A recent college classroom conversation had a peculiar effect on me.
We were discussing Rerum Novarum, an 1891 papal encyclical published under Pope Leo XIII. Generally, the essay is a prescient (from my perspective) statement against socialism. That general theme received an encouragingly fair, even sympathetic, treatment by the class and the professor. In the midst of the lesson, however, as I knew it would, the following quarter-paragraph emerged for special scrutiny, even though it’s a brief tangent in 64-paragraph work. I provide the whole paragraph because the context is important to a reasonable reading:
… Finally, work which is quite suitable for a strong man cannot rightly be required from a woman or a child. And, in regard to children, great care should be taken not to place them in workshops and factories until their bodies and minds are sufficiently developed. For, just as very rough weather destroys the buds of spring, so does too early an experience of life’s hard toil blight the young promise of a child’s faculties, and render any true education impossible. Women, again, are not suited for certain occupations; a woman is by nature fitted for home-work, and it is that which is best adapted at once to preserve her modesty and to promote the good bringing up of children and the well-being of the family. …
In the field of nineteenth-century sexism, this is mild stuff, and one must stretch to make it representative of centuries of patriarchy. The concern of paragraph 42 is fair and reasonable working conditions, with the compassionate insistence that this judgment must be individualized to reflect the circumstances of the actual worker.
The clause about women being “by nature fitted for home-work” is certainly dated, although we too easily forget that the dating involves lived experiences, not merely an evolving culture. Sure, sweep away the revolutionary changes of electricity in the home and automobiles (which both post-dated Rerum Novarum) and Leo looks as if he’s holding to unreasonable sexism. Return those considerations — and many more — to the calculation, and a different picture emerges.
Simply put, a great deal more labor was necessary to maintain a household back then, and mobility was much reduced. That is, for “the well-being of the family” the need for somebody to focus on home-work was much greater, and the question of who should stay home is different from the assertion that women should do so… just because. Even within that context, one might insist there was room for Leo’s view to evolve further, but a reasonable critique in one direction does not justify an unreasonable application of modern life to the judgment of the past.
Indeed, reviewing the social advances of the last century and a half, a suspicion creeps in. The standard narrative is that social movements won their ground by beating back the rigid hands of greed and intolerance. The more accurate story seems to be (although not in all cases) that historical circumstances permitted the changes, making them practical, and the movements merely accelerated their realization. In some cases, one might argue the movements merely took credit for things that were about to happen anyway.
What affected me emotionally in the conversation wasn’t that this level of nuance is uncommon, but the impression that an utter lack of nuance is the common stance. Even the first sentence quoted above came in for criticism: “work which is quite suitable for a strong man cannot rightly be required from a woman or a child.” Take note that Leo specifies a strong man and that the assertion concerns what can be required, not what can be accepted. I repeatedly had to check the text to confirm that those words were there, because they were entirely unacknowledged.
Coming to this point in an otherwise encouragingly fair presentation felt like coming to the edge of permissible reality. The atmosphere veritably dared a retrograde participant to defend the notion that one can speak of such a thing as strong men. I did (of course), and the professor recognized that sounds of some kind had come out of my mouth, but we quickly moved on to the next point.
Frequently, I’ll complain of the way in which the news media shapes people’s sense of reality by ignoring certain people or certain stories. Others have made the point that progressives seek to control the language to make it impossible to think certain things, but I’d never before felt the significance of this prohibition so palpably. The experience was as if the truth literally could not be spoken. Words that I could see on the page were apparently not there for others, and when I offered testimony from my own time as a carpenter, it evaporated as if I’d never spoken.
Featured image by Engin Akyurt on Unsplash.
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To begin with, let me apologize for the subject line. Once it occurred to me, I couldn’t let it go.
If you’re of a certain age, you may recognize the sexual undertones of the phrase, which I began thinking about after stumbling across a Twitter exchange between apparent progressive Liz Gledhill and known conservative Nicole Solas. both of South Kingstown:
Gledhill: All this GOP rhetoric that’s anti “pleasure based sex education” makes me really glad I never slept with a republican because it kinda seems like it would be terrible.
Solas: “if you don’t groom children you’re bad at sex”
Gledhill: “If we tell folks sex isn’t just for making babies, they might go onto have healthy, happy intimate adult relationships and forget their place in the patriarchy.”
