Making Nobody Happy

  Fear, or anxiety, is driven by two factors: unfamiliarity and helplessness. And it can attack and be attacked from both of those angles. Either increase familiarity and habit enough that dealing with the object of your fear becomes so banal and workaday that it loses its emotional power, or develop your own knowledge and competence enough that you increase your own perception of your efficacy in the face of your fear, so you lose your sense of helplessness.

   Familiarity, or knowledge, and competence are the shields we wield against the terrors of the world. They let us manage them. The things themselves do not change, but our reactions and ourselves do. We become more capable of managing and dealing with the object of our fear. We cease to be in unknown and dark territory, helpless and directionless and without defense.

    The territory does not change. But we bring light to it, we become able to see and know it, and we gain tools and weapons, we become able to navigate and manipulate it, resist it, even make use of it. Fear is never conquered through avoidance. The object of our fear may pass, but we will still be as ignorant and helpless before it as ever, if it were to return. Only by facing it and by developing our capacity to confront it do we finally overcome it. But first you must look at it. You must see where it comes from and what it is that you fear. Only then can we place ourselves in proper relation to our fear. 

   Often life is not so simple, through, and there is not one fear, but two. And by avoiding one we choose the other, as a man who will not swim across a river must sometimes stumble across a trail of slippery stones instead, or as a retreating army escapes death but must face the unknown consequences of defeat. Fear in these cases must not only be faced, it must be ordered. We must recognize which of the opposing fears is truly the greater, and set the worse one behind us as a pursuing fire and the lesser before us as a trial. In submitting to go through one we set ourselves at a distance from the other. And maybe only that desire for escape will give us the proper motivation to enter territory we would rather avoid. 

In response to a discussion of how the modern version of feminism took over the popular movement and became the dominant voice of female advocacy and identity in our culture. 

Third wave feminists have won. And now they’re all so happy! 
    And as a result, all our social problems have declined, our children are happier than ever, women are working and having fewer families and all their anxieties and depression and lack of satisfaction have subsided, and the relations between the sexes have never been better.

    In every generation, people seek to come up with a new explanation of what exactly is wrong with the world and how they’re going to fix it. And they turn the world upside down. And in every generation we discover new problems and have new things that make us unhappy, and we realize that the solutions we enacted to solve our previously identified problems and that were supposed to make everything better haven’t really made any difference to how we feel.
    Someday people will realize that there is no magic bullet. And things like the family and marriage and work and government and all of it are all just ways that we manage the fundamental problems of mortality and the human condition. Nothing gets solved. We just exchange strategies. And none of them are perfect solutions, and so much of their outcomes are dependent on chance and on ourselves and what we do with them.

   You can give the problems we face many names. Capitalism, sexism, socialism, greed, witches, patriarchy, war, poverty, decadence. These are merely the faces of the world and the faces of one ourselves. How we see the problem, who we blame, how we respond, the framing, the circumstances, all of that changes. But people don’t, and the world doesn’t. And in the process we often lose or cripple what we have and built to get us to where we are, in the hope that we’ll end up somewhere else. Life is tragic. But some things help us face that tragedy, and some better than others. But none perfectly, and none universally.
    Like so many movements, the feminist movement overpromised and underdelivered, and women found that the same structural struggles and problems and deprivation and restrictions that men had felt in a life of work outside the home would also be theirs now. Not that something didn’t need to happen and that there wasn’t a need that had to be addressed. But we almost almost always radically misunderstand what it is and how to adapt to it. And we were so quick to assume we knew what the problem was that we never really counted the cost of our solutions, or took thought for how to preserve what we were giving up. 
    As a man who has spent his major working years taking care of the kids while my wife worked, I’ve had a chance to experience the difficulties of switching roles. It was hard for me to learn to find fulfillment in my family, absent a career. But I learned a heck of a lot about just how great and how good for you and how fulfilling and how complex and challenging being a homemaker and raising children really is. And my wife has learned a lot about the downsides and costs and tradeoffs and compromises you make in a career, even a very successful one with great employers in your field of choice.

   And after ten years of it she’s wondering if she could move out of it and into a home role while I go back out into the working world. Of course I’m not sure that will solve all her problems or make her perfectly happy either. They’re both positions with tradeoffs. You make sacrifices inside the home and outside, of careers and within them. And it will be harder for me to replicate her success, having spent the last decade at home. So it might not be easy to make that switch. And it’s not a switch I’m completely eager to make myself.

   People can find happiness and meaning, and unhappiness and dissatisfaction, anywhere. And a lot of that is up to you. But we’re always chasing some horizon, thinking if I just change this or that, that it will all be different and I will get exactly what I want without any tradeoffs of downsides. I’ll get that heaven that I deserve and that other people seem to have.

   You can spend a lifetime chasing those hopes. Our country certainly has. That doesn’t mean we can’t change what we’re doing, or that circumstances might even demand it. How do you think I ended up in my current situation? But we need to be more honest with ourselves and with others. About our limitations, about the limitations and demands the world puts on us, and the limitations of our own nature. We also need to be honest our struggles and listen more honestly to the struggles of others. And then, maybe, we can work something out and try to help one another. 

    No one escapes life. We all struggle through. And a big part of how we do that is through our relationships with one another, though our families. And relationships are always going to be a challenge and a problem and will always demand a lot of all of us. But avoiding those challenges isn’t a sure route to happiness either. Everything carries a cost. But family, however you choose to arrange it, is the greatest tool ever devised for weathering the storms that life is prone to throw at us, and is also the greatest tool ever devised for mutual help and development. We might imagine more ideal solutions, we might imagine the development of some mechanism or solution or structure that will give us each individually everything we want with none of the limits, costs, struggle, or compromises of relationship. But so far we’re not doing great. We’ve pulled down a lot of the old world, but have yet to show up with any widespread solution to this vast field of human need and endeavor.

    We can put our hope in the government or in the universities, in sociologists and sexologists and psychologists, that some expert will come along who can order everything for us to make us strong and happy and secure. At least the old kind of security belonged to us and was in our own hands, in the hands of each family, each couple. It was a technology and power that belonged to them and didn’t depend on some intellectual or government official or social scheme or tax scheme or program. It was at least up to us. 

   Whatever we may have gained in the modern era, we’re losing something important if we think that family is the enemy of our success and happiness. But young people especially are acting like that is the case. I don’t blame feminism for that. Or the patriarchy. We’ve lost our vision for what love is, what it really is. What the relationship between the sexes means. That’s not something you can take apart or put back together in a day. And its failure can’t be easily laid at any one door, when all of us everywhere across time have participated in it and contributed to it. 

    We’re not alright. Men or women, young or old. We’re not doing as great as we say we are, as we said we would be. Losing our need for one another hasn’t made us less dependent or more free. Not in absolute terms. It’s merely shifted who and what we’re dependent on, and where the costs must be paid. That may not be an argument for going back, and maybe that’s never been an option. But it might be an argument to keep going forward, seeking a new direction with both eyes open. 

A system that cannot produce bad outcomes for someone is unlikely to produce good outcomes for anyone. Completely safe systems do not involve mechanisms and actions that interact with the world in any way significant enough to generate meaningful outcomes. And humans aren’t made for them. Or any living thing, really.

