Boomer Death Watch

Happy new year!

Today the oldest baby boomers turn sixty-one and enter their seventh decade. Austin Ruse last year summarized their influence:

What we will say about the passing of the boom, contra their own self-adulation, is that they were a decidely mixed bag who had an outsized and largely negative influence on all of our institutions. Much of our cultural work [against the culture of death] is to repair the deep damage they have done.

It doesn't take a lot of imagination to blame this self-indulgent generation for so many of our modern ills.¹ Even their continued existence is societally deleterious. How? Social security, etc. are pyramid schemes that only work when there are more workers to pay into the system than retirees to cash out. The boomers failed to uphold their part of the implicit inter-generational contract (Social Security blunted the natural motivation). They dallied in an extended adolescence and failed to raise a comparably-sized generation of successors. The November 21 American Conservative featured two excellent cover articles on the way the oldsters haven't pulled their own weight: they now drain more and more resources from the economy and make it harder for the younger generation to attain the financial footing necessary to settle down and raise families (further aggravating the inverted population pyramid of fewer youngsters than oldsters). The boomers have effectively enslaved younger generations via the welfare state.

And let's not forget that the boomers are the generation most responsible for the egotistical syndrome of "generational consciousness," in which each generation self-consciously names itself in distinction from its elders. This misbegotten legacy is one reason Gen-Xers have psychological complexes over their lack of a similar generational identity. And let's not forget the reverberations in the subsequent Generation-Y... followed by "Generation Why-not".

But to be fair, previous generations had something of a generational consciousness, e.g. the lost generation. And let's not forget the role that state-run indoctrination (as opposed to parent-run education) had in separating each generation from its predicessors.

Causes

Well and good: the boomers a baneful cultural influence. What's discussed less often is what made the boomers what they are. Quantitatively: contrary to popular mythology, the baby boom did not stem from an increase in birth rate, but from a decrease in infant mortality.² Qualitatively: the boomers are such self-centered people because their parents—the so-called "greatest generation"— spoiled them rotten.

How did this happen? It goes back to a misconception of wealth. We Americans have a tendency to see wealth in exclusively material terms: as money or physical resources. We forget about the immaterial resources that it takes to acquire material resources, such as legal, educational, and social organization. What impoverishes the poor is not so much their lack of money, but the disorder that defeats their ability to marshall any resources effectively. I used to visit weekly a family in a South Bronx housing project, and the most striking thing was not their lack of resources, but the ease with which they either broke or misplaced anything I gave them. It is for this reason that money transfers aren't enough to raise a people out of poverty. (People need education, and before education they need a sense of the overriding value of education.)

Along these lines, the boomers' parents wanted to give them "everything" and misconceived "everything" as purely material. But it wasn't exclusively their parents. Before the war children's products were universally advertised to parents; after the war, advertisers no longer abstained from targeting young people directly.³ The boomers, lacking a strong education in virtue, were powerless to resist the lures of materialism. With such moral poverty, with the consequent egoism, it would be surprising were there not a war of the old and the rich on the poor and the young.

Today the oldest baby boomers enter their seventh decade. If the total life expectancy is 75, their numbers will begin to drop precipitously in another fifteen years or so. Another year down.

Happy new year!

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Notes

1. This moribund blog may be of interest: Boomer Death Watch.

One need only look at our last two Presidents to get some idea of quality of the boomers. Clinton couldn't keep you-know-what in his pants. Bush can't keep the federal budget in the black or our miltary servicemen in the country (long enough to keep their families from splitting under the stress). No self-control.

2. President's Bioethics Council, Beyond Therapy, footnote p. 189.

3. From a Touchstone article of a couple years ago. Will post reference here once found.

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Doug Bandow, "Everyone’s Entitled," The American Conservative (November 21, 2005).

Pavel Kohout, "The Old Country," The American Conservative (November 21, 2005).

