I Never Doubt the Equality of the Sexes

I never doubt the equality of the sexes until I read Feminists. Ace does the autopsy.

A Sign of the Times

This form letter posted on National Review is not really that far off the mark. Browsing through the bottom half of that page, one wonders how many of the commenters are planning to use it, and how many more are just sad that they didn't have such a form letter available to them.

Sometimes, the Narrative Is Satirical

Some narratives are already tragicomedies, at which point we might ask what's the point of satire. Recent examples include The Onion's most honest article yet, and the fact that the so-called "Brights"  fell for a post on a parody site which paints the Vatican in a bad light. See, this latter matches the narrative which the supposed "Brights" desire, so it must be true. All that is gold does not glitter, nor apparently does all which is bright actually offer light.

Bottom of the Barrel

The other guy has already written up his reflection on Joseph Bottom's interminably pointless Commonweal piece. Rock bottom, indeed. It's not just the despair and "weariness" of the piece, which really was "weary and wearisome" (as somebody who was not fired from First Things so aptly put it). There have been many criticisms leveled at it, though I think that Emily Stimpson's summary of them should suffice from hitting each one in turn:

Around the 1,000 word mark, however, I realized this piece was more worthy of skimming than reading. That’s the point where he fell into the heresy of Americanism, noting that “We are now at the point where, I believe, American Catholics should accept state recognition of same-sex marriage simply because they are Americans.”
Right. 

That tidbit of heretical wisdom and just about every other shortcoming of the essay is being roundly criticized elsewhere on the Catholic internet. I don’t disagree with a one of those criticisms. The essay was interminably long, rambling, self-indulgent, shoddily reasoned, and woefully deficient in its grasp of first principles—of what really matters.

I feel a little sorry for him, because from reading the comments around the internet, it would seem that he doesn't have many friends left in this fight. As Mark Shea put it, "I come back to work today and FB is teeming with flutterings about Jody Bottum and Miley Cyrus. And for the same reasons." On the other side, Bottom knows that his gay friend isn't going to be mollified: the "homosexualists" who are pushing this campaign don't want to stop at winning on marriage, but rather are engaged in a scorched-earth campaign in which surrender isn't an option save on the terms presented Germany after the first World War.

The attitude of those driving this campaign, of those to whom Bottom is surrendering, is encapsulated in this early comment on Ross Douthat's post about the whole affair (my empahsis added):

Listen closely, and you can almost hear the angels tap dancing on the head of a pin. Douthat analyses an analysis of church doctrine, trying to find relevance for a worldview that Oscar Wilde may have been stuck with, but that today doesn't seem to be worth the electronic ink spilled to discuss it. Gay people are real, and religion isn't. The happiness of gay people is worth more than all the hateful hypocrisy the Church has ever uttered. If the love homosexuals feel for each other can rattle the foundations of the Church, then the Church deserves to crumble. We're constantly hearing about the Church denying the full participation of women, demeaning gay people, shielding pedophiles and inserting nonsensical dogma into public policy. It's embarrassing, and it needs to stop.

Left unsaid is how, exactly, it will be "made to stop" (and also, since the person writing it is not a faithful Catholic, how, exactly, it can be "embarrassing"), but the final solution isn't going to be pretty. And if this essay encourages the Bottom-Feeders who would seek to destroy the Catholic Church, I can only imagine the kind of damage done by lines like this:

Mostly when people today toss out a reference to “natural law”, they really mean “biology.” To be crass, they mean “those parts don’t fit together.” If they’re Catholic or Mormon, they might toss in “and they can’t make a baby“. Let me tell you who is convinced by this argument: exactly no one, including, usually, the person making it.... 

I just also happen to agree with Joseph Bottum, that the fight over gay civil marriage is not the good fight we should be fighting....Attempting to stop legalized gay civil marriage because of the “grave threat” it poses seems disingenuous, not just to gay people but to everyone. Even to me. Where was the united effort to stop legalized no-fault divorce? Or contraception? We didn’t fight those civil battles. Why are we fighting this one? 

