Don’t Forget That We Need Fathers

There’s a question to ask with the statement, “I need ….” Why do you need it? What do you need it in order to do? You might find out, by exploring the question, that you may only want something, but not really require it. Or you may find that you do require something, and you’ll come to understand why that thing is essential.

The other day Andrew Klavan (how many times have I quoted him at the top of a post lately? It’s from 7 minutes onward in this clip) suggested that one trouble with woke, or leftist, culture is that it is forgetting obvious things that have always been known. He says,

Every great civilization dies by forgetting the obvious thing…. And they want to make sure that your children forget it too. The culture war is the war.

I believe that among these forgotten things is the fact that we need fathers.

Why do we need fathers? What do we need them in order to do?

We need them to fill the role in the basic unit of civilization—the family—that fathers must do.

Dennis Prager recently put out one of his 5-minute videos asking and answering the question, “Are Fathers Necessary?” Yes, is the answer. Yes, fathers are essential.

screenshot from Dennis Prager's PragerU video "Are Fathers Necessary?"

After listing several publications showing the answer has been forgotten, Prager quotes Barack Obama, from a 2008 speech, saying fathers are “critical” to families, that “they are teachers and coaches; they are mentors and role models; they are examples of success; and they are the men who constantly push us toward it.”

That speech wasn’t disqualifying to Obama as a candidate, so that must mean, as recently as 2008, this basic truth was in the public consciousness. So it’s only recently that it has been forgotten.

But it’s still true.

Prager goes through some of what we know through social science data[i], showing that both boys and girls need fathers. First, for boys:

A boy has no built-in understanding about how to be a man—meaning a good and responsible man. Male nature is wild—most obviously regarding sex and violence. If a boy does not have a father who models how a man controls himself, he will most likely not know how to control himself—let alone want to. That's why most males in prison for violent crimes grew up without a father.

After days of riots in the UK in 2011, quite like the 2020 riots in America, Cristina Odone wrote a column for The London Telegraph whose title says it all: “London riots: Absent fathers have a lot to answer for.” In the column, she wrote, “The majority of rioters are gang members…. Like the overwhelming majority of youth offenders behind bars, these gang members have one thing in common: no father at home.”

The way social science data works is, it’s about the odds. It doesn’t mean that mothers never successfully raise boys on their own. It means the odds are against them. It means that, if you take a large number of people where boys are raised without fathers and compare them to large numbers of boys with both parents, the fatherless boys have a much higher likelihood of bad outcomes than boys raised with both mother and father.

According to family researcher Glenn T. Stanton, in Secure Daughters, Confident Sons,

Anthropologists tell us that the primary problem in every human community throughout time and place is always the same: the unattached, undisciplined male. His male nature—with its raw physical strength and energies, appetite for food, drink, and sex and even violence—needs to be domesticated and even socialized.

Next, for girls, Prager says this about fathers and daughters:

Mr. Spherical Model and granddaughter.
Masks are still required on the tram ride at
Space Center Houston, but we had fun
taking yet another generation there.

As regards daughters, the father is the man girls learn to relate to. Without a father to relate to and bond with, there are at least two destructive consequences. First, she will not know how to choose a man wisely. She will not know how a man should treat her, and she may well end up with a man who mistreats her. Second, to fulfill her desire to bond with a man—as primal a yearning in most women as bonding with a woman is in most men—she will go from man to man. Girls without fathers in their lives are far more likely to be sexually promiscuous, and to begin sexual activity at an earlier age, which in turn are reasons many young women are depressed. Few women find sleeping with man after man fulfilling. Most find it ultimately depressing.

It isn’t a matter of simply having two parents—of whatever sex—to help with the parenting; it is that fathers and mothers contribute particular things to the family. Some of this is borne out in data surrounding children raised by two same-sex parents. There’s this summary of the data from 2013, in a piece by Michael Bauman: 

Compared to children who were raised in intact homes with both the biological father and mother present to raise them, the children of homosexual parents grow up to:

•                   Be Much more likely to receive welfare.

•                   Have lower educational attainment.

•                   Report more ongoing “negative impact” from their family of origin.

•                   Be more likely to suffer from depression.

•                   Have been arrested more often.

•                   (If they are female) Have had more sexual partners—both male and female.

If they were the children of lesbian mothers, they are:

•                   More likely to be currently cohabiting.

•                   Almost 4 times more likely to be currently on public assistance.

•                   Less likely to be currently employed full-time.

•                   More than 3 times more likely to be unemployed.

•                   Nearly 4 times more likely to identify as something other than entirely heterosexual.

•                   Three times as likely to have had an affair while married or cohabiting.

•                   An astonishing 10 times more likely to have been “touched sexually by a parent or other adult caregiver.”

