In a previous entry, a reader named Joel complained that it isn’t possible for young hard-working professionals in their twenties to form families without some dramatic changes in social policy. To this, readers and I responded that young couples would be wise to accept relative poverty for the sake of having children while they are young. This, we argued, is the best way to save the West from further decline and to achieve personal happiness.

But, let’s be honest about what this advice means. It means that people such as Joel must step outside the world they live in and go it alone. The fact is, they will lose friends and status for the sake of a less materialistic way of life.

More than a hundred years ago, Thorsten Veblen, in his Theory of the Leisure Class, described our situation, a society in which large numbers of people would choose conspicuous consumption over family contentment and a higher birthrate.

He wrote:

The accepted standard of expenditure in the community or in the class to which a person belongs largely determines what his standard of living will be. It does this directly by commending itself to his common sense as right and good, through his habitually contemplating it and assimilating the scheme of life in which it belongs; but it does so also indirectly through popular insistence on conformity to the accepted scale of expenditure as a matter of propriety, under pain of disesteem and ostracism.

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Can you imagine any portion of the male anatomy deified as the female breast has been in recent years? If there were ten-foot phallic symbols lining the mall in Washington, would we be any more in thrall to masculinity than we are to femininity in our current state of outright breast-worship?

Last week, newspapers and TV news programs gave top billing to the news that women in their forties may do okay without mammograms. It was as if government officials had ordered mass mastectomies, so intense was the alarm and the widespread concern that the breast – o, sacred teat! – was not being given its due.

Breast cancer is a serious and terrible scourge. But, breast cancer in women in their forties is not as pressing a concern as male heart disease or childhood leukemia and yet it is hard to believe similarly minor news about these diseases would have received such near-hysterical attention.

No, the breast is sacred.

But it is also profane. With the current state of women’s fashion, the breast has been ironically cheapened at the very moment of its glorification. There is more exposed cleavage in the average corporate office than rump roasts in Costco’s refrigerated cases. The breast spills forth from its bindings with molten overabundance. Even the female leaders of Western nations –  senators, ministers and diplomats – freely advertise their wares. Over-exposed in this way, the breast becomes something sad:  just one more piece of flesh. 

And yet how beautiful it can be. How truly sacred it is. Fountain of life. Pillow for weary heads. Gift to men. Nothing more lovely was conceived by God. If we did not see the body itself as profane, a mere biological manufacture, we would not deify the breast as we do.

From Milton’s Il Penseroso:

But let my feet never fail,                                   
To walk the studious Cloysters pale,
And love the high embowed Roof,
With antick Pillars massy proof,
And storied Windows richly dight,
Casting a dim religious light.
There let the pealing Organ blow,
To the full voic’d Quire below,
In Service high, and Anthems cleer,
As may with sweetness, through mine ear,
Dissolve me into extasies,
And bring all Heav’n before mine eyes.
And may at last my weary age
Find out the peaceful hermitage,
The Hairy Gown and Mossy Cell,
Where I may sit and rightly spell
Of every Star that heav’n doth shew,
And every Herb that sips the dew;
Till old experience do attain
To something like Prophetic strain.
These pleasures Melancholy give,
And I with thee will choose to live.

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Apparently some people think they should.

Lydia Sherman writes:

I get comments all the time, intended for my blog, Home Living,  telling me that any freedom I have is due to the efforts on the part of feminists of the past. This comes from a false view of history and a false view of womanhood. 

See the rest of Lydia’s comments in the post “An Accusation of Phoniness.”

A long Sunday magazine article in yesterday’s New York Times, explores the effect of DNA testing on the men and children who sudddenly discover they are not biologically related.

Eric writes:

I was horrified by the Times piece and left a long comment there that apparently didn’t get past the moderators.

My take on it is that the Times completely stepped around the heart of the story, which is that (thanks to the new technology), the women who deceive their mates with the mockingbird’s hatchlings are now confronted with the truth. It is a terribly painful situation, hard for the men (there are two of them), hard for the woman, but mostly hard for the child. But what matters most is (1) it is the woman who set up the tragedy, first by infidelity, then by deceit, and (2) the longer it takes for everyone to get the truth, the more it hurts when they do.

