Freedom Is Endangered But Not Extinct

In the last post I talked about the sci-fi series Extinct, created by Orson  Scott Card for BYU TV. There’s another theme I’d like to look at from that series—about freedom, or free will.

There are, among the few people who have been brought back to life 400 years after the extinction of humans, who are different from the handful who are the protagonists. This other group is called skin riders. There is a parasite, appearing as a glowing lump on the back of the neck, that joins with the human body. Ezra’s brother (from earlier earth days) is one of them; in fact, Silas is their leader.

The skin riders search out the humans, capture them, and try to make them join up.

In episode 2, Ezra has evaded the larger group of skin riders, and ambushes Silas alone. He overpowers Silas, and checks the glowing thing on the back of his neck. Here’s their first conversation [Ep2 40:58]:

Ezra tries to find out what has happened to his brother.
Screen shot from Season 1 Episode 2

Ezra: What is that?

Silas: Don’t hurt it. I’ll die if you do.

Ezra: What have they done to you?

Silas: Opened my mind. [others arrive] Don’t kill him!

Jaz: I won’t. [strikes Ezra, scene goes black. Ezra wakes at night near a campfire.]

Silas: If you try to run, I’ll call the others. You wouldn’t get far. I sent Jax to find your friend. (Ezra checks his own neck) We haven’t injected you. Jax wanted to, but…  I think it’s best if you choose to join us.

Ezra: I’ll pass.

Silas: Four hundred years and you haven’t changed. Nobody can teach you anything.

Ezra: Did the Sparks remake you?

Silas: The Sparks? Fascinating, aren’t they? How they can make anything—humans, clothing, a bologna sandwich, albeit a soggy one.

Ezra: That thing on the back of your neck—It’s alive, isn’t it?

Silas: A companion. It teaches me, comforts me, connects me to my brothers and sisters.

Ezra: I’m your brother, Silas.

Silas: You were. Join us and you will be again.

Ezra: It controls you.

Silas: Does knowledge control you? That’s what the companion provides. If I need to know how to start a fire, it shows me. It’s a gift!

Ezra: Can you remove it?

Silas: Why would I want to?

Ezra: Because it’s turned you into someone else.

Silas: Someone better, yes. What was I to you before, other than a disappointment? Now look at me. A leader. A spiritual advisor. I’m worth something now.

[flashback scene]

Ezra: You weren’t a disappointment, Silas.

Silas: Bankrupt at 20?

Ezra: Because you hired all those people, and you didn’t have the heart to let ‘em go when you should have. It makes you a bad businessman, not a bad person.

Silas: Doesn’t matter. I’m the person I want to be now.

Ezra: A slave?

Silas: A servant.

Ezra: Let me take you to the Sparks. They can heal you.

Silas: And go back to what I was?

Ezra: What you were was a better man, Silas.

Silas: My companion is very tired. (signals for Ezra to escape)

It appears, in a moment of weakness, the real Silas was able to come through, and that’s why he lets Ezra escape.

In Episode 4, Ezra’s wife, Lynn, is reconstituted (brought back to life as a human), but is quickly taken captive by the skin riders. She escapes but is eventually retaken. Somewhere in the sequence, one of the skin riders was killed by one of the other humans. At the moment Lynn is brought to Silas, he is going through a ritual about the dead man, removing his parasite (crystal in his neck), so his memories can be preserved. Anyway, Silas gives us this description of what that “Companion” does for them:

Silas: The humans kill our brother with one touch of their weapon. We offer them a companion to choose for them, to remove from them the burden of discipline and self-mastery, guilt, and shame. We offer them guaranteed joy, and they give us this.

He’s not, apparently, interested in the life and memories of the human, but of the parasite that inhabited him.

In episode 5, Silas is trying to persuade Lynn to voluntarily become injected with the parasite/companion. He starts out gently telling her how normal and improved they are. But when she asks what happens if she refuses to join them, the answer is pretty threatening.

Later he brings in a red drone, and produces a hologram of Lynn and Ezra’s daughter, but the hologram quickly disappears [Ep 5 12:38]:

Lynn: Is this what you’ve become? Cruel?

