Culture War

People justly tire of the term "culture war" and find themselves asking, like the philosopher Rodney King, "Can't we all just get along?" And yet watching the disparate reactions to yesterday's Federal Court ruling overturning California's Proposition 8 (for now) it struck me that the culture war terminology is quite apt. What is termed the culture was is essentially a zero sum game over which of two roughly equally numerous groups will be allowed to define the dominant understandings of culture and society in our country.  By taking this to the federal level, same sex marriage advocates have made it clear that no degree of regional acceptance is satisfactory -- their understanding of the nature of marriage must be the single dominant understanding enforced throughout the country, and those with a traditional understanding of marriage must be the ones who find themselves aliens within their country. And, presumably, if same sex marriage advocates lose, they will in turn consider themselves aliens within the country. Given that it is the most basic units and purposes of society which are in dispute, it seems hard to see how it can be any other way. And while the dispute is to an extent regional, it is much more so philosophical and ideological, making the culture war more resemble the Spanish Civil War than the American. Every city and region has representatives of both sides.

Judge Walker clearly lays out in his ruling the extent to which the question is of how society is to be defined and that there can be only one dominant definition. That section reads like an inverted version of the compaints many orthodox Catholics have been making about the state of modern marriage for some time:

The evidence at trial shows that marriage in the United States traditionally has not been open to same-sex couples. The evidence suggests many reasons for this tradition of exclusion, including gender roles mandated through coverture, FF 26-27, social disapproval of same-sex relationships, FF 74, and the reality that the vast majority of people are heterosexual and have had no reason to challenge the restriction, FF 43.

The evidence shows that the movement of marriage away from a gendered institution and toward an institution free from state-mandated gender roles reflects an evolution in the understanding of gender rather than a change in marriage. The evidence did not show any historical purpose for excluding same-sex couples from marriage, as states have never required spouses to have an ability or willingness to procreate in order to marry. FF 21. Rather, the exclusion exists as an artifact of a time when the genders were seen as having distinct roles in society and in marriage. That time has passed.

The right to marry has been historically and remains the right to choose a spouse and, with mutual consent, join together and form a household. FF 19-20, 34-35. Race and gender restrictions shaped marriage during eras of race and gender inequality, but such restrictions were never part of the historical core of the institution of marriage. FF 33. Today, gender is not
relevant to the state in determining spouses’ obligations to each other and to their dependents. Relative gender composition aside, same-sex couples are situated identically to opposite-sex couples in terms of their ability to perform the rights and obligations of marriage under California law. FF 48. Gender no longer forms an essential part of marriage; marriage under law is a union of equals.

It's also worth noting that this is a highly progressive approach to understanding society, one in which human relationships and human nature itself is fully mutable. The danger of this approach from a traditional perspective is that it makes it almost impossible for advocates of traditional marriage to make their case. Any examples or evidence drawn from the past can be summarily dismissed as discussing only the "old" version of marriage. It represents victory for the cultural revolutionaries almost by definition.

Caaaarl, call your office

As the heat soars here, we're going to reach this point eventually...


Just watch it in German already:

Save us from the fires of hell...

"If a man could see what awaits him in the next world in return for work well done, he would occupy his intellect, memory and will only in performing good deeds, not paying attention to whatever fatigue and hardship he might have to endure."
St. Catherine of Genoa

This is something to hold onto this week, as the A/C is down until at least Monday...

ADDENDUM: Oh look! This week there's a coronal mass ejection, driving up temperatures! We're all advised to stay indoors because it's going to be extra crispy!

Privacy or Anonymity

The Wall Street Journal has been running a series on the business of online "spying" for marketing information about web browsers. From today's installment:

You may not know a company called [x+1] Inc., but it may well know a lot about you.

From a single click on a web site, [x+1] correctly identified Carrie Isaac as a young Colorado Springs parent who lives on about $50,000 a year, shops at Wal-Mart and rents kids' videos. The company deduced that Paul Boulifard, a Nashville architect, is childless, likes to travel and buys used cars. And [x+1] determined that Thomas Burney, a Colorado building contractor, is a skier with a college degree and looks like he has good credit.

The company didn't get every detail correct. But its ability to make snap assessments of individuals is accurate enough that Capital One Financial Corp. uses [x+1]'s calculations to instantly decide which credit cards to show first-time visitors to its website.

In short: Websites are gaining the ability to decide whether or not you'd be a good customer, before you tell them a single thing about yourself.

The technology reaches beyond the personalization familiar on sites like Amazon.com, which uses its own in-house data on its customers to show them new items they might like.

By contrast, firms like [x+1] tap into vast databases of people's online behavior—mainly gathered surreptitiously by tracking technologies that have become ubiquitous on websites across the Internet. They don't have people's names, but cross-reference that data with records of home ownership, family income, marital status and favorite restaurants, among other things. Then, using statistical analysis, they start to make assumptions about the proclivities of individual Web surfers.

Examples of this technology in action are described as follows:

To gauge the system's accuracy, the Journal asked eight people to visit the credit-card page of Capital One's site and note the credit cards they were shown. The Journal also analyzed the computer code that zipped back and forth between the testers' computers and Capital One.

Separately, the Journal asked its testers to click on a custom website that [x+1] built to demonstrate its technology. After the testers clicked on that site, [x+1] described to the Journal what it knew about each person.

Throughout both of these processes, the testers didn't reveal any personal information.

[x+1]'s assessments of the testers were generally accurate, though some specific details missed the mark. For instance, [x+1] correctly placed Ms. Isaac, the Colorado Springs mom, in a Nielsen demographic segment called "White Picket Fences." People in this group live in small cities, have a median household income of $53,901, are 25 to 44 years old with kids, work in white-collar or service jobs, generally own their own home, and have some college education.

