly anti-England and anti-traditional) ideas. They want thatched roofs and canal boats and you can't even get a pint of Watney's Red Barrel anymore. We actually do know this sort in every country in the world. In America one version is the people who want the old traditional hymns that are actually 100-200 years old, no more, no less, because that just seems holy to them. (Look, I like a lot of those hymns and sing them with gusto, but you have to know what you're saying before spouting off.)  Traditional means grandparent. There are versions in every town. This gets humorous only when you are something of an outsider, noticing that traditional foods for Passover means Egypt only for the purely ceremonial parts, but mostly means Delancey Street. If you are actually inside on one side of the controversy it's not so funny.

Satire and sendups are funnier when they are meant affectionately (see my posts on earlier Keillor vs later Keillor. The first two tell you much, no need to scrape the barrel in my other posts.), and I don't think Pete's intentions are kindly here. Yet I think Arlo's are, so we will give the song a pass.

Anyway, Stonehenge is ground zero for that sort of argument in England, with more archaeologists per capita than elsewhere, more non-archaeolgoists opinionated about the topic, and more protected sites, leading to more people living and driving in and amongst them. And being Stonehenge, there is a full contingent of people getting exercised about fanciful history or what should be true, but isn't, in science and archaeology. So there is debate about the proposed Tunnel under Stonehenge. There. Are. Protests. 

If you put the visitor center bang up against the stone circle then lots of people can bus out there, go to the gift shop, and see the stones easily.  But then when you stand back to contemplate the ancient site...it's got a visitor center in it.  Same for nice roadways going by. As for the tunnel, people are worried that it will destroy future archaeology. Well, but the immediate site has been worked over quite a bit and we aren't likely to find gripping new things. The new things, like the discovery of Durrington Walls, came about because a road was being built. Archaeologists are much more interested in the less-explored areas in the wider area, especially to the west of Stonehenge. 

Taking the entirety of the ritually-used landscape, suspicion is growing that Avebury may turn out to be the bigger deal and tell us more going forward. (We are very pro-Avebury around here.) The shallow conservationist position is based on the idea that there are very few important things out there and they are deeply endangered, so we have to basically Not Touch Anything. Yet if we have learned anything in the last hundred years it is that there are lots of new things being discovered all the time that we have barely studied at all. Most of the discoveries arise because of construction - of roads, golf courses, shopping districts, apartments. The Amesbury Archer was discovered because they were building a school.

Developmental Politics

Correction: This series on the key values of progressives was supposed to be an attempt to look at the origins of said values - the good thing each was originally based on before going awry. I didn't do that here, going negative right from the start. I'm not sure what I'm going to do about that now that I've noticed it. I don't like going back and editing a published post except for typos.

In the mind of an arts and humanities progressive, conservatism is a developmental stage on the way to becoming a liberal. While this is not intellectually very rigorous, it is nonetheless understandable. From the POV of an articulate young person moving out of the nest and into adulthood via AP classes and college, there is even something natural about the social progression. This is part of why I describe liberalism as a social rather than intellectual phenomenon. Socially alert children pick up on the cues in their environment. Their first forays into adult environments are often at colleges, where the surrounding adults are overwhelmingly liberal. It is thus easy to conclude that the old world with dumb people is conservative, the bright new one liberal. This is doubly true for those who went to Christian schools, then secular (or lite Christian) colleges.

This pattern was often described by people who grew up rurally or in small towns in my generation and just before it. They revelled in coming to a place where people liked discussing ideas instead of corn prices and altar guilds, where people read things, were sophisticated, and knew things about the world. Garrison Keillor does a great sendup of this with his Flambeau family (paragraph 9 if you're in a hurry). Keillor can poke fun at it because he understands it. So do I.

There was a long succession of authors in the 20thC who wrote about leaving their stultifying boyhoods in Ohio.

I actually want to write about Lawrence Kohlberg, but before I go away from the general observation above I want to highlight a large weakness in the partly-conscious reasoning of those who I described above. The adults at a college are not a representative sample, not of grownups in general, nor even of thoughtful, sophisticated adults. They are just the first ones we encounter. If you stay in certain fields, they will be most of the adults you ever encounter. And they are emphatically not representative of mature adults, averaging a little on the downside of the bell curve in that category.