Absolute safety and the predictability of positive outcomes, without accompanying risk and its resulting negative outcomes, simply doesn’t exist in the kind of world we inhabit. That which produces no negative outcomes produces nothing. That which risks nothing gains nothing. That which demands no struggle produces no strength.

The wish to “have it all” with no cost and no tradeoffs is very understandable. But it is hopelessly immature. It is a childish fantasy, the fantasy of a dependent and undeveloped and ignorant creature that has yet to become an actual agent within the world. And even if the child cannot see where that price is being paid, it is being paid somewhere. It is only their ignorance and dependence that protects them from it. The burden of realization is a painful one, that we must leave the garden and head out into the dusty land to make our way by sweat and pain, ending in death.

It is the duty of all parents, their own terrible burden, not merely to protect our children within the garden, but to prepare them for the world beyond. The madonna is the picture of joy for a parent, but the pieta is our destiny. And we escape it and comfort ourselves only at the cost of our own children’s knowledge and strength and integrity and agency.

A system that can produce no pain will produce nothing. A child that can suffer no pain will never mature into an adult. A world with no struggle is not a world we can live in, nor would it be worth living in or satisfying to us. Nothing that can be obtained without cost has any enduring value. Risk is the lifeblood of reward. And failure is the price we pay for any true success.

What should feminism be? Is there any good likely to come of embracing an overtly partisan interest? It seems that feminism should be, nothing more nor less, advocacy for the love of the feminine. Increasing the degree to which women and their femininity is valued. But feminism seems to mean something else. Hatred of the masculine. Perhaps even hatred of the traditionally feminine. Partisan social and political power brokering for women, in the barest sense. Women as a bloc, as a class, as an oppositional identity.

That’s a very different concept than feminism, the way of the female. Femininity is something we belong to, rather than possess. It is a transhuman abstraction. It is embodied in women, all women, in varying ways and to different degrees. But because it is not itself a person, not a being with individual interests, but rather belongs to the realm of spirit and essence, it can only demand what is appropriate to such an entity. And you can only render to it what is fitting for such a spirit.

And the appropriate response to femininity is understanding, appreciation, love, perhaps even need, as the child needs its mother, or desire, as the lover desires his beloved. We can embrace and inhabit femininity, live within it, as a woman, as a devotee and avatar; or we can embrace and inhabit femininity as a child or as a lover, as a man. You cannot possess Venus, and you cannot give her the goods of mortal life. She doesn’t need them and cannot use them. The only true good she requires and deserves is your worship.

There is no good man, possessed of masculinity, who could not love this feminism, who would not be driven toward it by his very being and by his very masculinity. To love the feminine is the great calling of men. I won’t say that it’s not a struggle. Women often struggle to appreciate men and masculinity, just as men struggle with femininity. We’re not always sure what to do with it, and we’re not always sure we wouldn’t be better off without the other.

But it is inherent to both sexes, not only to be what they are and to love and appreciate themselves (and to find it hard, therefore, to understand and embrace that which is not like ourselves) to seek and love that which is different. Attraction between the sexes is as fundamental a law of the natural world as the laws of magnetism. The two exist as differences to find their completion in one another. That is the purpose of sex, it is why we have it.

Masculinity and femininity are both fundamentally incomplete. That is part of the human condition, a fracturing of the species we are unable to face or solve or recover from except by making the choice and compromise to return to one another. That is a painful reality to face. But the survival of our species has been made conditional on our ability to accept it. That’s a pretty forceful inducement. I won’t comment on the ethics of such existential blackmail, except to observe that you won’t escape it by resenting it or refusing it.

So long as we are caught within such a trap, we may as well learn to love and worship Venus. She is part of the world we cannot escape. As is Mars. And Venus and Mars, though they are two of the most dangerous and unpredictable of all the gods, are the parents of Concordia. The marriage of the sexes in a stable society. Harmonia, as she was known in Greek, held in her hands the caduceus and the cornucopia, peace and prosperity. But her opposite was Eris, or Discordia. The Greeks were wise enough to build no temples to Eris and give her no devotion, no worship. But I am not so sure that we are so sensible.

There’s a trend among Christian authors, particularly women, to take an approach to the subject that is explicitly feminist. And not the old school kind of feminism, but “the proper view of history and the church is as an oppressive patriarchy, and women are not only equal to but equivalent to men” kind of feminism. And although Christian literature has often followed the cultural and philosophocal trends of the time, for better or worse, this has often been a problematic fact.

One massive reason Afghanistan failed is cultural. It doesn’t matter how many bad men you stop, if you don’t raise up good men in their place. Bad men will always be there, and good men have to be there to resist them or your cause will fail.

Now, I don’t mean to be placing the burden of blame or responsibility on men specifically, as a group. But as a structural fact, in this area, it does lie on them. There is a burden of responsibility. And it can be discharged negatively or positively. Men have strength, they have aggression. They have a willingness to fight and a willingness to die. And part of their burden in life is learning what to do with it. And if you’re thinking that what we should really do is eradicate it or suppress it, that is a genocidal thought.

Men are meant to exist. And they are meant to be men. And you can’t eliminate them chemically or psychologically or sociologically castrate them out of being men. That’s half the species, that’s half of what it means to be human. You don’t get to decide that it doesn’t need to exist.

So men are a problem. Partly because men are highly variable and unstable. They occupy the highest positions on the distribution of outcomes: social, economic, genetic, physical, and they also occupy the lowest. They are both the most and least capable and the best and worst off. And there are good reasons for why they are this way, and they’re so deeply embedded in our bio-genetic natures and in the depths of time itself, in the structure of life and its reponse to reality itself, that they aren’t easily seperated from the very nature of our species and of life itself.

So men are a problem, and they are a problem with two solutions. The first solution is women. Women regulate men, actively, during their lives. Especially when they are in intimate, dynamic, interactive relationships with them. Women make demands on them, they set conditions, they share concerns, they offer counter-perspectives. But Afghan culture limited the effectiveness of this positive influence, in many ways. And solving that problem was beyond the scope or powers of the American military presence.

Women also engage in sexual selection, which has a massive effect. Men want to please and impress and be found acceptable and admirable by women. They want to be chosen. And they will practically kill themselves to get noticed. And after having been noticed, they will kill themselves to protect what they have secured (their mates and children and society). And that leads us to the second solution for the problem of dangerous bad men: dangerous good men.

Afghanistan failed because the good men were never created to resist the bad, to protect and lay down their lives for their wives and children. Someone had to do that job. Someone had to wield strength in the service of love. And America made the mistake of thinking that they had that, in the Afghan army. Years of training, billions of dollars. But they never reached the culture. They never created a new generation of men as passionate to defend their freedom and their homes as other men were to take it. And so Afghanistan fell the moment America left. The army just stood down. They collapsed. They didn’t even fight. The Taliban conquered the country in days. And people were left wonder what happened and why?

Humanity is more than mere political structure, more than training and equipment. When the time comes and the enerlmy is at the door what will give you the strength to stand and fight, to die? You have to have a cause, a meaning, something that your heart pursues more strongly than it pursues the continuation of your own breath. America didn’t have the ability to give that to the Afghan people. Afghanistan is hardly even a country, more a collection of divided and feuding tribal interests. What soldier is going to die for the idea of a country they hardly even believe in? You can’t simply manufacture that in a moment, or even a decade, not even with billions of dollars at your disposal. All the economic and technologicsl capital in the world doesn’t mean anything without the human capital to make use of them.

