Why I walk funny (with gratuitous postcard)

I had figured that it was my injuries from a decade ago. Nope. I'm a conservative. I'm just too rigid.

In reviewing the notes and comments at Althouse, though, I'm inclined to think that it might not be a bad thing to be a little rigid, in my decision-making...

Building a new community

Bill Whittle at Eject! Eject! Eject! always has provocative essays posted. He takes his time and crafts beautiful works, presenting intriguing ideas and addressing half-hidden truths to ultimately leave them bare and lovely.

This particular piece (in two parts) is also quite timely. Whittle, like many of us, senses a certain desperation among many on the internet (it's in more places than just that, but we're dealing with this particular concrete set), that civilization seems to be falling apart, and there is no clear way to prevent that collapse.

Nevertheless, he sees that, throughout history there have been those who stood up for what is right and sane, for essential human virtue and decency and fairness and, well, you get the idea:

Today, when we think of virtues, we tend to think of things like prudence, chastity, modesty… pretty cold porridge. But to the Greek, the Virtues were dynamic and bold. More, Aristotle and others believed they were harmonized – that is related, interconnected, so that to not know one was to imperfectly know the rest. They were dionethic, he said, built by rationality – the virtues of understanding of substance, science, wisdom, the practical crafts and the practical mind.

And there were ethnic virtues, built by custom – courage and temperance; the property-based virtues of generosity and goodwill; honor-based virtues like pride, assertivity and control of anger; the social virtues of wittiness, honesty and friendliness; and the political virtue of justice.

These righteous individuals, who have been in ancient text called "Remnants," are what keep humanity from backsliding into oblivion. And the Remnants are always with us, secreted deep in every society, one way or another.

But look at the list of virtues in bold above, and ask yourself how you would feel about your child if they were fluent in all these? What if the political issues of the day were discussed not by how they would advance one party or the other, but rather as they held up against the list of virtues mentioned above?

What kind of society would a citizenry so educated and versed produce? I did a little beta-testing of this concept prior to posting this essay. I asked my regular readers two questions:

1. What are you good at?
2. Can you teach it?
   

With these questions, he's proposed the building of a new community, online, of and for people who believe in the classic virtues.

I have to admit, when I look at my own resumé, I see little to recommend me to this community. I am a Jill-of-all-trades and have mastered none. I can wield hammer, pliers, screwdriver, saw, drill (and they don't have to be power tools, but I can work those, too), shoot a bow and arrow with moderate accuracy, these days, and have myriad other basic skills, but no marketable area of excellence and expertise. I write moderately well, but know there are many others much better at it than I, and begrudge them not.

I have yet to seriously contribute to my own community. The stint I served as a substitute teacher was long ago, far away, and short-lived.

I'm good with furry and scaly animals, but will never be a veterinarian. I can make soap from ashes and animal fat. Not that I want to. I'm pretty adept at planning gardens, but, due to a long list of disabilities, I'm not so goodly a farmer and weed-puller.

I have a hellaciously large library of useless books -- who else needs Fran Striker's Tom Quest series in first edition, or a coverless, marked-up copy of volume I of The American Treasury of 1004 Folk Songs: a Musical History in Two Volumes, 1700-1899? anybody? anybody? Bueller? I lean toward the impractical.

My paintings and drawings have been good, but the effort to produce them leaves me an unpleasant person, dwelling too long within the darker parts of my mad self. I have had to surrender the habit until I can find a better way to live with myself. That is why I write.

Still, I'm told that, for a crazy woman, I've managed to keep remarkably balanced over the past couple of years -- without the help of chemicals. I'd say that means I have a superabundance of good luck. Or, maybe I've been suffering from undiagnosed old-lady-toxoplasmosis euphoria, today.

I'm also told that, when pressed for personal advice, I'm occasionally -- nay, often -- right. I also make good popcorn, and, according to both children and a handful of experienced adults, I give really great hugs.

I wonder if hugs are enough to make me a citizen in good standing in a community such as the proposed Ejectia!? If not, is it the sort of place I'd want to live?

Anti-property goofs in control of classrooms (again)

Zo vot else is noo?

Teachers at a Seattle pre-school are indoctrinating kids against property.

I realize this has been bouncing all over the nets this week, but I haven't had much of an opportunity to think much on this, until now. My first response was much like that of a commenter on one of the many blogs I'd surfed through: the irony! a hugely expensive private school is teaching babies to fight against capitalism.


I'm an artist. Not the most successful one, of course, but I still grew up as a bit of an outsider. When I was young, I'd have given my eyeteeth to have been included in the popular circles. And, yet, I could never bring myself to wear the uniform of the day, the disco dress. I couldn't spray my hair into a Dorothy-Hamill-mushroom-helmet or the flippy Farrah-Fawcett-pointy-curled-neck-armor, and blue eye shadow was, in my mind, a worse spread over the eyelids than were I to follow my dog for a sample of his leavings to adorn my face. I chose to dress and act differently from the others. I suffered socially and emotionally for it, but, ultimately, I was a free woman for my decision.

