Bill's Notes

In this post, Bill explained the pleasure a man takes in his lover's voice by, "A woman uses a different voice when she loves you, a voice that ends up hitting the same spot in our soul as the loving and reassuring voice of our mother's back when we were infants." This reminded me about the lullaby Hush Little Baby, and what I wrote about it a few years ago. It's my favorite lullaby, so I hope that you'll forgive me if I quote it here in full:

Hush Little Baby, Don't say a word.
Momma's gonna buy you a mocking bird.

And if that mocking bird don't sing,
Momma's gonna buy you a diamond ring.

And if that diamond ring turns brass,
Momma's gonna buy you a looking glass.

And if that looking glass should break,
Momma's gonna bake you a birthday cake.

And if that birthday cake's too tart,
Momma's gonna buy you a horse and cart.

And if that horse and cart don't go,
Momma's gonna buy you a boat to row.

And if that rowing boat don't float,
Momma's gonna buy you a billy goat.

Hush little baby don't say a word,
Momma's gonna buy you a mocking bird.

Mothers want to keep their children safe, but they can't; in the end all hope for anything from man must be in vain in this life, for as Jesus observed, we can't even turn one hair on our head white or black. We are weak creatures who will die. That makes God the only safe bet.

But more importantly, man can't find salvation from man. Ultimately we want to know not that we're wanted by men or women, but that we're wanted by God. We look for it in each other, but even if we find someone weak enough that we find it in their love for us, we eventually learn that it's an illusion. We thought we saw God, but it was just a person we mistook for God because we were looking through a glass, darkly. (Incidentally, I say week enough that we find it because strong people, however much they care, will never offer that sort of affirmation because they know, however instinctively, that it isn't theirs to give.)

Human beings can be many things to each other. Truly it is not good for man to be alone. But the real ache of our hearts is for God, not man. Unfortunately, for whatever reason filling that ache will not happen in this life. We can only soothe it, we can't heal it. We can't eliminate that fear we have of death, because death will come for us. But the good news that the Apostles started spreading 2000 years ago is that death is frightful, but it isn't final. We might almost put it that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and he saw that they were good. That is, he decided that it was worth it. The good news is that despite all that's happened between then and now, he's never changed his mind.

God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whoever believes in him will not perish but have eternal life; that's more than any man or woman can offer. Yet Christianity is a very ironic religion; one might almost say that it is a humorous religion: God's offer is what makes what men and women can give each other worthwhile. Jesus came that we might have life, and have it more abundantly.

(That being said, men and women don't marry in heaven but are like the angels; so one should not take even Christian marriage too seriously.)

I'm sure that no one who's heard the formulation, "The Lovely and Talented Ms Jane Doe", is under any illustions that her talent had anything to do with why the speaker said it. She may or may not be, but "and talented" is mostly just a CYA, if not a complete gloss. Yet this is related, I think, to the way that when we want to insult people, we rarely state what we think is wrong with them.

It's common when a man wants to insult a woman, for him to call her a "whore". The mere fact that she isn't a whore — nor does she do anything even analogous to selling sex — is really quite irrelevant. When someone wants to insult Michael Moore, they don't call him dishonest (which he is much to his discredit), they call him fat and unkempt (which he is, but with very little significance). That's even a more striking example, I think, because most of the people who insult Moore by calling him fat would never disapprove of their friends for being fat. We all carry the greek ideal in our heads, but most of us suppose fat people to be about as honest as anyone else.

What is it about human beings that when we wish to insult people, we reach for the most viciously physical (but plausible) insult we can find, however unrelated to our opinions it might be? Indeed, when we dislike someone, characteristics which wouldn't normally be insults will suffice. When you really want to shout your hate at someone, just take any significant physical characteristic. Is he short? Does he have a long nose? Lots of freckles? A cleft chin? Then it will do fairly well to call him a short, long-nosed, freckled, dented chinned francophallus! (That last bit of course makes it redundant to call him short, but as Jane Austen once observed, angry people are not always wise.)

There is the simple animal explanation, of course: as animals we prefer things which are like ourself, so when aroused any difference is sufficient as a means of pointing out antipathy. I'm not suggesting that we discount this explanation; a great deal of life can be explained by the fact that human beings are animals. Still, it doesn't feel like a complete explanation.