Napoleon once said that “In war, morale forces are to physical as three to one”. And the German tactician Foertsch said that, “The final word regarding victory and defeat rests not on arms and equipment, nor the way in which they are used, nor even on the principles of strategy and tactics, but on the morale of the troops.” For all the training and equipment we were able to give the Afghans, we couldn’t give them this one thing.

I couldn’t catch the tails of all the love songs that drift through the summer air.

I couldn’t fit them in a jar or distill them and give them to you.

I couldn’t find that catch, that thrill, that slow throb, and make it real between you and me.

I couldn’t fit all those stories between my teeth, or carry the tune.

All those memories of moments I fell from love and walked out the door of my silence.

And every time I looked back, and that door was open again.

And love was a gift.

I can’t sing or write, can’t draw, can’t spell.

I can’t tell it like it should be.

So many moments of how I wished it was, caught in a tremor call, a note in the air.

I wanted to store them up, to add their names to a list of the elect.

That they could be a choir beside me, telling my story. Telling us.

Telling us, even when we’re gone, when the hall has filled with silence.

A quietness so small for something so great.

So many songs, so many bright days calling, drifting by in the open sun.

Never knowing how long the round would last.

Or where over the hill the ringing went on.

All I am left with is a wish for a song.

One that I knew, that was true. One you could sing with me.

And love me through as much as that song.

And love you in return, to be yours, always.

I wanted to give you music. But the music hides from me. And I can’t make it stay.

But love knows its secret song. It hides it in the dawn and the silences and the smoky air.

And you will not forget.

I finished this book a couple weeks ago. It’s very good. If you’ve read a lot of Sowell there are some sections that are very redundant to other works of his. But there’s a uniqueness to how this one is arranged. It broadened and complexified my idea of how culture works, or rather how cultures work together or work off one another, or work because of (rather than in spite of) their differences.

I think you could summarize this book by saying that the reality of cultural interactions are so complex that it’s useless to try to engineer and evaluate them in the moment at the level of large, aggregated generalizations. Instead, you’re better off approaching life as an individual. Being aware that you have a culture is useful, as is realizing that other people have a culture. But it’s so complex that you can’t comprehend or engineer it from the top down. You have to distribute that task to the millions of individuals and the processes of individual thought, value, choice, and cultural evolution. You can’t directly manipulate outcomes, you can only at best devise optimal processes.

I am a father who served for many years as the primary caregiver for two young children. How did that happen? I made deliberate choices that sacrificed my earning potential in the formal economy for value and quality of life gains for my entire family at home. Did I earn less? Absolutely. Was it 100% the right choice to make? Without a doubt.

Even today, now that my kids are in school, figuring out how to make things work is often a serious challenge. I still work occasionally from bedtime to midnight or 1 a.m. so I can be there to take care of my kids during those precious hours when they’re at home. As I write this by dictation I am rushing to make a delivery so I can finish and be back in time to pick up my kids from school.

My life went a certain way because of choices I made. Did I pay a price for those choices? Sure. Did I also gain things from that tradeoff? For certain. People aren’t simply the products of their environment or social conditions or economic structures. People aren’t simply piano keys to be played by some larger forces. We have our own desires and values and make our own choices based on them, and there are demands and responsibilities and ambitions that we have to prioritize, because it really isn’t possible to have it all or do it all. We aren’t superhuman. We aren’t God.

I often feel, though, like experts and activists and politicians and the government are trying to convince me otherwise by making the argument that I could have it all and wouldn’t have to make any compromises, that my choices wouldn’t need to matter so much and have such high stakes and complexity and risk so much, if only I would give them a bit more power and funding. And that’s a tempting offer. Who wouldn’t find that pitch appealing? Give up a bit more of my responsibility and my productive capacity and autonomy to them, and they will take care of me and relieve my load.
To be perfectly frank, there are some responsibilities I’m reluctant to surrender to paid or government-funded substitutes and institutions, even for the sake of ease, convenience, and freedom. Especially when those solutions compete with or may even be trying to replace evolved solutions refined through thousands of generations and millions of years to give individual humans personal agency over the most fundamental responsibilities that human life entails.

Responsibilities, I should add, whose assumption provides the greatest means for durable meaning and happiness in life that exists. Marriage and parenthood are by far the most important and meaningful and productive jobs you will ever work at. And some of us are sensible enough to know that and make choices based on it. It isn’t for everyone, but even if it isn’t, it’s still the strongest game in town. I’ve read Melinda Gate’s book, and it’s essentially a plan to replace both the assets and feelings of marriage and parenthood with government and NGO programs, so everyone can live their best lives and become an engineer or executive like her. And that’s the kind of benevolent nightmare that not only won’t work but that will fundamentally denigrate humanity, not empower it.

Having said that, her motivations are understandable. She has seen the failure of husbands and the consequences for wives and mothers, and she has seen the failures of parents and the consequences for their children, so she wants to put something in place to make up for these failures and ensure that these people are provided for regardless of the lack of human capital and structure in their personal lives. She’s an engineer, so she sees it as just a matter of building the right machine to assist us. More than a safety net, a vision for a new structure of human provision in relationships and productivity, a new system designed to solve the problems that marriage and parenthood were designed to address.

The problem is, so much of our identity as a species and who we are even on the most basic biological and psychological level is so deeply designed around these innate species-technologies that it is it is extremely unclear and unpredictable what will result from deconstructing or replacing them. There’s also the problem, as Thomas Sowell has often pointed out, of how unlikely it is that any one person, or even a group of people of finite intelligence and wisdom and capability and knowledge will (in the course of mere years) successfully devise a universally applicable solution to a problem that took tens of millions of years and thousands of lifetimes of experimentation and consequences to achieve the solutions we already possess. Assuming you take a non-religious view of the world.

The implications are the same regardless of which view you take of history and human nature. Human social relationships aren’t arbitrary structures that we simply invent and remove or replace as we wish. They’re adaptive. Evolved. Or designed. How they were designed isn’t the issue, in either case you end up at the same place. We are designed for these species-technologies on the deepest levels of our being. Trying to design a solution or alternative to the existing pathologies of those systems, which certainly do exist, by removing or replacing them does not respect or acknowledge the fact that they are endemic to our being and our very sanity, happiness, development, and meaning in life. It’s like offering to remove our capacity to see to save us from seeing things that might disturb us, or our capacity to feel pain, lest we suffer a terrible trauma. It is hubris and delusion, anti-human, and doomed to fail. This kind of solution might prove even worse than the problems it is meant to address. By seeking to abolish them we seek to abolish humanity itself.

Sex, parenthood, and even work weren’t made for us; we were made for them. Quite literally. And any philosophy, no matter how well-meaning or how accurately it sees the problems we face or how genuinely desires to address them, that cannot understand them cannot help them. You cannot provide greater health if you do not deeply understand the nature of the patient you’re treating, or the nature of the diseases that afflict them, if you do not really know what health looks like or where it comes from. And hardly any of the unconstrained utopianiasts do. They take their vision for granted. They are so busy designing what life should be like that they have never really looked hard enough at what life is.

