Distributing Ownership Instead of Money

Anthony Esolen in his Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization points out three factors that contribute to lower birth rates:

1. High taxes
2. Scarcity of land for private property and agrarian lifestyles
3. Poor living conditions

The Wall Street Journal just published the following on the increased cost of child-rearing:

A child born in 2009 will cost nearly a quarter of a million dollars, or about $222,360, to raise to maturity, up a little less than 1% from 2008, the Agriculture Department said Wednesday in its annual report on the average cost of raising a child. (The department runs the survey to help courts and state governments set child-support guidelines.) Expenses for child care, education and health care rose the most compared with 2008, while the cost of transportation for a child actually fell, the department said. Annual child-rearing expenses for the average middle-income, two-parent family range from $11,650 to $13,530, depending on the age of the child, the department says.

Child care accounts for 17% of the total spending, and education for 16% of the total. The cost of housing makes up nearly one-third of the total; this is gauged by the average cost of an additional bedroom. But the tally excludes any spending on kids over age 17, so it doesn't include one of the biggest and fastest-growing single financial outlays many parents make: the cost of sending your child through college. Higher-education costs aren't included, the department says.

Families in the Northeast have the highest costs, followed by cities in the West, then cities in the Midwest. Families in rural areas and in Southern cities have the lowest child-rearing costs.

For families with many kids, however, there is some good news: The more children you have, the less it costs to raise each one. These economics of scale deliver 22% savings per child for families with three or more children. That is because kids can share a bedroom, hand down clothing and toys to each other, and consume food purchased in bulk quantities, reducing costs. Also, private schools and child-care centers may offer sibling discounts. The data is compiled based on spending by 11,800 two-parent families and 3,350 single parents with at least one child under 18 living at home.

What if we started distributing land instead of money? What if we created tax laws in favor of small business, family farms, and distribution of ownership to employees instead of corporate combinations owned exclusively by big businessmen?

In such a new climate, would we find our work more fulfilling and quit working for a paycheck? Could we start finding fulfillment in our families instead of individual consumption?

Might I propose that God made us to flourish in families, living in gardens, working with our own tools, and not on assembly lines, working with other people's machines, and looking forward to the weekend and our next spending spree.

Do We Share 99% of Our Genes with the Town Mouse or the Country Mouse?

I asked a friend last night how long naturalism will be able to hold up against the onslaught of Stephan Meyer's argument in his Signature in the Cell. Meyer's basic thesis is that evolution by natural selection and random genetic mutation cannot explain the diversity of life much less the origin of life. The main problem here is that it can only select from what's there or change what's there. They cannot supply what's there. These mechanisms cannot produce genetic information, which is akin to digital code.

This would be like saying that the consumer market and viruses can account for all computer hardware and software. The consumer market selects particular computer hardware and software for survival, and virus and spyware can damage it, but neither of these impersonal agents can produce it. How do you go from computers the size of houses to iPads through consumer choices and hackers? Without intelligent computer programmers we would not only never have a computer but the iPad would never assault us with its sexy sleekness.

Now check this from James Le Fanu, a guest blogger at the Discovery Institute, who writes on " The Last Days of the Façade of Knowing":

Interchangeability across species reaches its apotheosis with the finding that we share 99% of our genes with a mouse. How so trivial a genetic difference can generate such diversity of form defies all explanation, other than to suppose it must be ‘something to do’ with gene regulation, ‘the turning on and off of genes at different times and places in the course of development’.

The implications are clear enough. Biologists could in theory sequence every living creature on the face of the planet, but this would only confirm they all share the same core set of genes that account for the nuts and bolts of the proteins and enzymes of the cell of which all living things are made. But beyond that the really interesting question — that of ‘form’ — what it is that so readily distinguishes the elephant from the octopus, fireflies from foxes would remain as elusive as ever.

The genetic instructions must be there of course because otherwise the tens of millions of our fellow species would not replicate themselves with such fidelity from generation to generation. But we are compelled in the light of these extraordinary findings of the recent past that we have no conception of why we should become so different from a worm or fly.

And the same applies though more significantly still to Darwin’s proposed mechanism of evolutionary transformation. There is, to be sure, persuasive evidence of a shared or common ancestry in the interchangeability of, for example, our genome with that of a mouse and our primate cousin — but beyond that the myriad of random genetic mutations that would provide a basis for the transformation of one form of life into another are nowhere to be found. “We cannot see in this why we are so different from chimpanzees”, observed Svante Paabo Chairman of the Chimpanzee Genome Project on its publication in 2005 — “part of the secret is hidden in there, but we don’t understand it”. Nothing has subsequently emerged to challenge that conclusion.