•                   Nearly 4 times as likely to have been “physically forced” to have sex against their will.

•                   More likely to have “attachment” problems related to the ability to depend on others.

•                   Use marijuana more frequently.

•                   Smoke more frequently.

•                   Have more often pled guilty to a non-minor offense.

Whenever a family is missing a mother or a father, the children are missing something essential to their upbringing. If we recognize that this father-shaped piece is missing, we might be able to compensate—with another father figure, maybe a grandfather, uncle, coach, teacher, or minister.

There’s a dad who saw what was lacking, and took it upon himself to fill in a bit. He teaches people, through short videos, how to do basic skills that typically a father would teach. “Dad, How Do I?” shows how to tie a tie, how to iron a dress shirt, how to shave, how to jumpstart a car, how to fix a toilet, and even something as important as how to have integrity. A video might not make up for the absence of the father, but at least it’s a resource to help out the moms, who can’t teach it all.

screenshot from "Dad, How Do I" video on how to iron a dress shirt

But if we fail to notice what has been obvious to civilizations for millennia—that children need a mother and a father—and suddenly think we know better, we leave that gap. And it’s the children who suffer.

We’ve looked here at what happens with a missing father. But, in honor of Father’s Day coming up soon (a week from Sunday), let’s also list what fathers-doing-the-dad-thing-right provide. I offered this list in 2019. And when I wrote it, I had adapted it from this article. 

·       Children who come into families with loving fathers know they were wanted, planned on, and welcomed. If affects their identity in positive ways today’s society should know better than to take for granted.

·       Fathers fill a need. Without a father in that role, there’s a father-shaped hole in the child’s life that good mother can’t fill.[ii] It’s not just about love; it’s about the security and protection that a good father represents, allowing a child to feel secure enough to explore the world and grow to potential.

·       Fathers work to generate the wealth necessary to provide for a wife and children—far beyond the typical earnings of non-fathers, and also far beyond what non-resident fathers provide even when required by law. These good fathers create a sense of worth in the child that some other resource—such as welfare or even charity—could provide.

·       These good fathers modify their behavior; they become more civilized personally. They control their anger, their language, their aggression around the woman and children they love—thus modeling civilization for that next generation.

·       Good fathers have a particular effect on their daughters. Daughters need the respect and love of a father to know to value themselves with the men in their lives. This helps daughters grow socially, with self-respect, better able to accomplish their personal goals and better able to resist men who would not be good partners in marriage.

·       Good fathers have a particular effect on their sons. Boys in particular need the example of male role models in order to grow into civilized, socialized men.

·       Good fathers channel the use of power toward defense and protection, rather than toward aggression. They protect the family both physically and morally. This eliminates male predatory behavior toward women and children. And it eliminates aggressive force among larger societies—nations—for any reason but defense.

 I heard earlier this week, on Glenn Beck radio, a parent complain that their child was given the writing prompt on an AP exam, “Explain the benefits to society if marriage didn’t exist.” The answer is easy—a blank page. But that doesn’t get you any kind of passing grade on such an exam. That question could only be asked by those who have forgotten obvious things—and are insisting no one else should remember those things either. Because the culture war is the war. 

The forgetful—those pressuring for some experiment that doesn’t include mother-father families—ought to try a better experiment. As I said in 2019 and still stand by:

 

If all men were living civilized lives within families, many of the world’s ills would disappear: war, famine, poverty, tyranny, bullying, abuse. We would still have illness, accident, and natural disasters. But we’d also have the strong help to face those things.

 

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[i] I suggest this compilation of social science data: “Why Marriage Matters, Third Edition: Thirty Conclusions from the Social Sciences” by family scholars, for the Institute of American Values, 2011. 

[ii] The piece I adapted my list from included this anecdote: “And that longing can hardly be extinguished: a never-married San Francisco professional with a young child was stunned by it: ‘My son began asking for his father before he was two. I’ll never forget it. He said, “Why no daddy?” with the reference to Maggie Gallagher, The Abolition of Marriage, pp. 54-56.

Ennui and Evil

We had another school shooting, this past Friday. Too close to home. It was at Santa Fe High School, about 30 miles south of Houston, toward Galveston. It’s a little over an hour from our home, near where we go to pick strawberries in the spring. I didn’t know anyone there, but almost right away a friend asked for prayers from Facebook friends for her relative who was a teacher at the school.

News report following the Santa Fe shooting
screen shot from here

Santa Fe High School has been in the national news before. You might recall, back in 2000, the Supreme Court ruled in Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe, on the question, “Whether petitioner's policy permitting student-led, student-initiated prayer at football games violates the Establishment Clause." SCOTUS ruled 6-3 that it did.

