Late Night Laugh: The Aquarium

Inside the Middle East: The myth of linkage

From The Jerusalem Post:

Martin Kramer

Last September, when I arrived in Cambridge for my fall stay at Harvard, I opened the Boston Globe and saw this headline over an editorial: “The Other Middle East Conflict.”

I immediately said to myself: well, I know what the Middle East conflict is that’s the Israelis and the Palestinians. So what is the other Middle East conflict? But as I read through the first sentence, it became clear that I was totally wrong. The editorialist, or the headline writer, assumed that most readers would understand “the Middle East conflict” to be the war in Iraq. By the “other Middle East conflict,” it turned out, they meant the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, which was the subject of the editorial.

I began to wonder whether typical students, in a classroom, would know what I was talking about if I started discussing “the Middle East conflict” without defining it. And if I defined it as Israel and the Palestinians, would I be showing my age?

It also reminded me of something else that had surprised me: a 2005 National Geographic survey of 18-to-24-year-olds, asking them to look at a blank map of the Middle East and locate Israel, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. I would have guessed that Israel would have loomed largest on the mental maps of young Americans today.

I would have been wrong. 37 percent can identify Iraq and 37 percent can find Saudi Arabia not high percentages overall. But even fewer, 26 percent, can identify Iran, and still fewer, 25 percent, can find Israel on a blank map. Perhaps it isn’t surprising when one recalls that war has cycled well over over a million Americans through Iraq and Afghanistan as soldiers, administrators, and contractors. It was Ambrose Bierce who once said, “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.” Thanks to war, the Middle East of early 21st-century America has been re-centered away from Israel and toward the Persian Gulf. That is where conflict commands American attention.

But not everyone thinks it should. The last time I counted papers at the Middle East Studies Association annual conference, about two years ago, there were 85 papers on Palestine-Israel, 30 on Iraq, 27 on Iran, and only 4 on Saudi Arabia. Here, too, the skewing is conflict-driven that is, the judgment that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians should command American attention.

And it isn’t just the specialists. They would be seconded by Jimmy Carter, who was recently asked: “Is the Israel-Palestine conflict still the key to peace in the whole region? Is the linkage policy right?” Carter’s answer: “I don’t think it’s about a linkage policy, but a linkage fact…. Without doubt, the path to peace in the Middle East goes through Jerusalem.” Likewise, Zbigniew Brzezinski: “The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the single most combustible and galvanizing issue in the Arab world.”

This is obviously meaningless unless one has weighed all the other issues. Is it more combustible than the Kurdish question? Is it more galvanizing than Sunni-Shiite animosity? How would Brzezinski know if it were? I have broken down all Middle Eastern conflicts into nine clusters, and have appended them below. You decide.

But the bottom line is this: given so long a list, it is obvious that conflict involving Israel is not the longest, or the bloodiest, or the most widespread of the region’s conflicts. In large part, these many conflicts are symptoms of the same malaise: the absence of a Middle Eastern order, to replace the old Islamic and European empires. But they are independent symptoms; one conflict does not cause another, and its “resolution” cannot resolve another.

So the more interesting question is this: why is the idea of “linkage” so persistent in some quarters? Why are there still people who see one particular conflict as “the Middle East conflict,” and who believe that in seeking to resolve it, they are pursuing “the Middle East peace process”?

Some would answer this question by pointing to the world’s fascination with Israel. Unlike, say, the future of the Kurds, the future of Israel (and the Palestinians) fascinates the world. A conflict involving Jews, set in the Holy Land of Christianity and in a place of high significance to Islam, is destined to received more than its share of attention. There is also an illusion of familiarity with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. No one beyond the specialists can spell out the difference between Sunnis and Shii’tes, or understand why the (Muslim) Sudanese government is persecuting the (Muslim) people of Darfur. But many people believe (usually wrongly) that they understand the core of the issue between Israel and the Palestinians.

Others might point to the West’s self-imposed obligation to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In Europe, but to some extent also in America and even Israel, there is a perceived sense of guilt at having caused the conflict in the first place. There may be other conflicts that are more dangerous, but foreigners did not create the Arab-Persian or Shiite-Sunni conflicts, whereas the international community facilitated the creation of Israel and legitimated it by a UN resolution, along with a Palestinian state. Thus, many believe, the world has a special obligation to employ all means to bring peace to Israelis and Palestinians, by creating that Palestinian state.

