Monthly Archives: July 2015

Charles Darwin Decides to Marry

30 Thursday Jul 2015

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Richmond - Charles Darwin J980057

In late July of 1838, a twenty-nine-year-old Charles Darwin, mulling over his charmed courtship of cousin Emma Wedgwood, split two pages of his journal for a cost-benefit analysis in which he jotted the following:

“This is the Question [whether to marry or not].

Marry:

Children (if it Please God). Constant companion (& friend in old age) — who will feel interested in one. Object to be beloved & played with — better than a dog anyhow. Home, & someone to take care of house. Charms of music & female chit-chat — these things good for one’s health. But terrible loss of time.

My God, it is intolerable to think of spending one’s whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, & nothing after all. — No, no won’t do. — Imagine living all one’s day solitarily in smoky dirty London House. Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music perhaps — Compare this vision with the dingy reality of Grt. Marlbro’ St.

Marry—Marry—Marry Q.E.D.,

Not Marry

Freedom to go where one liked. Choice of Society & little of it. Conversation of clever men at clubs. Not forced to visit relatives, & to bend in every trifle.— To have the expense & anxiety of children — perhaps quarelling. Loss of time. — cannot read in
the Evenings — fatness & idleness — Anxiety & responsibility — less money for books &c — if many children forced to gain one’s bread. (But then it is very bad for one’s health to work too much.)

Perhaps my wife won’t like London; then the sentence is banishment & degradation into indolent, idle fool —

It being proved necessary to Marry.

Marry when? Soon or Late?

The Governor says soon for otherwise bad if one has children — one’s character is more flexible — one’s feelings more lively & if one does not marry soon, one misses so much good pure happiness.

But then if I married tomorrow: there would be an infinity of trouble & expense in getting & furnishing a house… Then how should I manage all my business if I were obliged to go every day walking with my wife.— Eheu!! I never should know French, or see the Continent, or go to America, or go up in a Balloon, or take solitary trip in Wales — poor slave. — you will be worse than a negro. And then horrid poverty, (without one’s wife was better than an angel & had money). Never mind my boy —  Cheer up — One cannot live this solitary life, with groggy old age, friendless & cold, & childless staring one in one’s face, already beginning to wrinkle. Never mind, trust to chance. Keep a sharp look out — there is many a happy slave.”

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Selections from the diaries of Charles Darwin, which you can find neatly summarized in Adam Gopnik’s short book Angels and Ages: Lincoln, Darwin, and the Birth of the Modern Age. And so the either-or above seemed to settle it. The Darwins were married on January 29th, 1829. 

Gopnik, a fluent, often funny writer and hyper-articulate storyteller, has produced several assessments of Darwin the man, the spouse, and the father. In his essay “Is There a Secret to a Happy Marriage?,” he hinges his theory of marriage on the relationship between Emma and Charles, opening:

Anyone who tells you their rules for a happy marriage doesn’t have one. There’s a truth universally acknowledged, or one that ought to be anyway.

Just as the people who write books about good sex are never people you would want to sleep with, and the academics who write articles about the disappearance of civility always sound ferociously angry, the people who write about the way to sustain a good marriage are usually on their third.

Gopnik goes on, quickly making his way to dissecting Darwin’s marriage:

What made it work? My theory is that happy marriages, from the Darwins on down, are made up of a steady, unchanging formula of lust, laughter and loyalty.

The Darwins had lust, certainly — 10 children in 17 years suggests as much anyway — and they had laughter. Emma loved to tease Charles about his passion, already evident in youth, for obsessive theorizing.

“After our marriage,” she wrote to him early on, “you will be forming theories about me, and if I am cross or out of temper you will only consider: ‘What does that prove?’ which will be a very philosophical way of considering it.”

And loyalty? Well, despite Emma’s Christian faith, she stood by him through all the evolutionary wars, and did for him the one thing only a loyal spouse can do — pretend he wasn’t in when German journalists came calling.

So, marriages are made of lust, laughter and loyalty — but the three have to be kept in constant passage, transitively, back and forth, so that as one subsides for a time, the others rise.