So what does the Times write about?

They write about how the English common law, written centuries before the existence of any kind of blood test, has always shaken down the men (it’s traditional! we love tradition!). They write about how much it hurts when the truth comes out (better they never know!). They write about how much adoptive dads love their kids (DNA doesn’t matter!). They write about men, who after decades of bonding with someone else’s child, choose to continue to support them after they learn the truth (they would be fathers anyway, no need to tell them!). And they write about kids who are devastated when their “fathers” push them away after the test results come in (damn those stupid tests!).

But about the women who lie, cheat, and steal themselves and their families into this horrible situation, they say not one unkind word.

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A male reader writes:

Interesting blog. Unfortunately I’m among many men that will not be convinced. You are as much the recipient of the Matriarchy’s benefits as a strident ideological Feminist. There are no women attempting to turn back the Violence Against Women Act, ‘family’ court secrecy, and various other gross violations of the Constitution. Why is that?

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Katherine S. writes:

Your evaluation of Sarah Palin is completely accurate in my view. Just wanted you to know that! She has done tremendous harm to the concept of traditional motherhood, for all the reasons you have mentioned. And, if she were not so pretty and glamorous, she would be a nobody.

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Annie, a reader who is age 23, writes:

I am expecting baby number three! My husband told a friend from work, a young man in his late twenties, and do you know what he said? “Oh, and your wife’s a Catholic, so she doesn’t believe in abortion, huh?” “NO” was my husbands firm reply, with a disgusted, angry look in his intimidating, Sicilian eyes. Can you believe that is the response you get for having a third baby in Boulder? Unbelievable! Like we’re idiots because we don’t want to murder one of our children!

Laura writes:

Congratulations to you. That is wonderful.

I am not surprised at the response of your husband’s co-worker, as revolting as it was. People hesitate to have children today not just because of the economic burden, but because of an active disdain for the disorder and unpredictability of family life. Children are spoiled today and yet so despised. They are not machines. And, that’s the problem.

It’s amazing that some people still believe overpopulation is a problem. Westerners commit cultural suicide by not replacing themselves yet some consider it noble to withold the fruit of their loins. Westerners travel the world to procure children whom they believe are uncared for and yet when someone produces a large family here, they say, “That’s going too far!”

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 “Dear Sister. Do you miss home? When are you coming home to me?”

This is a quote from one little girl’s letter to another. They are twin sisters. One remains in China where she was born while the other was seized from the home of relatives and put up for adoption on the international market.

The quote comes from the remarkable articles of Barbara Demick of the Los Angeles Times on the sometimes fraudulent adoption business in China. Most of the children end up in the homes of families in the United States. According to some Christians, it is the duty of Americans to take these children thousands of miles away from their families in order to expose them to Christianity and give them all the material benefits of life in the West. [See discussion below about this statement.]

Here is more from Demick’s piece on the twin girl who was seized by government officials:

The twins were separated before their first birthday, when their mother, Yuan Zanhua, a migrant worker, went off to another province. Afraid she wouldn’t be able to handle two babies in addition to an older daughter, Yuan took Shangjie, strapping her to her back, and left the other twin, Xiuhua, with her brother and sister-in-law in the countryside.

Then on May 30, 2002, a dozen officials from the local family planning office stormed Yuan’s brother’s house. They grabbed 20-month-old Xiuhua, shoved her into a car and drove off.

Although couples aren’t supposed to be penalized for having twins, and this rural family was entitled under Chinese law to a second child because their first was a girl, the family planning officials demanded 6,000 yuan, then about $750. The brother had the money, but when he went to get the girl back, they demanded 2,000 yuan more.

“My brother borrowed money from all the families in the village, a little here and a little there. If people could only give 10 yuan, they did,” says Yuan. But when her brother handed over the money, the family planning officials again raised their demands.

