The .Plan

Last week, Time magazine reported on an alleged “pregnancy pact”, prompted by an epidemic of 17 pregnant girls at one 1,200-student high school, a spike in the pregnancy rate at 4 times the usual. Subsequent investigation failed to uncover evidence of a “pact”, and the article was more or less retracted. Whether there was or was not a pact seems to be missing the point. Chris Rock, along the lines of his stellar performance in Bigger and Blacker, might wonder out loud why — in light of national data that places pregnancy rates among teenage blacks and Latinas at 70-80 per 1,000 — a thinly sourced story about 17 girls at a largely white high school made the national news at all.

This is the kind of conversation I wish Barack Obama would have with the legions of dreamy-eyed evangelical Christians who think they have found in him a champion of the voiceless (babies) and vulnerable (teenagers), but somehow I doubt that will happen anytime soon. I don’t need for him to suddenly become pro-life overnight; I just want him to admit that abortion is tragic. Is that too much to ask for? Clinton had the balls to do this 3 years ago, but unfortunately she was way ahead of her time. Obama has probably learned from her mistake.

Humbly I ask thee: teach me Your will
While You are working, help me be still
Satan is busy — God is real
Order my steps in Your word
Please, order my steps in Your word
–as sung by the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir

Has it really been a whole year?

Roberts describes the difference:

We don’t always construe as promising the prospect of what we want. Sometimes we construe the probability of fulfillment as poor, while still wanting the outcome very much. If I am “absolutely set on” the picnic and the very reliable weatherwoman announces a 100 percent chance of dark skies and deluge tomorrow, I will be in despair… If I am visited by a fit of maturity, I can cure myself of this despair by resignation. What is resignation? It is a downward adjustment of the concern. Seeing that the prospect of a sunny picnic tomorrow is almost nil, I adjust my desire for the picnic: sure, I would still love to have the picnic, but I can live without it; I’ll plan something else. So now I’m no longer in despair. Resignation, then, is a sort of halfway house between hope and despair. If I completely cease to care about the thing I once hoped for, I neither hope for it nor am resigned with respect to it. If I continue to want it with my whole heart but see my prospects as nil, then I am in despair. To be resigned with respect to something in the future, I must continue to care about it, but in a mitigated way that makes me able to “live with” the poor prospect…

Resignation is a way of tolerating the future, hope a way of welcoming it. Resignation is a healthy option in the case of most of the things we hope for, but it will not be healthy if applied to the most fundamental of our concerns, the one that, according to Christian psychology, is essential to our nature as persons. To dull or downgrade the concern for the eternal kingdom, for a perfect relationship with God and neighbor, is to compromise one’s status as a person, to live a damaged life; it is a sort of spiritual crippling.
–Robert C. Roberts, Spiritual Emotions: A Psychology of Christian Virtues (Eerdmans, 2007)

Deliciously understated passages like the following make the new Roberts book an occasionally pleasurable read:

It is hard to be friends with an unrepentant cannibal. Even if he is not at the moment eyeing my musculature with a fond view to the tenderloins, still the fact that my tenderloins are the kind of thing on which he feeds threatens to spoil everything. I may not notice that the relationship is spoiled. For one thing, I may be so crass that I accept this mutual cannibalism with equanimity; perhaps I don’t have an inkling what spiritual friendship is. Dog-eat-dog is just the name of the game; what does it matter if after we’ve had some nice meals together, one of ends up in the other’s pot? Only I’d better watch out that if that happens, it’s me who makes a meal of him, and not the other way around. On the other hand, if I am not so crass, I may achieve equanimity by deceiving myself a little about the mutual cannibalism. I say to myself, “I would never eat him, for he is my friend; and I’m sure he wouldn’t eat me, either. It would never come to that. No, I’m sure it wouldn’t”. But the way to avoid all these doubts and troubles is to give up cannibalism.
–Robert C. Roberts, Spiritual Emotions: A Psychology of Christian Virtues (Eerdmans, 2007)

Is there no end to it?

In early May, Vumilia Makoye, 17, was eating dinner with her family in their hut in western Tanzania when two men showed up with long knives.

Vumilia was like many other Africans with albinism. She had dropped out of school because of severe near-sightedness, a common problem for albinos, whose eyes develop abnormally and who often have to hold things like books or cellphones two inches away to see them. She could not find a job because no one would hire her. She sold peanuts in the market, making $2 a week while her delicate skin was seared by the sun.

When Vumilia’s mother, Jeme, saw the men with knives, she tried to barricade the door of their hut. But the men overpowered her and burst in.

“They cut my daughter quickly,” she said, making hacking motions with her hands.

The men sawed off Vumilia’s legs above the knee and ran away with the stumps. Vumilia died.
–Jeffrey Gettelman, “Albinos, long shunned, face threat in Tanzania”, New York Times, June 8, 2008

Oh. My. God. Becky, look at his log file.
It’s so… big.
He looks like one of those biostats grad students.
Who understands biostats?
They only hired him because he looks like a total geek.
Okay? I mean, his log file is, like, 200 pages.
I can’t believe he even calculated… what’s a Schoenfield residual?
Gross. Look. He’s just so… smart…

I like good stats and I cannot lie.
You other brothers can’t deny.
When you get some data and you put it in STATA and it spits out a beta of ten,
You get sprung.
And you’re thinking hoorway,
Gonna send that to JAMA today…

Oh data, I wanna get wit’cha
regress and fit’cha…

More research on how choices overwhelm us, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In brief, the researchers from the University of Minnesota had a series of mall shoppers randomized to two groups: one group that was asked to consider some options (about college courses, or consumer products) vs. another group that was asked to actually make some decisions about these options. Afterwards, they had to complete a series of tasks.

Making choices apparently depleted a precious self-resource because subsequent self-regulation was poorer among those who had made choices than it was among those who had not. This pattern was found in the laboratory, classroom, and shopping mall. It was found with assigned choices and spontaneously made choices. It was found with inconsequential and more consequential choices… The present findings suggest that self-regulation, active initiative, and effortful choosing draw on the same psychological resource. Making decisions depletes that resource, thereby weakening the subsequent capacity for self-control and active initiative. The impairment of self-control was shown on a variety of tasks, including physical stamina and pain tolerance, persistence in the face of failure, and quality and quantity of numerical calculations. It also led to greater passivity.
–Kathleen Vohs et al., “Making Choices Impairs Subsequent Self-Control: A Limited-Resource Account of Decision Making, Self-Regulation, and Active Initiative”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, April 2008