With friends like these, who needs enemies? The first commenter out the gate takes her to task on this one:

"Where was the united effort to stop legalized no-fault divorce? Or contraception? We didn’t fight those civil battles. Why are we fighting this one?"

It's before my conversion too, but I would never say "we" as if no one fought in my absence. You seem to be saying that "we" should not fight now, and just wait until the disordered society is thoroughly disordered. How can you say there was no "we" fighting before and now ask the current "we" why we are fighting?

She's joined by the next one:

The battle against contraception and against no-fault divorce was barely fought and completely lost before I was even born. Why should the failures of the previous generation force me to throw up my hands on the only live issue on which I can articulate a unitive-procreative view of marriage as opposed to a contractual-emotional model? If everyone thinks that marriage must include same-sex couples, they can't admit the first model. Our recitince to argue against this hurts our chances of re-opening the issues of divorce and contraception.

My sentiments exactly. And it's more than a little annoying to have my sincerity (collectively) called into question by turncoats and people who have all but admitted that they don't know what they're talking about. That our parents' and grandparents' generations largely drove the culture to the edge of the cliff on the whole marriage issue so that we have been teetering on the brink (at best) is no excuse for us to insist on finishing the job. Why is it that with these people, it's always an either/or?

Either we can love our spouses and raise our children rightly (Alexander's suggestion, which is itself not bad advice) or we can fight against gay "marriage" in the political realm; I just don't buy it. It's little different from arguing that pro-lifers don't care about children once they're born: it's not only false, but actually disingenuous. The gay "marriage" equivalent is now apparently "pro family people only care about the marriage until the man and woman say 'I do.'"

I can understand that some people are too weary to fight what they see as a loosing fight, too tired to run a losing race, and thus want to bow out. I can even understand the desire to punt on this issue, the supposedly "bad fight" of the Christian right (the "good fight" being against abortion). But if you plan on punting, it would be nice to at least make sure you're personally punting on this issue rather than kicking the people who are willing to attempt the fourth down. It seems (to hide behind the same word as Alexander uses) as if these people not only never cared about this fight, but frankly never wanted Christians to win it. I've known too many people who seemed quick to criticize the Church, in particular through criticizing particular individuals, while pretending to be on the Church's side, only to show their true colors by actively rooting for the fight to be lost. I don't know if Alexander and Bottom are such people, but their writings on the subject sure seem to fit the model.

And while I suspect that neither Bottom nor Alexander wants to see the church take it in the, er, teeth on this issue, they sure seem quick to surrender without attempting to negotiate some sort of exit strategy. We're fighting an opponent whose basic strategy is scorched earth. We haven't yet seen whether our opponents in this particular battle of the culture war will take prisoners and treat them with mercy, but the outlook on the likelihood of that is rather grim.

If the rest of this rant is born of frustration, I should add something in charity to the end. If you want to give up on this fight, and focus on some other fight, or look into some other avenue, look to evangelize the culture, or whatever because the engagement with this dirty bit of politics is not to your liking, then please: at least have the courtesy do do so without stabbing the rest of us in the back. Make a clean break, and by all means be honest, but try to do so without calling the integrity and honesty of the rest of us into question. You may have spent the last few years fighting for something that you didn't believe in, but some of us really do think that this is a fight worth winning, or (barring that), worth losing. Don't go throwing us under the bus for the sake of getting better treatment from the would-be cultural victors.

Rock Bottom

It's become borderline predictable these days, in the debate of the legal redefinition of marriage, that there will be a few weary culture warriors who are ready to surrender before the final battle is fought. So much the more so when the warriors in question are fighting for a cause that they're not sure they actually believe in. I read Joseph Bottum's indefatigably long essay in Commonweal, and then went for a good stiff drink. There's really not much more response I can muster to it.