“He’d already borrowed money from hundreds of people,” she says. “There was just no way he could get any more.”

By the time Yuan got home, Xiuhua had been sent to the orphanage in nearby Shaoyang. When she complained to the family planning office, she says, the officials sneered at her: “Why did you give birth to so many babies?”

By the way, I have met Barbara Demick. She is one of the finest journalists in America.

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Lines of Love

O, Sarah we’ll always love you
No matter what you do
With eyes, smile, and glasses
Or the teasingly-tousled do.
You’re a pipeline of hope for America,
A cup of true liberty;
Like Joan, Deborah, and Diana,
A torch of femininity.
From the moons and mountains of Alaska
Came this pure and radiant force.
You’ll dine on elites for breakfast
And ride the Beltway on your horse.
O, Sarah we will always love you
Even when they say you’re essentially dumb.
We’ll stand by you and protect you
From now til eternity come.

Most people probably would say that America’s school buildings resemble prisons with windows – and without the barbed wire – because it would be too expensive to make them otherwise. But, that doesn’t make sense. Some of this ugliness is enormously costly.

In 1906, William Torrey Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education, wrote in his influential book The Philosophy of Education:

The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places…. It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world.

I agree with John Taylor Gatto, author of a more recent book on education, Weapons of Mass Instruction. This architecture serves one of the main purposes of school. Its aim is to create a shallow inner life.

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IN a dialogue on international adoption at the website What’s Wrong with the World this week, I argued that child adoption should occur only within national borders. We cannot control the adoption business in other countries or ever be assured that it does not become a form of child trafficking, especially given the large sums Westerners are willing to pay.

A recent story in the Los Angeles Times confirms my point. According to Barbara Demick:

Since the early 1990s, more than 80,000 Chinese children have been adopted abroad, the majority to the United States.

The conventional wisdom is that the babies, mostly girls, were abandoned by their parents because of the traditional preference for boys and China’s restrictions on family size. No doubt, that was the case for tens of thousands of the girls.

But some parents are beginning to come forward to tell harrowing stories of babies who were taken away by coercion, fraud or kidnapping — sometimes by government officials who covered their tracks by pretending that the babies had been abandoned.

Parents who say their children were taken complain that officials were motivated by the $3,000 per child that adoptive parents pay orphanages.

“Our children were exported abroad like they were factory products,” said Yang Libing, a migrant worker from Hunan province whose daughter was seized in 2005. He has since learned that she is in the United States.

Doubts about how babies are procured for adoption in China have begun to ripple through the international adoption community.

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Joel, the reader who wrote in the previous entry, sends this:

I appreciate your reply.  The sense of abandonment felt by middle-class aspiring males in my generation is immense.  Combine this with the preachiness and sentimentality of most social conservatives from older generations, my mother being a good example, and you get a festering resentment toward more traditional forms of living.

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In a previous entry, a reader commented that it was impossible to reverse the destructive course of sexual liberation because the age of marriage and child-rearing is now relatively late. People can’t wait to have sex until they’re 30 and it is no longer possible, for economic reasons, to get married earlier.

I responded that there are a number of social and economic remedies to this, but I forgot to mention another way people can marry sooner: by becoming more resourceful with a single income. Here a reader explains it well.

Gail Aggen writes:

I was sitting with a group of fellow baby-boomers and younger folks, discussing current events. I pointed out how the fertility rate among Americans, has, but for the Hispanic immigrants, fallen below sustainable levels. Europe is in even worse shape, as I am sure people know. I voiced my somewhat flippant opinion that the best thing that could happen for America would be to bring all the soldiers home so they could make lots of babies (within the context of marriage, of course). This would save all that blood and treasure and do more to protect our country from our enemies (who are procreating at quite a clip), than remaining in the Middle East. Just my opinion of course.

One of the ladies, my age, replied by asking me, “Well, how could they afford to support all these children?” That is a fair enough question, and here is the answer.

