Admixture

One day, while at the drugstore, I came across a flyer on "navigating sexual wellness." Ho, hum. What interested me about it was the photograph of a twenty-something couple on the front of the flyer. It was a mixed-race couple; he was Black, she was White.

I always find it interesting when businesses (in this case, a national pharmacy chain) prominently feature mixed race couples in their advertising and other materials. Mainly because I'm old enough to remember when this sort of thing was somewhere between vanishingly rare and completely unheard of. The implication that two people of different racial backgrounds were a couple, let alone having sex, came across as something of a taboo when I was a child. (Keep in mind that Loving v. Virginia, which struck down anti-miscegenation laws, was decided only the year before I was born.) Of course, it wasn't an ironclad social prohibition; there was the occasional mixed couple on television when I was growing up. But even after I was out of college, mixed marriages had yet to gain full acceptance.

Nearly I'm well into middle-age, and mixed couples with a Black man and a White woman have become something of a diversity cliché. This is, I suppose, because they're one of the more common visibly mixed-race couples that one is likely to encounter, despite the fact that there are still undercurrents of disapproval to that specific pairing in both the Black and White communities. I don't pretend to understand all of the reasons why, but matters of identity and presence seem to play a leading role when people push back.

I do find myself curious as to how other people see mixed-race couples in advertising. They stand out for me, because for much of my life, they simply weren't present. I don't expect to see such portrayals, and so they catch my attention. I would presume that for people younger than myself, "Gen Z" and perhaps Millennials, they might simply fade into the background, as unremarkable as any other advertisement. If that's the case, I suspect that the number, and types, of mixed-race couples in advertising will grow. As long as the practice stays out of the Culture Wars, that is. And who knows what the thing to be sucked into that teapot tempest will be.

In the End

I was listening to a podcast about free will the other day, and one of the speakers used a very interesting turn of phrase; describing free human volition and intent as "an uncaused cause." Which is a very good way of contrasting it with Determinism, which tends to view the human will as an effect, when then goes on to cause other effects.

It was interesting, because whether or not human volition is viewed as uncaused by outside events or circumstances is one of those things that is rarely viewed consistently. As I see it, it tends to be linked to whom someone wants to give the credit or the blame to. And that tends to be the crux of debates around free will; whether or not humans are blame and/or praiseworthy for their actions, in the sense that many debates tend to have at least one participant who comes down on the side of free will specifically due their attachment to blame or praise.

Of course, a lot of arguments work this way, especially when lay people debate philosophy; there are a number of arguments against relativism that effectively come down to: "If relativism, then X is not objectively wrong, but X must be objectively wrong, therefore relativism must be wrong." It's that self-serving bias that makes philosophy difficult, and I wonder if philosophers will ever find a good way around it.

In Difference

There is, I have learned, a trick to being a serene member of a community or identity. And it mostly comes down to understanding that there will be people who, for reasons of their own, have a problem with it. And the point to remember is the "for reasons of their own" part.

I recently discovered a website called "Only Sky." While it doesn't appear to outright say so, I suspect that the name is a direct reference to that Beatles song, "Imagine." I've been looking for some philosophy to add to my Internet diet, so I read a few articles, and then came across this one: "A philosopher’s bigoted views on atheists." It's a diatribe of the author's problems with the online writings of one "Eve Keneinan." Not long into the piece I found myself thinking that for all that this Eve Keneinan person had taken up residence in the author's head, he may as well be charging her rent.

There's a part of me that gets it. I remember when I felt the need to hit back at people whom I felt were denigrating me and what I believed (or disbelieved, as the case may be). And Ms. Keneinan very much denigrates atheists and atheism. At one point, on X, she notes the following:

We have decided, against all reason and tradition, to attempt to tolerate all manner of vices and evils.
It won't end well for us.
It isn't going well for us.
First, rebellion, and then judgment. That's the way of things.

I understand why people are put out by this, but I'm not sure what else one would expect. A person who understands that the Universe itself demands obedience, and metes out punishments to show its displeasure is not going to be happy with people who openly flout the rules they find to be important (especially if they believe in a Universe that indulges is collective sanctions). This was something that I came to understand when I was still in grade school.

