It’s all about the thresholds.
“With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan ~ to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
Hundreds of thousands of men of the old stock died fighting over two competing visions of the country. As the war wound down and Union moved towards victory, Abraham Lincoln had a vision of reconciliation . . . of true union for all, white and black, union and confederate. That vision was marred by the reality–true visions always are–but at least soon after the war Americans north and south began to honor the men who had died. That was the beginning of Memorial Day.
Over time, it has come to include all the Americans who died in the wars. For whatever reason today I am remembering the colonial boys who made a desperate fight to uphold their ancient right and privileges against the hungry British establishment, and who died in the attempt.
Is life so dear or peace so sweet to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? They answered in their flesh. Forbid it, Almighty God.
By the rude bridge that arched the flood . . .
Thinking more about Undersexed and Oversexualized
I have this thought that I’m working through. Bear with me.
What if, for women, sweet surrender was a key part of sex. Risk-taking, but not in a male way, the risk of daring. Instead, the risk of trust. And if modern social arrangements damaged sex because they made it impossible to surrender. You can’t fully commit to anyone, law and custom do not allow it. Dunno, just thinking out loud.
1.
the path to agency is submission to God’s will
And, unrelated,
2.
Let’s build off yesterday’s discovery that undersexed and oversexualized is the vicious synthesis (i.e., the synthesis of vices) that the modern world has stumbled on.
Undersexed fat, ill, unattractive, depressed. Digital inhuman online courtship systems, broken courtship models. Broken expectations. Broken marriage models, and unsupported by the culture at large. Lower testosterone. Women strongly encouraged to take artificial sex hormones that suppress sexual appetite. Diminished differentiation between the sexes physically and culturally. Less people having sex, less frequent sex, less satisfying sex.
Oversexualized Media, entertainment, school, culture. Ubiquitous pornography of the grossest kind. Sex ed classes on activities that would have been known 20 years ago only to the most jaded or deviant fringe, being pushed down to kindergarten. A cultural expectation of casual, frequent sex.
Undersexed => Oversexualized People require blunter, cruder, and more immediate stimulus to feel anything. Brazenly declaring your no-limits sexuality hides your lack of sexy from yourself and others. A continuous unmet craving for that deep connection drives people to hunt for it in the broken parody.
Oversexualized => undersexed Emphasis on frequent casual sex with any number of people drives an attack on sex roles and sex differences, because they lower the partner pool. Emphasis on frequent casual sex means attacking things like marriage and fecundity that limit the pool of sexual partners, but downplaying these things makes it all much less satisfying. Frequent unsatisfying sex leads to infrequent sex because unsatisfying. Pornified expectations make sex less satisfying and physiologically affect performance. There are biological reasons why lots of casual sex makes people less attractive, especially women. Casual sex makes attachment harder. Less attachment ultimately means less sex.
Usually we start with a virtue chart and then discover a synthesis based on it. This time, we’ve discovered a synthesis. Let’s reverse engineer a virtue chart based on it.
We are undersexed, in both senses. And oversexualized.
Undersexed and oversexualized.
That is probably one of those virtue chart synthesis of vices.
There was a rich kid sitting by the side of a stream flipping gold and silver coins into the water. (more…)
I’m thinking more of that vision people have of an ideal carefree country that has the same golden haze over it that we can see when we remember our own childhood or when we observe children. (You don’t experience this much when you are an actual child until you are on the point of losing childhood, but the outside observer can see that it is very real).
The peach blossom country.
Never never land.
Going down under faerie hill for a night, or maybe a century, of happy revelry.
Arcadia.
The Garden of Eden.
There is of course a ‘bad’ version of all these. A distorted destructive attempt to ape arcadia.
Faerie hill has a foot in both camps.
Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island.
The Land of the Lotus Eaters.
The Eloi from HG Wells.
The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas
(The Ones Who Walk Away is not a book I recommend. Preachy, self important, and so on. But a number of critics miss the mark when they complain that walking away doesn’t actually help the tortured kid. True, but as literature its resting on the theme of transition from being a child to being an adult, which requires you to walk away from childhood. You can’t remain a child while fixing the problems of childhood).
Generally the idea of some land of innocent fun sounds pretty good to people so the artist has to “cheat” a little by slowly revealing the dark underbelly, as in Omelas, the Eloi, or Pleasure Island.
But the best artists show that the problem isn’t the dark underbelly, its the thing itself. Paradise can’t last and wasn’t meant to. Attempts to make it last beyond its natural bounds are inherently destructive. Tolkien is the king here. It sounds weird to say that LotR is an epic about puberty blockers, but it kinda is.
But if we have a good thing, and a distorted version of a good thing . . . hmm, I feel a virtue chart coming on. We think that virtues are just admirable personal characteristics, but the concepts work for anything good or desirable.
Lets try it out. My antonyms here are tentative, feel free to propose alternatives.
My daughter was listening to a song last night.
The telestial/terrestrial kingdoms are in the same mythic space that so much art and literature are. Neverland. Under the fairy mound. Erresea.
Mad science isn’t dead, dash it! (more…)
The Sexual Revolution seems to make you fat, sad, and unlibidinous. Its weapon is the pill. The effect is to unwoman women. Now there is a version for men that does the same thing, chemical castration.
It was there in the name all along. The Sexual Revolution, i.e., the overturning of the sexes.
The children of Israel had slave mentality. Probably not the way Nietzsche would understand it, but so what? They had it. (more…)
I’ve been working to reconcile these two perspectives:
90% of mothering is showing up–getting married and having the kids and not getting divorced–everything else is gravy and probably only makes a difference at the margins.
vs.
The mother’s influence makes a tremendous difference in the life of each child.
Both of which I hold. At first glance, being able to believe both is an amazing intellectual feat. The contradiction doesn’t bother me that much–I am large, I contain multitudes–but it bothers me enough I’ve been thinking about it.
First, the reasons I believe each one. We are pretty relaxed about our parenting (except for media) and its worked great. We don’t let our children read until they are five, minimum, no early interventions. They have quite a bit of free time. There’s twin studies and a lot of other evidence saying that within the same broad social context (very broad, like the same country and the same decade), how you raise kids doesn’t seem to make much difference absent abuse, malnutrition, or divorce. Except possibly in their level of religious commitment when they are grown. (I made a big hit with the school board when I spoke against some proposed program on the grounds that probably nothing the school was doing made any difference).
G raising his kids —
But in a lot of ways when it comes to media and discipline and manners and dress and, I don’t know, gardening and stuff, we are that family. Again, as far as I can tell, its working out great. Everyone comments on how well mannered and happy our kids are, and our kids love being our kids, knock on wood.
Also G raising his kids–
Here are some possibilities. (more…)
Over the weekend, notorious social conservative firebrand Mitch McConnell raised the possibility of a national abortion ban.
Roe v. Wade is terrible. Making evils invented parts of the Constitution is wrong in every way.
McConnell’s comments make it less likely to be overruled.
If overruled, his comments galvanize the opposition and make it more likely they will do extreme, dangerous things.
They also put off ordinary people and make it harder to make real progress on protecting the unborn when the issue is returned to the states.
Add to that Blackburn and others shooting off their mouths about how Griswold was wrongly decided. It was, but it shows the political savvy of a drunk kindergarten teacher to highlight that particular abstract claim right now.
I am struggling to fight off the conspiracy-minded voice that says there is something more at play than world-historic incompetence.
