What an interesting essay. I kept stopping to think about what you were saying. I also am really sore at your third grade teacher. What an insensitive buffoon. Only for Catholics (I am one) would that sentence make sense - it was grossly unfair of her. Good for your third grade self for attempting to reason with her. I'd still like to punch her arm.
Thank you and I love being reminded of that term "sore"! I was sore, yes. There were Catholic-Protestant tensions in the town I didn't really understand (and they handed out bibles on the playground that I dutifully wrote my name in, in the place specified) but I had no idea what anyone's goals were. Thank you for reading. :)
«asking the hard questions about what policies and cultural changes might be needed for more people to have more babies. [...] My own views are that preoccupation with scale, efficiency, and effective altruism are to blame.»
That view seems to me ahistorical and runs counter to the obvious historical observation that up to a point the poorer a woman is the more children she will have, which runs directly counter to the idea that it is a cost issue.
For the past several dozen thousands years of most western (and not only) societies being dominated by the matronarchy children (specifically sons) have been primarily and often solely retirement assets, the more the better, and were often raised in the cheapest way and appalling conditions hoping some would survive to maturity to be their mother's retirement providers. In modern terms "tiger moms" were the rule and matrons competed in having raised the most profitable and powerful retirement assets. What has happened in the recent past is two related things:
* Industrial wars require mass conscription of those retirement assets so in the 19th century the government of Germany introduced state pensions for women to reduce their resistance to having their retirement assets being sent to die in battle, and other governments followed for the same logic (in the USA for the same reason Social Security was initially for women only).
* Industrialization made it possible for both men and women to get jobs paid in money and for mothers to put a portion of that money in savings accounts and so replace biological retirement assets with financial ones, thus avoiding a series of health risks and physical efforts related to bearing and raising sons, and besides sons as retirement assets are illiquid and money is fairly liquid.
As "The Economist" pithily wrote quite some time ago in industrialized economies with financial markets sons are no longer an indispensable long-term asset but have become an option durable consumption item in competition with others like a nicer cars, a kitchen remodelling, a more comfortable holiday, etc.
My alternative way to summarize is that sons are no longer a necessary investment but an optional hobby and one that therefore gets delayed to the very last biological minute (or never practiced) by strong and independent women who maximize the satisfaction of their spending choices.
«You need extended family (aunts and uncles as well as grandparents). It’s desperate altruism.»
This indeed describes an optional hobby, not "desperate altruism". To make the optional hobby more popular it just needs to become so cheap that its cost does not displace the purchase of other durable consumption goods and services (like a newer car, a better holiday, ...). That means not just full-salary maternity periods, but free birth care for women, free healthcare fro women, free childcare for women, all state-funded; ideally free surrogacy for women too.
But the biggest opponents of all that are many women: those who want to maximize their financial portfolio and are not interested in spending on the hobby themselves object very much to the prospect of paying higher taxes to subsidise other women's reproductive hobby, and also consider that it is much cheaper to import the ready-made sons of foreign mothers who have already paid for bearing, raising and educating them.
«But boiling a baby goat in its mother’s milk is just mean [...] this passage was the basis for the kashrut law of keeping meat and dairy separate.»
The switch from a mere example that cruelty offends the deity to keeping meat and dairy separate seems absurd but I suspect that it worked like this:
* Most religions before christianity and buddhism were based on the idea that deities can grant wealth or inflict poverty and that they have appetites, so bribing them helps in getting wealth rather than poverty, and typically the way to bribe them was to "sacrifice" to them something (or someone), so the smoke of the offering would satisfy their appetite.
* Priests happened to be the provider of advice not just on how best to bribe the deity for the maximum grant of wealth, but also how to avoid offending them to avoid poverty. A matter of extreme importance because deities were usually depicted not just with greedy appetites but also easily offended.
* Therefore obviously the best priest was the one that proposed the strictest rules to avoid offending the deity. What if the plain words of the deity actually had deeper meaning and "boiling a baby goat in its mother’s milk" did not mean literally that? Who could risk just not doing that?
* So my guess is that first a priest said "to err on the safe side never boil any baby goat in milk" then became "never boil any meat in milk", and eventually "never allow even a trace of milk be near any trace of meat just in case accidentally the meat contain a tiny bit of that of a baby goat and the dairy have a tiny proportion of the mother's milk because if that happens the deity will inflict poverty on us".
In addition there are all the blood and corpse purity rules and then you get to 3 sets of crockery and pans and 2 distinct washbasins.
My guess is that all the absurdly strict food and other purity rules had a side effect of preventing contagion from infective diseases and so they persisted.
What an interesting essay. I kept stopping to think about what you were saying. I also am really sore at your third grade teacher. What an insensitive buffoon. Only for Catholics (I am one) would that sentence make sense - it was grossly unfair of her. Good for your third grade self for attempting to reason with her. I'd still like to punch her arm.