Lawrence Kohlberg's theory of moral development was taught in my college intro psych course. He was a student of Piaget's and his moral development ladder had a great deal of Dr. Jean's thinking, especially in the first few stages. The first stages were to avoid punishment, then receive rewards; the middle stages were to be thought of as a good person, then to obey the rule because it was the rule - this fourth stage was called, significantly at the time, the Law and Order stage; the fifth stage was more integrative, weighing various costs, principles, and abstract justice.

I still recall the illustration for the sixth stage: Jesus, Gandhi, and MLK Jr. floated up in clouds - Jesus being on top, presumably to avoid offending people in 1973 - the caption informed us that these were people who had transcended usual moral thinking, and developed new moral constructs. They were Stage Six in moral development, attained by But A Few.

Bleah.

Even in my nominally Christian state, it was clear that this was just fuzzy liberalism, trying to piggyback the pacifist Mahatma and the assassinated civil-rights leader on Jesus's reputation. Jesus didn't bring much to morality that was new. He highlighted some OT principles, and extended a few - then he lived them, which was fairly rare, and was crucified for them , rarer still. Gandhi was a fraud, and King was himself a Christian, unlikely to suggest that he had added anything new to Christ's teaching.

It was a really sappy Jesus, too, such as was common in 2nd grade Sunday School books. Pretty good picture of MLK, though.

Kohlberg kept going, eventually founding a "just community" in a Cambridge highschool, dedicated to teaching children how to be liberals, and he still has followers in psychology today. He also has critics, including feminist Carol Gilligan, who noted that his test groups were all young,relatively wealthy American males, who might not be representative of humanity. Kohlberg's cross-cultural studies had some merit, but his data was strongest for the first few stages, which correlate fairly well to Piaget's cognitive development. This creates a "Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor, king hereafter" prophecy. Macbeth is already Thane of Glamis. The witches who know that Macbeth has already been promoted to Cawdor by the king, prophesy this and add the prophecy that he will be king. When Macbeth learns he is now Thane of Cawdor, he thinks the prophecy is coming true - it must be right that he will be king!

Kohlberg's early stages parallel Piaget's, so that by the time we get to #4, we are thinking "the pattern is true! Look how well it works," which predisposes us to think that #5&6 are well-supported also. They aren't. There are just all kinds of problems. Articulate sociopaths turned out to score in Stage Five or even Six more frequently than nice people who worked, stayed married, and had no criminal records. Retesting people in later years revealed that some of the Stage Fives had inexplicably slipped back into Stage Four. Rather than conclude that they might know something he didn't, Kohlberg called these 4+. Gilligan's observation that women had been left out of the picture (she originated the theory that women have a different moral reasoning, based not on rules but relationships, which is woefully unsupported, but at least plausible) turns out to be a specific instance of a larger cultural bias.

You can see why the idea of growing out of a rules-based morality would appeal to college students, who are really good at rationalization and have many things they would like to do that are against the traditional rules. I observe, for example, that when kids discover heavy petting they suddenly wonder whether all these church rules might be wrong, rather than the reverse order. Ditto abusable substances and all manner of popular social practices.

Progressives often equate conservative principles with something they believed in childhood. They were supposedly taught that America was always right, but they learned to see through that; that the free market is a selfish, me-first attitude; and that people who are different than us are automatically bad, which they learned in college wasn't true. In my most recent discussion with my uncle, with a back-and-forth about Liz Cheney's criticism of Obama's international speeches, he scoffed that my belief that America was very much in the right during the Cold War would be something he would fail on an eighth-grade essay. I thought his choice of insult significant.

#24 - Arch Humor

There is a whole style of comic performance and writing that relies on snark, on archness. It is comic hipness. I won’t try to trace its history, but it includes Carlin more than Cosby, Newhart, or Pryor. You could sense it in Carson and Leno, but it is Letterman’s stock-in-trade. SNL seems to have retained the joys of silliness through its many incarnations, but the attitude of superiority has never been far below their surface. Al Franken breathed it. Monty Python, very little archness. There’s a touch in Steve Martin, and not so much as you’d think in Bill Murray or Will Smith. Very little in Robin Williams.

