Author: Andrew Sullivan

Face Of The Day

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Ellen Ruddick-Sunstein highlights Taiwanese photographer Yun-Fei Tou‘s Memento Mori, a series of photographs that “captures the final minutes in the lives of hundreds of shelter dogs awaiting euthanasia”:

For each, he visits on the day of their predetermined deaths. In the last instants of their existence, he often plays with them, feeds them, and gives them a voice that has eluded them for much of their troubled lives.

Inspired by philosopher Peter Singer, Tou explains that the rights of animals are not the product of sentimentality but of moral fortitude and integrity. We are bound ethically to these silent creatures, and Tou frames them as he would any human subject, imbuing each with a palpable sense of soulful tenderness and dignity. Freed from the cages that have become their final homes, the dogs are immortalized on life-sized prints.

Coming Around To Kierkegaard

Pankaj Mishra admits he thought there was “something haughty” about Kierkegaard’s The Two Ages when he first read it as a young man. Revisiting the text this summer, however, he better understood the insights of a book that “deplores the mass society that in the mid-19th century was coming into being across Europe, and what he saw as the general diminishment of the individual by the very means — public opinion, press — devised to enlighten and unify individuals into an equitable society”:

My beliefs have not fared well during the past decade’s lowering display of disingenuous political and business leaders; meek, if not blinkered, journalists; and easily frightened and manipulated publics. The last few months alone have confirmed Arendt’s fear of a “tremendous increase in mutual hatred and a somewhat universal irritability of everybody against everybody else.”

Kierkegaard’s arguments about the modern world’s negatively unifying principles had seemed overwrought because my own perception was shallow. The process of leveling has reached an advanced stage, accomplished not only by the imagined communities of the nation-state and the statistical majorities of public-opinion polls but also the idea of sociality and community promoted by the digital media.

Kierkegaard anticipated the confining fun-house mirrors of Facebook and Twitter when he wrote that the seeker of true freedom must “break out of the prison in which his own reflection holds him,” and then out of “the vast penitentiary built by the reflection of his associates.” And though I am as far from being a Christian as ever, I am better prepared to comprehend Kierkegaard’s insistence that a genuine union of human beings required a greater spiritual strenuousness from “the single individual”: that he or she establish “an ethical stance” regardless of general opinion. “Otherwise,” he warned, with steely accuracy, “it gets to be a union of people who separately are weak, a union as unbeautiful and depraved as a child-marriage.”

(Hat tip: Paul Elie)

The Reinvention Of Evil

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John Gray investigates how we understand evil today – and looks back with appreciation at the wisdom of St. Augustine, who found “the source of evil within human beings”:

In its official forms, secular liberalism rejects the idea of evil. Many liberals would like to see the idea of evil replaced by a discourse of harm: we should talk instead about how people do damage to each other and themselves. But this view poses a problem of evil remarkably similar to that which has troubled Christian believers. If every human being is born a liberal – as these latter-day disciples of Pelagius appear to believe – why have so many, seemingly of their own free will, given their lives to regimes and movements that are essentially repressive, cruel and violent? Why do human beings knowingly harm others and themselves? Unable to account for these facts, liberals have resorted to a language of dark and evil forces much like that of dualistic religions.

The efforts of believers to explain why God permits abominable suffering and injustice have produced nothing that is convincing; but at least believers have admitted that the ways of the Deity are mysterious. Even though he ended up accepting the divine will, the questions that Job put to God were never answered. Despite all his efforts to find a solution, Augustine confessed that human reason was not equal to the task. In contrast, when secular liberals try to account for evil in rational terms, the result is a more primitive version of Manichean myth. When humankind proves resistant to improvement, it is because forces of darkness – wicked priests, demagogic politicians, predatory corporations and the like – are working to thwart the universal struggle for freedom and enlightenment. There is a lesson here. Sooner or later anyone who believes in innate human goodness is bound to reinvent the idea of evil in a cruder form. Aiming to exorcise evil from the modern mind, secular liberals have ended up constructing another version of demonology, in which anything that stands out against what is believed to be the rational course of human development is anathematised.

(Image: The Conversion of St. Augustine by Fra Angelico, 15th century, via Wikimedia Commons)

Matisse’s Chapel

Near the end of his life, the famed artist – ostensibly an atheist – designed a chapel in Vence, in the south of France. Morgan Meis muses about the project that Matisse called his “masterpiece”:

In the chapel, Matisse took some of the amusing plant squiggle designs from his cut-outs and used them for a stained glass called The Tree of Life. The squiggles are yellow against a deep blue background. The result is tense and calming at the same time, not unlike the tension of the crucifixion, in which a scene of a horrible death affirms, somehow, the eternality of life.