Silas: Death is cruel, Lynn. It rips us from those we care about, and buries them away forever. But what if I told you there was a way to connect with the dead? To see and feel their memories and knowledge whenever you needed them? Not with a machine, but with your mind?

Lynn: The crystal in your neck—

Silas: Always so smart. The crystal is the mind of an organism we call “a Companion.” It’s a friend, a counselor. But the human brain keeps getting in the way. Reactions are slower, decisions are muddled. There’s resistance.

Lynn: What do you want from me?

Silas: The drone and the Sparks wove the neural pathways in our brains. I want to block some of them, to give greater control to the Companion.

Lynn: I’m not a brain surgeon. I can’t help you.

Silas: I don’t need a surgeon, Lynn. I need a test subject. [pulls out a vial with a sharp end meant for injecting] You prick yourself. The companion does the rest. Once it’s taken root and you’re one of us, we can begin with the drone.

Jax: You should just stick her and get on with it.

Silas: You underestimate Lynn, Jax. She always makes the right choice.

But it’s not much later, a day or less, when he comes back and tries more persuasion [Ep5 23:26]:

Silas has Lynn captive.
Screen shot from Season 1 Episode 5

Silas: You still haven’t chosen to join us.

Lynn: Still weighing the pros and cons.

Silas: You haven’t changed, Lynn.

Lynn: Wish I could say the same for you.

Silas: You don’t know what you’re rejecting. You could be one with the Community.

Lynn: I’m one with my husband. That’s enough for me.

Silas: Technically, he’s no longer your husband. You were married “until death do you part,” remember?

Lynn: I remember. I remember you were his best man. And I remember the toast you gave. That you had everybody laughing one moment, and most of us crying the next. Because everyone knew you loved your brother. That’s what I remember. Do you?

Silas: I remember my knees shaking, my voice almost cracking, my heart pounding. Because I was weak and fragile. Now I’m not. I’m beginning to think you’re not going to make the right choice here, Lynn.

Lynn: I’m never going to join you, Silas. I’ll never give up who I am.

[he stabs her in the arm with the vile]

Silas: I didn’t want to have to do that. You’re angry right now, but when you have your Companion, we’ll have a good laugh about this. About how much fuss you made. Sleep well.

There’s a line in The Princess Bride where the Grandpa interrupts the story to say, “She doesn’t get eaten by eels at this time.” So, like that, I’ll say, she doesn’t become a skin rider at this time.

What I’m interested in, in these interchanges, are the enticements from the skin riders, through Silas. He offers freedom from error, freedom from weakness, freedom from “the burden of discipline and self-mastery, guilt, and shame.”

This is very much like the choice from the Council in Heaven—Lucifer’s plan. “I will take away your ability to make bad choices.” But that takes away humanness, and with it the ability to choose to be a good human being, leaving something far inferior.

Silas makes a show of offering a “choice,” but the choice isn’t really there; give in to having your self taken, or your self will be taken.

So, I was thinking of this “choice,” when I read an opinion piece from the New York Times called “WhyAre Millennials Wary of Freedom?” by Clay Routledge.

There are some disturbing statistics from the World Values Survey, the Pew Research Center, and other surveys:

·         Only 30% of Americans born after 1980 believe democracy (rule by the people) is essential, compared to 72% of older Americans.

·         In 2011 24% of young adults think democracy is a bad idea; they would prefer to be ruled over.

·         40% of millennials believe government should control speech they find offensive (not profanity, but rather ideas they disagree with).

·         20% or more of students of either party believed it was acceptable for student groups to use violence to prevent speech on a college campus that they disapprove of.

Routledge offers an explanation for why young adults have so little respect for freedom: “I propose that the answer is fear—the ultimate enemy of freedom.”

The Spherical Model can give us some perspective here. People who have not been brought up to understand the blessings of freedom live in the southern hemisphere, oscillating between chaotic tyranny and statist tyranny, unaware of the entire northern hemisphere of freedom. Those who seek power create, or at least point out, the chaos, accentuate its danger, and then promise to make everything calm. “Allow us to rule over you, and we’ll make what you’re scared of go away. But, if you don’t choose to be ruled by us, we’ll force you to.” That last part gets left unsaid, but it’s there in every tyranny.

As Reagan once said,

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.

