Rod Dreher's Blog, page 610

Wombs For Rent, Babies For Sale

What happens when a woman can do anything she wants with her body, including renting out her womb? What happens when anybody who can afford it has the right to pay medical scientists to create human life in a laboratory, and implant it into the womb of a woman who sells her body? What happens when the creation of human life is separated from basic humanity, and turned instead into a commodity?

This horror story can happen. From Slate:

Last year, a 47-year-old California woman named Melissa Cook decided to become a commercial surrogate. Cook is a mother of four, including a set of triplets, and had served as a surrogate once before, delivering a baby for a couple in 2013. According to her lawyer, Harold Cassidy, she’d found it to be a rewarding way to supplement the salary she earned at her office job. “Like other women in this situation, she was motivated by two things: One, it was a good thing to do for people, and two, she needed some money,” Cassidy says.

For her second surrogacy, Cook signed up with a broker called Surrogacy International. Robert Walmsley, a fertility attorney and part owner of the firm, says he was initially reluctant to work with her because of her age, but relented after she presented a clean bill of health from her doctor. Eventually, Surrogacy International matched her with a would-be father, known in court filings as C.M.

According to a lawsuit filed on Cook’s behalf in United States District Court in Los Angeles earlier this month, C.M. is a 50-year-old single man, a postal worker who lives with his elderly parents in Georgia. Cook never met him in person, and because C.M. is deaf, Cassidy says the two never spoke on the phone or communicated in any way except via email. In May, Cook signed a contract promising her $33,000 to carry a pregnancy, plus a $6,000 bonus in case of multiples. In August, Jeffrey Steinberg, a high-profile fertility doctor, used in vitro fertilization to implant Cook with three male embryos that were created using C.M.’s sperm and a donor egg. (According to the lawsuit, the gender selection was done at C.M.’s request.) When an egg donor is under 35, as C.M.’s was, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine strongly recommends implanting only one embryo to avoid a multiple pregnancy, but some clinics will implant more to increase the chances that at least one will prove viable. In this case, they all survived. For the second time in her life, Cook was pregnant with triplets. And soon, the virtual relationship she had with their father would fall apart.

Read the whole thing. A 50-year-old postal worker, deaf, unmarried, and living with his elderly parents, wanted to buy a baby or babies? What the hell? How do we know he’s not a child molester? It gets worse: author Michelle Goldberg tells us that he’s now broke. He tried to compel the surrogate mom to abort one of the triplets, saying he couldn’t pay for them. Now he’s demanding that when she gives birth, she has to turn the babies over to him, because they’re his property. And then what will he do to those children, those human beings?

Goldberg says even if you support surrogacy, this case and the issues it raises. She writes:

Whether you agree with this depends on your understanding of what it means to be a parent. It depends on whether you believe that pregnancy can ever be merely a service instead of a relationship. Cassidy insists that it cannot. “A woman can’t just turn a child over to anybody,” he says. “You just can’t do it.” But Cook signed a contract, and she may have to.

This practice should be banned. It is inhuman, it is unnatural, and it trains us to see human life as a commodity. C.M., the postal-working baby-buyer, might well be a creep, but if he were part of a stable, well-off couple, that would not change the morality (or rather, the immorality) of what he has done, and what his surrogate has done. Those poor unborn children, their lives nothing more than freight in a contract dispute.

Why does the state allow this? Why do we? Is this freedom? Is this what we will tolerate for the sake of choice? We are a country and a people that will destroy natural parenthood, marriage, childhood, and family, all for the sake of preserving the liberty of adults to do what they damn well please.

We deserve judgment, and we deserve it good and hard.

The Washitah Nation Embassy

In New Orleans, some black nationalist crazies invaded a vacant house for rent, claimed it as part of their self-described “Washitah Nation” … and the police won’t do anything about it. Excerpt:

Fredrick Hines, whose name is on the tax rolls for the property and whom neighbors say is the true owner, called police after he found out a group of young people had moved into his investment property and changed the locks. Hines said he showed police the deed, which has his name on it, but they wouldn’t remove the people living in the house.

The squatters also showed the officers some papers claiming ownership, Hines said, though he isn’t sure what kind of papers they could have had. They wouldn’t give him a copy.

Police said that, because both parties had papers, there was nothing they could do.

If Hines wanted the squatters removed, he said, police told him he would have to file eviction papers, a process that would take more than a week and cost him several hundred dollars. Hines said that he has filed the eviction papers and is now waiting for the time limit for the squatters to contest the ruling to run out, which should be some time this week.

“It’s frustrating,” Hines said, especially because this does not appear to be the first time the group has done this. “The police told me this is like the third house they’ve broken into,” he said.

So the New Orleans cops know this bunch are nothing but common thieves, but they’re forcing this homeowner to go to court and spend several hundred dollars to evict people who stole his house from him. More from the story:

Hines appeared to be taking the NOPD’s stance in stride, saying he couldn’t afford to alienate the authorities, whom he may have to rely on to deal with the squatters, but some of his neighbors are furious.

“It’s absolutely ridiculous,” said Tom Houghton, who lives across the street from Hines property and owns rentals in the neighborhood. “You’re telling me you can just walk into someone’s house and claim it’s yours, and the police don’t do anything?”

Read the whole thing. I dunno, I think these homeowners are being unfair to the local authorities. The City of New Orleans government may simply be to have time to worry about black nationalist thugs stealing people’s houses.

But seriously, you want public symbolism? Oh, you’ve got lots of public symbolism on display here.

UPDATE: I expect this fact will matter to some liberals feeling all fuzzy about these black nationalist outlaws: the landlord they are abusing is also black.

UPDATE.2: The house is liberated, and the Washitah Nation is captive. More:

The four individuals were charged with criminal trespassing after police served a search warrant on the two-story shotgun single. They were taken into custody without incident, though a neighbor said that two of them appeared to be trying to flee through a side door after police announced their presence.

Two of the individuals arrested refused to give their names, police said. The other two were identified as Devin Garner, 24, and Danamaria Thornton, 18.

More:

The owner, a California man named Fredrick Hines, said he hoped the group were prosecuted to the “full extent of the law possible.”

A supervisor in a mechanic shop, Hines said he was forced to take a week off of work to deal with the issue. He also had to file formal eviction papers. “No one should have to go through this,” he said.

Neighbors say the squatters broke into the house and changed the locks two weeks ago and shouted at a real estate agent who was attempting to get inside. The neighbors reported the squatters to police, but officers said there was no visible forced entry and there was little they could do without the owner’s presence.

Hines flew in last week and met with police Friday. Although he showed them his deed and other legal documents, the officers said the squatters had also shown papers claiming ownership. It was a civil matter, police said.

That poor man. Had to fly here from California and take a week off of work to deal with this crap. Sounds like the cops were happy to dump this into the system, and not worry about it, until the local media got wind of it. When I suggested that to a New Orleans friend, he responded:

And thus have you discovered how N.O. government works: ignore a hundred problems until one of them gains traction in the media. Then fix that one.

I bet if that house had been occupied by four Confederate monuments, Mayor Mitch Landrieu would have had them evicted at once.

UPDATE.3: The Washitaw Nation are supremely, delightfully, utterly insane. Take a look at their Emperial (sic) Royal Council. I am especially impressed by this cat:

Royal Interim Minister of the Interior

Crown Prince Emperor El Bey Bigbay Bagby Badger

Now that’s a man with proper theology and geometry. Check out this Tribute to the Empress of the Washitaw Nation. It is a thing of crackpot beauty:

UPDATE.4: I have to say on reflection that I wish I had not been so insouciant about the possibility of the deaths of these four turds in a putative conflict with the police. It was wrong, and I apologize for it.

