Environmental Romanticism

Once upon the time, conservation as exemplified by such as Teddy Roosevelt was about improving the quality of people’s lives.  It sought to ensure that people would be able to enjoy the beauty of nature.  Likewise, the early environmentalists wanted people to enjoy clean air and water, and vistas unspoiled by garbage.

Nowadays, of course, environmentalism has been about the critters for their own sake, and is specifically anti-human.  There are shades of this latter strain in E. O. Wilson’s recently published novel, Anthill.  Raphael Semmeses “Raff” Cody, the novel’s protagonist, travels as a boy with his parents to Lake Nakobee, an isolated tract of undeveloped land known only to a handful, and apparently visited by almost nobody.  It is a testament to environmentalism’s earlier successes that the critters endangered by its prospective development are all bugs*, notably the various warring ant colonies along its banks.  Not a single cute, huggable mammal among them.

Ultimately, though, Raff is a moderate.  He recognizes that his romantic attachment to his boyhood hideaway is not sufficient to get anyone else to care about Nakobee.  So he successfully proposes a development plan that involves a smaller number of more expensive houses, further spaced, leaving most of the land as a nature preserve.

Of course, any good novel needs a villain, and as you might expect, Anthill casts Christians in the role.  These range from the developer executive ranting about how Christianity requires them to be against the environment (somehow the populist argument about building homes for middle-class people never gets made) to a shadowy rural pastor who tries to kill Raff because . . . well, actually, the novel never really explains why.  Likely Wilson and his editors thought that the kind of people likely to read Wilson would nod along at the idea that murder is something that rural pastors just do.

To Wilson’s credit, he appears to appreciate how off-putting actual environmental activists can be.  While a law student at Harvard, Raphael encounters Gaia Force, a group of poseurs who’s notion of protecting the environment is violent socialist revolution.  They angrily expel Raphael, having no truck with his goal oriented, work-within-the-system approach to establishing this particular nature preserve.  Raphael wants to try various mediating strategies that allow development in the context of conservation, but the response he receives shows why so many conservatives sometimes sound as if they don’t care about the environment:  to do so would put them in league with the likes of Gaia Force.  I remember the exact moment when the environmental movement became prominent on my college campus:  it was the same autumn that the Berlin Wall came down.  It was apparent to me that, once socialism had been exposed for the hoax that it was, all the socialists simply moved over to environmentalism as a proxy for the same agenda.

On the other hand, developers suck too.  Raphael’s Uncle Cyrus speaks truthfully about the ambition to turn the Mobile – Pensacola corridor into a sprawling megalopolis.  Indeed, the lust of developers extends along the entire Gulf coast.  Tellingly, Cyrus asks Raphael, “Do you want this area to stay redneck heaven forever?”  But that’s the problem.  I have a passing familiarity with the ongoing efforts to ram a new airport down the throats of the voters in Panama City.  I’ve always been skeptical about its advocates’ promises of development.  I can understand the interest hotel owners in Panama City Beach have in increasing the tourist traffic; what I don’t understand is, how is this supposed to help the people that live there now?  Will they be able to afford the new homes that will be built?  Will they qualify for the jobs brought in?  Or will they rather be alienated by the influx of immigrants with different values, eventually driven from their own communities?

Steve Sailer asked why conservatives wound up on the same side as developers in conflicts over the environment.  If I had to answer that, I would say that conservatives were responding to the difficulties faced, not by developers (who apparently find it easy to overcome environmental objections), but by individual property owners who want to make modest improvements.  (Granted, I haven’t read any stories about this in a while.  I bet I could find them in the Reason archives.)

In summary, while Wilson is a good-enough storyteller, I was somewhat disappointed.  I was hoping to read an insiders account of the political and legal environment in which developers and environmentalists operate.  Unfortunately, Wilson is not that insider.  His book is much more about his own personal vision than how the world usually works in real life.

* Yes, I understand that, entomologically speaking, “bug” is a specific category that normally doesn’t include ants.  I just don’t care.

Sociobiology Game

Edward O. Wilson, renowned father of sociobiology, has published his first novel, Anthill.  Steve already reviewed it at length; I want to initiate a discussion about how, given the chance, Wilson applies his knowledge of Darwinism to recounting the courtship between the protagonist’s parents in 1976:

The FloraBama Restaurant was a famous establishment located on the coast precisely at the line between Florida and Alabama.  Out back lay a sugar-white beach and shallow turquoise water that stretched unbroken from Perdido Bay on the east all the way west to Fort Morgan at the entrance to Mobile Bay.  It was already famous in the 1970s as a center of Redneck Chic, where families could eat piled-up shrimp off paper plates, and men could drink American beer directly from longneck bottles.  Young lawyers and stockbrokers squeezed in at the bar among truck drivers and oystermen – among real people, in other words, the ones who actually produce and fix things for a living.