Freedom isn’t extinct yet, here in our world. But if those statistics are an indicator, it’s on the endangered list.

If you have any influence over a young person, let them know that real freedom is not freedom from financial concerns, interpersonal challenges, or “the burden of discipline and self-mastery, guilt, and shame.” Let them know what real freedom is for: to thrive, grow, and live a fully human, happy and sometimes painful but meaningful life.

Family Isn't Extinct

I’ve been watching a new sci-fi series on BYU-TV called Extinct. One of the creators is Orson Scott Card, who wrote Ender’s Game, it’s sequels, and many other sci-fi fiction books and series. Even with those high expectations, I’m surprised at the quality of this show. I don’t know how they do it out of a college campus media program.

It was introduced October 1^st, with two opening episodes. But BYU-TV did something I’m really appreciating. Besides showing one episode a week for the next month and a half, followed by a season finale, they put the first eight episodes online right away, for streaming at your convenience.

So I binge-watched that first week, up through episode 5. And then I decided to slow down, because I didn’t want to have a huge gap between those eight episodes and the finale. Anyway, I recommend the series, if you like sci-fi at all.

There was a moment in episode 5, “Broken,” that I want to highlight.

The premise of the show is that aliens came and wiped out the human race 400 years ago. But those aliens or others (not sure) recorded the DNA and memories of a number of the humans, and then they try to have the human race repopulate centuries later.

The humans wake up, one at a time, in a lake, with their memories from their previous life intact. They are at the age of their prime (mid-20s to mid-30s), regardless of the age at which they died. One character, Abram, was a psychologist near retirement age in his previous life.

I don’t want to give away too many surprises, but Abram has been trying to decode messages from a mysterious obelisk in their fortress, where there used to be a settlement. Rummaging around the place, he finds a notebook with shorthand notes—in a type of shorthand he invented for himself, back when he was a therapist. So it’s not possible that someone else wrote that notebook; he had been there before, trying to decode those very same things.

In episode 5, we get a flashback of the old Abram visiting his wife, Tasha, in the hospital before she dies. Then we see the new, younger Abram, in the fortress, talking with the drone (a floating metal robot about the size of a basketball) as he’s looking for something. If you watch the full episode, this two-minute clip comes at 18 minutes in.

Embed:

Here’s the dialogue from the essential part:

Drone: Looking for something?

Abram: My notebook proves that I was here before. Maybe there’s proof Tasha was too.

Drone: What makes you think your wife may have been reborn?

Abram: Ezra and Lynn. Feena and Duncan. There’s a pattern of restoring couples.

Drone: I’d hardly call four people a reliable statistical sample.

Abram: Not statistics. Sociology. If you want to start a community and generate offspring, you need strong, monogamous relationships.

Drone: You don’t need monogamy to create offspring.

Abram: No, but you need it to create stable families. And you won’t have much of a civilization without those.

This isn’t the only time Orson Scott Card has his characters mention how important family is. I wrote about one place here.

The alien attack, when these Extinct people’s original bodies died, was approximately our day. It’s interesting that it’s an older character who understands, both intuitively and scientifically, the importance of family for building civilization, because in our day, especially among younger generations, that’s not always common knowledge.

For example, there’s this guy whose presentation came up through Mindvalley (a self-help organization, providing information on things as diverse as meditation, healthy eating, breaking through mental blocks, how the brain works, and other informative and sometimes weird things) on Facebook. The guy, Dan Savage, does a longer presentation called “The 3 things we get wrong about love, sex, and monogamy.” I apologize for the bleeped profanity; the subject itself is profane, but in the two-and-a-half-minute promo video [https://www.facebook.com/mindvalley/  October 4, 2017], Savage says,

Every monogamous relationship is a disaster waiting to happen. If you are with someone for 50 or 60 years, and you cheated on them one time, you are terrible at monogamy. It’s an impossible standard of perfection, and it’s why we all fail at it. Those who attempt it almost all fail at it. Those who attempt it almost all fail at it.

And we tell people, and people believe, that if someone touches someone else, someone who’s committed to you, made a monogamous commitment to you, touches someone else with their genitals even once, they didn’t love you. They never loved you. That your entire relationship was a lie, and your…the only corrective is divorce. You must leave that person. We define it as an unforgivable betrayal, and then we experience it as an unforgivable betrayal.

