RSS
Reihan has a post up, The Paskwotiz Family, where he praises the new documentary Surfwise. I first heard about this family a few weeks ago on the radio show On Point; the director of the documentary and a few of the sons were interviewed at length. Reihan finishes:
I get the point. I sympathize! But note that there’s no getting out of the “iron cage.” Mind you, I’m pro-modernity, pro-market. What troubles me (us?) about the Paskowitz story, which of course I invest with a lot of romance and affection, are the constraints on the kids – what was their context of choice, and how could they live full lives in a market society?
Reihan is alluding here to the fact that though Dr. Dorian Paskowitz has a medical degree from Stanford he doesn’t send his children (seven of them) to schools in keeping with his counterculture orientation. A month ago I posted When the weirdos are white, in reference to the state of Texas’ forcible intervention in the family lives of Fundamentalist Mormons. The intervention was clearly due to moral unease with the nature of the lives these Mormons led and the expectations that we Americans have in terms of our fellow citizens. As white Americans of no peculiar ethnic identity Fundamentalist Mormons were not shielded by the tendency of elite moderns to cut a bit of slack to the Other (the Amish are a more extreme case in their difference from society so more slack is given).
The reactions of the Fundamentalist Mormons and the Paskowitz family I think smoke out the contradiction at the heart of contemporary elite Western life: the simultaneous superposition of a disavowal of judgement & absolute values and an adherence to a set of standards which scaffold and guide one’s life rather rigorously (e.g., the “best schools,” the “fulfilling careers” and the “loving spouse”). Conservative Christians in the United States often see themselves as in contradiction to the values encapsulated by the dominant dispensation, and so I believe though they are often guilty of myopia they can easily elucidate the general outline of what they mean by the Good Life. In contrast, mainstream America, the pulse of which is defined by upper middle class professionals, the English gentry of our day, often adhere to a set of values implicitly and discernible only through the subtext of their words and actions.
Societies have norms. When individuals and groups violate those norms society sanctions them in some manner because of their revulsion at the violation of those norms. But many modern Americans have a tendency to mask the causal factor behind this revulsion, the transgression against particular taboos or beliefs & folkways held sacred, and talk as if in reality it was some more abstract and distant ultimate principle which motivated them. For example, the extraction from children from “dangerous” parents is to allow the children to “make up their own mind” and not be “brainwashed,” because after all humans with free choice and will always make the “right” choices. So you simply turn it into a general issue of individual choice as opposed to a specific reaction to an infraction against the unwritten moral law. A more more explicit exploration and discussion of the values which “mainstream” Americans hold might be in order for our society I would think. But then, I value transparency….
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
I looked at the economics of the FLDS here:
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/04/economics-of-eldorado.html
The bottom line is: Don’t let these people into your state. They are parasites. Once you let them in, it’s very hard to do much about them, as the failed raids of 1953 and 2008 shoe.
Steve, these are not Mormon polygamists. It seems to me that the Doc is a follower of Rabbi Carlebach, the singing Jewish Orthodox guru. Very nice people, and no parasites, they all work for a living.
Well said, Razza.
the Amish are a more extreme case in their difference from society so more slack is given
The reasons why we cut the Amish so much slack are complicated, but I don’t think it’s primarily because they are a more extreme case. I’d say it’s more that
– they aren’t a burden to others financially
– they don’t cause trouble for their neighbors (unless you count driving up the price of good farmland 😉
– it’s easy mentally for people to summarize the Amish weirdness as just ‘well, they want to live simply, like our great-grandparents did’. Lots of people who have hippie or crunchycon tendencies admire the Amish and occasionally express a desire to be more like them.
In reality I think they are more screwed up than most people think (see here for example), but people like to romanticize them.
Lots of people who have hippie or crunchycon tendencies admire the Amish and occasionally express a desire to be more like them.
Sometimes they even go completely overboard and conceive of them as noble savages who must be protected from our sinful world at all costs.
http://www.house.gov/pitts/press/speeches/040220s-amishtv.htm
bbart, yeah, i knew about the legal affairs piece.
I think this whole thing is an example of ‘libertarianism’, which with regards to kids is our reigning philosophy or paradigm, failing.
A libertarian is someone who takes economics really seriously. Per economics, there are a limited number of categories that ‘things’ can be in. They are either a member of society, i.e. economically rational man, a ‘private’ good, that can have positive or negative externalities, or a ‘public’ good, like a bridge, the police or the army. Kids just don’t fit into any of these categories at all.
I’ve only read two Ayn Rand novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and there aren’t any kids in either novel, and though all libertarians aren’t Randians, it illustrates the point, in that libertarian philosophy just doesn’t deal with kids because it can’t, so a ‘philosophical’ novel won’t have any kids in it.
They are certainly not full members of society. That leaves public or private goods. Unless you’re in Brave New World, they’re not public goods. Most libertarians shove kids into the ‘private good’ category, I once read something by Virginia Postrel, where she just says that’s what they are, it is the only place to put them.
But to use a more extreme example than the one given in the post, if kids really are ‘private’ goods, then Virginia Postrel would have no problem if the Smith’s next door kept their kids handcuffed to the furnace in the basement.
To Ms. Postrel’s credit, in this instance she’d probably toss her philosophy in the trash at this point. If she wanted to be consistent, given that she doesn’t actually follow it, she’d leave it there, and come up with a new one that actually describes how she thinks, but I doubt she’ll ever get that far.
… ‘libertarianism’, which with regards to kids is our reigning philosophy or paradigm, failing.
Not sure where you get the idea that libertarianism is the ‘reigning philosophy’ when it comes to kids. Pretty sure every state has an agency with some TLA name (CPS, CYS, whatever) that is charged with protecting kids if their parents are abusive or neglectful. And the limits on the powers of these agencies seem to be rooted more in traditional ideas of family structure and authority than in libertarian philosophy per se.
A libertarian is someone who takes economics really seriously
There are libertarians who come at it from other angles.
Per economics, there are a limited number of categories that ‘things’ can be in
This is a general problem of philosophy, modeling, reification of categories or what have you which is hardly specific to economics. Or libertarianism.
libertarian philosophy just doesn’t deal with kids because it can’t
More accurate would be to say that the proposals put forth by libertarians who are not consequentialists tend to be at variance with good taste and common sense. But there is a robust strain of consequentialist philosophy in libertarianism (Friedman and Hayek to name two). Rand is influential, but I personally don’t even consider her a philosopher, since she seems to have a total lack of comprehension of at least 400 years of Western philosophy.
The majority of economists are not libertarians. They just tend to be much more friendly towards markets and free trade than the general public (who might be described as “populist”).
David Friedman suspects that Texas had Sailerian reasons for grabbing the FLDS kids.