MAILBAG DELUXE: Rich and poor; pacifism; sex; all of love is a quotation. As always, I am in plain text and my readers are in bold. I’ll post surrogate-motherhood mail later, since I want to write a separate post replying to some very good questions I got about that.

From Barbara H. Ryland, in re this post: As the saying goes, when the rich get a cold, the poor get pneumonia. That is, the rich have the means to buy the medicines that keep them, if not healthy, then from knocking on death’s door, at least not at the same rate. You might have also said that, while we have unequal means we have democratic expectations — for true love, for freedom, Nike shoes, etc. For an interesting read of something truly culturally prescient, read The Children by Edith Wharton, about a wealthy, much divorced family. For being written around 1920, mom and dad voice sentiments that sound shockingly modern, except that now the moms and dads voicing those sentiments go all the way down the social strata. It made me realize how “modernism” did not spring fully formed during the 1950s.

From Stephen Mewborn on the same subject: Almost everyone can do good by their soul by making it a point to say “There but for the Grace go I…” when they see people whose life is in disarray, even it it’s in disarray by their own hand.

However I think there’s a difference between emphasizing personal responsibility in trying to solve social problems and blaming the vicitm. Part of the point of emphasizing personal responsibility (and the cornerstone of “compassionate conservatism,” rightly understood) is the recognition that people closest to problems have the best chance of solving them.

Take an inner city woman who keeps having babies out of wedlock. It may be wrong for me to think of myself as her moral better because my life is more stable and prosperous than hers, since after all I had a pretty stable childhood in a loving home that emphasized working hard and getting an education, and she presumably didn’t. But I can still in good conscience advocate for public policies that put the onus on her for lifting herself up out of poverty and misery, because I might well believe that the chance of her succeeding in so doing is much greater than the chance of a third party helping her. I’m not blaming her for the wreck of her life, just saying that she’s in a better position to un-wreck it than anyone else.

From Peter Nixon, re sex and men: You posed a great question at the end of last week. Of course, after ten years of marriage, my answer is somewhat obvious. But I’ll try to project myself back to my high-school and college years, which are probably more applicable.

I think men are a lot more conflicted about the sexual libertinism of our culture than is generally recognized. You wouldn’t get this impression reading Maxim or Details of course, but I think it’s true. Particularly in the high-school and college years, men are under enormous pressure to conform to a particular image of masculinity. While women may feel the most pressure to have sex from their boyfriends, I think men feel it from other men and from the culture around them.

I remember a friend of mine from high-school who dated the same girl for almost the entire four years. Later I learned that they had been having sex on a reasonably regular basis for the last two years of high school. About a month after they graduated, he told her he was gay. That’s an extreme example, of course, but it demonstrates the length that some men will go to conform to a cultural stereotype of masculinity.

In my own sophmore year, I dated a women who wanted to move much faster than I did sexually. This eventually broke up the relationship. I just wasn’t ready. But for years, I wondered whether I did what I did because I thought it was the right thing to do, or merely because I was a coward. No man likes to feel that way about himself, and my failure to resolve that internal debate probably contributed to some bad decisions I made later.

My point is that we shouldn’t fall for the old line that “men give love to get sex” and “women give sex to get love.” It’s too simplistic. It’s certainly the image that most men want to project, but our true feelings are often a lot more complicated. Our culture doesn’t give men a lot of space to share those feelings. A lot of women say they want men to do that, but a lot of them are pretty uncomfortable when it actually happens. A lot of women don’t want their men to be vulnerable. They want their men to be the “rock” that they lean on and, to be fair, that’s what a lot of men–myself included–want to be. But it’s a time bomb that blows up a lot of marriages.

Well, it’s getting late and I need to hit the hay, so I can’t keep developing my point for several more paragraphs like I’d like to. But I hope you get the general point I’m trying to make. Men are a few more steps removed from our primate ancestors than a lot of people seem to believe.

From the Talking Dog, also re sex: I think one might suggest that, although I don’t disagree with the premise that, anecdotally, many women may feel trapped by pressures of relationships (both their boyfriend-relationship and their familial relationship), I daresay a great many more women, probably for the first time ever in historical terms, can now, finally, just have sex because (by divine design) IT’S DARNED FUN AND ENJOYABLE.

Further, thanks in large part to “safe sex” and liberal mores (with accent on e), WOMEN can now define sex in contexts of their own chosing for the first time ever. This is one of the reasons we profess superiority over the Taliban: women in the Arab world exist solely in context; if a woman were to express sexual desires, longings or likings of her own, she would almost certainly be stoned to death. We’ve moved on from the days when Edmund Burke once said “God has given women so much power that our laws have very wisely given them very little”.

Obviously, anything can be made dysfunctional, and we are coming off an eternity of sex-as-property-rights, which we are still shaking off (and are far from in large parts of the world). And by definition sex (other than in the Joycelyn Elders-prescribed methods) is always in the context of a “relationship” (even if the relationship lasts no longer than the sex). But in the realm of the sexual revolution and its benefit to women, I give you the classic Objectivist Advice: please check your premises.

