Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 153

Face Of The Day

Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed El-Beltagy flashes rabia sign during a trial of the Wadi el-Natrun prison case at Cairo Police Academy in Egypt on September 15, 2014. Cairo Criminal Court adjourned the trial of Mohamed Morsi and 130 others to 21 September. By Ahmed Ramadan/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.

Paternity Pays, Ctd

Kay Hymowitz responds to Claire Cain Miller:

The jumping off point of [Miller's] piece will be familiar to anyone who has kept a casual eye on gender gap research. Mothers earn less than fathers with similar credentials and laboring in similar occupations. Citing research by sociologist Michelle Budig, Miller notes that “childless, unmarried women earn 96 cents for every dollar a man earns, while married mothers earn 76 cents.” Men, on the other hand, get a parenthood bonus. Their earnings go up when they become fathers.

Now, there are two plausible reasons for the motherhood penalty and fatherhood bonus.

One is that women behave differently than men when they deal with the inevitable tradeoffs between jobs and children. That position is certainly consistent with Budig’s finding that men increase their work hours after becoming a parent while women reduce theirs—not to mention mother’s oft-repeated preference for part time over full time employment. Miller, however, seizes on the gender gap literature’s preferred explanation: The gap is caused by discrimination against women, or in this case, “old fashioned notions of parenthood.” Employers remain suspicious of working mothers, she believes, while they are forever patting working dads on the back with raises and promotions.

Megan McArdle also sees some inherent divisions in family roles:

The fundamental unfairness of reproduction carries over into the partnerships we form to assist it. The ideal of an egalitarian partnership in which both partners work outside the home and inside the home in equal measure isn’t achieved even in those Nordic paradises where everyone gets scads of fully paid parental leave and subsidized day care — and women are even less likely to end up in a private-sector job or management than they are in the heartless U.S.

Instead of talking about how unfair it all is, it’s probably more useful to talk about what we want to achieve. Do we want to encourage the formation of marriages in which one spouse charges harder outside the home and the other spouse assumes more domestic duties? Or should we penalize spouses who made the mistake of counting on their partner to provide the lion’s share of the earning power? That was the argument of many feminists in the 1970s; they didn’t want women to have the choice of becoming housewives.

A reader chimes in:

My husband benefited from the Family Man trope. I didn’t benefit so much. We made compromises – I made compromises – all through our marriage to help him meet the requirements of his job. That meant that my career got derailed and we moved to places where we had no support network and I had problems finding work. So his career flourished and I went along with it, because the more I compromised the less of a career I had. Critics of “wage gap” calculations will no doubt point out that I undermined my own earnings, so I have no right to complain about the wage gap, but in retrospect if I’d been paid more for comparable work when I started out, my job would have been a more powerful bargaining chip when we made joint decisions.

When my husband died unexpectedly from a rare and previously undiagnosed cancer before age 60 and I was a widow in my late 50s, I found out widow’s benefits don’t go far and sometimes aren’t even available until later. Pensions are reduced for widows and cut further when the pension holder dies before retirement age. Social Security isn’t much help for younger widows who earn a disproportionately smaller share of the family income. Even though he had life insurance (I insisted), and we had retirement funds, I am facing a rocky retirement that began earlier than expected after my dead-end job laid me off just after I turned 60.

I have good friends who made the same compromises, but their husbands are alive and the wives are working part-time or not at all, traveling, and facing a much different old age – because so far, their husbands are still earning money and clocking time on pension actuarial tables and contributing to Social Security (and they’re lucky because as far as I can tell, they have less insurance and retirement savings than we had, although a couple of the men have larger pensions than my husband did). It takes a lot of capital to produce the high cash flow that a living, successful spouse brings in.

While my problems may sound like the problems of privilege to single moms, I find there isn’t much awareness about how early death pretty much burns up all the financial advantages of having a Family Man who earns most of the family income. It’s very hard for a couple to calculate how career decisions will play out financially 30 or 40 years in the future. These days, I don’t recommend the Family Man model.

Zoolander Award Nominee

Urban Outfitters hits new low with faux blood-stained Kent State sweatshirt http://t.co/f1BT9AQgS4 pic.twitter.com/YyofpX7FuF

— HuffPostBiz (@HuffPostBiz) September 15, 2014

The Zoolander Award for fashion absurdity has introduced Dish readers to everything from erotic Mickey Mouse ears to Holocaust-evoking children’s-wear. Abby Ohlheiser spots a new contender:

“Get it or regret it!” read the description for a “vintage,” one-of-a-kind Kent State sweatshirt that Urban Outfitters briefly offered for just $129. However, the fact that there was just one available for purchase is far from the most regrettable part of the item: the shirt was decorated with a blood spatter-like pattern, reminiscent of the 1970 “Kent State Massacre” that left four people dead. …

As outrage spread, Urban Outfitters issued an apology for the product on Monday morning, claiming that the product was “was purchased as part of our sun-faded vintage collection.” The company added that the bright red stains and holes, which certainly seemed to suggest blood, were simply “discoloration from the original shade of the shirt and the holes are from natural wear and fray.” The statement added: “We deeply regret that this item was perceived negatively.”