The State of the State of Louisiana

Are we really having this conversation? Is this a real question? Where am I from? @roddreher @tobydanna @WAFB https://t.co/VCCvD02Qjl

— Caleb Bernacchio (@calebb_caleb) February 15, 2016

WAFB is a Baton Rouge television station. And yes, we are having this conversation. The thing is, the answer to this real question might really turn out to be, “Hell, no!”

Louisiana is having its worst-ever budget crisis. The state legislature is in special session now to try to plug the nearly billion-dollar budget hole. Thank you, former Gov. Bobby Jindal. Yes, the new governor is a Democrat, but he’s been in office for less than two months, and he inherited a hellacious mess from his predecessor. How’s that? Look:

Louisiana is in a financial mess for a number of complicated reasons — including that former Gov. Bobby Jindal and the Louisiana Legislature passed budgets for years that used temporary funding for ongoing expenses.

For example, Jindal would use legal settlements or the profits from state property sale — money that wouldn’t be available the following year — to cover the state’s basic, ongoing bills. This created problems, because the money wasn’t available in the next year to cover those same expenses.

In the current budget, Edwards says Jindal and the Legislature included $800 million of the so-called one-time money. Now, new funding must be found to replace that money for the next budget cycle.

It’s not only Jindal’s fault. This story explains some of the structural reasons the budget is as bad off as it is. Part of that involves a tax repeal started under the last Democratic governor, Kathleen Blanco, and completed under her successor Jindal and the GOP-led legislature:

Blanco initiated a rollback of what’s called the Stelly Plan — a tax program approved statewide by voters in 2002. Jindal and lawmakers then fully trashed the initiative in 2008, during the governor’s first year in office.

Named for former Lake Charles lawmaker Vic Stelly, the plan raised income taxes on mostly moderate-to-wealthy people and did away with a sales tax on food and utilities that disproportionately affected poor people.

It was passed and supported by Republican Gov. Mike Foster, but it had become a target for conservative talk radio by 2007, when lawmakers and Blanco passed the first portion of the repeal. Lawmakers and Jindal followed up by fully rolling back the Stelly plan the next year.

Albrecht said if Louisiana still had Stelly in place, the state would have about $800 million more in the bank each year. That amount of money would go a long way to addressing Louisiana’s current $940 million shortfall and the $2 billion problem that exists for the next fiscal cycle.

The new Gov. John Bel Edwards is proposing raising taxes on booze and cigarettes to raise the money needed. If legislators can’t solve the problem, there will be devastating cuts to higher education in the state. One state college said today that it might have to close before the end of the spring semester.

It gets worse. Next year’s state budget is going to be short $2 billion.

A friend who is in a position to know — really — tells me that the main problem is Jindal’s gimmicky budgeting, but it’s also the case that there is an incredible amount of, yes, waste, fraud, and abuse in state government, especially in Medicaid (a point that the Republican state treasurer is now making). Gov. Edwards just took a swipe at Jindal, widely disliked, even among Republicans, for gallivanting around the country running for president while the state’s finances stumbled toward collapse.

So, yeah, baby, your booze or your baccalaureate? That’s where we are after eight years of Republicans in charge of the executive and legislative branches. Again, it would be inaccurate and unfair to say it was entirely their fault; some of this stuff is baked into Louisiana’s constitutional cake. Still, eight years they had to fix this, to work on it, to lead. And … this.

A Letter From Trump’s America

The e-mail below just came in. I’m not going to use the reader’s name or geographical location, and have altered slightly a couple of lines, to protect the reader’s privacy:

I hardly know why I am writing to you except that I think you’re a good listener. You treat your readers very kindly. And on the internet to boot!

War is coming and Trump is one of the first indicators from our side.

I am 31 years old. My [spouse] and I are teachers. When we started down south nine years ago, our school district proudly provided insurance that cost us $0 a month. We had to move north to find a better situation after 2014 when our district moved to a high-deductible HSA that was going to bankrupt us if we were unfortunate enough to have to use it. The birth of our first daughter, born in 2010, cost roughly $500 in hospital bills. Our youngest, in 2013 and with a much more costly and garbage insurance, cost over $5,000. The difference a few years can make!

[In my new job,] we started the school year off with a foster child student, new to the district, causing mayhem. He assaulted over 10 adults in his first week at school. He cussed, spit, bit, hit, ran, and intimidated every single person in the school. I was called in on the second day of school to help move him from one room to another after a violent outburst. When he attempted to assault me, I restrained him. I was informed not to do that anymore. I told them not to call me anymore to help.

He eventually received a one-on-one teacher who he abused every day, as well as his very own classroom. He was formally disciplined one time, with one day of out-of-school suspension when he harmed another child. This went on for near a month and a half, until he was committed to a psych hospital by an outside doctor. Insanity. All of it!

He was in the first grade.

I would imagine all of Trump’s supporters have similar nasty experiences they can point to. Where the world feels like it is coming to pieces in front of them for no good reason. And then there are the obvious, big picture disasters. Government is broken and openly hates on folks. The Church abuses children and covers it up. The media lies and ruins the lives of decent people. Police are murdered in the street. Jihad is here. The White House is lit up in rainbow colors. We invite the Third World. Vets die waiting for care.

My grand-dad was a prick. But he helped win a world war, raised nine children, walked tall, and got things done. He would have loved Trump.

Here is a man who is talking to us in a language we used to speak ourselves. Since when do men have to wrap their speech and beliefs in velvet? Why can’t a sledgehammer be used when a sledgehammer is needed? After eight years of being put down and told we are what is wrong with America, why can’t we get behind someone like Trump? Someone who is not at all afraid to mix it up!

Laurus Contest Winners

‘Ustina,’ by Matthew Teter

Above, the first winner of the Laurus contest: a portrait of the character Ustina from the celebrated Russian novel. Matthew Teter, the San Antonio, Texas, art teacher who produced the striking image above, writes:

I was inspired by the novel LAURUS to paint an imagined portrait of the character Ustina. The novel was so engrossing to me as I found myself lost in its pages. I think the religious person is comfortable reading a story such as this as our lives can have the same “sacramental” attitude and meaning. We see the spiritual forces at work everyday as we encounter people in our sphere. The secular world tries its hardest to tell us this is all myth and we have no real significance. But this is not the case! Life is a glorious mystery and there is a God who loves us and is reaching out to us! Enjoy the painting.

You’ve got it, Matthew — and thanks for sending in a link to your blog. And a paperback copy of Laurus will be headed your way when it comes out in the fall.

Here’s a winning essay by Tom Smith of Madison, NJ:

The relevance of Laurus lies in its unexpected use of Time as it relates to what is known as “modern.” First, it has been described as a “postmodern” novel. This designation is most likely used in its resemblance to “magical realist” literature, especially in its treatment of Time in a way that recalls such futuristic science fiction novels such as Dhalgren or Ubik.

However, Laurus can also correctly be described as “premodern.” The novel’s Orthodoxy, for instance, arises not because it contains theology or apologetics or other such modern devices, but because it takes an Orthodox worldview for granted in that the actions of the characters and the fabric of the story would make no sense without distinct Orthodox beliefs, or at least a willingness to suspend one’s doubts for the sake of comprehending the story. Thus, the book gently edges the reader towards the premodern, partially seeming to recast physicality as a sort of fantasy-land that plays by different rules without acknowledging that the story is in any way ‘fantastic.’

The boldest aspect of Laurus is, however, that in doing this it bridges the postmodern with the premodern. It draws implicit connections with both the Golden Legend and contemporary works such as Invisible Cities, all the while bypassing the linear, reductionist “Modern” worldview entirely. Laurus does not, however, gaze Janus-like both forward and backward – for time does not run forward or backward! – it, rather, contemplates the Eternal Return while lifting its gaze along the spiral path of Ascent.