To treat it fairly as I can, and to give it as fair a reading as possible, I would say that it really isn't that different from what Fr Dwight Longenecker, or Monsignor Charles Pope, is proposing. Oh, I grant that the subtitle ("A Catholic's Case for Gay Marriage") is a bit misleading on that score [1], since he really doesn't make a case "for" so-called "gay marriage." Instead, he makes the case that we should all stop fighting it, at least in the civil sphere. Granted, he uses more than a few grating lines in his tedious tale; I especially groaned when I read this one: "Just as there’s a rule in some online discussion groups that you’ve automatically lost an argument if you compare your opponents to the Nazis, so there ought to be a rule in public discourse that you’ve guaranteed your failure if you compare modern America to the decline of Ancient Rome." It's possible that people are weary of hearing about this, but that does not make it any less true.

Anyhow, that a conservative Catholic is calling for the Church to change her approach to the whole "gay marriage" issue is nothing new. Monsignor Charles Pope has argued before (twice) that we should consider divorcing civil marriage from Holy Matrimony, with the Church then getting out of the civil marriage business entirely. Father Dwight Longenecker has more recently suggested something similar. I still think that these two priests are wrong, but I notice that neither one really elicited the same kind of reactions (both for and against) as Jody Bottum, at least not immediately and not in quite the same volume. And, much as it makes it into every other (negative) appraisal of Mr Bottum's essay, I suspect this has nothing to do with the medium chosen to present the argument [2] nor the source of (financial) inspiration behind the essay, though these didn't help.

Rather, I suspect that the crucial difference is that the posts by Monsignor Pope and Fr Longenecker read like proactive though apparently passive resistance to the march of "progress," whereas Mr Bottum's essay read more like a preemptive surrender. In part this may have been the focus of each essay: the good priests focused on the distinction between Holy Matrimony (the sacrament) and marriage (the civil institution), and on how the Church would refocus on and fight for the former in the face of losing the fight on the latter. Contrast this with Mr Bottum's essay, which devoted roughly 1500 words to his gay former friend [3] and managed to sound more-or-less like the Church's position against "gay marriage" was hurting more people than it helps. In reality, the Church's stance against "gay marriage" is motivated by metaphysics and morality rather than by bigotry, but from reading Mr Bottum's essay you would almost come to the opposite conclusion [4]. Thus, in the words of Mark Shea, Mr Bottum is "God's good servant, but the king's first":

If he wants to say, “Most Americans oppose the Church on this and realism dictates facing that fact” he gets no argument from me. But he’s saying, “The Church needs to get with the program and pretend gay ‘marriage’ is something other than a fantasy agreed upon by a culture that is radically out of touch with reality.” His core message is “Surrender”, not “Maintain the Tradition in a hostile culture.”

It is certainly easy to read Mr Bottum's essay in this way. And, in fact, I have read little to suggest that he intends anything other than surrender by his writing. Sure, he has this short line:

if that’s what the same-sex marriage movement is really about—the redefinition of history as Christian oppression, the rereading of even success stories like the civil-rights movement as tales of defeating Christian evil, all for the purpose of cutting off the religious roots of Western civilization—then to hell with it.

To hell with it, as well, if the campaign for same-sex marriage has anti-Catholicism as one of its major causes, or a feeding of anti-Catholicism as one of its welcome effects.

But this is precisely what the "gay rights" campaign is turning into. Add to this the timing--had he written this essay 10 years earlier, minus the parts about the culture's shifting attitudes, it might have looked more prophetic, more "be careful which battle you choose, and how you choose to fight it." It still has the quality of a warning about choosing carefully the beach or hill on which to die in the culture war, but it lacks that sense of doing so for the actual good of the Church as delivered. It looks far more like a tired missive explaining why he will be AWOL from this particular front of the culture war from now on--and why the rest of us should give up, as well. There are no hopeless battles when one fights on the side of the Church, even if victory in the here and now is far from assured, and even if not all the victors survive.

But to return one last time to the two priests, I note that their concerns really do seem to be more about how to "Maintain the Tradition in a hostile culture," inasmuch as they suggest something for the Church to do other than to surrender. Theirs is still a withdrawal, but it is a withdrawal to rest and regain strength, to renew the Church and then from there to renew the culture. For all of Bottum's musings about wanting to "enchant" the culture, I see no coherent plan for doing this. He may be saying essentially the same thing as Monsignor Pope and Fr Longenecker, but with one crucial difference. Whereas Monsignor Pope and Fr Longenecker's posts convey a sense of renewal and hope beneath the pessimism, Mr Joseph Bottum mostly conveys a sense of weariness and despair.