I must have liked it fairly well over the years – PJ O’Rourke has got plenty, Bryson moved increasingly in that direction. The tone is there in Dave Barry, in Garrison Keillor. But I find it quite tiring and irritating these days. That raising of the eyebrows and looking toward the audience with amusement at how stupid, how gauche, the particular object of ridicule is now provokes a desire to punch their slightly-lifted noses. Except if they can still laugh at themselves.


I have noted how much I value the ability to laugh at oneself as a measure of emotional health. I think some of that is in play here. Rick Reilly used to be able to laugh at himself, and was funny. Now he can’t and he sucks. Bill Simmons still can, for the time being. Barry laughs at himself easily; Keillor can laugh at his young self but less so at his adult self; O’Rourke can still skewer himself (though perhaps less…?), Bryson is a mixed bag on this and always has been. If you go back over the entries in the first paragraph, the pattern holds pretty strongly: those who can self-mock stay funny. Trudeau and Breathed started by being able to laugh at themselves, then lost this. Scott Adams’s pounding on the stupidity and meanness of management worked when Dilbert and Wally’s foibles were also a main focus. As that went, and they became only the hapless everyman observers of the lunacy, Dilbert became less funny.

Ben reads Chuck Klosterman and David Sedaris. I can tell they have this snarky humor - it may be the humor of the era, growing up slowly in the 70's, establishing dominance in the 90's. It is certainly the humor of the reader more than the viewer. I don't know if either of them have the ability to send themselves up, but I'm pretty sure that would be the dividing line whether I liked them.

Update 2011: Wow. I hadn't realised it had gotten this bad. I sense a Firesign Theater reunion right around the corner. So topical, so now!

Update 2019.  I had not included the late-night TV hosts in my original essay, but I think it applies to them as well.  I am not especially knowledgeable about the topic, but it is my impression that they started off being able to laugh at themselves but have become less able to over the years.

Sentiment And Politics

It is a rare bird who isn’t sentimental about something. From the inside, affected by an emotional appeal, we view those unaffected with suspicion. There is something wrong with them. Something heartless, cold, not-fully human. From the outside, when a particular emotional appeal isn’t of much interest, we view those inside as not very bright, rather shallow and easily manipulated.

Judging from my emails, lots of people find animals sentimental. Puppies in costumes; kitties with captions. I am relatively immune to that, though not entirely with the puppies.

In politics, progressives tend to stand outside sentimental patriotic displays. And as above, with any display one stands outside of, they find those moved by such things shallow and not very bright. Yet progressives have their own areas of sentiment, equally opaque to their political opposites. Lyrics of popular music, especially from the 60’s or other cool categories, figure prominently here. Progressives find these so meaningful at times. I like U2 well enough, for example, but I just don’t see anything profound in what they say. They’re okay, but banal, obvious. Whatever that brand of sentiment is, it’s opaque to me. Thus, I have to fight hard not to regard those so moved as shallow and not very bright. Because generally, they read books (only the right ones), are reasonably intelligent, and educated.

Yes this is related to my soapbox about tribalism, but I’m not going there.

One of neo’s regular commenters, Occam’s Beard, referred to a liberal friend and the emotional appeals which moved him, causing the penny to drop for me. The friend is a Scandinavian from the upper Midwest. I know lots of those. Anyone who followed that great sentimentalist Garrison Keillor knows that type of liberal as well. To that group, flags and most country music are bad sentiment and they mock it; bumper stickers and folk music or light classical are good sentiment. (I don’t know what the music equivalent for later progressives is, other than U2. Anni DiFranco? Green Day? World music?).

In case it wasn’t clear above, I’m not saying that all conservatives are one type of sentimentalist and all liberals another. Many aren’t sentimentalists at all. Plus, there’s some crossover which I’ll touch on at the end. Personal nostalgia, telling little stories about themselves, are a major source of sentiment for this brand of liberal upper Midwest Scandinavians. Check out the nostalgia movies and sitcoms, all with pretty much the same politics.