Poverty in Wealth, Wealth in Poverty

[Christ Jesus] though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.¹

[B]eing rich he became poor, for your sakes; that through his poverty you might be rich.²

May our many material gifts not blind us to our true poverty. We must recognize our emptiness before we can accept His wealth.

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Notes

1. Phil 2:6-7.

2. 2 Cor 8:9.

The Schonborn Saga

At last the semester is complete! Now I have some time... for the Christmas rush. Despite my desire to write a more in-depth analyis, I will have to be satisfied with merely pointing you to the latest exchange in the Schönborn offensive on evolution and design:

Christoph Cardinal Schönborn, "The Designs of Science," First Things 159 (January 2006): 34-38.

The piece addresses Steve Barr's response in FT to Schönborn's controversial New York Times op-ed this summer:

Stephen M. Barr, The Design of Evolution," First Things 156 (October 2005): 9-12.

Also interesting are the Cardinal's Vienna catecheses on creation:

• -Creation and Evolution: To the Debate as It Stands First Catechetical Lecture for 2005/2006; October 2, 2005
• -"In the Beginning God Created..." Second Catechesis: "In the Beginning God Created..." on November 13, 2005, St. Stephan's Cathedral, Vienna.

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Recent posts on this general topic:

• Creation, Atheism, and Darwinisms
• Intelligence Transcends Science
• Providence and Chance

Wasted Bullet

In case the barrage of stories praising his "legacy" hasn't tipped you off... yes, John Lennon was shot 25 years ago today.

Let's be honest: the guy was a great musician, arguably among the best, but no philosopher. Contrary to the American habit of equating profound emotion with depth of substance, most of his ideas were pretty, well...ungood. The best that can be said of them is that they were lukewarm and derivative.

Who else but a white limosine liberal would be gullible enough to believe that to banish all strife and suffering, we need only "peace"?

I put peace in quotation marks because his idea of it wasn't based on the right ordering of society (i.e., justice), but on the shallow standard of lack of conflict. The "free love" Lennon proposed as panacea is an intrinsic disorder. (As Woody Allen taught us, everyone pays for sex, whether they know it or not.) At the very least there would be hurt feelings among the jilted lovers. (No, Mr. Lennon, no one ever fought over love and sex. Roight.)

In one pretentious song he imagines "all the people living for today." The existential myth: we needn't order our actions according to the actual structure of the world, but instead we'll find paradise by ignoring all that rot and concentrating on the here and now: here in my now and what I want. As if mankind's hyper-obtrusive self-centeredness were a plausible foundation for peace and harmony!

It's such low-lying fruit that the observation can only be a cliche. The obvious one-line reply to Lennon's "Imagine...Nothing to kill or die for\ No religion too..." was made by a contemporary of his, a man who suffered (and died) for his beliefs and for others and whose religion gave self-sacrifice a transcendent value: "A man who won't die for something is not fit to live."²

What a contrast, Martin Luther King, Jr. makes with Lennon: a giant next to a moral midget!

As a human being John Lennon was like all of us, a child of God, and thus possessed of a dignity surpassing the whole remainder of the universe. For that reason his death is a tragedy. But it needs to be observered that while figures like King die for their beliefs, Lennon died merely for his fame; his beliefs weren't worth a bullet.³

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Notes

1. Originally I thought to call this post "John Lenin." The man has some biographical affinities with Marx, but the comparison would grant him much more weight than he merits. (More on Communism.)

2. Martin Luther King, Jr., 1963 (A reply eight years previous!); cf. "A man who won't die for something is not fit to live." —Decimus Junius Juvenal, Satires (VIII, 244)

3. ...and certainly not all the media retrospectives!

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John Lennon, "Imagine," Imagine (1971).

Woody Allen, dir., Shadows and Fog (1992).

Kleinmann (Allen). I've never paid for sex in my life.
Prostitute (Tomlin). You just think you haven't.

Double Homicide

Science News reviews a couple New England Journal of Medicine articles on maternal deaths from the abortion pill RU-486.¹ In the five years of the pill's availability, four otherwise healthy women died of toxic shock after being "treated." All four developed vaginal infections of a microbe called Clostridium sordellii. Why?