---Footnotes---
[1] Of course, there is no such thing as a Catholic case for "gay marriage," but I suppose that Catholics can at times break with the Church, at least on prudential matters. This doesn't make that break right, however.

[2] For the priests, it's personal blogs as opposed to the somewhat liberal Commonweal for Joseph Bottom. It is that same Commonweal in which we also read something of praise for the New Mexico Supreme Court's decision against a photographer who refused (on grounds of religion, conscience, and freedom of speech/association) to photograph a gay commitment ceremony and was promptly sued by the homosexualists involved. So much for tolerance from the homosexualists, which in this case includes the gays in question and there defenders at Commonweal.

[3] And rather pointlessly, since he concludes that his about-face on civil marriage is "not the answer same-sex marriage advocates want" and, showing that he really does understand that his surrender probably accomplishes nothing, he continues with "Certainly it will not satisfy Jim Watson, my old [gay] friend from New York. How could he accept talk of the Catholic Church’s charity and evangelizing? He wants the church hurt, its tax exemptions and even property-holding rights stripped away until it not only accepts laws allowing same-sex marriage, not only encourages same-sex marriage, but actually performs same-sex marriage."

[4] Yes, I know that he devotes some time to the idea of "enchanted" metaphysics and "enchanted" morals etc, and that his stated purpose is the work to the re-enchantment of the culture. But much of the rest of his essay sets up to paint the fight against legal recognition of "gay marriage" in a bad light, as if it is a bad fight.

For the Sake of Self-Criticism

Via Ace, there's this piece on the Breitbart site about tit-for-tat racial crime reporting:

I dislike the tit-for-tat stories anyway. The fact that the media and the left are obsessed with race does not mean the rest of us must be. And there is the very real danger that in trying to demonstrate the hypocrisy of race-mongers like Al Sharpton and the journalists who follow eagerly in their wake, focusing on the race of perpetrators and victims ends up emphasizing stereotypes and inflaming passions--quite independently of the argument at hand. We risk becoming no better than those hypocrites whom we would criticize. 

It is becoming harder for some conservative journalists to resist the tit-for-tat arguments when Sharpton et al. continue to pretend the Martin case was about race when everyone involved, including the prosecution, said that it was not. Even the Martin family, given the opportunity (before the verdict) to comment on the fact that there were no black jurors, said that they placed their faith in their fellow citizens and the judicial process. The fact that the racial argument has survived the trial and the facts is both sad and frustrating.

I suppose that this criticism also falls on me, since I've posted my share of black-on-white crime links. And, if Pollak's analysis was complete here, he'd be right. The thing is this; whereas Al $harpton and Je$$e Jack$on and (to some extent) Obama and member of his administration insist on seeing everything through the lens of race, that really isn't the whole story. Hence, counterexamples (and they far outnumber the examples that $harpton et al. can muster). As Ace puts in (in a rhetorical question),

The media does not report black-on-white crimes -- which are, as a statistical matter, far more likely to occur -- due to fears that ignorant, angry, nothing-to-lose whites will be incensed and attempt some racial score settling on their own.
Okay fair enough. 

So... I guess I would have to ask what effect the constant drumbeat of white (Hispanic)-on-black crime reporting would have on ignorant, angry, nothing-to-lose blacks.

My main point in these posts is to show that the media, and Je$$e Jack$on, and Al $harpton, and Obama et al, are in fact helping to incite more black-on-white crime, racially motivated as revenge for a case of, well, of poor judgment. It kind of underscores the hypocrisy of the media, who is willing to jump at every spree shooting or bombing or etc and ask which conservative (or Christian) ideology inspired it, when in fact there have been very few Christian, conservative spree-killers, and when in fact many of these spree killers have had ties to liberal/progressive and/or anarchist groups.