Melinda wants to design a better world, like a benevolent God. The world we live in is often a painful and tragic one. And she has a tender, caring heart and has the skill and determination to try to do something about it. That is wonderful. But her philosophy, her medical and moral theory, is flawed. She has the unconstrained, utopian vision, as Thomas Sowell would put it. There is a kind of nobility and ambition and beneficence to her rejection of the tragic, or constrained, vision of the world. She invites us to imagine what the world could be like. You getting to be more like her, among other things.

Unfortunately, attempting a broad-scale redefinition of the most basic, fundamental structures of human society has not tended to be one of the great success stories of history. Utopian perfectionism and optimistic creativity make for fantastic helpers, but dangerous guides. The unconstrained vision can be the crowning grace of humanity when it supports and builds on and cares for and nurtures the realities and emergent solutions of the tragic, constrained vision of the world.

The problem isn’t that one vision is wrong and one is right, the problem is when you get them the wrong way round so they don’t work as intended. If you put the tragic vision in the position of trying to perfect the world, it might not go anywhere or do anything because it might not see that there is anything that can or should be done. It can become cynical and careles, heedless of the cost of its own means and unwilling to challenge or reinvent them. It can become callous and disengaged and selfish. But it is very good at seeing the world as it is and making practical, personal decisions about how to understand and deal with it.

If you put the unconstrained vision in charge of understanding the world and deciding what to do about it, it won’t respect the world as it is or try to comprehend it or appreciate it, but will just try to ignore or replace it. The unconstrained vision will wander too far and do too much, things that never should have been done, in an attempt to remake the world according to its preferences, whatever the cost. It can be naive, careless, dangerously unrealistic, and dangerously experimental. Both Visions can become tyrannical. And both can be blind to the cost of their approach and justify them too easily in the service of their vision.

Both outlooks have their value. You have to respect the constrained vision, and you have to love the unconstrained vision. But if you can’t marry both those attitudes, you’re in dangerous territory and will have a hard time addressing or understanding the world. These outlooks are part of the fundamental psychological and social technology we have been given to understand and address the world and its challenges.

And you probably can’t be or possess both in a single person. And that’s OK, you don’t need to. But you do need to have your relationship to the other vision in its proper shape. If you’re tragic but can’t love the utopian, you’re going to go wrong. If you’re utopian and can’t respect the tragic, you will go wrong too. You’ll be missing half the human vision of the world and half of human capability, and will inevitably become unbalanced.

   We’ve got our minds on medicines and treatments, but have no idea where health comes from. We need interventions, sure, but health and growth come from within. You can’t create them with policy or funding or initiatives. That’s not where the life of humanity lives. And there are inherent costs to choices we’ve made as a society and the freedoms we’ve embraced and responsibilities and capacities we’ve abdicated, and we pay them by picking up the tab in doctor’s bills for the scrapes and bruises we aquire as a result. You can’t expect people to advance when they’re forever undergoing treatment.

    Our systems pay the price of establishing a semblance of order and mitigating consequences that we can’t or won’t establish order in our own lives. And ultimately that’s all those systems can do. They can compensate, like a crutch. They can blunt and soothe like a painkiller. They can cover up, like a bandage. But they can’t heal us. That comes from within.

   And if healing doesn’t come from within, and even worse if we mistake our treatments for the source of of our health, if we become dependent on them to keep us together, then we will never be free of them and they will never work the way we think they should, and we will keep casting about for more and more (and more extreme) treatments and interventions. Until we kill the patient.

I had a strange dream the other night where someone was trying to show me a family crest and tell me what it should be. They kept shouting at me and repeating the motto, so I wouldn’t forget. And when I woke up, I didn’t. I had to look it up to make sure what it meant. The motto pressed upon me was “Praxis in principia”.

Setting aside whatever dream logic produced it, and whether it even makes linguistic sense, I do see what the point was. It’s not a simple motto. It’s a statement of tension and complexity. Praxis, practice, action, the practicum. In principia, in principle, within or under the rule of principle.

I can see why. It’s meant to be a solution to the question of faith vs works, unconditional or conditional love, abstract laws and concepts or concrete actions and results. The right way of living is to live within both, for the two to be married. Any separation of the two hollows both out. They are an ontological unity in a human being. We live across both domains, and we must live across both domains. We cannot afford to be either Plato or Aristotle. We must follow the example of Jesus, the finite infinite. The incarnate abstract. The embodied principle.

Let’s be brutally honest. There is a huge disconnect between what women say they want or even think they want and their actual instinctive reactions. Women are, almost universally, extremely prejudiced against short men as romantic partners. And they have some intense positive prejudices too. So yeah, money and status are the ideal ways to overcome the innate loss of value that comes from being short. You body is screaming that you’re not worth considering. Wealth and status are easy shortcuts to getting women to think you are are. And after that it’s up to you as a person. But you’ve got to get your foot in the door before they will even give you a chance.

Now, if you don’t have wealth or status to counterbalance your height, your best best is a slow, targeted approach. Develop your other attributes. Make sure that you actually know what they are (charm, intelligence, humor, verbal ability, creativity, pluck, kindness), and really get to know some girls. They might be willing to accept you more easily as a friend because you’re not viable dating material. And that gives you a chance to reveal the worth that you do have.

As you become more of a distinct individual to the women you get to know, outer proxy measures that people use to quickly judge other people (like height, and even looks in general) don’t become less real or relevant, but they decline in relative significance as the picture of your value becomes complicated by more and more additional factors.

Some women will never get over the height issue. Almost none of them will when it comes to a quick, basic appraisal of the romantic viability of a man. But we all discover things about one another eventually that we aren’t thrilled about, but we learn to ignore them because there are so many other things that we’re focusing on that we like.

The fact is, women are as heavily prejudiced about men as men are about women. Their main differences are their baseline attraction and the direction of their prejudice. The baseline assessment of most men of most women is that they seem pretty good as romantic prospects. And the baseline assessment of most women is that most men are not acceptable romantic prospects. Men have some very strong innate preferences (for beautiful women, mostly), and they’re mostly positive prejudices, things they like. Overall, they’re pretty attracted to most women, and they’re even more attracted to really beautiful ones.

Women, on the other hand, have mostly negative prejudices. Their baseline judgment is that most men aren’t that attractive, and there are certain things that make them completely unacceptable and of no romantic interest. So as a man, especially a man who possesses some of those undesirable traits, you’re in the business of neutralizing objections, finding ways to remove standing indictments against you. Some things, like height, can’t be changed, but you can get the judge to take extenuating circumstances into account and maybe commute your sentence of exile.

It’s very hard to make yourself attractive to women, in general, without some decent reserves of wealth or status to flaunt. Those tend to be the skeleton keys to the chains of your own personal limitations. But you can free yourself to become attractive to some particular women who you get to know and who get to know you by other means.

On a side note, most of the very young are too dumb to have any idea what they actually want or what they are attracted to, and they only learn, if ever, by experience (mostly bad ones). So don’t expect too much of teenagers or even young adults. By the time they’ve had a couple decades to accumulate a history of romantic wreckage, even the slowest students will gradually begin to aquire some idea that they’re not very good at figuring out what it is they really want or need. And even the great youthful romances could be viewed as a pretty bad idea, when looked at with too ungenerous an eye.