All of those points were correct for Ms. Isaac—to her surprise. "They pinpointed my income more accurately than I remembered it," she says.

But the "White Picket Fence" category wasn't 100% accurate. It suggested Ms. Isaac might read People en Espanol, watch Toon Disney and drive a Nissan Frontier truck. In fact, she doesn't speak Spanish, doesn't subscribe to cable TV and doesn't drive a truck.

I'm curious what others think of this.

This is the sort of "privacy" issue which I find it difficult to get worked up about. While I'm not exactly crazy about companies tapping into my browsing history, I can't get chills to go up my spine about the idea of some marketing company classifying me as a married man, aged 30-45 who reads the Wall Street Journal, has kids, shops on Amazon and reads a lot about religion and economics. Big whoop, as the saying used to go.

Certainly the technology could be mis-used in the wrong hands -- mostly as a way of identifying people as having "enemy" tendencies. Imagine if when you filed your taxes electronically the IRS quickly downloaded your browsing history and assigned people who read National Review and Fox News frequently to the audit list. I'm sure everyone, in every part of the ideological spectrum, could come up with some sort of nightmare scenario using this kind of technology. However, I don't see any particular reason to be upset about the particular uses described in this series. (Nor do I honestly foresee such politburo tactics coming into use in the US in the near future.)

It seems to me that this kind of marketing profile tracking is not very much of a privacy invasion, since names aren't assigned to the data and it's really just a means of assigning people to a profile -- much as a real life salesperson might do visually in the moment of sizing you up as you enter a store.

Should this kind of thing be considered a privacy worry, or does it merely fall in the harmless to slightly annoying range? Is it important that we retain absolute privacy online (except where we choose to divulge information intentionally) or is anonymity enough?

Scouting in a Fractured American Culture

The New York Times runs an article about how the national leaders of the Boy Scouts of America are seeking to address concerns about shrinking membership as they celebrate 100 years of boy scouting in the US. The number of boy scouts has declined 42% since it's peak in 1978, with 2.8 million boys currently in the Scouts.

To judge from the commentariat at the Times, you would think this is entirely the result of the BSA remaining firm in their ban of gay scout leaders and statement that "homosexual conduct is inconsistent with obligations in the Scout Oath." Not to mention saying that boys who refuse to recite the Scout Oath because of its references to God and reverence may simply not have a place in the program. Commenters claiming to be Eagle Scouts line up one after another in the comments to announce that no son of theirs will ever be a member of the Scouts while it remains homophobic and theocratic.

I find this rather hard to believe -- especially as girl scouts (who have chosen the other side of the cultural divide, with acceptance of atheist girl scouts and an open door for Planned Parenthood to provide sex education through the organization) have suffered identical membership declines, with only 2.3 million girl scouts in the US as they near their own centenary.

What I think this underscores is rather two related but separate trends:

1) The US have become culturally fragmented to an extent that an organization such as the Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts is not capable of appealing to the entirety of American culture. These organization must, by their nature, have a philosophy of what it means to be a responsible and maturing young person, and in formulating any set of principles along these lines they will necessarily estrange a significant portion of the country. Be assured that for parent claiming he will never let his son join the boy scouts because they are homophobic, there are other parents who would never allow their sons to join a troop led by an gay scoutmaster, or to belong to an organization which assured boys that homosexual activity is "normal and healthy".

2) The scouts thrive in a culture in which there is some degree of father/son culture, and in which people are excited about outdoor activities. Certainly, some of the boys who benefit most from Scouting are boys without fathers -- and many other boys from stable families have fathers who don't have time to be "scout dads" and come to all the meetings and camp-outs. (I was among that latter group, as my dad worked many nights and weekends.) But if virtually no dads are willing to put time into helping to run a troop and do outdoor activities, scouting simply won't happen. Adult leadership is always an essential component. And although troops can thrive in urban or suburban settings (my troop was sponsored out of our working-class parish in the old suburbs of Los Angeles) it has to be at least possible to interest boys in the idea of camping and hiking and trying knots and building fires. For people to whom the idea of going camping seems totally pointless, scouting will have little point.

As a result of these two, it strikes me as unsurprising that scouting finds less fertile ground in some parts of the country and among some cultural groups in the modern US. But so long as it remains true to its core values, the Boy Scouts will continue to thrive among those open to its values, and where scouting does thrive it will continue to provide boys and young men with a chance to learn skill and independence while gaining an appreciation of the great outdoors. I certainly look forward to the day my son is old enough to join.

Norse Mythology Comes to the Humanities Program

My little sister spent her wild young days studying Old Norse and Old English at Oxford, before settling down as a mild mannered web-programming lay Dominican, so it was of course irresistible to ask her to tackle Norse Mythology for the elementary Humanities Program (volume two covers the "dark ages"). First up, the Norse creation story:

In the beginning there was Múspell, the realm of fire, and Niflheim [niv-uhl-heym], the realm of ice. Between them there was nothing except a vast emptiness called the Ginnungagap [gin-oong-ga-gahp]. For many ages there was nothing else. But gradually, sparks began to fly out of Múspell while icy fogs billowed out of Niflheim. They met in the middle of Ginnungagap, which became as mild as a summer's day; the fog condensed into water-drops, and the drops were given life by the sparks.

Out of the mixture condensed Ymir [ee-mir], the first giant....

However, you must read the whole thing to find out about the giant who gave birth via his armpits and about the world cow.

No more heathen babies in this house

Her head still smells delightfully chrismatic.