And we sit around with our thumbs in our a—s wondering why the divorce rate is as high as it is, when what we should be telling people is that you will grow up, you will fall in love. Perhaps if monogamy is right for you or what you think you want—a lot of people think they want it and actually don’t—you will make a monogamous commitment. And, asterisk, that doesn’t mean because you’re in love, you’re not going to want to f— other people. You’re still going to want to f— other people; so does your spouse. What monogamy means is you will refrain from f—ing other people, hopefully.

And if you make it through 50 years, and they cheated once or twice, and you cheated once or twice, you were good at mono… you get a monogamy gold medal, like the snowboarder who fell down that day. You should have a monogamy gold medal around your neck, not a noose around your neck.

I’ve been with my husband for 23-ish, 24-ish years, I can’t remember, but a long time. And for 18 of the last years, we have been non-monogamous. I have had conversations with people in monogamous… who are appalled by the fact that we’re public about it, that I’ve talked about it, the fact that we’re parents and we’ve talked about it publicly, and this is how these conversations have gone. I’ve had people look at me and say to me, “I could never do what you and Terry have done, because I value commitment and loyalty too highly.” And I look at them like…  I don’t say anything, but I’m thinking, “You don’t think I’m…  What?”  And the next thing out of the m—f—‘s mouth is, “All three of my marriages have been monogamous.” And I’m like, “Oh, what you’re committed to and loyal to is monogamy, not these a—s you keep marrying and divorcing, but monogamy.” We are committed and loyal to monogamy to such an extent that we are not committed and disloyal to the people we’ve married.

Let’s unpack this, because he’s making a living telling quite a number of untruths.

He’s not in an actual marriage; he’s in a same-sex relationship that cannot produce children (yet they got children from someone who did produce children). He says he’s married, but this doesn’t include the essential sexual relationship that leads to reproduction. And it does not include exclusivity as a marriage contract requires. He calls what he has a non-monogamous committed marriage. And the problem, he says, on his authority, is that the rest of the world thinks marriage should require monogamy.

He claims that nearly all marriages include infidelity, because fidelity is an impossible standard. That is, he thinks it’s hard, and therefore you should give up on the very idea. The social science shows that essentially all long-term same-sex relationships include infidelity—more so for gay men and for lesbians. So if he’s going by his limited experience, that’s about right. But their numbers don’t reflect what is normal for heterosexuals.

Among real marriages—between men and women, married for life, with exclusivity, or in other words monogamous—well beyond half, 70% or more continue without divorce. Of those, 78% of men are never unfaithful, and 86% of women are never unfaithful. Compared to the numbers for gays, those statistics are a sharp night-day contrast.

Heterosexual marriages that face infidelity are severely strained. Often they end in divorce. But where the straying spouse is repentant and willing to do whatever it takes to make amends—and this often takes professional counseling for both spouses—there is no requirement that the marriage ends. Savage is saying the goal is no divorce, which you get if you are willing to stay in a marriage with unrepentant infidelity. He’s not clear on the concept if he thinks that makes for a better actual marriage.

I’m raising an eyebrow at his casual reference to sex, like it’s a typo. If the person committed to you “touches someone else with their genitals even once,” like that could so easily happen. It doesn’t happen accidentally; we don’t walk around in public places with those body parts uncovered, where they could just accidentally bump into someone else’s. No, it happens when you make a number of decisions, a number of steps toward having sex with a person. If that’s with a person you are not committed to, then you did indeed commit betrayal. You lied. Maybe you thought you loved your partner, but apparently not enough to control your lust.

This guy holds himself up as an expert when he has no idea what an actual marriage is like. He doesn’t know that huge numbers of people are happy in their marriages—the vast majority of them with total fidelity. It means something when sex is an expression of love in marriage. It means something else entirely when sex is just about self-gratification within or without a relationship. It matters. Because when it’s about self-gratification, it isn’t an expression of love.

People are happier when sex is an expression of love. And that love grows when the two committed parents bring children into their forever family. Maybe, just maybe, God knew how we were most likely to be happy when he required us to limit sex to within marriage.

