[BRIEF NOTE] Approaches to Rhetoric

When we were both active on USENET, autopope's posts on SHWI back in the last millennium were frequently followed by a .SIG written by one Geoff Miller.

Now let us peel back the foreskin of misconception and apply the wire brush of enlightenment.

This somewhat wince-inducing quote later appeared in Stross's excellent novel Iron Sunrise, excellent not only because a major character has to flee the Newfoundland Four outpost ahead of an unfortunate and unexpected nova. (Poor New Muscovite stellar meteorologist. Poor New Moscow, for that matter.)

The more that I think about this .SIG (i.e. the more successfully I get past the wince-inducing initial reaction), the more that I think that it actually provides useful advice to anyone interested in making arguments. Why stop halfway?

[META] Blogroll Notes

I've added Andrew Sullivan and Wonkette to my blogroll, along with pimpsophist's new blog Democratic Freedom.

[BRIEF NOTE] Homophobia in Toronto School and Muslims, A Statistical Artifact

Yesterday morning, while I was riding the subway to work, a brief article originally from the Toronto Star caught my attention. (The complete original is available here, having appeared on the front page of Wednesday's Star below the fold.)

In a cross-cultural clash of family values, Muslim parents at a downtown school want the Toronto District School Board to exclude their children from discussions of same-sex families.

But at a meeting last night, board officials refused to exclude Muslim students at Market Lane Public School from what the board calls "anti-homophobia education."

To allow some students to be removed from those discussions would violate the rights of children of same-sex parents, board officials said.

While the board has a policy to consider accommodation based on religious rights, "religious beliefs do not trump human rights," said Patricia Hayes, a rights expert with the school board.

About 150 parents packed a gym at the St. Lawrence Community Centre last night, but some Muslim parents leaving the meeting said they felt their religious beliefs were receiving less respect than homosexual families.

"They showed a gay lifestyle to the kids without the knowledge of the parents," said Mohamed Yassin, a father of three. "They’re willing to help gay students with support. Gay people have their rights. I have my rights."

Later that morning, listening to CBC radio in the morning as usual, on the Metro Morning program I heard the host Andy Barrie spoke with parent Yassin Yousef and Alimamy Bangura, a founding member of the Muslim Education Network. The interview is available, as streaming audio, here. Bangura favoured the classes, by analogy to anti-racism education. I'm not at all sure what Yousef wanted, his mumbling aside, as he talked somewhat incoherently about a variety of topics including the school board's lack of consultation with parents and the propagation of the gay lifestyle.

This last criticism--apparently the central one--mystifies me somewhat, inasmuch as the "anti-homophobia education" didn't deal with same-sex families per se but rather with children who have same-sex parents and who have apparently been subject to bullying because of their parents. Surely even people hostile to same-sex marriage and parenting would agree that the children shouldn't be harassed? (I'm a perennial optimist.) Regardless, both Premier McGuinty and the Minister of Education, Gerald Kennedy have both said students will not be exempted on religious grounds.

It's very important to note that the prominence of Muslim parents in the opposition to the anti-bullying seems to be largely a function of the fact that between 10 to 15% of the students at Market Lane Public School are of Muslim religious background.

"They are trying to make it a Muslim issue, but a Christian or Jew would feel the same," Omer Amir, a parent of a 5-year-old at the school, said.

And indeed, although neither Christianity nor Judaism is uniformly hostile to same-sex parents (and, for that matter, Islam isn't), the Toronto Star's forum on the subject is worth visiting. Most of the people who made posts in this forum hostile to the anti-bullying initiative are not Muslims, but rather Canadians of Christian background.

Homophobia isn't a particularly Muslim issue; it's a general one that, for a variety of contingent circumstances, happens to have stronger-than-average connections with Islam as it exists.

[NON BLOG] Further Explorations

One thing that I realized last night, in the course of my final psychotherapy session, is that I really haven't explored much of Toronto beyond a narrow band around Parkdale and Queen Street West and Yonge Street, most recently Bloor Street West to Ossington. I suppose that this bias of mine is an unconscious legacy of my past patterns of visits and current networks of friends. I really need to go further. I've heard good things about College, so perhaps there.

Tomorrow evening I'll be going to the ROM's Greece and Cyprus show, catching the Maza Meze concert and perhaps Dr. Cutler's lecture on Byzantine art, and thence to Church Street.

[REVIEW] The Fewer the Better? Wattenberg's Fewer

Earlier this week, I had a chance to read Ben Wattenberg's Fewer: How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future, an examination of how fertility rates are falling below replacement levels worldwide. I touched upon this topic back in May, in my post "Staying Poor and Growing Old in the Third World". Suffice it to say that despite the tics common to American conservative writers (blanket condemnations-in-passing of Europeans as inherently anti-Semitic, a boring praise of American virility-cum-fertility, and so on), Fewer is a decent enough overview of the unexpected global decline of fertility rates around the world, in every culture that has even begun to modernize.

Fewer's problems lies in its predictions, and in its policy recommendations. He recognizes that the elements of modernity and postmodernity have discouraged childbearing: consumerism, contraception and abortion, feminism, gay rights. Wattenberg is correct to note, I think, that population shrinkage--starting first of all in the developed world, then becoming a global phenomenon--will cause many problems. Pay-as-you-go pension systems, for instance, aren't viable without sustained above-replacement fertility rates. The problem with Fewer lies in the book's advocacy of strongly pro-natalist policies.