The priestly vestments—bright orange chasubles with streaks of yellow punctuated by the darkest black crosses—are made of paper. They are cut-outs to be worn during the act of worship. What does one worship in the chapel of cut-outs? Life, of course, which is to say God. Here, art has come back into its own. It isn’t didactic. It isn’t art that has a specific religious bone to pick. Instead, it is art that is religious in its very bones. You stop worrying about art’s purpose when you stand before Matisse’s Tree of Life. You stop worrying and you start, without so much as consciously deciding, to bend your knees.

Egg Freezing On The Company Dime, Ctd

Reihan Salam takes the conversation to what might be its logical conclusion:

[P]erhaps Silicon Valley is simply seeing the future before the rest of us do. Many talented female employees are balancing a desire to climb the corporate ladder with an unwillingness to foreclose the possibility of having children. The executives who’ve embraced the idea of paying for egg-freezing coverage are doing their best to meet the needs of these workers. That said, the fact that a growing number of working women are interested in the procedure is in itself an acknowledgment that it is difficult to combine child-rearing with the all-consuming, more-than-full-time professional work that we find in the uppermost echelons of the American economy. …

[I]f we want to achieve gender equality by changing attitudes, it can’t just be male attitudes that change. Men will have to become more interested in spending time with their children, but women will also have to become less interested. If the miracle of childbirth is a central component of what bonds women to their offspring, and pregnancy envy is a force that drives men to accumulate wealth, outsourcing pregnancy might be the best solution.

In August, Zoltan Istvan, author of The Transhumanist Wager, touted the potential benefits of artificial wombs for women, from the most obvious (“females would no longer have to solely bear responsibility for childbirth”) to the less obvious (“ectogenesis could unchain women from the home”). Even some of the criticisms of ectogenesis—that it will reduce the intimacy between mother and child—could be a good thing if your concern is that when it comes to raising children, the attitudes of women and men are too different.

Annalee Newitz is totally on board:

An artificial womb – now there is a technology that could transform everything. No more paying for those frozen eggs or expensive fertility treatments. No more potentially fatal pregnancies and births. No more women terrified that their “biological clocks” are ticking; no more of the pain and discomfort of pregnancy. Women and men would be liberated from having to use (and often abuse) women’s bodies to make cute little humans.

If you look back at the twentieth century, it’s undeniable that one of the most important technologies to emerge – one that changed social relationships, families, and our understanding of biology – was the birth control pill. As Jonathan Eig argues in a fascinating new book on the topic, the Pill was the culmination of decades of research. It was a major scientific breakthrough. And it transformed the lives of everyone, male and female alike. Women could enjoy sex the way men always had, without fear that one moment of pleasure would have life-altering consequences.

If the Pill brought us into the future, imagine where an artificial womb would take us.

Meanwhile, back to the in-tray, a reader disputes the argument that young adults are better suited for parenthood:

I’m a 46-year-old father of a three-year-old and a nine-month-old. My partner is 48. We met in our early 40s, and we tried to start a family when we knew it was right, but we couldn’t conceive the usual way or through in-vitro fertilization. We eventually had a donor egg and have since given birth to two beautiful boys.

I do have less energy then I did at 25 or 35, which makes it more difficult to chase the kids around or stay up nights bottle-feeding (or, in my partner’s case, breastfeeding). However, I believe I’m a much better father now then I would have been at an earlier point in my life. Having been able to experience life has made me much more patient, content, and laid-back.

I grew up in a dysfunctional home with alcoholic parents, and by doing some work on myself, I’m now able to spot my demons and manage them much better than when I could in my youthful, high-energy days. Plus, my salary is triple what it was in my 20s, and I’ve been able to establish myself in a job that allows me flexibility to deal with the surprises that my two little devils are waiting to unleash. We’ve both upped our life insurance, and we realize that no early retirement is in our future. We are very happy with this lot in life.

And another questions the efficacy of egg-freezing:

The real issue with the procedure is that the odds of producing a live baby on any one IVF cycle are no better than 50%, without using frozen eggs.  The typical egg retrieval is 5 to 12 eggs, which are used for one cycle, with the take-home-baby rate dropping as the number of eggs retrieved drops.  There’s an upward limit on how many eggs can be retrieved, because too much stimulation causes Ovarian Hyperstimulation Syndrome.   If the number of eggs retrieved is on the low side (closer to 5 than 12), the woman would need to do more than one retrieval to reach a 50% chance of taking home a baby when she chooses to use her eggs.

