"What Questions Have disappeared?"

This post from Steve Sailer on an essay by evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller caught my eye for several reasons. It is on questions about your child's prospective mate that, for (PC? ) reasons, we no longer ask or even admit to thinking about. Some of the difficulty is that we legitimately resist social stereotyping-- I have known a few WASP types who considered my possession of "Mediterranean genes"-- ie a vowel at the end of my name-- to be a real fault.

But Miller's take on the second question in particular, "What are their accomplishments?", was wonderful.

"The question "What are their accomplishments?" refers not to career success, but to the constellation of hobbies, interests, and skills that would have adorned most educated young people in previous centuries. Things like playing pianos, painting portraits, singing hymns, riding horses, and planning dinner parties. Such accomplishments have been lost through time pressures, squeezed out between the hyper-competitive domain of school and work, and the narcissistic domain of leisure and entertainment. It is rare to find a young person who does anything in the evening that requires practice (as opposed to study or work)--anything that builds skills and self-esteem, anything that creates a satisfying, productive "flow" state, anything that can be displayed with pride in public. Parental hot-housing of young children is not the same: after the child's resentment builds throughout the French and ballet lessons, the budding skills are abandoned with the rebelliousness of puberty--or continued perfunctorily only because they will look good on college applications.

"The result is a cohort of young people whose only possible source of self-esteem is the school/work domain--an increasingly winner-take-all contest where only the brightest and most motivated feel good about themselves. (And we wonder why suicidal depression among adolescents has doubled in one generation.) This situation is convenient for corporate recruiting--it channels human instincts for self-display and status into an extremely narrow range of economically productive activities.

"Yet it denies young people the breadth of skills that would make their own lives more fulfilling, and their potential lovers more impressed. Their identities grow one-dimensionally, shooting straight up towards career success without branching out into the variegated skill sets which could soak up the sunlight of respect from flirtations and friendships, and which could offer shelter, and alternative directions for growth, should the central shoot snap."

By luck and temperament, we seem to have raised our child by "Victorian" principles-- adventure, skills, music (encouraged not forced), a diverse bunch of accomplished if often impoverished friends as examples of some- damn- thing. And not only has he found a mate whose interests, accomplishments, and friendships seem to mirror his; they have an entire, if small, community of friends with the same values. Despite Doom and Gloom, all is not yet lost...