There were larger questions in the case as it came up. The majority religion in the area was Baptist. The Does (the unnamed plaintiffs) were Catholic and Mormon. The Mormon family did not object to prayers at graduation and football games. What happened was that a particular teacher, in class, handed out flyers to students encouraging them to attend a revival meeting—clearly inappropriate. But that same teacher also harangued the Mormon student in front of other students, insisting that Mormons belong to a cult. That should never happen in a school, or anyplace else that we expect civilized behavior.

If I had been the mother of such a child, you can be certain the Mama Bear teeth and claws would have come out in protection of my beloved cub. That family joined in a class action suit with the prayer-objectors, although it was the establishing—or favoring—of one religion over all others that was at issue.

The families filed anonymously with good reason: the school district attempted to “out” them through various means, which were harshly condemned by the judge. In other words, what we would normally see as simply pro-religious behavior was, indeed, anti-any-other-religion behavior. And at a public school, no student should be required to submit to that sort of atmosphere.

It's harder to see how someone could be harmed—or forced to participate in a particular established religion—at a football game prayer. The issue there was that a particular chosen chaplain always gave the prayer. Respecting other religions by taking turns, or having various students apply to pray would have solved that issue. But by the time it got to the Supreme Court, it became an opportunity for an overreaching court to actually limit religious freedom.

The ruling ended up giving permission for a student-led prayer at a solemn, once-in-a-lifetime event such as a graduation, but not giving permission for student-led prayer at football games. The original ruling allowed for “non-sectarian and non-proselytizing” prayers and discussions at the school. The school district went ahead with graduation prayers following students’ voting for that. But then the district appealed based on the “non-sectarian and non-proselytizing” phrase, and lost even more.

In the dissent, Justice Rehnquist pointed out that the majority opinion "bristles with hostility to all things religious in public life.” For one thing, the policy change being ruled on, going against the original ruling, had never been put into action, so no one could have been materially harmed by it. SCOTUS legislated from the bench to prevent a possible future violation of the Establishment Clause. And second, Justice Rehnquist asserted that the speech in question would be private, chosen and delivered by the speaker, rather than public, school-sponsored speech.

overhead view of  Santa Fe High School
image from here

I’m bringing this up because of the irony of preventing a community that wants to have prayer—that has even had students vote in favor of having prayer—from having the free exercise of religion, which is the essence of the First Amendment. And now, that same community that was prevented from exercising religion is faced with the evil of a school shooting.

Is there a direct correlation? I don’t know. The prayer in school question goes back much further—before I was in school. When I was in first grade, I had a teacher who decided to disobey what she deemed a wrong decision and have us bow our heads for our own private prayer every day anyway. No one complained.

One thing we do following a school shooting is offer prayers for the victims and their families and friends. That is good and right to do. Anti-gun people complain that that is doing nothing. But what we really needed was prayer in schools all along—or, I should say, the atmosphere in which prayer is natural, normal, and encouraged. Because when you have an atmosphere that honors God, you’re a lot less likely to have an atmosphere that cultivates mass murderers.

Back when I was in high school, people brought rifles, in a rack in their pickup trucks, or in their cars, so they could go deer hunting after school. The guns themselves, or their prevalence, did not increase our danger—because no one intended to use them for mass murder. People carried knives to school too. We didn’t need metal detectors, or armed teachers, or policies that didn’t tolerate even a paper gun or a pop-tart bitten into the shape of a gun. We didn’t have mass murders, because we didn’t have mass murderers among us.

So the question is, why are there mass murderers among us now?

The answer is going to be cultural. When you have savagery and you want civilization, you need to have a preponderance of people living the rules of civilization. And that hasn’t been happening for a while.

We’ve been looking at various possible causes, which, if any single one was the actual cause, we could address it. If only it were that easy.

There’s the fatherless home issue. But Friday’s shooting was someone from a two-parent family. No record, like the Parkland shooter, where there were multiple calls for police to come to the home. The parents seem duly shocked.

There’s mental illness, and medications used to treat it. We may not know enough yet, but that doesn’t appear to be part of this scenario. It may be a factor in some others, but not all.

People have talked about the bullied child, the loner, the unaccepted one. If that were the causal factor, some people think we could address that with better inclusion skills.

There’s video game addiction. But it doesn’t seem to be just any game for any person. There’s a problem with single shooter games, where the “win” or the “score” comes from killing multiple innocent people—in the game. So they look like humans, and the reaction to doing that may lead to desensitization. But only for some people who can’t, or won’t, separate fantasy from reality.

Along those lines, Dennis Prager talked today about ennui. That’s beyond boredom, to world weariness. The world weary youth attempts to address this undesirable feeling with excitement, for some sort of adrenaline rush. In a mind without purpose or meaning—without civilization—that might mean acting out violence for the adrenaline hit more than because of any hatred or other rationalization.