They tend to gravitate to performance musicians, often marrying them. No surprise there, that sentimentalists would be moved by music. The Germans were known as overly sentimental long before they were stereotyped as coldly efficient. The musicians themselves, as they grow older, are less reliably sentimental, politically or otherwise. I’m thinking of half-a-dozen specific friends who fit that category. No, up to a dozen – and it’s most of the progressives I know.

Crossover: Here’s something interesting. Those who are strongly moved by sentiment can sometimes be moved by other brands of sentiment, so long as it’s not too far out of range. That type of conservative can be moved by some types of emotional appeals to social justice. That type of liberal will respond to some types of patriotic display. Just so long as it isn’t too obviously from “the other camp.” Keillor is an excellent example here.

I’m sounding a bit condescending to both groups, which is unfair. I have little of the sentimentalist in me now, but I have in the past, and it has been formative for me. And even in me, some easy soft spots remain. Eowyn’s speech to the Nazgul, Sam’s farewell to Frodo, Peter’s plaintive response to Jesus – “Lord, to whom shall we go?”, Bigwig’s defiance to Woundwort in the tunnel on Watership Down. I can barely think of these things without tearing up.

Not music so much anymore. Also, I like my sentiments separate, not mixed in a casserole. I like the meaty religious sentiment to be entirely separate from the patriotic potatoes, not even touching. (Gravy confuses that metaphor, but maybe it’s culture, or philosophy or something. And I have no idea what the vegetables are. Have fun with that.) The slideshows and videos people send me have the god-thing, the family-thing, and the country-thing all together. It has kind of put me off all those categories.

That’s worse than kitties, I think. Because that’s not my kind of sentiment.

Humor Writers and Political Affiliation

Reposted from December 2005

*******

There are four writers of somewhat similar style from my generation who came from Middle America and were liberals in the 1970’s. Two still are, the other two have become libertarian/conservative. The two who are still liberal came from deeper into the Midwest: Bill Bryson and Garrison Keillor (Iowa and rural Minnesota). The other two, PJ O’Rourke and Dave Barry, came from Ohio and western New York. I wonder if there is a deeper fear of being associated with rubes and yahoos that comes from it hitting closer to home. Bryson and Keillor have both lived in Europe and take more pains to show they can move with sophisticates, even when they laugh at themselves about it. O’Rouke and Barry have been more willing to embrace their yahooness. I prefer the latter two, by the way, while retaining some affection for the former.

There is a long literary tradition in America of young men writing about how benighted their childhood towns were in Middle America. We are formed by what we run from, perhaps. In our church, people come from a variety of church backgrounds. This is common in the Evangelical Covenant, a denomination somewhere between the mainstream and the evangelical, purposefully inclusive of both. In adult Sunday School classes, you can sense people still running from their Catholic, or fundamentalist, or social gospel pasts as often as you can sense them embracing those pasts.

General Stereotypes

After posting the rather clever Massachusetts Stereotypes in the post-before-last, I browsed around the many other stereotype maps and images: New Hampshire stereotypes, New England stereotypes, England stereotypes...American, European, regional. The beauty of the one I displayed, and many that I like, is that it is essentially affectionate, and a community's expression. It is balanced, not trying to pick on any group in particular. Labeling Cambridge "Commies" and the islands "White Caribbean" would be offensive in many contexts. Describing SW NH as anarchists, and the Lowell/Lawrence/Methuen/Haverhill section as mill towns an methadone would also rankle if some Los Angeles comedian put that forward. But taking them all together, it becomes family banter, teasing. It might sting a bit but we bear up under it for our own good. And because it preserves our ability to take soft shots at others in the family. But most of the stereotype maps were just mean and bigoted. You would only think they were funny if you agreed with the bigotry and had a mean streak of your own. There was no affection for many of the groups on your map, just contempt.