A while ago, the topic of why so few women are at the top of NZ Bear's blog ecosystem. It was perhaps a bit of an echo, or at least somewhat framed by, Larry Summer's famous remarks about possible explanations for why so few women are at the top of math and science at major universities.

Of course, why there are so few women in X, when the answer isn't "because they're not allowed" or "because they're biologically incapable of it" is usually unanswerable. This is because "why do so many people do X" is itself rarely an answerable question; each person has their own reasons and their own complex history which led to it.

The discussion got me to thinking about how I got into computers (I'm a programmer by trade). I originally got interested in computers from playing computer games, but it was my friend Tom who introduced me into programming. Having him around encouraged me to get into it. He never recommended it to me that I recall, except perhaps for wanting him to do something and him telling me in exasperation to do my own damn programming. But without question I was encouraged to do it; my parents didn't particularly want me to do it but they helped me when I asked (bought me a compiler back in the bad old DOS days, let me install linux on the family computer, etc.).

Then I got to thinking about why my friend Michael never got into computers. He's a brilliant man, truly brilliant, but he has no interest in computers (that I ever saw). What he likes is philosophy of religion. He has the aptitude for computers (or math, or science), but no interest in them. I prefer theology and philosophy myself, but I like programming well enough to do them for a living (and I prefer the idea of keeping my true love unpaid so I'll never need to worry about it). So why did we each follow our paths?

Certainly temperment has something to do with it, yet I think that temperment plays less of a role in life than many people think. People are very maleable creatures, to our own will as well as to our environment. I don't mean to discount individual nature entirely, merely to take it as somewhat more general than it is often given credit for. It's an appealing theory that everyone has a profession that's their natural end (I'm as steeped in platonic idealism as the next man), but I think that we overrate it because as humans we like things to be neat and orderly. God doesn't seem to have made us in a very neat and orderly world, though.

So if we leave temperment as only a contributing factor, and not necessarily a very strong one, we're left with encouragement and discouragement. Of the two, I suspect that the former is much stronger than the latter, and I think that this is where most feminists go wrong. They (whether intentionally or not) tend to emphasize discouragement. But we've all been discouraged, and most of us have had an awful lot of discouragement. I was picked on mercilessly from kindergarden until highscool (it has a huge highschool, so most people didn't know each other, but even then I was sometimes picked on). If discouragement keeps you from doing something, you probably didn't want it enough to do it anyway. Most fields are more discouraging than social pressure anyway. For example, programming constantly makes you want to throw your computer through your monitor; compared to the discouragment involved in programming, being picked on is easy. (And that goes ten times if you have to deal with users who discover bugs.) I suspect that every other challenging field is the same way, certainly both math and computers are.

What does matter is encouragement, but not in a simple way. Being encouraged into a field is not just a matter of someone saying, "gee, you should do this for a living!" or even of a whole bunch of people saying it. The encouragement which really matters is someone helping one discover the satisfying part of a field (C.S. Lewis or Chesterton might describe it as finding joy in the field). This is complex, and almost certainly dependent on temperment — there seem to be people who cannot be interested in some fields — but it's usually a key ingredient.

But here we run into something tricky: if people are indeed maleable, what they go into depends not only on what they're introduced to, but in what order. I'm told that if I kept up with my piano lessons when I was young, I could have been a concert pianist. Having given up the piano early, I'll never know, of course, but perhaps it was true. If it was, and if I had discovered the joy of playing piano when I was young, I might well now be a pianist and not a programmer.

And this is one of the subtle reasons why social expectations for women do play a role in directing them into some fields and away from others — given that most people expect women to like certain things and dislike others, they tend to encourage women into fields incompatible with more male dominated ones (in the sense that since most fields require devotion, most fields are incompatible with each other). The very maleableness which allows people to specialise into a multiplicity of fields is what tends to direct them into some when people expect them to go there — they're more likely to find out what's enjoyable in it before they're likely to find out what's enjoyable in other fields.

This is not a conspiracy; it's not malicious. Indeed, it's so insidious about it — it's the result of people doing each other good. We are not God, so we cannot create. Thus everything we call creative is also destructive — when we open one door we close the rest. When we paint a canvas red we keep it from being green. When Michaelangelo clears the marble away from the statue he sees trapped inside of it, he destroys every other statue which was trapped inside of the marble to do it.