Another winner, this one from K.I. in Richardson, Texas:

To be a 21st century American is to be deluded. Paul called it 2000 years ago – when you don’t honor God, your thinking becomes futile, and God lets you experience the fruit of your idolatrous ways. Abortion, suicide, and addictions are merely a few signs our idolatrous nation is like Israel in the time of the judges: everyone doing what is “right in his own eyes” to the point of death. Thousands of years’ difference between these and our times doesn’t matter because the truth doesn’t change. When you live in the truth, time is on your side.

21st century Americans are obsessed with time. We use, control, and kill time (and all of God’s creation). The hook of Laurus is the centrality of time to the story. The author’s playful use of time-warpy language and visions connects Laurus with the reader. Yet Laurus, unlike us, lives in peace with time – and has all the time in the world.

Laurus portrays a life surrendered to God, in a time and place unlike ours yet with the same universal issues (love, loss, sickness, humility, suffering). Laurus’s life has meaning and purpose because he pursues eternal, not only temporal, good for others.

For Christians, the “communion of saints” helps us to know what is true; how to pray; how to live. We are connected with them and with Jesus in his death: a connection of eternal matters and thus beyond time. Laurus can help us all understand eternal realities.

Here’s a good one from reader Sam M.:

My take on “Laurus” stems from my work as a Catholic school administrator. We run a great school, but Catholic schools are being forced to take a business-minded approach which often means increasing tuition, paring back programs, and becoming ever-more responsive to students not just as Catholics, but as “customers” to be “satisfied” in a new “data-driven environment.”

When one parent is asking about our Common Core alignment, another is requesting 10 years of SAT scores to assess his son’s chances of getting into Princeton, and holy cow the plow truck just broke… we struggle to keep the unmeasurable wonder of the church on the front burner; the SATs NEVER ask how many hours you have spent at adoration.

This novel’s very existence and its reception make it an essential tool in reinvigorating that wonder. I try to give my students a good grounding in the classics, but they often wonder if that kind of work can be produced anymore. Yes it can. Just as important, the wider culture’s warm embrace of the novel, even in places like the New Yorker, proves that these issues still resonate beyond the walls of a Catholic school that aspires to a healthy balance of orthodoxy and relevance.

Answered prayers are what kept Arseny on the righteous path. For a Catholic school administrator, the fact that Laurus exists and can be shared with my students is just such a prayer answered.

I made the mistake of buying an electronic copy. I need a physical version to pass along to a young English teacher who feels the fire of his faith. He lives it and breathes it but, like me, he thinks his way through theology. Laurus is an incendiary bomb that will set that tinder ablaze.

Alan Orsborn writes:

The novel is a deeply thoughtful work that develops nuanced theological themes without being either explicitly religious or preachy. It also offers a glimpse into the fragility of the fabric of time. Most of us in contemplating an embarrassing past mistake have yearned for the chance to go back and correct the error. In Laurus, time is fluid. While time prohibits do-overs, it may gracefully offer a recapitulation and a second chance to do it right. This instability of time throughout Laurus shows our smallness in the face of forces we cannot control, and that our Enlightenment and our individualism count for little.

The shame of the medieval Russian herbalist Arseny lies in the deaths of his lover and child, unburied due to the sin of cohabitation. He lives to “atone” for the eternal rest of their souls. While we are not told whether he found that atonement, progressively through the phases of his long life from tow-headed child to schemamonk, he finds what it means to utterly empty himself and live for others.

Steeped in individualism, we do not readily understand this utter emptying that transcends the Western theological controversy of grace versus works. But this emptying is simultaneously both grace and works while disclosing the true meaning of love. Though not stated as such, it is a window into a deep appreciation of the emptying of Christ for the life of the world, a most profound message in this most contemplative book.

Eric Mader (who blogs at this spot), writing from Taipei, Taiwan, writes:

Laurus is an extraordinary literary accomplishment, certainly the most powerful novel I’ve read in the recent handful of years.

Eugene Vodalazkin’s mastery of the modes of late 20th century narrative combines with a deep respect for the medieval Christian vision to make this vision fresh for postmodern readers. The result is a hard-hitting wake-up call for all those who’ve succumbed without struggle to the “playful” (read: jaded) sensibility that dominates our literature–a wake-up call delivered with all the more punch because it’s delivered in a narrative idiom more reminiscent of our career literary cynics and deconstructionist wonks.

There’s not a hint of cynicism in Vodalazkin’s book, however. The writer brilliantly proves that major Christian literary prose need not remain faithful to 19th century realist modes.

I’d go even further. Though he’s sometimes compared to Umberto Eco or the magical realists, Voladazkin has clearly surpassed them. I can’t think of another work since Dante’s Commedia that more powerfully links love for a departed woman with a deep spiritual vision of the universe.

I predict this novel will hit many who read it as a bombshell, especially those who feel the anomie and pointlessness of our consumerist culture and who yearn for something deeper, wiser, weightier. The perfect reader is the spiritually curious, literate seeker who has so far remained unimpressed by what contemporary organized religion offers, but who nonetheless continues to yearn.

I look forward to Vodalazkin’s next work to appear in English and thank God that we have him.

Robert Woods writes:

Love calls us to the things of this world, however, we need great literature to assist us in properly naming, knowing, and ordering our many loves. Literature in the older and higher sense of the word enables us to see both things and people in a larger perspective than our myopic moments calls us to apprehend. The best literature transports us in an escapist manner to another time and place only to return us better to our own. Laurus is such a novel. In both form and content, it mercifully rescues the contemporary narcissistic reader from the maudlin and mundane of our normal hollow existence. Laurus sweeps the reader into a reality that is both of this and not of this world. We are reminded throughout this tapestry-like tale that as glorious as our embodied state is, it truly is our intimations of something grander reflecting what is beyond all of these hints and signals. This is a novel that I will read again because when I returned to my everyday life after the first read, I was more aware of the good, true, and beautiful all around me. When Dostoevsky penned the phrase, “beauty will save the world,” it was the kind of beauty described within the pages of Laurus that he most certainly had in mind.

Though I was interested in hearing from readers of Laurus, I opened the contest also to people who could make a short case for what we 21st-century Americans have to learn from Russian literature. Here are a few winners, starting with one who wants to be identified by the initials “M.E.”:

Love is patient. In The Brothers Karamazov, a woman seeks out Fr. Zosima for his advice. She cannot get beyond feeling love to the Christian goal of incarnating her love in action. Fr. Zosima responds: “Love in dreams thirsts for immediate action, quickly performed, and with everyone watching… Whereas active love is labor and perseverance.” In other words, Fr. Zosima stresses the need for patience, (the supreme conservative value, one sorely lacking in the era of Twitter), in putting love into action. Consumerism, what Dostoevskij would perhaps label as “sensualism”, must of its very nature try to exsanguinate this patience. As long as men make idols of their demands, individualism and consumerism thrive. Patience produces no demand, and a world without demand frightens marketers. Patience is the idol slayer. Only with patience can consumerism, which gives only the illusion of belonging, be uprooted, allowing true, organic communities to blossom.

The great spiritual struggle of America today is this choice: consumerism or community. Community is life. Consumerism is death. And Doestoevskij reminds us that if you want to live in community, to pray in community, to be saved in community, to resurrect in community, you must labor and persevere. With patience.

Kevin Donohue writes:

While Western novelists, by and large, embraced the headlong rush into modernity lead by the pioneering spirit of those espousing the liberalization rooted in Reformation-era Protestantism and eventual Vatican II-era Catholicism, Russian spirituality came to greatly mistrust the deeper societal havoc wrecked by these forces of capitalism, scientism, and general progressivism. As Dostoevsky points out in Crime and Punishment, Demons, and, most epically, The Brothers Karamozov, these forces serve to unhinge people from their community (whether it be socially or religiously-rooted). This tendency has arisen a new in the modern age of America as progressive forces marshal under banners of justice and equality to remove what they call the last barriers of discrimination, but what Russian spirituality (and many modern Christian writers) recognize as that which gives mankind telos and true humanity. This groundedness against and skepticism of the “new individualized age” is what Eastern spirituality can offer us. Reading any modern American writer of literature (Wallace, Pynchon, Franzen, et al.), I am struck by sheer loneliness that modernity has caused in its great rush. In presenting truly great characters that wrestle with this loneliness in a milieu that acknowledges a spirituality greater than humanity, Russian literature presents a unique voice unheard in most of the Western canon.

