Fertility Morality

Peter Singer (yes, that Peter Singer) has a piece at the New York Times philosophy blog where he tries to grapple with the question of whether it is moral to reproduce. He spends most of the piece laying out arguments as to why we should choose not to have children due to the suffering that live involves, then at the end states (without much explanation) that he doesn't actually support the idea of voluntary extinction through refusal to reproduce because a would without people in it would not be as good -- though he never explains how he reaches this conclusion given what came before.

On the flip side, Jeff Mirus of CatholicCulture.org writes a piece on how Catholics are ready to change the culture because they actually have the theological and philosophical reason to believe that having children is a good thing.

Who shall inherit the earth?

Restin' Up

I do believe that at this point I know the majority of American women who've gone two weeks overdue, so it was rather a surprise to me when my midwife informed me at my 35-week visit last week that I ought to go on quasi-bed-rest because I'm already 1 1/2 cm. dilated and 50% effaced. ("Quasi-bed-rest" is a highly untechnical term that just means "put up your feet for half a day and don't irritate your cervix".) This isn't a long-term deal -- after 36 weeks, she'll deliver at home, but that still means I've got to sit around until Friday. For the first few days this was exciting, but the novelty has quickly worn off. The idea of putting up my feet is appealing, but there's some inherent conflict with my nesting urges. My periods of energy are in the morning and late at night -- the quiet times in the house -- whereas when I really have a strong desire to put up my feet is the mid-day period in which the children desire to charge around the house.

Also, I just can't suspend disbelief enough to think that baby would come this early, or next week, or the week after, or any time before her due date. I'm not feeling it. And yet, when my midwife, with her thirty years of experience, tells me to take it easy, I do start to wonder. And that's the irritating part, because I don't really want to go early, and it's unlikely that I will anyway, but man, it sure would be nice not to be pregnant for 4 1/2 more weeks.

The Rhyming Song

This one's for you, Dad!

More Decline in Detroit

The decline of Detroit holds an odd fascination for me. The abandonment of so much beautiful architecture rips my heart out -- I've longed all my life to live in such houses, and to see them fall into irreparable decay saddens me in a way that the meager offerings of modern housing are incapable of doing. Fortunately, the WSJ reliably runs a death-of-Detroit piece every few months; today's article is about the urban flight of Detroit's professional black class:

DETROIT—This shrinking city needs to hang on to people like Johnette Barham: taxpaying, middle-class professionals who invest in local real estate, work and play downtown, and make their home here.

Ms. Barham just left. And she's not coming back.

In seven years as a homeowner in Detroit, she endured more than 10 burglaries and break-ins at her house and a nearby rental property she owned. Still, she defied friends' pleas to leave as she fortified her home with locks, bars, alarms and a dog.

Then, a week before Christmas, someone torched the house and destroyed almost everything she owned.

In March, police arrested a suspect in connection with the case, someone who turned out to be remarkably easy to find. For Ms. Barham, the arrest came one crime too late. "I was constantly being targeted in a way I couldn't predict, in a way that couldn't be controlled by the police," she says. "I couldn't take it anymore."

Ms. Barham's journey from diehard to defector illustrates the precarious state of Detroit today. The city—which has shed roughly 1 million residents since the 1950s—is now losing the African-American professionals who had stayed steadfastly, almost defiantly, loyal.

Through decades of white flight and economic distress, these diehards have sustained the city's cultural institutions and allowed prime neighborhoods such as Indian Village and Palmer Woods to stave off the blight that infects large swaths of Detroit.

Today, frustrated by plummeting property values and high crime, many diehards have hit their breaking point. Their exodus is consigning borderline neighborhoods to full-blown blight and putting prime residential areas at risk. By some estimates, this year's Census will show a population drop of 150,000 people from the 951,000 people who lived within city limits in 2000. That would be roughly double the population loss in the 1990s, when black, middle-class flight began replacing white flight as the prevailing dynamic.

There are other signs the middle class is throwing in the towel. From 1999 to 2008, median household income in Detroit dropped nearly 25% to $28,730, after growing 17% in the 1990s, according to Data Driven Detroit, a nonprofit that analyzes Census data for the city. Over that period, the proportion of owner-occupied homes fell to 39% from 49%, while the proportion of vacant homes nearly tripled to 28%.

A serious problem? A police force so understaffed and busy with major crime that petty theft, break-ins, and even arson fall through the cracks. Architecture is one thing, but how can any city survive if the people who pay the taxes don't feel safe enough to live there?

