The Nature of Things

"Must women 'civilize' men?" Joan Walsh asks in her column today in Salon.com . After all, it is the position of many conservative thinkers (See Charles Murray) and politicians (See Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney, et. al.) that this is the role of women in society. That it is the only role they should play in society. They must stay home, tend the fires, raise the kids, and be there whenever their husbands want them. This is the basis of all human civilization and when women seek to play any other role, that civilization begins to break down. In this worldview, all the problems of our society today can be traced back to women trying to break out of the mold that genetics put them into, and everything would be fine again if women would just shut up and fit themselves back into that mold. And why should it be women's responsibility to provide that civilizing influence? Are men such wild and base creatures that they have no instinct for civilized behavior on their own?...

Two iconic literary characters of this time of year are essentially mirror images of each other. George Bailey is the ultimate self-sacrificing good citizen. His first sacrifice is to jump into the freezing water of a pond to rescue his little brother. It seems from that point on, the trajectory of his life is determined. Whenever he has to make a choice between his desires and what would be the greater good for his family or his community, he gives up his desires and his dreams of world travel to serve that family and community. When the crunch comes, he questions all the decisions he has ever made and thinks the world would have been better off if he had never been born. Through the intervention of his guardian angel, Clarence, he gets to see that alternative life - or un-life - and gets the ultimate Christmas gift of learning just what his life has meant to everyone around him. He has really had a pretty wonderful life, after all. Scrooge, on the other hand, is the quintessen...