Here’s the only reflection I received on Russian literature from the Soviet era. The writer of this is A.R. from Columbia, SC:

“O mighty, divinely delimited wisdom of walls, boundaries!” – We, Zamyatin

The protagonist of Zamyatin’s We lives in a society where walls protect citizens from external threats and, ominously, internal feelings and thoughts that threaten the supposed perfection of collective society. External, superficial harmony is absolute; individuality and an interior life is a threat to this harmony and therefore forbidden.

Russian spirituality may be rooted in the individual struggle to ascend to God and the everlasting happiness found only in that ascent. The oppression in Russian history makes this longing acute, and the resistance to walls more pronounced. The Russian liturgy and Orthodox faith, with its connection to the past and reverence for tradition, perhaps transports us to a time and place without the oppressive walls imposed by society. The ancient liturgy is a taste of freedom, a chance to experience ways of thought not burdened by present constraints.

America is no stranger to walls. Protection and safety have emerged as the primary societal values. As citizens, we not only secure ourselves from every possible external threat, but protect our minds from unsettling words.  Taken further, we self-censor our thoughts in order to conform. Of course, I am not the first person to highlight the mental strain imposed by modern society’s extensive rules for action, speech, and thought, all in the name of security and at the expense of freedom. However, I suggest that a minor part of the appeal of ancient forms of worship is that sense of participating in life outside the walls imposed by the present.

Those are the ten winners. I will be sending your e-mail addresses to the publicist for Laurus, who will be in touch about sending you your paperbacks later this year. Many thanks to Oneworld, the book’s publisher, for its generosity.

One more thing: I wanted to include on this post this very fine reflection from reader K.D. (not Kevin Donohue), but it went way over the stated word limit, and I didn’t feel that it was fair to all the other entrants who followed the rules. However, it’s really very good, and I want you to read it. Thanks to everyone who participated. This was a hard call, because all of the entries really were good! Here’s K.D.’s wonderful work:

To the Russians belong the quality of cultural purity, which has been both its great blessing and its great curse. At the time of Vladimir the Great’s conversion to Orthodox Christianity in 988 A.D., his conversion and the subsequent Christianizing of the Rus took place over what may be characterized as a primitive, pagan, and non-European cultural background. Kievian Russia had never been part of Byzantium or the Roman Empire, nor even, like the Celts and the Teutonic tribes of Europe, existed along a fault line of cultural and military conflict with Rome. It was never Hellenized, never subjugated by Romans, and the Rus were never the subjects of Byzantium. The Christianization of the Rus was thus a pure transmission of the Christian Faith onto a simple people which overwhelmed and displaced their primitive pagan outlook. The Cyrillic alphabet itself, developed in accordance with Byzantine missionary efforts, insured that the emergence of the written word in Kievian Russia corresponded to the introduction of the incarnate word. In this sense, Russian culture became an expression of Christian culture, from its very alphabet outward, in a way that proved impossible to the West.

The same may be said of the introduction of the ideas of the European Enlightenment, which constituted foreign ideas imposed on the Russian people starting with the reign of Peter the Great. But unlike Christianity, which the Russian people embraced, the ideas of the European Enlightenment were confined to a narrow elite of mostly Russian aristocrats, many of whom could not even speak the Russian language of their own serfs. Just as the Russian people received a pure transmission of Christianity, the Russian intelligentsia received a pure transmission of the Enlightenment, one which existed not only in dialectical opposition to traditional Russian culture but to the Russian language itself.

It is in the consciousness expressed in Russian writers of the 19th Century and 20th Century that this dialectal struggle for the Russian soul finds its clear expression, and whether we look to Slavophile Dostoevsky, or Westernized Belinsky, we find the conflict between an authentic apostolic heritage and a modern, Westernized nihilism. What is in the 19th Century a cultural discussion, becomes by the 20th and 21st Centuries a political struggle. November 1917 marks the date of the triumph of the colonization of traditional Russian society by an atheistic intelligentsia steeped in Western enlightenment ideals, culminating in the recapitulation of Peter the Great’s decapitation. Yet in the works of writers like Solzhenitsyn, we find the same old struggle, but now spatialized in concentration camps, instead of those internalized, concentration camp of the soul that characterize the spirit of modernity. The struggle is now politicized, a competition between political answers rather than debate over political questions, and solutions can only be obtained only through blood in distinction to ink. The Soviet period represents the new death of the Word in Russian culture, as the post-Soviet period points to its possible resurrection in defiance of its enemies.

It might seem to the American that there is nothing to be learned from Russian literature. After all, colonial America based its early religious life on the complete rejection of an authentic, apostolic Christian tradition. Only in the American South can anything resembling a pre-modern traditional social order be found, and this order was wiped off the face of the Earth in one of only two wars that Americans universally proclaim to be just. America was not colonized by the European Enlightenment, the Enlightenment grew in an Anglo-Saxon mold organically out of American society and its intercourse with Europe. The fire that the Soviets reduced to smoldering embers in their native country was never introduced to America, save in remotest corners of Alaska.

So why Russian literature? Because only in Russian literature can we engage with a cultural possibility, that of an ancient society rooted in an authentic, apostotlic faith, a possibility that as of this day has never been a cultural possibility for Americans. Through Russian literature, we can understand, as a result of a series of decisions by our ancestors, what we have lost, what we have sacrificed, in order to arrive in our present. For some of us, growing up listening to Johnny Rotten’s prophesies of “No future”, we can only feel a lurch toward an approaching end, coming not only for the United Kingdom, but of a setting sun falling on all roofs globally. Yet this end, whether it occurs naturally or is hastened by deliberate effort, will only serve as the fertilizer for a new future of competing possibilities, one of which may be inspired by a renewed Slavic consciousness, emerging in synthesis with many now dormant and repressed dimensions of American heritage. Russian literature, in its purity, provides a means for Americans to see clearly who we once were, what we have become, and in what direction we must go if we intend to have any future descendants.

Have you not yet read Laurus? What are you waiting for? 

A Populist SCOTUS Strategy

The other day, I quoted this passage from Justice Scalia’s dissent in Obergefell:

Judges are selected precisely for their skill as lawyers; whether they reflect the policy views of a particular constituency is not (or should not be) relevant. Not surprisingly then, the Federal Judiciary is hardly a cross-section. Take, for example, this Court, which consists of only nine men and women, all of them successful lawyers who studied at Harvard or Yale Law School. Four of the nine are natives of New York City. Eight of them grew up in east- and west-coast States. Only one hails from the vast expanse in-between. Not a single Southwesterner or even, to tell the truth, a genuine Westerner (California does not count). Not a single evangelical Christian (a group that comprises about one quarter of Americans), or even a Protestant of any denomination. The strikingly unrepresentative character of the body voting on today’s social upheaval would be irrelevant if they were functioning as judges, answering the legal question whether the American people had ever ratified a constitutional provision that was understood to proscribe the traditional definition of marriage. But of course the Justices in today’s majority are not voting on that basis; they say they are not. And to allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation.

I presume that President Obama will nominate a sacrificial lamb — Eric Holder would be perfect — and force the Senate GOP to make good on its promise not to consider a SCOTUS nomination until the next presidency. I’m sure they would, and that would give the Democrats something with which to fire up their base this fall. If the depressing Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee, as she almost certainly will be, they will need all the juice they can get.

