Of All the Places I Thought I Would Never Live. . .

The great Kansas rectangle does its work again. And we return this weekend to the Sunflower State. I had taken a temporary job in July in Tulsa working under the same parent company umbrella of my dad's company in Colorado. I had hopes of turning my two month Okie exile into a career in Colorado, but alas those hopes were dashed (for the time being) upon the rocks of practicality. Colorado is still the long-term goal and realizable, but the company (and myself in my better moments) think it would be great if I could learn the business and get some solid experience apart from the supervision of my dad. Even the owner's son when at my age he decided to come aboard began in the company at the parts counter in Commerce City, Colorado before moving his way into operations in the headquarters at Wichita. The plan, then, is to spend a few years working hard for the company in Kansas--I am going to train for about two months in Wichita before moving on to a new location in that great World City, Salina. In all seriousness, it is a wonderful opportunity and a tremendous blessing. 

One quick story. I found out only yesterday that Wichita for two months was a go. I had been hoping for a break in between Tulsa and whatever was next, accustomed as I became through graduate school with regular and lengthy vacations. But yesterday I found Wichita was on and I was to start there Tuesday after the holiday weekend. This deflated my vacation prospects, but I took that in stride. It was good to grow up, good to not have a break in income, etc. But it also meant that I had to find a place to live in Wichita, preferably furnished lest I be forced to move our stuff twice in two months, starting in six days. This was considerably more stressful. 

I spent the bulk of the afternoon yesterday trying to find something and came up almost entirely empty. Deals that looked good were not good and everything that would accommodate our needs was well over $2,000 per month. When I got home I was stressed out and feeling sorry for myself. My wife, levelheaded as she is most of the time, suggested a website we have used in the past to find vacation rentals. Destination hotspot that it is, Wichita has three such homes available. Two were vastly more expensive than I could afford. The other was booked until the middle of September. 

I decided to call anyway, figuring we could live out of suitcases for 10 days if we needed to. Less than an hour after I requested more information, the owner of the home called me back. That morning the maid who cleans this property informed her that the man who had been renting was no longer there. She emailed him and he responded that he had in fact moved out. The owner told him that if she could find someone to take over she would stop charging him. And then she got my email. She called me to size me up and it turns out she has gone to church for years with the owner of the company and knows him and his family well. She gave us a discounted rate and we can move in this weekend. My hours of depression and melancholy dissipated and I was happy for the opportunity to move for this company, believing again that this was the right decision for our future. You can choose to believe that this is coincidence, or you can choose to believe it to be Providence. For my part, I pick the latter.

Off we go.

Commonplacing: Hilary Mantel on Thomas Cromwell on Thomas Wyatt

This is from Hilary Mantel's excellent work on the reign of Henry VIII, Bring Up the Bodies. Following up on the first book in the series, Wolf Hall, Mantel explores this turbulent period through the eyes of Lord Chancellor Thomas Cromwell, an enigmatic figure who went from being the low-born son of a drunken blacksmith, to a mercenary fighting on the continent, to the most powerful man in England short of the king himself. Indeed, Cromwell pulled the strings in the empire, until, that is, he fell out of favor with Henry, suffering the fate all such people who experienced a similar fell, a grisly and public spectacle of a death. 

Cromwell has fascinated me for a long time, mostly because I felt that he never got a fair shake from historians who most often associate him with his heir, Oliver Cromwell, the leader of the Puritan revolution (or English Civil War, depending upon your preference) and executioner of King Charles I. Cromwell is an incredible character and this series of books told from his perspective are wonderful storytelling and wonderful history (though speculative, of course, as anything from this period must be). The following quote is his feeling toward Thomas Wyatt, the most beautiful of poets from the Henretian period. For those of you who have read and loved Wyatt, these words will ring true and say what you have always seemed to feel about him:

“It is not easy to explain to a young man like Wriothesley why he values Wyatt. He wants to say, because, good fellows though you are, he is not like you or Richard Riche. He does not talk simply to hear his own voice, or pick arguments just to win them. . . He writes to warn and chastise, and not to confess his need but to conceal it. He understands honour but does not boast of his own. He is perfectly equipped as a courtier, but he knows the small value of that. He has studied the world without despising it. He understands the world without rejecting it. He has no illusions but he has hopes. He does not sleepwalk through his life. His eyes are open, and his ears for sounds others miss.” 

It is the latter part of Cromwell's internal monologue, beginning with Wyatt's unblinking yet hopeful assessment of the world, that most appeals to me. This is poetry, this is humane: to look into the world in all of its vice and sin and fallenness and fallibility and yet to hope. To have your eyes open as you walk through life and to see and hear things that others are too jaded, hurried, blind or deaf to see. 

