EXPATRIOT writes:

Perhaps this poem would be an inspiration to the woman who is considering abortion. I’ve always found it to be especially moving. It’s Rabindranath Tagore’s own English translation of his Bengali original. Actually I’ve seen several slightly different versions over the years, but this is the one I know by heart. 

 The Beginning

“Where have I come from, where did you pick me up?” the baby asked its mother.
She answered, half crying, half laughing, and clasping the baby to her breast:
“You were hidden in my heart as its desire, my darling.
You were in the dolls of my childhood games, and when with clay I made the image of my god each morning, I made and unmade you then.
In all my hopes and my loves, in my life, in the life of my mother you lived. Read More »

ANTI-FAMILY WOMEN’S ORGANIZATIONS continue to repeat the nonsense that women are paid less than men because of discrimination. Heidi Hartmann, president of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, has gone so far as to say that marriage is bad for women and the government should not promote it. Instead, the government should “equalize” earnings and subsidize child care. Terry O’Neill, president of the National Organization for Women, agrees that marriage often does not “produce good outcomes.” Read More »

INGRID writes:

I’m writing from southern Europe to ask the help of you and your readers. 

I spoke to a friend of mine the other day, who told me that she is pregnant, very depressed about it, and considering having an abortion. She already has two children, and she hadn’t wanted a third anytime soon. It seems that she and her husband are having some problems in their relationship and I think that they might be having some financial problems, as well.

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THE U.S. SUPREME COURT ruled on Monday that a company’s dismissal of the fiancé of a woman who had filed a sex discrimination suit was unlawful. The woman, Miriam Regalado, had filed a claim against her employer, North American Stainless, stating that it failed to promote her because she was a woman. The company later fired her fiancé. But the court ruled this was unfair retaliation against her.

Have I fallen down a rabbit hole? 

Why does the government control the hiring decisions of private employers? Why can’t a business hire or dismiss anyone it pleases? What’s wrong with denying promotion to someone because she is a woman given that most women rely on men for financial support and given that women are different from men? I thought the purpose of private enterprise was economic, not to remake the world into a female-dominated hellhole.

I guess I’m just a starry-eyed, nostalgic traditionalist who foolishly refuses to accept that things have changed.                         Read More »

THIRTY years ago, there were approximately 20,000 children educated at home in this country. A recent study puts the number at two million, or four percent of all school-age children. This is a remarkable development. Colleges now routinely accept homeschoolers.

The home schooling movement represents a successful challenge to the ideology and power of state-controlled schooling. All parents should welcome the growth of this movement whether they themselves home school or not. The homeschooling movement has led to parent-controlled ventures in education throughout the nation. Homeschooling is creating better schools.

The goal for traditionalists is not to abolish all schools and bring about universal homeschooling, but to break up the monopoly of government education.

JAMES BOWLING MOZLEY, the nineteenth-century English theologian, wrote:

A Christian is bound by his very creed to suspect evil, and cannot release himself. His religion has brought evil to light in a way which it never was before; it has shown its depth, subtlety, ubiquity; and a revelation, full of mercy on one  hand, is terrible in its exposure of the world’s real state on the other. The Gospel fastens the sense of evil upon the mind; a Christian is enlightened, hardened, sharpened, as to evil; he sees it where others do not …. He owns the doctrine of original sin; that doctrine puts him necessarily on his guard against all appearances, sustains his apprehension under perplexity, and prepares him for recognizing anywhere what he knows to be everywhere.

Daniel Mitsui

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VISHAL MEHRA writes:

I would like to offer a perspective on the culture, nation and immigration topic regarding your comments on the Pope.

Traditionally most societies were multicultural, a hodge-podge of races, castes and nomads, castoffs, immigrants, trading colonies and whatnot. Europe was no exception in the main but perhaps England was (along with some other Northern lands). Read More »

FROM The National Journal:

A recent paper by researchers at the Asian Development Bank Institute concluded that the iPhone, one of the United States’ top innovations of the past decade, actually contributes nearly $2 billion to our trade deficit because it is almost entirely produced and assembled in Asia. The paper also raises a conundrum for lawmakers and business leaders alike: If Apple moved its assembly line to the United States and created domestic jobs but didn’t raise the cost of the iPhone, the company would still turn a 50 percent profit on every one it sold.