Over the years, I've made plenty of other choices, as well. I traded things for other things, to make my life what it is. Most of the choices have not resulted in my being happy, or rich, or famous, or even healthy. But again, they were my own decisions. I own them, as I own myself.

Now, I have three siblings. Each one of them started out with pretty much the same stuff I did. Our parents raised us well. We had equal opportunities for education, we had comparable health issues (physical and mental). We are all four equally talented on a number of fronts, and test out with comparable IQs. And, yet, my siblings are very successful financially, maritally, and, yes, in health, while I am pretty much a wreck.

Hey, their houses are nicer than mine! They all own their own cars! They have stuff I don't have. They even dress better than I do (well, my sisters do, anyway).

Should I have the right to take, from each and all, a part of what they've earned, just to balance the outcome of our lives? I don't think so. That's theft.

When our parents are gone, do I get to claim everything because I'm poor and nobody else in the family is? I don't think so. That's greed.

I made my choices. I live with my results. They made their choices, and get to live with the results therein. That's the true equalizer.


But there's more to it than simply fighting capitalism, regardless of what these teachers have been taught in their Church of Socialism. This program they're aiming at would squelch all individuality, all individualism, and therefore all humanity.

Destroying the tendency toward selfishness isn't always a good thing, no matter what the nice people say. If it were not for selfishness, art would not have developed. It is the mind of the individual, stressing its own selfish need to express itself, which has given us the greatest inspirational works in the history of the world. We lose ourselves in the moment, as we view Michelangelo's Pietà. But Michelangelo would not have created that magnificent work, had he, as a lad, done the selfless thing and worked as a simple quarryman beside his father. He selfishly sought to expand his own skills, expand his own abilities to shape stone into more than blocks.

Without selfishness, without ego, there would have been no ancient pyramids, no Sphinx, no Roman Colosseum. Without selfishness, there would have been no Declaration of Independence, no Bill of Rights, no Constitution., no settling the New World (not even in the earliest Asian migrations -- the predecessors of the people we called the Indians). We'd have no need for the new lands, because everybody would be happily living -- or dying -- in treetops back at the point of origin. One little forest fire and we'd be a paleontological footnote.

So selfishness is a survival tool, as well.

We develop communities, tribes, so that we can offset the downside to selfishness -- loneliness and a loss of opportunities to propagate. But the communities can not supplant the individual. Just as one can not breed by committee, one can not truly create anything new, vibrant, and inspirational by that committee. Thus, the moderately selfish individual is essential. Killing him dooms us all.

And "teaching" him into a coma is a crime against humanity.

Whose brain is better -- his or hers?

John at EclectEcon quotes and links an interview with Dr. Paul Irwing regarding the difference in cognitive abilities of men and women:

All the research I've done points to a gender difference in general cognitive ability. There is a mean difference of about five IQ points. The further you go up the distribution the more and more skewed it becomes. There are twice as many men with an IQ of 120-plus as there are women, there are 30 times the number of men with an IQ of 170-plus as there are women.

I'd love to see Irwing's test data... especially, though, I'd love to see similar cognitive tests performed on pre-school kids, as compared with college students. Doing a comparative analysis of young to older subjects might -- or might not -- indicate where education/culture influences the application of intellect.

We've already seen, in a number of fairly reputable studies, that girls have an inborn adeptness with language (verbal and nonverbal) for which boys have drawn the short straw. Boys, on the other hand, have a more overt, exploratory (read: aggressive... wink wink you wouldn't hit a girl like me, wouldja?) nature and the mathematical bent. These are tendencies which likely have always had some root in necessity, in survival of the species in the wild. However, they are also tendencies which can, with proper upbringing, be overcome.

That is to say, a boy may learn to use language as an art form to become the next Walt Whitman, and a girl may learn to be an astrophysicist. They are not sex-exclusive brain abilities, but merely trends and tendencies in higher brain function.

So, the questions I have to ask are as follows:

1. Do toddlers show comparable sex-based differences in cognitive testing as their adult counterparts?
2. If yes, should this be cause for alarm (shouldn't we accept that genetics might have had a useful function, at least originally, and say "vive la difference!")?
   
3. If no, precisely how is it that our culture/education fails us all, and how can we safely and effectively fix the fault?

I'm not terribly worried about this, for myself. Aside from being nuts, I'm smart, dammit, and comfortably so. I score in the upper-130s on IQ tests. And I'm the slow one in my family -- both my younger sisters score higher than I, as does my older brother. The difference, however, is only about 5 points -- and one of my sisters is at the top. We are, apparently, an unusual family.

There seems to be a fear that the XY/XX difference is writ in stone as the only definition of what we can become. If there are genuine innate partitions, I believe we ought to take advantage of them. They're built-in, so welcome that reality, and use them as support walls for the structure of our souls and minds.

If the divisions are not genetic, but cultivated over time via repetition of observations and behaviors, so be it. Culture is a large part of what we are, and what we will become. Changes in culture -- like changes in biology -- need time to develop safely.

Meanwhile, don't panic. Whatever the outcome, we are all still human beings, aren't we?