"I Wish My Mother Had Aborted Me": Moral Ineptitude on the Far Left

At regular intervals the extremists of the pro-choice movement show the intellectual and moral vapidity of their cause. A few months ago it was the article published in the Journal of Medical Ethics (!), where two bioethicists argued for after-birth abortion, a practice also referred to as infanticide and practiced by various regimes throughout history. As Will Saletan at Slate pointed out at the time, apart from being an appalling idea, the notion is entirely consistent with the moral practice of abortion. The most recent example of appalling morality is this completely unhinged column by Lynn Beisner (pseudonym), a college professor and mother of two who argues that her mother should have had an abortion. Here is the link and a quote:

"I make even my most ardent pro-choice friends and colleagues very uncomfortable when I explain why my mother should have aborted me. Somehow they confuse the well-considered and rational: "The best choice for both my mother and me would have been abortion" with the infamous expression of depression and angst: "I wish I had never been born." The two are really very different things, and we must draw that distinction clearly.

The narrative that anti-choice crusaders are telling is powerful, moving, and best of all it has a happy ending. It makes the woman who carries to term a hero, and for narrative purposes it hides her maternal failing. We cannot argue against heroic, redemptive, happy-ending fairytales using cold statistics. If we want to keep our reproductive rights, we must be willing to tell our stories, to be willing and able to say, "I love my life, but I wish my mother had aborted me."

There is a lot to pick at here. First of all, the idea that her own mother would have definitely had a better life had she not given birth to the author is completely unproveable, an impossible calculus. Her mother clearly had multiple issues apart from missing out on the liberation she certainly would have experienced from Feminism and Psychology and the other leftist gods had she aborted and gone skipping off to college: brain trauma, history of abuse, and parent suicide tends to mess someone up, unintended child or not.

I mentioned recently, while excerpting the article on how capitalism wants us to be single, that our current culture tends towards the commodification of all things and this article is further evidence of this tendency, particularly applied to human life. Modern culture treats human life like elementary accounting: line up your assets and your liabilities and if at first blush the liabilities seem to weigh more, terminate. Resources were wasted on the author! She took away from the perfection of the machine! And here she is, a measly college professor. It clearly was not worth the effort and expense. This reduction in the value of the human life to economic terms is a function of both the right and left so I don't mean to put all of the emphasis on this example, but this is a particularly frightening example of the practice. If people will be a burden to society, better to eliminate them before they get the chance. No doubt the author finds herself very brave for staking out such a controversial and startling position, but she is merely showing how in the throes to economic absolutism she happens to be. She is also denying, in league with the Pentecostals I have been around this summer, that pain has any purpose in life. Under the right circumstances, socioeconomic for Beisner and strength of faith for the Pentecostals, they seem to imagine that pain itself could be eliminated. But suffering is part of what makes us human and no amount of money and privilege, or faith, can remove that.

When I first read this I almost laughed it struck me as so ridiculous. But as I have read back through it my emotion has shifted to sadness. How sad it is that someone has to see their life in this way. She castigates "anti-choice" (should pro-life people start calling pro-choicers "anti-life") supporters for their emotional manipulation and unwillingness to budge, but she does exactly the same thing, refusing even to admit that she is grateful for her life. The nihilism her philosophy has bred is very sad. But she is in a bind at the same time. Her mother is the poster-child for the types of pregnancies the pro-choice crowd is trying to limit. And if she wants to go all the way in for that ideology, she must believe that the world would truly be better if people like her birthed to mothers like her's did not exist. It is social and economic Darwinism, the same arguments of eugenicists and early abortion advocates: breed out the lazy, the dumb, the black, and the impoverished. Create a race of the Ubermensch. And the world will then be perfect. For the survivors, that is.

Commonplacing: John Calvin and Liberality

John Calvin is one of my heroes. I was raised under our popular cultural belief that he was the Tyrant of Geneva, a cold-hearted apologist for a sadistic God and the preacher of a calloused, unfeeling gospel. And then I read him, a basic charity that most of his detractors never paid him. And I read stuff like this:

