What’s Wrong with the World

Via the eccentric and interesting blogger Reihan, of The American Scene, comes this fascinating piece of Wikipediana related to Anton Szandor LaVey, the founder of the so-called Church of Satan:

Blanche Barton, author of an autobiography of Satanist Anton LaVey, not speaking disparagingly, has suggested that the Neo-Tech "system of thought...offers Satanism in a grey flannel suit, promises overnight wealth, and never mentions the dreaded `S' word."

Mark Steyn has been banging on for many months now about the demographic decline of the great liberal welfare states of the West (and East), especially compared to the enviable fecundity of the Islamic world. Now James C. Capretta, in an interesting piece for The Weekly Standard underlines the point that this decline has everything to do with the (apparently unchallengeable) ascendancy of government-run pension systems like Social Security.

As Capretta points out, "a primary motivation for having children in earlier times was economic security in old age. As parents became frail and less productive, it was expected that one or more of their adult children would take care of them, oftentimes by bringing them into their homes. Married couples thus 'invested' in numerous children, in part, to ensure there would be family members to care for them in their twilight years. With state-run Social Security, the government has largely assumed this family responsibility. Married couples have a greatly diminished economic incentive to have children, because now they are counting on--and paying for--government-based old age support."

Take away that "primary motivation," and the consequences are (or should have been) predictable: "a government-run pension system equal to 10 percent of a country's economy correlates with a reduction in the Total Fertility Rate (TFR)--which measures the average number of births per woman during her lifetime--of between 0.7 and 1.6 children, after controlling for other variables...This is extraordinary given that most industrialized countries now have TFRs well below 2.0...The bigger the Social Security scheme, the steeper the fertility decline."

To which I would add that "government-based old age support" (which, in the US, includes Medicare as well as Social Security) not only reduces the natural incentives for having babies, but also the incentives for raising them rightly.

Which is to say: it reduces the incentives for bringing up one's children - for training them - in the traditional middle-class virtues: i.e., in industry. In prudence. In temperance. In fidelity. Etc. Instead, as Pavel Kohout has pointed out, people in the modern welfare state can increasingly afford to treat their children as "pets" - indulged, and flattered, and encouraged to "follow their bliss," as the phrase goes.

Can you say "disaster in the making?" For although programs like Social Security and Medicare make it less important from the individual point of view to have lots of kids and to bring them up conservatively (so to speak), the long-term solvency of such programs precisely depends on people going on doing just that. Over to Mr. Capretta:

"Gunnar Myrdal, the eminent Swedish socialist economist, observed in the 1940s that state-run, pay-as-you-go pension systems are built on a fundamental 'contradiction': They reduce the economic incentive within a family to have children, even as they remain ever dependent on a new generation of productive workers."

Capretta's whole piece is well worth a read. But there is one point where I part company with him. And that point concerns the essential nature of the disaster that is in the making here. For him, the worry is that the welfare state might prove unsustainable, unless we can get people to have more babies. But he seems not to be at all bothered by the collapse of traditional expectations about what family members owe to one another. He writes:

"Acknowledgment of Social Security's role in fertility decline is not an argument for abandoning government-sponsored old age support. The elderly--and their adult children--far prefer financial independence to dependence..."

To which I'm inclined to reply: well, yeah, sure. Old folks don't want to be reduced to dependency on their children. And young folks don't want to get stuck with the burden of looking after their parents. So if you're looking to maximize (short-term) preference-satisfaction, such programs are the way to go.

But is that any way to make people better people?

Correct me if I'm wrong - but I might have thought that the mutual and unbreakable ties of obligation that bind parent to child and child to parent are among the essential features of our humanity, and that anything that weakens - or promises to replace - those ties, however superficially attractive to both parties to that relationship, is the devil's own brew. Why should I welcome a world in which parents pamper their children, and where children abandon their parents, with an easy conscience, so long as the whole system is enonomically sustainable?

I was recently involved in a discussion about a sperm donor (or his estate, if I recall correctly, but it isn't important) being sued by a lesbian couple to whom he had donated his sperm. A child was born, the child was adopted by the lesbian couple, the male donor's estate was sued for money.

The knee-jerk reaction to this kind of case seems to be that it is wrong to view the natural parent as having any obligation to support the child once the child has been adopted by another. But that knee-jerk reaction is, in my view, wrong.

