Hildegarde

Yesterday, I had to take my older son to the train station so that he could get back to school, and I came home in the middle of the day bone tired and not much interested in doing anything that took effort.

The result is that I spent the late afternoon watching a little movie playing on my local cable station called The Laramie Project, a fictionalized examination of the aftermath of the Matthew Shepard case–well, sort of.

I’m not much for docudramas, but this was not actually a docudrama, and it was very well made.

The premise is that a group of people from a New York film project have decided to go out to Laramie and make a documentary about the Shepard case by talking to the people involved in it both about what happened and about how they feel–and how they think Laramie feels–about gay people.

Okay, it sounds awful.  It wasn’t.  It wasn’t even particularly ham handed on the ideological front, although the underlying premise was indeed ideological.  There was also the fact that the talent was good, mostly a long list of second-tier actors and actresses who have been in everything are were easily recognizable:  Steve Buscemi, Janeane Garafolo, Christina Ricci, Peter Fonda, on and on.

The basic underlying idea here is that what happened to Matthew Shepard happened because although most people tolerate homosexuality, they do not accept it, and the lack of acceptance sends a message to the idiot wing of the population that it’s “all right” to commit violence against gay people.

I do get the argument, and it is not completely silly.  Black people in the South after Reconstruction and (especially) in the early to mid-twentieth century were in the same position.  It wasn’t that most people were violent towards them.  It was that, being despised, they were seen as fair game by thugs and lowlifes, and therefore in greater danger than they would have been if they had been accepted in the same way as any other citizen.

What bothered me as I watched this movie, though, was the thought that this particular approach to what happened misses the real issue, and I think the real issue will be with us long after the entire country has accepted homosexuality without prejudice.

The mistake is to think that Henderson and McKinney’s hatred of gay people was essential, rather than opportunistic.

In other words, these two men were going to end up killing somebody.  If they had lived in a society that was totally accepting of gay people, they would have killed a black guy.  If there were no black guys, they’d have picked on a little old lady.  The issue was not who, but that–and that was a structural social reality that isn’t going away any time soon.

The good news is that we live in a scientifically and technologically advanced culture that requires more and more people who can do math and science and engineering and communications and–well, all that stuff.

The bad news is that we live in a scientifically and technologically advanced culture that increasingly has no place for people who cannot do that kind of thing.

And let me be clear about the kind of thing I’m talking about.  Even working on an automobile assembly line requires at least some technological skills.  So does working as a receptionist in even a small company–you’ve got to know how to run the computer, how to use various business software programs, how to handle the digitalized phone system.

For people like Henderson and McKinney, for people who are not very bright at the best of times, there is not a lot of wriggle room–jobs for convenience store clerks and fast-food restaurant cashiers are there but not endlessly plentiful, and they don’t go anywhere in the long run.

The more complex and sophisticated a society becomes, the larger the group of people whose innate level of ability is just not good enough to function in it.  Every advance for the rest of us means that another layer of the least well endowed of us becomes superfluous to the functioning of society as a whole.

I am not trying to say here that Henderson and McKinney couldn’t help themselves.  Most people in their circumstances do help themselves, at least in the sense that they don’t go out and torture and murder somebody.  They do do a lot of drugs, and alcohol, and petty theft, but the scale is hardly the same.

I’m not trying to say that Henderson and McKinney couldn’t have gotten low level jobs and, by dint of hard work and self discipline, have survived as solid citizens.  They could have.

But they would always have been on the bottom.  And they knew it.  What’s more, they would know that the work they did was not important in any way, that they were always dispensible, that they had very little to be proud of.

The real work of their society was something they could not participate in.

Henderson and McKinney would have found somebody to beat the crap out of not because they hated gays or blacks or anybody else, but because they hated themselves for being utterly worthless on the only scale of worth this society has any use for.

And it’s not money.

Bleh.  I’m losing it here.

But I do think we should start thinking–as a society–about the people we leave behind, because we are inevitably going to leave some people behind.  And a lot of them are going to be furious about it.