JAMES N. writes:

As you may know, a doctor, Kermit Gosnell, has been arrested in Philadelphia and charged with several counts of murder. He ran an abortuary which delivered viable infants and then killed them by severing their spinal cords. Some of the details are quite gory – apparently in at least one case one of his nurses played with a child and then killed it. Read More »

H.G. WELLS, the British author, was a lifelong socialist and a member of the Fabian Society when Beatrice and Sydney Webb were its leading lights. In this excellent essay on Wells, Thomas F. Bertonneau describes the author’s encounters with the Webbs, whom he caricatured in his novel The New Machiavelli. As Mr. Bertonneau puts it,

People like the Webbs saw in dislocation and discontentment an opportunity to be in charge, to direct and assemble people, and to pull strings, but without knowing where to direct anyone or what someone ought to do to ameliorate the ills of a disintegrating society.  The Webbs liked bossing people about even to the extent of arranging, or attempting to arrange, marriages.  Wells finally saw the Webbs as ineffectual dilettantes, self-deluded, not as the architects of a rational utopia, and therefore he saw them as part of the existing confusion. Read More »

THIS IS me (left) in 1966 with my best friend, B. We look innocent, but actually we weren’t. We were always scheming. We wanted to buy cupcakes at the store down the street and never had enough cash. So we sold lemonade. We opened a nursery school and charged tuition (it lasted for a few days.) We opened a neighborhood library in the hopes of elevating minds and collecting fines for overdue books from other children. From the age of seven to about 13, we were constantly scheming. That’s what I mean by normality. We lived in a world apart. The rest of the human race had trivial concerns unrelated to cupcakes.

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Little Miss Muffet, Arthur Rackham

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I have become a Socialist not because I believe it would ameliorate the conditions of the masses (though I think it would do so) but because I believe that only under communal ownership of the means of production can you arrive at the most perfect form of individual development – at the greatest stimulus to individual effort; in other words complete Socialism is only consistent with absolute individualism. As such, some day, I will stand on a barrel and preach it.

Beatrice Potter, the British heiress who ventured into London slums and dockyards, wrote these words in her diary in 1890. She was born to socialism on her first meeting with Sidney Webb, then civil servant and Fabian socialist. Or rather, as she put it in her diary, she realized then that she had been a socialist all along. There was an element of predestination in her understanding of the phenomenon: the elect were chosen from birth.

Beatrice’s two published diaries, My Apprenticeship and Our Partnership, provide insights into the psychology of a nineteenth-century Anglican collectivist. Reading her recollections, one can’t help but conclude that her illusions about the salutary effects of socialism had a lot to do with her illusions about herself. There is a running conflict with her own womanliness. She wants to commit herself to this bold project of reforming society. On the other hand, she realizes she is not cut out for it, and has painful memories of Joseph Chamberlain, “a sacrament of pain fitting me for a life of loneliness and work.” She seems embarrassed and disappointed in herself for having fallen in love.

Sidney Webb, as it turned out, would dispel this conflict. Before he could do this, she had to overcome her dislike of him. She wrote in her diary:

His tiny tadpole body, unhealthy skin, lack of manner, cockney pronunciation, poverty are all against him. This self-complacent egotism, this disproportionate view of his own position is at once repulsive and ludicrous.  Read More »

THERE ARE many arguments that come sailing through the air like so many intellectual frisbees for why traditional motherhood is no longer desirable. One of these arguments is that the domestic role consigns women to stupidity. In other words, before women were careerists, their mental development was neglected.

