Note to consies: moralism doesn’t work.

Very telling chart from the New York Times, showing divorce rates, teenage birthrates, and subscriptions to porn sites, sorted into red and blue states:

Divorce, teen births, porn by red/blue states

Notice a pattern?  Red states cluster at the top, blue at the bottom.  To put it simply, conservative moralism doesn’t produce morality… quite the opposite.

Though I have my doubts about the last column… who subscribes to porn sites?  Listen, you red staters, I’ll tell you a secret… you don’t have to pay for it. 

 

A great player– but immeasurably

Here’s a fascinating article by Michael Lewis in the New York Times Magazine, surely one of the only times I’ve ever linked to something about sports.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/magazine/15Battier-t.html?_r=2&ref=magazine&pagewanted=all

It focusses on Shane Battier of the Houston Rockets, a player his own front office admits is “a marginal NBA athlete”… who nonetheless has an uncanny ability to make his team win.  Both teams he’s played for started out losing and ended up in multiple playoff seasons.  Battier doesn’t score well by any conventional metric… but he’s an outlier on several unconventional metrics.  Something about his play makes his team play better and his opponents worse. 

It’s an offshoot of the statistical methods that began in baseball and are now being applied to other sports, but it’s also a spotlight on what makes teams gel, why it’s important to ask exactly what we’re measuring, and why we need more than superstars.

 

Fans of disaster

Ben McGrath has an interesting article in last week’s New Yorker on “The Dystopians“– people who look forward, with barely concealed glee, to complete social collapse.

They have a point– the late-20C American lifestyle is not economically sustainable– but it gets lost in priggishness.  McGrath spends some time with James Kunstler, who gets points for predicting the housing crisis, and loses them for having predicted that Y2K would be a big disaster.  Among Kunstler’s signs of the apocalypse: obesity, tattoos, ugly buildings, large cities, kids and their bongs, Wall Street investors, flat screen TVs, Wal-Marts.  Basically, anything they don’t like becomes a sign of the upcoming barbarity.  It becomes a pleasant revenge fantasy to picture people “studying to be hedge-fund managers” and ending up “supervisors of rutabaga pickers.”  (I guess even after the apocalypse, American managers will think they can manage things they don’t understand.)

Some of the doomsayers are busy making plans– one guy has relocated to a boat, so he can become a maritime trader after the collapse.  Kunstler has a shotgun.  Planning is admirable, but these preparations strike me as another type of fantasy, a hope that the post-apocalypse will basically resemble the 1840s.  Somehow we’ll bypass all the nukes and wars and plagues and looting and just settle into a more rural, more virtuous lifestyle.

Doomsaying is an ancient business, and given human nature, it’s sometimes accurate.  But it doesn’t perceive– it doesn’t want to perceive– human adaptability.  Kunstler describes the 20th century as a “horror show”, and of course it was.  But it was also a dizzying display of progress.  If a European of 1900 would be dismayed at two upcoming world wars and a clash of totalitarianisms, he would also be astonished at the European Union, unparalleled health and prosperity, the Internet, and the progress of China and India from basket cases to powerhouses.

Also, a hint to aspiring dystopians: if you don’t want to look risible in twenty years and validate the scoffers, don’t foresee an early collapse.  2012 is wishful thinking.

 

Culture wars over: traditionalists lose

Interesting article by Hannah Rosin: http://www.slate.com/id/2199255/

She starts by explaining why the religious right likes Palin– didn’t another cute-pit-bull candidate, Dan Quayle, actually castigate single mothers just 16 years ago?  But it turns out that evangelicals have simply adopted ’60s morality:

The rest of the 30 percent of Americans who call themselves evangelical have started to slip in their morals and now actually poll worse than the rest of America on traditional measures of upstanding behavior—they are just as likely to live together and have kids out of wedlock, and their teenage daughters lose their virginities at an earlier age than the girls of most Americans.

…The most remarkable differences between the large mass of evangelicals and the rest of Americans are in divorce statistics. Since the ’70s, evangelicals and the coastal elites have effectively switched places. Evangelicals are now far more likely to get divorced, whereas couples with four years of college education have cut their divorce rates in half.

Narrowly, it’s a lesson for lefties: don’t assume based on the public issues of the ’80s that you know how evangelicals think and behave in the ’00s.  More broadly, it’s a reminder that as a religious revival broadens, it also weakens.  Only a small minority of human beings can actually follow strict religious rules.  If they manage to take power, the rules will be broken, though perhaps only in private.

 

Unrefined Sesame

Not having children, I get a little out of touch with these things, but I was surprised to read that the early years of Sesame Street sport warnings that they’re “intended for grown-ups”:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/magazine/18wwln-medium-t.html

Apparently, anarchic behavior like cookie-glomphing, pipe-eating, and trash-can-grouching is now considered way too edgy for children.  If that’s the case, I predict a backlash when the children of today’s overprotective parents grow up.