This as an addendum:  John wants to know if we wouldn’t be better off if there was less emphasis on culture and more on training.

I’d say that there is NO emphasis on culture in the vast majority of American colleges and universities these days.

We are relentlessly focussed on training, and have been for over thirty years.

The result is not better scientists and engineers–it is, by and large, worse ones.  

Newman would say that knowledge is not divisible, and when you teach it as if you could learn a part and not the whole, you get people who don’t know the part all that well. 

I’d also point out that Newman’s idea of what would be taught in a university included mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology–which were then and are now part of the liberal arts. 

But it wouldn’t have included English literature, which was not part of the university curriculum until Newman had been dead for fifty years.

So, it’s the day after Easter, and I’m still on John Henry Newman’s book, and  notmuch farther in than I was on Saturday.  I had people over, and they took down part of a tree and an enormous parasitical vine that was eating half my house, so that was good.

But as to the book–

At the beginning, at least, it is not what I expected it to be.  I’ve spent so much of my life hearing about this thing that I assume that the things I’ve heard will come to fruition in the second half.

But the first half is a set of discourses in which Newman argues against what was then called “mixed education.”  This was not a matter of the mixing of races, and it wouldn’t have occured to anybody at the time to let women into a university, never mind to mix them in classes with men.

Newman is responding to a proposal to build a university in Ireland that would admit both Protestant and Catholic students.  This was an era in which Oxford and Cambridge did not admit Catholics, and Newman, who was a graduate and fellow of Oriel College at Oxford, was forced to resign when he converted to the Catholic Church.

What he wants for Ireland is a Catholic university, not a “non-sectarian” one, and the reason he doesn’t want a non-sectarian one is that he knows that there is only one way to get it–to take theology out of the core of the curriculum and treat it not as a science but as a mere matter of opinion.

And that, Newman believes, makes a mess of the entire university curriculum, because it leaves that curriculum without an organizing idea.

Give me a minute here.

First, you’ve got to understand that what Newman thought of as a university education is not what we’re used to.  It isn’t even what we were used to before this age of narrowly focused vocational training we’ve relabeled “college.”

Newman rejects the aims and organization of the German research university in their entirety.  He does not expect a university to train scholars in particular fields, or to become the home of “departments” which parcel out bits and pieces of knowledge into separate little classifications and areas.

“The view taken of a University in these discourses,” he says, “is the following:–That it is a place of teaching universal knowledge.  This implies that its object is one the one hand intellectual, not moral; and, on the other, that it is the diffusion and extension of knowledge rather than its advancement.  If its object were scientific and philosophical discovery, I do not see why a University should have students; if religious training, I do not see how it can be the seat of literature and science.”

In other words, when Newman talks of  “a University,” what he’s referring to is something closest to our great books colleges, like St. John’s in Maryland. 

And the way he formulates the problem–that he is talking about the necessity of theology having a central place in such an institution, and it therefore being a bad idea to teach Protestants and Catholics together (because they do not share such a theology)–is interesting, because he obviously isn’t using the word “theology” as a code word for teaching religion. 

That is, what Newman wants students to learn in theology is not how they should behave or worship. 

The question then arises, though–if this is not what Newman wants, why does he want theology at the center of a university’s curriculum?

The answer, I think, is that what he’s actually looking for is a single “subject” that provides the structural and intellectual framework for all the others, the eggshell into which the egg will fit. 

Newman was not only an academic and a convert to Catholicism, but eventually a Cardinal in the Catholic Church, and for him–as for a number of other people in his time–theology was the eggshell, not just for university education, but for virtually everything else.  Theology, by teaching us about the Creator of the Universe and the purpose for which He created, provided the franework through which all other ideas could be understood.

If you look at theology that way–as a framework, what I’d call a master narrative–not only the book, but a lot of modern academic life, makes a lot more sense.

I think Newman was right on at least one level:  we do need a master narrative which provides the interpretive framework for all the rest of what we study.  Without such a master narrative, what we have is just a lot of chaotic detail that doesn’t necessarily make sense and doesn’t necessarily make logic, either.