This matter is an excellent example of the human capacity to firmly hold to a belief simply by definitional assumption. In Gledhill’s mind, there is no reason not to want political insiders and ideologues to mandate that unionized teachers must instruct other people’s children that all of life should be centered around pleasure and readily associated with sex, so opposition must be evidence of our own discomfort with that topic. Gledhill would likely make the contrasting assumption of a social work grad student on the board of Planned Parenthood who coos at her 18-month-old son about how good it must feel when he touches himself. Surely, she must really know how to pleasure other people in fulfilling ways, right?
Ummm…
The first step when marching forward to mandate what other people’s children must be taught should be checking whether your assumptions are true. Are conservatives terrible at sex, and do we have unhealthy, unhappy adult intimate relationships. Well, no. Indeed, evidence consistently emerges that conservatives have better sex lives.
This actually shouldn’t seem contrary to assumptions. The patriarchal extremes are much more prominent on Netflix and in progressives’ self-justifying imaginations than in real life. Generally, conservatives find that acknowledging human nature while treating sex as something more profound than mutual masturbation is a winning formula. A love life doesn’t get much better than a stable relationship of deep comfort, trust, and mutual concern in which a couple’s intimacy is implicitly connected with their longstanding love for each other as well as their children, and even with God.
Of course, the ideal isn’t always possible (although in this case, your odds are pretty good if you’re smart and reasonable), but no ideal is. That doesn’t mean we can’t base the way we think and teach about relationships on an ideal. In contrast, making the individual’s personal pleasure the basis for what we think and teach children is certain to cause isolation and misery and, yes, to contribute to the sexual grooming of children.
Featured image by Konstantin Makovsky on WikiArt.
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Among the encouraging signs that are beginning to peak out of the COVID chill like early buds in spring is that coverage of Dr. Stephen Skoly’s lawsuit hasn’t been limited to the website of the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity, of which he’s chairman, and national conservative sites like The Daily Signal. The Providence Journal published an article last week, as did WJAR (NBC 10). WPRI got around to it a few hours ago.
The unfortunate reality is that the past decade has seen the news media, particularly in Rhode Island, embed the preferred narrative of the left and the Democrat Party more deeply in its editorial decisions. A doctor with a reasonable case to make being forced out of practice over a controversial government mandate ought to have been on journalists’ list of deep wells. They could have profiles on him, deep dives into the data behind the state’s decision, personal interest stories on both sides of debate — those suffering from lack of his care and others affected by COVID.
But of the half-dozen or so major sources of news in Rhode Island, none has taken that opportunity. In fairness, their business models are changing, and that sort of story may be less economically feasible, particularly when it cuts against the grain of what their left-wing base of subscribers/viewers wants to hear.
Whether the reason for the lack of coverage has been political bias or the economic reality of the business, however, a little bit of thawing is hopefully a positive development. We may find reason to hope in this angle, from The Daily Signal story linked above:
“After four months of being forced out of work, I still held out some hope that all mandates might come to an end in mid February,” Skoly said in a statement.
He continued: “But now, with Rhode Island’s Speaker of the House [ K. Joseph Shekarchi, a Democrat] and Senate President [Dominick Ruggerio, a Democrat] openly planning with Gov. [Dan] McKee to extend his executive orders and unilateral powers for at least another two months … I am left with no choice but to file this lawsuit.”
One suspects many people are starting to have such feelings: Look, we played along; we tolerated huge impositions and fear-mongering; but now we’re sending signals that the tyrants and mongerers have to pull back.
Perhaps the news editors have their fingers up in the wind and sense the change. We’ll see.
Featured image by Justin Katz.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- McKee’s contract controversy
- Taking off masks
- A telling poll
- The teachers union head’s mask comes off
- The next wave of people waking up
- Joe Rogan is all of us
Featured image by Amin Moshrefi on Unsplash.
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Having grown up in the New York City tri-state area, I’ve been aware of Al Sharpton for a long, long time. This may be the first time I’ve ever been aware of agreeing with him:
[Open full post]“… you cannot normalize what they are doing in China. And to go there and act like all is well is to normalize some very brutal behavior …
So we’re supposed to leave our principles of protest at the — when we check in at Customs? … I don’t think so. We need to let China know, ‘You live in a world that human rights is non-negotiable.”
Erika Sanzi shared a post on Parents Defending Education about a school assignment to teach kids about sexual consent. Working in groups, students design a pizza that their partners will like by communicating with non-verbal cues. Everybody likes cheese, but not everybody will want olives. Here’s step number two: “Now mirror these preferences in relation to sex!” The assignment gives a couple examples.
To be sure, assuming the underlying lesson is acceptable in a school setting, making lessons relatable is an important technique. We have to be wary of a fine line, however. As I noted the other day, part of the “pleasure-based sex ed” that progressives want to inject into public schools is sexualizing everything — having children associate everything from playing with their pets to making a pizza with the pleasures of sex.