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Garrison Keillor was charming and successful because even as he made fun of Central Minnesota and later, American arts and music culture, it was clear that he had a real affection for them both. Inasmuch as any of us shared in the cultures he lampooned - I was a Lutheran when he first came out, and my previous group identification had been the musicians, actors, storytellers, and poets on the fringes of success - we also winced and considered ourselves warned. There was irony in his Hopeful Gospel Quartet but more of his continuing desire to live among them. He brought in chorales from flyover country that were darn good. But when Keillor didn't actually love the culture he was talking about, it turned vicious quickly.

Over at Maggie's, Barrister links to an article about Lee Jussim's* research on stereotypes, which shows they are often accurate. We apparently think this way because it's efficient - a shorthand for navigating the world.  Theodore Dalrymple has written on the necessity of stereotypes as well - that without this 80% accurate instant evaluation, we would be unable to raise children or move about safely. So which is it? The easy answer is that the American ideal has always been that we start everyone at zero, every time, on anything of importance. We have never even approached this ideal, but we can at least say we have done better than others, and have held the ideal as desirable across many political persuasions, in good weather and bad.

  *Dr. Jussim is showing up a lot in articles I have been reading this year.

The Old Homestead, Swanzey, NH

Imagine Garrison Keillor talking about a stage production from his childhood, a Lake Wobegon tradition, now long since defunct. Now imagine the first awakening of that Sehnsucht for Keillor, a nostalgist from his childhood, describing for young Gary a stage play from their own town that toured the country in 1900, and was a big deal then (though no one remembers it now). Theater hanging by a thread on the prairie, because people wanted to have it for a dozen reasons of their own.

*** ***

Dropping by before the production, a guy who seemed to be one of the head techs points out to me the 11 instruments that light the show, and informs me "Five of them came from an old battleship.  It's hard to get bulbs for them now."  I'll bet. I look at the stained burlap main curtain and the few bare benches on the grassy hillside.  My first thought was I have to tell my brother Jonathan about this.  And he thought Sudbury Savoyards and Plymouth State College was primitive lighting.

Thus I am surprised the next night when the four sets are elaborate and quite good. One in particular is a marvelous backdrop.

*** *** 

We have long been driving to church camp past the Potash Bowl, where they stage a community production of The Old Homestead every year. You can catch the history at the link, but the short version is this: It's a long-running community theater production in Swanzey NH. The playwright was a minor 19th C song-and-dance man who hit it big with this one script when he fell on hard times, playing the lead role 15,000 times and making a fortune. The town revived the playscript of their favorite son in 1939 as a fundraiser. It is now the third-longest-running outdoor play in the country. The Lost Colony in NC and Ramona in CA seem to be ahead of it. I can't find the definitive list, but my own search uncovers no others earlier. All of the similar productions seem to be largely professional, tourist-driven affairs about historic events, though with more modern scripts.

Whatever is fourth on the list is going to become third-longest in two years, as Swanzey is throwing in the towel after the 75th year July perfomances in 2016. (Arithmetic note: WWII. Blackouts.) I see their point, and I think they are making the right decision, but it's shame. This script and performance are historical in a different way, and I can't find anything else in the country like it. The play is not "about" the 19th C, it is from the 19th C, and produced in a fashion that would have been common then. Local musicians, local actors, local designers, directors, everything. Just the regular folks you meet in church, or the elementary school, or the aisles of stores, and the surprise is "Hey! Some of these people are really good!"

I should note that it is also historically accurate late-19th C American humor, which is less funny in a 21st C context. As in Oh, yeah, I get it now. Ha ha ha. Yeah. More on this later.

It's a midpoint between the feeling you have at every talent show, when Act#5 shows real talent* - you are pleasantly surprised - and "Britain's Got Talent" when some shy housewife shows jaw-dropping professional talent. This is between. These are the best talents of your neighbors, better than people-who-got-up-and-sang-a-duet-because-the-program-was-short, but not those magical talents that go viral on YouTube. You are so happy that they're good. You never knew. The eight guys in Act I who seemed to be pointlessly working together on someone else's farm before going home for the evening did a very decent barbershop rendition of "Massa's In The Cold, Cold Ground" and "The Old Oaken Bucket." The town band from the next community over was just fine. How do they pull such a group from so few people?

