Published in The Family

One of the giants of contemporary political science, James Q. Wilson, has passed away. His writing displayed insightful commentary on areas of public policy--crime ("broken windows"), poverty, bureaucracy (the classic book), bioethics, marriage, and ethnic politics, plus a book on snorkeling,co-authored with his wife. I happened to use his Bureaucracy book last spring, originally published in 1989. Wilson taught us what questions to raise in examining political institutions. Some of his writings for the Claremont Institute can be found here. An appreciation of his work by Shep Melnick is here.

It is not to damn him with faint praise to say that Wilson was likely the nicest and the wisest President of the American Political Science Association. I can still recall the headshaking and denunciations of his presidential address, on "The Moral Sense."

Addendum: A conversation from 1987 with Wilson, conducted by Steve Hayward mostly.

In Liberty Fund's new blog Michael Greve points out how powerful and efficient bureaucracies can be when they have determined leaders. The issue here is HHS rules requiring religious organizations to provide contraception coverage in their employee health plans. In sum:

Follow the progression: first comes a statutory text of sufficient ambiguity ["Obamacare"] to keep the Catholic Health Association, representing Catholic hospitals, on board in support of the ACA. (Now that it's been had, one hopes the association has learned its lesson.) Then comes an administrative creep forward and a de facto delegation to a private organization of known disposition, whose perceived authority and expertise provide cover for the bureaucracy. Then comes the wholesale, underhanded adoption of the interim rule.

It doesn't make sense to berate the captain of the Costa Concodria to be one of the first on the beach in an egalitarian age that decries the notion of hierarchy, difference, and duty. Taking off from Mark Steyn,  The Sage of Mt. Airy emphasizes that point, taking off on "women and children first:"

What [Steyn] leaves out is that it's become instead, and sadly so, an increasingly accurate descriptive phrase that captures perfectly a class of people who do go first, whether they should or not. (If, that is, it's even possible to use words like should or ought in a properly multicultural society.) "Women and children" is now descriptive of, well, descriptive of almost everyone, male and female, young and old, able and infirm, etc.. We're all equal after all and that's exactly as it should be. (Here's one place where should is not only allowed, but demanded.)

Steyn on the origins of "women and children first:"

In fact, "women and children first" can be dated very precisely. On Feb. 26, 1852, HMS Birkenhead was wrecked off the coast of Cape Town while transporting British troops to South Africa. There were, as on the Titanic, insufficient lifeboats. The women and children were escorted to the ship's cutter. The men mustered on deck. They were ordered not to dive in the water lest they risk endangering the ladies and their young charges by swamping the boats. So they stood stiffly at their posts as the ship disappeared beneath the waves. As Kipling wrote:

We're most of us liars, we're 'arf of us thieves, an' the rest of us rank as can be, But once in a while we can finish in style (which I 'ope it won't 'appen to me).

I think of all the couples with advanced degrees who have remarkably successful children, and I wonder how other kids can enjoy such success.  Charles Murray has long made this a theme of his. The full account can be found in The New Criterion.  "Many [in the new elite] have never worked at a job that caused a body part to hurt at the end of the day, never had a conversation with an evangelical Christian, never seen a factory floor, never had a friend who didn't have a college degree, never hunted or fished." Here is the excerpt from today's WSJ:

The members of America's new upper class tend not to watch the same movies and television shows that the rest of America watches, don't go to kinds of restaurants the rest of America frequents, tend to buy different kinds of automobiles, and have passions for being green, maintaining the proper degree of body fat, and supporting gay marriage that most Americans don't share. Their child-raising practices are distinctive, and they typically take care to enroll their children in schools dominated by the offspring of the upper middle class--or, better yet, of the new upper class. They take their vacations in different kinds of places than other Americans go and are often indifferent to the professional sports that are so popular among other Americans. Few have served in the military, and few of their children either.

Worst of all, a growing proportion of the people who run the institutions of our country have never known any other culture. They are the children of upper-middle-class parents, have always lived in upper-middle-class neighborhoods and gone to upper-middle-class schools. Many have never worked at a job that caused a body part to hurt at the end of the day, never had a conversation with an evangelical Christian, never seen a factory floor, never had a friend who didn't have a college degree, never hunted or fished. They are likely to know that Garrison Keillor's monologue on Prairie Home Companion is the source of the phrase "all of the children are above average," but they have never walked on a prairie and never known someone well whose IQ actually was below average.

