Hildegarde

So, yes, the Facebook thing-

I’m sort of with those people who don’t see the point, although it does seem to me that it might come in handy if you have to make a general announcement an want everybody to see, but for some reason can’t or don’t want to call them or e-mail them all individually.

And the way I first went to Facbook started like that.  My high school graduating class was having its 40th reunion, and I  was pretty sure that I wasn’t going to make it, or to make much of it. 

And the thing is,  I wanted to.  I know a lot of you think I had a God awful time in high school, mostly because of Somebody Else’s Music, but SEM is actually a reflection of what happened to me in junior high.  I actually had a kick ass time in high school.

Part of that was certainly the fact that my high school didn’t have much in common with your regular American public school.   There was a cheerleadin team, but I’m not sure what they cheered for–a boys’ school in the vicinity, I think–but nobody paid much attention to them.  

“Popular” in this place didn’t mean athletic, or cute, or any of the rest of it.  Since all the students were girls, it was usually pretty impossible to tell if anyone was dating at all, never mind if the date in question was “cool.”

So “popular” ended up being scholastically accomplished–it was comprised of the people who made the Honor societies (plural) and the people who got the highest SAT scores and the people who were most likely to end up in “name” colleges. 

It was the first place I’d ever been where a girls’ status depended on her brains and ambition, and it existed before there was anything like a feminist movement afoot in the land. 

Sometimes, reading through the comments here about how the English department was full of people who looked down on everybody and thought they were better than everybody else, I get a little frisson of recognition, but it’s not English departments I’m seeing.  

I did, in fact, know a lot of people, growing up, with the attitudes Robert ascribes to his English department, but none of them were in the English department, or involved intellectually in any way at all.

And part of me woners if the widespread distaste of academics for American middle class life might come from this–growing up in a world where just being smart was enough to earn you endless, sneering abuse.

But, like I said, my place was not like this, and I was interested in seeing people, and especially the people I’d been closest to.  Checking in with people you were once close to that you have not seen in forty years is an interesting exercise.

But as I got closer and closer to the time, it became more and more obvious that I wasn’t going to make it, or that if I did it was going to be for no more than a few hours at the end.  

Since some of the people who were organizing this were putting up information and notes on Facebook, I signed on to Facebook in order to see them, and I signed on under my birth name because that’s the name most of these people would remember me as. 

Or rather, they’d remember me by a nickname I hated beyond belief and got stuck with because my cousins also went to this school and wouldn’t call me anything else.  Or allow anyone else to call me anything else.

For what it’s worth, those same cousins still won’t call me anything else, and they go into paroxysms of snit whenever they remember that I didn’t change my name when  I married.

Paroxysms of snit.  That should be the title of something.

Anyway, once I got onto Facebook, all hell broke loose fairly quickly, and it sort of got worse by the day. 

Or maybe worse isn’t the word. More out of control by the day may be more like it.  For one thing, there are a lot of people out there who know a lot more about the names I might be going under than you’d think.   This resulted in my immediately getting “friend requests” for a gazillion people, which, you know was fine.  I’m a sociable sort if I don’t have to sit in a crowded room with people getting liquored up, and I was happy to have them.

Then here were the requests, which had to do with stuff like food fights, which I finally tried out the other day, and have no idea if I responded correctly.  I figure I’ll get back to that when I have a chance.

I did upload some photographs of the cats, nice ones taken by my friends Carol and  Richard when they were over one Sunday, because I’ve sort of decided to use the Facebook page for the happy-face stuff.  

But I also started looking around on Facebook as a sort of general thing, and I came up with some stuff that confuses me.

I understand this as a way to do general announcements, and to find people you haven’t seen in a long time but would like to get back in touch with, or to keep in touch with people you don’t get much of a chance to correspond with or see otherwise.

But the more I looked around, the more I realized that there are a fair number of people who use Facebook to communicate with people they see all the time.  And I do mean all the time.  

Could somebody explain this to me?  Why do you need to send messages through a Fac ebook page when you talk to that someone at least once a week, if not oftener?  There has to be something going on here I don’t get exactly. 

Okay, there’s a lot I don’t get.  I’ve already had to be rescued twice from accidentally subscribing to expensive silliness I had no idea–and still have no idea–how I got myself into.

But certainly there’s got to be something going on here that isn’t just about “communicating,” since some of these people were communicating just fine before Facebook came along.

And what is the difference, exactly, between Facebook and MySpace? 

Okay, I haven’t been to MySpace to check it out.  But it sounds the same when people describe it to me. 

Right.  Anyway.  Here we go again, Jane confronts popular culture and is confused.