Seven Quick Takes

(Joint Post Edition)

1. Tycho Brahe was one of the great astronomers of the 16th century, a contemporary of Galileo and Kepler, and an all-around colorful character. He lost part of his nose in a duel, and had a metal prosthetic made (reportedly embellished with gold and silver) which he wore in its place. He is also reported to have had a tippling pet moose:

Lantgrave Wilhelm of Kassel in Germany, with whom Tycho Brahe had an extensive mail correspondence and astronomical discussions, asked Tycho in a letter 1591 about an animal he had heard about called "Rix", which was faster than a deer, but with smaller horns. Tycho replied that such an animal did not exist, but maybe he meant the norwegian animal called reindeer. Tycho wrote that he would check further details about such animals and if he could perhaps send one. He wrote that he had a young moose, that he could send if the Lantgrave would like. The Lantgrave replied that he had owned reindeers before but they had died of the heat, he also had a moose, which was tame and followed him like a dog. He would gladly accept a tame moose from Tycho, and would in such case reward Tycho with a riding horse for the trouble.

Tycho replies that he would order additional moose, and he would have sent his tame one, had it not died shortly before. It had been transported to the castle of Landskrona, a city close to Hven, to entertain a nobleman there. But it had happened that during the dinner, the moose had ascended the castle stairs and drunk of the beer in such amounts, that it had fallen down the stairs, and broken a leg. Despite the best care, the moose had died shortly thereafter. [source]

However, the most famous story about Tycho regards his death, and comes to us from his friend and fellow astronomy Kepler: Tycho had attended a banquet in Prague for the emperor Rudolph II, whom he served as imperial mathematician. The etiquette of the day required that none of the guests rise until the emperor did -- a stricture which Tycho followed despite having drunk deeply and suffering acutely from the call of nature. When he got home, he found he couldn't urinate, though he was in great pain. Nor was he able to for several days. When at last he was able to urinate a bit, it was tinged with blood. He died of a fever (with severe lower abdominal pain) several days later.

This would make Tycho the perfect warning to children reluctant to go to the bathroom before leaving for car trips, except that modern autopsies suggest that he may actually have died from mercury poisoning, perhaps from a medicine that he took to help his bladder ailment. (Darwin)

2. We had a chance to go see the movie Babies last week, and it was just good. Though the focus is mainly on the babies (natch), I couldn't help but observe what glimpses you got of the parents as seen through the eyes of a baby. I was struck by the unstudied beauty of the Mongolian and African mother, and, in the case of the Japanese mother, how meaningless trendy strollers and artfully tousled hair and hipper-than-thou clothes are to a baby. I thought the American parents a bit silly, but I suppose in Mongolia there are plenty of mothers who might protest that their babies aren't allowed to wander around farm animals unsupervised. Or, plenty of African families who would object that it's inaccurate to portray African life as a primitive Bronze-Age existence, and that their children aren't raised in the dirt, thank you very much.

But who cares? The point is the babies, and they're worth watching. As a parent, I recognized every moment of this movie. (MrsDarwin)

3. One of the odd sensations of having written a blog for so long is that every so often I'll go look up a post that I remember as being recent and fairly clever, and find to my shock that it was written 3-4 years ago. I had this sensation this week when looking up a post I'd written in praise of amateurs. (Darwin)

4. Darwin and I often encounter situations that leave us shaking our heads and saying, "I'm glad we're us." And here's a fine example of other couples being silly, from a WSJ article about married couples who spat about driving:

Beverly Floyd will never forget the worst argument she ever had with her husband—a fight that saw the couple screaming at each other and hurling insults of "crazy" and "psycho."

A spat about finances? The kids? Work? Nope. It was about which one of them should gas up the car.

The fireworks started when the couple pulled into a service station while on a return leg of a road trip. Already silently fuming that he hadn't offered to do his share of the driving, Ms. Floyd was astounded when her then-boyfriend didn't lift a finger to pump the gas. So she did it herself and paid for it. As she got back into the car, he handed her a $20 bill.

Bad idea. She threw it at him. He tossed it back at her. She ripped it up. He shredded the cash she kept in the ashtray. She ripped up the money in his wallet. All told, they destroyed about $200 in a matter of minutes. (They spent their evening trying to match serial numbers and tape the shredded pieces of money together.)

Well then. Darwin and I aren't given to fighting anyway, but we're both essentially serious enough that I can't see us ripping up legal tender to make a point about the psychological issues underlying who pumps the gas.

