Recently in Culture Category

Alex e-mailed to me the remarkable story of Gaby Hinsliff, the political editor of The Observer newspaper in England -- or rather, the former political editor, inasmuch as she resigned because she concluded she couldn't have both a high-powered career and a satisfying family life. Excerpt:

Tucked away down a winding track on a remote Welsh peninsula, the farmhouse we rented for a family holiday last June was a much-needed haven from real life. My two-year-old son and his cousins ran wild on the empty beaches all day, chasing crabs through rock pools. When they all finally fell asleep in a sandy tangle of sheets, the adults cracked open another bottle and watched the sun sink slowly into the water. Months of tension melted away... until the night someone flicked on the television for the weather forecast, just in time to see James Purnell resign from the cabinet.

"That's the end, then," I said.

Of Gordon Brown, someone wondered? But I meant, of the holiday. The point of journalism is being there when things happen: the blessing, and the curse, of political journalism is that things happen so often. I rang the office, and started packing.

All the way back down the motorway, the car seethed with resentment. "Freddie NOT go home," said my son mutinously, kicking the back of the seat. "Yes, well, Daddy doesn't want to either," my husband muttered. Even the dog glowered.

And was that the tipping point? The moment I realised I couldn't do this any more, couldn't do it to my family any more, and would therefore have to resign from the job I loved? It would make for a convenient story if it was. But in all honesty, it was a slower, subtler thing than that.

Surrender steals up on the working mother like hypothermia takes a stranded climber: the chill deepens day by day, disorientation sets in, and before you know it you are gone. In the sleepless blur of the last three years, I can barely even remember now how it started.

More:

Every day became a battle against the clock. I never listened properly to phone conversations with friends, because I was always simultaneously doing something else. I was so on edge I raged at the tiniest delay - tourists blocking tube escalators, a computer slow to spark up in the morning. Running for the train in high heels, I sprained my ankle: the doctor prescribed some exercises, but who had time for that? I wore flat shoes, took painkillers.

My reward was that for two crazed but fantastic years, I did - in that loaded cliche - have it all: terrific job, plus small child. Thanks largely to a brilliant nanny and a hands-on partner, I don't honestly believe either suffered from the other.

But what got lost in the rush was a life, if a life means having time for the people you love, engaging with the world around you, making a home rather than just running a household.

So when my long-suffering husband was offered a new job in Oxford, involving the move to the countryside he has always wanted, there was strangely little to discuss. For years he had organised his own career to let me do what I loved, and now it felt like his turn. I closed my eyes and jumped.

But I never expected the emotional outpouring that followed. "Wish I had the guts to do the same," texted a junior minister, when I announced my resignation.

A seemingly unflappable PR confessed secretly agonising over "not being the kind of mother my son deserves": a colleague whose slick work-life balance I had always envied admitted she was "at the end of my tether", dying to quit.

Confessions tumbled compulsively from people I barely knew: tales of stricken marriages, miscarriages, only children who were meant to have siblings but then a career got in the way. "Too many of us once had relationships that we haven't got now because of this job," said a veteran male reporter, now divorced.

"I can't afford regrets," mused a cabinet minister, "because I've had this fantastic career, but..." Politics had, he said, dominated his children's lives.

I hope you'll read Hinsliff's whole essay.

Hinsliff is now writing a blog about her life as she tries to downshift from high-powered career woman to stay-at-home mom. Here's an excerpt of a recent entry:

I come from a family where good food and the rituals associated with eating together -- talking, arguing, laughing, getting drunk -- mattered.

When I worked fulltime, cooking supper marked the transition from office to home: here is something terribly soothing about chopping, stirring, spooning. But it was also one more thing to fit in, and sometimes by the time it was finished I was too tired to eat it.
So Henry has reminded me that now I have more time I want to spend more of it on food: cooking for friends, cooking with my son, maybe growing a bit more of our own stuff, and working out how to use cheaper cuts and leftovers.

After all, without a fulltime salary, there can't be expensive takeaways and convenience foods and nice stuff from the deli. But there might actually be time to eat without getting indigestion.

I don't mean to give the impression that Hinsliff believes she's stepped out of a stressful life into a garden of domestic bliss. She's struggling with a lot of anxiety over whether or not she's done the right thing, and getting used to life at home all day instead of being at the office. What Gaby Hinsliff did takes courage, and I bet she'll embolden many more couples to try it. Her blog is one to watch.

The lamest Soviet propagandist couldn't have made this up. Yves Smith:

It should come as no surprise that those at the top of the food chain get preferential treatment on all levels. But this still stinks to high heaven. Employees of the Goldman, the Fed, Citigroup, and other banks are getting H1N1 vaccine allotments out of proportion to what can be justified from a public health standpoint. In particular, Goldman has gotten more than Lenox HIll hospital, which needs it not just for the sick but more important, for workers (not only does the public need to keep front-line health care workers in as good shape as possible, but if they get the infection, they become disease vectors fast, given the number of people they see).

Then again, banks have become parasitic, so why should we expect anything different?

Can there be a more fitting illustration of something deeply wrong with our country and its government? I mean, for frack's sake, major banks are getting proportionally more flu vaccine than hospitals! It's almost a parody, with top-hatted Monopoly men smoking seegars at the front of the line, with their sleeves rolled up ready for their flu jab. But this is reality.

Libertarian writer Shikha Dalmia says Ayn Rand was right about so much, but fatally wrong about an essential aspect of human nature: the impulse to selflessness and compassion. This explains why she's a cult figure for younger people, but eventually is outgrown. Excerpt:

Most people read Rand when they are young and are deeply moved by her, only to outgrow her by mid-life. Her adherents like to blame this on the moral pusillanimity and irrationality of the readers. But the real problem is perhaps with Rand herself: Her ideology of self-actualization speaks much more to the concerns of the young than the mature--again, because she ignores the "other-interested" side of human nature.