Read on:

Darwin Journal - Marry

Nuclear Weapons Are a Black Hole

27 Monday Jul 2015

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Martin Amis

“What is the only provocation that could bring about the use of nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the priority target for nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the only established defense against nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. How do we prevent the use of nuclear weapons? By threatening to use nuclear weapons. And we can’t get rid of nuclear weapons, because of nuclear weapons. The intransigence, it seems, is a function of the weapons themselves. Nuclear weapons can kill a human being a dozen times over in a dozen different ways; and, before death — like certain spiders, like the headlights of cars — they seem to paralyze.

Indeed they are remarkable artifacts. They derive their power from an equation: when a pound of uranium-235 is fissioned, the liberated mass within its 1,132,000,000,-000,000,000,000,000 atoms is multiplied by the speed of light squared — with the explosive force, that is to say, of 186,000 miles per second times 186,000 miles per second. Their size, their power, has no theoretical limit. They are biblical in their anger. They are clearly the worst thing that has ever happened to the planet, and they are mass-produced, and inexpensive. In a way, their most extraordinary single characteristic is that they are manmade. They distort all life and subvert all freedoms. Somehow, they give us no choice. Not a soul on earth wants them, but here they all are.

And the trouble with deterrence is that it can’t last out the necessary time-span, which is roughly between now and the death of the sun. Already it is falling apart from within.”

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Pulled from the introduction to Martin Amis’s collection of stories about the nuclear world Einstein’s Monsters.

Because Kingsley, Martin’s father, is in my opinion the funniest post-war writer, I have to include the following anecdote, which comes only a few pages later:

I argue with my father about nuclear weapons. In this debate, we are all arguing with our fathers… [he] regards nuclear weapons as an unbudgeable given.

Anyone who has read my father’s work will have some idea of what he is like to argue with. When I told him that I was writing about nuclear weapons, he said, with a lilt, “Ah. I suppose you’re … ‘against them,’ are you?” Epater les bien-pensants is his rule. (Once, having been informed by a friend of mine that an endangered breed of whales was being systematically turned into soap, he replied, “It sounds like quite a good way of using up whales.” Actually he likes whales, I think, but that’s not the point.) I am reliably ruder to my father on the subject of nuclear weapons than on any other, ruder than I have been to him since my teenage years. I usually end by saying something like, “Well, we’ll just have to wait until you old bastards die off one by one.” He usually ends by saying something like, “Think of it. Just by closing down the Arts Council we could significantly augment our arsenal. The grants to poets could service a nuclear submarine for a year. The money spent on a single performance of Rosenkavalier might buy us an extra neutron warhead. If we closed down all the hospitals in London we could…” The satire is accurate in a way, for I am merely going on about nuclear weapons; I don’t know what to do about them.

We abandon the subject. Our sessions end amicably. We fall to admiring my one-year-old son. Perhaps he will know what to do about nuclear weapons. I, too, will have to die off. Perhaps he will know what to do about them. It will have to be very radical, because there is nothing more radical than a nuclear weapon and what it can do.

I apologize for the extended break — personal business. I promise to try to make it up in the next few weeks.

Read on:

How the Greek Conception of Human Nature Can Shape Your Politics

14 Tuesday Jul 2015

Posted by in Interview, Political Philosophy

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Roman Bust

“I don’t think I would think the way I do if I hadn’t had an affinity for the writings of the Greeks. I think the idea the Greeks had, the tragic view of the world — that there are limitations in the human experience: we all age, we all die, we don’t demand utopian perfection given the brief time we’re on earth — has made me more realistic about things.

So when you see a war, for example, you don’t ask who’s one hundred percent good and who’s one hundred percent evil. There is good and evil in the world, yes, but it can sometimes be very difficult to understand that you have to go to war even though you won’t always be in the right.

The Greeks were much more realistic about the fallibilities of human nature. That’s had a very profound influence on me…

The idea that people are predictable across time and space, as the historian Thucydides said. That they have appetites and urges which are often identifiable. That people seem to respond to status and honor and fear, and that civilization — whether it’s religion, or custom and tradition, or politics — tends to save us from our selves.

