Some Sunday reading. My fave: Ezekiel 23:19-20. But 2 Kings 2:23-24 deserves a looksie:
23 From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some youths came out of the town and jeered at him. "Go on up, you baldhead!" they said. "Go on up, you baldhead!" 24 He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the LORD. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the youths.
Pete Wehner and Yuval Levin chart the enormous gains in various social indicators since the early 1990s. The one great anomaly is the family, which remains roughly where it was:
Even as the teenage birth rate has fallen, out-of-wedlock births in general have reached an all-time high: 37 percent of all births in 2005. Over half of all marriages are now preceded by a period of unmarried cohabitation, and marriage rates themselves have declined by almost one-half since 1970.
In the life of any society, the place of the family is central. That fact alone makes these last statistics significant, and seriously complicates the picture of dramatic progress in other, related realms. Indeed, the two starkly divergent trends, taken side by side, should cause us to reconsider certain common assumptions concerning just how culture, behavior, family, and society interact, and how they change.
Wehner and Levin don’t really have a coherent explanation for this – especially since social conservatives have long argued that the breakdown in traditional family structure is the core reason behind other social ills, such as crime. Perhaps it isn’t in all social settings. Perhaps living in sin for a while before marriage is actually a social good for some; perhaps lower rates of marriage are not the end of the world – as many victims of awful marriages can attest. Perhaps child-birth outside marriage is not necessarily a bad thing if the relationship is solid and care for the child is secure. Perhaps, in other words, holding the family of the 1950s up as the standard by which all family structure should be measured is not, in fact, very helpful. I don’t know, but it seems one obvious inference from the data worth exploring further.
Wilmington, Delaware, 2.45 pm.
Some very cool links from Chris Chatham.
A reader writes:
I’m sure that your post will generate its share of outrage from southerners who feel unfairly singled out for blame for the cultural roots of torture in America, so I commend you to a book called "The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity" by Jill Lepore (now a professor of history at Harvard). Professor Lepore describes a conflict with some eerie similarities to the post-9/11 "war on terror." After a period of engagement, in which the British settlers of New England tried to engage and "civilize" the native population, the Wampanoags turned on the settlers in a series of brutal attacks (including the murder and kidnap of women and children on isolated farms).
In their resulting terror, the settlers retaliated with an extraordinary level of brutality, nearly exterminating the native population in southeastern New England. The specific accounts of torture are sparse because, as Professor Lepore relates, subsequent written accounts seem to gloss over the specifics of how the campaign was conducted — the intellectuals who came to build a "city on a hill" were clearly ashamed of what (they agreed) had to be done. Indeed, the very existence of the Wampanoag was glossed over, as Indian place names were systematically changed to familiar English ones. But Lepore’s excellent book shows that it’s not only American southerners who have perceived attacks by dark-skinned people as an existential threat, and have jettisoned their principles regarding human rights in response.
The online pro-follicle community continues to grow. Here’s a hot-or-not beard page; a blog dedicated to growing beards to help battered women; and a no-shave November round-up.
Now we begin to understand why Romney struggled so much with that question in the YouTube debate about Biblical literalism. The question itself may have been a code attack on Mormonism itself. This LDS official statement is pretty clear:
"Latter-day Saints revere the Bible. They study it and believe it to be the word of God. However, they do not believe the Bible, as it is currently available, is without error… As the Bible was compiled, organized, translated and transcribed, many errors entered the text."
I have a feeling a lot of evangelicals may be getting those sentences by email in the next few weeks. Now, of course, the imperfection of the Bible seems self-evident to me. It contradicts itself many times. But it sure doesn’t look that way to fundamentalists and many evangelicals. And the question is broad enough to make it into legitimate mainstream discourse. So the evangelicals don’t have to "go there" in attacking Romney’s Mormonism directly, or raising some of its more eccentric doctrines; they can simply challenge Romney on Biblical literalism and tell their followers why a Mormon can’t answer the question as well as Huckabee can. And it becomes very hard to tell them to knock it off: all they’re doing is defending their own approach to Scripture.
Macaque apes turn out to be like humans:
Platt found that male macaques strongly preferred to look at pictures of females’ rear ends and dominant males’ faces. They liked them enough to pay, by sacrificing a chance to get a treat. But you had to bribe those same monkeys with treats to persuade them to look at female macaque faces or the faces of subordinate males.
A child plays as he looks for fish in Southkali, 01 December 2007. More than 3,400 people are confirmed dead after the powerful storm ripped through Bangladesh’s southern and central districts on November 15. Thousands more are missing feared dead and an estimated 280,000 without shelter. By Mehdi Fedouach/AFP/Getty Images.