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For example, under Rand's schema would a person who abandons some passion in order to look after an elderly parent have a higher or lower moral standing than someone who doesn't (assuming that the parents are equally worthy)? Will the former be happier? More at peace? Rand gives us no real reason to believe so. In fact, the distinct impression one gets from her work is that an individual's first duty is to cultivating his own passions rather than nurturing his interest in the flourishing of those around him (with the possible exception of one's romantic partner). No surprise then that the virtue of generosity or benevolence, though it has pride of place in the work of Aristotle--the only philosopher to whom Rand acknowledges any intellectual debt--occupies a second-class status in her own work.

The fact is that Rand gets harder to take as one grows older and concerns about those around us become more important than our own personal project of self development. The relentless, single-minded dedication to one's passions that Rand seems to favor requires a coldness of the soul, a narrowing of one's humanity--the natural interest in the fortune of others that Smith alludes to--that most people find is not exactly conducive to their happiness.

This has profound and unfortunate political consequences. On the practical level, it makes it difficult to build a strong and growing anti-government movement based solely on Rand's philosophy, because the older cohort of her followers is falling off on a regular basis. On the theoretical level, Rand's ideas offer no real possibility of developing robust civil society responses to address the needs of those down on their luck. It is difficult to imagine a Randian qua Randian, say, volunteering in a soup kitchen to feed the hungry, or even founding the Fraternal Order of Fellow Randians to provide free health coverage and housing to jobless and homeless Randians. Since misfortune and distress are a normal part of the human condition, a philosophy that offers no positive, private solutions to deal with them will just have a harder time making the case against government intervention stick.

The linguist John McWhorter wonders whether we might be better off in the end with only one world language. Excerpt:

Viscerally, as a great fan of Russian for many years, I am as uncomfortable as anyone else with the prospect of Russian no longer being passed on to children. However, I am also aware that mine is not necessarily a logical discomfort. Coming back to the Tower of Babel, can we say that the benefits of linguistic diversity are more important, in a way that a representative number of humans could agree upon, than the impediment to communication that they entail? Especially when their differentiation from one another is, ultimately, a product of the same kind of accretionary accidents that distinguish a woodchuck from a groundhog?

At the end of the day, language death is, ironically, a symptom of people coming together. Globalization means hitherto isolated peoples migrating and sharing space. For them to do so and still maintain distinct languages across generations happens only amidst unusually tenacious self-isolation--such as that of the Amish--or brutal segregation. (Jews did not speak Yiddish in order to revel in their diversity but because they lived in an apartheid society.) Crucially, it is black Americans, the Americans whose English is most distinct from that of the mainstream, who are the ones most likely to live separately from whites geographically and spiritually.

The alternative, it would seem, is indigenous groups left to live in isolation--complete with the maltreatment of women and lack of access to modern medicine and technology typical of such societies. Few could countenance this as morally justified, and attempts to find some happy medium in such cases are frustrated by the simple fact that such peoples, upon exposure to the West, tend to seek membership in it.

As we assess our linguistic future as a species, a basic question remains. Would it be inherently evil if there were not 6,000 spoken languages but one? We must consider the question in its pure, logical essence, apart from particular associations with English and its history. Notice, for example, how the discomfort with the prospect in itself eases when you imagine the world's language being, say, Eyak.

Maine voters reject gay marriage -- and the vote wasn't all that close, either. From the NYT:

In a stinging setback for the national gay-rights movement, Maine voters narrowly decided to repeal the state's new law allowing same-sex marriage.

With 87 percent of precincts reporting early this morning, 53 percent of voters had approved the repeal, ending an expensive and emotional fight that was closely watched around the country as a referendum on the national gay-marriage movement. Polls had suggested a much closer race.

With the repeal, Maine became the 31st state to reject same-sex marriage at the ballot box. Five other states - Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, New Hampshire and Vermont - have legalized same-sex marriage, but only through court rulings and legislative action.

Unless I'm missing something, in the 31 states in which voters had a say on whether or not gay marriage was going to be the law of the land, they all rejected it. Every single state. Even California, the national bellwether state on liberalizing social trends. Even Maine, in the most liberal region of the country.

You can come up with all kinds of theories about why this is, blaming the voters for being bigots, accuse the churches of playing dirty, whatever. The plain fact is, every single time it's been put to a popular vote (as opposed to allowing a tiny number of elites to vote on it), gay marriage has been a loser.

Do I think it always will be? No, I do not, in part because homosexuality is far more accepted by young Americans, and in part because heterosexual America has already conceded the philosophical grounds on which traditional marriage was based (which is why younger Americans are more comfortable with gay marriage). Nor do I believe that the voters are always right. But unless you're prepared to call more than half the country bigots -- and I have no doubt that many, perhaps most, gay marriage supporters are, and let that self-serving explanation suffice -- maybe, just maybe, you ought to ask yourself if there's something else going on here. And that maybe, just maybe, serious attention should be paid, instead of paying attention long enough to insult people who disagree with you as evil people who deserved to be excoriated and harrassed.

UPDATE: Linda Hirshman, no doubt speaking for millions of liberals today, is so sick and tired of what the people think about gay marriage that she doesn't think the people should have a say over the definition of marriage. See? If the pro-SSM left can't convince people of the rightness of their cause, they're perfectly prepared to see their views imposed from on high. Honestly, folks, I understand the case for same-sex marriage, though I don't agree with it, but look, if you're reduced to having to tell the public that they have no right to be consulted about the radical redefinition of a bedrock social and cultural institution, then you have a big, big problem.