Because that’s the only way you get civilization. Without civilization we have savagery. There’s been plenty of that in the news this week. Consider: would it be better for us to slake our lusts wherever and whenever we want—so that whatever Harvey Weinstein and others like him do, we just shrug our shoulders and give them a pass? We don’t even think it’s wrong?

Weinstein’s defense? “Everybody makes mistakes.” Not big, felonious ones. Not dozens or hundreds of times. Not endlessly until caught and finally held accountable.

Who is happier when no one considers sex under any conditions wrong? Not those he has used.

Family--with a man and woman married and faithful, raising their children--is still necessary for civilization.

Meanwhile, a Little Movie Preview

I’ve been planning, since the end of the Supreme Court session at the end of June, to look again at SCOTUS voting patterns. The first such post is April 13, 2012. We were looking at data prior to the ruling on Obamacare, to see if there was a clue about what to expect. What we found was that, while there is a liberal bloc and a conservative bloc, the early decisions of the 2011 session showed a fair amount of congeniality on the Court.  (A session starts in the fall and ends in June of the following year. So those rulings in spring 2012 were part of the 2011 session.)

The 2012 session, now complete, includes all the cases, not just the early ones of the session. So building the data base is a fair amount more work than last time (79 cases, compared to 14). So I set aside a day for it, built the data base, saved it (multiple times while working, plus a final time before closing the file for dinnertime)—and then, because of my technical challenges, the file disappeared. No amount of searching so far has yielded anything but the original few.

Such is life. Maybe I’ll be able to redo the work for Monday’s post.

In the meantime, a little movie preview.

 

This fall the classic science fiction book Ender’s Game comes to the big screen. I’ve been aware of this story for a long time. The novel, I think, was published in 1991, but it was a short story in a collection before that, where I first encountered it. Orson Scott Card was a graduate student at the university I attended more than a decade before this novel, but even then he was a name on campus, because so few English majors go on to make it big. The story is powerful. I don’t recommend it to young readers, but it can be good for more mature teen readers. It’s clean, but there is some raw violence and a lot of psychological struggle.

A couple of years ago I read three of the sequels: Speaker for the Dead, Children of the Mind, and Xenocide, and I’ve occasionally mentioned them. Ideas come up in his writing related to civilization; some have become among my favorite quotes. So Orson Scott Card comes up April 28, 2011; May 31,2011; June 6, 2011; October 14, 2011; and a year later October 15, 2012.

There have been rumors about an Ender’s Game movie almost since it came out, but the author wasn’t willing to lose control to Hollywood. He’s a screenwriter himself as well. So when I heard earlier this year that the movie was really going to happen, I was hopeful it would do the story justice. I’m still a little apprehensive about it (the trailer makes it look like Ender is aware of things he doesn’t know in the book). But Harrison Ford plays the commander, so that’s a possible plus. And then you add in Ben Kingsley and Viola Davis.

Card also authored a nonfiction book for fiction writers called Characters and Viewpoint. It was clearer and more useful than anything on the subject I came across in college. I have a lot of respect for him as a writer.

I think he’s a writing teacher in North Carolina. I haven’t been following closely for a while, but he used to do a regular column for the local newspaper, and it often got picked up by The Mormon Times, an online news and opinion publication. I would often see his articles linked, and several over the years have been worth saving in a file.

His writing is only occasionally political. He’s a Democrat, but I’m puzzled by that, because he feels strongly about the Constitution, and I think he warned us, both times, against the disaster that would follow an Obama election. Once in a while he has written about traditional marriage, as I do. [My Defense of Marriage collection is here]. In 2009 Card joined the board of the National Organization for Marriage, an organization I appreciate. I get their newsletters, and follow their efforts in the courts, as well as with local organizations in many states.

The other day I came across a story about a boycott of the movie—because of Card’s controversial view. Presumably that “controversial” view is the majority opinion that marriage should continue to be defined as it has for  all of the millennia up until now, by all civilizations until the decadent ones we are beginning to experience. Because he has opinions in favor of family, and in favor of children being raised by their own two parents in a committed real marriage, these people who believe they know better than us all think he should be shut down and silenced as a human being, because they deem his opinion unacceptable.