But yesterday there was a story in the news about a guy who is suing a Vegas casino because he lost his shirt, which has got to be the ultimate “it’s not MY fault” story in the world.

And tomorrow I’ll get back to morality, the Humanities, and Nathaniel Hawthorne redux, since I’m reading The Blithedale Romance at the moment.

Every once in a while, I end up having these epiphanies about stuff everybody else knows about, but that I’ve never heard of.  I lead a sheltered life.

Anyway, the first of these has to do with country music, and it came to me because the people hired to work my television cable company’s customer service department are possibly the stupidest people on the fact of the planet.

Let’s just leave it, at the moment, that after about a year and a half of screwing me over on a matter that required things like sending registered letters, the company decided to calm me down by giving me a year’s worth of free cable service–and when they did that, they gave me what they called the “Gold Package.”

I think the idea is that, once you’ve had the  Gold Package, you’ll be so addicted to your television you won’t ever want to cancel service again.

They’re wrong, mostly, although I am going to miss the European news channels, not only the BBC World News  Service but another one that seems to be operating out of Paris. 

But the other thing I’m going to miss is, believe it or not, the country music channels. 

Sometime when I wasn’t paying attention–and I was never paying attention, so this could have happened eons ago–country music changed what it was.   There are still the kind of songs most non-country fans think of as “country,” like Dolly Parton’s “Backwoods  Barbie,” but they’re rare–there’s even a song, called “Johnny Cash is Dead and  His  House Burned  Down” about the lack of good old fashioned country music.

It wouldn’t be half as funny if it wasn’t for the fact that it is not, itself, good old fashioned country music.

What else is on there is, well, American popular culture, and it’s not just for Americans any more.   It’s not just for white guys, either.  There are now black guy s on the country circuit, including one of the moment’s biggest superstars, a guy named Darius Rucker.

There’s also this other guy, probably one of the two or three biggest names in the genre at the moment, called  Keith Urban–who’s from Australia. 

But here’s the thing.  If I ever worried about the state of America, what made me worry about it was MTV.  It’s not just that the stuff on the straight rock channels these days is largely rude, crude, and lewd–that can be a good thing if it’s done right–or that all the male artists seem determined to look as decadently grotesque as possible, or that all the women seem to be dancing on poles and talking about their vaginas.

(If you think I’m exaggerating, go see if you can find a video of Lady Gaga’s “Love Game.”)

No, my real problem is that everything on VH-1 and MTV feels artificial and manufactured, as artificial and manufactured as any old Bobby Darin ballad, but less pleasant.  

And it doesn’t shock anybody any more, or at least it doesn’t shock me, because it’s the same old same old.   Yes, you hate your parents and love your drugs, the world is a mess and it’s all somebody’s fault, and you over there are sixteen and really hot so you’re going to talk about screwing.  Big deal.

There’s certainly some stuff on the country stations that feels manufactured–what is it about record executives that makes them all so enamored of crooing?–but there’s incredible variety and what I think is an admirable concentration, by both the artists and the stationss, on real life.

As for the music, there’s the pretty straightforward (but not lewd) pop, as in Taylor  Swift and Kellie Pickler (she of the Pearl Harbor started Vietnam celebrity quiz show gaffe); the good-time party pop (see Kenny Chesney)l and a throwback not to old country music but to the very birth of rock and roll, in a song called “Firecracker” that could have been done by Jerry Lee Lewis. 

There’s also an incredible amount of political stuff, all of it realistically concentrated on blue collar troubles in the present crisis, none of it self-referential, self-satisfied, look-I’m-a-revolutionary crap. 

Which is interesting, because if there’s a really huge difference between  MTV and GAC, it’s definitely in the non-musical programming about the artists.   MTV gives you Cribs, which shows off the houses of very rich people and concetrates, as in my favorite Nickelback song, on “living in hilltop houses driving fifteen cars.”

GAC gives you little profiles of the artists at home, but only if they’re just starting out.  Here’s a band that has a hit this summer, but they’re still not making enough money to do it full time, so here are the tract houses they live in and here’s where the leads singer works in a body shop.

The relentless drumbeat is home, family, church and regular life, and it makes the political songs–my favorite is something called “Shutting Detroit Down”–a punch political songs don’t have when they’re done by, you know, Bono.

It also makes for different politics, which is something for a different entry on this blog, someday. 

Let’s just say that the Dixie Chicks do not know how to pick their spots.

 The kicker in all this, though, is the work of two men, Brad Paisley and Trace Adkins.  Adkins does a fair amount of what is standard for country these days (“You’re Gonna Miss This”), spiced up with some seriously funny stuff like the one about how he’s going to marry for money and the one I really like, called “Honky Tonk  Bedonkadonk” which–well, let’s just say that you can be a lot more entertaining about lewd sex if you’re not that lewd.