And I think that every individual person finds such a master narrative for himself, somewhere, because I don’t think that we are capable of functioning witout one.  We take the master narrative presented by our country or our religion or our politics, or we invent one for ourselves, but we all build prisms that separate and organize the light around us.

I think that a lot of the political silliness we see on college campuses these days–the speech codes that punish “inappropriate laughter,” the “diversity training” orientation seminars that resemble the more abusive forms of Eighties poppsych scams, the periodic hysterical paroxyms over deadly threats that don’t actually exist–is a symptom of a culture in search of a master narrative and an attempt to impose such a narrative by force.  For the American university of the twenty-first century–or at least a certain kind of American university–these things are its theology working itself out in day to day particulars.

I think the same is the case with our political discourse–everybody is hysterical all the time, because nobody has a master narrative that he can actually trust.  I think that’s true on the right and on the left, and more true the more stridently each side insists that it has The Answer without question. 

I will say that I don’t know, off the top of my head, whether this situation is a good thing or a bad one.

My instinct says that it’s a bad one–that no society in history has ever survived without a generally shared master narrative, and that the lack of such a narrative has had consequences for education that are–well, that make it not really education. 

A lot of my frustration with the “professional priniciples” some posters would like to substitute for such a narrative, and with things like Good Social Work Practice, are directly the result of people in various fields being unable to see how what they know is connected to everything else there is to know, or how what they know is challenged by everything else there is to know. 

The reason no one has noticed that rehab is a failure has less to do with entrenched interests than with the fact that most clinical psychologists and MSWs don’t understand the criteria for success as established by the hard sciences.   If they did understand that criteria, we might get past methods with 95% failure rates to look into new approaches to the problem of addiction. 

Instead, we start with our premises–addiction is a disease–and then just go with it, and the evidence of failure is explained away by saying  “addictions can’t be cured.”

Really?  Because I know of several people who do, in fact, seem to be “cured.”  I’m just not too sure if “cured” is the right word for it.

I’m still of the opinion that we’d all be better off if psychologists and social workers and teachers were required to read and understand a lot of Homer, Shakespeare and Dickens–although Freud was required to know the first two, and made a mess of them anyway–but in the end I understand Newman’s point. 

If we do not have a framework for understanding the whole as a whole,  then we’re like the guys in that story about the elephant.  Each of us thinks our own narrow area of expertise is the whole animal, and in the end we’re wrong not only about the whole animal, but about our narrow area of expertise.

And yet.

There’s a part of me that can see some good in all the contentiousness, maybe because I’m the kind of person who likes contentiousness for its own sake.  I hate the entire us-and-them nature of contemporary politics, which isn’t really about politics at all, but about our lack of a shared moral vision.  On the other hand, I think that lack keeps the culture from getting stale, and I fear staleness–and the stiffling strangulation of conformity (see half the EU)–more than I do all the yelling we do at each other.

And now I’m going to go get lunch.

So–the book on faith healing was short, and I finished it yesterday morning, which ended up giving me a sort of paralysis right before I had to go off and teach.  I had no idea what I wanted to read next, and I knew I was going to end up picking something in haste and then deciding–when I was stranded somewhere with nothing else to read–that it wasn’t what I wanted at all.

At any rate, I managed to negotiate all this, helped by the fact that my classes had almost no students in them–we were the only school in the area holding class on Good Friday–and I finally settled on John Henry Newman’s The Idea of the University.

It’s one of those things.  You’d have thought I’d have read it four times over by now, but I’ve never read it before at all, and it starts out distinguishing Education from Training, too.

I mean, really.

But for some reason, it got me going on something else.

I’ve spoken on this forum before of Plain Living and High Thinking, and I’ve done it with the automatic assumption that the phrase would be immediately familiar to almost everybody.  It is, after all, the epitome of New England-ness.  Okay, that’s not a word.  But you know what I mean.  It is, in my mind, a description of what it means to be a New Englander, and, maybe because I grew up around so many examples of the breed, I always thought its meaning was self evident.