Remember when Gabrielle Giffords, the Arizona Congresswoman, got shot, and the media attempted to pin it on Sarah Palin's "targets" ad (the one about "targetting" weakly held democratic offices for getting Republicans elected instead)? This despite some rather similar Democratic campaigns and rhetoric. Now we have so actual examples of race-baiting, some actual examples of stirring up emotions towards violence, and the media suddenly becomes interested in just about anything else.

In Defense of Jesse Jackson

In Defense of Je$$e Jack$on, his "condemnation" of the Lane murder may have been tepid, but it was far more than the Obama administration could muster. I also loved that lie by the White House deputy press secretary about how Obama didn't speak out extensively before the Trayvon Martin trial:

 Which reminds me: if  Obama had a city, it would look like Detroit.

Don't Go to College

So, about my guilty pleasure? Yeah, Matt Walsh delivers another good one, this time about not going to college:

"Although formal “higher education” is obviously necessary for people who wish to become doctors, nurses, engineers, architects, etc., some rebellious souls might question whether ALL young people should be pushed into universities. Some crazed anarchists are beginning to suggest that this situation could be brought under control if we stopped positioning four year colleges as the ideal for all kids. These troublemakers claim that purchasing a six figure education on a credit card might not be in the best interest of those who haven’t a clue as to which job path they will ultimately pursue. These barbarians run around insisting that you should try to figure out what you want to do with your life, and then only invest a considerable amount of time and money into a four year college if it will actually be necessary to attain your goals. These psychopaths even go so far as to claim that, often times, skill and experience are more important than a piece of paper from an expensive college!...

I am uneducated and uninformed. Such is the fate of anyone who does not attend an educational facility. Sure, I can go to bookstores and libraries and read books on many different subjects. Yeah, the internet, if utilized properly, can be a magnificent portal to an infinite expanse of information; but none of these things qualify as an “education.” I merely research topics and explore ideas because I want to know more about them. My motivations can not match the purity and fruitfulness of someone who learns what they’re told to learn in order to pass a test....

Education is something that happens in buildings specifically designed for that purpose. Then, after a few years, you walk across a stage and — POOF! — you’re educated. You’re done. Education complete. You are officially an educated person. You completed all the steps, followed the path, solved all the puzzles, made it to the final boss and killed him, and now you’ve beaten the game. Time to kick back and take it easy!"

I have a handful of successful (and happy) friends and acquaintances who never did college; I know a few more who did college, but not as job training. I've also known more than a few miserable college students (and this is before they get out of college with the $30k debt and the poor job prospects). I've even been a miserable college student, at times, though my particular suffering and frustration is at least in pursuit of a particular life goal. Here's the thing, too: I actually do really like what I'm doing in grad school (I just hate the long hours and the low pay and the expectation that the rest of my life should be placed on hold). And it really could be preparing me for more than a few jobs that I'd like (though I also notice that there are quite a few--a majority, even--that I really am not interested in, and the ones I most like are the ones off the beaten path).

I would also like to note, however, that I have met quite a few grad students (and many, many more undergrads) who don't seem to like what they are studying, who don't seem to like the whole "educational" experience. In some cases, I can't blame them, because going to a university does not guarantee that you'll become educated, and for many it really is an impediment. Frankly, when every other class is there to propagandize for one or another ideology--scientism, utilitarianism, marxism, feminism, gay liberationism, nihilism--and when a large segment of the student population spends its out-of-class time engaged in hedonism, gaining a real education is difficult, to say the least. The very culture is at times antithetical not only to intellectual learning, but disciplining the will, curbing the appetites, and developing the virtues, all of which should form a part of a complete education.

My observation, after more than a decade of being enrolled in universities (between an undergrad degree and then a PhD) is that most of the students seem to hate it. Many students are simply miserable, and many don't really even want an education (to say nothing about the training and propaganda which is often passed off as education). I would go so far to say that the majority of my students could not care less about the material that I'm teaching (physics), and that they further resent the way in which I try to teach it (lots of labs with an emphasis on problem solving and figuring things out for yourself). They resent working for anything. I get complaints about homework assignments ("I spent a whole three hours on the last one" which covered two weeks' worth of material), which results in a lowered bar for the handful of people who are willing to put forth some intellectual effort.