Think about it. Did you ever have a math lesson that used pizza to teach about angles or percentages or probability? For a while afterwards, every time you had pizza you may have thought of that lesson and done a calculation. Now replace math with sex, and you get a very different outcome when your family opens the pizza box — something more like grooming.
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Something clicked as I listened to the podcast version of the Megyn Kelly episode embedded from YouTube below.
Her primary guest was Tristan Harris, a Silicon Valley player who’s been warning about the manipulative dangers of social media. He’s taken the Stanford classes on “persuasive technology” along with the tech entrepreneurs and knows how it works — what sort of information they can and do capture, what techniques they use to model users, what strategies they deploy when people start to escape their clutches.
As I listened to the challenge posed by social media manipulation, from the addiction of teens all the way to geopolitical problems and a new kind of warfare, one thought kept returning to me: The core of any solution, whether we’re talking for your mental health, for your children’s development, or for the health of the community, is actual human interaction.
Farther down the line of thinking about the universe that I’ve begun on Dust in the Light, I’m going to propose that human souls are drawn toward each other. The closer they are, the more truly they are living in the same universe, and just as quantum particles can become entangled without regard to distance, so can souls. Thus, as we form communities online with people who think like us, we move more and more deeply into a particular way of thinking — literally, a particular world. And what defines that world is the set of ideas toward which we in the community have a tendency.
In flesh and bone life, the people with whom we come into contact share close geographic proximity not typically based on ideological agreement, but because of a wide variety of considerations having to do with life itself. Theologically, we’re living in God’s reality, and our choice of location has to do with our individual interactions with Him. The relevant point for this post is that, through daily interactions, our souls are attracting and being attracted by others who live in different political realities. This keeps us in line with God, as I would frame it, rather than the false gods of our own intellectual creation.
Well, what have we had in the past few years to reduce flesh-and-bone interaction and make a response to social media involving human contact next to impossible? COVID restrictions.
We spend a lot of time arguing about the benefits and drawbacks to our health of various measures the government has been taking in response to the pandemic, but this one is almost never mentioned. Not being able to interact — or even having our interactions impeded by masks — is itself a profound harm, one that makes us easier to manipulate, whether for the profits of tech oligarchs or for Egregores.
Featured image by Uriel SC on Unsplash.
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Dr. Shafman on National Cancer Prevention Month
Middletown Chief of Police Bill Kewer
Dr. Stephen Skoly on his battle with the state
President Trump’s impersonated commentary on Rhode Island news and media
Accuracy in Media gave me some space to express frustration with the dishonesty of a video from NowThis that attempts to cover for Joe Biden’s pledge to pick the next Supreme Court justice from a narrow demographic:
NowThis is lying to its young audience when it claims that “conservatives are freaking out at the idea of a Black woman on SCOTUS” (i.e., the Supreme Court of the United States). Producer Emily Barger lays the nonsequiturs and condescension on thick in the short space of the one-minute clip, returning to the same lie over and over.
“Conservatives are pissed that President [Joe] Biden is considering replacing Justice Stephen Breyer, an old white dude, with a Black woman,” it begins.
Something is very strange about this all. The political strategy of calling Republicans racist is really old and stale, at this point. How can media ostensibly serving youth still get away with pushing it? Moreover, as I note in the article, it isn’t difficult to discover that it’s false — arguably inverted, politically.
Another curious aspect is the connection of this story with the Whoopi Goldberg dustup. Goldberg’s offense was claiming the Holocaust was not about racism because Jews are white, and that’s exactly how Barger treats Jews. Justice Breyer is just “an old white dude” as far as the blond, blue-eyed Barger is concerned.
It’s really amazing that progressives get away with the lies they tell. No wonder they’re so desperate to start pushing censorship throughout our society.
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Often, public corruption is simply a matter of special interests waiting out public attention. Voters don’t want to subsidize a non-viable bit of real estate in Providence? Just wait them out. They’ll forget or some money will come along:
It’s been nine years since Bank of America moved out of the 26-story skyscraper known as the “Superman” building, leaving the state’s tallest building vacant. But sources confirmed to the Globe Thursday that the state and the building’s owner, High Rock Development, could be “weeks away” from a deal.
Your money. Somebody else’s profit. Union support.
If this sort of thing is off the table indefinitely, the people closest to the building will have no choice but to find the highest and best use for their possession. But in Rhode Island, they know there’s always a way to turn a trick.
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