A woman who does two retrievals, each of which retrieves over 10 eggs, can do two IVF cycles, giving her something around a 60% to 70% chance of taking home a baby, still not great odds, if her other choice was to have children at a younger age.  Each retrieval is a month of daily hormone injections, medical monitoring, and an outpatient procedure, none of it without risks (see Ovarian Hyperstimulation Syndrome).

Even The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists doesn’t recommend egg freezing as a way to delay fertility.  Yet the idea is being pushed and discussed in the media, rarely with much skepticism.

This is how the free market American medical system works.  A new technology gets pushed, usually by the people who stand to benefit, such as fertility clinics eager to expand their client base beyond infertile couples.  The media picks it up, often without questioning or investigating the science or the numbers, despite the fact that they are out there and easily Googled.  There’s no systematic process of questioning the hypothesis pushed.

Well there is at the Dish, at least – your emails. Another reader takes a new approach:

I only have a moment, as I’m one of those older parents (53) with a 12 year old who I need to get to bed, but I have one word that I’d like to put out there in response to the “need” to freeze eggs so that it’s possible to become a parent later in life: ADOPTION!

How about if more companies offered adoption benefits. That way, employees of all ages and fertility “abilities” could become parents if and when they wanted to, AND more children in desperate need of homes would have the opportunity to find their forever families. In the frantic quest to have their “own” child, so many people are missing out on the amazing blessing of adoption, which can be a win-win-win – for a child, the parent(s) and society.

Having had children by birth in my 20s, and another by adoption in my 40s, I can personally attest that energy levels decrease; but, having come to parenthood both by birth and adoption, I can also attest that each of my children is 100% “mine” and that the joys and challenges and miracles of parenthood are gifts beyond compare at any age.

I wonder if all of the companies that offer egg-freezing benefits also offer comprehensive adoption benefits.  If they don’t, they certainly should!

Follow the whole discussion thread here.

“All We Will Ever Have”

In his new volume of prose reflections, The Labyrinth: God, Darwin, and the Meaning of Life, the poet and atheist Philip Appleman comes to terms with life’s meaning in a world where God is “an unnecessary hypothesis.” Daniel Thomas Moran praises Appleman’s book, summarizing its message as “we must care for one another, for this planet we exist on only briefly, and for all the living things that share it with us”:

We who call ourselves humanist or agnostic or atheist don’t have the available remedy of luxuriating in the pat explanations of ancient texts or the bumptious pronouncements of holy men. To a greater degree than those who get answers from priests, preachers, imams, or rabbis, we nonbelievers must invest more of ourselves in the great wrestling with our nature, and surely, our fate as mortal beings. How many times have all of us been asked by people of faith how it is that our lives can have meaning in the absence of a belief in a god and an afterlife? Unlike the blindly faithful, we refuse to find our meaning in the worship of death and in the chimera of an eternal life.

Appleman sums it up with grace and directness as only a poet can:

Once definitely done with our adolescent longing for the Absolute, we would find this world valuable after all, and poignantly valuable precisely because it is not eternal. Doomed to extinction, our loves, our work, our friendships, our tastes are all painfully precious. We look about us, on the streets and in the subways, and discover that we are beautiful because we are mortal, priceless because we are so rare in the universe and so fleeting. Whatever we are, whatever we make of ourselves: that is all we will ever have—and that, in its profound simplicity, is the meaning of life.

The Labyrinth is perhaps the book we have been waiting for, the one Philip Appleman has been waiting a lifetime to write. It is a comfort. Let it also be a companion.

Generation Sext, Ctd

Amid the continuing debate over teen sexting, Zara Kessler notes that school districts are trying to address the phenomenon:

Sexting teaching materials already exist. There’s “Empowering Students to Engage in Positive Communication: K-12 Curriculum to Combat Student Sexting,” from Miami-Dade County Public Schools. A key message can be quickly distilled from “Secondary Lesson 3”: “Safe Sexting, No Such Thing.” The previous lesson has an accompanying handout, “My Personal Promise to Avoid ‘Sexting,’” with spaces for student and parent signatures. The description of a later lesson notes that it “will help students gain an insight into the perspective of the ‘victim’ of sexting as well as helping those affected stop being victimized.”

Texas has the “Before You Text… Program,” an online course that the Texas School Safety Center states “can be mandated by a judge or used as an educational tool.” Not surprisingly, the program isn’t so fond of the sexting life, asserting, “Even if you only sent one sexting message, others may now have a bad opinion of you,” and “Your family members are eventually very likely to see any images you send electronically.” Just in case the low opinion of peers and family is no deterrent, the program points out that “Embarrassment, humiliation, fear, and betrayal may come back to haunt you.”