"The Old Homestead" is not a good script, though it made it to Broadway in 1903. The NYC shine and fame of Denman Thompson was the foundation for this community theater's origin, but it's the modern talent that's carrying it now.  This was before American Musical Theater. In 1900, transitions into musical numbers basically amounted to "Fellers, let's have a song." It's cornball, and the current actors get the irony lovingly. Yet back in the day, this was as good as entertainment got.  "Before you go, could you play my favorite song?" Thompson steers the script so that he can work in a pointless joke about the Centennial, and names a character Jack Hazzard so that the old coots can ask "Any relation to Hap Hazzard?" (knee slap.) The plot meanders into several of these, but the basic idea was dear to the hearts of the people of a moving, expanding, population where children went away - and we hope not astray. A country boy goes to New York and turns to drink. A NYC boy becomes a railroad tramp and turns to drink in the country. Through the kindness of strangers, they both repent, return to their homes, and are restored. Tying this together is country mouse/city mouse humor from each group encountering the other.  Plus Irish servants, old coots competing for the same woman, and a flirting girl.  Great stuff.

Before vaudeville. Not all vaudeville was great, you know. It was mostly crap, or at best, ephemeral.  The cream, the 1% that survived that, and the transition to radio and the talkies and even (gulp) TV, give us the false impression that the touring performances were just riotous, laugh-a-minute humor.  Nah. Plus, vaudeville (the earliest versions frankly suck, but you can see the potential if you squint real hard) drew on French Variety and English Music Hall entertainers, so even that was the top shelf of three cultures. And still wasn't usually all that funny, and they didn't sing or dance that well.

Even before that.

If I lived in Swanzey I would have been roped into this years ago, because I sing a little, act a little, all of that. I would bring up the average an five fronts, but not outshine the lot. My dad would have owned a succession of roles of this had it been Westford, MA. (My two younger brothers would probably have participated as teenagers and then wisely moved on.) For those inside, it's just a local thing, trying to drum up people to move scenery or work the concessions every year.  The play isn't that big in the history of theater, it's only important because (blush) well it's Swanzey, and it's all we've got. No one else came from here, and people in Keene laugh at us.

*"She also had a Minor in Voice at State U. You didn't know?"

*** ***

Next year, for the last performance, everything changes. This year, it is a Thornton Wilder universality drawn from the specific: dozens, hundreds, thousands, millions of towns and stagehands and nights. In 2016, The Old Homestead enters a W.P. Kinsella, Tom Stoppard, Ionesco, Borges world.  The cliche "it works on so many levels" becomes true. This is the last dinosaur - a small one, unnoticed, disappears into the forest.

The curtain rises at 7:30pm.  Cloth being cloth, and the sun setting in the west, the scene changers after the long first act are not visible through the burlap. The audience sits impatiently, wondering what could possibly take so long in an amateur production. The town band plays on, one old song and two from Disney movies, as if losing the battle of securing us to a receding past.  But as the sky darkens and the many backstage workers need light later, their overhead hardware-store floodlights behind the curtain start to illuminate their many movements after Act II, and are fully, though eerily visible after Act III. We sit and watch the ghosts of decades of stagehands move complicated scenery to set up another 19th C moment, defiantly staking the past into the stage.  Five minutes, almost ten of human shapes disassembling a Place and assembling another. Next year it will be even more pronounced, and they will set the scene One Last Time before it slips into the abyss. It will not be some magnificent Wagnerian set they preserve against the Götterdämmerung; it's just an old farmhouse behind a scrim. Oddly, it is revealed at the end they had another curtain they could have pulled between to disguise it all along. Accident.

Touch carefully.  If you go next year you might leave this time and not get back.

Humor Writers and Political Affiliation

There are four writers of somewhat similar style from my generation who came from Middle America and were liberals in the 1970’s. Two still are, the other two have become libertarian/conservative. The two who are still liberal came from deeper into the Midwest: Bill Bryson and Garrison Keillor (Iowa and rural Minnesota). The other two, PJ O’Rourke and Dave Barry, came from Ohio and western New York. I wonder if there is a deeper fear of being associated with rubes and yahoos that comes from it hitting closer to home. Bryson and Keillor have both lived in Europe and take more pains to show they can move with sophisticates, even when they laugh at themselves about it. O’Rouke and Barry have been more willing to embrace their yahooness. I prefer the latter two, by the way, while retaining some affection for the former.

