So Mary reminds us of the seemingly bad news that the demographic “crisis” has made welfare states worldwide unsustainable.

The good news, in her opinion, is that the welfare state has the main cause of the erosion of proper responsibility for and dependence on the family. Maybe it’s the main cause of the demographic crisis.

So here’s another piece of good news that I like to highlight: The road to serfdom never gets to serfdom.

Here’s another, according to Mary: Once the welfare state is unable to compete with family for a person’s loyalty, the family might well make a comeback. Well, it might.

But Mary exaggerates when she suggests that Americans are dependent on a cradle-to-grave welfare state. Our welfare state, in my view, is too minimalist to have been the main cause of the withering away of children, especially among our sophisticates. Social Security has never been enough to make anyone feel all that secure.

So I emphasize individualism, in Tocqueville’s sense, as a cause of our birth dearth. Tocqueville was wrong to think that that “heart disease” wouldn’t enter the homes of America’s nuclear families. The flooding of the workforce with women wasn’t caused by the welfare state. And today the erosion of our various safety nets (not only entitlements but unions, pensions, churches etc.), so far, hasn’t been good for stable families.

And we can’t forget that “the global competitive marketplace”–perhaps as a form of individualism–hasn’t been so good for families. We remember Rusty Reno’s largely true claim that capitalism has already won. And the promiscuously pro-choice logic of libertarianism can be understood as our “bourgeois ideology.”

So let’s leave it at saying that the picture is a lot more complicated than Mary leads us to think.

HERE

For those who lack the above, let me recommend the informative and intelligent SHELDON COOPER WIKIPEDIA PAGE.

It is clearly a labor of love. It is also under review for having too much intricate detail (which would only be of interest to someone who cares about the subject) and for something like treating a fictional character like a real guy. It is quite true that many a very famous real guy has a far less impressive Wikipedia presence.

You could spend all day checking out the links in the footnotes.

HERE

So naturally I’m envious that Ken Masugi and John Presnall made major contributions to BIG BANG STUDIES before I could get around to posting on the show.

And all I have time to do today is to give some random notes.

1. THE BIG BANG THEORY is a network show. That means the continuity is better than on the HBO series (which disappears for long periods only to rise again). It also means it has an annoying laugh track.

2. The characters improve as relational beings. Amy Farrah Fowler meets Sheldon (via the dating website) only to satisfy her mother’s demand that she date once a year. Now she plans to marry Sheldon in four years. She can’t tell him, though, because she’s knows he still a “flight risk.” And her bodily urges are becoming less creepy (because detached) and more relational. The spanking show was an important transition here.

3. Ken makes a path hbreaking observation on PARENTS. The theoretical kids are wounded, in large part, because their parents were “monsters” (in two cases). Leonard’s mom, of course, is more like Sheldon than any other character on the show. The difference is her hyper-creepy clinical approach to sexual satisfaction and the relevant bodily organs. She is mind and body, with no relational stuff in between. Then, there’s Howard’s mom, who has (almost) none of the warm qualities of the smothering yet self-absorbed Jewish mother. Raj’s parents aren’t monsters, and Raj probably is the least wounded of the four major male characters. The most unrealistic part of the show, maybe, is that he’s unable to find a woman who appreciates his charming feminine side. Someone could say a lot on the connection between Raj’s relative “normalcy” and the fact that his parents are together and his dad lays down the law (with somewhat indulgent and very uneven success).

4. Sheldon’s mom loves him and knows what best for him. (His dad, apparently, was a monster too.) She knew what to say to get him back together with Amy, and when she lays down the law, Sheldon obeys. (Penny–with Leonard’s encouragement–deployed that nuclear option once.) Sheldon, of course, is in many ways a big baby (who needs to hear “Soft Kitty” when he’s sick). His mom may wish he wasn’t like that, but she accepts him just as he is. (It would be easier for her if he were just gay.) So Sheldon’s intellectual contempt for her is true enough on the level of impersonal “mind,” but she has what it takes to rule in this world. Ken has said a lot, and there’s a lot more to be said, about the telling fact that the least wounded character in the show is a fundamentalist Christian.

