For Friday: It is to laugh

Seven Quick Takes

Thanks to Jen, our hostess.

1. Central Texas is bracing up for as much as 1" (that's 2.54 cm!) of snow today, and everything is just falling apart. Events are being canceled, friends are warning each other not to go out in these dangerous conditions, and provisions are being stocked with the kind of care you might expect in rural Alaska. I myself canceled a rehearsal for a play I'm directing for the homeschoolers, but I have an ulterior motive -- I feel so morning sick (and all-day sick) that I really have less than no desire to leave the house.

2. As I was feeding my kids leftover pizza for breakfast (again), I thought how low we'd sunk from our cheerful planning at the beginning of the school year. Then I was getting up and making breakfast every morning, and we started our lessons at 9:00 with a clean table. Then the flu struck, and shortly after we all recovered (a month-long process) we got pregnant. Now our former weekly shopping trip, made with the assistance of a crafted list, has devolved to Darwin stopping at the store on his way home or at odd times, picking up whatever he can remember that we need (I just can't man up enough to take all four kids through the store anymore). The state of the pantry and the fridge are haphazard, though we're glad that before everything went south we signed up for a 40-week share from a local farm. At least we have vegetables.

This all leads me to think that it wouldn't be a bad idea for a family to have an list of emergency running procedures for times of chaos like flu season or early pregnancy -- a kind of bare-bones how-things-get-done list just to make sure the kids don't eat too much leftover pizza for breakfast.

3. We do have some communication advances: Jack, almost 15 months, can now answer "yes" to questions. Usually he does this with a deep head bob and a grunt, but sometimes he'll say, "Yeah". He's also gotten good at following basic directions, which means if I tell him clearly and slowly, "Jack, go find your cup on the kitchen floor," he'll toddle off and get it.

4. The neighbor girls have introduced my girls to this series of books called Rainbow Magic, about a pair of human girls who assist the trendily-named fairies of Fairyland in finding various magical items that get lost. (The fairies seem rather incompetent -- they can't seem to do anything without the assistance of two pre-pubescent girls.) The books are harmless if fluffy, but there are a ton of them (it's one of those interminable Scholastic series, though interestingly enough we've determined that it's originally from England), and the ladies have been checking them out en masse from the library. Things have come to a head, however, and I'm putting my foot down on allowing any more of these things in my house. For one thing, they've become a trigger for nausea for me (seriously), and for another, Jack has already thrown one of them in the toilet. It flicks on the raw to have to buy such a dumb thing from the library, so that's the end of trendy series for a while in the Darwin house.

5. Watched the new The Lion in Winter recently, the one with Glenn Close and Patrick Stewart, and it's just not up to the standard of the old one. Both leads are fabulously talented thespians, of course, but I just can't buy Glenn Close as the aging beauty of the world.

6. I've only just discovered that you can listen to various radio stations on iTunes. This is useful knowledge since we don't actually have a working radio in the house.

7. A few months ago I bought nice pillows for Darwin and myself (at least they were the highest-end option at Wal-Mart). And we've spent the last few months waking up with neck aches and trying to pound the things into shape. Anyone have a recommendation for a really comfortable pillow? After all, for the amount of one's life one spends in bed, it's not worth it to have a lousy pillow.

Difference and Equality

Individualism is one of those terms which a great many people use in a great many different ways, so it has been with interest that I've been reading Individualism and Economic Order by F. A. Hayek. The book is a collection of essays dealing the individualism, its definition and its place in the economic order.

From the first essay, "Individualism: True and False" comes an interesting thought:

Here I may perhaps mention that only because men are in fact unequal can we treat them equally. If all men were completely equal in their gifts and inclinations, we should have to treat them differently in order to achieve any sort of social organization. Fortunately, they are not equal; and it is only owing to this that the differentiation of functions needs not be determined by the arbitrary decision of some organizing will but that, after creating formal equality of the rules applying in the same manner to all, we can leave each individual to find his own level.