Others might point to the fact that a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (and the leftover Israeli-Syrian conflict) still lies just around the corner, because it was once so tantalizingly close. All of the conflicts’ protagonists were regular guests in the White House and frequent guests of a succession of Secretaries of State. No one knows what it would take to end other conflicts, but there are “parameters” for ending this one. The United States theoretically has enough leverage on Israelis, Palestinians, and Syrians, and if only it were prepared to use it, this conflict could be ended, along predictable lines.

All of these beliefs are widespread, and they explain why so much attention and effort have been lavished on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But they do not explain the belief in linkage. It is possible to be fascinated by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, feel obligated to resolve it, and think it is relatively easy to resolve, and still not believe in linkage that is, that the success of your efforts will bring a greater reward across the Middle East, or that an absence of progress will have grave consequences across the region.

The concept of linkage requires another belief: that the Middle East is a system, like Europe, and that its conflicts are related to one another.

Europe in modern times became a complex, interlocking system in which an event in one corner could set off a chain reaction. In Europe, local conflicts could escalate very rapidly into European conflicts (and ultimately, given Europe’s world dominance, into global conflicts). And Europe had a core problem: the conflict between Germany and France. Resolving it was a precondition for bringing peace to the entire continent. Churchill put his finger on this in 1946: “The first step in the re-creation of the European Family,” he said, “must be a partnership between France and Germany.”

Linkage, I propose and this is my original thesis is a projection of this memory of Europe’s re-creation onto the Middle East. The pacification of Europe was the signal achievement of the United States and its allies in the middle of the 20th century. It then became the prism through which the United States and Europe came to view the Middle East. From NATO to the European Union, from the reconstruction of Germany to Benelux, Europe’s experience has provided the template for visions of the future Middle East.

It was this mindset that led analysts and diplomats, for about three decades after the creation of Israel, to interpret Israel’s conflict with its neighbors as “the Middle East conflict.” Like the conflict between France and Germany, the Arab-Israeli conflict was understood to be the prime cause of general instability throughout the region, as evidenced by repeated Arab-Israeli wars, in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973.

The flaws in the analogy only began to appear after Egypt and Israel achieved peace in 1979. From that point onward, the Arab-Israeli conflict moved in fits and starts toward resolution. Yet other conflicts in the region intensified. Large-scale wars erupted not between Israel and its neighbors, but in the Persian Gulf, where a revolution in Iran, and the belligerence of Iraq, exacted a horrendous toll and required repeated US interventions.

By any objective reading, the reality should have been clear: the Middle East is not analogous to Europe, it has multiple sources of conflict, and even as one conflict moves to resolution, another may be inflamed. This is because the Middle East is not a single system of interlocking parts. It is made up of smaller systems and distinct pieces, that function independently of one another.

The myth of “linkage” persists, then, because many observers cannot shed the analogy of the Middle East with Europe. A good case is Brzezinski, a man who did play a role in reconstructing Europe, and who has said: “The problems of the Middle East are conflated, and certainly the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Iraq are interactive. That’s absolutely a fundamental truth.” This is no more than a profession of faith, mere habit and analogy substituting for analysis. In what way are these problems conflated? How are they interactive? Brzezinski offers no substantiation at all.

The myth of linkage also persists because, paradoxically, the neo-conservatives embraced it. They, too, made extravagant claims about the likely effects of Iraq’s “liberation” from Saddam’s regime, which they understood as directly analogous to the destruction of Hitler’s dictatorship. Former CIA director James Woolsey, before the war, used precisely this analogy: “This could be a golden opportunity to begin to change the face of the Arab world. Just as what we did in Germany changed the face of Central and Eastern Europe, here we have got a golden chance.” But it may have been a realist, Henry Kissinger, who first claimed that ‘the road to Jerusalem will lead through Baghdad” that victory over Iraq would produce a peace dividend for Israel. Saddam’s fall hasn’t had any such effect, but such claims have tended to validate the idea of linkage as a principle that roads from here lead to there.