There is a long literary tradition in America of young men writing about how benighted their childhood towns were in Middle America. We are formed by what we run from, perhaps. In our church, people come from a variety of church backgrounds. This is common in the Evangelical Covenant, a denomination somewhere between the mainstream and the evangelical, purposefully inclusive of both. In adult Sunday School classes, you can sense people still running from their Catholic, or fundamentalist, or social gospel pasts as often as you can sense them embracing those pasts.

Moralistic Therapeutic Deism

After James's comment under Casual Meanness, below, I looked up "therapeutic deism," a term I thought I might have read before.

Yeah, that's what I'm talkin' about.  Its full title is Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, from Soul Searching a sociological study of the religious beliefs of young people that came out a decade ago. The central characteristics of this religion are

several moral statutes not exclusive to any of the major world religions. It is this combination of beliefs that they label Moralistic Therapeutic Deism:

1. A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.
2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

Well, not just youth, I'd say.  They didn't invent it out of nowhere.  We have been moving in this direction since my childhood in a Congregational Church.  Many of Garrison Keillor's characters seem to draw from this spring.  I get the sense that people who hold these views do not think this is a description of correct doctrine so much as a bare minimum that any other religious person has to reach in order to be credible. It's not very intellectually rigorous, certainly.  There's a lot of "But what if..." that hasn't been thought out here.

Still, the great majority of people in any time and place haven't put a lot of independent thought into their beliefs.  Dissenters of various stripes do a bit better in thinking, but they usually pretty quickly just fall into some other rut that happens to present itself. As it has ever been. On a FB thread from a minister friend last night was the reply "...he called people to know and follow him, to find the positive of life-of-the-vine that transforms us, not the negative of stop-doing-that-first..." This was by an adult. 

When I went back to get the exact quote just now, I found my comment there had been deleted, BTW.

There are plenty of nominations who to blame for this, but as I see it criticised in Both Lewis's and Chesterton's writing, I don't think the origins are American or recent.  I do think this is the religion that will bring down the Church in the West. It already guides even the believers. Unconfortable truths can always be headed off as hurtful.

Freethinking Seldom Is

See, even when posting on my own site in my own home that natural skepticism just emerges. A much grabbier title would have been Freethinking Isn't, or Freethinking Ain't. Good bumper-sticker stuff. But I look at the pithier versions and think "Well, sometimes it is. Seen it myself. And there might be some freethinker out there who really tries hard and deserves better..." So I hedge.

A very fine psychiatrist I have worked with for several years is leaving tomorrow to work at Concord Hospital instead. It is a great loss for our hospital. He gave me a parting gift, Doubt: A History, inscribed "To my favorite skeptic." This may seem odd coming from a Unitarian to an Evangelical, and he laughed at that himself. But he is correct. It is my natural cast of mind to look at what "everyone knows" and challenge it.

That has its own dangers, of course. If someone makes a really bad argument in favor of something I tend to counterreact and think well, that must be untrue then, if knuckleheaded arguments are the best they can muster. That is equally foolish, for even true things have defenders who make no sense. Progressives, freethinkers, 60's liberals, granolas, and alternative medicine adherents think they agree with me on this skeptical approach, seeing themselves as the ones willing to challenge received wisdom. (There is overlap among those groups, but folks usually tend to specialise in one skepticism.)

In fact, the opposite is true. The members of those groups - in general, mind you, not universally - tend very much to question their own beliefs very little. They see the conventional wisdom as being what their parents believed, or their childhood church, or their fifth-grade history book, and they are very proud of not believing that, proving how fearless they are. To be sure, there are many people who still do believe those older conventional wisdoms who deserve to have their ideas challenged. They live and move among us.