They all just want to get the piece of paper which certifies them as degree-holders, and then get out, preferably with as little time spent learning (or, to be fair, spent working at learning) as possible; some then go to "professional" schools (MBA or Law Degree, with the students I have), some of which really do involve the use of an education. And they hate every minute of it. They endure it when they must and attempt to get it to go away when they can, because parents and high-school counselors and later college peers all tell them that they need that college degree. And when they find that there is no employment for that gender studies degree (thankfully), that they need to get more training.

There's nothing wrong with getting a degree that you won't (likely) use for employment: philosophy, history, classics, etc. If that's how you learn best, and if you really do want to learn about that kind of thing, then by all means! Though I'd say pick a smaller school than the various State Behemoth Colleges, and preferably one which takes these things seriously enough to teach them well but lightly enough to realize that they are guarantees of employment. And it's really won't kill you to wait to study these until you've tried getting a careers, whether as an electrician or a beautician or a welder or a brew-master or a salesman.

But, for the love of God (or whatever idol you hold instead), if you are just going to college because that's what everyone else is doing, don't! You will end up as unhappy as they are. And if it's to get a good job, then study something like engineering or science, which are difficult but which lead to most of the "good" jobs anymore; and if you don't like those fields which have the "good" jobs, then figure out what you do like, and only then go to college if it's necessary to pursue that career.

State Sponsored Tyranny

It's hard to say which is a greater example of state-sponsored tyranny in America: the Obama Administration's odious HHS contraceptives mandate, or the New Mexico Supreme Court's ruling against Elane Photography:

Justice Richard Bosson wrote, in concurrence, that the Huguenins are “compelled by law to compromise the very religious beliefs that inspire their lives.” He concluded, “The Huguenins are free to think, to say, to believe, as they wish; they may pray to the God of their choice and follow those commandments in their personal lives wherever they lead. The Constitution protects the Huguenins in that respect and much more. But there is a price, one that we all have to pay somewhere in our civic life.” That “compromise,” he wrote, “is part of the glue that holds us together as a nation, the tolerance that lubricates the varied moving parts of us as a people. That sense of respect we owe others, whether or not we believe as they do, illuminates this country, setting it apart from the discord that afflicts much of the rest of the world. In short, I would say to the Huguenins, with the utmost respect: it is the price of citizenship.”

This judge does not deserve the title justice, though justice will be served him some day. The compromise that he talks about is that religious faith and the rights of conscience must be sacrificed on the alter of "tolerance;" but tolerance only extends to certain favored groups, and must be exacted at the expense of others. One wonders how many actual rights will be crushed under the boots of so-called "tolerance" and how much of the fabric of civilized society must be unraveled in the name of this "glue." This judge can take his false respect and shove it: the pretense only adds insult to injury.

TMM: The Atheist Equivalent to God of the Gaps?

Via Mark Shea comes this review of a book about scientific progress in the Middle Ages. Note that the guy writing the review is himself an atheist: just like many people who take apart God-of-the-Gaps arguments for theism are themselves theists.

The atheist argument--often trotted out, and frequently rebutted--is that scientific progress ground to a halt during the medieval period (of the "dark ages"). The argument basically says that the Christian religion ruled Europe during the dark ages, that scientific progress ceased during the dark ages, and that the first thing is the cause of the second thing: the Christians came to power and immediately started to suppress scientific progress by suppressing anyone who would have been a scientist. Call it, the gap in scientific progress argument.

There are a number of problems with the argument. For one, religious authorities were often not so powerful as we like to paint, and indeed many of the actual monarchs (and princes, and lords, etc) lacked such complete power to suppress science. For another, very few rulers--weather clerical or noble--actually went about suppressing science (whether technological or speculative), and indeed often embraced technological advances: the stirrup, the horse collar, the water-wheel, the printing press, spectacles, etc. were rather quickly embraced by those to whom they were introduced.

