Conservative Resentment

This is in response to a post on Facebook about a letter written to the Waco Tribune Herald of November 18, 2011.  The article was titled, "Put Me in Charge."  Rather than get into a detailed political discussion on Facebook, I decided to address it here instead.

The article was apparently written by a 21-year-old woman who was offended by the vast numbers of people on the welfare rolls.  According to the preface, she was concerned about the future economy if the government continued to overspend on social programs (though I didn't see anything of that nature in her comments).  She proposed to fix welfare by putting her in charge.

She had in mind numerous sweeping reforms:  giving out free cheese, beans, rice, and powdered milk, but not giving out food stamps.  Drug-testing welfare recipients.  Putting recipients to work in a day program.  But worst of all to me, mandatory birth control via implants and tubal ligation.

While I understand the overall sentiment, this article is very dangerous for two reasons:  One, it is a clear case of emotional reasoning.  Two, it doesn't take into account the reality of the world today.  While some of the ideas sounded pretty good, like inspecting public housing facilities and expecting residents to take care of them, much like military housing, the overall sentiment is overly harsh and just impractical in today's world.  For any real change to be made, some fundamental things about our society would have to change first.

Periodically, I see people posting on Facebook about drug-testing food stamp recipients.  This seems to be a fairly popular idea.  In fact, Florida recently implemented such a policy.  But the state of Michigan already researched drug-testing of welfare recipients in Detroit.  The results contradicted many people's prejudices.  Only 3% of the food stamp recipients tested positive, and that was for marijuana.  None of the food stamp recipients tested positive for cocaine or heroin or any other drugs.  Hmm, could it be they didn't have the money to buy drugs?  Could it be that some drug addicts, especially those on cocaine or methamphetamine or opiates, don't care about eating, and therefore don't bother to apply for food stamps?  To me, this type of knee-jerk conservatism ironically smacks of liberal prodigality.  Drug testing costs lots of money and would only catch a few minor offenders and possibly harm children or families.

I think the bigger picture here is the attitude of the article.  At times, her comments seemed sadistic or fascistic.  Again, I'm not entirely in disagreement.  I know where she's coming from.  In my experience, those who protest most loudly about welfare are hard-working folks who put in 60-70 hour work-weeks in hard-labor jobs.  They figure, If I have to work 60-70 hours a week, then why should they get something for nothing?

But no one stops to ask, Why should I have to work 60-70 hours a week just to survive?  Adjusted for inflation, factory workers in the 1960s typically made the equivalent of a six-figure income in today's economy.  On top of that, in those days, overtime was actually paid not at time-and-a-half, but at double-time, dissuading employers from overworking employees unless necessary.  Nowadays, many of these hard-working folks are "exempt" from overtime as their base salary is more than one-and-a-half times minimum wage.  Their employers take advantage of this loophole and work them outrageously long hours.  In this way, employers save about $20,000 in health insurance by hiring one person to work 80 hours rather than two.  They also save on things like company trucks, workers comp, and so forth.  The point is that, in today's economy, the choice for most people is between working like an indentured servant or collecting welfare.  The best disincentive to welfare would be real jobs paying living wages and working reasonable hours.

A real change in the economy would probably require some measures against globalization.  In the 1960s, the U.S. still had a global economy because it wasn't viable to import and export everything on the scale we do today.  If you owned a television, it was manufactured in the United States.  Today, few (perhaps no) televisions are made in the U.S.  That means there are no comparable jobs for the people who used to make televisions, or for the children of the people who used to make televisions.  Granted, now many families can afford a television in every room.  But are we really any better off?

The one thing the complainers about welfare seem to miss is that perhaps these programs are the result of very deliberate and real decisions by those who are living in a different stratosphere of wealth.  Picture the men and women at the Bilderberg Group or at Bohemian Grove getting together and discussing the global economy.  They can pay a worker in China $2 an hour AND pay an American to collect SSI for around $3.50 per hour for a total of $5.50 per hour.  If they hire an American factory worker, they will pay anywhere from $10 to $20 per hour.  They save a ton of money going with the Chinese worker.  And to keep Americans from rioting in the streets and ruining the whole system, just sell 'em a cheap TV and give 'em some food stamps and SSI.  I'm not saying this is right.  I'm just saying that my imaginary scenario is more true than most people realize.  Getting angry at welfare recipients is not the answer.