Ralph P. Miech, a physician at Brown University School of Medicine in Providence, R.I., suspects that quick-responding immune cells typically fend off C. sordellii infections. Mifepristone may sabotage this defense in certain women. How that occurs, he acknowledges, "is unknown."

When you're dealing with a state as intimate to a woman's being as pregnancy, it seems unsurprising that ending it has radical repercussions on the woman herself. The further commentary is illuminating.

If there is a connection between the treatment and the fatalities, says Michael F. Greene, a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, these data suggest a risk of about 1 death per 100,000 patients getting mifepristone. That's about 10 times the risk of death for a surgical abortion during the first 7 weeks of pregnancy, when mifepristone is used, Greene comments in NEJM.

If the risk of fatality is ten times that of surgical abortion, that's rather remarkable for a "treatment" that our betters have told us is completely safe,... pay no attention,... move along.

Even more illuminating is the incidence relative to death among women at large (not just RU-486 "patients"); the researchers found only 9 deaths from the same microbe-induced toxic shock unconnected with the abortion pill in the 25 years between 1977 and 2002. In what population were these deaths? Worldwide or only the U.S.? Science News doesn't say. But even if only the U.S. that would make the result 9 deaths from over 130 million women in 25 years. If the incidence of death linked to RU-486 were merely normal, we would expect 113 deaths in five years or 565 in 25 years. That makes deaths by toxic shock over 141 times more likely with RU-486 than without.²

Of course, these numbers need to be put in perspective with other causes of death (getting run over by a car, dying in a plane crash,...). But you still gotta wonder what our betters mean by "safe."

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Notes

1. The mortality rate among the children targeted by this "medicine" is undoubtedly close to 100%.

2. The article says the risk from surgical abortion is ten times less than for RU-486. So it must be that having a surgical abortion directly increases one's risk of dying 14 times. That's not including all the indirect ways that abortion results in the death of the abortive mother (depression, suicide, illness, etc.). See Elliot Institute, press release, "Abortion Nearly Four Times Deadlier Than Childbirth," June 2000.

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Nathan Seppa, "Rare but Fatal Outcome: Four deaths may trace to abortion pill" Science News 168:23 (December 3, 2005), 358, 360. [online article for subscribers only; References and Sources]

Michael F. Greene, "Fatal Infections Associated with Mifepristone-Induced Abortion" New England Journal of Medicine 353:22 (December 1, 2005), 2317-2318.

Speaking about Ensoulment

A prime focus abortion debate is the timing of "ensoulment," that is, when the soul enters the human embryo and makes it fully human. The language of this issue is a great obstacle, because there are two notions of the soul easily confused.

The more common understanding of "soul" is the invisible, supernatural part of the human being, the spirit, that will survive our bodies. Being wholly immaterial and most evident in intellectual acts, it is understandably difficult to point to evidence of its presence in any but a conscious, fully formed human.

The concept of soul more relevant to abortion is that of the natural form of the body: what holds its parts together and animates it. Unlike the spiritual soul, this natural soul is manifestly evident from the first moment of conception, and historically the law has been quick to recognize the rights of the unborn thus ensouled. Chapter 8 of the NCBC's Handbook on Critical Life Issues documents the evolution of laws regarding the unborn through the centuries as medical knowledge of life in utero has grown.

Already in 1823, a standard American work on law, Elements of Medical Jurisprudence, by Theodore Beck and John Beck, argued for considering "vitality" from the moment of conception on grounds of reason and physiology....

In 1803, the first British statute against abortion condemned as a felony any attempt to procure an abortion [and] cleared up any confusion in common law about the act of abortion before quickening: it was a felony.

The significance of quickening, the point at which the mother can feel the child stir in her womb, is that it was regarded as the time when the soul entered the developing body. In the 18th century, Blackstone had set it at the point at which the fetus was to be regarded as living legally.