There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal. While the first is the condition of a free society, the second means, as De Tocqueville described it, "a new form of servitude."
(Individualism and the Economic Order p. 14-15)

This strikes me as touching on the sense in which classical liberals in the tradition of Burke and Smith can still be considered "conservative" in the old sense of the term. Although Burke is commonly accepted by those who argue that classical liberalism is not "truly conservative" as being conservative in his outlook because of his reaction to the French Revolution, he was (like Smith) Whig, though they were Old Whigs, not True Whigs or Country Whigs. Prior to the French Revolution, Burke had been generally supportive of the cause of the colonists in the American Revolution.

Taking Hayek's point, classical liberals in the tradition of Burke and Smith do not reject the necessary hierarchy of society. Nor do they embrace sudden, transformative social change. As such, they can certainly be seen as conservative. However, they do seek sufficient freedom within society to allow people to "find their own level", believing that there is a natural hierarchy of ability which will thus result in an ordered society, and a more desirable one than one in which hierarchy comes strictly from birth and rank.

In this sense, the freedom of a classical liberal society creates social order, and a more stable one than the sort that an ancien regime conservatism maintains. Indeed, arguably, at this point in history, it is only this Whig-ish conservatism which is commonly found within society. Ancien regime conservatism has virtually died out.

Entirely different are notions of politics or the human person in which it is held which all people are truly and fully equal -- in ability and inclination as well as in human dignity. Such systems would indeed seem to lead quickly to a most undesirable oppression.

Life Happens

Thanks to all of you for your congratulations and kind wishes; they mean a lot to us.

We're very fortunate to have a congenial readership, and so we can dispense with the givens up front. Yes, we're delighted at the idea of a new life; yes, it's exciting to think of a little brother for Jack, or another beautiful girl. Yes, even though we weren't expecting or planning to have another one so soon, we're glad to see our family grow and we look forward to meeting baby and introducing him or her to the world.

There, that was sweet. Now let's be a bit more gritty.

We were in denial, and then in shock, for several weeks after we discovered we were pregnant. It's hard to complain about a surprise pregnancy without sounding bitter or hostile, and yet the idea of five children is still hard to come around to. I think it's understandable that I'm not excited about having three kids under five years old again. I think it's excusable to feel ambiguous about the process of being pregnant, which is nine months of weariness and discomfort followed by some hours of miserable agony. It's less excusable, but perhaps understandable, to not immediately relish being that woman who drags her five small kids places. People think four kids are cute. People think five is a lot, and tell you so.

We had not planned to be pregnant; we did not want to be pregnant; many of our future plans involved not being pregnant. (So much for the big tenth anniversary trip we were just starting to save up for.) We did not cheat or push our luck or take risks; we made what appeared to be a standard call. Perhaps our scientific rigor was lacking. We had grown complacent, not taking the temperature at the same time every morning, and when the baby walked off with the thermometer after what seemed obviously to be three days of temperature rise, we figured it didn't matter. And it didn't, because it would have been too late by then anyway. The point is, we thought we had played it safe, and met a standard that had held us in good stead in the past. Only, we were wrong.

The only reason I go into any detail at all on this point is that I know that we can't be the only couple in the world to find ourselves in this situation. Everyone knows, or ought to know, that birth control fails. Most of the pregnancies of Darwin's coworkers resulted from birth control failures, and even something so drastic as a tubal ligation isn't always infallible. (I've just wasted a stupid amount of time trying to track down the British news story I read last week about the woman who became pregnant 13 years after having her tubes tied.) But I think that there's a secular perception that charting one's fertility is so fraught with pitfalls or unreliable that if you get pregnant it's really your own fault. Don't you know what causes that?