From the full article, his conclusion:

The upper middle class in general, and the new upper class in particular, will continue to do well. But they will no longer be living any resemblance of what used to be called the American Way of Life. They will be the class on top in the same way that all complex societies have had a class on top, with nothing exceptional about it. We are perilously close to being in that world already....

One should not miss the comparison over the last week of youth descending on the cities of two European nations. In England, hundreds of young thugs spent the week rioting with aimless violence and general impunity in cities across the nation. Meanwhile, in Spain, over a million young pilgrims arrived in Madrid to celebrate the Catholic Church's World Youth Day. Two more stark profiles of today's youth would be difficult to produce. I would just as readily entrust our future prosperity to the latter group as I would commit the former to prison sentences excluding them from any participation whatsoever in the future of planet Earth.

A social scientist somewhere should observe a representative share of both communities over the next several decades and report on their respective contributions to civil society. A subsequent report on the comparative methods of rearing employed during the tender years of these sample populations, including values instilled and disciple-enforcement, would provide a interesting - though predictable - social commentary.

The way to avoid scenes like those in London is rather simple. Madrid is presently full of one million examples. When the parenting methods which produce this latter sort are rejected, it's no great mystery why they turn out as little more than prison fodder. Simply because a publisher will print the latest breakthrough in child developmental theory, it does not follow that human nature will respond favorably to such progressive nonsense.

In light of the London violence, Kevin Kosar (a frequent Weekly Standard contributor) reminds us of the late political scientist Edward Banfield's sly--and revealing--comment on urban riots.  It's not a lack of government spending, discrimination, poverty, etc.  Often young men riot because it's fun to do:

Often, though, people riot "mainly for fun and profit," as Banfield put it in The Unheavenly City. Riots, as he reminded us, have been around as long as there have been cities. "In Pittsburgh in 1809 an editor proposed satirically that the city establish a 'conflagration fund' from which to buy twelve houses, one to be burned each month in civil celebration."

Kosar concludes, "[O]ne sure accelerant to riots present and future, Banfield explained, is the widespread belief that one can get away with it."  RTWT for clear thinking and illuminating links.  Kosar's website, covering higher education, reviews, Banfieldiana, and whiskey, can be found  here. 

As Groucho would say.

Ann Althouse points us to a lawsuit in Utah challenging the state's ban on polygamy.  The suit is not asking to legalize polygamy, per say, but only saying that the state has no right to prosecute someone who is legally married to only one person, but, in fact, considers himself married to several women, "Mr. Brown has a civil marriage with only one of his wives; the rest are "sister wives," not formally wedded."

Professor Althouse comments:

I think the Lawrence-based argument for decriminalizing polygamy is much stronger than the Lawrence-based argument for requiring the government to give legal recognition to same-sex marriage. One is an argument demanding only that the government leave them alone as they pursue their "own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." The other is a demand that the government alter its treatment of its citizens, giving them access to to the benefits of having the official status as a married couple.

If each of us has the right to purshue his "own concept of existence," then we are free to choose to be slaves, no?  On what grounds, other than an underlying idea of what it is to be human, can one justify the right of an individual to choose how he will live?

I am also reminded of the bit in Natural Right and History were Strauss discusses Max Weber: "Weber's own formulation of his categoric imperative was 'Follow thy demon' or 'Follow thy god or demon.'  It would be unfair to complain that Weber forgot the possibility of evil demons."  Basically the same idea as Bill Cosby's comments on cocaine. (at 3:50 or so).

At a Bar-b-que yesterday, I found my self talking with a family law expert.  I asked him a question which has been troubling me for a while: what prevents two people who are otherwise unattached, and not closely related from marrying for tax purposes, and then divorcing.  He said, nothing.

Transfers between husband and wife, or perhpas we should say between Partner A and Partner B are tax free.  Hence it is possible for two businesspeople who wish to sell a business to marry, transfer cash for stock, and divorce.  Voilla, a tax-free sale.