Then Robert wrote me an e-mail saying that he had always assumed I meant people who worked at humble jobs in order to pursue the life of the life, but that he’d come across the phrase in Chesterton, and Chesterton used it to mean…well, I suppose you’d call them hippies, these days.

I’d never heard that particular use of the term at all, but I put it down to the fact that Chesterton was talking about England, not New England, and New England has had very distinct ideas about England ever since those first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord.

Or maybe before.

But let me go back to Plain Living and High Thinking, New England version, because it’s something I’ve always found enormously attractive as a philosophy of life.

And yes, I do realize that its attraction to me is something of an accident.  I’m an upper middle class educated professional woman FROM New England, so of course this is the sort of thing I like.

But I do like it.  And I think it has intrinsic merit.

First, it’s not necessary to work humble jobs to engage in Plain Living and High Thinkng.  Most of the people I knew who lived that way when I was growing up were probably very well off.  It just wasn’t obvious that they were very well off.

The issue wasn’t money, but what you did–and didn’t–do with it.  You didn’t buy “designer” things, for instance.  You never bought anything with a visible label.  A PLHT rich person buys store brands and generic medicines and has no problem shopping in Wal-Mart–there’s something just wrong about spending more money for something than is absolutely needful.

They have Fords and not Mercedes, sweaters their grandmothers knitted, and underwear in some plain generic variety they picked up on a sale rack.

On the other hand, quality counts, so a PLHT person would have “good” things, the sort of things that last forever.  But never anything…obvious.

The great maxim for PLHT people was the little poem nearly every girl of my mother’s generation was required to embroider into the sampler her mother made her do to make sure she knew how to sew:

Use it up
Wear it out
Make it do
Or do without.

One of the reasons a lot of PLHT families had money in the bank is that they virtually never spent any of it.

Which brings us to point two–PLHT people do their own work, and they do it on a schedule that would make most people cry.  They get up early in the morning.  They sweep up, make breakfast, and pack the kids off to school.

If they do have help, it’s one woman who comes in to do heavy stuff like vacuuming or rugs.  They do not have the sort of help that serves at table, even if they’re very very rich–unless they’re also very, very old, and it’s assumed that they aren’t capable of getting up and doing for themselves. 

Of course, a lot of these women wouldn’t admit they were no longer able to do for themselves until they were so blind and feeble they started falling out of bed and not being able to find the bedroom door–but that was a cross for their children and grandchildren to bear, and they insist on being “independent” no matter what.

If there’s a young son in the house, he’ll be the one who does the lawn mowing, even if he’s got a trust fund somewhere worth $40 million.  Their daughters wash up after dinner.  They go out and walk their own walls in the spring and they shovel their own snow in the winter.  

The two biggest sins in the PLHT world are “laziness” and “display.”

Third, they’re connected to their place.  A lot of them have been connected for a couple of centuries, but there are PLHT people who are “new” from the last generation or two.  It’s a matter of commitment to the idea rather than longevity per se.

They go to their town meeting and they participate.  Sometimes, too much.  They run for local office.  They volunteer for the local food bank and at the local library.  They run food drives and fund raisers.  If there’s a local Meals on Wheels, they volunteer for it.  If there’s a local Literacy Volunteers of America, they work for that, too. 

Their children go to the local public schools at least through the eighth or ninth grade. Richer PLHT people, or PLHT people whose families go very far back in  America, sometimes send their children to boarding or prep schools, but if they do it tends to be a matter of tradition.  Great-great-grandfather started the place and grandmother gave the library, so it’s a matter of sticking with the family.

Richer PLHT people sometimes have daughters who have “debuts,” but they’re not the kind of “debuts” you’re used to hearing about.  A bunch of her parents friends invited to have lunch or tea on a Saturday afternoon–that kind of thing.  No getting in a band or having champagne or dancing or anything like that.

There’s a famous story about a PLHT Boston debutante from the Fifties who invited her best friend over to pick out her coming out dress–and the two girls sat down on the sofa and went through the Sears catalogue.

