It would have been 1987 that my college roommate’s parents came to Provo for a visit; it was their first time back since they themselves had been students at Brigham Young University. The parents took a stroll around campus and found to their dismay an 11-story tower in the middle of their quad. Such is the fate of alumni: they properly go away, don’t give ol’ alma mater a whole lot of active thought, but send occasional donations. When their children come of age for higher education, their attention to such things rises, and the alumni find a lot has changed while they were bowling in the hills.

This comes to mind this morning on learning that BYU plans to demolish the Harris Fine Arts Center. I have two sons who are near the end of their time as BYU undergraduate students, and as a friend said, it is remarkable how much more often I have chosen to travel to Provo these past five years compared with the twenty before them. The last couple times I have visited my sons’ apartments but not their college campus. The campus is a bit alienating for someone my age.

My first hint of this was a decade or so back when a BYU fundraiser called. (more…)

Samson’s real weakness was not his hair.

(more…)

Friend of the JG Greer has an interesting and insightful analogy.

A boy runs off to sea and spends nearly every day of his 25-month voyage longing for home.  At last his ship sails within sight of it.

The captain went up to town in the boat with Mr. H——, and left us to pass another night on board ship, and to come up with the morning’s tide under command of the pilot.

So much did we feel ourselves to be already at home, in anticipation, that our plain supper of hard bread and salt beef was barely touched; and many on board, to whom this was the first voyage, could scarcely sleep. As for myself, by one of those anomalous changes of feeling of which we are all the subjects, I found that I was in a state of indifference, for which I could by no means account. A year before, while carrying hides on the coast, the assurance that in a twelvemonth we should see Boston, made me half wild; but now that I was actually there, and in sight of home, the emotions which I had so long anticipated feeling, I did not find, and in their place was a state of very nearly entire apathy. Something of the same experience was related to me by a sailor whose first voyage was one of five years upon the North-west Coast. He had left home, a lad, and after several years of very hard and trying experience, found himself homeward bound; and such was the excitement of his feelings that, during the whole passage, he could talk and think of nothing else but his arrival, and how and when he should jump from the vessel and take his way directly home. Yet when the vessel was made fast to the wharf and the crew dismissed, he seemed suddenly to lose all feeling about the matter. He told me that he went below and changed his dress; took some water from the scuttle-butt and washed himself leisurely; overhauled his chest, and put his clothes all in order; took his pipe from its place, filled it, and sitting down upon his chest, smoked it slowly for the last time. Here he looked round upon the forecastle in which he had spent so many years, and being alone and his shipmates scattered, he began to feel actually unhappy. Home became almost a dream; and it was not until his brother (who had heard of the ship’s arrival) came down into the forecastle and told him of things at home, and who were waiting there to see him, that he could realize where he was, and feel interest enough to put him in motion toward that place for which he had longed, and of which he had dreamed, for years. There is probably so much of excitement in prolonged expectation, that the quiet realizing of it produces a momentary stagnation of feeling as well as of effort. It was a good deal so with me. The activity of preparation, the rapid progress of the ship, the first making land, the coming up the harbor, and old scenes breaking upon the view, produced a mental as well as bodily activity, from which the change to a perfect stillness, when both expectation and the necessity of labor failed, left a calmness, almost of indifference, from which I must be roused by some new excitement. And the next morning, when all hands were called, and we were busily at work, clearing the decks, and getting everything in readiness for going up to the wharves,—loading the guns for a salute, loosing the sails, and manning the windlass—mind and body seemed to wake together.

Correlation between a woman’s children and her lifespan.

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.

(more…)

We are undersexed, in both senses.  And oversexualized.

Undersexed and oversexualized.

That is probably one of those virtue chart synthesis of vices.

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.

(more…)

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.