The standard scientific response to these anomalies and perplexities is to concede that ‘it’ has turned out to be much more complex than originally contemplated — which is certainly true. But nonetheless, the argument goes, the accumulation of yet more biological data, the sequencing of yet more genomes must eventually, like a bulldozer, drive a causeway through current perplexities. Perhaps, but more certainly, the reverse for the more that science progresses, the more genomes that are sequenced, the more striking the irresoluble discrepancy between the similarity of the genetic instructions and the diversity of the living world (click on post title to read the whole).

Go Fish!

Stanley Fish reviews three new books on classical education. Click on the title of this post and take a trip!

Our Forgotten Father

I caught Victor Davis Hanson on Book TV (C-SPAN 2) talking about his new book The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern (click on the title of this post for more). He argued that we have no stomach for war because we are therapeutic, affluent, and technological.

Westerners have fought wars because they believed that life was supposed to be hard and to win a war you had to be harder. But in a therapeutic culture this worldview falls on "hard" times. Being affluent, we enjoy leisure and war and leisure don't mix to well. A long protracted struggle in the dessert is not our idea of the good life. We also expect wars to be manageable by technology. The Enlightenment dream is that we can wrap our machinery and communication around war and control every facet of it. When we run up against the unknown, which war inevitably is, we don't know what to do. When it comes down to fight we seek flight. Hanson argues that until recently our civilization knew that wars were a test of will.

Someone asked him if he would still support the war in Iraq given what we know now about the absence of weapons of mass destruction. He answered that there were many more reasons for going to war against Sadam than WMDs. But George W thought that would be the best way to present the security threat to the American people, so he hitched his simplistic wagon to the wrong horse.

I also got the sense that Hanson was saying we must return to the just war tradition. If we don't have a just war policy, the world will try to get away with unjust war. Without a deterrent, people and nations will try to push you around. Hanson defined a deterrent as a strong military and the will to use it, even preemptively. The question isn't pre-emption or not, unilatereal or bilateral, but who you're dealing with. If it is a bad guy who is committing crimes against humanity and plans on including you, then you have grounds for a just war. But this requires a definition of such things as good and evil, which is problematic in our post-modern world.

Hanson also point out that we have a post-modern president dealing with pre-modern dictators. Dealing with them, he argued, is like dealing with his neighboring farmers (yes he farms!) When they want to take your irrigation for themselves, and you tell them its my turn, they look at you as if to say, "Stop me." Then, he said, you have to convince them it's not in their best interest.

My lone criticism of Hanson's presentation is based on the Micah mandate, which he did not address, but perhaps it's in the book. Micah 6:8:

He has showed you, O man, what is good.

And what does the LORD require of you?

To act justly and to love mercy

and to walk humbly with your God.

We haven't tended "to act justly and to love mercy" but build up our military and do whatever we want. We aren't Hanson at the irragation ditch. We're usually the guy stealing the water! We demand that third world countries repay their debt to us while we continue to rack up our own in the trillions. We comfort ourselves by saying nobody will come calling because we're too important to their economy. If they do we can bomb them to kingdom come. I actually had somebody explain it this way to me about three weeks ago. We may think we're righteous because we give more than any other country to world relief, but we give less as a percentage of GDP than any other first world country. If we tithed ten percent of our military budget we could end world hunger within our lifetimes. Read Hope in Troubled Times by Goudzward, etc.

We will never be able to fight a just war without an eternal perspective. As long as we're affluent, therapeutic consumers who worship at the altar of technology, we will be bound to a temporal perspective. This means that it will be difficult for us to conceive of just war or bear the cost of one for our neighbor. In order to fight for justice we will also have to learn how to do justice and love mercy and might I put in a plug for a chastised Constantinianism--walk humbly with our God. Then we may be able to create a new world climate of love instead of fear.

Remember Your Fairy Tales

C.S. Lewis wrote in “The Weight of Glory:”

Remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years.

We need to remember that the disenchantment of the world is an enchantment. Nothing breaks the spell like Scripture and fairy stories remind us that Scripture reveals God's enchantment of the world.

Pious Gold

The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
O'Connor is literary "shock and awe" in the best sense of the metaphor. She pitted herself against what she called "pious trash." She is also one of the best anti-dotes to trashy-trash nihilism that I know of.