Finally, there is the deliberate effort by Iran, Al Qaeda, and others, to create linkage, or at least the illusion of it. In a bid for the sympathy of the fabled “Arab street,” they seek to portray the conflict with Israel as a supra-conflict between Islam and evil. The globalized Arab media such as Al Jazeera effectively do the same. Then various Pew and Zogby polls pick up the reverberations, and spread the message to Western elites that nothing interests the “Arab street” so much as Israeli misdeeds and American support for them.

Take, for example, this statement by Jimmy Carter:

There is no doubt: The heart and mind of every Muslim is affected by whether or not the Israel-Palestine issue is dealt with fairly. Even among the populations of our former close friends in the region, Egypt and Jordan, less than 5 percent look favorably on the United States today. That’s not because we invaded Iraq; they hated Saddam. It is because we don’t do anything about the Palestinian plight.

Carter, of course, has no idea what is in the “heart and mind of every Muslim.” He simply picks up sound bites from pollsters and so-called experts on Arab opinion. He then avoids the inconvenient fact that while the United States has been accused for decades of doing nothing for the Palestinians, its popularity in places like Jordan and Egypt has only plummeted since the Iraq invasion military action that removed a ruler, Saddam Hussein, who was beloved by the “Arab street” and Arab intellectuals.

I have called linkage a myth, both in past and present. It is a myth because the Middle East is not a single region. But is it destined to remain so?

I still believe Middle East is less integrated than Europe, but it does share one feature with early 20th-century Europe. Until now, the Middle East has had more geography than military power. States have been unable to project power very far beyond their borders. But the spread of missiles and, possibly, nuclear weapons, could change that, leaving states with too little geography and too much power. In these conditions, conflicts that have been localized could become regionalized. In this case, it would not be the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that would occupy the place of France and Germany. It would be the conflict between Iran and Israel, and between Iran and the moderate Arab states. Such a conflict could configure the Middle East as one region, collapse the distance between the Levant and the Gulf, produce arms races, spur nuclear proliferation and proxy wars, create tightly-integrated alliances in short, make the Middle East very much like Europe in its darkest days.

Whether the United States will act to affirm the pax Americana, by checking Iran’s rise, remains to be seen. Whether or not it does, but especially if it does not, the common understanding of “the Middle East conflict” seems destined to shift again. We may then look back with nostalgia to a time when the grandiose title of “the Middle East conflict” belonged to Israelis and Palestinians. The next Middle East conflict could be very different.

Clusters of Conflict

First, the Arab-Persian conflict (with its origins in earlier Ottoman-Persian conflict). This manifested itself in our time most destructively in the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, and it continues to inflame post-Saddam Iraq and other parts of the Arab/Persian Gulf (even the name of which is the subject of dispute). This is probably one of the oldest rivalries in the history of the world. It has been exacerbated by the bid of Iran, under the Shah and now under the Islamic regime, to restore lost imperial greatness and achieve hegemonic dominance over the Gulf and beyond.

Second, the Shiite-Sunni conflict, which goes back in various forms for fourteen centuries, and which the struggle for Iraq has greatly inflamed, both within that country and beyond. There is some overlap here with Arab-Persian conflict, but the Shiite-Sunni conflict also divides Arabs against each other, in Iraq, Lebanon, and the Gulf countries. The ruthless violence between the sects in Iraq suggested the savage potential of this sectarianism, which has some potential to spread to other places in the Middle East where Shiites and Sunnis contest power and privilege.

Third, the Kurdish awakening, which involves a large national group experiencing a political revival in the territory of several existing states. Over the past two decades, violent conflict generated by Kurdish aspirations has torn at the fabric of Turkey and Iraq. Kurdish groups have used terrorism, and states have used scorched-earth repression and chemical weapons against Kurds. Now that Iraqi Kurds have established a de facto state in northern Iraq, there is every prospect that the Kurdish awakening will generate more conflict, and that it will spill over borders, possibly involving Turkey, Iran, and Syria.

Fourth, the inter-Arab conflict among Arab states over primacy, influence, and borders the result of disputes created by the post-Ottoman partition of the Arab lands by Britain and France. In some places, these disputes are exacerbated by the inequities in nature’s apportioning of oil resources. The most destructive example of such a conflict in our times was Iraq’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait the attempted erasure of one Arab state by another. Other examples include Nasser’s invasion of Yemen and Syria’s occupation of Lebanon.