The View From Your Window

Busingen, Germany, 8.40 am

Quote For The Day

“The economic arguments against independence seem not to be working — and may even be backfiring. I think I know why. Telling a Scot, ‘You can’t do this — if you do, terrible things will happen to you,’ has been a losing negotiating strategy since time immemorial. If you went into a Glasgow pub tonight and said to the average Glaswegian, ‘If you down that beer, you’ll get your head kicked in,’ he would react by draining his glass to the dregs and telling the barman, ‘Same again,'” – Niall Ferguson, who knows whereof he speaks.

Mental Health Break

Almost too much awww to handle:

Equal In The End

Alex Mar tours the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility (FARF) in San Marcos, Texas, America’s largest “body farm” for studying human remains:

The odor is strong as I walk among the cages, the air redolent with the heavy, sour-wet scent of these bodies letting go of their bile, staining the grasses all around them. I look at the sprawl, each individual in its strange shelter, shriveled and shocked-looking; each with more or less of its flesh and insides; each, in its post-person state, given a new name: a number. They died quietly, in an old-age home; they died painfully, of cancer; they died suddenly, in some violent accident; they died deliberately, a suicide. In spite of how little they had in common in life, they now lie exposed alongside one another, their very own enzymes propelling them toward the same final state. Here, in death, unintentionally, they have formed a community of equals.

The Soul Of John Updike

In a review of Adam Begley’s Updike, William Deresiewicz finds that writer’s short story, “Pigeon Feathers,” offers telling insight into his religious beliefs. In the story, the character David is asked by his mother to kill the pigeons roosting in their barn, which gives him “the sensation of a creator.” How Deresiewicz describes what happens next:

It is when he’s burying these creatures that he has his epiphany. He has never seen a bird up close before. “Across the surface of the infinitely adjusted yet somehow effortless mechanics of the feathers played idle designs of color, no two alike, designs executed, it seemed, in a controlled rapture, with a joy that hung level in the air above and behind him.” Now he knows “that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let 
David live forever.”

The story is a credo at once theological and artistic.

David finds God by emulating him. He creates. That he creates by killing—
the story’s brazen moral scandal—only draws him nearer to his model, for He does the same, as Piet in Couples understands. The more important point lies in the way in which he kills: carefully, cleverly, with a patience both of seeing and of skill. It takes no wit to recognize a third, implied creator, intermediate between the other two. The boy creates the birds; the artist creates the boy; the deity creates them all. “Controlled rapture” is a precise description of the state in which the patterns of Updike’s own work, here and elsewhere, have been so evidently crafted. The joy hangs level 
everywhere around us.

This is the argument from design, and it is also an argument for design. Updike believed in art as imitation, a tracing of the wonders God has put in pigeons and in Davids. “Pigeon Feathers” tells us that people do not matter, not even to themselves, unless they have immortal souls. Elsewhere Updike makes a corollary statement about fiction. Without souls, he asks, “are mundane lives worth writing about?” Art becomes a form of affirmation. Updike didn’t want a better world, he only wanted this one, forever. He may not have thought that everything was holy—he wasn’t pious or sentimental—but he thought that it was beautiful, to use the language of art, and he certainly thought, to use the language of Genesis, that it was good. And men and women (their sins 
included)—they were very good.

Recent Dish on Updike’s faith here.

(Photo by Partha S. Sahana)

The Ideology Of ISIS

Kevin McDonald argues that its origins are not at all medieval, but rather modern, and indeed, even Western:

It needs to be said very clearly: contemporary jihadism is not a return to the past. It is a modern, anti-traditional ideology with a very significant debt to western political history and culture. When he made his speech in July at Mosul’s Great Mosque declaring the creation of an Islamic state with himself as its caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi quoted at length from the Indian/Pakistani thinker Abul A’la Maududi, the founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami party in 1941 and originator of the contemporary term Islamic state. Maududi’s Islamic state is profoundly shaped by western ideas and concepts. He takes a belief shared between Islam and other religious traditions, namely that God alone is the ultimate judge of a person, and transforms this – reframing God’s possession of judgment into possession of, and ultimately monopoly of, “sovereignty”. Maududi also draws upon understandings of the natural world governed by laws that are expressions of the power of God – ideas at the heart of the 17th-century scientific revolution.

Ella Lipin focuses on its allusions to Islamic eschatology and how ISIS uses the promise of an apocalyptic battle as a recruiting tool:

In July, ISIS released the first two issues of Dabiq, its digital magazine, revealingly named after a Syrian town believed to be the site of the future climactic battle, to be fought between Muslims and Romans, that will lead to Judgment Day.