Such actions were, of course, always possible, but with the rise of gay marriage, they become much more possible, perhaps even more likely.  There are many more people who are now eligible.  In addition, now that the definition of marriage is now in play, the social pressure to view marriage as anything other than a status in positive law is reduced.

On what grounds would such marriages be illegal?  We can't say that love is essential to marriage. In fact, marrying for money is an ancient tradition.  (And how would we test it anyway?) We can't say that the desire to have children is essential, since that idea has already been rejected, at least in states where gay marriage is legal. Etc.

For the time being, the Defense of Marriage Act might mitigate the federal tax element, but I fear that law is not long for this world.

Justice Clarence Thomas has authored one of the Court's most unusual and as usual most instructive court opinions, dissenting in the violent video case (look about 40% of the way down, after the majority opinion).  In voting to uphold California's restrictions on sales of violent video games to minors, Justice Thomas surveys the Founders' views of child rearing, noting among other items Jefferson's education instructions to his wife, the contrasting views of Locke and Rousseau, and children's reading of the time.  The upshot:

The Founding Fathers. George Washington, the father of our country. The Holy Father. When you love someone and hold them in esteem beyond words, you call them father. There's a reason for that.

Here's to our dads.

We love you.

"It is good for Catholic universities to host and engage the thoughts of powerful public figures, even Catholics such as yourself who fail to recognize (whether out of a lack of awareness or dissent) important aspects of Catholic teaching."

To jump so seamlessly from the Magisterium's insistence on the fundamental and non-negotiable moral obligation to the poor to the specifics of contingent, prudential, and political legislation is wholly unjustified in Catholic social teaching. 

Catholic social thought is about the empowerment of the poor. It is not about failed policies of social assistance that treat poor people as problems to be solved rather than as people with potential to be unleashed. 

Sane people are best advised to simply ignore the fever swamp of liberalism which is the New York Time's editorial page. But occasionally it's interesting to gain a glimpse into the views of extremists. The Time's celebrates the sanctity of Mother's Day with Stephanie Coontz's revisionist essay, "When We Hated Mom" and Nicholas Kristof's appeal for greater funding for abortion and contraception to prevent motherhood.

Coontz - who unsurprisingly began her career as a leader of the Young Socialist Alliance - continues her quest to denigrate traditional womanhood and motherhood as the only remaining avenue by which to defend the legacy of modern feminism. The truth, of course, is that feminism began as a noble cause and succeeded in accomplishing most of its goals. At the end of the game, winners usually take a victory lap and move on. But the radicals can't let go - they create new, absurd goals and rely on the noble legacy of their history to coerce sympathy until at last they have so corrupted their cause as to have divorced it from all previous accomplishments. Thus, the rise and fall of American feminism - and its current shameful treatment of women and mothers. Coontz credits feminism with allowing women to choose "meaningful work" over motherhood. 

Kristof provides less philosophy with which to argue. He sums up his Planned Parenthood appeal essay by criticizing Republicans for voting to fund sterilization for wild horses but not for women. I'm sure he didn't really mean to compare women to horses, but his inability to recognize a distinction between policies for animal breeding and human beings is dismaying.

So, motherhood was never that great and we should observe a day devoted to mothers by celebrating means by which to prevent and terminate pregnancies. That's the left's celebration of motherhood. Intersting, at least.

Did you know the origins of mother's day date back to the Civil War, when mothers of sons who died on opposing sides of the war met in an attempt to foster healing and friendship? Most mother's day events nowadays are a bit less demanding - usually involving lots of chocolate and flowers. So, to all our NLT moms:

Married to a commoner Englishwoman himself, Alexis de Tocqueville would have approved of the latest royal union.  Using insights from Democracy in America, Julia Shaw argues the splendid moment was "quite an American affair."  What the visiting, onlooking Americans "were watching was not some imaginary fairy tale or even a typical lavish royal wedding. It was another American love story."  They went abroad to meet themselves.

My favorite commentary on royalty in the modern world is on a less fortunate royal couple. Mark Helprin's splendid comic novel, Freddy and Fredericka, describes Charles and Di romping incognito across America and acquiring its virtues to make them fit for the royal throne.

We are the first moms in history to have grown up with widely available birth control, the first who didn't have to worry about getting knocked up. We were also the first not only to be free of old-fashioned fears about our reputations but actually pressured by our peers and the wider culture to find our true womanhood in the bedroom. Not all of us are former good-time girls now drowning in regret--I know women of my generation who waited until marriage--but that's certainly the norm among my peers.