One fact of nature and development that decisively separates America from her ancestors in Europe is that “wild unknown country” out West. At one time in our history it was only as far west as the Appalachians, then it shifted to the west bank of the Mississippi; and even when parts of the farther West were settled, whole huge swaths of its interior remained wilderness. Some are almost so to this day. When the last region of Europe to be settled was settled can only be conjectured, I think, but it was before the first was settled in North America. Columbus sought a western route to the East, not because Europeans did not know the East, but because a great martial Eastern Power blocked access to it. So Columbus found North America, and Americans have been finding more of it ever since (or least they had been, until relatively recently.)

Though I have been a resident of Southern states for over a decade now, and even tentatively consider myself an adopted son of the South, I was in fact born and raised in Denver, Colorado. My ancestors were the first Italians in that fair city.

Those of you who take a little torture with your TV dinner might be experiencing a bit of post-game letdown now that the final episode of this season's 24 has come and gone.

Paul Cella has long wanted one of us here to savage the show, believing that it perpetrates much mischief in the American moral imagination, or what's left of it. He is apalled that millions of his fellow citizens watch it weekly, unrepelled by certain of Jack's interrogation techniques, which this season included snipping off a Russian diplomat's finger with a pair of wirecutters.

A professor at Washington and Lee University by the name of Eduardo Velázquez, in his recent book A Consumer’s Guide to the Apocalypse — in my incomplete reading, a rip-roaring adventure in polemics and philosophy, bombast and humor, caricature and insight — dedicates a chapter to a careful analysis of the music and lyrics of Dave Matthews. Now for those readers over 40, Dave Matthews is the songwriter and frontman for an exceedingly successful rock band, whose albumic strategy, if you will, has largely consisted of a couple very catchy tunes supported by a mass of more complex and enterprising material, much of which is uneven but the great peaks of which have formed the soundtrack for a generation of young men and women.

Lawrence Auster, the prolific blogger over at View From the Right, has posted an enlightening letter from a reader, who has summarized the atheism-inspired philosophical declension of John Derbyshire, National Reviews' resident curmudgeon.

I should state, for the record, that neither "peak oil" nor "global warming" impress me as being inherently "liberal", though certain policy responses to either would assuredly be "liberal". And while I'm more in the "how you take your Darwin" camp than the "whether you take your Darwin" camp, the role of untethered Darwinian speculation in the Derb's evolution merits reflection. Were we a people given to myth and legend, Darwinian thought would surely figure in myth as one of those benefactions that can destroy, or as a basis of civilization that also alienates us from ourselves. But enough of my thoughts. Read the letter.

Scholars and theorists thrashing about in the waters of postmodernism sooner or later encounter a bizarre and stupefying fact: Michel Foucault had a thing for the Islamic revolution, had, in fact, a rather unnatural affection for it. To what can we attribute this shattering aporia?

David Frum, in a brief blog review of a recent scholarly interrogation of this theme, Foucaut and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, writes:

...of all the absurd infatuations ever to sweep literary Paris, none has ever matched the absolute incongruity of Michel Foucault’s enthusiasm for the Iranian Islamic revolution of 1979. Foucault, a man utterly devoid of religious feeling, a homosexual who reveled in the brutalities of San Francisco’s sado-masochistic bar scene, decided in 1978 that the Khomeini revolution offered mankind’s best hope for personal liberation.

How could Foucault – for all his absurdities, obviously no idiot – have talked himself into believing anything so manifestly absurd?

Speaking of keeping the wolves away from the cattle, The New Atlantis brings us this eye-opening book review by Cheryl Miller.

She asks too whether feminists’ commitment to equality and “social justice” is compatible with the eugenic possibilities of ART [assisted reproductive technologies - ed.], particularly the way clinics divide women into the different “categories” of donors and surrogates. “Most surrogates I come across are not typical donor caliber as far as looks, physical features, or education,” one doctor explains. “Most egg donors are smart young girls doing it for the money to pay for college. Most surrogates are—you know, they need the money; they’re at home with four kids—of a lower socioeconomic class.” Or as another physician more succinctly explains the value of this “breeder class” of women: “Moo.”

“[I]t is insufficient to consider only the welfare of the child, which cannot, in any case, be isolated from that of the parent. Thus the primary concern should be for the welfare of the family as a whole.”