What Paisley does is to make fun not only of the usual subjects–he’s got one called “I’m So Much Cooler Online” that should be the anthem of a generation–but also of himself and of the stereotypes about country music prevalent in the culture at large.  There’s “I’m Gonna Miss Her,” which almost made me punch the remote when it started, because I was so sure it was going to be Paisley’s entry in the sad ballad sweepstakes, but which turned out instead to be the story of this guy who lovs his wife, but he really loves his fish, too, so when she threatens to leave him if he goes fishing this morning, well…he goes.

Paisley’s songs are well written and inventive lyrically, but his videos are good enough to knock you on your ass.   The one for “I’m So Much Cooler Online” stars  Jason  Alexander as the son of two quarreling old farts, with the father played by William  Shatner.  “I’m Gonna Miss Her” seems to feature some actual local television reporters doing updates on fishing competitions.  

Then there’s the one, which I’ve only seen as a performance video taken from a live act, called “I’m Still A Guy,” which is a comment not only the whole Metrosexual thing, but the Feminization of Everything thing I was talking about a few months back as it relates to boys in schools.

There’s a lot about love of God and love of country, but none of it is smarmy and none of it is stupid.  My guess is that Mr. Paisley has a very good mind indeed, with an attitude straight out of the Weasley brothers. 

The approach to religion is something I didn’t think I’d ever see in American Protestantism, and I don’t think most of these guys would take somebody like  Pat Robertson or the Reverend Falwell seriously for a minute.  There seems to be an easy acceptance of both religion and personal imperfection–a guy named Billy Crudington wrote a song whose tag line is “God is great, beer is good, and people are crazy.”

I don’t mean to be going on and on about something that isn’t really related to reading, which is where this blog started, but I’ve always thought that the two most significant modern art forms were film and jazz, with jazz defined to include everything that came out of it, from blues and country to pop and rock. 

And for a while, it seemed to me that the music had mostly just died.  What you see on MTV these days is largely forgettable, and the frighten-the-cows thing is so stale it puts me to sleep.   All that seemed to be left of popular music was adolescent posturing and lots of concentration on how much money you could spend, whether it made any sense to spend it or not. 

And I never got to Facebook.  But.  You know.  What the hell.

Okay, I’ll admit it.   There’s really no point to the title of this post except that I was thinking of Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, and I really like wombats.

I’ve also got to admit that I’ve never read The Turn of the Screw, largely because it always seemed to me that teachers tended to assign it not because it was the best James, but because it was relatively short, and therefore suitable for students who didn’t really like to read.

I wonder how much of the literature that gets beat up here as awful and boring gets assigned for the same reason–not because it’s the best that could be assigned, but because it’s relatively short and therefore at least theoretically easier to read.  That might explain why so much of what people here think is part of the Canon consists of stuff I managed to get through four years of high school, four years of college, and seven years of grad school without ever having been assigned even once.

That said–I think most of you think of morality differently than I do.  For one thing, I think we need to separate the essential from the secondary. Take the sentence “any moral code that is to prove workable must do something to control the innate aggressiveness of young men, by drafting them into the armed forces and training them to be disciplined soldiers instead of rootless loose cannons.”

Only the first half of that sentence is essential.  The second half is a strategy, not a moral precept, even if it presents itself in society as “it’s immoral for young men not to join the army and do their bit.”

I think that one of the problems with talking about morality and moral codes is that we tend to frame our statements about strategy as if they were moral precepts.  It is, I think, the differences in strategy that make moral codes look vastly different when they very rarely are. 

That’s not to say the strategies are necessarily negligible.  Sometimes they are, and sometimes they’re not.  But questions of strategy rest on different foundations than questions of morality, and mixing the two together only makes everything look arbitrary and muddled.

Thinking of the human capacity for thinking in moral terms as analagous for the human capacity for language explains a lot of things, not the least of them the tendency of people who vigorously deny the existence of morality altogether (everything is relative!) to engage in highly puritanical, often hysterical moral censoriousness under other names.  Cigarettes?  Fossil fuels?  Hate speech?

What’s more, when we’re dealing with something that is an essential question of morality–sexual behavior, for instance–the moral thinking not only comes back with a vengance, but comes back in the very same area we pretended to banish it from.  Sex?  Well, sex is good, everybody gets to decide what to do about sex, that’s none of society’s business, we should all do our own thing–but if you’re over eighteen and have sex with somebody under eighteen, we’ll lock you up for five years, even if she was seventeen at the time and you were nineteen and the only reason the two of you had sex is that she walked into your dorm room stark naked and threw you a condom. 