“The Lord commands us to do ‘good unto all men,’ universally, a great part of whom, estimated according to their own merits, are very undeserving; but here the Scripture assists us with an excellent rule, when it inculcates, that we must not regard the intrinsic merit of men, but must consider the image of God in them, to which we owe all possible honour and love; but that this image is most carefully to be observed in them ‘who are of the household of faith,’ inasmuch as it is renewed and restored by the spirit of Christ. Whoever, therefore, is presented to you that needs your kind offices, you have no reason to refuse him your assistance. Say he is a stranger; yet the Lord has impressed on him a character which ought to be familiar to you; for which reason he forbids you to despise your own flesh. Say that he is contemptible and worthless; but the Lord shows him to be one whom he has deigned to grace with his own image. Say that you are obliged to him for no services, but God has made him, as it were, his substitute, to whom you acknowledge yourself to be under obligations for numerous and important benefits. Say that he is unworthy of your making the smallest exertion on his account; but the image of God, by which he is recommended to you, deserves your surrender of yourself and all that you possess. If he not only deserved no favour, but, on the contrary, has provoked you with injuries and insults,--even this is no just reason why you should cease to embrace him with your affection, and to perform to him the offices of love. He has deserved, you will say, very different treatment from me. But what has the Lord deserved? Who, when he commands you to forgive all men their offences against you, certainly intends that they should be charged to himself.”  John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion 3.7

There is a lot to be said about a passage like this, but instead of me saying it, just read it again and ask yourself if this measures up with your ideas about God and our duties to our fellow man.

Jonah Lehrer, Malcolm Gladwell, and the Simplistic Explanation

For those of you who don't follow the navel-gazing world of internet journalism, Jonah Lehrer, staff writer for the New Yorker, was released from his duties when it became apparent that he had fabricated a quote from the quotable Bob Dylan in his recent bestselling book, Imagine. Lehrer had previously been reprimanded by the folks at the snooty periodical I can't help but love for essentially reposting his old material from his Wired days on his New Yorker blog without indicating the duplication. But misquoting and misrepresenting the voice of a generation was a bridge too far. And now Mr. Lehrer is out of work.

Unsurprisingly, I find Alan Jacobs's reflections on this issue illuminating and well-reasoned. This is unsurprising because Mr. Jacobs is responsible for the best biography I have ever read (The Narnian, a bio of C.S. Lewis) as well as the best book on reading and books I have ever read (The Pleasure of Reading In an Age of Distraction). He writes:

If things go a certain way, this fall from grace could be the best thing that ever happened to Jonah Lehrer. In spending the past decade striving to be The Next Malcolm Gladwell, he has fallen victim to Gladwell’s besetting sin, which is glibness. In the Gladwellian intellectual cosmos, immensely complex ideas and experiences get boiled down to simplistic binary oppositions or are run through a single interpretative filter (here’s the tipping point, there’s the blink of instantaneous judgment).
. . .
But maybe, just maybe, it’s not worth it: maybe the neat little points you make that way aren’t intellectually substantive enough to justify the risks you take on their behalf. There could be a better way to go about this business of trying to understand human behavior and explain it to others. That other way will require more patience, more research, possibly more education (Lehrer has two bachelor’s degrees); and it will probably result in books that don’t sell as well, so the lifestyle will take a hit. But if you can make a real and lasting contribution to the human understanding of ourselves, the tradeoffs are more than worth it. I hope Jonah Lehrer finds that better path.

Jacobs cuts to the heart of my problem with so much of Gladwell's writing (someone I find immensely entertaining) and Lehrer's standard practice and so much of what counts for intelligent discourse: how simple it all becomes. The Marxist screams "economics!", the feminist "patriarchy!", Gladwell shouts "blink!". And they are all hammers with every bit of sociological date looking like a nail.

I remember listening to Gladwell's breakout hit, The Tipping Point, on audiobook driving out to Phoenix and being blown away by what I was hearing. It all sounded so incredible. The intense crime of late 80s New York was ceased by fixing broken windows and painting subway cars! How simple! Think of how easy it would be to fix other problems: you only need to find some simple cure. And I bought it, and others that I know bought it. A good pastor friend of mine was trying to figure out what the tipping point was for the Church and how, through one simple thing, we could experience revolution, go viral.

But it is not that simple, of course. There were multitudinous factors at play in New York in the late 80s that helped curb crime: the waning of the crack epidemic, the high profile prosecutions by Rudy Guliani of Gotham crimelords, a mounting frustration on the part of New Yorker's towards crime, and a dozen dozen other things. To attribute it to something simple glosses over everything else at play.

And Gladwell knows this and Lehrer knows this (I don't mean to entirely conflate the two, I find Gladwell far more trustworthy of an author, especially now), but there is something so sexy about having a really clever and surprising thesis statement that it causes writers to see One Uniting Theme linking everything. And so these writers perform intellectual gymnastics to get specific cases to fit the Master Thesis. Lehrer wanted a Bob Dylan quote to say something that he wanted it to say. But he couldn't find one that fit perfectly. And, as The Atlantic points out in a recent article on quoting, sometimes the appeal of inventing a quote to say something a bit better than what was said, a bit more in line with the point you are trying to drive home, is irresistible.