Similarly from Avram Grumer: My first thought on reading your paragraph about the sexual revolution is that you and your friends must be really screwed up. I know a few people who are having sex for the reasons you describe, but more who aren’t.

And the people who are having sex for bad reasons? A hundred years ago they’d have been getting married for those same bad reasons, and stuck with the consequences for the rest of their lives. That doesn’t strike me as an improvement.

OK. Let me try to clear up a few things here: 1) No kidding, sex rocks. If I came off as suggesting that sex is not fun, that’s certainly not what I intended; my post was coming from a basic stance that sex can be very cool (…duh) but that there are all kinds of ways that humans find to mess it up, leach the pleasure out of it, or combine the pleasure with a huge helping of self-contempt, anger, despair, or pain. And that sucks, because that’s not how sex should be.

2) I think it’s possible to point out the lousy effects of the sexual revolution without saying we should “go back” (which is impossible anyway) to some idealized pre-sex. rev. period. The Victorian Era was hellacious for women in a lot of respects. (Let’s start with marital rape and continue on through deaths in childbed, rampant prostitution, and tight restrictions on owning property.) I have no desire to return to the 1950s, or whatever. But I do think that the ideology of the sexual revolution has led to really harmful consequences, and I don’t believe that in order to sustain women’s property rights, right not to be raped, non-Taliban status, etc., we have to defend the beliefs about sex and love that, in my view, deeply harm women, men, and children. I made the analogy to the Reformation here: You can get totally righteous about how awful many pre-Reformation bishops and even popes were, without thinking the Reformation was the right solution to Catholics’ problems.

3) My claims about why many women have sex weren’t based on my random friends. My friends may be screwed up, but actually, by this point in their lives most of ’em have their heads on straight when it comes to sex. My claims were based on a slew of other sources–the women I counsel at the pregnancy center, women who post on a big feminist discussion board I frequent, surveys of high school students that have found (for example) that girls list “how to say no without hurting his feelings” as the piece of sex-ed info they need most and that teens say “the best age to start having sex” is older than when they themselves started, past histories of friends, friends of friends, my experiences in high school, etc. etc. etc.–in other words, all the different places where I would be able to hear women talking about their personal lives. I make no claim that all women having sex outside marriage do it for the reasons I listed–that would be idiotic. But I think it’s much more prevalent than Grumer implies.

4) Finally, I’m not sure why Grumer thinks people would have sex for exactly the same reasons if they had to get married first. That’s just weird, in my opinion. There’s not some fixed amount of sex in the world. People make different decisions under different circumstances; thus when the consequences for casual sex are high, it’s less likely. When there’s a lot of pressure to have sex outside marriage (as in many high schools today), people will be more likely to have sex outside marriage. When you have to either get married or go through a lot of furtive rigmarole before you can have sex, people will be (and are) choosier about who they shtup. Now, just telling people “get married first!” is in no way enough. People need a culture that helps them be chaste, make good marriage decisions, and develop habits of loyalty, love, courage, and self-knowledge. Pushing marriage is not my idea of a cure-all; I’m trying to change a lot of things in how we view love and sex. But even if all that changed was much-less-sex-before-marriage, that in itself would change people’s behavior.

5) I truly think that if you put in a lot of time, and listen to women about their experiences (especially their experiences before they hit, say, 25), you’ll agree that many, many women are having sex for reasons that are seriously screwed up. So then the question becomes: What can be done about that? How can we help women gain a sense of self, a sense of identity, responsibility, and worth? My point is that the sex. rev. promised to give women that sense of self, and that really hasn’t materialized, so let’s try something else.

From Jendi Reiter, re pacifism: I became a Christian last year, and was baptized in the Episcopal Church because its understanding of church authority and structure makes more sense to me than the Catholic one. But I do wish that my church was a stronger witness on issues of marriage, abstinence, etc. Sometimes I wish Christians could just agree to disagree on homosexuality and stop talking about it so much, as I think it can be decoupled from other questions of sexual morality. This is just to say that although I may never become Catholic, I am to some extent a fellow-traveler and feel very comforted by the vibrant Catholic blogging community.

Your dialogue with Telford Work on Christian pacifism is very thought-provoking. My biggest problem with his claim that Christians cannot be soldiers is that it requires the presence of a large number of non-Christians in any society in order to safeguard the Christian members’ moral purity. Call it the “Sabbath goy” approach — getting a non-Jew to turn on your lights, carry your packages or open your door because you are Orthodox and not allowed to do work on that day. To me, this attitude appears both elitist and contrary to the Great Commission. Don’t we want everyone to come to Christ? If Christians must leave the use of force to others, a Christian society would be completely helpless, confirming our opponents’ criticism that Christianity is a religion for losers and

doormats. (I say this as a former Ayn Rand/Nietzsche disciple who believed such criticisms.)

