High Creativity is Rare - But Joining the Conversation is Worthwhile

Randall Collins estimates that there will be, at best, 2 majors philosophers per generation, and perhaps another dozen or so important secondary philosophers. In The Sociology of Philosophies he contends that high levels of intellectual creativity are rare. Taking the long view, it is likely that none of the major thinkers of today will rate a paragraph in the intellectual histories of 500 years from now. This can be somewhat depressing.

On the other hand, the great intellectual project of understanding the world is worth doing. Even being a provincial intellectual, or a thoughtful member of the reading public, is an important part in making creative thought real. How can this be so? Because, Collins argues, the right measure of creative thought is how much other people use and develop your ideas. His rule of thumb is that we can't really begin to say that a thinker is a creative intellectual until a third generation of thinkers has taken up that person's ideas. That means that we, the readers and thinkers (to whatever degree) of this day, are vital to the creative intellectual work of those who went before. Our thoughts are really what makes a genius a genius.

One of the most inviting images in Collins' argument is his account of what intellectual life is, at its heart:

"The intellectual world is a massive conversation. … What makes one an intellectual is one's attraction to this conversation."

EE from CC in IR

I began "theory camp" today with a group of students, working our way through Randall Collins' The Sociology of Philosophies. The heart of the book is a sociological analysis of all the great schools of philosophy, east and west, as social networks. Before he gets to the philosophers, though, Collins outlines the "skeleton of theory." He argues that in any social network, people get emotional energy from exchanging, developing, and arguing over cultural capital in great chains of interaction rituals. In his terms, we get EE from CC in IR.

Interactions rituals are an idea he developed from the work of Erving Goffman, who in turn was expanding an insight of one of the founding sociologists, Emile Durkheim. Social structures aren't really physical structures like walls and floors, but rather are interactions that people have regularly, habitually -- that is, ritually. The specific words they say differ each time, but the form of the interaction is a ritual.

Cultural capital is the kind of knowledge that secures us a place in a social network. It is the kind of knowledge that is useful to you and to other people. We not only exchange it, we develop it, mostly by combining one kind of cultural capital with others to make new social value. Intellectuals, such as philosophers, are especially and primarily focused on exchanging and developing ideas. The idea of cultural capital Collins draws directly from Pierre Bourdieu.

The new idea I have learned from our studies so far is about "emotional energy." When we interact with others in our social networks, we have emotional reactions. The more the network matters to us, the more power these interactions have to lift up or dash our emotions. Collins says we are drawn to the kinds of arguments that our network finds most interesting. If we add to our network's argument successfully, the positive feedback will fill us with emotional energy; the reverse effect leads to negative feedback, which drains our emotional energy.

The stars of philosophy, or any intellectual network, are the most productive, some of their products being particularly insightful to the rest of the network. These stars have the drive to keep working so hard because of their great emotional energy. Emotional energy is clearly a cousin of Durkheim's "collective effervescence." Collins transforms Durkheim's notion from a product of collective emotion and solidarity, to be an engine of the social network. EE makes the social structure go.

Spoiler! (Not Really)

The eldest Gruntled child, Megblum, is paranoid about running across any Harry Potter spoilers. Her friends know this. She called one of them to give him birthday greetings. The conversation went like this:

Friend: "Hello?"

Megblum: "Happy Birthday!"

Friend: "Boromir dies!"


Layers of cultural literacy are buried in that prank.

Gone to Hogwarts for the Duration

Cuba's Low Infant-Mortality Rate is Propped Up by its High Abortion Rate

Cuba has an infant-mortality rate of 5.3 deaths per 1,000 live births, which is better that the U.S. rate of 6.4. However, Cuba also has an extremely high abortion rate. The United States has a fairly high abortion rate, with about a quarter of conceptions getting aborted. The Cuban abortion rate is about 3 times the U.S. rate.

No wonder Cuba has such a low rate of infant death - so few its babies get to be infants in the first place.

No-Fault Divorce Is Not the Problem – Unilateral Divorce Is

The "no-fault" revolution that swept the states in the 1970s increased the divorce rate about ten percent. Since the overall divorce rate is now a little under 50%, that is a sizable hunk of all divorces. A new study from the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy (iMAPP) by iMAPP president Maggie Gallagher and law professor Douglas Allen reviewed all the studies in this country and elsewhere to see what effect the no-fault revolution has had. They conclude that many factors contributed to the divorce boom, but the no-fault legal changes that made divorce easier were definitely significant.

No-fault was supposed to increase the divorce rate, at first. When states started passing divorce reform in the late sixties they figured that there was a backlog of unhappy marriages that would take advantage of the easier rules. Gallagher and Douglas estimate that most of the increase in the divorce rate due to no-fault came in the first ten years. Proponents of no-fault expected that there would be a divorce spike, followed by a return to the earlier divorce rate, or maybe even a lower one. Judges and lawyers were eager to end the charade that many divorces had become, in which both parties agreed to have one party pretend to be to blame, especially of adultery.

That is not quite the way it worked out, though. There was a divorce spike after divorce reform – but the spike did not come back down. By the early '80s we hit the highest divorce rate ever, and many respectable analysts thought half of all marriages would end in divorce. Things never got quite that bad, and there has been some improvement recently, especially for educated people. Still, as Gallagher and Douglas show, divorce reform makes people reluctant to get married, or lets them expect to take an easy exit when things get tough, as they always do.

New York is the only state that still requires that someone be at fault in order to grant a divorce. Yet about 2/3rds of New York divorces are uncontested, and in many of those cases the parties agree ahead of time that one of them will admit to fault in order to get on with the divorce. This is why a high-level panel of judges and lawyers is proposing to do away with New York's fault standard altogether.

So, if we went back to fault-based divorce, would that be better for marriage? Not really. The problem is not really that we now have no-fault divorce, but that we have unilateral divorce. What the no-fault revolution has really meant is that it takes two to marry, but only one to divorce. In practice this often means that the "monied party" – usually him – can walk away from the "unmonied" (or making-much-less) party and the kids.

New York probably will join the rest of the country in abolishing fault as the only standard for divorce. They could strengthen marriage, or at least make divorce less awful, if the state eliminated unilateral divorce at the same time.

Self Esteem is Bad For You

Self esteem should be a by-product of actually achieving something. Self esteem is not a viable goal by itself. Indeed, I don't see how you can inculculate self esteem as an end in itself.

Andrew Lam of New American Media and a chronicler of the Vietnamese diaspora reports that American kids have high self esteem, but lousy achievement in math, whereas Asian kids have modest self esteem, but much higher actual achievement in math. This finding is fairly well known to people in the education racket. Lam also reports a finding I had not seen, a new study by Jean Twenge at San Diego State. A quarter century ago, at the beginning of the self esteem fashion in American schools, a third of American college students had above average scores on a narcissism index. Today, two thirds of American college students have above-average narcissism scores.

If kids think that they cannot achieve anything, then they are less likely to. The cure, though, is not to tell them that they are already great the way they are. The cure to is to help them actually achieve something worthwhile. As a friend put it, "school should teach kids; let the little buggers look after their own self esteem."

Three Parents, or None?

A lesbian couple wanted a baby, so one of them got pregnant with the help of a sperm donor. The baby was born. Then the lesbians split up. Then the sperm donor got sued for child support. And then, in a surreal conclusion to the whole disaster, the Pennsylvania Superior Court declared that all three adults are the child's legal parents, with all the rights that married parents have who make kids the usual way. Elizabeth Marquardt has a very calm op-ed in the New York Times about the legal earthquake that this decision makes.

What impresses me most about this case is not so much that this poor kid has three parents, as that he barely has one.

No-Fault Divorce Adds 10% to the Divorce Rate

A forthcoming study by Maggie Gallagher and Douglas Allen, previewed in Newsweek, estimates that no-fault divorce laws added 10% to the divorce rate beyond what we otherwise would have had. They found that the big direct effect -- adding extra divorces -- came in the first ten years. Since then there has been an indirect effect in the couples who cohabitate but avoid marriage due to a heightened fear of divorce. This leads to further misery, as cohabiters break up at even higher rates than married people do, and cohabiters who later marry have an even higher divorce rate than other married people.

In her earlier book with Linda Waite, The Case for Marriage, Gallagher had reported that no-fault added 6 to 7% to the divorce rate. This new report is based on more and more recent studies.

I will have more details when the study itself is released.

Sugar Cookies

The wonderful Megblum, daughter #1, and one of her buddies very nicely took it upon themselves to entertain visiting cousins, who are five-year-old twins. Megblum, who is a great Arranger, collected sugar cookie dough and many kinds of icing, sprikles, glitter, candy bones, and other things to turn cookie-baking into an art. Boy cousin made many quickly, and ate them as fast as he made them. Girl cousin made one, which she layered with every kind of topping to a great height -- which she then carefully licked off, leaving the cookie.

A good time was had by all.