The Atlantic ran another article recently by a history professor from the University of Iowa, named Marshall Poe. Poe writes of his struggle to squeeze a book he was under contract to write about Wikipedia into this One Big Explanation mold of the sociological bestseller mold. But he couldn't do it. There was no easy pattern there. And Poe, mercifully, had the intellectual honesty to accept that the rise of Wikipedia, or the rise of any one thing really, was not simple and to resist the temptation to manufacture an easy (and pithy, entertaining, and possibly bestselling) explanation. It cost him materially, no doubt, maybe even a TED Talk (the reigning king of pithy, simplified explanations) and the social clout of being the Explainer. But at least he told the truth. And maybe Poe's type of writing, and Jacobs's type, and every other honest academic who doesn't conceive of a thesis and do research to prove it, but lets the material speak for itself, will be how Lehrer recovers and finds a way back from his exile.

Commonplacing: The New Radical

From Ewan Morrison at the Guardian:

Consumerism now wants you to be single, so it sells this as sexy. The irony is that it's now more radical to attempt to be in a long-term relationship and a long-term job, to plan for the future, maybe even to attempt to have children, than it is to be single. Coupledom, and long-term connections with others in a community, now seem the only radical alternative to the forces that will reduce us to isolated, alienated nomads, seeking ever more temporary 'quick fix' connections with bodies who carry within them their own built-in perceived obsolescence. 

The solution: Get radical, get hitched, demand commitment from partners and employers. Say no to the seductions of the disposable singles market.

Read the whole thing. As someone who made what felt like a very countercultural decision to get married when I had just turned 23, this resonates deeply. For someone who also flirts with a Marxist view from time to time as well, in the sense that I hate the commodification of  pretty much everything in our culture, this also makes perfect sense.

London 2012: That Jamaican Swagger

The Olympics are over and the freedom of my evenings is restored. The same cycle seems to play itself out in every games: I begin excited and ready to watch every event that I can, but by the end I don't even really care anymore, yet I find myself turning them on mindlessly every night all the same, guilting myself into the four hours of coverage on the premise that this only takes place once every four years (or two, depending on your point of view). But the Spice Girls mercifully have broken the spell and I can have my life back now.

It was a good Olympics overall. The Americans did much better in the track and field portion than four years ago, which was nice to see. The marathon, for both genders, was a bust, but really that reflects the actual conditions of American marathoning these days. Swimming was fun. Even diving was somehow exciting (I know I have ranted about this before, but why in the world do they show diving every night? Are there that many people who care about diving?).

NBC's coverage was pretty bad, but they start in a hard place. When everything already happened at least six hours before you show it, it is hard to keep a lid on the results. The ESPN website was merciless in terms of early posting, even NPR was known to fire off results without warning their audience that, hey, this stuff hasn't been on television yet. Not that NBC did much to help their cause. The worst example was the preview of Missy Franklin reuniting with her parents after winning her first gold medal that aired immediately before the gold medal race. Took a bit of the suspense out of the affair.

My favorite part of this year's games, though, was the absolute domination of the sprinting events by the island nation of Jamaica. Their control of the contest was so total that even my wife, for whom humility is perhaps the chief virtue, found herself smiling along and cheering as Usain Bolt self-proclaimed himself a legend and Yohan Blake put up his bear claws for the camera screen. She had hated Bolt in Beijing, thought he was nothing but cocky. But the results speak for themselves. And cockiness, when matched with performance, can almost be endearing. And it got me wondering whether the Jamaicans' inordinate success (an island of less than 3 million people has four of the fastest six human beings of all time) might not have something to do with their swagger.

Compare Usain Bolt pre-race to Tyson Gay, an American sprinter. Bolt looks like he is having fun, like he enjoys the sport, like he knows he will win. Gay looks like Harrison Ford's character in Air Force One after Gary Oldman as a Russian terrorist makes him choose between his wife and daughter. It is hard to run when you are wound that tight. Bolt, by contrast, is loose and springy. An event like the 100 doesn't require the same sort of mental concentration as the marathon, or even other shorter distances like the 400, which involve some level of strategy. Basically, you just line up and run as fast as you can. This is part of the appeal of the short event--it is so primal. Of course there is more to it than that, but with the amount of training these athletes put in for their 10 seconds of work (cue that great ESPN commercial with Bolt) I can't imagine the race is anything other than muscle memory doing its job. Maybe in such an event it helps to be cocky and loose. This is only a theory, but I do know that there is a lot to be said for believing you can win. Obviously this has limits. I could line up against Bolt with all the confidence in the world and still get beat by 4 seconds, but the best athletes in any sport just know that they are better than everyone else out there. The Jamaicans had that look in the short sprints; the Americans didn't. Maybe then the winner isn't such a surprise.