(Why super-involved conservative young people may actually be working for the liberals!)

I was once on the board of an alumni association. One of the older members said everyone on the board was either right out of school and new to the area, or retired. He wasn’t upset about it in the least. He said it was simply that everyone else was busy raising their families, which he thought was a good thing.

Nowadays the conservatives really want to get more young people involved. They seem over-excited about getting attendance at events and meetings. You know, it’s just some guy talking too long about something only a little interesting, but the Facebook event page says “come be part of this exciting event!” Uh huh. A local conservative nonpartisan organization just gushes over its 30-year-old single guy who is ready to volunteer for everything. They love how much time he gives to the group. But 30 isn’t actually young. And at that age, he ought to be contributing by raising a family. But it looks like he has invested so much of his energy in political volunteering, sending e-mails, organizing rallies, maintaining a superficial internet presence, that he has missed the boat on major life investments.

If conservatives really intend to try to live like super-involved liberals, they will be abandoning the very worldview they are fighting for. Consider:

Liberals get a lot of young adults involved, but if my friends and associates are any indication, those people are living out a worldview in which individuals interact with civil society directly, without being invested in a family first. At its worst, it’s me and the government. That is, those friends tend not to be married. They tend not to have families. They have huge presence on facebook, and they hold and attend lots of “events,” but if you ask me, the whole thing looks a lot like college. In college, we were all separate individuals participating in student organizations and attending events. Accumulating experiences. Stuffing our schedules with “involvement” for its own sake. Living in organizations rather than families.

And that is the liberal worldview, isn’t it? Everyone unmarried, everyone dependent on society at large, the State, for emotional and economic support. Pure democracy is both radically individualistic and totalitarian. But it has no legacy. It is impermanent.

My married friends don’t live like that. Certainly many of them still care about politics, but their investments look much less like they’re just desperately trying to fill their time and be “involved.”

Conservative young people seem to be more likely to get married and start families. They spend less time on Facebook, and their political volunteering comes after their commitment to their families. In fact, to the extent that they are involved in politics, they are doing it FOR their families, because they have something, someone, important to take care of beyond themselves. They aren’t individuals interacting directly with the State. The first interaction they have is their spouse, and everything they do flows out of that basic relationship. If you ask me, that is a far better way to generate policy.

And I have been convinced that cultural change comes about by example. Getting young adults to give all their time to politics keeps them from focusing on building families. But families are the most important units of society. So if conservatives want to stay unmarried and over-involved in politics, they will actually be working for the liberals. Even if they are fighting for conservative policy! Because they are living out the liberal model of society.

So, I’m not saying young people shouldn’t be involved in politics. I’m saying they should have families first.

I want to celebrate an internet meme that I saw recently! I keep saying that married people need to do more of this. Pretty much every happily married couple I am friends with has spoken about the importance of friendship in selecting a spouse. (They know the secret! There is a reason they’ve won the game.) Many of them seem concerned that their unmarried friends don’t seem to understand, and are ending up in problematic situations (whether with people they date or as differently-aged adolescents who find it increasingly hard to justify their choices).

I think it is really interesting that we have to have the conversation at all! We shifted away from old cultural norms, and now, if we want to return to them, we have to make them explicit for the first time and argue them. In the past, everyone was expected to marry, and they made their decisions much more efficiently. My grandparents talk about friendship like it’s obvious, about finding someone headed in the same direction, about common sense next steps to take with someone who is a natural companion. A now-famous marriage psychologist has demonstrated scientifically (with a level of statistical precision that is almost unsettling) that good friendship is the seed and sustainer of romance. That is, if you are willing to intend to love your friend. But doesn’t it seem funny that we had to prove it?

Will our new explicit instructions make a difference? I have my doubts. I’m not sure it is as persuasive as those social expectations used to be. It’s one thing to fall into the pattern that surrounds you. It is another to be intellectually persuaded of an argument, and further to admit that it applies to you, and then to translate that into a habit of thought and action. This meme is a step in the right direction. It has been shared more than 80,000 times on Facebook. I don’t have to be persuaded by psychologists, because the truth of the claim about friendship is evident in the lives of people all around me. And the ugly counterexamples among my acquaintances further demonstrate the truth! Even on Facebook, I am always seeing people post status updates about how their spouses are their best friends. May my single friends read those status updates! May they notice them and find the healthy pattern!

Are you married to your best friend? Tell Facebook! Better yet, tell your friends, so they know what the foundation of your marriage really is. They may not know! They may think you are trading sex for cooking. They may think you married for infatuation! For the past few decades we have all but forgotten what makes a good marriage, and it is hurting us. But now, we need to get serious.

The all-you-can-eat buffet is quintessentially American. We are a cafeteria society. You’ve heard the term “cafeteria Catholic.” It refers to someone who picks and chooses whatever he considers the more appealing parts of Catholic doctrine and leaves the rest. Think Joe Biden at the Vice-Presidential debate: he really goes for that “social teaching”, but he thinks of the pro-life stuff as totally optional and not really his thing.

We’re cafeteria everything! And not a Latin-American cafeteria, where you go through the line, pick your choice of meat, choice of starch, choice of vegetable, choice of dessert, and then pay for whatever you picked. We’re like my college dining hall. A hundred distinct food items sit up at the front of the room along with an endless supply of plates, and kids make three or four trips. You can put one slice of mushroom on a plate, and one piece of ravioli to try. Or why not take a full plate of the ravioli? If you don’t like it, you can throw it all away and go back for a hamburger instead. Actually, you can throw away the hamburger, too, when you realize that you’d rather just fill up on peach cobbler and ice cream. And when the dining hall management says they can meet the students’ demands for costly cage-free eggs only if they get rid of something else, there’s a huge uproar! We want the cage-free eggs AND the natural peanut butter AND the waffle bar AND the feta cheese AND the make-you-own-stir-fry with the array of twelve or so eastern spices!