Teens Get Smarter About Sex

The teen intercourse rate fell below 50% a decade ago. The teen pregnancy rate has been dropping for twice that long. Of those teens who do have sex, nearly 2/3rds now say they use condoms. The teen birth rate has hit a record low. All of this good news is in a just-released federal report.

The only thing that bothers me about this report is that the reason the government gives for the improvement. Edward Sondik, director of the National Center for Health Statistics, said "The lower figure on teens having sex means the risk of sexually transmitted disease is lower." He is right, of course, and lowering the risk of STDs is a good thing. But think of how else he might have finished that sentence. "The lower figure on teens having sex means ...

- that more teens see the value of saving sex for marriage
- that more teens understand that their children will be healthier and happier if they wait until they are older to have them
- that more teens understand that sex is better if it is part of a mature commitment, one they are not ready to make yet
- that more teen girls understand that they do not have to say yes to hold on to a guy
- that more teen boys understand that they should not press a girl to say yes even when she wants to please him
- that more teens understand that popular culture is saturated with sex because it is an easy way to sell things, not because that is the way real life should be

... and a dozen other positive, mature reasons why some teenagers control their natural desires more sensibly.

Sex is not primarily about disease and death. Smart kids know that.

3-Year Itch -- Without Kids?

The New York Times is giving prominence to a new report by Larry Bumpass and Kelly Musick that seems to show a decline in marital happiness after three years of marriage. The professors, the reporter, and the experts queried go on about the possible effects of today's instant gratification lifestyle, or the effects of widespread cohabitation before marriage, or perhaps of the later marriage age that is common now.

What none of the voices in the article mention, though, is whether these unhappy marrieds had kids. Measuring marital happiness without asking about kids is like writing restaurant reviews without mentioning the food.

Marriage Forces Social Closure

How do we turn the spectrum of social status into a ladder with rungs? This is a problem for sociology. Objectively, it seems that all the thousands of status distinctions add up to a smooth spectrum of individuals, not a structure of status groups. Yet we know that people make and experience social life as full of groups with boundaries that define who is in, and who is out.

One of the ways that we make these boundaries is by using educational credentials. Randall Collins, as I have noted in the last couple of posts, says that we are in an advanced state of a "credential society," where we use educational credentials, certifications, licenses, and so forth to make social distinctions that go way beyond the knowledge that those credentials can really certify.

Frank Parkin, a Weberian sociologist, wrote a wonderful book, Marxism and Class Structure: A Bourgeois Critique. He develops Weber's idea that social life has an endless process of creating and resisting social closure. The up group finds some marker to insist on that excludes the group below; the group below resists this usurpation of their upward claims -- and in turn exclude groups below them.

Class theorists rarely really grapple with how marriage relates to class and status structure. In the old days, a man's status was simply assumed to define the status of the women in his family. Since the '70s, we have been more careful to treat women's status separately from men's. Still, sociologists remain remarkably individualistic on this point. We do not have a theory of the social status of a married couple and their children.

Closure theory may be the beginning of such a theory. Status groups are not just categories made up by sociologists. They are the real groups in which we tend to find our friends, spend our free time, find out mates, and raise our kids. Marriage forces a couple to consolidate in one status group. This is not an absolute rule, but a tendency. The loose flow among social groups that single people, especially young single people, can enjoy (or suffer) tends to give way to a much more fixed and coherent social life when they marry, and especially when they have kids. A family is a little society which, in normal circumstances, all live in one status group. Families, especially networks of families, may be the basic unit of social closure.

I am groping toward an idea here, but I think I am on to something.

Credentialing the Lump

R.H. Delderfield's classic school novel, To Serve Them All My Days, describes "the lump," the block of students who move through a school without being much affected by their "education." They have brains enough to be engaged and transformed by their studies. They just aren't curious about what is being taught. The lump isn't changed by their schooling, and don't really want to be. What they want from school is a good social time and a punched ticket to a better job than they would have otherwise.

A light feature story I read profiled some students who had just finished their first year of college. The opening was something like "They have just been through a year of hard work, intense discussions, and late night study sessions. Yeah, right." The young people had successfully completed freshman year at some big state universities. Now they had found undemanding summer jobs to give their lives structure. They were shown sitting by the pool, playing cards. When asked to describe their first year of college, they said nothing about the books they read, the classes they took, the challenging diversity of people they met, or the life-changing discussions they engaged in. The only part of their college experience they thought worth mentioning were the fraternities and sororities they joined during freshmen orientation. Once they had achieved that, "college" could unfold smoothly. The story was not at all critical of these young people, having been written by an intern who was himself a student at a similar school.

Randall Collins, in The Credential Society, says that the core function of the enormous American higher education system is giving credentials to this lump. What a college degree means for them is that they do not have to compete with the high school graduates for better-paying jobs. Knowing that someone has a B.A. tells us almost nothing about what they learned, if anything, or what kind of people they have become.

As a teacher, I would much rather have an average kid who wants to learn than a smart one with no curiosity. At Centre we do awaken many from their comfortable drift through college. I have to say that small teaching colleges have more success than big research universities in breaking through the shell of intellectual indifference. But even the best college passes some students through undigested and unaffected. But, as Collins notes, at least we kept them off the job market for a few years. And they pay the bills.

Credential Society vs. Babies

Yesterday I started writing about Randall Collins' The Credential Society. Collins offers a strong critique of the way we continuously ratchet up the educational credentials needed to even be considered for a job. Collins argues that we invest so much in educational credentials because we need a way to create arbitrary breaks in the status structure, so that some groups (the ones with the credentials) can monopolize the better jobs. The actual education, he argues, has little relation to doing the job.

Collins makes a strong proposal to abolish compulsory credential requirements ("you must have X degree to be considered for the job"). He fears, though, that what is likely to happen is that credential inflation will continue, which will inspire a further round of ratcheting up.

In one way, credential inflation is just a relative game. If a job that took a high school degree before now takes a college degree, then everyone just competes to move up a step, without changing relative position. The same number of people, drawn from the same classes, end up with the job as before -- it just takes them longer to get there.

There is one calendar, though, that it more imperious than the academic one: the biological clock for babies. Now that all positions are legally open to women, women as a group have been doing very well in competing in school to prepare for the top positions -- doing better, in fact, than men. However, highly credentialed women face a conflict that highly credentialed men do not face nearly as much: how to fit in having and raising babies with the endless credentials chase?

Credential inflation hurts women more than men for irreducible biological reasons. Babies are reason enough to consider fighting the credential society.

Collins on Church Competition

I have given up on working through Habermas. After Legitimation Crisis, which I still think is great, Habermas took a turn toward toward linguistic analysis that I can't follow.

Instead, I have been working through the works of Randall Collins. I have used Collins' theory essays for teaching for years. A few years ago he wrote a massive study of the social networks that make up schools of thought, The Sociology of Philosophies. This book won the top award (Distinguished Scholarly Publication) from the American Sociological Association. This is the book that we are going to read in theory camp in a couple of weeks.

In the meantime I have been working through two of Collins' earlier works, The Credential Society and Weberian Socialogical Theory.

So why am I writing about this on Sunday, religion day in the Gruntled Center?

Collins argues that thought is best developed when groups of thinkers compete with one another. This is true for schools of philosophy -- and for religious denominations.

The American religion market is so vibrant because of the endless competition of our religious communities.

Moving Middle East Map

This link goes to a fantastic moving map of the various empires that have affected the Middle East.

The Love Bank

Willard Harley studies how people stay in love through a long marriage. His wonderful metaphor is that when we meet someone, we start a "Love Bank" account for them. The more we associate good feelings with them, the more their account grows; the more we associate bad feelings with them, the more it shrinks. When a couple discovers how to make each other happy, they build up their respective Love Bank accounts until the become so irresistable that they have to marry.

Long happy marriages keep filling that account, and minimizing the withdrawals. Marriages start to fail when one persons makes more withdrawals than deposits, which leads to a negative spiral.

What Harley teaches the couples he counsels is how to do the basic things that meet their spouse's emotional needs, and builds up their Love Bank account. And what are those basic needs for most couples? Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised at what Harley found in his three decades of research. In most couples, he wants fulfilling sex and recreational companionship; she wants affection and intimate conversation. Harley found that in declining marriages, not only were the couple not meeting these basic desires, they often thought what their spouse wanted was silly.

Marriage is mutual, which means that you have to give what the other wants, even if that is not the same as what you want. And that way you can each fill the Love Bank.

Willard Harley was given an award for his long-term impact at the Smartmarriages conference last week.

Lifetime Chastity for 1 in 5

About a quarter of women, and a sixth of men, report that they had no more than one sex partner in their whole lives. Now, some of these folks may stray after the survey. On the other hand, remarried widows and widowers may have more than one lifetime partner, but still be chaste. Still, this seems like a good baseline number of what fraction of Americans are likely to be virgins or to have sex only with their spouses in their whole lives. The "Chaste Fifth" is a minority, to be sure, but not a negligible one. I will remember this the next time someone proposes that chastity is unrealistic or that "everyone" has unmarried sex.

