Unbelievable:

The latest battleground in Israel’s struggle over religious extremism covers little more than a square mile of this Jewish city situated between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and it has the unexpected public face of a blond, bespectacled second-grade girl.

She is Naama Margolese, 8, the daughter of American immigrants who are observant modern Orthodox Jews. An Israeli weekend television program told the story of how Naama had become terrified of walking to her elementary school here after ultra-Orthodox men spit on her, insulted her and called her a prostitute because her modest dress did not adhere exactly to their more rigorous dress code.

The country was outraged. Naama’s picture has appeared on the front pages of all the major Israeli newspapers. While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted Sunday that “Israel is a democratic, Western, liberal state” and pledged that “the public sphere in Israel will be open and safe for all,” there have been days of confrontation at focal points of friction here.

Ultra-Orthodox men and boys from the most stringent sects have hurled rocks and eggs at the police and journalists, shouting “Nazis” at the security forces and assailing female reporters with epithets like “shikse,” a derogatory Yiddish term for a non-Jewish woman or girl, and “whore.” Jews of varying degrees of orthodoxy and secularity headed to Beit Shemesh on Tuesday evening to join local residents in a protest numbering in the thousands against religious violence and fanaticism.

When a man stands in public and spits on a little girl and calls her a “whore,” he has not only lost the argument, he has lost his soul.

Whether in Beit Shemesh, in Hamas-run Gaza, or in Afghanistan, why is it that you can almost always find out who the scum of the earth are by the way they treat women?

UPDATE: Similarly, I’ve found over the years that you can usually spot the scummy people by what they think of Jews. I’m not talking about what they think of the Israeli government, or the acts of individual Jews. I’m talking about how they view the Jews as a people. When I read or hear someone expressing anti-Semitism, I know that they don’t just hate the Jews, but deep down, perhaps unawares, hate all the finer things of the human spirit.

There’s a great new book out from ISI, The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry, a collection of essays about Berry’s thought. It features essays from many of the Front Porch Republic gang, and others. The editors included a piece from Your Working Boy, no doubt out of pity. I just finished a good essay from the writer D.G. Hart, who reflects on the by now familiar claim that contemporary Christianity should study Berry and learn from him. Hart agrees, but contends that Berry has been too quick to dismiss the institutional Church. Says Hart:

Indeed, one of the ironies of the church’s grappling with Berry is that his arguments actually have more force with Christians specifically, and theists more generally, than with the average agnostic who is on the fence about whether Creation is actually created. As otherworldly as Christianity may be in its promise of a new heaven and new earth, its official versions have always rejected as heresies — such as Gnosticism, Manicheanism, and Docetism — any version fo the faith that depicted Creation or embodiment as less than good or that suggested the body and the created order were unworthy of care and cultivation. The gospel may tempt Christians to flee the world, but the narrative of Genesis will not allow them to get very far.

Hart says Berry’s harsh criticism of contemporary Christianity may have a lot to do with the fact that he’s a Southern Baptist, and mistakes a particularly Evangelical view of the connection between the soul and the body, matter and spirit, for the whole of Christian teaching. Hart — who is a historian and a Reformed Christian — calls Berry’s critique of American Evangelicalism astute, because it focuses on how the Evangelical style is so amenable to a culture of rootlessness and a disembodied spirituality. Hart quotes from a Berry passage about economic exploiters (versus nurturers), from Berry’s The Unsettling of America:

The exploiter typically serves an institution or organization; the nurturer serves land, household, community, place. The exploiter thinks in terms of numbers, quantities, “hard facts”; the nurturer in terms of character, condition, quality, kind.

Applying this insight to religion, not economics, Hart, who taught at a conservative Presbyterian seminary, sees a link to Evangelicalism. He says many Evangelicals wouldn’t see themselves in this passage, because they believe they’re doing good.

But they rarely consider the perspective of the settled pastors who have to clean up or work around the religious debris left by the itinerant evangelist or the numerous religious entrepreneurs who compete for adherents and financial support. Evangelicals often think that their work is done once they have secured a person’s conversion. An ordinary pastor, though, is in for the long haul and feels compelled to shepherd those converts well beyond the first flush of faith.

Hart goes on to say that just as the church universal would do well to learn from Berry, so would Berry do well to recognize that his great allies are in the older forms of Christianity — Catholic, Orthodox, and Reformed — “that highly regards the rites, ceremonies, holy days, and patterns of inheritance upon which Christians for most of two millennia relied. But these forms of Christian devotion and ministry have generally been the healthiest in out-of-the-way places on the margins of industrial society.”