Being unattractive for some minor and unalterable reason is frustrating. It is a handicap. And don’t kid yourself that it’s all about confidence or this or that. Most women will never bother looking close enough to see your confidence, or ever see it as anything but silly on a shrimp like you. But in narrow and specific cases where you can broaden the spectrum of information, you can hide it and make them forget it.
And once you have someone who does, you can forget it too. Something so big and impactful to your life suddenly becomes a total non-issue with almost no relevance.

Inside a real relationship, you’ve got so much going on that your height is just a passing afterthought, hardly even remembered by even yourself. I sometimes forget that I’m short, just like I sometimes forget that I’m a good bit younger than my wife (another feature most women, especially young ones, don’t like). I forget that I’m not a great singer too, and bad at team sports, because these things simply aren’t relevant in our day to day relationship.

Other things end up mattering far more, like how good I am at remembering to do things I said I would do, and how patient I am about my wife doing something that annoys me for the seven hundredth time. The fact that I’m bad at both of those things has a much more active negative impact on my romantic life these days than my height.

The fact that I had an unusually clean room (my wife has extremely tidy parents and sees tidiness as a sign of being in control of your life) and an unusually well-decorated room (my wife has a great appreciation of aesthetic and natural beauty) in college ended up being more important and relevant and notable information than my height, which was obvious. And I mostly talked to her sitting down, or over email. We didn’t play basketball. I found a way to move the battle to more advantageous territory. Being short and young was a serious problem, but I found ways to give myself a fighting chance.

The playing field is never even and never will be. Everyone has innate advantages and disadvantages, and everyone has innate preferences and prejudices, many of which are widely shared and some which are very peculiar to the individual. Your job is to figure out what your handicaps are and what your assets are and learn how to tell the story of you in the most advantageous way possible.

Faint heart never won fair lady. That’s a cliché, but it’s a cliché because it’s almost tiresomely true. Most everyone is pretty shallow. They have to be. There are six billion people out there and they need to filter the possibilities at a glance somehow. But most people will also look deeper and more complexly, given the right chance and the time and space to take notice. If you can find the right people, and you give them the chance, you can broaden that pool so you can find a place in it. Or at least make it less deep so you can stand. Short stuff.

There are many great books in the Bible that have had great consequence for human thought, history, and personal living. But my own two personal favorites share the same attribution, someone with whom I’ve always felt a kinship. Everyone finds some person or story in the Bible that speaks to them personally, there’s such a huge variety. For me, the two greatest books that I can never say enough about are Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes.

     My only complaint is that these are probably the most unappreciated and poorly understood books in the entire Bible. People just can’t seem to deal with them. They don’t know what to do with them. They need to make excuses for them being included in the Bible, find ways to explain them away as something other than what they are. They offend the sensibilities of many. But to me they’re the most precious jewels in the treasury of Biblical literature, and you impoverish yourself by not accepting the gifts they offer.

    So I would like, at the offset, to absolutely repudiate all the gnostic literature that tries to explain away or reinterpret or hide or shame or obscure them. Can you make a leap from the primary content and relate it to other subjects and matters? Certainly. But in addition to, not instead of.

     You can draw a lot of lessons about business management from the Sermon on the Mount. You could write a whole series of books about it, because Jesus has insight into life and value and the human condition, and that wisdom has broad applicability. That doesn’t mean that the sermons of Jesus were about business management. And if you focus on that aspect of their applicability to the exclusion of their primary intent and subject matter, then you’ve got a serious problem. You’re using them, not receiving them. You have to love them and want to listen to them first before you start wielding them as tools of your personal preferences and interests. 

    And far too few theologians through the years have properly loved these books in the way that the Bible demands simply by including them in the scriptures. These are essential, remarkable, ancient books about two of the greatest mysteries of life: love and the human condition. I suppose you could call them the romantic dilemma and the existential dilemma. What does love mean and what does life mean? That’s plenty to be concerned about. You can bring in all sorts of metaphors about the Jews, the Church, and whatever else you want. But you don’t need to. There’s plenty of deep material of ultimate significance to human life that anyone in Earth could identify with. 

    So go to these books and spend some time with them. They’re not long. Take some time to really take them in. And if you have an opinion about the Bible as a whole, maybe readjust your understanding of it in light of the fact of these two long-celebrated books. Personally, I think they stand entirely on their own merits and should be read as important poetic and philosophical texts, even outside their religious significance. Love and death are waiting for you in their pages. So go greet them and kiss them on the mouth. 

This entry will be a bit scattered. My parents had their 50th wedding anniversary recently, and I had to give a couple different speeches in different occasions. And in preparation for that I wrote some notes. These are those notes.

Dad took me places I didn’t want to go. My mom showed me places I wanted to be.

I wanted to share some thoughts about my parents and about their marriage.

I never wanted to be like my dad. That was a hard thing for me to realize, and I think it was hard for him too. Partly I was just too stubborn and independent to want to follow anyone, and in that way I think I was being like my dad. But I never felt that I could do what he did or be who he was. I didn’t have the same capabilities or desires. And we fought about that a bit when I was younger. But he was always willing to be disagreed with, willing to be surprised, even willing to be wrong. And that meant he was always my dad, and that we were alike, even when we went different directions on things.

I did want to be like my mom. She never pushed me to be like her, she just set an example that I fell in love with. I loved so many of things she loved and wanted to share in them. Books, music, art, photography, her love of nature and gardens and living things, her appreciation of simple comforts, traditions, good food, unpretentious pleasures, independence, self-confidence, reserve, and a very absurd and sometimes dark sense of humor. She was very wry and very careless, thoughtful but unconcerned. She worried about other people but never seemed to worry about herself.

—-

There has been so much argument and pain and confusion and naiveté and disappointment over marriage and what it is and isn’t and how great or how much of fraud and trap it is.

Marriage through the years has had a lot of bad press. And people have earned that bad press, so it’s not like it’s unrealistic. But I was never convinced by all the arguments and bribes and alternatives and escapes and denunciations and declarations and marketing and counter marketing.

I always, almost more than anything, wanted to get married and be in a partnership with someone else. Why? Because of my parents. I had seen with my own eyes what marriage meant and what it could be. My parents aren’t mushy, sentimental people. My dad just threw away the love letters my mom sent him after he had read them. He’s a wonderful man, but there isn’t any poetry in him. And my mother is one of the most even-keeled, reserved, straightforward women I have even known. But in spite of all that, you could not avoid seeing their love for one another.

I knew how much my parents loved each other. I lived with them for 18 years, and with only them for the last four. And being that close to someone for that long, there’s a lot you realize that really annoys you about them. You learn all their habits and idiosyncrasies that you can’t stand, from the way they chew to the things they say that drive you crazy. So I knew exactly what there was about both of them that made them almost impossible people to live with, much less be married to.

But I never saw anyone, no romantic couple in movies, no passion or love affair in any TV show or book that could compare to what I had seen in my own home. I saw them fight, of course, I saw both of them be idiots, I saw them criticize and embarrass each other, I awe them accuse and annoy each other, I saw them be worried about and frustrated by each other. And yet I have never seen anyone who was as absolutely and continuously in love with one another as my parents.

I saw their partnership firsthand, up close, and what it meant to them and what it meant to everyone around them. Their friends, their family, their neighbors, their church, their coworkers, their patients. I saw their love and I saw the consequences of their love in the world around them and what they were capable of because of that partnership.