Most People Fly the Flag

Most Americans fly the Star-Spangled Banner. That is true for young as well as old, Democrats as well as Republicans, the well educated and the least educated. In fact, of all the demographic categories in the recent Pew Research Center study -- sex, race, age, party, region, education -- the only category in which most people did not report flying the flag was African-Americans.

In academic world, though, flag-flying is rare. Yet recently, three of my colleagues - liberal Democrats, every one -- installed brackets and bought flags. As one of my neighbors explained, "patriotic liberals" like him were not going to leave the flag, or the country, to their opponents. In fact, I came by one morning and he was outside, shirtless, picking up the paper, cup of coffee in hand, with his flag flying from his front porch, and his motorcycle parked invitingly in his front yard. I told him the scene looked like the cover of a Toby Keith album (he guffawed).

This Independence Day morning I had my eldest put our flag up, joining in the hallowed ritual of the Fourth of July that most Americans do - together.

Kids Are Still Vital to Married People's Happiness

A new study by the Pew Research Center reports the scary news that only a minority (41%) of Americans think that children are very important to a happy marriage. Press reports have noted that people rank doing the chores higher as a factor in marital happiness. However, when you ask parents how important children are to their happiness, 85% say kids are the most important source of happiness (rank 10 on a 10 point scale) -- higher than any other factor.

I think the first question is a little misleading. The question asked which factors made for a happy marriage in the abstract -- not "your marriage," but marriage in general. On that scale, the rank of kids fell 24 points since 1990. What has changed in the meantime in the public's discourse about marriage? Same-sex marriage, both as a debate and, in a handful of states, a reality. While most people (57%) oppose homosexual marriage, the percentage thinking it should be allowed has risen in the past decade and a half as gay marriage has become a reality for the first time.

I believe that what we are seeing here is a change in how some people - maybe even a quarter of the population -- think about what marriage is. If "marriage" can include homosexuals, then it would seem unfair to assume that children are important to marital happiness in general. However, when married parents are talking about their own, non-abstract happiness, children rank at the very top.

What the Pew survey shows is not a change in how most people rank children, but rather a shift in how some people define marriage.

Deinstitutionalization

This is what David Blankenhorn is really worried about in The Future of Marriage. There is a concerted campaign to delegitimize the couple-raising-their-children model of marriage and family life. The form of the campaign is, he argues, being most effectively carried on not by a head-on assault, but by side actions. The proponents of The Full Stacey (see my posts of last week) explicitly want to dethrone The Family by placing it on a level with all kinds of families. The effect of this movement, Blankenhorn argues, will not be to broaden the meaning of family, but to deinstitutionalize marriage. When marriage is whatever people want to call a marriage, then there is no public marriage any more.

The core of Blankenhorn's advocacy of marriage for two decades is that it is the best institution for the hard but socially essential business of raising children. He knows, as I do, that any given child might be raised by all sorts of committed adults, and most of those kids will turn out ok. We should honor all those good-enough efforts to raise children as good enough. But the most likely, the most durable, the most efficient, and the most successful option for kids and for society is still to be raised by their own married parents.

I disagree with Blankenhorn about whether same-sex civil unions are too dangerous to legally permit. I think they are good enough. I also don't think there will be many takers, but that does not affect the principle of the thing. I agree with Blankenhorn, though, that any social change that really did deinstitutionalize marriage would be socially disastrous.

Thais Do the Right Thing, Keep Buddhism Out of the Constitution

Thailand is writing a new constitution. The country is 90% Buddhist. The Muslim minority is getting increasingly militant. The Buddhist leadership pressed the constitution writers to declare Buddhism the national religion. To the consternation of the monks, the constitution writers voted against it 66 - 19. The Constitution Drafting Assembly's spokesman said "we will lose more than we would gain from it." And quite right, too.

The days of nation-state religions are over. Declaring the majority faith to be the national religion now only makes the minorities more oppressed and more resistant. It is a particularly bad idea to make Muslims more resistant at this moment in history. Buddhism has thus far been able to avoid developing a violent fundamentalist wing, at least outside of Sri Lanka, which is a good thing, especially in the religious tinderbox of South Asia.

My advice to the Buddhist monks in Thailand: insist on a freedom of religion clause in the constitution. Then go evangelize.

Bedtime Poker

Boybot, newly 13, came upstairs a bit before he could be told that it was time to retire for the night.

He stuck his head in our bedroom and offered "I see your 'go to bed,' and raise you a 'right now.'"

Then he grinned and went to bed.

Blankenhorn's Three Rules of Marriage

David Blankenhorn offers three fundamental rules of marriage in The Future of Marriage:

The rule of two
The rule of opposites
The rule of sex

The three rules go together. A man and a woman are drawn to one another, the natural result of which is that they wish to have sex with one another, the natural result of which is a child. Marriage is a social institution created to provide that child with his or her own mother and father permanently. Marriage also makes the sex between the man and woman legitimate, because it protects them from the natural shocks that any human relationship is subject too, and pre-emptively protects any future children that could normally be expected to result from their sexual relationship.

Blankenhorn thinks an assault on any one of these rules would lead to undermining them all. For this reason, he opposes same-sex marriage. He does not object to homosexuals, homosexuality, or, as far as I can tell, homosexual sex. His concern, rather, is to protect children. He views marriage as the greatest social invention to protect children. Any social move that deinstitutionalizes marriage will soon hurt all kids some, and hurt some kids terribly.

Blankenhorn details well that there is a concerted effort to deinstitutionalize marriage. He takes Judith Stacey as a leader in this movement, and refers to the extreme position that she represents as "the Full Stacey." Stacey is against all three rules of marriage, and openly wants to deinstitutionalize marriage altogether. Her position is that any relationship, made by any number or composition of consenting adults, constitutes a marriage if they say so. Blankenhorn points out the irony that the greatest opponents of marriage, the brigade of the Full Stacey, are the strongest proponents of same-sex marriage. The most aware anti-marriage leaders (like Judith Stacey herself) are deliberately promoting gay marriage in order to end all marriage as a social institution. They want to save the village in order to destroy it.

No Sex in Gay Marriage

David Blankenhorn in his new book The Future of Marriage points out something I had not noticed: proponents of homosexual marriage define marriage as the close relation of two people who love one another. They do not include sexual intercourse as part of the definition. By that standard, nearly all parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren, siblings, even most close friends would be "married."

The Future of Marriage reviews the anthropological evidence for the early origins of intense sexual attachments among human beings, which normally result in children. Blankenhorn then makes the case that marriage is a cultural achievement, created in historic times, to permanently unite these sexually bound parents to raise their children. Once invented, marriage has become a nearly universal social institution through which a man and woman turn their sexual relation into a social relation for rearing the kids that their sex produces.

Blankenhorn can only find two schools of thought that do not include sex as an essential good of marriage. The first were the early Church Fathers, who were trying to develop a theory of marriage based on the unique relationship of the Virgin Mary and Joseph. They acknowledged that sex was part of the definition of marriage, but they weren't too happy about it. The other school of marriage theorists who define marriage without praising sex are today's proponents of same-sex marriage. Indeed, Blankenhorn says, the same-sex marriage theorists are the only marriage theorists that he has ever run across who do not include sex in their definition of marriage at all. And Blankenhorn has been a professional student of marriage for twenty years.

Blankenhorn thinks that gay marriage proponents don't want to talk about sex because they don't want to talk about children -- children being the main, though not the only, focus of all marriage theories ever developed before the current moment. It occurs to me to wonder, though, if another reason to avoid spelling out the sexual point of homosexual marriage is because most people find the idea of it distasteful, even if they don't think it should be illegal. Tactically, gay marriage may sell better if the campaign is about who you love, not who you have intercourse with, or why.

The Science of Gaydar

There is a very interesting article of this title in the current issue of New York magazine. Author David France was on "The Colbert Report" last night, making a mild case for the tantalizing physical correlates of homosexual orientation. What Colbert focused on were the headline-grabbing findings like the comparative lengths of index and ring fingers (gay men more like women, lesbians more like men), or the fact that later-born brothers are a third more likely to be gay than their next-oldest brother. A new finding is that gay men are significant more likely to have a counter-clockwise swirl to their hair (23% vs. 8%) -- a literal "headline" story.

In the article, France reports more of the detailed work on less visible body features that correlated with homosexuality. He talked to Simon LeVay, who did a pathbreaking study on the size of the hypothalmus, the brain structure most seaped in sex-controlling hormones, in which gay men's brains are more like women's. He reviewed the research on the most probable chromosomal region for a hypothetical gay gene. France talked to researchers working on how hormone sequences in the womb influence all kinds of expressions of masculinity and femininity -- a line of research that I am guessing will prove the most instructive in the end.