It’s a very different view from the Rousseauian, Diderot, French enlightenment idea that we’re born into the world perfect human beings, but that religion or the family or the government repress us and ultimately ruin us.”

__________

Victor Davis Hanson, checking off the important boxes in the first minute of his three-hour-long C-SPAN In-Depth interview in 2004. If you want to read Hanson, pick up his acclaimed study of nine pivotal battles in history, Carnage and Culture. I just ordered my copy.

Watch Hanson’s answer (along with the other two hours and fifty-nine minutes) below.

Then move on:

Our Students Are Taught to Feel but Not Think

13 Monday Jul 2015

Posted by in Politics, Psychology

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Thomas Sowell

“Science is not the only field in which American students are lacking in knowledge and — more importantly — in the ability to tie what they know together to form a coherent chain of reasoning. Many American students seem unaware of even the need for such a process. Test scores are only the tip of the iceberg. Professor Diane Ravitch, a scholar specializing in the study of American education, reports that ‘professors complain about students who arrive at college with strong convictions but not enough knowledge to argue persuasively for their beliefs.’ As Professor Ravitch concludes: ‘Having opinions without knowledge is not of much value; not knowing the difference between them is a positive indicator of ignorance.’ In short, it is not that Johnny can’t read, or even that Johnny can’t think. Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is, because thinking is so often confused with feeling in many public schools.

The phrase ‘I feel’ is so often used by American students to introduce a conclusion, rather than say ‘I think,’ or ‘I know,’ much less ‘I conclude.’ Unfortunately, ‘I feel’ is often the most accurate term — and is regarded as sufficient by many teachers, as well as students. The net result, as in mathematics, is that many students are confident incompetents, whether discussing social issues, world events, or other subjects. The emphasis is on having students express opinions on issues, and on having those opinions taken seriously (enhancing self-esteem), regardless of whether there is anything behind them…”

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Excerpted from Thomas Sowell’s 1993 book Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogmas.

Below, watch Sowell debating American schools in a 1981 episode from Buckley’s Firing Line.

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David Brooks: What Do We Mean When We Say Someone’s “Deep”?

10 Friday Jul 2015

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David Brooks

“I think we mean that the person is capable of experiencing large and sonorous emotions… People who are deep are spiritual. They’ve come to some stable philosophical convictions about fundamental things; they’ve made firmly-rooted moral commitments.

To put it in another way: they have a built a web of unconditional love. In the realm of intellect they have a permanent philosophy about how life is. In the realm of action they have a commitment to important projects that can’t be completed in a lifetime. In the realm of morality they have a certain consistency and rigor; they’re not always perfect but there’s a sort of moral demand that pervades everything they do.

The next question is, how long does it take to get depth? When we look at people who we think have depth, we notice that it doesn’t happen all at once. The desires that lead you astray, those things are fast — lust, fear, vanity, gluttony. The things that we admire most — honesty, humility, self-control, courage — those things take some time and accumulate slowly.

It’s an ensemble of settled feelings. It’s not something that happens to people when they’re fifteen.

And these individuals often possess a certain virtue.

And the word ‘virtue’, again, it has pompous connotations. It seems stuffed-up, self-righteous. But all virtue means is that you have your loves in the right order. We all love and desire a multitude of things: love, friendship, family, popularity. We all desire money, to be good shape. And we understand whether we’ve thought about it or not that some loves are higher than other loves — that the love of family is higher than the love of money. If you’ve sold out your family to make an extra buck, you’ve done something wrong.

If the love of truth or friendship is higher than the love of popularity. If somebody tells you a secret and you blab it at a dinner party, you’ve become popular for a few minutes in that conversation, but you’ve inverted your love. And so being virtuous is not some pompous thing, it’s not some puritanical thing. It’s just having your loves in the right order.”

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Pulled from David Brooks’s speech at the 2014 Aspen Ideas Festival “The Road to Depth: Thinking about What Character Is”. Find these ideas elaborated in Brooks’s new book The Road to Character.