If I were a Republican — especially if I were Donald Trump, but any Republican will do — I would pledge to nominate a Supreme Court justice that looks like America: the America that has been ignored and disdained by legal elites. The Republican’s nominee to the High Court will be chosen to increase diversity. He or she should be an Evangelical from a region and culture not represented on the Court now. And he or she should have graduated from a top-notch law school that is not Harvard, Yale, or any of the Ivy League institutions. The GOP presidential candidate could frame this promise as a way of honoring Justice Scalia.

In a perfect world, I don’t think there should be a de facto religion test for Court members, nor should there be a geographical test, nor a law school test. But as Scalia pointed out, when the Court usurps its role in a democracy and starts making laws, this matters. Besides, this strategy would have the benefit of forcing the left to confront its own diversity rhetoric and commitments, which would likely reveal them for exactly what many of us think they are: thin veneers masking power grabs.

It is surely the case that somewhere in this vast and diverse nation, there are judges who are extremely good at what they do, despite the fact that they do not hold Ivy League law degrees. There are surely first-rate judges who are also Evangelical Protestants, a demographic group that makes up 25 percent of the US population, but zero percent of the US Supreme Court. There must be worthy SCOTUS candidates not from a coastal state; only Pinpoint, Georgia’s Clarence Thomas comes from a state in the American interior. All the other sitting justices are from New York City (3), New York state (1), New Jersey (1), and California (2). Scalia, of course, was born in New Jersey, but raised in New York City.

Come on, Republican candidates: pledge that when you are elected president, you will end the Harvard-Yale death grip on the Supreme Court. You will appoint a Supreme Court nominee from the Other America. In his Obergefell dissent, Justice Scalia said that the Court, as it now operates, and as it is now constituted, is a “threat to democracy.”

Do you agree? If you agree, honor Scalia’s prophetic wisdom and bring more balance to the Court by nominating a justice from Flyover Country.

UPDATE: OK, yes, Georgia does have some Atlantic beachfront, so technically, it’s a coastal state. And yes, John Roberts may have been born in Buffalo, but he spent most of his childhood in Indiana. Still…

Trump: Out Of The Ruins

Reader Bobby, a cultural liberal, responded to a conservative’s criticism on another thread, and tries to point out that economics, not sex, drove social fragmentation in his hometown:

I may work in finance now, but I grew up in a manufacturing town in the Midwest. I watched the moral decline occur. I saw thousands of people lose high-wage manufacturing jobs and face the prospect that the best available jobs paid less than half the salary they’d been earning for the past 20 years. And, in many cases, they had to drive an hour to a larger city just to get those jobs. When that happens, it tears apart the entire social fabric of a community. During my senior year, five guys on my soccer team were living with neighbors or grandparents because their parents had left the state to look for work. My father’s practice survived, but my parents lost nearly all of their closest friends. Several of my closest friends moved away the morning after our high school graduation. One moved to Colorado, another to Texas, and another to Georgia. The four of us grew up on the same cul-de-sac and our families had been inseparable since as long as we could remember. Churches all over town went bankrupt. Civic leagues collapsed, as their most active members moved away. Within a 5-year-period, attendance at high school sporting events fell by 90%.

This didn’t happen because people woke up one morning and decided en masse to follow the siren call of the sexual revolution. No, it happened because one manufacturer eliminated 18,000 jobs overnight in a town with barely more than 85,000 people. And the same thing happened in communities all over middle America. My parents are still scarred by it. They decided to stay, and try to help the city recover. They’re now angry and depressed, and proudly supporting Trump.

I think it’s inaccurate to say it’s either/or, but I take Bobby’s point, and it’s one that most conservatives don’t really want to hear, for the same reason that most liberals don’t want to think about the role of sexual liberation in social fragmentation. But this is something conservative really must think about.

Along those lines, here’s a link to a Washington Post interview with Michael Brendan Dougherty. Excerpt:

Why are conservative leading having such a tough time finding policy approaches that ring true to working-class voters? Are the Mikes of the world too easily persuaded by what I might call magical thinking solutions – for example, the idea, which you hear fairly often from Trump supporters, that Trump as president would essentially “renegotiate” the terms of trade and business in order to boost the working class?

Because the burden of taxation overall falls on the highest-income earners and those in the investor-class, the advocates of a small-government philosophy naturally find themselves allied with those voters when talking about reforming government or removing the economic burdens of government. Libertarian-leaning economists love to advertise that free trade deals mean cheaper everyday consumables that are available to lower income Americans, they don’t talk as often discuss how free trade makes it easier for America’s wealthy to invest their capital in cheaper foreign workforces. I think we all know who got the better overall end of the deal and who paid the cost for it.

When conservatives think of American trade negotiators and diplomats working to lower the barriers to American capitalists investing in overseas workforces, they see it as a core function of government, not as a kind of favor to wealthy clients of the American state. But if the same negotiators had in mind the interests of American workers instead, they see it as corrupt protectionism, that coddles the undeserving. There is a huge failure of imagination on the right. And a failure of self-awareness.  It may also be that I don’t see conservatism’s primary duty as guarding the purity of certain 19th century liberal principles on economics. I see its task as reconciling and harmonizing the diverse energies and interests of a society for the common good.

That last line of MBD’s shines light on the difference between traditionalist conservatives and mainstream conservatives. But then, if we can’t even agree on what the common good is — and we can’t — then we are stuck.

I have not heard Trump say anything about how he would make things more fair, and protect the interests of American workers (over those of American manufacturers). All he does is talk about how unfair it is, and to make promises to bring home jobs from overseas — promises that he has not explained how he would fulfill.

Scalia & One Nation

Some readers can’t figure out why I said over the weekend that my first reaction upon hearing of Justice Scalia’s death was fear for the country. Really? they ask, not unreasonably. He was only one justice on a court of nine, and when you think about it, he was on the losing side of the high-profile issues that religious and social conservatives most care about (that is, abortion and marriage).

Well, I’ve thought about it, and here’s why I still believe my gut reaction was valid. In fact, I believe it now more than I did over the weekend.

First, the death of Scalia has unleashed even more and greater political passions than we have yet seen in this already passionate election year. You will have seen by now that the Senate Republicans have ruled out voting on a nominee to replace Scalia until a new president is in place. This makes sense from one point of view. The partisan one is obvious: the GOP hopes that it’s a Republican president making that appointment. But I think there’s a prudential case to be made for this as well: that the next nomination is going to be the most politically contentious one since Robert Bork’s, and will likely exceed that one in extreme combativeness. It is arguably in the greater interest of the country that the new president and the new Senate make this call, given that the November vote will have been the closest thing we can have to a referendum on the direction the American people want the post-Scalia court to take.

But it is inconceivable that the nomination would be any less contentious if it were made by the new president. Both parties will fight as hard and as dirty as they would have done otherwise. Plus, if I were a Democrat, I would be outraged by what the Senate is doing. The sitting president has a right to nominate a candidate for the Supreme Court; that’s the way our system works. David Frum points out, quit reasonably, that there’s a huge political risk in the Senate GOP refusing to consider an Obama nominee to replace him:

By assuring Obama that he need not worry that a nominee will actually serve on the Court, McConnell empowered and invited the president to play radical politics with the nomination. The big concern Democrats have (or should have) about 2016 is the decline in turnout that occurred between 2008 and 2012. Obama’s support dropped by 3.6 million votes between his election and his re-election. The Republican ticket gained only 900,000 votes over the same four years. Absenteeism was most marked among younger voters and Latinos.

What saved Obama was the loyalty and commitment of African Americans: their participation actually increased between 2008 and 2012—and it was their ballots that provided the president with his margin of victory. If they should feel uninspired in 2016, the Democratic nominee is likely doomed. Democrats will want to do everything they can to rev up African American excitement and energy.

