Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 264

A lot of talk about this among my online friends lately. As a semi-private pseudo-intellectual who writes about public intellectuals, here are my candidates for the most influential American public intellectuals of this millennium so far (in no particular order):

Richard John Neuhaus
Cass Sunstein
Samantha Power (got that one from Ross Douthat)
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Clayton Christensen

When Colleen Malloy, a neonatologist and faculty member at Northwestern University, discusses abortion with her colleagues, she says, “it’s kind of like the emperor is not wearing any clothes.” Medical teams spend enormous effort, time, and money to deliver babies safely and nurse premature infants back to health. Yet physicians often support abortion, even late into fetal development.

As medical techniques have become increasingly sophisticated, Malloy said, she has felt this tension acutely: A handful of medical centers in major cities can now perform surgeries on genetically abnormal fetuses while they’re still in the womb. Many are the same age as the small number of fetuses aborted in the second or third trimesters of a mother’s pregnancy. “The more I advanced in my field of neonatology, the more it just became the logical choice to recognize the developing fetus for what it is: a fetus, instead of some sort of sub-human form,” Malloy said. “It just became so obvious that these were just developing humans.”

— Emma Green 

 

Missionary work indeed in heathen countries was being carried on with some energy, but Theobald did not feel any call to be a missionary.  Christina suggested this to him more than once, and assured him of the unspeakable happiness it would be to her to be the wife of a missionary, and to share his dangers; she and Theobald might even be martyred; of course they would be martyred simultaneously, and martyrdom many years hence as regarded from the arbour in the Rectory garden was not painful, it would ensure them a glorious future in the next world, and at any rate posthumous renown in this—even if they were not miraculously restored to life again—and such things had happened ere now in the case of martyrs.  Theobald, however, had not been kindled by Christina’s enthusiasm, so she fell back upon the Church of Rome—an enemy more dangerous, if possible, than paganism itself.  A combat with Romanism might even yet win for her and Theobald the crown of martyrdom.  True, the Church of Rome was tolerably quiet just then, but it was the calm before the storm, of this she was assured, with a conviction deeper than she could have attained by any argument founded upon mere reason.

“We, dearest Theobald,” she exclaimed, “will be ever faithful.  We will stand firm and support one another even in the hour of death itself.  God in his mercy may spare us from being burnt alive.  He may or may not do so.  Oh Lord” (and she turned her eyes prayerfully to Heaven), “spare my Theobald, or grant that he may be beheaded.”

— Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh 

Farhad Manjoo:

Another idea is to let you impose more fine-grained controls over notifications. Today, when you let an app send you mobile alerts, it’s usually an all-or-nothing proposition — you say yes to letting it buzz you, and suddenly it’s buzzing you all the time.

Mr. Harris suggested that Apple could require apps to assign a kind of priority level to their notifications. “Let’s say you had three notification levels — heavy users, regular users and lite, or Zen,” Mr. Harris said.

My question is: Why let any app issue you notifications ever? Here are the notifications I get on my phone: Text messages from my family. That’s it. Everyone and everything else has to wait until I’m ready.

Damon Linker has a recommendation for dealing with the enormous social problem of homeschooling:

There can and should be greater oversight. As [Jeremy] Young suggests, annual checks by a state government employee, empowered to look for signs of abuse and evidence that kids are actually being educated, would seem to be a minimum required by a commonsense concern for the well-being of the children involved. Sure, the home-school lobbyists will object. But then they will find themselves in the awkward position of defending the right of the Turpins to torture their kids undetected.

Excellent idea! But why stop there? Spousal abuse is surely a greater blight on our society than child abuse by homeschoolers, so I make this proposal: In households of married people, annual checks by a state government employee, empowered to look for signs of abuse by one spouse of another, would seem to be a minimum required by a commonsense concern for the well-being of the adults involved. Sure, some pro-marriage lobbyists will object. But then they will find themselves in the awkward position of defending the right of men to beat their wives undetected.

Please don’t try to tell me that children can’t choose their parents while marriage is a voluntary arrangement that can be ended by either party. We know from long experience how many people, especially women, remain in profoundly abusive relationships because they fear something worse. As in sexual relations more generally, “consent” is a vexed concept.

Though perhaps you have another objection: my plan is unworkable. There are not, and could never be, enough state government employees to visit every household of married people. If so, you have a point. It is, I admit, far easier to direct the suspicious attentions of state power on tiny minorities of people whom you despise for cultural reasons than to address truly widespread social tragedies.

And in any case, the level of intrusion is so minimal, especially from the child’s point of view. Once a year or so, a stranger comes into your home and asks you to take your clothes off so he can see whether your parents have been hurting you, because if he decides they have been, then he’ll take you away to foster care and your parents will be arrested, almost as if they had allowed you to play alone at a playground. What could possibly go wrong?