The Tofflers commented in their Future Shock that the only way to restore the conservative social climate of the 1950s, complete with its above-replacement fertility rates, would be to impose totalitarian controls. Romania under Ceaucescu tried this as part of a plan to boost Romania's population to the level of 30 million, unleashing the full power of the Foucauldian panopticon state on Romanian women in order to ensure that they were bearing children for the nation, in part inspiring Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. The results? The Catholic fundamentalist group Human Life International observed disapprovingly that "You will no doubt be shocked to hear that the first law passed after the overthrow of Dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu by the unelected National Salvation Front (NSF) government composed of senior Communist Party figures, high-ranking military officers, and prominent Romanian dissidents was to make abortion legal on demand! Not only did they legalize abortion on demand, they did it on the day after Christmas, December 26, 1989."

Googling, I found that in 1998, he debated demographic Kenneth Hill on the very subject of impending population decline. In Hill's article of 27 January 1998, he notes that the current situation of demographic aging and impending shrinkage isn't unique to our time:

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Net Reproduction Rate (a measure that combines both fertility and mortality to provide an indicator of long-term population growth) fell to well below unity in much of the developed world. In Britain, for example, the NRR in 1936 was 0.74, a level that would imply a population decline of 26 percent each generation and was below any level reached in the 1970s or 1980s. The rhetoric of the population-decline alarmists then was strikingly similar to yours. For example, Enid Charles, in The Twilight of Parenthood, wrote in 1934 that "in place of the Malthusian menace of over-population there is now a real danger of under-population." Charles blamed the low fertility of the time on what she called the "Acquisitive Society," in which children were "regarded as a form of capital expenditure which brings the parent no return commensurate with its investment value to society as a whole." "Statistics clearly show that the choice between a Ford and a baby is usually made in favour of the Ford." It all sounds very like Wattenberg in the 1990s, "Young men and women conceiving children ... are thinking about a good life for themselves, in quite new, modern, circumstances."

Pro-natalism--including pro-natalist hysteria--was particularly strong in France, where Paul Lawrence noted in his article "Naturalisations In France, 1927-1939: The Example Of The Alpes De Haute Provence (Formerly The Basses-Alpes)"> that "[a]larmist predictions were made about how, if the birth rate continued to fall, the French population would be less than 29,000,000 by 1985." The difference? Western Europe isn't the only region, and, admittedly, fertility rates in most countries are considerably lower. Then again, these regions tend to be considerably richer and more technologically advanced than Europe in the 1930s; they can afford to support their citizens' preferences for low fertility rates much more than western Europe in the 1930s ever could.

Wattenberg's logic is flawed by the unspoken assumption that children have minimal costs, unlike the elderly. In the long run, yes, children might be net producers. For their parents, children are personally expensive. In fact, children might constitute net losses for national economies before they become producers, consuming basic goods (and diverting production away from high-end consumer goods), requiring significant expenditures (education and health care on top of necessities). In fact, if a country has a high birth rate, ity has an abundance of workers that discourages technological innovation and supports labour-intensive businesses, diminishing national wealth. For whatever its worth, a recent discussion on soc.history.what-if suggests that Mexico's failure to follow Spain into the ranks of the First World might be owing substantially to Mexico's much higher rate of population growth, of course among other factors. Pop-demographers frequently talk about high dependency ratios, of the high ratio of the elderly in 2015 to the working population. What they forget is that dependency ratios also relate to children.

Further, Wattenberg wrote for the New York Times back in March 2003, that "[n]ations with low fertility rates, meanwhile, will face major fiscal and political problems. In a pay-as-you-go pension system, for example, there will be fewer workers to finance the pensions of retirees; people will either have to pay more in taxes or work longer." There is a third option, though: junking those programs, establishing economically viable pension systems, and encouraging the elderly to enter the workforce on at least a part-time basis. Modern medicine allows people to live long and relatively healthy lives, remaining productive. Unlike children, after all, the elderly are already educated and have proven track records of productivity.

The oddest thing about Fewer is that despite surveying the multiple reasons for below-replacement fertility rates, despite demonstrating that there are good reasons for people to prefer not to bear hordes of children at the request of Church and State, Wattenberg concludes that the situation is "unnatural." This sort of attitude is best expressed (if unwittingly so) by Human Life International, this time in relation to Serbia.

Feminists, on the other hand, heatedly charge that "propaganda" and "moral condemnations" are coming from the State and the Orthodox Church to increase the birthrate. They do not seem to notice that few are eligible to receive the Jugovic medals for mothers with four or more children when the average family has 1.77 children.

To illustrate the anti-child climate that permeates Serbia, Dr. Stoyan Adasevic did a study of 350 women requesting abortions. He found that in 92 percent of the cases their reasons had nothing to do with serious health or economic reasons, but rather abortion for convenience, as he says. After his conversion he would speak against abortifacients like the Intra-Uterine Device (IUD) to women in his gynecological practice and would frequently face hostile reactions. One said to him, "We are not farm animals to have large numbers of children."

That last sentence is the clincher. Last month, I wrote about the pervasive tendency in the modern world for people to have few or none children, and for these people to happy with this outcome. And why shouldn't they? Certain pro-natalist strategies--in particular, generous subsidies to prospective parents--might boost fertility rates, though if the experiences of Sweden and East Germany are anything to go by their effects will be ephemeral. People don't want to have children. It's natural for free people living in open modern and postmodern societies to not to want to be "farm animals" like Dr. Adasevic's anonymous patient. It's unnatural for people to want to radically alter this trend.