There’s a lot of truth in that, and I wish I could say it was entirely true. But there’s a part of me that wonders to what extent what Hart characterizes as the rootless culture and style of Evangelicalism has come to characterize a general American way of thinking about religion and religious difference. In Hart’s refinement of Berry’s account, the Evangelical church has become the handmaiden of industrialized modernity, because its theological particularities are especially amenable to a rootless, placeless, individualized way of thinking and living. What I’m not sure of is the extent to which these older traditions to which Hart points have managed to successfully resist what Hart, and Berry, identify as the spiritually and theologically problematic aspects of modernity. I know they have the resources within the traditions to mount resistance. But do their leaders, and their people, want to fight — or do they want to assimilate?

Megan McArdle is making me jumpy with her truth-telling:

In between the happiness of Christmas and the promise of the New Year, permit me to introduce a sour note, a hint of a scold.  If you’re like, well, almost everybody, you’re not saving enough.  15% of each paycheck into the 401(k) is the bare minimum you can get away with, not some aspirational level you can maybe hope to hit someday when you don’t have all these problems.

More:

Many people tell me they can’t save because children are so expensive.  Children are indeed very expensive.  But they’re getting more expensive every year, and that’s because we’re spending more money on them.  We’re spending more money on houses to get them into good school districts, on activities so that they have every chance to get into Harvard (or the NHL), on clothes and cell phones and video game consoles and the list is endless, plus then there’s that tuition to Harvard or some sort of even-more-expensive smaller private college.

These expenses are optional, not mandatory.  And before you tell me about how unhappy your child will be if you do not buy him all of these necessities, think about how unhappy he’s going to be if you have to move in with him.  Better yet, volunteer for some outreach to the bankrupt seniors whose kids wouldn’t let themmove in, and see how their lives are going.

This is not to criticize.  Saving is hard, which is why, just like you, we’re trying to figure out how to hit even more ambitious savings goals in the New Year.  And consumption is fun.  That’s why most people struggle to save very much.

I keep saying that I like Ron Paul and I’m glad he’s in the presidential race. He’s so refreshing compared to his opponents, and I particularly appreciate his non-interventionist approach to foreign policy. But he will never be president, if only because of the flake factor. I’ve put off saying anything about this latest thing about the racist newsletters, because I was trying to figure out my own position on the matter. Here’s what I think.

I don’t agree that this is old news that Paul has already dealt with. Yes, it came up during the last presidential race, but Paul never did give a plausible explanation for those wretched things. My sense is that he didn’t write them himself, but that he’s protecting whoever did. I find it hard to believe that Paul himself believes the things that are in those newsletters, but that’s not very exculpatory, given that they did come out under his own name. At best, Ron Paul was indifferent to their content. At best. My guess is that Paul is the kind of person who is so enamored of ideas, and the purity of his ideas, that he doesn’t pay as much attention as he should to matters he considers to be on the periphery — like, for example, the fact that some nasty people attached themselves to him, and used his name and reputation to spread wicked ideas. (Again, that’s the best possible interpretation I can come up with on the facts as we know them now).

Paul supporters want to believe that this stuff doesn’t matter, for various reasons, but I think they’re wrong, if only for this one reason: it reminds people that Paul is something of a flake. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, if he did not and does not believe the things written in those letters, the fact that he didn’t grasp how offensive they were at the time tells you something about where his head is, and is not. I wonder about the kind of judgment he would exhibit as a president. This fiasco about the newsletters reminds me how easy it is to like Ron Paul and want to see his candidacy go far: if you don’t believe he has a chance to be president, you don’t have to think hard about the kind of president he would be, in terms of temperament and judgment. Because to me, that’s the most damning thing about the racist newsletters (unless, of course, it were to come out that Paul wrote them, or in some way consciously endorsed their racist content): that Paul was at best indifferent to the garbage that was in them.