Fourth, they are intensely commited to Ideas.  Whether they’re good at them or not is a question for another time and place, but they are committed to them.  They read lots of history, and in the old days they used to read a lot of published sermons.  They’ve read the Bible, often several times, since in the old days it was a common practice for PLHT people to keep a copy of the Bible on their bedside table so that they could read a chapter every night before going to bed.

They were the stalwarts of the old Congregationalist Church, and some of them still go there.  But it’s become such a center for newfangledness these days, and newfangledness is a kind of “display,” so—.

They’ve read Aristotle and Plato, Cicero and Tacitus, and the collected works of McCauley and Gibbon, but not much in the way of fiction, which they consider “frivolous.”   “Frivolousness” is the third of the deadly sins after “laziness” and “display.”   

They always vote, and they always know the issues and the candidates.  They make a point of it.

Every one of them now living has already returned his census form. 

They follow all the rules of the road when they drive.  They carefully insure their houses and cars.  If they don’t have health insurance, they still go to the doctor and pay him up front for everything. 

They may or may not have credit cards, but they never run a balance.  And if they have mortgages, they have the shortest term mortgages they can get and pay them off as soon as it’s feasible. 

They rarely eat out–it’s expensive, and the food isn’t good for you.  They don’t belong to country clubs–it’s expensive, and just a lot of people indulging in a lot of “display.”  If they own a television at all, they either don’t get cable, or they get the lowest tier.  Their television sets are never in their living rooms, and they only have one, tucked away in a back room somewhere. 

They eat dinner together every night, with no electronics blaring in the background. The dinner table talk runs to political issues, religious issues, or making sure the kids know something besides the names of the latest Pop Tarts.

They have gardens out back that they work religiously and in which they grow the most marvelous vegetables.  Then they pick the vegetables and boil them into mush.  You really do not want to eat their cooking.

These days, they tend to contrast their way of life with “New York,” but at the start of the country, the big comparison was with Virginia–and all those proflgate, slave-owning planters who liked to drink too much, gamble too much, and spend too much money.

They were the first people in America to oppose slavery, and many of them went to extraordinary lengths to cut their ties to it, often jettisoning significant amounts of money they felt was tainted by the practice. 

They were, in fact, very much like my father–who was the son of Greek immigrants–and very little like my mother, who has the kind of pedigree that would seem to make her heir to this kind of thing.

And, like I said, I find this kind of thing attractive–except for the cooking, which is deplorable.

But I do think it beats the buy-everything-designer-labeled, throw-cash-around-and-show-how-much-you-can-spend ethic of the present age. 

I’ve got to go buy chocolate bunnies.

It’s Friday morning, and I’m sitting in the computer lab because–well, because virtually nobody showed up for my eight o’clock class.  It’s Friday at the start of a holiday weekend, and the other schools in the area have the day off–but still.  I have to wake up at a ridiculous hour to get in for this class. They could come.

No, I’m not going to go on with that.  Not today.  But I’m REALLY annoyed.

But I was thinking of the comments to yesterday’s post, and it occurs to me that what we are seeing is what I think of as the diversity dilemma.  Real diversity–not the candy-sprinkles kind, where everybody looks different but thinks essentially the same, but real diversity of ideas and philosophies–causes a whole raft of problems, and we tend to ignore the fact that they’re there.

Let me start with the issue of whether children have “rights.”  Of course they do, the same rights as any other citizens under the U.S. Constitution.

But rights under the U.S. Constitution are negative only–they are restrictions on the power of the government to regulate your behavior. 

Children have the same rights to freedom of speech and freedom of religion and freedom of assembly as do any of the rest of us, meaning they have the right to be free of government interference in those issues in their lives.  They also have rights to due process.

In reality, of course, the courts and society routinely deprive them of all these rights.  The SCOTUS has said that schools may limit student speech in any way they want (but not universities–interesting point), and juvenile courts usually operate on a system that denies the right to trial by juror and that allows judges to jail minors for things that are not in fact crimes (like running away from home).

But when people want to know whether or not children have “rights,” they aren’t usually talking about actual rights.

