Today (4/30/2024) the Washington Post ran a guest editorial with this title, “The ideal number of kids in a family: Four (at a minimum).” The author is Timothy P. Carney, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs To Be. Carney argues that the more kids, the merrier. He writes, The best way to make parenting and childhood happier and less stressful is to have more kids, not fewer of them. . . . Smaller households, where the parents adhere to the quality-over-quantity… Read More
Continue ReadingLooking at Critical Race Theory
Arguments against teaching anything that smacks of critical race theory (CRT) are largely based on a misunderstanding. Perhaps this short primer will help calm the waters. Critical theory, in general, argues that behavior within institutions is shaped by structural elements that are not immediately conscious to the actors, and leads to harmful unintentional consequences. For CRT, the argument focuses on the continuing “enslavement” of Blacks by the activities of many social institutions, such as criminal justice, labor markets, housing, health care, etc. Critics of teaching CRT argue basically, that the acceptance of the systemic features of CRT points the finger… Read More
Continue ReadingFraternal Twins (Part 3)
Routines, Institutions, and Unintended Consequences Much of our time is spent acting within institutions without even thinking that our actions are being driven by a lot of rules and resources. From the moment of our birth, we are embedded within the structures of many intersecting institutions, and much of our time awake we act according to the peculiar structures that constitute them. The first of such institutions virtually all of us encounter from birth onward is family. Institutions are human creations. We create them by establishing their structure and keep them in place by re-embedding the structure through the actions… Read More
Continue ReadingFraternal Twins (Part 2)
Different Worlds—Different Human Beings Humans are different from all other species in many ways, but one that has been singled out is that we seek meaning. A corollary to this is Socrates’s warning that, “An unexamined life is not worth living.” Heidegger wrote that only human beings make an issue about being, itself. Only we ask questions about what it is to be? This could be interpreted, again, as seeking the meaning of existence. We are also unique in our ability to create and use language in our quest for meaning and generally to express our intentions and feelings, and… Read More
Continue ReadingFraternal Twins (Part 1): Introduction (Reposted May 10)
Fraternal Twins Are you aware that there are two of you? Two different people live inside your skin. One, cool and controlling – rational, too; T’other, empathetic, unlike its twin. The left brain offers a world, abstracted, Defined by dead reductions from the past. Because all meaning has been subtracted, You’re run by rules memory has amassed. The right brain connects you to the present Where the real you acts in the here and now. Unlike the rule-bound left, you can invent; Now, the creative, caring you can show. Our modern culture has suppressed the right. That means there’s little… Read More
Continue ReadingLying, the Left-brain, and the President
As many others and I have written, the real world always wins, in the sense that no matter how much we think we are in control, outcomes result from whatever forces are at work out there. Objects will always fall down, not up, when we drop them. People will behave the way their brains tell them to, no matter how we think they should respond to our commands. Even proven scientific theories don’t work when the circumstances depart from those from which the theory was deduced. Newtonian mechanics do predict the path of a cannonball, but not how electrons in… Read More
Continue Reading