5. We all have our strange little hang-ups. One of mine is that I absolutely cannot rest when there is a fly in the house. This is awkward, because one of the favorite activities of my many offspring is standing with the door open trying to decide whether to go in or out. On reaching a decision, they go in the chosen direction, leaving the door open. (On my gravestone it will say, "Shut the door!") Thus, when I get home in the evening, the first thing I have to do (even if dinner is on the table) is take up the fly swatter and hunt down all the interlopers. Time is of the essence, if the sun goes down they don't congregate on the window anymore. (Darwin)

6. If you want to see a master actor at work, catch Alec Guiness playing eight very different roles in the classic Kind Hearts and Coronets. Here he is as three characters in rapid succession.

I really only looked up this clip because we've been cracking ourselves up all night by rasping out, "The enemy emerged from behind the kopje..." I post it for your amusement (except that I find it won't embed -- grr).

NOTE: YouTube and Google are not going to win themselves any fans with this new Google Ads deal clogging up videos.(MrsDarwin)

7. Young master Darwin (21 months) has learned, in rapid succession, how to climb out of his crib and how to open doors. Nothing is safe. There is, however, one approach to getting him down to bed that often works. Give him a doll to protect and his toy lightsaber, and he will often settle down with one under each arm. (Darwin)

Inventing Jesus

Ross Douthat has a good post on his NY Times blog responding to Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker piece on the search for "the historical Jesus".

James Tabor, a professor of religious studies, in his 2006 book “The Jesus Dynasty,” takes surprisingly seriously the old Jewish idea that Jesus was known as the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier named Pantera—as well attested a tradition as any [emphasis mine — RD], occurring in Jewish texts of the second century, in which a Jesus ben Pantera makes several appearances, and the name is merely descriptive, not derogatory.

The whole problem with two centuries worth of historical Jesus scholarship is summed up in those seven words: “As well attested a tradition as any.” Because obviously if you don’t mind a little supernaturalism with your history, a story about Jesus being a Roman soldier’s bastard that dates from the second century — and late in the second century, at that — is dramatically less “well attested” than the well-known tradition (perhaps you’ve heard of it) that Jesus was born of a virgin married to Joseph the carpenter, which dates from the 70s or 80s A.D. at the latest, when the Gospels of Luke and Matthew were composed. Bracket the question of miracles, and there’s really no comparison: Giving the Roman soldier story equal weight with the accounts in Matthew and Luke is like saying that a tale about Abraham Lincoln that first surfaced in the 1970s has just as much credibility as a story that dates to the 1890s (and is associated with eyewitnesses to Lincoln’s life).

Now of course what Gopnik means by “well attested” is “well attested and non-miraculous,” which is fair enough so far as it goes. But this no-miracles criterion is why the historical Jesus project is such a spectacular dead end — because what would ordinarily be the most historically-credible sources for the life and times of Jesus Christ are absolutely soaked in supernaturalism, and if you throw them out you’re left with essentially idle speculations about Jesus ben Pantera and other phantoms that have no real historical grounding whatsoever.

Think about it this way: If the letters of Saint Paul (the earliest surviving Christian texts, by general consensus) and the synoptic gospels (the second-earliest) didn’t make such extraordinary claims about Jesus’s resurrection, his divinity, and so forth, no credible historian would waste much time parsing second-century apocrypha for clues about the “real” Jesus. They’d thank their lucky stars that the first-century Christians were such talented narrative writers, and spend most of their time trying to reconcile the discrepancies and resolve the contradictions in Matthew, Mark and Luke, while arguing amongst themselves about how much historical weight to give to the events and sayings recorded in John’s gospel. The gospel of Thomas would attract some modest attention; the later “lost gospels,” very little, save as evidence of how intra-Christian debates developed long after Jesus’s death. For the most part, the argument over how the Nazarene lived and died would revolve around competing interpretations of the existing Christian canon, and the rough accuracy of the synoptic narrative would be accepted by the vast majority of scholars. [read the rest]

I read the Gopnik piece a week or two ago and was struck by a similar feeling in regards to the futility of the exercise he was attempting. Gopnik and other secular scholars seem to come to the scriptures with the idea, "Well, we certainly know that Jesus wasn't, so let's throw all that stuff out and see what we can come up with." At that point, you're not really looking, you're inventing.

Smells Like Tight Harmony

For your Thursday. Courtesy of the awesome Embrethiliel at Shredded Cheddar comes a medley for all of us who listened to alternative radio in the '90s: The UC Men's Octet sings Nirvana.



I didn't care one way or the other for Nirvana, but I'd listen to these guys all night.