On a Saturday afternoon Marcia came to the FloraBama with a group of other Spring Hill College coeds.  One of the real people present when Marcia arrived was Ainesley Code of West Pirate Beach, Alabama, a graduate of Fairhope Senior High School and an expert automobile mechanic and part-time persimmon and strawberry picker.  He was seated at a table next to the bar with four of his friends, sipping beer and rating young women as they came through the entrance.  They were assigning scores from zero to ten for overall attractiveness, and planned to confer a crudely made imitation gold medal to the first one given a unanimous vote of ten.  After an hour and a half without a winner, the impatient judges were arguing over whether the requisite scores should be lowered to nine.

When Marcia walked in, Ainesley was startled, then riveted by the look of her.  First was her petite size, matching his own.  She was even smaller than Ainesley.  This was an increasing rarity in the well-fed South.  Most young women were his size or bigger, and they had big feet.  Marcia’s were much smaller.  Her clothing size, he was to learn later was petite small.  Then, in the two-second survey hard-wired in males, he saw in sequence:  nice shape, lovely face, well-groomed hair, neat clothes, graceful walk.  Summary:  a really great-looking young woman.  Moreover, she was talking with animation, flashing an orthodontically corrected perfect smile.

“Do you see that, the one on the left?” he said to his scruffy companions.  “Check it out.  A perfect ten, you gotta vote ten.  This one I’m gonna personally meet.”

With that, he stood up and walked across the floor to the girls, wh were settling at their table.  Ignoring the others, straightening his shoulders, he looked into Marcia’s eyes and assumed the winsome grin he had practiced so often in front of a mirror.

“Excuse me, miss.  My name’s Ainesley Cody and I live close to here and I come in a lot and I’ve just got to say, and the other fellows over there agree with me, that you are the prettiest girl that ever walked into this place.  You are just terrific!”

Marcia glanced nervously left and right, then back to Ainesley with a surprised “You mean me?” expression.  The other girls giggled.  Several, all larger than Marcia, were thinking they were just as pretty.

Ainesley, the talented fast-talker, abruptly shifted gears.  A sadness came into his face, and he continued in a calmer voice, shaking his head slowly, in mock remorse.

“Well, I guess I just made a fool of myself.  Believe me, I've never just walked up to someone like this before.  I hope you’ll forgive me, and I apologize to you, ma’am and to you all.”

Marcia stayed stock-still.  The girl to her right elbowed her in the side, laughing, then turned to Ainesley and said, “Do you mean me?”

Without answering, he walked back across the floor to rejoin his buddies and stood with them, making gestures and facial expressions meant to look both serious and concerned.  He cautioned the others not to laugh or raise their voices.  He knew Marcia and her companions would be looking his way in eager conversation of their own.  He kept them in view furtively, with sidewise glances.

Later, as the girls were heading for the door, none carrying the gold medal, Ainesley eased up to Marcia, making a pleading gesture with his hands up, palms forward, and fingers spread.

“Excuse me,” he said, then hesitated.  He knew what he wanted to say, but in an un-Ainesley lapse was beginning to feel confused.  The would-be ladies’ man and casual seducer felt a pang of sincerity.

“Could I say something?”

Marcia halted politely.  Two of her friends stayed with her as he finally put the words together.

“Listen, I'm sorry if I seemed rude when I came up to you.  But you do look like such a terrific person.  I’d appreciate if I could just talk to you sometime, maybe get a cup of coffee, like they say in the movies.  That’s all.  And then I’m gone.  I promise.”

Ainesley nervously handed her a pencil and two scraps of paper torn from the table mat.  One had his name and telephone number written on it, and one was for her to write hers.  Marcia was flustered.  This was not in her finishing-school playbook.  Trying not to be rude, she took the slips of paper and said, “Thank you.  Excuse me, I have to go.”  And walked quickly to the waiting van.

She thought, Ms. Rhodes at Hartfield [her finishing school] would have given me an A for that.  Or maybe not.  Did I just make a mistake?

Ainesley caught up with one of the girls who had stayed with her, and commanded, “Quick, what’s her name?  Please, I’m a good guy.  I just gotta know.”

“Marcia Semmes.”

With that innocent betrayal, Marcia Semme’s fate was sealed.