I saw my dad come home from work and I saw my mom greet him each day. I saw him stand and hold her, and I saw them smiling and humming and kissing in a way that was completely disgusting and embarrassing to a teenager. I had a room right next to theirs, and so I knew exactly how much time they spent fighting and arguing, and I also knew exactly how much time they spent snuggling and smooching and reading to each other and talking together late at night.

And it was a little embarrassing. But not to them. Instead it was me who was embarrassed and ashamed to be so exposed and inadequate. They were part of something so strong and so overwhelming and meaningful that me as their son was outside of it. And I was the one who was embarrassed to be standing in the presence of something absolutely blinding like that.

That was the kind of love my parents had. It was like the sun. It was hard to look at. But it gave life and warmth and growth to everything around them. And it didn’t matter what they were like, how annoying and imperfect and impossible they could be. Nothing could possibly reach them inside it. They were completely secure and unashamed inside it. It was an irresistible picture of the power of faith and love.

That picture they presented extended to their children. I never really felt like I wanted children, I never felt that burning desire or urge, but I never for a moment bought the arguments and narratives against parenthood. That it meant the end of romance, that kids were a burden and a trap, that they were competing with my own interests or wellbeing, or that they would restrict my own greatness and pleasure and freedom. I knew, by my own experience that that was false.

Not because the hardships of parenthood were ever hidden from me by my parents. I knew that I myself was quite the handful. I knew how hard it was to be a parent because I was my parents’ kid. But they also couldn’t hide how amazing parenthood was, how much it meant to them, what a struggle and adventure it was, what joy it brought to them despite everything, how absolutely worth doing it was.

I knew that if I had kids, I would love them, and it would make my life greater, even if I didn’t know what it felt like to want them yet. I knew that it was real, that it was out there. Even when I was angry at or frustrated with my own parents, I knew what parenthood was meant to be. They showed me that. And I could never forget it. Their lives, their marriage, and their parenting was an argument that I could never defeat.

Nothing that happened to me in my whole life could make me forget what I had seen with my own two eyes in my own home between my parents and between them and their children. Nothing could ever change that, nothing could take it away. And I never saw anything greater. I never saw any fame or fortune or power or pleasure that could compare to what was alive in my own parents’ home. Even with all its hundreds of imperfections it swept the competition.

Even if I walked away from them and was a terrible son, even if we neglected each other or betrayed each other, I knew too much to forget.

There are few things last in this world. Monuments fail, people are forgotten, honors lose their meaning, knowledge becomes outdated and useless, happiness passes, wealth runs out, fame is forgotten, jobs can be replaced. But you can’t build or legislate or buy or award what my parents have done and what they have made.

My parents built a fifty year living monument to the power of a loving marriage. That is a miracle of art, of living, of endurance, cooperation, struggle, painful honesty and revelation, and of genuine human goodness in a world of pain and fear and uncertainty and disappointment and change. And that is the closest thing to a glimpse of divine truth and goodness and beauty that we will see in our lives on earth.

–

A marriage like this is a like a cathedral. It is a living and tangible argument for the power of romantic love between a man and woman and what it means when those two seperate halves of humanity are reunited. It is an unfolding of the consequences of the most powerful human relationship in existence. And it’s also the most basic and ordinary thing in the world. My parents aren’t great. They’re ordinary people who have lived perfectly ordinary lives.

No offense to my dad, but he would collapse in an instant without my mom. And my mom was able to be and do everything she did because of what my dad meant and did for her.

What does it mean to live a successful life

What can endure, what makes us be seen, what gives life meaning, what makes our lives matter?

Achievements, wealth, fame, awards, degrees, success, status, some law, some holiday, some chapter in a history book, some monument.

We think we’re the center of the universe because we’re the center of our universe; we think we’re so much greater than we are that we can hardly picture the world without us.

Our clothes, our cars, our houses, our titles, our degrees, our reputation, all protect us from the reality of what small, weak, vulnerable, organic creatures we are.

I learned the power and greatness of ordinary lives from both my parents. Both parents hammered home to me the greatness and value of ordinary lives and people. Dad through being a doctor. Mom through her understanding of, care of, and appreciation of others. Small people. Small things. Small places. Small moments.

You can be a massive success but have no friends, no one who knows you, no one who truly misses your absence or passing. However many people there are who know about you, Who knows you and cares about you in such a way that you are an essential and meaningful part of their world and they can’t imagine the world without you? That’s a much rarer achievement.

So many of us live a much more tenuous existence than we would like to admit. We’re only one bad turn from losing our happiness, our wealth, our status. And everyone’s lives are like that.

All monuments fail, all people are forgotten, all honors lose their meaning, all knowledge becomes outdated and useless, all happiness passes, all wealth runs out and , all fame is forgotten, all jobs can be replaced. Whatever is has already been, and what will be has been before.

What is the measure of a meaningful life, a life that endures; what is a sure defense against the enormous void of our finitude and imperfection and how much smaller our reality is than what we imagine ourselves to be?

Your life alone, no matter what you accomplish, can’t matter enough to survive against those odds. There’s no such thing as a lone wolf. Only rabid wolves are ever alone. The lone wolf is weak, it has no protection against the world or the future. It has no future. Only in connection to others do we become complete ourselves.

We often put conditions on our happiness and the meaning of our lives. I can only be happy if I have this kind of spouse, this many children, or if my children turn out like this, or if I can live here or have this nice of a house, or if I have this kind of job or can spend my time doing this thing that I like. We hold our lives hostage with all the demands and preconditions we place on it. Only this can make my life matter, only this will make me happy, I must be this, do this, see this, be seen as this.

My parents have spent their lives trying to teach me not to let myself fall into that trap. They’ve showed me where meaning and happiness can be found. My dad worked hard and never worried about trying to be important. In fact I think he was deliberately trying not to be so he wouldn’t have to bother with worrying about his own reputation. Be was always doing everything he could to disabuse people of any expectations they had of him to be a great man. And by a strange turn of fate, that turned out to be exactly how you become a great man. Not by chasing your own greatness, but by casting that aside as a distraction from the real business of living life.

My mother showed me the place where meaning and happiness live. In little pleasures, small moments and places of beauty. She was never trying to be the best mom or have the best house. She was loving what it was good to love: her children, her garden, her neighbors, music, books, food, special times together.

My parents showed me two visions of happiness and meaning. Meaning and happiness out there, meaning and happiness in here.

Gaining weight is so easy, and losing it is so hard. That says something about the fundamental structure of the world and our own constitution. I spent weeks of hard work losing weight this spring. I managed a few pounds, got down from 186 to almost 181. And then lately I’ve been very busy with work, stressed in various ways, not sleeping well, and a couple weeks ago I just decided that I was going to eat whatever I wanted for a while. I’m now almost 188.

That happened so fast, with so little effort. Actually with no effort, all it really took was to stop making an effort to not do whatever I wanted. And it crashed all my previous efforts so fast, so easily.

It’s so easy for one brief decision to stop holding yourself back and stop living on purpose and restraining your desire to take away everything and leave you feeling distended, distorted, unwell, and uncomfortable. I can feel the results. I avoided weighing myself because I was hoping that there hadn’t really been any long-term consequences from my lapse, that it would be fine and being fitter and healthier was just a natural outcome I didn’t need to maintain or strive for so deliberately.