Hell, we’ll go farther than that.   If you’re a fiteen year old girl and take a naked picture of yourself on your cell phone and then send that picture to everybody you know, we’ll brand you as a sex offender for life, and do the same to everybody you sent the picture to, even people who didn’t want the picture or know it was coming. 

What’s more, we lump everything from the actual rape of a six year old to the consensual sex between a nineteen year old and a seventeen year old as a “sex crime,” and if we catch you doing any of it we will make you register as a “sex offender” and brand you, literally, for life, and warn the public about you in a way that makes it impossible to know what you actually did.  They will assume,  however, that you violently raped somebody, or molested a child, because why else would you have to register at all?

If you look at this stuff, you’ll notice that what it is is an attempt, once again, to control the sexual behavior of young and youngish men.  All the different rules about sex that have come down to us over time, from the burqa to the sex offender registry, exist largely to protect women and children from the sexuality of men. 

In Crete before very modern times–we’re talking right up to WWII here–mothers carefully sequestered their daughters from the men in their own families once the girls reached puberty.  The assmption seemed to be that men would nail anybody or anything if they got the chance, so it was important not to give them the chance. 

We’d call that wrong,  punishing the (prospective) victim instead of the (prospective) perpetrator, and it’s not the kind of rule I’m fond of myself, but it speaks to a deep and abiding conviction in all human societies at all times that sex is a dangerous thing, and that the sexuality of men is violent, volatile, unrustworthy and anarchic.

Controling that sexual behavior is an essential moral question.  Wheter we do it by sequestering women, establihing parietal hours, or running sex offender registers is a matter of strategy.

Nor do I think that it’s all that odd that so many people do not follow the moral rules they’ve been brought up with, even in societies where failing to follow them results in harsh penalities.

Genes are blindly driven to insure their survival and replication at any cost.  Morality addresses individual behavior in order to direct it away from radical selfishness and towards a concern for and recognition of others.

Moral precepts that insist we keep alive men and women who have passed their ability to reproduce are almost certainly reacting to something hardwired–respect for elders is something else that tends to exist almost universally in all societies. 

And the evolutionary advantage in that should be obvious–in a preliterate world, there’s a lot to know and no way to know it but acquiring it painfully and over a long period.  The Elders might not be able to have children, but they’ll enhance the ability of their grandchildren and your children to surrive to reproduce themselves by their knowledge of things like agriculture, hunting, cooking, and building shelters.

Obviously, strategies matter in another way, too–some of them are conducive to the advancement of civilization and technology, others seem to just mire themselves in an eternal present. 

But–just to throw a bombshell at the end here–there’s something else that has existed in all societies everywhere until the twentieth century.

Religion.

A few years ago, I reread a lot of Henry James’s novels–I’m a big James fan, and I still think The Princess Cassamassima is the best tourist-at-the-revolution portrait I’ve seen yet–and I got a little shock in the middle of The Bostonians. 

For those of you who haven’t read James–and that seems to be mostly everybody lately–The Bostonians is the story of the rivalry of two people for the love and loyalty of a very beautiful young girl.  The rivalry has as much to do with the rivals’ philosophies of life as it does with ordinary sexual love.  One of the rivals is a down-at-heels Southern aristocrat with very traditional ideas about the relationships between men and women and the position of women in society.  The other is a high-born Boston woman and ardent suffragist whose bookish, pinched and censorious nature make her a bad political campaigner.  She hopes to turn the young woman into a fiery and effective crusader for women’s rights.

James being James, the Southerner, and the primeval urges for sex and procreation, win in the end, but the scene that always sticks in my mind is of the little band of women’s rights activists spending the Fourth of July at a house on Cape Cod, where they parade with candles and sparklers to celebrate “the Glorious Fourth.”    They’re absolutely ecstatic.  They love everything about the Fourth.  They think it’s the most important day in human history.   And they show no signs of the niggling, pinched, resentful anti-Americanism that characteried a lot of later American radicals.

I trust James for observations like this.   He’s good at them, and he had absolutely no patience with the kind of preening self-satisfied distaste for one’s own society that he found running rampant in radical circles in England, for instance, at the time. 

I find all this interesting, because it means that there are no necessary connections between the two branches of thought–that there is no reason why, if you’re the kind of person who wants significant chane, you must also feel that your own society is so thoroughly and irretrievably corrupt that it must be either worthless, or at least worth less than that of anybody else’s society anywhere.