5. The show portrays caricatures that are only semi-fleshed out (but who get more fleshed out as the show goes on). The guys: THE THEORETICAL PHYSICIST, THE EXPERIMENTAL PHYSICIST, THE ASTROPHYSICIST, and THE ENGINEER. That is: the mind caught in an alien body; the not-quite-genius nerd who’s “the king of foreplay” or will do anything to “get laid” and, really, anything to have a relational life with a pretty girl; the highly erotic metrosexual who turns the whole cosmos into a romantic tale that has room for appreciating “The Good Wife”; the guy who is better than he says (but still genuinely short on manliness), but who is creepy in his ingenuity when it comes to using his robotic gadgets for personal satisfaction.

6. Those who have compared the show to Aristophanes aren’t wrong. But a big difference is that show has almost no civic dimension; these theorists are no danger to America (except when they use government stuff to pursue personal goals). They’re less of a danger than humanities professors, actually. They actually love America for its intellectual freedom, easygoing techno-prosperity, and openness to comic-book adventures. In no other country could they get away with wearing their superhero costumes…

7. They are (except maybe Raj–a complicated man) ideological secular humanists, but they’re not very evangelical secular humanists. If Sheldon really did return to Texas to teach evolution, things wouldn’t work out well for him (his day as a professor was a pretentious failure), and Leonard’s somewhat uncharacteristic showdown with Penny over astrology was a lesson for him in relational humility.

It turns out I could go on and on, but this contribution to to BIG BANG STUDIES should be considered ill-considered and incomplete.

So here’s an amusing essay about how to tweet like a Straussian. I would comment more if I were an actual tweeter. It does seem to me that ALL CAPS could become an indispensable form of twitter pithiness.

I do have a student–Kristian Canler (Berry name: Christian with a K)–who has set up a twitter thing for me. It’s not going so well. I only have 126 followers. Pete has A LOT MORE.

So HERE’S YOUR CHANCE to follow me down…

So says our friend Ivan the K.

BIG THOUGHTS HERE

So says Rusty Reno. Compare today with 1980! Those who still fear socialism (or, I would add, even progressivism) just haven’t being paying attention. Sure, there’s ObamaCare. But it’s only a relatively small part of a big picture.

Unlike our friends the Porchers, Rusty realizes that this victory is more good than not. But it still has to be managed politically. In Rusty’s view, Romney was wrong to view our big problems as economic. And our libertarians are just as wrong to think that freedom is just another word for having less and less government.

I’m getting more impressed with those who worry about the “individualism” or displaced irresponsibility of our new ruling class–the cognitive elite. It’s not so much that the rich are quickly getting richer, and the middle class not at all. But our cognitive elite–that, in a way, deserves what it has because brains are what sell these days–is politically irresponsible. Its method of ruling is “nudge” economics–incentivizing the poor, vulnerable, and stupid to behave better. That’s not the same as respecting the freedom and dignity of ordinary people and their tough struggles in a deteriorating environment.

One domestic consequence of the victory of the competitive marketplace of global capitalism is the erosion of the various safety nets that balance our individualism with various venues for what Rusty calls “social solidarity.” Here we can talk about unions, pensions, families, churches, local government, government entitlements, and so forth. We can even talking about having space for “voluntary caregiving.” It’s here that we can even find space for Rod Dreher and his ruralism, as long as we don’t forget that the collapse of the safety nets disproportionally affects rural communities. On balance, Charles Murray would say, our small towns get stupider–as they are increasingly ruled by the cognitive elite in an undisclosed location. That might be true even as intellectuals who can work from anywhere decide to move home. Having an independent contractor writer in town doesn’t make up for the local bank, hardware, restaurants, and so forth losing their intellectual independence.

One reason among many to question the sustainability of capitalism’s victory is, of course, the birth dearth that’s pretty much gone global. It’s surely typically the case that you have to be from some place to have lots of kids. It’s certainly true that our youthful productive meritocracy will be stuck with paying for a world in which more and more people are unproductive.

So global capitalism or cosmopolitanism is, as Pierre Manent explains, at war against BODIES and every institution that’s rooted in our EMBODIMENT. Among those institutions are our FAMILIES, COUNTRIES, and CHURCHES. So global capitalism is also at war against personal eros, just as it’s at war against personal birth and personal death.

There I go again, becoming all Marxist or libertarian by overemphasizing globalism. That’s because I took Rusty’s point and ran (too far) with it. Our political problems, as Pete explains time and again, potentially have political solutions.

Well, it’s not quite a “vs.”

Carl updates: here’s the real link.