One of the best explanations I’ve seen was written by David French this past weekend. He was referring to an explanation by sociologist Malcolm Gladwell from 2015, who in turn referred to research by Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter. Granovetter’s theory is that we should not be looking at these shootings as isolated incidents. We are essentially looking at a slow-motion riot. Someone starts it—and that seems to be the Columbine shooters. And others who would not start an action on their own become willing to do it along with other bad actors.

French explains the theory this way:

In the elegant theoretical model Granovetter proposed, riots were started by people with a threshold of zero—instigators willing to throw a rock through a window at the slightest provocation. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone else goes first. He has a threshold of one. Next in is the person with the threshold of two. His qualms are overcome when he sees the instigator and the instigator’s accomplice. Next to him is someone with a threshold of three, who would never break windows and loot stores unless there were three people right in front of him who were already doing that—and so on up to the hundredth person, a righteous upstanding citizen who nonetheless could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera from the broken window of the electronics store if everyone around him was grabbing cameras from the electronics store.

The theory goes that the Columbine shooters laid out a script, and others have followed it.

Researcher Ralph Larkin examined the twelve major school shootings in the United States in the eight years after Columbine; eight of the twelve perpetrators made explicit reference to the Columbine shooters. Looking outside the US, he examined eleven school shootings between 1999 and 2007; six of the eleven were copycat versions of Columbine. In addition, he looked at eleven cases of thwarted shootings during the same period; all followed the Columbine script.

Friday’s shooter wore a long trench coat, like the Columbine shooters. This is ostensibly to hide a longer weapon. But the 17-year-old perpetrator wore it daily, like a signature—in Texas where the weather was 90 degrees and humid. There were explosives placed, as in Columbine. I don’t know whether he was addicted to video game killing; he may have been. But there does seem to be evidence that he admired and emulated the legend of Columbine. If only someone had noticed that way ahead of time.

As Gladwell says, “Let’s not kid ourselves that if we passed the strictest gun control in the world that we would end this particular kind of behavior.”

That’s grimly pessimistic.

Riots always end—after lots of destruction. But they do end. Typical riot control involves strong security forces controlling, dispersing, and arresting rioters. Sometimes riots can be prevented by the presence of strong security forces and the announcement that heavy penalties, possibly even death, could result for rioters.

In this “mass shooting” riot, they’re already dispersed. We can try to control, with various safety measures around schools aimed at thwarting mass shooters and/or bringing them down quickly. Sometimes they don’t care about the threat of heavy penalties or death. They may count on death. The last two have been taken alive, but that is rare. And no school shooter ever gets away with it and goes on with life. Not one.

David French ends his essay with this: “There are young men in the grip of a terrible contagion, and there is no cure coming.”

He may be right that there is no cure in sight. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a cure that we can eventually find. We must.

I don’t know what the specific actions we must take will be. But, step one, if you’re a parent and want your kids safe: pull them out of school and homeschool. There are plenty of good reasons for that; safety is only one. Providing your child with civilization is even more important.

Another step might involve profiling, recognizing the kids who are showing signs of acting out this particular Columbine-inspired fantasy. We need a way to intervene without trampling the rights of innocent people. That’s a big challenge.

And, somehow, we need a more civilized total society. We have to say this is rock bottom; we can’t endure with this evil among us. Then we follow the rules of civilization so thoroughly that we move up out of savagery until those savage acts again become unthinkable.

It comes down to this: There is evil among us. We mostly have control only over ourselves. So we protect ourselves and our families—and outward from there as best we can. And we live lives so full of goodness andpurpose that there is no room among us for world weary ennui or any other excuse for riotous evil.

So we pray. And may God bless us as we do what we can.

Thanksgiving Yields Happiness

There’s an axiom about God’s commandments: He commands us to do exactly what will lead to our greatest happiness. One commandment is to give thanks in all things. It is mentioned a lot.

Here’s one:

Psalm 107:1

O give thanks unto the Lord, for he is good: for his mercy endureth for ever.

And another:

Mosiah 26:39 (Book of Mormon)

… being commanded of God to pray without ceasing, and to give thanks in all things.

And another:

Ephesians 5:20

Giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Earlier this week, Dennis Prager put out a new Prager U video on the connection between gratitude and happiness. Worth watching, this week while we’re purposely thinking about being gratitude.

As for me, I’m especially grateful for a new grandbaby. We were traveling on the day she was born, but she waited until just after we arrived at our hotel for the night, so we got to tune in with video chat (we used Duo) in the nick of time for her grand arrival. And there she was, right on our tablet screen. I’m grateful for technology that can make that possible.

It was another full day’s drive, and then the following day before we got to meet her in person, just an hour before coming home from the hospital.