But the milk-and-water skeptics who reject those things have a new set of conventional wisdoms they adhere to. Not very new, either, just newer than the 1950's. They reveal themselves at the spot where they are challenged. They cannot conceive of anyone disagreeing except as a representative of the Old School. They argue with you as if you must be defending the POV they abandoned upon leaving their parents' home. You must be an ignorant person who just hasn't read up on where ideas have gone since then. That you might have considered their ideas seriously - in my case have believed them for many years - and moved on simply does not compute for them.

I do have hopes for this particular book. I read the blurbs - Howard Zinn, Garrison Keillor - and scanned the table of contents. I know already a lot of what will be in this book. Voltaire, Freud, Hume; a collection of Jewish writers, tending strongly to the mystical and the reformed; Buddhists and related Chinese writers; a few Marxists and Existentialists; as the author is female there will be a collection of feminist writers. Physics will be dragged in inappropriately, showing that in the 20th C we learned that everything is relative, because hey, even Science admits of uncertainty now. Chesterton, Lewis, Wright, Flew, will be studiously avoided. Jesus is mentioned as an example of a doubter. We know where that's going.

I left the book at work so I can't check if I'm correct. But you know I am.

There were some chapter titles and references which were new to me, however. Huzzah! There may be something new here after all. I certainly hope so. I'm really hoping there will be something that knocks me back.

What's Wrong With The West?

 Rob Henderson interviews Theodore Dalrymple, author of Life at the Bottom and many, many essays: What's Wrong With the West, in The Spectator. Henderson has written a new introduction for the 25th anniversary edition of the book. I have linked to or written about Dalrymple a score of times if you are interested in my experience with his work. He was an inner-city psychiatrist in England and saw much of what I did in my career.  I usually agree with him.

 I had spent a lot of time in Africa and traveling the world, where material goods were infinitely worse than anything in Britain. Yet in certain respects poverty in Britain was spiritually and psychologically worse than what I had seen in Africa, where people actually went hungry! So I came to the conclusion that there was something other than mere absence of economic wellbeing that explained what I was seeing.

Even people who are answering off-the-cuff will mention that there is less community in America and the West than there once was, and less than they observe in other cultures. Much of this is perception. As Garrison Keillor once said and I have repeated many times "We think times were simpler then because we were children and our needs were attended to by others." We remember getting together with cousins - or even siblings - but that doesn't happen anymore. We generalise that into believing that the culture as a whole has lost something. But we don't see the cousins because they now have other people that they love - spouses, children, grandchildren. It is the natural order of things for cousin closeness to be recreated in every generation. Similarly, we don't share a home with our siblings anymore.

When we view other cultures and the closeness and camaraderie they have, we are seeing a survivor bias of those who stayed in the village or neighborhood. Yet they also have young people who moved to the city. 

Yet with all that said, there might be something to it. The fragmentation of culture may not all be illusion. 

It's a good thing to comment on at Christmas, I think, when you were thinking about similar topics already. 

Random Thoughts On Listening

When we have finished all this listening and we somehow have the same problems, can this be the last time we try this?  I am reminded of "Pontoon Boat," a story by Garrison Keillor from the 1990s, in which a committee of Lutheran pastors were going around Minnesota to gather information and discuss failing family farms. One of them says on the last day, just before they go under in the shallow lake "I don't know what we can do.  But I know we aren't doing enough.  And I think at least we are coming out of this conference with a renewed sense of purpose."  Perfect.

Choosing listening as a solution implies that there is some learning that needs to take place.  I don't think that's it.  Unlearning is what needs to happen.  People believe a number of myths that they are just sure are backed up by statistics somewhere.  Well, they have a point.  There are any number of misleading statistics that keep getting recirculated, mostly in the form of associations dressed up as causes. Conservatives have a couple of beauts. I will repeat my caution that the old adage that there are lies, damned lies, and statistics is based on a true story, but not accurate.  Statistics will tell you the truth if you shove them up against the wall and get them to tell you who their friends are.

Civilization

Garrison Keillor made a humorous but profound observation years ago. "When you are a parent, Western Civilization is just a job. Whether it is going up, or down or is in trouble or not is not something you are worried about."