Instead, they’re talking about expectations or entitlements–they think that children should be able to expect certain things from the adults around them, and that they are entitled to certain kinds of conditions and behavior on the part of the people who take care of them.

And that’s where the diversity dilemma comes in.

I’ve found the discussion around “beating” and “corporal punishment” insteresting on a number of levels, not the least of these that jem defines such terms different than I’ve heard them defined elsewhere.  Most of the discussions I’ve been involved in, and most of the written material on the issue that I’ve looked at, have defined “corporal punishment” as any hitting at all, from the mildest spanking to the most severe beating.  I’ve never heard it used to mean only those cases when you hit a child with an implement.

Jem is also somewhat at a disadvantage in that a number of people who post here once took part in a series of discussions on the subject of spanking on an internet secular humanist list, and in that discussion the people opposed to all forms of corporal punishment repeatedly referred to any such form–including the mildest of spanking–as “beating” a child. 

So everybody is sensitive to the terms used, and a lot of us here tend to react rather strongly to any discussion of “beatings.” 

But the simple fact is this:  the issue only comes up when different segments of society have different ideas about the practice.  In a society where everybody opposed hitting children, there would be no such discussion.  In a society where spanking (not beating) was considered not onlhy normal but probably a good thing (as it was in the Forties and Fifties in the US), there would be no discussion either.  The only reason there is a problem is that we have–well, actual diversity.

In terms of the discussion of children’s “rights,” what we’re almost always discussing is whether all children are entitled to our particular idea of what is good for them. 

On the same discussion list on which we had the argument about spanking, a poster declare that children had a “right” to a secular education, and that therefore all religious schools and homeschooling should be banned.

The poster was a librarian, and she was appalled at a “home schooling mother” who wouldn’t allow her son to take out the Lemony Snickett series.  They child had a “right” to explore different opinions in his reading!

You can find a larger discussion of this whole thing here, the first essay I ever wrote for the internet:

http://www.janehaddam.com/chd/nicole.html

But, of course, the child had no such right.  What was really under discussion was who had the right to make decisions for the minor child, and that is in fact what is usually at issue when people start talking about children’s “rights.”  A six year old has neither the knowledge nor competence to know if he wants a “secular education.”  The question is who has the right to decide what kind of education he gets.

The issue becomes very complicated in the Humanist community and among secular people generally because of the elephant in the middle of the room:  religious people are far more likely to have large families than secular people are.  Hell, they’re more likely to have any children at all.  That means that a majority of children in any American community are likely to be raised by parents who strongly disagree with many, if not most, of the norms of secularists in general and of secular professionals in particular.

But even the majority is not necessarily a majority–parents who think proms and football games are the best part of high school are appalled at parents who forbid their children from taking part in either; parents who forbid their children taking part are appalled at the parents who allow it and therefore risk their children having early sex or falling down on their schoolwork and not getting into the best colleges and universities. 

The issue of faith healing and children is not as clear as it seems for many reasons.  For one thing, most faith healing families spend their entire lives without ever seeing serious harm come to any of their children.   Treating Susie diabetes with prayer may have grave consequences, but treating Tommy’s cold will not, even if we assume prayer has no efficacy whatsoever.

Second, it is indeed the case the medical science loses patients too, and not always for incompetence.  There are still plenty of diseases we don’t really understand–many forms of cancer, for instance–and don’t really know how to cure. 

Third, we can only act on what we know.  Faith healing parents do not forgo standard medicine because they’re neglecting their children.  They forgo it because they think it doesn’t work (at best) or that it is downright dangerous.  They may be wrong, but to charge them with “neglect’ or with homicide in these cases is ludicrous.  There is neither neglect nor homicide here. 

My own personal solution to this is that parents should be the soul authorites allowed to make any decision for their minor children as long as that decision is not most likely to result in permanent physical disability or death.

That particular formula would allow states to prosecute parents for things like not giving diabetic childen insulin while pretty much keeping the state out of things like whether or not the kid gets to watch television (real case in the early 1980s) or goes to a religious school that teaches creationism.