France also discusses the inevitable politics of even doing such research. Most of the researchers in this field are homosexual, and they, like France, are looking for an account of their own lives. Some gay activists, though, oppose even asking the question, for fear that suggesting a biological cause will then lead to a search for a biological cure. I am sure, as France is, that how individuals turn out is a complex mix of nature and nurture. I fear no research, because I know good science will yield appropriately complex answers.

In facing the question of where to draw the nature/nurture line in understanding sex differences, I was driven some years ago from the "overwhelmingly nurture" position that most sociologists take, to a more balanced position. I find it best to think that sex and gender are a 50/50 balance of nature and nurture -- recognizing that these are imprecise metaphors for a complex set of causes on both sides of the divide. I believe the science of sexual orientation, like the science of sex itself, will turn out the same way: 50/50.

Creation Museum

Yesterday I went to the Creation Museum in northern Kentucky. Why Australians came all the way here to place their museum, I do not know. Still, it is a gift to me that a place so interesting is only a day trip, so daughter Endub and I made the expedition.

The museum is very nicely done. The Lexington paper reported that they spent $27 million. All the animatronics are up to date, the videos were professionally done, and the planetarium show was great. The content of the museum has generated controversy, because they promote a fairly extreme version of "young earth" creationism. When they opened, there were secularist pickets marching outside the gates. In fact, security was surprisingly strong and evident - electronic gates, uniformed guards, security cameras everywhere. The crowd was also great -- evangelicals from all over, a few respectful skeptics, a vanload of Mennonites, and four young goths in full Marilyn Manson get up. A sociologist's feast.

The tone of the museum is very calm. It is hard to convey very much information in a museum -- all the text presented in the plaques and video scripts would probably fit in a 100-page book. The visuals of the size of the stars and the distances of the universe were wonderfully done in the planetarium show, and could not have been done as well in a book. The core of Answers in Genesis' argument is that the Noah flood can account for the many phenomena that appear to have taken millions of years to develop. The visuals showing (hypothetical) floating forests being folded into coal seams by tidal waves, and giant rafts of logs circulating with currents carrying ark animals to different continents are very helpful in getting the picture they are trying to convey. Their reading of Eden has some new features I had not heard before, including the idea that all animals before the Fall were vegetarians, and no poisons, diseases, or other methods of dealing death yet existed in nature.

And then there are the dinosaurs. The Creation Museum loves dinosaurs as much as any natural history museum does. They have full-sized models, some of them moving, in Eden. They are about to open a whole Dinosaur Wing, which we got to peek into. The film that ends the tour suggests that Noah took dinosaurs on the ark, Job's Behemoth was a brontosaurus, and St. George fought one of the last remnant dino-dragons. In the park next to the museum the kids can play with a T. Rex, and Nessie swims in the lagoon. The New York Times story has the best set of pictures. They do not have my favorite scene, though: a cave girl playing with a squirrel, while two veliciraptors (or something like that) hang around nearby. I think one of the central creative decisions made in designing the museum was to take the dinosaurs, and dinophiles, head on.

I was not convinced by the Creation Museum, despite their slogan -- You Will Believe. There are plenty of other kinds of biblical and creationist views that do not entail believing in a 10,000-year-old earth. Still, I commend the expedition to all who can make it. And since the conflicts and scandals have already begun within Answers in Genesis, you might want to get there before the whole extravaganza implodes.

Dutch "Weariness With Moral Squalor"

The Dutch are cutting down on prostitution, pot, and hash. Moral reformers from many parties, from the orthodox Christian Union to the liberal and secular Labor Party, are trying to roll back the "anything goes" policies of the last few decades. The Dutch are particularly disturbed that they are becoming a regular tourist destination for foreigners seeking sex, drugs, and abortions that are illegal in their own countries. Foreign mobs have been entering the sex and drugs markets, too.

While the small Dutch Reformed remnant has very active in pushing the moral reforms, the movement is by no means restricted to religious people. James C. Kennedy, a history professor at the Free University in Amsterdam was quoted in the Washington Post as saying that there is a national "weariness with moral squalor."

Piñata

[There is a small spoiler in this post]

For his 13th birthday, I went with my son to see the new "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie. At one point one of the characters is revealed to be the goddess Calypso bound in a human body. When the right spell is said to release the goddess, the character suddenly grows to be as tall as the ship's mast, harangues the crew for being rotten mortals -- then bursts into a hundred thousand crabs, who scuttle across the deck (and over all the humans) and jump into the sea.

Boybot turned to me and said "Worst piñata ever."

Feminism is Over? 'Kay

Kay Hymowitz says feminism is obsolete. On the one hand, equal opportunity is a sacred belief of the civil religion. On the other hand, most women want to use their equal opportunities to have a life that includes getting married and staying home with the kids when they are little. Most young women, even the ones who do think of themselves as femininsts, are willing to sacrifice some money and power in the world to get that kind of life. If the graying Second Wavers don't like it, they can lump it.

The best story Hymowitz recounts in the "The End of Herstory" chapter of Marriage and Caste in America is of Peggy Orenstein speaking Second Wave truths to college women. A Washington University student said from the audience, "I don't want to wait until I am 35 to have kids!"
Orenstein's reaction: "I nodded sympathetically. It really wasn't fair. Then suddenly I thought, 'Wait a minute! I am nearly 37 and I don't have children yet. These women don't want to be me."

Yup.

Three Nice Teenagers

Today my youngest child turns 13. He joins his sisters, who are 17 and 19. This is the Year of the Teenager.

I do not face this with apprehension, though, they are pretty good kids.

The Mission of the Marital Caste

I think the best idea in Kay Hymowitz' Marriage and Caste in America is that higher class parents see their main job as educating and developing their children, while parents in the lower classes see their main job as simply assuring that their children have the necessities of living. Middle class mothers, especially, organize their lives around what Hymowitz calls The Mission. The mission to educate the children becomes the organizing principle of middle class households.

Hymowitz says the importance of the Mission has multiplied in recent years, as our economy is more and more based on knowledge and the sustained capacity to learn.

When you tie together the Mission, the knowledge-based economy, and the caste-like advantage of the married classes,

... the reason for that Mozart or Rafi tape in the morning, and that bedtime story at night, for finding out all you can about a teacher in the fall and for Little League in the spring, for all the books, crib mobiles, trips to the museum, and limits on TV ...

looks not so much like a fussy lifestyle as it does the foundation of the next ruling class.

Keep the Engagement, Lose the Diamond

Diamond engagement rings are a fad ingeniously cooked up by DeBeers, the diamond monopoly. Now that diamond engagement rings average $3,200, they are becoming an obstacle to engagement, the way that the absurd cost of weddings -- now averaging nearly $30,000 -- are becoming an obstacle to marriage.

Meghan O'Rourke, writing in Slate, is against engagement rings altogether, because they are one sided and therefore, in her mind, sexist. I do not have the same objection. I think men and women are complementary but not the same in their approach to courtship, a difference as much rooted in our different biology as in culture. It is important for men to give public tokens of their exclusive commitment to a woman. And, as Steven Rhoads writes in Taking Sex Differences Seriously, if you had to show a space alien an example of what a happy human being looks like, you could not do better than an engaged woman. Now, that token of betrothal does not have to be a ring, and certainly not a diamond ring. I gave Mrs. G. an opal that had been in the family. It was bigger and flashier than our "homely Protestant" aesthetic would have picked if we had been starting from scratch. Opals are fragile enough that you wouldn't want to wear it all the time. Still, I think a gemstone ring on the left ring finger would be universally understood as a engagement ring in our time and place.


O'Rourke cites legal scholar Margaret Brinig's argument that big engagement rings became popular in the middle of the 20th century in a transitional cultural moment. At the beginning of the century, if an engaged woman gave up her virginity, then was abandoned, she could sue for Breach of Promise to Marry. As the century wore on legal fashion turned against making a legal case out of it. By the end of the century, loss of virginity was not much of an obstacle to marriage anyway. In between, though, a woman deserted at the altar still had a big asset she could sell, as partial compensation for what she had lost.

We can go a little deeper into this story, though. Edward Jay Epstein tells a fascinating story in The Atlantic in 1982 with the instructive title "Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?" He tells the story of how the DeBeers cartel hired the Ayer advertising firm in the Depression to create a market for a useless kind of rock which, thanks to DeBeers' own mines, was no longer even rare. Ayer invented the slogan "A diamond is forever," and planted the notion that a man's love for a woman can be measured by the size of the diamond her gives her. Having successfully planted that thought, DeBeers today is trying to create a market for anniversary diamonds.

Let me say that I really like the mushy romantic DeBeers ads. I like the young couple holding hands looking at the old couple holding hands. The one in which the husband re-proposes to his wife in Trafalgar Square, with all their friends and relatives showing up to surprise her, makes me laugh every time. And the guy shouting to the world in St. Mark's Square "I love this woman!" is something I can plausibly threaten Mrs. G. with.

