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Saturday,
St. Patrick's Day. Begorra I have a lecture that begins
with the story of how my Viking ancestors used to raid Ireland for slave
girls. Then, somehow, instead of slaves they became wives, and next thing
we knew a celibate priest was telling us we couldn't leave presents for
the elves, and when we could sleep with our wives. This is known as how
the Irish saved civilization.
By now you will have figured out that Roberta is Irish. And the real
point of my lecture is that the family is the basic civilizing structure
of what we call civilization. Men are naturally barbarians. As Helga says
to daughter Honi looking at Hagar, "Think what he'd be like if we
didn't keep after him every minute."
Of course there is a price for this: the price is that many families
aren't very civilized to begin with, and things happen that we consider
bad, and then we break up the family in the hopes that underpaid civil
servants who care can find foster homes that will function better than the
original family did. This is known as putting the kid into The System, and
it works about as well as anyone not blinded by ideology would expect it
to: which is to say it should be thought of as a necessary evil at best,
but things become routine, and a woman telephones a help line to ask if
it's normal to get sexual excitement from nursing her baby, and ends up
with the police taking the baby to live among strangers for a month. This
is known as How Child Welfare Saved Civilization.
In the search for perfection are many sins committed. "Lend me the
sword of state and I will create a more beautiful world, because I care."
But that is no guarantee that those you get to implement your plan will
care as much as you do, or that they can then find others who care as much
as they do. In any event, Dr. Hume on child abuse as seen by the pshrink
is in Mail.
Of course the modern world refuses to believe that anyone acts from
other than personal motives deeply hidden, unless of course they are
zealots for making the world better. If I have misgivings about the way
child protection and Child Welfare Services and The System operate then it
must be because I have either abused my children, or wanted to, or have
repressed memories of having done it, or repressed memories of wanting to,
or whatever. And if I observe that the people who have four times failed
to fix my washing machine, twice because they sent the wrong parts, are
paid more than the people in The System and are presumably at least as
competent as those in The System, then I must have some hidden agenda.
I am not one of those who believes there is no role for government in
this world. If the government went away tomorrow my neighbors and I might
not notice for a while, but there are places within a mile of me in which
anarchy already surfaces from time to time; at which point no matter how
law abiding my friends and neighbors may be, we'd have to institute some
kind of government as defense, to quarantine the anarchy. And once you
begin hiring people to defend you, or organize to defend yourselves, you
have government. And as Adam Smith observed, there are those enterprises
with great payoff to all but little to any individual and those are proper
matters for government. I think with Jefferson that government is best
when it governs least, but I do not agree with Thoreau when he said that
it is even better if it governs not at all, and neither did Thoreau.
And that is probably enough rant for this morning. Happy St. Patrick's
Day.
Of course our President, in a moment of complete
nuttiness, seems to have invited Ian Paisley, a Presbyterian who makes no
secret that he believes the Roman Catholic Church to be the Whore of
Babylon and has about as much use for Catholics as --well the analogy
would be in bad taste -- to the White House St. Patrick's day ceremonies.
Doubtless Bush thinks he can charm Mr. Paisley. But a British friend sends
me this:
The Reverend Ian Paisley, for thirty years a
key figure in the Northern Ireland Protestant community, is to attend this
year’s St. Patrick’s Day festivities at the White House. This news
item brought to my mind a story from the late 1970s. ....
The British Prime Minister at that time was
one James Callaghan. “Gentleman Jim”, as he was known, was a back-slapper
— a bluff, hearty, can’ t-we-all-get-along sort of chap. He was not an
especially good Prime Minister, but everyone seemed to like him.
Gentleman Jim sooner or later had to go to
Northern Ireland and meet with “community leaders”. ... One of them
was Ian Paisley. Now, Paisley is a Protestant of the most fundamentalist
sort, founder of the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster. He detests
Catholicism, routinely refers to the Catholic Church as a limb of Satan,
to the Pope as the Scarlet Whore of Rome, and so on. At their meeting, he
delivered a long harangue to Callaghan along those lines, warning him of
the mortal peril their nation was in from the advancing armies of Popery.
Callaghan put up with it for a while, then,
when Paisley paused for breath, interrupted in his very best
oil-on-troubled-waters voice: “Come, come, Mr. Paisley. Are we not all
the children of God?”
Paisley: “No, Sir. We are the children of
wrath.”
The best of British Luck to you, Mr. President. I
suspect you are going to need it...
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