Deists who believe that sins are a form of deliberate harm, either to the individual, the community or to the Universe itself, are likely going to be angry about that. And if that also induces fear in them, their complaints are apt to be public, and loud. This makes them people who are never going to approve of those who who don't follow the rules that the deist believes have been set in place. Once I realized this, I stopped looking for their approval. And for ways to get them to seek mine. Sure, people who understand the life one leads to be a direct threat to them can be bad news. But so can a lot of other people.

Ms. Keneinan appears to believe that tolerating behaviors that depart from her own accepted brand of Christianity is dangerous, and therefore, is irrational, at best. Understood, but why care about that? As much as I understand the point that tolerating intolerance is a bad idea, one's intolerance has to be worth something, or it's just noise. Freedom of religion means that some people are going to be members of religions that teach them to be afraid of the beliefs of others. And freedom of speech means that they're going to be allowed to give vent to their fears. By the same token, freedom of thought means that everyone is free to be concerned about the way other people see the world. But it tends to be a freedom that brings little, if anything, positive with it.

I'm sure that if I met Ms. Keneinan, she'd consider me odious, damned, detestable and vicious. She wouldn't be alone or even particularly noteworthy in that. So why not simply let her rave impotently against my deciding that her deity is mythological? The alternative sure doesn't bring anyone anything, or make the world a better place.

The author notes, at the end of their column on Ms. Keneinan: "When you want a world full of decent people—kind and generous of heart—I can’t help but think, sometimes, that we’ve still got a long way to go." Of course there is a long way to go, because the path is infinite. Kind and generous of heart are not objective terms. Each person is going to fulfill them in their own way, and they don't need permission from others to see themselves as having achieved them.

Playing With Mismatches

Economist Melissa Kearney has a new book out, and so she's been giving interviews and writing articles in an attempt to get her name out there, and drum up some sales. She's hitting the publicity circuit, which is something that a lot of authors do. To Mary Harris at Slate magazine, however, this has the makings of a moral panic over marriage rates, with Conservative thinkers and pundits looking to roll back women's rights by trapping them in bad marriages in the name of helping children.

But over the past month, this conservative panic burst into the mainstream. You might have noticed one article after another—in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic—arguing that marriage is good for you, makes you richer, makes your kids more successful. Some took this a little further, arguing marriage should be a policy goal.
Marriage Won’t Fix All of America’s Problems

The problem, as I see it, is stated somewhat succinctly in the NPR article on Ms. Kearney's work (which post-dates Ms Harris' breathless Slate article): "[Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas'] book suggests that many women don't marry the father of their child not because they reject the concept of marriage, but because they do not see him as a reliable source of economic security or stability. They appear to have a higher bar for a potential spouse than their partners, or the fathers of their children, have met." This is not a new concern; at least, not for the nation at large. Low educational attainment, leading in turn to a lack of good employment prospects, has been a problem in America's lower-income Black community for at least as long as my lifetime. It's part of the reason why only a minority of Black adults are married. Black men are married at low rates because they're not considered good prospects, and Black women are married at low rates because they don't consider many Black men good prospects and won't typically look to other communities for partners. People like Melissa Kearney have become involved because the pattern has become widespread enough in the non-college-educated White population that people are starting to take notice.

The general Liberal critique (and/or fear) of books like Ms. Kearney's is that it will be taken as a reason to enact policy that makes it more difficult for unmarried women to get along in society, the assumption being that this will force them to marry whomever they can, even if that person is a poor partner for one or more of any number of reasons. And it's not completely unfounded; finding self-described Conservatives who believe that women's rights should be rolled back in the service of forcing them back into the role of men's domestic partners isn't particularly difficult. And that leads to a perception that people like Ms. Kearney are useful idiots for reactionaries who want a return to the relationship mores of the past. Casting the whole enterprise as revanchist, however, doesn't actually deal with the underlying problem; namely that a woman who declines to marry someone who will be either unable to add anything to the household, or, in a worst-case scenario, need to be actively supported by her (along with any children the couple might have) is a perfectly rational choice. Not wanting to marry someone who is incapable of routinely contributing anything is much different than an insistence on "marrying up."