Thank you and I love being reminded of that term "sore"! I was sore, yes. There were Catholic-Protestant tensions in the town I didn't really understand (and they handed out bibles on the playground that I dutifully wrote my name in, in the place specified) but I had no idea what anyone's goals were. Thank you for reading. :)
Heard and read many vegan apologetics (and agree often), but Deuteronomy 14:21 is a new one to me (and satisfyingly short)!
Pretty sure donuts don't count.
Yeah I think you're right, it's telling us slow down. Everything, especially AI, makes life all about production. Reproduction is entirely different.
ZH
Thank you from someone who is always dying to know what happens at that conference.
Look at what eating road kill did to RFK. Not good 😆🤔😁🤮
Ha! Yes!
There was ice in the time of Deuteronomy - and a cold fresh dead fish is a decent meal. Obviously Deuteronomy needs much further interpretation!
«asking the hard questions about what policies and cultural changes might be needed for more people to have more babies. [...] My own views are that preoccupation with scale, efficiency, and effective altruism are to blame.»
That view seems to me ahistorical and runs counter to the obvious historical observation that up to a point the poorer a woman is the more children she will have, which runs directly counter to the idea that it is a cost issue.
For the past several dozen thousands years of most western (and not only) societies being dominated by the matronarchy children (specifically sons) have been primarily and often solely retirement assets, the more the better, and were often raised in the cheapest way and appalling conditions hoping some would survive to maturity to be their mother's retirement providers. In modern terms "tiger moms" were the rule and matrons competed in having raised the most profitable and powerful retirement assets. What has happened in the recent past is two related things:
* Industrial wars require mass conscription of those retirement assets so in the 19th century the government of Germany introduced state pensions for women to reduce their resistance to having their retirement assets being sent to die in battle, and other governments followed for the same logic (in the USA for the same reason Social Security was initially for women only).
* Industrialization made it possible for both men and women to get jobs paid in money and for mothers to put a portion of that money in savings accounts and so replace biological retirement assets with financial ones, thus avoiding a series of health risks and physical efforts related to bearing and raising sons, and besides sons as retirement assets are illiquid and money is fairly liquid.
As "The Economist" pithily wrote quite some time ago in industrialized economies with financial markets sons are no longer an indispensable long-term asset but have become an option durable consumption item in competition with others like a nicer cars, a kitchen remodelling, a more comfortable holiday, etc.
My alternative way to summarize is that sons are no longer a necessary investment but an optional hobby and one that therefore gets delayed to the very last biological minute (or never practiced) by strong and independent women who maximize the satisfaction of their spending choices.
«You need extended family (aunts and uncles as well as grandparents). It’s desperate altruism.»
This indeed describes an optional hobby, not "desperate altruism". To make the optional hobby more popular it just needs to become so cheap that its cost does not displace the purchase of other durable consumption goods and services (like a newer car, a better holiday, ...). That means not just full-salary maternity periods, but free birth care for women, free healthcare fro women, free childcare for women, all state-funded; ideally free surrogacy for women too.
But the biggest opponents of all that are many women: those who want to maximize their financial portfolio and are not interested in spending on the hobby themselves object very much to the prospect of paying higher taxes to subsidise other women's reproductive hobby, and also consider that it is much cheaper to import the ready-made sons of foreign mothers who have already paid for bearing, raising and educating them.
«But boiling a baby goat in its mother’s milk is just mean [...] this passage was the basis for the kashrut law of keeping meat and dairy separate.»
The switch from a mere example that cruelty offends the deity to keeping meat and dairy separate seems absurd but I suspect that it worked like this:
* Most religions before christianity and buddhism were based on the idea that deities can grant wealth or inflict poverty and that they have appetites, so bribing them helps in getting wealth rather than poverty, and typically the way to bribe them was to "sacrifice" to them something (or someone), so the smoke of the offering would satisfy their appetite.
* Priests happened to be the provider of advice not just on how best to bribe the deity for the maximum grant of wealth, but also how to avoid offending them to avoid poverty. A matter of extreme importance because deities were usually depicted not just with greedy appetites but also easily offended.
* Therefore obviously the best priest was the one that proposed the strictest rules to avoid offending the deity. What if the plain words of the deity actually had deeper meaning and "boiling a baby goat in its mother’s milk" did not mean literally that? Who could risk just not doing that?
* So my guess is that first a priest said "to err on the safe side never boil any baby goat in milk" then became "never boil any meat in milk", and eventually "never allow even a trace of milk be near any trace of meat just in case accidentally the meat contain a tiny bit of that of a baby goat and the dairy have a tiny proportion of the mother's milk because if that happens the deity will inflict poverty on us".
In addition there are all the blood and corpse purity rules and then you get to 3 sets of crockery and pans and 2 distinct washbasins.
My guess is that all the absurdly strict food and other purity rules had a side effect of preventing contagion from infective diseases and so they persisted.
I dislike the word 'altruism' - its ethical content is so 'thin'. It reeks of its origins as a neologism - albeit from a century and a half ago. As I explained here: https://www.abc.net.au/religion/altruism-economics-and-the-need-for-the-virtues/12605938
Actually I should explain my comment above by saying that I've not read your essay Hollis, so it's just a twitch you set off with your note :)