So, this week of Thanksgiving, I’m writing less. Sitting around holding a baby. Doing a lot of cooking, and playing with her big brother (almost 3 years old). And taking lots of photos. We have plans for a Christmas card photo with the littles playing the main roles.

Here’s a quick glimpse of this new, perfect, little blessing.

Little Social Sphere 2, 4 days old

5 days old, still sleeping a lot

Socialism Is Selfish

Dennis Prager spoke at the University of Wyoming this past week, despite student protests. He spends 25 minutes addressing the protests; he had also had a protester on his radio program. The accusations were both absurd and unfounded. For example, he was accused of being anti-Semitic. Um, he’s Jewish, and has written books on Judaism and anti-Semitism.

screen shot from video

He gets to his topic, “Why Socialism Makes People Selfish,” at about 25 minutes into an hour-long speech plus Q&A. I did a transcript of that beginning 10-minute segment on the topic. He says things that I’ve said.

So, the topic was “Socialism Makes You Selfish.” I didn’t forget the title. According to all sorts of opinion polls, you, your generation—half of you believe in socialism and not capitalism. So, let me respond to a few things, the moral and the economic. I’ll just begin with the economic.

The only thing that has ever raised large numbers of people from abject poverty is capitalism. Nothing else in the history of humanity has raised large numbers of people from abject poverty. You would think that would matter to people who care about people living in abject poverty. But they don’t. That’s the interesting thing. People on the left care about equality, not prosperity.

It’s a different moral world. Just understand that. They live in a different moral world. And clarity is our best friend. They don’t care about lifting large numbers of people from abject poverty; they care about the inequality in the Western world.

But inequality only bothers people who are bothered by inequality. That’s a tautology, obviously. In other words, only if you resent the fact that some people make more than others do you resent inequality. Inequality doesn’t bother me.

Mr. Prager then tells a story about being raised middle middle class, related to cars. The man next door bought a Cadillac every year; he was clearly much richer than the Oldsmobile-buying Prager family. They were happy for Mr. Klein. His wealth in no way harmed them.

Then he gives other comparisons and finishes his first main point:

Shortstops make more than surgeons. Is that fair? No. In some utopian world it isn’t fair, because surgeons save more lives than shortstops. OK, that’s just a fact. But it doesn’t matter. In a free society shortstops will make more than teachers and surgeons and nurses, and all people doing sweet and good things. That’s just the way it is. And it’s OK. Why would it bother me? If they make their money legally and ethically, why do I care?

I don’t care. They care. Because they covet. They resent the fact that some people have more than others.

I’ve been pointing this out as well—it’s because they covet. I wrote about that here and here, and more recently here. Prager continues:

Capitalism, not socialism, has taken people out of poverty. Capitalism also has a lot of inequality, because all liberty will have inequality. If you develop an iPhone, you make a lot of money. That’s just the way it is. And everybody likes using some sort of smart phone. That’s good. It’s good for everybody.

Why does it hurt me if some guy has billions of dollars? It doesn’t hurt me in any way. It helps me, because I am more productive, thanks to what that person has developed.

Socialism spends the money that capitalism creates. That is what you need to understand. Socialism does not produce wealth. Only capitalism produces wealth.

And the only moral question is not, “Why is there poverty?” The only moral question is, “Why is there wealth?” Poverty is the norm. Wealth is the aberration. All of the world was impoverished. But capitalism saved them from it.

This is also something I’ve written about. The economic section of the Spherical Model defines wealth as the accumulation of the results of labor.” Why shouldn’t someone who labors and accumulates the results be able to choose how to spend it?

Then Mr. Prager begins his second main point, the other moral argument:

Socialism and all of the doctrines of the left make people, generally speaking, more selfish and in many other ways morally worse than they were before.

Let me give you the biggest single example. Let me read to you a statistic. Americans give more charity per capita per income than any other people in the world. OK? Let me read to you.

This is the Comparative Non-profit Sector Project at the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society[i]. It compiled a ranking of private philanthropy in 36 countries from 1995 to 2002. Based on giving alone, the United States comes first. Giving 1.85% of GDP, followed by Israel at 1.34%.

By the way, isn’t it interesting that the two most hated countries in the world are the two most generous countries in the world? Isn’t that fascinating? It shows you how sick anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism are. I have that in my book… my book on anti-Semitism has a whole chapter on anti-Americanism.

Next, one fact stands out. This is Forbes, December 26, 2008. “Among developed nations, those with higher taxes and bigger social safety nets tend to have lower rates of giving.” You hear that? The countries with higher taxes and bigger social safety nets produce cheaper people. Produce less generous human beings. I’ll explain why in a moment.