... what he means is ...

"The most important thing is fulfilling the narcissistic desires of adults. If we have to feed a few untermensch children-accessories, sperm donors, and breeder-women into a meat grinder in order to carry out the will of the free and equal superman, so be it."

What follows is a discussion of an issue with many empirical aspects to it. Because pro-lifers have been urged to get on board with the proposal in question, I think it's important for us to have an informed opinion. The empirical statements in what follows all have evidence for them, but I am interested in and open to corrections of any of them, the more so as I am not an embryologist and have studied these matters only as an amateur.

The procedure in question is called ANT-OAR: Altered nuclear transfer oocyte assisted reproduction. My position is that ANT-OAR is wrong, not primarily because the entities it would produce would be human embryos (in one current versions of the proposal, I'm presently inclined to think that they would not be), but even if the entities it produces are not human embryos. My position against ANT-OAR is thus, as far as I know, original in the debate.

Via Rod Dreher, members of the Animal Liberation Front wishing an excruciating death upon a ten-year-old boy suffering from terminal cancer:

I can only hope the boy's death was a painful one. If you think about it though, this story has a somewhat happy ending. A young boy dying; therefore he can not grow up, spawn some other mutant losers and teach them how to hunt. I wonder how satan is treating him???(Note: the ALF site requires registration, a procedure to which I will not submit; hence, my quotation of the fool Dreher cites, Dreher having his ways.)

I don't have any third thoughts, any reconsiderations, beyond the observation that, if this is the face of environmentalism and conservationism, it is no wonder that most Americans simply roll their eyes and continue to live as though the modern, suburban lifestyle could be perpetuated indefinitely, which it cannot. These things are all rolled together in the American consciousness. I'm much more sympathetic to conservation concerns that most conservatives, so far as I can determine, but given the choice between folks like the ALF on the one hand, and shooting bears and guzzling gas on the other, well, I'd like to drive my Yukon to every last state and national park and shoot a bear in each one.

...Just as pointless as the New Fusionism:

What Lindsay, who enthusiastically supported the Iraq war, doesn’t say—or isn’t quoted as saying—is that he hates Paul’s old right and quintessentially libertarian opposition to our foreign policy of global interventionism. Senor Lindsay and his fellow ”modern" libertarians have made their peace with the Empire. As long as they can take drugs, abort fetuses, and sodomize each other to their hearts’ content, he and his Beltway buddies have no problem with the US rampaging over half the earth, regime-changing and taking out “rogue” states at will. As long as it’s a “free market” empire, they’re all in favor of it. (Justin Raimondo, at Taki's Top Drawer.)

Update: It is worth noting that the Other New Fusionism has the advantage of coherence, which the New Fusionism simply lacks, inasmuch as the former combines a utilitarian/hedonist social ethic with a foreign policy utterly utilitarian in essence, wanting as it is for a moral warrant, while the latter attempts, vainly, to combine a substantive social ethic with that same foreign policy. At the meta-level, this is one reason why the social conservatives are not only dupes and suckers, often enough, but almost destined to witness the defeat of their ostensibly highest aspirations: their functional non-negotiables accept all the premises of their substantive adversaries. They have conceded 90% of the debate already.

As a pro-choicer, that is.

Well, sort of. He still calls himself "pro-life." I don't know how that makes him compare to Rudy Giuliani. Does that make Giuliani more honest, or what?

Some of us have had real questions about Thompson on this score already because of the statements he made in 1994. (Please note that the guy whose blog this is was evidently the founder of the libertarian organization that gave Thompson the interview in 1994 in which he said that "government should stay out of" the abortion decision.)

But anyway, the 1994 remarks are more or less moot now, given this recent interview with Tim Russert. Thompson is unequivocal there that abortion should not be illegal, though he still says definitely that Roe v. Wade should be overturned.

He casts the question of legality in typically pro-choice terms: throwing "very young girls, their parents, and their family doctors" in prison. Has the man never heard of Planned Parenthood? Doesn't he know that abortion clinics exist? Does he really believe that pro-lifers want to throw thirteen-year-old girls into prison for obtaining abortions?