The use of Dabiq draws from hadith, revered accounts of the Prophet Muhammad’s sayings or practices. The relevant passage states that the end of days won’t come until the battle at Dabiq. After the battle, the triumphant Muslims will go on to conquer the Western world (symbolized by Constantinople). ISIS reprinted this hadith in full in the first issue of its new publication. Herein lies ISIS’s propaganda strategy: employ Islamic apocalyptic tradition – with the West as the modern day Romans – to mobilize followers. Both the organization and its new recruits understand this script, made all the more relevant and compelling by the recent debate about U.S. airstrikes in Syria. …

This interpretation of events is not limited to Sunni extremists; a large number of Muslims believe these events may be imminent. A 2011-2012 Pew survey found that a high percentage of Muslims in the Middle East believe they would witness events leading to the Day of Judgment. In Iraq, where ISIS has recently expanded, 72 percent of respondents expect to experience the coming of the Mahdi, a messianic redeemer who will restore the political and religious purity of Islam. While the figures were lower in other Muslim countries—Tunisia (67 percent), Lebanon (56 percent), Morocco (51 percent), the Palestinian Territories (46 percent), Jordan (41 percent), and Egypt (40 percent)—the apocalyptic tradition clearly resonates deeply throughout the region.

Last week, Laurie A. Brand looked into how ISIS is trying to promote its ideology by rewriting the school curriculum in the areas it controls:

The term “Syrian Arab Republic” is to be removed completely and replaced with “the Islamic State,” and the Syrian national anthem is to be discarded or suppressed. There is to be no teaching of the concepts of national patriotism (wataniyyah) or Arab nationalism (qawmiyyah); rather, students are to be taught that they belong to Islam and its people, to strict monotheism and its adherents, and that the land of the Muslim is the land in which God’s path (shar’ Allah) governs. The words “homeland” (watan), “his homeland,” “my homeland,” or “Syria” are to be replaced wherever they are found with the phrases “the Islamic state,” “his Islamic state,” “land of the Muslims” or the “Sham (or other the Islamic State-governed) Province.” The teacher is instructed to replace any gaps in Arabic language and grammar instructional materials that may result from the suppression of these terms with examples that do not conflict with sharia or the Islamic State. In addition, all pictures that violate sharia are to be removed, as are any examples in mathematics that involve usury, interest, democracy or elections. Finally, in the science curriculum anything that is associated with Darwin’s theory or evolution is to be removed and all creation is to be attributed to God.

Meanwhile, Michael Koplow cautions against conflating the defeat of ISIS with the defeat of the ideas it espouses:

ISIS’s ideology is a revolutionary one seeking to overturn the status quo and to constantly expand, which makes it particularly susceptible to living on beyond the elimination of its primary advocate. Much like Voldemort’s life force after he attempts to kill Harry Potter as a baby, ISIS’s ideology will not die just because its host body is decimated. It will lurk around until another group seizes upon it and resurrects it, and much like ISIS seems to be even worse than al-Qaida, whatever replaces ISIS is likely to be more radical still. The problem with Obama’s speech yesterday was that it set an expectation that cannot be fulfilled. Yes, ISIS itself may be driven from the scene, but the overall problem is not one that is going to go away following airstrikes or even ground forces.

The Carpaccio Dog

In an essay exploring how Vittore Carpaccio portrayed animal life, Jan Morris turns her eye to “the Carpaccio dog”:

Vittore has been called pantheistic. I am quite sure he revered Nature, anyway, or he could not have painted the birds and beasts as he did. He seems to have loved them in the way Montaigne loved his cat—as equals, unpatronizingly, clear-eyed, never gushingly. Consider the little dog in his celebrated painting concerning Saints Jerome and Augustine, one of the most famous dogs in all art—the Carpaccio Dog, in fact. Nearly everyone wonders what kind of dog he is. Ruskin, in 1851, thought he was exactly like his white Spitz Wisie (which he described, during a nadir in that animal’s career, as being a “poor little speechless, luckless, wistfully gazing doggie”). Pompeo Molmenti (1907) considered him “a lively little spaniel.” Terisio Pignatti (1958) believed him to be a Maltese puppy, and called his coat “fluffy.” So did Kenneth Clark (1977) in his book Animals and Man. I myself though (2014) prefer to think of him as a dog of no particular breed, a tough urchin mongrel, cocky, feisty, and fun, rescued from the street perhaps by one saint or another, and cherished by multitudes down the centuries. To me he is simply the Carpaccio Dog. Doggie indeed! Fluffy my foot! …

In a preliminary sketch for his picture about Jerome and Augustine, the Carpaccio Dog was not a dog at all, but what seems to be a cat, a crouching, weasely thing with a collar around its neck. Having failed so abysmally in this exercise, Carpaccio gave up, turned the animal into a dog and, so far as I know, never tried to paint a small feline again.

(Image: The Vision of St. Augustine, 1502, by Carpaccio via Wikimedia Commons)