Fifth, conflicts over the political aspirations of compact Christian groups with strong historic ties to the West. Foreign Christian minorities were turned out of the region decades ago, but the Maronites of Lebanon and the Greeks of Cyprus have held their ground. In the 1970s, wars were launched to deprive them of their political standing, leading in Cyprus to de facto partition between Greek and Turkish areas, and in Lebanon to a quasi-cantonization. These conflicts have defied all attempts at final resolution.

Sixth, conflicts that arise from the quest of Arab states to preserve or restore parts of their pre-colonial African empires. The most significant conflicts in this category are the long-running war in Sudan, which has descended into genocide in Darfur, and the festering contest over Western Sahara.

Seventh, the nationalist-Islamist conflicts within states, which are the result of failed modernization and the disappointed expectations of independence. The costliest of these conflicts in our time were the Iranian revolution in the 1970s (Islamists prevailed), the Islamist uprising in Syria in the 1980s (nationalists won), and the civil war that ravaged Algeria for much of the 1990s (nationalists triumphed). Smaller-scale conflict has occurred in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and is now afflicting the Palestinian territories.

Eighth, numerous conflicts, centered in the Persian Gulf, generated by the addiction of the industrialized West to the vast oil resources of the region, and the need of the United States to maintain its hegemony over the world’s single largest reservoir of energy. The United States essentially keeps the Gulf as an American lake, using aggressive diplomacy, arms sales to clients, and its own massive force to keep oil flowing at reasonable prices. This has put the United States in direct conflict with regional opponents Islamic Iran, Saddam’s Iraq, and a non-state actor, Al Qaeda who have seen its dominance as disguised imperialism. In particular, US-Iranian conflict for regional hegemony has escalated over the last thirty years, and is now being exacerbated by Iran’s nuclear ambitions and pursuit of regional power status.

Ninth, there is conflict involving Israel, on three planes: Arab-Israeli (that is, Israel versus Arab states), Palestinian-Israeli, and Iranian-Israeli. The Arab-Israeli conflict produced a series of four inter-state wars in each of the four decades beginning in 1948. But since Egypt’s peace with Israel, three decades ago, there have been no general Arab-Israeli wars, and Israel has negotiated formal or de facto agreements or understandings with neighboring states. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict periodically erupts and subsides (most dramatically in two intifadas), and continues to defy resolution, but hasn’t led to a regional conflagration. The brewing Iranian-Israeli conflict isn’t about the Palestinians; it is an extension of the contest between the US and Iran for regional dominance. So far, this conflict has manifested itself in short but sharp contests between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

So Much For The Palestinian Spirit Of Peace

That didn’t last long…Ceasefire? What ceasefire?

Hamas says smuggling into Gaza will continue:

Smuggling into the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip will not stop, the head of the territory’s government, Ismail Haniya, said on Friday, threatening an already tenuous two-day-old truce with Israel.

During Egyptian-mediated negotiations, Israel “wanted to force Hamas to stop what they call the smuggling of contraband across land and sea borders,” Haniya told worshippers before Friday prayers.

“They also said that (the release of detained Israeli soldier) Shalit must be part of the truce deal. But we have not agreed to these demands because they are unjust and go beyond the capabilities of this government,” he said.

Reacting to Haniya’s remarks, a spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert underlined that the Egyptian-brokered truce explicitly stated that arms smuggling into the impoverished territory must halt.

“The agreement with Egypt states clearly that there must not be any contraband arms heading for Gaza and no attacks from Gaza towards Israeli territory by any of the armed groups,” Mark Regev said.

“Those people in Gaza who claim this is not true are seeking to weaken the peace,” he added.

Israeli security sources say Hamas has smuggled more than 100 tonnes of explosives into Gaza, including rockets and anti-tank missiles, since the Islamists seized control of the strip in June 2007.

As well a halt to militant rocket fire and Israeli strikes on Gaza, the deal calls for Israel to progressively ease its blockade of the overcrowded strip of land where most of the 1.5 million population depend on aid.

Israel has also been pushing for progress over the release of Israeli Corporal Galid Shalit, who was captured by Palestinian militant groups including Hamas in a deadly cross-border raid on June 25, 2006.

Hamas has repeatedly stated that Shalit’s release and the Gaza truce were separate issues and that Hamas would free him in exchange for 450 prisoners held by Israel.