Such as for example, nominating somebody like Eric Holder, who might welcome his nomination with a fiery statement about voting rights, affirmative action, and Black Lives Matter. Republicans would of course go wild, denying him a hearing … and Democrats would gain a bloody shirt to wave in November. Emancipated from worrying about the best candidate for the bench, they could instead use the nomination to elect their candidate to the Oval Office.

The point I’m trying to make here is not that the Senate should do this or that, but that whatever it does, replacing Scalia in the current polarized atmosphere is going to tear our already frayed bonds even worse. How can anyone who cares about the country look forward to what’s to come? The result of the confirmation battle, whatever side wins, will be simply this: that we will hate each other even more across partisan lines.

It is, of course, bizarre that it has come to this for the nation: that the nomination of a Supreme Court justice could inspire such passions. But that’s because of the role the Court has taken in the culture war. This is the poisoned fruit of what Ted Kennedy and his Senate Democratic colleagues did to Robert Bork. And this is also the poisoned fruit of the culture-war results-oriented jurisprudence of the Court — especially Reagan appointee Anthony Kennedy — on abortion and same-sex marriage. It fell to Scalia, over and over again, to reveal the partisan emptiness of these rulings, and therefore how nakedly political the Court had become on defending the Sexual Revolution at all costs.

It was Scalia’s scalding, mocking phrase — “the sweet mystery of life” — that revealed the vacuity of Kennedy’s reasoning in the majority Planned Parenthood vs. Casey opinion reaffirming Roe. The logic of that single fateful decision, which defined liberty as “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life,” has been the foundation upon which other key decisions in advancing the constitutionalization of the Sexual Revolution were built. Scalia repeatedly pointed this out — that is, showed with prophetic clarity and conviction where this was taking us. In his lacerating 2003 dissent in Lawrence vs. Texas, which overturned sodomy laws, Scalia demonstrated that the Court had destroyed the basis for any so-called “morals laws” governing sexual conduct. He pointed out that he was not defending the Texas sodomy law in itself, but only the principle that states have a right to pass laws like it. And he said, most memorably, that the majority opinion’s assurance that the holding in Lawrence would not mandate gay marriage was worthless (“Don’t you believe it”).

And he was right. Scalia said that the Court had ceased to be an impartial observer, and had taken sides in the culture war. The Court had become inappropriately political. Mind you, the Court’s decisions inevitably have political consequences. This is unavoidable. Scalia’s point is that on questions having to do with what you might call sexual liberty, the Court had usurped the role of the legislature, and done so on specious legal grounds.

Scalia’s death hits conservatives very hard because he was, in some sense, a restraining force. As Molly Ball points out, Scalia, an ardently traditional Catholic, did not always come down in his decisions on the side that pleased religious believers. Nevertheless, as a general matter, Scalia’s death hits social and religious conservatives with particular intensity because we know that the deck is stacked against us on the Court — and that the stakes in this post-Christian society could not be higher.

What’s ironic about this, obviously, is that Scalia usually was on the losing side of the cases that mattered most to us social conservatives. Elliot Milco captures what Scalia meant to us philosophically and, well, emotionally. Milco recalls Scalia’s words in his Windsor dissent (Windsor was the decision that struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act), in which Scalia lacerated the Court majority for labeling those who hold to the traditional view of marriage as hostes humani generis — enemies of the human race. (You will remember that the majority opinion held that the only reasons to defend traditional marriage were rooted in bigotry). Milco writes:

Those of us who have run the liberal academic gauntlet knew, in 2013, what Scalia meant in Windsor. We understood what it meant to be labeled hostes humani generis. It meant to be deprived of the right to voice your opinion in the public square; to be excluded on principle from the main stream of civil discourse. To be told that your moral universe was anathema to the political foundations of a free society.

Antonin Scalia was a hero to me, as he was to thousands, perhaps millions of conservative Americans. He was brilliant. He was morally engaged. His prose sparkled. He was the great champion of the Right, and he could not be silenced or voted out, no matter how much the press despised him. While his enemies pushed relentlessly to have their views enshrined as fundamental principles of free society, Scalia fought to keep the moral question open for debate, to maintain the possibility of reasonable dissent, because he believed that in a fair fight we could still prevail. He was the mighty rearguard in our long and slow defeat.

That’s it. That’s it exactly. We know we’re losing, and that we are going to lose. But there was something heroic in knowing that the wiser man was standing there in the arena telling his colleagues on the Court, and indeed the entire nation, exactly what they were doing. The cause may have been lost — and on this, Scalia had this Court’s number from virtually the beginning — but with Scalia on the Court, we marched into exile with our heads held high, knowing that the stronger army won, but not the better one.

In an emotional sense, for me, Scalia functioned as a kind of keystone holding up the crumbling arc of the Republic. I know: he lost these morally significant cases having to do with the dignity of life and the meaning of marriage, even though he did not fight them on moral grounds, but on legal, democratic ones. And yes, I know that Scalia was himself no kind of unifying figure that keeps the entire structure from falling down, as a keystone does. What I’m trying to convey is what it feels like to experience his loss from the point of view of a religious and social conservative. As I said, there was something of a restraining force about him — maybe by the power of his prose and his intellect, and the strength of his conviction. In any case, the passions that will now come roaring forward in the fight to replace him will do damage that we are not well suited to absorb. To have him pass from the scene at a time when the Democrats are prepared to drive traditional religious believers from the public square, and when the Republicans are melting down, is an extremely bad sign. Again, David Frum, this time on the repulsive spectacle of the GOP debate on the day Scalia died:

On Twitter, I compared the night to a horrible Thanksgiving at which one too many bottles of wine is opened, and the family members begin shouting what they really think of each other. But in retrospect the evening was too ominous for even so bitter a joke.

For a decade and a half, Republicans have stifled internal debates about the George W. Bush presidency. They have preserved a more or less common front, by the more or less agreed upon device of not looking backward, not talking candidly, and focusing all their accumulated anger on the figure of Obama. The Trump candidacy has smashed all those coping mechanisms. Everything that was suppressed has been exposed, everything that went unsaid is being shouted aloud—and all before a jeering live audience, as angry itself as any of the angry men on the platform. Is this a functional political party? Is this an organization readying itself to govern? Or is it one more—most spectacular—show of self-evisceration by a party that has been bleeding on the inside for a decade and longer?

I am grateful to Donald Trump for forcing the Republican Party to confront the legacies of the Bush presidency, especially on Iraq and foreign policy, but also on its collaboration on the globalist project of hollowing out middle America. But Trump is a demagogue and a tyrant-in-waiting, and no degree of natural disgust with what the Republican Party has become can obviate that fact. Had the GOP had these discussions before now, they might have avoided the Trump phenomenon. But they didn’t, and now they can’t stop it. Ross Douthat tweeted over the weekend:

Between Trump and Scalia, hard to escape the feeling that 2016 is an Ending, of some sort, for American conservatism as we’ve known it.

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) February 14, 2016

That’s true, and I would add that it’s hard to escape the feeling that this year is an ending, of some sort, for America as we’ve known it. This is why my gut reaction to Scalia’s death is to fear for my country in a way I have not since 9/11. The fight to replace Scalia, no matter which president nominates that candidate, is going to cause us to remember the Bork confirmation hearings as a gathering of the Garden Club board to work out the menu for spring tea. We are going to emerge from that Gettysburg bloodied, maimed, and full of passionate intensity, with one side or the other holding the nation’s supreme legal institution in even greater contempt.

This is going to happen for reasons that the Prophet Antonin Scalia warned us about again and again. And this is going to happen for reasons that the Prophet Alasdair MacIntyre warned us about. The United States, I fear, is about to live out a judgment.

Finally, remember this exchange from an interview Scalia had with a writer for New York magazine:

Isn’t it terribly frightening to believe in the Devil?

