The other day I read our own @rachellu’s review of the new book by Mark Regnerus, provocatively and moralistically called Cheap Sex. The review is a balm upon the heart, so go read it. The book itself is receiving more praise then I can catalog here — it’s science and it’s reassuring for conservatives. The facts are in and they’re what you’d expect: liberated America is a sexual marketplace, and that’s a wasteland.

I’ll skip the topographical survey of the wasteland. Writer and reviewer both agree with most among us that we’re long on problems and short on solutions; and most — but not all — our predictions are grim. We’re shamelessly theoretical about our catalogs of facts — no prudes we! And then we’re hopelessly impractical about doing anything about all this stuff we think we know. Am I the only one to find this hilarious, that we’re hard at work, most earnestly and morally, to prove that knowledge is a source of impotence? This is not to say anything against either author. They didn’t cause this mismatch between the power of our science and the impotence of our politics.

Let’s talk about the problems with our science, because that’s where we seem to turn to ask for knowledge that works, that helps us out. We can call it political science or social science or psychology or evolutionary biology. What we want to get out of it is knowledge about ourselves as human beings. The problem here is that we ourselves are split between theory and practice.* You might say that theory is a talking brain like Stephen Hawking, trying to know the cosmos, and practice is back on Earth, him turning his wife into a nurse and then a nurse into a wife, because someone has to care for the body while the mind is roaming. But let’s not start with our healthcare crisis…