She writes so convincingly about what biographer Ralph Wood calls "the Christ-haunted South." The characters are almost tangible to the imagination. As I read I became convinced that I knew people like this whether it was true or not. This happened especially while reading "The Displaced Person" and "Greenleaf."

O'Connor is shocking and redemptive at the same time. Read "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," "Revelation," and especially "The Artificial Nigger." The latter is one of the most profound stories, short or long, that I've read. "Parker's Back" is lightly allegorical about the love/hate relationship between Catholicism and a kind of Protestant evangelicalism. The former is ignorant of itself but down to earth, the latter knows what it believes but is, at the same time, impoverished by those beliefs.

"Good Country People" is a critique of naive nihilism by a coherent nihilism: "You ain't so smart. I been believing in nothing ever since I was born." Self-righteousness is a constant theme that she crushes in her narrative crucible, especially in "Revelation." Many of her stories resonate with Jesus' parable of the "Pharisee and the Tax Collector." "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is O'Connor at her theological best. The Misfit knows that without God there is no final justice and "Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead ... and If He did what he said, then it's nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn't ... No pleasure but meanness."

View all my reviews >>

God Loves the French

Huguenot Heritage Presentation from Daniel Foucachon on Vimeo.

Is America Democratic or Bureaucratic?

I recently put the wraps on a year of teaching American history and am beginning my preparations for teaching Ancient history. To that end I am reading Anthony Esolen's Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization. We stand to learn much from the history of Greece and Rome since we took our democratic cues from their civilizations. Esolen writes:

Note what such a State cannot be. It canot be an empire, because empires steal from men the opportunity to govern themselves. It cannot be anarchy because lawlessness makes one's life too uncertain for the leisure to pursue the good of the intellect. It must somehow take into account human nature as we find it.... The State cannot be so vast that we fall into anonymity, and government is imposed upon us rather than created by us and for our purposes. Thus the modern "democracy," neither republican nor democratic but bureaucratic, distant, imperial in its all-encompassing demands ... is poor soil too for man's thriving.

What then? "Man is political animal," says Aristotle. He thrives in a community of families and clans who govern themselves freely and well, providing for more than a basic subsistence. What they mainly provide is freedom: free time, leisure for conversation, an arena for debate, for struggles that have consequences, for reading and arguing, for sport, for contemplation, for honing all the practical and intellectual virtues. True civility has more to do with a well-ordered fight than with the bonds of niceness (36).

By taking responsibility for its citizens the State takes responsibility away from its citizens. Consider the what Alexis De Tocqueville said about the despotism of too much government:

I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls.

Over these is elevated an immense, tutelary power, which takes sole charge of assuring their enjoyment and of watching over their fate. It is absolute, attentive to detail, regular, provident, and gentle. It would resemble the paternal power if, like that power, it had as its object to prepare men for manhood, but it seeks, to the contrary, to keep them irrevocably fixed in childhood … it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their needs, guides them in their principal affairs…

The sovereign extends its arms about the society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of petty regulations—complicated, minute, and uniform—through which even the most original minds and the most vigorous souls know not how to make their way… it does not break wills; it softens them, bends them, and directs them; rarely does it force one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting on one’s own … it does not tyrannize, it gets in the way: it curtails, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

Government needs to be strong enough to provide for human flourishing and weak enough not to get in the way of its citizens' flourishing. Government needs transcendent morality that can only be provided by the church and its God and it must enforce it. The government also needs to respect the image of God in man and trust it to take care of itself.

Man needs freedom but freedom without morality is not true freedom. Luther spoke of "royal freedom" as the ability to do what is right. Today in America we have reduced freedom to choice. Esolen points out that both Plato and his student Aristotle "saw that if freedom means 'being free to take what you like, within the law," then no nobler faculty of the soul beyond the appetite will be developed." We want De Tocqueville's "small and vulgar pleasures." This makes us weak and malleable for the state to form us to its liking. We lose ourselves.

Plato wrote in his Republic: "The father habitually tries to resemble the child and is afraid of his sons, and the son likens himself to the father and feels no awe or fear of his parents" (8.562e). Esolen comments:

Teachers fawn upon their students; students ignore their teachers. A lawless egalitarianism descends upon all, along with a great touchiness, an inability to bear any restraint, until finally, slaves to their appetites and plunged in chaos, the people choose to be slaves to a 'protector' who can rein them in. Hence tyranny--welcomed!

We need the civility of a well ordered fight! We need a contentious democracy and citizens who imbibe from the wells of revelation!