Original sin is a tricky thing to argue from. We have to make compromises in a fallen world, but that notion can tempt us to make too many compromises. On the other hand, refusal to take on the burden of possibly sinful violence when others’ safety is at stake is also an egoistic temptation. There’s no rule that will make you righteous. (Realizing this was another reason I became a Christian!)

If you’re not already sick of the pacifism topic, the First Things website has a good article by Darrell Coles, from a few months ago. It’s

about war as a heroic calling rather than just a necessary evil.

From Dakin, also on pacifism: The subject of war, like that of, say, homosexuality, is something that Jesus never really addressed directly in his ministry. Therefore, any conclusions on the subject based on scripture will be highly speculative and ultimately based not on the teachings of Jesus, but on the opinions of his subsequent “followers”. I think therefore that in discussing this question, it would be more profitable to come at it from a different direction, taking into account the larger context of the meaning of human existence as a whole.

It is hard for me to find in the teachings of Jesus any motive for going to war. Jesus taught that the purpose of human life was to prepare oneself to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. This was accomplished by striving to be perfect, as the Father is perfect. The rich young man was advised to sell all he owned and give the proceeds to the poor so that he could follow Jesus (i.e. imitate Him by undertaking the task of becoming worthy of the Kingdom). We are not to lay up stores in the earth and thereby enter into an endless and futile struggle against the robber and the moth: we are to be like the lilies of the field. We are not to be distracted from our purpose, which is union with the Eternal, by becoming involved in what we today call “the rat race.”

Wars of defense are normally fought to protect property, or political freedom. If we go to war to protect a weak neighbor from a strong one, we are only protecting the property of the weak neighbor. Is this true charity? By allowing our weak neighbor to hold onto that property which is a stumbling block on his road to sainthood, are we fighting for the Lord, or for the Prince of this World?

Did Jesus value political freedom? It is possible that Jesus was betrayed precisely because of His refusal to provide leadership for any campaign to free the Jews from the yoke of Rome. His Kingdom was, explicitly, not of this world. Therefore, go to war for what purpose? How could waging war possibly makes us more worthy of Sainthood?

Here it might be profitable to contemplate the career of St. Francis, himself a failed warrior, and possibly the most perfect imitator of Christ known to history.

In short, I care little what your church, or my church teaches. We have a perfect teacher and He made His teachings perfectly clear, and simple enough to be understood by little children. Both your church and mine have a lot of property to hold onto, don’t they?

What do you think?

From Lauren Coats, still on pacifism: In discussions of this topic, by people undoubted my betters, it seems to me that two issues tend to be conflated – namely pacifism and the concept of a just war.

The question “May a Christian be a soldier?” is a superset of the question “May a Christian be a soldier in this war?”. However, many seem unable to clearly separate them.

From Tom Harmon, ditto: You’re dead on about war and charity. Aquinas addresses just war in the section of his reflections on Charity. You’re also dead on about it being a benefit to the unjust soldier to be stopped, as he is being stopped from committing evil, sin, and bein g cut off from sanctifying grace. By doing physical violence to the unjust soldier, we are preventing him from doing

spiritual violence to his immortal soul. One finds this throughout Catholic tradition.

You’re off-base about what kind of eschatalogical sign the celibate provides, though. In fact, there is most definitely marriage in

heaven: the marriage of the person to God. One of the most frequent images of heaven in Scripture is the Eternal Wedding feast. All people are called to live out their sexuality on earth and in heaven. We are material beings and our sexuality is an essential part of our nature. The proper context for human sexuality is within marriage. The person on earth marries, in the case of the non-celibate, another person; in the case of a celibate, that person skips earthly marriage (which is a sign and signifier, a sacrament, of the Eternal Wedding Feast) and goes straight for the Eternal. Both vocations, calibate and “married” are, in fact, living out marriage, just in

different senses. Both are signifiers of the eternal Wedding Feast. Both are, therefore, eschatalogical. Both will be completed in the beatific vision. The celibate life is of a higher order because of the very fact that it does skip the earthly and heads straight for the eternal. Rather than there being no marriage in heaven, instead heaven consists of the ultimate marriage: God as bridegroom and the Church (us) as bride.

Also, does Prof. Work show any indication of having dealt with St. Augustine’s very explicit response to the question of whether a

Christian can fight, especially of Augustine’s treatment of the “turn the other cheek” argument?

Also, it is my impression that the Christian soldier does not need to worry about questions of whether the war he fights in is just. His duty is to follow the orders of legitimate authority. If the war is unjust, the authority that orders it is culpable, not the Christian soldier who is following orders. The Christian soldier is not a legitimate authority and therefore is not competent to act on his own judgments about whether the war is just or not.

That last bit seems extraordinarily sketch to me–I thought the relevant catechism passages referred to those who have a responsibility for the common good, which would definitely mean the citizens of a democracy, but would in my view mean all adults.

And from The Rat, re this post: La Rochefoucauld–I haven’t got the exact words but paraphrases to, How many would ever have fallen in love if they had never heard of love?

And this site looks really cool, and has good posts on pacifism and the sexual revolution stuff–I hope that I answered her sex-rev comments above.