The stiff upper lip (or gaman) that Tiger Mothers produce:  Little public wailing in Japan about the earthquake and tsunami--that's saved for private times.  H/t Hugh Hewitt.

The world's largest family. Britian's Daily Mail reports on 1 man, 39 wives, 94 kids and 33 grandkids all stuffed into a 100 room "mansion" in India and living according to a strict, cultish order.

Do I smell a reality TV show...?

Jonah Goldberg has made a highly qualified case for bourgeois homosexuals (Hobos) and hence for same-sex marriage.   In the lively new University of Chicago journal, Counterpoint, "Carl Roberts" anticipated why Jonah's argument fails.  Unlike the Robby George-inspired recent natural law essay "What is Marriage?"  Roberts bases his argument on social science. 

Roberts maintains that legalizing same-sex marriage would change the cultural underpinnings of marriage from procreation to companionship.  This profound shift undermines marriage in general (here he uses the Chicago lingo of "incentives").  It subsequently encourages single motherhood, which clearly is the major source of urban poverty. 

The conservative journal (edited by Chicago undergrads) boasts a series of thoughtful articles on Martin Diamond, Jane Austen, gun rights, Lady Gaga, and many other topics of enduring and contemporary interest.  May it be blessed with a Rockefeller!

David Brooks insists that Barack Obama, despite his misreading of public opinion, "is still the most realistic and reasonable major player in Washington."  (Look at the abuse leftist commenters heap on him, as your conservatism dismisses this as liberal madness.)  "In a sensible country, people would see Obama as a president trying to define a modern brand of moderate progressivism."  Bring me smarter citizens--the cry of savants throughout the ages!  In truth, Brooks has a point about Obama's Middle East policy and maybe on another issue or two.  But what is at the man's core, what he does he ultimately want to achieve?  Brooks is at odds with, among others', Charles Kesler's reading of Obama, which finds far more ambition (and political extremism) in him than in Clinton or other liberals.

Michael Gerson is even more problematic in his reasoning, making extraordinary parallels based on the relative successes of the gay rights and the pro-life movements:

But so far the gay rights movement has succeeded for many of the same reasons that the pro-life movement (to a lesser extent) has succeeded. Both have taken sometimes abstract, theoretical arguments and humanized them. Both have moved away from extreme-sounding moralism (or anti-moralism) and placed their cause in the context of civil rights progress. Whatever your view on the application of these arguments, this is the way social movements advance in America.

Yes, the way social movements advance is often through spurious comparisons, repeated by authorities.  Moreover, the civil rights movement morphed into racial/ethnic preference pleading that is a key part of expanding the administrative state.  It is the civil rights movement based on the Declaration that must move Gerson, but he has a strange view of it, if he wants to apply it to both pro-life and gay rights. 

Both Brooks and Gerson seem to lack any objective standards by which to assess whether a policy is moral or immoral, just or unjust.  Brooks endorsed a form of gay marriage; is Gerson far behind?    

But as much as some conservatives fail us we should ourselves of how bad liberal establishment journalism was and remains.  See the anti-Fox rant of Howell Raines, former NY Times editor, in tomorrow's WaPo.

"People have been raising children for approximately as long as there have been people. Only recently -- about five minutes ago, relative to the long-running human comedy -- have parents been driving themselves to distraction by taking too seriously the idea that "as the twig is bent the tree's inclined." Twigs are not limitlessly bendable; trees will be what they will be. "

I suppose a handbook won't determine whether my sons have an enriching Scout experience. Their troop's leaders will. And I will. "Troops," says an Eagle Scout friend, "are like churches." You get some good and some bad; it depends on who's doing the work. This reliance on local community is, more than stances on gays or the environment, what makes the Boy Scouts of America conservative in the most wise and American sense of that term.

1. "Sexually active adolescents and young adults under age 25 account for 50 percent of the 19 million new cases of STIs annually." [Sexually Transmitted Infection]

2.  "One in five Americans over age 12 is infected with genital herpes, and one in four sexually active girls over age 13 is infected with at least one STI."