That’s just not the case. I avoided the scale that would tell me the truth. But I felt it, in the way I moved, how I felt, how my clothes fit. So I finally faced the scale. And I’m unhappy with the scale. It’s just the messenger, the conveyance. All its doing is what it’s supposed to, telling me the truth. I’ve had a bad couple weeks. I fell off the horse of life in general. I let disorder creep in and destabilize one area after another. And it wasn’t fine. I didn’t escape unscathed. And the more of me that came apart, the more I was willing to let other parts of me go to make up for it and make myself feel better or distract myself.

As a substitute for healthy living, I fed myself indulgences and exceptions. And that only made things worse. Worse, I let it distract me and take me away from and endanger the really good things in my life that make it work. My health, my family, my wife, good sleep, good food. That’s the tragedy of life. The road isn’t wide and easy. It is narrow and hard. It’s not a hundred out of a hundred turtles that make it to the open sea or salmon that make it back to their stream, it’s only a handful. And that’s terribly painful.

If you have a chance, you should read the book Albion’s Sons. It’s a book about four groups from Britain that settled early America and how drastically different they were and how each tried an entirely different theory of rule and culture. All of them became America, in the end. But seeing how radically different they were is very interesting.

The Scots were decentralized and independent and liberal, but in constant conflict with one another. The Cavaliers in Virginia built a very rigid, stratified, and centralized society that was in constant tension with itself and required heavy-handed enforcement of the system. The Quakers had a very fraternal and communitarian society with much much less centralized power and law, but had very intensely strong social power structures (soft power, social praise and harsh shaming, reputation destruction and reputation building). And the Puritans liked nice, structured systems of law that covered all the details and kept society orderly. They loved law and education and suing people.

The Puritans and Cavaliers were more hands-on as far as centralized structures of law and order, and the Quakers and Scots-Irish were more hands-off, but with very different approaches. They all experimented with different forms of liberty. Liberty within the structure of the law, liberty within the structure of social/moral norms, liberty within the structure of a defined social structure, and liberty as you can define it for yourself with very few defined moral/social norms or defined social or legal structures.

And they all had problems. Some solutions were certainly better for certain desired outcomes, but the idea that having just the right system would somehow make universal problems among humans and their most common solutions (such as force and violence) disappear suddenly was and is simply wishful thinking.

Even the best systems have to assume that things won’t go according to plan, and you will need contingencies and institutions to handle it when that happens. That’s very much what the founding American documents were. Contingency plans for all the ways things can and will go wrong and solutions to deal with it. And if you read this book, you can see why they thought they needed them. It really is amazing that these groups managed to work together, much less stay together and form any kind of cohesive society.

People talk so much about America and its founding and the people involved, but often know so little about it. This book is the cure for that. And it’s impeccably researched. It’s enormously long, but incredibly informative. I would put it up there with DeToqueville as a source. Its much less grand and philosophical, of course, but it’s a lot easier to understand.

Activism is fundamentally, structurally, about wielding power over other people. That is its goal. That’s not a criticism, it’s a description. That’s what distinguishes activism from other kinds of social and moral activity. It is an attempt to influence, control, restrain, dictate, or guide the behavior of other people. In particular, people you don’t personally know and aren’t directly related to.

We don’t call a parent an activist because they influence their child’s behavior. We don’t call a person an activist just because they have influence among their friends. You’re an activist when you try to impress or impose your desires and beliefs about what other people should think, feel, do, or value. And if you’re a skilled and successful activist you will have power over what other people can think, feel, do, or value.

It’s an evangelistic position. You’re not preaching to the choir, not simply being yourself among friends of family. You’re on a crusade, a conquista. You’re out to convert and change (or control maybe even denounce and immolate) the unreached, the unsaved, the pagans, the heretics, the sinful. Activists are the monks and holy warriors of modern society. They are conquistadors, spreading the banner of righteousness and raising the sign of the cross over the temples of pagan societies.

Men have to live with the hormonal burden that assumes you need to beget children. Our minds are calibrated around it, and it affects our approach to life. Men have to live with their aggression, that drive. Ensure the elevation of your bloodline in the present and its continuation in the future. It seems like a desperate need, a moral dictate.

We live with a voice inside constantly telling us to get out there, fight, strive, conquer, aquire, win status, win over mates, and have sex. The purpose of which is fathering children, but it’s easier for men to focus on the means than the ends, because they’re more immediate and compelling and have a greater biological urgency.

It’s entirely possible to have an incentive toward an ultimate desired end that doesn’t rely on the person pursuing it to have a full understanding of what it is they’re being incentivized toward, so long as the incentive effectively captures their immediate personal interest. This is not unlike the principals that underlie free market capitalism, in which the selfish goals of the individual ultimately serve the common good of society.

Of course one downside of this arrangement is that it’s easy to get focused on the means as an end in itself and never realize that there was an end and a purpose, and never let ourselves be led to it. In this way the unconscious mechanisms that are meant to push us toward paternity, into the waiting arms of women who will constrain and make use of that urge and balance it with their own power and own interests, can be subverted. Especially if we won’t allow ourselves to be led out of the comfort of adolescence, the safety of our same-gender childhood society, out of Neverland into the conflicting and dangerous and demanding world of adulthood.

I’ve always thought that it was very appropriate that, in the movie Hook, what finally drew Peter Pan out of Neverland was the desire to be a father. Staying in Neverland meant forgoing the pleasures of the kisses and esteem of women, the comforts of home and of mothers, but it also meant not being subject to the burden or work, specifically work that wasn’t for your own benefit. You could fight and play and win and gain treasure that was just for you and your friends.

It’s very clear that Peter Pan enjoys many enviable pleasures that other children, who must grow up, cannot. There is a special kind of freedom he has as a result of not being confined by the role of becoming a man, of not taking on those responsibilities. And to give them up would be a real loss. Wendy’s parents are essentially the most dangerous people in the story that must be avoided at all costs. They carry a weight, a burden of slavery and destiny and confinement. To belong to the mother, to be forced to become the father.

Captain Hook, for all that he represents the envy of youth that old age feels, is really just a degenerate Peter Pan. He is an adult who has attempted to return to Neverland. But Neverland is the domain of children, and so he hates and resents the youth and optimism of Peter that has soured within himself. Peter is still at the beginning of his life’s adventure, and Hook knows he is approaching the end of his.

Hook feels time chasing him down and has no protection against it, which all the other characters have. The children have the protection of youth, and the parents have the protection of parenthood itself; they have their children. In their own ways, both have their immortality secure. They both have incredible possibility in front of them, not behind. But Hook has already lost a part of himself to the ticking clock monster of time and is being relentlessly pursued by it. And so Peter can laugh at him. He is a joke. A man who has tried to live in Neverland, but can’t be happy within it because of the twin galls of his own pursuing mortality and the mocking carelessness of youth personified in Peter.

But the parents of Wendy are not a joke and cannot be treated as a game, even by Peter. A real mother is a serious threat to Peter and to his whole world. The promise of marriage and of motherhood and fatherhood are the only true threats to his kingdom. And they’re a constant risk that tugs at his friends and followers and games, threatening to pull them away and absorb them into their world.

So parenthood, a husband and wife, the whole marital institution, is a kind of existential threat to Peter’s world in a way Hook never can be. It’s one thing to be defeated or captured or even killed in Neverland. It is another thing entirely to be subsumed, converted, absorbed into the great mortal continuum of growing up.