This leads to the most offensive comments in the article about forced sterilizations and birth control.  From biology we know that there are two basic strategies for having offspring.  One is to have lots of babies and hope for some of them to survive.  At the extreme, insects and fish lay lots of eggs in the expectation that a few will survive.  At the lower end of this strategy, foxes have maybe a dozen offspring.  With this large litter strategy, most of the energy is invested in having the offspring.  Once the babies are born, very little time or energy is spent on raising them.  On the other extreme, humans typically have one child at a time.  Bears have two.  In these cases, the parents spend a lot of time educating and raising their young in the hopes that this education will give them the edge to survive and, in turn, breed the next generation.

In humans, both of these survival strategies can be seen, even though the overall biology is for one child to be born at a time.  Thus, in difficult economic times, the trend is not for parents to have less children, but actually for disadvantaged mothers to have a brood of children.  Demographically, we know this to be the case.  In our culture today, with some exceptions in religious families, the poorer the mother, the more children she is likely to have.  This is not necessarily single-mothers taking advantage of a glitch in the welfare system, it is simple biology.  The more children they have, the more likely at least some will survive.  She doesn't want birth control.  She wants to have babies.  It's programmed into her biology.

So the answers to the problem of welfare are far more complex than the simplistic comments from the newspaper in Waco, Texas would lead one to believe.  Living wages, globalism, healthcare, tort-reform, and family stability are just a few of the factors that contribute to the current situation.  I'm all for real conservative solutions to liberal prodigality.  But we have traveled very far down the rabbit hole, indeed.  It will take far more than fascist posturing to fix this problem.  But I don't see anyone really doing anything meaningful to fix it.

By the way, the writer in Waco didn't even address the most egregious of the welfare programs--Public Childcare Subsidies.  It seems that every solution to welfare only makes the problem worse, as if the solutions were coming from "The ABCs of Communism."

Why We Started this Blog

Several years ago, maybe a year before we started this blog, my wife and I were working on a book.  The working title was Judicious Christian Parenting, and we felt this blog would be a good way of promoting the book.  As we were writing, especially when we were ourselves struggling as parents, we sometimes asked:  "What makes us such authorities on raising children?"  In all honestly, the answer was, "Nothing, we are not particularly good parents."  Nonetheless, at the time, our children seemed to be on the right track and we felt we had a voice and something to say.  Turns out that, most of the time, we were the ones who needed to hear what we had to say.  Writing the blog and especially the book forced us to clarify our values.  As a result, some ideas that were more or less vague at the time have become crystal clear now.  If our mission statement was to clarify our Christian values, we certainly succeeded in that endeavor.  But I don't know if we strengthened our family or anyone else's.  As it says in the Scripture, our Christian values have sometimes turned "father against son, brother against brother (Matthew 10:35)."  Being a Christian is difficult.  So, in the midst of all this struggle, it's not hard to see why this blog and the Judicious Christian Parenting book fizzled out.  We wrote three or four tormenting chapters, hashing out the details.  But our message changed as we were writing, our audience narrowed, and we felt as though we were preaching to a very small choir.

If there was a good or genuine motive for writing the book, it was to argue against a trend we saw coming out of the Christian community.  Let's call it Reactionary Parenting, and the most extreme and dangerous advocates of Reactionary Parenting were the Ezzo's.  Essentially, Ezzo Parenting and its secular counterpart, Babywise, represented a rebirth of authoritarian parenting methods.  Based upon an Evangelical interpretation of Original Sin, the parents' job is to counteract the negative effects of their children's inherently sinful characters.  To this ends, the Ezzos instituted strict bedtimes and feeding schedules, and they discouraged parents from forming excessively emotional bonds with their children.  At best, the Ezzo method resulted in some well-disciplined and obedient children.  At worst, the Ezzo method was associated with numerous pediatric cases of failure to thrive, many adolescent examples of alienation, and perhaps many irreparable rifts in family relations.  Though Reactionary Parenting may have appealed to a number of Evangelical Christians, it clearly contradicted contemporary psychology and, more importantly, common sense.  Not to mention that it's based on a heretical interpretation of Original Sin.