I like the mush. I just skip the diamonds.

What American Marriage Does

This is the title of the second essay in Kay Hymowitz' Marriage and Caste in America.

The answer is "raise children." The distinctive feature of American marriage, compared to the Old World models against which we revolted, is that couples were much more supported in choosing who they would raise children with. A republic needs civic-minded, self-reliant citizens, and the best nursery for such adults is a strong democratic family. What has changed since the cultural revolution is that children are being driven out of the picture. Marriage has been redefined as being about the happiness of the couple, not the protection of their children.

The good news in Hymowitz' essay is that this redefinition of marriage may not be a permanent change, but is another idiosyncrasy of Baby Boomers. As they age out of childrearing, the generation on the front lines gets to try to restore the main task of marriage to the center of the job description. She cites a Yankelovich survey that found a bare majority of Boomers supported a return to more traditional, child-oriented standards of family life -- whereas nearly three-quarters of Gen Xers do.

It will be a hard slog to restore democratic childrearing as the first job of families. But it will be worth it, because that is what American marriage does.

Father's Day Gratitude

Father's Day is a pretty bogus holiday. Nonetheless, I am genuinely grateful for my three wonderful children. Good, smart, funny, well-behaved, teen-aged kids. I am listening to the sounds of them getting ready for church -- showering, ironing, reading the paper. We will walk down Main Street to church. The eldests will fuss at the youngests, and the youngests will do silly things to amuse themselves and, with a delay, the eldests.

I don't know what the future will bring, but this day, this moment, is the fulfillment of the promise.

Miniature Goat Hoax

Mrs. G. and I recently celebrated our silver anniversary. I thought of two perfect presents, and on that rare occasion when a husband (this husband, anyway) thinks of a perfect present, he better get 'em. The first was the sign over our front door, which made her laugh to falling over.

The second one would require getting. The best place to get it was in Pennsylvania. I knew we would be there for my college reunion. So I told my wife that on our last day at Swarthmore, I would rise early, take one of the kids, and come back for breakfast with Something. She didn't know what it was, but she knew it could fit in the back of the minivan.

My sister recently acquired a pair of Nubian miniature goats. They are very cute. My sister lives on a farmlette and has lots of animals, so the goats were an appropriate addition for them. We, on the other hand, live in a very bourgeois house on a very bourgeois street, and can't manage any animal that needs more maintenance than a cat. So goats would be wildly inappropriate as an anniversary present.

Therefore, I kept dropping hints that I was getting a miniature goat. The kids were in on it, and played along. At the reunion, all of our friends were brought in on it as well, and began making up horror stories of goats eating houses, cars, children, etc. I pointed out to the Mrs. that she is short, so would soon get the hang of milking a miniature goat.

Last Sunday, Boybot and I got up at 5:30, drove out to the lovely spring countryside, and brought back The Gift. We joined the family at breakfast. Our friends joined in the crescendo of goat humor. She still had no idea (though she was pretty sure it wasn't a goat).

Finally, we got to the van with our suitcases. I asked her is she were ready for "the reveal," as we have learned to say from the house makeover shows. Tah da!

A lovely three-foot-tall copper beech, our favorite tree.

It is now planted in our front yard.

She was delighted.

What American Families Do -- Then and Now

Continuing with Kay Hymowitz in Marriage and Caste in America, she writes about "What American Marriage Does."

Hymowitz rightly rehearses the argument established in the early days of the republic that democracies depend on parents to raise children to be strong, self-reliant citizens. In fact, today, unlike 1776, most governments around the world are republics, or pretend to be. Now more than ever the nation -- the world -- needs parents who make raising good strong children the top priority of their marriage.

To this familiar republican argument Hymowitz adds a new theme: in a knowledge-based economy, children need their parents to really focus on their kids' emotional, social, and especially their cognitive development. The gap between have and have-not families depends more on how parents try to raise their kids -- or don't try -- than it does on sheer money. Annette Lareau, whose work Hymnowitz cites, calls this the difference between the "natural growth" that poor and working class parents leave their kids to, and the "concerted cultivation" practiced by middle class parents.

Any family could practice concerted cultivation. But middle class families, and especially upper middle class families like Hymowitz's (and mine), are much more likely to. The more money a family has, the better they can cultivate their kids, but many poor families find the resources of schools, libraries, community organizations, and religious institutions to make a good effort at concerted cultivation -- if they want to.

And how is this a function of marriage? Hymowitz makes the more evident point that married couples can get more resources for their kids and, especially, divide their labor to better cultivate their kids. Beyond the argument Hymowitz makes, I have been convinced that fathers and mothers tend to cultivate different skills and strengths in kids. Kids benefit greatly from having both fathers and mothers working hard to raise them.

So what American families did -- raise good citizens -- is as politically important as it ever was. What American families do now -- cultivate their kids' knowledge and skills -- is now economically vital, as well. And married families tend to do both jobs better.

Marriage and Caste: The Book

Kay Hymowitz has just come out with Marriage and Caste in America. Earlier, I blogged about her article of the same name, which is the lead essay in the book. I will blog about the book over the next few days. Today I wanted to take just one striking statistic from the title essay.

Of all American mothers with a college education, only 10% do not live with their husbands.

Of all American mothers with less than bachelor's degree, 36% do not live with their husbands.

This is the foundation of the growing gap between the haves and have nots in this country.

Antioch College, R.I.P.

Antioch College, once a leader in liberal education, has finally been done in by decades of unrelenting leftism. The college is supposed to reorganize and re-open in a few years. Nonetheless, if it is not dead, it is likely to remain a shadow of itself, short of a wholesale housecleaning. In its glory days of civil rights liberalism, when Coretta Scott King and Eleanor Holmes Norton were students, Antioch supported equal access to a high standard of education, combining liberal arts with a well-establish co-op work program. Antioch's contributions to academic life include Stephen Jay Gould, Clifford Geertz, and David Apter, while the college's pop culture creators include John Flansburgh (half of They Might Be Giants) and Rod Serling, who made "The Twilight Zone".

In recent decades, though, Antioch entered its own twilight zone. The looney left took over, promoting egalitarianism, and then just sheer radical chic, at the expense of the academic program. They dropped grades, discouraged disciplinary majors, and had celebrity murderers as commencement speakers. The college also grossly over-extended its resources to try to create a far-flung adult education empire as Antioch University. Lately, the school has become a laughingstock for its "may I please do this, may I please do that" sexual conduct policy for students.

Antioch was a great school in its day. I wish its academic remnant well in their attempts to rebuild from the rubble.

Is Habermas' Final Unanimity Possible?

My major project for the summer is to work systematically through the works of sociologist Jürgen Habermas. This will eventually lead me to an empirical study of the family culture of the knowledge class vs. the corporate class.

Today I want to start with a vision that he presents in his earliest major work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962). He argues that the "public sphere" was born in the English coffeehouses of the mid-1600s. In our day, however, the spinmeisters have turned public opinion into manipulated propaganda. (Ok, he doesn't really say spinmeisters, but that is what he means.) In a truly rational society, though, he thinks that the public sphere should produce

the final unanimity wrought by a time-consuming process of mutual enlightenment, for the "general interest" on the basis of which alone a rational agreement between publicly competing opinions could freely be reached.

Can society have a "final unanimity?" Can there be a rational agreement between publicly competing opinions? Habermas is Marxist enough to assume the possibility of an objective conflict of interests among social classes. Yet he is liberal enough to believe that these interests and the broader difference of opinions that lie beyond interest can be reconciled with enough conversation.

What Habermas does not assume is a Calvinist expectation that our pride, fallenness, and sin will always prevent unanimity, this side of the Second Coming. He does see that different people have different interests. He does not see, though, that people sometimes perversely pursue opinions and desires that are objectively against their own interest.

I can't tell whether his argument is with a specifically Christian understanding that sin distorts our understanding of what is good, or with the larger foundation of Western philosophy that we really do have a good. More reports as I work through his body of work.

Swarthmore - 25th Reunion

We have just returned from my college reunion at Swarthmore. The whole weekend was so jam-packed with people to catch up with that there was not a sensible moment to blog.

I loved Swarthmore when I was a student, an affection that has not diminished with the years. One of our many treasured memories occurred one night when my now-wife and I were walking by the library, and some guys in letter jackets, in a moment of high spirits, leaned out of a passing car to yell "Hey, its Mr. and Mrs. Swarthmore." The college shaped my character and understanding more than anything except my flesh-and-blood family. To be sure, much of my flesh-and-blood family were and are shaped by Swarthmore, as well. My parents met at a freshmen mixer dance. My aunt was there this weekend, celebrating her 50th. My eldest is a student there now. And, of course, Mrs. G. is alma mater's greatest gift to me.