But the advances of medical science have clearly demonstrated that the child is ensouled from conception. It is not the mother's body that assembles the embryonic body; she only delivers the nutrients that the embryo itself arranges into itself. Certainly, in the earliest stages of zygotic development, the cellular machinery from the egg's cytoplasm plays an essential role in "jumpstarting" the process, but the force of the new life is itself indispensibly central.

Science refutes the old assumption that the fetal soul enters an already assembled body. Rather the soul is present from the beginning and is the primary architect of its body. We of the modern age take too much for granted modern science's revelation of natural wonders. The reason previous ages didn't criminalize abortion throughout pregnancy is that they had no idea how early the natural soul of the developing child manifests its presence.

We who seek to defend that life need to be clear that we base our defence of unborn humanity not by pulling some sort of invisible, supernatural spirit out of rhetorical thin air, but by simply following the evidence that modern science presents to us so clearly.

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John A. Leies, Donald G. McCarthy and Edward J. Bayer, Handbook on Critical Life Issues, ed. Louise A. Mitchell (Boston: National Catholic Bioethics Center, 2004), ch. 8. [The book itself is burdened by an easily misunderstood definition of the human being]

Also: Robert P. George, "Statement(joined by Dr. Gomez-Lobo)" in President's Bioethics Council, Human Cloning and Human Dignity (Washington, D.C.: 2002), 258-266.

The Essential Father

In case you've missed it, the November Touchstone contains a number of good articles on marriage and family. One article in particular deserves to be highlighted:

W. Bradford Wilcox, "Reconcilable Differences: What Social Sciences Show About the Complementarity of the Sexes & Parenting," 32. (Sadly unavailable online.)

Wilcox sketches the respective indispensible contributions that father and mother contribute to the upbringing of children, but concentrates on the underappreciated role of fathers.

[T]here is considerable evidence that paternal involvement is associated with higher rates of educational and occupational attainment, self-confidence, and more pro-social behavior for boys and girls....

Because of the smaller role they play in procreation and because they do not have the same hormonal priming to engage in nurturing behavior as mothers do, fathers are—to some degree—more distant from their children and, more generally, from the daily emotional dynamics of family life than are mothers. Although this distance can be a liability if fathers are neglectful..., if can be an asset if fathers take advantage of this distance to engage their children in a distinctly fatherly way...

But this only makes sense. As Aristotle notes, we use "male" analogically to refer to that which brings forth life in another and "female" for that which brings forth life in itself (On the Generation of Animals I:2). So for example, we refer to Earth as mother and God as father. The emotional detachment of fathers from their children is closely related to the characteristic distance of the masculine consciousness from the senses, in contrast to the proximity of the female consciousness to the senses. (These relations find expression in characteristic length of hair.) As Wilcox notes, mothers are hormonally "primed" to be responsive; among these hormones, estrogen plays a central role in both responsiveness (along with oxytocin) and in strength of sense impression.

A passage from sociologist David Popenoe summarizes the complementary parenting styles of fathers and mothers:

The complimentarity of male and female parenting styles is striking and of enormous importance to a child's overall development.... [F]athers express more concern for the child's long-term development, while mother's focus on the child's immediate well-being (which, of course, in its own way has everything to do with a child's long-term well-being.)... [T]he disciplinary approach of fathers tends to be "firm" while that of mothers tends to be "responsive." While mothers provide an important flexibility and sympathy in their discipline, fathers provide ultimate predictability and consistency. Both dimensions are critical for an efficient, balanced, and humane childrearing regime.

The article's bibliography is itself a valuable contribution and summarizes some of the great resources of modern sociology at the disposal of anyone seeking to defend the traditional (and natural) structure of the family.

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W. Bradford Wilcox, "Reconcilable Differences: What Social Sciences Show About the Complementarity of the Sexes & Parenting," Touchstone (November 2005), 32.

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Along similar lines: Marriage Sprung from the Earth