Never mind.  I really love Henry James.  I think it was The Portrait of a Lady that gave me my first glimpse of what I would later feel to be the best way to live, and that in spite of the fact that Isabel Archer largely makes a mess of it.  Well, no, actually not.  Maybe the thing is that she makes a success of it in spite of having made a choice so catastrophically wrong it should have destroyed her.

I also think it’s interesting that James should have been the person to have focussed so much attention on the tourist-at-the-revoution business, and to have had so little sympathy for people who rejected and denigrated their American (or British, when it came to that) heritage. 

He lived most of his adult life outside the United States, largely because he was uncomfortable here.  He came from what Jonathan Franzen would later call “the high art tradition” with a vengeance.   He was the distinguished son of a distinguished and highly intellectual  Boston family.  He knew his bluestocking feminists at first hand.  He was homosexual at a time when there was not much room for it in New England.  He was naturally and by conviction an elitist in both the good and the bad sense, and this was a country that had just defeated its only even close to aristocratic tradition.  

Still, I’ll take James over any of the other nineteenth century novelists writing in  English.  I think he’s better than Dickens or  Trollopse and certainly better than Hawthorne or Melville, even the Melville of Moby Dick. 

There’s very little overarching philosophy in  James and a lot of careful attention to the details of everyday social ritual, or the lack of it.   His people, and especially his women, are among the most highly realized characters in all of prose fiction. 

He can be difficult to read, and he was not terribly commercially successful when he was alive.  He was one of those writers whom later writers needed to love or hate.  Edith Wharton made him not only her mentor (which he was, for a time), but her ideal.  Hemingway defined  his entire career in opposition to everything he thought James stood for.

I have a tendency to think of “American Literature” in the New England  Renaissance mode, as that body of work that includes both Hawthorne and Melville but also Whitman, literature about plain people in a plain country.   Even the New York of Bartleby the Scrivener–another of my favorite American stories, come to think of it, and the only Melville I think is nearly as good as even mediocre James–but even the New York in that story is a place with not very many people in it and not very much else, either. 

I know I’m not making much sense here.  I’m trying to describe something that is literally visual in my head, rather than verbal, and I don’t seem to be very good at it.  But it’s there in Emily  Dickinson, too, and in Winesburg, Ohio, and in Hemingway’s early stories about Michigan.  

And it’s even there in F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was consciously trying to write about the intricate web of social interactions, but who produced mostly stories about people behaving archly in a largely uninhabited landscape.  

James does something different, and so does his protegee, Edith Wharton. 

If you’ve got access to interlibrary loan or the kind of library that carries esoteric and not very popular books, try getting hold of an essay by George Steiner called “Archives of Eden.”  It’s a very long esay.  It could h ave been pulished on its own as a small paperback without too many complaints.  It’s basically an argument that says that America can never have truly great art because truly great art cannot be produced in a democratic society.   Truly great art, Steiner says, requires elitism to exist at all.

Well, James seems to have managed.  And although he was uncomfortable living in democracy, he had neither hatred nor disdain for it. 

And I’ve got no idea what that’s supposed to mean.

Back to hardwiring and moral codes–especially since Lymaree seems to have misunderstood me–tomorrow.

Let me just note that I have NEVER said that human beings were hardwired for any particular moral code or moral precepts.

I have said instead that:

1) human beings are hardwired for a lot of things, including the ability to think in moral categories and the drive to do so (just as we’re hardwire to be able to form languages and then to do it) AND

2) that by looking into all the things we are hardwired for, it is possible to apply our capacity to formulate moral codes to discover (in our hardwiring about things OTHER THAN moral codes, in our hardwired emotional and behavioral responses to certain stimuli) what those moral codes should be  AND

3) that there’s nothing odd about this.   We’re hardwired for curiosity about the world.  We’re hardwired to be capable of logical thought (if we weren’t, we couldn’t think that wasy).  Put these things together, and we discover lots of things about the world, and eventually invent the sciences.  But the fact that we’re not already hardwired to k now that the earth goes around the sun instead of vice versa doesn’t mean that when we discover that, it’s just a “social construct” that’s all about cultural influences.

4) the facts of morality are out there for us to find–but they’re out there, they’re not something we make up

5) we aren’t hardwired with the facts of morality any more than we’re hardwired to speak French rather than German,  BUT

6) we ARE  hardwired to need to find this information, and to invent it if we can’t find it, and to go looking for it until we come up with something that at least seeems to work.

And, like I said, I’ll get back to that later.

I have to cook.

Okay, let’s start here–human beings are hardwired for language.

That means that there is something about the physical structure of our brains that makes language possible for us.  If our brains were physically different, we would not be able to form languages or learn to speak them.