There’s more:

Steve Martin on the Death of His Father

08 Wednesday Jul 2015

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Steve Martin

“My father… died in 1997 at age eighty-three, and afterward his friends told me how much they loved him. They told me how enjoyable he was, how outgoing he was, how funny and caring he was. I was surprised by these descriptions, because the number of funny or caring words that had passed between my father and me was few… When I was seven or eight years old, he suggested we play catch in the front yard. This offer to spend time together was so rare that I was confused about what I was supposed to do. We tossed the ball back and forth with cheerless formality…

My father…  was not impressed [with my comedy act]. After my first appearance on Saturday Night Live, he wrote a bad review of me in his newsletter for the Newport Beach Association of Realtors, of which he was president: ‘His performance did nothing to further his career.’… I believe my father didn’t like what I was doing in my work, and was embarrassed by it. Perhaps he thought his friends were embarrassed by it, too, and the review was to indicate that he was not sanctioning this new comedy. Later, he gave an interview in a newspaper in which he said, ‘I think Saturday Night Live is the most horrible thing on television.’… But as my career progressed, I noticed that my father remained uncomplimentary toward my comedy, and what I did about it still makes sense to me: I never discussed my work with him…

[Years later, just before my father’s death] I was alone with him in his bedroom; his mind was alert but his body was failing. He said, almost buoyantly, ‘I’m ready now.’ I sat on the edge of the bed, and a silence fell over us. Then he said, ‘I wish I could cry, I wish I could cry.’

At first, I took this as a comment on his condition, but am forever thankful that I pushed on. ‘What do you want to cry about?’ I said.

‘For all the love I received but couldn’t return.’

I felt a chill of familiarity.

There was another lengthy silence as we looked into each other’s eyes. At last, he said, ‘You did everything I wanted to do.’

‘I did it for you,’ I said. Then we wept for the lost years. I was glad I didn’t say the more complicated truth: ‘I did it because of you.'”

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A selection from Martin’s 2008 memoir Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life.

Related paths:

Steve Martin 2

The Problem with Qatar

07 Tuesday Jul 2015

Posted by in Current Events, Debate, Freedom, Religion

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Qatar World Cup

“In Doha last Friday, the sermon given by the Imam at the biggest mosque in Qatar. Just reflect on this: biggest mosque in Qatar. You might have noticed Qatar is doing quite a lot of business in this city these days.

But what did the Imam say at Friday prayers? He said, among other things, this:

Allah strengthen Islam and the Muslims and destroy your enemies — the enemies of the religion. Allah destroy the Jews and whoever made the Jews, [and destroy the Christians and Alawites and the Shiites.]

This has been and is being pumped around by the ministries of the Qatari government. They’ve been sending around the video. They’re proud of it!

Is any leader in this country going to raise their voice about this sort of thing? I doubt it, because people don’t even raise them when it gets preached in this city, which it does. It really does.

[…]

It’s as bad as Je suis Charlie, which I’m deeply, deeply aggrevated and upset by… People weren’t Charlie, ladies and gentlemen. They really weren’t. They aren’t. If they were, Charlie Hebdo cartoons would’ve been published in every newspaper and on every TV station.

You know when Nick Clegg and David Cameron and all the other political leaders say Je suis Charlie, no they’re not. No they’re not. If Charlie Hebdo had been published here, it would have been decried as a far right wing, racist, Islamophobic magazine, and would have been shut down years and years ago. And don’t think when people say Je suis Juif that they mean that any more. They really don’t. It doesn’t mean anything more than Je suis Charlie. It’s a bit of sentimentality.

But hold them to it. Hold them to it, for God’s sake.”

__________

Pulled from Douglas Murray’s spot on, fervent opening on a recent panel with Maajid Nawaz and others discussing radical Islamism in Modern Europe:

The bracketed part of the pulled quote above is sourced from Jamie Dettmer’s article in the Daily Beast “An American Ally’s Grand Mosque of Hate,” which I’m assuming is where Murray found the quote.