In charitable giving as a percentage of GDP, nations with cradle-to-grave welfare systems rank far down the Johns Hopkins list. Sweden 18th. France 21st, Germany 32nd. Why? Here’s the answer. In American history—before socialism caught on—in American history, this was the belief: I have to first take care of me; then I have to take care of my family; then I have to take care of my community; and then I have to take care of my whole society. That was the belief.

Socialism kills all four. The state will take care of me; the state will take care of my family; the state will take care of my community; the state will take care of my society.

Which produces finer people? It’s so obvious that it is indeed a rhetorical question. If you think that you’re morally obligated to take care of people, you are a better person than the person who thinks, “The state will take care of my mom; why do I have to?” And that’s the way they think in much of Europe and in all of these other cradle-to-grave welfare places. Indeed, I don’t have to take care of me.

Today, a lot of your generation—indeed, I shouldn’t say your generation, ten years older than you—still live with their parents, playing video games in the basement. “Mom and Dad will take care of me, and if they don’t, the government will. The rich will take care of me.” And this is considered a moral idea. Well, it obviously isn’t.

There’s nothing more beautiful than taking care of yourself, and taking care of your family and community.

And a minute later he adds,

As government gets bigger, we get smaller.

He means small as in small-minded, small as opposed to great or generous.

There’s a lot we know about socialism. It has been tried elsewhere (like Denmark or Venezuela), so we can extrapolate the outcomes. We would be less well off by every measure: less freedom, less prosperity, less civilization.

Yet the pro-socialists are gaining purchase. Our next presidential race will probably include a Democrat who gladly proclaims he’s a socialist, along the lines of Bernie Sanders. They use the appeal of the argument, “It’s unfair that there’s inequality.” They promote coveting.

screen shot from here

This can be countered by education—although I don’t think we can expect our schools and universities to provide it, since they’ve been failing to teach principles of freedom, prosperity, and civilization for many decades now. My Spherical Model project is an attempt to help educate.

But the trend must also must be countered with better morality—standing up for real morality, and calling out fake morality such as unfair income distribution. 

Better moral teachings are going to require adherence to the outcomes of the Ten Commandments, honoring God, life, family, truth, and property. That last one relates both to “Thou shalt not steal” and “Thou shalt not covet”—both of which are sins socialism is based on.

Capitalism, on the other hand, is always moral. I wrote about that in a four-part piece called "Anything Evil about Capitalism?: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, in the first month of this blog, back in 2011. And I also wrote about it here and here.

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[i] I found this here: http://ccss.jhu.edu/research-projects/comparative-nonprofit-sector-project/ .

Changing Minds and Hearts

On Glenn Beck Radio this morning, he was talking to ex-KGB agent Jack Barsky (author of Deep Undercover), who had been deep cover as a spy in the US back in the 80s. He defected shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, remaining in the US because of his daughter.

image from Amazon.com

In telling his story he mentioned that, when you’re indoctrinated with certain ideas, or ways of thinking, it’s very hard to let go of those ideas as an adult.

“Ideology as it’s fed to you from childhood on is a very very strong foundation.”

In their further conversation, they mentioned that Islamists, and North Koreans, who have been trained since childhood to believe we are the enemy, the Great Satan, and worthy of death for existing and not being “them,” can’t be expected to change just because we offer them freedom, prosperity, and civilization. Many former East Germans now support Putin, for example. In reference to North Korea, Barsky said,

“You cannot think that, once you free them from that dictator, that the country is going to change.”

A little later in the day I heard radio host Dennis Prager say that one of the purposes of his PragerU videos is to educate the young people who have been missing a lot of truth in their education. He believes that, if you can bring them facts, and show them truth in a logical way, you can get through to them.

This afternoon I read an email from Hillsdale College, advertising their free online American Heritage course, which I have taken. They mention some troubling statistics:

According to the National Assessment of Education, only 18% of American high schoolers are proficient in U.S. history. So it’s no surprise that, according to the Pew Research Center, only 32% of Millennials think America is the greatest country in the world.

They say this happened on purpose:

Progressives who opposed the ideas of limited government and individual rights began a concerted effort over a century ago to take over America’s schools and universities. Since the late 1960s, to the extent young Americans have learned anything about our country’s history, it is more likely than not to be about its faults.

Meanwhile, I’ve just finished a section in my Book of Mormon reading about the conversion of a rather large group of people who had previously been taught to hate the other people, to see them as thieves and liars that they had a right to murder and subjugate. The change was dramatic. They were so determined to keep their new promises to God and their fellow human beings, that they buried their swords as a sign of their promise never to kill again (Alma 24:16-18). For them that even included in self-defense, which caused some issues later, but that’s another part of the story.

Anti-Nephi-Lehies, burying their weapons
image from LDS.org

These people did remain faithful. The change was not only dramatic; it was permanent.