As long as we live among people whose ideas are different from ours, though, these cases will come up.  What seems natural and just and right to some of us will not seem natural and just and right to others.

I’m going to go see if anybody is bothering to show up for my second class.

I’m just going to end with this addendum:  Jem asked, in the case of the woman jailed because she wouldn’t go to the hospital to deliver her baby, what the odds were that by not going the baby would be harmed when born.

My response to that is–I don’t care.

It is not acceptable to me–ever–to incarcerate a person for an act she might commit in the future, and especially when that act isn’t even a crime.

Ever.

For any reason.

No exceptions.

I feel the same way about regulating the behavior of pregnant women to “safeguard” the health of the fetus.

The fetus has no standing whatsoever in American law.  It is not a legal person.

And even if it were, the general rule is that no person can be compelled to provide the use of their physical body (blood and skin and bone) to the benefit of another human being against her will.

The pregnat woman should have no interference from the state no matter what she’s doing, and that includes snorting crack.

Well, you don’t want me to get started on that one.

We’ll be here all day.

It’s stopped raining out where I am at the moment, which is a good thing.  It’s been raining like crazy here for most of a week, and down on the coast the kids are having rain days they way they used to have snow days.  Last week it was the Gold Coast that had to cancel classes for days on end because the storm had downed power lines and the damage took forever to repair.

(And here’s how you know that you live someplace called a Gold Coast.  For most of us, if the power goes off for days, we get to complain.  When the power goes off in Greenwich and Stamford, there are state and federal criminal negligence investigations.)

Anyway, today it’s the eastern shore that’s a mess, with flooding bad enough to carry away small apartment buildings and entire towns evacuated north to wait until the waters of the rivers recede.  A lot of people here are annoyed that President Obama declared only Rhode Island a disaster area.

At any rate, it’s Thursday, and Matt comes home today from one of the most annoyingly frustrating semesters of his college career–home only for the week-end, but you know what I mean.  And I have to drive down towards the damage, because the train station is in New Haven.

I’ve been reading a book I managed to get hold of only a year ago,  a book I went to some trouble to acquire and then circled around for months.  I think part of the problem was that I expected this thing to be very depressing.  No matter what my sons say, I don’t go out of my way to get depressed.

The book is called When Prayer Fails:  Faith Healing, Children and the Law, by Shawn Francis Peters, and I knew it was going to be depressing because I know something about the kinds of cases it covers.  If you don’t, you might want to go here:

http://www.childrenshealthcare.org/

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned that website, or that organization, before, but that’s the site for C.H.I.L.D., Children’s Healthcare is a Legal Duty, founded by former Christian Science parents who lost children in a meningitis epidemic in Massachusetts in the 1980s, because they took those children to Christian Science practitioners instead of medical doctors.  Treated only by prayer and not by medicine, nine (I think) of the children died.

Yeah, I know.  It’s depressing.  But it’s at least as complicated as it is depressing, an the complications interest me.

You’ve got to understand that none of the Christian Science parents whose children died were convicted under child neglect laws, and that in most states in the union they probably could not be.  We’ve got laws on the books in every state that make it possible to charge parents with neglect if they don’t get medical help for their sick children–but almost all those laws have “religious exemptions” that say that a parent cannot be charged with neglect if the decision not to seek such help was the result of “sincere religious conviction.”

There are similar religious exemptions on the books to laws requiring things like vaccinations.

And most of our states have such exemptions because they have to have them to qualify for some federal funds for medical services.

The first time I heard about this, my reaction was completely knee-jerk:  charge faith healers with practicing medicine without a license and lock them up. 

But the question really is a lot more complicated than that, and it goes to the core of an issue that bothers me in a lot of ways.  There are limits to my libertarianism, but they’re pretty far out there, and it’s libertarianism all the same. 

I’m also the sort of person who gets immediately suspicious when people tell me we have to trash First Amendment and due process rights “to protect the children.”  It’s too handy an excuse for giving the state carte blanche to regulate private life.