I treasure the friends I made there, some of whom I saw for the first time in 25 years this weekend. My quad, the guys who are my primary reference group, reunited for the first time in a dozen years. So many people have had parallel lives to mine, especially those who married and had kids. We have similar tales of investing in our communities, returning to religious life, trying to build up the world. The panel discussion by four of our classmates centered on the question "did we change the world?" The main speaker at the all-alumni collection was a fellow who had created a successful mutual fund that has a mission to fight genocide. A popular tee-shirt of my day was "Swarthmore College: Guilt Without Sex." The guilt was over not doing enough to change the world. This is a good kind of prod of conscience to have.

Still, it was in the formal education -- what I learned in class, what I read and discussed, the informal study groups with professors, the conversations on street corners, and the long bull sessions about how the things we studied related to the world -- that shaped me the most.

Swarthmore is "mother of professors," and many of my classmates were teaching, including quite a few who had practiced law, medicine, or another profession for a time. Teaching is a way of giving back (as well as a lifestyle better suited to family life than most). I heard and had many conversations about teaching. I have to say, though, that as I passed one conversational group and another, the default topic seemed to be "software."

I hope that everyone reading this can love your alma mater as I do mine.

St. John's College

St. John's College, Annapolis, is a horse of a different color. I had known it as the "great books" college. I had not visited before. We had a fine long discussion with two enthusiastic students, one introvert and one extrovert. This is a good combination -- I recommend it to all admissions offices.

St. John's is for people who seriously want to understand the Great Conversation. It has no sports, no Greeks, none of the trappings of college life which can become so important to students who are not at college primarily to deeply engage ideas. The whole curriculum is really a long and detailed philosophy seminar.

From the pounds of college mailings I got when I was in high school, the only one I remember was from St. John's. It was entitled: "College as Paradise." I was sorely tempted. In the end, I chose Swarthmore because I was very interested in contemporary politics.

Endub is ... thinking about it. She really liked the seriousness, and the close community. She does, though, want to make a difference in this world, and is still unclear on how the Johnnies make the connection. This one may take a second round.

One of the most intriguing things that both young men said, in answer to my daughter's question, "Who should not come to St. John's?" was "people who are intellectually arrogant." They said this very diffidently and humbly. They told the story of someone who dropped out of St. John's after one term. He had already concluded that he hated Aristotle, and Aristotle had nothing to teach him. He also objected to the tutor's (not "professor's") insistence that he go back to the text to see what Aristotle himself said. Instead, the disgruntled student wanted answers now. The two admissions workers were taken aback at the idea that one could come right out of high school, begin to learn Greek, start to read Aristotle, and conclude that you could already know enough about him to know that Aristotle had nothing to teach. I admire their humility in the face of such a challenge.

Haverford

Haverford is an excellent liberal arts college. It is also the arch-rival of my alma mater, so I am obliged to look askance at it. Nonetheless, I have to admit that it is an excellent liberal arts college. It has a restrained beauty, a strong Quaker tradition of reaching common understanding, and a honor code culture that is deeply embedded in student life. The plain stone Pennsylvania architecture is deep in the Gruntleds pre-verbal understanding of what true beauty is.

As the great sociologist E. Digby Baltzell argued years ago in Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, Quaker culture militates against individual superiority over others. This was confirmed, indirectly, by Haverford's unusual motto: Non doctior, sed meliore doctrina imbutus, which roughly translates, "Not more learned, but steeped in a better learning."

Endub will give it another look.

Lafayette

Lafayette College looks pretty good to us. Endub will be back for another look in the fall.

My background is Quaker, but Mrs. G. and I are both Presbyterian now. We both went to Swarthmore, a Quaker-founded school, and now live happily amidst Centre, a Presbyterian-founded school. Child #1 is now at Swarthmore.

What has been interesting to see in Endub's search is that, after sifting many fine colleges all around the country, she kept being drawn to the Presbyterian and Quaker institutions. It was that insight that led us to give a hard look at Lafayette in the first place. Lafayette has historically been connected with the Presbyterian Church, though the tie is very loose these days. She is somewhat liberal, but wants to have a diverse world to talk to. Lafayette is liberal the way most liberal arts colleges are. Our tour guide, though, a nice young woman named Amanda, said that the healthy dose of engineers kept the student body more balanced. This sounds like a good thing.

So the search continues. But Endub is minding her Ps and Qs.

Bucknell

We are on the great college hunt for child #2, the wonderful Endub. Today we visited Bucknell. It is a very nice little university -- a biggish college of 3000+, heavy on engineering and business, with a few graduate programs. Lewisburg, PA is a lovely little town. One interesting feature of their pitch: they want the well-rounded student. Most places that we have visited set themselves up against the Other Places that want the well-rounded student, whereas College of the Day is for unique individuals who can develop their quirkiness. I thought the college of well-rounded students was a straw man, but I was wrong. And it is a good thing that in the great ecology of American higher education there are such places.

They also talked about how small they are. Since this is the largest institution that we are likely to look at -- two or three times the size of the liberal arts colleges on our list -- this was an enlightening self-conception.

Bucknell University is a fine place. It was a bit weak in the visual arts, and not quite ideal for the Christian bohemian that we have raised, but a quite good place.

How Many Callings Can I Have?

Under postmodern conditions, it is hard for young people to believe that God has a calling for their lives. The hard part is not that God has a calling, but rather that God has a calling -- just one -- for your whole life.

This reflection is the fruit of a conference on "Re-Forming Ministry." We have been charged by the Presbyterian Church (USA) to think about how to support pastors in congregations today. We have spent some time on thinking about the meaning of God's call, and whether we need to rethink the church's traditional conception under changed conditions today.

I am mostly skeptical of any postmodernism, but I have come to believe that we have begun to enter a condition of postmodernity. One consequence of this change for the church is that the notion of one fixed calling for life is hard to believe, and worth reconsidering. The Reformed notion of a calling for each believer still shows its roots in the medieval Catholic notion of a calling for priests, monks, and nuns to a special ontological status. Yet the rest of Reformed practice treats our calling not so much as a change in our essence as it is a particular task that God has commissioned us to do.

It is a short step from thinking about the call as a commission, to think about a call as one commission, which may be followed by other, different commissions.

The advantage of thinking about a call as a commission is that it allows for changing from one big job to another without seeing that change as a failure. Many seminarians have turned to ministry as a second career. One of the intriguing ideas to come from this meeting for me is to think that ministry might be a first career, which could legitimately be followed by a second calling to a second career. And so on.

I am still chewing on this idea. Your comments are most welcome.

My Demon Project

I am spending my weekend with a high-powered group of Presbyterian ministers and church officials. One of our number wanted to describe what she had done for the Doctor of Ministry degree, usually called the D. Min.

What we all heard her say, though, was "What I did for my demon project."

Upper-Middle Brow Porn

A tiny movement is afoot to create a higher class of porn.

Some Harvard undergraduates have created a new magazine, H-Bomb, which they say is a "magazine about sex" without being just pages and pages of pornography.

New Republic editor Britt Peterson wrote about "Porn with a Silver Spoon." She writes that in the "alt-porn" movement "the smut itself is becoming more upper-middle-class: urbane, ironic, self-aware, and intellectually as well as sexually titillating." As an example of this, she cites a film in which she appears as an extra, which contains a "cum blanket" scene. "The scene with the cum blanket, for example, ... exaggerates the traditional cum shot to the point of subversive absurdity."

Oh, great, just what we need.

Now, I don't think pornography ranks very high on the list of things you shouldn't do. I think it is a fair assumption that every man you know, and most of the boys, look at is from time to time. Kiddie porn, of course, is evil. Porn addiction is bad the way all addictions are bad. Mostly, though, porn is bad because it is kind of a waste of time, time spent on the most animal kind of sex that could instead be devoted to real human love.

Still, I think the attempt to create upper-middle brow porn (which is about as high as the genre can go) will fail. The market is too small and the options too limited, and the temptation to sink back into the tried and true will be too strong. Alt-porn sounds like just another temptation to liberals to think they are smarter and more sophisticated than traditional people.

Loving v. Virginia

This is the 40th anniversary of the great Supreme Court decision, Loving v. Virginia, which struck down state laws against racially mixed marriage.

The Court made three arguments against the Virginia statute:
1) State marriage laws must comply with federal constitutional norms;
2) The statute violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment because it only prohibited mixed marriages involving white people;
3) The Due Process protection of the Constitution means that the state can only violate a basic right if state has a compelling interest in doing so. Keeping the races separate was not, the Court ruled, something Virginia was compelled to do in the basic institution of marriage.

The Loving decision was necessary -- but dangerous.

As a centrist, I welcome the federalist principle that states should make laws suited to the custom and culture of their distinctive people. This is why the federal takeover of any area of state law is dangerous.

On the other hand, I have long thought that anti-black racism is the original sin of America, and it has introduced more misery in our practice and more irrationality in our law than other mistake we ever made. If we had not had whole states that embedded anti-black racism deep in their laws, even their constitutions, we would not have had a civil war, and we would not have needed to hugely expand federal power. This is why Loving v. Virginia was necessary.