Death in Neverland lacks reality because life is a game, and being killed in a game isn’t the same thing as being killed in the real world of children and responsibilities, or even living in it. To do that you must face and accept your own limitations and confinement within time, within a species, within the roles and responsibilities that the species life demands of you. You pay the price of subjugating your desires, goals, and identity, your play and make-believe, to the unfeeling world of work and responsibility. You can’t be whatever you want. You can’t do whatever you want.

There is a real sense in which, as the movie Hook seems to show, Peter Pan would die, would cease to exist, if he did this, if he left Neverland. And that does seem like a terrible loss. The journey he goes on in that movie is simplified. In the middle of his life he undergoes a reversion and goes back to being Peter Pan. And he begins to forget his adult life and even why he ever left; life in Neverland seems so sweet. But then he does remember, and the two parts of him come together.

Curiously, for all the celebration of childishness in Hook, it is the adult Peter that is actually stronger than anything in Neverland. Peter the father, not Peter the boy hero. The only thing that really changes in him is that he remembers what was great about Neverland and why he loved it, but he also finally remembers why he left it. What was more powerful than Neverland. And suddenly he’s unstoppable. He has a purpose beyond play and selfish pleasure, and he knows what it is.

By fusing the vitality of his youth with the purpose of his maturity, he stops being a pawn of either the childish or adult world and becomes an independent, purposeful, complete, mature human. He has essentially defeated both the unthinking adult world and Neverland. And then he can rescue his kids and defeat Hook and travel between both worlds at will, possessing the best of both, with a purpose and understanding that transcends both.

I’ve seen so many people call anything that portrays people as being different “racist”. Cartoons, old TV shows, costumes. Regardless of whether the portrayal or intent is actually negative or not, the mere fact of difference itself, characterization, is habitually and thoughtlessly labeled as racist. The very idea that someone from another culture might speak differently or dress differently and not just be a “normal person”, meaning someone exactly like me. Shocking.

Personally, I’ve always found the idea that, instead of having their own character, accents, differences, and idiosyncrasies, all people of different races, cultures, and nations should be generic and similar and conform to modern American ideals is the real absurdity and stereotyping. We’re so scared of difference that we call any reminder of it racism, as we call any reminder of difference between the sexes sexism. Why are we so afraid? Because we’re afraid if we really are different, then someone might think they’re better. So please sweep all that under the counter. Its essentially the policy toward nationality of the European Union. The way way to peace is elimination of uniqueness.

The truth is, people of different cultures are different. It can be hard to understand one another. You can’t take for granted that other people will be the same as what you’re used to. And if you risk leaving your own little pond, you risk looking a little silly sometimes, and having a hard time sometimes, because all cultures and people are not generic and uniform. And America, with its unprecedented mixing of immigrants, really brought that home to people in a way they had never had to deal with before.

But despite their differences they had to learn to live and work together. And that wasn’t easy and wasn’t without some real challenges and work and friction and misunderstandings, because the differences were real. In fact they were so real that the citizens of other nations thought the entire experiment was almost guaranteed to fall apart within a few years.

It’s only comfortable, modern Americans who can assume everyone is generic and equivalent and interchangeable, and that load other people and the world with those expectations and try to enforce a relativistic progressive monoculture. That is why, increasingly, we have so little tolerance, and much less humor, for any reminders about those differences.

Part of the way that differing peoples dealt with all the tension generated by their differences in the past was with humor, about themselves and about others. By recognizing their own and others’ distinctiveness. But instead of getting overly upset about it, or resentful or angry or fearful, people learned to be amused. We learned to acknowledge our differences openly in part through humor. And that had some real cathartic value. We started to become familiar with one another. It wasn’t just being mean or reductive. To assume there aren’t real differences and challenges and conflicts that need to be aired and deflated is what’s truly reductive.

We’re not more advanced and tolerant today, we’re more repressed and ignorant and naive and comfortable. Even tiny differences bother us, because we think humans are all supposed to be the same and act the same and talk the same and have the same values and the same culture, or at least one that agrees with ours. We’re not better at resolving conflict, we’re just better at avoiding it. The great thing about actual immigrants is they usually don’t have time for these sort of pretensions. It’s obvious to them that people are different. And if they have a positive attitude and aren’t helpless and have some spine and character in them, that amuses them.

Even within ethnicities, there are differences so big that the other side could be a whole different people, and you can either be amused by that or decide to hate it. Because it’s real. Northern and Southern Italians are very different (and in America we’re mostly used to southern Italians). Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews are very different and have had to learn to live with each other and work together. They couldn’t just assume that they would all be the same and have no conflicts, differences, or misunderstandings just because they were both Jews. And you certainly couldn’t assume in early America that the Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Cornish, and English would be the same, or could even understand one another, even though they share the same two, small islands. Even just among the English the variety of attitudes and cultures and accents was enormous. It was a reality early Americans dealt with on a daily basis.

We today come at things from the end point of a very long process, with a very different set of assumptions. And it’s not clear that we’re the smart or advanced ones. We’re just the beneficiaries of everything these people went through. We have the luxury of our illusions and prejudices. We can dismiss stereotypes and differences (as well as having a bit of humor about them) as silly and illusory and shallow, or even immoral.

That’s part of what great about the movie “An American Tail”. It shows the actual struggle of immigrants, the process of meeting one another, being amused, being shocked, duped, amused disappointed, surprised, hopeful, learning to work together, learning to respect one another, learning to be friends, learning to be countrymen…or countrymouses. If we can’t take some pleasure and have some humor about that process, that struggle, we’re going to fear it. We’re going to fear each other. And hiding from it, losing our humor, won’t make us less afraid, any more than avoidance cures phobias. The only way to overcome difficult things is by learning to face them.

So no, I’m not afraid of stereotypes, because I’m not afraid of the fact that people are different. I’m Dutch, and the little that anyone knows about them usually comes down to amusing images of tulip fields and dikes and people with wooden shoes. And if you look up the occupations of my recent ancestors, you’ll find that I’m descended from a dike worker and a flower seller. And we had a pair of wooden shoes with out family name on them. I don’t know about you, but I find that hilarious.

The lesson of the long history of sexual specification is that life is not best served by reduction to a single strategy or morphology. What then is the ideal number of strategies or morphologies for a species? At the individual and embodied level the answer is: as many as there are individuals. Each one provides an element in an avenue to success, each is a contributing morpheme (to borrow a term from linguistics). But at the level of biological organization and morphological strategies of which individuals are only particular examples, the answer is: two. A strategy and its opposite, or mate. The positive and negative ions of an elemental structure.

These two will by necessity be in tention with one another. Their function is to pull the body of mass in opposite directions. But they will also contain fundamental attraction to one another. As between ions, each seeks their mate and compliment to achieve a balanced physical equation.

The important difference between this equation and a world involving only neutrons is that you achieve balance through the combination of complimentary charged particles, not through having only uncharged neutrons. The structure of life is ionic balance, not neutrality. It is an equation, not an integer. It is electricity, exchange, tension, not equivalence.

Of course, in order for the equation to balance, both ions must be of equal value. You cannot have an effective exchange, even in a complex interaction, if the value of one side of the equation doesn’t contribute or the other side doesn’t receive it. Relationships are much more volatile and unstable in some ways than inert particles. But they are also more powerful and tenacious, when their bonds are properly formed and maintained.