And yet, what this comes down to is a control failure. We thought we had the next few years mapped out, and that we were really in charge. As life-changing events go, we're lucky. Instead of losing a job or dealing with some terrible disease or injury, we're getting a baby who will bless and enrich us for the rest of our lives. And we've received a fairly clarion signal that we're not really as in control of our future and our fertility as we thought. And if any well-meaning person asks me, "So, are you done yet?", I can pretty honestly say (through politely gritted teeth), "I don't really know." Because it seems that in the end, it's not totally my call. Life happens.

ADDENDUM: I should add, now that I'm not sleepless and nauseous at 3 AM, that writing out what we've been chewing on for the last five weeks privately is very therapeutic. For various reasons, including some early miscarriage worries, we were reluctant to talk about the pregnancy earlier, which perhaps is good, because we don't have a month's worth of "What the hell!" posts archived. It's very refreshing to get all this off my chest, and now I have to go contemplate getting this cup of tea off my stomach. Toodles.

And Then There Were Five

We attempt to make up for the lack of substantive posts lately by letting the world in on a discovery that we made some weeks ago: we have one more child than we had hitherto suspected. How exactly this new addition crept into the family without our knowledge I cannot say, but he/she is certainly welcome and encouraged to get bigger soon so that he can be tasked with picking up toys and such along with the other offspring.

Asked how she felt about these developments, MrsDarwin (who proved to have been concealing the new addition from the rest of the family, unbeknownst even to herself) responded, "Tired."

This Is Going To Hurt You More Than It's Going To Hurt Me

If I realized one could find out these sorts of fascinating things, I would read the sports pages more often. Sports Illustrated and CNN bring us this inspiring tale of Gators player Tim Tebow doing good off the field as well as on:

Whether you consider him genuine or fake, Tebow, at the end of the day, is a Heisman Trophy-, SEC- and BCS-title winning quarterback who goes to class, goes to church and circumcises people less fortunate than him. More people should be so intolerable.

Programmer Smack Talk and Global Warming

I've been amused to watch some of the arguments going on out in the blogsphere as discussion of the hacking of the climate change servers moves off into a discussion of the quality of the code being used by climate researchers to model global warming.

Example:

Commenter One: Much of the code in the academic world tends to be written by grad students that have taken a class in programming and get told to write it.

Commenter Two: This is totally untrue. I never took a class in programming before writing my crappy undocumented code.

There's a certain wry self recognition for me here as well: I've never taken a class in programming, and I build mostly undocumented models to predict revenue and profits at specific price points based on past data. My results are directionally correct when you look at whole categories of products, but can be wildly off when projecting specific instances. (I try to make this clear to those who use my data, but people are always looking for certainty in life, even if they have to imagine it.)

The difference is, of course, that I'm seeking to mitigate the risks people take in making decisions that they're going to make anyway. "Gee, I really feel like we need to turn this product 50% off for the holidays." "Well, past experience shows that we wouldn't sell many more units, but would lose a whole lot of money. Let's try something else."

You would think that if you were going to, say, recommend that the entire world ratchet levels of CO2 emmissions back to the levels of the 1800s (with all the impacts to living standards and, let's be honest here, human life, which that entails), you would aspire to higher levels of accuracy and transparancy.

In a sense, I would imagine that these climate researchers have much the same justification for their actions that I do: They're just giving people common sense advise. I advise people not to waste too much profit margin. They advise people not to emit too much CO2.

Waste enough profit margin and your company goes out of business. Get enough CO2 in your atmostphere, and you get to enjoy the kind of climate that Venus has. From the point of view of serious environmentalists, who often seem to assume that any change made by humans to the planet is pretty clearly a bad thing, it may not seem like one needs to bring a lot of rigor to advising people to not burn fossil fuels. From that point of view, of course doing all these "unnatural things" will have bad consequences.

However, for the rest of us, the fact that modern industrial technology allows six billion people to live on this planet -- and for many of them to do so in greater material comfort than at any previous time in history -- is pretty clearly a good thing. And standing in front of that yelling "Stop" requires some pretty rigorous evidence. This isn't something that can be left to buggy code whose results are massaged into shape manually when they're going to come out into the light.