Also overlooked is the fact that much of what made the dark ages so bleak was not the relevant rulers and other authorities, but rather the constant invasions from without. There were Huns, Goths, Vikings, Mohhamedans, Franks, Vandals, and Saxons who are various times were invading one part or another of what once was the Roman Empire (and each other). The western half of said empire had basically collapsed, and the Eastern half was often besieged. Manichaenism from the east took popular piety beyond the bounds of Christianity, and (especially in its Cathar/Albigensian phase) often laid waste to the areas where it took hold.

Not shown: Saracens, Normans, Norsemen, Lombards, Mohammedans....

Consider a fictional analogy. Suppose that the Cold War had turned into a "hot" war with nuclear arsenals deployed towards each other. Some cities survived, whether by luck or chance, and were not destroyed by the nuclear bombs. However, these cities found themselves largely cut off from each other, and unable moreover to sustain their present populations due to being cut off from the farmlands. Many people therefore migrated from the cities into the country, many died of starvation, and a few became brigands who made a living by sacking successful cities. Suffice it to say that scientific progress would slow somewhat during such an era. Indeed, most well-written science fictions stories of this type do have science slowing or even being forgotten, and society becomes slowly less advanced despite the efforts of some to re-organize. Even once the populations stabilize and starvation becomes less of a threat, survival is still in question, thanks to the various immigrant invasions.

Travel is dangerous, trade is dangerous, thanks to the brigands, and yet these are basically the only way for information to be passed from one town to the next.

The fact that any widespread developments are possible at all becomes something of a miracle in that scenario, no? Sure, the occasional inventor or genius might pop up here or there, though in such a setting simply rediscovering forgotten knowledge is perhaps more important that making new discoveries. Further, I can't imagine that paper to write down observations come cheaply in such a world.

This is basically the world shortly after the fall of the Roman Empire (at least in the west), sans radioactive fallout. This lasted a while, in part because of the invasions (build a monastery, it becomes a center of study and learning, and in a couple of generations it's been sacked and razed). The occasional renaissance becomes possible, often when one leader unites a large area under his rule (e.g. Charlemagne), but then he dies and his descendants squabble over the empire and it falls back to pieces: it's a story older than Christianity, and indeed had gone on even during the "glory day" of Rome. The big difference is that after Rome, there was a Church which worked to reunite society and rekindle civilization. It took a few hundred years to do the latter, and the former never has really happened (the closest to it might be the rule of Charles V, or possible the British Empire during its heyday). Thanks to the Church, some parts of civilization survived; thanks to the monks, often in unpopulated and thus relatively un-endangered areas, some of the learning of the old world remained with us, and eventually some new inventions caught on, then spread.

As Ye Olde Statistician notes in commenting on this,

"In part, this was self-promotion; in part, a humanist reaction against science and reason. There was virtually no progress in the natural sciences during the humanist Renaissance -- which was really about art and architecture. In part, too, the medieval era was rejected because it was too Catholic. The Age of Reason, another self-congratulatory name now rejected by more objective historians, was an age of demolition of philosophy. The Scientific Revolution was less revolutionary than many suppose. Most of its features were present in the 14th century. The most revolutionary feature, the restriction of science to the metrical properties of physical bodies, shifted natural science from a sort of art criticism (understanding how it all fits together) to a servant of business and industry (knowing how to apply it to useful products).
This was all primarily a consequence of demographics achieving a critical mass of inquiring minds, the medieval printing press accelerating the distribution of new knowledge, the employment of late medieval mathematical notation, and new measuring devices. The medievals knew there was a difference between a form and its quantitative extension -- between say 'heat' and 'temperature,' but they had no instrument with which to measure the latter."

As we learn more and more about the real history of the middle ages (as distinguished from the Enlightenment's propaganda of that era), we see fewer and fewer places in which the Catholic religion can legitimately be called a suppressor of science, to say nothing of civilization.