Are Men and Women Hardwired for Altruism the Same Way?

The Washington Post has a fascinating story on new brain research suggesting that our altruistic responses come from the deep old emotional centers of the brain, rather than the newer rational calculation parts.

Other well-known research has shown that women are more likely to use their whole brain in reasoning, whereas men are more likely to use one part or another. Women are more likely to incorporate their emotional responses in their reasoning, whereas men are more likely to separate "cold" reason from their emotions. And everyone knows that men are more likely to commit crimes than women are.

SO, putting these facts together, perhaps men and women have a similar altruistic emotional response to the plight of others, based on empathy. And men and women also make rational calculations about how their self-interest would be served by acting altruistically versus selfishly, even to the point of harming others for my own gain. The difference is that women are more likely to act with a response that tries to integrate the two competing responses, whereas men are more likely to choose one over another. And thus men are more likely to choose a response that suppresses their empathy for others.

Just a first theory. This research on the deep roots of altruism, though, is important and very interesting.

Silver Anniversary

Mrs. G. and I were married 25 years ago today.

I surprised her with a permanent sign over our front door.

Vote in Honor of a Veteran

I have a button that announces that I am voting in honor of a veteran -- my father. My wife has one in honor of her father. We wore them on primary day. They were created by the Secretary of State's office in a nifty program called, helpfully, Vote in Honor of a Veteran. It has been hugely popular in the commonwealth. They made 10,000 in responses to citizen requests in the first week, and the county clerks ran out. They are making more for the general election.

Honoring veterans by voting seems like a good subject to contemplate on Memorial Day.

If You Don't Accept the Rules for Ministers, Don't Apply to Be One

Mission Presbytery, in San Antonio, TX, had accepted a woman as a candidate for ministry even though she told the presbytery she was a lesbian in a committed relationship. The presbytery declared that the well-known rule barring practicing homosexuals from the ordained ministry did not apply to candidates for ministry, and voted to accept her as a candidate, 169 - 111. On appeal, the Permanent Judicial Commission of the Presbyterian Church (USA) General Assembly, the church's top court, ruled that a practicing lesbian can't be a candidate for ordination, for the same reason that she can't eventually be ordained.

This is another case of those who disagree with the church's rule playing brinksmanship to see what they can get away with. It does not matter what the rule is, this is the wrong way to change the church.

Hegelajara

As my post-Commencement treat, I have been working my way through Hegel's Philosophy of Right. This is pretty hard, so I asked some smart colleagues to recommend some secondary works to read along with it. I proposed that when I was done, Ken, Ken, Jason ("mind if we call you Ken?") and I could all sit down at Guadalajara, our fine local Mexican restaurant, for a wide-ranging discussion.

"A Hegelajara!" one of the Ken's said. Quite right.

Hegel: Marriage is the Most Immense Contradiction

Now that the urgent daily business of the school term is over, I have time for some richer brain food. I have been reading Hegel's The Philosophy of Right, especially the section on the family. Hegel's core concern is that we become free by making our will actual in the world. Yet marital love, he says, is "the most immense contradiction; the understanding cannot resolve it" (§ 158) because we individually choose to give up our individuality. We use our individual free will to sacrifice our individual free will, to become one with another person. Yet this is not a foolish loss, but the path to our true freedom. And the fulfillment of our choice for two to become one is realized in our children. This is a real poser for Hegel, a mystery for his philosophy. He does not shrink from it, but rather makes family life, and the civil society made of families and dissolved families, the foundations of ethical life.

Marriage is a mystery. It is, I think, the most fundamental of all human mysteries.

Gilmore Girls Finale: Luke In, Logan Out

So, I got it half right at the end of "Gilmore Girls." I predicted in February that the Gilmore Girls, mother and daughter, would choose poor Luke and rich Logan, respectively. The series ended with Luke going all out to take care of Lorelei. Though no future plan was settled, marriage is likely. Logan did in fact propose to Rory, but she turned him down in order to find herself. At the end she got a job writing about Barak Obama, rathering than marrying her college love and moving across the continent.

This is a sensible ending. Rory is young, and doesn't have to marry now. I thought it was a mistake to tie her so specifically to an event of this moment (the Obama campaign), which will probably not age very well. Still, I wish they had written her a better speech than simply "I'm too young to decide this now, can't we wait?" Logan sensibly replied, "What's the point?"

I will miss the "Gilmore Girls," both in itself and as a bonding activity with the women of my household. They like "Grey's Anatomy," as most young women do, but I can't get into it (or even stand it, actually). The writers have stuck all the characters except one (Dr. Bailey) in perpetual adolescence.

Perhaps Amy Sherman-Palladino, the creator of "Gilmore Girls," and Aaron Sorkin, the creator of "The West Wing," could write a show together about fast-talking, witty people with real work and strong marriages.

Family Issues That Affect College Students

We finished the term last week, and I just got the evaluations of the family life course. Most of the comments suggest that students liked the course, loved the subject, and learned a great deal. The first part of the course, the "all about me" section, covered sex differences in mate selection, gender differences in communication, and the advantages of marriage. In the second part we explored some of the main sources of variation in families, especially divorce and unwed motherhood. Only one comment bothered me:

I thought the first part was more interesting than the second part. I feel like more time could have been spent on things directly affecting us as college students rather than divorce and single parents.

I have been trying to put my finger on what bothers me about this view. Part of the problem is the sheer obliviousness that the comment betrays, since about a quarter of the students in the class were children of divorce, and one was about to become an unwed mother (though I believe the course convinced her to marry, after all). More trying, though, is the unconcern it suggests about the rest of the world beyond the great privilege of being a healthy young college student with no responsibilities and no disasters. The last third of the course is devoted to moving from the micro picture of my family to the macro picture of how the whole array of families shapes this country. Our last book, James Q. Wilson's The Marriage Problem, is devoted to this subject. Wilson's argument is that the decline of marriage in some sectors undermines everyone's marriages, and creates the seedbeds of all social problems.

So which family issues affect college students? Ultimately, all of them.

Join the Political Elite: Vote in the Primary

Today is primary election day in Kentucky. The secretary of state is predicting a 15% turnout. This means that your vote counts for six.

This election is important to you even if you don't live in Kentucky. The commonwealth is one of only three states to elect its governor the year before the presidential election. The Kentucky governor's race is, therefore, often an early test of the general mood of the electorate. This year we have an unpopular and not-so-competent Republican governor heading a scandal-plagued administration. How bad is it? His own lieutenant governor refused to run with him, a former congresswoman is running against him in the primary with a serious chance to force a runoff, and half the leading Republican officials tried to get the governor not to seek re-election.

On my side of the aisle, the crowded field is coming down to The Turncoat, a rich businessman who backed the now-disgraced Republican in the governor's race last time, versus the strongest ticket of real Democratic officials, to see who could win in the fall.

This primary election is also a milestone in the Gruntled household. Child #2, the wonderful Endub, figured out that since she will be of age by the general election in the fall, she can vote in the primary now. She then went through the high school registering every other member of her class who will be of voting age by November. We will vote a little later in the day, and wear our I Voted stickers proudly.

With the rest of the political elite.

Most of the Little Bast -- Um, Children of Unwed Parents -- Have Dad at Home

Most of the children of unwed parents -- bastards in the technical sense -- born in America in this century came home to both parents. This is a significant change from a generation ago, according to the Child Trends study, when less than a third of unwed births were to cohabiting couples.

We celebrate silver linings at the GC, and the silver lining is that more children of unwed parents will have both parents and two incomes at home when they come home from the hospital. The dark cloud, though, is that cohabiters are likely to break up, kid or no kid.

The most educated people are increasingly likely to marry. The least educated people are decreasingly likely to marry. The front line in the marriage struggle is for those in the middle. Couples with some education, jobs, and a baby are exactly the people who should marry, and usually do marry. We need to win their hearts and minds to improve the marriage culture of the United States. And to give the little bastards -- in the most respectful and affectionate sense -- a better chance.

Centre Commencement 2007

Today was a glorious conclusion to a fine year.

My colleague Rick Axtell opened the day with a fine baccalaureate sermon on "Babel." The punchline: you are graduating to a life of service. You may be heading to the top of society, but the true view of how the world works is the view from the bottom. Commencement speaker Tim Russert concluded the day with a complementary message: to whom much is given, much will be expected. A solid, coherent, and moral message.

(OK, one story from Tim Russert.
He said his favorite "Meet the Press" was this. In the '92 election, he had Ross Perot on the show.
Russert: "Mr. Perot, you have said that the deficit is the most important problem facing America. Now that you are candidate for president what is your proposal to solve the problem?"
Perot: "What?"
Russert repeats the question.
Perot: "If I had known you were going to ask trick questions, I never would have come on the show!"