At the same time, we’re not hardwired to speak any particular language.  We each learn a particular language in a cultural setting, from the nuclear family to the kibbutz and back again.

There are therefore a wide range of languages on earth, at various stages of development, and with many differences.

But none of these languages is, as far as we know, radically different.  Even when we discover a language we cannot translate, because nobody speaks it any more and we have no Rosetta stone to relate it to other languages and it’s not part of one of the language families now existing, we can identify it as a language, because it shares what Chomskey–back in the days when he was actually doing linguistics–called “deep grammar.” 

All languages share a common foundation, and therefore common foundational traits, no matter how different they are on the surface.

Morality–the tendency to erect and attempt to live by what we call moral codes–seems to have this same quality, and a number of evolutionary psychologists are spending their time these days trying to work this out.

If you want to know one of the best books I’ve ever read, it’s Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, which spends its time demolishing the entire idea of nurture as the foundation of the human personality.  It’s also a really great example of what a truly educated mind would look like–Pinker knows the science, but he also knows Jane Austen, Hegel and Snoopy.

Well.

All human societies–all human beings not raised feral (and maybe feral children, too, although  I don’t know)–erect and attempt to follow, or at least to explain through,  moral codes.  It’s a universal trait, and it’s almost certainly hardwired, meaning caused by the genetically determined physical structure of the brain.

And it operates on the level of the individual, for the same reason that everything–yes, even instinct and basic human drives–operate on the level of the individual.

There is no other level on which it is possible for biology to operate.

Nature isn’t concerned with keeping “the species” alive.  Nature has no concept of species, or anything else.  Each individual organizsm is busy keeping its own genes alive, and the fact that this means that something we’d call “a species” survives is a side issue.

All biology operates on the level of the individual, and the need to, and ability to, create moral codes certainly looks like something that is biologically encoded in us.

To the extent that this is true, all moral codes, no matter how divergent they may seem on the surface, will share certain foundational similiarities.

And, of course, they do.  Moral laws against murder and theft are universal.  The apparent differences are only apparent–a matter of who the moral group in questions defines as “human” and therefore subject to and protected by such laws. 

The universality of the double sexual standard for women (until the 20th century West) and of the routine assumption of the second-class status of “women’s work” (even in the 20th century West), look to me to be useful to Darwinian survival in an obvious way.

The principle problem in the survival of human beings as human beings is to convince women to have children, and preferably more than one.  And  Lymaree is right on both counts.  There is a genuine biological hunger to have a child–any woman who nears menopause withoutever having been pregnant can testify to just how strong this desire is–but children are also a huge drain on the physical and mental resources of adults, and especially of women.

But that second thing means that many women will be perfectly happy to have just one child, or at least as few as possible, to have them late rather than early if possible, and otherwise to forgo childbearing, at least some of the time, for other, more fun and more remunerative things to do.

A society in which women are automatically barred from reaching the highest levels of status in the public world, but are venerated and respected for having children, is one in which women will have more children than they have in ours. 

What’s more, a society in which women’s public lives are restricted is one in which there is less chance that the child that woman bears will not belong to her own husband.  To the extent that a society restricts the sexual activity of women, men find it possible to insure that their own genes will survive.

What interests me about this whole phenomenon, though, is just how resilient it is to the truly radical changes in technology and environment that have occurred in the last two hundred years.

Robert is right in thinking that the rise of the “knowledge professions” and of labor saving machinery had as much to do with female emancipation as politics or morality, but what’s really interesting to me is this:

In a world where women have full access to education, work and politics, where they can strive for any position, climb any corporate ladder, acquire any advanced degree–women are still paid best for being women.

Take a look at the Fortune list of world’s wealthiest individuals, and you’ll find maybe one or two women (next to a couple of hundred men) who’ve made their pile as inventors, entrepreneurs or corporate executives.  The vast majority of women on these lists fall into two categories:  the wives and daughters of such men, or entertainers.  

Female entertainers are rewarded largely for being “hot,” meaning for being young and sexually available.   They can have all the singing, dancing and acting talent in the world, and they’ll do no better than middling well if they don’t “look right.”   And if they do look right, they can often make quite a lot of money–or marry it–on that alone.  

Even Oprah fits into the category of a woman being paid for being a woman.  She’s our national Mother, and Mothering is what we expect from her.

Note that some of these women can become enormously powerful, especially as iconic Mothers–but that’s been true throughout history, and it doesn’t chane the landscape here.  If you need to keep women in a place where they’ll be driven to have lots of children, then providing them with a role that provies them with wealth and power as long as they don’t leave the reservation makes a lot of snese.