For The Children: Why Marriage Matters

Consider this: 37% of children born in this nation are born to unmarried mothers. As the story of the Gloucester 18 pregnancy pact makes clear, not all of the pregnancies are unplanned for or unwanted.

From The Claremont Institute:

Over the past four decades, American adults have seemed more concerned with enjoying their own existence than with the generation and welfare of children. Kay Hymowitz’s Marriage and Caste in America and David Blankenhorn’s The Future of Marriage address the consequences of this failure to attend to nature’s scheme. The first book compiles Hymowitz’s essays, most of them previously published in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. Without footnotes or bibliography, it is less a resource for studying the issues than a lively discussion of the family today, which may appeal to those who are part of the problem but could be part of its solution.

Hymowitz contends that marriage’s separation from reproduction and its redefinition as a “state-stamped intimate relationship between two adults”—the work of the feminist movement and the sexual revolution—has made children “incidental,” no longer the focus of a union devoted to their rearing. Yet there is a vast divide between the educated middle-class women who are more likely to marry before bearing children and the less educated, frequently black, women who constitute the bulk of single-parent families. Hymowitz tells us that “children of single mothers are less successful on just about every measure than children growing up with their married parents regardless of their income, race, or education levels: they are more prone to drug and alcohol abuse, to crime, and to school failure; they are less likely to graduate from college; they are more likely to have children at a young age, and more likely to do so when they are unmarried.”

Soaring divorce rates and out-of-wedlock births (37% of U.S. births are illegitimate) have made ours a nation of separate and unequal families. On one side is the middle-class woman following a life script of schooling and preparation for work, leading to self-sufficiency, then marriage, and only then children. On the other is the lower-class, less educated woman for whom sex, babies, and life just happen. “Children in the top quartile,” Hymowitz explains,

have mothers who not only are likely to be married but also are older, more mature, better educated, and nearly three times as likely to be employed (whether full- or part-time) as are mothers of children in the bottom quartile. And not only do top-quartile children have what are likely to be more effective mothers; they also get the benefit of more time and money from their live-in fathers.

This is the same two-family nation examined in James Q. Wilson’s The Marriage Problem (2002, a work Hymowitz might have mentioned); Wilson depicts America, in Disraeli’s famous words, as two nations that are “ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.”

* * *

But is the picture so rosy for children on the upper side of the divide? In our no-fault divorce culture, these children, although born to married parents, often end up being raised by a single parent. In fact, the propensity to divorce is apparently correlated with two-income families; Hymowitz notes that “traditional families, with breadwinner husband and stay-at-home wife, had the lowest rate of divorce.” Women employed 80% of the time since the birth of their first child are twice as likely to be divorced as stay-at-home moms are.

In her essays “Dads in the ‘Hood” and “The Teen Mommy Track,” Hymowitz gives little hope for the renewal of a marriage culture on the inner-city side of the divide. The poor black men she describes are “neither searching for, nor expecting, durable companionship with the opposite sex.” One adolescent explains: “I just can’t see myself being with one woman.” But these young men do want children insofar as they provide status as proof of manhood, even though most inner-city dads come around with diapers and money only occasionally. Four years after giving birth, 80% of young single mothers are no longer romantically involved with their child’s father, who has often moved on to other women and babies. Compounding these mothers’ dilemma is the fact, noted by James Wilson, that “educated, affluent African-American men are no more likely to marry than their poorer counterparts.”

The “baby mamas” of the hip-hop song (“cause nowadays it’s like a badge of honor / to be a baby mama”) cannot be explained by the lack of sex education, says Hymowitz. The cultural mores socializing these girls include early sexual experience and motherhood, but not marriage. One pregnant 14-year-old explains: “All my friends have babies. I was beginning to wonder what was wrong with me that I didn’t have one too.” These words reflect a subculture which, “unlike elite culture, values motherhood over career achievement,” Hymowitz writes. But she concedes that “nothing could be more natural than a sixteen-year-old having a baby”—commonplace especially among African-Americans, though up until the 1960s young mothers were usually married.

