Father and Lather

I am a proud father, and now the proud owner of Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters, a book by pediatrician Meg Meeker. I'm sure it contains sage advice, but I've yet to read it from the beginning - I couldn't resist first diving into the chapter Teach Her Who God Is, because I thought I might learn something on that score. Wrong. A quick excerpt from the good doctor:

"...imagine you are walking out of [your sleeping daughter's] bedroom. Could you turn around and look at her and believe that the sum of her existence rests in a mass of cells? ...this is how a rank secularist [sic.] is obliged to view his daughter. She is nothing more than a genetic product of his and her mother's DNA. The puffing of air though her tiny chest keeps her alive. Your time with her is...purely a biological phenomenon. Her thoughts and feelings can be traced to neuronal firing in her brain... I can't imagine a father feeling this way about his daughter."

I can't imagine how this paragraph got past the editor. I - a "rank secularist" apparently - do think "puffing air", amongst other things, keeps my daughter alive (I would prefer "breathing", however, as inhaling is rather vital) - am I wrong about that? All mental events have been (or will be soon) traced to neuron firings - scientists call these the neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs) - are they wrong? Maybe it's just me, but I don't think of time as a biological phenomenon (except, maybe, when it's time for a nap!).

Zoe is indeed a mass of cells and a genetic product of her mother and yours truly. But "nothing more"? Well, physically nothing more, yes of course, but just because I am an atheist doesn't mean I treat my daughter as if she were a tree, which is also a mass of cells. Why does Dr Meeker think I do? Non-believers, believe it or not, have feelings too, you know! We cry, hug, get angry, think certain things are right and others wrong, grieve, love, lust, have longings and laugh just like everyone else. We have values and even think raising daughters right is important. Why do believers think they corner the market on this stuff?

"When you look at your sleeping daughter, you are confronted with a spiritual reality you can't deny", pre-empts Dr Meeker. When I see"spiritual reality " I am confronted with an oxymoron. Yes, I can and do look at my sleeping daughter with awe and wonder. Actually, I look at a lot of things with awe and wonder - like the fact that the brain contains 10 billion neurons, many with 10,000 connections to other neurons. Or Einstein's amazing 1905 output. Or the Eiffel Tower. Or the Rockies (mountains and baseball team). I love non-fiction because it's so much more awesome than fiction. But can't things just be awesome without dragging God into it? Does that add to, explain, enhance or amplify the awesomeness? "A man can banter with his friends about whether God exits. But a father looks at his daughter and knows." Knows she is going to be trouble at some point, knows he better start saving, knows he's got a lot of precious moments ahead, yes. But the argument from looking-at-one's-sleeping-daughter as a argument for God? Sorry, non-starter.

I do hope Dr Meeker doesn't think I am "rancid, putrid, festering" secularist, though. I do apply soap regularly - after all, I think it important enough to keep this mass of cells clean and sweet-smelling!

What To Do About It - part 2

Consider the Voter's Dilemma: No presidential election has ever been won by a single vote (even the most recent!), not could it be - we simply cannot count that accurately. So whether I vote or not, or who I vote for cannot possibly affect the outcome. So why bother to vote at all.

Before mentally crafting your reply, pause and think about the force of the argument. It is rather compelling. In fact, the only reason to vote in such circumstances is because there would be trouble if everyone took inaction as a result of that conclusion. We vote anyway because we want everyone else to, we want to do what we we expect everyone else to do. If we thought few other people would, in fact, vote, maybe we wouldn't after all.

In the prior blog on this subject, I promised part deux. And here it is, just making the point that, like the Voters Dilemma, there's the Global Warming Dilemma: whatever hybrid car I buy, trees I plant, energy I avoid using, etc., I couldn't possibly make a dent in the problem. So why bother? Well, if everyone... However, voting has become a norm - we know people will vote. GW is another story - we're not serious yet, we are nowhere near the "tipping point", where an idea suddenly takes off and everyone's doing it (e.g. listening to iPods). So right now, my sacrifices are for nought (or would be if I were making any). On this side of the water, anyway, someone besides Gore has got get the momentum going, grab the dilemma's horns. 'Cos right now, we're cold on Warming.

Signing Out?

As president of the board of the Listen foundation, a not-for-profit agency that funds auditory-verbal therapy for deaf kids whose parents want them to learn to listen and talk, I wrote the following editorial in our recent newsletter:

As I was approaching the Cherry Creek hotel for the A.G. Bell Oral Conference last month, a crowd of individuals wearing yellow shirts exhorted me to toot if I supported….well, sign language, I think. I didn’t toot. It wasn’t that I don’t support sign language, but I wanted to find out more about what this group represented. I later chatted with some of the group, who feel that children who are deaf have the right to learn the natural language of the deaf – sign language – and that should have primacy over listening and speech for deaf children. So I decided that perhaps I should take this opportunity to restate what the Listen Foundation is about:

We believe parents are the ones who have the right to make choices for their very young children, and that parents should make an informed choice – considering all options available for deaf children, from Total Communication to Auditory Verbal Therapy (AVT). We advocate AVT because we believe it is most often the best choice for families, since it presents the opportunity for deaf children to join with hearing children in common activities – learning, playing, making friends, etc. We are certainly not against children in AVT learning to sign, but not while they are learning language itself. Once a child is proficient at listening and talking, then he/she may chose to also learn sign language. We don’t think signing is wrong or inferior, but simply that very few people use it to communicate. Almost everyone listens and talks – why shouldn’t children who are deaf?

I believe the main worry of the yellow-shirted demonstrators is that sign language will disappear as more and more deaf kids learn to listen and talk, and that feels like the disappearance of the culture in which they live. And that would indeed be sad – ASL is a beautiful, expressive language. But that really doesn’t justify their misrepresenting AVT and “oralism” as unnatural and damaging to the deaf child.
This is not the first time the deaf culture has worried about its disappearance. The yellow pamphlets being handed out quoted George Veditz, who called sign “God’s most noble gift to the deaf”, and from 1910 to1920 put together a collection of films of signers signing, “so that future generations might see master signers of the past” [Gallaudet Library]. Personally, I think listening and talking is God’s most noble gift – to everyone

Fine!

One fine morning, oh, a year ago or so now, I was driving to work down Dry Creek road, a dual carriageway road with speed limit of 35, when I was pulled over by a cop. I was doing 40, and the school light, which I had not noticed, was flashing, meaning the speed limit was 25 mph. Oh, and fines were doubled in this stretch of road. So my ticket cost me $200. Needless to say, there were no actual schoolchildren to be seen, and no one was in any danger from my recklessness. But, hey, I acknowledge I was guilty as sin.

A more recent fine morning saw my daughter start daydreaming in her car and not notice the car in front, which she duly hit. No one was hurt, fortunately, though her 2000 Corolla was a write-off. She got a ticket, and went to court, where she was allowed to plead guilty to defective vehicle, for which the fine was...$54 (plus $30 court costs).

Moral: if you find yourself speeding with a cop flashing in your rear-view mirror, try to hit something!