Despite this, I still am pleased with Paul’s candidacy, even though I’m not going to call myself a supporter (and note well, I will not ever call myself a supporter of any candidate, at least not on this blog, as a matter of TAC editorial policy). A few days back, Nick Gillespie at Reason blogged about why the Paul newsletter controversy may not invalidate his candidacy. He writes:

[Reason’s Brian] Doherty is right that the appeal of Paul in the here and now has absolutely nothing to do with the newsletters and everything to do with the fact that he alone among Republicans (and Democrats) is providing an actual alternative to the status quo. As Doherty says, in an age of historic and chronic budget deficits, Paul is the only candidate talking about actually cutting spending; in a country tired of war and unabated increases in military spending, only Paul is talking about reducing the size and scope of armed forces and redirecting foreign policy; and in a country that never embraced bank bailouts and monetary policy that abetted the asset bubble that fueled the financial crisis, Paul was the first person to talk about auditing the Federal Reserve.

He’s right. I am not a libertarian, but libertarian Ron Paul is the only Republican questioning the status quo. Conor Friedersdorf, in a long, thoughtful observation about Paul and this controversy, makes a lot of sense here:

How is it — some of you might ask — that I’d even consider a vote for a candidate who, at best, negligently lent his name to a racist publication, profited from the deal, and either never bothered to find out who wrote the offending material or lied about being ignorant of it? (To be clear, if I thought he actually wrote the newsletters I certainly would not vote for him.) I’d answer that none of the policies he advocates makes me morally uncomfortable — unlike his competition. And that he has a long history of doing what he says when elected, and no more.

“How could you vote for someone who…”

Isn’t that a thorny formulation? I’m sometimes drawn to it. And yet. We’re all choosing among a deeply compromised pool of candidates, at least when the field is narrowed to folks who poll above 5 percent. Put it this way. How can you vote for someone who wages an undeclared drone war that kills scores of Pakistani children? Or someone who righteously insisted that indefinite detention is an illegitimate transgression against our civilizational values, and proceeded to support that very practice once he was elected? How can you vote for someone who has claimed to be deeply convicted about abortion on both sides of the issue, constantly misrepresents his record, and demagogues important matters of foreign policy at every opportunity?  Or someone who suggests a religious minority group should be discriminated against? Or who insists that even given the benefit of hindsight, the Iraq War was a just and prudent one?

And yet many of you, Republicans and Democrats, will do just that — just as you and I have voted for a long line of past presidents who’ve deliberately pursued policies of questionable-at-best morality.

In voting for “the lesser of two evils,” there is still evil there — we’re just better at ignoring certain kinds in this fallen world. A national security policy that results in the regular deaths of innocent foreigners in order to maybe make us marginally safer from terrorism is one evil we are very good at ignoring.

Frankly, I think Newt Gingrich is a far bigger flake than Ron Paul. It’s just that he’s flaky in more conventional ways. And his flakiness, I think, represents a far bigger danger to the country than Ron Paul’s. But the awfulness of the other candidates does not somehow make Ron Paul a philosopher-king. We all want somebody pure to vote for. In the 2008 election, I found myself really liking Mike Huckabee, and blogging hard in his favor. Someone who read my blog, and who knew Huckabee well, wrote me to say that it was pretty clear that I wanted a Christian philosopher-king as president, and he was sorry to tell me, but Huck wasn’t that guy. Huck was and is a good man, but that I was projecting my own hopes and desires and frustrations with presidential politics onto Candidate Huckabee, and trying to make him into someone he wasn’t, and could not ever be. This reader, I later saw, was correct. I think a lot of Ron Paul supporters do the same thing.

But who else is there? Gingrich? Romney? Really?

UPDATE: You want to see a Gingrich flake? The light-in-his-pointy-little-loafers dancing elf, man:

(H/T: Andrew Sullivan)

The very, very, very good news from my son Matthew’s point of view is that across the street lives a 17-year-old girl who is a fellow Doctor Who fanatic. We invited E. and her boyfriend, a fellow Doctor Who fan, over yesterday afternoon to watch the annual Doctor Who Christmas special, which Matthew had recorded from BBC America. I don’t watch any of this stuff, but I could hear them in there having a great time.

Today I read in the Telegraph a review of that episode faulting it for being boringly p.c. Here’s an excerpt:

Worst of all was the misandrist posturing. The message, yelled at full volume, was that men are weak and women are strong. I’m not paraphrasing. Only women could save the acid-rain-threatened tree-people, the Doctor declared, though whether this was something to do with their two X chromosomes or the gynecological consequence of that was never (thankfully) explained. Even the rapacious, acid-rain-producing trio of alien humanoids appeared for long enough only to display men as useless (one burst into tears) and women sensible (the female acid-rain-producing etc instantly threw off her alien background to side with the protagonist, a middle-class 1940s mother). It was so narratively lazy, as well as politically predictable.