3. "America has failed to achieve levels of condom use among teens high enough to eliminate those STIs for which condoms are most preventive, (chlamydia, gonorrhea and HIV), let alone those for which condoms are least preventive (herpes and human papillomavirus, or HPV)."  I'd add that this last type of sexual infection, HPV, is the kind most likely to infect young girls and that its consequences for them are quite serious.  It is the virus that leads to cervical cancer.

4. "Sexually active girls are three times as likely to report being depressed and three times as likely to have attempted suicide as compared with sexually abstinent girls."

5.  "Sexually active boys are more than twice as likely to suffer from depression and seven times as likely to have attempted suicide as compared with sexually abstinent boys."

David Brooks has no regard for the old Establishment and admires the new meritocracy based on equality of opportunity. 

Yet here's the funny thing. As we've made our institutions more meritocratic, their public standing has plummeted. We've increased the diversity and talent level of people at the top of society, yet trust in elites has never been lower.

It's not even clear that society is better led.

The elites of finance, government, and journalism, for example, have not produced better policy than before.  Brooks proposes some interesting possibilities for these lousy results:  there is too much transparency (and therefore less trust) in government, there is less mutual trust within each elite, merit has been ill-defined, and quick results count more than steady growth. 

But Brooks is describing what Progressives have wanted from their new vision of government.  See Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, a century ago.  The character of elites in fact reflects the perversity of meritocratic education.  (See Plato's Gorgias or recall the foul-mouthed Ivy League-educated traders at the beginning of Bonfire of the Vanities.)  Moreover, Brooks avoids discussing the effects of feminism and its peculiar place in the pathology of elites and meritocracy.  Racial preferences would seem to play little role, but the power of sex does.  One observation:  Consider women who started their careers as public school teachers and wound up in powerful Washington positions.  Were their former teaching positions occupied by people as talented?  The women who rose doubtless went to more satisfying positions but at a social cost.

Consider as well the abolition of the draft.  It is hard to imagine Professors Seth Benardete, Harvey Mansfield, or James V. Schall as army privates, but there they were.  The professionalization of the military made it more effective but again at a social cost. 

We observe one of the problems of a free society:  the individual good frequently clashes with the social good.  Statesmanship seeks to harmonize the two, but no one is rushing to fulfil this obligation.  

Family Research Council has published a report on the effects of pornography upon individuals, marriage, family and community. (PDF here)

Along with drug use (recreational drugs) and sex trafficking (prostitution), pornography is often labeled a "victimless crimes." Of course, this assumes that, if the perpetrator and victim are the same person (or family unit), there is actually no victim. Such thinking is a natural consequence of the substitution of an actual morality ("you shall love your neighbor as yourself") with a useful, but limited axiom ("you shouldn't hurt other people"). When self-harm (which will invariably also harm all those who love the "victim") is not seen as an evil, half of morality has already been ceded - and the remaining ground is left defenseless.

FRC's report is good reading for the oft-overlooked consequences of a particular "victimless crime," but its greater worth is in reminding us of the damage caused by well-intended but flawed moral reckoning. One cannot love another until they have loved themselves, and personal degradation will find expression well beyond the privacy of one's own dehumanization.

The courts have asked this question in a recent case in New Jersey.  Here's what happened:

A New Jersey judge has ruled that a gestational surrogate who gave birth to twin girls is their legal mother, even though she is not genetically related to them.

The ruling gives the woman, who carried the babies in an arrangement with her brother and his male spouse, the right to seek primary custody of the children at a trial in the spring.

This reminds me of another case from 2007:

A New York man who said he donated sperm to a female co-worker as a friendly gesture and sent presents and cards to the child over the years likely will owe child support for the college-bound teenager, according to a judge's ruling.

This is a trend. (here is another case, and here is the first one I recall seeing, a case from Sweeden in 2005).  Our friends on the Left like to say that marriage is a social construct. Yet our Courts keep putting biology (sometimes as raw genetics, and sometimes as the fact of carrying a baby to term) back in.

A further, and related point.  I have wondered before whether, given the rise of out-of-wedlock births, our courts will re-create something like common law marriage.  If they may impose obligations on, and discover rights for, people who agreed not to be considered parents, so much more would it follow logically for the law to impose obligations on parents who were a couple when the baby was conceived.