Is there such a thing? Kansas City Star columnist Jason Whitlock says yes, and it’s literally killing black men.

Stephanie Coontz, a professor of history at Evergreen State College, asks why anyone needs the state’s permission to marry. It’s not an unreasonable question.

For most of Western history, they didn’t, because marriage was a private contract between two families. The parents’ agreement to the match, not the approval of church or state, was what confirmed its validity.

For 16 centuries, Christianity also defined the validity of a marriage on the basis of a couple’s wishes. If two people claimed they had exchanged marital vows — even out alone by the haystack — the Catholic Church accepted that they were validly married.

She recounts how the marriage license became intertwined with monetary benefits of survivorship in the middle of the last century, and why “the marriage license no longer draws reasonable dividing lines regarding which adult obligations and rights merit state protection.”

In 2004, I argued sort of conversely that it is the church that should get out of the wedding business - let the state worry about validating weddings and let the church worry about nurturing marriages. I still think it’s a good idea, and if you read Prof. Coontz’s essay and mine, you’ll see that they are actually congruent.

Sahree, A’hm uh born in bred Tennuhseeun:

So much fer these yar onlyin’ poles.

If you post an eBay auction for “allsop’s arctic ale.full and corked with a wax seal,” you get three bids and sell for $304.

And if you are the buyer of that item, you wait less than two months and repost the bottle of 155-year-old beer for sale on eBay again, this time spelling it correctly: “Museum Quality ALLSOPP’s ARCTIC ALE 1852 SEALED/FULL!!!”

And you make - sit down, please - $503,300. A cool half-mil profit. Bet he can afford a few Buds now.

Fromp nowp onp, I’mp goingp top writep everypthingp withp extrap “P’s.”

… this time as an environmental responsibility. The mind boggles.

On the same day the following two wire pieces appeared in The Tennessean:

1. “Princesses rule in the movies and at the office - Most workplaces have a narcissist or two who demand the royal treatment.”

Half of all offices and workplaces have them — people who feel entitled to special projects, entitled to their own timetable, entitled to almost everything anytime they want it. …

“You see Workplace Princesses in the C-Suite and on the factory floor,” said Canter, a San Francisco executive and career coach.

“The question becomes, ‘What’s in our culture that enables princesses to thrive?’ ” Canter said. “To me, the princess, whether male or female, is a narcissist. They think it’s all about me. It’s always how great am I, and what have you done for me lately.”

2. “Younger workers crave praise around the office.”

While tech-savvy, independent and well-educated, these young workers revel in, even crave, constant praise. …

“You used to think that no news was good news,” said Kent Crossland, director of information technology for PING, the Phoenix-based golf club maker. “Today, I guess no news is bad news. They need attention and feedback.” …

[The Y generation was] raised in an age of “active parenting” and are overindulged, overprotected and oversupervised.

That’s why some Generation Y members crave constant feedback into adulthood.

“One of the ways that this generation got narcissistic is that their parents praised them all the time,” said Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University.

We are reaping the fruits of the self-esteem movement that began a generation ago. Low self esteem was blamed for all manner of disfunctions, from failing grades to juvenile criminality. If the kids just had a higher opinion of themselves, so we were told, then they’d be happier, better adjusted, as less likely to get into trouble.

It was all baloney, of course, but millions of moms and dads and educators bought into it. They heaped praise on children for the most trivial reasons: “Hey, Andrea, you’re doing a great job breathing!” Okay, I exaggerate (but only slightly). The result:

For decades schools have embraced the idea that … unless the classroom was cozy and thick with “warm fuzzies”-an educational watchword-students wouldn’t even try. That led to avariety of policies aimed at protecting children’s feelings. It also led to grade inflation, an emphasis on groupwork rather than individual effort, the elimination of valedictorians and even the dearth of spelling bees, critics say.

By the time in the late 1990s that even educators and psychologists realized that the self-esteem emperor had no clothes, it was too late to undo the damage done to millions of kids. And now we see the result.

… Kids born in the ’70s and ’80s are now coming of age. The colorful ribbons and shiny trophies they earned just for participating made them feel special. But now, in college and the workplace, observers are watching them crumble a bit at the first blush of criticism.

“I often get students in graduate school doing doctorates who made straight A’s all their lives, and the first time they get tough feedback, the kind you need to develop skills,” says Deborah Stipek, dean of education at Stanford University. “I have a box of Kleenex in my office because they haven’t dealt with it before.”

Andrea Sobel (same cite) is the “director of recruitment for an entertainment firm” who observes,

“One of the things the managers talked about is an incredible sense of entitlement for people who don’t deserve it,” she says. “They’ll come in right out of college and don’t understand why they’re not getting promoted in three months.”

[Neil] Howe [co-author of Milliennials Rising: The Next Great Generation] blames the attitude on society’s high expectations. “We’ve become a much more child-oriented society around milliennials,” he says. “Self-esteem for them meant you’re the focus of society’s attention.”

Dr. Michael Hurd puts the problem this way:

Self-esteem is crucially important, but it’s a byproduct of more fundamental factors-the core one being a deeply embedded sense of personal responsibility over one’s life. If you act in a personally responsible way and operate continuously on this premise, the sense of control and efficacy associated with self-esteem will largely follow. I have never once met a high self-esteemed individual without this core sense of personal responsibility. I don’t expect I ever will.

Dr. Hurd gets it close, but doesn’t quite earn the cigar. Self esteem is nothing more than what military leaders call morale. A military unit’s high morale does not come from its commander praising them, but from achieving a high level of skill and accomplishment. Praise may then follow, but every commander knows the folly of praising before achievment. It is not really “personal responsibility” that results in high self esteem, but accomplishing things meaningful and difficult. If that gains the respect of peers, so much the better. But first must come accomplishment, then and only then the recognition.

Here’s some countercultural advice: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. ”

Update: Thomas Sowell:

… Today, almost everywhere you look, people seem to be putting their efforts into getting attention.

Wild hairdos, huge tattoos, pierced body parts, outlandish clothing, weird statements — all these have become substitutes for achievements. …

The problem is not just with people who want to get attention by the way they dress, act, talk, or show off in innumerable other ways. The more fundamental problem is that the society around them pays its attention to such superficial and often childish stuff.

As H.L. Mencken said, “No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American people.”

Comments on

Eric Scheie has the story.