Of course, there were reasons for the remarkable success of the Ezzo Parenting books, mostly as a reaction against the increasing prevalence of Permissive Parenting.  It seems that most modern parents want to be best friends with their children, and the results should be obvious.  Children, adolescents, and young adults are increasingly spoiled, insolent, and lazy.  They claim to be egalitarian judges of what they view to be right or wrong, and they dare adults to think otherwise.  They demand control over their own influences, lifestyles, religion, and morality, but without the requisite responsibility or self-support to make these decisions.  In their adult lives, they fail to meet developmental milestones at appropriate ages, but they argue that these milestones are simply outdated.  In the past, this form of adolescent relativism was strictly confined to those raised in non-religious families.  Today, even children who attend church-group several times a week will most likely develop these pagan values.  With each generation, children from Christians and pagans evolve from being obviously distinct to becoming indistinguishable.

For a solution to these parenting traps, we turned to an unlikely source, Diana Baumrind, an experimental psychologist with atheistic and socialistic leanings, who also happened to be of Jewish decent.   Baumrind had originally described three basic parenting styles:  Authoritarian (eg. Reactionary or Ezzo Parenting), Permissive (eg. modern Permissive or Democratic Parenting), and Authoritative Parenting (a parenting style that takes the best of either style).  According to Baumrind, Authoritative Parents are warm and open to the child's will, while also being directive and placing high expectations on their children.  Baumrind's three types of parenting proved an apt solution to much that was wrong with Ezzo Parenting as well as modern, Permissive Parenting.

We spent the first three or four chapters of Judicious Christian Parenting on Baumrind's three (actually four) different parenting styles.  It turns out that her categories are a good way of classifying different Christians.  Some Christians are Reactionary or Authoritarian, others are Progressive or Permissive, some are Laissez-faire or minimalist, and a few are Authoritative or Judicious.  We spent several years critiquing Progressive Christians and their Permissive Parenting styles, as well as critiquing Reactionary Christians and their Authoritarian Parenting styles.  But most of all, we racked our brains trying to figure out what Judicious/Authoritative/Interactive Christian parents would be like and how we could incorporate the best of these traits into our own parenting methods.  Implicit in all of this search was concern over the souls and futures of our children.  We wanted to raise Christian children, and we were well-aware that nowadays few  grown children follow their parents' religious practices.  We theorized that those children who do follow their parents' examples are not from Authoritarian or Permissive backgrounds, but from Authoritative families.

But we were also writing in a period of transition (or perhaps our writing and research led to that transition).  We went from being modern Catholics with ecumenical sensibilities (i.e. Progressive Christians with therefore somewhat Permissive Parenting Styles, virtually indistinguishable from most mainline Protestants) to becoming Traditional Catholics with a conviction that the Catholic Church, particularly the pre-Vatican II church, is the one true church necessary for salvation.  With this transition, our intended audience shrank to comparatively microscopic proportions.  We were no longer thinking about a generic Christian audience; we were thinking about Catholics, especially Catholics who, among other things, attend Latin Mass.  We knew that most Evangelical Christians, especially Christians attracted to Ezzo Parenting, would be unlikely to read our blog or book.  And we knew that the forces driving Progressive Christianity and Permissive Parenting had reached epidemic proportions, poisoning the modern Catholic Church, and therefore causing Western Civilization to lose its Catholic foothold on Christianity.  Increasingly, we were coming to see this modern form of Christian belief as "form without the content," or, as Kant might have said, "void."  In other words, in modern society, Christianity is merely a personal belief with only subjective value and no objective reality.  As such, Christianity without at least some reference to the traditional Catholic foothold is subject to caprice and abandonment.