Here is Dettmer’s more detailed account:

On the Friday before ISIS posted the horrific footage of the burning [Jordanian] pilot, a preacher sermonizing from the [Doha] Grand Mosque’s minbar prayed for the destruction of the faithful of other religions. “Allah, strengthen Islam and the Muslims, and destroy your enemies, the enemies of the religion,” intoned Saudi cleric Sa’ad Ateeq al Ateeq. “Allah, destroy the Jews and whoever made them Jews, and destroy the Christians and Alawites and the Shiites.”

His comments wouldn’t have been out of place in ISIS-controlled Mosul or Raqqa. He also beseeched Allah to save the al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the third-holiest site in Islam, from the “claws of the Jews.”

Al Ateeq, who was on his sixth visit to the state-supervised Grand Mosque since 2013, reserved his most bellicose remarks for the part of the sermon called the du’aa, when the preacher encourages the faithful to join in guided prayer.

Within minutes, Qatar’s Ministry of Endowments and Islamic Affairs promoted al Ateeq’s remarks on Twitter. And the sermon was broadcast on several local television channels, including Qatar TV, the official state channel, signaling another stamp of approval…

If the thousands of dead slave laborers, gross violations of basic human rights and criminal extortion involved in Qatar’s hosting the 2022 World Cup are not enough to force us into even threatening to boycott the games, then surely the above facts and their attendant, sordid details should. Our only consolation so far is that hosting the World Cup is an enormous economic boondoggle.

Read on:

Advice for Tearing Down Fences

01 Wednesday Jul 2015

Posted by in Current Events, Original, Politics

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G.K. Chesterton“In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’

This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion.”

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Pulled from the chapter “The Drift from Domesticity” in G.K. Chesterton’s 1929 book The Thing.

My friend Matthew Sitman recently said to me, while sizing up the opposite sides of the Ferguson riots, “Maybe this just proves how conservative, in terms of temperament, I really am – I’m just not an activist.” He continued: “Any rage I feel is quickly tempered by the voice in my head that says, ‘Yes, but…’ I always go back to the great Max Weber line: Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards.”

An approach this deliberative doesn’t thrive in the world of social media, nor does it naturally attract allies, loathe as it is to jump off the sidelines, don a jersey, and play partisan games.

You will of course read Chesterton’s (and Matthew’s) quote in light of the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell, rendered last Friday. I don’t have anything to add to this debate, which, if you haven’t noticed, is no longer a debate at all. Though several contradictory emotions have arisen.

I am happy for my gay friends; I am surprised at the lack of gravity being lent what is a moment of apparent social and political liberation (not to rain on anyone’s parade). I don’t think gay marriage “threatens” any individual, current, heterosexual marriage; I do believe our society has forgotten how critical that decaying, traditional institution is, and that the upcoming generation will have an impossible time recovering it. I am amazed how quickly this has escalated. I am fine with the Supreme Court deciding issues like this, even though it was 5-to-4, and even though I think ground-up, organic change is preferable for social issues. I am disappointed the executive branch has taken sides in a contentious judicial issue, displaying cutesy memes of support for one side in what has been an honest debate that’s divided good people on both sides of the electorate. I despise the vapid phrase “… right side of history,” currently being thrown around to justify certain positions on this issue. History isn’t about opinions. It has no right sides for the exact reason Eliot could declare that, in this life, “There are no lost causes because there are no won causes.”

Two other thoughts spring to mind in wake of last Friday’s verdict. The first is from Max Planck, who sized up the unglamorous way in which scientific progress occurs: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

It’s no accident this ruling comes at a moment when the Greatest generation is quickly fading from public life just as liberal Boomers now sit comfortably at the helm, braced by upcoming Gen-X’ers and Millennials.

The second quote is from Alexander Herzen, who had the following to say about the tumult of the failed 1848 revolutions:

The death of the contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul. Yet what is frightening is that the departing world leaves behind it not an heir, but a pregnant widow. Between the death of the one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass.

Read on: