David writes:

“Spousal abuse (like divorce) is almost certainly much rarer among Williams graduates than it is for the larger population.”

While I am tempted to call David out for asserting as “fact” something that he can’t know to be true, I won’t do so because (a) he hasn’t asserted it as “fact,” and (b) perhaps he has some evidence to support his statement. Are there studies on the rates of divorce and domestic violence among Williams alums? Williams graduates are (necessarily) more educated than the “average” American and are likely wealthier as well. I suspect there are there studies correlating wealth and/or education with domestic violence and divorce, but I don’t know what they show.

There are no studies that I am aware of on the extent of these problems among Williams alums — more thesis opportunities! Casual empiricism (going to class reunions, reading class notes) suggests that the divorce rate among Williams graduates is much less than the 40% or so usually cited for a national population. The is almost certainly due to IQ/education/wealth and not to something magical in the Purple Mountains. Whitney should be able to Google this literature as well as I can, but he could start here.

Women without undergraduate degrees have remained at about the same rate, their risk of
divorce or separation within the first 10 years of marriage hovering at around 35 percent. But for college graduates, the divorce rate in the first 10 years of marriage has plummeted to just over 16 percent of those married between 1990 and 1994 from 27 percent of those married between 1975 and 1979.

About 60 percent of all marriages that eventually end in divorce do so within the first 10 years, researchers say. If that continues to hold true, the divorce rate for college graduates who married between 1990 and 1994 would end up at only about 25 percent, compared to well over 50 percent for those without a four-year college degree.

Data on spousal abuse (as well as other sorts of violent criminality) are obviously harder to come by, but if you think that these things aren’t (negatively) correlated with IQ/education/wealth, then you need to get out more.

About a year and a half ago, an intern from one of the local hospitals walked into the cafe where I was sitting. Let’s call her Laura. This was Laura’s usual off-shift ritual: a half-hour of coffee and company, between the intense duties of the emergency room, and the duties of home.
She had not had an easy day. She had saved a life, an accomplishment that she, at twenty-four, had achieved far more times than I.
Laura began to unwind and tell the story, and to linger longer than her usual half-hour. Her patient came in, in severe trauma– and though her team was unaware, a ventricle of his heart had been pierced by a knife.
They had worked with God’speed, stabilizing his condition and preparing him for surgery in less than ten minutes. Less than five, I believe. And after hours– after hours of a tricky and impromptu open-heart– Dr. Potzik came down to thank them for their work. Had a few more minutes passed– and there would have been no hours in the surgery.
At another juncture, perhaps we’ll tell the tale of Dr. Potzik grounding a medivac helicopter in a rural field to stabilize a similar patient, on the way to Vanderbilt. No matter.
This patient had arrived with only minutes to spare– and as “Dr. Paul” is oft to say, there is no time for theory during triage. The doctors had done what theyhave to do so often– but the real victory, the point where only moments had been to spare, had been in those minutes after he arrived in the ER. Laura’s quick judgments and actions had saved the patient, and the doctors took the time to let her know that she mattered.
Laura is now in Miami; our region creates and then bleeds such talents, and other patients die, because they are no longer here. No matter.
Days later, Laura and I met again at the cafe. Her patient– this patient– was still in critical care, but had awoken. The police had come, that day, to ask him who had done this to him. He had refused to answer them.
Later, long after they left, she went upstairs and approached him with the same question. “My wife,” he said, “but I don’t want to get her in trouble.”

Some months before these events, I was walking down a street near campus,– the right street, as it was, at the right time of night. I found a student’s dog running loose, wild and spooked, looking for someone familiar, two blocks from the young woman’s home.
I was what the dog was searching for, as it were, as it was, that night.
The young woman did not normally let her dog run off its chain and by itself, and I had been watching this one for a while. I did not quite run, and, by a few seconds, the dog beat me to the house.
By the time I reached her apartment, I found the front door open, which, I suppose, I already expected. By the time I reached her locked bathroom door, again on the heels of the dog, I already knew what was on the other side.
Fortunately, general contractors do not generally go to the expense of installing the hard security doors seen at Williams. Fortunately, I’ve added a good seventy pounds to my Williams weight. Fortunately, I was able to open the door without doing further harm to a woman whose wrists were already bleeding onto to the floor.
If it is not clear, like the dog, she wanted someone to come, a signal she had been sending in various ways for many months. Or more likely, many years before I came to know her.

I faced the above situation twice at Williams, much more naively, somewhat as a result of being the first male involved with the Rape Crisis Center. Once I called the Berkshire Crisis Team and Security, as the Handbook said; once I did not. Many Ephs have faced more and worse situations at Williams, without the insulation of training and office, whatever those may mean.
Towards the end of my senior year, Professor Jeanne Bergmann, who had guided me along these paths along with Bill Darrow and so many others, asked me to publish my case notes and reflections. Norah Vincent’s reflects on being twenty have recently reminded me that my perceptions were far too naive, — as they still seem. Thus, I’ve not yet found a constructive way to follow Jeanne’s suggestion. But in the years that have followed, I’ve filled several notebooks with observations and experiences, “cases,” amid trying to make something of them, in the light of Freud and Kristeva and Dan Goleman.

Two months later, the woman above would break into a young man’s second floor apartment, climbing the wall to his window, cutting her arms and wrists on the shards of the window she had broken, fracturing her ankle as she fell, climbing again, scarring parts of her body as she pressed through the window.
What plea was this? What sort of cry for help? What response– what responsibility– does it demand of us?
I don’t think the young man wanted to see her. But he took her to the hospital.

Forward then to a year later: in another city, another “boyfriend,” now another “ex-”. This man follows the young woman from a bar– how and why does he know she is there?– and somehow he lures her into his car, and he kidnaps her, and…
And? And the next morning, by fortune and chance and fate and luck, the young woman is in an coma in an intensive care unit at one of the our nations’ best regional care facilities. Compared to the history David gives us above, she is among the lucky. She is still alive.
I should find the officer who found her– who saved her. If you think for a moment that any of my actions or history related here are heroic– consider instead the officer who, here in Bowling Green, is responsible for calls of “Domestic Violence,” and who responds to thirty or more such calls in a week. And who tells me that close to 40% of those calls involve women attacking men.
At least, in the police’s terms of determining the “aggressor.”

Why? What is the pattern here– what, beyond our understanding and perception, is going on? What– what concrete pattern of causal determination– leads a wife to pierce her husband’s heart? Or a young man, in response to the semiotic pattern of “calls” above, to, with pre-planning and malice aforethought, leave a once-beloved on the side of a highway, with only minutes or hours to live, save for our society’s immediate attention and care?

Turn the metaphors of our understanding again. As our nation and nations play out these dramas on a global scale– in which the stakes are salvation or the destruction of hundreds of millions of human lives– stop, if you will, to consider that the problems above may be much other than what they seem.

That the problem and question may not be at all “violence against women,” but the problems and questions of violence and force in general– problems and questions with far more intricate details and histories than the short series of events outlined above.

Bien metaphorien, to make reality appear from the right metaphor, Aristotle put in (in what remains of the Poetics), though I am not sure anyone heard him until Paul Ricoeur repeated that call. Consider that we are speaking– metaphorizing– the patterns of violence, and of the sometimes inevitable consequences of the first step, once it is taken, down the wrong causal pathway.

Move then far afar– or to the exact same question– and consider that the Chinese nuclear arsenal has, by reasonable intelligence, increased from five or so 5 megaton devices to nearly two hundred. Why?

Turn to Goethe, looking out upon the devasted face of his beloved Cologne, the collapsed church domes and bridges. Consider my friends from Novi Sad, considering the similar face of their own city. Consider Napoleon and Baron Hausmann, planning such patterns of violence– to restore the face of France, in response to Germany’s own violence against their beloved.

What is going on? And what will be our fortune, our fates, the responsibilities to which we must answer– and to which all that we hold dear may survive or perish?

Go then and read Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian wars– perhaps, try Hobbes’ translation. Go then and read Michael May, my once-tutor and another father of the hydrogen bomb, on the United States’s nuclear posture. All this has happened before.

A young woman sits abandoned on the side of a highway, bleedling, unconscious. A nation and world sits, as we did in that October of 1963, on the brink of catastrophe, each step or mis-step determining our survival or disaster.

As we stand today.

I pray to thee, please, pause to understand our situation. Understand that, in the last half-decade, that the People’s Republic of China has developed the capacity to exterminate two-thirds of the United States’ population in a quarter-hour. Understand that in the terms of “calls for aid,” and of “nuclear posture” and “force equations,” that China may choose to do so, for reasons similar to why the woman above might crawl, bloody and dying, into the room of her once-beloved.

Please understand. Recursively, in the voice of the woman above, “please understand.” See the situation, if but for a moment. Glimpse the situations as the same, but for a moment. Think of the woman above, awaking, alive, in a critical care facility, amazed that she has been saved, amazed that someone has answered her call, her plea. And that she lives. Think of how many of us, how I and Paul Wolfowitz and Michael May and thousands of others, wake each morning— sometimes very surprised that our world is still here.

Despite our fears and nightmares. Imagine Paul Wolfowitz, waking on Vienna’s Ringstraesse the morning I first wrote this, amazed, perhaps, that Vienna still exists. That the bombs have not fallen– again.

Try, for some moments, to understand the young woman above, risking her life to climb the wall of a man who will never understand. Why? Please– And please– je vous prieie, I pray to you– consider why? Consider that we will never understand,

And, that we must, none-the-less.

Ken,

I don’t know you but I do know that you should get your own blog. (If you don’t already have one.)
Then post the url here.

You write beautifully, with nuance and persuasion. I’ll be waiting.

Ken should not get his own blog! But he should write more here. Longtime readers will recall that I tried to organize a program of Ephayists, Ephs who would write essays on whatever topic they liked and post them at EphBlog. Here is Ken’s contribution to that effort.

That idea never took off, perhaps because Ken and others sometimes feel that if a post isn’t Eph-related than it doesn’t belong on EphBlog (whereas comments are fair game). I (and perhaps “lurking” above?) disagree. We need more fine writing by Ken and others, on whatever topic strikes their fancy.

Perhaps we could put some friendly peer-pressure on Ken to produce such an essay, maybe the first Wednesday of every month? Maybe more often? Chime in if you agree.