A few days later, with a telephone directory of Mobile and Pensacola, in which few Semmeses were listed, Ainesley quickly tracked Marcia down.

“Is Marcia there?” he asked on the telephone.

“No, she’s at the college today,” Elizabeth Semmes [Marcia’s mother] responded.

“Spring Hill College, I guess.”

“Yes.  You can reach her there.  Who shall I say called?”

“A friend.  I’ll call her there.  Thanks a lot.”

Knowing he wouldn’t be given her number at the school, Ainesley simply waited until the first holiday weekend and called her at home again.  This time she was the one who answered.

“Yes?”

“Hi, is this Marcia Semmes?”

“Yes.  Who are you?”

“I’m Ainesley Cody.  We met at the FloraBama a month ago.  I sort of hoped you might remember.  I’m a senior at the University of West Florida, over in Pensacola,” he lied.  I hope you’ll forgive me, but I didn’t want to bother you.  After  saw you, I just wanted to talk to you, you know, maybe for a couple of minutes.”  He strained to sound casual.  “So here I am.  I won’t come around or bother you or anything.”

Marcia was intrigued.  After all, he sounded like a nice guy, who was really, truly interested in her.  She said, “Oh, no, no, that’s all right.  A couple of minutes is okay with me.”

Two weekends later, after several telephone calls, each longer and warmer than the last, the ersatz senior of the University of West Florida showed up at the Semmes home for a first date.  He was driving a new 1976 Chevrolet, on which he’d made a down payment the day before.  He wore his best clothes.  His hair was freshly cut and brushed.  In his pocket were two tickets to a bull-riding competition in nearby Chickasaw.

Ainesley was startled by the magnificence of Marybelle [the family’s antebellum plantation house], its colonnades, its spacious lawn and circular drive.  When he got out of the car and searched for the street number, unaware that great houses do not as a rule display their street numbers, he found instead a bronze plaque installed by the Alabama Historical Society identifying Marybelle as a state historical site.

While Ainesley waited anxiously in the main hall for Marcia to come down the spiral staircase, her father Jonathan stepped out of the library to speak to him.

“Isn’t bull-riding a rough kind of sport to take a young lady?”

Ainesley was prepared for this.

“Well, sir, I see your point, sir.  It’s been my experience, though, that young ladies among my friends sometimes get tired of going to concerts and stuff like that, and it’s a nice change of pace for them.  You can learn a lot from bull-riding.”

Jonathan was worried by this response.  He opened his mouth to probe some more, then let it pass.  He had documents to review, and an important meeting with a committee of state senators in Montgomery the next afternoon.

Marcia joined them at that point.  She was dressed in a vaguely cowgirl outfit of jeans, kerchief, and low boots.

“Oh, Daddy, I’m so excited!  Have you ever been to a real rodeo before?”

“Yessir,” Ainesley said.  “Nothing less than the real thing.”

What attracted Marcia to Ainesley was his vitality and self-confidence.  Despite his bantam size, he seemed strong, able to address her father as one adult to another.  That evening and later, he implied dark deals in his past he wished not to discuss.  He told stories, all with a kernel of truth even if they had happened to someone else.  All were richly embroidered.  To Marcia, Ainesley was a man above the callow youths of her acquaintance, with a deep and significant history relative to her own meager experience.  The highway was in his eyes, the airways, the sea lanes.  He had destinations, he had plans, and he had connections implied but still undisclosed to Marcia.  She tried to imagine, as he intended, how it would feel to be at his side during these adventures.

This persona of Ainesley was not deliberately false.  It was an accretion of stories and poses, at the center of which lived undisturbed his personal sacred code.  This much was unalterable:  he would always meet his obligations, if at all possible, and he would never tell a lie that could hurt his family or friends.  He would never assault another except in self-defense, and in conflict he would never bend to anyone if he knew he was right.

If all else came apart in Ainesley’s life, the code would remain.  It was the definition of his manhood and the safety net of his sanity.

What Marcia could not understand about Ainesley, nor could her parents, was that he was a commonly encountered denizen in the particular stratum of the world he inhabited, and that he was working his way through a biography appropriate to it.  He would in good time settle down, but not to the end that he imagined and wished the Semmeses of Mobile to believe.  Ainesley was endowed with powerful self-respect, but he lived one day at a time, and sought the pleasures awaiting him in each one.  He was not a man to put off rewarding himself.  Since his teenage years he had been a heavy smoker, although he could still cut back, as he now did in the presence of Marcia and her parents.  He thought sipping hard liquor and holding it well to be a masculine virtue.  He had occasional weekend binges, but none Marcia was allowed to see.