Since its reboot, Doctor Who has had two talented writers in charge, but both have flaws. Russell T Davies had a God complex about the Time Lord which became wearing towards the end. Steven Moffat’s politics are his own business, but when one of the most-watched children’s television characters becomes a cipher for Harmanism, then I object.

Again, I’m not a Doctor Who fan, so I have no idea if this is right on or not. I know some of you readers are fans of the Doctor (what you do call yourselves, anyway?). What say you? Is the Doctor politically correct? I heard gossip in my kitchen yesterday that Billie Piper might be coming back to the series as a future Doctor. All fans present, male and female alike, seemed to agree that would be totally weird and Just Not Done.

Quite a story:

Janelle and Jasmine Newswanger lead simple, contented lives in one of Pennsylvania’s Mennonite communities.

The 17-year-old twins drive a horse-drawn buggy, wear long dresses and white head coverings, and see their friends at church on Sundays.

Done with education at 14, after finishing eighth grade, Jasmine works as a teacher’s aide, and Janelle helps her mother around the house, speaking Pennsylvania Dutch and English.

The girls blend in with the people in their lives, set apart in only one way.

Janelle and Jasmine are African American.

They are among about 100 children, most of them black, born to women who were incarcerated at Pennsylvania prisons and sent by their mothers to Mennonite foster families in Central Pennsylvania as part of an informal caretaking program. About 29 remain in Mennonite homes.

The children navigate two worlds as they grow up in white insular cultures.

What a fascinating story. The little girls, you read, feel safe and secure and loved in their white Mennonite family. That is the most important thing: that they are loved, and know they are loved, and cared for. I have never understood the feeling some social workers and others have, re: the inappropriateness of white people adopting children of another race — as if the children will be deprived of something essential by not being raised by someone of their race. Yes, they will miss out on something cultural, and that’s not nothing. But it seems to me that more important than the color of the skin or culture of one’s parents is the love they can offer to children. This is a great lesson of the life of President Obama’s grandparents, and his relationship with them.

If my children were orphaned, I would much rather them be raised with a black (or Hispanic, or Asian) family that loved them and protected them than with a white family who treated them indifferently. It’s not even a question to me.

Anyway, the idea of black people worshipping in the Mennonite tradition is an interesting one. My Dallas friend Julie Lyons, who is white, wrote a really good book about her and her husband’s experiences worshiping and serving in a black Pentecostal church in a poor part of south Dallas. It’s a different version of the black Mennonite experience: someone discovering God and building loving relationships in community in a radically different church culture. Julie’s book, “Holy Roller,” really taught me something about the universality of the Christian experience, even within a highly particular cultural setting.

Um, Walter Russell Mead … what?!:

Moving abroad for your autumn years can be a fresh lease of life. It can also be a lot more than a change of scenery and cost of living. Retiring abroad offers potential new settings for community, cultural, business and humanitarian involvement.

Government policy should advance this idea; I’ve written before and still believe that the US should work out arrangements so that medical treatment overseas could be covered by Medicare, and that foreign banks who meet tests of safety and soundness would be eligible for direct deposit of Social Security checks.  For cash strapped older Americans, it means a retirement closer to the one they have been dreaming of.  For the neighbors, it provides new sources of income and employment — without costing the US a dime in foreign aid.

I don’t think he’s being sarcastic. “Potential new settings for community”?! What’s wrong with the actual old settings? Why would we  want to encourage people to leave their children and grandchildren behind and emigrate to a foreign country? If living in a condo on the beach in Costa Rica sounds like a much better way to spend your golden years than being with your kids and grandkids, then you’ve got problems that go beyond the ability of the geographical solution to address.

Fascinating (long) story from today’s NYT, exploring how two Aspies (people with Asperger’s Syndrome, a mild form of autism) navigate their romantic relationship. Excerpt:

Only since the mid-1990s have a group of socially impaired young people with otherwise normal intelligence and language development been recognized as the neurological cousins of nonverbal autistic children. Because they have a hard time grasping what another is feeling — a trait sometimes described as “mindblindness” — many assumed that those with such autism spectrum disorders were incapable of, or indifferent to, intimate relationships. Parents and teachers have focused instead on helping them with school, friendship and, more recently, the workplace.