If the rest of us boycotted every movie in any way associated with anyone who has differences of opinions with us on things totally unrelated to their movies, we would simply never see movies. We conservatives tend to value actual tolerance much more than the “we order you to be tolerant” crowd, apparently.

Anyway, if you think there’s a chance the movie coming from this excellent classic book might be worth seeing, maybe you should not pay heed to SkipEndersGame.com (hyperlink purposely omitted). Check it out with some friends and family (preview before sharing with children, please).

Parents Bring about Civilization

The other day I saw a short clip of Andrew Klavan, mentioning again his suggestion that for every proposal government makes, they elected official then asks, “to keep us free,” as a test for whether the law does what it ought to do. [I can't re-find the 30-second clip I viewed, but this is a good recent one.] I used that suggestion in a piece last April, as an exercise, and found that the phrase is good at guiding us toward the proper role of government.

So I re-read that piece the other day. And it occurred to me: what if we come up with a similar test phrase concerning civilization principles?

There are two parts describing the hallmarks of civilization, according to the Spherical Model: one part is about honoring God, the grantor of our rights, and the other is about honoring family, the perpetuator of the principles. So it may be that a single phrase won’t cover all issues. But, for our experimental purposes today, I thought I’d try a family-based phrase:

We should_____, so that we can help parents raise civilized children.

Let’s give it a try.

·         We should disallow religious symbols on public property, so that we can help parents raise civilized children.

·         We should discourage voucher systems that allow tax money to follow students who could choose private or parochial school options, so that we can help parents raise civilized children.

·         We should use tax money to provide health clinics in high schools[*] that dispense birth control medicines and devices to minors without parental notification, so that we can help parents raise civilized children.

·         We should have our public schools teach alternative sexual lifestyle information, including graphic information at the high school level, with a difficult opt-out policy (or no opt-out), so that we can help parents raise civilized children.

·         We should make sure our schools have a no tolerance policy for bullying, combined with a refusal to teach “religious values,” so that we can help parents raise civilized children.

·         We should give special privileges, such as in college admission and in hiring practices, based on race rather than ability and character, so that we can help parents raise civilized children.

·         We should experimentally redefine marriage to equal “being in a sexual relationship with another consenting person at this time,” instead of the long-standing definition of “a husband and wife, permanently committed and faithful, who raise their own offspring together,” so that we can help parents raise civilized children.

·         We should encourage divorce whenever marriage is perceived by one or both married parties to interfere with personal happiness goals, rather than considering best circumstances for children, so that we can help parents raise civilized children.

·         We should always allow women the option of abortion, for any reason at any point in pregnancy, without imposing our personal values on that woman, so that we can help parents raise civilized children.

None of these make sense. They’re common “liberal” suggestions, but they do the opposite of helping parents civilize the upcoming generation. But if we turn some things around to actually help parents, we can see a different picture.

·         We should allow and offer as many educational options as can be invented, allowing parents to decide how and where their children will be educated, so that we can help parents raise civilized children.

·         We should encourage and honor religious practice such as prayer or displays of symbols, in public and private, remembering that God the Creator is the grantor of our inalienable rights and has offered direction for living civilized lives, so that we can help parents raise civilized children.

·         We should encourage individuals and families to donate time, money, and whatever they can offer to help those truly in need, encouraging hard work, self-reliance, and selfless service, so that we can help parents raise civilized children.

Not everyone is in a marriage or family situation, but everyone is affected by family strength in society. Whenever we look at the “social” issues, we can gain clarity by looking at the effect on parental rights and responsibilities. A majority of children born out of wedlock, outside the normal circumstances in which civilization and economic prosperity are perpetuated, is a drain on the resources and stamina of the successful providers.

We’ve been moving southward toward savagery for too long, with some visible, scary results. We need a change of direction, northward toward civilization. One successful family at a time.

I want to repeat a quote I used in June 2011, in a piece about an Orson Scott Card book in the Ender series. Valentine, Ender’s sister, has a conversation with Olhado [pronounced Ohl-yah-doo; the language is essentially Portuguese], one of Ender’s grown stepsons. Ender joined a very dysfunctional family in the previous book, and now 25 years have passed. The others all went into science fields, but Olhado is a brickyard foreman. When he was young, he had many philosophical ideas that no one listened to, so Valentine is coming now to get his opinions. He tells her what happened when Andrew [Ender] joined the family, and how it affected his life.