Later, Russert got on a plane.
A flight attendant asked him, "What did you think of Ross Perot?"
Russert: "I never comment on guests. But what did you think of Ross Perot?"
Flight attendant: "I think he is the kind of guy who would refuse to put his tray in the upright and locked position.")

An excellent year. Now on to the summer!

LOLCATS

My daughter, the wonderful Endub, introduced me to LOLcats last night. They are very silly captioned cat pictures. We laughed ourselves sick.

The emerging convention of this, um, artform, have given the cats a very peculiar grammar, as suggested by the site from which this example comes, I Can Has Cheezburger.

This is what the internet was created for.

Pet Are Man's Best Friend – But Woman's Practice Children

Today's guest blog is from Taylor McGovern who wrote a wonderful journal entry for my family life class that I thought should be shared.

We haven’t talked about gender differences in quite a while but I noticed one recently that I have to talk about. Women treat their pets as their children and men treat them as their friends. My boyfriend’s brother, Ben is dating a girl who just got a new puppy. The dog is absolutely adorable but she talks to it like it is her new-born child. She says things like, “Now, mommy says don’t bite. Listen to mommy.” Of course, the dog has no idea what she’s saying and continues to bite her and everything else in sight because it is a DOG not a child. And she also calls Ben the dog’s “daddy” but they’ve been dating for less than a month. I assume it doesn’t freak him out but I know it would freak Brian out. This is an extreme case and I’m being rather hard on this girl but Brian and I have been laughing about it all week. I just got a new cat at Christmas and I’m just as guilty as she is with the baby talk – although I never said anything about being it’s “mommy” or Brian being it’s “daddy.” My mom, however, would say things like “Come here to your grandma” which is just hilarious. Anyway, the point I’m getting to is that women get pets and it’s like they are getting children.

But men treat animals as newfound friends. My dad talks to my cat in a normal voice and feels sorry for him when we are coddling him. He’ll call him by saying, “OTIS, my man!” which is very friendly and masculine. Ben will play with his girlfriend’s dog instead of cuddling with him and he uses his normal voice. My dad makes fun of anyone who talks to an animal in any abnormal voice. The pets for men are new friends, companions. I guess that’s why they call dogs man’s best friend – although I think they were speaking of mankind with that phrase.

It’s interesting because these two views on pets are totally different and I wonder how many couples (like Ben and his girlfriend) get pets thinking one thing about them and then find out that their mate is thinking another thing. What a mean is – if a girl gets a dog and thinks it’s going to be a tester child while the guy thinks it’s going to be a new friend, there could be some problems

GPS Monitoring for Batterers: Yes

Several states are beefing up their restraining orders on potential girl-friend beaters by making them wear global positioning system (GPS) bracelets. When these guys get within a restricted zone, such as near the potential victim's house or work, she gets a quick warning message.

In the early studies, none of the bracelet wearers has violated the order to stay away. The researchers think that this excellent result is due, in part, to the restrained guys knowing that someone is watching them, that the object of their obsession is not alone in the world.

This seems to me to be a good thing. The barrier so far is cost -- about $10 per day. I think this cost could be driven down dramatically through further automation. And this is the sort of ounce of prevention that pays for itself in avoided law-enforcement costs, pain, and death.

Where Gangs Are a Step Up

I have a student from the Hyde Park slum of Boston. He said he was the only young man not in a gang. Each day his grandmother prayed for him when we went out the door, and he prayed thanksgiving when he got home safely. He now has a scholarship to study a world away in lovely Danville. He should be able to graduate and do good things in the world.

His part of town is not the worst section of Boston. Another student of mine had a cousin shot to death in Dorchester. It was the third cousin she had lost that way in a year. When I asked her if she knew why it happened, she sighed and said "Just ... stupidness." The dead man may have said something at some earlier time about a girl. A group of guys walked up as the young man was talking to his pregnant girlfriend and her mother. They beat him up, then shot him. Even with all that information, this murder may remain unsolved, like the others in her family. She said the police and the press are likely to report this as a gang killing, but gangs, she said, are old news in her neighborhood. There used to be gangs, as there still are in Hyde Park. They provided a measure of protection for those in them and order in the neighborhood.

Dorchester has fallen below even the level of gangs. Now there is no order -- all the young men can be assumed to be armed ("have hammers"), and are likely to "roll up" on anyone for any reason or no reason. Dorchester wishes it still had gangs. Now it is just anarchy.

One Cheer for Jerry Falwell

Jerry Falwell died today. I disagreed with him on most political positions, and many of his religious positions. In his later years he said some truly reprehensible things.

Jerry Falwell changed the definition of fundamentalist Christianity to include political involvement. Before the "Moral Majority," fundamentalists were separated from the world, especially on political matters. They were waiting for the end, and expected God to sort out this sorry world, and that soon. Fundamentalists differed from evangelicals, their post-war, college-educated cousins, precisely over whether it was worth trying to save this world.

The Moral Majority as an organization was mostly the creation of political conservatives who were not themselves fundamentalist Protestants, but who saw that they needed someone out front who was. Falwell, an independent Baptist of great entrepreneurial zeal, took that role and ran with it. The organization that he created was mostly made of fundamentalist and evangelical Protestants. A greater wonder is that it got them to work together with conservative Catholics, Orthodox, and Jews -- often for the first time.

I believe that when groups get involved in electoral politics, they can't help but be drawn toward the center. They learn something of the humanity of their opponents by engaging them. More effectively, they learn that they have work together with people who oppose them on one issue but agree with them on another. This moderates conflict and helps hold the body politic together. If electoral politics were possible in Iraq, the civil war would diminish. Electoral politics is happening in Iran, and moderates are emerging within an extreme cultural revolution.

So let us give one cheer for Jerry Falwell, may be go to his reward.

The Queen Has a Terrible Job

I commend Stephen Frears' excellent film, "The Queen." Helen Mirren won a well-deserved Oscar for playing Queen Elizabeth trying to cope with reality when ex-Princess Diana died. I have never favored monarchy, and few monarchs grow on me up close. Still, I have to feel for Elizabeth Windsor (or whatever of her many last names she might pick) who was supposed to be a minor royal, when all of a sudden she was stuck as a young woman with being princess, then queen. She has been truly dutiful for decades, stuck in an endless round of official tasks, few of which are intrinsically important. And the difficult kids. And the ungrateful press. And snippy foreigners who don't like monarchy anyway.

At one point in the film, Elizabeth's husband, Prince Philip, says that Diana should have done her duty as a royal wife and overlooked Charles' inevitable mistress. The Queen gives her husband a small pained look. That is another ugly requirement of the job.

Queen Elizabeth has a terrible job.

Invested Motherhood is Not a Feminine Mistake

A Mother's Day defense, supplied by Mrs. G.

At the Family Scholars Blog, I read a brief quote from Leslie Bennetts’ The Feminine Mistake:

“It’s nice to be at home when your child loses her fourth tooth, but is it worth the price you might pay if your breadwinner dies or divorces you, and you end up losing that home entirely?”

Well, yes, it could be worth the price.

I’m thinking of my mother, who spent more than a decade at home with kids, chose divorce, quit a satisfying job to move her kids closer to extended family, changed jobs to move in with her aging mother, and stopped working in order to provide hospice care when cancer attacked her older sister.

In a life full of ideas and art and humor and books and talent and wisdom and affection, my mother has also handled quite a few cramped apartments, unreliable cars, and struggles to make ends meet.

So no, Ms. Bennetts, I can’t fear having to work harder or live more cheaply in the future because I loved energetically yesterday or today.

My feminist mama made sure of that.

I Have Body-Image Issues ...

... I think I'm good looking.

(This drew a good scrunch-face from Mrs. G.)

Two Cheers for a Lower Divorce Rate

The divorce rate in the United States is at its lowest point since 1970, when the current divorce boom began with the passage of no-fault laws. The annual rate dropped from 5.1 per 1000 people in the worst year, 1981, to 3.6 last year.

Why only two cheers? The good news is that the marriage success rate is rising among college-educated couples. They really are learning how to hold it together better. Likewise, there has been some revulsion at easy divorce, especially among young people, who are "being the change they wish to see in the world" by staying married.

On the other hand, one reason the divorce rate is down is because the marriage rate is down in the first place. The proportion of couples who just cohabit, even after they have children, has been rising. Many children of the '70s divorces are so afraid of making the same mistake that they don’t marry at all. I predict that the cohabitation rate will start to go down among college educated people as more people learn that cohabiters who marry are more likely to divorce than are couples who don't live together before marriage.

The other not-so-good fact is that the divorce rate has not fallen among the least educated. The growing marriage divide is becoming a class divide. This divide cuts both ways: poor people are more likely to divorce (or have children without marrying), but also people who divorce are more likely to end up poor.

So let's build on the positive. And educate the poor and the cohabiters about what their real odds of happiness are.