True to his culture, Ainesley was a gun lover.  His father and paternal grandfather had gathered collections of firearms as large as the law and household space allowed.  In his parents’ home at West Pirate Beach hung a photograph of his grandfather with two brothers standing behind a fallen black bear, cradling their rifles in folded arms.  The slain animal had been one of the last of the endangered Florida subspecies seen in Escambia County.

From early boyhood Ainesley enjoyed, along with excursions to hunt and fish, trips with his father to an abandoned farm in Jepson County to try out items from the family armory.  On those occasions he was allowed to fire an old army issue Colt .45 and a rifle used by a distant cousin during the Spanish-American War.  Ainesley, then and afterward, was awed by the spectacle of objects bursting into pieces at the pull of a trigger.

Ainesley was a patriot.  As a boy, he had a fantasy of wiping out pillboxes with a machine gun and grenades and marching in a victory parade down Government Street with a chest full of medals.  During the Vietnam War he tried as a seventeen-year-old to join the Marine Corps, but was turned away for reasons he preferred thereafter to keep to himself.

Finally, Ainesley was a racist.  But he had a way of squaring that with his code.  He was a separatist, he said.  He had a formula to recite when in polite company:  “I got nothing against colored people; I just want to be with my own kind.”  Otherwise, he stayed muted and ambivalent on the subject – except when drinking in bars and on fishing trips with like-minded white male citizens.

Ainesley did, at least, have a boast-worthy pedigree.  He and his close relatives claimed that there had been a Cody in every American war since the Revolution, and that might well have been true.  Several of his forebears were Hodgeses, one of the clans that settled Blakely and the fertile land of what was later to become Baldwin County across the bay from Mobile, when that city was still a mud village.  Another ancestor, John Tom Cody, along with his brother Lee, were among the Mobile hotheads who joined the Alabama Artillery as soon as they heard news of Fort Sumter.  Buck privates to the end, they helped lay the “hornets’ nest” of concentrated cannon fire that drove back the Union forces at Shiloh.  Lee was captured at Murfreesboro, but John Tom fought on despite an injured right leg.  He was captured at the last battle of the Civil War, fought the day after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox and before the news reached the gathering battalions.  The battle site was providentially Fort Blakeley, in South Alabama, so that John Tom had only to shoulder his rifle and other belongings and walk home in a single day.  Settled back in Mobile, he married and fathered a large family.

Ainesley and Marcia’s courtship proceeded uneasily under the noses of the elder Semmeses.  Her parents were as beguiled as Marcia by Ainesley’s charm and unfailing good manners.  He returned her home on time, every time.  He told her parents he was a junior executive in his father’s business, and a sometime student at the University of West Florida.

Their surveillance of Ainesley was cursory.  They saw the image he projected, not the real young man remaining hidden.  They asked the mandatory questions, and were satisfied with the answers they got and the easy assumptions they made.

“Who are his people?  The Baldwin County Codys?  That’s a good  family,” Jonathan Semmes said to Elizabeth.

He was thinking of the Codys of relatively posh Fairhope, not the Codys who inhabited West Pirate Beach on Perdido Bay a short distance away.

To the Semmeses, Ainesley relentlessly displayed what he himself considered to be his three most genuine and impressive qualities.  He believed in himself, in what he said, and he was passionate about it all.  Truth was whatever Ainesley thought for the moment to be factually true – that is, true for sure or mostly true, or at least very possibly true.  His cocky self-confidence cut through the exaggerated good manners and foggy urbanities of Marcia’s own class.  Ainesley focused his energies on Marcia solely as a desirable woman.  He was sexually passionate but never forced himself on her.  He showed no desire to use her or her family to climb the social ladder, and, while polite to her parents, was otherwise indifferent to them.  He just didn’t care about anything but her, and that endeared him still more to Marcia Semmes.

Jonathan Semmes saw Ainesley’s intentions the same way.  He thought the young man rough cut but “up and coming.”  Marcia’s mother Elizabeth alone remained suspicious.  She called him a “zircon in the rough.”

No matter.  Marcia fell in love with this earnest man.

Marcia’s parents learned of the depth of her feelings too late.  they were uneasy about the match, but not enough to be openly hostile to so intense a romantic attachment.  In any case, most of the ambitions were invested in their son, Cyrus, ten years older than Marcia, and already a vice president of the family firm.  They hoped – in fact, they expected – that Marcia herself would soon end the affair and regain her freedom to meet other young men, this time of her own class.