Here is an interesting statistic that suggests otherwise. In 1920, in the United States, according to historian Theda Skocpol, women constituted almost half of the 283,000 students enrolled in institutions of higher learning. The vast majority of these female students became full-time mothers and wives after college. For most of these women, college was not vocational, but for higher learning. Read More »

REX WRITES:

One thing that puzzles me about your commitment to so-called ‘traditionalist roles’ is that the basis of your commitment seems to be unrelated to certain principles which govern human societies. 

By and large, societal roles — including those having to do with gender relations — are conditioned by the pressures which arise as a result of competition with other societies. Read More »

FEW RECENT STORIES in the mainstream news are less compelling to me than the uproar over Yale Law School Professor Amy Chua’s article in the Wall Street Journal “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior.” The article is based on Chua’s book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which is about raising her two daughters to be the sort of hyper-engineered students who are worthy of an Ivy League degree.

Chua, who seems to have done well by American educational institutions, criticizes American culture for being too lax with children. Having benefited from American largesse, she now turns on her hosts. This sort of criticism from an Asian reduces parents to a state of quivering, jello-like fear.

Americans are already in the grip of manufactured hysteria about whether their children can compete internationally. From the earliest moments of parenthood, they lie awake wondering whether their offspring will get into good colleges and if they will have the enormous treasures to pay for it. They read articles about how their children are dumber than the rest of the world, articles which are skewed by the failure to mention the demographic realities of American educational statistics, which include a large underclass that will never compete globally. They then welcome the heaps of homework their children receive. They give their sons and daughters over to assembly-line education all in the mistaken belief that training is all that matters.

Then Amy Chua comes along and tells them all this is not enough. Their children are still stupid, destined to sink to the nether levels of the global economy. I haven’t read all of the enormous commentary about Chua’s points, but I wonder if it has occurred to American parents that their children might not have to compete so hard if our colleges did not admit the best and brightest from the four corners of the globe and if our nation did not often fail to protect its own economic interests. In the grip of their irrational fears and great eagerness to please, they perhaps do not have the clarity of mind to see this. Read More »

Sidney Webb the socialist dined here to meet the Booths. A remarkable little man with a huge head on a very tiny body … somewhat unkempt, spectacles and a bourgeois black coat shiny with wear; somewhat between a London card and a German professor. His pronunciation is cockney, his H’s are shaky, his attitudes by no means elegant — with his thumbs fixed pugnaciously in a far from immaculate waistcoat, with is bulky head thrown back and his little body forward, he struts even when he stands, delivering himself with an extraordinary rapidity of thought and utterance and with an expression of inexhaustible self-complacency.

BEATRICE POTTER wrote these words in her diary the day of her first extended meeting with Sidney Webb in February, 1890 over dinner with others at the Devonshire House Hotel in London. The wealthy heiress, already considered a spinster at 32, was not entirely repulsed by this déclassé figure, the son of a Leicester hairdresser. She added to the above: “But I like the man. There is a directness of speech – an open-mindedness and imaginative warm-heartedness – which should carry him far.”

Two years later, after her repeated refusals and an almost constant exchange of letters, they married. 

This unlikely pair became an influential force in British politics and culture. Founders of the London School of Economics and the weekly journal The New Statesman, they were the foremost proponents of Fabianism, the idealistic strain of socialism which shaped the modern Nanny state. 

They were “two second-rate minds,” as Beatrice put it, a judgment that has been amply confirmed by posterity, especially in light of their later enthusiasm for Stalinism and their support for eugenics. Nevertheless, these architects of modern collectivism, with its bureaucratic governance by experts and gradual permeation of all institutions, were intelligent and enterprising. Their romance and marriage was a strange melding of Victorian refinement and quasi-religious political fervor. Read More »

IN THIS 2002 piece about Pope John Paul II, Lawrence Auster describes the Pope’s use of conservative rhetoric to expound liberal ideas that deny the essential connection between culture and human dignity. He writes of the Pope’s speech to UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, delivered in Paris in 1980:

Throughout the speech, John Paul II keeps evoking the larger wholes of culture and nation, but only in light of their subordinate function in fulfilling the spiritual strivings and psychological needs of the individual person. The larger whole has no existence or transcendent value in itself. Read More »