I do think the government should increase income assistance to economically struggling individuals and families, both married and single. But no government check—even one much larger than what’s politically feasible in the U.S. today—is going to make up for the absence of a supportive, loving, employed second parent in the home.
Melissa Kearney “A Driver of Inequality That Not Enough People Are Talking About”

Not having read Ms. Kearney's book, I don't know if she's outlined any plans for dealing with that lack. I wouldn't be the first person to point out that no-one has figured out how to legislate the presence of a supportive, loving and employed second parent. And a number of women have clearly decided that they're not in the business of gambling that a man who doesn't fit the bill when she isn't married to him will find a way to meet those criteria if she is. And, as often as people would point out that all children deserved a father and a mother, no-one was, or is, in the business of finding single people who would make good second parents and enticing, or coercing, them into taking on the role. Of course, Ms. Kearney isn't the only person who is at a loss. When I touched on this topic more than a decade ago, I was coming at it from the other direction, that is was unrealistic to expect single people to avoid having children until they'd found a suitable marriage partner. I noted:

There is no viable method of ensuring that only those people who are financially (or physically, or emotionally) capable become parents. So we're better off working to broaden the population of capable people.

That struck me as a tall order then, and it strikes me as one now. Both reducing the costs of having children or helping the low-income become less low-income so as to make them both more secure parents and better partners are likely simply off the table. And maybe that's why so many people fear that Melissa Kearney is enabling bad ideas; there seems to be a distinct lack of good ones.

Not At All

I heartily accept the motto,—"That government is best which governs least;" and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe,—"That government is best which governs not at all;" and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.
Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

I know a number of people who would call themselves anything from Libertarians to Anarchists. (While I am given to understand that in some places outside of the United States, the two are considered synonymous, in common American usage, there's a fair amount of daylight between the two.) And they, for the most part, are all in favor of Mr. Thoreau's sentiment, even though they are not all aware of its source. For my part, I can sympathize. I've certainly had my share of occasions to wonder why this or that function or duty should be carried out by a department of government, when it seemed that others were as well, if not better, placed to take it up. And there are certainly things that people would prefer that government be involved in mainly because they view it as a means of exerting control over others. So there are times when I most definitely see the appeal of small government.

That particular ship, however, has set sail and gone out of sight of the shore, only to strike an iceberg and now find itself resting comfortably on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. And so those people who desire small government must instead console themselves with an incompetent or dysfunctional one. The House of Representatives being a case in point. With Representative Matt Gaetz and his supporters having ousted Representative Kevin McCarthy from the role of Speaker of the House without having a replacement candidate on deck, the process of electing and installing a new speaker has been something of, well, a disaster. (Not that this should be a surprise to anyone, really.) After Representative Steve Scalise concluded that he wouldn't be able to muster enough votes to win election and walked away from the job, Representative Jim Jordan gave it a shot. Being a favorite of the more conservative (for some definition of "conservative," that is) segment of the Republican Party, many people seemed to conclude that his election was something they were entitled to. Accordingly, those Republicans who were perceived as being insufficiently supportive pf Representative Jordan started to receive harassment and threats; and so did their families. Representative Jordan disavowed such tactics and took to social media to say: "hey. cut that out." (Because this is what's expected of politicians.) But the damage was already done, so now Representative Jordan has bowed (or been forced) out of consideration. This lead to a plan being being floated to give the current acting Speaker, Representative Patrick McHenry, more powers, so that he could take the role on more formally, and allow the House of Representatives to conduct business. It went over like a lead balloon. So as of now, there are about 10 Republican Representatives who are interested in the job. (And in keeping with popular stereotypes of the party, only one is non-White, and none are women.) We'll see if any of them manage to get anywhere.

In the meantime, no business is being conducted in the House of Representatives. Which is also in keeping with the Republican brand. Personally, I would rather have seen Republicans work to create private sector or civil society institutions to take over those functions that they feel that government doesn't do well, but this way plays well in Peoria, I suppose. (Not that I've been back to Peoria anytime recently.) I understand those people for whom gridlock is the closest thing to a genuinely small and unobtrusive government (or at least one that will only bother people they don't like) that they are going to get, and so understand there to be a silver lining in all of the Republican infighting. But I suspect that it will be short-lived if it prompts people to vote for representatives who believe in getting things done.