You’re looking at me as though I’m weird. My God! Are you so out of touch with most of America, most of which believes in the Devil? I mean, Jesus Christ believed in the Devil! It’s in the Gospels! You travel in circles that are so, so removed from mainstream America that you are appalled that anybody would believe in the Devil! Most of mankind has believed in the Devil, for all of history. Many more intelligent people than you or me have believed in the Devil.

You watch: we are on the verge of seeing Scalia vindicated, again.

The Smartphone Menace

In Charlottesville, I found myself having a lunch conversation one day with some folks who are involved in Christian education at the elementary and secondary level. They were talking about the challenges they face today. One of the biggest is the ubiquity of smartphones in the hands of kids. Parents think nothing of giving them to their children, the educators said, and many kids have virtually unlimited access to the Internet. There’s the “older brother porn problem” in which younger kids get turned on to porn by watching it on an older sibling’s smartphone. And there’s the problem of “After School App,” an anonymous bulletin board service designed for high schoolers, one that allows them to gang up on other kids in their class and trash them mercilessly.

Parents, I was told, are typically no help at all. They don’t want their kids to be out of step with their friends, so they give kids smartphones, which is a technology the kids aren’t emotionally prepared to use. There’s all kinds of bullying, and accessing porn — but parents don’t seem to want to know about it because they don’t want to have to tell their kids no.

One of the educators at the table added that the problem is not limited to the content accessed through the phones, but to the way using these devices is radically distorting the way kids communicate with each other, or fail to. Even if the kids only accessed benign content, and did not use social media to attack each other, they nevertheless spend enormous amounts of time on their smartphones, ignoring everyone around them. Some of them have trouble sustaining an actual conversation for more than a few minutes. All of them are losing the habits of common courtesy that has since forever been how human beings in social situations treat each other.

Listening to this, I thought about the time we had a dinner party at which the youngest guest at the table, a woman of about 24, pulled out her smartphone and began checking her mail. I thought perhaps she was expecting an urgent message; why else would someone drop out of the conversation and turn to her iPhone at the dinner table. But no, that’s exactly what she was doing. She sat in her seat ignoring everyone else at the table for a good 10 minutes, until, it seemed, the conversation topic turned to something that interested her. It was appallingly rude. But that’s how kids are today.

Writing in the New York Review of Books, Jacob Weisberg surveys recent volumes devoted to studying how we use this technology. The title says it all: “We Are Hopelessly Hooked”. Excerpts:

Americans spend an average of five and a half hours a day with digital media, more than half of that time on mobile devices, according to the research firm eMarketer. Among some groups, the numbers range much higher. In one recent survey, female students at Baylor University reported using their cell phones an average of ten hours a day. Three quarters of eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds say that they reach for their phones immediately upon waking up in the morning. Once out of bed, we check our phones 221 times a day—an average of every 4.3 minutes—according to a UK study. This number actually may be too low, since people tend to underestimate their own mobile usage. In a 2015 Gallup survey, 61 percent of people said they checked their phones less frequently than others they knew.

Our transformation into device people has happened with unprecedented suddenness. The first touchscreen-operated iPhones went on sale in June 2007, followed by the first Android-powered phones the following year. Smartphones went from 10 percent to 40 percent market penetration faster than any other consumer technology in history. In the United States, adoption hit 50 percent only three years ago. Yet today, not carrying a smartphone indicates eccentricity, social marginalization, or old age.

What does it mean to shift overnight from a society in which people walk down the street looking around to one in which people walk down the street looking at machines?

More:

It is the troubling aspects of social and mobile media that Sherry Turkle attends to in her wise and observant new book, Reclaiming Conversation. A clinical psychologist and sociologist who teaches at MIT, Turkle is by no means antitechnology. But after a career examining relations between people and computers, she blends her description with advocacy. She presents a powerful case that a new communication revolution is degrading the quality of human relationships—with family and friends, as well as colleagues and romantic partners. The picture she paints is both familiar and heartbreaking: parents who are constantly distracted on the playground and at the dinner table; children who are frustrated that they can’t get their parents’ undivided attention; gatherings where friends who are present vie for attention with virtual friends; classrooms where professors gaze out at a sea of semiengaged multitaskers; and a dating culture in which infinite choice undermines the ability to make emotional commitments.

Turkle finds the roots of the problem in the failure of young people absorbed in their devices to develop fully independent selves, a topic she began to explore in Alone Together (2011). In that book, she examined the way interaction with robotic toys and “always on” connections affect adolescent development. She argued that phones and texting disrupt the ability to separate from one’s parents, and raise other obstacles to adulthood. Curating a Facebook profile alters the presentation of self. Absorption in a gaming avatar can become a flight from the difficulties of real life. Young people face new anxieties around the loss of privacy and the persistence of online data.

In her new book, she expresses a version of those concerns that is as much philosophic as psychiatric. Because they aren’t learning how to be alone, she contends, young people are losing their ability to empathize. “It’s the capacity for solitude that allows you to reach out to others and see them as separate and independent,” Turkle writes. Without an ability to look inward, those locked into the virtual worlds of social media develop a sensibility of “I share, therefore I am,” crafting their identities for others. Continuous digital performance leaves teenagers experiencing what ought to be the satisfactions of solitude only as “disconnection anxiety.”

As in her earlier work, Turkle considers this loss of empathy as both a clinician and an ethnographer. She culls from hundreds of interviews she has done since 2008, the first year many high school and college students became armed with smartphones. Unhappy teachers at one private middle school in upstate New York describe students who don’t make eye contact or respond to body language, who have trouble listening and talking to teachers, and can’t see things from another’s point of view, recognize when they’ve hurt someone, or form friendships based on trust. “It is as though they all have some signs of being on an Asperger’s spectrum,” one teacher tells her. Turkle even seeks to quantify the damage, repeatedly citing a study that shows a 40 percent decline in empathy among college students over the past twenty years as measured by standard psychological tests.

One more thing, about how young people communicate:

One group of students explains that when they get together physically, they “layer” online conversations on top of face-to-face ones, with people who are in the same room.

It sounds insane, doesn’t it? But I have personally seen children with smartphones sitting in the same room, texting or Instagramming each other, not for the novelty of it, but because that’s just how they roll.

Read the whole thing. There’s a discussion, based on another book, about how app designers use research from psychology and other disciplines to maximize the addictiveness of their apps. “But in the main, his book reads like one of those tobacco industry documents about manipulating nicotine levels in cigarettes.”

In the several separate conversations I’ve had about this phenomenon in Charlottesville, someone has said a version of, “You know, Steve Jobs wouldn’t let his kids use smartphones.” I wondered if it was an urban legend. But no, it’s true. Excerpts:

“So, your kids must love the iPad?” I asked Mr. Jobs, trying to change the subject. The company’s first tablet was just hitting the shelves. “They haven’t used it,” he told me. “We limit how much technology our kids use at home.”

More from that same 2010 New York Times article:

Since then, I’ve met a number of technology chief executives and venture capitalists who say similar things: they strictly limit their children’s screen time, often banning all gadgets on school nights, and allocating ascetic time limits on weekends.

I was perplexed by this parenting style. After all, most parents seem to take the opposite approach, letting their children bathe in the glow of tablets, smartphones and computers, day and night.

Yet these tech C.E.O.’s seem to know something that the rest of us don’t.

Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired and now chief executive of 3D Robotics, a drone maker, has instituted time limits and parental controls on every device in his home. “My kids accuse me and my wife of being fascists and overly concerned about tech, and they say that none of their friends have the same rules,” he said of his five children, 6 to 17. “That’s because we have seen the dangers of technology firsthand. I’ve seen it in myself, I don’t want to see that happen to my kids.”

The dangers he is referring to include exposure to harmful content like pornography, bullying from other kids, and perhaps worse of all, becoming addicted to their devices, just like their parents.