The urge to reproduce is hard-wired into most living beings. There is merit in what Rutgers professor of anthropology Lionel Tiger asserts in his book The Decline of Males that these girls are choosing Darwinian reproduction over Marxist market production. “I am unwilling,” he says, “to accept the notion on face value that having a baby is less valuable than acquiring a law degree or a small business. It is not self-evidently better to become a lawyer than a mother.” Perhaps some of the women who followed the feminist script would agree with Tiger insofar as they enjoy market success but face an ever-diminishing chance of marrying and bearing children. In her essay “The End of Herstory,” Hymowitz observes that “there are no Feminists in the throes of fertility anxiety” and that an increasing number of mothers are opting out of the workplace to return home. The older career woman, who sacrificed her marital and maternal prospects, and the baby mama in the ‘hood, each responded to the message of her subculture. But both the baby mama and the single woman who uses a sperm donor to achieve motherhood are acting selfishly, treating babies as commodities to satisfy their own needs while denying them a marital home with two biological parents.

Revival of a marriage culture depends on convincing women on both sides of the divide that marriage should precede childbirth and that children need their biological fathers at home. This culture would re-stigmatize illegitimacy, reform divorce laws, and enforce mores that uphold sexual intercourse as the reward of marriage. Citing evidence of disgust with the sexual revolution and the determination of children victimized by divorce to do better than their parents, Hymowitz concludes that Americans are now “earnestly knitting up their unraveled culture.

* * *

For those endeavoring to protect traditional marriage, David Blankenhorn’s The Future of Marriage is an invaluable resource. The founder and president of the Institute for American Values, Blankenhorn is a forceful critic of the divorce culture. He analyzed the disastrous effects of fathers’ departure from the home in Fatherless America (1995). Now, he addresses same-sex marriage, thoroughly weighing the arguments on both sides. A self-identified Democrat and liberal who has frequently debated same-sex marriage advocates, Blankenhorn expresses concern—even anguish—at opposing their demands. He does so because he believes that to grant them would destroy marriage as a public institution dedicated to the production and rearing of children by their two biological parents.

Analyzing the historical record, Blankenhorn describes the origins, purpose, decline, and attempted recovery of marriage, and he demonstrates that the institution will be further damaged if same-sex marriage is made legal. While same-sex marriage advocates focus on the needs of adult homosexuals, Blankenhorn focuses on children:

What children need most are mothers and fathers. Not caregivers. Not parent-like adults. Not even ‘parents.’ What a child wants and needs more than anything else are the mother and the father who together made the child, who love the child, and who love each other.

To be sure, heterosexuals eroded this ideal, converting 1950s marriage culture into 1970s divorce culture. Today, more than 40% of all first marriages end in divorce (the rates for second and third marriages are even higher), and more than half of all U.S. children will spend “at least a significant part of their childhood living apart from their father.” But redefining marriage to include same-sex couples, Blankenhorn argues, “would eliminate entirely in law, and weaken still further in culture, the basic idea of a mother and a father for every child,” the precise purpose for which marriage was created. Same-sex marriage advocates deny this, arguing that sex and children are not at the heart of marriage, which they redefine as simply “a commitment between two people” in an “intimate, caring relationship.” This definition, says Blankenhorn, is “wildly inadequate.” He demonstrates that marriage developed as an institution in all human societies “to bridge the sexual divide, facilitate group living, and carry out reproduction.” Essentially, “marriage is socially approved sexual intercourse between a woman and a man” within a relationship structured so that “any children resulting from the union are…emotionally, morally, practically, and legally affiliated with both of the parents.”

Blankenhorn analyzes, for example, The Epic of Gilgamesh, the story of the institutionalization of marriage in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and the Laws of Lipit-Ishtar (1870-1860 B.C.), one-third of which concern marriage and reproduction. He presents a wealth of material from philosophy, anthropology, and evolutionary biology and psychology to show that “without children, marriage as institution makes little sense.” Some of his sources naturally stand out. John Locke, writing in his Two Treatises of Government that God “put strong desires of Copulation into the Constitution of Men, thereby to continue the race of Mankind,” defined marriage as “a voluntary Compact between Man and Woman,” consisting of “a Communion and Right in one another’s Bodies, as is necessary to its chief end, Procreation” and calling on them to unite their care and affection towards their common offspring, “who have a right to be nourished and maintained by them, till they are able to provide for themselves.” Anthropologist Helen Fisher puts it succinctly: “People wed primarily to reproduce.” Bronislaw Malinowski, one of the founders of anthropology, established that in every culture there is “the rule of legitimacy,” requiring a father and a mother for every child; “in all human societies…the group consisting of a woman and her offspring is not a sociologically complete unit.” “The human family,” says Malinowski, “must consist of the male as well as the female,” and because the “father is defined socially,” “in order that there may be fatherhood there must be marriage.”