(Am I unfairly generalizing about government employees on the basis of a few bad apples? Perhaps; but that’s not an argument you can make when you’re proposing a massive expansion of state power over all homeschooling families because of what the Turpins did.)

I confess that I speak as an interested party here, because my wife and I taught our son at home — in conjunction with a homeschooling co-op — from seventh grade through high-school graduation. And we did not do it out of conviction that public schools are intrinsically evil. We are products of public schools ourselves, throughout our entire education. We did it because he was relentlessly bullied over the course of an entire year, and no teacher or administrator or local government employee or state government employee did a damned thing about it. We did it because I myself had been relentlessly bullied for several years in elementary school — I was two years younger than most of my classmates and a very easy target — and no teacher or administrator or local government employee or state government employee had done a damned thing about that either, and after what I had been through I could not stand by and watch my once-happy son descend into sheer and constant misery.

When people who cry out for mass surveillance of homeschooling families articulate some strategy for addressing the far, far larger problem of bullying in schools — I’ll even allow them to ignore spousal abuse — then I’ll believe that they care about the children. Until then, I’ll continue to believe that recommendations like Damon’s exemplify plain, straightforward bigotry against religious conservatives.

P.S. The Linker-Young argument is a classic example of what my friend Ashley Woodiwiss has called “ecclesial profiling.”

– The notion that there is any milk in this house is a laughable error, one that could be committed only by the most willfully imperspicacious of observers;

– That we need bread is a conclusion inescapable to any but the most doltish and slack-witted of my co-residents;

– The fatuousness of the belief that a carton of orange juice resides in the refrigerator is so palpably evident that I struggle to comprehend that I must, after all, refute it;

– That any sugar may be found anywhere in this domicile is demonstrably false, and only a fool or a knave, or some unfortunate who contrives to be both at once, could affirm otherwise;

– The claim that we are in no need of beer is so flagrantly nonsensical that one could be forgiven considerable exasperation at the perceived need to signal its nullity — and yet such a requirement remains in force, so that silence on my part would constitute an effectual concession to idiocy;

– I pity the fool who thinks we have coffee.

Update: DBH writes to say that he is flattered by my parody, but wishes to protest the inappropriately high proportion of Latinate words here. I fear I must plead guilty, especially with regard to “imperspicacious.”

Carl Trueman writes about the future of Christian higher education:

Thus, for Christian educational institutions, the way ahead may be very hard. It will not simply be a matter of budgeting without federal loans. It could easily become a matter of budgeting without not-for-profit status. That double whammy is likely to annihilate many of those institutions which refuse to accommodate themselves to the dominant sexual culture. And that means that educators may need to look to new models of pursuing their callings.

The current struggle probably cannot be won in the law courts — certainly not until there are deeper changes in the ethos of society. Laws that may be used to dismantle Christian educational institutions are already on the books. How they are to be applied will be determined by the dominant taste or cultural sentiment.

Therefore every Christian institution of higher education needs to be pursuing “financial planning for the worst-case scenario, where not only federal money but also tax-exempt status is revoked.” Trueman has other things to say as well, but I want to focus on this point, and to indicate another dimension that he does not address.

As I have noted in another venue, calls are already being made for Christian institutions to lose their accreditation also. Many Christian colleges will be unable to survive losing federal aid for their faculty and students alike; those that can survive that may not be able to afford their taxes once they lose their traditional exemption; but a loss of accreditation is likely to be the death knell for all of them, because that will dramatically reduce the number of students who apply for admission. Students with degrees from unaccredited institutions are deemed ineligible for almost all graduate education, and for many jobs as well. How many parents, even devoutly Christian parents, even those few who can afford it (given the lack of federal student aid), will be willing to pay to send their children to institutions if that narrows their future horizons so dramatically? Almost none, I suspect.

The people who argue that Christian institutions should support the modern left’s model of sexual ethics or else suffer a comprehensive shunning do not think of themselves as opponents of religion. And they are not, given their definition of religion, which is “a disembodied, Gnostic realm of private worship and thought”. But that is not what Christianity is. Christianity intrinsically, necessarily involves embodied action in the public world. And this the secular left cannot and will not tolerate, if it can help it, because it rightly understands that Christianity stands opposed to the secular left’s own gospel, which, popular opinion notwithstanding, is not essentially about sex but rather may be summed up as: “I am my own.”

All this to say that while I agree with Trueman that Christian institutions need to plan for a dark financial future, I also believe that the Christian community as a whole needs to plan for a future in which most or all of its educational institutions have been forced either to close or to accommodate themselves to Gnostic disembodiment. What does Christian formation — paideia and catechesis — look like in a world in which many of the institutions that have long supported that formation have been shut down or substantively eviscerated? In relation to these issues, that is the question that Christian need to be asking. Because, I am convinced, that moment is coming: maybe not in the next decade, maybe not even in my lifetime, but certainly within the lifetimes of many reading this blog post.