And the former spy, Jack Barsky—his change has been permanent as well. In the cases where these people changed permanently, there are a couple of similarities: they were taught about Christ in a way that changed their hearts, and they felt love for those who taught them and for those around them.

If we’re looking for a way to change the world—to change a generation from hating freedom and the rules that lead to civilization into a free and prosperous people—how do we do it? There’s a simple but not easy answer: teach truth while loving them as they are.

I’m hoping that Dennis Prager is right. I hope that teaching millennials (and all of us) with clear, short videos that explain the truths will contribute to some conversions.

Add in the free online courses by Hillsdale College—on American Heritage, the US Constitution, the classics, and more—and clear truths are made accessible. This may mean more conversions.

I’m adding my small efforts here, at the Spherical Model, to try to lay out truth, as logically as I can, as a path to freedom, prosperity, and civilization.

I’m hoping for enough conversions here in America and among freedom-loving people around the globe, that the next generation won’t be trapped by the regressive teachings of the progressives. If we can preserve and recover freedom here in America, there’s hope for the rest of the world, or at least much of it.

But we’re up against a lot. And calmly teaching truth is the easy part. The other part, the letting them feel loved by us, so the change of heart comes—that’s always going to be a challenge.

But this week we celebrate the impossible: Christ overcoming death and the fall. With the help of the One who made the ultimate sacrifice for us, we can be made capable enough to help in change-of-heart miracles.

Common Sense or Calamity

“Studies either confirm common sense or they’re wrong.”—Dennis Prager[i]

Common sense tells us things that eventually social science can confirm, if done correctly.[ii] If you start with correct principles, and follow the correct procedures, then you get the right answers. Same with logic, which is mathematical. If you start with the right premise, and don’t get off track with faulty reasoning, then you get the right answer. But if you don’t start with a true premise, your answers will be faulty. Or if you take a wrong turn along the way.

That’s why it makes sense to look at what has been tried and tested over many years, by many people, in many places, in many cultures. If they come to see the wisdom in the same things, they might be right. Learning from the past, we can identify the principles that lead to civilization.

It’s kind of pointless to say, “Now that we’re more evolved, or progressive, we can ignore the experience of the sum total of human history, and try something new and untried, because we’re so advanced.” That is probably what every decadent society thought: “We don’t need to cling to those old ideas of morality; we want to do things our own way.” And then they sink from civilization into savagery, and misery. Every time.

Detroit after decay

Economist Thomas Sowell wrote a piece earlier this month, comparing life for blacks in America before and after the Civil Rights movement, and then the War on Poverty in the 1960s.

You would be hard-pressed to find as many ghetto riots prior to the 1960s as we have seen just in the past year, much less in the 50 years since a wave of such riots swept across the country in 1965.

We are told that such riots are a result of black poverty and white racism. But in fact—for those who still have some respect for facts—black poverty was far worse, and white racism was far worse, prior to 1960. But violent crime within black ghettos was far less.

Murder rates among black males were going down—repeat, DOWN—during the much lamented 1950s, while it went up after the much celebrated 1960s, reaching levels more than double what they had been before. Most black children were raised in two-parent families prior to the 1960s. But today the great majority of black children are raised in one-parent families.

Sowell gets to talk openly about race by virtue of his color. It’s helpful to get truth from someone who has lived a life worth knowing. But he doesn’t leave it as a racial problem; you do the same things in any culture, and you get the same results. He suggests reading Life at the Bottom, by Theodore Dalrymple, talking about British white slums caused by the welfare state.

Sowell concludes,

You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization—including work, behavioral standards, personal responsibility and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain—without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large.

He’s an economist, so the requirements of civilization he’s focusing on particularly affect economic prosperity, such as a strong work ethic. But more than that, you don’t get prosperity without the necessary behavioral standards and personal responsibility. And what are those? The principles were laid out in basic form about 3400 years ago, in the Ten Commandments. Every civilization has had something very close to that: you don’t lie, you don’t steal, you don’t have sex outside of marriage, you don’t take innocent life, you honor family, and you recognize God as the giver of life and inalienable rights. If you throw out any of the essential ingredients, you don’t get to have civilization.

image found here

In 1995 the leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sent out A Proclamation to the World, titled “The Family.”[iii] It’s a short document, and at the time we thought it seemed puzzling, because the points made in it were what we’d believed all along. They were common sense.

But very shortly afterward, ever line in it began to be attacked. Things like:

·        Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.

·        We declare that God’s commandment for His children to multiply and replenish the earth remains in force.

·        We further declare that God has commanded that the sacred powers of procreation are to be employed only between man and woman, lawfully wedded as husband and wife.

·        Marriage between man and woman is essential to His eternal plan.