They were therefore stunned when she announced upon returning from an evening date that she and Ainesley were engaged to be married.  She found them in Jonathan’s study and held up her left hand to display a diamond ring just given her by Ainesley.

“We’ve decided to have the wedding as soon as possible,” she said.

She paused to examine their faces, her face screwed tight in anxiety.  She was torn in loyalty between the two forces she was pitting in opposition.

Jonathan stood up,his mouth curling down and started to speak.  “Are you—”.

Marcia interrupted quickly, “Oh, no, no.  Nothing like that, Daddy.  I’m not pregnant or anything like that.  It’s just that we love each other and want to start our life together.”

She forgot to bring her left hand down, and left the ring posed in the air like a flag.

Elizabeth grabbed the arm of a chair to sit down.  Jonathan tried to speak again.  “Let me get this straight –“

But Marcia interrupted.  “We want to keep it simple, nothing too fancy.  I hope I haven’t upset you too much.  I’m real tired right now  Can we talk about this tomorrow?”

There’s a lot to work with here, but I’ll let my readers take the first crack at it.

Toby Young on Humiliation

From How to Lose Friends and Alienate People:

I first set eyes on Syrie in 1989 in the dining hall of Trinity College, Cambridge. After Harvard, I'd gone on to Cambridge and was attempting to get a Ph.D. in Philosophy. It was the first day of the new academic year and, in keeping with College tradition, me and several other "mature" students were checking out the latest batch of "freshettes." Not that we had any hope of getting into their knickers; in the Cambridge student hierarchy, post-grads are on a par with "natscis" (natural scientists). Lusting after first years -- and knowing that it would never be reciprocated -- was just another exercise in self-flagellation, a favorite post-grad pastime.

As [Syrie] passed the post-grad table, she didn't so much as glance in our direction even though it was perfectly obvious we were all gawping at her. Everything about her radiated contempt, which suited our masochistic mood to a T. This arrogant, full-lipped beauty embodied all that was forbidden to sad losers like us. My misery was compounded when she chose a seat directly opposite mine in the College library, making it impossible for me to concentrate on my philosophy books. For the remainder of that academic year, until I abandoned my Ph.D. altogether, I tortured myself by imagining what her nubile, eighteen-year-old body would look like in the nude. I was 100% certain I'd never find out.

Syrie resurfaced in my life in 1994 when, as a twenty-three-year-old researcher for an independent television production company, she called me out of the blue and invited me to lunch. Aha, I thought. This could be interesting. Instead of an impoverished student living in a hall of residence I was now a fully-fledged media brat and a member of The Groucho Club, London's premier watering hole. I assumed that she remembered me from Cambridge and wanted some career advice -- maybe even a job! Perhaps I would get to see her naked after all.

My hopes were soon dashed. She confessed that she'd been ordered to take me out to lunch by her boss so that she could "steal" any ideas I might have for television programs. I'd been expecting a wide-eyed ingenue who'd hang on my every word and instead found myself sitting opposite an intelligent, confident young woman. After graduating from Cambridge with a major in English she had worked in publishing for a while and, the previous year, had helped organize the Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival. That was where she'd met her current boyfriend, the novelist Will Self. Had I heard of him? I had, as a matter of fact. He was only the most famous young novelist in the country!

The low point came when I told her I'd been to Cambridge.

Syrie: Oh really? When were you there?

Me: 1988-90

Syrie: But that's when I was there! What college were you at?

Me: Trinity.

Syrie: No! But I was at Trinity.

Pause.

Me: Yes, I know.

I had sat opposite her almost every day for a year and failed to make any impression. I think I would have preferred it if she'd remembered me as a creepy, starry-eyed post-grad -- anything would have been better than not making any impact at all. I had been completely invisible to her. What could be more humiliating? All the lust I'd felt five years earlier came flooding back, but this time I was determined to do something about it.

. . .

Having sex with Syrie was like being granted a wish by a fairy godmother. It was an opportunity to turn back the clock and do what I'd longed to do at the time but hadn't had the balls for. In a sense she stood for all the unattainable girls I'd lusted after throughout my life. This well of unrequited desire had left a deep psychic would and here, at last, was my chance to heal it. By the time I moved to New York I'd been sleeping with her for about nine months but the damage was by no means completely repaired. Of course, the humiliation caused by sexual rejection can never be fully expunged, but that wasn't going to stop me from trying -- again and again and again. I had no intention of abandoning my "therapy" in mid-stream.