More:

So how do tech moms and dads determine the proper boundary for their children? In general, it is set by age.

Children under 10 seem to be most susceptible to becoming addicted, so these parents draw the line at not allowing any gadgets during the week. On weekends, there are limits of 30 minutes to two hours on iPad and smartphone use. And 10- to 14-year-olds are allowed to use computers on school nights, but only for homework.

“We have a strict no screen time during the week rule for our kids,” said Lesley Gold, founder and chief executive of the SutherlandGold Group, a tech media relations and analytics company. “But you have to make allowances as they get older and need a computer for school.”

Some parents also forbid teenagers from using social networks, except for services like Snapchat, which deletes messages after they have been sent. This way they don’t have to worry about saying something online that will haunt them later in life, one executive told me.

Although some non-tech parents I know give smartphones to children as young as 8, many who work in tech wait until their child is 14. While these teenagers can make calls and text, they are not given a data plan until 16. But there is one rule that is universal among the tech parents I polled.

“This is rule No. 1: There are no screens in the bedroom. Period. Ever,” Mr. Anderson said.

Read the whole thing.  These are the adults in this world who know more about tech and these devices and media than anybody else. And they shield their children from it. Here’s a comment to the story that’s chilling:

Angel_Ysa

September 12, 2014

I was addicted to Facebook at a young age. I was addicted to TV. After losing my parents and having to go out on my own, I discovered how technology can sometimes corrupt who you are when you don’t set limits on yourself. I would stay up till 3 or 4 AM on these sites. All of the typical life aspects were affected by my behavior. You start comparing yourself to people. You get depressed.

Now, I don’t even own a TV, have no accounts on any social media website. There a couple of apps on my phone but not one single game or distraction. All the interaction I have with friends is by visiting them and I stay in touch with the outside world through my new found joy of reading news and books. I wish I could have discovered this at an earlier age but I’m glad I did even now. Some people just seem to let themselves get trapped and have no way out.

My wife and I are already pretty strict about these devices with our kids. Having listened to what teachers, school administrators, and others who see first-hand what these technologies are doing to students, and having read these articles sitting in the airport waiting for my flight out of Charlottesville, I resolved that we are going to have to be even stricter. Our little girl came home from a friend’s house nearly in tears the other day because she didn’t have an electronic device (we won’t let her leave the house with one), and her friends did. They were playing with their devices. My kid told her friends that she didn’t have a device, so she was going to have to go home. The other kids never once looked up or acknowledged that she was leaving. They were mesmerized. Our kids are going to suffer like that socially, but this weekend, after hearing testimonials from teachers and others who deal with the consequences of what these technologies are doing to individuals and to the social environment of teenagers, I don’t care. It’s too important to protect them while they are developing, and prevent them from becoming narcissists and self-induced autists.

I would like to hear from teachers and school administrators in this blog’s readership on this topic. What are you seeing? What are you dealing with?

Justice Scalia, RIP

I’ve just heard the news: Justice Scalia found dead on a hunting trip. First, gut reaction: I have not been as unsettled about the future of the country since 9/11.

Open thread.

UPDATE: From Justice Scalia’s dissent in Obergefell, insight into the kind of country we have become. Emphases below are my own:

I write separately to call attention to this Court’s threat to American democracy. The substance of today’s decree is not of immense personal importance to me. The law can recognize as marriage whatever sexual attachments and living arrangements it wishes, and can accord them favorable civil consequences, from tax treatment to rights of inheritance.

Those civil consequences—and the public approval that conferring the name of marriage evidences—can perhaps have adverse social effects, but no more adverse than the effects of many other controversial laws. So it is not of special importance to me what the law says about marriage. It is of overwhelming importance, however, who it is that rules me. Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court. The opinion in these cases is the furthest extension in fact— and the furthest extension one can even imagine—of the Court’s claimed power to create “liberties” that the Constitution and its Amendments neglect to mention. This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.

This is a naked judicial claim to legislative—indeed, super-legislative—power; a claim fundamentally at odds with our system of government. Except as limited by a constitutional prohibition agreed to by the People, the States are free to adopt whatever laws they like, even those that offend the esteemed Justices’ “reasoned judgment.” A system of government that makes the People subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called a democracy.

Judges are selected precisely for their skill as lawyers; whether they reflect the policy views of a particular constituency is not (or should not be) relevant. Not surprisingly then, the Federal Judiciary is hardly a cross-section. Take, for example, this Court, which consists of only nine men and women, all of them successful lawyers who studied at Harvard or Yale Law School. Four of the nine are natives of New York City. Eight of them grew up in east- and west-coast States. Only one hails from the vast expanse in-between. Not a single Southwesterner or even, to tell the truth, a genuine Westerner (California does not count). Not a single evangelical Christian (a group that comprises about one quarter of Americans), or even a Protestant of any denomination. The strikingly unrepresentative character of the body voting on today’s social upheaval would be irrelevant if they were functioning as judges, answering the legal question whether the American people had ever ratified a constitutional provision that was understood to proscribe the traditional definition of marriage. But of course the Justices in today’s majority are not voting on that basis; they say they are not. And to allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation.

But what really astounds is the hubris reflected in today’s judicial Putsch. The five Justices who compose today’s majority are entirely comfortable concluding that every State violated the Constitution for all of the 135 years between the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification and Massachusetts’ permitting of same-sex marriages in 2003. They have discovered in the Fourteenth Amendment a “fundamental right” overlooked by every person alive at the time of ratification, and almost everyone else in the time since. They see what lesser legal minds— minds like Thomas Cooley, John Marshall Harlan, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Learned Hand, Louis Brandeis, William Howard Taft, Benjamin Cardozo, Hugo Black, Felix Frankfurter, Robert Jackson, and Henry Friendly— could not. They are certain that the People ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to bestow on them the power to remove questions from the democratic process when that is called for by their “reasoned judgment.” These Justices know that limiting marriage to one man and one woman is contrary to reason; they know that an institution as old as government itself, and accepted by every nation in history until 15 years ago,  cannot possibly be supported by anything other than ignorance or bigotry. And they are willing to say that any citizen who does not agree with that, who adheres to what was, until 15 years ago, the unanimous judgment of all generations and all societies, stands against the Constitution.

This is a naked judicial claim to legislative—indeed, super-legislative—power; a claim fundamentally at odds with our system of government. Except as limited by a constitutional prohibition agreed to by the People, the States are free to adopt whatever laws they like, even those that offend the esteemed Justices’ “reasoned judgment.” A system of government that makes the People subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called a democracy.

Here is a terrific remembrance of Scalia by Ross Douthat. Excerpt:

It is because of all of this — because of his immense influence, his intellectual clout, his long cultural shadow — that Scalia’s death in a presidential year promises to be a nightmare for the republic.

… [It is] impossible to imagine Republican senators confirming an Obama appointee in the next 11 months. And it’s probably a good thing for the republic that they won’t: If there is to be a liberal replacement for a figure as towering as Scalia, if the court is about to swing sharply to the left, it’s far better for the judicial branch’s legitimacy if that swing follows a democratic election, a campaign in which the high court stakes are front and center in the race.

But because they will be front and center, Scalia’s death promises a war like none other between here and November, and an extra layer of insanity in a campaign already defined by radicals and demagogues.

The irony is that this kind of high-stakes collision of law and politics is precisely the thing that Scalia’s legal philosophy strained to curb and check and roll back, by promoting a more limited and humble vision of the Supreme Court’s role in our republic.

But for all of his importance, all his influence, in this effort he clearly failed — and what’s about to come will prove it.

The next US president will name Scalia’s replacement, and likely Ginsburg’s (she’s in her 80s, and a cancer survivor. He or she may well name Kennedy’s and Breyer’s, as they are both approaching 80.