Yet as they reach adulthood, the overarching quest of many in this first generation to be identified with Asperger syndrome is the same as many of their nonautistic peers:  to find someone to love who will love them back.

My oldest son Matthew is an Aspie, but right on the border with neurotypicality, such that it’s not obvious that he has the condition until you spend some time with him. Learning to live with him has taught me to see myself in a different light — specifically, to see aspects of my own personality that reflect autism spectrum characteristics. For example, despite being highly intuitive — I scored unusually low on Simon Baron-Cohen’s test, indicating that I’m rather far away from the autism spectrum — I have certain qualities associated with Asperger’s. For example, my mother tells stories about how intensely frustrated I could be as a child when people wouldn’t do what I wanted them to do. Often I had it all worked out in my head what the correct thing to do was — and I would usually, in fact, be correct, as a matter of procedure — but when things didn’t go the way I thought they should, I found it very difficult to deal with emotionally. My father, who was my baseball coach in the 9-to-12-year-old-boy league, said that at any given moment on the field, I would have it all worked out in my head what the correct defensive play should be, no matter where the ball was hit. But I was so anxious over the fear that the correct play would not take place that I couldn’t enjoy myself.

All this worked itself out to a significant degree with age, but it’s still ineradicably there. I think to some extent my somewhat stern moralism is as much a function of my neurological constitution as it is a matter of moral conviction. On the other hand, the unusually high level of empathy I have tends to be at constant war with my moralistic rigor — and this too (the empathy) is, I think, also an expression of neurology.

Granted, this is all armchair self-diagnosis, so take it for what it’s worth. Still, autism runs in families, and my kid has to have gotten his autistic tendencies from somewhere. As mild as his autism is, I can tell that what he has is only a more pronounced version of inchoate tendencies within his father — and that these are tendencies that I can see recurring in various members of my extended family. The interesting thing to me is that at this level, it’s hard to determine which of these are expressions of genetic predispositions, and which are matters of nurture, of learned behavior. In other words, are we pathologizing a character issue, wrongly ascribing what it a moral issue, or primarily a moral issue, to medical causes? Or, on the other hand, are we seeing what people in an earlier generation (and very many in our own) would see as a flaw in one’s character (“Oh, he’s so prideful, don’t you think?”) when in fact it is a sign of their neurological atypicality, and therefore not something under their control?

A pure materialist would say that our personalities are nothing more than the expressions of brain chemistry and electricity, determined in part by our genes, and in part by our environment. I don’t believe that. But it is not the case either that we can overcome, by force of will, the neurological inheritance nature bequeathed to us. Complicating the mystery — and this is something that you really do see and have to come to terms with when you’re raising a neurologically atypical child — is that there is no formula that predicts how autism-spectrum disorders will manifest in each person who has them. I don’t think it’s accurate to go much further than saying that there are tendencies; to over-define these things is t0 risk editing out part of an autistic individual’s reality because it doesn’t fit into a theoretical model. As I said, by most measures, there is nothing autistic about me. But living with a mildly autistic child, and learning more about the spectrum, and especially hearing my parents talk about the way I thought and behaved when I was younger (which sounds very familiar to me now, as the parent of an Aspie), compels me to realize that there are more autistic tendencies latent within me than I would have guessed.

Woke up this morning to the sound of soft rain on the roof, one of the loveliest and most comforting sounds I can imagine. It’s raining again, and the air is, as always here in south Louisiana, damp. The garden shop owner who sold me the Meyer lemon tree I gave Julie for Christmas — that’s it in the photo above — told me, “People who aren’t familiar with how wet we are come down here in the winter thinking the temperatures are an accurate guide to how cold it is. Then they get here and they’re freezing, because they didn’t think how much colder it would feel with all the humidity in the air.”

That’s true. The coldest morning in my personal memory was every morning I woke up in Anchorage those days in February. Other than that, the coldest mornings were spent in the swamp near the hunting camp as a child, especially when the wind was off the Mississippi River. That wet cold seems to soak into your bones. I’ve trudged through feet of snow in New York City and Philadelphia, and not been nearly as cold as I was in the swamp in winter.

Anyway, I love the rain, and the damp. It feels like England to me — or rather, as is closer to the truth, I have never minded the rain when I’ve been in England because it reminds me of home. There is something about the rain in Louisiana that makes me feel more myself. I am abashed to contradict this beautiful e.e. cummings poem, but yes, indeed, the rain here has such small hands.