Toby Young on Jane Austen

From How to Lose Friends and Alienate People:

In terms of relations between the sexes, Manhattan is like a throwback to the nineteenth century. At the "hot boites" of the moment the men slouch at tables in chinos and button-down shirts while the women parade past them like peacocks, fanning out their tail feathers for all the world to see. Sitting in the audience at the premiere of Sense and Sensibility on December 13, 1995, it suddenly struck me that the reason for the glut of Jane Austen adaptations -- Clueless and Persuasion had been released earlier that year and Emma would soon follow -- was because of the overwhelming similarity between early-nineteenth-century rural England and late twentieth-century urban America.

Contrary to popular belief, the reason Austen adaptations struck such a chord with American audiences wasn't due to the usual nostalgic yearning for a kinder, gentler era in which everyone wore top hats and lived in stately homes. It was because they recognized their own society up there on the big screen. Austen's novels may appear to be light, pastoral comedies about romantic love, but whisk the tea cozy aside and the cruel mechanics of nineteenth-century English society are laid bare.

Take the case of Ron Perelman, the richest man in the city. In 1995 he was married to Patricia Duff, a gorgeous blonde trophy wife, having divorced Claudia Cohen, a middle-aged glamorpuss, a year earlier. After Perelman separated from Duff in 1996 he was linked with a string of beauties, including the acress Ellen Barkin. Given Perelmen's physical appearance, it seems unlikely that he would have gotten all these women if he'd been, say, a plumber.

Kurt Andersen made this point in an email exchange with Nora Ephron in Slate on September 13, 1999: "Regarding Ron Perelman (and the Ron Perelmans of the world): At what level of consciousness do you suppose he knows or cares that if he weren't rich he wouldn't get to sleep with women like Patricia Duff and Ellen Barkin? And, even more coarsely, how tightly do you think the Patricia Duffs and Ellen Barkins of the world have to close their eyes and think of $$$ as they're being ravished by unattractive billionaires?"

The world Austen depicts -- a world in which ambitious young women compete with each other to attract the attention of rich, eligible men -- is uncannily like contemporary Manhattan. Both societies are rigidly hierarchical, with power concentrated in the hands of a plutocratic elite, and the swiftest route to the top is through marriage. The cavernous waterfront mansions in the Hamptons that New York's ruling class retreat to every summer are the equivalent of Pemberly, Darcy's estate in Derbyshire.

The willingness of New York women to enter what is essentially a nineteenth-century marriage market is surprising. After all, the cause of women's emancipation is more advanced in Manhattan than in any other city in the world. They might not describe themselves as "feminists," but if these women experience any form of discrimination they're straight on the phone to their attorneys. They're more ambitious, better educated and less oppressed than any previous generation of women and yet they're prepared to go to any lengths, however demeaning, to secure a husband. Why?

The short answer is in order to impress other women. As anyone who's read Edith Wharton will know, it's long been a fact of life in Manhattan, particularly among the social elite of the Upper East Side, that women judge each other according to who they can ensnare. Status is valued more highly than any other commodity in New York and marrying well is still the fastest way to get it. At Vanity Fair legend has it that when one female Contributing Editor finally landed her trophy husband the first person she called was not her mother but the gossip columnist Liz Smith. Only after Liz had promised to announce the engagement in her column did the contributor deign to tell her family.

But why is a prominent husband still considered such a desirable asset? One hundred years ago women's status was largely dependent on who their husbands were but today they're perfectly capable of acquiring it in their own right. So why don't they? The answer is they do, but on the whole they prefer to do it with a ring on their finger. Part of the reason is that New York is such a Darwinian place. In this fundamentally hostile environment, full of ruthless predators who'll stop at nothing to get to the top, people are constantly forming alliances for their own protection and a husband is the most dependable ally a woman can have. Yet it's also because, in terms of sheer status wattage, women shine more brightly if they're married to a powerful man, particularly successful women. The ideal is to become the female half of a power couple. In Manhattan, the highest tier of society is occupied by these all-conquering husband-and-wife teams: Diane von Furstenberg and Barry Diller, Diane Sawyer and Mike Nichols, Gail Sheehy and Clay Felker, Binky Urban and Ken Auletta, Tina Brown and Harold Evans -- the list is endless. For the city's most ambitious women, this is the ultimate goal.