(And we all complained about the crummy cafeteria food even though I really don’t know of any other college cafeterias that put out the likes of natural peanut butter and cage-free eggs and feta. Even the Commons at Yale University had fewer lunch meat and bread options in the sandwich line than my little college.)

But isn’t this our approach to everything? (Not to over-simplify. Ahem.) “I’m just attending this church until I find someplace I really like.” Or our involvement eyes are bigger than our involvement stomachs and we end up throwing away commitments left and right. Or we keep them and realize too late that we’ve made a whole meal out of fried things and dessert and we forgot to go get the entrée of a job or a marriage or a set of friends who are likely to be around for a few years. Friends come and go. Incredible relationships are almost assumed to be temporary. All the choice makes it hard to commit to a job, to a spouse, to a church. Instead we commit to para-church groups, we go on dates and dabble in mismatched relationships because it seems like there’s no downside to that, we do internships because we don’t want to get stuck someplace. We say to ourselves, “Oh, no, I’m not going to be in Cincinnati two years from now.” And we complain that we can’t find the perfect job, perfect church, perfect spouse.

What if we just don’t realize that the guy or gal we’re such great pals with is actually not available in those other cafeterias we are imagining, and we’ve got it pretty good as marriage set ups go? My friend’s job may not speak to his soul, but if he’s getting $40,000 a year when a lot of others are playing employment Frogger, maybe he shouldn’t be too anxious to empty that plate and start over. Maybe the kid who has collected five different campus ministries thinks it’s cool to have one group for the games, another for the discussions, another for the music. You don’t owe much to the sampler of cafeteria food. No one thing is responsible for sustaining you and there’s always more out there. But I saw a sign recently in a restaurant insisting that customers clean their plates. Maybe something is owed to the food after all? What if the others in each of those five Christian groups are trying to form communities and build strong relationships? Isn’t that kid’s dabbling actually taking something from the experience of the others in the groups?

Alright. All analogies are flawed. I like this one. Feel free to point out flaws, and maybe it can be refined! (Or, you know, dumped in the trash. Surely there’s a whole buffet full of analogies!)

(So let’s call the whole thing off!)

Read this article. It is a lot like another I linked to a while back, in an entry I titled “I think gender is a zero-sum game“. I don’t have much more to say here than I’ve said before. Bennett argues that the advancement of women has been bad for men. He needs to use some statistics a little more carefully, but his point is not unsubstantiated. I think his conclusion is spot-on.

Here’s some from the end of the piece:

Movies are filled with stories of men who refuse to grow up and refuse to take responsibility in relationships. Men, some obsessed with sex, treat women as toys to be discarded when things get complicated. Through all these different and conflicting signals, our boys must decipher what it means to be a man, and for many of them it is harder to figure out. For boys to become men, they need to be guided through advice, habit, instruction, example and correction. It is true in all ages. . . .We need to respond to this culture that sends confusing signals to young men, a culture that is agnostic about what it wants men to be, with a clear and achievable notion of manhood.

We have left young men and young women without guidance, not just about who they are, but about who they should be. We’ve abandoned them.

How many times do we say “it doesn’t mean anything” before we are willing to accept that even our protestations are now evidence that it (whatever it is) DOES mean something?

Apparently, women don’t contribute to Wikipedia. Apparently, we’re surprised. Apparently, it is a problem. Read the New York Times article.

Thirteen percent of Wikipedia’s contributors are women. Why? The article suggests that boys write more about boy topics (like action figures) than girls write about girl topics (friendship bracelets). I think it is possible that there is simply more to say about action figures than about friendship bracelets. Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, says, in the article, “Everyone brings their crumb of information to the table…If they are not at the table, we don’t benefit from their crumb.” She echoes a common, and valid, argument: women, as a differently situated social group, have a lot to contribute to the great conversation of mankind. They have different subjective perspectives as well as access to different knowledge and information. Boys don’t know much about those little bracelets.

But is that the reason we need more women’s voices in the public forum? We need to know more about friendship bracelets?

The article observes that Wikipedia’s female participation rate is similar to that of many other public fora.  Pundits, op-ed columnists, and politicians tend to be male. In the wider world beyond Wikis, we can speculate that men are keeping women from participating in public discourse.

But what about Wikipedia? It is open to anyone who wants to be there. Faced with these numbers, commentators cast about for explanations: something about Wikipedia is latently patriarchal. Women have been trained to feel their views aren’t wanted. If only elementary school science teachers could convince girls to love engineering we wouldn’t be in this mess! 

What if Wikipedia reflects some generalized truth about the feminine character? What if we simply don’t want to be part of public discourse? What if we prefer to talk about politics in person, with our families and friends? What if we prefer to show our friends how to make friendship bracelets?

I’d like it if we stopped complaining that women aren’t acting enough like men and started affirming the activities women choose to pursue and the contributions that they make to society in “traditionally feminine” areas. The devaluation of activities and manners women prefer is an especially insidious form of repression, maybe. Some feminists find the feminine worthless. If femininity is more than a social construct, the feminists may be doing more harm than the patriarchal society they are fighting.