·        Children are entitled to birth within the bonds of matrimony, and to be reared by a father and a mother who honor marital vows with complete fidelity.

For someone with common sense, those aren’t weird or outmoded or ridiculous in any way. They’re just the common sense way to happiness.

If you take a look at some older movies, or maybe some Shakespeare, you’ll find that the assumption that sex must only take place within marriage is a given. It was so widely accepted that even villains would expect they needed marriage before they could prey upon the damsel.  It has always been known that not everyone would abide by this societal requirement, but rebels knew they couldn’t expect society to condone their rebellions. Society must reverence marriage and family as sacred, or civilization ceases to be.

I’ve mention Vico and Unwin before. Giambatista Vico came first. Back in 1725 he concluded that marriage between a man and a woman is essential for civilization—it is the “seed plot” of society.[iv] Religious people, statesmen, and pretty much any educated thinking person in Vico’s day recognized that sex outside of marriage was an evil against society. Vico just explained the reasoning (the social science).

Two centuries later, in 1935, along came anthropologist and “progressive” thinker (i.e., progressive movement that Woodrow Wilson foisted on us) Joseph D. Unwin, who set out to prove that the institution of marriage was unnecessary, maybe even harmful. He did an exhaustive study of some 86 cultures, all the world cultures throughout history that he could obtain sufficient data for.[v] He was forced by the evidence to conclude that only marriage with fidelity, what he called absolute monogamy, would lead to the cultural prosperity of a society—civilization. Anything else, such as “domestic partnerships” or living together unmarried, or any other type of promiscuity, would degrade society. He reported:

The evidence was such as to demand a complete revision of my personal philosophy; for the relationship between the factors seemed to be so close, that, if we know what sexual regulations a society has adopted, we can prophesy accurately the pattern of its cultural behavior... (p.5).

Now it is an extraordinary fact that in the past sexual opportunity has only been reduced to a minimum by the fortuitous adoption of an institution I call absolute monogamy. This type of marriage has been adopted by different societies, in different places, and at different times. Thousands of years and thousands of miles separate the events; and there is no apparent connection between them. In human records, there is no case of an absolutely monogamous society failing to display great [cultural] energy. I do not know of a case on which great energy has been displayed by a society that has not been absolutely monogamous…(pp.31-32).

So a society’s sexual behavior can be predictive:

If, during or just after a period of [cultural] expansion, a society modifies its sexual regulations, and a new generation is born into a less rigorous [monogamous] tradition, its energy decreases... If it comes into contact with a more vigorous society, it is deprived of its sovereignty, and possibly conquered in its turn (p.21).

It seems to follow that we can make a society behave in any manner we like if we are permitted to give it such sexual regulations as will produce the behavior we desire. The results should begin to emerge in the third generation ( p.45).

The Family Proclamation ends with a more religious sounding but nearly identical warning:

We warn that individuals who violate covenants of chastity, who abuse spouse or offspring, or who fail to fulfill family responsibilities will one day stand accountable before God. Further, we warn that the disintegration of the family will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets.

Some people have to learn by experience; I understand that. But let them experiment in their own limited lives and circles. There’s no need for them to bring on dire consequences to entire civilizations just because they want to try out ways of living that have proved misery-inducing throughout all of human history.

I choose common sense rather than the proven path to calamity.

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[i] Donna Carol Voss quotes (without quotation marks, so possibly a paraphrase) Dennis Prager at the beginning of her piece, “Could it Be? Stay-at-Home Moms Are Bad for Children?”

[ii] For example, “Why Marriage Matters: Twenty-One Conclusions from the Social Sciences,” 2002, Institute for American Values, available at www.americanvalues.org, and the updated version “Why Marriage Matters, Third Edition, Thirty Conclusions from theSocial Sciences.” See also Linda J. Waite’s tabulations from the 1987-1988 waves of the National Survey of Families and Households available in Linda J. Waite and Maggie Gallagher, 2000. The Case for Marriage: Why Married People are Happier, Healthier, and Better-Off Financially (New York:  Doubleday): 155-156.

[iii] The proclamation was read by President Gordon B. Hinckley as part of his message at the General Relief Society (women’s auxiliary) Meeting held September 23, 1995, in Salt Lake City. In its entirety at https://www.lds.org/topics/family-proclamation?lang=eng&cid=PA0414-02

[iv] Vico, Giambattista, The New Science, 3rd Edition, trans. by Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin, paragraphs 10-11:  “The first of these [human institutions] was marriage…For marriage, as all statesmen agree, is the seed-plot of the family, as the family is the seed-plot of the commonwealth…”

[v] Unwin, also Joseph Daniel, Ph.D., “Sexual Regulations and Cultural Behavior," an address given to the Medical Section of the British Psychological Society.