Toby Young on Sexual Harassment

I'm finally getting around to reading How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, British journalist Toby Young's memoir of having spent 1995 working at the Conde Nast publication Vanity Fair in New York. I can already tell the book will yield a trove of quotables, among which the following:

Needless to say, any attempt to chat up the goddesses at Conde Nast is completely taboo. I discovered this shortly after I arrived when I made the mistake of cracking a faintly risque joke during a tour of Conde Nast's headquarters by a woman from "human resources." I was thrown in with a bunch of other new recruits and, at the conclusion of the tour, I asked her what we should do if we ever got lost.

"You could always consult the model in the lobby," she suggested.

"Which one?" I quipped.

Nobody laughed.

The following morning I found a memo on my desk headed "Policy on Harassment." . . . It went on to list various forms of conduct that would "result in disciplinary action up to and including dismissal." They were:

• Sexual remarks, advances, propositions

• Touching or other physical contact

• Repeated requests for dates or other social engagements

• Comments about an individual's body

I was flabbergasted. I pointed out to [coworker] Chris Lawrence that if Romeo had stuck to these rules he never would have ended up with Juliet. . . . How were we supposed to get dates with the women at [the Conde Nast building] if not by flirting with them and asking them out?

"It's all bullshit," Chris explained. "They just don't wanna be hit on by dweebs like us."

It's true. With the $3,000 handbags and mink collars, the fashion plates at Conde Nast can hardly be descibed as politically correct. The company's policy on sexual harassment isn't a concession to the feminist sensibilities of its female employees; it's designed to protect them from men who earn less that $500,000 a year. They don't spend all those hours getting their bikini lines waxed by Brazilian beauticians just so they can go out with journalists. They want to date movie producers, club owners and investment bankers.

Losing Derb's Religion: a partial review of Camp of the Saints

We've been studying the book of Revelations in Sunday School for several months. A few weeks ago we came to the passage describing the battle of Armageddon (or Gog and Magog, depending on your timeline):

7And when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from his prison 8and will come out to deceive the nations that are at the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them for battle; their number is like the sand of the sea. 9And they marched up over the broad plain of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city, but fire came down from heaven and consumed them, 10and the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.

I presently use the English Standard Version for personal study, but I grew up with the New International Version, which renders "camp of the saints" as "camp of God's people". So I didn't recognize the origin of the phrase when I read Derbyshire's review of the Jean Raspail's book,Camp of the Saints,several years ago. (O. D.: I can't find Derb's review online; it may have appeared exclusively in the dead tree edition of NR.) But knowing the origin, my curiosity was piqued, and I ordered it from the library last weekend.

Raspail's novel, first published in 1977, describes the collapse of Western Civilization in the face of a "peaceful invasion" of nearly a million impoverished third-worlders wading ashore on the southern coast of France. This invasion is greeted, not with force, but by the moral paralysis of a governing elite that no longer believes in its own country's right to self-preservation.

I offered this post as a review, but that's not quite right. This novel, which at this writing I haven't finished, is perhaps one of the most disturbing books I have ever read. (Perhaps I have lead a sheltered life.) It is disturbing on several levels. First, the physical and moral squalor of the invaders is horrifying. The details don't bear repeating (and are in any case easily found online) and surely exaggerate -- though perhaps not: I've never been to Calcutta, only to South America.

Second, and more noteworthy, the book disturbs in its amorality. In contrast to, say, Altas Shrugged, a novel which deals with not-dissimilar premises, Raspail's novel steadfastly refuses to make grand metaphysical claims of justice. On the contrary, it explicitly concedes, far more than I believe to be warranted, that Western power and prosperity is built on the oppression of the Third World. Raspail's point is not moral, but historical: this is the way all nations play the game. A people, through luck of natural selection, becomes strong: Sumerians, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Ottomans, Mongols, Aztecs, Incans, Mayans, Europeans. These peoples rise to prominence on that strength; they maintain their position by their strength; and as their strength fades, they are violently displaced by those stronger than they are. Every people is in this same struggle, but only the Europeans tell themselves that their own pre-eminence is wrong, and only they believe that they must atone for their victories by choosing submission to destruction at the hands of peoples less powerful than themselves.

There is a lot to argue here (and if I ever get any commenters, we shall indeed argue it), but hashing out Raspail's overall thesis is not my primary intent. What I want to address is Raspail's decision to lay the suicide of the West directly at the feet of Christianity.

Consider this exchange between a retired professor, observing the armada from his house on the coast, and the spoiled shopkeeper's son come to loot him. The young looter refers to the invaders as "a million Christs."

"I got it from this priest. One of those worker types from the wrong side of town. I ran into him an hour ago. I was on my way up here, and he was running like crazy down the hill. Not in rags or anything, but kind of weird. He kept stopping and lifting his arms in the air, like the ones down there, and he'd yell out, 'Thank you, God! Thank you!' And then he'd take off again, down to the beach. They say there's more on the way."