I don’t want to sound as if I think there’s some sort of plot here.  We seem to do this instincitvely, and no amount of hectoring from the New Moral Forces of the age seems capable of making us stop.  The paradigm even works on a stratified class level–the  Hooters waitress makes a whole hell of a lot more money in tips than the waitresses in comparably priced restaurants where the uniforms are more modest, and the few men who have ever decided to take jobs at Hooters find their tips are in the toilet.

The very capacity to think in terms of morality, like the very capacity to form lanuages, is hardwired into human beings. 

And all biology is, at base, i ndividual.

Meaning that sometimes, the responses on this blog fascinate me.

I was talking about hardwiring, and practically everything anybody had to say had to do with social construction, or presumed social construction.

Let’s start with  Robert.  I’m not sure from the ost, but if he’s trying to imly that I was claiming that some moral precepts become “outmoded,” he’s wrong.  In fact, I was claiming exactly the opposite.

To the extent that what we are looking at here is hardwiring, the fact is that the moral precept may remain constant and constantly relevent even if the initial conditions that led to it becoming hardwiring have disappeared.

We can talk all we want about why it was the sexual double standard arose, and its concomittant restriction of the public activities of women, and we can speculate that the advent of DNA and the knowledge professions make it all no longer needed, but if the hardwiring is such that the result of doing away with all this is a birth rate in negative numbers, then our change in moral codes will not (in the long run) lead to progress for anybody.   It will just lead to the death of our society an a world in which the restrictions on women would be much greater than what they might have been if we had kept the basic parameters of the original.

And no, I’m NOT  saying that this is the case.  This is a hypothetical I’m using here.  And, admittedly, mostly because I think it’s the kind of hypothetical that will get people upset.

On the other hand, it’s a hypothetical with a certain real-world kick at the moment.

And I disagree with Lymaree that human societies are infinitely various.  I think the variety is mostly a surface phenomenon.  The underlying codes and assumptions seem to be to be remarkably constant throughout time.

For instance, as satisfying as the supposition may be that the division of labor was about phyiscal strength, or death in childhood, the precept that holds in all literate and most non-literate socieites is not “men will do the heavy labor” but “the jobs men do, whatever they are, will be held in higher esteem than the jobs women do.”

That’s a precept, by the way, that holds true even in the twentieth century West, although it’s modified slightly–here as in all complex socieites–by issues of class.

Although even there, less than you’d think. 

Back in the days when there were still big industrial plants in the US, the men who worked the assembly lines at places like Ford made more money than their wives who taught in the public schools, in spite of the fact that the “prestige” of the woman’s job was supposedly higher.  

Even now, though, a good way to tell if the prestige and remuneration of a profession are going to rise or fall is to figure out if it’s becoming more masculine or more feminine. 

The issue is this:  what can change and make the world better, and what, when changed, only makes the world worse?

The answers to those questions are written in our biology–biology is destiny, in some ways, although not in the exact way the person who first came up with that dictum meant.

The position of women in the 1950s US was better than the position of women is now in Saudi Arabia, or Iran.  The position of women in the twenty-first century US is better than either.  And that’s the good news, as long as that last thing is sustainable.  If it isn’t, then we’ve got a problem.

And it’s a bigger problem than you’d think, and closer to us than you’d think.  There are ordinary, non-Muslim women in many cities in Western Europe now whose lives are more restricted than they would have been in 1950, because they live in neighborhoods where to go out without a veil means to be beaten up or raped by gangs of young men who don’t accept the Western idea that women should have the rights and priveleges of men and who feel completely safe in imposing their own moral codes on the women around them. 

There’s a lot of talk in the US about the cowardice of the governments in these countries, because they often refuse to police this sort of thing or respond to it adequately, but in the end the issue isn’t cowardice but numbers.  Muslim women may be oppressed, beaten down, and subject to something close to slavery and jail, but their birth rates are qunituple those of the Western women around them. 

And demography is destiny, especially in a democracy.

I’m not advocating any particular thing here.  I’m only pointing out that any real investigation of the objective bases of morality would have to look at things like this–at the response of things like birth rates to the structures and assumptions of our socieities–without prejudice, and this is something we adamantly refuse to do.

But the fact that we refuse to do it–and that in refusing to do it we  produce silly “moral philosophy” with little relation to objectivity in any sense–does n ot mean that it can’t be done.

So, I got an e-mail from John telling me that the site wouldn’t let him post a comment yesterday.  If any of you are having the same trouble, you should e-mail me so that I can have it looked into.  I’ll admit it was rather strange with no comments at all yesterday, but I just figured you all were bored. 