And I wouldn't care if a doctor as homey and paternal-looking as C. Everett Koop performed an abortion. An abortionist is an abortionist, whether he is a "family doctor" or not. This is all typical pro-choice claptrap. It is hard to believe that Thompson either believes it himself or thinks he can get away with spouting it and also being considered pro-life. But if Rudy is wooing social conservative voters without calling for the overturn of Roe, merely by mouthing a mantra about judicial appointments, why shouldn't Thompson try to get one up on him, grabbing the "pro-life" label by advocating overturning Roe, while advocating legal abortion?

Sadly enough, we've come far enough down in our political process that that is, pragmatically speaking, a good question.

Peter Suderman, writing at The American Scene, apparently wishes to analogize radical life extension to ordinary health care:

One of the biggest political debates in the country right now is over health care and health insurance. Read books like Jonathan Cohn’s Sick and you’ll be inundated with stories purporting to show situations in which people died for lack of care. The underlying reasoning here — reasoning that I suspect is shared by the majority of the population — is that no one should die when the technology exists to keep them alive. So why does technology-driven radical life extension spook so many people? I’m honestly baffled by this, and have yet to read anything that amounts to much more than someone’s account of having a vague moral instinct that living that long would be a perversion of human existence.

...a transfer of resources away from two kinds of people: (a) some who are already alive and don’t have the potential or wherewithal to buy into the methuselocracy and (b) a possibly very large number of people who will have to not be born.

Human rights will be fundamentally rejiggered in the methuselocracy, for no more grandiose reason than that people who are alive have a selfish interest in generally not dying for as long as their resources and ingenuity permit.

One October 21, op-ed writer for the Waco Tribune-Herald, John Young, published a piece entitled,"In search of `pro-lifers who are really anti-abortion." I published a response in the paper eight days later, "Let us define pro-life for you." I reproduce it here:

In his Oct. 21 column, John Young claims to offer a critique of the pro-life position on abortion. Yet, he never once reveals to us the content of the pro-life position.

What then is the pro-life position? It is the view that the membership of the human community includes prenatal human beings, even if excluding them would benefit those who are more powerful than the prenatal and who believe that the prenatal’s destruction is in their interest.

It is the view that human beings have intrinsic dignity by nature that is not a consequence of their size, level of development, environment or dependency.

Somebody page Humpty Dumpty. Some folks in Washington State think they can make the word 'negligent', in a legal context, mean whatever they want it to mean. These stellar parents sued doctors at the hospital where their baby was born for negligence for continuing resuscitation efforts for an hour when the child was born without a heartbeat...because he survived with disabilities.

It boggles the mind.

A hearty cheer for the Washington State Supreme Court, however. I don't know much about that court, and for all I know it may have handed down lots of other bad decisions, but this time, the court did the right thing and came down on the side of the doctors.

HT Wesley J. Smith at Secondhand Smoke

The liberal dogma of Zero Group Differences, explained by John Derbyshire in terms of the following experiment -

Experiment Y: Take a largish group—say five thousand—of people at random from any fairly compact, but not too compact, populated region—fifty to a hundred miles across, say—anywhere in the world. Now take a second group of the same size from some other similar region elsewhere. Run both groups through batteries of mental and personality tests.

Experiment Y will, under all circumstances, with all possible combinations of groups, deliver identical statistical profiles on all metrics, with only statistically insignificant variations.

If group differences are real as a matter of statistical averages, then disparate outcomes are more or less entailed, and those of European descent cannot be blamed for this. If so, vast sectors of our contemporary political and economic culture are an absurdist kabuki theatre, a tableau of pretense and, in the case of those, say, denied admission to schools for which they are plainly qualified, injustice. Immigration and globalization become, on various levels, alliances of the elites and the global poor and underclasses against the middle, and the American future begins to assume the sociological shape of Brazil, instead of that of a first-world nation. We can have our literature back. And so on and so forth.

With respect to the Zero Group Differences mythology discussed in Maximos' post below, a commenter observes:

Essentially, a "noble lie" (Zero Group Differences) has been constructed to counter an ignoble one (ateleological reductionism), in order to prevent the horrific consequences that would follow from people accepting the latter on its own en masse.

So my understanding of the strength of the "zero group differences" mythology in the face of what has always been massive evidence against is this: that implicitly everyone understands that it is the only thing standing between the advanced liberal superman and the nazi.