The trouble for us as Catholic parents trying to raise Catholic children was that some of our children were already approaching adulthood.  Our older children's foundation in religious instruction was so weak that we stood little chance of raising them to be Catholic.  No, they had not been tainted by modern parochial education.  Instead, they had attended public school so they were brainwashed according to Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives.  And while they had received modern Catholic Religious Formation, their knowledge-base was remarkably empty.  If they had learned anything of substance about being Catholic, they had learned it from us.  At CCD, they socialized, did a few good works, and became indoctrinated into feel-good Catholicism.  Hardly anything likely to have a lasting impact.

Our oldest son, now a Junior in college, has one distinct advantage.  His college program has an emphasis on the study of the Classics.  There's really nothing like a study of Plato and Aristotle to set a time bomb in a young mind, leading to a certain kind of conversion before the age of forty.  He's unlikely to become a flat-earth Evangelical, and he might not become a Traditional Catholic, but a study of the classics is the perfect antidote to everything that ails modern education.  So we have great hope in his future religious formation, even if he is currently in the hands of the clumsy Brethren.  As Erasmus said, "In the land of the blind, a one-eyed man is king."

The progress has not been so clear with our second son.  We started home-schooling at the same time with all our children.  While the oldest was then a Freshman in college and escaped homeschooling, our second son was entering 10th grade.  He viewed homeschooling as a punishment, and his view of our motives was far from charitable.  So we have struggled with him.  There have been some hopeful moments.  But overall our relationship with him has been troubled.  We gave him plenty of time to get up to speed, but he only engages in short bursts.  Currently, he is showing no outward signs that he will either apply himself academically or religiously.  We have only two consolations.  One, we have been able to instill a small amount of religious instruction that he would not have otherwise received.  And two, homeschooling has forced his real level of motivation and adaptation to become evident.  In public school and later in a state university, he could have skated by until his Freshman or Sophomore year of college. Reality is sometimes painful, but at least we have not wasted years thinking he was okay when he wasn't.  Of course, we hope that he will eventually come around.

With the younger children, our optimism is almost inversely proportional to their ages.  As Lenin said, "Give me four years to educate the children, and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted."  A big portion of our hope is that we have pulled them out of the public schools and daycare system (okay, the younger children were never in daycare) before the modernists could inflict too much damage.  Similarly, the Jesuits (not a group I currently admire, but historically among the best) have a saying, "Give me a child until the age of 7, and I will show you the man."  There's nothing like instilling a small child with traditional Catholic faith--the Baltimore Catechism, the lives of the Saints, Catholic history including the Crusades.  They devour this instruction.  And it takes root in their souls, their characters.  Everything they do in later life will be informed by their current education, whether they become scientists or religious, men or women of reason or of faith.  Not only have we removed them from the secular indoctrination of modern education, but we have been able to provide substantive religious instruction.

My clinical supervisor, a child psychologist, recently told me something like, "Once a child becomes a teenager, there's very little you can do."  He explained, "An adolescent can come up with more ways to mess things up than a parent can invent to control the situation."  This is not to say that there is nothing a parent of a teen can do, but it does imply that parents of teens should be realistic about their expectations.  Essentially, parents of teens should strive to portray themselves as allies, without taking responsibility for the adolescent.  To children, parents are simultaneously antagonists and protectors, punishers and guardians.  But to adolescents, reality is the real antagonist, and parents need to withdrawal from their role as protectors.  This can mean allowing teens to make some stupid choices.  It can also mean being there emotionally but not financially when the choices inevitably fail.  This is a difficult dance, one that we as parents of teens are just now learning.  Of course, this dance would be much easier if we had already thoroughly steeped the children in our belief system prior to their brains leaving their bodies in adolescence.