So another of the reasons I was reluctant to read this book was that I was worried it was going to turn into the kind of one-sided, blind-fury diatribe I’ve read in “humanist” publications, triumphantly declaring that here is one more “proof” that religion is child abuse.

My fears were not allayed by rifling through the book on occasion.  I kept running across throwaway lines about “religious based medical neglect,” which is a term I find problematic at the best of times.

Now that I’ve actually started reading the thing, I find what the book actually is is a little schizoid, almost as schizoid as I am about the subject, and in much the same ways.

As far as I can tell, Peters uses the term “religion based medical neglect” both because it’s the only one he has to describe what he’s looking at, and because that’s the term used by those people on the side of the issue with which he agrees.

On the other hand, he does understand that whatever is going on in most of these cases, “neglect” is not it.  If anything, most of the parents involved go to extraordinary lengths to get the children the help they feel those children need–it’s just that, at the same time, they are firmly and sincerely convinced that standard medicine does not work and often that it causes more harm than good.

Nor does he see the cases as having simple answers, and some of the ones he covers are downright chilling–and not solely because harm came to, or might have come to, a child.  Consider the case of Rebecca Corneau, who was forcibly removed the the prison wing of a local hospital to give brith, because her last child had died in a breech delivery at home and the local district attorney thought she might give birth at home again and have the same problem, resulting in another dead child.

In other words, she was imprisoned–the authorities refused to accept the term, but that was what it was–not for a crime she had committed, but for something that wasn’t even a crime that she might do in the future.

Rebecca Corneau’s case is only nominally about faith healing.  Similar cases have cropped up across the country, involving women from many different religions and none.  When does the state have the right to force a woman to have a Cesarian section?  What if the doctors are convinced that without one, the baby will die?  What about a woman who insists on eating junk food, or who is addicted to crack or heroin, or who drinks a glass of wine every night at dinner? 

If you think I’m making this stuff up, or exaggerating it, you’re wrong.  These and similar cases have hit the courts in a dozen states, and all seem to be predicated on the assumption that, once a woman is pregnant, she ceases to be a human being with rights.  Only the child in her womb has rights, and those rights are determined by local authorities acting on current conventional wisdom. 

Even if the current conventional wisdom is skewed, exaggerated, or downright wrong.  (A glass of wine every night at dinner?  The child will be born with fetal alcohol syndrome!  Which explains France, where virtually every expectant mother drinks wine with dinner and the entire country is a basket case of damaged newborns.)

Still, Rebecca Corneau’s case is in this book because she refused to have her baby in a hospital, or to have a trained midwife in her home, for religious reasons.  And there are enough cases involving religion to make a case that this is a distinct problem of its own, with its own parameters.

It’s also a difficult problem to think about without becoming overwhelmed by emotion.  Many of these cases are heartbreaking in the extreme–children dying in agony from diseases that are easily curable in today’s medical environment; children dying young from diseases that are controllable if not curable.  Meningitis, diabetes, leukemia, even measles–one of the odder things about this book is the way in which it soon becomes obvious that the congregations of some of these smaller denominations have an oddly heightened susceptibility to diseases and conditions that are actually rate in the general population. 

I have no idea what that means.  It’s a question somebody should take up at some point, though–why is it that in a denomination of fewer than a thousand people there are a dozen cases of childhood leukemia?  Or several of Wilmes’ Syndrome, which is a (usually) non-fatal children’s cancer that is rare enough so that most people have never even heard of it.

Every time I start to look into this issue, I begin by assuming that it is a lot simpler than it actually is.  We know and can prove that medical science can control diabetes, say, and we know and can prove that prayer either doesn’t, or doesn’t very often, or at least cannot be relied on to. 

In the case of diabetes, this is certain–we actually know this.  It’s not (like the nonsense about one glass of wine at dinner causing FAS) either a conjecture or an exaggeration.  So where’s the problem? 

The problem is, of course, that it is in no way clear to what extent the government should be allowed to enforce expert opinion as if it were itself law, and that the cases never do stop with simply protecting the children.

Which brings us back to Rebecca Corneau.