Because the human infant remains immature and dependent for many years, notes Blankenhorn, helping the infant grow “into a flourishing human being is the most difficult, time-consuming, and important work of our species.” Human evolutionary adaptation met the infant’s need for constant care through biological innovations (e.g., unusually large male penises and female orgasm, with its accompanying release of the bonding hormone oxytocin) to make sexual intercourse more enjoyable and “bind together the man and the woman who make and raise the child.”

The material blankenhorn amasses establishes that far from a private relationship to satisfy adult needs, marriage is a social institution to meet social needs. Against this argument the case for same-sex marriage cannot stand. Same-sex marriage advocates’ crucial contention is that marriage will secure “social endorsement” for the homosexual couple. As Andrew Sullivan puts it, “only marriage” will assure the homosexual that “his love has dignity, that he does indeed have a future as a full and equal part of the human race.” But, replies Blankenhorn, accepting same-sex marriage means accepting same-sex parenthood, by whatever means a child is acquired. This will deny the child the very benefit marriage was instituted to confer on him. Blankenhorn characterizes Sullivan’s argument as “reeking of narcissism” and demanding that “we worry less about children and more about adults.”

The Future of Marriage does not predict the outcome of the same-sex marriage debate. Some developments do favor traditional marriage: divorce rates have declined slightly; 59% of adults believe it should be made harder to divorce; teenage pregnancy rates have declined significantly; and an increasing number of mothers are leaving the workplace to raise children at home. This last development indicates that some women are rejecting the feminist ideology that gave same-sex marriage its plausibility. But is this enough to make it implausible? Surveys show that younger members of the population are most supportive of same-sex marriage. This is unsurprising. As children, they were indoctrinated to be politically correct, non-judgmental, and accepting of the feminist teaching that there are no important differences between the sexes. Although they believe that divorce hurts children, many reject the importance of child-rearing by both father and mother, perhaps because they grew up knowing many single-parent families and two-income families.

Blankenhorn himself bows to political correctness in using the female pronoun as a general referent. Why would the author of Fatherless America adopt this academic conceit and patronize the feminist belief in ongoing female oppression? He knows that our problem is to fortify the declining male, not the ascending female. Young women, who graduate from college at much higher rates than men and earn more than men in our largest cities, do not need to have the female pronoun waved in support of their cause.

Blankenhorn opposes same-sex marriage reluctantly. His diffidence is suggested by phrases like “Dear Reader” and “Gentle Reader,” which almost beg the audience to indulge a dubious narrator. His work, based on vast research and compelling analysis, needs no indulgence. He seeks it perhaps because he believes that “gay marriage would reaffirm society’s commitment to social justice and equal treatment under the law.” He fears, then, that he is arguing for a denial of equal justice. He is not. Refusing a benefit to those who lack the qualifications for receiving it is not a denial of equal treatment, and Blankenhorn demonstrates beyond doubt that homosexuals are unqualified for the defining duties of marriage.

F. Carolyn Graglia is author of Domestic Tranquility: A Brief Against Feminism (Spence Publishing Co.).

“…the way I THINK has changed”

The Atlantic:

“Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

Is Google making us stupid?

“Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits, conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:

It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”

“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler, Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”

As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”

The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.

The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.

The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. And that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, The New York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts, its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.

Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.

About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists. With the approval of Midvale’s owners, he recruited a group of factory hands, set them to work on various metalworking machines, and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the operations of the machines. By breaking down every job into a sequence of small, discrete steps and then testing different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of precise instructions—an “algorithm,” we might say today—for how each worker should work. Midvale’s employees grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into little more than automatons, but the factory’s productivity soared.

More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher. Taylor’s tight industrial choreography—his “system,” as he liked to call it—was embraced by manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the world. Seeking maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure the jobs of their workers. The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.” Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency. “In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.”

Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”

Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.

The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.

Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”

Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of computer scientists in their employ. A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to use technology, in Eric Schmidt’s words, “to solve problems that have never been solved before,” and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there. Why wouldn’t Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it?

Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

Maybe I’m just a worrywart. Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).

The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.

So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

I’m haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.