Another theme with which we have struggled is popular media.  Earlier in the blog, in a post called i-Think, Therefore i-Am, we talked about modern technologies and inferred some thoughts on popular music and movies as well.  This is a difficult area.  For us, excessive restrictions in this area can quickly cause strife with neighborhood children, extended family, and our own children.  Perhaps our biggest struggle in this area is with our own laziness.  Honestly, it's easier to let the children watch television or play video games.  And we don't wish to start an argument with, for example, a visiting uncle or another child's parent.  To us, it is amazing how few adults have any real boundaries for what movies or video games children can watch.  This lack of discretion is partly a matter of social class, but it's also about Christian values, or lack thereof.

When I sat down to write this blog, something was weighing on me.  Oddly enough, it's taken until now for me to get around to it.  Something has happened in our culture.  I see it everywhere, but it's really hard for me to explain to unsympathetic ears.  Perhaps the most obvious example is daycare.  Sometime in the 1970s, mothers started entering the workforce en mass.  This created a demand for childcare.  Oddly enough, churches, the same institutions that might have been conveyors of traditional Christian values, became in large part the providers of daycare.  At first, they had "Mom's Day Out" programs, and later these expanded into 5 or 6 day a week childcare facilities.  This was logical, in a way, since churches had Sunday school facilities that were in disuse throughout the week, and they could make economic use of these spaces.  At first these programs provided childcare for children ages three and up, but quickly they started accepting children as young as six weeks.  Almost overnight, the majority of American mothers (80%) were dropping their children off at daycare as they traipsed off to work.  Here's what really bothered me:  I could accept daycare (among many other things) if it weren't for one particular phenomenon--it's as though this is how it's always been.  Sure, modern mothers may joke about how things were in the 1950s, when women "had to stay home" and "live boring and empty lives."  But this characterization is inaccurate by thirty years.  There were virtually no daycare centers until the 1980s.  It reminds me of a secular movie I once saw, The Lathe of Heaven, in which the main character dreams the world has changed, only to awakened to a world that has change as in his dream, only everyone else believes the world has always been so.  I have conversations about some of these issues with people my age or older than me, and I am stunned.  Don't they remember?  Do they really believe that, prior to birth control, people had frequent casual pick-ups?  Do they really believe that single mothers were ever so common prior to welfare and child-support laws?  Do they really think that children have always been so detached from their parents?  I can accept that some people believe that the vast social experiment that has occurred since the 1960s has been beneficial, but I cannot accept that it's always been this way.  What kind of Orwellian dystopia am I living in?

This leads to my fundamental and disturbing insight.  My liberal family, friends, and associates and I can disagree about values, but we should be able to agree on the facts.  I may not value daycare or birth control the way that other parents do, but we should agree about the facts surrounding the issues.  But this is not my experience.  All of the agenda-items in the vast social experiment require much propaganda or marketing before they can be implemented.  What's really remarkable is how fast the change is taking place.  Essentially, for society to forget living history and to believe that life has always been as it is today is a marker of hypnotic suggestion.  Call it education, propaganda, indoctrination, marketing, or hypnotic suggestion, there are forces that are purveying these forces upon our children and our society.  Even our Christian religious institutions are becoming purveyors of these social experiment agendas.

There are a few antidotes.  As I stated earlier, a study of the Classics can be such an antidote.  I would include religion in this form of study, if religion is studied critically and in historical context.  Various forms of critical thinking can be helpful but probably not sufficient, especially Geometry and Algebra.  Removal from the sources of indoctrination, for example, withdrawal from public schools can be important.  Limiting exposure to modern movies and television is helpful, though I might say that with older children critical analysis can be quite instructional.  Entrenched education in traditional Christianity is indispensable.

The forces of change in our culture are strong and hard to resist.  Some of these changes are mostly good, for example, the civil rights movement.  Others are mostly bad, for example, the secularization of our culture.  In principle, not one of these changes is entirely good or entirely bad.  But for small children, it's just better to believe the men in the white hats are good guys and the men in the black hats are bad guys.  They can learn to differentiate when they get older.  The trouble is that nowadays the public schools, the media, and the entertainment industry teach children that there's really no such thing as good guys and bad guys, that bad guys are just misunderstood and good guys are just the one's on our side.  In such a relativistic world, young people don't stand much chance of distinguishing the good from the bad when they become young adults.  God help us all.