Transvestites Dilemma

Transvestites present us with a dilemma: what pronoun is proper for the occasion? The Bradley Manning kerfuffle--or is it the Chelsea Manning boondoggle?--is what brings this particular question to mind. The recent New Mexican Supreme Court ruling does not have me feeling particularly tactful towards the queer community; and I will say that if same-sex attraction is "queer" in the sense of being relatively strange, then the desire to actually become a member of the other sex must rank as queerer still. One wonders if there will come a time in the not-so-distant future that men will desire to become, not women, but androgynous beings capable of both begetting and conceiving: the feminist revolution will be complete.

After that, only a change in species entire becomes more strange (and dare I say disordered), but I suppose I wouldn't be surprised.

And so I return to my previous question: what become the proper pronoun to refer to a transgendered person? The politically correct thought-police will insist that we use the gender to which that person switches, but that doesn't quite sit right. A man who wakes up and decides to be a woman doesn't actually become a woman, however he may mutilate himself; nor does a woman who undergoes some specialized surgery and hormone therapy simply become a man. On the other hand, neither does our hypothetical person remain a man as before, or a woman as before.

Thus, neither "He" nor "She" seems correct--the old pronoun may be more nearly so, since these things are apparently reversible, though whether fully reversible or not is something else. But a woman who tries to change her sex doesn't really become a man: such a person is not eligible for marriage [1] nor for ordination (which is apparently not limited to Catholics). To use the "new" pronoun would rather tend to give some credibility to the claim that the person really has successfully switched sexes; to use the old one would tend to suggest that nothing has changed at all. The other option, I suppose, is "it," but this would make the person out to be inhuman, which is also not quite right. They may be mad, but a madman is still a man. Also, I should add, hey have added a layer of offendedness to those who choose the wrong pro-noun. By this, I mean that there are some who try the sex-change but want to keep the old pronoun, others who undergo no change but try switching to the new pronoun (hence a certain law in California), and others who do both: and each is uniquely offended when those who do try to get the preferred pronouns right fail.

I tend to rather disfavor the politically correct demands that we refer to every group by their own preferred title [2] unless notified otherwise by the PC Thought Police to be a bit grating. It's not that I oppose letting people pick their own name for themselves (if reasonable), but that some groups are constantly changing the acceptable name. First it's negro, then African-American, then person of color, then black... First it's homosexual, then gay, then queer, then gay again, and now (apparently) queer again... Indian, then redskin, then Native American... In the words of a friend, it's the verbal equivalent of a secret handshake. You must use the correct (ever-changing) noun to refer to the favored/victim group to show that you are sufficiently sensitive to their feelings. After so many changes, I tend to stop playing along and then pick my own nouns for them.

The queer community is the worst of the lot, since (unlike with the other groups listed) each name they pick for themselves tends to take on an "unclean" meaning.  I think at this point that they have looped around to picking one of their own rejected terms as being correct--or maybe it was rejected in one region and then embraced in another--but there comes a time of frustration when one decides to simply call them Sodomites and be done with it.

The Transvestite/Transexual/Transgendered (see what I mean) subset of the queerly-lettered community in turn views themselves as the victims within the victim community. It's no longer merely the wrong choice of nouns which is offensive, but but of pronouns.

I will therefore conclude with a palate-cleanser, by linking to two rants worth reading: one by author John C Wright, the other by political commentator PJ O'Rourke. 



[1] I can't imagine that this was the original meaning of Christ's exception of divorce in the case of non-chastity, though I think it probably counts.

[2] The biggest exception to this is the pro-lifers, who must at all costs be called either "anti-abortion" or "anti-choice,' but never pro-life;

Quick Link: Destructive Uprisings

The followers of Mahound in Egypt have destroyed a 1600-year-old Coptic Church, along with two other Coptics churches, a Catholic church, and a Protestant church in the area. And it's now a "thing" (on the Left) to support these uprisings. I wonder at times how much of this support is vicarious, because some on the Left wish they could have been there and done that; there's no love of the Christians in the secular Left, or (to be fair) in the secular Right (think Hitchens), but it seems to be the secular Left who really is relishing this.