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If the rich countries of the West could bring thirty percent, or even five percent, of the poor children of the Third World into Western homes, taking them away from their poor parents and poor grandparents and poor cousins, removing them from the grinding poverty that limits their prospects and shortens their lives,would this be the best thing for these children? The answer to this question appears to be, ‘Yes,’ according to those who support unlimited adoption of the unfortunate children of the world by Western couples.

I say the answer is, ‘No.’  The poor are just like the rich in one respect. They need more than material things. They need their home lands and their people. They cannot be stripped naked of these and be forced to accept a creed of universal liberation. They are human too, not rootless beings fed only by abstractions and material goods.

“If the poor man’s right was only derived from strict necessity, your piddling selfishness would soon reduce him to a bare minimum, paid for by unending gratitude and servility.”

Such are the words of Monsieur le Curé de Torcy, the senior curate of George Bernanos’ The Diary of a Country Priest. He continues to say of  Christ’s claim, The poor you have always with you, but me you have not always with you:

Rich and poor alike, you’d do better to look at yourselves in the mirror of want, for poverty is the image of your own fundamental illusion. Poverty is the emptiness in your hearts and in your hands. It is only because your malice is known to Me that I have placed poverty so high, crowned her and taken her as My bride. If once I allowed you to think of her as an enemy, or even as a stranger, if I let you hope that one day you might drive her out of the world, that would be the death sentence of the weak.

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LAURA F. writes to Laura Wood:

I know you’re taking a lot of flak from Mrs. Palin’s admirers right now, so I wanted to let you know I appreciate your assessments of her. She is absolutely a feminist. Feminism has been assimilated into mainstream U.S. conservatism and the conservatives haven’t even noticed it. People many years my senior who claim to support conservative family values love her, and I ask them, “If 20 years ago she had come on the scene as she now is, would you have considered her a conservative?” They don’t seem to think it matters because liberalism has progressed so far since then. So in many minds, conservatism means “staying a few steps behind the liberals” rather than having eternal principles. And people are so alienated from our own traditional family structure that they think it comparable to life under the ayatollahs in Iran. Thanks for putting your courageous voice out there.

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FROM today’s New York Times:

An Army cook and single mother is under investigation and confined to her post after skipping her deployment flight to Afghanistan because, she said, no one was available to care for her son while she was overseas.

The woman, Specialist Alexis Hutchinson, 21, said she had no choice but to refuse deployment orders because the only relative who could care for her 10-month-old son, her mother, was overwhelmed by the task and already caring for three other relatives with health problems.

Her civilian lawyer, Rai Sue Sussman, said one of Specialist Hutchinson’s superiors told her she would have to go anyway and put the child in foster care.

Feminism is great, isn’t? It’s given women the thrilling opportunity to put their children in foster care so that they can go off and work as Army cooks. As Sarah Palin put it, “Things have changed. There’s so much equality now.”

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In my previous post on Obesity in America, I argued that the poor eating habits of Americans were not just a result of economics or poor nutritional advice or even the decline in home cooking, but of a deep and pervasive spiritual lassitude.

The problem of course is not unique to this country. Britain has seen the same phenomenon, perhaps to an even greater degree, among its native population.  Theodore Dalrymple describes it here:

I tell the doctors that in all my visits to the white households in the area, of which I’ve made hundreds, never—not once—have I seen any evidence of cooking. The nearest to this activity that I have witnessed is the reheating of prepared and packaged food, usually in a microwave. And by the same token, I have never seen any evidence of meals taken in common as a social activity—unless two people eating hamburgers together in the street as they walk along be counted as social.

This is not to say that I haven’t seen people eating at home; on the contrary, they are often eating when I arrive. They eat alone, even if other members of the household are present, and never at table; they slump on a sofa in front of the television. Everyone in the household eats according to his own whim and timetable. Even in so elementary a matter as eating, therefore, there is no self-discipline but rather an imperative obedience to impulse. Needless to say, the opportunity for conversation or sociality that a meal taken together provides is lost. English meals are thus solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.