Or, you know, appalled.

Anyway, John’s comment was this:

>>>Jane wrote “But there´s something else that´s universal across all literate (and
most nonliterate) societies across time-that women are socially and politically
secondary to men. ”

Some simple arithmetic sheds light on this. Consider a society before modern
medicine.

First. if half of all children die before puberty, then a society needs at least an
average of 4 children per woman or it will die out. That means women will have
to spend a lot of time caring for children.

Second, remember the story of Semmellweis and his discovery of the importance
of cleanliness in hospitals. He observed a deathrate from childbirth fever of about
10% in a ward where doctors and medical students worked but 2% in a ward that
used midwives.

Take that 2% death rate as typical. Start with 100 pregnant women. 98 will
survive childbirth. Of those 98, 96 will survive a second pregnancy. You can carry
out the calculation and get about 90% survive 5 pregnancies.

Result: Women need to have a lot of children in order for the society to survive
but that means at least 10% of women will die in childbirth.

If it takes 5 years to turn a raw apprentice into a skilled carpenter, would you
choose a 14 year old boy or girl? I’d go for the boy!>>>

And I agree, of course.  A lot of what we find, as we look into the moral codes of various societies across time, is going to be moral precepts based in practical reality, but that’s been my point all the time.   Morality is grounded, objectively grounded, in the realities of the human condition, which are not infinitely malleable, but at least substantially fixed.

And it’s also true that some of those conditions may change, at least on the level of the day to day.   It’s almost certainly the case that the universal prescription of (at least relative) chastity for women is grounded in the need of men to insure that they are raising their own (and not somebody else’s) children. 

The evolutionary imperative there is obvious, assuming Darwin was right–controlling the sexuality of women insures that men will have their genes passed down, therefore the genes of men bent on controlling women are more likely to be passed down.

These days, of course, we’ve got much better and more accurate methods of figuring this out.  Even women in strict purdah found ways to have affairs.  DNA tests don’t lie.

But here’s the kicker–whatever good and practical reason there may have been for a particular rule over time, if it’s been around long enough, there’s a good chance that it’s at least in some way genetically encoded.  And that means that there is a chance it won’t go away–or, to be more precise, that the effects of it won’t go away–even after the initial conditions no longer apply.

That is certainly what has happened with the aggressiveness and attraction to risk in young males.  What was a really good evidence of biological fitness in a hunter-gatherer society somewhere out on the savannah is largely counterproductive in a world where success–including the ability to provide for a wife and children, or even to get a wife and children–is attained by sitting still in classsrooms, making five and ten year plans, and watching your every move to be sure there’s nothing on your record that Yale wouldn’t like.

But counterproductive or not, we’re stuck with the effects, which show up in everything from soccer hooliganism, violent crime and lighting farts to hypercompetitiveness in everything from climbing the corporate hierarchy to having the best and most expensive prom tux.

My point, in all of this, is not that if we discover an objective basis for morality, the morality we discover will violate some of the moral precepts some of us now hold–that it will dictate a second class status for women, say–but that, due to the fact that we fear it will, we don’t actually do the investigation we need to to make the discoveries we need to.

There’s a tradition of narratives in science about how the Church, for instance, feared scientific advance because it would disprove the myths it loved dearly, but in fact there’s little danger in most of the discoveries of natural science.  Evangelical Protestant problems with evolution notwithstanding, the chemical nature of nitroglicerin or the distance of Alpha Centauri from earth do not impinge significantly on our innermost convictions of who and what we are, or who and what we should be.

Morality is different because it is, in fact, intimately related to who and what we are, to our very identies as individuals, to our very status as human beings.  Grown men and women–who are, after all, the people who do philosophy–don’t get to where they are without having already internalized a set of moral rules, and those rules determine whether the philosophers themselves are decent human beings.

If you have internalized to a gut level the idea that doing X or thinking  Y makes you a monster and completely unworthy to belong to the human family, you’re not going to follow investigations whereever they lead you if they seem to lead you to the conclusion that morality lies in doing X or thinking Y.

I think that the reason that we are where we are, that we as yet have no objectivel based moral code (at least since Aristotle), that our modern philosophers give out squishy moral pronouncements based on nothing, is that nobody is actually doing the work to make the discoveries that would fix the problem.

We find the investigation of these things far too threatening, and so we don’t, really investigate.

If we did, we might find out that our fears are unfounded.  Or not, but at least we’d find out.

What we’ve got instead in the moral mush of Kurtz’s book, and a world population increasingly too diverse to be ruled by any single concept of God’s law, or even any single concept of God.