"More what?"

"More priests, just like him . . ."

But Raspail isn't content with attacking only those clerics seeking radical redemption from the sins of their ancestors; this was but an extreme example. Witness this conversation between a Belgian consul in India and a group of missionaries. The missionaries were leading a protest against the Belgian suspension of transnational adoptions.

"Are you saying you've lost control?"

I'm afraid we have. But it doesn't matter. Most of us are glad to go along. You're right. There is something brewing, and it's going to be tremendous. The crowds can feel it, even if they have no notion what it's all about. Myself, I have one explanation. Instead of the piecemeal adoptions that these poor folk have hoped for and lived for, perhaps now they're hoping and living for something much bigger, something wild and impossible, like a kind of adoption en masse. In a country like this that's all it would take to push a movement beyond the point of no return."

"Nice work your Grace," the Consul retorted, simply. "A lovely job for a bishop of the Roman Catholic Church! Mercenary, hireling to the pagans, all of a sudden! What is this, the Crusades in reverse? Judas leaping up on Peter the Hermit's nag, and crying, 'Down with Jerusalem!'? ... Well, you chose a good time. There's no shortage of poor. There are millions and millions! The year isn't three months old, and already half of this province alone is starving. And the government won't do a thing. They've had it. Whatever happens now, they're going to wash their hands. That's what every consul in the city heard this morning. And what have you all been doing in the meantime? You've been 'bearing witness.' Isn't that what you call it? ... Bearing witness to what? To your faith? Your religion? To your Christian civlization? Oh no, none of that! Bearing witness against yourselves, like the anti-Western cynics you've all become. Do you think the poor devils that flock to your side aren't any the wiser? Nonsense! They see right through you. For them, white skin means weak convictions. They know how weak yours are, they know you've given in. You can thank yourselves for that. The one thing your struggle for their souls has left them is the knowledge that the West -- your West -- is rich. To them, you're the symbols of abundance. By your presence alone, they see that it does exist somewhere, and they see that your conscience hurts you for keeping it all to yourselves. You can dress up in rags and pretend to be poor , eat handfuls of curry to your hearts' content. You can spread your acolytes far and wide, let them live like the peasants and dispense their wise advice ... It's no use, they'll always envy you, no matter how you try. You know I'm right. After all your help -- all the seeds, and drugs, and technology -- they found it so much simpler just to say, "Here's my son, here's my daughter. Take them. Take me. Take us all to your country.' And the idea caught on. You thought it was fine. You encouraged it, organized it. But now it's too big, now it's out fo your hands. It's a flood. A deluge. And it's out of control ..."

Raspail would impeach, if not the whole of Christian morality, then the universal application of that morality. He would presumably have no objection to the intra-societal exercise of philanthropy, where the charity alone does not define the relationship between giver and receiver. Such charity rightly springs from "the mystic chords of memory," as Lincoln put it in his inaugural address. But Raspail sees in the universality of the gospel message -- "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." -- an insidious prejudice against loyalty to, and preference for, one's own, and he indicts this prejudice as the seed of our destruction.

Which brings me to John Derbyshire.

When I started reading him, and at least up until he reviewed Camp of the Saints, Derb described himself as "a feeble Christian" -- feeble, that is, in his attachment to the central Christian truth. Given his policy priorites, and given that his exposure to Christianity was in the Episcopal Church, Derb undoubtedly found Raspail's argument powerfully resonant, and his own faith far too feeble to resist it. If any outsider can point to the place where Derb abandoned Christianity, I would point to the pages of Camp of the Saints.

As for myself, by God's grace my faith is stronger, I have aligned myself with the more muscular branches of Christianity, and I am in any case more comfortable with the paradoxes in my worldview. But none of this is an argument. The blogger known as Vera and I went back and forth a while back on the question of what, if anything, contemporary Christianity (as opposed to the medieval kind) brings to the defense of Western Civilization. I did, in fact, bring up some practical uses for orthodox Christianity as it is lived by its adherents, but these were admittedly small-bore.

But let's turn the question around. How does Derb's present war on religion (which, in practice, means a war on Christianity) help advance his vision of a secure West? Does he really think that a receding Christianity will be replaced by a more muscular paganism? Does he really think that being atheist will encourage us to set about the bloody business of resisting the invasion? Or rather, will it not further empower the very forces seeking our destruction?

The question answers itself.