“I saw what Andrew did in our family. I saw that he came in and listened and watched us. He tried to discover our need and then supply it. He took responsibility for other people and it didn’t seem to matter to him how much it cost him. And in the end, while he could never make the Ribeira family normal, he gave us peace and pride and identity. Stability. He married Mother and was kind to her. He loved us all. He was always there when we wanted him, and seemed unhurt by it when we didn’t. He was firm with us about expecting civilized behavior, but never indulged his whims at our expense. And I thought: This is so much more important than science. Or politics, either. Or any particular profession or accomplishment or thing you can make. I thought: If I could just make a good family, if I could just learn to be to other children, their whole lives, what Andrew was, coming so late into ours, then that would mean more in the long run, it would be a finer accomplishment than anything I could ever do with my mind or my hands.” 

“So you’re a career father,” said Valentine. 

“Who works at a brick factory to feed and clothe the family. Not a brickmaker who also has kids…. 

“Jacqueline. My wife. She followed her own road to the same place. We do what we must to earn our place in the community, but we live for the hours at home. For each other, for the children. It will never get me written up in the history books…. It’s a boring life, to read about,” said Olhado. “Not to live, though.” (pp. 448-449, Xenocide) 

To be a good parent: not for the history books, but heroic nonetheless. It’s what makes for civilization when every other path fails. Whatever we do as a society, it should be with the purpose of helping parents perform this quietly powerful role.

---

[*] Obamacare contains such a provision; you can read about it here.

To Believe In

I’m reading Children of the Mind, yet another in the Ender’s Game series by Orson Scott Card. As with the last one or two, I haven’t loved the story, but I’m captured by the occasional interesting idea. 

There’s a moment early in the book when Ender/Andrew is talking with his wife, Novinha, at a time when she has withdrawn following the death of an adult son. Ender, I have to say, has been very committed to staying married, no matter how hard she makes it. At this point she has joined a convent of sorts, and he has gone there to join her. 

She shook her head. “You don’t believe in God, how’s that for starters?”

“I certainly do too believe in God,” said Ender, annoyed.

“Oh, you’re willing to concede God’s existence, but that’s not what I meant. I mean believe in him the way a mother means it when she says to her son, I believe in you. She’s not saying she believes that he exists—what is that worth?—she’s saying she believes in his future, she trusts that he’ll do all the good that is in him to do. She puts the future in his hands, that’s how she believes in him. You don’t believe in Christ that way, Andrew. You still believe in yourself. In other people…. You aren’t leaving anything up to God. You don’t believe in him.”

…“Maybe I don’t believe in Christ the way that you do,” said Ender. “But isn’t it enough that I believe in you, and you believe in him?” (pp. 29-30)

The argument between them isn’t as important as this description of believing in God. I think it’s a way of describing faith—believing so much that you act on the belief, trusting in the outcome. Not just believing in God’s existence, but believing God, trusting Him. And for those who can’t yet do that, but can trust someone else who does trust God, that is at least a step in the direction God is suggesting. 

It might not be possible to know, for example, that being honest in your business dealings will lead to financial success. A high level of financial success might not even happen. But being willing to act honestly in business may be the path to a more fully lived life, a happier life. And if not in this life, then in the life to come—God’s choice. But acting on that trust opens the way for God to offer blessings of abundant life that won’t come, with or without financial success, when the honest path isn’t followed. 

People who do not believe in God—do not trust Him—look for some other entity to trust. That makes them vulnerable to tyrants in a way that God-trusting people are not. If we know, as our founders did, that our rights come from God, we don’t give in to a power-hungry dictator who steps up and says, “Trust me; I’ll give you everything; just let me make all the decisions.”

I am reminded of these orchestrated protests exemplifying lack of civilization in cities around the country. These people do not trust God, to begin with. But in addition, they do not believe in themselves. They trust some super-entity, some government, to coerce outcomes that they want. They are sacrificing their time and work opportunities—real living, or making a living—trusting that some benevolent dictator will step in and meet their demands. From my point of view, believing in God is much more rational.